Long Range Desert Group
Page 25
At this time L.R.D.G. H.Q. was still at Kufra but the battle on the coast was moving quickly westwards and we should soon have to move too. It may appear strange that our H.Q. was often situated so far away from the country in which the patrols were working, but we had learned by long experience the value of a base at which the patrols could find some measure of comfort and where fitters, watchmaker, armourer, map draughtsman, signals instrument mechanic and the other technicians could work undisturbed.
The Italians had evacuated Zella and in Christmas week Oliver Poole and I took the H.Q. party up there from Kufra, a pleasant, uneventful journey of 600 miles, through the edge of the Rebiana Sand Sea to Zighen, then two days’ easy going across the gravel to Oliver’s Dump where we had built up a supply of petrol and water for the raids into the northern Fezzan, then northwards, with the basalts of the Harug seen as a dark line on the western horizon, through broken country to Zella, a mine-strewn hollow in the desert where a few hundred Arabs wring a precarious livelihood from the sandy soil. In the days of early winter the inner desert is at its best—the air at dawn clear, dry, exhilarating, the sun pleasantly warm at noon, and the stars at night, brighter than a northerner can imagine, lighting up the moonless sky.
The need to signal made the move of Group H.Q. a very leisurely affair, the scorn of the patrols who did their 250 miles a day. While at base Signals kept a 24-hour watch and on the move this must be restricted as little as possible, so we camped early and started late, with a long halt at midday with the three or four wireless trucks spread in a wide circle round the office caravan.
Rommel was being pushed steadily westwards and it was clear that his next big stand would be made beyond the Tunisian frontier in the gap between the Matmata Hills and the sea. Here, some years before the Nazi war, the French, fearing an Italian invasion from Tripoli, had built a strong defensive position along the line of the wadi which runs through the small town of Mareth.
Some weeks before Tripoli fell on January 23rd the Army Commander had sent for Prendergast to explain the part which he wished L.R.D.G. to play in the last phase of the advance to Tunis. It was his intention to make a holding attack against the fortified line at Mareth, while an encircling force turned the position by a “left hook” to the southwards and he wanted L.R.D.G. to reconnoitre the country over which this force would have to pass. (Among other visitors to Army H.Q. was the Frenchman who had built the Mareth Line, now in the difficult position of having to explain how to overcome his own excellent defences!)
At that time our base was still at Zella, for the Italians continued to hang on in Hon where the garrison of a thousand or more was too large for us to dislodge. Nangle with his Indians fought a skirmish on the outskirts of Uaddan on Christmas Day, and for the next fortnight he lived in the hills above the village, going down by night to discover if the Italians had left. On Tanuary 10th Hon was clear and L.R.D.G. moved there from Zella.
Now from Hon to the Tunisian frontier as the crow flies is four hundred miles, and it was clear that from there the patrols would not be able without refuelling to reconnoitre the country south of the Matmata Hills, zigzagging to and fro to make their “going” maps, and return to their base. The solutions to this difficulty were a series of dumps made by the Heavy Section in the desert country south of Gebel Nefusa, of whose existence the Italians never seem to have been aware, and a supply of petrol and food at Tozeur in Tunisia, arranged by Easonsmith in a flying visit to First Army at the beginning of the year.
All January and half of February our patrols and those of the Indian Long Range Squadron were going out from Zella or Hon. On January 12th T patrol crossed the frontier, the first troops of the Eighth Army to enter Tunisia. The information which the patrols were collecting might be needed by Army H.Q. at any moment, and therefore we could not wait till each party had returned to Hon with the map of its route. So at their midday halts and again in the evening they would signal the results of their work, giving their route from point to point by map reference and describing the terrain by the code Bagnold had worked out a year before.
The map which we gradually built up thus was not made without losses. Lazarus, crossing the track between Shueref and Mizda, fell in with a strong enemy column moving up to Tripoli from the Fezzan. In the scrap which followed the Rhodesians knocked out a German armoured car but lost half their own vehicles, and Henderson, the navigator, was killed. At nightfall three men were still missing but a week later they turned up at Hon, having walked eastwards till they met some friendly Arabs who set them on camels and brought them in. A week earlier Hunter was searching for a way, other than the existing roads which were sure to be guarded, down the precipitous northern face of Gebel Nefusa on to the coastal plain. East of Nalut he tried to get down the cliff with two Jeeps but one overturned, rolled down the slope and was wrecked. As they were recovering their guns and kit a Libyan soldier appeared offering assistance. Hunter explained in Arabic that they were a German party testing out new cars and while the man went to fetch help from his camp in the next valley made off hurriedly in the opposite direction.
It was Wilder who in the end found the route by which two months later the New Zealand Division made their last “left hook.” By the middle of January, a week before Tripoli fell, he had reached a point thirty miles south-west of Medenine, and from a hiding place here sent out parties on foot to search the hills. But a few days’ work showed that they were impassable so he turned to search farther southwards and a week later had found the pass which the Army came to know later as Wilder’s Gap.
Meanwhile Tinker, Bruce, Rand, Spicer and the other patrols were covering the area west of the hills. Tinker with a couple of Jeeps pushed up to within 25 miles of Gabes but when he got back to his temporary base beyond Qasr Rihane he found his patrol had been shot up by enemy aircraft, two men wounded and most of his cars burnt out. While he had been away the survivors of a party of Free French parashots had come in to his camp, and Tinker was faced with the problem of getting home thirty-seven men, two of them wounded, in his five remaining Jeeps. So with three cars he went across the shott to Tozeur, borrowed more transport and returned to collect the twenty-five men who were following on foot.
Bruce’s area was between the Shott el Gerid and the Grand Erg Oriental, the great sand sea of Southern Algeria, which a progress of fifty miles in three days in its confused and “choppy” dunes showed to be far less passable than the Libyan sand seas. Bruce had become expert in this work of “going” reconnaissance for at the end of December, when the front line stood at Buerat el Hsun, he had explored all the country south-west of Misurata over which XXX Corps later advanced to Tarhuna and on to Tripoli.
Before these operations in Tunisia began we had been warned that the Arabs of the country would probably be unfriendly and this proved to be true enough. Two years of efficient Nazi propaganda backed up by lavish bribery, and their long-standing dislike of the French had made their attitude to us very different from that of the Arabs in Libya. Arabs gave away the position of Tinker’s base near Qasr Rihane; they had betrayed David Stirling when he was attacked and taken prisoner near Gabes and on February 13th Bruce was twice ambushed by an Arab band. The Guards beat off both attacks, but in the first two men had been wounded so Bruce took his patrol into Tozeur, filled up with petrol and food a day before the Germans occupied the village, and took his wounded on to El Oued. With his return to Tripoli by the northern route now cut off he finally reached Hon by way of Touggourt, Fort Flatters and Ghadames, a sort of Cook’s Tour through the Algerian Sahara which brought his mileage up to 3500 miles in the five weeks since he had started out.
During January and February the patrols had explored hundreds of square miles of country, had lost men, cars and equipment and used thousands of gallons of petrol. In the middle of March all this work bore its fruit.
The information we had collected showed that a “left hook” to outflank the Mareth Line was a possibility and the New Zealand Division wa
s chosen to carry it out. From the beginning of the month, along the roads from Tripoli, supplies were pouring into the F.M.C.1 at Dehibat. By night the R.A.S.C. companies lifted them forward to a second dump near Wilder’s Gap, hurrying to be back at Dehibat again before dawn. In the wadis around the Gap the supplies were carefully camouflaged.
By the middle of March all was ready. A L.R.D.G. party under Tinker was to guide the force and it was only fitting that the Group’s last task in Africa should be carried out by the New Zealanders who had begun its work two and a half years earlier, a thousand miles to the east.
On the 19th the New Zealand Division started westwards along the route which had been marked out by Bassett, Tinker’s navigator, a couple of days before. From Wilder’s Gap they moved up towards Gebel Tabaqa with El Hamma and Gabes as their final objectives. Rommel, appreciating the threat to his right flank, moved the 21st Panzer Division and two other divisions out west of Gabes to plug the gap. But Montgomery sent the 1st Armoured Division after the New Zealanders and on the afternoon of March 26th, with overwhelming support from the R.A.F. and the American Air Force, the two British divisions inflicted a defeat on the enemy which left Rommel with no alternative but to abandon the Mareth Line. On the 29th Gabes fell.
General Montgomery wrote this letter to Prendergast :
MAIN H.Q. EIGHTH ARMY,
M. E. F.
2 April, 1943.
MY DEAR PRENDERGAST,
We are sending back the Indian Long Range Squadron to-morrow. They have done some useful jobs here—road recces, protective patrols for aerodromes, etc.—but I feel that there will be no further scope for them in the country we are now entering.
I would like you to know how much I appreciate the excellent work done by your patrols and by the S.A.S. in reconnoitring the country up to the Gabes Gap.
Without your careful and reliable reports the launching of the “left hook” by the N.Z. Division would have been a leap in the dark; with the information they produced the operation could be planned with some certainty and, as you know, went off without a hitch.
Please give my thanks to all concerned and best wishes from Eighth Army for the new tasks you are undertaking.
Yours sincerely,
B. L. MONTGOMERY.
Lt.-Col. PRENDERGAST, D.S.O.,
O.C., L.R.D.G.”
That was the end. The hilly country beyond Gabes was, as the Army Commander said, unsuitable for L.R.D.G. to work in and Prendergast took the unit back to Egypt for a re-fit and the rest it had well earned.
For two and a half years L.R.D.G. had been masters in the inner desert, moving through it as and when they pleased, causing the enemy losses out of all proportion to their own, and helping to make more true one of the few true sayings of the Leader of our enemies, who wrote of the “spirit of the broad masses” (of the British nation) “which enables it to carry through to victory any struggle that it once enters upon, no matter how long such a struggle may last or however great the sacrifice that may be necessary or what the means that have to be employed; and all this even though the actual military equipment at hand may be utterly inadequate when compared with that of other nations.”2
1 Field Maintenance Centre.
2 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. Unexpurgated edition, 1939. (Hurst & Blackett, Ltd.)
APPENDIX 1
GLOSSARY
A.F.V.
Armoured fighting vehicle.
’Ain
Spring.
Ascaris
Native troops.
Barchan -
Crescent-shaped dune.
Bir
Well, cistern.
Carabinieri
Italian police.
Dom Palm
Hyphæne thebaica.
Erg
Sand sea.
Fusti
Fuel-drum.
Gebel, Jebel
Mountain, hill.
Ghibli
Colonial bomber aircraft, Italian.
Gilf
Cliff, plateau.
Goum
Band of irregular troops.
Goumier
Member of such a band.
Hammada
Stony desert.
Hatiet, Hatiya
Patch of vegetation.
Kebir
Large, big.
L.G.
Landing ground.
Ma’aten
Well.
Méhariste
Camel Corps soldier.
Mudir
Native official.
Qaret, Gara
Hill.
Qibli
Hot south wind.
Recce
Reconnaissance.
Ril
Addra gazelle.
R.V.
Rendezvous.
S.D.F.
Sudan Defence Force.
Shott
Salt marsh.
Sirir, serir
Gravel desert.
Tibbu, Tebu
Inhabitants of Tibesti.
Wadi
Watercourse, normally dry.
Zawia
Religious centre, monastery.
APPENDIX 2
ROLL OF HONOUR
Arnold, Capt. P. L.
General List.
Ashby, Cpl. L. C.
Rhodesia.
Beech, Cpl. F. R.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Easton, Gdsmn. J.
Scots Guards.
Gravil, Dvr. M.
R.A.S.C.
Gurdon, Lt. Hon. R. B.
Coldstream Guards.
Henderson, Gnr.
Rhodesia.
Henry, Lt. J.
Rhodesia.
Hewson, Sgt. C. D.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Hopton, Gdsmn. A.
Coldstream Guards.
Jordan, Sgmn.
R.C.S.
Matthews, Gdsmn. G.
Coldstream Guards.
O’Malley, L/Cpl. N.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Rezin, Pte.
Rhodesia.
Riggs, Pte. R.
Rhodesia.
Yates, Cpl. G. F.
R.A.S.C.
APPENDIX 3
HONOURS AND AWARDS
D.S.O.
Clayton, Major P. A.
General List.
Easonsmith, Major J. R.
R.T.R.
Prendergast, Lt.-Col. G. L.
R.T.R.
Wilder, Capt. N. P.
2 N.Z.E.F.
O.B.E.
Bagnold, Lt.-Col. R. A.
R.G.S.
Steele, Major D. G.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Shaw, Capt. W. B. Kennedy
Intelligence Corps.
M.B.E.
Barrett, Lt. D.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Heywood, Capt. G. B.
Middlesex Yeomanry.
M.G.
Browne, Capt. L. H.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Bruce, Lt. Hon. B.
Coldstream Guards.
Easonsmith, Capt. J. R.
R.T.R.
Holliman, Capt. C. A.
R.T.R.
Hunter, Capt. A. D. N.
R. Scots Fusiliers.
Lawson, Capt. R. P.
R.A.M.C.
Mitford, Major E. C.
R.T.R.
Morris, Lt. C. S. -
2 N.Z.E.F.
Lloyd Owen, Capt. D.
The Queen’s.
Olivey, Capt. J. R.
Rhodesia.
Sutherland, Lt. J. H.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Timpson, Capt. J. A. L.
Scots Guards.
Tinker, Capt. R. A.
2 N.Z.E.F.
D.C.M.
Bassett, Pte. D. M.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Browne, Cpl. L. H.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Moore, Tpr. R. J.
2 N.Z.E.F.
M.M.
Brown, Tpr.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Cave, Tpr. A. H.
R. Wilts Yeomanry.
Craw, Cpl. M.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Crossley, Cpl. J.
Coldstream Guards.
Dennis, Cpl. J.
Coldstream Guards.
Dobson, Tpr. T. B.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Dornbush, Tpr. C.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Duncalfe, Gdsmn. R.
Coldstream Guards.
Ellis, Tpr. E.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Fraser, Cpl. M. B. P.
Scots Guards.
Garven, Cpl. G. C.
2 N.Z.E.F.
Gibson, Cpl. L.
Scots Guards.
Gunn, Pte. D.
Seaforths.
Hutchins, Sgt. D.
N. Somerset Yeomanry.
Jackson, Sgt. C.
Rhodesia.
Lewis, L/Cpl. T. J.