Tales from the Special Forces Club. Sean Rayment
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it was with a keen sense of anticipation that I visited Jimmy, now 92, at his wonderfully serene hillside home in rural Kent.
‘I’m not sure there’s very much I can tell you,’ said Jimmy diffidently. ‘But why don’t we have a cup of tea and then we can chat.’
Fortified by a cup of tea and some of my wife’s home-made cake, Jimmy began to talk.
* * *
Jimmy’s life in the special forces began while he was stationed in a large, tented camp on the outskirts of Cairo in the summer of 1941. One day as he walked through the pristine, whitewashed headquarters of the Royal Artillery Depot at Al Maza with his friend Bill Morrison, he saw a note pinned to a noticeboard bearing the following typed message: ‘Volunteers required for special duties with the Long Range Desert Group. Details from the orderly room clerk.’
The two wiry young Royal Artillery gunners, who had long been in search of wartime adventure, looked at each other and smiled.
Almost from the moment of their call-up, a year earlier in May 1940 in the wake of the British Expeditionary Force’s calamity in France, Jimmy, who was born in east London, and Bill, a proud Cornishman of Scottish descent, had been seeking an escape from the drudgery which typified the life of the private soldier during the early war years.
On that early summer’s day within the vast training camp on the outskirts of Cairo, both men thought their prayers had been answered as they joined a growing queue of volunteers who were being assessed for their suitability for ‘special operations’ by Lieutenant Paul Eitzen, a young, diminutive South African who spoke with the clipped, confident tones of a public school boy. Eitzen, a member of the Royal Artillery attached to the Long Range Desert Group, wanted suitable volunteers to boost numbers of a covert unit which had begun experimenting with a 25lb artillery field gun while on operations behind enemy lines.
‘Eitzen was very pleasant to both of us,’ recalled Jimmy, 70 years later. ‘He asked us a few questions, made a quick assessment of our intelligence and our suitability to operate in small groups. He must have been satisfied with Bill and myself because we learnt within a day or so that we were in, or at least attached to, the LRDG. It was probably the easiest interview of my life. I think he sensed our suitability very quickly. We were two young, impressionable men, happy to try anything and full of initiative, and that is what Eitzen was after.’
A few days later Jimmy, Bill and Lieutenant Eitzen left Al Maza in a 15cwt Ford truck, one of several in an LRDG replenishment convoy, and began the long, arduous journey across the scorching desert to the group’s main base at the Siwa Oasis, which was about 350 miles south-west of Cairo and just 30 miles from the Libyan border.
Despite the demands and dangers of undertaking such a mission, Jimmy and Bill were gripped by a sense of excitement which they had not previously experienced as soldiers in an army at war. As the convoy entered the Sahara, Jimmy was immediately struck by the colossal expanse of the North African desert.
‘I was 21 and had never left Britain. Now I was in the desert and the natural beauty was staggering. It was something you couldn’t possibly hope to imagine. I had read about the Sahara in books but to see it with one’s eyes was breathtaking.’
Back in 1941 the wider Army knew little about the LRDG, or any of the so-called ‘private armies’ emerging during the North African campaign. But gradually stories revealing their exploits began to seep out, often in the bars of Cairo, and for men with a sense of adventure the LRDG held a certain allure.
* * *
Jimmy Patch was born in 1920 and attended the Aldersbrook Elementary School in Wanstead before winning a scholarship to the Wanstead County High School where he was educated until the age of 16. Although he possessed the intellectual ability to attend university, his father, who had served in the First World War and won the Military Cross, had other ideas. After being demobbed in 1919, Jimmy’s father was employed in the Ministry of Labour during the depression and, after seeing hundreds of men join the dole following the collapse of the economy, decided that his son would get a ‘nice steady job’.
‘I left school and joined the Post Office as a counter clerk. I worked there for three years, based in Loughton, Essex; then I passed a clerical exam and was transferred to London. It was a very comfortable existence; the hours were nine to four, and nine to twelve-thirty on Saturday.’
When war was declared in September 1939, Jimmy, like hundreds of thousands of young men of his generation, soon began to accept the inevitability of being called up to train, fight and possibly die in a war of national survival.
‘I was 19 at the outbreak of war. I didn’t volunteer to serve in the Army, I waited until I was called up, which happened in May 1940, at the time of Dunkirk. I was told that I would be going to the Royal Artillery and would be a signaller – there was no option. Basic training took place in Scarborough at the Royal Artillery Signals Training Regiment. Obviously the threat of invasion at the time was very real. With practically no training at all – we certainly hadn’t fired a rifle – we were marched up to Scarborough Castle dyke every evening and spent the night guarding England. We each had a rifle and 50 rounds of ammunition in a cardboard box. We were the only thing that stood between Britain and being invaded by Hitler.’
For Jimmy, life in the Army was everything he had feared. He found the discipline and the endless inspections tiresome beyond belief, although he did enjoy the signals training, which taught him how to use a Number 11 radio* and how to send messages by radio or light-flashes using Morse code.
‘I didn’t regard being called up as an adventure, I just looked upon it as something that was inevitably happening to me. I had to submit to the discipline of the Army, of course, which I found very tiresome. In fact at one stage in 1941 I volunteered to be transferred to the RAF, because volunteers were called for, but nothing happened.’
The training continued until the late spring of 1941, when both Jimmy and Bill learnt that they were to be sent to fight in the North African campaign. Both men were given embarkation leave, but Jimmy’s leave was extended by another week after his parents’ house was damaged during a German bombing raid. ‘It was pretty scary. The house was badly damaged, but no one was injured and I got an extra week’s leave before being sent up to Liverpool to board a troopship bound for the Middle East.’
The Mediterranean Sea was a war zone in 1941, and the only relatively safe way for ships to reach Cairo was to travel in convoys via the Cape of Good Hope and up the east coast of Africa. For Jimmy and hundreds of others aboard, it was a journey into the unknown from which many would never return.
‘We were packed cheek by jowl on the troopship. There were dozens of us in a huge dormitory, each with a hammock. It was impossible to sleep. The atmosphere was hot, fetid and noisy. Every night a group of us would collect our blankets and try and find a sheltered spot on the deck and sleep there, and we did it in all weathers.
‘We all soon settled into a routine. There was a bit of training and PT to do, but we also played a lot of housey-housey – now called bingo. The voyage seemed to take an age but it ended up being quite enjoyable. We steamed almost to the other side of the Atlantic before heading back to the West African coast and pulling into Sierra Leone to refuel. Then we travelled down to Durban, where we transferred to another ship, the New Mauritania. In a convoy of three ships we moved up the east coast of Africa, into the Red Sea and on into the Suez Canal and Port Tufic.’
The LRDG was the creation of Major Ralph Bagnold of the Royal Signals, a man regarded by many within the new world of special forces as a genius. In the late 1920s and 30s, Bagnold, together with a collection of friends such as Bill Kennedy Shaw, Guy Prendergast and Rupert Harding-Newman, spent a great