Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (20 page)

“Militari,”
said Fitzroy Maclean, who had not spoken Italian for about three years.

The Italian sentry, armed with a machine gun, looked vaguely quizzical. “Staff officers,
di stato maggiore,
” added Maclean. “
Di fretto
. In a hurry.”

Another Italian soldier was standing off some thirty yards to the right. Three more, carrying rifles, observed proceedings from beside the guard hut. All had bayonets fixed. Behind him, Maclean heard the ominous click of a safety catch being eased off the tommy gun in the hands of the man behind him. Cooper had drawn his knife in the darkness. In Maclean’s left hand he held a half-eaten bar of chocolate; in his right, out of sight, he clutched a large wrench with which he planned, if necessary, to brain this Italian sentry.

The soldier lifted the bar and waved the car through. “You ought to get those dimmed,” he said, pointing at the headlights. As the wail of the wheels rose once more, David Stirling accelerated into the night toward Benghazi.

The Italian sentry would have been astonished to discover how close he had come to being clubbed senseless by a British member of Parliament. He would have been still more stunned to learn that a pair of heavy-caliber machine guns had been hidden on the floor, and that the vehicle contained two inflatable rubber boats and enough explosives to demolish half of Benghazi. But he would surely have been utterly flabbergasted by the revelation that the tubby man seated in the middle of the back seat was one of the most prized potential prisoners of the war: Captain Randolph Frederick Edward Spencer-Churchill, the son of Britain’s wartime prime minister.

Randolph Churchill was a tricky personality and a divisive figure, a frustrated son who had spent most of his life trying, and largely failing, to impress a celebrated father. He was opinionated, bad-mannered, and often very drunk. At moments of frustration, he tended to burst into tears. As the heir to a great name, he was cruelly nicknamed “Randolph Hope and Glory.” But he was also clever, generous, and astonishingly courageous. He had come out to the Middle East with Layforce, and when the commando unit was disbanded he took over the propaganda section of Middle East HQ. Jock Lewes, who admired few people, had liked him: “Much too outspoken and militant in his convictions to be popular…but he puts heart into me by his robust and healthy character.”

Stirling was also fond of Churchill, though not without reservations. “A likeable chap, but dear me he could talk. He just couldn’t resist holding forth about how the war should be handled…But he was certainly brave enough.” Stirling had allowed Churchill to join L Detachment, though he was hardly cut out for the rigors of desert warfare. On his first parachute jump, Randolph hit the ground hard because, in Stirling’s uncompromising assessment, “he was just too bloody fat.” Churchill wrote to his father in glowing terms about the new unit and its commander. “I am extremely happy where I am. My Commanding Officer David Stirling is a very great friend of mine. He is only 25 and recently got the DSO for his attacks on German airfields. At the moment the unit have 121 enemy aircraft to their credit. Apart from Bob Laycock, he is the most original and enterprising soldier I have come across. Not being a regular soldier, he is more interested in war than in the army. He is one of the few people who think of war in three-dimensional terms.”

This was a most perceptive observation, and one that cut to the essence of Stirling’s approach. Unlike most officers, who thought in linear terms, and cared about promotion, medals, and the steady progression of the battlefront, Stirling approached warfare sideways, and from an amateur perspective. Killing the enemy was only one aspect of the process. If, using surprise and guile, the enemy could be disorientated, alarmed, and embarrassed, then the three-dimensional impact could be far greater than traditional tactics.

After much badgering, Stirling reluctantly agreed to allow Churchill to come on the Benghazi raid, on the understanding that he would not take part in the action but remain with the vehicles at the LRDG rendezvous. There was more than a little calculation in this: Churchill was invited along as an observer, “to see the fun.” A journalist by training, he was certain to report back to his father on the daring qualities of the SAS, and the more support Stirling could get from the top, the better he would be able to circumvent the obstructive elements in the middle of the military machine.

After the first, failed foray to the harbor, Stirling had refined the Benghazi plan. If two large ships could be mined and sunk at the harbor entrance, this would block the port, temporarily paralyzing Axis seaborne supply lines. If Rommel could be starved of food, fuel, and ammunition, then the deadlock might be broken. Even if the impact was only temporary, the effect on German and Italian morale might be significant. More troops would have to be deployed to defend the ports. Rommel could be made to look backward defensively, rather than east toward Cairo. A single, spectacular raid on Benghazi might change the course of the war.

Aerial photographs and intelligence reports confirmed a small strip of shingle, between the jetty and the harbor wall, ideal for launching small craft. It was agreed that the RAF would launch a bombing raid on the harbor the night before the attack, to divert enemy attention. Fitzroy Maclean was detailed to find boats that could be relied upon, unlike the fickle folboats. The only requirement, as Stirling put it, was that they “had to bloody well work.” Maclean obtained two rubber dinghies, “small and black and handy,” that could be swiftly inflated with a pair of bellows. The bellows emitted a loud asthmatic wheeze, but otherwise the boats appeared to be ideal. To test them, Stirling carried out a dummy night raid against the Allied shipping in Suez harbor, which proved to be almost as inadequately defended as Benghazi. When a passing British soldier spotted three men inflating a boat in the middle of the night beside the harbor and asked them what they were doing, he received the following response: “Never you fucking mind. Fuck off.” Which he did. The raiders planned to employ exactly this tactic if challenged in Benghazi.

The party would consist of Stirling and Maclean, Seekings and Cooper, Gordon Alston, an intelligence officer who had spent three weeks in Benghazi during the latest British occupation, and Sergeant Johnny Rose, a former manager of a branch of Woolworths and an expert mechanic, who would keep the Blitz Buggy running. Churchill would come along in the capacity of official observer.

The four-hundred-mile drive to the Benghazi escarpment took five days. Maclean marveled at the beauties of the changing desert, “sometimes flat, sometimes broken and undulating, sometimes sandy, sometimes hard and stony, a mixture of greys, browns, yellows and reds, all bleached by the sun and merging into each other.” The wilderness was dotted with patches of scrub and low grass, from which dashed frightened gazelles, “hardly bigger than hares,” as the convoy rumbled past. In the cold of the morning, the men drove huddled in greatcoats, but as the sun rose they gradually stripped down to shorts and the Arab headscarves adopted as an unofficial part of the SAS uniform. “Apart from their romantic appearance they were extremely practical,” wrote Maclean, as a sun shield, dish cloth, and face mask to keep off the flies and sand. Crossing the ancient caravan route, the Trig al Abd, Maclean noted the desiccated bones of camels “and no doubt men, who in the course of centuries had fallen by the way and been left to die.” Farther on, they passed the charred shells of tanks and trucks, some still containing corpses, victims of the winter fighting. Somewhere to the north lay the bones of Jock Lewes.

Stirling insisted on driving the Blitz Buggy himself, though he was an exceptionally inattentive and dangerous driver: “One hand on the wheel, puffing away quietly at his pipe, and looking at the scenery all around, and all the time doing a cool sixty, for all the world as if he’s out for a run down the Great North Road.” Maclean wondered what motivated soldiers to follow such a man, and found himself reaching back to the words of another desert warrior, Lawrence of Arabia. In
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
T. E. Lawrence described the elusive essence of military leadership: “Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals.” Stirling, it seemed to Maclean, was a perfect illustration of that irrational tenth, with his “never-failing audacity, a gift of daring improvisation.”

On the morning of May 20, the team made camp in the safety of the Jebel. As always, curious Senussi goatherds appeared almost immediately, offering eggs in exchange for cigarettes: tea was brewed and shared, followed by a ritual in which the locals were shown photographs of their tribal and religious chief, Sayed Idris, now living in exile under British protection in Egypt. Grandson of the Grand Senussi, founder of the order, the future King Idris I of Libya was held in reverential awe by his tribe. His photograph symbolized the informal alliance between the Senussi and the British. “They fingered it admiringly…grinning,” wrote Maclean.

That night, after a fortifying dinner of hot bully stew and tea, followed by a tot of rum, Maclean lay in his sleeping bag in the sand, watching the flashes over Benghazi as the RAF carried out the bombing raid on cue. The next morning, while Seekings and Cooper were preparing explosives and Maclean was testing his inflatable boats, another Senussi appeared in the camp, wearing a trilby and carrying a furled umbrella. Maclean immediately nicknamed him the “City Slicker.” The man “spoke fluent Italian and showed more interest in our affairs than we liked.” A whispered conversation took place, in which it was discussed whether this man might be a spy, and whether to take him captive as a precaution. When they looked around, the City Slicker had vanished. Before they could reflect further on this episode there was a loud bang, followed by a torrent of oaths. A faulty detonator had exploded in the hand of Reg Seekings: the injury was not severe, but enough to put him out of action. Seekings was furious; Randolph Churchill, on the other hand, was jubilant, for now he would take the place of the injured man. Within moments, Churchill was “oiling his tommy gun and polishing his pistol in preparation for the night’s work.”

It took five hours to maneuver the Blitz Buggy down the escarpment through boulder-strewn gullies; on the concrete road east of Benghazi, at around 10:00 p.m., the resulting damage to the suspension became apparent, and loudly audible. As Stirling accelerated, the squealing racket grew worse. Sergeant Rose spent five minutes hammering beneath the car in an effort to silence it, to no effect. Their approach to Benghazi would be less than stealthy.

Three miles out of town they reached the checkpoint (which ought not to have been there, according to the latest intelligence reports), making a din that echoed around the desert. “We could hardly have made more noise if we had been a fire engine with bell clanging,” Maclean later wrote. His combination of swagger and bad Italian somehow got them through the first encounter without a fight, but on the other side of the barrier another threat appeared. Two German cars passed in the opposite direction, then stopped, turned around, and began to follow them into town. Stirling slowed down, inviting the cars to overtake them; they also decelerated. He drove faster; they did so too. He stopped. They braked. Stirling hit the accelerator, the Ford V-8 engine roared, and the Blitz Buggy tore through the night and hurtled into Benghazi at seventy miles per hour, screaming like a banshee. By Churchill’s account, as they reached the native quarter, Stirling “crammed on the brakes and shot round a corner into a narrow side street.” To add to the cacophony, the air-raid sirens now started up, accompanied by police whistles and shouting. Alston yelled out directions: “Second on the right, that’s right. No you’ve passed it. Blast. Go on. Go on, take the next turning instead.” In the back, the men clung on as they slewed from side to side: “We were simply scorching along, whipping around corners on two wheels, and all the time making enough noise to raise the dead.”

Reaching what appeared to be a bombed-out cul-de-sac, Stirling turned in, braked, and switched off the engine. The pursuers had been shaken off. Since there was to be no RAF attack that night, the wail of sirens must surely have indicated that their own raid had been detected. “It very much looked as if the alert was being given in our honour,” wrote Maclean. “They were onto us.” Had they walked into a trap? Had the City Slicker given them away? The Blitz Buggy, with its telltale screech, was now a liability; it would have to be abandoned and destroyed to prevent it falling into enemy hands. To save time they would use only one of the boats. This was unloaded in its large kit bag, along with the explosives and machine guns; a Lewes bomb with a half-hour time fuse was placed inside the car beside the petrol tank. They would be leaving Benghazi—if they ever left it—on foot. Randolph Churchill was in a state of raging overexcitement, intoxicated by a combination of pure adrenaline and the neat rum in his water bottle. It was, he later wrote to his father, “the most exciting half hour of my life.”

The six men set off in single file for the docks, led by Alston. Rounding a side street, they ran straight into an Italian policeman standing under a streetlight. Maclean retrieved his best Italian.

“What is all this noise?”

“Just another of those damned English air raids,” said the bored cop.

“Might it be that enemy forces are raiding the town?”

This was considered to be quite a good joke.

“No, there is no need to be nervous about that,” said the laughing policeman. “Not with the British almost back on the Egyptian frontier.”

“Thanks. Good night.”

“Good night.”

This conversation, surreal as it was, put a different slant on matters. The sirens, it seemed, were simply responding to a false alarm, rather than warning of their arrival, and the pursuing cars had probably just been air-raid wardens trying to get them to dim the car lights. The destruction of the Blitz Buggy was therefore unnecessary. Moreover, the sirens had now fallen silent. Cooper was sent running back to defuse the bomb, with roughly five minutes left before it exploded. Fingers trembling, he stuck the safety pin back into the time pencil, extracted the detonator, and threw it over a wall. “I have never been so scared in my life,” he later admitted.