by Sadler, John
Nibbling at the Flanks
As these titanic struggles were breaking along the North African coastal battlefield, the deep desert, still shunned by regular forces, largely remained LRDG’s private hunting ground. On 1st October the whole unit had been placed under the direct command of Eighth Army and its CO, General Cunningham. The role of Bagnold’s buccaneers was defined as:
Gaining intelligence as to enemy movements along main highways and to observe how Rommel reacted to Allied moves;
To provide data on terrain, (suitability for movement of armoured vehicles etc);
Biffing the enemy and beat ups generally, though offensive action should not prejudice intelligence gathering;
Glean tactical information and relay this as quickly as possible, even at the risk of compromising wireless security.3
Siwa, from November, became LRDG’s base of operations. This was much closer to the action, often uncomfortably so, being well within range of Axis bombers. These were more irritating than dangerous, but it was realised that patrols, typically comprised of one 15-cwt car and ten 30-cwts, were too large and unwieldy. They were already being split into two parties for operations. The lighter trucks were beginning to become something of an anachronism, exacerbated by frequent mechanical failures.
Now the existing patrol structure would be split into two, each with six 30-cwt vehicles. LRDG thus doubled its effective strength for a limited increase in manpower and resources, though much extra gear was, of course, needed. All patrols were now designated, say, G1 and G2, S1 and S2, etc. By the end of October, LRDG had been primarily concentrated at Siwa, keeping only a residual presence further south at Kufra. At Siwa: HQ ‘A’ Squadron with R1, R2, T1 and T2 Patrols. At Kufra: HQ ‘B’ Squadron with G1, G2, S1, S2, Y1 and Y2 Patrols. As the ‘Crusader’ offensive opened, the whole strength was moved up to Siwa.
Nearly all, that is: S1 and S2 were out on missions. The former, commanded by Holliman, was to beat up enemy traffic on the road from Hon to Misurata and, if the hunting there proved sparse, could have a crack at the coast road. When they reached their primary target zone, they initially had to corral some local workers before scoring their first success, taking out a heavy Italian lorry and crew. Having laid mines, they moved on towards the coast, destroying the captured truck en route.
Holliman selected a roadhouse halt as his next suitable target, but in the fog of war a friendly fire incident resulted in one of his troopers taking a round in the shoulder. His prisoners were duly brought back to Siwa and interrogated. Major Wilson, in his spymaster role, carried out the questioning, mixing threats with ample doses of restorative gin. This mix seemed to work and one of the captives, a pilot, blurted out that the ‘jinking’ manoeuvres all LRDG vehicles adopted when being strafed made them very difficult targets – useful information by any standard.4
S2 had a rather different assignment at this time, a classic exercise in disinformation. The patrol was to plant a fake Eighth Army map in the vicinity of Jalo (then held by the Italians), to suggest an imminent attack developing from an east-west axis, targeting the oasis. The incriminating evidence was cleverly, almost, hidden at a waterhole at El Aseila. The ruse worked – when Brigadier Reid’s force took Jalo, the dummy map had been pasted onto the overall scheme for the area. Bait taken!5
As the high drama of ‘Crusader’ began to unfold, LRDG’s role was clarified as primarily focusing on road watch plus supporting Brigadier Reid’s mobile column, as the need should arise.6 Reid commanded Force E, a mixed all-arms unit with some armoured cars in support. Jake Easonsmith also provided a taxi and guiding service for an SAS detachment under Stirling, the first meeting between Stirling and the LRDG, and from it resulted the very successful combination of the two forces.7 Tony Hunter did the same for Hasledon and a team of his spooks. Road watch continued much as before, grinding, unglamorous, often dangerous and always vital. What was new was that the wearing of Arab headdress was discarded. The gear had proved generally satisfactory for patrol work but was always a dead giveaway in terms of disguise.8 No Axis unit sported this type of casually exotic headwear!
Having safely guided Hasledon, Hunter resumed road watch northwest of Mekili, splitting his patrol into three teams of watchers. The weather was vile and the watch, besides being uncomfortable, yielded little intelligence. On 23rd November, Corporal Porter, who’d been one of those watching, went missing. Hunter went out to search for him with two troopers, Kendall and McIver. The trio ran into a score of Italians, beefed up with a 20-mm Breda. Hunter sent his own truck, the Bofors-carrier, back to alert the camp while his small group kept up the unequal fight. Lieutenant Freyberg wisely gathered in the patrol and led them clear of the area. When Dick Croucher, who’d been sent out to complete Hunter’s original mission and collect Hasledon reached the RV, he found Hunter there; he’d managed to avoid capture.9
Easonsmith’s mission with the SAS was to pick up Stirling’s men after a parachute-borne raid on two aerodromes at Tmimi. This was very early days for the SAS and air drops were not destined to be fruitful. The men were very widely dispersed and when Jake Easonsmith brought in all he could find – returning to Siwa on 26th November – he could only account for 21 of the 55 troopers who’d set out. The attack had been a costly waste.
The varying fortunes of the main offensive brought about a switch of gears for LRDG. From 24th November they were ordered to act with the utmost vigour offensively against any enemy targets or communications within reach; game on for beat-ups. Despite their mastery of the many facets of travelling over desert terrain, even pros like David Lloyd Owen could still get caught out. The more cultivated nature of ground in Cyrenaica, closer to the coast, proved unexpectedly hazardous at times. Lloyd Owen mistook mudflats for fields, the trucks racing over like an LRDG derby until the gut-wrenching moment they nose-dived into soft, stinking slime: Mickey was laughing so much when he saw the round little figure of Titch Cave hurled over the top of our truck that he himself was too slow to avoid the cause of it all.10 It took six hours in the very near proximity of the enemy to laboriously unload the bogged trucks and dig them free! After a very short while, it stopped being funny at all.
Prendergast let slip the dogs of war with gusto. Y1 & Y2 would concentrate on the Gazala-Derna-Mekili section, G1 & G2, would watch, wait and pounce along the Benghazi–Jedabia Road, while S2 & R2 were to keep an eye on the highway linking Marsus-Barce-Benghazi. Franks Simms with YI suffered a very poor beginning, their wireless truck being shot up by ‘friendly-fire’ from Desert Air Force, always a risk when operating so far behind enemy lines.11
This nasty near miss led LRDG to devise a form of Heath Robinson recognition panel, a plywood circle around eighteen inches in diameter, RAF roundel on one side Swastika on the other. The disc was attached to a five-foot pole and could be laid on the vehicle bonnet – right side up for whoever was prowling the skies above.12 Aircraft were the enemy to be feared. Ground patrols could be outfought or outrun. Obviously, LRDG had tactics for avoiding hostile planes, but the desert is a bad place to hide at times. You can’t outrun a Messerschmitt, and the trucks, laden with fuel and ammo, provided a nice, fat and satisfying target.
Vehicle identification was never entirely easy as both sides used captured transport. After the numerous retreats from France, Greece and Crete, the Axis had a fairly good store of Allied equipment. Lloyd Owen, patrolling in the cold light of a winter’s dawn, suddenly noticed that Brian Springfield – never at his most cheerful at that hour… was looking rather more alert than usual. The watcher had spotted movement. Titch Cave lined up the handles of his Vickers. The vehicle was identified as a 15-cwt truck but was it theirs or ours? Titch was all for ‘brassing-up’, sure they must be hostile. Lloyd Owen was more curious, and besides the truck was useful plunder. The occupants were in fact Italians who threw up their hands when challenged. They were on their way to a spot of leave in Derna. The LRDG comics informed them that they wouldn’t be going there after all but to Cairo i
nstead; the one who spoke the best English thought this a splendid idea, as he had, he said, always wanted to see Cairo!13
After some empty-handed patrolling, Y1 got lucky on 2nd December, shooting up a transport park and accounting for more than a dozen vehicles. Although LRDG lost none killed or wounded in this action Lance-Corporal Carr went missing. Like others, he was determined not to surrender and though he didn’t make the next RV, he headed north towards the coast, ending up there, a few miles northwest of Gazala. This area was already an LRDG target zone so he hoped to run into friends. Instead he found some Senussi who kept him safe for two weeks. As the ebb and flow of the main battle raged around, he was eventually picked up by Allied forces and got back to Siwa on 23rd December.14
David Lloyd Owen had brought up Y2 so the two patrols worked for a while in tandem, though after the beat up of the MT Park, there was little trade to be had. On 29th December Lloyd Owen had better luck, netting some prisoners, one of whom gave details of a nearby garrison outpost, located around seven miles east of the holy site at El Ezzeiat. After a short, sharp fight the fort surrendered, two men were killed and the place yielded seventeen prisoners and some kit.15 After this it was back to road watch near Wadi Maalegh. Here Y2 attacked a petrol tanker and shot up a truck full of troops, two officers and seven enemy ORs’ were accounted for. Despite the inevitable pursuit, Lloyd Owen avoided the posse and came safe back to Siwa on 3rd December.
In mid-November, G1 was dispatched to beat up any traffic around Bir-ben-Gania on the Trigh el Abd. Another enemy MT laager was duly shot up along with a tanker convoy next day. G2 was sent to operate in the vicinity of Maaten el Grara where, on 22nd November, the patrol came across a Fiat B.R.20 plane which had made a forced landing. The bomber was revving its motors, clearly had an engine stutter but at least one of its machine guns was manned. Timpson shot first. The aircraft was destroyed, some crew were killed and the survivors captured. John Olivey, destined to become one of LRDG’s most energetic raiders, led both S2 & R2 on a patrol aimed at the highway between Benghazi and Barce. On 29th November they took on a number of enemy vehicles, knocking out a series of Axis transports and killing several of their occupants.16
These hit and run fights were swift and savage affairs. Surprise and superior firepower were the keys to survival. Even if the amount of traffic damaged or destroyed wasn’t great in terms of volume, the enemy was forced to send up planes constantly in daylight, diverting these from offensive operations and consuming fuel. Convoys, even deep behind Axis lines, needed beefing up with extra protection. Everyone had to stay on the alert, with no such thing as a ‘safe’ zone or harbour.
LRDG raiders would erupt from the sheltering darkness, hose their targets in a storm of automatic fire and grenades, then roar off into the night unscathed. In modern terms this was a brand of asymmetric warfare where the two sides are unevenly matched, but the dash, energy and aggression of the smaller makes up for numerical deficiencies. As David Lloyd Owen confirms, the panic spread by raids was infinitely more damaging to the enemy than the losses inflicted: The actual nuisance that Tony Hay and his men had caused was nothing to the alarming effect that it had on the enemy, who thought that he was the advanced guard of an enemy force striking towards Agedabia. The Italians stopped all traffic on this stretch of road, and when convoys did start up again they were only allowed along it with an escort of armoured cars.17
Road watch and occasional beat ups were very much the order of the day throughout December 1941. With Jalo occupied by Allied forces, ‘A’ Squadron with several patrols and the mini artillery train of a single 25-pounder moved up early in the month, taking their orders from Brigadier Reid. Prendergast kept the remainder under his wing at Siwa. Their main role was to concentrate on the Benghazi to Jedabia, Barce to Benghazi, Tobruk–Derna roads and the Mekili area. G1 shot up some enemy traffic but Captain Hay was captured in a brush with the enemy on 16th December.18 Several patrols were ranging during early December: G2 had to abandon operations when one of the Guardsmen developed appendicitis; Y1 and Y2 were out and Lloyd Owen, leading the latter, joined up with G1, and these combined patrols shot up an enemy convoy on the evening of 14th December.
Eighth Army was deploying larger columns of raiders, such as Reid’s force, against specific enemy targets. This was edging towards the kind of operation Orde Wingate had suggested in 1940 – often unwieldy, too heavy for raiding and too light for an all-arms battle. Bruce Ballantyne took out T1 to guide another column, ‘Marriott Force’. This was comprised principally of 22nd Guards Brigade, but there were no signs at the RV. It turned out the brigade had been swept up in the desperate fighting around Tobruk, which wasn’t properly relieved till 8th December, and took a further fortnight to deploy southwards.19 After some to-ing and fro-ing, due to the fast moving battle, Marriott Force did not begin its westward advance till 20th December. The target was Antelat. In best cavalry style, 11th Hussars would lead the charge with R1 & R2 patrols guarding both flanks.
Jake Easonsmith had taken R1 out of Siwa on 10th December. He was to join Marriott Force but found time for some hit and run strikes in generally pretty foul weather before catching up on the 16th. Both R1 & R2 were to cover the eastern flank of Marriott Force’s axis of advance, establishing contact with 12th Lancers. These desert linkages could be tricky, with the possibility of friendly fire incidents, but happily there were none. Both patrols continued patrolling without incident whilst the Axis continued a rapid retreat. By 20th December Benghazi was captured and Rommel fell back on Jedabia.
Adventures with SAS
David Lloyd Owen had first met Stirling in the wake of the SAS’ first disastrous ‘parashot’ raid: What a man! Failure meant nothing more to him than to generate fierce determination to be successful next time.20 It was their leader’s unbreakable enthusiasm that generated the ‘can do’ spirit which has led the SAS to become, in the seventy years since, the most respected and admired Special Forces in the world. At the outset, the respective roles of SAS/LRDG were not defined. There could even be conflict between pure intelligence gathering, which depends on being invisible, and sabotage, which stirs up the hornets’ nest.
Stirling had realised, as he and Lloyd Owen sipped their mugs of tea in the aftermath of an early raid, that parachuting wasn’t ideal. It was Lloyd Owen who had the idea of a joint effort between both groups, travelling overland to deliver the parashots to their target zone. LRDG would provide the taxi and navigation service; SAS could get on with blowing things up and killing Germans. This proved to be the ideal relationship and the birth of a Special Forces legend.21
Meanwhile, ‘A’ Squadron from Jalo, still under Brigadier Reid’s orders, had undertaken further operations in tandem with the SAS. Their target was the airfields at Sirte while LRDG attacked the highway and Axis traffic. A lesser man than David Stirling might have been disheartened at his continuing bad luck. Both he and LRDG played their assigned roles superbly but there were no enemy aircraft to be had at Sirte. Paddy Mayne fared rather better. At Tamet his crew wrecked two dozen planes and shot up enemy positions: the story was often told of how Paddy Mayne – who was an immensely powerful man and had been an Irish rugger international before the war – personally destroyed one aircraft with his own hands. He was always reported to have returned with the instrument panel, which he ripped out for a souvenir.22 All got away safely and were back in Jalo by 16th December.
Six days earlier, T2 patrol, commanded by Kiwi Lieutenant ‘Bing’ Morris, had motored out of Siwa intending to taxi a dozen SAS to El Agheila, looking for more aircraft to blow up. They were also tasked to beat up Mersa Brega, some 25 miles northeast, and shoot up whatever targets presented themselves along the coastal highway. Bad conditions, rough going and adverse weather threw up numerous hurdles, but the SAS were delivered to within striking distance of their target. Again, the birds, quite literally, had flown and the landing grounds were bare.
The raiders were not to be denied some trade, however, and
on the evening of 16th/17th December brazenly drove along the main road towards Mersa Brega. At the stroke of midnight hey pulled into a large transport park, brimming with enemy vehicles. Battle was joined at no more than 25 to 30 paces.23 The firefight was furious and intense, the pale desert night ripped by blinding muzzle flashes and the tremendous din of long bursts of automatic fire. Despite all this huge sound and fury, the LRDG disengaged without loss, leaving around fifteen enemy dead and perhaps just over half a dozen vehicles totalled. Jock Lewes, who was leading the SAS detachment, chucked any number of time bombs into enemy trucks as the firefight was raging.
Lewes was a particularly inventive saboteur. He’d set out to devise an IED which would go off after an interval, but which would also be incendiary. He decided on the use of a time pencil, which worked on the notion of acid eating away at a wire. When this burnt through, a spring was released which caused the blast. This was immediately followed by a further explosion of flame. These proved very effective at destroying planes, habitually the SAS’ primary target, and the time delay allowed the raiders to get well clear.24
For ten days, 13th–23rd December, John Olivey led S2 and the LRDG’s artillery section on an operation from Jalo. This would be the first time an LRDG patrol could muster such heavy fire support. The gunner detachment, commanded by Lieutenant Paul ‘Blitz’ Eitzen, had originally come with a 4.5-inch howitzer but this had been gifted to Leclerc and the Free French. Gunner Bill Morrison and his chum Jim Patch volunteered to serve with LRDG – even though they weren’t sure what the acronym stood for!25 ‘Blitz’ and one of the other volunteer artillerymen were South African and had the habit of lapsing into Afrikaans, disconcerting for the English. The gun they’d be using was a standard 25-pounder mounted in a Mack 10-tonner. Blitz had the use of a light 8-cwt car.