by Sadler, John
The Western Desert
The great swathe of the Sahara Desert covers a vast expanse. It has an enduring aura of romance and exoticism, experienced by very few of those who served in the Desert War. Armies have fought in desert conditions both before and after, but never on such a scale and of such duration. Desert (“the Blue”) threw up a whole catalogue of factors to hinder military activity and increase the misery of individual combatants.
For these, British and Dominion, the Germans, Italians, French, Greeks and others, it seemed they had arrived in the very cauldron of a particular version of hell. …my three strongest recollections are: the heat, sweat pouring and oozing from me, until I ached and itched with it … the strange lack of fear … the seemingly endless hours of utter boredom, observing a law ridge about 2,000 yards away with nothing moving, nothing happening, except the sun beating mercilessly down and one’s eyes straining (as I remember our gunner putting it) “at miles and miles off*** all”.3
The story of the Long Range Desert Group unfolds primarily in the Libyan Desert, a natural amphitheatre in which large armies wheeled and charged, stood at bay, gave and took ground. Men poured out their lifeblood over featureless, rock-strewn ridges barely showing above the scorched desert floor. Tanks, like dusty men o’ war, cruised and fought, largely untroubled by the human landscape that defined other battlefields.
Along the Mediterranean coast, runs a narrow littoral of pleasant and cultivated land, the fertile coastal strip, along which most of the main settlements are located. This agreeable plain is bounded inland by a line of limestone cliffs, steep and bare, dragged through with narrow defiles or wadis. These create a formidable barrier, impassable to most wheeled vehicles. Atop the cliffs and running southwards in a gentle decline, is a bare plateau, scorched by the hot sun and scoured by millennia of harsh winds. The surface is comprised of rock and layered grit, like the topping on a primeval cake, varying in density from metres to centimetres. Where the base rock is denser, low hills have been left, insignificant humps or irregular ridges, possession of which was to be vital to the armies and demand a vast sacrifice in blood and materiel.
Where the limestone is more friable, depressions of varying size create undulations. These can form either obstacles or handy defences. Of all these pits in the desert floor the largest is the vast Qattara Depression which lies to the south of the plateau, forming an impassable inland sea several hundred metres below the escarpment, bounded by steep cliffs with salt-marsh below. As one moves southwards towards this great depression the unyielding surface of the plateau gives way to a rolling, almost dizzying series of dunes.
This, perhaps, is nearest to the classic image of the desert landscape so beloved of filmmakers. Theses dunes arise some half a hundred miles inland and the ground considerably restricts movement of large forces. Thus the armies were penned into the area between the coast and the dunes, a relatively narrow battlefield in so wide a landscape. This was never more than seventy miles in width but stretched for a thousand miles and more east and west, creating a very thin oblong.
Though unremittingly harsh, the desert was not devoid of either flora, fauna or, for that matter, inhabitants: … there was virtually no animal or insect life. Just the occasional jerboa – the desert rat (a nice friendly little fellow) – the scorpion and an occasional gazelle. The Arabs and their camels kept well out of the way.4 Of manmade roads running east to west there was only one, the Via Balbia from Tripoli through Sirte, El Agheila, Benghazi, Derna, Gazala, Tobruk and Bardia, to Sollum. Westwards lay Sidi Barrani, Mersa Matruh, Fuka, the rail halt of El Alamein, and finally the great jewel of Alexandria and the fertile sweep of the Nile. Of these coastal settlements only Tripoli, Benghazi and Tobruk had significant harbours. For transit north to south there were only local track ways, (‘trigh’).
These were not hard-surfaced but beaten paths linking oases, hammered out by centuries of human and camel traffic.5 Clearly these had never been intended for wheeled vehicles, and the passage of motorised convoys punished the surface, leaving a chaos of endless ruts. To avoid these, drivers tended to edge their vehicles to the side, thus beating an ever widening path. When winter rains deluged the trigh, surfaces turned into a glutinous, impassable soup. Where these routes crossed, the location naturally assumed a clear local significance often marked by a saintly burial, (denoted by the prefix ‘Sidi’).
Such places became natural foci for area defence or supply stations. Without wishing to push the naval analogy too far, fighting in the largely featureless desert placed a premium on navigation, demanding an exact use of the compass. So five miles beyond Sidi Barrani we branched off into the open desert and bumped along over boulders and scrub as far as “Fred Karno’s Circus”. This was the name given to the gap in the wire on the Libyan-Egyptian frontier, at the southern end of the Halfaya (‘Hellfire’) escarpment. By this time we were beginning to realise just what driving in the desert meant. The sun was merciless, even at this time of year, and our loads were floating about the lorry, bursting open tin after tin of priceless petrol6. In addition to the magnetic compass, often upset by the steel in vehicles, the sun compass7 came into its own. It was our first effort at movement, using only compass and sun compass. Fortunately, we had some guide in a row of telegraph poles that stretched away towards the forward area along the desert tracks.8
In this, the pioneering work undertaken by pre-war cartographers was particularly useful. Mapping the desert had an appreciable provenance, beginning with Herodotus. Classical and medieval travellers were followed by British explorers such as Mungo Park and Major Laing who first crossed north–south to Timbuktu in 1826. During the inter-wars years much work had been done by an eclectic group including two Englishmen who were both to serve in LRDG: Bagnold9 and Clayton.10 One of the more colourful of this colourful bunch was the Hungarian Lazlo Almasy.11 Due to their combined efforts the empty canvas of the desert was marked by the network of ancient trails, with every feature in an otherwise bare landscape plotted and surveyed. This included the white bones of escarpments, sunken depressions, oases, salt marshes and dry wadis that could spring to brilliant life after rains.
During the summer months, from May–October, the climate is scorching hot, a blisteringly and relentless sun, furnace bright and searing dry. Only in the evenings before the dark cold of night, before the sun sinks, is the broiling fire of day mellowed into evening cool. Winters are drear and damp with frequent heavy downpours. Torrents flow down the scree-riven wadis but water is soon soaked up by the parched and greedy desert.
Mainly in spring, an enervating wind shifts direction and can whip the sands into the abrasive fury of the Khamseen. The land is harsh and gives nothing, shows no mercy to the unwary and punishes all who toil there. Yet there is great beauty, and the desert can exert a powerful, almost obsessive pull. Dawn and sunset can be infinitely memorable and the stars glow with a clear cold light that conjures biblical images. Soldiers were thrown back on their recall of heroic conflicts as depicted in the Iliad.
Wilfred Owen said that the poetry is in the pity; but that was in another war. This later war was one of great distances and rapid movement and for me the poetry came when least expected, in the interstices of a generally agitated existence, in the rush of sudden contrasts, and the recognition that, whatever else changes, one’s own mortality does not.12
East of the emptiness lies Egypt, fertile valley of the Nile, a cradle of civilisation, the jewel in successive empires. Britain’s interest in Egypt stemmed primarily from her need to safeguard the vital passage of the Suez Canal. This concern had led Britain to perceive a need for intervention in 1882, when nationalist sentiment in the Egyptian army simmered. After the native military were suitably chastised at the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir (1882), Britain became the dominant force. Egypt remained vital to Britain’s strategic interest during the Great War, even though the land was still nominally an Ottoman possession.
A popular uprising broke out in 1919 and, in Nove
mber 1924, the British representative to Sudan, Sir Lee Stack, was murdered. King Fuad, a British puppet installed in 1922, died in 1936 and his youthful successor, Farouk, was minded to enter into an Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. It was agreed that the British would withdraw from Egypt, save for a garrison of 10,000 who would remain for a certain period to defend the Canal. Fear of Italian aggression following Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia was an influential factor. When war broke out again in 1939, Egypt once again assumed a key strategic role. Many in the local opposition would not have been unhappy to see the Axis powers victorious.
Waging war in the Desert
Q. Were they good days for you?
A. Oh yes. Happy days with my men … I have always longed to meet them again. Where are all the Geordie men I loved and commanded now?13
You can stew it, you can fry it
But no matter how you try it
Fundamentally it remains the same,
You can hash it, you can slash it,
With potatoes you can mash it,
But when all is done you’ve only changed the name.
—‘A Cook’s thoughts on Bully’
Herodotus chronicles the dire warning offered by the unfortunate experience of King Cambyses II of Persia (d. 522BC). The despot dispatched an army, said to be 50,000 strong, to punish the Oracle of Amun at Siwa Oasis. This entire force vanished in a sandstorm of suitably biblical proportions and was never seen again. Over centuries the legend flourished, and many explorers since (including Count Lazlo Almasy), have sought to solve the riddle of this lost army.
Wartime infantry who fought in the Desert would never forget the hardships the terrain imposed. In addition to the normal perils of being under enemy fire and the hidden hazard of landmines, there were flies in abundance, numerous forms of disease, plus the odd poisonous snake or scorpion. Ground was barren, scorched, featureless, waterless and invincibly hostile to man. It must at times have seemed almost unbelievable that such titanic efforts were exerted by both sides to win these arid, seemingly endless acres. …In the desert, men asked “Why?” again and again. There had to be some good and justifiable reason for fighting in such inhospitable climes. No men fought merely for the sake of fighting.14
For the most part infantry inhabited trenches, much as their fathers had done on the Western Front, though these were less permanent affairs. To dig down into sand was not difficult but, where the surface had been whittled away by wind and the limestone was exposed, powered tools were necessary to gouge out shallow trenches and foxholes, supported by a rough parapet of stones, or ‘sangars’.15
Battles were large and terrifying, though relatively rare. Smaller actions at platoon or company level were far more common and there was a constant need for patrolling, either light reconnaissance or the beefier and bristling fighting patrol.
Recce patrols were messy affairs if we had to go through the pockets of some poor devil who had been killed and had been left lying out in the sand for a couple of days. People talk about rigor mortis, but after a day or two the limbs were flexible again and indeed, after a week or so, a quick pull on an arm or leg would detach it from the torso. Two-day-old corpses were already fly blown and stinking.
There was no dignity in death, only masses of flies and maggots, black swollen flesh and the body seeming to move, either because of the gases within it or else the thousands of maggots at work. We had to take documents, identity discs, shoulder straps, anything of intelligence value. Pushing or pulling these frightening dead men to reach their pockets was sickening. Of course, we couldn’t wash our hands – one rubbed them in sand – sometimes we rubbed them practically raw if it had been a particularly disgusting day.16
‘Desert Rose’ sounds like an attractive form of flora. To the Allied army however it denoted an altogether more basic convenience – the field latrine. For temporary arrangements the hollow shell of a petrol container was buried with another laid on top at a suitable angle to form a urinal. Where more creature comforts were needed a deep trench was sunk with a hessian sheet on timber frame arranged above. Chlorine was applied liberally.17
Cleanliness was essential in the Desert climate where dysentery and other horrors stalked. Personal hygiene and liberal application of AL6318 were equally emphasised. Opportunities for washing one’s person or attire were often limited, the soldier coated in a caked carapace of stale, dried sweat and dust. Cuts and scrapes could swiftly become infected and morph into most unpleasant weeping ulcers.
For the majority of the young men who served in these campaigns, any form of overseas travel, indeed any travel at all was a novelty. To such innocents the Levant appeared a distant and exotic place: Waiting for a taxi, he breathed the spicy, flaccid atmosphere of the city and felt the strangeness of things about him. The street lamps were painted blue. Figures in white robes, like night shirts, flickered through the blue gloom, slippers flapping from heels. The women, bundled in black, were scarcely visible. 19 Few could deny that their apprehensions were overlaid by a sense of adventure: We sailed along the Red Sea for a century, it seemed. The heat was insufferable. Sleep an impossibility. Tempers were frayed and fights developed freely. … Curiosity replaced apathy. Stage by stage, and those men who had been to Egypt before found themselves in popular demand and frequent visitors to the canteen.20
At first their destination appeared almost delightful. As we clambered ashore we stamped and rubbed our feet delightedly.… We ran the sand slowly through our fingers; it was warm and real and comforting. I could never have believed then that I would hate this self-same sand so bitterly; the crumbled, remorseless rock that sucked at the lifeblood of us who tried to master her vastness in the following months.21 They would find that the epithet ‘Desert Rat’ was not accorded to novices as of right. It had to be earned, the recognition of an apprenticeship in desert warfare and survival.… The name given to themselves by the soldiers of the Eighth Army … it became an expression of pride among the men. It soon became the entitlement only of experienced desert fighters and could not be claimed by any newcomer to the desert.22
In such surroundings the comradeship of war was inevitably heightened. Men might express fine sentiments and extol the nobility of sacrifice but such poetic expressions soon wilted in the face of reality. Endless hours of tedium, dirty, sweaty, beset by a constant and ravenous horde of flies, troubled by looseness of the bowels and all the other complaints that add endless misery to a soldier’s life, enlivened only by odd moments of sheer terror. The code of behaviour which evolved was dictated by pure pragmatism:
Your chief concern is not to endanger your comrade.
Because of the risk that you may bring him, you do not light fires after sunset.
You do not use his slit trench at any time.
Neither do you park your vehicle near the hole in the ground in which he lives.
You do not borrow from him, and particularly you do not borrow those precious fluids, water and petrol.
You do not give him compass bearings which you have not tested and of which you are not sure.
You do not leave any mess behind that will breed flies.
You do not ask him to convey your messages, your gear or yourself unless it is his job to do so.
You do not drink deeply of any man’s bottles, for they may not be replenished. You make sure that he has many before you take his cigarettes.
You do not ask information beyond your job, for idle talk kills men.
You do not grouse unduly, except concerning the folly of your own commanders. This is allowable. You criticise no other man’s commanders.
Of those things which you do, the first is to be hospitable and the second is to be courteous … there is time to be helpful to those who share your adventure. A cup of tea, therefore, is proffered to all comers …
This code is the sum of fellowship in the desert. It knows no rank or any exception.23
Discipline was essential, though the fire of combat tempered the parade ground bellow
ing of peacetime and the drill sergeant into a more businesslike focus.
Discipline such as we had formerly known disappeared. In its place came a companionship. Officers no longer issued orders in the old manner. They were more friendly and more with the men. They realised that this was a team. We, for our part, never took advantage of this new association. While orders were given, except in emergency, more in the nature of requests, they were obeyed even more punctiliously than under peacetime conditions. It was a case of every man pulling together, willingly. From what we had seen of the German Army, so such relationship existed, and it was not long before we discovered this was our strength.24
Krieg ohne Hass25 was a description attributed to Rommel himself and insofar as war can ever truly be said to represent chivalry then it was here. The British had a high regard for the Desert Fox, both as a fighting soldier of the highest calibre and a man of impeccable honour. Some years after the war Lieutenant-General von Ravenstein26 observed: If the warriors of the Africa Campaign meet today anywhere in the world, be they Englishmen or Scots, Germans or Italians, Indians, New Zealanders or South Africans, they greet each other as staunch old comrades. It is an invisible but strong link which binds them all. The fight in Africa was fierce, but fair. They respected each other and still do so today. They were brave and chivalrous soldiers.27
Humour, as ever, was the soldier’s balm. A typical example of the sort of thing that amused us was the story that Hitler had secretly contacted Churchill with the offer to remove Rommel from his command in return for Churchill retaining all his generals in theirs.28 Though the soldiers in the line observed a strict blackout procedure, the sky to the east was lit up with the rich glow of the Delta cities. The brightness and gaiety of easy living these represented could not have contrasted more tellingly with the drab but dangerous austerity of the front. The contrast between the rigours of the line and the luxury of Cairo, the ‘Unreal City’, could not have been greater:
