Long Range Desert Group

by W B Kennedy Shaw

  On the same night that Y 2 patrol was at El Ezzeiat S2 and R2 raided the southern of the two roads through Gebel Akhdar. At dusk, with Olivey in command of the combined party, they got on to the road between Maraua and Slonta, cut the telegraph wires and turned eastwards. In a deep cutting Olivey laid an ambush and not long afterwards the first enemy lorry, its driver dead, had run off the road into the ditch. As he walked across to look at it Olivey was momentarily shocked to see a large red cross painted on the side. But then a number of Italians with rifles and automatics scrambled out over the tailboard and started shooting at him, to receive a moment later the full fire power of the two patrols.

  Turning westwards for some miles Olivey arranged another ambush and by the time he drew off the road southwards some hours later had destroyed eight more lorries, leaving the roadside a shambles of petrol, oil, wine from punctured casks, wrecked trucks and dead or dying Italians.

  In addition to these “beat ups” we did two “taxi service” jobs in November, 1941.

  West of Cyrene in Gebel Akhdar is Beda Littoria, a small village centre of an Italian colonisation scheme. The first building on the right as you enter the village from Cyrene is a grain silo, then a row of bungalows, then standing back from the road among cypresses a larger two-storied house, dark and rather gloomy. Here in November, 1941, lived Rommel. The Eighth Army’s offensive was timed for November 18th, and on the eve it had been planned to kill Rommel at Beda Littoria.

  The plan came so near to success. And how different events might have been if it had succeeded. Perhaps no second withdrawal from Cyrenaica, no Tobruk and no ’Alamein, North Africa cleaned up a year earlier. Who can say?

  In October John Haselden left Alexandria by submarine and was landed near Cyrene on the Libyan coast. Haselden, killed a year later at Tobruk, was the outstanding personality of the dozen odd men who worked with the tribes in Cyrenaica behind the Axis lines. Untiring, strong, courageous, never without some new scheme for outwitting the enemy, yet with a slow and easy-going way of setting about a job which was far more successful with the Arabs than the usual European insistence on precision and punctuality which they neither like nor understand. His name and his work will not easily be forgotten in the Gebel Akhdar.

  For a fortnight Haselden lived with the Arabs, exploring the routes up to Beda Littoria from the coast. On the night of November 14th he was on the beach again, signalling to H.M. submarine Torbay which had brought a party of Commando men from “Layforce” under Major Geoffrey Keyes. From the landing Haselden led them three nights later to Rommel’s garden gate at Beda Littoria and there left them, his share in the attack done.

  At midnight Keyes and the two men with him, Campbell and Terry, were at the front door loudly demanding entry in German. The sentry opened to them, but when they were inside showed fight and was overpowered. At the noise two officers appeared on the stairs and were shot down. All the lights in the house were then extinguished and silence fell. Keyes started to search the ground floor rooms. The first was empty, but from the darkness of the second came a burst of fire and Keyes fell, mortally wounded. Campbell was also hit and taken prisoner, but Terry got away.

  In all this there was no sign of Rommel. Perhaps his dossier in the Intelligence files at Middle East should have been more complete, but one does not worry much over the anniversaries of enemy generals. Rommel was at his birthday party in Rome.

  The cemetery at Beda Littoria is on a hill-top a mile south of the village. In the north-east corner, far from the graves of the Italian settlers, five wooden crosses stand in a row. First four Germans, and at the end :

  MAJOR GEOFFREY KEYES

  V.C., M.C.

  gef. 17.11.41

  L.R.D.G.’s share in this adventure was a small one, to pick up Haselden at a rendezvous south of Beda Littoria and bring him back to Siwa.

  The other “taxi service” job was to collect a party of David Stirling’s men. The name of David Stirling will occur so often in this book that I must explain here who he is.

  Stirling, now a prisoner of war in Italy or Germany, fills two hackneyed descriptions—“a born leader of men” and “does not know what fear is,” and his exploits became a legend from Gabes to ’Alamein. At the beginning of the war he was, I think, in the Commandos in England, but L.R.D.G. first knew him in the Western Desert in command of the S.A.S. (Special Air Service) troops, who were later called “L Detachment,” but were always known to us as “The parashots.” At that time he had trained a small force of his own to drop by parachute from aircraft, to march immense distances by night or day, and to specialise in the destruction of aircraft (and of anything else for the matter of that) on landing grounds behind the enemy’s lines. In those early days Mayne, Fraser and Lewis were his other officers, a quartette whose initiative, courage and endurance cost the Axis dear.

  A certain amount of confusion has arisen in the public, and also in the official,1 mind about Commandos, S.A.S. Troops and L.R.D.G. All three were independent units, but the S.A.S. Troops and L.R.D.G. on a number of occasions operated very successfully together : one squadron of the Middle East Commando was placed under command of L.R.D.G. for a short time at Siwa in the summer of 1942.

  Stirling’s part in the autumn offensive of 1941 was to land by parachute on the night of November 17th, and attempt to destroy aircraft on the landing grounds near Gazala and Tmimi, and L.R.D.G. was to pick up the parashots a day later and bring them back to Siwa.

  The night of November 17th was one of the foulest of the Libyan war. Looking north from Siwa we could see the flashes of lightning along the coast though the torrential rain did not reach so far south. As a result of the bad weather the R.A.F. dropped the parashots wide of their target and when they had landed rain, wind and mud hindered them still more. Easonsmith had gone north from Siwa to meet them, but though he picked up Stirling, Mayne, Lewis and twenty odd men the remainder never came in to the rendezvous at Rotunda Segnale.

  1 The Ministry of Information pamphlet, The Eighth Army states (page 29) : “The Long Range Desert Group, under the leadership of Lt.-Colonel (then Captain) David Stirling, and the Middle East Commando carried out two remarkable raids on Sirte and Agedabia airfields… This is incorrect : Stirling was never in L.R.D.G. These raids were the work of his men (S.A.S. Troops, not Commandos) who were carried to the scene of action by an L.R.D.G. patrol.

  CHAPTER NINE

  RAIDS FROM JALO

  WHILE the battle was being fought out along the coast between the Egyptian frontier and Tobruk another operation, of which little was heard at the time and less than it deserves has been written since, was taking place in the desert two hundred miles inland. During October and November Brigadier Reid had been assembling at Jaghbub a flying column composed of the 2nd Punjab Regiment, the 6th South African Armoured Car Regiment and a few 25-pounder and ack-ack gunners. His object was to threaten Rommel’s southern flank by the capture of Jalo Oasis and on November 25th the Italian garrison there surrendered to him. Now from Jaghbub to Jalo is two hundred miles as the crow flies and nearly a hundred more by the route which Reid’s column had to follow. Over that length of bare, waterless desert he had to carry all his supplies and fight a battle at the end of it. The petrol problem alone was one of the greatest difficulty. We knew the country round Jalo fairly well from our reconnaissances of the previous summer and in October I took the Punjabis’ C.O. from Jaghbub to within thirty miles of Jalo to see the country over which he would have to march. Up to that point the going was fairly good, but we had misjudged the extent to which the heavy armoured cars would stick in the sand north of Jalo, and in the last lap of the journey the petrol consumption was so high that Reid would have had no chance of withdrawing if his attack failed.

  There were six or seven hundred Italians in Jalo but they resisted with as little spirit as their other desert garrisons in the next two years. Reid took the small oasis of Aujila one afternoon, made a skilful night march of fifteen miles to the outskirts of
Jalo, and attacked the next day. By evening the defence had crumbled and Reid jumped into his car, drove up to the gate of the fort and found the seventy Italian officers of the garrison sitting calmly down to dinner. They soon made it plain to him that they regarded the tiresome business of fighting as being happily disposed of, though a mile away in the outlying hamlet of Lebba a few with stouter hearts still fought on, and were only overcome by a charge of the South Africans, dismounted from their armoured cars which they left bogged on the sandy slopes.

  David Stirling’s parachute raid on the landing grounds around Gazala had failed, but it had had one good result—it introduced Stirling to L.R.D.G. and out of that introduction was born a partnership which cost the Axis in Africa more than a hundred aircraft.

  Steele, then commanding “A” Squadron, had gone to Jalo from Siwa with S1, S2 and T2 patrols shortly after Reid took the oasis and it was from there that the first combined L.R.D.G.-parashot raids were made.

  It was an ideal partnership. We could exploit to the full what was our greatest asset—the ability to deliver a passenger anywhere behind the enemy’s lines at any time he asked. And weeks of training for their airborne operations had made the parashots fine artists in getting into—and out of—places at night. They made a wager with the R.A.F. on one occasion. On such and such a night, said the parashots, we will arrive at Heliopolis, having walked the seventy miles from Kabrit, get into your hangars and write our names on your aircraft. The R.A.F. accepted the challenge, doubled their guards and prowled anxiously around the airfield, but all they caught were a few parashots on the way out after the job was done.

  Early in December, Holliman left Jalo carrying Stirling, Mayne and a dozen of their men. Their objectives were the landing grounds of Sirte and Tamet, far along the coast road towards Tripoli, which the enemy were known to be using as staging points as they moved their aircraft eastwards. Late on the afternoon of the 14th two trucks drove quietly over the flat country intersected by salt marshes and low sand dunes which lies south of the Via Balbia and dropped Mayne and his party three miles from the landing ground at the north end of the Wadi Tamet, arranging a rendezvous at which to pick them up when the job was done.

  By dusk the parashots were in position on the edge of the airfield and what a sight for their first attempt! All around the edges were parked the aircraft; at the huts on the western side the unsuspecting aircrews were finishing their evening meal; beyond them on the coast road a little traffic was passing; beyond the road the white sand dunes hid the sea.

  For an hour or more Mayne waited and watched; then when all seemed still the party crept up to the huts. Inside a faint light was burning and there was a murmur of voices from the few Italians not yet asleep. Quietly the door was opened and the parashots stepped inside, then a hose-spray from six Tommy guns ensured that there would be no interference from the ground staff in their work. By the time Mayne had finished and was on his way back to the rendezvous the petrol dump and twenty-four aircraft were ablaze.

  Meanwhile for the last two days Stirling and Brough, with seventy pounds of explosives on their backs, had been dodging the enemy round Sirte only to find in the end that the airfield on that day was not in use.

  Holliman had just time to reach Jalo again and then on Christmas Eve he was on his way back with the same party to the same task. The Italians at Tamet seemed to have learned little from their experience of a fortnight earlier and before they were aware of what was happening Mayne had planted “sticky bombs” on twenty-seven aircraft. The sticky bomb was a parashot speciality, invented, as I have heard, by Lewis, who was killed afterwards near Nofilia. It was a mixture of explosive and incendiary materials and started a fire after it had gone off. The ideal place for a sticky bomb was at the tail of the aircraft or where the wing joined the fuselage. It was always better to be sure of destroying the airframe rather than the engine, for engines could be replaced on the spot whereas an airframe had to be sent to the base to be rebuilt. The fuse for a sticky bomb was a “time pencil,” an ingenious but temperamental device in which acid from a glass phial broken by squeezing ate its way through a fine wire and so released a spring. The pencils were rated to various times and the choosing of the right pencil was a matter of importance; with too long a delay the enemy might discover what you were doing and hurry round to remove the bombs from the aircraft; with too short an interval the first bomb would have gone off before the job was finished. Moreover, pencils do not always keep good time and on this night before Mayne had finished a bomb went off and set a C.R. 42 alight, silhouetting the parashots against its blaze. With the sentries shooting wildly, some landwards and some to repel what they seemed to imagine was attack from the sea, the parashots crawled off the landing ground and got safely away.

  At two in the morning Holliman with the other half of the patrol dropped Stirling on the main road four miles west of Sirte to raid the airfield there while the patrol waited for him to return, parked by the roadside between groups of enemy vehicles. But again Stirling had no luck for he was challenged at the perimeter defences and the guards, suspecting what might happen, promptly floodlit the landing ground. So there was nothing for it but to retire and Holliman drove for ten miles westwards along the road with headlights on, letting fly at anything he could see. On a truck by the roadside an unwary Italian lit a match for his cigarette and got everything the patrol could give him; in two lorries a few miles on the crews were sleeping in their cabs and knew nothing till the thermite bombs left by the Rhodesians awoke them, and not much then.

  On raids of this kind, as on other occasions, trouble is apt to come the morning after for by then the enemy has had time to regain his wits and send out aircraft to scour the country. S1 were late in getting away, but even so they had travelled seventy miles southwards by daylight. Not long after dawn they halted for a few moments, ranging the cars for cover alongside the few straggling bushes of desert broom. Before they moved on there came the throb of engines to the northwards and two ME no’s appeared, carefully quartering the ground. But they turned half a mile short of the patrol and Holliman, blessing his luck, turned eastwards to Jalo.

  While Stirling and Mayne were attacking Sirte and Tamet, Olivey had taken another party of parashots under Fraser to raid the airfield at Agedabia, where Fraser destroyed thirty-seven aircraft and got safely away.

  In affairs of this sort it is always interesting to see the other side of the picture and some time later we were able to do this. In January, 1942, the Eighth Army swept forward to Agedabia and among the prisoners taken there was Corporal Pietro Nutini of the 32nd Tank Regiment. Back in the P.O.W. cage, Nutini was interrogated and described his experiences on Christmas Eve. On that night, he said, he was very surprised to see the aircraft on the airfield at Agedabia being blown up one by one. It was said that Arabs had placed time bombs in the planes and a number were arrested and threatened with hanging if they did not reveal the culprits.

  He might well be surprised.

  But of all these L.R.D.G.-cum-parashot operations there was nothing to surpass the adventures of T2 patrol under Morris at Marsa Brega.

  On December 10th he set out from Jalo with fourteen of his own men and a dozen parashots. Their objectives were the landing ground at ’Agheila and the shallow anchorage at Marsa Brega at which the Axis was then landing a certain amount of supplies from small coastal vessels. After a day or two spent reconnoitring the salt marsh country south of ’Agheila, Morris dropped the parashots ten miles from the village to make their attack on the aircraft and went off to explore Marsa Brega. Around it the country is as flat as a pancake so any exploration had to be done on foot. All one day and half the next night Morris was ploughing his way through soft sand and salt marsh trying to find a good line of approach, but in the end he realised that the only way to get to Mersa Brega was the way the Axis transport was reaching it at the rate of about two hundred cars a day—by road.

  The next day the parashots returned from ’Agheila; the
y had found the airfield empty since the enemy, unknown to us, had moved all their aircraft to Agedabia. At dusk the patrol drew near to the road. There were five L.R.D.G. cars and an Italian Lancia lorry which the parashots had collected from somewhere. Morris watched the traffic for an hour or more and noticed that most of it was in small convoys of about a dozen vehicles in each, and so he decided to make up a “convoy” of his own. The road here runs along an embankment and the Lancia baulked at the steep slope. With a struggle they got it on to the road and fortunately none of the passing drivers stopped to give them a helping hand.

  Once on the road the convoy sorted itself out. In front was the Lancia without lights and next behind it Morris’s own truck with headlights full on to show up the Lancia and dazzle the eyes of oncoming drivers; the other cars brought up the rear. In this order they started to cover the ten miles to Marsa Brega, meeting Axis traffic all the way; Morris counted up to forty-seven cars, he told me afterwards, and then lost count. The road was narrow with little more than a foot to spare in passing, and across the gap our drivers would shout a greeting to the oncoming trucks.

  About midnight they reached the turning where a track leads off to the anchorage. Two trucks had lagged behind and Morris waited for them to come up. Round the buildings at the cross roads were twenty cars or more, with their crews, German and Italian, waiting beside them or getting a meal at the roadhouse. A normal scene on a line of communications a hundred miles behind the front.