The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  The Italian sentry asked for the password. When Kahane began to harangue him in German, he turned out the guard – a dozen Afrika Korps men with sub-machine guns, under a sergeant major. ‘[The] sergeant major came up to the truck,’ Storie remembered, ‘and took a good look at us. Kahane spoke German and said we were on a special mission, but he knew we were British.’10

  Both Storie and Cooper recalled that at this point, Mayne cocked his Colt .45. ‘The German stiffened,’ Cooper said, ‘the rest of us instantly followed suit with a series of clicks. The German … must have realized that he would be the first to be gunned down if he tried to detain us … [he] gave the order for the barrier to be removed.’11

  As it shut behind them, their flesh began to creep. Stirling was acutely aware that the guardhouse where he had lobbed a grenade two nights ago was less than a mile away. There was no way they could get back through the barrier, and now they were in a trap – the message would be passed on by wireless, and every Axis unit in the area would be on the alert for them. Mayne was about to skip off the road when Stirling spotted lights a few hundred yards on. ‘It would have been stupid to drive right on to Benghazi,’ he said, ‘though I have to admit the temptation was there. I was determined … that we shouldn’t leave without dropping a calling card somewhere.’12

  Cooper remembered the place as a truck-stop and filling-station that had been occupied by the Italians. ‘Some of us jumped out and began fixing bombs on to anything that was of military use,’ he said. Stirling recalled only a small petrol-store, where the team ‘planted a few bombs for good measure’, and some trucks a little further on, where they did the same. ‘I seem to remember there was a fire-fight there,’ he said.13

  Storie recalled a more elaborate scenario – a horde of Germans and Italians drinking on the veranda of a café. ‘We drew up alongside the café and opened fire,’ he said. ‘They didn’t have time to defend themselves, we just blew everything to bits.’14 In a letter to his brother, Mayne described ‘a lot of tents and trucks and people [and we]… started blowing the hell out of them – short, snappy and exhilarating’.15 The official history records the damage as ‘five trucks riddled with MG fire, and “many of the enemy” killed’.16

  Afterwards, Mayne switched off the headlights and zoomed off the road towards the Wadi Qattara, directed by Stirling, who had taken a compass-bearing. There was only one place where they could cross the wadi to be sure of hitting a route up the escarpment. Mayne suddenly spotted the lights of an enemy vehicle trying to cut them off. He drove like a maniac, outrunning the enemy, plunging down through the wadi. The opposite side was so steep that the men had to jump out and push.

  They crested the wadi-side, and were driving steadily along the road up the escarpment, when Bob Lilley suddenly yelled, ‘Get out quick! There’s a fuse burning.’17 Cooper smelt it at once, and realized they had twenty seconds. ‘I have never left a vehicle more quickly in my whole life,’ he said. He vaulted over Mayne, hit the bonnet, and sprinted away. Mayne didn’t try to brake. He rolled out of the driving-seat and let the Chevvy travel on, while Stirling flopped out of the other side. The rest flew in all directions off the back. The truck got a few yards before it blatted apart in a luminescent fireball. ‘The explosion bowled us all over,’ Cooper remembered. ‘The truck was blown to kingdom come.’18

  32. ‘The target was a fat and sitting bird’

  The previous night, while Mayne, Storie and Lilley were ramping up the Green Mountains, Georges Bergé, George Jellicoe and the three French enlisted men had cut the wire at Prassas. It was a close-run thing – a German patrol actually stalked up on them while they were doing it. They feigned sleep. ‘The patrol had a torch,’ Jellicoe said, ‘and stopped within one foot of my head. A happy snore from one of the Free French satisfied them that we were a party of German drunks!’1

  After the soldiers had slunk off, they went on cutting. Moments later, though, they heard the patrol coming back. Just then, aircraft zoned over them – two Blenheim bombers fishtailing over the landing-ground, dumping bombs. The bombs whistled down and crunched into buildings wide of the parked planes. They split apart in carnelian sears. Flames licked up. Germans scuttled with fire-extinguishers. Bergé’s team used the confusion to slide inside the wire.

  The fires lit up their targets, grasshopper-shadows glinting metal. They lay low for an hour to let the furore die down, then shimmied along the lines of planes, easing bombs into place. They counted nineteen Junkers JU88 bombers, two fighters, and a Fieseler Storch spotter. Jellicoe whamped charges on crated aircraft-parts and trucks. He jerked out safety-pins. They had taken care of less than half the planes when the first bomb ripped off in a spurt of black and methyl orange. Wing-parts and glass whiplashed. The aircraft undercarriage buckled and the plane pitched. Dark figures swarmed across the landing-ground.

  Bergé and Jellicoe watched the crackling debris, stunned. They had set the time-pencils to two-hour delays, but the Blenheim sortie had cost them over an hour. This was the snag in pressing the time-pencils before sticking the bombs. There was no chance of completing the task. Bergé clocked a troop of soldiers being marched smartly out of the western gate. He and his men fell into step behind them and tramped out unnoticed. They peeled off into the bushes just as the rest of the charges shuddered massively, igniting the bomb dumps – a cauldron of burning gases bubbled, wheezing across the area with battering concussion. Beaming all over his blackened face, Bergé said he was recommending the whole team for the Croix de Guerre. Jellicoe offered his congratulations, but remained convinced that if the RAF raid hadn’t intervened they could have bagged the lot. ‘The target was a fat and sitting bird,’ he commented in his report. ‘I feel that the results achieved were not commensurate with the opportunity presented.’2

  They backtracked to their cliff, where they picked up Petrakis. The area around Heraklion was relatively open, and their aim was to get out as quickly as possible, and to hike across the spine of the island to the sparsely populated south coast, where the sea could be approached only by a series of coves. Their destination was an inlet near Krotos. Here, they would meet with SBS parties who had raided airfields at Kastelli and Timbaki. All three groups would be extracted by Porcupine, a caique piloted by Lt. Cmdr. John Campbell, RNVR.

  They spent the next three days trekking across granite hills, through gorges and down tree-strewn valleys, fed and guided by locals. ‘Contact with the local population was hard to avoid,’ Jellicoe reported, ‘and in the end led to betrayal and disaster.’3 On the way, Petrakis went off on a foray and brought back chilling news. As a reprisal for the attack on Prassas, the Germans had shot fifty Cretans at Gazi, just to the west of Heraklion. The number included Tito Georgiadis, a former governor-general, a seventy-year-old priest and a handful of Jewish prisoners. Petrakis said the executions had caused a wave of bad feeling against the British.

  On 19 June they found a hide in a narrow gorge under the mountain wall, within two hours of the coast. There they were visited by a villager who offered to bring them food and wine. Bergé was suspicious, and asked Petrakis, who came originally from the local village, if the man could be trusted. Petrakis said he’d been away too long, and couldn’t tell. The Cretan disappeared. Bergé sent Jellicoe and Petrakis, disguised as peasants, to the coast. Their task was to make contact with Cretan agents who would be guiding the trawler in.

  At last light, Bergé’s crew stashed gear into packs and clipped on belts, ready to move. Bergé glanced up and saw three patrols of German soldiers in field-grey greatcoats and angular helmets converging on their hiding-place. He guessed they’d been betrayed. Lifting his Beretta sub-machine gun, he whacked off a burst at the first German, who buckled, with crimson rosettes sprouting from his chest. The enemy broke ranks and dashed for the scrub. The French threw themselves into cover and punched out a volley of gunfire that whanged off the rocks around the enemy and spliffled among the bushes. Fourteen-year-old Pierre Leostic made a break for it, and w
as swept off his feet by a lick of automatic fire. Bergé couldn’t see him, but could hear him moaning. There was another throb of fire, and Leostic suddenly went quiet. The Frenchmen kept shooting until their ammunition was almost finished. After dark they made a final attempt to break out. All of them were wounded and captured.

  As the darkness liquefied into rose and blue next morning, Jellicoe turned up at the position. There was no one there. He saw his comrades’ kit laid out neatly – too neatly, he thought. When it was fully light, he searched the nearby valleys and ran into two young Cretans in sheepskins, who gesticulated at him in excitement. Jellicoe spoke no Greek, but he got the message. He had to leave – now. He jogged back to the beach, where he hid out with Petrakis and the SBS teams until they were picked up by Porcupine on 23 June. Being rowed out to the boat, Jellicoe passed an SOE agent and his radio-op being rowed in. The agent was Patrick Leigh Fermor, a fluent Greek-speaker, who was after the war to become one of Britain’s most distinguished travel-writers.

  33. ‘I suppose you’ve had a good time then’

  Stirling and Mayne made it back to the LRDG base at Siwa on 21 June. The most famous oasis in the Egyptian desert, it lay in a depression of sparkling white salt-flats under the dunes of the Great Sand Sea, encompassing a forest of date-palms and hundreds of sweet-water springs. At LRDG headquarters in the dilapidated hotel, Stirling learned the bitter news of the fall of ‘Fortress Tobruk’. Its garrison, the twenty-thousand-strong 2 South African Division, had surrendered to Rommel after a week’s siege. Ritchie had pulled the Eighth Army back to Alam Halfa, near Alamein, only sixty miles from Cairo. For Winston Churchill, the war had reached its nadir: ‘Defeat is one thing,’ he said. ‘Disgrace another.’1

  After their Chevvy had blown up, Stirling’s group had tabbed to a Senussi camp, where they were fed by the Arabs until Gurdon found them four days later. When he heard the fate of his truck, he chortled. ‘I suppose you’ve had a good time then,’ he said.2 Lt. Jaquier’s section had arrived in Siwa four days earlier. They had lucked out at Barce. The Germans seemed to know they were coming. They had crept to within a few hundred yards of the landing-ground when all its landing-lights suddenly flashed on, dazzling them. They melted into the darkness, blowing a petrol dump as they went. André Zirnheld’s section had come in with Mayne and Stirling. They had had better luck on Berka Main landing-ground. Mayne and his section had heard shooting from that direction, but it turned out that the French had got the better of the fight – they claimed at least fifteen enemy kills. To Mayne’s fury, they had also managed to take out eleven aircraft to his one.

  Guild’s patrol lurched in a few hours after Stirling’s, carrying Jourdan and Buck. Jourdan was in tears. ‘I felt very depressed coming back alone,’ he said, ‘but I was so grateful to Stirling … he never doubted my capabilities … he gave me the opportunity to create a second French unit.’3 It turned out later that Jourdan’s Mertuba group under Jean Tourneret had all been bagged. Joined by de Bourmont and his mate, they had made the RV near Mertuba, but next morning found themselves encircled by Germans. There was a ferocious shoot-out. Almost all of them took hits, and some were wounded seriously. According to the official history, Tourneret’s group blew no fewer than twenty aircraft before they went down.

  Stirling considered the raids a success, but it was difficult to say how many of the planes they had taken out were directly relevant to the Malta convoys. Even the total number of aircraft the SAS and SBS put out of action remains uncertain. Official figures make it around seventy. At different times, Stirling himself made it as few as thirty-seven and as many as seventy-five. The strategic purpose failed. Of the total of seventeen ships that set out for Malta that June, only two got through. All the others were sunk or turned back.

  Protecting these convoys from attack was beyond the capacity of the SAS. Many of the ships were crippled by torpedoes from German U-Boats. Others were sunk by aircraft based on Sicily or the Italian mainland, far out of Stirling’s reach. The good news was that the two ships that did get through brought enough supplies to keep Malta going for the next two months, until a larger convoy succeeded in reaching port. Stirling maintained that the seventy planes the combined SAS/SBS teams knocked out tipped the balance. ‘A lot of the convoy were destroyed,’ he said, ‘but some got through. [Without our action] there was no way they would have got through. Therefore we regard what we did on [those raids] as saving Malta.’4

  34. ‘Our job was to constantly invent new techniques’

  At the end of June Benito Mussolini landed his private plane at Derna, with a transport aircraft carrying a thoroughbred white charger ready for his triumphal entry into Cairo. At No.10 Tonbalat Street ‘The Flap’ was in progress. RAF bomber squadrons were being evacuated to Palestine, and the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet was weighing anchor at Alexandria. On Wednesday 1 July the acrid fumes of burning paper permeated GHQ ME as secret documents were incinerated – the day would be remembered in military folklore as ‘Ash Wednesday’. Neil Ritchie, the ‘awfully nice chap’ who had assisted the foundation of the SAS, had been bowler-hatted by Auchinleck a week earlier. Like Cunningham, whom he had replaced eight months before, Ritchie had begun to think defensively. ‘The Auk’ had now assumed direct command of the Eighth Army. G(R) was organizing ‘stay behind’ parties. Guy Prendergast had moved the LRDG to Kufra on the Sudanese border. Stirling was considering withdrawing as far south as Nairobi.

  But not yet. On 3 July almost the entire strength of the SAS – a hundred men – was drawn up in jeeps and trucks on the leafy streets of Garden City. French and British SAS-men, with wings up, were brewing tea on the pavement under the eyes of disapproving Redcaps.

  At Peter Stirling’s flat near the British Embassy a council of war was in progress. Mayne and Fraser were there, with Cooper and Seekings, Jellicoe, Alston, Jourdan, Zirnheld, Jaquier and a group of recently recruited officers, some of whom had laughed in Stirling’s face when he had invited them to join L Detachment a year earlier. One of these was Lt. Carol Mather, Welsh Guards. ‘I had to admit that I’d been wrong,’ he confessed, ‘in effect, I had to eat humble pie in asking to rejoin [Stirling].’1 With Mather were two friends, twenty-year-old Stephen Hastings, Scots Guards, and Sandy Scratchley, 3 County of London Yeomanry, an Old Harrovian built like a rake-handle, who had been a jockey in civvy-street.

  The flat was a riot of chatter, hazy with tobacco smoke. The briefing was late, because Peter Stirling’s zealous house-keeper, ‘Mo’, had hidden the top-secret maps in the bathroom during a tidying-up session, and it had taken some time to retrieve them. Now, while Stirling jabbed ‘Mo’ reproachfully in the midriff with his pipe, a group of SAS-men poured over the maps, and George Jellicoe briefed the party on the route they would be taking behind enemy lines. In another corner sat a bevy of demure and rather pretty young ladies, among them Countess Hermione Ranfurly, sipping cocktails as a prelude to visiting the racetrack. ‘The va et viens between the two groups,’ recalled Stephen Hastings, ‘added much spice to the proceedings.’2

  In the few days since Stirling and Mayne had returned from the Malta Convoy ops, there had been a crucial change in SAS capacity. Mayne had suggested to Stirling that he should put in a claim for a consignment of M38 Utility Trucks – Willys Bantam General Purpose vehicles, known as ‘GPs’ or ‘jeeps’ – that had just been sent by the US government. Mayne, who had been known to trek as far as fifty miles on his way in and out of targets, and had lost two good men in the process, thought the jeeps would cut down the walking time. The vehicles were tiny in comparison with the LRDG Fords and Chevrolets. They were designed to carry only two men and their equipment, but they had four-wheel drive, which would make them more handy for climbing up and down escarpments.

  Stirling managed to ‘borrow’ fifteen Willys on the wildly optimistic promise that they would be returned intact. He also managed to acquire twenty brand new Ford three-ton trucks. The jeeps and trucks didn’t by themselves mean an end t
o the partnership with the LRDG. Though the SAS had driver-mechanics and navigators of their own, they still relied on Prendergast’s boys to guide them in and provide wireless communications. The jeeps had been fitted with sun-compasses, auxiliary fuel-tanks, and coolant-condensers to prevent the engines from overheating – all Ralph Bagnold/LRDG inventions.

  From the RAF, Stirling had picked up a dozen Vickers Type K gas-operated machine guns, stockpiled as spares for the now decomissioned Bombays and Wellesley bombers. The guns had been introduced in 1935, but were already obsolete as aircraft armaments due to the introduction of the powered gun-turret. Ever since Johnny Cooper had used a Type K to break out of the Italian ambush at Bouerat, the SAS had been impressed with the weapon. At a thousand rounds a minute it was the fastest-firing machine gun in the theatre, and for the SAS the ear-splitting racket it made was a psychological advantage. The gun was fed by hundred-round top-mounted pan mags that were cleaner to use than belts, and the ejected cases were snagged in gunnysacks to prevent them blinding the shooter. Its only disadvantage was its tendency to jam in hot weather. Stirling had several of the jeeps fitted with special pintle mountings to hold Vickers in pairs and singles. He set up three on the ‘Blitz Buggy’.