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| Middle East |
| Who Are the Ralph Bagnold’s of our Day? |
| 2003-03-09 |
| Among the many American and British engineers who have worked in Iraq, there must be present-day men of the courage and imagination of Major Bagnold involved the affairs unfolding in the Middle East. Ralph A. Bagnold (1896-1990) had an innate curiosity and inventivenessas a young boy that was encouraged by his father, a British Army RoyalEngineer. Young Bagnold followed a family tradition when... became an officer in the British Army Royal Engineers. He spent three years in the deadly trenches in France, after which he utilized a special militaryeducational leave program to study engineering at Cambridge University,receiving an honors degree in 1921 and returning to active duty with the army.It was a life-long yearning to explore the unknown that led him and his associates, during the period between World War I and World War II when he was stationed in Cairo and later in India, to explore the desert. Using vacation leave periods and personal vehicles, he and his colleagues drove thousands of kilometers in Trans-Jordan, in the Sinai, and in that part of the northeast Sahara known as the Libyan Desert. The sizes and striking geometry and symmetry of the desert sand dunes together with the vastness of the great sand sheets stimulated his desire tounderstand their origin and evolution, i.e. to understand the processes by which sand is moved by the wind. His deep sense of curiosity, combined with his sound background in basic physics and mathematics and his inventiveness, resulted in his building and instrumenting wind tunnels and running experiments with them in the laboratory and in the field. These experiments and his careful field observations led to his classic, "The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes," completed in 1939 and published in 1941. He was recalled to active duty as a Signals Officer as war in Europe erupted in 1939; He was soon reassigned to Egypt. Concerned about the vast unprotected desert flank west and south of Cairo, Bagnold proposed to General Sir Archibald Wavell, Commander in Chief of Middle East Land Forces, the establishment of a small organization equipped with desert-worthy vehicles that clandestinely could observe enemy vehicular traffic along the coast road in northern Libya and Egypt and could attack remote desert outposts andairfields southward. As Bagnold remarked to Wavell, "How about some piracy on the high desert?" Wavell's response was immediate and positive, and thus was born the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) that very effectively put to use the knowledge and experience that Bagnold and his colleagues had accumulated during their earlier travels and that utilized the techniques andknowledge that they had developed, among them the sun compass and a closed cooling system for their vehicles. The LRDG (the forerunner to the SAS) very effectively tied down significant Italian and German militaryresources that otherwise would have been available to use against the British farther north and,through their "road watches," provided invaluable information of movements of enemy troops and material east and west along the coast road in Egypt and Libya. After the war, Bagnold continued his interest in the movement of sand, expanding his research toinclude water-borne sand. Through the influence of his good friend Luna B. Leopold, he was supported in much of this work by the U.S. Geological Survey. |
| Posted by:George H. Beckwith |