The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  The journey, through Tobruk and along the foot of the Jebel Akhdar to Benghazi, was like a fast rerun of SAS history. At Ajadabiyya the convoy left the road and crossed desert flats of sand and gravel without a single tree or clump of grass. The first historic meeting of A and B Squadrons took place at Bir Zaltin on 29 November. ‘A Squadron had a quiet self-confidence that was impressive,’ Wilfred Thesiger wrote. ‘In the past year these men had mastered the desert and learned to use its vast emptiness as their hideout. Many of them had grown up in towns; few of them had been out of England before the war. Yet now they were equally at home among the giant dunes of the Sand Sea or on the limitless gravel flats of the Hammad.’3

  Mayne’s men had made themselves useful by gouging hollows out of the chalky overhangs to hide the vehicles. That evening campfires flickered at the foot of the cliffs. After bully-beef stew, bottles of beer were passed around. Soon, the men were singing ‘Lili Marlene’.

  Stirling assembled the officers for an O Group. His orders from Shan Hackett were to keep up pressure on a four-hundred-mile stretch of road between Aghayla and Tripoli. The eastern section, from Aghayla to Bouerat, was assigned to A Squadron, probably because the area was already familiar to Mayne. B Squadron was given the more populated, cultivated area between Bouerat and Tripoli. The operation was planned to support Montgomery’s next offensive on 13 December.

  Each squadron would supply eight patrols. Each patrol would take a forty-mile sector and launch at least three strikes a week. The aim was to make it so hot for Axis motor-transport at night that it would revert to moving by day, presenting clear targets for RAF air-power.

  The squadrons split up three days later. Stirling travelled with B Squadron, whose forward operating base would be at Bir Fascia, a Roman cistern forty miles south of Bouerat. It was a four-hundred-mile journey across terrain so bad that it was marked on maps as ‘impassable’. Fortunately Stirling had brought with him navigator Mike Sadler, now promoted to lieutenant. Thesiger, who had travelled thousands of miles by camel with Arabs in the Sudan, was highly impressed with Sadler’s performance. ‘[He had] an uncanny aptitude for keeping his direction by night,’ he recalled, ‘even over ground strewn with rocks, cut up by steep-sided wadis or interspersed with areas of soft sand.’4 They arrived at Bir Fascia just as Monty’s offensive was kicking off.

  Apart from Carol Mather, who had chosen to give up his staff assignment for the new operation, Gordon Alston, the ex-ME Commando Gunner, and François Martin of the Free French, most of the officers were new. These included Thesiger, Major Peter Oldfield, Royal Armoured Corps, Captain the Hon. Pat Hore-Ruthven, Captain P. S. Morris-Keating and Lt. Andrew Hough, all of the Rifle Brigade, Lt. John O’Sullivan, Kings Royal Rifle Corps and Lt. P. J. Maloney, Royal Warwicks. Among the enlisted men there were a few seasoned hands, notably Reg Seekings and Ted Badger, but most were inexperienced, ‘good chaps,’ said Mather, ‘but clueless about the desert.’5

  Stirling called the officers, allocated their sectors, and showed them air-photographs. ‘Right,’ he said finally. ‘You’d better be off now.’6 He intended to go out with Thesiger and Alston’s patrol that night for a last bash at the enemy before heading back to Cairo and leaving the squadron with Street. Before he left, Mather buttonholed him about supplies. He pointed out that while they had been ordered to stay in the field for a month, they had rations for only ten days. ‘“Oh,” replied David rather vaguely,’ Mather recalled, ‘ “you’ll just have to live off your fingernails. Forage around and see what you can pick up from the Italian settlements. They’re bound to have hams and that kind of thing.” ’7 It gradually began to dawn on Mather that this op was ‘a one-way ticket with no return’.8

  42. They had become invisible

  Mather’s intuition proved correct. When Stirling came back from Cairo on 7 January, B Squadron had ceased to exist. Of the original officers, all but Thesiger, Alston and Martin had been captured or killed.

  Mather’s crew had tried motoring through a town with Stirling-like nonchalance, but were instantly identified by Italian colonial carabinieri. The Italians followed them to their lying-up place in a cave, where they had attracted a large crowd of local Arabs. Mather and his team fought a gun-battle with their pursuers, then bugged out into the night. They were eventually tracked down, surrounded and captured. The Italians stood them against a wall ready to shoot them, but the execution was called off at the last minute. They were sent to Italy by submarine.

  Reg Seekings had gone out with Pat Hore-Ruthven’s patrol, and was reported missing. The day Mather was captured, his jeeps took on six Axis vehicles including two tanks. They ran into heavy fire. Hore-Ruthven’s right arm was shattered by a 20mm round. Seekings carried him to cover. He was losing blood fast, and Seekings knew he couldn’t move him any further. He left him, and hopped on a jeep with the rest of the group. After eluding the enemy for days, they were finally picked up by a patrol of the King’s Dragoon Guards on 5 January.

  Vivian Street had initially gone into action with the Hore-Ruthven–Seekings patrol, and had enjoyed some success in planting Lewes bombs on twenty Italian lorries. After being spotted and chased by Italian troops later, though, his party headed back to the operating base at Bir Fascia and drove into a squadron of Axis armoured cars. Pulling out hastily, they laid up in a wadi. They were spotted by passing Arabs, who informed the Italians. The enemy encircled them. ‘Through my mind flashed the picture of five Englishmen fighting to the death against impossible odds,’ Street wrote later, ‘… but a couple of hand-grenades landing near us soon banished these mock heroics, and with the enemy only twenty yards away we were forced to accept the inevitable, and held up our hands in surrender.’1

  Thesiger and Alston had narrowly evaded capture. For more than a week they went out night after night, shooting up convoys, mining the road, raking camps with furious Vickers fire. Unlike Mather’s and Street’s groups, they were never challenged, and Thesiger sometimes had the eerie sense that they had become invisible. He began to feel that the spell couldn’t hold. ‘It seemed inevitable that sooner or later a sentry would identify us,’ he wrote, ‘and fire a burst into our car. Even if he missed Alston and myself the land mines in the car would probably go up.’2

  Hiding out near Bir Fascia, they learned on the wireless that the Allied offensive had succeeded. The Eighth Army was advancing towards Sirte. Two days before Christmas, though, while Alston was away getting water, Thesiger had a scare when a section of German armoured cars arrived suddenly and began poking around the area. He spent hours lying in a pit, camouflaged under a blanket, afraid that they’d winkle out the wireless jeep in the bushes nearby. Though the cars rumbled to within a hundred yards of his hiding place, they never found him or the jeep. Alston returned in the afternoon, having heard gunshots, believing that Thesiger had been taken out. It transpired that the shots had been for François Martin, who turned up later. Martin’s jeeps had been chased by the same armoured cars, and had only just managed to outrun them.

  43. ‘Mistakenly overconfident about our security’

  Stirling put the loss of B Squadron down to the inexperience of the men, and the more densely populated nature of the country. He felt, though, that the Regiment had achieved its task. ‘We certainly succeeded in stopping enemy transport by night for a considerable period,’ his official report ran.

  Thesiger, Alston and Martin linked up with him at Bir Guedaffia on 12 January. Stirling was looking frail and exhausted, and was suffering badly from frequent migraines and desert sores. Johnny Cooper and Mike Sadler were with him. So was Lt. Bill MacDermott, the Irish Gunner who had lost Jimmy Storie. Stirling’s section was accompanied by another A Squadron group under twenty-seven-year-old Lt. Harry Poat, Kings Own Scottish Borderers, an impressive and professional-looking officer who was in fact an ex-tomato-grower from Guernsey. Augustin Jourdan, the sole French survivor of the Derna–Mertuba raid back in June, was also there with most of the Free French detachment.
<
br />   Montgomery’s attack on Tripoli and into Tunisia was due to start in three days. Stirling knew the SAS campaign in the desert was winding down. Although B Squadron hadn’t achieved much, Mayne’s A Squadron had reduced Axis road-traffic to almost nothing, and had suffered few casualties. It was already back at Kabrit.

  Stirling’s last scheme in North Africa had four aspects. Poat’s section would loop round Tripoli and cause mayhem among the retreating Axis forces as the Eighth Army advanced. Jourdan’s group would leapfrog forward into Tunisia and harass communications in the Gabès Gap, the bottleneck created where the Tunisian salt-flats, the Shott al-Jarid, approached the sea. Stirling’s party would recce the Mareth Line, a defensive wall built years earlier by the French. They would find out if Rommel was preparing to make a stand there, and if there was a way round. Either Sadler or Cooper would then be sent back as guide for Montgomery’s spearhead, 7 Armoured Division. Once in Tunisia, Stirling’s orders were to operate under the command of the GOC First Army, Lt. General Kenneth Anderson, in the Gabès–Sousse area.

  As commanding officer, there was no necessity for Stirling to make this trip himself. He said later that he wanted to meet up with his brother, Bill, currently commanding 2 SAS Regiment, attached to the advancing Anglo-American forces. His aim, he said, was to discuss with Bill his ideas for creating a third Regiment, and expanding the SAS to brigade status.

  Stirling could easily have flown to Algiers. In any case, if his priority was the future of the SAS he would have done better to stay in Cairo. A British officer, Colonel Anthony Head, of Combined Operations, was already on his way there to discuss Eisenhower’s request that 1 SAS be sent back to Britain to train for other theatres. Stirling missed Head by four days. His real object in heading the Gabès op seems to have been purely romantic. He wanted to be part of the first Eighth Army unit to link up with the advancing First Army, to be there at a moment in history that would never be forgotten.

  The forward operating base for the Tunisian op would be Bir Soltan, near Kasr Ghilan oasis on the edge of the vast sand-sea known as the Great Eastern Erg. His party and Jourdan’s set off separately on 14 January, having agreed to rally there in about a week. The first part of the drive, across the Hammadat al-Hamra to Ghadames on the Algerian frontier, was a breeze. It was a flat serir of hard-packed sand and fine gravel, where the jeeps could race along at fifty miles an hour. For the first time the SAS was not under threat from enemy aircraft – the only planes they saw were USAF Lightnings. From Ghadames the patrol headed north, along the rim of the Great Eastern Erg, where mish-mish and interlocking fish-scale dunes reduced the going to only a few miles a day. They made Bir Soltan eight days later.

  The Eighth Army was advancing fast and Stirling didn’t want to be overtaken. When Jourdan’s group came in he sent them off immediately in eleven vehicles, with orders to pass through the Gabès Gap and blow the Sfax–Gabes railway line. Jourdan was to avoid hitting opportunity targets in the Gap itself until later. The area was thick with enemy troops, and if the French stirred things up prematurely it would make the situation sticky for Stirling’s own party.

  Jourdan’s convoy vanished into the darkness. Martin’s section of two trucks followed on as a rearguard. Stirling’s group consisted of five jeeps and fourteen men, among them Cooper, Sadler, MacDermott, Reg Redington DCM, an ex-Gunner from Croydon, Charlie Backhouse, ex-Cameron Highlanders, Signaller Ginger Tatton and Sgt. Freddie Taxis, an Arabic-speaking Free Frenchman. They left twelve hours after Jourdan’s group, heading for the Mareth Line. Stirling had intended to take Thesiger and Alston with him, but changed his mind when one of his jeeps broke down and he had to exchange it for Thesiger’s. Instead, he left them at the base with instructions to await reinforcements.

  Stirling’s team worked its way around the Mareth Line and drove the same day towards the Shott al-Jarid salt-flats. His orders from Shan Hackett had been to drive across the Shott, outflanking the Gabès Gap. As Reg Seekings was later to prove, the salt-flats could be crossed by motor-vehicle, but only by sticking to known camel-tracks. ‘We hit the salt marsh,’ Cooper recalled, ‘and the first jeep got stuck, so we had to unload it and roll it out. Obviously we weren’t going to be able to get across the Shott. Dawn was coming, so David said, “Right, we’re going to bluff it”… we motored onto the main tarmac road, and went through the Gabès Gap.’1

  Along the sides of the road the personnel of two Axis armoured divisions were just getting up after a night’s bivouac. Stirling told the others not to make eye-contact with them. They should stare straight ahead and pretend the enemy weren’t there. They sped along with their accelerators stuck to the floor. Cooper recalled, though, that some of the Germans did look at them curiously. ‘Somebody must have recognized us,’ he said, ‘I mean we had [five] jeeps … with all our equipment which [was] so different to theirs … anyway, we motored through and nobody challenged us.’2 Stirling claimed later that they had been identified by an enemy spotter-plane going through the Gap, but no one else remembered seeing it.

  For an hour they mixed with Axis convoys moving along the road. After getting clear they turned off into open country, trying to remain halfway between the edge of the Shott and the sea. The area felt foreign after the open Sahara they’d got used to. It was speckled with farms, orchards and patches of cultivation. A crust of low hills about ten miles away glistened quicksilver grey in the sun. They were shattered after their almost non-stop drive from Bir Soltan, and needed to find a lying-up place.

  Their aim was to get as far away from the road as possible, but to Sadler’s dismay they hit another track that cut through the hills. An hour later they came to a narrow ravine on the left. Stirling thought it looked promising, and gave the order to follow it. It led them to a series of narrow feeder-wadis, where they separated the vehicles and cammed up.

  Stirling sent Sadler and Cooper up a ridge nearby to watch for any reaction. Lying sprawled out on the top, they could see the coast-road some miles away across country. Hundreds of Axis vehicles were still moving along it – tiny black shapes like a parade of soldier ants. At about noon they spied two lorries following the track into the hills. The lorries halted below them and Axis troops jumped out. They were wearing blue uniforms of a kind they hadn’t seen before, and Cooper couldn’t tell if they were Germans or Italians.

  Sadler said later that they had finally agreed the troops were Italian. Neither he nor Cooper was worried, though. They thought the enemy had stopped for a rest. Instead of waiting to see if the blue-clad soldiers got back in the trucks and drove off, they left the position. ‘I’m sure our judgement was not at its best,’ said Sadler, ‘we were mistakenly overconfident … about our security …’3

  They slithered down the ridge and reported the sighting to Stirling, who didn’t renew the watch. Neither did he post sentries. They had covered their tracks carefully, and the jeeps were well camouflaged. The SAS-men rolled out their sleeping-bags. Stirling and MacDermott slept under an overhang near the wireless truck. Stirling’s driver, Reg Redington, was already asleep nearby with his boots off and his .45 Smith & Wesson by his head. Cooper, Sadler and Taxis went to doss down at the mouth of the wadi, in front of a camouflaged jeep.

  Since the time Stirling and Brough had stumbled over the sleeping sentries at Sirte, Stirling had been lucky on operations. He had acquired an unconscious sense of immunity, akin to Thesiger’s feeling when he drove into an enemy camp that the patrol was somehow ‘invisible’. Thesiger himself had suspected that his luck would not hold, but Stirling believed that he would continue to get away with it – if he could swan around Italian-occupied Benghazi with a towel around his neck, he could do anything.

  He might have taken note of what had happened to B Squadron, and realized that in Tunisia the game was a little different from Cyrenaica and the hyper-arid Libyan desert. Scooting through the Gabès Gap in broad daylight had been risky. It wasn’t like passing a convoy at night on the Via Balbia, where the SAS always h
ad the option of vanishing into the Sahara’s vastness.

  There was also something Stirling didn’t know. He had instructed Jourdan’s group to stay quiet as mice until they hit the Sfax–Gabès railway, but the French patrols had had two contacts with the enemy the previous day. Martin’s section of two trucks had been chased by Axis armoured cars to Jebel Tebaga, the same area where Stirling’s party now lay. One of Martin’s trucks had exploded when the bombs it was carrying were hit. Though Martin and his driver had escaped, the three French SAS-men in the truck, Sgts. Castagner and Vacclui, and Cpl. Vaillant, were believed dead. Now, Jourdan’s group was lying up not far away, planning to blow the railway that night, but a company of Luftwaffe troops had been assigned to hunt them down. The men in the blue uniforms Cooper and Sadler had seen from the ridge belonged to that company.

  In mid-afternoon, Sadler was awoken by the crunch of footsteps. Bleary-eyed, he glanced up from his sleeping-bag and almost jumped out of his skin. Two German troopers were standing over him with Schmeisser sub-machine guns. His weapon was hidden under the jeep’s cam-net, and he knew there was nothing he could do. He saw Cooper peering out from his sleeping-bag, looking worried. To their amazement, though, the Germans motioned to them to stay quiet, and continued down the wadi. The moment they were out of sight, Sadler, Cooper and Taxis whipped out of their bags and ran like madmen up the wadi until it petered out, then clambered up into a narrow defile beyond. ‘It was a hard run up a hillside,’ Sadler said, ‘but luckily we managed to get into a little gully among some camel scrub. By now we were absolutely knackered, so we just lay there.’4