The Daring Dozen (27 page)

Throughout the battle of El Alamein in autumn 1942, the LRDG carried out invaluable reconnaissance patrols on the German forces, as well as laying mines and strafing enemy transport columns. Y Patrol, for example, spent several perilous days concealed near Marble Arch, 600 miles west of El Alamein, reporting on the Axis army as it fled towards Tunisia. Between 30 October and 10 November 1942, the number of enemy vehicles heading west each day rose from 100 to 3,500. At times the retreating Germans pulled off the road and rested, their lorries and tanks a matter of yards from the hidden LRDG patrol.

In his report on their exploits during this period, the British Army’s director of military intelligence in Cairo wrote: ‘Not only is the standard of accuracy and observation exceptionally high but the Patrols are familiar with the most recent illustration of enemy vehicles and weapons… Without their reports we should frequently have been in doubt as to the enemy’s intentions, when knowledge of them was all important.’
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In the final two years of World War II, the LRDG served with distinction in the Aegean and the Balkans. But the desert is where their indelible legacy remains. ‘Never during our peace-time travels had we imagined that war could ever reach the enormous empty solitudes of the inner desert, walled off as it has always been by sheer distance, by lack of water and by impassable seas of huge dunes,’ Bagnold recalled in 1945. The success of the LRDG owed much to their courage and resourcefulness; but just as important was the maverick spirit fostered by Ralph Bagnold – daring to venture where others feared to tread.

Bagnold was far from being from the same warrior caste as Blair Mayne or Anders Lassen, and he was the antithesis of the ‘Gung Ho’ guerrilla fighter Evans Carlson. Bagnold was a scientist first and a soldier second, and it was to his first love that he returned in 1944. Having retired from the army that year aged 48, with the honorary rank of brigadier and the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his work in raising the LRDG, Bagnold married a year after the war ended and for the rest of his life devoted himself to his scientific studies. Among the papers he authored were ‘Motion of waves in shallow water’, published by the Royal Society of London in 1946, ‘The sand formations in southern Arabia’, published by
The Geographical Journal
in 1951 and ‘Flow resistance in sinuous or irregular channels’, published by the United States Geological Survey in 1960. His work was recognized with a string of awards, including the Founders’ Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London and the Penrose Gold Medal of the Geological Society of America. In 1977, in his 82nd year, Bagnold gave the keynote address at a NASA conference on the desert landscapes of Earth and Mars, and his work
The Physics of Blown Sand
was an important reference for NASA scientists in studying sand dunes on Mars.

Bagnold died on 28 May 1990, aged 94, and his considerable collection of private papers relating to his scientific and military work were donated by his family to the Churchill Archives in Cambridge. Among Bagnold’s war correspondence was the draft of a letter he sent to Archibald Wavell in January 1945, just a few months after he had retired from the army. In the letter Bagnold thanked Wavell for his role in giving life to the Long Range Desert Group five years earlier. ‘I shall never forget your friendly encouragement in 1940/41,’ wrote Bagnold.

Bagnold was aware that the gratitude was mutual, and perhaps the belated letter was a response – now that he had more time on his hands – to an official despatch issued by General Wavell in October 1941, after he had been replaced by General Claude Auchinleck as Commander-in-Chief of British forces in the Middle East. In the despatch Wavell declared:

I should like to bring to notice a small body of men who for a year past have done inconspicuous but invaluable work, the Long Range Desert Group. It was formed under Major (now Colonel) R.A. Bagnold in July 1940, to reconnoitre the great Libyan desert on the Western borders of Egypt and the Sudan. Operating in small independent columns, the Group has penetrated in to nearly every part of desert Libya, an area comparable in size with that of India.

Not only have patrols brought back much information but they have attacked enemy forces, captured personnel, destroyed transport and grounded aircraft as far as 800 miles inside hostile territory. They have protected Egypt and the Sudan from any possibility of raids and have caused the enemy, in a lively apprehension of their activities, to tie up considerable forces in the defence of distant outposts.

Their journeys across vast regions of unexplored desert have entailed the crossing of physical obstacles and the endurance of extreme temperatures, both of which a year ago would have been deemed impossible. Their exploits have been achieved only by careful organisation and a very high standard of enterprise, discipline, mechanical maintenance and desert navigation.
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At the time of his death in August 1974 Junio Valerio Borghese was known throughout Italy as ‘The Black Prince’. Such was his notoriety that he was denied full military honours and a full funeral ceremony at his burial in the Basilica de Santa Maria Maggiore. Instead Italian riot police looked on as a small crowd of Borghese’s followers cried ‘Italia, Italia, Fascisi, Fascisi!’
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It was an ignoble end to a life that had begun 68 years earlier in Rome. Junio Valerio came into the world the son of an Italian aristocrat from the illustrious Borghese family, and among his Tuscan antecedents were one pope (Paul V), three Italian cardinals and Pauline Bonaparte, younger sister of Napoleon.

From an early age Junio Valerio was marked out as a future naval officer and in 1922 he enrolled in the Naval Academy in Livorno, a port city on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Seven years later Borghese entered the Italian Navy and by the time he was 27 he was a submarine commander.

He was also an ardent follower of Benito Mussolini, the fascist Italian dictator who had come to power in the same year Borghese entered the naval academy. When Italy’s military forces invaded Ethiopia and, in May 1936, proclaimed the country to be part of Italian East Africa, Borghese described it as ‘a victory actually achieved by a people fighting in unison for its right to live’.

A few weeks after the subjugation of Ethiopia, Mussolini turned his attention to the civil war raging in Spain, offering General Franco the use of his forces. In all, an estimated 75,000 Italians fought for the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, and Borghese was one of them. He was part of the Submarine Legion (
Sottomarini Legionari
) and commanded the
Iride
during hostilities.

When Italy entered World War II in June 1940, Lieutenant Borghese had just turned 34 and was in command of the submarine
Vettor Pisani
, an old vessel that he recalled had many ‘wheezy whims’. A month later the
Pisani
took part in the naval battle of Calabria (known to the Italians as the battle of Punta Stilo) in the waters of Calabria at the toe of Italy. The outcome was inconclusive, although one consequence was that the
Pisani
was withdrawn from active service after Borghese complained to his superiors of the number of leaks she sprang.

Along with two other Italian naval officers, Borghese was sent on a commanders course in submarine warfare at Memel on the Baltic. The course was run by the German Navy and specialized in teaching operations against the British Atlantic convoys. For nearly two weeks Borghese served on U-boats, observing the crews at work and concluding that in terms of skill and proficiency there was little difference between German submariners and their Italian counterparts. It was a theme that featured heavily in Borghese’s memoirs, perhaps an indication that during the war he had encountered more than once the stereotypical view of the Italian Navy – as expressed by Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, Commander-in-Chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet 1939–43, when he declared a ‘healthy contempt’ for his adversary. In his memoirs entitled
Sea Devils
, Borghese praised ‘the heroism of which Italians are capable when properly led, with due attention paid to their physical and spiritual needs’.

Upon his return to Italy in August 1940, Borghese was appointed commander of the
Scire
, a 620-ton submarine with a crew of 50. The vessel, along with the submarine
Gondar
, had been adapted into an ‘assault craft transport’ with three steel cylinders welded on deck (one forward and two aft), all with the same pressure resistance as the submarine. In these cylinders the secret weapon of the Italian Navy would be transported – the two-man torpedoes into which so much energy had been channelled in the years preceding the outbreak of war.

The Italian Navy were the pioneers of naval sabotage in the 20th century. In October 1918, with Italy fighting alongside Britain, France and the United States against Germany, Sub-Lieutenant Raffaele Paolucci and naval engineer Major Raffaele Rossetti embarked on a mission to attack the battleship
Viribus Unitis
, pride of the Austro-Hungarian fleet, at anchor in the Croatian harbour of Pula.

Pooling their innovative resources, the pair modified an unexploded German torpedo so it could be piloted by them underwater at a speed of three to four miles per hour, powered by two propellers driven by compressed air. They set out from Venice just weeks before the end of the war on the torpedo boat and when they were within range of Pula, Rossetti and Paolucci boarded their human torpedo and slipped beneath the harbour’s defences. They planted a mine on the hull of
Viribus Unitis
that exploded at dawn on 1 November, sending the ship to the bottom of the sea.

Though World War I ended less than three weeks later, the Italian Navy had glimpsed the potential of human torpedoes, and in the years after the war they were at the forefront of developing the new weapon. Two engineer officers, sub-lieutenants Teseo Tesei and Elios Toschi, spent years working on the prototype until in the words of the latter they had produced a weapon which ‘in size and shape [is] very similar to a torpedo but is in reality a miniature submarine with entirely novel features, electrical propulsion and a steering wheel similar to that of an aeroplane … equipped with a long-range underwater breathing gear, the operators will be able, without any connection with the surface, to breathe and navigate under water at any depths up to thirty metres and carry a powerful explosive charge into an enemy harbour.’
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Initial tests proved satisfactory and in 1936 the pair were authorized to oversee the construction of several more such weapons. Meanwhile the nucleus of what would become the Tenth Light Flotilla was established at La Spezia, on the north-west coast of Italy, under the charge of Commander Catalano Gonzaga.

Simultaneously, another naval sabotage unit was being formed using a different form of attack craft. It was Duke Amedeo of Aosta’s idea to attack British shipping using fast, lightweight speedboats with explosives packed into the bow. The pilot, having circumvented the harbour defences, would set course for his target and jump clear in the seconds before the speedboat exploded.

Not long after the formation of the two units, however, the Italian naval command decided to abandon both projects. With the war against Ethiopia concluded, and with resources being directed towards assisting the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, the top brass saw no need to channel time, effort and money into two sabotage units. Though Borghese had yet to join the saboteurs, he wrote later that the decision was in part motivated by a distaste for innovation among certain senior officers, a distrust that others such as David Stirling, Evans Carlson and Orde Wingate had also encountered during their military careers.

‘A new invention inevitably provokes reaction, distrust and scepticism,’ wrote Borghese. ‘There were the conservatives: guns alone, in the future, as in the past, could decide the question of naval superiority; what could two men, immersed in chilly water and the darkness of night, do against the insuperable defensive measures taken by a fleet at anchor at a naval base?’
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