His departure wasn’t, however, immediate. It was agreed that he would hand over command to Prendergast officially on 1 August, allowing the latter time to familiarize himself with his new role, and also oversee the recruitment of new officers and men to the LRDG. Together with Bagnold, Prendergast toured transit camps and infantry depots in search of fresh blood.
Alexander Stewart was a bored 21-year-old in the Armoured Troops Workshop of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps when Bagnold and Prendergast arrived one morning at his depot. ‘As we listened in a big marquee the bulk of the troops walked out,’ recalled Stewart, a Scot from Banffshire. But he was attracted to what he heard and what he envisaged. ‘It would be a minimum of discipline, army discipline, and free from parades and drills and so on.’5
Guardsman Spencer Seadon was recovering from a leg infection at a Left Out of Battle camp when Bagnold arrived in search of recruits. ‘A notice came up asking for volunteers,’ recalled Seadon, who shared a ridge tent with eight other convalescing soldiers. ‘So we said we would all join the LRDG [because] we were fed up in this camp, there was nothing much to do … we went up and one by one they came out and they said, “Blimey Spence, we’re not joining that mob, they’re a suicide squad”.’6
Bill ‘Smudger’ Smith, a signaller, encountered a similar response when he answered the call for volunteers. ‘My sergeant did his best to dissuade me,’ he recalled. ‘He sincerely believed I was courting certain death. “They’re a suicide squad, Smudge.” What little I had heard about the LRDG suggested the suicide was reserved for the enemy so I did my utmost to calm the good sergeant’s fears.’7
Lothian, Higham, Lowenthal and Endersby. Notice the leather jerkin, popular in the desert when the weather was cold. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
Archie Gibson jumped at the chance to escape the Scots Guards, where he ‘felt stifled by the discipline’. He told Prendergast and Bagnold he was a skilled driver who could handle any vehicle in any terrain. ‘From what I’d heard of the Long Range Desert Group it was definitely my type of operation,’ he reflected. ‘I liked the whole mystique of the desert, and the fact that we’d be moving in small parties using our own initiative.’8
Watson, Bragge, Ken Low and Ryan. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
The ‘mystique’ was also the attraction for a 23-year-old officer called David Lloyd Owen, who had commanded a company of the Queen’s Royal Regiment during the rout of the Italian Army in December 1940. Subsequently, and for reasons that eluded Lloyd Owen, he had been posted to the Officer Cadet Training Unit (OCTU) in Cairo in charge of administration. ‘I was about at my wits’ end and loathing every minute of it all,’ recalled Lloyd Owen. Admitting that he ‘had always been a bit of a dreamer’ with a love for ‘Beau Geste and other tales of the French North African Empire’, Lloyd Owen applied for the LRDG and was accepted after a rigorous interview by Bagnold.9
An LRDG patrol prepares for a roadwatch near the Arco dei Mileni’, better known to the Allies Marble Arch because the Italian monument resembled the famous London landmark. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
One or two men volunteered simply because they were the volunteering kind. ‘One morning a little officer turned up on the parade and said he was calling for volunteers for the LRDG,’ remembered Jim Patch, a 21-year-old signaller from London. ‘We’d never heard of but it sounded all right so my friend, Bill Morrison and I, volunteered.’10
With its ranks replenished, the LRDG was placed under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Alan Cunningham, recently appointed commander of the reconstituted Western Desert Force, henceforth known as the Eighth Army.
On the same day that the Eighth Army came into being, Bagnold wrote from Cairo to Prendergast, whose headquarters were at Kufra. He began by reassuring his successor that the transfer of the LRDG to the Eighth Army ‘is quite all right as far as you are concerned’. Bagnold then offered his thoughts on what Prendergast should do about administration, supplies, the mobile medical unit and the signal section. He cautioned that there were problems once more with General Freyberg, commander of the New Zealand forces in Egypt, and Bagnold informed Prendergast that ‘things are such in a muddle with the NZ people between what they say and what they write that I really think you should never rely or act on any more verbal arrangements with them’.11
Five days later, on 29 September, a conference was held at Eighth Army HQ, attended by both Prendergast and Bagnold, in which the role of the LRDG was discussed. A major operation was brewing, and the LRDG were told they would have a small but significant part to play. Their tasks, as laid out in the conference minutes, would be as follows:
a.To obtain information as to enemy movements on certain tracks, and in certain areas, and to watch his reactions to any offensive by us.
b.To provide further information of the state of going in certain areas.
c.At all times the LRDG should try and harass the enemy as far as possible, and in any way they liked provided they did not get too involved themselves. The army commander realized that the LRDG should not deliberately court trouble, and was in no way armoured.
d.Any tactical information obtained would be required as early as possible. During and before offensive operations, LRDG would be justified in taking more risks than usual in order to send back up to date information.12
C HAPTER 9
THE SAVIOURS OF THE SAS
By mid-October 1941, the LRDG was at Kufra in its entirety. David Lloyd Owen was delighted with what he found, the oasis living up to the idyll he imagined when reading stories of the desert as a young boy. ‘It was so unbelievably peaceful,’ he wrote. ‘The Arabs with their donkeys padded silently across the sand and only the slight rustle of the palm trees in the breeze would disturb the silence.’1
Captain Crosby ‘Bing’ Morris, was older than most LRDG officers but the New Zealander proved a brave and resourceful soldier. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
Lloyd Owen’s Y Patrol parked their trucks in the shade of some palm trees, and while his men bathed in the two salt lakes close by, where it was possible ‘to lie floating on your back and contemplate the perfection of the blue sky above’, the officers assembled before Prendergast. There were several introductions to be made: not only Lloyd Owen was new to the unit, but so too were Frank Simms, also recruited to Y Patrol, and Alastair Timpson of G Patrol. Timpson was 26, a product of privilege, having been educated at Eton and Cambridge. Upon leaving university he had entered the gold mining business in South Africa, but he returned to Britain on the outbreak of war and received a commission in the Scots Guards.
The LRDG weren’t long at Kufra, although long enough to enjoy a duck shoot or two around the salt lakes, and in November they moved 350 miles north-east to Siwa. ‘It was common knowledge that something was simmering up north,’ recalled Timpson.2 On the 13th of that month Prendergast briefed his men on the offensive that was to begin five days hence and the role that the LRDG would play. Most of the talking was done by Bill Kennedy Shaw. He explained that their job was purely reconnaissance, and to each officer he allotted an area in which to operate and ‘report in detail on what the enemy does behind his front line’. On no account, emphasized Kennedy Shaw, was any patrol to go looking for trouble. ‘It will only give the game away if you do,’ he said. ‘Your job is to watch and tell me what you see and you can’t do that if you are seen yourselves.’3
The SAS became self-sufficient in the summer of 1942 and in the opinion of David Lloyd Owen lost some of their effectiveness. Captain Malcolm Pleydell, their medical officer, is standing second from right in the middle row. (Author’s Collection)
One initiative of Prendergast’s since assuming command had been to reorganize the patrols, dividing them into two, because he felt a ten vehicle patrol was too conspicuous. In future a patrol such as Y Patrol would be split into Y1 and Y2, each comprising five 30cwt trucks with one smaller pick-up truck.
A group of Rhodesian LRDG soldie
rs, including Jacko Jackson (second left) and Stan Eastwood (far right) enjoying the shade offered by Kufra’s palm trees in September 1941. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
The four Guards and Yeomanry patrols, along with a New Zealand patrol under Bruce Ballantyne, left Siwa on the morning of 15 November 1941, three days before General Claude Auchinleck launched his grand offensive codenamed Operation Crusader. Its aim was to retake Cyrenaica and seize the Libyan airfields from the enemy, thereby enabling the RAF to increase their supplies to Malta, the Mediterranean island that was of such strategic importance to the British.
To achieve these aims, Auchinleck intended his 13 Corps to launch a frontal attack on a 65-mile front against the Axis forces holding the front line, while the 30th Corps would swing round the flanks and annihilate Rommel’s armoured force of 174 tanks, markedly inferior in number to the 710 tanks at Auchinleck’s disposal. Meanwhile the besieged garrison at Tobruk, 70 miles behind the German front line, would break out and meet the 30th Corps as they advanced west across Cyrenaica.
The LRDG’s role was observing and reporting enemy troop movements, alerting GHQ to what Rommel might be planning in response to the offensive. They did have an additional responsibility, however, one that entailed Captain Jake Easonsmith’s R1 Patrol collecting a party of 55 paratroopers – ‘Parashots’, as the LRDG called them – once they had carried out a daring raid on a string of enemy airfields at Gazala and Tmimi.
It was no coincidence that Prendergast detailed Easonsmith to collect the paratroopers, who in fact were David Stirling and his recently formed Special Air Service Brigade.* Henceforth, for the sake of clarity, I will refer to them as the SAS. A wine merchant before the war, Easonsmith was a man able to adapt to any given situation with an infectious good humour. Unorthodox and unflappable, the 32-year-old was by far and away the most popular officer in the LRDG. Timpson was beguiled by Easonsmith’s ‘calm and kindly judgement’, while Lloyd Owen said of him: ‘Not only was he a natural leader of men, because he understood men in the kind of way which few others have done, but he was also a master at the art of craft and guile.’4
Easonsmith left Siwa at 0530 hours on 17 November and travelled north in seven LRDG trucks and two Bedford lorries belonging to the SAS. The first rendezvous was reached two days later, and there the patrol left the two SAS vehicles. Pushing north-north-east towards the second RV (rendezvous) at the Gadd-el-Ahmar crossroads, Easonsmith encountered Lloyd Owen and Y2 Patrol. They had spent the last few days in a wadi (a dry river bed) observing a track along which it was presumed the enemy would move. They hadn’t, however, and a frustrated Lloyd Owen gladly accepted Easonsmith’s instructions to help him in the collection of SAS raiders.
Paddy Mayne, who succeeded David Stirling in early 1943, as commanding officer of the SAS. He finished the war with the DSO and three bars. (Author’s Collection)
During the evening of 19 November, Easonsmith reached the first RV and a few hours later Captain Jock Lewes, the second-in-command of the SAS, appeared with nine of his men. In the early hours of the following morning David Stirling arrived with only his sergeant, Bob Tait, and not long after dawn Paddy Mayne and eight exhausted men showed up.
Mayne’s subsequent report of the inaugural SAS raid encapsulated the wretched failure of the operation. In the laconic manner for which he was famous, the former Ireland rugby international described an ‘unpleasant’ landing on ground studded with thorn bushes and with the parachutists buffeted by winds of 25mph. Two men were injured and several of the SAS containers lost, but nonetheless Mayne led his men towards the target, an airfield on which he counted 17 aircraft. Their reconnaissance completed, Mayne and his men laid up in a wadi and waited for nightfall. Mayne wrote in his report:
It had rained occasionally during the day and at 1730 hours it commenced to rain heavily. … After about half an hour the wadi became a river, and as the men were lying concealed in the middle of bushes it took them some time getting to higher ground. It kept on raining and we were unable to find shelter. An hour later I tried two of the time pencils N.B A time pencil resembled in shape and size a biro pen. It was a glass tube with a spring-loaded striker held in place by a strip of copper wire. At the top was a glass phial containing acid which broke when squeezed. The acid then ate through the wire and released the striker. The thicker the wire the longer the delay before the striker was triggered (the pencils were colour coded according to the length of fuse). The time pencil was part of the ‘Lewes Bomb’, invented by Jock Lewes, an SAS officer, and was placed in a small cotton bag containing plastic explosive coated with petroland they did not work. Even if we had been able to keep them dry, it would not, in my opinion [have] been practicable to have used them, as during the half-hour delay on the plane the rain would have rendered them useless.5
To his consternation, Mayne discovered that the instantaneous fuses did not work, either, and despite waiting overnight in the hope they would dry out, he aborted the attack on the aerodrome the following day when it became apparent the fuses were useless. ‘I withdrew that night, 18/11/41, some twenty miles on a bearing of 185 degrees,’ wrote Mayne. ‘The next night I did a further five miles on that bearing and then turned due west for approximately three miles where we contacted the LRDG.’6
Though Mayne was disconsolate at having to scrub the operation within sight of the target, Stirling was more sanguine about the failure of the first SAS raid, even though 34 of the 55 men who had parachuted into Libya had been killed or captured. ‘David told me the story of his drop and of all that had gone wrong,’ recalled Lloyd Owen, who had first made Stirling a mug of tea fortified with whisky. ‘He had had rotten bad luck and any lesser man would have had his ardour completely damped. Not so David. He was already trying to analyse what had gone wrong and deciding how it would go right next time.’7
‘He had had rotten bad luck and any lesser man would have had his ardour completely damped. Not so David. He was already trying to analyse what had gone wrong and deciding how it would go right next time.’
As Stirling and his 20 SAS survivors were transported by the LRDG to Jarabub, further north the Germans were fighting back after their initial surprise at the British offensive. The launch of Operation Crusader over a 65-mile front from Sollum to Jarabub had gone as well as Auchinleck had hoped. Armoured troops made steady progress, reaching the escarpment at Sidi Eezegh (32 miles south-east of Tobruk) and capturing its airfield on 19 November. However, the next day Rommel launched a fierce, fast counter-thrust that caught the Allies off-guard. Tanks fought a series of ‘long and confused’ engagements, neither side capable of landing the knockout blow. But learning of the Allied breakout at Tobruk, Rommel struck south-east into his enemy’s rear at Sidi Omar in an audacious manoeuvre that outfoxed the Allies and cost General Cunningham his job (he was replaced by Neil Ritchie).
Rommel’s thrust towards Sidi Omar also led to a change in the LRDG’s role, with Lieutenant Colonel Prendergast receiving fresh instructions from Eighth Army HQ on 24 November. No longer were they to be passive observers; instead the LRDG were told to ‘act with the utmost vigour offensively against any enemy targets or communications within reach’. In particular, the patrols were ordered to focus on Mekili, Gadd-el-Ahmar and the coastal road in the vicinity of Jedabia.
Prendergast and Bill Kennedy Shaw studied the map and then directed each patrol to an area within the target zone. David Lloyd Owen’s Y2 Patrol headed off towards El Ezzeiat, capturing a small Italian fort and its garrison of ten Italians and two Libyans. The prisoners were only too willing to provide information on enemy troop dispositions in Derna and Mekili.
Meanwhile the 11 men of Y1 Patrol, under the command of Captain Frank Simms, were instructed to attack convoys travelling between Mekili and Derna. For the first couple of days they saw no suitable targets, but on the late afternoon of 1 December the patrol located a large camp at a road junction 20 miles south-west of Derna. Simms and his navigator, Lofty Carr, reconnoitr
ed the camp and discovered it was a motor transport park of 30 vehicles approximately 800 yards off the main road to Gazala. In his subsequent report recounting the attack, Simms kept his description to a minimum, simply writing that he had split his force into two raiding parties and that 15 vehicles were damaged before the patrol withdrew.
On returning to the RV, however, Simms discovered that Carr was missing. They waited an hour but when the navigator failed to show Simms concluded that he had been captured. But Carr hadn’t been captured, and on finding himself left behind in the darkness he kept calm and set off on foot for where he hoped the patrol would lie up when dawn broke. At first light he was 2 miles from his destination and close to a main road used by the enemy. ‘I heard noises of animals which I associated with a Senussi settlement,’ Carr wrote in a report. ‘With due caution [I] approached, and finding it to be indeed a Bedouin camp, I asked for food and water and was provided with camel’s milk, macaroni and coffee by the natives.’8
Carr remained a guest of the Senussi for more than a week. It was imprudent to leave, as their camp was on the periphery of the offensive and Axis troops were visible in the distance. On a couple of occasions Carr was ushered by the Senussi to a cave in a wadi as German patrols approached the village. His narrowest escape was on 12 December. ‘I was lying under some camel saddles when six tanks came into the village,’ recalled Carr. ‘I wasn’t sure whose they were so I started walking towards them. On their forage caps the soldiers had a roundel like the RAF. I remember thinking “I didn’t know the British tanks had those”. They were German. Fortunately I was dressed as an Arab so I very quietly turned round and ducked into a tent’.9
The Long Range Desert Group in World War II Page 9