Members of G Patrol shortly after their formation in late 1940, possibly on their way to attack Murzuk with Captain Pat Clayton in January 1941. (Courtesy of Jack Valenti)
C HAPTER 5
FIGHT AT THE FORT
With the Long Range Desert Group undergoing an expansion, Bagnold required a more spacious barracks for the unit, and he found one within the walls of the Citadel, an imposing edifice built by Saladin in 1166 using stone brought from the small pyramids of Gizeh. The LRDG moved into their new home in the first week of December, a relocation that, as their official war diarist noted, coincided with the cessation of the unit as ‘a purely New Zealand family and [it] began to assume a new character with the arrival on December 5th of British personnel to fill the establishment of Unit HQ and one complete squadron’.
Tom Merrick was one of the LRDG’s best navigators and helped train other members of the unit in the art of finding their way across the desert using the sun. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
One of the unit’s unofficial diarists, Frank Jopling, expressed his reservations about the upheaval. ‘They are going to make the LRDG a lot bigger with the inclusion of Tommies,’ he wrote on 5 December. ‘We don’t like the sound of it much as we think that after we have trained all these Tommies we may be sent back to our Units.’ Jopling’s mood darkened further when he arrived at the Citadel. ‘I went in the new barracks this morning to cart biscuits but we couldn’t even get them in the morning so I had to go down again in the afternoon and even then we couldn‘t get them until 5 p.m.,’ he complained to his diary. ‘I don’t like the look of the barracks in comparison with the place we are in now.’
Jopling and his comrades moved into their new abode on 7 December, and two days later he was one of several New Zealanders sent on ‘a three day trip with the Scotch Guards to teach them a little about desert driving’. The guardsmen were among the 36 selected from the 3rd Battalion The Coldstream Guards and the 2nd Battalion The Scots Guards. Designated G [Guards] Patrol, they were commanded by 25-year-old Captain Michael Crichton-Stuart of the Scots Guards with Lieutenant Martin Gibbs, a Coldstreamer, his second-in-command.
In between patrols there was usually time for a spot of sightseeing in Egypt for the LRDG. This photo of the Sphinx was taken in September 1942. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
Crichton-Stuart was a blue-blood. The grandson of the 3rd Marquess of Bute, his father was Lieutenant Colonel Lord Ninian Edward Crichton-Stuart, killed fighting on the Western Front in 1915 while the sitting Member of Parliament for the united boroughs of Cardiff, Cowbridge and Llantrisant. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, Crichton-Stuart’s lineage was impressive, though first impressions didn’t go down well with the New Zealanders. ‘The O.C. of G3 Patrol is Capt. Crichton-Stuart and the 2/IC is Lt Gibbs of Gibbs Dentrifice,’* wrote Jopling. ‘We don’t like either of them but don’t have anything to do with them so it doesn’t matter much.’
As the guardsmen were instructed in the ways of the desert, the LRDG commander was in the throes of planning his boldest operation yet. It had been hatched in November and entailed an attack against Murzuk, a well-defended Italian fort in south-western Libya set among palm trees with an airfield close by, approximately 1,000 miles west of Cairo as the crow flies. As Bagnold recorded, the fort ‘was far beyond our self-contained range but a raid on it seemed possible geographically if we could get some extra supplies from the French Army in Chad’. The aim of the attack wasn’t just to harass the enemy deep inside their lines, but to send a clear message to the Free French that they were a valued and valuable ally in the North African campaign.
Bagnold flew to Chad at the start of November and met the commander of the French troops, Colonel Jean Colonna d’Ornano, a tall red-headed officer in his mid-forties. The Frenchman agreed to the request to supply the LRDG on one condition: that he and his men participate in the assault on the fort. Bagnold agreed.
As G Patrol readied itself for its inaugural operation, the desert war swung spectacularly the way of the British. In mid-September six divisions of Italian troops had advanced cautiously into the Western Desert, covering 60 miles before calling a halt at Sidi Barrani, some 80-odd miles west of the British positions at Mersah Matruh. Their commander, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, ordered the construction of a series of fortified camps that were spaced too far apart to support one another. For nearly two months the desert war was in abeyance until Wavell ‘decided that, as the Italians did not come on, he would sally forth and strike at them’. The attack was launched by General Richard O’Connor’s Western Desert Force early on 9 December, and it caught the Italians completely off-guard. The British force of 30,000 – compared to the 80,000 enemy troops – captured thousands of prisoners and 400 guns in the first three days of the assault. The Italians fled in panic to the coastal fortress of Bardia, their rout so complete that if Wavell had pressed the attack he could have advanced into Libya. Instead he stuck to the original plan, which was to recall the 4th Indian Division as soon as Sidi Barrani had fallen and transfer it to the Sudan. In the meantime, the British dug in and waited for the arrival from Palestine of the 6th Australian Division before continuing the offensive against the demoralized Italians.
The success of the British strike at Sidi Barrani almost led to a change of role for the LRDG, ‘in which we were to cut the enemy’s lines of communication along the coast’. To Crichton-Stuart’s relief, the operation was cancelled and G Patrol continued preparing for the raid on Murzuk.
Now that the guardsmen no longer needed their hands held, Frank Jopling made the most of this quiet period. On 20 December he enjoyed a game of billiards and in the evening watched Pirates of the Air, a 1916 propaganda film about World War I aerial warfare. Jopling didn’t much appreciate the outdated and jingoistic film but the following evening he found Lana Turner’s performance in These Glamour Girls much more to his liking.
Tom Merrick uses his theodolite to shoot the sun, and at night it would be used for an astrofix. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
Jopling began Christmas Day with a game of billiards before joining his comrades in the canteen. ‘For Xmas dinner we had roast turkey, Xmas pudding, which was very good,’ he recorded in his diary. ‘The sergeants waited on us at the table and the officers shouted us a bottle of beer each. After dinner I played more billiards.’
Two days later, on 27 December, the LRDG departed Cairo. They had been briefed on Boxing Day with Clayton – recently promoted to major – telling T Patrol that they could be away as long as three months. They would also be accompanied by two Arabs, one of whom, said Jopling, ‘is sort of a prince among the Arabs and they are going to be used partly as interpreters and partly as inducement for the Libyans to surrender’.
In fact, the ‘prince’ was Sheikh ‘Abd el Gelil Sief Al Nasr, chosen personally to accompany the LRDG by Sayed Idris, the Senussi leader. The second Arab mentioned by Jopling was the sheikh’s personal slave, and Crichton-Stuart recalled that the former ‘had welcomed this opportunity of a trip to his old tribal lands, so long as he got a chance to shoot an Italian or two’.1 In total there were 76 raiders in 23 vehicles, comprising T and G patrols under the overall command of Major Clayton.
They made good progress across the desert and spent New Year’s Eve camped in the middle of the Great Sand Sea.,’ wrote Crichton-Stuart in his operational report. ‘Withal it is utterly lifeless and dead, without a blade of grass or a stone to break the monotony of sky and sand.’
‘Packed and shaped by the prevailing wind over thousands of years, this Sand Sea compares in shape and form with a great Atlantic swell, of long rollers, crested here and there, with great troughs between’
Michael Crichton-Stuart
New Year’s Eve was a rather melancholic affair for the men, an unwanted opportunity to dwell on sweethearts, mothers, fathers, siblings, thousands of miles away. Jopling wondered how his sweetheart, Irene, whose letters were so priceless, was spending the final day of
1940. The men had a brief sing-song round the campfire but none of them stayed up to usher in the first day of 1941.
The patrols split on the approach to the border, travelling independently into Libya and rendezvousing near Tazerbo, 350 miles east of Murzuk, on 4 January 1941. The day was notable for a discovery made by Bill Kennedy Shaw, who had a nose for such things. ‘The country was as featureless and barren as could be,’ wrote Crichton-Stuart, ‘but when we stopped on rock once, to pump up our tyres again after deflating for the soft sand, Shaw discovered flint instruments of some bygone civilization.’2
On that same day Clayton left with four trucks to collect the French contingent from Chad, and Bill Kennedy Shaw took three trucks to see whether Tereneghei Pass was negotiable by vehicle and therefore viable as a possible escape route after the attack on the fort. ‘It was a good trip,’ recalled Kennedy Shaw, thrilled with the opportunity to fill in a blank map as he blazed a trail on a hitherto unexplored route. They weaved a path over the Eghei Mountains, ‘a jumble of sandstone, basalt and granite’ and ‘saw no sign of life, even the Tibbu [also spelled ‘Toubou’, herders and nomads originating in northern Chad] seldom visit these barren hills’.3
Before settling down to supper after a day’s operations, the LRDG patrol checked their weapons, water and vehicle and reported any problems to the patrol commander. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
While Kennedy Shaw was exploring the Tereneghei Pass, Jopling was reforming his opinion of Captain Michael Crichton-Stuart. Despite his background as a Guards’ officer, he was broad-minded and approachable, with an intellectual suppleness that absorbed swiftly the nuances of guerrilla warfare. On seeing Jopling studying G Patrol’s map, Crichton-Stuart wandered over and explained to the New Zealander the plan of attack on Murzuk and of the withdrawal. ‘It sounds as though it is going to be a great trip,’ wrote Jopling. After his talk with Crichton-Stuart, Jopling fell into conversation with the man he’d described with mild disdain a few days earlier as a prince – Sheikh ‘Abd el Gelil Sief Al Nasr. ‘He is a far more important man than I at first thought,’ Jopling recorded in his diary. ‘His people are around Murzuk and Kufra, etc. He is also a Bey, which is a high sort of knighthood conferred on him by King Farouk [king of Egypt from 1936 to 1952]. He reckons he would like to get into Murzuk before us and have a talk with the population and he reckons he could get the people to rise up against the Italians and then we come in. However, just what we do remains to be seen.’4
Clayton returned with the French contingent on 7 January. Colonel d’Ornano brought with him supplies and also two junior officers, two sergeants and five native soldiers. None of the Frenchmen spoke English, but one of the New Zealander navigators, Terry Brown, had spent most of his childhood in Morocco and was fluent in French. Colonel d’Ornano made an impression on Crichton-Stuart, who noted in his report that the Frenchman ‘was a magnificent figure of a man, very tall, in native uniform, complete with burnous [a long cloak of coarse woollen fabric with a hood] and a monocle’.
That night Sheikh ‘Abd el Gelil Sief Al Nasr joined what Crichton-Stuart described as ‘an international council of war’, in which representatives from France, Britain, New Zealand and Libya discussed the impending attack on Murzuk. The sheikh revealed that several years ago he and his men had laid siege to the fort, an account which was treated with more respect than the ‘wireless message from Cairo giving fearsome and rather incredible details of the defences of Murzuk from a document captured at Sidi Barrani’.5
The 23-vehicle raiding party set off on the 350 miles to Murzuk at 6am on 8 January and the featureless plain was soon supplanted by a bewildering array of terrain, from dark volcanic rocks to sharp-cornered boulders half buried in the ground.
At least their progress was unimpeded by any sight of the enemy, and early on 11 January they were ten miles north of the target, having covered 1,333 miles in 18 days. Clayton sent a reconnaissance party towards the fort and they returned reporting ‘not a soul was in sight’. The raiders sat down to luncheon and later made their final preparations for the attack. Kennedy Shaw constructed a sand-plan of Murzuk, using it for the final briefing, which was précised by Crichton-Stuart. Having first explained that the natives inhabited a string of small oases to the north and east of Murzuk, Kennedy Shaw said that Murzuk itself ‘sported an aerodrome and a large, modern stone fort with a considerable garrison and a wireless station. There had been stationed there the “Auto-Saharan Company”, the Italian equivalent of our Long Range Patrol, well equipped but absurdly used’.6 He ended his talk with a quote from Machiavelli: ‘Those enterprises are best which can be concealed up to the moment of their fulfilment.’
An LRDG vehicle enters a wadi (a dry river bed) in search of a suitable spot to camp for the night. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
Then they set off to the target.
On the road leading to the fort the raiders drove past a huddle of natives. Almost as one they clicked to attention, giving the fascist salute and shouting ‘Bongiorno’. A grin spread across the grimy faces of the LRDG, broadening as they spotted up ahead a plump figure cycling towards the fort. Clayton pulled over and invited the postmaster, Signor Colicchia, to hop on board. The ‘terrified official’ accepted the invitation and acted as their guide on the final approach to the target. ‘Ahead I could now see the fort, partly hidden by trees,’ recalled Kennedy Shaw, ‘and with some after-lunch strollers around it. The surprise was complete.’7
The plan, finalized with the help of Kennedy Shaw’s sand-plan, was straightforward: Clayton’s T Patrol would attack the airfield that lay in close proximity to the fort while G Patrol targeted the actual garrison, situated in the fort south-east of the town. The LRDG didn’t have the firepower to destroy the thick walls of the fort, but they hoped to ‘frighten or surprise the garrison’ into surrendering. As to what could go wrong, though the LRDG didn’t fear the garrison itself, they did worry about the main Italian air base at Fezzan, 250 miles north, and what it might do on receiving a radio message requesting aerial assistance.
The closer one got to the Libyan coast the greener the landscape became. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
When the convoy was 150 yards from Murzuk, close enough to see the Italian flag fluttering above the main central tower, the gates of the fort opened and out turned the guard, ready to welcome in what they imagined was an Italian relief force. That was the cue for Clayton’s patrol of six trucks to head towards the airstrip, while Crichton-Stuart’s force targeted their weapons at the guard outside the fort and ‘let them have it’. As he later admitted, ‘we were rather sorry for them, but they probably never knew what hit them’.8
In the official report of the attack on the fort, built by the Ottomans during their occupation of Libya, Crichton-Stuart described the subsequent chain of events: ‘All [LRDG] positions were from 250 yards to 500 yards from the fort, the broken ground, scrub, and a few native huts affording considerable cover,’ he wrote. ‘Effective resistance, however, began at once. The fort was engaged by G Patrol, half of T Patrol and the French, with one 37mm Bofors and two 2in. mortars, and with rifle and M.G. [machine gun] fire.’
The mortars were under the direction of Lieutenant Martin Gibbs, who was concentrating his fire on the western wall of the fort. They scored an early success when a bomb hit the main tower, sending a thick cloud of black smoke billowing into the air, and within a few minutes the tower was ablaze.
What Crichton-Stuart’s report omitted was the unfortunate incident that occurred midway through the attack. Kennedy Shaw, who was engaged with Clayton’s force on the airfield, subsequently gave a second-hand account in his war memoirs, describing how ‘in the middle of the attack a touring car drove up to the gate. In it was the Italian commander, who had probably been out to lunch, and also as some said afterwards, a woman and child. One shell from the Guards’ Bofors put an end to them.’9
The ‘effective resistance’ mentioned by Crichton-Stuart
soon had the LRDG pinned down and ‘any movement brought down heavy fire’. The slave of Sheikh ‘Abd el Gelil Sief Al Nasr didn’t endear himself to his British allies by standing up after each shot with his old rifle and shouting a stream of abuse at the Italians. The LRDG had no idea what he was saying, and probably nor did the enemy, but nothing was lost in translation with the ferocity of the response from the fort.
Some of John Olivey’s men pose for the camera en route to attack an Italian fort at El Gtafia in December 1941. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
On the airfield, meanwhile, the other half of T Patrol was also encountering some resistance, as Jopling described in his diary.
We stopped about 700 yards from the hangar and there were quite a few soldiers running about and quite a few pillboxes scattered about so we got behind a rise and opened up on them. After quite a few had fallen and a few Bofors shells had gone into the hangar, we advanced to another rise just in time to prevent some soldiers from entering an anti-aircraft pit. Then the skipper [Clayton] came past from the fort and went to circle the hangar, and just as he turned a corner of the hangar a machine-gun opened up on them at only 20 yards away, so the skipper jammed on the brakes and put it in reverse. How the skipper, Wink Adams and Clarrie Roderick escaped, goodness knows.10
Ron Low proudly displays the Italian sword liberated from El Gtafia during the successful raid. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
The Long Range Desert Group in World War II Page 5
