Ralph Bagnold, seen here in Egypt during the 1920s, founded the LRDG in 1940 and his vast experience of the Libyan desert proved invaluable in the North African campaign. (Getty)
INTRODUCTION
The desert campaign of World War I is a largely forgotten theatre in the minds of the British and their allies. One hundred years after the ‘war to end all wars’, the perception is of a conflict of carnage fought in the trenches of France and Belgium. Mud, blood and barbed wire. Of course, Australians and New Zealanders still recall with pride the bravery and fortitude of their troops in the Dardanelles campaign of 1915, but few are aware of the consequences of that failed campaign to knock Turkey out of the war.
Ralph Bagnold, seen here in Egypt during the 1920s, founded the LRDG in 1940 and his vast experience of the Libyan desert proved invaluable in the North African campaign. (Getty)
It resulted in Britain diverting 80,000 of its soldiers from the Western Front to Egypt and then a march up through Palestine into Syria to engage the Turks. Turkey’s reaction was to call on Muslim states to wage a jihad against Britain and her allies. The appeal met with a mixed response. In the Arabian Peninsula, thanks in part to Colonel T. E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – Prince Feisal and his warriors fought with the British against Turkey. But in the Egyptian Desert, the vast arid tract of land west of Cairo, the Senussi tribesmen embraced the call to jihad against the European ‘Crusaders’.
Armed by Turkey and Germany, thousands of Senussi, led by Sayed Ahmed esh Sherif, began attacking British outposts. The raids caused little in the way of material damage to the British but they were nonetheless a concern, and forced their commander, General Sir Archibald Murray, to transfer troops from Palestine to reinforce the British position in Egypt. An innovative general by World War I standards, Murray organized his troops into the Western Frontier Force, combining infantrymen with units of cavalry and artillery, further strengthened by a squadron of light bombers from the Royal Flying Corps (RFC).
The innovation didn’t stop there. A Camel Corps was formed, but, bold as they were, the men were no match for the Senussi who had grown up on the awkward animals. If they were inferior to their enemy in tradition, Murray reasoned, why not gain the advantage by using their superior technology. And so in early 1916 the Light Car Patrol (LCP) was formed.
Comprising a fleet of 20 horsepower, four-cylinder Model T Fords, the Allies – the volunteers were all British and Australians – now had the mobility but more importantly the firepower to take the fight to the Senussi. Operating in conjunction with the RFC, the patrols were provided with the location of a Senussi camp by the reconnaissance aircraft and they would then drive into the desert and launch a hit-and-run attack. ‘They,’ said Lawrence of the Light Car Patrols, ‘were worth hundreds of men to us in these deserts’.1
T. E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia, recognized the worth of vehicles in the desert during World War I. (Getty)
An LRDG patrol rests by a small desert oasis during a 1942 operation.
The small but significant contribution of the LCP in the Desert War was quickly forgotten following the Armistice. But in 1925 a young British captain was posted to Egypt, an officer who had survived the horrors of the Somme and who in North Africa found a land of enchantment and unlimited adventure. Ralph Bagnold’s keen and enquiring mind devoured a mountain of literature about his new posting, including an account of the Light Car Patrol’s activities nearly a decade earlier. Then, when he saw the desert for the first time, he was captivated. It reminded Bagnold of Dartmoor, where he had spent many happy times as a boy. ‘Both had the strange aura induced by the physical presence of the remote past, and also by the great bare trackless expanses where the careless might well get lost,’ he later wrote.2
Bagnold set off to explore the interior of the Western Desert, and as he disappeared into the towering dunes he was unwittingly blazing a trail for a special forces unit whose name, in time, would come to be a byword for intrepidness.