by Roger Cole
The SAS tours in Dhofar were four months at a time. Unaware that the rebels were writing their names on bullets, the lads from B Squadron were back home in Hereford where they were enjoying a last few days of R&R, rest and recreation, before returning to the battlefield.
In February 1972, Roger Cole, Bob Bennett and some of the others went to watch Hereford United beat Newcastle United 2–1 in extra time, still one of the greatest ever shocks in the history of the FA Cup. Hereford were a non-league team. Newcastle – with Malcolm Macdonald, the England centre forward, leading their attack – were riding high in the saddle, a dominant force in what is now the Premier League. The Hereford hero was a Yorkshire carpenter, Ronnie Radford, who scored a spectacular goal, a 30 yard strike into the top corner to equalise. This clip has been shown hundreds of times, as it is the moment that symbolises the wonder of the FA Cup. David against Goliath: the perfect sporting metaphor for the battle ahead.
After the usual round of parties it was back to Oman, where the SAS continued the existing policy of hearts and minds, but now with a twist. Under the old Sultan, football had been banned but now the men played endless games with the local boys. One team was always Hereford and the other always Newcastle. Hereford United always won 2–1 in celebration of the club’s FA Cup victory. The SAS men also taught a whole generation of Omani boys that the most appropriate chant at all football matches is ‘Hereford! Hereford!’ regardless of who was playing.
These same small boys were soon going to play a small, but significant role in the battle of B Squadron’s lives.
7
The Big Push
By the time B Squadron returned to Dhofar in early 1972, the intelligence officers were starting to pick up rumours of a big operation.
Despite the endless chitchat, in the East it was becoming relatively quiet. A sit rep (situation report) dated 3 March 1972 noted that the coastal towns of Hasik, Sudh, Mirbat, Taqah and Ragest were ‘all free from enemy harassment.’ The coastal track between Taqah and Mirbat was now open and the Wadi Dharbat was clear.
Unfortunately for the Sultan’s Armed Forces and the SAS, the insurgents were determined to change that.
On 9 May 1972, the Intelligence Corps picked up some bad news. The Front had just received a massive re-supply of Chinese 82mm mortars. As these easily out-ranged the British equivalent, every officer on the djebel slept just a little more uneasily. One lucky mortar could prolong your kip indefinitely – and many of the Front mortar men were very good, often dispensing with a first ranging shot and going straight for the target.
Throughout the spring and early summer of 1972, the rebel commanders collected every scrap of information they could. They re-equipped their men with radios and better equipment. The men’s training was stepped up to ensure that they were comfortable with their new weapons. The senior officers, fresh from Moscow training, honed the young warriors into disciplined units.
As always, good intelligence – and the ability to use it – was crucial.
Dhofar was made up of a series of small tribes, inter-bred over centuries. Not so much six degrees of separation between any two people – maybe three at most. Just like the Americans in Vietnam, the SAS men lived cheek to cheek with the locals in their community.
The morale-sapping thing for the Americans in Vietnam was that they never knew whether the teenager who smiled at them every day in the market was also the dedicated revolutionary making and planting the improvised roadside bomb that would either kill them or shackle them in a wheelchair for the rest of their lives.
The relationships in Dhofar were different. At Mirbat, the British soldiers did not live in a base. They lived in a house in the town. Even when the British built big bases, like White City and Jibjat, the locals often came and went freely. The British took the view that this was their land and they had a right to be there. Right from the start there was a sense of genuine community. Every base had a clinic and throughout the war there was not a single incident of terrorism by the locals against the British or the Sultan’s forces.
The British knew that in small colonial wars, the surprise offence could produce asymmetrical results.
In early June 1972, just as the Front were putting their plans together for the battle of Mirbat, the British had plans of their own. As the Front fighters slipped over the border from Yemen, soldiers from the Sultan’s Armed Forces slid across the border the other way to cause havoc behind enemy lines. Such operations were only sanctioned at the highest level. In theory, Oman was not at war with its neighbour, Yemen, but everyone knew what was really happening. It would have been embarrassing for the Sultan if any of his men were captured so only the best went. They all came back.
The year before, the local firqat had identified and removed the rebels’ intelligence cell in Mirbat but the ties of blood and tribe remained. The eight SAS men from B Squadron were embedded closely in the local community, and although they were quiet about their movements the local rebel spies knew they were about to go home to be replaced by new soldiers. Every military commander in history knows this is the best time to attack, when soldiers are relaxed, their minds elsewhere.
A week before the battle, the rebel commanders made a final, detailed assessment of the SAS at Mirbat.
Back in 1972, Mirbat was a small fishing village on the coast of Dhofar, but strategically very important.
As well as the British soldiers there were around forty firqat, a group of old men guarding the Wali’s fort, armed with .303 British Lee-Enfield rifles from World War One, and some local gendarmerie, young police officers there to maintain the civil peace. Above the fort, on the slopes of the djebel, there were usually six local gendarmes, policemen in a sangar – a small sentry post fortified with rocks. Their job, twenty-four hours a day, was to raise the alarm in the event of an attack. They also kept a watchful eye on the locals.
The rebels wanted to reduce the numbers so they planted a rumour of a big arms cache hidden in a cave out on the djebel. Normally the SAS went out with the firqat when there was the possibility of seizing weapons. Had they done so on this occasion, they would have all died. The insurgents were already there, waiting in ambush, around 100 strong. If the SAS had gone with them, they would have been caught on open ground, surrounded and slaughtered as they fought alongside the firqat.
The morning before the battle, Sean Creak, one of the fixed-wing pilots, flew a small Beaver passenger plane down to Mirbat. These planes were airborne taxis, largely used to move officers round the djebel so they could talk to people directly and see for themselves what was going on. With the handover due the next day, he flew the B Squadron boss, Richard Pirie, down to Mirbat to talk to his Captain, Mike Kealy. While the officers chatted, he went off to have a cup of tea and a natter with Laba, a man he remembers very affectionately now as ‘a big bastard, six foot tall, six foot wide and six foot deep!’
As he pootled back to RAF Salalah with Richard Pirie in the Beaver, Sean Creak had no idea that less than twenty-four hours later he would be returning to Mirbat, at speed and with deadly intent. After he returned to Salalah, the weather over the sea turned bad. The normal pattern for the khareef was to be heavy in the morning and then gradually lift during the morning and afternoon. At other times, like this day, the weather patterns were all over the place.
When the SAS lads were first told they were going to Oman, they all imagined airmail blue skies, the odd wispy cloud hanging over long undulating deserts, Lawrence of Arabia on the horizon. The reality was very different.
As soon as they asked the SAS veterans, ‘What’s it like?’ the answer was always, ‘What time of year you going?’
‘If it’s winter in England, you will roast over there. If it’s summer here, then it’s horrible over there. Think Dartmoor, every day cold and very damp.’
And that was Dhofar on 18 July 1972, the day before the Battle of Mirbat.
For weeks now the weather at RAF Salalah had been terrible. Relentless drizzle, thick swirli
ng mists, low clouds, minimal visibility and a morale-sapping feeling that the enemy was out there, out of sight, re-arming and re-grouping. Both sides knew that when the weather lifted, the serious fighting would start again.
The afternoon before the battle, G Squadron were scheduled to fly into Salalah, ready to take over from the boys in B Squadron. Typical of the miserable weather, a huge storm had brewed up, a tempest so violent that the C-130 Hercules passenger plane carrying G Squadron struggled to land.
A big beast of a plane, a four-engine turboprop, the C-130 was the workhorse troop carrier for the British Army at the time and is now used by almost half the world’s military. It can land anywhere, even on the South Pole, and will fly in the very worst weather conditions anywhere in the world. Since it was first built in the 1950s it has been very reliable and now boasts the longest production run of any single family of planes, with well over 2,000 built. So when the RAF pilot told the soldiers in the back of the plane that he could not get into Salalah airport because of the weather, this was a very rare event.
After the second attempt circling Salalah airbase, the pilot told the guys from G Squadron, ‘I’ve tried twice now but the weather is terrible. I can’t get her down in the deck. I’m going to have one more go and if it doesn’t work this time we will have to go to Masirah instead and come back tomorrow.’
Masirah was an old RAF base on an island nearly 400 miles north-east of Salalah, out in the Indian Ocean. Going there would mean another hour and a half in the air, kipping for a night and then flying back the next day. Not good. Besides which, no one liked staying at Masirah. It was as bleak and unforgiving as a concrete floor.
The pilot slowly arced the Hercules back through the low cloud, with the thick rain lashing the windows, the wind bouncing ninety-seven feet of plane, crew and passengers as if they were made of paper. He came in for his last attempt, desperately squeezing every ounce of power from each of the four Allison turboprop engines. All he could see was steel grey clouds tumbling and breaking against the reinforced glass. He was flying blind, relying on his instruments, trusting his skill and training and, ultimately, banking on his nerve.
He lined up the Hercules using the beacons at Salalah airport. This was 1972 and none of the technologies that modern pilots use were available. His instruments gave him height, speed and direction and that was it. Everything else was experience and judgement. Slowly the pilot reduced the throttle, and dropped the flaps, desperately hoping against hope there would be some break in the thick cloud to give him a visual confirmation. He knew that soon he would reach the point of no return and he would have to go for it. He talked to the control tower and they cleared him to land, wishing him all the best.
In the back of the plane, Major Alistair Morrison and the rest of G Squadron sat, tense and nervous. Being out on the djebel with bullets screaming past your head was one thing. The lads could live with that. They felt in control of their destiny. This was different. Their lives were not even in someone else’s hands. It was all down to fate now. Luck, kismet, call it what you will.
But these guys had faith. They knew from their own experience that the RAF pilots assigned to the SAS were a breed apart. One of the exercises they had all done was to go out on to Salisbury Plain at night, clear a landing-strip no more than a 1,000 yards long and stand there with torches. Two men at one end indicated the width of the landing-strip. The two men at the other end, indicated where the plane had to stop. It was terrifying stuff. The plane, 100 foot long with a 132-foot wingspan, seemed even bigger than usual, especially when the wheels came down and they were only feet from the young soldiers’ heads. It always seemed impossible, but this plane, originally designed as a Short Take-Off and Landing (STOL) aircraft, would then scream, shake and stop in half the distance required by a 747. Even remembered years later, it was one of those pieces of engineering that defied the imagination and never ceased to amaze the SAS soldiers every time they witnessed it.
The guys in the back of the Hercules smiled ruefully at each other, trying not to look worried. Like all soldiers, they knew it was never good to look scared in front of your mates. Not only do you not want to be a wimp, but doing so is always regarded as bad luck, as if being scared will bring on the worst.
Regardless of what anyone says, most soldiers secretly believe that karma is the invisible force in every war.
The pilot went for the final approach. Stage one was to accumulate all the basic arithmetic from the flight engineer. They had done it many times before but still they checked and double-checked. This was the complex mathematical relationships of field elevation, air, pressure, altitude, temperature, winds and the weight of the aircraft. The plane was not at full loading capacity on this flight but the cargo was as valuable as it gets. The cream of the British Army Special Forces was in the back. Salalah was a short runway of impacted sand, so at least it was smooth. If it had been mortared that day, the pilot knew that the holes would have been filled in by now.
The crew re-worked the numbers. Speed, altitude and descent. Get these wrong and it’s all over.
When they first designed the C-130 back in the early 1950s, the engineers at Lockheed used all the knowledge of World War Two and Korea to design a plane for modern wars. It had to be big, reliable, able to fall out of the sky almost vertically and then pull up and land in a very short distance. All planes have relatively small flaps for landing. The C-130 has barn doors, two-thirds the length of the wing. It is a frightening sight when they are dropped down fully. From behind it looks as if the wings are falling off. But the drag is immense and it means the C-130 can land on a shoebox, crucial when the plane is surrounded by enemy mortars, rockets and guns. Every second on the ground is another second when the plane is an easy target.
The pilot started his landing about 1,000 feet up, slowing the plane down, then dropping the flaps. It was now all about keeping a delicate balance. Once the pilot had reached a slow landing speed he wanted to get on the ground as soon as possible, as he knew that at every second he was right on the edge of stalling. Any slower and he would be on the ground much quicker than he wanted and the plane and the passengers would be in pieces. The trick now was to spend the shortest possible time in the air and get down on to the deck. He slowed the C-130 and dropped the landing gear, then lowered the flaps slowly and incrementally, always holding the big bird at the fastest speed he could. As soon as he had the flaps fully down he headed, once again, for the Salalah airstrip.
Most planes come in at an angle of about three degrees, the long slow descent everyone sees when they watch a passenger plane land at a standard airport. The C-130 comes in twice as steeply, at six to seven degrees, and it is one of the very few planes that can do this with the flaps fully down and not nosedive into the ground below. But it takes a pilot with icy nerve.
The trick was stability. All five crew sharpened every nerve, listening and looking for every clue. The pilot was all jangling nerves, ready to abort and pull out on a heartbeat.
Five hundred feet and dropping.
Four hundred feet and dropping.
Three hundred feet and dropping.
Decision height. The point at which he had to decide whether to go for it or not. He was on the absolute limits. It was now all about what pilots call the ‘press on’ spirit. There was little sign of the runway. Just the sinking altimeter and the airport beacons confirming he was in the right place. The big decision now – and it had to be made in an instant – was one of the biggest of his flying career.
Do I go for it? Do I trust my training, believe in the plane and go with the instruments or do I pull out and go to Masirah instead?
The pilot decided to go for it.
He was not to know it but it was a decision that would change the course of the war. But for these seconds of courage, the Battle of Mirbat would have been lost and the Dhofar War would have swung towards a communist victory. Of such pivotal moments is military history written.
He breathed in
deeply, along with the rest of the flying crew and the passengers, G Squadron. One in four of the whole SAS regiment was in the back of that plane.
Three hundred feet.
The pilot was now at a standard rate of descent and his flight engineer was no longer sweating like a man shovelling coal on a steam train.
Two hundred.
One hundred and fifty.
One hundred.
And still the cloud billowed thickly against every window.
The pilot and his co-pilot crew squinted into the thick greyness at the distant shapes and lights, remote outlines of buildings, trying to find anything to give them some reassurance as thirty-five tons of engineering slowly dropped out of the sky, the wind lifting and tossing them all from side to side.
The pilot had one extra focus, just over the nearest end of the landing-strip, 100 feet inside and nothing more. If he missed that then there was no choice. It was off to Masirah.
At fifty feet he pulled back on the power and flared the aircraft, lifting the nose up slightly. He was now down to 300 feet per minute.
Forty feet.
Thirty feet.
Twenty feet.
And then rubber kissed the impacted sand as the plane’s wheels found the runway through the cloud. There was a slight slurring of the fuselage as the plane fought off the swirling wind and then there was the shriek of the brakes as the pilot reversed engines and slowed the plane to a stop at the end of the runway.
G Squadron was finally on land at Salalah. It was a transcendental piece of flying skill, one of many that defined this war.
The men got out of the plane, jet-lagged, exhausted and shaken. From here it was a short drive to the SAS headquarters at Um-el-Ghawarif. After a quick debrief and dinner, most of them turned in for the night, sleeping in the lines of bivouac tents just beyond the whitewashed walls of the armoury.