SAS Operation Storm

by Roger Cole

  The Ops Officer finished the briefing by telling the two pilots that the BATT house would be ‘on the blue SARBE’. Though they knew that every second was precious, so too was accurate intelligence. In the best military traditions they double-checked.

  ‘Blue SARBE?’

  ‘Correct. Blue SARBE.’

  That morning Sean Creak was the number one pilot and David Milne-Smith was his number two.

  They all looked down the runway. The cloud cover was still very low, just 300 feet, and there was no reason to believe it would be any better forty miles east at Mirbat. It was doubtful whether it was safe to fly. In those days even the Strikemasters were limited in their instrumentation: height, speed, direction and then what you could see – and what they could see was not even to the end of the runway. In normal circumstances they would not have flown, but it was already clear that this was not any other routine operation. There was already a buzz round Um-el-Ghawarif. Officers who were usually calm were getting agitated.

  As Duke Pirie and Lofty Wiseman were arriving at RAF Salalah, Sean Creak and David Milne-Smith were already in the air, taking their planes out over the town. Many of the houses had high whiplash aerials, invisible to the pilots. Both pilots knew that if they caught one of those on the undercarriage of their plane it could ruin their whole day, as well as damage relationships with the locals. So they flew just high enough to clear the aerials but low enough to stay under the cloud.

  The normal pattern on operations like this was to fly up to 8,000 feet and then descend through the cloud, but today this was not an option. They had no idea what they would be coming out into, who would be waiting for them or what weapons the enemy had. They did not even know if there was any visible space at Mirbat at all. The khareef was notoriously capricious and even if the cloud base was currently at 300 feet, by the time they arrived it could be much lower. There was little point in plunging down from 8,000 feet only to discover that there was zero visibility at ground level.

  The key thing was to get out over the sea where there was nothing to fly into. The two men flew over the houses, quickly banked to their left and flew east towards Mirbat.

  As the pilots passed Taqah and were coming into range of the SARBEs, they started calling on 243, the blue SARBE. There was nothing. The radio pattern that had been established since 0515 still held up. The caller spoke but no one replied.

  Just a few miles away at Mirbat, Bob Bennett shouted to Roger Cole to come up the stairs, where he told him another chopper was on its way. Outside, the mist was still clinging to the ground. Inside the BATT house, the fog of war was about to descend again. The SAS men were expecting one thing but something else happened instead.

  Roger grabbed the small SARBE radio so he could talk to the chopper pilot. As he ran out of the house, down the stairs and then outside, he made sure he picked a landing zone behind the BATT house where he could bring the chopper in safely, out of sight of the machine-guns up on Djebel Ali.

  Over the sea, the two planes flew in loose formation – not bunched tight like the Spitfires in World War Two, but about fifty metres apart, so they could have a good look round. Flying at just under 300 miles per hour, 50 to 100 metres apart, gave them just a little bit more wiggle room. As they came into range, both pilots kept trying the blue SARBE. But neither pilot got a response.

  Then David Milne-Smith had a flash of insight. He tried the other SARBE, the one Roger Cole had just picked up by mistake. He got through straight away and immediately called Sean Creak to tell him the good news.

  ‘I’ve got the BATT man on the white SARBE!’

  ‘I haven’t time to change frequencies and find him. Talk to him and then tell me what’s happening.’

  Just twenty miles to the west of Mirbat, Neville Baker and his two-man crew were just finishing up their inspection of their helicopter, lining up the entry and exit holes to see where the bullets had come and gone. The good thing about the Augusta Bell 205 helicopter is that, as a target, it’s mostly fuselage. The key parts – the engine and the controls – occupy relatively little space. Though the Front gunman had managed to hit it eight times, he had missed all the vital organs. As the crew lined up the holes, they realised they had missed death by a hair’s-breadth – two bullets had gone through the window behind Neville and in front of his crew. A microsecond either way and they would now be dead and this day would be shaping up very differently.

  In the gun-pit, Kealy and Tak were shooting rebel soldiers, now only yards away. A grenade landed on the parapet above their heads. They crouched down and it exploded, deafeningly loud but, thankfully, not causing any serious damage. The light was now improving and it could only be a matter of time before the rebel mortar men got a direct hit on the gun-pit, with either a mortar or a grenade. A direct hit from either, in such a confined space, with low walls all the way round to concentrate the blast, would be the end of the battle for everyone in the gun-pit.

  At RAF Salalah, Richard ‘Duke’ Pirie was losing patience. He was the man running the SAS in Oman that day and yet here he was, trapped in the mist. By this point, the Duke knew that he had one man dead and two seriously injured and a battle that was running away from him. He and Lofty Wiseman stood next to the control tower, cocooned in the khareef, and shouted up to the air traffic controller.

  ‘What’s the news from Mirbat?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The planes haven’t arrived yet!’

  The Duke had a really bad feeling about this. Sometimes, soldiers just know, as if they are tuning in on some other frequency. The bad ones ignore the voices in their head, the good ones listen and react. It was now nearly two and a half hours since the gendarmerie had first contacted SAF headquarters at Um-el-Ghawarif and an hour and a half since Pete Warne had told his own radio operator that the SAS were under heavy fire. It was time for big decisions. He told Lofty Wiseman to go back to Um-el-Ghawarif so that he had his man there on the ground.

  If there was a world land speed record for getting from RAF Salalah to Um-el-Ghawarif, Lofty now broke it.

  18

  Foxhound, Foxhound, This is Star Trek.

  Just over the sea, forty miles to the east, Sean Creak and David Milne-Smith were approaching Mirbat, where Roger Cole was waiting for a casevac helicopter. To his relief, his SARBE crackled into life. At 250 knots, just under 300 miles per hour, the jets were now only seconds away. Milne-Smith spoke to the SAS man on what was his red, but Roger’s white, SARBE radio.

  Foxhound, Foxhound, this is Star Trek.

  ‘Foxhound’ was the call sign for the SAS and ‘Star Trek’ was the Strikemasters’. All at once Cole’s perspective shifted. This was no casevac copter.

  Where are the enemy?

  Roger had never done the forward air controller’s course, but he figured it couldn’t be that difficult. Enemy north and east of the fort. We are under heavy fire. Be aware, heavy machine-guns on the djebel, he warned them.

  Foxhound, Foxhound. This is Star Trek. How far away?

  One hundred yards and closing. I say again, one hundred yards and closing.

  Roger remembered that everything had to be repeated for clarity – so that was it. The forward air controller’s course, six weeks of sitting in a class room was dispensed with. Course completed, exam sat and certificate issued, all in two seconds.

  Understood. Out.

  David Milne-Smith immediately relayed this to Sean Creak, who told Milne-Smith to follow him in. There was no space to throw a turn and come in over the town, besides which Sean Creak had visited Mirbat the day before, when Laba had walked him round the site, so he knew where the wire ran round the camp.

  After a quick discussion they decided to try a level strafe and some Sura rocketing. Both pilots had sixteen of these rockets hanging down under each wing. Neither of them had ever done this before, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

  The normal pattern of attack for the pilots was to climb
to 3,000 feet, have a good look round and then swoop down on the target in a steep dive coming out vertically on the other side. It was dangerous, but what they now proposed was truly reckless.

  If they climbed to 3,000 feet they would not be able to see anything. Instead they decided to fly in at less than 200 feet. There were no instruments working at this altitude so they would be navigating on naked sight and skill, flying at 300 miles per hour, hugging the ground over terrain that changed constantly, with very limited visibility.

  Apart from the enemy anti-aircraft guns, there were two much more serious dangers. The pilots were firing from a very low height at targets just ahead of them. The ground below was hard as granite, baked hard by centuries of desert sun. There was a high risk that their own bullets would bounce up from the ground and hit them from underneath as they flew overhead. On top of that, the reverse thrust caused by firing the rockets and the submachine-guns slowed down the planes, making them easier to hit. A long strafe across the battlefield was therefore as high risk as you could get.

  The other danger was that as this was such a confined area, and they were flying so low, there was a real risk that they would crash into each other.

  They knew the risks, but did it anyway.

  At around 0735, Sean Creak flew in low over the sea, at about fifty feet, in a shallow dive along the wire. Any lower and he would have taken people’s heads off with the rocket pods hanging down from the wings. He wanted to go as low as he could to really terrify the rebels below. From the cockpit he could see very little, other than the wire, but still managed to fire 200 bullets, which crashed, smashed and ricocheted off the rocks below.

  The noise of the jet at this level was shocking. From underneath it looked huge, a terrifying mass of flames and noise. The stomach-churning scream and boom of the jet engines only punctuated by the urgent rattle of cannons hurling 7.62 machine-gun bullets down on to the desert floor below.

  As Creak flew over, the rebels opened fire on him, and the BATT men on the roof watched the Strikemaster with awe as it flew through a metal cloud of heavy machine-gun bullets. It was just above their head height – an epic piece of aerobatics.

  Before he could escape back out over the sea, Sean Creak’s instrument panel lit up, amber warning lights everywhere. He had not had it all his own way. The PFLOAG gunmen had hit his Strikemaster at least half a dozen times. The hydraulics, which controlled the flaps and the undercarriage, were now leaking. As he needed both of these systems to get back to base and land safely, he knew that he was now in serious trouble. He pulled up sharply, just missing the tower of the gendarme’s fort, and climbed as fast as he could above the cloud base, topping out at around 3,000 feet.

  As he did so, David Milne-Smith crashed through the Mirbat battlefield, just a second behind. It was a terrifying echo of the first attack, a fast-moving blur of noise, heat and high explosives. His cannons were blazing fire and hot bullets. The pods carrying his Sura rockets dropped them into the air so they could deliver high explosive into the wadis. Amazingly, his jet emerged unscathed, the gunmen underneath still running for cover after the first attack just seconds before. The men on the ground were now more concerned with their own survival than with hunting the second aircraft.

  Sean Creak threw a right turn out of Mirbat and headed back to RAF Salalah, over the sea, hoping that his plane would get there and he would not have to bail out over water, where his chances of survival would not be good. The ocean here was very cold and he only had a flying suit on. The chances of a helicopter finding him in this appalling weather were not high. He didn’t know it, but this was an area patrolled by great whites. In a race between the choppers in the air and the chompers in the water, the smart money would have been on the sharks.

  Before he headed back home, David Milne-Smith banked steeply and flew back repeatedly along the fence, approaching from different angles to keep up the element of surprise.

  After Milne-Smith had completed his first couple of passes, Roger Cole gave the SARBE emergency radio to Bob Bennett, who was much more experienced in directing planes.

  After pulling out and turning round for the next attack, Milne-Smith asked Bob, ‘How long have they been going at you?’

  ‘Since dawn,’ replied Bob.

  And then the question that had been on every SAS soldier’s lips since 0530.

  ‘How many are they? How many can you see?’

  The reply was in the finest traditions of accurate situation reporting:

  ‘Fucking hundreds of them!’

  For nearly forty minutes David Milne-Smith flew in and out of the battlefield, pinning the rebel soldiers down in the wadis. While they were hunting for cover, there was little they could do to turn the battle in their favour. After each pass they had to wait, nervously, not knowing where he would come from next. It had a devastating effect on the rebels, as they had never expected the planes to make an appearance. Under their original battle plan, they should now have been in the Wali’s palace, eating the best food Mirbat could offer. Instead, they were cowering in the wadis, hoping not to be hammered from above.

  The arrival of these first two Strikemasters changed the battle. The rebels were minutes from taking the 25-pounder. Had they been able to continue the same level of attack as before, then sooner or later they would have got a clean hit with a mortar or a grenade. The SAS defence was now focused on just three small areas: the roof of the BATT house, the mortar pit and the gun-pit. If the rebels had managed to neutralise just one of them, that would have been enough to deliver victory. Instead, David Milne-Smith, nicknamed ‘Boots’ because his initials were the same as the DMS army boots they wore, pinned them back for over half an hour.

  The noisy arrival of the jets had one other battle-changing impact, unknown at the time. The Front commanders had another 250 men in the area ready to join the battle. Once the men heard the planes they left the area. The timely arrival of the Strikemasters had already changed many battles in this war and the soldiers ready to join the battle now decided that it was better to leave and fight another day, rather than march into a hail storm of bullets from above.

  Even though this was a small war, the SAS men had never met the man who called in the air strike and saved their lives, Captain David Venn.

  As Boots was delivering terror from above, the SAS at Taqah were telling Neville Baker that, from what they had heard, it was too dangerous for him to fly back to Mirbat and he was to return to base. With no other choice, he took his bullet-riddled helicopter back across the waves to RAF Salalah, where Lofty Wiseman had just set off to go back to Um-el-Ghawarif, driving like a man possessed.

  Meanwhile, the soldiers of G Squadron were still hanging round at Um-el-Ghawarif waiting to go to the range to test their weapons.

  Forty miles away in Mirbat, the locals who were now fighting alongside the SAS knew it was a battle to the death for themselves and their families. If the rebels won, then the revenge would be horrendous, and the families of those who had fought with the British could expect to be tortured and beheaded.

  Despite the aerial bombardment, the rebels were still firing intensely. As Roger Cole made his way back to the BATT house after guiding in the first jet strike, he was confronted by young boys from the town begging for ammunition. He gave them as much as they could carry, draping bandoliers of bullets over their little shoulders till their knees creaked under the strain, and then they were off, scuttling out of the door, off to rearm their fathers and grandfathers, uncles and cousins. Roger knew that they were on the same side. The men in the town all had old Lee-Enfield rifles, which took .303 calibre bullets. The rebels had Kalashnikovs, which used 7.62 calibre ammunition.

  Roger recognised many of the boys. Over the previous four months, the SAS soldiers had become part of the local community. Their food rations were the standard British Army compo packs, predictable and very boring, with fresh food once every ten days. There were only so many times a week they could eat steak and kidney pie, so the
y tried to supplement their rations. Looking at old black-and-white photographs, their kneecaps look like pork pies tied on cotton. Desperate for some variety in their diet, they used to swap their compo boiled sweets for crayfish, which the young boys caught for them.

  B Squadron had somehow acquired an old Land Rover and Pete Warne, the magician with a screwdriver and a set of spanners, had managed to fix it up. Once they had some transport, they started a small business, moving rocks. Under the old Sultan, all house building had been banned, but it was now permitted under the new regime. One local had a camel and charged the townspeople an extortionate amount to bring down rocks off the djebel. The BATT team used the Land Rover to undercut him and then used the money to supplement their rations, buying fresh fish and vegetables from the market. It was a perfect enterprise. The locals were able to build houses much more cheaply than they could have otherwise. All the money earned by the SAS went straight back in to the local economy and the men themselves had enough nutritious food to be able to train the firqat and prosecute the war.

  It was hearts and minds, Mirbat style, and this was when it really paid off.

  On the morning of the battle, the local firqat were out on the djebel. With one SAS man already dead and two more injured, it was now down to a small group to defend the town. There were the SAS, the pensioners on the roof, the locals left behind and their kids. These were the boys they played football with. Apart from that, there were a few very young police officers trapped in their fort and unable to join in the battle. This was the day when the SAS men would really know who was with them and who was against them.

  As Roger Cole went back to the BATT house to keep tending the wounded, he was aware that just outside there was one more vital person in the battle, David Milne-Smith in his Strikemaster. From the roof of the BATT house, the men watched as he swooped and dived, coming in from different angles, constantly surprising the rebels. Most importantly, he was keeping them away from the 25-pounder. The battle was not as intense as it had been an hour before, but it was still raging on three sides of the town.