The Daring Dozen (6 page)

In the detailed six-page account of the formation of L Detachment, written not long after the war, Stirling recorded the far more prosaic reality of how he proposed his idea: ‘Having submitted these proposals to the C-in-C [General Claude Auchinleck] I was three days later summoned to the DCGS, Major General Neil Ritchie. He took me along to the C-in-C and CGS [Chief of General Staff Arthur Smith] and after some discussion they agreed that the unit should be formed forthwith.’
⁹

What had impressed Auchinleck above all was Stirling’s comprehensive plan for a raid to coincide with the forthcoming large-scale offensive that was common knowledge among British forces in Egypt. Stirling outlined how his force would parachute into Libya in five raiding units two nights before the main attack was launched. ‘The DZs [drop zones] of these sub-units were to be 12 miles south into the desert from their objectives and they were to be dropped at night without moon, thus preserving surprise to the utmost,’ wrote Stirling. The men would lie up for 24 hours and then launch five simultaneous attacks against Axis forward fighter and bomber bases between Timini and Gazala. Once the raids had been effected the raiders would rendezvous at a pre-arranged spot in the desert where a patrol of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) would be waiting.

Auchinleck was sold on the plan. He promoted Stirling to captain and authorized him to recruit six officers and 60 other ranks to a unit called L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade; the reasoning being that if – or more likely when – German intelligence got wind of the incipient force, they would be dismayed to discover that a British airborne brigade was in Egypt.

Thrilled that his idea had won official approval, Stirling nonetheless had one demand to make of Auchinleck. Stirling had a visceral dislike of staff officers, a species he termed ‘fossilized shits’ on account of their outdated ideas as to how a war should be run. Stirling ‘insisted with the C-in-C that the unit must be responsible for its own training and operational planning and that, therefore, the commander of the unit must come directly under the C-in-C. I emphasized how fatal it would be for the proposed unit to be put under any existing Branch or formation for administration.’
¹⁰

Auchinleck had no objections and a delighted Stirling departed MEHQ to begin the task of breathing life into his brainchild.

Stirling first appropriated the six officers, of whom Jock Lewes was a priority. It took Stirling a while to convince the sombre Lewes that the unit wasn’t a ‘shortterm flight of fancy’ and that he himself wasn’t a ‘good-time Charlie’. Eventually Lewes agreed, and soon he was joined by five more lieutenants: Englishmen Peter Thomas and Charles Bonington (the latter the father of the renowned mountaineer, Chris Bonington); and three ex-Layforce officers in Irishmen Eoin McGonigal and Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, and the fresh-faced Scot Bill Fraser.

Mayne also needed some convincing, but said later that one of the Scot’s strengths was his way of ‘making you think you are a most important person. Stirling was a master of that art and it got him good results’.
¹¹

Guardsman Johnny Cooper agreed with Mayne’s assessment. The teenager from 2nd Battalion Scots Guards stepped forward to volunteer for L Detachment when Stirling arrived at their desert camp, dubbed ‘Bug Bug’, looking for recruits. ‘He talked to you, not at you, and he usually gave orders in a very polite fashion,’ recalled Cooper. ‘His charisma was overpowering and we followed him everywhere.’
¹²

Most of Stirling’s recruits, however, were the disillusioned men from Layforce, the highly trained former commandos stuck in the desert waiting to be posted somewhere. ‘We were just hanging around in the desert getting fed up,’ remembered Jeff Du Vivier, who had fought under Mayne with 11 Commando at the battle of Litani River. ‘Then along came Stirling asking for volunteers. I was hooked on the idea from the beginning, it meant we were going to see some action.’

Stirling established L Detachment’s camp at Kabrit, a windswept spot 90 miles east of Cairo on the edge of the Great Bitter Lake. The HQ was christened ‘Stirling’s Rest Camp’, an ironic moniker given the remorseless nature of the training that the men endured.

‘In our training programme the principle on which we worked was entirely different from that of the Commandos,’ remembered Stirling. ‘A Commando unit, having once selected from a batch of volunteers, were committed to those men and had to nurse them up to the required standard. L Detachment, on the other hand, had set a minimum standard to which all ranks had to attain and we had to be most firm in returning to their units those [who] were unable to reach that standard.’
¹³

When Guardsman Mick D’Arcy wrote an account of L Detachment’s formation in May 1943 he recalled: ‘Numerous exercises carried out in training. Actual training hardest ever undertaken in Middle East. Long marches starting from 11 miles working up to 100 miles with full load … average training 9–10 hours daily plus night schemes.’
¹⁴
For the men who had come through the Layforce training on Arran there was nothing out of the ordinary in the physical training (except the heat and the flies) and the weapons training was also similar. But none of them had been asked to jump out of an aircraft before.

On the first day’s parachute training, 16 October, disaster struck when the ’chutes of Ken Warburton and Joe Duffy failed to open as they left the aircraft, 900ft above the ground. The pair fell to their deaths as their horrified comrades looked on. ‘Stirling assembled us all in one of the marquees and assured us that modifications would be made immediately [a subsequent investigation revealed that the snap-links on the men’s static line had buckled],’ recalled Johnny Cooper. ‘He also told us parachute training would recommence the following morning, and that he would be the first to jump. He was quite right to get us into the air again as quickly as possible after the fatalities as otherwise our confidence would have evaporated.’
¹⁵

As Stirling had envisaged, Jock Lewes proved his immense value to the unit with his diligence, hard work and especially his inventiveness. It was he who designed what was to become L Detachment’s most effective weapon in the Desert War – the Lewes bomb, a small but potent mix of plastic explosive, thermite and engine oil, fitted with a No. 27 detonator, an instantaneous fuse and a time pencil. A Lewes bomb could blow the wing off an enemy aircraft, but crucially it was also light enough to carry on long marches through the desert to the target.

Jimmy Storie, the last surviving member of the original L Detachment, recalled how Lewes complemented Stirling: ‘David was a good soldier and he had the pull that Jock never had because he came from a well-known landowning family. He was born a gentleman and he was a great man … [but] while Stirling was the backbone Lewes was the brains, he got the ideas such as the Lewes Bomb and without that we couldn’t have done a lot. To us Lewes was the brain and David had the power to get things done; he [Stirling] was there for a certain amount of training but he was looking further ahead. Jock liked things right, he was a perfectionist and he thought more about things in-depth.’
¹⁶

On 15 November 1941 Stirling celebrated his 26th birthday. The next day he and 54 men left Kabrit for the RAF base at Bagoush, approximately 300 miles west. It was the eve of L Detachment’s first raid, the one Stirling had sold to General Auchinleck in the summer, and there was an air of cool excitement among the men as they were looked after like royalty by the RAF personnel at Bagoush.

Stirling, meanwhile, spent 16 November anxiously monitoring the latest weather reports handed to him by the RAF. A fierce storm was forecast for the target area with winds expected to reach speeds of 30 knots. The Brigadier General Staff Coordinator, Sandy Galloway, advised Stirling that the mission should be aborted. Dropping by parachute in those wind speeds, and on a moonless night, would be hazardous in the extreme. Stirling absorbed the reports and the advice of Galloway and chose to let his men decide: did they wish to cancel the mission, or press on and to hell with the storm? The answer was an emphatic wish to continue.

Stirling had divided L Detachment into four sections under his overall command. Jock Lewes was to lead numbers one and two sections and Blair Mayne would be in charge of sections three and four. At 1830hrs on 16 November a fleet of trucks arrived at the officers’ mess to transport the men to the five Bristol Bombay aircraft that would fly them to the target area. Stirling was in the lead aircraft, along with nine other ranks including Sergeant Bob Tait, who wrote a report of the raid upon his return a while later:

We were scheduled to arrive over the dropping area about 2230 hours but owing to the weather which I think was of gale force, and the heavy A.A [anti-aircraft] barrage we were much later. The pilot had to make several circles over the area, gliding in from the sea, coming down through the clouds right over Gazala, which was well lit up by flares dropped by the bombing force, covering our arrival. During this glide, we came in for an uncomfortable amount of A.A. We finally were dropped about 2330 hours, and owing to the high wind (I estimated this about 30 miles per hour) we all made very bad landings. I myself being the only one uninjured. Captain Stirling himself sustained injuries about the arms and legs, Sergeant Cheyne, we never saw again. We had considerable difficulty in assembling, the wind having scattered us over a wide area but finally set off at about 0100 hours [on November 17].
¹⁷

Stirling and his men laid up at dawn, and it soon became clear to him that the extent of the injuries suffered on landing made the original plan unfeasible. He instructed Sergeant-Major George Yates to lead the men to the rendezvous with the LRDG (70 miles to the south-west) while he and Tait continued on to the target.

At nightfall Stirling and Tait broke cover and began marching towards their target, but at 2000hrs they were engulfed by an electrical storm, one of the worst to hit that part of Libya in living memory. ‘We were unable to see more than a few yards in front,’ wrote Tait, ‘and within fifteen minutes the whole area was under water. Eventually reaching the fork wadi we endeavoured to make our way down on to the flat coastal strip, but found this impossible owing to the water which rushed down with great force. From then until long after midnight we moved along the escarpment, attempting to go down the various wadis but with no success, so accordingly about 0100 hours [18 November] Captain Stirling abandoned the attempt and we turned away and marched south.’
¹⁸

When Stirling and Tait finally reached the rendezvous they were met with the disastrous news that only Mayne and Lewes had brought their men in safely. The rest of the raiding force, 34 men in total, were presumed either dead or captured (six of the soldiers were killed).

Dismayed as Stirling must have been, he refused to countenance that this was the end for L Detachment. According to Captain David Lloyd-Owen, who was in command of the LRDG rendezvous party, Stirling was thinking of the future even as he gratefully accepted a mug of tea. ‘He was so certain he could succeed and nothing was going to stop him,’ wrote Lloyd-Owen in his memoirs,
Providence Their Guide
. ‘He was convinced that he had been only thwarted by bad luck and certainly not by any lack of preparation or training.’

But it was Lloyd-Owen who came up with the solution to Stirling’s quandary: if parachuting was too hazardous a form of transport in the desert, why not let the LRDG drive Stirling and his men to the target area? Having operated in the region for nearly 18 months he knew the desert intimately and could not only drop the raiders within marching distance of the target, but pick them up after and avoid detection on the long journey back to base.

Stirling put the idea to Lloyd-Owen’s commanding officer, Colonel Guy Prendergast, once they were back at Siwa Oasis on 25 November, and the approval was given. Stirling also benefited from the fact that the main British offensive, Operation
Crusader
, which L Detachment’s raid had been timed to coincide with, had not gone well. General Rommel’s Afrika Korps had counter-attacked and pushed the British back into Egypt. The fate of 34 British paratroopers, therefore, was not an overriding concern for MEHQ. In fact Auchinleck, who shared Stirling’s eye for an opportunity, saw that Rommel’s supply lines along the Libyan coast were over-extended and ordered two flying columns under the command of brigadiers Denys Reid and John Marriott to attack the Axis forces hundreds of miles behind the frontline. In the meantime, Eighth Army would launch a secondary offensive against the Afrika Korps.

The LRDG had been allocated the task of attacking Axis aerodromes at Sirte, Agheila and Agedabia, timed to coincide with the attacks of the two flying columns, but Prendergast thought this was a mission best suited to Stirling’s L Detachment. His suggestion, cabled to MEHQ on 28 November, was accepted and Stirling received the go-ahead to attack the aerodromes in the second week of December.

In the event, a party of seven men led by Mayne achieved complete success, destroying 24 aircraft and a barracks full of Axis pilots at Tamet aerodrome. Thirty miles to the east, at Sirte landing strip, Stirling could only watch in bitter frustration as the 30 aircraft he was intending to attack took off a few hours before the raid. A party of five men under Bill Fraser accounted for 37 aircraft at Agedabia.

At the end of December 1941 Mayne returned to Tamet and blew up 27 aircraft that had only recently arrived to replace the ones destroyed in his previous visit to the airfield. Stirling tried for a second time to inflict damage on Sirte but again was foiled, this time by a newly installed perimeter fence and an increased guard detail.

Upon his return to base Stirling learned that Jock Lewes had been killed, shot by a marauding German fighter plane as his party of men returned from a raid on Nofilia aerodrome. ‘Stirling was rocked by Lewes’ death,’ recalled Jimmy Storie, who was with Lewes when the Messerschmitt attacked their patrol.