The story of the fabled Long Range Desert Group, one of World War II's leading special forces, is told in the new Greenhill paperback by W. B. Kennedy Shaw. Kennedy Shaw served as an intelligence officer with this remarkable British unit and his book Long Range Desert Group is the classic account of fighting in North Africa. In a gripping narrative he relates daring LRDG exploits far behind the enemy lines. Emerging suddenly and unexpectedly from the desert, the LRDG would raid airfields or attack the axis' lines of communication along the Mediterranean coast, before vanishing back into the desert. Small yet potent and destructive, the Group proved outstanding in special missions against Rommel's Afrika Korps. "A long, straight road runs from the airfield through Barce town to the railway station. By this time the Italians had been able to pull themselves together and at the far end of the road were two tanks firing down it, their shots luckily all going high. There was no time to turn and no way round, for the tanks blocked the road, so Wilder in the leading Chevrolet stood on the accelerator and charged. Crashing into one tank he pushed it aside and cannoned into the other. This cleared the road but wrecked his truck. The crew scrambling to their feet thrust grenades under the tank tracks, someone (Dobson, I think it was) tried to drop one down the turret but found it shut. The Jeep following into this shambles picked up the Chevrolet crew and dashed on down the road. At the station turn the driver, blinded by the tracer which Wilder was firing, hit the kerb and overturned. When they had picked themselves up Wilder was found pinned down by the Jeep, soaked in petrol and unconscious. The next truck behind righted the Jeep, picked him up and got out of the town. But Craw and his crew in the last car had been cut off and were not seen again. Meanwhile the Guards under Sergeant Dennis, who had taken command of the patrol in Timpson's absence, were dealing with the other end of the town. His job was to attack the barracks and keep busy any troops who might interfere with Wilder. The hospital lies betwen the barracks and the town and here two armed sentries stepped out and challenged. Dennis rolled a four-second grenade between them and turned them from sentries into patients. Farther on he came to the barracks where two more sentries shared the same fate. A man fired from the roof and got all the patrol's gunfire in return. Then Dennis and his party hurried through the barrack buildings, throwing grenades into doors and windows and into the slit trenches from which the Italians were shooting wildly. Ammunition finished, he withdrew, meeting two tanks on the way with whom he played hide and seek for a time in the hospital grounds. While all this was going on Jake was playing a lone hand. Having seen the patrols off to their tasks at the entrance to the town he drove in in his Jeep. On the east were some buildings which looked like officers' quarters, small detached bungalows standing in a courtyard, and from one of these light showed through the window cracks. Stumbling around the flower beds Jake sought in vain for an entrance for his Mills bombs. In disgust he threw one on to the flat roof, which at least put the lights out and the fear of God into the occupants, and retired in search of other targets. These came in the form of two tanks parked in a small square. He opened fire with two twin Vickers K's which disconcerted the tank crews and made them slow in pursuit. Having parked his Jeep in an alleyway he started on a tour of the town. In what seemed in the dark to be some sort of market place, a building with arcades and pillars, he ran into a party of Italians and for a time chased them around the columns, bowling Mills bombs among their legs. The Italians soon tired of this, so Jake recovered the Jeep and moved on till he found an M.T. park with a dozen unattended vehicles in it and here with grenades and Tommy-gun fire he and Gutteridge, his driver, wrecked all the cars. By now the night was nearly over and it was time to collect our forces and withdraw. The tanks which had been guarding the escarpment had vanished and by 4 a.m. the party was reunited at Sidi Selim, with three Jeeps and seven 30-cwts. of the total of twelve vehicles which had gone in the night before." Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 99 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com