On Sunday 16 November, Stirling was at HQ RAF Western Desert near Baggush when the first weather reports came in. They were not encouraging. The weather at Baggush was fine, but the met boys were tracking a storm that would break over the target area with rain, and winds of thirty knots. Stirling was staggered. A fifteen-knot wind was enough to cancel the drop. The Brigadier General Staff coordinator, Sandy Galloway, advised him to call it off. There would be no moon, and with winds gusting that fast, the parachutists would be scattered. They would certainly sustain high casualties. ‘There will be plenty of other opportunities,’ Galloway told him. ‘However, the decision will rest with you.’1
Stirling cursed his bad luck. He told Galloway glumly that he would talk it over with the boys and get back to him within the hour. The Detachment was at Baggush airfield, where they had arrived that morning, raring to go. They had been briefed about the operation only twenty-four hours earlier. The atmosphere in the lecture-tent at Kabrit had been electric when they discovered that they had been training to knock out the whole fleet of Messerschmitt 109-Fs.
In October, Stirling had conducted a night-recce over the targets, riding passenger on a Royal Navy Albacore aircraft. His final orders had come from Eighth Army Battle HQ the previous day. The SAS was to raid the airfields at Tmimi, Gazala No. 1 and Gazala No. 2, on the night of 17/18 November. The airfields would also be bombed by RAF Wellingtons and Albacores during the dates his unit was in the field. After completing its tasks, the SAS was to rendezvous with a patrol of the Long Range Desert Group early on 21 November, at a place agreed on between them. The LRDG would carry them to a fallback rendezvous, where they would find two of their own trucks in the charge of Lt. Bill Fraser. They would travel by their own transport to Jaghbub oasis on the Egyptian border, from where they would return to Kabrit by air.
The target airfields lay on the coastal strip west of Tobruk, and extended a total distance of seventy miles. The area wasn’t the desert proper, but a flat, rocky plain with well-frequented tracks running east-west, grooved by shallow wadis, and covered with sedge, esparto grass and thorny acacia scrub. It was sparsely inhabited by Bedouin of the Awlad ‘Ali, coastal semi-nomads who kept camels and sheep and hitched their camels to ploughs in the rainy season. It was hot and humid and subject to sea-mists. In winter, daytime temperatures got up to about 29° Celsius, and went down to 11° Celsius at night.
The Bombays would hug the coast at eight thousand feet, then wheel south over the Gulf of Bomba. They would pass over the target area, and drop the parachutists in the desert about twenty miles west-south-west of their objectives. The SAS would lie up five miles south of the airfields during the next day, and hit the targets simultaneously at exactly one minute past midnight, as the Eighth Army’s tanks lumbered into battle.
Stirling felt depressed as he drove back to the airstrip. The one thing he had dreaded was a cancellation. After the final ex, the Detachment’s spirits had hit the roof, but everyone had bad memories of the continuous aborted operations they had suffered in Layforce. Galloway had told him there would be other chances, but he didn’t think postponement was an option. The operation had to be pulled off in coordination with the Crusader advance. Whatever the brigadier said, Stirling was convinced that if this job was called off, they would never be allowed another go.
He knew he had enemies among the ‘layers of fossilized shit’ at GHQ, many of whom had predicted that Squatter would fail. He was also embarrassingly aware that one of his main selling-points for the new unit had been that ‘weather would not restrict their operations to the same extent that it had done in the case of seaborne special service troops’.2 On the other hand, the allocation of five Bombays for a single special-operations mission was unprecedented. Was it right to risk five priceless aircraft and fifty-four highly trained men, when the weather conditions offered only a minimal chance of success? Sandy Galloway had left the decision with him. He knew that he was facing the gravest choice of his life.
At the airfield, Stirling called Lewes, Mayne, Bonington, McGonigal and Major F. C. Thompson – an Indian Army officer who was accompanying the drop as an observer. He put his cards on the table. He said he thought they ought to take the risk, but didn’t try to argue the case. Lewes and Mayne agreed immediately, and the others concurred after a moment’s hesitation. Stirling then had Sergeant-Major Yates bring in the enlisted men. Lewes explained the situation and told them that though the op could be postponed, it would not be a tactically sound option. Any man who wanted to could pull out now. The way Johnny Cooper remembered it, after Lewes had finished, Stirling stood up and said, ‘We’ll go because we’ve got to go. The job is important … the whole army depends on us to get in there and knock off as many of those Messerschmitt 109-Fs as possible.’3 No one opted out. ‘Rightly, people might … say we should never have dropped under those conditions,’ commented Reg Seekings. ‘But if we hadn’t there would never have been an SAS.’4
14. Raining so hard it hurt
Of the fifty-four men who set off that night, only twenty-one came back. Those who jumped landed in forty-mile-an-hour winds that dragged them for long distances across the desert, and were flayed alive by sharp gravel and the spiky acacia bushes that covered the drop-zones. One man of Stirling’s stick was blown away and never seen again. Jock Lewes had to leave his giant troop-sergeant, Jock Cheyne, on the DZ, with a broken back. Mayne had to abandon Dougie Arnold and Bill Kendall, neither of whom could walk. Dave Kershaw’s arm was fractured. Stirling’s stick suffered two sprained ankles, a broken wrist and a broken arm. Though he never reported it, Mayne hurt his back so badly that he was never again able to play first class rugby. There wasn’t a single man in the three sections who walked away without concussion, bruises, cuts or sprained limbs. It was pitch dark on the DZs and sound was obscured by the roaring wind. They had been instructed to do everything in silence. Instead there was pandemonium as they bawled to each other and flashed torches. Though they had brought entrenching tools to bury their parachutes, many of the canopies inflated and flew off before they could catch them. It took up to four hours to clear the drop-zones, and by that time there was little chance of making their lying-up places by first light. Both Stirling’s and Lewes’s sticks had been dropped in the wrong place.
The fate of Eoin McGonigal’s stick, on No. 2 Flight, remained a mystery for several years. It was only when one of the parachutists, Jim Blakeney, escaped from his prison camp, that the truth was revealed. Blakeney, a former Grimsby trawlerman and ex-Grenadier who, along with Riley, Almonds and Lilley, had been one of Lewes’s celebrated ‘Tobruk Four’, reported that the stick had jumped, but that McGonigal had been killed on landing. The rest of the section had made for the meet-up place, but had been captured by the Italians on the way.
Bonington’s stick didn’t jump at all. After being hit by flak, No. 4 Flight headed back east for fifty minutes until the fuel gave out. Pilot Charlie West set the Bombay down on what he was certain was Allied territory, only to discover that a shard of shrapnel had lodged behind the compass-faring, and that they had flown round in a circle. Using the last of the fuel, West managed to get the Bombay airborne again, but she ran straight into a Messerschmitt 109-F, which shot her down. She crash-landed in the desert and broke up. West suffered a fractured skull, ribs and shoulder and a ruptured diaphragm. His wireless operator was badly hurt and his co-pilot killed. Charles Bonington, his troop-sergeant Ernie Bond, and the other eight SAS-men were injured, one mortally. All of them, including observer Major F. C. Thompson, were bagged by German troops.
One major tactical mistake was the system of dropping the gear separately. The men jumped with only their pistols and webbing, wearing khaki overalls over shorts and shirts, with woollen ‘stocking-caps’ instead of helmets. Thompson sub-machine guns, Lewes bombs, detonators and fuses, personal packs containing rations, spare ammunition, spare food, blankets and water, were packed separately in canisters, attached to parachutes. Most of them vanished into the night. Some
canopies failed to open. Some detonators exploded on impact, setting the containers on fire. Plunging down under his canopy, Paddy Mayne saw the flashes and thought his section was under fire.
Mayne recovered only one of his five canisters. Lewes’s men found two. Stirling’s section found two, containing personal packs, six blankets, and twelve Lewes bombs with no fuses. Incredibly, though, both Lewes and Mayne decided they had enough bombs to do at least a partial job, and pressed on to their targets. Even Stirling, who lacked any explosives, and sent his stick back to RV with the Long Range Desert Group, took Sergeant Bob Tait and trekked to the coast to do a recce of Axis movements.
Stirling’s later assertion that ‘no party was dropped within ten miles of the selected DZs’, though, was untrue. In fact, Mayne’s section was dropped more or less on target. Despite depleted equipment, they actually lay up six miles from Tmimi aerodrome, and discovered by close observation that there were seventeen 109-Fs on the strip. With the sixteen Lewes bombs Mayne had retrieved, they stood a good chance of bagging almost all of them. Mayne divided his section into two four-man groups. He had already issued final instructions when the rain hit them.
The terrible rainstorm that swept the coast of Cyrenaica on the afternoon and evening of 17 November, bedevilling Cunningham’s advance, has become part of Second World War legend. It came in a shock-wave – a wall of water that crashed out of the sky on the tail of cracking forked lightning and booming thunder. It sizzled across the sand, spreading like electricity into the vast network of clefts and channels, plunging downward with increasing momentum, until wadis had become swirling deep rivers hundreds of feet wide. The transformation it wrought was breathtaking. The land, till that moment still and bone dry, suddenly became a heaving monster of glistening wetness and frantic movement.
The storm was characterized by war correspondents as ‘the worst storm in living memory’, or ‘the worst storm in forty years’. This may have been the case, but the stitchwork of deep wadis gouged across the desert was adequate indication of the part water had played in its geological history. It rained frequently in this area at this time of year – Cyrenaica averaged twenty-four inches annually, and it was by no means rare for nomads to be drowned in flash floods. No one in GHQ had anticipated it, mainly because of the enduring Western belief that the desert is a hot, dry place that can be cold at night, when in fact it is a landscape of extremes in a constant state of dynamic flux. Not even Lewes, for all his brilliance, had considered the possibility of rain – the fuses and time-pencils weren’t waterproofed.
At first, Mayne’s section tried to sit out the cloudburst. When it dawned on them that they were sitting in what had just turned into a fast-moving river, though, they scrambled out of the wadi to higher ground and tried to dive under their blankets. It was raining so hard that it hurt. The rain sieved out the wadi, bringing twigs and branches and animal droppings. It carried off bits of gear, it penetrated everything. At last light, Mayne found that the instantaneous fuses were soaked. He was so furious at having been thwarted at the last minute that he declared he would go ahead on his own with a couple of grenades. The others tried to talk him out of it. It was only when he realized he would have to swim a seventy-five-foot-wide wadi in spate that he gave up. Mayne was never a good swimmer. The following night the section moved out to the rendezvous.
For Lewes’s section, the rain kicked in just after noon as they lay up in a wadi. They clambered to higher ground, but their fuses and time-pencils were wrecked in minutes. Until that point, Lewes had still been determined to carry out the mission. Now, he knew they had no choice but to withdraw.
Stirling and Tait managed to reach high ground from where they could see both the coast-road, the Via Balbia, and the sea beyond. There was a great deal of Axis activity on the road, and Stirling told Tait he wanted to climb down to have a closer look. They didn’t make it. At about 2000 hours, just as they were starting their descent, the skies opened and the deluge began. They found themselves slithering about in a waterfall. Stirling, an experienced mountaineer, saw that they were going to end up plummeting down the escarpment. They decided to retrace their steps and make for the rendezvous.
Their destination was Rotunda Segnale, a crossroads on the Trig al’Abd (the Slave Route), a desert track in places forty miles south of the coast. Stirling had chosen it in consultation with the Long Range Desert Group, mainly because it was exactly thirty-four miles from both targets.
The squadron had rehearsed long marches on minimum water, but had never dreamed they would be marching back thirty miles through water that was often up to their knees. It was horrendous going, only alleviated by the thought that the rain had saved their lives. None of the sections had the full complement of water-bottles, most of which had been lost on landing. Stirling and Tait had only one full water-bottle to cover the whole distance. Thirst was further suppressed by the unbelievable night cold. The men were used to British winters, but none of them had ever experienced such cold before. ‘I couldn’t explain how cold it actually was,’ Jeff Du Vivier said. ‘To believe it one would have to experience it … I couldn’t speak, every time I opened my mouth my teeth just cracked against one another.’1
15. ‘Well crikey, if these people can penetrate this far …’
On 20 November, Captain David Lloyd Owen, MC Queens Regiment, and Trooper Titch Cave, Wiltshire Yeomanry, were lying in a desert hide, watching the crossroads at Rotunda Segnale. They belonged to Y Patrol of the Long Range Desert Group, whose thirty-hundredweight Fords were camouflaged nearby. Lloyd Owen had been with the LRDG only since September, but Cave was a veteran who had already won the MM for action behind enemy lines. Not long after first light, they clocked two men limping towards them out of the desert. They were David Stirling and Bob Tait, on their way to the rendezvous three miles further on.
Lloyd Owen accosted the two SAS-men and steered them back to his hide, where he plied them with tea laced with whisky. Stirling was worried about Bill Yates and the rest of his stick. Lloyd Owen hadn’t seen them, but said that Mayne and eight men had passed by a few hours earlier. Gulping tea, Stirling told Lloyd Owen that Squatter had been a fiasco. He was especially irate about the loss of the equipment-canisters. On the other hand, he and Tait had managed to get right up to the coast-road and back again unobserved, proving that it was possible to operate in the Axis rear.
Lloyd Owen smirked at this. The Long Range Desert Group had been penetrating Axis territory with impunity for almost a year and a half. They had been set up by Wavell before Layforce had even landed in Africa, as a way of persuading the Italians that the British had large forces operating in their rear. Unlike the rest of the army, the LRDG didn’t operate only on the coastal plain. They ranged thousands of miles into the deep Sahara, where in the early days of the war they had carried out some spectacular raids on Italian outposts.
Founded by Major Ralph Bagnold, Royal Signals, the LRDG was the military manifestation of the pre-war ‘Zerzura Club’ – a group of peacetime army and navy officers, colonial administrators and pilots dedicated to exploring the eastern Sahara. In the course of their travels, they had invented or improved the sun-compass, the expansion tank for condensing radiator water, dead-reckoning techniques, the sand-channel, the sand-mat and the supply-dump. They had worked out detailed tables of food and water consumption that Lewes would have given his right arm for. Not only had they done the seemingly impossible by driving cars and lorries across vast dune-fields like the Great Sand Sea, they had also made new maps of the Sahara and presented papers to the Royal Geographical Society. Bagnold, more a boffin than an army officer, had written a book on the physics of blown sand.
Lloyd Owen claimed later that, as he mulled over Stirling’s problem, an idea struck him. ‘Why shouldn’t we in the LRDG take [Stirling’s] men to their targets, let them do their dirty work and then transport them home again?’1 When he suggested this, he said, Stirling muttered that trucks were too slow: his objective was surpris
e. Lloyd Owen countered that it was better to be certain of getting to the targets than ‘to risk the whole thing going off half-cock like this last show of yours’.2
Stirling looked sceptical. ‘Perhaps he didn’t want to abandon his idea of parachuting,’ Lloyd Owen commented. ‘… Perhaps also he wasn’t convinced that we could do all I said we could … Anyway this conversation was the birth of an idea which grew to fruition in David Stirling’s mind, and he never again attempted to reach his objective by parachute.’3
Stirling never denied Lloyd Owen’s oblique claim to have been the unofficial ‘godfather’ of the SAS, in its role as a vehicle-borne unit. He later called the LRDG the ‘supreme professionals of the desert’ and ‘honorary members of the SAS family’. He commented that Lloyd Owen was ‘a very high-grade chap’, but mentioned another LRDG officer, Jake Easonsmith, as the man who had first suggested being carried by truck instead of parachuting.
Years afterwards, he told journalist Gordon Stevens that he had known all about the LRDG before the operation, and had originally planned to make the SAS an LRDG-style force. He had been dissuaded from the idea by a fellow Scots Guards officer, Michael Crichton-Stuart, a former LRDG patrol commander, who advised him that GHQ would never accept a proposal for what would essentially be a second version of the LRDG. Instead, Stirling had written Jock Lewes’s parachuting idea into his paper, not because he thought it was a more efficient means of delivery, but because it was a novel ‘selling-point’; ‘they could grasp the newness of the idea,’ he said, ‘[because] it was identified by a new method of arrival. Psychologically the parachute was the ideal propaganda means of putting over the proposition of the role of the unit.’4
Evidence unearthed by SAS scholar David List shows that Stirling did plan more parachute drops after Op Squatter, and was dissuaded from them, not by Lloyd Owen, but by GHQ. At the same time, he was open to suggestions – a point he’d made clear at the conference in July, when he stated that while the principal aim of the SAS was parachute missions, it could also be deployed on ‘any combined operation’.
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