THE AREA OVER WHICH THE Allied and Axis armies fought, the Western Desert, is one of the most arid and desolate regions on earth, covering some 1500 miles from the Nile Delta to Tunisia. The Egyptian part covers 250 miles from the Delta to the border with Libya and is 150 miles north to south at its widest point between the Mediterranean coast and the Oasis at Siwa. South of Siwa is the Egyptian Sand Sea and the Gilf Kebir plateau, the most inhospitable region. East of Siwa, running northeast, is the Salt Marsh of the Qattara Depression, which ends about 40 miles from the Mediterranean near a small railway station called El Alamein.
Thus the Western Desert had two open flanks, the sea to the north, and the desert to the south. It was the opportunities provided by these flanks that gave rise to specialist Allied troops: the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), the Special Air Service (SAS) and the commando units. One unit of specialists that opposed them was the Brandenburgers, Ritter’s Abwehr commando, which came under the umbrella of the German 800th Brandenburger Lehr Regiment. Almásy and Eppler served in this organisation.1
The desert is not consistently the flat, grey expanse dotted with scrub that it first appears. There is cover, for the desert rolls and moves, providing much ‘dead ground’, and there are long rocky ridges of limestone. The great coastal ridges, the escarpment, rises west of Mersa Matruh to a height of 450 feet, a steep blocking wall that vehicles can only cross via roads cut through the Halfaya Pass and Sidi Rezegh. The escarpment can also be crossed by camel as the Bedouin have done for centuries. During the Second World War some of the camel tracks were marked out with oil drums, like buoys marking a channel at sea.
The Bedouin were always there and ready to trade, but there was little other life in the desert in 1941. The greatest torment for the soldiers was the flies, droves of them from dawn to dusk. The blistering heat made the slightest movement draining; any cut or abrasion was soon infected by sand. Every man who fought in the desert suffered the constant chafing from fine sand in dirty clothing, which caused lesions or desert sores. If sand got under the foreskin the result was agonising; many men had to be circumcised.
The nights were freezing and tracks could be washed away by torrential rain. Sand storms, the scourging Khamsin, could come at any time or season.
The Italians hated the desert, and kept it at bay by building stone houses in their camps, laying out paths and little gardens. The Germans fought it with science; their stores were full of foot powders, eye-lotions, insect repellents, mouth washes and disinfectants. The British, Australians and New Zealanders simply ignored the desert. They slept in blankets on the ground, and were not unduly worried about germs.2
There were few towns and those only on the coast. The desert provided a huge battleground for open mobile warfare only limited by supply. In his history of the Eighth Army Robin Neillands wrote: ‘There is nothing to sustain an army here; every gallon of petrol, every drop of water, every round of ammunition, has to be carried in. The first point to keep in mind about the war in North Africa from 1940–43 is the chronic problem of supply.’3 These precarious supply lines were vulnerable and were an ideal target for the Special Forces.
While Almásy was being wined and dined by the Abwehr in 1939, some of his British pre-war desert acquaintances, Ralph Bagnold, Pat Clayton, Kennedy Shaw and a new boy, Captain Rupert Harding-Newman, were setting up the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG). The story of this, the most successful of the ‘private armies’ that flourished in the desert war, began when two ships collided in the Mediterranean in October 1939. One limped into Port Said for repairs; on board was Major Bagnold of the Royal Corps of Signals en route to take up an appointment in East Africa. He decided to take a few days to look up old friends in Cairo and the buzz soon got around that he was in town, it was mentioned in the Egyptian Gazette.
Baggers, as he was affectionately known, went to see General Maitland (Jumbo) Wilson, commander of British forces in Egypt, and suggested forming ‘a mechanised desert raiding force’ but it was turned down. However Bagnold was sure of himself and not easily put off. He therefore went over Wilson’s head and asked for an interview with General Archibald Wavell; within an hour of the request he was facing the Commander in Chief across his desk. He managed to convince him to revive the Yeomanry Light Car Patrols of the First World War, explaining that they needed to find out what the Italians might be up to beyond the Egyptian Sand Sea. Also they might engage in ‘piracy’, which appealed to Wavell, who had been lukewarm to the idea up to that point. He gave Bagnold six weeks to get his patrols off the ground, and he had carte blanche to obtain equipment with an order that all branches and heads of departments were to cooperate ‘instantly and without question’.4
During the First World War the roles had been somewhat reversed: Italy and Britain were allies, while the Senussi Arabs were allied to the Turks. At the end of 1915 the border between Egypt and Libya was the scene of some skirmishes, when the Senussi – aided by Turkey and Germany – invaded Egypt reaching Mersa Matruh. The British responded with cavalry patrols, but the units, including Australian cavalry, found operations in this terrain away from the coastal strip to be difficult. Even switching to camels did not really solve the problem. For the Senussi camels were a way of life and they knew more about the terrain, which was virtually unmapped away from the coast.
To combat the Senussi the Yeomanry Light Car Patrols were set up in 1916. Using Model T Fords with oversized 3.5-inch tyres, these patrols were able to range well down into the desert, and learned how to operate there. Inventing new techniques of navigation and movement, surveying and mapmaking, they were finally able to clear the enemy from the frontiers and oases. By 1917 the war had moved on and the patrols were disbanded.5
During the Second World War most of the desert fighting took place within a narrow coastal strip. However to the south, beyond the oases of Siwa, Jarabub and Jalo lay the inner Libyan Desert, a huge expanse of territory larger than France and Spain put together, of which the Western Desert was mere edging. The desert was (and still is) uninhabited and without much life due to lack of rainfall. This was where the LRDG was to operate.
Within the inner desert the Italians had established a chain of military posts and landing grounds in their territory. They had also formed special colonial forces for duty there; the motorised ‘Auto-Saharan’ companies had the advantage of permanently attached reconnaissance aircraft. But the ground patrols were designed only to operate over reasonably good surfaces.
One chain of Italian posts, connected by a good track, went south to Jalo and Kufra and onto Uweinat, 600 miles inland, the nearest Italian post to the East African Empire 1000 miles away across the Sudan. When war came the garrisons of these posts continued their watch, feeling safe behind the natural barrier of the great Egyptian Sand Sea which lay to the east.
Bagnold knew that the Egyptian Sand Sea was not a complete obstacle to all forms of motor transport. However, the vast inland flank was unlikely ground to be used by the main armies; the great dunes could only be crossed at a few narrow places and the surfaces could not stand the passage of many vehicles. The patrols would have to be small and because of the distances involved, self sufficient. They needed great skill and confidence in ‘finding their position astronomically, for the chance of being lost in almost lunar surroundings is a great deterrent to moving far away from reliable tracks.’6
Personnel was the first requirement. Bagnold sent for Pat Clayton and Bill Kennedy Shaw, neither of whom were serving in the army; the former was a surveyor in Tanganyika, the latter curator of the Palestine Museum in Jerusalem. These three men had all served in the First World War and were long in the tooth for the arduous tasks that lay ahead. Their companion Rupert Harding-Newman was somewhat younger; his job was to obtain vehicles and equipment.
As soon as Clayton and Kennedy Shaw arrived they were commissioned as captains. Bagnold recruited men from the newly arrived New Zealand Division, who, he felt, would be more at home with vehicles and machinery than home-grown troops.
For transport Harding-Newman obtained Chevrolet 30cwt trucks, modified to take loads of two tons with up-rated springs; the doors, windshields and body tops were stripped off. Carrying racks were fitted for extra fuel, water and radio sets and machine-gun mountings were welded on. A radiator condenser system was fitted to each vehicle in the form of a steel tank bolted to the step and connected to the radiator, both being sealed. When a radiator boiled – which happened frequently in the desert – the steam was condensed into the water in the condenser and as the radiator cooled the vacuum sucked it back inside. All modifications were carried out by American and Greek technicians at Chevrolet in Alexandria and at Fords in Cairo. Ten trucks were needed for a 40-man patrol unit, with each patrol carrying ten Lewis guns, four Boyes anti-tank rifles and one 37mm Bofors anti-aircraft gun, plus the usual infantry weapons of Bren guns, Sten guns and rifles.
The men were schooled in the problems of desert navigation by Kennedy-Shaw, who introduced them to the sun compass, one with which direction could be maintained despite the magnetic effect of vehicle bodies that could throw an ordinary compass as much as ten degrees out. Bagnold took the signals training, teaching the young New Zealanders the use of the army No 11 wireless sets, which according to the manual had a range of some 75 miles, but which he knew, from experience, could transmit Morse over 1000 miles across the desert at certain times of day. The New Zealanders were quick to learn, taking to their strange new life ‘like ducks to water’, recalled Bagnold.7 After six weeks of tough training Wavell inspected the small unit and declared it fit for operations.
Clayton had already taken a small party on one valuable reconnaissance in August; he had discovered a second sand sea (the ‘Libyan’8) to the east of the Jalo-Kufra, and had found a way across it. He watched the route for three days, discovering that the track had broken up and the Italians were using a track some 20 miles to the west. He also discovered a level plain to the north of Kufra within the horseshoe of the sand seas. During this time the main body set up dumps along the safe routes within Egyptian territory to the southwest of Cairo and across the Sand Sea as far out as the Gilf Kebir. These dumps contained everything that might be needed, and by laying them out the crews gained much first-hand experience in driving and navigation.
With the dumps ready and with Clayton’s report on Italian activities, Bagnold felt it was time for his men to cross the Sand Sea. Kennedy-Shaw considered the prospect with mixed feelings.
Late in the evening when the sands cool quickly and the dunes throw long shadows the Sand Sea is one of the most lovely things in the world; no words can properly describe the beauty of those sweeping curves of sand. At a summer midday when the sun beats down all its shapes to one flat glare of sand and the sand-drift blows off the dune crests like the snow-plume off Everest, it is as good an imitation of Hell as one could devise. It was across 150 miles of this dead world that Bagnold was proposing to take for the first time a force of heavily loaded trucks.9
Just before the Italians launched their attack on Egypt, Bagnold and his evolving force set up their first base at Siwa Oasis on the Escarpment of the Qattara Depression. From here two patrols set out into enemy territory. One attacked Italian fuel dumps and landing grounds along the hard track south to Kufra, while the other – commanded by Clayton – went right through Italian-controlled territory into Chad, to make contact with the French forces at Fort Lamy. The appearance of the LRDG patrol convinced the garrison to join forces with the Free French and British.
This was all carried out in the heat of summer. Kennedy-Shaw observed, ‘You don’t merely feel hot, you don’t merely feel tired, you feel as if every bit of energy had left you, as if your brain was thrusting its way through the top of your head and you want to lie in a stupor till the accursed sun has gone down.’10 At midday they could do nothing but lie under their trucks in an attempt to find some relief from the blistering sun. However the first mission was a success, the patrols have covered around 4000 miles. Arriving back in Cairo, Wavell was delighted by his ‘mosquito army’ and promoted Bagnold to lieutenant-colonel and gave the go-ahead to expand the force.
In November 1940, Bagnold went to Fort Lamy to finish the negotiations Clayton had started with the garrison. Soon French troops were working alongside the LRDG, carrying out raids led by Clayton – now a major – against positions in the Murzuk Oasis region deep within Italian-held Libya. From Murzuk they tracked back east. Scouting ahead for a possible attack on Kufra, Clayton’s patrol was spotted by enemy aircraft who strafed the vehicles. Not far away was a patrol of the Italian Auto-Saharan. Clayton was sitting in the last vehicle and was shot up. ‘They got me on the head though the helmet prevented a wound, and punctured both front tyres and the radiator.’11 Clayton was then wounded in the arm and his truck was disabled with hits to the fuel tank and engine. The Auto-Saharans closed in and he had no choice but to surrender. Clayton was taken to Kufra, then to a camp in Tripoli and finally to a POW camp in Italy.
Bagnold wrote to Clayton’s wife Ellie, saying that the Italians would treat ‘Pat’ well, and that the success of the raid on Murzuk was entirely due to him. Lieutenant Bruce Ballantyne – who had been on the same patrol but evaded capture and returned safely to Cairo – described Clayton as ‘always leading and showed no personal fear at all. He had one fault, and that was an over readiness to expose himself rather than risk casualties to his men.’12
See here for a list of abbreviations used in the below notes
1 KV/2/1467 p.5
2 Cooper, p.110
3 Neillands, R., Eighth Army p.3
4 Bierman, p.142
5 Pitt, p.223
6 Playfair (Volume 1), p.295
7 Bagnold, R., Sand, Wind and War p.219
8 Playfair, (Volume 1), p.295
9 Kennedy Shaw, W.B., Long Range Desert Group p.24–25
10 ibid, p.42
11 Clayton, p.153
12 ibid, p.147