Auchinleck had told Stirling that he would have to put the Bouerat raid in before the third week in January, when the port was scheduled for bombing by the RAF. There was no time to be lost. The op was important, in Stirling’s mind, to demonstrate that the SAS had more strings to its bow than aircraft-demolition. Some elements at GHQ ME, particularly Chief of the General Staff Arthur Smith – and presumably Dudley Clarke – still saw L Detachment as a parachute unit, and wanted Stirling to re-start parachute training in April. Stirling had already been down that road. In December, Rommel had been supplied with twenty-two panzers by sea at Benghazi. This demonstrated the vital importance of shipping and harbours. Stirling had already brewed up a scheme to raid Benghazi, but it had been rendered obsolete by the Axis retreat. Bouerat still lay behind Rommel’s lines, and to destroy vital fuel-tankers and fuel-storage facilities there would be a major coup.
Stirling’s was the kind of mind that grasped the importance of symbolism. He had stated at the very first staff meeting that the elite unit needed a special, mystic insignia to set it apart. In Cairo, he had taken the astute step of wearing SAS wings and cap-badge during a meeting with the C-in-C. His implacable foes in the Adjutant-General’s office had reminded him bluntly that the SAS was a temporary unit and couldn’t have its own badge. Stirling ignored them, and the gamble paid off. Auchinleck liked it. That day, he commented, was ‘the day the SAS was truly born’. He owed it to Jock Lewes’s memory to crown success with ‘an accepted identity of which we could all be proud’.2 Lewes had designed the wings the previous year. They had a straight edge on top to make them distinct from the wings of other airborne units. The design was said to have been borrowed from a fresco in the lobby of Shepheard’s Hotel, based on an ancient Egyptian motif of a sacred ibis. In fact, as Seekings pointed out, it was actually a winged scarab-beetle motif, with a parachute in place of the scarab. The dark and light blue backgrounds were said to be the colours of Stirling’s and Lewes’s respective alma maters, Oxford and Cambridge universities. So it was that emblems of two of Britain’s oldest and finest institutions found their way into the insignia of a quite different but equally distinguished one. Those who qualified as parachutists could wear the wings on their shoulders, but veterans of three SAS operations had the right to wear them above the left breast-pocket.3
The cap-badge was the work of Bob Tait, now missing in action with Fraser, who had designed it back in October. Tait’s sketch was the winner of at least a dozen entries in a competition set up by Stirling. Though it would later be familiar as the ‘Winged Dagger’, the badge actually symbolized the flaming sword Excalibur. Tait’s suggestion for the SAS motto, ‘Strike & Destroy’, was vetoed by Stirling as being too value-neutral. Instead, he came up with the inspired ‘Who Dares Wins’ – a more robust statement of an axiom favoured by Combined Operations chief, Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Roger Keyes: ‘He Most Prevails Who Nobly Dares’.
Not all Stirling’s friends were impressed with it. Randolph Churchill dismissed it as ‘totally rotten’. Stirling solved the carping in characteristic fashion by betting Churchill £10 he couldn’t improve on it. He never did, but as Stirling pointed out in amusement later, Churchill soon became quite desperate to wear the ‘totally rotten’ badge himself.
While officers would wear the flaming sword on their peaked field service caps for some time to come, Stirling had got hold of some surplus snow-white berets for enlisted men. On their first leave in Cairo that January, the men got into so many fights with wolf-whistling Aussies and Kiwis that some of them refused to wear it. Eventually it was replaced with the sand-coloured beret that, with several hiccups, was eventually to become the lasting emblem of the SAS Regiment.
25. ‘Surrounded by bottles, reading James Joyce’
Stirling launched the Bouerat mission from Jalo on 17 January, going in with Captain Anthony Hunter’s Guards patrol of the LRDG. He had with him the now inseparable Cooper and Seekings, and two Squatter veterans who had been hors de combat until recently, Pat Riley and Dave Kershaw. He also had with him Bob Bennett and his mate Lofty Baker, Jimmy Brough, Charlie Cattell, Frank Rhodes, Ted Badger and Frank Austin. He had a two-man RAF intelligence team, and two canoeists from the Special Boat Section, Captain G. I. Duncan, Black Watch, and Corporal Edward Barr, Highland Light Infantry.
The Special Boat Section had been founded two years earlier by canoe-expert Lt. Roger ‘Jumbo’ Courtney, Kings Royal Rifle Corps. Originally part of 8 Commando, its main role was beachhead reconnaissance, but it also had a limited capability as a raiding force. The SBS operated in two-man teams, using collapsible kayak-style canoes known as folbots. Stirling decided to take a folbot with him on the Bouerat raid, and have the SBS team set limpet mines on shipping in the harbour.
Once again, he was unlucky. On the drive in, Hunter’s patrol was buzzed by Stukas in the Wadi Tamrit and his wireless truck and an operator and two other men were lost. Stirling had been relying on them to relay data on the position of storage tanks and fuel-bowsers in the port from the Army Air Photographic Interpretation Unit. His chances of obtaining this data were abruptly scotched. Worse was to come. Stirling had instructed the SBS team to assemble the folbot before going in. The fragile canoe was smashed when the 15 cwt Ford truck the SAS were using for the final approach went over a pothole. It would not have been much use in any case, because the SAS team found no enemy shipping in the harbour. Stirling divided his raiding party into four groups under himself, Duncan, Riley and Kershaw. Sauntering past Italian sentries, who never even bothered to challenge them, they set Lewes bombs on the wireless station, cables, dumps, and eighteen petrol bowsers. The impressive firework display that lit up the night for hours afterwards didn’t deceive Stirling that he had achieved his aim.
On the exfiltration, Stirling’s crew were meandering along the road, having just planted bombs on Axis lorries, when they were banjoed by Italians in two guard-sangars they had passed on the way in. Then, they had appeared deserted. Now the sentries had woken up, and were pulling iron on 20mm Bredas. Rounds were skeetering at them. The situation looked critical.
The LRDG driver, Cpl. ‘Flash’ Gibson, Scots Guards, switched his headlights to full beam and floored the accelerator. Cooper, on the back, chunked the enemy with a Vickers K aircraft machine gun that had been fitted specially for this operation. ‘[I] let fly with a devastating mixture of tracer and incendiary,’ he recalled, ‘… at the same time Reg [Seekings] opened up with his Thompson, and we ploughed through the ambush completely outgunning and demoralizing the Italians.’1 Cooper and Seekings scragged at least five Italians dead. A moment later they heard the unmistakable crunch of mortar shells hitting the earth.
Stirling believed that they had done the near impossible in running the ambush unscathed, and put their survival down to Gibson’s presence of mind, and Cooper’s cool shooting. Gibson was awarded the MM, and Cooper the DCM.
Back at Jalo, Stirling found out why there had been no ships in Bouerat. The op was based on stale intelligence. Rommel’s Afrika Korps had moved on 21 January and pushed the Eighth Army all the way to Gazala, near Tobruk. Benghazi had again fallen to the Axis. Ruminating over the recent reverses on the way back to Jalo, Stirling saw that the news wasn’t all bad for the SAS. Raids on Axis ports and shipping would now be a priority. While Stirling hadn’t achieved his major objective on the Bouerat raid, it had at least proved that the SAS could bring off harbour attacks.
Stirling arrived back at Kabrit with a plan for a raid on Benghazi already formed in his head. He was desperate to get Mayne’s input, but there was silence when he inquired after him. He eventually tracked him down to his tent. ‘I went in,’ Stirling recalled. ‘Paddy was surrounded by bottles, reading James Joyce.’2 Mayne had been holed up for three days, drinking. He didn’t ask how the Bouerat raid had gone, answered in grunts, and refused to look at Stirling. He had fallen into a slough of despond, brooding not only on his exclusion from the raid, but also on the loss in November of h
is only close friend, Eoin McGonigal.
He hadn’t bothered monitoring the training, but had withdrawn into his shell. He had become bored with administration and frustrated by the bureaucracy at GHQ. Stirling could only be thankful that he hadn’t ended by punching out some senior staff officer. Bergé’s French contingent was only halfway through its course, and would not be ready for the next operation. There was a host of other recruits. Mayne had even let GHQ take back the priceless Bill Cumper, who was now wasting his talents ‘fitting toilet-seats in Alexandria’.
Stirling quickly saw the folly of trying to tie Mayne down to an admin job, and promised him it would not happen again. According to Jim Almonds, though, the tension between them continued even after Mayne returned to an operational role. There may have been other reasons for this. With the death of Lewes, Mayne was now ‘No.2’ in L Detachment, yet Stirling never made him second-in-command. In fact, Stirling had recruited Lt. George, Earl Jellicoe, a member of the ‘Silver Circle Club’ and a fellow ex-8 Commando officer, in early 1942, as Detachment 2IC. Jellicoe said that he took up the post after being released from his battalion, 3 Coldstream Guards, on 30 April.
However, Stirling told his biographer, Alan Hoe, that he didn’t appoint a 2IC in the spring of ’42, because he ‘had no-one at the time’.3 It seems likely that he did promise Jellicoe the post, but never made it official. At the same time, he had his eye on LRDG patrol leader Captain the Hon. Robin Gurdon of the Scots Guards, whom he had offered the same job. Stirling rated Gurdon ‘a very, very fine man’ and said that by early June he had almost talked him into transferring from his current assignment. As Jim Almond’s biographer, Lorna Almonds Windmill, put it, Stirling’s success lay partly in his ability to ‘kiss all the girls’ – to back more than one horse, and to tell people what they most wanted to hear.
According to Jim Almonds it was common knowledge that Stirling didn’t think of Mayne as second-in-command for the detachment. In view of Mayne’s reaction to being desk-bound in Kabrit, there were obvious reasons for this, but there may also have been other, less obvious ones. Stirling admired Mayne as a fighter, but wasn’t at ease with him socially. He would later declare that the SAS was a unit ‘without class’, where every man could aspire to become an ‘aristocrat’ in his own lifetime, but in practice he preferred the company of his social peers. ‘He had a slight weakness for the well-heeled with the right old school tie,’ said Almonds, ‘and even took on one or two [officers] whose suitability some thought questionable.’4
Jellicoe and Gurdon didn’t fall into this category, but both were the kind of upper-class officers Mayne disliked. Gurdon was killed in July 1942, before he got the chance to take up Stirling’s offer, but assuming Mayne knew that Stirling had promised the post to one or both, he may well have taken it as an affront – more of the same ‘old boy network’ that he had experienced in the commandos, but of which he had imagined the SAS would be free.
Stirling argued later that Mayne had amply demonstrated his unsuitability for administrative duties, and that his temperament and moods made him a difficult subordinate. ‘He had, I suppose, something in common with Hotspur, the young Harry Percy,’ he said, ‘quick-tempered, audacious, vigorous in action, but not one who took kindly to being thwarted, frustrated or crossed in any way.’5 Stirling probably believed that only one of the ‘old school’ could press the right buttons in GHQ ME. Certainly, Mayne had a great many aversions, among them the English, Catholics (excluding McGonigal) and the landed gentry. He despised ‘big mouths’ and those he thought were ‘shooting a line’, but in his violent moods he picked indiscriminately on friend and foe.
Despite recent efforts to whitewash Mayne’s character, the evidence is that he could be awkward even when sober, and extremely belligerent when drunk. ‘When he drank you felt your life wasn’t safe,’ said Lt. Johnny Wiseman, a later SAS recruit, describing how Mayne once hurled him to the floor for some unknown reason, and forcibly shaved off half his beard.6 Wiseman added that while he was superb in action, Mayne could be terrifying off duty. It wasn’t a matter of blind fury: Wiseman was convinced that Mayne had a deeply ingrained destructive urge.7 ‘[Mayne] was a nice, kind fellow,’ Mike Sadler commented, ‘… very considerate for other people … but once he had gone beyond a certain point, drinking, he became somebody quite different.’8
Big Pat Riley, the Wisconsin-born ex-Coldstreamer, was perhaps the only SAS man who ever knocked Mayne down. He once found him drunk, beating someone so savagely it looked as if he might do him real harm. Without even thinking about it, Riley – who had been a champion boxer in the Guards, and had fought Reg Seekings in the ring before either had joined the commandos – walloped Mayne with a massive fist and flattened him. ‘I thought I was in for a rough time,’ Riley said, ‘but not a bit of it. He stood up, looked at me for a while and then quietly went off.’9
It was Pat Riley, now promoted sergeant-major, and the Detachment’s senior non-com, whom Stirling chose to replace Mayne as training officer. He managed to extricate Bill Cumper from his ‘toilet-fitting’ duties and have him permanently attached to the SAS. He had also discovered on his arrival at Kabrit that he was one good officer and four good men better off. Bill Fraser and his party – Tait, Du Vivier, Byrne and Phillips – had returned. They had been picked up south of Ajadabiyya by a patrol of the King’s Dragoon Guards on 10 January, having made an astonishing eight-day trek across the desert from Marble Arch. The LRDG men who had disappeared at the time of Lewes’s death had also come in, but the SAS-man with them, Geordie White, was still missing.
26. ‘You can get away with it by sheer blatant cheek’
In the Naval Intelligence Office at Alexandria, a little whitewashed room stocked with maps and aerial photos, Stirling examined a scale-model of Benghazi with a recently trained officer-recruit, Second-Lieutenant Fitzroy Maclean, Cameron Highlanders. Maclean, an ex-Foreign Office diplomat, spoke German and Italian, and had travelled extensively in Russia, China and Central Asia before the war. Barred from military service by his profession, he had managed to circumvent it by getting elected a Conservative MP. A half-admiring Winston Churchill would later quip that he was a man who had ‘used the Mother of Parliaments as a public convenience’.
Maclean was one of the new SAS intake authorized in January, and his first experience at Kabrit was getting turfed out of his tent by a bearded and filthy Bill Fraser, just back from his two-hundred-mile tramp across Cyrenaica. Now he was keen to accompany Stirling on a mission to Benghazi, due to take place on 21 May.
Lying about two hundred and fifty miles behind the Afrika Korps divisions pressing on Ritchie’s defences at the Gazala Line, Benghazi was Rommel’s main conduit of supplies. Stirling was obsessed with it. So was RAF Middle East, but the thousands of tons of high explosive they had dumped there hadn’t put it out of business. Air bombardments were hit or miss affairs, and Stirling had already proved the SAS could outdo the RAF on airfield raids at a fraction of the cost. Now he was anxious to prove that he could get the same result with Benghazi’s docks and shipping.
This would be Stirling’s second venture into the Benghazi area. On 15 March, he and Mayne had conducted a series of strikes in and around the port. Stirling’s crew had managed to get near the docks with a folbot, intending to limpet-mine fuel-tankers in the harbour. The plan fell through when the SBS officer in charge found the canoe parts incompatible.
Of the three attacks Stirling had planned on nearby airfields at the same time – at Barce, Slonta and Berka – only Mayne’s raid on Berka achieved anything significant. Mayne, who lost Jack Byrne on the thirty-mile march-out, reported that his team had knocked off fifteen aircraft and fifteen torpedoes. The huge grin Mayne wore as he presented his report cannot have been endearing to Stirling, who had once again failed in his task. During the withdrawal another team blew up five aircraft in hangars at the Luftwaffe repair depot at Benina, a few miles east of Benghazi, but thirty planes they had spotted there earlier tu
rned out to be dummies.
In the Naval Intelligence office, Stirling and Maclean studied the model of Benghazi. A tiny dab of yellow paint marked a narrow strip of shingle that would make the ideal launch-pad for their boats. Stirling had never liked folbots, and for this op Maclean had got hold of a pair of inflatable recce craft from the Royal Engineers. Stirling thought these would prove more robust. Together with Seekings and Cooper, they had practised with them, laying dummy limpets on Royal Navy destroyers riding at anchor on the Great Bitter Lake, quite unaware that the crews regularly dropped five-pound depth charges over the side as a security measure.
Stirling had chosen 21 May for the mission because it fell in the moonless period, when SAS troops could creep within feet of enemy sentries unseen. Mayne was to be excluded once again, in favour of Maclean – perhaps it was the sight of his grinning face on the last op that had clinched it. The team included Seekings, Cooper, Rose, Bennett and Lt. Gordon Alston, Royal Artillery, ex-Middle East Commando, another recent SAS acquisition, who had been with Stirling on the March raid.
Also with the team was the Prime Minister’s son, Captain Randolph Churchill, 4 Hussars, who had completed a few weeks of training with the SAS. He had lost more than ten kilos, but according to Stirling was still ‘damn fat’.1 Churchill had made only one of his five qualifying jumps, but persuaded Stirling to take him on the Benghazi op. Stirling knew Randolph wrote his father daily, and could hardly refuse a chance of gaining the Prime Minister’s ear. He agreed to let him come ‘as an observer’. He didn’t doubt that Churchill had courage, but felt he wasn’t so much interested in fighting behind enemy lines as in wearing the SAS insignia – the same badge he had dismissed weeks earlier as ‘totally rotten’.
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