The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  Escorted by Robin Gurdon’s LRDG patrol, they set off from Siwa in their own vehicle – the ‘Blitz Buggy’ – a stripped-down Ford V8 utility vehicle done up with Afrika Korps TAC signs. Stirling had ‘found’ it in Cairo and had it modified. Churchill irritated him early on by swigging rum from his water-bottle. ‘We do not drink on operations, Captain Churchill,’ Stirling told him, not entirely truthfully, as he snatched the offending bottle and emptied it into the desert. His plan had been to deposit Churchill at the LRDG rendezvous overlooking Benghazi, before the raid. This scheme went awry when Reg Seekings was injured by an exploding time-pencil while sorting out the Lewes bombs, and Churchill claimed the right to go in his place.

  As it turned out, Churchill was the least of Stirling’s worries. One of the Blitz Buggy’s track-rods had been damaged in a wadi, giving the car an exasperating two-tone whine that could be heard miles away. After Maclean had used flawless Italian to bluff his way through a checkpoint, they were chased by another vehicle. They entered the town at eighty miles an hour. Having lost their pursuer in the labyrinth of streets, they heard air-raid sirens, and knowing no RAF raid was planned for that night, assumed the sirens were for them. They ditched the ‘Blitz Buggy’ and set a charge on her with a half-hour time-pencil. They had to remove it hastily when Maclean ascertained from an Italian carabiniere that the alarm really was for an air attack.

  The RAF raid never materialized. Leaving the car with Churchill and Johnny Rose, Stirling found a gap in the wire around the harbour. They manoeuvred one of the packed inflatables surreptitiously down to the waterfront, weaving through cranes and railway sidings. There was no moon. The night was cold, clear and brilliant with stars. The sea was dead calm and stretched away from them like a sheet of lead. In the starlight Maclean made out some tempting-looking Axis vessels lying at anchor.

  Cooper and Maclean began to inflate the boat, while Stirling and Alston went for a look-see round the docks. The foot-pump made a racket, and an Italian on watch on one of the ships shouted to inquire what they were doing. Maclean told him to mind his own business. They continued pumping away but nothing happened – the ‘robust’ inflatable had been punctured.

  Cursing to themselves, Cooper and Maclean had to sneak back through the wire, trek a mile through the streets to the car, and get the second boat, which once again had to be ferried silently all the way to the harbour. After half an hour’s pumping they realized that this one, too, wasn’t inflating. ‘It was heart-rending,’ Maclean said.2

  They found Stirling and Alston outside the hole in the wire, and decided against placing charges on the railway trucks, as it would prejudice their chances of carrying out a future raid. They would have to abort the mission. Stirling said they should return to the waterfront and collect all their gear, so as not to betray the fact that a raid had been attempted.

  It was starting to get light. On his way back through the wire, Maclean was prodded with a bayonet by a Somali guard. He quickly cowed the colonial soldier with an indignant diatribe in Italian. He, Stirling and Cooper packed the mines and inflatables into their bags, but as they moved off they noticed two more sentries hovering behind them. This was awkward. It meant they couldn’t return through the gap without alerting suspicion. Instead, they headed for the main gate, where Maclean marched up to the guard-commander and accused him of sloppiness and ‘a gross dereliction of duty’ for allowing the three of them to wander about without being challenged. For all the Italian knew, he said, they could be British saboteurs. The guard-commander looked suitably intimidated, and as the SAS team went out, the sentry presented arms.

  They lay up for the next twelve hours in a bomb-damaged house directly opposite a building that turned out to be a German Area HQ. Stirling couldn’t help chuckling to himself at the thought of the British Prime Minister’s son lurking within a stone’s throw of a German nerve-centre. They were disturbed only once – by an Italian sailor they thought might be a spy, but turned out to be a looter. After sunrise, Stirling went out and sauntered around the harbour mole nonchalantly with sunglasses on, and a towel around his neck, as if he were going for a swim.

  Stirling said that his walk revealed two boats that were ripe for demolition, but the way Maclean remembered it, several of them went for a stroll around Benghazi after dark the following night to identify potential targets. They strolled past the Italian basilica, down the middle of the street, arm in arm, whistling, as though they owned the place. ‘Nobody paid the slightest attention to us,’ Maclean recalled. ‘On such occasions, it’s one’s manner that counts. If only you can behave naturally and avoid the appearance of furtiveness, it is worth any number of disguises and faked documents.’3

  Maclean said that they noticed the two motor-torpedo boats tied to a jetty and realized they would make good targets. They hurried back to the ruined house, where Johnny Rose had been working on the Blitz Buggy’s damaged track-rod. They piled into the car and returned to the jetty with their bombs, only to find that a guard had been put on the boats. ‘To bomb [them] would have been tantamount to suicide,’ Cooper commented.4 Instead, they left the town on the Benina road, passing easily through the checkpoint by tacking themselves on to an Italian convoy. On their way back to the meet-up, they set a couple of charges on some machinery at Benina landing-ground.

  The bombs went off as they were motoring up the escarpment. Looking back they could just make out the spiral of smoke. It was no more than a pin-prick, Cooper admitted, ‘but at least we had something to show for our persistence’.5 Stirling’s second raid on Benghazi had turned into a farce, but a useful farce. A team of SAS troops, in uniform, had entered a vital enemy port and remained there for thirty-six hours without detection. They had even completed a foot reconnaissance.

  The lesson was that the chink in the enemy’s armour was always the human factor: ‘If you think of something the enemy would consider an impossible stupidity,’ Cooper said, ‘and carry it out with determination, you can get away with it by sheer blatant cheek.’6 They laughed about it all the way back to their own lines, where the joke finally backfired on them. Overtaking a British convoy on the road between Alexandria and Cairo, Stirling clipped a lorry and rolled the ‘Blitz Buggy’. Maclean suffered a fractured skull and was out of action for three months, Churchill’s spine was so badly injured he had to be evacuated to Britain, Rose broke his arm and Stirling escaped with a cracked bone in the wrist. The Daily Telegraph correspondent Arthur Merton, who had hitched a ride with them, was killed.

  27. The most ambitious SAS project yet

  For twenty minutes, Paddy Mayne and his three-man team had been proned out on the Berka Satellite airfield near Benghazi. A terrific fire-fight was in progress. RAF bombs were wheezing in, hammering the deck with seismic quakes, rupturing into hot shrapnel that seared around them. The night was split by the flashes of flares like lightning streaks, and the probing arms of searchlights, punctuated by the percussion of 20mm ack-ack guns thumping out streams of tracer. Mayne heard the groan of an aircraft dopplering out of control, and a moment later there was a head-pounding shock as it hit the ground and blew apart not six hundred feet away. Mayne and his men felt the heat braise their faces.

  It was 2340 hours on 12 June 1942, almost a month after Stirling’s aborted raid on Benghazi shipping. Mayne’s attack was supposed to go in at midnight, synchronized with eight other SAS raids in Cyrenaica, and across the water on Crete. It was the most ambitious SAS project yet, and Mayne was furious that the RAF had messed up his part in it by bad timing.

  This was the second time Mayne had raided Berka. The first had been back in March, when he had bagged the fifteen aircraft. Since then, the enemy had got wise to the fact that SAS raiders came at midnight during the moonless phase. They had also learned to space their aircraft out on the airfields to make them less vulnerable to air attack, and to assign individual sentries to each machine.

  The bombers passed and the thump of the AA guns stopped. The downed plane was still
burning. Jimmy Storie and Arthur Warburton had already set a Lewes bomb on one aircraft, and Bob Lilley crawled forward towards another. Lilley was ten yards from the plane when he was challenged by a sentry. A rifle cracked. A round soughed over his head. Almost at the same instant, a No.36 Mills grenade hurled by Mayne erupted, whacking the sentry’s body apart in mid-air.

  Rifles cracked. Sub-machine gun fire sizzled out of the darkness. ‘The stuff was whistling over our heads this way and that,’ Lilley recalled ‘… They had our range more than once as we ducked and ran for it, so Mayne shouted out to us to split into two groups and find some place to hide.’1 Somehow the pairs got mixed up. Mayne ended up with Jimmy Storie, while Lilley stuck with Warburton.

  The one aircraft they had snagged detonated and blazed up. The plain around Benghazi was lit with pinpricks of fire from the RAF bombing and the other SAS raids. Mayne could hear a furious barrage of gunshots from Berka Main aerodrome only two miles away, targeted by a Free French SAS party under Aspirant André Zirnheld. There was a smug pink frisson in the sky over Benina aerodrome, slightly inland from Benghazi town. This had been Stirling’s assignment. Mayne wondered if he had scored at last.

  Up on the jebel, at Barce, fifty miles away, another French SAS team under Aspirant Jaquier was heading for the aerodrome. Beyond that, far to the east, fifteen more French SAS-men had infiltrated the airfields of Derna and Mertuba, concealed in Afrika Korps vehicles. Another French group under Commandant Georges Bergé was scheduled to hit an airfield at Heraklion on Crete.

  For two hours Mayne and Storie lay motionless in a ditch as the Germans tromped up and down beside them. At first light they set off towards the escarpment. They had covered only two miles when a command vehicle pulled up sharply across their line of march. They fell flat, eating dust and gravel. A troop of soldiers jumped out of the command vehicle, dressed into a neat line, and advanced straight towards them.

  28. ‘Give them something to remember us by’

  At that moment, Johnny Cooper was raking through bush on the jebel towards the meet-up point with Robin Gurdon’s patrol, in a wadi four miles away. Benina aerodrome was on fire below him, and Benghazi town, to the west, lay under a pall of smoke.

  A few hours earlier, Cooper, Seekings and Stirling had raided Benina. They had knocked out at least five enemy aircraft, torched three hangars and a fuel dump, and fragged a guardhouse full of enemy troops. On the way up the hillside, Stirling’s elation had been marred by a migraine so intense that for a while Seekings and Cooper had to pull him along. Cooper had left the two of them, and had gone on ahead to recce the RV.

  All the previous day they had hidden in scrub a thousand feet above the airfield. This was Stirling’s third attempt to hit Benina, and he knew its value as a repair-depot. Their lying-up place was close enough to hear the growl of machinery being tested in a cluster of hangars and workshops. Through their binoculars, they watched Luftwaffe engineers swarming over stripped-down airframes, fitting new engines and parts. Several planes took off, wheeled lazily round the cloudless sky like kites, and landed again.

  The plain below them wasn’t as arid as the coast further east. From here, it looked like a shaggy Persian kilim woven in greys and greens and duns and ochres. Benghazi port, now familiar to Stirling from the thirty-six hours he had spent there last month, lay basting in the heat, its buildings dazzling white against a wedge of jade-coloured sea. There was a lot of activity on the hillside. Arab women in rainbow skirts laboured on plots. Boys in tattered trousers sauntered behind donkey-trains. Bearded herders hustled mobs of sheep. No one spotted them. All was quiet when they moved out after dark.

  It was a hard climb down through steep wadis, but they slipped into the aerodrome easily. They lay on the field and waited for the RAF sortie that was due to hit Benghazi town before midnight. The Blenheims soared in right on cue, just before moonset, and by the time their engines had faded the night was pitch black. At midnight the SAS-men primed their sixty Lewes bombs. It was standard operating procedure to press the time-pencils after the bombs were laid, but tonight they were going in with live bombs, set to hour and half-hour delays. Once the bombs were in place, they would pull the safety-pins and hope they wouldn’t blow up in their faces. The change in procedure marked the importance of the mission. ‘This is a big moment in our history,’ Stirling told them, ‘all the way along the coast, right into the Med, now everybody’s [pressing] their time pencils.’1

  The eight SAS raids synchronized for midnight on 12 June 1942 were the mature expression of Stirling’s original concept, without the parachuting element. Six of the eight SAS groups were drawn from the Free French detachment, and the other two from L Detachment veterans. The missions were strategic in nature – the outcome of the entire North African campaign might hinge on their success.

  Malta, the key British supply-base in the Mediterranean, was blockaded by the Italian navy and under daily attack by the Luftwaffe. At the end of April, the island’s governor, General Dobbie, wired Churchill that Malta was starving and couldn’t hold out after mid-June. Churchill announced that the loss of Malta would be ‘a disaster of the first magnitude to the British Empire, and probably fatal in the long run to the defence of the Nile Valley’.

  The Prime Minister decreed that the supply convoys due to be sent from Alexandria and Gibraltar in the June dark-phase must get through. Some Axis aircraft that would be deployed against the convoys were based on airfields in Cyrenaica and on Crete. Stirling was tasked to hit these airfields on the night when Naval Intelligence thought a concerted air assault was most likely.

  Stirling, Seekings and Cooper lurched towards the hangars hefting forty-pound packs of explosive. On the way they nearly fell into a six-foot deep silo of aviation fuel they hadn’t clocked from their observation point. They stuck two bombs on it and pulled pins. They moved on again with Seekings lead-scout, their senses fine-tuned for movement. Seekings heard the tramp of a sentry’s hobnail boots, magnified in the stillness. He grabbed Stirling’s arm and they all froze. They squatted down till the sentry passed, then made a beeline for the first hangar.

  It loomed over them, its big sliding doors closed. Stirling found the catch, but when Cooper and Seekings pushed the door open, the rollers creaked. They stood stock-still and listened. No shouts, no sudden movements. Seekings hunkered down outside. Cooper and Stirling dollied-in bombs.

  It was dark as a tomb. ‘As our eyes got accustomed to the darkness, we saw [it] was full of German aircraft,’ Cooper said. ‘Motioning me to go to the right, David went to the left, and we busily placed our bombs on the Stukas and Messerschmitts that were in there for repair.’2 They were still laying bombs when Seekings hissed a warning. They stiffened again. Two sentries marched past.

  They finished placing the charges and moved to the next hangar. Seekings nosed his way into a third, and found about thirty crates of what looked like brand new aero-engines. He set bombs on them and yanked safety-pins.

  On the way out they noticed a guardhouse further down the track. The door opened and shut at intervals, transmitting chinks of light, as sentries went in and out. Stirling eased the pin out of a nobbly No. 36 pineapple. ‘We’ll give them something to remember us by,’ he said. He moved silently to the door, and stood poised for a second before kicking it open. ‘We saw that the room was crowded with Germans,’ Cooper recalled, ‘many of whom were asleep. David calmly bowled the grenade across the floor saying, “Share this among you.” He slammed the door and jumped clear …’3 The explosion rocked the building.

  Stirling later called the grenade attack on the guardhouse ‘a silly show of bravado’.4 If the grenade hadn’t exploded, he said, the guards might have had time to save some of the planes. He also confessed that he was not at ease with the action, which seemed to him ‘close to murder’.5 It was almost certainly an impulse animated by his sense of competition with Mayne, and the necessity of convincing his men that he was capable of merciless acts. ‘[Stirling] was too much of
a gentleman,’ commented Sgt. Fred White, an L Detachment man who was to become one of the most highly decorated soldiers in the Regiment. ‘In our job you needed a killer …’6

  They were still behind the hangars when the first Lewes bomb cracked off inside. They pelted across the road and started to clamber up the escarpment. They had covered about three hundred feet when Stirling complained of a massive migraine. He had a needle in his skull, and felt nauseous. His head was spinning, his peripheral vision had gone haywire.

  Stirling’s migraine is a possible indicator that he had taken a whopping dose of Benzedrine that night. A highly addictive member of the amphetamine group – ‘speed’ – the drug kept the men awake, made them more active, but also increased recklessness and clouded reasoning. Benzedrine was on issue to SAS troops, but most weren’t aware of how dangerous it could be. The extent of Benzedrine use among wartime SAS troops will never be known for certain, but remains a hidden factor behind many SAS actions. One symptom of the ‘let down’ after a large dose is intense migraine. It is at least possible that Benzedrine consumption was responsible not only for the crippling migraine Stirling suffered on the Benina operation, but also for what he himself called his ‘silly show of bravado’ that night.

  They plumped down in the scrub to rest and watch the show. Below them, the hangar roofs were blasted off like volcano-plugs, releasing towering gouts of flame and smoke. The heat had set off the 20mm cannons on the Messerschmitt in the first hangar, and tracer bullets were scorching air, creasing the darkness with tramlines of light. The guardhouse was still blazing. The fuel dump suddenly went up in a boiling wedge of brilliant gases. Firefighters were running about like ants, and anti-aircraft guns were walloping blindly into the night. It was, Cooper recalled, ‘stupendous’, ‘a fantastic firework display’.7 It was difficult to believe that so much chaos had been caused by just three men, and the contents of their knapsacks.