Sublime

Bagnold located old companions from pre-war desert explorations, plucking Pat Clayton from Tanganyika and Bill Kennedy Shaw from Palestine, and put them in charge of young men from the backcountry of New Zealand who had lost all their guns and kit in a torpedo attack at sea. Their commander, Major General Bernard Freyberg, VC (the man who swam asho

Wavell had a gift for picking good people. One was Major Ralph Bagnold, an officer in the Royal Signals, one of a select band who knew and respected the great desert that lay behind the cultivated coasts of North Africa. Bagnold had been exploring the Sahara since 1926. He had improved the sun compass for desert navigation, discovered the best way

It was at the bar of White’s, one of the most exclusive gentleman’s clubs in London, that Stirling first learned about a form of soldiering that seemed much closer to the adventure and excitement he had in mind: a crack new commando unit intended to hit important enemy targets with maximum impact. Stirling’s cousin Lord Lovat had been among the fir

Other men with imperial experience, among them Ralph A. Bagnold and Dudley Clarke, who were instrumental in the creation of the Long Range Desert Group and the Commandos, respectively, served as intellectual conduits to their organizations. But with regard to SOE itself, Gubbins’s influence was unrivaled.

Jan Christiaan Smuts,

When I commanded in Palestine in 1937–8, I had on my staff two officers in whom I recognised an original, unorthodox outlook on soldiering . . . One was Orde Wingate, the second was Dudley Clarke.

To Clarke, they were the antithesis of modern European armies, and the stories of their thrilling exploits were burned into his mind. As Clarke reflected upon such memories, it occurred to him that the Boer Commandos could be ‘reborn’ in Britain, to aim ‘mosquito stings upon the ponderous bulk of a German Army’. Hurriedly, he noted down the main co

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and the Schutztruppe