The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  Stirling knew this, but answered that the SAS never claimed more than they were certain of. The air-vice-marshal snorted. What was needed for Bigamy, he repeated, was regular troops. Stirling tasted poison. His eyes slitted. He lurched for a heavy glass inkwell on the DMO’s desk. Brigadier Davy saw the movement and locked Stirling’s eyes. The staff officer on Stirling’s right put a hand on his wrist. The air-vice-marshal noticed the movement too, and his eyes widened. He opened his mouth to speak, but he was beaten to it by the air-commodore. ‘I understand why you don’t consider Bigamy an SAS task, Colonel Stirling,’ he cut in, ‘but you are the only commander who has actually been inside Benghazi since Rommel retook it.’

  Stirling couldn’t refute this. The air-commodore had got him, not by bribery, but by suggesting that there was no one else who could do the job. ‘The game was lost at that moment,’ he admitted. ‘I could still have refused and I believe I should have done so … I felt that I had lost ground and would appear to be bleating unnecessarily.’5

  Stirling claimed to have found out later that the air-vice-marshal had a grudge against him. Stirling’s friend Brigadier Sir John Marriott had told the RAF-man that Stirling should be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, because his pipsqueak unit had knocked out more aircraft than the RAF.

  After the meeting, Stirling learned that he had been invited to dinner at the British Embassy. The guests of honour were Winston Churchill, General Smuts, the South African politician, and General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Fitzroy Maclean, now recovered from his injury in the car smash, was also invited. Stirling decided to attend, and try to get into conversation with the Prime Minister. The DMO staff warned him not to mention Bigamy to Churchill – the Prime Minister loved to talk, and was considered a security risk.

  Stirling was too junior to sit near Churchill at dinner, but afterwards British Ambassador Sir Miles Lampson called him over and introduced him. The Prime Minister, puffing cigar-smoke, introduced him to General Smuts, and to two British generals who would soon be taking over command from Auchinleck: Harold Alexander, as Commander-in-Chief Middle East, and Bernard Montgomery, as General Officer Commanding the Eighth Army. Although Churchill didn’t mention it at the time, Auchinleck had been sacked for losing Tobruk. The Prime Minister said later that he hated dismissing Auchinleck – he felt it was ‘like shooting a noble stag’.

  Stirling soon saw that his public-relations gamble with Randolph Churchill had paid off. Randolph had praised him to the high heavens and exaggerated SAS exploits. Churchill invited Stirling and Maclean to join him in a stroll round the embassy grounds, where they gave him the lowdown on Bigamy. With an eye on the future, Stirling mentioned that he envisaged a role for the SAS in Europe at a later stage in the war.

  Churchill is reputed to have described Stirling to Smuts as ‘the mildest mannered man that ever scuttled ship or cut a throat’ – a quote from Lord Byron’s most famous poem, Don Juan. Stirling himself refuted this, but Churchill was certainly impressed enough to send him a request next day for his proposals on improving the coordination of SAS operations.

  In response, Stirling wrote a paper proposing that, in future, all special service units, apart from those like G(R), dealing with lone agents, should be amalgamated under the SAS. This included the Middle East Commando, known as 1 Special Service Regiment, which should be disbanded, giving him the pick of its personnel. Control should remain in the hands of the commanding officer – himself. All special operations planning should be carried out by the SAS ‘head-shed’, not the Directorate of Military Operations. It was an impertinent gambit – an attempted coup d’état for the control of special ops in the Middle East theatre. It would establish the SAS as a real private army without rivals, answerable only to itself.

  Stirling and Churchill met again at dinner that night. Stirling poured out his fears that the SAS, being regarded only as a temporary unit, would be quickly disbanded when the North African campaign came to a close. What he needed was permission to constitute the SAS as a Regiment. SAS skills and expertise could then be used to probe ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’. Churchill made few comments, but admired the phrase ‘soft underbelly of Europe’ and asked Stirling if he could use it. Stirling left the meeting a little disappointed, not realizing that Churchill had been bowled over by him and was privately referring to him as ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’. It was the second nickname he had acquired that summer. German radio reports were already calling him ‘The Phantom Major’.

  36. ‘It looks rather that we are expected’

  On 10 September, Paddy Mayne and the Force X advance-party ran their jeeps and trucks into the Wadi Gamra, a meandering watercourse cut through the northern scarps of the Jebel Akhdar. The maquis shrub, a fleece of rust-brown and olive-green growing thick as fur around tors of smooth granite, fell away along bare scarp-slopes into the Benghazi plain. Sheep were grazing on the hillsides. Pencil-lines of blue smoke rose above the tents of Senussi shepherds pitched along the gravel wadi-beds. The tribes had migrated here in greater numbers than ever this year to avoid the troubled areas along the coast.

  Mayne knew the SAS couldn’t avoid being clocked by the Senussi, but he had never yet had a reason to doubt their loyalty. He and his one hundred and eighteen men had just driven sixteen hundred miles across some of the worst desert on earth. They had travelled from Cairo to the LRDG base at Kufra oasis on the Libyan-Sudanese border, and from there across a gap in the Kalansho sand-sea to Cyrenaica. Mayne was confident they hadn’t been detected by enemy aircraft.

  The wadi was a perfect hiding-place. It led off the main track in a series of twisting angles, opening up into wide, steep-sided basins. The wadi-bed was dotted with thickets of oleander, acacia, ilex, lentisk and wild olive that made ideal camouflage for the vehicles. It took almost an hour to cam-up. After that, Mayne instructed the men to strip and clean the Vickers Ks. The machine guns had been covered in quilts for the desert journey, but the fine dust got in everywhere.

  Mayne had Fitzroy Maclean with him. He sent the subaltern to locate a G(R) agent, Captain Bob Melot, who had been dropped by an LRDG patrol on 2 September, and had spent the last eight days lurking in the jebel, dressed as an Arab. Melot and Maclean were to make contact with Alan Lyle-Smythe, an officer of the Inter-Services Liaison Department – a cover name for MI6. Smythe would have intelligence on the situation inside Benghazi.

  After inquiring at a Senussi camp, Maclean tracked Melot down to a dry-wash about five miles away, where he was lying up in a cave with his assistant, a deserter from the Italian colonial army now serving with the Libyan Arab Force (LAF). Melot was a fifty-year-old Belgian. A fluent Arabic-speaker, he had been a First World War fighter ace, and manager for a cotton export company in Alexandria between the wars. Taxied in by the LRDG, he had been tramping these wooded hillsides on and off for the past year, moving continuously from cave to cave and camp to camp. He never knew when he would be betrayed, or run into a search-party. He had been lucky so far, but he had learned to be cautious.

  Melot obtained his rations mostly from LRDG food-dumps, but the recent German advance had cut into his supply system, and he was starving. Maclean whipped him up a mess of bully beef rissoles fried in oatmeal, from his compo rations. Melot ate ravenously.

  Bigamy was due to kick off in three days time. Pouring over the map, though, Melot told Maclean he had a bad feeling about the op. In the past ten days there had been some disturbing troop-movements – small outposts on the edge of the jebel had been reinforced. ‘It looks rather that we are expected,’ he said. Melot hoped to get more information from the MI6 officer Alan Lyle-Smythe, a bearded Englishman who, in another life, was a professor at the University of Cairo. He trolled around the jebel dressed like an Alpinist, in a checked jacket and hiking-breeches, carrying a knobbly walking stick.

  The MI6 agent failed to show at the rendezvous and instead they drank tea with two Arab sheikhs, who expressed their view that there was an une
asiness among the Italians. Melot decided to send his LAF-man into Benghazi to find out what was going on. They escorted him to the edge of the escarpment, where successive grooves had been scored sharply through bare limestone by aeons of rain. Below them the hillside fell away, lush and green under oleanders and cork-oaks. They told him to find out what he could, and bring back with him cigarettes and matches. ‘He looked,’ Maclean observed, ‘singularly unreliable.’1

  All the next day and night, Melot and Maclean lay under spiky-leafed junipers and wild olives twisted and bent by the prevailing wind. It was dead quiet but for birdsong and the chirp of crickets. Maclean cooked rissoles. The Arab arrived back just after breakfast on 12 September, footsore and exhausted, having trekked more than forty miles. He had brought the cigarettes and matches they had requested, and he had plenty to say. After quizzing him in Arabic and Italian, Melot and Maclean moved him swiftly down to the SAS lying-up place in the Wadi Gamra.

  Stirling had arrived earlier that day with the main party. He was confident they hadn’t been observed from the air, but the two Honey tanks he had brought with him all the way from Cairo had conked out just north of Kufra. His approach to the jebel had been marred by bad luck. The previous day one of his jeeps had hit a Thermos mine as it crossed the Trig al-‘Abd, and its passenger, Lt. Robert Ardley RNR, off HMS Stag, had been badly burned. The SAS driver, Cpl. James Webster, Essex Regiment, had leapt down, run round to pull him out, and stepped on another mine. It had blasted the flesh off his leg.

  Medical officer Malcolm Pleydell had done what he could for them, but Ardley had third-degree burns, and died that night. This was a blow to Stirling. Ardley had been assistant harbour-master at Benghazi the previous year, and knew the port intimately. Pleydell performed an emergency amputation on Webster in the blazing sun, ‘crude, unskilful work’, he commented. ‘The dust blew … forming a dirty film on the antiseptic solution, coating the instruments and fouling the raw wounds …’2

  At first light Pleydell supervised Ardley’s burial, then went to see how Webster was doing. The corporal was lying on a stretcher in the shade of a truck. He was on morphia, but seemed to be recovering. His first inquiry was for Ardley, but Pleydell, who had been a ship’s doctor at Dunkirk, knew by experience that the truth would affect his morale. He said that Ardley had been moved further up the wadi to be near the rest of the naval detachment.

  Almost a hundred vehicles were now concealed in the olives, junipers and ilexes in the wadi-bed, and along its sides. There were more than two hundred men – SAS, SBS, bluejackets, and recent transfers from Middle East Commando. The place was also full of Senussi Arabs, squatting among the troops in their cloaks, blankets and tight hoods, chattering in fractured Italian, bartering eggs and meat for sugar, salt and cigarettes. At nightfall the MO dropped in on Stirling and Mayne, and found them in a huddle with Melot and his Arab spy, whom Pleydell thought looked ‘rather timid’. Melot was translating his report for Stirling. The Arab had spent four hours in Benghazi, chatting to people in the suq, and had stayed the night with his relatives. It was common knowledge, he said, that a British attack was imminent, and some townspeople even seemed to know it would come on 14 September. Five thousand Italian troops were being shifted from al-Abyar, thirty miles distant, and an Afrika Korps battalion encamped to the north-east of the town had been strengthened by Italian infantry. The Arab had passed through a minefield and pillbox positions on his way out, and thought the entire perimeter of the town had been mined. Worse, all ships in port had put out to sea. Only one landing-ground was being used, under heavy guard.

  For Stirling, this was depressing news after the sixteen-hundred-mile safari across the Libyan Desert. The SAS couldn’t take on troops in division strength, dug in, ready for an attack. ‘I suppose this Arab is quite reliable?’ he asked Melot.

  Melot nodded, and pointed out that if the man were being bribed by the Germans, his obvious ploy would have been to keep quiet and let them walk into a trap, rather than warn them that they were expected.3

  Stirling instructed the others to keep the news from the enlisted men in case it caused a slump in confidence. He had the wireless operator send a message to GHQ conveying the new intelligence, and asking if there should be a change of plan. Within two hours a message came back: ‘… no great importance is attributed to this information.’ The operation was to go ahead as planned.

  Stirling must have felt a pang of disquiet at this point. The message from GHQ could be suggesting that it had better data, and that the SAS were not expected, or it could be interpreted as saying that he should go ahead with the plan even though they were expected. Fitzroy Maclean took it to mean that the Arab’s report was false. ‘Evidently there was nothing in the rumours we had picked up,’ he wrote. ‘Melot’s Arab had simply been trying … to put us off an operation in which he had no wish to take part. We went about our preparations feeling reassured.’4

  Malcolm Pleydell’s reading was different. ‘It was evident that the enemy knew of our plans,’ he said, ‘and were expecting us. We had lost our most powerful card: that of surprise.’5 Pleydell added that it was on the assumption that the town was ringed with mines that he decided not to accompany the raiding-party. ‘I reckoned it would be wiser,’ he wrote, ‘for the medical post to remain outside the minefield.’6

  While Maclean insisted that the party was ‘reassured’, Pleydell wrote that some of them were ‘quite thoughtful that evening as they sat round the trucks and considered the possibilities’.7 Paddy Mayne was even more taciturn than usual. He raised his head from his Penguin only to remark that it ‘looked as though there should be some hard scrapping’.8

  Maclean said that Stirling modified his plan at this juncture, from an assault from several directions at once, to a single approach. ‘Our plan was simple,’ he wrote. ‘The main body … would … rush the road block and drive full speed down to the harbour, where various targets had been allotted to different parties.’9 Carol Mather, though his memoirs were not written down till years afterwards, confirms Maclean’s statement. ‘As a result of this disquieting news,’ he wrote, ‘David decided to abandon the plan to enter the town at several different points and concentrate on a surprise attack at an unexpected point to the south of the town.’10 The official report, though, suggests that Stirling changed his plan later, when he realized that the raid was going in too late.

  37. ‘Let battle commence’

  Next morning the men stripped and buffed the Vickers Ks again. The Lewes bombs were prepared by Captain Bill Cumper, the Cockney demolitions expert, out on his first mission with the SAS. Bombs, grenades and incendiaries were distributed and packed in haversacks. The men were issued with an escape kit. It consisted of a silk map of the Western Desert to be hidden in the battledress lining, a button-compass, Benzedrine tablets, a folding water-bottle, a miniature saw and other gadgets. The men carried Thompsons, pistols, .303 Lee-Enfields, or EY rifles with a grenade-launching capability.

  The force was split into two groups. The first, under Bob Melot and Chris Bailey, comprising a dozen men, would knock out an Italian wireless post in a fort overlooking the escarpment. This attack was timed for 1600 hours. Stirling gave Melot orders that the fort was to be overcome within twenty minutes, to stop the Italians warning their base. Melot’s group would then meet up with the main assault-group, and Melot would guide them down the escarpment.

  The main raid was due to go in after an RAF bombardment, timed for midnight. The men, in jeeps and three-tonners, would concentrate on a single roadblock. Once through it, they would divide into parties, some of them on foot, and go about their assigned tasks. Stirling hadn’t rescinded orders concerning the blocking of the harbour. Neither had he covered the possibility that the jeeps might not be able to penetrate the roadblock, despite the fact that he no longer had the two Honey tanks assigned to him for this purpose.

  Melot’s section left in a jeep and a three-tonner in the early afternoon. The main assault convoy left be
fore last light. The scene was peacefully biblical, with shepherds tending sheep-flocks and smoke rising from Senussi camps. The Arabs waved to them encouragingly as they passed. They halted twice when enemy aircraft appeared, dark specks against a mackerel sky, heavy with cloud. Pleydell was disturbed further by the suspicious fact that the planes didn’t come in for a closer look.

  Not long before sundown, Pleydell set up a medical aid-post in a small wadi in the outer skirts of the jebel, and waved to the rest of the jeeps as they moved on down the track. The sun faded, and the going became increasingly steep and difficult in the darkness. It was, recalled Mather, in the back of a three-tonner, ‘a horrible journey … over jagged boulders following the course of a rough track’.1 The track dwindled and seemed to Maclean, in the leading jeep, to be petering out. The way was littered with sharp boulders that scraped irritatingly against the jeeps’ sumps.

  During one of the numerous halts, Mather recalled, an SAS-man was spotted scuttling down the wadi. He turned out to be one of Melot’s party. He reported that they’d taken the fort, but that Melot, Bailey and Cpl. Doug Laird had been badly injured in the fighting. He couldn’t say whether or not the enemy had given the alarm. Jim Almonds, driving one of the jeeps, heard the news, and saw that the mission was in trouble. ‘Everyone in the column,’ he said, ‘realized that the scheme now left far too much to chance.’2

  Since Melot was no longer available, navigation was handed over to his LAF Arab. Under his guidance, the track entered a steep-sided ravine and ended abruptly in a cul-de-sac. The Arab admitted to Maclean that they were in the wrong wadi. This meant retracing their steps and, for the three-tonners, virtually creating their own route down. ‘We had to clear boulders all the way,’ wrote Mather, ‘build a rough track, and guide each vehicle down individually.’3 Mather put the guide’s performance down to ‘treachery’. The official report suggests, more fairly, that he was simply incapable of judging what was suitable ‘going’ for motor-vehicles.