by Pete Scholey
When the recce party returned, the commander described in detail the large camp, which consisted of a collection of bamboo huts. The troop was split into smaller teams that deployed silently around the camp to keep watch, count the number of men in the camp and assess how heavily armed they were. Pete took up his position and got his first view of the camp. The terrorists displayed an arrogant disregard for their own security. They had had an easy ride slaughtering the unarmed villagers in the region and expected no reprisals from that quarter. Camp fires burned lazily, their embers producing wisps of smoke that fought their way skyward through the dense jungle air. A few of the inhabitants appeared from time to time, rifles or Sten guns slung over their shoulders and panga jungle knives dangling from makeshift scabbards at their waists. A couple of well-worn paths where the vegetation was cut back or trodden flat marked the most-used exits from the camp into the jungle. Pete knew that covering those quick-escape routes would be key to mounting a successful attack.
After observing the camp for long enough to establish that their targets were most definitely ‘home’, a plan of attack was drawn up. They would hit the largest huts first, coming at them from different angles but avoiding catching each other with ‘through-and-through’ shots – the .303 rounds from their rifles and Bren guns would pass straight through the flimsy huts, even straight through some of the occupants, and they didn’t want to end up shooting each other. Part of the troop was detailed as an assault group, some were to provide covering fire and others were to take out anyone attempting to use the escape paths.
From their careful observation it had become obvious to Pete and the others that this was not a regular communist enemy outfit. They were too unprepared for an attack, too careless in their general defence. This group was simply a bunch of jungle gangsters, terrorizing the area for their own ends. They were not the official ‘enemy’, but the attack would be pressed home nonetheless. Getting rid of them would help to keep the locals ‘on-side’ and enhance the ‘hearts and minds’ campaign that the Regiment was waging.
At a given signal, Pete opened up with the Bren, spraying one of the largest huts with a withering wave of fire. The rounds scythed through the bamboo, blasting the frail hut to pieces and laying waste to anyone inside. The terrorist gang was swift to respond, but as quickly as one popped up to bring his weapon to bear, he was cut down by deadly accurate fire either from the men hidden on the edge of the clearing or from those who were now storming from hut to hut, terminating all resistance.
Loon-Kon-Kim’s band of cut-throats was wiped out in the attack on their camp. The locals would no longer live in fear of his bloodthirsty thugs emerging from the jungle to prey on their villages. In the months that followed, these villagers showed their gratitude to the SAS by giving the soldiers support and passing on useful information about the activities and positions of the real enemy.
One of the best things about Malaya, as far as Pete was concerned, was the leave time, especially in Penang. He enjoyed many a Tiger Beer at the Sandicroft Rest and Recuperation Centre and Club, and all on ‘28 bob a week’ – just £1.40 in today’s money. But there was plenty of serious work to be done, too. At this time, the art of Close Protection (CP) was an emerging skill and Pete was one of the first soldiers to train and then operate as a bodyguard. Part of that training took place with Lofty Large and the rest of A Squadron in Kenya with John Slim. The modern style of pistol shooting they were taught was first developed by former Royal Marine William Fairbairn around 1910 when he worked with the Shanghai Municipal Police. Fairbairn abandoned the traditional ‘duelling’ stance for aiming a handgun in favour of a combat mode more in keeping with the way he saw men operating during police raids. When they were fired on, they instinctively adopted a protective crouch position and, rather than try pointlessly to drill this out of them, he decided to use their natural inclinations to their best advantage. He taught his men to fire from a crouch position instead of standing erect to take aim, and to fire instinctively rather than waste the split second it took to bring the weapon to bear. He also designed the first killing house to simulate the sort of environment his men would find in the field.
Fairbairn’s techniques were further enhanced by another British officer, Grant Taylor, who spent some time on attachment to the FBI in America during the 1920s, gaining experience in the type of urban combat they were forced to undertake when dealing with mobsters. He also took part in Combined Operations commando raids during World War II, on one occasion landing secretly by submarine in occupied France to find the quarters where a group of Luftwaffe pilots were billeted and, along with a colleague, assassinate them. Taylor’s CQB skills were put to good use when he joined Field Marshal Slim’s Fourteenth Army in Burma. He taught a method of pistol shooting that involved aiming with the body, holding the firearm at stomach height with the forearm parallel to the ground. Like Fairbairn, he advocated the use of live-fire room ranges, sometimes called ‘execution sheds’, to train men in room and building clearance.
When John Slim, who had trained with Taylor when he served under his father in the Far East, established an SAS CQB training facility in Kenya, he refined the Grant Taylor method, with Pete Loveday and Lofty Large among those who benefited from his experience. For Pete, swapping his Bren gun or SLR for a 9mm Browning automatic came as something of a shock to the system. What they were doing was worlds apart from the infantry weapons training he had had in the past. No longer were they lying on their bellies peering down rifle sights at a target a hundred yards away or more. Here they stood shoulder to shoulder, not as they would on a battlefield, but as they might find themselves in an urban situation. They could hear the report and feel the blast from each other’s gunshots as each man stood at the mouth of an open slit trench cut into the hillside, emptying a magazine into a playing card stuck to a man-sized target only 15ft (4.6m) away at the end of the trench. They practised until they could slot every shot into the playing card without taking ‘proper’ aim.
The double-handed ‘instinctive’ aim from the shoulder was ultimately adopted as the most accurate method from the crouch and Slim also put Pete, Lofty and the others through a killing house training scenario. These experiments and training methods turned the pistol from being regarded as a largely defensive weapon with limited accuracy into a very effective offensive weapon, as Tommy Palmer proved when he shot a terrorist in the head while on the move during the Iranian Embassy job in 1980.
Demonstrations of the SAS’s impressive CQB techniques led to their being in great demand for bodyguarding duties. Pete found himself in far more comfortable surroundings then he had ever known in the Far East when he was part of the protection team for the General Officer Commanding Malaya, and he even acted as bodyguard to Kenyan president Jomo Kenyatta at one time. It was quite ironic for the president to benefit from the protection of Britain’s elite special forces when not too many years before he had been accused of being one of the organizers of the Mau Mau rebels that British troops fought so hard against. Such is politics.
Pete’s activities were not, however, confined to the ‘cushy’ job of CP. He travelled with A Squadron from the jungles of Malaya to the barren mountains of northern Oman in 1958, where they fought for five months on the Jebel Akhdar against communist-backed insurgents.
In 1959, Pete was back in the UK, based for a short time at Malvern before the Regiment moved to their home in Hereford. He didn’t have long to enjoy a home life, though. He was still an operational soldier and served in the jungles of Borneo during the confrontation with Indonesia, as well as in the battles against Yemeni insurgents in the mountains of the Radfan and the Aden townships from 1963 to 1966.
His experience and good humour were invaluable when he became the sergeant storeman in the quartermaster’s department. It’s a soldier’s worst nightmare when it comes to returning kit you have drawn from the quartermaster’s stores and all is not as it was when you were issued with it. James Bond might be able to get away wit
h losing or wrecking valuable bits of kit issued to him by ‘Q’, but an ordinary soldier is usually expected to stump up for anything he has lost out of his own wages. No-one wanted to see those ‘stoppages’ deductions on his pay slip. Pete knew exactly how the system worked and he was a master at juggling stores to try to keep him and others out of trouble.
Pete carried on working in the stores until he left the Regiment in 1975, but he found leaving army life behind no easier in 1975 than he had done 22 years before and was back with the Regiment the same year, rejoining his mates as a civilian, still working in the stores. He always had time for a chat or to give advice, and was hugely respected by everyone in the Regiment. Pete was one of the men, after all, who showed that SAS soldiers were more than just the desert raiders so many believed them to be. They were more than merely a bunch of jungle warfare experts and more than a mountain reconnaissance force. Pete helped to prove that the SAS was a flexible, adaptable unit capable of operating under extreme conditions anywhere in the world, including in emergencies on the streets of our own cities.
Eventually, Pete retired in 1996 after an incredible 45 years’ loyal and courageous army service – 43 of those years having been spent with the SAS Regiment.
WO2 SQUADRON SERGEANT-MAJOR STEVE CALLAN
Steve Callan tightened the fingers of his right hand around the pistol grip of his SLR and tugged at the straps of his Bergen with his free hand, shifting the weight of the radio packed on his back as he followed Staff Sergeant Frank Williams through the gathering gloom of the late afternoon. The mountainous jungle of north-eastern Sarawak was a challenging place to be. The inherent dangers of patrolling in the jungle, the arduous heat and humidity, the poisonous insects, the vegetation that clawed at your skin through the thin layers of sweat-drenched clothing, and the strength-sapping terrain with its precipitous slopes and raging mountain torrents, all combined to make the trek they had undertaken one of the most physically demanding he had ever experienced. The fact that they were only a stone’s throw from the border with the Indonesian state of Kalimantan and could expect to run into an enemy patrol at any moment only served to heighten the tension. Under normal circumstances, such an encounter might have been exactly what they were looking for, but this was no normal patrol.
A normal patrol would have seen them traversing the dense jungle slopes slowly and with great caution, wary of making the sort of noise that would alert any Indo ambush team to their presence. While Steve and the others remained very much conscious of the enemy threat, on this occasion they pursued their course with a far greater urgency. This was a rescue mission.
On 4 May 1963, a Belvedere helicopter had taken off from Bakelalan, a mountain base in Sarawak right on the Kalimantan border, on a flight to visit tactical patrols (concerned with gathering intelligence and engaging with the enemy) in the jungle. On board were Major Ronald Norman, second-in-command of the SAS Regiment; Major Harry Thomson, the operations officer; Corporal ‘Spud’ Murphy and six others, including the RAF crew, Mr M.H. Day of the Foreign Office and Borneo Company official Mr D.Reddish. The Bristol Belvedere was a twin-rotor, heavy-lift helicopter with two powerful Napier turbines and was capable of flying on just one of its engines. The type had been in service with the RAF for two years and was of proven reliability in the jungle, the natives having christened it ‘Long House’, as its cigar-shaped fuselage reminded them of their own long huts. On this flight, however, something had gone drastically wrong with the stalwart Belvedere and the chopper had gone down.
As soon as news of the crash was received, Frank Williams, who had been due to join the flight but was recalled to the operations room just before take-off, put together a four-man crash rescue team, including himself. Top of his list for the patrol had been Steve Callan. Frank knew he would need an expert signaller, and Steve was the best in the business. The other members of the team were Rickie Coomber (medic) and ‘Chopper’ Essex (lead scout). A local jungle tracker led them through the mountains and down into the Trusan Valley towards the isolated village of Long Merarap, the area where they expected to find the crashed Belvedere.
Steve paused and sank to one knee as a silent hand signal was passed from man to man. Something was wrong. The normal jungle background noise was strangely hushed. He peered through the maze of giant tree trunks and tangles of hanging vines to his left and right. He saw no sign of movement, no hint that they might have stumbled upon a lurking Indo ambush squad. Frank signalled to Steve to move forward and Steve passed the signal on to Rickie Coomber, crouching among some tree roots a few paces behind him. After a few steps, Steve noticed a new, alien scent in the heavy jungle air. It was like the smell of a dampened bonfire, the dank aroma of an extinguished blaze. Then, glancing up towards the jungle canopy, he could see broken branches and, before long, he spotted the dull glint of metal. There was wreckage in the trees and, as the patrol came closer to the site of the crash, more charred and twisted metal mixed with burnt and broken tree limbs on the ground. It became clear that the helicopter had exploded. They spread out to comb the area in search of survivors, but it didn’t take long for their efforts to confirm that there were none. All nine aboard the Belvedere had perished. The patrol shared the gruesome task of recovering all of the bodies, gathering them in one place so that they could all be buried at the scene of the crash.
Steve also had the onerous task of reporting back to base that they had found the crashed chopper. It was not possible for the small team to work out why the aircraft had gone down, nor were they in a position to gather any evidence. Having put in a massive effort to reach the crash site, their job was now to get themselves safely out of the jungle again. This was not the first jungle sortie in which Steve participated, nor was it to be his last operational patrol but, for the worst possible reasons, it was one of the most notable.
Highly intelligent and a thoroughly professional soldier, Steve was the nicest, most straightforward bloke you could ever hope to meet. I came to know him really well when I worked with him in the mid-1970s in ‘Ops Research’. Those who know no better seem to think of the SAS’s Operations and Research Wing as some kind of dumping ground for soldiers who are past their prime. That is really not the case. It is true, however, that to be of any use in Ops Research, you need to have a good deal of experience in all aspects of SAS soldiering.
The job of the Ops Research team, which usually consists of only a couple of senior staff, is to source or develop specialist equipment that could be of use to the Regiment on operations. Obviously, you need recent operational experience to know which bits of kit are going to work in the field and which bits your mates are going to curse you for lumbering them with. On the equipment front, Ops Research looks at everything from new weapons and vehicles to new boots, clothing or field rations. Some of these things are developed ‘in-house’ by the Ops Research team, but they also spend a great deal of time evaluating equipment from a variety of different manufacturers and suppliers.
Another aspect of the Ops Research job is to visit airfields and military installations at home and abroad to assess their suitability for use by the Regiment. We looked at airfields and heliports, working out flying times to and from different potential locations where the Regiment might feasibly have to be deployed. We looked at airport security and the length of runways at different places around the country, working out not only which ones could take troop transports or supply planes, but which ones could accommodate passenger jets in the event that they had to be diverted in an emergency. It was vital to be able to know where a hijacked aircraft could be sent and what facilities were there so that the SAS could control the situation once the plane was on the ground. I accompanied Steve on countless car trips all over the UK looking at different bases and buildings. He had all sorts of contacts not only at regular military facilities, but also in research establishments, some top secret, with whom he worked either in an advisory capacity or as a ‘client’, with them helping him in his own research on projects for
the Regiment. If he hadn’t joined the SAS, Steve would almost certainly have been working as a boffin himself, as he was a talented designer and engineer. His range of contacts was also quite amazing. On one trip with Steve, we met a man called Jack Roberts who had designed PLUTO, the pipeline under the ocean that supplied fuel from England to France for the Allied forces that landed in Normandy on D-Day during World War II. Jack also designed the bomb disposal robot that has famously been seen many times on TV tackling suspect devices in Northern Ireland.
Steve and I had a very strange experience on one of our trips during the mid-1970s when we were invited to take a look at a facility in the Home Counties. Prime Minister Harold Wilson was resident in 10 Downing Street at the time and outlandish rumours were being circulated by conspiracy theorists accusing both Wilson and his private secretary, Marcia Williams (now Baroness Falkender), of being secret Soviet agents. At the time there was a great deal of social and industrial unrest, with Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath’s government involved in a protracted confrontation with the miners just before Wilson came to power in 1974.
This was the time of the ‘Three-Day Week’ when businesses closed down to save power, and there were regular blackouts in homes all over the country when power stations went offline due to a lack of coal. During that time troops were actually deployed at Heathrow on an anti-terror security exercise. Conspiracy theorists continue to propose, even today, that that exercise, and others during this period, were ‘rehearsals’ rather than mere exercises and that some shady background organization within the establishment was demonstrating that a military coup could easily be organized in Great Britain if what they saw as communist-backed industrial action was not brought under control.
