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

by Sadler, John

  Psychology during the war years was, of course, not the advanced science it now represents. Conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”) were not fully recognised. The stress of operations was intense, the drain on the men’s physical and emotional resources enormous. Many thrived on the adrenalin burn, there is no greater intoxicant, but our stores are finite and the trick is to spot when someone is beginning to run low. Those who volunteered and passed LRDG selection were a special breed, born for the life. They had to be; otherwise it would have been intolerable. Time and again, LRDG personnel went far beyond the normal call of duty and kept on doing so. The scorpion badge was a byword for toughness and courage, something also to impress in the fleshpots of Cairo!

  Men went from long periods of constant danger, physical discomfort, hunger, cold and exhaustion to the sudden luxury of warm baths, comfortable beds and billets, R&R and cheap booze. That some might O/D on the latter is hardly surprising. When in the desert, the fabled lights of Cairo took on an unearthly allure, a fleshy Shangri-la where the young soldier could be instantly transported from dirt, disease, death and terror into a world of instant hedonism. As far as this author is aware, no physiological and emotional assessments were made of former LRDG personnel, such as would be relatively commonplace with today’s Special Forces. These would, had they existed, make very interesting reading!

  As the end of the war drew nearer and the great German counter-offensive, Wacht am Rhein – the Battle of the Bulge – was repulsed, the scope for LRDG type operations appeared to diminish. It did seem likely that, as Allied armies ground down Axis resistance in Italy, there might be some trade to be had in northern Yugoslavia and Austria. This would surely involve mountain warfare, yet another fresh departure for LRDG. Moir Stormonth-Darling’s squadron was withdrawn from the field for further training. In part this was frustrating for them but it did offer new horizons and the chance for some fresh exertions before the war finally ended.

  By mid-February, the Scottish laird and his LRDG hooligans were enjoying the luxuries of Il Duce’s favourite spa resort at Terminillo, some fifty miles north of the capital. LRDG took up lodgings in the five-star Caserna M hotel, a grand palazzo of fascist pampering, and offering rather better billets than they were used to! Here, they were under the tutelage of the Mountain Warfare School, though this was being run down and the squadron moved to another celebrity spot, the Gran Sasso.

  It was here in the equally impressive mountaintop resort hotel, the Albergo Campo Imperatore, that the dictator had been incarcerated after his fall. Not for long, as an audacious raid led by Otto ‘Scarface’ Skorzeny had sprung Mussolini from this seemingly impregnable redoubt. In many ways a true Nazi, Skorzeny was still a remarkable operator, one with whom LRDG must instinctively identify. Like them the Austrian, who’d trained as an engineer, pioneered Special Forces operations and led numerous commando raids of great ingenuity, dash and daring.

  The place was a wonderful base for mountaineering and ideal for training in load-carrying once the funicular had broken down. All stores had to be laboriously hauled up in backpacks, a full three thousand feet of near vertical ascent. The record was one hour twenty-five minutes with a forty-pound pack.23 After all their intensive training, however, the would-be mountaineers never got to try out their newly acquired skills. The war ended beforehand and they spent VE day humping all their exhaustingly humped kit down the steep hill again.

  Last Gasps

  As both Allies and partisans advanced, Vis ceased to be a sensible base. The port of Zara, which Tito had taken at the end of January 1945, offered better prospects. It was ideally placed for air and naval support plus liaison with partisan friends, or at least sometimes friends, and handy for disrupting enemy activity by sea. This was a worry with Allied shipping coming so far north. For LRDG, this implied both more shipping watch and scope for active patrolling. The new command was rather grandly styled Land Forces Northern Adriatic. As well as LRDG and SBS it contained artillery and an RAF ground unit which was to provide weapons supply and support.24

  Ken Lazarus would lead the Rhodesians and, as befitting his well-earned seniority, even had his own flagship, the MV Kufra. This addition to the fleet was an 80-ton schooner which Dick Croucher, one of Lloyd Owen’s more experienced sailors, had very cleverly adapted into a floating HQ. LRDG might not be the senior service but, for landlubbers they did alright; no small achievement with his music-hall crew of flafoots.25 As ever, Tim Heywood had exercised his magician’s touch on the comms. The Germans were everywhere retreating; they were beaten but not yet defeated. Though their cause was vile, nobody can deny the courage and resilience of the Wehrmacht. As the late Brigadier Peter Young, who would certainly know, once remarked – if you haven’t fought the Germans, you’ve never been to war.

  Even in February 1945, they still held all of Yugoslavia north of Karlobag and the islands offshore. The waters were extensively mined and Axis shipping could move, at least under cover of darkness, virtually unhindered. Shipping watch was still very much the order of the day. During daylight, patrols would seek out enemy lurking holes and introduce these to the attentions of the RAF while, by night, they would activate naval raiders.

  Mike Reynolds would be leading the first of this current round of patrols. Contact and liaison with the partisans would have to be instigated afresh. His was a picked crew, including the highly experienced W/O Private Metcalfe. The patrol set out on 23rd February and would remain in the field for nearly two months. They were inserted by sea on the eastern coast of Istria close to the Arsa Channel. Here the enemy had utilised local coal staithes, loading supplies mined inland. An attempt to bomb the facility on 3rd March proved abortive due to bad weather.

  Their time was far from being wasted. As a result of the patrol’s activities, enemy vessels were hounded and sunk through March and early April, despite the best efforts of German ground forces. A number of tramp steamers and coasters were hit, most damaged, more than a few sunk. From Mike Reynolds’ diary entries, we can appreciate the considerable amount of damage his team caused, not to mention the diversion of troops to hunt them down.26 The Axis failed in this but our erstwhile allies did the job for them, corralling the patrol on 13th April.

  Despite the nasty, sharp end of conflicting aims and ideologies, the locals themselves provided unstinting support, even going so far as to provide a night-time barber service!27 At one juncture, when it seemed a pair of LRDG, observing from an exposed hilltop, were bound to be captured by an enemy sweep, two young women used their local knowledge to find a safe hiding place till the danger had passed. The risks were very great; to be discovered would certainly prove fatal.

  Tiny Simpson with a second patrol was infiltrated into Istria to link up with Mike Reynolds’ crew. Simpson had troubles with his radio and Tim Heywood’s deputy, Stuart Hamer, brought over the replacement set, and became something of a heartthrob and a great hit with the local girls! The war wasn’t over though, and shortly afterwards two troopers, Corporal Waller and Private Edwards, who’d been detailed by Reynolds to deliver the replacement wireless to Simpson, simply appeared to vanish. Nobody knew where or how but there were disquieting rumours that they’d been captured and shot.

  Thus far, LRDG had not been troubled by Hitler’s infamous “commando order,” but if the pair had indeed suffered such a fate, it raised serious questions for Lloyd Owen as CO. It is one thing to ask soldiers to take risks which might lead to capture, on the assumption that, being in uniform, they’d be treated properly as POWs. To do so in the knowledge that they will subsequently be murdered is a very different matter. If the operational hazards are raised to this level, then many operations might become questionable; a dangerous mission is still a far cry from a suicidal one.

  Understandably, Lloyd Owen was unsure if he should warn patrols of this, especially as the reality remained unclear. All of the oracles up the chain of command were consulted and the instruction came back that men should be warned bef
ore being committed to action. This was still the LRDG, not one man demurred. As it happened, the missing men had been captured but not ill-treated, and both came safe home after the war’s end.28

  At one point, indeed for a time, they thought they might be shot. They’d been captured along with a partisan guide whom they knew would be roughed up by their interrogators. They maintained a strict silence and spent days in solitary confinement with only miserable rations. Eventually they were taken out through Trieste to a POW camp in Austria where they remained until the liberation. It seems the rumours of their deaths might simply have been a clever ruse by the Germans to damage morale. If so, it failed. Equally, our partisan ‘friends’ were not above a little rumour-mongering of their own.

  Despite not getting his new radio, Simpson carried on, managing to get some replacement parts for the existing set. Soon he, like Reynolds, was transmitting a steady stream of data, enabling the Navy to locate and sink an enemy barge. The Germans took this very badly and exerted themselves to locate his patrol. Despite some very close shaves, they did not succeed. Both British officers shared fluency in the Rhodesian Chisona dialect. They used this to communicate by short wave ‘walkie-talkie’ radios. There are echoes here of the use of Navaho by the US in the Far East, albeit on a larger scale. Happily, the Germans in Istria possessed no Chisona speakers!

  John Olivey was also active in Istria. His patrol set off on 8th March, their mission being to replicate and extend the shipping watch. He might also locate some suitable installations for David Sutherland’s SBS squad to blow up. Reynolds’s patrol provided a reception committee. This could disrupt their own work but it did mean the incomers would be getting ashore safely. Olivey’s team was to operate around Fianona, a populous beat which proved very tricky.

  Early next month, as spring arrived in Dalmatia, the last of the war, Olivey’s patrol was re-assigned, back to their old routine of road watch, this time to the highway running between Fiume and Trieste. Stan Eastwood, with his squad, took over the coastal stretch from 8th April. LRDG now had four full teams in Istria, bolstered by half a hundred SBS under David Sutherland, who was appointed as local area commander. This was all good. Relations with the partisans, however, were turning all bad.

  The Spring of Discontent

  Mike Reynolds was the first LRDG patrol commander to get a foretaste of the Cold War. Without warning, at a routine morning get together, things turned nasty. He and his team were shanghaied at gunpoint. Providentially, his radio operator got out a distress call before he was scooped up. The entire patrol was threatened with ignominious deportation but was brought off by the Navy. Next to feel the freezing breath of the new east wind was Stan Eastwood, then David Sutherland and his SBS team. Our partisan allies had succeeded where the Germans had failed, to destroy all of the valuable work being done, in no small measure, on their behalf and to hopelessly compromise any future operations in the sector.

  Trieste was the reason. For Tito, Istria with the city was the great prize. The presence of British forces could only detract from, if not hamper and delay, the great communist-led advance, the red and reds only finale. In fairness, the Yugoslavs were not alone in this politicized obsession. General de Gaulle was never too keen on having British SOE or SAS representatives mar his gloriously staged Franco-centric liberation parades.

  Allied Force HQ lodged all of the appropriate protests. The bargaining chip was the continued flow of arms and equipment; Tito would have to decide how hard he wanted to bite the hand that was feeding him. In the meantime, Lloyd Owen issued orders that patrols were to obey local partisan instructions and not risk armed confrontation, however compelling the temptation. John Olivey’s patrol was not yet corralled and the local partisan generalissimo, commanding their 4th Army, blandly denied any knowledge of arrests. As LRDG was learning, Nazis burned books whilst the communists preferred simply to re-write them as suited the moment. Tito’s HQ issued the even more scandalous suggestion that the partisans in question were probably Axis forces in disguise!29

  The haggling continued at senior level, leaving Lloyd Owen and his patrols, literally in their case, out on a limb. David Sutherland had been driven beyond the point of patient diplomacy by the shifty intransigence of his hosts and asked for evacuation. Once tempers, including his own, had cooled, Lloyd Owen proposed one last operation. Senior command agreed, but he then found himself at odds with his elders and betters who were firmly of the view that the British presence in Istria had to be maintained beyond this for political rather than military ends.

  Brigadier Davy went as far as to countermand Lloyd Owen’s order for the withdrawal of patrols still in the theatre. This caused understandable friction within the chain of command. Air Vice Marshal Mills supported Lloyd Owen – I am certain we would lose less face by leaving Istria under our own steam and with some dignity (if the position becomes impossible) than by having our men manhandled by a gang of ghastly garlic eaters.30 The patrols would have agreed wholeheartedly.

  John Olivey meanwhile was playing the game like a master. He was rather older than the other officers and perhaps understood just how best to compete in this uncongenial sport. He acted as a bigger idiot than the most literal-minded idiot amongst the partisans – a significant challenge for even the most accomplished mummer. Any order he didn’t like, which was all of them, he simply misunderstood and therefore ignored. He also grasped that many of the local Yugoslavs were simply obeying orders themselves, percolating down through an extended and highly politicized chain of command.

  Lloyd Owen, as his own signals testify, was being goaded beyond endurance. The worry over the well being of those for whom he was responsible (at the age of 27) – hope to avoid court martial but this unlikely and an inconvenience I must accept31 – was a heavy burden. This high level angst persisted till 21st April when authorisation to pull everyone out was finally issued, though the prevailing weather conditions meant this was, for the moment, impossible. Things in Istria were getting very sticky and an emergency ex-filtration loomed. However, this was all in the Balkans where the mood shifts with the clouds, and a left-dominated Balkans at that, one where yesterday’s history becomes today’s fiction.

  With a fine instinct for brinkmanship, Tito backed down over the sad ‘misunderstanding’ – smiles, handshakes and drinks all round. Allied HQ was prepare to share this novel fantasy in order to save face, and therefore decided Sutherland and crew should carry out at least once more operation and thus leave on a suitably prestigious note.

  On the ground nothing had changed; David Sutherland was deprived of viable local targets due to the enemy’s continual withdrawal (the dire irony being that our allies were now covering the Germans backs very effectively). The SBS had about had enough of their surly and aggressive hosts and were ready for a showdown. Allied Forces HQ’s woeful complacency could have triggered a most unpleasant incident, perhaps the first in the Cold War, even before the main conflict had ended!

  At last, however, the penny dropped at AFHQ and they gave in. The order for evacuation was sent out. By the time the spring darkness had come down on 25th April, the SBS had been successfully ex-filtrated back to Zara. John Olivey, playing the canny fool till the end, was still operating in Istria when peace broke out, returning to base via Trieste. The whole sorry fiasco left a bitter taste, a very sour note for LRDG to end their eventful war on. Officers like Lloyd Owen, perhaps not overly political in outlook at the start, developed a distinct antipathy towards communism, which would plunge most of Eastern Europe into a continuing tyranny for the next half-century.

  Not all was lost on the Dalmatian coast though. Whilst frustration and duplicity flourished on the mainland, several LRDG patrols were quietly conducting business as usual offshore. George Pitt had been inserted to identify coastal gun positions south of Karlobag. Next he crossed to the island of Rab for a spell of shipping watch. The place was crawling with Axis troops but he managed both to keep giving them the slip and to maintain the flow of
intelligence. The RAF duly showed their appreciation in the usual way and even the local partisans remained on side. Pitt joined forces with them for attacks on the island garrison. Lieutenants Savage and Saunders were respectively active on the islands of Krk and Olib. Again they both watched out for enemy shipping and worked well with the resident guerrillas.32

  Yet another offshore base was on Ist. By Dalmatian coast standards this was a ‘cushy billet’; the enemy left the patrol alone and they settled into a routine, based in one of the islander’s stone houses. Though the enemy might have been quiescent, they weren’t entirely absent and certainly not complacent. On 10th January 1945, on a winter’s night, they sent raiders of their own to engage in a ‘beat-up’. It was a novel and disagreeable experience for LRDG to be the quarry rather than the hunter.

  Signaller Kenneth Smith was the W/O, asleep at the time, LRDG occupying some rooms, the family still in others. Whether the partisan sentry was merely negligent or complicit could never be determined, but the enemy crept close enough to plant several explosive devices. One of these was placed by Smith’s radio, an obvious target. Someone loosed off a couple of rounds which rather gave the game away and woke everyone including Smith, who discovered the bomb by his wireless. The thing was ticking, clearly about to explode so, to save everyone and his precious radio, he grabbed the IED and made a dash for open ground where he could safely chuck it. He didn’t make it but everyone else did. For this act he was awarded a posthumous George Cross.33