The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  By the time B Squadron had arrived, the A Squadron boys had completed their training ‘on the hoof’ in the rain-forest, and now considered themselves the jungle experts. To them, the B Squadron men seemed rigid and aloof. Though some of these veterans had seen hard fighting – more SAS-men had been scragged in three days at Termoli than would be lost in the whole eight years of the Malaya crisis – the younger A Squadron men scoffed at them. Their attitude was similar to that of the young Stirling and Lewes to the ‘old sweats’ of the First World War. B Squadron were proud of their medals and para-wings hard-won on wartime operations. A Squadron, who hadn’t even done their jumps, quickly dubbed them ‘Big Time Bravo’. Woodhouse commented later that A Squadron wasn’t irredeemable. It had some bad apples, he said, but its best men had ‘the immense unshakable physical endurance and determination of young British soldiers at their best’.7

  They had at least proved Calvert right in his assertion that British soldiers could survive long periods in the jungle. An A squadron patrol under Lt. Mike Sinclair-Hill had remained in the ulu for a hundred and three days. They had also had the Scouts’ first contacts with the Communists. The first kill was made by Trooper Bill Anderson, almost by accident. ‘We got into a river and I was about up to my knees,’ Anderson recalled, ‘and I suddenly saw this figure who appeared from a bush. He jumped up like a jack-in-the-box. I just turned and shot him. I worked that bolt three times, I remember.’8

  Sinclair-Hill’s patrol had seen casualties: one Scout killed in action, a police officer and a Chinese auxiliary accompanying patrols shot dead, and four SAS-men missing. Three of them turned out to have taken refuge in a village on the coast, when one of their number was wounded. The fourth, Trooper John O’Leary, Royal Artillery, had been left behind by his patrol. Finding his way to an aborigine longhouse, he was hacked to death by the natives, at the instigation of the Communists.

  The aborigine problem was one Calvert had considered carefully. He knew that while some of the aborigines sympathized with the CTs, others had been coerced into helping them by threats and atrocities. To smash the Communists, he believed, the Scouts would first have to undermine their ties with the jungle-folk. Calvert’s initial report had recommended a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign to bring the aborigines on board. He had also proposed translocating the half-million-plus Chinese squatters on the forest fringes to robthe Communists of their main support. Both of these proposals had been adopted by the new Director of Operations, General Sir Harold Briggs, whose celebrated ‘Briggs Plan’ was the blueprint for British success in the Emergency.

  After the murder of O’Leary, A Squadron was naturally wary of the ‘abos’, but on their first ops they had made a start on the ‘hearts and minds’ battle by operating basic jungle clinics. There were few trained medics among them as yet, but a handful of soldiers had acquired a rudimentary grasp of medical skills. The clinics were little more than distribution centres for penicillin – in great demand among the Sakai as a treatment for yaws, a common skin disease – but they were a foot in the longhouse door. A Squadron men also made the first use of inflatables for river patrols, and of helicopters for resupply.

  Within days of their arrival, B Squadron was thrown into the rain-forest on Calvert’s sink or swim principle. There was almost no one to train them, and Int. Officer John Woodhouse took on the training himself. The first requirement was to be able to live and move in the jungle for weeks, in small patrols, without noise, without leaving traces, constantly on the alert for the enemy. ‘In the three months I was with [B Squadron],’ he recalled, ‘… I did establish the rudiments of battle-discipline. We got away from the rather slap-happy way A Squadron had gone round the jungle.’9

  Woodhouse was a quiet, reserved officer, lean, gangly and unimpressive-looking at first sight, with what the SAS came to call ‘a Bergen stoop’. Like Jock Lewes, though, he was a superb and unorthodox training-officer. When one man had a ‘negligent discharge’ with his weapon, for instance, Woodhouse made him walk around with a primed grenade in his hand for the next forty-eight hours. Once, when fired on by one of his own sentries in the jungle, he put the man on a charge – for missing. When a later recruit – Peter de la Billière – stumbled across his trip-flares for the third time, Woodhouse loaded the flares with plastic explosive, ‘to help him concentrate’.10

  Woodhouse was a Second World War veteran who had won the MC during the Italian campaign. Despite his public school education, he had joined the Devon & Dorset Regiment as a private, and had been promoted from the ranks. He was soon a platoon commander in 1 East Surrey Regiment, and had seen action in Tunisia and Sicily. Although he had no SAS experience, he was more versed in patrol work than most. He had commanded an infantry patrol-unit that had acquired some special forces functions, including the snatching of prisoners as informants, and longrange reconnaissance patrols.

  Woodhouse was also a fluent Russian-speaker, and had worked as a liaison-officer with Soviet forces at the end of the war. His last job before volunteering for the Malayan Scouts was G3 Intelligence with 40 Infantry Division in Hong Kong. He had joined Calvert on the understanding that he would be given command of a combat unit, but on arrival in Malaya had found himself appointed the Scouts’ Intelligence Officer. Despite this apparent double-dealing, and his resentment of Calvert’s continual criticism, Wood-house retained an enormous respect for his new CO’s intellect. ‘[Calvert] had that spark of genius … that a soldier is lucky to see at close quarters once in his career,’ he commented. ‘… He had the moral courage and tactical sense to match three-man patrols against gangs much bigger … he … made the Regiment, and it reflected his faults as well as his virtues.’11

  At the end of March, A and B Squadrons were joined by a third – C Squadron, a hundred volunteers Calvert had recruited in Rhodesia. Its chief was Captain Peter Walls, later to be General Officer Commanding the Rhodesian army. The Rhodesians were physically tough, well educated and idealistic. Their Achilles heel, as far as Calvert was concerned, was their inability to make friends with the aborigines, coupled with their susceptibility to jungle diseases, which seemed to hit them more severely than any of the British squadrons. The Rhodesians were followed a few months later by a second contingent from the UK – D Squadron – made up of untrained volunteers from the Airborne Forces Depot. Though neither C nor D had undergone a selection course, they were happily without the discipline problems of the A Squadron men.

  B Squadron boss Tony Greville-Bell agonized over the discipline situation. He complained to Calvert. Calvert fobbed him off. He had never really got on with Greville-Bell, who he thought was under the impression that he ‘had come to take over from me’. In the end, Greville-Bell complained to C-in-C John Harding. By military custom, this was a major faux pas, and Harding, another vet of the Italian campaign, who’d had three fingers shot off in Sicily, called him to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur. Whatever Greville-Bell had been expecting, Harding handed out what he described as ‘the biggest bollocking I have ever had in my life’.12 He had transgressed the ultimate military taboo: an officer does not go over the head of his immediate superior. Greville-Bell had compounded the offence by sending a screed to the second-in-command of 21 SAS, Major ‘Leo’ Hart, who had been SAS Brigade Major at the end of the war, suggesting that B Squadron should operate under its own command. After his ‘bollocking’ by Harding, Greville-Bell was given the elbow from the Malayan Scouts, and in his own words ‘treated like a criminal’. Posted to a series of military ‘Siberias’, he eventually resigned.

  But Greville-Bell’s reproaches had hit the bull’s-eye. Despite closing ranks, the ‘head-shed’ knew it. In London, Leo Hart was openly admitting that the SAS Regiment would be glad to see the back of Calvert and his half-baked Scouts. Their reputation had gone from bad to worse, and other units in the theatre were showing them open contempt. Hart was protective of the Regiment’s name, and didn’t want to see it go down the sewer over Calvert’s roughneck army.

&nbs
p; Calvert’s days were numbered. Even the men noticed that he looked ill and unhappy. ‘We’d see him totally drunk all the time in our mess,’ said Mike Sinclair-Hill. ‘Then, one day, I found him unconscious on the floor in his room. I tried slapping him and throwing water, but he was just totally dead.’13

  On 8 June, Director of Operations General Sir Harold Briggs arrived for ‘discussions’. He held a number of private interviews with Calvert, who, at a cocktail party that night, seemed devoid of his customary exuberance. Next morning, he told Woodhouse that he was going into hospital and would be sent home. Wood-house was dismayed. He couldn’t imagine anyone capable of both putting the administration in order and maintaining and improving Calvert’s tactics in the field. The Scouts’ disbandment was already being predicted by its detractors, and he was worried that, with ‘Mad Mike’ out of the way, their hopes would quickly be fulfilled. ‘You can’t go, sir,’ he protested. ‘Who will take over command?’

  ‘I must go. They’ll make me go,’ Calvert said. ‘You chaps must carry on.’14

  Later that day, Calvert was admitted to Kinrara Military Hospital with ‘hepatomegaly of unknown origin’ – enlargement of the liver, a well-known product both of alcoholism and of malaria. The official line was that he was invalided out as a result of a ‘cocktail of exotic diseases’, but this was almost certainly a cover-up. The ‘medical grounds’ pretext was a tried and tested military anti-scandal formula – Auchinleck had used it when sacking Cunningham during Crusader. When Woodhouse visited Calvert in hospital to say goodbye three days later, he showed no symptoms of the ‘exotic diseases’ he was supposed to be suffering from. ‘Remember, I expect a lot from you, John,’ were Calvert’s last words to him.

  Calvert was flown to hospital in Singapore, and then on to London. By October, though, he had recovered sufficiently to be posted to Hanover, as OC Royal Engineers, with the British Army of the Rhine. It was here that Calvert heard good news from Malaya. ‘The designation “Malayan Scouts” had been dropped,’ he wrote, ‘and the unit renamed 22 SAS Regiment. The Special Air Service, at last, was back in the regular army.’15

  David Stirling omitted Calvert’s name from the select list of men whom he considered his co-founders of the SAS, though he did admit that Calvert had played a vital part in the development of the Regiment. John Woodhouse, who was later to become an almost legendary commanding officer of 22 SAS, and whose name was on Stirling’s list, said that he had learned all he knew about counter-insurgency from Calvert. He added that Calvert had analysed the whole Malayan scenario with stunning prescience, and had outlined future SAS principles – three- or four-man patrols, medical aid to the local population, and, most important of all, the idea of a counter-guerrilla force establishing bases in the deep jungle, and staying there. Calvert had come up with these ideas long before anyone else thought of them.

  The creation of 22 SAS was to be ‘Mad Mike’s’ last great achievement. Within a year he would be charged with ‘committing or attempting to commit acts of gross indecency’ with certain German youths. He was court-martialled, found guilty, and drummed out of the army.

  66. ‘Like a bunch of grapes hanging out of his slacks’

  Calvert’s replacement was Lt. Col. John ‘Tod’ Sloane, Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, a conventional line-infantry officer with a no-nonsense attitude. He’d been sent in to clean up the Malayan Scouts and he intended to do so. Calvert’s non-existent admin was to be put on a firm footing. The Regiment was to be whipped into shape. Sloane’s first action was to pull all four squadrons out for six weeks’ rest and retraining in Singapore. During that time, Sloane ruthlessly RTU’d the cowboys, bar soldiers and misfits, and persuaded some first-rate men not to leave. One of these was Major Dare Newell, an A Squadron officer who had worked for SOE in the Balkans and fought the Japanese in the Malayan jungle with Force 136. Newell was later to play a major role in preserving 22 SAS. Together as a unit for the first time in their history, squadrons previously at each other’s throats began to feel the unfamiliar stirrings of esprit de corps.

  When Sloane moved the Regiment to its new base at Sungei Besi at the end of January it was no longer the Malayan Scouts, but a new regular army formation, 22 SAS – its designation following in sequence from 21 SAS (Artists’). The switch in title had been instigated mainly for recruitment purposes, and coincided with a change of tour-length from eighteen months to two years. It was felt that volunteers would be more ready to join if the designation didn’t suggest that the unit would operate only in Malaya. The new Regiment would remain junior to its Territorial equivalent, 21 SAS, and despite the change, its future was not yet secure. It was still not listed on the British army’s order of battle.

  One prop to the new esprit was the common cap-badge the squadrons now shared. B Squadron had turned up wearing the Artists’ Rifles ‘Mars and Minerva’ insignia, but A Squadron still wore the badges of their parent units. All squadrons now wore Bob Tait’s wartime ‘flaming sword’ badge and ‘Who Dares Wins’ motto with the Airborne maroon-red beret.

  While in Singapore the squadrons had started training for a new operation, to kick off in February. Meanwhile, Johnny Cooper had arrived from the UK. Cooper had served as a subaltern in 21 SAS for four years, but his future had been decided when he attended the Regiment’s first annual camp at Okehampton in Devon. ‘The camp turned into a splendid reunion, and the atmosphere was wonderful,’ he wrote. ‘The problem was that this happy fortnight upset me for my future life as a civilian. I had great doubts about what I was doing and whether it was all worthwhile.’1 It had taken him some time to finally decide, but two months after Mike Calvert had arrived in Germany he applied for a short-service commission with the newly designated 22 SAS.

  Cooper was appointed OC 8 Troop, B Squadron, and spent his first weeks on jungle orientation. Once the civilized surroundings of the rubber-estates fell away, he found himself in an alternative dimension. He’d experienced the majesty of the Sahara, and had fought in the woods of the Morvan, but had never seen anything quite like this. The primary rain-forest was a dark cathedral of staggering vastness, where the trunks of gigantic trees rose, smooth and black, scarlet and scaly, ash-grey and crusted green, as perfect and straight as columns, up to a canopy so dense that it cut out the sky. Giant lianas as thick as a man’s thigh coiled round the great tree-boles or drooped from the branches like pythons. The forest bed was a carpet of rotted leaves and saplings, from which extended a dense growth of bamboo, rhododendron, rattan, thorn-bush, and the whip-like ‘wait-a-bit’ nante sikkit thorn.

  At first, navigation in this labyrinth seemed impossible. A man could rarely see more than ten yards – it was difficult to judge distance, and there were no landmarks. Straight line marching was frustrated by thickets, precipices, rock-outcrops, swamps and meandering rivers that switched back on themselves in continuous hairpins. Going varied with the terrain. It was easier in primary jungle than secondary, but in places it might take eight hours to cover a mile on the map.

  The forest abounded with unpleasant surprises. There were malarial mosquitoes, sand-flies with a sting that caused nettle-rash, bees that killed by suffocation, wasps with an allergenic chemical that bloated the flesh, hornets so aggressive they buzz-bombed anything that moved, red ants, hairy caterpillars, fever-laden ticks, centipedes, scorpions and venomous snakes that might rear up suddenly on the track. There were also larger animals – elephant, tiger, water-buffalo, bush pig, and even rhino. The most hated creatures of all were the leeches that could creep inside a man’s clothes or through his boot-eyelets. Some were poisonous, others – the swamp-dwelling bull- or tiger-leech – could suck half a pint of blood at a go.

  After the Communists, Cooper commented, leeches were their number one adversary. ‘You couldn’t feel them,’ he wrote, ‘but as they slowly sucked blood, they enlarged into horrible black swollen lumps.’2 They had an alarming propensity for homing in on a man’s private parts. It wasn’t unknown for a leech to crawl
down the urethra and expand inside, from where it could only be dislodged by surgery. Trooper Don ‘Lofty’ Large, an ex-Gloster who had fought the Chinese at the heroic battle of the Imjin River in Korea, once claimed to have seen eleven leeches clinging to the end of a comrade’s penis. ‘It looked like a bunch of grapes hanging out of his slacks,’ he wrote. ‘When he pulled them off he bled like a stuck pig.’3 Leech-bites could develop into ulcers that needed twice-daily dousing with antiseptic, and took weeks to heal up.

  The majority of SAS casualties, though, came from jungle diseases. Malaria-carrying anopheles mosquitoes were more of a problem on the inhabited jungle fringes than in the deep forest. To contract malaria could be an RTU offence, because the SAS were under orders to take daily doses of the newly-developed prophylactic, Paludrine. A common hazard was leptospirosis or ‘lepto’ – a virus carried in the urine of rats, which could be passed on in water through a leech-bite and was potentially fatal.

  There were no seasons in the rain-forest but the monsoon. It was almost always hot and wet. Tropical rain fell like a knife, often continuing without a break for seventy-two hours. The wet was a burden an SAS-man had to carry – it soaked his clothes and his equipment, doubling the weight, rotting the material within days. Stitches fell to pieces. Boots lost their soles. Wet clothes chafed the skin, making it agony to continue. Mildew could sprout between first and last light.

  The patrol carried .30 M1 carbines familiar to Cooper from his days in France and Germany, and a Bren-gun. Lead-scouts were equipped with ‘pump-guns’ – 12-bore pump-action shotguns with deadly 9-ball ammunition. As Bill Anderson had discovered on the unit’s first contact, encounters with the enemy were blink-of-the-eye affairs, and with visibility down to as little as five yards, a pump-gun with its scattershot pattern was frequently a better bet than a high-velocity rifle. Later on, both the M1 and the Bren would be replaced by the 7.62mm FN, the Belgian-made prototype of the standard-issue self-loading rifle, or SLR. Unlike the later model, the FN could be fired fully-automatic.