Desert Rats Mounted Captured Italian Guns on British Trucks — The Improvised Weapon Became Legendary d

In November 1941, somewhere west of Sidi Rezegh in the Libyan desert, a column of battered Ford F30 lorries rumbled across the open scrubland at 35 mph. Perched in the flatbeds of those lorries, lashed down with rope and field improvised mounts, sat captured Italian Cannone da 47/32 anti-tank guns, weapons designed to sit still on the ground and fire from fixed positions.

The men of the 7th Support Group, 7th Armoured Division, had no intention of letting them sit still. They were hunting German armor. And the Germans had no idea what was coming. This was the Portee, pronounced Port-A, a French word meaning carried. It described the peculiar British habit of bolting guns to lorry beds and driving them straight at the enemy.

To every conventional military thinker of the day, this arrangement was borderline suicidal. Guns were heavy, fragile precision instruments. Lorries were thin-skinned, petrol-fed fire traps. Combining the two and charging toward Panzers was not doctrine. It was improvisation born of desperation. And yet, by 1942, German after-action reports were identifying the Portee as one of the most tactically disruptive weapon systems they faced in North Africa.

What looked like a makeshift botch had become, in the hands of the Desert Rats, a weapon of genuine strategic genius. The conventional wisdom, naturally, said this should never have worked at all. Standard anti-tank doctrine in 1940 emphasized concealment, fire discipline, and fixed defensive positions.

You dug your gun in, you camouflaged it, you waited for armor to advance upon you, and then you opened fire from a position of relative safety. The German Pak 36, and later the devastating Pak 38, were purpose-built for exactly this philosophy. They were towed behind half-tracks or lorries, unlimbered, sighted, and fired from prepared positions.

On paper, this was the correct way to employ an anti-tank gun. It minimized exposure. It maximized accuracy. It allowed crews to use terrain for cover. The Portee violated every one of these principles simultaneously. The gun was not dug in. It was not concealed. It sat atop a lorry that was taller than a man, visible from 3 mi across flat desert terrain, and constructed of steel so thin that a rifle bullet at close range would pass straight through the cab.

Critics within the British military establishment, and there were many, argued that the portee crews were simply presenting the enemy with a large, slow-moving, easily combustible target. They were right about the vulnerability. They were comprehensively wrong about what that vulnerability meant in practice.

The secret was in the desert itself. Libya and Egypt were not the European battlefields that military theorists had planned for. There were no hedgerows, no villages, no railway embankments, none of the terrain features that made fixed defensive positions viable. The Western Desert was an open, featureless expanse stretching roughly 1,200 mi from Tripoli to Alexandria, with engagement ranges frequently exceeding 1,000 yd.

In this environment, the fixed anti-tank gun’s greatest advantage, concealment, was largely irrelevant because there was precious little to conceal behind. What mattered in the desert was mobility. The 7th Armoured Division’s area of operations covered thousands of square miles, and the front line, such as it was, shifted by dozens of miles in a single afternoon.

Resupplying a network of dug-in gun positions across that kind of terrain was a logistical nightmare. Moving them when the line collapsed, as it did repeatedly throughout 1941 and 1942, was nearly impossible. A portee crew, by contrast, could limber it up, which, on a portee, meant simply driving away, in under 30 seconds. They could cover 60 mi of desert track before nightfall, reposition, and be engaging new targets the following morning.

The Ford 30 and the Chevrolet WB lorries used as portee carriers had a cross-country speed of approximately 25 mph on firm sand, and a road speed of 45 mph on metal surfaces. That made them, in the open desert, faster than any towed artillery arrangement the Germans could field. A Pak 38 towed behind a half-track needed several minutes to unlimber, sight, and prepare for action.

A Portee could fire from its vehicle within seconds of stopping. This was not accidental. The men of the Royal Horse Artillery and the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, who operated these systems, had thought carefully about what desert fighting actually required, as opposed to what the training manuals prescribed.

There was also the matter of crew survival. A dug-in gun position, however well concealed, became a fixed target the moment it opened fire. In the flat desert, muzzle flash and dust clouds were visible at 2 mi. Enemy artillery could range on a static position and deliver accurate fire within 4 minutes.

A Portee crew that fired and immediately moved denied the enemy a fixed reference point. They were, in the language of the desert, ghosts, present long enough to destroy, absent before the response arrived. Trooper James Garrett of the 11th Hussars described the experience in a letter home in January 1942.

We’d loose off five or six rounds, the corporal would shout, “Driver, go!” And we’d be bouncing across the scrub at 30 mph before the first Jerry shell landed where we’d been. It wasn’t bravery, it was good sense. The choice of the captured Italian Cannone da 47/32, and later the British 2-pounder QF gun, as the Portee’s primary weapon, reflected the same pragmatic thinking.

The 47/32 weighed only 277 kg in action, light enough to be mounted on a standard lorry flatbed without overwhelming the vehicle’s suspension. Its muzzle velocity of 630 m/s was sufficient to penetrate the 30 mm frontal armor of the early Panzer III at ranges up to 500 yd. It was, by the standards of 1941, an adequate weapon against the majority of Axis armor in the theater.

Critics pointed out, correctly, that the 47/32 was already becoming obsolescent by 1941, and that the British 2-pounder, itself no giant killer, would struggle against the up-armored Panzer IV variants appearing in 1942. They were right about the gun’s limitations against heavier armor. What they failed to account for was how the Portee’s mobility changed the tactical equation entirely.

The purpose of the Portee was never to slug it out toe-to-toe with the latest German tank. It was to attack the soft tissue of the Axis war machine, the supply columns, the reconnaissance vehicles, the field workshops, the fuel bowsers. Against those targets, a 47/32 or a 2-pounder was perfectly lethal. And those targets, in the logistic star of desert campaign, were often more valuable than tanks themselves.

Destroy three petrol lorries and you immobilize a panzer battalion as surely as if you’d knocked out the panzers directly. A Portee crew was not trying to win a slugging match with a tiger. They were trying to destroy supply lorries, knock out lighter armored vehicles, ambush fuel columns, and then vanish before the enemy could bring heavier weapons to bear.

Speed and surprise compensated for penetration limitations. Crews of the 7th Support Group’s anti-tank batteries repeatedly reported engaging enemy transport at ranges of 300 to 800 yards, firing three to five rounds, and withdrawing before counter-battery fire could be directed at them.

The Battle of Sidi Rezegh, fought between the 19th and 23rd of November, 1941, demonstrated the Portee system at its most brutally effective and its most costly. During Operation Crusader, the 7th Support Group’s Portee batteries engaged advancing German and Italian armor across the exposed plateau south of Tobruk. The terrain around Sidi Rezegh was almost textbook Portee country, flat, open, with visibility extending 4 miles in clear desert air.

There was no cover. There was no concealment. The only advantage available to either side was the ability to move faster than the enemy could respond. On the 21st of November, B Battery, 60th Field Regiment, operating Portee mounted 2-pounders, engaged a column of approximately 30 Italian M13/40 tanks attempting to outflank the 7th Armoured Brigade’s position.

Moving at speed across the flat ground, the Portee lorries maneuvered to within 600 yards of the Italian column’s flank, a position a dug-in gun could never have reached in time and opened fire. 14 M13/40s were knocked out in the engagement. B Battery lost two lorries to return fire and three men killed.

14 tanks for three men and two lorries. Those numbers tell the story more clearly than any tactical doctrine. German after-action reports from Operation Crusader noted, with considerable professional irritation, that British anti-tank guns seemed to appear from unexpected directions, engage at close range, and withdraw before they could be brought under effective fire.

Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel, in his own operational diary from December 1941, described the British ability to appear, strike, and vanish as one of the defining characteristics of desert fighting that his supply-starved forces struggled to counter. He was describing precisely the portee at work. This wasn’t improvisation masquerading as doctrine, it was improvisation becoming doctrine.

By early 1942, the War Office had formalized portee operations within the structure of the Royal Horse Artillery’s desert batteries. The 3rd Royal Horse Artillery, the 4th Royal Horse Artillery, and the 11th Hussars all operated formal portee sections with established drills for mounting, dismounting, and maneuvering under fire.

A trained portee crew could bring a 2-pounder to action, being stop, traverse, and fire the first round in approximately 15 seconds from road speed. That figure came from training records of 3 RHA at Kabrit in February 1942. 15 seconds from movement to first round, a towed gun needed 3 to 4 minutes minimum.

The drills themselves reflected hard-won desert experience. Portee crews trained to fire no more than six rounds from a single position before moving. They practiced dismounting the gun under fire, unhooking the traveling clamps, dropping the bipod, and establishing a ground position in under 4 minutes should the lorry be knocked out beneath them.

They rehearsed resupply on the move, passing ammunition between lorries at 15 mph across rough ground. None of this appeared in any pre-war manual. It was knowledge earned in blood on the plateau at Sidi Rezegh and the approaches to Tobruk. The Portee system also revealed a deeper principle about combined arms operations in the desert.

Commanders weren’t clinging to improvisation out of desperation alone. They understood that in an environment where speed was the decisive factor, any weapon that could move fast enough to concentrate force at the critical moment was worth more than a theoretically superior weapon that arrived too late or couldn’t be moved at all.

The 25-pounder field gun was, in direct comparison, a more powerful and accurate weapon than anything mounted on a Portee lorry. But a 25-pounder battery took 45 minutes to move, redeploy, and come back into action. A Portee troop took 3 minutes. In a battle where the front could shift 5 miles in 20 minutes, those 42 minutes were the difference between supporting the advance and watching it collapse.

By the summer of 1942, even as the Portee’s limitations against heavier German armor became more apparent, the lessons of its operational success were already reshaping British thinking about mobility, combined arms, and the relationship between fire power and maneuver. The Long Range Desert Group, which operated deep behind Axis lines, adopted Portee-mounted Lewis guns, Vickers guns, and eventually Bofors 37-mm cannon for their raiding lorries.

The same philosophical principle applied to penetration raids rather than anti-tank work. The Special Air Service’s Jeep columns of 1942 and 1943 were direct descendants of the Portee concept. Mobile firepower that traded armor for speed and traded concealment for aggressive initiative. The Germans, for their part, developed their own version, the Sd.Kfz.

251 half-track with mounted Pak guns, but never fully replicated the Portee’s particular combination of simplicity, speed, and mechanical reliability. A Ford F30 lorry could be repaired by a driver with a basic tool kit and a jerrycan of engine oil. A Sd.Kfz. 251 required specialized parts, factory-trained mechanics, and a supply chain that, in North Africa, was perpetually under strain.

The British lorry’s very ordinariness was in the desert a formidable operational advantage. What made the Portee legendary was not its firepower. Other weapons in the desert carried more punch. It was not its armor. It had none. What made it legendary was the audacity of the men who took a captured gun, a civilian lorry, some rope and welding equipment, and created something the textbooks had never envisioned.

Something that forced professional soldiers of the German Wehrmacht to write frustrated dispatches about British anti-tank guns that refused to behave as anti-tank guns were supposed to behave. The Desert Rats named their Portee lorries. They painted kill tallies on the cab doors. They developed unit pride around a weapon that officially barely existed in the supply tables. That pride was not misplaced.

From Sidi Rezegh to El Alamein, the Portee system tied down German reconnaissance, disrupted Axis supply columns, and gave the 7th Armored Division a tactical flexibility that no amount of conventional artillery could have provided. Battlefields aren’t testing ranges. They’re chaotic, exhausting, and merciless to elegant theories.

The Portee survived the desert not because anyone planned it perfectly, but because the men who used it understood instinctively that in the open expanse of North Africa, the lorry that could move was worth a dozen guns that couldn’t.