The day after the L Detachment survivors arrived at Jaghbub Oasis Stirling had an audience with General Alan Cunningham, commander of the Eighth Army. The first week of Operation Crusader had not gone well; in fact, it was a disaster and all the months of meticulous planning had come to naught when Rommel seized the initiative with a bold counter-thrust that pushed the British back into Egypt.
The whereabouts of 34 parachutists didn’t therefore create undue alarm for Cunningham, whose only interest was if Stirling had seen any German tanks on his travels. Stirling hadn’t, and he was dismissed with an instruction to return to Bagoush and await further orders.
Hours later, however, Cunningham was relieved of his command, replaced by Neil Ritchie, the general to whom Stirling had first gone with his idea for a unit of highly trained parachutists. Ritchie wasn’t bothered by the failure of L Detachment either, although he did have orders that piqued the interest of Stirling. Auchinleck was disappointed by Operation Crusader’s lack of success but by no means downhearted. He saw a chance to derail Rommel’s offensive by striking at his over-extended supply lines along the Libyan coast.
Ritchie’s orders, therefore, were to send two flying columns under the command of brigadiers Denys Reid and John Marriott to attack the Axis forces hundreds of miles behind the frontline. In the meantime, the Eighth Army would launch a secondary offensive against the Afrika Korps.
To the LRDG fell the task of attacking Axis aerodromes at Sirte, Agheila and Agedabia, timed to coincide with the attacks of the two flying columns, but their commanding officer wasn’t altogether happy with the idea. On 28 November Lieutenant Colonel Guy Prendagast sent a signal from his base at Siwa Oasis: ‘As LRDG not trained for demolitions, suggest pct [parachutists] used for blowing dromes.’1 Prendagast’s suggestion was accepted and Stirling received permission to launch an overland assault on the aerodromes the following month.
Stirling moved his men to Jalo Oasis, recently seized from the Italians and a caricature of a desert haven: an old fort set among palm trees and pools of water, though there were also thousands of flies and a wind that never rested. The 21 survivors from the first operation were augmented by the handful of L Detachment men who had been held back for varying reasons, among them Bill Fraser, whose broken arm had healed.
On 8 December, two days after their arrival at Jalo, Stirling, Mayne and nine other men from L Detachment set out to raid the aerodromes at Sirte, 350 miles to the north-west. They were travelling in seven Chevrolet trucks driven by the LRDG and painted pink and green for camouflage, but three days out from Jalo and 20 miles from Sirte the convoy was spotted by an Italian Ghibli reconnaissance aircraft. There was an exchange of fire and then the Ghibli dropped its two bombs, neither of which found a target, before departing. Stirling ordered his men under cover and they barely had time to conceal themselves among some camel scrub before two more Italian aircraft appeared on the horizon on what turned out to be a fruitless search.
The raiders had survived one contact with the enemy but Stirling knew the operation had been compromised and that the Italians would tighten security at Sirte. Facing the prospect of another failure Stirling improvised, instructing Mayne to attack Tamet aerodrome, 30 miles to the west of Sirte, while he and Sergeant Jimmy Brough proceeded to Sirte in the hope of slipping unnoticed on the airfield.
As it turned out, Stirling and Brough were thwarted when the 30 Italian bombers they had under surveillance took off just before dusk. Stirling couldn’t believe it. He and Brough returned to the RV ruing their misfortune and overwhelmed by despondency. Suddenly away to their west, there was a clap of thunder and the sky lit up. The pair paused and then Brough shouted: ‘What lovely work!’2
Mayne’s report on the Tamet operation was characteristically laconic:
Execution
Party left Jalo Oasis to reach Wadi Tamet, being lightly and inefficiently strafed by Italian air force on the way. Left LRDG trucks at 1830 hours, returned at 0300 hours. Party was then conveyed to Jalo.
Results
(a) Bombs were placed on 14 aircraft.
(b) 10 aircraft were destroyed by having instruments destroyed.
(c) Bomb dump and petrol dump were blown up.
(d) Reconnaissance was made down to the seafront but only empty huts were found.
(e) Several telegraph poles were blown up.
(f) Some Italians were followed and the house they came out of was attacked by machine gun and pistol fire, bombs being placed on and around it. The inhabitants there appeared to be roughly thirty. Damage inflicted unknown.
Remarks
The guards were slack and when alarmed wasted many rounds in misdirected fire.3
On point (f) of his report, Mayne had been economical with the truth, recognising in hindsight that he had been imprudent. Having crept on to the aerodrome, the nine raiders were unable to find any aircraft in the inky blackness. What they did see, however, was a thin strip of light that on closer inspection was the bottom of a door to a house. From within came the hubbub of convivial conversation. Later, in a more colourful account of the raid on Tamet, Mayne described what happened next:
I kicked open the door and stood there with my Colt 45, the others at my side with a Tommy Gun and another automatic. The Germans stared at us. We were a peculiar and frightening sight, bearded and unkempt hair. For what seemed an age we just stood there looking at each other in complete silence. I said: ‘Good evening.’ At that a young German arose and moved slowly backwards. I shot him… I turned and fired at another some six feet away. He was standing beside the wall as he sagged … the room was by now in pandemonium.4
The occupants of the house were in fact a mix of German and Italian air crew, none of whom had ever imagined they were vulnerable to such an attack hundreds of miles behind their own lines. After the initial shock, however, some recovered and dived for cover, drawing their sidearms and exchanging fire with their attackers. Mayne left four men to continue the firefight while he and four others took care of the aircraft.
Mayne ordered his men to plant the bombs on the left wing of each aircraft with 30-minute fuses. When they ran out of bombs, they jumped up on to the wings of ten aircraft and destroyed the instrument panels with gunfire.
When all 24 planes had been destroyed or adorned with Lewes bombs, the five men withdrew from the airfield to join their four comrades who had ended the resistance of the pilots with grenades and machine-gun fire and were already on their way to the RV. ‘We had not gone fifty yards,’ recalled Reg Seekings, ‘when the first plane went up. We stopped to look but the second one went up near us and we began to run. After a while we felt safe and stopped to take another glance. What a sight! Planes exploding all over, and the terrific roar of petrol and bombs going up.’5
Mayne’s party had destroyed 24 planes as well as killing several enemy pilots, all of whom would be harder to replace than the aircraft. It was a wonderful coup, one with enormous propaganda potential. Those back in Britain on the Home Front would be encouraged by the daring raid, and so too the Americans, who a few days earlier had declared war on Japan and Germany. One newspaper carried a report of the attack on Sirte with details supplied by Stirling:
In the officers’ mess on an Axis aerodrome just beyond Sirte, 30 German and Italian pilots sat one night drinking, laughing and talking. The campaign was not going well for them. Rommel was retreating. But they were still a long way from the fighting line. The mess snugly blacked out, a bright fire was burning, some of them were playing cards.
Suddenly the door flew open. A burst from a Tommy gun swept the card players and drinkers at the bar. Drinking songs turned to shouts of fear, and those who were not killed or wounded desperately trying to make for the doors and windows were mown down. They were 500 miles behind the front line, but a British patrol was in their midst.6
Mayne and Stirling returned to Jalo without incident. Three days after their arrival at the desert oasis, Jock Lewes arrived from Agheila (60 miles east of Sirte). Though they’d found the aerodrome bereft of aircraft, it wasn’t a total waste of a trip. Lewes knew from intelligence reports that an Italian transport depot was nearby so that’s where they headed. ‘It was used by Italians as a parking area for trucks,’ recalled Jimmy Storie, who waited in their Italian Lancia truck while Lewes and Jim Almonds planted more than 30 bombs on vehicles.7
On 23 December, a week after Stirling and Mayne had reached Jalo Oasis, Lieutenant Bill Fraser and his party returned from their mission to bomb the aerodrome at Agedabia (also spelt Jebabya), 150 miles north-west of the oasis. They had left four days earlier in the company of a LRDG patrol, reaching a point 16 miles from the target at 0100 hours on 21 December. Fraser had with him Jeff Du Vivier, Jock Byrne, Arthur Phillips and Bob Tait. Du Vivier and Tait had participated in the first luckless operation but for the other three this was their first time in action with L Detachment. Phillips was a cantankerous Englishman who spoke warmly of communism; Byrne and Fraser knew each other from days in the Gordon Highlanders when the pair had been lifted from the Dunkirk beach.
Fraser was – and always would be – something of an enigma to the rest of L Detachment. He was a loner by nature, happiest in the company of his dachshund dog, Withers, than with his fellow officers. ‘Paddy Mayne used to give him a hell of a time because he thought he was that [way] inclined,’ recalled Storie. ‘Paddy could be cruel especially after a few.’
The men nicknamed the fresh-faced Fraser ‘Skin’ because they suspected he was homosexual, yet no one gave a hoot what his sexual preferences were. He had proved himself a courageous and competent officer with Layforce during the battle for Litani River and that was all that mattered as far as they were concerned. ‘He was very quiet, a deep thinker and yet he was a very good soldier,’ remembered Storie.
The raiding party was travelling light. Each of the five men carried a revolver, eight Lewes bombs, a water bottle, a tin of emergency chocolate, a ration bag containing a mixture of raisins, lumps of cheese and broken biscuits, a length of rubber tubing and six feet of string. Byrne was in possession of the section’s one Thompson sub-machine gun and between them they carried eight spare magazines. ‘The Lewes bombs,’ recalled Byrne, ‘were fitted with two-hour time pencils plus a quick action pull switch to enable us to explode the bombs in 14 seconds if it was necessary.’8
After parting company with the LRDG patrol they continued on foot with the intention of reaching a point of observation three miles from the aerodrome. But there was too much enemy traffic and too little cover so the five men concealed themselves among some rocks eight miles from the aerodrome. Dawn on the 21st revealed to Fraser 150 Germans digging defences half a mile to the north, while enemy soldiers could also be seen to the east and west. Also visible through the binoculars was Agedabia. ‘We took note of where every aircraft was positioned on each side of the runway,’ said Du Vivier. ‘And we were able to plan our escape route to reach the LRDG rendezvous.’9
There was the odd rain shower during the day and a young man tending a herd of goats passed close by and noticed the five men concealed among the rocks. ‘He just looked at us and walked on,’ recalled Du Vivier, ‘We told ourselves he wouldn’t spill the beans.’
At 1830 hours they left their position and moved towards the aerodrome. It was dark and as the men moved slowly and noiselessly in Indian file through the German positions they could hear the low murmur of conversation among the defenders. Suddenly they were caught in the beam of an enemy vehicle. ‘We held our breath, to lie flat or to run would have caused suspicion,’ said Du Vivier. ‘So we carried on, the vehicle passed on, too, and we breathed again.’
There were two further moments of anxiety as they edged ever closer to the target. ‘Two tripwires were tripped over without results!’ wrote Fraser in his official report of the operation.10 At 2115 hours they had breached the outer defences of Agedabia aerodrome but as Fraser recorded in his report there now ensued several fraught and frustrating hours:
Some difficulty was experienced in finding the planes, detours being necessary to avoid AA guns and strolling sentries. The first plane was located at 0005 hrs (on the 22nd December). At first the aircraft were fairly well dispersed, but nearer the hangars they were closer together, one batch of C.R 42s [Italian fighters] standing wing to wing … charges were laid in thirty seven aircraft and in one dump of Breda ammunition. The first charge exploded at 0042 hrs and the aerodrome was evacuated at 0055 hrs, by which time four aircraft were blazing.
Du Vivier described how they counted more than 40 explosions as they withdrew from the chaos which they had created. Then they heard a ‘blood-curdling deafening roar’ and guessed the flames had spread to a bomb dump. ‘Though we must have been at least half a mile away by this time,’ wrote Du Vivier, ‘we felt the concussion press on our lungs.’
They were helped in their escape from the aerodrome by the arrival of three British bombers, attracted by the fires like moths to a flame, and amid the confusion no one took any notice of five men striding confidently away from the carnage. At 0425 hours they made contact with the LRDG and soon Fraser and his men were en route to the Wadi el Faregh where Brigadier Denys Reid’s flying column was leaguered. Byrne later described the meeting between Reid and Fraser.
‘How many aircraft did you get?’
‘All of them.’
‘How many is that?’
‘37, sir.’
Whereupon the brigadier gave Bill a whacking great thump on the back and said: ‘There’s nothing to stop us now.’
Fraser and his party arrived at Jalo late on the afternoon of 23 December. Stirling celebrated their return, and the news they brought with them, by throwing a premature Christmas party. Amid the singing of songs and the toasting of success, Stirling debriefed the five men on the raid. Bob Tait had some interesting observations to make that would form the basis of his report on the attack. There were no individual sentries on aircraft but they did find men asleep under the heavy bombers. Asked what they had done with the sleeping men, Tait replied ‘We did not wake them!’11
Where the planes were close together, continued Tait, they had placed bombs on alternate machines, and though they each had carried eight Lewes bombs they would have been able to hold ten in their haversacks. Finally, and most importantly, it was noted that the night in question was warm and as a result the 30 minute time pencils had ignited after an average of just 18 minutes.
Fraser’s men had scant time to rest on their laurels. On 25 December, barely 36 hours after their return from Agedabia, they were off again, this time to attack the aerodrome at Arae Philaenorum, known to the British as ‘Marble Arch’ on account of the preposterous arch that Mussolini had erected nearby as a monument to his conceit. Stirling and Mayne had departed from Jalo on Christmas Eve to attack Sirte and Tamet, while Lewes travelled in the same convoy as Fraser’s section bound for Nofilia, a coastal airfield that lay 60 miles to the west of Arae Philaenorum.
Mayne once more struck gold, destroying 27 aircraft that had only arrived the previous day to replace the squadron he’d wiped out ten days earlier. He and his five men encountered a similar problem with the fuses to that of Fraser’s section at Agedabia. The first bomb exploded after 22 minutes instead of 30, illuminating the raiders as they made a hasty withdrawal. Mayne threw a grenade at an Italian guard who challenged them but in the confusion the raiders left behind four haversacks, which were passed for examination to the Italian engineers.
There were 19 charges inside the haversacks, as well as two unexploded charges that were removed from the wing roots of two aircraft, and in the opinion of the engineers they had failed to explode because of ‘faulty manufacture in the part joining the detonating fuse of the charge to the slow match fuse of the igniter’.12
With schoolboy enthusiasm the engineers repaired the fuses before finding a couple of old aircraft on which to place the charges. They laid them in exactly the same spot as the British raiders and stood back and watched, reporting the effects in their subsequent report:
In every case, the firing of the charge, besides causing other considerable damage due to the explosion, set the fuel alight, both in the aircraft and in the vehicle, thus causing complete destruction of the material. The fires, however, do not seem to have been due to any particular qualities of the explosive but to the accurate placing of the charges in proximity to the fuel tanks and, in the case of the aircraft, to the specific facility of combustion owing to greater inflammability of the fuel.13
In short, the Italian engineers were mightily impressed by Jock Lewes’s creation.
When Mayne and his men reached the RV to find Stirling had again drawn a blank at Sirte he couldn’t resist a gloat. Fifty-one planes to Stirling’s nil. ‘It’s obvious I’ll have to pull up my socks,’ reportedly replied a rueful Stirling, whose frustration at finding their target too heavily guarded was offset by Mayne’s latest success.14
The two officers saw in the New Year of 1942 at Jalo Oasis, waiting anxiously for the return of Lewes and Fraser. Late in the evening of 1 January a truck arrived carrying four LRDG troopers and three members of Lewes’s section: Bob Lilley, Jim Almonds and Jimmy Storie. They had no news of the other nine LRDG soldiers or their L Detachment comrade Corporal Geordie White. Unfortunately they were able to inform Stirling that Jock Lewes was dead.
The trio described to Stirling how they had breached the aerodrome all right, only to discover there were just two aircraft. The next morning as they headed to the RV to collect Fraser’s party they were bounced by a Messerschmitt 110. Storie recalled later how the German fighter came in very low ‘at about 30 feet and from behind us with his cannons firing’. A shard of shrapnel tore a strip from Storie’s shorts, but Lewes wasn’t so fortunate. ‘He got a burst in the back and the two offside wheels were blown off. I don’t know how I got away with it because Jock was alongside me.’ Later, after the Messerschmitt had expended its ammunition they laid Lewes to rest in the desert. ‘We just buried him, said a prayer, stuck a rifle in the ground with a steel helmet where his head was and scratched his name on the helmet hoping someone would go that way again,’ said Storie.
The convoy had been split up during the attack* and it was only the ingenuity of a LRDG trooper who succeeded in coaxing the truck into life that they were able to make it back to Jalo. Nonetheless, recalled Storie, ‘Stirling kicked up hell because we didn’t bring back Lewes’s body.’
* The LRDG troopers arrived at Jalo a week later having walked 200 miles in eight days. Corporal White had dropped out with raw feet and was taken prisoner.
Lewes’s death was a bitter blow, not just to Stirling but to every man in L Detachment. ‘He was more austere than Stirling and didn’t suffer fools gladly,’ remembered Cooper, ‘but his intelligence was phenomenal and his innovative ideas were invaluable in the early days of the regiment.’15
For nearly another fortnight there was no news of Fraser and his four men (Du Vivier, Byrne, Phillips and Tait), and Stirling began to fear the worst. Then on 12 January Stirling received word from Eighth Army HQ that Fraser and his section had been picked up after an epic nine-day trek across the desert following their aborted raid on Arae Philaenorum. In Fraser’s report he described how on the sixth night they had almost been captured as they rested in a wadi: ‘A party of twelve men advanced in line towards the position from 200 yards. The section withdrew successfully. I returned later and found that a telephone line had laid over the position.’ Fraser concluded his report with words of high praise for his men who ‘behaved admirably … and made the task much easier by their cheerfulness and ready obedience to orders’.
Tait also wrote a report on their unsuccessful mission in which he highlighted the positives, particularly the training instilled in them by Lewes: ‘We always had the advantage over the enemy, who were obviously not accustomed to night movement.’16
Jeff Du Vivier confined his thoughts in a letter to his mother, reassuring her that he was indestructible despite all the danger he faced, and the fact they had survived by eating lizards, berries and snails: ‘I must have more lives than a cat. Although I have seen quite a bit of action I always seem to get away with it, and something tells me I always will.’17 For Mrs Du Vivier back in south London, these were the words she wanted to hear from one of the four sons she had serving in the military.
Fraser and his men re-joined L Detachment at Kabrit in the second week of January to learn that Stirling had been promoted to major, Mayne to captain and both had been recommended for the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). There were other medals in the offing, too, among them a Military Cross for Fraser and Military Medals for Du Vivier and Tait.
Stirling was altogether more pleased with life now that he had come to terms with Lewes’s death. He had been to Cairo to see General Auchinleck, who himself wore the look of a satisfied man. The initial sluggishness of Operation Crusader had been transformed into a successive offensive with Rommel driven back across Libya. The port of Tobruk had been relieved, the port of Benghazi captured and more than 300 Axis aircraft had been destroyed. The SAS had accounted for 90 of that number, and Auchinleck was quick to congratulate Stirling for his contribution. He also acceded to Stirling’s request to recruit a further 40 officers and men, and authorised him to begin planning a raid on Bouerat, a port in western Libya, a few miles beyond Tamet airfield.
The raid on Bouerat was not a resounding success. Stirling had hoped to destroy enemy shipping moored in the harbour but there was none to be found. Instead they planted bombs on wireless stations and petrol carriers before withdrawing across the desert. As the raiding party approached Jalo on 30 January they picked up a BBC news bulletin on their wireless set that left them stunned, and also accounted for the empty harbour: Rommel had counter-attacked, retaking Benghazi and pushing the Eighth Army east across Libya as far as Gazala. Alerted to what had happened, Stirling pulled in briefly at Jalo and then pressed on east to Siwa with the advancing Axis army not far behind.
Stirling arrived at Kabrit in early February to discover all was not well with L Detachment. Before leaving on the Bouerat raid, Stirling had appointed Paddy Mayne the unit’s training officer with instructions to whip the new recruits into shape. It was the role Lewes had accomplished with aplomb a few months earlier but it was a role for which Mayne was ill-suited; he was a fighting soldier, the most successful one in L Detachment, and he bitterly resented being made to stay in camp while Stirling went off to have another crack at the enemy.
Instead of drilling the new recruits – among which was a contingent of 52 Free French paratroopers under the command of Captain George Berges – Mayne had spent most of his time either in his tent reading one of the Penguin paperbacks that his mother sent him or boozing in the sergeants’ mess. One of the men who had volunteered for L Detachment in January was Arthur Thomson, a Londoner who been in No.7 Commando, part of Layforce. ‘We soon came to realise that Paddy was a quiet man but a very hard man,’ recalled Thomson, ‘and that there were two things he loved above all else: a booze up and a punch up. At Kabrit we would be in the sergeants’ mess having a beer about 10 at night, and then Paddy would walk in at 11, and it was an unwritten rule that nobody left till he did, and that was usually 2 in the morning.’18
Stirling quickly remedied his error by reassigning Mayne to operational duties and appointing Sergeant-Major Pat Riley the new training officer, with Jeff Du Vivier his second-in-command. Du Vivier’s expertise lay in night navigation and one recruit, Les Ward, recalled later that ‘we would sit propped up beside our jeep while Jeff explained all the stars and constellations in the sky’.19
In addition to the French paratroopers there was a new face in Captain Bill Cumper, like Du Vivier a Londoner, and a man who had risen through the ranks of the Royal Engineers to become an officer and an expert in explosives. ‘Bill taught us how to make the Lewes bomb, which gave you a bit of a headache because of the ammonal,’ recalled Albert Youngman, a Norwich-born commando who joined L Detachment in 1942. ‘He’d make us sit there and make them over and over until he was satisfied. He also taught us in the use of gelignite, primer cord, gun cotton, which was used mainly for cutting railway lines.’20
The new recruits saw little of Stirling when he returned from Bouerat. He was already planning L Detachment’s next raids, scheduled to take place in March, so much of his time was spent in Cairo, in discussion with MEHQ or organising the operation from his brother’s well-appointed flat (Peter Stirling was a secretary at the British Embassy). ‘Stirling was hard to get to know,’ remembered Thomson. ‘When he looked at you it wasn’t with a blank stare but with very little expression on his face. But once you knew him then you knew what he was doing; he was sussing you out, observing your body language, the way you conducted yourself, what you said and so forth. He could judge you. He was a quiet, methodical man.’ Meanwhile at Kabrit the new recruits were undergoing the same rigorous training that the original members of L Detachment had experienced the previous summer. For the French recruits, however, desperate to strike at the enemy following the capitulation of France 18 months earlier, there was no question of failure no matter how punishing the instruction. ‘The training was very hard,’ recalled Roger Boutinot, an assistant in a St Mâlo patisserie before rowing across the English Channel in May 1940 to escape the invading Germans. ‘We did a lot of marching across the desert and a lot of explosives training and sabotage work. And every morning Sergeant Major [Gus] Glaze took us for P.T. [physical training]. Everybody went, British and French. We played basketball against the English, and football. The camaraderie was excellent, lose or win, it was just a laugh, and we were always well received by the British. There was never any feeling that we had to prove ourselves to the British as Frenchmen.’21 For the L Detachment veterans, the handful of men who had come through the early operations unscathed, February and early March offered them the chance to grab some well-earned leave in Cairo.
By now the unit had their own beret and insignia. The cap badge to be worn on the snow white beret had been designed by Bob Tait, victor of a competition held by Stirling the previous October. His winning entry was the flaming sword of Excalibur above the motto ‘Strike and Destroy’.* Stirling was less impressed with the motto, however, and plumped for one of his own – ‘Who Dares Wins’. Tait’s cap badge was manufactured by John Jones in Cairo, as were the unit’s operational wings that were the work of Jock Lewes. Designed with a straight edge on top to distinguish them from other airborne units, the wings represented a scarab beetle with a parachute replacing the scarab. The background colours were light blue, the colour of Cambridge University, where Stirling had been an undergraduate, and dark blue for Oxford University, Lewes’s alma mater.
* The cap badge is now more commonly referred to as a ‘winged dagger’, a misnomer attributed to Roy Farran, a flamboyant wartime SAS officer who published his memoirs in 1948 as Winged Dagger because it sounded more gung-ho than ‘Flaming Sword’.
Every member of L Detachment who successfully undertook parachute training was entitled to wear the wings on the shoulder, and those soldiers who completed three missions were allowed to sport them above their left breast pocket.
But on their first leave in Cairo L Detachment veterans soon encountered a problem with their new attire, one that ran counter to the creed imposed by Stirling, who warned: ‘There had grown up in the commandos a tradition that to be a tough regiment it was necessary to act tough in barracks and on leave and they were liable to be badly dressed, ill-disciplined and noisy in the streets and restaurants of Cairo. We insisted with L Detachment that toughness should be reserved entirely for the benefit of the enemy.’22
Yet the moment L Detachment veterans strolled through Cairo proudly wearing their snow white berets there was trouble. Some had their sexuality questioned by mocking Australians while Jimmy Storie remembered: ‘When we wore the white berets we were mistaken for Russians and got called names. It was causing so much trouble that [they] were changed to sand-coloured berets.’
Nonetheless, wherever possible the men heeded Stirling’s warning about behaving themselves in Cairo. No one wanted to run the risk of incurring their CO’s wrath and being returned to their unit. ‘Arthur Phillips and I were in a bar when these Australian and English soldiers squared up to each other,’ remembered Storie. ‘Then the bottles began flying and we were stuck in the middle wearing our white berets. We thought the best thing to do was stay absolutely still and hope for the best … after that we kept away from the so-called popular bars and went into the not so popular bars where there was less likely to be trouble.’
Johnny Cooper and Reg Seekings, by now the best of pals, went everywhere together in Cairo with the taciturn Fenman acting as chaperone to the younger and more exuberant Cooper: ‘I did have a habit of singing once I’d had a few beers, I couldn’t help it,’ remembered Cooper. ‘Poor old Reg was very tolerant, although before we’d go out he’d often ask me not to start singing. But I think perhaps he secretly liked hearing me sing!’
After the fluidity of the winter months, the Desert War had become a stalemate by March 1942. Auchinleck was consolidating his defensive positions at Gazala and Rommel was augmenting his thinly stretched supply lines while planning his next move. The British wouldn’t be in a position to launch a fresh offensive for several more months but Auchinleck nonetheless was keen to strike a blow at Rommel. It was decided therefore that L Detachment would attack a string of Axis aerodromes in the Benghazi area, while Stirling would lead a raid against the port itself.
With Jalo in the hands of the enemy, L Detachment made their base at Siwa Oasis, a far more salubrious alternative. There were palm trees full of dates and a sparkling expanse of water known as ‘Cleopatra’s Pool’ where the men could bathe under the hot sun.
On 15 March the raiding party left Siwa for the 400-mile trip to Benghazi, among their number a 48-year-old Belgian called Bob Melot on his first operation with L Detachment. A veteran of World War I, Melot was a fluent Arab speaker working for Belgian Steel in Cairo when the next world war erupted. He offered his services to the British general staff and was now putting his vast knowledge of North Africa to good use under Stirling’s command.
Just south of Benghazi, Mayne split from the main party and headed off to attack Berka satellite airfield in the company of Bob Bennett, Graham Rose and Jock Byrne. The others continued on their way before Fraser left to tackle Barce, a new officer called Lieutenant Roy Dodd went off to Slonta and Gordon Alston headed to the main airfield at Berka.*
* Dodd was RTU’d shortly after and joined the Parachute Regiment where he was killed during the drop into Arnhem in 1944.
Fraser blew up the solitary aircraft he found on Barce, along with eight repair wagons, but neither Alston or Dodd had any success. Nor did Stirling, who found plenty of shipping in Benghazi but was unable to launch his folding boat. Fortunately Mayne saved the day, again, destroying 15 aircraft on the Berka satellite airfield. In a letter to his brother, Douglas, Mayne described what happened after they fled the scene of devastation:
The day and night after the raid we couldn’t find our rendezvous. The maps are awful, we had been walking from 1.30am to 7 o’clock the next night and couldn’t find the damn place anywhere. We must have covered about fifty miles, first of all getting to the drome and then coming away. It was dark and we were due here [the RV] at dusk. It was no good walking around in circles in the dark and I had more or less resigned myself to a 250-mile walk to Tobruk, and so we (three of us, two corporals [Rose and Bennett, Jock Byrne was captured by the Germans] and myself) went to the nearest Senussi camp for some water and, if possible, a blanket.
The Senussi were very suspicious at first, but once they were sure that we were ‘Inglesi’ everything changed and we were ushered into one of their tents, our equipment brought in, blankets put down for a bed. There was a fire just outside and everyone crowded in. First of all they boiled us some eggs, which were damned good, then platters of dates and bowls of water and a huge gourd of goats’ milk was brought in … and now listen to this and never believe in luck again or coincidence, or whatever you like to call it. The men who were waiting for us at the rendezvous – and they would have left the next morning – had got a chicken which they had bartered for some sugar. They wanted it cooked and had an English-speaking Arab with them, so they sent him to get it cooked. In that area must have been thirty or forty different encampments spread over the three-odd miles we were from each other and he picked the one that we were lying in to come to!23
Throughout the spring of 1942 General Auchinleck came under increasing pressure from Winston Churchill to break the stalemate in the Western Desert. He and Rommel were biding their time, like two grand chess masters waiting for one to make the first move, and it infuriated the British Prime Minister. He believed Malta was in danger of falling into German hands, which, in a wire he sent to Auchinleck at the end of April, he emphasised would be ‘a disaster of the first magnitude for the British Empire’. Auchinleck retorted that he must have more time to build up his reserves but when Churchill was told a large convoy would sail for Malta during a moonless period in June he issued Auchinleck with an ultimatum: either launch an offensive against the Axis forces before the middle of June or be relieved of your command. While the pair squabbled, Rommel acted, launching an offensive of his own on 26 May.
The British defences held firm initially and repulsed the German attack, and on 2 June Churchill cabled Auchinleck to inform him that the supply convoy would soon be headed towards Malta. ‘There is no need for me to stress the vital importance of the safe arrival of our convoys … and I am sure you will take all steps to enable the air escorts, and particularly the Beaufighters, to be operated from landing-grounds as far west as possible.’24
Stirling was summoned to Cairo and instructed to formulate a plan to aid the passage of the two-pronged convoy (from Gibraltar and Alexandria) to Malta. Stirling ensconced himself in his brother’s flat, along with Johnny Cooper and Reg Seekings, and came up with his most audacious plan to date. On the night of 13 June they would launch simultaneous attacks against a string of enemy aerodromes in the Benghazi sector. It wasn’t the first time that Seekings and Cooper had helped Stirling in the planning of a raid; he trusted their judgement and valued their opinion. ‘We used to plan out beforehand what we were going to do according to the aerial photographs,’ recalled Seekings. ‘We didn’t just go in. And we also had an emergency plan. You never go in without one so you’re not caught napping. But unless the situation has changed and there’s been a big influx of men or weapons [on the airfield], the plan you made back in base sitting down and concentrating, that’s going to be just as good as the day you arrive on the scene. If you start talking about it when you arrive you’re going to cock it up because indecision will creep in. Once you’ve made up your mind to do something, do it.’
The subsequent report on these raids stated that:
The results of these operations in June were as follows:
| Aircraft | destroyed | 27 at least (others damaged) |
| Aero engines | " | 20 to 30 |
| Truck | " | 5 |
| Fuel dumps | " | numerous |
A good many casualties were inflicted on the enemy.25
For the first time on an operation Paddy Mayne returned empty-handed, thwarted from blowing up aircraft on Berka satellite by the premature attack against Berka Main by a party of French SAS troops. ‘They went in an hour before their time and we were caught on the damned ‘drome putting bombs on various things,’ remembered Jimmy Storie. The French blew up 14 aircraft on Berka Main but their British comrades had time to plant bombs on just one plane before all hell broke loose. Nervous German and Italian troops fired at each other from opposite ends of the airfield as the four raiders melted into the darkness.
‘Then we split up with Warburton and Lilley going one way and me and Paddy going another,’ said Storie. They walked for a while, then rested, then continued on their way at first light. ‘We got to top of one escarpment and just over the side I spotted an armoured car,’ said Storie. ‘We were on its blind side so we just slid back down and waited an hour until away it went.’ There was also a detachment of German soldiers nearby combing the area for the raiders but they didn’t climb the escapement. Later the pair took refuge in a Senussi encampment where they found Lilley already enjoying the hospitality on offer. Over dates and goats’ milk, Lilley described how he strangled an Italian soldier who had blocked his path, but of Warburton he had no news, he had simply vanished. ‘We believe Warburton fell down a well in the dark,’ explained Storie. ‘Some of the airfields had wells nearby and they were 20 feet deep. If you fell into one there was no way of getting out by yourself.’
When Mayne arrived at the RV he found Stirling waiting with a triumphant smile. Finally, he had broken his duck! Mayne listened as he heard how Stirling, Cooper and Seekings had caused havoc at Benina, the Germans’ chief repair base for their aircraft, planting bombs in hangars and workshops on vital pieces of equipment. It had required all their stealth to avoid the numerous guards as they crept from building to building, further testament to the training instilled in them by Lewes. In one hangar Stirling and Cooper had deposited bombs on more than 30 crates containing spare engines while Seekings acted as lookout. With their supply of bombs exhausted, Stirling turned his attention to the guardroom on the edge of the base, perhaps mindful of Mayne’s daring attack on the pilots’ mess at Tamet six months earlier. Seekings later described how he and Cooper covered their commanding officer as he kicked in the guardhouse door and threw in a grenade. ‘The twenty Germans who had just come off guard were inside. Their officer was sitting at a desk no doubt making his report. “Here catch,” said the CO. The Jerry at the desk did in fact catch it, and in a voice of horror cried “nein, nein”. “Ja, Ja”, said the CO and closed the door. A moment later there was a big explosion. We then ran like hell as the bombs in the hangars had also started to go off.’
Still coursing with adrenaline at the rendezvous, Stirling accepted Mayne’s challenge of driving into Benina and on to Benghazi to attack anything that took their fancy. Plus, as Mayne reportedly teased Stirling: ‘I want to make sure you’re not exaggerating.’
Stirling sweet-talked the LRDG into lending them a truck and jumped into the front passenger seat alongside Mayne, who was driving. Into the back clambered Seekings, Cooper, Jimmy Storie, Bob Lilley and an Austrian Jew attached to L Detachment by the name of Karl Kahane. ‘It was a bloody silly thing to do, but funny at the time!’ remembered Cooper. ‘David, in his usual self-confident way, reassured us that there wouldn’t be any roadblocks along the way. We didn’t waste time taking back routes, just went straight along the main road towards Benina all unconcerned at the potential danger we were driving into.’
After six miles they encountered their first roadblock, manned by what appeared to be a solitary Italian holding a red lamp. No one in the truck expected the Italian to be anything other than cooperative, but as he peered at the strange truck and the bearded occupants who said they were German he barked a command. Suddenly a dozen Germans rushed from the guardhouse, their weapons levelled at the truck as they fanned out in a semi-circle. The sergeant-major in charge demanded the password. Kahane cursed him and said they had no idea of the password, that they had been fighting the Tommies for the past three days and were tired and hungry and in no mood for this nonsense. The sergeant-major took a couple of steps towards the truck to get a better look at the men inside. Mayne described subsequent events in a letter home:
Fritz isn’t satisfied so he walks to about three feet from the car on my side. I’m sitting there with my Colt on my lap and suddenly I remember that it isn’t cocked, so I pull it back and the Jerry has one look and then orders the gates to be opened. Which they did in a chorus of ‘Guden Nachtens’ and we drove on. We thought later that he came to the conclusion, the same one that I had come to, that if anyone was going to be hurt he was going to be a very sick man very early on.26
They drove on towards Benghazi aware that the alarm would have been raised by the sergeant-major. Soon they encountered a hastily erected roadblock. Mayne accelerated through it, scattering the Italian soldiers, while Seekings opened up with the Lewis machine gun. Mayne and Stirling agreed to postpone the visit to Benghazi and instead just shoot up whatever came their way in the next couple of miles. They came to a transport filling station complete with petrol storage tank, which was unmanned and easy to festoon with bombs. A mile or so further on, at the village of Lete approximately five miles east of Benghazi, a most appealing sight hove into view. ‘It was a roadside café and sitting out on the verandah having a drink were a lot of Germans and Italians,’ remembered Storie. ‘We knew we would have to do something about this so we drew up alongside the cafe and opened fire. They didn’t have time to defend themselves, we blew everything to bits.’
Stirling decided it would now be prudent to retire. They left the road and headed into the Wadi el Gattara that ran parallel; it was the only alternative route to the one just taken and which was now crawling with the enemy. It was dark and bumpy, but Stirling confidently navigated Mayne towards the track that would lead them down the escarpment to safety. Suddenly they saw the lights of another vehicle tearing across the desert in their direction in the hope of cutting them off. Mayne put on his lights and went hell for leather for the escarpment. In the back, Seekings attempted to fire at their pursuer’s lights as the truck jolted from side to side. Mayne got to the track that cut across the wadi and accelerated down it, leaving the enemy vehicle helpless on the wrong side of the escarpment. The evening’s excitement wasn’t quite finished, however, despite the fact that the men began to drift off to sleep as Mayne headed for the RV across flatter, smoother ground. Suddenly there was a shout of ‘Burning fuse!’ from Bob Lilley, and in a second all seven men had leapt from the truck. Moments later there was a terrific explosion as a time pencil blew the vehicle sky high.
The dash up the wadi had jolted a fuse to life but fortunately Lilley had heard its climatic fizz in the nick of time. ‘What was left of [the truck],’ reminisced Storie, ‘could have been put in a haversack.’27
They surveyed the wreckage in silence and then began to giggle. Soon they were laughing out loud, marching across the desert towards a Senussi camp without a care in the world. ‘It wasn’t very wise in hindsight,’ reflected Storie, ‘but it did you good sometimes to treat the war as a joke.’
