What made me want to write a new history of the Long Range Desert Group? Well, I’m of that generation, born in the ‘fifties, who grew up on a diet of Ealing/Pinewood war films, Desert Rats, LRDG, Ice Cold in Alex, mostly black and white, latterly in colour, then it was Tobruk, Raid on Rommel and the altogether darker Play Dirty with Michael Caine and Nigel Davenport. Rock Hudson, George Peppard and Nigel Green (also in Play Dirty), starred in Tobruk, from the book by Peter Rabe. In the drab, post industrial landscape of Tyneside, in the grip of dank, icy winter, the desert formed a near magical backdrop.
This was, as described at the time, pure warfare; no moral issues over civilian casualties or mass destruction, just ‘us’ and ‘them’. Mostly the Germans were portrayed as honourable. Rommel was as popular here as he ever was in Germany, Monty was the quintessential national hero, the doubts and criticism came much later. The dead hand of cultural Marxism which has blighted our society since had not then gathered strength and we were allowed to play at war. Most of our fathers had served in some capacity, army surplus kit, ’37 pattern webbing and battledress could be had for pocket money prices.
The LRDG developed mythic status very early on. Ralph Bagnold and those other pre-war Saharan explorers fitted into the shining tradition of Doughty, Burton, T. E. Lawrence and Glubb. They carried the gloss of romance into an industrial war, the most terrible in history. In 1940, Britain needed some gloss. Disaster in Norway had been followed by Dunkirk, the desperate struggle of the battle of Britain and the dragging prospect of a long, costly Blitz against British cities. Coventry was flattened in November.
Coventration – the term Luftwaffe officers coined to refer to the firestorm effect the planned mix of high explosive and incendiaries created, showed the terrible face of strategic bombing. They also sowed the seed of mass destruction which they’d come to feel in earnest three and four years later. But the LRDG were the beau sabreurs who fought a Kipling-esque war, where individual courage, skill and dash could still count, could even win the day. Places such as Kufra and Siwa had a mystic ring, distant, ancient, mysterious and exotic. At a time when Britain stood at bay, they took the fight to the enemy and won.
It was in the desert that the fight back began. General O’Connor’s campaign against Il Duce’s legions, Operation Compass, kicked off in December 1940 and the results were spectacular. Italian POWs were counted by the acre rather than the thousand. Tobruk, Bardia and Benghazi fell. Marshal Graziani’s legions were decimated and Tunis appeared to be the next stop. Then Erwin Rommel arrived and the tide was immediately turned. The swinging ‘pendulum’ of the Desert War had begun and would see-saw until the final Axis collapse in May, 1943.
As the battles along the Mediterranean littoral intensified, LRDG became kings of the desert. Patrols ranged across a vast, empty canvas, some of the harshest terrain on earth, emerging behind enemy lines to ‘biff’ supplies, communications, transport and, above all, planes. Rommel didn’t have enough and LRDG, soon joined by Stirling’s fledgling SAS, shot up many of those on the ground. LRDG were the eyes and ears of 8th Army, embedded deep behind the lines along key arterial routes, ghost patrols, the silent watchers the Axis never saw right under their noses.
Success often led to raising unrealistic hopes. In September 1942, in the prelude to El Alamein, Operation Agreement grew from a simple idea for a daring LRDG penetration at Tobruk into a major raid involving Special Forces/commandos, marines, navy and air force. With hindsight it was too big, too complicated and predicated more on wishful thinking than hard intelligence.
Agreement proved a costly fiasco; most of the raiders were killed or captured, two destroyers, a light cruiser and a number of MTB’s and launches were lost. That part of the operation carried out entirely by LRDG against the air fields at Barce was a complete success, though most of their vehicles were shot up on the road back. After the end of the desert war LRDG, in part, struggled to find a new role and the unit, despite service in the Aegean, Italy, Greece and the Balkans never quite filled the same niche. They were disbanded in 1945.
There is a legacy. I’d assert that the concept of Special Forces in the modern context derives from LRDG. Their successes proved that the idea had merit – high command had been (and would remain) sceptical about such maverick units which tended to siphon off the bravest and best from line formations. Nonetheless, the SAS was revived for the Malayan Emergency and now rates as best in the world.
The role of Special Forces has shifted radically from participation in inter-state conflict, (the Falklands and Gulf Wars being the exceptions), to a counter-insurgency/anti-terrorist role. Most who were around in the eighties will recall the dramatic hostage rescue as the denouement of the siege of the Iranian Embassy. Like LRDG before them, UK Special Forces during the early stages of the war in Afghanistan during 2001/2002, demonstrated the ‘force-multiplier’ effect that teams of highly trained and focused operators can engender in a conventional conflict, in this instance, allied to surgical air strikes, breaking a longstanding stalemate and leading to the rout of the Taliban.
Present and future conflict bears little resemblance to industrial warfare between defined nation states. Now we have wars of collapsed states, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. Combatants are not armies in the western sense but armed militias, driven by religious fervour or political ideology which, amoeba-like form and shift alliances seemingly with the tide. No good guys. No bad guys, just an awful lot of civilian victims and a whole generation of refugees. Future wars will erupt in the vast shanty towns, spreading beyond third world cities as populations swell and struggles for power and diminishing resources proliferate.
The story certainly hasn’t ended.
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By John Sadler, author of the new Casemate UK title, Ghost Patrol. Find out more by clicking on the image below:
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God, I feel like I shulod be takin notes! Great work