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

by Sadler, John

  Recovery was swift. Stormonth-Darling, who’d managed to extract himself from the Aegean whirlpool, would command the UK squadron. This was one of two; each would be comprised of eight patrols with one officer and ten troopers. Moir Stormonth-Darling had been immured on Mykonos, surrounded by Axis, but had got back through Turkey. Like Lloyd Owen, he was a Wykehamist and the two men were firm friends, an ideal choice for squadron commander.

  Ken Lazarus would lead the Rhodesians; another excellent candidate, he’d proven himself many times and was an expert cartographer. He too had seen service in the dismal Aegean, supporting the Italian garrison on Stampalia. At the first sight of Fallschirmjager the defenders fled. Grabbing a boat, he and four troopers pulled for the Turkish Coast, then took a caique to Cyprus and finally returned via Haifa.

  Ken was a rather quiet, dour man who took a bit of time to get to know well but he had great courage, a fine heart and a true love of his fellow men. Moir was much more of an extrovert, with an infectious laugh, a splendid sense of duty and a slow, deliberate and thorough mind. He was worshipped by his men, for they trusted him implicitly, and they always knew that he would support them.32

  The rejuvenated unit was to be housed in the Arab village of Azzib, north of Haifa on the Syrian border. The place had little inherent charm; an Arab village of no outstanding note, smelling as strongly as most Arab villages, and its houses were just as squalid.33

  Camp was an unedifying mix of old Nissen huts with the rest under canvas. The workload was formidable. LRDG was almost being rebuilt from scratch and the Kiwis departed on 29th December – their farewell was fairly lively. With the New Year came new skills: parachuting at Ramat David twinned with small boat sailing (George Jellicoe’s SBS provided the instructors). Mountain warfare was practised from the Cedars. The skills list seemed endless: improved orienteering and map-reading, use and handling of explosives, recognising enemy aircraft, loading of transport from jeeps to mules. Recruits also had a crash course in the byzantine maze of Balkan history and topography, the latter being slightly less twisted. Tim Heywood was drilling signallers, and the new MO, Michael Parsons, who’d replaced Dick Lawson (captured in the Dodecanese disaster), taught first aid.

  Training was augmented by free-ranging exercises where patrols lived out in the open. These forays intensified after the unit moved to Syria, close to ancient Baalbek. Those two ageing WACO planes amazingly were still flying (if, at times, only just) and kept giving good service, ferrying men and kit from Cairo, over the stark expanse of Sinai to Beirut. Meanwhile Guy Prendergast, in his role as deputy chief of Raiding Forces, had been discussing, in very high places, how the restored raiders might best be employed.

  In late February, Lloyd Owen was instructed to fly to Italy and attend upon Alexander himself. Reality proved less stimulating. When he flew into Bari nobody had heard of him. He borrowed a car to drive the fifty miles to catch up with the SAS, as he’d been instructed, before they left for Blighty. Virtually all had gone, and those who remained denied all knowledge! Lloyd Owen’s attempt to fly across Italy from Bari to Caserta was met by obfuscation. Again he had to beg the loan of a car and drive.

  Unwashed, unfed and very tired, he arrived in the early hours. He did have an ally to hand in the person of Brigadier Hugh Mainwaring, who knew LRDG well from their days in the desert. This got him through the door of General Harding, Alexander’s chief of staff. Harding too was a friend and he was amenable to the idea of LRDG being deployed in Italy under his control. Lloyd Owen wanted a look at this new front line, to gauge the ground over which patrols would be operating. Most told him it was impossible to get across Axis lines, the country too broken, too mountainous.

  This was, of course, precisely the type of terrain they’d trained for, and he remained undaunted. Another close ally, Bernard Bruce who’d commanded G Patrol, was with Eighth Army tactical HQ and proved very helpful. Lloyd Owen then wrote an encouraging note to Guy Prendergast: Everyone was inclined to tell me that the mountains were dangerous and difficult to move over but I hope that fact will be an ally to our patrols, who are trained for it. On the whole, I think the country is ideal for our kind of work.34

  Tim Heywood became the pathfinder, scouting for a permanent base in Italy. As ever, he did a good job and LRDG moved to Rodi on the Gargano Peninsula. The place was chosen had the advantage of reasonable proximity to the airfield complex at Foggia whilst sufficiently off the beaten track to maintain secrecy. Rodi itself was a pretty little Italian town with narrow, cobbled winding streets, and it was a little cleaner than many similar places. The people were typical of the rather indolent and backward southern Italian. They did not like the British much….35

  Meanwhile, there were many ideas and projects for LRDG, veering between the barely realistic and plain daft. None amounted to anything concrete. Lloyd Owen had sagely adopted the operational principle that he would never commit men to an enterprise unless their extraction route was sound. Oddly, when he did call for volunteers to attempt a near suicidal raid on the Brenner Pass railway tunnel, a mission that offered little hope of ex-filtration, nearly everyone volunteered at once!36 Happily, this plan foundered in its conceptual phase and was quietly buried without mourners.

  Disruption of enemy communications became the favoured path. A dozen patrols would be committed fighting alongside additional UK and US units. Railways would be hit first, then roads. Three main railway routes were to be targeted: first, Parma to Spezia; second, Bologna to Pistoia; and last, Faenza to Florence. Intelligence on each sector was provided by Allied agents already in place. A great deal of planning activity followed; Stormonth-Darling, with Dick Croucher as IO, spent weeks in careful preparation. As usual, Lloyd Owen was concerned that the patrols, which amounted to some 75 percent of unit strength, should be sure of their reception in the target zone and that their exit routes were feasible. Both LRDG officers became worried over the first problem, the need to ensure a friendly reception. They proposed that three pathfinder patrols go in ahead of the main body to ensure everything was as it should be.

  In the event, the whole scheme was abandoned due to a lack of air transport. For LRDG this was particularly frustrating, for surely this major logistical impediment should have been obvious from the start. Lloyd Owen bluntly demanded to know if there were in fact any sensible proposals in the offing. There weren’t, so he suggested that a full squadron should be placed with Force 266,37 responsible for coordinating all of the many teams active in the Balkans providing aid to the partisans.

  Here, at last, a stroke of good fortune: LRDG found another ally in Tom Pearson, a Rifleman and now GSO1 to Force 266. After all the messing about, here at last was a kindred spirit and a realist. Ken Lazarus and his Rhodesians went on loan to Pearson on the sole proviso they’d be returned if an urgent need arose on the Italian Peninsula. By 7th May, Lazarus was setting up in Bari, which was to be his and his troopers’ base for the rest of the war. The Greek officer Pavlides, who’d proved himself so ably in the Dodecanese, went as his IO.

  It was time to get back into the war.

  Notes

  1 Quoted in Ball, S., The Bitter Sea (Harper Collins, 2009), p. 248.

  2 Durrell, L., The Greek Islands (Faber & Faber 1978), pp. 153–154.

  3 Field Marshal Henry Maitland Wilson (1881–1964) – a Boer War veteran, Wilson saw much action in the Great War. After being involved with the success of Operation Compass in 1940, he’d led Ninth Army in Palestine and Syria during 1941 then was appointed to command in Persia and Iraq, becoming C-in-C of Middle East Command from February 1943.

  4 Field Marshal Alan Francis Brook, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke (1883–1963), was CIGS, promoted to Field Marshal in 1944.

  5 Ball, p. 248.

  6 Ibid.

  7 The Jews of the Dodecanese, who’d escaped relatively lightly under the Italians, became yet more victims of the Nazis. Few of Rhodes’ ancient 2,000-strong Jewish community survived.

  8 Lloyd Owen, p. 129.

/>   9 Ibid., p. 133.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Durrell, pp. 153–154.

  12 Lloyd Owen, p. 135.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Ibid.

  16 Ibid., p. 136.

  17 Ibid., p. 137.

  18 Ibid.

  19 Ibid., p. 138.

  20 Ibid.

  21 Ibid., p. 140.

  22 Ibid., p. 141.

  23 Ibid., p. 142.

  24 Ibid., p. 143.

  25 Ibid.

  26 Ibid., p. 144.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Chetniks, more properly Chetnik Detachments of the Yugoslav Army, were the followers of former war minister Draza Mihailovic. Nominally loyalist, monarchist partisans, they frequently collaborated as auxiliaries of the Axis occupiers. The Allies quickly despaired of them and focused on Tito.

  29 Lloyd Owen, p. 146.

  30 Ibid., p. 148.

  31 Ibid., p. 150.

  32 Ibid., p. 152.

  33 Ibid., p. 152.

  34 Ibid., p. 155.

  35 Ibid.

  36 Ibid., p. 156.

  37 For the Allied organization formed out of Force 133 (SOE) and jointly staffed by SOE and the Office of Strategic Services, see: http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198604464.001.0001/acref-9780198604464-e-622 retrieved 25th January 2015.

  CHAPTER 8

  Garlic-Reeking Bandits, 1944–1945

  Along the twisting terraces of broken view

  The silent colonnades, the shattered arch

  Look down on dust-masked things that pass

  Tired, waving shadows in the ghostly streets,

  Stumbling in rubble spewed from gaping mouths

  New torn in tall, smooth walls, cool-drenched

  I’ the moon, up-stretched to the violent sky

  Night blue with layering patterns of fire overlaid

  Cool scent of sage in the scrub, with acrid fumes

  From roaring, vicious flames, mix in the nostrils

  And darkening, climbing pillars of dust

  Mask from the cool, smooth sea and the plain

  The placid farms and ominous, towering hills.

  —E. Yates: Salerno Fragment

  In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or to convince, nor to inform but to humiliate; and therefore the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. a society of emasculated liars is easy to control.’

  —Theodore Dalrymple

  Communist duplicity and treachery was something LRDG would come to understand only too well.

  A Very Balkan ‘Do’

  As a young man, I recall sailing from Corfu and approaching, as close as one dared, the Albanian shore. It was dark and deserted with what appeared to be barbed wire and bunkers guarding the beaches. There were no tourists. The contrast with bikini-clad Corfu could not have been more profound: ‘us and them’; the communists shut away in their blank-faced tyranny. At this time Enver Hoxha, wartime partisan leader, was still alive and very much in control. He hung on till he died in 1985 and it took a while after that for the Cold War ice to thaw.

  Albania is both wild and beautiful. The region was part of Rome’s Dalmatian colonies in classical times and the historic connection appealed to Il Duce with his bold intentions to resurrect Italy’s imperial glories. The country didn’t gain independence from Ottoman rule until 1912, though its great medieval hero Skanderbeg had been a formidable bastion against the Turkish flood. From 1928 to 1939 the state was ruled as a form of constitutional monarchy by King Zog and his consort, Queen Geraldine. The King was inclined to be westward looking, encouraging his deeply conservative subjects to modernize. He even sent the royal princesses into the mountains dressed in, by rural Balkan standards, rather risqué outfits.1

  The port of Vlore and its wide bay had attractions to Italian naval strategists both as a gateway to the Adriatic and a beachhead in the Balkans. From the mid-1920s Italian influence began to grow, as the country was dirt poor and debt ridden. Treaties were entered into in the 1920s but Zog was no puppet and stood fast against a blatant attempt at intimidation in 1934. With Hitler trumping Mussolini and annexing Austria and the Sudetenland four years later, Il Duce felt he was slipping behind in the lebensraum stakes. On 7th April 1939, despite King Victor Emmanuel’s misgivings, Mussolini’s new legions invaded in his name. Zog, whose queen had just produced an heir, fled – eventually to London. Count Ciano, Il Duce’s son in law and foreign minister, had toyed with the idea of having the king murdered, but refrained due to a lingering fondness for Queen Geraldine.2

  The King of Italy now also became King of Albania. Initial military resistance was non-existent, another easy coup for the Axis with no formal reaction from Paris or London. One of Ciano’s aides sounded a warning note of skepticism, observing that had the Albanians possessed a half decent fire service, their firemen could have pushed the Italians back into the Adriatic.3 The whole easy conquest fuelled Mussolini’s delusions that he was the new Caesar and his army the new legions.

  In October 1940, Mussolini used Albania as a balcony from which to begin his attempt on Greece. Here, plans for a Roman revival foundered badly until German intervention crushed the Greeks in 1941. The Italians remained as occupiers in Albania but several nationalist factions and a strengthening communist resistance, the National Liberation Movement (“NLM”), directed by Hoxha (these only commenced operations after Barbarossa), fought them, and latterly the Germans who moved into the vacuum after Il Duce’s fall in September 1943.

  In religious terms Albania was predominantly Muslim, and the Boche, for once, were content to rule with a greater degree of restraint. Several nationalist movements, being anti-communist, collaborated, and the SS raised a Muslim SS Division (an interesting extension of supposed Aryan supremacy and elitism). The war against the occupier also embodied a very nasty civil war. In total some 30,000 Albanians died at Axis’ or each other’s hands, and there was widespread devastation. On 29th November 1944, Hoxha’s communist partisans took the capital Tirana as the Germans withdrew and, very quickly afterwards, brought the shutters down. They were to stay drawn for a very long time.

  From early 1941, British missions had been trying to make contact with Albanian partisans. These attempts foundered once the Axis had also occupied neighbouring Yugoslavia, and it wasn’t until April 1943 that Colonel W. ‘Billy’ Maclean4 and Major David Smiley, on behalf of SOE, trekked in from Greece. By June, regular supply runs to the NLM had been arranged. Later in that year, a second mission under the left-leaning Brigadier Frank (‘Trotsky’) Davies and Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Nicholls was infiltrated. Both Maclean and Smiley had reported that the NLM were keener to acquire weapons to use on their political adversaries than for killing Germans.

  In January 1944, Frank Davies was netted in a German sweep. Though the Huns didn’t have the same level of resources as previously, they could still bite. Nicholls escaped but later died from his exertions. Maclean and Davies were now working with the nationalist Balli Kombetar and complaining the NLM were waging war on them, using primarily British weapons!

  LRDG in the Land of the Eagle

  Bismarck once remarked, or is said to have remarked, that the Balkans ‘weren’t worth the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier’. Regardless of the accuracy, the sentiment is understandable. Nobody has ever penetrated the labyrinth of internal politics. Another apocryphal quip, attributed to General Michael Rose during the Bosnian war of the 1990s, delivered at the end of a briefing, goes something like ‘anybody who now believes he understands what’s going on here [Sarajevo]
hasn’t been paying attention’. LRDG were latecomers to the game in Albania. Happily, their path had been smoothed by a well embedded mission led by Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Palmer.5

  An LRDG officer penned the following assessment of the worth and character of the Albanian partisans (author’s paraphrase):

  1. Unreliable and disorganised;

  2. Only objective to extract as much equipment as possible from the Allies;

  3. Rapidly succumbing to hard-line communist orthodoxy;

  4. Would cheerfully cut our throats for a trifle;

  5. Totally untrustworthy.6

  As a succinct demolition, this is pretty good. Lloyd Owen, whilst fully aware of the partisans’ abundant defects and limitations, was prepared to admit a limited seduction. They were wild and untamed, nineteenth century brigands, largely unaffected by the influences of Western civilization; sanitation was a word unknown to them. Honesty was one with which they were barely acquainted.7 Those members of the former Italian garrisons, who came into their hands, fared very badly; starved and degraded. Few ever saw their homeland again. The partisans growing adherence to communism was not born out of any deep ideological understanding but more from a desire just for change. They’d had enough of elites with King Zog, and warmed to any creed that was different – the peasants were too disinterested ever to oppose it, or too ignorant to understand its dangers. What a pity they never did.8

  LRDG’s primary mission in Albania was to interdict German lines of withdrawal from Greece. John Olivey, after his dramatic escape in Athens, had been enjoying well earned leave in Rhodesia. Now returning to the fight, he was dispatched to the south of the country to spy out the enemy’s grip on the Llogara Pass. This snaked along the coast, taking the road from Greece up through Valona. Olivey was duly infiltrated with his patrol and found the landscape bare, except for some local guerrillas who rather appeared to resent our intrusion.9