Just a nice story

[tonker]

Amongst all what's going on........


http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a52_1204319879

[heli-cal]

How utterly lovely!

To see the joy on the face of the sister is marvellous.

Her brother carried letters from his eight year old sister whilst serving as a Military Despatch Rider, behind enemy lines, in the desert. I imagine these personal memento's provided immense comfort at the time.

What an honourable man the tour guide is.

[Big Tudor]

Wasn't the Long Range Desert Group a fore runner of the SAS?

Amazing that the bag and its contents have lasted so long. Must be the dry conditions in the desert. Just a shame that Mr Ross didn't live long enough to be reunited with his bag. Wonder if he was charged with losing it?

[johno617tonka]

great story!!

there is a programme on one of the sky channels at the moment called
'SAS- the originals'.. and it's narrated by col tim collins. it's only into it's 2nd episode and although the LRDG are always seen as a forerunner to the SAS, this programme makes you think that they 'were' and they 'weren't'..

it seems that when they were in their infancy (SAS), they had to beg, borrow and steal pretty much everything until they got noticed and the doubters were convinced.

i personally get the impression that the LRDG were very established when the SAS were beginning to make a mark on the war, but in a nut shell they had no transport whatsoever, hence they used the LRDG as a kind of 'drop-off' service! it seems that they would go and hammer the jerries and the LRDG would be waiting to pick them up again at the RV.....assuming the LRDG had fun of their own to take care of in the mean time!


all the same, it's a nice story to hear... even 'bizarre' to find her letters from when she was a little girl in the pouch too!

[Wensleydale]

The concept behind the original "Special Air Service" was to drop raiding parties by parachute behind enemy lines to attack Luftwaffe airfields. The LRDG would then have an arranged pick-up point to bring them back after the raid. The early raids were not successful due to the old problems of aircraft navigation, and the forces dropped by parachute in the first raid were scattered and mostly ineffective. Following the first raids, the SAS decided to go both in and out by vehicle, borrowing and "stealing" what they could.

The LRDG helped whenever it could, however the roles of surveillance and raiding were not mutually beneficial. The SAS raids advertised the LRDG presence to Axis patrols and generally made life more difficult. Unofficially, the two units got on well together, often sharing the same bases, such as Kufra, deep in the German/Italian flank.

Good reading is the book "The Phantom Major" by Virginia Coles. Its a bit boys own, as most war books written in the 1950s were, but it gets the message across!