Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (21 page)

Churchill and Rose were left to find somewhere to conceal the car. The remaining men set off again for the docks. Having passed through the European quarter of white-stuccoed buildings, they cut a hole in the perimeter wire surrounding the port and slipped down to the water’s edge. Stirling headed off to reconnoiter the harbor; Alston did the same, in the opposite direction, and Maclean and Cooper set to work inflating the rubber dinghy on the sliver of beach. Through the gloom Maclean could make out several large ships at anchor, “no more than a stone’s throw away.” The equipment that night seemed determined to be both treacherous and loud. The wheezing of the bellows attracted the attention of a nightwatchman aboard one of the ships, and a voice floated across the water.
“Chi va là?”

“Militari,”
replied Maclean.

A short silence.

“What are you up to over there?”

“None of your business.”

That seemed to do the trick.

After several minutes of pumping, the boat showed no sign of inflating. Somehow, on the journey to Benghazi, it had developed a puncture. They went back to get the other boat, and found Rose and Churchill maneuvering the car into a tiny, half-derelict garage. The operation now threatened to dissolve into dangerous farce: Stirling returned to the shingle and, finding it deserted, went off to look for the others; they, on returning to the same spot, were alarmed to find that Stirling and Alston had not returned, so Maclean went to look for them. Almost the entire unit was now wandering around in the dark. Cooper began pumping up the second boat, only to discover that this too was punctured: “It was heart-rending.” One by one, the team reassembled. The last to appear was Stirling, who explained that he had run into a sentry but had got past him by “mumbling incoherently and pushing him aside.” All the coming and going on shore had attracted yet more attention from the night sentries aboard the boats, who again quizzed the party, through the darkness, as to what, exactly, they were doing. Maclean replied testily that he was “very bored with being challenged and they were to shut up.” It was now growing light, and the sound of “metal doors slamming and excited shouting” from the ships indicated that their crews were now thoroughly suspicious. Clearly, the mission would have to be abandoned, yet again. The men packed up the infuriating dinghies and headed back toward the perimeter. Maclean was nearing the fence when he found himself face-to-face with a very large African soldier from Italian Somaliland. The sentry grunted, and by way of inquiry prodded Maclean in the stomach with his bayonet. Maclean launched into a flood of Italian, of which the sentry plainly understood not one word. “It seemed,” he wrote with fine understatement, “a more intractable problem than we had hitherto encountered.” But Maclean had a very simple, and very British, solution. “I have always found that in dealing with foreigners whose language one does not speak, it is best to shout.” This he now did, while gesticulating extravagantly, in a first-class impersonation of an irate and pompous officer who has been interrupted in the performance of important duties by an insolent underling. The sentry, browbeaten, eventually lowered his bayonet and backed off with “an expression of injured dignity.” But as they filed off into the darkness Maclean realized that the party had miraculously expanded; two more Italian sentries, alerted by the commotion and apparently thinking some sort of drill was under way, had joined the line of men and fallen in at the back—one of the very few occasions, perhaps the only one, when Axis and Allied soldiers had marched together.

Maclean now opted for an act of brazen bluff. Leading his little Anglo-Italian troop, he marched up to the gatehouse, accosted the lone sentry, and indignantly demanded to see the guard commander. A sleepy Italian sergeant emerged a few moments later, pulling on his trousers. The two Italian hangers-on, sensing trouble, melted back into the darkness. Maclean now launched into a virtuoso harangue. Most of his Italian had been learned from studying art, and the use of obscure baroque terms may have added to the force of his speech. As later reconstructed by Randolph Churchill, it went something like this: “We are German officers and have come here to test your security arrangements. They are appalling. We have been past this sentry four or five times. He has not asked once for our identity cards. For all he knows, we might be English. We have brought great bags into the dock. How is he to know they are not full of explosives? It is a very bad show indeed. We have brought all this stuff in here, and now we are going to take it out.”

Maclean then turned stiffly on his heel and stalked out, with the others following. The bemused Italian sergeant saluted. “As we passed him, the sentry on the gate made a stupendous effort and presented arms, almost falling over backwards in the process.”

Dawn was breaking by the time the party had reassembled at the cul-de-sac. The car was now thoroughly camouflaged with rubble and planks inside the garage of a half-bombed house. Above it, up a rickety wooden outside staircase, Churchill and Rose had found a small, decrepit flat, plainly long abandoned, shuttered and “reassuringly derelict,” and an ideal daytime hiding place: Churchill christened it “10 Downing Street.” The six men fell asleep on the floor, drained by the night’s alarms and excursions. They awoke as the town was stirring, “in very high spirits and feeling there was nothing we could not get away with inside Benghazi.”

Any attempt to return to the Jebel would have to take place in the dark; waiting for nightfall was both boring and nerve-racking. Their hiding place, it transpired, was not quite as secluded as it had seemed in the dark. Through a crack in the wall they watched as an elderly Arab couple emerged from the flat next door and began cooking their breakfast over a fire in the courtyard at the back of the house. A hubbub of German, Italian, and Arabic rose from the street in front. The building opposite, it seemed, was some kind of German area headquarters, with “dispatch riders dashing in and out on motorbikes and busy-looking officers arriving and leaving.” The men took turns to act as lookout through the window shutters. The heat rose. Since their stay in Benghazi had not been planned, no one had thought to bring any food or water. Randolph Churchill passed the time by reading F. S. Oliver’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. The sun threw a patch of light into the room; Rose watched it slowly creep across the floor and invented a game with himself to pass the time. “How long will it be before it reaches the plank with the crack in it? What’s the betting that I’m still here by the time it reaches the far corner?” At midday, someone crawled noisily over the roof. Planes droned overhead. They could only talk in whispers, something that the voluble Randolph Churchill found almost impossible.

By early afternoon, Stirling declared he could stand the tension no longer: he was going for a swim in the harbor and would carry out a reconnaissance for possible sabotage targets at the same time. Dressed in corduroy slacks, desert boots, and a polo-necked pullover, with a bushy black beard and a towel draped around his neck, he looked, to Cooper’s eyes, unmistakably English. “We thought: that’s the last we’d ever see of him.”

A few moments later, the fugitives tensed as heavy footfalls were heard coming up the wooden stairs, accompanied by labored breathing. Randolph Churchill cocked his tommy gun and took up a position behind the door. All eyes were fixed on the door handle. “We all seemed mesmerized,” said Rose. The handle turned, and an Italian sailor, obviously drunk, lurched into the room. He took one look at the piratical figure brandishing a submachine gun, uttered a yelp, and fled. Churchill later wrote to his father: “Terrified by my appearance (I had quite a long beard which I am sure you would not have liked) he fell headlong down the stairs and bolted out.” From the window, Cooper watched nervously to see if he would run into the German headquarters and was relieved to spot the man heading off at high speed in the opposite direction. The sailor was probably a looter, but the encounter did nothing to alleviate the anxiety of waiting. The men spent the next two hours with guns and grenades in hand, ready “to give any visitors a warm reception.” Stirling finally returned, announcing that on his walk around town he had spotted two German torpedo boats tied up at the dock; these could easily be bombed that evening on their way out of town.

Rose had been working on the suspension and believed he had finally silenced the squealing Blitz Buggy. At nightfall, they set off, but after a few hundred yards the noise started up once more. Stirling parked at the roadside, and Rose slipped back underneath with his tools. Passersby barely spared them a glance. “Nothing arouses less sensation than people working on a car,” wrote Churchill. “No one said a word to us.” Rose declared that the problem could not be fixed without a major overhaul. Stirling insisted they would continue as planned. Near the waterfront, he parked, Rose and Cooper picked up two bombs each, and the little party headed toward the dock, “walking down the middle of the street, arm in arm, whistling and doing our best to give the impression that we had every right to be there.” To Stirling’s annoyance, a sentry had now been posted on the dockside, and as they approached the moored torpedo boats four Germans stood up inside them and looked inquiringly at the approaching group. “We were holding the bombs, and trying to look as if we weren’t,” Cooper recalled. The team sauntered back to the car as nonchalantly as possible and drove off. After a few hundred yards, the jittery comedy of the situation became too much: “All we could do was giggle.”

They passed through the checkpoint, in the opposite direction, in much the same way, and making much the same noise.

“Militari,”
declared Maclean.

“What sort of
militari
?” asked the sentry, a little more inquisitive than his compatriot of the previous night.

“German staff officers.”

“Molto bene.”

The Blitz Buggy and its exhausted occupants reached the rendezvous in the Jebel at 6:00 in the morning, exactly twenty-four hours late. The LRDG, assuming that the party had been captured or killed, were preparing to pull out.

It was, wrote Randolph Churchill, “the longest day I’ve ever known.”

—

Comedy and tragedy are brothers. Men and women are prepared to die in war, for a cause, but death can be as meaningless and fickle in wartime as it can be at all other times. One of the grimmer ironies of conflict is that so many are claimed, not in the heat of battle, but by cold, capricious accident, often far from the battlefield.

Four days later at around midnight, Stirling was at the wheel of the Blitz Buggy, on the road between Alexandria and Cairo. Beside him sat Sergeant Rose. In the rear seat, dozing, lolled Maclean and Churchill, along with a celebrated journalist: Arthur Merton, the correspondent of the
Daily Telegraph,
one of the most distinguished reporters covering the war, a veteran who had famously reported the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922. Stirling knew him slightly, and when Merton met him at dinner in Alexandria and asked for a lift back to Cairo, he had been happy to agree. Clementine Churchill, Randolph’s mother, described how the party set off “at night with a good moon.” Everyone was exhausted and half asleep. Stirling, as usual, was driving much too fast.

Taking a sharp bend at around seventy miles per hour, with horror he saw a truck directly in their path, the tail end of a slow-moving convoy. Stirling braked a fraction too late, and swerved into a sand bank; the Blitz Buggy spun off the road and rolled twice down the embankment.

Arthur Merton was killed. Trapped under the open-top car, he suffered fatal head injuries and died before reaching the hospital in Alexandria. Maclean regained consciousness in the hospital three days later, with a broken arm and collarbone and a badly fractured skull. “The others were all thrown clear.” Randolph Churchill had three crushed vertebrae, and Rose had broken his arm in three places. Stirling fractured a wrist. He never spoke about the crash, but was said to be suffering from “shock” for some time afterward. They had cheated death in Benghazi, only to find it on the road home, in a banal traffic accident. Maclean later remarked that “David Stirling’s driving was the most dangerous thing in World War Two.” They might have made light of the incident, but it had been a horrifying end to a mission that had achieved nothing. Stirling’s refusal to discuss what had happened on the road to Cairo was a sign, perhaps, of just how deeply it had affected him.

War is not a science: it frequently fails to achieve the intended result, or finds success by chance; it kills the wrong people and spares those fully ready to die. Stirling was prepared to destroy any number of enemies in uniform; the first person he had killed, by mistake, was a civilian on his own side.

Stirling had now visited Benghazi twice without being caught, yet the operations had inflicted no damage on Axis shipping, no dent in enemy morale. Rommel’s vital supply lines were undamaged, and the threat to Malta undiminished.

Yet one aspect of Stirling’s plan worked flawlessly.

Convalescing from the car crash, clad in an iron brace for his back, Randolph Churchill requested permission to write a “secret and personal” report on the raid for his father, which Stirling was only too happy to grant. On June 24, Randolph wrote a private ten-page account of the episode for Winston Churchill. Exaggerated and boastful in parts but largely accurate, it gave a vivid account of events, stressed the daring and strategic value of L Detachment, SAS, and lavished praise on both Stirling and Maclean. “Fitzroy is worth his weight in gold…with him at my side I would be perfectly happy to spend a week in Rome,” he wrote. Stirling’s leadership of the successful foray into and out of Benghazi had “filled us with confidence for future operations.”

This was just the sort of tale Winston Churchill adored, and liked to repeat after dinner, replete with secret missions, fast cars, brushes with death, narrow escapes, and British derring-do. That the mission had failed was neither here nor there. The story was also proof of his son’s mettle, which was, of course, the main reason Randolph had written it. The fruitless raid in Benghazi would be Randolph Churchill’s first and last foray with the SAS. His back injury was sufficiently severe for him to be invalided home. But he made a vital, albeit indirect, contribution to the SAS—not with his gun, but by his pen.