The raid on Barce took a heavy toll on the LRDG and here Captain Nick Wilder and troopers Dobson, Burke and Parker of T Patrol await evacuation by air to a Cairo hospital. (Author’s Collection)
A wounded LRDG soldier enjoys a cup of tea at Kufra as he waits to be flown to a Cairo hospital following the failed raids in September 1942. (Author’s Collection)
Having tricked their way into Tobruk, the Commandos set out to eliminate the gun positions to the east of the port, while Lieutenant Colonel John Haselden, in overall charge of the raid, established his command post in a small house close to the harbour. But soon the operation began to go wrong. The commando charged with signalling in the Royal Navy motor boats got lost. As the amphibious force circled waiting for the light from the shore, they were spotted by the enemy. So too were the destroyers transporting the Northumberland Fusiliers and Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, both of which were eventually sunk. With the element of surprise gone, the Commandos and SIG were trapped inside Tobruk. The raiders fought valiantly, none more so than Haselden, who was killed leading a charge against the Germans. In all just four men – three Commandos and a 19-year-old member of the SIG – managed to slip out of Tobruk. Unable to reach the LRDG rendezvous, the quartet set off on foot along the coast in an easterly direction. Forty days and 400 miles later they reached Allied lines, having survived on bully beef, goat meat and a few bottles of water.
John Haselden, MC and Bar, worked closely with the LRDG in his role as the Western Desert Liaison Officer at 8th Army HQ. He was killed leading a gallant charge against the enemy during the Tobruk raid in September 1942. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
At the LRDG rendezvous on the eastern perimeter of Tobruk, Jim Patch recalled: ‘We installed ourselves near the road in a bit of a depression to keep out of sight. There were searchlights scouring the land for anything they could pick up but we were too low for them to pick us up.’3 By first light it was clear the raid had failed, so Lloyd Owen and his patrol reluctantly drove away from Tobruk.
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Jake Easonsmith led his force out of Fayoum on 1 September. There were 47 men in total, travelling in 12 trucks and five jeeps, including Captain Nick Wilder, a New Zealand sheep farmer before the war, who was in charge of T1 Patrol, and Captain Alastair Simpson, in command of G1 Patrol. Between Fayoum and Barce lay 1,155 miles of desert, which entailed traversing the Great Sand Sea between Ain Dalla and Big Cairn. No one was relishing the prospect of tackling its monstrous dunes. The convoy was accompanied by two 10-ton lorries carrying petrol for the first 250 miles as far as Ain Dalla; there they were refuelled and took on fresh supplies of water. It was after Ain Dalla that the going got tough, their route guarded by row after row of dunes. ‘They came out of the north in long, white barriers, towering into razorbacks 300 feet high at times and mostly sharp at their crests, and so stretching away endlessly south,’ recalled Timpson.4 There was on average a mile between the crest of one range and that of the next. The deeper they penetrated into the Sand Sea, the harder it became to surmount the waves of sand. They were bigger, steeper and softer. Timpson described it as ‘a world of nothing but sand’. The convoy was approaching the dunes from the east, the steep side, which required vehicles to accelerate towards the crest, slow, and then with wheels aligned, gently topple over the tip and surf down the gentle undulation of the western side to the trough below the next formation.
If a vehicle took a sand dune too fast it could well topple over, as was the case with Captain Alastair Timpson’s jeep. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
Six days out from Fayoum, Timpson crested a dune too quickly. The jeep flipped over, fracturing Timpson’s skull and breaking the spine of Thomas Wann alongside him. Easonsmith organized an aerial evacuation while Captain Richard Lawson, the medical officer, stabilized Wann, a big man who on the troopship from Britain to Cairo had won the Scots Guards heavyweight boxing championship.
‘Wann and I were carried on the backs of two of our trucks with awnings spread over us until we reached the gravel country,’ wrote Timpson. ‘After two days a Hudson aircraft arrived from Kufra ... and flew us back to Cairo.’5*
The rest of the patrol continued towards Barce, reaching the foothills of the Jebel Akhdar without further mishap. On 13 September they reached Benia, approximately 15 miles south of Barce, and concealed themselves within some of the trees in the green, wooded countryside. Three guides – including two Senussi – were sent forward to reconnoitre the target and obtain what information they could from their brethren in Barce. At nightfall Easonsmith led his men north. ‘At nine o’clock we moved northward through the warm darkness,’ recalled Corporal Arthur Biddle, a British signaller attached to Wilder’s Kiwi Patrol. ‘Everyone detailed for the road had been primed in his particular task, and we drove hard for Barce confident of catching the Italians on the hop.’6
They drove up a deep winding wadi when suddenly a challenge rang out and a figure stepped in front of the lead truck. Easonsmith switched on the headlights, blinding the man temporarily and allowing his noiseless capture. He was a native soldier, only too willing to tell the LRDG that an Italian officer was nice and warm in the guardhouse 200 yards away. The native soldier called out to the Italian. He appeared a few moments later, striding towards the trucks, whereupon he was shot dead.
By 2300 hours, the convoy had rendezvoused with the guides and reached the road running eastward from Barce to Maraua. Everything was on schedule and going according to plan. They turned westward, cutting the telephone wire as they went, and motored along the road that led into Barce. Up ahead, two light tanks were seen. Easonsmith in the lead jeep held his nerve, banking on the Italian tanks mistaking them for their own vehicles. It was a gamble. Like everyone else, Easonsmith suspected details of the raids had been compromised. The tanks were now only a matter of yards away. Still Easonsmith kept his composure. They drew level with the enemy armour, and then Easonsmith gave the order to fire. The gunners in his jeep opened up with their Vickers and Browning, as did those on the other vehicles, subjecting the crews of the two tanks to such a firestorm that they were able to race off into the darkness without receiving any return fire.
An LRDG patrol examine the wreckage of an aircraft south-west of Sirte in September 1941. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
When they reached a crossroads on the outskirts of Barce, Easonsmith despatched the various patrols to their targets. The Guards Patrol took the road to the main army barracks and workshops, Wilder and his New Zealanders headed towards the airfield, and Easonsmith and his driver, Gutteridge, went off in his jeep to ‘shoot up anything they could find’.
Wilder led his four trucks towards the airfield, but found their route blocked by a dozen Italians behind a barrier. ‘We wiped them out without leaving our seats,’ Wilder told Eric Bigio, the war correspondent for the Daily Express, in an article that appeared nine months later.7 ‘But it was only the beginning of the battle. We had to shoot our way onto the ’drome. Once inside, we found the main track of the landing ground blocked by a huge petrol tanker-trailer. We set that alight with our machine-guns and it made such a big blaze that the whole surroundings lit up: that helped us find our bearings.’
The truck containing Arthur Biddle had been detailed to remain at the airfield’s perimeter fence and, as Wilder drove onto the strip, he opened up with the Vickers. ‘The target was a number of Italians who had suddenly appeared and made a dash for cover, firing wildly as they went,’ he recounted.8 He continued to blaze away whenever he saw an Italian, amusing himself in the interim by firing the occasional burst at the buildings on the edge of the airfield, which included a pilots’ mess, barracks and workshops. Biddle had to be careful not to hit Wilder, whose vehicle was now circling a large red-brick building used as a mess, its gunners raking the walls and windows. Wilder slowed and managed to throw a couple of hand grenades, and by the time they had completed two laps of the building it was well ablaze.
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bsp; The other trucks had been laying waste to some petrol dumps while Wilder attacked the building, but once reassembled the New Zealand officer led his men through a hedge and onto the airstrip. ‘There were 30-odd German and Italian fighters and we set to work to destroy them methodically,’ Wilder explained. ‘We went round the ’drome in our vehicles in single file, each one of us pouring a hail of machine-gun bullets.’9 Any aircraft that wasn’t sent up in flames from the stream of incendiary bullets was left to the truck bringing up the rear. ‘Its occupants had to place a bomb in the fuselage, pull the pin and then fling themselves to the ground and wait for the explosion ten seconds later. Fourteen planes were destroyed in this way. Six others were blazing beautifully and a dozen more were well alight by the time we had gone right around the field. I wish you could have seen the scene.’10
Arthur Biddle had a grandstand view of the attack from his position at the perimeter fence. ‘One after another the machines caught fire,’ he recalled. ‘And when a petrol lorry flared up the whole town was illuminated.’11
Wilder had been surprised initially at the light resistance encountered. It may have been because the Italians believed there was an airborne assault in progress, because he saw a lot of tracer being fired into the air. Gradually, however, the Italians understood the nature of the raid and subjected the LRDG to machine gun and mortar attack. But it was now an hour since Wilder had driven through the perimeter fence, and 20 aircraft had been destroyed and four more were badly damaged. It was job done, and time to get the hell out of Barce.
On watching Wilder and the Guards Patrol set off to their targets, Jake Easonsmith drove towards the town centre to cause as much diversionary havoc as he could in the space of an hour. He soon spotted some small detached bungalows that he suspected were officers’ quarters, and lobbed a grenade onto the flat roof of the one bungalow showing a light. Driving on, his next victims were two light tanks, both hosed in machine gun fire from the twin Vickers. Once in the centre of town, Easonsmith told his driver to pull off into an alley. Scrambling out, Easonsmith went off exploring, eventually finding himself ‘in what seemed in the dark to be some sort of market place, a building with arcades and pillars’. Then he literally bumped into a patrol of Italian soldiers. Easonsmith later described to Bill Kennedy Shaw how ‘for a time [I] chased them around the columns, bowling Mills bombs [hand grenades] among their legs’.12 The Italians eliminated, Easonsmith returned to the jeep and drove off on a new hunt, one which ended in the destruction of a dozen military vehicles in a motor transport park.
As for the Guards Patrol, led by Sergeant Jack Dennis following Timpson’s mishap, they first cut the telephone wires to Benghazi and Tobruk and then headed to the large barracks two miles east of the town. En route to their target they passed a military hospital, and the two sentries on duty outside issued a challenge. ‘I placed a four second grenade between them and continued driving up the road,’ Dennis wrote in his report, adding that ‘both sentries were seen to be blown down by the blast.’13 A similar challenge at the entrance to the barracks met with a similar response, and grenades were also hurled at a group of Italians on the steps that led to the main building. ‘By this time the trucks were covering two sides of the barracks and were emptying their guns into the buildings,’ wrote Dennis. ‘When presumably an ack-ack sentry opened up with small arms fire on to the trucks from a gun post situated on the top of a brick-built tower, he was quickly silenced as all our guns immediately turned on him.’14
A dead animal discovered in the Haruj hills. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
Dennis led a party on foot to attack the barracks, but they were beaten back by accurate small arms fire from Italians now in slit trenches. They threw some more grenades at the building before returning to the trucks and subjecting the defenders to several thumping bursts of fire from the Vickers and Browning. Suddenly someone shouted a warning. ‘Tanks!’ On seeing the approach of two light tanks (probably the two that the LRDG had encountered on the outskirts of Barce), Dennis ordered G Patrol to withdraw.
Skinning a gazelle. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
Wilder’s T1 Patrol was also having problems with tanks. Three of them blocked their escape route from the airfield. ‘There was nothing to do but rush them,’ he reflected. ‘So we charged straight into them with guns blazing. I was driving the leading truck and ran down one of the tanks with it. The truck was smashed to pieces, the wheels flung off and the engine knocked back – but the tank was knocked over on its side.’15 Wilder suffered some minor injuries in the collision, but everyone else in the truck was unhurt. But it was utter pandemonium on the road. A couple of the tank crew had already scrambled to safety, and instead of fleeing they advanced on the LRDG, trading blows with Wilder and his men. ‘For three minutes there was a glorious all-in scrap,’ said Wilder.
Sergeant H. R. T. Holland was beaten to the ground, and another soldier, Lance Corporal Alan Nutt, a farmer from Motukarara, vanished after leaving his vehicle to aid Wilder and his men (both were captured, but Nutt escaped the following year). Wilder leapt into a jeep driven by Trooper Burke and opened fire with the Vickers, sending a torrent of tracer into one of the two remaining tanks. Burke, ‘dazzled’ by the tracer, drove the jeep into the kerb and the vehicle overturned, trapping himself, Wilder and Parker. Meanwhile two of the LRDG had climbed onto the stricken tank and dropped hand grenades through the slits, and the valiant pair then immobilized a second tank with a grenade under its tracks.
Wilder and the other men were pulled from under the jeep, loaded onto a truck, and the raiders then careered into the night. But their ordeal was not yet over. The rear truck, driven by Merlyn Craw, was intercepted by three armoured cars that had arrived on the scene. Turning into a narrow side street, Craw’s vehicle came under fire and he crashed into a concrete air-raid shelter. Within seconds Italians were upon them, and Craw and his three comrades on the truck were all captured.
‘We drove straight down the main road the way we had come,’ said Wilder, adding that Italians were lined up on both sides of the route, firing at will as the convoy passed. ‘Some of them can’t have been more than 30 yards from the track,’ explained Wilder. ‘It was a sort of ambush and inevitably some of our men were wounded. But all got through, even the truck which burst a tyre halfway through the wadi. I will never forget that. The sergeant in charge of the truck calmly got out and we changed the wheel there in the middle of the ambush with bullets flying all around us.’16 The sergeant who changed the wheel in the middle of an ambush was Jack Dennis, and once done the convoy was able to turn off without further damage to the vehicles. Five miles on, it was deemed safe enough to find cover and let the fitters repair all the damage.
Simpson of S1 Patrol was wounded in the shoulder during an attack on an Italian roadhouse at Tmed Hassan on 8 November 1941. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
KUFRA, 1942
Kufra offered plenty of shade from the sun, but also attracted the flight of German Heinkels who attacked the oasis following the failed raids at Tobruk, Jalo and Benghazi in September 1942. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
Jacko Jackson and Pluto Endersby, one of the unit’s signallers, at Kufra in 1942. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
The living quarters of the LRDG at Kufra. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
In all, G Patrol had lost four men and a truck, and T1 Patrol was down two trucks, a jeep and six men. The following day they were located by the Italians, attacked from the ground and from the air, resulting in the loss of all vehicles except one truck and a jeep. More men were also wounded. The situation was grim. Easonsmith detailed the medical officer, Richard Lawson, to load the six most seriously wounded men into the truck and two jeeps, and head south to a RV point with David Lloyd Owen’s Y1 Patrol. The rest of the men organized themselves into two parties. Easonsmith led 14 men some 80 miles, the men taking it in turns to ride in the other jeep, which also carried wat
er and rations, before they were met by another LRDG patrol. The second group consisted of nine guardsmen and Frank Jopling, the New Zealander who had been in the unit since day one. Jopling was carrying a nasty flesh wound to his leg, which soon turned gangrenous. Unable to keep up with the rest of the party, Jopling and another ailing soldier urged the others to press on. They reached safety, but Jopling and his comrade, despite covering an extraordinary 150 miles in total, failed to locate any British units and were picked up a week after the raid by the Italians. ‘The whole saga of the raid that Jake led on Barce is one that is resplendent in adventure, in courage, in fortitude and leadership,’ wrote Lloyd Owen, who was the first friendly face Lawson saw when he reached the RV on 16 September.
Nonetheless, overall the four raids on Tobruk, Benghazi, Jalo and Barce had come at a heavy price: a dozen men wounded, ten captured and the loss of many vehicles. At least there had been no deaths, and Lloyd Owen considered that the unit was ‘bloodied but unbowed’. But the Axis retribution was not finished. On 25 September, not long after the LRDG had arrived at Kufra for a well-deserved rest, the peace was shattered by a series of sharp whistles. Aircraft! Suddenly a flight of eight Heinkel bombers swooped over Kufra. ‘I was standing looking up into the small area of sky that I could see through the trees when suddenly I saw a great shiny silvery Heinkel come bearing down on us,’ wrote Lloyd Owen. ‘Its four cannons were spitting flame and lead as it roared towards us.’17
The Long Range Desert Group in World War II Page 13