by Roger Cole
In all, David Milne-Smith almost emptied his machine-guns of their entire store of 1,000 rounds and fired all sixteen of his Sura rockets, each one carrying high explosive or fragmentation warheads.
Then he had to head back to base, leaving the SAS men to fight on alone.
As it approached 0800 there was another flurry of activity. Neville Baker was returning to RAF Salalah. Around the same time, the first of the Strikemasters, flown by Sean Creak, was trying to get back down through the cloud and was being talked through an emergency landing. Creak had been in the air for just thirty-five minutes and his hydraulics were leaking badly. As he landed on the runway, his plane suddenly veered to the left. He did not know it but he had taken a Shpagin bullet in the tyre.
Back at Mirbat, Boss Kealy spoke to Bob Bennett on the TOKAI. He wanted to know what had happened to the reinforcements. He and his men had now been fighting for two and a half hours and all they had seen was a lone helicopter, which had failed to land, and a couple of Strikemasters, which had raked the battlefield for the best part of forty minutes but had now disappeared.
Reinforcements were desperately needed.
At 0755 Bob Bennett again told Pete Warne to call Um-el-Ghawarif for reinforcements.
At 0800 the men from G Squadron, who had been hanging around waiting to go to the range to zero their weapons, were finally deployed. Lofty Wiseman had long suspected that Mirbat was going to kick off and so he had already emptied the armoury – 10,000 rounds of 7.62 bullets, nine GPMGs, five M79 grenade launchers plus 100 bombs and rifles. To top it all, he stuffed every pocket on every man with syrettes. The nineteen members of G Squadron still at SAS headquarters were now ready for battle and the SAS finally had the level of fire-power needed to take the battle to the rebels.
At 0815, the Front commanders tried to step up the battle and win it quickly. With the skies now silent, the rebels raised the heat again. Their soldiers resumed the bombardment of the BATT house and the gun-pit in earnest. Once again, the surviving British soldiers had to get used to bullets whizzing and cracking over their heads.
The Front commanders knew that one helicopter had tried to get in but had been repulsed. They were also still recovering from the first jet strike and knew that where there had been two jets before, there would be another two on their way soon. They needed to get this thing wrapped up – and quickly. They had silenced the gendarmerie by lobbing the occasional grenade over the wall. The 25-pounder was silent and the gun-pit was now only protected by a couple of soldiers, one of whom was injured. The Wali’s fort was not as active as it had been. But at least it was business as usual at the BATT house, where the GPMG and the mortar were still showering the battlefield with hot metal. Once again, the rebels felt that this was theirs for the taking. It just needed one big push.
Back at RAF Salalah, David Milne-Smith was landing, after spending just over an hour in the air. He leapt from his Strikemaster and had a very short conversation with his boss, Squadron Leader Bill Stoker. Nobby Grey was the next duty stand-by pilot, but Bill Stoker pulled rank on him. He was not going to miss this for anything. He jumped into one waiting Strikemaster, while David Milne-Smith got into another and off they went. The weather conditions were still awful as they roared off down the runway, one after the other. Although he was the boss, Stoker made a smart decision. He told Milne-Smith to lead, as he knew the battlefield from the air better than anyone.
Back at the BATT house, the locals were bringing more and more wounded in. Many had flesh wounds but three or four were more seriously hit. By now, Roger Cole had run out of medical supplies, so it was a case of stopping the bleeding and treating for shock. He improvised by ripping shirts off people’s backs and then tearing the cloth into strips to make bandages. In the middle of the grime, blood, horror and stench, Roger looked up and saw a vision in white. The local town nurse, one of the members of the fledging Omani health service, arrived with what kit he had, looking magnificent in his white coat. There had long been animosity between him and the SAS medics, as he regarded them as trespassers on his patch, but now he put all that behind him, plunged in and started saving lives. In no time at all it was clear his white coat was never going to be the same again. It was now beyond the reach of any washing powder or detergent that existed then or since. Despite the blood splatters, the nurse was calm, professional and focused, and the SAS men were really impressed. At that moment, the Sultan of Oman’s health service was born.
The extra help was needed more than ever, because the casualties just kept coming. Roger Cole called upstairs for Pete Warne to come and give him a hand. Pete was not an SAS medic, but he lived up to his reputation as the go-to man who could do anything. They grabbed a man with a bad stomach wound, ripped off his shemagh and Roger showed Pete how to jam the material into the wound and stem the flow of blood. Many of those injured survived, so whatever they did, however they improvised, it worked.
Meanwhile, the men in the BATT house were also keeping an eye on the 25-pounder. If there was silence and they saw the gun being moved they were going to take it out with the GPMG. At 700 yards, sustained fire from the GPMG was their last hope. But there were still shots coming regularly from the gun-pit. Boss Kealy was in one corner of the bunker firing and Tak was in the other corner, still propped up on sandbags, shooting at anyone who came close. Amazingly, Tommy Tobin and Walid Khamis were still alive, both men slipping in and out of consciousness. Crucially, the young gendarme was still doing what was needed, constantly filling and refilling magazines for both men.
But then a few moments of total mind-destroying horror. Captain Kealy and Tak both froze and watched as a grenade landed at their feet. Both men started counting down the last moments of their lives. But the explosion never came. Instead, the grenade fizzled out – a damp squib, another casualty of the monsoon.
Yet again, luck played a decisive role in the battle.
19
Bollocks the Cat
If the grenade had gone off, it would have changed the course of the battle. Firstly, it would have killed everyone in the gun-pit. The soldiers on the roof of the BATT house would have had to move the GPMG to attack the 25-pounder. To do so would have meant moving the gun across the roof, leaving them exposed to enemy fire. While they were firing at the 25-pounder, the BATT house would have had no defences apart from the .50 Browning, which could now only fire the occasional round.
With this in mind, Boss Kealy did something beyond all normal bounds of courage. Knowing how vulnerable they were in the gun-pit, he called Bob Bennett and said, ‘Drop the mortars round the gun!’
He knew the risks and so did Bob. Mortars are designed for pattern bombing. They cover an area, not a precise spot, especially when there’s only one man firing them. That was not the only worry. The rebels were now so close that Fuzz Hussey could not fire the mortar on its tripod. Instead, he had to hold it with one arm wrapped round it so he could pull it back and rest it against his chest. With the other arm he then had to drop the mortar down the tube. This made it even harder to get an accurate shot off.
Bob Bennett could see how close the rebels were to the gun. Something needed to be done. He shouted down to Fuzz, ‘Put the rounds as close as you can to the gun!’
Fuzz Hussey already thought the world was going crazy and this confirmed it. He thought, ‘What kind of fucking fire order is that?’
From the corner of the building, Roger Cole watched Fuzz, who had now been firing the mortar for three and a half hours, the last two hours on his own. Fuzz pulled the mortar almost vertical, back up off its base plate, and then wrapped it with one arm, while with the other arm he grabbed a bomb and dropped it down the tube.
He had no co-ordinates and no bearings.
This was a line-of-sight shot.
If Fuzz got it wrong he would kill his boss, his close friends, Tak, Tommy Tobin and Walid Khamis, and the young policeman in the gun-pit. But still he went for it. Many soldiers have bottle, but this was something else.
This was Fuzz’s moment, the time he would be judged as a soldier and as a man. If he got it wrong, he would never be able to live with himself.
The mortar flew through the morning air and dropped thirty yards north of the gun, near where the rebels were gathered.
Fuzz Hussey was one of the great mortar men of his generation and this was the finest round he had ever fired. It scattered the rebel forces – they had never expected anything like that.
Calling for the mortars to be dropped around the 25-pounder was an act of valour as great as any in the history of the British Army. Boss Kealy knew that the gun was close to being captured, and if that happened, the PFLOAG would win the day and his men back at the BATT house would all die, along with everybody in the town. He was prepared to sacrifice his own life to save everyone else. When he woke up that morning, he had been Captain Kealy, a young officer still finding his way in the toughest regiment in the British Army. During the battle he became Boss Kealy, a man worthy of respect. He was now the undisputed Boss of Mirbat.
Just minutes away, Bill Stoker and David Milne-Smith were hugging the waves as they came back for a second attack. As before, they flew in a low-level strafing pattern. Knowing that there were now two jets in the air and a high chance of a mid-air collision, they set up a racetrack pattern over the battlefield. As one exited the battle, he called Out! on his radio so the other one could then go in. They kept up the criss-cross pattern until Bill Stoker was hit badly. He had to get back to RAF Salalah and quickly, but he did not want to waste the trip back. The cloud had now lifted enough to see so he went up over the Djebel Ali and took out the rebel mortars and then flew back to base, leaving David Milne-Smith once again to terrorise the rebels from above.
By 0830 the soldiers from G Squadron were good to go. The men piled into vehicles, now laden down with GPMGs, extra belts of ammunition, bombs and enough fire-power to start a small war.
One new SAS soldier had just passed recruitment and had not yet met his boss, Major Alistair Morrison. As the men were milling about waiting to load up, Morrison approached him with the immortal greeting, ‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘Jeff Ellis, sir. I’ve just joined after selection.’
‘Well get on the fucking truck. You’re a lucky man – you’re going to war!’
With that, the nineteen men from G Squadron filled the Bedford truck with all their weapons and then set off for RAF Salalah, where the Duke and two choppers were waiting for them, plus Neville Baker’s now well-ventilated Augusta Bell 205.
Back at Mirbat, the rebel forces re-grouped and came back once again. After watching the mortar land near the gun-pit, Roger Cole ran back into the BATT house to get more ammunition for the GPMG to feed Jeff Taylor. As he did so, he heard the cries of cats coming from one of the storerooms. He kicked the door open and there, cowering in the corner, on top of some sacks, were the SAS cats. Every SAS troop at Mirbat had looked after the same group of cats, their children and their grandchildren.
There was a logic to this, as the BATT house was also home to a large population of rodents. The cats kept them in check, but there were still rat droppings everywhere. The star cat was a tom with a voracious sexual appetite. He was known to successive troops of jealous SAS soldiers as Bollocks, so called because he had enormous testicles and jumped the nearest female every time he was fed. As Roger Cole peered through the half-light and dust, he spotted Bollocks, normally a proud tom who strutted everywhere, the master of his feline domain. Now he was huddled in a corner of the room with three other cats, looking terrified.
Roger suddenly thought, ‘I haven’t fed them since yesterday!’
He ran upstairs in to the room they used as a kitchen, grabbed a tin of fish, quickly ripped it open, ran back down the stairs to the cats and threw the fish on the floor. The cats leapt on the food. Roger gave them all a pat and a stroke along their backs, all the time offering some words of reassurance. As he leapt back up the makeshift staircase, he suddenly thought, ‘This is personal. You bastards, you’ve frightened our cats!’
As he left the room, he heard the sound of Jeff Taylor still giving it the old rooty-toot on the GPMG.
‘That’s good. That’s one back for the cats!’
Back at RAF Salalah, there were three helicopters on duty that morning. Everyone wanted to be on the first chopper, whether they were veterans or combat virgins. The man who would decide was Fazz, the Troop Sergeant of 21 Troop.
His troop was on the first helicopter, so everyone struggled to get on it. The next few hours were going to be defined by fire-power, and the men with rifles were taken off to make way for the men with GPMGs.
As for the pilots, Neville Baker stayed in the helicopter he had been flying all morning, bullet holes and all. The rebels had just missed him, so he trusted to luck. They wouldn’t get so close again twice in the same day – or so he hoped. Flight Lieutenant Roy Bayliss, an ex Royal Navy contract pilot, and Flight Lieutenant Chris Chambers, an RAF pilot seconded to the Sultan’s Air Force, took the other two helicopters.
Six to eight men from G Squadron jumped into each one. The men were airborne and on the way to Mirbat in jig time.
With a lot more weight on board, each soldier being heavily tooled up, the pilots lifted their helicopters just over the houses on the outskirts of the base and then it was out to sea towards Mirbat.
It was now about 0855, a good three and a half hours since the first shots were fired.
G Squadron were finally in the air on their way to join the battle.
They knew little more than they had done nearly three hours before, when the BATT radio shack had been told that the men at Mirbat were under heavy fire. It was nearly two hours since the SAS HQ at Um-el-Ghawarif had been told there was one soldier dead and two very seriously injured.
What they did know was that there was only one viable attacking option. They could not come in via the north, as they would be landing on the Front guns already stacked up along the Djebel Ali. Coming in from the west or directly south would also be suicide, as the slow-moving helicopters would be easy targets for the Shpagins. Neville Baker had already tried that route and been lucky to get away with just eight bullets. If the gunman had fired his two bursts just a microsecond earlier or later, then he and his crew would now be dead and his 205 would be resting on the bottom of the sea. That just left the beaches, two miles to the south-east of the town.
As the helicopters flew to Mirbat, Roger Cole went back into the corridor of the BATT house. The day before it had been neat and tidy, ready for the handover. Now it looked like a slaughterhouse. More wounded had come in, both locals and rebels, and there was blood and open wounds everywhere. He had a quick scan up and down and thought, ‘Thank God there are no kids injured. They’ve been running backwards and forwards carrying their bandoliers of ammunition and none of them has caught a bullet.’
There in the middle was the local Omani medic, still tending the wounded. He was covered in dust and bloodstains, but still calmly working away and reassuring everyone that they would survive. This was hearts and minds at its very best. The SAS were giving protection to the locals and working with them. The town medic was reassuring everyone in Dhofari, the local language, that they would be all right. It’s important to remember that this was a civil war and that both sides knew each other well. The townspeople knew that they could bring the rebel wounded in and they would be treated properly, with care and respect. The SAS men believed in the Geneva Convention, which says that you should care for the wounded, regardless of who they’re fighting for. This was something the locals also believed in, as it chimed with the Islamic rules of warfare, which lays a duty on soldiers to care for the wounded of both sides.
Out at sea, the three helicopters flew on to Mirbat, staying well out to sea and then rounded the headland before they landed around two miles south-east of the town. After dropping off the nineteen men from G Squadron, the helicopters took off again. Two returned to Salalah but Neville Baker flew t
o Taqah and stayed there, ready to take casualties out as soon as it was safe.
As the reinforcement troops were getting closer, the Strikemaster jets were keeping the rebels at bay. The second air attack was the clincher. The rebels now had well over 100 dead and wounded, and even though they had managed to take one of the planes out of the game, the second seemed invincible. The short odds were that someone, at some point, had to get a clean hit on David Milne-Smith, but still he kept coming back, sometimes swooping in so low the rebels were terrified he would knock their heads off.
After flying over the battlefield for the best part of forty-five minutes, Milne-Smith’s fuel was running low so he had to return to Salalah. By then the damage had been done. The rebel soldiers who could still walk began to flee the battlefield.
It was now around 1000 and the tide of battle had turned.
20
'How Many Bullets Have You Got Left?’
Unknown to the men fighting in the BATT house, G Squadron were on their way.
During the flight to Mirbat, some of the G Squadron men who had been there before were briefing the others, trying to make themselves heard above the rotors.
The adrenaline was flooding their nervous systems, the dogs of war straining at the leash. The men were impatient enough already, pumped and ready, but now the journey took an age. The weather conditions were still horrible and flying was extremely hazardous. The choppers were sandwiched between the cold sea below and the wet cloud above. The veteran SAS men looked for familiar landmarks like the Djebel Ali to the north, but they could see very little through the thick curtain of cloud. Still Neville Baker and his fellow pilots pushed on past Mirbat, now a long way out to sea so they would not be heard. Then the choppers banked north towards the shoreline to find a suitable drop zone.