Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (8 page)

Mayne did not like posh people. As a militant Ulster unionist, he was instinctively anti-Catholic. He despised the way certain officers seemed to gain preferment through social connections. So the first meeting between Mayne and David Stirling—an upper-class, Catholic officer with unrivaled access to the old-boy network—was never going to be easy. According to Stirling, Mayne eyed him with dark suspicion as he laid out his plans and asked the Irishman if he would like to come aboard. Mayne listened, and then began asking questions in a “gentle, slightly mocking voice,” with his light Ulster twang.

Finally, Mayne leaned back: “I can’t see any real prospect of fighting in this scheme of yours.”

Stirling was quick in response. “There isn’t any…except against the enemy.”

Mayne laughed. He was hooked. But, before they shook on it, Stirling had one condition: “This is one commanding officer you never hit, and I want your promise on that.”

“You have it,” said Mayne.

Stirling was only half joking. He would always remain wary of Mayne’s “vicious temper, at times unnatural in its ferocity.” Recruiting Mayne was like adopting a wolf: exciting, certain to instill fear, but not necessarily sensible.

—

The officers underwent exactly the same training as the NCOs and other ranks: they marched together, leaped off the back of the lorry at the same speeds, and studied maps, compasses, and explosives together deep into the night. And when Lewes deemed that they were ready, they jumped together.

The first real parachute jump was scheduled for October 16, 1941. The RAF’s 216 Squadron had agreed to provide a Bristol Bombay aircraft, which, though not ideal for parachuting, was a lot safer than the Vickers Valentia from which Stirling had so disastrously jumped four months earlier.

The first team, or stick, of ten parachutists jumped without incident, the static lines smoothly yanking out the parachutes and then safely disconnecting. Young Johnny Cooper drifted gently to earth, marveling at the view of the Gulf of Suez and beyond to the Great Bitter Lake. He landed lightly in soft sand, and “felt a sense of stupendous elation.”

Then the second stick climbed aboard and the Bombay trundled into the air. The first to jump was Ken Warburton, a twenty-one-year-old from Manchester, a keen amateur pianist, who had done some fine pounding on the stolen piano in the mess. The second was his friend, a young Scotsman named Joe Duffy. Warburton jumped; Duffy followed him a few seconds later. The third man was about to leap, when the RAF dispatcher hauled him back with a look of horror.

The first two clips on the static line had twisted and sheared off. Warburton and Duffy were plummeting to earth with parachutes unopened, their screams clearly audible to those on the ground. There can be few more horrendous ways to die than the slow seconds as a fully sentient person tumbles through unresisting air. The two men landed close together, and were killed instantly. Duffy, it appeared, had still been desperately trying to pull his parachute out by hand as he hit the ground.

The deaths of Duffy and Warburton stunned the rest of the unit. Jock Lewes immediately called a parade and announced that the men had died due to a fault in their parachute lines, which had now been rectified; everyone would be jumping in the morning. This was the moment for faint hearts to back out. None did. “We made our way to the canteen, each man with his own thoughts but no one speaking…never in the history of the SAS has a canteen been as deathly quiet as it was that night.”

David Stirling was first out of the plane the next morning, as he had to be. He had more reason than most to dislike parachuting, having barely recovered from his first attempt. He knew his classical mythology, and must have wondered if he was flying too close to the sun in his attempt to forge a unit of parachute raiders. It was, he later said, the hardest jump he ever made. He landed well, and rolled. One by one, the men followed. A cheery cockney named Bob Bennett played the mouth organ as he descended. One NCO recalled: “That night in the canteen we were again one big happy family of fifty noisy men, but we didn’t forget to drink a toast to our two absent brothers.”

Stirling had made it clear, from the outset, that failure would not be tolerated: anyone who did not fit in, or proved unable to reach Lewes’s demanding standards, would be ejected. Several had already dropped out, unable to take the pace of training. “There will be no second chances,” Stirling had told them. He tried “not to hurt feelings when rejecting someone,” but reject them he did, in quite large numbers, politely but inflexibly. Fear of being “returned to unit” (RTUed, in army parlance) stalked the detachment, but also motivated and drove them on. “That fear of an RTU was with everybody,” said Reg Seekings. “It was always there, at the back of the mind.” The men with the right stuff were prepared to go to extremes to fulfill a training program others fled from. A note in the files records that one private soldier “walked 40 miles across the desert in stockinged feet rather than fall out after [his] boots gave way.”

A dread of humiliation in front of one’s peers may not be the most noble of motivations, but among many groups, particularly young males locked in physical competition, it often provides the most forceful impetus of all. In the SAS, one of the motors of success was the collective fear of failure. The only acceptable direction was forward. “Never run away,” Jock Lewes instructed them. “Because once you start running, you’ve stopped thinking.”

As numbers were whittled down, by death, dropouts, illness, and rejection, another kind of bonding mechanism began to emerge: the sense of belonging to an elite unit, barely one hundred strong, tested by trial, selected for survival. Even before it went into action, this strange and mixed bag of independent-minded individuals was beginning to forge a collective identity. “They weren’t easily controllable,” Stirling later admitted. “They were harnessable. The object was to give them the same purpose….That band of vagabonds had to grasp what they had to do in order to get there.”

All soldiers complain. Grumbling is a cherished part of military tradition, a form of pressure release that does not necessarily reflect genuine dissatisfaction. L Detachment grumbled as it bonded. An official investigation later noted that Lewes’s training regimen was the “hardest ever undertaken in the Middle East,” with the men being put through their paces an average of nine or ten hours a day, “plus night schemes.” The food at the Kabrit camp was supremely nasty, consisting largely of bully beef, biscuits, herring, dried bread, and yams. While the men were becoming exceptionally fit, they were also permanently, ravenously hungry. One night, as a treat, the cook served jam-roll pudding. Reg Seekings decided his portion was too small, and reacted in the way he usually did: he pushed the plate into the face of the poor kitchen orderly. On another occasion after about a month of grueling training, a minor rebellion erupted: a group of men had been digging holes in the sand for hours; it was boring, boiling, and “appeared to be mindless.” They downed tools and stomped off to the mess tent. According to Seekings, it was Jock Lewes who averted mutiny by turning the episode into a test of machismo. He jumped on a table and shouted: “You’ve all got a bloody yellow streak a mile wide down your backs! You just can’t take it! Unless you can prove otherwise.”

The uprising subsided, but tensions still simmered.

In such a small unit, close attachments and intense enmities rapidly arose. Friendships evolved slowly, and fights erupted quickly. Stirling had given orders that “scrapping” between the men would not be tolerated: “Toughness should be reserved entirely for the benefit of the enemy.” But friction was inevitable.

Cooper and Seekings, the young grammar school boy and the pugnacious boxer, loathed each other on sight. Cooper, with his more refined accent and education, was a red rag for Seekings, who had left school at fourteen to work as a farm laborer, before joining the Cambridgeshire Regiment. Cooper had probably never met anyone quite as raw and belligerent as Seekings, and he did little to hide his opinion of the older man as a thug and a bully. “We hated each other’s guts,” recalled Seekings. “I was the country yokel, he was the public schoolboy.” The two men avoided each other as much as possible.

Lieutenant Bill Fraser tended to keep to himself, spending much of his time alone in his tent with a stray dog, part dachshund, he had adopted and named “Withers.” Paddy Mayne picked up on the rumors of Fraser’s homosexuality and teased him brutally, a cruelty that in no way undermines, and may even reinforce, suggestions that Mayne was gay himself. “Paddy used to give him a hell of a time, because he thought he was that way inclined,” one contemporary noted. “Paddy could be cruel, especially after a few.”

The one man in the unit who was neither awed nor intimidated by Mayne was Eoin McGonigal. “Dark-haired, dark-faced, slim and neat,” McGonigal had also fought at the Litani River, where he had won a reputation for coolness under fire. The two men had known each other since before the war. McGonigal’s father had been a judge in County Tyrone, but the family had moved north after the partition of Ireland. The two young men probably met on the rugby field, and had visited each other’s homes and families. Their friendship had deepened after they joined the Royal Ulster Rifles in early 1940, and then together applied to join the commandos. “They were absolutely inseparable,” said one contemporary. McGonigal was slightly built and gentle, with a knack for conciliation and a liking for fair-haired women. “Apart from that, they seemed to have almost every other taste in common.” When Mayne became drunk and aggressive, only McGonigal appeared able to calm him. As a Catholic Irishman from the South, McGonigal might easily have been the butt of Mayne’s sectarian prejudice, but there is no evidence they ever exchanged a harsh word. It seems likely that Mayne urged Stirling to recruit McGonigal, and felt a strong sense of responsibility for his welfare. “McGonigal is here with me,” Mayne wrote to his sister in September, like a schoolboy delighted to find himself in the same class as his best friend.

By October, the men had been training at peak intensity for two months, without having a clear idea what they were training for. The waiting exacerbated the tension. Stirling was forced to spend much of his time in Cairo, chivvying the “unfailingly obstructive and uncooperative” military bureaucracy for supplies and backup. The work he was doing to meet the detachment’s logistical needs was as important as any amount of training. Lewes acknowledged as much: “Together we have fashioned this unit. David has established it without, and I think I may say I have established it within.” Yet Stirling was acutely aware that while the others were slogging through the desert and living under canvas, he was usually moving around pieces of paper and sleeping in a comfortable bed. During his long absences, the group was developing its own internal dynamics, frictions, and rivalries.

Stirling worried that “Paddy was emerging as the natural leader.”

—

The first opportunity to demonstrate the team’s practical prowess came in the form of a bet. Heliopolis airfield, the home of the RAF’s 216 Squadron, was ninety-four miles from Kabrit, and surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. An RAF group captain had told Stirling his chances of creeping onto a British airfield undetected were “practically non-existent.” Stirling disputed this, and offered a wager to settle the matter. It was agreed that the fake attack would take place on a moonless night toward the end of the month.

The men selected were divided into five groups of ten, led by Lewes, Mayne, Fraser, McGonigal, and Charles Bonington. Each man carried a pack containing rocks equivalent to the weight of a full complement of explosives, along with four pints of water, half a pound of boiled sweets, biscuits nicknamed “sand channels” (because they were hard enough to drive a jeep over), and some raisins. They marched at night, and hid out during the day, each man covered with a strip of burlap that blended with the desert sand, as camouflage against being spotted from the air. The October sun was still roasting: lying out in the midday heat covered by a strip of cloth was a particularly brutal form of self-torture. After three days of dehydration, some of the men were hallucinating and close to collapse. “I was dreaming of a running tap every time I closed my eyes,” Bennett, the cockney mouth organist, later recalled. On the fourth night they reached Heliopolis, cut their way through the outer perimeter, and began planting self-adhesive labels on the RAF planes parked in neat rows. Had the guards spotted them, they might have been shot. Each team deposited around forty stickers (some planes were later found to have several attached) and slipped out of the aerodrome by the same route they had entered. Then they turned themselves in at the army barracks in Abassea, where the guards, seeing a group of smelly, dirty, sun-burned men emerge from the desert, initially assumed they must be surrendering Italians. Stirling won £10.

Destroying a plane, however, is far trickier than simply planting a sticky label on it. The most effective weapon against a stationary aircraft is a time bomb that simultaneously explodes and ignites, setting fire to the plane’s fuel tanks. This meant combining two bombs into one, with two fuses and a clock timer, a cumbersome device weighing five pounds that took ten minutes to prime. Stirling needed a new sort of bomb: so Jock Lewes set to work, applying a very little knowledge gained from playing with his brother’s chemistry set as a child and a great deal of determination. For several weeks he experimented, in a makeshift open-air laboratory away from the camp, with various combinations of gelignite, ammonal, and gun cotton. The sound of the explosions echoed across the desert. Finally, in triumph, he produced a solution: a pound of plastic explosive, rolled with a quarter pound of incendiary thermite and some motor oil. This could be triggered by a pencil detonator, a glass tube similar to a ballpoint pen, with a spring-loaded striker held down by copper wire; gently squeezing the glass vial at the top of the detonator released acid, which then ate through the wire and released the striker, quickly or slowly depending on the thickness of the wire. The detonator could be primed to go off with a delay of anything between twelve seconds and two hours. This homemade explosive-incendiary bomb would prove to be one of the more remarkable innovations of the war: lightweight, versatile, sticky enough to attach to the wing of a plane, hard to spot in the dark, and hugely destructive—an all-purpose time bomb that could be carried in a backpack and primed in seconds. Jim Almonds described it as “a nice little black pudding.” The “Lewes bomb” would be a permanent addition to the military arsenal, the ideal desert-raiding explosive, and the first customized weapon created by and for the SAS.