by Pete Scholey
The installation that Steve took me to see was incredibly well disguised. Even people living nearby would never have known it was there. The entrances blended in quite unobtrusively with their surroundings, but what they concealed was breathtaking. Deep underground, there was a highly sophisticated bunker system housing an operations centre that was, to Steve and me, like something from a science fiction movie. There were living and sleeping quarters for a sizeable number of men; a gymnasium; a dining hall; a medical ward with an operating theatre attached; a briefing room that doubled as a library and cinema; a small-arms range and combat training hall; an armoury; a high-tech operations and communications room and storage facilities for food, ammunition and explosives. The whole bunker system was blast-proof and fitted with gas and chemical detection systems as well as closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance of the surrounding area. You could have run a war from that place, yet it was empty, mothballed, unused.
Steve and I were a bit mystified about why we had been shown the place. It didn’t appear to be part of any normal ‘Cold War’ nuclear defence facility that we knew about. It wasn’t until much later that we began to hear all the weird conspiracy theories about a ‘military coup’ and started to wonder if someone might have wanted to get the place ‘checked out’ by the SAS prior to its use as a secret command centre. Or were we just buying into the coup fantasy? It’s more likely that one of Steve’s contacts just wanted to let him see it. After all, what’s the point in playing caretaker to a complex that any James Bond villain would be proud to call his own if you can’t show it off once in a while?
The bunker was just one of the things that made for so many strange days with Steve in Ops Research, but most of the work that this remarkable man undertook really was of genuine benefit to the Regiment. Steve had wanted to be a scientist from the time he was a schoolboy and on leaving school he started a degree course at the University of Wales, Cardiff, his home town. He suffered from the inevitable student malaise of never having enough money to get by and became hugely frustrated when he saw his brothers and friends, all of whom had jobs, splashing money around, never short of a few pounds for a good night out. In the end, being broke all the time became too much for him to bear and he dropped out of university.
Steve’s technical aptitude was, however, put to good use when he joined the Royal Corps of Signals and he was able to resume his higher education when the Signals sponsored him through a degree course in electronics at Bristol University. The Regiment can always find a place for a talented signaller, provided he can hack it on the Selection course, and by 1959 Steve was a highly proficient all-round soldier. On passing Selection, he was badged as a member of A Squadron.
Steve served on operational tours with A Squadron in Oman, Aden, Borneo and Northern Ireland. He was even awarded a Malaysia bar to his General Service Medal (GSM) when the Indonesians made a landing on the Malaysian peninsula during the Borneo campaign. You have to be on active service in the conflict zone to receive such an award and Steve qualified even though he was actually on a Malay language course in the operational area at the time. Steve’s greatest contribution to the Regiment came later when he joined Ops Research. He was posted there when the powers-that-be recognized his ingenuity and enthusiasm for all things scientific and technical. He was very keen to evaluate and improve equipment by observing it in use by the squadrons when they went on operations. And that’s precisely what he was doing when he was attached to D Squadron on their tour in Aden in 1966.
It would seem a bit odd, spotting a soap dish lying by the side of a mountain track in the middle of the Radfan. The barren terrain wasn’t the sort of place where anyone would have much use for a bathroom accessory. The terrorist who had trekked for days with his comrades through the mountains to infiltrate secretly from Yemen into the Aden Protectorate was tired and thirsty, but he remained alert enough to spot this alien object, so curiously nestled behind the small stones at the side of the track. Was it really a soap dish – the kind of thing he had seen during his many visits to the market in Crater? Those may well have been the last thoughts that passed through his mind before the soap dish erupted in a blinding flash, sending a hail of deadly shrapnel screeching towards him. The ambush was sprung. Had the shrapnel not ended the terrorist’s journey, he and his friends would then fall before the withering fire of the SLRs and Bren gun of the SAS patrol. Steve Callan’s home-made Claymore had worked a treat.
At the time Steve was in Aden, the US troops in Vietnam had recently been issued with their new Claymore mine. Steve managed to acquire one to have a look at. The Claymore is a devastatingly effective weapon. Its primary use is in an ambush situation. The mine has to be sited very carefully and can be camouflaged with loose leaves or undergrowth, its trailing wires covered with a scattering of earth or vegetation to hide them from view. The weapon consists of a box about 8in (20cm) long with a heavy steel backplate and a plastic front cover. Inside, the backplate is lined with explosives and the space between the explosives and the plastic cover packed with steel balls. The plastic cover is marked ‘Front Toward Enemy’ to make sure you place it facing the right direction. When the explosive is detonated, the shrapnel – around 700 steel balls – is sent hurtling out in a spread pattern that forms a 60-degree arc. If you are caught inside that arc at anything less than 55 yards (50m), you don’t stand much chance. At up to 110 yards (100m), you would still have problems passing through an airport metal detector. The Claymore was designed by a man named Norman MacLeod and named after a type of heavy Scottish sword, but it was based on research by the Germans in World War II who discovered that the force of an explosive detonation could be directed away from a heavy backing surface. They tried to develop this into an anti-tank weapon, but it was the Americans who picked up on the idea to use as an anti-personnel device.
When Steve got hold of one, he dissected it, examined it and decided to try to make his own. This was in the days when Ops Research’s equipment consisted largely of parachute cord, masking tape and any other bits and bobs that could be found lying around. To make his Claymore mine, Steve started with a plastic soap dish. He removed the lid and put a strip of plastic explosive around the inside of the base, then filled the base up with plaster of Paris, liberally laced with ball-bearings. He then replaced the lid and secured it with masking tape. A meat skewer was used to make a small hole in the base through which an electric detonator was fed and embedded in the plastic explosive. Then it was a case of retreat as far as possible and ‘heads down’ when the detonator wires were touched to a hand-held battery. Amazingly, it worked. Steve then set about making up several of these, which the squadron used unofficially. That was not the end of Steve’s ingenuity, however. Using another soap dish he devised an electrical switch that could be used to detonate the mine.
Flushed with success, Steve returned to the Ops Research building in Hereford to continue work on the detonation device and came up with a formidable piece of equipment that was named the Callan Switch. He once showed me his original plans of how it worked. It looked very complicated to me, but he understood it perfectly. It was a box of electrical tricks with switches and buttons that provided for a variety of settings. This device, when modified and refined, later became known as the Shrike Exploder and is used extensively by armies all over the world. Its effect can be seen in many military and action films, but it was a real and deadly piece of equipment. It could be used with all sorts of explosives as well as the Claymore mine and could be set to detonate up to 30 or 40 mines, either individually, in groups, in sequence or all together. For his original invention, Steve was given £30 by the government, which he donated to an army charity. His device was later sold on by the government to a commercial organization in Devon, who developed and marketed it. The Shrike is currently in service with the armed forces of over 40 countries worldwide. He may not have made a fortune from it, but Steve was later awarded the MBE for his ‘outstanding contribution to the SAS and the Government for work in operationa
l research’.
Another of Steve’s inventions came as a direct result of requests from squadron members on operations. In the jungles of Borneo, they found that when resupplies were dropped to them from aircraft, the parachutes and their rigging lines would often become entangled in the tops of the trees. As the jungle canopy was so high and dense, the supplies were inaccessible. Flares were sometimes fired at the parachute to try to set it alight so that the supply box would then drop to the ground. Apart from the dangers of setting the jungle canopy ablaze and the problems of smoke and flames advertising your position to the enemy, by firing a flare you also ran the risk of setting light to the supplies themselves. You wouldn’t want to be standing under a consignment of ammo or explosives when it went off.
Steve took a look at the parachute delivery system to try to work out some improvements. When the supply boxes left the aircraft, they were attached to the parachute by means of a long strap, which unfurled as the parachute deployed, allowing the box to swing free below it. While in the Malaysian jungle with one of the squadrons on jungle training exercises, Steve experimented with an ingenious solution to the tangling problem. Having played around with different kinds of detonator fuse cord to establish their rates of burning, he reasoned that a length of fuse could be fixed to the strap where it was joined to the parachute. When the fuse burned down to the strap, it would cause the strap to burn through and the box would be released to fall down through the trees, leaving the parachute on the tree-tops. Even if the patrol wasn’t waiting directly underneath (unadvisable with falling supply boxes coming at you) the parachute would act as a marker for the retrieval of the box, which would be somewhere directly below. The height at which the aircraft was flying was taken into account when calculating the length of the fuse required, so that the box was timed to be released just as it reached the top of the trees, making it less likely to get caught up in the branches along with the parachute. The system was perfected and developed into an integral part of our supply equipment that became known as the Jungle Line Supply System (JLSS). It was basically a very simple idea, but was invaluable to the troops on the ground.
I joined Steve in Ops Research after I finished my time in a Sabre Squadron, and worked with him on all sorts of routine evaluations of many items of clothing and equipment that the Regiment was considering using. Soldiers would, for example, be asked to wear a new type of boot and report on its durability, water resistance and comfort. The reports would then be collated and comparisons made with other boots before a decision was made about the best type to buy. Having trekked around in everything from the old standard-issue hob-nailed boots to parachute jump boots, Steve and I had the experience to be able to evaluate the soldiers’ reports sensibly.
As well as routine work on things like boots, some of the projects we were involved with can only be termed weird and wonderful and, as in any research, did not get past the experimental stage. One of the projects was a device to help the men on vehicle patrols in Northern Ireland. When on patrol in the winding lanes of the border country you had to be constantly alert, even if you were in an ordinary unmarked car, for a carefully concealed ambush. The stone walls, ditches and hedgerows in the undulating countryside meant that you could seldom see too far ahead, so it was easy to round a bend and find a vehicle checkpoint staring you in the face. From a distance, especially at night or in poor weather conditions, it could be difficult immediately to tell if the checkpoint was one of ours, or one of theirs. The IRA mounted vehicle checks just as the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and army did. The big difference was that at an IRA checkpoint, as soon as they realized who was in the car, an ambush would be sprung and you could end up sharing an already packed car with more 5.56mm Armalite rounds than is ever going to be comfortable.
Steve knew that magnesium flares had been used to great effect in mapping previously uncharted territory, such as the jungles of Borneo. They were fitted to the undersides of Canberra bombers and, when lit, acted as a camera flash, equivalent to a quarter million candlepower, for aerial photography. The photographs were then studied to put together maps of the area. What we tried to do in Ops Research was to fit much smaller magnesium flares just below the headlights of a car. The idea was that if a vehicle patrol came upon an illegal vehicle checkpoint, it could electrically ignite the flares via a foot pedal inside the car. The resulting blinding glare would dazzle the men manning the checkpoint. This would give the soldiers in the car a chance either to drive through the checkpoint, reverse at speed to get away, or pile out of the car and take out the terrorists while they were still wondering whether it was evening, morning or next Wednesday.
Another idea Steve investigated was to fit steel bars 2 or 3ft (0.6 or 0.9m) long to the underside of cars on either side. If anyone attempted to hijack the car, the bars could be hydraulically operated from inside the car to shoot out and take the legs from under the hijackers. Neither of these James Bond-type projects got much further than the drawing board.
One of the more adventurous projects we worked on was to produce an incendiary device that instead of going up in one great ball of flame (in the hope that it would set fire to everything around it) would burn for a much longer time. This would allow it to carry on feeding any fire that it started and could, under certain circumstances, prove more effective. Our effort involved boiling a gallon of petrol over a single Bunsen burner then mixing in soap-flakes (using a very long stick). As the soap mixed with the petrol, a thick, jelly-like consistency was achieved. The mixture was then ladled into (yet another) soap dish and allowed to cool. A time pencil detonator was inserted into the incendiary gel, and strong magnets attached to the underside of the dish, the theory being that it could then be attached to anything from a car or truck to a gas tank or elevator. We made a lot of pretty fires testing these out in safe areas on the base and we both lost our eyebrows a few times, too.
When we were travelling around, the long journeys could be quite exhausting, but Steve never seemed to flag. He was a thorough workaholic who was incredibly enthusiastic about every aspect of his job. On away trips, he was always reluctant to take long breaks, always eager to get on to the next part of the trip and sort out whatever lay in store for us. Part of that motivation was a thirst for knowledge. Steve never stopped learning and never stopped wanting to learn more. Looking back, I think one of the reasons I found those long trips so exhausting was because I was having to keep up with Steve all the time, but it was always fun, nonetheless.
Steve left the army in 1983 and set up his own research and development company. Sadly, he died shortly afterwards of a heart attack at the very young age of 42. I have absolutely no doubt that, if he had been given just a little more time, he had the drive, enthusiasm and talent to have become enormously successful. But you’d always want to steer well clear of one of his soap dishes.
CAPTAIN GAVIN JOHN HAMILTON
I never had the honour of serving on operations with Captain Gavin John Hamilton, (known mostly as John), but knew him to be a very likeable man who very quickly gained the respect of the men who served under him. John Hamilton joined the Regiment from the Green Howards in January 1981 as the new commander of D Squadron’s Mountain Troop. At the age of 28 he was an experienced soldier and mountaineer, leading his troop on two successful assaults on the summit of Mount Kenya (the Kirinyaga that Mountain Troop had first climbed 20 years before) on training exercises in the few short months he was with the squadron prior to the eruption of the Falklands War in the spring of 1982.
While I was messing around with B Squadron’s equipment, loading and unloading C-130s at RAF Brize Norton, John Hamilton and D Squadron were already on their way to the South Atlantic. He and his men were to be among the first SAS detachments to be deployed in the campaign to wrest the Falkland Islands back from the Argentine invaders. I ended up having to watch it all on TV back home, left behind to mind the shop while so many of my friends went off to war. You could sometimes worry about your mates when y
ou knew they were under the command of certain young officers. Mainly you worried that they might murder them. There were no such worries with John Hamilton. He was one of the best.
The initial stage of the Falklands campaign focused on the retaking of South Georgia, a wind-blasted island over 600 miles (966km) south-east of the main Falkland Islands group. Around 100 miles (161km) long but only 18 miles (29km) wide, South Georgia is a land of barren mountains that rise to over 9,500ft (2,896m) and are cloaked in glaciers. Although remote and inhospitable, the wide bays along the island’s north shore formerly provided safe anchorage for the whaling fleets and are scattered with small settlements. It was at the old whaling station of Leith in Stromness Bay that the Argentine ‘scrap metal merchants’ had first landed and laid claim to the island in March. Following the full military invasion of the Falklands and South Georgia on 2 April, the Argentines were now in possession of strategic buildings strung out along the coast, including the BAS (British Antarctic Survey) team’s base at Discovery House in Grytviken. They were also in possession of the island’s thousands of penguins and colonies of seals, whether they wanted them or not. My guess is that the seals and penguins probably didn’t give a stuff who was in charge, but they were about to be liberated, whether they wanted it or not.
D Squadron had flown out to Ascension Island from Brize Norton on 4 April. There they embarked on the Royal Fleet Auxiliary ship Fort Austin to head south with the lead elements of the naval task force. On 12 April Hamilton and his men transferred by helicopter to the ‘Red Plum’, the scarlet-hulled ice patrol vessel HMS Endurance. They had been tasked with landing on the Fortuna Glacier in the mountains to the west of Leith, then making their way down towards the coastal settlements, where they would set up observation posts watching Leith and the nearby whaling stations of Stromness and Husvik to determine Argentine troop strengths and dispositions. They were also to identify suitable beach landing stages or helicopter LZs on the shore of Fortuna Bay, an uninhabited inlet on the other side of the mountains from the target settlements. As the Argentines would be expecting and guarding against approaches from the sea, the route down from the glacier was regarded as the best way to establish the OPs covertly.