The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  Twice-daily callisthenics sessions under the acerbic tongue of CSM Gus Glaze, Army Physical Training Corps, punctuated instruction in map-reading, compass navigation, field-craft, weapon-training, bayonet practice and shooting. The men stripped and assembled Lee-Enfield rifles, Thompsons and Bren-guns until they knew them better than their own faces.4 In the new theatre there would be no jeeps or LRDG Fords to ferry them in, no mounted Vickers machine guns, no Sidi Haneish style blitzes with thousands of rounds of ammunition. The Bren light machine gun had to do the job of the Vickers, with a maximum of three hundred rounds, in ten magazines. At five hundred rounds a minute, the Bren had only about half the rate of fire of a Vickers K, but it was light and highly accurate. Mayne, a stickler for ammo-conservation, and a marksman with the Bren himself, trained the men to fire in single shots rather than bursts.

  The squadron would still require demolitions skills. The uninitiated were introduced to the mysteries of the Lewes bomb and the time-pencil by demolitions guru Captain Bill Cumper, and a section of Sappers he now had under him. To give the unit a heavier punch, though, it was assigned a support detachment of three-inch mortars, under the command of Lt. Alec Muirhead. Muirhead, ex-Royal Worcesters, a former Cambridge University medical student, knew nothing about mortars, and, as it turned out, neither did most of the forty men who volunteered for his detachment from the Infantry Base Depot at Geneifa. They soon mastered the skills so well, though, that they could assemble the tubes and fire the first round in twenty seconds. Muirhead discovered a natural gift for estimating ranges, but also had one narrow escape when he mistakenly directed the detachment’s fire on to his own position. Like the Sappers, and a Royal Signals wireless unit also appended to the SRS, the mortar group would be broken down into three sections, attached one per troop.

  The SRS fired most Axis small-arms until they knew them as intimately as their own weapons. Many preferred the German Schmeisser to the Tommy-gun. On foot behind enemy lines, the ammunition they could carry would soon be exhausted, and this skill would provide them with an almost endless source of resupply. Pistol shooting wasn’t neglected. The men were sent in sections to Jerusalem to undergo the new Grant-Taylor close-quarter battle-shooting course.

  Overland marches in full equipment and rock-climbing were crucial aspects of the seaborne-assault role. The men practised cliff scaling with assault-ladders and ropes, and with only hands and feet, carrying equipment and weapons, first by day, then by night. They also endured gruelling bashes in full kit in the arid hills of north Palestine, culminating in a forty-mile drag from Lake Tiberias to the sea. This exercise, to become a model for future SAS selection courses, had a twenty-four-hour time limit, and was carried out partly in the blazing heat of the day and partly by night.

  Although the SAS hadn’t done an operational drop since Squatter, and the SRS would not jump at all on the Italian campaign, it retained its parachuting skills. The days of makeshift equipment, though, were over. Recruits were now sent to the new parachute school at Ramat David near Jerusalem, where they were trained by full-time airborne forces instructors. More vital for their new commando role was landing-craft drill that began in Haifa harbour under the tutelage of the Royal Navy, in early May.

  That they were being primed for ‘stormtrooper’ tasks quite different from the ‘sneaky pete’ primary role of the SAS was evident from the fact that they no longer wore camouflage. Gone was the dust-coloured kit that had so often saved them in the desert by making them indistinguishable from the enemy. Now, they wore blue shirts, with shorts, crepe-soled boots and white socks. Stealth was being sacrificed for sharp, fast penetration: the men had to be easily distinguishable to prevent them getting into blue-on-blues.

  The training stretched the men to the limits of their endurance. Mayne demonstrated that he could be an accomplished training officer when his heart was in it. He also showed himself an unexpectedly ruthless martinet. He exerted such tight discipline that the ‘colourful individualist’ reputation that had flourished under Stirling was soon dispelled. ‘Unlike some who take on this specialized and highly dangerous job,’ Dempsey commented, ‘you maintain a standard of discipline and cleanliness which is good to see.’5

  That afternoon, Dempsey watched the men firing Axis weapons and took part in an exercise in which they snaked on their bellies across the beach while machine-gunners pumped out live ball ammunition over their heads. In the evening he watched a mock assault on a pillbox in the hills, preceded by a cliff-climb, and the descent of a fifty-foot embankment on ropes. The general said later that he had been very impressed, and that the SRS ‘took its training very seriously’.6 So seriously, in fact, that at the end of their six weeks in Palestine the men felt they were ready to tackle anything.

  It was Dempsey who informed them that they had been tagged to take out a coastal defence battery on Sicily, in support of his 13 Corps landing by sea and glider. Though they weren’t told the date or name of the target, they were shown sketches and aerial photos, and from the day after Dempsey’s visit began to train on a lifesize mock-up of the Capo Murro de Porco battery. Covered by Muirhead’s mortars, they practised the attack over and over until they knew the target better than they knew their own quarters. On 4 July, after a month in the Red Sea on landing craft, rehearsing all their training drills, they embarked on Ulster Monarch for the invasion of Sicily.

  48. ‘The best crowd he had ever had under his command’

  The cemetery at Termoli was being whapped by 88mm anti-tank rounds from the German position six hundred yards away, on a ridge overlooking the main road. ‘Moaning Minnie’ rockets, sixty at a time, were shrieking over the walls and tombstones, detonating in cascades of stone-chips and debris. One man of Pete Davis’s section who had survived the earlier truck-blast lay curled up in a foetal position, sobbing. His nerves were shot. Nobody sympathized, but Davis’s men were disturbed, especially after the carnage they had just seen outside the monastery. All day, British infantry units famous for doggedness had been running scared. Paddy Mayne’s cool settled Davis’s men, though. He told them calmly to take cover behind the cemetery walls and knock holes in them as firing-slits. He appeared completely unruffled by the hellfire. Reg Seekings noted that Mayne always seemed in total control of himself. When things turned noisy, he became cooler and cooler.

  Forty minutes after sunset, in splicing rain, three tanks clanked down the railway line on Mayne’s right flank. They were heading straight for the positions occupied by a hundred men cobbled together under Harry Poat, from 1 SRS, the commandos, and Brigade HQ’s cooks and runners. Some of the men started to think it was curtains. They’d fought on doggedly till now, but their Bren-guns were no match for tanks.

  Poat’s rag-tag squad had been reinforced by twenty men of 2 SAS, commanded by Major Roy Farran, ex-3 Dragoon Guards, a wry-humoured Irishman who had been ordered into Termoli to set up a base for future operations behind enemy lines. This was the first time 1 and 2 SAS had fought shoulder to shoulder. Farran’s D Squadron detachment had arrived in jeeps with the spearhead of 78 Brigade on 3 October, to be joined by another small 2 SAS group who had sailed into the harbour in caiques and a schooner. Lurking in the basement of Brigade HQ under heavy shellfire earlier, Farran had been gripped by Major Sandy Scratchley, the beanpole ex-Yeomanry officer and former jockey, now attached to 2 SAS. Scratchley had tongue-lashed Farran for sitting around while Termoli was falling around their ears. Now, the 2 SAS group lay on a ridge overlooking a goods yard on the railway line with a three-inch mortar and six Bren-guns trained on the approaching tanks.

  Poat screamed, ‘Fire!’ A dozen Brens ruptured the night with ear-splitting double-taps. ‘Number-Twos’ fingered rounds into mags with cool precision. Poat’s single anti-tank gun burped smoke. 57 mm shells blowtorched air. Wet clods and stones whistled. Bomb fragments lufted a spume of mist over the tanks. Tank cannons sprattled. Behind the gunners, Bob Melot was goading them on, his chest strapped up where he’d been hit two days before.
Persuaded with some effort by Mayne to get treatment at the medical post, he had later discharged himself and come back to the front.

  Arthur Thompson and his mate Trooper Davie Orr, RAC, ramped hell-for-leather across open ground to the monastery to get an ammo-resupply. Rain slashed down. Cannon-rounds blimped and whiffed past their ears. Soon they splashed back, biceps straining, sledding five weighty boxes of .303 ball roped together by the handles. Tank shells sawed air. Earth, stones, shrapnel ripped and splattered. A building near the railway station blazed up in raw sienna and black. Reg Seekings’s kid brother, Ronnie, ex-Cambridgeshires, now serving with 1 SRS, was so close to the tanks he got his face singed by a muzzle blast. Melot supervised the switching of red-hot Bren-barrels and the refilling of mags. SRS-men man-handled two more six-pounder AT guns through the mud and set them up on Farran’s ridge. It was no easy task. The six-pounders, firing 57mm HE, incendiary or armour-piercing shells, weighed over a ton, but had a range of two thousand yards. The SAS laid the guns, and fired. Basso profundo booms thundered. Shells squealed overhead, thumped, guffed smoke. Iron splinters gouged and heaved. The tanks rotated guns and went into reverse, gears grinding, scuddering backwards along the tracks through mud and pools.

  The SRS-men could hardly believe it. Arthur Thompson thought that if the Jerries had known it was just the SRS holding the line, nothing would have stopped them. A foray by enemy half-tracks followed, but was turned back at six hundred yards by some concentrated firing from 2 SAS. ‘The fighting on 5 October was an all-out attack on Termoli through the cemetery and down the railway line,’ the official Brigade diary ran. ‘It seems that the enemy lacked the commitment to advance through fear of being cut off. The attack was abandoned when the threat to the town was greatest.’1

  But it wasn’t over yet. Shells whinged overhead all night. In a railway station building, a blood-smeared surgical team fished for slugs and sutured wounds on an improvised operating-table. Poat’s men fell asleep in pounding rain, their coats stuck to their backs. Lt. Derrick Harrison and his crew of No. 2 Troop slept in a station hut on doors they ripped off their hinges. At first light, they went to join the defenders on the fifty-foot cliff overlooking the station yard. Two hundred yards away, a ridge sloped up before them, with the walled cemetery on the left and the railway and the beach to the right. 2 SAS lay in front of a farmhouse on the far left, past the cemetery.

  It was still raining, and the SRS-men struggled to scoop slit-trenches and foxholes out of the waterlogged ground. Mayne directed, his face grim. ‘We came here to take this place,’ he told the men. ‘We’ve taken it and we’re staying. What we have, we hold on to.’2 It was the first defensive action he had ever fought. A brace of Me 109-Fs appeared, curving in from the sea for a strafing run. They broke off when a squadron of RAF Spitfires creamed out of low cloud towards them. Mayne received news that the Irish Brigade had landed, and would soon be moving up to relieve them. ‘Sure, you’ll see some fighting now,’ he grinned.

  The enemy came at 0500 hours on a wave of wheedling mortar bombs and 88mm A/T shells frying air, figures in blue greatcoats, angular helmets and jackboots, hefting Schmeissers. The SRS were well dug in, and the Germans ran into a wall of lead from thirty Brens they had put together in the night. The Brens tap-tapped, flailing fire. The Germans took hits and fell sprawling in the mud. The attack faltered. Most didn’t get anywhere near the SRS trenches, but even those who did were battered back by .303 rounds fired point-blank. Germans staggered, streaked with blood, uniforms smouldering from the close-quarter shots. Mortar shells crimped wide into the engine sheds. ‘I’m sure we inflicted heavy casualties …’ Roy Farran said. ‘The range was so short we couldn’t fail to hit a man advancing in an upright position.’3

  The Germans withdrew, but came again and again. 88mm shells screwed and burst, spraying iron fragments across the SRS positions. Sgt. ‘Buttercup’ Joe Goldsmith sprinted through the station with a gasper hanging from his mouth, and plonked his Bren down in the best field of fire he could see. He didn’t realize until after he had started shooting that he had set up shop by a five-hundred-gallon fuel-tank. He fought his corner the whole morning, aware that one stray round would blow him to hell and back.

  At 1000 hours a forest of enemy mortar fire sprouted up in front of SRS trenches, the bomb-bursts leaping down the slope like wildfire. Captain Sandy Wilson’s section of No. 1 Troop lay in the eye of the barrage. Wilson, ex-Gordon Highlanders, was blasting off rounds from a six-pounder AT gun under a haystack with his No. 2, L.Cpl. Bob Sherzinger, Royal Artillery, when a rain of mortar bombs forked down and sheered grapeshot across them. Most of Wilson’s men were hit. The haystack blazed up and collapsed. Wilson and Sherzinger were trapped under the bales and suffocated. The only man unscathed was Sgt. Duncan MacLennon, 56 Reconaissance Regiment, who pulled every one of his wounded comrades to safety before returning to the position and ripping off at the encroaching Germans with his Bren.

  The same foray forced the section led by the ex-L Detachment man, the barrel-chested Sgt. Fred ‘Chalky’ White, to pull out. Regretting his move, White skirmished back alone to the position he had just vacated under covering fire. Charging like a bull, with shrapnel grooving the ground and enemy rounds zipping past like flies, he retook his old spot. When the blue-coated enemy came haring out of cover down the slope towards him, he held them off single-handedly for two hours.

  The attack was so ferocious that Mayne, with Davis’s section, had to pull out of the cemetery and dig in fifty yards away. ‘[The Germans] got themselves firmly established in the cemetery,’ Harrison said, ‘and sniping started from the tombs.’4 The shooters were spotted by a tank crew manning one of the four Shermans of 3 County of London Yeomanry, that had rumbled up in support. ‘[The Sherman] scored a beautiful direct hit on the dome in the cemetery,’ Farran recalled, ‘and the green marble disintegrated like the atom [bomb] at Bikini. Everyone cheered loudly.’5

  The Germans dove into a bunch of railway buildings and started slinging mortar shells and chugging machine-gun fire. Pat Riley’s section hit them with an anti-tank gun. Six-pound shells scored air and mashed brick. Whiffs of smoke polyped the walls. The Germans ran.

  Muirhead’s mortars were silent. Ammunition was out. Cpl. Bob Lowson, Liverpool Scottish, hammered a truck into Termoli to hunt down more bombs. He found an ammo dump of the West Kents and buttonholed the RSM in charge. Instead of giving instant help, the RSM demanded, ‘Have you got anyone to fire them?’

  ‘Of course I have,’ Lowson snapped. ‘Just give me the rounds.’

  He hefted crates on to the truck and bulleted back to Muirhead’s position. While the bombs were broken out, he went back for more. Muirhead’s mortar-men sighted tubes, slipped bombs, ducked. Bombs wheezed. Bombs crashed and split, shock-waving the enemy. Muirhead’s team pitched bomb after bomb, loading and ducking like lunatics, till the barrels were steaming and the base-plates were hammered into the earth by the recoil. Bombs honked and greased the enemy with scrap and fire. The Germans wilted. Not long after noon, Derrick Harrison left his position and moved to the top of the railway embankment. He could see all the way down the railway to the dunes on the beach, where heads in Gothic helmets were bobbing up and down. He lay behind his Bren and began to take pot-shots.

  About two hours later, Harrison clocked movement in the goods yard and realized it was the point battalion of the Irish Brigade arriving in jeeps. By three o’clock, the Brigade was sweeping past his position with bayonets fixed, while Mayne’s boys and 2 SAS rammed out massive covering fire. Roy Farran didn’t realize how many the enemy were until they came out of cover. ‘Several hundred figures in blue overcoats began to double back,’ he said, ‘tacking this way and that to avoid our bullets … I think [they] must have been surprised at our firepower for we’d conserved ammunition carefully until this last moment.’6

  The mortars stopped firing. The crews sat back, exhausted. One by one the Brens went silent. By 1500 hours, the only Germans th
ey could see were dead ones. The battle was over. Termoli had been held.

  It was, though, Mayne thought as he walked quietly back to his palazzo, the costliest action an SAS unit had ever fought. His squadron had taken more attrition than any other at Termoli, including the commandos. In three days 1 SRS had lost sixty-nine men, killed, wounded, and missing – exactly a third of the two hundred and seven who had come ashore. When racked up together with the previous three ops in Italy, the SRS was down about fifty per cent on its original strength.

  The men had fought brilliantly. Mayne could be forgiven for basking in the reflection that he had been entirely vindicated as a commander, against all those who thought him incapable of it. He, an ex-solicitor and non-career officer, had trained them, commanded them, and moulded them into the finest fighting unit in the British army. ‘Paddy Mayne was fantastic,’ Seekings said. Miles Dempsey, who had been in Termoli during the battle, would later tell the squadron that in all his military career he had never before met a unit in which he had such confidence.

  ‘The Unit has done smashingly well,’ Mayne wrote Malcolm Pleydell later, ‘General Dempsey … paid us what I imagine were the highest compliments paid to any unit … he said we were the best crowd he had ever had under his command. I think he is right too; the lads have done well!’7 They had done well: the fighting had been magnificent, but it had not been SAS.