Though Stirling didn’t know it until much later, one of his five aircraft hadn’t made it through the ground-defences. Minutes earlier, No. 4 Flight’s pilot, Flight Sergeant Charlie West, had taken the Bombay down to two hundred feet to get a visual fix on the coast. No sooner had she shucked cloud-cover than she was hit by a burst of flak that shattered West’s instrument panel and holed the port engine.
West heaved the thirteen-ton bird back into cloud, but she had lost power, and fuel was bucketing out of the wing tanks. He told the SAS section commander, Lt. Charles Bonington, that he was aborting the drop and turning back.
Paddy Mayne was on the trailing aircraft, No. 5 Flight, the last to take off from Baggush. As his Bombay dipped over the coast, he braced the open door, shivering with cold, wondering how his section would hold up in combat. His section sergeant, Edward McDonald, Cameron Highlanders, had fought with 11 Commando at the Litani River in Syria, where he had commanded a sub-section during a daylight advance on the Kafr Badr bridge. Corporal Dougie Arnold, Cameron Highlanders, known as the ‘Great Escaper’, had been in combat with 7 Commando on Crete. Separated from his troop, he had survived in the mountains for a fortnight before stealing a boat and navigating it back to Egypt.
Parachutist Reg Seekings, poised near Mayne at the front of the stick, had already acquired his ‘red badge of courage’ – he had been wounded in the thigh during the raid on Bardia. He was another 7 Commando man. A dour ex-farmhand from the desolate East Anglian Fens, Seekings had served in the Cambridgeshire Regiment before volunteering for the commandos. A fitness fanatic, keen on running and cycling, he had also been heavyweight boxing champion of his division. Seekings was living an ambition. He had been turned down for parachute training with 2 (Airborne) Commando in 1940, because he exceeded the weight limit. Now he was about to take part in the first ever SAS operational jump.
Next to Seekings was Corporal Bob Bennett, a Grenadier with the mercurial charm of a Cockney barrow-boy. Born and bred in London’s East End, he had joined the Guards at the start of war but, disillusioned with ‘bullshit’ and what he thought were antique ideas of warfare, he and his mate, J.H.M. ‘Lofty’ Baker, had volunteered for 8 Commando. The disbandment of Layforce had left them high and dry at the Infantry Base Depot at Geneifa, with no parent unit serving in the theatre. Both had joined the SAS.
Behind Bennett were Parachutist Harold White, Royal Army Service Corps, Corporal Geordie White, Royal Scots (an ex-11 Commando man) and three 8 Commando veterans – Lance-Corporal Bill Kendall, and Parachutists Anthony Hawkins and Thomas Chesworth, Coldstream Guards. Chesworth, a world-class complainer, had already incurred Mayne’s wrath once on the final exercise, when Mayne had shut him up by holding him one-handed over the edge of a cliff.
The last man in the stick was thirty-one-year-old Cpl. ‘Honest Dave’ Kershaw, another Grenadier, who had been with the 8 Commando raiding detachment at Tobruk. Kershaw, a sailor in his youth, had fought with the International Brigade against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He had enlisted in the Guards, but had ditched the gloomy prospect of training recruits at Pirbright for 8 Commando and Layforce. Now he was in the SAS, waiting to leap out into darkness and a forty-mile-an-hour wind. When the green light came on, at 2230 hours precisely, there was no drama. Mayne went out first, and the section cleared the aircraft in thirty seconds.
For Jock Lewes’s section, on No. 3 Flight, the situation for the past few minutes had looked sticky. His aircraft had only made it through the AA screen by the skin of her teeth. Seconds after banking, she had been illuminated by ‘flaming onion’ tracers, pinpointed by half a dozen searchlights and hit by streams of orange, green and yellow 20mm tracer, punching through the hull with the sound of ripping paper.
No sooner had the plane cleared the first line of defences than she was picked up by two more beams, and the clatter of ack-ack fire started up again. Now Lewes was plying through the cabin with a deliberate expression of nonchalance on his face, while his ten-strong stick battled to hook up their static lines, to stay balanced as the plane bucked, plunged and yawed, and to dodge the enemy flak coming up through the floor. Poised near the rear starboard door, Cpl. Jeff Du Vivier saw a 20mm shell burst through the aircraft’s skin and plop out again, narrowly missing the auxiliary fuel tank that took up most of the cabin’s space. ‘The flak was terrible,’ recalled Du Vivier, London Scottish, an ex-hotel clerk who had fought with 11 Commando at the Litani River. ‘We were all leaning back against the side and the flak was coming up through the centre. How the hell no one got wounded I don’t know.’1
Opposite him, twenty-two-year-old Parachutist Jimmy Storie, Seaforth Highlanders, ex-11 Commando and a former tile-fitter from Ayr in Scotland, was trying to convince himself that the men nearest him, both six-foot giants, were more likely to be hit than he was. They were Lewes’s sergeants, twenty-five-year-old John ‘Jock’ Cheyne, Gordon Highlanders, and his friend Charles ‘Pat’ Riley, Coldstream Guards. Both had been uncomfortable with the fit of their parachute-harnesses, and had swapped them on the two-hour flight from Baggush. Cheyne, a good-natured Scot known for his humour, had distinguished himself with 11 Commando at the Litani, by taking command when his troop officer, Lt. Bill Fraser, had been hit and knocked out. Fraser, another Gordon, was also serving with L Detachment but had been left behind on this operation because of a broken arm sustained in training. Charles ‘Pat’ Riley, an ex-policeman in East Anglia and Palestine, was technically an American. Born in Wisconsin, he had been brought up in England and had enlisted in the Coldstreams at eighteen, giving false information about his nationality. He had rejoined the Guards at the start of the war but, faced with the prospect of drilling recruits for the duration, had volunteered for 8 Commando and sailed for the Middle East on Glenroy. Riley had seen action at the Twin Pimples, and was one of the famous ‘Tobruk Four’ who had patrolled with Jock Lewes behind Axis lines that summer.
Nineteen-year-old Parachutist Johnny Cooper, near the front of the stick, was convinced that the Bombay, slow and unstable at the best of times, was going to crash. A youth from Leicester with a grammar-school education, Cooper had been an apprentice wool-grader in Bradford when war broke out. Under age at the time, he had persuaded the recruiting sergeant to enlist him in the Scots Guards on the strength of five shillings and his Scottish descent. He had served in Stirling’s troop in 8 Commando, and was one of thirteen guardsmen recruited from Buqbuq. For Cooper, who would end his military career a lieutenant-colonel, this was his second taste of enemy fire – his first had been with the 8 Commando raiding detachment at Tobruk. Now, he was watching Jock Lewes’s placid face and wondering why he should be scared if Lewes wasn’t.
Behind Cooper were Parachutist Bob Lilley, Coldstream Guards, a big, physically tough barrack-room philosopher, and another of Lewes’s ‘Tobruk Four’. With him were three more 8 Commando men, Corporals Johnny Rose and Jimmy Brough, both of 2 Scots Guards, and Parachutist Frank Rhodes, of the Grenadiers. The tenth man was Lance Corporal Charlie Cattell, East Surrey Regiment, who had served with 7 Commando.
The Bombay had taken a hit on the starboard wing, but was still climbing steadily up to five hundred feet. Lewes told the stick that the pilot was lost. They would be jumping blind, into a force nine wind.
Eight minutes from the drop-zone, the RAF dispatcher ordered, ‘Prepare to jump.’ They were the longest eight minutes any of them remembered. It was freezing in the cabin because the door had been removed. The men were nauseated by the stink of aviation fuel and the craft’s constant pitching. Jumping blind or not, they couldn’t wait to get out. Then, two minutes to exit-time, the red light flashed on. Hands turned white on the static-lines. Everything went out of focus but the door of the aircraft. The green light winked. They were almost on top of each other as they dropped out into the night.
8. ‘The man is the Regiment’
Almost the only thing the men of L Detachment had in common was a yearning for action. They came from differe
nt parts of Britain and from different backgrounds – from rural hamlets, suburban estates, inner-city slums. Some were teenagers not long out of school, others were men in their forties with wives and children. In civvy-street, they had been labourers, farm-hands, factory-workers, seamen, fishermen, policemen, clerks. What they shared was a contempt for the humdrum, and a need for dynamic quality in their lives. Forty-odd years on, David Stirling would comment that the ‘type of chap’ who joined the post-war SAS, though more politically aware, technically sophisticated, and ready to argue his corner, was ‘really no different in spirit from those who came together in Africa’.1
Critics who dismiss special forces troops as ‘adrenalin addicts’ or immature characters needing to ‘prove themselves’ are probably acceding subconsciously to Dr Johnson’s adage that ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.’ Peter Ratcliffe, DCM, who started his military career as a private in the Paras, served in the post-war SAS for a quarter of a century and retired a major, spoke for almost every special forces soldier, on one level or another, when he wrote that he had joined the army to ‘get away from a miserable dead-end existence’, and owed to both the Paras and the SAS the fact that he was not ‘still in a dead-end job’.2 Captain Malcolm Pleydell, L Detachment’s medical officer, said that his motive for joining the SAS was simply ‘boredom’: ‘This sort of warfare possessed a definite flavour or romance,’ he wrote. ‘It conjured up visions of dashing deeds which might become famous overnight.’3
Some people are content with static lives, others endure them. Some need dynamic quality to feel alive at all. Change comes about through individuals who are not able to accept things as they are. The commando idea was itself an attempt to rid the British army of its outdated feudal ethos. It was partly to supersede the tactics of the ‘thundering herd’ with its mass ‘suicide-charges’ of the First World War that Stirling and Lewes had come up with the SAS concept in the first place. In every age there have been men who have sought the dynamic edge of reality in the warrior’s path – a path on which ‘the only perceived good is freedom, and the only perceived evil is static quality itself’.4
The original L Detachment was an elite of an elite. All its personnel were ex-Layforce, and therefore volunteers. They had made a further commitment to join the new unit. Stirling personally interviewed all potential recruits who hadn’t seen combat. Those with favourable combat records were taken on automatically. There was no selection in the modern sense of a pro-active pass/fail course, but standards were high. Tough desert battle-marches organized by Jock Lewes, and dangerous parachute-training, served as satisfactory rites of passage. The idea was that the training would sort out the ‘passengers’ – but the men would ‘fail themselves’.
Stirling understood that the quality of the SAS was the quality of its recruits. Technology and technique couldn’t transform men into supermen, while for the right men almost anything was possible. ‘The man is the Regiment,’ he said later, ‘and the Regiment is the man.’
In a speech made years later, he told his audience that the cornerstone of the SAS was and had always been the ‘calibre of each individual man recruited’. His initial menu of SAS values was basically a restatement of the purity of the commando idea – a purity that had been corrupted in actual performance.
In his inaugural address to the Detachment on 4 September, he told the men that they would be expected to display self-discipline, independence, personal initiative, modesty, and the highest standards of turnout and behaviour. RTU would be the penalty for those who weren’t committed, or weren’t up to the training. ‘We can’t afford,’ he said, ‘to piss about disciplining anyone who is not a hundred per cent devoted to having a crack at the Hun.’5
There was a paradox inherent in his requirements, though. He wanted men ‘who argued’, who were ‘not controllable, only harnessable’, who were ‘individuals’, yet men who would be as rigidly disciplined as the Brigade of Guards. One of these principles had to go, and inevitably it was the old ‘bullshit’ style of discipline. ‘There was no bawling,’ Jeff Du Vivier said, describing conditions at the SAS base in the early years. ‘None of what is commonly known as bullshit. Drilling, saluting officers every time you passed them, it was all forgotten … You had to learn to think for yourself. If the sergeant said do this and you didn’t think it was right, then you didn’t do it.’6
This laid-back attitude to normal discipline continued in the post-war SAS. Charlie Beckwith, the US Special Forces officer who served with 22 SAS, wrote that ‘[The SAS] shared with the Brigade of Guards a deep respect for quality and battle-discipline, but unlike the Guards it had little respect for drill and uniform, in part because it approached warfare in an entirely unorthodox manner.’7 ‘The discipline was there,’ wrote wartime SAS-man Roy Close, ‘but it was unobtrusive and understood; and that is really the hallmark of the SAS. We knew who was who.’8
The ‘Cheekie Laddie’ Stirling was himself no paragon of Guardsman-like ways, and was certainly ill-qualified to impose this ideal on men like Paddy Mayne, who was never cured of his addiction to binge-drinking and bar-room brawls. Nor was it only the officers. Reg Seekings, the quintessential SAS enlisted man, who served in almost every major SAS action of the war and became one of the Regiment’s most highly decorated soldiers, for example, was remembered by his comrades as a pugnacious and prickly bruiser, who, like Mayne, was apt to settle arguments with a knuckle sandwich.
9. ‘A yellow streak a yard wide’
Stirling’s first op was designated ‘Squatter’, and training for it lasted ten weeks. The Detachment’s base at Kabrit on the Great Bitter Lake, Canal Zone, was little more than a patch of desert next to a naval camp, an airstrip and a signal station. There was no view but the canal and the stony wastes of Sinai on the other side. The odours of salt-breeze and sulphur hung on the air. The canal, with its heavy shipping, was a frequent target of Axis bombing and mine-dumping runs.
The base grew by the men’s own efforts from five tents and a signboard to what Stirling called ‘a spectacularly effective camp’. With his encouragement, they looted most of the tents and furniture from the nearby Allied Stores Depot, and the camp of 2 New Zealand Division, currently in Tobruk. Some of the boys had qualms about this, because the Kiwis were well-liked, but it was pointed out that they also had more than they needed: ‘everything but the kitchen sink’.
Although Stirling later claimed that the men never complained about conditions in Kabrit, this was not the way some of the others remembered it. Reg Seekings recalled that Stirling had promised there would be no fatigues or sentry duty, but for the first fortnight all they seemed to do was dig holes and fill them in. Eventually they started to wonder if they’d been conned. Many decided to go back to their own units.1
Stirling probably failed to recall this incident because he spent most of his time in Cairo, wrangling with GHQ, and was away when it occurred. Day-to-day running of the camp was left to Jock Lewes, who suddenly found himself faced with a near-mutiny. He held a meeting in the lecture-tent, and after listening to the chuntering for a few moments, leapt on a table and barked, ‘The trouble with you people is you’ve all got a bloody yellow streak a yard wide down your backs. You just can’t take it, that’s your problem.’2
There was an incredulous silence as the men wondered if they had heard right. To soldiers who had just laid their lives on the line for special service, many of whom had already seen hard fighting in Crete, in Syria and at Tobruk, it was an almost unforgivable insult. Lewes stared back at them stony-faced, and said, ‘Right, prove me wrong. From now on you’ll do anything I do, and I’ll do anything you do.’3 Later, Seekings couldn’t believe that he hadn’t flattened Lewes on the spot. Yet it worked – the real training started from then on.
The Detachment was divided into A and B Troops, commanded by Lewes and Mayne. The troops were subdivided into sections. Stirling envisaged his eleven-man sticks being subdividable into two units of five,
plus one officer, but the essence of the SAS was its flexibility. It would not fight in set formations like infantry, but its personnel could be picked and mixed according to the task. All ranks were trained in demolitions, Axis small-arms, including Beretta pistols and Schmeisser sub-machine guns, first aid and parachuting.
Lewes doubled as Training Officer, and, besides Mayne, there were three other officers on the orbat: Lt. Bill Fraser, Gordon Highlanders, Lt. Charles Bonington, General List, and Lt. Eoin McGonigal, Royal Ulster Rifles. The Company Sergeant-Major, George ‘Bill’ Yates, and a Company Quarter Master Sergeant, Gerry ‘Daddy’ Ward, had been among the first men selected. In practice, the Detachment had an operational orbat of sixty-eight men, with another twenty-six assigned for back-up and administration duties – a total of ninety-four. Captain Peter Warr, East Surrey Regiment, a trained parachute instructor, turned up at the beginning of November in time to add the finishing touches, but too late to affect the basic parachute course.
Lewes’s course was commando training geared to desert conditions. The men developed the confidence to navigate across hostile terrain, with little food and water and the sketchiest of maps. Night confidence and night shooting were essential, as movement and offensive operations would take place only in darkness. They practised night movement blindfolded during the day, crawling, feeling and sensing objects, so that their instructors could watch them and point out mistakes.
They practised the recognition of sounds at night until it was second nature, and it soon became clear that operating during the moonless phase conferred considerable advantages. On moonless nights, visibility was down to a maximum of twenty yards, and the range of automatic weapons down to only ten or twenty yards, rendering enemy machine-gun posts virtually useless. For the observation phase, they were trained in recognition and memory techniques, including ‘Kim’s Game’, and coached in writing observation reports. The dyslexic Reg Seekings found this the most taxing job of all. While the others were sound asleep, he would be poring over his notes, convinced that he would never make it.
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