The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  By the time he arrived at the Kinrara Military Hospital in Kuala Lumpur by ambulance, several hours later, he had downed a quart of Tiger beer on top of the speed and morphine and was as high as a kite. He waltzed into the Emergency Room, swinging his mauled arm, only to be whizzed straight into surgery. The surgeon, Major Steele, told him later that his arm had been fractured in three places, and had suffered severe nerve-damage from the wrenching action of the static-line. The jury was out as to whether he’d ever again be able to use the limb properly. This was a shock to the twenty-nine-year-old Cooper, who had been commissioned for the second time in the regular army only six months earlier, having finally decided that he wasn’t cut out for civilian life.

  63. ‘Scope for tremendous development’

  During his wartime officer cadet training, Cooper had been told that his parent unit, the Scots Guards, wouldn’t take him back as an officer. The Guards didn’t accept ‘field commissionees’ or officers who’d once been Guardsmen. Despite two world wars, the old mystique still obtained. On the demise of the SAS, therefore, Cooper soldiered on with an ‘adopted’ parent unit, 6 Green Howards, mostly in Cyprus, until it was demobilized two years later.

  After demob he returned to his old firm, Vickers & Wheelers, as a trainee wool-buyer, but he missed the SAS and especially his oppo, Reg Seekings. That summer, though, he heard through the grapevine that the Regiment had been revived as a Territorial Army mob. It was designated 21 SAS (Artists’), and was based at Duke’s Road, Euston, in London, commanded by wartime veteran Lt. Col. Brian Franks. Cooper wrote Franks immediately, and was offered a TA commission.

  The catchment area of 21 SAS was the south-east of England, but Franks had also created a ‘phantom’ SAS troop at Wetherby, Yorkshire, attached to 10 (Yorkshire) Airborne Battalion. Since Cooper was working in nearby Bradford, Franks asked him to take command of the troop, which was almost entirely composed of wartime SAS-men. 21 SAS (Artists’) was the creation of Brian Franks and ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert. The Crawford memo had concluded that the SAS should be retained ‘in some form’ after the war, a decision confirmed in a year-long study by the War Office’s Directorate of Technical Investigation, to which Calvert had made a major contribution. The DTI affirmed that the wartime SAS had shown it could achieve results out of all proportion to its size. Although the full potential of SAS-type outfits was not yet known, the report ran, there was ‘scope for tremendous development’.

  As a result of the DTI report, 21 SAS (Artists’) was established by Royal Warrant on 8 July 1947. Its curious designation came from a reversal of the numerals of the two British wartime Regiments, 1 and 2 SAS. The ‘Artists’ component derived from the ‘Artists’ Rifles’ – a battalion of the Middlesex Regiment raised in 1859, when Britain was thought to be in danger of invasion by the French. Founded by an art student, whose name, by coincidence, was Edward Sterling, its ranks were drawn partly from the London artistic community. ‘Originals’ included such figures as William Morris, Holman Hunt, J. E. Millais, G. F. Watts and Lord Leighton. Though the threat of invasion never materialized, the Artists’ Rifles was added to the British army’s orbat. It fought with distinction in the First World War, winning no fewer than eight VCs and fifty-six DSOs.

  During the Second World War, the Artists’ had been used as an Officer Cadet Training Unit. It was also searching for a role in the post-war world, and Franks suggested an amalgamation. Recruiting began in August 1947, and by the following year 21 SAS (Artists’) was almost two hundred strong, its ranks including fifty-nine men who had fought with the wartime SAS or other special forces units. At the same time, Franks was instrumental in creating the SAS Regimental Association, chaired by David Stirling, with Blair Mayne as vice-chairman, and the ‘Z Reserve’ – a register of ex-SAS-men ready to volunteer for special forces work in the event of general mobilization.

  One casualty of the amalgamation was the ‘flaming sword’ cap-badge, in post-war years more often referred to as the ‘winged dagger’. 21 SAS wore Boy Browning’s maroon beret with the Pegasus arm-flash, but had acquired the Artists’ Rifles’ ‘Mars and Minerva’ cap-badge. The Regiment was organized along the lines of the wartime SAS. Equipped with Austin Champ utility vehicles, it was trained for long-range penetration and reconnaissance in Norway and the Middle East. Though it was divided into four combat or ‘sabre’ squadrons and an HQ squadron, Franks emphasized that squadrons and troops were only administrative units. The new SAS, like the old, would fight in whatever numbers or formations the job required. Franks, originally a signaller, also formed the first SAS signals squadron, and had the precocious idea that the Regiment should include specialist units such as ‘boat troop’ and ‘mountain troop’. This concept never took off in 21 SAS, but was later to become a feature of the regular Regiment.

  Franks had bigger fish to fry than simply raising a TA Regiment. He pushed the War Office to grant the SAS Regiment a Corps Warrant, which would give it the status of a specialist arm of the British army. This would mean that 21 SAS (Artists’) would be a cadre from which other SAS units could be raised in future – a flexible resource with almost infinite possibilities.

  The Corps Warrant was ratified by a Joint Staff Memorandum in July 1950. A month earlier, the first major post-war flap had broken out, in Korea, where a multinational United Nations ‘Blue Beret’ force had been deployed for the first time. Under the auspices of 21 SAS, Franks authorized the raising of a new sub-unit to operate as jeep-borne long-range patrols behind North Korean lines. Volunteers included ex-wartime SAS-men like BobBennett, and 2 SAS vets Alastair McGregor DSO, MC and Jock Easton, all three of whom had served with the Reparations Committee in Greece. It also included volunteers without wartime experience who had passed selection for 21 SAS. Designated M Independent Squadron, it was mustered at the Airborne Forces Depot in Aldershot under another distinguished 2 SAS officer, Major Tony Greville-Bell, DSO. Before deploying to Korea, though, the commander of United Nations forces there, General McArthur, decided that it was no longer required. Instead, the squadron was diverted to Malaya, where six months earlier ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert had raised the Malayan Scouts.

  64. A force that would ‘live, move, and have its being in the jungle’

  From the dizzy heights of brigadier, Calvert had plummeted in rank to major after the war. He had spent the immediate post-war period becoming, in his own words, ‘a true staff wallah’. To the uninitiated he seemed more of a staff officer than a sharp-end warrior – his intellect was formidable, but at first glance he didn’t look the soldierly type. Barrel-chested and corpulent, he tended to waddle, possessing what one comrade described as ‘a simian grace’.

  To those who knew him, though, Calvert was a legend. A Sapper officer, fluent in Cantonese, he had graduated from Cambridge, where he had studied mechanical engineering, won a double-blue for water-sports, and boxed heavyweight for the university and the army. He had won thirteen decorations during the war, including two DSOs. Under the controversial Orde Wingate, Calvert had spent three of the war years commanding 77 Chindit Brigade in the jungles of Burma, where he had acquired a reputation as an inspirational leader of outstanding bravery. The ‘experts’ had then believed it impossible for British troops to outfight the Japanese in the jungle: the Chindits had proved them wrong.

  In January 1950 Calvert was summoned to Malaya, where a Communist insurrection had broken out two years earlier. A thousand men and women had been killed, and the war – officially termed an ‘Emergency’ for insurance reasons – was tying down forty thousand British and colonial troops, and seventy-five thousand full-time and part-time police. Hidden in their jungle strongholds, the Communist Terrorists – CTs – seemed invincible. Calvert was tasked by the Commander-in-Chief Far East, General Sir John Harding, to find a way of rooting them out.

  It was a classic Mao Tse-tung guerrilla campaign, orchestrated by the remarkable Chin Peng, secretary-general of the Communist Party of Malaya, to jerk his former British comrades out
of what he called their ‘gin-and-tonic stupor’. The prize would be some of the richest rubber plantations and tin-mines in the world. Chin Peng, OBE, had fought alongside British stay-behind parties of the SOE-style Force 136 during the war, as commander of the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army. His four-thousand-strong guerrilla band, almost all ethnic Chinese, had learned to live and fight in the dense rain-forest that covered nine-tenths of the country.

  Redesignated the Malayan Races Liberation Army, the force consisted of anti-British ‘Killer Units’ with jungle hideouts in almost every state of the Federation. They already had a source of arms – three thousand weapons had been dropped to them by the British during the war, which had been greased carefully and cached in the jungle. The MRLA drew support from among more than half a million Chinese squatters living in kampongs on the forest fringes, who, with disaffected city workers, rubber cultivators and tin-miners, formed the ‘proletarian pool’ in which the terrorist ‘fish’ could swim. In the jungle the Communists were parasites on some hundred thousand aborigines, commonly known as ‘Sakai’.

  The insurrection kicked off on 16 June 1948 with the murder of Arthur Walker, manager of the Ladang Elphil rubber-estate in Perak, shot in his office by a trio of Chinese who arrived on bicycles. The same day a Chinese gang tied up John Allison, manager of the neighbouring Sungei Siput plantation, and his assistant, Ian Christian, and drilled them both with .45mm rounds from a Tommy-gun. The Malayan Emergency was declared two days later.

  Calvert spent six months studying the problem. He travelled thirty thousand miles, met everyone, saw everything. He went on patrol with soldiers and police. He measured them against the abilities of his wartime Chindits, and found them wanting. Instead of patrolling, British troops were taught to hack their way through the bush in a straight line, ‘making a lot of noise and achieving very little’. They knew nothing of navigation, less of tracking, and did not have the patience to lie in ambush. One Guards commander told him that he didn’t consider it the job of his men ‘to chase bare-arsed niggers around South-East Asia’.1 Worst of all, many had an instinctive fear of the jungle.

  Medical Corps wisdom currently held that British soldiers could not remain in the jungle for more than two weeks. Calvert’s Chindits had been able to stay there indefinitely. Like his friend, ex-Force 136 fighter Freddie Spencer Chapman, author of the celebrated book The Jungle is Neutral, Calvert believed that mental rather than physical toughness was the key to survival in these conditions.2 He conceived of a special force that would possess this mental toughness to a high degree – that would ‘live, move, and have its being in the jungle, like the guerrillas’.3 Given leave to raise his special force in July, he named it the Malayan Scouts (SAS).

  65. ‘The Special Air Service, at last, was back in the regular army’

  The Malayan Scouts was raised for the Emergency, and was not intended to outlive it. Calvert saw the Scouts as the prototype for other short-term SAS units that could be formed for a specific task in a specific geographical environment – desert, mountains, snow – and easily disbanded. Bitterly opposed to the break-up of the SAS Brigade five years earlier, he originally wanted to call the new unit the ‘Special Air Service’. When this was turned down, he’d suggested the ‘Pacific Rangers’. This was also vetoed: Rangers were the US version of the commandos, and the unit was not to operate in the Pacific. Raised within a month of the issue of the SAS Corps Warrant, the Malayan Scouts was part of the SAS Regiment, along with 21 SAS (Artists’), and a small Regimental HQ.

  Calvert recruited A Squadron, Malayan Scouts (SAS), from British units serving in Malaya. Volunteers were accepted on ‘the Chindit principle’ that any infantryman with the right training could be deployed on special operations. This non-elitist approach had worked against the Japanese in Burma. Unlike the SAS, though, the Chindits had fought in big battalions, where the weak links were covered by the strong. The Malayan Emergency was a different kind of war – a war of counter-insurgency, involving small numbers and tiny formations. The Chindit principle failed in Malaya, because SAS-style patrols of three or four men could not afford weak links. Recruited without selection, the Malayan Scouts quickly began to suffer not only a collapse of discipline, but also an appallingly low standard of military skills.

  When Tony Greville-Bell’s independent squadron from 21 SAS, now renamed B Squadron, Malayan Scouts – poled up at Calvert’s base at Kota Tinggi in Johore Bahru the following January, they were shocked at the behaviour of A Squadron. The local recruits were dirty, bearded, indisciplined, drunken – and much worse, careless in weapon-handling. ‘It was a hell of a problem,’ said the new squadron’s sergeant-major, ‘Original’ Bob Bennett. ‘We had pretty good discipline in [B] Squadron, and it made things difficult all round when I was making my guys shave and do all the normal things soldiers do in camp, while A Squadron seemed to do just as they pleased … We soon heard the stories of Calvert’s boozing and the wild parties that went on when the lads were out of the jungle.’1

  The A Squadron boys sneered at Bennett, pointing out that this wasn’t the desert. Many of the ‘normal things soldiers do in camp’, like shaving, were counter-productive in the jungle. But they missed the point. Bennett wasn’t advocating ‘wooden-top’ discipline on operations, only smartness while back in camp – a quality of which both Stirling and Mayne had approved. Calvert’s Intelligence Officer, John Woodhouse, agreed: ‘I couldn’t see that it mattered if a man was bearded or not in the jungle,’ he said, ‘but I did recognize the importance of looking tidy when you were not on operations and within a base area.’2

  Some of the A Squadron men were excellent soldiers, and would become veterans of the Regiment, but others had joined the Scouts for ‘a swan’. Calvert himself admitted that local commanders had taken the opportunity to unload their undesirables on him. Some came directly from military prisons – he had even recruited a dozen deserters from the French Foreign Legion, who had jumped ship en route to French Indo-China. Some, perhaps a minority, were useless, and would, in Woodhouse’s words, ‘probably have been useless in any Regiment’.3

  The first A Squadron operation-cum-training exercise, in the Ipoh area of Perak, was a washout. The troops moved through the jungle like tourists on an afternoon stroll, dumping litter, lighting huge fires, chatting noisily, handling their weapons with careless abandon. Battle discipline was non-existent, standard operating procedures were conspicuous by their absence and navigation abysmal – most of the men had never seen a map, and in any case, the ones they had were air-charts with vast areas designated ‘obscured by clouds’. Some of the men felt claustrophobic in the dense jungle, others couldn’t remain in ambush positions for more than a few hours. Unsurprisingly, they had no contact with the terrorists, which only increased the sense of boredom. By the end of the op, according to John Woodhouse, the squadron had virtually fallen apart.

  This failure didn’t bother Calvert, who had a ‘Darwinian’ approach to training. Any man who wasn’t up to it, he thought, would soon be weeded out by the hardship of living in the jungle. The Malayan Scouts didn’t need selection. Jungle ops were the selection: if you survived, you were in.

  The indiscipline of the troops off ops, though, stemmed directly from his own cavalier attitude – Calvert had never been hot on parade-ground regulations, and didn’t approve of soldiers being ‘dressed up like a tailor’s dummy’. Stirling’s early stipulation that discipline in camp should be as stiff as that of the Brigade of Guards hadn’t lasted, but had given way to a culture of self-discipline inherited by the B Squadron boys. Calvert later admitted that A Squadron’s unruliness was his own fault. ‘In my defence,’ he wrote, ‘I must say I had so much to do that some minor problems escaped me. I was serving three different generals … I attended high level meetings while still having to attend to people brought up in front of me for the loss of a pair of boots or something …’4

  Calvert was also reaping the harvest of his war years in a blend of tropi
cal diseases that were now scourging his bloodstream, which, with a drinker’s self-delusion, he had always maintained a good daily dose of liquor would keep at bay. He had even recruited fellow heavy boozers as officers, on the bizarre principle that if they could stand a hangover they could put up with the discomforts of the jungle. Fighting a rearguard action against alcoholism, he was also struggling to hide another secret: his homosexuality, which in the British army of the day was still the ultimate stigma.

  Calvert’s heroes were officers who were loved by their men. His punishments for what might otherwise have been court-martial offences often consisted of verbal admonitions, on his long-held but dubious belief that soldiers who misbehaved often turned out to be good fighters when the chips were down. ‘This to me was always Calvert’s weakness,’ said Woodhouse. ‘He didn’t appreciate the importance of good discipline. There is little doubt that the outbreaks of offences resulting from ill-discipline can be laid at Calvert’s door.’5

  The wild drinking that Bennett and the other B Squadron men had heard about when they arrived was no mere rumour. Calvert’s perilous attempt to rugby-tackle Paddy Mayne wasn’t the most reckless act he was capable of when smashed. On one occasion he booby-trapped the latrines at a nearby Australian RAF base. On another, occasioned by the visit of an Indian general, he hurled a grenade into a pig-wallow, causing the officer to throw himself flat in mud and pig-manure. Woodhouse confessed later that the other officers knew morale was heading for a precipice, but just stood by and watched. ‘We were aware of the problems …’ he said, ‘but Calvert dominated us in a way which is rather hard to explain now.’6