The Long Range Desert Group in World War II

by Gavin Mortimer

  C HAPTER 10

  ON THE BACK FOOT

  The return of the nine men was a rare bit of good news for the LRDG in the winter of 1941–42. Captains Frank Simms of Y Patrol and Tony Hay of G Patrol were both captured on operations, and on 24 January the Afrika Korps advanced, forcing the LRDG to withdraw from Jalo to Siwa.

  A folboat (collapsible canoe) such as this one was used by the SAS during raids against shipping in Benghazi harbour in the spring of 1942. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  By the start of February the Germans had reoccupied Cyrenaica as far east as the line Bir Hakim to Gazala (known as the Gazala Line), and Eighth Army instructed the LRDG to ascertain to what degree the enemy was using the main coastal roads, and if fuel and supply dumps were being stockpiled in the area northeast of Jedabia, which might suggest Rommel’s intention to advance on Tobruk.

  Rommel was not gathering himself for any more offensives, having already overstretched his supply lines in his advance of the previous month. He was now urging Berlin to provide him with the men and machines to finish off the British in North Africa, but to his frustration his requests were stone-walled. ‘Our demands for additional formations were refused on the grounds that with the huge demand for transport which the Eastern Front [Russia] was making on Germany’s limited productive capacity, the creation of further motorized units for Africa was out of the question,’ he wrote in his journal, adding that it was ‘a sadly short-sighted and misguided view’.1 In March 1942 the Afrika Korps received 18,000 tons of supplies, 42,000 tons fewer than Rommel calculated his army required for victory in North Africa. He also received a few thousand additional men to augment his three German divisions ‘whose fighting strength was often ludicrously small’. Rommel resigned himself to taking on his enemy with far inferior resources.

  An LRDG patrol enjoy a cup of tea at Siwa in March 1942. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  Auchinleck, meanwhile, was consolidating his defensive positions and would not be ready to launch a fresh offensive for several more months. Throughout March the LRDG gathered intelligence on the enemy’s movements and supplies, information gratefully received at MEHQ (Middle East Headquarters). ‘The commander-in-chief directs me to say how impressed he is with the work of the LRDG in the carrying out of their deep reconnaissance along the Tripoli–Benghazi road, and elsewhere,’ cabled Lieutenant General Thomas Corbett, chief of the general staff, to Prendergast on 7 April. ‘The information which they are producing is of the utmost value to us at the present.’2

  Despite the glowing praise from MEHQ, Prendergast was becoming ever more exasperated with what was being asked of the LRDG. Keeping enemy traffic under surveillance – what was known as ‘road watching’ – was of course an integral part of their work, but it was playing what Prendergast described as ‘universal aunt’ to the SAS, stranded aviators and secret agents that grated. ‘These demands have usually been met,’ he wrote, ‘but not without straining the unit’s own resources and personnel.’3

  Then on 23 April 1942 the LRDG received fresh instructions from Eighth Army HQ. With estimates stating that more than half the enemy’s maintenance tonnage for Cyrenaica was being transported on the road from Tripoli to Benghazi, the LRDG were ordered to step up their road watches both west of Cyrenaica but also inside its boundaries as well. In addition, where possible they were to conduct offensive operations, the main targets designated as petrol motor transport and armour. The two types of operation didn’t complement one another, and waging a guerrilla war deep behind enemy lines would only increase the chances of discovery for those LRDG covertly conducting a road watch.

  By now there had been several changes within the LRDG. Captain Jake Easonsmith was second-in-command, Lieutenant Robin Gurdon had replaced Tony Hay as commander of G2 Patrol and Captain Bing Morris had taken over command of A Squadron in light of Don Steele’s return to the New Zealand Expeditionary Force.

  Gurdon was unique among the LRDG. Not only was he 38, married with three children, but he was an aristocrat, the son of Sir Bertram Francis Gurdon, 2nd Baron Cranworth of Letton and Cranworth. He had no need to volunteer for service, being above military age, but he stepped down from his directorship of Imperial Airways and enlisted in the Coldstream Guards before joining the LRDG in February 1942. ‘Practically all situations were natural to him, though he injected a good deal of his own preferences into what he did and whom he did it with,’ recalled Alastair Timpson, who commanded G1 Patrol. ‘He hated the war but he was determined to take an active and effective part in trying to win it.’4

  In an attempt to reconcile the LRDG’s conflicting tasks, Alastair Timpson and his Guards Patrol began experimenting on how ‘to devise a method of destroying enemy vehicles without the enemy finding out how the destruction was done, or at least the areas where the aggressors operated’.5 If successful, hoped Timpson, the enemy wouldn’t suspect enemy guerrillas but believe that their depots had been infiltrated by fifth columnists.

  After a week at Siwa practising different methods, it was agreed that the only really effective way to plant a bomb on a moving vehicle was first to make it slow down. But how to achieve this without causing suspicion? Set up a fake maintenance warning on the road, someone suggested. A couple of hurricane lamps on top of two oil drums with a pole stretched between, alongside which would be a large sign in German ‘Achtung! Strassenbau’ (Road under Repair). The drivers, seeing the sign looming out of the darkness, would slow down, at which point the LRDG would leap up from the side of the road and gently drop over the tailgate of the vehicle a haversack inside which was a 2lb bomb, similar to the ones used by the SAS during their airfield raids. Timpson approved of the plan. ‘When the explosion came, half an hour or an hour to two hours later, depending on which type of time-pencil we employed, it would be a shattering surprise and an insoluble riddle for those who investigated the disaster.’6

  Timpson’s G1 Patrol left Siwa on 8 May and headed for the stretch of coastal road between Marble Arch and Sirte. They selected for the first attack an area about 20 miles north-west of Marble Arch and on the night of 14 May Timpson and six of his men concealed themselves by the side of the road with 25 bombs between them. The rest of the patrol remained in the vehicles, only 150 yards away, machine gunners behind their weapons and drivers behind their wheels, all ready for a rapid withdrawal if things didn’t go to plan.

  There was plenty of traffic on the road, but to Timpson’s chagrin the drivers blithely ignored the warning signs and carried on without slowing. Waiting for a lull in the traffic, the men pulled the barrier further out into the road so that drivers would be obliged to decelerate. They did, but only momentarily, giving the LRDG raiders only a brief window in which to emerge from the roadside and drop their lethal haversacks into the back of the trucks. Additionally, the tailgates of the enemy vehicles were higher than the ones that the LRDG had practised on and entailed throwing the haversacks rather than dropping them, adding precious seconds to their task. Eventually, by 0200 hours, Timpson had had enough and announced they were changing tactics. They would cruise the highway in their trucks and attack any lone targets. Timpson had travelled three miles when one of the tyres on his truck burst. The spare wheel was also found to have a puncture. It was not their night. By the time a fresh tyre had been obtained from another vehicle, dawn was nearly upon them, and Timpson led his men off the road and into Wadi Cahela. They breakfasted, slept, and then lunched. Timpson was just putting a spoonful of tinned peaches to his mouth when the sentry came tearing down the wadi. Enemy transport, he panted, following our tracks. ‘I ordered the gunners to stand to just as the enemy opened fire,’ recalled Timpson. George Matthews, a 25-year-old from Leicester who had joined the LRDG from the Coldstream Guards, clambered up on top of his truck to where his machine gun was positioned. He was killed by a bullet to his forehead. Timpson remembered the incoming fire as ‘brisk’, and said vital seconds were lost in responding to the enemy attack because of the c
amouflage nets that had to be dragged off their vehicles. Timpson scanned the wadi for signs of the enemy and saw several soldiers crawling across the desert floor 150 yards away. ‘They were attacking us from the top of the wadi and closing in on the hillsides around us,’ he said. ‘I felled one with a rifle as he approached with a bunch of others on the hillside.’7

  By the time Timpson had identified the enemy as Italian, the LRDG’s guns were in action. Their two Vickers ‘kept up a good steady patter’ and the double Browning ‘poured out streams of lead’, while Timpson and a couple of other men grabbed some hand grenades and readied themselves for an assault on their left. After 20 minutes the Italians began to pull back, and Timpson hurriedly ordered the three trucks at the bottom of the wadi – furthest away from the enemy – ‘to leave by our only remaining line of retreat, up a small subsidiary river bed’. The LRDG extracted themselves from the wadi without sustaining further casualties, and the only opposition they encountered was a section of Italians endeavouring to work their way round the rear of the British. A long burst from the Browning scattered them and G Patrol were out of the wadi and out of immediate danger. Nonetheless, Timpson appreciated they were still in grave danger. The main road was just a few hundred yards away and it was of course inevitable that the Italians had radioed for reinforcements, probably on the ground and in the air. ‘They would expect us to make off in a south-easterly direction,’ said Timpson. ‘We therefore set off towards the south-west, changing our course frequently in an attempt to lose our tracks, in very open formation and going as fast as we could.’

  ‘They would expect us to make off in a south-easterly direction. We therefore set off towards the south-west, changing our course frequently in an attempt to lose our tracks, in very open formation and going as fast as we could.’

  Alastair Timpson

  But on this occasion their luck was in. At breakneck speed they covered 65 miles without molestation and finally Timpson called a halt ‘among some small dunes and scrub in the middle of a large open plain’.8 They buried Matthews and marked the spot in anticipation of retrieving his body at a later stage.*

  Throughout the spring of 1942, General Auchinleck had come under increasing pressure from Winston Churchill to break the stalemate in the Western Desert. The British prime minister believed Malta was in danger of falling into German hands: something that, as he emphasized in a wire he sent to Auchinleck at the end of April, would be ‘a disaster of the first magnitude for the British Empire’. Auchinleck retorted that he must have more time to build up his reserves, but when Churchill was told a large convoy would sail for Malta during a moonless period in June he issued Auchinleck with an ultimatum: either launch an offensive against the Axis forces before the middle of June or be relieved of your command. But before Auchinleck had time to respond to the PM’s threats, Rommel launched his own offensive against the Allies’ left flank.

  Leading his troops in a right hook, Rommel’s intention was to sweep past the French garrison in Bir Hakim and attack the British behind the Gazala Line. While this audacious outflanking manoeuvre was performed, the Italian X and XXI Corps launched a diversionary frontal assault on the line. The fighting was intense and for three days the Axis and Allied armour fought while the First Free French Brigade offered heroic resistance at Bir Hakim. Rommel’s supply line was stretched perilously thin, so he pulled the Afrika Korps back and formed a defensive position called ‘The Cauldron’. The British advanced, confident that victory was within their grasp, with the Afrika Korps having lost nearly 200 of its 320 tanks in four days of fighting. But the 21st Panzer Division countered and the German anti-tank guns took a heavy toll on the British armour. Slowly Rommel began to gain the upper hand. On 10 June Bir Hakim was finally taken by the Germans, and three days later the British armour was decimated in what became known as ‘Black Saturday’. The Eighth Army pulled back from the Gazala Line and, in what was subsequently dubbed the ‘Gazala Gallop’, withdrew all the way to El Alamein. On 21 June Tobruk finally fell, along with 50,000 British and Commonwealth troops.

  The disastrous events had bitter consequences for the LRDG. They were forced to abandon Siwa, the oasis that had been one of their bases for more than a year. The rear party left the oasis on 28 June and established a new base at Fayoum, a town 62 miles south-west of Cairo. Nonetheless, reflected Timpson, every cloud has a silver lining. ‘Fayoum was healthier than Siwa and pleasantly close to Cairo, in fact one hour’s jeep ride away, as was frequently proved.’ Captain Richard ‘Doc’ Lawson was certainly relieved to evacuate Siwa; in the first three weeks of June he had recorded 26 cases of malaria among the LRDG, as well as an increase in the number of men suffering from lumbago and mysositis, muscle inflammation that can cause weakness and pain. This, he believed, was due ‘to the clothes soaking in sweat during the day and when the sun goes down and they go on driving, they cool off too rapidly’.9

  The arrival of Lawson in the LRDG led to a sharp improvement in the treatment of the sick and wounded. As he himself noted in writing a brief history of his role within the unit, ‘in the early stages it was difficult to persuade patrol commanders to take on an extra man to an already heavily loaded patrol’.10 Consequently, patrols embarked on operations miles behind enemy lines without any soldier possessing anything more than a basic knowledge of first aid. That complacent attitude underwent a fundamental shift in the course of the desert war, and Lawson wrote that ‘it was satisfying to find in the later stages that whoever else was left behind the orderlies were always sure of one of the coveted places in the patrol’.11 When he joined the unit one of his first innovations was ‘to build a truck which would carry all M.I. [medical inspection] room drugs and equipment above the standard load, i.e. 28 gallons of water and 16 jerrycans of petrol’. Acquiring a 15cwt Indian pattern Chevrolet, Lawson built the vehicle up to 4ft 6in. from the floor with wood and canvas, and an iron superstructure was added so that when on patrol its height was 4ft 9in. and when required as an M.I. room this increased to 6ft. ‘The floor area is 6 foot square,’ added Lawson, ‘and all drugs and equipment were fitted into solo padded boxes, keeping them firm while moving. When stationary these boxes could be unbolted and moved into permanent buildings.’12

  In the 15 months that Lawson served as the LRDG’s medical officer on combat operations in North Africa, from January 1942 to April 1943, he kept a detailed record of his work, noting that ‘the sickness rate was not high’. Gunshot wounds were also uncommon, with just 41 cases in 15 months, and almost entirely from aircraft and with the odd one a result of driving over a mine. ‘Bacillary dysentery, V.D., jaundice were rare and nearly always followed leave or coastal visits for supplies,’ he wrote. ‘There was no amoebic dysentery; malaria highest in May and June. Diphtheria was treacherous in that sore throats on patrol developed paresis [slight or partial paralysis] on return to camp or even on the next patrol.’13

  If malaria was at its most prevalent in the early summer, desert sores were most common in the autumn, the cases decreasing by Christmas, with only two requiring hospital treatment. Other afflictions suffered by the LRDG were mild conjunctivitis, as much due to wind as glare, and Lawson was surprised to discover that ‘athlete’s foot, heat exhaustion and sun stroke were rare … in spite of the fact that some men wore no caps and others balaclavas, the sun did not appear to affect them under normal working conditions’.14 As for the soldiers’ mental well-being, or ‘morale’, as Lawson termed it, he made the following personal observations:

  The unit was made up of picked men and officers, the majority of whom had a definite individual responsibility either in regard to their patrol, their truck, their gun or their speciality … For the most part the unit was away from other troops and away, except on leave, from the towns and their softening influence. The men were doing work of which they were proud and which was novel. Their badge and shoulder tabs gave them a distinction. These points contributed to form a loyal and contented unit, proud of itself and with the spirit
of an expedition. This was helped by the successful thoroughness with which the senior officers organised the work and rest periods. Arising from this, the sick rate was genuine and there was little neurosis and no malingering.15

  __________

  SIWA AT THE TIME OF THE MALARIA OUTBREAK

  Some photographs of Siwa Oasis in 1942. An outbreak of malaria struck down many men from the LRDG and the unit was pleased to withdraw following the Afrika Korps’ offensive in June that year. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  Paddy Allen wearing a cap comforter, the most popular form of headgear among the LRDG. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  The LRDG’s new base at Fayoum also had other advantages beside being more salubrious, explained Bill Kennedy Shaw, providing them with a ‘back door to the country behind Axis lines’. The back door was through the Qattara Depression, a remarkable natural feature 150 miles long, half as broad, and 450 feet below the Mediterranean at its deepest point. It was a pin-prick on the earth’s surface, but a crueller, more desolate spot would be hard to imagine, particularly at the height of the North African summer. ‘In the basin the heat is stifling,’ recorded Kennedy Shaw. ‘No hill gives shade, no tree breaks the monotony of the salt marshes. Drive your truck two yards from the beaten track and it will be sunk to its axles in the quicksands.’16