The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  They were still descending the escarpment when the RAF bombing-raid went in. It was on schedule. Angling a peep at his watch, Stirling became conscious that they were badly behind time. They should have been poised to strike as soon as the bombers wheeled off back to base, but they hadn’t yet made it down the escarpment. Benghazi was still fifteen miles away.

  At the medical post, Pleydell and his drivers heard the bombers truckling overhead. They climbed up to a high point to watch the attack, but could make out only twinkles as the bombs struck. Two hours later, the medical officer was roused from a doze by the buzz of a jeep engine. One of Melot’s party had arrived with the news that Melot, Bailey and Laird were in a bad way.

  Pleydell found Melot twenty minutes later, lying under a greatcoat surrounded by the rest of his section, shivering in the night air. He had been hit by shrapnel from a grenade, and had multiple wounds in the leg, thigh and abdomen. His femur was fractured, and his thigh was peppered with steel fragments. Pleydell was relieved to find that the stomach-wound was only muscle-deep. He had lost a lot of blood, and Pleydell administered morphia and blood-plasma. He loaded him on a stretcher, and shifted him to the medical post.

  Melot’s party had concealed their vehicles out of earshot of the fort and climbed the spur on foot. When challenged by an Italian sentry, Melot grunted in Italian that they were German troops sent to relieve the post. They’d almost made it through the door when the Italians tumbled them, and started shooting and hurling grenades. Melot was hit in the first seconds, but continued hammering away with his Tommy-gun. The battle was short and vicious. Three of the Italians were killed, and two captured: one escaped. The SAS team smashed the wireless gear and bugged out to their vehicles. On the way, Melot collapsed.

  It was 0300 hours by the time Stirling’s group made the foot of the jebel. The RAF bombardment had ceased hours before. The jeeps and trucks raced across the plain towards the town, pulling into file along a tarmac road lined with poplar trees. They were almost on top of the roadblock before they saw it–this time there was no sentry and no swinging red light. The column halted. The barrier was a cantilever gate weighted by an oil-barrel filled with earth, and about a hundred and fifty metres further on was another barrier. Stirling saw barbed wire along the sides of the road, and noticed that the soil seemed to have been disturbed. Jim Almonds, further back, felt uneasy. This was a classic place for an ambush. The road was too narrow to turn round without straying into the minefield.

  Stirling called forward Bill Cumper, who examined the verges and confirmed it was a minefield. Peering out of his jeep, Almonds saw the two officers talking solemnly, Stirling with his unlit pipe stuck upside down in his mouth, as if discussing a game of bowls. Almonds took a dekko at his watch. It was already 0430 hours and if the attack didn’t go in now, they would be caught by daylight on the march out.

  Suddenly Stirling beckoned him forward to the head of the column. Almonds’s target was the harbour mole, and his crew had the furthest to go. Apart from his front- and rear-gunners, McGinn and Fletcher, Almonds had with him an Arab whose job was to guide him to the harbour. Whether or not this was Melot’s LAF-man is not clear. As Almonds drew up near Stirling, the Arab suddenly pivoted himself out of the jeep and raced off into the darkness. Almonds glanced after him open-mouthed, then looked at Stirling. For a moment time seemed frozen. Almonds had a fleeting impression that his CO was completely lost. Then Stirling said, ‘Are you all right?’

  Almonds nodded ‘OK’.

  ‘Right-o,’ Stirling said. ‘Carry on.’

  Cumper opened the catch on the barrier, and the bar flew up. Almonds gunned the engine. Cumper stood out of the way, raised his arm in a mock-Nazi salute and declared, ‘Let battle commence!’ No one who survived the Bigamy op ever forgot those words. ‘Battle did commence good and proper,’ Reg Seekings recalled.

  No sooner had Cumper finished speaking than machine-gun fire hacked through the night like a mower. Breda 20mm ack-ack guns bumped. There was the chomp of mortar-shells hitting the ground. Small-calibre tracer wonked across the track from snipers concealed in the poplar trees. Rounds slapped into vehicles and sizzled off the road. Reg Seekings, at the gun on one of the forward jeeps, was exchanging a word with Cpl. Anthony Drongin, Scots Guards, when they were caught in a spurt of fire. Drongin was hurled off the jeep and Seekings went down with him. Seekings, miraculously untouched, hoisted up Drongin to find him in agony – a bullet had drilled through his thigh and slashed off his penis.

  Almonds drove on past the barrier, roaring towards the second roadblock along a channel lined with barbed wire. A second jeep followed. He braked fast when he saw the barrier was a thick steel chain between two heavy lumps of concrete. The road was bathed in brilliance. Rounds suddenly spritzed out of nowhere. McGinn, on the back, hit the triggers on the twin Vickers, traversing the way ahead with a deadly arc of fire. Almonds realized that the Lewes bombs and limpets would go up any second, and screamed at the gunners to bail out. McGinn and Fletcher launched themselves out of the jeep and tried to claw their way under the barbed wire. Almonds jumped after them. An incendiary shell chugged into the jeep’s petrol tank and the vehicle went off like a rocket in a blur of flame. The jeep behind exploded at almost the same time.

  Most observers thought that Almonds had gone up with the jeep. Pat Riley clocked him, though. ‘I saw Jim sort of collecting himself,’ he said, ‘and running for it. They had been waiting for us and we had a right old scuffle as we tried to get ourselves out of it as best we could.’4 Chaos reigned. Two jeeps, driven by Paddy Mayne and Captain Terence ‘Jim’ Chambers, ex-5 Mahratta Light Infantry, jerked to a halt near the barrier, with their guns sling-shotting tracer. The gunners worked through drum after drum, switching drums with burning fingers, jetting out covering fire. ‘The jeeps in front directed a withering fire on the enemy guns,’ Mather wrote, ‘but they were protected by concrete emplacements.’5 Stirling thought enemy reinforcements would soon be arriving, and knew his party couldn’t afford to be caught on the plain in daylight. Reluctantly, he gave the order to withdraw.

  Everyone was yelling, gears grating, motors squalling, drivers wrenching steering-wheels. Mayne’s and Chambers’s gunners drilled rounds into the enemy positions. The two wrecked jeeps beyond the barrier crackled with fire. Trails of gunsmoke wafted through the trees. The jeeps were hemmed in by the poplars, a ditch, the minefield, the drivers trying desperately to turn on a sixpence. A reversing jeep winged Bill Cumper and knocked him down. Seekings laid Drongin in the back of his jeep. A green young officer told Bob Bennett to get rid of the corpse. Drongin opened his eyes and snapped, ‘Corporal Drongin to you, sir.’ Seekings jumped in and hollered at the driver to back up.

  Seconds later he spotted Cumper lumping along on hands and knees, and loaded him in the back of the vehicle. He picked up Mather, who had got separated from his three-tonner. ‘Cpl. Drongin was slumped in the back,’ Mather remembered, ‘shot in the groin. We travelled too fast for the wounded man’s comfort, I’m afraid.’6

  38. ‘This is going to be a shaky do’

  The first Pleydell knew about the fiasco was when John Olivey’s Rhodesian patrol bumped past the medical post on their way back to the Wadi Gamra. They had intended to hit Benina airfield, but had called it off because it was getting light. Only a minute after the patrol vanished into the green-brown draperies of the jebel, an Me 109-F came bowling along above the track at a hundred feet. Pleydell and his team sank into cover and watched it as it hugged the dust trail of the departed Chevrolets. ‘We waited in silence,’ Pleydell wrote. ‘Then it came: the fast crackle of machine-gun fire, sounding hideous and frightening on the chill morning air.’1

  At the crack of dawn, Chris Bailey had been shifted to the aid-post on a three-tonner. He had been shot in the chest during the assault on the wireless post. Pleydell found only a small entry-wound, but the round had punctured Bailey’s lung, and the least exertion had him gasping for air. He had a sucking pneumo
thorax, and without hospital treatment Pleydell considered the prognosis poor.

  For the whole morning the medical officer and his orderly, ‘Razor Blade’ Johnson, scuttled from bush to bush trying to tend the wounded, watching out for the hawk-shadows that flitted across the wadi. The enemy planes flipped, yawed, machine-gunned the maquis at random. Twice the medics were interrupted in the process of cleaning Melot’s wounds, and had to cover the giveaway whiteness of the bandages and cotton wool. Pleydell felt a dreamlike sense of detachment. All morning they heard the tremor of bombs bursting on the escarpment above them, and the far-off shudder of machine guns from the plain below. Pleydell prayed that the rendezvous in the Wadi Gamra hadn’t been compromised.

  For the SAS raiders, the pursuit had started at first light. By the time the bulk of Stirling’s party had reached the foot of the escarpment, the sky was scarlet and gold and the twisted thorn trees were surreal shadows on the frayed edges of the plain. Before sunrise, Axis aircraft had scrambled from local airfields and were raking across the valley after the raiders. ‘There were about a dozen [planes] in the air at a time,’ Maclean recalled. ‘They flew round in a circle, one after another peeling off and swooping down to drop its bombs or fire a long burst from its guns.’2

  Some of the SAS took shelter at an emergency RV twelve miles out of Benghazi, in a tangle of acacias near a ruined Quranic school. ‘We lay all day beneath the thick bushes and trees,’ wrote Mather, ‘and all day long aircraft buzzed overhead; the CR42s slow, low and dangerous, searching out every bush and tree; the 109s and Macchis faster and not so sharp eyed.’3

  Maclean was already halfway up the escarpment. Lying in junipers and olives near his camouflaged jeep, he looked down on a spectacular panorama – the tilting rust-red and olive tapestry of the Jebel Akhdar, with its flaky ragstone faces, punctuated by grassland, shrub, tangled maquis and forest. Below him lay the plain, from here a vast coarse mat of spiky fibres slashed by roads and tracks, dotted with buildings and trees, and beyond it the walls of Benghazi, hovering over the eerie turquoise of the sea. As he watched, Maclean saw an aircraft strafe a party of Senussi Arabs – men and women making their way with donkeys to the local market.

  He saw a spiral of black smoke rising from a three-tonner on the plain. He heard the far-off snap and crackle of small explosions as its ammunition went up. Another lorry, hundreds of feet below, came apart in a white puff. The aircraft were combing the intersecting wadis on the hillside, passing out of view, then reeling suddenly back. Maclean and his crew would dive into cover again. They couldn’t open up with their guns, because it would betray their position to the enemy.

  Seekings was in a jeep beetling backwards and forwards across the plain, looking for stragglers. Any vehicles stranded in the open were sitting ducks. Roger Boutinot of the French detachment recalled how his jeep was machine-gunned by an Me 109-F. The crew hurled themselves flat on the gravel floor just as the fighter came in. The jeep whacked apart in flames. ‘We had no cover at all,’ Boutinot recalled. ‘It was all down to luck. You just laid there and hoped you would not be hit.’4 Another French team stood their ground and blasted back at an aircraft with their Vickers as it came in to savage their three-tonner. The aircraft took a hit, whistled overhead for two hundred yards and whumped into the ground, disintegrating into a jellyfish-shaped cloud of smoke and flame.

  In the afternoon, Pleydell was called to tend Doug Laird, the third of Melot’s casualties. He was in agony from an arm smashed in two places, and begged Pleydell to cut it off. At last light Stirling’s jeep drew up at the ruined Quranic school. Stirling gave instructions that everyone should make for the lying-up place in Wadi Gamra that night. Up on the escarpment, Pleydell and Maclean were already moving there with the wounded. They reached the rendezvous at about 0300 hours.

  It wasn’t until eight hours later that Pleydell was called out to treat Anthony Drongin, who had been ferried up the jebel in the night. The MO found him lying in the sparse shade of a thorn-tree with a forced grin on his face. ‘Sorry to have given you so much trouble, sir,’ he said. The words almost brought tears to Pleydell’s eyes. Drongin, a former commando RSM who had reverted to corporal, had just had his manhood blown away. The fortitude of British enlisted men was incredible, Pleydell thought. He gave the ex-Guardsman an injection of pentothal and started psyching himself up for a harrowing operation – an abdominal incision under conditions of zero sterility.

  In the Wadi Gamra, Maclean was lying behind a boulder watching a couple of enemy spotters gyrating, leaving smears of vapour across the velveteen sky. Mayne had chosen the site well, Maclean thought – none of the vehicles was seen. Then, to his horror, he noticed an SAS jeep lumbering up from an adjoining wadi, shrouding the air with dust. He watched helplessly as one of the spotters dipped down to investigate, then spun round and reamed off towards Benghazi.

  Maclean wondered if it was possible the pilot hadn’t seen them. This thought was quickly dismissed when he peeped out and received a spritz of cannon-fire from the plane’s rear-gunner. Flight officer Laurence Pyke, Royal Australian Air Force, who was sharing his refuge, looked at him gravely. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is going to be a shaky do.’5

  The spotter was back in half an hour, riding point for a wing of fighters and bombers that hung together like a swarm of dark commas. Maclean thought there were between twenty and thirty of them. As they began to troll slowly around the wadi, SAS-men hidden in the junipers opened up with machine guns. Maclean heard the clack-clack-clack of the guns, and saw the blots and trails of smoke from the tracer cutting the air like knife-blades. It had no effect. The aircraft thrummed in low, releasing their payloads and cleaving the bush with their cannons. Quiffs of smoke and dust appeared along the wadi-bed, frozen for a moment like a gallery of giant exclamation marks. The planes came in wave after wave, reeling and striking, saturating the whole wadi with fire. Suddenly a camouflaged three-tonner convulsed in a searing arc of red and black. Then another and another. Watching grimly, Maclean found himself trying to calculate how many vehicles they would need to get back. ‘As truck after truck disintegrated before our eyes,’ he said, ‘it became clear that it would be a tight fit.’6

  Hidden with the wounded Drongin in the maquis ten miles away, Pleydell saw the aircraft roll and dive, heard the thud of bombs and saw the dark columns of smoke. His team stayed hidden until just before sundown, then laid Drongin in a cam-net and drove him back to the lying-up place. On the way, the MO watched the last enemy plane flying back towards Benina, a dark dragonfly against vast arcades of flame-coloured cloud.

  He found the Wadi Gamra full of smoke and the stink of burning oil and rubber. The place was littered with bits of red-hot steel and smouldering kit. Unexploded bombs were stuck nose down in the wadi-bed, and hot jerrycans of petrol lay strewn about, still intact, but swollen to the size of pumpkins from the gas inside. More than twenty vehicles were on fire, including Pleydell’s own medical truck. The men were stumbling back from their hiding-places, yelling to each other.

  The first officer he saw was Bill Cumper, who escorted him over to the wounded. One of the French officers, Aspirant Germain Guerpillon, was only just alive and died a few minutes later. Another officer, Lt. David Lair, an American who had served with the French Foreign Legion, had been badly injured. A REME fitter, AQMS Arthur Sque, had been shot in the leg. Sque had been particularly unlucky. He had taken leave to accompany the SAS mission at the request of his mate Reg Seekings, but had fallen off a truck on the drive-in and fractured a leg. Left in the open on a stretcher during the attacks that day, he had copped a cannon-shell in the other leg. Another man, Driver Bill Marlow, Royal Army Service Corps, was dead. Considering the intensity of the attack, though, Pleydell thought the casualties weren’t as bad as they might have been.7

  Stirling and Mayne had arrived earlier and were already preparing to move out to Jalo oasis, where they could get resupply from the Sudan Defence Force. In all, more than sixty vehicles had been los
t. Petrol, food and water were short. Stirling called Pleydell and told him that the seriously wounded would have to be left behind, as there was no room for them on the transport. Melot and the American officer, Lair, were determined to ride back to Kufra with the column whatever the cost, but the stretcher-cases, Bailey, Sque, Webster and Drongin, would be sent to Benghazi in a jeep driven by a medical orderly under a white flag. Pleydell’s three medical orderlies drew lots for the job: an ex-commando medic named Ritchie drew the short straw.

  Captain Arthur Duveen was still missing, with sixteen enlisted men. Jim Almonds and his gunners, Fletcher and McGinn, were presumed captured. That night Stirling divided the survivors into three parties, under himself, Mayne and Scratchley. While his group would linger in the vicinity to watch for Duveen’s party, the other two would start for Jalo at midnight.

  By the time Reg Seekings arrived at the wadi with twelve or thirteen men hanging off his jeep, Mayne’s and Scratchley’s parties had already gone. He found that Ritchie had laid out a huge red cross in the wadi-bed as an aircraft recognition signal. Seekings collared him and told him to get rid of it. He said that, come first light, the cross would only reveal that there was still activity in the wadi, and would bring in the hunters again.

  Lying on his stretcher, Seekings’s mate, Sque, overheard the conversation. ‘Reg … we’ll die if we don’t get help quick,’ he groaned. Seekings apologized, but told him that the wounded were just numbers now. He had to think of the dozen fit men he had with him. He had to get them out to fight another day. ‘My pal [Sque] started calling me sergeant, then,’ Seekings recalled. ‘He was disgusted with me. I hated doing it, absolutely hated it. But it was my job.’8