Authors: Ben Macintyre
Tags: #World War II, #History, #True Crime, #Espionage, #Europe, #Military, #Great Britain
Pleydell was woken at 3:00 a.m. by one of the orderlies, a bespectacled Londoner named Johnson who had earned the nickname “Razor Blade” on account of his skill with the scalpel. “The officer’s just died, sir,” Johnson reported. Ardley had expired quietly in a deep morphine-sleep. As for Marlow, “he was hanging on, just doing that, and no more.” At dawn, Ardley was buried “with no ceremony, in a small hollow, where the soil lay deep.”
The mission had suffered serious casualties before it had even begun. Stirling debated whether to abort the operation, given the discouraging report from Melot’s spy.
“This Arab is quite reliable?” he asked the Belgian.
Even so, Stirling sent a wireless message to headquarters warning that the operation might be compromised. The reply blandly ordered: “Disregard bazaar gossip.” Therein lies one of the problems with secret intelligence: its recipients tend to believe it implicitly when it chimes with their own preconceptions, and reject it with equal firmness when it does not.
Maclean felt “reassured” by the response from headquarters. Pleydell did not. “We had lost our most powerful card: that of surprise.” Paddy Mayne merely remarked that there was likely to be “some hard scrapping” in the next few hours. “Looks as though you’re going to be kept busy, doc,” said Almonds.
An advance party of a dozen men set off in the early afternoon of September 13, led by Bob Melot and Chris Bailey, a new recruit to the SAS. Their mission was to knock out an Italian wireless post on the edge of the Jebel escarpment. Once that had been done, the way would be clear to attack Benghazi. The main body of troops followed about two hours later: French, British, trained SAS men, new recruits, and a handful of navy personnel. There were many familiar faces in the party: Mayne, Fraser, Seekings, Cooper, Almonds, and the little Frenchman Germain Guerpillon, “the duffer.” Stirling drove the lead jeep, with Sadler alongside him. Pleydell and his team established a medical post and advance rendezvous site on the edge of the escarpment, to await the returning troops and treat any wounded. Maclean noticed that the doctor was already “busy preparing bandages, splints and blood plasma” as the raiding party, led by Melot’s Arab spy, set off down the steep escarpment.
Pleydell remained behind, waiting in the dark. The “completeness of the silence” was suddenly shattered by the “shrill laughter” of a jackal, setting hair on end and teeth on edge. The doctor tried to read
The Forsyte Saga
by torchlight. At around 2:00 came the sound of a motor, and a jeep careened into view. “Mr. Melot’s been wounded, sir, in the stomach and legs. He’s lost a good bit of blood…Mr. Bailey’s caught it too.”
It took twenty minutes to reach the point where Melot lay, covered in a greatcoat, almost ridiculously nonchalant about his wounds: “There’s nothing much the matter with me. Hand grenade wounds, you know,” he said, in his slightly antique English. Melot had led the successful attack on the Italian guard post, but in the short and vicious battle that followed, a grenade had exploded beside him, sending shrapnel into his abdomen, lower leg, and thigh. He had destroyed the wireless equipment, taken two prisoners, and managed to walk most of the way to the rendezvous with a fractured femur, before collapsing. He initially refused anesthetic—“I’ve never taken any medicine in my life”—but finally submitted to Pleydell’s morphine injection, and declared it “the best thing I have had for a long time.”
Bailey was brought in on a stretcher a few minutes later, with a single bullet hole above the heart and a collapsed lung. Pleydell returned to his jeep to get more supplies and was astonished to see a complete stranger rise up out of the darkness, a man dressed in the costume of a rural gentleman out for a ramble in the English countryside.
The figure was wearing a checked tweed jacket and plus fours, and carrying a knobbly walking stick. His face was adorned with a magnificent jutting beard and a pair of extravagant mustaches.
“Oh…I say…er, excuse me!” said the tweedy apparition, in “a very superior Oxford voice.” “Do you happen to have seen David Stirling or Bob Melot around here recently?”
Pleydell was momentarily stunned by the sheer weirdness of the situation. They were standing on the edge of a desert cliff, in the middle of the night, with a major battle about to take place a few miles away, and a man who looked uncannily like George Bernard Shaw and spoke like George VI had suddenly materialized from nowhere.
“Who are you?” he finally demanded.
“Me? My name is Farmer. I work around here, you know. But look, old chap,
have
you seen Stirling recently? I want to speak to him.”
Pleydell pointed to where Melot lay under the greatcoat.
“Really! I
am
sorry,” said the man, who then wandered over to speak to Melot, who was now thoroughly addled with morphine. They exchanged a few words, and then Farmer, swinging his walking stick, disappeared back into the darkness.
It had been, Pleydell later reflected, “a rather odd little incident.”
Farmer’s real name was Alan Samuel Lyle-Smythe, alias “Caillou,” policeman, actor, writer, and, at that moment, secret agent of the British Intelligence Corps. He was responsible for gathering information behind the enemy lines, but made no effort whatever to disguise himself, apparently believing that the more brazen his approach and the more obvious his Englishness, the more likely he was to be offered interesting titbits of information. Lyle-Smythe was remarkably fearless, and wildly eccentric. A few months after bumping into Pleydell in the desert, he would be captured and incarcerated in a POW camp, from which he then escaped.
On the evening of September 13, 1942, he had set out in his tweeds to warn Stirling that he had received a reliable report from an informant in Benghazi: the attack was fatally compromised, and the enemy was lying in wait. But he was too late.
Led by Melot’s Arab spy, the main raiding party of two hundred men in forty jeeps descended the escarpment and trundled along the road into Benghazi in the darkness. A cantilevered gate barred the way on the outskirts of the town, with barbed wire double-strung along either side of the road and signs of a newly laid minefield. Another roadblock could be seen through the gloom, 150 yards ahead. This had not been there before. Bill Cumper, an explosives expert and irrepressible joker, jumped down to inspect, and swung the barrier up. “Let battle commence!” he said, snapping off a Nazi salute. Then battle indeed commenced.
From either side of the road, a brutal volley of machine-gun fire erupted, followed by Breda 20mm and mortar fire. They had driven straight into a trap. The lead jeep, with Jim Almonds at the wheel, charged forward, as the gunner in the rear opened up with his Vickers gun, strafing wildly in the direction of the gunfire. That seemed to dampen the enthusiasm of the attackers, although sporadic fire continued. Stirling made a swift calculation: they might be able to fight through this ambush and the next roadblock, but the town’s defenders were plainly alerted and awaiting them. “Get the convoy turned round and we’ll have a go another day,” he told his driver. The jeep drivers performed laborious three-point turns, as the bullets continued to spatter around them, the air “alive with strings of tracer.” Almonds was “last seen vigorously returning enemy fire”; moments later his jeep took a direct hit in the petrol tank from an incendiary bullet and burst into flames. The jeep convoy charged back toward the escarpment, no longer an orderly procession but a chaotic scramble, “racing to reach cover before the sun rose.” Stirling assumed that Almonds and the two other men in his vehicle had perished; in fact, they had jumped clear just before their jeep exploded. Almonds and a Irish guardsman named Fletcher hid in a ditch by the road. As the sun rose, they saw a squad of twenty Italian soldiers advancing, bayonets fixed, searching for survivors. “Our best chance is to stand up and give ourselves up,” Almonds whispered.
The two SAS men were taken into captivity in the Benghazi barracks, shackled, and interrogated. When Almonds refused to divulge any information, he was chained kneeling in the back of a truck, and paraded around the town to be spat and jeered at by the inhabitants. Back at Benghazi prison, Almonds found he was now sharing a cell with another prisoner, who introduced himself as Captain John Richards, an intelligence officer with the Inter-Services Liaison Department. Richards explained that he had been captured near Benghazi, but had then escaped and started to walk back toward the British lines. He had almost reached Tobruk before being recaptured and brought back to Benghazi. Garrulous and friendly, the officer spoke with a pronounced cockney accent, and seemed only too happy to talk about his adventures in the desert. Yet there was something about Richards that struck Almonds as odd: he claimed to have walked almost eighty miles, but he “looked unfatigued, did not limp and was wearing new Italian boots.” He also asked a lot of questions. One morning, an officer appeared at the cell door and Richards was taken away. Two days later, Almonds was shipped to Italy and incarcerated in POW Camp 51 at Altamura.
Gentleman Jim’s captivity, and his separation from the SAS, would turn out to be short-lived.
—
The sun was up by the time the vanguard of the main party reached the escarpment. Fitzroy Maclean looked back toward the Benghazi airfields, to see dozens of enemy planes “rising like angry wasps.” The troops dispersed, taking cover among the ravines and hastily camouflaging their vehicles; minutes later the planes were upon them. Pleydell was tending to the injured Melot, who was “snoring blissfully, with his false teeth laid out beside him,” when the first plane clattered overhead, spraying machine-gun fire. The attacking pilots knew that their quarry was holed up on the escarpment, but could not see exactly where: their tactics were therefore to pour as much metal and explosive onto the area as possible, in the hope that they would hit something. Working in relays, they bombed and strafed the ravines. Seekings estimated that at times some twenty planes were in action overhead. The fugitives could only hide and hope. “During the long, hot hours of that morning we could hear the shuddering, breaking noise of exploding bombs, interrupted by the brisk staccato of machinegun fire.” From time to time a louder explosion indicated a direct hit on one of the concealed trucks or jeeps. During a lull, several wounded men, some seriously so, were brought to Pleydell to patch up as best he could. At dusk the planes departed, and the remnants of the troop climbed into the surviving vehicles and drove the remaining twenty-five miles to the Jebel. “That night drive was a wretched affair,” wrote Pleydell, with the injured groaning in the back of the trucks, amid the stench of blood, burned flesh, and singed clothing. The rendezvous point was reached at 3:00 a.m. “Home sweet fucking home,” someone grunted in the darkness.
The ordeal was not over. In midmorning, enemy planes located them in the Jebel, and swooped down once more. Several of the wounded were hit by machine-gun fire where they lay. A young corporal was brought in, horrifically injured by a bullet that had passed through his hips. Pleydell’s medical transport took a direct hit and burst into flames. A few minutes later, a figure was carried in on a blanket and gently lowered in front of the doctor. Pleydell immediately recognized Germain Guerpillon, the former consular official, the least martial and most determined of the early French recruits. His face was drained of color, and his breath came in shallow gasps. The doctor knew at once that the Frenchman was close to death, and “far beyond any crude help that I could give.” Pleydell had always liked and admired Guerpillon, not because he was a natural soldier, but because he was not: a civilian utterly determined to fight. He looked oddly at peace, although his hands clenched and unclenched “with mechanical lifelessness,” reminding Pleydell of how he had once seen “a bird open and close its claws as it died.” In a few moments Guerpillon was dead. The little Frenchman had successfully fought to vanquish his own fears, and died in the attempt, an end as noble as any more orthodox battlefield hero. Guerpillon had “no more obstacles or trials to overcome,” Pleydell reflected, as he covered his body with a blanket.
Stirling called Pleydell over. “Hello, Malcolm,” he said. “You
have
had a busy time. You must be absolutely exhausted.” Even in the thick of battle, pleasantries were to be observed.
Stirling broke the bleak news. “We’re moving off in two hours’ time.” Their hiding place in the Jebel had been exposed, and the planes would soon be back, perhaps with ground troops, to root out and exterminate what remained of the attacking force. With every passing minute their chances of escape dwindled. But much of their transport had already been destroyed. “We simply haven’t enough room to take the wounded with us,” said Stirling. “Stretchers are out of the question. I’m terribly sorry.”
To Pleydell fell the grim task of choosing which of his patients were still fit enough to travel back in the packed trucks, and who must remain behind to face captivity. Six of the wounded required continuous medical attention: of these, Melot and another man with a shattered arm could probably travel suspended in camouflage nets. The remaining four, including Marlow, the amputee, and Bailey, whose chest wound remained critical, seemed likely to die unless they got to a hospital soon. Reg Seekings took a typically brutal line when one of the wounded men protested at being left. “I’m sorry, you’ve had it. You’re just numbers,” he said, and pointed to the rest of the troop, now preparing to leave the hills. “They’re fit, they’re ready to fight another day. You can’t. I’m sorry.” He would later describe this as “the hardest little speech I’d ever made in my life.” It is highly unlikely he actually made it, since the responsibility for the decision was not his, but it certainly reflected his philosophy: “You’ve got to make yourself callous…After all, what’s it all about? Winning a war, isn’t it? So you’ve got to do these sorts of things.” The men were exhausted. Some were in a state of shock, staring into space. Seekings bullied them into order, shoving them into the trucks, shouting and swearing: “I kicked men to their feet, belting them. It was crude and cruel, but the only way to do it.” Seekings was a brute, but a lifesaver.