KIWI Bedorun A KORERO REPORT

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 20, 9 October 1944, Page 3

KIWI Bedorun A KORERO REPORT

Published by arrangement with Army Archives Section. No part of this article may be reprinted without the permission of Archives Section, Army H.Q.

A trackless, waterless waste : uninhabited, unknown : a dreary monotony of rolling sand-dunes some of them 400 ft. high and running for scores of miles without a break : a land where by day the naked heat can kill, and night makes it like a valley of the moon : the Great Sand Sea, barrier to the inner Libyan desert. Impenetrable, impassable were the adjectives applied to it. But picked New Zealand troops, led by a British officer who had used his peace-time leaves exploring this very area, penetrated it, and as they gained experience, mastered it. They brought the twentieth century to an unknown portion of the world where through countless ages the wind had eroded the earth’s crust in places to the naked rock, and replaced the soft padding of the camel with the roar of petroldriven trucks. Then they rolled up their sleeves and roared far into enemy territory: gathered information, took prisoners, shot up forts which fondly believed their isolation was sufficient protection, left the enemy bewildered and apprehensive, on edge in a territory he thought secure. They distracted his attention from the area where the main blow would come, in the north, and forced him to dribble away men and materials in a vain attempt to stop their depredations. So it stands first saga of Long Range Desert Group. In the early summer of 1940 when Italy entered the war information as to her dispositions in the Inner Libyan Desert was scanty. It was known that

she held a line of oases and wells running from Benghazi 800 miles into the interior, and that at Kufra she had a fortified post and aircraft. The danger that from Kufra and Uweinat air raids or mechanized assaults might be launched against the Aswan Dam or the river port of Wadi Haifa was evident, and it was vital to find out all that was happening in the interior across the Great Sand Sea, 600 miles west of the Nile. It was finally decided that the best means of obtaining information would be by long-range reconnaissance into the interior by small mobile columns. They would have to be self-contained in fuel for up to 2,000 miles and in food and water for at least some hundreds of miles. They must traverse the greatest belt of sand-dunes in the world and operate in enemy territory without maps and where no help could reach them in the event of casualties to men or machines. To train and lead these columns British officers who had explored this or similar parts of the world were found, and picked officers and men from the New Zealand troops in Egypt formed the personnel. In six weeks the organization training and equipping was complete, and the Long Range Desert Group was ready for those exploits which brought it fame and praise, and to the humbler members of the Group, in the words of one of them, welcome change from parades and fatigues; adventure and excitement enough. During the training period one of the chief “ arts ” to learn was the driving

of the trucks, 30 and 15 cwt., over the sand-dunes. This called for plenty of practice and skill in gear-changing. A rush down the slope of one dune and up the next, and unless the gear-change was nicely timed—well, out would come sand-plates and sand-mats and it would be a case of all hands but the driver heaving from the rear to get a truck over the crest. On one training trip a truck took the upward slope at speed, shot off the crest and landed on its nose 30 ft. down the other side. The occupants were spilled out, but not seriously hurt, and a broken front axle was replaced by the fitter working hard for thirty-six hours. Soon, however, the drivers had mastered tunis this new type of driving, and

over the firmer parts the truck, speeding up, over and down dune after dune at 50 m.p.h. gave the impression of standing still while huge breakers of sand rushed past it. Some of the difficulties were enough to daunt the most intrepid. As the distances were so great, and maps, where they existed, inaccurate, the vehicles had to be navigated in the same way as a ship. For this a sun compass was used, necessitating an open cab. In

order to deal effectively with any roving enemy patrols, a 37 mm. Bofors gun was mounted on the truck with anti-tank rifles and Lewis guns. So a hood could not be

used. And that meant that the occupants were exposed to the blazing sun during their daytime travels. Temperatures rose at times to i zo° and 130° F. The north wind, which cooled the nights, would sometimes swing to east, south, and west, and stir up the sand till the column was enveloped as though in a fog and the heat struck like a naked flame. Several became delirious with heat stroke, and to show they were

not the only sufferers, often under the shade of small rocks would be found dead or dying migrant birds. As water was limited and precious, shaving and washing were dispensed with. In spite of this the only vermin picked up were camel ticks after a night spent in an abandoned Italian camp. Such camps were given a wide berth after that. One man, badly wounded during an attack on a desert outpost, had to be carried seven hundred miles by truck and then flown by plane three thousand miles to a hospital. On another occasion a spill from a capsizing truck split open the knee of one of the party and this

was sewn with a needle and an ordinary piece of string. A truck which broke down was towed a thousand miles to a spot where it could be repaired. Desert sores broke out on some men after they had been on several patrols. Malaria attacked many. On one occasion three men developed the disease while on patrol. They carried on. At the end of the patrol they were evacuated to hospital. By that time they had suffered malaria for twenty-one days and temperatures were still at 103°. The going was as rugged as could be. At one small desert post where a patrol was stationed for a while the shade temperature was 130°, and men had to lie under their vehicles from eight in the morning until five in the evening. Flies added to their miseries at this particular post, and men ate with their heads wreathed in the smoke of a fire to keep the pests away. Thirst, that terror of all desert places, the foe to be feared on waste of land or sea, struck at one patrol. Using their precious water to fill up a radiator which had leaked, they found on reaching the well at their next stop that the water was extremely brackish. They took some of it with them, but in the meantime drank the water from a Vickers gun. On the return journey they took the brackish water, strained it three times, boiled it, and added plenty of tea and sugar. They drank it—and were immediately sick. By the time they returned to their base they were near to the limit of thirst.

All this and fighting, too! For as yet no word has been said of any military fighting. The only enemy has been Nature—very much in the raw. A preliminary reconnaissance in the late summer of 1940 showed that a selfcontained fighting patrol could cross the Sand Sea. Incidentally this patrol discovered on the interior a second range of sand-dunes of whose existence no one dreamed. From Siwa oasis, just inside the British “ wire,” the patrol crossed the Great Sand Sea and then swung west into enemy country where it sat for four days on the main enemy route from Benghazi to Kufra, studying the tracks of vehicles that had passed. As rain falls rarely there, perhaps once in twenty-five years, tracks remain, and for the experienced civilized man have as much a story as prints of birds and animals for the savage. The stage was now set. The Great Sand Sea had been crossed successfully, dumps had been set up, and a reconnaissance of the enemy’s territory made. So after an inspection by the C.-in-C., who commended them on their work, they set out from Siwa, and for the first time a military force crossed the uncrossable desert. And from then on the raids went forward, daring to the point of impudence, as witness the one on Murzuk, chief town of Fezzan, and 1,200 miles from Cairo. In order to maintain secrecy all wells and tracks had to be avoided and the whole trip was done through unexplored country. A fortnight after leaving Cairo they joined forces with a Free French patrol

which had come up from Lake Chad by prior arrangement, and after a long detour to avoid detection, presented themselves outside the fort. So totally unexpected was this cheeky intrusion that they were greeted with the Fascist salute from stray soldiers on the outskirts of the fort, and a number of men standing near the gate were called to attention by an N. C. O. Taking advantage of astonishment,surprise is hardly a strong enough wordthe. party at the gate was promptly settled and the fort set on fire with mortar shells. The aerodrome was occupied, the hangar and everything in it destroyed and thirty prisoners were collared. And so it went on, until by the spring of the next year Italian control of the inner desert was ended. And the life on these patrols. The fighting was fast and furious while it lasted, and in between were days of weary travelling over the desert. Away from a base for weeks at a time the food carried had to be concentrated. So stew made its appearance— would hardly be the Army without it. But gazelle meat made a welcome change. Shooting these swiftly-moving animals with a tommygun from the back of a swaying, bumping truck at fifty miles an hour was sport de luxe. And in camp at night there were snakes, if you slept on the ground, to be guarded against, and scorpions, the bite from which would incapacitate you for thirty-six hours. As problems arose they were dealt with. On one occasion a camel was carried by truck for five hundred miles, sent out on a reconnaissance and then returned by truck. It must have been difficult for a camel to look dignified after that. There were caches to be made for future patrols, mines to lay on enemy routes, emergency landings for our aircraft to be selected and prepared, and enemy aircraft to dodge at times. For a while one patrol did garrison duty at Kufra Oasis, and as by this time the Group had expanded and had elements of Imperial and other Dominion troops in it, social life sprang up. There

were Rhodesian troops in the Group, so the “ All Blacks ” had to take a crack at the “ Springboks.” They played ten minutes the first half —and by mutual consent seven minutes the second half : and the “ All Blacks ” made the onlyscore of the match, a try in the first half. Wireless kept them in touch with happenings in the rest of the globe, and the day the news came through that the Anzacs were fighting a rearguard action in Greece, the patrol at Kufra Oasis was turning out a guard of honour for a visiting Free French Colonel. A sports meeting was held, two items of which were a competition in marksmanship using Bofors guns and mortars, followed by a smoke concert. Oh, yes —it was still the Army. There were growls over orders to shave, parades made their appearance, and two whiskered miscreants found themselves “ on the mat ” for aversion to razors. So from small beginnings the Group had become a valuable addition to the Desert Army, and as the Inner Desert was cleared and the battles surged up and down the Mediterranean coast of North Africa the Long Range Desert Group played its part in all the campaigns, its tasks growing bigger all the while, but always surmounted, until in that final clean up of the Afrika Korps it was the Group which did the advance reconnaissance for the Eighth Army’s advance into Tripoli and later into Tunisia. And when the famous “ left hook ” outflanked the Mareth Line it was a Group patrol which led the New Zealand Corps on the job. What memories those men of the Long Range Desert Group must have. Chief of all—the desert itself. The illimitable space ; the blazing heat, the numbing cold ; the colouring at sunrise and sunset. They will remember the comradeship of the evening meal by a small blaze of crackling thorns ; the thrill of the swift swoop on an enemy outpost, the too hectic excitement of dodging enemy bombers ; the toil and exasperation of freeing bogged trucks. Of them it can be said their place in history is secure. Salute —Long Range Desert Group.