Light Car Patrols 1916-19: War and Exploration in Egypt and Libya with the Model T Ford

By Claud Williams

Captain Claud Williams’ memoir tells, firsthand, what it was like to be a Light Car Patrol commander during the First World War, while Russell McGuirk’s commentary provides the historical background to the formation of the Patrols and follows their activities from the British raid on Siwa Oasis to desert exploration and survey work and the Kufra Reconnaissance Scheme. Lavishly illustrated with original photographs from Light Car officers, this combined memoir and history provides a fascinating and informative picture of an unsung hero of the desert – the Model T Ford.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Society for Libyan Studies
• Release date: Nov 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781900971195

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Produced by Silphium Books, an imprint of

The Society for Libyan Studies

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© 2013 Russell McGuirk, the Royal Geographical Society and the Society for Libyan

Studies

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ISBN 978-1-900971-15-7

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-900971-19-5

MOBI ISBN: 978-1-900971-20-1

PDF ISBN: 978-1-900971-21-8

CONTENTS

Glossary

Abbreviations Used

PART I

INTRODUCTION

by Russell McGuirk

The Model T Ford

HISTORY OF THE LIGHT CAR PATROLS IN EGYPT AND LIBYA

by Russell McGuirk

Background

The Sanusi Invasion

Rivalry at the War Office

The Formation of the Light Car Patrols

Arrival of the Yeomanry

Early Activities, 1916

1st Australian Armoured Car Section

The British Raid on Siwa

Explorations and Survey Work

Australian Move to No. 1 Light Car Patrol

‘Lt E.D. Moore’

The Kufra Reconnaissance Scheme

Surveys, Patrols and Paperwork, 1917-18

Military Mission to Muhammad Idris

The Armistice

Egyptian Riots, 1919

Allenby’s Visit to the Western Frontier

Aftermath

Epilogue

Appendices

1 Light Car Patrol Roll of Honour; Officers Serving in the Light Car Patrols, 1916-19

2 Diary of the Military Mission to Sayyid Muhammad Idris

3 C.S. Jarvis on the ‘Jebel Iskandar Expedition’

4 A Selection of LCP Correspondence

5 Captain Owston’s Reports on Moghara Reconnaissance

6 ‘The Englishman’s House’

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

PART II

LIGHT CAR PATROLS IN THE LIBYAN DESERT

by Claud Williams

REPORT ON THE MILITARY GEOGRAPHY OF THE NORTH-WESTERN DESERT OF EGYPT (excerpts)

by Claud Williams

CLAUD HERBERT WILLIAMS: A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

by Russell McGuirk

Back pocket maps: Map no. 1: Route map of the North-Western desert of Egypt Map no. 2: Map of the country between Siwa oasis and Jarabub (Libya)

GLOSSARY

Libyan Desert: Located in the northeast part of the Sahara Desert, the Libyan Desert may be loosely defined as that part of the Sahara west of the Nile, including all of Egypt’s Western Desert, northern Sudan and extending across Libya. Others would limit its extension into Libya to the most arid part of the Libyan province of Cyrenaica.

Western Desert: The Egyptian desert west of the Nile up to the Libyan and Sudanese borders.

Light Car: A term used in Great Britain before the First World War for an automobile of various engine capacities, but at the time usually less than 1.5 litres (90 cubic inches). During the war the Model T Ford, with its 2.9 litre engine (177 cubic inches) was termed a Light Car by the British Army by comparison with the much more powerful Rolls-Royce. (See ‘LC’ in Abbreviations Used.)

Yeomanry: British regional cavalry, usually part-time, in the Territorial Force. (The TF was the volunteer reserve component of the British Army from 1908 to 1920.)

ABBREVIATIONS USED

INTRODUCTION

The scene should sound familiar:

Egypt has been invaded; thousands of British and colonial soldiers are rushed to the Western Desert to stop the enemy before he can get to the Nile Valley; a tiny force of volunteers, organized into motor patrols, carries out extraordinary journeys deep inside the desert.

This meagre sketch clearly refers to momentous events preceding the Battle of el-Alamein. The story of that epic two-year struggle for Egypt, beginning with the Italian invasion from Libya up to the defeat of the German army dangerously close to the Nile, has been told and re-told in minute detail, popularised through television and film, to the point where mere mention of the words ‘Western Desert’ is enough to imply the Western Desert of Egypt and bring to mind visions of Rommel and Panzer tanks, Montgomery and the 8th Army—and, of course, the cars of the Long Range Desert Group wreaking havoc behind enemy lines. But if these dramatic events during the Second World War are common knowledge, it is extraordinary that so few of us are aware that the same three-line scene perfectly depicts events in the same desert during the Great War. The invasion in that case occurred in 1915. The cars were three dozen Model T Fords known as the Light Car Patrols.

For three years the Light Cars ranged widely over the Western Desert, first as part of military operations against the Turkish-led Sanusi army from neighbouring Libya; and later to chart much of that wilderness, the size of Sweden, for the first time. How can we know so much about war and exploration in the Western Desert, yet so little about the Light Car Patrols, the true pioneers of desert motoring?

The most famous of the desert explorers to use motor cars, Ralph Bagnold, acknowledged that his own astonishing achievements in the 1920s and ’30s with Model T and Model A Fords were based on the work of the Light Car Patrols during the First World War. In the opening pages of Libyan Sands (1935) he regrets that no one has told their story:

The history of the desert motor-car in Egypt is oddly discontinuous. Introduced into the country early in the Great War by the British Army, it was found that the Ford car, even the Model T of twenty years ago, was capable of supplanting the camel in certain areas, notably in the western desert, and in 1916 a tiny force of Light Car Patrols, armed with machine guns, guarded the whole 800-mile frontier against a possible recrudescence of the Senussi menace. These patrols covered great distances of unknown waterless and lifeless country as a normal routine, they took part in the final capture of Siwa Oasis from the Senussi, and among other things they succeeded in mapping, with the aid of speedometer readings and compass bearings, a great part of the northern desert, with its ranges of sand dunes, between the Nile and Siwa. Their exploits, with the crude vehicles they had, were astonishing... As far as I can trace, no one has ever written up the history of the Light Car Patrols. It is a pity, for there was nothing like them before.¹

Bagnold went on to found the above-mentioned Long Range Desert Group during the Second World War, having been given the task because he convinced General Wavell that the British in Egypt needed something ‘corresponding to the Light Car Patrols’² which could give warning of impending attack from the west. The LRDG proved to be far more than simply a motorized alarm system against invasion, but its forerunners were the Light Car Patrols.

The first historian of the Long Range Desert Group was W.B. Kennedy Shaw, who, before joining the LRDG, had been a member of Bagnold’s team of amateur explorers between the two world wars. Shaw’s history opens with a reference to a confidential publication entitled Report on the Military Geography of the North Western Desert of Egypt, by Captain Claud H. Williams, who had been the commanding officer of No. 5 Light Car Patrol. Williams’ ‘Military Geography’ was written for the British Army in 1918–19 for the purpose of preserving the special knowledge acquired by the patrols which might be of military value in the future. Naturally, this document was made available to the LRDG in the early 1940s.³

When Shaw’s Long Range Desert Group⁴ first appeared in 1945, the author of the ‘Military Geography’ was 69 years old and managing his large sheep farm in New Zealand. Seeing his name and service with the Light Cars mentioned on the first page of Shaw’s book, Williams sent the author the manuscript of a memoir about his service in the first war entitled ‘Light Car Patrols in the Libyan Desert’. With Williams’ permission, Shaw presented the manuscript to the Royal Geographical Society in London. That memoir, which forms Part II of the present volume, is a unique firsthand account of the work of the Light Car Patrols.

It is fitting that the RGS should be the repository for Williams’ account. The Society’s involvement in desert exploration, in particular exploration of the Libyan Desert, is long and distinguished. Indeed, in the second quarter of the 20th century no fewer than five of the Society’s annually awarded Founder’s Medals were presented to explorers of the Libyan Desert—Major Bagnold among them in 1935—while the Society’s Geographical Journal is simply unrivalled for articles by distinguished desert explorers.

In addition to the manuscript of ‘Light Car Patrols in the Libyan Desert’, the RGS also holds a rare copy of Williams’ Report on the Military Geography of the North Western Desert of Egypt (classified by the British Government as ‘confidential’ until 1963⁵), as well as an unpublished typescript entitled ‘Handbook for Patrol Officers in Western Egypt’, written by a certain Dr John Ball, whose name will appear frequently in these pages. It also has a collection of contemporary maps produced by the Survey of Egypt and based on the work of the Light Car Patrols. We shall see that Light Car officers had different strengths, but one of Claud Williams’ particular talents lay in his mastery of surveying techniques. As often as not, his name appears on these maps as the officer responsible for the information they contain.

Off-loading a Model T Ford at Port Said.

Footnotes

¹ Bagnold, R. (1935), Libyan Sands, pp. 16–17.

² Bagnold, R. (1990), Sand, Wind and War, p. 14 (cited by Goudie (2008), Wheels across the Desert).

³ Report on the Military Geography of the North Western Desert of Egypt was meant to replace an earlier volume, Military Notes on Western Egypt, hastily put together by Dr John Ball in 1916.

⁴ Shaw, W.B. Kennedy (1945), Long Range Desert Group: The Story of its Work in Libya, 1940–1943.

⁵ Williams used to relate how, after the two world wars, he asked the HMSO for a replacement copy because his own author’s copy was falling apart—only to be told that his request was impossible to grant as the material was ‘classified’.

THE MODEL T FORD

It is no exaggeration to say that the Light Car Patrols were only possible because of the unique qualities of the Model T Ford. At the start of the Sanusi campaign in late 1915, the British Army relied mainly on two types of motor car: the Rolls-Royce and the Ford. The Rolls-Royces were mainly armoured cars, few in number but self-evidently formidable against the horse and camel-mounted Sanusi. Needless to say, they were a source of great pride to the British.

The Model T Ford was at the other end of the automotive ‘social scale’ entirely. Its primary function at the beginning of the campaign was to serve as handmaiden to the Rolls-Royce. It was chosen because it was inexpensive and despite the fact that the British, since the start of the war, had taken a dim view of Henry Ford’s outspoken pacifism. From the very beginning of the fighting Ford had worked fervently to keep the United States out of the war, vowing that the internationally popular Model T Ford would not be used by either side. In early December 1915, as the military campaign in the Western Desert was getting under way—and, incidentally, as the millionth Model T was trundling off the assembly line in Detroit—Henry Ford was sailing around the North Sea in his ‘Peace Ship’, still hoping ‘to get the boys home by Christmas’. Britain at the time was in trouble both on the Western Front and at Gallipoli; casualties were horrendous and, consequently, pacifism was abhorred by the vast majority of the British population—indeed it took either uncommon courage or great cowardice to be a pacifist or a conscientious objector in the country, and not a few expressing those principles ended up in prison, like mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell. Ford’s determination to keep his automobile out of the war did not prevail. There was already a Ford assembly plant in Manchester, and the British government was able to purchase some 19,000 Model T Fords in the course of the war, and more than one thousand wound up in Egypt before it was over.

Car LC 0645 near Mersa Matruh. ‘LC’ designated British motor vehicles in the Middle East; it did not stand for ‘Light Car’.

With the first threat of Sanusi invasion on Egypt’s western frontier British Army Headquarters ordered an Emergency Squadron of Rolls-Royce armoured cars and Model T Fords to Sollum, a coastal town on the Egyptian side of the Libyan border. The track was in bad condition, and the Rolls-Royces—the pride and joy of British automotive engineering—got stuck. That would not have been particularly noteworthy given the state of the track but for the fact that the handmaidens drove on past and continued all the way to Sollum. Thereafter, examples of this one-upmanship by the Fords occurred repeatedly. The Rolls-Royces were unbeatable where the ground was flat and hard, but where surface conditions were bad due to mud, sand, rock—and even swamp, as we shall see—the Fords were more reliable.

What qualities made the Model T Ford so ideal for desert patrols?

There is no shortage of archival testimony concerning the Model T’s superior performance in the Western Desert. At any one time there were seldom more than three dozen Fords with the Light Car Patrols, but there were hundreds more, all individually numbered, in other units. An officer working near Baharia Oasis with the Motor Section of the Machine Gun Corps reported, for example, that to drive on very broken terrain his unit had mounted guns on both Studebakers and Fords, and that ‘the Studebakers were not a great success... [but] the Fords were excellent and able to cover any sort of ground and were of the very greatest use’.⁸ The general surprise and admiration concerning the qualities of the Model T Ford can be summed up in this comment by a soldier being driven around by a Light Car driver from Siwa Camp: ‘We whirled round impossible corners on a road that was not a road, fell over small precipices, ran over boulders, and generally achieved the impossible.’⁹

Claud Williams was, of course, second to none in expressing his appreciation of the Model T Ford and, as one might expect, ‘Light Car Patrols in the Libyan Desert’ has numerous insightful and humorous anecdotes about the car. In fact, Williams provides a light-hearted but intelligent record of virtually all aspects of the patrolmen’s daily life and work. Readers may notice, however, that he does not say much about friends and fellow-soldiers, even when they are the subject of a particular story. When one of his men is wounded stopping a caravan, when another performs an unbelievable feat of navigation in a sandstorm, Williams tells the story but leaves the persons involved nameless, only occasionally going so far as to refer, for example, to ‘... my friend L.’ Fortunately, in this first published edition of the memoir it has been possible to identify most of the principal characters left anonymous in the original text. This sort of minor clarification of the text has been done with footnotes: Williams’ own text is left virtually unchanged. In the history of the Patrols which follows, care has been taken, where possible, to provide background information to events touched upon by Williams but where historical context or amplification might be helpful. The history is meant to supplement the memoir and vice versa.

It is hoped that this volume will go some way in meeting Bagnold’s challenge to tell the story of the Light Car Patrols and to give the Patrolmen their rightful place among the great explorers of the Western Desert.

This Ford at Mersa Matruh has double-tyres for better traction in the desert.

Footnotes

⁶ Badcock, G. E. (1925), A History of the Transport Services of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, p. 306.

⁷ For readers interested in a brief summary of technical detail, suffice it to say that the Model T had a 177 cubic inch, 2.9 litre, engine with 4-cylinders and 2 side-valves per cylinder. Block and crankcase were cast as a single piece with a detachable head. The engine, which was started with a hand-crank, produced 20 horsepower at 1600 rpm. The vehicle was rear-wheel drive with two forward speeds and reverse. Transmission control was by means of three foot pedals and a lever to the right of the driver’s seat. The pedal on the left was used to engage the gear, while maintaining it in middle position put the car in neutral. By pushing the lever forward and taking his foot off the left pedal, the driver entered high gear. The middle pedal was for reverse. The right-hand pedal was for braking. On a good surface normal cruising speed was 35 to 40 miles per hour (56–64 kilometres per hour), and top speed on a good road was about 45 mph (72 km/h).

⁸ WO 95/4443, letter in the MGC file.

⁹ Briggs, Martin S. (1918), Through Egypt in War-Time, p. 150.

BACKGROUND

Before the First World War, there were no motor cars in the Western Desert. The Egyptian