The Daring Dozen

by Gavin Mortimer

  Meat pudding

  Each man was allowed six pints of water a day with one issued at breakfast, two in the evening as tea and one at midday with lime juice. The outstanding two pints were drawn by the men in the evening and were used to fill water bottles for the following day. ‘The men,’ wrote Bagnold, ‘are trained to use their water bottles during the day at their own discretion for sipping from time to time to moisten their lips.’21

  Fortunately, while Bagnold’s patrols were on garrison duty at Kufra, G and Y patrols were operating out of Siwa Oasis 400 miles to the north, and they spent May and June of 1941 reconnoitring the enemy troops’ positions in eastern Libya. The versatility of the LRDG was evident in July when, under the command of Jake Easonsmith, the two patrols displayed the full range of their desert skills. Writing shortly after the war, Bagnold described it thus:

  It was decided to carry out reconnaissance with small parties into the southern foothills of the Gebel Akhdar with the object of getting some idea of the enemy’s dispositions in this area, 300 miles behind his front line, and also making contact with friendly Arabs. Easonsmith carried out a number of such journeys, dropping native agents and in some cases British officers on the outskirts of the Gebel and picking them up a few days later when their tasks had been completed. In addition he was able to collect a number of our troops who had been sheltering with the Arabs in Cyrenaica [eastern Libya] since our withdrawal in the Spring [of 1941]. On one occasion information had been received that a Free French pilot was hiding up near a well in enemy territory and a patrol was sent off to try and pick him up. They located the well but could see nothing of the pilot and were about to leave when a head appeared out of a dry cistern almost under their feet. This was in fact the pilot who had been reluctant to announce himself earlier as he thought that the party of bearded and dishevelled ruffians could not possibly be British troops. In an interval between two such trips Easonsmith, working behind but nearer to the enemy’s front line, successfully shot up a large Italian MT [Motorized Transport] repair section.22

  In July 1941 the Sudan Defence Force arrived at Kufra to relieve Bagnold and the rest of the LRDG, which were then able to resume their offensive operations against the Axis forces, conducting invaluable reconnaissance in the Sirte desert inland from the Libyan coast. One patrol ventured to within 40 miles of the Axis-held port of Benghazi, bringing back invaluable information for MEHQ which was in the throes of planning a large offensive for November, codenamed Operation Crusader.

  Since February 1941 the Germans had been arriving in North Africa to fight alongside their Italian allies, but despite the presence of the Afrika Korps, no unit comparable to the LRDG emerged on their side during the Desert War. Only once did the Germans attempt a mission behind British lines, a sortie led by a pre-war desert explorer named Count Ladislaus de Almásy, who was Hungarian-born and British-educated. But he discovered that most of the Germans under his command lacked the initiative and self-sufficiency to survive the desert.

  Bagnold and Almásy had bumped into each other in the Middle East before the war and they did so again in 1951, when the Count told his British acquaintance ‘a strange story of an interview he had with Rommel in 1942. If true it throws a curious light on Rommel’s attitude even at that relatively early date. Poor Almasy. With his knowledge of the interior and of how to travel in it he must have longed to do what my people were doing. But Rommel was no Wavell and he was kept on a tight rein.’23

  There were other reasons, of course, as to why Rommel didn’t raise a unit similar to the LRDG – notably constant fuel constraints and the fact that the British military installations were less remote and better guarded – but ultimately it was because the German mentality was not as individualistic, adventurous or innovative as its British counterpart.

  But the British top brass could at times be just as narrow in its outlook as the Germans. In August 1941 Bagnold was promoted to colonel and recalled to Cairo to take up a desk job at GHQ. It was a decision that infuriated many of the LRDG, who knew their leader as ‘Baggy’. ‘He was a great lad and the worst thing that happened to him was that he got promoted and put into GHQ Cairo,’ recalled Les Sullivan. ‘He used to get his own back by any trouble we got into in Cairo – and we often did get in trouble, getting arrested by Redcaps [Military Police] – then we would phone GHQ and he would get us out of where the Redcaps were holding us.’24

  On one occasion, remembered Sullivan, some members of the ex-Guards G Patrol recently returned from ‘Up the Blue’ (the slang for the desert) misbehaved in the restaurant/bar Groppis, one of the most glamorous in Cairo. The outraged owner of Groppis sent a letter to GHQ demanding compensation for what he claimed was £6,000 worth of damage. As the LRDG were blamed, the letter ended up on Bagnold’s desk. ‘He wrote to Groppis and said in flowery language that it was dreadful, etc, and we can’t have it,’ remembered Sullivan. ‘He said “I enclose a cheque for £6,000 and in future Groppis is out of bounds to all ranks.” He sent it off and in no time it was back again with a note [from the owner] saying “Please don’t make Groppis out of bounds and here’s the cheque. I’ll pay!”’25

  With Bagnold in Cairo, command of the LRDG fell to Major Guy Prendergast, who proved himself a more than capable replacement in leading the unit during its role in Crusader, the purpose of which was to rid Cyrenaica of the Afrika Korps. The LRDG’s initial task in the operation was to infiltrate enemy lines and observe and report their troop movements and reactions to the main British advance. But on 24 November, six days after the start of the offensive, the LRDG was ordered to attack ‘with the utmost vigour enemy communications wherever they offered suitable targets’.

  For the next few weeks the LRDG operated as guerrilla fighters, attacking German and Italian targets in three areas – the coastal road north of Agedabia; the Barce to Maraua road and the Tmimi to Gazala road. One of the most brazen strikes was made by Y Patrol under the command of Captain David Lloyd-Owen, who in broad daylight attacked an Italian fort at El Ezzeiat, killing two enemy soldiers and capturing a further ten. Five weeks later and 500 miles away, Lloyd-Owen assaulted another fort in Tripolitania and the night after ambushed an Italian convoy on the coast road near Tmimi, killing 11 soldiers.

  Lloyd-Owen had joined the LRDG from The Queen’s Royal Regiment just before Bagnold relinquished command of the unit, but in that short space of time he was able to gauge something of his leader’s character. Writing in his memoirs, Providence Their Guide, Lloyd-Owen said:

  He had such a shrewd understanding of the capabilities and limitations of human nature that he knew that he would only get the best out of it by devoted attention to what I described as the four fundamentals essential to successful desert travel, which are also the secret if any small behind the-lines force is to triumph.

  These four tenets are: the most careful and detailed planning, first-class equipment, a sound and simple communications system and a human element of rare quality. Ralph Bagnold had learnt these things the hard way in his pre-war desert ventures, and he was not the sort of man to forget them when it came to applying them to war. It was his teaching of the men who served with him in the Long Range Desert Group that made us ever mindful of every minor detail in order to ensure success.26

  It was Lloyd-Owen who was partly responsible for expanding the role of the LRDG in North Africa still further from December 1941 onwards. On the night of 16/17 November a small force of British paratroopers under the command of Captain David Stirling jumped into Libya, intent on attacking five enemy landing strips. But bad weather thwarted their designs and the mission was aborted with heavy casualties. Lloyd-Owen’s patrol rescued some of the survivors, including Stirling, and it was the start of a partnership that was to prove immensely profitable for the British and hugely damaging for the Axis. The force was L Detachment of the Special Air Service, and one of its number from the early days recalled the esteem in which they held the LRDG. ‘After a while we started to call them the Long Range
Taxi Service,’ recalled Jeff Du Vivier, ‘but it was a joke the LRDG took well. They knew how much we respected them.’27

  The SAS weren’t alone in their respect for the LRDG. Throughout their operational life in the North African desert – which continued up until March 1943, when the advance of the American First Army from the west and the British Eighth Army from the east trapped Axis forces in a small pocket of Tunisia – the LRDG won plaudits for their pluck and professionalism.

  Throughout the battle of El Alamein in autumn 1942, the LRDG carried out invaluable reconnaissance patrols on the German forces, as well as laying mines and strafing enemy transport columns. Y Patrol, for example, spent several perilous days concealed near Marble Arch, 600 miles west of El Alamein, reporting on the Axis army as it fled towards Tunisia. Between 30 October and 10 November 1942, the number of enemy vehicles heading west each day rose from 100 to 3,500. At times the retreating Germans pulled off the road and rested, their lorries and tanks a matter of yards from the hidden LRDG patrol.

  In his report on their exploits during this period, the British Army’s director of military intelligence in Cairo wrote: ‘Not only is the standard of accuracy and observation exceptionally high but the Patrols are familiar with the most recent illustration of enemy vehicles and weapons… Without their reports we should frequently have been in doubt as to the enemy’s intentions, when knowledge of them was all important.’28

  In the final two years of World War II, the LRDG served with distinction in the Aegean and the Balkans. But the desert is where their indelible legacy remains. ‘Never during our peace-time travels had we imagined that war could ever reach the enormous empty solitudes of the inner desert, walled off as it has always been by sheer distance, by lack of water and by impassable seas of huge dunes,’ Bagnold recalled in 1945. The success of the LRDG owed much to their courage and resourcefulness; but just as important was the maverick spirit fostered by Ralph Bagnold – daring to venture where others feared to tread.

  Bagnold was far from being from the same warrior caste as Blair Mayne or Anders Lassen, and he was the antithesis of the ‘Gung Ho’ guerrilla fighter Evans Carlson. Bagnold was a scientist first and a soldier second, and it was to his first love that he returned in 1944. Having retired from the army that year aged 48, with the honorary rank of brigadier and the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his work in raising the LRDG, Bagnold married a year after the war ended and for the rest of his life devoted himself to his scientific studies. Among the papers he authored were ‘Motion of waves in shallow water’, published by the Royal Society of London in 1946, ‘The sand formations in southern Arabia’, published by The Geographical Journal in 1951 and ‘Flow resistance in sinuous or irregular channels’, published by the United States Geological Survey in 1960. His work was recognized with a string of awards, including the Founders’ Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London and the Penrose Gold Medal of the Geological Society of America. In 1977, in his 82nd year, Bagnold gave the keynote address at a NASA conference on the desert landscapes of Earth and Mars, and his work The Physics of Blown Sand was an important reference for NASA scientists in studying sand dunes on Mars.

  Bagnold died on 28 May 1990, aged 94, and his considerable collection of private papers relating to his scientific and military work were donated by his family to the Churchill Archives in Cambridge. Among Bagnold’s war correspondence was the draft of a letter he sent to Archibald Wavell in January 1945, just a few months after he had retired from the army. In the letter Bagnold thanked Wavell for his role in giving life to the Long Range Desert Group five years earlier. ‘I shall never forget your friendly encouragement in 1940/41,’ wrote Bagnold.

  Bagnold was aware that the gratitude was mutual, and perhaps the belated letter was a response – now that he had more time on his hands – to an official despatch issued by General Wavell in October 1941, after he had been replaced by General Claude Auchinleck as Commander-in-Chief of British forces in the Middle East. In the despatch Wavell declared:

  I should like to bring to notice a small body of men who for a year past have done inconspicuous but invaluable work, the Long Range Desert Group. It was formed under Major (now Colonel) R.A. Bagnold in July 1940, to reconnoitre the great Libyan desert on the Western borders of Egypt and the Sudan. Operating in small independent columns, the Group has penetrated in to nearly every part of desert Libya, an area comparable in size with that of India.

  Not only have patrols brought back much information but they have attacked enemy forces, captured personnel, destroyed transport and grounded aircraft as far as 800 miles inside hostile territory. They have protected Egypt and the Sudan from any possibility of raids and have caused the enemy, in a lively apprehension of their activities, to tie up considerable forces in the defence of distant outposts.

  Their journeys across vast regions of unexplored desert have entailed the crossing of physical obstacles and the endurance of extreme temperatures, both of which a year ago would have been deemed impossible. Their exploits have been achieved only by careful organisation and a very high standard of enterprise, discipline, mechanical maintenance and desert navigation.29

  JUNIO VALERIO BORGHESE

  TENTH LIGHT FLOTILLA

  At the time of his death in August 1974 Junio Valerio Borghese was known throughout Italy as ‘The Black Prince’. Such was his notoriety that he was denied full military honours and a full funeral ceremony at his burial in the Basilica de Santa Maria Maggiore. Instead Italian riot police looked on as a small crowd of Borghese’s followers cried ‘Italia, Italia, Fascisi, Fascisi!’1

  It was an ignoble end to a life that had begun 68 years earlier in Rome. Junio Valerio came into the world the son of an Italian aristocrat from the illustrious Borghese family, and among his Tuscan antecedents were one pope (Paul V), three Italian cardinals and Pauline Bonaparte, younger sister of Napoleon.

  From an early age Junio Valerio was marked out as a future naval officer and in 1922 he enrolled in the Naval Academy in Livorno, a port city on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Seven years later Borghese entered the Italian Navy and by the time he was 27 he was a submarine commander.

  He was also an ardent follower of Benito Mussolini, the fascist Italian dictator who had come to power in the same year Borghese entered the naval academy. When Italy’s military forces invaded Ethiopia and, in May 1936, proclaimed the country to be part of Italian East Africa, Borghese described it as ‘a victory actually achieved by a people fighting in unison for its right to live’.

  A few weeks after the subjugation of Ethiopia, Mussolini turned his attention to the civil war raging in Spain, offering General Franco the use of his forces. In all, an estimated 75,000 Italians fought for the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, and Borghese was one of them. He was part of the Submarine Legion (Sottomarini Legionari) and commanded the Iride during hostilities.

  When Italy entered World War II in June 1940, Lieutenant Borghese had just turned 34 and was in command of the submarine Vettor Pisani, an old vessel that he recalled had many ‘wheezy whims’. A month later the Pisani took part in the naval battle of Calabria (known to the Italians as the battle of Punta Stilo) in the waters of Calabria at the toe of Italy. The outcome was inconclusive, although one consequence was that the Pisani was withdrawn from active service after Borghese complained to his superiors of the number of leaks she sprang.

  Along with two other Italian naval officers, Borghese was sent on a commanders course in submarine warfare at Memel on the Baltic. The course was run by the German Navy and specialized in teaching operations against the British Atlantic convoys. For nearly two weeks Borghese served on U-boats, observing the crews at work and concluding that in terms of skill and proficiency there was little difference between German submariners and their Italian counterparts. It was a theme that featured heavily in Borghese’s memoirs, perhaps an indication that during the war he had encountered more than once the stereo
typical view of the Italian Navy – as expressed by Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, Commander-in-Chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet 1939–43, when he declared a ‘healthy contempt’ for his adversary. In his memoirs entitled Sea Devils, Borghese praised ‘the heroism of which Italians are capable when properly led, with due attention paid to their physical and spiritual needs’.

  Upon his return to Italy in August 1940, Borghese was appointed commander of the Scire, a 620-ton submarine with a crew of 50. The vessel, along with the submarine Gondar, had been adapted into an ‘assault craft transport’ with three steel cylinders welded on deck (one forward and two aft), all with the same pressure resistance as the submarine. In these cylinders the secret weapon of the Italian Navy would be transported – the two-man torpedoes into which so much energy had been channelled in the years preceding the outbreak of war.

  The Italian Navy were the pioneers of naval sabotage in the 20th century. In October 1918, with Italy fighting alongside Britain, France and the United States against Germany, Sub-Lieutenant Raffaele Paolucci and naval engineer Major Raffaele Rossetti embarked on a mission to attack the battleship Viribus Unitis, pride of the Austro-Hungarian fleet, at anchor in the Croatian harbour of Pula.

  Pooling their innovative resources, the pair modified an unexploded German torpedo so it could be piloted by them underwater at a speed of three to four miles per hour, powered by two propellers driven by compressed air. They set out from Venice just weeks before the end of the war on the torpedo boat and when they were within range of Pula, Rossetti and Paolucci boarded their human torpedo and slipped beneath the harbour’s defences. They planted a mine on the hull of Viribus Unitis that exploded at dawn on 1 November, sending the ship to the bottom of the sea.

  Though World War I ended less than three weeks later, the Italian Navy had glimpsed the potential of human torpedoes, and in the years after the war they were at the forefront of developing the new weapon. Two engineer officers, sub-lieutenants Teseo Tesei and Elios Toschi, spent years working on the prototype until in the words of the latter they had produced a weapon which ‘in size and shape [is] very similar to a torpedo but is in reality a miniature submarine with entirely novel features, electrical propulsion and a steering wheel similar to that of an aeroplane … equipped with a long-range underwater breathing gear, the operators will be able, without any connection with the surface, to breathe and navigate under water at any depths up to thirty metres and carry a powerful explosive charge into an enemy harbour.’2