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

by Sadler, John

  Later, a more realistic communiqué ordered a retreat to Leros. On the evening of 4th October, all personnel and stores were loaded onto the LSF caiques and the diminutive fleet stole way into the autumn darkness to arrive and unload safely on Leros. They came in like thieves in the night, unheralded and unwelcomed. The only people to pay them due attention turned out to be the ever vigilant Luftwaffe. Soon the bowl of the ancient harbour was lit by furious light, the clatter of AA guns and the deadly whine of Axis bombs. The bay became an inferno of noise, explosions, the crash of fallen masonry, dust, death, chaos. Miraculously everyone survived.16

  Ungainly and outmoded, the JU87 ‘Stuka’ was a fearful instrument of torment if you happened to be pretty much defenceless beneath the tortured, wailing scream of its dive. Lloyd Owen and Easonsmith set up the LRDG’s automatic weapons to take on the dive bombers but, without any air cover, this was a one sided fight. As the Axis predators swooped again, they hit a ship in the harbour, a great coiling stack of black its obituary. During a lull, the survivors scrambled out of the trap of the bay and into the hills. Casualties had been remarkably light considering the fury of the aerial tempest – I remember seeing David Sutherland of the SBS covered in blood.17

  In the centre of the beleaguered island, the ground was held by a battalion of Royal Irish Rangers. LRDG became their eyes and ears. Patrols went down to each of the Italian shore batteries. This boosted their shaky morale and also deterred any who might think of swapping sides again. Theirs became a miserable, hunted existence. Axis planes controlled the skies and accounted for most of the Allied ships. LRDG lived in caves, kept constant watch and endured life under siege. This was all a very far cry from their previous existence as desert raiders. Rare as fairies had been the taunt in the last disastrous Greek campaign of 1941, and the RAF came in for a lot of stick. The navy was much in evidence, still carrying the fight to the enemy, pounding the harbours at Cos and Calymnos by night.

  Some patrols were active in the outlying islands. Ken Lazarus on Stampalia, Dudley Folland on Giaros, others on Kithnos and Simi. At least in these tiny listening stations the patrols could achieve what LRDG was intended to do: watch, listen and count. They could also bite. A stiffening of LRDG on Simi, backed by a company or so of Italians, saw off a German beach landing, giving the attackers a very bloody nose. Inevitably, swarms of Stukas came over to exact retribution.18

  This wasn’t the only aggressive action. As the Axis had now garrisoned Calymnos, a Greek-born officer, Lieutenant Pavlides volunteered to row over and recce. Three nights after this successful beginning Stan Eastwood and two of his Rhodesian troopers went across. Their foray proved more adventurous. Onshore, they bumped a German patrol and Eastwood with one of the men was captured.

  Lance Corporal Whitehead escaped and swam for it, evading capture and landing elsewhere on the island coast. Taken in by a friendly shepherd, he was able to get a message back to Leros by another swimmer. Receipt of his message was to be acknowledged by a particular firing of some of the big guns. Whitehead was brought off five days later. Eastwood and his other trooper also gave their captors the slip, though they then had to go the long way round through Turkey to get back.19

  Belatedly, Cairo was listening to the sage counsels of experts like George Jellicoe who was lobbying to have all Special Forces brought under some form of centralised command function. The new creation styled ‘Raiding Forces’ was to be commanded by a Colonel Turnbull, a regular without experience of behind-the-lines operations. On 18th October, Guy Prendergast, to his surprise was suddenly elevated to 2I/C of this new outfit and magicked back to GHQ. Jake Easonsmith became leader of LRDG with Lloyd Owen as his deputy.

  Both men were already close friends:

  I never knew his equal. He had a guile which was almost uncanny in his ability to foresee how the enemy would react. He was always thinking ahead and asking himself what he would do if the enemy adopted a certain line of action. Thus he was always prepared, and I never knew him to be caught on the wrong foot.20

  These were perhaps the best of Britain’s civilian soldiers – men who had never necessarily thought of a career in arms yet answered the call and rose to the challenge. Leros would test them to the limit and the toll would be dreadfully high. Easonsmith’s first executive task was to send a fifty-strong raiding force to recapture the tiny island of Levita which the Axis had stormed. In fact Levita had been taken by prisoners pulled out of the carnage of the Axis supply convoy the Navy had decimated early in October. Forty or so of these had been en route to captivity aboard His Majesty’s very small ship Hedgehog. The vessel’s engine broke down and the skipper put into Levita where his prisoners took over the ship by coup de main. The small Italian force on the island hadn’t interfered.

  Easonsmith saw this raid as completely pointless. Lloyd Owen agreed but their brigadier did not. In the expanses of the desert with so much room to manoeuvre, interference from ‘top brass’ had been minimal. Conversely, in the shrunken theatre of the Dodecanese, the ‘bull’ closed in like a net. It was impossible to avoid. Levita had to be re-taken as it seemed like a good idea at the time, and such cheek from the Germans could not pass unnoticed.

  The Battle of Leros

  John Olivey with Dick Lawson the MO would lead the operation against Levita. He would have forty-five troopers, and the tiny expedition weighed anchor at 19.30 hours on 23rd October. The plan was for a classic pincer, one party landing at the southwest tip of the island and another at the northwest. This party, all Kiwis, experienced heavy contact, and the watchers on Leros, queasy with worry, watched packs of JU87s & 88s swarming all next day. As Jake Easonsmith returned with the launches to collect the raiders, he found only Olivey, Lawson and half a dozen others. Of the rest there was no sign. Olivey had experienced very heavy fighting and had been obliged to break through the ring to escape.21

  It was a costly fiasco. The small German garrison of escapees had been heavily reinforced, the raiders were hopelessly outgunned, and the cost was very high. This pointless, unnecessary little raid had cost LRDG more in losses than they’d incurred during three years fighting Rommel. There was some comfort in that when Brigadier Davy, Director of Military Operations in Cairo, came for an inspection, very wet and rather oily after having had his destroyer sunk beneath him on the way, he grasped the futility of LRDG’s deployment and, in consequence the GOC Aegean was, in Great War slang, promptly stellenbosched.22

  It was obvious to those immured on bony Leros that the game, in this case, was up. Turkey wasn’t interested and the Axis controlled the skies. Evacuation seemed the only sensible course. Morale was low as each creeping autumn dawn the brigade stood to arms awaiting the inevitable onslaught. RIR was still holding the central massif, Mereviglia; King’s Own the south with the Buffs to the north. The defenders had the existing coastal guns, a single battery of 25-pounders and a dozen Bofors’. Lloyd Owen was spared the last act of this very British Greek tragedy when Jake Easonsmith sent him back to Cairo to acquaint those in the fairy tale castle what was actually happening. It is entirely possible Easonsmith wanted to ensure his old friend survived what was coming, and so would be the rock around which the unit could be rebuilt.

  With a soldier’s comradely instinct, Lloyd Owen knew he would not be seeing Jake again. He boarded an Italian submarine for a five-day passage first to Haifa then on to Cairo. He arrived in this oasis of surreal, cosmopolitan hedonism just as, on 12th November, the final act on Leros commenced. Landing craft came in with the dawn, attempting beaches in the south and middle of the island. They took hits but battered on, gaining a foothold. Stukas came down like prehistoric winged predators, no sign of the RAF. Mid-afternoon and JU52s, fat bellied with their heavily armed human cargo, came in at 500 feet and dropped parachutists in the centre of the defences.

  LRDG patrols were thrown in to stem the rot, to engage the formidable Fallschirmjager. Alan Redfern, a very popular and experienced officer, became an early casualty. The enemy was checked
, held but not repulsed. Nobody had any illusions about the outcome. A further flotilla of transports was lying offshore, whatever small ships the defenders had were long sunk and, that night, enemy reinforcements were ferried onto the beachheads. The defenders fought hard. The parachutists were contained and losses were inflicted. John Olivey was holding the six-inch gun battery at Clidi on the northern flank of Leros. The Italians, for the most part, had cleared off but Olivey blasted the attackers over open sights till they were virtually on top of the position before spiking the gun and withdrawing. He still wasn’t done. That afternoon, leading a detachment from the Buffs, he retook the position despite being wounded.23

  Still no sign of the RAF, and the grinding attrition continued. On 15th November, the Germans could deploy 450 planes, constantly bombing and strafing. On the following day the Axis attempted to take the high ground in the centre, and the Luftwaffe threw in every type of plane imaginable, antiques included; all were safe as there was none of ours to intercept them. For David Lloyd Owen this was a terrible day. Tim Heywood called to give him the news he’d dreaded. Jake Easonsmith had been killed. Typically, he’d insisted on leading a patrol into the village of Meriviglia, crawling with Germans. He was shot by a sniper.24

  Jake’s death was more than a personal tragedy for his friends. LRDG had lost one of its most respected and inspirational leaders. Perhaps it is more galling to lose so valued a comrade in a doomed operation, a pointless and unnecessary sacrifice. It was also the beginning of the end on Leros. Meriviglia was lost, the depressing stench of burnt papers wafting over the confused battlefield. By the 17th, the Axis had sent in yet more reinforcements. What remained of the garrison mustered in the south but there was no real prospect for further resistance. LRDG W/O Sergeant Hughes was the last to transmit, at 18.35 hours that day, confirming that silence had indeed now fallen and Leros was gone.25

  John Olivey, despite wounds and exhaustion, was still in the ring. His Rhodesians had formed an ad hoc perimeter on the high ground at Clidi, and kept on fighting. He’d had to abandon the battery but wasn’t going to let the enemy grab ammunition stocks. As he carefully probed one of the casemates, he found two astonished Germans already in possession. The dispute was short lived: they didn’t have long to think about things because I had to shoot them.26 Olivey and his troopers fought on for another thirteen hours till he passed out from injury and utter exhaustion and was captured. For his outstanding bravery, he earned a bar to his MC; Sergeant Coventry, his steadfast NCO, won a DCM.

  The LRDG contingent on Leros had numbered 123. Not all went into the bag; their remarkable talent for escaping meant 70 odd got clear away in the ensuing weeks. It was still a body blow. Lloyd Owen had foreseen just how bad the outcome on Leros might be and had pressed GHQ to set contingency evacuation plans in motion. There was no arguing with the logic of this. He pressed for a signal he’d drafted to the garrison commander to be sent whilst there was still time. He’d planned to send small boats to the neighbouring islands nightly to pick up survivors. This would have saved many men, but the message wasn’t sent till the fight was nearly over and comms were gone.27

  Lloyd Owen writes that he felt great bitterness as a consequence, and rightly so. Though nearly a thousand men were rescued, the total could have been far higher and the defeat made less palpable. As ever, LRDG members proved infinitely resourceful. Ashley Greenwood had escaped to the Turkish mainland. Pausing only to disguise himself as a suitably disreputable peasant type, he returned to help others. One of the beneficiaries of this telling individual initiative was W/O Peter Mold, who made it safely to Turkey by 2nd December.

  With Jake Easonsmith killed, Guy Prendergast returned to the unit to pick up the reins of command, and his dynamism saved many. A large proportion of those infantrymen left behind were too exhausted to think of escape. Prendergast got his survivors out through Bodrum in Turkey. Amazingly, another irrepressible escapee was John Olivey. Despite having done far more than ‘his bit’, he gave his captors the slip in Athens and managed to get word to Lloyd Owen at the end of January 1944. He was successfully ex-filtrated.

  One of the more epic stories is that of Gunner Patch and Trooper Hill. They’d been captured on 24th October during the abortive raid on Levita. They were sent by flying boat to Piraeus, then on to Athens, and then with minimal rations they were bundled into cattle trucks for the long haul to Germany. By 5th November they’d chugged as far as the Yugoslav border but they’d spent the long hours productively by removing the wire from the truck windows. They and two Kiwis removed themselves from the train and spent a freezing week in the bare highlands till they stumbled into partisans. These were Chetniks28 and, though they were in a bad way themselves, they soon became indispensible paramedics to the disorganised partisans. Hunger and sickness stalked the pair relentlessly but they had no intention of giving up. The winter weather was vile, food scarce or non existent; Christmas was toasted in local Raki. They were a very long way from home.

  Their ordeal continued through a grim Balkan winter. Food was always much on their minds, along with sickness, the appalling cold and the fugitive hunter/gatherer lives they led in the high mountains. It wasn’t until 10th February that they made wireless contact with a British liaison officer. Overall, their present hosts were a pretty dismal crew, with little or no active interest in the war – all drunkards, always at loggerheads and sometimes coming to blows….29 It was a nasty little war, inconclusive brushes with Bulgar patrols, informers shot and mutilated. Their precious wireless had to be abandoned in a hurried scramble for safety and they didn’t get another until early May.

  Despite the unprepossessing nature of their Chetnik comrades, the LRDG men attempted to wean them from the path of indifference or collaboration into a more fruitful alliance with Tito’s partisans. These were, in terms of politics, very much of the left but also vastly more proactive in the business of killing Germans. Under their patient mentoring, the band swelled to around three hundred. It wasn’t until 1st September 1944, the fifth anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, that they could join forces with a British mission. They would not return to the fold until February 1945.

  Six years later, while working at the War Office during the war in Korea, Lloyd Owen heard from Trooper Hill, saying that both he and Gunner Patch were ready to sign up to the colours again. Their story embodies the very spirit of courage, resourcefulness and indomitable will that was the soul of LRDG. Little else that was good could have come from the debacle in the Dodecanese. Bizarrely, Churchill had sent a message to GHQ in October: Efforts must be made to withdraw the Long Range Desert Group… this would be much better than their being taken prisoners of war. It deepens the tragedy that no one was listening.30

  Counting the Cost

  It was time to consult the oracle. LRDG’s losses in the abortive campaign had been so high it raised the question of whether the unit could be rebuilt at all. Lloyd Owen was now de facto commander, as Guy Prendergast had not yet returned from temporary exile in Turkey. The only great fount of LRDG wisdom to hand was the founding father himself, Ralph Bagnold. As ever, the great man was courteous, listening to the younger officer’s passionate entreaty that LRDG still had a role to play and could be fully resuscitated. Lloyd Owen saw, rightly, that the flowering of resistance forces throughout Greece, Italy and the Balkans offered plenty scope. He reckoned he needed to find and train enough new volunteers to fill the empty boots and that this had to be accomplished within a span of six months, a big ask all round.

  What he was in fact proposing in terms of attaching LRDG patrols (‘teams’ as they’d now be called), to guerrilla bands would, in contemporary terms, be defined as generating the ‘force multiplier’ effect. This in practice implies that highly trained, well equipped specialists infiltrated to mentor and direct insurgent forces can significantly boost the effectiveness of those irregulars to a degree far beyond their own small number. Few modern Special Forces commentators would disagree. The employment o
f UK and US operators in Afghanistan in late 2001 to bolster the Northern Alliance forces, combined with effective use of air strength, defeated the superior Taliban army, previously unstoppable, in a matter of weeks.

  Bagnold, having deliberated, uttered his Olympian pronouncement – I think you should try to keep the unit in being.31 This was the holy covenant and Lloyd Owen went forth, the fire in his loins that had been dampened now re-kindled. The history of the LRDG did not end with the fall of Leros. It tells us much about the high calibre of both men. Brigadier Muir Turnbull did not demur, and Lloyd Owen was confirmed as CO. LRDG was back in business.

  Guy Prendergast duly returned and resumed his role as 2I/C to Turnbull. Inconveniently, the New Zealand government now wanted its troopers back. This was a blow, naturally, as the Kiwis had been magnificent throughout. Freyberg, as ever, would listen, but his hands were tied. The Home Government, understandably, was concerned at the high level of losses on Leros – given they hadn’t been consulted in the first place. Besides, casualties from the desperate slog up the Italian Peninsula had to be made up.

  Good fortune now intervened. The Rhodesians had always been first class, and more of them could make up for the loss of the Kiwis. Sir Ernest Lucas Guest, Rhodesia’s Air Minister, paid a visit to his own lads who were serving with LRDG. He was impressed with them and Lloyd Owen with him. This new relationship bore fruit and more Rhodesians arrived. The minister remained an ally till the end of the war.