Ralph Bagnold

Yeah.

Jeff Bratton says, "I'd rather hang with Bagnold's boys." Funny you should mention Ralph Bagnold, because I hang out with his grandson in London all the time.

He's the guy who inherited the Bagnold Sun Compass.

If you see the movie The English Patient, it's about these deep desert explorations that people who were hanging out in Cairo after World War I were just like, "Hey, y'all, let's just drive 350 miles into the desert and see what we find," in these Model T Fords, right? And they would...

In, in the story of The English Patient, they found this cave called the Cave of the Swimmers, which showed that the southwest desert of Egypt had lakes, uh, you know, in early histor- you know, in early times.

So, um, so that's what the movie The English Patient is about.

Laszlo Almasy, Ra- Ralph Bagnold, and then they make this, this other character where Almasy's sleeping with somebody's wife, and the guy kills himself.

So Dex is in the chat.

Off the open desert entirely, into the cramped, vertical terrain of the Greek islands, fighting a war it was never built to fight.

It costs the unit its commanding officer, most of its founding New Zealand contingent, and very nearly its existence.

And yet, by the time the guns in Europe finally fall silent, this small, strange unit is still standing.

Right up until the moment its own government decides it no longer has a war left to fight.

It is, by a wide margin, the single costliest action in the unit's entire history, worse than anything the North African campaign inflicted on it in three years, absorbed in less than two days on an island most maps do not bother to name.

The losses trigger a diplomatic reaction almost as fast as the military one.

When word reaches Wellington that New Zealand troops, the same founding contingent Ralph Bagnold recruited out of the 2nd New Zealand Division back in the summer of 1940, have been committed to an entirely new theatre of war without New Zealand's government being consulted, the Prime Minister formally protests to London.

The remaining New Zealanders are shortly withdrawn from the unit altogether, closing out a connection that had defined the LRDG since its very first patrols.

I personally enjoy the history and common ground segments, but love the podcast as a whole.

I even went out of my way to purchase R.A. Bagnold's Libyan Sands book.

Right, I'm not having

it anymore, and you need to be paid for this.

in the doghouse.

Weird little Bezos boy.

In doing so, I came across a sentence where Bagnold mentions that his desert expedition made it into the papers back home due to his rescuing of Bedouins who had been displaced by Italian forces moving

through the Libyan desert.

By the summer of 1941, the Long Range Desert Group is no longer a novelty.

Its road watch patrols and hit-and-run raids on isolated garrisons have earned it a reputation on both sides of the line, and on the 1st of August, Ralph Bagnold hands over command to Lieutenant Colonel Guy Prendergast and moves to a staff post in Cairo.

Prendergast, dour, precise, and himself a veteran of pre-war desert expeditions alongside Bagnold, inherits a unit that already knows exactly what it is good at.

What it does not yet know is that its job is about to expand.