The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  They passed through Nienburg. They passed through Neustadt. At Celle they found the bodies of two thousand concentration-camp victims – men, women, children – slaughtered by panicking Germans on the platforms of the railway station. At Bergen-Belsen they came across a camp eight miles square, where sixty thousand people had been packed into accommodation intended for only fifteen thousand. Typhoid was rampant, and the Allies had agreed to a three-day truce: fighting would result in the escape of the inmates, and the spread of the disease to Allied and German lines alike. After being inoculated, the SAS-men were sent into Belsen to find out what medical attention was needed. They were the first British troops into the concentration-camp.

  Many were hardened fighters, but none expected what they saw that day. ‘I will never forget my first sight of the inmates,’ Johnny Cooper wrote. ‘Ostensibly they were human beings, but to me [they] were just walking skeletons … we … discovered a whole series of communal graves, consisting of trenches about a hundred yards long and twenty feet deep, which were being steadily filled with naked, skeletal bodies …’1

  One of the strangest aspects of the SAS visit to Belsen was that German guards and Hungarian and Romanian auxiliaries continued to shoot and torture prisoners, even though they knew British soldiers were in the camp. Intelligence Sergeant Duncan Ridler saw a group of living scarecrows feasting on what looked like a six-foot-high pile of potato-peelings. As he watched, a Romanian auxiliary shot a woman dead. Cooper realized that his mate Reg Seekings was working himself up into a frenzy. ‘I could see that he was on the verge of pulling out his pistol,’ Cooper said, ‘and shooting the first German guard he came across.’ Despite apocryphal stories, though, no guards were shot that day. The truce was observed. Instead, all the Romanians were arrested. Seekings contented himself with grabbing a guard and beating him to a pulp with his fists. ‘As long as I live I will never forget the Germans who perpetrated such acts,’ wrote Cooper. ‘Although I was only twenty-one at the time, I had been in action for three years and was no stranger to violent death. What I saw in that camp, however, defies adequate description, and those scenes will stay with me forever.’2

  On 3 May Mayne’s two units, now amalgamated as a composite squadron under Tony Marsh, were north of Oldenburg when they were ordered to withdraw from the front and RV with the other SAS squadrons at Poperinghe, on the Franco-Belgian border. The same day, three armoured jeeps carrying Johnny Cooper, Reg Seekings, Jack Terry and other A Squadron men snailed along the docks of Kiel, the first Allied troops into the town.

  Cooper and Seekings had set off at first light from their lying-up place in a farmhouse near Lübeck, sixty miles to the south. All along the road, Germans had come out waving white flags. About six miles out of Kiel, Cooper’s jeep was halted by two German generals with their hands up. They told him that they had five hundred officers and NCOs under their command, who wanted to surrender. Cooper had little choice but to agree. The Germans marched forward one at a time, laid their weapons on the jeeps’ bonnets, and saluted formally – not one of them, Cooper noted, attempted a ‘Heil Hitler’. At first, Cooper found the whole thing ‘a laugh’, but it started to become embarrassing when it dawned on him that his tiny force couldn’t possibly guard the prisoners. In the end, he told the senior general that his men would have to stay put until the main force arrived, and motored on towards the town.

  Cooper wasn’t aware that in entering Kiel they had driven across an armistice line. Brian Franks had sent a wireless message earlier warning him to stay out of the town, but he hadn’t received it. The SAS jeeps halted outside the town hall, where Cooper graciously accepted the surrender of the Deputy Mayor. He, Seekings and Terry sauntered into the building and started smashing anything that sported a swastika or a portrait of Hitler. ‘[We] were in the mayor’s office, having a right old time …’ he recalled, ‘when the following signal reached us: “Cooper of 1 Troop, get out. Get back to your original positions. You are well over the armistice line and this might upset the armistice agreement.”’3 Cooper acknowledged the signal. He and his men hopped quickly into their jeeps and beat a hasty retreat. As they roared back past their five hundred astonished prisoners of war, they waved them a cheery goodbye.

  A week later Reg Seekings was sitting in a roadside café just outside Brussels when a young woman rushed in. ‘The war is over,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve heard that one before,’ Seekings replied.

  ‘No, it’s true,’ she insisted. ‘Your Prime Minister, Mr Churchill, is speaking now.’ Seekings jogged into the nearby garage where there was a wireless tuned to the BBC. He heard Winston Churchill declare that the armistice had been signed. The first feeling that came over him was one of astonishment. When he considered all he’d been through since jumping with Mayne’s stick on Squatter, he couldn’t believe that he’d actually survived.

  61. ‘In peacetime a man born to battle has to change his ways’

  On 8 October 1945, 1 SAS paraded for the last time. The disbandment ceremony took place at Hylands Park, near Chelmsford – the 1 SAS base since the previous November. 2 SAS were disbanded the same day at their base at Colchester. ‘The whole Regiment was drawn up, squadron by squadron, in front of the main house,’ wrote Johnny Cooper. ‘… It was a very tragic day.’1 Mayne was conspicuous, not only by his size, but because he was the only man present wearing the sand-coloured beret of desert days.

  The SAS Regiment had come a long way from the Case for the retention of a limited number of special service troops, for employment as parachutists that David Stirling had scribbled out in his hospital bed. Yet his three basic principles – surprise, the deployment of small parties and the economical use of manpower – had remained unchanged, despite the various ways in which the wartime regiments had been misused. The SAS had established a unique modus operandi, neither as an Airborne commando-style raiding force, nor as an SOE-type group of secret agents operating with partisans, but as a military force capable of establishing bases behind enemy lines and launching continual raids for long periods. It had also established three ideal principles of action: command at the highest level, intelligence at the highest level, and the right to plan its own operations.

  On 21 September, 5 SAS had been formally handed over to the Belgian government. A week later the two French regiments reverted to the French. The order to stand down 1 and 2 SAS had been issued on 4 October. The night before the disbandment, the 1 SAS boys held a wild party in Hylands House, the two-centuries-old manor that served as the officers’ mess. It was the culmination of several days of revels, during which, at one point, Harry Poat and Johnny Cooper had drunkenly telephoned Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s office and told his private secretary, ‘If you cut our bacon ration, we’ll cut a slice off your arse!’2

  The high-point, though, came when Mayne drove a jeep up the central staircase of the hall, round two right-angled bends, through a pair of oak doors, and on to the landing. The house’s owner and occupier, the long-suffering and amenable Mrs Hanbury, heiress of the Truman, Hanbury & Buxton brewing company, regarded Mayne with much affection. That night, though, she decided a line had been crossed. ‘Now, Paddy, that’s quite enough of that,’ she said. ‘You’re keeping me awake. It’s time you all got to bed.’3 Despite the best efforts of the Regiment’s star drivers, the jeep was stuck there. It had to be dismantled and brought down piece by piece.

  In the early hours of 8 October, Mayne drew himself up, and told the men, ‘I want everyone on parade, properly turned out at 8 a.m.’ ‘Everyone had to forget their hangovers quick,’ said ex-SSM, now Captain, Jim Almonds, whom Mayne had commissioned in the field, ‘get smartened up and get outside.’4 Mike Calvert, who took the salute that morning, had had personal experience of Mayne’s belligerence. During the SAS’s last job, Op Apostle – overseeing the surrender of three hundred thousand German troops in Norway – Calvert had brought him down with a rugby tackle in the mess. Mayne, who had been haranguing SAS Brigade Major Esmond B
aring at the time, picked himself up, seized his commanding officer with giant’s hands and hurled him over his shoulder. Calvert’s head came into sharp contact with the fender of the nearby fireplace, and he got up with two black eyes.

  Since March – two months before the German surrender – Calvert had been working doggedly to find a new role for the Regiment. His initial objective, to deploy SAS troops in the Far East, had been supported by David Stirling, who had been released from Colditz in April. Stirling had relived old times by bringing Fitzroy Maclean MP to lunch with Winston Churchill, the man who had started it all with his ‘bands of brothers’ memo back in 1940. Churchill had been voted out of office that July.

  Stirling’s proposal was to form a new SAS brigade from three elements: 2 SAS, an American Regiment made up of ex-Office of Strategic Services men, and another consisting of released prisoners of war. Curiously, perhaps, Mayne’s 1 SAS played no part in his scheme. Clearly, Stirling retained a degree of the old competitiveness. While he had endured a frustrating two years as a prisoner of war, Mayne had taken the SAS to new heights of excellence, and had emerged one of only eight men to have won the DSO four times. What Stirling might have achieved had he not been captured would forever remain open to conjecture.

  Before his political defeat, Churchill had encouraged Stirling’s Far East scheme, as he had encouraged Calvert, but this time his support may have been disingenuous. He had known all along about the Manhattan Project, and the likelihood that the war against Japan would be won by atomic strikes, rather than by ground troops. The SAS had even begun training for a job in Asia, but with the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August, all bets were off.

  The Regiment’s days were not quite over, though. A small group of SAS-men, including Bob Bennett, were sent to Greece attached to the Military Reparations Committee, and spent another four years wearing the flaming sword. Rumours that they became involved in the civil war have never been confirmed. There was also the matter of the murder of SAS troops on Gain, Bulbasket, Loyton and other ops, to be dealt with. Brian Franks, who felt a personal commitment to his dead Loyton comrades, was determined to find out who was responsible. The previous May, Franks had sent a team to France, under his IO Major Eric Barkworth, to trace all the SAS-men still missing in action. This group would develop into the SAS War Crimes Team, which would bring several Nazis to court, and remain in operation for another four years.

  Calvert had suggested to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, that the War Office should make a study of wartime special forces operations, so that the usefulness of these units could be assessed. On 13 August the Director of Air Warfare, Major General K. N. Crawford, issued a memo arguing that ‘the Special Air Service Regiment has proved its value in the present war and it is considered that it should be retained in some form in the post-war army’.5

  This conclusion was a triumph, not so much for Calvert or even Stirling, as for Blair Mayne. Too modest a man to claim that he had been a founder of the Regiment – though Stirling would later accept him as ‘co-founder’ – the SAS owed more to him than any other individual alive. It was Mayne who had rescued L Detachment with his classic strike at Tamet; it was Mayne who had proved its efficiency by personally bagging almost a hundred aircraft; it was Mayne’s A Squadron that had saved the unit’s reputation on the coast-road ops; it was Mayne whose compromise had rescued it from disbandment; it was Mayne’s outstanding organization and command of the SRS that had led to the formation of the SAS Brigade, and the superb performance of Mayne’s 1 SAS in France and Germany that had led directly to the recommendation that its skills should be preserved after the war.

  Mayne didn’t found the SAS, perhaps, but in a very real way he was the man who made the Regiment, the man without whom it might easily have vanished into obscurity, like the short-lived ‘Popski’s Private Army’. Even Stirling acknowledged this. ‘[Mayne’s] achievements in battle and his superb leadership of the Regiment,’ he wrote, ‘undoubtedly made inevitable the establishment of the SAS as a permanent part of the British Defence Forces.’6 Original Ernie Bond, captured on Squatter, put it more concisely. ‘A lot of the SAS’s strength was down to Mayne – the way he worked.’

  As Mayne saluted Calvert that morning, though, it must have seemed to him that the dark days were just beginning. The articulate Calvert, more similar to Mayne than either would have admitted, probably voiced the thoughts of both, when he wrote, ‘I was a fighting man. The fact remains that in peacetime a man born to battle has to change his ways, and this I had to face.’7 Calvert was a professional soldier, Mayne was not. Yet the idea of returning to the law didn’t attract him. ‘The more I think of being a solicitor again,’ he had written his mother earlier, ‘the less I like it.’8 For Mayne, as for many of these SAS-men, peacetime held little promise. They had gone in search of the dynamic, and in the SAS they had found it to the full. They would never find it again. ‘The end of the war was for me an anti-climax,’ said Johnny Cooper. ‘I had experienced many theatres of war and had enjoyed the solid comradeship with so many of my friends in the SAS, especially Reg Seekings.’9

  Seekings himself put it more bluntly. ‘It [was] like the bottom dropping out of the world,’ he admitted. ‘You were lost.’10

  The RSM called the men to attention for the general salute. Four hundred hands snapped to maroon-red berets. Then the men of 1 Special Air Service Regiment turned sharply, and marched out of history, into legend.

  Part Three

  SMALL WARS AND REVOLUTIONS 1947–80

  62. ‘The standard jungle-drills must have come out’

  Below him the rain-forest canopy stretched unbroken to every horizon, like the green baize of a billiard table. Lt. Johnny Cooper dropped towards it, fighting to stay conscious, desperately trying to steer his ‘X’ type parachute with his right hand. He knew something was badly wrong. His helmet was missing, his left arm numb, and his neck felt as if it had been doused with acid.

  Seconds earlier, Cooper had jumped from an RAF Dakota over the Betong Gap in Malaya’s Selangor state, the last in a stick of three parachutists taking part in a ‘tree-jumping’ experiment. The jumper in front of him, Major Peter Walls, had hit the doorframe and stumbled back. Cooper gave him a push with his left hand, without noticing that his arm had become entangled in the other man’s static-line. When Walls’s parachute developed, the line snapped Cooper’s arm like a twig, wrenching off his helmet and whiplashing his neck with friction-burns.

  The jungle was riding up to meet him at breakneck speed. ‘I crashed into the top of the foliage,’ he recalled, ‘slithered through many branches and finally came to rest with my canopy well and truly hooked up.’1 Scanning downwards, he realized with a shock that he was dangling two hundred feet above the jungle floor, with a giant thicket of bamboo directly beneath him. The bamboo-tubes looked like a nest of sharpened stakes. A wave of pain from his smashed arm overwhelmed him. He passed out.

  Later it felt as if he’d dreamt it all – that he was still back in the desert with David Stirling and Reg Seekings. In fact, it was May 1952. Six years had passed since the disbandment of the SAS Brigade, and the Cold War was in full swing. Cooper was serving in Malaya as a troop commander in a brand new unit – 22 SAS.

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d hung there. It seemed hours before he heard a voice shouting, ‘I’ve got Cooper. He’s up here.’ Dragging himself out of the fog of pain, he glanced down. With a surge of gratitude, he realized that the voice belonged to Sgt. Roger ‘Olly’ Levet, Royal Horse Guards, his troop-sergeant. He made out more figures in bush-hats and jungle-green fatigues working slowly through the dense undergrowth. Soon, his entire troop was gathered in the bamboo beneath his feet.

  For a few moments there was a stand-off, as Cooper and his troop eyeballed each other, two hundred feet apart. No one knew what to do. Cooper had been in plenty of tight corners, but never one quite like this. He tried to ignore the excruciating throbin his arm,
and to remember the drill he’d been taught for the infant art of ‘tree-jumping’. Attached to his harness he had a hundred-and-fifty-foot rope, knotted at eighteen-inch intervals, which he was supposed to secure to a branch to let himself down to the forest floor. Since the two trees he was snagged on were more than thirty feet apart, though, he realized that the chances of carrying out that particular drill, one-handed, were precisely zero. The other alternative was to cut himself free. This was also a definite no-no. If the fall didn’t kill him, he would almost certainly be impaled on the razor-sharp bamboo. Soon, though, he was relieved of the necessity of making a decision by the Regiment’s medical officer, Captain Freddie Brunton, who had just arrived on the scene. Brunton shouted to him to let down his scaling rope, so that he could send up a canteen of water. While Cooper was tugging up the canteen, Brunton shimmied up the nearest tree with climbing irons. He told Cooper to swallow one of the Benzedrine tabs he’d been issued with, to prevent him passing out again. Cooper chugged water greedily and crammed down four Bennies.

  Brunton hammered a piton into his tree-trunk and secured Cooper’s scaling rope to it. He told Cooper to cut himself loose. Cooper severed his lift-webs and plunged sixty feet before the rope pulled him up. He swung like a pendulum, narrowly missing the tree. The MO told the men to let him drop. Cooper tumbled the last fifteen feet, landed smack on Olly Levet, and passed out. When he came round again, the MO was giving him a morphine shot.

  Cooper remembered nothing about the march-out, but Levet told him later that, despite his injury, he’d taken charge of the troop, given instructions to the lead-scout, and ordered the men to take up covering positions as they crossed a fast-flowing torrent. ‘The standard jungle-drills must have come out,’ Cooper said, ‘despite the effect of Benzedrine and morphine.’2