Long Range Desert Group Page 4

  One other short reconnaissance made at this time is worth mentioning, not so much for its results, which were small, but for the originality of the idea, which was Clayton’s.

  We were anxious to know what the Italians were doing at ’Uweinat; in what strength they held their two posts and to what extent they were using the landing grounds. A reconnaissance by car would be difficult to carry out unseen, for the bad going close to the mountain forces one to keep some distance out on the plain where cars can easily be spotted by sentries. The ideal method would be on foot, but in the heat of August the distances to be covered made this out of the question, so Clayton fell bafck on the idea of using camel transport. But as the camel would have had to cross three or four hundred miles of arid desert before reaching the objective he bought a camel in Kharga, folded it into a lorry and sent it off, peering disdainfully over the tailboard, to ’Uweinat. Two Arabs went with it, old employees of Clayton’s in his surveys before the war. They stayed there a week, obtained some useful though negative information, packed their camel into the lorry again and returned safely to the Nile.

  Before we could operate in the area round Kufra and ’Uweinat we had to make dumps of supplies along the Libyan frontier for the distance from Cairo was too great to send out patrols self-contained from there. So while Clayton was going out west from Siwa I took the 6-ton Marmon-Harringtons of the Heavy Section to make a dump of petrol beyond ’Ain Dalla on the edge of the Sand Sea.

  It was almost exactly ten years since I had been at ’Ain Dalla., Then we had come from Bahariya in three Ford cars, a party of six men under Bagnold. We had hoped to get right across the Sand Sea to the Gilf Kebir but the southern sands had defeated us. However, we did force our way sixty miles west of ’Ain Dalla, beyond the line of Rohlfs’ route in 1874, and far enough to show that at any rate along this latitude the dunes were not impassable.

  The place had not changed in ten years. There were the same stunted palms, the same rickety wooden hut where we had stored our spare petrol in 1930, and the same pipe tapping the warm spring water half-way down the slope. Across the soft gravel of the wide depression in which the spring lies I could see the narrow wheel tracks of our former visit leading to the point where we had struggled up the northern cliffs.

  In the months to come ’Ain Dalla was of immense advantage to L.R.D.G. Many will remember with pleasure the sweet waters of its unfailing spring on blistering summer days, but greater still was its strategical importance. The ’Ain Dalla route was our “underground road” to Libya; a patrol could leave Cairo, pass by the Pyramids and disappear over the shoulder of Gebel Khashab with the certainty that till it was over the frontier it could travel unseen. And ’Ain Dalla was the junction of the routes to Kufra via Big Cairn and to ’Uweinat via Pottery Hill, both guarded by sand seas which the Italians would never expect us to cross.

  This time we had a bathe at the spring and pushed on westwards towards the Sand Sea. In 1932, Clayton had found a way up the western cliffs of the depression on to the desert plateau on which the Sand Sea lies, and named it “Easy Ascent.” So it was to his small party of Fords, but after some months use by L.R.D.G. the sand slopes broke up and Clayton swore that he would never put the word “easy” on his maps again. Even now it was too steep for the Marmon-Harringtons, so we made a dump at the foot of the pass, well hidden behind an outlying rock. Easy Ascent dump was used till April, 1941, whenever patrols went across the Sand Sea, and according to the Dump Book there are still 1200 gallons of petrol there for any one who cares to collect them.

  We still had another trip to make to pick up the rest of the 3500 gallons of petrol at Mushroom Rock where the three patrols, which had come, but with us, on a training run from Cairo, had dumped their surplus petrol. On the second journey southwards to ’Ain Dalla one of the Marmon-Harringtons cracked its main chassis member. I went on with the other two cars, intending to return and ferry the load forward for I thought that we should have to abandon the broken vehicle where it was. However, I did not know New Zealanders, still less “Arch” McLeod, a year later “A” Squadron staff-sergeant fitter and I dare swear the best fitter in the Middle East. The next day we were washing at ’Ain Dalla when there was a distant roaring towards the eastern cliffs and out of the haze came the abandoned truck. McLeod had cut a bit off the tail of the chassis, plated the crack and hurried after us only a few hours behind.

  And so back to Cairo.

  At the beginning of September L.R.D.G. set out on its first big job.

  The Italians, after three months of hesitation, had at last shown some initiative and advanced across the Egyptian frontier to Sidi Barrani. In the inner desert they might also be on the move and so Bagnold planned a thorough examination of all the routes leading to Kufra from north and south. By watching the tracks and traffic and by taking prisoners if possible he hoped to learn what the Italians were doing. All three patrols were taking part.

  I was with Bagnold and his small H.Q. party, and with us was Mitford’s W patrol. On September 5th we left Cairo by the usual route to ’Ain Dalla, filled up there with water and with petrol at Easy Ascent. Easy Ascent was still easy and all fourteen trucks got quickly to the top where we slept. At dawn next day Bagnold and I started ahead to pick a route. Across “El Qantara”—the Bridge between two wide sand-filled basins—and for fifteen miles beyond was easy going over gravel and flat sand. Then at one of Clayton’s small survey cairns on a ridge-top we hit the first great “breaker” of the Sand Sea.

  There is nothing like these sand seas anywhere else in the world. Take an area the size of Ireland and cover it with sand. Go on pouring sand on to it till it is two, three or four hundred feet deep. Then with a giant’s rake score the sand into ridges and valleys running north-north-west and south-south-east, and with the ridges, at their highest, five hundred feet from trough to crest.

  Late in the evening when the sands cool quickly and the dunes throw long shadows the Sand Sea is one of the most lovely things in the world; no words can properly describe the beauty of those sweeping curves of sand. At a summer midday when the sun beats down all its shapes to one flat glare of sand and the sand-drift blows off the dune crests like the snow-plume off Everest, it is as good an imitation of Hell as one could devise. It was across 150 miles of this dead world that Bagnold was proposing to take for the first time a force of heavily loaded trucks.

  To begin with it was easy. In the morning when the shadows fall you can see the shape of the dunes and steer accordingly; but by nine o’clock the shadows have vanished and only the feeling of the pit of your stomach tells whether you are going up or down.

  Then I had to remember the lessons of five years before, of the last time I had been here when we made the first crossing from ’Uweinat to Siwa. Gradually I recalled them—always keep height so that you can turn downhill when a soft patch comes and profit by the slope to get through it; ribbed sand, butter-yellow, is generally hard and safe; shining purplish patches are usually liquid bogs; never brake hard to stop or the wheels will dig in; change down early before the slope begins and charge it in second gear. When we passed out of the stony ground we could let down the tyres so that the lower pressure gave an extra inch or two on the bearing surface of the tread. It was a common belief that the sand was harder in the early morning but the real explanation was that at that time the tyre pressure was lower; in the heat of midday the pressure would rise considerably.

  After twenty miles we came to a huge dune barrier, a mile wide and three hundred feet high, in which there seemed to be no gap. Bagnold decided to rush it and went at speed for a low place in the crest. Being an old hand at this game he slowed at the top and so could turn sharply and stop at the brink of the fifty-foot precipice where the west-facing slope of soft sand fell away below. When you know how to do it you can topple the car gently over the edges of these slopes and plough down them, axle-deep and in first gear, to the bottom, But in a flying leap from the crest the car turns over and over and in the n
ext two years one man was killed and a back and more than one limb broken on these unseen sand slopes.

  So we turned south and hunted for a gap in the dune range, finding one which took us a few miles farther on, only to be held up again for two hours and more while the patrol pushed its way across a soft patch between two high crests.

  By now we were through the country where there were gravel patches between the dunes. The whole world was sand, millions of tons of it, and no stone, no bush, nothing living save an occasional Painted Lady butterfly and a few pied wagtails (why always wagtails?) whose life in this coverless waste must have been made a misery by the hawks which live always in the dunes and prey on the passing migrants.

  In their arrangement the dunes form a repetition sequence. From the summit you plough down a mile-long slope with many soft patches to the foot of the next range to the west, then turn north or south searching for a crestless slope which will lead over the next range, up this and then through the whole process again.

  For the leading cars “sticks” were frequent and inevitable. At one moment you would be doing a steady thirty miles an hour to the reassuring whine of the tyres; the next halted dead in five yards with the car up to its axle in a dry “quicksand.” Then to continue to use the engine in low gear was fatal for the back wheels would dig a grave from which release could only be achieved by unloading. The first thing was to decide whether to go back or forwards to the nearest patch of “solid” ground. Then, using sand channels and sand mats and with a dozen sweating and cursing men, the truck would be extricated two yards at a time.

  In the Western Desert during the war thousands of Army cars carried slung alongside them a pair of these A_________A section, perforated steel channels yet probably not one man in as many thousands knew their origin, so for the sake of history I record it here.

  In the spring of 1926 Bagnold had been up to Jerusalem from Cairo by car across the Sinai Desert and in the Mitla Hills through which the pass led up from the Canal he had trouble in crossing the steep-sided water runnels. Before setting out on another journey some months later he looked round for a solution :

  “It was thought that the best answer to the difficulty of the vertical water banks would be to carry light portable ramps to be laid like bridges for the wheels, so as to avoid the necessity of digging down the banks to make a road. After unsuccessful experiments with corrugated iron beaten into channels Bader discovered, by nosing round among the old-iron shops of Cairo, a stock of strong rolled-steel troughing designed in the war for roofing dug-outs. We bought a couple of these, five feet long, to carry with us. Actually the road was found to be so much improved that the channels were not wanted once. They were carried home and lay about at the back of the mess garage for the next three years till accidentally, as shall be told, they paved the way very literally for our later expeditions.”2

  That was in 1929, in the eastern edge of the Sand Sea near ’Ain Dalla when :

  “Every few miles one or other of the two lorries would get stuck in the soft ground, the back wheels sinking in and merely spinning round, digging themselves even deeper as long as they were forced to turn. If it had not been for these old steel channels we must have given up after the first three days and gone back to Cairo. They were the salvation of the expedition. They proved an unfailing way of extricating a car or lorry which no amount of pushing could move. The mode of operations was as follows. With our hands or with shovels sloping grooves were dug out between the front wheels and the back, reaching down to the lowest point of the back tyres sunk in the ground. In these grooves the channels were laid with their rearmost ends almost underneath the tyres. Then, when the clutch was let in, the back wheels at once began to grip firmly on the steel on which they rolled forward easily up the slope. By the time the front ends of the channels were reached, the lorry had attained sufficient momentum to carry it for some distance beyond. The great thing was to keep the speed up once it had started moving.”3

  We used these original channels of Bader’s over thousands of miles before the war. Now I think they are lost and have missed what ought to be their final resting place—the Imperial War Museum.

  After about a hundred miles from ’Ain Dalla the dunes become lower and you enter an area of rolling sand “downs” and the last twenty miles are easy, fast going with no “sticks.”

  It took us two days’ hard work to get to Big Cairn on the western edge of the Sea. Here on the Libyan frontier Clayton had built his last survey cairn when he carried his triangulation across from ’Ain Dalla in 1932. The dunes peter out into the gravel plain between the two sand seas, with Big Cairn five feet high and conspicuous because it is the only feature in a featureless waste.

  Here we unloaded all the spare water and petrol and while Bagnold stayed to mark out a landing ground Mitford took his patrol back for another load from Easy Ascent.

  It is only in this latitude, in a belt ten or twenty miles wide, that the Sea is reasonably easy to cross from east to west. Farther south near the Gilf Kebir and north near Siwa the high sand ranges would make this impossible. Our tracks were still easy to see but would vanish in the first wind, and I wanted to mark this route permanently. Coming across we had put empty petrol tins on every crest and strewn our camp rubbish along the way, and to make the route still clearer I collected boxes of stones at Big Cairn and from the back of a truck tossed them out the whole 150 miles back to Easy Ascent, dropping one just as the last went out of sight. On the sand a stone the size of a fist shows up for two hundred yards; the sand never blows over it and so the route was marked for all time. Coming back with full loads we did the crossing in six and a quarter hours.

  While we were ferrying supplies across from ’Ain Dalla Clayton and Steele had been moving 7000 gallons of petrol through the most difficult part of the Sand Sea from Siwa to Big Cairn. There all the patrols parted; Clayton set off for Tekro and the French frontier, 600 miles away; Mitford for the area north of Kufra, and the long-suffering Steele turned back to Siwa for another load.

  I went with Mitford. Across the gravel plain to the eastern edge of the Kalansho Sand Sea was, easy going, but on the morrow when we were in the sands began what were, I think, the three most unpleasant days of my life.

  After sixteen years in the Middle East I was beginning to think that I knew something about heat. I had had some experience—five years in the Sudan; the Red Sea in the hot weather; a summer at Beisan in the Jordan Valley 300 feet below sea level; Cairo to Khartoum by train in June—all these had qualified me to lie against any one about the temperatures I had known. But I had not before this met a Libyan qibli.

  Many countries have their hot winds; the khamsin of Egypt, the sherqiya of Palestine, the harmattan of West Africa. Add all these together and blow them, with sand to taste, northwards out of the gates of Hell and you may begin to know what the qibli is like at Kufra in the summer.

  You don’t merely feel hot, you don’t merely feel tired, you feel as if every bit of energy had left you, as if your brain was thrusting its way through the top of your head and you want to lie in a stupor till the accursed sun has gone down.

  It started on September 16th. All that day we struggled across the Kalansho sands and at evening reached the Jalo-Kufra track. The next day was worse, for a southerly sandstorm blew as well and the driving grains pricked face and legs like needles. We visited two of the landing grounds on the Jalo-Kufra air route and wrecked the petrol pumps, fuel tanks and wind indicators, the latter small iron aircraft pivoting to the wind on a pipe. No Italians were moving on such a revolting day. West of L.G.3 is a crashed aircraft with the fuselage set up on end, a landmark for miles around. I remember we spent midday at the base of it, crouching under tarpaulins stretched between the cars for shade.

  Up on the coast, where the wheels of ten thousand vehicles had churned up the desert surface, dust-storms were common enough and made life a misery, but in the real desert of the south sandstorms, which in fiction so often overwhelm the
hapless caravan, are less frequent and fairly harmless, especially if they come on a north wind.

  The worst I ever experienced, on the west side of the Gilf Kebir in April, 1935, was blowing in gusts of up to 60 m.p.h., but though it whipped our skin and took the paint off the cars, we could travel for most of the day with the sun-compass, for the sand grains are heavy and rise only 10-20 feet above the ground, and so cannot darken the sun as does a dust-storm in the north.

  In Siwa in the summer of 1942 we had a dust-storm the like of which even the oldest inhabitants could not remember. It came about six in the evening, a solid wall of “cloud” 2000 feet high, stretching from horizon to horizon, pouring down the northern scarp into the depression. It hit “A” Squadron mess first, a mile north of the Rest House where we were living, and they telephoned saying it was too dark to read. With us all was still. A moment later it had reached us, as a 40 m.p.h. storm of fine dust, penetrating everywhere and bringing the thermometer, which had been 102° at tea-time, down to 80° in a few moments.

  Having judged from the car tracks the amount of traffic on the Jalo-Kufra route we moved on westwards to examine that between Tazerbo and Marada. That afternoon was, I think, the worst of all. At camp, Beech was slightly delirious from heatstroke and I remember Croucher, who was navigating in the second car behind Mitford, telling me that for the last twenty miles he found himself saying, to the rhythm of the tyres on the sand, “If he doesn’t stop I shall go mad. If he doesn’t stop I shall go mad. If he doesn’t …”