by Hamish Ross
I tried the instantaneous fuses and they did not work either.
I remained there that night hoping to dry the fuses, but the next day was cloudy and there was insufficient sun.
Also, I found that a deep wadi about twenty-five yards wide, running between us and the aerodrome, was full of water.
I withdrew that night, 18/11/41, some twenty miles on a bearing of 185 degrees. The next night I did a further five miles on that bearing and then turned due west for approximately three miles, where we contacted the LRDG.
There was nothing of importance seen on the withdrawal except two Italian tents . . . We moved up to them at dusk hoping to get rations but we found them empty.
The whole section having behaved extremely well and although lacerated and bruised in varying degrees by their landing, and wet and numb with cold, remained cheerful.
Sgt McDonald, the Section Sergeant, proved himself an extremely good and able NCO.
I am certain that given normal or even moderate weather our operation would have been entirely successful.38
Stirling’s section had been dropped far from their original dropping zone; the containers with their explosives had been scattered and could not be found. In addition, most of the section had been injured on landing and one man was lost; only Stirling and Sgt Tait were fit enough for action. Without explosives and far from their target it was hopeless; Stirling ordered the injured to set off for the rendezvous under Sgt Yates, but as a result of a navigational error the group ended in an area where they were picked up by an enemy patrol. Stirling carried out a reconnaissance of the coast road with Tait before setting off for the rendezvous. Lewes’s section, too, had landed far from the dropping zone; all were accounted for, but one of them was too badly injured to move and had to be left where he was. They recovered sufficient numbers of explosives to enable them to carry out an attack on planes, but they were far from their target. Lewes’s decision that night was to make for the rendezvous. The remnant of these three sections were all who returned. The first L Detachment raid had ended ingloriously. As we shall see later in Brig Wynter’s letter to Mayne, it appears that none of the reports written by Stirling, Lewes or Mayne was sent to HQ. But Mayne kept a copy of his.
At Beda Littoria, the raid by No. 11 Commando ended in failure. Laycock accompanied Keyes and the party from two submarines, Torbay and Talisman, but not all of those on Talisman were able to get ashore that night due to the heavy sea. Laycock lay up in the rendezvous wadi for its return the following night. The group under Keyes went ahead and attacked the house at Beda Littoria at midnight and a brief firefight ensued. (The raid is visually very effectively re-enacted in the pre-credit sequence of the film about Erwin Rommel, The Desert Fox 1951, directed by Henry Hathaway.) Keyes and Capt Campbell started a room-by-room search, but, on reaching the second room, Keyes, illuminated by the light in the hallway, threw open the door, received a burst of gunfire and fell fatally wounded.39 Of the group who landed, Laycock and Sgt Terry (who would later join the SAS) were able to reach Allied lines after a long march through the desert. That the Rommel raid had been misconceived became apparent: it had never been Rommel’s headquarters; it was the headquarters of Rommel’s quartermaster. As for Rommel, ‘he himself would never have pitched his tent so far from the front.’40 Keyes, for his gallantry, was posthumously awarded the VC. But the ill-fated raid was the death knell for No. 11 Commando; it was finally disbanded. On the face of it, something similar might have been expected with L Detachment. Yet this did not happen.
Although the first raid turned out a failure, Stirling was convinced, as he observed enemy traffic on the coastal road during his reconnaissance with Tait, that the basic concept of the unit was correct. Mayne had even more reason for such conviction. Of course it was due to the skills of the aircrew that they had reached the dropping zone; it was luck that no more of the section had been badly injured on landing; but, thereafter, it was Mayne’s competence and determination that had brought them to within striking distance of Timimi airfield. Next time they would succeed.
For the remnant that returned, disappointment was overlaid by the loss of friends and comrades. Jim Almonds expressed the sense of loss when he wrote in his diary on 26 November, ‘In our tent, the beds remain empty and their personal effects lie strewn where they left them. I don’t have the heart to alter things.’41 Among those who did not return was Mayne’s friend McGonigal.
Lessons were learned from Operation No. 1. Parachuting, as a means of reaching a target, had its limitations: not only could the group be scattered far and wide, the level of injuries sustained on landing could prevent a small group from operating. However, if they could be brought out by truck from a rendezvous after a raid, they could also be brought in accurately to a point from which they could proceed on foot to the target.
On the wider front, ‘Operation Crusader’ was not going according to plan: Rommel, with characteristic dash, had counter-attacked brilliantly, but his position was precarious. This development notwithstanding, Auchinleck replaced Gen Cunningham, Commander of the 8th Army, with Gen Ritchie. As the consequences of ‘Crusader’ preoccupied MEHQ, Stirling thought it better to move the remnant of L Detachment further from MEHQ and deeper into the desert. He was recommended to move to Jalo Oasis, which had recently been taken from the Italians. Stirling had to come up with success and, confident now about their means of progression to the area, he boldly planned four separate raids. The landing ground at the end of the wadi at Tamet was to become what is described in the chronicle as Operation No. 2 (B), and Mayne had with him Sgt McDonald, who had been in his section at the attempt on Timimi, and Parachutists Chessworth, Seekings, White and Hawkins.
His group was transported by S1 Patrol of the Long Range Desert Group, which was navigated by Mike Sadler, formerly of the Rhodesian Anti-Tank Battery. Sadler had been brought up in England but as a teenager had left to study agriculture in Rhodesia. In September 1939, on the outbreak of war, he volunteered for the Rhodesian forces. Thereafter, he transferred to the LRDG where, the SAS soon learned, he was a highly skilled navigator. It was his first encounter with Mayne and it made a lasting impression on him. Before they reached the drop-off point, one of the SAS team, Hawkins, asked Sadler if he could borrow a rather attractive dagger that Sadler had showed them: it had the Nazi emblem on, for Sadler had bought it on a cycling holiday in Germany in 1936. After the raiders set off from the rendezvous, the LRDG, deep in a wadi, waited. Hours later, when it came, the effect of the light and sound caused by planes, bomb dumps and fuel dumps exploding, though not experienced close up by those waiting, was impressive nonetheless. The six returned without any casualties (the only loss, it seemed, was Sadler’s dagger) and as the LRDG team drove them back to base, some of the raiders graphically described what had happened. Mayne said little. His written report is brief. In marked contrast with the report of Operation No. 1, its style would characterise the remainder of his reports on his desert raids – it may well have been the style that collectively they agreed suited their work.
Execution
Party left Jalo Oasis to reach Wadi Tamet being lightly and inefficiently strafed by Italian air force on the way.
Left LRDG trucks at 1830 hours, returned at 0300 hours. Party was then conveyed to Jalo.
Results
(a) Bombs were placed on 14 aircraft.
(b) 10 aircraft were destroyed by having instrument panels destroyed.
(c) Bomb dump and petrol dump were blown up.
(d) Reconnaissance was made down to the seafront but only empty huts were found.
(e) Several telegraph poles were blown up.
(f) Some Italians were followed and the house they came out of was attacked by machine-gun and pistol fire, bombs being placed on and around it. The inhabitants there appeared to be roughly thirty. Damage inflicted unknown.
Remarks
The guards were slack and when alarmed wasted many rounds in misdirected fire.42
Shortly afterwards, the newspapers printed embellished accounts from what was presumably a briefing paper Stirling issued for release to the press. Interestingly, copies of some of these newspaper accounts were inserted back-to-back with Mayne’s report in the unit’s chronicle, in ironic juxtaposition. Two of them give a flavour of their tone, and were to provide the basis of different variations over the years:
Raid on Tamet Landing Ground, Newspaper Cuttings
In the officers’ mess of an Axis aerodrome just beyond Sirte 30 German and Italian pilots sat one night drinking, laughing and talking. The campaign was not going too well for them. Rommel was retreating. But they were still a long way from the fighting line. The mess snugly blacked out, a bright fire was burning, some of them were playing cards.
Suddenly the door flew open. A burst from a Tommy gun swept the card players and drinkers at the bar. Drinking songs turned to shouts of fear, and those who were not killed or wounded desperately trying to make for the doors and windows were mown down. They were 500 miles behind the front line, but a British patrol was in their midst. Not one left the room alive.
The second more specifically points to the leader of the team:
A British lieutenant, a famous international sporting figure before the war, walked into the mess with one man. They pushed the door open and pressed the triggers of their Tommy guns. It was all over in a minute. He threw a time bomb on the roof of the mess. Then on to the next job.43
These newspaper accounts, however, were merely the harbingers of what was to come for both the unit and for Mayne.
Of the other three raiding parties that night, only Fraser had success, the biggest bag of all, his group destroying thirty-seven aircraft. This was vindication indeed for the unit, and Stirling sensed that, without pausing, they should strike again.
On 24 December, Mayne raided Tamet airstrip for the second time. This time he had some rotation of personnel: Sgt McDonald, Parachutists Bennet, White, Chessworth and Hawkins. They drove to within three miles or so of the airfield and then made an approach by stealth. They found that the enemy had taken heed of their previous visit: guards were sited in groups of seven or eight around the field and there were signs of greater vigilance than a fortnight earlier. The raiders silently went about their work, placing bombs on twenty-seven planes. They had enough bombs for some transport parked nearby and for a fuel tank. However, the technology of the fuses of the Lewes bomb was not flawless, and one exploded before they had finished their work. Silhouetted by burning planes, the raiders came under machine-gun fire and had to use grenades to fight through an encircling cordon. It was an impressive achievement, for they had destroyed twenty-seven aircraft without suffering any casualties. Tamet airstrip henceforth became known in the unit as ‘Paddy’s Own’, since his groups had damaged or destroyed fifty aircraft there within two weeks.44
Stirling also made his second attempt on the Sirte aerodrome, but found that an armoured enemy division was moving along the coast road. Hours were lost before they could approach, leaving insufficient time to carry out the raid. On 27 December Fraser’s party reached their objective and lay up to observe it. They found it used by planes during the day for refuelling and bringing reinforcements, but deserted by night. For three frustrating days this pattern continued; and then Fraser withdrew. On their return, there was some confusion about the rendezvous point and they began to run short of water, so they had to resort to stalking any isolated enemy trucks they came across. It took them until 11 January to reach base camp. Lewes and his men reached Nofelia and found forty-three planes on which they began placing bombs. When the bombs exploded, however, the effects were not as spectacular as they had hoped because the planes’ fuel tanks were empty. Next morning the party was spotted and strafed by a Messerschmitt 110, and Jock Lewes was killed.
The military hierarchy now began to take notice of the unit’s achievements: Stirling and Mayne were each awarded the DSO – a distinction usually awarded to more senior officers – and Stirling was promoted to major and Mayne to captain. A unit of Free French parachutists under George Bergé was by now attached to L Detachment and undergoing training. But Jock Lewes’s death was keenly felt in the unit, for he had made a unique and lasting contribution to its rationale and development.
When it came to replacing Lewes as training officer, for such a flexible thinker Stirling showed a certain rigidity in his assumptions. Fraser and Mayne were his two experienced officers, but Fraser was still missing. So Stirling appointed Mayne, presumably reasoning that he had no alternative. However, Mayne was to remain at Kabrit and supervise the training while Stirling left with a raiding party. It was Cowles who first reported that there was discord between Stirling and Mayne over this arrangement; but, as with much of this early period, there is no documentation, such as a war diary, to examine. Stirling gave his version of events, but Mayne’s case was never put. Certainly, in later years Stirling seems to have indulged in rationalisation by arguing that Mayne must have had a blockage with administration; he seems not to have asked himself how it was that Mayne was so effective as a manager and administrator when he later took command of the unit. For, as we shall see, Mayne was a very capable organiser. Cowles depicted him as Achilles, sulking in his tent while the battle raged outside Troy’s walls, and had him growing more disgruntled when he heard that Rommel had launched an attack – the emergence of a caricature of the one-dimensional action man. But, in truth, Mayne seemed not to have too much difficulty in keeping his mind off the disappointing war news. For example, during the last week in January he met Jane Kenny, the Nursing Sister from Longford whose patient he had been the previous June. They arranged to meet again, but, before they did, on 4 February Jane Kenny wrote to Barbara Mayne:
I met your brother one day last week and when I congratulated him on winning the DSO and said how well he looked, he replied, ‘I wish you’d write and tell my sister, because I’m afraid my letters are a bit erratic, and I know they worry about me at home if they don’t hear from me.’ So I promised I’d drop a line and tell you how well he is. . . . When he was a patient he loaned me one of Percy French’s books, which I hadn’t time to finish before he went away. He tells me now that he has a second copy, so I’m going to borrow it again – any little bit of Ireland out here is welcome.45
When Mayne wrote to his sister Frances on 8 February, he made no reference to his present duties, but mentioned his forthcoming promotion.
I am becoming a captain. I am rather sorry, as I was fond of my two pips. I have had them a long time, but it is backdated to 1st September so it means a few extra shekels.46
When Stirling returned, he had second thoughts about whether the training role had to be fulfilled by an officer, for he did not appoint Bill Fraser, who was back on duty, but Sgt Maj Riley.
In the meantime there was a new urgency on the military front, for the momentum of Rommel’s advance at the end of January had brought the Panzerarmee to Gazala, so the airfields in the Benghazi area were to be attacked. With the loss of Jalo Oasis, the LRDG moved to Siwa as a base. Siwa Oasis, a large fertile settlement, was one of a chain of oases in the outer Libyan desert. It had a long history: for centuries it had been a halt on the caravan routes and indeed had been developed as a Roman settlement. There were artesian wells; Cleopatra is supposed to have bathed in its waters. In addition, it had had an important oracle, which was said to have been consulted by Julius Caesar, among others. However, long before the Second World War, its former glory had departed. While there was still the grandly styled, but unprepossessing-looking, Farouk Hotel, the houses had fallen into decay. Crumbling mortar had been picked over by the wind and fine dust lay all around. Yet to the raiders, just as to travellers in the past, it offered welcome respite.
On the ides of March, defying augury, Stirling left Siwa. And, sure enough, on the 17th, two days later, one of their transports struck a thermos bomb and two men were injured; but, more importantly, Stirling’s ultimate aim for the raid was to
be thwarted. He was determined to extend the unit’s capability. Rommel’s supply lines were relatively short across the Mediterranean; his supplies via Italy were landed at either Tripoli or Benghazi. Stirling’s idea was to attack shipping, not by a seaborne assault, but by an overland approach, penetrating a harbour town under cover of darkness, blending the raiders’ transport with vehicles used by the Axis forces, launching collapsible Folboats (folding kayaks), attaching limpet mines to supply ships, and retreating as they had come. He had tried out the idea at Bouerat and had got as far as the harbour. Their destination, from where they would launch their attacks – the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Hills, a range of rolling hills with deep valleys, water and trees – was very much of a contrast with the desert terrain. Accompanying the party was a Belgium, Bob Melot, who served with General Staff Intelligence. He was older than most of the others; born in 1895, he was a veteran of the First World War, having served as a pilot in the Belgian Air Force where he received the Croix de Guerre.47 He spoke several European languages, and having married and lived in Alexandria for years, he also spoke fluent Arabic. He and Mayne formed a friendship at Siwa which was to last until Melot’s death in 1944.
The qualities of individualism and determination which characterised many of those who had been recruited were further developed by the unit’s work, as the next operation shows. On the night of 20 March, Mayne had with him Bennet, Rose and Byrne when he left to raid Berka satellite airfield. Their target lay between the coast road and the sea. Progress was slower than expected; boulders impeded the truck’s progress and it was an hour and a half after midnight before the team set out on foot. First they came upon the airfield defences and found two German sentries guarding an anti-aircraft gun. They also spotted some bomb dumps. As they were behind schedule, Mayne subdivided the group into pairs, taking Bennet with him to look for aircraft and leaving Rose and Byrne to deal with the bomb dumps. While they were silently at work, one of the Lewes bombs went off prematurely; this was followed by the bomb dumps exploding. Unhindered, both pairs of raiders disappeared into the darkness. Rose and Byrne made for the foothills and took stock. They had been given two rendezvous points: the first in the foothills and the second, a vehicle rendezvous, some thirty miles further on. In Byrne’s view they were too late for the first rendezvous and he was for going on to the second; Rose felt equally strongly that they should go to the first rendezvous. Unable to agree, they separated.48 When he failed to find the second rendezvous, Byrne decided to walk south the two hundred miles or so to the fort of Bir Hacheim. He eventually ran out of water but met some Arabs, who fed him and filled his water bottle. Striking out again, he made further progress but was later picked up by the Germans and taken prisoner. However, Rose met up with Mayne and Bennet. They were indeed too late for the first rendezvous so they set off for the second, but their map was lacking in detail and they were unable to find it. There was no alternative but a long walk through the desert, so Mayne decided that they would make for Tobruk. There were Senussi tents in the area and in preparation for their walk they approached one and asked for water. What happened after that is conveyed in Mayne’s own words of the time, in a letter to his brother Douglas.