The “Crude” British Desert Truck That Let Six Men Wage War Five Hundred Miles Behind Rommel’s Lines

June 1940, a motor depot in Alexandria, Egypt.

A 43-year-old signals officer in ill-fitting car key is inspecting a row of Chevrolet trucks parked in the afternoon heat.

They are commercial vehicles, two-w wheelel drive, 85 horsepower, the kind of thing a Cairo grosser might use to deliver flour.

The officer walks between them slowly, pressing his thumb into tire sidewalls, checking gearbox oil.

He has been given 6 weeks and almost no money.

He needs these trucks to cross the largest sand sea on Earth.

The trucks have no armor, no four-wheel drive, no military specification of any kind.

Their top speed is 30 mph.

Their engines drink fuel at 12 m to the gallon.

They were designed for paved roads and like cargo.

They look like delivery vans with the roofs cut off.

Over the next 3 years, trucks exactly like these will operate more than a thousand miles behind access lines, destroy over 30 aircraft on the ground, provide the intelligence that shaped the Battle of Lamagne, guide the Special Air Service to its first successful raids, and survey the route that allowed Montgomery to outflank the Marath line.

They will cross terrain that no military vehicle was believed capable of crossing, survive conditions that destroyed purpose-built army trucks in weeks, and operate across a desert the size of India, with patrols sometimes gone for a month at a time.

They were the patrol trucks of the longrange desert group, and they were the most effective deep reconnaissance vehicles of the Second World War.

The officer buying them was Major Ralph Bagnold, and everything about this story begins with what he already knew.

To understand why the long-range desert group existed, you need to understand the problem Britain faced in June 1940.

Italy had just declared war.

The Italian 10th Army in Libya outnumbered British forces in Egypt by more than 4 to one.

The southern flank of this theater, the Libyan desert, stretched 1500 m from the Nile to the pheasant, and conventional military thinking dismissed it as impossible.

No army could operate there.

No vehicles could survive there.

The desert was not a battlefield.

It was a void.

Bagnold knew otherwise.

Between 1926 and 1938, he had led a series of expeditions deep into this same desert using civilian cars and trucks, covering distances of up to 6,000 mi in a single journey.

In 1929, at a well called Ian Dala, he made a discovery that would later save the lives of hundreds of men, reducing tire pressure by half, allowed heavy vehicles to float across soft sand that would otherwise swallow them to the axles.

In 1932, he completed the first recorded east to west crossing of the entire Libyan desert.

Along the way, he invented the tools his future unit would need.

The Banold Sun Compass, a vertical needle mounted on a graduated disc, could be read while the vehicle was moving, giving continuous bearing without stopping.

The radiator condenser piped overflow steam into a water can bolted to the running board.

When the engine cooled, the vacuum sucked all the water back in.

No water was wasted and steel sand channels scavenged from a Cairo junk shop gave instant traction when wheels dug into soft ground.

After Italy entered the war, Banold placed his proposal on General Wville’s desk.

Small groups in desertworthy trucks operating deep behind Italian lines, gathering intelligence, and conducting what Banold called acts of piracy.

Wovel asked how he intended to reach Libya.

Banold pointed to the map and said, “Straight through the middle of the sand sea.” Weville gave him 6 weeks.

The truck Banel chose was the Chevrolet WB300 weight.

An American commercial chassis powered by a 216 cubic inch inline six-cylinder engine producing 85 brake horsepower, four-speed manual gearbox, rearwheel drive only, standard fuel capacity of 20 imperial gallons, giving a range of roughly 240 mi.

These were bought from dealers in Alexandria and Cairo, some borrowed from the Egyptian army, a few through regular army channels.

What Banald’s men did to those trucks transformed them.

They stripped off the cab doors and windscreen because glass reflections could betray a hidden vehicle to aircraft at 20 m.

They bolted on Bagnold’s sun compass and radiator condenser.

They fitted raised timber sides called greedy boards to increase cargo capacity.

And the steel tubes securing these boards doubled as machine gun mounts.

They added racks for sand channels, brackets for spare wheels, and mounts for up to eight weapons per vehicle.

They strapped on additional jerry cans of fuel and water until each truck carried well over two tons, doubling its rated payload.

With the extra fuel, range extended beyond a,000 m.

Each truck carried a crew of three or four and bristled with armorament that evolved throughout the war.

Lewis guns on swan neck mounts gave way to twin vicar’s K aircraft machine guns with devastating rates of fire.

Boy’s anti-tank rifles sat on center pintless Italian breeder 20 mm cannon captured after the battle of beafon became the most prized weapons in the unit lighter than the bowors and effective against both vehicles and aircraft.

Thompson’s submachine guns rode in the cab.

Every man carried a Leenfield rifle, a revolver and grenades.

The British army had told Bagnold the desert was impossible.

He knew it was not.

And the Chevrolet 3000 weight was the reason he could prove it.

Now, before we get into where this truck actually fought and what it achieved behind RML’s lines, if you are enjoying this deep dive into British wartime innovation, hit subscribe.

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The long-range desert group’s first major offensive operation struck Murzuk, capital of the pheasant, 1400 m from Cairo by the route they drove.

On the 27th of December 1940, Major Pat Clayton led 76 men in 26 vehicles out across the Egyptian sand sea.

They joined 10 free French soldiers under Colonel Dornano who had arranged camel fuel supplies through the Tibsty Mountains.

On the morning of January the 11th, 1941, they reached Murzuk.

Clayton’s lead truck intercepted the Italian postman cycling toward the fort with the morning mail and pressed him into service as a guide.

The fort sentry spotted 23 approaching vehicles and slammed the gates shut.

The garrison had been caught completely off guard.

The main force engaged with a bow’s gun, 2-in mortars, and masked machine guns.

Lieutenant Leonard Ballentine led a troop to the airfield and destroyed three Caproni aircraft and their hanger.

Clayton personally eliminated an Italian machine gun nest by driving his truck directly over it.

Two men were killed, Trooper Houston and Colonel Dornano.

Corporal Tony Brown shot through the foot, stayed at his Lewis gun until the action ended.

He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

3 weeks later, Clayton’s patrol was ambushed by the Italian Auto Saharan Company at Gel Sheriff.

Outgunned by 20 mm cannon, T Patrol lost four trucks.

Clayton was wounded and captured.

Trooper Ronald Moore, wounded and separated from the column, walked approximately 210 mi through the open Sahara over 10 days with almost no food or water.

A free French patrol found him still walking.

He received the Distinguished Conduct Medal, but the raids were not the long-range desert group’s most important work.

The Road Watch was.

From early 1941 to mid 1943, patrols maintained clandestine surveillance of the Via Balbia, the main axis coastal highway from Tripoli to Benghazi.

Three patrols rotated continuously, one watching, one on route to relieve, one returning to base.

From March to July 1942, surveillance ran practically 24 hours a day for five straight months.

They did not lose a single man or vehicle.

Twoman teams lay in camouflage positions as close as 30 yards from the road at night, identifying vehicles by sound and silhouette.

Some men went deliberately unarmed, reasoning that if captured without weapons, they might pass as lost stragglers.

Every vehicle that passed, its direction, type, bumper number, and personnel count, was recorded and transmitted to Cairo by radio each night.

This data allowed military intelligence to cross-check Axis vehicle figures against Enigma decrypts, producing accurate estimates of the tanks RML could field.

Brigadier de Gingand, Montgomery’s chief of staff, called it the single most valuable contribution the Long-range Desert Group made to the war.

The relationship with David Sterling Special Air Service began with catastrophe.

In November 1941, 54 SAS men parachuted into a thunderstorm to attack Axis airfields.

32 were killed or captured.

Captain Jake Een Smith’s patrol collected the 21 survivors at a desert rendevous.

The lesson was immediate.

If the long-range desert group could extract men from the desert, they could deliver them, too.

On the 8th of December 1941, LRDG trucks carried two SAS parties to their targets.

Patty Mains group at Tamt airfield destroyed 24 aircraft.

Every man returned alive.

The long-range desert group earned a nickname that stuck, the Libyan desert taxi service.

The largest single raid came in September 1942.

Operation Caravan sent 47 men under Major Eenith over 1800 km to attack Barfield.

Corporal Melin Craw, a New Zealand farmer’s son, ran between burning aircraft, placing homemade gelite time bombs on wings above fuel tanks.

He personally destroyed 10 aircraft using 11 of his 13 bombs and emerged without a scratch.

The withdrawal was devastating.

Italian forces caught the column at dawn.

10 Chevrolets and four jeeps were destroyed.

Survivors walked out in scattered groups, some covering 150 mi on foot.

In Tunisia, in early 1943, Captain Nick Wilder’s patrol discovered an uncharted path through the Jebel Dahar Hills.

Wilders’s gap, as it became known, proved passable for armor.

This intelligence allowed the Second New Zealand Division to execute the flanking left hook around the Marath line.

Montgomery himself stated that without the Longrange Desert Group’s reconnaissance, his attack would have been a leap in the dark.

The Longrange Desert Group occupied a position that no other Allied unit could fill.

The SAS was built for direct action, raiding airfields, destroying aircraft, killing.

Popsky’s private army formed by Vladimir Penikov with just 23 men, focused on demolition and sabotage.

The Longrange Desert Group was fundamentally an intelligence unit.

Its motto, nonvvised arte, not by strength, but by guile defined everything it did.

When the British army forced the unit to switch from Chevrolets to Ford F-30 trucks in 1941, the consequences proved the point.

The Ford’s V8 engine consumed fuel at 6 mp gallon, half the Chevrolet’s economy.

For a 600-m patrol, the Ford needed 15 extra jerry cans of fuel, where the Chevrolet needed six.

The heavier Ford bogged more easily despite its four-wheel drive, and its engine proved catastrophically vulnerable to sand ingestion.

Every Ford engine had worn out by the end of 1941.

The longrange desert group fought to get Chevrolets back and in March 1942, 200 Chevrolet 1533 X2 trucks were specially ordered from Canada.

They served for the rest of the war.

The unit’s later career took it far from the desert.

Operations in the Dodkanese islands in late 1943 cost more men than 3 years of desert operations combined.

At Leva, 49 men were overwhelmed by Stukoka dive bombers and German assault troops.

Five were killed and 37 captured.

At LOS, Lieutenant Colonel Een Smith, described by intelligence officer Kennedy Shaw as the finest man the unit ever produced, was killed by a German sniper.

He was 34.

The rebuilt unit fought on through Italy, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece until its disbandment in August 1945.

One original longrange Desert Group Chevrolet survives at the Imperial War Museum in London.

Truck number eight of W Patrol named Wahar by trooper Clark Wetford, a Maui place name.

It was recovered from the Libyan desert in 1983 by David Lloyd Owen himself, the unit’s final wartime commander, who later rose to major general.

It sits today exactly as it was found.

Sand still in the engine bay, paint still flaking after 80 years in the Sahara.

June 1940, a motor depot in Alexandria.

A middle-aged officer is buying grocery trucks with government money, and no one in Cairo thinks it will work.

The trucks have no armor, no four-wheel drive, no military pedigree.

They are two-w wheelel drive.

Chevrolets with 85 horsepower and a top speed that would embarrass a motorcycle.

They had no night vision equipment, no radio direction finding gear, no satellite navigation, no air support worth mentioning.

They navigated by sun compass and stars.

They carried their own water and fuel for weeks at a time.

They relied on mechanical simplicity and the knowledge of one man who had spent a decade driving civilian cars through terrain the army had declared impossible.

And yet they worked in the dunes of the great sand sea on the gravel plains of the pheasant along the via balbia at 30 yards range at Muruk and Bath and Wilder’s gap and a 100 nameless positions across a desert the size of India.

They worked because Bagnold understood what the desert demanded.

Fuel economy over horsepower, simplicity over specification, reliability over armor.

He built a unit around a commercial truck because a commercial truck was the right tool for the job.

Field Marshall RML himself acknowledged it.

The long-range desert group, he wrote, caused more damage than any other British unit of equal strength.

350 men, stripped down Chevrolets, a sun compass made from a knitting needle.

That is not luck.

That is British operational.