The Long Range Desert Group in World War II

by Gavin Mortimer

  On 10 April they arrived at Jarabub, where Crichton-Stuart was waiting with the bottles of Chianti, but within 48 hours the squadron was on the move again, this time to Siwa. Here they found Guy Prendergast. He had no wine to offer them, only a reorganization of the squadron into three patrols, led by Mitford, Crichton-Stuart and Martin Gibbs.

  ‘During the month that followed the operational employment of G Patrol could be summed up as a) passive misuse and b) active misuse,’ reflected Crichton-Stuart, who took his patrol west in an attempt to salvage some of the vehicles abandoned in the British withdrawal. He was too late, however, and aborted the mission because of the large enemy presence in the area. Next Crichton-Stuart’s patrol spent a week observing enemy movements on the track that led from Aujilawjila to Jarabub. The men suffered from heat and tedium, their surveillance ‘enlivened only by a football’.

  Gibbs’ patrol, meanwhile, comprising an equal number of guardsmen and yeomanry, was maintaining a similar watch on the northern approach to Jarabub. The two patrols returned to Siwa in late April, around the time Rommel’s Afrika Korps seized the coastal town of Sollum, just inside the Egyptian border and approximately 130 miles north of Jarabub.

  Gibbs was therefore detailed to take his patrol and guard ‘the immediate approaches to Jarabub’. This mission coincided with what Bill Kennedy Shaw described as the ‘worst qibli in LRDG history’, a heat storm far more merciless than the one his patrol had endured the previous September. For Gibbs and his patrol it was made all the worse by the fact there was no water to be had from the wells around Jarabub: they had been polluted by the Italians during their occupation.

  With inadequate water, Gibbs and his men began to suffer the effects of extreme thirst and dehydration. They couldn’t sleep and argued among each other, until eventually Gibbs radioed Crichton-Stuart and requested permission to abort the patrol. When they arrived at Jarabub Crichton-Stuart was shocked by their state. He oversaw their evacuation to Siwa, and Gibbs, after six weeks convalescing, returned to the Guards.

  To their relief, the LRDG were ordered in mid-May to embark on a more aggressive patrol, in tandem with a British offensive to try and retake Bardia. Crichton-Stuart’s instructions were to protect the southern flank of the 11th Hussars as they advanced west across the Egyptian frontier into Libya. On 14 May G Patrol arrived at the rendezvous point close to the Libyan side of the frontier fence. ‘I saw a number of armoured cars and at least two tanks which looked like our cruisers,’ Crichton-Stuart wrote later in his patrol report. Peering through his field glasses, Crichton-Stuart was unable to discern any markings on the vehicles because of dust and camouflage. Taking guardsman William Fraser in his truck, Crichton-Stuart advanced towards the vehicles. ‘At about 250 yards one M.G. [machine gun] opened fire at, but over, me,’ he wrote. ‘The next moment they opened up with a number of M.G.s, both heavy and light, with plenty of tracer, and a few shots from a tank gun. Their shooting was very poor, and my truck was the only one hit.’17

  A desert latrine, like this one at Kufra, wasn’t the height of sophistication. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  Crichton-Stuart swung his vehicle round and drove manically over the desert to escape the hostile fire. Beside him, Fraser tried to stem the flow of blood from two bullet wounds to his arm. The sluggish response of the truck indicated that a bullet had also punctured a tyre. Ordering three trucks to continue south, Crichton-Stuart stopped his vehicle out of sight of the enemy and with the help of men from the fourth lorry began changing the wheel. ‘We failed to get the tyre changed,’ he explained in his report, ‘for we heard the enemy coming and all got on to the other truck and away with enemy armoured cars 300 yards behind.’18

  There now began a frantic pursuit south across the desert, the LRDG vehicles travelling at 45mph and their hunters matching their speed. The British glanced back, checking the distance; after a few miles, there was no doubt that the enemy was closing. Faster, faster, urged Crichton-Stuart, and the trucks shook and rattled as their drivers neared their maximum speed of 50mph. ‘An unlucky shot got another truck’s tyre,’ said Crichton-Stuart, ‘and I transferred their crew on to mine, which now had nine on board. We only just got away in time. After this, firing back and cracking up to 50 again, we gradually drew away, and about five miles south of Fort Maddalena, having been chased for over 30 miles, I halted.’19

  Crichton-Stuart couldn’t even say for certain in his report if their assailants had been German; they may have been British. But whoever they were, it was fortunate their shooting was wayward. Apart from the minor wound to Fraser, no other soldier had been hit, although when Crichton-Stuart prepared for bed that evening he discovered that one bullet had shattered the toothbrush in his kit bag and another holed his tin mug.

  G Patrol was ordered to Siwa, 350 miles north-east of Kufra, where it spent the rest of May. Prendergast had established his HQ in a stone building built on a rocky outcrop close to the oasis’s landing strip – a levelled area of sand strong enough to withstand light aircraft. Though the men of G and Y Patrol were dispersed throughout Siwa, a communal meeting place was one of the oasis’s many pools. ‘Out of their dark green depths cool water bubbled,’ recalled Crichton-Stuart, ‘and Cleopatra’s Bath, in particular, close-shadowed by palms, made the midsummer heat of Siwa easy to bear.’20

  Crichton-Stuart was less enamoured with the locals. In his view they were ‘degenerate and diseased [and] lived in a honeycomb of mud huts built on top of one another like a playing-card castle’. Not all the men shared this narrow-minded opinion, and Bill Kennedy Shaw took a great interest in the natives.‡ In Tripolitania, through which the Eighth Army swept in four months, there was less opportunity for the Arabs to aid us, but many of them did so: one Arab of my acquaintance hid two airmen for some months in his house in the centre of Tripoli city. It is to be hoped that the Council of Foreign Ministers will bear these facts in mind when planning the future of the former Italian colonies in North Africa.’ The LRDG intelligence officer was fascinated by the practicality of the locals in exploiting the natural resources of Siwa: olives, dates, grapes and pomegranates. Writing in a 1944 issue of the Geographical Magazine, Kennedy Shaw explained: ‘The date palm in fact supplies almost all simple human needs – food for men and animals, palm wine, fuel, building timber, leaves for thatch, baskets, mats, sandals and fibres for ropes.’21

  Captain Richard Lawson, who became the LRDG’s medical officer in December 1941, appraised Siwa shortly after his first visit to the oasis. Of the ‘200 pools of deep clean water’, he wrote, ‘all are suitable for drinking and many have an output of several thousand gallons daily. Two pools, one by the rest house and one at the foot of the Jebel Takrur, were used for drinking water only and were already fenced and concreted. There is little or no dysentery or typhoid among the natives.’22 The doctor also noted that half a dozen of the pools were reserved for bathing or washing and in this way avoided contamination.

  Drawing water at Kufra in the summer of 1941 when, to their frustration, the LRDG were deployed as garrison troops. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  C HAPTER 7

  MISUSE AND MALARIA

  May had been a trying month for the LRDG, as it had been for the Allied army as a whole. On 27 May three Afrika Korps assault groups had driven the British out of the Halfaya Pass, the strategically important escarpment just inside the Egyptian border with Libya. The enemy, noted General Rommel, ‘fled in panic to the east, leaving considerable booty and material of all kinds in our hands’.1 The next day, 28 May, a gloomy General Wavell lamented the fact that his ‘infantry tanks are really too slow for a battle in the desert’. Easy prey for the German 88mm anti-tank guns, the British armoured corps had suffered heavy casualties since the arrival of the Afrika Korps, but Wavell nonetheless retained his belief that he would ‘succeed in driving the enemy west of Tobruk’.

  (left to right) David Lloyd Owen, Jake Easonsmith and Gus Holliman, three LRDG officers sporting
a variety of headwear. Only Lloyd Owen survived the war. (Author’s Collection)

  As Wavell prepared to launch Operation Battleaxe in mid-June, he received a complaint from Ralph Bagnold ‘as to the misuse of the LRDG Patrols’ in the preceding weeks. Teddy Mitford in particular had agitated for a more ‘active employment’ rather than acting as garrison troops and fetching and carrying supplies to Mersa Matruh. Additionally, an outbreak of sickness at Siwa had decimated G patrol. ‘Men started going down with a fever which the medical officer attached to the squadron diagnosed as malaria,’ recorded Crichton-Stuart. ‘When he sent to Mersa Matruh for supplies of quinine and other appropriate medicines he got the curatives he asked for, but the authorities refused to send him the necessary preventatives, curtly informing him that Siwa was NOT [they repeated NOT] malarial.’2 Eventually an expert in tropical diseases was despatched to Siwa from Cairo and within 24 hours he confirmed that ‘the oasis was swarming with anopheles mosquitoes’.

  THE IRRIGATION POOLS AT SIWA

  The irrigation pools at Siwa were the perfect way to cool off at the end of a long patrol, or even a long day. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  There were many of the pools at Siwa and while some were used solely for bathing, others were reserved for washing laundry. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  Captain Michael Crichton-Stuart recalled: ‘Out of their dark green depths cool water bubbled … they made the midsummer heat of Siwa easy to bear.’ (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  On 6 June Captain Pat McCraith rejoined the LRDG at Siwa, arriving from Cairo with a batch of new trucks to replace the ones lost in recent patrols. The following day Y Patrol returned from Jarabub and the unit underwent another reorganization: Y, G and a new temporary patrol, H, were formed, with McCraith leading Y, Crichton-Stuart G and Jake Easonsmith H. All three patrols comprised six trucks and were issued with similar instructions, ‘the conveyance of agents to the interior of Cyrenaica and the collection of their reports, and with gathering geographical information about the country south of the Jebel-el-Akhdar’.3 Also formed in June 1941 was the unit’s Survey Section, under the eye of Bill Kennedy Shaw.

  The exploits of the LRDG captured the media’s imagination and they appeared in newspapers, magazines and even gave radio interviews during the desert campaign. (Getty)

  The day before Crichton-Stuart was scheduled to lead his patrol on a surveillance of enemy traffic on the main road through the lush countryside of the Jebel Akhdar, he succumbed to malaria. Reluctantly he handed over command to Jake Easonsmith, of Y Patrol, who took with him a recently arrived G Patrol officer called Anthony Hay, erstwhile of the Coldstream Guards. Hay was to replace Crichton-Stuart, who had been summoned back to the Scots Guards, and although he had persuaded his CO to allow him three months to school Hay in the work of an LRDG officer, Crichton-Stuart’s remaining time in the unit was bedevilled by recurrent malaria. Throughout the summer he spent a lot of time in Mersa Matruh, grouching at the misuse of the LRDG and of another special forces unit called Layforce. Formed in the summer of 1940, just as the LRDG came into being, Layforce was commanded by Colonel Robert Laycock and comprised three commando troops – Nos. 7, 8 and 11. No. 8 Commando was also known as Guards Commando, and among its ranks when it sailed from Britain on the last day of January 1941 were Randolph Churchill, the prime minister’s son, George Jellicoe, son of the famous World War I admiral, and a 25-year-old Scots Guards lieutenant called David Stirling. Crichton-Stuart wrote:

  The frustration felt by the LRDG during this season was shared and even exceeded by a commando force under Colonel Laycock … They spent the summer in abortive attempts at harassing the enemy’s rear by sea landings. At the end of the summer the force was disbanded, defeated by the difficulties of a rocky coast and the unreliable sea. It was simply not yet realised that the desert approach was incomparably easier and safer, for there you could hide from the air.4

  Most of Layforce were returned to their parent units, but not David Stirling. Crichton-Stuart met him several times in Cairo and Mersa Matruh and the former was keen to pump the LRDG officer for information on their operations. Together the pair ‘discussed … at length’ the advantages of a desert approach to enemy targets rather than a seaborne approach. Crichton-Stuart, of course, was thinking solely of using vehicles. Stirling, however, had another method in mind, one that in the course of that summer started to take shape.

  C HAPTER 8

  HEAVY LOSSES AND A NEW LEADER

  General Wavell launched his offensive, Operation Battleaxe, on 15 June, the intention of which was to sweep the Axis forces out of Cyrenaica and relieve the pressure on the besieged port of Tobruk. The assault failed, the British armour being destroyed by the German 88mm guns in Halfaya Pass, renamed ‘Hellfire Pass’ by the Allies. ‘The three-day battle has ended in complete victory,’ wrote Rommel to his wife on 18 June. ‘I’m going to go round the troops today to thank them and issue orders.’1

  An LRDG observation post in the Libyan Desert. Look carefully for the lookout! (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  Despite his success at repelling the British attack, Rommel was unable to capitalize on his triumph by pushing into Egypt. His lines of supply and communication were now stretched precariously thin, and the defiant Allied defenders in Tobruk – to his rear – caused him consternation. Nevertheless, at the end of June Rommel wrote again to his wife, declaring the ‘joy of the Afrika troops over this latest victory is tremendous … now the enemy can come, he’ll get an even bigger beating.’2

  The failure of Operation Battleaxe cost General Wavell his job. The LRDG’s principal champion was replaced as commander-in-chief by Claude Auchinleck with Lieutenant General William Gott succeeding O’Creagh as commander of the 7th Armoured Division. With Wavell gone, and the Allies reeling from their losses, the LRDG had lost, for the time being at least, some of its clout. Not only was Michael Crichton-Stuart recalled to his regiment, but Major Teddy Mitford was summoned back to the 1st Battalion Royal Tank Regiment and Pat McCraith was returned to the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry (although their losses had been sustained during the battle for Crete in late May). His loss was a particular blow for Y Patrol, recalled Lofty Carr, the navigator. ‘A lot of officers in the army were resentful of soldiers who displayed any intelligence or initiative, but not McCraith,’ reflected Carr. ‘He was a fussy fellow, a solicitor before the war, who would spend the whole night before any operation checking every item personally so that the QM [quartermaster] would be at his wit’s end.’3

  If losing Crichton-Stuart, Mitford and McCraith wasn’t bad enough for the LRDG, they also had to cope with the loss of their commanding officer. Twelve months after raising the unit, Ralph Bagnold decided in June 1941 that it was time to hand the baton of command to a younger and more active man – Guy Prendergast. Bagnold – ‘Baggers’ to the men – expanded on his decision to resign in an editorial published in Tracks,* the first and only issue of the LRDG magazine, published in June 1941. Reflecting on the work of the LRDG, Bagnold wrote proudly:

  The unit has more than achieved the purpose for which it was designed. It has in fact become famous, not only for the exploits of individual patrols but for its ability to exist and to move about over a desert and in a climate both of which had been thought impossible for any military force … I now leave the LRDG with the knowledge that it has more action and useful work in front of it, against an enemy for whom new methods must be evolved. May I thank all ranks for their hard work and ready cooperation, and wish the unit the best of luck for the future.4

  Where the enemy was known to be close the LRDG would double back on themselves to confuse aircraft who might spot their tyre tracks. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  It wasn’t just sand that posed a problem for the LRDG in the desert, as this patrol discovered when they became bogged down in a salt marsh. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  What Bagnold didn’t divulge was the
toil taken on his health over the last 12 months. He was now 45 and the pressure of command, of raising and leading a reconnaissance force, combined with the brutal environment of the Libyan Desert, had left him exhausted. To only his close associates did he confess that his health ‘was beginning to suffer, so I thought it was time to quit’.

  Bill Kennedy Shaw wrote of traversing a salt marsh: ‘Drive your truck two yards from the beaten track and it will be sunk to its axles in the quicksands.’ (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)