SAS Operation Storm

by Roger Cole

  At the Wali’s fort, the ‘askaris were already on the roof. Men of pensionable age, they started to load their antique .303 Lee-Enfield rifles. Their eyes were rheumy, their joints ached and their knees creaked as they went up the ladders, but no one could deny their courage or their commitment. Their role was to protect the Wali. As a tribal group, they had done so for centuries and they were going to continue the great tradition, even if this meant that some or all of them would die in the struggle. They stood along the crenellated rooftop, watching and waiting, with wrinkled fingers tightening on steel triggers.

  Pulses now pumped a little quicker. Every sinew was just that bit tighter. The raw ends of nerves were just a bit closer to the surface. Everyone knew that if these soldiers were part of the communist-led insurgency, then the closer they got, the more dangerous it would be.

  The decision about whether or not to open fire was now critical. A full-scale battle could be just a few heartbeats away.

  Roger Cole and Pete Warne tracked every movement through the sights of their guns. The advancing men were now coming very slowly into focus. Soldiers, armed with rifles, walking slowly towards them.

  Both men slipped the safety catches on their weapons.

  The opening salvoes in a battle always define the morale for both sides and time was now measured in milliseconds.

  Even if the SAS men could identify the type of rifles the men carried it would not help, since both the firqat and the rebels used whatever weapons they could lay their hands on: Russian-made AK-47s, Belgian FN rifles and British .303 Lee-Enfields. This was a small-scale, low-budget guerrilla war, and both sides routinely stole and scrounged weapons and ammunition from each other.

  It now went very quiet.

  The early morning silence in the desert is unlike anything else in the world. There are no sounds of animals starting their day, no distant traffic, no conversations of people going to work. The stillness crushes the ears and assaults the senses. The first time you experience it, it feels as if your head is clamped in an invisible vice and the silence is crushing your ears.

  In that moment at dawn on 19 July 1972, just for a few seconds, the universe was perfectly still. The men on the roof of the BATT house felt focused, completely at one with themselves.

  But it was only for a few seconds.

  Lurking in these moments of stillness was something very sinister. In front of them was the unknown. They all felt a chill, not knowing what was out there. Coming next would either be hot sweet tea and breakfast with the men walking towards them or a fierce firefight to the death. If this was the enemy, the SAS knew that they were already outnumbered – and this was just the first wave.

  The rebels were not completely sure if they had been spotted or not. All they could see was the long barbed-wire fence in front of them, the BATT house and the Wali’s fort, all still wrapped in the early mist. Their commander gave a whispered order and his men suddenly start running, bringing their rifles to their shoulders.

  Over at the Wali’s fort, the ‘askaris, men who knew their fellow Dhofaris better than anyone, were no longer in any doubt. They opened fire.

  At exactly the same time, over in the BATT house, the two SAS men on the heavy weapons, Roger Cole and Pete Warne, reached the same conclusion.

  Roger Cole shouted across the roof, ‘Can you see them?’

  ‘Yes, Adoo!’

  They did not wait for orders. Both men fired short bursts. Roger Cole already had the rebels in range as they were running towards the fort. He raked the first line of men from left to right, a long burst. The group, ten to fifteen men, hit the desert floor as the bullets from the GMPG ripped through them. A quick look and he could see some of the bodies still moving. Cole adjusted the machine-gun slightly and then fired jumping shots back along the line to make sure that they were all either dead or too wounded to stay in the battle. The SAS call them ‘jumping shots’ because that’s what the bodies do when they are hit again.

  The GPMG ammunition belts were loaded with standard British Army red tracer as every fifth round. Tracer rounds carried a small pyrotechnic charge in the back of the bullet which glowed as they flew across the desert. Firing tracer was crucial. Pete Warne and Roger Cole could see where the other was firing, a wonderful visual aid to help them locate their targets, even though Pete could only fire two rounds at a time. His was an anti-aircraft gun which fired and then tilted up towards the sky, in search of an enemy air force that did not exist.

  As he pushed it back down to fire again, the fallen bodies were still and the desert scrub in front of the BATT house returned to an eerie quiet.

  This was the first shock to the Front commanders. They knew the sound of a GPMG and knew the damage it could do to someone’s day. This was modern heavy warfare coming back from the roof of the BATT house. The insistent burst of metal from the GPMG and the double crash of exploding rounds from the .50 Browning echoed round the battlefield. Then there was the pop pop pop of mortar fire being returned. As they looked round the evidence was there for all to see. Some of their best fighters, the natural leaders who the other men would follow, were already dead – and this was just the first skirmish.

  The shocked Front commanders did a quick audit and so too did Captain Kealy, two men looking at the battlefield from the opposite ends of a gun barrel. In all, Kealy counted just nine SAS soldiers plus Walid Khamis, the artillery man from the Sultan’s Army. They were about to fight one of the key battles of the Cold War and they were only lightly armed.

  Like every other SAS soldier, Kealy knew his military history.

  This was Rorke’s Drift all over again, the battle immortalised in the feature film Zulu, starring Stanley Baker and Michael Caine. Rorke’s Drift was a key battle in the war between Britain and the Zulu Kingdom in South Africa. Over two days, 22 and 23 January 1879, 150 British and colonial troops held back wave after wave of attacks from a massive force of between 3,000 and 4,000 Zulu warriors. The battle raged day and night over two days, before the British, led by two lieutenants, John Chard and Gonville Bromhead, prevailed. Much of the fighting was hand to hand, fixed bayonets against assegai, the short spears used by the Amazulu. At the end of the battle, the British casualties were minimal. There were seventeen killed or mortally wounded and fifteen other wounded. The Amazulu count was just over 350 dead and around 500 wounded, many of whom would have subsequently died from their injuries, battlefield medicine still being a relatively primitive science. Both Chard and Bromhead were awarded the Victoria Cross, along with eight privates and a Swiss volunteer – the highest number in any single battle. This confirmed Rorke’s Drift as one of the defining moments in British military history. It is always quoted as the quintessential example of British grit, courage and total refusal to yield an inch. But that was the nineteenth century, when the Amazulu were armed with spears and ancient muskets. They did carry some modern weapons, but had not been trained to use them.

  This was 1972. Just like Rorke’s Drift, the British were massively outnumbered. The odds of around twenty-five to one were similar. But there was one big difference. Here at Mirbat, the enemy were much better trained and were armed with automatic weapons, mortars and rockets. There were 400 of them now circling round the BATT house and another 100 out on the djebel. The Front knew that fighting alongside the British soldiers were more than forty firqat. A few days before, they had planted a rumour of an enormous arms cache way up on the djebel. So the day before the battle, the great majority of the Mirbat firqat had pushed off to look for an arms cache that did not exist. Waiting in ambush were around 100 fighters from the Front.

  In all, the defenders had a 25-pounder left over from World War Two, with some shells manufactured in the early 1950s, shortly after the end of the Korean War, a .50mm Browning anti-aircraft gun which could only fire two bullets at a time, a general purpose machine-gun (GMPG) set to sustained fire, an 81mm mortar and a smaller mortar. Each soldier had a rifle, and their commander, Captain Kealy, carried a pistol
, as was the fashion among some officers at the time.

  The .50mm Browning was one of three delivered to British forces at the beginning of the war and was greeted with incredulity by the men who took them, neatly packed and greased, out of their boxes. The immediate suspicion was that this was just the latest example of the spectacular incompetence in routine arms purchases that has marked the Ministry of Defence (MOD)throughout the twentieth century, going all the way back to the bayonets in World War One, which were made of low-grade steel and snapped. But then darker thoughts entered the minds of the soldiers and they assumed that bribery and corruption was the driving force behind the purchase. This was a constant refrain throughout the war.

  The war was kept tight, with only a small group of Whitehall insiders in on what was a very closely guarded secret. The key politicians and senior civil servants inside the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office could all fit into a large briefing room. On the outside of this group were the soldiers, mostly Special Forces and intelligence officers, all of whom knew how to keep a secret. There was one other group, outsiders who had seats inside the magic circle. From their privileged position they received regular briefings and introductions to all the most important people. These were the arms dealers, those snake oil salesmen who swarmed round trying to offload their kit, whether it was what was needed or not. Then, as now, there were some senior officers who had retired on index-linked army pensions and then taken jobs in the arms companies to sell weapons back to their former colleagues. It was – and still is – a well-trodden path, a smooth running machine. Everyone in the MOD knows that if they play the game, then they too can retire, travel the world and sell weapons back to the chaps they sat next to just months before.

  A Browning anti-aircraft gun was of little use when the only planes and helicopters were your own, but this did not stop a salesman from British Aerospace turning up in Oman trying to sell the Rapier surface-to-air missile system.

  The Rapier, a wheeled launcher with four rockets on it, was specifically designed to take out low-flying enemy planes, of which the rebels had precisely none. Worse still, at this time the Rapier did not work, as the British Army troops discovered in the Falklands, when the weapons would not fire properly if they were damp, precisely the conditions at Mirbat on 19 July 1972. The salesman’s patter was as slick as the margarine running out of Roger Cole’s GMPG. After listening to his pitch, General Sir Timothy Creasey, a giant of a man nicknamed Bull by his men, threw the salesman out, with the curtest of responses. ‘This country needs the Rapier like I need a second arsehole!’

  Pete Warne may well have echoed Bull’s sentiments as yet again he fired off two rounds, only for his anti-aircraft gun to rear up to the sky searching for invisible aircraft.

  In terms of defence, that was it.

  The forty-strong Firqat Salah al-Din, who would normally be based at the fort inside the compound, were somewhere out on patrol. They carried TOKAI radios, but these only had a range of a couple of kilometres and they were now well beyond that distance, at least a day’s walk away.

  From the BATT house, the SAS men could see little sign of life from the gendarmerie fort. This was not that surprising. The police officers who were still alive were trapped in their rooms, all of which opened out on to a small courtyard. The rebels were dropping mortars and throwing grenades over the walls every few minutes. If the gendarmes had left their rooms, they would have been killed as soon as they stepped outside. Even if they escaped the mortars and grenades, the only way up to the roof was via a rickety ladder. Climbing it would have left them totally exposed – easy targets for the insurgents, many of whom were crack shots.

  Looking across to the Wali’s fort, the SAS men saw the reassuring sight of the ‘askaris, elderly men with huge beards standing proudly behind their .303 Lee-Enfield rifles, resolutely plugging away at the rebels below. Like many Dhofaris, they were exceptional shots, having been desert hunters all their lives. The PFLOAG commanders had underestimated them. Not only were they now providing valuable crossfire, which was a useful distraction in itself, but they were also taking out one or two of the advancing soldiers. At this stage of the battle, every single enemy casualty, whether they were killed outright or just badly injured, made a massive difference. Many of the advancing soldiers were related by blood and tribe, brothers, cousins and close friends fighting side by side, so every man down deeply affected the morale of at least three or four others.

  As the SAS men looked across at the ‘askaris, watching the puffs of smoke coming from their guns, they all had the same thought.

  ‘They look like a scene straight out of Beau Geste!’

  The idea of Beau Geste, with its glamorous heroes, heavily bearded locals and the French Foreign Legion, was a warming thought. The reality in front of them was not. The rebels had deep intelligence links in the town. They knew what the SAS were only just beginning to guess. Even with the Wali’s guards, the rebels outnumbered the British by twenty-five to one.

  However, there was one serious gap in the Front’s intelligence.

  12

  Much Adoo About Nothing

  The SAS men had never let anyone from the town into the BATT house, so the rebel commanders did not know that on the roof, concealed but waiting for them, was a GPMG and .50 Browning. All they had ever seen of the SAS was the men running medical clinics and doing relatively soft, civvie tasks like giving injections, delivering babies and pulling teeth. They also knew that they trained the firqat, but again, they saw that as an essentially passive activity. They did not know that the men in the BATT house were British Special Forces, men who were not going to roll over, regardless of the odds.

  This was a huge failure of intelligence on the part of the Front.

  Over the previous six years, the rebels had tried to take the village on several different occasions, but this time they were more determined than ever to succeed. They first had it in their sights in September 1966, when around thirty insurgents attacked just before dawn using rocket launchers and small arms. While one group attacked the fort, killing one of the ‘askari guards, another group ambushed the reinforcements from the Muscat Regiment as they drove down from Salalah. The attackers took relatively heavy casualties – four men were killed in the attack on Mirbat and four injured in the ambush. Two years later, in August 1968, they had another crack at the village with rocket launchers and mortars. Again they took casualties, two killed and five wounded with no losses among the defenders. Later that year, in October, they attacked the Wali’s fort again, but were seen off by a pair of Strikemaster jets who hit their position just above the town. Throughout 1971 they continued to attack Mirbat, once in February, but then more frequently once the khareef set in and gave them cover. The attack season started on 8 June, to mark the anniversary of their revolution. This was half expected as the Front loved to mark anniversaries with military operations. In all, they had attacked the town five times between 5 June and 18 June but then the Firqat Salah al-Din smashed the PFLOAG intelligence cell in the town. It was a brilliant operation and this was one area where the firqat excelled. The Front tried a retaliatory assault a month later but they were easily seen off by the Civil Action Team, which was working in the town. None of these attacks had been particularly successful but they had learned two things: they had to attack during the khareef and they needed to turn up with overwhelming force.

  Despite all their experience of attacking Mirbat, the rebels were overconfident. They underestimated their enemy and believed that victory was inevitable. From their perspective at the beginning of the battle, the initial view from the top of the Djebel Ali looked good. The cloud base was too low and too thick for the SAS to bring in reinforcements. All their military training and their experience of fighting in Dhofar over many months told them it was now just a matter of time. After all, they were fighting for their homeland. They had right on their side and a glorious victory was theirs for the taking.

  Do
wn below, the SAS men in the BATT house waited.

  The standard operating procedure was to wear their olive green shirt and trousers for a solid month and then return to base at Um-el-Ghawarif for a shower and a shave. They would throw their clothes into the incinerator since they would not survive an army washing machine. The morning of the battle was the last day of the month for them, so there was now four weeks of sweat rehydrating on their backs in the morning drizzle.

  Suddenly, there was an ear-ripping shriek as a shell flew over their heads and landed behind them in the town. In the distance, somewhere in the dust cloud that was rising over the town, there were women screaming, men and children shouting.

  For the SAS soldiers, the next few minutes of the battle slid past in a blur.

  As the insurgent gunmen started to rake the BATT house with heavy machine-gun fire, mortars and rockets, the SAS men knew they were heavily outnumbered and outgunned. Following on from this first realisation was another, even worse than the first. Bullets started coming in from the rear and the side of the BATT house as well. Not only were they outgunned, they were now also surrounded and outflanked.

  In that moment, a huge brake slammed across the clock and time started to go by very slowly.

  Seconds seemed like minutes, minutes cranked slowly like days and hours dragged like weeks. A man could now live a lifetime in a few minutes.

  Still the rebels came, cleverly using the wadis as cover.

  This was the age before computers, but what happened next was straight out of a shoot-’em-up game. The rebels moved sideways, deep out of sight in the wadis, before popping up briefly to shoot at the roof of the BATT house. The SAS tried to guess where they would appear next so they could get their guns lined up ready. Regardless of where they were, Roger Cole kept strafing along the top of the wadi, so the rebels could feel the bullets screaming past, just inches above their heads, occasionally hitting and splintering the rocks so they would be covered with shards of stone and freshly minted dust. Anything to frighten the enemy and keep them down.