Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (14 page)

“I reckon you got him,” shouted one of the New Zealanders. Almonds had indeed hit the rear gunner. The Messerschmitt peeled away, and the attack ended as suddenly as it had started. The respite was brief, for within minutes a pair of Stukas had taken over the battle; they dived in to attack the empty trucks. The men scattered, plunging into some low scrub, and then lying flat and still in the hope they would not be spotted. Some scooped sand over themselves to try to blend into the ground. Some hid under bushes, while others curled up and played dead. “There is no lesson which improves camouflage as well as a low level machine-gunning attack,” one man drily remarked.

The first pair of attacking Stukas was replaced by another; for eight hours the onslaught continued, unsystematic but terrifying. In a brief lull, Almonds looked up, and saw oily black smoke rising in the distance: the Stukas had located at least some of the dispersed convoy. In midafternoon, a German reconnaissance plane flew over to assess the damage; the men lay still. Satisfied, the plane wheeled away. The one-sided battle was over. “They thought they’d got everyone,” Almonds later wrote. But slowly the remnants of the team emerged from hiding, dusty and exhausted. Only now did Almonds realize that Lewes was missing. “Jock was sat in the truck. I don’t know why he didn’t get off. Just don’t know why.” Lewes had, it seemed, obeyed his own injunction: never run away.

A 22mm cannon shell had smashed through Lewes’s thigh and severed the femoral artery. Another may have hit him in the back. He bled to death in a matter of minutes.

Jock Lewes was buried in a shallow grave in the sand. Someone said a prayer. A rifle, with his name scratched on it, was planted upright, with a helmet on top, as a temporary marker, “hoping someone would go that way again.”

The truck had been badly shot up, but miraculously the petrol tanks remained intact. With something close to engineering genius, one of the LRDG mechanics managed to get it working again. Almonds, two other SAS men, and the LRDG survivors clambered aboard and headed south once more. No other trucks were intact, and the survivors from the rest of the party had already set off on foot for Jalo. Almonds headed first to the rendezvous near Marble Arch, “to let Bill Fraser know we hadn’t forgotten him and we would send other trucks out for him.” The meeting point was deserted. Almonds was more than eight hours late for the rendezvous, unavoidably detained by an aerial bombardment. Bill Fraser and his team had already moved on. “There was no sign of him or any of the party.” They waited a few hours, and then pushed on for Jalo.

The single truck limped dejectedly into Jalo just before midnight on December 31. Stirling was furious that Lewes’s body had been left behind, although it was Lewes himself who had insisted during training that collecting the dead was a dangerous waste of time.

Stirling tried not to show it, but the loss of Lewes was a devastating blow. The New Year’s Eve gathering was a frugal and melancholy one: some jam, a pot of tea, and a tin of condensed milk. “We’d lost one of our best officers, our best men,” said Cooper. “Everybody was upset.” Even Seekings, who prided himself on disguising all emotion, was secretly grieving: “In some ways Jock’s loss was worse than the 40 men in the abortive raid in November 1941.”

In Lewes’s empty tent lay an unopened letter from Miriam Barford, written the previous October, joyfully accepting his proposal of marriage.

That night, Almonds wrote in his diary: “I thought of Jock, one of the bravest men I have ever met, an officer and a gentleman, lying out in the desert barely covered in sand. No one will ever stop by his grave or pay homage to a brave heart that has ceased to beat. Not even a stone marks the spot.”

The grave of Jock Lewes was never found. This austere warrior from another age was buried where he fell, and was absorbed into the battlefield without leaving a trace.

—

Bill Fraser and his four-man team were quite unaware of the fate of Lewes. They knew only that they had failed to link up with the LRDG and Lewes’s team and were now stranded in the desert, two hundred miles from Jalo Oasis, with roughly half a pint of water each and enough sardines, bully beef, and biscuits to last two days at most. The landing strip at Marble Arch had seemed impregnable, with freshly dug trench defenses and dozens of alert-looking German guards. The two SAS groups managed to miss each other at the rendezvous site. Finally concluding that the rest of the troop was not coming, Fraser and his men set off on foot, heading southwest.

The last of the water soon ran out. On the third day, they came across a rank pool of brackish salt water. This had to be distilled, a laborious process that produced far too little liquid to combat the dehydration brought on by heat, forced marching, and diarrhea. They resorted to drinking their own urine, and eating berries, snails, and tiny lizards found under rocks.

On January 6, 1942, ten days after being dropped near Marble Arch, the team nearly bumped into a squad of Italian engineers laying telephone lines. They hid until nightfall, and then launched an ambush: the Italians were held at gunpoint while rusty water was siphoned from their truck radiator. The team then escaped back into the desert with two jerry cans of water, some indeterminate jam, one tin of pears, and another of fishy spaghetti. Despite this gastronomic windfall, some of the men were deteriorating fast. Fraser decided, as he later put it, to “get a lift.” That night, they worked their way back to the coast road, lay in wait, and then flagged down a Mercedes-Benz carrying two German wireless operators. The frightened occupants were disarmed and ordered to drive while the five British soldiers all crammed into the back and Fraser held a revolver to the driver’s neck: “We were not going to leave the Jerries behind to raise the alarm.” After an hour, Fraser ordered the driver to turn off the road and steer south into the desert, in what he hoped was the direction of the front line. Some fifteen miles later, trying to cross a salt marsh, the car became irretrievably stuck. The Germans were pointed northward and told to start walking. The British Eighth Army, Fraser estimated, should be about fifty miles to the east. The next forty-eight hours were eventful; they were shot at by Italian sentries, walked through a minefield, and ate the last of the food: a mouthful of sardines with jam. Some friendly Bedouin nomads supplied a few dates. A burned-out German vehicle, a casualty of earlier fighting, was found to contain several blackened tins of meat roasted by the heat, which were devoured with relish. A sandstorm erupted. Dimly, through the swirling grit, troops could be glimpsed in the distance; whether Fraser and his team would be shot or captured before they starved seemed an open question.

Then came the sound of an English voice. The British soldiers advancing from Agedabia were highly suspicious of the hirsute, ravenous figures staggering toward them out of the storm. “They must have thought we were a band of savages,” said one survivor. “With our long matted hair and beards. Faces and hands caked in dirt, and torn ragged clothes.” The men, wrote Fraser, had “behaved admirably,” displaying undimmed “cheerfulness” throughout the ordeal. “Particularly noticeable was their determination not to be captured under any circumstances.”

A few days later, they were on their way back to SAS headquarters at Kabrit, where the rest of the detachment had now returned from Jalo for some well-deserved recuperation. The scattered Lewes party had also made it across the desert on foot, with the loss of only one man who had been unable to walk any farther and opted to wait and be captured. The survival of so many was greeted with astonished delight by their comrades, as if “a party of ghosts” had come back from the dead.

The odyssey had a permanent effect on Bill Fraser’s appetite: having come so close to starvation, whenever he caught “the smell of cooking food…he had to eat something immediately to satisfy his lust.” In the space of a fortnight, Fraser had almost died of thirst, drunk his own urine, crawled across a minefield, dodged bullets, hijacked a German car, eaten a tin of semi-cremated beef, crossed the front line, and trudged for nine days across 150 miles of desert. Reunited with his dog, Withers, and utterly exhausted, he made his way to the tent he had vacated six weeks earlier and was understandably surprised to find that, since it was assumed he was dead, his bed was now occupied by someone else: specifically, the Conservative MP for Lancaster.

Fitzroy Hew Royle Maclean, diplomat, linguist, and explorer, was the latest addition to the SAS ranks, one of the bravest men in the British Army, and one of the funniest. Like Stirling, he was the scion of an ancient and warlike Scottish clan; unlike Stirling, he was an intellectual and a scholar, fluent in Italian, Russian, and German (as well as Greek and Latin). Tall, erect, with an angular face and dimpled chin, Maclean looked like a Roman senator who has just heard a very funny joke. After joining the Foreign Office in 1933, he served in Paris and Moscow with distinction, and was tipped as “one to watch” in the diplomatic service. He was determined to join the armed forces and go to war, but under wartime rules the diplomatic service was classed as a “reserved occupation,” which meant that, to his intense frustration, he was forbidden to leave his official post on the Russia desk.

Having tried, and failed, to persuade the Foreign Office to let him go, Maclean hit on a solution that appealed to his finely honed sense of the ridiculous. The fine print of Foreign Office regulations stated that officials must resign if elected to Parliament. To his own astonishment and the fury of his superiors, in October 1941, Maclean managed to win a by-election in Lancaster, after one of the shortest political campaigns on record. He immediately quit the diplomatic service, enlisted with the Cameron Highlanders as a private, and was deployed to North Africa. One night in Cairo late in 1941, at a dinner party, Maclean fell into conversation with a “tall, dark, strongly built young man with a manner that was usually vague, but sometimes extremely alert.”

“Why not join the SAS?” said David Stirling, who had briefly met Fitzroy Maclean before the war.

“What is it?” asked Maclean.

“A good thing to be in,” came the enigmatic answer.

“It sounded promising,” Maclean later wrote. “I said I should be delighted to join.”

Fitzroy Maclean, now commissioned as a lieutenant, arrived in Kabrit in mid-January 1942, and was shown to an empty tent by a large guardsman from Aberdeen, who informed him that its previous occupant had been Bill Fraser, adding lugubriously: “The poor gentleman will not be requiring it any more.” Maclean had barely settled in when a “wild looking figure with a beard” appeared through the tent flap carrying a small dog and demanded his bed back. Maclean was deeply impressed by the tale of Fraser’s epic trek across the desert, “keeping himself alive by drinking rusty water from the radiators of derelict trucks.”

Despite the death of Jock Lewes, the experience of the previous weeks had imbued the detachment, in Stirling’s words, with “enormous self-confidence and a feeling of exhilaration.” More than ninety planes had been destroyed; Fraser and the others had survived against the odds, and the unit had made a dramatic and demonstrable contribution to the war. Stirling paid a visit to Middle East Headquarters in Cairo, and found General Auchinleck in a genial and receptive mood.

The war, suddenly, seemed to be progressing well, as seen from Middle East Headquarters: Rommel had been driven back, Tobruk relieved, and Benghazi captured. The Auk congratulated Stirling on his involvement in attacking enemy airfields “up front,” and authorized him to recruit an additional six officers and forty men. Stirling was promoted to major; Paddy Mayne was made a captain. Both were recommended for the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). Fraser would be awarded the Military Cross. Auchinleck was content to allow Stirling extraordinary latitude, in both the planning and execution of operations. Contact with headquarters was maintained by radio, but there is no evidence that the commanding officer either demanded, or expected, to be told exactly what Stirling was doing until after he had done it. Which was exactly the way Stirling wanted it.

With promotions, medals, and battle honors came a new sense of permanence, an increasingly sturdy collective identity. The unit began to refer to itself as “the SAS,” and not just L Detachment.

The unit still had its detractors back at base. One critic carped: “Some unit commanders such as Stirling want to be absolutely independent…our experience in the past has proven this very unsatisfactory.” The newly appointed deputy chief of the general staff, A. F. Smith, wrote: “I agree. It is of course quite wrong to have a number of little private armies.” Among the traditionalists within Middle East HQ, there remained a deep suspicion, not entirely unfounded, that Stirling was fighting his own war, by self-made rules. But at least in the short term, with Auchinleck in command, the survival of the SAS was no longer in question. Reinforcing this sense of stability came new insignia, a motto, “operational wings” to distinguish trained parachutists from novices, and a distinctive white beret. The color proved a problem: worn on leave in Cairo’s bars, the beret attracted wolf whistles from other soldiers, which inevitably led to fights, despite Stirling’s prohibition on brawling. Eventually the white beret would be swapped for a slightly less obtrusive sand-colored version.