The Daring Dozen

by Gavin Mortimer

  In February 1941, 7, 8 and 11 Commandos sailed from Scotland for the Middle East. On board one of the troop ships were Stirling and two other notable officers of 8 Commando, the novelist and satirist Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill, son of the Prime Minister. The trio whiled away the voyage playing cards, drinking pink gins, and doing their utmost to escape the signalling courses and physical training organized by their commanding officer.

  The Commandos arrived in Egypt on 11 March and were soon in camp in Geneifa near the Great Bitter Lakes, under inspection from General Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief Middle East Forces. He told them that they were now to be known as ‘Layforce’ under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Laycock.

  The commando units separated, and while 7 Commando took part in a botched raid on the Libyan port of Bardia and 11 Commando were posted to Cyprus (and then attacked Vichy French forces in Syria), 8 Commando spent their time in more mundane pastimes. There were daily route marches into the hills, lessons in map reading and fatigue duties such as mending fences blown down by the frequent sand storms. In what free time they had the men went swimming in the Suez Canal.

  On 9 April, 8 Commando boarded a troop ship and sailed for Port Said from where they entrained to Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city. They were not there long before being ordered to move once more, to Cairo, where they were allowed to spend a day at the race track. Stirling lost a lot of money on the horses but some of his men had better luck and later blew their winnings in the city’s many bars.

  By early May Stirling and his men had still seen no action. They idled away their time on the banks of the Suez Canal and on 3 May Evelyn Waugh, Layforce’s Intelligence Officer, wrote in the brigade war diary: ‘Repeated cancellations and postponements of LAYFORCE is engendering an attitude of cynicism in all ranks.’ As to prove his point, Waugh noted some graffiti found scrawled on the Glengyle, one of their troop ships: ‘Never in the whole history of human endeavour have so few been buggered about by so many.’

  Not long afterwards 8 Commando sailed to Mersa Matruh, an Egyptian port approximately 150 miles from the border with Libya. They began practising for a raid on a German airfield 30 miles from Tobruk but the mission was then scrubbed because of bad weather. The sense of frustration was palpable and it was almost too much to bear for David Stirling, but at least he had a haven to which he could escape when the opportunity presented itself – his brother’s flat in Cairo.

  Peter Stirling was a secretary at the British Embassy in the city who was in the habit of throwing wild and raucous parties for the expatriate community. David was present whenever possible and after one particular shindig discovered the elixir of life. ‘I chanced, after a somewhat vigorous party, to be in the company of a charming young nurse from the Scottish Hospital,’ recounted Stirling in his biography. ‘And I must have bemoaned the fact that the next day was going to be quite intolerable because of the inevitable hangover. She told me to pop around to the hospital the next morning and ask for her. This I did and was introduced to the magical effects of taking a couple of deep snifters from the pure oxygen bottle. Wonderful. The hangover vanished in seconds.’5

  In June 1941 Middle East HQ (MEHQ) informed Laycock that his force of commandos was being disbanded and its men either returned to their original unit or used as replacements for undermanned regiments in North Africa. The decision by MEHQ had been prompted by two factors: first, Layforce had taken heavy casualties during operations in Syria, Crete and Bardia. There just weren’t enough men to replenish their diminished ranks, particularly as the British were launching a large offensive against Rommel’s Afrika Korps called Operation Battleaxe. Secondly, British intelligence reported that since Layforce had begun raiding targets along the Mediterranean coasts, Axis forces had strengthened their defences and they were now largely immune to the type of raids envisioned by the British commandos.

  While Laycock wrote to Major-General Arthur Smith, Chief of the General Staff, Middle East Forces, expressing his ‘bitter disappointment at witnessing the disbandment of a force on which they had set their hearts’, Stirling wrote to his family in Scotland to tell them: ‘The Commandos are no more. I am not sure what I shall do now but I am attempting and may succeed in establishing a permanent parachute unit. It would be on a small scale but would be more amusing than any other form of soldiering.’6

  Dismayed as he was by the breakup of Layforce, Stirling was far from despondent. He had seen in 8 Commando the potential capability of small bands of highly-trained soldiers, but he had also glimpsed their weaknesses. So had Jock Lewes, a puritanical officer in the Welsh Guards, whose inspiration for a force of paratroopers came from the recent history of Crete and what the German Fallschirmjäger had achieved in capturing the island from the Allies in May 1941.

  Lewes and Stirling were granted permission to intercept a consignment of parachutes destined for India and experiment with their idea of forming an airborne unit. Mick D’Arcy of the Irish Guards accompanied Lewes and Stirling as they collected the parachutes from an RAF officer at a base near Fuka. ‘He showed us the parachutes we were to use,’ recalled D’Arcy, who wrote a report on the first parachute exercise by British troops in North Africa:

  From the log books we saw that the last periodical examination had been omitted but Lt Lewes decided that they were OK. Next along with Lt Stirling and Sgt Stone who were hoping to do a job in Syria, we made a trial flight. The plane used was a Vickers ‘Valencia’. We threw out a dummy made from sandbags and tent poles. The parachute opened OK but the tent poles were smashed on landing. Afterwards we tried a 10ft jump from the top of the plane and then a little parachute control.

  The following afternoon we flew inland in the Valencia which was used to deliver mail. We reached the landing field towards dusk, landed, fitted on our parachutes, and decided to jump in the failing light. We were to jump in pairs, Lt Lewes and his servant Gdsn Davies* first, the RAF officer was to despatch. The instructions were to dive out as though going into water. We hooked ourselves up, circled the aerodrome, and on a signal from the RAF officer, Lt Lewes and Davies dived out. Next time round I dived out, and was surprised to see Lt Stirling pass me in the air. Lt Lewes made a perfect landing, next came Davies a little shaken. Lt Stirling injured his spine and also lost his sight for about an hour; next myself, a little shaken and a few scratches, and lastly Sgt Stone who seemed OK.7

  Stirling’s parachute had caught on the aircraft’s tail section as he jumped into the slipstream, an error that proved common among inexperienced army paratroopers. With a section of his canopy torn, Stirling descended at high velocity and hit the ground with a sickening thud. Temporarily blinded and paralysed (the injuries to his spine would plague Stirling in later years), Stirling was rushed to Cairo’s Scottish General Hospital while a telegram was despatched to his parents in Scotland informing them that their son had been admitted to hospital on 15 June ‘suffering from contusion of the back as a result of enemy action’.

  As he lay in bed, slowly recovering the feeling in his legs, Stirling put his enforced rest to good use. The ‘job in Syria’ that D’Arcy tantalizingly referred to has been lost to posterity, but whatever Stirling and Sergeant Stone (a 31-year-old Londoner in the Scots Guards who was killed on the first SAS operation in November 1941) were planning it was now shelved.

  But Stirling’s enthusiasm for a parachute unit remained as strong as ever despite his accident. Propping himself up in bed, Stirling drafted a memo: Case for the retention of a limited number of special service troops, for employment as parachutists. In a subsequent summarization of the memo Stirling wrote:

  I argued the advantages of establishing a unit based on the principle of the fullest exploitation of surprise and of making the minimum demands on manpower and equipment. I argued that the application of this principle would mean in effect the employment of a sub-unit of five men to cover a target previously requiring four troops of a Commando, i.e. about 200 men. I sought to prove that, if an aer
odrome or transport park was the objective of an operation, then the destruction of 50 aircraft or units of transport was more easily accomplished by a sub-unit of five men than by a force of 200 men. I further concluded that 200 properly selected, trained and equipped men, organized into sub-units of five, should be able to attack at least thirty different objectives at the same time on the same night as compared to only one objective using the current Commando technique. So, only 25% success in the former is equivalent to many times the maximum result in the latter.8

  Stirling spent several weeks in hospital and upon his release resolved to put his memo into the hands of a senior officer at MEHQ. How Stirling actually achieved this has been shrouded in myth and hearsay ever since the publication of Virginia Cowles’ The Phantom Major in 1958. Cowles interviewed Stirling and several other SAS veterans in the course of her research and produced a colourful description of Stirling, complete with crutches, sneaking into MEHQ in Cairo through a gap in the fence, having been denied entry because he lacked an official pass. This seems far-fetched in the extreme.

  MEHQ was tightly guarded (the British were paranoid about spies in Cairo) and it is inconceivable that a 6ft 6in officer on crutches could have slipped through a gap in the wire and disappeared inside headquarters without being apprehended. Furthermore, according to Cowles, Stirling evaded an armed guard on his tail by slipping through the first door he encountered inside MEHQ. By an amazing coincidence it was the office of one of Stirling’s lecturers from the Guards Depot at Pirbright, who recognized his former pupil at once and harangued him for his impertinence. Fleeing his abuser, Stirling tried the next office and found himself face to face with Major-General Neil Ritchie, Deputy Chief of General Staff (DCGS), Middle East Forces, who liked what the young lieutenant had to say about the potential of a parachute unit.

  In the detailed six-page account of the formation of L Detachment, written not long after the war, Stirling recorded the far more prosaic reality of how he proposed his idea: ‘Having submitted these proposals to the C-in-C [General Claude Auchinleck] I was three days later summoned to the DCGS, Major General Neil Ritchie. He took me along to the C-in-C and CGS [Chief of General Staff Arthur Smith] and after some discussion they agreed that the unit should be formed forthwith.’9

  What had impressed Auchinleck above all was Stirling’s comprehensive plan for a raid to coincide with the forthcoming large-scale offensive that was common knowledge among British forces in Egypt. Stirling outlined how his force would parachute into Libya in five raiding units two nights before the main attack was launched. ‘The DZs [drop zones] of these sub-units were to be 12 miles south into the desert from their objectives and they were to be dropped at night without moon, thus preserving surprise to the utmost,’ wrote Stirling. The men would lie up for 24 hours and then launch five simultaneous attacks against Axis forward fighter and bomber bases between Timini and Gazala. Once the raids had been effected the raiders would rendezvous at a pre-arranged spot in the desert where a patrol of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) would be waiting.

  Auchinleck was sold on the plan. He promoted Stirling to captain and authorized him to recruit six officers and 60 other ranks to a unit called L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade; the reasoning being that if – or more likely when – German intelligence got wind of the incipient force, they would be dismayed to discover that a British airborne brigade was in Egypt.

  Thrilled that his idea had won official approval, Stirling nonetheless had one demand to make of Auchinleck. Stirling had a visceral dislike of staff officers, a species he termed ‘fossilized shits’ on account of their outdated ideas as to how a war should be run. Stirling ‘insisted with the C-in-C that the unit must be responsible for its own training and operational planning and that, therefore, the commander of the unit must come directly under the C-in-C. I emphasized how fatal it would be for the proposed unit to be put under any existing Branch or formation for administration.’10

  Auchinleck had no objections and a delighted Stirling departed MEHQ to begin the task of breathing life into his brainchild.

  Stirling first appropriated the six officers, of whom Jock Lewes was a priority. It took Stirling a while to convince the sombre Lewes that the unit wasn’t a ‘shortterm flight of fancy’ and that he himself wasn’t a ‘good-time Charlie’. Eventually Lewes agreed, and soon he was joined by five more lieutenants: Englishmen Peter Thomas and Charles Bonington (the latter the father of the renowned mountaineer, Chris Bonington); and three ex-Layforce officers in Irishmen Eoin McGonigal and Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, and the fresh-faced Scot Bill Fraser.

  Mayne also needed some convincing, but said later that one of the Scot’s strengths was his way of ‘making you think you are a most important person. Stirling was a master of that art and it got him good results’.11

  Guardsman Johnny Cooper agreed with Mayne’s assessment. The teenager from 2nd Battalion Scots Guards stepped forward to volunteer for L Detachment when Stirling arrived at their desert camp, dubbed ‘Bug Bug’, looking for recruits. ‘He talked to you, not at you, and he usually gave orders in a very polite fashion,’ recalled Cooper. ‘His charisma was overpowering and we followed him everywhere.’12

  Most of Stirling’s recruits, however, were the disillusioned men from Layforce, the highly trained former commandos stuck in the desert waiting to be posted somewhere. ‘We were just hanging around in the desert getting fed up,’ remembered Jeff Du Vivier, who had fought under Mayne with 11 Commando at the battle of Litani River. ‘Then along came Stirling asking for volunteers. I was hooked on the idea from the beginning, it meant we were going to see some action.’

  Stirling established L Detachment’s camp at Kabrit, a windswept spot 90 miles east of Cairo on the edge of the Great Bitter Lake. The HQ was christened ‘Stirling’s Rest Camp’, an ironic moniker given the remorseless nature of the training that the men endured.

  ‘In our training programme the principle on which we worked was entirely different from that of the Commandos,’ remembered Stirling. ‘A Commando unit, having once selected from a batch of volunteers, were committed to those men and had to nurse them up to the required standard. L Detachment, on the other hand, had set a minimum standard to which all ranks had to attain and we had to be most firm in returning to their units those [who] were unable to reach that standard.’13

  When Guardsman Mick D’Arcy wrote an account of L Detachment’s formation in May 1943 he recalled: ‘Numerous exercises carried out in training. Actual training hardest ever undertaken in Middle East. Long marches starting from 11 miles working up to 100 miles with full load … average training 9–10 hours daily plus night schemes.’14 For the men who had come through the Layforce training on Arran there was nothing out of the ordinary in the physical training (except the heat and the flies) and the weapons training was also similar. But none of them had been asked to jump out of an aircraft before.

  On the first day’s parachute training, 16 October, disaster struck when the ’chutes of Ken Warburton and Joe Duffy failed to open as they left the aircraft, 900ft above the ground. The pair fell to their deaths as their horrified comrades looked on. ‘Stirling assembled us all in one of the marquees and assured us that modifications would be made immediately [a subsequent investigation revealed that the snap-links on the men’s static line had buckled],’ recalled Johnny Cooper. ‘He also told us parachute training would recommence the following morning, and that he would be the first to jump. He was quite right to get us into the air again as quickly as possible after the fatalities as otherwise our confidence would have evaporated.’15

  As Stirling had envisaged, Jock Lewes proved his immense value to the unit with his diligence, hard work and especially his inventiveness. It was he who designed what was to become L Detachment’s most effective weapon in the Desert War – the Lewes bomb, a small but potent mix of plastic explosive, thermite and engine oil, fitted with a No. 27 detonator, an instantaneous fuse and a time pencil. A Lewes bomb could blow the wi
ng off an enemy aircraft, but crucially it was also light enough to carry on long marches through the desert to the target.

  Jimmy Storie, the last surviving member of the original L Detachment, recalled how Lewes complemented Stirling: ‘David was a good soldier and he had the pull that Jock never had because he came from a well-known landowning family. He was born a gentleman and he was a great man … [but] while Stirling was the backbone Lewes was the brains, he got the ideas such as the Lewes Bomb and without that we couldn’t have done a lot. To us Lewes was the brain and David had the power to get things done; he [Stirling] was there for a certain amount of training but he was looking further ahead. Jock liked things right, he was a perfectionist and he thought more about things in-depth.’16

  On 15 November 1941 Stirling celebrated his 26th birthday. The next day he and 54 men left Kabrit for the RAF base at Bagoush, approximately 300 miles west. It was the eve of L Detachment’s first raid, the one Stirling had sold to General Auchinleck in the summer, and there was an air of cool excitement among the men as they were looked after like royalty by the RAF personnel at Bagoush.

  Stirling, meanwhile, spent 16 November anxiously monitoring the latest weather reports handed to him by the RAF. A fierce storm was forecast for the target area with winds expected to reach speeds of 30 knots. The Brigadier General Staff Coordinator, Sandy Galloway, advised Stirling that the mission should be aborted. Dropping by parachute in those wind speeds, and on a moonless night, would be hazardous in the extreme. Stirling absorbed the reports and the advice of Galloway and chose to let his men decide: did they wish to cancel the mission, or press on and to hell with the storm? The answer was an emphatic wish to continue.