The Long Range Desert Group in World War II Read online

  D EDICATION

  To the men of New Zealand, Britain and Rhodesia whose courage created the LRDG legend.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1From Scientist to Soldier

  CHAPTER 2Only the Tough Need Apply

  CHAPTER 3Into Action

  CHAPTER 4Expansion and Excitement

  CHAPTER 5Fight at the Fort

  CHAPTER 6The Afrika Korps Arrive

  CHAPTER 7Misuse and Malaria

  CHAPTER 8Heavy Losses and a New Leader

  CHAPTER 9The Saviours of the SAS

  CHAPTER 10On the Back Foot

  CHAPTER 11Courage in the Face of Calamity

  CHAPTER 12The Eyes of the Alamein Offensive

  CHAPTER 13Adventures in the Aegean

  CHAPTER 14The Battle for Leros

  CHAPTER 15A Different Type of Warfare

  CHAPTER 16Valour and Versatility

  CHAPTER 17Until the Bitter End

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  The desert campaign of World War I is a largely forgotten theatre in the minds of the British and their allies. One hundred years after the ‘war to end all wars’, the perception is of a conflict of carnage fought in the trenches of France and Belgium. Mud, blood and barbed wire. Of course, Australians and New Zealanders still recall with pride the bravery and fortitude of their troops in the Dardanelles campaign of 1915, but few are aware of the consequences of that failed campaign to knock Turkey out of the war.

  Ralph Bagnold, seen here in Egypt during the 1920s, founded the LRDG in 1940 and his vast experience of the Libyan desert proved invaluable in the North African campaign. (Getty)

  It resulted in Britain diverting 80,000 of its soldiers from the Western Front to Egypt and then a march up through Palestine into Syria to engage the Turks. Turkey’s reaction was to call on Muslim states to wage a jihad against Britain and her allies. The appeal met with a mixed response. In the Arabian Peninsula, thanks in part to Colonel T. E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – Prince Feisal and his warriors fought with the British against Turkey. But in the Egyptian Desert, the vast arid tract of land west of Cairo, the Senussi tribesmen embraced the call to jihad against the European ‘Crusaders’.

  Armed by Turkey and Germany, thousands of Senussi, led by Sayed Ahmed esh Sherif, began attacking British outposts. The raids caused little in the way of material damage to the British but they were nonetheless a concern, and forced their commander, General Sir Archibald Murray, to transfer troops from Palestine to reinforce the British position in Egypt. An innovative general by World War I standards, Murray organized his troops into the Western Frontier Force, combining infantrymen with units of cavalry and artillery, further strengthened by a squadron of light bombers from the Royal Flying Corps (RFC).

  The innovation didn’t stop there. A Camel Corps was formed, but, bold as they were, the men were no match for the Senussi who had grown up on the awkward animals. If they were inferior to their enemy in tradition, Murray reasoned, why not gain the advantage by using their superior technology. And so in early 1916 the Light Car Patrol (LCP) was formed.

  Comprising a fleet of 20 horsepower, four-cylinder Model T Fords, the Allies – the volunteers were all British and Australians – now had the mobility but more importantly the firepower to take the fight to the Senussi. Operating in conjunction with the RFC, the patrols were provided with the location of a Senussi camp by the reconnaissance aircraft and they would then drive into the desert and launch a hit-and-run attack. ‘They,’ said Lawrence of the Light Car Patrols, ‘were worth hundreds of men to us in these deserts’.1

  T. E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia, recognized the worth of vehicles in the desert during World War I. (Getty)

  An LRDG patrol rests by a small desert oasis during a 1942 operation.

  The small but significant contribution of the LCP in the Desert War was quickly forgotten following the Armistice. But in 1925 a young British captain was posted to Egypt, an officer who had survived the horrors of the Somme and who in North Africa found a land of enchantment and unlimited adventure. Ralph Bagnold’s keen and enquiring mind devoured a mountain of literature about his new posting, including an account of the Light Car Patrol’s activities nearly a decade earlier. Then, when he saw the desert for the first time, he was captivated. It reminded Bagnold of Dartmoor, where he had spent many happy times as a boy. ‘Both had the strange aura induced by the physical presence of the remote past, and also by the great bare trackless expanses where the careless might well get lost,’ he later wrote.2

  Bagnold set off to explore the interior of the Western Desert, and as he disappeared into the towering dunes he was unwittingly blazing a trail for a special forces unit whose name, in time, would come to be a byword for intrepidness.

  C HAPTER 1

  FROM SCIENTIST TO SOLDIER

  On 15 August 1939, a 43-year-old scientist was recalled to the colours. In the four years since leaving the British Army, Ralph Bagnold had made something of a name for himself within the scientific fraternity as a writer of crisp prose. His area of expertise was the North African desert, a region he knew intimately from the years he had spent exploring it in the late 1920s and early ’30s. Two of Bagnold’s papers appeared in the Royal Society’s journal, and in 1939 his first book was published, The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes. In the summer of that year Bagnold was commissioned to write a long article for the Scientific American, entitled ‘A Lost World Refound’. The piece, a blending of science with exploration, recounted one of Bagnold’s adventures in Egypt’s Western Desert. The desert, he explained, made one feel very small and insignificant, not just because of nature’s vast splendour but also the realization that they were retracing the footsteps of men throughout thousands of years. ‘The most lasting memory of the expedition doubtless will be a trivial incident which happened in a cave in which we had taken shelter for the night from the cold wind,’ wrote Bagnold. ‘The beam of a torch fell on an artificial rock ledge. On the ledge lay a solitary stone knife, left behind by the last occupant untold centuries ago, just as we ourselves would empty our pockets before going to bed.’1

  The key to successfully surmounting a sand dune was for the vehicle to accelerate towards the crest, slow, and then with wheels aligned, gently topple over the tip and surf down the gentle slope on the other side. (Author’s Collection)

  Shortly after Bagnold posted his article to the editor of the Scientific American in New York, he received through his letter-box his call-up papers. Ordered to report for two and a half months’ training with the Third Signals Division at Bulford, Bagnold arrived on Salisbury Plain feeling a little apprehensive. His last war had been a quarter of a century ago when, as a young officer in the Royal Engineers, he had survived three years on the Western Front. What skills could he bring to the British Army, an out-of-shape middle-aged man, against the enemy that Britain would surely soon be fighting – Nazi Germany?

  None, seemed to be the view of the British high command, who on 26 August appointed him commanding officer of the East Africa Signals. It was a backwater appointment if ever there was one, and Bagnold believed his contribution to any conflict would be negligible. ‘War declared’ was his curt diary entry for 3 September. Germany’s invasion of Poland had little relevance for the East Africa Signals.

  The Italians were responsible for the 400-mile barbed wire fence that ran south from the coast along down the Libyan frontier with Egypt. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  On
28 September, Bagnold was one of several hundred military personnel who sailed from Britain bound for Kenya on board RMS Franconia, a requisitioned Cunard liner. There were no German troops in East Africa, but there were plenty of Italian soldiers stationed in Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia), Eritrea and Somaliland, the three countries conquered on the orders of the fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini earlier in the decade and formed into the Africa Orientale Italiana.

  Seven days into their passage to East Africa, the RMS Franconia collided with the merchant cruiser Alcantara as the two vessels manoeuvred their way through the Mediterranean. Bagnold saw the incident from the deck and believed that the Alcantara ‘must have mistaken starboard for port for she ran straight into us’. Neither ship sank, but the damage required the vessels to limp into the nearest port for repairs. The Franconia arrived at Malta on 6 October and the following day Bagnold transferred to the Empress. The ship was not the only change to Bagnold’s schedule: instead of sailing directly to East Africa, he was first heading to North Africa, to Port Said, where he disembarked on 9 October while they waited for the next available troopship to take him onwards to Kenya.

  Bagnold wasted no time in exploiting to his advantage the unexpected change to his itinerary. Catching the first train to Cairo, he arrived in the Egyptian capital and began looking up old friends from his time stationed in the city a decade earlier. One of his first calls was on Colonel Micky Miller, chief signals officer at the headquarters of British troops in Egypt. The pair went for a drink in the Long Bar of the Shepheard’s Hotel, the favourite haunt of the officer class, and Bagnold asked Miller to have a word with the War Office. Surely even they must see the nonsense of packing off arguably Britain’s foremost expert on the Western Desert to East Africa when Libya was of far greater strategic importance, particularly as the Italian commander, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, had an estimated quarter of a million men in 15 divisions at his disposal.

  Miller promised to submit his friend’s request to the War Office, but unbeknown to Bagnold he had a more powerful ally by his side. He and Miller had been spotted in the Shepheard’s by a reporter from the English-language newspaper, the Egyptian Gazette, and the next day an article appeared in the ‘Day In, Day Out’ gossip column praising the War Office for wasting little time in bringing to Egypt an expert like Bagnold. The War Office, of course, had done no such thing. If it had its way, Bagnold would be swatting away flies in Kenya not Cairo, but the information reached the ears of Archibald Wavell, General Officer Commander-in-Chief of Middle East Command. Instructions were issued and Bagnold was soon sitting in front of Wavell in his cramped office at the top of the ‘Grey Pillars’ HQ.

  Wavell knew all about Bagnold, how he and a group of like-minded adventurers had put their spare time as army officers in Egypt to good use, driving Model T Fords into the Western Desert. Bagnold’s first expedition had been a short one in March 1926, a drive along the old caravan road from Cairo to Suez. A year later, Bagnold – by now a major in the Royal Corps of Signals – commanded a party from Suez to the southern Sinai. Then in October 1927 came his most ambitious expedition yet, penetrating 400 miles west from Cairo to the Siwa Oasis, where in 331 BC Alexander the Great had visited the Temple of the Oracle of Amun during his conquest of Egypt. Bagnold and his five companions (one of them a 26-year-old officer in the Royal Tank Corps called Guy Prendergast) set out in three Model T Fords, venturing onto an ocean of sand that was as merciless to the foolhardy and complacent as the Pacific or Atlantic oceans. In the account he wrote of the journey, Bagnold’s prose ebbed and flowed with awe, astonishment and apprehension. He wrote of the ‘terrible tract of white jagged rock’ they encountered as they searched for the camel track that led towards Siwa; of the ‘damp gardens of oranges and pomegranates’ they drove through and of their sight of Siwa from a cliff-top 70 miles east, ‘with its salty lakes and distant groves of palms dark green against a shining skyline of pale gold domes and sandy pinnacles’.2

  This LRDG patrol has stopped to fill up with petrol. In the early days the petrol was carried in flimsy tins, packed in wooden casing, but these leaked so much that jerrycans soon replaced them. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  On their return from Siwa the British explorers had come across a small Italian outpost, an incongruous reminder of the propensity of the human race to wage war even in the most remote corners of their planet. Bagnold tacitly supported the Arabs, who had been fighting a guerrilla war with the Italians since 1922, but it wasn’t until the 1930s that tensions between Italy and Britain began to increase. Mussolini wanted control of the Mediterranean and that unsettled the British, who feared the dictator’s ultimate aim in North Africa was the conquest of Egypt and the Sudan.

  It was Bagnold’s knowledge of the Western Desert that so interested Wavell. He knew that Italian spies had for some years been sending reports to their superiors about British defences and troop strengths in Egypt, and despite the signing in April 1938 of the Anglo-Italian Agreements, the aims of which were to keep the peace in Africa, Wavell didn’t trust the Italians. They hadn’t entered the war, but the presence in Benghazi, a Libyan port 675 miles west of Cairo, of a German military mission was proof of where Mussolini’s sympathies lay.

  C HAPTER 2

  ONLY THE TOUGH NEED APPLY

  On 16 October 1940 Bagnold wrote in his diary: ‘Cable from WO [War Office] agreeing to my staying in Egypt. Posted to Armoured Divisions Signals, Matruh.’

  Bill Kennedy Shaw, the LRDG intelligence officer, and (right) Shorty Barrett, the unit’s quartermaster, who entered the church on his return to his native New Zealand. (Author’s Collection)

  Mersa Matruh, 135 miles west of Cairo, was situated halfway between the city of Alexandria and the Libyan border. It was also the HQ of the 7th Armoured Division. Bagnold knew the area well. The coastline west from Alexandria is flat, a chain of limestone reefs protecting the beach from waves. It was the limestone that lent the coastal dunes a ‘dazzling whiteness, formed from the debris worn from the outer reefs’.1 As Bagnold made his way west to Mersa Matruh he glimpsed some of the 70,000 people who were estimated in 1940 to inhabit the coast between Alexandria and Libya. They were composed almost ‘entirely of nomadic, or semi-settled Bedouin, who raise camels and small cattle, and grow a little grain’.

  Four thousand natives lived in Mersa Matruh, significant militarily because of its small harbour, but the most important person when Bagnold arrived was General Percy Hobart, commander of the 7th Armoured Division. Hobart’s mind was more open than that of most senior British officers in North Africa and he agreed with Bagnold’s suggestion that they should ‘buy a small assortment of desert-worthy American vehicles and train a nucleus of officers and men in the art of cross-country driving’.2 Nor was Hobart surprised when the suggestion was rejected by his immediate superior, General Henry ‘Jumbo’ Wilson, a Luddite in the art of desert warfare. Bagnold was all the more appalled when he discovered that the only map the British had of the country west of Alexandria was dated 1915.

  Bagnold’s expertise at Mersa Matruh wasn’t completely wasted, however, and he was able to demonstrate to the officers of the 7th Armoured Division some of the tricks he had picked up during his desert explorations a decade earlier. In his expedition into the Western Desert in 1927 Bagnold had dispensed with the unreliable magnetic compasses (because of all the metal in their vehicles) and used a sun compass instead. This was a variation on the sun dial, giving true bearings and not magnetic ones. On the rotating dial was a pointer that the driver lined up with an object on the horizon and then followed as he drove, keeping the pin’s shadow on the pointer. It required patience, and one had to allow for the variation of the sun’s azimuth but, by adjusting the bearing every 20 minutes, navigation became far more reliable.

  Like a sailor on the high seas, Bagnold navigated at night with a theodolite and a knowledge of the stars, while the challenge of extracting a vehicle from sand was solved with the introduction of
sand channels. These were sheets of perforated steel, 5 feet long and 11 inches wide, that were placed in front of the rear wheels of trucks and jeeps for support on the sand.

  Sand Channels were five feet long and eleven inches wide and usually made of perforated steel. They were placed in front of the rear wheels of trucks and jeeps for support on the sand. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  The last improvisation used by Bagnold was the most ingenious of the lot, although it wasn’t his invention, as is often stated, but one he modified from an idea first introduced in World War I. It was a way of preserving that most precious of commodities in the desert – water. To reduce the amount of water lost during expeditions when radiators boiled over and blew water off through the overflow, Bagnold used a water condenser. ‘Instead of having a free overflow pipe we led the water into a can half full of water on the side of the car so it would condense in the can,’ he wrote. ‘When that began to boil too it would spurt boiling water over the driver who would have to stop. All we had to do was turn into wind, wait for perhaps a minute, there would be a gurgling noise, and all the water would be sucked back into the radiator, which was full to the brim.’3

  The longer Bagnold spent in Matruh, the more alarmed he grew that the British could be easily outmanoeuvred by the forces of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, the 59-year-old Italian who had enjoyed a series of successes in the Abyssinian campaign of a few years earlier. Fortunately for the British, Graziani was as rigid in his thinking as General Jumbo Wilson, his British counterpart, and the two armies adopted an approach that was more akin to the battlefields of the Western Front in 1916 rather than the Western Desert of 1940. The Italians had erected a 400-mile barbed-wire line that ran south from the coast along the Libyan frontier with Egypt. The fence was 12 feet thick and 5 feet high in places, and consisted of a triple row of posts embedded in concrete. At intervals along the 400 miles of fence were outposts garrisoned by native troops, although opposite each of these outposts was a gap in the barbed wire big enough to allow a vehicle through.