“A painstaking study of a remarkable corner of the planet and its equally extraordinary inhabitants.� - Geographical Magazine
Sun, Sand, Sea and Spies: Military Intelligence in the Middle East from Lawrence of Arabia to the SAS.
Outline
World War I: T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt
Between the Wars: “The International Sand Club”
World War II: Long Range Desert Group and SAS
God told Moses to spy on Canaan...
“Get you up this way southward, and go up into the mountain, and see the land, what it is; and the people that dwelleth therein, whether they be strong or weak, few or many.�
Book of Numbers, Ch. 13
Spying the World’s Second Oldest Profession
Spying the World’s Second Oldest Profession
Military Intelligence mocked as the First Oxymoron
The First World War (1914-1918) T.E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt
Camel Corps, Egyptian Sahara, 1910
Australian Camel Corps, Jordan, 1918
British Camel Corps, Sudan, 1915
(London Illustrated News, 1918)
Ottoman Camel Corps
Camel Corps memorial Embankment Gardens, London
Records the dead of the Corps and battles fought in the Sahara, Sinai and Palestine
The Arab Bureau, 1916-1918
“…the Desert produces her own type of man exactly as the sea does.”
Rudyard Kipling
Lawrence in Syria, 1913
The start of a journey from awkward undergraduate ...
... via military intelligence ...
... and advisor to the British and the Arabs ...
... to a figure of legend
(Tip: read “Revolt in the Desert” first)
Aerial reconnaissance was used
with mixed results!
The Arab Revolt (1916-1918)
Lawrence’s theory flowed from practice, not the other way around.
50,000 Turkish troops pinned down by 3,000 Arabs
Another 100,000 Turks were busy trying to crush the Arab Revolt
Only 50,000 Turks were left to meet General Allenby’s big push to Damascus
Could the Arabs have beaten the Turks on their own?
Could Allenby have beaten the Turks without Lawrence and others? the Arab Bureau? or the Arabs?
Lawrence with George Brough, 1930
T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935)
Between the Wars “The International Sand Club”
British troops at Suez, 1920
Major Ralph Bagnold (1896-1990)
The “International Sand Club”
Bagnold wrote one of the greatest books about desert exploration
“Libyan Sands: Travels in a Dead Land� (1935)
and one of the dullest!
“The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes” (1941)
“…the fact is that we were a little afraid of the desert…” Bagnold, “Libyan Sands”
Count Laszlo Almasy (1895-1951)
... better known as ... ?
... “The English Patient.”
More accurately, the Hungarian Explorer
The Cave of Swimmers
700 miles from Cairo
and 400 miles from the Nile
World War Two The Long Range Desert Group and the SAS
“The tactician’s paradise and the quartermaster’s nightmare.”
The Sahara according to General von Ravenstein
Ralph Bagnold
- Retired from the British Army in 1935
- Recalled in 1940 ... and sent to East Africa
Insignia of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG)
“Non Vi Sed Arte”
Range of LRDG activity in the Sahara
“...highwaymen of the desert...” Cecil Beaton
Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel (1891-1944)
also known as ...
... the Desert Fox
Desperate to find a way across the Great Desert, Rommel employs the services of ...
... Ralph Fiennes
... that is to say Laszlo Almasy
“...a Nazi but a Sportsman.”
David Stirling (1915-1990)
Insignia of the Special Air Service (SAS)
... founded thanks to a broken leg
Inspired by the Long Range Desert Group and “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”
In 15 months, SAS patrols destroyed 250 enemy aircraft, hundreds more enemy vehicles
... dozens of supply dumps, wrecked roads and railway communications
Stirling captured by the Germans
... but escapes
Field-Marshal Rommel takes up the story ...
“[Stirling] made his way to some Arabs, to whom he offered a reward if they would get him back to the British lines.
But his bid must have been too small, for the Arabs, with their usual eye for business, offered him to us for eleven pounds of tea – a bargain which we soon clinched. ...”
“... Thus the British lost the very able and adaptable commander of the desert group which had caused us more damage than any other British unit of equal strength.�
Diary of Field-Marshal Rommel, 1943
Stirling memorial, near Stirling, Scotland
Conclusions
What do our examples teach us?
- Lawrence with the Arab Revolt
- Bagnold with the LRDG
- Stirling with the SAS
Closing observations: - The importance of accurate, up to date, local knowledge
- Small groups and individuals can make a big difference
- Create a space for the unorthodox
- Never underestimate the importance of chance
Thank you, or as we say in Arabic,
ﺷﻜﺮﺍ (shukran!)
“… it is refreshing for a writer to approach the Sahara as an entity of its own and try to dispel the images we hold of an uninhabited, empty space …” - Francesca Washtell, Department of International History, LSE