It’s June 20th, 1942, in the beleaguered city of Tobruk, Libya.
Job Maseko and a fellow soldier of the 2nd South African Infantry Division
hurry back to the field hospital carrying yet another wounded soldier on a stretcher.
Whistles of incoming bombs terrorize the city and shocks of exploding ordinance
reverberate through the rubble-filled streets.
The fighting is intense in the edge of the city;
infantry and tanks clash amongst a rain of artillery,
the allies fighting tooth and nail to keep out the Germans, but it's not successful.
The Germans keep pushing the allied lines back,
capturing their ammunition depots and forcing them out of their bunkers.
It is complete chaos; most of the defences have already fallen and fighting takes over the city streets.
Between it all Maseko and his partner face an impossible choice,
with the number of wounded rising by the minute they have to decide who to take to the hospital
and who to leave behind.
With almost no time to think they pick a soldier they believe has good odds to survive,
put him on the stretcher, and then run back for the field hospital as a bomb decimates a building just one block over.
Nightfall ends the hostilities for the day, bringing an odd respite for the battered soldiers.
Maseko is about to go to sleep when their superior summons his unit.
He is shocked when they are given rifles and told he must join the battle on the front the following day.
Maseko has no firearms training but he resolves to do his best.
In the end it wasn’t to be.
The next morning his commanding officer surrendered the city,
believing it wasn’t worth the human cost to defend.
Job Maseko is taken prisoner before he ever got to fire a shot.
33 thousand men were captured by the German forces on that day.
The Germans separated their prisoners by race.
While white troops were sent to camps in Europe,
prisoners of colour were kept in POW camps in Africa and force to work under horrific conditions.
They Germans were unprepared for such quantities and had to hastily put together a camp to house them all.
The camp was made on the outskirts of Tobruk, out of simple tents surrounded by barbed wire fencing.
As a prisoner Maseko and his fellows endure appalling treatment.
They are malnourished, being fed just 2 dry crackers and a bowl of weevil-infested porridge every day.
They’re beaten regularly and made to perform never-ending hard labor.
If they refused to work, either for principles or for exhaustion, they are tortured or even executed.
But Maseko isn’t about to tolerate such treatment.
With indignation burning in his heart, he decides he’ll take the fight to his oppressors,
he doesn’t know how,
but he will.
One night he joins a small band of escapees.
The haphazard construction of camp left it full of holes
and the overstretched guards can’t keep a good hold on the prisoners,
so escapes in search for food are relatively common.
But the prisoners can’t make a run for it as they don’t know where the allied lines are
and they aren’t prepared to take on the brutal desert of North Africa, so escaping altogether was out of the question.
Instead, they loot the destroyed buildings, searching for some half-decent food or something else that’s useful.
The group or men are exiting one of many ruined homes when Maseko spots a cartridge on the ground.
Curious, he takes it and pulls the bullet out, revealing a bundle of cordite.
In that moment he gets an idea.
Before the war he used to work at a mining company,
he wasn’t a miner but he got to be around explosives and picked up a thing or two.
Applying this knowledge, he realises that he needs something like a resealable tin can,
which is conveniently a popular way to store foods in the army.
With this idea burning in his mind he says goodbye to his fellows and sets off to the edges of Tobruk,
where the fiercest fighting took place.
Scouring the streets, it doesn’t take him long before he finds his can discarded on the side of the road.
Then he spends the rest of the night searching for unfired cartridges.
He finds many around corners and behind sandbags, some simply discarded on the floor,
others still stuck to their abandoned clips.
He keeps going until the sun threatens to rise over the horizon and he is forced to return to camp.
The can is far from full, but he isn’t about to be deterred.
He escapes every single following night, searching the streets while operating with barely any sleep at all.
But it does bears fruit, after days of tireless work and emptying more than 2,000 individual cartridges,
Maseko has his bomb.
And that’s not all, during his search he's also sourced matches from a destroyed corner store
and two long strands of fuse in abandoned allied emplacements.
He is exceedingly happy, it’s almost too perfect.
But he understands that sourcing the materials was the easy part, now he has to use it.
For the next week he ponders.
He considers detonating an ammunition storage but realizes one is too small to make a difference.
His next thought is a supply truck but also dismisses the idea,
reasoning that the trucks have mostly food and if he was to destroy it the first ones to starve would be the prisoners.
And so, the bomb sat, hidden away in a ruined building near the camp, wasting away without a target.
That is, until his captors gave him one on a silver platter.
The 19th of July
he and a bunch of his fellow prisoners are rounded up and escorted out of the camp without explanation.
They are brought to the Tobruk docks and ordered to unload a German freighter.
Maseko is quietly ecstatic; this is perfect.
He doesn’t have the device on him, but he doesn’t miss a chance to scout.
The group are made to unload crates of weapons and ammunition one by one,
the watchful guards keep eyes on them the whole time.
Maseko doesn’t like it; it’s beginning to look impossible to plant the device unseen.
They finish the unloading and are swiftly ordered to load it up again with new cargo.
While leaving the crates inside the hold he realizes he isn’t being watched anymore,
the guards are all outside, only a single one stands idly by the entrance.
Now this is more like it.
Next time it’s his chance.
He carries the bomb in his army haversack which the guards have allowed him to keep.
His heart is racing,
but he acts natural and by some miracle the guards completely ignore his bag the entire way to the docks.
They arrive and a bunch of petrol drums and jerry cans sitting in the dock immediately catch Job's eye.
Was that cargo for today?
He really hoped so.
They get to work, and he nonchalantly leaves his bag on board.
He’s sweating bullets the whole day, just waiting for a guard to discover it, but no call ever comes.
The work continues throughout the afternoon and loading begins.
To his relief, the petrol is brought on board.
As the day comes to an end he approaches two friends saying that he needs them to distract the guard.
Confused, they ask him what he’s going to do, to what Maseko leans in and lays it out clearly
— he’s going to burn the ship.
Agreeing with the plan,
the two men approach the single guard on board and make small talk while Maseko helps load the last of the cargo.
His fellow prisoners leave him alone in the hold and he quickly sets to work.
He retrieves the bomb and the fuse, sticks the fuse in the can and plants it between the drums of gasoline.
Then he takes a handful of straw from the vegetable crates, covers the can with it,
and to top it all off he dowses it all in gasoline with one of the jerry cans.
Looking over his shoulder, his friends are standing right between him and the guard.
Perfect.
He gets the fuse as close to the hatch as he can and sets it alight.
Maseko casually closes the hatch behind him and the guards were none the wiser.
He calmly joins with everyone else as the officers round up the men and herd them back to the camp.
Maseko waits expectant, prepared to hear the explosion behind him at any moment…
but nothing happens.
They arrive back at the camp and Maseko is devastated.
He stands on a corner of the camp,
staring blankly in the direction of the docks wondering where everything went wrong.
But then…
A “Boom!” snaps him out of his thoughts.
He stares in disbelief as a column of black smoke rises into the evening sky.
The plan had worked!
The next morning the prisoners are interrogated but none of them are suspected of sabotage,
instead they are questioned about smoking in the ship.
The prisoners of course hadn’t, and the cause of the explosion remained a mystery for the Germans.
The ship sunk in the dock with all its cargo, but perhaps most importantly,
it was being used to ferry cargo back and forth between Tobruk and bigger freighters too large for the docks.
Its destruction permanently slowed the movement of goods through the port city
for the duration of the German occupation,
one more logistical headache for the Africa Corps to deal with.
All thanks to one man and a tin can.
Job Maseko wouldn’t be done either.
Days later during one of his now-routine escapes he managed to repair a radio
which he used to learn about the battle of El Alamein.
Confident that he could get that far
he and a couple of prisoners gathered all the food and water they could and escaped by foot.
They would successfully reach allied lines 20 days later.
Back in the army he was reassigned as a stretcher-bearer and continued to serve throughout the war,
he received proper firearms training and took up arms in battle several times.
Surviving the war he would be given the Military Medal for his brave actions in sinking the freighter.
But sadly, none of the commendations would translate to a better life after the war.
He returned to his hometown in South Africa with a miserable pension to thank him for his service,
receiving only 40 per cent of the pension of white soldiers.
Job Maseko would live in poverty working as a local policeman.
And tragically he passed away in 1952 in an accident at a train station,
aged just 30 years old.
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