by Hamish Ross
Pedder’s HQ and No. 1 Troop, having reached their objective, engaged in fierce fighting before overrunning the barracks and capturing the French flag. They also knocked out a 75-mm gun battery. Lt Bryan’s section of No. 1 Troop routed the crew of a 75-mm gun emplacement – the right-hand gun of a battery of four. There were Royal Artillery men in the section and they succeeded in priming it, swivelling it and firing it at one of the remaining guns with spectacular results.41 However, No. 1 Troop and Pedder’s HQ came under concentrated automatic fire from the higher ground. Soon they began to sustain very heavy losses. First Lt Coode was killed, then Pedder was killed and Lt Bryan badly wounded and captured. Lt Farmiloe took over from Pedder but then he, too, was killed. With the death of all of the officers of HQ group and Bryan’s capture, RSM Tevendale took over command of the troop.
Mayne led No. 7 Troop in the direction of the coastal road, reaching it at around 0530 hr. He spotted a group of soldiers directing fire northwards and it occurred to him that they might be Australian forces who had crossed the river and made rapid northward progress (for he had no idea, at this stage, that X Party had been landed on the wrong side of the river). As there was good cover, he crawled forward until he got within earshot of them. Having ascertained that they were French troops, he stormed their position, throwing hand grenades, and his men brought fire to bear.42 The defenders soon surrendered and Mayne found that they had netted forty prisoners, two machine-guns and a mortar. At this point, Mayne sent a runner to find Pedder and report the capture of the post. However, the runner returned later having been unable to find Pedder’s HQ.43 Mayne then ordered the troop to move further into the hills and, leaving that group of prisoners, they continued in that direction, passing north of the barracks. Then they turned south-east and headed for Qasmiye; there was little opposition and on the way they took some more prisoners.44
The secondary purpose of Y Party was to act as a reserve to X Party, and so, at around 0630 hr, Mayne ordered the troop south towards the river. On the way, they passed Fraser’s Section of No. 8 Troop. About an hour later, they reached an explosive store where they took more prisoners, this time about thirty, whom they brought with them. But at about 0800 hr, as they came nearer the river, they came under fire from the Australians on the south side of the Litani river. Accordingly, the Troop displayed a white flag – the earlier agreed symbol if the Commando found itself under friendly fire – but it had no effect. They remained pinned down for about an hour before they were able to retire under cover and concentrate their prisoners at the explosive store.45
Their primary objectives had been achieved, but the troop could not carry out its secondary purpose, for it was clear that X Party was not on the north side of the river; the Australians were still stalled on the south side and treated any troop movement on the north as hostile. So while surprise, speed and aggressive spirit had achieved much initially, they were a lightly armed Commando and as that long June day wore on the balance would inevitably tilt against them. Mayne decided to move further east into hilly country; he took over the forward section and found a track which led them to some tethered mules. Mayne was sure that it would lead them to another enemy emplacement. It did, and Mayne, in the lead and with revolver in hand, surprised a group of about thirty French colonial soldiers, mostly mule drivers. He called on them to surrender, but one of them raised his rifle and Mayne shot him instantly. The others surrendered and he found that he had made a particularly good haul: not only was it a small arsenal, it was also a store and contained victuals.46 It was the best part of six hours since they had left the landing craft, so they fell upon the food and drink. However, their repast was interrupted by the phone ringing in the store; so they followed the telephone wires and surprised another enemy position, capturing forty prisoners and a selection of automatic weapons.47
Mayne decided that the only reasonable prospect of reaching their own lines was to take a long detour east, then south. This took the best part of five hours, and they reached the river at about 1700 hr. Again they were fired on by the Australians, and this time it cost No. 7 Troop a man killed.48 However, this time their signal was understood, and just before dark they got across the Litani river by a pontoon bridge, which the Australians had thrown across not far from the bridge that had been blown up. The troop had about seventy prisoners with them, and next day they marched them down to Tyre.
In a letter to his brother Douglas, Mayne gave some insights into his grasp of battlefield tactics, and he also created vignettes of both friend and foe. But the letter reveals more: there is some indication of his relationship with his men. He made more use of the first-person plural than the first-person singular and, for the most part, he described the action in terms of teamwork. In addition, the letter shows another important soldierly quality: he did not exult in the death of an enemy – there was an expression of regret at the unnecessary death of the soldier he had to shoot.
We did a good piece of work when we landed behind the French lines at the Litani. We were fired on as we landed, but got off the beach with a couple of casualties – then we saw a lot of men and transport about 600 yards up the road. I couldn’t understand it as they seemed to be firing the wrong way, but might have been Aussies: there was quite a lot of cover – kind of hayfield. I crawled up to fifty yards or so and heard them talking French, so I started whaling grenades at them and my men opened fire. After about five minutes up went a white flag. There were about forty of them – two machine-guns and a mortar – a nice bag to start with. We had only a couple of men hurt. They had been firing at McGonigal’s crowd, who had landed further north. We left those prisoners and pushed on. McCunn, a Cameronian, was in charge of my forward sections and he got stuck, so we went round him. I had about fifteen men, it got hilly and hard going and [there were] Frenchies all over the place. Eventually we came to a path which we followed and came on a dozen mules and knew that there must be something somewhere – we came on it just round the corner – about thirty of those fellows sitting twenty yards away. I was round first with my revolver and the sergeant had a T. [Tommy] gun. Were they surprised! I called on them to ‘jetez vers à la planche’, but they seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake; one of them lifted a rifle and I am afraid that he had not even time to be sorry. This was a sort of HQ place with typewriters, ammunition, revolvers, bombs, and, more to the point, beer and food. We had been going about six hours and were ready for it. While we were dining the phone rang. We didn’t answer it but followed the wire and got another bull – four machine-guns, two light machine-guns, two mortars and forty more prisoners. We lost only two men (sounds like a German communiqué). It was a long time since I had a day like it. Eventually, about eight hours later, we came back through the Aussie lines. We were rather tired, so the prisoner laddies kindly carried the booty and equipment. The rest of the story can keep until I see you.49
But the remainder of the Commando to the north, Z Fighting Party, had also made rapid progress on its key objective, and, although they suffered casualties, No. 10 Troop captured the Kafr Badda bridge just over an hour and a half after running ashore. Macpherson and MacDonald adopted positions on the nearby commanding heights, thereby preventing enemy reinforcements coming down from the north. McGonigal’s troop took up a position on the hills about 500 yards to the east, above the lateral road. McGonigal engaged an armoured truck and an armoured car on the road running east from the Kafr Badda bridge. They destroyed the truck, but the accompanying armoured car escaped eastwards.50 The fighting party’s secondary task was to support Y Party, but they could not communicate with it by radio. So Capt More, who was a Royal Engineer and happened to be a keen motorcycle enthusiast,51 found a motorbike among the enemy transport, commandeered it, and used it as a means of keeping in touch with groups of his party before setting out on it to find Pedder’s Y Party. At around 0800 hr, he sped south down the main Beirut to Tyre road, but, rounding a bend from where he could see the river, was fired on by the Australian forces
on the south side, his motorcycle shot from under him despite the large white towel he was carrying.52 This was roughly about the same time that Mayne’s troop came under fire from Allied forces.
Fraser’s B Section of No. 8 Troop, after having supported Mayne’s No. 7 Troop for a while, pushed eastwards and after some time met a section of No. 4 Troop, commanded by Richards, who then joined them. They encountered some French dismounted cavalry, engaged them and took some thirty prisoners. Veering south, the combined group came to the crest of a hill overlooking the Litani and were fired on by the Australians, first with small-arms fire and then, for good measure, by their artillery. They retired northwards and lined up with Z Party.
Although the raiders had cut his lines of communication between the barracks, the bridge and the rear, the enemy had a comprehensive capability: mortars, 75-mm field guns well hidden, mountain guns, heavy Hotchkiss machine-guns, armoured cars; by early afternoon, McGonigal recorded that a French reconnaissance plane flew repeatedly overhead;53 and two French destroyers, Guerpard and Valmy, appeared. Macpherson recalled his impressions of their arrival.
It was a beautifully clear day, absolutely calm, and there were these warships lazily cruising offshore, and through binoculars you saw their twin turrets coming round until you thought that you actually were, through the binoculars, looking down the barrels, and off came these heavy shells. It just was a slightly unnerving experience until you realised that they weren’t pointing at you, because they couldn’t see you and they were just guessing.54
The shelling from offshore lasted until the French warships in turn were engaged by the Royal Navy.
It was just a question of time until they were overwhelmed and so, as the afternoon wore on, the troop sections of Z Fighting Party, like Mayne and No. 7 Troop, extricated themselves from their positions and made their way towards the Litani river at different points. Under cover of darkness Fraser brought his troop southeast to the river. It was swift-flowing and treacherous in places. Sgt Cheyne and Sgt Nicol both swam across and found a suitable fording place, and a line was set up by which the troop crossed. Macpherson moved his section towards the river but he had an added encumbrance – a number of prisoners.
The prisoners I really didn’t know what the hell to do with, because you couldn’t withdraw potentially through enemy lines in the dark with a lot of prisoners, so I took their trousers and their boots and turned them loose. And we turned south. Now, what you would hardly believe is that each company, squadron or whatever only had one map, and of course MacDonald had gone off with the map. This is part of what I regarded as inadequate preparation, in hindsight – although we were full of enthusiasm, but that was just because of war. Anyway, I got them back. We ran into a patrol just on the Litani river; then we crossed the river by fording it – it was actually quite deep (up to about chest height in the middle) and I got terribly ticked off by Keyes afterwards because we lost a couple of weapons. But I thought we had done well enough in getting all the chaps through. We lost the anti-tank rifle – it was a most unwieldy thing, .55 – and I think we lost one Bren gun, but everything else came through.55
More and McGonigal conferred and agreed that they should attempt to cross the Litani near where it entered the sea. But in the early hours of the morning they were trapped under fire on two sides; they had no option but to surrender to the French. However, in the course of the night their positions were reversed when the Australians succeeded at their second attempt during the night to drive north; and the French in turn surrendered to their captives; More took their surrender. The Australians moved through and pushed on towards Beirut.
On 11 June Keyes, the senior surviving officer, and More, the adjutant, went to Jerusalem to report. Gen Wilson congratulated them, applauded the Commando for its action at the Litani river and expressed his satisfaction at the outcome. After three days’ rest and recuperation in Haifa, the remnant of No. 11 Commando returned to garrison duty on Cyprus, disembarking at Famagusta at 0830 hr on 15 June.56 But returned to what? The die had been cast: Layforce was to be disbanded. Nos 7 and 8 Commando were already in the process of being disbanded; No. 11 Commando would follow suit when relieved of garrison duty in Cyprus. The losses that Layforce had sustained in Crete and now in the Litani operation could not be replaced. The options that emerged from GHQ Cairo for the Commando were either that they could return to their own or a similar unit in the Middle East; or they could express an interest in joining the Long Range Desert Group; or they could go to the Middle East Commando Depot and await developments.57 By this time Mayne had already put in for a transfer to a military mission to the Far East.
Pedder’s death had far-reaching consequences for No. 11 Commando. When he departed from Cyprus to meet Gen Wilson in Jerusalem, he left Napier in command; but when he sent for the Commando, he bestowed the command on Keyes and ordered Napier to remain with the rear party. When the remnant of the unit returned after the Litani action, there was tension between Majs Napier and Keyes. Napier had as good a claim as Keyes to be acting CO: his substantive rank was captain and he was a temporary major; Keyes’ substantive rank was lieutenant and he was an acting major. Keyes had joined the Commando in August 1940 as a lieutenant; by October he had been promoted to acting captain; five months later, in March 1941, he was advanced to acting major, and on 10 June he became acting commanding officer. But an acting commanding officer lacking experience – even a son of the director of combined operations – was not in a strong position to influence policy within GHQ. Indeed, by the end of his first week in the new role, Laycock told him that MS Branch considered that he was ‘too young and had too little service to be a battalion commander.’58 As a regular officer he was, quite naturally, concerned that he should not drop below the substantive rank of major when the war was over. But while he was ambitious, Keyes worried about his responsibilities.
However, there was not only tension between Keyes and Napier, there was also antipathy between Mayne and Keyes. Macpherson observed how Keyes related to both officers and men:
Yes, Geoffrey was not everybody’s cup of tea. I wouldn’t say that he traded on his father’s name – although, I think, Pedder on a number of occasions showed him a degree of favour – but he was slightly an odd man out. We were – I suppose we were – very simple young officers, simple enthusiasms (in 1940 I was nineteen) and we were committed to what we were doing and so on; Geoffrey was, I’m quite sure, committed to what he was doing, but he was a much more complex character, withdrawn to some degree. I think he was hugely conscious of his heritage and the need to do well in a situation where he was not terribly well equipped to do well in the physical side of soldiering: he was not strong; he was tall and, you might say, weedy in build; he also was slightly more Bertie Wooster-style spoken than the rest of us. But because he was not a natural athlete-soldier, I think he had a slight chip that he must do well: he was absolutely determined to excel somehow as a soldier – and frankly that is how he got himself killed. He was an odd man out and he did have an uneven way of dealing with people: he would be extremely fair on one occasion and extremely unfair on others, dealing with both officers and senior NCOs when he became Commanding Officer. Again, he commanded a degree of respect, but again, he was not particularly liked and perhaps he didn’t have a capacity of making friends. I’m not aware, even his contemporaries like David Blair and Charles Major (both of whom I knew well after the war as well) – they were not his friends and yet they were the ones at his level.
Yes, he didn’t get on with Blair Mayne. Blair thought him a little insincere and Geoffrey thought Blair a little unreliable, which was certainly not true, because Blair was very reliable – he was merely eccentric. And off duty he was certainly unreliable; on duty he was thoroughly reliable and his troop thought the world of him.59
Antipathy between Mayne and Keyes did not matter much while Pedder was CO, but it mattered when Keyes became acting commanding officer. Within a week of No. 11 Commando returning to Cyprus
, Mayne had left it. He wrote to his brother Douglas, ‘I have left the Scottish Commando now; it wasn’t the same since our CO got written off.’60 Matters quickly came to a head.
When Geoffrey was carrying out his Acting Commanding Officer role, there was not a mess night, because that was too grand for our circumstances in Cyprus, but a dining-in night, and Geoffrey came over and interrupted what Blair and Eoin were doing (it may have been a chess game) and Blair stood up and pushed him away. Geoffrey fell over and had a slight cut from the edge of a table. He made loud noises about putting Blair under close arrest, but he never did. It is doubtful, in the hierarchy, if an acting officer had the authority to make an instant close arrest.
I was not there at the time: I must have been out at Karpasso at that point. But I was informed of it later – it was the topic of substantial conversation in the mess.61
An expression that Mayne used later, in referring to someone with whom he simply would not work, was ‘he really gets my goat’. In this case it was worse. Mayne left the unit, wasted no time in departing from Cyprus, returned to Egypt and reported to the Commando Base at Geneifa. Keyes, for his part, was probably relieved that Mayne had taken this course; for it was not unusual: earlier, another officer, Tommy Murdoch, had left the unit after a difference of opinion.62 However, Keyes did not officially record in the war diary until 23 June that Mayne had left,63 but, as we shall see, he had already left Cyprus before then.
Some days after arriving in Egypt and reporting to the Commando Base, Mayne went down with a bout of malaria and was admitted to No. 19 General Hospital at Geneifa. Jane Kenny was a 31-year-old Nursing Sister from Longford in the South of Ireland who worked in No. 19 General Hospital in the officers’ wards. She particularly remembered Mayne as one of her patients, for he was a fellow countryman and he loaned her his copy of the works of Percy French. He also told her that he had a sister who was a nurse in Belfast; and Jane Kenny later wrote to Barbara Mayne, ‘He was a patient of mine last June, had a mild attack of malaria – much to his disgust.’64 When he was discharged from the general hospital, Mayne went into a convalescent hospital on 13 July, where he remained until 27 July. And it was here that he wrote to Douglas on 15 July, giving his address as Commando Base, MEF.