Long Range Desert Group Read online

  So there was a real need to know what the enemy was doing in the inner desert. Being Italian he was in fact doing nothing, but we were not then entitled to gamble on that.

  How was this need to be met? After the Light Car Patrols had been disbanded official interest in the inner desert lapsed and in the early summer of 1940 there was no military force in Egypt capable of reaching Kufra from the Nile Valley. But the nucleus from which such a force could be created did exist.

  For ten years and more before the Nazi war Major (now Brigadier) R. A. Bagnold had been the acknowledged leader of a small band of enthusiasts who found enjoyment in exploring the Libyan Desert. Their expeditions, beginning in the late ’twenties with week-end trips from Cairo to Siwa or Sinai, had grown into large-scale explorations in the ’thirties, journeys of five thousand and six thousand miles during which we covered most of the desert between the Mediterranean and the northern Sudan.

  Our expeditions were all private ones, paid for by those who took part in them, and they cost about £20 a head per thousand miles. From so-called “official quarters,” in a typically British way, we received little or no attention, though I remember being sought out in London during the Sanctions “flap” of 1935 by a harassed staff officer from the War Office who asked me whether I thought the Italians would be able to move an armoured force along the escarpment from Solium to Matruh. As I had never seen an armoured force I expect my advice was of little value, and in any case the problem was solved by a surrender to Mussolini’s blusterings. There was an exception, however, in the Royal Geographical Society from whom we received constant support and encouragement. The R.G.S. had a real share in the successes of the L.R.D.G.

  During those years we re-learned the lessons of the Light Car Patrols and added new knowledge of our own. Bagnold perfected the sun-compass, invented rope-ladders (now replaced by sand-mats) and steel channels (of which more later) for “unsticking” cars from sand, and with them forced his way far into the Sand Sea which Williams and his men had hardly touched.

  About thirty men and women shared in those pre-war journeys, but six or eight of them had a much greater knowledge of the desert than the rest, having served for many years in Egypt with the Army or, like Clayton, in the Egyptian Government Survey. At the outbreak of war with Italy only one or two of these men had been sent to the Middle East. None were engaged in work directly connected with the desert. Had the Germans been in our place would they not have seen the war with Italy as at least a very considerable probability, have gathered these men together and set them to work in the country of which they knew so much?

  In fact it was a fortunate accident which brought L.R.D.G. into being. In October, 1939, Bagnold was on his way from England to take up some routine post in East Africa. In the Mediterranean, still open as Italy had not yet come down from her seat on the fence, his ship was involved in a collision and put into Alexandria for repairs. During the delay Bagnold visited Cairo where General Wavell heard of his arrival and had him transferred to his own Command.

  You may read in the newspapers of a year or two later, when they were first allowed to write about L.R.D.G., that the moment Italy declared war the Army sent for Bagnold, the man who knew more than any one else about sand, saying to him, “Make us a Long Range Desert Group.” The only true part of this tale is about the sand.1

  In November, 1939, and again in January, 1940, Bagnold made proposals for such a force but it was not until after Italy had declared war on June 10th, that his scheme was adopted. On this third occasion Bagnold put forward his plans on June 19th; on the 23rd they were approved; on August 5th L.R.P.2 left Cairo on its first training trip and on the 27th was ready for action. But much had happened before then.

  At the beginning of the war I was in Palestine in the Colonial Service. In September, 1939, I had written to the Middle East Command offering to serve in an area of which I had much experience, but 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. In June, 1940, Bagnold came up to Jerusalem and asked me to join his new force. This was a chance which comes only once in a lifetime. 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. In two weeks I was out of the Colonial Service and into the Army.

  Meanwhile Bagnold had begun to collect a few more men who knew the Libyan Desert. Clayton soon arrived from Tanganyika. He had spent eighteen years in the Egyptian Desert Survey and had a knowledge of the desert which was unsurpassed. Of the other “desert trippers” of pre-war days Harding Newman was in Egypt but the Military Mission would not let him go, and Prendergast was in England and did not join us till six months later. But Bagnold had found Mitford, an R.T.R. officer who knew Egypt well, and who, besides Clayton, was one of the few Englishmen who had been to Kufra.

  Arrival in Cairo put time back ten years. It was just like the preparation for a “Bagnold Trip” in the ’thirties and the same friends helped us as they had helped us then. Since maps of Libya and suitable technical equipment were not at the time available from Army resources Rowntree printed the maps for us at Giza, we borrowed theodolites from Black at the Physical Department or from Murray at the Desert Surveys, and Harding Newman “wangled” sun-compasses for us out of the Egyptian Army. When we wanted information we went to Hatton or Bather at the Egyptian Frontiers Administration or to Jennings Bramly at Burg el ’Arab. Shapiro at Ford’s did rush jobs on the cars; school-mistresses gave us books of Log. Tables and racing men their field-glasses, and in half-forgotten shops in the back-streets of Cairo we searched for a hundred and one (to the Army) unorthodox needs.

  The first big problems were men and machines. All our early journeys had been made with Ford 15-cwt. “pick-ups,” first the Model T, then the Model A, the best car Ford ever made, and later with the V 8’s. Though the load which these could carry was enough to give a range of twelve hundred odd miles for peacetime exploring, their capacity was far too small for the guns, ammunition, mines and all the paraphernalia of war, and so Bagnold proposed to use 30-cwt. trucks. I was doubtful if these would be able to cross the sand seas over which we should have to operate, but Bagnold was right. The huge tyres now made—we used 10.50 × 16’s—and the higher horse-power engines enabled us to cross almost any dunes with loads up to two tons.

  The Army had no suitable cars in Egypt but Bagnold and Harding Newman managed to collect them; some from the Chevrolet Company in Alexandria and others from the Egyptian Army. At Ordnance Brigadier Richards, a very good friend to L.R.D.G., gave us a high priority for the necessary alterations and by the middle of August all were ready.

  After machines men. The New Zealand Command in the Middle East were asked if they would provide officers and men for three patrols and on the 1st July they agreed to do so. It must have been a hard decision to take. It involved a small but continuous liability against their own then scanty forces, and also the placing of New Zealand troops directly under British command. I think they never regretted the decision; certainly no one else ever did.

  A newspaper article once described L.R.D.G. as “the bravest, toughest and brainiest unit of Britain’s great desert army.” “When,” it went on, “the decision was taken to organise the Long Range Desert Group for operations behind the enemy lines a call was sent out to all units of the desert army for volunteers. The call stated ‘only men who do not mind a hard life, with scanty food, little water and lots of discomfort, men who possess stamina and initiative, need apply.’”

  The second sentence is hardly accurate as the initial recruiting was confined to a few units only, and modesty compels a denial of the first, but the qualities were some of those we needed. Brains, initiative, reliability, endurance and courage were probably of equal importance, though the L.R.D.G. man did not need his courage so often as the unfortunate infantryman suffering constant bombing and shelling up on the coast. But when, caught by enemy aircraft in open desert, he did
need it—he needed it badly. Toughness without intelligence was of no use to us, nor was extreme youth essential; speaking without statistics I should say that the twenty-five-year-olds or the nearer-thirties lasted longest and did best.

  There can be no doubt whatever that much of the early and continued success of L.R.D.G. was due to the speed and thoroughness with which the New Zealanders learned desert work and life. For it is not enough to have learned how to operate, in the military sense, in the desert, though that may be half of the battle. Naturally the driver must be able to drive in conditions entirely new to him, the signalman to keep in touch, the navigator to find his way, the gunner to have his sand-filled Vickers ready for instant use. But there is more to it than that. To exist at all in the Qattara Depression or in the Sand Sea in June or in the Gebel Akhdar in February is in itself a science which practice develops into an art. The probtem 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, as the task presents itself from day to day.

  Most of the first New Zealanders were from the Divisional Cavalry—the “Div. Cav.”—farmers or the like in civil life, and with a maturity and independence not found in Britishers3 of similar age. 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. Many were owner-drivers at home and therefore naturally disposed to take care of their cars; regarding them as a thing to be preserved rather than, as was sometimes the British attitude, as the property of an abstract entity, “the Government,” whose loss or destruction was small concern of theirs.

  I had never met New Zealanders before; all the knowledge I had of them were my father’s words of the last war—that they were the finest of the troops from the Dominions. Closer acquaintance showed that one should always believe one’s father. To me they always seemed to have a real sense of what our Empire could be to them. The untravelled Englishman, so long as he gets them, is little interested where his bread and butter comes from. The New Zealander on the contrary has a very real appreciation of where his butter (and mutton) go to. And it is not merely commercially that he sees what the Empire stands for. How often have I heard a man express the hope that after the war he might have a chance to go to England—to “home.” To hear a New Zealand farmer’s comment on the Labour Government one would imagine that the country could look forward to nothing but instant and utter ruin, but having discounted all that it seemed to me, an outsider, that New Zealand approached most nearly to that true democracy which so many of us profess to be fighting for and which so few understand.

  Occasionally it fell to a British officer to command a New Zealand patrol. Knowing the conventional opinion held by the New Zealanders of the average Englishman this was a task approached with some misgivings. But if you could show that your first object was to get on with the job, and that you knew as much or even a little more than they did about doing it, then the patrol, awarding perhaps the high praise that you were “not such a bad sort of bastard after all,” would achieve all and more than you could ask. And to distract attention from your own shortcomings you could always resort to a diversion—to start a discussion on the relative merits of the North Island and the South Island or invite, if you had time to spare, a description of pig hunting in the woods round Lake Waikikamukau.

  In the L.R.D.G. we had one immense advantage—all our men were volunteers drawn, at times, from as many as fifty units of the Army. There was never any lack of them and always a long waiting list; in the early days it was said that a vacancy was worth a “fiver.” It was common enough for men to go down in rank when they joined. Captains came as lieutenants; sergeants as privates; driver-mechanics gave up their trade pay. The best stayed for years; the worst left very quickly. For example, an unhappy choice who arrived in Siwa one Christmas Day. By evening he was calling the Second in Command by his Christian name; worse—being familiar with the Sergeant-Major; worse still—telling his future patrol just how L.R.D.G. work should be done. It was a surprised and injured man who left for Matruh at 7.30 a.m. on Boxing Day.

  A balance sheet of serving in the L.R.D.G., drawn up from the point of view of the average soldier, would probably read something like this :

  Assets.

  Liabilities.

  The best food in the Middle East.

  A job which was always interesting and often exciting.

  Almost complete freedom from drills, guards and fatigues.

  A minimum of being “mucked about.”

  The strain of operating almost continually behind the enemy’s lines.

  Never returning to base for a long refit and rest, and suffering as a result from weariness, desert sores and occasional cafard.

  Living as we usually did two hundred miles or more from the nearest other troops and being under direct command of either Middle East4 or Eighth Army, we escaped those periodical inspections which involved other units in days of fev erish preparation and a two-hour wait on a hot parade ground until the (relatively) Great Man arrived. I recollect being inspected once by a Secretary of State for War and twice by a Commander-in-Chief, Middle East. Lesser mortals, such as Divisional or Brigade Commanders, did not bother us.

  1 I refer those who wish to know just why sand gets into their bully stew to The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes by R. A. Bagnold, O.B.E., F.R.S. (Methuen, 1941.)

  2 During the first six months the unit was called “Long Range Patrols,” but for the sake of clearness I have used the title L.R.D.G throughout.

  3 There seems to be no word for “dwellers in the United Kingdom.” Throughout this book only the context will show whether “British” means this or “men of the British Commonwealth of Nations.”

  4 I use the phrase “Middle East” both in its geographical sense, i.e. the countries of the Middle East and also, as all the Army used it, to mean G..H.Q. Middle East in Cairo. The context will usually make it clear in which sense it is used.

  CHAPTER TWO

  PREPARATION

  HAVING found men and vehicles the next thing was to turn them into a fighting force. There were so many things to be arranged—training in cross-desert driving, special equipment, alterations to the cars, navigation, rations, signals, Intelligence.

  The Military Historian will find the War Establishment for L.R.D.G. in the archives of Middle East H.Q. Briefly, the first (L.R.P.) patrols consisted of two officers, about thirty men, eleven trucks, eleven machine-guns, four Boys anti-tank rifles, one 37 mm. Bofors gun, with pistols and rifles to taste. Later on we got better arms and many more of them. The Lewis gave way to Brownings and Vickers K’s, and the Boys and Bofors to .5 Vickers and 20 mm. Bredas. And later the patrols were halved in size to become one officer and 15-18 men in five cars, the whole unit being organised as : Group H.Q.; “A” (New Zealand) Squadron; “B” (Guards, Rhodesian and Yeomanry) Squadron; Signal Troop, and L.R.S.1

  The alterations to the trucks were based on the experience of pre-war journeys of exploration—more leaves in the springs; condensers for the radiators; doors, windscreens and hoods removed; and special fittings for wireless, guns, water-containers, sand-channels and the rest. The trucks, so-called 30 cwts., actually carried something like two tons, with a standard range (in time) of three weeks’ rations and water and (in distance) of 1100 miles without re-fuelling. One truck in each patrol carried a Bofors or Breda gun mounted in the back; machine-guns, as the photographs in this book show, were mounted on a central pillar or on tube mountings round the sides of the cars. At the beginning Bagnold made experiments in armouring the trucks but the extra weight of metal reduced the range of action so much that he abandoned the idea.

  Knowing that we should often get no fresh meat or bread or vegetables for weeks or months on end we needed a special ration scal
e. In the back numbers of the Geographical Journal were the scales which Craig and Harding-Newman, the quartermasters of our peace-time journeys, had drawn up, and which long experience had proved to be admirable. Using these and the kinds of food provided by the Army in the Middle East I increased the amounts of some, reduced others, and sent the result to the medical people.2 They returned it saying that the calorific value was 5000 (or was it 500?) points too high but that as “most of it would probably be lost in inefficient cooking” the scale was approved, and so it remained till the end. Later on, David Stirling’s men, all the British troops in Kufra, and one or two other units who could manage it, got themselves put on the L.R.D.G. ration scale, to the envy of those who had failed to do so.

  Most men in L.R.D.G. were specialists in something and of all these experts the signalmen were probably the most important, though the navigators ran them close. For what was primarily a reconnaissance unit good signals were essential. Without them a patrol, three or four hundred miles away from its base, could neither send back vital information nor receive fresh orders. If signals failed the best thing to do was to come home.

  And looking back now I realise how seldom they did fail. We were far too often unkind to the signalmen. We cursed them for having to halt at given times to “come up’ for Group H.Q.; we disliked their poles and aerials which might advertise to the enemy the presence of a patrol; we scoffed at their atmospherics, skip-distances and interferences; we blamed them when they could not “get through” and when the ciphers would not come out; we were impatient of their “check and repeats,” forgetting the regularity with which they kept communication.