Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (10 page)

Eoin McGonigal’s party was doomed from the moment of landing. McGonigal himself appears to have broken his neck on hitting the ground, and may never have regained consciousness. The team laid up overnight. By morning, McGonigal was dead. He was twenty years old. The others quietly buried him in the sand and then struck out for the rendezvous point. Lost, they wandered onto the Timimi airfield and were captured by Italian guards.

Back at Kabrit, Gentleman Jim Almonds fretted over the fate of his comrades.

The lads are now 280 miles inside enemy territory, hiding in the sand and awaiting dark to start their reign of terror and destruction. After the massacre is over and the enemy planes blown up, there remains that terrible march back through the desert. No one who is sick or wounded can possibly make it, and none can afford to help…I am not there. I sit back here in the safety of the camp and wish I were…Reality beats fiction for sheer, cold, calculating courage. Some of the lads cannot be beaten. Films and books of adventure fall far short of the real thing. More will be heard of the SAS should this raid go through as planned. My mates are somewhere in enemy territory…poor devils, they need all the luck possible.

For a few hours after the landings, the wind had seemed to abate, as the two teams under Mayne and Lewes set off in the dark, marching north. Then the skies opened. Not the spitting rain of the previous evening, but a blinding, soaking deluge. A desert storm and flash flood is a terrifying experience: dry riverbeds, or wadis, transform in minutes into raging torrents. “The water was up to your chest,” recalled Johnny Cooper. Lewes ordered his men to a section of higher ground, now an island in the flood, and announced that he and Sergeant Riley would push ahead to try to locate the target airfield. They returned after a few hours, having seen nothing but an endless damp horizon of desert and convinced they must have been dropped far to the south of their target. “To get to the airfield before light is now out of the question,” said Lewes. Using blankets as makeshift tents, the men huddled together for a sodden, freezing, hungry, sleepless night. “With constant wringing out of blankets and the occasional sip at the old rum stakes we managed to survive,” one man recalled. As dawn broke the rain eased, but it was clear the operation would have to be aborted: the explosives were soaked and useless. Lewes ordered the men to turn around and head toward the rendezvous point. “At least we won’t die of thirst,” said Lewes brightly, as the men set off, alternately marching and wading across the still-sodden sands. Riley led the way, bullying, urging, and cajoling: forty minutes’ marching, then twenty minutes’ rest, then another forty minutes’ marching, hour after hour.

Mayne’s team was in a similar plight, although, unlike Lewes, Mayne had a good idea of where he was. In the five hours of darkness after landing, his team marched six miles. At dawn, they laid up in a wadi about five miles south of the target, Timimi airfield. Mayne conducted a swift reconnaissance and declared that they would attack that evening. Then the downpour started. “In the middle of the desert we had this raging torrent,” recalled Seekings. “I’ve never been so cold in my life.” Several haversacks were washed away. “It rained as I have never seen it before—clouds broke by the score, and our nice dry little wadi was transformed in a matter of minutes into a lake.” The men were soaked to the bone; even their cigarettes were waterlogged, a source of deep annoyance for soldiers who craved tobacco more than food.

Mayne ordered the men to salvage what they could and scramble to higher ground, but the rain had already done irreparable damage to the sabotage equipment. “I tried two of the time pencils and they did not work….I tried the instantaneous fuses and they did not work either.” Mayne was prepared to continue, and attack the planes using only grenades. “We had a hell of a time talking him out of it,” said Seekings. “But there was no point getting knocked off in a hopeless cause. You couldn’t knock an aircraft out with a grenade.” With ferocious reluctance, Mayne aborted the mission, and as night fell once more, the men set off on the thirty-five-mile slog to the pickup point.

Lewes and his men trudged south. It was beginning to grow dark, on the evening of November 19, the third day of the operation, when Johnny Cooper spotted a pole incongruously sticking out of the desert: a marker for the Trig al Abd, an old Italian signpost complete with fascist symbol on top, pointing toward Egypt in one direction and Benghazi in the other, and indicating that they were just a few miles from the rendezvous point. The men cheered. Some kissed the post. Then they headed west. As they walked, Cooper could see two stationary stars on the horizon, which gradually resolved themselves into hurricane lamps posted on twin hillocks, one hundred yards apart. The password was “Roll Out the Barrel”; the men broke into a loud rendition of that old drinking song. A voice emerged from the gloom: “Over here, Pommies.” They had found R1 Patrol, a New Zealand unit of the Long Range Desert Group, their trucks encircling a small fire, and hidden in a shallow desert hollow. The welcoming feast of bully-beef stew washed down with rum-laced tea was “the best meal I have ever had in my life,” said one of the survivors. The disheveled remnants of Mayne’s team stumbled into the camp a few hours later.

The following morning, before the rest of the camp was awake, David Lloyd Owen of the LRDG was brewing up his tea when a tall figure emerged out of the dawn gloom. “My name is Stirling,” the man said. “Have you seen any of my chaps?” Lloyd Owen had not, of course, for all of the other chaps on Stirling’s team had been captured. Under Sergeant Yates, they had taken a wrong turn and stumbled into an Italian patrol. Stirling and Sergeant Tait had managed to reach the coastal escarpment, locating the coast road but not the airfield, before turning back and trudging fifty miles through the rain to the rendezvous. They were the only members of their stick to make it back.

Stirling remained at the desert rendezvous for two more days, scanning the horizon in the hope that other stragglers might eventually emerge. None did.

The L Detachment survivors tried to look on the bright side. They had encountered some cruel ill luck, weather even worse than forecast and conditions “almost unbelievably unsuitable for a parachute operation.” The pilots, unable to see the coast or the drop-zone flares, had simply guessed at the right moment and altitude to drop the men, who had consequently landed “all over the bloody shop.” Not one of the sticks landed within ten miles of its intended drop zone. No one could have anticipated the biblical flood of the next day.

Stirling pointed out that he had personally reached the coast road and seen the sea, having approached from the desert, which proved that “given the right conditions what I had thought of was possible.” The men had performed admirably, under appalling conditions. “The whole section behaved extremely well,” wrote Paddy Mayne, “and although lacerated and bruised in varying degrees by their landing, and wet and numb with cold, remained cheerful.” Cooper was philosophical: “OK, we’ve had a beating. It’s been a fiasco, but the weather did it all. The general plan was alright.” Seekings, as usual, struck an uncompromising pose: “You can’t sit around thinking about casualties. We joined to fight a war. We knew what it was about.” But behind the bravado, even Seekings was rattled.

There was no disguising the grim truth: Operation Squatter had been an unmitigated disaster. Of the fifty-five men who parachuted into the gale on November 16, just twenty-one had returned. The rest were dead or injured, missing or captured. L Detachment had lost most of its strength without firing a shot, attacking the enemy, or detonating a single bomb. They had been defeated, not by force of arms, but by wind and rain. The mission had done nothing to support Operation Crusader. Worse than that, the failed operation had alerted the enemy that the British were conducting active sabotage behind the lines. Bonington’s party, shot down and captured, was under orders to reveal only name, rank, and serial number to their German captors. But someone had blabbed.

Late on November 19, as the remnants of L Detachment were slogging back to the rendezvous, British code breakers intercepted and deciphered a message sent by the commander of Gazala airfield to the Luftwaffe and the panzer commanders of the Afrika Korps. “Reference the sabotage detachment of the Lay Force [
sic
] from the shot down Bombay. Attention is drawn to five [
sic
] further Bombays which operated over Cyrenaica in the night of 16–17/11. Accordingly you must count on the probability that further sabotage detachments were dropped.”

One of the captives had apparently revealed that they were part of a larger sabotage team. On the return journey, the LRDG convoy carrying the SAS survivors had come under attack from an Italian Savoia-Marchetti fighter. The decoded message might explain why: the enemy was already looking for the other British sabotage units in the desert.

The men were deeply demoralized. Everyone had lost a close friend. Jock Cheyne, left in the desert with a broken back, had been a particular chum of Pat Riley’s. Jim Almonds learned of the loss of Bonington’s unit with a stab of guilt. “I should have been with that plane,” he reflected. “The terms of fate are past all understanding.” Though he never spoke of it, the loss of Eoin McGonigal devastated Paddy Mayne. “Eoin McGonigal was the one person who liked Paddy before he became a hero,” said one who knew them both. One of Mayne’s biographers goes further: “If there was a real love in [Mayne’s] life, it was his friend Eoin McGonigal.” Something snapped in Mayne when McGonigal died.

What should have been a triumphant first mission, Stirling conceded, had been “a complete failure.” He had feared that canceling the operation might jeopardize the future of the SAS; by pushing ahead, he had very nearly destroyed it. “It was tragic…so much talent in those we lost,” he reflected. The reduced detachment seemed quite likely to be disbanded.

But in disaster, as so often, lay the germ of salvation.

It may have been during the two-hundred-mile journey back to Jaghbub Oasis, the Eighth Army’s forward base, that inspiration struck David Stirling. Riley claimed that the idea came to Stirling while they were lying under a tarpaulin with Jock Lewes on the night they reached the desert rendezvous. Seekings insisted that Stirling’s eureka moment came while they were scouring the horizon for stragglers. The most likely source of inspiration was David Lloyd Owen, a highly intelligent officer who would go on to command the LRDG. But the most extraordinary aspect of this idea is that it seems, in retrospect, so blindingly obvious: if the LRDG could get the SAS out of the desert without difficulty, then the reconnaissance unit could surely drive them in as well, thus cutting out all the danger and uncertainty involved in jumping out of airplanes in the dark. Quite why this glaringly good idea had not occurred to anyone before is one of the enduring mysteries of the SAS story.

The Long Range Desert Group was the brainchild of Ralph Alger Bagnold, soldier, explorer, scientist, archaeologist, sedimentologist, geomorphologist, and the world’s greatest living expert on sand. Bagnold was the brother of Enid Bagnold, author of the novel
National Velvet;
his own, less popular but no less durable contribution to world literature was
The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes,
first published in 1941 and today still influencing NASA’s ongoing research into sand dunes on Mars. A veteran of the Somme and Ypres, a pioneer in desert exploration, inquisitive and indestructible, Bagnold spent much of 1930 driving a Model A Ford around the vast desert between Cairo and Ain Dalla in search of the mythical city of Zerzura. He made the first east-west crossing of the Libyan desert in 1932, driving more than three thousand miles and winning a medal from the Royal Geographical Society. Then he drove through the Mourdi Depression of northeastern Chad and back to Libya. He worked out that reduced tire pressure and wider tires increased speed across desert terrain; he invented a condenser that could be attached to a car radiator to prevent it from boiling over, and steel channels for unsticking vehicles bogged down in soft sand. He developed “Bagnold’s sun compass,” which, unlike the traditional magnetic compass, was unaffected by desert iron-ore deposits and was also impervious, in Bagnold’s words, to “changes in the positions of magnetically uncertain spare parts carried in the vehicles.” He spent so long being battered by the desert wind that his nose achieved a permanent roseate hue. “Never in our peacetime travels had we imagined that war could ever reach the enormous empty solitudes of the inner desert, walled off by sheer distance, lack of water, and impassable seas of sand dunes,” Bagnold wrote. “Little did we dream that any of the special equipment and techniques we had evolved for very long-distance travel, and for navigation, would ever be put to serious use.” But that, of course, is what happened. Nine months after the outbreak of war, Major Bagnold was given permission to form and command a mobile desert scouting force to operate behind the Italian lines: the Long Range Patrol (later the Long Range Desert Group) was born in Egypt in June 1940, to commit “piracy on the high desert.”