The day after the first meeting, Stirling talked to his force commander, Bob Laycock, at the Long Bar of Shepheard’s. Laycock was about to leave for Britain by air to make a case to Winston Churchill for retaining commandos in the Middle East. Stirling’s parachute idea dovetailed neatly with his own objectives. They discussed which officers would be suitable for the new unit. Stirling asked for Lewes, and Laycock suggested Lt. Robert Blair Mayne, an officer of 11 (Scottish) Commando who had distinguished himself in action at the Litani River in Syria a few weeks earlier.
Claude Auchinleck had inherited from his predecessor, Wavell, a scheme to establish a parachute training-school in the Middle East. The plan had been booted around for a year, but had gone into abeyance. The C-in-C leapt on Stirling’s proposal as a way of reviving it. For Auchinleck, it was a no-lose deal. The Parachute Unit project would be attached to Dudley Clarke’s deception programme. If it succeeded, it might deliver a genuine strategic advantage. If not, it would still show the enemy that the Allies really did have an airborne capacity. Auchinleck told Ritchie he would see Stirling right away. They met at Grey Pillars, probably on the morning of 18 July, and Stirling saw at once that he’d hit paydirt. Not only were Auchinleck and Ritchie there, but also Ritchie’s immediate superior, CGS Arthur Smith. Auchinleck authorized the recruitment of sixty-eight men and seven support staff; Ritchie told Stirling he could recruit from the whole of the defunct Layforce. The unusual number was dictated by the capacity of the RAF Bristol Bombay transports assigned to parachute operations. One of the officers Stirling had consulted about his plan, Group Captain Ronnie Guest, RAF, who worked with A Force, had assured him that Bombays would be available for training and operations, and may also have pointed out that they carried only eleven men. The Parachute Unit would, therefore, be divided into six sections of ten men, each with one officer.
Stirling said later that one major proviso was that the force must come directly under the Commander-in-Chief. The Parachute Unit should have a strategic role, and should not be ‘acquired’ by any other department, such as Combined Operations, which directed commando ops, and others. It seems likely that Auchinleck accepted this in principle, but for practical purposes, Stirling’s early missions would come under the General Officer Commanding the Eighth Army, Lt. Gen. Sir Alan Cunningham.
That evening, a signal left GHQ bound for the War Office in London, asking for authorization to create the new unit. Stirling quit No. 10 promoted captain, elated but troubled by the tall order he had just imposed on himself. He had only three months to create from scratch an entirely new unit. He had bluffed his way into the highest circles with his rhetoric and social connections, but without the training skills of Jock Lewes, the unit was unlikely to get off the ground.
5. ‘Jock wanted to be sure I was going to stay with it’
The night before Stirling met Auchinleck, Lewes had been in action near Tobruk, when a sixty-strong detachment of 8 Commando raided the ‘Twin Pimples’ salient. Lewes, a section commander, led his men to within thirty yards of the Italian rear under the cover of an artillery barrage. A sentry popped a shot. The commandos strafed him with .45 calibre Tommy-guns and .303 rifles, exploding into a ferocious charge with bayonets fixed. The twenty Italians on the knoll bolted to their sangars. The commandos lobbed in grenades, and gouged the enemy with bayonets as they stumbled out. In four minutes the hill was bloody with Italian dead. The commandos pulled back – only just in time. Before they’d made a hundred yards, enemy artillery and machine-gun fire blitzed the salient from adjacent positions. Five of the commandos were hit before they slipped away into the night.
The Twin Pimples raid achieved nothing of strategic importance, but it was a sorely needed morale-booster for the besieged garrison. Tobruk was manned by twenty-three thousand troops, Australian, British and Indian. Conditions there were oppressive. The town stood on white cliffs over a blue bay whose pellucid waters concealed the dozens of ships that had been sunk by Axis dive-bombers. The British perimeter was a thirty-five-mile crescent under daily attack from tanks and artillery – and from aircraft based so near that the troops could hear them taking off. Most of the men lived in dugouts and stone sangars, assailed by hordes of flies and fleas, riddled with dysentery and desert sores.
It was in this warren of defences that Stirling visited Lewes. He tried to persuade him to become the first recruit in what was to be known formally as ‘L Detachment, 1 Special Air Service Brigade’. Dudley Clarke, Director, A Force, had offered to give Stirling as much help as he needed on the understanding that his parachute unit came under his non-existent SAS. Since there were already fictitious ‘J’ and ‘K’ Detachments, ‘L’ Detachment seemed appropriate. Stirling said later that he accepted Clarke’s suggestion ‘just to humour him’.
Lewes listened to Stirling’s proposal. His answer, Stirling said, was ‘No way.’ He knew the principle was sound – the plan had, after all, been based on his ideas – but he didn’t trust Stirling’s commitment. He also resented the fact that while GHQ had scrapped his own operation, they had accepted a similar idea proffered by a known wastrel, with no experience of combat, whose only advantage was ‘the old school tie’. In a few short weeks Lewes had gained a reputation as the boldest patrol-leader in Tobruk. He was loath to hand himself over to a cynical upper-class layabout, who had as yet scarcely heard a shot fired in action.
Stirling saw Lewes’s refusal as a challenge to his credibility. He was so desperate for his comrade’s approval that he returned to Tobruk twice. ‘Jock wanted to be sure that if we got the thing working, I was going to stay with it,’ he said, ‘and also tackle the enormous problems at GHQ, which he possibly foresaw more clearly than me – he just didn’t want to get involved if it was going to be a short-term flight of fancy.’1
Lewes held Stirling at arm’s length. While his reputation was mounting in Tobruk, Stirling went ahead and recruited his first fifty men. On 27 July he attended a conference at GHQ’s Training Branch, with eleven other officers, including Deputy Director of Military Training Col. J. A. Baillon, Adjutant General Lt. Col. Frederick H. Butterfield, Lt. Col. Dudley Clarke, and Major Vivian Street, Special Duties.
Adjutant General Butterfield told Stirling that he had a list of some hundred and twenty ex-Layforce men from whom he could make his selection. Stirling replied cheekily that Ritchie had authorized him to choose from the whole of Layforce. In any case, he had already acquired twenty-one ex-commandos from the Scots Guards, and another eighteen from the Infantry Base Depot at Geneifa. He added that he could probably obtain the final eleven men he needed from the same sources, but preferred to wait until the ‘specially trained Layforce personnel’ were released from their patrol duties at Tobruk.
Red-faced at this impertinence, Col. Joe Baillon snapped that he should acquire his recruits ‘through the proper channels’ and ordered him to discuss the matter further with Butterworth. It was probably from this moment on that Stirling and the Adjutant General’s office became bitter enemies.
The conference debated scales of weapons, ammunition and equipment, and Stirling was allocated a training-camp on a site at Kabrit in the Suez Canal Zone, which had previously housed a commando training school. When he argued that his new unit must have a distinctive cap-badge, though, the Adjutant General snorted.
Stirling complained that he had very few officers to choose from, as the best of Layforce had already been offered other posts. According to Lt. Carol Mather, Welsh Guards, though, the truth was that he had already canvassed most 8 Commando officers, and been bluntly turned down. ‘We really could not give [his scheme] credence,’ Mather wrote, ‘and we thought we knew David too well for it to work. Another fiasco was the last thing that anyone could take.’2
Almost totally bereft of officers, Stirling thought once more of the brilliant Jock Lewes in Tobruk. In late August, Lewes was posted back to Alexandria and spent a few days in hospital recovering from acute desert sores – an ubiquitous problem among the troop
s, resulting from the British staple diet of bully beef. Suddenly, Stirling had Lewes cornered, and was able to focus on him the full power of his rhetoric. He urged Lewes to join the Parachute Unit as training officer, with carte blanche to run the show from within. After he’d gone, Lewes thought it over. The Stirling he had encountered in his hospital room was a different kettle of fish from the ‘pudding’ he’d known previously. This was a Stirling whose determination and enthusiasm were irresistible – a man inspired.3 Stirling had already proved that he had the right connections to get the project moving, and, if Lewes had to play second-fiddle in the eyes of the world, at least it would be a vindication of his ideas.
A man of very little ego, Lewes realized that, together, he and Stirling could make the perfect partnership. Stirling might be commander in name, but the character of the new unit would be Lewes’s. He decided that it would be more pragmatic to accept a bird-in-hand than to hold out for his own command. When he met Stirling at Shepheard’s Hotel a few days later, he capitulated. ‘I have been and gone and done the very thing which I promised myself in [Tobruk] that I would never let myself in for again,’ he wrote home wryly. ‘The only difference … is that now it appears that success does depend in a very large measure on what I do.’4
6. ‘An extremely truculent Irishman’
On 21 June, five days after Stirling had ‘piled in’ at Fuka, Lt. Col. Geoffrey Keyes returned to his HQ at Salamis on Cyprus, to find an ‘appalling scandal’ in progress. The previous evening had been Guest Night at the 11 (Scottish) Commando’s officers’ mess, and one of his subalterns, twenty-six-year-old Lt. Robert Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, Royal Ulster Rifles, had drunk himself into a frenzy. Called to order by the commando’s acting 2IC, Major Charles Napier, Gordon Highlanders, the scion of a well-known military family, Mayne had growled threats and become ‘very bolshie’.1 Later, as Napier returned to his tent, he was set upon by a ‘huge unknown assailant’, and severely thrashed. Napier was certain it was Mayne but was unable to identify him in the darkness.2
Geoffrey Keyes, Royal Scots Greys, son of the Director of Combined Operations, First World War hero Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, was a bespectacled Old Etonian, who, at twenty-six, was reportedly the youngest battalion commander in the British army. He investigated the assault on Napier, and by next morning was satisfied that Mayne was responsible. On 23 June he hauled Mayne in front of the Divisional Commander, Brigadier Rodwell, who promptly RTU’d him. The orders session is recorded in Keyes’s diary:
June 23: ‘Produce Paddy before Div Commander, and he is rocketed and removed. Very sorry to lose him as he did awfully well in the battle and is a great fighter. He is, however, an extremely truculent Irishman when he is “drink taken” and is as strong as a bull.’3
11 Commando had arrived back in Cyprus only a week earlier, after its spectacular but costly landing at the mouth of the Litani River in Syria – the first opposed landing ever carried out by commando troops. Of the three hundred and eighty-five men who had struggled ashore, a hundred and four were killed and thirty badly wounded.
The Litani action was Mayne’s baptism of fire, and he had acquitted himself well. His 7 Troop had engaged the enemy minutes after hitting the beach, and had ended the day with ninety prisoners, eight machine guns and three mortars. Back on Cyprus, he was recommended for a Mention in Dispatches – the first in the series of awards that would eventually put him among the most decorated men of the war.
Mayne was eleven months older than David Stirling. Born in Newtownards, Northern Ireland, where his family were Protestant businessmen and lawyers, he was the second youngest of four brothers and three sisters. Articled to a firm of solicitors, he had read law at Queen’s University, Belfast, but had not completed his studies when war broke out.
He was a big man – six foot two or three, fifteen and a half stone of muscle, yet as light on his feet as a tap-dancer. He was respected by his troops, but not known for his small-talk – softly spoken, shy and withdrawn, he filled his spare moments with his head in a book and a cigarette in his mouth. He was a formidable boxer. While at Queens he had won the Irish Universities heavyweight championship and reached the final in the British Universities championship. It was rugby, though, that was his real forte. Capped six times for Ireland, and once for the British Lions, he had made his name as lock-forward against the Springboks in the Lions’ 1938 South African tour.
Mayne had been commissioned in the Royal Ulster Rifles, but was ‘on loan’ to a Scottish battalion, the Royal Cameronians, when 11 (Scottish) Commando was formed at Galashiels. He volunteered together with a close friend from the RUR, a nineteen-year-old fellow-solicitor from a well-known Catholic family in Ulster, Lt. Eoin McGonigal. In normal circumstances, Mayne shared his culture’s disdain for Catholics, but he and McGonigal were close. David Stirling was later to make the not entirely flattering observation that McGonigal was ‘the one person who liked Paddy before he became a hero’.4
Mayne was much more than the stereotype bruiser. He was a man of sensitivity – modest, gentle, considerate, literate and intelligent. He had a profound ability to empathize. Like many shy people, though, he had a shadow side – one that, in his case, emerged during bouts of heavy drinking. This alter ego was an ‘Edward Hyde’ character, capable of beating others to a pulp for no good reason. When Mayne was drinking heavily he could be frightening, even to hardened soldiers. In years to come, there would be a mad scramble for cover when it was announced that ‘Paddy was looking for a drinking partner’.
Mayne was interested in women, but lacked the ability to form long-term relationships. This may have been the result of his close ties with his dominant mother, around whom, according to his brother, Douglas, he ‘behaved like a child … responding to her every whim’, and who ‘demanded his constant attention’.5 Despite his athletic prowess and huge dimensions, he regarded himself as a ‘big, ugly man’, to whom no woman would be attracted. Stirling later ascribed the shadow aspect of his character to a frustrated creative urge, which, he wrote, ‘got bottled up to an intolerable level and this led to some of his heavy drinking bouts … and … explained at least some of his violent acts and black moods’.6
After being RTU’d, Mayne returned to the Infantry Base Depot at Geneifa, in Egypt, where, a week later, he went down with malaria. He spent most of July recovering at No. 19 General Hospital, Canal Zone, and at a convalescent home nearby. Laycock had been on Cyprus the day Keyes had brought Mayne in front of the Divisional Commander, and knew all about the assault on Napier. He had suggested Mayne’s name for the new unit, but Stirling had lost track of him. He said later that he’d discovered where Mayne was through a ‘great friend’ of his, and went to interview him.7 This ‘great friend’ can only have been Eoin McGonigal, whom Stirling recruited for the SAS in mid-August.
Stirling’s encounter with Paddy Mayne, probably at Geneifa, that August has become one of the great SAS foundation myths. Stirling himself maintained that Mayne was in military prison when they met, awaiting court martial. In fact, he was neither under close arrest, in prison, nor facing court martial. Keyes, who would have recorded any such sentence in his diary, simply wrote that he was ‘removed’ – RTU was the usual punishment for commando offenders.8
Mayne greeted Stirling with suspicion. He had a problem with authority figures, and particularly disliked ‘snooty public-school types’, of whom Stirling was a prime example. When Stirling addressed him as ‘Paddy’ he replied curtly that his name was ‘Blair’. He gave out contradictory signals. On one hand, he spoke in a self-effacing way, blinking ceaselessly. On the other, there was a sheer physical presence to him that was intimidating. Stirling felt challenged from the beginning by his physical superiority, and later, unexpectedly, by his natural qualities of leadership. In months to come this would develop into a fierce sense of competition that would lead both to reckless acts. Mayne was a very different character from either Stirling or Lewes. While Stirling was a dreamer, and Lewes a thinker, M
ayne was a warrior – an instinctive fighting man.
‘What are the chances of fighting?’ was Mayne’s inevitable question.
‘None,’ Stirling is supposed to have answered. ‘Except against the enemy.’
Mayne chortled, and agreed to join Stirling. Before shaking hands on the deal, though, Stirling demanded his word that the Napier incident would not be repeated. Mayne promised, and as Stirling later commented, ‘kept the promise at least in respect of myself, though not with others’. The triumvirate of remarkable men who made the Special Air Service Regiment – the dreamer, the thinker and the fighter – was complete.
7. Wondering why he should be scared if Lewes wasn’t
At about 2220 hours on 16 November 1941, five Bristol Bombays of 216 Squadron RAF banked south over the coast of Cyrenaica into a wall of Italian flares, searchlights and ack-ack fire. The aircraft were spaced out at irregular intervals, their pilots searching for separate drop-zones on the littoral plain, about ten minutes away. It was a moonless night, with rain and cloud, and below them a sandstorm was brewing. Although they could see snatches of the coast through the swirling dust, the pilots could make out neither the landmarks they had anticipated, nor the flares they had dropped to assess their positions.
The aircraft had taken off at twenty-minute intervals from Baggush, an airbase west of Alexandria, not long after sunset. At the same time Auchinleck’s Eighth Army, under his field commander, Cunningham, had started rolling towards Libya, on the long-awaited Crusader offensive. Cunningham’s column – six hundred tanks, five thousand lorries and armoured cars, and a hundred thousand troops – stretched through the desert for more than a hundred miles.
In the lead Bombay – No. 1 Flight – David Stirling felt the aircraft lurch as the pilot tried to put cloud-cover between the plane and the Italian anti-aircraft gunners. The RAF dispatcher had already ordered the stick of eleven men to stand up and hook up. The jump was just six minutes away.
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