SAS Heroes

by Pete Scholey

  Following that Aden tour, Ginge applied for a transfer and eventually moved to the Regiment’s Training Wing. After a while, Ginge went back to his roots with the Royal Artillery at the Citadel in Plymouth. This was a commando unit and they sent him to Lympstone on the Commando Course. He passed the course, winning the Commando Medal, the award that is given to the student who comes top. He spent the next year training would-be commandos who were about to take the course, then had to make a decision about whether to return to the Regiment or take a posting to Singapore, where he could move with his family for a year. He chose Singapore.

  With his vast experience of operating in so many different environments, and his patient, methodical, understanding nature, Ginge was a natural instructor. He had been a patrol medic, parachute and survival instructor with expertise in desert, jungle and Arctic tactics, as well as a mountain leadership instructor. He was an easy choice when a job came up in the UK organizing the training of young soldiers at the Royal Artillery Adventure Training Centre in Snowdonia. As well as his military expertise, the skills and knowledge Ginge had acquired as a child in Kent could now be passed on to young men who had not enjoyed such an enlightened upbringing. He not only trained the soldiers, but also encouraged them in the tough sport of fell running, competing in most of the fell runs across the country himself. Many of the soldiers he trained went on to serve with the Regiment, including Mick Clifford, who became regimental sergeant-major (RSM) of 22 SAS.

  When he left the Army in 1982, Ginge, by then recognized as one of the foremost survival experts in the country, ran survival courses for an outfit called Survival Aids in Cumbria before setting up his own successful adventure training and survival school. His Breakaway Survival School courses are based around the places he knows so well, like the Brecon Beacons and the mountains of North Wales. In fact, the last place I saw him perform his Iban dance was on the lower slopes of Snowdonia in 2005.

  STAFF SERGEANT JOHN PARTRIDGE

  What on earth was he doing trudging around in snow? It was only a month or so ago that he had been drenched in sweat and tropical rain, hacking his way along a jungle path in Malaya. If you’d told him then that he would be up to his knees in snow in a few weeks’ time, he would have thought you were nuts. If you’d told him the same thing a few days ago, when he was looking for his hat to protect his head in an area where he barely cast a shadow (he was pretty much on the equator and the sun was right above him), he’d have thought it was you who’d been out in the sun too long.

  John Partridge put his hands on his hips and drank in the spectacular view. Standing on the Gregory Glacier on Mount Kenya, he could see the rocky, scree-covered slopes climbing away from him to one side, with the glacier’s wide expanse of snow and ice stretching up into the distance, combining with the Lewis Glacier as it reached up to the east almost as high as Point Lenana at over 16,000ft (4,876m). He squinted in the bright sunshine, its dazzling effect exacerbated by the reflection from the pure white surface of the glacier, and then stared back down in the direction from which he had come. Down there beyond the jagged rocks, beyond the ancient lava flows that were crumbling under the onslaught of centuries of freezing ice at night and relentless daytime sunshine, was Shipton’s Cave, named after Eric Shipton, the first man to climb Mount Kenya’s Nelion Peak in 1929. He could still make out the forms of the buzzards wheeling in the clear blue sky above the area of the cave and Shipton’s Camp. He crunched his feet in the snow, shifting his weight and that of the rucksack on his back. He wondered if they were Shipton’s crampons he was now driving into the snow of the glacier under his boots. The gear he was using was certainly old enough to have belonged to the first man to have made the climb.

  He smiled. What a crazy idea. They had come here to do advanced jungle training and practise the new close-quarters battle (CQB) techniques, not climb the second highest mountain in Africa. Unfortunately, John Slim’s CBQ camp at Nanyuki, almost 90 miles (145km) north of Nairobi on the other side of the Aberdaire mountains, was at the foot of Mount Kenya. Kirinyaga was what the local Kikuyu people called it. They believed that their supreme god, Ngai, lived somewhere among the peaks of the extinct volcano. Now, of course, they had a different kind of leader to worship. The Kikuyu were Jomo Kenyatta’s people and he seemed set to become the leader of the shining new, independent Kenya.

  John heaved at the straps of his rucksack again, shifting the load ever so slightly on his shoulders. They had thought they might have come up against the Mau Mau terrorists when they first came out to Kenya for this three-month training stint, but the serious trouble had pretty much died down by the time they arrived in 1960. Not that they would have been much help anyway. There had been a flu epidemic raging back home when they left and a couple of the lads were suffering when they boarded the plane back in England. By the time they landed in Kenya, most of the rest of them had it too, having been shut up in an enclosed environment with those already suffering for hours. For the first ten days or so at Nanyuki, the squadron had been pretty much bedridden.

  Once they were all fit enough, they were flung into an intensive training regime. When they weren’t learning the new CQB drills on the strange little trenches hacked out of the side of a crater on one of the lower slopes of Kirinyaga, or disturbing Ngai’s peace and quiet by charging through the sandbag corridors and rooms of the makeshift ‘killing house’, blasting away at cardboard targets, they were out patrolling through the mountain forests. The African forest wasn’t as dense as the jungles of Malaya, nor as humid, but it gave them the chance to try out a few different patrol manoeuvres, and operating in the forest was given a special edge by the knowledge that a few of the most notorious Mau Mau terrorists were still on the loose, hiding out somewhere in the Aberdaire region. They never came across any of them, though. Pity. With all that target practice under their belts, they were itching to go operational again.

  John found the experience of patrolling through the Aberdaire forests fascinating nonetheless. It was hard going, but John soon found that the higher they climbed the more the nature of the forest changed. Lower down it could be dense and distinctly tropical, but then they would ascend into an area where the trees were smaller and spaced much further apart. The canopy was less dense and, during the day, more sunlight streamed through, illuminating the different coloured mosses or ‘goat’s beard’ lichens clinging to the tree bark. Then they would come into areas that were tangled with blackberry bushes or dotted with giant lobelia and higher still, above around 11,000ft (3,352m), the trees disappeared altogether, the landscape changing to moorland cloaked in giant heather.

  The forest also changed entirely after sunset, just as it did in Malaya, with no twilight but immediate pitch darkness. In Malaya, they generally set up their basha (Malay for ‘hut’ or ‘shelter’) and camped where they were when the light faded. Here, they crept through the darkness, hearing the occasional crash and thump of heavy animals moving around. John had kept telling himself that the jungle creatures were more scared of him than he was of them, that they would hear the clumsy soldiers coming long before the patrol got close. All the same, he had been glad to be carrying the Bren. He wasn’t sure if it would actually stop a charging bull elephant, but he would have given it a go if he’d had to.

  John remembered when he had first gone into the jungle. The SAS had offered him a Sterling SMG. The weapon had been in service for around five years at the time and had a reasonably good reputation for reliability. It fired a 9mm round from a 34-round magazine and, in the right hands, was accurate up to as much as 100 yards (91m). He turned it down, however, for he knew all about the Sterling. John may only have been 19, but he had been in the army for more than four years. He had enlisted straight from school in Leicester and joined the Boys’ Regiment, Royal Artillery, based at Bradbury Lines in Hereford. There he’d received a proper, old-fashioned grounding as a soldier.

  The boy soldiers had a particularly tough disciplinary regime. They had 19-year-old bomba
diers, the same age as he was when he joined the SAS, screeching at them on the parade ground, bullying them with both verbal and, from time to time, physical abuse. If you weren’t already tough enough to take it, you had to toughen up fast. The uniform at the time was World War I-issue service dress with plenty of brass buttons that had to be polished thoroughly every day. Boots had to be finished to an immaculate, deep, mirror shine. For the boy soldiers the Hereford bull was all in the barracks, not in the farmer’s field. They were schooled in infantry tactics and given intensive training on the 25pdr field gun.

  Three years later, when his boys’ service ended and John progressed into the regular army, he was sent on the Advanced Leadership Course for former boy soldiers at the 64th Training Regiment at Oswestry. John came top of the course and was presented with the RSM’s Cane of Honour. He then volunteered for and passed P Company selection for the 16th Independent Parachute Brigade. He was posted to the 33rd Parachute Light Regiment, Royal Artillery. He was now an airborne gunner and completed his parachute course in 1956. Following that, he was trained as part of a mortar crew to give close fire support to the 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment.

  In that time, with all that experience under his belt, John had come to know a thing or two about the Sterling. The weapon weighed just 6lb (2.7kg) and had a high rate of fire, but he’d heard it didn’t pack much of a punch. He’d heard that in Malaya when patrols had come up against CTs high on ‘waccy baccy’ (smoked narcotics) or some kind of ‘loony juice’ (intoxicating spirits), some of those jungle maniacs had taken multiple rounds from the Sterling and still kept coming. He’d heard that Surrendered Enemy Personnel (SEP) had been brought in with eight rounds from a Sterling lodged in their bodies and still survived. So, given the choice, John had opted for the 7.62mm Bren gun. That had real stopping power. Eight rounds from a Bren would just about cut a man in half. No amount of artificial courage would hold up an enemy after he’d been hit by eight rounds from a Bren. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, as the old nursery rhyme ‘Humpty Dumpty’ goes, wouldn’t do him any good at all.

  John also knew that the Bren weighed more than three times as much as the Sterling. He’d have to carry at least ten magazines loaded with 28 rounds in each. There would be no shoulder strap. The SAS did not carry weapons on straps or slung over their shoulders. The weapon would have to be in his hands, ready for use at all times when on patrol. You don’t have time to unsling your weapon in the jungle when an enemy soldier pops up in front of you just a few yards away. In any case, slings and straps get caught up on jungle vegetation, making a noise when you least want it or whipping the weapon out of your hands at just the wrong moment. No, John would have to carry the Bren unaided. It was a lot of weight for a 19-year-old to lug over long distances in the exhausting heat and humidity of the jungle, but he knew he’d made the right decision whenever they got a sniff of a contact. If the patrol was approaching an area where they thought there might be a chance of coming up against the CTs, or they came across an enemy camp showing signs of recent occupation, one or two members of the patrol would inevitably offer to carry the Bren. Just to take the weight off him for a while, they would swap him for a Sterling SMG. Needless to say, John just smiled and declined the kind offers. So it was a Bren that he carried on the forested slopes of Mount Kenya.

  It was patrolling the lower reaches of Mount Kenya that probably sparked the idea of climbing the entire mountain. Surely the resourceful, highly trained, superfit SAS squadron could reach the top? All they had to decide was which of the mountain’s peaks to aim for, as Kirinyaga was like a whole range, its three highest peaks being Lenana at 16,450ft (5,014m) and Nelion and Batian, both soaring up to well over 17,000ft (5,181ft). The peaks had been climbed several times, the first recorded ascent over 60 years before. If some amateur could make it up there at the turn of the century, then surely the modern SAS could handle it, too? The trouble was, they were kitted out for operations in the tropics and, even from way down in the foothills, you could see the glaring white frosting of snow up high. Cold-weather clothes they could probably rustle up, but they would be mad to attempt it without the proper gear for climbing on snow.

  John and the rest of the squadron mulled the problem over for a few days, discussing it around the camp from time to time until a local farmer turned up one day with a large wooden box. He had come to hear that the SAS was considering climbing the mountain and wondered if he might be able to help. In the box was all the equipment they could have wished for – crampons, ice axes, the lot – all beautifully made by local craftsmen for a small team of mountaineers who had climbed Kirinyaga as long ago as 1929. That may well have been the team that included Eric Shipton. The gear was gratefully accepted and 19 Troop, the Mountain Troop, came into being.

  John turned again to look up the mountain towards their destination. Climbing through snow, in Africa, practically right on the equator, who’d have thought it? Even as they had planned their expedition, aiming to follow what was said to be an established route up the mountain, he could hardly believe that they were actually going to do it. Even when they had made their way to their start point some 15 miles (24km) east of Nanyuki, where the trucks had dropped them off, it had seemed like a madcap scheme. But once they were plodding up the mountain slopes, weighed down with enough high-energy rations and water to last them several days, John really started to enjoy the trek. It certainly made a change being out in a foreign country in patrol strength without having to worry about someone taking pot shots at you.

  Following a rest stop, a brief call of ‘Let’s go’ spurred all of the small team into action. They lifted their now wearying legs and planted one foot in front of the other to continue their methodical ascent. This wasn’t the first mountain John had climbed with the Regiment, nor would it be the last, but it was the highest. That John and the rest of the team succeeded in such a demanding climb using antiquated equipment is a tribute to their courage and endurance, but they achieved much more than just the ascent of an icy glacier. They established that the SAS was capable of operating not only in environments as diverse as the desert and the jungle, but that it could cope with the unforgiving, rarefied atmosphere at high altitude with minimal acclimatization. They had effectively established Mountain Troop and the SAS would return to the heights of Kirinyaga many times over the following years, evaluating and training with the most advanced mountain equipment available, forever in debt to John and the other trailblazers.

  If John thought that the peaks of Mount Kenya were the highest outdoor experience he would ever enjoy, he was wrong. Within a few short years he would be much higher still, and plummeting to earth at over 120mph (293km/h). Having operated with Mobility, Amphibious and, of course, Mountain Troops, John had opted for a change to put his parachute experience to good use and joined B Squadron’s Air Troop. He was one of the first to train for High-Altitude Low-Opening (HALO) parachute jumps with the SAS.

  Cyprus, 1970s. The cavernous interior of a C-130 Hercules becomes surprisingly overcrowded when a detachment of free-fall SAS paras and all their kit is crammed in. John looked around at the men standing in the aircraft, anonymous behind their oxygen masks, goggles and jump helmets. You were supposed to be able to get over 60 paratroops in one of these, over 90 regular passengers. He couldn’t see how. A thunder of windrush topped off by the roar of the four Allison engines dragged his attention back to the task in hand. The tailgate was now almost fully lowered and the black of the night made the blacked-out interior of the aircraft seem positively bright. His hands wandered over his equipment as he felt his way through one final check. Even if he had still had enough light, the mask and goggles would not have made it easy for him to make a visual check of all of the kit that was now strapped to his body. Over his jump boots he wore gaiters that zipped up the front and enclosed his legs almost up to the knee. They would help to keep him warm when he exited into the sub-zero temperatures outside the Hercules, but they also stopped the
legs of his jump suit flapping around as he dropped – any loose piece of kit could potentially throw him off balance in the air and that was to be avoided at all costs. When you were jumping from over 25,000ft (7,620m) – almost 5 miles (8km) high – you didn’t take any unnecessary risks.

  His gloved fingers gripped webbing and harness straps, tugging to ensure a snug fit. He nestled his M16 rifle in a little tighter to his body. The butt was in his shoulder, the barrel pointing at the floor. It was secure. His hands, with an altimeter fastened to each wrist, came to rest on the oxygen bottle strapped to his belly. They had been on pure oxygen for almost 45 minutes to expel any nitrogen from their bloodstreams before they switched from the aircraft’s supply to their own bottles. You had to be careful on the switch. There wasn’t much air to breathe in the aircraft flying at that height, but there was enough to boost the nitrogen almost back up to normal if you took just one whiff. You had to make the switch smoothly and calmly while holding your breath. Nitrogen in the bloodstream could induce hypoxia that would lead to a blackout when you were in mid-air. You couldn’t enjoy your jump if you were unconscious – and you certainly wouldn’t enjoy the landing.

  The oxygen was, of course, essential. John remembered training in a decompression chamber where six of them had sat opposite each other, all wearing oxygen masks. The air pressure in the chamber was then reduced until the oxygen level was equivalent to that at around 26,000ft (7,924m). John watched as those sitting opposite him were ordered to remove their masks. They then had to carry out some simple instructions, counting backwards in fives from 100 and writing the sequence on a pad in front of them. They also had to draw a house. John and the others observed so that that they could recognize the effects of oxygen deprivation. The lips and fingertips of those opposite started to turn faintly blue. Their counting became progressively confused and their draughtsmanship would have embarrassed the average five-year-old. He recalled being exactly the same when he took his turn, and also noticed that he started to develop tunnel vision, a peculiarity that was reversed as soon as he went back on the oxygen.