It was Stirling’s gift as a leader to see the big picture, and where the SAS fitted into that scene. He was also, due to his social background and boundless confidence, possessed of friends in the highest places. Both attributes came together in early January 1942, when Stirling sought a personal interview with Auchinleck, the Commander-in-Chief, during which he proposed that L Detachment should switch from striking airfields to ports. Although the Crusader operation had pushed Rommel westwards, the Afrika Korps remained a potent force, not least because it continued to receive supplies of Panzers through the coastal harbour. Stirling pointed out to Auchinleck that Bouerat would become the likely main supply harbour for the Afrika Korps, and that the fuel dumps there could and should be blown up. Auchinleck agreed. When Stirling asked for men for L Detachment, Auchinleck gave him permission to recruit a further six officers and thirty to forty men, some of whom could be drawn from the Special Boat Section of No. 8 Commando. For good measure, Auchinleck promoted Stirling to major.
There was one final thing: Stirling’s enemies in general headquarters (who were the sort of literal-minded men who thought irregular forces were a diversion from the ‘real’ war) had bluntly informed him that L Detachment, because it was a temporary unit, could not have its own badge. Nonetheless, Stirling brashly wore SAS wings and cap badge to meet the Commander-in-Chief. Stirling had calculated correctly; Auchinleck liked and approved the badge. The SAS badge was more than a mark of an elite unit, it was a debt Stirling felt he owed Lewes, who had been instrumental in its design. The so-called ‘Winged Dagger’ was modelled by Bob Tait on King Arthur’s sword Excalibur, while the wings were probably taken from an ibis on a fresco in Shepheard’s Hotel. The colors of the wings, Oxford and Cambridge blue, were selected because Lewes had rowed for Oxford, and Tom Langton, another early L-Detachment officer, for Cambridge. It was Stirling himself who came up with the motto ‘Who Dares Wins’. The badge was worn on berets – which at first were white, but when these attracted wolf whistles they were changed to a sand color, which they still are.
On the way back to Jalo, Stirling came across fifty French parachutists at Alexandria who, after some vigorous appeals to the Free French commander in Cairo, General Catroux, Stirling annexed for the SAS. He also recruited Captain Bill Cumper of the Royal Engineers, a Cockney explosives expert who would take on the vacancy of demolitions instructor left open by Lewes’ death. But Cumper could not take on the whole gamut of training the SAS recruits who were now so numerous the camp at Kabrit was overflowing with them; that mantle, Stirling resolved, should be taken by Paddy Mayne. Sitting in his tent, Stirling explained his thinking to Mayne, who accepted with bad grace verging on insubordination. He would only ‘do his best’, and then only on a temporary basis. Mayne even hinted that Stirling was green-eyed about his success in blowing up aircraft, and pinning him to a desk was a way of stealing the glory.
With a moody Mayne left sulking in Kabrit, Stirling launched a raid on Bouerat from Jalo on 17 January. Taxiing the SAS team out was the Guards patrol of the LRDG, led by Captain Anthony Hunter. As on previous missions, Stirling seemed chained to ill luck. On the sixth day out, the patrol was strafed and bombed in the Wadi Tamrit, with the loss of the radio truck and three men. Then Stirling instructed the two Special Boat Section men in the party to assemble their folbot (a type of collapsible canoe) before the final approach – the plan being for the SBS men to paddle out and set limpet mines on ships in the harbour. As their 1,680-pound Ford truck neared Bouerat, it lurched down a pothole and the folbot shattered. Not that it mattered; there were no ships in the port. Instead, Stirling had to satisfy himself with detonating petrol bowsers and the wireless station.
Picked up by a LRDG truck driven by Corporal ‘Flash’ Gibson, Stirling and his crew rode around, stopping to plant bombs on parked trucks. They then made off to the main rendezvous. Mounted on the back of the Ford V-8 truck was a novelty – a Vickers K aircraft-type machine gun, whose .303-inch barrels could spew out bullets at 1,200 rounds per minute. Johnny Cooper was the man with his finger on the trigger:
As we motored at speed along the track, we suddenly noticed flashing lights up ahead of us and a few isolated shots whizzed through the air. Whether they were warning shots or the enemy clearing their guns we did not know, but as our truck accelerated down a slight incline it became painfully obvious that an ambush had been set up … I slipped off the safety catch and let fly with a devastating mixture of tracer and incendiary, amazed at the firepower of the Vickers. At the same time, Reg [Seekings] opened up with his Thompson, and we ploughed through the ambush, completely outgunning and demoralizing the Italians. Gibson, with great presence of mind, switched on the headlamps and roared away at about 40 mph, driving with absolute efficiency and coolness to extricate us from a difficult position.
Gibson was awarded the Military Medal (MM) for the operation, and Johnny Cooper the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM). The Vickers K, fired for the first time in action by the SAS, became the unit’s weapon of choice for the rest of the war.
On the way back to Jalo, Stirling discovered why Bouerat had been free of shipping. Rommel had ordered the Afrika Korps to advance and, in what became known as the ‘Msus Stakes’, had rolled the British back to Gazala line. He now had a port closer to the front line – Benghazi.
With his head full of a plan to attack Benghazi, Stirling returned to the SAS base at Kabrit, only to find that Mayne had virtually abandoned all administration and training. He had even let the estimable Cumper be posted away. Stirling went into Mayne’s tent. ‘Paddy was surrounded by bottles, reading James Joyce,’ Stirling recalled. A furious row ensued, only resolved when Mayne was returned to the orbat. Old hands, however, noticed a continued tension between Stirling and Mayne, which was not cooled by Stirling appointing a complete outsider, Lieutenant George, Earl Jellicoe, as his second-in-command. Probably Mayne’s contrived incompetence as an administrator ruled him out of the job, but doubtless too Stirling wanted as his right hand someone less combustible than Mayne, whose aggression when drunk was notorious. Mayne’s role as training officer was taken over by Sergeant Major ‘Big Pat’ Riley. It was Riley who inducted Reg Seekings, Bob Bennett and ‘Young Johnny’ Cooper, all recently promoted, into the sergeants’ mess. Cooper recalled:
Once you were promoted you had to go to the bar on first entering the mess and drink a pint of whatever drink you designated without taking your lips from the glass. One Saturday morning, Reg and I entered the mess tent and were welcomed by Pat Riley. To me he said, ‘Well, young Cooper, I know you don’t drink alcohol, so you had better have a non-alcoholic drink.’ ‘Yes, Sergeant Major,’ I replied, somewhat overawed by the whole occasion. Pat continued, ‘We have a drink here which is definitely non-alcoholic – it’s called cherry brandy.’ A tankard was filled with red liquid and handed to me. At first it was quite sweet and enjoyable but then I found it sickly and thick. I only just managed to get it down before bolting from the tent in the nick of time to get rid of the contents of my stomach. For the next two days I had a permanent hangover and have never touched the stuff since.
The good tidings that awaited Stirling at Kabrit were that Bill Fraser and four men, missing since the Yuletide attack on the ‘Marble Arch’ airfield, had been picked up by British troops. Second Lieutenant Fitzroy Maclean, an SAS new boy, was just settling into his tent when Fraser turned up at Kabrit:
As I was unpacking my kit, the flap of the tent was pulled back and a wild-looking figure with a beard looked in. ‘My tent,’ he said. It was the owner, Bill Fraser. He was not dead at all. Finding himself cut off, he had walked back across two-hundred-odd miles of desert to our lines, keeping himself alive by drinking rusty water from the radiators of derelict trucks. It showed what could be done.
Prevented from military service by his profession of diplomat, Maclean had obviated the ruling by getting himself elected to Parliament and thus out of the Foreign Office. (Churchill quipped that Maclean had ‘used the Mother of Parliaments as a public convenience’.) Maclean had been on his way to join the 2nd Camerons in the desert when a chance meeting with the persuasive David Stirling in Cairo resulted in him transferring to the SAS. For all Stirling’s promotion of meritocracy in the SAS, he was always most comfortable in recruiting officers from his own set. Maclean and Stirling’s brother, Peter, the Secretary at the British Embassy in Cairo, were old friends. Another acquaintance brought into the SAS by Stirling was the Prime Minister’s son, Captain Randolph Churchill, 4 Hussars. Pinguescent and overbearing, Churchill was not standard SAS material, but, as Stirling knew, Randolph wrote to his father daily. In the Machiavellian world of Army politics, with its shifting loyalties and competing empires, Stirling understood the importance of gaining, even indirectly, the Prime Minister’s ear.
Maclean and Churchill both accompanied Stirling on the raid against Benghazi on 21 May 1942. The intention was to penetrate the harbour, where the team – which also included Cooper, Rose and Lieutenant Gordon Alston – would lay limpet mines on Axis ships. An earlier SAS venture against Benghazi had come to grief when the folbot collapsible canoe proved impossible to fit together; for this operation, Stirling had secured inflatable recce craft from the Royal Engineers.
Escorted by an LRDG patrol, the SAS team set off for Benghazi in the ‘Blitz Buggy’. This was a Ford V8 utility vehicle Stirling had poached in Cairo and had then modified by removing the roof and windows and installed a water condenser, an extra-large fuel tank and a sun compass. It also had a single Vickers K machine gun at the front and twin Vickers at the rear. The ‘Blitz Buggy’ was painted in olive grey to look like a German staff car. Alas, on the long run into Benghazi the Blitz Buggy developed a distinctly attention-seeking fault. Maclean recalled:
Once we had left the desert and were on the smooth tarmac road, we noticed that the car was making an odd noise. It was more than a squeak; it was a high-pitched screech with two notes in it. Evidently one of the many jolts which they had received had damaged the track rods. Now the wheels were out of alignment and this was the result.
We laid down on our backs in the road and tinkered. It was no use. When we got back into the car and drove off again, the screech was louder than ever. We could hardly have made more noise if we had been in a fire engine with its bell clanging. It was awkward, but there was nothing we could do about it now. Fortunately, it did not seem to affect the speed of the car.
Soon we were passing the high wire fence round the Regina aerodrome. We were not far from Benghazi now. We were going at a good speed and expected to be there in five or ten minutes. I hoped that the Intelligence Branch were right in thinking there was no road block. It was cold in the open car. Feeling in my greatcoat pocket I found a bar of milk chocolate that had been forgotten there. I unwrapped it and ate it. It tasted good.
Then, suddenly, we turned a corner and I saw something that made me sit up and concentrate. A hundred yards away, straight ahead of us, a red light was showing right in the middle of the road.
David slammed on the brakes and we slithered to a standstill. There was a heavy bar of wood across the road with a red lantern hanging from the middle of it. On my side of the road stood a sentry who had me covered with his Tommy gun. He was an Italian. I bent down and picked up a heavy spanner from the floor of the car. Then I beckoned to the sentry to come nearer, waving some papers at him with my free hand as if I wanted to show them to him. If only he would come near enough I could knock him on the head and we could drive on.
He did not move but kept me covered with his Tommy gun. Then I saw that beyond him in the shadows were two or three more Italians with Tommy guns and what looked like a guardroom or a machine-gun post. Unless we could bluff our way through there would be nothing for it but to shoot it out, which was the last thing we wanted at this stage of the expedition.
There was a pause and then the sentry asked who we were. ‘Staff officers,’ I told him, and added peremptorily, ‘in a hurry.’ I had not spoken a word of Italian for three years and I hoped devoutly that my accent sounded convincing. Also that he would not notice in the dark that we were all wearing British uniforms.
He did not reply immediately. It looked as though his suspicions were aroused. In the car behind me I heard a click, as the safety catch of a Tommy gun slid back. Someone had decided not to take any chances.
Then, just as I had made my mind up that there was going to be trouble, the sentry pointed at our headlights. ‘You ought to get those dimmed,’ he said, saluting sloppily, opened the gate and stood aside to let us pass. Screeching loudly, we drove on towards Benghazi.
Soon we were on the outskirts of the town.
Coming towards us were the headlights of another car. It passed us. Then, looking back over our shoulders, we saw that it had stopped and turned back after us. This looked suspicious. David slowed down to let it pass. The car slowed down too. He accelerated; the car accelerated. Then he decided to shake it off. He put his foot down on the accelerator, and, screeching louder than ever, we drove into Benghazi at a good eighty miles an hour with the other car after us.
Once in the town, we turned the first corner we came to and, switching off our headlights, stopped to listen. The other car shot past and went roaring off into the darkness. For the moment our immediate troubles were over.
But only for a moment. As we sat listening a rocket sailed up into the sky, then another, then another. Then all the air-raid sirens in Benghazi started to wail. We had arranged with the RAF before we started that they should leave Benghazi alone that night; so this could not be an air-raid warning. It looked very much as though the alert was being given in our honour …
Clearly the battle wagon, with its distinctive screech, was no longer an asset now that the alarm had been given. We decided to get rid of it at once and take a chance escaping on foot. Planting a detonator timed to go off in thirty minutes amongst the explosives in the back, we started off in single file through the darkness.
We were in the Arab quarter of town, which had suffered most heavily from the RAF raids. Every other house was in ruins and, threading our way over the rubble through one bombed-out building after another, we had soon put several blocks between ourselves and the place where we had left the car to explode. Once or twice we stopped to listen. We could hear people walking along the adjacent streets, but no one seemed to be following us.
Then, passing through a breach in a wall, we emerged unexpectedly in a narrow side street, to find ourselves face to face with an Italian Carabiniere.
There was no avoiding him and it seemed better to take the initiative and accost him before he accosted us. The rockets and sirens provided a ready-made subject for conversation. ‘What,’ I asked, ‘is all this noise about?’ ‘Oh, just another of those damned English air raids,’ he said gloomily. ‘Might it be,’ I inquired anxiously, ‘that enemy ground forces are raiding the town and that they are the cause of the alert?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s no need to be nervous about that, not with the English almost back on the Egyptian frontier.’
I thanked him for his reassuring remarks and wished him good night. Although we had been standing under a street light, he did not seem to have noticed that I was in British uniform.
This encounter put a different complexion on the situation. We seemed to have been unduly pessimistic. We might have a go at the harbour yet. And save ourselves a long walk back to the Jebel.
We hurried back to the car. Our watches showed that about twenty-five minutes had elapsed since we had set off the time pencil. If it was an accurate one, there should still be five minutes to go before it detonated and blew up the car … Nervously, we extricated it from the back of the car and threw it over the nearest wall. A minute or two later we heard it go off with a sharp crack. We had not been a moment too soon.
The next thing was to make our way to the harbour, which was about a mile off. The screech made it inadvisable to take the car. Accordingly we left Randolph and Corporal Rose to find somewhere to hide it, while David, Corporal Cooper and myself, with Alston as guide, started off for the harbour, armed with Tommy guns and carrying one of the boats and a selection of explosives in a kitbag. Soon we had left the dark alleyways of the Arab quarter behind us and were in the European part of the town. High white buildings loomed up round us, and our footsteps echoed noisily in the broad paved streets. Then, just as we were coming to the barbed-wire fence which surrounded the harbour, I caught sight of a sentry.
Laden as we were, we made a suspicious-looking party, and once again I thought it better to try to set his suspicions at rest by accosting him, rather than attempting to slink on unnoticed. ‘We have,’ I said, thinking quickly, ‘just met with a motor accident. All this is our luggage. Can you direct us to a hotel where we can spend the night?’
The sentry listened politely. Then he said he was afraid that all the hotels had been put out of action by the accursed English bombing, but perhaps, if we went on trying, we would find somewhere to sleep. He seemed well disposed and was an apparently unobservant man. We wished him good night and trudged off.
As soon as we were out of sight, we started to look for a place to get through the wire. Eventually we found one and dragged the boat and explosives through it. Then, dodging between cranes and railway trucks, we made our way down to the water’s edge. Looking round at the dim outlines of the jetties and buildings, I realized with a momentary feeling of satisfaction that we were on the identical strip of shingle which we had picked on as a likely starting point on the wooden model at Alexandria. So far, so good.
David, who possesses the gift of moving slowly and invisibly by night, now set off on a tour of the harbour with Alston, leaving Cooper and myself to inflate the boat. Crouching under a low sea wall, we unpacked the kitbag and set to work with the bellows. There was no moon, but brilliant starlight. The smooth, shining surface of the harbour was like a sheet of quicksilver, and the black hulls of the ships seemed no more than a stone’s throw away. They would make good targets, if only we could reach them unobserved. At any rate, we should not have far to paddle, though I could have wished for a better background than this smooth expanse of water. Diligently we plugged away at the bellows, which squeaked louder than I liked, and seemed to be making little or no impression on the boat. Several minutes passed. The boat was still as flat as a pancake. We verified the connection and went on pumping.
Then suddenly we were hailed from one of the ships. It was a sentry. ‘Chi va la?’ he challenged. ‘Militari!’ I shouted back. There was a pause and we resumed pumping. But still the sentry was suspicious. ‘What are you up to over there?’ he inquired. ‘Nothing to do with you,’ I answered, with a show of assurance which I was far from feeling. After that there was silence.
Meanwhile, the boat remained flat. There could only be one explanation: somehow, since we had inspected it in the wadi that morning, it had got punctured. There was nothing for it but to go and fetch another. It was fortunate we had two. Hiding the first boat as best we could under the shadow of the wall, we crossed the docks, slipping unseen through the hole in the wire, and walked back through the silent streets to where we had left the car. There we found Randolph and Rose in fine fettle, trying with the utmost unconcern to maneuver the car through a hole in the wall of a bombed-out house. Occasionally passers-by, Arabs for the most part, gaped at them with undisguised interest and admiration.
Wishing them luck, we pulled the second boat out of the car and started back to the harbour. Once again we got safely through the wire and down to the water’s edge, but only to find that the second boat, like the first, was uninflatable. It was heart-rending. Meanwhile, there was no sign of David. We decided to go and look for him.
As we reached the hole in the wire we saw, to our disgust, someone standing on the other side of it. I was just thinking what to say in Italian, when the unknown figure spoke to me in English. It was David, who had been down to the water to look for us and had been as alarmed at not finding us as we had been at not finding him.
There followed a hurried council of war. All this tramping backwards and forwards had taken time and our watches showed that we had only another half-hour’s darkness. Already the sky was beginning to lighten. We debated whether or not to plant our explosives haphazardly in the railway trucks with which the quays were crowded, but decided that, as targets, they were not important enough to justify us in betraying our presence in the harbour and thus prejudicing the success of an eventual large-scale raid. If we were to blow them up, the alarm would be given. We should probably be able to get away in the confusion, but another time we should stand a much poorer chance of raiding the harbour unnoticed. Our present expedition must thus be regarded as reconnaissance.
Stirling’s disappointed party were not out of the harbour yet, though. After an altercation with a Somali sentry, the SAS team collected their equipment and were making for the hole in the perimeter wire when two Italian sentries fell in behind them. Realizing that massive bluffing was now the only option, Maclean led the party to the main gate, where with ‘as pompous a manner as my ten days’ beard and shabby appearance allowed,’ he demanded to speak to the guard commander. A sleepy sergeant, pulling on his trousers, appeared. Maclean upbraided the sergeant for not keeping a proper guard. What if he had been leading a band of British saboteurs? Maclean demanded. The guard commander tittered at such an improbability.
With a final warning to the sergeant to improve his security, Maclean dismissed him and they briskly walked out through the main gate. After lying up in a deserted house for the day, Stirling gave the order to leave Benghazi and rendezvous with the LRDG.
On the way out of Benghazi a notion to bomb two motor torpedo boats had to be abandoned due to the watchfulness of enemy guards. All that could be said for the Benghazi raid was that it provided useful reconnaissance and taught the SAS a valuable lesson in the virtue of bluffing. In the words of Corporal Johnny Cooper: ‘If you think of something the enemy would consider an impossible stupidity, and carry it out with determination, you can get away with it by sheer blatant cheek.’
Otherwise, the ill star over the Benghazi mission continued to dog us. On reaching their own lines, Stirling struck a truck on the road to Cairo and rolled the ‘Blitz Buggy’. Arthur Merton, the Daily Telegraph journalist who had hitched a ride, was killed, Maclean suffered a fractured skull and was hors de combat for three months, Rose broke an arm, and Churchill damaged his spine so severely that he had to be invalided to Britain. Stirling himself escaped with a broken wrist, which prevented him from getting behind the wheel for a time. As many muttered silently, this was no bad thing, as Stirling’s driving was atrocious.
Stirling had little time to nurse his injury, even if he had wanted to. Aside from the constant struggle with Middle East Headquarters to preserve, let alone expand, L Detachment, Stirling threw himself into the planning of another raid – one which tested the soundness of his strategic vision. This raid was intended to assist in the battle of Malta. Perched in the middle of the Mediterranean, British-controlled Malta posed a mortal threat to Rommel’s line of supply back to Italy. Consequently, the Axis was trying to bomb and blockade the island into submission. Announcing that the loss of Malta would be ‘a disaster of the first magnitude to the British Empire, and probably fatal in the long run to the defence of the Nile Valley‚’ Churchill decreed that two supply convoys must get through in the June dark-phase. Since these convoys would almost certainly be attacked by Axis aircraft operating from Cyrenaica and Crete, Stirling proposed that L Detachment would mount a synchronized attack on Axis aerodromes in these locations on 13 and 14 June. Fortunately for L Detachment, its ranks had been modestly enlarged by the annexation of the Special Interrogation Group. This had been formed by Captain Buck and consisted of German-speaking Jews and a couple of Afrika Korps deserters, all of whom were prepared to masquerade in German uniform, knowing all too well their fate if caught.
The various L Detachment teams who were to carry out the raids in North Africa gathered at Siwa, before being escorted to within striking distance of their targets by the LRDG. Stirling, accompanied by his familiars, Cooper and Seekings, headed for Benina aerodrome. For once, Stirling had good hunting. Johnny Cooper later wrote:
We were about a thousand feet above the airfield and were able to look down on the coastal plain towards Benghazi. We lay up during the day in a patch of scrub and bushes, making our plans and checking compass bearings for the night approach. David told us that he had laid on an RAF raid on Benghazi that night to act as a diversion, and that this would determine the time of our attack. At last light the three of us, with David in the lead, started to descend the escarpment. This was quite difficult as our way was criss-crossed by numerous small wadis. Slithering and stumbling over the rocks, grabbing hold where we could in order not to break our necks or legs, we managed to complete this section before total darkness fell. We got on to the airfield without difficulty and simply walked out into the middle. Dead on time, the RAF arrived over the town and started their bombing runs, while we sat there in the dark. As we were a long way from the main buildings we were able to talk quite freely about all sorts of subjects. David gave us a long lecture on deer stalking, including methods of getting into position to stalk, the problems of wind and the necessity for camouflage and stealthy movement. Absorbed in his Highland exploits we could forget the job in hand and time passed very quickly.
Glancing at his watch, David brought the lecture to a close. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘squeeze the time pencils. We’re ready to go.’ We each had twenty bombs and the whole operation only took a few minutes. We crept forward for about five hundred yards when we found ourselves in the middle of a dug-in dump of aviation fuel which was about six feet deep and extended over quite a large area. We left two bombs there so that we would have illumination later, then moved on. Reg suddenly grabbed David by the arm. We all heard the heavy tread of a sentry on the tarmacadam perimeter track between the hangars and the office block. He was ambling along quite nonchalantly and his hobnailed boots gave us plenty of warning. We crouched down and waited until he had passed the hangars and then crept up to the closed doors. Reg and I managed to prise them open rather noisily, but no alarm was given. Leaving Reg outside with his Tommy gun, David and I went inside. As our eyes grew accustomed to the darkness we saw that the hangar was full of German aircraft. Motioning me to go to the right, David set off to the left, and we busily placed our bombs on the Stukas and Messerschmitts that were in there for repair.
I came across a Me110, a large twin-engined fighter-bomber, and had to stand on tiptoe to try to place my bomb on the wing. But David, who was so much taller than I, stole up from behind. ‘All right, Cooper, this one’s mine. You go into the far corner and fix that JU52.’ I reluctantly withdrew my bomb and went over to do justice to the Junkers. We then continued to the second hangar and dealt with more aircraft while Reg discovered a mass of spare aero engines and highly technical-looking equipment. All this accounted for our full stock of sixty bombs. As each weighed nearly two pounds, fifteen were all that could be carried easily, in addition to personal weapons and other kit. Further down the track between the hangars we came across a small guard house and we observed that occasionally the door opened as the sentries were changed. David said that he would give them something to remember us by, and with Reg and myself covering him, he kicked open the door. We saw that the room was crowded with Germans, many of whom were asleep. David calmly bowled a grenade along the floor, saying ‘Share this among you.’ He slammed the door and jumped clear. The delay was only four seconds and the explosion shattered the guard house while we rapidly made our escape behind the hangars. We never knew what casualties we had caused, but they must have been considerable in such a confined space.
While still behind the last hangar we heard our first bomb go off, to be followed in rapid succession by all the rest. Although all the time pencils had been activated at the same time, there was always a slight difference due to differing acid strengths. Almost deafened by the noise, we struggled through a gap in the wire, crossed the main road and scrambled up the escarpment.
Climbing up the escarpment on the edge of the Jebel, Stirling called a halt; he was suffering one of his frequent migraine attacks. Eventually Cooper and Seekings led Stirling, staggering and half blind, into a concealed position in the scrub, where they watched ‘the fantastic fireworks display’. Cooper thought it difficult to believe that such destruction could be wrought by just three men and the contents of their knapsacks.
At the rendezvous, Stirling fortified himself with rum in his tea. He was elated that he had finally emulated Paddy Mayne. Two days later, Mayne himself arrived at the rendezvous; for once Mars had not smiled on the Ulsterman, and his attack on Berka Satellite field had failed to destroy a single aircraft. Mayne’s pride took another buffeting with the news that Lieutenant Zirnheld and a team of French SAS had knocked out eleven aircraft at Berka Main aerodrome. Unable to resist pouring salt into the wound of Mayne’s cut ego, Stirling foolhardily proposed driving back to Benina to view the damage, and perhaps do some drive-along shootings at the same time. Jollying along the coastal road in a Chevrolet truck borrowed from the LRDG, they came across a road block. Although they talked their way through the road-block, thanks to Karl Kahane, one of Buck’s SIG who was aboard, the suspicious Italian sentries raised the alarm. Further along the road, the SAS men were intercepted by Italian troops waving rifles. Mayne put his foot down, and Seekings dispersed the enemy with a burst of Vickers fire. Then, after placing bombs on enemy trucks at a roadside filling station, Stirling decided to high-tail it back to the rendezvous with the LRDG by cutting across the coastal plain. Nearing the top of the escarpment, Bob Lilley yelled for everyone to jump out. He had smelled burning and realized that one of the time pencils in the bombs had activated. Mere seconds after they scrambled out, the truck blew up. Bruised and subdued, they set off for the rendezvous on foot, Stirling wondering how he was going to explain the loss of the Chevrolet to the LRDG.
The other SAS raids had met with mixed fortune. Although one French SAS group had succeeded in destroying the ammunition dumps at Barce, the party sent to attack Derna had been betrayed by one of Captain Buck’s Afrika Korps prisoners and almost all the party were captured. The SAS raid on the Cretan airfields was in the charge of George Jellicoe and Captain Georges Bergé. Jellicoe takes up the story.
About three weeks before the German offensive which led to the disorderly retreat to Alamein, I was evacuated to the CCS at Tobruk and from there to the General Hospital Alexandria. We had a really beautiful nurse who was only 24 years old, she nearly became the Duchess of Wellington, but she married really well. Then David Stirling asked me to join him. I went to Beirut on sick leave and got malaria. Then I got sent to an Australian Hospital with male nurses, no beautiful nurses. I don’t think I’ve ever got out of a hospital quicker. I then joined L Detachment of the SAS.
Stirling required me as his 2ic, to try to get the organization and administration better. Also I spoke French, and Stirling had just got a French detachment of Free French under a marvellous commander, Georges Bergé. Very soon I found myself on operations. Much more fun than administration.
My first op with Stirling was June 1942 on German airfields on Crete and North Africa. There were about five attacks on airfields in North Africa in which the French were involved as well as the rest of the SAS. These were to coincide with the passage of two convoys to Malta, which was extremely hard pressed. One convoy from the east and one from the west. David asked me to go with Georges Bergé and three of his men, and a Greek officer, to attack one of the airfields on Crete at Heraklion.
We took passage in a Greek submarine, the Triton, a bit long in the tooth. I wouldn’t recommend a voyage in an old French-built Greek submarine. The submarine surfaced at night, we had two rubber boats and paddled in. There was no one on the beach. After landing, two of us swam out with the rubber boats, filled them with shingle and deflated them so they sank and there was no trace of them. Then we had aimed to get into position from where we could observe the airfield that night, but we were further away than we planned because of the wind, which had resulted in our being launched from the submarine further out than expected. The going was very rough and we had far more equipment than we could carry. So we disembarrassed ourselves of some of it. We lay up that day, but not where we could see the airfield. We tried to get in that night, but not having observed it before, we ran into a German patrol, who fired on us. So surprise was lost. So we moved to a position from which we could observe the airfield properly. We did this the next day, and moved to a place where we thought we could get through. The wire round this airfield was pretty deep, about twenty feet. As we were cutting our way through, we were challenged by a German patrol. I didn’t know what to do. If we had fired all surprise would have been lost. But the French Sergeant was inspired. He lay on his back and started to snore. The patrol moved on. We later learned from a captured document that they had taken us for drunken Cretan peasants. Then two Blenheims [bombers] came over to bomb the airfield. It had been arranged that they would bomb it if we hadn’t got on to it the first night. That also helped us, and in the resulting confusion, we cut ourselves through and placed our charges. We destroyed a Feisler Storch and about 23 JU 88s. We marched out in what we thought was good German formation. We had the pleasure of hearing the explosions going up as we moved off.
It was less pleasant in the morning when we were lying up not having navigated very well. We were quickly discovered by Cretans, who told us that about 80 hostages had been shot as a reprisal, including the Greek governor of Crete. We later learned that when Paddy Leigh Fermor captured the German General Kreipe in Crete he was at pains to leave messages that this had been carried out by the British. We had a long walk back across the island. It took us three nights. That went fine. We kept ourselves to ourselves. We crossed the Masara Plain east of Tymbaki. As usual a Cretan found us. Georges Bergé was suspicious of him. But our Greek guide said he was okay. Shortly after that Georges asked me to go off with Petrakis our guide to meet the agent where we would re-embark. So I went off with Petrakis and made the contact. Petrakis’s feet had given out, so I returned alone by night to the valley where I thought I had left my French friends and could not find them. After a great deal of searching and by daylight I found the right place. I was immediately suspicious, because some of their belongings were neatly laid out. I thought this is not how my French friends behave, there is something wrong. At that moment three boys ran up shouting, and I gathered something had gone wrong. What had happened was that by sheer misfortune we had met one of the few quislings in Crete. He had sent one of his boys running into Timbaki to tell the Germans that there were British troops there.
As Bergé was getting ready to move, he found himself surrounded by two companies of Germans. They tried to shoot their way out. One Frenchman was killed, one wounded and Bergé decided to surrender. Georges finished up in Colditz with David Stirling. Georges Bergé was a great loss. I was evacuated three nights later, and joined up with two other parties, SBS. They had not been so lucky. One airfield, Timbaki, had no aircraft on it, one by Maleme was so heavily defended that they couldn’t get on to it. We were taken off from the south coast by boat commanded by a marvellous man called John Campbell RNVR. As we went out in a rubber boat, another boat came in and we were hailed, and a voice said, ‘I am Paddy Leigh Fermor, who are you?’ I shouted back, ‘I am George Jellicoe. Good luck to you.’ That’s the first time I have ever met him. We got back to Mersa Matruh one day before the Germans took Mersa Matruh [28 June 1942].
Following the June raids on the airfields, the SAS underwent a change in its raiding style. Essentially, the SAS’s modus operandi had been – despite its insistence on parachute training – to hitch a ride on moonless nights with the LRDG and attack airfields, before scuttling back to base. With Rommel’s dramatic offensive during May and June 1942, which rolled up the 8th Army to the outskirts of El Alamein, a new and tempting target presented itself: the Afrika Korps’ communication lines, which were at their all-time longest. In order to wreak as much havoc as possible on these overextended lines of communication as well as the old target of airfields, Stirling determined that the whole of the SAS – some 100 men – should set up a temporary base in the forward area, from which they could raid when they wished, nightly if possible. It followed that the SAS needed its own transport. Employing his customary silver tongue and light fingers, Stirling secured twenty three-ton Ford trucks and fifteen American ‘Willy’s Bantams’, as jeeps were initially known. Stirling had each of them fitted with a pair of Vickers K guns, fore and aft, the suspension was strengthened and an extra fuel tank added. He also secured the services of a very human attribute, Corporal Mike Sadler, the LRDG’s master navigator. Sadler’s old unit would provide an escort to the forward base, as well as wireless communications.
On 3 July an SAS convoy of thirty-five vehicles left Kabrit, and days later slipped unnoticed through the German lines to rendezvous with Lieutenant Timpson of the LRDG north of Qattara. Timpson penned a memorable portrait of his meeting with the SAS band:
In the afternoon a great cloud of dust could be seen approaching from the east. The country here is full of escarpments and clefts, and one could see the dust and hear the sound of vehicles long before they hove [sic] into view. Robin [Gurdon, LRDG] was in the lead with his patrol. We directed them to a hideout next to our own. Then came truck after truck of SAS, first swarms of jeeps, then three-tonners, and David in his famous staff car, known as his ‘blitz-wagon’, Corporal Cooper, his inseparable gunner, beside him and Corporal Seekings behind. Mayne, Fraser, Jellicoe, Mather and Scratchley were all there; Rawnsley was wearing a virgin-blue veil and azure pyjamas. Here was the counterpart of Glubb’s Arab Legion in the west. Trucks raced to and fro churning up the powdery ground, until most of them came to roost after a while in a hollow half a mile away which we had recommended to them. As aircraft had been flying about we did not quite approve of this crowded activity, yet they had gone through the Alamein Line undetected – an ME 110 which now flew over took no notice – and the reckless cheerfulness of our companions was at least stimulating.
Having to rely chiefly on LRDG wireless communications – and on our navigators – David kept our operators busy sending and receiving messages for the whole party. We had a conference that evening and again the next morning, in which he revealed his plans and gave his orders.
Stirling’s plan was for six raids to take place on the next night, which would support the 8th Army’s counter-offensive. Two patrols would head for Sidi Barrani and El Daba, while four patrols would attack airfields in the Bagush-Fuka area.
The Bagush raid, led by Stirling and Mayne, was conspicuously successful and led to the birth of a new attacking technique. After planting charges on forty aircraft, Mayne was furious when only twenty-two explosions lit up the skyline. The dissatisfaction was caused by damp primers. Waiting nearby at a roadside ambush, Stirling hit upon a solution to the failed cull. They would all drive on to the airfield in their vehicles – a truck, the Blitz Buggy and a jeep – and shoot up the remaining aircraft with the Vickers machine guns. As with Stirling’s best ideas, it combined speed, audacity and simplicity in equal measure. Five minutes later, a further twelve aircraft were destroyed. The only SAS casualty was the Blitz Buggy, destroyed by an Italian CR42 aircraft when the party was on its way back to the rendezvous.
Impressed by the reliability and manoeuvrability of the jeeps, Stirling wired the deputy director of operations from his desert base on 10 July:
Experience in present operations shows potentialities of twin-mounted Bantams at night to be so tremendous to justify immediate allocation of minimum fifty Bantams to L, repeat L, Detachment for modification to be effected immediately on my return. Fear owing to miscarriage of plan, only forty aircraft and some transport destroyed to date.
The ‘miscarriage’ Stirling referred to was the almost across-the-board failure of the other parties, frustrated by poor maps, imperfect intelligence and heightened perimeter security at Luftwaffe airfields. Nevertheless, forty aircraft was, Stirling’s modesty notwithstanding, a decent ‘bag’, and took the SAS’s total so far to 180 enemy aircraft destroyed. Perhaps the greatest proof of Stirling’s successes by mid-1942 was that the Germans garlanded him with the accolade ‘the Phantom Major’; he even became an item in Rommel’s diaries, where Stirling’s exploits were noted as having ‘caused considerable havoc and seriously disquieted the Italians.’
Stirling’s new method of drive-by shootings would also seriously disquiet the Germans. Amassing no less than eighteen jeeps, Stirling set off for Landing Ground 126 at Sidi Haneish, with Sadler’s navigation getting them all to within a mile of the target in the moonlight of the evening of 26 July. Sergeant Johnny Cooper recalled:
I walked quietly over to the two column commanders and gave them David’s orders, which were to form into their lines as we moved off. The engines roared and we drove on to the perfect surface of the airfield. David took a line straight down the runway with aircraft parked on either side. The blasting began.
It was not long before the whole aerodrome was ablaze. The ground defences had obviously been alerted but they had difficulty as they were using the low-firing Breda, an Italian 15mm machine gun. With the obstruction of so many parked aircraft they were only able to fire at us in fleeting bursts. At the top end of the runway we turned left and right in a complete wheel and came back down again on another track, still firing. We were almost back at the edge of the field when our jeep came to a shuddering halt. David shouted, ‘What the hell’s wrong?’ I leapt out and threw open the bonnet, only to discover that a 15mm shell had gone through the cylinder head and had then passed only inches away from David’s knee in the driving position. As if by magic, Captain Sandy Scratchley’s jeep came alongside and he shouted, ‘Come along, we’ll give you a lift.’ I jumped into the back, where Sandy’s rear gunner was slumped with a bullet through the head. I eased him out of the way and grabbed the machine gun as David piled into the front beside the forward gunner. We roared off the airfield in pursuit of the two columns that were rapidly disappearing in the smoke haze caused by the havoc we had unleashed. The scene of devastation was fantastic. Aircraft exploded all around us, and as we left the perimeter our own jeep went up in a ball of flame – the only vehicle casualty of the raid.
Flushed with success, Stirling planned another mass jeep operation, but his entire command was instead ordered back to Kabrit. Middle East Headquarters had determined that Stirling should be brought under tighter control. There was a new broom at the head of the 8th Army, Bernard Montgomery, and his maxim was ‘No more maneuver – fight a battle.’ The sort of battle Montgomery had in mind was a battle of attrition, and the entire Allied effort in North Africa was to be subordinated to it. Stirling’s part in Montgomery’s scheme was to interfere with Rommel’s supply depots and harbour facilities at Benghazi and Tobruk. More precisely, Stirling was to attack Benghazi harbour with forty lorries, forty jeeps and 220 men, while Lieutenant Colonel Haselden was to lead a combined SAS and Royal Marines force against Tobruk. Meanwhile, Jalo was to be taken for use as a future forward base for SAS operations.
Stirling loudly objected to his part in the operation. ‘The whole plan,’ he later wrote, ‘sinned against every principle on which the SAS was founded.’ The force was too large and unwieldy to achieve the necessary element of surprise; besides, many of the men involved had no special SAS training. But Stirling allowed himself to be ‘bribed’ into participation in the Benghazi attack, after Middle East Headquarters promised him that his reward would be an enlarged command afterwards.
The Benghazi raid proved to be the disaster Stirling feared. The approach in early September was across the Great Sand Sea. Fitzroy Maclean, now recovered from his injuries, was in the advance party, and described the frustrations of travelling across an expanse of deep, soft sand the size of Ireland:
Our crossing of the Sand Sea was something of an ordeal. With increasing frequency the leading truck would suddenly plunge and flounder and then come to an ominous standstill, sinking up to its axles in the soft white sand. Once you were stuck it was no good racing the engine. The wheels only spun round aimlessly and buried themselves deeper than ever. There was nothing for it but to dig yourself out with a spade and then, with the help of sand mats – long strips of canvas with wooden stiffening – back precariously on to the firm ground you had so unwisely left. Then the whole convoy would wait while someone went cautiously on ahead to prospect for a safe way out of our difficulties.
Or else we would find our way barred by a sand dune, or succession of sand dunes. These were best negotiated by rush tactics. If you could only keep moving you were less likely to stick. The jeeps, making full use of their extra range of gears, would lead the way, with the three-tonners thundering along after them like stampeding elephants. Very rarely we all got through safely. Generally someone hesitated halfway up and immediately went in up to the running-boards in sand. Then out came the spades, sand mats and towing ropes, and the whole dreary business of ‘un-sticking’ would start again.
But too much dash had its penalties. Many of the sand dunes fell away sharply on the far side, and if you arrived at the top at full speed you were likely to plunge headlong over the precipice on the far side before you could stop yourself, and end up with your truck upside down on top of you forty or fifty feet below.
The tracks we left gave a vivid picture of our progress. Sometimes, when the going was good, they ran straight and even like railway lines; at others, when things were going less well, they wavered and branched off; where disaster had overtaken us, they ended in a confused tangle of footprints, tire-marks and holes in the sand.
But ours were not the only tracks which scarred the face of the desert and, fortunately, from the air fresh tracks are not easily distinguishable from old ones. Otherwise it would not have been difficult for enemy aircraft to track us down from the air. Even so, a party as large as ours, trundling across the open desert in broad daylight and throwing up a great cloud of dust, could not hope to be as unobtrusive as a single patrol, and we knew that, once spotted, we should offer a splendid target. Above all, it was important that we should not attract the attention of the Italian garrison while passing Jalo, for they were known to be in wireless touch with Benghazi, and a message from them at this stage of the proceedings announcing our approach would have deprived us of any hope of success.
Accordingly we timed our journey so as to pass the Jalo gap at midday, when the heat haze made visibility poor. When the navigators reckoned we were abreast of the oasis, we halted and I climbed to the top of a little conical hill to have a look round. There was nothing to be seen except a few depressed-looking camels chewing at the almost non-existent scrub, and westwards on the horizon, some black specks, jumping up and down in the haze, which, by a stretch of imagination, might have been the palm trees of Jalo. On the top of my hill I found a chianti flask. I wished that it had been full. Then we had a hurried meal of tinned salmon and biscuits, washed down with half a mug of tepid water, and hurried on.
Now that we were nearing the coast, where we were more likely to encounter patrolling aircraft, we only moved by night, lying up by day and camouflaging the trucks. Once again we picked our way cautiously across the Trigh-el-Abd, keeping a sharp look out for thermos bombs.
But not sharp enough. As we were halfway across, I heard an explosion immediately behind me, and looking round, saw that the three-tonner which had been following in my tracks had had a wheel blown off by a thermos bomb, which my own jeep had gone over but had been too light to explode. Fortunately the height of the three-tonner from the ground had protected the occupants and no one was hurt. The three-tonner’s load was distributed among the other trucks and we continued on our way.
Two or three days later we reached the welcome cover of the Gebel. So far as we could tell, our convoy had completed its journey across 800 miles of open desert, to a destination 600 miles behind the enemy’s front line, without being spotted either from the air or from the ground. This was encouraging.
On the Jebel, Mayne and Maclean got in touch with Bob Melot, a Belgian cotton merchant who operated as a behind-the-lines spy for the British. Melot was not encouraging; the enemy had reinforced the Benghazi garrison and the date of the impending SAS attack, 14 September, was known even to the local bazaar. However, Middle East Headquarters was firm that the attack should proceed as planned. The attack went ahead – and turned into a military shambles. By the time the main SAS party was approaching Benghazi, the cover raid by the RAF was almost over. James Sherwood of the Special Boat Section, who had been seconded to the SAS for the raid, recalled:
We had a guide with us, some Arab who was supposed to know the way. He didn’t know where he was, neither did anyone else. We went down the escarpment with headlights full on – Stirling hoped to bluff his way, that nobody would be stupid enough to come down with their headlights on.
We came to a proper road. Ahead you could see a striped pole. David Stirling got out and walked up to this pole just to see what was going on. All the headlights beamed away behind him. He was a very brave bloke. He quickly found out that instead of Italians being there, the Germans were waiting for us. They knew all about it. They opened up with everything they’d got. The extraordinary thing was that they scored very few hits. Just as well because, sitting on our explosives, we would have disappeared in a big bang.
We were told to get out of it, every man for himself, in jeep and truck as best we could. There was a great deal of confusion, backing and filling of trucks trying to turn round. Shot and stuff was flying all over the place without anybody being hit in the petrol tanks except one jeep which went up in flames, adding to the already illuminated scene. We headed out of it, having achieved nothing at all. A complete fiasco, the whole operation.
At break of day we were all haring hell-for-leather across this big gravelly plain, trying to get to the Gebel area where there were ravines for concealment before the [enemy] planes got up to look for us. We weren’t in time. They got the fighters up, strafing and bombing. I can remember trucks with great clouds of dust driving faster than they’d ever driven in their lives before, all trying to reach cover before the worst happened. None of us were hit. Some of us would bale out of the trucks when we thought a plane was diving on us and run like hell. But the plane wasn’t diving on us, it was after another truck which it didn’t catch. The driver of our truck would slow up so we could catch him, and we all jumped aboard, and off again. Eventually we gained the shelter of the Gebel, the planes having turned presumably to rearm and come after us again.
The first sight that greeted us when we got to a particularly deep ravine was a group of SAS blokes with a fire going, cooking breakfast as though on a picnic. We didn’t stop there. It was a daft place to be. We’d two officers with us, and we went up the ravine as far as we could. For the whole of the day we lay up under camouflage netting. Nothing spotted us. The rest of the force had a fearful dusting about a mile or two west of us which went on all day, machine-gunning and bombing. How many were lost then I don’t know; very few at the encounter at the border post, but a lot altogether.
We lay up all day. We’d received a message from Stirling: ‘The operation all off. Head for Kufra as best you can.’
Kufra was some 500 miles away.
Malcolm Pleydell was L Detachment’s doctor, and he gave a vivid account of the carnage sustained in the Benghazi raid in a letter home:
I started off with a fractured femur, which I had to carry on with on the back of a truck, and I had to keep the injured soldiers well under with morphine. Then I had two men wounded through driving over a thermos bomb – one with extensive second-degree burns over chest, abdomen, arms and legs, and one who died quietly during the night. The other man with the amputation I gave two pints of plasma, and he lived. Not bad, amputating with an officer to help me and the dust blowing. We had to hurry up to catch up with the others, and driving behind the truck it was hell to watch the legs and one stump being flung up in the air and falling back each time the truck hit a bump, so in the end we had to tie the legs down with a rope. And the dust was thrown up and fell all over them so they quickly became yellow, and we had to stop now and then to bathe their faces and let them breathe. Later on I had a case of multiple wounds, though not too bad: one shot through the lung, for which there was little to do: one with a compound fracture of the humerus, radius and ulna, with the arm shattered in two places. I left the arm on. All the bad injuries had two pints of blood plasma and I waited until they were stronger before operating. As a last case I had a retention of urine due to the perineal urethra being shot away. I had to do a supra-pubic cystomy eventually, being unable to find the proximal end of the urethra. It was the devil. I was wondering if I would open the peritoneum or what. Again, I was alone and had two spacer wells, two scalpels and one forceps. With nobody retracting and no retractors it’s damned difficult to see what you are doing. I dare not risk any bleeding and I could hardly have reached the bleeding point and tied it off. I did muscle splitting with blunt dissection and got down to the bladder with no bleeding. When I got back to the others I found we had no room for stretcher cases as we had lost a good bit of our transport, so I had to leave them with an Italian orderly who had given himself up. I offered to stay but I knew it wasn’t really my job. It was a strange scene that night by the fitful light of the burning trucks, and I tossing a one-piastre piece and the two medical orderlies solemnly calling heads and tails. And so home again. I brought back two major wounded and all the minor cases. One was the chap with a shattered arm and the other with multiple wounds. They both made the long trek home ok. I should have like [sic] to have brought the man with the femur, but there was no room for a stretcher.
Reaching Kufra, a dismayed Stirling found that the raid on Tobruk had also failed. In one of the few after-action reports to have survived the SAS’s campaign in North Africa, Lieutenant Tom Langton, formerly of the Irish Guards and No. 8 Commando, wrote about the Tobruk attack:
The intention was to drive into Tobruk in three of the 3-ton lorries disguised as British prisoners-of-war, with a guard made up of the SIG party in German uniform (increased in number by Lt Macdonald, Lt Harrison and myself).
The trucks were to turn along the south side of the harbor and drive to the wadi near Marsa Umm Es Sclau. Here troops were to de-bus, and divide into two parties. Lt Col Haselden with the SIG, RA detachments, Lt Taylor’s section, Lt Sillito’s section and Lt Macdonald’s section were to take the small house and gun positions on the west side of the bay. The remainder of the squadron, under Major Campbell was to take the positions on the east side. Success signals were to be fired by each party on completion of task, and then Major Campbell’s party was to proceed two miles east to find out if there were any guns there and to deal with them. Unless it proved to be extremely simple for Lt Col Haselden’s party to push on eastwards and take the AA positions there, they were to hold until the Coy of A & S Highlanders and 1 Platoon RNF were landed from MTBs [Motor Torpedo Boats] in the bay.
I was responsible for ‘signalling in’ the MTBs and meeting the party when they came ashore. The signalling was to take the form of three ‘Ts’ flashed every two minutes in red from a point on the west shore of the bay and also from a point just outside the bay to the east.
On the journey up, Major Campbell developed dysentery badly, and, although he insisted on seeing the job through, Lt Col Haselden told me to accompany him as Second-in-Command as far as the first objective. My own plan was to station two of the RE [Royal Engineers] party at the eastern signalling point, with a torch and instructions as to how to signal in case I couldn’t get back to them. I was then going back to the small house on the west side (which was to be Col Haselden’s HQ) to report and to collect F/O Scott and his two Aldis lamps. I would substitute F/O Scott for the two REs and return myself to signal from the western point. Signalling was not due to start until 0130 hours, so there should have been plenty of time.
The rest of the plan does not affect the remainder of the report.
Entrance
Owing to a slight miscalculation the party was late getting on to the El Adem road and it was dark soon after we had turned on to the main road towards Tobruk. However, the entrance went smoothly and no check posts were encountered. Further delay was caused by the fact that, apparently considerable alterations (wire fences, etc.) had been made where the track along the southern bank of the harbour joined the main road. We were still some way off our debussing point when the bombing started.
After debussing, sorting stores, hiding German uniforms, etc, the two parties set out.
Action
Immediately on leaving the trucks, Major Campbell’s party had to negotiate a small minefield. This was done by an RE party with a detector, and caused considerable delay and necessitated the party walking in a long single file. In the middle of this operation a rifle was fired from the other side of the wadi. This caused further delay. Eventually one section was sent forward (under Lt Roberts) to investigate and I asked permission to reconnoitre the sandy beach. I walked right across the beach without encountering anything, and directed Lt Roberts to take his party up on the high ground to get round the back of whoever had fired the rifle. I then went back to Major Campbell and guided one section across the beach, the rest following at intervals. Lt Roberts in the meanwhile engaged and put out of action a section of enemy who were manning a Spandau.
We had taken almost an hour to get across the wadi. The same procedure of advance was adopted up the wadi-side and on. I waited on top to guide Lt Roberts and the REs who were labouring under heavy burdens of explosives, etc., and it took some time to catch up with the rest, who I eventually found had struck eastwards away from the bay. Soon after that I met Lt Duffy who said that all the positions near the bay were empty and unused.
By this time the success signal from Lt Col Haselden’s party had been fired.
We proceeded to catch up to Major Campbell and soon afterwards came on a small wireless station which was put out of action with its personnel – mainly by Lt Roberts.
In climbing out of that wadi I discovered it was already 0130 hours. I urged Major Campbell to fire the success signal, which was done. I then returned alone and as fast as I could towards the bay. This journey was made more difficult by the fact that I had to skirt a small enemy camp in a wadi which we had missed on the way out. I found the eastern signalling point and was relieved to see that F/O Scott was signalling from the west side, although he was far too high up. The REs had disappeared by this time, and I presume that they returned to HQ on finding no guns to destroy. I had no watch and only an inadequate torch. I tried to time my signalling with F/O Scott’s.
After a short while I saw two MTBs come in. After that, however, no more appeared. My problem now was whether to stay signalling or to go to meet the landing troops and conduct them to HQ as I was supposed to be doing. I decided to try a compromise by wedging my torch in a rock and leaving it alight. I did this and started back but, before I had gone 200 yards I saw a light flashing out to sea and it appeared to be on an MTB proceeding away again. I rushed back to the torch and started to signal again. But nothing materialised. After another half hour I left signalling and started back towards the landing point. On the way back I found that my haversack and Tommy gun had been taken from the Sangar, where I had left them before climbing down to the rocks. I later ran into two enemy, one of whom I hit with my revolver.
On reaching the landing point I found the two MTBs unloading. Lt Macdonald appeared to be organizing the landing, so I took one man with me with a Tommy gun and returned at once to continue signalling. During all this time F/O Scott was still signalling from the west side.
By the time we got back to the eastern signalling point the searchlights were sweeping the entrance to the harbour and our own shore. However, I resumed signalling. Heavy fire was coming from the opposite shore of the harbour out to sea. Once the MTBs got caught in the searchlights and I could see their wake, and tracer bouncing off one of them. They were well to the east of us, however, and it was obvious that there wasn’t much chance of them getting in. One of the two MTBs slipped out past me during a slight lull, and appeared to get away safely. At ‘first light’ I decided to abandon signalling and I returned to the landing point. By the time I got there dawn was breaking and I saw one MTB apparently aground. Sounds of rifle and LMG [Light Machine Gun] fire was coming from just over the west ridge of the wadi, near where we had left the trucks. I hailed the MTB, but getting no answer, I walked around the bay and up the small wadi to the house which was Lt Col Haselden’s HQ. Rifle fire was coming down the wadi. I got to the house to find it deserted and I saw the heads of about a platoon of enemy lying covering the house from about 300 yards away. I walked back down the small wadi, and thinking I heard a shout aboard the MTB, I boarded her, but found no one. I filled my water bottle and took what food I could find. Lt Russell, Lt Sillito, Pte Hillman and Pte Watler then came aboard. Lt Russell opened up with the twin Lewis guns forward on troops on top of the hill. I went to the engines to see if there was any hope of getting them started, but not even Pte Watler – a mechanic – could help there. We then took all we could in the way of food and water and boarded one of the assault craft lying alongside. We paddled out into the bay but were forced to go ashore by being fired on from the rocks on the west side. We saw some of our own men dodging along the west side of the bay and there were large explosions coming from behind them. It was impossible to tell who they were, but I think they may have been the REs dealing with the guns on the point. We climbed through a minefield and into a wadi. Here we were joined by Sgt Evans. We made for the hills, having to hide frequently from low-flying aircraft. I looked back from the higher ground and saw what I now know to have been HMS Zulu with HMS Sikh in tow. The latter appeared to be burning and shells were bursting round. We were fired on heavily, going over a ridge, from the direction of Brighton, but got safely into a large wadi where we found about 15–20 others waiting. These included 2/Lt Macdonald and Lt Barlow, also those of the RNF who had been landed from the MTBs. We decided it was now useless to resist. No one knew what had become of Major Campbell’s party. It seemed clear that Col Haselden had been killed. We decided to take to the hills and make for Wadi Shagra north of Bardia, where we had been told we would be picked up five days later.
Escape
We did not stop long in the big wadi. Lts Sillito and Macdonald took their respective sections. I believe their intention was to make towards the coast further east and try to get taken off by the MTBs the same day. I have not heard of any of them since.
Lt Barlow, Lt Russell and myself went off up the wadi with eight men. We found a small wadi and lay up all that day among the bushes. At dusk we disposed of everything we did not require, divided what food we had into three and ourselves into three parties. We split up and made for the perimeter that night. Later in the night – after avoiding two enemy posts – I joined up again with Lt Barlow’s party. Soon after we met, we ‘bumped’ another enemy post and had to head hurriedly to the nearest wadi. When we regathered Lt Barlow was nowhere to be found, and I have not seen or heard of him since. After ‘bumping’ several more posts we eventually got through the perimeter wire and lay up the next day in a cave in a wadi.
We had two nights of dodging camps, etc., during part of which we walked on the road. We hid up every day in caves in the wadis. On the fifth night, just as we were desperate for food and water, we found the first Arab village, where we were taken in, fed and given water. Pte Hillman acted as interpreter. The Arabs knew all about the Tobruk raid. They also said they could not understand how the English managed to come all the way from Kufra.
Going from village to village, we eventually reached the wadi Am Reisa. There was a large Carabinieri post at the shore end of this wadi, the strength of which had recently been doubled, according to the Arabs. They also told us of boats cruising up and down at night – they said they thought they were British. One had landed a party one night and someone had shouted ‘Any British here?’
The Arabs then showed us to the wadi Kattara about five miles north of Bardia. Here we found an Indian soldier of the 3/18th Garwhal Rifles who had escaped three times from Tobruk and had been living there for two months.
We also found Pte Watler. His story is as follows
On leaving us on the night of the fourteenth, Lt Russell, Pte Watler and one member of the SIG got through the perimeter and walked ‘all out’ towards Bardia along the road. They arrived at Mersa Shagra one day late. That night they ran into the enemy post in wadi Am Reisa and were fired on. In making their getaway Pte Watler got left behind because of bad boots. Nothing further is known of the other two. The man with Lt Russell spoke only German.
We lived in the wadi Kattara for four weeks, being fed by the Arabs as best they could. We tried making fires by night to attract the attention of aircraft, but only got a stick of bombs extremely close. The only news or information we got was obtained from Italian or German soldiers via the Arabs who sold eggs, etc., on the road and engaged the soldiers in conversation. It was apparent that the enemy was very low in morale and very short of food. We had to take great care not to get caught because the Italians would undoubtedly have ‘wiped out’ the village. As it was, we saw no one during our four weeks there.
After three weeks, Sgt Evans unfortunately got dysentery and later we had to help him to the road by night and leave him to be picked up the next morning. The same happened a few days later to one of the Leslie twins and his brother went with him. The rains had come heavily and it was very cold and damp. I decided to move. The Indian stayed behind, and so the party consisted of Cpl Wilson, Pte Watler, Pte Hillman and myself. I was lucky to have a German compass and a small German map, though the latter was not much use being 1:5,000,000. We had some tins of bully-beef, some goat meat and bread and ten water-bottles. We started on 26 October.
Apart from getting fired on on the second night, our journey was uneventful. We did not see anyone from the day after we climbed through the frontier wire until we were picked up at Himeimat on Friday 18 November, with the exception of one convoy which looked very like an SAS patrol – near the Siwa-Mersa Matruh track on 5 November. We walked south of the Qattara depression for the last four days and thereby missed the ‘retreat’.
The Benghazi and Tobruk raids were the first major failures by the SAS since its maiden outing, a mere ten months before. Stirling arrived at Middle East Headquarters expecting censure but, ironically, found smiling faces and plaudits. He was even promoted to lieutenant colonel, while the SAS was to be expanded into a full regiment – an emphatic acknowledgement that Stirling’s style of guerrilla warfare was now an accepted part of the British military effort. (Almost certainly the hand of Winston Churchill was behind the SAS’s elevation to regimental status; not only had the Prime Minister received glowing reports of the SAS from Randolph, but he had twice dined with the persuasive, charismatic Stirling in Cairo.) In order to make up the SAS to regimental strength, Stirling went to see Montgomery with a view to recruiting officers and non-commissioned officers from the 8th Army.
Montgomery, never a fan of ‘mobs for the jobs’, flatly refused. He had a point: Montgomery needed his best men – the same men Stirling wanted – for his offensive beginning in just a fortnight. In the event, Stirling was left to pick the best men he could from the Base Depot, the Palestine–Iraq force, the disbanded 1 Special Service Regiment, the remnants of the Commandos and the Greek Sacred Regiment. For a while a shotgun marriage resulted in the Special Boat Section being part of 1 SAS, but by mutual agreement the SAS and SBS divorced the following year.
While Stirling busied himself with raising and training 1 SAS, he placed the regiment’s most seasoned men in a squadron under the command of Paddy Mayne, who was charged with establishing a base in the Great Sand Sea. From there Mayne and his A Squadron were to mount sorties against the coastal railway, with a view to frustrating the retreat of the Afrika Korps following Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein. In mid-November, Mayne’s A Squadron was joined by B Squadron, and together they attacked not just the railway but the coastal road along a front of several hundred miles. Mayne’s merry band of veterans proved conspicuously successful at sabotage, but most of B Squadron’s patrols (which suffered both from inexperience and the presence of unfriendly Arabs in the Bir Fascia area) were either killed or captured within days. Among those who escaped the Afrika Korps’ net were the veteran Reg Seekings and the newly recruited Wilfred Thesiger, later to earn an illustrious reputation as an explorer. Thesiger’s patrol, in the circumstances, did remarkably well:
Our target was the road to the west of Bouerat. We decided to lie up in daytime at El Fascia: there were bushes along the various wadis where we could camouflage our jeeps against air observation, and water in the cistern, but with no evidence that it was being used by others. We should be within striking distance of the road at night but far enough from it, we hoped, not to be stumbled on inadvertently.
Stirling was determined to have another go at the Germans before he went back to Egypt, so he and his driver, Sergeant Cooper, went with us on our first raid. We left the two signallers and their jeep at El Fascia and set off as it grew dark, separating when we reached the road, Stirling to shoot up a camp, while Alston and I waited for a convoy.
Shortly afterwards, with Alston driving, we saw the lights of a large convoy coming from the direction of Agheila. We waited until it was close, when I enfiladed it with a pair of our machine guns, emptying both drums into it. We then drove off down the road, blew up some telegraph poles, cut the wires and laid some mines.
Further on we came to a large tented camp where cars were driving about with their lights on. We switched on our own lights and motored into the camp, raked a line of tents and drove out on the far side. Again, no one fired at us, but almost as soon as we left the camp, one of our tires went flat. We stopped and tried to get the wheel off, but the nuts would not move. We hammered away, unable to make any impression on the nuts and very conscious of the proximity of the camp we had just shot up. Eventually we drove back to El Fascia on a flat tire. In the morning Cooper pointed out that we had been tightening instead of undoing the nuts. I had never changed a wheel before.
As it got dark Stirling set off with Cooper on his long journey back to Egypt, and Alston and I went back to the road, again leaving our signals’ jeep at El Fascia.
Each night we found more parked vehicles and more tents, but now less and less traffic on the road. On one occasion I saw a large tanker driving towards us, and at the same moment a Staff car coming from the opposite direction. I decided to take the tanker; as it blew up the Staff car skidded to a halt and its occupants scrambled for cover. During these nights we shot up camps over a wide area, including one which turned out later to be a Divisional Headquarters. We would drive into a camp and stop to select a target. We often heard men talking in their tents, and sometimes saw people moving about in the moonlight, but I had a comforting delusion that we were invisible, for we were never challenged or shot at. Once we drove up to a group of tents and found ourselves among a number of tanks; we were evidently in a tank repair workshop. When I tried to open fire on the tents the guns jammed. I changed the drums as quietly as possible, conscious even so of the rattle, but the guns still refused to fire, so we drove into the desert, put them right and found another target. One night we motored up to a canteen with a dozen trucks parked outside the large tent; inside men were talking, laughing and singing. I fired a long burst into the tent, and short bursts into the engines of the trucks as we drove off.
During these operations we must have killed and wounded many people, but as I never saw the casualties we inflicted my feelings remained impersonal. I did, however, begin to feel that our luck could not last much longer. It seemed inevitable that sooner or later a sentry would identify us and fire a burst into our car. Even if he missed Alston and myself the land mines in the car would probably go up.
Several times while lying up at El Fascia, we heard the sound of engines and suspected that patrols were hunting for us.
One morning Alston took the two signallers in our jeep to fetch water. Shortly after he had left I noticed a small reconnaissance plane flying towards the cistern; it circled and went off. A little later I heard the sound of several heavy vehicles coming along the wadi towards me. We had carefully hidden the wireless jeep under a camouflage net among some bushes. I took a blanket, went some distance away into the open, where there was no apparent cover, and lay down in a small hollow, covering myself with the blanket on which I scattered earth and bits of vegetation. Peeping out from under it, I saw two armored cars; I thought I heard others on the far side of the wadi.
The cars nosed about but failed to find the jeep. One of them passed within a couple of hundred yards of where I lay. I heard it stop; my head was under the blanket and I wondered if they had seen me and were about to open fire; then it went on. It seemed ages before they finally drove off. Soon after they had gone I heard several bursts of machine-gun fire. I felt certain they had either killed or captured the others, and that I was now on my own.
Thinking things over under my blanket, I decided the best thing would be to remain at El Fascia and hope the Eighth Army would eventually turn up; there was water in the cistern, food in the wireless jeep and some petrol, but I had no idea how to work the wireless. I felt that the Germans, having searched the place once, would probably not come back another day; meanwhile I stayed under the blanket in case they came back now. I had Doughty’s Arabia Deserta in my haversack but felt little inclination to read.
Some hours later I spotted Alston moving about cautiously among the bushes and startled him by calling from cover, ‘Hello, Gordon. I thought they’d got you.’
‘I thought they’d got you when I heard the firing. I just hoped they hadn’t found the wireless jeep. I came back to look for it. The plane came right over our heads. Luckily our jeep was in some bushes and they didn’t spot it. The armored cars never came very close.’
‘Well, they came damned close to me!’
Alston went off and fetched the jeep and the other two. Later that afternoon Lieutenant Martin and his driver, both of them Free French, turned up in their jeep. They had been with one of the patrols in B Squadron and had been surprised by the Germans, but had managed to escape. When they got near El Fascia they had again been chased and shot at by armoured cars. This accounted for the firing we had heard.
We now decided that after dark we would move to another wadi some distance from the well, and lie up there to await the arrival of the 8th Army. Our petrol was very low; we had not enough left to go on raiding the road. Martin was also short of petrol and decided to remain with us. In the late evening several armored cars arrived and laagered nearby. They must have heard us when we eventually motored off; it looked as if, having found our tracks, they intended to deny us the cistern, and go on searching for us.
Our new hiding place was in a delightful wadi full of trees and carpeted with green grass and flowers. Some Arabs turned up in the morning. Like all these tribal Arabs, they wore white blankets wrapped round their clothes. They were very friendly and I found their Arabic comparatively easy to understand. We made them tea and later they fetched us a goat and spent the night with us. They hated the Italians, who during the pacification of Libya had treated the inhabitants with incredible brutality. I was confident that as the Germans were helping the Italians these Arabs would not betray us. On Christmas Day, two days after we had left El Fascia, we again heard armored cars; they sounded fairly close but did not enter our wadi. I was certain that they would not be able to follow our tracks over the rocky ground we had crossed to get there.
Stirling had given El Fascia as the rendezvous for B Squadron, and we expected some of the other patrols to arrive shortly in our neighborhood. We had no idea that all the others had actually been killed or captured; but we were aware that our combined raids had brought night traffic more or less to a halt during the critical days of Montgomery’s offensive.
Rommel had been very concerned by these SAS raids on his communications. He wrote in his diary, later edited in English by B. H. Liddell Hart:
They succeeded again and again in shooting up supply lorries behind our lines, laying mines, cutting down telegraph poles and similar nefarious activities …
On 23 December we set off on a beautiful sunny morning to inspect the country south of our front. First we drove along the Via Balbia and then, with two Italian armored cars as escort, through the fantastically fissured wadi Zem-Zem towards El Fascia. Soon we began to find tracks of British vehicles, probably made by some of Stirling’s people who had been round here on the job of harassing our supply lines. The tracks were comparatively new and we kept a sharp look out to see if we could catch a ‘Tommy’. Near to El Fascia I suddenly spotted a lone vehicle. We gave chase but found its crew were Italian. Troops from my Kampfstaffel were also in the area. They had surprised some British commandos the day before and captured maps marked with British store dumps and strong points. Now they were combing the district, also hoping to stumble on a ‘Tommy’.
When I read this after the war I realized that Rommel himself must have been with the armored cars that I had seen searching for us at El Fascia.
Stirling arrived back from Cairo, and Alston, Martin and I joined him near our hideout, which was still some forty miles behind the German lines.
In what was destined to be the last phase of the SAS’s war in the Western Desert, the SAS were charged with four tasks, all of which were intended to aid and abet Montgomery’s offensive against Tripoli in January 1943. One party was to operate west of Tripoli to facilitate the 8th Army’s advance; another was to reconnoitre the defensive Mareth Line with a view to discovering a way around it; a third operation consisted of raiding the enemy’s supply lines between Gabes and Sfax; lastly, Colonel Stirling would lead a patrol as far north as northern Tunisia, where it would cut the Sousse railway line. Stirling also intended to link up with his brother, Bill, who had formed the 2nd SAS Regiment, which was advancing eastwards as part of the 1st Army, following the Torch landings in Algeria in November. The link-up with Bill Stirling had more than fraternal importance: David Stirling intended to build the SAS (which some wags now said stood for ‘Stirling and Stirling’) up to Brigade strength:
My plan was to bring in my brother Bill’s 2nd SAS Regiment, and to divide my own regiment, which had grown beyond the official establishment of a full regiment, into the nucleus of a third one. This would enable me to keep one regiment in each of the three main theatres – the eastern Mediterranean, the central Mediterranean–Italy, and the future Second Front. I felt it was vital to get intervention and support from a more important formation than Middle East Headquarters. The first step in this plan seemed to be to acquire the sympathy of the 1st Army’s top brass, and to consult my brother Bill, who had recently arrived on the 1st Army front, as to the state of the game at the War Office. I was conscious that the reputation of the SAS would be greatly enhanced if it could claim to be the first fighting unit to establish contact between 8th and 1st Armies.
David Stirling set out for northern Tunisia on 10 January. After successfully completing his reconnaissance of the Mareth flank, he sped towards Sousse. Rommel’s position was deteriorating, and haste in knocking out his communication lines seemed sensible. Instead of taking the slower, safer route south of Chott Djerid salt marsh, Stirling, with five jeeps and fourteen men, headed for the Gabes gap. Another SAS party, led by the Frenchman Captain Jordan, had already been through the gap. Accordingly, the Germans were on the alert. As Stirling’s convoy passed through the gap it was spotted by a Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft. The SAS patrol hid in a wadi near the Gabes-Gafsa road.
And it was here that a German paratroop battalion found them. Unaccountably, Stirling failed to post sentries. Cooper and Sadler, kicked awake by a German who then rushed off to get reinforcements, ran up the wadi to warn the rest. Shouting that it was every man for himself, Stirling, along with MacDermott, was trapped in a shallow cave. In the confusion, Cooper, Sadler and Freddie Taxis dived into a shallow depression covered by camel scrub and, by lying inert, marvellously managed to evade capture.
The seizing of Stirling was enough of an event for Field Marshal Rommel to write an entry in his diary:
During January, a number of our AA gunners succeeded in surprising a British column … in Tunisia and captured the commander of the 1st SAS Regiment, Lieut. Col. David Stirling. Insufficiently guarded, he managed to escape and made his way back to some Arabs, to whom he offered a reward if they would get him back to the British lines. But his bid must have been too small, for the Arabs, with their usual eye to business, offered him to us for eleven pounds of tea – a bargain which we soon clinched. Thus the British lost the very able and adaptable commander of the desert group which had caused us more damage than any other British unit of equal strength.
Rommel was being slightly loose in his use of the words ‘to us’; it was the Italians who recaptured Stirling, and highly delighted they were at their success compared to the butter-fingered clumsiness of the Germans. Eventually, Stirling was sent to the prisoner-of-war camp for bad boys: Schloss Colditz. For the founder of the SAS, the war was over. Yet his many desires for the SAS would be realized, even that it would be the first unit to link up with the 1st Army. After several adventures, including an encounter with a gang of Arab robbers, Cooper, Sadler and Taxis reached the Free French Legion at Tozeur. The French then handed them over to the Americans – who promptly arrested the trio as spies. Cooper wrote later:
… during the late afternoon an American armored patrol arrived to collect us. We must have looked a motley crew; my head was swathed in bandages and all our feet had been similarly treated as we were covered in blisters from our march across the desert. The Americans were most uncivil while trying to handcuff us, and bundled us into an armored car with soldiers guarding us. Without any nourishment whatsoever we were driven through the mountains to Tebessa.
Eventually, after an exchange of signals Cooper, Sadler and Taxis were cleared. ‘Cairo,’ wrote Cooper, ‘had confirmed our names and numbers, and somewhat reluctantly our American captors began to fête us with canned substances of all types. To our chagrin, though, there was only Coca-Cola to drink and no beer!’
Soon afterwards, Mike Sadler was flown back to the 8th Army and asked to retrace his steps, this time as ‘honorary guide’ to General Freyberg’s New Zealand Division as they outflanked the Mareth Line:
Thus I passed for a second time over the same territory that I had reconnoitred with David, but in far more comfortable conditions. It was good to know that the original journey had not been in vain.
Little, indeed, of the SAS’s life under Stirling’s leadership had been in vain. As Malcolm Pleydell, the SAS’s first doctor, noted in his memoir, Born in the Desert, about the Regiment’s days in North Africa:
To those who love statistics, I can only quote the following figures: we destroyed a total of approximately four hundred enemy aircraft in the desert; A Squadron, during the autumn of 1942, demolished the enemy railway line on seven occasions; while between September 1942 and February 1943, forty-seven successful attacks were made against German key positions and communications. Our raids then were more than mere pin-pricks, and there were occasions when we must have diverted enemy forces and upset their road convoy system considerably, while the steady drain on aircraft probably exercised an influence on the desert war.
Paddy Mayne’s personal ‘kills’ were more than twice that of any British or American fighter ace. As a return on investment, which is the only true measure of the worth of a unit, the SAS gave high dividends for a very small outlay.
One important testament to the viability of the SAS was that it survived the removal of its leader. It wasn’t a one-man show. Nonetheless, Stirling’s capture left both his subordinates and Middle East Headquarters with headaches, because only Stirling knew who was where and for what reason in 1 SAS. When Harry Poat’s patrol returned from raiding Tripoli, nobody else in 1 SAS had any idea that they had been sent on the mission. Confusion was only added to by the geographical scattering of the regiment in early 1943, with sections as far flung as Tunisia and Lebanon. In the latter location, detachments of A Squadron had been sent on ski-training courses, a proof in itself that Stirling had been carefully planning a future for the regiment in the European theatre, when it finally opened. Captain Derrick Harrison was among the ski novices at the Cedars of Lebanon ski school:
After lunch Major Riddell, the chief instructor, offered to take a few of us out and show us around. His eyes glinted keenly from a lean, weather-beaten face as he explained: ‘Of course, work does not really start until tomorrow, but if you would like to go out on one of the slopes …?’
We had drawn skis and clothing from the store and been shown how to put them on. Now, sweating profusely and slipping and sliding all over the place, we made our way painstakingly up the road to the top of Chapel Hill – a hundred and fifty yards of sheer agony. By the time I reached the top the lesson had started.
‘Now when doing the kick turn,’ Major Riddell was saying, ‘you kick one ski up, like this.’ He demonstrated, digging the back of one of his skis into the snow, tip pointing to the sky.
‘We’ll take it stage by stage. Now all do just as I have done. Ready? All together. Up!’
I gritted my teeth, steadied myself on my sticks, took a deep breath, then – up! I swung the ski skywards, followed it, describing a far from graceful arc through the air, and a thud was down, snow in my eyes, my ears, everywhere. All around me was a struggling mass of bodies, sticks and skis. We struggled to our feet and started again, practising it again and again until we could do it and still stand up.
‘All right now. We’ll just have a shot at going down this slope.’
During the next six weeks we were to go down that slope many times, in gentle traverses from side to side. Now Major Riddell pointed his skis straight at the bottom and pushed off. In a flurry of snow he arrived safely in the valley below. Grinning broadly, he called up to us. ‘Come along. Nothing to be frightened of.’
Somewhat dubiously we pointed our skis, and pushed off. Immediately the chapel vanished, the trees in the valley vanished. Everything vanished in a mad swirl of white.
Next morning the course started in earnest. We learned to walk and turn. Like pompous penguins we ‘herring-boned’ up hills. We learned the easy way of traversing up hills, and still lost pints of good honest sweat. Back in the hotel we had to wear greatcoats and mufflers to keep warm. In the mornings we woke to find our wet ski clothes, even our boots, frozen stiff.
With snow all round us we soon began to forget the desert with its heat, dust and flies. And sometimes as we sat in our rooms huddled round the cold radiators we wondered why we were there. The official story was that it was a reward for good work done in the desert, but as the days passed, there came a spate of rumours.
The Germans were pressing hard through the Caucasus towards the Russian oilfields at Baku. We, so the rumour had it, were to be taken through the Black Sea by submarine and landed behind the German lines, here to carry on our work of harassing their communications. Sweeping down from above the snow-line we were to ambush his troops, blow up his supplies and report on his movements. We could get no confirmation of this, but neither were there any denials. From then on there was an edge to our training.
After two and a half weeks we could climb a hill with moderate ease, and glide down again with a fair measure of confidence. For six and a half days a week we slaved at it, gliding, falling, picking ourselves up again. Cursing and sweating up the hills – an hour to get up and five minutes to come down. There were no cable railways. It was hard, uphill work with an occasional brief but exhilarating dash across the snow into the peace of the valley. For six and a half days, for on Wednesday afternoons we were free. And on Wednesday afternoons, immediately after lunch, in twos and threes we drifted down to the locker rooms. For a while bedlam reigned and the rooms echoed and re-echoed to the sounds of laughter: strong, hearty, good-natured laughter, the chatter of small talk and the shouts of men in high spirits. Gradually silence came again as, still in our twos and threes, we glided away to spend the afternoon on the nursery slopes, or to attempt that run we had noticed the other day but had not been allowed to try. The snow was in our blood.
On the third Wednesday after our arrival I found myself trudging along by Alec Muirhead’s side, rucksack on my back and a good deal of foreboding in my heart. Behind and below us lay the water tower that served the school and the village, looking for all the world like a small pebble. To the right, a small dark smudge – the sacred cedars of Lebanon. Immediately behind us our zigzag tracks showed black where they had trapped the only shadows among the vast expanse of white.
Ahead of us the edge of the snow seemed to cut a black line across the sky. It had been aptly named False Crest. From where we stood it seemed we could go no further. It was the edge of the world. For another five minutes we trudged on in silence. At the crest we would rest.
Standing squarely across the slope we removed our skis. Many a man has come to grief by neglecting that precaution; has slipped his foot from the trap, only to see his ski go hurtling away by itself down the slippery mountainside.
‘How far now?’ I was sweating freely.
‘We’ve come about a thousand. That leaves us something over two thousand feet to go.’ Alec looked towards the far ridge. ‘A bit windy up there, by the looks of it.’
‘Yes, and cold,’ I added bitterly, ‘with the last five hundred feet sheer ice. And what do we get when we get there?’
‘The view, old boy, the view from ten thousand feet.’
Two days later we had to pass the elementary test. The sun shone vividly from an ice-blue sky. Three thousand feet above us, wisps of white cloud trailed across the surrounding peaks. Wearing goggles to protect our eyes from the dangerous glare, we winged our way down Chapel Hill, through the clump of sturdy cedars towards the examination ground. All morning we climbed, executed kick turns, snow-plough turns. We glided, halted, ran along balancing first on one ski then on the other, till we were passed okay. Now I was lined up with about twenty others for the climax of the test – a three-hundred-foot climb followed by a speed descent.
A whistle shrilled and we were off. Some took it the hard way, by direct ascent. Most, like myself, preferred the long easy traverses across the slope. Ten minutes later I was at the top, breathless but happy to know I had done it under time. Only the descent remained. I had studied that run down. I could go at it like a bull at a gate. That did not appeal. The alternative was a wide sweep round the hill, coming in to the finishing line almost at right angles to the course. But it meant steady judgement round the curves.
The whistle shrilled again. The starter’s thumb jabbed at his stopwatch. Away we went. Gently, gently. Round the first curve all right. It was too easy. In front someone stumbled. Too late I swerved. I was over. Head first I ploughed into the soft snow, rolling over and over. One ski was wrenched from my foot and I had a brief glimpse of it careering down to the bottom, skimming lightly round the second curve. Sliding, rolling, I followed it at great speed, up the banking of the curve, and over the top.
That evening a short note was posted up to say that those who had failed in either the ascent or descent would be re-examined the following day. I breathed again.
At length, order came to the chaos caused by Stirling’s capture; 1 SAS, placed under the command of Major Paddy Mayne, was renamed the Special Raiding Squadron (SRS), while 2 SAS continued to be commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Bill Stirling. Both units functioned independently of each other. Meanwhile, the SBS was unshackled from its marriage to the SAS and rebranded the Special Boat Squadron and placed in care of Major, the Earl, Jellicoe.
Reorganization was all well and good, but what was the British Army to do with the abundance of special forces at its disposal now the war in North Africa was all but over? In truth, there was no place else for the SAS but the Mediterranean. Direct cross-channel attack on Nazi-occupied France was more than a year away, and the Far East campaign had its own special forces in Orde Wingate’s ‘Chindits’. Accordingly, the SRS and 2 SAS were warned for action in the forthcoming invasion of Sicily.
As a preliminary to the invasion, Major Geoffrey Appleyard of 2 SAS was requested by General Alexander to survey Pantelleria, an Italian-held island midway between Tunisia and Sicily, in May 1943. Accompanying Appleyard on his ‘excursion’, codenamed Snapdragon, was Lieutenant John Cochrane:
Our party consisted of Geoffrey, two sergeants, six men and myself. We left the submarine base, at Malta, in (if I remember correctly) His Majesty’s submarine Unshaken, under the command of Lieutenant Jack Whitton, RN.
After an uneventful trip we arrived off the coast of Mussolini’s secret island fortress and for the next twenty-four hours Apple and Jack made a periscope reconnaissance of the fortifications in order to decide on the best place to make a landing.
At last, after an intensive study of both air photographs and the beach defences, Geoff finally decided on a very high and particularly inaccessible cliff as the best landing place – naturally the success of the operation depended upon taking the enemy by surprise and off their guard, and the harder the climb the greater the surprise.
The raid had a two-fold purpose: to spy out the best landing places for the Allied assault troops, and secondly to try and find out the enemy’s strength – the latter being very important as our own intelligence did not have much information on the subject.
In order to gain the necessary information, Geoff had been told to try and capture a sentry and bring him back with us in the hope that he would be able to supply us with the enemy’s strength.
As in all his operations, Geoffrey had to have the moon in his favour (that is, to land under the cover of darkness and work in the light of a rising moon). The whole plan was calculated to a split second – so many minutes to get ashore, so many minutes for the raid and so many minutes for the return to the submarine; all this was vitally important otherwise both the submarine and our party might have been discovered in an early dawn.
During exhaustive tests Apple had decided that RAF rescue dinghies were more suitable than canvas boats and these we blew up as the submarine surfaced half a mile off the coast and launched them over the side.
Leaving the submarine was a matter of minutes and I soon found myself following Geoff’s dinghy ashore, each boat holding five men.
Our landing was uneventful, and after posting one sentry on the two dinghies Geoff started off in search of the way up that he had already seen from the submarine – no mean feat in the pitch blackness. We had one false start and then began the hardest climb any of us had ever experienced – we pulled ourselves up completely by instinct and every foothold was an insecure one, the rock being volcanic and very porous, crumbling away under our hands and feet.
By what seemed to be a miracle, Geoff finally got us safely to the top, covered in scratches, for we had decided to wear shorts so that in an emergency swimming would be easier.
We were nearly discovered as we reached the top of the cliff, which was about a hundred feet high at this point. Geoff and the others were crawling away from the edge towards a path that they could dimly see, and I was just pulling myself up over the edge when we heard men approaching. We all froze where we were and then, to my horror, I felt the edge of the cliff on which I was lying begin to crumble.
The sounds of marching feet and voices were coming much nearer and it became obvious that the Italian patrol was going to pass along the very path by the side of which Geoff was now lying, and there was I slipping slowly back over the edge and not daring to move a muscle for fear of dislodging some of the loose rocks.
Just as the patrol came level with Geoffrey, who was lying in the gorse not three feet from their feet, the worst happened. A large stone slipped out from beneath me and I waited tensely for the crash as it hit the rocks a hundred feet below me.
The crash came and Apple and the others prepared to let the patrol have it at short range. But the Italians, chattering to each other, apparently didn’t hear a sound and passed by, little knowing how near to death they had been. We breathed again and prepared to start the work we had been sent to do.
Of course, the capturing of a prisoner in our case depended upon silencing him in the quickest way possible, and Apple had decided that the best plan was to crack our particular man on the head with a leaded hosepipe and then lower him down the cliff and away.
Because of the stiff climb we had encountered, Geoff changed the plan on the spur of the moment – it being impossible to lower or carry an insensible man down the route we had followed. He decided to jump on a sentry, half throttle him and, when he had calmed him down, force him to make his own descent.
Apple therefore detailed me with two men to guard the route down and under no circumstances to give our position away unless directly attacked. He then crept away with the others to find a sentry.
Hardly had we settled ourselves into our position when the whole guard passed by on their relieving rounds – so close that we could have touched them had we stretched out our hands.
Geoff and his party also had to lie in the gorse further down the path as the guard passed them and then wait for things to settle down again.
Very close by they could hear an Italian sentry singing ‘O sole mio’ and decided that he was their man. They crept silently up to him and then Geoff sprang for his throat. In the uncertain light he missed his hold and the sentry let out a scream of fear. Needless to say it was the only sound he made, because by this time four desperate men were sitting all over him and Geoff’s fist was literally jammed down his throat – all to no avail, even though Geoff was whispering ‘Amico! Amico!’ in his ear. The Italian reciprocated by getting his teeth well into Geoffrey’s wrist.
The next sentry, about fifty yards away, heard the scream and came running through the gorse towards them. Herstall was nearest to this new danger and although armed only with a rubber truncheon gallantly rushed forward in an attempt to silence him. He was met by a burst of fire in the abdomen, and above the sound of firing I heard him call out to Geoff that he had been hit. That was the last anyone saw or heard of Herstall, because by now the whole guard was aroused and Apple and the other two survivors of his party were desperately fighting them on the cliff edge. Geoff accounted for at least three with his automatic and Sgt Leigh got one and possibly two.
By this time things had got so hot that just as my small party had decided to join in the fray Apple shouted, ‘Every man for himself,’ and as we turned to go back down the cliff I saw him, outlined against the gun flashes and tracer, dive over the edge along with Leigh and the other trooper.
I thought, as I scrambled madly down the cliff, that I’d seen the last of Apple, but when I reached the bottom he was already there with his two men. How they got down is a mystery because the piece of cliff where they went over was quite strange to them, they were being shot at the whole of the way down, and all the rock was loose and crumbling away. It had taken us nearly three-quarters of an hour to climb the cliff and they got down in about a minute and a half – Sgt Leigh put his knee out falling part of the way.
Somehow or other we all managed to find the boats and started to paddle like mad for the rendezvous with Unshaken, which was lying submerged offshore.
By this time considerable activity had begun from the shore – Very lights and machine guns were going off in all directions. Luckily they had no searchlights and we were soon out of Very light range.
We had arranged an emergency signal with Jack Whitton just in case of a hurried withdrawal – two grenades to be thrown into the sea, the explosions bringing Whitton to the surface in a hurry.
Geoff let the grenades off and Unshaken broke surface very close by. What a relief it was to see her! We clambered on board and down the conning tower in double-quick time, while hefty sailors slit the rubber boats in little pieces and sank them.
Unshaken immediately submerged and set course for Malta. I’d like to say that the officers and crew couldn’t have treated us with more consideration or kindness – they bound up our considerable cuts and bruises and insisted upon giving up their own comfortable bunks to those of us who had been more severely cut.
One last tribute I want to pay to our naval hosts. Jack’s orders had been quite implicit: rather than endanger his submarine he was to abandon us to our fate. But luckily for us he had waited around, although we had been ashore longer than expected, and was prepared to cover our retreat with his 3-inch gun if necessary.
Pantelleria was captured shortly afterwards, an important stepping-stone in the taking of Sicily.
While it was a feather in the SAS’s cap that Alexander had asked Appleyard personally to perform the Pantelleria job, the Army continued to show little real appreciation of what the SAS could do in a strategic sense. What the SAS should have been doing was dropping deep behind enemy lines; the Army instead began a habit of using the SAS as assault troops.
A case in point was the invasion of Sicily itself, where the SRS arrived in landing craft as part of the invasion fleet, and was tasked with the seizure of a lighthouse suspected of housing machine guns. Captain Roy Farran recalled:
We embarked on the Royal Scotsman in Sousse the night before the party. We were housed in all the luxury of a modern Irish Channel packet and the food was better than anything I had experienced since South Africa. The few remaining men were in good heart, quite confident of success in spite of their reduced numbers, and spent most of the next day in cleaning their weapons for the fight.
It was a brave display of strength. All around, as far as the eye could see, ships of all sizes were tossing up and down on the waves; rakish LCIs rolling sideways, waves washing over their bows, clumsy tank-landing craft, gunboats, motor torpedo boats and the larger hulls of the mother ships (all converted Channel packets). On the horizon were the watchful shadows of lean, wolfish destroyers and to the south-west we could see the comforting silhouettes of the big ships of the Fleet. Although the weather was fine and the sun set in a crimson glow behind the masts, the sea was so rough as to cause us to be anxious that the operation might be cancelled.
In the afternoon I developed a serious headache and began to sweat on my bunk. Boris Samarine, my Russian second-in-command, who was one of the many foreigners in the SAS, borrowed a thermometer which showed that I had a temperature of 102°F. It seemed clear that I also was in for a bout of malaria. Boris scrounged a quantity of quinine from the doctor and I took about four times the normal dose – so much that I fell back into a deep sleep from which I was not roused for eleven hours.
At three o’clock in the morning Boris shook me and told me that the boys were already in the boat. I buckled on my equipment and staggered out of the cabin. The ship was at rest, tossing silently on the waves, and round about I could just see the shadows of other vessels through the darkness. Over on the shore, which was a thick black smudge at the foot of the dark-blue sky, a searchlight was probing the water. The barge was lowered down the last few feet to land with a bump in the sea. And then we were being thrown about in confusion in the bottom as we were caught up in the angry turmoil of the waves. It was rough – too rough for a landing. Flynn, our Naval lieutenant, put her blunt nose into the rollers, which crashed over the end to swamp everybody sitting forward. The men crouched under the sides, bent over their weapons to keep them dry, while the spray dashed against their faces. They were just black huddled shapes, immobile and silent in the dark.
I reeled over the metal deckboards, trying to recapture my footing, to where Flynn was sitting, face into the wind, dressed in black shiny oilskins. I saw that he was trying to follow a small launch with a red tail-light. And then he shut off the engine and we wallowed for a little, being tossed about at will by the waves. Behind were the bobbing shapes of the first flight, who would idle there at the rendezvous until they had given us our proper start. He glanced at his watch, and looking up, gazed once behind and once at the shore before giving the signal to restart the motor. Our bows began to carve into the white, splashing crests once more. The searchlight momentarily lit up the faces of the men, but passed on mercifully without pausing. Overhead the drone of hundreds of aircraft became louder. I could see by their black silhouettes that they were Dakotas, heavily laden birds of the night bound for the bridges at Syracuse. Then red tracers shot up dotted lines into the sky as the anti-aircraft guns opened fire from Pachino.
We were getting in closer to the shore now and we could see the color of the sand sloping up from the water’s edge. There were little white houses and fields of cabbages beyond the beaches. Everything was ominously quiet. The landing craft swung into calmer water north of the island and then she turned to approach the place where our objective was joined by a sandbar to the shore. Still there were no signs of hostility. She ground to a standstill some five yards from land, her hull stuck hard on the bottom. I told Flynn to lower the ramp. Dropping myself into the sea, holding my carbine above my head, I found myself in water to my waist. I waded steadily ashore and the others followed behind, breaths bated. One fool slipped on a rock and dropped his Bren gun into the water. Then we were wriggling on our bellies up the slope towards the lighthouse, white and gleaming now in the moonlight. I saw three shadowy figures come out of the front door and disappear round the back. We took the last few yards in a rush, fingers on our Tommy guns ready to fire. I kicked open the front door to find the house deserted, although the uneaten meal on the table showed that the occupants had only recently left.
While we were searching the rooms and the outhouses, firing started from the Argylls’ beach on the left. The first flight was ashore. Odd tracer bullets zipped into the lighthouse, shattering the glass. I walked out of the front door and fired our success signal into the sky. There were lights going up on both sides now and further back there were the occasional flashes of mortars fired by the enemy. Tracers were criss-crossing into the dunes. I walked back into the building and sat down, decided to change my socks. Boris came in after a few moments to report that a further search of the island had revealed three terrified little Italians, crouching in holes in the ground, and an abandoned machine gun. I directed a party to take up fire positions on the neck connecting us with the shore, while we resumed our search of the lighthouse. Suddenly there was a tremendous roar, which shook the broken glass out of the tower and sent us diving under the tables, thinking that the end of the world had come. It was some time before I realized that it was not the biggest bomb in the world, but that the new rocket barges were firing their first salvoes at the shore. One cannot wonder that the Italians put up so little resistance.
Soon afterwards Randolph Churchill, now a liaison officer between the SAS and the Highlanders, appeared and told Farran to take his men to Bizerta and reinforce other SAS operations on Sicily, including an attack on the four-gun coastal battery at Capo Murro di Porco. The raid on Capo Murro di Porco may not have been the stuff for which the SAS was intended, but the task was executed in superlative fashion. Among those taking part was Derrick Harrison of 1 SRS, who with his men was taken to the foot of the cliffs at the cape by an LCA (Landing Craft Assault):
We clambered ashore, slipping and sliding in our rubber-soled boots on the spray-drenched boulders. I tried to recall the photos of the area. There seemed little doubt that this was the right place.
In single file we began to scale the cliff. I could see neither foothold nor handhold. I felt for them instinctively, hauling myself up inch by inch. My dread of heights had gone. Only once during the climb did it threaten to return. We had been edging our way along a ledge of rock for some minutes when … the ledge was not there any more. I remember thinking only that I must try another way. I could see nothing. It was as if someone else were guiding my hands and feet. I stretched up above me. The rock was broken but firm. I scrambled up.
How long that climb took I do not know. It could have been ten minutes or ten years. At the top I lay down among the rocks and boulders strewn around, and took out my .45 revolver. I had brought that and twelve hand grenades with me.
A moment later I was joined by my signaller with his small .38 set. ‘Any news of the others?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘There’s some dame singing on my frequency,’ he whispered.
We lay there watching and listening while the rest of the section clambered up over the cliff top and took up their positions one by one among the rocks on either side.
So far there had been neither sight nor sound of the enemy. The unexpected silence was unnerving. My imagination began to run riot. Somewhere above us, and unseen, they were preparing to open fire. A stone rattled loose and clattered down to the cliff edge. From in front came the sudden, excited shouts of Italians. My finger tightened on the trigger. Then the shouts died away into the distance.
‘Half right till we meet the wall …’
As we rose from the cover of the rocks and moved forward in open formation, I ran over in my mind the route we were to take. Soon we should reach the junction and … There was a sharp swishing sound through the air. As one man we fell flat. Above us and not more than thirty yards away there came a blinding flash and a deafening roar. Mortars! A bright red glow stained the night and I tried to sink into the flickering uncertain shadows that darted among the rocks. I felt as naked as a floodlit monument.
Cautiously I raised my head. Where the bomb had fallen a shed was burning. In the flare of the flames I could see, only a few feet away, a tangle of wire and beyond that the menacing muzzle of a big gun. We had been advancing right into the enemy battery, and into our own mortar fire. For a moment I was tempted to rush the battery from where we were. The defenders were obviously unaware of our presence but, if we attacked frontally, we would meet Tony and Peter with their sections coming in from the opposite direction. And my job was to get the Engineers safely on to the gun positions.
There was only one thing to be done: retrace our steps and carry on with the original plan.
It was obvious now that we had not landed at the right place but had scaled the cliff almost beneath the battery. We had lost a good deal of time so set off at a good pace, dropping to the ground every so often to avoid being spotted in the flash of bursting mortar bombs.
From somewhere on the right a light machine gun opened up on us as we scurried across the open ground between the battery and the farm. Bending low, we made for the wall ahead as fast as we could. Once on the other side we were safe for the time being.
We were behind the battery now. Most of the buildings appeared to be blazing, and in the light of the flames we could see the guns. So far there had been no sign of the other two sections, so I guessed they must already have reached the gun positions. I had to get those Engineers there, fast.
From behind came a sharp rattle of machine-gun fire. Streams of green tracer cut through our ranks. As we dived for cover our two Bren gunners swung round, firing from the hip in the direction from which the tracer had come. No more firing came from the mystery gunner. His one burst had mercifully done no damage.
We were about to step over the one remaining wall between ourselves and our objective when, from our right front, came a stream of red tracer. Lying full length in the nettles behind the wall – it was no more than a foot high – I yelled the challenge at the top of my voice: ‘Desert Rats!’
Back came the answer: ‘Kill the Italians.’ We breathed again. Tony and Peter. Somewhere we must have passed them in the dark. We scrambled to our feet. At once there came another burst of fire from their direction, and once more we fell flat. This time we lay there hugging the earth as bullets chipped the top of the wall. It was good shooting but we did not appreciate it.
I shouted again. Once more came the reply: ‘Kill the Italians.’ The firing continued. I crawled to the end of the section to have a look from higher ground. The last man peered through the darkness.
‘Mr Harrison? They’re our chaps. They keep shouting the challenge and I’ve answered right each time but I don’t think they can hear me.’
I stared back, beginning to understand. ‘That was me challenging. We’ve been shouting to each other. Come on, let’s all shout together. Pass the word down.’ We yelled at the top of our voices. Faintly came the answer. Tony stepped forward out of the night.
Together now, Tony leading, we stormed into the gun positions. The noise of battle was already dying down. Here and there an occasional shot was fired but, in the main, the fight was over. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a slight movement three or four yards away, at ground level. Something froze inside me as the light gleamed on the barrel of a machine gun pointing straight at us. They could not miss.
I was too close to use a grenade and could pick off only one man at a time with my revolver. If only I could attract the attention of one of the Tommy-gunners. All these thoughts passed through my mind in the fraction of a second before three very frightened Italians crawled out of their hole, hands high in the air. Taking them with us we crossed the wire and headed for the first gun.
While the engineers prepared the guns for the big bang we started to round up the prisoners and wounded. If they could walk we herded them over against one of the huts where they stood dejectedly, a dazed look on their faces. They were dirty and unshaven, and had that unkempt look about them that men who have fought long and hard in impossible conditions might have – but without that excuse. A little way off, under separate guard, was a second group of prisoners, about twenty women and children. They had fled to the safety of the shelters on the battery position thinking it was yet another RAF raid. They were numb with fear. Italian home propaganda was nothing if not thorough.
On the whole battery position we found only one officer, and he claimed to be a doctor. He was lying in one of the gun pits, his legs lacerated by mortar fragments that had embedded themselves deeply. As we carried him across the battery to the rest of the prisoners he waved his arms wildly, insisting loudly, ‘Dottore, dottore, dottore!’ He calmed down a bit when we started to dress his legs, and watched our efforts with professional interest. Among his papers were visiting cards describing him as ‘obstetrician and gynaecologist’.
He confirmed that he was the only officer but that he was the doctor. There had been some German officers, however. He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the high ground. He had sent them word that the British were landing but they would not believe him. No one, they told him, could land on a night like this. They would not come. Now, no doubt, they had fled.
By this time the Engineers had laid all their charges. From the pits came the warning, ‘Stand clear.’ The guns were ready to blow. Prisoners were shepherded to safety behind a rise in the ground. The wounded were carried there. We lay down and waited. There was a sharp concussion and flying pieces of metal whined eerily above our heads. As the sound of the explosion rolled away, from the signaller’s wireless set came the strains of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, as a broadcasting station crashed in on our frequency.
When a previously unknown battery began firing at the Allied invasion fleet, Paddy Mayne, with his usual contempt for his own safety, led the attack in person, brandishing nothing more dangerous than his favourite Colt .45 automatic. Next day Mayne marched his men into Syracuse, with nearly 500 Italian POWs in tow. For his leadership at Cape Murro di Porco Mayne received a well-earned bar to his DSO.
A proper, strategic use of the Regiment came in early September 1943, with Operation Speedwell, which was designed to stop the flow of German troops down Italy following Mussolini’s surrender. ‘Tanky’ Challenor took part in the operation:
We were to parachute in to two areas of Italy and derail trains in tunnels by explosives … It was to be no picnic. We were to be dropped by night on a tricky operation deep behind enemy lines in hostile mountain country. Nobody had any information as to conditions we were likely to encounter. The actual purpose of the raid was straightforward, but afterwards it was to be the age-old method of Shanks’ pony, the hard footslog through enemy-held country towards advancing Allied armies which had landed at Reggio, on the toe of Italy, three days before the launch of Speedwell … The sun was dipping low over the horizon as we took off from Kairouan. There was a great deal of aimless chatter about the respective merits of Italian wine and women. At least they could not be any worse than the North African variety, particularly the wine … By 11.30 p.m. we were nearly there. We met some flak in the Genoa/La Spezia area, which ceased as we flew inland. I was No. 6 in the dropping order and last out. I saw that we were a nice tight stick. In the direction of Spezia we clearly heard the wail of an air-raid siren. Down below the Appenines looked like hillocks. It had been a high drop, 7,000 feet, the highest I had been on.
Finally I plunged into a small tree and spent a frustrating time tearing the chute from the branches and then scraping a hole in the ground with my knife to bury the damn thing. I had landed in a small wooded copse on a scrub-filled mountainside. I began to walk on my line to link up with Mr Wedderburn, using a low whistling sound as a pre-arranged means of identification. Within an hour we had all linked up.
After checking their bearings and agreeing a rendezvous for a week later, the SAS parachutists split up. After several days scrambling around the mountains, Challenor and Wedderburn found the ideal railway tunnel to blow. At midnight they entered the unguarded tunnel, and placed two charges:
We were making our way back to the entrance when we heard a train coming. It was travelling on the down-line where we had placed the first set of charges. Running and falling, we just cleared the tunnel mouth as the train thundered in. With a rumbling ‘BOOM’ the explosion echoed down the tunnel. There followed a crashing, smashing, banging, screeching sound of metal piling up. As we left the scene we both heard it – a train on the up-line. We listened in awe. BOOM! Again, more crashing noises and then an eerie, awful silence. We had claimed two trains and undoubtedly blocked the La Spezia-Bologna line as ordered.
Challenor and Wedderburn reached the rendezvous, but when no one else turned up after three days, they left on ‘Shanks’ pony’ for the Allied lines. After numerous adventures, including the demolition of another railway tunnel, generous hospitality from Italian farmers and debilitating bouts of malaria, the two men split up on Christmas Day 1943. Both were captured shortly afterwards, but Challenor succeeded in escaping dressed as an Italian woman. Seven long months after the start of Speedwell, Challenor made it back to British lines. All he could say, over and over again, was, ‘I’ve done it, you bastards.’
For the size of the force dropped – 13 men – the Speedwell operation achieved a significant result, and Bill Stirling pressed Supreme Allied headquarters in Italy to action more such deep-behind-the-lines sabotage by SAS units. For the most part, Bill Stirling’s pleadings fell on deaf ears, beginning a disillusionment with the top brass that would see his eventual resignation as 2 SAS’s commanding officer.
Even if not deployed to its best advantage, the SAS contributed substantially to the campaign in Italy. In September 1942 detachments of 2 SAS landed with the 1st Airborne Division at Taranto, to operate on the enemy’s flanks and frustrate counterattacks. An ambush of a German column outside Ginosa by Roy Farran’s D Squadron was just one of the spectacular actions that followed.
I led the column in line-ahead for about eight miles beyond Pogiano until we came to an Italian policeman on a crossroads. He told me that German vehicles were passing all the time and usually turned left towards a village called Ginosa. I waved the jeeps into ambush positions and the last vehicle was still backing into the trees when I saw the head of a large column approaching from the west. I threw myself into the ditch, pointing my Tommy gun up the road. I half-suspected that they were Italians and the first vehicle was nearly on top of us before I noticed the German cockade on the front of the driver’s cap. The squeezing of my Tommy gun trigger was the signal for the whole weight of our fire-power to cut into the trucks at practically ‘nil’ range. Having once started such a colossal barrage of fire, it was very difficult to stop it in spite of the fact that the Germans were waving pathetic white flags from their bonnets. I remember screaming at a Frenchman called Durban to cease fire and making no impression on his tense, excited face until the whole of his Browning belt was finished. At last the racket stopped and I walked down the road towards a tiny knot of Germans waving white flags from behind the last vehicle. All those in the front trucks were dead. Still panting from the excitement of the ambush, we screamed at them to come forward with their hands up. A totally demoralised group of Germans was led up the column by an officer, bleeding profusely from a wound in his arm and still shouting for mercy. It was plain that there would be no question of further resistance from any of them. In all we took about forty prisoners and four trucks. Eight other vehicles were destroyed and about ten Germans were killed.
My greatest fear was that the Germans would retaliate from Ginosa or at least investigate the cause of the shooting. We had not sufficient strength for a pitched battle so that, after sending back the prizes with the prisoners, we sabotaged the remaining vehicles and withdraw a short way down the road.
The Germans sent down a number of infantry in armored troop-carriers within an hour of our attack. They halted at the crossroads and began to salvage the remnants of the vehicles and to bury their dead. I sent up two men hidden in the back of an Italian hay cart to get a better view of their activities and they returned later to say that the enemy had withdrawn to Ginosa.
Like other SAS officers, Farran revelled in the opportunity to ‘twist the tails of the Germans’, which of course made it easier for uncomprehending generals to use the SAS as a ‘fire brigade’. These were men who were never averse to a spot of action against the enemy, no matter what it was. A month later Farran was busy behind the lines escorting escaped POWs to embarkation points on the coast, when he was ordered to proceed to Termoli and requisition a house to use as a billet. The town had just been liberated by the SRS, No. 3 Commando and 40 Marine Commando. In the event, Farran was in the nick of time to participate in one of the SAS’s most brutal engagements of the war, a straightforward soldiers’ battle with the German Parachute Division as it attempted to retake Termoli on 5 October. Roy Farran takes up the story:
We were engaged in settling into our new billet while the first parties were landed up the coast, and one night we were entertained to dinner by our comrades in the 1st SAS Regiment. There was nothing to indicate an impending enemy attack.
By the next morning the whole situation had been transformed. Reports came in about an enemy counterattack developing and shells began to crash all over the village. Several landed in the street outside our billet, wounding a number of civilians. As the day went on the weight of the bombardment increased.
All I did was to improve the safety of our billet with sacks of corn as protection against blast. As far as we were concerned the battle was somebody else’s affair. The regular infantry with several tanks had arrived in Termoli and I could not see where we could fit in with our twenty-odd men. It may have been a weak view but we had had a good run from Taranto and were supposed to be resting.
Several times during the day a pair of Focke-Wulfs swooped in at ground level to bomb the shipping in the harbour. They landed one small stick astride the jetty, sinking one of our fishing boats with a direct hit. I dived into the water to rescue a wounded man but neglected to remove my German jackboots. In consequence they filled with water to weigh me down so much that I also had to be rescued.
The bombardment had become, if anything, more intensive by the next morning. It was impossible to get a proper perspective on the situation from behind our corn sacks, so I sent off Peter Jackson to see if he could find some news at Brigade. He came back at about midday, after an adventurous drive through bursting shells, to tell a comic story of his encounter with the Infantry Brigadier. Apparently a rather pompous man, he had said, ‘Don’t worry, old boy! Nothing at all. Everything perfectly under control.’ At that moment a spandau had begun to fire into the Brigade Headquarters at close range, forcing the Brigadier to cut short his interview by diving under an armored car. Peter did not seem at all sure that the situation was under control. He said that 78th Division was fighting off fierce counterattacks between the bridge and the brickworks, that whole units were fleeing in panic from the village and that the Commandos had been called back into the line to hold Termoli itself.
In the afternoon when the bombardment was at its height, Sandy Scratchley arrived in the billet, having recently come out to Italy from North Africa. He quite rightly reprimanded me for sitting idle like a rat in a hole while Termoli was in acute danger of falling to the enemy. I sheepishly collected twenty men with six Bren guns and followed him down to the Commando Headquarters. Even the short walk down to their billet was extremely perilous. I got in a burst with my Tommy gun at a Focke-Wulf diving low over the houses and shells were bursting everywhere.
The first hour was spent in the cellar beneath Brigade Headquarters, where we found some delicious apples. The building had been hit only a few minutes before by a shell which killed the Staff Captain. Brigadier Durnford-Slater, and especially the Brigade Major, Brian Franks, struck me as being incredibly cool amongst it all. German tanks had approached the edge of the railway line, overrunning the Commandos, who nevertheless stuck to their ground although hemmed in on three sides. It appeared that the counterattack was being made by a Panzer and an infantry division – a formidable force in view of the fact that 78 Division had not got all its heavy equipment across the river. I am sure that if the enemy had been less half-hearted, he would have taken Termoli.
When we were led out to a position in the windows of the hotel, it was humiliating that I felt forced to duck at every shell, whereas Sandy only half-ducked and Brian Franks walked on as though nothing had happened.
We chose positions on the second-floor balconies, but it was fortunate from our point of view that in less than an hour Sandy arrived with fresh orders for us to hold the railway goods yard. When the battle was over I noticed that not a single balcony remained intact.
Our first position was on a crest at right angles to the coast, perhaps a mile north of the village. We had not been there long when the Germans advanced on our left to seize the cemetery, which forced us to fall back on the last ridge before the goods yard.
Although we only had a strength of twenty men, our fire power was quite abnormally strong. In all there were six Brens and a two-inch mortar. I covered our thousand-yard front between the 1st SAS and the sea by putting ten men with three Brens on each side of the railway line. Our main trouble was that we had no tools with which to dig weapon pits.
In spite of the fact that heavy fire was directed on us from the cemetery and that constant attempts were made to advance down the line of the railway, we held our positions for three days. Mortar bombs swished down all the time but most of them crashed harmlessly in the engine sheds behind. Only one man was wounded although I am sure we inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy. The range was so short that we could not fail to hit a man advancing in an upright position.
Crossing the railway from one side of the position to the other was a most perilous venture. A sniper cracked bullets dangerously close to our heads as we raced across the open track. We had been in our position for nearly a day before we discovered that the railway engine and truck in the middle of our front was loaded with high explosive, ready to be detonated. I was terrified during the entire battle that it would be hit by a mortar bomb.
We were short of rations and the nights were bitterly cold. It was the only pure infantry battle I fought in the war and I never want to fight another.
Finally, on 6 October, the SAS units disengaged, licked their wounds and buried their dead. Termoli had not fallen.
The SRS was withdrawn from Italy shortly afterwards, but detachments of 2 SAS continued to operate in Italy until the end of the war in Europe. The Regiment’s most effective actions in the twilight of the Italian campaign tended to be those jointly undertaken with the partisans, as with 3 Squadron’s Tombola operation. Newly raised, mainly from volunteers from the 1st and 6th Airborne Divisions, 3 Squadron was commanded by Roy Farran, now promoted to major. The idea behind Tombola was to insert a well-equipped SAS party into the enemy-held province of Emilia-Romagna, where it would cooperate with partisan brigades (‘Commando Unico’) in operations against the German defensive position to the south known as the Gothic Line. The centrepiece of Tombola was an attack on the German corps headquarters at Albinea in the Po Valley. Farran – going under the nom de guerre of Major McGinty – was specifically ordered not to accompany 3 Squadron’s drop into Emilia-Romagna, but ‘accidentally’ parachuted down with the advance party on 4 March 1945. Meeting the party was Mike Lees, the British SOE liaison officer who subsequently helped Farran birth the ‘Battaglione Alleata’, a mixed partisan and SAS combat group comprising 25 SAS, 30 Russian POWs and 40 largely Communist partisans under Farran’s command. Few of the partisans had any military experience, but two weeks of intensive training by the SAS welded them into a decently effective force. Shrewdly, Farran gave the partisans a distinctive green and yellow feather hackle to wear in their beret, and allowed them to embroider the SAS motto ‘Who Dares Wins’ on their pockets in Italian. (Farran wrote later, ‘I regret to say that the British often parodied this motto [‘Chi osera ci vincera’] to read, ‘Who cares who wins’.)
On the approach to corps headquarters, Farran received a wireless message telling him to call off the attack. He decided to ignore the order, on the basis that the SAS contingent would lose all credibility with the partisans if the attack was cancelled. After lying up at a farm about ten miles from the objective, Farran led the ‘Battaglione Alleato’ towards the corps headquarters, which consisted of the Villa Rossi, the commander’s house, and the Villa Calvi, the chief of staff’s house, and a number of billets:
The moon glowed palely through the banks of mist. I had not realized we were so close to the limit of the mountains and it was with something of a shock that, at the top of a grassy rise, I suddenly saw the Lombardy plain laid out beneath us. The hills ended so abruptly, and beyond all was dark and flat except for the silver Po that shone in the moon and the pinpoint dots of light that marked farms and villages below. It all seemed so close, and only Albinea, presumably at our very feet, showed no lights. All around us the night was silent. It seemed so improbable that soon we were to break it with the din of battle. As I slid softly down the hill into the black abyss I looked back once. The long file was silhouetted on the skyline against the background of mist and moon, and their figures were elongated like distant bushes in a desert heat.
My Italian guide whispered goodbye and crept off into the night. The main road, he pointed, lay only a few yards ahead. The columns stayed motionless in the wet grass while our scouts went ahead to find it. They tiptoed back, crouching despite the cover of darkness. It was twenty yards in front and there were no signs of the enemy. We moved slowly forward into the ditch and lay still again. I told the columns to fan out on either side of me, but to be careful not to get mixed in their ranks. We would re-form on the other side. Then we scurried across the exposed hardtop and crawled under a thick hedge on the north side, scratching our faces and rattling our weapons alarmingly as we wriggled through.
I lay in the grass beside Kirkpatrick, the piper, Morbin and my faithful Bruno, awaiting the message that all our hundred men were safely over the road. In an amazingly short time the word came back. All were with me, even the Russians, ready in their columns to move forward again. A small Italian farmhouse gleamed white in the moon and I recognized it from the air photograph. Now the responsibility for navigation was mine alone and a single mistake might lead us to disaster. I took a north bearing on my compass and began to count my steps. The columns closed up tight behind me, each man less than an arm’s length from the next, and we crept stealthily forward. I tested almost every footstep before putting down my weight and paused frequently to listen for danger. A dog barked in the farm and my heart leapt. We made a detour to avoid two more buildings, neither of which I remembered from the photographs. I heard a truck pass along the road we had crossed and I threw myself flat. The others dropped to the ground behind me and we lay still for several minutes before daring to move again.
We came to a ploughed field where the going was heavy and I was terrified the sentries would hear the rattle of our equipment. Twice I stumbled into a wet ditch, stepping into it unawares in the dark. And once I heard a German shout. Then, as my count of paces told me that the time had come to swing east, I caught my parachute jacket in some barbed wire and shook the whole fence as I broke free. Still no sound, and the men were incredibly quiet behind me. It had taken more than an hour to cover a few hundred yards.
We were on the objective before I was ready. Suddenly I found myself on the edge of the crescent-shaped wood that lay at the foot of Villa Calvi – the villa which contained the staff-officers and their operations room. I had not expected it so soon, but my navigation was accurate. Our force of a hundred men had penetrated the German headquarters undetected.
The time for action had come, but, since my excitement had been gradually mounting to a crescendo ever since we crossed the road, words seemed to stick in my throat. My mouth was dry and when I did manage to speak the words came in whispered gushes. I sent a runner back to find the Russians, to tell Modena to form his protective screen to the south. Above the half-moon wood I could see the white walls of Villa Calvi on the top of a small hill. No lights were showing and I vaguely wondered whether we had been misled, whether the villas were really occupied by Germans. The British columns stood around me in the dark, but somehow the Russians had become separated. The air was heavy and still. Not a single sound disturbed the night – no dogs barked now, no wind disturbed the trees in the woods, and the men held themselves tense, ready for my word to advance.
The runner came back. He was so quiet that he was by my side before I knew he had returned. He had failed to find Modena and the Russians. I could only assume that without waiting for orders Modena had already led his men into position. He must have branched off from the moment I changed direction to the east. We could delay no longer. At any time now the Russians might alert the sentries and surprise would be lost.
I called for Riccomini and told him to start. I would allow him only three minutes before I let Harvey attack Villa Calvi in front of us, so it was important that he move fast. He was to remember that the main German strength lay to the south. That was the direction from which enemy machine guns would probably fire. After twenty minutes, whether his attack was successful or not, he was to withdraw back to the mountains. If I fired a red Very light before that, he was to withdraw anyway.
I watched him go, hoping as I did so that he was not infected by my obvious fear, by the difficulty I had in speaking. Lees lumbered by his side, a big hulk of a man in the darkness. Behind him came the ten British and the Goufa Nera led by Bruno and they disappeared into the darkness towards Villa Rossi, their weapons carried at the ready.
The black silence was almost forbidding and I shivered from both cold and excitement as I cocked my carbine. I led Harvey to the edge of the wood, below the hill that led up to Villa Calvi. One of the Garibaldini pointed to the wire fence that surrounded the trees and crossed a narrow path leading up the bank to the lawns around the villa. Nailed to a tree behind it was a sign in red letters – ‘Achtung – Minen.’
There was no time to make a detour. The three minutes was up. But Ken Harvey did not falter. He swung through the fence and the British swarmed up the path behind him. Yani and his Garibaldini hesitated, but I pushed them from behind, forcing them to follow the British up the bank to the villa. The minefield was obviously non-existent, a bluff.
I began to move over to my allotted position on the road. The others had lost me somehow in the darkness, but Kirkpatrick, the Highland Light Infantry piper, was still by my side. I walked into a slit-trench and lost my carbine, but Kirkpatrick retrieved it. Then, as I was still recovering from the shock of my fall, the fighting began.
The silence was broken by a tremendous burst of fire from Villa Calvi above. It sounded like a whole Bren magazine fired without pause and, as much as if it were a signal for which both Germans and ourselves had been waiting, it triggered automatic fire from every direction – from the enemy billets to the south, from Villa Rossi and from Villa Calvi. The night was shattered by the rattle of machine guns. I heard the harsh rasp of a spandau and knew the Germans were firing back. Bullets whistled over our heads as if the Germans could see us, which was impossible. All along the line to the south Modena’s men maintained continuous fire and I saw tracers bouncing off the white walls of the guardhouse. A siren wailed from the direction of Villa Rossi. That was unfortunate because it meant the alarm had been sounded there before Riccomini entered his target. Even mortars added their thuds to the general racket and, between the rattle of small-arms fire at Villa Calvi above, I heard the thump of a bazooka.
Having loosed off the attack, I had no more control and I could only sit with Kirkpatrick and wait. I told him to play ‘Highland Laddie’, just to let the enemy know they had more than a mere partisan attack with which to contend. The British at Calvi cheered when they heard the defiant skirl of the pipes. Our job was to cause panic and confusion and, even if we failed to clinch our attack, this had already been achieved. An enemy spandau singled us out and the bullets whizzed uncomfortably close. I pushed Kirkpatrick into a convenient slit-trench and he continued to play from a sitting position. I wondered whether I should join Harvey at Villa Calvi, but decided against it. Someone had to stay in the middle to fire the signal for withdrawal. So, while Kirkpatrick played his pipes, I sat beside him amidst the bullets, cursing myself for not having restrained Harvey a few minutes longer.
Only later, when we were on our way back to the mountains, did I piece together what had happened.
The British at Calvi crept up the bank to the edge of the lawn. Four German sentries were standing on a gravel drive in front of the villa. There was no time for finesse, so Harvey shot them down with his Bren and that initial burst of machine-gun fire which awakened the whole headquarters carried death to these sentries. Then the British charged across the lawns to the house, covered by the Garibaldini who fired into the windows. The front door was locked and several minutes elapsed before the British shot it in with a bazooka. By then Harvey and Sergeant Godwin had entered through ground-floor windows and were fighting Germans in the operations room. Bursting into one ground-floor room, Harvey was confronted by a German with a Schmeisser sub-machine gun. He ducked but forgot to extinguish his flashlight. Fortunately, Sergeant Godwin, who was close on his heels, fired over his shoulder and killed the German in time. Four other Germans, including the staff colonel, were killed on the ground floor, as were two other sentries in the outhouses. But the remainder fought back down a spiral staircase that led to the upper story. Several unsuccessful attempts were made to climb this stairway but failed in the face of intense enemy fire. The Germans were able to cover the first landing from behind balustrades and could not be seen from below. In one of these attempts Parachutist Mulvey was wounded in the knee. Then the Germans began to roll grenades down the stairs, one of them wounding Corporal Layburn. Harvey decided to raze the villa. It was impossible to take the house in the twenty minutes allowed. Working frantically against time, the British piled maps, papers, files and office furniture into a heap in the middle of the operations room. Then, with the assistance of a little explosive and some petrol found in one of the outhouses, they started the fire. Our men kept the Germans confined to the top floor, shooting up the stairs and through the windows outside, until the flames had taken good hold. After firing the rest of their bazooka bombs and most of their ammunition through the windows, they withdrew from the grounds, carrying their wounded with them.
The story at Villa Rossi was similar except that there, because firing broke out at Villa Calvi first, our raiders did not have full advantage of surprise. Riccomini’s men were still in the ditch beside the road when the fighting began at Villa Calvi. They had used more caution in their approach than time allowed and were still outside the grounds when sirens sounded from the roof of their villa. Realizing that surprise was lost, the British shot the three sentries in the grounds, firing through iron railings that surrounded the lawn. Then they charged the house, cheering as they heard Kirkpatrick’s pipes. Several more Germans were killed in outlying buildings and most of the thirty raiders – British and Goufa Nera – crashed through the windows into the house. In the ground-floor rooms, more Germans were encountered, two of whom surrendered. These two prisoners were locked in an outhouse and presumably lived to tell the tale.
As at Villa Calvi, a furious battle took place for the upper floor. The British led attack after attack up the spiral stairway, but were always repulsed when they ran into merciless fire on the landing. Mike Lees led one attack and was severely wounded, as was Bruno, the Goufa Nera leader. Riccomini and Sergeant Guscott tried again and almost reached the top, but, there on the second landing, Riccomini met his death. He was shot through the head and died instantly. Sergeant Guscott dragged his body down. Then, angry at the loss of his leader, Sergeant Guscott led another attempt. While shouting from the landing, urging the others to follow him, he too was mortally wounded and died there on the staircase. Both had volunteered for Operation Tombola although entitled to a rest after the operations north of Spezia. Both met their end at Villa Rossi.
Then the Germans, heartened by their success, attempted to come down the stairs. A hail of fire greeted them at the bottom and three more Germans died with Riccomini and Guscott on the staircase. Kershaw, Green and Taylor decided to light a fire in the kitchen. They poured petrol on the walls, heaped up curtains and bedding from the other rooms and started the blaze. Sergeant Hughes and Ramos, one of our Spaniards, carried the wounded outside.
Meanwhile I waited nervously, wondering whether to fire the signal for withdrawal. The planned twenty minutes had long expired and I saw flames licking around the roofs of both villas, especially at Villa Calvi. German return fire was becoming more intense and mortar bombs crashed into the trees of the half-moon wood at the foot of Villa Calvi. A few Italian and Russian stragglers had already joined me, and I knew that soon trucked reinforcements would be arriving in Albinea from other German-occupied villages nearby. The time had come for retreat if we were ever to return safely to our mountain base. I pointed my Very pistol at the sky and fired three red signal flares. Immediately the alert spandau to the south sprayed bullets all around me, sending the Italians scuttling for cover.
I waited until all the British, at least, had rallied around me. They came down from Calvi in twos and threes, jubilant at their success. Corporal Layburn and Mulvey, the two wounded, hopped between them, supported by a man on each side. Those from Villa Rossi were less triumphant. They told me how Riccomini and Guscott had died and that Mike Lees was being carried on a ladder to safety by Burke and Ramos. And the Goufa Nera, they said, were also carrying Bruno, their leader.
I waited as long as I dared, but Burke, a red-headed Irishman, and Ramos never arrived with Lees. In fact, they carried him on a ladder for four days and, by some miracle, escaped capture by the hundreds of Germans who scoured the area after our raid. Considering that Lees, who was seriously wounded, weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds, it was a tremendous feat. Both were awarded the Military Medal after they carried him to a safe hiding-place in the mountains. Bruno also evaded capture, and a few days later I arranged for a light aircraft to evacuate him and Lees to Florence. Burke and Ramos later rejoined us at Tapignola.
The sky was red from the blazing villas as we straggled west to the River Crostollo. We glanced occasionally over our shoulders at the burning headquarters and at the star shells now being fired over the area by the guns from Pianello. It was a satisfying sight. If only we could regain the safety of the mountain, the raid could be marked up as at least a partial success.
Though our withdrawal was far from organized, by astonishing good fortune most of the scattered parties managed to link together on the banks of the Crostollo. Our progress was slow, since neither Layburn nor Mulvey were capable of walking, and I was desperately anxious to cross the main road before dawn. I led them across the river and then cut south towards the hills. We were extremely tired, but there was no hope of rest for many hours. It was already getting lighter. German trucks drove helter-skelter along the road and once we hid for several minutes when we heard the rumble of tank tracks. Only Green’s alertness in spotting a German unit sign saved us from walking into an anti-aircraft battery. Wearily we made yet another detour. Sounds of firing still came from Albinea and I could only guess that either some of the Russians were still in action or the Germans were shooting at themselves.
At last we crossed the road safely and began to climb into the hills. Obviously something had to be done about the wounded. Mulvey was in great pain and could go no farther, even with the help of the others. I took him into a farmhouse and, after laying him on the kitchen table, did my best to bandage up his shattered knee. The peasants promised to hide him until the fuss died down and then to bring him up in an ox-cart to our mountain base. I did not like leaving him, but there was no alternative. And Mulvey himself, well aware that he risked capture, begged me to hurry away while there was still time. I gave the Italians some money and promised more after safe delivery of our comrade. Layburn could limp along with the help of two others and, with some misgivings, I allowed him to accompany us as long as he could. In the event, the Italian peasants were as good as their word and delivered Mulvey safely to the mountains. The farm was searched, but the Germans did not find him.
It was broad daylight by the time we reached Casa Del Lupo. The poor padrone was very frightened after the excitement of the night and at last seemed to realize that we were not Germans. He begged us to go away as soon as possible. We did not need urging. After tying Corporal Layburn’s wounds with a field dressing, I lashed him to an ancient horse we commandeered from the farmer. The horse was extremely decrepit and blind in both eyes, but it served the purpose. Layburn was much more badly hit than I had imagined. He had multiple grenade wounds in both legs and it was remarkable how he had managed to struggle along so far. I tied him tightly to the saddle with his wounded legs hanging limply by the horse’s side. Though those dangling legs, dripping blood most of the way, must have been extremely painful, he never once complained.
There could be no more halts now. According to peasants we met on the track, the countryside buzzed with Germans and we frequently skirted round danger areas. At first the mist was still thick, aiding our escape, but a light rain made the muddy path slippery underfoot. This time I did not doubt peasant rumours. We had to believe all reports of enemy patrols for it was illogical to assume they were not looking for us. We were too short of ammunition and our weapons had fallen too often in the mud for us to look for a fight.
The men were exhausted, but their morale was high. Only the loss of Ricky Riccomini and Guscott marred their good spirits. Incessantly, as we plodded through the mud, they recounted stories of their experiences during the raid. The best anecdote had it that one German officer at Villa Rossi was chased on to the lawn in his pyjamas. But as the day dragged on and I kept them marching without pause, fatigue began to tell and they trudged silently behind me, straggling raggedly down the track. I was probably more tired than most, for the old wounds in my legs ached and I doubt if I was in as good condition as the men. But I was more alive to danger than they were and knew that only a forced march across the Secchia would save us from capture.
The old horse frequently stumbled in the mud, throwing Layburn to the ground. Even on the best of going it was inclined to trip over the slightest obstacle, causing him to slip sideways in the saddle. When it finally collapsed, crushing Layburn beneath, we decided to abandon it. We made a rough stretcher from saplings and parachute blouses and four of us carried Layburn up and down the hills. I took my turn with the rest at this gruelling chore and soon we were all so tired that we could only reel blindly forward. Often, with the poles across our shoulders, we slipped to our knees in the mud. Layburn volunteered to stay behind, but the men would not hear of it. Actually I thought I made better progress when I took my turn at the stretcher, for then the weight on my shoulders made me forget the aching in my legs. We marched mechanically now, tramping wearily in step with our heads down. If we had encountered any Germans, resistance would have been impossible. Our weapons were caked with mud and we were so tired that we were incapable of anything more than this monotonous trudging along the track. We marched without scouts, for no one had enough energy to climb to higher ground. Soon I even abandoned my earlier practice of skirting around danger points and we crossed the north-south highway without any attempt at concealment. We walked openly through a village, to the amazement of the inhabitants, and were still lucky enough not to meet any Germans.
I remembered that Mark Antony made his soldierly reputation not so much from feats of arms as from his endurance while retreating from Modena through this very country. But our own endurance was close to an end. Without bothering to discover if the German drive was still in process around Baiso, I followed the route by which we had come, up the steep slope to Vallestra. Still we were lucky, although homesteads on the way were strangely silent. I gathered later that the Germans passed through this area and aimed along a Baiso-Carpineti axis, by-passing Vallestra.
We managed to conjure up enough energy to stage a little show for the villagers of Vallestra. Forming columns of threes outside this village from which we had launched our raid, with Layburn leading the way on his stretcher, we marched through the streets to the music of Kirkpatrick’s pipes. Women came to doorways and cheered us and little children ran beside the parade, but no men were to be seen. I hoped that the Germans in Baiso would hear the pipes and take them for defiance, for proof that we were safely beyond their reach. The men tried to pick up their sore feet and to straighten their shoulders as if they, too, realized that more by luck than good judgement we had successfully passed through the German lines without making contact.
After Vallestra, where my immediate fears were at an end, my legs refused to respond to the demands I made on them. I lagged farther and farther behind the rest, even though it was now easy going downhill to the Secchia. Some of the men took mercy on me and found a horse on which I finished the last four miles to Cavola. I was so completely exhausted that I could not appreciate the tumultuous welcome given us by the Green Flames, who carried the men off to celebrate in various houses in the village. I know the mayor made some sort of speech, but I was more grateful for the bed of the local schoolmistress. She, of course, was not there, but even if she had been she would have been safe. I did not awaken for another fourteen hours. We had marched for twenty-two hours without pause and, excluding the eight-hour halt at Casa Del Lupo had been awake for more than two days.
When all was reckoned, our raid cost us three British dead and three wounded, three Italian wounded, two Russians wounded and six Russians captured. At first we thought we had killed the German general at Villa Rossi, but apparently this was not so. However, we did kill Colonel Lemelsen, the chief of staff, and many other Germans. We destroyed the two main buildings in the headquarters together with many maps and papers. Above all, we made the enemy realize that he was not safe anywhere, no matter how far behind the front.