The Regiment Page 11

  In the blaze of light, Fraser clocked eight Me 109-Fs about fifty yards away to the right. They were parked snout to tail, and they were covered in blanket-like cowlings as if they were straight off the assembly-line. Fraser shouted to Byrne to collect all the remaining Lewes bombs and follow him. There were seven bombs left. While they were sprinting to the Messerschmitts, Byrne pressed the time-pencils. Fraser stood guard as Byrne placed the bombs. Before they had made it back to the others, all seven charges had gone up.

  Then the ammo dump exploded with what Du Vivier remembered as ‘a blood-curdling deafening roar’.5 It was so powerful that they could feel the concussion press on their lungs. ‘By this time the whole area was in turmoil and alive with shouting and excited men,’ Du Vivier said, ‘… they hadn’t the foggiest idea what was going on.’6

  The SAS team couldn’t resist crowing in atavistic glee at the firework show. ‘All five of us added to the bedlam by shouting to each other,’ Byrne said, ‘pointing out the destruction all around. The whole area was as light as day, and we must have been clearly visible.’7

  They spread out into a line and marched unhurriedly off the aerodrome, heading for the desert track they intended to follow on the withdrawal. As they vanished into the darkness, a flight of RAF Blenheim bombers glommed overhead on its way to hit the main road, and loosed a stick of bombs on the brilliantly illuminated airfield, for good measure. By the time the SAS team made the RV with Olivey’s patrol it was almost daylight. They were well overdue. When they thanked Olivey for waiting, one of the LRDG men said, ‘It was such a fantastic show, we just had to stay till the end.’8

  They drove towards the Wadi Faregh, where an hour later they encountered an armoured patrol of the Kings Dragoon Guards, outriding Denys Reid’s E Force column. They exchanged recognition flares, and as they got closer the entire column came into view, hundreds of vehicles spread out over miles of desert. Soon the force engulfed them. Brigadier Reid had his driver move forward, and ran straight up to Fraser’s truck. He stopped and asked him how the raid had gone. ‘Very sorry, sir,’ Fraser answered laconically in his Scots brogue, ‘I had to leave two aircraft on the ground as I ran out of explosive. But we destroyed thirty-seven.’9

  The massive Reid beamed and thumped Fraser on the back. ‘There’s nothing to stop us now!’ he exclaimed. ‘This was indeed a wonderful achievement by an officer and three men [sic],’ Reid wrote in his diary. ‘Incidentally, we heard later that Rommel had been in [Ajadabiyya] that night. He must have had a bit of a headache.’10

  By the time Fraser’s section arrived back in Jalo two days later, their exhilaration had been dampened by a blue-on-blue incident that occurred on the way back. Just after meeting Reid, the patrol halted for breakfast of tea and oatmeal porridge, and a few hours’ rest. Jeff Du Vivier was shaken out of a doze by the rat-tat-tat of machine guns. He opened his eyes wide to see the blue bulk of an RAF Blenheim bomber droning in on them like a Valkyrie, while another one soared five thousand feet above. Rounds were whipping up sand in puffs all around the vehicles. Du Vivier rolled out of his blanket, almost at the same instant as the man next to him, Corporal Laurence Ashby, rolled into his place. Ashby took a couple of bullets in the chest. Another Rhodesian, Bob Riggs, leapt up and shook his fists at the aircraft, yelling and pointing at the air recognition panel the patrol had laid out. A second later he was blasted to pieces.

  The Rhodesians were incensed, and irrationally seemed to blame the SAS for the deaths. When the two LRDG men were buried in the desert later, Olivey asked Fraser and the others to stay away.

  Fraser’s section got back to Jalo just in time for the advance Christmas party Stirling had laid on for the whole detachment. He was over the moon with Fraser’s performance, not least because it was a ‘textbook’ SAS operation. In a few days, his handful of men – twenty-five in all – had destroyed or damaged sixty-one Axis aircraft with little cost and no casualties. At last, he felt, the epiphany he had had back in Cairo in June had been vindicated.

  No one has recorded what Mayne thought of Fraser’s success. Predictably, perhaps, it was his feat of shooting up the hut at Tamet that later grabbed the publicity, and his Herculean ‘ripping the control panel out with his hands’ that would go down in legend. While SAS historians generally mention Fraser’s raid on Ajadabiyya only in passing, in terms of stealth and efficiency alone it would be equalled but never surpassed. It was as perfect a raid as any the SAS ever carried out.

  22. ‘When they went up, they went’

  Stirling and Mayne were heading off again next morning. Stirling suggested to Fraser in his usual understated manner that it would be ‘a good crack’ to have a go at another airfield. Fraser had no objections. Rommel was still at Ajadabiyya, but his forces were believed to be wilting under Ritchie’s new onslaught. Stirling wanted to bump airfields while the Afrika Korps was on the hop, but he was also driven by his lack of personal success. Fraser and Mayne had both made good ‘bags’, but his own best shot had been one enemy truck. This couldn’t be put down entirely to bad luck. Stirling had felt envious of Mayne ever since he had joined the unit at Kabrit. Combat-wise, Stirling was a greenhorn compared with Mayne, Lewes, Fraser, and a lot of the men. The men knew it, he knew it, and it mattered. He was determined to have another bash.

  He wanted at least one man with him who’d had experience laying Lewes bombs in actual combat. Mayne told him Seekings had done well at Tamet, so Stirling poached him. Seekings wasn’t pleased. He revered Mayne, and hated Johnny Cooper, who was in Stirling’s section. He had already had a run-in at Jalo with the mercurial, plummy ex-grammar-school kid over some blankets Seekings thought he had helped himself to. He had called Cooper ‘a bastard’ and a ‘big mouth’ and threatened to ‘knock his bloody block off’. When he found himself paired up with the kid in Stirling’s section he was appalled. They looked daggers at each other all the way to the next foray.

  Stirling and Mayne’s groups set off together on Christmas Eve with Holliman’s patrol, to go in for the ‘double whammy’ at Sirte and Tamet. Stirling reasoned that the Axis would not be expecting follow-up raids so soon. On Christmas Day Lewes’s and Fraser’s sections would head out with Morris’s patrol. Lewes would attack Nofilia. Fraser would go for an airfield sixty miles away, near Mussolini’s triumphal monument, Arae Philenorum, which the British had nicknamed ‘Marble Arch’.

  Mayne’s second Tamet raid went off as smoothly as the first. His section – Sgt. Ed McDonald, Parachutists Harold White, Hawkins, Chesworth and Bennett – hit the aerodrome on Christmas night. They blew up twenty-seven planes. Once again, the time-pencils were set to delays that were too short, and the Lewes bombs began to rip before the raiders were off the airfield. ‘When they went up, they went,’ Bennett recalled, ‘and you had great big volumes of flame, and so we started running … [the Italians] started shooting. So we just ran through, throwing grenades and firing, and managed to get through and back to the rendezvous.’1

  Stirling, with Brough, Cooper, Seekings, Rose and Cattell, was unable to penetrate Sirte airfield. A barbed-wire fence had been erected since his last sortie – probably because of it. As they boxed round it, they were seen by a sentry. They bugged out to the vehicles, where Stirling only just avoided being shot by the LRDG sentry. They piled in and bumped down the road, halting to stick Lewes bombs on two trucks whose crews were asleep. For the next twenty-five minutes they cruised along the Via Balbia in Holliman’s Fords, the LRDG belting away with their Lewis guns and a Bofors, and the SAS cracking fire with their Tommy guns, zapping grenades at anything they saw. They left behind them a trail of flaming lorries and camps, and scores of Italian troops whaling about in confusion.

  Heading back to the RV as magenta streaks thickened over the desert to the east, Stirling knew the damage they had done was a poor substitute for his failure to hit the airfield. Seekings and Cooper, though, were flying high. They had run the gauntlet of enemy fire together, and discovered suddenly that the bad blood
between them had evaporated. Thereafter, they became inseparable. ‘There was an almost intuitive rapport between them,’ Stirling said. ‘A marvellous team.’2

  On the way back, Paddy Mayne ribbed Stirling unmercifully on his second failure at Sirte.

  23. ‘The only one to be killed and it had to be him’

  Jalo felt desolate without the Indian and South African soldiers of Denys Reid’s E Force. The war passed into its third year without celebration, as Stirling waited anxiously for news of Lewes and Fraser. After dark on New Year’s Day, a single damaged Chevrolet limped into Jalo, carrying four LRDG troopers and three SAS-men. They were all that was left of the patrol of six vehicles and twenty-five men who had set out on Christmas Day to hit Nofilia and Marble Arch. The SAS-men were Jim Almonds, Jimmy Storie and Bob Lilley. The fourth enlisted man of their group, Cpl. Geordie White, had vanished. Bill Fraser’s entire section was missing. Jock Lewes was dead.

  Next morning, Stirling sent for Almonds, who marched into the CO’s tent still sporting his week-old beard. Stirling was stunned by the news of Lewes’s death. He wanted to know how he had died, but Almonds couldn’t provide an entirely coherent answer. He told Stirling that they had lucked out on the Nofilia raid. They had found only two aircraft on the strip, with their fuel-tanks empty – the planes hadn’t burst into flames when the charges detonated. They had been picked up by Morris’s patrol on 30 December, and the next day set off early to scoop up Fraser and his section near Marble Arch.

  It was 1000 hours. Almonds and Lilley were riding behind Lewes in a Ford with three LRDG men when the shadow of a Messerschmitt 110 passed over them like a giant bat. They watched frozen for a few seconds as she banked steeply and came in out of the sun at only sixty feet, with four wing-mounted machine guns blistering the ground. Two cannon in the rear gun-turret wheezed out incendiary shells. The drone of the engines and the tattoo of the guns was terrifying. Lilley pivoted the Lewis gun and had almost emptied the magazine before the driver braked. Everyone piled out and scattered. As he jumped, Almonds had a fleeting impression of Lewes in the front seat, ‘fiddling about with some papers’.1

  For the next few minutes Almonds and Lilley were too busy rattling Bren-gun rounds at the aircraft, and playing a hazardous game of hide and seek round a rocky knoll, to notice what had happened to Lewes. When the plane broke off her attack and vanished, Almonds was pretty sure he had snagged her rear-gunner. He sprinted back to find LRDG men milling round the truck, which was no longer where it had been when they ran for it. There was no sign of Lewes, but Almonds didn’t have time to think about it, because the driver was already revving the truck’s engine. He leapt in and they shot off into the desert. They covered another seven miles before a pair of Stukas rolled up, wailing like demons. The driver slammed brakes. Almonds hared off in double-quick time and sprawled in the thorn-scrub, assuming the most non-human-like posture he could, and layering himself with sand.

  It was getting on for sunset before the Stukas’ banshee shrieks finally went silent. By that time nine of Morris’s LRDG men had simply melted into the desert, taking with them SAS-man Cpl. Geordie White. All the Fords but one were smoking wrecks. It wasn’t until he met up with the truck crews again that Almonds discovered Lewes hadn’t made it. He had been hit on the Messerschmitt’s first run, but no one knew exactly what had happened.

  Jimmy Storie2 had helped bury Lewes’s body in the interval before Almonds had returned from his fight at the knoll. Storie said that Jock had been taken out by a 20mm slug in the thigh. The exit-wound had ripped half his leg away and slashed an artery, and he’d bled to death in about four minutes. He thought Lewes had been wounded while jumping from the truck. His body had been buried in the place the truck had originally been hit.

  Stirling listened solemnly, chewing at his pipe, then asked about Bill Fraser’s team. Almonds had no news. After Morris and his men had managed to get the one serviceable truck running that night, they’d made the rendezvous near Marble Arch, but Fraser hadn’t showed. Morris had decided they couldn’t wait till first light. With one battered truck to nine men, it was touch and go as to whether they would make it back to Jalo at all.

  Stirling wanted to know why Almonds hadn’t brought Lewes’s body back. Almonds was surprised. SAS operating procedure was to leave the dead, and even the wounded when they couldn’t be carried. Lewes himself had left Jock Cheyne on the DZ on Squatter. Almonds saw how profoundly Stirling had been affected by the loss of his friend. He empathized. His own first thought on hearing the news had been, ‘the only one to be killed and it had to be him. If the enemy only knew the loss to the SAS.’3

  Reg Seekings said later that Lewes’s death was such a blow to morale that some of the men wondered if it was worth going on. ‘Although I never met Lewes,’ wrote Malcolm Pleydell, ‘I hadn’t been in the SAS for long before I realized that he was the man who was responsible for its construction and organisation … by all accounts he was a remarkable man, possessing … a terrific drive of character together with a natural sense of leadership.’4 Pleydell recalled a later recruit to the SAS, Captain Jim Chambers, telling him, ‘[Lewes] never had any official sort of recognition but just you listen to some of the men talking about him. Anyone would think he was some sort of a god … If it hadn’t been for him none of us would be here now.’5 Pleydell added that the enlisted men always spoke of Lewes with admiration and ‘as much reverence as could be expressed in their rather gruff and unemotional voices’.6 ‘There is no doubt,’ Stirling himself wrote Lewes’s father a year later, ‘that any success the unit had achieved up to the time of Jock’s death, and after it, was, and is, almost wholly due to Jock’s work.’7

  24. ‘The day the SAS was truly born’

  During the first few days of the new year, when the seventeen-strong detachment was back from Jalo and settling into its base at Kabrit, David Stirling turned up with an unpleasant task to perform. He had just come from Cairo, and had every reason to be pleased with himself. Claude Auchinleck had been impressed with the unit’s performance. Crusader was over. Tobruk had been relieved, Benghazi taken and Rommel pushed back to Aghayla, from where he had started his offensive a year earlier. The Axis had lost three hundred aircraft, and almost a third of those had been taken out by the SAS.

  The Commander-in-Chief approved the new partnership with the LRDG, authorized the recruitment of thirty-three more volunteers, and agreed to Stirling’s new project – a raid on shipping in the harbour of Bouerat al-Hsun, a port on the coast of Tripolitania west of Sirte and Tamet. Stirling had been promoted major and Mayne captain. Both had been recommended for the DSO.

  Stirling had other promising developments in his pocket. He had come across fifty Free French parachutists of 1 Infantérie de l’Air languishing in Alexandria, under an irascible but keen-as-mustard young Gascon, Commandant Georges Bergé. With some difficulty, Stirling had persuaded the Free French commander in Cairo, General Catroux, to let them join the SAS. They would be in Kabrit shortly. He had also secured the services of Captain Bill Cumper, Royal Engineers, an explosives genius, who would fill Lewes’s role as demolitions instructor.

  The only cloud on Stirling’s horizon as he debussed at Kabrit that day was the necessity of telling Paddy Mayne that he had been struck off the orbat for the Bouerat op. This seemed a poor way of repaying the man who had done most to reverse the fortunes of the SAS, but Stirling had decided to appoint him officer-in-charge, recruitment and training. Kabrit would soon be swelling with almost a hundred recruits, and he had convinced himself that he needed a man like Mayne to inspire them. It was a job tailor-made for Jock Lewes, but Lewes was dead.

  In his tent, Stirling explained the situation to Mayne as diplomatically as he could, adding that it was ‘nothing personal’, and in the best interests of the SAS. The explosion he had half-expected didn’t come. Instead, Mayne’s eyes narrowed hazardously. He hinted obliquely that Stirling was jealous of his success. He was eliminating him from the field so as to over
take his ‘bag’.

  This was not as ludicrous as it sounded: Mayne and Stirling were still in their twenties. Stirling, a major at twenty-seven, had yet to make his mark in combat. Mayne had distinguished himself in action with 11 Commando, and had taken out more than fifty aircraft on recent ops. Stirling envied Mayne’s intuitive battlesense, and the way the men venerated him. While they responded to Stirling’s laid-back style of leadership, Mayne had the knack, as Stirling himself admitted, of touching just the right chord in each of them. He was a natural gang-leader, a born bandit-chief. While Stirling always seemed to have his head in the clouds, looking for lessons and patterns, Mayne concentrated on the job in hand. ‘[Mayne] was a very good fellow to operate with,’ said Mike Sadler, ‘because he gave a great sense of confidence and was focused on the operation, and knew exactly what was happening in it. David obviously did too, but he didn’t give you the same feeling.’1

  Mayne may have reminded Stirling that he had joined the SAS to ‘get a crack at the Hun’, not to become a ‘desk wallah’. Stirling stuck to his guns, and Mayne accepted the situation with bad grace, on the understanding it was temporary. He gave his CO the entirely unconvincing assurance that he would ‘do his best’. Stirling admitted later that the decision to chain his best fighter to a desk was ‘bloody stupid’. Despite his rhetoric about ‘what was best for the SAS’, though, he was at least partly motivated by his need to run an operation on which he would not, for once, be overshadowed by Mayne.