The Daring Dozen Read online

  With Stirling driving the ‘Blitz Buggy’, a stripped-down Ford V8 staff car, and Mayne at the wheel of the jeep, the raiders set off. Both vehicles had been fitted with single and twin Vickers K machine guns from obsolete Gloster Gladiator biplanes, which could fire 1,200 rounds per minute. Johnny Cooper was alongside Cooper in the buggy: ‘I was on the single Vickers and you really couldn’t miss,’ he reflected. ‘The rear gunner was on the twin Vickers in the back and David was driving, shouting words of encouragement as we cruised up the airfield. We were doing about 20mph and yet I can’t remember any fire coming our way.’29

  Having destroyed 37 aircraft, the raiders departed and headed south towards their base some 70 miles distant. ‘Paddy joined us in the buggy and he stretched out in the back and went to sleep while I drove,’ recalled Cooper, whom Stirling had allowed to take the wheel of his prized buggy for the first time. ‘It was just before dawn when I heard aircraft approaching. David jumped into the driving seat and made for a wadi just as a couple of Italian CR42s [fighters] appeared. David did his best to lose them but there was no cover. We jumped out of the Blitz Buggy as they came in low and got clear just before it exploded.’30

  Despite the loss of the buggy, Stirling was delighted with the results of the motorized foray onto Bagoush airfield. On 13 July he returned to Cairo to acquire a fleet of jeeps as well as rations, equipment and Mike Sadler – a respected navigator for the LRDG who had been persuaded to join L Detachment. ‘Stirling had a very good social manner and also had a compelling personality,’ recalled Sadler. ‘He was a terribly quiet chap and didn’t raise his voice but he would come to one and say “I want you to take a party on this raid” and you would never think of saying no as he was so persuasive, but in a very charming way.’31

  The operational strength of L Detachment was up to 100 men, and Stirling appointed as his second-in-command George Jellicoe. In November 1942 Jellicoe wrote a report on this period of operations that gave an interesting insight into how Stirling, quiet and charming though he might have been, set standards of utmost rigour:

  I should like to lay emphasis on the great strain imposed on personnel of SAS regiment and the LRDG patrols before the actual operations began. 1SAS* regiment had never before been motorized. Four days only were available for preparations. 15 jeeps had to be prepared with special equipment and guns and twenty 3-ton lorries loaded. This meant that the drivers and maintenance crews had to work, for some times, as long as 72 hours almost without a break.32

  Their industry, however, was not in vain and when L Detachment launched its first large-scale jeep attack it was a stunning triumph. On the night of 26/27 July Stirling arrived at Sidi Haneish, an airfield approximately 30 miles east-south-east of Mersa Matruh, at the head of two columns of heavily armed jeeps, with tracer, armour-piercing and incendiary bullets loaded into the drums of their Vickers guns. As the raiders drove slowly down the landing strip they could hardly miss the stationary aircraft either side of them: ‘The whole place just erupted in this deafening roar,’ recalled Cooper, who was in Stirling’s vehicle. ‘It was like a duck shoot, pouring Vickers fire into the planes and seeing them explode. But in fact there was return fire, although not that accurate – partly because the planes and the smoke obscured us from the Italian defences as we drove back down the runway. We got a shell through the cylinder head and had to abandon our jeep. Sandy Scratchley’s pulled up alongside and we hopped on board.’33

  The raid was the perfect climax to end a month in which, operating self-sufficiently from their remote desert base, L Detachment had destroyed a minimum of 86 enemy aircraft and between 36 and 45 motorized vehicles. Nonetheless when the raiders reassembled at their desert hideout after the Sidi Haneish raid, they were given a dressing-down by Stirling for their profligate shooting. Though approximately 40 aircraft had been damaged or destroyed, it could have been more if the gunners’ accuracy had been better. ‘Privately I was very pleased,’ Stirling reflected in his biography, ‘but I didn’t want the men to become too blasé about the business. What we had proved to my satisfaction, and it was something I could use to positive effect at MEHQ, was that we could operate under a variety of tactics to the same end.’34

  But despite this confirmation of L Detachment’s versatility, the unit was recalled to Cairo in early August 1942. Stirling arrived in the Egyptian capital to discover that Churchill had sacked Claude Auchinleck and replaced him with General Harold Alexander. There was also a new commander of Eighth Army, General Bernard Montgomery, who was in the throes of planning a big offensive for the end of October to start from the Alamein front. Stirling was summoned to MEHQ and informed of what would be expected of L Detachment in the forthcoming attack. With the Afrika Korps receiving regular supplies through the ports of Tobruk and Benghazi, Montgomery instructed L Detachment, together with elements of Middle East Commando and the Special Boat Section (SBS) to raid Benghazi on the night of 13/14 September, while a combined force of commandos and infantry would launch a simultaneous seaborne strike against Tobruk.

  Stirling was horrified at the plan, considering it anathema to L Detachment’s modus operandi. They were suited to small-scale raids, lightning guerrilla warfare, yet the Benghazi raid – codenamed Operation Bigamy – was large and cumbersome, with 200 men and a pair of Honey tanks.

  Stirling’s fears proved well-founded. On the approach to Benghazi the force was ambushed and the survivors were forced to race across the open desert in the hour before dawn, before the inevitable enemy aircraft appeared. Not all of them reached the safety of the nearby mountains, 25 miles away, and 12 vehicles were destroyed. Casualties were mercifully light but Stirling still had to order Malcolm Pleydell, the unit’s medical officer, to make a decision about which of the wounded could manage the long trip back to base and which would have to be left behind. Once the main party had moved off, Stirling remained in the mountains for several days with a small party of men and three jeeps in case any stragglers arrived. None did. When Stirling returned to Kufra Oasis, Pleydell expected him to be downcast but he gave no indication of being morose:

  On the contrary his view was that, since the enemy had known of our raid, none of us could be blamed for what had taken place. ‘The raid simply wasn’t on!’ But now, he continued, looking round at us eagerly, there was an easy target we ought to be getting busy on: the railway line from Tobruk to Alamein. That should make a lovely objective… In addition David had some fresh ideas concerning the future of the Special Air Service. He wanted it divided into two squadrons which, by relieving one another, could constantly maintain a force in the rear of the enemy.35

  How the enemy came to learn of the attack on Benghazi remains unclear. After the war Mike Sadler blamed it on loose tongues in Cairo bars, and the sharp ears of German agents, though according to Brian Dillon, an intelligence officer in Cairo: ‘The US had a military mission in Cairo and had access to British Operation Orders and they sent details of the Benghazi raid to Washington in low grade cipher and Germans intercepted it and broke it.’36

  Perhaps as a form of compensation for the misuse of L Detachment, MEHQ promoted Stirling to lieutenant-colonel on 28 September 1942 and authorized the expansion of the unit to a full regiment comprising four squadrons: A, under the command of Major Paddy Mayne; B, under Stirling; C, a French squadron; and D, a Special Boat Section squadron under Jellicoe. Mayne took the experienced men into his squadron and, in October, disappeared into the desert to cut railway lines and attack vehicle convoys in an area between Tobruk and Matruh.

  Stirling meanwhile oversaw a recruitment drive to bring the regiment up to its fighting strength of 29 officers and 572 other ranks. He was also, with his brother Bill, pressing for the formation of a second SAS regiment, permission for which was granted with surprising speed. Stirling had always viewed middle-ranking staff officers with distaste, because in his view they were jealous, spiteful, mediocre men who resented any young officer with ideas and initiative. The fact that L Detachment had b
een expanded into two regiments proved that even the ‘fossilized shits’ in MEHQ were powerless to prevent his rise. But all this frenetic activity did little for Stirling’s health and when he led B Squadron into the desert at the end of November to link up with A Squadron he was again suffering from intermittent migraines, solar conjunctivitis and desert sores.

  However Stirling didn’t intend to deviate from his plan to lead B Squadron in a series of operations against the Axis forces – now in full retreat west following their defeat at the battle of El Alamein – in an area between Tripoli and Misurata. Operating in an area swarming with enemy soldiers, casualties for B Squadron were heavy during this period, but by the start of 1943 the indefatigable Stirling had envisaged the future for his regiment, as he outlined in his biography. ‘With the end of the war in North Africa in sight … I had to be ready with a plan to move out of the desert and into other pastures,’ he explained. ‘To gain credence for the plan, which would first have to be presented to Montgomery, I must ensure that we had maximum impact in Africa before the end of the [desert] war. We had to be remembered.’37

  Stirling thus arranged for Mayne to take A Squadron on a ski course at the British Army Mountain Warfare training centre in the Lebanon, in readiness for deployment to deal with the German threat in the Caucasus. He himself would head in the other direction, west into Tunisia, continuing to attack the retreating Germans while also reconnoitring to see if Rommel was preparing to dig in on the Mareth Line, a defensive wall from an earlier era of warfare. There was also the possibility of becoming the first unit from Eighth Army to link up with First Army.

  On 21 January 1943 Stirling’s patrol rendezvoused with Augustin Jordan and his 21 Frenchmen at Bir Soltane in central Tunisia. Word had just reached Stirling that Tripoli and Gafsa had fallen to the Allies and it was imperative that they attack the Axis lines of communication between Sfax and Gabes forthwith. Jordan left at 1600hrs on the 21st for the Gabes Gap, a geographical bottleneck between the Tunisian salt flats and the Mediterranean Sea. Stirling followed 12 hours later, his 14 men travelling in five jeeps.

  They passed through the Gabes Gap at dusk on 23 January, and early the next day were on the road to Gafsa in bright early-morning sunshine. After a while they turned off the road and headed into the hills to lie up for the day. On finding a deep wadi, the patrol dismounted, camouflaged the jeeps and lay down to rest.

  One of the men with Stirling was Reg Redington, the former artilleryman who had won the DCM in 1941. ‘We could see the Germans from the wadi and some Arabs came up to us and they asked us if we could give them some tea,’ he remembered. ‘I’m sure it was the Arabs who gave us away. I put my Smith & Wesson by my side, and I’d had my boots on for weeks and weeks so I put them by the side and lay down. Next thing I know someone was kicking my feet shouting ‘Raus, Raus’. I reached for my Smith & Wesson but it was gone.’38

  Further up the wadi Mike Sadler and Johnny Cooper, along with a French soldier called Freddie Taxis, were also rudely awakened by the company of Luftwaffe troops – who had been on the hunt for Allied soldiers since encountering Jordan’s patrol the previous day. Strangely, the Germans motioned for the trio to stay where they were and continued up the wadi looking for more men to capture. The moment they were out of sight, Cooper, Sadler and Taxis scrambled up the steep side of the wadi and escaped into some thick camel scrub.

  Stirling and the other 11 men were herded into lorries and after a two-hour drive were forced from the vehicles at gunpoint. ‘They took about four of us to a hut,’ recalled Redington. ‘Stirling wasn’t with us because he was an officer. I thought we were going to [be] bumped off. The hut was just four walls, and it looked as though it had already been peppered with holes. In the hut they roughed us up a bit and I got it a bit worse than the others because I was a corporal. They knocked us around, hit us with rifle butts. I thought we were going to be shot.’39

  Stirling was not beaten but was threatened with execution, although he believed his captors to be bluffing. Nevertheless, he decided to try to escape, and did so that night when he was escorted outside to answer the call of nature. Sprinting into the darkness, Stirling was soon out of sight of his pursuers, and he kept running until dawn. At daybreak he encountered a friendly Arab, who fed him and allowed him to rest in his barn. When it was dark Stirling moved off in the direction of Bir Soltane where he hoped to encounter Allied forces. He saw another local and asked for food and water. The man smiled and told Stirling to follow. He did, and was escorted to a waiting Italian patrol.

  The capture of the ‘Phantom Major’ was a rare slice of good fortune for Field Marshal Rommel at a time of otherwise gloomy news for his forces in North Africa. In a little over a year, the Special Air Service had destroyed 327 Axis aircraft, innumerable motorized vehicles and petrol dumps, and seriously disrupted his lines of communication. Writing to his wife at the start of February, Rommel explained that with Stirling’s capture, ‘the British lost the very able and adaptable commander of the desert group which had caused us more damage than any other British unit of equal size’.40

  Some of Stirling’s comrades were also writing letters, although of course their emotions were anything but triumphant. Colonel Robert Laycock, who had commanded Stirling in 8 Commando, wrote to Stirling’s mother to tell her that her son ‘has done more for his country than any single individual of his rank in the army’. Mrs Stirling also received a letter from George Jellicoe in which he said: ‘I don’t think it is necessary for me to tell you what even a temporary loss of David’s company – and his genius for command – means to me … I am quite unashamed in avowing my devotion to him.’41

  When Malcolm Pleydell heard the news of Stirling’s capture, he wrote to his fiancée in England: ‘There is no one with his flair and gift for projecting schemes. He ran the unit … so now the ship is without a rudder.’

  Though the immediate future of the SAS appeared in doubt following Stirling’s capture, it survived the grievous loss of its leader. Stirling was flown to Europe and in 1944 was transferred to the notorious prisoner-of-war camp at Colditz. With the Allies winning the war against Germany, Stirling spent much of his time in Colditz thinking how best the SAS could be deployed in the Far East. Within days of his release from captivity in April 1945, Stirling was discussing with Brigadier Mike Calvert, commander of the SAS Brigade, the feasibility of sending the SAS into China to sever the Japanese supply line to Malaya. In the end they were overtaken by events in the Far East and the decision of the Americans (a decision with which Stirling disagreed) to drop atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Like so many young men who make their mark in war, the years that followed proved anti-climactic for David Stirling. At the start of 1946, just a few months after the SAS had been disbanded, Stirling emigrated to Rhodesia. He went to seek his fortune in business but in 1948 formed the Capricorn Society, the aim of which was to establish a ‘modus Vivendi by which all races, colours and creeds in Africa can live in harmony’. A little over ten years later, with the Society making little headway in an Africa in the throes of decolonization, Stirling resigned as president. By the early 1960s Stirling’s health was deteriorating and he was in debt because of the money he had poured into the Capricorn Society. He went back into business, founding Television International Enterprises, and in 1967 formed Watchguard International Ltd, a company whose services were aimed at ‘preventing the violent overthrow of a government’ – in other words offering mercenaries to beleaguered governments in Africa and the Middle East.

  Stirling continued to suffer from a bad back as a result of his parachute accident in the summer of 1941, and in 1970 he was involved in a serious car crash that exacerbated his health problems. In 1972 he ceased all involvement with Watchguard International Ltd.

  In 1990 Stirling received a knighthood to go with the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) he had been awarded for his leadership of L Detachment in North Africa nearly 50 years earlier. But the acc
olade that pleased Stirling most was when he was the guest of honour at the unveiling of Stirling Lines, the refurbished SAS base in Hereford, in June 1984. In front of hundreds of past and present members of the regiment, Stirling gave an address which holds even more resonance now – nearly 30 years on – than it did at the time: ‘The very survival of the regiment, in a society wary of elitism, depends on the calibre of each individual recruited,’ said Stirling. ‘This was, is and must remain the cornerstone … [but] the regiment must never regard itself as a corps d’elite, because down that road would lie the corruption of all our values. A substantial dash of humility along with an ever-active sense of humour must continue to save us from succumbing to this danger.’42

  Stirling died on 4 November 1990, 11 days before his 75th birthday. In February the following year a memorial service was held in the Guards Chapel in London, on the same day that the Irish Republican Army – who had suffered two costly attacks by the SAS in the preceding three years – launched an audacious mortar attack on Downing Street. A coincidence? Who knows.

  Stirling was without doubt one of the founding fathers of Special Forces warfare. Like many great men in their chosen field, Stirling glimpsed the future while the rest were stuck in the present, or in the case of the British Army in 1940, the past. Stirling had grasped that the advances in weaponry and technology that had taken place since World War I could change the very nature of warfare. No longer would vast opposing armies confront each other on battlefields with the spoils going to the biggest, or the bravest, side. Now small units of highly trained soldiers with the right weapons could be just as destructive as an entire division.