Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (6 page)

At the end of the meeting, Stirling was told he would be promoted to captain, and authorized to raise an initial force of six officers and sixty men from the remnants of Layforce.

The new unit needed a name. It was provided by a little-known military genius with a unique talent for deception and subterfuge, and a taste for theatricality. Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke was responsible for strategic deception in the Middle East, the strange but vital offshoot of military operations dedicated to concealing the truth from the enemy and planting lies in its place. Clarke had emerged as one of the great deceivers of the Second World War: operating from a converted bathroom and then from the basement of a Cairo brothel, he perfected the use of fictional orders of battle, visual deception, double agents, and misinformation to confuse and mislead the enemy. He was flamboyant, charming, and very funny. He was also a bit odd. In October 1941, he would be arrested in Madrid dressed, rather elegantly, as a woman. This incident, never fully explained, caused much sniggering (the Spanish police photographs were sent to Churchill), but it did his career no harm whatever.

One of Clarke’s ruses in the Middle East had been the creation, in January 1941, of a fake paratroop brigade, to try to fool the Italians into fearing that the British might land airborne troops to assist the next attack. The aim was to soak up Italian forces by making them mount defenses against a nonexistent threat, inflate the apparent size of British forces, and generally corrupt enemy planning. The operation was code-named Abeam, and the bogus unit was given the invented name “1st Special Air Service Brigade.” Clarke had planted fake photographs in Egyptian newspapers showing parachutists training in the desert, dropped dummy parachutists near prisoner-of-war camps, and had two men in bogus uniforms wander around Egypt pretending to be SAS paratroopers, convalescing from injuries sustained while parachuting. False documents identifying the 1st SAS Brigade were also planted on known enemy spies, including a Japanese consular official. Captured enemy documents appeared to indicate that Operation Abeam was working, but when Clarke got wind that a real parachute unit was being prepared, he sensed an opportunity to bolster the deception. If Stirling’s small assault team took the same name, Clarke argued, this would surely reinforce the idea, in the mind of the opposition, that a full brigade of paratroopers was preparing for action.

Stirling readily agreed to name his force “L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade.” The letter “L” was selected to imply that detachments A to K were already in existence; Stirling later joked that it stood for “Learner.” Clarke was “delighted to have some flesh and blood parachutists instead of totally bogus ones.” In return he promised to use his extensive network of contacts to spread the word that Stirling was looking for recruits.

The SAS was formed as part of a larger contingent that did not, in reality, exist—an oddly appropriate start for a unit that had come into being through a most unlikely combination of good luck and bad, error, accident, and design.

Of the new recruits to the SAS, none would be more important, or harder to reel in, than Jock Lewes, the hard-minded and demanding Welsh Guards officer whose ideas about raiding behind the lines mirrored, and partly inspired, Stirling’s own.

While Stirling was coaxing and charming the generals at Middle East Headquarters, Lewes had been fighting a series of bloody skirmishes in besieged Tobruk, one of the most active and unpleasant battlefronts of the North African war. The vital port was still in British hands, accessible by sea but encircled to the south by German and Italian forces, which kept up a steady bombardment.

On July 18, 1941, Lewes led a night raid on the Italian lines, attacking two rocky outcrops known as the “Twin Pimples.” More than fifty enemy soldiers were killed, and Lewes wrote ecstatically of “winkling out the wretched wop from his entrenchments with the bayonet, or rolling in the hand grenades when he lay low.” Lewes returned to his own lines, only to be told to go back and take a prisoner—which he did, capturing a luckless Italian soldier who had left his dugout to defecate. Lewes dragged him into camp with his trousers still around his ankles.

Lewes seemed to revel in the discomfort, the heat and flies, the acute boredom punctuated by episodes of extreme violence and raging adrenaline. Every other night a small force of commandos would venture into no-man’s-land, navigating through minefields and across barbed wire. “I did most of the patrolling,” wrote Lewes, “as desert sores, dysentery and the unspeakable squalor rendered most of the other officers temporarily unserviceable.” A solitary, steely figure, he was deeply admired by his comrades (he was “by far the most daring of us all,” wrote one), yet he was remote from them. A single-minded predator, he had little need of comradeship.

Stirling made no fewer than three trips to Tobruk, over a six-week period, to try to persuade Lewes to join his fledgling detachment as its first recruit. Lewes had expertise and discipline, to an almost brutal degree, and Stirling had concluded that this meticulous attention to detail would make him “the ideal officer for the unit’s training programme.” But Lewes held back, resisting all entreaties, and Stirling had enough self-knowledge to realize why: “He just didn’t want to get involved if it was going to be a short-term flight of fancy…I suppose I’d come across to him in the past as a bit of a Good Time Charlie.”

At the end of August, Lewes returned to Egypt for some desperately needed rest. Stirling found him lying in bed, “an absolute wreck,” and therefore unable to escape Stirling’s appeals. It was a neat reversal of their earlier meeting when Stirling had been immobilized. “I could really get at him,” observed Stirling, who proceeded to deploy every argument he could muster to convince Lewes that his future lay with the SAS. Finally Lewes cracked and agreed to come on board as chief instructor of L Detachment, and Stirling’s deputy.

The two men would never become close friends. “We got on well enough,” said Stirling, a tepid commendation from a man who got on famously with almost everyone. They had very little in common, but their very dissimilarity would be a crucial source of unity and strength.

Lewes’s first contribution to L Detachment was to bring with him some of the toughest soldiers in the British Army, men whose abilities he had witnessed at first hand during the commando raids around Tobruk. The first was an American.

Sergeant Pat Riley was a hard-grained native of Redgranite, Wisconsin, who had moved to England with his family in the 1920s. As a teenager, he had worked in the Cumbrian mines, alongside his father and grandfather, before falsifying his birth certificate and faking British citizenship in order to join the Coldstream Guards, the Foot Guards regiment second only in precedence to the Grenadier Guards. A huge man, with a wide Irish face and cheery grin, Riley was one of the most experienced soldiers among the early recruits. On arrival in the Middle East with Layforce he learned that, as an American citizen, he had been summoned to join the US Army. He ignored his call-up papers. Well over six feet tall and broad as a buffalo, Riley exuded an air of great latent power and complete calm: at moments of danger, he tended to hum cowboy songs. The younger men under his command jumped twice as high as he ordered, but also looked on him as a protective figure, instilling instant confidence. Soldiers tended to follow him instinctively. With the breakup of Layforce, several of Riley’s fellow guardsmen had asked him what he was planning to do: “They decided they’d go wherever I went.” In Tobruk, Riley heard the rumor that a special assault team was being formed, and approached Jock Lewes: “I gather it’s a do-or-die unit that you people are forming?”

Riley brought with him another sergeant, Jim Almonds, a fellow veteran of Tobruk who had caught Lewes’s eye by dragging a wounded soldier to safety during the Twin Pimples raid. Almonds had joined the Coldstream Guards at the age of eighteen, in 1932. His deceptively soft voice and courtesy had earned him the soubriquet “Gentleman Jim,” and there was an old-fashioned air about him, grave, careful, and serious. “I don’t think I was ever a vagabond, really,” he said. Married, with an infant son at home, in many ways he was the least wild of the bunch. Intensely practical, Almonds was also a person of intelligence and sensitivity: his diary and letters depicting life in the early SAS are a trove of close observation and good sense.

The SAS would attract many rough and fierce individuals in the coming years, but in Riley and Almonds, the bedrock of the unit, it had two men who were anything but intemperate: older, married noncommissioned officers, combat veterans who were keen to fight but who also knew how to calculate the odds, retreat if required, and live to fight again. “I can’t think of any better blokes,” said Lewes, who advised Riley and his mates to take some leave in Cairo, and then report for duty at the new L Detachment headquarters.

Stirling, meanwhile, was mounting his own recruitment drive. Word swiftly spread among the remnants of Layforce that something unusual was in the offing. Most commandos had signed up in order to see action, and there was no shortage of volunteers. Stirling was careful not to reveal too much and would say only, “I’m forming a unit that is going to drop in behind enemy lines.” That was sufficient enticement for most.

A few recruits were approached by Stirling in person. During training in Scotland, he had taken note of a private in the Scots Guards named Johnny Cooper. The most immediately striking thing about Cooper was that he looked barely old enough to be a Boy Scout, let alone a soldier. He came from a middle-class Leicester family, and had been educated at Wyggeston Grammar School, where his most notable achievement had been to play the part of Robin Hood opposite Dickie Attenborough as Maid Marian in the school play. Soon after the outbreak of war, at the age of seventeen, he quit an apprenticeship in the wool trade and bribed a recruiting sergeant to swallow the obvious lie that he was twenty. Cooper was slightly built, with a thin face and piercing eyes; his boyish looks belied a remarkable strength of will and almost unnerving resilience. He neither smoked nor drank, and he endured the demands of training, the pain of amoebic dysentery on the passage to the Middle East, and the monotonous inactivity in the desert without a murmur of complaint. Cooper was made of some light but tough material that seemed able to endure any kind of stress without breaking.

“Do you want to do something special?” Stirling asked him.

“Yes,” said Cooper, without pausing to ask what “special” might involve. He was not yet nineteen, the youngest recruit to this newborn unit.

Stirling made a point of interviewing every man who volunteered. Many were rejected, for he had formed a clear idea of the sort of men he would need. Commandos were already some of the most highly trained soldiers in the army, but he was looking for something more profound, and rarer: an ability to think and react independently. Individuality and self-reliance are not always highly prized in an army. Indeed, many officers prefer soldiers to do exactly what they are told, without question or, indeed, thought. But Stirling was insistent that this unit would not be composed of biddable yes-men: “I always hoisted onboard guys who argued.”

The men would also have to be willing to kill, at close quarters, and not merely for the sake of killing. “I didn’t want psychopaths,” he insisted. Stirling, then, was seeking a set of qualities that are not often found together: fighters who were exceptionally brave but just short of irresponsible; disciplined but also independent-minded; uncomplaining, unconventional, and, when necessary, merciless. People who simply wanted a change of routine were dismissed out of hand: “It is no good men volunteering for this type of work just for the novelty,” Stirling believed. He even listed the traits he sought: “Courage, fitness and determination in the highest degree, but also, just as important, discipline, skill, intelligence and training.”

Inevitably, Stirling’s band attracted distinctive characters, as well as some very strange ones, and a few who were positively dangerous. Independent-minded soldiers, as Stirling was about to learn, are not always easy to control.

Reg Seekings was a very difficult man. An amateur boxing champion, he was chippy, irascible, almost blind in one eye, and not very bright. One historian has compared him to “a bad-tempered dog, snarling and scowling.” He believed that every argument could be solved with his fists. If someone disagreed with him, he would threaten to fight them; if they declined (as most did, given that he was almost two hundred pounds, muscular and possessed of a famous right hook), he called them a coward. Like most aggressive people, Seekings was insecure, in part because he was dyslexic. Motivated by a sort of desperate competitiveness, he had a morbid fear of being found wanting. Ferociously loyal to those comrades he considered worthy, he was disdainful of everyone else. He once described himself as a “rough tough so-and-so.” Many considered him a complete bastard.

But Reg Seekings had one asset that set him apart. He was hard, in the way that very few people are truly hard. He was prepared to do brutal things that others would never have had the stomach for. He never took a backward step, in the boxing ring or on the battlefield, and he had no compunction about the shedding of blood. This was not an attractive human trait, but in the experiment now under way it would prove a supremely valuable one.