The Lost Band of Brothers (40 page)

According to one account, Lt Lassen and Capt. Pinckney’s initial overtures were well received in both HQ Cairo and Eisenhower’s headquarters.
23
Thus encouraged, on 2 February 1943, Lt Col Bill Stirling handed over command of SSRF in England to Peter Kemp at Anderson Manor and set out for Africa.

†††

In summer 1941 West Africa had offered Maid Honor Force all the space and scope it could have wished for – General Giffard and Admiral Willis notwithstanding. But North Africa in early 1943 was a different place altogether. Rommel’s Afrika Korps was retreating westwards towards Tunisia, its extended supply lines with that open southern flank to a vast and empty desert now a thing of the past: trapped between two great armies, in May 1943, 275,000 Afrika Korps troops would surrender and be shipped across the Atlantic to POW camps in Mississippi.
24
As German units retreated into Tunisia and supply lines shortened, the land became increasingly confined and unfavourable for jeep operations. SSRF came to North Africa in January 1943 hoping to find bountiful harvest. Instead, they discovered lean pickings. The suggestion, therefore, that Lassen and Pinckney found themselves welcomed and badly needed new arrivals knocking at an open door is contradicted by the SOE War Diary:

B [Stirling] is sadly disillusioned partly through his own fault and partly owing to the CCO’s [Chief of Combined Operations] excessive enthusiasm. There is at this moment no job for SSRF here. AFH [Allied Forces’ Headquarters] felt that CCO sold them SSRF against their better judgement but as too late Recant [sic] they must do something with it … 1st SAS had already informed the 1st Army [to the west] that the country and the largely hostile Arab population almost prohibited operations of the kind carried out by them already in the desert. There was no opening either for raids by sea.
25

In England, SSRF had been thwarted by Slocum, the Admiralty and a set of initials – ACNS(H). In North Africa it seemed destined to be hostile Arabs, the Tunisian terrain and the speed of Montgomery’s advance westwards that might frustrate their ambitions: ‘Stirling’s command would only be his own small party plus possibly a small detachment of the 1st SAS who were there and at present there was little future for him’ records the SOE official history.
26
While there
was
a future for SSRF – albeit one that would emerge under a different set of initials – Stirling’s attempts to locate his unit within the existing matrix of irregular units already operating in North Africa met with limited success and clashed with SOE’s Brandon mission.
27
Stirling himself was described by one of his opposite numbers as ‘a really bad piece of work’.
28
Like
Layforce
before it, SSRF as originally conceived was struggling to find a role. And, like
Layforce
, it too was destined to disappear, services no longer required.

Back in England, the days of Anderson Manor as a powerhouse of cross-Channel raiding were also waning. Between March and April 1943 one SSRF/SBS raid, Operation
Backchat
, would be compromised – possibly by enemy radar – and aborted before troops could be landed;
29
another, Operation
Pussyfoot
– a second attempt to recce parts of Herm unvisited on
Huckaback
– would be cancelled because of thick fog; an ambitiously planned Operation
Kleptomania
– a radar station and garrison assault/prisoner-snatch on Ushant, hardly a small scale raid, involving four Hunt Class Destroyers, eight MGBs, No 1 Commando and up to
fifty
SSRF, was eventually abandoned as impracticable; two further undated raids – Operations
Hillbilly
and
Mantling
– were destined to be ‘cancelled … owing to interference with SIS’.
30
Now, with the French coastline closed and with other units like COPP
31
weaned away from No 62 Commando to take on the specialised business of stealthy beach reconnaissance on their own, there was little left for SSRF to do in either England or North Africa. On 19 April 1943 the Small Scale Raiding Force was quietly disbanded, its former members dispersing back to the Commandos SAS and SOE.

By then Appleyard’s childhood friend and the comrade posted Missing since Operation
Aquatint
, Capt. Graham Hayes, had made his way first to Paris and then, with the help of the Resistance, down an escape corridor to Spain. But safety there was illusionary. Soon after crossing over into Spain in November, Hayes had been betrayed and handed back to the Germans. Post-war research revealed the Resistance circuit Hayes had turned to for help in Paris had been hopelessly penetrated by the Gestapo. Thereafter, his every step towards freedom had been tracked and observed, his unwise letters of thanks to friends in Normandy intercepted, photographed and turned into death-sentences for those who had risked their lives to help him. Back on French territory, Hayes was taken back to Paris and imprisoned at Fresnes.

†††

Out of the ashes of the Small Scale Raiding Force, Bill Stirling – his brother David had been captured in January whilst he was asleep in a
wadi
by a startled German dentist out on exercise – was given permission to form another SAS Regiment, 2 SAS. The name and its connections – the brothers’ cousin was Lord Lovat – evidently still counted for something. Before his capture by first the Germans (escaped) and then by the jubilant Italians, Lt Col David Stirling had laid plans to expand 1 SAS into a formation of brigade strength: ‘
Now
I know what SAS stands for,’ confided one of Bill Stirling’s comrades as the light dawned – ‘Stirling and Stirling.’
32

Thanks to the January promise wrung out of Eisenhower by Lord Louis Mountbatten, Major Appleyard and a few other SSRF old hands had followed their Colonel to Africa by sea, sailing from the Clyde in mid-February. Appleyard, meanwhile, considered himself still part of SSRF – for the moment, at least. Arriving there in March 1943 – 2 SAS would not be formed until May, the month the Germans surrendered in Africa – he set about creating a new camp, just as he had in Freetown, for the men of SSRF he anticipated would soon be joining him in Africa:

Our base is a most delightful place, right on the sea amongst the sand dunes and about ten miles from the nearest town. A really healthy spot (all in tents, of course) and in an excellent training area. We are making it our permanent base, rest camp, training, holding and stores depot. Wonderful surfing and great fun with the boats for training in surf work, etc., and the length and height of the surf is about Newquay standard … The weather is very variable, some absolutely heavenly days, like the very best days of an English summer and of a perfect temperature, so that we are all already very brown about face and hands, and then there are other days like today, wet and dull with low, driving clouds.
33

The camp was at Philippeville, 40 miles north of Constantine, in Algeria. Former SAS soldier and chronicler of the first fifty years of his regiment’s history, desert veteran Michael Asher described it as ‘a huddle of tents pitched in a grove of cork-oaks between the beach and dense
maquis
scrub that hid a malarial salt marsh. Beyond the scrub, forested hills rose to a height of a thousand feet, their knobbly peaks stretching across the skyline like knuckles.’
34
In that time and in that place, Appleyard found himself enchanted by the countryside:

This is a very fascinating country. It really is absolutely beautiful and infinitely varied – at times almost desert, and then a few miles later one could be in England on the Downs and then for miles it will be Mexico with dead flat plains stretching away to sudden scraggy bare rocky hills, and then suddenly one sees views of blue hills and valleys for all the world like Scotland … As regards natural life, there are a lot of birds, some very English – swallows, martins, skylarks – and some very foreign – vultures, hawks, eagles, storks (all standing on their nests on one leg, etc). Flowers are not really out yet, but there are quite a lot of small spring wild flowers, mostly very small, but at times, looking across the ground, you get the most lovely ‘patch’ colour effects with the myriads of tiny little flowers – great yellow, brown, pink or purple patches cover the hillsides in places. But most lovely of all are masses of most gloriously scented wild narcissi … Scorpions (yellow and black) abound in stony places and later there will be a lot of snakes … At night the jackals come and howl round the camp (a weird and chilling sound).
35

Once Stirling’s new – and old – recruits for SSRF/2 SAS
36
began to arrive, there would be little time for them to admire spring flowers, narcissi or scorpions of either hue:

The training matched the course at Kabrit [1 SAS training base on the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal Zone] – infantry skills, PT, demolitions, Axis weapons, route-marches and parachuting, which was run at a parachute school in Morocco. Final selection for 2 SAS depended on the ability to run to the top of a nearby six-hundred foot hill and back in sixty minutes. Failures were RTU’d [Returned To Unit].
37

Plus ça change.

Yet, despite its pedigree, its intimate link with the founder of the Special Air Service Regiment, 2 SAS was slow to find its feet. According to Michael Asher ‘[2 SAS] was never to achieve the cachet of 1 SAS … If 2 SAS had never quite lived up to its promise, it was mainly because many of the tasks it was handed were pointless or badly planned by outsiders.’
38
To begin with at least, that was not how it appeared to the men on the ground. Appleyard wrote:

As regards prospects, they are good, and things will be very busy soon. I think now that I shall not be coming home again quite so soon as I indicated at first. We can do such a really useful job here and there is so much co-operation and keenness … after all, this is where the war is now and is going to be in the future.

The job Appleyard and his men trained for was small unit behind-the-lines reconnaissance, sabotage and disruption of enemy communications. Training for what, by June, would have become the new A Squadron, 2 SAS, translated into toiling up and down murderous countryside in broiling heat each carrying an explosives-laden rucksack whose webbing straps bit deep into aching shoulders:

I think you would be surprised to see me now! I am sitting, with a 5-days growth of beard on my face, stark-naked in the sun on a rock in the middle of a little stream with my feet in the water, cooling off some of the blisters! We are in a tiny little wadi in the midst of a cork forest and there are dense bushes of juniper, thorn, bamboo and broom all around, making this a perfect little hide-out for the day. We got in here about 5 this morning after being on the move since 7.30 last night and shall be off again as soon as darkness falls tonight … I think this is quite the toughest thing physically I have ever done. We are each carrying 65 lbs (sixty-five) packs (rucksacks) and if you want to know just how heavy that is, Ian, [his younger brother] try it! This country is most incredibly difficult to move over and through, and the maps are abominable … We started this scheme last Monday and now, with only fourteen more miles to go, should be back in camp just before dawn tomorrow. So far in our four night’s travel we have covered about forty miles as the crow flies, but you cannot measure distance in this country in miles, as in that time we must have climbed between 6,000 and 8,000 feet.
39

A little later in the same letter Appleyard’s mood changes as a love of a home sorely missed bubbles to the surface:

I even heard a cuckoo the other day, and saw swallows and pied wagtails, going north presumably. I’ll send my greetings with them! Linton must be looking very lovely now and when you get this the daffies will be out and April will be with you. The first nests – and the dippers. Tea at Malham, and perhaps ham and eggs. I suppose I’ll miss all that this year. Still, there’s a job to do here first and then, perhaps, a year hence it will all be over.
40

Training soon gave way to live operations in early April with a raid on the island of La Galite off the coast of Tunisia. On the way to embark, Appleyard was shot – by an American. He was in a jeep which was passed by a large US truck going the other way, in the back of which sat a bored American plinking at passing road signs with a .45. The shot went through the jeep’s dashboard and then entered and exited his shoulder without breaking bone. Shrugging off the suggestion of a stay in hospital, Appleyard got the wound strapped up and carried on with the night’s raid: ‘a very amusing night’s entertainment with a few I-ties!,’ as he later described it.

The plan had been to attack La Galite in strength with forty men, capture a prisoner and send him back to the Italian CO with an ultimatum that, unless he surrendered, the town would be shelled by both the landing party and naval guns waiting off-shore. In fact, there were no guns at all. It was all bluff. Heavy seas badly damaged one of the landing craft on the way in and only a small party was able to slip ashore on a recce that did not carry sufficient authority to bluff anyone. The party withdrew without loss or detection.

They were lucky not to lose a man on another raid, too – an aborted attack on the Tunisian coast. The intention had been to land in two Dorys behind the enemy lines in Tunisia, make their way inland some 60 miles to Mateur, destroy a radar station and then break back through the enemy lines and return to base. Each man was carrying a 65-pound rucksack laden with explosives. ‘[W]hile still a long way from the shore the boat grounded,’ remembered ‘Stokey’ Stokes:

Major Appleyard climbed out of the boat and started prodding in front of him with the boathook to find the depth whilst we scanned the shoreline. Suddenly, he bloody vanished under the water and into the gloom. One of the skills you had to have was to be a very strong swimmer, which was just as well as a few moments later he appeared again soaking wet and told us we had hit a sandbar. We all knew the drill and got out of the boat and shouldered our rucksacks. The Dory now rode high with us and the rucksacks no longer in it. Suddenly the sand bar disappeared and we were now pushing the fucking boat up to our necks in water.