by Ian Blake
‘Can’t help you there, Tiger. But I was told by my brother, who was in Cairo earlier this year, that Colonel Stirling’s unit – the Special Air Service, it’s called, or something like that – was split up after the colonel was captured. Perhaps it’s an offshoot of that mob.’
Tiller had vaguely heard of Stirling and his recently formed Special Air Service. The SAS’s desert exploits sounded like Boys’ Own Paper stuff to him – not the kind of fighting the Corps went in for. The Marines had a long tradition of amphibious raiding and a Royal Marine Commando had already been formed, and had taken part in the Dieppe raid the previous year. But a few men dashing around the desert in jeeps fitted neither of these categories and Tiller looked sceptically on anything the Corps wasn’t involved in as probably not worth pursuing.
Which was why he had been – he had to admit it now – very doubtful at first about Tasler’s organization and schemes, though anything the major normally said or did was all right with Tiller. Indeed he would have followed that resourceful Royal Marines officer to the end of the earth if necessary. Still, he remembered thinking at the time that if the Chief of Combined Operations, Vice-Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, had backed Tasler’s ideas, then who was he, a mere sergeant, to have his doubts?
‘Sally’ll take it hard, you know.’
Tiller nodded. ‘I know.’
Curly grinned. ‘I’ll look after her.’
‘I bet you bloody will, you randy sod,’ said Tiller, who knew Curly to be happily married with two kids and a third on the way. Now that was the perfect example of what was meant by having ‘strong family ties’ and Tiller was having none of it.
He got up, folded the movement order, and put it in his pocket. ‘I’d better get my kit ready and say my farewells to the lads. I’m being picked up first thing tomorrow morning.’
‘Rather you than me,’ Curly said, but Tiller could detect the envy in his voice.
‘Yeah, I suppose so,’ he said. ‘So long.’
He extended his hand. Curly shook it and said: ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. The brothels there are notorious for some interesting strains of clap.’
Tiller walked out to the barracks and turned left along the coast road to Southsea. The rest of the mob had local billets since they had the same status as commandos. But Tiller had preferred to sleep at the barracks at Eastney, where he could keep his nightmare to himself.
The unit’s training headquarters were two Nissen huts on the sea front. One was used as a lecture room, the other for stores. They were situated right under one of the forts which had been built in Napoleonic times to guard the Solent. Called, for some reason Tiller had never discovered, Lumps Fort, it lay at one end of the six-mile boom which had been erected to protect Portsmouth harbour from torpedo attacks by submarines or from surface attack by small craft. Two other forts had been built in the Solent at around the same time as Lumps. They, too, were now part of Portsmouth’s defences, for the boom, which stretched to Seaview on the Isle of Wight, was not only joined to them but they were bristling with anti-aircraft guns.
Behind the Nissen huts was Southsea Corporation’s Canoe Lake, which in peacetime had attracted the many day trippers and holidaymakers who came to the seaside resort during the summer months. Tiller remembered splashing around in it as a small kid. Now it was deserted and drained, with only a puddle of rainwater in its middle. One of the concrete sides, Tiller noticed, was badly cracked, perhaps caused by a bomb a ‘tip-and-run’ German aircraft had dropped nearby a couple of months back.
Tiller skirted it and made for Dolphin Court, a block of flats which overlooked the lake and the Solent. The block had been taken over by the Admiralty. Flat 24 had originally housed the Development Centre of Combined Operations. But the Centre had been absorbed into the Combined Operations Experimental Establishment and its staff relocated to north Devon or somewhere, and Tasler, who had been an early member of the Centre, had requisitioned the flat for his unit.
Tiller showed his pass to the naval sentry and, ignoring the lift, climbed the stairs three at a time. It was all part of the fitness regime Tasler had imposed and which was second nature to Tiller now.
The door of the flat was open but Tiller knocked before entering. A pretty Wren petty officer, the unit’s clerk, looked up from her typewriter. ‘He’s waiting for you, Sergeant.’
‘Thank you, Maggie, and how are you this sunny morning?’
‘Just fine,’ the young woman said, and, fluttering her long eyelashes in mock coquetry, added: ‘As if you cared.’
Tiller leant on her desk and looked deep into her amazingly blue eyes. ‘Oh, but I do, Maggie, I do.’
But the Wren’s pretty face was deliberately expressionless now. She simply nodded towards the inner office. ‘You’re lucky. He’s in a good mood. So you’d better go in before the wind changes.’
Tiller pursed his lips and blew her a kiss. Maggie was a good sort who knew never to take anyone, or anything, too seriously. He turned and strode towards Tasler’s inner sanctum while the Wren studied Tiller’s straight back and broad shoulders, and renewed her resolve. Men like Tiger, her instincts told her, made wonderful lovers but they were not husband material. And she knew, with more than a twinge of regret, that much as she desired the former her nature and upbringing dictated she acquire a reasonable specimen of the latter.
The door had on it a neat sign reading ‘Major H.G. Tasler DSO OBE RM, Commanding Officer, Royal Marines Boom Patrol Detachment’.
‘Come,’ Tasler called out in response to Tiller’s knock. Tiller closed the door behind him, stiffened to attention, and saluted. Even after all these years he still counted to himself ‘up, one, two, three, down’ as his hand, palm outwards, came up to his beret before snapping down to his side.
Tasler sat at his desk surrounded by trays of paper. He was a man in his late twenties with red-gold hair, most of which he had lost, and a flowing moustache. He was studying a plan of a small craft which he thrust towards Tiller. ‘Morning, Tiger. Beautiful day. What do you think of this?’ He handed Tiller the plan. ‘We’re calling it the Sleeping Beauty.’
‘The motor submersible canoe,’ Tiller read aloud. ‘So here it is at last, sir.’
‘The first is just about to be delivered for trials,’ said Tasler. ‘I’m sorry you won’t be here to try it out. I assume your movement order has arrived?’
‘Yes, sir. This morning.’
Tasler snorted. ‘About time, too. We’d better start the rigmarole for signing you off the unit’s strength. But before you go I want to show you something else. Maggie!’
The Wren appeared at the door.
‘Sergeant Tiller’s leaving us, Maggie, so get the necessary bumf ready for me, will you. I won’t be long.’
The Wren’s blue eyes rested on Tiller for a moment, but the twinge of regret she felt again did not show in them for an instant.
‘The best of luck, Sergeant,’ she said. She didn’t ask where he was going. No one in the unit was ever asked that.
‘Thanks, Maggie,’ Tiller said. ‘Perhaps you’ll stop refusing to come out with me when I come back a hero.’
‘I doubt it, Sergeant. I very much doubt it.’
The two men doubled down the stairs and out into the summer sunshine.
‘I think that girl’s saving herself for her knight in shining armour, sir,’ Tiller said.
‘I think it’s just,’ Tasler replied with a grin, ‘that at a very young age her mother must have warned her about men like you.’
Half the unit’s complement of thirty-four men were attending a navigation lecture in one of the Nissen huts. The other half were training on the beach. The boat-house, where the cockles were kept, was on the road along the sea front. Beyond the road was a sea defence wall with a drop of five feet to the beach. It was another of Tasler’s rules that although there were steps down to the beach these were never to be used. Whatever a man was carrying he had to go via the wall not the steps.
&nbs
p; As they approached the boat-house Tiller could see that an instructor was supervising a race between three teams of two men each to get their cockle from the boat-house, across the road, down the wall, across the beach and into the sea. The teams then had to paddle round a buoy some three hundred yards from the beach, return, run up the beach with the cockle, heave it over the wall and across the road, and set it back on its cradle in the boat-house. Another three teams were practising how to push their cockles down the beach with their paddles and then into the water, the most effective way, it had been found, of launching a cockle with its crew in rough seas. Others were doing their daily feet-hardening exercises, which entailed running up and down the pebble beach in bare feet or jumping on to the pebbles from the wall. One whole section of ten men would be aboard Celtic, an old Thames barge moored in Chichester harbour. Sections were rotated a week at a time to practise, among other routines, shallow-water diving in the DSEA Sladen diving suit and, the most unpopular exercise of all, crawling across the mud-flats at low tide.
But the most effective exercise Tasler had developed was for his canoeists to sneak up on, and board, the official boom patrol boats before their crews were aware what was happening. It was like a game of grandmother’s footsteps at sea and some of the canoeists had become very good at it. Favourite targets were the patrol boats which were dispatched to keep the Solent clear while the anti-aircraft batteries on shore and on the forts practised shooting. These patrol boats were sometimes manned by Wrens and in the summer, when they thought they were safe from prying eyes, they were often tempted to strip to their undies and sunbathe.
Tiller had met Sally that way. She had been lying on her back on the deck when he had silently levered himself aboard. She had been modestly attired in nothing more than a small towel draped across her middle. Her scream must have been heard in Southampton.
Tiller smiled to himself now when he remembered the heated conversation that had followed. Perhaps it was the manner of their first meeting that had persuaded her to try and make an honest man of him.
Yes, it was time to move on.
‘They all look ready for action, sir,’ said Tiller.
A shadow passed over Tasler’s face. ‘So am I, Tiger, so am I. But whatever plans we put up, there seems to be a good reason for not going ahead with them. As you know, we were going to have a crack at going up the Gironde again, but in the end the good and the great decided against it. I certainly wouldn’t let you be leaving us if there had been any chance of us being able to have another go. That is, presuming you would have wanted to have another try?’
Tasler looked at Tiller enquiringly.
‘I’m sure I would have, sir,’ Tiller replied. Like falling off a horse, he knew the best possible way of combating fear was to remount as quickly as possible. Now he would have to find another way of eradicating his nightmare.
‘Well, “if ifs and ands were pots and pans”,’ Tasler quoted cheerfully. ‘It didn’t happen so we must get on and hope something else crops up.’
As they walked back past the two Nissen huts the major said: ‘This is what I wanted to show you.’
They entered the store hut and walked to the back of it. Tasler threw back a canvas cover and displayed the captured Italian explosive motor boat.
‘The Eyeties officially call them Motoscafi di Turismo modifacti, or MTMs,’ said Tasler, ’though the pilot who we captured said they were generally known as barchini esplosivi or barchini for short.’
Tiller whistled. ‘So that’s what it looks like. It’s bigger than I had imagined.’
‘Eighteen feet. Vosper’s have finished with it as ours is now well developed, so I am sending it to Celtic for the lads to practise on.’
So this, Tiller thought, was what the unit’s secret weapon was being modelled on; the weapon which had always been referred to as a boom patrol boat to cover up its real identity. It had been the hub of Tasler’s activities, the original reason for the formation of his unit. Yet no one had yet had a chance to see even the Italian version of it.
‘It looks fast, sir.’
‘It’s powered by an Alfa Romeo engine which can crank out 120hp. Vosper’s got over thirty-five knots out of it.’
Tiller studied the craft intently, astonished by its compactness and the audacity of those who had operated it. He touched a hinged rectangle of wood attached to the boat’s counter right behind where the driver sat, and looked quizzically at Tasler.
‘That’s the flutterboard,’ said Tasler. ‘It’s attached by a line to the driver’s wrist. When he wants to bale out he pulls this lever here and the flutterboard drops into the water. The driver can climb on to it to escape the concussion of the explosion when the boat hits its target. It can also be used as a surfboard.’
‘Ingenious.’
‘Very. The Italians aren’t half as daft as some people make out.’
‘And this is the detonating device?’ Tiller pointed to the bumper-car rim around the bows of the boat.
‘That’s it. This one had 500lb of TNT in its bows. It was meant to be detonated by a hydrostatic fuse, but something went wrong with it and it ran up on to the beach with the driver. Suda Bay in Crete that was, in April ’41. But others managed to cripple a tanker and damage the cruiser York. Gave everyone a nasty shock, I can tell you.’
‘Is that how we’re going to use them?’
Tasler shook his head. ‘We’re going to drop them by parachute near their targets, complete with driver.’
Tiller whistled quietly again. So that was why they had all been put through a parachute course earlier that year.
The two men walked out into the sunshine and back to Dolphin Court, where Tasler shook Tiller’s hand. ‘Good luck.’
‘I reckon I’m leaving just when things are beginning to happen, sir.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ Tasler replied, but he sounded doubtful. ‘Anyway, I look upon you as the unit’s standard-bearer in the eastern Mediterranean. Not enough of the high-ups know what we’re about or what we’re capable of. Show ’em what we can do, Tiger. I’m relying on you.’
2
The roar of the Halifax bomber’s engines made it impossible to hear anything, and the fuselage vibrated and bucked. The dispatchman touched the shoulder of the young army officer sitting nonchalantly on the bench reading a book. For the first time the dispatchman noticed the officer’s sand-coloured beret with its unusual winged badge. He had no idea what it signified, and it was now too late to find out. Anyway, on this type of mission it was better not to ask too many questions.
The officer looked up and the dispatchman gestured to the officer’s beret and then to the pudding-basin-shaped paratroop helmet lying next to him. The officer nodded and smiled, and reached for the helmet. He took off his beret and tucked it under the epaulette of his left shoulder, which had a single crown stitched to it.
Christ, thought the dispatchman, if majors are that young nowadays the British Army must have suffered heavy losses among its officers. Or perhaps, he corrected himself, this chap’s just brilliant. He looked the studious type. The dispatchman glanced at the dog-eared service-issue paperback the major was reading, its cheap paper already greying and frayed. The Aeneid, it was called. The title meant nothing to the dispatchman.
He held up five fingers.
The major buckled the chin strap of the parachute helmet, and nodded.
Five minutes, the dispatchman mouthed, just to make sure.
The major nodded again, moved his beret from his shoulder to a pocket of his battledress trousers and buttoned it up. Then he leant across to the two figures lying on the floor of the Halifax, and shook each in turn.
One was the major’s wireless operator, a sergeant, the other his Italian interpreter, an elderly English captain. Both buckled on their gear and donned their helmets. The sergeant put his helmet on with practised ease, but the captain initially put his on back to front. The major grinned at him encouragingly. The captain smiled grimly and allowed
the major to adjust his chin strap.
‘It’s easy!’ the major shouted above the roar of the engines, but the captain shook his head, not in disagreement but because he couldn’t hear.
The dispatchman was back now. He held up two fingers and indicated that they should attach their static lines to the wire running along the bomber’s roof.
Parachutists dropped from Halifax bombers usually had to exit from a hole in the fuselage floor. But this one, part of a Special Duties squadron based in the Middle East, had been specially converted by having a door cut into its side. But it did not run to such refinements as red and green lights to indicate when the parachutist had to jump.
The dispatchman opened the door and it swung inwards and clipped itself open. The rush of night air and the increased noise made all three men gasp and lower their heads.
Below them the major could see flickers of light and it took him a few moments to realize they were being fired on from the ground.
The dispatchman had decided the wireless operator should jump first, then the elderly captain, and finally the major. That way the captain would be able to see the sergeant jumping and his parachute opening. This would encourage him to follow. If it didn’t, then the captain knew he had the major behind him, which should be encouragement enough to jump. In parachuting, pride usually conquered fear.
Thirty seconds, the dispatchman mouthed, and the wireless operator, his set strapped to his back, took his position by the door, gripping each side of the opening. The dispatchman banged the operator’s shoulder and the operator was gone, and seconds later the captain saw the operator’s parachute bloom. It did nothing to alleviate the dryness of his mouth or the thought that he must have been stark raving mad to volunteer for such a mission.
He gripped the sides of the door as he had seen the operator do. He had seen the signal the operator had been given to jump, and expected the same slap on the shoulder. But the dispatchman knew his job and wasn’t taking any risks. With just the right amount of force he ejected the captain by pushing him between the shoulders and watched until his parachute opened. Poor bugger, he thought, he was much too old to be jumping.
