by Damien Lewis
On 30 December 1941, Byrne had been part of a five-man raiding party that had journeyed to an enemy airbase situated not far from the Arch of the Philaeni. On arrival they had discovered there was nothing much there: the airfield appeared to be little more than a landing strip hewn out of the desert, devoid of any warplanes. Disheartened, the team had returned to their rendezvous point to wait for the LRDG. But the patrol tasked to collect them had come under fire from enemy aircraft in a ferocious eight-hour attack, the survivors were forced to limp back to base in their one remaining truck.
Official reports noted that Byrne’s party waited seven days to be picked up, during which time they consumed most of their food rations and almost all of their water. As time passed it became evident that the normally reliable LRDG were not coming. Byrne described this realisation as ‘every desert soldier’s nightmare coming true’. After a week of such waiting, they finally started the long trek back with very little by way of supplies. Thus began a desperate, nine-day slog through the desert.
They covered 150 miles in total, scavenging water wherever they could: draining the radiators of enemy vehicles, drinking their own urine and even trying the brackish water from polluted salt marshes. They trudged through fields of battle littered with burned-out tanks; they ate lizards and snails; and they came under fire repeatedly from enemy patrols. Worst of all, on the last night of their epic march Byrne recalled how they came upon a mass grave, where the stench of death hung thick in the air, and the ‘arms, legs, heads and feet’ of British soldiers ‘protruded from the sand at odd angles’. The party were finally picked up by a patrol of the King’s Dragoon Guards, who delivered them back to their base camp.
Unavoidably, that ordeal was at the forefront of Byrne’s mind, as he contemplated the unending desert before him now. It had been a near-fatal mistake to remain so long at the Arch of the Philaeni, one that Byrne had no wish to repeat. He estimated that it was over two hundred miles to the closest friendly outpost now – the French-held fort at Bir Hakeim, which marked the southernmost point of the Allied frontline. While he had yet to sip from the two-pint bottle of water he carried, he knew it would not last long if he tarried in the desert heat. He told himself that he would wait until dawn and not a moment longer.
Byrne killed time by taking stock of his supplies. In addition to his two pints of water, the only rations he had were a tin of emergency chocolate and half a pint of brandy in a silver flask. He had been delighted to receive the liquor as a gift from his commander during an earlier SAS operation, after being promoted back to the rank of Corporal. But now, he badly wished it were full of water instead. He also carried a Webley revolver, a Thompson submachine gun – commonly known as a ‘Tommy gun’ – binoculars and the iconic Commando fighting knife.
With dawn, there was still no sign of the LRDG, and Byrne felt his resolve begin to falter. Summoning all of his willpower, he forced himself to get to his feet and, with reluctance, stepped out into the vast wilderness. He headed south-east over the featureless and empty desert and did not rest until the sun had risen high enough to really warm the sands. While thirst was a constant companion, Byrne recalled, he was ‘determined not to drink until dusk’.
Byrne had an iron will when it came to water discipline, something that had been drilled into the SAS recruits remorselessly. During training at Kabrit, maintaining iron-tight water discipline had been sacrosanct. Jock Lewes had marched for days on no water, and all were expected to follow his example. There was good reason behind this, as another renowned SAS desert survivor, Jack Sillito, explained: ‘The basic thing was never drink during the heat of the day because you’d just perspire and it would all come out of you again.’
During training each man was permitted, under observation, to swig from his bottle, wash the fluid around his mouth to dispel the terrible dryness, and then spit the water back into the bottle. Recruits would be sent out on exercises in the morning with a full water bottle and expected to return with it a day later. In this way they trained their minds to ignore the water they carried, leaving it alone in spite of their thirst.
Ignoring the burning heat, Byrne marched until twilight, when he took his first drink. ‘The first mouthful evaporated as it passed down my throat,’ he remembered, though he did sense the second reaching his stomach. As night fell, he tried to sleep, but was beset by worry. He reckoned he’d covered around thirty miles that day. If he turned around now he could make it back to the rendezvous before dawn, in the hope of meeting the LRDG patrol. Perhaps they had arrived after he’d left and were even now making efforts to find him. He lay awake until the cold night air forced him to make a move.
With a heavy heart he took up a bearing for Bir Hakeim, so abandoning the possibility of turning back. For better or worse, he was now committed to the long march. He would just have to keep walking: ‘Day or night, it did not matter now.’
Byrne pushed on a further twenty miles that night, and after a brief rest continued at a good pace. The following day a vicious sandstorm blew up, leaving him little choice but to curl up on the ground and wait for the worst to pass. He must have drifted into sleep, for he awoke stiff and shivering, his eyes, ears and nose caked with sand. It was the depths of the night. He swigged some brandy to warm himself. Surprisingly, the gift had actually come in handy, after all . . . Forcing himself to his feet, he decided to press on, using the stars to find his way. Byrne’s pace only slowed with the return of the burning heat, come dawn. He rinsed his mouth occasionally with what remained of his water, spitting the liquid back into the bottle.
Byrne staggered on, but by the morning of his fourth day he was feeling horribly weakened. After much agonising, he decided to abandon his Thompson submachine gun, first rendering it useless by scattering the parts across a wide area of sand. Relieved of that extra weight he set off once more. Come noon he went to swish a sip of water around his mouth, only to find that the remaining liquid had congealed into a ‘lukewarm slime, having become nothing more than spittle’. Byrne gagged and vomited on the warm sludge, sinking to the ground. He lay there, face in the sand, ‘unable or unwilling to go on’.
His mind turned to the friends and comrades he had lost, for the early days of the SAS had been marred by tragedy. In November 1941, the desert had claimed around half of the men of L-Detachment during their first ever mission, codenamed Operation Squatter. For Squatter, Middle East Command had defined their primary task as being ‘to raid both aerodromes at Timimi and Gazala’, taking out the enemy warplanes based there. This was in preparation for Operation Crusader, the Eighth Army offensive designed to relieve the coastal city of Tobruk, which was besieged by Afrika Korps forces.
David Stirling had reported that the operation involved dropping teams of parachutists ‘at night without moon, thus preserving surprise to the upmost’. But as the time for Squatter had approached, the weather deteriorated. Unseasonable wind and rain swept the desert, until the raiders faced the worst weather seen in the area for thirty years. But in spite of the terrible conditions, everybody wanted to jump. The SAS troopers, keen for action, insisted that the mission go ahead regardless.
Thrown off course by strong gusts and appalling visibility, the pilots had faced horrendous conditions in which to drop the troops. Some of Stirling’s men were knocked unconscious by the impact of landing; others were killed outright or injured so badly they had to be left behind; and those who did make it to ground in one piece struggled to get out of their parachute harnesses in the ferocious wind. A number were swept along and, unable to free themselves from their ’chutes, were ‘dragged to death’. Still more had been dropped so far off course they ended up falling into enemy hands while wandering through the dunes.
Of the fifty-odd men who had taken off from Kabrit, only twenty-one made it back alive. Byrne was one of the survivors, though he could hardly bear to recall the trauma of that night, when so many of the men that he had trained alongside had bee
n killed. Thinking now of his fallen comrades, their remains lost for ever in the sand, Byrne stubbornly refused to join their number. Summoning his last vestiges of strength, he pulled himself into a sitting position, scrabbled together a couple of cigarette packets and some blank pages from his diary and lit a fire, warming the viscous sludge in his water bottle until it liquified. He mixed this with some brandy from his hip flask and, grimacing, swallowed the lot in one.
With that, he struggled to his feet and by sheer effort of will he marched on. It was dark now, and he staggered ahead by the light of the stars alone. He continued through the dawn, finally taking a break in the late afternoon and falling into an exhausted sleep. He came to his senses sometime later. Once more, it was dark. His mouth was dry and his head throbbed painfully. He figured it was the night of his sixth day alone in the desert, but he was no longer entirely sure. The last twenty-four hours had left him in a state close to delirium and he was losing track of time.
Byrne struggled to his feet and ‘plodded on slowly and uncertainly’, he recalled, barely able to keep moving. Then, suddenly, quite ‘without thinking about it’, Byrne decided to try a spell at running. He forced himself to walk and run for hours on end until, finally feeling the need to rest, he dropped to the sand once more. He had no way of knowing how long he lay asleep – his watch had stopped some days ago. But when he awoke it was daylight. Doubting whether he had the energy even to stand, Byrne pulled out his binoculars and surveyed the scene. Then he noticed, standing motionless no more than a hundred yards away, the unmistakable figure of a man. He was dressed in the flowing robes of the local Bedouin – desert nomads who live a wandering existence across North Africa, thriving in the desert as their ancestors had before them.
The stranger stood very still, shading his eyes against the glare, regarding Byrne with interest. Byrne tried to call out, but his parched throat could only croak out a hoarse rasp. He waved his hands and threw clouds of sand into the air, trying desperately to get the man to comprehend his dire condition. Finally, the Bedou hurried forward, dragged Byrne to his feet and helped him towards a pair of goatskin tents, concealed in a depression in the desert.
Byrne’s would-be saviour settled him in the shade of the largest of the two tents, making him comfortable with pillows, before holding a large enamel bowl of goat’s milk to his lips. Byrne drank deeply, finding the liquid ‘delicious and cool’, slowly finding his strength and clarity of mind returning. He was joined in the tent by more Bedouin. Though he feared he must be ‘a revolting sight, not having washed or shaved’ for more than two weeks, they treated him with kindness and respect, sharing a meal of goat meat in thick gravy and coarse Arab bread.
Using a mixture of English, Arabic and Italian, the Bedouin explained to Byrne that they were heading across the desert, to take camels to Mechili, a remote village 170 miles east of Benghazi. Byrne felt ‘very lucky to come across them’, for it was by sheer chance that they happened to have chosen this spot to break their journey. After thanking them for the meal, which he recognised had been ‘especially laid on’ for his benefit, Byrne announced that he would have to leave. His hosts were shocked. They invited him to accompany them to Mechili, or at least to spend the night in their tent to regain his strength.
Now that Byrne ‘had fallen in with friendly Arabs’, as the SAS war diary from the time noted, he would have been forgiven for opting to remain in their care until he was fully recovered. Yet he remained resolute: he must keep going and return to his unit. He checked with the Bedouin the direction in which Bir Hakeim lay. They indicated it was around eighty miles due east. Before departure, an elderly Bedouin woman refilled Byrne’s water bottle, pressing a parcel of food into his hands. Inside lay more of the coarse bread and some dates. Byrne felt deeply touched by their generosity. The war had been hard on these nomadic people and they were often hungry.
With final words of thanks and farewell, Byrne set out east into the desert night, walking with renewed energy and spirit. At this pace he guessed he would reach his destination in a little over two days, depending on the terrain. The next night he was still ‘too excited to sleep much’, and he set out again before daybreak. Feeling fit and confident, he covered the ground rapidly, figuring he had less than forty miles to go now.
The following morning, he began what he reckoned would be the last leg of his journey. He walked at a slower pace, taking care to rake the shimmering horizon with his binoculars, searching for any sign of Bir Hakeim. The ground sloped upwards and Byrne increased his pace, hoping to be able to spot an Allied outpost from the higher ground. He crested the top of the rise and the distinctive form of a Chevrolet truck hove into view, the kind favoured by the British military here in the desert – none more so than the LRDG.
Byrne felt his heart leap. ‘I thought that I was by now in the British lines, and walked towards the truck,’ he noted in his escape report. But as he stepped forwards, the sand around him erupted under the impact of heavy machine-gun fire. The firing only stopped when Byrne found himself surrounded by a patrol of Afrika Korps soldiers. Just ahead, beyond the rise of the hill, a pair of tanks squatted in the valley, camouflaged against the desert. The turret of one of these flew open and a young German officer sprang out, sprinting towards Byrne.
‘Hand over your weapon!’ he yelled. ‘Get your hands up!’ The figure did not stop running until he was mere feet away, his pistol pointed directly at the SAS trooper. ‘Get your hands up!’
Reluctantly, Byrne pulled his Webley from its holster. Dropping it to the sand, he refused to raise his hands. Sensing his defiance, the German officer made to strike Byrne in the face with his pistol, but instead unleashed a shot at point blank range.
Byrne collapsed to the ground. Blood leaked into the sand, staining it scarlet. Figures rushed to help Byrne, turning him onto his back. Shortly, he realised how incredibly lucky he had been. The bullet had taken a slice out of his nose and his eyebrow but had miraculously caused no more serious damage than that. The gashes were bleeding badly, as was his lip, which, already painfully blistered, had been split open by a rock when he fell.
The German officer seemed badly shaken. He explained to Byrne in broken English that he had not meant to shoot him, only hit him with the pistol when Byrne had failed to raise his hands. He had pulled the trigger by accident. For his part, Byrne was caked in blood and sand, and unable to believe that he had survived a journey of almost two hundred miles across the desert, only to be captured by the enemy at the final hurdle.
The German soldiers fussed about, brushing the sand from his uniform and trying to persuade him to lie on a stretcher, but Byrne shook his head. He was damned if he would let them carry him! As he allowed himself to be led in the direction of the tanks, he realised that amid the shock and drama of his capture the German officer had failed to search him. He still had his fighting knife and compass.
Byrne was led past the tanks and over a further rise, where he regarded the scene before him in astonishment. There ‘were hundreds of armoured fighting vehicles’ parked up amid the featureless terrain. ‘The whole of the German Afrika Korps’ seemed to be gathered there, Byrne noted. Indeed, the Chevrolet that he had spotted was nothing more than a captured British vehicle.
Before long they reached a vehicle that Byrne described as being like a mobile library, with ‘the whole of one side covered in maps’. There, he was brought before a group of senior commanders. The young officer who had shot Byrne began recounting the story, until a senior officer cut him off by barking out some orders. Figures stepped forward, grabbing Byrne roughly by the arms. He resisted violently, startling them and causing one to drop his rifle. Despite their nervousness and apparent inexperience, the German soldiers persevered, attempting to drag Byrne forwards, but they were no match for his brute strength and stubborn, unyielding nature.
Finally, the German commander shouted another order and the soldiers stepped away from Byrne.
When he was no longer being forcibly restrained, Byrne approached of his own accord. Byrne’s attitude represented more than just wayward obstinacy – it embodied the spirit of the SAS. Self-possessed, despite the gravity of the situation, Byrne refused to compromise on being treated respectfully, no matter the difference in rank between himself, a corporal, and those before him. The appreciation of merit above rank was actively encouraged in the SAS, being the bedrock of the unit.
Of the men he had recruited, David Stirling once remarked, ‘they weren’t really controllable. They were harnessable.’
Despite his bloodied face, unkempt beard, dirty uniform and swollen lip, Byrne stood bolt upright as he met the enemy commander’s gaze. He held his head high as the German examined the emblem stitched over his breast pocket. That badge – depicting the open wings of a desert beetle and a stylised parachute in two shades of blue – had been bestowed upon Byrne when he completed seven successful parachute jumps. All SAS troopers wore their ‘wings’ with pride. Initially, they were sewn onto the man’s sleeve, but when a trooper had carried out three raids, or had otherwise distinguished himself, he was granted the privilege of wearing his wings above his breast pocket. That was where Byrne – a seasoned and distinguished raider – wore this iconic emblem.
