The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  It was full daylight, and for the past few minutes the squadrons had been travelling in echelon, bunched closer together than they should have been. They had been hunting for a way across the next canal, and Dick Bond’s men had found a bridge intact at a village called Borgerwald. They hadn’t been expecting a contact. Briefing the SAS-men that morning, Intelligence Officer Major Mike Blackman had informed them that ‘there would be next to no opposition, except from the German equivalent of the Home Guard’.2 Most of the men were inexperienced newcomers, and regarded the job of supporting an armoured division as ‘a swan’. Derrick Harrison, with Tony Marsh’s C Squadron, knew it wasn’t real SAS work, but at least it was a job. ‘We were satisfied,’ he said, ‘if a little perturbed. Our “mechanised mess tins” were poor substitutes for the armoured cars we were relieving.’3

  Mayne was aware that there could be German strongpoints on the road, and had warned the men to keep their eyes peeled. Many of the newcomers had never seen him in action, though, and considered him far gone in drink, and ‘over the hill’ at twenty-nine. Derrick Harrison surmised that there might be trouble from the Hitler Youth. Neither he nor Mayne knew they were up against their old foes from Termoli, the crack 1 Parachute Division.

  Mayne stood up and scanned the landscape over the armoured farings that were now standard fittings on SAS jeeps. He could see the B Squadron vehicles halted at a crossroads at the bottom of the valley through which the canal ran. The road was a narrow track leading between a cluster of buildings. On the left-hand side was a barn, and on the right a nest of two houses forming a protective ‘L’ shape, with the upstroke of the ‘L’ at right-angles to the road. Beyond the two houses was a dense copse of trees. He kicked out Danger, and Hull hit the accelerator. Jeep wheels mangled tread as the vehicle raced towards the village. Harrison, whose C Squadron jeeps were halted on the side of the road looking down on Borgerwald, saw Mayne flash past.

  Since Loyton had been pulled out of France the previous October, all five SAS Regiments had been largely unemployed. The exception was 3 Squadron, 2 SAS, under Roy Farran, which had been sent to carry out Ops Galia and Tombola – partisan missions in northern Italy. The Italian jobs had tied down large numbers of German troops, but on the northern front there were few opportunities for SAS operations. The war had settled down to static fighting in Holland and on the German border, punctuated only by Hitler’s desperate and unsuccessful Ardennes offensive in December.

  In January, Brigadier J. M. ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert, Royal Engineers, had taken over the running of 3, 4 and 5 SAS. A military thinker of genius, Calvert’s ideas were far ahead of their time. His paper The Operations of Small Forces Behind Enemy Lines had led to the setting up of the Auxiliary Units, many of whose soldiers were now fighting with the SAS. In March, when Rory McLeod was moved to India, Calvert was appointed Brigadier 1 SAS Brigade. Despite the fact that he was the army’s top expert on guerrilla warfare, and had done a superlative job as 2IC of Orde Wingate’s legendary Chindits in the rain-forests of Burma, the SAS considered him as much an ‘outsider’ as McLeod.

  Calvert himself foresaw a role for the SAS in East Asia, and Churchill had allowed him to make preliminary plans. The same idea had occurred to David Stirling, now incarcerated in Colditz Castle, who had conceived the Chung-King Project – a three-part scheme proposing the deployment of an SAS Brigade to prepare the way for a US invasion of Japan. Meanwhile, though, Hitler still had to be dealt with. Calvert had been searching for any acceptable job for the SAS Brigade in the Dutch-German theatre, and had agreed to a number of operations, none of them classic SAS tasks.

  In March, Frankforce – a squadron each from 1 and 2 SAS, under Brian Franks – had crossed the Rhine on amphibious Buffaloes. Their mission, Archway, was to scout deep into Germany ahead of Montgomery’s 21 Army Group. The innovative Amherst, which had gone in on 8 April, had involved a blind drop on radar in zero visibility by seven hundred men of 3 and 4 SAS over the Groningen, Coevorden and Zwolle areas of northern Holland. Equipped for only seventy-two hours in the field, the SAS-men were to harry the Germans, prevent the destruction of eighteen bridges, secure the airfield at Steenwijk, provide intelligence, and recce the routes for 2 Canadian Corps. Larkswood, a task involving three hundred men of 5 (Belgian) SAS, was running parallel with Mayne’s. A single squadron of 2 SAS would drop near the Zuyder Zee and capture the key bridges over the Apeldoorn canal – a mission codenamed Keystone.

  Mayne’s operation, Howard, with a hundred and eighty men of 1 SAS, had begun on 6 April when his force had left Tilbury with forty jeeps. At Canadian Army HQ near Nijmegen, Mayne had been briefed by Mike Calvert, who informed him that 5 SAS would be taking the left flank on 4 Armoured Division’s advance, while his B and C Squadrons took the right. The Mayne group had concentrated at Meppen, and crossed the Rhine at Emmerich the next day.

  At Borgerwald, Mayne found his B Squadron men squatting by their jeeps in front of the L-shaped nest of houses. There was a constant tick-tack of rounds from the enemy, but it was coming from the house hidden behind the L’s upstroke, which stood in the shooters’ line of fire. About a hundred yards away, the three point-jeeps stood abandoned. The acting commander, Tim Iredale, confirmed that OC Dick Bond was dead. He told Mayne that the three leading jeeps had been banjoed suddenly from enemy positions on the right.

  Lt. Phillip Schlee, who had been with the scout party, said later that they had been whopped by Spandau-fire and rockets fired from Panzerfausts – the German equivalent of the bazooka – as they passed between the second house and the wood. The gunner in the first jeep, Sgt. Schofield, had taken hits in both thighs. The third jeep’s gunner had also been wounded. Schlee was in the middle jeep, with Eddie Ralphs on the rear Vickers. Ralphs spritzed .303 tracer at the enemy. The others rattled off with Brens and Tommy-guns. ‘Eventually,’ Schlee said, ‘[we] got out of our jeeps … and took to the ditch with the wounded.’4 They were still pinned down there by enemy fire.

  Iredale told Mayne that Dick Bond had attempted to reach Schlee’s position by crawling down the ditch, but had found his way blocked by a drainpipe. It was while attempting to creep over the pipe that a German sniper had potted him clean through the forehead. Lt. John Scott, an ex-ranker field-commissioned by Mayne in France the previous year, had then sent Bond’s driver, Trooper Mike Lewis – a Czech-born Jew whose real name was Mikhael Levinsohn – to have another go. ‘He was small and I thought he would be able to climb through the drainage pipe,’ Scott said. Instead, Lewis, like Bond, tried to crawl over the pipe. The same shooter took him out with an identical head-shot. ‘I felt very bad about it,’ said Scott, ‘since I was the one who ordered him in there. He was a brave man.’5 The jeeps had been ambushed so suddenly that no one in Iredale’s group could estimate the enemy’s strength.

  Mayne doubled forward to the first house, to find out if it presented any threat. It didn’t. Scott and his boys had pumped the roof full of lead minutes earlier, and a German family had evacuated it under a white flag. Mayne sauntered to his jeep, unhooked the Bren, pulled back the cocking lever. He filled his smock with magazines, and nodded to Hull to follow him with his Thompson. Hull sensed that Mayne was in ‘one of his silent rages’. This may have been because he had been pally with Bond, an Auxiliary Units officer who had taken over B Squadron recently. More likely, though, it was exasperation at the indecisiveness of his new men. ‘We were all pretty clueless,’ admitted one of them, Lt. David Surrey-Dane, ex-4 Para. ‘We hadn’t much idea of this type of forward reconnaissance work.’6

  While Mayne edged around the first house, hugging the wall, Hull went inside to find a vantage point for covering fire. He slipped upstairs and found a window overlooking the second house. He blipped .45 calibre bursts. There was an instant answer. ‘The bastards opened up on me,’ he said, ‘… bullets were ricocheting off the walls and ceiling, and in seconds the ceiling was set on fire by tracers.’7

  At the same moment, Mayne stepped out of cover, his
Bren held at the shoulder like a rifle. He tick-ticked short bursts. Tracer whaled vapour trails. Rounds spat back at him, chiselling brickwork. Although the official report said that Mayne took out all the enemy in the house, it is probable that it was occupied only by the sniper who had potted Bond and Lewis. He lifted the Bren, sighted it, and blew him away. The main threat, he saw, came from machine-gunners and the Panzerfaust shooters in the wood.

  He called up one of Iredale’s jeeps to give covering fire, ramped back to the B Squadron men, and asked for a volunteer. The first taker was Lt. John Scott. They climbed into a jeep. Mayne braced the steering-wheel. Scott gripped the Vickers and heaved back the cocking-handles. Mayne hit the starter. The Willys motor revved, and the jeep shot forward. The second they were past the covering vehicle, Scott swivelled the gun at the second house, and squeezed iron. Rounds blatted and lashed, whipping off the walls. ‘The woods!’ Mayne hollered. ‘Fire at the woods!’ Scott angled the gun at the trees, pulled metal, boosted fire. Smoke trails curved into the copse. A rocket hissed past them, gobbing smoke. Spandau rounds creaked, stripped air, clunked steel. Mayne’s car streaked past the abandoned jeeps. Scott banked the Vickers and snapped rounds. Mayne yelled at Schlee’s men in the ditch that he’d pick them up on the next run.

  Mayne braked, wrenched the steering-wheel. Scott ducked into the seat next to him, grasping the Browning on the passenger’s side. Mayne speared the accelerator. Scott spliffed .50 calibre ball. The jeep rushed past the wood back to the first house, and wheeled again. Three times Mayne surged through the tunnel of enemy fire, while Scott saturated the place with rounds. Panzerfaust rockets had stopped coming. The machine-gun fire dwindled, then died. Finally, Mayne braked the jeep opposite the drainage pipe where Bond’s and Lewis’s bodies lay sprawled. He jumped out, pitched over to the ditch and started hoisting the wounded out. Scott wellied fire into the place where the enemy had been. ‘By the time Paddy got our men out of the ditch, things were quiet,’ he recalled. ‘We retreated down the road some three miles, where we buried Dick Bond and Trooper Lewis at the side of a farmhouse.’8

  The new recruits, who had thought Mayne was ‘over the hill’, were dumbstruck at the sheer audacity of the deed. For his action at Borgerwald, he would be awarded his fourth DSO. The officers who wrote the citation, Derrick Harrison and Ian Blackman, though, were not happy with the result. They had put him in for the Victoria Cross.

  John Scott, who, despite his bravery that day, received no award, said later that the citation was inaccurate. First of all, Scott himself was not named – and in fact, though a ‘rear gunner’ is mentioned, the citation does read as if Mayne had been doing the shooting himself. Second, the report states that Mayne rescued the stranded men ‘in the face of enemy machine-gun fire’. Scott was clear that there was no enemy fire at the time he stopped the jeep. To have attempted to pull out the wounded under direct fire from only yards away would have been suicidal, and Mayne was always a calculating soldier. According to another witness, David Surrey-Dane, the phrase ‘in the face of enemy machine-gun fire’ was added to present a better case for Mayne’s being awarded the VC. ‘I think they tried to make it something more Hollywood style,’ Scott said.9

  This was entirely unnecessary. The Borgerwald action was a splendid feat of arms, even without the added phrase, and the suppression of Scott’s part in the affair. That Mayne deserved the VC, not once, but many times over, is incontestable. As it happened, Mayne himself wasn’t entirely happy with his fourth DSO. He told Surrey-Dane that he would rather have had the more modest MC.

  60. He couldn’t believe that he’d actually survived

  Bill Fraser’s A Squadron had crossed the Rhine at Wesel with Brian Franks’s Frankforce almost a fortnight earlier. Two days after the crossing they ran into a party of Canadian parachutists pinned down in a wood by a Spandau machine gun. Fraser hit dead ground, and his jeeps popped up on the machine-gunners’ left flank, only thirty yards away. The Spandau cranked towards them and blitzed Fraser in the point-jeep. A bullet smashed into his hand and his jeep somersaulted out of control. Fraser survived.

  Alex Muirhead’s troop wheeled their jeeps right, Vickers Ks clattering a deadly broadside. The Spandau went silent, all the gunners dead or badly wounded. ‘We blasted hell out of them,’ Reg Seekings recalled. He spotted an arm waving and weaved up to the machine-gun nest to find a German sergeant shot in the thigh. ‘You can imagine what a mess he was in,’ he said. ‘Bone everywhere. I got him out, but he died about half an hour later.’ Before Seekings left the position, though, a fifteen-year-old boy popped up clutching a pair of potato-masher grenades. Seekings bawled at him in German to throw them down. He was just about to zap the kid, when he dropped the bombs. The German command-post surrendered moments later, and an officer told Seekings that if he had shot the boy, they would have fought to the death.

  Lying up in a farmhouse at Schermbeck the following day, Harry Poat informed Ian Wellsted he’d been promoted squadron commander – Fraser had been casevaced to a field hospital. He didn’t want to go: he couldn’t accept that after surviving North Africa, Italy and France, by the skin of his teeth, he wouldn’t be in at the kill. When they set off that day, Seekings found himself saddled with a W/T operator named Perkins, who up to then had been with John Tonkin. Tonkin had asked to swap him for Seekings’s operator, Neil McMillan, because Perkins had threatened to punch him. When Perkins jumped into Seekings’s jeep, the SSM told him, ‘One squeak out of you and I’ll flatten you for bloody good.’

  Seekings’s rear-gunner, Tpr. Jock McKenzie, Cameron Highlanders, was another ‘character’. In Italy he had tried it on with the daughter of an Italian family he and Seekings had been billeted with. When Seekings had warned him off, he had threatened to kill him in his sleep. The girl’s mother had asked Seekings how he dared go to bed. He told her that Mac wouldn’t risk harming him: he needed him too much.

  The 1 SAS contingent of Archway, mostly Fraser’s A Squadron, and Tonkin’s D Squadron, had split up with the 2 SAS party the previous day. While 2 SAS was heading for Munster with 6 Independent Guards Armoured Brigade, the 1 SAS crew were forging ahead of 8 Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, and the Inns of Court Regiment – a light armoured unit – making for Ostrich and Rhade. They were in a convoy of a dozen jeeps led by two Dingo armoured cars. Just past Ostrich they were following a road running between tall trees when a German stuck his head up out of a ditch and let rip with a Panzerfaust. The rocket hooshed, struck the leading Dingo, welted flame. Small-arms fire shuddered out of the bush, and from a barn further on. The jeep ahead of Seekings’s, driven by Trooper Dixie Deane, jiggered forward past the flaming Dingo. Deane’s gunner sprattled Vickers fire at the barn up ahead. Seekings hit the accelerator, and the jeep lurched. Behind him, Sgt. Cornelius ‘Maggie’ McGinn, who had survived the attack on Roy Bradford’s jeep on Houndsworth, reversed his vehicle with rounds clanking against his armoured farings. McGinn rolled out of his seat into the wood. Further back, Sgt. Jeff Du Vivier and his oppo, Trooper ‘Digger’ Weller, had unpacked a two-inch mortar. Seekings heard shells whooping over his head, stonking the barn. Ian Wellsted and Jack Terry were skirmishing towards the building on foot, carbines tack-tacking.

  As his jeep shot through the wall of incoming, Seekings’s rear-gunner, Jock McKenzie, was hit. Seekings passed the barn and stopped. He pulled Mac under the jeep and searched him. He couldn’t find any wound. ‘Get back behind that gun,’ he roared.

  ‘I’m hit,’ Mac pleaded. ‘I’m bleeding to death. I know it.’

  ‘I’m also hit, sir!’ Perkins yelped suddenly. Seekings glanced up at his W/T op and his eyes widened. A row of seven or eight entry wounds was stitched all the way down Perkins’s left arm, at neat one-and-a-half-inch intervals.

  Seekings lifted McKenzie back on to the seat, and noticed that his battledress was drenched in blood. He ripped away the sleeve and found that Mac’s armpit had been blown out by an explosive bullet. His face was as white as
chalk. Seekings broke open two shell-dressings, shoved them in the bloody hole, and told Mac to put pressure on them.

  Seekings remembered passing an Airborne first-aid post earlier, and knew he had to get the men back there. Perkins lay drooped over the rear guns. Seekings sat Mac in the front. ‘What can you do to man those guns?’ he demanded. As he accelerated Mac fired the forward Vickers one-handed, screaming ‘You bastards!’ Gritting his teeth with pain, Perkins managed to get off a burst or two from the rear gun. When Seekings pulled up at the first-aid post, the Airborne medical officer told him that if he had arrived a few minutes later, Mac would have bled to death. Seekings suddenly recalled his remark to his Italian landlady, and grinned.

  The Archway team fought on day after day into the heart of Germany, hitting machine-gun posts, running into ambushes, taking prisoners, whacking out SS troops, Hitler Youth, German Home Guard. Tpr. John Glyde, Royal Artillery, was almost decapitated when his jeep was hit by a Panzerfaust rocket. L Detachment Original and prison-camp escapee Cpl. Jim Blakeney was taken out by an armoured car, while running from his blazing jeep. Jock Lewes’s former batman, Tpr. Roy Davies, Welsh Guards, was badly wounded when his jeep was hit. Tpr. Dougie Fergusson, Highland Light Infantry, another ex-L Detachment man, was shot trying to rescue him. Ian Wellsted was wounded in both legs. Jeff Du Vivier copped a 20mm round in the calf, while ripping off his Vickers at an armoured car.