The Long Range Desert Group in World War II Read online

  The British had been working on defensive preparations of their own in and around Matruh, the Royal Engineers erecting a chain of concrete pill boxes, antitank ditches and minefields in anticipation of an Italian attack, as well as laying water pipes along the coast road back towards Alexandria.

  The reason for this thoroughness was the importance of Egypt to the British. Control of the country meant one controlled the Suez Canal, the artery connecting the eastern oceans to the Mediterranean. To the north, in the Levant, Britain had the French forces in Syria to protect the canal from any German incursion, while to the south in Chad the French were also present to guard against any possible Italian attack from their base at Kufra in south-east Libya.

  A distinctive feature and a boon for navigators, this was known as Chimney Rock and was located north of Kufra. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  Bagnold was horrified by the blinkered vision of Wilson, an officer who was still in thrall to the static warfare of the Great War, a man lacking the imagination and intelligence to grasp how advances in transport, communication and weaponry made it possible to fight a more fluid, mobile and wide-ranging campaign.

  Bagnold submitted a proposal a second time in January 1940 for the raising of a small reconnaissance force to patrol the 700-mile frontier with Libya, but again the idea was rebuffed by Jumbo Wilson. Irritated at the presumption of Bagnold, Wilson sent him to Turkey in February to idle his time away in a staff job. In April he flew to Khartoum to look up an old friend from his exploration days, Douglas Newbold, and he even found time to edit the proofs of the American edition of his book, The Physics of Blown Sand.

  Then on 10 May there was another of Bagnold’s laconic entries in his diary: ‘Germans invade Holland and Belgium’. Bagnold had no way of knowing it at the time but the attack on the Low Countries by Nazi Germany would have far-reaching repercussions for him. ‘Fall of Paris, French collapsing,’ Bagnold told his diary on 15 June, and two days later Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun in the Great War, asked Germany for armistice terms. Britain’s dismay turned to alarm when they learned that the French colonies in North Africa and the Middle East would not carry on the fight but would accede to the terms of the armistice agreed by Pétain, who became head of the Vichy government. Now Britain’s position in Egypt, and its control of the Suez Canal, was threatened in the north, where French forces came under the command of the collaborationist Vichy government.

  The situation was more stable in the south thanks to the decision of Félix Éboué, the governor of Chad, not to support the Vichy regime, but French forces in Morocco and Algeria were not so loyal. Their defection to Vichy meant that Italy, who had declared war on Britain on 10 June, no longer had to station a large proportion of its air and ground forces in western Libya in case of an attack from Morocco or Algeria. Instead these forces were released for use against the frontier of Egypt. With British troops in the Middle East cut off from their comrades in Europe because Italy controlled the Mediterranean and Red Sea routes, Bagnold thought it worth submitting his proposal for a light reconnaissance force once again. Third time lucky, he mused, as he updated his idea, explaining there would be three patrols heading deep into Libya to spy on the enemy’s disposition:

  Every vehicle of which, with a crew of three and a machine gun, was to carry its own supplies of food and water for 3 weeks, and its own petrol for 2,500 miles of travel across average soft desert surface – equivalent in petrol consumption to some 2,400 miles of road. By the use of 30-cwt [hundredweight] trucks there would be a small margin of load-carrying capacity in each. This margin, if multiplied by a large enough number of trucks would enable the patrol to carry a wireless set, navigating and other equipment, medical stores, spare parts and further tools, and would also allow extra petrol to be carried for another truck mounting a 2-pdr gun with its ammunition, and a light pilot car for the commander.4

  LRDG signallers used commercial procedure when communicating on their wireless so if the Germans intercepted the message they would believe it was an Egyptian company. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  Bagnold gave the proposal to an old friend, Brigadier Dick Baker, the pair having first met as officer cadets in the summer of 1914. Baker duly delivered the memo into the hands of Wavell, and as Bagnold recalled in an unpublished draft of his memoirs, written shortly after the end of the war:

  I had expected interest, a meeting perhaps, discussions as to whether the scheme was practicable, counter-proposals and considerable delay. But instead of this the whole scheme, just as it stood, had been strongly supported by the heads of both the operations and intelligence staffs, and had been read and approved by the C-in-C himself. I was to push on with it at once, under the aegis of Brigadier Shearer, the DMI [Director of Military Intelligence], without waiting for any formal authority.5

  The previous complacency of the British high command had evaporated with Italy’s declaration of war. Their position in Egypt was tenuous, and finally they appreciated it. The enemy’s control of central Libya centred on what they called their Southern Territories Command, the headquarters of which was in Hon, in the north-west, one of five oases that also included Marada, Augila, Jalo and Jarabub. In the east of Libya (also known as Cyrenaica) the Italians were in possession of a chain of oases and wells that ran from the port of Benghazi 800 miles south into the heart of the desert. Therefore, when Italy entered the war, ‘they had not only the means of reinforcing their aircraft in East Africa by flights from Kufra and Oweinat [also spelled Uweinat], but if they had so wished, they could have used Oweinat and Sarra as jumping-off places for raids by mechanised forces or by air on the Aswan Dan, our river port at Wadi Halfa, into Darfur or into the French possessions in the south-west’.6

  In short, the British situation in Egypt in June 1940 was critical and Bagnold’s proposition couldn’t have been more opportune, hence the alacrity with which it was embraced by Wavell. There was just one thing – such was the pressing urgency Bagnold was instructed to raise his force within six weeks. He later described Wavell’s decision to give him carte-blanche to put his idea into practice ‘remarkable’, adding: ‘it was also astonishing that Wavell, on hearing my proposal for the first time, should have given me such a free hand seemingly without any pause for thought, specially when others had ridiculed any such idea as utterly impossible. He alone grasped the possibilities and implications.’7

  ‘It was also astonishing that Wavell, on hearing my proposal for the first time, should have given me such a free hand seemingly without any pause for thought, specially when others had ridiculed any such idea as utterly impossible. He alone grasped the possibilities and implications.’

  Ralph Bagnold

  Bagnold wasted no time bringing his brainwave into life, cabling many of the men with whom he had explored the Libyan Desert in the inter-war years. These were members of the Zerzura Club, founded by Bagnold in November 1930 in the Greek bar of Wadi Halfa during his expedition into the desert that year. The club was named after the mythical oasis that had drawn many an adventurer into the desert. Among the six explorers present at the club’s inaugural meeting were Guy Prendergast, Douglas Newbold and Bill Kennedy Shaw.

  Prendergast, who had been on the 1927 expedition to Siwa, reluctantly declined the invitation to join Bagnold in Cairo. He was now a major in the Royal Tank Regiment and stationed in England. Similarly, Newbold was the political head of the Sudan government and obliged to fulfil his duties in Khartoum. One experienced explorer who did respond positively to Bagnold’s telegram was 44-year-old Pat Clayton, who arrived in the Egyptian capital from Tanganyika where he had spent 18 years working for the Egyptian Survey Department.

  A desert water hole from where artesian water could be drawn. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  Bagnold also approached Rupert Harding-Newman and Teddy Mitford, both of whom were serving army officers with experience of desert exploration. The former was stationed in Cairo, like Prenderg
ast a tank officer, and while he wasn’t given permission to join the new unit he was encouraged to offer logistical assistance in its formation.

  Captain Mitford, a cousin of the notorious Mitford sisters, one of whom, Unity, was a friend of Adolf Hitler, was one of the few Europeans to have travelled by motor car across the desert to Kufra Oasis. He jumped at the chance to join Bagnold and his ‘private army’, and received permission to leave his regiment.

  Some of the men from T Patrol, which was commanded by Pat Clayton until his capture in January 1941. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  The other pre-war explorer recruited was 38-year-old Bill Kennedy Shaw, who was working for the Colonial Service in Jerusalem when Bagnold flew up to see him. Described by his contemporaries as ‘utterly charming’ with a ‘tidy and academic mind’, Kennedy Shaw spoke Arabic and was an expert in archaeology, botany, entomology and navigation.8 Like Bagnold he had chafed at his contribution to the war effort in the first months of the conflict, but when he had written to Middle East Command offering his services as a desert explorer he had been told ‘that it was considered inadvisable to take me off the job I was then doing – which was helping to censor the Palestine newspapers’.9

  Kennedy Shaw couldn’t believe his luck as Bagnold outlined his idea. ‘Here was the army proposing to pay me to do what I had spent a lot of time and money doing for myself before the war,’ he wrote later in his war memoir, Long Range Desert Group. ‘This was a chance which comes only once in a lifetime … in two weeks I was out of the Colonial Service and into the army.’

  Between them, Bagnold and his coterie of desert explorers called up old contacts and cajoled new ones in their quest to have the unit ready within the six weeks demanded by Wavell. Harding-Newman ‘wangled’ a quantity of sun compasses from the Egyptian Army; maps were printed at the Cairo Survey Department; theodolites were charmed from the Physical Department and field glasses were donated by race enthusiasts from the Gezira Sporting Club. Among other items obtained during this period were nautical almanacs (for use with the theodolites), logarithmic tables and trouser clips (to keep maps on their boards). All the while, recalled Kennedy Shaw, ‘in half-forgotten shops in the back streets of Cairo we searched for a hundred and one (to the Army) unorthodox needs’.

  After the capture of Clayton, T Patrol was led by the highly regarded New Zealand officer, Bruce Ballantyne. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  The biggest challenge was the vehicles, or at least it would have been had not Harding-Newman been in Cairo to help. Bagnold described Harding-Newman’s contribution to the formation of his unit as ‘invaluable’ and within 24 hours of being asked, he had four types of truck for Bagnold to test. ‘We took them out for test runs over rocks and through soft sand,’ remembered Bagnold. ‘I decided there and then upon an ordinary commercial pattern of 30-cwt Chevrolet, fast, simple and easy to handle.’ Mitford recalled that Bagnold ‘produced a camouflage pattern of very broad dark and light stripes, different for each truck, which would help in areas of rock and scrub’. Additionally, the 7th Armoured Division’s red rat insignia was painted on each vehicle to further conceal the unit’s ‘real purpose’.10

  An immaculate T2 Patrol, commanded by Second Lt Saunders, pose for the camera. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  Harding-Newman also charmed the Egyptian government into loaning Bagnold 19 trucks from their fleet, with a further 14 supplied by General Motors in Alexandria. These were then delivered to the Army Ordnance workshops where Harding-Newman oversaw their adaptation to off-road desert travel – including the attachment of water condensers to radiators, the raising of the sides of the normal box body in order to carry the required loads, mountings for machine guns and brackets for compasses.

  Bagnold was delighted, all the more so because he found it onerous to go cap in hand to organizations and companies in search of equipment. A shy and introverted man by nature, with a stammer to boot, Bagnold wasn’t a man who exuded effortless bonhomie. An officer who joined the unit a few months later described its commanding officer as a ‘small wizened figure with piercing eyes and an abrupt manner’,11 while David Lloyd Owen, who ended the war as CO (commanding officer) of the LRDG (Long Range Desert Group) said of his predecessor, ‘He was not particularly ebullient nor forthcoming with pleasantries. He was not that kind of man; there was never any time to waste over trivialities in his life. He lived it to a plan, which was worked out in every detail of efficiency and purpose’.12

  Bagnold had his vehicles and equipment, now he just had to find the men to fill the ranks of his new unit. His first choice were Australians, conscious that in World War I they had manned the Light Car Patrols (LCP), the motorized unit formed in 1916 to patrol the Egyptian border against attack from the Senussi forces led by Sayed Ahmed esh Sherif, an ally of the Turks. It was the LCP who, according to Bill Kennedy Shaw, had invented the sun compasses and the water condensers, although they had to make do with tyres that were just 3½ inches in diameter, thin and fragile compared to the 10-inch sand tyres on the 30cwt Chevrolets.

  David Lloyd Owen (standing far left) with members of his Y Patrol. The sergeant on the right of the photo is the highly respected Jock Carningham, who was captured on Leros in 1943. (Author’s Collection)

  Lieutenant General Thomas Blamey, in command of Australian forces in the Middle East, refused to release any of its men to serve under British command on the orders of his government, so a despondent Bagnold returned to Cairo and approached Brigadier Edward Puttick, temporary commander of the New Zealand forces in Egypt in the absence of Major-General Bernard Freyberg, who was in England with the second infantry brigade of the NZ division. Puttick acceded to Bagnold’s request and 80 officers, non-commissioned officers and men from the New Zealand Divisional Cavalry Regiment and Machine Gun Battalion were selected from the volunteers who answered the call for ‘men who possess stamina and initiative’.13

  Bill Kennedy Shaw was impressed when the New Zealanders arrived in Cairo to begin their training. He had never encountered any before. ‘All the knowledge I had of them were my father’s words of the last war – that they were the finest troops from the Dominions. Closer acquaintance showed that one should always believe one’s father.’14 Bagnold described the Kiwi volunteers as a ‘sturdy basis of sheep-farmers, leavened by technicians, property-owners and professional men, and including a few Maoris. Shrewd, dry-humoured, curious of every new thing, and quietly thrilled when I told them what we were to do.’15 Kennedy Shaw shared his commander’s assessment, adding that: ‘Physically their own fine country had made them on the average fitter than us, and they had that inherent superiority which in most of a man’s qualities the countryman will always have over the townsman.’16

  New Zealanders, like these men of T Patrol, were the first recruits to the LRDG and their initiative and endurance were highly valued by Ralph Bagnold. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  Bagnold explained to the New Zealanders that the unit to which they now belonged was concerned primarily with reconnaissance; that they were to discover what the Italians were up to in the interior of the Libyan Desert 600 miles west of the Suez Canal. To reach the enemy’s positions they would have to cross the Great Sand Sea, the vast protective barrier roughly the size of Ireland that stretches from Siwa Oasis, in the north-west of Egypt, almost as far south as Sudan. In total, the Libyan Desert is the size of India, 1,200 miles by 1,000, composed of limestone to the north and sandstone to the south. The terrain varies enormously, from the treacherous sand seas to the 6,000ft massif of the Jebel Uweinat, and temperatures were similarly inconsistent, sometimes reaching 120°F in the shade in the summer and plummeting to several degrees below freezing in the winter. The landscape was also one of sharp contrasts. The gravel desert was called in Arabic serir, the stony areas known as hammada. Both, in general, were good to travel on because the wind had removed the sand, a process known as ‘deflation’. At other times they would encounter a bed o
f powdered clay, which enveloped intruders with choking, billowing clouds of white dust that were visible for miles around.

  Bagnold explained that reconnaissance wasn’t possible by air, because what long-range aircraft were at their disposal were required for other purposes, ‘and in any case would have been of little avail for patrolling such an enormous area without an elaborate system of landing grounds and petrol supplies, neither of which existed’.17 It would have to be done by motor vehicle, manned by a small band of intrepid men who respected but weren’t cowed by the immensity of the desert. Bagnold, Kennedy Shaw and the other middle-aged desert explorers spent several weeks schooling the New Zealanders in desert travel and navigation, vehicle maintenance and the conservation of food and water. Kennedy Shaw was impressed with the ‘speed and thoroughness’ with which the New Zealanders absorbed all the instructions. ‘For it is not enough to have learned how to operate, in the military sense, in the desert … the problem is to make yourself so much master over the appalling difficulties of Nature – heat, thirst, cold, rain, fatigue – that, overcoming these, you yet have physical energy and mental resilience to deal with the greater object, the winning of the war.’18