SAS Operation Storm

by Roger Cole

  As he looked down at the 25-pounder, Roger Cole remembered that he had been over to look at the gun the day before. The shells were from a job lot that had been made in 1954. Thankfully, 25-pounder rounds last forever.

  When Roger Cole was in the Royal Ordnance Corps in 1964 and had to move some 25-pounder shells, he had been shocked to see that they were left over from 1945, but once they got them out on the range they still worked perfectly.

  As a devoted artillery man who loved his gun, Laba kept the shells under cover, so they were not affected by the insidious damp. As Laba and Walid Khamis fired off the first shell, sending a huge piece of hot metal skimming the ground where the Front soldiers were crouched in the wadis, Roger Cole’s thoughts echoed that of every other SAS man there.

  ‘Thank God, they haven’t taken the gun, or we would be well and truly fucked!’

  Many of the soldiers fighting on the side of the rebels had received their original training when they had been government soldiers in the Trucial Oman Scouts, the British-run regiment that had provided internal security for the previous twenty years. In their time with the Scouts, many would have been trained on the 25-pounder.

  If they had sneaked into the town before dawn, seized the gun and aimed it at the BATT house, the battle would now be over. They could have fired half a dozen shells in a minute, before the SAS men were out of their beds. At a range of just 700 yards, the shells would have gone through one wall and come out the other side. The BATT house would have collapsed with the SAS men inside and the battle would have been over before the British soldiers could have fired a shot. Instead, the Front chose a full-frontal assault, no doubt inspired by the communist successes at Khe Sanh in Vietnam. But Vietnam was very different to Mirbat, and what had worked against the Americans in the jungle was not the best strategy against the British in the desert.

  From the gun-pit next to the gendarmerie fort, Laba and Walid kept up the conveyor belt of shells into the 25-pounder.

  For once, the British had managed to design and build a piece of military technology that was not delivered ten years too late, did not cost four times the original estimate and which actually worked. The 25-pounder was one of the decisive pieces of weaponry from World War Two. It was the gun that delivered victory at El Alamein, a cannon capable of such rapid fire that the Germans were convinced the British had made an automatic version. The 25-pounder could drop a shell over seven miles. Here, the enemy was not even 700 yards away.

  Laba dropped the barrel and aimed low, hurling huge shells skimming and bouncing over the battlefield, pushing the rebels down and out of sight. The big gun was now the main target for the enemy machine-gunners behind the men in the wadis. They opened up with their Shpagins, and the 12.7 mm rounds started to crash and bounce off the metal shield on the front of the British gun.

  The only thing that saved Laba and Walid at this stage was that the Shpagins were on top of Djebel Ali and at the limit of their lethal range. By the time the bullets reached the 25-pounder they still had enough venom to smash through the skin and bone of a man but would not do the same damage to the thick shield on the front of the gun. This, and the sandbags, was all that was keeping Laba and Walid alive.

  The shield was designed to give the men firing the gun some protection, but now it was being hit by a constant stream of 12.7mm bullets. As the men cowered down, with the sounds of metallic rain rattling round their heads, they wondered:

  How long will it last?

  At what point will the metal give way and the bullets start breaking through?

  The minimum crew for a 25-pounder is four, but six is recommended. Laba and Walid Khamis started out with two gendarmes. Very early on, one of the gendarmes caught a bullet and fell dead into the bottom of the gun-pit. The other policeman went into shock, his eyes glazed, unable to move or function. He just sat at the side of the gun-pit, unable to speak coherently, just gibbering occasionally.

  It happens in war and it can happen to the most highly decorated soldier. The central nervous system just crashes with sensory overload and the mind-crushing fear of immediate death becomes unbearable. The Americans in Vietnam called it the ‘thousand-yard stare’ and no soldier worth his uniform would ever condemn this policeman for losing it. But lose it he did and the gun was now down to a crew of two. After months of practising their moves, the two men began an extraordinarily tight rhythm.

  Load.

  Fire.

  Load.

  Fire.

  They could fire one round every fifteen seconds, but they knew they needed to preserve their ammunition. They had less than 100 shells. If they fired them all in the first few minutes, then they would be very vulnerable, an easy target for the rebels to come and take the gun-pit.

  They started to do something that few gunners ever do. They fired over open sights. This meant using no calibrations of distance or height. Essentially, they turned the huge gun into a rifle, aiming at targets by sight and then firing, keeping the shells as low to the ground as they could.

  From the roof of the BATT house they could hear the steady boom boom boom of the 25-pounder, a resonance that vibrated the guts and rattled the stomach of every soldier there. The sound was deep and visceral. There was something else that helped reignite the optimism of the SAS men back in the BATT house.

  Laba was behind the gun. Laba, the giant Fijian. Laba, the man who used to love telling his fellow SAS men that his ancestors in the Cook Islands had eaten theirs.

  While Laba, the indestructible colossus, was behind the gun, what was there to fear?

  The view from the BATT house roof was like the Somme all over again, but this time it was the British behind the machine-guns as the enemy charged undefended across open ground.

  Just one floor below them, the 316 radio sat quietly, the signals from base bouncing back into the ether, never to be heard.

  82. 82. This is Zero Alpha. Radio check. Over.

  Back at base after trying to get through for a good quarter of an hour, Trevor Brooks got down on his knees – not to join morning prayers, but to check all the wiring. He checked and double-checked every connection, then wired a second radio system and tried that, but still nothing.

  Just static.

  Crrrrrrrrr. Crrrrrrrrr.

  He went and woke up a second radio operator, Tony McVeigh.

  ‘Have you checked everything? All the connections?’

  ‘Yes.’

  McVeigh then got down on his knees in the silent prayer of the radio operator, under the table where he checked and double-checked every connection to confirm that everything was fine.

  Then they tried again.

  82.82. This is Zero Alpha. Radio check. Over.

  All they got was more static.

  They then went to wake up the SAS Duty Officer, Derek Dale, a former Flight Lieutenant in the RAF Regiment who had passed selection and joined the SAS, one of the first to do so.

  Together, they considered the options. There could be a mighty battle going on, the silence might be that the radio was down – after all it was the khareef, when communications were traditionally rubbish – or the guys at Mirbat might be changing frequencies. At dawn, the SAS always changed the frequencies. Not knowing what was going on at Mirbat, they opened up two channels, one on the night-time frequency and one on the daytime.

  They now tried the daytime frequency.

  82. 82. This is Zero Alpha. Radio check. Over.

  But still all they got was static.

  With the clock inching towards 0530, Derek Dale went to wake the B Squadron boss, Duke Pirie.

  Back in Mirbat it was, in theory, first light.

  According to the calendar, dawn should have been just after 0530 but visibility here was still very poor, still the weird half-light that was neither day nor night. In theory, soon they should be able to start to calibrate a much clearer and more realistic sense of the enemy. In theory, the ghosts in the fog should soon become real and shapes should translate into hard n
umbers. But that was just theory.

  The khareef was at its laziest, a thick and heavy cocoon of mist, cloud and drizzle just lying on the ground.

  The view from the BATT house was patchy, but still the soldiers searched for the men they called the Adoo. Every few minutes a group of ten would burst from one wadi and run to the next, hoping to make those precious few yards across open ground before they were caught by a British bullet.

  Some made it.

  Many didn’t.

  But still they came.

  13

  Enter the Duke

  Over at Um-el-Ghawarif, the silence from Mirbat had chilled the blood of Captain David Venn, the SAF Ops Officer. Venn knew that it might be a false alarm. He also knew from his own very recent experience, and from the flow of intelligence from the Sultan’s forces all over the djebel, that the rebels could muster serious numbers of troops and they could pop up anywhere. If this was the big push that the Front had been threatening since the beginning of the year, then he would need to throw in whatever resources he could. And all that would have to happen at very short notice.

  It was now all about speed. He contacted the SOAF Ops Officer at RAF Salalah to request a chopper pilot to go to Mirbat and take a look. It was what he had done at Habrut just a few weeks before. As with Mirbat, the radios had not worked well then. With no instant communications, there was no choice but to get some eyes out there.

  The men at Um-el-Ghawarif needed some troops on the ground at Mirbat who they could talk to directly. And they needed them half an hour ago. In any conflict, there is no substitute for first-hand, real-time intelligence, and coming up to 0600 it was in very short supply, on both sides.

  Soldiers train endlessly for situations like this, so much so that many moves become instinctive.

  Major Richard ‘the Duke’ Pirie, the Commanding Officer of B Squadron, was called from his bed at about 0545. His Staff Quarter Master Sergeant (SQMS), John Wiseman, known to everyone as Lofty, was a notoriously early riser. He was already up and pacing about, having pulled himself from his dreams some time before. At six foot three, it was a mystery to everyone how he managed to fit into a regulation-issue camp bed, but maybe that explained why he was up at first light – pacing around the base was more comfortable than lying in bed.

  It was going to be a big day for both of them, though not in the way either of them anticipated. Their expectations were that the SAS soldiers from B Squadron would return from their bases all over the djebel. The plan was to greet them all and debrief them, get a taste of the ebb and flow of the war – the sort of stuff you only get by looking a man in the eyes, rather than plodding through written reports. Lofty and the Duke were both very adept at reading the body language of their soldiers, and they both anticipated that these few hours would be invaluable.

  Once they had sorted out B Squadron, they would finalise the handover to G Squadron and then they would all pile into the C-130 Hercules transport plane back, everyone rushing to the back of the plane with their sleeping bags to jam their legs against the struts and get in some serious sleep before arriving back in England. After a four-month tour, it would be party time as soon as they got home.

  The Duke and Lofty were both hugely popular and well respected.

  Pirie was the Major in charge of B Squadron, which meant that when the Colonel was not in the country he was the most senior SAS officer there. Like many other SAS soldiers, he came out of one of the Parachute Regiments. He was called ‘Duke’ to his face by the men, because although he was a toff, and normally the sort of man they would despise, he was a gentleman and everything they imagined a duke would be. Like Johnny Watts, he genuinely cared for the welfare of his troops and that was clear in everything he did. He was a genuine leader of men. They knew that although he might take them into the valley of death he would walk them out the other side – every last man of them. And that was what counted.

  Lofty was a huge bear of a man, and a good six inches taller than the average SAS man, who in the early 1970s was about five foot eight. As SQMS, Lofty was the great fixer, the man in charge of stores and logistics. He was a one-off. There has never been anyone else like him in B Squadron, before or since. When something needed to be squared away, then Lofty was the man to do it. This was the man who was always improvising with what he had to make the impossible happen – so if the men needed some bags of cement, some white paint and some extra petrol in the middle of the desert, then he would make them appear. Everyone knew that as SQMS he was a man going places. The SQMS was a Warrant Officer Class 2, the first rung on the ladder to becoming the most senior non-commissioned officer in the regiment. SQMS was where aspiring non-commissioned officers learnt the basics of command. From here, Lofty would become Sergeant Major of B Squadron and the next step would be RSM, Regimental Sergeant Major, of the SAS, one of the greatest posts in the British Army.

  The Duke and Lofty were from completely different backgrounds, yet formed one unit in the engine room of B Squadron. The Duke is dead now, killed in a road accident in France, but ask Lofty about him to this day and he goes misty eyed, describing him as ‘one of the best soldiers I ever served with’.

  As the Duke and Lofty walked over to the BATT radio shack at Um-el-Ghawarif, the SOAF Ops Officer was on his way to wake Squadron Leader Neville Baker, the helicopter stand-by pilot on duty that morning. The SOAF pilots prided themselves on being able to scramble in five minutes or less. Neville Baker was their leader, who had hand-picked all the chopper pilots. He had a strong sense of leadership. A pilot who always led from the front, he knew that this was one of those days when he could not tell anyone else to make the trip to Mirbat. He slipped on his flying suit and went outside, his chopper parked just a few yards from his bed. Outside a fine drizzle was already clinging to his helicopter, thousands of tiny raindrops like heavy condensation on a morning window. It was still dark and the mist was resting on the ground. He immediately went to collect his crew, Flight Lieutenant Charlie Gilchrist, who was there on secondment from the RAF, and Flight Lieutenant Stan Stanford, who had been in the RAF but was now a contract pilot working directly for the Sultan. It was a typical mixed crew of seconded and contract pilots. Regardless of where they came from and how much they grumbled about the living conditions, all the pilots loved being in Oman.

  By 1972, the war in Vietnam was winding down and so the Dhofar War was the only big game in town. A pilot here could fly more hours in a month, take greater risks and have more fun than anywhere else on the planet. If you were an action pilot and wanted danger, if you wanted to be shot at on a regular basis, if you wanted to land back at base with light pouring through fresh bullet holes in the fuselage of your plane or helicopter, then Oman was the place to be.

  David Venn had worked with Neville Baker for months now. He had sent him on many missions before, knew him well and, more to the point, completely trusted him. Over the radio, he briefed him, explaining that he had received a signal from Mirbat but the BATT radio was down. He could not confirm the report, and they all knew that the gendarmerie were prone to call for aircraft strikes if they heard a shot a few hundred yards away. They also knew that the locals tried to call in air strikes against their tribal enemies to settle old scores. As always, caution was needed but, as the Operations Officer that day, David Venn needed to know what was going on.

  ‘Sure, we’ll go,’ said Neville, ‘but have you seen the weather?’

  By now, it was just before 0600 and the BATT radio shack was getting crowded. There was the Duty Radio Operator, Trevor Brooks, and his boss, Tony McVeigh, who had the grand title of Yeoman of Signallers and was hanging on Brooks’ every action. Next door, through a hatch in the wall, was the BATT Operations room, where Richard Pirie, Lofty Wiseman and Derek Dale, the SAS Duty Officer, were also waiting for a clue from the ether.

  The Duke was an anxious man. A few of the guys from G Squadron were up and wandering around. The buzz was already humming round the camp. Something was going down
at Mirbat.

  All everyone could see was Trevor Brooks tapping out the morning mantra. Every SAS soldier starts with a signalling course and so no one needed a translation.

  82. 82. This is Zero Alpha. Radio check. Over.

  No one needed a translation of the static that came back, either. Every new burst of static jangled the nerves. The tension was now palpable.

  Forty miles east at Mirbat, it was now nearly an hour since the rebels had first slid across the top of Djebel Ali and slit the throats of the policemen guarding the town. As often in battle, there was a slight lull. Captain Mike Kealy, with his watch, ID dog tags and morphine syrettes (syringes contained in a plastic tube specially developed for soldiers in war) all clanking on the paracord round his neck, slithered across the roof of the BATT house to reach Pete Warne, the BATT radio operator.

  Their faces just inches from each other, Kealy told Warne, ‘Get on the radio. Send a contact report to base. Tell them what’s happening.’

  As they talked a shell flew overhead, landing on the town. The explosion rattled the BATT house, and as they looked back over their shoulders a thick column of smoke and rubble dust started to plume up in to the sky. The distant screams and shouts of men, women and children bounced round the roof and were still echoing in his head as Pete Warne set off towards the radio room.

  Sending a message was no easy feat. First of all, he had to run across the roof between the sandbags, all the time being exposed to several hundred men shooting at him. But he had to get through to Um-el-Ghawarif, so he set off, weaving and ducking along the top of the BATT house wall, as the bullets zinged and pinged round him. He made it to the top of the stairs, knelt down and took a couple of deep breaths, just glad to be still alive. He then leapt down the staircase, made of old ammunition boxes filled with sand, to reach the radio room.