The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  29. ‘The lorry kept spluttering to a halt’

  A hundred and fifty miles away, north of east across the ‘bulge’ of Cyrenaica, Aspirant Augustin Jourdan of the Free French SAS detachment was running for his life back to his RV, six miles from Derna West airfield. A couple of hours earlier Jourdan had escaped from his German captors when the truck he had been pulled out of had turned into a fireball.

  Jourdan, an ex-French colonial officer in Morocco, had fled from France to Britain when his cadet school had been captured by the Germans. Volunteering for de Gaulle’s Free French Forces in London, he had served on missions in Ethiopia and Syria, where he had met his friend, Major Georges Bergé, currently commanding the French SAS detachment. This was Jourdan’s first mission with the SAS, and after all the careful planning it had gone seriously wrong.

  Jourdan’s part in the Malta Convoy op had been the most tricky of all. His targets were two airfields at Derna and one at Mertuba on the eastern end of the Jebel Akhdar massif. As Stirling knew, these aerodromes were sited on a thousand-foot plateau in a bottleneck on the coastal plain, where a fast run-in by the LRDG was ruled out. Not far behind Axis lines, only a hundred miles from Tobruk, the area was alive with Axis troops.

  While Stirling was wondering how to infiltrate these targets, GHQ pointed him in the direction of the Special Interrogation Group – a dozen German-speaking Jews who had fled to Palestine in the 1930s. Most of them had served in 51 Commando, a unique force recruited originally from Jewish and Arab Palestinians, but later filled up with British troops. The commanding officer, SIG, Captain Herbert Buck MC, of 1/3 Punjab Regiment, was a fluent German-speaker who had broken out of an Axis prison-camp and crossed enemy lines masquerading as a German officer. His only prop was an Afrika Korps peaked cap. The ease of his escape brought him an epiphany: a group of commandos trained to carry out sabotage behind Axis lines, disguised as German soldiers. For the Jewish SIG-men it was a risky proposition – capture would mean torture and certain death.

  To bring his men up to speed on current army slang, Buck had drafted in two bona-fide non-Jewish Afrika Korps NCOs who had defected to the Allies. Their cover-names were ‘Esser’ and ‘Brueckner’ – ex-French Foreign Legionnaires who had fought against the Germans in 1940. Drafted into the German army after the defeat of France, they had been captured by the British and declared themselves anti-Nazi. Brueckner’s real name was Heinrich Brockmann – Esser’s was Walter Essner.

  The plan, put together by Stirling and Buck, was for three five-man groups of Free French SAS under Jourdan to conceal themselves in a convoy of Afrika Korps vehicles, driven and guarded by SIG-men in German uniforms. The SIG would ease them through barriers and checkpoints until they reached Derna and Mertuba airfields. There, at midnight on 12 June, the French would plant their Lewes bombs. They would then beat a retreat and meet up with an LRDG patrol under Captain Alastair Guild of the New Zealand Divisional Cavalry.

  The only flaw was that when the convoy left the LRDG base at Siwa on 6 June, they went without the June password. Buck, driving up front in a military version Volkswagen with Afrika Korps TAC signs, hoped they could get by without it. There was also an Opel staff car, but the fifteen Frenchmen were secreted in two trucks, one a German three-tonner, the other a British 30cwt lorry done-up as a ‘captured’ vehicle, with the Afrika Korps palm-tree and swastika motif.

  They reached the drop-off point five days later. The SIG-men donned Afrika Korps uniforms and kit authentic to the last detail – Luger automatics, Schmeisser sub-machine guns, bayonets and ‘potato-masher’ grenades. Buck wore the uniform of a German private, and the two defectors, Esser and Brueckner, were turned out as Afrika Korps NCOs. The French SAS, dressed in overalls and forage-caps, and carrying .45 calibre Colt automatic pistols and a brace of No.36 Mills grenades each, would from this point dip under blankets and jerrycans in the back of the vehicles.

  Next morning they passed the first barrier, manned by Italians. Buck engaged the sentries in conversation and persuaded them to hand over the password. He told them his group was taking the vehicles for repair in Derna. Further on, they passed a checkpoint guarded by German military policemen and oiled the wheels by donating a crate of English beer. They said it was ‘spoils of war’.

  By 1200 hours they had set up a base six miles from the Derna airfields. Jourdan wanted to recce all the targets, but Buck vetoed a trip to Mertuba as too risky. Instead, Jourdan and Buck were shipped in for a shufti at Derna East and West. They returned excited, having spotted an entire squadron of Messerschmitt 110s and a dozen Stukas.

  Jourdan gave the final briefing an hour before last light. Cpl. Jean Tourneret would take four men and hit the Mertuba field. They would travel in one truck with an SIG-man driving, and two others on guard. After setting the charges, they would rally at a point nearby. The remaining SAS were divided into two groups under Cpl. Pierre de Bourmont and Jourdan himself. They would go for Derna East and West in a single truck, driven by Brueckner, accompanied by two other SIG-men, Eliyahu Gottlieb and Peter Hass. Buck would hold the base with the Volkswagen and the remaining ‘bogus Germans’.

  They split up at 2100 hours. The Derna aerodromes were a fifteen-minute drive away, but from the start Jourdan’s truck had engine-trouble. ‘The lorry kept spluttering to a halt,’ he recalled, ‘and Brueckner would get out and spend five minutes with his head under the bonnet.’1 The tension spiralled. After an hour, Brueckner drew up near Derna West. Hidden under the baggage at the back, Jourdan could hear music from a cinema or a wireless in the hangars. He heard Brueckner tell Hass he was going to the guardroom to ask for a spanner.

  Jourdan was wound up after the stop-go journey. Suddenly, he heard the unmistakable crunch of boots on the tarmac. Whipping back the flap, he was grabbed by two Germans and yanked out of the truck. It was surrounded by a platoon of nervous-looking enemy soldiers with Schmeissers. ‘Heraus! Aber schnell!’ came the chilling order. The French SAS-men shifted blankets and jerry-cans. They jumped out with their hands up. For a moment they milled around in confusion. Then the truck blew. Tongues of flame licked, shards of twisted metal spewed, black smoke billowed. The Germans hit the deck. For a second, Jourdan didn’t know what was going on. Something told him that Hass, the SIG-man left in the truck, had blown himself up rather than face torture. In the same moment he jerked himself free and greased off into the night. Cpl. de Bourmont and his mate followed suit.

  Jourdan sprinted like lightning. He made the shadows on the northern rim of the airfield and halted to let de Bourmont catch up. He hung on for ten minutes, gulping air, but de Bourmont and his mate never showed. It took Jourdan two hours to cover the six miles back to the meet-up point, where he found Buck leaning up against the Volkswagen, smoking a cigarette.

  Buck was staggered. He had no way of knowing that the entire op had been exposed by Rommel’s Rebecca Ring spies in Cairo, and supposed that Brueckner had simply sold them out. That meant the RV was compromised, and they couldn’t hold out for stragglers. They poled into the Volkswagen and roared off towards the RV with Alastair Guild’s patrol.

  30. They crammed down Benzedrine tabs and kept stag

  At about the time Jourdan was being jerked out of the truck at Derna, his boss, Georges Bergé, was tromping over lush hillsides towards Prassas airfield, near Heraklion on Crete. There were five other men with him. The going was tough. The team was weighed down with sixty-pound packs of Lewes bombs, time-pencils, detonators, plastic explosives, rations and water. Bergé had served in one of the earliest French parachute units, 601 Compagnie d’Infanterie de l’Air, and had escaped France at Dunkirk. In Britain he had been authorized to raise his own airborne company, and had conducted a number of raids into occupied France. Stirling was later to acknowledge him as one of the co-founders of the SAS.

  The three other Free French SAS-men in Bergé’s group were Sgt. Jacques Mouhot, a quick-witted Breton, Parachutist Jack Sibard, a former merchant seaman, and Pierre Leostic, who at onl
y fourteen had usurped Johnny Cooper’s place as the ‘kid’ of the SAS. His guide was 2.Lt. Costas Petrakis, Royal Hellenic Army, and his second-in-command twenty-three-year-old Lt. George, the Earl Jellicoe, Coldstream Guards. Son of the late First World War naval hero Admiral John Rushworth Jellicoe, George had returned to the Guards after the disbandment of Layforce, and had been wounded in January during Rommel’s push to Gazala. The previous year, while serving with the 8 Commando detachment at Tobruk, he and a fellow officer, Lt. Carol Mather, Welsh Guards, had failed in a brave attempt to put in a two-man raid on Gazala. Jellicoe, to whom Stirling had promised the post of Detachment 2IC, hadn’t completed SAS training, but Stirling had assigned him to assist Bergé because he spoke fluent French and had some knowledge of Crete.

  At about 0300 hours, while Jourdan and Buck were burning rubber on the way to Guild’s position, Mayne and his party skulking near Berka, and Stirling being dragged uphill by his corporals, Bergé and his party approached the barbed-wire fence round Prassas aerodrome. They were inching forward when a sudden movement betrayed them. A sentry croaked in German. There was a muzzle-flash and a round whomped past. They broke up, dropped into the brush, and lay prone, expecting a follow-up. Nothing happened. They regrouped and boxed around the airfield. Approaching from a different angle, they found their way barred by another sentry.

  They squatted in the underbrush, and held a whispered conflab. The sentry could be taken out, but that would cost them the element of surprise. The raid was supposed to be synchronized with the strikes in Cyrenaica, and with two other raids on Crete being carried out by SBS folbot teams. A quick dekko at his watch, though, told Bergé they had only an hour of darkness left – not enough time to carry out the mission. He decided to pull out to a lying-up place and have another bash the next night.

  The Heraklion op, the first SAS seaborne mission, had been planned by Bergé and Jellicoe with the help of the Royal Navy and the Free Greek Navy. The team had been shipped from Alexandria aboard the Greek submarine Triton on a five-day voyage. In the early hours of 11 June the SAS made landfall in three inflatable commando-boats at San Barbara creek, about twenty-five miles north of Prassas. While the rest of the team brushed the beach free of tracks, Jellicoe and Mouhot dog-paddled out to sea with the boats, weighted with stones, and scuttled them with their daggers.

  An hour after landing they set off, intending to lie up near enough to eyeball their target at first light. This turned out to be a tall order. The country was steep and jagged, and they had overburdened themselves. In addition to Lewes bombs and spare explosive, each man was carrying grenades, a Colt .45 pistol, a Beretta sub-machine gun, a dagger, a compass, maps and aerial photos.

  One thing Jellicoe didn’t like was the way they were approached several times by Cretan hill-men, in turbans, high boots and sheepskins. The men carried ancient rifles, and some of them greeted the team in English. The SAS blew them off, but by the time the first shards of sunlight turned terracotta among massed terraces of cloud, they had made less than fifteen miles. They ducked into a cave that stank of goat. Petrakis and the parachutists grabbed some shut-eye, but Jellicoe didn’t trust the Cretans, and didn’t want to be caught napping. He and Bergé crammed down Benzedrine tabs and kept stag. They moved out three and a half hours after last light.

  After the first aborted attempt at the airfield on the night of 12/13, they withdrew a few miles south-west of Prassas, locating a cleft in a rock-face that gave them an overview of the aerodrome. It was too exposed to use during daytime, but at last light they counted more than sixty Junkers JU88 bombers parked on the field. Bergé reckoned there were more than there had been the previous night. If they could get them all, it would be the most successful SAS ‘bag’ to date. It had to be a major jumping-off place for the assault on the Malta convoy. As the shadows lengthened, they checked their weapons and explosives, and prepared to move out for their second try.

  31. ‘We had finally emulated Paddy Mayne on our own’

  Splayed in tussock-grass on Benghazi plain, Mayne and Storie thought they were in the bag. They lay there snuffling dust and grit. The Germans were quartering the ground with the command car rolling at snail’s pace beside them. The enemy were a hundred yards away when they stopped and clustered round the vehicle. Suddenly, they leapt into the back. The engine roared, wheels churned gravel. The SAS-men waited until the car was out of sight, then scoped the area. All looked clear. They picked themselves up and continued their march out.

  The plain was as rough and wrinkled as antique calfskin – dark veins of sedge, thorn-bush, patches of denuded limestone. It stretched to the foot of the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain, a sixteen-hundred-foot massif of flaking naked scarps, transverse wadis forested by cypress, cork-oak, Aleppo pine and juniper. The foothills were furred in maquis scrub, brilliant yellow flowers, spiky goat-grass. Arab camps were dotted across the plain, melting into the background – black tents of goat’s-hair circled by sheep-flocks. Soon, they came across a nest of tents pitched in the lee of the escarpment. The Senussi tribes living on the northern side of the Jebel Akhdar in Cyrenaica were not true Bedouin, but semi-nomadic cultivators and shepherds. The Senussiya was a once-powerful Islamic fundamentalist brotherhood founded in the eighteenth century, whose people had been continuously persecuted, displaced and massacred by the Italians since Libya became an Italian colony in 1912. They hated their colonial masters. Their leader, Grand Senussi Sayid Idriss, was in exile in Egypt. He had thrown in his lot with the British, and had exhorted all members of the Senussi fraternity to assist them.

  Some of the Senussi were in the pay of the enemy, so seeking shelter in an Arab camp was a leap of faith. Mayne had got away with it on his March op, though, and decided it was worth the gamble. The tribesmen, in long cloaks and tight headcloths, had the granite-carved faces of sphinxes. They were taciturn until they found out their guests were Inglezi. Then they ushered them into a tent, where Mayne was astonished to find Bob Lilley contentedly quaffing bitter tea the colour of drain-water.

  Lilley didn’t know what had happened to Warburton. They had split up, and just afterwards he’d heard a burst of fire that didn’t bode well for his mate. At dawn, he had found himself in a German laager about two miles in diameter. Hiding in a thicket of gorse near a house, he was almost sniffed out by an Alsatian being walked by an Italian girl. When the dog came too near, Lilley thumped it on the nose. Dumping his kit, he set off to walk across the camp, through battalions of enemy soldiers washing, shaving, lining up for breakfast, and buffing their equipment. He was dressed in khaki shorts and a shirt similar to their uniform. No one took any notice of him.

  About two miles past the camp, though, he was accosted by an Italian soldier on a bike, who tried to arrest him. ‘We were neither of us armed,’ Lilley said, ‘but he tried to make out I was his prisoner … so I had to strangle him. Funny, killing a chap with your bare hands … I can still see his white face and dark brown eyes clearly. His cap had toppled off in the struggle so I put it back over his head to make him look more natural.’1

  About ten miles over the Benghazi plain Lilley stopped at the Senussi camp for a rest. Vehicles were still patrolling the plain looking for the SAS raiders. After a couple of hours in the tent, the Arabs told him there were two soldiers coming towards them. He had a shufti, and recognized Paddy Mayne and Jimmy Storie.2 The three of them left the Arabs an hour before dusk, padding through esparto grass and thorn-scrub. After dark they broached the escarpment, following well-trodden goat-paths through thick maquis shrub and groves of ilex, arbutus and wild olive. They made the LRDG position next morning to find Stirling, Cooper and Seekings already there. They had arrived the previous morning.

  Stirling had recovered from his migraine, thanks to copious quantities of tea laced with rum, supplied by Robin Gurdon’s patrol. He listened to Mayne’s tale with a wry grin on his face, and couldn’t resist the opportunity to crow. ‘It’s a bit of a change to see my fires lighting up the skies ins
tead of yours, Paddy,’ he told Mayne.3 ‘[Stirling] was extremely elated,’ Cooper recalled. ‘That we had finally emulated Paddy Mayne on our own.’4

  Stirling was so elated, in fact, that he suggested Mayne should come and see ‘his fires’ for himself. Mayne rose to the challenge, jibing that he had to make sure Stirling ‘wasn’t exaggerating’.5 They decided to borrow one of Gurdon’s Chevrolets and drive down to Benghazi to ‘shoot up some stuff along the road’.6 Gurdon agreed reluctantly, but pointed out that the idea was rash. The plain was teeming with Germans on the lookout for them.

  It was bravado of a kind that would be deprecated in the later SAS. In his reflective mode, Stirling himself deplored this type of action. His main criticism of the French SAS contingent, for instance, was that they were too anxious to ‘prove themselves’ and erred on the side of ‘over-gallantry’. ‘We tried to indicate to them that it was rather a disgrace to be a casualty,’ he said, ‘because after so much training … it was very important for them to survive.’7 In this case, his success on the Benina raid – his first major triumph as a raider – had evidently switched his mind to a different track. Once again, though, the impulse grew out of his need to compete with Mayne. ‘It was foolish, of course,’ he commented later, ‘but that’s how [Paddy and I] were.’8

  All six SAS-men piled into the Chevvy, with an SIG-man called Karl Kahane, a morose Jew who had done twenty years in the German army before emigrating to Palestine. Mayne took the wheel and they careened off the escarpment and skeetered down the steep Regima–Benghazi road with their headlights on. Stirling, in the front passenger seat, kept craning his neck to catch a glimpse of his hangars, hoping they’d still be on fire. He kept assuring Mayne that there were no roadblocks. He was wrong. ‘We got about five, six miles and then we saw a red light being swung,’ Mayne said. ‘That didn’t worry us as always before it was only Italians and we[’d] shout tedesco [German] and drive past. But they were getting wise to us and this time we see a bloody big contraption like a five-barred gate that was mixed up with a mile or so of barbed wire.’9