‘Well, shoot at them,’ Hastings barked. ‘Go on, shoot at them.’15
Vickers rounds plonked, but the gunner couldn’t tell if he’d hit the enemy. Scarlet gashes fleched towards them, knob-sized Breda shells thunked the bonnet. ‘I felt something hot pass most uncomfortably close beneath my seat,’ Hastings recalled. ‘Clang! My face and my gunner’s were doused in oil. There was a moment of blindness. I wiped the oil out of my eyes, the jeep swerved violently, hit a bump, recovered itself and miraculously continued.’16
In the centre, ex-jockey Sandy Scratchley’s gunner, twenty-one-year-old Bombardier John Robson, Royal Artillery, a recent recruit, was struck by a 20mm Breda round that sliced off half his head. He slumped across Scratchley and his forward-gunner. Stirling ordered a halt. The jeeps drew up alongside him. He called for a casualty and ammunition report. Apart from Robson, there were a few grazes and light wounds. Some gunners were out of ammunition, some of the guns had jammed. Almonds and his crew jogged up to report that their jeep had got snagged. ‘Oh, bad luck,’ Stirling commented. He sent them to join Sadler, whose navigation truck was on standby at the south-east corner of the airfield. ‘We’ll have one more go over this side of the dispersal area,’ he said, ‘… don’t fire unless you’re certain of getting a target and watch out for those bloody Bredas.’17
Mayne stood there fidgeting. Seconds earlier, he had leapt out of his jeep, done a try-scoring dash across the piste to an unharmed Heinkel III, and stuck a Lewes bomb on the wing. It wasn’t just for old time’s sake. He liked to keep track of his ‘bag’, which was getting close to the century. Now Stirling had halted the jeeps smack in the blast area, and he had set a short fuse. ‘Start up! Start up!’ he broke out suddenly. They made it out only an instant before the aircraft blew.
The airfield was brilliant with raging planes and bomb-dumps. On this arm was a row of Rommel’s precious JU52s that hadn’t been touched. The ruckle of Vickers started again. ‘The noise was appalling,’ one of the boys told Malcolm Pleydell later. ‘The roar of the aircraft blowing up drowned the din of the machine guns.’18
Stirling was concerned about the withdrawal. The attack had gone in late, and first light would be up in only two and a half hours. They wouldn’t make it back to base in darkness. It was time to bug out. He looped the wheel and was heading back to the hole in the fence when the jeep spun forty-five degrees and juddered to a halt. Seekings jumped out to investigate and found that a 20mm shell had clunked right through the cylinder head.
At that moment, Scratchley’s jeep yammered up beside them, with the dead Robson still lying in the back. Seekings slapped a Lewes bomb on Stirling’s jeep. Cooper shifted Robson’s corpse and braced Scratchley’s rear Vickers. Stirling squeezed into the front by the forward-gunner. The columns were already well ahead. Seekings pressed the time-pencil and vaulted into the jeep by Cooper. ‘We roared off the airfield in pursuit,’ Cooper recalled. ‘The scene of devastation was fantastic. Aircraft exploded all around us and as we left the perimeter our own jeep went up in a ball of flame.’19 Once out of the airfield they broke up into prearranged groups and made for Bir al-Quseir by different routes.
The attack had taken fifteen minutes and had accounted for thirty-seven aircraft. Some hadn’t exploded or caught fire, but even those would need serious repair-work before they could fly again. For Stirling, this raid was the apex of his active career as SAS commander. He would never reach such dizzy heights again. It was also the last successful action carried out by L Detachment. Back in Cairo, wheels were already in motion that would change things for ever.
35. ‘Mort au Champ d’Honneur’
At 1600 hours next afternoon, medical officer Malcolm Pleydell, in his cave at Bir al-Quseir, was alerted by a shrill whistle from the sentry. He looked out and saw Paddy Mayne being driven along the edge of the escarpment in a battered jeep, with another following behind. ‘He looked as massive and unconcerned as ever,’ Pleydell recalled, ‘hunched up and dwarfing both driver and vehicle.’1 Later Pleydell ran over to Mayne’s camp and found him lying full-length by his jeep. He was reading a Penguin paperback, and lazily swiping at flies with a fly-swat. His hands were swollen with desert sores, and the bandages seeped fluid. When Pleydell asked him about the raid, he answered, ‘Och, it was quite good crack,’ and changed the subject, asking the doctor to dress his hands. Pleydell had just finished treating him when the whistle went off again. He heard the growl of aero-engines, and peeped out from under the tarpaulin covering the cave entrance to see six Stukas reaming over the base at a thousand feet. A brace of Me 109-F fighters was circling around them. ‘They looked dark, aggressive, and full of forboding,’ Pleydell said.
The SAS sections had withdrawn from Sidi Haneish under a thick blanket of mist. It appeared at first light, lasted an hour, and cut visibility to a few yards. When the mist melted back, Aspirant André Zirnheld, a former philosophy professor, and his mate, Aspirant François Martin, found that they were on the main Qara–Matruh track–an area Stirling had warned them to avoid. Within minutes they heard the scream of Stukas. The sound inflated rapidly into a mesmeric shriek that seemed to petrify the whole landscape. Zirnheld led the two vehicles into the shadow of a cliff, but the Stuka pilots had spotted the dust trail, and the planes yawed in with their sirens blaring and their cannons stuttering. Zirnheld’s jeep was hit by a squirt of cannon-fire that spun him out of his seat and slashed open the ligaments of his shoulder. Streaming blood, he tried to run for cover. Another round whacked him in the stomach.
Martin managed to pull him to shelter, but Zirnheld was hanging on to life by a thread. The Stukas made nine attacks before they sheared off into the cobalt sky. Martin and his men loaded Zirnheld into a jeep and continued, but the gut-wound was agony. They halted in a shallow wadi, and Martin went off alone to Bir al-Quseir to bring back Pleydell. By the time the medic arrived, Zirnheld was dead. They buried him at last light, under a crude wooden cross inscribed ‘Mort au Champ d’Honneur’. Going through his kit, they came across a crumpled piece of paper, on which he had scrawled his epitaph: ‘A Para’s Prayer’.
I do not ask for wealth
Nor for success …
I want insecurity and disquietude,
I want turmoil and brawl …
Zirnheld had found all he had asked for.
Later that day, Captain Nick Wilder’s LRDG patrol reached the forward base, carrying a couple of German prisoners. One of them, a sergeant, was among Rommel’s personal flyers. The other, a doctor named Baron Von Lutteroti, belonged to a family Jellicoe had met before the war. Stirling had instructed Wilder’s men to give covering fire during the Sidi Haneish attack, but they had been delayed by the minefield, and had laagered up on the north side of the aerodrome to cover the withdrawal.
On the way back, Wilder had fought several skirmishes with German armoured-vehicles. One of his Chevrolets, manned by New Zealand Troopers Keith Tippett and T. B. ‘Dobby’ Dobson, happened on a Fieseler Storch spotter-plane taking off. They stopped it with a Tommy-gun burst, and picked up the two prisoners before dousing the aircraft with petrol and torching it. Both were recommended for the MM.
Mike Sadler’s vehicles came in after dark, with Jim Almonds riding passenger. Almonds’s jeep was still stuck in a tank trap at Sidi Haneish. Sadler had stayed near the aerodrome for two hours after the attack to provide a rallying point for anyone who got lost or had mechanical problems. At first light he had taken photographs of the landing-ground to confirm the damage. What amazed Sadler was the way the Germans had got the place working again, putting out fires, dragging hulks away with tractors, so that more planes could land.
On the way back to base, Sadler’s group had cleared the mist to find themselves in the middle of a German motorized infantry patrol that seemed to be searching for them. One Afrika Korps soldier had looked straight at them, but evidently hadn’t noticed anything wrong. Sadler streaked off into the desert and hid the jeeps between two ridges. Moments later they
were buzzed by Stukas that swooped low but turned away, probably mistaking them for part of a German recovery team at work nearby.
Stirling came in on the night of 28 July. With him were Jellicoe, Hastings and six other SAS-men hanging on to a single jeep that was bumping along on four naked wheel-hubs. Jellicoe’s own vehicle had given out just before reaching the forward base.
In the morning, Stirling was passed the latest intel by the wireless operator. Axis forces were reported to be scouring the desert like enraged wasps, and he gave orders that the base would be moved next day to a site fifteen miles away. The SAS had been using the current one for three weeks, and had created a converging network of tracks that the enemy were bound to pick up sooner or later.
In the operation debrief, held after breakfast, Stirling was uncharacteristically severe with the men. They had wasted ammunition. They had shot too high. They had got out of formation. They had engaged aircraft from too long a range. Pleydell said he had never seen Stirling so angry, and wondered what was eating him. The problem might have been initiated by Mayne, who had cocked a snook at the whole ‘mass attack’ business with his try-scoring sprint to lay a Lewes bomb. Pleydell reported that most of the men, especially the veterans, preferred going in by stealth. Pleydell put this down to egotism. ‘With bombs each man could keep a tally of the number of planes which he, personally, had destroyed; there was a healthy rivalry over it.’2
Stirling’s later explanation for his fury that day, that ‘he didn’t want the men to get too blasé about the business’, is unconvincing. He knew full well that to destroy thirty-seven aircraft it had taken twelve jeeps, forty-eight machine guns, and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition. He had lost two men dead. This was not exactly what he had planned for the SAS. On one of the first raids, Bill Fraser and four men had destroyed as many aircraft at Ajadabiyya, using forty Lewes bombs, without a jeep, and without sustaining so much as a graze. The Sidi Haneish op was not the ‘maximum achievement for minimum cost’ Stirling had raved about.
Yet he was desperate to sell these new tactics to GHQ. He had been struggling for months to convince his bosses that the SAS was more than a bunch of saboteurs. Now, his old hands were pulling the rug out from under him. His defensive attitude is betrayed by the asperity of his concluding remarks at the debrief. ‘And don’t let me hear any of you say that you could have done better by going in on foot. You couldn’t. Get that quite clear in your minds … There were too many sentry-posts and ground defences about … you’d never have got anywhere.’3
Stirling’s plan was to remain at his new forward base for the next three or four weeks to harass Rommel’s lines of communication. The SAS would be resupplied by air. He had already made arrangements with Group Captain Bruce Bennett of Combined Ops to have supplies landed by 216 Squadron’s Bombays, at an emergency airstrip about ten miles distant. He had requested another thirty jeeps. He and Mayne were planning a series of nightly strikes on soft-skinned vehicles and fuel and water dumps along the main road.
Next day, Stirling sent Stephen Hastings back to locate André Zirnheld’s jeep, which had badly-needed spares aboard. Hastings hadn’t returned by nightfall, so Stirling dispatched the next raiding party without him – a convoy of eight jeeps split into four parties. The officers included Jourdan, Mather and two new recruits – Lt. Chris Bailey, 4 Hussars, an ex-hotel manager on Cyprus, and Lt. David Russell, Scots Guards, a fluent German-speaker, who had previously done good work with Herbert Buck’s SIG. Their orders were to attack dispersed tanks and motor-transport laagers in the enemy’s rear areas near the Alamein line.
The patrols expected to find transport pools drawn up five miles to the rear of the enemy positions. They discovered that the Alamein line had stabilized and vehicles were under heavy guard. The only success was scored by Russell, who devised a cunning strategy of his own. Halting his jeep by the main road, he would flag down any German lorry that came along and ask in impeccable German to borrow an air-pump. While the crew were fumbling for the pump, Russell would stick a Lewes bomb with an instantaneous fuse on the chassis, and quickly bug out. Russell’s one-man campaign accounted for eight enemy vehicles.
Stirling was now feeling in his element. He was running his own little band of cut-throats from his own hideout in the desert, far from the eyes of GHQ. He envisaged his guerrilla war going on until Rommel was driven back as far as Tunisia, but GHQ had other plans. No sooner had the last raiding party disappeared over the horizon than he was handed a message by the W/T operator, summoning him back to Cairo. He was to come in and bring the entire detachment with him. He was to start preparations for a new job being planned by the Director of Military Operations.
Auchinleck’s offensive had ended in stalemate. Rommel couldn’t press forward because his supply-lines were stretched to the limit. He needed more tanks and more fuel. An analysis conducted by Auchinleck’s brilliant acting Chief-of-Staff, Major General E. ‘Chink’ Dorman-Smith, indicated that he was dependent for his supplies on three main ports: Benghazi, Tobruk and Mersa Matruh. If there was ever a time to knock out these ports, it was now. Auchinleck’s next offensive was projected for mid-September or early October, and in the meantime he intended to throttle Rommel’s supply-lines by massive raids on shipping in Benghazi and Tobruk. He would deploy all the special operations forces at his disposal.
Stirling was enraged and refused to come in. He had already told the Directorate of Military Operations that only SAS could plan SAS jobs, and if he was to be put under anyone else’s authority, he would reject the order ‘under pain of court-martial’.4 His objections were brushed aside. The reality was that the SAS was dependent on the RAF for resupply. GHQ had instructed 216 Squadron to pick up all SAS personnel not needed to drive the transport back, and to supply only enough food and fuel to get the vehicles to Cairo. Stirling had no choice but to obey orders.
He flew to Cairo at the beginning of August, and discovered that he had been caught in a trap of his own devising. He had always been fixated with Benghazi, especially after his walkabout there last May. He had told an officer of G(R) about an idea he had in mind, to get a naval party into Benghazi harbour, scuttle a ship and block the entrance. All enemy shipping would be trapped inside, and would be sitting ducks for SBS parties with limpet mines.
The G(R) man Stirling told was Lt. Col. John Hasleden, Intelligence Corps, a well-respected figure among G(R) agents and the LRDG. Hasleden, a fluent Arabic-speaker, had been the Egyptian manager for a US cotton-broker before the war, and his journeys on foot behind enemy lines dressed as an Arab were legendary. He had been one of the main instigators of the attempt to assassinate Rommel a year earlier, in which Geoffrey Keyes had been killed. That raid had failed when it was discovered that Rommel was not at home, and there were a few people who were not impressed by the accuracy of Hasleden’s intelligence.
Like Stirling, Hasleden had seen the raid as a small-scale affair, involving a dozen of Buck’s SIG-men. Instead, the Directorate of Military Ops had run with it, ballooning it into an ambitious scheme to take out both Tobruk and Benghazi in one go. The Benghazi part of the operation, codenamed Bigamy, was to take place on the night of September 13/14. Stirling was instructed to deploy the whole of L Detachment, supplemented by troops from the Middle East Commando and the SBS. He was to take with him a Royal Navy detachment, and two Honey tanks for clearing roadblocks. Stirling’s party would be codenamed Force X.
While Force X dealt with Benghazi, Hasleden’s Force B would raid Tobruk and Force A – the Sudan Defence Force – would retake Jalo oasis, lost in Rommel’s recent push. An LRDG patrol would beat up Barce landing-ground. Reg Seekings felt that it was more like a battalion assault than an SAS raid, and recalled that many of the boys were against it.
Stirling was one of them. He was unhappy about the scale of the task, which reminded him unpleasantly of the sort of Combined Operations debacles that had ending up wrecking Layforce in ’41. Too many men were involved from too many dif
ferent branches. He maintained later that he was ‘bribed’ into accepting the plan. GHQ promised him promotion to lieutenant-colonel. If Bigamy was successful, L Detachment would be expanded and have carte blanche to rub out all enemy installations in Cyrenaica. Since Stirling admitted that he didn’t trust GHQ’s promises, though, it seems unlikely that this was the only reason for his acquiescence.
The planning conference was held at Grey Pillars in early August, and bristled with officers wearing the scarlet gorgets of the general staff. The chairman was Brigadier George Davy, the Director of Military Operations. Arrayed around him were representatives from Q, Supply Branch, and A, Administration Branch. There was an air-vice-marshal and an air-commodore from RAF Intelligence, and top brass from Naval Intelligence. Most were desk-bound officers who had seen no recent action.
Bigamy contradicted one of the three basic SAS principles – the ability to plan its own ops. Stirling was to have under his command two hundred and fourteen men, more than half of whom had no SAS training. He was to have ninety-five vehicles, including forty three-tonners – a massive convoy that would be difficult to conceal. The operation had been planned by people who didn’t understand the SAS.
The RAF air-vice-marshal declared that Bigamy wasn’t a job for ‘colourful individualists’, but for disciplined regular troops. Stirling gave him a minus-forty glare. He took exception to the insinuation that his troops weren’t disciplined, but agreed it wasn’t an SAS job.
The air-vice-marshal added that he didn’t believe the SAS had destroyed as many planes as they claimed. Stirling’s glare dropped ten degrees. In fact, the RAF-man had probably touched a raw nerve. Though it is unlikely that the SAS deliberately upped their bag, later evidence showed that some of the planes blown up in the early attacks were already out of commission. The Italians craftily pushed damaged aircraft to the periphery of the aerodromes, where they made easier targets for saboteurs, and the fact that they were unserviceable would not have been apparent by night.
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