Long Range Desert Group Page 6

  (c)

  Sun Compasses and Land Navigation.

  Designed for land navigation and used by Brig. BAGNOLD in 1927. The original form of precision instrument has been used by specialist desert units since 1940, and was the forerunner of the modified designs which have been generally used for desert course setting.

  Brig. BAGNOLD collaborated with Lt.-Col. V. F. CRAIG and Maj. W. B. KENNEDY SHAW in formulating precision methods of desert navigation and route plotting.

  (d)

  Expansion Tank for Conservation of Radiator Water.

  Used by Brig. BAGNOLD in 1926, and subsequently adopted as standard desert equipment.

  (e)

  Composite Ration Pack.

  The use of a ration pack to provide a varied daily ration for a standard small number of men was instigated by Brig. BAGNOLD for specialist desert units in 1940, and this principle has since been generally adopted.

  CHAPTER FOUR1

  MURZUK

  BETWEEN September and November of 1940 we had harried the Italians from Jalo in the north to ’Uweinat in the south. The next time we appeared in that area they would presumably be more ready for us, and Bagnold was looking round for new targets.

  In July and August, far away in the French Central African colonies, heated, discussions had been taking place. Petain had signed the armistice with the Huns in June, and in Africa soldiers and civil servants were wavering. Generally spealdng, the older men with more to lose were for Vichy, and the younger for de Gaulle.

  At the end of August a coup d’état, in which General de Larminat and Capitaine Moitessier were the leaders, had scotched the Vichy-istes at Brazzaville, but some weeks before M. Eboué, the stout-hearted Governor of the Chad Province, had declared for de Gaulle. Colonel d’Ornano, Capitaine de Guillebon and the younger officers were wholeheartedly with M. Eboué, and the visit of General de Gaulle himself in October set the seal to their enthusiasm.

  In November Bagnold, with the idea of a raid on the Fezzan in mind, went to Fort Lamy, the headquarters of the Chad Province. His proposal for a combined Anglo-French operation was greeted with enthusiasm; d’Ornano, commanding the troops at Fort Lamy, was determined to go on the raid himself. The French in Chad wanted to take some immediate step to implement their recent change of politics by military action against the Italians, and to justify themselves in the eyes of their own people and of the native population. They would show the world, and the “gens de Vichy” in the other French colonies, that the Free French in Equatoria had both the will and the means to fight.

  Bagnold and d’Ornano quickly got to details and before he left Fort Lamy Bagnold had written out the operation order for the raid into the Fezzan.

  The main objective was to be Murzuk, a thousand miles as the crow flies from Cairo and 350 from the nearest French post in Tibesti. Murzuk is the capital of the Fezzan, in time past a great centre of Saharan trade. To-day its trade has dwindled to nothing but it is an important garrison town and road junction.

  At such a distance from our bases the raid could be nothing more than a “hit and run” affair; even if we took Murzuk we could not hope to hold it for more than a day or two. But in addition to the damage we might do the raid would make the Italians waste petrol, transport and aircraft in chasing us out again.

  We had a fair idea of what we should find at Murzuk—a native town with two or three thousand inhabitants, a small fort, two or three aircraft at the aerodrome and a garrison of about fifty Italians and a hundred and fifty Libyan troops. Various Italian books on the Fezzan gave a rough idea of the layout of the town and barracks, and I had got some useful information from Libyan prisoners of war taken at Sidi Barrani early in December, at the beginning of Wavell’s spectacular advance into Libya.

  On the afternoon of December 26th G and T patrols left Cairo. Clayton commanded T patrol and the whole force and Crichton-Stuart the Guards. In all there were seventy-six men and twenty-three cars.

  Outside Cairo on the Mena road Anderson, the Senussi Liaison Officer, was waiting for us with Sheikh ’Abd el Galil Seif en Nasr. After the Italo-Turkish war of 1911 the Arabs in Libya resisted Italian penetration long and bitterly; at the beginning of the Great War they drove them back to the shelter of a few towns on the coast and when the Italians began to reconquer the country in 1922 the Arabs took up arms again. During all that time the Seif en Nasr family were among the leaders. They are the paramount chiefs of the great nomad tribe, the Awlad Suleiman, with a name for courage and leadership which still lives in Tripolitania.

  ’Abd el Galil himself was the veteran of a score of battles. It was the desperate charge of five hundred horsemen of the Awlad Suleiman led by him and his brother which turned the tide at Qasr bu Hadi in 1915 and gave the Arabs the victory over the Italians. He had fought his last fight at Garet el Hawaria north of Kufra, where in January, 1931, the power of the Senussi in Libya was finally broken. Then the family had been forced to flee from Libya and for the last ten years ’Abd el Galil had been living in Egypt. His brother, Ahmed, had taken refuge with the French in Chad, and at that time was raising a gown from among his followers to fight the Italians again.

  At that stage in the war there could be no question of inciting the Fezzan tribes to rise against the Italians. An unsupported rebellion would do more harm than good, and in any case the fighting qualities of the sedentary Fezzazna are almost negligible. We took the Sheikh with us partly as a guide and partly because we hoped it would disturb the Italians if the news got round—“’Abd el Galil Seif en Nasr is back.”

  Edmundson, the New Zealand M.O., had a spare seat in his car so ’Abd el Galil rode with him. A big man, sixty years or more, with a fine, fierce face which reminded me of Kennington’s pictures in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and with one claw-like hand shot to pieces in some desert battle, he chewed tobacco and spat incessantly and the doctor’s temper for the day varied with the direction of the wind.

  For me nothing ever dulled the excitement of those departures from Cairo in the autumn of 1940 when we had our base there. The change from the town to the desert was instantaneous, dramatic. Yesterday you were enjoying the very considerable comforts of war-time Cairo. To-day from Abbassia or the Citadel you drove through the crowded streets, along the Mena causeway, past the hideous architecture of the roadside villas, past the gardens and mango-groves, past the camels and dragomen at the Pyramids, through Mena camp on to the Faiyum road, and off the road again to the northern shoulder of Gebel Khashab. In the soft ground round the Gebel a car or two would be sure to stick; during a fortnight in Cairo the drivers had lost their “hands,” and waiting for them to come on you looked back to the Nile Valley—on the right the Pyramids, behind them the green streak of the richest soil in the world, beyond again the tall houses of Cairo with Saladin’s Citadel above them, and, filling the eastern horizon, the cave-riddled Moqattam Hills.

  Driving on when the trucks had been “unstuck” in half a mile you were in another world. A treeless, plantless, waterless, manless world, almost featureless too save for poor, nondescript Gebel Hamid ahead, appearing and disappearing over the rolling gravel, and farther on the long dune lines of Qatania and Rammak, their saw-toothed sand peaks like a string of battleships in line ahead at sea.

  From Cairo we followed the well-known route to ’Ain Dalla, up Easy Ascent—not so easy now that it had been cut up with the passing of many cars—across the Sand Sea to Big Cairn to refuel there from the dumps laid down in September. Then the sands had been scorching by day; now it was bitterly cold and there was ice on water-bottles at dawn. From Big Cairn across the dividing serir, through the second Sand Sea of Kalansho, over the Kufra track unseen, and then in country unknown to us through the sands north-west of Tazerbo.

  On the tenth day we reached a point a hundred miles southeast of Wau el Kebir. From there Clayton went south to Kayugi to collect the Free French party and the petrol which they had brought for us by camel over the mountains from Bardai.

&
nbsp; While Clayton was away I took three cars of T patrol to map the Italian route believed to run from Wau el Kebir through the Eghei Mountains to Kufra. As the map shows, north-south lines of communication are good in Libya, but east-west are bad, hindered by the basalts of the Harug and by the Dohone Plateau which stretches north-east from Tibesti. For many years the only known route westwards from Kufra lay round the Rebiana Sand Sea north of Tazerbo and then to Bir Ma’aruf and Wau el Kebir. But we had heard rumours of a new route which the Italians had found through the Eghei Mountains, and in March, 1940, Monod, the Saharan explorer, sent up by the French on camels from Tibesti, had found their car tracks and the lines of empty fusti which marked the Tereneghei Pass. This route might be useful to us in future operations and if the Murzuk raid failed and we had to “beat it,” a withdrawal through the hills would be more pleasant, with aircraft overhead, than across the bare Kalansho gravels.

  We traced the route eastwards half-way through the hills, but then, following the wrong track, branched off for fifty miles to the south and had no time to finish the job.

  In the Tereneghei Pass, where the Italian route cuts through the mountains, Monod had found a deposit of amazonite, an attractive green stone which was the “emerald” of the Garamantes who, according to Herodotus, were the ancient inhabitants of the Fezzan. The deposit had been worked since very early times and the Tibbu still use it to obtain material to make crude pendants and amulets. I had hoped to be able to visit the place but our wrong turn prevented us. A year later Lazarus surveyed the pass more accurately and brought back some specimens of the “emeralds.”

  It was a good trip : the Eghei Mountains, a jumble of sandstone, basalt and granite, are a blank on the maps and one of the few unexplored areas of North Africa. Except for the Italians’ tracks we saw no sign of life; even the Tibbu seldom visit these barren hills.

  When we got back to camp, Clayton and the French were there—Lieut.-Colonel d’Ornano commanding the troops in Chad, a “Beau Geste” figure, tall, monocled, in turban and burnous Capitaine Massu from Zouar and Lieutenant Egenspiler from Fort Lamy, and with them two French sergeants and five native troops.

  On January 8th we started again for Murzuk. The original plan had been to attack Wau el Kebir first where there was a small post, but Clayton wisely decided against this for it was essential to reach Murzuk while the Italians were quite unaware that we were even in Libya.

  The next day, moving north between Wau el Kebir and Wau en Namus we saw the first men since leaving Cairo, three wandering Tibbu with their camels. The chances of their bothering to go in to the nearest Italian post and report us were very slight, but we kept half a mile away and sent one of the French natives, also a Tibbu, over to them to say that we were an Italian patrol seeking a new route between Wau en Namus and Fogha.

  ’Abd el Galil was quiet and sad all that day and I thought he must be unwell, but he explained that we had passed a place where, years before, the Italians had shot eleven of his tribesmen. In the past, in years of good rains, they had grazed their camels over this country, but the Italians, wishing to keep a tight grip on these nomads who were their chief opponents, had since then forced them to move up north nearer to the coast.

  Late on the 9th there was a hitch, for we struck very fresh lorry tracks on a beaconed route north of Tmessa. We were still 150 miles from Murzuk and any enemy who came along this route again could not fail to see our tracks. So we turned back without crossing and camped a mile away, and at dawn all twenty-three cars were driven across the route following exactly in each other’s tracks, and then a party of men, walking backwards, swept over the wheel-marks with the skirts of their sheepskin coats while others scattered gravel to restore the desert surface. When it was finished our car tracks were almost invisible but the job took too long to do often.

  It is said that a nomad Arab will look at a month-old camel track and tell you that it was made by a white Bishari she-camel five months gone in calf and ridden by a middle-aged Arab missing two fingers of his left hand! We could not claim such precise gynaecological data regarding our Italian opponents, but car-track lore was important in L.R.D.G. Age and direction were the two vital points. The sharpness of the tread-impressions and the steepness of the sides of the track marks told you their age, and on sand you could guess the direction from the small ridges thrown up alongside the wheel marks. And on uneven ground with small drainage lines the track marks were rather wider where the weight of the car had flattened the tyre as it hit the bottom of a short slope, and this showed whether the car was moving up or down hill. In broken country where the going was difficult one could be certain of the direction of travel by following the tracks for a mile or two and noticing small obstacles crossed by the driver who had come upon them unseen but which he would have swerved to avoid if, approaching from the opposite direction, he had noticed them some distance ahead.

  I remember one visitor to Kufra being sceptical of the knowledge we claimed. Dick Croucher took him out in a car near the landing ground to demonstrate but he remained unconvinced, and finally disputed hotly Dick’s assertion that the track before them ran from left to right. Dick persisted, but the visitor would not agree. “How can you be so certain?” he demanded. “Well,” said Dick, rather bored by this time, “it was made by that car standing there in which we have just driven out.”

  On the morning of January nth, still unseen, we hit the Sebha road ten miles north of Murzuk. From a ridge a few miles farther south we could see the palms and, what was better still, the wireless masts at the fort and the roof of the hangar. Not a soul was in sight so we picketed and mined the road on the Sebha side and had an undisturbed lunch, while Clayton made his last plans and I built a sand-plan of Murzuk from what could be seen and from, what I already knew.

  While this was going on the sentry reported aircraft. There was a moment of despair that we should be discovered at the last minute of the eleventh hour, but, as we learned later, it was only a bomber returning from a flight to Ghat.

  Lunch over, we set off to finish the last two miles of the journey which had begun in Cairo eighteen days and 1500 miles before. Clayton led in his 15-cwt., then Hewson with one troop of “T” patrol, and then the rest—a quiet procession of cars, down the scarp on which we had halted, through some broken ground, over a low ridge and into the outskirts of the town. I wondered if the Italians had. had the foresight to put even one machine-gun post on the Sebha road. Luckily they had not, and we had achieved the advice of their own Machiavelli :

  “Those enterprises are best which can be concealed up to the moment of their fulfilment.”

  The road seemed to lead to the fort so Clayton followed it. At a well by the roadside a group of natives gave the Fascist salute and cried “Bon giorno.” A little farther Clayton overtook Signor Colicchia, the postmaster, bicycling towards the fort, and hustled the terrified official on to his car as a guide. Ahead I could now see the fort, partly hidden by trees and with some after-lunch strollers around it. The surprise was complete.

  Then things began to happen. Hewson swung off the road to the left and opened fire on the strollers; the Guards turned to the right and started to engage the fort. I was with Bruce Ballantyne with the other half of T patrol who were to tackle the airfield. The hangar was now out of sight, so from a group of natives outside a hut I seized a Sudani for a guide and pushed him on to the truck. No doubt he thought he was going to be murdered and he was paler than I should have thought a black man could be. He was too scared to speak and soon fell off, but by now we could see the hangar and were racing to beat the landing ground guards to their machine-gun posts. Bruce with two trucks got there first and most of them surrendered without firing, but he killed the last man, still fumbling with his rifle, with a quick shot through the head.

  Out of the corner of my eye during this confusion I had seen Clayton’s car crossing the aerodrome and wondered how he had got there. A few minutes later he joined us with his car full of bullet holes
and d’Ornano’s body in the back. Round the corner of the hangar he had run into a machine-gun post which one of the bolder Italians had manned. Beside him, in the front seat, Adams’s Vickers gun had jammed, and before Clayton could slam the gears into reverse d’Ornano on the back had been killed with a bullet through the throat and also an Italian Air Force sergeant whom Clayton, having handed over the postmaster, had roped in as another guide. No doubt the Italians thought we had shot him in cold blood, but this is the truth about his death.

  We got the Bofors going on to the gun post and the hangar and before long the twenty odd Italians had had enough of it and one of them appeared on the roof waving a white flag. Three dead or dying Libyans and one wounded Italian were their casualties. In the middle of it all I remember seeing, shuffling with half-bent knees across the landing ground, that so familiar African sight, a string of old women carrying firewood bundles on their heads.

  Meanwhile at the fort, where Hewson had been killed and Wilson and three other men wounded, the patrols were successfully containing the garrison and a lucky mortar bomb had set the tower ablaze and burnt the flag and flagstaff. In the middle of the attack a touring car drove up to the gate. In it was the Italian commander who had probably been out to lunch and also, as some said afterwards, a woman and child. One shell from the Guards Bofors put an end to them; it was unfortunate about the woman and the child but people should arrange their lunch parties more carefully.

  In the hangar were three Ghiblis (Colonial bombers) and finding a portable re-fuelling tank which was full I set the Libyan prisoners to pump petrol over the aircraft. I remember being surprised to find them fitted with Lewis guns; such are the mysteries of the international armaments business. As we were finishing Clayton came back from the fort saying that the garrison continued to hold out and that as the main objective, the destruction of the aircraft and hangar, would be achieved he proposed to withdraw. From what we heard afterwards the fort was probably on the point of surrendering, for that evening the French native troops said that they had heard cries of “Nitla burra. Nitla burra” (“Let’s get out”) from the Libyans. They may have been insisting on an offensive sortie, but it seems more likely that they had had enough.