by Damien Lewis
Tellingly, Captain Garstin had had to fight every inch of the way to be allowed a frontline role. Having enlisted in the Royal Ulster Rifles (RUR) in July 1939, Garstin had first seen action in May 1940, in the battle for the medieval city of Louvain in Belgium. As Major General Bernard Montgomery had positioned his forces along the city’s main railway line, Garstin – then only twenty-one, and known to all as ‘Pat’ – had found himself leading the defence of the city’s main railway station, holding the entrance hall and Platforms 1 and 2, plus the subways.
At dusk on 14 May the Germans had attacked. For many of the defenders, this was their first experience of being on the wrong end of the fearsome MG 34 machine gun – the ‘Spandau’ as it would become known – a weapon with so rapid a rate of fire that the human ear was unable to distinguish between each gunshot, earning it the nickname ‘Hitler’s buzzsaw’. By dawn on the 15th, German forces had succeeded in penetrating the rail yard, and had taken up firing positions amongst the shattered remains of the rolling stock, but still Garstin and his platoon held firm.
Dashing from subway to subway, his small force kept popping up all over the station to unleash bursts of fire, giving the impression they were far greater in number than they really were. As bullets tore apart the glass roof above them, Garstin led from the front, repeatedly driving back the enemy, which led to headlines in the British press – ‘The Battle Now Raging on Platform 1’. Up and down the railway track troops had fought with incredible bravery, often to the last round, and the battle for Louvain would earn for the Durham Light Infantry the first Victoria Cross of the ground war.
By the time Montgomery ordered a withdrawal to new defensive lines, Garstin was among several men to be decorated in the field, earning a Military Cross for the heroic stand. Full of fighting spirit, but hugely outnumbered and outgunned, British forces executed a fighting withdrawal to Dunkirk. There, during nine incredible days, 338,226 men were taken off the beaches and spirited back to Britain. But the losses were staggering. Almost 70,000 were listed as killed in action, missing or prisoners of war. Along with the hundreds of tanks and field guns left behind, 288 ships had been sunk and 372 aircraft lost to enemy action.
In Britain, the government propaganda machine cranked out the message that Dunkirk was somehow a heroic victory. Heroic it certainly had been, but it was no victory, as Winston Churchill was at pains to point out. On 4 June 1940, even as the Dunkirk evacuation came to an end, Churchill delivered a rousing speech to Parliament, lauding the rescuing of so many, ‘out of the jaws of death and shame’. But he added a stinging note of caution: ‘We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuation.’
As for Captain Garstin, it was all but a miracle that he had made it off the Dunkirk beaches at all. Already suffering partial deafness due to a grenade blast at Louvain, he was wounded by shrapnel while awaiting pick-up by the minesweeper, HMS Skipjack. Worse still, as the heavily laden warship had pulled away from the gently shelving shoreline, she was struck by a series of bombs and rapidly sank, most aboard being killed.
Garstin, though injured, managed to slip away from the sinking ship and to struggle back to land. He finally made it to Britain aboard another vessel, and by September of that year he felt recovered enough from his injuries to travel from his home in Canterbury to Buckingham Palace, to receive his Military Cross. Three months later, he found himself in East Africa attached to the 1st Battalion, the Northern Rhodesia Regiment, a unit raised in what was then Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) whose ranks combined black and white soldiers under the motto Diversi Genere Fide Pares –Different in Race, Equal in Fidelity.
Barely weeks into that posting Garstin was admitted to a local hospital suffering from acute appendicitis. Given two months’ sick leave, he instead chose to return to his unit, whereupon he was promoted to lieutenant and became embroiled in the fierce fighting of the East African campaign. Though heavily outnumbered, a mixed force raised from Britain, South Africa, India and across the African continent defeated the Italian East African Command, which combined units of the Regio Esercito (Royal Army), Regia Aeronautica (Royal Airforce) and Regia Nautica (Royal Navy), plus some 250,000 soldiers of the Regio Corpo Truppe Coloniali (Royal Corps of Colonial Troops).
This little-known campaign represented the first significant Allied victory of the war, but throughout the fighting – which in the remote African bush often assumed a guerrilla-like intensity, with wild skirmishing and hit-and-run attacks – Garstin was dogged by ill health. By June 1941, the abdominal pains were back to plague him. A medical board dispatched him to Britain, ominously for ‘treatment and final disposal’.
Garstin, however, was having none of it. Deftly sidestepping that ‘final disposal’ order, he instead volunteered for airborne operations, earning his parachutist’s wings by March the following year. Abdominal surgery and several months of convalescence followed, after which he married Susan Nicola Beresford-Jones in the autumn of 1942, before embarking for North Africa, where he was to serve with the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), the intelligence-gathering and raiding force that pre-dated the SAS. Raids on German airfields and transport followed, before Garstin suffered two further hospitalisations, first in Tunisia and then in Algeria.
Once again he was returned to Britain, so his injuries could be treated and to convalesce. Instead, and demonstrating a truly indomitable spirit, on 15 February 1944 Garstin volunteered for 1 SAS, a unit commanded by a fellow Irishman of towering repute, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne. Of course, it was no exaggeration to say that Pat Garstin shouldn’t have been in any position to put himself forward for special service duties: in truth, he should have been invalided out of the military some three years earlier. It was the mark of the man that he volunteered, regardless of the dangers that were to come.
Equally, it was no secret that Mayne – already the recipient of two Distinguished Service Orders (DSO and bar), plus a Mention in Dispatches – cast a favourable eye on any Irishmen applying for the ranks, regardless of whether they hailed from north or south of the border. Indeed, during the earliest days of the SAS it had been Lieutenant Eoin (pronounced ‘Ian’) McGonigal, a southern Irishman and a Catholic, who had argued most persuasively that there was room for a man like Mayne in the fledgling Special Air Service.
Forging a friendship long before the war, via Eoin’s brother Ambrose, and at Queen’s University, Belfast, McGonigal and Mayne had shared a passion for rugby, Mayne going on to play for both Ireland and the British Lions prior to the war. When hostilities were declared, McGonigal and Mayne had been the first two officers from an Irish regiment to join No. 11 Commando, in 1940, seeing fierce and bloody action in Syria in June 1941. Over the years they had truly become inseparable, until McGonigal was killed during a disastrous parachute jump over Libya, on one of the fledgling SAS’s first ever missions.
Mayne was said to have been shattered by the loss of McGonigal, a man who, like himself – and Pat Garstin – had enlisted first in the Royal Ulster Rifles. Bearing in mind Garstin’s distinguished war record, not to mention his experience of guerrilla-style warfare and his dogged refusal to let injury stand in his way, his application to join the SAS was welcomed by Mayne, especially since he was desperately short of experienced officers, after nearly three years of the SAS being at war.
Following a relentless series of North African and Italian missions, plus raiding operations that had spanned the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, the SAS had been pulled back to the UK for a period of recuperation and expansion, in preparation for the hardest battles of all – the D-Day landings and the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe. A unit that had originated in North Africa in the summer of 1941 with seventy-odd recruits –‘the originals’ – was to be grown into four regiments, composed of some 2,500 troops.
In theory two of those regiments – 1 and 2 SAS – were made up of the British contingent, but in reality the SAS h
ad returned from the long months overseas with just about every conceivable nationality within its ranks. Basically, anyone possessed of the right qualities and who hungered to take the fight to the enemy had been welcome. Mayne’s command, 1 SAS, was described as some kind of piratical ‘foreign legion’, boasting scores of Irishmen, a good dose of Russians, one or two Americans and even a smattering of Germans within its ranks. Upon their return to the UK, many of Mayne’s men proved to have no record of ever having served within the British Army at all.
Two French regiments – 3 and 4 SAS – plus a Belgian parachute company were also being raised, while F Squadron of the GHQ Liaison Regiment – specialist signallers, better known as ‘the Phantoms’ – were being attached, to make up the shortfall in radio operators.
Widely experienced in behind-the-lines raiding and sabotage, most of the SAS old hands hadn’t seen Britain for years and were little accustomed to the rigours of regimental soldiering –drill, spit and polish and the adherence to rigid military convention – which did little to win them any easy friends within the top brass. Mayne, 1 SAS’s commanding officer, was foremost amongst them. All too often portrayed as a psychopathic Irishman with a famously volcanic temper, especially when he’d been drinking, Mayne was in truth far from that. Recruited into the SAS by its founder, David Stirling, Mayne had reputedly destroyed a hundred aircraft during SAS raiding operations, immobilising one by ripping out the control panels ‘with his bare hands, when he had run out of bombs’. At times executing more than a dozen raids per week, Mayne was said on one occasion to have calmly approached ‘a German officer’s mess and “liquidated” it’, thus fuelling his reputation as a cold, calculating killer.
Certainly, the citations for Mayne’s decorations reflected an utterly driven personality, a man who led from the front. In February 1942, his first DSO recorded: ‘this officer was instrumental .. . in destroying, with a small party of men, many aeroplanes, a bomb dump and a petrol dump. He led this raid in person and himself destroyed and killed many of the enemy.’ Mayne’s citation for his second DSO, for the October 1943 Sicily landings, stressed his ‘courage, determination and superb leadership . . . He personally led his men from the landing craft in the face of heavy machine gun fire.’
With David Stirling’s capture by Erwin Rommel’s forces, in January 1943, Mayne had taken over command of 1 SAS, shaping and nurturing the unit through to its return to the UK. During that time he’d proved himself to be of a paradoxically shy and retiring nature, a soldier-poet who cared passionately for those under his command. Since its publication in 1944, Mayne had carried on his person a poetry anthology entitled Other Men’s Flowers, compiled by Field Marshal Lord Wavell, formerly Commander-in-Chief Middle East, whose remit had included the North African campaign.
‘He wasn’t the hard-drinking, fearless, mad Irishman of popular myth,’ Mike Sadler, one of the SAS originals, would remark of Mayne. ‘He was intelligent, sensitive and warm underneath.’ A former Irish and British Lions rugby international and the Irish Universities heavyweight boxing champion, Mayne would fight doggedly to safeguard the unique ethos and esprit de corps of ‘his’ regiment. That was not to be diluted in any way, which seemed to threaten to be the case, as the SAS contemplated D-Day operations.
Formerly a freewheeling outfit answerable largely to itself, the SAS had been shoehorned into 1 Airborne Corps upon its return to Britain. Brigadier Roderick McLeod, formerly of the Royal Artillery, was placed in overall command of the SAS. As McLeod himself was the first to admit, he was a peculiar choice for such a role. His military career had hitherto consisted mostly of ‘hunting, polo, pigsticking . . . followed by staff college’, and his initial view of the men who had fallen under his command was of a band of ‘colourful and curiously dressed ruffians’.
While the placing of the SAS under 1 Airborne was viewed as being an ‘entirely unnecessary evil’, McLeod would prove to have a surprisingly appropriate light touch. Not so higher command, which seemed determined to drag the SAS, kicking and screaming, into line. Amongst other unwelcome developments, the men were ordered to replace their distinctive beige-coloured beret with the standard red version worn by ‘all’ airborne troops.
Typically, Mayne’s quiet resistance took the form of continuing to wear his battle-worn sandy version, and few were the men who would argue to his face that he should do otherwise. As Mayne’s prescription for his ideal SAS recruit would reveal, much of his fearsome martial spirit sprung from the need to stand tall amongst his fellows, and to stand firm by their sides. It was camaraderie, and his devotion to his brother raiders, that drove Mayne on.
‘I have a mental blueprint of the ideal SAS man,’ he would declare. ‘No one fits it exactly, but when I look at a man and listen to him, he must come close.’ That blueprint included: stamina, both mental and physical; intellect and cunning; the ability to operate as a team; a certain versatility and self-confidence, without ever being brash or arrogant; iron-willed self-reliance; and an indomitable spirit.
For Mayne, these things were key, and over the long years that he’d spent at war Captain Patrick Garstin had more than proven to possess these qualities. Indeed, tonight’s mission – SABU-70’s top-secret tasking – would call for such attributes in abundance, and it was one in which Mayne had played a pivotal role.
Parachuting into occupied France in support of Operation Overlord – the codename for the D-Day landings – would call for very different skills and tactics than driving columns of jeeps through the empty deserts of North Africa, to strike at targets many hundreds of miles behind enemy lines. Dropping into France – densely inhabited, heavily garrisoned by the enemy and with a population reeling from the long years of occupation –would prove a whole different ball game, each mission presenting a wholly new and challenging set of circumstances on the ground.
As Mayne had advocated, when planning the coming operations, flexibility and adapting to fast-changing situations would be key. ‘Ultimate leadership will be assumed by the person on the spot with the greatest determination and ability’, he wrote, in a top-secret strategy document. ‘SAS parties must not be put under command of any person outside the SAS, and Resistance Groups must be told that SAS parties are their own masters.’
For a man often accused of having psychopathic tendencies, Mayne wrote with surprising compassion regarding the treatment of enemy captives. ‘Before they surrender, the Germans must be subject to every known trick, stratagem and explosive which will kill, threaten, frighten or unsettle them: but they must know that they will be safe and unharmed if they surrender.’ Resistance groups were to be left in no doubt that ‘instructions given by any SAS Commander as to the treatment of German prisoners must be implicitly obeyed’.
Captain Garstin and his eleven men aboard that Stirling would be amongst the first to put Mayne’s edicts to the test. For tonight’s mission they were charged with parachuting into the heart of France, to block German heavy reinforcements from reaching the D-Day beachheads, which would have calamitous consequences for Operation Overlord. Dropping some 200 miles behind the Normandy beaches, they would blow up railway lines, rolling stock and road transports, halting the German military in its tracks.
Their orders – classified top secret – were to cut ‘the main lines in the area PARIS–ORLÉANS and keep these cut for as long as possible’. Specifically, they were to cut ‘the EAST and SOUTH railways,’ thus blocking the advance of German armoured units –chiefly 9 SS Panzer Division Hohenstaufen, 10 SS Panzer Division Frundsberg and 2 SS Panzer Division Das Reich. In doing so, they were to employ tried and tested SAS tactics: ‘sabotage, disruption of communications, individual guerrilla action, etc., all designed to harass the enemy’.
Garstin’s stick was slated to be one of the first to drop, but scores of similar teams were to follow, spreading chaos across the length and breadth of France. Without such disruption, planners for Operation Overlord feared that it would take a matter of days for the Panzer divisions
to reach the Normandy beaches. If they did, some 150,000 Allied troops risked being driven back into the sea. At all costs the German heavy armour had to be stopped.
Small-scale hit-and-run operations such as Garstin and his men were now embarked upon were classic SAS taskings, yet it was only down to the dogged determination of Mayne and his fellow commanders that the SAS were going to be used in this way. Since their return to the UK, high command had failed utterly to grasp the unique nature and strategic value of such specialist forces. Indeed, initial plans drafted in support of Overlord had amounted to little more than a suicide mission.
On 29 March orders had been issued that the SAS would drop en masse on D-Day minus 1 – i.e. on 5 June – just a few miles to the rear of the landing beaches. There they would take up static positions to block any German forces from getting to the beaches. SAS commanders were aghast. They were never conceived of as a large-scale infantry fighting force; their skill was to wage war far behind the lines, in small, fast-moving bands executing shoot-n-scoot attacks, adhering to the tried and tested adage: ‘He who shoots and runs away, lives to shoot another day.’
Indeed, in David Stirling’s original conception the ideal SAS operational unit would be no more than four, so as ‘to extract the very maximum out of surprise and guile’. Operating in four-man units, ‘it was psychologically easier to make them all interdependent, so we had four pairs of ears that were listening and four pairs of eyes that were looking’. That way, an eighty-strong force could hit twenty targets in one fell swoop, before melting away into the night, which should ensure a string of successes.
Stirling, who famously described higher command as being ‘layer upon layer of fossilised shit’, averred that he sought recruits who were not inclined to say ‘“yes, sir” without thinking. Each one of them had to be an individual.’ He was single-minded in his conviction that ‘it was no good putting us under any orthodox . . . headquarters department . . . we had to have a special status of our own.’
