The Daring Dozen (24 page)

‘Yes,’ said Bagnold, ‘provided…’

‘Yes, I know, there’ll be opposition and delay,’ interjected Wavell, picking up a small bell on his desk.

Major General Arthur Smith, Wavell’s Chief of Staff, entered the room at the sound of the bell and was instructed to type up an order in his superior’s name: ‘I wish that any request by Major Bagnold in person should be met instantly and without question.’
¹

Ralph Bagnold was born in Plymouth in April 1896, the son of a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Engineers. Upon the outbreak of World War I Bagnold was commissioned into his father’s old regiment as a second lieutenant, serving on the Western Front and rising to the rank of captain. In a conflict unprecedented in its carnage, Bagnold’s greatest achievement was to simply survive Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele. He didn’t have a particularly ‘good’ war, with a Mention in Despatches the only recognition for his three years of active service.

In 1919 Bagnold – still just 23 – went up to Cambridge to read Engineering, and upon completion of his studies he resumed his military career with the 5th Division Signal Company, then serving in Ireland. In 1926 Bagnold was posted to Egypt and it was as part of his research into his new posting that he read the work of Dr Alois Musil, a Czech scholar and explorer who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, travelled across 13,000 miles of Arabian desert by camel. The fruits of his endeavours were more than 50 books (several of which were lavishly illustrated with maps) and 1,000 articles for various academic and scientific journals. Not all of those who read his work were admirers. T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, the British officer who helped foment the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire in World War I, expressed his views on a Musil book about North Arabia in an undated letter to Bagnold sometime in the 1920s: ‘It is difficult to read because Dr Musil is not anxious to convey more than the facts of his observations,’ wrote Lawrence in reply to a letter from Bagnold. ‘Arabia has been fortunate in attracting so far people who travelled in it, rather than people anxious only to map it. Musil’s map seems to me wasted because he does not distinguish between the part which is observed and the part which is hearsay.’
²

The extent of the correspondence between Bagnold and Lawrence in the 1920s is unknown, but it seems likely that the young army officer would have sought the famed explorer’s advice before embarking on his first expedition in October 1927. Now a major in the Signals, Bagnold led six men on a 400-mile journey from Cairo to Siwa Oasis in the west under the auspices of the Frontier Districts Administration of the Egyptian Ministry of War. They travelled in three Model T Ford cars, carrying 42 gallons of petrol and enough food to last ten days. The objective of the expedition was to map some of the interior of the north-east Sahara known as the Libyan Desert, which was ‘roughly the size and shape of India’. Hitherto only the Egyptian side of the desert had been subjected to the cartographers’ handiwork and it was Bagnold’s aim to explore the Libyan side. In the subsequent account of the expedition Bagnold wrote:

In the first fifty miles … horizon followed pebbly horizon interminably – no features visible that were not multiplied in every direction as in a hall of mirrors – no living plant or even insect. The gnarled black trunks of forest trees that lie about for many hundred miles only increase the sense of utter lack of life, for they have ages ago been turned to stone. Their broken splinters, mingled with the flints, tinkled on one another steely hard under our wheels. Sometimes the logs lie singly for several miles, sometimes in tumbled heaps; perhaps the vast debris of some flood that swept over north east Africa long ago.
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At sunset on the first day of their adventure, they hunkered down behind a low bank 100 miles from the Nile and dined on tinned food, boiled in water that was then used to make a pot of tea. The next day the explorers encountered the Ramak Dunes and also saw faint vehicle tracks that Bagnold surmised to be those of the British Light Car Patrols (LCP), the desert force of World War I that had patrolled the Egyptian border against German-backed Senussi tribesmen.

For the next two days they negotiated as best they could the desert terrain, often forced to make tedious detours to circumvent towering razor-backed sand dunes as they searched for the ancient camel track that would guide them across the Sabbakha, a river of rock salt. Away in the distance the explorers saw the 1,000ft-high cliffs that ‘separate for over five hundred miles the coastal plateau of north east Africa from the low-lying inner desert here far below sea level’.

Eventually they found the camel track and Bagnold could feel the ground soften under the wheels of their vehicles. Looking around him he could understand why the ancient Greeks had believed ‘this Libyan land was the home of the petrifying Gorgons’. He continued:

It was a painful crossing. The cars creaked and groaned as each wheel climbed independently and fell over the cracked waves of upthrust salt. For nearly an hour we crawled across at walking pace, past here and there the bones of camels who had fallen broken-legged by the way. Halfway we passed a brine pool edged with snowy crystals and translucent rose-pink salt boulders. The rough road twisted down the cliff face. Below, it ran out into the stuffy low-lying hollow for a dozen miles of soft sand followed by interminable meadows of salt with coarse grass and stunted palms.
⁴

Having crossed the Sabbakha, the explorers found themselves in a thick palm forest among which were damp gardens of oranges and pomegranates. Bagnold wrote of the thrill in knowing that Alexander the Great must once have passed this way en route to Siwa to have himself proclaimed a God (in approximately 332 BC). On reaching Siwa they bathed and visited the nearby village of Aghormi, where they bought bread and dates at the market, replenished their supplies and enjoyed a cup of coffee. They returned by a different route, heading north from Siwa to the coastal road and coming back to Cairo via towns that would, in a few years’ time, be of great strategic importance to the British Army: Sidi Barrani, Mersa Matruh and El Daba.

The five-day expedition whetted Bagnold’s appetite for more desert adventures and he returned to the desert in 1930, penetrating as far south as the Jebel Uweinat. In September 1932 Bagnold headed an eight-strong team that embarked from Cairo to explore ‘the whole of the north-west portion of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan up to the border of French Equatoria’ while making notes on geology, archaeology and vegetation. Over two months, their four vehicles traversed 5,000 miles of desert in an adventure that was serialized in
The Daily Telegraph
. In his articles Bagnold described discovering remote oases, forgotten camel tracks and, in the shade under a little overhanging cliff, they stumbled upon some cave paintings of ‘little red figures of men, some of whom carried bows and were wearing a plumed headdress. There were red animals, too, mostly giraffe, which belong to a very different climate from this now lifeless wilderness.’
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In the mid-1930s Bagnold spent what he later described as five years ‘spent happily in research laboratories in the Alps and in London clubs’. It was an absurdly modest appraisal of a period of Bagnold’s life when he dedicated himself to scientific research. The fruit of Bagnold’s labour was published in the book,
Libyan Sands: Travels in a Dead World
and a paper entitled
The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes
. In the latter he wrote:

In 1929 and 1930, during my weeks of travel over the lifeless sand sea in North Africa, I became fascinated by the vast scale of organisation of the dunes and how a strong wind could cause the whole dune surface to flow, scouring sand from under one’s feet. Here, where there existed no animals, vegetation or rain to interfere with sand movements, the dunes seemed to behave like living things. How was it that they kept their precise shape while marching interminably downwind? How was it they insisted on repairing any damage done to their individual shapes?… No satisfactory answers to these questions existed. Indeed, no-one had investigated the physics of blown sand. So here was a new field, I thought, one that could be explored at home in England under laboratory-controlled conditions.
⁶

More than 75 years later,
The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes
remains a classic reference for desert geologists.

In 1938 Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy ruled Libya in the north and Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia to the east, and the perceptive Bagnold knew that he had ambitions to add Egypt and its precious Suez Canal to his African Empire. Six years after his last expedition, Bagnold, now retired from the army, was back in the Libyan Desert. Although he described his experiences in a 1,700-word article for the
American Scientist
journal (for which he was paid $40 and commended by the editor for his crisp prose) with particular focus on the geology, archaeology and vegetation discoveries, there is little doubt Bagnold and his fellow British explorers were also reconnoitring the region ahead of the war he knew was looming.

Less than a year after the expedition, Bagnold was recalled to the colours. Bagnold underwent a signals refresher course at Bulford and on 26 August 1939 – a week before the outbreak of war – he was appointed commanding officer of the East Africa Signals stationed in Kenya. On 28 September 1939 Bagnold sailed on the
Franconia
for East Africa, but a week later the
Franconia
accidentally collided with another vessel. It caused a change in his schedule that would take his army career in a dramatic direction. The
Franconia
put in at Malta and Bagnold transferred to the
Empress
; now, instead of going to East Africa, he sailed for Port Said. Immediately Bagnold cabled the War Office asking to remain in Egypt, as he knew the region far better than East Africa. On 16 October he was granted permission to join 7th Armoured Division (later immortalized in the North African campaign as the ‘Desert Rats’) as a signals officer in Mersa Matruh, one of the coastal towns he had passed through in 1928.

The news was well received by the English-language
Egyptian Gazette
. In its mischievous ‘Day In Day Out’ gossip column, detailing the comings and goings of British military personnel in Cairo, it commented on Bagnold’s posting: ‘Major Bagnold’s presence in Egypt at this time seems a reassuring indication that one of the cardinal errors of 1914–18 is not to be repeated. During that war, if a man had made a name for himself as an explorer of Egyptian deserts, he would almost certainly have been sent to Jamaica to report on the possibilities of increasing rum production … nowadays, of course, everything is done much better.’
⁷

Once at Mersa Matruh, Bagnold soon gauged the precarious situation confronting the British. Italy’s Marshal Rodolfo Graziani was estimated to have around half a million troops at his disposal, a force far superior to the 50,000 men under Wavell’s command. There were Italian garrisons at Kufra and Uweinat in the south-east of the country, the latter close to the Egyptian and Sudanese borders. It was imperative, in Bagnold’s view, that the British learned the disposition of the Italian forces; there was the very real likelihood that the enemy might strike east and seize the Nile and then Cairo when, as was inevitable, war erupted between Britain and Italy. ‘I began to wonder why we had no other separate force with a range of action proportionate to the vast size of the interior,’ he wrote. ‘No one knew what surprise campaigns might be in store for us. 500 miles of the inland frontier was now left entirely unpatrolled, guarded only by the supposedly impassable Sand Sea.’
⁸

Bagnold was dismayed to find that the only map in the possession of the British was a ‘reprinted sheet dated 1915 on which the interior of Libya was an almost medieval guesswork’. However, he was pleased to see that some of his recommendations to the British Army in the wake of his pre-war expeditions had been put into practice.

First there was the Bagnold sun compass. In his first expedition into the Western Desert Bagnold had discovered that the magnetic compass was unreliable because of the metal in their vehicles, resulting in the impractical necessity for the men to take a bearing some distance from their vehicle. ‘It was quite hopeless for long distance travel,’ reflected Bagnold, who put his mind to devising an alternative means of navigation. His invention, which was subsequently manufactured by Watts & Co of London, was a sun compass, a modification of the sundial, which gave true bearings and not magnetic ones. On the rotating dial, which was fixed to the front of the vehicle, was a pointer that the driver lined up with an object on the horizon and then followed as he drove, ensuring that the pin’s shadow was on the pointer. It was not perfect, and allowances had to be made for the variation of the sun’s azimuth, but by adjusting the bearing every 20 minutes, it was possible to navigate with confidence.

At night Bagnold had navigated with a theodolite, using the stars as his guide, much as a sailor relied on a sextant, and this too had been adopted by the British Army. They were also using sand channels, 5ft-long sheets of steel that slid under the rear wheels of trucks and jeeps for support on the sand, and Bagnold’s method of water conservation had been implemented. Having discovered that vital water was lost in the desert when radiators boiled over and blew water off through the overflow, Bagnold came up with an ingenious solution for his vehicles: ‘Instead of having a free overflow pipe we led the water into a can half full of water on the side of the car so it would condense in the can. When that began to boil too it would spurt boiling water over the driver who would have to stop. All we had to do was turn into wind, wait for perhaps a minute, there’d be a gurgling noise, and all the water would be sucked back into the radiator, which was full to the brim.’
⁹