FIGHTING UNIT
SAULLEST IN BRITISH EMPIRE KENYA INDEPENDENT SQUADRON BAND OF EIGHTEEN SCOUTS. Tlie smallest lighting unit in the British Empire is the Kenya Independent Squadron, who total strength is only 18. They seem to be a sell-suffi-cient body of men. who want as little as possible to do with the rest of the Army while they get on with the war on their own. Four of them are South Africans. The founder of the Independent Squadron was Major J. J. Drought; who wiil be ri/mcmbered as the leader cf Drought's "Skin Corps" in the campaign in German East Africa in ilie lasi war. The "Skill Corps" were :i body of iDtiv’e troops who were nuked except for a i>aiidoli<?r and who harassed Von iPiiow": Iroops considerably, legends have grown up around the “Sitin Corps." and eno still hears picturesque stories to the effect that no man was admitted io the corps until ho could prove he had already killed an enemy. Major Drought is now connected will’, the Rhodesian Forces but. in Juno, just afit'T. Italy entered, the war. he originated the Kenya Independent Squadron. He looked for, and recruited, .men ! of the type who make frontiersmen. They had to be men who could ride and knew animals, who were at home in tough country, and who were ready to live hard and dangerously. ROLLING STONES. They came from all parts of. Africa and from all walks of life, many of them rolling stones who had won a i living in half-a-dozen different ways, j from elephant hunting to riding race-1 horses. | For three months or so the recruits trained in the bush on the edge of the Northern Frontier District desert, just below the great -escarpment of the Kenya Highlands. . They learned to ride little Somali mules through the wilderness of acacia and sand. They learned to handle light machine-guns and polished up their musketry. They learned how to read maps in terms of actual country, and went out by day and night into the bush with compasses and learned how to navigate their way through the great spaces of this lonely kind. • The’Kenya Independent Squadron ■were absorbed into cither units at end of September, and their intensive training is now proving its worth. But one of the officers, Captain E. McK. Nicholl. put up a scheme that the squadron should be reformed on a smaller scale to act as special scouts.! and so the present unit of a few| selected volunteers came into exist-1 once. i
Only 100 of the badges of the unit were struck. The badge is a laurel wreath, surmounted by the letter "D" —for Drought's—enclosing a diagrammatic representation of the cardinal points of the compass, will) the motto. “Quod Ago Agis"- "Do what lias Io be done." -CAMP ISOLATED. Tiie squadron's eamp is isolated far from any other unit. and Ihe men do not concern themselves with looking like parade-ground soldiers. They wear weather-stained slouch hats, khaki bush shirts and shorts or slacks that, bear the scars of rain. sun. sandstorms and thorns. It is true, they have tents for Ihe O’C.'s olfice and for their stores, but’, when in camp, the men live in rough grass lints, built native style, and when out on patrol they sleep in their blankets. Sometimes they go out on patrols lasting live days, and they cover as much as 90 miles at a time. They patrol the desert, wastes fol - signs of enemy movement and Banda gangs, and they report on water holes.
Their little Somali mules, they say. know cavalry drill, better than the troopers themselves, and they certainly know discipline. One of them betrayed no excitement, when a hyena leapt, on her back, trying to filch a leg of buck she was carrying- -she merely bucked Ihe hyena oil, and went on plodding siloiig dui.-ilely behind tier mmilfer.
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Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 March 1941, Page 6
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644FIGHTING UNIT Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 March 1941, Page 6
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