Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (7 page)

Stirling had been allocated a base camp for his new unit, but almost nothing else. Kabrit was a desert headland, flyblown, sand-flayed, and roasting, about one hundred miles east of Cairo, on the western shore of the Great Bitter Lake near the junction with the Suez Canal, on the edge of an existing military encampment. The new detachment arrived at the designated spot to find a signpost with the unit’s name scrawled on it, three ragged tents, a single ancient lorry, and a couple of chairs. Stirling’s battles with headquarters over equipment and supplies would become a recurrent, and rather boring, theme of the early days of the SAS. The unit required a camp, and urgently, so they did what soldiers at war have always done when faced with a lack of necessities: they stole what was needed. It is unclear whether Stirling gave a direct order for the act of larceny that now ensued, but he certainly did nothing to stop it.

A few miles from their designated area was a camp occupied by a New Zealand regiment, which happened to be away on an exercise. That evening the SAS recruits drove the lorry into the camp, and helped themselves to tents, bedding, tables, chairs, a gramophone, cooking equipment, hurricane lamps, rope, washbasins, and tarpaulins. They made no fewer than four round-trips that night, to load up with stolen goods and return to Kabrit. They even stole a piano and a table-tennis set. By morning, they had one of the best-appointed small camps in the Middle East. This story has become an SAS founding myth, combining many of the elements that would define the regiment: bold, successful, and joyfully breaking all the rules.

Stirling was an officer different from any other. A stooped, lanky figure, an unlikely pioneer of a regiment that would become famed for physical strength, he limped around the camp, making a point of getting to know each of the men. Most of the recruits were used to being disdained by their officers, bullied by their NCOs, and generally treated as a lower life-form. Stirling was exquisitely polite to all. “He did not bark orders,” marveled Johnny Cooper. “He asked people to do things.” While many officers existed in a state of permanent choleric meltdown, Stirling never raised his voice. Riley found him a “very quiet chap, very shy.” Most of his recruits had never come across an officer who not only tolerated alternative views but encouraged them.

Other elements of Stirling’s peculiar character seeped into the unit, including his natural modesty and talent for extreme understatement. From the earliest days, he insisted that there should be “no bragging or swanking.” The members of L Detachment would be carrying out secret, perilous tasks that might well impress other soldiers and civilians, but they should never speak about them outside their own ranks. This was sound military policy, but it also reflected Stirling’s personal allergy to boasting. The men of the SAS were expected to maintain a discreet silence about their activities.

As the mini-camp took shape, Jock Lewes set about devising a training program of spartan rigor, a regime so severe that many came close to quitting—which was, of course, exactly what Lewes wanted the quitters to do.

Lewes’s intention was to create a force capable of landing in the desert, and then operating there for far longer than anyone else had attempted before. Training began almost immediately in explosives, first aid (including amputation in the field), radio operation, and identification of enemy aircraft. Navigation was of vital importance, given the vast and all but featureless terrain: there was training in map reading, compass use, and celestial navigation. Lewes instituted intensive weapons drills, using Thompson submachine guns and Webley pistols. Much of the training was conducted at night. During the day, the same operations would be carried out by blindfolded men, so the others could observe the way men move and react in nighttime conditions. Lewes also framed a program of memory training, to enable the filing of accurate intelligence reports, and initiative tests to see which men responded well to unexpected situations. They were even assigned homework to do in their tents, which had to be handed in the next morning. Reg Seekings found this particularly demanding: “The physical side was easy, but the writing, the mental side…Everybody else would be asleep and I’d still be struggling with my notes.” Each unit of between four and six men would include a specialist navigator, a driver-mechanic, and an explosives expert, but with such small teams, and such a high probability of casualties, everyone had to be able to do everything.

“Lewes Marches” were a particularly telling example of the man’s constructive brutality. Within days of arriving in Kabrit, Lewes began a series of route marches across the desert, “starting from 11 miles working up to 100 miles with full load,” while gradually reducing the water ration. In order to work out how far a man could walk in the desert, Lewes first tested himself: he would set off alone, transferring a stone from one pocket to the other every hundred paces, and calculating the resulting overall distance on the basis that one stone was equal to eighty-three yards. Since he was covering huge distances, this created the added burden of slogging through the sand with his pockets full of stones. The men were permitted to carry water, but told not to drink it until the day’s march was completed. Self-control in relation to water was a matter not just of life and death but of military discipline. The men were instructed never to share their own water bottle with a friend, for in extremis such an act could create tensions that might explode in terrible ways: “You’d got to train your mind to carry the water, and leave the damned stuff alone.” Such marches were not only demanding but very dangerous, since Lewes insisted that the desert treks be carried out without vehicle, medical, or radio backup. If something went wrong, if the navigator miscalculated, if someone fell ill, the results might well be fatal. Above all, he sought to instill supreme physical stamina and self-confidence, to make the men so inured to hardship that the reality, when it came, would feel almost easy. “The confident man will win,” Lewes insisted.

As for Lewes himself, the disciplined deprivation seemed to give him strength. He wrote: “I can keep going almost indefinitely on one cup of tea at breakfast, and tea and one glass of water at lunch and supplemented by two or three oranges.”

Training the men in parachuting was obviously of the first priority. Lacking any sort of formal parachuting expertise, Lewes took an experimental approach: he decided that jumping from the back of a moving vehicle would replicate the lateral and vertical movement of a parachute landing. It doesn’t, but it is a very effective way to break bones. Lewes, as ever, used himself as a dummy. First he rolled forward off the tailgate of a truck moving at fifteen miles per hour. Then he rolled backward. Then he gradually increased the speed. Then he forced the men to do the same. One after another, they leaped into the desert at up to thirty-five miles per hour, landing (or more often sprawling) in an explosion of dust and sand. Rudimentary protection was provided by strapping on some borrowed American baseball gear, including kneepads and helmets. Several men were injured, some quite badly, in what was less a useful training exercise than a primitive test of nerve. Next Lewes devised a trolley that would hurtle downhill with a parachutist aboard before slamming into a buffer and hurling him out. “By the end of the first week’s training,” one NCO recalled, “every man in the unit was sporting a bandage or plaster, some were in splints.” Finally, Sergeant Jim Almonds designed and built a wooden jumping platform, which was safer, though not much. “Very primitive equipment locally constructed and no qualified instructors available,” a later report noted.

With Lewes on board, Stirling had five more officers to recruit. He chose with extreme care.

Lieutenant Bill Fraser seemed slightly baffled by life, too delicate for soldiering—but he had seen some hard fighting. Tall and thin, with protruding ears and a restrained manner, he had followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps by joining the Gordon Highlanders. During the Litani River action, an assault on Vichy French positions, Fraser had been shot in the face, the bullet bouncing off his chin strap but leaving him with no more than a “slight concussion.” Some of the soldiers considered him “a bit strange”—code for “homosexual”—and nicknamed him “Skin Fraser.” He may well have been gay, but it is noticeable that, at a time of intense homophobia in army ranks, most of his comrades in arms (with some notable exceptions) could not have cared less. Fraser was a superb leader.

Another recruited officer was Eoin McGonigal, a Catholic Irishman who had signed up with the Royal Ulster Rifles and then joined the commandos. Two Englishmen, Lieutenants Peter Thomas and Charles Bonington (father of the future mountaineer Chris Bonington), were added to the roster.

Stirling’s final choice of junior officer was both inspired and quite odd: inspired because the officer in question would set an unparalleled standard for courage and leadership in the SAS; and odd because he was also given to volcanic explosions of temper and sometimes violent insubordination. He was truculent, troubled, and dangerously unpredictable, particularly when drunk, which was often. A celebrated international rugby player, a frustrated poet and barroom brawler, this man was 240 pounds of highly volatile human explosive. At the time when Stirling set out to recruit him, he was also allegedly in prison for thumping his commanding officer.

Robert Blair Mayne, known by all as Paddy, was one of seven children of a prosperous Protestant family from Northern Ireland. Born in Newtownards in County Down in 1915, he had excelled at rugby as a schoolboy, and went on to read law at Queen’s University Belfast, where he won the Ireland universities heavyweight boxing championship. Over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and swift, he first played for Ireland’s national rugby team, in the position of lock forward, against Wales in 1937, and went on to represent Ireland on five subsequent occasions. In 1938, he was one of eight Irishmen chosen to take part in the Lions’ tour of South Africa. One reporter noted his “quiet, almost ruthless efficiency.” The war interrupted what had seemed destined to be a great rugby career. He signed up with the Royal Ulster Rifles, and then the commandos. After the Battle of Litani River in June 1941, he was mentioned in dispatches for the impressive way he had commanded his troop, achieving his objectives and bringing back a large clutch of prisoners.

All of which makes Paddy Mayne sound like some plastic model of academic, athletic, and military virtue. Which he most emphatically was not.

Mayne struck many, on first meeting, as a subdued, almost shy man. After a few drinks, he became boisterous; after a few more, he became argumentative and challenging; quite soon after that, it was time to get out of the bar.

His conduct during the Lions’ tour of South Africa broke all records for drunken misbehavior, in a sport not noted for sobriety and tranquillity off the field. He repeatedly broke into his teammates’ rooms after midnight and smashed all the furniture to splinters; in the company of Welsh player “Bunner” Travers, he headed down to the Durban docks to get plastered and pick fights with the longshoremen; he argued with the team manager, and then disappeared on a three-day bender. One night he found a team of convicts chained up beneath Ellis Park stadium, where they were being put to work erecting stands. This he considered barbaric, so he returned the following night with bolt cutters and set free at least one, and possibly all of them. In an attempt to impose some restraint on Mayne, he was made to share a hotel room with teammate George Cromey, a Presbyterian minister. One night, after an official dinner, Mayne vanished. Cromey was still waiting for him at 3:00 a.m. when Mayne, in bedraggled evening dress, burst in and announced, “I’ve just shot a springbok,” before dumping a very bloody, very dead South African antelope on the floor. He had run into some hunters in a bar and gone off for a little midnight game hunting.

This was Mayne the amusing drunk. Mayne the vicious, fighting drunk was a different proposition altogether. In the latter state, he was liable to pick up people who had annoyed him and hurl them quite considerable distances, or simply beat them senseless. He never remembered what he had done the next morning. As one of his closest friends put it, Mayne was “a very nice and kind fellow, most of the time, although he could be roused to be something else…once he had gone beyond a certain point, drinking, he became somebody quite different.” Inside Paddy Mayne there was a deep reservoir of anger that welled up in violence; it had found one channel on the rugby field, and another in alcoholic postmatch mayhem. On the battlefield, it would produce heroics; off it, Paddy Mayne’s destructive demon could erupt without warning, and with terrifying force.

What was the source of Mayne’s inner fury? He may have been subconsciously rebelling against a rigidly strait-laced Protestant upbringing. He had a strong aversion to the use of foul language. The only person he feared, it is said, was his mother—who was, admittedly, petrifying. Mayne was a deeply literate man, with a particular liking for the darker poetry of A. E. Housman, and he may have harbored dreams of becoming a writer; some have seen frustrated creativity as the root of his anger. There have also been suggestions that he had homosexual inclinations. Certainly, his relations with women were strained, and he never established a long-term heterosexual relationship. “How could any woman love a big, ugly man like me?” he once said to his brother. Male sexual banter on the subject of women could send him into a rage. He was intensely secretive about his emotional life, as he was about much else. Mayne’s sexuality has no bearing whatever on his qualities as a soldier, except to the extent that the repression of his feelings may have contributed to an inner turmoil that made him a most complicated and angry man, but a very remarkable soldier.

Mayne was said to have been in prison, for striking a superior officer, in the late summer of 1941. The story is told that he was playing chess with Eoin McGonigal, his closest friend, when they were interrupted by his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Keyes, an upper-class Old Etonian and the son of Sir Roger Keyes, the director of combined operations. Keyes was a brave man (he would die just a few months later in an abortive attempt to kidnap Rommel, winning a posthumous Victoria Cross), but he had the voice of Bertie Wooster and exactly the sort of patrician manner that lit Mayne’s very short fuse. A row ensued, Mayne pushed Keyes, who fell over and cut himself on the edge of a table. According to some accounts, the confrontation ended with Mayne running Keyes out of the mess tent on the point of a bayonet. Soon afterward, Mayne applied to be transferred to the Far East. If he was arrested, there is no supporting evidence in the archives. Stirling, however, told and retold the story of how he had discovered Paddy in prison, and arranged for the charges to be dropped in order to get him into L Detachment. Mayne never denied it.