‘The Western Desert is a place fit only for war,’ begins the
script by the Sunday Times journalist James Lansdale Hodson for the 1943
propaganda documentary film Desert Victory:
Thousands of square
miles are nothing but sand and stone. A compass is as necessary, once off the
road, as it is to a sailor at sea. Water doesn’t exist until you bore deep into
the earth. You bath in your shaving-mug. Flies have the tenacity of bulldogs. Bruises
turn rapidly to desert sores. Days that are very hot are followed by nights of
bitter cold. When the hot khamsin wind brings its sandstorms, life can be
intolerable. The Arabs say that after five days of it, murder can be excused.
In this testing environment, Major General Archibald Wavell,
the soldier who lost an eye near Ypres and walked through the Jaffa Gate into
Jerusalem with Lawrence in 1917, had been reviving Lawrence’s guerrilla
tactics, using cunning, deception, mobility and tiny ‘mosquito columns’ against
elephantine Italian forces. Wavell had been appointed British
commander-in-chief of the Middle East Command a month before WW2 broke out. He
was now in the same post once held by General Allenby, whose biography he was
writing. Just like Allenby confronting the Ottoman Turks in WW1, he was facing
a numerically superior enemy.
Wavell had a gift for picking good people. One was Major
Ralph Bagnold, an officer in the Royal Signals, one of a select band who knew
and respected the great desert that lay behind the cultivated coasts of North
Africa. Bagnold had been exploring the Sahara since 1926. He had improved the
sun compass for desert navigation, discovered the best way of driving up dunes
(full-speed, head-on), invented rope ladders and steel channels for getting
unstuck in soft going, and even written a treatise on ‘The Physics of Blown
Sand’ which got him elected to the Royal Society. Bagnold foresaw that the Italians
might send reconnaissance and raiding parties out of the enormous Libyan desert
to sever British military communications between Cairo and Khartoum and, when
Fascist Italy finally declared war on the Allies in June 1940, got carte
blanche from Wavell to set up, equip, supply and prepare a new Long Range
Desert Group (LRDG).
Bagnold located old companions from pre-war desert
explorations, plucking Pat Clayton from Tanganyika and Bill Kennedy Shaw from
Palestine, and put them in charge of young men from the backcountry of New
Zealand who had lost all their guns and kit in a torpedo attack at sea. Their
commander, Major General Bernard Freyberg, VC (the man who swam ashore before
the Gallipoli landings), was reluctant to let them go, but the New Zealanders –
as always the best troops in the Dominions – took to the desert as though born
to it. They became mainstays of the LRDG, doing what Wavell called
‘inconspicuous but invaluable service’.
From the beginning, Wavell had been creating the illusion
for the Italians that he was stronger and better equipped than he actually was.
In June 1940, the Daily Mail correspondent Alexander Clifford was able to
deduce the ‘routine of bluff’ by British forces on the Libyan–Egyptian
frontier, 300 miles west of Cairo, and made one of the earliest references to
the use of dummy tanks:
I saw, gradually, what was happening. Subtly and
systematically Wavell was doing his sums and faking his figures. These tiny
British patrols were staging big demonstrations. Continually they were making
nuisances of themselves, moving rapidly from place to place, shooting up
convoys, flinging ambushes across roads, attacking forts and positions, always
pretending they were much bigger than they were. Dummy tanks were toted about
to give the idea that we had strong armoured units . . . In every way that tiny
army set itself to gain time by frightening the enemy.
The dummy tanks were the responsibility of the fake 10th
Battalion Royal Tank Regiment (10 RTR) under a Major Johnston. The unit,
actually formed from men of the 1st Battalion Durham Light Infantry, deployed
and operated primitive dummy tanks and lorries made out of wood and canvas
which they carried folded in the unit transport.
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