by Roger Cole
David Venn, as the SAF Operations Officer, knew that the Sultan of Oman’s Air Force had Strikemaster jets which he could call on twenty-four hours a day. The British-made jets were ideal for small counter-insurgency wars like this. They could carry a lot of weaponry, both machine-guns and rockets. They could take off on rough airstrips – and there were plenty of those. Even at low altitudes, the pilots could eject safely.
But this was 1972 and though the jets were on stand-by, their range of instrumentation was small. The pilots flew on what they could see and what they could see was their hands and not much more. They relished the challenge of flying in the raw, but the cloud was too thick and too low to take off. It was just about safe enough for a helicopter, but still too dangerous for a jet.
There was a lot of frustration at the base. Just minutes’ flying time away, a group of nine SAS men needed their help, but no one knew just how bad the situation was. Reports were now infrequent and, even if they could find out what was going on, there was not much they could do about it. They all had to recognise one simple fact – they were prisoners in their own headquarters and the khareef was their jailer.
Ever since the BATT radio shack got the signal from Mirbat, Trevor Brooks kept responding. Duke Pirie wanted them to know that they were trying to put together a plan to get help to Mirbat, but the radio shack was plunged back in to the nightmare of signal static. While Lofty went off to check the armoury, Richard Pirie went off to talk to Alistair Morrison about getting G Squadron down to Mirbat. Everybody in the Ops room back at Um-el-Ghawarif had three words now burning their way through every cortex – under heavy fire – and at this very moment, there was nothing any of them could do about it.
The cloud base was too low to risk twenty soldiers in three helicopters, flying into a battle about which they knew little.
All their hopes were now on Neville Baker and his crew, flying slowly just feet off the waves. The khareef was always capricious and this morning the clouds over the sea were being particularly bone idle, lying heavily just above sea level. If the mist dropped any lower, Baker would have to turn back, no matter how much he wanted to save the men.
Back in the Mirbat mortar pit, Tak, Fuzz Hussey and Tommy Tobin fired back at the rebels’ attack position somewhere high above the town up on Djebel Ali. On the roof, Bob Bennett had his mortar plotting board and was trying to work out where the rebels were firing from, but this was proving impossible. The mortars were deep in the wadis, somewhere beyond the realm of sight, their telltale flashes lost in the mist.
It was now all about teamwork. This was a slick operation.
The cook, the engineer, the infantryman and the Fijian.
Tommy Tobin, the cook, prepared the mortar, putting on different charges depending on distance and elevation. Fuzz, the engineer, then adjusted the sight depending on the instructions from Bob Bennett, the infantryman on the roof. Once they knew where to aim, Take it Easy Takavesi, the Fijian, dropped the bomb down the tube, and then it was round away.
This was a multinational force in all but name. The cook was an Irishman born in London, the engineer was from Oldham in Lancashire, the infantryman was from Devon and the Fijian was from a Scottish regiment. All of them kept looking anxiously at the gun-pit, where their comrade, a Fijian from an Irish regiment, was firing the 25-pounder with an Omani gunner.
The poor visibility was now helping the SAS as well. The Front’s mortar men were usually precision perfect, often dropping their first mortar right on target. But this morning, for some reason – maybe because they could not see the BATT house from where they were firing – they were well off-target and many of the mortars fell between the two forts.
There was something else as well that surprised the SAS men. As they looked down, they noticed that many of the mortars were landing, sticking in the sand but then failing to explode. It was to be one of the key issues in the battle.
Not knowing if help would ever arrive, the BATT men fought on.
Pete Warne plugged away on his Browning, his ammunition belt a cocktail of four incendiary bullets to one round of tracer. The incendiary rounds exploded on impact and the tracer left a vivid trail. He was trying to pick out targets, so the others, particularly Roger Cole on the GPMG, could lay down much more sustained fire. From the roof, Bob Bennett fired his British-made SLR (self-loading rifle) and in between called out the positions to the mortar pit so Fuzz Hussey, Tak and Tommy Tobin could try and take the fight back to the rebels. The SAS men had one functioning mortar. The opposition had at least half a dozen.
In between doing everything else, Bob Bennett and the others fired their SLR rifles whenever they could, but the insurgents were still a good 400 yards away. The SAS saw a party of insurgents north-east of their position between the Wali’s fort and the gendarmerie’s fort. At first they had thought it was the firqat patrol finally returning, but it soon became clear that it was the enemy.
More bad news. Yet more men coming at them from different angles.
By now, the insurgents were just a few yards outside the perimeter wire and one of them fired his Carl Gustav rocket launcher at the gendarme’s fort, hitting the outside wall. The men braced themselves for another huge explosion but this time there was nothing. The giant shell buried itself in the thick mud wall but failed to explode. ‘One back for the good guys,’ they all thought.
Roger Cole and Pete Warne kept trying to pin the insurgents down, but they were using the wadi’s well, popping up, shooting and then running along the wadi out of sight, only to appear somewhere else.
The insurgents were well trained. By now – and unknown to the SAS – some rebel soldiers had also circled round to the south and west of the town as well, so they were firing at the SAS soldiers from three sides. Down in the mortar pit, the guys suddenly had to duck. The bullets were now much lower than usual, screaming just feet over their heads. The rebels were firing at them from the south-east as well – and their snipers had now found their groove.
By now, the rebels had realised that the ‘askaris on the roof of the Wali’s fort were excellent shots and that a bullet from a .303 Lee-Enfield might be a shot from World War One technology, but it was still pretty lethal. The ‘askaris were proud, defiant men and they were not going to yield. They had laid down continual rounds from the start of the battle and the PFLOAG commanders had to re-deploy some of their troops to start firing back. It was a good diversion as it took men away from the main assault. The ‘askari great beards on the roof of the Wali’s fort now had a real fight on their hands as the marksmen from the PFLOAG set themselves up in the wadis and opened up in what was now a short-range sniper war, with two sets of crack shots trying to take each other out. Two of the ‘askaris were hit with greasers, bullets that flew through their hair leaving a long scorch mark on the skin below.
But still they fired on, resolute and unshaken. True men of grit.
Surprised that the battle was still raging and that they had not yet crushed the resistance from the BATT house and the Wali, the insurgents escalated the battle, opening up with everything they had – small arms, mortars, rifles, machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
The SAS men had already been in dozens of firefights with the Front, but this was not like anything they had seen before. Even Pork Chop Hill had not been as intense as this.
The attack was relentless and the number of rebels was exponentially higher than in any previous battle. Usually the Front operated in small squads of ten or less, armed with Kalashnikovs. Now there were hundreds and, instead of just shooting from deep cover, they were mounting a full-scale, head-on assault, sometimes over open ground. This was a complete departure from their previous tactics. A conflict that had been largely based on guerrilla skirmishes had suddenly morphed into industrialised warfare in its deadliest form.
15
'I've Been Chinned!'
As the rebels charged forward, they picked up their dead, throwing the bodies over the barbed wire so the livin
g could crawl over them. Bob Bennett looked up and saw one of the insurgents straddling the wire, exhorting his men ever forward.
Time suddenly opened up.
Bob Bennett was a pretty calm guy, but now a new chill settled on him as he gazed at the man in his khaki uniform, his Chinese peaked cap proudly on his head, bandoliers of ammunition slung across his chest. As he gazed, Bob thought, ‘He looks like a hero from a Maoist poster.’ The man had clearly seen the communist propaganda posters when he had been to Beijing for guerrilla warfare training. His pose was magnificent as he jabbed at the sky, his rifle held high in his right hand. In his mind’s eye, he no doubt saw himself as a timeless figure from history, defying the gods of battle.
The rebel soldier was a good 500 yards away from the BATT house. The other guys stopped briefly and watched as Bob Bennett stood and aimed. They all knew that Bob was one of the best shots in the regiment – in fact, he later went on to complete the SAS snipers’ course with Roger Cole. What’s more, they knew him to be one of the coolest men around, always relaxed, a wry smile dancing across his lips. Here was a man who was never, ever, fazed by anything.
Bob fired the first bullet, but instead of falling, the rebel soldier waved on his men. The guys looked first at the rebel and then at Bob. He had missed – something they thought they would never see. Bob looked again, fired a second time, but again he missed. This was not good, a bad omen for the future of the battle. He composed himself. Breathing in, he became a still point in the crazed kaleidoscope of colour, noise and rush all around him. Remembering his training, he breathed in and cleared his head. The only two things that now existed in his world were the rebel soldier fixed in the sights of his gun and his finger on the trigger.
Stay calm, ease the trigger.
This time the insurgent soldier fell, draped over the barbed-wire fence. Roger Cole smiled at Bob, who smiled back.
All was well with the world again. Bob Bennett was in his groove and one more rebel soldier was down. One less man trying to capture their HQ and kill them.
In battle, only a small percentage of soldiers do the actual killing. When it comes to that moment of playing God, deciding whether someone will live or die, many soldiers shoot to miss. But this was what the SAS had trained for, month after month, year after year. Kill without doubt and without hesitation. Them or you. Every man now knew that this was a fight to the death and the consequences for them if they lost were too grim to think about.
Every man in Mirbat knew what had happened in Radfan, just over the border in Yemen. A few years earlier, two SAS soldiers had been captured. They had been out on patrol and came across a boy herding his goats. He was just a boy, a civilian, so they didn’t shoot him. But then he ran and shouted for help. In no time they were surrounded. After a fierce firefight they were captured, brutally tortured over days, then beheaded, their heads put on spikes in the nearby village – a gruesome spectacle for everyone in the area. It was a brutal reminder to the SAS that they were not going to have it all their own way, in that war or this one.
Just to the west of Mirbat, Neville Baker and his two-man crew were still inching their way along the shore. As they reached a spot opposite Taqah, a point halfway along the coast, the visibility suddenly became even worse. It hardly seemed possible but the cloud base dropped from about ten feet to sea level. But still the crew of three continued rotoring their way east, still with no real idea of what lay ahead of them. By all normal standard operating procedures they should have turned back, but the big bird was not for turning.
None of the crew, nor any of the SAS men, either at Mirbat or back at base, knew that they were about to experience their first serious setback.
As it approached 0630, the battle was reaching stalemate. Both sets of soldiers were shooting at each other, with neither side taking serious casualties. After the first rush of blood, when they had taken heavy losses, the Front had settled into a more circumspect battle plan and were now using the natural ground cover much more effectively. Back at Mirbat, the battle had settled into a steady pattern. The rebels moved around the wadis trying to catch the SAS soldiers off guard, popping up, firing and then disappearing, all the time moving round to different places as they tried to find a weakness somewhere, anywhere.
The rebel commanders took a small break and re-directed their troops. After concentrating their initial attacks on the BATT house, they now focused their attention on the 25-pounder, the weapon making the most noise, but not the one doing the most damage. That was the GPMG up on the roof of the BATT house. The rebels were now split into groups all over the djebel, one attacking through the town, one attacking the 25-pounder, one attacking the BATT house, one trying to pin down the ‘askaris in the Wali’s fort and one group moving one of their Shpagin machine-guns to the west of the town. The mortars kept falling from the sky, but the Front’s mortar men had still not found their range. They were still off-target and their bombs continued to drop in the half mile of desert between the BATT house and the gendarmes’ fort.
But then, a blow came from out of nowhere, which shocked the men at Mirbat to their core.
Back at Um-el-Ghawarif, Trevor Brooks and Tony McVeigh in the BATT radio shack were still trying to get through to Mirbat and tease out some further and better particulars from the signal of just fifty-four letters and numbers.
The best part of an hour had passed and they still knew little more.
As they looked down at their notepads, there it was.
Zero Alpha. Zero Alpha. This is 82. Contact. Under heavy fire. Wait. Out.
They desperately wanted to speak to the radio operator at the other end. The biggest question was whether the battle was still going on. The Front often attacked with great intensity and then disappeared back into the djebel, especially during the khareef when the mist gave them cover.
Now it was all about juggling men, weapons, choppers and planes with whatever was going on beyond the cloud. Just dropping men in to a battle zone, where visibility was zero and without knowing what was happening could be sending many men to their deaths. That was if they could even take off and then get through. Back at Um-el-Ghawarif they needed some real intelligence and they needed it an hour before.
At SAS headquarters, the Duke and Lofty were starting to formulate a plan. Lofty double-checked the armoury. Inside were lines of GPMGs, light machine-guns, SLRs, mortars, mines and boxes containing thousands of rounds of ammunition. He patted one of the boxes, closed the door and locked up again, then set off for a face to face with the Duke.
In the SAF Ops Office, David Venn anxiously waited for some feedback from Neville Baker. The original news on the gendarmerie net was that there was wagin rubsha, big trouble, but over an hour later, no one had any idea whether or not the battle was still going on.
Back at Mirbat there was no such uncertainty. The rebels were inching ever closer.
Just when the battle seemed to be going well for the men in the BATT house, Laba’s voice came over the TOKAI walkie-talkie.
‘I’ve been chinned!’
This was now a time when instinct took over. The two Fijians – Laba and Tak – were inseparable. If any one of the SAS soldiers ever saw one of them round the BATT house, they knew the other would never be too far away. Without stopping to consult anyone or take orders, Tak was off on his toes. Whereas the British soldiers in Dhofar were, for the most part, skinny, the Fijians were big men – pure muscle. Before anyone could blink, Tak was gone.
A born rugby player, he moved with great power and grace. Still in his flip-flops, his desert boots hanging by their laces round his neck, he ran to the gun-pit. What happened next was pure Hollywood. In the cinema it would have defied belief, but for 700 yards Tak ran, ducking and diving between rocks and wadis. The cover was minimal. Even the wadi here was very shallow, more like a storm drain.
The insurgents knew the 25-pounder was crucial. They also guessed from the temporary lull round the gun-pit that one of them had struck lucky.
Still Tak ran and ran, bullets, rockets and grenades splintering and crashing off the rocks round his head. If the Fijian had a guardian angel, he was working overtime now.
On the roof of the BATT house, Roger Cole, Bob Bennett and Pete Warne tried to pin down the insurgents to give Tak a fighting chance of getting there, but wherever they fired insurgents popped up elsewhere.
Amazingly, Tak made it, diving into the gun-pit as the mortars rained down round him.
Despite being hot, sweaty and lacquered with the grease of battle, Tak was chilled by the sight that greeted him when he leapt in to the gun-pit.
Laba, his fellow Fijian, his best friend in the world, had been shot in the jaw. The Omani gunner, Walid Khamis, was bleeding heavily, leaning forward and clutching his stomach.
Despite Laba’s injury, together the two Fijians continued to fire the big gun, so fast that the insurgents must have thought it was some belt-loaded machine.
But still the rebel soldiers kept coming. The Communists had trained them in their own pattern. Here was Stalin’s strategy of wave after human wave: a full-frontal assault of hundreds of men running at the guns. It was the same old numbers game they’d played in World War Two, with the assault commanders hoping that enough men would get through the curtain of bullets.
The Fijians hit a small group just yards away, blowing them to dust with the 25-pounder, but others came to take their place.