A new Anzac Day podcast reveals the full story behind New Zealand’s unsung wartime heroes, the Long Range Desert Group. John Daniell explains how they made a difference.
They were the first and “probably the best” of the world’s special forces teams – yet many New Zealanders have never heard of the Kiwi farmers and mechanics whose daring exploits helped the Allies to victory in North Africa during World War II.
Now a four-part podcast series, co-produced by NZ Herald and Bird of Paradise Productions, celebrates the story of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) using the veterans’ own voices.
An accompanying short film uses candid footage, freshly digitised for the project, filmed in Cairo and on operations in 1940 and 1941.
Officially, the LRDG, formed in Egypt in 1940, was part of the British Army, but in the beginning virtually the entire unit was made up of Kiwis.
“To those in the know,” says Gavin Mortimer, a British military historian and the author of numerous books on wartime special forces, “the LRDG were the first and probably the best. They’re the pioneers of the world’s special forces.”
Mortimer says that over the years, this origin story has been obscured.
“People think the SAS [Special Air Service] pioneered the tactic of driving on to an airfield, shooting up enemy aircraft and raiding behind the lines. No, that was the Long Range Desert Group who did that, and when the SAS came along nearly 18 months after the LRDG, it’s allowed the LRDG to concentrate on intelligence gathering, which they did just so brilliantly.”
The LRDG was a British unit under British command, but New Zealanders were at its core from day one: initially, there were four Brits and 90 Kiwis. When, in November 1943, a disastrous deployment in the Greek islands meant the New Zealand Government looked likely to pull its troops out, the British commanding officer wrote frankly to a colleague: “They supply us with such good, intelligent officers and men that it will be an extremely difficult task to maintain the standard.”
Sifting through archives at the Waiouru Army Museum, I came across a long letter written decades after the war by a Kiwi officer of the LRDG. His niece had asked him to record his first-hand experience for posterity.
The officer had been awarded a Military Cross, but the letter glosses over the action that led to his own medal in just a couple of lines.
For him, the essential part of remembering the LRDG had been overlooked in the histories written immediately after the war.
These had focused on the more high-profile English officers and their experiences – but, the Kiwi officer wrote, “none give credit to the real heroes, the MEN” (his capitals and underlining).
The men had been hand-picked for their practicality and resourcefulness and tended to come from backgrounds in farming or mechanics. After the war, they returned to New Zealand and took up those kinds of ordinary jobs: dairying in the Waikato, running an electronics shop in Matamata or piloting the Devonport ferry.
They weren’t inclined to write books but - happily - historians and journalists did interview them. So while they are now all gone, we have audio archive of the men telling their own stories – audio that goes back as far as 1940.
By drawing on oral history sources from places like the Waiouru Museum, the Imperial War Museum in London and Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision, we have been able to pull together material that reaches back nearly a hundred years. It allows us all to hear firsthand from these men who, in the words of that Kiwi officer, were “the real heroes” of the LRDG.
Some of the audio comes from diaries written at the time and then recorded in Egypt by the NZ Broadcasting Service – there’s even an address to New Zealand by the father of the LRDG, British desert explorer Major Ralph Bagnold, from 1941.
Some of it is more recent and allows for a different perspective: men thinking back to their own near misses and the ones who weren’t so lucky, stories of raids and reconnaissance and even the North African desert itself, this arid land of sand, snakes and scorpions; impossibly starry nights, caves full of ancient paintings and the knowledge that they are treading in the steps of Alexander the Great and his army.
We also hear from Kiwi researcher and author Brendan O’Carroll, who interviewed dozens of LRDG veterans from the 1990s and whose intimate knowledge of the men illuminates the entire series.
O’Carroll recounts incidents like the heartbreaking sacrifice of Corporal Rex Beech, holding off the enemy in a rearguard action that leads, inevitably, to his death.
The stories are by turns poignant and raw: O’Carroll says he heard from veterans of the occasional need for mercy killings of men who’d been wounded in operations in the desert, where the alternative was an agonising, slow death.
This wasn’t a straightforward task: “The only people who could do it were the farmers.”
Glossier versions of the LRDG story came in the movies. In The Guns of Navarone, the hero – played by Gregory Peck - is an LRDG officer called Mallory: in the Alistair MacLean book the film is based on, Mallory is a New Zealander.
The home movies filmed by the men themselves are a kind of magical precursor of social media, fresh and brilliantly unfiltered: we follow a barefoot Kiwi climbing a pyramid and enjoying a cheeky cigarette at the top; others wash naked in the desert after weeks of heat and sand. We also see them traversing the desert and preparing for an attack. In its aftermath, plumes of black smoke spiral into the sky.
While the LRDG was disbanded at the end of the war, its members’ legacy is acknowledged and upheld by today’s Kiwi special forces. We were allowed access to NZSAS headquarters at Papakura to film the spaces there that honour them – in the chapel, on the parade ground and above the entrance to the mess hall, where an old LRDG jeep has been transported back from Egypt to help remind today’s elite New Zealand soldiers of their desert roots.
Desert Pirates is presented by the NZ Herald in collaboration with Bird of Paradise Productions.
Made with support from NZ On Air.