Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (30 page)

One of the medical team would have to stay behind with the wounded, to drive to Benghazi, surrender, and ensure they were given proper medical treatment. Pleydell volunteered without hesitation, but was ordered by Stirling to remain with the fighting force, since further casualties were likely. The orderlies drew straws to select who would perform a task that would certainly mean captivity, or worse. Ritchie, a regimental medical orderly with the commandos, drew the short straw. “He did not seem unduly upset.”

“Goodbye,” said Pleydell. “I’m sorry about all this. It’s very bad luck.”

“Well, someone had to stay, sir.”

“Yes.”

There was a pause in this stilted, oddly moving exchange, as they watched the trucks lining up to leave.

“You are quite sure about what you have to do?” said Pleydell.

“Yes, sir.”

“You have the morphia and syringe?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

“Well. Goodbye. All the best.”

“Goodbye, sir.”

Pleydell and Ritchie shook hands.

The next day, the little troop of wounded men and the lone orderly were taken into captivity by Italian forces and transported to the Benghazi military hospital. All would die in captivity. Ritchie died eighteen months later, of unknown causes, in a prison camp.

Operation Bigamy had been a disaster. It had departed from Stirling’s concept of small, highly mobile units operating with stealth, with most unhappy results. “We were too big,” admitted Johnny Cooper. “They knew we were coming.” The plan had required “complete surprise, good planning and rapid action,” said Stirling, and achieved none of them. Over a quarter of his force had been killed, wounded, or captured, and more than half his vehicles destroyed; apart from diverting a number of enemy troops to defend Benghazi, its impact was negligible. The simultaneous raid on Tobruk had proved even more costly and ineffective. When the SAS limped back into Cairo, they were mistaken for a “grubby looking batch of German prisoners.”

Armies are fickle organisms. A few months earlier, such a failure might have spelled doom for the SAS. Yet, instead of recrimination, Stirling was rewarded. On his return to Cairo, while his bedraggled force licked its wounds, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel and told that the unit was being granted full regimental status. A unit that had started with a fictitious name was now a formal element in the British order of battle: on September 21, the SAS was ordered to undergo a major expansion, to 29 officers and 572 other ranks. A combination of Churchill’s enthusiasm, the reputation of the SAS, and its track record of destruction (when properly deployed), and perhaps a desire to appease Stirling for the debacle of Operation Bigamy, had conspired to turn an abject failure into a most unlikely triumph. The unit, noted Order 14521 promoting L Detachment to regimental status, “has had conspicuous success and its morale is high.”

The new force would be divided into four squadrons: A Squadron, under the command of Paddy Mayne; B, commanded by Stirling himself; C, the French squadron; and D, the Special Boat Section (this would hive off from the SAS in April 1943, as the Special Boat Squadron, under the command of George Jellicoe). At the age of twenty-six, Stirling had become the first man to create his own new regiment since the Boer War. He was understandably proud, and completely stunned. Yet if he thought that this meant he now had a free hand, he had not reckoned with the prickly new commander of the Eighth Army: General Bernard Montgomery.

The previous commander had looked with an indulgent eye on Stirling’s unconventional approach to warfare. Monty was a quite different sort of general. He had not been grouse shooting on the Stirlings’ Scottish estate, was not a natural gambler, did not drink, and did not like being told what to do by anyone, least of all by a young Turk with a taste for extreme adventure. Their first encounter was not a happy one.

Soon after his return to Cairo, Stirling made an appointment to see Montgomery in his trailer. The general resembled an “underweight fighting bantam cock,” thought Stirling, all sinew and strut. He asked, sharply, what Stirling wanted. Wrong-footed by the absence of polite preliminaries, Stirling explained that his force could offer important support to the coming offensive by raiding Rommel’s overextended supply lines and knocking out fuel dumps, ammunition depots, and airfields: for this he would need to recruit at least 150 first-class fighters from other regiments. Monty fixed him with a bayonet stare.

“If I understand you correctly, you want to take some of my men from me. Indeed my best men; my most desert-worthy, my most dependable, my most experienced men. I am proud of my men. I expect great things of them. What makes you think, Colonel Stirling, that you can handle my men to greater advantage than I can handle them myself?”

Stirling, shocked and stung, launched into a defensive speech, insisting that there was no time to train up raw recruits for the sort of offensive actions he had in mind. But the general was not listening.

“I’m sorry, Colonel, but the answer is no. A flat no. Frankly your request strikes me as slightly arrogant. I am under the impression that you feel you know my business better than I do. You come here after a failure at Benghazi demanding the best I can give. In all honesty, Colonel Stirling, I am not inclined to associate myself with failure. And now I must be on my way. I’m sorry to disappoint you, Colonel Stirling, but I prefer to keep my best men for my own use.”

Stirling was livid. Hitherto, he had always achieved his ends through a combination of charm and argument. Here was a general immune to both, and even more determined to get his own way than Stirling himself. Instead of cherry-picking recruits from Middle East forces, he would have to build up the expanded SAS with men from the infantry base depot, most of whom were without desert or combat experience. This, in turn, meant restructuring the force: most of the L Detachment veterans would fight under Mayne in A Squadron, while Stirling’s B Squadron, largely made up of new recruits, would have to undergo training in Kabrit before going into action.

Stirling did not know it—and Montgomery was careful to conceal it—but the younger man had made a profound impression on the new commander of the Eighth Army. Monty was touchy and rude, but he was also brilliant, a fine judge of character, and a master of warfare. At a dinner, soon after their first ill-tempered meeting, Monty remarked: “The Boy Stirling is mad. Quite, quite mad. However, in war there is often a place for mad people. Now take this scheme of his. Penetrating miles behind the enemy lines. Attacking the coastal road on a four-hundred-mile front. Who but the Boy Stirling could think up such a plan?”

Paddy Mayne lay in the sand, in the cool of the October evening, totting up the booty from his latest raid: two cameras, including a Rolleiflex with viewfinder, some German automatic weapons, a shotgun, and a handful of Italian prisoners. “The loot has looked up. We were like a lot of pirates,” he wrote to his brother. “We are in the Sand Sea, about 200 miles from the nearest oasis, and just going out and acting the fool from here.” Mayne’s base camp lay in the dunes on the edge of the Great Sand Sea, some 150 miles south of the coast road and beyond the range of enemy planes. From here, the buccaneers of A Squadron sailed out on nightly raids. “Acting the fool” was a euphemism for piracy of the most ruthless and profitable sort: sabotaging the railway line, ambushing convoys, destroying communication lines, mining the road between Tobruk and Mersa Matruh, and generally causing mayhem in the German rear ahead of Montgomery’s imminent westward surge. In the space of just twenty days, the railway link to Tobruk was severed thirteen times. The threat of night raids forced the German and Italian convoys to travel the road by day, where they were vulnerable to air attack by the RAF.

Mayne’s force of eighty men included most of the L Detachment veterans, including Lilley, Cooper, and Fraser. Reg Seekings was not among them; to his chagrin, he was detailed to lick the rookies of B Squadron into shape. Among those under Mayne’s command was a twenty-three-year-old Irishman named Chris O’Dowd, irrepressible and indestructibly cheerful, who had taken part in the failed Benghazi operation. There is a photograph of O’Dowd cleaning his revolver in the desert camp before a raid: his hair is wild and matted, beard untrimmed; he wears shorts, a tattered jersey, and a broad grin; he looks filthy, happy, and extremely dangerous. At the other end of the social and sartorial scale came Lieutenant Harry Wall Poat, a former tomato farmer from the Channel Islands, who spoke in a refined upper-middle-class accent, sported a neat mustache, and was never less than immaculately attired, even after weeks of desert living.

The official reports of this period are rigorously matter-of-fact, a dry litany of violence, deliberately underplayed, austerely factual: “Fired on by heavy machine gun, rifle and 20mm fire…unable to get through on radio…had to chase [a] convoy which speeded up when it spotted us…owing to shortage of petrol and water, party split…all jeeps opened up with K guns…hid for three days…ran into minefield…mined road, blew telegraph poles, cratered road…” And so on. The only allusion to danger is heavily ironic. “Much frightened by a cheetah, with whom we shared our lying up wadi.” There is more detail about the cuisine than the killing: “Chased a gazelle for ten minutes, wounded it with K’s and finished it off with a pistol. Made very good eating.”

Traditional warfare tends to follow straight lines: advances, retreats, fields of fire, front lines, vanguards, rear guards, and points of engagement. The SAS was pioneering a new sort of war, so asymmetrical as to be almost lopsided. Increasingly confident in their tactics and terrain, the independent jeep units selected targets as they appeared, with little deliberate planning. This was war on the hoof, invented ad hoc, unpredictable, highly effective, and often chaotic.

Corporal John William Sillito, known as “Jack,” was navigating a jeep party to blow up a section of the railway near Tobruk in mid-October 1942 when his unit came under attack from a German night patrol. In the ensuing confusion, Sillito became separated from the rest of the men: “Suddenly he found himself completely alone.” He carried only a revolver, a compass, and a small flask containing enough water for twenty-four hours. Sillito was a straightforward man, a farmer in civilian life. Having reflected for a while, he concluded that he had three options: he could go north and surrender; he could strike out east, in the hope of evading the Axis troops and reaching the British lines at Alamein; or he could head south, and try to cross the 180 miles to Mayne’s desert camp. He chose the third option, despite knowing that there was “next to no chance of meeting any form of life or water, and where a mistake in direction meant certain and unpleasant death.”

At first, the trek was not unpleasant, though it was lonely. Recent rain had left puddles of drinkable water. But as Sillito trudged on, the moisture dried up and the skies became “pitilessly blue and unchanging.” He ran out of water on the second day, and began to store and drink his urine, which steadily grew more concentrated and disgusting. He walked at night and lay up during the day, under whatever shade he could find. On the fourth day, his feet blistered and cracked; by the fifth, his tongue had swelled up and his limbs began to cramp. Still he trudged south, while “the flat landscape stretched on and on in front of him.” On the seventh day, now pitifully weak and starting to hallucinate, he spotted a convoy of jeeps in the far distance. Sillito jumped up and down, shouting, but the vehicles seemed to be heading away. Fumbling with his box of matches, he stripped off his shirt and set fire to it and then waved the burning garment above his head, but the smoke seemed to evaporate in the heat. The jeeps vanished over the horizon. “He was alone once more, with the heat, the sweat, and his thoughts.” And no shirt. On day eight, close to death, he spotted the white dunes that mark the edge of the Sand Sea. Somewhere, about forty miles inside the sandy ocean, was the camp. If he could find the spot where the jeeps drove in and out of the Sand Sea, he might be saved; he knew he could not walk another forty miles.

A three-jeep SAS raiding party had made an unscheduled stop for repairs when a “skeleton, with sore and bleeding feet,” staggered out of the heat. Back at camp, Malcolm Pleydell bathed and bandaged Sillito’s tattered body, and listened to his story in stunned admiration. Then the corporal stood painfully to attention for some souvenir photographs. Stirling reckoned that a fortnight after his astonishing desert trek, the man had “recovered completely.” Pleydell knew Jack Sillito would never fully recover: “A hesitancy of manner and an expression in the eyes told their own story of mental strain and physical hardship.”

—

On October 23, Montgomery struck, hurling his Eighth Army’s nearly 200,000 men and more than a thousand tanks at Rommel’s panzer army. By November 4, the Germans were in retreat; four days later, a vast Anglo-American invasion force landed in Morocco and Algeria and began heading east. The Second Battle of Alamein marked a turning point in the war: the first decisive Allied victory since the start of the war, raising morale and lifting the threat to Egypt and the Suez Canal. As Montgomery’s victorious army pushed west, the First Army, formed of British and American land forces under General Kenneth Anderson, advanced east through Tunisia: Rommel was trapped in an enormous vice that would soon close, with crushing force. Despite his initial hostility toward Stirling, Montgomery had predicted that the SAS “could have a really decisive effect on my forthcoming offensive.” The precise impact of the SAS on the military situation is, of course, impossible to measure, but Monty himself was convinced that the unit had played a pivotal role in the weeks before and after Alamein. The string of raids behind the lines had disrupted communications, sown confusion, and further sapped German morale.