Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (12 page)

The trucks rumbled on through the darkness, now driving without lights and reliant entirely on Sadler’s compass and sense of direction. The route took them close to the village of Qasr Abu Hadi, little more than a cluster of tents and low buildings some fifteen miles south of Sirte. In one of those goatskin tents slept a pregnant woman, the wife of a local goat herder: six months after the SAS raiders had passed in the night, on June 7, 1942, she would give birth to Muammar Gadhafi, the future dictator of Libya.

At 9:00 p.m. on December 14, Sadler called a halt and announced that they were now just four miles from Sirte airfield. Since the Italian pilots had surely given warning of the approaching raiders, Stirling announced a change of plan: they would split the force in two. He and a couple of men would push on that evening, assess the chances of getting onto Sirte airfield, and, if it seemed feasible, attack the following night. Paddy Mayne, meanwhile, would drive some twenty-eight miles west to Tamet airfield with the rest of the troop, and launch a simultaneous assault there. “If one of us fails, the other may be lucky,” said Stirling.

At around midnight, Stirling’s men slowly groped their way toward Sirte airfield, looking particularly “villainous,” as one recalled, “carrying large rucksacks and sub-machine guns and wearing stocking caps.” The silhouette of a parked plane loomed up ahead, and then another. They were gingerly working their way around the aircraft, when a loud scream erupted from beneath their feet. Stirling had trodden on a sleeping Italian soldier. A gun went off in the dark. The three intruders turned and ran. Behind them they heard an antiaircraft gun start up, apparently shooting out to sea. The defenders, it seemed, were under the impression that they were facing a seaborne invasion. “The Italians were getting extremely excited and shouting,” recalled Cooper. That evening, British intelligence intercepted and decoded a peculiar message from the mayor of Sirte, claiming that his town was under attack.

Stirling’s team was safely back behind a low ridge about a mile to the south when the firing subsided. As dawn rose, he peered over the crest and his heart warmed. The little whitewashed town of Sirte was clearly visible now, and so was its airfield, with rows of neatly parked Italian military aircraft, predominantly Caproni bombers. Stirling counted at least thirty. In the course of the morning, more planes arrived, and others took off. The men dug in to wait for nightfall, when they would attack. But as the hot day wore on, they observed that something odd was happening on the airfield: more planes were taking off than were landing. By afternoon, there were only a handful left. And by evening, none at all. The events of the previous day had spooked the Italians into a full-scale evacuation of the airfield.

Deeply disconsolate, Stirling waited for nightfall, and then headed back to the rendezvous point near the coast road, where he had arranged to be picked up by the LRDG.

Paddy Mayne was busy burning.

Half an hour earlier, the Irishman and his team of ten had slipped onto Tamet airfield, single file, without being detected. Dozens of planes were lined up along the runway. Instead of planting their bombs immediately, however, Mayne pointed toward a large hut on the edge of the field; light shone from beneath the door and there were sounds of merriment within, a mixture of Italian and German voices. “Some sort of party must have been going on.” Mayne, Reg Seekings, and one other man crept up to the door, guns drawn. Mayne described what ensued.

I kicked open the door and stood there with my Colt .45, the others at my side with a Tommy gun and another automatic. The Germans stared at us. We were a peculiar and frightening sight, bearded and with unkempt hair. For what seemed like an age we just stood there looking at each other in complete silence. I said: “Good evening.” At that, a young German arose and moved slowly backwards. I shot him…I turned and fired at another some six feet away.

Then the two submachine gunners opened up. “The room was by now in pandemonium.”

As the attackers withdrew, the survivors began to return fire. Mayne ordered four men to keep the Germans and Italians pinned down inside the mess hut, and set off with the remaining six to attack the stationary planes. In the space of fifteen minutes, they planted Lewes bombs with thirty-minute time fuses on fourteen planes, and then climbed into the cockpits of ten more and shot up the dashboard controls. Mayne is said to have torn out one cockpit panel with his hands. Bombs were also swiftly planted on the petrol tankers, a line of telephone poles, and an ammunition dump.

A final volley of gunfire and grenades seemed to silence the last of the resistance from inside the hut. Mayne gave the signal to fall back to the rendezvous. “We had not gone 50 yards, when the first plane went up. We stopped to look but the second one went up near us and we began to run.” Seekings turned back to see Tamet airfield aflame as planes exploded in quick succession and the petrol dump blew up with a shattering roar. From the desert, Mike Sadler observed the devastation: “It was a dramatic sight. The sky lit up by flashes. I had never seen anything like it.” A few minutes later, Mayne and his men arrived at the rendezvous, panting and elated. The truck drivers started their engines, Sadler set his course and the convoy steered south through the darkness, the sky shivering and shimmering behind them.

As Stirling and his two men waited to be picked up, the sky to the west took on a livid glow, the air seemed to shudder for a moment, and the boom of rolling thunder rippled across the wind. “A succession of flashes” lit up the darkness, one observer recalled, followed by the eerie pink of fire reflected on nighttime clouds. The spectacle, said one of the LRDG officers, was like the northern lights, the great particle painting that splashes across the sky in the high latitudes of the Arctic and Antarctic. “What lovely work,” murmured one of the men.

Mayne’s assault on the officers’ mess had been daring, brutal, and quite reckless. It alerted the enemy to the attack before the first bomb had been planted. Killing highly trained pilots was, arguably, an even more effective way of crippling enemy airpower than destroying the planes themselves, but it veered away from sabotage and close to assassination. It seems quite possible that Mayne, faced with the opportunity to kill at close quarters, had been unable to stop himself. “No prisoners taken,” Almonds noted in his diary, without further comment. Stirling was shocked when the scale of the carnage was reported back to him. “It was necessary to be ruthless,” he later wrote, “but Paddy had overstepped the mark….I was obliged to rebuke him for over-callous execution in cold blood of the enemy.”

In an official report on the Tamet raid, Mayne made only the briefest mention of the assault on the officers’ mess: “Hut [was] attacked by sub machine gun and pistol fire and bombs were placed on and around it. There appeared to be roughly 30 inhabitants. Damage inflicted unknown.”

Mayne’s laconic report was very different from a British newspaper account that appeared soon afterward, apparently the result of a briefing from a highly imaginative press officer. Headlined “Raid on Tamet Landing Ground,” it read:

In the officers’ mess of an Axis aerodrome just beyond Cirte [
sic
], 30 German and Italian pilots sat one night drinking, laughing and talking. The campaign wasn’t going too well for them. Rommel was retreating. But still they were a long way from the fighting line. The mess was snugly blacked out, a bright fire was burning. Some of them were playing cards.

Suddenly the door flew open…A British lieutenant, a famous international sporting figure before the war, walked into the mess with one man.

A burst from a Tommy-gun swept the card players and drinkers at the bar. German drinking songs turned to shouts of horror. Those who weren’t killed or wounded tried to make for the doors or windows. They were mown down before they had gone a yard. They were 500 miles behind the front line, but a British patrol was in their midst.

The contrast between the studied understatement of those involved and the imaginative accounts written afterward by those who were not is a good example of the tension between reality and mythology that has dogged the SAS ever since.

Sadler expertly led the convoy back to Jalo Oasis, where the salty waters seemed the height of luxury after more than a week in the parched desert. Success had subtly altered the chemistry within the unit. Reg Seekings and Johnny Cooper, chalk and cheese in class, education, and temperament, had found a bond. In the adrenaline rush of danger, their former antagonism seemed to evaporate. As Seekings put it: “He’d got guts. I’d got guts. And we just clicked. We’d seen a bit of action and as dawn came up we got talking about that night, how exciting it was.” As they chatted, the middle-class, thoughtful youngster and the bellicose working-class fist-fighter discovered that they had more in common than had ever separated them. Cooper had shown a level of pluck that Seekings had not expected, but that he respected. In turn Cooper seems to have sensed a way to measure himself against the older man’s brutal fearlessness. “I was perhaps more scared than he was,” he later acknowledged, “but I would never let myself down in front of him.” Seekings recognized that, whatever the situation, Cooper would not turn tail. “We had complete understanding of each other, we were very confident in each other. It’s a great thing to have a man alongside you who you know you can trust, and whatever happens he’s not going to beat it.” Stirling noticed the way the two men had suddenly connected: “Cooper was quick witted and high spirited. Seekings was slow and steady and shrewd. They were perfect complements to each other.”

Henceforth, Cooper and Seekings would be inseparable, on the battlefield and off, forging an enduring, fighting partnership that would last for as long as they lived.

Jock Lewes and his team had gone out to strike Agheila airfield the same night, and arrived back at Jalo Oasis a few hours after the Stirling-Mayne party, with a story to rival theirs for adventure, if not in results. They had reached the target, 160 miles to the north, without incident, only to discover that the airfield, described in intelligence reports as a teeming air hub, contained not a single aircraft. Lewes blew up a line of telegraph poles and two trucks, and then ran into a patrol of native soldiers, attached to one of the Italian colonial regiments, which immediately surrendered. The corporal was taken prisoner. Never one to miss a racial tag, Lewes immediately nicknamed him “Sambo.” Determined that the journey should not be entirely wasted, he hit on an alternative plan: the LRDG convoy included a single captured Lancia truck. “Having studied the enemy’s convoy procedure,” Lewes decreed that the Italian lorry could be used as a simple form of disguise. A few miles along the coast road, beside a small fort known as Mersa Brega, was a military truck stop and staging post, with a roadhouse canteen said to be frequented by senior German and Italian officers. Dozens of lorries, petrol tankers, and other inviting targets would be parked up around the building.

Lewes waited until the coast road was empty before he swung the Italian truck onto the tarmac, followed by the two British lorries. The Germans had captured a number of vehicles during earlier fighting, and with luck the British trucks would not attract undue attention. Lewes ordered the men to smoke, and appear as relaxed as possible. They drove for nine miles, and counted forty-seven enemy vehicles passing in the opposite direction. No one paid any attention to the troop of men wearing the same dusty khaki clothing as everyone else.

The sun was going down as the convoy pulled into the truck park and stopped. Lewes climbed out and covertly assessed the possibilities. He counted twenty-seven vehicles. Several drivers were dozing in the shade beneath their trucks. Others were eating inside the roadhouse. The new arrivals elicited no interest whatever. At this moment, an Italian driver appeared and asked Lewes for a match.

“Italiano?”
asked the friendly Italian.

“Inglese,”
said Lewes.

The Italian laughed politely, apparently assuming that this must be a German exercising that country’s famously opaque sense of humor. He stopped laughing when Lewes pressed a revolver into his back and said, “Get on the truck.” The Italian prisoner was bundled into the back, where he promptly burst into tears and had to be gagged.

A surreal scene now took place at the Mersa Brega roadhouse. Lewes’s men moved quietly around the parking lot, planting bombs with short time fuses on each vehicle, including a three-ton Italian truck containing incendiaries. It was a matter of only a few minutes before someone spotted what was afoot.

Dave Kershaw opened the door of a truck, preparatory to tossing in a bomb, and was blinded by the flash of a gun fired by the driver inside. The bullet missed him by inches. “I just held up the .45 and pulled the trigger. I must have caught him right on the bridge of the nose because his face opened up.” Kershaw could never expunge the memory of “what the inside of a man’s face looked like” when shot at point-blank range. “It wasn’t pleasant.”

Suddenly the air was fizzing with bullets, though the enemy fire was “poor and erratic.” Jim Almonds, manning the 20mm Breda antiaircraft gun mounted on the back of the Lancia, took aim at the roadhouse, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The oil in the firing mechanism had thickened with the drop in temperature. “So we used the small guns we had. Shot the place up.” The firing lasted twenty minutes, in “a hectic scrap fought at about 30 yards’ range.”

On a signal from Lewes, the men piled into the LRDG trucks, leaving behind the Lancia and between fifteen and twenty enemy dead or wounded. Lewes calculated that they had exploded thirty-eight bombs on the various vehicles and around the roadhouse. On the road, they passed a peculiar-looking, brightly painted vehicle with blacked-out windows, and emptied a blast of machine-gun fire into it as they sped past. Only later did it emerge that they had shot up a mobile Italian military brothel. After a few more miles, Lewes instructed the drivers to turn off the road, and head south for Jalo. The Italian prisoner, who now seemed only too happy to be in captivity, got extremely drunk on rum and sang loudly most of the way back to the oasis.