by Hamish Ross
As the part the SAS played in the desert war drew to an end, news began to percolate through that Stirling and most of a small group with him had been captured in his attempt to reach the 1st Army in Tunisia. But not until 14 February was it announced that he was missing presumed captured, though Sadler, Cooper and a French sergeant who were with Stirling managed to escape.
Stirling had achieved much: the efficacy of the idea had been proven; a new unit had been born, which recruited men who had qualities of individualism and initiative and a strong sense of discipline. It was the end of a remarkable period of his leadership. But the period of the nascent unit was also rich in myth. Seen through European eyes, of course, there has always been a mystique about the desert, particularly through the meeting of two cultures. Then there was also the nature of the desert war: armies fighting in the open without involving the civilian population. There was also the esteem in which Rommel was held by his enemies; and of course the Afrika Korps did not have the sinister trappings of the SS and Gestapo. Mayne’s part in the unit’s success had been that of a soldier who was supremely professional. His competence and leadership qualities were the stuff that myths are made of, but he also had a very powerful strength of mind. For example, Pleydell noticed that some in the unit used euphemisms of war, describing raiding as good sport or good hunting. But Mayne did not. As Mayne was leaving to go on a raid one night, Pleydell wished him good luck. Mayne responded that he thought there might be some ‘good killing’. Pleydell reflected not that this characterised some savage beast slouching off into the desert night (as some have supposed), but someone having intellectual grit, for he concluded, ‘I wondered if I could ever think of “good killing” and felt rather weak-minded and unwarlike in my inability to do so.’85 Rommel’s army, nonetheless, represented the Third Reich; and when the poet Sorley MacLean, who fought in the 8th Army, expressed his conviction that he was fighting a just war, he adopted a hard logic like Mayne: ‘And though I do not hate Rommel’s army/ the brain’s eye is not squinting.’ For Mayne, motivation and strength of mind were to be important qualities in the years ahead: if the unit was to have a future, it now lay with him.
5
SPECIAL RAIDING SQUADRON
They boarded their assault craft several hours before dusk . . .
Collectively, they lent something to each other, seemed harder and meaner than they would if isolated.
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
After the official news of Stirling’s capture was announced on 14 February 1943, Combined Operations and MEHQ planners did not take long to come up with options for the unit: restructuring, merging with 2 SAS or absorption into the Commandos. There were two stages to a consultation process, and both required input from Mayne. The first was a face-to-face encounter. Even before he went to MEHQ, Mayne knew that some sort of compromise was necessary, but he had to fight for the unit’s continued existence. A new side of Mayne began to emerge.
In response to a summons, Major Mayne – as he then was – went to GHQ in Cairo to discuss the future of the regiment. In some quarters, the suggestion was made that it had outlived its usefulness, but Major Mayne fought hard for the preservation of the regiment in whose development he had played a leading part. The outcome of his efforts was the formation of the Special Raiding Squadron, with himself as commanding officer.1
On the one hand, Mayne had to concede that the unit would not be able to operate in the European theatres of war – which were about to open – as it had in the desert. But, on the other, he argued that it would be irresponsible to allow a highly trained unit, whose members had parachute training and could operate for long periods behind enemy lines, to be fragmented among other units. Its adaptability, the calibre of those who were drawn to it, the high state of their morale were its additional value; it should be retained with a distinctive identity.
An indication of the strength of Mayne’s resistance is discernible in a letter which Col Anthony Head, Chief Military Planner with Combined Operations, attached to MEHQ, sent to Lord Mountbatten, Director of Combined Operations. On 26 February 1943, he wrote, highlighting the problem of what they were to do with the SAS. One idea which he said had been mooted was to retain only a small amphibious force of about 150, while the remainder formed a Commando. But Col Head indicated to Mountbatten that the SAS did not like the idea.2 Then there was an obvious alternative. Bill Stirling, David’s brother, had received permission to form 2 SAS, which at the time was training in Algeria. Were two SAS Regiments one too many? The idea of a merger of both SAS Regiments under Bill Stirling was discussed but rejected.3
The next stage, on 8 March 1943, was the distribution of Directive MO3/3201/1 which really had the status of a consultative document. Mayne and Jellicoe were asked to give comments or suggestions which would then be incorporated into a later directive, to be issued on completion of the reorganisation. Basically, the paper envisaged that a small HQ Raiding Forces would control two smaller units, one commanded by Mayne and the other by Jellicoe. They were styled, at that point, ‘SAS Commando Squadron’ and ‘SAS Small-scale Raiding Squadron’. The latter in due course would have attached to it the Greek Squadron, upon its release from the 8th Army.4 Responses were swift and changes were made in about one week. And on 19 March 1943, the commanding officer designate for the new HQ Raiding Forces, Lt Col H.J. Cator, recorded that the regiment had been reorganised into two parts: the Special Raiding Squadron, commanded by Mayne, and the Special Boat Section under Jellicoe.5
Mayne was not promoted to lieutenant-colonel at this point, as Bradford and Dillon claimed.6 He was a major in charge of a unit of about 280 including all ranks. Lt Col Cater, who had formerly commanded No. 1 Palestine Company Pioneer Corps,7 was duly confirmed as Commander HQ Raiding Forces. His responsibilities were limited and tightly prescribed: oversight of training, the specific administration of the two units, including stores and equipment, and overall discipline. The limitations of his powers were carefully drafted: ‘You will not command in operations. Units or sub-units will normally be put under comd of a local commander for operations.’8
Anomalous it may have seemed, but the drafting of the respective remits for the Commander HQ Raiding Forces and the Commander Special Raiding Squadron showed that military regulations made provision for such a situation. An officer could receive additional, per diem payment – command pay – if certain criteria were met. However, he would have to make a claim retrospectively. And to do this successfully, he would have to be aware of the regulations and he would have to keep good records. All of which, with his legal training, was straightforward to Mayne.
However, Mayne had not won outright; and in the months ahead, during training as well as the period when the Squadron carried out excellent operational work in Southern Europe – in fact because it performed so well – Mayne was to come under renewed pressure to agree to change the unit’s composition and purpose.
The squadron’s advance party left on 21 March for the unit’s new base at Azzib in Palestine. Its personnel were largely those from A Squadron. Bob Melot, recovered from his wounds of the Benghazi raid, was posted to 1 SAS with effect from 25 January and hence to the SRS, 1 SAS. Mike Sadler rejoined the squadron. He, along with John Cooper, had been with David Stirling when Stirling was captured. But Sadler and Cooper had both evaded capture and succeeded in getting through to the American lines. In Sadler’s case, having transferred from the LRDG, his navigational skills were of such value to the raiders that he missed out on parachute training. He therefore left for parachute training at Ramat David and after that he went to Rhodesia on leave. On 14 March, RSM Riley left to undergo officer training, and Bill Fraser returned from operations in the desert and rejoined the unit.
From this time on, however, Mayne’s organisational abilities had opportunity to develop. He was now a commanding officer who had to train and fashion a unit for Commando work. No longer could it be assumed that because a man had joined 1 SAS Regiment he had
previously undergone Commando training – as had the original recruits to L Detachment. Mayne therefore devised and carried out an intensive training programme. (Lt Col Cator merely oversaw that both squadrons were undertaking appropriate and effective training – he did not direct their training.) Mayne directed the training; he knew what he wanted to achieve, and he had a model – Pedder of No. 11 Commando. Night landings from landing craft and rock scaling were carried out repeatedly, and Mayne’s regime for physical fitness was severe. On 12 April, the commander-in-chief visited both squadrons and observed their training.9 A wide range of skills was covered. Tony Marsh and nine other ranks were sent on a snipers’ course.10 Throughout late March and all the month of April, Mayne, it appears, did not once leave camp, apart from weekend leave for the squadron. Jellicoe and Cator went to a conference in Cairo for two days, but Mayne did not. Cator was presumably invited to give a lecture on security to the SBS and stayed overnight; there is no record of his giving a lecture to the Special Raiding Squadron. But not all the training was undertaken at Azzib. Cliff scaling took place in the Gulf of Aqaba, where the heat, combined with low humidity, caused rapid dehydration. Even in Commando training degrees of rigour were to be found, and comparisons among the different units were not uncommon. For example, when the three Commandos that had made up Layforce had been on the voyage from the UK to the Middle East in 1941, the novelist Evelyn Waugh, who was in No. 8 Commando and who had then been Laycock’s intelligence officer, observed differences in their training. He wrote that No. 11 Commando were overdisciplined and ‘They trained indefatigably all the voyage. We did very little except PT and one or two written exercises for the officers.’11 An outsider might well have concluded that Mayne was overtraining his men.
His men began to see Mayne in a new light, too. As Macpherson reported that Pedder was authoritarian but very efficacious in his training,12 some of those who underwent Mayne’s regime said much the same of him. Sillito, who had undertaken that painful 180-mile march for survival in the desert when he was in A Squadron, illustrated the severity of Mayne during the period of their training. They were in the Gulf of Aqaba at the time, carrying out mock raiding, and had been cooped up on board ship and in landing craft for days. Mayne felt that the confinement was affecting them and ordered a route march. Sillito, then a sergeant, wrote that on their return:
I halted the men and pulled them to attention. One man moved and Paddy was on him like a ton of bricks. That was when he appeared to be a bit unfair. But this was the discipline he was demanding and he insisted on having it.13
Harrison was another who recorded the experience of endless training in and out of landing craft: ‘Paddy worked us into the ground.’14 But Mayne’s leadership style during this training period was not designed to make him popular: he knew what he wanted and he knew what he had to do to get it – unremitting training. However, in retrospect this approach was seen to pay off, as the chronicler of 1 SAS recorded:
His untiring efforts, his insistence on a proper discipline, and his instinctive realisation of the really important things, soon welded the Special Raiding Squadron into a formidable fighting unit.15
Evelyn Waugh, six months after Pedder’s death, describing a colonel in the Royal Marines who believed in intensive training, wrote, ‘He is like Pedder, but without passion or eccentricity.’16 But Mayne had both; he may have out-Peddered Pedder.
During this time, David Stirling was being held in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp. Among his fellow prisoners was Capt Tommy Macpherson of No. 11 Commando. Macpherson had been captured in November 1941 carrying out reconnaissance for the ‘Rommel Raid’. Stirling told him about Mayne’s work in the desert. Some months later, Macpherson managed to escape and succeeded in returning to the UK. He was recruited to Special Operations Executive (SOE) and learned of Mayne’s whereabouts and wrote to him, ‘From what I heard of your work from David S. it [Mayne’s DSO] was damn well earned.’17 Certainly, Stirling thought highly of Mayne’s work. However, his knowledge of Mayne and his assessment of Mayne’s potential was based on the first eighteen months of the unit’s existence and its style of working in the desert. As a result, his overall reflections on Mayne, long after the war, tended to fall short.
For Mayne had developed in the role of officer commanding the Special Raiding Squadron. Although committed to the training regime he had introduced to make the unit effective in carrying out Commando work, Mayne was still determined – insofar as it lay within his power – to try to hold on to its original concepts. Indeed, from 1943 on, Mayne had become the standard-bearer of the original unit’s principles; its continuation and development lay not with 2 SAS under the command of Bill Stirling, but with Mayne.
Taking the war into Europe, the Allies had agreed as early as January 1943, would be most effectively achieved by invading Sicily. The Combined Chiefs of Staff decided that the invasion should take place during the favourable period of the moon in July.18 But there were formidable difficulties. Gen Alexander, who had been appointed operational commander-in-chief for the operation, which was code-named ‘Husky’, described Sicily as a heavily fortified island. According to early intelligence assessments, there were two German divisions, six Italian mobile divisions and five Italian coastal divisions.19 Part of the island – to the north and the north-east – was beyond Allied fighter cover, while the enemy, on the other hand, had numerous airfields in Sicily. Moreover, there were only four ports on the island with the necessary capacity to provide the flow of supplies which an invading army required: Messina, Catania, Siracusa (Syracuse) and Palermo. One of these would have to be captured within twenty-four hours of a landing. The plan was cast to seize the south-east of the island and, within hours of the landing, capture the port of Siracusa. Operation Husky would be the largest amphibious invasion of the war to date; it would comprise the US 7th Army and the British 8th Army and it would require the use of both Airborne and Commando forces – among the latter was to be the Special Raiding Squadron.
Since its inception, the SAS, both as L Detachment and later as 1 SAS Regiment, had been under the unitary command structure of Middle East HQ, attached for specific periods to the 8th Army; it had not fallen within the ambit of Combined Operations HQ. With the advent of the invasion of Europe, however, the role of Combined Operations assumed considerable importance, and, as a consequence, it was restructured, developed and enlarged. Adm Lord Mountbatten had succeeded Adm Keyes as chief of Combined Operations in early 1942, Gen Haydon was his adviser and Laycock, after his return from the raid on Beda Littoria (the presumed HQ of Gen Rommel) was recalled to the UK, promoted to brigadier and appointed to command the Special Service Brigade.
The Allies were most concerned that the enemy would reason that Sicily, was the most likely target for invasion. Planning had begun as early as January. As part of its strategy, senior officers in the Allied High Command collaborated in – and the Prime Minister sanctioned – a deception, code-named Operation Mincemeat, which in time became known by the title of the book (1953) and film The Man Who Never Was. Having taken advice from the most eminent pathologist of the day, Naval Intelligence devised a scheme which entailed releasing from a submarine – so that it would drift to the Spanish mainland at an area where there operated a German agent who was known to be highly efficient – the body of a man, the victim, it appeared, of an aircraft mishap, dressed in the uniform of a major in the Royal Marines, purportedly (from correspondence in his briefcase) a staff officer at Mountbatten’s Combined Operations HQ, carrying informal but cleverly constructed letters to Gen Alexander, Adm Cunningham and Gen Eisenhower containing clues that the invasion would take place elsewhere.
With the high profile of Combined Operations in Operation Husky, there reappeared, however, a threat to the unit: Mayne came under renewed pressure to compromise, as he saw it, on the unit’s original tenets. He was asked to agree to its being redesignated as a Commando. Although not widely known, insiders were aware of this development and Maj Bl
ackman recorded it in the unit’s chronicle.
In the months ahead he resisted successfully all attempts to rename the unit No. 1 Commando although such, in fact, was its new role. He still cherished the idea of continuing at some later date the work begun in the desert.20
It is interesting that the proposal was to rename the unit No. 1 Commando. For there had been a No. 1 Commando in the Middle East from late 1942 until April 1943, whereupon, along with No. 6 Commando, it returned to the UK.21 Both of these Commandos were Anglo-American in composition: four of No. 1 Commando’s troops were American Rangers. Both Commandos docked at Liverpool on 2 May 1943 and were met by Brig Laycock. No. 1 Commando was much depleted and its original complement of US Rangers had been given the option of rejoining American units or remaining with the Commando. The majority rejoined their country’s army.22 It was perhaps from May onwards that Combined Operations pursued the idea of having an embryo unit in the Middle East reconstituted as No. 1 Commando (leaving the remnant of that name in the UK to amalgamate with No. 6 Commando). Whenever the idea was raised and for however long a period it was pursued, Mayne held out.