Authors: Ben Macintyre
Tags: #World War II, #History, #True Crime, #Espionage, #Europe, #Military, #Great Britain
There was, however, another, secret side to Jock Lewes that might have given Stirling pause, had he known about it: Lewes had flirted with Nazism.
On a cycling tour to Germany in 1935, Lewes had been deeply impressed by the organization and strength of the nascent Third Reich. “England is no democracy and Germany far from being a totalitarian state,” he wrote to his parents. “Dazzled” by National Socialism, he visited Germany several times in the following years, returning home more smitten from each visit: he mixed with German high society, attended a 1938 ball where Hitler and Goebbels were guests of honor, and fell in love with a young German woman, Senta Adriano, an enthusiastic member of the Nazi Party. He mooned over Senta’s “frankness and sincerity,” her “golden hair, eyes greeny blue and well spaced, fine delicate eyebrows—not plucked.” Plucked eyebrows would have been a mark of frivolity.
Then came
Kristallnacht,
the night of broken glass, as Nazis rampaged through Germany and Austria, smashing and looting Jewish shops, businesses, and synagogues. Jock Lewes may have been politically naive, but he was not a fool: the events of November 1938 provoked in him a violent and painful change of heart. Suddenly, with horrible clarity, he understood the true nature of the regime he had appeased, politically and emotionally.
“I have been struggling to retain my belief in German sincerity but only a fanatic faith could withstand the evidence they choose to put before us,” he wrote. “I swear I will not live to see the day when Britain hauls down the colours of her beliefs before totalitarian aggression.” He broke off his engagement to Senta, and became, almost overnight, a ferocious opponent of Nazism. “I shall willingly take up arms against Germany,” he wrote. He felt he had been duped, both by the Nazis and by the fascist woman he loved. “He took the lie personally”; he was out for revenge.
Lewes’s determination and ruthlessness, his utter dedication to the task of fighting Germany, was the reaction of a man who has been wronged by a faithless lover, one who has made a terrible mistake and needed to make amends.
The light was already fading when Lewes, Stirling, and four other men climbed into an elderly biplane to perform the world’s first desert parachute jump: for Stirling, a jaunt; for Lewes, the next stage in his campaign of revenge against Nazi Germany. The Vickers Valentia, on loan to the Royal Air Force, was used to deliver mail; it was almost comically unsuitable for parachuting. The parachutes purloined by Lewes were designed with static lines to be clipped to a steel cable, attached fore and aft. As the parachutist left the plane, the line would pull out the folded parachute until fully extended, at which point a connecting thread would snap and the parachute canopy would fill with air. There were no parachute instructors in the Middle East, but a friendly RAF officer advised them to “dive out as though going through into water.” The team practiced by jumping off the plane wings, a fall of about ten feet. By way of a test, Lewes tossed out a dummy parachutist, made from tent poles and sandbags, at a height of eight hundred feet. “The parachute opened okay, but the tent poles smashed on landing.”
Lewes and Stirling agreed they were ready to go: they would simply tie the parachute lines to the legs of the passenger seats, open the door, and dive out. The pilot took off from the small airfield fifty miles south of Bagush, circled once, and then gave the signal to jump. Lewes and his batman went first, followed by a volunteer named D’Arcy and then Stirling. D’Arcy later wrote: “I was surprised to see Lieutenant Stirling pass me in the air.” But not half as surprised as Lieutenant Stirling. His parachute had snagged on the tail of the plane and badly ripped. Realizing that he was not so much parachuting as falling, he closed his eyes and braced himself for the impact.
Stirling did not regain consciousness until he awoke, half paralyzed, in a bed at the Scottish Military Hospital. “I was a bit unlucky,” he said, with resounding understatement.
Lewes, predictably enough, had “made a perfect landing,” and felt moved to write a poem about the romance of parachuting.
Green for Go! Now! God, how slow it is!
The air doesn’t rush and earth doesn’t rise
Till you swoop into harness and know it is
Over, look up and love the white canopy
Steadfast above you, an angel in panoply
Guarding the skies.
Stirling did not feel that way. His first experience of parachuting had been extremely unpleasant. He would suffer back pain and migraines for the rest of his life as a result of his spinal injury. The fall had almost killed him, but it had given him a very good idea.
It was eight weeks before Stirling could walk again. In that time, he gathered every map of the coast and inland area he could lay his hands on, jotting down notes on airfields, roads, rail lines, and enemy positions along the coast. When Lewes visited him in hospital, Stirling laid out his plans: “I believe it would be possible, not too difficult in fact, to infiltrate small numbers of men into selected German positions from the desert flank. I think we could then have a pretty dramatic effect on their efficiency and morale by sabotaging aircraft, runways and fuel dumps.”
With typical generosity, Stirling would later credit Lewes with much of the thinking behind this plan. Yet at this stage Lewes was skeptical. How would parachutists be able to carry sufficient explosives to do real damage? Who would authorize such an operation? And how would the raiders get away after an attack across hundreds of miles of sand? “Have you thought about training for walking in the desert?” he asked. Lewes’s doubts may have had less to do with the feasibility of the plan than with misgivings about the character of Stirling himself, a man with a rakish reputation and many of the traits Lewes despised. He may also have felt that Stirling was interfering with his own plans. Lewes was heading back to besieged Tobruk. They agreed to discuss the concept of parachute raiding once more when he returned. “If you manage to get anywhere with the idea, talk to me again,” said Lewes, as he got up to leave. “I don’t hold out much hope.”
By mid-July, Stirling had written the outline of a proposal, giving credit to Lewes and noting that the plan was “largely based on Jock’s ideas.”
Stirling’s original memo was handwritten in pencil, and does not survive in the SAS archives. Its outlines were straightforward: Rommel’s eastward advance along the North African coast had swung the battle in favor of the celebrated German commander, but it had also created an opportunity, leaving the enemy supply lines extended and coastal airfields vulnerable to attack. Most were only thinly defended. Some even lacked perimeter fencing. On a moonless night a small group of highly trained commandos could be dropped by parachute, as close as feasible to enemy airfields; they would then split into small teams, each no more than five strong, which would penetrate the aerodromes under cover of darkness, plant time bombs on as many aircraft as possible, and then retreat back into the desert, where they could be picked up by the Long Range Desert Group—the British reconnaissance unit that, Stirling had learned, was capable of driving deep into the desert. Up to thirty separate attacks might be launched in a single night. To maintain security and secrecy, such an operation would have to be approved by the commander in chief in the Middle East. The new unit would need special status, access to military intelligence, and its own secluded training ground. Stirling was suggesting “a new type of force, to extract the maximum out of surprise and guile.”
With hindsight the plan seems obvious. At the time it was revolutionary.
Many middle-ranking officers in the British Army had fought in the First World War, and clung to an old-fashioned, classical conception of warfare: men in uniform clashing on a battlefield, and then fighting until one side emerged victorious. So far, although the battlefront had moved back and forth, the war in North Africa was following this pattern. What Stirling proposed would leapfrog the front line and take the battle directly into the enemy camp. In the eyes of some, this was not only unprecedented, but unsporting, like punching a chap when he is looking the other way. Blowing up planes in the middle of the night and then running away, some felt, was a job for saboteurs, mercenaries, and assassins, not for soldiers of His Majesty’s armed forces. It was not war, as they knew it, and it was not cricket. Worse than that, Stirling’s idea represented a threat to the very concept of rank. The chain of command is sacrosanct in every army, but Stirling was proposing to bypass that too, and report only to the most senior commander—in this case General Sir Claude Auchinleck, the newly appointed commander in chief of Middle East Command. Stirling was a mere lieutenant, and an undistinguished one at that, who was proposing to subvert centuries of military tradition by speaking directly to the top boss, in order to create and command what looked suspiciously like a private army. To the traditionalists among his superiors, this was more than just impertinent; it was positively insurrectionary.
Stirling had no illusions about how his plan would be received by the staff officers at Middle East Headquarters. He was openly contemptuous of the mid-level military bureaucracy, which he referred to, variously, as “a freemasonry of mediocrity” and “layer upon layer of fossilized shit.” If his idea was to have a chance, he would need to get the proposal directly into the hands of the most senior officers, before anyone lower in the hierarchy had a chance to kill it. If it passed through the normal channels, the plan would perish on the desk of the first staff officer who read it. Stirling’s radical approach to the “fossilized shit” was similar to his attitude toward the front line: he did not intend to try to go through it, but to go around it. How he did so has become the stuff of myth.
British Middle East Headquarters was housed in a large block of commandeered flats surrounded by barbed wire in Cairo’s Garden City. Still on crutches, Stirling hobbled up to the entrance, only to find his way barred by two guards demanding he show a pass, which he did not have. So, waiting until a moment when the guards were preoccupied, he climbed through a gap in the fence. As he was entering the building, the guards spotted his abandoned crutches and gave chase. Going as fast as his stiff legs would carry him, he flew upstairs and burst into a room marked “Adjutant General.” There he found himself confronted by a red-faced major, who just happened to be one of his former instructors at Pirbright. The senior officer remembered Stirling as one of his least attentive students and swiftly sent him packing: “Whatever lunatic idea you have, Stirling, forget it…Now, get out.”
In the corridor, hearing the guards thundering upstairs, he entered the next room, which turned out to contain General Sir Neil Ritchie, the deputy chief of staff. Stirling handed over his proposal, which he had condensed into a short paper. Ritchie leafed through it with, according to Stirling, growing interest. Then he looked up: “This may be the sort of plan we’re looking for.” The adjutant general was summoned from next door and instructed, to his astonishment and barely suppressed fury, to give the young officer all the assistance he needed. “I don’t like you, and I don’t like this business,” hissed the adjutant general, after Ritchie had left. “You will get no favours from me.” Three days later, Stirling was summoned back to see General Auchinleck.
This is an almost perfect Stirling story, containing the characteristic admixture of self-deprecation, bluff, and impudence, describing an act of daring crowned with unlikely success, while taking a swipe at the military bureaucracy he disdained. It has the patina of a tale polished, told, and retold after dinner. It might even be true, or partly true.
But there is another, more prosaic explanation for Stirling’s successful attempt to gain access to the top brass. Auchinleck was an old family friend of the Stirlings. Ritchie had been grouse shooting at Keir. Both were Scots, and both had fought in the First World War alongside General Archibald Stirling, David’s father. This was an age when family and class connections counted for much: if there was one junior officer who could get to see a general simply by asking, that was David Stirling. “I knew I could argue with a general,” he later said.
Generals Auchinleck and Ritchie were both present at Stirling’s next interview, along with Major General Eric Dorman-Smith—a man considered by one colleague to be close to lunacy, but one of the few senior officers who appreciated the way war was swiftly evolving with new technology and motorization.
The three officers quizzed Stirling closely on his outline proposal, and listened attentively as he laid out his ideas.
Auchinleck, universally known as “the Auk,” had only recently taken over as commander in chief, and was already under intense pressure from Winston Churchill to strike back at Rommel and reverse the tide of the North African war. A major counteroffensive would be taking place sooner (if Churchill had his way) or later (if Auchinleck had his), and Stirling’s band of raiders might possibly play an important role in hampering enemy airpower at a critical moment. The decision had been made to disband Layforce, providing a ready pool of possible recruits, and unlike earlier commando operations, the plan would not require the use of expensive ships and the complexities of naval cooperation. Stirling’s plan was cheap, in terms of manpower and equipment, and could pay handsome dividends, if it worked. And if it didn’t, all that would be lost would be a handful of adventurers. There may have been another reason for the generals’ willingness to listen. All three had been in the thick of battle during the last war: Dorman-Smith had won the Military Cross at Ypres; Ritchie had won the same medal for his “coolness, courage and utter disregard of danger” under fire; Auchinleck had been mentioned in dispatches during the fierce fighting in Mesopotamia. The trio of generals may have heard this twenty-five-year-old soldier explaining how he intended to help win the war by fighting the Germans at close quarters, and seen in him a little of themselves.