Eastern Approaches (24 page)

A week later I was in a seaplane on my way to Cairo. I had no idea what awaited me at the other end. But at least I was bound for what, in that bleak autumn of 1941, was the only active theatre of operations: the Middle East.

W
HEN
I got to Cairo, I took a taxi to the address at which I had been told to report. ‘Ah,’ said the villainous-looking Egyptian who drove me, when he heard the address. ‘You want Secret Service.’

Hopefully I sent up my name and was shown into a comfortably furnished office. There I was given some idea of what lay in store for me. It sounded exciting but improbable.

Then I was introduced to some of my companions in the proposed venture. What they told me made me even more sceptical. For months already they had been standing-by to leave at twelve hours notice for a special operation. They had been trained in map-reading and demolitions and mountain warfare, and the workings of the internal combustion engine. They had been sent on ski-ing courses and language courses and courses in leadership and administration. They had been promoted to the rank of Major and then demoted to the rank of Captain. They had drawn special equipment and special weapons, and special pay and allowances. Everything they had done had been treated as if it was of the utmost urgency and importance. But nothing ever happened. They longed to get back to their regiments.

It was accordingly with little surprise or regret that I learned quite soon after my arrival that whatever I had been wanted for was not going to happen after all and that I was free to return to regimental duty. The 2nd Camerons were in the desert and there was nothing to prevent my being posted to them immediately. But things turned out otherwise.

On my way to the Adjutant-General’s branch of G.H.Q. I ran into David Stirling, a subaltern in the Scots Guards, whose brother Peter, then Secretary at the Embassy in Cairo, was an old friend of mine. David was a tall, dark, strongly built young man with a manner that was usually vague, but sometimes extremely alert. He asked me what
my plans were. I told him. ‘Why not join the Special Air Service Brigade?’ he said. I asked what it was. He explained that it was not really a Brigade; it was more like a Platoon. It was only called a Brigade to confuse the enemy. But it was a good thing to be in. He had raised it himself a month or two before with some friends of his after the Commando with which they had come out to the Middle East had been disbanded. Now there were about half a dozen officers and twenty or thirty other ranks. He had been made a captain and commanded it. He was also directly responsible to the Commander-in-Chief. I asked what Special Air Service meant. He said it meant that everyone had to be parachute trained. I asked him if he liked parachuting. He said that he found it most disagreeable, but thought that it might be a useful way of getting to places — behind the enemy lines, for instance. Once you were there you could blow things up and find your way home by other means. I asked what they had managed to do so far. He said their first operation had been a disaster. But since then they had had several successes; all in the desert. They had taken the enemy by surprise and done a good deal of damage. He went on to elaborate his ideas on small-scale raiding. They were most illuminating. We could operate in the desert first of all; then in southern and eastern Europe. Small parties could be dropped there by parachute and then picked up on the coast by submarine. There were endless possibilities.

It sounded promising. I said I should be delighted to join.

Special Air Service Headquarters were in the Suez Canal Zone. I travelled down with two Sergeants coming back from leave in a truck that was full of tommy-guns and parachutes and packets of high-explosive. It was a long bleak drive. A bitter wind filled one’s eyes with sand and chilled one to the bone. On either side of the narrow tarmac road, with its never-ending stream of cars and trucks, the desert stretched away dismally. From time to time we passed camps and dumps: huts and tents and barbed wire and sign posts and clouds of flies, an uninviting smell of food rising from the cookhouses; the sickly smell of disinfectant rising from the latrines.

Now and then, as we jolted along, I caught snatches of the Sergeants’
conversation. They were talking about the last operation. ‘Dropped in the wrong place … rations all gone … ammunition all gone … water all gone … couldn’t make out if their parachutes hadn’t opened or what … dead when we found him … enemy patrol … gave them a burst for luck … couldn’t see in the dark … must have stepped on a mine.’

It was dark when we arrived. The wind was still blowing the sand about. I was told that Guardsman Duncan would look after me. He was a large, imperturbable man from Aberdeen. Before the war he had been a male nurse. There was, it seemed, a shortage of tents. Together we set out to look for one, plodding through the soft sand. In the end we found one that looked empty. But it had someone else’s kit in it. I asked if it mattered taking someone else’s tent. ‘Ah,’ said Duncan gloomily, ‘the poor gentleman will not be requiring it any more; or his kit.’ Then he brought me a hurricane lamp and a petrol-can full of water, spread my sleeping-bag on the previous occupant’s camp bed and went away.

By the light of day things looked a good deal more cheerful. Our camp was pitched on the shores of the Great Salt Bitter Lake. The wind had fallen in the night and the sun was shining on the blue water. There was good bathing only a few hundred yards away. There was an R.A.F. station on one side of us and a Naval camp on the other. Some landing-craft were riding at anchor off the shore. A lot seemed to be going on.

As I was unpacking my kit, the flap of the tent was pulled back and a wild-looking figure with a beard looked in. ‘My tent,’ he said. It was the owner, Bill Fraser. He was not dead at all. Finding himself cut off, he had walked back across two hundred odd miles of desert to our own lines, keeping himself alive by drinking rusty water from the radiators of derelict trucks. It showed what could be done.

Resignedly Guardsman Duncan set out to find me a new tent. This time he erected outside it a small board, labelled, quite firmly:
THE CLACHAN
. I had settled in.

More operations were being planned. David Stirling had said that, as soon as I was trained, I could go on one. The next thing was to get trained.

Parachuting was only part of the training. So far the S.A.S. had attempted only one parachute operation, and it had not been a success. They had been dropped in the wrong place; they had had difficulty in reaching their target; they had run into every kind of trouble; they had lost several of their men; their stock had gone down at G.H.Q. After this setback, David had come to the conclusion that, in the desert, parachuting was not necessarily the best way of reaching one’s target.

The survivors of the first operations had been picked up by Long-Range Desert Group. This was a specially equipped, specially trained unit, which had been formed the year before primarily for reconnaissance purposes. In patrols of half a dozen trucks, carrying their own water and petrol, they pushed far into the vast expanse of waterless desert which stretched away for hundreds of miles to the south of the relatively narrow coastal strip where the Desert War was being waged. They thus circumnavigated the flank of the two armies, and re-emerged miles behind the enemy lines. There they stayed for weeks on end, hiding in the desert with their trucks camouflaged, watching enemy troop movements and returning with much vital information. The desert, particularly that part of it which was nominally enemy territory, became a second home to them.

We had to have the L.R.D.G. to bring us back (for the idea that we were ‘expendable’ or a ‘suicide squad’ was strongly discouraged by all concerned). Why, David argued, should we not make use of their trucks to take us to the scene of the intended operation or at any rate to a point from which the target to be attacked could be reached on foot? It would be a safer, more comfortable and, above all, more practical way of reaching our destination than parachuting. And it would involve no great loss of time, for, when necessary, the L.R.D.G. could cover great distances very quickly.

Henceforward the Long-Range Desert Group provided expert knowledge of the desert, skilled navigation and first-rate administration — vital necessities where one’s life and the success of the operation depended on getting to the right place at the right time and on carrying with one a sufficient load of food, petrol and water to last the trip. David, for his part, brought to these ventures the striking power and, to their planning and execution, what Lawrence has called
‘the irrational tenth … like the kingfisher flashing across the pool’: a never-failing audacity, a gift of daring improvisation, which invariably took the enemy by surprise. The resulting partnership was a most fruitful one.

The best targets were aerodromes. From these the Luftwaffe and their Italian allies regularly attacked our convoys, fighting their way through the Mediterranean to Malta, and Eighth Army, now driven back to the Egyptian frontier. Situated hundreds of miles behind the front, these desert airfields were not heavily defended: some wire, some machine-gun posts and an occasional patrol were considered sufficient protection. After carefully studying the lie of the land, it was possible to slip through the wire under cover of darkness, and surreptitiously deposit charges of high explosive in the aircraft where they stood dotted about the airfield. The high explosive, mixed for better results with an incendiary substance, was made up into handy packages and provided with a device known as a time-pencil which could be set to detonate the charge after an interval of a quarter or half an hour.
¹
This gave the attackers time to put a mile or two of desert between themselves and the airfield before their bombs exploded and the alarm was given. After that it only remained for them to make their way back to wherever the L.R.D.G. trucks were waiting to pick them up.

Working on these lines, David achieved, in the months that followed, a series of successes which surpassed the wildest expectations of those who had originally supported his venture. No sooner was one operation completed than he was off on another. No sooner had the enemy become aware of his presence in one part of the desert and set about taking counter-measures than he was attacking them somewhere else, always where they least expected it. Never has the element of surprise, the key to success in all irregular warfare, been more brilliantly exploited. Soon the number of aircraft destroyed on the ground was well into three figures. In order to protect their rear the enemy were obliged to bring back more and more front-line troops. And all this was done with a handful of men, a few pounds of high explosive and a few hundred rounds of ammunition. One thing, perhaps, contributed
more than anything else to the success of these operations: that David both planned them and carried them out himself, and that, in the early days at any rate, every man in the unit had been picked by him personally.

Second only to David Stirling’s own part in the history of the S.A.S. was that played by Paddy Mayne, a large and formidable Ulsterman, who combined immense physical strength with great agility both of mind and body and at the same time possessed a total disregard of danger and a genuine love of fighting for fighting’s sake which can rarely have been equalled. In twelve months he destroyed over a hundred enemy aircraft on the ground with his own hands, a record which puts into the shade the performance of the most successful fighter pilots. A tremendous figure of a man, with a deceptively quiet manner, he inspired absolute devotion and confidence in those he led and utter terror in the hearts of those who were unfortunate enough to encounter him in battle.

Training was based on this practical experience. Physical fitness was clearly of the utmost importance. For days and nights on end we trudged interminably over the alternating soft sand and jagged rocks of the desert, weighed down by heavy loads of explosive, eating and drinking only what we could carry with us. In the intervals we did weapon training, physical training and training in demolitions and navigation.

Two Free French officers, Captain Berger and Lieutenant Jordan, had joined the S.A.S. at about the same time as I had, bringing with them a dozen or so French other ranks, and it was with them that I did most of my preparatory training. Berger came from southern France; Jordan from the north. The one was excitable; the other calm and phlegmatic. Both had one idea in life: to get at the enemy. They took their training very seriously, marching twice as far as anyone else and prolonging the periods of physical training almost beyond human endurance. I went with them. It was a stimulating, but exhausting experience.

Someone had to teach the French about explosives. We put in to G.H.Q. for a sapper. They sent us Bill Cumper. After twenty years in the Army, Bill had recently been given a commission. He had
spent the last few weeks hastily blowing up Eighth Army stores and installations to prevent them falling into the hands of the advancing Germans. He knew all there was to be known about demolitions. He arrived straight from the desert in a fifteen-hundredweight truck full of high explosive. As he got out, I noticed that he was wearing a detonator behind his ear as if it were a cigarette. He had sandy-coloured hair and a jaunty appearance. His hat was worn well over one eye. He had a loud and penetrating voice. His pockets were bulging with explosive devices of one kind or another.

Soon it became clear that we had made a remarkable acquisition. In addition to his knowledge of explosives, Bill had a gift for repartee which pricked anything approaching pomposity as though with a pin. He was never bad-tempered and never at a loss. He also had an unrivalled command of cockney rhyming slang and a most revealing stock of anecdotes. After an initial period of total bewilderment, the French, who only understood one word in three of what he said, took to him whole-heartedly, and he to them. Soon the whole camp echoed with the crash and thud of exploding charges. When at the end of a fortnight he left us, our knowledge of the theory and practice of demolitions had increased out of all recognition and Bill had become an important part of our lives.

So important a part that we decided that we must get him back at all costs. David and I went up to Cairo to look for him. We found him sitting in an office in the Chief Engineer’s Branch, dispensing sanitary fittings and looking, for once, profoundly unhappy. Some strings were pulled (an art in which David specialized), and a few days later Bill was with us once more, this time on a permanent basis.