The Long Range Desert Group in World War II

by Gavin Mortimer

  Corporal Alf Curle was one of the men captured by the Germans in October 1943 when the LRDG landed on the Aegean island of Kalymnos. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  On the evening of 16 November, Lieutenant Colonel Guy Prendergast, having ascertained that there were no more LRDG personnel at Porto Largo, trekked to the top of Monte Scumbarda to check on a section he knew to be there. But the only man he found when he arrived at midnight was Private Lennox, who explained the rest of the patrol had vanished while had had reconnoitred a stretch of coastline. Prendergast and Lennox filled two rucksacks with rations and water, but just as they were leaving a band of Italian soldiers arrived. They were agitated and annoyed, their officer telling Prendergast ‘the British had let them down and he was proposing to hand us over to the Germans’. Prendergast suspected the Italians had been drinking, and it was certainly not difficult to escape a couple of hours later. They hiked through the mountains and the next day, 17 November, stumbled upon a cave containing Captain Dick Croucher and Ron Tinker, another desert veteran, and three other LRDG men. ‘For the next three days our routine was very monotonous,’ remembered Prendergast. ‘By day we lay, with stomachs rumbling, in the cave and waited for the next meal. By night we tried to sleep on the rocky shore and shivered in our inadequate clothing. We saw many German craft chuffing slowly round the coast, looking for escapees.’25

  Some of S Patrol’s officers, including (left to right) John Olivey, Gus Holliman and Stan Eastwood. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  The Germans failed to spot Prendergast and his party but by the morning of 20 November the British soldiers were beginning to wonder if they would ever get off the island. They were also nearly out of rations, and so Prendergast decided that, as the only member of the party with rubber-soled boots, he would creep down to Serocampo Bay and see if he could pilfer some rations, and perhaps a small boat. He left the cave at dusk, and approached the bay without incident. ‘I walked through the small village of Serocampo and could see that one of the houses was occupied by Germans as they had two jeeps there and were singing and playing an accordion,’ he recalled.26 Many of the other houses were deserted, but eventually Prendergast found one occupied by a local family, who opened the door to him but were nonetheless clearly scared by his presence with the Germans in such close proximity. Despite their fear, like all islanders in the Aegean, the family were fiercely anti-German, and having fed Prendergast, the man of the house ‘agreed next day to patch one of the boats and to leave it at the water’s edge with oars and a rudder’.

  Prendergast returned to the cave and explained that, all being well, they would soon be off Leros. But the next night, 21 November, when Prendergast and the six others arrived at Serocampo Bay the wind was up and the sea rough. None of them rated their chances of crossing several miles of water in such conditions. Then, ‘about midnight [we] heard a craft approaching the coast,’ recounted Prendergast. They could just make out its shape through the darkness. ‘We decided to risk everything and flash our torch,’ said Prendergast. It was a moment of extreme tension for the seven men, ‘as we did not know whether we should be greeted with a hail of bullets or whether we should be taken off’.27

  On board the craft the atmosphere was also strained. Sergeant George Miller of the SBS had left Bodrum on the Turkish coast at 2145 hours with orders from Major George Jellicoe, his commanding officer, to scour the coastline for stragglers. Miller and the Royal Navy personnel on board the caique saw the signal, a series of Ns. It wasn’t on the list of expected signals, and they suspected it was a German trap. The naval captain was all for withdrawing. Miller had a nagging doubt. What if? Miller, a south Londoner and one of the coolest operators in the SBS, persuaded the commander to let him take a dinghy in so he could be sure. He knew the risks. If he wasn’t back in a few minutes, then they should get the hell out.

  Miller climbed into the dinghy and started to row towards the signal. The man holding the torch, Prendergast, suddenly spotted a small boat ‘and the occupant hailed us’. They were too far to make out what he was saying, so Prendergast cupped his hands and shouted their names. ‘After a lot of hesitation he came in closely and eventually came right up to us.’28 Miller introduced himself, and invited the first two men into the dinghy.

  C HAPTER 15

  A DIFFERENT TYPE OF WARFARE

  Any hopes Guy Prendergast entertained of resuming command of the Long Range Desert Group in the wake of the debacle on Leros were soon dashed. He returned to England in early 1944 where he joined the staff of the Special Air Service Brigade as they began preparations for the invasion of France. No matter that the LRDG could have done with Prendergast’s calm, efficient leadership as they counted the cost of their autumn in the Aegean. As well as the men killed or captured on Leros, the LRDG had lost 43 men on the island of Levitha, many of them New Zealanders. The LRDG had landed on the island – 20 miles south-west of Leros – to round up what they believed to be a small force of German sailors who had swum ashore after their ship was sunk. In fact the sailors had managed to send a message to German HQ in Kos requesting assistance, and a large force of Gebirgsjäger, the crack mountain troops who had as their cap insignia the white edelweiss, were sent to collect the sailors.

  Captain Stan Eastwood and his patrol spent the autumn of 1944 in Albania ‘chasing the enemy where he could’. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  Jim Patch was one of the men who landed on Levitha under the impression that it was simply a matter of detaining a few bedraggled and unarmed sailors. ‘As we were crossing the open ground, we came round some sort of bend, and we were confronted by a German machine gun,’ remembered Patch.1 ‘We didn’t try and get up to anything desperate, to do so would have been suicidal. So we gave up.’ Patch’s friend, Ron Hill, was on the other side of the island when he was confronted by the reality of the situation. ‘I turned and found myself looking down the barrel of a German machine gun,’ he said. ‘I froze. My terror at that moment can only be described by the old clichés – my blood ran cold, my knees turned to water, the hairs on the back of my head bristled.’ Hill was convinced he was going to be shot, but instead the German ‘motioned me away from the cliff edge to join the others who, with their hands above their heads, were being searched by their captors. I let out a long, long breath of relief and thanked the powers that be for the Geneva Convention.’2

  Patch, Hill and nearly all of the 50-strong LRDG group were taken prisoner, to the fury of the New Zealand government. ‘[We] are greatly disturbed over events in the Dodecanese Islands,’ they cabled their British counterparts subsequently. ‘His Majesty’s government in New Zealand wish to observe that they were never consulted as to the use of their troops in this connexion nor, they are advised, was their Commanding Officer [General Freyberg] in the Middle East advised until the men had actually landed.’3 The upshot was that on 29 December 1943, A Squadron, the Kiwi squadron, was withdrawn from the Long Range Desert Group.

  The man responsible for steering the LRDG through this diplomatic mess was David Lloyd Owen. He had spent November in Cairo at the insistence of Jake Easonsmith, who had ordered his second-in-command to return to the Egyptian capital ‘to collect more recruits and to start a training organisation for them’. Easonsmith was already 43 men down at this point because of the Levitha fiasco, and Lloyd Owen sensed that his CO foresaw a disaster of even greater proportions on Leros. When they parted, Lloyd Owen had a premonition that he wouldn’t see Easonsmith again. Did he, too? Easonsmith ‘talked about home, and about his family, to whom he was devoted’, recalled Lloyd Owen.

  Now that Easonsmith was dead, Lloyd Owen was more determined than ever that the LRDG would survive. In a reorganization of the squadron, Lloyd Owen – recently promoted to lieutenant colonel – appointed Major Ken Lazarus commanding officer of the Rhodesian A Squadron, with Major Stormonth Darling assuming command of the British B Squadron. Each squadron comprised eight patrols of one officer and ten men, with a sig
naller, medical orderly and trained navigator included. It was also decided ‘to give up the all black beret for the beige type which Raiding Forces were going to adopt’, the colour chosen by David Stirling for the SAS in 1941.

  There was the problem of filling the ranks of the LRDG after the loss of so many men in the Aegean, and then of training them to operational standards. Lloyd Owen’s greatest concern, however, was whether the LRDG still had a role to play in the war against Germany. Embedded with the unit at this time was Captain Stuart Manning, described in contemporary reports as a ‘Southern Rhodesia official observer’, who came from the South African public relations department. He commented that

  for five months some of the senior officers of the unit added steadily to their collection of grey hairs in trying to establish a properly appreciated niche for the LRDG. It seemed that few at GHQ (Middle East) could achieve a clear-cut picture, as was essential, of the proper functions of such a unit. But Lloyd Owen and others worked with extraordinary diligence and even more praiseworthy tact to create the right impression in the right places of how the LRDG should be allowed to function.4

  A member of the Rhodesian Patrol pedal-charging radio batteries during a shipping watch on one of the Dalmatian islands. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  By February 1944 Lloyd Owen had moved the LRDG to Syria, where they underwent mountain training, and also attended a close combat school in Jerusalem. One of the Rhodesian officers, Lieutenant Cecil ‘Jacko’ Jackson, recalled that the ‘chief instructor of the school was an American who had been training the FBI in how to use pistols and Tommy guns’.5 The man in charge of physical training was Oscar Heidenstam, one of the pioneers of body-building, or what was known in the 1930s as ‘Physical Excellence’. Heidenstam had been crowned Mr Great Britain in 1937 and seven years later he was still in formidable condition as he whipped the LRDG into shape. ‘We started the day with an hour of PT to loosen up,’ recalled Jackson. ‘Then breakfast, after which we had small arms instruction, followed by more PT, including holds and bare-hand strikes. After a light lunch there was more PT followed by firing practice at the end of the day.’6 The culmination of all their instruction was a test of what they had learned in a specially adapted house. Inside, remembered Jackson, were ‘a series of rooms rigged out with dummies which leapt up from chairs and beds, and out of corners when the door was opened, or we trod on a certain part of the floor’.7

  As his men honed their skills in Jerusalem, Lloyd Owen flew to Italy at the end of February where he spent a week discussing the possibility of LRDG operations in Italy in Field Marshal Alexander’s headquarters. Soon the unit was moving into new quarters in Rodi, on the Gargano Peninsula, or as the soldiers liked to call it, the top of the spur on the Italian boot.

  Jackson and Scott clean their teeth while a comrade checks the wheel of their vehicle. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  But the move failed to usher in a new phase of dynamism for the LRDG. Lloyd Owen continued to shuttle back and forth between Rodi and AAI (Allied Armies in Italy) HQ at Caserta, mooting plans of his own and listening to those of others. Captain Manning, the Rhodesian observer attached to the unit, articulated the frustration felt by Lloyd Owen during this period of inertia. ‘It would seem natural to believe that special forces needed special understanding and treatment for the sake of efficiency,’ he wrote.

  But it is not cynical to realise that such a happy state of affairs is a difficult thing to achieve under army regulations and drill. But as in the desert the LRDG worked on the unexpressed assumption that to achieve something, something had to be attempted, so now they believed that one got nothing they didn’t ask for. They asked, and asked again.8

  The LRDG HQ was established here in Rodi in early 1944 in readiness for operations in Italy. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)

  Lloyd Owen compiled a report on the skills of the LRDG, a CV of sorts, intended to sell the unit to the top brass. ‘All operational and other essential personnel are trained parachutists,’ he wrote.

  They have also been trained to operate by sea in small boats landed from bigger craft. A large number of men have been trained on skis, and are capable of existing in snow conditions. Patrols are capable of walking distances of up to 100 miles and being self-contained in supplies for 10 days when on foot and can maintain communication to their HQ. All ranks are trained in demolition and a number of men have been trained in handling mules.9

  Eventually their persistence paid off, and on 7 May 1944 it was agreed that Ken Lazarus’s A Squadron, the Rhodesians, would be loaned to Force 266, the Allied organization encompassing the SBS, SOE (Special Operations Executive) and OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the SOE’s US equivalent) then at work in the Balkans. By now Manning had spent several months with the LRDG and he was struck by the calibre of the men who served. ‘If a man did not “fit” he went,’ he wrote. ‘That original rigid discipline, born and matured in the desert, reinforced by the bufferings on Leros, was very much alive. In the atmosphere of that code no man ever left a compass behind, or ran out of water, or got lost. Whatever happened, nothing could be due to carelessness.’10

  Six months after the Leros shambles, the LRDG returned to action on 16 May 1944 when Captain Stan Eastwood and four men (including the irrepressible Gunner Edwards) were ordered to Corfu, the 35-mile-long island just off the Albanian coast garrisoned by more than 2,000 enemy troops. Their task was to gather intelligence on an enemy radar station believed to be on the island with the help of a Greek agent. They came ashore in a rowing boat and spent the first 24 hours observing the countryside while the agent went off in search of the radar station. Having located its whereabouts, the agent returned to the LRDG hideout and next day set off again for the station accompanied by one of the LRDG soldiers, Private Marc, who like the agent was dressed as a local.

  Once at the radar station, Marc not only made several rough sketches of it, but ‘he even endeavoured to enter the enemy camp by pretending to sell fish but was forcibly ejected by a sentry’. Their mission accomplished, the LRDG men returned safely and provided Force 266 with ‘very detailed information which included suitable landing places and routes to the target for Commando raiders at a later date’.11

  At the same time that Eastwood was reconnoitring Corfu, events were occurring in Italy that would have significant repercussions for the LRDG. On 18 May the Allies finally seized Monte Cassino after five months of bitter fighting. The Germans withdrew from the Gustav Line, the defensive position that crossed the Italian peninsula from Garigliano in the west through Cassino and then to Sangro in the east. On 23 May the US VI Corps broke out of the Anzio beachhead and suddenly the Americans, as well as the Eighth Army, began advancing rapidly north after months of bitter and bloody stalemate. As the Allies pushed north, the LRDG were asked to insert four patrols by parachute on the nights of 11 and 12 June to obtain intelligence about enemy traffic on roads north of Rome.

  The first two patrols from B Squadron to insert were those of lieutenants John Bramley* and Simon Fleming. Fleming was an Irishman, from County Down, who had come to the LRDG from the Royal Artillery at the end of 1943. Lloyd Owen appreciated his ‘glorious sense of humour’ and his ‘carefree attitude to life’. En route to Italy from the Middle East, the LRDG stopped one night at a transit camp at Port Tewfik, on the southern boundary of the Suez Canal. The unit was confined to barracks that evening ahead of its morning sailing to Italy, but Fleming and a couple of others slipped out of camp for one last spree. He was eventually tracked down to a hotel where he was coaxed down from a bar counter in the middle of a demonstration to a group of delighted naval officers of how not to do a parachute roll.

  These LRDG men don’t look too enthusiastic about jumping from this training tower. (Courtesy of Jack Valenti)

  The drop zone (DZ) for Fleming and his eight men in M2 Patrol was Montepulciano, approximately 35 miles west of Perugia in Italy. Once on the ground, they were to gather intelligence
on German troop movements during the Allied advance and then make their own way south through enemy lines. It was a challenging operation from the moment they took off from Foggia, and the mission became even more onerous when Fleming vanished during the drop. The seven other men searched for their officer as long as they could, but time was of the essence and they had to get away from the DZ as quickly as possible.† But it was already too late. There was a shout and suddenly ‘there was a hail of bullets flying around our ears’. The LRDG dived for cover among the long stalks of corn, but four were soon in German hands. Three managed to escape, wriggling their way through the cornfield into the trees and, eventually, Allied lines.

  Two days after Fleming’s patrol had left Foggia, it was the turn of another LRDG stick to drop into occupied Italy. M1 Patrol, led by Captain Ashley Greenwood, took off at 0130 hours on 14 June with instructions to obtain information on roads and tracks, enemy troop movements and types of transport. One of the men with Greenwood was Vincent Murphy, known to his pals as ‘Spud’. A former Coldstream Guardsman, Murphy was a skilled navigator who had been with the LRDG in the desert. He was also one of the most popular men in the unit, ‘a cornerstone of reliable strength in all conditions’.12 Murphy wrote a diary of the mission, which began with a description of their area of operations. ‘We would operate at a place named Lama, a small village in Italy … 50 or 60 miles behind the German front line,’ he related. ‘The plan was to be dropped at a spot three miles outside the village and near to a wood in which we hoped to establish our rendezvous.’13