The Daring Dozen Read online

  Stirling had divided L Detachment into four sections under his overall command. Jock Lewes was to lead numbers one and two sections and Blair Mayne would be in charge of sections three and four. At 1830hrs on 16 November a fleet of trucks arrived at the officers’ mess to transport the men to the five Bristol Bombay aircraft that would fly them to the target area. Stirling was in the lead aircraft, along with nine other ranks including Sergeant Bob Tait, who wrote a report of the raid upon his return a while later:

  We were scheduled to arrive over the dropping area about 2230 hours but owing to the weather which I think was of gale force, and the heavy A.A [anti-aircraft] barrage we were much later. The pilot had to make several circles over the area, gliding in from the sea, coming down through the clouds right over Gazala, which was well lit up by flares dropped by the bombing force, covering our arrival. During this glide, we came in for an uncomfortable amount of A.A. We finally were dropped about 2330 hours, and owing to the high wind (I estimated this about 30 miles per hour) we all made very bad landings. I myself being the only one uninjured. Captain Stirling himself sustained injuries about the arms and legs, Sergeant Cheyne, we never saw again. We had considerable difficulty in assembling, the wind having scattered us over a wide area but finally set off at about 0100 hours [on November 17].17

  Stirling and his men laid up at dawn, and it soon became clear to him that the extent of the injuries suffered on landing made the original plan unfeasible. He instructed Sergeant-Major George Yates to lead the men to the rendezvous with the LRDG (70 miles to the south-west) while he and Tait continued on to the target.

  At nightfall Stirling and Tait broke cover and began marching towards their target, but at 2000hrs they were engulfed by an electrical storm, one of the worst to hit that part of Libya in living memory. ‘We were unable to see more than a few yards in front,’ wrote Tait, ‘and within fifteen minutes the whole area was under water. Eventually reaching the fork wadi we endeavoured to make our way down on to the flat coastal strip, but found this impossible owing to the water which rushed down with great force. From then until long after midnight we moved along the escarpment, attempting to go down the various wadis but with no success, so accordingly about 0100 hours [18 November] Captain Stirling abandoned the attempt and we turned away and marched south.’18

  When Stirling and Tait finally reached the rendezvous they were met with the disastrous news that only Mayne and Lewes had brought their men in safely. The rest of the raiding force, 34 men in total, were presumed either dead or captured (six of the soldiers were killed).

  Dismayed as Stirling must have been, he refused to countenance that this was the end for L Detachment. According to Captain David Lloyd-Owen, who was in command of the LRDG rendezvous party, Stirling was thinking of the future even as he gratefully accepted a mug of tea. ‘He was so certain he could succeed and nothing was going to stop him,’ wrote Lloyd-Owen in his memoirs, Providence Their Guide. ‘He was convinced that he had been only thwarted by bad luck and certainly not by any lack of preparation or training.’

  But it was Lloyd-Owen who came up with the solution to Stirling’s quandary: if parachuting was too hazardous a form of transport in the desert, why not let the LRDG drive Stirling and his men to the target area? Having operated in the region for nearly 18 months he knew the desert intimately and could not only drop the raiders within marching distance of the target, but pick them up after and avoid detection on the long journey back to base.

  Stirling put the idea to Lloyd-Owen’s commanding officer, Colonel Guy Prendergast, once they were back at Siwa Oasis on 25 November, and the approval was given. Stirling also benefited from the fact that the main British offensive, Operation Crusader, which L Detachment’s raid had been timed to coincide with, had not gone well. General Rommel’s Afrika Korps had counter-attacked and pushed the British back into Egypt. The fate of 34 British paratroopers, therefore, was not an overriding concern for MEHQ. In fact Auchinleck, who shared Stirling’s eye for an opportunity, saw that Rommel’s supply lines along the Libyan coast were over-extended and ordered two flying columns under the command of brigadiers Denys Reid and John Marriott to attack the Axis forces hundreds of miles behind the frontline. In the meantime, Eighth Army would launch a secondary offensive against the Afrika Korps.

  The LRDG had been allocated the task of attacking Axis aerodromes at Sirte, Agheila and Agedabia, timed to coincide with the attacks of the two flying columns, but Prendergast thought this was a mission best suited to Stirling’s L Detachment. His suggestion, cabled to MEHQ on 28 November, was accepted and Stirling received the go-ahead to attack the aerodromes in the second week of December.

  In the event, a party of seven men led by Mayne achieved complete success, destroying 24 aircraft and a barracks full of Axis pilots at Tamet aerodrome. Thirty miles to the east, at Sirte landing strip, Stirling could only watch in bitter frustration as the 30 aircraft he was intending to attack took off a few hours before the raid. A party of five men under Bill Fraser accounted for 37 aircraft at Agedabia.

  At the end of December 1941 Mayne returned to Tamet and blew up 27 aircraft that had only recently arrived to replace the ones destroyed in his previous visit to the airfield. Stirling tried for a second time to inflict damage on Sirte but again was foiled, this time by a newly installed perimeter fence and an increased guard detail.

  Upon his return to base Stirling learned that Jock Lewes had been killed, shot by a marauding German fighter plane as his party of men returned from a raid on Nofilia aerodrome. ‘Stirling was rocked by Lewes’ death,’ recalled Jimmy Storie, who was with Lewes when the Messerschmitt attacked their patrol.

  The death of Lewes robbed Stirling of his natural successor. Paddy Mayne was the unit’s most successful operator, but he was first and foremost a man of action who led from the front. Lewes was not only a brave, tough and resourceful Special Forces soldier, but also an intelligent and innovative thinker, and someone whom Stirling had hoped would help him develop L Detachment in the coming months and years.

  But Lewes was dead and Stirling didn’t have the time to mourn him. Instead he was eager to capitalize on the unit’s success since forming their partnership with the LRDG. Auchinleck agreed to Stirling’s request to recruit six new officers and up to 40 men. He was also promoted to major and given permission to approach a group of 50 French paratroopers, led by Captain Georges Berge, who had recently arrived in the Middle East from Britain. Stirling went to see General Georges Catroux, Commander-in-Chief of the Free French Forces, to ask if the paratroopers could be seconded to L Detachment. Stirling later recalled:

  As soon as introduced he demanded ‘explain why you are here?’ I tried in my appalling French to state the purpose of my visit but the general replied ‘No, absolutely out of the question’. He was still standing in his formidable straight up posture and although a little taller than him I felt in that instant minuscule… I persisted in arguing further the purpose of my mission. He stared at me with cold eyes and answered flatly ‘no, positively not, goodbye sir’. ‘Hell,’ I said under my breath, but so that he could just hear me. ‘He is as pigheaded as those bloody English at MEHQ’, and still listening he overheard my observation. Suddenly a tiny grin transformed his expression and he commented, ‘well, it appears as though you are not English’. ‘Wholly not, mon general, I am Scottish and was brought up in the tradition of the Auld Alliance between the French and the Scots against the English’. After this incident he invited me to sit down and began what turned out to be a series of very exacting and precise questions. It took only half an hour for my proposal to be agreed.19

  One of the men recruited was Reg Redington, a pre-war regular soldier who had won the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) a couple of months earlier for his conduct during the battle for Sidi Omar the previous October. Redington saw an appeal for volunteers pinned to his barracks’ noticeboard, and was soon standing before Stirling. ‘He asked me how I won the DCM and I told him, and he congratulate
d me. “But what makes you want to join our lot?” he said. I told him I was a regular soldier and I wanted to see more of life and a bit more action, and I thought it would be a change.’20 For a fortnight Redington heard nothing, then he was called to see his commanding officer and informed that he had been selected for L Detachment.

  Another arrival was Captain Malcolm Pleydell, a London doctor before the war and then an officer in the Royal Army Medical Corps, who was recruited as L Detachment’s medical officer. ‘Stirling was terribly informal when I arrived at Kabrit. It was clear he wasn’t much interested in paperwork and the way he talked about operations one would have thought he was talking about something quite harmless,’ reflected Pleydell. ‘He inspired in a quiet way, he was so charming you would do anything for him.’21

  On 21 January the ebb and flow of the Desert War continued when Rommel launched a counter-attack to regain territory ceded to the British the previous month. The Libyan port of Benghazi fell into German hands, along with most of Cyrenaica. On the plus side, the losses at least allowed Stirling to launch a fresh round of raids against Axis airfields in March, involving some of the men recruited at the start of the year. Stirling led a daring raid against Benghazi with the intention of blowing up enemy shipping in the harbour, but the collapsible canoe carried by the seven-strong party was defective and the mission ended in another failure for Stirling.

  By now the strain of operations was beginning to tell on Stirling. With no Jock Lewes to lean on, Stirling was burdened with operational and administrative tasks. He spent an increasing amount of his time at his brother’s Cairo flat, planning raids and chasing up stores and supplies. More often than not Johnny Cooper and Reg Seekings (arguably the most skilled operator in the detachment after Mayne) were present at the flat and despite the difference in age, class and rank there was no insistence on formality. ‘With Paddy we addressed him as Blair and Stirling as David when there was no one about or when we were on patrol,’ remembered Seekings. ‘There was no rank, they called us Reggie and Johnny. But we never took advantage when other people were around, then it was always sir. Stirling was always very open to suggestions and if John and I made a suggestion we would never get an off-hand answer from him.’22

  Cooper recalled that it was around this time that Stirling ‘suffered from migraine which meant wearing dark glasses and [he] was often sick with desert sores which refused to heal’. Nevertheless, Stirling maintained his relentless pace, fearful that those staff officers at MEHQ who had been opposed to L Detachment from the outset would jump at the chance to disband the unit if they thought the commanding officer was not up to the job.

  Throughout the spring of 1942 the pressure was mounting on General Auchinleck to break the stalemate in the Western Desert. It was Churchill’s view that the commander-in-chief was not being proactive enough in confronting Rommel and he feared that Malta, the invaluable island in the Mediterranean, could fall into the enemy’s hands while Auchinleck dithered.

  Auchinleck’s defence was that he needed time to build up his reserves after the winter offensives, but when Churchill was told a large convoy would sail for Malta during a moonless period in June he issued Auchinleck with an ultimatum: either launch an offensive against the Axis forces before the middle of June or be relieved of your command. ‘There is no need for me to stress the vital importance of the safe arrival of our convoys … and I am sure you will both take all steps to enable the air escorts, and particularly the Beaufighters, to be operated from landing-grounds as far west as possible.’23

  Stirling was issued with instructions to come up with a plan to help the two-pronged convoy (from Gibraltar and Alexandria) reach Malta. What he produced was L Detachment’s most ambitious operation to date. On the night of 13 June they would launch simultaneous attacks against a string of enemy aerodromes in the Benghazi sector while a party of men under the command of Georges Berge and Captain George Jellicoe (the son of the famous World War I admiral) would attack Heraklion airfield on Crete, having been transported to the island by submarine.

  The raids met with mixed success. A group of French soldiers who raided Berka Main airfield destroyed six aircraft but their timing was slightly awry, so as Paddy Mayne closed in on Berka Satellite the sight of their explosions lighting up the night sky prompted him to abort his attack. In Heraklion, more than 20 German aircraft were blown up but Berge was captured. The most productive sabotage that night was accomplished by Stirling who, along with Johnny Cooper and Reg Seekings, had wreaked havoc on Benina aerodrome, which was used by the Germans as a repair base. Cooper recalled that as he, Seekings and Stirling lay concealed in the dark, waiting for the RAF to begin a diversionary raid on nearby Benghazi, ‘David gave us a long lecture on deer stalking, including methods of getting into position to stalk, the problems of wind and the necessity for camouflage and stealthy movement. Absorbed in his Highland exploits we could forget the job in hand and the time passed very quickly.’24

  When they did move, the trio did so with noiseless precision, creeping from hangar to hangar and placing bombs on aircraft and engines. As they withdrew from the target area they passed a guardhouse and Stirling, perhaps with Mayne’s destruction of the pilots’ mess at Tamet still on his mind, kicked open the door and tossed in a grenade. Stirling subsequently regretted the act, saying: ‘It was a silly show of bravado, I suppose. In a fight I would shoot to kill with the same enthusiasm as the next man but I was not at ease with that action. It seemed close to murder.’25 Such thoughts never troubled Paddy Mayne, who talked of going on raids in the hope of some ‘good killing’, and whose ruthlessness at times unnerved Stirling.

  The immediate consequence of the grenade attack was the onset of a violent migraine and as the three raiders made good their escape from Benina, Cooper and Seekings grabbed their commander and ‘led him staggering and half-blind to the top of the ridge’. By the time Stirling encountered Mayne at the LRDG rendezvous he had recovered his old self and on learning of the Irishman’s misfortune at Berka he couldn’t help but gloat – for the first time the great Paddy Mayne had failed to destroy any German aircraft. Mayne jokingly doubted the veracity of Stirling’s account of what had happened at Benina, so the pair decided to borrow an LRDG truck and see for themselves.

  They took with them Seekings, Cooper, Jimmy Storie, Bob Lilley and Karl Kahane, an Austrian Jew attached to L Detachment. ‘It was a bloody silly thing to do, but funny at the time!’ remembered Cooper. ‘David, in his usual self-confident way, reassured us that there wouldn’t be any roadblocks along the way. We didn’t waste time taking back routes, just went straight along the main road towards Benina all unconcerned at the potential danger we were driving into.’26

  Six miles down the road they ran into a well-manned enemy checkpoint. As Storie recalled:

  A German sergeant major came up to the truck and took a good look at it and at us. Kahane spoke German and said we were on a special mission, but he could see we were British. But at the same time the German could hear the sound of weapons being cocked, and he was obviously a wise man. He knew that if he made a false move he would be the first to go. So he turned to the men on the roadblock and told them to open the gates.27

  The truck raced on down the road, crashing through a smaller checkpoint with Seekings scattering the Italian soldiers with a burst of machine-gun fire. At the village of Lete, approximately five miles east of Benghazi, they attacked a roadside café and killed a number of German and Italian soldiers enjoying a late-night drink on the terrace. Then Stirling told Mayne (who was driving) to head for home across the desert. Chased by the Germans for much of the way, only the brilliance of Mayne’s driving allowed the men to evade their pursuers, and Stirling later admitted that had been ‘a little pomposo’ in trying to return to the scene of his crime.

  When Stirling led his men back to their base at Siwa Oasis on 21 June it was to learn the alarming news that the Germans were once more on the attack, advancing at breakneck pace across the deser
t with the British retreating rapidly. They had already ceded 150 miles to the Germans and Tobruk was in Rommel’s hands. The Royal Navy was pulling out of Alexandria and in Cairo there was a genuine fear that the city would soon fall. The Eighth Army did eventually manage to hold the German advance at El Alamein, by which time L Detachment had returned to Kabrit to see how they could be of use at this dire juncture of the Desert War.

  Stirling visited MEHQ in Cairo and informed them that his unit had destroyed 143 enemy aircraft in the last six months, although this was on the conservative side. In truth it was probably more, but as Reg Seekings later recalled: ‘Stirling reduced all tallies by ten percent, he wouldn’t let anyone claim higher. At first they [MEHQ] couldn’t believe we were destroying so many. Impossible. We were destroying more than the best fighter squadrons.’

  In addition L Detachment had destroyed myriad petrol bowsers, repair bases and bomb dumps. It was said that the Germans now called Stirling ‘The Phantom Major’, such was his ability to ghost onto airfields, wreak havoc and then melt into the night. There was a downside to all the success, however, as Stirling himself noted: ‘By the end of June L Detachment had raided all the more important German and Italian aerodromes within 300 miles of the forward area at least once or twice,’ he wrote later. ‘Methods of defence were beginning to improve and although the advantage still lay with L Detachment, the time had come to alter our own methods.’28

  The opportunity to alter their methods of attack presented itself on the night of 7/8 July when L Detachment carried out a sequence of raids to coincide with the Eighth Army’s offensive to regain control of the coastal region of Mersa Matruh. Stirling and Mayne headed to Bagoush (the airfield from which L Detachment had departed on their first fateful raid in November 1941, now in Axis hands) with the intention of going in on foot. Mayne penetrated the airfield without problem, but on setting the explosive charges he discovered that the primers were damp. Returning to the rendezvous, Mayne discussed with Stirling what they should do and they agreed to ‘drive on to the field and shoot the beggars up’.