The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  Basic infantry skills were honed until they were perfect. Jock Lewes taught fieldcraft, Bill Fraser, map-reading, and Eoin McGonigal, weapon-training. Mayne took gruelling PT sessions and doubled as Provost Marshal – punishments usually consisted of going a few rounds in the ring with him, a daunting challenge to all but the other boxing champs like Reg Seekings and Pat Riley.

  The commandos had aimed to produce men capable of marching two and a half miles an hour with full equipment, over distances of up to thirty-five miles. The endurance march was to become the key aspect of SAS training and, later, its selection course. The marches took place mainly at night, over distances of between twelve and thirty miles, carrying packs filled with sand. The men soon got wise to this, tipped the sand out, and replaced it before the end of the march. Lewes took to issuing bricks instead. The conservation of water was crucial to these marches. The men carried a water-bottle, but would be expected to have water left when they returned. They didn’t drink unless instructed, and even practised washing their mouths with water and spitting it back, in the belief that swallowing it would only make one more thirsty.

  In parachute-training, Lewes had to improvise from lack of experience. Requests for guidance to No. 1 Parachute Training School at Ringway, Manchester, evoked responses that were slow in arriving, and some of Lewes’s do-it-yourself techniques proved counter-productive.

  The training-gear was created from designs Stirling acquired. It was constructed by a self-styled ‘bogus engineer’ – twenty-seven-year-old Sergeant John ‘Gentleman Jim’ Almonds, Coldstream Guards, ex-8 Commando, and one of Lewes’s celebrated ‘Tobruk Four’. Almonds was to be left out of Op Squatter because his newly-born son – incidentally a future 22 SAS squadron-commander – was in hospital in Britain, gravely ill. The son of a Lincolnshire smallholder, Almonds was a brilliant improviser who had built a boat and an aeroplane in his youth. He took advice from a Royal Engineers officer, Captain Fred Cumper, and constructed training-towers, gantries to simulate parachute-canopies, and a miniature railway with a trolley that could be used for practising parachute-rolls.

  When the trolley proved cumbersome, Lewes decided to have the men hurl themselves from the back of a fifteen-hundredweight truck instead. Seekings recalled jumping off at about thirty-five miles an hour and trying to land on his feet rather than rolling. ‘I ploughed up the bloody desert with my face,’ he remembered, ‘I was in a hell of a state. That was the last time I tried to be clever. [Then] Paddy Mayne jumped out and you could hear his head hit the deck half a mile away.’4

  The truck-jumping technique, rightly considered dangerous by professional parachute-instructors, caused injuries to more than half the Detachment, and resulted in at least half a dozen broken limbs: Jeff Du Vivier, Jimmy Brough and Lt. Bill Fraser were among the hospitalized cases.

  10. ‘We tried not to think about it. But we did’

  The situation grew darker when the time came for aircraft jumps. Dudley Clarke had pointed out at the July conference that experience had shown the necessity of training on the same aircraft parachutists would use on operations. Stirling had managed to get the use of an RAF Bristol Bombay for parachute-training.

  The Bombays were veterans, with a maximum airspeed of about ninety miles an hour in all but the most favourable conditions. They were as unstable as kites. When a parachutist wanted to go to the heads (toilet) in the rear gun-turret he had to inform the pilot, because the movement displaced the centre of gravity by eleven feet. Still, they were an improvement on the Valentia Lewes and Stirling had used on their first drop at Fuka. They had been modified with a head-level anchor-line to which the parachutes’ static-lines were clipped. When the parachutist jumped, the force of the slipstream yanked him sideways and down, pulling the static-line taut and jerking open the parachute canopy. The static-line was fixed to the canopy with a tie that broke under pressure, leaving the line attached to the anchor in the aircraft, and allowing the canopy to fall free.

  By the third week in October there had already been two drops. Stirling himself had jumped both times, though not all of the Detachment had yet made their first descent. One of the uninitiated was Jeff Du Vivier, who was just about to collapse in his tent one evening when someone poked his head in and told him, ‘You’re down for jumping tomorrow.’ Du Vivier dashed over to the noticeboard and examined the manifest. His name was third on the list. That was the end of his sleep for the night. He tossed and turned till first light, and at breakfast found that he had lost his appetite. When he scanned the faces of the other condemned, he saw in them a reflection of his own.

  The 16 October jump was to include multiple lifts, carrying sticks of mixed one-jump veterans and first-timers. The drop-zone was on the opposite side of the canal, on the shores of the great rocky shelf of Sinai. Du Vivier was with Johnny Cooper, Jimmy Storie and seven others in the first stick. Nineteen-year-old Cooper recalled that he was desperately afraid, but that as soon as he was out of the door and hurtling through the slipstream, the fear dissolved. As he drifted down slowly under his canopy, he took in the stunning view – the yellow-amber landmass right down the Canal to the Gulf of Suez and, on the other side, the paper-model town of Ismailiyya and the blueness of the Bitter Lakes. The first stick landed without mishap, then the Bombay picked up its second stick, and took off for another run.

  As it happened, the first three men in the next stick were all ex-11 Commando and veterans of the Litani action. The first two were both ex-Seaforth Highlanders, twenty-one-year-old Ken Warburton from Manchester and his mate, Scotsman Joseph Duffy. The third man was Parachutist Billy Morris of the Black Watch. The Bombay came in for her final run, and the green light sparked. The dun-coloured desert was only nine hundred feet below, but to Warburton, at the door, it looked a thousand miles away. The RAF dispatcher, Flight Sergeant Ted Pacey, clapped him on the shoulder and yelled ‘Go!’ in his ear. Warburton leapt out into the sky. Behind him, Joe Duffy hesitated. ‘What are you waiting for, man?’ Pacey yelled. Duffy jumped. Neither he nor Warburton were seen alive again.

  On the airstrip waiting for the next lift, Bob Bennett, Dave Kershaw and Reg Seekings watched the aircraft bank around the drop-zone and head back towards them. They looked at each other, wondering what had happened. ‘I’m sure I saw something come out of the plane,’ Bennett told Kershaw.

  ‘Well, if it had done there would’ve been a parachute,’ Kershaw replied. Moments later, the Bombay landed and the stick trooped out grim-faced. Warburton and Duffy had jumped to their deaths: their parachutes had failed to open. The snap-links on their static-lines had bent and burst under pressure – there had been nothing to pull the canopies out. Dispatcher Ted Pacey, who blamed himself for the accident, had only noticed after Duffy had gone. He’d pulled the third man, Morris, back from the brink. Morris considered himself the luckiest man alive.

  The attachments had actually been changed a week earlier, after a previous jump. The original system had been to fit the D-ring on the static-line strop through a shackle on the anchor-line, and screw it closed. A new snap-hook with a spring release-clip, like a dog-leash, had been introduced for convenience and speed, but the steel wasn’t robust enough to take the torsion forces. Ironically, there had been a similar fatality at Ringway previously, but news hadn’t yet reached the SAS. Stirling was incensed when he found out.

  Jimmy Storie was one of the party detailed to bring back the bodies of Warburton and Duffy. They found them lying on their backs, side by side, as if awaiting burial. There were signs that Duffy, at least, had attempted to pull his own canopy open as he fell. Mayne, on the drop-zone at the time, said later that he had heard the men screaming as they dropped. Their bodies were brought back to Kabrit by boat – the first two names on the SAS roll of honour.

  According to some eye-witnesses, Stirling had also been on the DZ and had seen the men pile in. Seekings and Bennett, though, recalled that he was away in Cairo at the time, and on hearing what had happened, signalled back immedia
tely that everyone would jump next day. Bennett said that it was Jock Lewes, not Stirling, who took the parade at Kabrit that evening. ‘Lewes had us on parade and told us that [the accident] was due to the fact that the RAF had put the fitting in the hands of the Egyptians,’ he recalled. ‘[Lewes] said that this would be put right. The RAF would do it.’1 Lewes relayed Stirling’s order, but told the boys that anyone who wanted to leave was free to do so.

  Nobody left, but that night proved to be the severest test of the whole training course. Parachuting was unnatural enough – most SAS-men loathed it – but a chute that failed to open at only nine hundred feet was the parachutist’s worst nightmare. Few of them got any sleep that night. They were issued with a tin of fifty Players’ Navy Cut cigarettes each, and spent most of the night chain-smoking. It was the worst twenty-four hours of their lives. ‘We tried not to think about it,’ Bennett said, ‘but we did.’2

  Next morning, Stirling, back from Cairo, hooked up number one on the first lift, for what was probably the most crucial drop in SAS history. Bob Bennett, jumping for the first time, said that, when ‘Action stations’ was called, everyone began tugging on their static-lines frantically. Stirling went out first, and the whole detachment jumped in five successive lifts, at a thousand feet, without a hitch. Bob Bennett was so euphoric that on the way down he started playing his mouth-organ.

  The deaths of Warburton and Duffy weren’t entirely in vain. The episode that might have been disastrous for the SAS proved an important morale-booster. The next day’s jump was, said Bennett, ‘when I found out I was with a unit that meant something, because not one man backed out’.3 Stirling’s evident courage in going out first increased his standing. He had joined in virtually none of the training, and the men didn’t know him as well as they knew Lewes, Mayne, Fraser and the others. Most of the time he’d been away in Cairo, and Lewes had been the real boss. ‘David has been … absent more than not,’ Lewes wrote to his mother, ‘and I have been in command the while … We have fashioned this unit; he has established it without and I think I may say I have established it within.’4

  Stirling admitted later that the enlisted men had been ill-at-ease with him. Some remembered him from 8 Commando days as a member of the jet-set ‘Silver Circle Club’ in Cairo, centred on author Evelyn Waugh and the Prime Minister’s son, Randolph Churchill, whose natural habitat was the bar and the racetrack. Stirling, who had been more shaken than he showed by the accident, admitted later that he hated parachuting. The jump on 17 October, though, was the worst he ever had to make.

  11. ‘A nice little black pudding’

  Stirling always denied that the SAS was a band of airborne saboteurs, yet at first it was in their demolitions training that they differed most from other special units. Lewes set up lectures by visiting experts, including civil engineers, railwaymen and aircraft engineers, who advised them where to lay charges for the most devastating possible results.

  Lewes was aware, though, that the available five-pound charges weren’t suitable for saboteurs operating on foot. They were too heavy and cumbersome. He worked out that the men would be able to carry only two charges apiece, which meant that the operation would inflict minimal damage. This was worse than useless, because the enemy would be able to get the undamaged planes airborne and pursue the raiders. Lewes had been determined from the start not to get involved in a suicide raid.

  He had made it a personal challenge to develop a bomb that was light, easy to set up, and would write off an aircraft in one go. He needed a charge that would be both explosive and incendiary at the same time. A Sapper demolitions expert from GHQ told him that he was hunting the snark: bombs could explode or burn, but not both. Lewes ignored him and erected a small hut on camp as a laboratory, where he began to conduct chemical experiments. He laboured night after night, and nocturnal bangs and crashes became commonplace.

  Stirling returned from Cairo one night to find the camp in uproar. Earlier, Lewes had burst into the bar shouting, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’ All the men had left their beer and jogged over to goggle at the new charge in operation. ‘[Lewes] was going nuts,’ Seekings recalled. ‘It was the only time I ever saw him excited.’1

  He had invented the ‘Lewes bomb’ – a mixture of plastic explosive with thermite and aluminium turnings, rolled in engine-oil. It was, said ‘bogus engineer’ Jim Almonds, ‘a nice little black pudding’ that was ignited by a gun-cotton primer and a No. 27 detonator, set off by a thirty-second fuse. The thermite caused a flash that would detonate the petrol in the aircraft’s fuel tank, blow the wing off, and destroy the entire plane. The bomb could also be detonated by a ‘time-pencil’ when longer or shorter delays were needed. A pen-sized glass tube, the ‘pencil’ contained a phial of acid and a spring-loaded striker held back by a strip of copper wire. When the phial was smashed, the acid would eat through the wire and release the striker – the time depending on the thickness of the wire. The time-pencils were colour-coded according to delay-times.

  While conventional charges had to be tied in place, the Lewes bomb was ‘sticky’ – it could be moulded into position in a few seconds. It also weighed only a little more than a pound, which meant that every man could carry in his pack the means of wrecking at least eight aircraft. The Lewes bomb was literally custom-built for SAS operations, and was a brilliant feat of ingenuity. Later, the legend grew up that Lewes was an Oxford science graduate – in fact his only relevant experience was with a childhood chemistry set.

  12. Rite of passage

  By the end of October, Lewes felt that L Detachment was ready for its first mission. A few recruits had fallen out or been RTU’d, leaving a core of desert-hardened men who were all marching fit, demolitions-trained, and qualified parachutists.

  Stirling had an idea for a gruelling final exercise. It came to him over a £10 bet with a deprecating RAF Group Captain, that his men could get into the RAF base at Heliopolis, near Cairo, and slap labels representing bombs on the aircraft parked there. The Group Captain, whose name remains unknown, was almost certainly the officer responsible for airfield security, an activity on which the RAF were currently conducting an in-depth study.

  The whole operational orbat of the Detachment would trek across the desert from Kabrit, a distance of ninety miles, in three days. Hefting packs simulating the weight of Lewes bombs, they would travel in four groups, moving only by night, and lying up in daytime under a piece of hessian they each carried with them. They would be allowed only four pints of water each. The idea was to complete thirty miles a night for the first three nights, then hit the airfield on the fourth night. The RAF knew they were coming, but Stirling didn’t tell them that the SAS would be arriving out of the desert.

  On briefing, the men thought there would be a high drop-out rate: in the event, it went off superbly, and only one man fell out. Having covered the distance unspotted, the SAS arrived at Heliopolis at midnight on the fourth day, so feverish from water-loss that some of them were half convinced that it actually was an Axis airfield. They clipped their way through the fence and stuck their labels on more than forty aircraft. They then did a few circuits of the drome to reassure themselves that they could get away with it without being nabbed.

  Stirling duly collected his £10 wager and a gratifying letter of congratulation from the Group Captain. The SAS had proved that they were capable of moving long distances on foot across the desert by night, lying up by day, and infiltrating a guarded airstrip unseen. They had undergone their ordeal, their rite of passage. They had survived hellish marches on little water, had come through parachute training that had injured many and killed two of their comrades. They had earned a special identity forged through shared hardship. They were ready for anything.

  The first operation – Squatter – was to go in on 16 November against Axis airfields at Gazala and Tmimi. These were the bases for both Italian and German aircraft, including the Messerschmitt 109-Fs, state-of-the-art airpower that could fly faster and higher than RAF H
urricanes and outdated Gloster Gladiator biplanes. The 109-Fs had first been reported in Libya by British intelligence only weeks earlier, and one had been shot down more or less intact. These fighters were fitted with 20mm cannons that could outgun anything the RAF could throw at them. It was estimated that about 50 per cent of Axis single-engined aircraft would be 109-Fs by the end of October. On 10 November Stirling received his brief, instructing him that Messerschmitt 109-Fs would be his priority targets.

  The operation was secret, but the existence of the SAS was not. It had come into being primarily as part of Dudley Clarke’s propaganda force, and its airborne potential was to be proclaimed to the world. When Auchinleck arrived in Kabrit for his final inspection on 13 November, he was accompanied by a small army of newsmen, including two American correspondents, and a newsreel cinematographer. The cameraman shot footage of Stirling greeting the C-in-C, of Jock Lewes and his stick inside a Bombay, of the parachutists descending from two thousand feet. The footage became a four-minute film that was shown at cinemas around the world on Pathé News. This exposure was of even greater significance than the operation itself. Almost forty years before the Pagoda team appeared on the world’s TV screens at the storming of the Iranian Embassy, the SAS potential as a psychological weapon had already been unveiled.

  13. ‘We’ll go because we’ve got to go’