Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (26 page)

The dramatic narrative of war is as important a weapon as guns and bullets, and at a time when the war in North Africa was going badly, Stirling and his men demonstrated a willingness and a capacity to fight back against the German advance. “This sort of war possessed a definite flavour of romance,” wrote Pleydell. The men of L Detachment were mindful of their own drama, for they looked and dressed like, and to some extent played the part of, swashbuckling desert fighters. Some, thought Pleydell, came in pursuit of glory, to perform “daring deeds which might become famous overnight.” Regular irregulars, they carried a variety of guns. “If a chappie liked a weapon—a Luger, a Beretta or just the .45—he carried that.” Some adopted Arab headdresses or bandanas; few wore regulation uniform; almost all, including Stirling, sported bushy beards. At the most grinding, boring, colorless, and perilous period of the desert war, Stirling’s raiders added a dash of exotic adventure, a reputation for indomitability at a moment when Rommel threatened to dominate the battlefield. Few in the unit were conscious of it, but theirs was a psychological, even a theatrical role, as well as a military one.

Stirling professed to be baffled by all the barroom “nonsense” being talked about him and his unit; in truth, he reveled in the attention.

But notoriety came with a price. The Axis forces had been bitten hard, and were now taking countermeasures: erecting wire perimeter fences with lights, digging trenches around aerodromes, mounting additional guards, sometimes as many as one to each plane, and on some airfields stationing armored cars at the gates with powerful floodlights. Since it was increasingly difficult to slip undetected onto an airfield, L Detachment would instead go in with all guns blazing.

Twenty more jeeps arrived from Cairo, each one fitted with four Vickers machine guns, double-mounted and bolted to the front and rear. With the new vehicles came additional supplies of water, rations, petrol, ammunition, explosives, spare parts, and a few welcome luxuries: rum, tobacco, new pipes, sticky Turkish delight, and a pint of eau de Cologne—in place of soap. The men might be unable to wash, but they would go into battle highly perfumed. The peaceful desert hideout at Bir el Quseir was transformed into a busy transport hub, with jeeps swarming all over the escarpment. The place was beginning to “look like Piccadilly,” Pleydell grumbled happily.

The next night, “a long line of vicious looking jeeps” formed up for a full dress rehearsal. As if organizing a Scottish reel, Stirling explained the plan: the jeeps, manned by both French and English troops, would form up abreast in two lines of seven, with five yards between each vehicle, shooting outward. Stirling would lead the way, firing forward, with two more jeeps flanking him a few yards behind, in an arrowhead formation. Each gun was loaded with a combination of red and white tracer ammunition, and both armor-piercing and incendiary bullets. Stirling fired a green Verey light flare into the sky to commence proceedings, bathing the scene in a “garishly green electrical sort of relief,” and cacophony erupted. The drivers in the left-hand column faced particular peril. The forward gun was mounted on the right, which meant that one stream of bullets passed directly in front of the driver’s face, while the rear gunner blasted away from behind his head. If he braked suddenly, or leaned backward inadvertently, he would be decapitated. “The noise was deafening,” wrote Pleydell, “the tracer flying and bouncing along the ground on every side.” Johnny Cooper considered this exercise, firing thousands of rounds into the empty desert behind enemy lines, to be “one of the more bizarre moments of the war.”

Twenty-four hours later, the double line of jeeps formed up again in the darkness. Sidi Haneish airfield lay bathed in floodlight a few hundred yards ahead. Stirling fired the Verey light. The night turned green, and then exploded.

As the convoy smashed through the perimeter, the fusillade erupted, sending the airfield’s defenders scrambling for cover. Forming up on the runway tarmac between two long rows of parked aircraft, the double line rumbled forward at walking pace, laying down a brutal blanket of strafing fire to left and right as sixty-eight guns opened up from a range of fifty feet. The noise was infernal, a terrible symphony of “roaring, belching fire” merging with the boom of igniting fuel and the crack of exploding ammunition. For Stirling, it was the sound of victory, a “tremendous feu de joie.” The first aircraft detonated with such force that the men on the nearside felt their eyebrows and eyelashes singeing. Some planes did not just explode in the inferno, but seemed to “crumble and disintegrate as the bullets ploughed into them.” A bomber, coming in to land, was hit by a volley from the leading jeeps just as it touched down; the plane burst into flames and slewed to a stop. “It was like a duck shoot,” said Johnny Cooper, Stirling’s front gunner. “I really couldn’t miss.” In the rear, Seekings blasted away in concert through the smoke. From somewhere, a mortar started up, followed by the steady rap of a Breda gun and a rattle of small-arms fire. The defenders were fighting back.

Stirling’s jeep shuddered to a halt.

“Why won’t it go?” shouted Stirling.

“We haven’t got an engine,” Seekings shouted back. A 15mm Breda shell had passed through the cylinder head, missing Stirling’s knee by inches.

They scrambled on the jeep behind, where a figure sat motionless in the rear seat, “back curiously straight and head and shoulders resting on the guns.” John Robson, a twenty-one-year-old artilleryman, had been shot through the head.

The column made another pass around the perimeter, picking off planes parked away from the main runway. A second Verey light, this one red, soared upward, Stirling’s signal to withdraw. One officer recalled a small but typical coda: “As we moved off the aerodrome Paddy Mayne spotted an untouched bomber and, jumping from his jeep with a bomb in his hand, ran up to it and, placing the bomb in its engine, ran back and caught us up.”

The jeeps, no longer in formation, hurtled for the gap in the fence and out into the open desert. Mike Sadler lingered at the southwest corner of the field, watching for any stragglers and photographing the devastation. Some of the wrecks were still burning when the Germans began towing them away. Within an hour, the airfield was functioning again. They had kicked a “hornets’ nest,” reflected Sadler. Soon the hornets would be flying, and in angry pursuit. Once in the open, a mile outside the perimeter, the jeeps split into groups of three or four and scattered south, with orders to find somewhere to lie up for the day, under camouflage, and then head for the rendezvous under cover of darkness. Official estimates put the destruction at thirty-seven aircraft, mostly bombers and heavy transport planes.

At dawn, Stirling took refuge in a bowl-shaped depression, with four jeeps, fourteen men, and one dead soldier. Robson’s body was placed under a blanket. It was 5:30 in the morning. The light revealed “a ragged looking bunch. Faces, hair and beards were covered in a thick yellow grey film of dust.” The man who had been sitting beside Robson scraped with a stick at the sand-crusted bloodstains on his trousers. The conflagration of the previous night had left many with thumping headaches, saliva that tasted of fuel, and inflamed eyes. Seekings brewed tea over a fire made from pouring petrol into a sand-filled tin. Two men set to work digging a grave. An hour later, the little party gathered around the “pathetic little heap of sand and stones” covering John Robson, beneath a cross fashioned from an old ration box. “We stood bareheaded, looking at the grave, each with our own thoughts,” recalled one of the officers. “Most of us did not even know this man, who was one of the more recent arrivals; he was just a name to us, or perhaps a cheery red face and shock of black hair. It was indeed a curious burial, just a two minutes’ silence with a handful of tired, dirty comrades. Yet for this short fraction of time, lost in the middle of nowhere, there was dignity.”

A similarly bleak and simple ceremony took place, in French, a few hours later, about twenty miles to the east.

André Zirnheld’s team of three jeeps had been slowed by punctures, and when the morning mist lifted they found themselves dangerously exposed in open desert. A low ridge with a fringe of scrub offered at least a modicum of camouflage. Four Stukas discovered them at midday and swarmed down. Zirnheld was hit in the shoulder and abdomen on the second pass. One of his comrades dragged him under cover. After nine attacks, the dive-bombers ran out of ammunition and departed. The jeeps were “riddled,” but one was still functioning. Zirnheld was loaded aboard, conscious but fading, and they set off for the rendezvous in the hope of reaching Dr. Pleydell in time. Zirnheld was too badly injured to withstand the jolting, and after a few hours the French team holed up in a small wadi. Soon after midnight, Zirnheld turned to François Martin, his second in command, and said:
“Je vais vous quitter. Tout est en ordre en moi”
(I am going to leave you. Everything is in order within me). Moments later, he was dead. The twenty-nine-year-old French philosopher was buried under a cross made from a packing case, marked with the words:
“Aspirant André Zirnheld Mort au champs d’honneur 27 Juillet 1942
.
”

Going through his belongings back at the camp, Martin came across a notebook, in which Zirnheld had written a poem. It has since become known as the “paratroopers’ prayer,” and was adopted as the official poem of French airborne forces.

I ask you, O Lord, to give me

What I cannot obtain for myself.

Give me, my Lord, what you have left.

Give me what no one asks of you.

I do not ask for repose

Nor for tranquillity

Of body or soul.

I ask not for riches,

Nor success, nor even health.

My Lord, you are asked for such things so much

That you cannot have any more of them.

Give me, my God, what you have left.

Give me what others don’t want.

I want uncertainty and doubt.

I want torment and battle.

And give them to me absolutely, O Lord,

So that I can be sure of having them always.

For I will not always have the courage

To ask for them from you.

Give me, my God, what you have left.

Give me what others do not want.

But give me also the bravery,

And the strength and the faith.

For these are the things, O Lord,

That only you can give.

Surgeon Captain Markus Lutterotti—or Baron Markus von Lutterotti di Gazzolis und Langenthal, to give him his full civilian title—was enjoying the joyride over the desert. The plane trip was a welcome break from the monotony of treating the desert sores and other ailments of the German troops. From the passenger seat of a Fieseler Storch reconnaissance plane, the young doctor looked down on a flat wasteland that seemed to stretch away into infinite emptiness. He had never seen anywhere so utterly devoid of life. Lutterotti wanted to inspect the desert at close quarters and stretch his legs, so he ordered the pilot to land. The Luftwaffe sergeant, Rommel’s personal pilot, did not disguise his irritation. For an hour he had been flying aimlessly around the desert for no purpose other than to entertain this young officer. He began the descent, barely bothering to see what might be below, since it all looked exactly the same to him. Neither man spotted the camouflaged vehicles lurking beneath a low escarpment.

Captain Lutterotti wore German uniform, but he would have been offended to be described as German, and even more put out by any suggestion that he was a Nazi. The Lutterottis were Catholic aristocrats from South Tyrol, the German-speaking region of northern Italy, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and annexed by the Italians after the First World War. Italy’s German-speaking minority was distrusted by Mussolini, and Markus’s outspoken father had fallen foul of the fascist authorities. The oldest of eight children, Markus had been obliged to complete Italian military service after his medical exams, and was briefly deployed to the Horn of Africa following Mussolini’s invasion and occupation of Abyssinia. His time in Africa sparked an interest in tropical medicine, and on returning to Europe he studied at the Hamburg Tropical Institute. The war put a halt to his career in academic medicine. Signing up with the Afrika Korps seemed the best way to escape having to join the Nazi Party.