Oct 3, 2026 · 15 min · 6 segments
Partisans and Parachutes - The Last Stand of the Long Range Desert Group (Part 3) With the Axis surrender in North Africa in May 1943, the Long Range Desert Group faced an existential crisis: the…
There is no longer an open flank to watch, no coast road running through contested territory, no thousand-mile drives behind enemy lines.
The unit is sent to Lebanon that same month to retrain, not in desert navigation, which none of them need to relearn, but in mountain warfare, small boat landings and close quarters fighting.
It is, in effect, a different unit being built on the bones of the old one.
The reason becomes clear in September, when Italy signs an armistice with the Allies and effectively drops out of the war.
The Italian-held Dodecanese Islands, a scatter of more than a hundred islands between Greece and Turkey, are suddenly un-garrisoned in any reliable sense, and British forces move to occupy them before Germany can.
The plan, codenamed Operation Accolade, is meant to tie down German forces in the eastern Mediterranean and, with luck, draw Turkey into the war on the Allied side.
It is also, from the start, under-resourced.
The Americans see the whole operation as a distraction from the campaign in Italy and decline to commit aircraft or troops.
Churchill presses ahead anyway with what Britain's Middle East command can spare, including, in September 1943, close to 200 men of the Long Range Desert Group assigned an island coast-watching role that sounds, on paper, a great deal like the job they already know.
it will not turn out that way.
Rhodes, the largest of the Dodecanese and home to the airfields, both sides need to control the sky over the whole group, falls to a German assault within two days in early September before British troops can even establish themselves there.
Kos follows in early October, its garrison overwhelmed and more than a hundred captured Italian officers later executed by the Germans.
Each island that falls tightens German air superiority over everything British forces still hold.
And without land-based fighters of their own, convoys and reinforcements moving between the remaining islands are exposed to attack from the air with almost no warning.
For the LRDG, the effect is to push the unit further and further from the work it was built for.
Patrols that spent years lying motionless in the open desert, watching and reporting, now find themselves used increasingly as conventional infantry, holding ground, launching direct assaults, plugging gaps in an overstretched garrison, because there is simply nothing else available to plug them.
It is a role none of their training anticipated, on terrain that erases every advantage the unit built its reputation on, there is nowhere to disappear to on an island a few miles wide.
A British vessel sent to investigate a possible German presence there is sunk by shore fire, and the local British commander orders an immediate assault to retake the island.
Immediate enough that the LRDG's request for even a basic reconnaissance first is refused.
On the night of 23 October, 49 LRDG men under Captain John Olivey land on Levitha in two groups.
Through the night, the fighting goes their way.
There is no longer an open flank to watch, no coast road running through contested territory, no thousand-mile drives behind enemy lines.
The unit is sent to Lebanon that same month to retrain, not in desert navigation, which none of them need to relearn, but in mountain warfare, small boat landings and close quarters fighting.
It is, in effect, a different unit being built on the bones of the old one.
The reason becomes clear in September, when Italy signs an armistice with the Allies and effectively drops out of the war.
The Italian-held Dodecanese Islands, a scatter of more than a hundred islands between Greece and Turkey, are suddenly un-garrisoned in any reliable sense, and British forces move to occupy them before Germany can.
The plan, codenamed Operation Accolade, is meant to tie down German forces in the eastern Mediterranean and, with luck, draw Turkey into the war on the Allied side.
It is also, from the start, under-resourced.
The Americans see the whole operation as a distraction from the campaign in Italy and decline to commit aircraft or troops.
Churchill presses ahead anyway with what Britain's Middle East command can spare, including, in September 1943, close to 200 men of the Long Range Desert Group assigned an island coast-watching role that sounds, on paper, a great deal like the job they already know.
it will not turn out that way.
Rhodes, the largest of the Dodecanese and home to the airfields, both sides need to control the sky over the whole group, falls to a German assault within two days in early September before British troops can even establish themselves there.
Kos follows in early October, its garrison overwhelmed and more than a hundred captured Italian officers later executed by the Germans.
Each island that falls tightens German air superiority over everything British forces still hold.
And without land-based fighters of their own, convoys and reinforcements moving between the remaining islands are exposed to attack from the air with almost no warning.
For the LRDG, the effect is to push the unit further and further from the work it was built for.
Patrols that spent years lying motionless in the open desert, watching and reporting, now find themselves used increasingly as conventional infantry, holding ground, launching direct assaults, plugging gaps in an overstretched garrison, because there is simply nothing else available to plug them.
It is a role none of their training anticipated, on terrain that erases every advantage the unit built its reputation on, there is nowhere to disappear to on an island a few miles wide.
A British vessel sent to investigate a possible German presence there is sunk by shore fire, and the local British commander orders an immediate assault to retake the island.
Immediate enough that the LRDG's request for even a basic reconnaissance first is refused.
On the night of 23 October, 49 LRDG men under Captain John Olivey land on Levitha in two groups.
Through the night, the fighting goes their way.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
