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by Michael Asher


  Cooper remembered seeing Stirling haring off in the opposite direction, but this seems unlikely. The way Stirling recalled it, he and MacDermott had no chance of escape. He was woken up by a yell of ‘Raus! Raus!’ and found himself looking down the barrel of a Luger held by a short, thickset German soldier. He and MacDermott put their hands up. They were marched down the wadi with their ten men. At the bottom, they saw Luftwaffe troops massed in company strength.

  Stirling remained confident that he would escape, and was aware that the most opportune time was always shortly after capture. That night, at a moment he judged his captors’ attention had lapsed, he let out a piercing yell and both he and MacDermott poled off into the darkness. Stirling covered about ten miles, but once again his overconfidence betrayed him. He wasted three hours surveying an airfield for a possible future SAS strike. ‘I was a bloody fool,’ he commented later. ‘I thought I was going to make it back you see.’5 The next day, lying up in some acacia scrub, he was seen by an Arab who offered to give him food and water. The Arab led him straight into the arms of the Italians. The story went round later that the CO, 1 SAS, had been sold out for eleven pounds of tea.

  Only three months earlier, David Stirling had been flying high. At twenty-seven he had become the founder and commanding officer of a totally new type of Special Service unit. He had been on the verge of expanding it into a brigade – perhaps even of becoming the army’s youngest brigadier. It had been a long, hard haul from the clubs and cabarets. Now, his war was over. He would never see active service again.

  In two years, Stirling’s SAS, at one time down to seventeen men, had destroyed three hundred and twenty Axis aircraft, exercising an influence on the campaign out of all proportion to its size. Between September 1942 and January 1943 it had executed no fewer than forty-three successful raids on Axis lines of communication. The ultimate measure of Stirling’s achievement, though, can be gauged from the Desert Fox himself. On 2 February Rommel wrote his wife, Lucy: ‘During January, a number of our AA gunners [sic] succeeded in surprising a British column … and captured the commander of 1 SAS Regiment, Lt.Col. David Stirling … Thus the British lost the very able and adaptable commander of the desert group which had caused us more damage than any other British unit of equal size.’6

  Part Two

  EUROPE 1943–5

  44. ‘It’s a bad one this time’

  When 16 Panzer Division’s counter-attack on Termoli reached fever pitch, Paddy Mayne was shooting billiards in an abandoned palazzo with Bill Fraser, Pat Riley and Phil Gunn, his new medical officer. It was 5 October 1943, and David Stirling had been in the bag eight months.

  Termoli was a small port on Italy’s Adriatic coast. Set on a promontory, sealed in on three sides by the sea, it was a town of ornate houses tightly packed around a central square, dominated by a cathedral and a medieval castle. Along the sea-front were the remnants of ancient walls that had withstood the Turkish fleet a thousand years earlier. Mayne’s squadron had first been billeted in the draughty cells and cloisters of a deserted monastery overlooking the harbour but he had moved his officers to a luxurious palazzo across the road: deep shagpile carpets, comfortable beds, a gramophone – and a billiard table.

  From first light, when half a dozen tanks had rumbled towards the Eighth Army’s defensive ring north of the town, British units had been pulling back. 6 Royal West Kents and 5 Buffs had retreated in panic, and were digging in along the Termoli–Larino highway. 8 Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders had lost the church and factory they had been ordered to hold at all costs. Men of 56 Recce Regiment had abandoned their brand new armoured cars and Bren-gun carriers. The infantry were so shell-shocked that the CO of 1 Special Service Brigade, John Durnford-Slater, had threatened to have officers and men stood against a wall and shot. One of the few units to hold its ground, 40 (Royal Marine) Commando, had been decimated by 88mm anti-tank shells. The olive grove they had occupied above the town was littered with their mangled dead.

  In Termoli, Italian civilians, emboldened by the attack, started dropping grenades and taking pot-shots at British soldiers from their windows. Durnford-Slater called the entire male population together in the piazza and promised mass executions unless these irritations ceased. At 1330 hours, an 88mm round mashed Brigade HQ, killing a staff captain.

  While panic reigned and shells were crumping into the streets outside the palazzo, Mayne chalked his cue with Francis Drake-like insouciance. ‘He just carried on with the game,’ Pat Riley recalled. ‘I thought to myself, “Well, if you can do it, chum, I’ll do it with you.” And we did. We finished the game, and then we went out to get things sorted.’1

  Mayne ordered every available man – including cooks, bottle-washers, clerks – up to the town cemetery where the eye of the assault was focused. Five captured German trucks were lined up opposite the monastery garden to shift ‘Paddy’s Boys’ to the front. Bill Fraser, commanding No.1 Troop, stopped to give instructions to one of his section commanders, Lt. Johnny Wiseman, a short, stocky, ex-employee of an optical company and former Yeomanry trooper, commissioned in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. Wiseman’s section-sergeant, Reg Seekings, got the men to their feet and ordered them to hop on to the first lorry. Sgt. Bill McNinch, Royal Armoured Corps, an ex-bank manager highly popular in the troop, was already injured in the foot, but had volunteered to drive. He leaned out of the cab and waved as the men moved up. Seekings found the truck already occupied by a section of No.2 Troop. A moment later, Wiseman arrived and told them to get the hell out of it. His own boys piled in. Wiseman jumped into the cab beside McNinch, who started the engine. In the back, Seekings slapped the tailboard shut. A runner from Mayne shouted to Wiseman, who leaned out of the window to talk to him. An Italian family, three or four girls, a twelve-year-old boy, a woman and an old man, who lived across the street, had turned out to watch from their doorway.

  Pat Riley, now a lieutenant, was hurrying back towards the palazzo with his batman, who had just told him that Mayne wanted a word. Suddenly, the whole street seemed to shudder, to come apart in rubble and smoke. ‘The next thing I knew I was halfway down the street,’ Riley recalled, ‘lying on my back, laughing like hell. It must have been [the] shock …’2

  Riley never heard the 105mm shell strike, but Reg Seekings did. ‘[There was] a God Almighty crash and explosion,’ he remembered, ‘and [a shell] landed right, smack in the truck … It blew us to hell.’3 The first lorry disintegrated. Steel scraps, glass shards, molten rubber shot skywards: blood, flesh, minced body parts spattered walls. Seekings grovelled in the gutter, drenched in blood and bits of other people’s warm flesh. He couldn’t believe the packet of foot-long, two-pound-apiece No. 76 Hawkins grenades he was carrying hadn’t exploded. His was the only pack that hadn’t. The runner Wiseman was talking to was spliffed sixty yards through a second-floor window. Only his torso was found. Another man, Sgt. Jock Finlay, Royal Artillery, an ex-auctioneer, was decapitated instantly by spiralling steel, and his head flung into a tangled clump of orange-trees nearby.

  Wiseman lolled out of the cab dazed, not a scratch on him. Men staggered about moaning in a pea-soup of dust and smoke. Wiseman’s driver, McNinch, still sat at the wheel with bug eyes and a big grin on his face. He was stone dead. A length of tubing had pierced the back of the cab and skewered him right through the abdomen.

  Seekings staggered up and blinked red-eyed at a scene like the Devil’s kitchen. Bits of human tissue, flayed skin, burned organs, charred hands and feet, crisped intestines, were strewn about the street, festooned from telegraph wires, roofs, the branches of trees. Trucks and walls were greased in blood. Seekings inhaled cordite fumes and the stink of roasted flesh. He saw Sgt. Jock Henderson, Riley’s section sergeant, hanging upside down, his chest slit open like a watermelon, his arm hanging off. His ribcage had been sliced open. Seekings could see his lungs pumping and his heart beating. He still had his Tommy-gun clamped across his chest. ‘Reg, take the gun off,’ Henderson croaked. ‘
It’s hurting me.’ Seekings helped him down, and watched white-faced as the man pulled off his own severed arm. ‘He said, “It’s a bad one this time,”’ Seekings recalled. ‘I said, “You’ll be all right”… I knew he wouldn’t.’4

  Henderson called for water. Seekings slithered across a mass of bloody pulp. It had a voice. ‘Sergeant, can you get me a drink, please.’ Calm as hell. The face had ceased to exist, but Seekings recognized the voice of L.Cpl. Charlie Grant. He gagged as Grant reached across, picked up his dismembered arm and dropped it to one side. For the second time, Seekings saw a man’s heart and lungs working close up. He saw another of his section, Alex Skinner MM, Royal Engineers, whose body was crackling, on fire. ‘It was the first time I’d seen a body burning,’ he remembered, ‘and I didn’t realize how fast [it could] burn.’ Skinner was already dead, but Seekings felt a compulsion to find water to put him out.

  He was stepping over more cadavers when he saw the Italian boy from the family across the street, lying on top. His guts were hanging out, swollen up like a pink balloon. To Seekings’s horror, the boy suddenly leapt up and started scuttering round in a circle, shrieking. Seekings pulled his Colt .45, caught the boy, and shot him in the head. ‘You couldn’t let anybody suffer like that,’ he said. Among the corpses was another mate, Pte. Titch Davison, Durham Light Infantry. He was also dead, lying on his back, barely recognizable – his nose and jaw had been shattered. When Seekings tried to lift his body out of the way, it fell to pieces. He knew Davison had lied about his age when he had joined up – he reckoned the kid was no more than seventeen.

  Lt. Pete Davis, Queens Regiment, commanding No.2 Troop, saw one of the Italian girls sitting dazed in the ruins of her house, while all the rest of her family lay gutted around her in a heap. Looking up, he realized that a lump of flesh hanging from a wire was the scalp of Sgt. Chris O’Dowd, Irish Guards, an SAS veteran. Davis doubled up and hurled vomit.

  Corporal David Danger, a bespectacled ex-Royal Signals wireless-op, had been sheltered from the blast by a doorway, and escaped with only a wedge of scrap stuck in his backside. The man next to him hadn’t been so lucky – he was peppered with shrapnel in both legs. Bill Fraser had been tossed on top of Pte. Doug Montieth, Devonshire Regiment, by the shock of the explosion. Montieth’s uniform was in tatters, but he was relieved to find the blood soaking him wasn’t his. Fraser sat in the middle of the road, eyes focused on nowhere, blood globbing from his shoulder. Montieth was unscathed apart from concussion, despite the fact that he had been splattered against a wall so hard that his helmet had been riveted to his skull.

  A few yards away Cpl. Spike Kerr sprawled out with his hands over his head, praying loudly to God. David Danger got up and hobbled over to the carnage. He found Pte. Graham Gilmour weaving around drunkenly with his hands across his brows, shrieking, ‘My eyes! My eyes!’ He had a gash in the head cascading gore, and one eyeball was dangling obscenely by the optic nerve. ‘Am I blind?’ Gilmour implored him. ‘No, you’ll be OK,’ Danger said, putting his arm around him. Within minutes, Gilmour had recovered himself enough to salute Johnny Wiseman and ask for permission to report to the medical post.

  The squadron padre, Captain Robert Lunt, had arrived, and was slapping Spike Kerr’s face, assuring him he wasn’t going to die. Medical officer Captain Phil Gunn did what he could, concentrating only on those he thought had a chance of pulling through. The boys who had got off lightly dressed wounds for the others. Wiseman stalked dazedly around the casualties, trying to determine how many men he had left in his section. The answer wasn’t encouraging. Only Seekings, Gilmour and one other man were still standing. Gilmour was badly injured, and according to Seekings, the third man never spoke to anyone again. Two days later he was found smashing his head against a brick wall, and had to be RTU’d.

  Wiseman went off to report to Mayne, whom he found in the palazzo with Squadron Sergeant-Major Johnny Rose. Mayne said Rose had apprised him of ‘one or two’ casualties. Wiseman answered that he no longer had a section to command. Eighteen had been killed or mortally wounded – the most devastating single mortality the SAS had ever suffered. Although no one mentioned it at the time, most of the casualties may have been caused not by the shell – probably a stray shot – but by the armed Hawkins grenades many of the men were carrying – an embarrassing home goal. Mayne made no comment, but his eyes went deathly cold. He told Wiseman calmly to attach the survivors to his own HQ Troop and get up to the cemetery right away. The enemy was about to break through.

  45. ‘Will you shoot my brother?’

  Termoli wasn’t of much strategic importance on its own, but it lay only two miles north of the Biforno river-mouth, and the river was a natural defensive line. Once dug in there, the Germans would be hard to budge.

  The Allies had landed on Sicily on 12 July and on the Italian mainland on 9 September, and now the British Eighth and US Fifth armies were steamrolling north, against savage opposition from Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s forces. Although the Italians had surrendered and joined the Allies, and Mussolini had been arrested, Hitler had ordered Kesselring to sell every inch of Italian soil dearly. The Allied planners decided that a coup de main seaborne attack by commandos on Termoli would turn the German flank, and render a defence of the Biforno untenable. As it turned out, the assault had taken the Germans completely by surprise.

  Surprise was about the only factor in the recipe Stirling would have approved. The rest was Layforce redux – the SAS had been used as shock-troops in exactly the way he and Lewes had deplored. Gone were the three- and four-man groups, the stealth attacks – even the jeeps. Mayne’s boys, now designated 1 Special Raiding Squadron (SAS), still wore the sand-coloured beret, para wings and flaming sword badge, but they were part of a thousand-strong Special Service Brigade that included 3 Commando and 40 (Royal Marine) Commando. 1 SRS, numbering two hundred and seven men, had jumped ashore from landing-craft at a beach-head northwest of Termoli in the early hours of 3 October.

  It was a dismal night, with a swell on the Adriatic and chiselling rain. At half past three in the morning the thirty-nine-foot LCI (Landing Craft Infantry) carrying the squadron had snagged on a sandbank sixty feet off shore. Bill Fraser judged the water shallow enough to wade through. He jumped into the sea and promptly vanished beneath it. As he was hauled back on board gasping for air, smaller LCA (Landing Craft Assault) were dollied up to ferry the men the final distance. Mayne supervised the transfer with customary coolness.

  The Brigade’s task was to capture Termoli, but the assault on the town was down to the commandos. Mayne’s job was to secure two bridges on the main road, Highway 16, and to link up with elements of the British 11 Infantry Brigade, spearheading 78 Division, advancing from the south. For Mayne it brought back memories of his first action – 11 Commando’s assault on the Litani two years earlier.

  On shore there was chaos as SRS-men mingled with commandos, rallied by the Brigade Major, Brian Franks, Middlesex Yeomanry, the ex-manager of London’s Hyde Park Hotel. It was still drizzling and the ground beyond the beach was slippery under their rubber-soled boots.

  At five thirty that morning, B Section of No. 3 Troop 1 SRS, under twenty-two-year-old Lt. John Tonkin, Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, made first contact with the enemy. Advancing to a bridge on the road, they bagged three German prisoners, then spotted a slow-moving convoy of five enemy trucks. Tonkin’s three-inch-mortar team lobbed a salvo of bombs at the convoy. The first truck belched flame; glass and scrap-metal blew. Germans staggered out coughing smoke and Tonkin’s Bren-gunners sickled them down – an officer was killed, another injured. Germans scattered and made off. Three of them dropped their rifles and reached for the sky. As Tonkin’s section regrouped, his flankers spied a German platoon hovering in the shadows. The SRS Bren-gunners went to ground and dusted the enemy with .303 rounds so thickly that they broke and ran, carrying the wounded with them.

  The rain had stopped, and now the blackness was scored with strands of blurr
y light. Tonkin’s men tabbed it into a long valley, where they saw dark figures lining the ridges above them. For a moment the SRS-men thought they had encountered 11 Brigade. Then the men on the heights rattled fire at them. A field-gun throbbed. Shells coughed and thumped. Rounds riffed around them from behind, and Tonkin realized they had been boxed. They had walked into a trap rigged by battle-hardened German troops of 1 Parachute Division – veterans of the drop on Crete. ‘Every man for himself!’ Tonkin screeched.

  There was no easy way out of the box. L. Cpl. Joe Fassam, Royal Artillery, hurtled out of the ditch he had been sheltering in, searing away with his Tommy-gun. Enemy fire whacked him down. Six of his mates made use of the diversion to break out of the valley, lugging with them the three prisoners they had picked up earlier. Two lay in the bush until the shooting died down. Tonkin himself leopard-crawled through the undergrowth right into the muzzle of a German paratrooper’s Schmeisser. He and twenty-two of his men were captured.

  Captain Bob Melot, now recovered from his grenade wounds at Benghazi, was with a group from Captain Ted Lepine’s A Section, moving up fast towards Tonkin’s position. On the way they slammed into a group of German paratroopers who had gone to ground in an abandoned farm. There was a violent contact. Melot got walloped in the chest by a 9mm Luger round, while the section staff-sergeant, Fred ‘Nobby’ Clarke, Royal Engineers, was sent crashing by a plug of shrapnel in the skull.

 

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