What de la Billière now needed was an ally, and as though sent by fate Lieutenant-Colonel Nick Neill and his 2/2nd Goorkhas arrived to take over the Lundu front. Neill was a fighter, dedicated like all Gurkha officers to his soldiers. He called them his hatchet-men for, despite their charm, humour, kindliness and romantic origins, fighting was their first love. They had joined the British Army to find it, and under officers like Neill they did. He believed singlemindedly that the function of an infantry battalion being to fight the Queen’s enemies, its commander should use his utmost endeavour to get at them, leaving to his seniors the task of restraining him should their hearts grow faint.
Neill and de la Billière therefore formed a pressure group which Cheyne found difficult to resist; not that he tried very hard, for what commander is not inspired by subordinates with unlimited enthusiasm? Other battalions, just as efficient, keen and well led, had to wait for their chances merely because their COs lacked (if that is the right word) Neill’s damnable persistence, enhanced by de la Billière’s, which would obtain the lion’s share of the hunting for the 2/2nd. Now, however, Cheyne kept them chafing for the statutory month while they familiarized themselves minutely with their area and demonstrated that they were at the peak of their form. But he did allow reconnaissance for planning purposes and the first patrol with SAS guides was even now being organized.
In pondering these matters de la Billière did not forget Condie’s patrol, for he had seen that look on men’s faces before when 3 Troop had returned from Shi’b Taym. Having then been through hell himself and being obsessed with his own guilt, he had lavished praise and sympathy on them, led them an easy life, and found to his astonishment that they became even more sorry for themselves and their restoration to fighting fitness was delayed for an unnecessarily long time. He learnt the lesson that old-fashioned ‘bull’ if administered perceptively could be a far more effective and therefore kinder therapy. The four musketeers had scarcely consumed one of the many bottles of whisky needed to fulfil their orders faithfully when a messenger brought an immediate summons that starkly evoked memories of being abandoned on a mountain-top and deep foreboding. Sure enough:
‘I’ve had a re-think. It’d be much better for you chaps if you went straight back in again; the Gurkhas want to be taken to the Koemba tomorrow so go and get ready.’
Saddened again, they did so; but as Condie says:
‘He was so professional you had to take it from him; in the ops room 24 hours a day (General Lea once told him to take a night off but he wouldn’t), knew everything the moment it happened and took instant action, and when you were in the jungle you knew that.’
They knew it because de la Billière encouraged off-duty patrols to wander into the operations room to see it done, which was good professional morale-building. Professionalism was certainly his aim, but humanity obstinately followed closely and sometimes overtook. Despite his outward disregard for his men’s feelings, inwardly he could now hardly bear to send them back into danger while he himself was safe. He resolved to take the first opportunity of going on patrol himself, suppressing what he knew to be true – because he just had to go – that he was far more use to the men in base.
ACROSS THE BEMBAN
Major John Edwardes’s Cross-Border Scouts had meanwhile continued to harass the enemy, with growing success because Edwardes either led them himself or sent his attached SAS to do so. This his orders forbade, but he was no pirate; the task could not be achieved otherwise and his apparently swashbuckling disregard for authority really stemmed from duty and demanded high moral courage. But now the order was partially revoked for the important task of finding and disrupting the CCO trail, which led obscurely back into Kalimantan from Batu Hitam, itself undiscovered but being searched for by others; only he himself was still restrained as being too well briefed in current Intelligence. Realizing that this time he could not hope to evade the eye of authority, he stayed behind to control operations from the longhouse he had built for his scouts at a lonely part of the coast and known as The Island.
de la Billière allotted half of 2 Troop to Edwardes, although only three men joined at the start of the tour: ‘Rover’ Slater, Jimmy Green, and their leader Corporal Rob Roberts, a man of great stature in body and spirit, like Don Large. A gentle giant except with the enemy, Roberts was highly motivated, expert in most skills, and blessed with the divine gift of leadership to which men responded not just willingly but eagerly. The Ibans and Land Dyaks learned to worship him in a week, which was all the time he was allowed before leading his first foray; and if it is thought imprudent, even irresponsible, to send a lowly corporal with two troopers and eighteen peradventurous headhunters to find and possibly attack a camp beyond a major river 10,000 yards inside enemy territory, events would prove such doubts to be misplaced. The camp was the first CCO staging-post back from Batu Hitam, and Edwardes had good Intelligence reasons for supposing it to be somewhere on Gunong Kalimantan at the main bend of the River Bemban.
Roberts crossed the river north of the objective, apparently undetected; the natives may have had their weak points, but it was reassuring that they would miss no signs of any followers. Two days later, after a slow and cautious approach, he established an operating base on the mountain’s lower slopes and began the search. Two armed Chinese were seen almost at once and raised hopes of soon finding the camp; but, as at Batu Hitam, the CCO proved themselves clever at hiding and for the next two days not even the scouts spotted any human indications. Then came the first significant discovery; a track, cleared of jungle for ten feet on either side and so wide that a Land Rover could have driven down
It ran northwest-wards towards the mountain and must surely lead to the camp, but no; they followed it by looping and it just went up and over, on and on. After dark, Roberts, Slater and four scouts walked down it the other way. Their persistence seemed at last to be rewarded when they came to the river with a well-built log bridge and the dim outlines of huts on the far side where they had no reason to expect a village. Then they saw what they had previously missed in the darkness, a telephone wire suspended above the track and across the bridge. This must be the camp. Right; in the morning they would ‘take it out’.
Before first light they were back with the whole team, crossing the bridge stealthily, surrounding their objective like malignant ghosts and waiting, tautly patient, until the sky lightened. Soon the inhabitants rose to go about their business, chatting unconcernedly but causing Border Scout Ansang to start, involuntarily and whisper (in rough translation from the Land Dyak):
‘My goodness it’s a small world! That’s my uncle Gaya.’
With Roberts’s approval, Ansang shed his military kit and went forward unarmed for a family reunion with his uncle, Auntie Gawani and several cousins. He learnt much of great interest. No, this was not a camp but a new village built within the last few months as jungle dwellers do when their old land is impoverished. The nearest army base was six miles upriver and, yes, Gaya knew of a Chinese camp on the mountain; he was strictly forbidden from going there, but strongly suspected that if you went up the track to where a dip followed a rise and turned right at the big fig-tree with the ripe fruit you could not miss it.
Roberts withdrew his men to the west bank, putting the river between them and their base, and considered. The patrol had been exposed not only to the family circle but to anyone with eyes to see; their footprints too were all over the track and would inevitably be noticed by the next traveller. Aggressive action must therefore be taken at once or not at all; but the camp’s position being still uncertain, Roberts decided to cut the telephone wire and tempt the enemy into a trap.
Expecting the reaction to come from the CCO camp, Roberts took Slater and nine scouts into ambush 800 yards from the river. in that direction, while the third SAS trooper, Jimmy Green, with Sergeant Nibau and the rest of the scouts covered the bridge. It was there, six hours later, that the enemy in fact came. The first five of a seven-man patrol, two of
them Chinese, were on the bridge when Green sprang the ambush; the scouts responded to training and leadership with exemplary discipline and accuracy, hitting all five and knocking them into the water. Number six, who was on the far bank, managed to fire a few wild rounds but was then hit and also fell in. The last man was wounded too, but got away.
Three minutes after the first shot, Green’s men were on their way north to the rendezvous, and Roberts acted similarly on hearing the racket. When all were together again, he ordained a rest and a brew because they had been at high tension without sustenance for a long time and no enemy follow-up seemed likely. He underestimated Indonesian determination however. The seven men had been only an advance party, another group was following a short distance behind and after a pause these came into action with a mortar whose bursts rolled slowly closer. Disquiet and itchy feet were evident among the scouts, but Roberts did not fancy his tea too hot and savoured it lingeringly, nicely calculating the enemy’s progress and, like Sir Francis Drake, the steadying effect of such apparent unconcern. Then they moved further north to the crossing place, checked it minutely by daylight, crossed in darkness, and made their way home in the morning with all convenient speed.
Edwardes was delighted and said so warmly, disdaining the rather chilly SAS convention whereby the best is only to be expected and is therefore unremarked. But the camp on Gunong Kalimantan had still to be found, so he set about planning a larger operation with stronger SAS backing, accepting the time taken in training and rehearsal which would allow the enemy to simmer down.
SPOILS OF WAR
To stir the enemy up again, there now arrived Captain Malcolm McGillivray, a lean, taut young man from the Black Watch with a restless urge to go always much further. He had coerced his reluctant Regiment into sparing him for the SAS; first, by taking Selection without authority and passing easily, that degree of exertion being habitual to him; and then, it is said, by eating nothing but porridge with such dour persistence that his brother officers could not endure it and weakly let him go. Now 2 Troop Commander, he brought with him to the Island Troopers Franks, Henry and ‘Taff Bilbao; and to complete the SAS component for the Mount Kalimantan operation came those three musketeers Condie, Callan and Shipley, getting back in yet again as their inexorable destiny dictated.
Air reconnaissance produced excellent photographs of a clearing with huts high up on the mountain, to Roberts’s surprise because he thought he had searched that position thoroughly. A full-size replica was built which the team of ten SAS and 21 scouts attacked repeatedly until McGillivray was satisfied. They set out on 9 July 1965, and even as they neared the first rise, a huge monitor lizard lifted his venerable grey head and regarded them benevolently. The scouts were delighted at this good omen; and so were the SAS, patronizingly, there being no ladder aslant the track.
In five days they had crossed the River Bemban and reached the mountain’s lower slopes. On the sixth day they split into patrols and began the search, full of confidence in their Intelligence and the lizard which soon seemed justified when excited scouts returned with news of bootprints and the smell of cooking. They reported in the language of their own conventions, which was logical enough to them but not immediately comprehensible to another culture.
‘How far was it?’ McGillivray asked; a simple enough question he would have thought, but the reply reminded him of his old schoolmaster setting a problem in mental arithmetic:
‘Half as long as it took me to get there and back.’
‘Oh very well! Let “x” equal …’
Then the scent went cold; the tracks faded and the appetizing odour had no apparent source. The team worked their way south to the big track that Roberts had ambushed but the camp eluded them, nor were there any outlying signs as would be expected around a place with a resident community unless the latter were unusually clever. That might indeed have been the case; McGillivray had spent many hours memorizing features and key angles which now fitted the actual terrain in every detail, except the one that mattered. He was always accompanied by ‘Rover’ Slater, nominally the signaller but who saw his role more as a familiar spirit charged with stimulating his master with astringent goading. Whatever McGillivray proposed, Slater disputed, and when weary and frustrated they stood in a glade of virgin jungle and McGillivray sighed:
‘Everything checks, it must be here’, he was granted no solace but only further torment:
‘Well it obviously isn’t, is it? – Sir.’
The lot of a junior SAS officer is never easy, but if he subordinates pride to accomplishing the task he will get by. The relationship shared by McGillivray and Slater ensured that every avenue was explored, the jungle offering plenty of avenues. McGillivray even contributed his exceptional ability at tree-climbing, which he had acquired as a boy in Kenya up coconut palms; only the tallest would serve and although their soaring trunks were branchless for a hundred feet, he shinned lithely to the tops, where the views were magnificent but the camp formed no part of them.
They never did find it and failure was hard to bear. But the track was undoubtedly the main CCO trail to Batu Hitam, and a successful ambush on it would be a good second best. Early on the 16th, McGillivray took Slater, Sergeant Nibau and a bright English-speaking Iban called Percy to a place he had previously earmarked some 2,000 yards northwest from the river. A big log spanned a steep-sided gully which flattened out on the near, north, side into an unobstructed semicircle, across which one could shoot from perfect cover at anyone on the log whence there would be no escape. ‘A beastly way to hit them, but effective,’ and that was the point.
As though to confirm that assessment, four heavily-laden locals crossed the log where they were wholly exposed and vulnerable. McGillivray sent Nibau and Percy to fetch Roberts and the team, retaining only the constant Slater who, for the moment, could find nothing to disparage. Then, from the left, came a patrol of soldiers. McGillivray gripped his rifle. Slater thought, ‘Crikey, he’s going to start shooting’ and gripped it too, just to make sure but unnecessarily; there were eleven men in the enemy patrol and at five-yards range shooting would not have been a good idea. They looked to be Indonesian. One soldier had a light machine-gun, the rest rifles. They moved fast and purposefully.
McGillivray met the team at a lying-up place and immediate rendezvous 200 yards to the rear. Then he took Roberts and fifteen men forward to keep the first watch. He placed each man individually, in three groups with different functions though forming one continuous line at from five to twenty yards back from the track depending on the cover. In the commanding position abreast the log were Roberts, Franks, Nibau and three scouts; they were the killers. Condie, Callan and Shipley, each with a scout, formed the right-hand flank group; their tasks were to spot the enemy early and report him by pulling the cord which stretched along the whole line, then to pick off any enemy trying to escape and, finally, to give warning of any counterattack. Acting similarly on the left were Henry, Bilbao and their scouts. All was ready by one o’clock in the afternoon and the tense hunter/hunted syndrome set in.
Not expecting the enemy patrol to return until the evening, McGillivray went back to ensure that the rendezvous was organized to accept the withdrawal after a contact, a crucial moment when each man must be checked by name and the enemy prevented from joining in. He did not like his first position and had the bergens moved to a better one. Slater griped that this was most improper because the ambush party might miss it even if told of the change; but McGillivray planned to relieve the watch before anything was likely to happen and all would then be fully briefed.
At two o’clock drenching rain fell, its hissing noise together with that of the wind lashing the tree-tops, smothering all other sounds. Then, at three-thirty, the enemy returned. They came so fast with heads down, weapons slung and clearly intent only to be home and dry that Shipley, out on his limb in thick undergrowth with little more than a peephole view of the track, almost missed seeing the blur of the leading man; but he pull
ed his cord and then again, five times in all, as rapidly as he could jerk his arm. Condie received the signal, amplified it to Roberts who alerted his group just in time. The five soldiers were scarcely on the log than they were off it again, dead or wounded.
‘Stop!’, ordered Roberts; but after a pause quite long enough for the message to register, Bilbao fired two rounds on the left flank and earned his chiefs incisive displeasure. He was, however, only doing his precise duty, having spotted one of the enemy trying to crawl away.
Then something much more drastic happened on the right. Even as the ambush was sprung, Shipley became aware of a second enemy group, who now reacted violently. Deploying off the track on the near side, they put down a hail of fire with their machine-gun and rifles up the line of the ambush, in preparation it seemed for the classic manoeuvre of ‘rolling it up from the flank’. He was, literally, the flank, and waiting to be ‘rolled up’ seemed to him to serve no useful purpose even if he were still alive when it happened, which seemed unlikely. Branches snapped, foliage flew, saplings shattered, bullets whined, thudded and cracked, but he himself could see nothing beyond a few feet and was so enclosed that he could not even swing his rifle.
Condie was not so immediately threatened, but was quick to see the danger to his juniors and shouted, ‘Fall back on me.’
Shipley and Callan began to do so, joining each other with their scouts. Then they saw that lower ground to the rear would be ‘dead’ from the firing and there they dashed, missing Condie who crept forward into the barrage to check that they were safe. Condie was what the SAS call ‘a hard man’. Shipley and Callan continued to the rendezvous because it was standard drill to retire immediately after an ambush; arriving, they were greatly agitated to find nothing and nobody there.
SAS: Secret War in South East Asia Page 29