Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (13 page)

The participants would later describe what had happened at Mersa Brega as a “bash out,” a “shoot out,” and a “bit of fun.” None described it as what it really was: a ferocious, close-quarters gun battle, at once thrilling, petrifying, and exceptionally bloody.

Bill Fraser and his team had already set off for Agedabia by the time the other three patrols got back to Jalo. In a way, Fraser’s was the most crucial of the raiding parties. Brigadier Reid, the commander of E Force, was supposed to reach the area and link up with another flying column on December 22; if Fraser failed to inflict serious damage on the air squadron at Agedabia, the fighters and bombers could intercept Reid’s force in the open and cut it to pieces. Reid’s flying column set out in high spirits; only he and a handful of his officers knew that success, and survival, might well depend on five men trundling north in a lorry filled with explosives, just a few hours ahead of them.

Fraser and his team, armed with a total of forty Lewes bombs, were dropped by the LRDG sixteen miles short of the target; from a safe observation point, they counted thirty-nine planes on the airfield, including a number of Italian fighters parked wingtip to wingtip. At 9:15 p.m., in pitch-darkness, they reached the airfield perimeter and slipped through the fence, carefully stepping over some tripwire booby traps. Over the next thirty minutes they planted thirty-seven bombs on planes, with staggered timers to ensure that all exploded at roughly the same moment; one bomb was found to have a damaged detonator and the two remaining bombs were planted in the middle of a sandbagged building filled with shells, ammunition, and incendiaries. The first bomb went off at forty-two minutes past midnight, followed by three more in quick succession, as the attackers scrambled off the airfield. Marching at speed for the rendezvous point, they tried to count the explosions. Then the bomb dump went up “with a blood-curdling roar” that sucked the air out of their lungs from half a mile away. The little team “yelled with joy and excitement.”

The next morning, the LRDG trucks carrying Fraser and his men encountered the vanguard of Reid’s flying column, heading north. Fraser was summoned to report to the brigadier. “Sorry, Sir, I had to leave two aircraft on the ground as I ran out of explosives, but we destroyed thirty-seven,” he told the delighted Reid, who thumped him on the back and exclaimed, “There’s nothing to stop us now.” It later transpired that Rommel himself had been in the town of Agedabia that night. “He must have had a bit of a headache,” wrote Reid. Fraser, the most inscrutable and distant of the officers, had succeeded beyond all expectations and established an important principle: a team of just five men could wreck an entire airfield in a matter of minutes.

On December 23, Fraser’s team reached Jalo. An early Christmas celebration took place that night, with roasted gazelle, shot on the return journey, tinned Christmas pudding, and hot lime juice with rum. The Italian prisoner captured at the Mersa Brega roadhouse did a lot more singing. It was, wrote the cockney Bennett, “a very, very nice Christmas.”

In the space of just one week, starting with Mayne’s raid on Tamet and ending with Fraser’s attack on Agedabia, L Detachment had racked up an astonishing tally of destruction: more than sixty planes, at least fifty enemy killed or wounded, including a number of pilots, dozens of vehicles, several miles of telephone line, petrol dumps, a bomb depot, and a brothel. Two LRDG men escorting Fraser’s group had been accidentally killed by a British bomber, but the SAS unit had not suffered a single casualty. Total losses amounted to one secondhand Italian lorry. Cooper wrote that at last the founding theory of L Detachment had been “magnificently vindicated.”

Stirling had no intention of resting. Rommel was falling back and growing more dependent on air support than ever. The SAS would strike again.

Fraser had been back in camp for only a few hours when Stirling asked him, with unanswerable politeness, whether he “would mind” heading back out again to mount another raid, “if he was not too tired.” It would be “fun,” Stirling said, and might even lead to “the grand slam: fifty planes in one night.” It was an order, of course, disguised as an invitation, which encouraged the recipient to feel as if he was actually volunteering. Stirling somehow managed to make a perilous and daunting mission behind the lines sound like a day at the races, a spot of competitive excitement with convivial company. Stirling suggested that, after his first success, Fraser might like to attack the airfield at the Arco dei Fileni, the pompous stone arch erected near the coastal highway by Mussolini to mark the border between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. A triumph of fascist kitsch and a monument to Italy’s colonization of Libya, the British derisively referred to it as “Marble Arch.” It never occurred to Fraser to turn down Stirling’s courteous call to arms: no one ever did.

At the same time, Jock Lewes was detailed to attack the airfield at Nofilia, to the west, equidistant between Sirte and Marble Arch. Stirling and Mayne would launch a second attack on Tamet and Sirte: they knew the ground now, the enemy would not expect a repeat raid so soon, and, even if they did, they would have had little time to erect more robust defenses.

On Christmas Eve, Stirling, Mayne, and their men set off in a six-truck convoy, heading back to the coast. This time, the navigator Mike Sadler made for the Wadi Tamet, a long, deep ravine that ran into the desert from the town of Tamet. Entry to the ravine required a tricky drive down its steep sides but, once at the bottom, the trucks could drive at speed on a relatively flat surface with less danger of being spotted and attacked from the air. Three days later, at 9:00 p.m., some six miles from Tamet, the group split again: Mayne’s team set off for the airfield where he had inflicted such carnage two weeks earlier, while Stirling and his men climbed back into the trucks to drive to Sirte, along the coastal road. Both teams would attack at 1:00 a.m. The experience of the first raid seemed to suggest that they could simply drive along the road without attracting attention; but first they had to get onto it. Stirling and his team heard the traffic before they reached the road: an entire German armored division, tanks on trailers, lorries and armored cars, was rumbling down the road toward the front at Agheila, where Rommel was digging in. It was impossible to get onto the road without being spotted. For four hours, the long German convoy continued. In the early hours, exactly on schedule, the sky lit up over Tamet. “Paddy’s lit another bonfire,” said Cooper. Finally, at around 3:30 in the morning, the last vehicle in the German convoy passed, and the three LRDG trucks slipped warily onto the road. Stirling insisted on being dropped near the airfield, but time was running out. New fencing had been erected around the base. The LRDG would wait at the rendezvous until no later than 5:00 a.m. “There was no hope of cutting through the wire and destroying the planes within so short a time.” Once again, seething with frustration, Stirling called off the attack.

As a consolation, the LRDG agreed to drive along the road and, in the same manner as Lewes a few days earlier, “do a bit of shooting.” A few miles down the road, they came across twelve supply trucks parked up, their drivers asleep in tents nearby. The team quietly planted Lewes bombs and drove on. A little farther ahead stood a line of lorries and other vehicles, beside a larger tented encampment. As dawn was breaking, the three trucks screeched past, firing tommy guns and rifles and hurling grenades, before veering off into the desert. This action certainly terrified a lot of sleepy Germans, but how much real damage the drive-by shooting inflicted is debatable. Cooper described leaving behind a “total confusion of blazing vehicles,” but there was no disguising that Stirling’s second raid had also failed. Back at the Wadi Tamet they were reunited with Mayne and his team, which had destroyed another twenty-four aircraft at Tamet, many of them newly arrived from Italy to replace the planes wrecked the week before. Stirling tried to make light of his own failure. “I’ll have to pull my socks up,” he said. “The competition is too hot.” The remark was only half in jest. Like fighter pilots, the men were keeping a tally of their kills, which brought out “the spirit of personal competition.” Of the officers, only Stirling had so far failed to inflict any serious damage on the enemy.

Jock Lewes set out for Nofilia airfield on Christmas Day, in convoy with Fraser and his band. Lofty martial sentiments still burned brightly in Lewes’s heart, reminiscent of an earlier age of knightly valor and saintly sacrifice. “I feel my strength, and fear is far away,” he wrote. “I will not seek to save my life but will choose the most difficult and dangerous work…If I am to die it matters only to those who live on and whom by living I might have helped.” The news that he was likely to be decorated for his actions in Tobruk before joining the SAS only intensified his sense of glorious destiny. In October, he had written to Miriam Barford, asking for her hand in marriage. On Christmas Eve, he sent a telegram to his family, wishing them a happy Christmas and reporting that he now had a “Pullable Beard and Possible Medal.” Jim Almonds was in Lewes’s team. His thoughts also turned to home, to his sick son and the wife from whom he had concealed his activities. “What a Christmas,” he wrote in the diary addressed to his wife. “You think I am in a training job somewhere. I feel a terrible cad to be hoodwinking you like this, but if I told you the truth, well, you would only worry.”

Fraser and his team were dropped off for the attack on Marble Arch on December 27, with rations and water for three days. Lewes pushed on, telling Fraser he would pick him up on the way back.

The following day, the LRDG deposited Lewes’s team about eighteen miles from Nofilia aerodrome. A swift march and a dawn reconnaissance revealed potentially rich pickings. The airfield was covered in Stukas, the formidable German dive-bombers, brand-new to judge from their bright paintwork. Jim Almonds counted forty-three in all. “It must be glorious to soar over the desert on a morning like this,” he wrote in his diary. They would attack that night.

About a mile outside the airfield perimeter was a disused water cistern, or
ber,
an ancient storage tank hollowed out of the rock to collect the rare desert rainfall. It was dry, sheltered, and a convenient place to hide out and wait for night to fall. But it was not empty. In one corner lay the parchment-dry, skin-covered skeleton of a desert fox that must have fallen into the old well and found it impossible to escape. For all his ferocity, Almonds was a man of sensitivity. As they waited for darkness to fall, he found himself imagining the last struggles of the doomed fox. “It made quite an impression on me. It would obviously carry on, until it was too weak to jump any more. I felt deepest sympathy for the animal. The desire to live. The desire to see things through.”

At around 2:00 a.m, the men gathered their rucksacks and guns and crept onto the airfield. Lewes clamped a bomb on the first plane they found, and then a second. But as they pushed deeper onto the field, it rapidly became clear that all the other planes had gone. While the men had been in their snug underground cave, they had not heard the aircraft departing. Once again, a mission that had seemed so promising had come to nothing, or very little: even the two planes left on the airfield failed to explode properly, since they were almost empty of fuel.

The twenty-five-mile trudge back to the rendezvous point took all day. In darkness, the LRDG trucks turned and headed back to where Fraser and his team should have been waiting.

It was ten in the morning when the twin-engined Messerschmitt appeared above the horizon, making directly for the five-truck convoy. The drivers slammed on the brakes, in the hope that the pilot might not see them in the shimmering morning heat. The Messerschmitt flew overhead and seemed to be continuing on its way. “Everyone was breathing a sigh of relief,” wrote Almonds, when the fighter suddenly banked, performed a tight descending circle, and then roared in low, no more than thirty feet off the ground. “He’s coming back,” yelled Almonds. The convoy scattered. The Messerschmitt 110 was one of the most lethal fighters in the Luftwaffe, armed with four machine guns and two 20mm cannon capable of firing 650 rounds a minute. As one bore down on the truck with Lewes and Almonds, Almonds seized a Bren gun and scrambled out of the back. Another man grabbed the box of magazines as bullets thudded into the truck, tearing out the center of the floor and blowing off two of the wheels. Lewes, in the front seat, seemed to be fiddling with some papers, no doubt removing the operational orders in case the truck had to be abandoned. Almonds had spotted a rocky knoll nearby, about head-height, that might provide at least some cover. He and the man with the magazines ran for it, joined by three New Zealanders of the LRDG. The German plane had turned and was coming in again. Almonds set up the Bren behind the outcrop and started firing. There now ensued a “deadly game of ‘ring a roses’ around the rock”; the German plane was fast, but slow to turn; once it had made a strafing pass, the men would scramble around to the other side of the knoll and then blast away at the plane from behind.