Sinking ships: the SS Warszawa and the SS Chakdina

In the wider context of the North-African campaign, when both the Chakdina and the Warszawa sank in December 1941, Axis forces had been pushed back to El Agheila (Operation Crusader) and British forces were moving forward to reoccupy Cyrenaica. 3rd and 4th Battalions LAF were to be deployed into Cyrenaica, whilst 1st and 2nd Battalions were to remain around the Nile Delta.

The official report on the sinking of the SS Warszawa, which went down on 26 December, included memos and eyewitness statements from five British personnel who were on board. These were Captain Nevill, the adjutant of the battalion writing on behalf of the Officer Commanding (OC), Lieutenant Wythes (2 Company platoon commander), Company Sergeant Major (CSM) E Baker (2 Company), Captain Considine (2 Company commander) and Captain Fiteni (1 Company commander) (TNA WO 361/182, 1942).

Using this report in conjunction with the rather cursory war diary report and Fiteni’s later recollections in an oral history from the Canadian archives, events can be reconstructed and then compared with Peniakoff’s account. As accurately explained by Peniakoff, the battalion’s move to Tobruk from the Nile Delta area was divided into a land and a sea party. Peniakoff travelled to Tobruk overland. His account then states that the rest of the battalion ‘was to follow by sea on December 18’, that the troop ship ‘struck a mine and had her bows blown open’ and that as ‘she didn’t sink for several hours the whole battalion was taken on board the escorting vessels’ (Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 49). Archival reconstruction shows that the Warszawa sailed from Alexandria, leaving in the early hours of 23 December, not 18 December as Peniakoff claims, and she was torpedoed en route by U-559, which struck her in the stern rather than the bow (TNA WO 178/37, 1941; TNA WO 361/182, 1942; Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 49).

The archive reports show that rather than the whole battalion surviving unscathed, 20 men (all Arab other ranks) were killed instantly. The men who were killed, and are named in full in the report, were sitting at the stern of the boat. This group of men regularly chose to sit at the stern to stay out of the wind and to try to ‘shake off’ sea sickness (TNA WO 361/182, 1942). The 4th Battalion was the main unit on board; the only other military personnel on board were three ‘casuals from the Czech Army’ and one South African (TNA WO 361/182, 1942). Peniakoff is correct in stating that she did not sink for several hours: however, he gives the wrong date; does not acknowledge the loss of 20 men; describes the ship as having struck a mine rather than having been torpedoed; and places the damage at the bow, not the stern.

Agreement over the loss of the garrison’s Christmas turkeys on the SS Warszawa is therefore not trivial. It shows why Peniakoff’s account should not be dismissed completely, although the operational errors explain why it cannot be used without archival corroboration. His memoir retains vivid narrative detail whilst misplacing the chronology, cause, loss of life and physical mechanics of the sinking. Although the amount of turkey, which Peniakoff places at ‘sixty tons’, has not been verified (Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 49–50, Fiteni Reference Fitenin.d., one turkey feeding 10 people weighs around 13 lbs; 60 tons is 134,400 lbs; therefore, approximately 10,000 birds make up 60 tons), it poses the question: where would British Troops Egypt (BTE) find 10,000 turkeys and did the garrison at Tobruk have 100,000 men to feed? This strongly implies Peniakoff was exaggerating the volume of turkeys onboard. The episode shows that Peniakoff’s memoir can preserve memorable anecdotal truth while failing as operational and logistical reconstruction.

The details surrounding the sinking of the SS Chakdina on 5 December 1941 demonstrate a different problem widespread in Peniakoff’s memoir. Here, his memoir is not simply factually unreliable, it distorts the reputation of the commanding officer of the battalion in order to bolster his own. Although not identified by name in Peniakoff’s memoir, the officer in command of 4th Battalion LAF was Lieutenant Colonel John Stuart Noall Bernays. Notably, throughout the memoir officers whom Peniakoff criticises are left unnamed, whereas those he praises are named.

Bernays left the main body of the 4th Battalion in an advance party for Tobruk to prepare the ground for the rest of the battalion to move there on 22 November, along with one Arab officer, one British other rank and seven Arab other ranks, leaving his second-in-command, Major West, in charge at Amiriya Transit Camp (TNA WO 169/1767, 1941). Peniakoff describes Bernays as a stutterer with a loose tongue and a ‘Syrian girl-friend’ (Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 48). The description is included because Peniakoff took over temporary command of the 4th Battalion, and he built a picture of an unprofessional outfit. However, Peniakoff misrepresents his appointment to command saying that Bernays ‘was the man I replaced, pending the appointment of a new battalion commander’ (Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 48). This is only partially true. Peniakoff was transferred from 3rd Battalion to 4th Battalion on 27 November to take over the preparations for deployment to Tobruk underway under Major West, the second in command who had been injured in a car accident on 26 November (the car accident killed another officer, Captain Nagor). Peniakoff’s appointment was not a result of the death of Bernays (TNA WO 178/37, 1941).

Bernays was killed on 5 December when the Chakdina was sunk on its way back from Tobruk to Alexandria with the 4th Battalion’s advance party, and Peniakoff’s appointment was very short-lived. Rather than being pressed into taking command, he was a temporary stop-gap who could be spared from 3rd Battalion to help 4th Battalion whilst their second in command recovered and they found a new commander to take over from Bernays.

Peniakoff’s undermining of Bernays’ character hid the significant role he was undertaking when he died. As a senior officer, Generalleutnant Johann von Ravenstein required a senior escort officer on his journey to Egypt: he had been captured on 29 November near Tobruk by men of the 21st New Zealand Battalion. His diaries identify Bernays as his escort officer (Ryder Reference Ryder1978, 100–101). Ravenstein, Bernays and his original advance party, now acting as an escort party, embarked for Alexandria on the SS Chakdina at Tobruk. The SS Chakdina was carrying approximately 380 wounded soldiers as well as around 100 other German and Italian prisoners. Shortly after leaving Tobruk, she was attacked by an Italian S.79 torpedo bomber and sank in just over three minutes. Out of approximately 600 people on board, around 400 perished. Bernays, the Arab officer Lieutenant Mohamed Abdel Razeg, one British other rank and three of the Arab other ranks drowned. It is unclear from primary sources whether the immediate purpose of Bernays’ journey back to Egypt was to serve as a prisoner escort officer or to retake command of his battalion (TNA WO 361/131, 1941).

Bernays was not a one-dimensional caricature as portrayed by Peniakoff. He had been commissioned in 1916 and awarded the Military Cross (MC) for gallantry in France during the First World War. Ravenstein’s diaries, translated in Ryder’s biography, describe him as ‘a gentleman of the old school. He does his job with tact and understanding of the difficulties, and with personal kindness’ (Ryder Reference Ryder1978, 100). The contrast between Peniakoff’s memoir of a man lacking tact and Ravenstein’s evidence reveals one of the memoir’s larger effects: Peniakoff consistently recasts events around himself, systematically building a myth at the expense of the LAF and its personnel.

Bernays’s death is not merely a biographical correction, as it reveals LAF support for prisoner movement and wartime logistics, and it further reveals how LAF casualties were obscured. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) is actively investigating and reviewing historical inequalities in commemoration. Cross-referencing the CWGC database with the war diaries and sinking reports of both vessels shows that one of the 20 Arab soldiers lost on the Warszawa, Nafar Farag Fadil Abdallah, is commemorated with an incorrect date of death, 27 December, rather than 26 December. For the Chakdina, only two of the three Arab other ranks lost are commemorated: Nafar Abdel Azaz appears to be missing. However, the point should not be overstated as a racialised problem, since Sergeant H. Wallis, the British other rank attached to 4th Battalion and also lost on the Chakdina, is absent from the CWGC online database (TNA WO 178/37, 1941; TNA WO 361/182, 1942 and CWGC [accessed on 19 June 2026]). This ties into one of the core arguments of this article: that Peniakoff’s account has contributed to obscuring Senussi sacrifice and involvement because he omits to mention the losses of Arab personnel in either of the sinkings.

Peniakoff’s claims about Bernays appear within a wider attack on 4th Battalion’s commanders. He candidly describes the officers as ‘half-wits’ and claims that he ‘sacked’ the four company commanders and half the non-commissioned officers (Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 48). The claim that he removed officers from their posts was tested by triangulating records from weekly returns of officers in war diaries and personnel files, where they were available. This information was used to trace the postings of the officers mentioned in the SS Warszawa sinking report from the end of 1941 into 1942 and 1943. Fiteni was still a company commander in 4th Battalion into March 1943. Captain Nevill, the adjutant, was still in post in 4th Battalion in June 1942, and later joined Special Operations Executive (SOE). Lieutenant Wythes was still present in 2 Company, 4th Battalion into 1942 and 1943, although promoted to company rather than platoon command, and finally Captain Considine remained the commander of 3 Company, 4th Battalion into 1943 (TNA WO 178/37, 1941; TNA WO 169/1767, 1941; TNA WO 169/6848, 1942; TNA WO 169/9097, 1943).

Peniakoff’s claim that he wanted to expedite the appointment of a replacement battalion commander is difficult to reconcile with the reconstructed timeline, further emphasising that his descriptions are crafted to support and build his myth. The new commander, Lieutenant Colonel James Robertson McIssac, arrived to take over command on 16 December (TNA WO 178/37, 1941). Peniakoff was therefore in temporary command of the 4th Battalion for a maximum of 10 days, from Bernays’ loss at sea on 5 December until Robertson McIssac’s arrival at battalion headquarters on 16 December (Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 49).

Peniakoff caricatures Bernays, denigrates the quality of the officers of 4th Battalion, claims to have ‘sacked’ a large proportion of the officers and non-commissioned staff and was left languishing in command because he was so good at his newfound role. Evidence to the contrary shows that Bernays was considered a consummate gentleman by Ravenstein and entrusted with the significant role of escorting him to Egypt (Ryder Reference Ryder1978, 100). Crucially, Peniakoff fails to mention either the five members of 4th Battalion who were also lost on the SS Chakdina or the 20 Arab other ranks lost on the Warszawa, which underlines how his omissions as much as his errors have hidden elements of the history of the LAF. Inaccurate and partial details have further contributed to modern issues of tracking and tracing non-commemoration.

Peniakoff’s account used a temporary crisis in the 4th Battalion to reinforce his wider characterisation of the LAF as dull and untidy, and as he apparently took responsibility for ‘weeding and regrouping the men’, it reinforces his self-portrayal as an effective and efficient leader (Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 49). In this way, the issue is that his memoir converted a moment of institutional disruption into evidence of his own competence, while reducing other LAF personnel to foils in his narrative.

Peniakoff’s autobiographical persona

Oakes observes that Peniakoff was the most famous LAF officer of the Second World War (Oakes Reference Oakes2011, 71). Peniakoff was invariably described by his peers as ‘a character’. One unidentified colleague called him a ‘bogus old fool’ (Willett Reference Willett1954, 199). David Lloyd Owen of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) describes him as having ‘created for himself quite a considerable reputation, based more … on his strange behaviour than on anything he ever achieved’ (Lloyd-Owen Reference Lloyd-Owen2009, 96).

Peniakoff once described himself to an Arab audience on BBC radio as ‘an Englishman brought up in England in the English way’, which was simply not true (Willett Reference Willett1954, 200). Peniakoff was born in 1897 in Huy, Belgium. His parents were Russian émigrés, and he was home educated in Belgium, by an English governess. Although he did learn English from an early age, he was not brought up in England, nor in any conceivably English way. Willett, who was a personal friend of Peniakoff, wrote a biography published in 1954, three years after Peniakoff’s death. His personal connection gave Willett access to many of his personal papers and correspondence. The insights and details in his biography include a statement that Peniakoff described his attitude as having ‘the kind of life that lends itself to imaginative treatment, and I have no particular reverence for TRUTH as such but yet like to get facts, names and topographical details dead accurate’ (Willett Reference Willett1954, 200). The Warszawa and Chakdina examples demonstrate that this stated desire for topographical and factual exactitude was not always fulfilled in practice.

Despite, or perhaps because of his imaginative attitude to truth, Peniakoff was a celebrity in his own lifetime, and began appearing in newspaper articles as early as 1943, including one in the New York Times, where he was described as ‘a Belgian whose real name may not be revealed’ (New York Times 1943). Even in Britain, with stringent press censorship, ‘the Popski legend had filtered’ through (TNA WO 106/2332, 1942; Willett Reference Willett1954, 155). When Peniakoff arrived for demobilisation in London on 4 November 1946, the press were waiting with a photographer, a clipping of which can be found retained in a file in the National Archives in Kew. The same file records that he captured the imagination of King George VI who ‘read with much interest’ a file on his escapades. Therefore, although his memoir is the focus of this article, it should be seen in the context of the celebrity he had been building in the international press since 1943 (TNA WO 106/2332, 1942).

In 1914, his family fled to France when Germany invaded Belgium. In 1915 he was accepted to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied for four terms. Peniakoff boasts that he chose to turn his ‘back on a donnish career’ but, as Alexander explains, he had, in fact, only just passed the first part of his mathematics tripos with a third-class mark, making the option of a donnish career more than dubious (Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 10; Alexander Reference Alexander2010, 60).

After Cambridge, Peniakoff claims he promptly enlisted in the French Artillery, but his personal correspondence contradicts this, explaining that in the summer of 1916, he spent two months helping his father research a new process for the fixation of nitrogen and the production of potassium cyanide, ‘for poison gas, I am sorry to say’ (Willett Reference Willett1954, 29). Willett implies rather than states that during his time at Cambridge, Peniakoff may have been a conscientious objector and adds that ‘one friend suggests that he was actually arrested’ (Willett Reference Willett1954, 29). By the autumn of 1916, Peniakoff’s sister stated that his parents found him a job at the St Jean de Maurienne factory in the south of France, and he was therefore ‘mobilised as a chemist’ (Willett Reference Willett1954, 31).

Willett could find no evidence that Peniakoff served in the French military, and a search of the digital Grand Mémorial database recording all French First World War combatants has no record of him (Base nationale: Grand Mémorial 2023 and 2025). Peniakoff states that he told his military sponsor, Major Emery, he had ‘no military experience’ (Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 37). However, there is no archival evidence to establish exactly how long Peniakoff was employed at the Péchiney aluminium works at St Jean de Maurienne, and therefore there remains a possibility that he did spend a short period with the French Artillery, as he claimed. Nonetheless, it must remain unverified. Willett quantified the gap in chronology from 1 September 1916 – as Peniakoff’s sister reported on a postcard of that date, he was working at St Jean de Maurienne – to one year later, in September 1917, when he was taken ill with typhoid at Aubagne near Marseilles. When he was taken ill, he was doing similar work at another factory (Willett Reference Willett1954, 30–31). Peniakoff’s claim to French artillery service, therefore, remains unsupported by the available record and difficult to reconcile with his own correspondence, which places him in chemical work rather than military service. These examples demonstrate a broader pattern in which Peniakoff fashioned a persona, rather than embellished isolated details of his past.

The question of why Peniakoff chose to write a memoir requires some qualification. In his introduction to the book, he describes the war as the happiest period of his middle age. His ‘excuse’ for writing a book mainly about himself was the hope that readers might be interested in the events that brought him and a few friends ‘considerable happiness’ (Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 9). He also acknowledges his Senussi friends and comrades. He dedicated the book to the Senussi tribal leader, Ali Buhamed, whose son served in the LAF. The book was not written as a history of the LAF; rather it was a personal account written at a time when writing was becoming Peniakoff’s post-war occupation. By 1950, Peniakoff’s writing was being promoted in the press. An advertisement in the Dundee Evening Telegraph on 8 April promoted a serialised story by him in the Courier and Advertiser (Dundee Evening Telegraph 1950, 4). His death certificate subsequently described his occupation as ‘Author’ (General Register Office 1951). In an appreciation included in the 1953 Reprint Society edition of Popski’s Private Army, Brigadier (later General) John ‘Shan’ Hackett recalled that Peniakoff had realised that ‘writing was his game’ and was already working on another project to follow the memoir (Hackett Reference Hackett and Peniakoff1953, ix). Private Army (Popski’s Private Army in the US and later editions) was first published in 1950, little more than a year before Peniakoff died from a right frontal astrocytoma on 15 May 1951 (General Register Office 1951). No evidence suggests he wrote the memoir in anticipation of his death. Hackett’s recollection that he was already working on another project suggests Peniakoff envisaged writing as his continuing career. His memoir can therefore be understood as an attempt to record a period of his life and the people with whom he served, and as part of an emerging post-war career built around an already marketable wartime personality. It also gave Peniakoff the opportunity to fix his persona in print and to place himself at the centre of the story he was telling.

The irony is that a book that in part preserved the significance of the LAF’s involvement in the North-African campaign ultimately helped obscure it. The later fame of PPA magnified this problem, allowing LAF activity to be retrospectively absorbed into the story of PPA.

Libyan Arab Force (LAF) historiography and Senussi agency

The flaws in Peniakoff’s memoir and chronologies have implications for the historiography of the LAF and Libyan agency during the Desert War. Due to a lack of information about the LAF, the historiography has disproportionately relied on Peniakoff’s memoir as a primary source. The fact that one celebrity memoir has taken such a central role underlines the paucity of information available regarding the LAF. Later accounts that rely heavily on Peniakoff therefore inherit the limits of his experience which were restricted to 3rd and 4th Battalions and LAF Commando. Although the LAF lacks an official unit history, the reliance on a single memoir, which can be shown to misrepresent and selectively edit evidence, requires more than correction; it demands a reframing of the LAF’s contribution to the campaign.

Peniakoff’s self-aggrandisement has had consequences for the perceptions of Libyan agency during the Second World War. The structures from which the LAF emerged were initially connected to British plans to fund and encourage Senussi subversive activity (TNA HS 8/256, 1939). The LAF raised five battalions in the mould of an imperial gendarmerie and has widely been seen as a British instrument of control and military utility. It also served as a political tool, enabling Senussi leaders in exile, led by Idris el Senussi, to pursue their own anti-Italian political objectives (Kelly Reference Kelly2010). As a case in point, when 3rd and 4th Battalions were advancing into Cyrenaica in December 1941, British Troops Egypt (BTE) had requested permission to send 1st and 2nd Battalions to Syria. Idris vetoed this proposal as British authorities were yet to formally recognise Senussi support, and he was adamant that permitting those battalions to go to Syria would give the impression that the LAF was ‘nothing better than mercenaries with no national or political standing whatever’ (TNA FO 371/27573, 1942, 49).

The size of the LAF requires clarification, as published estimates range from 600 to 30,000 men (Lutterbeck Reference Lutterbeck, Kleynhans and Wyss2025, 75; Bernhard Reference Bernhard2012, 429). Reconstruction from surviving records indicates that approximately 6,000 men served in its ranks during its existence. A photocopy of an Arabic nominal roll held in the archives in Libya was provided by Dr Faraj Najem (University of Benghazi). The roll contains numbers extending beyond 11,000, but these do not represent 11,000 individuals. Only 5,596 numbers were issued to named Arab personnel, with blocks of numbers left unissued. The Arabic roll appears largely complete, whereas the British personnel record has had to be reconstructed piecemeal from war diaries, reports and other primary sources and is more fragmentary, producing a minimum identified number rather than a full nominal roll. This identified 278 British officers and 169 British other ranks, bringing the total to 6,043 identifiable personnel.

The figure of approximately 6,000 used here is therefore a conservative estimate based on identifiable personnel, rather than an inference from the highest number appearing in the nominal roll. The disparity between published estimates, together with the fragmentary nature of the surviving records, illustrates why even apparently straightforward facts about the LAF require careful archival reconstruction.

The LAF followed a well-established British practice of raising and employing non-British personnel within imperial military structures. Lunt demonstrates the range of such forces across the empire, while Johnson situates the use of indigenous personnel within a longer tradition of British and Western military practice (Lunt Reference Lunt1981; Johnson Reference Johnson2017). Stoil shows how British forces worked with indigenous irregular formations during the Second World War, and how British command structures operated alongside local military and political interests (Stoil Reference Stoil2016). The LAF was part of this wider imperial military system, but did not fit neatly within it, not least because Libya was never formally a British possession. In April 1942, Colonel Hardy, the LAF commander, wrote to General Headquarters in frustration at the lack of recognition that the Senussi were Allies rather than colonial troops (TNA WO 178/37, 1941). The distinction is important because Allied status more readily implied political agency, whereas colonial military status tended to subordinate such agency to imperial command. The LAF may have been raised under joint flags of Britain and Libya, but its troops were still subject to the racialised assumptions of the day. Hardy’s observation does not remove the imperial structure within which the LAF operated, but it does complicate any reading of the force as a passive ‘colonial’ formation. The LAF consisted of volunteers fighting in their homeland against one imperial power while allied to another whose long-term intentions towards Libyan independence remained uncertain (Kelly Reference Kelly2010).

The recruitment base for the LAF was the Senussi refugee population in Egypt and later-captured Senussi prisoners of war. As part of the recruitment process, these men were vouched for by local tribal sheikhs (Anderson Reference Anderson1985, 99–100). A Senussi refugee population had been growing since the 1920s, not just in Egypt but also in Tunisia, Algeria, Syria, Chad, Turkey, Palestine and Niger (Baldinetti Reference Baldinetti2003, 73). Fascist policies in Libya, euphemistically called the ‘suppression’ of the Senussi, were shaped by massacres, concentration camps, coercion and violence.

From the beginning of the LAF in August 1940, officers at LAF headquarters were instructed never to call Idris, Emir; they were instructed to call him the Sayid, or Sayid Idris, specifically to avoid making any implied promises over the future independence of Libya (Anderson Reference Anderson1985, 381). British authorities sought to use Idris’ political authority, including his appointment as the Emir of Libya in 1922 which precipitated his exile to Egypt, while limiting its implications (Kelly Reference Kelly2010). Formal acknowledgement of Senussi involvement from the British government came under duress in January 1942.

The Senussi, particularly in Cyrenaica, had been mounting a sustained guerrilla campaign against Italian authorities since Italy invaded in 1911. The men who volunteered for the LAF were not abstract auxiliaries but refugees whose families still in Cyrenaica remained exposed to reprisal, coercion and displacement. Their service should not be understood solely in terms of military utility or imperial structures but must be situated within a context of survival, obligation and negotiated loyalty. This nuance is present in Peniakoff’s work as a subtext: for example, he describes a conference of the Obeidi tribe, which he depicts as a negotiation to persuade them to aid him, including telling them what he knows to be untrue by stating: ‘I command the Allied force in the Jebel’ (Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 101). The officer who arguably did locally control the Allied forces in the Jebel was the Western Desert Liaison Officer (WDLO), who when Peniakoff made this statement around April 1942, was John Edward ‘Jock’ Hasleden.

In the section of his book discussing the Obeidi conference, Peniakoff acknowledges the ongoing conflict against Italian colonisation and the patronage of Idris in the formation of the LAF, but betrays a persistent inclination to view the LAF through the lens of Lawrence of Arabia. In British circles, Lawrence was a model of charismatic irregular command, leading Arabs across the desert in daring raids and sabotage. Lawrence and references to him pervade archival sources. By mirroring Lawrence, Peniakoff follows the day’s romantic ideals. War-Office documents explain how the strategy for recruiting and managing Senussi involvement needed to ensure that ‘Feisals’ were recruited as well as ‘Lawrences’ (TNA HS 8/260, 1939). Peniakoff cast Lieutenant Sa‘ad Ali Rahouma in a role analogous to Lawrence’s Feisal. Since the publication of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Reference Lawrence1926), the Lawrence idiom framed Anglophone perception of Arab irregular warfare through romanticised assumptions about noble desert warriors with qualities of a martial race, yet requiring charismatic British moral leadership (Stoil Reference Stoil2012). In this paradigm, Peniakoff tends to turn Senussi loyalty – which was conditional, driven less by allegiance to Britain than by their hatred of the Italian regime and fear for their kin – into personal loyalty.

Rahouma is depicted by Peniakoff as his long-suffering, faithful, Arab second-in-command, but this minimises him and reduces him to a caricature. Rahouma’s personal calibre can be seen in the Military Cross (MC) he was awarded for his part in guiding members of 3rd Battalion and other British stragglers over 200 miles back to British lines after the capture of Benghazi from 29 January to 18 February 1942 (TNA WO 373/19/89, 1942). Peniakoff played no part in this, as in January to February 1942, he was with 4th Battalion rather than 3rd Battalion, which, aside from a skirmish at Timini, successfully fell back with the rest of the Eighth Army to Gazala and then Cairo. Rahouma’s MC shows that Peniakoff’s memoir risks reducing him to a loyal companion, despite him having been independently recognised for operational leadership.

As Peniakoff’s memoir covers only the parts of the LAF with which he served, rather than the formation as a whole, it has a limited field of vision. He served with 3rd Battalion from October 1940 until December 1941 and therefore does not relate how 1st, 2nd and 4th Battalions were caught in the siege of Tobruk from April until June 1941; rather he complains about kicking his heels around the Depot in Mena, near Cairo. This further supports his dull, untidy and incompetent representation.

Syrett is one of several authors to fall into the trap of being unaware that Peniakoff’s description of the LAF was limited to his personal experience. As an example, Peniakoff relates that his unit had been disbanded when he returned to Cairo in August 1942, so Syrett states that in ‘August of 1942 Peniakoff was brought out of the Jebel Akhdar by the Long Range Desert Group, only to find when he reached Egypt that the Libyan Arab Force had been disbanded’ (Syrett Reference Syrett2014, 348). Syrett logically assumed that the disbandment Peniakoff discusses related to the entirety of the LAF when it was solely relevant to LAF Commando. The LAF was not disbanded until August 1943, and this is as indicative of the paucity of information available about the LAF as it is about the ubiquity of Peniakoff’s memoir. Even this disbandment requires clarification as the LAF did not disappear: it became the Cyrenaican Defence Force (CYDEF) and was transferred from under War-Office control to the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA) on 31 August 1943 (TNA WO 178/37).

Peniakoff’s memoir devotes almost half of its 500 pages to his work with the LAF before he begins the story of PPA. His timeline obscures facts and implies that PPA was founded in or before October 1942. A close reading, combined with other archival sources, establishes that Peniakoff did not return to Cairo from the Jebel Akhdar with the remnants of LAF Commando until 26 August 1942 (TNA WO 208/5588, 1942; Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 237). He then took part in an LRDG raid on Barce (Operation Caravan) on 14 September 1942, after which he was hospitalised with a wounded hand. He was not yet discharged on 14 October 1942, when he discussed his employment options with Hackett. At this point, he hoped to form a new patrol within the LRDG, and for a week, while still convalescing (until 21 October 1942), he was nominally a member of the LRDG. Colonel Prendergast, the commanding officer of the LRDG, declined to accept his proposal. Prendergast’s reason, as given by Peniakoff, was that the ‘war establishment of that unit did not allow for an extra squadron’ (Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 241). PPA was therefore proposed as an alternative around 21 October 1942. Peniakoff was told that it would come into existence on 15 November 1942. Consequently, it did not become operational until it reached Kufra on 4 December 1942.

Although nominally a member of the LRDG for a short period, officially until 15 November 1942, Peniakoff remained an LAF officer. He won his Military Cross for work with the LAF in the Jebel Akhdar in May and August 1942 and for accompanying the LRDG in September 1942 (TNA WO 373/46/37, 1942). Kleynhans and Gordon state that: ‘the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) and Popski’s Private Army (PPA) … established rendezvous points scattered across the desert, and could aid escapers in reaching Allied lines’, and that ‘it is evident that PPA increasingly picked up South African escapers from Derna and Benghazi from August 1942 onwards’, and that PPA in conjunction with the LRDG was responsible for facilitating the safe return of South African escapers towards Allied lines in Egypt (Kleynhans and Gordon Reference Kleynhans and Gordon2022, 59).

Molinari similarly states that it was PPA, rather than the LAF, that was busy behind the lines with other units, including Inter-Service Liaison Department (ISLD, a local name for SIS/MI6 operations) and G(R) (Molinari Reference Molinari2013, 75). She states that from July 1942 ‘the LRDG patrols were busy for the rest of the month carrying agents of the G(R), the Interservice Liaison Department and “Popski’s Private Army” across the lines’ (Molinari Reference Molinari2013, 75). This is a verifiable inaccuracy rooted in the instability of Peniakoff’s chronologies. PPA only became operational on 4 December 1942 at Kufra, after the Battle of El Alamein and the Allied landings of Operation Torch. PPA could not have been involved in escape lines; it did not exist in July 1942 when the escape lines did. This confusion between the LAF and PPA has had real consequences for how credit is distributed in military histories of North Africa.

The post-war context lies beyond the scope of this article, but it helps explain why the LAF has remained difficult to recover. In Libya after 1951, both the Senussi monarchy and the later republic and Jamahiriya under Muammar Gaddafi had limited incentive to present wartime cooperation with Britain in positive terms. Evidence to support this comes from a paper presented to the British Academy by Dr Faraj Najem, in which he explained the politicised context of historical research in Libya and the widespread reticence to investigate Libyan participation in the North-African campaign (Najem Reference Najem2025).

Popski’s Private Army (PPA) mythology and retrospective attribution

This section is included because the later glamour of Peniakoff and his unit, PPA, affected how Peniakoff’s earlier LAF service was remembered. Peniakoff and his men chased the action across the desert towards Tunisia, not catching up with active front lines until January 1943. As already argued, PPA’s chronology makes it unsafe to attribute any North-African escape-and-evasion activity to the unit. Clarifying the timeline is therefore a necessary first step in separating Peniakoff’s LAF service from later PPA mythology.

Willett drew attention to the disparity between PPA’s reputation and the brevity of its operational career when he noted that ‘few outside the … [PPA] knew how short its African career had been, or how little it had really achieved’ (Willett Reference Willett1954, 122). He explains that PPA only operated behind enemy lines for a month in Tunisia and for three weeks in Italy. Peniakoff’s version of events was reinforced by a series of synoptic memoirs dealing with PPA rather than the LAF. These works, all heavily influenced by Peniakoff, were written by members of PPA, including Yunnie and Owen (Yunnie Reference Yunnie1959; Caneri Reference Caneri1982; Owen Reference Owen1993; Yunnie, Owen and Yunnie Reference Yunnie, Owen and Yunnie2002).

Initially, from December 1942, PPA was attached to the LRDG, but when the LRDG returned to Cairo from Tunisia in February 1943, Peniakoff convinced the First Army to move PPA under its command and into Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ). While his troops were training with 2 Special Air Service (SAS), Peniakoff went to Algiers where he shared a billet with George Jellicoe, whom he describes as ‘the commander of another Private Army called the “Special Boat Section” which operated at sea somewhat on the same lines as our own PPA on land’ (Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 325). Many alumni of Robert Laycock’s Layforce, including Jellicoe, Bill Stirling and Geoffrey Appleyard, were in Algiers planning their Italian operations (Peniakoff Reference Peniakoff1950, 325). PPA and Peniakoff were accepted as peers and this is a significant reason why PPA is considered an elite force alongside the SAS, Special Boat Service (SBS) and others.

The point is not that PPA did nothing; it is that Peniakoff’s reputation was made before PPA, while he was operating under LAF auspices. PPA’s celebrity retroactively coloured understandings of the Western-Desert period and perceptions of its Italian operations. Peniakoff gained notoriety and credibility through his work in the LAF, but failed to have the same impact with PPA in the very different environment of Italy. The PPA fits Clifford’s characterisation of British special forces as having a ‘buccaneering, marauding, piratical sort of game’, including some of the darker elements of human nature (Clifford Reference Clifford1943). The PPA’s mythology depends on elite irregularity; the evidence suggests a more ambiguous formation whose charisma, indiscipline and marginality were part of the same phenomenon.