The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  A week earlier, a third of a million Allied troops had been scooped off the beaches of Dunkirk by an armada of little ships. British forces had sustained a shock to their morale, and were poorly equipped and unready. Churchill was convinced that the only way to slow down the German machine was with guerrilla attacks by ‘lightly equipped, nimble forces accustomed to work like packs of hounds instead of being moved about in the ponderous manner [of] the regular formations’. ‘We must have at least ten thousand of these “bands of brothers”,’ he wrote, ‘who will be capable of lightning action.’2

  Three days after Churchill’s ‘hunter class’ declaration, the War Office issued orders instructing each British regional command to supply the names of forty officers and a thousand other ranks ready to volunteer for ‘striking companies’ to be deployed on unspecified mobile operations. It was an ambitious gambit – no one quite knew how these ‘packs of hounds’ were to be trained or used. General Sir John Dill, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, delegated the task to his military assistant, Lt. Col. Dudley Clarke, a Royal Artillery officer of uncommon subtlety.

  Clarke not only came up with the name ‘commandos’, but also penned the first specifications for special forces troops. They would all be volunteers, he said, as fit as professional athletes, trained to perfection in the use of infantry weapons. They would be capable of killing quickly and silently, would operate by night rather than by day, and would be familiar with ships and the sea. They would be able to fight alone or in small groups, to use independent initiative, and would think of warfare only in terms of attack.

  The commandos were a new kind of army. Regular soldiers trained to fight like guerrilla bands, they would operate without heavy weapons, artillery or air-support. They would be trained to endure fatigue, face overwhelming odds and persevere to the end. The commando course emphasized comradeship between officers and men, self-reliance and individualism among all ranks. Commando units were flexible and mobile, unencumbered with barracks, cookhouses, HQ offices or rear-echelon staff. Being volunteers, there was no need for traditional military discipline – the ultimate sanction for misbehaviour was RTU, ‘Return to Unit’ – a humiliating expulsion from the elite force that the commandos came to consider a fate worse than death.

  It took three months to train the commandos, and by the time they were ready for action, the situation had changed radically. The Royal Air Force had won the Battle of Britain, and the immediate threat of invasion had receded. The ‘bands of brothers’ were raring to go, but suddenly there was nothing to shoot at. The focus of the war had already relocated from Europe to the Mediterranean theatre. In North Africa, Wavell’s field commander, Lt. Gen. Dick O’Connor, had thrashed Mussolini’s Tenth Army in Libya, and captured a hundred and thirty thousand Italian troops. Seaborne special forces might be useful in securing key Mediterranean islands to support O’Connor’s advance.

  In October it was proposed that the commandos should launch an assault on the island of Rhodes, to maintain British control in the eastern Mediterranean. On the last day of January, the Special Service Brigade, codenamed ‘Force Z’, comprising numbers 7, 8 and 11 (Scottish) Commandos with elements of 3 Commando, was dispatched from the Isle of Arran in Scotland to Egypt, in two landing ships, Glengyle and Glenroy. By the time the ships had reached their destination the brigade had been re-christened Layforce, after its commander, Col. Bob Laycock, of the Royal Horse Guards. David Stirling, an officer in 8 Commando, had left Arran on board Glenroy.

  When Layforce arrived in Egypt that March, a British victory in the Mediterranean theatre looked almost certain. Rommel had changed all that. By the end of April, all the gains O’Connor had made in six months had been reversed. The Rhodes operation had become untenable. Instead, 7 Commando had been squandered fighting a defensive action on Crete, 11 (Scottish) Commando had suffered more than twenty-five per cent casualties during a botched landing at the Litani River in Syria, and 7 and 8 Commandos had failed in three raids on the coast of Libya. By mid-June, Layforce had lost half its fighting strength, and was no longer a viable unit.

  3. ‘The landing of small parties by night will clearly be most effective’

  A month before his meeting with Ritchie, Stirling and four other commandos had made history by executing the first recorded parachute descent on the African continent. They had jumped from a Vickers Valentia a thousand feet above Fuka – a railhead on the Mediterranean coast. The others had landed well, but Stirling’s canopy had snagged on the aircraft’s tailplane, ripping out the panels. Later, all he remembered was the ground rushing up to meet him before he piled into it like a wrecking ball.

  The drop was the idea of John Steel ‘Jock’ Lewes, a twenty-eight-year-old lieutenant in the Welsh Guards, who was the first to jump that evening. Stirling and his companion, Sgt. Barney Stone, had muscled in on the party by claiming that they were planning an operation in Syria. Lewes resented their interference. An intense Oxford graduate with a puritanical streak, he had a tendency to make savage moral judgements on those who failed to live up to his ideals. Stirling certainly fell into this category. Lewes knew him as an idle, cynical, sybaritic ‘Cheekie Laddie’ from a privileged background, who had never managed to settle down to anything, and who was so notorious for over-sleeping that on Glenroy he had acquired the nickname ‘The Great Sloth’.1

  Lewes, who had left a sweetheart at home, and wrote romantic poetry, looked like a man constantly grappling with an internal chess problem. He was in many ways Stirling’s opposite: serious, single-minded, systematic and analytic – not the kind to be caught propping up bars in Cairo, or having a flutter at the racecourse. Lewes had volunteered to carry out tests with a consignment of fifty parachutes diverted to North Africa from India, and had plans to execute an airborne operation with a troop of fifty selected commandos.

  The experiment had been sanctioned by A Force, a secret psy-ops division with an office at 6 Shari’ Qasr an-Nil, Cairo. The brainchild of Lt. Col. Dudley Clarke, the same heterodox thinker who had named the commandos, A Force was engaged in dropping squadrons of dummy parachutists over Helwan, south of Cairo, for the benefit of enemy informers. This fictitious unit was designated ‘1 Special Air Service Brigade’: Clarke was keen on having some real parachutists to back up the charade.

  Lewes’s initial jump was successful – Stirling was the only casualty. He hit the ground hard and lay in the crater his body had gouged in the gravel, his legs paralysed, his eyes blinking sightlessly up at the darkening skies. An hour later he was slotted into a military ambulance and carted off to 15 Scottish General Hospital in Cairo. By the time he arrived there his eyesight had cleared, but the blindness had been replaced by a crippling headache. He still couldn’t move his legs. He was suffering low blood pressure, and was diagnosed as having sustained severe spinal shock.

  Stirling was in bed for about a week before the sensation started returning. Among his first visitors was Lt. Evelyn Waugh, ex-Royal Marines and 8 Commando. Already a famous author in civilian life, and one of the stars of the Cairo cocktail circuit, Waugh had seen hard fighting on Crete in May, as Layforce Intelligence Officer. He brought news that, while Stirling had been messing about with parachutes, Wavell had decided to disband the Middle East commando force.

  Stirling had already heard rumours about the breakup of Layforce, but the fact that it was now certain came as a shock. It could mean returning to his parent unit, the Scots Guards, and either shipping back to Blighty or settling down to a conventional war of platoons and companies. Though he came from a military family, Stirling had never envisaged a career as a soldier: he lacked the authoritarian pose. So quietly spoken that others were often unsure if he was actually talking to them or not, he also radiated warmth and bonhomie. ‘He had the knack of conning you into anything,’ said Ernie Bond, an early SAS recruit, who had known Stirling in the Scots Guards. ‘He was such a charming gentleman … He never gave you an order – it was sort of a suggestion …’2

  Bo
rn in 1915, educated at Ampleforth, Stirling was one of four sons and two daughters of Archibald Stirling, retired general, Member of Parliament, and Deputy Lieutenant of Perthshire, with an impeccable Scots-Catholic pedigree. His mother, Margaret Fraser, was the daughter of the 16th Baron Lovat.

  Stirling’s early ambition had been to become an artist, and after being sent down from Cambridge for gambling, he joined the Bohemian community of Paris with a view to making himself one. Advised by his tutor that he lacked the requisite drawing skill, he quit the artistic life in high dudgeon, and decided instead to become the first man to climb Everest. As part of his training regime, he spent seven months in the Canadian and American Rockies, and six months in the Swiss Alps. The Everest expedition was cut short by the outbreak of war.

  It was Stirling’s social position that gained him entry into the commandos. He had passed no more stringent a selection test than downing gin-and-tonics alongside 8 Commando’s socialite commanding officer, Lt. Col. Bob Laycock, at the bar of White’s. Stirling’s case was not unique – Laycock believed in going to war among friends, and many commando officers, including Waugh, had been recruited in the same way. The ‘Bar of White’s’ became a legend among the well-heeled young subalterns of the commando, projecting exactly the right brand of gentlemanly amateurism. Some of these officers were of real quality, but many were unable to pay more than lip-service to the ideals of the new unit.

  Lt. David Stirling had been one of them. It was only when faced with the prospect of RTU that June that his mind began racing over new possibilities for the deployment of raiding units behind enemy lines. Within a few days of Waugh’s visit he had come up with the blueprint for the SAS.

  What this memo actually contained has been the subject of some confusion, mainly because most SAS historians have been under the impression that the original paper was lost. This is not the case. In fact, a typewritten copy, dated 16 July 1941, bearing Stirling’s name, and the stamp of the Chief of the General Staff, has always been extant. Filed not with the SAS records, but in the A Force dossier, it was recently rediscovered by SAS scholar David List, when the A Force records were released into National Archives.

  David Stirling’s proposal was for a small parachute unit that would drop behind enemy lines, sabotage aircraft, vehicle parks, water, ammunition and supply dumps, and withdraw on foot. Entitled Case for the retention of a limited number of special service troops, for employment as parachutists,3 his paper suggested that while seaborne commando operations were restricted by weather conditions, this factor would not apply to parachute drops. The range of airborne troops would be much greater than that of seaborne commandos, because they would not be confined to areas within reach of the sea, and they could be tasked at much shorter notice.4 As the first paragraph makes clear, the memo was stimulated directly by the demise of Layforce:

  Now that Layforce has finally been disbanded, there remains no ad hoc organisation for raiding enemy lines of communication … This unit is being dispersed at a moment when the enemy is being forced … to fulfil his total commitment to Russia – a time which seems totally propitious for these raids … The landing of small parties by night on a wide range of objectives will clearly be most effective, in Lybia [sic] and elsewhere, so long as the enemy is finding difficulties in replacing material and in reinforcing troops.5

  Stirling knew that another drag on seaborne operations was the reluctance of the Royal Navy to commit ships without adequate air-support. His idea was to deploy parachute commandos in tiny groups. They would not seek to confront the enemy, but would operate like ghosts, coming silently out of the desert by night, laying demolitions charges on any available targets. By making full use of stealth and the element of surprise, Stirling thought, a small section of highly trained men could swing a hammer out of all proportion to its size.

  As the numbness in his legs thawed, he began to pen out his proposal on a memo pad. The more he scribbled and pondered, the more certain he became that his idea would work. After Waugh, he had a string of visitors, among them Jock Lewes, who was now bound for beleaguered Tobruk to carry out raids on Axis troops.

  Stirling had a certain awe of Lewes, and desperately needed his approval. Though an 8 Commando officer, Jock was anything but a ‘Bar of White’s’ recruit. Born in India in 1913, he was the son of Arthur Lewes, a chartered accountant of Calcutta. A lean, classically handsome six-footer with dazzling blue eyes and a long-ranging stride, he had spent his childhood in Sydney, Australia, but had moved to Britain to study Modern Greats – Philosophy, Politics and Economics – at Christ Church, Oxford. Unlike Stirling at Cambridge, Lewes had not only stayed the course, but had distinguished himself as President of the University Rowing Club. Under his leadership, in 1937, the Oxford team had broken a long string of Cambridge victories in the boat race, winning by three lengths. Lewes had earned himself a Blue and undying fame in rowing circles.

  Commissioned in the Welsh Guards, Lewes had been accepted by Bob Laycock as a subaltern in 8 Commando, and had joined the unit for training at Burnham-on-Crouch, where he found himself a fish out of water. ‘Jock Lewis [sic], the wiry Australian,’ wrote a comrade, Carol Mather, ‘surveying his companions knocking back their pink gins, muttered into his beer that after the war “all this would change” – meaning that society would change and us with it, that our … privileged lives might be cruelly shattered.’6

  Now Lewes considered Stirling’s proposal with critical acuity, and saw that he had not thought the problems through. Stirling was interested in patterns and concepts rather than nuts and bolts. When discussion came down to times, distances and details, his eyes would glaze over. ‘Stirling wanted the action without the preparation and training,’ Ernie Bond commented. ‘… Jock was the thinker, he used to think the “whys and wherefores”.’7 They were the perfect complement. ‘The chat with Jock was the key to success,’ Stirling admitted. ‘I knew I had to have all the answers to the questions he had raised if I was to get anywhere.’8

  Stirling’s initial plan was that his air-commando would attack a range of enemy targets within weeks of its formation. He later realized that this was aiming too high, and evolved a specific scheme to coincide with Auchinleck’s big push – Operation Crusader, due at the beginning of November. The raid would kick off two days before the offensive, when sections of his parachutists would drop on Axis airfields at Gazala and Tmimi, on the coastal plain of Cyrenaica, near Tobruk. The raiders would lie up for a day observing their targets, and go in silently at night, sabotaging every enemy aircraft they could find. They would then leg it back to their own lines, or get picked up by submarine. Stirling later modified the submarine idea – probably at Lewes’s suggestion. He proposed instead that his squads could be extracted by the Long Range Desert Group, a mobile force equipped with Ford trucks, already operating deep behind Axis lines.

  Stirling later said that Lewes was the ‘brains’ behind the SAS scheme: ‘… the proposal was largely based on Jock’s ideas,’ he wrote, ‘and was merely an application of them on a unit basis.’9 An analysis of the original document suggests that while its framework was Stirling’s, the solid detail came from Lewes. Lewes later acknowledged that Stirling’s great quality was his ability to see the big picture, and to ‘appreciate the long-term value of my experiment more accurately than I’.10 It was out of the tension between these two very different personalities – the analytic perfectionist and the romantic visionary – that the SAS was born.

  4. Friends in high places

  The date of Stirling’s discharge from 15 Scottish Military Hospital in Cairo is unknown. Stirling exaggerated the time he was there, claiming that it was two months, though it is unlikely to have been more than three weeks. On 16 July he wrote to his mother that he had recovered from the back injury ‘quicker than expected’, and had been ‘on leave’ in Cairo for a month.

  By the second week in July, he was staying with his brother, Peter, Third Secretary at the British Embassy, who had a fl
at at Qasr ad-Dubbara, a short taxi ride from Grey Pillars. The flat was shared with a third Stirling brother, Bill, currently assistant to General Arthur Smith, Chief of the General Staff. It was here, amid the Victorian chaos of books, maps, papers, weapons, shell-cases and overflowing cocktail cabinets, that David, puffing pensively on a pipe stuffed with Dark Empire Shag, considered the best means of introducing his proposal to the high command.

  To present the plan through the usual channels would be fatal. It would get swamped in the slough of bureaucracy – what Stirling would later call ‘layer upon layer of fossilized shit’. He needed to hand it to a senior officer face to face. Top brass didn’t usually talk to lowly subalterns, but if he could get near enough to establish his social credentials, he would be in with a chance. There is no independent corroboration, though, that he actually did vault over the wire at GHQ and elude the wardens. As a romantic, Stirling undoubtedly saw the mythic possibilities in presenting the creation of the SAS as the result of a daring ‘raid’. It is at least possible that he was not challenged at all.

  Whatever the case, there is certainly a vital element missing from his original account. His arrival in Ritchie’s office was no accident. Stirling admitted later that the Deputy Chief of the General Staff had always been his target. Ritchie was a man noted for ‘friends in high places’, and what he saw when he glanced up from his desk that morning was not just a lanky young officer, but a familiar face. He had shot grouse with Stirling’s father before the war, and certainly recognized the scion of a noble family when he saw one.