The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  Seekings set off and caught up with Mayne’s party the following day. By the time they reached Jalo, three days later, six more vehicles had been lost. To cap it all, the SDF had failed to capture the oasis, and was still fighting when Force X arrived. Their presence, though, saved the SAS by providing petrol, water and rations, and preventing the enemy from intercepting them as they withdrew back to Kufra.

  39. Talking out of turn over gin-and-tonics

  In a list of seven lessons learned from Op Bigamy, GHQ specified that ‘Too many people knew of the Benghazi operation and a very much higher sense of security was necessary.’1 Reg Seekings believed that the cat had been let out of the bag not by SAS personnel, but by desk wallahs from GHQ talking out of turn over gin-and-tonics in Shepheard’s bar and other places.

  Intelligence files, though, suggest that Op Bigamy was not anticipated: no leak was ever proved. A thorough air reconnaissance of Benghazi prior to the operation had spotted large numbers of Italian troops on the move, as Melot’s agent had reported, but concluded that these were units of the newly-arrived Pistoia Division being shifted to the front line. The Arab’s report was accurate, but the movements were discounted by GHQ as having no connection with the planned attack.

  The main cause of the failure was the time lost in descending the escarpment. This was blamed on Melot’s Arab agent, but the real blunder lay in Stirling’s failure to send a recce party, to make a thorough survey of the route. He had been relying on Bob Melot to guide them down, when there was always the chance that Melot would be killed or wounded in the attack on the wireless station. That assault itself was a longshot – the chances of being able to capture the fort within twenty minutes, and of preventing the Italian signallers from alerting their base, were not good. Stirling’s decision to concentrate on a single roadblock rather than go for an assault from several directions was also a mistake. It meant that one machine-gun post could hold them up: they could not have got through the second barrier, anyway, without using an explosive charge. Bigamy went wrong not because of a security leak, but through a lack of precision and planning by Stirling.

  This may be why he ‘drew a veil’ over it even in his official biography, and, according to Lorna Almonds Windmill, would apologize to her father, Jim Almonds, whenever they saw each other after the war. It might also explain that momentary look of blankness Almonds saw in Stirling’s face just before Cumper opened the gate.

  The most important ‘lesson’ learned on the Benghazi raid was one that Stirling’s men knew already – it was too big. The SAS concept was to operate in small groups – Bigamy was more like the commando-attacks carried out by Layforce than SAS. It was poor compensation that the simultaneous raid on Tobruk, led by John Hasleden, had fared even worse. Almost all his Force B troops had been captured, and Hasleden had been killed. The navy had lost two destroyers and four motor-torpedo boats.

  Bigamy was essentially a failure of the SAS principle of maximum return for minimum cost, but it did divert enemy focus from the front line. Reg Seekings, for one, argued that anything the unit did to keep the rear echelons guessing ought to be considered a success.

  40. The Regiment

  On 28 September David Stirling marched out of No. 10 Tonbalat Street the commanding officer of the British army’s newest regiment, 1 SAS. He had just spent several hours in conclave with Lt. Col. John ‘Shan’ Hackett, director of General Staff Raiding Forces, G(RF), a new staff cell under the Director of Military Operations. Hackett was now responsible for all military-style special ops.

  Stirling had turned up for the meeting with some misgivings. He had always objected to being run by the Director of Military Operations. He foresaw further cock-ups like Bigamy, planned by staff officers without an inkling of what the SAS was about. To his relief, he found Hackett a kindred spirit, a seasoned soldier who had taken the desk job under protest and who accepted that SAS missions should be chosen by the SAS. ‘We saw absolutely eye to eye,’ Hackett said later. ‘… [Stirling] was by far the best bloke to choose the targets he would operate most effectively against. We had a very close alliance …’1

  They had discussed the SAS role, particularly in relation to Bernard Montgomery’s planned break-out from Alamein, Operation Lightfoot, due to take place on 23–4 October. SAS targets were defined by a list of classic guerrilla tasks, similar to those outlined a generation earlier by T. E. Lawrence: hit and run attacks on railways, locomotives and rolling stock, bridges, roads, supply-dumps, administrative centres, tanks, troops in laager, motor-transport in laager or on the move, land-line communications, headquarters and important officers.

  Stirling and Hackett had also worked out an orbat for 1 SAS. It would have an establishment of twenty-nine officers and five hundred and seventy-two men. It would absorb the Special Boat Section, from now on to be known as the Special Boat Squadron, and have the pick of the disbanded Middle East Commando.

  The Regiment was to be divided into four combat squadrons. A would be under Paddy Mayne, and B under a new officer, Major Vivian Street, Devonshire Regiment. Street was a staff officer assigned to ‘Special Duties’, who had been present at the very first conference on L Detachment. He had grown tired of hearing about SAS exploits from the safety of his office, and decided to call in the favours he’d done Stirling over the past year. Mayne’s A Squadron included the old operators, while Street’s B Squadron was made up mostly of new recruits, with a smattering of vets as NCOs. C Squadron was the Free French detachment, and D, the SBS folbot group. There would be three troops to each squadron, and five troops attached to a permanent HQ Squadron at Kabrit, responsible for administration, training, signals, intelligence and light vehicle repair. One recent windfall was a body of a hundred and twenty-one Free Greek troops under their revered commander, Colonel Christodoulos Tzigantes. Tzigantes had reformed the Greek Sacred Squadron – a unit with a longer history than any other body of troops in the Allied forces. Raised originally in 370BC to defend Thebes against the Spartans, it had been revived a thousand years later, in 1821, to fight the Turks. Tzigantes’s third incarnation of the Sacred Squadron, already trained to use folbots, would be added to the strength of the SBS.

  SAS modus operandi would be stealth if possible, force if necessary, and the unit would be capable of approaching its targets by land, sea or air. It would come under the direct control of GHQ via Hackett, though part of it might come under another command for individual missions. Most important for the future, SAS operations were not to be confined to the desert. The unit might be required to operate anywhere in Middle East Command, which included Syria, Palestine and Iraq, East Africa and southern Europe. Squadrons and troops might be organized differently depending on the areas or the type of country they were operating in.

  As Stirling passed the pickets at the barrier that day, he had good reason to feel proud of himself. The ‘incorrigible’ subaltern who may or may not have leapt over the fence sixteen months earlier was now a temporary acting lieutenant-colonel, and had founded one of only a handful of new regiments to be added to the British army’s order of battle since his uncle, Simon Fraser, had founded the Lovat Scouts.

  This was not a coincidence. The ultimate source of Stirling’s success – the knowledge that such a thing was possible – lay in his family tradition. His superiors knew of this tradition, and so gave Stirling more credence than they would probably have allowed him otherwise. That the organization of light raiding forces was considered almost a Stirling family prerogative is illustrated by the fact that a second SAS Regiment had been founded in May, under Stirling’s brother, Bill. This can hardly have been a coincidence, either.

  To give GHQ its due, it had also sanctioned ideas for ‘private armies’ from those who had no such antecedents, including Ralph Bagnold, Herbert Buck, Vladimir ‘Popski’ Peniakoff and others. It is nevertheless interesting to speculate whether Paddy Mayne or Jock Lewes would have been successful had they set out single-handedly to create the SAS.

  If
Stirling’s family precedent had given him a head start, his network of social contacts had buoyed him at every turn – Ritchie, Marriott, Reid, Randolph Churchill, the ‘Silver Circle Club’, the Guards mafia. His success was also due to his own personal qualities of rhetoric and empathy, as well as astute politics. His allowing Randolph Churchill to take part in a mission despite being untrained, for instance, had brought him to the attention of the Prime Minister. To Winston Churchill, friend of Lawrence of Arabia, ex-troop commander in the legendary charge of 21 Lancers at Omdurman, Stirling was a man after his own heart.

  Stirling’s plan, approved by Hackett, was to continue what he had been doing before Bigamy had so rudely interrupted. He would strike along the coast far into the Panzerarmee’s back-yard. When Rommel’s forces fell back from Alamein, as it was now confidently expected they would, the SAS would cause havoc behind his lines.

  Starting in early October, Mayne’s A Squadron would set up a forward operating base in the deep Sahara and hit the railway in the Tobruk area, as well as motor transport and landing-grounds. After Montgomery’s attack began, A Squadron would go for motor-transport and HQ units. Once Rommel began his withdrawal, the SAS would focus on creating traffic bottlenecks to provide targets for RAF bombing, and on hitting Axis aircraft being leapfrogged to the rear on transit aerodromes. Meanwhile, B Squadron would be under formation at Kabrit, ready to take part in operations by late November.

  Recruitment, though, was a headache. Apart from Middle East Commando personnel, Stirling could no longer call on the commando-trained, combat-experienced volunteers who had made up L Detachment. His recruiting NCOs, including Sgt. Jeff Du Vivier, recently awarded the MM for his part in the Ajadabiyya raid, were already tramping round the camps of various regiments, giving talks and asking for volunteers. Du Vivier reported that it was difficult to find them, because battalion commanders weren’t ready to let their best men go.

  Stirling decided to take the bull by the horns and ask Montgomery for permission to recruit a hundred and fifty combat veterans from the Eighth Army. In early October he turned up at Montgomery’s command caravan ten miles from Alamein, with Hackett in support. The SAS star was in the ascendant, and he didn’t believe the General Officer Commanding would turn him down.

  He was quite wrong. Montgomery, a ruthless martinet and self-publicist, was determined to turn the tide of war once and for all. He was not about to hand over his most seasoned soldiers to a twenty-seven-year-old half-colonel who had just lost a quarter of his force and three-quarters of his vehicles at Benghazi. Lightfoot was the most crucial offensive of the entire campaign.

  Stirling and Hackett walked in and saluted. Montgomery glared. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded. His voice was like a knife, and Stirling’s heart sank. Gone was the clubby aura of Ritchie and Auchinleck. ‘What, Colonel Stirling,’ Monty snapped after listening to his request, ‘makes you assume that you can handle these men to greater advantage than myself?’2 Stirling tried to explain that he needed to bring 1 SAS up to establishment as soon as possible, and training green recruits would take too long. Seasoned veterans could be trained in only a month. ‘I find your request arrogant in the extreme,’ the GOC concluded. ‘… You failed at Benghazi and you come here asking, no, demanding, the best of my men. In all honesty, Colonel Stirling, I am not inclined to associate myself with failure.’3 He held up his hand to show that the meeting was at an end.

  Stirling couldn’t believe that Monty had sent him away with a flea in his ear. He had never been treated like this by a general, not even as a lowly subaltern. Carol Mather, who knew both Montgomery and Stirling and had recently been posted to Monty’s HQ as his personal assistant, commented that the GOC felt Stirling had become a law unto himself. ‘He considered that Stirling was a spoilt boy,’ said Mather, ‘Baby Boy, he used to call him. Others might put up with his gasconading, but Monty would not.’4 As Mather suggested, Stirling’s failure to admit that the GOC had a point, and his sometimes over-belligerent attitude to the ‘morons’ at GHQ ME, are signs of a side that didn’t often show. His patience, tact and ability to gain others’ friendship overlay a powerful element of the prima donna. This is probably why Mayne’s apparently easy superiority both in leadership and in combat irked him so deeply.

  That afternoon, though, after lunching extravagantly at Montgomery’s expense, he and Hackett returned to the GOC’s caravan to retrieve a document-case and ran into Chief of General Staff, Brigadier Freddie de Guingand. De Guingand, as it happened, was literally ‘old school tie’ – he had been at Ampleforth with Stirling. He told them that while there was no shifting Montgomery once he had made up his mind, he would put in a good word for the SAS whenever he had the chance. Stirling had to resign himself to recruiting raw material, but he did learn something of value from de Guingand: a tacit admission that an Anglo-American army would soon be opening up a second front in North Africa.

  Stirling started putting out feelers and found out that Operation Torch, the Allied landings at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers, would follow Monty’s Operation Lightfoot by about two weeks. Stung by the GOC’s attitude, he was determined that the new SAS Regiment should make its name before then. By the time he received his formal orders for the next series of operations against Rommel’s supply-lines, Paddy Mayne’s A Squadron, with Bill Fraser as second-in-command, was already at Kufra oasis poised to strike.

  41. ‘A one-way ticket with no return’

  At 2140 hours on 23 October, five hundred and ninety-two British guns opened up on Axis positions from the Alamein line. Just over an hour later, the blanket bombardment ceased. Montgomery’s artillery switched to specific targets. Royal Engineers mine-clearing parties crept out of their trenches, followed by infantry battalions advancing with bayonets fixed, supported by squadrons of Valentine tanks. They encountered savage opposition from Axis troops.

  Monty had predicted that Alamein would last thirteen days. He was correct. On the night of 3–4 November patrols of 51 Highland Division probed Axis positions and discovered that the enemy had gone. Rommel was retreating at last, and this time he would not be back. He had lost twenty-five thousand men killed or wounded, thirty thousand captured, eighty-four aircraft, a thousand guns, and four hundred and fifty tanks.

  During the last two weeks of October, Mayne’s SAS patrols, operating from the Great Sand Sea, blew the railway line in the Tobruk-ad-Dhaba area no less than seven times. So many, in fact, that by the end of the month, he had been requested to desist. The railway would shortly be in British hands and was required to be in working order. Lt. Raymond Shorten, General List, was killed on an attempt to blow the railway at Sidi Barrani, when his patrol was chased by German armoured cars and his jeep overturned in the sand-sea. His navigator, Trooper John Sillito, Staffordshire Yeomanry, a newcomer to the SAS, was stranded in the desert. He made a record-breaking march of two hundred miles back to base in eight days, alone, with one water-bottle and no food. When his water gave out, he was reduced to drinking his own urine. The SAS-men suffered badly from desert sores.

  Another newcomer, Irishman Lt. Bill MacDermott, Royal Artillery, grew so frustrated when his charges failed to blow a locomotive that he captured a railway station, taking prisoner three Italians and two Germans. He proceeded to demolish the station before disappearing into the desert. Cpl. Jimmy Storie, Mayne’s companion on the second Berka raid, wasn’t impressed with MacDermott’s proficiency. It was while on patrol with the new officer that he was captured by the Germans, after his jeep was hit by an armour-piercing shell. He blamed the patrol’s inexperience. ‘What used to happen with the old hands,’ he said, ‘if you got hit, one of them would swing right round and pick you up – but [these] were new boys.’1

  For two months Stirling remained behind his own lines, flitting from GHQ to Kabrit, supervising the training of the new recruits. He spent some time in hospital suffering from acute desert sores. Occasionally, as word got round that he was looking for men, he would get walk-ins. One d
ay in October, the doorbell rang at the Stirling flat. Mo, the housekeeper, admitted a gangly-looking major wearing a DSO ribbon on his service dress. The major was thirty-two-year-old Wilfred Thesiger, a distinguished explorer who had fought with Orde Wingate on the Gideon mission in Ethiopia. Thesiger, a fluent Arabic-speaker, had also worked with G(R) in Syria, where he had served for a time as second-in-command of the Druze Legion, a cavalry force raised to fight the Vichy French. He had grown frustrated with G(R). He’d heard that Stirling was about to mount a raid, and wanted to join the SAS.

  Stirling had been looking for combat veterans, and here was one ready and willing. Thesiger explained that G(R) had already refused to let him go. The brigadier in command had threatened to put him on a charge for insubordination. ‘[Stirling] picked up the telephone,’ Thesiger remembered, ‘and asked for the brigadier. “Colonel Stirling here. I’ve got Major Thesiger with me. I’m taking him on a forthcoming operation. So please release him at once.”’2 Stirling put the phone down and told Thesiger to get down to Kabrit the same day.

  Anglo-American forces landed in Algeria on 8 November. By that time, Montgomery had already chased the Panzerarmee back once again to Aghayla. Just over a week later, Stirling was issued orders to shift his operations beyond Egypt and Cyrenaica, to the Tripoli area. Montgomery was about to go in for the kill.

  B Squadron hadn’t yet finished its course. Many, like Thesiger, hadn’t done their parachute jumps. Stirling knew the squadron was hardly ready, but he felt that they could finalize their training in the field.

  They left Kabrit on 20 November in forty jeeps and a dozen three-tonners, led by Stirling. Their destination was Bir Zaltin, a hundred and fifty miles south of Aghayla, where they would rendezvous with Mayne. This time there was to be no sixteen-hundred-mile detour through Kufra. Stirling’s convoy drove along the coast-road from Alexandria, passing through the debris of the great battle that had just been fought. The battlefield was strewn with hundreds of wrecked tanks, dismembered guns and the burned-out skeletons of soft-skinned vehicles and aircraft. For days they passed Montgomery’s columns moving up to the front – trucks full of infantry, Sherman tanks on transporters, artillery batteries. There was an exhilarating sense of purpose in the air.