Ghost Patrol: A History of the Long Range Desert Group, 1940–1945

by Sadler, John

  Ability to make the 130-mile crossing of the dune barrier of the Sand Sea.

  Sufficient firepower to deal with enemy convoys and their escorts.

  A reasonable amount of AA Defence.

  Adequate W/T communications between detachments of the force and with Cairo at least once a day.

  Low, inconspicuous vehicles with good camouflage which could be easily concealed from aircraft.

  Leaders with experience of the desert country; and navigators trained in dead reckoning by compass and speedometer, and in astronomical position finding.

  Steady and self-reliant personnel.

  It was also decided that the organisation must be such as to provide two independent patrols to work the ‘police trap’ method of ambushing convoys on a road, with a third party in identical vehicles to provide immediate reinforcement of men, trucks and technical equipment. Each of these three parties was organised in four troops. The establishment decided on comprised:

  HQ., OC., Adj., QM., a

  Two fighting patrols: each including a major (or captain) intelligence officer, 1 subaltern and 23 Ors.

  ‘A’ Echelon Supply Party of 2 subalterns, 1 MO, and 19 ORs.

  ‘B’ Echelon Supply Party of 2 subalterns, 1 MO and 19 Ors.

  The two patrols and ‘A’ echelon supply party had each ten Lewis guns, four Boys AT Rifles, one 37 mm Bofors gun (at that time Bren guns were not available in Egypt; and the transport in each case consisted of ten 30-cwt trucks and one 15-cwt pilot car.10

  The new unit’s primary function would be to carry out deep reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. Wavell then asked what would happen if the group discovered little of interest. ‘How about some piracy on the high desert?’ Bagnold suggested. At the word piracy the rugged face that had seemed a bit stern suddenly broke into a broad grin. ‘Can you be ready in six weeks?’ – I said, ‘yes’.11 Before the end of June 1940, the Major’s revised scheme was approved and the basic building blocks assembled.12

  The Major was next handed a potent talisman: Carte Blanche signed by Wavell himself. This was a magician’s wand that cut through all of the normal laborious and highly uncooperative channels. A cadre of able volunteers was not hard to find. Many of Bagnold’s pre-war contacts were straining at the leash as soon as the green light was given. Experienced hands such as Bill Kennedy Shaw13 and Pat Clayton (surveying in Tanganyika), were rescued from mundane assignments and threw themselves into the herculean task with vast enthusiasm.

  As Barrie Pitt points out, the mere fact that the Italians appeared supine did not mean they were totally incapable – after all their dominion stretched back two full decades.14 Key to the Fezzan is the remote Kufra Oasis in south-eastern Cyrenaica. Sacred to the Senussi and fringed on three sides by depressions, Kufra dominates the ancient east-west route over the hostile sands. Jebel ‘Uweinat is a bloc of high ground forming a nub on the borders of Egypt, Sudan and Libya. Mussolini’s forces had both troops and aircraft there which, in addition to threatening Egypt, gave them a handy balcony for a strike inside Chad, where the administration was potentially pro-Gaullist. As well as for a raid on Aswan, the oasis was well placed for a blow against Wadi Halfa.15

  It must be stressed that, from the outset, Bagnold’s commandos saw their prime role as intelligence gathering rather than offensive action, or ‘biffing’ the enemy. Across this limitless expanse, knowledge of the enemy’s strength and likely intentions was invaluable. To undertake such a vital function, both the right men and the right kit were absolutely essential. Regular soldiers, drawn from the urban sprawl, were not ideal; too rigid, too conformist, too unused to so alien and harsh a battleground. Countrymen and farmers, gamekeepers (and poachers), hunters and marksmen were to be found amongst Kiwis and Rhodesians, from British Yeomanry regiments and even within the august ranks of the Guards.16

  Within six weeks we’d got together a volunteer force of New Zealanders. The New Zealand Division had arrived in Egypt but had yet to be supplied with arms and equipment because of shipping losses. So they were at a loose end. Apart from that, I wanted responsible volunteers who knew how to look after and maintain things, rather than the ordinary British Tommy who was apt to be wasteful. They were a marvellous lot of people, mostly sheep farmers who’d had fleets of trucks of their own and were used to looking after them.17

  Bill Kennedy Shaw had not encountered any Kiwis before this:

  all the knowledge I had of them were my father’s words of the last war – that they were the finest troops from the dominions. Closer acquaintance showed that one should always believe one’s father…. Most of the first New Zealanders were from the Divisional cavalry – the ‘Div. Cav’ – farmers or the like in civil life, and with a maturity and independence not found in Britishers’ of similar age. Physically their own fine country had made them on the average fitter than us, and they had that inherent superiority which in most of a man’s qualities the countryman will always have over the townsman.18

  These beginnings would become the LRDG, still, until 9th November 1940, the Long Range Patrol (“LRP”). Bill Kennedy Shaw as an English officer, even though highly experienced in the desert, was aware that commanding these independently minded colonials would constitute a significant test of leadership skills. You had to work very hard indeed to earn their respect, and the highest praise you might get would be a grudging not such a bad sort of bastard after all.19

  Kennedy Shaw drew up a balance sheet for life in the LRP, pros and cons: On the credit side there were excellent rations, no chance for boredom, blessed relief from normal army ‘bull’ and little or no ‘mucking about’. Desert soldiers were always very aware of just how much they were in fact ‘mucked about’. On the debit side of the balance-sheet, there was that constant stress of behind the lines action, tiredness, frequently to the point of exhaustion, and all the natural hazards of daily life in the desert, including ‘cafard’ (literally ‘cockroach’, a condition of apathy and depression brought on by exposure to the sun).20

  The creation of a completely unorthodox force in six weeks was quite a feat. And it was great fun. There was an awful lot to do. Everything was new. Clothing and footwear had to be redesigned. Army boots were no good at all because they got filled with sand. So I had sandals made – the Indian North-West Frontier chappali, which was very tough with an open toe so that if sand got into it you could shoot it out with a kick. All we wore was a shirt and shorts and Arab headgear. The advantage of wearing a shemagh or shawl which goes round the head, was that it flaps in the wind and keeps the face cool.

  For security reasons, Bagnold cannily decided to avoid putting in a bulk order for new shawls so he simply raided the Palestine Police stores!21

  The Chevy 30-cwt truck was the backstairs child of compromise. Begged or borrowed from local dealers in the Delta or from the Egyptian Army, these were standard commercial vehicles that could be heavily customised for the harsh rigours of desert warfare. Stripped down to bare skeletons, their load carrying capacity beefed up to a couple of tons by additional springs, fitted out for weapons and ammunition, wireless and medical gear, rigs welded on to take heavy and medium machine guns and the ingenious adaptation of the radiator condenser, the Chevy went to war (see Appendix 1). Surveyor’s instruments, binoculars and the all essential sun-compasses were cadged or scrounged from any and every source:

  We had this wonderful means of conserving water from the radiator. When the water boiled, instead of it being lost through the overflow pipe, it was blown off into a can on the side of the truck which was half full of water where it would condense. When the engine cooled it would be sucked back into the radiator again. If everything was right and there were no leaks you could go the whole life of a lorry and never put any more water in after the first filling.22

  Those Great War and inter-war geographers had produced some highly accurate and detailed maps, but enormous areas were simply blank. Italian cartographers were not well regarded as Bill Kennedy Shaw, newly appo
inted as Intelligence Officer (he’d been working as curator of the Palestine Museum), observed: There was no nonsense about the petty details of topography on these [Italian] sheets. Many of them were obviously based on air observation…after a few flights over the country the cartographer had roughed in a range of mountains here and a sand sea or two there. The mountains were all as high as became the dignity of Fascist Italy….23 In due course the appropriately named Captain Lazarus and his hardy volunteers provided LRDG with a first rate map-making section.

  Navigation in the desert is often likened to being upon the ocean, rather a lot of nothingness, unchanging, implacably hostile. Navigation skills would be at an absolute premium (see Appendix 1). Bill Kennedy Shaw divided the desert, in cartographer’s terms, into four areas:

  A little well mapped terrain but all within Egypt

  A lot of badly mapped ground and all in Libya

  Poor, very poor and very bad maps, some virtually blank

  No maps at all

  He took the rather sneering view that Italian maps of Libya reflect the Italian national character in its aspects of bombast and self-assurance…. This was translated into Tommy’s anonymous doggerel as:

  I never see a map but I’m away

  On all the journeys that I long to do

  Over the mountains marked in grey,

  Up all the rivers which are shown in blue,

  And into those white spaces where they say.24

  Discipline in the LRDG was considerably less formal than in regular units. It had to be. These men were independent specialists as well as fighting troops. In the desert everyone had an assigned role, and survival of the group depended upon both self-discipline and innate cohesion. As one volunteer explained it:

  We never had parades or rifle inspections, like we’d been used to in the Army; your common sense told you to keep your gun clean, one day you might want to use the damned thing! No one pulled rank either. When dinner was served at night, the cook would shout, ‘grub up!’ and you got in the queue. If you were in front of an officer, there was none of this, ‘I’m an officer, therefore I go first’ business. We were a very democratic unit, and it worked very well.25

  Campaign life in the Western Desert, especially the exacting role of LRDG, demanded a level of austerity and self-denial that harks back to the warrior monks of the crusades. It isn’t hard to see Bagnold, Clayton and the others as natural successors to Hospitaller knights. Water was more precious than gold. Bagnold reflected on the Spartan ethos:

  We had a water ration of three pints in winter and four in summer. It was really enough if one was careful and lived at the bottom of one’s spare gallon of water, instead of at the top like most people. Everybody has a spare gallon of water in their bodies. Most people in hot weather want to drink and they over-drink. They perspire freely and waste water which does no good and doesn’t cool you at all. But if you keep to the bottom of the spare gallon your perspiration only moistens the skin to provide evaporation and cooling. If you don’t sweat so much you don’t lose salt. We had no trouble with lack of salt whereas on the coast they did.26

  The Major recruited one of his former co-explorers, Rupert Harding-Newman, who was already on hand in Cairo, and Newman managed to scrounge the first thirty 30-cwt Chevy trucks (Harding-Newman’s military mission to the Egyptian Army was deemed too vital to permit his re-assignment to LRDG). The initial establishment would comprise three patrols, each intended to be fully self-reliant. GHQ’s slender stores were pillaged to provide weapons and communications; sandals were preferred to boots and the traditional Arab head-dress adopted. This gave far greater protection against blown sand. They would be encountering a great deal of this.

  As noted earlier, New Zealand provided the first batch of zealots. Bagnold had first fancied Australians but the home government would not allow their men to serve outside the regular units, and General Blamey felt his hands were tied.27 Happily, this did not apply to the Kiwis, and General Freyberg put out a suitably vague call for volunteers. Two officers and 150 men came forward and, providentially these turned up at the same time as the modified trucks were emerging from workshops – tough, reliant and responsible people with many useful skills. On the job training was combined with regular forays to Ain Dalla (an ancient stopover on the caravan routes to Siwa), to create a forward operating base (“FOB”). The Kiwis were quick learners.

  One of the pioneers of the LRP was Teddy Mitford, a Northumbrian from the colourfully contentious Mitford clan. He’d also explored in the desert pre-war and latterly commanded an armoured brigade:

  It was decided to form a small HQ and three patrols each of two officers and thirty men carried in eleven vehicles, also a small supply section of three large trucks for building forward dumps…. The armament was one Vickers machine-gun per patrol and some Lewis guns, First World War type as seen on television’s ‘Dad’s Army’. I think I was the only one to know anything about the Lewis gun, having been taught its use at Sandhurst twelve years before. My patrol was also given a Polish 37-mm gun with little ammunition and dubious sights. We managed to discard this after our first training run…. Our vehicles had painted on them the 7th Armoured Division red rat to disguise our real purpose. Ralph produced a camouflage pattern of very broad dark and light stripes, different for each truck, which would help in areas of rock and scrub.28

  Ralph Bagnold was a demon for detail. The Vickers, when used in an anti-aircraft role, tended to jam as rounds slipped out of the canvas belt, so he had an additional section of plate welded onto the belt box carrier, which kept the canvas taut and aligned. One tale concerns Bagnold berating a Kiwi driver that his tyres were not blown up to the correct pressure, which ended with the disgruntled squaddie muttering (polite version), the trouble with that joker is that he’s always right. In late 1940 when the unit was re-branded as LRDG, three further patrols, Guards, Yeomanry (regular British formations claiming descent from volunteer cavalry) and Rhodesians were to be created.

  Good and reliable communications would clearly be vital. Tim Heywood began his war as a Wireless officer with 1st Middlesex Yeomanry. His father, recalled to the colours and assigned to MI5, based, of all places, in Wormwood Scrubs, attempted to recruit him. He was tempted to join but the War Office had other ideas and he found himself, with his unit, in Palestine at the start of 1940. Nonetheless, his potential value to more clandestine branches had not been forgotten, and he found himself being interviewed by both Bagnold and Bill Kennedy Shaw.

  Bagnold didn’t waste words and Tim Heywood found himself slightly off guard: Do you know the Number 11 set? Yes Sir, his reply. What is their range? The young officer proudly announced he’d been able to communicate up to a distance of 120 miles. That’s nothing, snapped the Major. I expect you to manage over 1,000 miles. Lieutenant Heywood had just joined the LRDG. This sudden shift didn’t go down well with his colonel who was furious but the divisional commander was more accommodating … some thought me mad, others were envious.29

  Bill Kennedy Shaw observes, quite rightly, that nobody but Ralph Bagnold could have created LRP/LRDG. To do so required an intimate knowledge both of the desert and of the British Army, both of which have many secret ways! In summer 1940, getting one to fit into the other represented a Sisyphean task. It was particularly helpful that General Wavell was a man of both vision and practicality.

  The First Patrols

  On 27th July 1940, Pat Clayton came to Cairo. The desert explorer was in his mid-forties and by no means medically A1. He’d been promised a desk job but what Bagnold offered his old friend was no sinecure. Still, he didn’t refuse. On 7th August Clayton led the first patrol. Care had to be taken to leave nothing behind to disclose to the Italians that invasion had begun, so army toilet paper was refused and old Italian newspapers garnered from our lady friends in the censorship to whom was said ‘if I told you what it was for, you wouldn’t believe me!’30

  Both of the trucks and all six Kiwis were borrowed as the recruits wer
e still in training. From Siwa, where he picked up a party from the Egyptian army, Clayton pushed southwards motoring over the drear expanse of the Great Sand Sea. By 11th August he was through and established a supply point by the two ‘Mushroom Hills’. It was here that the Egyptian contingent had to turn back, much to their chagrin – orders forbade them crossing the border. Despite encountering a previously unknown belt of sand-sea, they reached the Jalo-Kufra road without incident. There were no signs of any enemy moves towards either Aswan or Wadi Halfa. By the 16th, Clayton’s patrol was safely returned to Siwa Oasis.

  We had, as hoped and intended, not fired a shot or seen the enemy … but we had proved that LRDG could go and come back to a strict timetable and general Wavell, who sent for Bagnold and me on 20th August, made up his mind then and there to give us his strongest backing … That was the LRDG’s first trip, 1600 miles in 13 days.31

  Clayton also wanted to have a peek at those Italians based at Uweinat. Using vehicles would be to give the game away, but the searing heat made any reconnaissance on foot virtually impossible. A camel was the obvious natural compromise but, due to the distance, this appeared equally tricky. Clayton then bought a camel, recruited two of his former herdsmen, and manhandled the beast into the back of a truck. This unusual portee method worked. The camel was transported to the sector, used for the job and then bundled back in the lorry, peering out with a fine show of disinterest over the tailgate!