SAS Heroes

by Pete Scholey

  We had two boats ready to depart the island for the trip back to Kuching, but only one shear pin. Alfie entrusted me with the vital item. It was safe in my hands – for about two seconds. Sometimes inanimate objects can just take on a life of their own. I think that the shear pin must have been some kind of sea serpent in a previous life, because it seemed to wriggle and slither in my fingers before it dived into the sea and made its way straight to the bottom, never to be seen again. Alfie grabbed a handful of my shirt front and growled, ‘Scholey, as soon as we get back, you are dead. You understand that, don’t you?’ That wasn’t much of an incentive for me to put my back into it on the two-hour row along the coast and upriver to Kuching. Still, I knew that Alfie wouldn’t stay angry with me for long. He was a good-hearted, fun-loving guy, really. He would see the funny side of it eventually. Probably when the rowing blisters on his hands cleared up ...

  Those outboard engines were the bane of Alfie’s life in Borneo. We had been sent down to Santubong in 1967 to take some well-deserved rest and to give our political masters a new card to play at the negotiating table where they were attempting to come to a peaceful settlement with the Indonesians (now our friends) who had been causing all the trouble. Withdrawing the SAS was deemed to be a show of goodwill. Alfie and the rest of us certainly appreciated it, although I think Alfie would ultimately rather have been shooting at Indos than tangling with those outboard motors.

  We set up a camp on the beach, relaxed for a while, then, after a few days, our troop sergeant, Willie Mundell, decided to give us some instruction in the fine art of amphibious assaults. Two of the 40hp (30kW) outboard motors were attached to one assault boat with Alfie at the helm. The plan was that Alfie would take the boat out far enough to give us a long run in to the beach. Then we would hurtle in with the engines on full power before cutting the motors short of the beach and gliding in to ground on the sand, so that we could all then storm ashore. Those not involved lay around sunbathing or pottered around in the water to watch the fun. All went well at first. Alfie took us out, he lined the boat up and then gunned the engines. We took off for the shore like a bat out of hell, but when the signal was given to cut the engines, we just kept going. Alfie cursed and thumped the switches but the engines simply would not stop.

  The aquatic spectators broke Olympic swimming records to get out of our way. Dodgy shear pins or not, no one wants to get chewed up by a runaway outboard motor. In the boat, with Alfie roaring almost as loud as the engines, we all exchanged glances. No one had to say anything. No one fancied baling out at high speed. We’d just have to brace ourselves for the crunch on the beach. We didn’t have to wait long. I was thrown out into the water by the impact and surfaced pretty much unscathed in time to see the others scrabbling away from the boat as it tried to grind its way up the beach. Alfie leapt clear into what he thought was shallow water. He disappeared from sight completely. It took him so long to resurface we thought he was going to be posted Absent Without Leave (AWOL).

  You have to give Alfie credit for his sheer determination in persevering with those boats, though. He was at the helm again when one bunch decided to try a spot of fishing. Ordinary fishing, however, can be a boring and time-consuming business. Their idea was to catch enough fish in one fell swoop to see us through a few days once the fish had been dried or smoked over our camp fires – or at least enough for a major barbecue. How do you catch that many fish? Not with a rod, line, hook and worm, that’s for sure. You need a net and a trawler. We didn’t have that. What we did have was enough explosives to rekindle the volcano Krakatoa. Everyone knows that if you drop a hand grenade in a river or pond, every fish in the area will end up floating on the surface, just about ready to be served up with a few chips. In the sea, we reckoned it would be slightly different. Rivers and ponds are enclosed spaces. In the sea, the blast would dissipate as it spread over a far wider area. The answer was to use more than just a grenade and, since we had been doing some demolition training, more was available. Alfie and the intrepid fishermen set off in a boat for their fishing ground armed with an ammunition box packed with plastic explosive.

  When Alfie had positioned them over what they thought was just the right spot, they set the timer and lowered their bomb over the side of the boat. We watched from the shore as Alfie gunned the engine to take them clear of the blast. The engine tone rose sharply, then cut out altogether. The engine had died. With the bomb ticking away below them, there followed a great deal of frantic gesturing and several panicked attempts to restart the engine. One of the fish bombers, having clearly decided that the boat was going nowhere (except perhaps to kingdom come), dived over the side and started swimming for the shore where most of us spectators were falling about laughing. With one last desperate attempt, Alfie got the engine running and the boat took off for the beach, full steam ahead, slowing only slightly to pluck the swimmer out of the water. They hadn’t gone very far when their home-made depth charge detonated, sending a massive fountain of water shooting skyward. The boat was flipped over and they were all dumped in the water. They had to swim back clinging on to the upturned boat. And there was not a fish to be seen.

  Alfie couldn’t be blamed for the unreliability of our outboard motors, of course. In any case, he was a soldier, not a sailor, despite having been born in the harbour town of Seaham in County Durham. Alfie, known to most as ‘Geordie’, worked down the local coal mines when he left school, but by the time he reached his early twenties he had decided that he needed to get out of the pits and so joined the army. On completion of his basic training, he was posted to Germany with the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment. By late 1952, he was part of the re-emerging SAS Regiment in Malaya.

  Following jungle training and his parachute course, Alfie joined 8 Troop, B Squadron, and became an expert jungle operator, eventually receiving a well-earned promotion. Over the next five years, he took part in all of B Squadron’s operations against the CTs and was also involved in the resettlement of villagers who had been living under the tyranny of the terrorist groups. Working in the jungle for up to 120 days at a stretch was hugely taxing both mentally and physically and the few days’ leave Alfie and the rest of B Squadron enjoyed between tours was spent in the bars of Singapore. When Alfie finally managed to have some real time at home in the UK once the Malayan Emergency was over, he was based at the Regiment’s headquarters in Malvern, Worcestershire. While in Malvern, Alfie met his wife-to-be, a young Welsh girl called Margaret.

  As with all SAS marriages, Alfie and Margaret had to endure some lengthy separations when he was away on operations. In 1960, he became part of A Squadron when the Regiment moved to its new home at Bradbury Lines in Hereford and by 1963 Alfie was back in the jungle, this time in Borneo. In April the following year, the squadron was sent into Aden and Alfie got his first taste of the Radfan Mountains. He was to come to know the mountain conditions well, slipping into the area on covert patrols to set up secret observation posts overlooking the wadis. From their lofty vantage points, Alfie and his cohorts could spot terrorist groups in the wadis, sneaking into Aden from Yemen with supplies of guns and grenades for the terrorists. They would then direct artillery fire onto the enemy with such accuracy that the superstitious hill tribesmen began to talk of a new magical weapon controlled by the British – a weapon that could seek out the tribesmen wherever they were.

  A Squadron’s arrival in Aden was, however, something of a baptism of fire. The normal period for acclimatization to any region is around two weeks. In Aden, where the temperatures can easily top 120°F (49°C) during the day but drop to almost freezing in the mountains at night, men who had only recently spent five months in the humidity of the jungle in Borneo might reasonably have been given a while longer to get used to the intense dry heat. In fact, immediately after landing at RAF Khormaksar, they transferred to what would be their operational base at Thumier, 60 miles (97km) north of the port of Aden and less than 30 miles (48km) from the Yemeni border. They were out on patrol in the moun
tains that very night. They had no time for a relaxed settling-in period. Within two weeks they were to participate in Operation Cap Badge. The object was to infiltrate an area of the Radfan Mountains known as ‘Cap Badge’ in order to secure and mark DZs for a much larger airborne force that was to occupy Cap Badge and another area, Rice Bowl. These two areas of high ground dominated the ancient trade routes from Yemen that were being used to smuggle men and weapons into Aden. Whoever controlled these sites effectively controlled the old camel routes.

  Alfie was one of two senior sergeants on the operation, the rest of the men being highly experienced veterans of Malaya and Borneo. The two exceptions were their troop commander, Captain Robin Edwards, and their signaller, Trooper Warburton. Edwards was fairly new to the Regiment, having come from the Somerset & Cornwall Light Infantry, but had established himself as a capable and reliable young officer. Warburton was a tough and wiry former sapper.

  It was early evening on 29 April 1964 when the patrol left the Regiment’s base at Thumier in a small convoy of armoured cars, setting off down the Dhala Road towards the Wadi Rabwa. There the convoy turned off the road and began making its way up the wadi. The armoured cars had bounced and swayed over the rough track for only a few minutes before they came under rifle and machine-gun fire from concealed positions high up in the cliffs above the wadi. By now it was dark enough for Alfie and the others to slip away from the convoy as the gunners in the armoured cars engaged the enemy positions with their machine-guns. Their departure went unnoticed by the tribesmen in their rocky sangars, the fortified bunkers that blended so well with the surrounding landscape. They were more intent on driving back what they obviously thought was an armoured patrol probing their positions.

  Captain Edwards’ plan was to continue up the Wadi Rabwa, then gain some height by traversing the slopes of the 3,900ft (1,188m) Jebel Ashqab, then descend towards the Cap Badge objective and be in position before dawn. They would then lie up during the day, ready to mark the DZ for the Paras the following night. The crucial thing was to reach their LUPs before first light, as they would be easily spotted on the mountainside in the daylight. They had only a few miles to cover, but it was rough going over steep, rocky terrain. Each man carried a 60lb (27kg) pack, four magazines loaded with 80 rounds total for his SLR, 200 rounds of 7.62mm ammo in a bandolier and 200 rounds .303 ammo for the patrol’s Bren gun, which was carried by Alfie. The Bren weighed more than twice as much as the 10lb (4.5kg) SLR. In addition, each man carried at least four water bottles and there was supplementary kit, including torches and an Aldis lamp to mark the DZ the following night. Altogether each man’s kit amounted to quite a load. Warburton did not carry as much ammo as the rest because he had a 45lb (20kg) radio to lug up the mountain. He was also hampered by a problem about which nobody knew until it was too late.

  No soldier likes to duck out of a patrol just because he’s feeling a bit off colour. You take a day off primary school if you have an upset tummy, but no one would ever want to be seen to duck out of an SAS operation for that. Apart from anything else, stepping down means that someone else has to go in your place, and if anything happens to him you’ve got that on your conscience. All of that, of course, amounts to nothing if you think you’re going to be a liability to the patrol. Warburton was having stomach cramps pretty much from the moment the patrol left Thumier. No doubt he thought it was nerves. If he’d mentioned it to Alfie, things might have turned out differently. Alfie had the experience to judge whether the lad was fit to go out with the patrol. Warburton, however, didn’t want to let anyone down and thought he could tough it out. But as they laboured silently up the mountain in the moonlight, he began lagging further and further behind. He had some kind of food poisoning, one of the myriad of bugs that can lay you low in places like Aden. Alfie and the other patrol sergeant decided that Warburton had to march in the centre of the column to ensure that he wouldn’t fall behind and get lost. They redistributed the kit everyone was carrying so that Warburton’s load was shared by the rest of the patrol and someone else could take on the burden of the radio. Inevitably, the patrol had to reduce its pace so that the signaller could keep plodding on.

  By 2.00am it was starting to look like they were not going to reach their objective before dawn. They were still more than 3 miles (4.8km) from Cap Badge over rough country and sunrise was less than threeand-a-half hours away. They couldn’t risk being caught out in the open, but Captain Edwards had spotted a couple of stone sangars that looked like they were abandoned. This could be the ideal place to take cover. When they checked out the sangars it was obvious that they had not been used for some time. Now they could all wait out the daylight hours and hopefully Warburton would recover enough to make the final push to Cap Badge as darkness fell.

  Edwards radioed the squadron commander back at Thumier to advise him of the situation. The patrol members were still confident that they could fulfil their mission. They were in a good position just below a ridge that led to the summit of Jebel Ashqab. They had decent cover in the sangars which, having been built by the locals, would not attract any undue attention. (Rearranging any part of the local landscape in an attempt to conceal nine men would have been spotted the instant any nearby villagers rubbed the sleep from their eyes.) Behind the low stone walls of the sangars, the patrol would even have some shade from the sun during the day. They had little choice but to stay put in any case. Move on to Cap Badge and they would be out in the open in daylight. Abandon the operation and head back towards the Dhala Road and they would also be out in the open in daylight. Sitting tight was their only real option – and they almost got away with it.

  When the sun came up, Alfie and the rest of the patrol were dismayed to find that they were only about 1,000 yards (914m) from the mountain village of Shab Taym, known to be an enemy stronghold. Sure enough, at first light local sentries were seen leaving the village, carrying their rifles to their lookout posts and sniper positions above the approaches to the village. None came in the direction of the hidden patrol. By 11.00am it was starting to look like the patrol was going to survive a quiet and uneventful day on the mountainside. Then they heard the jangling bells and scrabbling hoofs of a herd of goats approaching up a small wadi close by the sangars. The herd was accompanied by a man and a woman, the man shouting loudly to the woman as they made their way up the wadi. The men in the sangars hardly dared breathe. The goats were now only a few feet away. Unless the herder walked by facing completely the wrong direction, he was almost sure to spot them. But would he? The answer came an instant later. A cry of alarm from the herdsman told them that the game was up. The man set off for the village, yelling for help. A single round from an SLR cut him down. The sound of the shot echoed through the mountains, bringing an immediate reaction in the village below. The herdsman’s death would buy the patrol some time to prepare themselves, perhaps giving them a slight edge for the first few minutes of the firefight that was about to commence.

  The woman and the herd of goats vanished as though they had never existed. They were no longer important. The focus of Alfie’s attention was now the growing band of armed tribesmen making their way slowly, curiously in the direction of the sangars. They may have thought that the rifle shot was from one of their own sentries, firing either by accident or as a signal. They were certainly taking no pains to conceal themselves as they made their way up the slope. When he thought they had come close enough, Edwards gave the order to open fire. Several of the tribesmen went down, the others dived for cover. Alfie held his fire with the Bren, searching for a viable target, as the tribesmen wallowed in confusion. They were still uncertain about the source of the gunfire, but it didn’t take them long to work out what their next move should be.

  Captain Edwards already knew. Had he been the one taking fire from the sangars, he would certainly have tried to move round the flanks and take up a position on the ridge above. That is exactly what the tribesmen did. It took them two hours to place men on the ridge and, just as th
e first shots from the snipers cracked into the stonework, Alfie watched Edwards’ response come into play. Edwards was on the radio to Thumier, where his instructions were being relayed to an RAF Air Support Officer who radioed them directly to the pilots of four Hawker Hunters that dropped out of the sky to blast the ridge with their cannon. After the first pass, with the spent brass cannon shell cases still tinkling into the hillside, the enemy tribesmen abandoned their exposed positions on the ridge. They would not be able to dominate the sangars from the heights, but their sniper fire was to be merciless and continuous. In return, the Hunters circled above, swooping down to blast the enemy positions whenever there were signs of movement. The patrol was also able to call in artillery barrages to keep the tribesmen at bay. The result was a stalemate. The Hunters and the artillery stopped the enemy from overrunning the sangars, but the patrol couldn’t leave the sangars without being cut to pieces by the deadly accurate sniper fire. Even the slightest movement in the sangar attracted a fusillade of well-aimed shots. Ricochets and razor-sharp stone chips flying through the air meant that everyone picked up a few scratches, although some were less lucky.