by Roger Cole
The police immediately contacted SAF headquarters at Um-el-Ghawarif where the Ops Officer, Captain David Venn, picked up the call.
It was now just after 0500.
The Ops Office at Salalah co-ordinated everything on the djebel – apart from the SAS – all the different forces, the various regiments of the Sultan’s Armed Forces, his air force, police force and the various gun batteries. The SAS could listen in but had their own separate radio net, piped into a radio shack just over 100 yards away.
As the rebel leaders stood on the djebel and looked down on the tiny fishing village of Mirbat, they believed that the only thing between them and glory now was nine British soldiers, all relatively poorly armed, a few young policemen with no battle experience and some pensioners with fierce beards and World War One rifles.
As they looked down a radio message was flying through the ether, unheard but just above their heads.
The message to SAF headquarters at Um-el-Ghawarif was short and to the point. Given the urgency, the gendarme did not hang about to encrypt it. Standard operating procedures disappeared like rain in the sand. Sod any Russians who might be listening!
The young policeman grabbed the microphone and shouted, ‘Hadja wajit wagin rubsha,’ meaning, ‘There is big trouble here,’ and then added: ‘Takleef!’ – ‘Send jets!’
Now a veteran of this war, the young SAF Ops Officer, Captain David Venn, had heard many similar messages over the previous few months. He had started his military career in the Intelligence Corps. From there he had gone to the Parachute Regiment as a Platoon Commander in 2 Para and then had become the Brigade Intelligence Officer in 3 Commando, the Royal Marines, before being seconded to the SAF as the Operations Officer of the Dhofar Brigade: an all-round soldier’s soldier. From his own personal experience he knew that whenever there was any sort of contact the gendarmes would call for jets.
But maybe, he thought, this morning was different.
There was an urgency in the man’s voice – and he had sent the message in with no encryption and that could only mean one of two things. Either he had forgotten his training – and it would not be the first time that had happened – or there really was something big going down. A very experienced intelligence officer, Venn knew that the smart thing was to carry all possibilities in your head until things became clearer. There had been rumours for months now that there was going to be a big push. Good military intelligence analysis is all about sifting rumour from fact and spotting the moment when the former becomes the latter.
David Venn tried to get back to the gendarme’s fort on the radio to get more details but he couldn’t get through.
It was now around 0515.
Fresh in David Venn’s mind was a battle that had taken place just the previous month which he had been heavily involved in. That too had started with a dawn attack, up on the disputed border between Oman and Dhofar, a remote area that looked like the surface of the moon.
He did not know it at the time, but that battle was the blueprint for the one he was about to fight.
In early May 1972, the second in command of the Ho Chi Minh wing of the PFLOAG, which operated in the west of the country, defected to the Sultan’s side. The trickle of SEPs was becoming a substantial flow. This defection was a huge blow to the rebel forces as this man brought with him a trove of valuable intelligence on the state of affairs inside the PFLOAG. This added to their general urgency. It raised the stakes and the rebels knew that they needed a dramatic victory to restore their morale.
Just before dawn on 5 May 1972, the Front came across the border from Yemen in numbers, a force of between 100 and 150 men fighting alongside soldiers from the Yemeni Army. They ambushed a firqat patrol, killing three of them. They then attacked the Sultan’s fort at Habrut, ninety miles north-west of Salalah. Ranged against them were local gendarmes, some ‘askaris and the surviving firqat, who were joined by soldiers from the SAF.
Back in Um-el-Ghawarif, David Venn had received an anxious signal, very like the one from Mirbat. On this occasion, he knew the call from Habrut was real. In the background was the unmistakable soundtrack of war, the insistent bursts of machine-gun fire, the clatter of AK-47s and the distant plop of mortars landing. He immediately called a chopper and sent the commander of the Dhofar area and one of the firqat leaders to take a look. They reported back that the whole area was under heavy mortar fire and that the PFLOAG had attacked the water supply to the west of the town, using white phosphorus to denude the oasis of trees, making it very easy for them to attack.
The only troops Venn had to spare were half of Red Company, led by Ben Hodgson, a soldier known as Jesus Christ because he had been shot twice, taking one in the arm and one in the hand.
As the Battle of Habrut raged throughout the first day, the British officers back at Um-el-Ghawarif desperately tried to get permission to bring in the jets and bomb the enemy supply base, a fort across the border in Yemen. The diplomats were worried that if it got out that the British were involved in the bombing of another country it would play very badly at the United Nations. More importantly, it could galvanise the Arab League and countries like Saudi Arabia, who were sniffing round the edges of this war waiting to see if Dhofar would fall. If it did, they would then come in and scavenge the pieces of a shattered state.
As the diplomats stroked their chins, the battle raged. One of the firqat leaders, a man known to all as Buster, took a bullet through the baggy crotch of his trousers. It missed his small artillery by an inch, an incident that caused great hilarity among his men and helped to reinforce his status as one of those soldiers who would always walk away unscathed from everything.
After a day’s argument, the diplomats came up with a compromise. The Sultan’s forces could bomb the fort over the border in Yemen, but no RAF-seconded pilots could fly. It had to be contract pilots only, so the only fingerprints were the Sultan’s. In the best traditions of following the rules of war and avoiding civilian casualties, the standards and practices experts insisted that leaflets warning of the attack were dropped beforehand. The Arab-speaking linguists from the Intelligence Corps wrote them. They were quickly printed and then there was a confetti drop on the town. Such leaflets were fairly common throughout this war and it is doubtful whether anyone changed their plans for the day. The fort over the border was the only habitation for miles and there was nowhere else for anyone to flee. But the Sultan’s forces had obeyed the conventions of war and that was all that mattered. He was fully briefed and green lit the plan.
On the second day of the battle, two pairs of jets from the Sultan of Oman’s Air Force took off from Salalah. David Milne-Smith and Nobby Grey flew one Strikemaster, Squadron Leader Bill Stoker and Sean Creak were in the other. Bombing any PFLOAG target was always difficult as the rebels knew how to defend their key emplacements, usually with anti-aircraft guns, as well as their Kalashnikovs, which could cause serious damage to the hydraulics if the pilots got too close. The aim of the mission was to lay one of the big bombs against the wall of the fort and, if possible, blow a huge hole in it. Shock and awe for the Front and a huge boost in morale for the Sultan’s forces.
Each aircraft was armed with two 540lb bombs, sixteen SURA 80mm rockets and 1,000 rounds of 7.62mm machine-gun ammunition. The pilots hunted in pairs. While one plane roared down out of the sky at a steep angle of thirty degrees, the other plane concentrated on the Yemeni defences. The lead plane dived onto the fort at a steep angle and released its bombs at the bottom of the dive before it climbed back out of range as steeply as it could so the pilots could make themselves as small a target as possible. As well as trying to place one of their bombs against the outside wall, they also swooped in at lower angles, releasing the rockets that hung down from the bottom of each wing. As with the other attacks, timing was everything. Each attack was spaced out so they did not fly into any of the debris that was inevitably floating above the fort after the first attack. Bird strikes were unavoidable, but sucking a bit of your own d
ebris into the engine would have been embarrassing. After numerous attacks, one of the pilots hit the bull’s eye, the outside of the fort. The massive bomb exploded, taking off the whole wall. In the attack, the Front Commander was killed, meaning that they had now lost both their top two officers in the west in less than a week.
Game over. But the Sultan was not satisfied and launched Operation Aqubah, Arabic for revenge. Once again, no British personnel were involved as his planes and artillery pounded Al Hauf, the supply base for the Front just over the border in Yemen.
By this time, the Front had penetrated the Sultan’s entire intelligence apparatus, which meant that they often knew more about the big picture than his own commanders. The Sultan knew his spycraft from his days at Sandhurst. He kept everything on a strictly need-to-know basis. The problem was that – at this stage of the war – almost all internal information was shared with his Director of Intelligence, Malcolm Dennison. The leaks from here were massive. Every member of Dennison’s staff, apart from him, had gone over to the other side – and that included some very senior army officers. The result was that the Sultan’s capabilities and intentions, the two key imperatives in any intelligence war, were transparent.
So, by Spring 1972, the Front knew that the Sultan was planning to go on the offensive and take the war to them in their own backyard. If they had any doubts, the Russians could confirm all this as they sucked the Sultan’s radio traffic out of the sky and listened to it all from their intelligence post on the island of Socotra, just over 300 miles south of Salalah.
As well as Operation Revenge, the Sultan’s forces went on the attack in the north of the country to crush a small rebellion. Knowing that the British had no appetite for firing squads and were strongly opposed to public executions, this was ‘a non-whites operation’. Only Omanis took part. They crushed the revolt and all those involved were dragged into the village square and shot dead in front of everyone.
One shocked British officer challenged his Omani counterparts about this, but was slapped down with the riposte, ‘Well, they won’t do it again, will they?’
David Venn knew that, although the Front had taken a beating at Habrut, the insurgents would have to come back. The khareef was a much better fighting season for them, as the Sultan’s forces lacked the technological advantages they had during the rest of the year. The radios often did not work and the planes and helicopters could not fly, which levelled the battlefield between the two sides.
‘Maybe,’ he thought on the morning of 19 July 1972, ‘maybe this time they aren’t crying wolf. Maybe this is the big push after Habrut, this time at the opposite end of the country.’
Although both the SAF and the SAS were based at Um-el-Ghawarif, the SAS had a semi-detached status. They were formally part of the overall SAF, but were set apart. This strange status of being both integrated and a hermetically sealed, discrete unit was to cloud everything that then happened that morning.
The Sultan’s forces and the SAS both had their own separate communications. The SAF controlled all the radio nets run by the Sultan’s Air Force, his four regiments, the local gendarmerie scattered round Dhofar and the artillery. The BATT had their own.
As soon as he got the frightened call from Mirbat, David Venn started to check whether anyone knew what was going on. He contacted everyone on the SAF net to see if there was any intelligence to corroborate this call – nothing, and he could not raise the gendarmerie either. The natural instinct when there is no radio communication is to fear the worst.
After one last attempt to raise the gendarmes, he set off to go to the BATT radio shack to see if they knew anything at all.
It was around 0515 – fifteen minutes since the call from Mirbat – and outside it was still dark. It was a journey David Venn had made many times before and he could have done it blindfolded. Just as well. There were very few lights scattered round the base and they had already lost the battle to pierce through the morning mist. The mist was lazy, thick and glutinous, something straight out of a Gothic novel.
David Venn went into the BATT radio shack where Trevor Brooks was the duty radio op on the graveyard shift. Nothing had ever happened at night before, though dawn was a traditional time to attack.
‘We’ve had a call in from the DG at Mirbat. They say they are under attack. It’s “wagin rubsha”. A big one. They’re calling for jets. So no surprise there.’
The SAS man grinned. They always called for jets.
‘Have you heard anything?’ he asked.
‘Nothing. There’s been nothing in,’ Venn replied.
‘Let me see if I can raise anyone.’
He tuned into the BATT house and tapped out the standard message in Morse code.
82.82. This is Zero Alpha. Radio check. Over.
‘82.82’ was the call sign for Mirbat. ‘Zero Alpha’, was the regiment’s base at Um-el-Ghawarif.
There was no response – only the sort of insistent static that upsets radio operators the world over.
He tried again.
82.82. This is Zero Alpha. Radio check. Over.
Again there was no response.
82.82. This is Zero Alpha. Radio check. Over.
Nothing but static crackle. Both men had experienced this before, especially during the khareef, but no soldier at headquarters likes silence.
They both looked at each other, knowing the explanation ranged from the technical to the catastrophic. The best explanation was that the radio sets were not working. The worst-case scenario – the one that neither man wanted to acknowledge but both feared – was that the men in the field were in serious trouble. But without any intelligence there was nothing they could do.
For any soldier back at base, it is always agony knowing your mates are somewhere else and you cannot get to them.
Back at Mirbat, the rebel commanders, now fearful that they had lost the element of surprise, made their final checks, ready to attack the town. It was shortly before dawn, around 0515. The line of mortars was ready.
A mortar is a simple and fairly crude weapon designed to throw a small bomb over a relatively short distance. It consists of a short tube, which sits on a base plate. Each mortar looks like a short fat rocket and contains a small amount of propellant. The soldier drops the bomb down the tube, it hits a firing pin at the bottom which ignites the propellant, and that gives the bomb enough lift-off to fly a short distance in the air. Once the propellant runs out of energy, gravity takes over and the bomb falls out of the sky. The tube rests on legs at an angle, usually between forty-five and eighty-five degrees. The lower the angle, the farther the bomb will fly, though every mortar man knows he can get an extra bit of oomph by adding a teaspoon of petrol before dropping the shell down the barrel.
Mortars were first developed for siege warfare as a cheap and effective way of lobbing a bomb over the wall of a castle. It was the perfect weapon for the Battle of Mirbat. The SAS men and the ‘askaris were well protected against a ground-level attack but very vulnerable to a bomb falling out of the sky. Similarly, the Front’s own mortar men and their soldiers manning fixed-position machine-guns were equally at risk from the well-targeted mortar.
Down below, all the SAS men were asleep on their British Army camp beds, each one of them tucked up in their standard-issue sleeping bag, nicknamed the ‘green maggot’ by all who slept in them. The sleeping bags, filled with duck down, were terrific. The beds were not, and should have carried a small brass plaque reading ‘Sponsored by the Royal Society of British Osteopaths’. They had a taut canvas top and a bar across the middle, guaranteed to give its victims lower back pain for the rest of their lives. But the men were going home that morning and their dreaming minds were already swirling with the sights and sounds of England.
The SAS has always been a two-tier society and anyone can separate the men from the officers as soon as they open their mouths. The officers, ‘the Ruperts’ as they’re known, are nearly all public school boys, usually from army families, who speak w
ith one voice, clipped and posh. The troopers and the non-commissioned officers, who are the men who often run the operations, are almost all working-class, complete with regional accents from all over Britain and elsewhere in the world. Tak and Laba were both Fijians. Roger Cole spoke with a slight West Country burr, after being brought up on a rough council estate in Bristol. Two of the SAS men – Pete Warne and Fuzz – were Lancastrians. Jeff Taylor was a Guardsman from Ireland, with a soft Irish brogue and a body like a battering ram. But it was a thick, distinctive Oldham accent that dragged Roger Cole from sleep back into the world.
‘Stand to, Roger! A mortar’s landed just outside the town!’
Stood above his bed was Fuzz Hussey, already up and ready to go.
Every few weeks the rebels lobbed a few mortars into the camp around dawn and then disappeared back into the djebel. The mortars always fell short of the SAS camp. They never fell on the town.
Firing at the enemy just before dawn is standard military practice, and has been ever since cannons were first invented. It’s good for morale. It puts the attacking troops on the front foot first thing and keeps the enemy on edge.
After months of the occasional dawn chorus of Chinese mortars, there was no longer any surprise here. Fuzz Hussey usually dragged himself out of bed, lobbed a few mortars back, knowing that by the time Bob Bennett had located the likely location of the enemy, they would have gone.
‘It’s just a shoot and scoot,’ Roger grunted, keen to sleep on.
‘I’m not sure. Come on!’
Like all the other BATT men, Roger Cole slept in his trousers. Before Fuzz could blink, he was out of bed, pulling on his desert boots and shirt. On the way out he grabbed his rifle and his belt kit.
Roger slept in a room on the second floor at the front of the BATT house and just above the main door. From being in bed to being on top of the roof and behind his machine-gun took just a few seconds.