After supper on days like this many men would be sick, for one’s stomach refused to carry on under such conditions, and we had not then learned the anti-qibli pick-me-up, equal parts of rum and lime-juice, invented, I think, by the Rhodesian patrol coming down from Big Cairn to Kufra in May, 1941, when they met what was probably the worst qibli in L.R.D.G. history. In 1940 we had Chevrolets, but the Rhodesians were then in cab-over-engine Fords in which the hot blast from the engine swept straight up into your face and the engine casing had to be insulated to prevent the skin from being burnt off your leg.
The water ration was then six pints a day, one in tea at breakfast, two in tea in the evening, one in lime-juice at lunch, and two in your water-bottle to be drunk at will. In winter this would have been ample, and good enough in ordinary summer weather, but now it seemed nothing. In those days conversation was an interesting thermometer. When the temperature reached a certain height drink became the only topic and each man had his own ideas about making his water ration go further. There were the small sippers and the large gulpers. One would put his water out on a tin plate in the shade and accept loss by evaporation in exchange for the resulting coolness; another would save up for a drink of Eno’s and water in the evening and a third spare a few drops to wet a handkerchief to put against the back of his neck. A more elaborate plan was to have a Thermos which, left open to cool its contents by night, gave a cold drink the following day.
The water consumption of the cars was kept at a minimum by a simple condenser. From the top of the radiator, the overflow pipe of which was blocked up, a rubber tube led into a two-gallon can bolted to the running-board and half-filled with water. When the water in the radiator boiled the steam condensed in this can, and when it had ceased boiling the vacuum in the radiator would suck the water back and fill it up again. If all the joints were air-tight there would be no need to “top up” the radiator for hundreds of miles.
The next day we turned south towards Tazerbo. The track was marked every kilometre with posts, ten foot high angle-irons which threw a patch of shade about three inches wide. This was the time of the autumn migration and at the foot of every post was a bird, crouched and gasping. Most of them were some sort of dove or pigeon and on those three days they must have died in thousands. The moment we stopped they flew under the cars in dozens, striving to find shelter from the terrible sun and wind. We put water out for them but they seldom drank it; they seemed to have decided, rightly, that it was not worth the effort to keep alive, and died.
Two days later, on September 20th, L.R.D.G. went into action for the first time in the bloodless battle of Landing Ground No. 7. While we were following the track to Kufra near the L.G. there appeared, churning slowly through the soft sand, two six-ton lorries of the firm of Trucci and Monti, the fortnightly convoy to Kufra.
One burst of Lewis gunfire over their heads ended that great, battle and we had our first prisoners—two Italians, five Arabs and a goat, and our first booty—2500 gallons of petrol, a nice line in cheap haberdashery and, best of all, the bag of official mail. As a result of this incident the Italians, as we learned later, gave a ground and air escort to all convoys to Kufra, thus wasting vehicles, aircraft and fuel which they could have used better elsewhere.
In the days that followed we rejoined Bagnold and “R” patrol at Wadi er Riquba; hid the Trucci lorries in the Gilf Kebir where they still are; were seen but not attacked by the Italian Air Force from Kufra and joined up with Clayton for a reconnaissance in force of ’Uweinat.
Near Wadi Sura Ballantyne and I left the patrols to take the prisoners and mail back to Cairo. With three trucks we cut through the Gilf Gap and up to Pottery Hill, heading for ’Ain Dalla. This was a fascinating journey for me as from Pottery Hill to ’Ain Dalla I had to find a way over country which no cars had ever crossed before and which had only been partly explored by camel, by Rohlfs in 1874 and by Wingate working out from Dakhla in 1933.
Sixty miles north of Pottery Hill we passed Rohlfs’ cairn at Regenfeld where, more than half a century earlier, one of the strangest events in Libyan exploration had taken place. In 1874 the German Rohlfs, the greatest of the camel-explorers of last century, set out from Dakhla to reach Kufra. Sixty miles west of Dakhla he struck the edge of the Sand Sea, the nature of which was then quite unknown. The dunes run north and south and Rohlfs, travelling westwards, had to cross one of these 300-foot high sand ranges every few miles. For some days he struggled on, until at a point 110 miles from Dakhla he halted to rest his camels for a day. The outlook was gloomy, the country ahead was unknown, the camels were tiring and water running short, there seemed no alternative but to return. Then, while Rohlfs and his two companions, Zittel, the scientist, and Jordans the surveyor, were debating what they should do, it began to rain. This was little short of a miracle for no cautious meteorologist would predict that rain will fall in the inner desert more often than once in about twenty years. But on that February day in 1874 it poured; the Germans filled their water tanks, watered their camels, and abandoning hope of ever reaching Kufra, turned northwards along the dune lines to Siwa. Rohlfs named the place “Rainfield” and on a low ridge between the dune lines built his cairn.
With little trouble we found a new route to ’Ain Dalla which was used regularly by the patrols for the rest of that autumn.
In Cairo we delivered the prisoners to the Detention Barracks at Abbassia. Tommy Farr of 216 Squadron had come back with us; he had accompanied the patrol from Cairo nominally to prospect for suitable landing grounds, but actually as part of a plan of Bagnold’s to make the R.A.F. more inner-desert-minded against the day when we might need their help during our operations. With a month’s beard he might have been mistaken for anything and the sergeant-major at the barracks, pointing to him, asked me, “Is that one of your prisoners, sir?” Like a slow-witted fool I answered, “No, that is a R.A.F. officer,” otherwise we might have had the laugh on Tommy from the wrong side of the prison bars.
The capture of the Kufra mail gave us a reputation rather out of proportion to the value of its contents. From Cairo to Kufra is 650 miles in a straight line, farther than from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. The story got about. “Good Lord,” said the Staff, “how do these fellows do it?” In clubs and messes the tale became exaggerated. People asked it if were true that we had raided Graziani’s headquarters up on the coast and stolen his ciphers. And so it laid for us the foundation of a reputation which we never lost.
We got a pat on the back from one whose praise we valued :
GENERAL HEADQUARTERS,
MIDDLE EAST,
CAIRO.
1st October, 1940.
DEAR BAGNOLD,
I should like you to convey to the officers and other ranks under your command my congratulations and appreciation of the successful results of the recent patrols carried out by your unit in Central Libya.
I am aware of the extreme physical difficulties which had to be overcome, particularly the intense heat.
That your operation, involving as it did 150,000 truck miles, has been brought to so successful a conclusion indicates a standard of efficiency in preparation and execution of which you, your officers and men may be justly proud.
A full report of your exploits has already been telegraphed to the War Office, and I wish you all the best of luck in your continued operations, in which you will be making an important contribution towards keeping Italian forces in back areas on the alert and adding to the anxieties and difficulties of our enemy.
Yours sincerely,
A. P. WAVELL.
Meanwhile the patrols were out again. Mitford went off to attack ’Uweinat where among the giant boulders at the base of the six-thousand-foot mountain were two Italian posts, at ’Ain Zwaya on the west and ’Ain Dua on the south. At each ’ain there is good water and a landing ground, and this made ’Uweinat a useful base for the enemy. From it they could chase our patrols, send aircraft across the Sudan to Eritrea and keep an eye on the French
down towards Faya.
Mitford was spotted by aircraft before he got to ’Ain Dua and bombed for an hour or more but had no casualties. Air attack was the one real danger to L.R.D.G.; this was the first time we had experienced it and Mitford was fortunate, for in the next three years we came to learn how destructive and unpleasant it could be.
There is little cover in the desert where there is no vegetation and where the sand-charged wind rounds off all the natural features into smooth shapes which give no shadow. Moving cars, throwing up dust, are easy to spot, but if you could hear or see the aircraft first and stop, you would probably escape notice for stationary trucks are hard to pick up. Taking it all round we were amazingly lucky. Again and again I have heard men tell how aircraft passed over them unseeing when they had heard them first and halted or when they themselves had stopped for a moment for some trivial reason.
What you did when the pilot had spotted you depended on the country. If it was broken you could wedge the cars into small gullies or between rocks where they were difficult to see and to hit when seen, and where the men could find cover. Bombing never did much harm; the casualties always came from ground straffing. If the patrol’s fire was hot enough it might keep the enemy high up and prevent him from pressing home the attack, but it takes a good man to keep his gun going from an unarmoured truck against a fighter diving to attack. Yet it was done often enough.
When caught by aircraft in flat, featureless desert the plan was to keep moving and to split the patrol up and watch what the enemy would do. If he bombed it was fairly easy. The driver kept moving with a spotter up on top of the truck behind, and when the latter saw the bomber getting on his line or the bombs begin to fall he shouted, the driver turned sharply right or left and all might be well.
Mitford attacked ’Ain Dua on October 31st and found it held by a small garrison of Libyan troops in a strong natural position In the morning and again in the afternoon a detachment of W patrol on foot fought a hide-and-seek battle among the house-size boulders, while from out on the plain the Bofors and the Boys rifles kept the enemy’s heads down. A number of them were killed and wounded : L.R.D.G. had no losses and gained for Sutherland the first New Zealand M.C. of the war and for Willcox the M.M.
It was part of Bagnold’s plan to keep the enemy guessing where L.R.D.G. would turn up next, and so the day before Mitford’s skirmish at ’Ain Dua Clayton, five hundred miles away to the north, attacked the fort at Aujila. The unfortunate Italians could not reasonably expect us to turn up there and when Clayton appeared a Libyan soldier strolled out to greet him and was too astounded to speak when told to hand over his arms. A couple of Bofors shells into the fort sent a cloud of pigeons out of the tower and the Italian garrison over the back wall, scuttling to the palm groves. A few days before Clayton had pushed up north-west of Aujila to mine the road within seventy miles of Agedabia; this, as we learned a year afterwards, destroyed half a dozen or more Italian trucks. A week later he was back in Cairo, having travelled 2100 miles in 15 days.
We had one last crack at ’Uweinat that autumn. In November Steele went down with R patrol to mine the route to Kufra and see what else he could pick up. On the western landing ground he found a Savoia S.79 bomber and burnt it, as well as 8000 gallons of petrol in drums stacked nearby. A faint popping from the garrison at ’Ain Zwaya was the only Italian reaction. Buried in the sand a mile or two away were three tons of aircraft bombs and Steele, who always liked playing with explosives, had a day out.
The spring at ’Ain Zwaya is not at the foot of the mountain but three-quarters of an hour’s climb up a boulder-strewn gorge. The Italians had run a pipe down from the spring to a tank on the plain and, as we knew from the prisoners taken in September, kept a small pumping party up at the top. So while Steele was burning bombs and bombers I went off with three men in an attempt to cross the mountain on foot from the north and capture a couple of the pumpmen for the sake of the information they could provide.
It is easy to underestimate the difficulty of climbing on ’Uweinat though I should have known better. Bagnold and I had tried to reach the top in 1930 but started our climb too far to the east to cover the distance in the one day available. In 1932 we succeeded, much to the annoyance of the Italians when they found our summit cairn three years later on what they thought was the first ascent. The western end is heartbreaking climbing. The huge smooth boulders are as big as cottages and you spend hours, making little forward progress, scrambling over them and groping in the caverns in between. This time we spent two days and two nights on the mountain but failed to get to the spring in time and had to turn back to keep a rendezvous with Steele.
Meanwhile in Cairo Bagnold had been doubling the unit. In December a Guards patrol, half Coldstream and half Scots, was formed under Crichton-Stuart; McCraith collected a Yeomanry patrol from the Cavalry Division in Palestine and Holliman took over the Rhodesians.
Holliman had spent September down south with the Marmon-Harrington six-tonners adding to the line of dumps along the Libyan frontier. Before the war his journey would have been a major expedition; he went by rail to Aswan, drove along the west bank of the Nile to Wadi Haifa, and then started ferrying petrol four hundred miles across the desert to the Gilf Kebir where we needed a dump for operations south of Kufra.
The transport of petrol for long distances over bad going was a difficult problem. Until the capture of Benghazi for the second time gave us a supply of German “Jerricans,” we carried our petrol in four-gallon, non-returnable tins, packed two to a wooden case. At the beginning of the Libyan war, when wood for cases was plentiful, this method was fairly satisfactory, but later on, when the strong wooden cases were replaced by cardboard boxes or by plywood crates the loss of petrol by leakage was very high. Sand stuck to the damp tins and made a sort of grinding paste; this and careless loading at railhead and at dumps soon punctured the thin metal. Twenty-five per cent was a normal loss and on long journeys across rough country it would be much higher : enough petrol must have been wasted in the Western Desert in this way to run all the buses in London for months or years.
The four-gallon petrol tin, the safiyha of Egypt or the tanaki of Palestine, is one of the commonest objects of everyday life in the Middle East. It meets many needs—to bring water from the village well; to grow aspidistras on verandas; to provide the raw material for the tinsmith; to build houses in “tin-town” slums. For all these and many other uses it is as well suited as it is unsuitable for the transport of petrol in a desert war. It was unfortunate that the Army had equipped itself in peace-time only for a war in England where petrol-pumps abound.
The strong, unleaking, returnable “Jerrican,” by contrast, is an outstanding example of intelligent design followed by good production. We, or the Americans, imitated it with the “Amerrican,” but omitted to copy the most important item—a good pouring lip. The “Jerrican” had one disadvantage; it provided no wood for cooking meals.
Holliman picked up his petrol at Wadi Haifa. It was probable that the Italians had a spy there—they were fools if they had not—and the departure of some thousands of gallons of M.T. petrol into the desert might make him think. So it was explained in Wadi Haifa that the petrol was being sent out for the use of the R.A.F. at the landing ground at Selima and was therefore packed in aviation spirit cases. Unfortunately this proved too much for the local agent of the Shell Company who knew very well that aviation petrol must go into boxes marked aviation. He filled them accordingly which was not so good for our engines when the mistake was discovered later on. To add to the deception Holliman and his party were fitted out with R.A.F. caps, the only characteristic part of their nondescript clothing.
A stranger meeting a L.R.D.G. patrol returning from a month’s trip in Libya would have been hard put to it to decide to what race or army, let alone to what unit, they belonged. In winter the use of battle dress made for some uniformity, but in summer, with a month-old beard thick with sand, with a month’s dirt (for the water ration a
llowed no washing), skin burnt to the colour of coffee, and clad in nothing but a pair of torn shorts and chapplies (the N.W. Frontier pattern sandals imported by Bagnold) a man looked like a creature from some other world.
It was interesting to watch all the established ideas about sunstroke being exploded. At the beginning we were given the large, quilted army topees, which on their first trip inevitably fell beneath a case of rations or a gun magazine and were reduced to pulp. Then we tried the Arab head-dress of kaftya and aqal which were good for keeping out driving sand but stuffy in the hot weather and apt to get entangled in the engine or in guns. Finally most men, in summer as well as in winter, used nothing more than “caps, comforter” with few if any cases of sunstroke resulting, though heatstroke was another matter.
1 “A Desert Odyssey of a Thousand Miles,” Sudan Notes and Records, Vol. VII., No. 1.
2 R.A. Bagnold, Libyan Sands.
3 Middle East General Order 108, published 4.2.44.
108. INVENTIONS.
In accordance with para. 3, Standing Orders for War, M.E.F., it is recorded that Brig. R. A. BAGNOLD developed, in collaboration with other officers as stated below, the following inventions or applications of existing principles to military purposes :
(a)
Sand Channels.
Devised in 1929 and subsequently adopted, with modifications, as standard desert equipment.
(b)
Sand Mats.
Devised in 1929 in collaboration with Major P. A. CLAYTON, in the form of rope ladders with bamboo rungs, subsequently modified by the substitution of canvas for rope, and adopted as standard desert equipment.
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