David Lloyd Owen - Long Range Desert Group 1940-1945: Providence Their Guide

by General Sir John Hackett

Nothing throws a clearer light upon the characteristics of a nation than the way it goes to war, and what is revealed there is likely to be reflected to some degree in everything else it does.

The British way in war was the product of geography. The mongrel inhabitants of these off-shore islands, separated by salt water from the Continent of Europe, were forced ages ago to look to the sea, first for their very survival, and then for their prosperity. Defence, trade, the projection and advancement of the national interest as these islanders moved on towards the establishment of the worlds greatest empire, all depended on the use of the sea. Wherever there was blue water there was an open flank, first for military exploitation and then for the introduction of the trader and the empire-builder. The British way in war is not that of continental nations, whose natural tendency is generally towards massive frontal action. It lies more in looking for the open flank and then making use of it, often by distant action and deep penetration. The British method lies predominantly in the oblique approach, in going round or under or over whatever stands in the way, whether in terms of physical obstruction or military forces.

In World War II the Mediterranean theatre offered an almost embarrassing choice of open flanks. There was not only the sea, offering enormous stretches of coastline often backed by useful mountains, with a plethora of islands. There was also the desert. The land battle for Africa, and for control of the southern shore of the Mediterranean, was essentially fought along a narrow coastal strip, a couple of thousand miles long but rarely more than fifty deep. To the south of it lay vast stretches of desert wasteland, little visited and largely unexplored. In these deserts there came into being one of the most remarkable of the small specialist forces spawned in such numbers and variety by the British in the Mediterranean theatre of war for the exploitation of its open flanks. This was the Long Range Desert Group. When the war in Africa came to an end and we had run out of desert the LRDG was to be used with great effect on sea-coasts, islands and mountains. But the deserts of Northern Africa were its cradle and its original habitat. It was here that the LRDG found the disciplines and the challenge under which it grew into a unit which in its professionalism, its level of attainment in specialist skills, its internal coherence, its very high morale and its avoidance of the public eye was in my experience unique.

David Lloyd Owen had long wantedas had so many othersto join the Long Range Desert Group, and was taken on in July 1941. He was to finish the war in 1945 as its commander. This book of his about the LRDG, under so apt a title, is written with a restraint, and with a degree of generosity and modesty, as characteristic of the writer as of the unit he writes about. It is an enthralling document. I read it with deep enjoyment and a heightened understanding of men and events of which I already knew a good deal, and I am now grateful to be allowed to write this foreword.

It all started in the thirties, when travel by motor-car in desert places began for several young Army officers to become almost an obsession, and Ralph Bagnold, that ingenious and inventive officer of the Royal Signals, was developing better means of setting about it. Many others who served in Egypt in those years will welcome a glimpse in these pages of people some of us knew wellTeddy Mitford, Rupert Harding-Newman, Pat Clayton and Bill Kennedy Shaw (though these last two did not, I think, become soldiers till war came) and of course Guy Prendergast, whose modesty, and even shyness, made him not an easy man to get to know.

When war broke out and the early Patrols were set up out of detachments from the Brigade of Guards, the Yeomanry, Rhodesians and New Zealanders, there could hardly have been brought together men of more varied backgrounds. Of these the New Zealanders were the first, and the equally redoubtable Rhodesians came in soon afterwards. The development of high comradeship, intense loyalty to the unit and an almost fierce dedication to the task in handall characteristics uniformly found throughout the LRDGwas the result of careful selection from an enormous number of applicants (Lloyd Owen once had to select 12 from 700 volunteers), meticulous planning and the discipline of the task itself. Patrols worked and lived in small groups, very often hundreds of miles from each other, in a hostile environment and under frequent threat of discovery and destruction. Every member of a Patrol not only knew his own job perfectly and was able and willing to help every other man with his: he also knew exactly what was expected of him, and what he could expect from the others. The expectations were high, and were very rarely disappointed. To fall below them might mean being RTU, or returned to unit. This was a dreaded punishment. In a unit where exacting requirements had to be most precisely met, the threat of it was the only sanction ever needed. It is little wonder that in spite of the efforts of Guy Prendergast (its commander from August 1941 to October 1943) and of others to keep the LRDG away from notice, this was probably the most difficult unit to get intoas well as possibly being the most efficientin the whole theatre.

I found myself mentioned in this narrative, and enlarge a little here because that enables me to say something more about its author. In early September 1942, after the battle of Alam al Halfa, I was brought rather reluctantly in from the desert (where I had been in the summer of 1942 having a delightful time in tanks on rearguard columns, and then as 2 I/C of an armoured regiment), to set up a new General Staff section coordinating the operations in the whole theatre of all British raiding forces in the Middle East. I arrived in GHQ Middle East when the disastrous combined raid on Benghazi and Tobruk (see ) was already under way and beyond modification, let alone recall. It was too big and too complex, as both Prendergast and David Stirling had not been slow to point out. Security was bad, and (a point on which Montgomery was critical) it was commanded not by a field commander but by a committee of senior staff officers. My first big task was to pick up the pieces.