by Sadler, John
After the adrenalin rush of action, the burial of the two dead would be sobering, as was the thought they were still very far from safety with the imminent prospect of retaliation coming out of the blue desert skies. Despite this, Clayton wasn’t done. Heading south towards the Chadian border, he resolved to mop up any small outposts, and the first of these was the garrison at Traghen, some thirty miles south of Murzuk.
On 12th January, just outside the settlement, a pair of camel-mounted Libyan policemen were captured. The place had no wireless communications and a threat of imminent destruction persuaded the few carabinieri there to surrender without a shot, though not without noise and some pomp: With banners flying and drums beating, the Mudir [Mayor] and his elders were coming out to surrender the village in traditional Fezzan manner….53
The next target was Umm el Araneb, a further twenty miles or so northeast. This time the defenders were prepared and the fort looked substantial. The unfortunate Murzuk postman, still gainfully employed as a go-between, came pelting back after being fired on. Other tempting targets were about but so was the Regia Aeronautica. Happily, their aim was no better than their army’s, but Clayton wisely took the hint and headed back towards Chad. By now Leclerc was installed at Fort Lamy, and he was an energetic, aggressive commander. Bagnold was already liaising with him, and Kufra was very much on their joint agenda. Clayton’s two patrols would act as the vanguard for a Free French column, and LRDG left Faya on 26th January.
Leclerc also moved out of Faya the same day but his forces had little experience of motorised desert warfare and suffered accordingly. Clayton left Ounianga on the 29th, advancing to Sarra where he found the enemy had slighted and blocked the well. They pushed on to Bishara two days later and found the same had been done there.
It was now that their enviable run of good luck ended abruptly.54
Escape and Evasion
By 11.30 hours on 31st January, Clayton’s Patrol (G Patrol being left in reserve), had got as far as Gebel Sherif, sixty miles or so short of their intended target. Enemy aircraft had been prowling and, realising he’d been spotted, Clayton slid his eleven trucks into a defensive laager amongst rocks. The planes hadn’t given up and the patrol was soon contacted by ground forces. From 14.00 the LRDG was under sustained and heavy fire from 20 mm Bredas’. Clayton attempted to deploy and take the fight to them but was bounced by more enemy planes. One man had already been lost and Clayton himself was wounded and captured. This was a grievous blow which the Italian Press modestly described as a masterstroke.55 For once they weren’t far off the mark. The luckless postman of Murzuk was another fatality. There’s an interesting anecdotal postscript to the history of this fight related in chapter ten.
Most of the survivors made it back to rejoin G Patrol, and Leclerc realised he’s have to reshape his plans for the assault on Kufra. The bulk of the LRDG component returned to Cairo, arriving on 9th February 1941. They had covered a total of 4,500 miles since late December! Four men missing from the fight at Gebel Sharif were unaccounted for: Trooper Moore, Guardsmen Easton and Winchester, together with fitter Alf Tighe56 from the ROAC. These four had, in fact, suffered neither death nor capture.
Having dodged the Italians, who had, happily, shown little inclination to search the ground, abandoning even their own dead, the four escapees decided they would follow the LRDG vehicle tracks south till they were, hopefully, rescued. Both Moore and Easton had minor but troubling wounds, they had very little water and no food. On 1st February they began their lonely trek.
An Italian prisoner they still had with them wandered off and was eventually picked up by his own side. For three hard, relentless days they slogged south. Tighe weakened and had to be left lagging behind (though he was able to continue at a much slower pace). The others gave him the last of their precious water. After an exhausting tab of 135 miles, half-blinded by a sandstorm, they reached the original jumping-off point of Sarra. The place was abandoned and thoroughly wrecked by the enemy. There was no sustenance whatsoever. Tighe stumbled in, utterly exhausted, the next day but after the others had left. Providentially, he was rescued by a French patrol that immediately set off after the other survivors.
Easton too was now struggling and had fallen behind the other two. A French aircraft spotted Moore and Winchester and attempted to drop food and water. The bag burst on landing, they barely managed a mouthful each. On 10th February, the patrol from Sarra found Easton who had, even in his terrible state, managed a further 55 miles. Despite frantic efforts the wounded man, dehydrated and exhausted, nearly emaciated, could not be saved. Barely moments from death, when the French gave him some hot, sweet tea, he could still quip I like my tea without sugar.57
Ten miles on they found Winchester, nearly delirious but still on his feet. Another ten and they found Moore, some 210 miles from the ambush site and with no water for another 80 miles. Still going strongly, he was perfectly convinced he could have reached the water. These men embodied the very spirit of the LRDG, and their sublime courage and resourcefulness were beacons in a very dark hour. The Axis might be advancing but the fight was far from over.
Leclerc then moved on Kufra. The Italian motorised formations used their vehicles only to speed their withdrawal and, on 1st March the fort there surrendered. Bill Kennedy Shaw relayed the grandiose message sent out from the commander before striking his colours, a typical piece of overblown operatic bravura. As he pithily observed, positions are not held on such stuff as this.
Notes
1 This can be viewed on YouTube.
2 Crawford, R.J., I was an Eighth Army Soldier (London, 1944), p. 52.
3 Associated Press, 3rd March 1991–http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1991-03-03/ne retrieved 24th August, 2012.
4 An exception was Count Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs (1831–1896) and of course Almasy (see Appendix 6).
5 Pitt, B., The Crucible of War–Western Desert 1941 (London, 1980), p. 223.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., p. 224.
8 Morgan, p.3.
9 Ibid., p. 4.
10 Wynter, Brigadier H.W., The History of the Long Range Desert Group June 1940–March 1943 (National Archives, CAB 44/151, 2008 edition), p. 15.
11 Morgan, p. 5.
12 Pitt, p. 224.
13 Major William Boyd Kennedy Shaw (1901–1979).
14 Pitt, p. 225.
15 Pitt, p. 225.
16 Ibid., p. 224.
17 Ibid., p. 225.
18 Kennedy Shaw, W.B., The Long Range Desert Group (Greenhill Press, London, 1945), p. 19.
19 Kennedy Shaw, p. 20.
20 Ibid., p. 21.
21 Pitt, p. 226.
22 Quoted in Gilbert, (ed.) The Imperial War Museum Book of the Desert War 1940–942 (London, 1992), p. 192.
23 Quoted in Pitt., p. 227.
24 Kennedy Shaw, p. 24.
25 IWM, p. 191.
26 Ibid., p. 192.
27 O.H., Volume One, p. 295.
28 Morgan, pp. 9–10.
29 Ibid., pp. 13–14.
30 Ibid., p. 15.
31 Ibid.
32 Kennedy Shaw, p. 35.
33 Quoted in Pitt, p. 229.
34 IWM, p. 193.
35 Lloyd Owen, Major-General D., The Long Range Desert Group–Providence their Guide (Pen & Sword, Barnsley 2000), p. 27.
36 Kennedy Shaw, p. 32.
37 Lloyd Owen, p. 27.
38 Ibid., p. 28.
39 Wynter, p. 24.
40 Ibid., p. 25.
41 Ibid., p. 26.
42 Ibid., p. 27.
43 Ibid., p. 31.
44 Lloyd Owen, p. 29.
45 Wynter, p. 31.
46 Bagnold quoted in Lloyd Owen, p. 31.
47 Lloyd Owen, p. 30.
48 Kennedy Shaw, p. 55.
49 Wynter, pp. 34–35.
50 Ibid., p. 38.
51 Lloyd Owen, p. 31.
52 Ibid., p. 30.
53 Ibid., p. 33.
54 Wynter, p. 40.
>
55 Lloyd Owen, p. 36.
56 Tighe was awarded the MM before being killed in action in Greece in 1944.
57 Lloyd Owen, p. 36.
CHAPTER 3
A Year of Dangerous Living, 1941
Streams of blood must run over the earth,
The ground trembles, the world shakes;
Where over de-composing, shot-up heaps
The last men run, hounded by fear
Fire mercilessly strikes the field.
There’s drumming and drumming, rumbling and crashing!
The enemy has now got to know us!
For we have provoked this hell,
In which the victor of every battle –
Death – reaps his grim harvest.
—Gefreiter, Hanns Pfeuffer
After sixteen years in the Middle East I was beginning to think that I knew something about heat. I had some experience – five years in the Sudan, the Red Sea in the hot weather; a summer at Beisan in the Jordan Valley 300 feet below sea level; Cairo to Khartoum by train in June – all these had qualified me to lie against anyone about the temperatures I had known. But I had not before this met a Libyan ‘qibli’.1
Raids on Rommel
By any standards the LRDG was a remarkable and utterly professional fighting force, a perfect complement to regular operations. Yet Bagnold and his buccaneers were not completely alone. A slew of other units jostled for a place in the unconventional underbelly of desert warfare. First amongst these were the commandos. Colonel Robert (‘Bob’) Laycock commanded Nos. 8 & 11 Commando. Laycock was born into a military family and then commissioned into the Horse Guards. His first wartime appointment was responsibility for chemical warfare during the battle for France, an inauspicious beginning. David Niven2 later claimed to have been the facilitator for Laycock’s transformation to commando.
The Middle East Commandos were what might most kindly be described as a mixed bunch. Some had fought in the Spanish Civil War on the losing Republican side and so had a strong personal motive for fighting Fascism. Others volunteered for less idealistic reasons as Terence Frost, a yeomanry trooper who joined because he wanted some real fighting, found out: I didn’t know that the volunteers from the regulars hadn’t actually volunteered at all. They had been kicked out for getting drunk or socking the sergeant-major, and I had the shock of my life when I found this out. I was amongst a real shower of tough blokes…3
On the night of 19th/20th April 1941, the commandos mounted an amphibious raid on the Axis port of Bardia. The assault was a partial success as considerable damage was inflicted on German stores and materiel. Nonetheless, not all the commandos could be got off by the single landing craft which pitched up to extract them, and the rest were left on the beach. Inevitably they were forced to surrender. The prisoners were inspected by the Desert Fox himself who pronounced them very foolish but very brave.4 Many in the Allied camp would have agreed wholeheartedly with this pithy analysis.
After the Bardia raid, Laycock’s unit (‘Layforce’) was dispatched to Crete as a strategic reserve during the Axis invasion of the island. This was hardly a Special Forces role. Wavell had thrown in the commandos largely because there was simply no one else. By this time the fight was virtually lost and Layforce’s job was simply to provide a rearguard as the Allies withdrew over the bare spine of the high mountains towards the south coast. Evelyn Waugh was Laycock’s aide-de-camp and along with his CO was one of the last to be lifted from the beach at Sphakia. This conventional action cost the unit some 600 casualties, around 75 per cent of its fighting strength. Many commandos, fearing capture, wisely dumped their array of fighting knives and knuckle dusters!5
From the Boer War onwards the Lovat Scouts6 had formed the kernel of Special Forces within the British Army. Brigadier Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat, was one of the war’s most distinguished commando officers. His first cousin was David Stirling of the Scots Guards, initially attached to Layforce. The immensely tall and charismatic Guards officer was the very stuff of Hollywood derring-do. He attempted a self-taught course of parachute training which very nearly brought his career to an end, resulting in two months hospitalisation.7 His convalescence, enthusiasm undimmed, was spent in preparing ideas for a parachute force, descending from the skies upon unsuspecting enemy targets. Neil Ritchie, Auchinleck’s Deputy Chief of Staff and a long-term friend, proved receptive.
Stirling’s plan was simple. Operations should be undertaken by a mere handful of specialists rather than company-sized or larger raiding parties. The Scot was deeply unconventional and wary of the Army’s byzantine and frequently obstructive ways. He reported only to the Commander-in-Chief and his fledgling force was designated as ‘L’ Detachment, Special Service Brigade. Latterly the Special Air Service (SAS), this was indeed the birth of a legend.
Gainful employment was soon forthcoming. As a curtain raiser to ‘Crusader’ two particularly daring raids were conceived. In the first, Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Keyes, at 24 the youngest officer to hold so senior a rank, would lead No. 11 Commando in an attack on the former Italian prefecture at Beda Littoria. This lay 250 miles behind enemy lines and was believed to by Rommel’s HQ. ‘Jock’ Haselden,8 an experienced desert hand, had been dropped in by parachute to confirm that the Fox was actually in his lair. He was convinced this was indeed the place and that he had sighted Rommel himself.9
On the night of 13th November, Keyes led a force of raiders whose intention, put quite simply, was to kill or capture the Desert Fox. The rather oddly branded Operation Flipper got off to a bad start and fared worse. Keyes was fatally wounded in the initial stages of the assault.10 Aside from nearly the entire British force then being scattered or captured, casualties on both sides were light, but there was no sign of Rommel. In fact he wasn’t even in the theatre at that point. Haselden had indeed sighted him but only on a routine visit; his actual headquarters was far nearer the front line.
Stirling led the second attack. His objectives were the two Axis airfields at Timini and Gazala. Bad weather, which had already contributed to Keyes’ failure, scattered the drop. One planeload actually came down onto an enemy runway and all aboard were captured. Another crew were pitched out over the wastes of the Great Sand Sea and none survived. Stirling’s group lost most of their kit including vital explosives and detonators. When survivors limped back to the RV with LRDG, only 21 out of 54 had made it.11 The raid was a costly fiasco but Stirling was undeterred. He did, however, decide that his commandos, following the example set by LRDG, would now travel by vehicle.
By the summer of 1942 the SAS had some 15 customised jeeps in action in North Africa. The ubiquitous term ‘jeep’ may have originated with the designation ‘GP’ for General Purpose. These light but tough, durable 4WD vehicles were primarily manufactured by Willys and Ford, and several hundred thousand were produced during the course of the war. SAS jeeps were stripped, like their Chevy predecessors, of all superfluous features including the windscreen, most of the radiator grille bars and even sometimes the front bumper to increase effective load carrying capacity. Condensers, following LRDG precedent, were fitted, and the durable jeep could cart an impressive payload of ammunition, kit, fuel and supplies.
They were ideal, fast moving gun platforms, bristling with a formidable array of Browning and Vickers K machine guns. The latter were stripped from aircraft, generally mounted in pairs. Their combined firepower was phenomenal, a cyclic rate of nearly five thousand rounds per minute. A potent mix of ball, armour-piercing and tracer could devastate lines of parked enemy planes – as many as a dozen were destroyed in a single-five minute raid.
It was against vulnerable enemy aerodromes that the SAS proved its worth, not just in the total of enemy aircraft destroyed (this amounted to some 400 by November 1942), but because of these sudden strikes the Axis were obliged to allocate more and more troops to purely defensive roles. This is perhaps the most enduring image of SAS/ LRDG – a patrol of heavily armed jeeps, crewed by bearded, piratical comma
ndos, storming along lines of parked Axis aircraft. Engines racing and jeeps spewing fire, a volcano of noise and fury, planes shuddering and sagging, a brief exultant burst of satisfying destruction, and the raiders roar off into the desert night.
One of the leading lights in these operations was Robert Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne,12 a pre-war sportsman of renown, brave to the point of foolhardiness, and often in trouble as a result of drunken brawling. When Stirling recruited him he was in the guardhouse after striking Geoffrey Keyes, his CO! Despite his instability and propensity for binge-fuelled violence, Mayne was formidable. His leadership of a jeep-mounted raid on Tamet airfield on the night of 14th December 1941 did much to re-establish the unit’s credibility after the initial fiasco, and at a time when disapproving regulars would have been happy to see the SAS fold. Mayne was to claim he’d personally destroyed nearly a quarter of the regiment’s total score.
Success earned Stirling promotion to major and inspired a stream of recruits. Inevitably, such an unorthodox unit attracted unorthodox soldiers, including Free French and members of the Greek Sacred Squadron,13 all united by a hatred of the Axis and a burning desire to make an impact. From an inauspicious beginning, Stirling built a highly professional force, able to complement the LRDG with whom it often worked in tandem. Captain Pleydell, the unit’s MO, commented on this very unconventional brand of warfare:
Although life was free and easy in the mess, discipline was required for exercises and operations. On the operations in which I was involved, our patrol would make long detours south of the battle line and then loop up north to within striking distance of an airfield or similar target. Camouflage had to be expert, so that when you hid up you couldn’t be detected – even at close distance, slow flying enemy aircraft could follow our tracks to our hiding places and they represented a real threat. It was a hit-and-run, hide-and-seek type of war.14
