by Pete Scholey
SAS
HEROES
REMARKABLE SOLDIERS, EXTRAORDINARY MEN
PETE SCHOLEY
DEDICATION
I dedicate this book to HM Forces, who have always given a good account of themselves on the field of battle. All the soldiers were valiant.
We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow,
Across that angry or that glimmering sea.
(From The Golden Journey to Samarkand by James Elroy Flecker, inscribed on the SAS memorial clock tower.)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
FOREWORD – Frederick Forsyth
INTRODUCTION
LIEUTENANT-COLONEL ROBERT BLAIR ‘PADDY’ MAYNE
SERGEANT LEN OWENS
MAJOR MICHAEL ‘BRONCO’ LANE
WO2 SQUADRON SERGEANT-MAJOR DON ‘LOFTY’ LARGE
SERGEANT IAIN ‘JOCK’ THOMSON
WO2 SQUADRON SERGEANT-MAJOR KEVIN WALSH
SERGEANT MICK ‘GINGE’ TYLER
STAFF SERGEANT JOHN PARTRIDGE
WO2 SQUADRON SERGEANT-MAJOR ALFIE TASKER
WO1 REGIMENTAL SERGEANT-MAJOR REG TAYLER
STAFF SERGEANT BOB PODESTA
SERGEANT TALAIASI LABALABA AND STAFF SERGEANT SEKONAIA TAKAVESI
STAFF SERGEANT PETE WINNER
SERGEANT TOMMY PALMER
TROOPER TOMMY TOBIN AND STAFF SERGEANT PETE LOVEDAY
WO2 SQUADRON SERGEANT-MAJOR STEVE CALLAN
CAPTAIN GAVIN JOHN HAMILTON
SERGEANT VINCE PHILLIPS
AFTERWORD
Appendices
Glossary of Abbreviations
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to Rod Green, Mal Peachey, John Conway, Richard Belfield and Anita Baker for their help and advice during the writing of this book.
My appreciation, also, to the families of those mentioned in the book for their support and loan of photographs.
Special thanks go to Colin Wallace, Mark Haworth, John Partridge, Bob Podesta, Pete Winner, Don Large, Mike Colton and Paul Griffiths for their encouragement and help throughout this project.
Lastly, I am indebted to my wife, Carolyn, unpaid secretary and computer wizard.
FOREWORD
Like many people in Britain, I recall 5 May 1980 with perfect clarity. Half the country was riveted to the World Professional Snooker Championship on TV. It had reached a crucial stage. Cliff Thorburn and Hurricane Higgins were tied at 17 frames each; the world crown hung on the 35th frame. Then the screen blanked and turned to a blizzard of white dots that eventually dissolved into a street scene.
The language in my own sitting room went as blue as the sky outside. Then I recognized the building on which the cameras were fixed. It was the Iranian Embassy, which for a week had been infested by a group of terrorists, holding the entire staff, a BBC sound man and a London policeman hostage. As we watched, spidery figures in black outfits rappelled down from the roof, crashed through the windows and disappeared inside to the chorus of stun grenades. Within a few moments, the embassy had been liberated, the hostages freed and five of the six terrorists ‘slotted’ – as the Special Air Service (SAS) later came to refer to the act of killing.
It was on that day that the SAS Regiment was transformed from a shadowy and vaguely mentioned group of special forces soldiers into a national and eventually international obsession. Today it would be hard to count the number of mentions of the ‘SAS’ initials in media and fiction. Impelled by a fevered public interest, various journalists and writers have explored the history of the SAS from its beginnings in the Western Desert in 1941, as the much-mocked idea of a young Scots Guards officer called David Stirling, to the present day. Some accounts are accurate, some fanciful and not a few are enough to cause derisive laughter in a certain barracks complex outside Hereford.
We knew of course that the SAS played a covert but highly significant role in the 33-year struggle against the Irish Republican Army (IRA). We have learned of the long and sweaty campaign against Indonesian forces who tried to take over North Borneo (part of the Malaysian Federation and thus of the Commonwealth). We have heard of the seven-year secret war waged to deter fanatical guerrillas infiltrating into Oman from communist Yemen, and to keep Sultan Qaboos on his throne. We know vaguely about the presence of teams from the SAS who train special forces all over the world, protecting the lives of monarchs and presidents; of hostages ‘sprung’ and terrorists slotted; of high-altitude drops by parachute far behind enemy lines; of ships with illegal and deadly cargoes boarded at sea by dead of night; of prisoners liberated in Sierra Leone from the grips of drug-crazed madmen; and of missions deep inside Iraq during the Gulf War of 1990–91.
Some of us have learned from those who were there how the liberation of a hijacked German airliner at Mogadishu nearly went catastrophically wrong until two SAS men, who were only there to advise their German colleagues, stepped in and wasted three of the four terrorists. And there were tales that never hit the press at all, such as the affair of the president of The Gambia, toppled in a coup while playing golf at Gleneagles, restored 48 hours later and his captured family liberated. This feat was performed by two SAS non-commissioned officers (NCOs), who motored into Banjul from Senegal in a car hired at the airport.
Lastly, we have come to know that these three initials are synonymous with extreme physical hardness, relentless stamina, cool nerve and, on occasion, fearsome aggression. The most controversial operation of recent times was the ‘taking down’ of three IRA killers on the Rock of Gibraltar. The three were planning a bloodbath in front of the governor’s mansion with a massive bomb in the boot of a parked car. As their ill-luck would have it, the day they died they were on an unarmed dry run, a reconnaissance, casing the joint with an empty car ... but the SAS men tailing them could not know that. The dummy car was parked to reserve a space for the next day. The three IRA operatives (two men and a woman) headed on foot back to the Spanish border. The SAS watchers could not know they did not have any detonator button on their persons. The order was given: they must not leave the Rock. They didn’t.
The real car and the Semtex explosive were eventually found across the border in a Spanish car park, but the usual media elements attacked the SAS because the three IRA elements had been taken down while unarmed. Such coverage explains why the SAS really hates having to operate in front of crowds of civilians. They prefer to slip in, do the job and slip out again.
So what are they like? Really like? The only way to know is to ask someone who knew many of them, and well. Pete Scholey did; he was one of them. Pete is no spring chicken. Today a whole new generation of ‘Ruperts’ (officers), NCOs and troopers fill the ranks. In this book, however, Pete Scholey gives a pen portrait of 20 of those SAS soldiers who became legends, but only inside their own tiny brotherhood. This book is a glance behind a curtain that very few can draw aside.
Frederick Forsyth
April 2007
INTRODUCTION
Here is a very personal book. It is written as a tribute not only to the men featured in these pages, but to all of those who have served with the SAS. On many occasions since leaving the forces, a few of us old SAS veterans have got together over a beer or two and inevitably reminisced about our time in uniform. We remember all the happy times, of course, the pranks and the laughs, but also those moments when we experienced the excitement, the fear and the horror of combat. That’s something that, with only a few words, you know you can share with someone who has been there, who has gone through those experiences alongside you. It’s something that is often very difficult to explain, or even to talk about, with anyone who has not been through it. During these reunions, man
y of the same old stories are unearthed and given an airing not just to relive old times but also, I suspect, as a kind of cathartic exercise, a way of keeping old demons at bay. It’s also a way of remembering those colleagues who are no longer with us, some who lost their lives in action and a few who died in training. All were heroes but none would have regarded themselves as such and none needed a medal pinned on his chest for his bravery to manifest itself. I hope that in writing this book I can help those outside the Regiment to appreciate the dedication and courage of these heroes.
The men I have chosen to write about are special in many ways, not least because many of them are among the last of their breed: SAS ‘lifers’ who spent the best part of their military careers – sometimes more than 20 years – with the Regiment. I was honoured to serve with most of them and count many of them among my closest friends. Soldiers like Don Large, Alfie Tasker, John Partridge and Pete Loveday served with the Regiment during its renaissance in the jungles of Malaya in the 1950s before going on to Oman, Borneo and Aden. Pete would not ultimately retire for good until 1996, having spent 45 years with the army, 43 of those years with the SAS. Some of the men I have included, like Paddy Mayne, who was one of the founder members of the Regiment during World War II and took over joint command when David Stirling was captured, are legendary figures within the SAS. Lieutenant-Colonel Mayne was, unfortunately, before my time and I never had the opportunity to meet him, but I did come to know Len Owens, one of the survivors of a perilous mission behind enemy lines in the Vosges mountains in France in 1944 – his is a quite remarkable story. The only other man I have featured with whom I did not serve is Vince Phillips, a brave man who died on the ill-fated Bravo Two Zero patrol during the Gulf War in 1991.
Others in this book, good friends whom I came to know during my time in the Regiment through the 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s, served in theatres from Borneo and Aden to Northern Ireland and the Falklands. They saw the Regiment emerge from beneath its traditional cloak of secrecy, fighting a clandestine war in Oman, to become hot news in the tabloid press and on television with the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980. They lived through the changing tactics and expanding role of the Regiment and helped to develop the weapons and techniques of the Counter-Revolutionary Warfare (CRW) team, the world’s foremost counter-terrorist unit. The stories of these heroes, therefore, cover most of the history of the Regiment. Wherever they found themselves being sent around the world, I have tried to explain – as it was explained to us – why they were sent there.
This book is not, however, a history of the Regiment. It is the stories of some ordinary men who accepted an extraordinary challenge to become members of the SAS. In doing so, they chose to become part of a very special ‘family’ whose members are forever linked by bonds that are forged not only through their experiences in combat, their memories of journeys all over the world or their escapades during training, but by the common experience that every member of the Regiment must endure – Selection.
To understand the SAS, you first have to separate the realities of the Regiment from the myths. SAS soldiers are not supermen, they are not all budding James Bonds or Rambos and they are not infallible. So much nonsense has been generated around the SAS name in books, on TV and even in computer games, that it is worth remembering that SAS soldiers are just that – soldiers. But these are no ordinary soldiers. Whatever the myths and legends, one fact is not in dispute: the SAS is certainly the foremost military unit in the world, the elite of the elite, respected and feared in equal measure.
The rigorous Selection process ensures that only the very best are accepted into the Regiment, no matter from what unit or from which branch of the armed forces the Selection candidate has come. He must have been in the armed forces for at least three years and already be a highly proficient soldier before even considering volunteering for Selection. A potential SAS recruit in my day would have heard of the Regiment through the military grapevine, and known that it was the pinnacle of soldiering, but he volunteered for something he knew virtually nothing about. I applied to join the SAS after serving for eight years, first in the Royal Artillery and then in 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment. Today, every soldier knows what the SAS is and has a pretty good idea of what the Regiment does. This understanding, however, will not make it any easier to pass the SAS Selection course.
The gruelling marches carrying heavy loads of equipment over the Brecon Beacons (a stretch of punishing mountains in South Wales) that form part of the Selection process are designed to wear the candidates down, day by day, hour by hour, throughout the first three weeks of Selection. The candidates have to prove that they can carry on; that they have the stamina and determination to keep going; that they can still think and function as soldiers when they are struggling through appalling weather, soaked to the skin, fighting off fatigue and with every muscle screaming for rest. No one ever forgets facing up to the challenge of Selection. I can remember every exhausted step I took over those hills, every trick the instructors pulled to try to persuade us to give up, every blister and every muscle strain. Just like everyone else who goes on to earn the right to wear the Regiment’s beige beret and ‘winged dagger’ badge, however, what I remember most of all is the elation at being told that I had passed. That is a feeling that you share with very few others. Only nine out of the 120 candidates on my course passed – and that’s normal. The standard is that high.
As a professional soldier, going on to Continuation Training with the Regiment was, for me, a huge opportunity to improve my skills and learn many more new ones. It was the equivalent of attending the finest university, with the additional bonus of studying in North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, the Arctic, Africa and the Middle and Far East. Along the way I acquired a variety of specialist skills. We constantly trained for war, but as well as learning how to take life, the SAS also trained me to preserve it. I learned to work as a paramedic, capable of treating my own or my comrades’ wounds – gunshots, blast injuries and fractures – and acquired a working knowledge of disease and tropical medicine. The skills of an SAS medic are sufficient to treat minor casualties and stabilize major ones until they can be evacuated, even if it takes as long as three days. I was also involved in bodyguard and VIP protection, by then already a complex and still-evolving art. VIP protection in the UK was pioneered by the SAS; SAS soldiers started the process that sophisticated VIP protection offers today.
One of the reasons why SAS men are so effective in so many different situations is that we apply the lessons learned in training not just in combat but to our entire lives. Continuous self-criticism is a way of life in the Regiment. We’re always looking for ways to improve our performance, and in planning for any mission we attempt to cover every conceivable eventuality. It’s meticulous, exhaustive and often unconventional, but gives us the best possible chance to second-guess our opponents.
In SAS training, the soldier spends much of the time looking at things that might be targets and trying to find the weak spots. The viewpoint is similar to that of a criminal plotting to bypass or defeat security systems to pull off a robbery. The SAS soldier studies the defences and uses his knowledge of human capabilities to predict the likely response to any of his actions. Turning that on its head, once he knows how to find the weak spots, he also knows how to defend them. SAS men are the archetypal poachers-turned-gamekeepers, with the added twist that they are required to turn back into poachers again when necessary. Furthermore, when an SAS unit decides on a plan of action, it doesn’t stick blindly to it if the situation changes – it has to be flexible.
Many of the lessons SAS soldiers learn in training are lessons that can be applied outside the military environment, particularly awareness. The SAS soldier is always aware of his surroundings. He is constantly switched on, paying attention to what’s going on around him and what the likely dangers are. Amid the confusion and noise of explosions, gunfire, smoke, flames and CS gas, awareness helped the
SAS assault team storming the Iranian Embassy to distinguish instantly between terrorist and hostage, friend and foe. If a soldier is aware, he is better able to anticipate dangerous developments. Before any mission, the SAS plans ahead, using intelligence reports, knowledge of the terrain and any information about the opponents to predict their probable responses to any given action. SAS soldiers anticipate problems before they arise, and hence are better able to avoid getting into conflict. That’s not cowardice, it’s simple common sense, and it’s exactly what the SAS practises.
After the Regiment’s successful campaign against Indonesia in Borneo during the 1960s, Major-General Sir Walter Walker, commander of British Forces Borneo Territories (BFBT), described ten SAS soldiers as being ‘equal to 70 conventional troops’. The Regiment’s intelligence-gathering and its ‘hearts and minds’ work with the civilian population saved many lives through battles won without a shot being fired. The SAS extends its zone of security by deploying patrols to listen, observe and gather intelligence. When operating overseas, the Regiment enlists the help of indigenous communities, offering medical treatment and help with projects beneficial to them. In return, the native population gives advice on local food and medicinal plants, and information on the movement of enemy troops. An effective ‘hearts and minds’ campaign is a far better way of dealing with a situation than simply imposing your will on people by force of arms.
Contrary to popular myth, SAS personnel will go to great lengths to avoid confrontation. Whenever a patrol is confronted by an obstacle like a guard post or a gun emplacement, the first reaction is to ‘box it’ – going 500 yards (457m) north, then 500 yards west, for example – before resuming its track. Getting involved in firefights and skirmishes is counter-productive for them, because it delays or prevents them from achieving their primary objectives.