Long Range Desert Group Page 10
The sun-compass was ideal for the job.3 Without worrying about the induced magnetism of the car or the earth’s magnetic field it gave directly the true bearing which had to be plotted on the map.
For the astro-fix observations we used theodolites. Before the war I had spent many desert nights sitting for hours cramped 011 an empty petrol tin before the car’s headlights, working out the elaborate formula which ended—if all went well—in a latitude and longitude. But by 1940 things were easier, and this, thanks to the progress of aviation. In an aircraft at night, when you are taking star shots with your bubble sextant, it is no use if it takes you an hour to compute the results, for by that time, travelling at 200 m.p.h., you may be over the next continent. So the airmen had produced books of tables which greatly reduced the former labour and which would give a “fix” which was accurate to within a mile or so. Though this would shock the professional surveyors, it was accurate enough for our needs, for in the desert if you can land up within a mile of the well, oasis, road or fort for which you are aiming, there will be plenty of signs round about to lead you in to the actual spot.
There were, of course, occasions when the sums went wrong and a page of careful calculations showed one to be in Alaska or in St. Paul’s! Then the weary navigator must unpack his theodolite, find new stars and do his work over again.
And navigators were weary. They well earned the shilling a day which in 1942 the War Office approved to be paid to those who had passed the test for the new army trade—Land Navigator. Sitting all day beside the driver in the navigating car, with one eye on the sun-compass, the other on the speedometer and the third on his watch he would record the course and the distance run, seizing his chance between the joltings of the truck to write down each bearing and mileage. At halts, crawling under the car for shade or crouching with his back to the winter wind, he must plot his course up to date in order to be able at any moment to show the patrol commander the position. And, at night, when the rest of the patrol were (more or less) comfortably in. bed, sharing with the tired wireless operator the light of a hooded inspection lamp, he must chase Arcturus or Aldebaran through the flapping pages of the Astronomical Navigation Tables, Volume G.
In time, goaded by Bagnold, the Army came to realise that there must be something in this navigation business after ail, but not before one formation, ordered to march on a given bearing, disappeared from the battle along the grid line of the same value, which is not at all the same thing.
So the L.R.D.G. (but not Surveys or Military Training), became the Middle East experts in navigation. Bagnold wrote the two training pamphlets on the subject, and Browne, Croucher and I at various times conducted courses in navigation for officers and men from units of the Eighth Army. The first of these I took at Matruh in the spring of 1942, and did not complete without a passage of arms with an angry major of Field Security who was convinced that the torches we flashed to read the theodolite angles would bring a blitz on to the town. The lecture room was the battered parish hall of the Greek Church and, having no seats, I borrowed the pews out of the adjoining church, to the righteous indignation of the Church of England chaplain who had taken it over and the temporary dislocation of Sunday matins.
A couple of weeks after the completion of the Sirte reconnaissance Middle East gave us another similar task. They wanted a report on the country between Jalo and Agedabia, as seen through the eyes of a force of all arms with A.F.V.s and 3-tonners. Especially they wanted information about water supplies and possible landing grounds.
Though we did not know it at the time this was all part of the plan for the November offensive. It was intended to bluff the enemy into thinking that we were massing a large force at Jaghbub with which to advance on Jalo and thence up north to cut the coast road at Agedabia. Later, in the autumn, a number of tanks and lorries appeared in Jaghbub; cars drove up and down all day raising the dust in feverish activity, and a “Divisional” wireless station poured out bogus messages.
The Rhodesian patrols did the job, Holliman with Si covered the northern part of the country near Agedabia, and Olivey, with whom I went, the area round Jalo. We finished the reconnaissance without incident, zigzagging over the country and filling up old whisky bottles with samples of water, all very nasty, from the wells. They went in to Cairo and I suppose somebody analysed them.
Fortunately we had brought an Arab guide with us from Kufra, for the Italian maps were hopelessly inaccurate, and without him it would have been almost impossible to locate the actual wells. This old man never failed us, though it was eleven years since he had been in that area. On the way up from Kufra he was quite out of his depth for the speed of the cars threw out all his calculations, made at the two-and-a-half-mile-an-hour speed of walking camels, but within a few miles of a well he became interested and alert, stared at the half-remembered landmarks and led us straight to some three-foot waterhole scratched in the sand.
One of these was Bir Bettafal, the only good well near Jalo, to which the Arabs go out to fetch sweet water, for even in Jalo itself the wells are brackish. I hoped we might pick up some information here about Jalo, and we were in luck for we caught two Arabs with camels just about to leave. One was a precocious and rather unpleasant youth, the Arab equivalent of the English boy who recognises the make of every motor car at a glance, but he knew a great deal about the garrison of the oasis. He had been to an Italian school and was glib in descriptions of “contra-aerea” and “anti-carri” guns. As he said he had a married sister at Kufra it did not seem much hardship to take him back there for the sake of the information he could give.
The following January, when we were in Jalo, I met his father, a charming man, head of the big Majbri family of Bishara amongst whom I had some friends in Egypt. He welcomed the British but was rather resentful of some who had carried off his son from Bir Bettafal the summer before. I sympathised deeply and have wondered since if he ever found out.
Middle East wanted the results of the Jalo reconnaissance as soon as possible, so when the reports and maps were ready I took them to Cairo by air. The journey was a good example of L.R.D.G. aviation, typical of the flights which Prendergast and Barker had been making regularly for the past few months.
There are safer methods of travel than flying across the heart of the Libyan Desert in single-engined aircraft without wireless, and so we had done what we could to improve matters. The R.A.F. came to Kufra from Cairo by way of Wadi Haifa, but the Wacos were slow and the longer journey would have meant a day wasted. So earlier in the summer Prendergast had made a more direct air route of his own, to join the Nile at Asyut, and had laid out a chain of landing grounds and stocked them with petrol, oil, water and food.
From Kufra to the Gilf Kebir the route followed the track of supply convoys to Wadi Haifa, and if one had a forced landing there the chances of being picked up were quite good. But from Wadi Sura to Kharga was 400 miles of unfrequented desert and along most of this stretch we had made a depot of water and biscuits every fifteen miles.
There were three of us in the Little Waco; Barker, Arnold navigating, and myself. We took off as soon as it was light enough to see, hoping to get the worst part of the journey over before the September day reached its hottest. Before we had gone far the sun was up and we were flying into its eye, unable to see anything ahead. How much has been written of the glories of the desert dawn and how grudgingly we admired its beauty that summer at Kufra, longing for the moment when the scorching 14-hour day would end.
To the south were the two flat-topped hills which marked Kendall’s Dump, alias “Twenty-Four—Twenty-Four,” where the latitude and longitude of those numbers cross. Here we had a landing ground, and here on his first arrival at Kufra Bagnold had built up a dump of food and petrol, foreseeing the possibility of having to evacuate the oasis in a hurry and make his way back to the Nile.
Thirty minutes later we were at the Gilf and turned south along the cliffs. Three thousand feet below, halted in a bunch, were a dozen Mack
10-tonners on the last lap of their run from Wadi Haifa. They must have taken us for a roving C.R. 42 for they scattered in an instant like a herd of lumbering elephants surprised at the first shot.
At Wadi Sura we circled the landing ground to check position and then turned east across the Gilf. The Gilf is, with Gebel ’Uweinat, the most striking feature of the southern desert. On the west the cliffs, almost impassable, rise for a thousand feet above the plain to the flat plateau at their top. This is a relic of some earlier desert surface now suspended high above the surrounding country, preserved from erosion by the harder sandstone strata of.its surface layers. The 100-mile stretch across the Gilf was the least pleasant of the journey; at the worst after a forced landing exactly in the middle one would have to walk fifty miles to the landing ground at either end. And because of the difficulty of getting cars up on to the plateau we had made no dumps of food and water there.
We crossed the Gilf and landed—with a bump—at our new landing ground at Gebel Ailam, filled up with petrol and oil and left a note in the post-box to say we had passed by. The bump was no fault of Barker’s, for on a featureless, sandy surface in the glare of a summer day it is terribly difficult to judge height and you may well land fifteen feet above ground—or below it.
From here on to Kharga was the most difficult stretch of the flight. The plan made by Prendergast was that in the event of a forced landing we should come down on the car tracks, walk to the nearest water and wait for a rescue party. This meant flying low enough to see the tracks, which by now, with the sun casting little side-shadow, were only visible at about 300 feet, and so being unable to go up to the cool air at 6000. For 200 miles we stared down at the faint wheel tracks, Arnold peering out at one side and I at the other, now seeing them for a few moments, now losing them again.
A hundred miles from Kharga was the last emergency landing ground which I had marked out in June. Prendergast, flying to Cairo a few weeks earlier, had been unable to find it, for in all this desert good landmarks are very scarce. There had been some jesting at my expense and it was up to me to prove that the landing ground really existed. By now in the glare and the heat haze we had lost the car tracks for good and I was doubtful of picking up the one landmark I remembered, a dog’s tooth hill standing on a broken ridge, for in the desert a landscape first seen in the light of early morning looks entirely different when the shadows are falling the other way. However, the hill showed itself and we landed for oil for the over-heated engine.
In the air again there was no need to continue track-following for the great limestone scarp beyond Kharga showed clear ahead, and we could go up to 6000 feet and keep the engine temperature down. Below us to the left was the broken country round “Aviator’s Grave”; the record on the 1/500,000 map of some forgotten tragedy of the last war, now nothing but a few square yards of desert within a fence of rusty barbed wire and the inevitable blackened food tins scattered beside.
From Asyut, where the Nile was in flood across the valley and where the Shell agent produced cold drinks and biscuits, it was two hours easy going to Cairo over the weird landscape of the Eastern Desert where the wadis and their many-branched tributaries look like a scale model in a geography class designed to illustrate the progress of erosion.
The War Office and Middle East were pleased with the information we had collected.
GENERAL HEADQUARTERS,
MIDDLE EAST FORGES.
29th September, 1941.
MY DEAR BAGNOLD,
I have received the following message from the C.I.G.S. :
“I am very impressed by the work done by your Long Range Desert Patrols. Their latest reconnaissance is a fine example of their skill and daring. I would be grateful if you would convey my warmest congratulations.”
I am very glad indeed to forward this message and will be grateful if you will add my congratulations on a very fine performance, one of many that the Group have done, and convey the contents of this letter to all concerned.
Yours sincerely,
C. J. AUCHINLECK.
Col. R. A. BAGNOLD.
1 Generals and Generalship. The Lees Knowles Lectures, 1939.
2 From this point onwards the reader will find many references to the “Road Watch.” What that means is explained in Chapter 13.
3 The sun-compass consists of a horizontal circle, divided into 360 degrees, with a central needle casting a shadow across the graduations. By rotating the circle, which is fixed to the dashboard of the car, throughout the day to correspond with the sun’s movement through the sky, the shadow is made to indicate the true bearing on which the car is travelling.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“A” SQUADRON AT SIWA
WHILE T and G patrols were returning from Murzuk and, later on, while the incidents described in the last chapter were taking place, other patrols were busy in the north.
Wavell’s advance into Cyrenaica in December, 1940, had cut off the Italians in Jaghbub. His strategy was to contain the garrison there so an Australian cavalry regiment guarded the northern approaches and Steele with R patrol watched the western side, while the Italian broadcasts turned Castegna, their commander in the oasis, into a national hero for resisting attacks which were never made. R patrol sat outside Jaghbub for six weeks with only a fine haul of brandy from an Italian convoy coming in from the north-west to mitigate cold, boredom and days of driving duststorm. T patrol relieved them at the beginning of March and Jaghbub fell to a fierce assault by the Australians a few days later.
Jaghbub is the Holy City of the Senussi, for here beside the white-domed mosque is buried Sayed Ibn Ali es Senussi, the founder of the sect. For generations it was the centre of Senussi learning, and pilgrimage to the tomb of the Sayed brought the pilgrim a reward second only to that of the Holy Cities of Arabia—Mecca and Medina. From all other aspects Jaghbub is one of the most revolting spots in Libya. A few wretched palm groves and thin tamarisk scrub straggle dejectedly across the oasis-depression; mosquitoes and sand flies swarm and the water must have been the inspiration for Epsom Salts.
In late March and April of 1941 Mitford took two patrols up into Cyrenaica to do reconnaissance work for Desforce, keeping a watch on the country south of Gebel Akhdar 1 to Msus and beyond. They had some skirmishes with the enemy, took a few prisoners and destroyed some vehicles, but early in April the Germans made their first appearance in Cyrenaica and the British withdrawal to the Egyptian frontier began.
YI patrol took part in the fighting outside Mechili, but escaped capture when the place fell, all save one man, Cave,2 who was in Mechili when the Germans attacked. The following is the fine story of how he was captured, escaped, lived for six weeks with Arabs and finally reached our lines at Tobruk :
“YI patrol had returned from Msus to Mechili after the former had been over-run by the Germans. On arrival at Mechili the patrol was ordered to go out west again and harass the advancing enemy convoys, but unfortunately my truck had a damaged radiator, and as the Indian Ordnance workshops were at Mechili I had to stay there to get the repairs done.
“During the afternoon of April 6th the Germans began to shell us with long range. guns. At dawn on the 7th the main attack was launched with infantry supported by tanks. After three hours furious resistance Mechili fell, and I found myself a prisoner of war with 1500 other Indians, Aussies and Tommies. Here we remained for the next five days, living on one tin of ‘M. and V.’ and half a pint of water per man per day—perhaps.
“On the sixth day they moved us to the P.O.W. camp at Derna. During my stay there for the next seven days food was anything but plentiful, and the old Italian barracks where we were billeted were filthy. There were seven cases of typhoid and a hundred of dysentery. The only redeeming feature was that we were allowed to write one letter home; mine arrived in England in about five weeks. The Germans treated us well but the Italians seemed to grudge us everything they did for us which was not much.
“During the first few days I became friendly with ei
ght Australians. One of them was of the same mind as myself and wanted to escape at the first opportunity. On the afternoon of Sunday 21st, feeling particularly ‘browned off,’ we decided to make a break for it when darkness came.
“At about seven o’clock Alfred, my Australian friend, came into the billet and told me that the guards who had been patrolling the front of the building were nowhere to be seen and this only left the machine-gun posts encircling the camp to be avoided. We had accumulated eight tins of bully and two water bottles and six Italian biscuits each, and here was the chance we had been waiting for. We said good-bye to the others and dropped off the wall into the compound which encircled the billets. It was a moonless night and nobody noticed us. We made our way along the compound wall to an old cookhouse where we noticed a gap in the wall. We got through this and, hardly daring to breathe, crawled between the machine-gun posts about ten yards away. Luckily the ground was covered with large boulders which gave some cover and after about 400 yards we found ourselves in an old stone quarry.
“The next difficulty was to get up the Derna escarpment as the road had to be avoided at all costs. The first 500 feet were fairly easy, but then we came to a precipitous cliff which took us nearly four hours to climb. At the top we found a convenient cave and sheltered there till dawn came and we could get our bearings.
“Morning found us due west of Derna and, as we had to avoid the airport at the top of the pass, we decided to make a detour inland. After a few miles we met two Arabs who gave us cigarettes and offered us a meal in their tent. But we wanted to push on, so they put us on a track which they said avoided the airfield and led to another encampment of friendly Arabs. We met two other Arabs further on who gave us a very welcome drink of tea. They advised us to leave the track and cross the Wadi Derna, but this brought us right on top of the airfield. From there we watched our own planes bombing and straffing the hangars.