by Shaun Clarke
‘What was that?’ Steele asked sternly.
‘Nothing, boss! Please continue.’
‘Thank you, soldier, I will.’ Steele stared steadily at Jimbo for a moment, then shook his head in disgust and continued.
‘The first LRDG patrol, formed by Major, now Colonel, Bagnold, had two officers and thirty other ranks with eleven vehicles, each carrying a single machine-gun, supplemented by an early Bofors – a 37mm used as an anti-tank gun – and four Boyes anti-tank rifles. Those and subsequent patrols, including G1 and G2 from the Guards Brigade, spent last summer patrolling from this oasis and Kufra, and their experiences led to a number of fundamental developments in our techniques and roles. Our job was traffic surveillance on the Axis coast a good distance away from the main battle area. We also dropped and picked up agents for the Secret Service, recced terrain which the enemy might have to cross, and occasionally raided enemy transport convoys. Our new role is to be a taxi service for you lot.’
This encouraged cheers and jeers from the men, which Sergeant Lorrimer subdued by bawling: ‘Shut your mouths you lot and only speak when you’ve an intelligent question to ask!’ The laughter tailed off into helpless chuckling, then even that died away as they felt Lorrimer breathing down their necks.
‘So what were these changes in technique then?’ Jimbo asked to fill the ensuing silence.
‘They were related mainly to the size of patrols,’ Steele replied. ‘By that September we’d split the patrols into fifteen or eighteen-man teams led by an officer, with five vehicles. Our methods of crossing soft sand and navigating thousands of miles in featureless desert had improved, but they were still based on relatively simple ideas pioneered by Major Bagnold in Africa in the 1930s.’
‘Which were?’ Frankie Turner asked.
‘Bagnold developed the steel channel strips laid for vehicles to cross soft sand. In fact, he first did this in the Sinai Desert in 1926, where he used corrugated iron. By the early 1940s all vehicles carried such channels in the desert.’
‘Anything else?’ Taff Clayton asked, practically yawning.
‘Yes. As you probably know …’
‘Probably!’ Neil Moffatt called out from the back.
‘… it’s difficult to set up a prismatic compass in a motorized vehicle as you invariably get magnetic interference from tool-boxes and other movable metal parts.’
‘I was right,’ Moffatt crowed. ‘We all know that!’
‘Are you being funny, soldier?’ Lorrimer bellowed.
‘No, Sarge!’ Moffatt replied.
‘Then shut up and listen!’
Ignoring both of them, Steele continued: ‘To use a prismatic compass in a motorized vehicle, the navigator has to get out and walk far enough away to be clear of the car’s magnetic field. Even then, the compass can be an inaccurate guide – sometimes up to 400 yards out on a 20-mile march.
‘Doesn’t sound much to me,’ Taff Clayton said.
‘It’s equivalent to four and a half miles adrift after a 400-mile drive. I’d say that’s a lot.’
‘So what did old Bagnold do?’ Jimbo asked, blowing a cloud of smoke from his Woodbine.
‘Major Bagnold had his navigators use a sun compass with its horizontal disc marked off in degrees and a central needle casting a shadow – rather like a sundial. The graduated disc was mounted in the car, to be rotated as the sun moved across the sky; the needle’s shadow then fell to indicate the bearing on which the car was travelling. By reading the milometer, the navigator could work out his position along this bearing.’
‘You’ve got to hand it to the LRDG,’ Frankie said. ‘They sure as hell know their science!’
‘But even this method wasn’t infallible,’ Steele continued, refusing to be drawn into this unusual detachment’s verbal sparring which, so he had been informed by Stirling, was encouraged to bond the other ranks to the officers. Steele had his doubts, but was wisely keeping them to himself. ‘So each night,’ he continued, ‘the navigator would take star bearings to fix the car’s position.’
‘How?’ Sergeant Lorrimer asked in a perfectly normal tone of voice.
‘By calculating the longitude and latitude with the aid of a theodolite and astro-navigation tables.’
‘Very bright!’ Jimbo said.
‘Brighter than you are, soldier,’ Major Steele came straight back, getting into the swing of things. ‘Any more questions?’
‘How do the different patrols keep in touch?’
‘A sensible question from Sergeant Lorrimer,’ Steele teased, then turned serious again. ‘Each patrol has a radio truck with a No 11 set, which has a range of about 20 miles, and a separate set to pick up the BBC’s time signals.’
‘Here’s an intelligent question from the other ranks,’ Jimbo said. ‘What about communications in general from deep in the desert?’
Steele nodded, smiling. ‘It’s not bad. The radio operators are able to pick up Morse from a background slush of atmospherics when working at ranges beyond the normal operational limits of the No 11 set. Their radio links from patrols to the LRDG’s forward base and from the base to MEHQ in Cairo, and to the Eighth Army, are more tenuous. These operate on ground aerials at frequencies which mean that sometimes a patrol can’t contact base until it’s about 300 miles along its route. Our radio procedures, however, follow French civilian routines. Invariably, this makes those listening in think they’re hearing a commercial station in Turkey communicating with ships in the Levant. Certainly it appears to have deceived the German radio-interception services. Because of this, our operators are able to transmit for relatively long periods at night, over great distances, without being identified or interfered with.’
‘Water?’ someone asked sensibly.
‘I thought you heroes only drank beer,’ Steele responded.
‘We drink piss if we have to,’ Jimbo said, ‘but not if water’s available.’
Steele laughed, glancing at the grinning Stirling, then answered the question. ‘A gallon per man per day for all purposes, including the topping up of the individual’s vehicle. No shaving permitted.’
This last encouraged an outburst of cheering and clapping. When Steele had managed to coax the men back into silence, he said: ‘Once the briefing’s over, I’ll be taking you out and introducing you to the men designated as your “taxi drivers”. Treat them with respect. Like yourselves, the LRDG has suffered a number of losses recently. In January, a soldier formerly of the Egyptian Survey Department, and one of our most valuable men, was captured along with seven of his patrol. Y Patrol lost all its officers and G Patrol lost five trucks. In short, they’ve been through some hard times and don’t need too much ragging from you lot.’
‘I would appreciate it, men,’ Stirling interjected, ‘if you would take those particular remarks seriously. I want no nonsense between L Detachment and the LRDG. Those men deserve your respect.’
When Steele glanced at him, he smiled and nodded, indicating that his colleague should continue.
‘My men are more than mere taxi drivers,’ Steele said. ‘In fact, their job is to teach you everything they know about the desert – and since they’re mostly old hands who’ve been in the desert for years, both here and in Africa, they certainly know as much as anyone about the place – perhaps even as much as the Arabs. They’ve learnt to live hard, carrying the minimum amount of food and water, and to read the tracks of other men, vehicles and camels in what you might think is smooth sand. They can teach you all this and more.’
Sobered by these remarks, the men remained silent until Taff Clayton put his hand up and, at a nod from Steele, asked: ‘What do the various initials of the LRDG patrols stand for?’
‘When Bagnold was recruiting for the LRDG he first took on a large contingent of New Zealanders, followed by Rhodesians, then a bunch from the Guards Brigade, and, finally, from all over the place. He therefore divided them into lettered patrols: S Patrol for Southern Rhodesians, G Patrol for Guards, Y Patrol for Yeomanry, and so on. It’s as
simple as that.’
He glanced briefly at each of the men in turn, then asked, ‘Any more questions?’ Seeing only a sea of shaking heads, he checked his watch, then looked up again and said, ‘Right. Go and have a brew-up and be back here in exactly twenty minutes. By that time the vehicles will be here and you can commence your basic desert training.’ However, just before they were dismissed, Taff Clayton put up his hand again.
‘Yes?’ Steele asked.
‘According to what you’re telling us,’ Clayton said, ‘we seem to have an awful lot to learn. How much time do we have?’
‘Three days,’ Steele answered. ‘That just about gives you time for your brew-up, so you better go and get it.’
Taken aback by the tightness of the schedule, the men hurriedly filed out of the tent. When they had gone, the remaining officers – Steele, Stirling, Lewes, Callaghan and Greaves – gazed at one another in an uneasy silence that was finally broken by Steele.
‘Do you really think they can do it in three days?’ he asked, looking concerned.
‘They had better,’ Captain Stirling replied curtly. ‘If they don’t, we go anyway.’
He stood up and walked out.
8
What the men did not realize when they returned from their brew-up and smoko was that their three-day programme of training was going to take place in the desert, by day and by night, beginning the minute they climbed into the LRDG vehicles. These they found waiting for them in the scorching heat of noon when they returned from the relative shelter of the large mess tent. The vehicles were modified Chevrolet four-wheel-drive lorries armed with a Boyes anti-tank rifle fixed to the rear and a pintle-mounted Browning M1919 machine-gun operated by the steel-helmeted front passenger. They were covered in dust, badly battered and, in some cases, peppered with bullet holes.
‘Now you know what we’re in for,’ Jimbo confided to his mates. ‘A bleedin’ suicide mission!’
After being assigned their vehicles, the men were rekitted with clothes favoured by the LRDG for use in the desert: shirt, shorts, Arab headgear and special sandals. The headgear consisted of a black woollen agal, a small hat, and a shemagh, a shawl with tie thongs, which went around the head, flapped in the wind, kept the face cool, and also protected the nose and mouth in a sandstorm. Normal Army boots were useless because they filled up with sand, so they were replaced with a special kind of sandal, the Indian North-West Frontier chappli, originally chosen by Bagnold and obtained from the Palestine Police stores. Worn with rolled-down socks, the chappli was particularly tough and had a hole in the toe, enabling the wearer to kick out any sand that got in without having to stop when on the march. Also supplied were funnel-shaped leather gauntlets, which stopped sweat from running down the arms and onto the weapons.
Once dressed properly, they were then able to fix to their belts the obligatory holstered 9mm Browning High Power handgun and Fairburn-Sykes commando knife. They were then loaded up with a selection of larger weapons, including the Lee-Enfield .303-inch bolt-action rifle, the 9mm Sten sub-machine-gun, the heavier M1 Thompson sub-machine-gun, and two machine-guns: the Bren light machine-gun and the Browning 0.5-inch.
‘What the fuck do we need all these for?’ Jimbo asked, ‘if we’re only learning about desert survival?’
‘You’ll find out,’ Corporal Mick ‘Monkey’ Madson of the LRDG told him. ‘Now get back to the transport.’
After being led back to the modified Chevrolet lorries, the men were broken up into small groups of two or three and each group assigned to a vehicle. When they had placed their weapons on the back seats, piled up around the fixed tripod-mounted Boyes anti-tank rifles, they were given a thorough briefing on the unusual vehicles. These, apart from their bristling weapons, were also fitted with reinforced sand tyres, special filters, larger fans and radiators, wireless sets, sun compasses, sextants, sand shovels, jerrycans, water condensers, woven sand mats and steel sand channels, the latter two to be used when the vehicle became trapped in deep sand.
Once a cursory summary of the vehicle’s armaments had been dispensed – ‘cursory’ because Monkey knew that these men were familiar with such weapons – they were given a quick lesson in the use of the sun compass fixed to the vehicle’s bonnet and familiarized with the workings of the sextant. They were then shown how to improvise a simple compass by stretching a string from the bonnet up to a row of nails on top of the cabin – in the case of a Bedford QL four-wheel-drive lorry – or, in the case of the Chevrolets, to another string with hooks stretched taut between the side supports of what had been the windscreen.
‘Every hour,’ Monkey informed them, tugging lightly at the fixed line of cord, ‘you switch the string one notch along.’ He removed the knotted end of cord from one of the nails hooked, in this case, to the cord strung between the windscreen uprights, and looped it over the hook beside it. ‘The driver simply follows the line of the shadow created by the string and that keeps him in the right direction.’
The men were then shown how water could be conserved from the radiator. In this instance, when the water boiled, it was not lost through the overflow pipe, which had deliberately been blocked off to prevent this from happening. Instead, the steam from the boiling water was blown off into a can that was bolted to the running board and half filled with water. When the engine cooled, the trapped steam would condense and the topped-up water would be sucked back into the radiator.
‘If it works properly, without leaking,’ Monkey told them, ‘you can go the whole life of the truck without ever putting water in after the initial top-up.’
‘Pure bleedin’ genius,’ Taff, a car enthusiast, said in genuine admiration.
‘Right, men,’ Monkey said, grinning from ear to ear with pleasure at Taff’s remark. ‘Into your vehicles and let’s go.’
The men all piled into their respective Chevrolets and were driven out of the palm-fringed oasis into the vast, barren wastes of the desert. Immediately assailed by the ferocious heat, they were grateful for the wind created by the vehicles’ forward movement, even though this also created huge clouds of sand that threatened to choke them. Covering their faces with their shemaghs, they could keep the sand out of their mouths and nostrils, but that in turn made breathing difficult. Within minutes they were all sweating profusely and covered in a fine film of sand that stuck like slime to their sweat. Within half an hour most of them felt that they were in hell and some of them were already feeling nauseous.
After only an hour’s drive, Sergeant William ‘Wild Bill’ Monnery ordered all vehicles to stop and the drivers got out to check the tyres, let some air out lest they burst from heat, and make sure that there was no sand in the carburettors. They also checked the petrol, oil and water, adjusted the compasses, and checked all weapons for sand blockage.
The SAS passengers were obliged to do the same and most of them, to their dismay, found that their weapons already had sand in them and had to be cleaned. When it became clear that most of them were unable to clean their weapons properly because of the sand still blowing, the LRDG corporals showed them how to do it blind. A towel was thrown over the weapon resting on the man’s lap and the separate components were cleaned and reassembled beneath it. This process, which was frustrating and caused a lot of angry swearing, was repeated time and again until the SAS troopers got it right. And as they were soon to learn, with increasing despair, this tedious procedure was carried out every hour on the dot, greatly lengthening the time of the journey and causing a great deal of exhausting work.
Eventually, when the noon sun was almost directly overhead and the heat was truly ferocious, they stopped in the middle of what seemed like a boundless, barren wasteland, where they were told they would be making camp for the night. Shelters were raised by tying the top ends of waterproof ponchos to the protuberances of the vehicles and the bottom ends to small stakes in the ground. In some cases, where the men did not like the smell of petrol, they made similar shelters by using three-foot-long sticks as upri
ghts instead of a vehicle’s protuberances. In both cases, however, a groundsheet was spread out on the desert floor beneath the triangular poncho tent.
Exhausted already, covered in a fine layer of sweaty sand and burnt by the sun, the men crawled into their shelters with a great deal of relief, hoping to enjoy the shade as they ate a light lunch of sandwiches, known as ‘wads’, with hot tea and a cigarette.
Their pleasure was short-lived, as they were allowed only a thirty-minute break before being called back out into the blazing heat and informed by Wild Bill Monnery, with his grimly smiling fellow sergeant Lorrimer by his side, that they had to hump their heavy bergens onto their backs, pick up two small weapons – a rifle and a sub-machine-gun – and follow the two of them into the desert to learn navigation.
‘So why do we need the bergens and weapons?’ Neil Moffatt asked resentfully.
‘Because we’re simulating a real hike across the desert and that’s what you’ll be carrying.’
It was murder. They hiked for four hours and only stopped, about every hour, to learn one of the various methods of desert navigation. After being trained in the proper use of a compass and sextant, they were shown how to make an improvised compass by stroking a sewing needle in one direction against a piece of silk and suspending it in a loop of thread so that it pointed north; by laying the needle on a piece of paper or bark and floating it on water in a cup or mess tin; or by stropping a razor blade against the palm of the hand and, as with the sewing needle, suspending it from a piece of thread to let it point north.
By last light they had learnt that although in the featureless desert maps were fairly useless, they could get a sense of direction from a combination of marked oases and drawn contour lines. Whereas the marked oases gave a specific indication of direction, the contour lines showed changes in height which represented wadis, escarpments, particular areas known for their sand dunes, and the difference between convex and concave slopes, the latter being impossible to climb and so best avoided. They also learnt how to find local magnetic variations, when not recorded on a map, by pointing their compass at the North Star and noting the difference between the pointer and the indicated north. Lastly, while the sun was still up, they were shown how to ascertain direction by planting a three-foot upright in the desert floor, marking the tip of its shadow with a pebble or stick, marking the tip of the moving shadow fifteen minutes later, and joining the two with a line which would run from east to west, thus revealing north and south as well. This was known as the ‘shadow stick method’.
