SAS: Secret War in South East Asia

by Dickens, Peter;

  Smallness, exploiting surprise to penetrate enemy lines and accomplish an otherwise impossible task, would be an unremarkable concept if just anybody could do it. Clearly, it demands special qualities, which Stirling enunciated with such perception in 1941 that his principles are still adhered to despite many changes in role and fortune since then. They are also important for those of us who are not quite content with stories of derring-do, but want to probe a little deeper into the make-up of these men.

  First, the relentless pursuit of excellence. No qualification is needed because the words are explicit, uncompromising and daunting; and because excellence is unapproachable without deep personal motivation and few set themselves such a goal, those few must prove their commitment by surmounting a selection process so rigorous that Selection is spelt with a capital ‘S’.

  Next, strict discipline. That it may scarcely show on the surface is immaterial since it must spring from each man’s self-discipline, which in turn derives from the motivation he has to show in order to join at all. It must impel him to lead as well as obey, and to act as the Regiment would wish in lonely, frightening and unforeseen circumstances. Should he fail, the only necessary sanction is RTU – returned to unit.

  Then comes a precept as surprising as it was prescient in 1941: there must be no sense of class within the SAS. Only merit counts, because a unit, especially a small one, is strengthened operationally by each man’s ability being put to best use, and in morale by excluding false values from man-to-man relationships. Even the wives conform; Stirling said they must.

  It all means that the SAS has to be an élite. Although that is an admirable spur to excellence and comradeship, it contains also the seeds of smugness, which can blunt the cutting edge from within and provoke resentment from without. Stirling therefore prescribed the safeguard of humility, which is perfectly compatible with the self-assurance vital to high endeavour; the SAS is but a tiny part of the Army, which must on no account be let down, and excellence like an electric hare will never quite be caught, however hotly pursued.

  Really testing, however, is Stirling’s demand for smartness on parade, but even that is achieved with an effort – ‘we hardly ever have parades’. Frank Williams again, complying with Stirling’s final dictum that, lest all this relentless pursuing should lead the runners round the bend, humour – sharp and kindly, absurd and therapeutic – is indispensable.

  But aren’t they only a bunch of rather tougher than ordinary toughs? Why all this talk of high moral qualities? The answer is simple if paradoxical: the tough lacks the application to develop his skills to the utmost, the self-discipline to spare as well as to kill, the wit to decide which is right in the circumstances, and the dedication to endure to the end. The tough, therefore, is just not up to the tougher than ordinary job, and the moment he is recognized as such, he is out of the SAS.

  Building on those principles, what had the Regiment become when it went to Borneo in 1963? In the first place, it was indeed The Regiment in its men’s hearts, that almost holy entity to which each is glad to give his all, secure in the knowledge that others will do so as well. Tradition, however, was in the mind rather than the mess silver, finger-poking resulting in constant innovation in the pursuit of excellence and proving vital not just to success but for the Regiment’s very survival.

  For instance, the Army proper is wary of what it calls private ones, who have therefore to make a very good case for sending their wild young men out into the wild yonder to wreak who knows what havoc. Such misgivings are understandable since the only young men of use to the SAS are those who must seek adventure compulsively – even in the cannon’s mouth – and, if no officially authorized cannon offers, they will be strongly tempted to have a go at another which is not.

  Another recurrent frustration follows from the SAS being directly responsible to the highest commander. This is necessary because the Regiment can be employed anywhere on a variety of tasks, and its findings or depredations far beyond the battlefield may concern the whole campaign and influence major decisions. Thus, an intermediate senior officer under whom an SAS unit is placed for a particular task must endure its commander (however lowly in rank), disregarding his orders as unsuitable for the precious SAS and appealing directly to the top. Some find this trying, although restraint on both sides for the greater good of the whole usually achieves a working harmony; but, all in all, the SAS has learnt that, even with the strictest self-discipline, it must fight and fight again for the privilege of doing its duty and even of existing.

  Sure enough, having fought in every conceivable terrain behind every line in the Second World War with many specialized skills painstakingly pioneered and believing its value to have been proved, the SAS Regiment was caught on the wrong foot by the peace and disbanded almost without a struggle. On being reformed rather tentatively for the Malayan Emergency as the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, a characteristically confusing title which may serve to imbue its opponents with awe while being logical and precious to its initiates, its first resolution was that never, never must that be allowed to happen again, and for good practical reasons as well as sentiment. Indeed, the climb back to Stirling’s standard of excellence was unnecessarily protracted, but so, fortunately, was the Emergency. During its course a new father-figure emerged, Major John Woodhouse, one of the Squadron commanders who, with other dedicated officers and NCOs, strove for an even higher peak. His methods were austere; such as leading the first Selection course over the Welsh mountains while suffering from a severe bout of malaria, which normally incapacitates completely and can kill, causing the thoughtful to murmur, enlightened, ‘so that’s what it’s all about’.

  Malaya is mostly a vast primary jungle and the best possible training ground for Borneo. Aboriginal tribes lived in the far depths and on these the communist terrorists battened to provide secure bases by means of food and early warning of attack. The SAS task naturally became to go in and break up the organization. That could be done by killing enough terrorists to persuade the rest to go away, except that it was impossible to find any to kill unless the aborigines revealed where they were; there was even a danger of the natives betraying or killing the SAS, who would always be at a disadvantage however clever they might school themselves to be in the jungle.

  So began a fundamental element in the repertoire of the modern SAS – in General Templer’s immortal phrase, the winning of ‘hearts and minds’. To do so, special training and equipment proved necessary; for instance, an SAS medic had to be as well prepared for midwifery and dentistry as gunshot wounds. Material help obviously played its part, but lavish aid patronizingly administered would generate no loyalty under stress. Far more important, as the SAS soon discovered, was that truly to win hearts they had to give their own. There was no alternative to staying with the people and learning their language; not scorning their primitive way of life but living it – germs and all, but with many useful tips on the credit side – and, above all, respecting them as intelligent fellow humans, which proved quite easy once Western conceit was seen to be quite unwarranted. Then they would gradually accept the SAS and, using their incomparable jungle skills to share in their own defence, bind themselves ever more closely to the common cause.

  The task was hardly one for licensed thugs, and to judge the SAS by their appearance would have been misleading. Living with the natives meant doing so for three months at a time without any breaks of which the enemy could take! advantage. Four-man patrols searched the jungle incessantly, living like animals but looking a great deal worse because men must wear clothes which are not regenerating like the body and can actually rot away under such conditions. They also cause the body to smell even more horribly than it would otherwise, retaining the odour; and although by a strange and merciful dispensation of providence! that cannot be smelt by those in a like state – whose delicate nostrils can never theless easily detect a far more subtle waft of hair cream – to a helicopter pilot, fresh from his bath and tasked to lift
such men out of the jungle, it can verge on the hazardous.

  The way of life was surprisingly bearable for, after all, man is a viable wild animal and especially in the forest whence he emerged not so many millenia ago; he has a good turn of speed, sufficient to evade a charging elephant, as Ian Thomson can vividly testify; his senses are keen and positioned advantageously five feet from the ground; his hands are unmatched in nature for usefulness, enabling him to rectify his lack of an organic weapon; and that is all before he starts thinking.

  Like an animal, too, man could subsist on jungle fruit and meat, but since thai: took all day and the man was there to do a job, he had to carry his own food, only four day’s supply with the standard ration of the day. That meant he had frequently to be resupplied by air, which restricted his movement and revealed his position. To ‘go always a little further’ the SAS had to be innovators as well as sloggers, so Woodhouse experimented with concentrated and light-weigh: rations. For himself, the outcome was simple, since his own spare frame could be supported indefinitely by will power and little more than one tin of sardines a day; one hopes he actually liked sardines as that would be a glimmer of human frailty with which one could identify, but fears they just did not matter so long as the task was accomplished. His parting gift from the Regiment is a silver sardine tin, which symbolizes what in Borneo he would make a standard operational requirement: that an SAS patrol must be able to vanish for a fortnight, unhindered by apron-strings to friends or the need to reveal itself to foes.

  Many jungle skills were mastered and new techniques developed, including parachuting into trees and then abseiling to earth, which was dreadfully dangerous and cost three lives. But one acquisition was of greater value than any, as Frank Williams says: ‘Living like animals for three months brings out the best and the worst in people’ – though never mind the worst because RTU would soon take care of that. Sergeant, then Trooper, ‘Gipsy’ Smith narrows the point: ‘When you’re muddy, wet, hungry and tired all the time, that’s how you come together.’ And he should know; to a ruggedly individualistic horse-dealer who was dragged protesting into the Army when trying to evade national service, togetherness was a new and pleasant experience. In the SAS later he learned how to evade properly, but no longer wished to.

  The aborigines talked and kills resulted; then they denied their support to the terrorists and even killed some themselves with their blowpipes. Silently and unspectacularly the enemy withdrew, though the SAS do not claim to have played any but a very small part in a very large campaign, and most other people had not, as yet, so much as heard of them.

  Their true achievement had been to find themselves and set their standards, but only in a jungle environment. Now, in 1958, with Lieutenant-Colonel Deane-Drummond in command, the question began to be asked whether they had any part to play elsewhere. Disbandment threatened ominously and must at all costs be forestalled. Were their present skills too limited? Why then, develop more. Was there no scope for their present role? Find another, or several. Deane-Drummond looked around and discovered an interesting war in far-off Arabia, where rebel chieftains were threatening the Sultan of Oman from the top of a slab-sided plateau called Jebel Akhdar which had not been stormed for a thousand years, and then the Persians had lost nine out of ten thousand men. Now, the small British force, which was all it was deemed politically expedient to send, was baffled, and Deane-Drummond was asked whether the SAS could help.

  They could; they must, though on the face of it the proposition was absurd. Trained only for the jungle where the visibility was at most twenty yards, they would now operate where it was usually twenty miles, and in an infantry assault, which was not their proper role. Yet Deane-Drummond knew they could pull it off; their physical toughness needed no acclimatization, and their mental toughness, well practised determination and adaptability would soon accustom them to very different terrain and tactics.

  They did it by guile and toughness; the toughness being essential to the guile and the guile to the toughness, exploiting mind and body to achieve the utmost of which a man is capable. They marched by day and countermarched by night further than the enemy would think possible; scaled escarpments he would assume to be unscaleable; fed him false rumours; and finally surprised him into surrender with hardly a shot. In the bright desert light their quality was clearly seen as it could not be in the jungle; they established their ability to go anywhere and do anything, and although they lost ‘B’ Squadron, leaving only ‘A’ and ‘D’, there was no more talk of disbandment.

  There followed a period of comparative peace that the SAS would not normally have welcomed but now used to prepare for whatever might lie ahead in a worldwide role.

  The nominal strength of each of the two Squadrons was about 70 officers and men, the precise number varying with the task and, in practice, with the fully qualified people available. There were never enough at this period of the Regiment’s development and in no circumstances would shortages be filled with lightweights. A major in command was assisted by a warrant officer second class as Squadron sergeant-major, a quartermaster sergeant for logistics, and signallers, drivers, storemen, etc. as needed, sometimes attached from other units.

  ‘A’ Squadron comprised 1, 2, 3 and 4 Troops, and ‘D’ 16, 17, 18 and 19, which, like the Regiment calling itself the 22nd when there was only one (regular), baffles the logical comprehension of the outsider who must nevertheless take them as they were. The four-man patrol having become established as the basic unit, always including a signaller and a medic and often a linguist, demolitionist or other specialist, a troop of sixteen men could field four. A captain in command (not always present since junior officers of the right calibre proved hardest of all to find) and a troop sergeant were included in that number as commanders of their respective patrols. The keynote of the organization was flexibility, though the intimate little family that constituted a patrol was undisturbed as far as possible.

  To work then; what was needed? Keeping fit, by which they meant being in Olympic condition all the time; constant practising with a dozen different weapons to ensure hitting split-second targets at five yards or five hundred from every possible attitude; mastery of skills such as communications, demolition, medical aid to a standard not hitherto attempted by soldiers; parachuting in all its forms and applications; abseiling; learning to live, move and fight in deserts, mountains, jungles, snow and cities; fluency in the languages of countries where they might operate; practice and development of tactics through exercises and discussion both organized and endlessly around the bar, ‘shop’ being life to an SAS soldier; surmounting mental as well as physical hardship as in escape and evasion exercises over rugged terrain with no resources and every man’s hand against the lone soldier, followed by pitiless interrogation when drained of strength and vitality.

  By 1962 the Regiment was ready for Borneo – ‘have bergen, will travel’; and when Lieutenant-Colonel John Woodhouse assumed command its readiness increased, as may be imagined. But, satiated with training, it would not remain at the peak without the element of real challenge, and there was as yet no war in Borneo, or anywhere else.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘ARCADIA’

  ‘A’ Squadron’s First Borneo Tour, January to April 1963

  Java had once been the centre of a great empire, and such memories are cherished. That was before the Europeans staked out empires in their turn, of which the Dutch, British, French and American were in full vigour until the Japanese seized them all in 1942 to their great shame and ignominy. They fought their way back, but their reception by their old vassals depended on their popularity and likely value. The Americans were readily accepted in the Philippines, as were the British in Malaya who then demonstrated their goodwill and effectiveness by settling the Emergency before beginning the process of withdrawing from their empire. The French, however, were not welcomed in Indo-China and the long drawn out tragedy of Vietnam soon began, while in Indonesia the Dutch were met with armed resistance an
d had left by 1949.

  The charismatic and visionary rabble-rouser Soekarno emerged as President of Indonesia, flushed with victory and grandiose dreams of fresh worlds to conquer. Not that he had the least hope of governing his own nation effectively; one hundred million people of many sub-ethnic groups often jealous of each other and living on a thousand islands spread over three thousand miles of ocean would have baffled a far greater man. Bored with humdrum practicalities of administration and economics, which alone could have brought some amelioration to his teeming poor, he loved to invent words like ‘Maphilindo’ and distract the people from their troubles with a mystical vision of Malaya, the Philippines and Indonesia in one great Asian Utopia.

  His neighbours would not have worried too much had he meant something like the European Economic Community in which the members subscribed to fine principles of unity and then continued to act independently exactly as before, but much more was apparently intended, including the British relinquishing their military bases as well as their colonies. That would be unacceptable, and not only to the British, because Tunku Abdul Rahman of Malaya and Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore also wanted them to stay in view of the threat from communism to the north. And now it seemed that a threat was developing from the south too, for whatever ‘Maphilindo’ meant Soekarno clearly intended to be the boss of it. This concern was intensified by communism having become a strong and growing force in Indonesia.

  Time and again the Tunku asked Soekarno what he was getting at; but wily as he was, or woolly, he never explained. The implication could only be that he wanted the British out of the way for no good reason and must therefore be taken seriously, particularly since Indonesia had ten times the population of the British territories combined and was well armed by Russia. The Tunku’s reaction was to invent his own word, Malaysia, preserving the Commonwealth grouping of Malaya, Singapore and the three Borneo territories Sarawak, Sabah and Brunei as a viable political, economic and defensible unit, and the idea gradually caught on. Only Soekarno demurred, angrily, though no one was threatening him. It may be that he saw himself presented with an unsatisfactory choice between waiting until the British had gone before taking what he wanted, when Malaysia would be a recognized nation and his action overt aggression that might provoke outside interference, or doing his utmost now to prevent its ever being formed so that its individual states would remain weak and amenable to pressure.