Authors: Ben Macintyre
Tags: #World War II, #History, #True Crime, #Espionage, #Europe, #Military, #Great Britain
The hugely valuable partnership with the LRDG was nearing an end. After more than six months of operations the desert had become familiar terrain, and the SAS was now sufficiently expert in navigation to be able to operate without its “taxi service.” “By the end of June [1942], L Detachment had raided all the more important German and Italian aerodromes within 300 miles of the forward area, at least once or twice, and some of them even three or four times.” Mike Sadler was invited to join the unit as its senior navigator; he needed little persuading. Stirling decided to promote him. “You had better go down to the bazaar and get yourself some ‘pips,’ ” he told the twenty-two-year-old Sadler, who did as he was told and transformed himself, sartorially, into a lieutenant. No one got around to informing the authorities of his promotion.
With its own transport and navigators, and the ability to attack at will from a forward base, L Detachment was fast becoming what Stirling had always intended it to be: a small, independent army, capable of fighting a different sort of war. “We were now self-supporting,” Stirling later recalled, and from this point on “we really began to exercise our muscularity.”
The convoy passed through the lines of the Eighth Army and into the no-man’s-land beyond. “How frail and thin the line looked to be holding Rommel in check before the very gates of Alexandria,” Pleydell reflected. To the south, the great Qattara Depression stretched away, a wilderness of salt pans and sand dunes covering seven thousand square miles, the second lowest point in Africa, and one of the most desolate. Ralph Bagnold, founder of the LRDG, had skirted the northern edge of the depression in 1927, believing the area to be impassable. It now formed a natural barrier blocking the southern end of the front line, the edge of what would be the El Alamein battlefield. A lone German outpost was deployed in the emptiness, with the thankless task of watching for enemy movements. Every day the wireless operator sent the same message, “Nothing to report,” a statement so monotonous and predictable that it helped the code breakers of Bletchley Park to crack the Enigma code.
To Pleydell’s eyes, this was “a stricken landscape…with only the old Arab track to show that man had travelled this way before, and here and there the smooth bleached skeleton of a camel, so old that the bone crumbled in the hand.” The overladen convoy repeatedly got bogged down in the fine, light sand beneath the desert crust known in Arabic as
fech fech
. Through the haze, Pleydell’s driver pointed out a man in the far distance, standing on an outcrop, watching them. A Bedouin? A German scout? A spotter for an LRDG patrol? No one seemed unduly worried, but Pleydell never forgot “the memory of that lone figure, and the uncanny sensation of having been watched in that bleak wilderness.” That night they camped in a small wadi. Exhausted, Pleydell lay down in the sand and wrapped himself in his blanket: “I fell asleep wondering if I should ever be able to grow a decent beard like some of the other chaps.”
The next night, the attacking forces moved some sixty miles north of the forward patrol base at Qaret Tartura, and then split into raiding parties. George Jellicoe and André Zirnheld, the French philosopher, set off to reconnoiter the coast road and strafe any targets that happened to appear. Stirling and Mayne headed for Bagush, the airfield from which the disastrous Operation Squatter had set off, now in German hands. The French commander, Augustin Jordan, and Bill Fraser were slated to attack two airfields at Fuka; Pleydell would accompany them in a noncombat role. The doctor watched Fraser’s preparations with misgivings. “Poor Bill. God, I hope they don’t get him,” he reflected. “He seemed almost too young and boyish for this sort of thing.” Pleydell and two drivers remained with the vehicles, as Fraser slipped into the darkness.
Two hours later he reappeared, alive but exceedingly grumpy, complaining that the French party attacking the other Fuka airfield had started a firefight, which had alerted the sentries and rendered his own attack impossible. (In fact, Jordan and his French team had destroyed eight Messerschmitts, with only one minor injury.) On the way back, Fraser told Pleydell a revealing story. Crawling through the darkness at the airstrip perimeter, he had heard Italian voices and realized that a small band of sentries was standing not more than ten yards away. Quietly, Fraser extracted a hand grenade and was about to pull the pin “when he thought better of it,” stowed the grenade, and slipped away. Fraser never explained this act of mercy. “Perhaps he thought they were too childlike to be killed in cold blood,” reflected Pleydell. “But for a kind thought…three or four Italians would now be buried under the sand of Fuka, three or four families would have been bereaved.” Fraser was no less brave than Mayne and Stirling, and perfectly capable of killing when necessary; he just could not kill when it was not.
Back at the rendezvous, Stirling greeted the returning parties and totted up the scores, “welcoming us as if we had just come back from a game of golf.” Jellicoe and Zirnheld had blown up a truck, gathered useful intelligence on the nearby Al Daba airfield, and taken three German prisoners. The most successful round was completed by Stirling’s own party, which had destroyed thirty-seven planes.
In the course of the attack on Bagush, Stirling had discovered a new way to play the game, with jeeps.
Bombs had been planted on more than thirty planes in Bagush, but at least a dozen of these failed to detonate, due to damp fuses. Stirling suggested they return, immediately, and complete the job with the jeep-mounted machine guns. “After all,” he pointed out, “they were designed to shoot up aircraft.” Stirling led the way in the Blitz Buggy; Cooper manned the single Lewis gun alongside him; another gunner sat behind the twin guns in the rear; Mayne followed in one armed jeep, with another behind. The gunners were instructed to fire low, aiming for the petrol tanks. Still reeling from the initial assault, the defenders of Bagush were not expecting another, let alone the bristling little procession that now drove on to the airfield. At a stately fifteen miles per hour, the cars, with ten yards between them, drove around the remaining planes, pouring out a devastating broadside, at a combined rate of something close to 10,000 rounds a minute. As each plane exploded, the fire illuminated the next. Cooper had emptied a third magazine when his gun jammed. “The Vickers was designed for use in aircraft and therefore air-cooled. It would only accept a certain amount of ammunition down its throat before demanding a rest.” The convoy left a scene of “complete confusion.” Pleydell could see the conflagration from eighteen miles away, as repeated explosions “lit up the skyline like summer lightning.” At dawn, nearing the rendezvous, they came under attack from Italian fighters, which had probably followed their tracks across the desert. Stirling and Cooper leaped out as a plane swooped in. Seconds later there was an explosion, bringing the short but remarkable career of the Blitz Buggy to a fiery end. They walked the rest of the way.
Worried that Italian reconnaissance planes might have identified the encampment at Qaret Tartura, Stirling gave orders to relocate the forward base twenty-five miles west, to a spot known as Bir el Quseir, a long, low escarpment with numerous fissures and gullies ideal for concealing the vehicles. For the next month, this would be the SAS’s desert home. The raids continued: on the night of July 11, a party under Mayne destroyed at least fourteen planes at Al Daba. Jordan wrecked eight more at Fuka. But while the tally mounted, so did the toll. The day after Mayne’s raid, a patrol led by a dashing LRDG officer named Robin Gurdon (identified by Stirling as a possible second in command) came under attack from Italian fighters; Gurdon was shot through the stomach and chest, and died before Pleydell could reach him. The doctor had come to know Gurdon well and felt his loss keenly. The men almost never talked about their dead comrades. “You could never show your true feelings on the subject,” Pleydell noted. But when no one was looking, he wept. “How strange the desert war seemed,” he wrote. “The way we travelled over vast tracts of wilderness in order to search out and kill one another.”
—
In the desert camp, an oddly peaceful, almost domestic routine developed. The doctor set up a makeshift surgery in a small cave, where the men came to be treated for desert sores and other ailments. To while away the hours, he made a study of the local fauna, such as it was: snakes, scorpions, and the occasional howling jackal at night. Paddy Mayne wore a “sleepy grin as he lay in the shadow of his jeep reading a Penguin and flicking away the occasional fly.” Pleydell saw he was reading
The Spanish Farm
trilogy by Ralph Hale Mottram, First World War novels depicting an oasis of calm in the midst of a brutal war. Stirling spent the quiet hours happily reliving the recent raids and planning the next ones, “lying beneath the belly of a three-ton lorry, on his back, with one leg crossed languidly over the other, sucking peacefully on his empty pipe…for all the world, as if he was discussing the form of a point to point.” Stirling never relaxed his dress code: whether going into battle or unwinding after it, he always wore a tie. The men chatted idly in the heat, using a shared jargon, weighted with euphemism, black humor, and profanity, a private language unintelligible to a stranger: heading into the desert was “going up the blue”; a raid was “a party” or “jolly”; grumbling was “ticking”; sinking into sand was “crash diving” or “periscope work.”
One night, around the campfire after a dinner of bully-beef stew, someone opened an extra bottle of rum. “As it grew darker, the men began to sing, at first slightly self-conscious and shy, but picking up confidence as the song spread.” Their songs were not the martial chants of warriors, but the schmaltzy romantic popular tunes of the time: “I’ll Never Smile Again,” “My Melancholy Baby,” “I’m Dancing with Tears in My Eyes.” The bigger and burlier the singer, Pleydell noted, the more passionate and heartfelt the singing. Now the French contingent struck up, with a warbling rendition of “Madeleine,” the bittersweet song of a man whose lilacs for his lover have been left to wilt in the rain. Then it was the turn of the German prisoners who, after some debate, belted out “Lili Marleen,” the unofficial anthem of the Afrika Korps, complete with harmonies:
“Vor der Kaserne / Vor dem grossen Tor / Stand eine Laterne / Und steht sie noch davor…”
(Usually rendered in English as: Underneath the lantern, / by the barrack gate, / darling, I remember, / how you used to wait.) As the last verse died away, the audience broke into loud whistles and applause.
To his own astonishment, Pleydell was profoundly moved. “There was something special about that night,” he wrote years later. “We had formed a small solitary island of voices; voices which faded and were caught up in the wilderness. A little cluster of men singing in the desert. An expression of feeling that defied the vastness of its surroundings…a strange body of men thrown together for a few days by the fortunes of war.”
The doctor from Lewisham had come in search of authenticity, and he had found it deep in the desert, among hard soldiers singing sentimental songs to imaginary sweethearts in three languages.
—
Navigating across the desert is not easy at any time. Crossing seventy miles of desert, in the middle of the night, followed by seventeen heavily armed jeeps, with no headlights, an ancient map, and an increasingly impatient commanding officer was the sort of task only a navigator who was either supremely gifted, or mad, would have considered undertaking.
“Where are we?” demanded David Stirling, peering into the gloom.
“By my reckoning we’re less than a mile short of the field,” said Mike Sadler. “It’s right in front of us.”
At that instant the desert ahead exploded in a flood of artificial light. The landing-strip lights had been switched on at Sidi Haneish airstrip, 235 miles west-northwest of Cairo on the Egyptian coast. A Luftwaffe night bomber was coming in to land. The date was July 26, 1942. Sadler had brought them directly onto the target, on time, on the nose.
“That,” said Sadler many years later, with thumping understatement, “was a bit of a relief.”
At Stirling’s signal, eighteen jeeps rolled forward, each armed with four Vickers machine guns, enough firepower to destroy an entire air force: which was exactly what he had in mind.
A few days earlier, lolling under the truck and sucking on his pipe, Stirling had come up with a new plan, and a change of tactics: a massed jeep attack. At the First Battle of Alamein during July, Allied forces had stalled a second German advance into Egypt. The Eighth Army had taken more than thirteen thousand casualties, and the North African war was again reduced to stalemate; but Rommel’s eastward thrust toward Alexandria and Cairo had been halted. According to air reconnaissance reports, Sidi Haneish—or Fuka Landing Ground 12—was the main German staging area for planes going to and from the front, principally Junkers 52s, the transport aircraft on which Rommel was known to rely. L Detachment had been founded on concepts of stealth and economy, small groups of men achieving disproportionate results; the very success of those techniques now necessitated a noisier and blunter approach.
Tales of the British commandos able to slip behind the lines and inflict devastating damage before flitting back into the desert had begun to spread on both sides of the front line. German radio, it was said, had even bestowed a nickname on the shadowy commander of this band of marauding rogues: “The Phantom Major.” The nickname was probably an invention of British propaganda, but it stuck. Stirling’s activities certainly came to the attention of Rommel, who wrote in his diary: “These commandos, working from Kufra [an oasis near the Egyptian border] and the Qattara Depression, sometimes operated right up into Cyrenaica, where they caused considerable havoc and seriously disquieted the Italians.” British censorship (and good sense) precluded reporting on SAS operations, but in the ranks of the Eighth Army, stories of the unit’s derring-do became a staple of barroom chat, and a most effective recruiting tool. The men of L Detachment were under orders never to brag of their achievements; they did not need to. Others boasted for them. In the words of Vladimir Peniakoff, the adventurer known as “Popski” who led a separate detachment of desert raiders, Stirling swiftly emerged as “the romantic figure of war in the Middle East,” while his exploits, part legend, became a mainstay of British military morale.