by Shaun Clarke
Sometimes a man collapsed. When this happened, others supported him. When that man recovered, smiling sheepishly, maybe shaking, he took his turn in supporting another man – and so it went on for many hours – even when the dazzling light and fierce heat of the day had returned to blister the skin around their eyes and drain them of strength.
It was only the shemaghs that prevented their faces from being blistered and gave them protection from the frenzied swarms of flies and mosquitoes. They marched, walked, stumbled and sometimes crawled through those noisy swarms, those veritable clouds of insects, emerging from them, as if from dark rain clouds, to the sun’s dazzling light and the heat haze shimmering up from the desert floor. Scorched and consumed by the sun, they gradually merged with the featureless desert, becoming part of its landscape.
They were ghosts in the haze.
Captain Stirling stayed out in front. He felt that it was his duty. Already a tall man, he grew taller as the day began, letting his stature, both real and imagined, give strength to his men. They followed as best they could, some close behind him, others straggling, and were proud to see that the other officers – Captain Callaghan and Lieutenant Greaves – were marching as resolutely as himself, though now looking like scarecrows.
This is the final testing ground, Greaves thought, recalling the great battle outside Mersa Brega and thinking it child’s stuff compared to this. If we finish this hike, if we survive, we’ll have proved we are worthy. L Detachment, SAS, will exist and go on to better things. Keep walking. Don’t stop.
Greaves did not stop. Marching into the heat haze – or, more accurately, dragging his feet behind him, through the heavy, burning sand – he kept himself going by dwelling on where he had come from and what the end of his bitter journey might bring him.
He recalled his elegant family home in Hanover Street, Edinburgh, his student days at the University, romance with his girlfriend, now fiancée, Mary Radnor; then recruit training and his first years with the Scots Guards; and, finally, his baptism of fire in Sicily with 8 Commando, leading to that unforgettable day when, outside Mersa Brega, the awesome might of Rommel’s Afrika Korps – hundreds of tanks, thousands of men – had swept over the British defences and pushed them all the way back to Tobruk and the Mediterranean.
Whether a defeat or not, that last adventure had been the most exciting time of Greaves’s life to date.
Disturbing though it was to acknowledge the fact, Greaves had enjoyed the experience, had taken pride from surviving it, and was still feeling proud when recuperating from his painful wounds in the hospital in Alexandria, where he had first met Captain David Stirling, likewise Scots Guards, who had led him to where he was this very moment.
That pride sustained him even now as, scorched by the sun, his throat dry, his head aching, his eyes bloodshot and practically blind, he continued to stumble on towards that dazzling horizon.
He would not stop. He had a lot to look forward to. He would drink a cooling beer, eat a decent meal, be flown out to Cairo and, if he was lucky, even be reunited with Nurse Frances Beamish in the relative luxury of Shepheard’s Hotel. Life was for the living, he realized, and he wanted to live.
That romantic notion kept Greaves going when his exhausted body begged him to give in.
Nor did any of the others stop. Captains Stirling and Callaghan, Corporal Clayton, Privates Ashman, Privates Turner and Moffatt and all the others. Though hungry and thirsty, though burnt and blistered, though mentally and physically exhausted, they refused to give in. They hiked, marched, walked and, in some cases, eventually crawled, until they saw what some of them thought was a mirage: the palm trees, green grass and pale-blue water of Jalo Oasis.
Jimbo was on his hands and knees. Having collapsed, he had started crawling. After crawling on his belly for what seemed like an eternity, he had risen back onto his hands and knees. He was wearing shorts and his knees were blistered. The blisters burst and were scraped by sand. The raw flesh of Jimbo’s knees poured blood that soaked the sand and the pain, which was beyond his imagining, made him shed silent tears.
His hands were blistered, too. The burning sand burst those blisters. When the pus poured out, the hot sand scorched his raw skin and made him almost cry out with the pain. Almost, but not quite. Jimbo gritted his teeth instead. He advanced on blistered hands and knees, in the agony of the damned, leaving a trail of blood behind him, towards what he was convinced was a mirage of cool water and shade.
‘Won’t give in,’ he gasped. ‘Never!’
Someone walked out towards him, stopped above him, looked down at him. He was a very big man in an immaculate uniform, his arms folded across his broad chest as he gazed down in wonder.
‘You’re a right bloody mess,’ LRDG Sergeant ‘Wild Bill’ Monnery said with a widening grin. ‘Welcome home, trooper.’
Jimbo smiled and collapsed.
18
The SAS raids of December 1941 had accounted for ninety-seven aircraft, according to L Detachment’s meagre records. Also destroyed, however, were at least forty vehicles, including fuel tankers invaluable to the Axis forces.
In March, June and December of the following year, having learnt from their good and bad experiences, the SAS mounted a number of successful raids around Benghazi and Tobruk, destroying shipping and supply dumps as well as airfields.
When Rommel’s Afrika Korps advanced into Egypt, L Detachment, SAS, by then equipped with its own jeeps armed with mounted Vickers and Browning machine-guns, destroyed many enemy aircraft with Lewes bombs and machine-gun fire in raids against the airfields of Bagoush and Sidi Haneish.
Whatever the precise number of Axis losses, General Auchinleck, the British Commander-in-Chief of Middle East Forces, was satisfied that L Detachment had indeed proved its worth. Captain Stirling was therefore promoted to Major and allowed to recruit a further six officers and up to forty other ranks.
The deeds of L Detachment, and of Captain Stirling, soon became legendary, particularly in the folklore of service bars throughout the Middle East.
In October 1942, L Detachment, now 500 strong, was officially listed as 1st Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment.
Though the creator and official head of the SAS, Captain Stirling did not stay with it for long, being captured by the Germans in January 1943, during Operation Torch in Tunisia, then incarcerated in Gavi prison, Italy, from where he escaped four times, before being sent to the high-security Colditz Prison, where he remained as a POW for the rest of the war.
The future of the SAS Regiment was, however, assured when, in 1943, Captain Stirling’s brother, Lieutenant-Colonel William Stirling, then with the British First Army, formed 2 SAS and, with the Special Raiding Squadron (SRS) – which was 1 SAS temporarily renamed – performed invaluable work in the Allied capture of Sicily.
In October 1945 the SAS was officially disbanded because the War Office saw no future need for it. However, in 1947, the War Office, changing its tune, established a Territorial Army raiding unit attached to the Rifle Brigade, which was then merged with the Artists Rifles and renamed 21 SAS (Artists).
In 1950, during the so-called ‘Emergency’ in Malaya, Colonel ‘Mad’ Mike Calvert, veteran of the Chindit campaigns in Burma, formed the Malayan Scouts, which included a detachment from 21 SAS (Artists). In 1952, at the recommendation of Colonel Calvert, 22 SAS was created from the Malayan Scouts as a special counter-insurgency force.
Many of those who had fought with Stirling during World War Two rushed to join 22 SAS, serving with it during many remarkable campaigns in many parts of the world.
Within a decade, the SAS became the most famous regiment in the world. Whether reviled or admired, criticized or deified, it remains that way still.
Discover other books in the SAS Series
Discover other books in the SAS Series published by Bloomsbury at
www.bloomsbury.com/SAS
Soldier A: Behind Iraqi Lines
Soldier B: Heroes of the South Atlantic
>
Soldier C: Secret War in Arabia
Soldier D: The Colombian Cocaine War
Soldier E: Sniper Fire in Belfast
Soldier F: Guerillas in the Jungle
Soldier G: The Desert Raiders
Soldier H: The Headhunters of Borneo
Soldier J: Counter Insurgency in Aden
Soldier K: Mission to Argentina
Soldier L: The Embassy Siege
Soldier M: Invisible Enemy in Kazakhstan
Soldier N: Gambian Bluff
Soldier O: The Bosnian Inferno
Soldier P: Night Fighters in France
Soldier Q: Kidnap the Emperor!
Soldier R: Death on Gibraltar
Soldier S: The Samarkand Hijack
Soldier T: War on the Streets
Soldier U: Bandit Country
Soldier V: Into Vietnam
Soldier W: Guatemala – Journey Into Evil
Soldier X: Operation Takeaway
Soldier Y: Days of the Dead
Soldier Z: For King and Country
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
First published in Great Britain 1993 by Bloomsbury Publishing
Copyright © 1993 Bloomsbury Publishing
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eISBN: 9781408842232
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