The ‘American’ Truck Britain Turned Into The Ghost Patrol That Burned Rommel’s Airfields –  Hww

Alexandria, Egypt, the summer of 1940. An officer of the Royal Signals walked into a Chevrolet dealership on the waterfront and asked to buy trucks. Not military trucks, civilian trucks. The kind of farmer in Ohio would haul cabbages in. The salesman thought he had misunderstood. The officer had not. Britain was at war with Italy.

The Italians held Libya, and the man buying the trucks, Major Ralph Bagnold, was about to take those civilian American vehicles, strip them down to the frame, and use them to burn so many aircraft on Rommel’s airfields that the Italians would name his patrols Patuglia Fantasma, the ghost patrol. Two years and three months later, 12 of those same trucks would tear out of the Libyan darkness at midnight, smash through an Italian tankette roadblock at the top of an escarpment, and drive directly onto a Luftwaffe airfield with their machine

guns already firing. They had driven 1,155 mi to get there. They would drive the same distance home, fighting off Stukas for an entire day. The truck was never meant to be a weapon. The truck Bagnold bought was the Chevrolet WB 30 hundredweight, a 1940 model year, 1 and 1/2 ton commercial chassis, 85 horsepower, two-wheel drive.

By any reasonable military assessment, it was the wrong vehicle for the job. Within two years, it would be the platform on which a 350-man unit destroyed more enemy aircraft on the ground than the Desert Air Force shot down in the air. This is how Britain turned an American showroom truck into the longest-range raiding vehicle of the Second World War.

In June 1940, the British position in North Africa looked impossible. Italy had just declared war. Marshal Graziani held Libya with a quarter of a million men. The inner Sahara, the vast empty quarter south of the coast road, was considered impassable by motor vehicle. Bagnold disagreed. Before the war, he had spent 10 years driving across the Libyan desert as a private explorer.

He had won the Royal Geographical Society Gold Medal in 1934 for the first east-to-west crossing of the Great Sand Seas, and he had invented two pieces of equipment that no army possessed. The sun compass and the radiator condenser. He proposed to General Sir Archibald Wavell a unit of motorized patrols that would live in the desert for weeks at a time, ranging a thousand miles behind Italian lines.

Wavell asked him what he would do if he found nothing. “Piracy on the high desert,” Bagnold answered. Wavell approved the unit within four days. The problem was the vehicle. The standard British army truck overheated, drank fuel, and was nose heavy. Bagnold looked instead at the American commercial vehicles already on the streets of Cairo.

The Chevrolet WB was fast for a truck of its class. The engine was the 216.5 cubic inch stove bolt inline six. Spares were abundant in every Egyptian garage. According to LRDG historian Gavin Mortimer, Bagnold chose the Chevrolet because it was fast, simple, and easy to handle. He bought roughly 35 of them from dealerships with army money. Then he took them apart.

In workshops outside Cairo, British and Egyptian fitters performed surgery on the new trucks. The doors came off, the windscreen came off, the cab roof came off. What remained was a flat firewall, a steering wheel, and a small flip-up screen for the driver. The radiator grill bars were cut out for air flow. Then came the modifications no civilian truck had ever carried.

The condenser system was Bagnold’s pre-war invention. A two-gallon can was welded to the front fender and connected to the radiator overflow. When the engine boiled, the steam was captured. When the engine cooled, the condensed water was sucked back through a one-way valve. The result was a truck that could cross hundreds of miles of hard desert without refilling its radiator.

No German vehicle in North Africa could do the same. The springs were rebuilt with extra leaves to handle a war loaded weight of nearly four tons, twice the civilian rating. Sand tires were fitted at low pressure to float across soft sand. Down each side of the bed were strapped steel sand channels. When a truck bogged, the crew dug, slid the channels under the tires, drove forward a few feet, and repeated.

A long crossing could mean doing this 50 times in a day. Where the dashboard had been, Bagnold’s sun compass was mounted. A horizontal disc with a central pin that cast a shadow against a graduated card. A magnetic compass is useless inside a metal truck full of weapons. The sun compass gave bearings accurate to a fraction of a degree as long as the sun was visible.

Now, the truck needed teeth. The Vickers K machine gun was an obsolete RAF observer’s weapon. Designed in the early 1930s for the dorsal turrets of Fairey Battle and Bristol Blenheim bombers. By 1941, the RAF had switched to belt-fed Brownings, and large stocks of Vickers Ks were withdrawn to storage. The LRDG drew them out.

By accident, the gun was almost perfectly designed for desert raiding. Gas-operated, top-fed from a flat 96-round pan magazine. Cyclic rate adjustable between 950 and 1,200 rounds per minute. Mounted in pairs on the rear pintle of a stripped Chevrolet, a patrol truck could deliver a combined cyclic rate approaching 2,400 rounds per minute of incendiary and tracer.

The heavier weapon was the Boys anti-tank rifle. A bolt-action .55-in caliber monster firing a 60-g armor-piercing bullet at 747 m/s. It could penetrate 23.2 mm of armor at 100 yd. Against German medium tanks by 1942, it was obsolete. Against a parked Junkers fuel cell or an Italian tankette on a darkened airfield, it was murderously effective.

One truck per patrol also carried a 37-mm Bofors anti-tank gun. Later patrols replaced it with the captured 20-mm Breda. A single LRDG truck carried more concentrated firepower than a German motorized infantry squad. Now, the question was whether strip-down civilian trucks, navigated by a homemade sun compass crewed by New Zealand farmers, could actually get this firepower to within bomb-throwing distance of Rommel’s air force.

Now, before we see how this performed on Rommel’s airfields, if you are enjoying this deep dive into British engineering and small unit warfare, hit subscribe. It takes a second and it genuinely helps the channel grow. Let us see what happened when these trucks finally reach the enemy.

The weapon that actually killed the aircraft was none of these. It was something Lieutenant Jock Lewes of the newly formed SAS invented in a tent at Kabrit in the autumn of 1941, the Lewes bomb. A canvas bag containing roughly 1 lb of plastic explosive, a quarter pound of thermite, a measure of diesel oil, and a handful of steel filings.

A time pencil detonator typically set for 30 minutes. The plastic explosive ripped the wing apart. The thermite ignited fragments hot enough to melt aluminum. The diesel oil sustained the fire long enough to set off the aircraft’s own tanks. Placed accurately on the wing root, a single Lewes bomb destroyed a Junkers as completely as a 250-lb bomb dropped from a Wellington.

The first raid came on the night of December 14th, 1941. Three SAS sticks were driven by LRDG patrols to within walking distance of three coastal airfields. Paddy Mayne and seven men hit Tamet. They burst into the officers’ mess where the German and Italian pilots were drinking, gunned down some 30 men where they sat, then walked the dispersal line and planting Lewes bombs on the wing roots.

When Mayne ran out of bombs, his after-action report says he climbed into the cockpits and tore the instrument panels out with his bare hands. 10 days later, on Christmas Eve, he came back to Tamet and did it again. 27 more aircraft destroyed. The same night Mayne first hit Tamet, Lieutenant Bill Fraser and five men hit the airfield at Agedabia.

Eight CR.42s, five Fiat G.50s, six Macchi C.200s, two Caproni reconnaissance machines. The combined December tally was around 61 aircraft destroyed on the ground in two weeks. The Desert Air Force flying every fighter and bomber it had could not match that rate from the air. On the withdrawal from Nefilia on December 30, an LRDG truck carrying Jock Lewis was strafed by a Bf 110.

The inventor of the bomb that made the raids possible was killed. Sterling later said that Jock could far more genuinely claim to be founder of the SAS than I. For the next eight months, the LRDG was the SAS’s taxi. The men called it the Libyan Desert Taxi Service. Then the SAS got its own Jeeps and went its own way, and the LRDG mounted its single greatest operation, 1,155 mi from base, Operation Caravan.

The attack on the airfield at Barce deep in Eastern Libya, September 13, 1942. Major Jake Eason Smith commanded B Squadron. 47 men, 12 Chevrolet 30 hundredweight trucks, five Jeeps. They left Fayoum on September 1st and drove for 11 nights across the Calansho Sand Sea. Just before midnight on the 13th, they topped the escarpment above Barce and ran headfirst into an Italian roadblock manned by two L3 tankettes.

The lead Jeep’s twin Vickers K’s opened up first. Tracer arced into the tankettes at point-blank range. The column did not slow down. They drove straight through and the trucks rolled into the sleeping town with their guns already firing. Captain Nick Wilder’s New Zealanders peeled off to the airfield. The guards patrol drove onto the barracks and the railway station.

Eason Smith with two Jeeps cruised the streets shooting at anything in uniform. On the airfield, Wilder’s trucks drove down the dispersal lines while gunners poured Vickers K fire into parked CANT Z. 1007 three-motor bombers and Caproni reconnaissance aircraft. Bombs went on the bigger machines. The LRDG claimed 32 to 35 aircraft destroyed.

Italian records more reliably give 16 destroyed and seven damaged. Even at the lower figure, it was a catastrophe for a forward Axis airfield. The price came on the way home. Italian fighters caught the patrol in the open from mid-morning to dusk on September 14th. CR.42s Bf 109s, Stukas. 14 vehicles were lost.

10 men were captured. By the time the survivors limped back to base, they’d completed a round trip of roughly 2,300 miles behind enemy lines. It is the longest deep penetration raid by ground troops in 20th century warfare. This is where the comparison becomes uncomfortable for the Axis. The Volkswagen Kübelwagen, the German Afrika Korps standard light vehicle, could not have left Tobruk and reached the Kufra Oasis on a single tank.

The Krupp Protze, the German light truck, consumed 24 L per 100 km. By 1942, it was considered obsolete. None of the Axis light vehicles had condenser cooling. None of them had been designed by an officer who had spent 10 years driving across the same sand they were trying to fight on. In honest historical terms, the Axis answer existed, and it was Italian.

The company Auto Sahariana had been operating motorized desert patrols since 1923, 15 years before the LRDG. In 1942, the Italians produced the SPA Viberti AS.42 Sahariana, specifically designed to hunt the LRDG. Only about 140 were built before Allied bombing crippled the Turin factory. They were excellent vehicles.

They were not enough. The most quoted line about the LRDG is Rommel’s. The Long Range Desert Group caused us more damage than any other British unit of equal strength. It is the line that built the legend in the English-speaking world. The honest answer about that quote is more complicated. It appears in B. H.

Liddell Hart’s edited volume, The Rommel Papers, published in 1953. Liddell Hart’s editorial hand has been criticized by later scholars, including the political scientist John Mearsheimer, who concluded that Liddell Hart was inclined to put words in the mouths of German generals. The sentiment is firmly Rommelian.

A captured German document cited by Bagnold himself records that the LRDG plays an extremely important part in the enemy sabotage operation, but the precise English language formulation everyone quotes belongs to Liddell Hart’s edition, not to a confirmed wartime entry in Rommel’s own hand. The Italians, who suffered more from the LRDG than anyone, had given them their nickname 2 years earlier.

As Bagnold wrote in 1945, “To the Italians, the raiders seemed to appear from nowhere, as if from a fourth dimension, and to disappear as rapidly.” The combined SAS and LRDG total of aircraft destroyed on the ground is widely reported as over 400. Italian records, where they survive, confirm roughly half. The real number is probably between 200 and 300.

Still, almost certainly more enemy aircraft destroyed on the ground than the Desert Air Force shot down in the air across the same period. One Chevrolet WB survives. In 1980, the LRDG Association recovered a stripped-down patrol truck from the open Egyptian desert. Truck number eight of W Patrol, named Wicarha by Trooper Clarky Whitford, Major General David Lloyd Owen, the LRDG’s last wartime commander, presented it to the Imperial War Museum in London.

It sits there today, its paint scoured back to bare metal by 40 years of sun and sand. It is, as far as anyone can tell, the only original LRDG patrol vehicle in existence. The truck Britain found in an Alexandria showroom and turned into a ghost patrol does not need to be repainted to be understood. It just needs to be seen for what it was, the most useful thing General Motors ever sold to a customer who took the doors off.

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.