There was silence as the planes groaned up to dropping altitude. The squadron was apprehensive. They knew the statistics were favourable, but were also aware that their former commander, Oliver Brooke, would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair as a result of a tree-drop. The flight lasted thirty minutes. Braced against the door, the RAF dispatcher yelled, ‘Stand up!’ The boys heaved themselves out of the nets and began fitting their containers. They checked each other’s chutes and static-lines, and the dispatcher worked his way down the sticks for a final check, slapping each man on the shoulder as he passed. Back at his post, the RAF-man bawled, ‘Action stations!’
The men shuffled into position and froze, all muscles tense. Nobody spoke. This was the moment of truth. From here there was no turning back. For trained parachutists, the green light constituted an order to jump. To refuse meant disobeying a direct order, and certain RTU. ‘Red on’ gave them four seconds. The blood drained out of their faces. Everything went quiet. Time stopped. Nothing existed but that yawning door. The green light flashed. The dispatcher screamed, ‘Go!’ The sticks stomped up to the door. The men flipped out into the sky.
As Captain Peter de la Billière’s canopy snapped open, he saw light thickening in the distance. The forest looked like a turbulent grey-green sea. He assessed his drift and heaved on his lift-webs, feeling the Bergen beneath his feet pulling on his canopy. In seconds he was breaking the surface of the forest. ‘With a sudden rush I shot through the leaves and branches,’ he recalled, ‘and came to a stop with a tremendous jerk. My chute had lodged securely.’3
Everywhere, men were shimmying down to the forest floor on webbing straps. On the ground, Harry Thompson discovered that there was a casualty. Trooper Jerry Mulcahy’s canopy had snagged, but the branch had snapped, and he’d pitched two hundred feet, landing on a tree-root. His back was broken. Some of his ribs had been fractured and had punctured his lungs. Blood dribbled from Mulcahy’s mouth. His head, shaven by his mates as a prank during a wild party the previous night, gleamed ominously white. He was paralysed and in agony. As a medic shot him up with morphine, Thompson had his operator radio base for immediate casevac by chopper.
It was now about 0700 hours. At Sungei Besi, Tony Deane-Drummond was tuned into the squadron frequency. He knew the sticks were in, but had expected some delay before they assembled on the DZ. When the casevac request came through, his heart sank. This was exactly what he’d feared. He detailed his medical officer to go in, and asked the RAF for a helicopter. As it whirled off, Thompson relayed good news. There was a natural clearing in the forest only a hundred metres from the DZ, where lightning had knocked down trees. Thompson’s men were sending up an orange marker-balloon for the heli pilot.
Against SOPs, the pilot let down almost vertically into the clearing. Thompson watched the aircraft descend. She hovered, clattering, rotors razoring undergrowth, grating foliage, sucking leaves into air-intakes. The MO pitched out, making a beeline for Mulcahy’s stretcher. The whirlybird wheezed out of the hole, rotors gyrating, slashing more foliage. She did a circuit and shuddered in again. Mulcahy was hefted aboard. The chopper lifted off through a double helix of flying leaves. Sixty-nine survivors saddled Bergens, checked weapons, sidled off silently into the forest towards the Tengi River. Thompson had to assume the insertion had been comped.
Going was tough. They made only twelve hundred metres that day. Thompson set up a squadron base near the Sungei Tengi and established comms. Next day the squadron split into troops and trekked off to make satellite bases. Every troop carried a radio, and at the evening halt encoded sitreps went through to squadron and Regiment HQs. The radio ops got on the net every morning at sunup to check that the troop’s orders were still valid.
De la Billière’s troop waded through swamp for three days. It was ‘a hellish environment in which to live and move … The leeches were unspeakable,’ he recalled. At first the water was only ankle deep but it was soon up to the knees. Occasionally one of the patrol would sink up to his armpits. Getting drenched in swamp-water didn’t faze anyone, though. Humidity was a hundred per cent, and almost every afternoon saw a tropical deluge. The men were wet through all the time, with rain, swamp-water or sweat.
De la Billière had been in Malaya just over a year, and had got to know his 6 Troop well on jungle patrols. His biggest challenge had been earning the men’s respect. He was twenty-two. They were mostly older, and they were ‘Big Time Bravo’: they knew it all. Woodhouse’s brief had informed him that there were no bad soldiers, only bad officers, and that he had the best soldiers in the world under his command. If he issued orders infantry-style, he knew he’d soon lose control. In the jungle there was no one else to run to, no guardhouse, no provost-sergeant. The only thing he had on them was that he’d seen action in the Korean war and they hadn’t. He called them by their surnames. They called him ‘Boss’. When he insisted on following SOPs they smirked. They thought he was a typical infantry officer. In the end, he came to the same conclusion Jock Lewes had come to. He would do anything they did, and more – patrolling, setting ambushes or fetching water. Any difference of opinion would be sorted out by Chinese Parliament.
This tradition had always existed in the SAS, but it had been actively encouraged by Tod Sloane, who had introduced ‘criticism sessions’ where everyone could put forward his point of view. Some SAS-men thought the system useful, others didn’t. The hard-nosed Peter Ratcliffe felt that such discussions were a waste of time, simply confusing the issue, and allowing waverers to be negative. It was not the case that the opinion of the greenest trooper was equal to that of a senior NCO or officer commanding: as Tony Jeapes later pointed out, it was simply a method of eliciting constructive ideas that the commander might be able to use, but had generally thought of already.
In Stirling’s day, the wider gulf in economic and educational background between officers and men meant that there had been greater deference to the ‘officer class’. Wartime officers had still retained a modicum of the almost mystical aura of the aristocracy, which is why enlisted men found it difficult to accept officers commissioned from their own ranks. That deference was now melting away as ‘other ranks’ became more independent-minded: this was what Stirling meant when he talked about a modern SAS-man being ‘more ready to fight his corner’. In the post-war world, the ‘magical’ gulf between officers and men had vanished. De la Billière’s troop-sergeant, Lawrence Smith, soon told him if he disagreed with his proposals and why, but did it in a charming way. Another of his NCOs, Cpl. ‘Tanky’ Smith – an ex-Royal Tank Regiment man – was less charming. ‘If he disagreed with me, he said so without mincing his words,’ de la Billière recalled, ‘and usually followed up with a couple of verbal punches, just to make sure I’d got the message.’4
The descendant of a French Huguenot family, de la Billière had lost his father – a Royal Navy surgeon – at the age of seven, when his ship, Fiji, was sunk by the Luftwaffe. He had attended Harrow, but hadn’t shone as a student and left school with no qualifications. His ambition had been to join the Merchant Navy, but he’d failed the fitness test on colour-blindness. At the age of seventeen he’d decided instead to join the SAS – a unit of which he’d heard ‘exciting rumours’. Enlisting as a private in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry as the first phase of his plan, he was soon selected for officer cadet training and was commissioned in the Durham Light Infantry. A man who made it his policy to avoid direct confrontation if possible, his one lesson from combat in Korea had been ‘when someone is out to kill you, you had better get him first’.5
After three days in the swamp, de la Billière concluded that not even the guerrillas could endure these conditions. He moved his troop to drier ground along the river-bank, where it soon became clear his hunch had been right. Lawrence Smith picked up sign left by CT hockey-boots, and the patrol tracked the enemy through ten-foot-high swatches of lalang, or sword-grass, where they’d cut a path. The lalang was even worse going than the swamp –
scratching hands, ripping clothing to shreds. After a while, though, they came across the remains of recently used camps, marked by piles of shells from freshwater terrapins the enemy had cooked and snaffled.
This information was vital. When de la Billière relayed the news to Thompson, the OC thought it confirmed that the terrorists had seen the casevac. They were bugging out downriver, fast. Thompson deployed his other two troops to cut them off ten miles downstream from where de la Billière had found sign.
The NCO commanding one of the troops, Sgt. ‘Bosun’ Sandilands, had decided to move by night. It was an unorthodox strategy, made possible by the low height of the mangrove trees and the bright moonlight. Sandilands thought the night-sounds would cover his patrol’s approach, and at the same time he might pick up voices or the smell of cooking-fires. One afternoon, setting out early to cross a wide expanse of swamp, he clocked movement among some mangrove trees about seventy metres away. From hiding-places among the roots, his patrol spotted two CTs. They were tying hooks to fishing-lines, and had their rifles by their sides.
Sandilands thought the range was too great to be certain of a kill, but there was no obvious way to close it without being seen. He had the idea of approaching them using a drifting log as cover. His men detached a floating trunk from among the mangrove roots. Sandilands and his oppo crouched behind it and began to crawl through the water, pushing it in front of them. Moving steadily, they closed the gap. The guerrillas gave no sign of having spotted them, but Sandilands was aware that it would soon be dark and didn’t want to lose the chance of a kill. About fifty metres from the enemy, he gave the sign to open fire. The pair blasted 7.62mm rounds. Bullets whined and whacked, grooving water. One of the enemy went down. The other streaked off into the twilight. Sandilands and his mate didn’t follow up. Knowing it would be dark in minutes, they waded back to the patrol and strung their hammocks in the mangroves for the night. At first light they crossed the water, examined the corpse, and followed the tracks of the survivor eight kilometres to an abandoned terrorist camp.
Harry Thompson heard Sandilands’s report, and became certain that Ah Hoi was still in the area. He drew his troops in a ring around the swamp, and called for back-up from police and infantry units. He began to squeeze. As the patrols moved in, he shifted his squadron base to some paddy-fields near a village on the jungle fringes. Deane-Drummond choppered in with Malayan Special Branch officers. They waited. ‘At last the break came,’ Deane-Drummond recalled. ‘Out of the undergrowth beside one of the paddy-fields stepped a girl barely four foot six inches tall … she said her name was Ah Niet, and she had Ah Hoi’s terms of surrender.’6
Deane-Drummond had a Special Branch officer tell Ah Niet there would be no ‘terms’, except those extended to all surrendering CTs. If Ah Hoi refused, the RAF would blitz his camp with bombs within forty-eight hours. This was a bluff – the SAS had no idea where the camp was – but Ah Niet swallowed it. She vanished back into the forest. That night, Thompson watched a caravan of lights coming towards him, as Ah Niet led a miserable file of ex-guerrillas to his post. One of them was ‘Baby Killer’ Ah Hoi, dressed in a woman’s silk jacket and straw hat. ‘Even at this stage … he ranted on and said that the Communists would win in the end,’ said Deane-Drummond. ‘Like all bullies, he was a coward and had surrendered to save his skin.’7
Sandilands was awarded the MM for his work, and de la Billière received a Mention in Dispatches. Despite this, though, Thompson told Deane-Drummond that he wanted de la Billière RTU’d. They had disagreed over the deployment of his patrol’s bashas. John Woodhouse had laid down that in a troop-base bashas should be distributed ‘tactically not comfortably’, but de la Billière’s old hands had persuaded him that this was pointless – it was impossible for the terrorists to approach a camp in thick jungle by night without being heard. They preferred a more ‘sociable’ layout with the bashas grouped together. According to Ian ‘Tanky’ Smith, Thompson arrived at their base one day in a foul mood, and criticized the arrangement. De la Billière defended it. Thompson, Smith said, lost his rag and told them, ‘Right, I’m going to RTU the pair of you!’8
This might have been the end of de la Billière in the SAS. Deane-Drummond, mindful of Thompson’s tendency to explode, though, refused to RTU him. He was aware, as de la Billière was, that Woodhouse’s stipulations were guidelines, not orders. Instead, he moved de la Billière to HQ Squadron and later posted him quietly to Johnny Watts’s D Squadron, where, said Deane-Drummond, he subsequently performed ‘brilliantly’ in every job assigned to him. Harry Thompson would die in a helicopter crash in Borneo. De la Billière would become the Regiment’s commanding officer, Director, SAS Group, and – thanks to the Iranian Embassy siege – the most famous SAS officer of his time.
70. ‘There will be nothing left for my squadron at this rate’
Johnny Cooper, the callow young Guardsman who had jumped with Jock Lewes on Op Squatter, was now a thirty-six-year-old major and the most experienced SAS warrior in the business. While B Squadron was chasing Ah Hoi in Telek Anson, Cooper’s A Squadron was operating south of Ipoh on Op Ginger, in support of the Commonwealth Brigade. In two months Cooper’s boys made half a dozen kills. Harry Thompson sent a message asking him to go easy. ‘There will be nothing left for my squadron at this rate,’ he said.1 That August, Deane-Drummond was flown in with brigade-commander Freddie Brooke to congratulate Cooper personally.
When the heli touched down, Cooper ushered the two senior officers over to the bole of a tree, where a corpse lay wrapped in a poncho. This was a seventh CT they’d taken out – only that morning. Cooper ordered a brew. While his guests sipped tea from giant half-litre mugs, he described how the other CTs had been bagged – all of them by superb shooting from his patrols.
The first pair had been slotted by Trooper O’Brien of 3 Troop, who, with an Iban tracker, had been staking out a rebel staging-post. It was a bamboo platform on stilts with a thatched roof that had been located by the troop boss, Captain Muir Walker, a six-foot Scotsman with wild red hair known to the officers as ‘Red Rory’ and to the troops as ‘Black Abdul’. Walker had packed its floor full of plastic explosive.
Walker wired the PE to an igniter and had his men take up ambush positions. Two men at a time were on stag with the igniter, with the rest a hundred metres to the rear. They lay in wait in teeming rain for fourteen days. They didn’t smoke or cook. They conversed in signs and whispers, and crawled into the bush to relieve themselves. O’Brien was on stag when four Communists entered the post. He pressed the igniter, hoping to blow them to smithereens. Nothing happened, and O’Brien concluded that the rain had rendered the wiring useless. Unable to warn the rest of the troop for fear of alerting the enemy, he picked up his FN rifle and drew a bead on the entrance. When two of the guerrillas climbed out, he pulled iron. The FN barked twice. The men hit forest humus and wet leaves. The others lurched out of the back of the shelter and whipped off into the jungle. Walker ascertained later that one of the dead was a VIP – district committee secretary Ah Poy. He was a major bag.
A couple of weeks later, two more guerrillas were taken out by L. Cpl. Jimmy Ladner, Royal Artillery. Ladner was lead-scout on a patrol commanded by his squadron sergeant-major, T. W. ‘Jesse’ James. The patrol, returning to its base after a day’s trek, was three hundred metres short of camp. Ladner clocked bamboo shoots lying on the track that he hadn’t noticed on the way out. He halted and placed his hand across his face. It was a signal to James, behind him, that there was someone around. The patrol froze. Ladner, wide-eyed, saw a flash of khaki ten metres away. For an agonizing instant he held fire. He thought it might be one of the aborigines, who sometimes wore military-style shirts. The next thing he clocked was a red star. Ladner whoffed a shot from his pump-gun. As he fired, he spotted a second Communist. With blurring speed, he pumped and fired again. The lethal 9-ball shot whacked off the second man’s arm at the elbow and hurled it fifteen metres down the track. Ladner knew he’d been a h
air’s breadth from annihilation. He received one of the half-dozen MMs awarded to the Regiment in Malaya. He said later that his real reward was staying alive.
The last pair of guerrillas had been taken out by ‘Jesse’ James himself. ‘He left my HQ on a short exercise patrol,’ Cooper recalled. ‘Rounding a [bend] on a jungle track he came face to face with two CTs walking towards him. His reflexes were so quick that his carbine was up to his shoulder and both men were shot dead before they could themselves open fire.’2 Cooper was proud of the men’s performance. He knew SOPs still weren’t perfect – the men were in too much of a hurry, too competitive, and occasionally lacking the modesty David Stirling had considered a cardinal virtue. Still, things had come a long way since ‘Mad Mike’ days.
Ginger was Cooper’s last successful operation in Malaya. This wasn’t through any fault of his own, but simply because by that summer most of the Communists had surrendered or were about to. Cooper acquired several new officers, including his second-in-command, Captain Warwick Deacon, a noted mountaineer, and Captain Tony Jeapes, Devon & Dorset Regiment, another future commanding officer of 22 SAS, who would end his career a major-general. A Squadron were sent to patrol the Thai frontier. They spent weeks quartering the jungle, and even patrolled the Sungei Perak river in motorized dugouts, but found only deserted CT camps. In December, Cooper received instructions to pull his squadron out – a tall order, because all available helicopters were grounded. Instead, he had his men construct rafts and float downriver to base, getting in only twenty-four hours later than they would have done by chopper. At Sungei Besi, Deane-Drummond told Cooper he had a week to retrain and re-equip for immediate reassignment in the Middle East.
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