by Hamish Ross
At the moment I am about fifteen miles from Benghazi, so I won’t be able to post this for some time. We did a raid on the local aerodrome three nights ago and one of the party hasn’t returned yet, so we are waiting for him. It’s a very pleasant country here, great change from the desert. Some of the people who know the South Downs say that it is very like it – low hills and valleys, lots of wild flowers and long grass. It’s like a picnic; only annoying thing is the Jerry planes flying about, but we are well camouflaged. Luckily, the Italians treat the Senussi very badly so they will do anything to help us. The day and night after the raid we couldn’t find our rendezvous. The maps are awful, we had been walking from 1.30 am to 7 o’clock the next night and couldn’t find the damn place anywhere. We must have covered about fifty miles, first of all getting to the drome and then coming away. It was dark and we were due here at dusk. It was no good walking around in circles in the dark and I had more or less resigned myself to a 250-mile walk to Tobruk, and so we (three of us, two corporals and myself) went to the nearest Senussi camp for some water and, if possible, a blanket.
The Senussi were very suspicious at first, but once they were sure that we were ‘Inglesi’ everything changed and we were ushered into one of the tents, our equipment brought in, blankets put down for a bed. There was a fire just outside and everyone crowded in. First of all they boiled us some eggs, which were damned good, then platters of dates and bowls of water and a huge gourd of goats’ milk was brought in. I think that the form is that they never wash the gourd, and the sourer it gets the better they like it, and I think they must have liked this stuff very well. This gourd kept going round and round and we soon gathered that the best-mannered people take a great suck and the real connoisseurs a hearty belch. The belch wasn’t difficult. This went on for a long time. We knew no Arabic and they no English, but everybody knew what everybody else was talking about. Then they started brewing tea, awful stuff, must have been made with dandelions, talk about bitter – this was in little glasses. After the first round I pretended to be asleep.
Eventually the party finished and everyone started for their own tents, the three of us lying on the blanket. I don’t think that I have ever been more tired. Nearly every one of the old fellows, before they left, tucked the blanket round, pushing it in under our feet and in at the side – there was a chorus of ‘Sidas’ and the show finished.
All this time the host’s wife had been lying on her bed with two or three smaller Senussi, who looked about three years old. The Lord of the Manor then went out, brought in a goat and three kids, tied them to the tent pole, and we settled down for the night.
And now listen to this and never disbelieve in luck again or coincidence, or whatever you like to call it. The men who were waiting for us at the rendezvous – and they would have left next morning – had got a chicken which they had bartered for some sugar. They wanted it cooked and had an English-speaking Arab with them, so they sent him to get it cooked. In that area there must have been thirty or forty different encampments spread over the three-odd miles we were from each other and he picked the one that we were lying in to come to so we won’t have to footslog it across the desert!
We have been here now for two days and the trucks for three and I imagine that every Arab for miles around knows where we are and not one of them would go and tell the Jerries or the Eyeties where we are.49
Unaware of Byrne’s capture, the party left on the deadline and on the morning of 24 March, Mayne and his two companions returned to the Jebel.50
Of the raiding party leaders, only Mayne was successful: he accounted for fifteen aircraft destroyed. Dodds, who had led another group, was unable to get onto Slonta airfield because of its defences; another party under Alston failed to find Berka main airfield; Fraser discovered only one aircraft on Barce; and Stirling got onto Benina on two occasions, only to find it each time bereft of aircraft. However, what Stirling wanted to prove was the unit’s ability to raid Benghazi. And this he did. But having successfully penetrated the town to its harbour, Stirling was stymied, within a stone’s throw of shipping, by being unable to assemble the folding boat. But it was only a technical problem – he would not be deterred from trying again. He had earlier recruited a number of officers to whom the unit appealed. As far as political connections were concerned, he could not have gone higher when he secured the interest of Randolph Churchill. He also recruited Fitzroy Maclean and the Earl Jellicoe.
On 8 April L Detachment was due to begin training for further parachute operations; Stirling wanted to build the unit up to and beyond its original establishment, but in the meantime some leave was due. Unknown to his colleagues, Mayne went to Gazala to look for the grave of Eoin McGonigal. Grief at the loss of McGonigal was not something he shared with others; nor did he show his feelings. In time, though, he did talk about him, for Fraser McLuskey, the unit’s first padre, said, ‘Paddy often spoke of McGonigal’51 and Sadler, too, recalled that he often talked about McGonigal.
Now, Gazala, between 31 January and 24 May 1942, was not high on the list of places to visit for a British officer on leave. It was defended by the Allies as the northern bastion of the Gazala Line which stretched southward to Bir Hacheim. To its west lay a minefield and beyond that was No-Man’s-Land. Gazala lay some five hundred miles west of Alexandria, so Mayne may have negotiated a lift with the RAF or the Army. When he got there, he spent some time making enquiries and searching, though in vain. On his return to Kabrit, he wrote to McGonigal’s mother and told her of his quest and its failure. On 2 June 1942, Mrs McGonigal replied:
My Dear Blair
I have just got your very kind letter and really feel that I can’t thank you enough for all your great kindness. It was terribly good of you to have gone to Gazala and taken so much trouble to try to find Eoin’s grave. I know he did not have an identity disk – I think he just wanted to be an unknown soldier – but I had hoped he had been found and buried, as I meant to go to Gazala after the war. However, you know how much he hated a fuss so it is PERHAPS BETTER as it is – just as he wanted. I miss him so much – more in fact every day – but I know he is safe and happy and terribly interested in what you are all doing. I am sure he has been with you in your operations since he died. . . .
She ended:
Thank you so much for all your goodness – it has made such a difference.
Yours very sincerely
Margaret McGonigal52
Some who lose a close friend in combat try to immure themselves thereafter by adopting an attitude of indifference. Mayne did not.
It is something of a paradox that Gen Ritchie, the senior officer at MEHQ, who is credited with seeing the potential in David Stirling’s original memorandum and who gave his support to the raising of a unit which so eminently suited desert warfare, should have been the one to preside over the preparations for the defensive concept of the Gazala Line. The line stretched from Gazala to Bir Hacheim and comprised mine-marshes between a series of boxes, behind which was placed the armour capability. It was reminiscent of the Western Front in the First World War. This against an opponent who had already proved himself in desert warfare to be a master of agility and speed of movement! And, as though to prove it again, on 26/27 May Rommel swept south of Bir Hacheim then struck north behind the Allied line, heading for Tobruk. The earlier gains made under ‘Operation Crusader’ were reversed, and Egypt and the Suez Canal were once again under threat. With this development, Rommel’s airfields in the Benghazi area had to be attacked again.
On 8 June, three groups of raiders left Siwa Oasis. Stirling went to Benina, Mayne was allocated Berka satellite airstrip for a second time and Lt Zirneld led a group of Free French to attack Berka main airfield. With Mayne were Cpls Lilley, Storie and Warburton (this was the second of that name in the unit: Kenneth Warburton had been killed in parachute training on 16 October 1941). At Benina, Stirling had success, destroying five planes and attacking aircraft hangers in addition to between twenty and thirty aero
engines.53 The French party destroyed or damaged fourteen aircraft.
Lack of coordination among the services compromised Mayne in this attempt. Waiting for the return of the raiders, the LRDG party at the rendezvous were under the impression that ‘an ill-timed’ attack on Berka airfields by the RAF had hampered the raiders.54 Storie, who is now the only survivor of the raid, put the emphasis on the timing of the French raid.
The French went in before the arranged time and the Germans were alert and in their armoured cars and there we were in the drome. It was hopeless, we split into two: Paddy and I went together and Warburton and Lilley went together.55
Lilley and Warburton separated and Warburton was later captured. At daybreak, Lilley found that he was still within the perimeter of a very large enemy camp and set off openly walking to the perimeter. He was stopped by an Italian soldier, who tried to take him prisoner; Lilley had to overpower and strangle the man before he could get away. Next morning, Mayne and Storie found in their line of march, a German command car with a line of soldiers searching for them. They took cover immediately and lay waiting as the line of men came closer. Suddenly, the advancing troops stopped, some little distance short of where the raiders lay, and grouped round the command car. Then, apparently in response to a radio message to discontinue the search, they departed. Hardly believing their luck, Mayne and Storie continued on their way and reached a Senussi encampment where they joined Lilley, who had got there ahead of them.
Back at the rendezvous, Stirling and Mayne decided on a hitherto unplanned reconnaissance behind the enemy lines. What followed was an audacious face-to-face confrontation between members of the unit and the enemy. There was no subterfuge about their vehicle or their uniforms; but they did have with them Karl Kahane, who had previously served in the German Army before emigrating to Palestine and who was a member of the Special Interrogation Group (SIG). In its various narratives, this incident appears not to have been written up in exaggerated form. Several of the group who were there – Stirling, Cooper, Storie and Mayne – have retold it. The earliest account must be Mayne’s; and, as always with his most vivid letter-writing, it was addressed to his brother Douglas:
I have been up in the desert on one of our raids – got back three days ago. It wasn’t for my liking. I prefer the long nights, more time to get away, though my luck was as good as ever. Still after aircraft. In the last month I got forty off. I was shot up a couple of times and, bar losing some kit which was burnt – the blighters set my car on fire – I was OK. I had a party last time I was back in the Sergeants’ Mess. I had just broken the century in planes so it was fairly hectic, a dangerous place to go to – you are never quite certain what is in your glass. I remember in one of your letters you were complaining of not having seen a Jerry – that came to me forcibly about a week or so later. I had been raiding Berka drome and after I got back to our rendezvous we decided, the CO and myself, to have a look at Benghazi – so we took a truck. I was driving, the CO beside me and four of our lads in the back, also a Free Austrian. Well, we drove onto the road and started gaily down with headlights on. We got about five, six miles and then we saw a red light being swung. That didn’t worry us as always before it was only Italians and we shout ‘tedesco’ (German) and drive past. But they were getting wise to us and this time we see a bloody big contraption like a five-barred gate that was mixed up with a mile or so of barbed wire and so we stopped. The sentry was in the headlights and right enough an Italian. Our Austrian started to do his little piece and shouted out that we are Germans in a hurry and to open the blankety gate. The wop wasn’t so sure so he hollered for the guard – about ten Germans headed by a sergeant major, Tommy guns, grenades and rifles. I was scared to look further in case I saw tanks and machine-guns. I gathered later that the conversation ran like this:
Fritz: ‘What’s the password?’
Karl (our Austrian): ‘How the — do we know what the — password is, and don’t ask for our — identity cards either. They’re lost and we’ve been fighting for the past seventy hours against these — Tommies. Our car was destroyed and we were lucky to capture this British truck and get back at all. Some fool put us on the wrong road. We’ve been driving for the past two hours and then you so and sos, sitting here on your arses in Benghazi, in a nice safe job, stop us. So hurry up, get that – gate open.’
But Fritz isn’t satisfied, so he walks to about three feet from the car on my side. I’m sitting there with my Colt on my lap and suddenly I remember that it isn’t cocked, so I pull it back and the Jerry has one look and then orders the gates to be opened. Which they did in a chorus of ‘Guden Nachtens’ (sic) [and] we drove on. We thought later that he came to the conclusion, the same one that I had come to, that if anyone was going to be hurt he was going to be a very sick man early on.
We drove on at any rate and came on a lot of tents and trucks and people (at Lete) got our machine-guns up from the bottom of the truck and started blowing hell out of them – short, snappy and exhilarating. The story is far too long and I am fed up writing – at any rate we cut into the desert, chased by armoured cars. We climbed the escarpment. We had 40 lb of explosives, which blows when set off by our own delayed-action fuse. The fuse had got set off by the bumps but it is so fixed that after it cracks there is twenty seconds. We all got out at any rate. But there is no use writing this stuff, people think you are shooting a line – the most fantastic things happen every time we go out.56
The account loses nothing in its understatement – especially the escape from the truck as the fuse burned. Storie’s perspective on the incident where the fuse burned is equally laconic.
But to get up the gradient we had to get out and shove the truck, then get back in again. And all of a sudden there was the smell of burning. Someone had stood on a pencil so the fuse was burning. We jumped off the truck and, in a few seconds, up in the air it went.57
There were many resourceful, competent and courageous men in this unit, but an aura began to surround Mayne: he was a most incredibly successful operator. He, himself, in two letters to Douglas, put it down to luck. And luck certainly played a part. But it was much more than that: he had extraordinary abilities when it came to reading the situation in the field. There have been indications of it in what he wrote, from the Litani river action report, the Timimi report and implicit in his understated reports of other raids. And those who served with him recognised it. In No. 11 Commando, as Macpherson put it, ‘His troop thought the world of him.’58 But as his sustained record of achievement grew, raid by raid, it became clear to all that he was an outstanding leader. Mike Sadler had by this time transferred to L Detachment from the LRDG; he referred to Mayne’s qualities:
He was terribly observant and concentrated. He really concentrated on the job in hand and he really knew what was going on. Most of us, I think, when the bullets were flying, probably shut our eyes and ducked, but he went on and was quite conscious of what was happening and who was where and all that kind of thing. I thought that perhaps his legal training helped him concentrate – I don’t know whether it did or not – whereas David was more inclined to be focusing on the strategic considerations – lessons learned – and planning for the next operation. But Paddy was a tremendous operator – there’s no question about it. And he gave you great confidence in those situations.59
What accounted for his success, as Sadler has alluded, included cognitive powers, intuitive skills and a strong bonding with his men. Yet some of his contemporaries found it difficult to describe Mayne in the round; they tended to express his qualities in single characteristics: fearless, quiet, morose, fond of drinking sessions. And again, Sadler points to reasons for this:
I can always see him, in the desert, particularly. I can picture him very clearly – he made such a clear impression on one. I think I knew him better later in the war; I saw quite a lot of him then. But he was an enigma at that stage. I didn’t know him well enough to think about him I suppose, other than as a very keen opera
tor, and so I really didn’t think about him, his basic character: well I was only about twenty-two, I suppose, and I never thought of that sort of thing at all. So I was really badly briefed or badly trained to think about him.60
It took the arrival of a non-combatant, someone who was trained to observe not only physical symptoms but human behaviour – the medical officer, Malcolm James Pleydell – to begin to give a pen portrait of some of Mayne’s qualities and to assess the calibre of man he was. And, interestingly, Pleydell’s insights are consonant with those of a second non-combatant who would later join the unit, and some of them are confirmed by Mayne’s later wartime correspondence and, especially, his postwar journal. Pleydell was fascinated by the range of characters in the unit and the way they went about their work. He took notes, and two years after leaving the unit, he wrote the first book about the SAS, Born of the Desert. Published under his first and second names, his account not only evokes the beauty and harshness of the desert landscape, it provides vignettes of Stirling and Mayne, as well as some other figures in the unit. Mayne was no self-publicist: he would not discuss far less boast of his achievements. Nor was he a loner. Pleydell noticed that Mayne made friends with many of the Royal Navy personnel whose mess the unit shared. But balancing that convivial spirit was an important skill in a combat leader – the ability to assess others. And that was a characteristic brought home early on to the new medical officer.