The identity of the person who proposed the attack on Rommel’s HQ at Beda Littoria has never been officially revealed. After all, the British military didn’t go in for assassinations, not officially at any rate. If there were any records pertaining to the operation they didn’t survive the war; perhaps they were destroyed in late June 1942, when the Germans advanced so far east across the desert that British staff officers in MEHQ began burning documents in anticipation of the arrival of the Axis forces in Cairo.
However, the diary of Capt Tommy Macpherson implies it was Geoffrey Keyes himself whose idea it was to hunt down Rommel. On 4 October 1941, Macpherson wrote: ‘A red letter day! Today Geoffrey found a great idea and we began to put it over – it will be a fight’. Later, Macpherson wrote to the Keyes family describing how Geoffrey had ‘burst radiantly into our orderly room after a promising visit to headquarters and said “If we get this job, Tommy, it’s one people will remember us by!”’ In her biography of her brother, Elizabeth Keyes wrote in 1956 that it was Geoffrey who after ‘much persuasion and many interviews … won over a reluctant and sceptical G.H.Q.’, a view borne out by an account of the raid written subsequently by Col Robert Laycock, erstwhile commander of Layforce and in October 1941 the head of Middle East Commando. Laycock wrote:
The original plan, formulated several weeks in advance at 8 A.H.Q. [Advanced Headquarters was an organization specializing in rescuing prisoners of war] included orders for attacks on various separate objectives. Although the whole operation was considered to be of a somewhat desperate nature it was obvious that certain tasks were more dangerous than others. Colonel K[eyes] was present at all the meetings and assisted in the planning, deliberately selected for himself from the outset the command of the det.[ail] detached to attack what was undoubtedly the most hazardous of these objectives – the residence and H.Q. of the General Officer Commanding the German forces in North Africa.
When the plan was submitted to me as Comdr of the M.E. Commandos, I gave it my considered opinion that the chances of being evacuated after the operation were very slender and that the attack on Gen. R.’s house in particular appeared to be desperate in the extreme. This attack even if initially successful, meant almost certain death for those who took part in it. I made these comments in the presence of Col. Keyes who begged me not to repeat them lest the operation be cancelled. (WO 218/171)
Col Robert Laycock, seen here inspecting Special Service troops later in the war, was the commander of the ill-fated Layforce, the Commando unit sent to the Middle East in early 1941. Laycock accompanied the raiders on the mission to ‘get Rommel’ and would be one of only three survivors to return. (Cody Images)
Despite the misgivings he later claimed to have harboured over the raid, Laycock authorized the plan, and Keyes and his 58 men began training for the operation off a stretch of coastline near Alexandria in Egypt. Using rubber dinghies and folboats (folding kayaks), the Commandos practised beach landings at night. Laycock, meanwhile, instructed Capt John Haselden to lead a small reconnaissance party overland to verify the intelligence concerning Rommel’s headquarters at Beda Littoria. Again, because of the lack of extant records about the operation, it is impossible to say from where the information first came. It was probably a British spy – a trusted one, evidently, as MEHQ appeared quite convinced that Rommel’s HQ was at Beda Littoria.
Haselden was a fascinating individual, the nearest the British came in World War II to producing another ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. Born in 1903 at Ramleh near Alexandria, Egypt, Haselden married the beautiful Nadia Ida Marie Szymonski-Lubicz in Alexandria in 1931 and had a good job as a cotton merchant while his brother held a position in Egypt with Barclays Bank. The birth of his son completed the idyll but then shortly before the war Haselden’s wife was killed in an automobile accident. The outbreak of war offered Haselden an outlet for his grief, and his fluency in Arabic, French and Italian made him appealing to MEHQ, who appointed him Western Desert Liaison Officer at Eighth Army HQ, working closely together with the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG). In particular, Haselden was instructed to obtain information from friendly Arabs in the region. A MEHQ report described Haselden as ‘a very remarkable man with a great influence over the Desert Arabs’ (quoted in PRO 2001: 419).
This photo of SBS personnel is believed to have been taken in early 1941, not long after the unit’s establishment by Capt Roger Courtney. The three soldiers are in a collapsible kayak – better known as a folboat. (Author’s Collection)
On 10 October Haselden was landed by the submarine Torbay at Chescem el-Kelb, a small beach on the coast of Cyrenaica approximately 18 miles from Beda Littoria, on which it was planned to land the raiding party the following month. Haselden, disguised as a local and accompanied by an Arab companion, moved inland towards the village of Slonta, 12 miles south of Beda Littoria. The terrain the pair had to traverse was wild and rugged, known locally as the Jebel el-Akhdar (‘Green Mountain’). In reality, however, for most of the year the relentless sun bleached the grass white – and anyway it was stripped down to the red rock underneath by grazing goats and sheep. As for the ‘mountain’, this was in fact an escarpment of two tiers with a sloping shelf in between and a flat surface on the top.
The land rose approximately 1,000ft between the first tier and the second, with the step in between fractured with myriad gullies and wadis (dry riverbeds) covered in scrubland. In the winter months the desert storms could turn these wadis into raging torrents. Further inland, on the south side of the mountain, the terrain was flatter and more arid, and there were ancient tombs and columns from the Greek colony that had flourished in Cirene for centuries before the Romans arrived in 100 BC.
Once at Slonta, Haselden and his Arab companion made contact with the village elder, Hussein Taher, a Senussi tribesman working for the Allies against the hated Italians. For nearly 20 years the Senussi had been engaged in a vicious war against the troops of Benito Mussolini, with the Italian fascist dictator determined to bring the Arabs to heel. Atrocities were frequent as the Italians struggled to contain the rebellious Senussi, and eventually Mussolini had been compelled to construct a barbed-wire fence along the entire length of his eastern frontier.
Beda Littoria and environs, 1941.
The fascist leader of Italy, Benito Mussolini, had ordered the invasion of Libya in the 1920s but despite the Italians’ overwhelming superiority in manpower and weaponry, they struggled to bring the Senussi tribesmen under control. As a result the Senussi proved useful allies to the British during the war in North Africa. (Cody Images)
Whether the information concerning Rommel’s headquarters at Beda Littoria came from Senussi sources is unknown. But after a good night’s rest and plenty of food, Haselden and his guide embarked on a reconnaissance of the area accompanied by friendly tribesmen and gathered intelligence about German and Italian troop deployments in the neighbourhood. Once his reconnaissance was complete, Haselden made for his rendezvous with an LRDG patrol led by Capt Jake Easonsmith. He arrived to discover the LRDG had an Italian prisoner, a member of the ‘Trieste’ Motorized Division captured on the way to Mechili, who talked freely as the patrol made its way to the desert hideout at Siwa Oasis. From there Haselden travelled on to Alexandria, arriving on 27 October to give Keyes and Laycock a thorough briefing on all he had learned.
According to the Arabs there was no doubt Rommel’s headquarters was located half a mile west of the village of Beda Littoria and surrounded by a cypress grove. His offices were in the former prefecture – and Arab agents had even described to Haselden the plates on the doors – but the German general slept in a whitewashed villa at the far end of the village.
While Haselden had been reconnoitring the territory around Beda Littoria, Tommy Macpherson had been inserted east of the village to carry out a similar reconnaissance between Apollonia, on the coast, and Cirene, headquarters of the Italian forces. Leaving Alexandria in the submarine HMS Talisman, Macpherson paddled ashore at Apollonia with a Glaswegian corporal called Evans on the night of 26 October, and was accompanied by two officers from the Special Boat Section (SBS). The quartet negotiated the first tier of the escarpment – which consisted of a proliferation of rocks and thorns in similar quantities – and surveyed a suitable place on the step for the raiding party to rendezvous with its guide the following month.
Macpherson, Evans and the two SBS officers retraced their steps to the beach, found their folboats and paddled out towards the rendezvous, seven minutes ahead of schedule. There was no submarine, however (it later transpired they were waiting off the wrong beach), and an increasingly rough swell forced them back towards land, wrecking their kayaks and leaving them no choice but to strike out on foot for the besieged British garrison at Tobruk. For more than a week the four men made their way east, moving mostly at night and stealing food and water from German mobile workshops whenever they could. Then, on the night of 3 November, they were approaching the port of Derna when ‘on an apparently empty side road we walked straight into the middle of some thirty men of a bicycle patrol’ (quoted in Keyes 1956: 202). The four soldiers were taken to Derna and from there ferried across the Mediterranean to an Italian prisoner-of-war camp. The capture of Macpherson was a bitter blow for Keyes, but he determined to press on with the attack despite the loss of his second-in-command and the misgivings of Col Laycock.
One of the earliest-known photographs of the SBS, taken in the Middle East in 1941. Many of these men were killed or captured on operations, leading to the SBS’s incorporation into the SAS the following year. (Author’s Collection)
The LRDG was the brainchild of Ralph Bagnold, a veteran of World War I and a noted North African desert explorer of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In June 1940 Capt Bagnold submitted an idea for a desert reconnaissance force to Gen Wavell, who authorized Bagnold to establish his unit, provisionally called the Long Range Patrol. As Bagnold wrote later, there would be three patrols, ‘every vehicle of which, with a crew of three and a machine gun, was to carry its own supplies of food and water for 3 weeks, and its own petrol for 2500 miles of travel across average soft desert surface – equivalent in petrol consumption to some 2400 miles of road’ (quoted in Mortimer 2012: 162). Travelling in American Chevrolet 30-cwt trucks purchased from the Egyptian Army or from vehicle dealers in Cairo, and wearing Arab headdresses and leather sandals rather than British Army-issue leather boots and service-dress caps, the Long Range Patrol soon became the Long Range Desert Group.
For officers, Bagnold recruited some of his fellow explorers such as Bill Kennedy Shaw and Pat Clayton, while the men were enlisted predominantly from the New Zealand and Rhodesian forces because, in Bagnold’s view, the average British soldier was ‘apt to be wasteful’ while the average ‘Colonial’ soldier was ‘alert, intelligent and possessed of a sense of responsibility’ (quoted in Mortimer 2012: 163).
In August 1940 the LRDG embarked on its first mission, led by Pat Clayton, a reconnaissance of the Jalo–Kufra track used by the Italians in Benghazi to resupply their garrisons at Kufra and Uweinat. Having driven east into Libya, Clayton’s two-vehicle patrol watched the track for three days but observed no enemy vehicles. But it wasn’t a wasted expedition. Having penetrated 600 miles from his base, Clayton returned to Egypt with two important details. First, enemy aircraft rarely detected sand-coloured vehicles in the desert as long as they were stationary. Second, he had discovered a route that crossed first the Egyptian Sand Sea and then, once inside Libya, the Kalanhso Sand Sea. The two seas were in fact connected further north to form, as Bagnold later described, ‘an irregular horseshoe’ shape in the south (quoted in Mortimer 2012: 164). Clayton had pioneered a route across the two Sand Seas that would become the point of entry into Libya for future LRDG patrols.
By December 1940 the LRDG was proving so invaluable as a reconnaissance force that it was expanded, a new patrol being formed from the Guards regiments. The following year it began working with David Stirling’s SAS, providing the ears and the eyes to the guerrilla unit while they were the muscle. Though they jokingly referred to the LRDG as the Long Range Taxi Group – they would be driven to and from targets by the LRDG – the men of the SAS had enormous respect for the LRDG’s skills. So, too, did Gen Wavell, who in a dispatch at the end of 1941 declared: ‘Their journeys across vast regions of unexplored desert have entailed the crossing of physical obstacles and the endurance of extreme temperatures, both of which a year ago would have been deemed impossible. Their exploits have been achieved only by careful organisation and a very high standard of enterprise, discipline, mechanical maintenance and desert navigation’ (quoted in Mortimer 2012: 176).
The LRDG were ingenious in their modes of transport. Though they began by using American Chevrolet 30-cwt trucks, they were apt to improvise, as seen here in this photo. It shows a Ford V-8 staff car cut down to resemble a German staff car. It was later used by SAS commander David Stirling. (SAS Regimental Museum)