Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (24 page)

Bob Lilley had been one of the first to sign up with L Detachment. Nearing forty, he was one of the oldest men in the unit, and one of the toughest, with dark curly hair and black eyes. “Never hilarious and never downhearted,” wrote Pleydell. “He always maintained a steady level of good humour as if life could not spring any surprises on him.” The previous twenty-four hours had tested even Lilley’s prodigious reserves of phlegm.

On separating from Mayne, he and a companion had come across a house near the airfield with a garden surrounded by a thick, well-tended hedge. With dawn breaking, concealment seemed the best option. Lilley climbed under the hedge and, with a composure that seems scarcely human, fell asleep. When he awoke, he was alone. The other man was never seen again. His fate has never been established. A friendly Alsatian dog appeared, and insisted on licking Lilley’s face, until he punched the animal on the nose and it shot off whimpering. Italian voices could be heard on all sides. Concluding that capture was all but certain if he remained under the hedge, and even more likely if he tried to run away, Lilley opted for a tactic of extreme nonchalance. “I got out of the bush, stood up, and started to saunter off.” He continued walking, through an enemy camp in the process of waking up. On all sides, Italian and German soldiers were shaving, washing, and lining up for breakfast. They paid no attention whatever to another man in shirtsleeves and shorts trudging through the encampment. Eventually, he found himself on a deserted road, running parallel to a railway line, and began to walk in what he hoped was an easterly direction.

A dot appeared on the road up ahead, which gradually resolved itself into an Italian soldier on a bicycle. The Italian slowed as he reached Lilley, staring hard. Then he stopped and dismounted. Lilley reckoned the cyclist was probably about twenty years old. Lilley understood no Italian, but by the man’s gestures, which were not friendly, he plainly indicated that Lilley was now a prisoner and should accompany back him to the camp. “This I had no intention of doing,” Lilley later recalled. “So we got to wrestling.” Beside a railway line in the desert, two soldiers on opposite sides of the war, entirely without animus, now engaged in a hand-to-hand fight in the sand that was short, fierce, and lethal. The young Italian was fitter, but Lilley fought with the desperation of a man who believes he has no choice. “I got my hands around his throat and strangled him.”

Bob Lilley later described the episode to Malcolm Pleydell. “Funny, killing a chap with your own hands, doc. I can still see his white face and dark brown eyes quite clearly. I left him lying there, sprawled out and looking up at the sun.” Lilley picked up the dead man’s cap and placed it over his face, as if he was sleeping. Then he climbed on the bike and began pedaling toward the tribal camp on the horizon.

—

David Stirling prided himself on being “non-swanks,” never boasting of his own or his unit’s achievements. But back at the rendezvous in the Jebel, having at last taken part in a successful raid, he could not resist showing off: “It’s a bit of a change to see my fires lighting up the sky instead of yours,” he said to Paddy Mayne.

The rivalry between these two men was childish in the extreme, yet for Stirling it also served a purpose. Years later, the SAS founder admitted that while he had done his best to appear intrepid at all times, he had often struggled with his own fear. “I was afraid, on many occasions. I’ve little doubt we all were, but the secret—and perhaps the hardest thing of all—is to control that fear.” Mayne, however, seemed entirely immune to anxiety. Stirling’s terror of being found fearful in front of Mayne was greater than the fear itself. “With someone like Paddy in competition, and we were competitive, there was little danger of fear taking over.”

“Half-joking” (but only half), Stirling inquired whether Mayne would care to come and inspect his handiwork: “It might be fun to go and see if the bits and pieces are still burning.”

“I was being a little pomposo,” he later admitted. Mayne immediately accepted what was, in effect, a challenge. “I want to make sure you’re not exaggerating,” he said, with a glinting grin.

And so they set off the next morning, in a brand-new Chevrolet truck borrowed from the LRDG, on a secondary raid that was unscheduled, unnecessary, and dangerous, prompted solely by a schoolboy rivalry between grown men. “It was foolish of course,” Stirling acknowledged. “But that’s how we were.” Mayne drove. Alongside him sat Stirling and Karl Kahane, an Austrian Jew from Buck’s SIG unit who had spent twenty years in the German army before emigrating to Palestine. In the back sat Seekings, Cooper, and Lilley, the desert strangler, with a Lewis machine gun concealed under a tarpaulin.

On the Benina road, about ten miles from the airfield, they hit a roadblock. Not a flimsy Italian barrier, but a newly built construction of concrete and barbed wire, which could be neither rammed nor skirted. As Mayne came to a stop, a German sergeant major emerged from the guardhouse, carrying a “potato-masher” hand grenade in one hand and a torch in the other. At least a dozen German sentries stood in a semicircle, with automatic weapons ready. Karl Kahane did not wait for the sentry to speak: “We’re coming from the front. We haven’t had a bath for weeks, and we’re hungry. So cut out the formalities and let us through.”

The sergeant major seemed unimpressed.

“Password,” he grunted.

Kahane did not know the password. He did, however, know how to deliver a dressing down in fluent German military argot. Paddy Mayne paraphrased the speech that followed: “How the fuck do we know what the fucking password is, and don’t ask for our fucking identity cards either. They’re lost and we’ve been fighting for the past seventy hours against these fucking Tommies. Our car was destroyed and we were lucky to capture this British truck and get back at all. So hurry up and get that fucking gate open.”

Still unconvinced, the German moved around to the driver’s side, until he stood just three feet from the window.

At this moment Paddy Mayne did something very foolish, or very brave, but certainly effective. He cocked the Colt revolver held in his lap, with a loud click. The sergeant major heard the noise and knew exactly what it meant: he was a hair trigger away from a gun battle, in which he would be the first victim. Everyone remained “perfectly still for a few seconds” and then, as Mayne later wrote, the man made a sensible calculation: “If anyone was going to be hurt, he was going to be a sick man very early on.” The German signaled his men to raise the barrier, and the truck trundled through.

The sergeant major was certain to radio ahead that enemy forces were approaching. Sure enough, four miles farther on stood another guard post with half a dozen Italian soldiers drawn up across the road “waving rifles.” Mayne accelerated; the Italians scattered. As the truck stormed through, Seekings opened up with the Lewis machine gun. The enemy was now fully alerted, yet Stirling insisted they could not depart without leaving “a calling card.” In the next half-hour, they blew up an unguarded transport filling station and fuel depot, set Lewes bombs on a small fleet of heavy lorries in a car park, and opened fire on the roadhouse beside it, where a number of Germans and Italians were drinking. “Short, snappy and exhilarating” was how Mayne described the engagement.

A five-mile dash across the rocky plain, with a German armored car in pursuit, was ended when the truck reached the safety of a deep ravine. The German pursuers fell back, fearful of an ambush. Maneuvering the truck up the other side of the steep gully took several more hours. “In the end we practically carried it up,” grumbled Seekings.

It was a long drive back to the rendezvous. The men lolled drowsily against the sides of the truck. Suddenly Lilley shouted: “Burning fuse! Get out, quick.” Mayne did not even have time to brake. The men scrambled out with the vehicle still moving, moments before a deafening explosion threw them all to the ground. According to the SAS War Diary, “Lilley just cleared the truck as it blew up.” The jolting ride had set off a time pencil, and Lilley had picked up the smell of a burning fuse seconds before detonation. What remained of the brand-new truck, observed Lilley, “could have been put in a haversack.” They set off again on foot, snorting with laughter.

—

As the teams reassembled in the Jebel on June 14 and 15, Stirling assessed the results and counted the cost. Augustin Jordan, who would take over from the captured Bergé as leader of the French contingent, was the lone survivor of his squad, and distraught. But dozens of planes had been destroyed in the combined raids, the Axis airfields had been distracted at a key moment, and large numbers of enemy troops had been tied down dealing with the threat. Of the seventeen Allied ships that had steamed off to relieve Malta, just two made it through to the island with desperately needed supplies, yet Stirling looked back with satisfaction on the operation. Had the SAS not been so successful in disrupting the airfields and wrecking planes, he believed, none of the convoy would have gotten through. With an untypical degree of “swanks,” he later insisted: “We regard what we did as saving Malta.”

Not until the unit returned to Siwa Oasis on June 21, to find the LRDG hastily evacuating the base, did Stirling discover how radically the war picture had been redrawn, once again, in his absence. That afternoon, the BBC announced that Tobruk was once more in German hands. On May 26, before Auchinleck’s offensive, Rommel had launched his own attack, a brilliant lightning strike that would send the Allies reeling back 150 miles. The Afrika Korps was pushing into Egypt, while the British fell back, fighting hard, to a new defensive line running between El Alamein and the Qattara Depression. The Royal Navy was pulling out of Alexandria, bonfires of secret papers were being lit in Cairo, and the surging Axis powers scented victory in North Africa. Hitler promoted Rommel to the rank of field marshal, and told Mussolini that the decisive blow would be delivered without delay. “The Goddess of battles visits warriors only once,” he declared, in the sort of pompous tosh favored by dictators down the ages.

Churchill was blunter: “Egypt must be held at all costs.”

As the convoy rumbled into the desert, Malcolm Pleydell was elated, excited, and slightly bemused. For the second time in as many months, he had absolutely no idea where he was going, or what he might be called on to do when he got there. He knew he was part of a substantial raiding party, but beyond that the operation had been “surrounded by an atmosphere of delightful vagueness.” Stirling had promised only that they would “have some fun.” The uncertainty was deliberate, for Cairo was riddled with spies. The men seemed “light-hearted and carefree,” singing lustily as they headed off on a mission from which some would surely not return. That probability was never discussed. “To suggest a person was worried, in the slightest degree, was equivalent to the vilest form of abuse,” wrote Pleydell. The doctor had spent the previous week issuing emergency first-aid kits. No one ever asked for instruction on how to use them, or even admitted that they might be necessary. Pleydell found this refusal to acknowledge the risks of what they were doing bizarre, and rather wonderful. He expected to be away from camp for just a few days; he would spend the next five weeks in the desert.

With the Afrika Korps just forty miles from Alexandria, the military equation had altered once again. Rommel’s extended supply lines offered inviting new targets, including several additional airfields along the Egyptian coast. Instead of launching piecemeal attacks on moonless nights, Stirling now intended to deploy almost his entire force, numbering more than a hundred men, to an advance camp in the desert. From Qaret Tartura, a remote patch of scrub on the edge of the Qattara Depression, in the northwest of Egypt, they could harry and raid for weeks at a time without returning to base. To transport the men and supplies to the forward base Stirling obtained a fleet of three-ton trucks and, crucially, twelve brand-new four-wheel-drive American jeeps. These latter vehicles would transform SAS tactics. With the addition of a bulletproof windscreen from a Hurricane fighter, a water condenser to prevent overboiling, an armor-plated radiator, camouflage paint, reinforced suspension, and extra fuel tanks, these little cars became the most nimble desert vehicles. “The astonishing agility of the jeep enabled us to approach a target at night over almost any country,” said Stirling, who added one more crucial modification. The Vickers K machine gun, capable of firing up to 1,200 rounds a minute, was originally intended for use on bombers to defend against fighter aircraft. A cache of these powerful guns was found in an Alexandria warehouse, and fitted to three jeeps as an experiment: two had twin guns bolted to the front, and the third carried four guns on two mountings, fore and aft. When the Vickers guns were fired simultaneously, the recoil caused the vehicle to shudder and buck like a spooked horse, but the destructive effect was dramatic and terrifying, laying down a solid curtain of fire. L Detachment engineers transformed the jeeps into heavily armed, all-terrain combat vehicles: light, sturdy, versatile, and lethal.