Long Range Desert Group

by W B Kennedy Shaw

  Lack of rainfall and wind erosion—the climatic influences which, after thousands of years, have formed the desert landscape—have deprived it of recognisable landmarks by which one can find one’s way about and therefore a L.R.D.G. patrol had to be able to navigate as a sailor does at sea. Navigation and the teaching of navigators were my special concern and a subject to which, so it seemed, the Army had given no thought or training. Do not mistake navigation for map-reading. Map-reading is fully taught in the Army, but map-reading presupposes: maps and in Libya there was the rub. A map of the country in which L.R.D.G. worked would have delighted him who wrote :

  “I never see a map but I’m away

  On all the journeys that I long to do,

  Over the mountains which are marked in grey,

  Up all the rivers which are shown in blue,

  And into those white spaces where they say—

  Unknown.”3

  The country was divided into four classes :

  (1) A little, well mapped, all in Egypt.

  (2) A lot, badly mapped, all in Libya.

  (3) Some of which maps had been printed but with nothing on them.

  (4) Some of which no maps existed, at any rate not on a scale at which one could plot a course.

  In the beginning, for the country west of the Egyptian frontier, we had only the blank sheets printed for us at the Survey of Egypt or the reproductions of captured Italian maps. The former naturally had nothing on them; the latter far too much.

  The Italian maps of Libya must, I think, reflect the Italian national character in its aspects of bombast and self-assurance. There was no nonsense about the petty details of topography on these sheets. Many of them were obviously based on air observation (but not on air survey), and after a few flights across the country the cartographer had roughed in a range of mountains here and a sand sea or two there. The mountains were all high as became the dignity of Fascist Italy. Making our way anxiously towards an obviously impassable range of hills, we would find that we had driven over it without feeling the bump. But I have a certain grudging admiration for Captain Marchesi of the Instituto Geografico Militare, the equivalent of our Ordnance Survey, who made the 1/100,000 map of Jalo. Marchesi, I am sure, was a realist. Jalo, he felt, was a one-eyed hole of which no map was really needed. The sand was soft and the day hot, so why worry? Marchesi put his feet up on the mess table, shouted for another drink, and drew his map. It is just possible that the absurd inaccuracies were a deep plot to mislead our attacking forces, but it seems hardly likely that the Italians had thought of that as long ago as 1931.

  In time, after repeated journeys, we began to collect enough material to make our own maps. Map sheets conforming to the Egyptian 1/500,000 series now extend across Libya : look at the bottom of the sheet and on many of them you will find, below the “Compilation Diagram,” the words “Surveyed by L.R.D.G.” This became more true after Lazarus had joined us. Bagnold had applied for a Survey officer R.E. to be attached to L.R.D.G. and in the summer of 1941 he materialised in the form of Ken Lazarus, a Colonial Office surveyor in peace-time, who had been doing work for the gunners in East Africa and Abyssinia since the war began. There cannot be many instances of continued survey work behind the enemy lines in war-time. Lazarus with his small Survey Section of two or three cars would go out from Kufra or Siwa and return weeks later with enough material to add a new sheet to the maps of Libya which we were making for the Italians.

  Besides topography my other main job was Intelligence. The Concise Oxford Dictionary contains the definition “Intelligence Department, engaged in collecting information especially for military purposes.” At Middle East, in so far as Libya was concerned, the collection was not a very extensive one in the summer of 1940. It would seem elementary to have copies of all the standard works of reference, geographical journals, and military histories published by a country with which there was every chance of one shortly going to war, and also to have at least one copy of all the maps which that country had issued. But coming from Palestine to Cairo in July I could find at Middle East no copies of books which, as a matter of course, I had at home, and the Survey of Egypt were the only people who had a full set of maps. In two years’ time our Intelligence work in Libya, and particularly at the H.Q. of the Eighth Army, was probably as good as anywhere in the world, but at the beginning there seemed to have been a great lack of foresight and preparation.

  Nothing in the way of Intelligence interests the modern commander more than “going.” In the L.R.D.G. no question was asked us more often than “What’s the going like there?” To deal with this and other geographical problems there was created in 1941 a special section of the “I” branch at Middle East called G.S.I. (Topo.),4 which Stuart Menteith soon turned into a very efficient concern. In the inner desert and far into Libya most of his information came from L.R.D.G. For the areas nearer the coast he used other sources and by the end of 1941 had produced good coloured maps of all the country from Sirte to the Nile.

  Now there is no good reason that I know of why such maps should not have been printed long before the war for all the country east of the Libyan frontier. The Egyptians would not have prevented us. Who would? And even inside Libya much might have been done. There are several customary methods by which nations spy out each other’s territory in peace-time. Exploration and archæology are two of them, witness the survey of Southern Palestine made by Newcombe, Lawrence and Woolley in 1913 which provided Allenby with so much useful information. Missionaries, scientific research and tourism are others. The Italians themselves used all these against us in Arabia, Palestine and Abyssinia and they would have found it hard to object to a British Museum botanical expedition to central Cyrenaica or an investigation by the Royal Anthropological Institute of the skulls of the Arabs of Marmarica.

  But if the British had done little the Italians, with far greater opportunities, had done less. There are well over fifty thousand Italians in Egypt with whom they should have been able to organise a superb system of intelligence, yet their information about the Western Desert army was pitiful, and about our forces in the Sudan in 1940 even worse.

  Starting from scratch, in five weeks the L.R.D.G. had been created. I do not think that any one except Bagnold could have, achieved this. Some had the necessary knowledge of the Army, others the necessary experience of the desert, none had both. And what is more, I think no one had also the vision to see just what was needed for the job, backed by the driving power and the importunity to extract this from Middle East. Most of the people on the staff at G.H.Q. in Cairo with whom we had to deal were all out to help. But a few of them, accustomed to supplying the long-standardised wants of a peace-time army, found some of our requests difficult to understand. We asked, for example, for sandals while every one else wore boots; for an Egyptian shopkeeper’s whole stock of trouser-clips, because there was nothing else to be had for holding maps to map-boards; for Nautical Almanacs, yet we were not sailors; for 10-ton Diesel lorries, but we were not R.A.S.C.; for a 4.5 howitzer, usually given only to Gunners; for Arab head-dresses; for an apparently scandalous quantity of tyres (most Army vehicles ran on roads or passable tracks); for two aircraft; for a paraffin-worked refrigerator, to preserve the M.O.’s vaccjnes in the heat at Kufra.

  Moreover in those early days the Staff were not very desert—or distance-minded—some wag nicknamed them the Short Range Desert Group. Once we had occasion to seek some new theodolites to replace losses in action. The officer who controlled them was indignant. What on earth did we want theodolites for? Were we Sappers? He himself had made a march of twenty miles in the Sinai Desert and using a prismatic compass had been only four hundred yards out at the end of his “plot.” When we said that he would still have been five miles out at the end of four hundred he began to see the point.

  Three years later, looking back to 1940, one saw how sound Bagnold’s original conception had been. With a few minor changes the organisation had stood the test of time and battle. Tha
t was like Bagnold; he did not make many mistakes. In the words of an exasperated New Zealander, sternly bidden on a hot August afternoon to abandon the pretence that he had just checked the pressure of his tyres and to pump them up to 25 lbs. front and 39 rear—“The trouble with this joker is that he’s always——well right.”

  1 Light Repair Squadron R.A.O.C.

  2 See Appendix 5.

  3 In spite of diligent inquiry I have been unable to trace the author or the original version of these lines which I may have misquoted.

  4 General Staff Intelligence (Topographical).

  CHAPTER THREE

  FIRST SORTIES

  BY SEPTEMBER, 1940, L.R.D.G. was ready for action, and from that date until the fall of Tripoli in January, 1943, there were few occasions when at least one patrol was not out in the desert, usually far behind the enemy’s lines. As I have explained, L.R.D.G. was first formed to keep an eye on what the Italians were doing in the inner desert far south of the coast, and reconnaissance of one sort or another continued to be the most important part of our work. We could have risked, and sometimes did risk, a patrol in some desperate offensive action, but patrols took time to train and build up and to continue to do this would have entailed too heavy losses, working as we did with unarmoured cars and at such great distances from a base.

  What sort of a country was it, this Libya, the finest specimen in Mussolini’s collection of deserts, in which we were to spend most of the next three years?

  The Libyan Desert is roughly the same size as India, an area twelve hundred miles by a thousand, with two natural boundaries—the Nile on the east and the Mediterranean on the north, and two artificial ones—the beginning of the sub-desert country of the Sudan in about latitude 16° and the Tibesti Mountains on the south, and the political frontier of Libya on the west. The northern half, down to about latitude 26°, is limestone and the southern half sandstone. Above the generally flat desert surface rise the plateau of the Gilf Kebir, the six thousand foot massif of Gebel ’Uweinat and the rough basalts of Gebel Soda and the Harug el Aswad. Huge areas are covered by sand seas—those called Egyptian, Kalansho, Rebiana and Murzuk, the first about the size of Ireland and all normally regarded as impassable to cars.

  Enough rain falls each year to make a fairly fertile coastal strip, twenty miles wide in Tripolitania and in the Gebel Akhdar and narrowing to a mile or two at ’Agheila and ’Alamein. Over the rest of the desert no rain falls except an occasional local thunderstorm once every ten or twenty years. Scattered over it are a number of oases, fed by artesian water, ranging from poverty-stricken hollows like Zella or Tazerbo to the magnificent date-groves of Dakhla and Siwa. The population is confined to the oases and the coastal strip, at an average density of about one man to the square mile, and is mostly Arab in the north and mixed Arab and negro in the south.

  The sun shines on most days, shrivelling you to a cinder in summer and putting but little warmth into the winter winds. The temperature may reach 120°F. in the shade in June and fall a degree or two below freezing in winter. A country which recalls the Arab saying, “When God made the Sudan he laughed.”

  That is a dull, text-book description of the Libyan Desert which will not, I fear, give the reader that picture of the desert which I should like to put into his mind. I cannot describe the desert effectively in words; photographs show flatly and without contrast no more than a fraction of its immensity, and I have met only one artist who could paint its shapes and colours.

  There are really two deserts in Libya, or one semi-desert and one real desert. The former is the narrow strip along the Mediterannean where the Eighth Army fought and sweated and shivered; where the wheels of a hundred thousand vehicles had churned the clay surface to a fine powder which relentlessly made its way into eyes, nose, mouth, hair, food, engines and guns; where swarms of flies made life a burden. Early in the war this strip came to be called the Western Desert—inaccurately, for the western desert of Egypt is all the country west of the Nile, but the name stuck and cannot be changed now. Most men who fought there hated it and will carry that hatred all their lives.

  But not one man in a thousand had been fifty miles south of the coast into the real desert in which L.R.D.G. operated and which, to make this story plain, should have some distinctive name of its own—The Wilderness, The Solitude, The Waste. The desert, as Dan said of the sea, is all right in the middle : the edges are the sorrowful parts.

  Although in it one saw Nature at her hardest, yet it was a country which many of us, I think, in time began to love. Its attraction for me was that it was so clean. Clean of people, and there are many dirty ones, in every sense of the word, in the Middle East : clean of flies : clean sand instead of clay or limestone dust. Also because it was quiet, at times so silent that you found yourself listening for something to hear. And it was beautiful too, not at midday when the hills look flat and lifeless, but in the early morning or late evening when they throw cool, dark shadows and the low sun makes you marvel at the splendid symmetry of the yellow dunes. A psychologist would say, perhaps, that to take pleasure in deserts is a form of escapism, a surrender to the same impulses which made hermits of the early Christians, a refusal to face the unpleasant realities of modern life. He may be right; there are a lot of things in this life worth escaping from, even if only for half an hour at the end of the day’s run of an L.R.D.G. patrol.

  I have read nothing that conveys better the pleasant feeling of isolation which the real desert induces than the words of my friend, Douglas Newbold, written in an account1 of his explorations in the southern Libyan desert in 1923 :

  “The knowledge that there were no human beings save vagrant shepherds within several days’ march, and that these rocky uplands were as untrodden as the craters of the moon produced a feeling of remoteness from human affairs, such as has inspired the climbers of peaks … to endless flights of fancy. There is no better description of the sensation than the few words in stiff Latin of Professor Conrad Gesner who, led to mountaineering in the middle of the XVIth century by his study of mountain vegetation, wrote :

  “‘Nihil hie auribus molestum esse potest, nihil importunum, nulli tumultus aut strepitus urbani, nullae hominum rixae. Hie in profundo et religioso quodam silentio ex prealtis montium jugis ipsam fere celestium si quae est orbium harmoniam exaudire tibi videberis.’”

  I think it is difficult for any one who lives in an European climate and who has never seen a real desert to form a picture of just what it is like. It may help to realise that in a country where rain never falls there are none of those things which are directly attributable to rain—streams, lakes, hedges, woods, crops, river-valleys—nor any of those which are indirectly the consequence of it—roads, villages, towns, railways, canals. The result of thousands of years of this sort of climate has been to produce a landscape in which cars can move in most directions at will, restricted only to a relatively small degree by escarpments and sand seas.

  But Libya had not always been like this. Ten thousand years ago the climate was kinder, there was more rain and men lived in what is now desert, hunting ostrich and antelope and keeping milk cattle. Often we found traces of them—paintings and engravings on the rocks and stone implements at their camping places. Then the climate began to change, the rainfall failed and the desert people moved in to the oases or the Nile Valley. There must be many places which we passed through on L.R.D.G. journeys where no man had been for five thousand years.

  Clayton was the first to cross the Libyan frontier. It was known that all the supplies for the garrisons at Kufra and ’Uweinat went down from Jalo and he wanted to get on to the track and see something of the traffic. Instead of crossing the Sand Sea from ’Ain Dalla he decided to go from Siwa to Two Hills. This route leads through some of the worst of the Sea but Clayton knew it well from his surveys south of Siwa and from the days when he was demarcating the international boundary in 1929. So he went to Siwa by way of Matruh, arriving incognito as “Captain Smith.” The Italians were
then in Jaghbub and if they had heard that Clayton who, as their Intelligence ought to have told them, was believed to be in Tanganyika, was actually in Siwa, they might well have started adding two and two together. But Siwa knew Clayton as well as Clayton knew Siwa and I doubt if the incognito deceived any one.

  At Siwa he borrowed six trucks of the Egyptian Frontiers Administration to help as petrol carriers for the first part of the journey. The Sudanese crews were happy to get a trip into the desert and worked like blacks (which they were) in “unsticking” the cars in the next few days. The precise point on the map at which they turned back to Siwa is not recorded and they may, or may not, have been the only Egyptian Army troops to operate in Italian territory during the war.

  By August nth Clayton had crossed the Sand Sea to Two Hills and, pushing into unexplored country, was making discoveries that were to be of great use to us later on.

  For a hundred miles westwards from the edge of the Egyptian Sand Sea stretches a level gravel plain of excellent going. Having crossed this Clayton found himself in another Sea of which we had never heard. The Italians may have known of it but they never troubled to show it on their maps and certainly had never crossed it. All day on the 12th Clayton’s party forced their way through these new sands, over range after range of complicated dune lines with unpleasant cross-dunes in the valleys. By evening they were near the western edge along which runs the Jalo-Kufra route and here for three days in the hottest weather of 1940 they kept a 24-hour watch.

  Why they saw nothing we only learned some time later. The beaconed route with tall iron posts at every kilometre does run along the edge of the sands, but when continued use cut up the gravel surface and made it soft the Italians had gradually abandoned this and started to use a line farther and farther west and as much as twenty miles from the beacons. But though he saw no traffic the discoveries of this reconnaissance were some of the most useful that L.R.D.G. ever made. For many months afterwards, coming from both Cairo and Siwa, we used this route across the gravel plain guarded by the horseshoe of sands to the north. Across it we used to pass between Siwa and Kufra in 1941; over it ran the Kufra-Siwa air route with its chain of landing grounds and emergency dumps of water; in 1942 Easonsmith’s raid on Barce and Mayne’s attacks against the enemy’s lines of communication before ’Alamein profited by this knowledge.