The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  71. ‘Condition their frame of mind to the extent where negotiations will be successful’

  When A Squadron arrived at Bait al-Faluj, five miles from Muscat, in January 1959, they didn’t even know where they were. Most had never heard of Muscat and Oman, the large sultanate lying on the south-eastern corner of the Arabian peninsula. Ruled by the reactionary Sultan Sa‘id bin Taimur, it was the ‘land that time forgot’ – a country that boasted no roads, schools or hospitals, no electricity grid and no private cars. Inhabited by a galaxy of small tribes, both settled and nomadic, life went on there as it had for centuries, at the pace of the camel, the donkey and the sailing-dhow.

  Five years earlier, the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company had identified potential oil-bearing strata in the Fahud area of north-western Oman, from aerial photographs. The IPC prospecting-team had been hampered in its attempt to reach the spot by the hostility of interior tribes, owing allegiance not to the Sultan in Muscat, but to the Imam of Oman, Ghalib bin ‘Ali, in Nizwa. The Sultan deployed his British-officered armed forces and wrested Nizwa from the Imam’s control. The IPC team completed its task, and the first exploratory shaft was sunk at Fahud two years later. The oil-rig was delivered by air, courtesy of the RAF.

  The Imam’s brother, Talib, raised a small force of Omani exiles and with the backing of the Saudis, and a nod and a wink from the USA, returned to Oman. He planned to take back the interior, and its oil, in the name of his brother. Talib’s trump card was the support of Sulayman bin Himyar, chief of the Bani Riyam tribe – the most powerful sheikh in the region. Ghalib, Talib and Sulayman were now holed up with their rebel force in the Jebel Akhdar, or ‘Green Mountain’ – the central massif a four-hundred-mile-long mountain-chain that stretched from the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf.

  The presence of the rebels was a threat to the drilling operations, and to the stability of the Sultanate. The SAS brief was to scale the Jebel Akhdar and take out the three chiefs, or, in Deane-Drummond’s words, ‘to give [their] followers really bloody noses … [and]… condition their frame of mind to the extent where negotiations will be successful’.1 The locals considered the Jebel Akhdar impregnable. About fifty miles long and thirty square miles in area, it reached a height of nine thousand nine hundred feet – a convoluted Martian landscape of lurching ridges, hammered peaks and sheer-sided wadis, riddled with caves, overhangs and perpendicular slabs like giant steps. The jebel had never been explored or mapped by Europeans. Johnny Cooper’s ex-comrade, former 1 SAS officer Wilfred Thesiger, had attempted to get in a decade earlier, but had been sent on his way by Sulayman bin Himyar. Ordered arrested by the Imam, Thesiger had narrowly escaped with his life.

  The Green Mountain didn’t appear to live up to its name, except on the central plateau, where there were orchards and forests, and running streams all year round. It was bitterly cold in winter, when temperatures plummeted to freezing and snow was not unknown. There could be savage rainstorms, but on still days the heat was overpowering, with the sunlight reverberating back from the metallic rocks, and the surface too hot to touch.

  The Directorate of Military Operations in London had toyed with the idea of dropping a British parachute brigade on the plateau, but Tony Deane-Drummond thought this plan a nonstarter. The drop would result in up to twenty per cent casualties, and the massive resupply operation required would be impossible to keep secret. Deane-Drummond was aware that the world had entered the ‘media age’ – instant radio and television coverage made military movements difficult to conceal. And secrecy was of the essence, because the Suez crisis two years earlier had made the British persona non grata in the Middle East, especially with the Americans, who were jealous of their commercial activities in the Gulf.

  Directorate of Military Operations counter-insurgency expert Major Frank Kitson suggested that Arabic-speaking Englishmen should go in disguised as tribesmen, with the SAS in a supporting role. British intelligence officers on the ground had pointed out that it would be impossible for Europeans to pass themselves off as natives in this country. The Arabs didn’t miss a trick, and could tell even which tribe a man belonged to from over a mile away. The other strategy – air-strikes – had proved ineffective. RAF Venoms and Shackletons had strafed and bombed the plateau, but had found targeting impossible without observers to vector them in.

  D Squadron, under Major Johnny Watts, had been patrolling the massif since November. Watts, a dark, eccentric-looking man with a humorous expression and a roll-up eternally dangling from the corner of his mouth, had orders to carry out offensive recces of all possible routes up the mountain, and to take out enemy pickets. The principal human target was Talib bin ‘Ali, who was reckoned to be the rebel commander. Watts’s base was at the village of Tanuf on the western side of the massif, from where Captain ‘Red Rory’ Walker, transferred from A Squadron as Watts’s second-in-command, had recced up to a pass known as Aqbat adh-Dhuffar, at about seven thousand feet. He had set up a forward operating base at a position named ‘Cassino’, facing a twin-peaked ridge christened ‘Sabrina’ or the ‘Twin Tits’ after a pinup girl of the day. Sabrina was a natural defensive position. Connected to the Aqbat by a narrow rock bridge a mile long and only a hundred metres wide, with sheer drops on both sides, it was easy for the enemy to defend, and impossible to avoid. It was at this stage that Watts realized that a second SAS squadron was going to be needed if they were to broach the plateau.

  Deane-Drummond agreed, but he’d already pushed the boat out asking for one. The original proposal had been for ‘a few SAS volunteers’. To the CO, the request had been the break he’d been waiting for. Four months earlier, he’d been notified that the Regiment would be returning to the UK that spring, where it would be downsized to a skeleton force. Without an immediate task, it would have to compete with 21 SAS, and a new TA Regiment soon to be raised in the north of Britain, 23 SAS. These two Regiments were to be groomed for a major special forces role with NATO. If 22 was to survive, it would have to find itself a separate role: what Deane-Drummond had in mind was a ‘fireman force’ that could be trained to work in small units in any country, at short notice, in complete secrecy. The Jebel Akhdar operation would be its test-mission, and was therefore make or break for 22 SAS. To succeed they had to have another squadron. There were six hundred well-armed rebels on the plateau, and the sabre personnel of D Squadron alone numbered only forty men.

  On 30 November, a five-man patrol under Sgt. Herbie Hawkins was banjoed near Cassino by fifty Arabs who slipped down from Sabrina under the cover of a ferocious gale. The rebels came on the patrol out of every wrinkle and fissure in the rocks, supported by the tack-tack of Bren-gun fire. Hawkins’s patrol held off until the enemy were within a hundred and fifty metres, then squeezed metal. Their FNs crackled, pumping deadly 7.62mm rimfire. Bullets juked and fizzed off rock. Fragments geezed. Brens clittered. The wind wailed. Arabs tumbled. Hawkins’s men stopped at least a dozen rebels in their tracks with concentrated shooting. When darkness fell they made a skirmishing retreat. The incident would go down in SAS folklore as the ‘Battle of Hawkins’ Hump’.

  The same night, two troops under Peter de la Billière bumped a gallery of caves further south, where they suspected Talib might be hanging out. They hit the caves with a rocket-launcher and a Browning machine gun. Rockets hooshed and shivered, blowing brilliant flame and grey smoke. The Browning chunked. Bullets sizzed. De la Billière was expecting the rebels to bug out, but they stood their ground. They clacked cocking handles. They popped .303 rounds. They hoiked bombs from a two-and-a-half-inch mortar. Mortar shells creased air, spliffing iron coils and rock splinters. ‘The richochets were prodigious,’ de la Billière recalled, ‘bullets whanged and whined … and chips of rocks flew. All at once we were in trouble.’2

  The SAS-men were saved by a strafing-run of RAF Venoms that honed in with cannon sprattling. Venom engines droned. Cannon shells boomed and crunched round the caves. The SAS made a fighting withdrawal. They’d suffered n
o casualties but cuts from flying rock shreds. Intel reports later suggested that they’d taken out twenty enemy dead, and though they’d missed Talib, the chief was reportedly ‘shaken’ by the attack.

  The SAS, too, had learned a lesson about the enemy – the ‘adoo’. ‘They are a much tougher crowd than [we] thought,’ Watts wrote Deane-Drummond, by now back in Malaya.3 The CO was becoming concerned. Patrolling was one thing, but a general assault on the plateau would certainly need another squadron. It wasn’t until 29 December that the War Office gave its approval. Cooper’s boys had been deployed as a result.

  Meanwhile, ‘Red Rory’ Walker had decided to show the Arabs once more that they hadn’t got much to be cocky about. On Christmas Eve his men stonked rebel positions with three-inch mortars. 16 and 17 Troops moved out to attack Sabrina. They shimmied up the left ‘tit’ on ropes, ramped into the Arab position, and in an all-night gun-battle drove them off the peaks. At first light on Christmas Day, Walker pulled his men back to the forward base. He’d shown the rebels that they had a more formidable enemy than the Sultan’s Armed Forces. By January, D Squadron had notched up forty adoo kills. They’d sustained only one casualty – Cpl. ‘Duke’ Swindells, who’d won the MM in Malaya. Swindells had allowed himself to become skylined on a ridge, and had been taken down by a sniper.

  That, Deane-Drummond told Cooper’s squadron during their initial briefing at Bait al-Faluj, underlined the difficulties of fighting here. Swindells was a good soldier in Malaya, where there were no ridges to be skylined on, and where visibility was down to ten or twenty metres. Here in the arid mountains there was no cover, and men could be clocked miles away. Added to this, the hilltribesmen were superb shots. The ‘hard core’ were armed with .303 Lee-Enfield Mark IVs – probably the most accurate service-rifle ever made. Hawk-eyed, brave and hardy, the Arabs came from a culture where men carried rifles from childhood. They’d inherited a tradition of inter-tribal warfare and vendetta that went back millennia. ‘Do not underestimate the rebels,’ Deane-Drummond warned Cooper’s crew. ‘… Their minor tactics, and use of ground are both excellent.’4 Deane-Drummond said that five-sixths of the adoo were local tribesmen from the Bani Riyam and the Bani Hinna tribes. About a hundred were Omani exiles who had been trained in Saudi-Arabia. There were about ten Saudi ‘advisers’. The arms and equipment had been supplied by the US military mission in Saudi-Arabia. They were sustained and provisioned by about five thousand civilians living in villages on the plateau.

  Deane-Drummond’s plan was a return to the old Stirling keynotes of surprise and the economic use of force. The main rebel strongholds were the villages of Habib, Saiq and Sharaijah, on the southern edge of the plateau. D Squadron’s recces confirmed that the best way of approaching them would be from the village of Kamah, south of Tanuf, on an unguarded route that led up a steep mountain face known as ‘Ambition’. This would take them up to Habib, at seven thousand feet.

  Cooper’s squadron had only five days to acclimatize. While they were at Bait al-Faluj, Deane-Drummond took Watts and Cooper on an air-recce over the proposed route. From the spotter aircraft, Deane-Drummond noticed that Ambition was joined to the plateau by a narrow neck that, if defended, would put the kibosh on the assault. Instead he chose a slightly more westerly route that would involve scaling a slabnamed ‘Vincent’. From here he hoped to find a short-cut across a natural ‘causeway’ from a hump named ‘Pyramid’, cutting directly across two wadis to the wall of the plateau. They would scale the last leg up to a point known as ‘Beercan’, a stone’s throw from Habib. The route was convoluted – not a straight climb, but a succession of ups and downs taking them over steep rocky slabs and up sheer cliffs. Boulder-strewn screes would be tough going at night, and in places a slip would mean plummeting down thousands of feet.

  The SAS would have to be at Beercan before first light, at about 0645 hours. The climbhad to be completed in a single night, with the men carrying immense loads of ammunition, rations and water. The squadrons would be assigned ten donkeys apiece for their .50 Brownings and ammunition. Once on top, the SAS would take a resupply drop from the RAF. If the squadrons failed to make the DZ, or the drop went astray, there was a fallback logistics-plan. Supplies would be hauled up the jebel on a caravan of a hundred donkeys that had been imported specially from Somalia.

  One well-placed picket with a machine gun could make mincemeat of the assault-party – and there were thought to be four main sites where pickets could halt the advance. Deane-Drummond knew that a diversion would be essential to make Talib shift his watchdogs to cover the Aqbat adh-Dhuffar and Tanuf areas to the north.

  This was where Cooper’s A Squadron came in. The day before the main assault, Cooper would relieve de la Billière’s troops now holding the forward base near Cassino, and launch a major attack on Sabrina. D Squadron patrols would mount feints on the two-thousand-foot slab above Tanuf. RAF Venoms would concentrate their strafing runs on the northern area. Deane-Drummond hoped Talib would be convinced that the assault was coming that way. Leaving one troop on the Aqbat adh-Dhuffar to carry on the deception, the rest of A Squadron would RV with D Squadron at Tanuf and would be motored round to the foot of Vincent, where they would begin the real ascent. The assault would go in at the next full moon – 25/6 January.

  They would have a dismounted troop of the Life Guards and local troops from the Northern Frontier Force and Trucial Oman Scouts as back-up, plus six hundred levies from the pro-Sultan Abiriyeen and Bani Ruwaha tribes. The sabre personnel of the two SAS squadrons amounted to only eighty men. Colonel David Smiley, the ex-SOE man who commanded the Sultan’s Armed Forces, told Deane-Drummond privately that he doubted the SAS could do it. The final assault required a ten-hour non-stop climb carrying loads of up to fifty kilos, to be made in complete silence and under constant threat of attack. The general consensus was that at least two battalions of trained mountain troops would be needed to carry out the operation. ‘The Cupboard’ was determined to prove them wrong.

  72. ‘We had done it in the nick of time’

  For two days it rained heavily on the jebel. Dry-washes became raging torrents, and the head of the massif was wrapped in cloud. Deane-Drummond scanned the met reports, and postponed the assault until the night of 26 January. Three days before D Day, though, the clouds drifted off south, and sunlight burst through them in probing laser beams. The air smelt clean and new.

  In the early hours of 25/6 January, three troops of Cooper’s A Squadron slipped out of a wadi under the apron of Sabrina to scale the ‘Twin Tits’. A fourth troop covered them with Bren-guns. The moon had ballooned into a cloudless sky soon after dark, bathing the whole surreal edifice of the mountain in pale gold. As the men made their way cautiously up the slope, though, not a squeak was heard from the rebels. Reaching the summit forty minutes later, Captain Tony Jeapes, leading the right-hand assault-group, found out why. The enemy positions had been blitzed by Shackletons and Venoms earlier that day and the enemy had retired to a fallback position. Jeapes also found that his radio op couldn’t get comms, and shot off a white Very flare to let Cooper know they’d cleared the ridge. A moment later, Bren and Lee-Enfield fire rippled out of the night from enemy sangars fifty metres away.

  Jeapes led his troop up to high ground behind the left ‘tit’ and wreaked fire down on the Arabs below. The SAS-men walloped Energa grenades from the muzzles of their rifles. They whaled No.36 pineapples. They moved forward and down, belting out FN and Bren fire. Rebel rounds whipped and shrieked. Grenades thunked and shrilled, cascading spurts of orange fire. The SAS-men skirmished, double-tapping, weaving, jogging, rolling and firing. Trooper Wright, boosting hip-fire from his Bren, took a grenade fragment in the thigh and skittered over, blagging blood. Energas smacked stone and erupted in dark blots, splattering rock-chips. Arabs beetled out of sangars and ran for it. ‘There was one very brave Arab standing there throwing grenades,’ Jeapes remembered. ‘Three of us fired and couldn’t hit him. We charged using a Brengun. Bullets were
pinging off the rocks. I got as far as the outcrop he was standing on, waited till he threw the grenade, and shot him.’1

  The six-foot-five Jeapes leapt over the wall of a sangar. An Arab in a dishdasha and headcloth popped up with a rifle in his hands, and squeezed metal. The weapon misfired. Before Jeapes could shoot, Cpl. Slater blasted the rebel, who did a high-dive off the rocks into a fifty-foot chasm.

  The SAS cleared the area and found the sangars were empty. Three of the enemy were dead, and probably the fourth, who’d nosedived over the precipice. Blood smears told them that up to five more had been hit and dragged off by their comrades along a wadi behind the sangars. Jeapes’s squad wheeled right to cover an attack by Ian Patterson’s troop on the opposite ‘tit’, but the opposition had faded away. The rebels had pulled out. By 1400 hours, Wright had been casevaced by Sycamore helicopter, and the whole squadron was back with Cooper at Cassino. Three troops got ready to move back down to Tanuf under the cover of night. 4 Troop would stay on the pass to launch another diversionary attack.

  It took them fourteen hours to reach base. They were so shattered after their engagement that few made it without stopping. They’d gone a full day and a night without sleep – it was the hardest trek Jeapes remembered. They had a few donkeys with them and at one point had to lift them down an eight-foot drop. It was the first time Jeapes had ever heard SAS soldiers saying they’d had enough. ‘Our march down to Tanuf was mighty tough,’ admitted Cooper. ‘We were bloody glad to get in.’2 Deane-Drummond was there to meet them, with Johnny Watts, whose D squadron had been patrolling aggressively on the Tanuf slab for most of the day. Deane-Drummond was delighted with Cooper’s performance, and told the men they couldn’t have done better. He was confident Talib would draw his pickets back to Sabrina. The A Squadron boys hit the sack, remembering that what they’d done was only a feint. The real job was to come that night.