SAS Operation Storm

by Roger Cole

  Given what had happened to Neville Baker earlier, the pilots decided that they definitely wanted the element of surprise. Once round the headland, they landed around two miles south-east of the town. This was far enough away to be out of sight and out of range of the Front forces, but close enough for the troops to get to Mirbat quickly.

  As G Squadron were disembarking from their helicopters, the Front were still breaching the wire, well inside the minimum range for the mortar. Fuzz was still clutching the mortar tube to his chest so that it was almost upright. He continued to lay mortars on them. Whatever else, it had to hurt. Most mortar men drop the rocket down the tube and then turn away to avoid the blast.

  But Fuzz, outnumbered and surrounded, didn’t have that luxury. He was still firing alone. He was one tough soldier.

  Luckily help was finally on its way.

  After the first helicopter touched down, just a few feet from the water’s edge, the men immediately fanned out, taking up defensive positions, while other soldiers unloaded the spare ammunition boxes and all the other bits of kit that had been thrown into the chopper. Visibility was still very poor, the mist clinging to the ground. The only way they could see any distance at all was to kneel down and peer under the cloud base.

  As the helicopter flew away, Troop Sergeant Fazz told SAS men WM and Bernard Shepherd to stay behind with the spare ammunition to keep the dropping zone secure for the other choppers, which were following behind. Both men felt sick at being left behind but someone had to do it.

  As they waited for the next chopper to come in, the first section of G Squadron were already making their way at speed towards the town, stretched out in an extended line formation, ready to take on anyone and everything in front of them. As he watched them disappear, Bernard Shepherd thought, ‘These men – my mates – they look formidable.’

  He allowed himself a few moments of pride as they went off towards the battle, united in their single-minded resolve to do whatever it was going to take to save the B Squadron lads – or, at least, whoever was left alive.

  At the drop-off point, looking north, the sea was behind them. Twenty yards or so to the west, the beach took a ninety degree turn north for about 800 yards, before jinking west again. In good light, the shoreline was perfect ambush territory – lots of small rocky bays punctuated with sandbanks. In this light, it was about as dangerous as walking into a minefield blindfolded and in bare feet.

  It was now after 1000 and the cloud would occasionally lift, as if it had suddenly woken and decided to get up, but then slump back down again.

  Bernard Shepherd and WM scoured the ground left to right, looking for ambushers.

  Meanwhile, the advancing troop pushed on north. The ground was stony desert, with bits of scrub – the small bushes that grew everywhere during the monsoon. It was easy to move across at good speed, especially when they knew their mates were in trouble just a short distance away.

  Behind them, WM spotted a tiny movement in the rocks, just a couple of hundred yards to the south of the troop. These rocks were an obvious ambush point, as they were the only cover about.

  Bernard Shepherd had trained the firqat at Mirbat the year before, and he was worried that in this light it would be very easy to confuse them for rebels on the battlefield. Both sides carried weapons that looked the same from a distance.

  Ever cautious, the men held fire until they could say for certain who was lurking there: friend or foe.

  Then the mist lifted and they realised who they were dealing with. It was the Front, who had found themselves cut off, and were using the cover of the rocks to try and get away to safety.

  The two soldiers at the dropping zone had been left without radios so they had no means of communicating with their mates, now 600 yards away and moving fast. They tried waving, but the guys in front were moving forward and not looking back. They were too far away to be within shouting distance so there was only one thing a soldier could do, a solution thousands of years old. Bernard Shepherd took to his heels and ran 600 yards across open desert until he was close enough to bellow and let them know what was happening.

  As soon as the enemy soldiers realised that they had been spotted, they knew the game was up. They were outnumbered by men who were much more heavily armed, and by now none of the rebels had much stomach for the fight. A day that had started out with blood high and hearts full of hope had turned into one big stomach-churning failure. These men had lost and they knew it. The only thing now was to try and get out alive.

  They surrendered.

  Feeling guilty about leaving WM behind, Bernard Shepherd started to go back to the dropping zone when some of the enemy soldiers opened fire from the rocks immediately behind him. The rounds were way too close and everybody ‘did a fablon’ – they dived flat on to the ground. As the guys hit the deck, they were already trying to work out where the shots had come from.

  The SAS advance had stalled. The men were out in the open and pinned down by soldiers from the Front, who now had every battlefield advantage. They had the element of surprise and a much better position. But then one of them showed himself briefly and Bernard Shepherd took him down with a single bullet.

  Though there was now one enemy soldier down, the SAS still did not know how many were still hidden. Bernard Shepherd shouted to Hammy, one of the men behind him in 21 Troop, and told him to drop some M79 grenade rounds on to the rocks.

  One, two, three grenades hit the rocks in double-quick time. As the last round struck, Bernard Shepherd ran forward and spotted that one of the men running towards him was a firqat. With a quick nod of mutual recognition, together they assaulted the position with two other SAS men, Dinger and Dennis, killing all three rebel soldiers. The men then continued searching the rocks to make sure that the area was now secure. Meanwhile, the G Squadron boss, Alistair Morrison, had tracked back and taken charge of the bodies.

  Morrison assigned six men to clear the area and off they went. Many had only just met the day before on the plane and they had no idea who the others were, exactly the sort of conditions when a blue on blue can happen. But they all knew exactly what they needed to do. They moved round the rocks, covering each other, making sure each man had a clean line of fire without putting anyone else at risk.

  Meanwhile the main body of G Squadron continued tracking north, trying to make up for lost time. After checking out and clearing all the areas round the rocks, the men now turned and headed north-west towards the firqat house. As they approached the south-east corner of the town, they had another contact with a small pocket of enemy troops just below the house, near where the fishermen kept their boats and nets. The firefight was brief, the SAS taking no casualties.

  After checking that the firqat house did not hold any enemy troops waiting to ambush them, they walked on through what was still little more than a fishing town on to the BATT house.

  As G Squadron reached the battlefield, they thought it looked like a film set, with the dead, the dying and the wounded everywhere you turned. Everyone shared the same thought: history had been made this day.

  From the roof of the BATT house, Roger Cole and Bob Bennett looked out on the battlefield. It had gone quiet and there were now only occasional shots coming in from the wadis in front of them. Suddenly they saw a V formation coming over the hill. The two SAS men had just one thought between them. This was another Rorke’s Drift moment. If these were rebel reinforcements, then it was all over.

  Bob looked across at Roger to ask the question every soldier dreads: ‘How many bullets have you got left?’

  Roger looked down and counted them, ‘Seventeen.’

  Then Bob counted his bullets. He too had less than a magazine full, fewer than twenty rounds. By this time the .50 Browning was out of action. The breech block and slide were clogged with brass shavings. Pete Warne had fired it on his own. Normally, it would have been fired by two men, one of whom would have fed the heavy belt into the gun. Without a second man, the weight of the heavy belt ha
d taken its toll. Knowing what had happened to the captured SAS men in the Radfan, Roger Cole had just one thought. He was not going to be taken alive. He looked over at Bob and thought, ‘He’s thinking the same as me.’

  Both men knew that if the insurgents stormed the BATT house then they were – literally – staring down their own gun barrel.

  Roger Cole leapt down the stairs to the floor below and found what was now the last box of ordnance, thirty-six M grenades. He dragged the box across to the top of the stairs and primed the grenades ready to be used, thinking that, if the rebels came through the front door of the BATT house, he and Bob Bennett could hit them with grenades from above.

  As Alistair Morrison’s group advanced on the fort, they came under heavy fire. Given the poor visibility, they were worried that it was B Squadron firing on them. Major Morrison ordered his men not to respond, thinking that it was friendly fire. He withdraw his men to a nearby ridge and radioed SAS HQ at Um-el-Ghawarif, telling them to get a message to the men in the BATT house, but by now there were only five men left there and none of them was listening to the radio.

  The gunmen were now only yards away, and G Squadron had more important things to worry about. Morrison quickly realised that it was the rebels shooting and took the battle back to them, advancing steadily towards the fort.

  Just then, the men in the BATT house had another stroke of luck. This battle was all about timing, and, yet again, fortune smiled on the SAS. At that very moment, Pete Warne made a periodic check on the BATT radio shack and ran out with the first bit of good news since the start of the battle.

  ‘Reinforcements are on the way. They’re landing south-east of the town.’

  Roger Cole shouted back to him, ‘Upstairs!’ The two men went up the ladder back on to the roof, where Bob Bennett was on the TOKAI radio talking to the G Squadron leader, Major Alistair Morrison. Both signals had happened virtually at the same time. The TOKAI radios had a very short range, especially in poor weather conditions but as Morrison got close enough to the BATT house he had suddenly managed to make contact.

  Where are you? he asked.

  Coming in from the south-east over the plain, replied Morrison.

  Are you in V formation?

  Correct. We are in V formation.

  Bob Bennett grinned. I have you visual.

  Roger Cole and Pete Warne both looked across the plain and there in the distance was a sight they had seen many times during training sessions on Salisbury Plain. Men in V formation, their rifles swaying backwards and forwards at waist height, advancing towards contact.

  A huge feeling of relief swept through the BATT house. Finally, they were not alone. Some of their own had come to fight with them.

  Roger left Bob, Pete and Jeff on the roof, still dealing with the occasional pot shot.

  Hearing the silence, Fuzz Hussey decided it was time to make the most of the opportunity. He grabbed his personal medical kit and ran across to the gun-pit. Even for a hardened medic, the sight was one of visceral horror. One of his closest friends, Laba, was dead and there in the bottom of the gun-pit was another dead body, the gendarme who had been killed early in the battle. Boss Kealy was doing what he could, basically administering comfort and morphine to both Tak and Walid Khamis. Fuzz went straight to Tommy Tobin, cleared his airways, gave him a shot of morphine, put a shell dressing under his chin and cradled him in his arms and just kept talking to him to stop him drifting away. By now, Tommy was carrying several other wounds from grenade shrapnel. He was injured in the chest and had lost two fingers.

  Help had finally arrived, but for Tommy it was always going to be too late.

  21

  'How Many Did You Lose Today?’

  Back at the BATT house, Roger Cole heard the distinctive whoompf whoompf of a Huey helicopter arriving. He ran out of the back and saw it about fifty yards away. Out jumped a couple of doctors from the FST back at Salalah, carrying sophisticated medical kits under their arms. Ducking under the helicopter blades, they ran towards the BATT house.

  ‘Where are the wounded?’ asked the first medic.

  ‘Where do you want them?’ replied Roger Cole. ‘They’re everywhere.’

  He directed the medic to the small room on the left where there was a rebel soldier with a massive open stomach wound, his intestines hanging out. On the floor by his foot was a saline drip.

  Roger Cole explained, ‘The veins in his arms have collapsed and I’ve been trying to get a drip into the vein in his foot.’

  The battle was far from over and Mirbat was still a very dangerous place.

  Thanks to the TOKAI radios, some of the G Squadron up on the spur leading up to the Djebel Ali had discovered that there was still a major firefight north-east of the town. The firqat were engaged with soldiers from the Front, who had started to flee east after they sensed defeat. There was a quick discussion but the decision was that, even though they were outnumbered and pinned down, the firqat could look after themselves. For G Squadron, the key task now was to secure the battlefield and treat the dying and the injured.

  Despite his seven years of medical school, followed by extensive hospital training, the medic had never seen anything like this before. He took one look at the wounded man and promptly grabbed the door frame, leaned out and threw up. Thankfully, he immediately recovered himself and started work. Having been outside and then come back in again, Roger himself was shocked by the stench of the BATT house. It now looked like a charnel house, with bodies, broken limbs and open wounds everywhere. A second medic started to work on the wounded, and from somewhere a third British soldier appeared and started helping out. While the medics practised mass triage, sorting out the wounded into those they could help and those they could not, the linguists were handing out water and what food there was and gleaning vital intelligence. Reports would have to be written later and every snippet of intelligence now was crucial. Everyone knew this was a major turning-point in the war and there was much analysis to be done.

  Over in the BATT radio shack at Um-el-Ghawarif, Trevor Brooks was gathering intelligence as well. What he was hearing was that he could now contact the BATT team at Taqah and tell them it was safe for Neville Baker to fly into Mirbat and scoop up the casualties. The best intelligence suggested that the Front had been driven back but were still firing the occasional long-range shot. Quite how he was supposed to protect himself against the odd stray bullet was not explained to Baker, but by now all previous military norms were just a distant memory. What was happening to all of them was a unique, one-off event, which would define their lives forever after.

  As he set off, the BATT men at Taqah told him, ‘Use the SARBE. It’s safe and secure – and at least it works!’

  The cloud cover was still low and, once again, Neville Baker had to hug the wave tops as he made his way round to Mirbat. For the second time that morning, Roger Cole heard him arriving. The last time they had seen each other was when Roger had done the beach dance about three hours before. He went out to meet the helicopter and out jumped two G Squadron soldiers with three men they had captured as they worked their way towards the BATT house, ‘we’ve got three prisoners.’

  Roger told them to take the men upstairs and hold them. He then waved the chopper towards the gun-pit. As Neville Baker crabbed away a few feet off the ground, Roger realised it was the same helicopter from earlier on the beach, as he now had a close-up view of the bullet holes in the fuselage.

  By the time Roger Cole had reached the prisoners, Neville Baker had landed by the gun-pit and was greeted by Boss Kealy and Tak, who despite having five bullets in him, was pumped full of morphine and walked the twenty yards to wait by the chopper. His crewmen took the stretchers over to the gun-pit and scooped up the other wounded soldiers, Walid Khamis and Tommy Tobin. Tak stood by the loading door and only got on the chopper when his two mates were safely inside. Baker then stopped off briefly back at the BATT house to pick up the three most seriously wounded casualties, and then it was off to
the cutting shop at Salalah, where the surgeons were waiting.

  Back at the BATT house, Roger Cole walked past the medics, who were still treating the wounded. There were weapons everywhere, open wounds, blood, sweat and the thick grime of battle – the souvenirs of carnage. He found the prisoners upstairs on the first floor, sitting together, broken men, their faces hanging down with defeat. On questioning them, he discovered that they had not eaten for two days, starved by their commanders to keep them keen. He made them some tea, gave them each a cigarette and then cut open a tin of cheese and sliced it into three, offering a piece to each of them, all the while chatting away, a gentle interrogation designed to find out what they knew. Two of them had been in the Trucial Oman Scouts and spoke good English. Roger Cole searched them all and they were clean of weapons, though one of them had a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book written in Arabic and wrapped in a rag, which Roger Cole took off him. There was no recrimination between the men, just the mutual respect of warriors who had just fought a brutal battle but who now left their differences outside on the battlefield. As they exchanged the minutiae of battle, one of them asked him if he had lost anyone that day.

  ‘One very good friend, possibly two,’ replied Roger Cole. ‘What about you?’

  ‘A brother and a cousin,’ he said, his eyes bleak. As Roger gave him his slice of cheese, their hands touched. Roger took the man’s hand in his. Emotions slowly welled up in their eyes and a tear ran down each of their cheeks, a crucible of shared and intense emotion, thoughts and feelings. They were struck by a genuine sadness at their own and each other’s loss, a profound sense of the futility of it all – but also a huge sense of celebration for coming out, a gratitude tempered by the guilt that others had died.