The Regiment Page 9

  The devastating result of his attempted raid can only have sunk in fully, though, when Stirling arrived at the rendezvous with Captain Jake Easonsmith’s patrol later that day. Lewes was there with nine survivors – Pat Riley, Johnny Rose, Johnny Cooper, Jeff Du Vivier, Jimmy Brough, Jimmy Storie, Frank Rhodes, Charlie Cattell and Bob Lilley. Jake Easonsmith was rated as the LRDG’s best patrol commander. He had kept a couple of hurricane lamps burning all night on twin ridges above his vehicle-laager, to guide the SAS parties in. At first light he brought the lamps back and replaced them with a smoky fire of desert sedge as a beacon. His orders were to ditch the camp at 0700 hours, but in view of the fact that less than half of the SAS raiders had appeared, he pulled his six Fords into cover and stayed there another eight hours. Soon after dawn, Mayne’s section came in. They had spotted the lamps, but had laid up for the rest of the night in case it was an Axis trick. Mayne had eight men with him – Edward McDonald, Dave Kershaw, Harold White, Bob Bennett, Reg Seekings, Tom Chesworth, Tony Hawkins and Geordie White.

  Stirling could have trekked back to the fallback rendezvous in the Wadi al-Mra, where Bill Fraser was waiting with the two SAS Bedford trucks. He and all the men preferred to stay with Easonsmith and see if anyone else arrived. No one did. Dave Kershaw, nursing his smashed arm, reported that on the march back he had spotted another group in the distance and had identified them through his binos as Sgt. Major George Yates and others belonging to Stirling’s stick. He had shouted and fired his pistol, but they hadn’t responded. They had been going in the wrong direction.

  The men were shocked and dejected, not only by the loss of so many good mates, but by their failure to ‘get a good crack at the Hun’. Mayne thought his section had held up remarkably well. He was especially impressed with his section sergeant, Ed McDonald, who would end his career as an officer. Mayne felt that given even tolerably good weather the plan could have worked. But he was also shattered by the loss of his best friend, Eoin McGonigal. Bob Bennett was convinced this was the end of the SAS. Jeff Du Vivier agreed. He thought the next move would be a general RTU. Cooper and Riley both wanted to continue, but didn’t know if it was tenable.

  To the enlisted men, most of whom had known nothing of the LRDG until now, the answer seemed obvious. ‘Everybody said: “Well crikey, if these people can penetrate this far … why not get them to carry us in?”’ Seekings recalled. ‘We had no idea that we had patrols penetrating two, three or four hundred miles behind the enemy position, and it made the idea of parachuting in stupid …’5

  16. A landscape so vast it raked the senses

  It was probably while Stirling was riding back to base with Easonsmith that the full conceit of his original idea hit him. This was the first time he had been in the ‘real’ desert, and it was not the same place he had seen in the Canal Zone or Tobruk. This was the LRDG’s desert, a landscape so vast, endless and empty it raked the senses. It was a dimension beyond time and space, whose hugeness reduced even the great columns of the Eighth Army and the Panzergruppe Afrika to the status of ants, shaming the war into insignificant pettiness.

  That he had believed they could operate in this land of extremes, never having experienced it, must have begun to seem increasingly ludicrous. On the other hand, men could adapt to this wilderness. Jake Easonsmith, Royal Tank Regiment, had worked for a Bristol wine merchant before the war, and yet he led his patrol across the endless shimmering plains with the sureness of one born to it.

  Stirling watched Easonsmith and his patrol, mainly New Zealanders, with interest. He observed at first hand the accuracy of their navigation, the way they could exchange information quickly using wireless, their ability to improvise solutions to mechanical problems, the facility with which they read the desert surface, and most of all, the way they seemed to blend into the Sahara rather than standing out from it.

  The return was not without hazard. Next day, as the Fords were raking across the plain in a tailback of dust, there was a cry of ‘Aircraft!’ An Italian Savoia 70 fighter dipped over the convoy with its machine guns rattling like snare-drums, stitching a lethal pattern across the stones. The driver of the truck carrying Lewes and Riley took evasive action, and a second later the vehicle flipped over on its back, trapping the two SAS-men underneath.

  They were saved from being crushed only by the Lewis gun mounted on the back. By the time they crawled out, soaked in petrol, the Savoia had melted into the blue horizon, but Easonsmith guessed it would soon be back with help. Within minutes, his team had righted the truck and got the whole patrol into camouflaged positions. When the Savoia returned forty minutes later, riding shotgun for a Heinkel III bomber, the LRDG had cammed-up so expertly they were invisible. Instead, the Heinkel dropped its payload on some derelict trucks three miles away. All the following day, though, they had to remain in cover. The skies were teeming with enemy planes.

  17. ‘You’ll like him, and he’s well placed to help’

  It was not until Stirling was ushered into the presence of GOC Eighth Army Alan Cunningham at Fort Maddalena on 26 November that he fully realized how insignificant the Squatter flop was in the greater scheme of things. Cunningham was wrestling with the prospect of losing the entire battle. His plan, so uninspired it had confirmed Rommel’s analysis of British tactical methods as ‘stereotyped and over-systematic’, had backfired badly.

  He had hoped to lure Rommel into a stand-up duel at Gabr Salih, where superior British tank numbers – almost two to one – would outgun him. Instead the Desert Fox had lived up to his name as a ‘general gone raving mad’ and executed his notorious Dash for the Wire. Cunningham had been taken in, and had dispersed his armour. ‘What difference does it make if you have two tanks to my one,’ Rommel asked a captured British staff officer, ‘when you spread them out and let me smash them in detail?’1

  Stirling saw at once that Cunningham was under stress. He had expected some sort of reprimand, but the general spoke to him for no more than five minutes, and had little time to spare for the flea-bite loss of thirty-four parachutists and a Bombay aircraft, which had, in any case, been mainly a psy-ops gambit. He was only interested in whether Stirling had seen panzers on the Via Balbia, which he had not.

  The SAS had arrived at Jaghbub oasis in their own lorries at 1530 hours the previous day. Once the headquarters of the Senussiyya brotherhood, the most powerful Islamic fraternity in the Sahara, Jaghbub contained the ruins of a famous Quranic school and library. Now it was significant mainly as one of the Eighth Army’s forward landing grounds, and the site of a medical aid-post. After dispatching the wounded for medical treatment, Stirling received instructions to report to Eighth Army Advance HQ at Maddalena the following day. The rest of his party were to fly back to Baggush and await further orders. Stirling told Lewes to take them back to Kabrit.

  He left the GOC’s tent with some relief, not anticipating the swift succession of events that was to follow. That afternoon a plane landed on the airstrip at Maddalena, disgorging Chief of the General Staff Arthur Smith and his Deputy, Neil Ritchie. Smith marched smartly over to the tent and presented Cunningham with a letter from Auchinleck relieving him of command. The Eighth Army was to be handed over to Ritchie. Stirling was not altogether delighted by this development. He had no wish to face Ritchie and admit that his plan had failed. He was about to escape back to Jaghbub, when the new GOC issued a summons. He need not have worried. Ritchie, too, was mainly concerned with what he had observed on the coast-road. His only comments on the operation were ritual commiserations.

  Auchinleck hadn’t been taken in by Rommel’s madcap Dash to the Wire. He knew that, as on other offensives, this advance would soon be throttled by over-extended supply lines. Ritchie’s orders were to dispatch two flying columns across the desert to hit the Axis from the south, in support of a renewed offensive along the coast. One of these columns, E Force, under Brigadier Denys Reid, had captured the remote oasis of Jalo two days before Ritchie arrived. The second, Marriott Force, was to lin
k up with E Force in December.

  Stirling’s next parachute operation was scheduled to support the joint assault with a strike at Ajadabiyya aerodrome, on the coast of Cyrenaica. Stirling hadn’t lost interest in parachuting, but as he had only a handful of men left, he didn’t want to risk them on a jump that might wipe them out. He had already admitted to himself that his original proposal had been too ambitious.

  The formal suggestion that the SAS should accompany LRDG patrols came neither from Lloyd Owen nor Easonsmith, but from the LRDG commander, Lt. Col. Guy Prendergast, a reserved ex-Royal Tank Regiment officer who had been part of Bagnold’s pre-war club. He was now the Eighth Army’s desert expert and, in practical terms, the real ‘godfather’ of the SAS. On 28 November a signal arrived from the LRDG base at Siwa oasis: ‘As LRDG not trained for demolitions,’ Prendergast’s message ran, ‘suggest pct [parachutists] used for blowing dromes.’2 This was followed the same day by a signal from Maddalena to GHQ in Cairo, inquiring if the Detachment had reached Kabrit. If so, they were to collect demolition equipment and report as soon as possible for a ‘special mission with the LRDG’.3

  While at Maddalena, Stirling bumped into Marriott Force chief Brigadier Sir John Marriott, whom he knew as a fellow Scots Guards officer and Commander, 22 Guards Brigade. One of the Randolph Churchill–Evelyn Waugh ‘Silver Circle Club’, of which Stirling himself was an honoured member, Marriott was sympathetic. According to Stirling’s account, Marriott advised him to ‘lie low’ for a while, away from GHQ, and away from Ritchie. Reid’s new base at Jalo was exactly what the doctor ordered: in the middle of nowhere, out of sight of Eighth Army HQ, out of Rommel’s line of retreat, yet superbly placed as a launch-pad for mobile raids. ‘If you’re looking for a supply base to leech on to,’ he told Stirling, ‘Denys is your man. You’ll like him, and he’s well placed to help.’4

  Whether this conversation actually took place is uncertain, but if so, Stirling didn’t take Marriott’s advice. Signals traffic compiled by David List reveals conclusively that four days after meeting Ritchie, Stirling was at GHQ in Cairo, probably to run the new idea past the operations staff. He did take on board Marriott’s suggestion about moving to Jalo, though, and arrived there with two dozen SAS-men on 6 December.

  18. ‘Advance and attack any suitable objectives’

  Jalo was not a story-book oasis. Lying two hundred miles west of the border, it consisted of a thousand palm trees, brackish springs, a Turkish fort and two mud-brick villages half buried in sand. The wind hardly ever ceased here. It whipped across the open plains, layering the air endlessly with a miasma of brimstone-scented dust. When the wind did drop, the flies moved in. The nearest sweet water was twenty miles away. Protected by a jagged hammada of angular boulders on the western side, Jalo’s southern approaches lay across the Kalansho Serir – a sand-sheet of chilling monotony where a vehicle could speed on for mile after mile without encountering a tree, a ridge or a single stone. To the east lay the cut-glass facets of the Kalansho sand-sea, where the wind honed knife-blade crests on sand-plinths hundreds of feet high.

  The entire operational orbat of L Detachment had been landed by three Bombays of 216 Squadron. A few familiar faces were absent, including Pat Riley, and ‘Honest Dave’ Kershaw, currently in hospital in Cairo. There was a handful of replacements from Kabrit, including Bill Fraser, Jack Byrne, Arthur Phillips, Ted Badger, Frank Austin and Sgt. Jim Almonds, all of whom had missed the first op. Almonds had been stunned to discover that one of his ‘Tobruk Four’ mates, Jim Blakeney, had been lost.

  Stirling set up his headquarters in a disused warehouse. He met Denys Reid, a giant of a man with a florid drinker’s face, and found him as accommodating as Marriott had claimed. Reid at once saw the value of the SAS in ‘making a show’ at Axis aerodromes in the Aghayla–Ajadabiyya area, to cover his December offensive. Stirling also introduced himself to Major Don Steele, commanding A Squadron, LRDG, which had arrived at Jalo a few days earlier. Steele, ex-2 New Zealand Expeditionary Force, was a veteran operator of the ‘desert troops’. He had with him thirty men in three patrols – New Zealanders, Rhodesians and Guardsmen – with sixteen 30cwt Fords and a light recce vehicle. Steele’s squadron had been placed under Reid’s command, with orders from Eighth Army HQ to ‘advance and attack any suitable objectives on enemy communications’.1 This matched Stirling’s plans perfectly.

  The day after their arrival, Stirling assembled his men in the shade of a palm grove and told them the SAS was not finished. They were still a parachute force, but for now they would be operating overland with LRDG patrols. They would be going into action almost immediately.

  19. Swallowed up by the huge dimensions

  Stirling and Mayne quit Jalo next day with eleven SAS-men and eighteen troopers of the LRDG’s Rhodesian patrol under Captain Gus Holliman, Royal Tank Regiment. Their targets were the airfields at Tamet and Sirte, almost three hundred and fifty miles to the north-west. Jock Lewes would follow with his section two days later, to bump Aghayla aerodrome, about a hundred and fifty miles away. These three raids would be synchronized for the night of 14/15 December. The raid against Ajadabiyya – four men under Lt. Bill Fraser – would not go in until a week later, to prepare the way for Reid’s link-up with Marriott the next day.

  Mayne’s and Stirling’s sections were carried in five stripped-down Fords. As the trucks fanned out into the plain north of the oasis, the SAS-men felt swallowed up by the huge dimensions of the Sahara. Minutes faded into hours. The sun rose higher, leaching the rainbow colours from the desert. The trucks were a flotilla of tiny boats cast out into a vast ocean of stippled sand, black gravel beaches, tussock grass and desert sedge, thickets of acacia as fragile and desiccated as skeletons. To the west, they could make out the splintered scabs of rubble-stone escarpments, and to the east the iridescent sand-cliffs of the Kalansho dune-field, almost translucent in the heat-haze. To the north the horizon vanished into the trembling fata morgana of spectral lakes and cloud.

  Holliman, a stocky, blond Englishman, was leading the convoy with his navigator, Corporal Mike Sadler. An elvish-looking, tow-haired twenty-two-year-old, Sadler was an Englishman who had emigrated to Rhodesia in his youth to learn farming. He had been a sergeant in an anti-tank unit and was good with figures, but hadn’t studied navigation before joining the LRDG. He had taken to it like a fish to water, and was already Holliman’s most promising navigator.

  Sadler sat next to the driver, log in hand, his eyes flicking continually from the sun-compass, a steel needle casting a shadow on the vehicle’s dashboard, to the speedometer, to his watch, and back again to the compass. He plotted the course by dead-reckoning, noting every change in bearing, and logging the time and speed. At every opportunity he would mark the patrol’s progress on the map.

  At the evening halt, Sadler would lug out a theodolite to check the dead-reckoning position by astral fix. He took the ‘shot’ against the sixth pip of the Greenwich time-signal, picked up by the patrol’s W/T operator on the wireless truck, noted by a timekeeper with a Zenith Chronometre stop-watch. Sadler would then match the ‘shot’ against RAF astronomical charts, and compare the result with his dead-reckoning fix. Despite all the trouble, the log wasn’t that accurate, but if it brought the patrol to within a mile of its objective, Holliman was satisfied.

  On the patches of easy going the trucks sped along at forty miles an hour in fantails of dust, drifting back and forth in open and asymmetrical formation, to present a difficult target for enemy aircraft. On straight-line runs they would make deliberate one-and-a-half-mile detours every six miles to throw off air-spotters dogging their tracks. On rocky ground or in soft sand they slowed to no more than ten miles an hour.

  These Fords had reinforced springs – they were heavily laden with petrol, water, weapons and equipment, and carried .303 calibre Lewis machine guns on the back. Getting bogged down in mish-mish – soft sand – was a continual hazard. The LRDG crews would jump out with shovels and unload their steel
sand-channels and canvas sand-mats – both devices invented by Bagnold, and by now standard issue in the desert. The crew would shovel sand from under the Ford’s rear wheels and slide the steel channel underneath. The mat would go under the front wheels. Once the vehicle’s back wheels got some purchase, the crew would lay successive channels until the Ford was out of the soft patch.

  Mish-mish – literally ‘apricots’ – lay in places where the silicon particles hadn’t jelled, and there were relatively big air-pockets between grains. Pressure caused the grains to compress. The LRDG drivers could sometimes spot mish-mish by surface pattern – they had become expert at reading the desert ‘going’. The vehicles were hard to spot from the air, but there were dust plumes and tyre-tracks that aircraft could home in on. After a contact, the patrols would go to ground in the shade of a dune or a wadi, or in acacia scrub, with camouflage-nets flung right over the vehicles. As SAS medical officer Malcolm Pleydell said later, ‘There is no lesson that improves camouflage as well as a low-level machine-gun attack.’1

  Stirling reassigned himself the role of apprentice: there was a great deal to be learned. Over the first three days the SAS started to get into the rhythm of the desert drive. The patrol travelled from sunrise to sunset, and as the heat got up mid-morning, off would come the LRDG’s calf-length sheepskin coats, pullovers and shirts. They would strip right down to their drill shorts and sandals. Crossing open desert, the LRDG favoured Arab shamaghs as headgear. The SAS would later adopt the shamagh themselves, though they, like the LRDG, were careful to remove it once they were near the enemy. The LRDG had learned that by mirroring the khaki-drill uniforms of Axis troops they could often pass them quite unnoticed.