The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  Rommel was sixty miles from Alexandria. His advance was blocked by the Eighth Army at Alamein, a position Auchinleck had chosen carefully. It was a thirty-five-mile bottleneck, defended to the north by the sea and to the south by the Qattara Depression, a vast hole in the desert that had itself been an inland sea in prehistoric times, but was now a treacherous area of mish-mish sand and saltmarsh. The Auk had come up fighting. The last great battle of his career would be fought, as his biographer put it, ‘in some stony pass beneath a torrid unsparing sun, that knows no romance and no illusion’.3

  Auchinleck intended to hit back on 7 July, to prevent Rommel from boxing him in. The SAS, Stirling told his boys, would strike at five or six landing-grounds on the same night. They would set up a forward operating base at Qarat Tartura, on the very edge of the depression. Their new three-tonners would carry supplies for three weeks. They would stay in the field and bash Rommel’s airfields and supply-lines night after night until something gave way.

  The convoy roared off that afternoon, cutting through the teeming Bulak quarter and over the bridges of the Gezira. Brought to a halt in the narrow streets, the jeeps were hemmed in by a river of humanity – men in pyjama-cloth tatters, women and urchins, laden camels, trains of donkeys lugging panniers of sand, donkey-carts piled with loaves. Half-starved phantoms leered down on them from galleries of lurching balconies festooned with threadbare rags. The wave of voices, honking horns, braying donkeys, coughing camels and barking dogs was overwhelming. Everywhere there were cries of ‘Backsheesh!’ ‘To my … ear the constant babble of Arabic had a quality of sustained hysteria,’ wrote Stephen Hastings. ‘… What was it to them who marched across their land, made war, lived or died.’4

  The city gave way to cultivated land. They drove through a straggle of villages, but soon the smells of dung and rotting vegetation passed behind them, giving way to the chalk and flint scent of the desert. The track ran out.

  Next day, escorted by a detachment of Military Police, the SAS convoy slipped through Eighth Army lines and hit the Palm Leaf Road – an ancient caravan track running along the north edge of the Qattara Depression. The country on their right flank was a wasteland of rock, lone fangs, sawtooth ridges. To their left, the walls of the great hollow dropped sheer to its floor, a thousand feet below. They linked up with LRDG forward patrols under Captain Robin Gurdon and Lt. Alastair Timpson, Scots Guards, who guided them to Qara, a hamlet on the edge of the depression where a vast block of sandstone protruded out of the desert.

  Six SAS parties were tagged to raid airfields at Sidi Barrani, ad-Dhaba, and at two sites sacred to SAS tradition, Baggush and Fuka – now behind Rommel’s lines. Mayne and Stirling decided to take on Baggush themselves. Johnny Cooper would be going along without his alter ego, Seekings, whom Stirling had sent to a REME – Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers – field workshop to get advice on strengthening the jeeps’ springs. As they set off in the Blitz Buggy, a jeep and a three-tonner, Cooper realized that this was the first time Stirling and Mayne had ever carried out a raid together.

  It was an eight-hour drive in broad daylight. In the late afternoon, they passed through the remnants of Auchinleck’s offensive – burned-out tanks, smoking hulks of trucks and armoured cars. After dark, they left the escort on the Fuka escarpment and descended to the main road. A mile from Baggush they split into two groups. Mayne’s six-strong section would trek into the airfield with ten Lewes bombs apiece, while Stirling and two men would set up a roadblock. Intelligence had reported heavy enemy traffic on the Baggush–Fuka road, but they encountered nothing. Stirling guessed that the enemy had been scared off by a British light-artillery column they had sighted earlier, and which had put down two hundred shells on Fuka. He was furious that he hadn’t been informed about it by Eighth Army.

  Mayne’s group sloped off into the shadows, lugging bombs. Stirling and his two men set up shop by the road and waited. The deadline ticked by and there were no whizzbangs from Mayne. They were still clock-watching at 0135 hours, when the sky flared. Cooper heard a kettledrum boom like a peal of dry thunder. ‘There they go,’ he grinned. More rumbles followed. Stirling counted them off. By the time he had counted twenty-two, the whole skyline was a shimmering aurora borealis of orange and red. Over an hour later Mayne’s bulk eased out of the shadows. To Stirling’s surprise, he let fly a string of curses. ‘The bloody bombs wouldn’t work,’ he declared. They had counted forty aircraft on the landing-ground, but it had taken them some time to get in because the planes were parked in clusters and were heavily guarded. The really bad news was that half the Lewes bombs hadn’t detonated. Mayne found out later that the primers had been put in too early, and had got damp from the lubricant. ‘It’s enough to break your heart,’ he said.

  There was a moment’s hiatus. Stirling was thinking about the Vickers Ks that were mounted on the jeep and Blitz Buggy, and the fact that they had been designed as aircraft guns. Lewes had drummed the idea of ‘strategic damage’ into them – it was no good blowing a plane if its parts could be ‘cannibalized’–used to refit other damaged aircraft. The machines had to be totalled. Stirling thought that if they could engage the planes at close quarters, the Vickers could rip them to shreds. He decided that they would drive back into the aerodrome and open up with their machine guns.

  Stirling was gambling that the airfield garrison would not be expecting to get banjoed again immediately. He was right. They drove the Blitz Buggy and the jeep slowly into the Baggush landing-ground, ten yards apart. No one fired at them. The enemy gunners were constrained by the risk of shooting up their own aircraft. ‘Shoot low. Go for the petrol tanks,’ was Stirling’s only order.

  Five Vickers Ks swivelled and rumbled in a terrifying surge of noise. A plane went up, heaving into strangled bits of metal, spewing fire and gasoline fumes. The heat singed the gunners’ beards and eyebrows. Stirling and Mayne tooled the accelerators gingerly at fifteen miles an hour as the machine guns ratcheted out armour-piercing incendiaries and tracer. Plane after plane exploded around them until they were moving through a great dark boulevard between walls of dazzling flame. Cooper, manning the forward Vickers on the Blitz Buggy, pumped his way through two hundred-round drums, and was into a third when the weapon jammed.

  It took no more than five minutes. Only as they floored gas and sped back into the darkness did the enemy ack-ack guns finally go to work on them. Stirling heard a couple of 20mm shells creasing past him as he drove.

  The first joint raid by Stirling and Mayne had been an astounding success. The SAS team had destroyed thirty-seven aircraft, equalling Fraser’s record ‘bag’ at Ajadabiyya in December ’41. Stirling knew he had found a new modus operandi for the SAS.

  They still had to get away, though. Just after first light, Cooper, in the Blitz Buggy’s driving-seat, spotted a pair of CR-42 biplanes hanging low like gnats on the china blue skyline. It was evident they hadn’t bagged the entire contingent. Cooper guessed from their line of approach that the planes were homing in on their tracks or had spotted dust trails. Minutes later, he, Stirling and Mayne made an undignified exit from the Blitz Buggy, just before it erupted into flames. Lewes had always stressed the importance of taking out all the aircraft to prevent pursuit. Mayne’s attitude was that a raid was like a booze-up – you always paid for it the day after.

  At base they learned that the raiding party sent to Sidi Barrani had found nothing, and the al-Dhaba attack had been called off because Intelligence Branch had reported that it was disused. Jellicoe, who had set up a roadblock instead, had taken two German prisoners who told him that this intelligence was mistaken: al-Dhaba was the busiest Axis landing-ground in the area. Stirling was incensed at the lost opportunity. He sent off Jellicoe and a French officer, Aspirant François Martin, with Robin Gurdon’s LRDG patrol, to take it out.

  Against the advice of the SAS veterans riding with them, Jellicoe, Hastings and Mather pushed on in the face of enemy spotters. The party was strafed and bombed and lost
all its vehicles but one. They limped back, nine men clinging on to a single jeep whose radiator they had patched with bits of plastic explosive and kept filled with their own urine. There was more bad news to come: Gurdon had been killed in an air-attack, and Martin had aborted the mission.

  Mayne, Fraser and Jourdan hit Fuka on 11 July and another bull’s-eye strike by Mayne took out twenty aircraft with Lewes bombs.

  On his visit to GHQ in Cairo two days later, Stirling presented a paper to the Director of Military Operations entitled ‘New Tactics’. It laid out ideas for massed attacks on airfields by SAS armed jeeps. The current Axis method of defence, he wrote, made it much harder for sabotage teams to destroy planes. A massed onslaught by armed vehicles would wreck the new cluster parking tactics. It would goad the enemy into reinstating perimeter defence, and thus make them more vulnerable to sabotage attacks. In future, he reckoned, the enemy would never know which approach the raiders would use. ‘The alternative employment of two methods of attack,’ he went on, ‘… either by a small party on foot reaching its objective without being observed, or by a massed attack in vehicles – should leave the enemy hesitating between two methods of defence.’5

  Stirling’s genius as a special-forces commander lay in the elasticity of his intellect: he saw his campaign as an elegant mental dance with the enemy. The Axis response to the first attacks had been to place sentries under each plane: when this hadn’t worked, they had put up barbed-wire fences, brought in heavier guards, searchlights, armoured cars. It was staying ahead of these subtle shifts that exercised him. However, the truth in this case is probably that the idea of the massed machine-gun attack came to him in a flash, as an immediate solution to the problem, rather than as a reasoned response to enemy tactics. The ‘New Tactics’ paper was a prime example of Stirling’s rhetoric, and didn’t hold up to close analysis. Rather than being torn between two methods of defence, the enemy’s logical response would be a belt-and-braces method that would make both SAS modes of attack more difficult.

  Stirling was right, though, in varying his approaches. The SAS were not shock troops. It was axiomatic with Stirling that they should never be used as ‘cannon fodder’. The Clausewitz style of war – the clash of big battalions battering each other into oblivion with blind bayonet-charges against machine guns and heavy artillery – was exactly the opposite of what he was trying to achieve. When one of the early SAS-men was quizzed about the dangers of parachuting, he rightly answered that it wasn’t nearly so dangerous as a bayonet-charge. Twenty thousand casualties in an hour on the first day of the Somme in 1916 were mute testimony to this fact. SAS style was hit-and-run attacks on enemy resources: planes, trucks, railways, supply dumps, communications centres. Surprise was the keynote, and surprise couldn’t be maintained by obstinate adherence to the same approach.

  In the SAS skills golf bag, demolitions was only a single club. Potentially there were dozens of others. That GHQ classed the SAS as saboteurs made Stirling’s blood boil. In their passion for categorization, the staff refused to see that what he had created was a powerful and cost-effective new weapon – a unit of carefully selected and multi-skilled individuals that could gain ‘maximum achievement for minimum cost’ and could adapt itself to almost any situation. ‘I still hadn’t succeeded in getting those morons to understand that this was a new form of warfare we were developing,’ Stirling said. ‘… I don’t believe that even Auchinleck … had wholly grasped the awesome potential of the SAS …’6 ‘Clearly,’ said Johnny Cooper, ‘our job was to constantly invent new techniques so that the enemy could never predict our operational methods.’7

  When Stirling, Mayne and Jellicoe returned to the new forward operating base at Bir al-Quseir, they found the twenty-man party they had left behind cooling their heels in caves, plagued by a million flies. They were on starvation-rations, and down to half a mug of tea per meal. Jellicoe had brought sweets, cigars, pipes, tins of tobacco, last year’s glossy magazines, and eau-de-cologne to make up for the lack of washing water. Stirling had brought an armada of new jeeps, fitted with two pairs of Vickers Ks apiece. The following day, Stirling received a message from Major Peter Oldfield of the newly-formed Photo Reconnaissance Wing, pinpointing the airfield at Sidi Haneish, thirty miles east-south-east of Mersa Matruh, as a forward operating base for enemy Stuka dive-bombers. Stirling decided to hit the aerodrome with a dozen jeeps and a patrol of the LRDG.

  He held a dress rehearsal in the desert with twenty jeeps, experimenting with two formations: line abreast to cross the perimeter, and double column to go through the airstrip, the jeeps spaced ten yards apart. The idea was to let rip with a devastating salvo of fire without straying into each other’s sights. They practised wheeling right and left, rattling off hundreds of rounds of live ammunition. ‘The rehearsal was even more terrifying than the actual attack,’ Johnny Cooper said.8

  The night was bright, with a wedge of moon and wisps of cloud. Stirling had deliberately decided to carry out the raid in moonlight, a thing the SAS had never done before. ‘The first attack, at least,’ he had written in his paper, ‘would have the advantage of surprise.’9 Mike Sadler, now permanently attached to the SAS, was navigating. The target lay only forty miles away, and Stirling wanted to hit it at 0130 hours sharp, to give them enough darkness to escape.

  Descending the escarpment, they passed a chilling reminder of the struggle going on around them–fire-warped tanks encircled by mutilated corpses, huddled in bunches or spread-eagled across the serir, eye-sockets staring sightlessly at the moon.

  The LRDG, under Captain Nick Wilder, split off from the SAS patrol, heading north, while the SAS drove east. Shortly, Wilder’s trucks hit a minefield, and one of the Chevrolets was knocked out. Stirling’s group had six punctures and was obliged to make detours for boulder-strewn hammadas. Each delay meant halting the entire column. Time dribbled away, tension rose. After three and a half hours, Stirling stopped and marched over to Sadler, his unlit pipe stuck upside down in his mouth. ‘Where is this bloody airfield then?’ he demanded.

  ‘I think it should be about a mile ahead,’ Sadler said.

  At that moment the desert lit up like a Christmas tree, as the landing-lights of Sidi Haneish went on, no more than a mile away. Stirling jumped. ‘I thought we’d been spotted or betrayed again,’ he said, ‘but it was an aircraft coming in to land. It was perfect for us … I hit the accelerator and charged straight for the aircraft.’10

  About two hundred yards from the perimeter, the jeeps formed into line abreast and stopped. There was a moment’s pause. The drivers’ hands locked on their steering-wheels, feet tickled accelerators. The gunners froze in firing positions, hearts pounding, eyes peeled. Fingers took pressure on triggers. ‘Fire!’ Stirling bellowed. Forty-eight Vickers Ks snarled out in deep-throated unison, in blinding spear-thrusts of blood-red fire at twenty-five thousand rounds a minute. Rounds skimmed the surface, slicing through the defences. The aircraft that had just landed, a Heinkel III, was cut to shreds. Tracer, incendiary and armour-piercing shells stitched a tracery of slashes across its fuselage, and demolished its undercarriage. There was a spatter of return fire from enemy sangars. A broadside silenced it. Axis guards ducked for cover. Dark figures jogged forward to clip the fence with wirecutters, peeling back an entrance.

  Engines growled. Bantams wheeled forward, manoeuvring into double column. Vickers Ks rotated right and left as the vehicles passed through the breach. Jim Almonds’s jeep, second in the left-hand column, crumped into a tank trap with a bang. Almonds and his two gunners reeled out and hit the deck. Before the landing-lights cut, Stirling clocked the insect forms of the aircraft on the apron – Messerschmitts, Junkers, Stukas and Heinkels.

  Guns shuddered, jeeps shook, drumfire tippled in streams of tracer across the airfield. Stirling egged Cooper and Seekings on as they fired. ‘He drove right up the middle of the runway at around twenty mph,’ Cooper said, ‘and either side of us was an assortment of planes … It was like a duck-shoot, j
ust pouring fire into those Junkers and Stukas and watching the bullets tear through the fuselage, and then bang–they’d explode.’11 ‘One after another the planes burst into flames,’ recalled Carol Mather, in the last jeep. ‘Some of the aircraft would only be fifteen yards away, and as I passed them at the end of the column they would glow red and explode with a deafening phut and there would be great heat.’12

  The night was hazy with gas and toxic vapour. Scrap metal flew, shards of glass blew across the sky. Guns jittered, drums emptied, empty cases gunnysacked. Gunners ate smoke and fumes, faces singed by heat, eyes smarting, vision obscured by the nebula of burning gases. They kept on blazing.

  Planes crumpled and crashed as their undercarriages were blasted. Fuel and bomb dumps went up, fires crackled, exploding gases roared. Italians and Germans sucked hot gas, coughed, spluttered, puked, reeled in confusion. Mayne saw a pilot lying with his arms over his head, under the wheels of a blazing Heinkel, too terrified to move. The bomber went up a moment after he passed. Gunners blatted rounds into huts and tents. ‘There was quite a bit of return fire from the guards,’ Cooper recalled, ‘but it wasn’t very accurate. The burning planes and all the smoke obscured [their] view.’13

  A green flare bathed the whole conflagration in a ghostly, quasi-electrical light. Stirling had forgotten to fire it to signal the attack, but now it signalled a wheel to the left. The jeeps turned, the gunners kept firing. A single Breda 20mm ack-ack gun had kept up a steady fire on them from the moment they breached the perimeter. Mather didn’t notice it until they wheeled. ‘[We] were swinging round for another visit,’ he said, when an ack-ack gun some three hundred yards away opened up on us wildly. Our port side gunners returned fire.’14

  Hastings, crouching at the wheel of his jeep, heard the ponka-ponka-ponka of the Breda and saw spears of crimson tracer gouging grooves out of the night. He spotted two Germans lying prone, heads and shoulders raised. ‘There’s two Jerries,’ his rear-gunner gasped.