The Daring Dozen

by Gavin Mortimer

  But there was still work to be completed in Germany. On 18 March a combined force of 1SAS and 2SAS (codenamed ‘Frankforce’ after Brian Franks, CO of the 2SAS contingent) departed the regimental HQ of Hylands House in Essex, destined for the Rhine. However, Mayne remained in England, preparing B and C squadrons for their imminent entry into the Third Reich. David Danger, Mayne’s signaller, remembered that in time-honoured fashion Mayne ensured that once the day’s business concluded the pleasure began. ‘We had these parties at Hylands with Paddy and he had a Shillelagh, which he banged and the party would start, and you didn’t leave until you asked Paddy and if he didn’t like it you had to stay there and drink. There were some wild parties.’24

  Yet despite his uncompromising attitudes to drinking and training, Mayne could be compassionate if the mood took him, particularly to his younger soldiers whom he regarded as surrogate sons. One of them, 20-year-old Bob Francis, had fallen in love with a French girl during operations in France in September 1944. The pair became engaged and the Frenchwoman came to London where she found a job working for the French food ministry. Knowing that the regiment was shortly to resume operations, Francis asked Mayne if he could have a couple of days’ leave with his fiancée. Mayne gave Francis a week.

  Then Paddy asked ‘where are you going to stay?’ I said I had no idea. He said ‘I have friends who have a hotel’. He wrote the name of this hotel in Queen Anne’s Gate and told me to go there and he said we’d be well taken care of. Then he asked if I had any money. When I replied ‘a little bit’, he reached into his pocket and gave me £10. I’d never seen such a sum… Anyway we were at the hotel for three or four days and when I went to pay the bill the two ladies who were running the hotel said ‘There’s no bill, Blair has said it’s to be charged to him.’That was on top of the £10 he gave me.25

  On another occasion Lieutenant Denis Wainman, a young officer who joined the regiment in late 1944, arrived at Hylands from his parachute course to find the place deserted except for Mayne. His CO explained that the regiment was somewhere north on a training exercise, one which Mayne was shortly to go and inspect. The pair drove up together during which time Wainman saw another side of Mayne: ‘We took it in turns to drive and we stopped at some place for a drink and Paddy said “The trouble is that any place I’m at, if there’s a dance or anything, I have to be there as the colonel. There are all these majors there with their wives and it’s all very difficult. So now I’m going to take my crowns off.” So he went in to this bar as a Second Lt and we had a beer and talked… They’ve said all sorts of things about Paddy down the years and yes he was a tough character but he was also very gentle and very intelligent.’26

  On 6 April Mayne led B and C squadrons on what was to be the regiment’s last operation of the war. It was codenamed Howard, and their role was to carry out reconnaissance patrols for the 4th Canadian Armoured Division as they pushed into northern Germany towards the medieval city of Oldenburg. It was a dangerous, dirty mission, the SAS pitted against the fanatical dregs of the Nazi regime, most often teenage members of the Hitler Youth, but sometimes also professional soldiers defending their homeland. One such confrontation unfolded on 10 April as the two squadrons continued towards Oldenburg.

  Mayne was travelling with C Squadron, while B Squadron was commanded by Major Dick Bond, a relatively inexperienced SAS officer. David Danger was in the back of Mayne’s jeep, alongside a gramophone and a stack of Irish discs.

  On the front of the jeep there was a big loudspeaker and when we went across [to Germany] we used to play his records on this thing, and all the troops that were parked by the side of the road waved and sang. Paddy had the idea that he was going to harangue the German forces through this loudspeaker and call on them to surrender, and I was to operate this thing and play various Irish tunes if necessary… I was the one who got the message over the radio that the rest of the squadron had run into an ambush and one of the officers had been killed. Paddy asked what was happening and when I told him he threw me off the jeep and set off down the road.27

  What happened next remained a bone of contention for many years among those members of 1SAS present. On arriving at the scene, Mayne discovered that Bond and his driver were dead and a number of soldiers were pinned down in a ditch. The fire was coming from the woods to their right and from a group of farm buildings between the lane and the woods.

  Mayne’s response demonstrated that even after five years of fighting he had lost none of his destructive energy. First he ran across the open field to the outhouses, scoping out the German sniper believed to be concealed therein. Satisfied that he knew his position, Mayne returned to the column and took a Bren gun from a jeep. Mayne and another soldier, Billy Hull, then doubled back to the buildings and together flushed out and killed the sniper. Back on the track Mayne jumped into the driving seat of a jeep and, with Lieutenant John Scott manning the twin Vickers in the back, roared off up the track, past the stranded men and towards a crossroads. Now within sight of the Germans in the woods, the vehicle came under heavy small-arms fire, but Mayne nonchalantly swung the jeep around at the crossroads and sped back with Scott pumping bullets into the trees. He repeated the procedure until the enemy fire subsided, and only then did he stop to pick up the men from the ditch.

  Mayne was put forward for the Victoria Cross and few doubted he would receive it, a fitting finale to what had been a spectacular war. The citation for the award, signed by Brigadier Calvert, Major General Vokes of the 4th Canadian Armoured Division and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, 21st Army Group, stated: ‘There is little doubt that Mayne’s exceptional personal courage and leadership saved the lives of many men and greatly helped the Allied advance on Berlin.’

  Three months later, however, the award was downgraded to a DSO, ostensibly because Mayne had not acted alone but with Scott. This was a specious line, one that could be contradicted by dozens of other VCs. In all likelihood the decision to deny Mayne the VC was one purely born of spite by senior staff officers. Not only did they view the SAS as a bunch of renegade irregulars, besmirching the reputation of the British Army, but Mayne was an uncouth Irishman, prone to heavy drinking and insubordination.

  It was not a view shared by King George VI. When he presented Mayne with his fourth DSO at Buckingham Palace he asked why it was that the VC had ‘so strangely eluded him’. Mayne was said to have replied: ‘I served to my best my Lord, my King and Queen and no one can take that honour away from me.’28

  The ambush that cost the lives of Bond and his driver, a Czech Jew called Mikhael Levinsohn, was the last great adventure of Paddy Mayne’s war. There were further skirmishes during Operation Howard but the 4th Canadian Armoured Division was finding the going tough and their advance had been reduced to a crawl; the SAS were reassigned to the 2nd Canadian Division further north towards Esenz on the North Sea. But they still took casualties and as late as 29 April, Mayne sent a signal to A and D squadrons who were pushing up towards the Baltic Sea port of Lubeck, informing them: ‘Squadron now plodding along through bog and rain on their feet. Tpr. Kent killed by mine. Nobody very happy.’

  Mayne must also have been contemplating his own future. Germany was on its knees and word had just reached him of David Stirling’s release from captivity. Mayne had led 1SAS for two and a half years and now faced the prospect of handing the reins back to Stirling. To compound his uncertainty, there was still no clear role for the SAS after the end of the war in Europe, and Mayne feared the brigade might be misused by SHAEF as it nearly had been prior to D-Day. He expressed his concerns to Brigadier Calvert, far more of a soldier’s soldier than Roderick McLeod, and received the cabled reply: ‘Understand your worries. You are quite right to raise them… Hope can put you on good wicket soon as possible.’

  Mayne celebrated VE-Day, 8 May 1945, in Brussels, and the next day his two squadrons were reunited with A and D squadrons, at Poperinghe, 70 miles west. The next day the regiment was shipped back to England and within the week were
on the move once more, this time flying to Bergen in Norway, together with 2SAS, to organize the disarming of 300,000 Germans. It was an enjoyable summer for the 760 SAS men in Norway; there was little trouble from the Germans and a lot of hospitality from the locals, particularly the young women. The only ugly incident involved a large contingent of SAS soldiers and some so-called Norwegian militia fighters dubbed the ‘Grey Shadows’, derided by the British on account of the fact that they’d spent most of the war hiding in Sweden. Now back in Norway they took exception to the SAS and a mass brawl ensued – what came to be known as the ‘Battle of Bergen’ – by the city’s ornamental lake.

  Many of the SAS officers joined in the fray, though whether Mayne flexed his muscles wasn’t recorded. If he didn’t, he did nothing to stop the fighting, and according to Lieutenant Peter Weaver, for most of his stay in Bergen Mayne ‘held court in the mess on the top floor of a large building … there still seemed to be a plentiful supply of free champagne available’.29

  Brigadier Mike Calvert had now arrived in Bergen, and for a few weeks two of the greatest Special Forces soldiers of World War II were in tandem. Alas, there was no opportunity to fight the enemy, so instead they took on one another. But between the 5ft 8in Calvert and 6ft 3in Mayne there was only ever going to be one winner, as Calvert stated in his memoirs: ‘We had a particularly hilarious guest night in the mess,’ he wrote. ‘At one stage during the evening Lieutenant-Colonel Paddy Mayne, a giant of a man who played rugger for Ireland and won no less than four DSOs, had heaved me over his shoulder; my forehead came into contact with a fender and I ended up with two huge black eyes.’30

  The next day Calvert had a meeting with Lieutenant-General de Boer, commanding officer of the Germans in Bergen, at which de Boer’s aide-de-camp (ADC) sniggered at the brigadier’s injuries. Calvert’s own ADC, Major Roy Farran, an outstanding officer in 2SAS, took offence at this slight from his opposite number, and gave the German two black eyes of his own as a punishment for his impertinence.

  Back in Britain, meanwhile, it appeared the SAS Brigade might be sent to the Far East, although Mayne wasn’t involved in the discussions. Instead David Stirling, released from captivity in April 1945, and Calvert lunched with Winston Churchill to discuss the possibility of the SAS operating in China to sever the Japanese supply line to Malaya. On 5 August, Field Marshal William Slim, commander of the British Fourteenth Army, wrote to Calvert promising he would consider the proposal. However, the next day the United States dropped the first of two atomic bombs on Japan and within a fortnight the war in the Far East was over.

  Mayne left Norway ahead of his regiment and arrived back in Essex unannounced. Major Johnny Wiseman had been left in charge of Hylands House but was living just outside the base with his new wife. ‘I got a message telling me to hurry back to the mess as the colonel had turned up from Norway and he was in a hell of a mood.’

  Mayne was furious to discover that Wiseman, who had carried out his administration duties unfailingly, had nonetheless chosen to live outside the camp. In his eyes it was a betrayal of the regiment. Wiseman tried to reason with Mayne – after all, the pair had fought together for three years and Wiseman had been decorated with a Military Cross on Mayne’s recommendation – but the Irishman believed there had been a breach of trust. Wiseman was sacked on the spot. Mayne also tried to have him reduced in rank from major to captain but the War Office refused to oblige.

  On 25 August the two SAS regiments sailed from Norway for Britain and soon the Brigade was being dismantled. First to go were the Belgians, returned to their own army on 21 September, followed by the two regiments of French SAS on 1 October. There was no reprieve for 1SAS and 2SAS, even though General Miles Dempsey, commander of the Second Army, wrote in a letter to Calvert: ‘I always enjoyed having detachments of the SAS in Second Army, and their work was always up to the standard one expects of them. I wish I had been able to see more of them.’31

  On 1 October, 1SAS paraded for the final time at Hylands House in front of Brigadier Calvert and the following month, having tied up all the loose administrative ends, Mayne left the British Army as one of the most decorated soldiers in its history. He did not return to Northern Ireland and the firm of solicitors for which he had briefly worked before the outbreak of war; after six years of adventure that would have been far too dull. Instead Mayne signed on for a two-year expedition to Antarctica with the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey, along with two other former 1SAS officers – Mike Sadler and John Tonkin.

  The survey’s objective was as much political as it was scientific, the aim being to establish a number of bases in the Antarctic region in the face of claims from Argentina and Chile. Mayne flew by air, arriving in Montevideo, Uruguay, before his fellow expedition members who came by sea. Left to his own devices for a few days Mayne drank a lot and began keeping a journal, a feature of which was references to bouts of acute pain.

  Mayne had suffered an injury to his back at some point during the war, although he concealed his suffering from his comrades. When exactly the injury occurred is not known, but it might well have been during that first fateful L Detachment raid in November 1941 when the unit parachuted into a gale-force storm. The pain intensified when the expedition left Uruguay for the Falklands in January 1946 and when they arrived in Port Stanley, Mayne was examined by two doctors, who ‘talked of paralysis and serious trouble, so I am going home. It is still hurting me quite a bit. I think the movement of the ship causes a lot of the trouble.’32

  Mayne arrived home in Northern Ireland in March 1946, preceded by several articles in the local press heralding the return of their prodigious son. The theme was uniform: Colonel Mayne, war hero and bravest of the brave, is coming back to Belfast. Such unwanted attention would become the bane of Mayne’s life.

  In April he was appointed Secretary of the Incorporated Law Society of Northern Ireland, and he was enrolled in the Belfast Arts Club, the golf club and the sailing club. Although his back injury prevented him from resuming his rugby career, the 31-year-old Mayne was a regular spectator at matches in the Province. He moved back into the family home in Newtownards and bought a red Riley Roadster, a sports car that was soon a regular sight on the road between Belfast and Newtownards, ten miles to the east of the city.

  But beneath the surface Mayne struggled to reconcile himself to the banality of civilian life after six years of thrilling adventure. There was also the psychological fallout from his war service. Like most men of his generation, Mayne was loathe to admit that the horrors of combat might have scarred him mentally. It was an era of the ‘stiff upper lip’ and there was no such thing as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Yet evidence points to Mayne having suffered from such a condition in the years after the war. He would lose his temper for the most trivial of reasons, he had trouble sleeping and he turned increasingly to alcohol. Mayne had always liked a drop or two – one commando colleague recalled that he could drink a bottle of whisky without getting a glow on – but back in Northern Ireland his excesses took on a sinister tone. These culminated in an explosive incident in 1952.

  In Dublin on a February weekend to watch Ireland in the Five Nations rugby championship, Mayne endeavoured to find the Old Belvedere rugby club. He was in his cups and in need of further refreshment, but instead of knocking on the door of the clubhouse he banged on the door of Senator Quirke, a Dublin senator.

  The senator’s son answered the door and when Mayne was informed he had the wrong house, a fracas ensued, with the veteran soldier refusing to accept his mistake. Not surprisingly the senator’s son came off worse, and it took several bystanders to subdue Mayne as the police were called. Mayne pled guilty to assault and his solicitor told the court that his client’s ‘conduct on this occasion was entirely repugnant to his normal behaviour’. The court fined Mayne a total of £25 but the real damage was done in the press reports of the incident on both sides of the border.

  In January 1955 Mayne turned 40 and there were signs he
was putting the wild days to bed. The previous year he had invested in a poultry house, employing a breeder full-time to develop the business. His mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and he and his sisters spent many hours at her side. Then, 11 days before Christmas in 1955, Mayne went out for a few drinks with friends. He was returning home at 4am, speeding through the narrow streets of Newtownards when he clipped the back of a parked lorry and smashed into a telegraph pole.

  Four months after his death a tribute to Mayne appeared in Mars and Minerva, the regimental journal of the Special Air Service. It had far more resonance than any of the hyperbole that appeared in the national press in the days and weeks after the tragedy:

  The gift of leadership and the ability to inspire complete devotion and loyalty were his to an exceptional degree. In spite of his great physical strength, he was no ‘strong arm’ man. In the many operations in which he personally took part, and in those he planned for others, the same meticulous care and attention to detail was applied by him. He seemed to know instinctively exactly what the enemy’s reaction would be to the devastating raids he carried out far behind the enemy lines, and was able to give his orders accordingly.33

  David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, photographed here with the Winged Dagger badge on his cap. The famous winged dagger and SAS motto ‘Who Dares Wins’ came about as a result of a competition between the men. (Topfoto)

  Paddy Mayne (far right) with David Stirling on his right. The pair had contrasting personalities but together they complemented one another to devastating effect. (Courtesy of John Robertson)

  1SAS rugby team photographed before one of their matches. Paddy Mayne, a former Ireland international rugby player, is pictured second from left in the middle row. (Author’s Collection)