At the western edge of the airfield Mayne had seen some huts where the aircrews were living, and after dark he decided to deal with the occupants of these before turning his attention to the aircraft. Paddy waited until he thought most of them would be asleep; then he and five others rushed into the huts and with bursts from tommy-guns fired from the hips they made quite sure that there would be no one left alive to prevent them dealing with the aircraft.
He wasted no time. The whole raid only took about quarter of an hour, but this was the SAS method of working, and when they were on their way to the rendezvous a total of twenty-four aircraft and the fuel dump were either blazing or ready to explode into flames.
In fact the powerfully built Mayne personally destroyed one aircraft with his bare hands, climbing into the bomber’s cockpit and tearing out the instrument, which he took back to base as a souvenir. In those raids on that single night sixty-one enemy aircraft were destroyed on the ground. Effusive praise for the daring and brilliance of the joint SAS and LRDG operations came the following day. The fame of the SAS, which has never yet diminished, was born.
The idea of the SAS had come to its celebrated founder, Colonel David Stirling, as he lay, injured in a parachuting accident, in a hospital in Alexandria in the summer of 1941. In a memo written in pencil on reams of paper he argued for deep-penetration operations behind enemy lines in which small units would carry out strategic raids after parachuting into enemy territory. He believed that a small force of saboteurs could inflict a level of damage on enemy airfields equivalent to that of a Commando squad twenty times greater.
Stirling was a Cambridge-educated Scots Guardsman who joined one of the first army Commando units in 1940. Six foot five inches tall and weighing sixteen stone, he had always sought adventure and his principal hobby was rock climbing and mountaineering. The outbreak of war in 1939 gave Stirling the chance of as much adventure as any man could ever want.
Now, as a lowly young subaltern, he faced the formidable task of trying to sell his revolutionary idea to his illustrious army commanders, the only men who had the power to put such ideas into operation. It would not be easy. Knowing it would be all but impossible to gain an interview with the Commander–in-Chief, he decided on a frontal attack. Though still on crutches, Stirling decided to ‘break in’ to the C-in-C’s headquarters, situated in GHQ Cairo, and beard Sir Claude Auchinleck in his lair. He threw his crutches over the perimeter fence and then, somehow, clambered over, only to set alarm bells ringing.
As the Military Police searched for the intruder, Stirling reached the Commander-in-Chief’s block and hobbled into the office of his deputy, Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie, just as the MPs were about to grab him.
‘I think you had better read this, sir,’ Stirling said, handing the surprised Ritchie his memo. Still on his crutches, Stirling then withdrew, helped by the MPs. To his amazement, three days later he was recalled to talk over the idea with both Ritchie and Auchinleck, and within weeks he was promoted to the rank of captain and told to recruit and train sixty-six Commandos for his revolutionary idea. The SAS Regiment was born.
Later Stirling would write about the guiding principles of his brainchild:
Strategic operations demand, for the achievement of success, a total exploitation of surprise and of guile. A bedrock principle of this new regiment was its organisation into modules or sub-units of four men. Hitherto, battalion strength formations, whether Airborne formations or Commandos, had no basic sub-unit smaller than a section or a troop consisting of an NCO plus eight or ten men… In the SAS each of the four men was trained to a high general level of proficiency in the whole range of the SAS capability and, additionally, each man was trained to have at least one special expertise according to his aptitude. In carrying out an operation – even in pitch dark – each SAS man in each module was exercising his own individual perception and judgement at full stretch.
Stirling developed the idea of a module of four men, or ‘brick’, in order to prevent the emergence of a leader of operations. An important result has been to foster a military democracy within the SAS, which, through ruthless selection of volunteers, has traditionally led SAS soldiers to motivate and discipline themselves. Stirling’s revolutionary idea of the four-man brick proved so successful that it has been copied by nearly every other Special Forces unit in the world.
He described the SAS Regiment’s philosophy thus:
1. The unrelenting pursuit of excellence.
2. The maintaining of the highest standards of discipline in all aspects of the daily life of the SAS soldier.
3. The SAS brooks no sense of class and, particularly, not among the wives. This might sound a bit portentous but it epitomises the SAS philosophy.
The SAS’s first parachute operation, during a sandstorm in the desert, was a complete disaster in which both aircraft and parachutists were swept away. But the second operation, undertaken in collaboration with the Long Range Desert Group, was a brilliant success, destroying more than one hundred Luftwaffe aircraft on the ground at a number of German airfields. And what was remarkable about this mission was that it had been conducted by only twenty SAS men. Auchinleck was very happy that he had given his support to the young upstart Stirling and his radical idea. More importantly, that first series of attacks had established beyond doubt the role of the SAS. This new Special Force would spawn, throughout the world, many other similar units which have proved their worth ever since.
The extraordinary success of the young SAS came to the attention of Hitler, who dispatched a personal order to General Rommel: ‘These men are dangerous. They must be hunted down and destroyed at all costs.’
And they were. In his envy, anger and total disregard for the Geneva Convention’s pronouncements on prisoners of war, Hitler decreed in the early months of 1945, when defeat for Germany had become a reality, that every SAS man captured and imprisoned should be tortured and then killed. Indeed his brutality went further. A team of British investigators discovered that, after suffering torture, some SAS men had been flayed to death, others had been roasted alive on a spit.
The SAS was disbanded at the end of World War Two, but those soldiers who remained in the unit made it plain to the military authorities that they had joined it for action and adventure, not to sit on their backsides at home twiddling their thumbs. Given the SAS’s dramatic intervention in many operations during the war, the Ministry of Defence came to recognise that such men could be thrown into the deep end in virtually any military situation. As a result, the SAS began to be used in countless operations where small groups of men could carry out the task with great speed and commitment and, importantly, without the need for supply lines and logistical support.
In fact the services of the SAS were required within a few years of the end of the war. In Malaya, the newly armed communist guerrillas were indulging in a riot of murder, and the British government had to act to protect both the British families who had made the country their home and the indigenous population. By March 1950 the terrorists had killed eight hundred civilians, three hundred police officers and a hundred and fifty soldiers. Something had to be done.
A Special Force along the lines of the disbanded SAS was put together from soldiers and reservists who volunteered, but this was not particularly successful until discipline was tightened and the new SAS groups began to live for periods of weeks, or sometimes months. in the jungles of Malaya. For some six years the SAS maintained a presence in the country, taking part in all the most dangerous missions, tracking terrorists for days or even weeks. By 1956 five SAS squadrons, with a total of five hundred men, were playing an important role in the conflict, and the numbers of deaths in the jungle at the hands of the terrorists had been cut to about one a week. But there were still some two thousand hardened guerrillas hiding out in the jungle and swamps and terrorising villagers and farmers.
By the end of the 1950s the insurgents had been teasing the government forces, and killing or threatening the ind
igenous population, for almost ten years. Employing great technical skill, the SAS searched them out and destroyed them and their base camps, striking characteristically hard and fast. Now they were finally gaining control, and by 1959 the terrorists realised that they were not going to win the war in Malaya. Slowly but surely, the SAS were forcing them into retreat. The game was up, and groups of terrorists began to surrender. A war which many believed could not be won against such a guerrilla force had indeed been won by the SAS. Military strategists believed that it was the ability of the SAS to alter their tactics and adapt a new approach to jungle warfare that had brought them victory.
But it was not the end. The war in Malaya took on a totally different and more serious aspect when Indonesia decided to intervene in a bid to destabilise the fledgling Malaysian Federation by attacking Brunei, Sabah and Sarawak, to the north of Indonesian Borneo. The Indonesians had a large, professional army trained in jungle warfare and began to use members of this for clandestine guerrilla operations against Malaysian forces in Borneo. Almost unknown to the rest of the world at the time, a war lasting four years was fought by some thirty thousand British, Australian, New Zealand and Gurkha troops against an army of more than a hundred and twenty thousand Indonesians. And the SAS were in the thick of it.
Their task was deep penetration and intelligence gathering in the jungles of Borneo behind Indonesian lines. SAS bricks would be sent to watch and wait, and then to report back and advise those officers at headquarters whose job it was ambush the Indonesian forces or hit them in fast counter-attacks from the air and roads.
After commanding the SAS in Borneo, General Sir Walter Walker commented:
‘I believe that a few SAS bricks were equal to a thousand infantry not because they had the equivalent fire power but because their Intelligence gathering could save that number of lives in battles won without a fight.’
It was an extraordinarily hard life for the SAS men. They would have to live rough for three weeks at a time, surviving on poor, hard rations and very little sleep, and maintaining almost complete silence. They were taught to conceal themselves in the jungle by never smoking or chewing gum, never washing with soap, never cleaning their teeth, and never sneezing or coughing. When they returned to base they were often dehydrated and had usually lost twenty to twenty-five pounds in weight, so that they looked like skeletons. They were permitted just five days’ recuperation before their next three-week sojourn in the jungle. The three arduous years of this conflict, from 1963 to 1966, gave SAS volunteers an invaluable experience of jungle warfare.
Tasked with searching out, hunting down and killing Indonesian troops who had infiltrated into Malaysia along a seven hundred-mile border of jungle, the SAS knew that the only way to police this border was to win the hearts and minds of the Sarawak villagers, the way they had done in Malaya. As a result, the villagers became the eyes and ears of the SAS bricks, feeding them information about the enemy. Without such help it would have been impossible for the SAS and their Gurkha comrades to carry out the allotted task. SAS men would move cautiously into a village bearing gifts of medicine, small portable radios and other nick-nacks and make friends with the families, sometimes staying for six months at a time and becoming useful members of the village. In return, the tribesmen provided valuable information which was relayed back to base. The war came to an end in 1966 after President Sukarno of Indonesia was sidelined by his generals. British casualties throughout the entire period were nineteen killed and forty-four wounded; forty Gurkhas were killed and eighty-three wounded. The Indonesian death toll has been conservatively estimated at two thousand.
In the late 1950s another area of conflict had opened up – in the Middle East and, in particular, southern Arabia – and the SAS would operate there until the 1970s. Early on they were sent into Aden and Oman for a series of hellish operations often referred to as the last wild colonial war. This author served in the private army of the Sultan of Muscat and Oman. Given one hundred and twenty Arab and Baluchi troops, three three-tonners, a jeep and three excellent camels, I had to patrol the desert west of Muscat City and intercept caravans of camels transporting rifles and ammunition to the rebels fighting the Sultan in the famous Empty Quarter, the mountainous region on either side of the Saudi Arabian border. We would ambush rebels and their camel trains, raid their camps in the hills and stop and search anyone we came across in the desert. Every few days we would be attacked by marauding rebels – usually at night – and there would be a firefight lasting perhaps twenty minutes. Never once did we have to pull out of a battle but would usually see the rebels off by sending a five-man patrol to one flank or the other to surprise them. It worked every time. And in the six-month period of operations in the desert we suffered only two men wounded, and they were only flesh wounds which I treated and bandaged.
It was nothing like the tough, hard life the SAS had to endure in the region against substantial and formidable guerrilla forces. In December 1958, in one of the toughest assignments ever given to the unit, two troops of SAS men began the task of rooting out and destroying the main guerrilla headquarters and weapons and ammunition store in the caves of the Jabal Akhdar, the Green Mountain. From this remote, eight thousand-foot hideout in northern Oman, guerrillas had been leading marauding parties against Omani villages and camel trains in an attempt to destabilise the Sultan’s autocratic rule and set up a communist republic.
As the eight SAS men made their way under cover of darkness towards the summit, climbing up a near-vertical rock face, gunfire rained down on them. They were under attack from some forty guerrillas armed with Bren guns and rifles. The onslaught was ferocious and there was virtually no cover, so the SAS men lay still, held their fire and waited. Confident they had killed the raiders, the guerrillas made their way down to where they had seen movement. Only when the enemy were about one hundred and twenty yards away and visible in the star-studded night sky, did the SAS open up with automatic fire. Five guerrillas were killed outright and four wounded. The rest fled for their lives.
Two weeks later, while still trying to penetrate the mountain headquarters, Captain Rory Walker was leading another exploratory raid near the top when his two troops of SAS men were once again detected just before they reached their goal.
An SAS soldier was using a rope to climb up a fault in the cliff when a guerrilla above him shouted, ‘Come on, Johnny’ and opened fire. Walker took the man’s place, climbed up the rope and hurled a grenade over the top into the group of guerrillas gathered there, killing one and wounding some of the others. Walker signalled to the rest of his men and continued up the rope. When they had all reached the top they charged the enemy, firing their Bren guns from the hip as they ran. Eight more guerrillas were killed in the firefight; the rest fled into the caves.
On the other side of the mountain, also controlled by the enemy, Captain Peter de la Billiere, with two SAS troops, made a ten-hour forced march through enemy-held territory in darkness. In his book Who Dares Wins, Tony Geraghty writes:
The SAS crept to a point two hundred yards from the cave mouth (where weapons and ammunition were stored) lined up a 3.5 inch rocket-launcher, and waited. The only point from which the SAS could open fire was below the cave, and this meant that the rocket crew had to kneel or stand to use the weapon. The same firing-point was, for want of something better, a natural amphitheatre whose upper slopes were honeycombed by many small caves sheltering enemy snipers. At dawn, as the first of the guerrillas emerged, stretching his sleep-laden limbs and yawning, the soldiers poured a hail of missiles and machine-gun fire into the main cave.
Describing the action, one SAS officer later wrote:
Even such withering fire did not cause the rebels to panic or surrender. They quickly dropped into fire positions and returned the best they could. Reloading and firing the 3.5 inch from the standing position became interesting. What made it particularly interesting, as well as infuriating, was the failure of many of the SAS to leave the launcher after
being fired. They remained unfired but ‘active’ and had to be extracted immediately and replaced with another round, regardless of the necessary safety drills.
The noise of the battle instantly brought down rifle fire from the surrounding hills. Outlying rebel pickets retreated slowly and the SAS picked them off one by one. The rebels still had a mortar firing from a crevice behind the cave, but the SAS laid on air support. As RAF Venom aircraft came swooping in, one of their rockets made a direct hit. Mortar and men were destroyed immediately.
This action now became a fighting retreat, in which men moved back singly or in pairs, using every scrap of cover available. This lasted rather more than fifteen minutes and was covered by a .3 inch Browning machine-gun manned by a regimental veteran.
But the battle on the Jabal Akhdar was not yet won. In addition to an SAS squadron, the conflict now involved an infantry troop of Life Guards, two troops of Trucial Oman Scouts and a few signallers and REME men – a total of some two hundred soldiers. And the conditions were harsh. The winds were incessant and bitterly cold by day and night, when even the water bottles froze during the night.
By the end of December, when the SAS had been on the mountain some two weeks, the commanders knew there was no way they could dislodge the guerrillas, who were in a strong defensive position. One very good reason for the confidence of the defenders was the fact that, historically, the Jabal Akhdar had never been conquered by any force. It was considered to be impregnable. The SAS needed more men if victory was to be achieved.
The newcomers, a further SAS squadron of one hundred and twenty men, were given the task of staging a frontal attack between the twin peaks of the mountain. The assault route was up a narrow track that climbed four hundred feet to a fortified and very easily defended position. However, this assault was a feint, and the main attack would come from the other side of the mountain. The SAS men had to climb for some nine hours in the darkness up a four thousand-foot slope, for which ropes were needed on one traverse. Never before had any force attempted to scale and conquer the mountain from this angle of attack. Each soldier carried on his back sixty pounds of equipment, mainly ammunition. Behind came donkeys, laden with heavy machine guns.
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