by Shaun Clarke
Though it was impossible to stand upright without support, Stirling again made his way along to the pilot’s cabin and returned to inform his men that the aircraft had been hit by flak, but had not been badly damaged and was continuing on to the DZ, the drop zone. Lieutenant Bollington’s Bombay, however, had taken a worse hit and its entire instrument panel had been shattered. It was now leaking petrol from a damaged wing tank and losing power, so the pilot planned to head back to base.
‘If he makes it,’ Neil whispered mournfully, then looked a bit alarmed as the Bombay abruptly banked steeply.
‘Don’t worry,’ the RAF dispatcher informed the paratroopers. ‘We’ve just banked into our inland turn. You have six minutes to zero hour. On your feet, boys and girls.’
When the men had done as they were told, the dispatcher, an RAF sergeant who would supervise the jump, checked their static lines. Designed to jerk open the chutes as each man fell clear of the aircraft, they were fixed to ‘strong points’ in the fuselage. A man’s life could depend on them, but in this obsolete aircraft the fixings looked suspiciously flimsy. If these twisted free, the canopies would not open and the men would plunge to their deaths. However, a sharp tug on each line by the dispatcher satisfied him that the new clips would hold firm. He then moved to the door and nodded to the aircraftman to open it. When the latter did so, cold air rushed in with a startling roar.
With their senses abruptly revived by the shock of the cold, rushing air, the paratroopers lined up to make the jump. Supply packs of weapons and explosives tied to parachutes were stacked up in the rear of the fuselage, behind the lines of men, waiting to be pitched out by the airmen when the last of the paratroopers had gone; other boxes with parachutes were clipped to the bomb racks, also ready for dropping. Unable to be heard above the roar of wind and engines, the dispatcher mouthed the words ‘Get ready’ and pointed to the lamp above his head.
The sounds of anti-aircraft fire and exploding flak heard a few minutes earlier as the plane had banked into its inland turn had set the men’s adrenalin racing. Now, though nerves were steadier, their knowledge that the pilot was having difficulty finding the DZ, increased their fear of the unknown.
When Stirling’s gaze turned towards the small lamp mounted by the doorway, his eleven companions did the same. Men eased their shoulders more comfortably into their harnesses, fidgeted with their weapons, checked their equipment yet again, and forgot the discomforts of the two and a half hours already spent in the plane. At once nervous and relieved, they now just wanted to jump, to get it over and done with.
The red light came on. Two minutes to go.
Stirling, leading the drop, was first in line, at the door, waiting for the green light. When it flashed on, the dispatcher slapped his shoulder and he threw himself out. The second man, Lorrimer, moved up to take Stirling’s place and waited for a similar slap. He saw his predecessor’s line snake out and jar taut for a split second, before it trailed slackly from the door. Lorrimer heard a bawled ‘Go!’ before he felt the signal, then he he was out in the black void, the wind of the slipstream slapping at him, its noise deafening, as he held himself upright, heels together, waiting for the slipstream to release him and let him drop vertically, which it did within seconds. A sudden jerk and the roaring wind ceased, then Lorrimer dropped down through darkness and silence, looking for the ground. Where the hell was it?
By now Stirling should have felt, or at least seen, the ground, yet the blackness seemed bottomless as he continued drifting down. Suddenly, however, as he gripped the rigging lines, preparing to swing himself clear of anything harmful, he was smashed against a rocky stretch of desert. Hitting the ground with a jolt, he rolled over and was dragged away by the fierce wind, but he managed to roll again, this time onto his stomach, meanwhile wrestling to control the rigging lines, collapsing the canopy. Breathless and battered, with darting pains shooting through him, he was snatched away again by another strong gust of wind, then bumped, cut and bruised as he was dragged at great speed over sharp rocks and abrasive gravel. Somehow he managed to punch the release box and unravel his harness. Then he passed out.
Regaining consciousness, Stirling found himself lying on his belly. Rolling onto his back, he saw patches of stars between drifting storm clouds and, below them, the pale white flowers of other parachutes descending too far away.
‘Damn!’ Stirling whispered.
Attempting to stand, he was almost knocked off balance by the wind. Stinging granules of rock, the so-called ‘sand’ of the desert, stung his face, made breathing difficult and finally forced him to turn downwind, into the desert.
The gale had blown for several hours and put the other paratroopers well beyond their intended DZ, but Stirling did not know that just yet. He expected to find the rest of his party downwind. But when he reached what should have been the DZ, not one man was in sight.
Stirling was all on his own, lost in the desert, in the middle of the raging sandstorm that had reduced visibility to almost zero.
After fighting to get his breath back, gritting his teeth against the pain of his many cuts and bruises, and checking that his bergen straps and webbing were in one piece, Stirling switched on his torch and headed resolutely into the dark, storm-lashed desert.
Fighting against the raging storm and almost blind in the darkness, Stirling marched in the direction of where he thought he had seen the other paratroopers. Though shouting his name constantly, his words were lost in the wind, so he shone his torch left and right as a beacon, hoping someone would see it. Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, he saw the light of another torch veering from side to side, then another, and at last heard voices calling out to him. He soon came face to face with Ashman and Turner, both smeared with a film of sand and dust, leaning into the howling wind.
‘Have you seen anyone else?’ Stirling bawled.
Private Ashman nodded and pointed west. ‘Yes!’ he bawled back. ‘Over there! About half a mile away.’
‘Let’s go and find them!’ Stirling bawled.
Heading in that direction, the three men managed to link up with two others in the group, Lorrimer and Moffatt, then the search for the others continued, with all the men yelling out their names and waving their torches. In this manner it took nearly two hours for ten of the original group to link up. The eleventh man, Corporal Tanner, was missing and a further two hours of searching failed to find him.
‘He was probably dragged out into the desert,’ Stirling ventured with a sinking heart. ‘Almost certainly that’s what happened, likewise to the ten packages of weapons that were dropped.’
‘There’s two of them over there,’ Frankie Turner said, pointing east. ‘In the bed of a wadi. I didn’t see any more.’
‘Let’s go and fetch them,’ a dispirited Stirling said.
One of the parachuted crates contained Lewes bombs without fuses. There were also a few rations, but only enough for one day, and twelve water bottles, containing in all just over two gallons of drinking water.
‘Fat lot of good this will do us,’ Lorrimer said as they squatted on the cold wadi bed, protected from the howling wind but still covered in swirling sand, nibbling at some of the rations and quenching their thirst with the water. ‘No weapons apart from our pistols. No explosives. Nothing. We can’t do a damned thing, boss.’
‘We can at least have a look at the enemy installations,’ Stirling said stubbornly, refusing to go back empty-handed.
‘I’m willing,’ Lorrimer said, understanding Stirling’s frustration, ‘but I don’t think we should put the men through that after this bloody disaster.’
‘But you’ll come with me?’
‘Yes, boss.’
Stirling checked his watch by the light of his torch. ‘Three hours to daylight,’ he said. ‘That should give us enough time.’
‘Just about,’ Lorrimer agreed.
Stirling called Sergeant Bob Tappman over to tell him what they had planned. ‘Our objective,’ he sai
d, ‘is the German airfield near Gazala in Cyrenaica – one of the five we were to raid in this area. It should have been only a few hours’ march from here, so although we can no longer raid it Sergeant Lorrimer and I are going to have a look at it while you take the remaining men direct to the rendezvous with the LRDG lorries. If we’re at the correct DZ, the RV should be less than 30 miles away.’
‘If we’re at the correct DZ,’ Tappman said bitterly.
Stirling shrugged. ‘What is there to lose?’
Tappman returned to the men crouched on the dark floor of the wadi, grateful for its protection from the freezing, howling wind. When he had conveyed the news to them, they climbed wearily, dispiritedly to their feet, fell into single file and clambered up out of the wadi one by one, gradually disappearing into the stormy night. When they had all gone, Stirling and Lorrimer likewise climbed out and headed in what they assumed was the direction of Gazala.
They marched through the cold and dark until the grey light of dawn broke, when they laid up for a short break and a few nibbles of their remaining food. They then continued the march, taking their bearings from the Trig El Abd, a track line in the desert, previously used by the camel trains of the slave trade, then by either Axis or Allied vehicles, depending on who was holding the area.
After a hike of about ten miles, with the weather changing again and returning to a fierce, dry heat that lasted until last light, they reached a featureless desert plateau that led to an escarpment: a line of cliffs from which they could see the Mediterranean beyond the coast road. The road itself was the military supply route (MSR) for German and Italian forces loosely holding a line from the sea at Sollum, on the Egyptian border, 120 miles to the east of Gazala, well beyond the Allied enclave at Tobruk. Seeing the MSR, and the constant flow of Axis traffic heading along it in both directions, they realized that they had been dropped well south of their intended DZ, only ten miles or so from the coast.
‘There’s no airfield here,’ Lorrimer said, lying flat on his belly beside Stirling on the escarpment and studying the MSR through his binoculars. ‘We’re miles away, boss.’
‘Then let’s not waste our journey,’ Stirling replied stubbornly. ‘We’ll stay here for a bit and gather as much info as we can on the troop movements along that route. That at least will be something.’
‘Yes, boss,’ Lorrimer sighed wearily.
Unfortunately they were foiled in even that simple plan. They laid up all night and recced the MSR the following morning, but late that afternoon black clouds formed in the sky and they knew that another storm was coming. Hoping to find shelter, they advanced the last four miles to the edge of the escarpment, where they took shelter in a dried-up wadi bed, which they planned to use as their observation post (OP).
This was a mistake. When the clouds broke in a deluge of rain, they were caught unawares in the last thing that newcomers to the desert expect to encounter – a ‘flash flood.’ As the rain poured down with the force of a tropical storm, hitting the sand like bullets and making it spit and splash as mud, the bed of the wadi gradually filled up with water, becoming first a stream, then a fast-flowing river. This forced the pair to clamber up out of the wadi, where they were exposed to the full force of the storm, lashed by a freezing wind and now drenched completely by the torrential, incredibly noisy rain. Even as they lay there, hardly believing what they were experiencing, the river in the wadi became a raging torrent that swept baked sand and gravel along with it as it took the line of least resistance and roared along between the high banks of the wadi.
To make matters worse, the storm and flash floods – the latter were deluging other wadis – had blotted out the landscape and made surveillance of the MSR impossible. It was now clear to Stirling that their presence here could serve no valid purpose.
‘There’s no alternative but to head for the RV,’ he said, sounding bitterly disappointed, even though the storm was starting to abate. ‘And I think we should start straight away, before another storm comes.’
‘No argument,’ Lorrimer said.
The RV, they knew, lay 40 miles inland, back along the Trig El Abd. Luckily, as the rain was still falling, they were able to fill up their water bottles before leaving. When they did eventually set off, the rain was still falling, they were thoroughly soaked, and Stirling’s beloved, carefully packed cigarettes had virtually disintegrated in his sodden kit.
‘I can’t bear to be without a smoke,’ he said. ‘That’s worse than anything else.’
Lorrimer laughed at that.
Again they marched throughout the night. In the early hours of the morning, about three hours before first light, Lorrimer realized that he could barely put his weight on his swollen ankle, twisted during his parachute landing but passing virtually unnoticed in the tension generated by their many arduous, dangerous activities since the drop. Now it hurt like hell. Nevertheless, he followed Stirling steadily in the direction which the latter had judged would bring them to the RV where, it was hoped, the LRDG’s A patrol would be shining a Tilley lamp from a small hill as a welcoming beacon.
By 0700 the next morning, they had been over 36 hours in the desert. When the rain stopped, about dawn, they slumped in the shade of a hillock and slept the sleep of the dead for four hours. Their wet clothes had dried on them before they moved off again in the midday haze. By then the heat was fierce, scorching their skin, blistering their lips and filling them with an unceasing thirst that compelled them to finish off the water they had gathered from the rainfall on the escarpment the previous day.
Late that afternoon, just as they were both starting to feel that they might go mad from thirst, the weather turned yet again, becoming much cooler and, more importantly, bringing back the rain and enabling them to fill their bottles. Replenished and cooled down after their long, thirsty journey through the fierce heat, they continued the arduous march across the scorched, barren waste.
They were some 12 miles from the RV when Stirling spotted movement far to the south. Through his binoculars he made out nine figures heading for the Trig El Abd.
‘Nine men,’ he said to Lorrimer, ‘heading westward. It can only be Sergeant Tappman and the others. Let’s hope they make it the rest of the way without being caught.’
‘Let’s hope we do,’ Lorrimer said sardonically, still limping badly when he walked, but marching on anyway.
Stirling and Lorrimer marched throughout a third night, stopping only to watch a sudden, fierce sandstorm blowing up in the distance, where they had seen the other nine men.
‘Poor bastards,’ Sergeant Lorrimer murmured.
When the sandstorm had abated, they marched on again, finally lying up in the early hours of the morning, dropping off almost immediately and once more sleeping like dead men.
On waking just before first light, they saw what they thought was a star very low in the sky. But when they continued their march and drew closer to the glowing object, they realized that it was A Patrol’s lamp shining in the south, no more than two or three miles away.
They had made it back.
An exhausted Stirling and a badly limping Lorrimer found the LRDG lorries hidden under camouflage nets in a small ravine. There they were welcomed with hot tea laced with whisky, which perked them up temporarily. They were further buoyed up to find Lieutenant Greaves and Captain Lewes already at the RV with eight of their ten men. They, too, had had a disastrous drop and been up to the coast to fix their position before marching to this RV. Likewise Paddy Callaghan, who had come in just before Stirling and Lorrimer, having waited nearby to be sure that he had correctly identified the position of the patrol.
But Stirling’s brief euphoria was dashed when Callaghan told him what had happened to his group.
‘By the time we reached our DZ, much later than your lot, we found ourselves parachuting down through winds blowing at 90 mph. You can imagine! A lot of the men were injured as they landed, others were lost, and the rest of us, having no choice, marched on into the desert a
s planned, though with most of our weapons and supplies missing. The storm didn’t let up. More men were lost. Another had a fatal heart attack. After that I accepted that our situation was hopeless and led the remaining men towards the coast. When I reached there, I used the configuration of the coastline to navigate my way back to the RV. No enemy airfields were sighted, let alone sabotaged, and I lost eighty per cent of my men. A complete disaster, I fear.’
‘Has anything else been heard of the Bombay that was damaged and tried to limp back to base?’
‘Lieutenant Bollington’s plane?’ Callaghan looked none too happy. ‘According to Captain Owen, commander of this LRDG group, Bollington was captured with his men. The damaged Bombay made a forced landing west of Tobruk. The crew made emergency repairs and took off again, but they were forced to crash-land for a second time after being attacked by an Me 109F. That’s when they were captured – all twelve of them, plus the air crew.’
‘Damn!’ Stirling growled.
He was further deflated when he found Privates Ashman, Turner and Moffatt huddled together against the wheels of a lorry, covered with sand and gravel, red-eyed, clearly exhausted, and comforting themselves with tea and whisky.
‘You men look like you’ve had a rough time,’ Stirling said. ‘What happened out there?’
Turner and Moffatt glanced at Jimbo, who then spoke up for all of them. ‘When we left the DZ we soon learnt that we’d been dropped far off the mark.’
‘Yes,’ Stirling interjected impatiently, ‘I found that out as well.’
‘So,’ Jimbo continued, ignoring the interruption, ‘we couldn’t find our bearings and got even more lost. To make matters worse, we then ran into winds of over 90 mph …’
‘You as well!’ Stirling murmured bitterly.
‘… and a lot of us then lost one another and were widely scattered. We three’ – Jimbo nodded, indicating Turner and Moffatt – ‘found ourselves still with Sergeant Tappman, who managed to lead us out of the storm. We were looking for the Trig El Abd, but just before last light we turned in the wrong direction and instead ran into a Kraut patrol. There was a brief fire-fight – we only had our Browning handguns – and Sergeant Tappman deliberately exposed himself to the Krauts, distracting them, while we made our escape along a wadi bed. We saw him being captured and taken away. Eventually, we made our way back to the Trig El Abd, which eventually led us back here. A good bloke, that Tappman.’
