The squadrons had grown accustomed to the slow pace of movement in the cool shade of the great forest trees. This was commando-style battle-marching in double-time, with full equipment and a week’s provisions, across five-thousand-foot mountains, grilled by the sun. After twenty miles the tracks ran out. The men found themselves scrambling up hillsides so steep and slick with mud that they had to use hands as well as feet. They slid and slipped down impossible slopes, tracked along treacherous stream-beds, or slashed their way with parangs through bamboo thickets. Woodhouse, who was often to be found carrying a straggler’s Bergen as well as his own, was determined to reach the RV on time, or die in the attempt. He admitted, though, that this was the worst going he ever experienced in Malaya.
The squadrons tramped on for five days to reach the Sungei Belum. On the way, Woodhouse got word that the B Squadron drop was to be postponed a day, which gave him a small respite. On the morning of 9 February, C Squadron hit the Sungei Belum opposite the DZ to find that it had been swollen by recent rains into a forty-metre-wide surge of brown froth. Woodhouse ordered the men to construct bamboo rafts, while Lt. Mike Pearman volunteered to swim across towing a line. He bellyflopped in, and was whisked away by the current. Woodhouse reeled him back on the line, fearing he would drown. Pearman was furious. ‘You bloody nearly drowned me yourself pulling me in like that,’ he spluttered. He plunged in for another try. This time he reached the opposite bank, far downstream, and fixed the rope to a tree. Once the rafts were ready, it took only an hour to get the squadron across.
In the meantime, D Squadron had lost the way, and emerged from the forest a day’s march east of the CT base at Kampong Sepor. This effectively ruled them out of the initial stage of the operation.
The three Dakotas carrying B Squadron, under Alastair McGregor, had taken off from Butterworth on the coast at about 1300 hours. The drop had been scheduled shortly after first light, but had been delayed by rain and cloud over the mountains. Now the weather looked bad again, and the pilots were about to turn back a second time when there was a brief window. The Dakotas creamed in over the DZ two hours after noon, riding a fast tail-wind, dumping scaled-down dummy parachutists to assess drift. They were escorted by a flight of RAF Brigand light bombers, ready to hammer any flak coming up from the ground. The wind was dicey and the DZ a postcard rice-paddy on the river-bank, hemmed in by forest. The sticks went out anyway. Fifty-four olive-green fluted silk cupolas ballooned across the sky. All but four of the SAS-men missed the drop-zone and ended up in the trees. Most canopies were caught up in branches. Three men were slightly injured, but all managed to let themselves down to the ground on their knotted ropes. It was later said by some that the ‘tree jump’ was deliberate: in fact, it was an accident caused by the bad weather and the fast tail-wind.
Helsby proved an anti-climax. There were CTs around, but not in the numbers anticipated. C Squadron got bumped as it braced Kampong Sepor, and the Rhodesians fractured into four-man patrols to pursue their attackers. The patrols came back empty-handed: the MRLA had melted away across the Thai border. McGregor’s men took one badly wounded prisoner, who told them before he died that he was a courier from Thailand, proving, as suspected, that there were cross-border contacts. The only SAS casualty was a D Squadron man, hit in the backside as he squatted to relieve himself. Following orders from the C-in-C, the SAS and other units evacuated all the civilians from the area, and set fire to their crops to deny them to the terrorists. Without establishing a patrol-base in the region, though, little of long-term value could be achieved. In fact, the guerrillas were back inside two months.
The operation’s one major legacy was the ‘tree-jumping’ idea. The success of the freak drop convinced the SAS ‘Head-shed’ that in future it would be more reliable to jump directly into the forest canopy than on a cleared DZ. Since the parachute would almost certainly be snagged, it was safer than landing on ground obstacles like tree-trunks and bamboo. All that was needed was a more efficient method of getting down. That May, B Squadron boss Alastair McGregor roped Peter Walls, Johnny Cooper and other officers and NCOs into a tree-jumping experiment over primary jungle. It was as a result of this experiment that Johnny Cooper very nearly lost the use of his arm.
68. ‘The Regiment had got something. You could sense it from the moment you arrived’
Despite being told in hospital that the idea of returning to active duty was ‘just a pipe-dream’, Cooper’s arm mended. He was a captain again within a year, and soon boss of a newly rehashed D Squadron. Most of the early Airborne forces volunteers had gone. The new squadron was raised from local recruits and assembled around an original troop of fifteen, who, under Cooper’s command, trained the recruits from scratch. Their real training, though, consisted of being thrown in at the deep end in ‘Mad Mike’ style, on a one-hundred-and-twenty-two-day patrol in the deep jungle of Pahang. Cooper’s orders were to recce the area for the construction of a jungle fort, Fort Brooke – one of many that were being installed to protect the aborigines and keep them out of the clutches of the CTs.
Lt. Col. Oliver Brooke replaced Tod Sloane as commanding officer in ’53. He was an old acquaintance of Cooper’s from his time as boss of the SAS ‘phantom troop’, when Brooke commanded 10 (Yorkshire) Airborne Battalion. Under Brooke, ‘hearts and minds’ became buzz words. The concept had not been Calvert’s invention, but a lesson learned from Mao Tse-tung, who had ordered his Red Army to make friends with the Chinese peasants and treat them well. Mao had been rewarded by their support – the single most crucial factor in his success. By now, many SAS-men had picked up Malay – a lingua franca among the forest-dwellers – and were able to communicate with them. Others had become proficient as patrol medics, and ‘jungle-clinics’ were more extensive. The linguists and the medics worked together, treating cuts, bruises and broken bones, as well as complaints such as yaws, tinea, malaria and tuberculosis. Slowly the soldiers began to penetrate aboriginal culture, learning their customs, taboos, beliefs and humour, sometimes sitting crosslegged in their longhouses for hours, listening with Job-like patience to their chattering, picking up crucial titbits of information.
It was a difficult and painstaking process. The aborigines frequently passed intel to the Communists and played both sides, so contacts with them always held a degree of risk. Unlike both the terrorists and the Malay troops, though, the SAS never molested aborigine women. They employed the men as porters and labourers for the construction of jungle forts, and always paid them for their work.
Little by little, 22 SAS was developing a technique of winning over the local population, running parallel with their aggressive fighting patrols. Some of the troops were unable to cross the line – in the case of C Squadron (Rhodesian) it was due to a cultural prejudice. The Rhodesians returned home early on, but retained their identity as C Squadron until the establishment of majority rule twenty-eight years later. C Squadron still remains vacant in the 22 SAS orbat.1
‘Hearts and minds’ was, if anything, even more debilitating than pure patrolling. By the time Cooper’s squadron had handed Fort Brooke over to a police platoon, and was fished out of the ulu by helicopter, half of the eighty-strong unit had already been casevaced with fatigue, malaria or leptospirosis. One of Cooper’s patrols, under Lt. Bruce Murray, had smashed up the local Communist gang, killing some and chasing others out of the tactical area. Cooper had also lost two men, Cpl. ‘Digger’ Bancroft and Tpr. Willis, in a CT ambush. On extraction, Cooper received a personal message from Brooke, congratulating him on ‘a really splendid effort’.2
The character of 22 SAS was changing. During his first year as CO, Oliver Brooke had sustained a broken back in a tree jump, and was casevaced to Blighty, crippled for life. His replacement, Lt. Col. George Lea, another ex-10 (Yorkshire) Airborne commander, inherited a regiment that had improved in every way since Calvert’s day. Squadron patrols were now setting up bases and remaining in the jungle for three months at a time, just as Calvert had envisaged. Admin
stration was efficient. Most of the dross had been filtered out and discipline had returned. ‘The Regiment had got something,’ Lea wrote later. ‘You could sense it from the moment you arrived.’
Under Lea, Cooper was in turn Operations Officer and OC B Squadron. John Woodhouse had left the Regiment around the time of Cooper’s accident, to take up a posting with a TA infantry battalion in the UK. He had turned up in Britain not knowing if he would ever serve with 22 SAS again, but holding the conviction that, while Calvert’s tactics were a certain blueprint for success in Malaya, his ‘Chindit policy’ had caused most of the Regiment’s teething problems.
Before taking up his TA posting, Woodhouse was given temporary command of some SAS Z Reservists in annual training at Otley in Yorkshire, under the auspices of 21 SAS. This two-week stint in the company of ex-wartime SAS-men changed Woodhouse’s life. ‘It was their example,’ he wrote, ‘which inspired me to spend as much of the rest of my military career as possible in the service of the SAS.’3
Woodhouse was later assigned to take charge of a group of SAS volunteers languishing at the Airborne Forces Depot in Aldershot, and was asked to plan a selection course for them. Given no support from the Airborne, he organized everything single-handedly and took the group off by train to Snowdonia, where he ran a course geared to training in navigation and battle tactics under stress. The course was rudimentary, and lasted only ten days, but established the principle upon which the Regiment’s future excellence would be built. Afterwards, Woodhouse, who had gone down with recurrent malaria while conducting the course, wrote a report on the necessity of selection weighed against his early experience with the Malayan Scouts. He sent it to the Colonel-Commandant of the SAS Regiment, General Sir Miles Dempsey, a supporter of the unit since the days when Mayne’s SRS had been under his command.
Woodhouse’s memo laid the foundation for a permanent Selection in Snowdonia, later transferred to the Brecon Beacons in south Wales. The process received a major fillip two years later when another ex-Malayan Scouts officer, Major E. C. ‘Dare’ Newell, was assigned the post of SAS Regimental Headquarters Major – a key link between the War Office and the SAS Regiment. He set about improving recruitment and selection, and the integration of common principles between the two existing regiments. To this end, he started a system by which, after a squadron operation in Malaya, regular NCOs would be cross-posted to 21 SAS as Permanent Staff Instructors – PSIs.
Though the survival of 22 SAS was still by no means assured, Newell was able to spearhead a ‘Whitehall campaign’ lobbying for its continued existence. He was so successful in defending SAS interests that David Stirling would later refer to him as ‘Mr SAS himself’. Stirling would also call John Woodhouse ‘[the man] who restored to the SAS its original philosophy’. This was not quite justified: as Woodhouse indicated, the ‘original philosophy’ had never been lost among members of the Z Reserve and the Territorial units. Yet it was Woodhouse, more than any other individual, perhaps, who moulded the future character of the regular Regiment.
After a four-year absence, Woodhouse returned to Malaya and took command of D Squadron. The same year, the Regiment expanded in strength to five hundred and sixty men, in an HQ squadron and five sabre squadrons. In addition to A, B and D, there were new squadrons from New Zealand and the Parachute Regiment. The ‘old operators’ criticized the way the paras worked – more infantry-style than SAS – and the Kiwis’ tendency to fall sick. Both, according to Lea, ‘did [22 SAS] more good than many of the old hands were prepared to admit at the time’.4
The most significant event of the Emergency also took place while Lea was in the hot-seat. In 1957, Malaya was granted independence within the British Commonwealth. The carpet was abruptly whipped from under the MRLA, and many of the guerrillas surrendered. Ching Peng and his politburo, who had tried unsuccessfully to sue for peace, fled to Thailand. Though many terrorists remained obstinately in the jungle, their numbers had wilted to less than two thousand.
SAS operations began to wind down, as the British government handed over responsibility to the Malayan authorities. By the end of the year, the New Zealand and Parachute Regiment squadrons had departed. At the same time, Lea was succeeded as commanding officer by Lt. Col. Anthony Deane-Drummond, DSO, MC, another old Airborne hand. A month later, Johnny Cooper returned from a recruiting-drive in the UK, and was given command of A Squadron – his third stint as a sabre squadron boss.
69. ‘He was a coward and had surrendered to save his skin’
Tony Deane-Drummond was a tall, sandy-haired man, with a slightly intimidating manner. His nickname was ‘The Cupboard’, after the time he’d hidden in a cupboard for thirteen days, in a house occupied by German troops. He had taken part in the first British parachute operation – the celebrated Tragino Aqueduct raid in Italy – as an officer of 11 SAS Battalion, a commando force that had no connection with Stirling’s SAS. He had fought with the Parachute Brigade at Arnhem, and had been captured and escaped twice.
Deane-Drummond arrived in Sungei Besi with only one cloud on his horizon. A desk-wallah in the War Office had warned him that 22 SAS might only just last out his tour of duty. ‘Your chaps have been quite superb in the jungle,’ the officer said, ‘but I can’t see a task for them away from the trees.’1 Deane-Drummond, who had been graded A1 fit only a month earlier, having been previously diagnosed with terminal cancer, appreciated that the army couldn’t afford a specialist mob for jungle-fighting. He decided that his long-term goal would be to demonstrate that 22 SAS was more than a bunch of ‘Jungle-Jims’.
The new CO acquired a few days’ experience with D Squadron, whose boss, Major Johnny Watts, ex-Royal Ulster Rifles, had recently taken over from John Woodhouse. He then returned to base, where B Squadron, under Major Harry Thompson, had just come out of the ulu. Thompson was despondent. On the recent op he had found plenty of abandoned CT camps, but no terrorists. He was afraid they’d been scared off. ‘Don’t worry, Harry,’ Deane-Drummond told him. ‘Intelligence reports a complete CT gang in your next area of jungle.’2
Thompson was anxious to hear the details, but Deane-Drummond wouldn’t tell him until he was ready. Nicknamed ‘Skinhead’ by his men, Thompson, ex-Royal Highland Fusiliers, was a six-footer with a bald pate and a fringe of red hair, quicktempered and liable to lash out at his subordinates, but dedicated to the SAS. He had passed the newly revamped Selection in the Brecon Beacons, run personally by Dare Newell, a year earlier. One of his current troop commanders, Captain Peter de la Billière, had been on the same course. Thompson and de la Billière were very different characters. While de la Billière was quiet and reserved, Thompson was an extrovert, and something of a showman.
Thompson had to wait a week before Deane-Drummond briefed him on the new operation. His squadron was to enter the Telek Anson swamp, thirty miles north-west of Kuala Lumpur, where the last group of terrorists in the area was hiding out. The group’s leader was a high-ranking officer of the MRLA, named Ah Hoi. He was known as ‘Baby Killer’, because he had once murdered the wife of an informer in front of her assembled village by cutting out her unborn baby with a parang. Thompson’s objective was to snatch or take out Ah Hoi and his twenty guerrillas.
Thompson was leery that the CTs would move out of the area just as he suspected they had done on his last op. He decided that the squadron would go in by parachute. They would drop into the trees near the headwaters of the Sungei Tengi, a river that wound its way through the swamp to the coast. The guerrillas, whose base was thought to be in the middle of the swamp, wouldn’t expect them to come from inland.
Deane-Drummond appreciated the boldness of Thompson’s scheme, but had some reservations. He knew tree-jumping had its dangers. Though a recent study had concluded that casualties were relatively low – only 1.3 per cent – they tended to be serious, requiring immediate casevac. A helicopter casevac wouldn’t halt the operation, but it might compromise Thompson’s carefully thought-out approach. Deane-Drummond guessed that th
e parachute idea had its origin in what he called Thompson’s ‘relish for the spectacular’, but he didn’t try to interfere with the plan. He simply hoped it would come off.
Statistics showed that there was a seventy-four per cent probability of a jumper’s parachute getting caught up in a tree, but B Squadron spent much of the next week on synthetic training, just to make sure they could steer their chutes into the forest canopy. They were to jump from two RAF Beverleys – the first time these aircraft had been used for parachuting. The planes would make one run only, and would drop to parachuting speed soon after take-off, so no one on the ground would hear the engines shift tone as they came in over the DZ. After the sticks had gone out, they would continue into the distance as if they were on a regular flight.
Seventy men of B Squadron mustered on the airstrip at 0500 hours on a humid morning in February. They fitted their X-type parachutes in the dark, and clipped their heavy Bergens to the harness, while the Beverleys’ engines warmed up. They stalked silently to the aircraft with the stink of aviation fuel in their nostrils. The leg-bag technique developed at the end of the war had been modified for tree-jumping. The men carried their kit, including three weeks’ rations, in their Bergens, strapped in canvas sheets. On exit this bundle or ‘container’ would be dropped immediately beneath their feet, and would protect their legs as they crashed through the forest. Their 7.62mm FN rifles were strapped on their chests in a ‘valise’ for immediate access on landing, and they carried two-hundred-foot coils of webbing with ‘bikini’ clasps at the end, enabling them to sashay down from the trees.
The Regiment Page 36
