Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (15 page)

Back in October, Stirling had asked the men to come up with ideas for insignia designs. Bob Tait, the sergeant who had accompanied him on the first raid at Sirte, produced the winning entry: a cap badge depicting a flaming sword of Excalibur, the legendary weapon of King Arthur. This motif would later be interpreted, wrongly but permanently, as a “winged dagger.” The motto “Strike and Destroy” was rejected as too blunt; “Descend to Ascend” seemed inapt since parachuting was no longer the primary method of transport. Finally Stirling settled on “Who Dares Wins,” which seemed to strike the right balance of valor and confidence. The operational wings had been designed by Jock Lewes: the wings of a scarab beetle, with a parachute. Any soldier who completed parachute training could wear the wings on his shoulder; after three missions, they could be sewn above the breast pocket. Such marks and distinctions may mean little to the layman, but within a small unit like the SAS they were held in almost spiritual reverence, the emblems of a private brotherhood. The wings, Stirling noted, were treated as “medals in their own right.” Technically, as a mere detachment, the unit was not entitled to such insignia; this was precisely the sort of rule Stirling liked to flout.

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Stirling had a new plan: the detachment’s first amphibious operation. With Benghazi in Allied hands, he calculated, Rommel would be forced to ship increasing quantities of supplies through the Mediterranean port of Bouerat, some 350 miles to the west. If the SAS could get inside the harbor, with portable boats and a supply of limpet mines, they could paddle out to Axis shipping lying at anchor, probably including some large petrol tankers, and inflict substantial damage. He proposed taking with him two members of the Special Boat Section, a specialized marine raiding unit that had been attached to Layforce. The SBS men would handle the “folboats,” folding kayaks made of wood and canvas.

The operation was scheduled for the moonless night of January 23. Air reconnaissance would supply information on the ships in the harbor immediately before the raid. A recruiting poster was printed up, and Pat Riley, the most charismatic of the NCOs, was dispatched to the various military camps around the Middle East in search of suitable men.

While recruiting troops, planning the Bouerat attack, and generally preparing the SAS for major expansion, Stirling based himself in his brother’s Cairo flat, partly because it was more comfortable than Middle East HQ, but mostly because he was less likely to be interfered with by bureaucratic busybodies. Stirling’s idea of a planning meeting was most people’s idea of a party. Peter Stirling’s three-bedroom apartment became a scene of merry chaos, cluttered with maps, guns, papers, empty bottles, and full ashtrays, presided over by a resourceful Egyptian butler named Mohamed Aboudi who acted as majordomo, barman, unofficial quartermaster, and first line of defense against authority. “Mo” possessed an uncanny talent for simultaneously mixing pink gins, obtaining ammunition and vehicle spare parts, and answering the telephone. He was also adept at patching up the walls and calming the neighbors, after Stirling and his officers had staged late-night revolver-shooting competitions in the dining room.

A sudden influx of troops arrived from an unexpected quarter in early spring: a contingent of fifty-two Free French paratroopers under the command of Colonel Georges Bergé. These paratroopers were “tough cases,” in Stirling’s words, intensely patriotic Frenchmen who had escaped Nazi-occupied France and trained as parachutists in Britain. They were keen for any opportunity to take the fight to the Germans, and happy to do so under British command. Most of the British officers had at least a smattering of French, and a few of the French parachutists spoke English; even so, to avoid linguistic confusion, it was agreed that the smaller fighting units would usually be composed of one nationality or the other, while operating under Stirling’s overall command. Mixing French and British soldiers might have been a recipe for tension; in fact, though the forces teased each other endlessly, relations were almost uniformly peaceful. French troops would play a vital part in the evolution of the SAS.

Bergé was a regular army officer who had escaped to Britain after the fall of France. In March 1941, he had parachuted into occupied France on a mission to ambush a bus carrying Luftwaffe navigators coordinating the Blitz, but the operation failed because the bus, not untypically of French buses, failed to turn up. Bergé was picked up by submarine and made his way back to Britain, where Charles de Gaulle appointed him to command the parachute unit of the Free French forces. His deputy was Lieutenant Augustin Jordan, a former colonial civil servant, highly educated, impeccably attired, and courtly in manner, who had escaped to Britain from North Africa. Jordan’s finesse was slightly misleading; he was as ruthless as he was polite.

Of all the new French arrivals, the most remarkable was Germain Guerpillon, a former consular official who was probably the least soldierly man in the detachment. Guerpillon was tubby, diminutive, disorganized, and infinitely enthusiastic. “He couldn’t run, and he couldn’t jump, and he was terrified of heights,” one of his compatriots recalled. Initially, the other soldiers laughed at him, particularly the British, who nicknamed him “the duffer”; in time, they came to love him, and eventually to respect him deeply. For Guerpillon was indomitable.

The new men required training in explosives, desert warfare, and night operations. Parachute instruction continued because Stirling considered jumping out of planes to be “a good basis for judgment of character of the new volunteers.” With Jock Lewes gone, Stirling had lost a superb trainer; to replace him as training officer, Stirling chose the man who was living proof of the effectiveness of Lewes’s methods: Paddy Mayne. While Stirling, Seekings, Cooper, and a dozen others would head to Bouerat to sink ships, Mayne was instructed to remain in the Kabrit camp and train up the new recruits.

To say that Mayne was upset by this order does not quite do justice to the depths of his rage. His manner, on receiving the news, was “icy cold,” just one shade short of openly insubordinate. “I could see he was exasperated,” wrote Stirling, who nonetheless insisted that he had “no one else capable of this assignment.” Mayne, however, sensed that he was being left behind by Stirling because of the unstated but intense personal rivalry between them. Mayne had destroyed dozens of planes, whereas Stirling had yet to record a single “kill”; the more junior officer was convinced (perhaps with reason) that this was a ploy to enable Stirling to even up the score, and perhaps even “overtake his ‘bag’ of aircraft.”

Mayne managed to control his temper, but as he accepted the order Stirling noted that his tone of voice was “somewhat ominous.”

The Bouerat raid did not quite go according to plan. The convoy of seven trucks, led by Mike Sadler, had almost reached the safety of the Wadi Tamet when it was spotted by an Italian reconnaissance plane. The convoy scattered to take cover in the ravine. Minutes later, six enemy planes appeared; for an hour, they strafed and bombed blindly, up and down the wadi, before disappearing over the horizon as darkness fell. Emerging from hiding, Stirling was relieved to discover there were no casualties, but the wireless truck and its three operators had vanished. (They had in fact been captured and would spend the rest of the war in captivity.) There was now no way to contact headquarters to obtain the latest intelligence and reconnaissance reports.

That night, twenty men crammed into the back of a single truck, along with several dozen bombs and a collapsible canoe. Five miles from Bouerat, the lorry hit a pothole, sending men and equipment flying; the delicate folbot was smashed beyond repair. “We will have to reorganize a little,” said Stirling, displaying a nonchalance he surely did not feel. “There are plenty of targets waiting for us in Bouerat.” With luck, they might find a rowboat that would serve. Soon after midnight, Sadler dropped the men in fields on the edge of the town. The raiding party split into three groups: one headed off to disable the wireless station, while the other two, led by Stirling and Riley, crept down toward the sea.

Bouerat was little more than a cluster of houses around a small bay, with two quays on either side, lined with large warehouses. The place seemed eerily quiet, with no sign of any sentries. It was one thing to plant bombs on an airfield, but now they were five hundred miles behind the lines, stealing silently through an enemy-held town. Stirling and his men tiptoed down the pier. The only sound was the lapping of the water. The air smelled strongly of petrol. Through the gloom they could make out the shape, of some fishing boats; otherwise, the harbor was empty. Tankers had clearly been in port very recently, but now they were gone.

Over the next twenty minutes, bombs were laid in the harbor workshops and warehouses, which appeared to be packed with machinery, plane parts, and stockpiled food. In the darkness, the two parties bumped into each other and very nearly opened fire. Both Stirling and Riley had to stifle giggles. “I’m glad you’ve learned the art of moving quietly, Sergeant Riley,” whispered Stirling. With twenty minutes to go before the bombs exploded, the men headed back uphill, staying close to the road and pausing only to plant bombs on eighteen full petrol carriers assembled in a large lorry park. As they drove south in the LRDG trucks, the sky above Bouerat turned “a pale grey-pink.” The plan to destroy Rommel’s shipping had come to nothing, but for the first time Stirling felt he had “struck a real blow,” knocking out the wireless station, disabling the harbor, and wrecking a fleet of valuable petrol carriers, all within a few feet of the sleeping enemy.

On the return journey, they ran into an ambush and came under fire from mortars and heavy machine guns. A dust storm earlier in the day had rendered all their tommy guns inoperable. A Vickers antiaircraft gun was deployed from the back of the truck, which had the required “demoralizing effect” on the attackers, and the party managed to escape. To have set off without their weapons in working order, however, was the sort of oversight of which Stirling was too often guilty; Paddy Mayne would never have made the same mistake.

Stirling may have wondered on the drive back why he and his men had found the harbor empty. The answer came from the BBC. As the jubilant party neared Jalo, a radio bulletin relayed some disturbing news: the pendulum of the wider war had swung again. Rommel had counterattacked, retaking Benghazi and pushing the British back across Libya as far as Gazala, reconquering the territory he had so recently lost. Deprived of wireless contact, Stirling had been completely unaware of the battle. With the recapture of Benghazi, Bouerat was no longer Rommel’s major port. The LRDG had already pulled out of Jalo, which would also soon be back in enemy hands as Rommel continued his advance. Stirling finally got back to Kabrit on February 7; after just two weeks away, the war looked very different.

Stirling found Paddy Mayne in his tent, morosely drunk and reading a book in bed—a place, and a state, he had been in ever since the raiding party departed without him. Instead of training the new recruits, as instructed, he had pushed two beds together and climbed in, together with a stock of paperbacks (“mostly poetry”) and a large supply of whiskey.

Stirling seldom lost his temper; Mayne lost his frequently. On the few occasions when both events occurred simultaneously, the effect was spectacular. The sight of his best soldier sulking in bed and “surrounded by bottles” triggered what Stirling, with typically delicate euphemism, called “a very heavy storm”: a ferocious shouting match erupted, clearly audible to the rest of the camp, that lasted more than an hour. When the hurricane finally subsided, another bottle was opened, and the two men settled down to the only intimate conversation they would ever have together. For perhaps the first time, Mayne spoke of Eoin McGonigal, his closest friend, who had perished in the first raid. “I don’t think I had realized until then just how close Paddy had been to Eoin McGonigal or what the relationship had been,” Stirling later wrote, a little cryptically. “Paddy was able to relax totally with him…Eoin was able to communicate with Paddy on a different level.” Stirling, in turn, opened up about the “bitter disappointment” and sense of failure he had felt on being told he would never be an artist. “The frustration was so great,” he told Mayne, “that it drove me to compensate by tackling the most exacting physical goal I could set myself—the climbing of Mount Everest.” That admission of frailty seemed to touch a chord in Paddy Mayne.

“It was the look in Paddy’s eyes in response to this conversation rather than what he said (which was incoherent) that convinced me he was himself suffering from extreme frustration,” Stirling later wrote. “The only thing he wanted to do, he said, was write.”

Stirling felt he had discovered something about the demons that drove Paddy Mayne. “As there was no outlet for his creative energy, it got bottled up to an intolerable level…this led to some of his heavy drinking bouts, some of his violent acts and his black moods.” The unfulfilled writer inside Mayne, Stirling believed, had gone completely unrecognized, “except by his mother and perhaps by Eoin McGonigal,” explaining his mood swings and his aggression, but also his “astonishing intuition and inspiration on the field of battle.” During that long, drunken exchange of confidences, Mayne had hinted at his own internal frustrations, artistic and literary, but perhaps also psychological and sexual. Stirling never forgot the conversation that took place following their most bitter confrontation. He would be “haunted” by the enigma of Mayne’s contradictory character for the rest of his life: his “capacity for love and devotion on an almost spiritual level” combined with “sexual indifference to females (and males) and his social avoidance of women.” The parentheses are Stirling’s. “His compassion and gentleness in his day to day life,” thought Stirling, contrasted with the “bursts of extreme violence, sometimes even against those who were close to him.”

At the end of the evening, the two men shook hands and parted amicably. Mayne seemed immune to hangovers, either alcoholic or emotional, and “by next morning, he was back functioning with redoubled vigour.” Stirling was honest enough to admit that forcing Mayne to take on a training role had been a “dreadful mistake.” Pat Riley, now sergeant major, was appointed training officer in his place. Paddy Mayne would return to fighting on the front line or, more accurately, beyond it.