Long Range Desert Group Page 9

  The French, who had been there since March, wanted to be relieved of garrisoning Kufra and the Sudan Defence Force, who were to take over from them, could not arrive till July, so L.R.D.G. filled the gap. Bagnold became Military Commander and Steele and Holliman took their patrols out to Tazerbo and Bir Harash, for whoever holds the Zighen gap holds Kufra against attack from the north.

  Life in Tazerbo was not pleasant. The thermometer climbed steadily towards 120°F in the shade; from dawn to dusk the flies were beyond belief; every afternoon it blew a sandstorm; scorpions and snakes added to the hazards of existence. (The story of the Sand Viper, Libya’s deadliest snake, found gargling in its hole after biting a South Islander, is encouraged in Auckland but rejected by reliable authority in Christchurch.)

  At Bir Harash, where the Rhodesians dug themselves a swimming pool and where there were no flies, life was more pleasant. The absence of flies was a good example of the effects of camp cleanliness; under Holliman, when one appeared, the whole patrol turned out to slay it. I well remember his fury when in August we halted for a day at Harash which the S.D.F. had then occupied and the flies were so bad that we moved ten miles out of the place from dawn till dusk. But even so life at Harash was a “desert-island” sort of existence; for three months the Rhodesians lived there, sixty miles from the nearest human beings, sheltering under their cars among the few stunted palms, and patrolling daily across the Zighen gap.

  From Kufra the French were gradually withdrawing their garrison to Faya, but many of them stayed on long enough for us to make a lot of friends. They were a strange crowd these outlaws from France, the officers of the Regiment des Tirailleurs Sénégalais du Tchad, reckless, gay in spite of their misfortunes, and with one object in life—to get their teeth into the Boche. Yet for all their dash and courage one could not but notice some of the traits which must have helped to bring France to the Armistice—a spirit of Je m’enfoutisme about the dull things like discipline, good “Q” work and the maintenance of vehicles, aircraft and equipment which go so far to win modern battles. On the march they poured in oil, petrol and water and drove furiously to the horizon—suive qui peut.

  In addition to the garrison they had a bit of an air force, some worn-out Lysanders (“Les Lisandaires”), which were all the British could or would spare then, and a few ramshackle French machines. Of the latter the museum piece was the antiquated ambulance—le Potez Avion Sanitaire. But though the aircraft were a strange assortment tied together with string, there was nothing wrong with the pilots, amongst whom we counted many good friends. Their methods may have been unorthodox but they could teach our airmen a thing or two about desert flying.

  With Mahé, whom we knew best, I had some interesting flights. L.R.D.G. Headquarters reached Kufra in the middle of April, coming across the Sand Sea from ’Ain Dalla. Dick Croucher had left Cairo a few days earlier with an unwieldy party of two overloaded 10-tonners and some of our cast-off Chevrolets, carrying Barnes, the Political Officer, and his Libyan police. He took the longer route through Kharga and round the southern end of the Gilf Kebir, but should have reached Kufra about the same time as we did. So when he had not turned up three days later something had to be done about it, and Bagnold sent me off with Mahé to look for him.

  We took off at dawn in one of the decrepit Lysanders, Mahé piloting and I in the back, separated from him by the long-range petrol tank and squatting on a green enamel bath stool plundered from the Italian officers’ quarters in the fort. Like most of the gadgets in the Lizzie the intercom telephone was broken and its place was taken by a small bag tied on to the end of a stick in which we pushed notes to each other. Mahé’s English was worse than my French, so French was the official language for the operation. He also had a string tied to each arm with which I “drove” him like children playing horses.

  Looking for a dozen cars in the desert is like searching for the proverbial needle but we knew roughly the line Croucher would take : up the west side of the Gilf Kebir till he was level with Kufra and then due westwards. It was six years since I had seen this side of the Gilf and Mahé did not know it at all, but I hoped to be able to recognise the flat-topped outlier of Point 1020 and then turn south along the cliffs.

  We had not been off the ground long before the wind rose, and by the time we were nearing the Gilf visibility was very bad. I could recognise none of the familiar landmarks, and we only found the cliffs when they loomed unpleasantly close out of the haze. We turned south and followed them for a time, rather like a man in a dark passage putting out a hand to feel for the walls, but it was clear that the chances of seeing Croucher were far smaller than of getting lost ourselves. Mahé passed me a note : “Si vous n’êtes pas absolument sûr de notre position il serai mieux de rentrer à Koufra.” I was absolutely sure of nothing but a keen desire to be on the ground again, so we turned to Kufra on a guessed bearing and luckily hit off the sharp tooth of Qaret et Tawila, the good landmark south of the oasis. Later in the day, when the visibility was better, we went out again and saw Croucher near Wadi Firaq. We dropped a message saying that water and food were on the way out from Kufra. It was lucky that we found him for he was down to about the last pint.

  Eighteen months later on a December afternoon I was at almost exactly the same spot, returning to Kufra from Cairo in a Hudson. It was one of those occasions (late evening in the Sand Sea is another), when the desert repays in the beauty of a few short hours a hundred days of choking heat, bitter wind, driving sandstorm, thirst and discomfort. We came over the Gilf at about 6000 feet to a view which you get once in a lifetime and thereafter strive in vain to keep in the brain’s eye. One hundred and twenty miles away to the south-west was ’Uweinat with Arkenu to the right of it and the sharp tooth of Kissu behind, and the air was so clear that I could pick out the individual peaks which we had got to know so well climbing the mountain with Bagnold for the first time in 1932. To the south-east a black pimple in a vast sand plain was Gebel Kamil, named by Prince Kemal el Din, the Egyptian explorer, after his father. Far to the north I could see plainly the giant dune lines of the Sand Sea running down to the northern end of the Gilf plateau where (on my birthday as I remembered) in October, 1930, we had spent some hot and anxious hours bogged in soft sand between two dunes. I have always collected views, as others collect poems or postage stamps—Kitty’s Leap at Erkowit; the Bosphorus above Anatoli Hissar; the Jordan Valley from Kawkab el Hawa; Salisbury Plain from the Second Hawthorn Bush (a family favourite that one); the Cyprus coast from Kantara Castle—and that December afternoon over the Gilf takes a high place in the collection.

  Apart from some local patrolling to get to know the country, the first two months at Kufra were quiet, for we could not leave our outpost tasks and petrol was scarce. The “Q” problem at Kufra was an unending difficulty. Lines of communication were always long in Libya, but that from Wadi Haifa broke all records. 650 miles it was, the distance from Dover to Land’s End and back, with two water points en route, a journey of a week or more, over sand plain, dune lines, rock and gravel, and in the summer in a temperature that would make the fortune of the most inefficient publican.

  The Sudan Defence Force was responsible for supplying Kufra, and to begin with had very little idea—and small blame to them—of what they were up against. Tony Browne went down to Wadi Haifa at the end of April to guide the first convoy up. The first stage was from the Nile to Selima, loveliest of all Libyan oases, then to the desert well at Bir Misaha, and then 400 waterless miles to Kufra. Lonsdale was in charge of the transport and got the first seventy tons through on May 13th; a great achievement in the face of countless difficulties—heat, soft sand, worn-out trucks, inexperienced drivers. Gradually things improved as the drivers became more desert-minded, but the expense was always colossal; I think it cost £1 to put a gallon of petrol into Kufra. By the end of June twenty 10-tonners had been added to the convoys and things were going better.

  It was during the time we were at Kufra that the L.R.D.G. ai
r force began to come into its own.

  In January of 1941 Prendergast had arrived from England to join the unit as second-in-command. He had great experience of desert travel—with Bagnold in the early days; in Egypt and Palestine; in Iraq and Iran; with the War Office Experimental Column from Cairo to the Uganda frontier and back in 1933; and for many years commanding a Motor Machine-Gun Battery in the Sudan Defence Force. In addition he had about a thousand flying hours to his credit as a private aircraft owner, many of them in Egypt and the Sudan.

  He saw at once how valuable aircraft would be to L.R.D.G., based on Kufra and needing quick contact with G.H.Q. in Cairo, and set about to make an air force of his own.

  At the beginning there were many difficulties. The R.A.F., perhaps naturally enough, were very sticky. They could not spare us men or machines and did not at all like the idea of an independent unit like L.R.D.G. having its own aircraft. Their view was that all military aeroplanes in the British Empire must be under R.A.F. control, and for a time they refused to give us numbers or allow us to paint the roundels on the wings, without which we should have been shot down immediately. In the end they were only dislodged from this attitude by Very High Authority.

  Finally, after much negotiation, Prendergast got two aircraft—the Big Waco and the Little Waco—bought from Egyptian private owners. (“Waco” stands, I think, for Western Aircraft Corporation of Ohio.) Prendergast flew one and Barker, a New Zealand pilot who had at one time worked with Kingsford Smith, the other. There was no ground staff, the pilots did the maintenance in their spare moments, and, the R.A.F. still being “difficult,” an Egyptian aircraft company did the bigger jobs. The Wacos were single-engined, cabin machines, cruising at about 140 and 115 m.p.h. respectively, and carrying two men easily and three at a pinch. The payload was small, because when you are flying round the inner desert alone in a single-engined aircraft without wireless, you must have a navigator as well as the pilot. Not only did you want to be sure of your destination but at all times you had to be on the pre-arranged course, so that a rescue party could have a reasonable chance of finding you in the event of a forced landing or a crash. Both aircraft carried bubble-sextants and chronometers and more than once, when doubtful of their position, landed to check the course with a “fix” on the sun.

  The Wacos earned their keep over and over again—in visits to Middle East and to Army Headquarters from Siwa, Kufra, Jalo and Hon; in bringing in wounded men and taking spare parts out to the patrols. And it says a lot for the skill of the pilots and navigators that there was never a disaster or anything approaching one.

  In August of 1941 Prendergast took over command of the unit from Bagnold who was promoted to a staff job at G.H.Q., Middle East, and from then until the end of its operations in Africa Prendergast remained O.C., L.R.D.G.

  The most important of a general’s qualities, says General Wavell,1 is “what the French call le sens du practicable, and we call common sense, knowledge of what is and what is not possible. It must be based on a really sound knowledge of ‘the mechanism of war,’ i.e. topography, movement and supply. These are the real foundations of military knowledge, not strategy and tactics as most people think.”

  It was in his sens du practicable and his care for supply that Prendergast’s success in commanding L.R.D.G. lay. Topography and movement he could in great measure leave to the patrol commanders, to concentrate, with much attention to detail, on ensuring a flow of supplies from our very distant bases, and on deciding, among the many and strange tasks which we were asked to undertake, the difficult question, “Is it an L.R.D.G. job?”

  For the commander of so small a force, the equivalent of about half an infantry battalion, O.C. L.R.D.G. was in a strange position. He never commanded the whole unit in action and often was not within five hundred miles of the scattered sections of it which were engaged. From that distance, and with no more knowledge of the situation on the spot than was contained in a brief signal, he had to take decisions and issue orders which might make or mar a month’s work by a patrol.

  In July, the Sudan Defence Force took over the garrison duties at Kufra and we were free to be L.R.D.G. again.

  On the coast, the front line, as far as it was a line, was then at Solium with Tobruk in our hands. Bagnold had suggested to G.H.Q. at Middle East that, in anticipation of future operations in Tripolitania, it would be useful to know something about the Sirte Desert, the area inland from the Mediterranean coast between Buerat el Hsun and ’Agheila, and L.R.D.G. was told to make a plan for a reconnaissance. This was one of the first tasks of a kind in which we later became specialists; long range topographical or “going” explorations far behind the enemy lines.

  T patrol did the job with Ballantyne in one party and Ellingham and I in the other. “Going” reconnaissance means the production of a picture of the country as seen through the eyes of the force which is to follow after—tanks, transporters, 3-tonners, 10-tonners or whatever they may be. The R.A.F. want to know about possible landing grounds; Sappers demand information about water supplies; “Ops” will ask how many miles in an hour their columns can do and whether movement is possible on a wide or narrow front. Thus the mapping must be reasonably accurate, especially of any impassable obstacles and of landing grounds.

  We left Tazerbo on July 30th in blistering heat and, on the second day out, 120 miles south-east of Marada, in what was later to be the “Middle Lift Wadi,” the advanced base for the Sudan Defence Force’s attack on Jalo in 1942, left an unfortunate support party under “Doc” Edmundson to frizzle for ten days until we returned.

  We crossed the Marada track half-way up towards the sea, at a point where eighteen months later Tony Browne guided the New Zealand Division round to outflank Rommel at ’Agheila, and then split into two parties. Ballantyne took the southern and Ellingham and I the northern, and between us we collected information which proved very useful in the next two years. The Italians never seemed to go any distance inland and, as it was midsummer and the grazing had dried up, most of the Arabs were up on the coast, so the journey was uneventful, though after so many months of sand sea there was a thrill in turning north one evening west of Nofilia and coming within sight of the real thing. Remembering my Xenophon, I scrawled “Km. 6297 Θάλαττα, Θάλαττα” in my traverse book, and then, recollecting someone’s phrase about the “rude smattering of the classics which deceives no one,” felt a pedant and scratched it out.

  Prendergast, with an eye on future operations, had suggested that we should attempt to get right up to the coast road, the Via Balbia. We tried east of Sirte and found little cover and the going rough, but farther east, south of Ras el Aali, discovered better ground and an easy way down to the road.

  But that is another story.2

  On reconnaissance jobs of this sort one day’s routine differed little from that of another for four out of five were spent on the move. Before dawn the cook had lit the fire and for a few minutes you could lie, watching the eastern horizon brighten and the stars pale, in that most luxurious period of any day—when you are awake but need not get up. Then—“Come and get it.” Porridge, a sausage and a half, tea (tapping the empty petrol tin to make the tea leaves sink), biscuits, “margarine with butter content” (content not stated), jam. I kept the last half-inch of tea to wet the sand I cleaned my plate with—a clean, quick operation in the sandstone desert but muddy and messy with the fine limestone dust in the north. After breakfast the start could be leisurely for until the sun had risen twenty degrees or so above the horizon it would not throw a sharp shadow on the sun-compass dial. Moving on, in open, “air” formation with an aircraft spotter up on the back of the truck, the first hour or two would be cool and you drove coated and bare-headed, then towards nine or ten, hitting you on the ridge tops in waves of warm air, the heat began. In summer by eleven (sun time) it would be scorching and soon after, with the sun almost vertical and its shadow too short to reach the graduations on the compass, there was an excuse to stop. If the en
emy was far off and there was no need for camouflage a tarpaulin stretched between two cars gave good shade, and so you lay for the midday heat, not sweating for sweat dried as it reached skin surface, dozing or talking of the unfailing summer noontime topic—drink. Only the wireless operator had to stir himself, listening in case Group Headquarters had a message, and the navigator following the sun, falsely pale and cool through the smoked glass screen of the theodolite, on its climb to the meridian.

  By one o’clock the sun-compass could be used again and the patrol moved on. This was the best part of the day, for after 3 p.m. it would at least be growing hourly cooler, and in this Sirte desert the on-shore breeze would begin to blow. Towards sunset you camped, in low ground to hide the cooking-fire and car lights and near a sand drift if there was one for soft sleeping and good plate cleaning. Then supper—bully stew, tea and rum (in the early months before supplies in the Middle East ran short); drew to-morrow’s water-bottle ration; heard the B.B.C. news at 8 p.m.; scraped a hole for your hip-bones and so to bed, to listen to the hammering of the fitter busy with the day’s repairs; the tapping of the wireless operator’s key; and the “Coming. Coming. UP” from the navigator to his booker as a star moved past the cross-hairs in the theodolite telescope and the hour, minute and second of Greenwich time were noted down.

  Navigation in the desert has two parts—a “dead reckoning” course by compass and speedometer, and an “astro-fix” by observations of stars or sun to check the accuracy of the D.R. position. A magnetic compass is not much use in a car. The magnetism of shifting loads, changing gear levers and varying engine speeds makes such a compass almost impossible to compensate accurately; the only way to get a correct bearing is to stop and walk a few yards away from the car. In our long journeys this would have meant frequent delays so we used sun-compasses whenever the sun shone—and occasionally with the moon!