SAS: Secret War in South East Asia

by Dickens, Peter;

  The little eye blazed with fury, the great ears flicked wide like the wings of a dark angel, and a scream whose blood-chilling horror might have paralysed a lesser man set Thomson off along the bank with all the impetus of SAS training and two good legs. But the gap did not widen and the thought of tripping prompted an immediate change of plan. The charging beast would be upon him before he could turn to use his rifle, so with a well practised football swerve he turned through a right angle and raced up the hill; the lumbering giant crashing on and soon losing interest. Thomson regained the camp to pant with pained irony, ‘There are no bloody elephants in Borneo’; but was much more disgruntled to learn that Turnbull had known there were some in the neighbourhood all along, having noticed patches of mud eight feet up tree-trunks and ‘how else could it have got there?’

  Thomson was with Sergeant ‘Mo’ Copeman when they found a train. Yes, a, railway train with steam locomotive and six wagons, pierced and smothered by the jungle, so they laughed; expecting the unexpected was all very well, but really! Then they discovered graves with still decipherable Australian names and understood that this was a solemn and sinister testimonial to Japanese occupation. Sadder still, not a soul in Tawau had heard of it.

  THE GAP

  Eddie Lillico’s patrol began the tour in the eastern part of the Pensiangan district. He became ill with another potentially lethal tropical disease, tick, typhus, and with the impersonal logic and obedience to orders of a good soldier had himself lifted out by helicopter, was cured, and returned. That was becoming easier to arrange; more aircraft had been made available at the insistence of General Walker who realized that they must form the core of jungle operations in the 1960s, since a helicopter could move troops as far in five minutes as would take them five hours or more on foot.

  Lillico’s area merged into the lost world of the Gap, and when the call came in June to explore it, he was the natural selection. ‘I took a young officer with me’, he says, in the manner of what the officers called ‘The old Malayan Sergeant’ who needed no direction from a younger man with negligible experience; yet the view was also held that young officers were not entirely useless, the more broadly educated mind being better fitted to look at new problems from new angles and accept more readily that established practice was not always the best solution. Personalities alter cases; the officer in question, Andy Dennison, probably thought that he was taking Eddie Lillico with him, but since both were solely concerned to do the job with credit to the Regiment, harmony prevailed. Also in the augmented patrol were ‘Mau Mau’ Williams, whose nickname dates him but certainly does not describe his methods, ‘Yanto’ Evans, three hand-picked Muruts and two Ibans from among the SAS circle of friends, and five constables from the Sabah Police Field Force. They were gone for six weeks and did all that was asked of them.

  Intrepid Anglo-Dutch surveyors had delineated the border many years before, but there was no record of anyone else having been there; the map was almost blank and Major Tom Leask’s directive might have been intended for Captain Cook. The patrol was to report on the topography and its penetrability by friend or foe, the flora and fauna for its general interest and its capacity to support a military force, and the races, characteristics and customs of the people encountered ‘of whom little is known’. The phrase is revealing, clearly indicating that nothing at all was known for nobody lived there. Finally, recommendations were required on how best to patrol the area and deny it to the enemy.

  The country was certainly rugged, like an immense cauliflower Lillico thought, with hundreds of unmapped streams and rivers in gullies and ridges up to 4,000 feet, where it was so cold at night that they wished they had brought blankets. It was up and down, up and down all the way; much more so than usual, for with a reasonable map it is often quicker to detour round difficult places, but with few features marked and those inaccurately, as they soon proved, they could not have been sure that they had regained their track. They marched therefore on a fixed compass course until they came to a truly impassable obstacle, when they made a definite alteration.

  Navigation was one of Lieutenant-Colonel John Woodhouse’s innovations and he used the term advisedly because there was much more to his system than just map-reading. It needed endless practice, but the SAS were accustomed to that. Speed must be estimated accurately, a rough guide was 2,000 yards an hour on a track and 1,000 through bush that did not have to be cut, but you could school yourself to become ever more precise. Your course could never be absolutely straight in the jungle; you were always having to dodge round something, and so you looked at your compass at least once a minute and tried to ensure that your mean course was the right one. In the Gap they marched for fifty minutes in the hour. When they rested, Dennison would assess the direction and distance travelled since the last stop, making use of the others’ opinions, for all had to participate. They hoped that at last they would find a feature by which they could check their position for sure, but despite that rarely happening in the Gap they were never lost. ‘You may not know where you are,’ Sergeant-Major Lawrence Smith taught, ‘but you’re not lost; keep your head and use it and you’ll always get back on your track eventually.’

  Accuracy was important, however: to pinpoint the features they found, to keep their side of the border (which was sometimes as little as a mile away on their right hand), and to home-in their resupply aircraft. The latter was due every seventh day, its arrival being an important event though they could no doubt have survived without it; at the appointed hour they sent aloft an orange marker balloon which floated miniscule above the tree-tops and awaited the murmur of engines with studied carelessness. As though by a miracle the Twin Pioneer always found them and dropped its manna: food, medicine, new boots or anything they had asked for, collected by Frank Williams at whatever inconvenience to himself and others, and most precious of all, mail. Therefore, they blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it by doing no work thereon like other travellers in the wilderness before them, but here their environment was surely more wonderful than anything Sinai could offer. ‘Oh beautiful!’ says Lillico, ‘Primeval forest that nobody’s ever been in before’; and the latter attribute certainly enhanced the appreciation of those who, having eyes, saw. Loveliest of all were the river-banks; peaceful too, but only if the camp was sited to conform with two immutable principles of jungle lore. Falling trees can kill, and do so far more often than charging elephants or anything else; ‘deadfall’ is the menacing word, so look upwards before you spread your poncho. And then look downwards at the river, guess how high it could rise in a flash flood caused by torrential rain high up in its ‘ulu’, double it, and if you have to cross, do so while you may. Even Lillico underestimated once and they had to scramble when their river rose 30 feet in a night.

  Otherwise the peace was only disturbed on one occasion, by a 20-foot python; and yet it was not the snake that caused the trouble for it was merely proceeding on its innocent way which happened to cross the hump of a sleeping policeman. The man it was who objected and turmoil ensued, the snake expiring under slashing ‘parangs’ in a welter of gore; but Lillico barely remembers the incident, a lot of fuss about a creepy-crawly if you ask him. Tiger leeches, as Dennison called them, were far more annoying; spectacular two-and-a-half inch beasts with orange bellies and irridescent green stripes down their backs which came looping towards you like little drooling Draculas, and ‘if you didn’t feel the nip as they latched on, they gulped blood a tot at a time.’

  All these were but the normal inconveniences to set against the delights of jungle life. They were certainly no worse than rail strikes, traffic accidents and blocked drains. But this nature trail was unique even to Lillico, because man was such a rare species here that the animals came out of the bush to look at him. There were great sambar deer with antlers like Scottish stags, smaller barking deer and charming mouse deer only twelve inches tall, wild pig, innumerable sorts of monkey, an orang-utan as big as the Murut who met him, five-foot monitor lizards a
nd many others; even fish in the rivers swam towards them. It seemed a shame to kill, but they did so for the pot; an evening meal of, say, venison was more nutritious and better for morale than anything provided by Frank Williams. Monkey meat was preferred to pork, which places it on a high level of excellence. Snakes were best curried.

  They came at last to the headwaters of the River Serudong and found a, 500-foot high waterfall, a more than sufficient obstacle to permanent habitation. After that, signs of humanity began, then Muruts; the first they saw ran away thinking they were Indonesians, which was significant, but when they shouted that they were British they were welcomed as usual and given boats and paddlers with which to end their journey in the style of Sanders of the River, luxuriously.

  Dennison’s comprehensive report was praised by General Walker. It was not true to say that there was never anyone in the Gap because they had seen clear signs of occasional hunters. These were probably not only from Sabah because the border was crossed by two sizeable rivers which, although unnavigable, offered easy access. Where hunters could go so could Indonesian soldiers. Should these come, they could live off the country and need never be discovered until they fell on some unsuspecting objective far to the rear. Dennison proposed four forts with landing-points as patrol bases, manned largely by Border Scouts, and the steps that were taken as a result of his report contributed to two enemy raids being frustrated later in the campaign.

  From Labang, across the border from Pensiangan, a team of runaway rebels from Brunei set out to return home with arms and ammunition. The first part of their journey was entirely in Kalimantan, yet their progress was noted and reported at every stage by Muruts from SAS villages going over and listening to their friends’ gossip. Willie Mundell commanded the SAS patrol at Ba Kelalan. He had already earned a reputation for knowing more about events across his border than anyone else, and when the rebels reached his area he fixed their position and likely movement so nearly that on finally infiltrating into Sarawak they were intercepted by the infantry. The achievement was praiseworthy, said the General.

  But also in this area there occurred a calamity for the SAS. On 4 May a helicopter took off from Ba Kelalan on a round of visits to patrols with Major Ronald Norman the second in command of the Regiment, Major Harry Thompson the Operations Officer, Corporal ‘Spud’ Murphy and others, and crashed killing everybody. Frank Williams had been turned off the aircraft at the last moment in one of those whims of fate which seem afterwards to be inexplicably significant. He took a patrol in at once, establishing that death had been instant.

  Thompson had been earmarked to relieve Woodhouse in command at the end of 1964, so his loss was particularly serious, but over and above that the Regiment was collectively and individually upset. It would be reasonable to suppose that always living close to death they would somehow become impervious to it, but that was markedly not so. There was a strong family element in their relationships, the whole Regiment at this time comprising fewer than 200 men who knew each other well both in pleasure and adversity. Within the two Squadrons the affinity became even more intimate, and closer still in the Troops, while the four men in a patrol after a tour like this one, knew each other, as Williams obseryed, better than they knew their wives or than their wives knew them. Now, as then, deaths are felt as they would be in a family, and the utmost pains are taken to avoid them. That may be a weakness; John Woodhouse thinks it is sometimes, yet since the SAS do not recoil from danger, it encourages thoroughness in preparing for operations. What it also does is strip away the unfeeling image and reveal them as warmly human.

  George Stainforth was still at Long Jawai in the Third Division of Sarawak; that is to say, he was in and around it because he and his men patrolled huge areas, made friends, and established beyond doubt that an enemy build-up was taking place on the border. He too earned the General’s appreciation by arresting two high-up Brunei rebels, which of course came about through his being so intimate with the locals that no stranger could pass without his being told. When at last he and his patrol left in August after six months continuously in the jungle, the General guessed that the Long Jawaians must be feeling lost without him, but could not know how right he was to prove.

  Lawrence Smith’s luxury holiday on Cape Datu had been well publicized and ‘D’ Squadron raffled the job as being the best on offer. But the winning patrol must remain anonymous because the brandy proved too much for one member, who first entertained their Chinese friends with stirring British ballads of the bold and free and then crashed out cold beneath the table. The others stayed conscious but euphoric until somebody thought, ‘Crikey! What about the weapons and radio?’ Their host, doubtlessly out of solicitude and possibly enlightened self-interest (but it was still a remarkable gesture), posted six of his own men with shotguns to ensure that their rest and equipment were undisturbed. And this was against a new background of a strong Indonesian patrol on the other side of the point with whom the SAS had arranged a non-aggression pact through the locals, which they themselves were bound to keep because they were not allowed to cross the border anyway, though the Indonesians had no need for such restraint. All in all, it was a lapse.

  Nothing happened, and in due time the patrol was moved, through Long Jawai in the Third Division to the ‘ulu’ Rejang to investigate some of the primitive nomadic Punans, whose company they also enjoyed. The liquor was less tempting, being flavoured with ripe fish, but the meat was excellent, fresh-killed by blowpipe, which the SAS learned to use and added yet another weapon to their armoury. The eight-inch and almost weightless bamboo sliver would have been deflected by the slightest draught, but of course there was none in the forest anc accuracy was astonishing; a monkey 150 feet up, barely grazed but stunned by the virulent nerve poison, would cling for a moment and then fall to its death, its meat uncontaminated. ‘Double-tap’ too, whereby one dart was pushed well up the bore and a second held in the teeth, the thrusts coming from the powerful bellows of the whole lungs. They traded beads with the Punans, the Punans offering the beads, and of course enlisted them as allies. Although more backward than the other tribes, they were by no means unintelligent and would play a valuable part.

  It was all fun, but it was also hard, serious work to create a viable defence. The rest of the Army, the Police, the Royal Air Force, the Royal Navy, Intelligence services and all the many agencies concerned with military operations were hard at work too on an immeasurably larger scale. As they expanded and extended their activities, there was less need for the SAS on the British side of the frontier. Woodhouse was quick to advise General Walker that their proper place was beyond it, to harass the enemy and disrupt incursions before they started. No action was taken and the seed thus sown lay dormant, but it was his job to sow it.

  August came, and it began to seem as though Soekarno was confronting the hated neo-imperialists with little more lethal than hot air. To be sure, minor incursions continued, but most had been hit hard by the infantry and consideration was given to withdrawing the SAS, who were not properly employed in a static role. They had always to be ready, and trained, for those emergencies for which their special skills were designed.

  Then, Major Peter Walter, an SAS veteran now serving with his own battalion but uninhibited by that, arrived in Borneo for the shooting. Tom Leask suggested he might like to see the Border Scout training camp at Song, a small town of some importance on the middle Rejang, a long way from the Haunted House. Simultaneously, the Indonesians chose Song as the objective for their first large-scale deep-penetration incursion. Walter therefore grabbed all available men, dashed unbidden into the ‘ulu’ and took part in the battle with distinction; the SAS shrugged their shoulders and said it was typical of Peter Walter to be on the spot, some people were like that; the 2/6th Gurkha Rifles, whose area it was, said he was poaching; but General Walker said he liked that sort of sportsmanship.

  The enemy were badly equipped and led, and the Gurkhas harried them for a month, killing or capturing many. Th
ey never looked like reaching Song, but the attempt had been significant and now it seemed there might be a real war after all. The SAS was not withdrawn, and an idea even began to be canvassed in General Walker’s headquarters that more of them might be extremely useful. One cannot be sure who did the canvassing, but Lieutenant-Colonel John Woodhouse certainly raised no objections.

  Leask’s time in command of ‘D’ Squadron was up before the tour ended and Major Roger Woodiwiss came out to relieve him, full of enthusiasm for what was regarded as the best job in the SAS. He would be close to the men with every chance of leading them on operations, and senior enough, being SAS, to command the attentive ears of important people and influence the Squadron’s destiny. In appearance and brisk manner he resembled Field Marshal Montgomery strikingly, but not in public relations for he hid his light under a bushel so that it shone only downwards at the men who, always the best judges of an officer, rated him as highly as any. To Lillico, he was a soldier’s soldier, which included among many qualities complete identification with them, the Regiment and the trade of war, while excluding with a shudder of distaste any concern for the politics of self-advancement.

  ‘A’ SQUADRON

  ‘A’ Squadron took over in August 1963, this time temporarily commanded by Captain Bill Dodd. He was not happy with the static task he was given; to concentrate entirely in the approaches to Brunei, which was thought to be still under threat from her rebels. 1 Troop (Ray England) was based at Long Semado, 2 Troop (Captain Iain Jack) at Bareo, and 4 Troop (Sergeant Maurice Tudor) at Ba Kelalan, where Squadron Sergeant-Major Lawrence Smith went too, thinking the place ‘interesting’. 3 Troop was elsewhere in the world doing something or other; who knows what? In dealing with the SAS, one gets out of the habit of asking unnecessary questions.