Posts Tagged ‘Rommel’

The Long Range Desert Groups

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

I finished an excellent war novel by Steven Pressfield titled Killing Rommel. The title comes from a mission that the group is assigned, somewhat similar to the shoot down of Admiral Yamamoto in the Pacific. Here is a Japanese language video of the death of Yamamoto. It was a devastating blow. One of the pilots, Tex Lanphier was a long time friend of my father-in-law.

The novel, which is very well written, got me interested in the LRDG services of the British Army. They were the forerunner of the SAS and there is increasing interest in their exploits.

They set out on missions of hundreds of miles in trucks and jeeps carrying repair facilities with them. They ranged across the desert behind the lines and scouted Rommel’s Afrika Corps. They also carried SAS teams and attacked German airfields, destroying hundreds of planes. There are even American societies devoted to the LRDGs.

Some of the characters in the novel are real people, like Paddy Mayne an incredible special forces soldier. He was awarded four Distinguished Service Orders, the last having been downgraded from a Victoria Cross by a jealous REMF officer.

The commander and founder of the SAS was David Stirling, a Scottish Laird who was training to climb Mount Everest when the war began. He organized the SAS and led it until captured by the Germans. Thereafter, it was led by his brother and by Paddy Mayne. Many of the SAS men captured were spared by Rommel and Kesselring, his superior in the Mediterranean theater, but other German officers executed SAS prisoners. After the war, the surviving SAS men hunted down those Germans. The web site says the captured Gestapo and Nazis were turned over to the War Crimes Commission and I suppose the surviving ones were turned over. I wouldn’t give much for the chances of the rest of them, however. On one raid, the SAS men discovered that the German planes each had an armed guard. Mayne methodically went to each plane, killed the guard with a knife and destroyed the plane. On some raids, they destroyed as many as 60 planes.

The organization continues as Britain’s Special Forces.