The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  Clarke got up with blood guttering down his face and continued to urge the men forward. Sgt. Bob ‘Buttercup’ Goldsmith, Royal Sussex Regiment, hauled Melot away. Pte. Eddie Ralphs, South Lancashire Regiment, hefted his Bren across exposed ground and rolled into cover. He splayed the bipod, lifted the stock to his shoulder. He got a German in the sights, pinched metal, belted out a double-tap. Cartridge cases flew. The enemy soldier dropped. Ralphs lined up on another. While Goldsmith lugged Melot to safety, Ralphs drilled at least nine Germans, killing four and wounding the others.

  The A Section men skirmished forward, rousting the Germans from the farm, taking nine prisoners. By 0800 hours they had closed on the bridge Tonkin had occupied earlier, but found no sign of Tonkin’s men apart from scattered equipment. Here, they met up with some of Bill Fraser’s No.1 Troop, who had reached the second bridge too late – the enemy had already blown it. This hadn’t pleased the hard-nosed Reg Seekings, who felt the Intelligence boys should have known about it: they had been boasting about the accuracy of their information. Earlier, trawling through a slime-filled ditch at the side of Highway 16, with Johnny Wiseman’s section, Seekings had sighted a German tracked motorcycle dragging a 105mm recoil-less field-gun. Seekings remembered that about twenty Germans were hanging on to the vehicle and trailer. His section opened up suddenly, killing all but two. The survivors ran a little way, then turned to fight. Wiseman’s men cut one down. As the other brought his weapon up, Seekings plugged him.

  Around the bend Wiseman’s section came up against another stubborn company of German paras in a farmhouse. They were well dug in, and Wiseman guessed it was going to be a tough nut to crack. He sent a wireless message to Mayne requesting the three-inch mortar detachment commanded by Captain Alec Muirhead, a tall, slim officer with a laid-back manner, commonly referred to as ‘Bertie Wooster’. By the time Muirhead’s ‘tubes’ arrived, Reg Seekings had shimmied to within sixty yards of the buildings carrying a wireless set, as forward fire-controller. Once the tubes were assembled, Seekings stood up and told Muirhead over the net, ‘Aim on me plus twenty-five and you’ll be spot on.’ Seconds later a flight of mortar bombs hoiked over Seekings’s head and ramped into the farm. White smoke puffed, fire crackled, masonry and fractured tiles flew. Volley after volley followed, racking the buildings. When the Germans finally white-flagged, almost every one of them was carrying multiple shrapnel-wounds. These Jerry paras didn’t surrender unless they were all dead or wounded, Seekings observed. He recalled that the prisoners were wearing cuff-bands commemorating the Crete operation, of which they seemed immensely proud.

  A gigantic major, uniform limp with blood, pointed to a lieutenant prone on a stretcher. The man was dying in torment, with his intestines flopping out. ‘Will you shoot my brother?’ the major asked Wiseman, who spoke some German. Wiseman turned to Sgt. Fred ‘Chalky’ White, Loyal Regiment, an ex-professional footballer who had joined L Detachment from the Middle East Commando the previous year.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ White said.

  The sergeant put a .45 calibre Smith & Wesson round through the lieutenant’s head at hard contact range. ‘The major just blinked,’ Seekings recalled.

  Wiseman reported the bag to Mayne, with HQ Troop at a road-junction half a mile away. Mayne told Wiseman to withdraw and bring his prisoners back to the schoolhouse in Termoli. The commandos had taken the town with a hundred German dead and a hundred and fifty captured. They had advanced so quickly, the German battle-group occupying the port hadn’t even had time to destroy its secret documents. ‘You’ve done your job,’ Mayne said. ‘We’ve got the town and we’re holding it.’

  The commandos had thrown a hard perimeter around Termoli, and before sunset most of Mayne’s troops had been relieved by the Lancashire Fusiliers, scouting ahead of 11 Brigade, the land-based half of 78 Division. The other half – 36 Infantry Brigade – was about to be landed by sea, and would take over the defence of the town next morning. The SRS retired to the monastery on the waterfront. Only one section of No. 2 Troop, under Lt. Pete Davis, remained out: Davis had lost wireless comms with Mayne and hadn’t received the order to withdraw.

  The cost of the day’s fighting for the squadron had been one dead, three wounded, and twenty-three missing. The SRS had taken out twenty-three enemy killed, seventeen wounded, and thirty-nine captured.

  This was the fourth action Mayne’s SRS had carried out since the invasion of Italy had kicked off three months earlier. On 10 July they had landed at Capo Murro de Porco, on Sicily’s eastern coast, with orders to take and destroy a coastal battery in support of Lt. General Dempsey’s 13 Corps landing. The Murro de Porco action, described later by Dempsey as ‘a brilliant operation, brilliantly planned and brilliantly carried out’, had dispelled any doubts about Paddy Mayne’s qualities of leadership.

  In seventeen hours, the SRS boys had silenced not one but three batteries, captured four hundred and fifty prisoners, and taken out more than two hundred Italian soldiers. The following day the squadron was landed on a beach at the nearby town of Augusta – the first opposed daylight landing of the war. They captured the town, drove the Italians out and secured vast quantities of stores and equipment. For these two actions, Mayne was awarded his second DSO. ‘It was Major Mayne’s courage, determination, and superb leadership,’ his citation ran, ‘which proved the key to success.’1 ‘Have you heard they have given me a bar to my DSO?’ Mayne wrote home. ‘Still managing to bluff them.’2 Both Captain Harry Poat and Lt. Johnny Wiseman won the MC, and Reg Seekings the DCM.

  In a third landing, at Bagnara, on the ‘Toe of Italy’, on 4 September, the SRS took the town and secured a bridgehead for the advance of the Eighth Army.

  Mayne was perfectly aware that, in Stirling’s eyes, these ops would have amounted to a misuse of the unit. Stirling commented years later that SRS actions in Italy weren’t strictly SAS, but admitted that Mayne had handled them brilliantly. The formation of the Special Raiding Section (SAS) was a compromise Mayne had reached with GHQ ME back in March. Without it, 1 SAS might already have been history.

  46. ‘Paddy Mayne was the man’

  Stirling was officially confirmed missing in action on St Valentine’s Day, 1943. Long before then, Johnny Cooper, Mike Sadler and Freddie Taxis had become the first Eighth Army troops to link up with the First Army, but hardly in the glorious way Stirling had imagined. Filthy, bearded and dishevelled after their three-day march from the Tebagu hills, they were treated by the Americans as spies. ‘They just would not believe we’d come from the Eighth Army,’ Cooper said. ‘I don’t even think half of them knew where the Eighth Army was, anyway.’1

  Stirling’s loss threw Kabrit into turmoil. It wasn’t clear till then just how much of a one-man show the Regiment had been. Stirling’s brilliance lay in his suppleness, his penchant for outfoxing the enemy on a blow-by-blow basis. His aversion to writing down orders, instructions and SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) meant a hiatus in continuity – even the dispositions of SAS units were in his head. When Captain Harry Poat, the ex-Guernsey tomato-grower, turned up with his patrol at Kabrit that January, fresh from his Tripoli ops, nobody knew who he was.

  Stirling had often been urged to nominate an understudy, but hadn’t got round to it, because he’d never expected to be captured. George Jellicoe was theoretically second-in-command, but had been in Britain since the Sidi Haneish op, nursing an injured knee. He only got back in January, and was hardly up to scratch with the admin. In any case, despite his background, no one seemed to consider Jellicoe of sufficient calibre to take Stirling’s place. ‘David’s capture is regarded as a great blow here,’ wrote Peter Stirling to his mother, ‘as there is literally no one of the same stature and prestige to replace him.’2

  Stirling commented later that the ‘fossilized shit’ looked on his sudden removal as a heaven-sent opportunity to ‘regularize’ the SAS. They neglected to consider the fact, he said, that no ordinary officer could command the unit, nor use it effectively.
To the rank-and-file, Paddy Mayne was the only man who could do it. The army wasn’t a democracy, but since the men had the option of RTU, their opinion mattered. ‘Nobody ever thought of Jellicoe or anybody like that becoming CO of the SAS,’ said Reg Seekings. ‘It was Paddy Mayne. Paddy Mayne was the man …’3

  Like many of the other ‘Originals’, though, Seekings doubted that Mayne had the social connections to swing it. ‘We wondered if [Mayne] could weather the storm,’ he said. To some it looked like curtains. Even Bob Bennett, whom Mayne considered one of the ‘steadiest’ of the Originals, believed the unit would be disbanded. Bennett agreed that Mayne was the man, but wasn’t sure he’d make an effective CO without Stirling to keep an eye on him. Stirling himself maintained that Mayne, while inspired in the field, didn’t have the sense of military politics necessary for overall command.

  Lt. Pete Davis, Queens Regiment, like most new recruits, thought the SAS had been held together only by Stirling’s personality, and that without him it would founder. Johnny Cooper had been as close to Stirling as any of the enlisted men. His assessment was that 1 SAS had reached the end of the road.

  It may not have helped that, some time in January, Mayne got himself arrested in Cairo. The story was that, incensed by GHQ’s refusal to allow him to fly back to Britain after the sudden death of his father, he ‘went on the rampage’, hunting for BBC correspondent Richard Dimbleby, intending to beat him up. In the course of his fruitless search, Mayne is supposed to have wrecked half a dozen restaurants and finally laid out a Provost Marshal and a squad of Redcaps on the steps of Shepheard’s Hotel. He was arrested and thrown into the cells, but was released the following day when the Provost received a message from GHQ, stating that this officer was ‘too valuable to be reduced to the ranks’.

  The ‘half-dozen restaurants’ and the ‘squad of Redcaps’ story is undoubtedly an exaggeration. Another version is that Mayne had a disagreement with six large Australians – Stephen Hastings recalled that the incident happened much earlier, before Mayne’s father died. If it did occur, it must have been before 24 January, because on this date Mayne led most of A Squadron to the Cedars, the Middle East Skiing School in the Lebanon, to retrain for mountain warfare in the Caucasus. While they were there, Major Vivian Street, commanding B Squadron, returned to Kabrit and was appointed acting Commanding Officer, 1 SAS Regiment.

  After being captured on the coast-road operation in December, Street had been one of seven prisoners to miraculously escape from an Italian submarine after it had been depth-charged by a Royal Navy destroyer. He didn’t retain command for long. Within three weeks it had been handed over to an outsider, Lt. Col. Henry ‘Kid’ Cator, Royal Scots Greys. It was Cator who presided over the partition of 1 SAS.

  47. ‘Those bloody fools back at HQ will one day tell me who I’m talking to’

  For Mayne, Cator was hardly an ideal choice. Though he was famous for raising No.1 Palestinian Company of the Auxiliary Pioneer Corps – a unit in which Palestinian Jews and Arabs served side by side – his success was largely built on his social connections. Cator was the Queen’s brother-in-law – a great asset when he was lobbying to convert his three hundred Palestinian labourers into 51 (Middle East) Commando. ‘I had tea with the King and Queen,’ he wrote, ‘… I had … a real heart-to-heart with the King about the Palestinians. He said he would see [Colonial Secretary] Lord Lloyd.’1

  Cator, a friend and comrade of the late Geoffrey Keyes VC, who had kicked Mayne out of 11 Commando, didn’t believe the Ulsterman was made of the ‘right stuff’ to command a regiment. Like almost everyone else, he also underestimated Mayne’s ability to fight his corner. During a series of meetings with Col. Anthony Head of Combined Ops and the DMO in March, however, Mayne put forward an impressive case for retaining 1 SAS. He argued that it would be a mistake to disband a unit with such high morale – a morale that was partly the result of the distinct identity engendered by its unique training and ethos. The SAS were multi-skilled, para-trained, and capable as no other unit bar the LRDG of penetration for long periods behind enemy lines.

  At the same time, Mayne knew there would have to be a compromise. The work of the SAS in North Africa was almost done. The focus of fighting in the near future would not, it was now admitted, be the Caucasus, but in the Mediterranean – the Balkans and Italy – the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’. At the Casablanca Conference in January, Winston Churchill had agreed with US President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the invasion of northern Europe would not be ready for another year. Before then, the Allies would invade first Sicily, then mainland Italy. This action, the High Command correctly predicted, would topple Mussolini’s regime, and divert Hitler’s legions, which would be forced to occupy the country.

  Seaborne ops were obviously the key to the invasion of Mediterranean Europe. With a dense local population to consider, there would be little scope for the type of deep-penetration raids the SAS had carried out hundreds of miles across uninhabited desert. It was agreed that for guerrilla methods to succeed, the country must either be sparsely inhabited or home to a sympathetic population. Even the unit’s brief forays in Tripolitania and Tunisia had demonstrated this. Mayne was obliged to accept that if the SAS were to continue, it would have to revert to a commando role. He considered this a temporary measure. He never sold out Stirling’s and Lewes’s original concept, resisting pressure to rechristen the unit ‘No.1 Commando’. He believed that when the time was ripe, 1 SAS Regiment would once more emerge as the British army’s guerrilla force par excellence.

  If Mayne had been hoping to gain command of the Regiment, though, he was disappointed. Instead, on 19 March, 1 SAS was split into two groups, 1 Special Raiding Squadron (SAS) under Mayne, and 1 Special Boat Section (SAS) under Jellicoe. While the SRS would be a commando unit, the SBS would retain the folbot role, and would absorb the Greek Sacred Squadron. The French SAS detachment was to be returned to national command, joining two existing French parachute battalions that would eventually become 3 and 4 SAS. Command of the twin SAS raiding units would be given to Henry Cator, who would remain at GHQ ME with the title Commander HQ Raiding Forces. Fortunately for Mayne – and possibly for the SAS – Cator would have only an administrative role. SAS units would come under the orders of the general officer commanding the theatre in which they were operating.

  The bulk of SRS personnel would come from A Squadron, which returned to Kabrit from Lebanon in February. On their first day back, Mayne told the assembled squadron they were about to start a new and intensive retraining course. They would be divided into Nos. 1, 2 and 3 Troops, respectively under Bill Fraser, Harry Poat and Captain David Barnby, East Yorkshire Regiment. Instead of hand-picking personnel, Mayne reverted to the old commando system of choosing the officers and senior NCOs and letting them pick their own men.

  Bob Melot, long since transferred to the SAS from G(R), was appointed Intelligence Officer. Bill Fraser was still in the desert, commanding the last SAS forays in Tunisia, harassing Rommel’s lines of communication with mixed patrols of A Squadron, French and Greek detachments. When he returned on 20 April, he found that he had under his command most of the surviving Originals – Reg Seekings, Charlie Cattell, Bob Bennett, ‘Lofty’ Baker, Bob Lilley, Dave Kershaw, Jimmy Brough, Frank Rhodes, as well as post-Squatter men such as Ted Badger, Chris O’Dowd, Fred White and others. Johnny Rose was promoted Squadron Sergeant Major, and Pat Riley appointed commander of C Section, No.1 Troop, on his return from the Officer Cadet Training Unit on 27 April. No.1 Troop, a repository of all the skills and experience the SAS had acquired since its inception, was regarded as the elite. Nos. 2 and 3 Troops were made up of survivors of B Squadron, and new recruits.

  Noticeably absent were Johnny Cooper and Mike Sadler – both of whom Stirling had commissioned in the field. Cooper, who had been joined by Reg Seekings at Constantine, Algeria, in February, had found it hard to accept that Stirling would not be coming back. For days, he and Seekings tried to get permission to parachute i
nto Italy and extract their CO from whatever camp he was in. The plan was scotched by HQ, and the pair of them did penance on a couple of missions with Popski’s Private Army, a sabotage unit commanded by an Arabic-speaking white Russian, Vladimir Peniakoff. They admired Popski as a character, but weren’t impressed by his team. Cooper was now on his way for officer-training at OCTU, and would miss the Italian ops. Mike Sadler was currently attached to 1 New Zealand Division as guide and navigator in Tunisia, a job that would ultimately land him in hospital with stress-related stomach ulcers.

  The war in North Africa officially came to an end on 12 May. The following day, Lt. General Miles Dempsey, newly-appointed GOC 13 Corps, Eighth Army, visited the SRS boot-camp at Az-Zib (‘The Penis’) on the coast of northern Palestine. The camp – a few huts and a cinema surrounded by tents – stood on wasteland where a stream poured into the Mediterranean, near the village of Nahariyya. Dempsey, later to become the SRS’s favourite general, told the squadron that they would be under his command for the forthcoming invasion of Sicily.

  Dempsey got off on the wrong foot, though, when he talked down to the assembled unit in the camp cinema, as if they were green troops. Reg Seekings, for one, who had been on almost every major SAS operation since the beginning, was no more amused than he had been with Jock Lewes’s ‘yellow streak’ speech. As he marched the men out in silence, he saw Mayne whispering in Dempsey’s ear. The general suddenly stiffened and ordered Seekings to bring the ‘gentlemen’ back in again. Once they had sat down, he apologized. ‘I’ve been giving you all that tripe …’ he said, ‘when you’ve had more D-Days than I’ll ever have … Those bloody fools back at HQ will one day tell me who I’m talking to, and stop me making a bloody fool of myself.’2

  Dempsey watched a night training demonstration and stayed the night. The squadron had been working all out for six weeks, following a commando-style course designed by Mayne himself. One of its keynotes was that whatever a man’s rank or experience, he would relearn basic military skills from lesson 1:01. ‘Nothing was taken for granted,’ said Lt. Derrick Harrison, Cheshire Regiment, commanding C section, No. 2 Troop. ‘What can be learned can be forgotten, so we started from scratch … It was this thoroughness that accounted in great measure for the success of our … operations to come.’3