Deane-Drummond had two more tricks up his sleeve to distract the enemy. The previous evening, before the donkey-trains left for Kamah, he’d called the chief ‘donkey wallopers’ and inquired about watering-conditions up the Wadi Tanuf, giving the impression that the assault would go in from the north. ‘They were told not to tell anyone on pain of death,’ commented Don ‘Lofty’ Large, with D Squadron. ‘So we knew the enemy would know within minutes.’3
The other ruse came just before dark, when the CO had all the men jump aboard fifteen three-tonners and ordered the convoy to drive north, away from the starting-point at Kamah. The trucks bounced and jolted along the rough track around the jebel, in plain view of Talib’s watchers. At last light, the lorries halted and turned back the way they’d come, hotfooting it with lights off towards the start-point.
The assault started at 2030 hours, the men tabbing off in file up the eight-thousand-foot Vincent, the first stepping stone to the plateau. The climb was ‘blind’ – no one had done it before. They had studied air-photos and two SAS-men had made a recce from the desert, but Deane-Drummond was aware that there were a lot of unanswered questions. The most pressing ones were whether their ruses had worked, and if they’d be able to cross the ‘causeway’ between the wadis.
D Squadron led the way with de la Billière’s troop on point, preceded by a two-man scouting party. A Squadron followed, led by Johnny Cooper himself, with Deane-Drummond’s HQ, and the donkey-train carrying their radios, bringing up the rear. The rocks had sponged up the day’s heat, and even two hours after sunset the air was still hot. Sweat poured off them. They were tramping straight up the mountainside, lugging loads varying between forty and fifty kilos. According to de la Billière, who’d lain awake all day psyching himself up for the effort, the first hour was the worst. ‘So steep was the face of the slab,’ he wrote, ‘that some of the squadron couldn’t stand the pace and fell back.’4
According to the official report, the A Squadron troop left at Cassino put in their diversionary attack just as the main party started their climb. Deane-Drummond, though, recalled hearing gunshots about three and a half hours later, just as he reached Vincent. Apart from that, all was quiet. They encountered no pickets, but passed two abandoned enemy sangars. They staggered and stumbled on up the unrelenting mountain for a solid seven hours without a halt. The going was harder than expected. The rocks that had looked so smooth to Cooper from the air were ragged screes that slowed progress to a crawl. The aerial photographs hadn’t revealed the twenty-foot sheer-sided wadis that had to be worked around, with agonizing delays. Lofty Large thought they were making too much noise. ‘There is no way a man can climb over loose rocks and shale, heave himself up rock slabs,’ he wrote, ‘… in almost total darkness with a heavy load … and be both fast and quiet.’5
By about midnight Cooper’s squadron had taken up fire positions on Vincent, from where they would cover D Squadron’s advance. They were still exhausted from their battle the previous night, and their almost non-stop descent to Tanuf. Getting off the slab down fifty-foot broken cliffs proved more of an obstacle than anticipated, and it took D Squadron another four hours to reach the edge of Pyramid, where a two-hundred-foot precipice plunged down to ‘the causeway’ that had been seen from aerial photos. Johnny Watts deployed one of his four troops on Pyramid to support the next leg. In the lead, de la Billière’s scouts started looking for a way down the cliffs. Deane-Drummond’s HQ party moved up behind Watts, whose three leading troops were bunched together by the cliff edge.
Deane-Drummond was worried. It was now 0500 hours, which gave them an hour and a half to get up to Beercan before first light. The troops were already shattered. ‘Men began to collapse in their tracks,’ said Lofty Large. ‘I saw two fall flat on their faces, unconscious before they hit the ground.’6 De la Billière’s scouts came hurrying back to report that they’d found the place where the track descended the cliff, but they’d also come across a .50 heavy machine gun mounted on a tripod at the mouth of a cave. It was loaded with belts of armour-piercing, ready to fire, and was set up so as to command the crucial bottleneck.
Watts guessed that the crew was asleep somewhere nearby, and detached a troop to take them out. They would have to wait till first light, though, so as not to compromise the advance. ‘We couldn’t knock out the machine-gun crew,’ said de la Billière, ‘without making a noise that would advertise our presence to half the [jebel].’7 They would have to slip past the position quietly. Time was dripping away, and Deane-Drummond advised Watts to have his two remaining troops drop their Bergens, leave them with the detached troop, and make the rest of the climbwith only weapons and belt-kit.
There were twenty-two men in the final assault party. After they’d jettisoned their Bergens, they felt light enough to take off. Led by Watts and de la Billière, they slunk past the gun, worked their way down the cliff, and dropped about five hundred feet into the Wadi Sumait. Dark rock steeples towered menacingly above them, and they were glad to know that the D Squadron troop on Pyramid was covering them. Deane-Drummond’s party followed closely behind, still carrying their Bergens. From the top of the wadi, the CO could see the advance party above him as they moved up the final six hundred feet in a desperate race against time. He glanced east, and noticed that there was already a faint gash of crimson on the skyline.
It was getting light by the time de la Billière’s men came in sight of the end. They could feel their energy draining away. Despite having no Bergens, every step was agony. ‘Suddenly we came over one more ridge,’ de la Billière wrote, ‘and saw … [that] the slope eased off into a rough rocky plateau.’8 They had arrived. Watts and de la Billière collapsed behind a rock, reflecting that they were the first foreigners to ascend the Jebel Akhdar in a thousand years. Watts pulled himself out of his torpor and sent the men off in pairs in all-round defence, telling them to die at their posts if need be.9
Not far below, Deane-Drummond heard ‘the sweet music of aircraft engines’, and looked up in the thickening light to see three RAF Valettas coming in for the supply-drop, right on schedule. On the top, Watts realized suddenly that he’d left his smoke grenades in his Bergen, and that the pilots wouldn’t make the drop unless they saw smoke. He had his men set fire to a square of flannelette soaked in gun oil, and ignite some green bushes. A column of white smoke guffed out in the clear dawn air. The Valettas banked gracefully and zoomed in low. Fifteen seconds later, a bevy of pink fluted domes blossomed out of the sky. ‘It was the best possible welcome we could have had,’ said Deane-Drummond, ‘and we had done it in the nick of time.’10
When the CO’s party crested the plateau at seven o’clock, the expected attack hadn’t arrived. As the sun climbed further, it became clear to Deane-Drummond that there were no rebels in the vicinity. His deception plans had worked perfectly. They had taken the plateau.
The third D Squadron troop was up an hour after the HQ party, too late for Johnny Watts, who delivered a ‘bollocking’ to the troop officer. The subaltern countered that they’d had to stop to take out the machine-gun crew at the crack of dawn. After Watts’s party had descended into the Wadi Sumait, they’d divided up and scoured the caves around the gun, lowering themselves down the cliff on a fixed rope. A two-man team, ‘George’ and ‘Alex’, were climbing down to a lower cave, when one of the Arabs emerged, clocked Alex on the rope, and pot-shotted him with a .303. The Arab missed, but Alex was stuck there like a monkey on a stick until his comrade finally blotted the rebel. Alex landed on the ledge, pinned a No.36, and lobbed it underarm into the cave. An ear-splitting blam chased out a whoff of smoke. Alex wasn’t happy with George. He said his mate had waited till the very last moment to whack the Arab, just to give him a hard time.
When Watts argued that it shouldn’t have taken so long to deal with a three-man MG crew, the subaltern pointed out that the action had alerted another rebel gun-crew, and enemy rounds had started blipping and pinging around his troop. Arab snipers posted on the Ambi
tion feature woke up and belatedly realized the jebel was under attack. RAF Venoms wheeled in and rocketed them, unsuccessfully.
Cooper’s A Squadron, relieved by the Northern Frontier Force, set off to the plateau at mid-morning but were held back by snipers engaging them from half a kilometre away. By bad luck, a stray round hit the Bergen carried by Trooper Carter and set off an Energa grenade. It went up in a fireflash that mortally injured Carter, and sprayed Troopers Hamer and Bembridge with shrapnel. All three men were dollied out by choppers, whirling in perilously under fire from enemy mortars. Carter and Bembridge died, but Hamer survived. Cooper detailed a troop to knock out the snipers and machine-gun post, but they weren’t silenced until 1430 hours. By then, Cooper’s advance party was already on the plateau with Deane-Drummond. The D Squadron troop left on Pyramid didn’t set off until 1500 hours, after being relieved by the Life Guards.
The leaders of the rebellion – Talib, Ghalib and Sulayman – were never found. It turned out that the chiefs had taken the air resupply-drop for reinforcements, and had fled to Saudi-Arabia on camels with sixty tribesmen. The rebellion had been nipped in the bud: a small party of SAS-men, most of whom had seen service only in the Malayan jungle, had captured a mountain that had remained impregnable for a thousand years. The oil companies were delighted. A multibillion-barrel oilfield was struck at Fahud in 1964.
73. ‘A great success as a bloody idiot’
A and D Squadrons stayed in Oman until March, when Cooper moved them back to the UK to join the rest of the Regiment at its new base, Merebrook Camp, near Malvern – a disused wartime emergency hospital. The three sabre squadrons were immediately reduced in strength to three troops each – a total of no more than seventy sabre personnel. At a staff conference that Christmas, Deane-Drummond told the assembled officers that 22 SAS was shortly to be transferred to Bradbury Lines at Hereford, where a Junior Leaders’ camp had become vacant. The bad news was that they were to be further downsized to an HQ and two sabre squadrons – A and D. B Squadron was to be disbanded. Many officers were surplus to requirements, and would be RTU’d. Johnny Cooper was offered a desk job at the War Office.
Cooper was the only Original left in 22 SAS – Bob Lilley had served with the Regiment for a time, but had now departed. Bob Bennett was serving as RSM with 21 SAS. Cooper had dedicated the best part of twenty years to the Regiment, and was its most experienced soldier. When the medals had been handed out for the Jebel Akhdar op, though, Watts, de la Billière and Jeapes had all been awarded MCs, and Deane-Drummond his second DSO. Cooper had been left out. At thirty-nine, he wasn’t beyond the pale of operational employment. He deserved to be Regimental 2IC or commanding officer, yet there was no longer a place for him in the Regiment. Cooper decided that they could keep their ‘desk-wallah’ appointment. He left 22 SAS within a month, and was soon in command of C Company, the Northern Frontier Regiment, in Oman. Deane-Drummond left shortly afterwards, handing over to Lt. Col. Dare Wilson. He went off to command 44 Airborne Brigade.
Bradbury Lines proved the perfect base for the Regiment. Hereford itself was a sleepy, picturesque town strategically placed for training in the Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons, just across the Welsh border. It was big enough to provide most amenities, and small enough for SAS-men and their families to become part of the community. The barracks had been built in the 1930s, and consisted of wooden huts in configurations known as ‘spiders’, set in meticulously maintained grounds and gardens. The offices, including the ‘Blue Room’ or briefing room, and the ‘Kremlin’ – the Intelligence and Planning centre – were sited in a block overlooking the rarely-used parade ground, the centrepiece of which was the famous clock tower, which was to become a monument to fallen comrades. It was on the clock tower that James Elroy Flecker’s famous lines from Hassan were inscribed:
We are the pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond the last blue mountain barred with snow,
Across that angry or that glimmering sea …
‘The pilgrims’ was a tribute to the dead rather than the living members of the Regiment – those who had ‘failed to beat the clock’. Many would be buried in the cemetery of St Martin’s church in Hereford – another regimental monument.
Over the next four years, 22 SAS settled into its new base and went about the business of transforming itself into a professional special forces unit. The keyword was flexibility. SAS-men must be multi-skilled on several levels, cross-trained so as to be able to take over each other’s jobs instantly. On a troop level, they must be prepared to fight in any environment, and to arrive by land, sea and air. Dare Wilson set up a training wing, a repository of all SAS skills. Every man would be a swimmer, a driver and a parachutist, and would be trained in combat survival, escape and evasion, resistance to interrogation, battlecraft, close-quarter battle shooting, foreign weapons and jungle warfare. Every man would attain either advanced or basic level in signals, medical skills or demolitions, and some would acquire languages, including German, Arabic, Malay, Thai and Swahili.
Brian Franks’s concept of specialized troops was also taken on board. At first the idea was to have one speciality in each of the two sabre squadrons – a ‘mountain troop’ in A Squadron, and an ‘amphibious troop’ in D Squadron. A year later, it was decided to duplicate the specialist troops in both squadrons. In each, there would be four specialities. The ‘Boat Troop’ would be trained in the use of folbots, Gemini inflatables, ship and submarine landings and sub-aqua techniques. The ‘Mobility Troop’ would specialize in operations by Land Rover for the European and desert theatres, with advanced driving and repair and recovery skills. They would also be trained in astro-navigation and desert navigation techniques developed by the LRDG. The ‘Mountain Troop’ would become experts in mountain warfare, rock and cliff-climbing, skiing and snow survival. The ‘Air Troop’ would be trained to jump in small sticks from six thousand feet. Later, they would develop HALO – high-altitude, low-opening – drops, and would be inserted from civil aircraft from up to thirty-five thousand feet, breathing from oxygen cylinders.
SAS missions might require high security, but the existence of the Regiment was not secret. Until the late sixties it openly paraded in uniform. Even afterwards, its existence was never denied, and its deployment was publicized when convenient as a political tool by the government. Though the Jebel Akhdar campaign had been under wraps at the time of its execution, Deane-Drummond deliberately leaked details to The Times three months later. This was an example of the careful manipulation of the media, the use of which as a psychological weapon had been part of the SAS role from the very start, when Stirling’s operations at Kabrit were filmed and shown in cinemas world-wide. In SAS ops, the unit’s ‘mystique’ was always the hidden fourth dimension.
In the UK, the unit had to come to terms with the fact that the Special Air Service Regiment was more than just 22 SAS. There were two other Regiments, 21 SAS (Artists’) and 23 SAS. 21 now had sabre squadrons in London, Portsmouth and Hitchin. 23 SAS, with its HQ in Birmingham, had sabre squadrons in Leeds, Tyneside and Glasgow. 23, formed in 1959, had an even more curious pedigree than 21 SAS. It was descended from MI9 – the wartime escape and evasion division, responsible for setting up ‘rat-lines’ to extract downed aircrew and escaped prisoners. After the war it had become a territorial unit, Intelligence School 9 (IS9), later known as the Reserve Reconnaissance Unit.
In the year 22 SAS settled at Hereford, the War Office issued a directive laying out the Regiments’ various roles. The directive defined three characteristics of the SAS as a whole: the ability to operate for extended periods in small numbers in enemy-controlled territory; the ability to be moved by unorthodox means such as parachute or small craft; the ability to operate in extremes of climate and terrain. The three types of operations it was suited for were intelligence gathering, operations in cooperation with guerrilla forces and raids.
The directive also laid down SAS
roles in various war scenarios – limited, cold and global wars. 22 SAS had a capability for counter-guerrilla ops in desert, snow, mountain and jungle, in limited and cold war. In global war it would operate as an intelligence-gathering unit for 1 British Corps on the Rhine. 21 and 23 SAS had no role in cold or limited war, but in global war would be available within forty-eight hours to act as 1 BR Corps’ main ‘Corps Patrol Unit’ (CPU) or intelligence-gathering force, with particular reference to enemy nuclear systems.
21 and 23 SAS developed a new role in Europe, where, in the event of a Soviet advance, six-man patrols would lay-up in subterranean nuke-proof hides, observing enemy forces passing over their positions and relaying intel back to UK Base by ‘telegraph’. The NATO plan was to hold off until the Soviet divisions became bottlenecked at the river Weser, then hit them with nuclear strikes. Due to their role, 21 and 23 lacked the troop specializations of 22, but were as highly trained as 22 SAS in the other standard SAS skills.
When Peter de la Billière was posted to 21 SAS as adjutant the same year, he quickly found out that there was ‘an unpleasant amount of antipathy … between the regulars and territorials of the SAS. The regulars looked down on the part-timers as amateurs, and tried to unload poor instructors on them.’1 The regulars’ main beef, de la Billière said, was that the territorials were ‘unorthodox’ – a curious criticism in a unit that was founded on unorthodoxy. In fact, the regulars’ attitude sprang mostly from a kind of jealousy – that a man could be both, say, a highly-paid solicitor and an SAS trooper, seemed to challenge the superiority of those who could only do one job at a time. De la Billière acknowledged that TA personnel were ‘the cream of society’, and dismissed the notion of ‘amateurism’ as nonsense. Unorthodoxy was a virtue, and though it was obvious that standards could not be the same when people were soldiering in addition to their ‘day jobs’, he found TA standards high. He was determined to change this attitude, and later, as CO of 22 SAS, he made it a rule that no one could advance past the rank of sergeant without a successful tour with 21 or 23. ‘People began to see that the territorial SAS were first class,’ he wrote, ‘and enhanced the reputation of the whole Regiment in a special way of their own.’2
The Regiment Page 39