GORDON LYALL PAVER (1913–1988) AND 42ND GEOLOGICAL SECTION, SOUTH AFRICAN ENGINEER CORPS: MILITARY GEOLOGY AND GEOPHYSICS IN WORLD WAR II SUPPORTING BRITISH ARMY OPERATIONS: PART 1, THE EAST AFRICAN CAMPAIGN 1940–1941

Abstract

42nd Geological Section of the South African Engineer Corps was a unique unit that supported British armed forces during World War II. It was co-founded and led for most of the war by Gordon Lyall Paver (1913–1988), one of the few ‘British’ officers serving specifically as geologists during the war to achieve the rank of major. Born in South Africa at Johannesburg and in his early years educated there at St. John's College, from 1926 Paver was educated in England, at Charterhouse School until admitted in 1931 to Pembroke College in the University of Cambridge, where he studied chemistry, geology and mineralogy. He graduated in 1934 and returned to South Africa, being appointed to the Geological Survey of South Africa as one of its first geophysicists and contributing to magnetometric and gravimetric surveys in the Transvaal region, expertise used in 1938 to 1940 to draft his thesis for a PhD degree (awarded in 1942). Although married in 1939 and briefly employed as a consultant geophysicist, in August 1940 Paver was one of the first three geoscientists to be mobilized as officers to found 42nd Geological Section, at Zonderwater near Pretoria in South Africa. After only a month's military training, at the end of September the Section and its vehicles deployed by rail and sea to a base near Nairobi in Kenya for operational service in East Africa, with ‘Acting Captain’ Paver as its Second-in-Command. Detachments from the Section were widely deployed in Kenya and later in Italian and British Somaliland (present-day Somalia) and also in Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) for surveys by means primarily of electrical earth resistivity but also vertical force magnetometer. These guided drilling of wells by another unit of the South African Engineer Corps to abstract potable groundwater— thereby facilitating troop concentrations and forward movements in arid or semi-arid regions during the ‘British’ Army's East African Campaign. Members of the Section also compiled geological maps of Kenya at scales of 1:1,000,000 and 1:2,000,000 and pioneered a military geological unit created within the East African Engineers that supported British forces in the region from 1941 to 1945. The Campaign drew to a victorious close during 1941 and, from the end of August, the Section was re-deployed northwards to a base near Cairo in Egypt. It continued to serve within the British Army's Middle East Command but with leadership now by Paver, promoted ‘Acting Major’ from 31 August and in December ‘mentioned in despatches’ for his earlier distinguished service in East Africa.