FOOTNOTES

Chapter 3

*Patrols always stopped for lunch at midday because this was the hour that the sun was directly overhead and cast no shadow, and so rendered the sun compass ineffective.

†In the three years the LRDG operated in the desert they suffered one death and one broken back as a result of vehicles taking dunes too fast.

‡AKA William Joyce, the American-born Irish fascist who fled to Germany in 1939 and spent the war broadcasting Nazi propaganda in English. He was hanged for treason in January 1946.

§It is worth noting that water rations usually forbade men from washing. One LRDG veteran, Les Sullivan, recalled after the war that Bagnold taught them how to wash using sand. ‘He said that washing does not get you clean because we don’t normally get dirty. He reckoned you washed and bathed to get rid of dead cells of skin. So in deep desert we bathed in the sand.’

Chapter 4

*The 37mm Bofors was mounted on a turntable at the back of a truck, and came to be disliked by the LRDG because of its weight.

Chapter 5

*Gibbs Dentrifice, or toothpaste, was the leading company of its type in Britain at this time, and in 1955 it was the first product to be promoted on UK television.

†In fact four of these men had evaded capture by hiding among the rocks until the Italians had departed.

Chapter 6

*Contrary to some sources, which state that Prendergast was a direct replacement for Pat Clayton, Bill Kennedy Shaw confirmed in his memoirs that Bagnold had already procured his former fellow explorer from England before the capture of Clayton.

†Later in the desert the two WACOs began to lose power due to the effect of sand on the pistons and cylinders.

‡On 18 September 1945, the Times of London published a letter written by Kennedy Shaw entitled ‘Arab Helpers’, in which he stated: ‘Twice the British advanced into Cyrenaica and twice withdrew from it, and at each retreat the Italians took vengeance, sometimes with great severity, on those Arabs whom they suspected of having helped us.

Chapter 8

*On the front cover was the LRDG badge, a scorpion with the words beneath Non Vi Sed Arte (Not by Strength but by Guile). The badge was the brainchild of Teddy Mitford, who during a pre-war expedition to Kufra had been impressed by the insignia of an Italian air force squadron of a black scorpion within a blue wheel.

Chapter 9

*The actual designation of Stirling’s 60-strong force was L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade, a deliberate attempt by MEHQ [Middle East Headquarters] to fool the Germans into believing – through one of their many spies in Egypt – that an airborne brigade had arrived from Britain.

†Oedema is frequently caused by famine and leads to swelling and discolouration of the skin, often turning it black.

Chapter 10

*George Matthews’ remains were never found and he is commemorated on panel 54 of the Alamein Memorial.

†Lieutenant General William Gott was the initially the choice as Eighth Army commander but en route to Cairo to take up his appointment in early August his plane was shot down.

‡In the view of David Lloyd Owen, later the CO of the LRDG, this was an imprudent decision. ‘From the moment [Stirling] began to get his own transport, and became independent of the LRDG, he began to lose his effectiveness because he necessarily had to concern himself with the mechanics of administration,’ he wrote. ‘David Stirling was a magnificent fighting leader, but the tedious business of worrying where the food, the ammunition, the communications, the fuel and water were to come from was something with which he did not want to concern himself. Up until then the LRDG had done all that for him.’

Chapter 11

*Wann spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He died in 1987 and Timpson – who returned to the Scots Guards at the start of 1943 – wrote his obituary. He finished with an anecdote about one of his many visits to Wann in his native Edinburgh. ‘I always feel dreadful about my responsibility for what happened to you,’ he told Wann. ‘You should not worry, sir, I never regret having gone with you to the LRDG.’

Chapter 12

*Stirling paid a high price for his hubris when, a couple of weeks later, his patrol was captured by the Germans, just beyond the Gabes Gap, a geographical bottleneck between the Tunisian salt-flats and the Mediterranean Sea. Stirling spent the remainder of the war a prisoner and Paddy Mayne assumed command of the SAS.

Chapter 15

*Bramley’s was the most successful of the four. Inserting without incident, they spent a week radioing back information to Allied Armies in Italy [AAI] HQ. When the radio died, Bramley led his men back safely having provided information of ‘considerable value to our advancing troops’.

†It was subsequently learned that Fleming’s parachute had failed to open because of a default static line and he had been killed on landing. His mother commissioned a brooch designed on the LRDG emblem and wore it for the rest of her life.

‡Irrefutable proof of the Order came in August 1944 when two SAS soldiers miraculously managed to escape from in front of a firing squad in a French forest, running into the trees as the Germans gunned down the rest of their comrades. The pair were found by the Maquis who eventually spirited them back to England.

Chapter 16

*The rest of the raiding party were picked up by motor launch on the night of 6 September.

Chapter 17

*Commander Montgomery wrote in his log that ‘midget thought sunk’. It was probably a Biber (German for ‘beaver’) submarine, which were 9 metres in length, crewed by one man and armed with two torpedoes.