The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  They would halt for a short break for lunch at noon, erecting a tarpaulin for shade. The LRDG had acquired and developed the ‘composite ration pack’, a daily ration including canned bacon, sausages, stew and canned oatmeal biscuits.

  After twelve hours in the heat and the desert wind, the night halt came as a blessing. The napalm glare of the sun slowly drained away, the landscape turning by degrees to blood-red and gold. The heat dissipated quickly after dark, and greatcoats and sheepskins came back on again. The LRDG crews would cook bully beef stew in a cooker of British army devising – a petrol tin cut open and filled with sand soaked with petrol. While the meal was on the go, the W/T operator would report to LRDG base at Siwa, and the navigator take his star shot. After eating the men would squat round the fire swigging tots of army-issue rum – another special privilege of the LRDG. In the deep desert the patrols posted no sentries at night. They were confident enough of their security even to play dance music on the BBC.

  By noon on 11 December they were forty miles south of Sirte when an Italian Ghibli spotter poled up suddenly out of the haze. Holliman didn’t order evasive action immediately, because he knew that, nine times out of ten, enemy spotters could be persuaded the convoy was friendly if it failed to react. He saw quickly, though, that this pilot had decided already – it dropped straight into a strafing run at five hundred feet. Holliman ordered his bearded gunner, J. A. Kroeger, a South African from Pietermaritzburg, to open fire. Kroeger’s Lewis rattled drumfire, quickly followed by the other Lewis guns. The gunners ripped off ear-splitting bursts, blagging out round after round until the barrels were red hot. LRDG operating procedure was to engage fighters head-on at up to two thousand feet. The Ghibli was sluggish and lightly armed, and didn’t worry the LRDG squads. The Heinkel IIIs and Caproni Ca309s bombers presented a more serious threat, because they could release their payloads from five thousand feet, way out of range. In this case, the Ghibli pilot saw he was outgunned and dumped his two bombs. They went wide, detonating with a crump and kicking up wedges of pebbles and dust.

  Holliman ordered the patrol back to a tangle of thorn-scrub and camouflaged up, while some of the crew brushed out their tracks. His caution proved justified. Minutes later, the Ghibli was replaced by two more. They cruised over threateningly, but the pilots failed to pick out the vehicles in the tapestry of light and shade, and in frustration beat up a vacant stretch of desert nearby with bombs and machine-gun fire.

  Holliman had made a gamble earlier by breaking radio silence, and thought the Regia Aeronautica might have been alerted by the message. The Italians were exceptionally skilled at dee-effing – wireless direction-finding. In any case, the enemy now knew the patrol was there.

  Stirling was piqued. His crucial op had been compromised, but he had no choice but to go on. Instead of being dropped twenty miles from Sirte aerodrome as planned, the patrol motored him in to within three miles of the target. He decided not to risk his whole section, but to slip into the airfield with only one companion, Sgt. Jimmy Brough, an old comrade from 8 Commando and the Scots Guards. Both were carrying heavy Italian packs, but it was Brough who ended up lugging the seventy-pound bag of Lewes bombs they had with them. In his customary style, Stirling didn’t order Brough to carry it, but merely suggested it might be a good idea, as he would be doing the navigating. There had been a change of plan for Mayne too. Rather than hit the original target, the main airfield at Tamet, Mayne’s section, including McDonald, Seekings, Hawkins, White and Chesworth, would attack a new airfield not marked on the map. This was only five miles west of Sirte, at the end of the wadi. A recce had revealed aircraft landing and taking off from there.

  Stirling knew the Italians were on the lookout for raiders, and he and Brough spent some dicey moments dodging sentries. The aerodrome was wide open, without even a fence. There were thirty Caproni Ca309s bombers parked on the strip. Stirling was so excited to have got within striking distance of the enemy at last that he was tempted to lay his Lewes bombs straight away. He held back only because he knew it would jeopardize Mayne’s attack the following night.

  They were making their way round the edge of the airfield when they stumbled over two Italians sleeping in a hollow. One of the enemy let out a shriek, and fired blindly. The two SAS-men hared off into the desert. The airfield erupted into chaos behind them – strings of imprecations and prayers, cracks and muzzle flashes, and the rainbow tracer of a 20mm anti-aircraft gun, pumping rounds towards the sea. Stirling and Brough guessed that the Italians thought they were under attack from two sides. They grinned at each other, teeth glinting white in the darkness.

  They lay up in some scrub on a ridge two miles away, and at first light scanned the area with binoculars. The day was as clear as crystal, the aquamarine sea lying heavy against the pastel shore. They could see sand-wrinkles spreading along the coast to the west, and Sirte airstrip to the east, with the cream-cake buildings of Sirte town beyond. In the limpid air, the Ca309s, with their hornbill snouts, looked huge – far bigger than they really were. The SAS-men could make no move until sunset, so they lay dozing until noon, when they were awoken suddenly by girlish voices. Stirling peered out of the bushes and saw a gaggle of Arab women working with mattocks on a postage-stamp patch of cultivation nearby. He cautioned Brough to stay quiet and they waited for the women to go. They stayed and stayed. It was 1500 hours and the sun was already dipping by the time they packed up.

  An hour later they heard aircraft engines gunning. Sweeping the airstrip with his binoculars, Stirling saw with dismay that the Capronis were taking off in pairs. By last light all thirty precious targets had vanished west along the coast towards Tamet. Stirling surmised that they had been moved for security reasons, following the alert the previous night. His recce had been a cock-up.

  After dark, they trudged back to the road where they had arranged to rendezvous with Holliman’s patrol at 0045 hours that night. Neither of them spoke. The prize had been within their grasp, but it had slipped away through their own carelessness. Stirling was despondent. He knew that if this operation didn’t come off, there probably wouldn’t be another chance for the SAS. Everything now depended on Mayne and Lewes. If Mayne succeeded, they would see the flash and hear the blast of his bombs from where they were. Midnight came and nothing happened. Stirling concluded with a sinking feeling that Mayne’s part of the op had also fallen through.

  20. ‘I saw him rip the instrument panel out with his bare hands’

  Mayne’s section had been dropped at last light, two miles from the target. The team moved in and lay on the dunes for over an hour, observing the airfield. The aircraft on the strip were mostly Italian Fiat C42 biplanes, but it was too dark to tell how many there were, or the dispositions of the sentries. Mayne reckoned that it would not be heavily guarded. Just before midnight the section moved out of hiding and started boxing around the landing ground in single file.

  They recced the perimeter as far as the seashore, where they found a huddle of empty buildings. Mayne spotted a chink of light penetrating the blackout curtains from a Nissen-style hut nearby. He eased towards it, with the others following, and crept right up to the door. He listened. He could hear laughter and the raised voices of cheerful drinkers from within. It was the pilots’ mess, he concluded, and they were having a party. He had a party-surprise for them.

  Mayne stood back and opened the door, snapping it forward with a size twelve boot. For an instant, thirty faces froze in shock. Then he squeezed the trigger of his .45 calibre Tommy-gun, drumming rounds into the densest group. He heard yells and the crashing of tables, as bodies pitched in every direction. He put the last double tap through the light, and beat a hasty retreat.

  The rest of the SAS team were crouching outside. ‘As soon as Paddy cut loose,’ said Reg Seekings, ‘… the whole place went mad – [they fired] everything they had including tracer … They had fixed lines of fire about a couple of feet from the ground. We had either to jump over or crawl under them … Cheswort
h came slithering over to us on all fours. I can still see him getting to his feet, pulling in his arse as the tracer ripped past his pack, missing him by inches. On a signal from Paddy we got the hell out of it.’1

  They hurried back to the airfield, setting charges on a petrol dump, a bomb dump and some telegraph poles on the way. They trotted down the line of aircraft, sticking Lewes bombs on as many machines as they could. After an hour, Mayne sent Ed McDonald and three others back to the LRDG patrol to tell them to wait. He and Seekings stuck bombs on a last row of planes, but when they came to the final aircraft there were no bombs left. Mayne clambered into the cockpit. ‘At first I thought he’d gone mad,’ Seekings said. ‘Then I saw him rip the instrument panel out with his bare hands. How he did it I shall never know.’2

  The two men melted back into the night, just in time. ‘We hadn’t gone fifty yards,’ said Seekings, ‘when the first plane went up. We stopped to look, but a second one went up near us and we began to run. After a while we … stopped to take another glance. What a sight! Planes exploding all over, and the terrific roar of petrol and bombs going up!’3

  Five miles east, Stirling and Brough saw the starbursts of fire over the horizon. They heard the rumble of charges igniting, and locked each other’s eyes: Mayne had done it. ‘We didn’t grab each other and dance for joy,’ Stirling commented. ‘But damned nearly.’4

  Mayne and Seekings were racing for the rendezvous, with the enemy in hot pursuit. The LRDG drivers winked the Fords’ headlights to guide them in, but stopped quickly when they saw enemy torches. Mayne blew his whistle and received a shrill answering call from the patrol. The LRDG men hauled them into the trucks, and in a few seconds they were roaring off into the desert.

  When Gus Holliman’s patrol rocketed up to collect Stirling and Brough at Sirte, Stirling told them he wanted to set mines in the road, and see if they would have any takers. Holliman agreed to wait. Stirling and Brough set the mines, and together they took cover nearby. Ten minutes later an Italian truck came rattling out of the darkness and hit a mine. Its cab was torn apart instantly, and the vehicle veered off the road in an incandescent fireball. ‘That’s our fun over for the evening, boys,’ Holliman commented. ‘Now we have to get cracking.’

  The RV lay eighty miles to the south. Holliman brought Stirling’s section in two hours after sunrise, after a non-stop drive. They waited an hour, two hours, but Mayne’s group failed to show. When it finally arrived three hours later, Stirling’s team blasted a volley into the air in relief and celebration. Mayne’s news was just what Stirling had hoped for. He had destroyed or damaged twenty-four Axis aircraft, shot up a pilot’s mess, and sabotaged dumps and a truck. Stirling was ecstatic. The ‘truculent Irishman’ had saved the SAS.

  Three days after they arrived back at Jalo, Lewes came in. His team had been unlucky at Aghayla: they had found no aircraft there. They had blown up a transport park and destroyed telegraph poles instead. The SAS-men and the LRDG patrol, under New Zealander 2.Lt. Charlie Morris, had got into a contact with Axis troops and had only just avoided being encircled. In the ensuing firefight, they had killed or wounded fifteen enemy. Lewes also brought in three prisoners.

  21. ‘Rommel must have had a headache’

  While Stirling, Mayne and Lewes were heading back to Jalo, Lt. Bill Fraser’s section was making for Ajadabiyya. Though this was Fraser’s first action with the SAS, he had fought with 11 Commando at the Litani, where a richochet had struck his helmet and knocked him out. An ex-Gordon Highlander, he had survived Rommel’s capture of 51 Highland Division in France, and had escaped at Dunkirk. Even though he had seen more action than just about anyone in L Detachment, he was unfairly regarded as having ‘yet to prove himself’.

  Fraser was a dark-haired, smart-looking Scot from Aberdeen, five foot eight, with a puckish face and what one comrade would later describe as ‘an irresistibly jolly expression’.1 He came from a long line of Gordon Highlander sergeants. He was proud of being the first of his family to get a commission, but his background didn’t sit well with some of the men, who suffered from the peculiarly British snobbery of despising officers not born to the ‘officer class’. Apart from that, some of them thought Fraser ‘strange’ rather than ‘jolly’. They reckoned he might be ‘the other way’.

  Mayne was especially guilty of this. ‘Paddy used to give [Fraser] a hell of a time,’ Jimmy Storie recalled, ‘because he thought he was “that way inclined”. Paddy could be cruel, especially after a few.’2 Fraser wisely avoided the mess when Mayne was ‘drink taken’. He preferred the company of his dachshund, Withers. Not everyone shared Mayne’s view of Fraser. Jack Byrne, an Englishman who had served in the Gordons, had known him as far back as Dunkirk. Byrne thought him ‘one of the best’. Fraser was shortly to prove it.

  He had a good team. Sgt. Bob Tait, ex-London Scottish, a former merchant seaman, had won an MM at the Litani River with 11 Commando. Sgt. Jeff Du Vivier, London Scottish, and Cpl. Jack Byrne, Gordon Highlanders, were both ex-11 Commando men. Only Parachutist Arthur Phillips, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, a hard-drinking ex-7 Commando-man reputed to be a ‘Communist’, was a dark horse.

  On 20 December 2.Lt. John Olivey, Southern Rhodesia Force, dropped them north of Ajadabiyya airfield and gave them their position and bearings. Fraser knew there was a lot riding on this raid – the ‘show’ Reid had asked Stirling for was down to the five of them.

  The Chevy’s engine faded, and the SAS-men stood stock-still, listening to the night, allowing their bodies to adjust to the new environment. They remained motionless for ten minutes, drinking in the smell of the sea, the desert odours of flint and dust, picking out distant voices and far-off twinkles of light. Then Fraser gave the signal to move out.

  They moved in file, spaced five yards apart, with Bob Tait in the lead, navigating by compass. They covered only two miles, and lay up two hours before dawn. At first light Fraser realized their position was too exposed, and they shifted to a nearby hollow. A few hundred yards away there was a wooden building in a patch of green cultivation, which Fraser thought housed a deep-bore well. As it got light they saw a truck pull up, carrying a bunch of Arab labourers who started work in the cultivated area under the supervision of a European. They remained in cover the whole day. It rained intermittently. They couldn’t see the airfield from this distance, but were able to get a compass fix for night marching from flights of aircraft they saw coming in to land beyond the skyline.

  Some time that morning they heard the tinkle of sheep-bells, and saw an Arab boy grazing his flock about a hundred yards away. According to Du Vivier, the boy spotted Phillips as he was burying a Lewes bomb with a broken time-pencil. The boy climbed right up to their position to see what they were doing.

  It was the classic stand-off, shepherd-boy v. SAS patrol. Almost exactly fifty years later, the failure of one of the most famous SAS desert missions of all time would be blamed on just such a scenario, and astonishingly perhaps, the name of the SAS-man who was supposedly clocked by the Arab boy then would also be Phillips. As in that future incident, though, it is uncertain whether, in this case, Fraser’s patrol was actually compromised. Du Vivier said that the shepherd made eye-contact, but Fraser’s official report states that the boy simply hovered within a few hundred yards of them for most of the day. If he saw them, he evidently didn’t report it to the enemy.

  They pulled out just after last light, carrying eight Lewes bombs each. Byrne had a Thompson, and the other four carried .45 calibre pistols. They advanced with almost excruciating slowness – they had practised night stalking with Jock Lewes until it was second nature, and knew that to rush was to produce noise and movement that might be spotted. They marched in Indian file, Tait leading, Fraser second man, with Byrne, the Tommy-gunner, as tail-end-charlie. They covered a mile an hour, pacing carefully, boxing round any obstacle. They communicated by hand-signals. Once an hour they halted and got down in all-round defence, taking turns to relieve themselves. There was one close cal
l on the way, when the headlights of a German vehicle hit them full on. To react would have alerted the enemy, so they kept their cool, and carried on slowly until the headlights melted.

  Close to the target, Fraser, now in the lead, came to a two-strand wire fence. He gave the signal to halt. The patrol crouched down, and Fraser glanced at his watch. It was 2115 hours, and the raid was due to go in at midnight. He signalled Tommy-gunner Byrne forward. Byrne moved up with his Thompson at the ready, and stepped over the fence. The others followed. At first they couldn’t see any aircraft, and Fraser began to worry that they had all taken off. It took almost three hours to locate the planes. They found them just after midnight – mostly Italian Fiat C42s, but also a few Messerschmitt 109-Fs. Later, Byrne didn’t remember seeing enemy personnel, but Tait recalled passing aircrew asleep under some of the Fiat bombers. ‘We didn’t wake them,’ he said.

  The aircraft were parked in clusters, about two hundred yards apart. They dealt with each batch before moving to the next, pressing the Lewes bombs into position on the wings of the bombers, or the noses of the fighters. Tait and Du Vivier came across a big transport plane with its door open and went inside, hunting souvenirs. It was too dark to search properly, so they left a bomb instead.

  They crimped time-pencils. They pulled safety-pins. They worked systematically, ‘leapfrogging’ each other. Fraser used one charge on a dump of Breda anti-aircraft ammunition in a sandbagged building nearby. According to Byrne, they also stuck bombs on a truck and a tractor parked in the middle of the runway.

  It took forty minutes to set up the charges. When it was done, they faded quickly into the night, but had only gone a few hundred yards when there was an ear-shattering crump, and a plane erupted in a blinding cascade of flame, smoke and steel shards. Another blew apart, then another. ‘The centre of the airfield was one great forest of fires,’ Byrne recalled; ‘… enemy machine-guns began firing tracer-bullets on fixed lines down two sides of the airfield and partly across our escape-route.’3 Searchlights lasered the sky, and the ack-ack guns started grinding out a bass bump-bump-bump, spritzing waves of tracer into the darkness. ‘There was the most tremendous din,’ Byrne said, ‘with ammunition crackling in the exploding and burning aircraft … the enemy … remained in their bunkers … not one aimed shot came our way.’4