SAS: Secret War in South East Asia

by Dickens, Peter;

  The best way of applying that principle tactically, however, was not immediately clear. The ideal target was undoubtedly an enemy raiding force before it struck, but since such forces were assembled in the rear areas and spent the minimum time near the border we should be lucky to get timely enough warning. Additional targets must be selected, the most promising being routine enemy movements on tracks or rivers wherever Intelligence indicated and topography suited, so Lea’s policy became the art of the possible.

  ‘Claret’ began slowly because success was its essence and defeat over the border would be altogether disastrous; every factor had to be just right before a raid was attempted, not least the quality, acclimatization and training of the battalion concerned. The first infantry success in the First Division was not achieved until May and meanwhile the SAS had the field to themselves, often going where even the best trained infantry would have found it difficult.

  ‘They did a useful job,’ says Farrar-Hockley; though he added, valuing them more for the information they collected, ‘but it was pretty small beer you know.’

  Small in scale it may have been, but evidence will be produced that the enemy did not like it.

  THE NELSON TOUCH

  Captain Robin Letts was a diffident and shortsighted young officer who loved books, balancing on knife-edges between life and death, music, and winning; he had been across the border under training with Bigglestone to Batu Hitam and with Lillico to Gunong Rawan, but only now commanded his own patrol for the first time. Corporal ‘Taff’ Springles provided the experience as well as being both signaller and medic. The team was completed by Trooper Brown, another Welshman; and Pete Hogg, also a new entry, who had made his way from an upbringing in India by the unusual route of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. It takes all sorts to make an SAS Regiment.

  Berjongkong and Achan were known enemy forward bases, probably supplied up the River Sentimo and its tributaries. Daubney and Thompson of ‘B’ Squadron had already visited the area, but negotiating great areas of unmapped swamp had occupied most of their time. Letts would now make use of their pioneering effort to find out more about the enemy’s lines of communication, 9,000 yards in from the border. The patrol made good headway at first through flat, primary jungle, before hitting the swamp at about half-way, which slowed them down, not entirely because wading was difficult but because it was noisy.

  Sleeping above a swamp was, however, decidedly difficult to any but proboscis monkeys, who are born to it. The technique involved selecting two trees the right distance apart, hanging your bergen on one, getting your hammock out and slinging it, climbing the first tree to the lowest branch, changing into dry clothes, wringing out the sodden ones and hanging them out to dry, sliding down into the hammock and resting snugly over the watery waste. One false move meant a mighty splash, a silent I’m-all-right-Jack guffaw from your companions and night-long misery.

  On the morning of the seventh day they heard an outboard motorboat far ahead, which was both exciting and a useful check that their navigation coincided with Daubney’s. Then they came to a twelve-foot wide stream, which they took for one of the many tributaries draining the swamp into the main Sentimo, where the motorboat must be. This was obviously the place to establish a base for the reconnaissance proper, fortune providing a dry little island 40 yards back from the stream on which to do so. Letts and Hogg left their bergens with Springles and Brown and went on a preliminary inspection, walking in the stream so as to leave no tracks and sometimes even swimming because it was surprisingly deep. Some 200 yards downstream they spotted the nose, eyes and horns of what looked like a ferocious wild beast but proved to be a domestic water-buffalo wallowing luxuriously in a bed of soft, warm mud. That indicated a village, which voices soon confirmed; in fact, Babang Baba though the name would have meant nothing to Letts. He decided to bring the whole patrol down for a thorough reconnaissance the next day, and retraced his steps. While pushing against the current, however, a thought struck him; the stream was quite free of the usual submerged roots, jammed logs and low branches. Closer observation then revealed what older jungle hands would have noticed at once, that someone, the Sentimo Conservancy Board or whoever, had been hard at work keeping the channel clear and quite recently too. Immediately, walking in the fairway was no longer seen to be prudent but suicidal.

  Having completed the journey through the trees, Letts set a two-man watch on the stream at an admirable spot for the purpose, where it described a loop from the inside of which the view was clear for 60 yards to the left and 30 to the right. Towards evening two boats with two armed soldiers in each did indeed pass from right to left heading downstream. Letts and Hogg cowered behind large-leaved water-plants and were not seen; but it was an extremely close-quarters affair with the boats seeming huge, much longer than the stream’s width. Every sound down to the paddlers’ breathing was clearly audible as they steered their craft forcibly round the tight curves.

  The boats disappeared round the next bend, and Letts, marvelling at the sight of an enemy wondrously delivered into his hand, went straight back to the LUP and signalled for permission to engage should the chance recur.

  Left alone, Hogg gazed after the vanished boats. Then his back hair bristled with mortal fear, because he heard the splash of more paddles behind him and knew that his head was clearly visible. Crouching down with as smooth a movement as he could manage, he twisted round and prepared to sell his life dearly, grimly for he did not doubt that sold it would be; but these two crews unconcernedly followed where their leaders had safely gone without apparent suspicion.

  No approval to attack having come by the morning, Letts, blind as a bat without his glasses, took a leaf from Nelson’s book and resolved to engage the enemy just the same; closely too, there was no other way. Piecing together the evidence, he had to assume that the apparently insignificant stream was the waterway to Achan, and that the most likely purpose of the boat convoy was to embark men or stores at a staging-point on the Sentimo proper and ferry them back upstream. It also seemed probable that the staging-point was at the village they had discovered, so that the enemy’s reaction to an engagement would be swift.

  At first light, Letts made his dispositions around the loop, which was ideal for ambush as well as observation. He had noted how the boatmen had to work hard with their paddles in order to round it, backing, filling, and fending off the shore, the manoeuvre demanding all their attention; and how when a boat had passed, it was lost to view from those behind, denying the enemy mutual support and augmenting his confusion on being surprised. Letts placed himself at the top of the loop with Springles to his right and Brown to his left, ready to engage boats coming from either direction. But because that was most likely to happen from the left, Babang Baba, Hogg was positioned on that side and a little back from the bank, to give warning of any attempt by the enemy’s rear crews to rush the ambush from the flank and to hold them up. The ambush would be sprung when the first boat had rounded the bend and came opposite the man on the far side.

  They might have had to wait for days; in the event, their suspense lasted only two and a half hours, but even that seemed unbearably long. It is said that a man in ambush is a dangerous hunted animal, which is superficially paradoxical since he is the hunter and would seem to have all the advantages; but in practice it is true because he is about to call down the enemy’s wrath onto his head by his own act. In the jungle he will never know whether those he can see are all there are, or how the survivors of his first and perhaps only volley will react, but he can be quite certain that that volley will alert the whole military district and that he will be hunted remorselessly until he is out of it, perhaps with a casualty to carry. Letts and his three men expected to face eight enemies in four boats, acceptable odds in the circumstances but considerable none the less, and afterwards they would have to traverse 9,000 yards of very hostile territory. Thus their aim, which was to kill as many enemy soldiers as possible in order to further the General�
��s ‘Claret’ strategy, underwent a subtle change in their own minds and became to kill as many enemy soldiers as possible to prevent the enemy killing them. Steely, fierce, pitiless, but with hate as well as softness eradicated from their thoughts which were concentrated on professional execution of the task, and tense with animal fear which could not be wholly suppressed, they were dangerous indeed.

  At eight-fifteen on the morning of 28 April a boat nosed into view from the left, and when its length was revealed Brown saw that it contained three soldiers, not two. A second boat followed a length behind, also with three men. Each man in the patrol observed acutely all he could through his cover, assessing how best to kill the enemy and readying himself for the fight. In each boat only the front two men paddled and the third acted as sentry, alert with his weapon cradled, so there must be no mistakes.

  As the first boat came abreast Brown and the paddlers forced her into the bend, he shrank down; he must on no account be seen yet. Before he judged it safe to raise his head again, the second boat, inexpertly handled, nudged the bank precisely where he was so that if he had been disposed to be helpful he could have reached out an arm and pushed her off. Preoccupied with seamanship her crew failed to see him, and when she too passed into the bend Brown saw a third boat approaching, well into the straight. If the plan worked as intended, this would be his.

  The leading boat rounded the top of the curve with dreadful slowness. But finally her bow reached Springles, the second boat glided past Letts, and the time for action had come. To let live, and live? Rubbish! He stood up to shoot. His target was the sentry in the stern, but it was the bowman who reacted first, dropping his paddle and seizing his gun with such astonishing speed that Letts was in mortal danger. Disaster threatened the whole enterprise as he wrenched his body and point of aim through what was a wide arc at that absurdly short range. But Springles also saw the weapon come up and fired first, hurling the man into the water, and saving his officer by a hair’s breadth. Now the two of them faced five alert enemies and only killing mattered. Letts swung his SLR back to the rear man and hit him squarely in the chest so that he leant against the gunwale and then slowly, his head and torso arching limply backwards, slipped fluidly over it.

  By engaging Letts’s target Springles had to neglect his own, a mere eight feet distant. When he looked back, the boat’s crew had flipped her over like a kayak and were nowhere to be seen, a feat which – later – evoked his admiration. He fired ten rounds rapid at where they might have been and waited for heads to appear. Letts’s boat, rocked by violence, was a poor platform for a gunner, but the remaining man steadied himself on aim and Letts was again in peril; he sprang sideways to spoil the shot, before firing and hitting the soldier, who fell forward in the boat. Letts looked downstream and saw the third boat being engaged by Brown, but then his eye caught sight of the man he had just shot raising himself from the bottom of the boat. He shot him again, twice, and this time he died; a brave man if he knew what he was doing.

  In the micro time-scale of the engagement, all this took an age, and during it another brave and very quick-witted man from Springles’s overturned boat achieved a kneeling position on the near bank and had taken aim at the preoccupied Letts when Springles again intervened and shot him with not an instant to spare. The man slid back into the water dead, but left his weapon on the land. At once, another man scrambled ashore and reached for it, an act of barely credible courage when he might have remained hidden under the bank in the water. He too died.

  Brown had gone into action with the first shot of the sprung ambush. He had no choice of target because his boat was heading straight for him at 40 yards range. He first shot the bowman, who was thrown dramatically into the air and over the side, thus clearing his view of the second man, who was also raised by the shot but spun into the water. That exposed the man in the stern who, poor wretch, must have known what was coming to him, and it came.

  Hogg, covering the enemy’s rear, spotted the bows of a fourth boat emerging from the downstream bend and juddering to a halt as, he imagined, her crew seized the shore and hugged it for dear life; he fired at where they should have been, but they were able to haul their boat backwards out of sight. The action was over; there was no one left to shoot at.

  The silence was stunning to deafened ears, and the scene grim. Four bodies floated in the reddening stream, one face upward and wide-eyed, drifting slowly; a fifth sprawled on the bank at Springles’s feet; and two more lay crumpled in the boats, which had become their coffins. One man from Springles’s boat escaped; they heard him splashing and crashing wildly through the jungle swamp.

  Four months later, a newly-joined young officer in ‘A’ Squadron, Mike Wilkes, happened upon the place, which disconcerted him:

  ‘You could sense the ferocity just by the debris even after all that time; when a heavy SLR bullet goes through a tree it doesn’t make a clean hole but shatters the wood into tiny fibres as though it were explosive, and the top of a two-inch sapling is wrenched off leaving a stump like a shaving-brush. Imagine one going into you. Salutory.’

  The time, incredibly, still lacked a minute to eight-twenty when Letts raised his voice for the first and only time during the patrol to order retirement. Then they were all back at the LUP for their bergens, ready-packed, and away without wasting a second. Having so far to go Letts decided on speed rather than concealment as their best policy for survival, and, with SAS fitness serving the powerful instincts of the hunted, they really moved. One and a half hours later the enemy mortared the ambush position and presumably set out to chase them, but with few tracks to follow in the swamp and not knowing what size force he was up against, probably greatly overestimating it when he saw the carnage, he was most unlikely to achieve half their speed. By evening Letts and his men had nearly reached the border, a distance which had taken them six days to cover before.

  Basha’d down, Springles set up the radio with pleasurable anticipation as the bearer of good news, but was forestalled by base with the urgent message that permission to attack had been granted. The Nelson touch was thus vindicated, and the light relief welcomed after they had recovered from their astonishment and reminded themselves that this authority had still been outstanding.

  In the morning they were frightened by barking dogs, imagining themselves to be the quarry, but nothing ensued and after a slow and cautious last leg they crossed the border safely, found a gap in the tree canopy and asked to be winched out. It being evening they expected to have to wait the night and were pleasantly surprised when a helicopter homed onto their Sarbe. All, that is, except a disgruntled Hogg who had just cooked a specially generous and tasty curry which had to be buried quickly; and when his turn came to go aloft he was further irked by a vine coiling itself around his neck and threatening to hang him, downwards. But the four of them enjoyed an even better dinner in the ‘Green Dragon’ at Hereford some months later when Letts was awarded the Military Cross for what was undoubtedly a classic of its kind. He transferred to the Australian SAS soon afterwards so as not to miss the Vietnam War which, even without Springles as his right-hand man, he survived.

  Roger Woodiwiss flew home urgently, deeply worried for his wife who was gravely ill in childbirth – the risk business not being exclusive to the SAS – and distressed at having to leave his men at this active time. John Slim, his second in command, was in Borneo so continuity was maintained until Glyn Williams, the Adjutant at Hereford and already earmarked to relieve Woodiwiss, arrived out on 4 May and assumed command of ‘D’ Squadron. Peg Woodiwiss and her baby surmounted their challenge staunchly and returned safely to base.

  LARGE OF THE KOEMBA

  Patrols continued up and down the front, and one of Woodiwiss’s last acts had been to tell Large that his next objective would be the Koemba near Poeri. No fewer than six attempts to reach it had been foiled by swamp, but such was its importance that there was no question of accepting defeat. This would be ‘D’ Squadron’s last chance before their tour
ended and was just the challenge that Large and his men needed, especially since nobody truly expected them to succeed. Even Brigadier Cheyne, who was most anxious that they should and took a keen interest in the planning, told them he doubted whether there was a way through the swamp; but such pessimism together with their own unsatisfying tour so far served only to tune their resolution to the pitch where failure was entirely discounted. The mission was to establish the pattern of river traffic and then, having obtained permission, to engage a suitable target.

  Large approached the task well aware that he would do no better than the rest unless he built on their achievements with painstaking thoroughness in planning as well as determination in execution, qualities in which he was trained but also possessed naturally and enjoyed using. First, he extracted every last jot of information from their patrol reports and minutely interrogated any of their writers not on patrol, notably ‘Old Joe’ Lock who had only just returned after penetrating nearer to the river than anyone else. They told him chiefly where there was swamp, that is to say everywhere they had been, which was useful negative information because some approaches had not yet been tried.

  To that Large could add the positive evidence of air photographs which, although unable to show the ground or the limits of the swamp, did pick out contours, rivers broad enough not to be hidden by the tree canopy, and the nature of the growth whether primary jungle, ‘ladang’ or anything between. The pictures were particularly informative to Large as a qualified Air Photo Reader, and assisted by Staff Sergeant Watson of Brigade Headquarters, whose interpretive skill was little short of artistry, he added considerable detail to his largely featureless map. He did so with dots and smudges which would seem accidental to anyone else but were strictly disallowed just the same.

  Pondering his handiwork Large’s eye for country was attracted by two features which, taken in combination, might just possibly indicate a dry route to the river. The border ridge was low, 250 feet at its highest, and from it ran a just perceptible spur which became indistinguishable, even to Watson, 1,000 yards from the river but pointed directly into the big loop west of Poeri. What more likely than that the loop was actually caused by the spur? He would not walk along it because that would be dangerous and unnecessarily far, but aim to meet it in the loop; the plan seemed to offer an exciting chance, but it was still only a chance. He made one stipulation to Woodiwiss, which was readily agreed and would prove crucial; whereas earlier patrols had been directed to precise points on the river, he should be allowed complete freedom to select his own in the light of what he discovered.