Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (34 page)

The flat-bottomed craft hit the beach under cover of darkness and the men poured ashore, cut their way through the barbed wire, and reached the foot of the cliff. It was not until the bamboo scaling ladders were up against the cliff and the first men were ascending that the Italian defenders woke up to what was happening. Two machine guns opened fire, shooting blindly into the darkness while the searchlights swept the sea. Alex Muirhead’s mortar section opened up, and moments later the cordite dump behind the gun emplacements exploded with a roar. It was all over quite quickly. One section simply climbed up the hill path. Another, led by Johnny Wiseman, cut through the perimeter wire around the battery and then opened fire on the concrete emplacement. The Italians surrendered with indecorous haste. “They gave up very easily,” said Wiseman. A Cambridge graduate and former spectacles salesman, Wiseman lost his false teeth but won a Military Cross that day. Instead of the “tough, experienced and fanatically patriotic defenders we had expected,” these Italians were “fawning, friendly, smiling little creatures,” pathetically eager to get away from the war. In one bunker crouched a group of terrified women and children.

But nasty little pockets of resistance remained, including a number of snipers. One team of SRS men spotted a group of Italians taking potshots from the cliff edge, as if for sport, at the paratroopers still struggling in the water. What happened next is not recorded in official reports, but one of the SRS men later noted: “They didn’t see their families again.” While the coastal guns were being put out of action with explosives, the rest of the assault team headed inland to disable a second battery that had now opened up. As Reg Seekings pushed forward, his troop was approached by a group of Italians waving a white flag. At the last moment they flung themselves down and a blast of machine-gun fire from an unseen pillbox raked the British unit, killing one man and wounding two others. Seekings stormed the machine-gun post, hurled in a grenade, and then killed the occupants with a revolver as they staggered out, one after the other. A shell splinter passed through his nose, but Seekings was elated. “To a certain extent I enjoyed it, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea,” he said. “I enjoyed the killing. I was scared, but I would have gone into action every day if I could.”

At 5:20 a.m., Mayne fired a green Verey light into the gray dawn sky, to indicate that the coastal batteries were safely in Allied hands. The rest of the invasion fleet was now approaching the beaches, a flotilla of Homeric proportions. “We looked in amazement at the armada of ships which filled the sea to the horizon,” one of the officers recalled.

The SAS attack had been a complete success: eighteen large guns captured or destroyed, including four mortars, two hundred enemy killed or wounded, and more than five hundred taken prisoner, including the brigadier commanding the battery. Several captured Allied paratroopers had been released. The SRS had lost one dead, two wounded, two berets, and a single water bottle. The assault would later be described by the general in command as “a brilliant operation, brilliantly planned and brilliantly carried out.”

Yet it had been a brutal introduction to a new form of conflict: a war of terrified civilians, unseen snipers, and false flags of surrender blurring the line between a fair fight and an execution. The clarity and gentlemanliness of war behind the lines in the desert seemed suddenly distant.

—

Just two days later, the SRS was thrown back into action, to clear the Italian naval port of Augusta, eleven miles north of Syracuse, a vital launchpad for the Eighth Army’s drive northward. Despite rumors that the port had been abandoned, it was clearly still occupied by the enemy, and these were not second-rate, war-weary Italian forces but crack German troops of the Hermann Göring Division, camped in the hills above the town.

With the sun going down, the landing craft approached a harbor lined with white cottages. “All was very quiet and peaceful.” Then machine-gun fire spattered across the bay, and shells began to land around the launches. The men tumbled pell-mell onto the sand and over the seawall, with Mayne in the lead, as a pair of Royal Navy destroyers began pummeling the German firing positions. One pillbox was pulverized by the naval guns. “We simply flew across the beach and into the streets beyond,” wrote Cooper. While the men adopted house-to-house fighting tactics, Mayne could be seen strolling down the street, hands in pockets. Two medical orderlies were killed, brought down by machine-gun fire. But then the German resistance seemed to evaporate. By nightfall the section was headquartered in a fourteenth-century citadel, with lookouts posted around the town to await the expected counterattack. At about 4:00 a.m. came the sound of heavy tracked vehicles moving above the town, the unmistakable rumble of tanks. The SRS braced for battle, but the sound gradually faded. The Germans had withdrawn.

With Augusta secured and empty, the SRS threw a spontaneous, spectacular, and extremely boisterous looting party. The port had previously served as a headquarters for Italian naval officers and was copiously stocked with food and drink. Within hours the men could be seen staggering drunkenly around the town in a variety of bizarre costumes “liberated” from the local shops and houses: some wore straw boaters or Italian military headgear, but a few went further and dressed entirely in drag, having appropriated the finery of the ladies of Augusta. Paddy Mayne was seen pushing a baby’s pram down the street, filled with bottles; he then used a grenade to blow open a safe in the bank, but was disappointed to discover only a few silver spoons and an old brooch. A sing-along was held in the town square, using a trumpet, a tambourine, some cymbals, and a stolen pianola, which was then carried back in triumph as a gift for the captain of the
Ulster Monarch
.

The rest of July was spent encamped in Augusta. It was a strange time for the unit, a period of relaxation in the Mediterranean sun, interrupted by occasional Luftwaffe bombing attacks. Some recalled it as a “blissful” interlude, but for many it seemed an odd hiatus, a jolting sort of calm. Various operations were planned, and then called off. Mayne introduced a new, intensive physical-training program, though with what end in mind was never clear. The men marched up Mount Etna and down again. For some of the longest-serving SAS men, the stop-start nature of their existence was an unhappy reminder of the way the Layforce commandos had been used—or underused—in the earlier part of the war. In August, the squadron set up camp in Cannizzaro, twenty-five miles north of Augusta. Paddy Mayne prowled around, tense and troubled. Some of the officers avoided him, fearful that they would be compelled to go drinking with the commander, a ritual fraught with unpredictability and danger. When the boozing could not be avoided, Mayne forced the men to sing sentimental Irish songs, and observed them, as one participant put it, “like some emperor watching his gladiators.” By mid-August, the last German troops had retreated across the Strait of Messina to the Italian mainland, and the Allies’ long, slow, cruel slog up Italy began. The SRS, once again, was at the pointed end.

On September 4, 243 men landed at Bagnara, on the tip of Italy’s toe, with orders to secure the port and prevent its demolition ahead of the main invasion force, twelve hours behind them. Mayne was the first on the beach and strode into town. (Luckily, the SAS had landed on the wrong part of the shore—had the unit landed on the intended beach, which was heavily mined, he would have been blown to pieces.)

The German defenders at Bagnara, described in the regimental War Diary as “of good physique and experienced,” were already pulling out, but with rear-guard ferocity, fighting from the high ground above the port as they retreated. A tracer bullet tore through Harry Poat’s trouser leg, setting fire to it and killing the man crouching behind him. Another group pulled too far ahead and was pinned down in a farmhouse by enemy fire; when they tried to emerge, one man was shot dead. An unsuspecting team of German sappers was ambushed, and shot down too easily. “Like being at the funfair,” one man queasily recalled. Behind the town they found caves crammed with civilians who emerged cheering. A few hours later, the main body of regular troops poured into the town, British cruisers battered the German positions in the hills, and the town was taken. The SRS had lost five killed, with sixteen wounded. Some thirty Germans were killed.

The Bagnara operation had been an average episode of war, unspectacularly successful, typically exciting, no more than averagely unpleasant. The SRS was fulfilling the requirements of HQ Raiding Forces, and doing the job well, but mounting frontal assaults on enemy positions was a task for commandos, not for the specialized forces under Mayne’s command. The lateral-thinking war pioneered by the SAS was being shoehorned into the more traditional, one-dimensional demands of the Italian campaign—they were doing what any group of highly trained soldiers could do, suffering and succeeding in the normal way. That was not why the SAS had been formed. Stirling’s unique idea was being eroded. The full consequences of that change, the loss of their singular advantage as a fighting squad, would become horribly apparent at Termoli, two hundred miles to the north, on the opposite side of Italy. Even granite-minded Reg Seekings could not recall the place without a shudder: “Termoli was terrible.”

On September 8, six weeks after the removal of Mussolini as prime minister, the Italian government surrendered. Henceforth, the fight for Italy would be waged against German forces alone, and by the end of the month these were dug in along a line running east to southwest across Italy’s calf. Capturing the port of Termoli, on the Adriatic coast, would open up the way for the US Fifth Army, under General Mark Clark, to march on Naples: “Success would turn the hinge-pin of the enemy line at a crucial point in the Allied advance.”

At first Operation Devon went smoothly. The SRS landed at Termoli with 207 men, accompanied by two units of commandos. The commandos would take the town, while the SRS secured the approaches. A twenty-strong squadron of SRS under a young lieutenant, John Tonkin, was ordered to press on through Termoli and capture the bridge over the Biferno River. Regular troops would then move in.

The German defenders of Termoli turned out to be few but tough, some wearing the arm flash that denoted veterans of the Cretan campaign. One group holed up in an outhouse until heavy mortar fire forced their surrender. A German major emerged dragging a horribly wounded comrade. He explained that the man was his brother and pleaded with the British forces to end his agony: a trooper stepped forward and put a bullet in the dying man’s head. Tonkin’s unit passed through the town and into the hills, but as they pushed on toward the bridge, Tonkin realized, too late, that they had overtaken the retreating Germans. A line of German paratroopers appeared on a ridge. A sharp skirmish ensued. “It was a perfect ambush [in] the middle of the German retreat.” Tonkin ordered the unit to scatter: “Every man for himself.” A few minutes later, Tonkin was surrounded and captured, with three of his men. Only six of the unit managed to dive into the undergrowth and scramble to safety.

By midday, Termoli was safely under British control, and the regular infantry was pouring into the town. The SRS set up billets in a deserted monastery.

At German headquarters in Rome, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commander of German forces in Italy, blew a gasket. The assault on Termoli had caught him, and its defenders, entirely by surprise. The 16th Panzer Division, part of the German reserve army in Naples, was ordered to move north and “recapture Termoli at all costs and drive the British into the sea.”

For the SRS, the first indication of the German counterattack came at dawn on October 5, when two Tiger tanks were spotted on the high ground above the town. At least six more German tanks maneuvered into position, and by midday the counteroffensive was fully under way, a cascade of shot, shell, and machine-gun fire. Four Sherman tanks sent to repulse the attack were destroyed. The Allied perimeter line began to buckle. Under intense pressure some of the regular army units began to withdraw in disarray, to the disgust of the SRS, leaving them and the commandos “to hold for as long as possible until the army could regroup and attack in strength.”

A local Italian fascist, sensing a reversal of the tide, opened fire from an upstairs window. Corporal “Jock” McDiarmid, a Scotsman with a reputation for raw violence, entered the house and re-emerged a few minutes later, grinning. “He’ll fire that Beretta no more.”

Paddy Mayne appeared quite unperturbed by the speed and effectiveness of the German retaliation. He wandered the perimeter, “encouraging, cajoling and instructing,” and taking photographs. Bob Melot, the intelligence officer from North Africa, was wounded once again by flying shrapnel, but insisted there was “no time to wait for treatment and returned to the fighting.” (Melot’s transformation from Belgian cotton merchant to English officer was all but complete: he now displayed “all the qualities of a legendary English gentleman.”)

The defense of Termoli was reinforced by a small team from Bill Stirling’s 2SAS, which had already been bloodied on various operations elsewhere in Italy. This was the first time the two branches of the SAS had fought shoulder to shoulder. A line of Bren guns was set up on a ridge at the edge of town, and a steady stream of fire seemed to slow the German advance. But as mortar rounds began dropping into the town, and the Luftwaffe swooped low to bomb the harbor, the commander of the regular infantry urged Mayne to send “every available man to stem a fresh and powerful attack.” A small flotilla of fishing boats was sequestered in case evacuation should become necessary. It seemed clear that Termoli was about to be overrun. Mayne ordered Johnny Wiseman, the former spectacles salesman, to load his troop into a truck in a side street and move as quickly as possible to shore up the left flank, where another counterattack was expected imminently.