Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (22 page)

Winston Churchill may well have been unaware of L Detachment’s existence before he read Randolph’s breathless account. The story left a profound impression on the prime minister.

The two mighty armies still crouched, snarling, on either side of a front line that ran from Gazala, thirty miles west of Tobruk, to the old Ottoman fortress of Bir Hakeim, fifty miles to the south. Since February 1942, both sides had been gathering strength for the next round of battle in the Western Desert; with each passing day, the plight of besieged Malta grew more ominous. Churchill repeatedly urged Auchinleck to launch a counterattack, seize the airfields in Cyrenaica, and relieve the pressure on the island, “the loss of which would be a disaster of the first magnitude to the British Empire, and probably fatal in the long run to the defence of the Nile delta.” But the general refused to be rushed, insisting he needed more time to build up his reserves. Finally, he was presented with an ultimatum. In the moonless period of mid-June, two convoys would set out from Alexandria and Gibraltar, to try to reach Malta with vital supplies; Auchinleck must attack by then, or stand down from his command. The Auk began to make his move.

Stirling was summoned to the office of the director of military operations and asked how L Detachment could contribute to the coming offensive. A day later, he presented his most sweeping plan to date: SAS units would simultaneously raid six airfields around Benghazi on the night of June 13; a seventh party would be taken to Crete by submarine to attack the airfield at Heraklion.

Planning and equipping multiple missions was a daunting logistical task. Much of the administrative work was left to Cooper and Seekings, both of whom had been promoted to the rank of sergeant. “Paddy Mayne and I would decide our next jolly and then we’d hand over all the details to the pair of them,” Stirling said. “They were utterly dependable and there was an almost intuitive rapport between them.” While Cooper and Seekings assembled the necessary rations, weapons, camouflage, and ammunition, Mike Sadler calculated distances and petrol requirements.

The strain of operations and the rigors of desert life were beginning to tell on Stirling. His wrist was not healing quickly, and he had developed chronic “desert sores,” skin ulcers caused by the heat and chafing sand for which there was no very effective treatment. If these became septic, the infected tissue could be scoured out with a toothbrush, an exquisitely painful operation that frequently made them worse. Stirling simply taped a plaster over his sores and ignored them. He appeared as insouciant as ever, but may also have been suffering from the delayed trauma of the car crash. Most worrying of all, he had begun to experience migraines, the legacy from his first botched parachute jump, unpredictable and crushing headaches that left him immobilized and blinded with pain. Though largely indifferent to his own health, Stirling had come to realize that he needed a medical officer, both to tend the injured on operations and to maintain the health of the men at base camp.

Dr. Malcolm James Pleydell of the Royal Army Medical Corps had absolutely no idea what he was letting himself in for when he arrived at Kabrit in early June 1942. He had been told only that he would be attached to a unit operating in the desert, commanded by a young daredevil officer. “Everything is very hush hush down there,” the officer arranging his transfer had said. “We never get to know anything at all really. They are always dashing in and out on raids.” Pleydell was directed to a tent, surrounded by sandbags. A “tall and slender” figure rose to greet him. The handshake was firm, though the hand was wrapped in dirty bandages.

“Ah, you’re Pleydell. By Jove, this is marvellous, having our own doctor. This is real luxury! By the way, have you had any lunch? No? Well, what about going over to the mess and having a drink, and then we can talk things over.” As they strolled across the camp, Pleydell could hear explosions in the distance. Most of the men, Stirling explained, would shortly be “going out on a party,” and “all those horrible bangs over on the beach” were in preparation for a series of night attacks on the coastal airfields. “Paddy and myself have to go off at the end of the week. I know it must seem awfully rude of us to push off like this just as you arrive.” Pleydell had been expecting a man of blood and steel, a ruthless trained killer; instead he had been made to feel as if he had just joined a particularly jolly beachfront house party, with bombs. These men were “risking their lives in particularly daring and spectacular fashion,” but acting as if “the whole thing was a glorious rag.” Pleydell decided he was going to enjoy being part of L Detachment, SAS.

Born in Lewisham, in southeast London, some twenty-seven years earlier, Pleydell was a gentle soul, earnest, sensitive, and a little solemn. The experience of treating the wounded during the retreat from Dunkirk had been “traumatic,” but at least it was more interesting than his next posting to a military hospital in Cairo, where the medical challenge was negligible, the officer class pretentious, and the endless paperwork stultifying. Like many men in uniform, Pleydell sought “to prove himself and satisfy any little doubts of the conscience,” yet he was no fighting doctor, and “as a rule was very cautious of danger.” He was determined to get something out of the experience of war, but uncertain what that something was. This mysterious unit might offer an opportunity to test his medical skills, his courage, and the authenticity of his own feelings. The simplicity of the desert was a long way away from the refined artificiality of Lewisham and the affectations of wartime Cairo. “I wondered if I should find sincerity there; for, rightly or wrongly, it seemed to me that sincerity was the thing that mattered most: the stamp which gave the coin its true value.”

Like all the best doctors, Pleydell was a keen student of human nature. As a medic, he stood slightly apart from the fighting men, who came to regard him as a sort of resident shaman, different, slightly odd, but useful. He would emerge as the most astute observer and chronicler of the SAS.

Pleydell arrived as Stirling was parceling out the Benghazi targets. Paddy Mayne would attack the satellite airfield at Berka, which he had so successfully raided in March. Stirling, with Cooper and Seekings, intended to hit Benina, believed to be the principal aircraft-repair base. French units would strike at the airfields in Barce, Derna, Martuba, and the main aerodrome at Berka. The assault on Heraklion in Nazi-occupied Crete would be led by Georges Bergé, the French paratroop commander.

It did not take Malcolm Pleydell long to realize that he had joined a most peculiar fighting unit. From the outside, this was a “ruffianly, bearded, unkempt and ill-clothed mob.” There was none of the spit and polish he had encountered (and resented) in regular army units. The men treated their officers with a respect very different from the rote obedience required under traditional military discipline. “These men were seldom impressed by what an officer said, or the way he spoke; it was what he did that counted.” Stirling treated all his men with the same courtesy, never raising his voice or pulling rank. His authority seemed to stem from the quiet certainty of one who always got what he wanted, and knew how to ask for it. “There was about him a charm which it would be impossible to describe and this, together with his personal modesty and his flattery of others, made him very difficult to deny.”

In the mess, seated on bar stools made from parachute container cylinders, Stirling’s officers combined camaraderie with a “spirit of personal competition,” frequently expressed in physical roughhousing: “If someone’s trousers were not removed before the bar had closed you could be sure that there was something wrong.” Bill Fraser alone held back from the horseplay, and was teased mercilessly for it. He seemed most relaxed in the company of his dog, Withers, who wore a naval coat and followed Fraser everywhere with “deep and very soulful eyes.”

Stirling himself was a “baffling character,” whose “flowery form of expression” seemed to disguise a hidden shyness. To Pleydell’s trained eye, he looked “far from strong,” with worsening migraines and infected sores. He had cut off the plaster cast from his injured wrist with a pair of scissors (“It was such a nuisance”), and flatly refused to wear another. Stirling was clearly going to be “a tricky case to treat.”

The other ranks were as hard to categorize as their officers: Dave Kershaw, with his “lean look and eyes, bloodshot from the desert strain, giving him a piratical appearance”; Pat Riley, “huge and burly, who kept a rough law and order over all.” The man who most intrigued the young doctor was Germain Guerpillon, the pint-sized Frenchman, so singularly ill-suited to the life of an SAS soldier, but adamant in his determination to become one. “The very fact that he had come to be in such a unit was just one more of those strange peculiarities that you met in the war,” reflected Pleydell, who followed the progress of “the duffer” with affectionate fascination. One morning he watched Guerpillon hesitating at the top of the parachute training frame, desperate to jump but unable to do so, while “everyone laughed at him.” Finally, Guerpillon leaped, hit the ground, pitched forward, and landed on his face, breaking his nose. Pleydell rushed forward, as Guerpillon staggered groggily to his feet. “
C’est rien, docteur,”
he insisted, smiling broadly as blood cascaded down his face.

Of his new comrades, only Paddy Mayne gave Pleydell pause. A hulking figure, “dwarfing the very chair on which he sat,” he spent hour after hour at the bar, smoking continuously, saying little. When he did speak, he seemed determined to provoke: he told Pleydell he disapproved of the Red Cross, and described how, for every SAS man killed, he would kill a given number of the enemy in revenge, thus “wiping off the debt.” Pleydell was left in no doubt that Mayne was “out to kill when the opportunity presented itself. There was no question of sparing the enemy. No quarter was asked, and none given…to him there were no rules.” There should be “some good killing” at the Berka satellite, Mayne remarked airily. The young doctor pondered that phrase, and never forgot it: “I wondered if I could ever think of ‘good killing’ and felt rather weak-minded and unwarlike in my inability to do so.” A man whose every instinct was to save life wondered whether, in extremis, he might be capable of taking it too. “I know I would have regretted it soon afterwards.” Mayne seemed to take pleasure in slaughter: “Fighting was in his blood: he thrived on it.”

In the two months leading up to the great offensive, the men were granted some much needed leave. Most spent it in the bars and fleshpots of Cairo. Paddy Mayne, however, did not join them. Instead, in mid-April, he vanished for several days. It was assumed that he must have been off on a solo bender. In fact, Mayne had gone on a private pilgrimage: to try to find the grave of his friend Eoin McGonigal. Gazala, where McGonigal had perished in the first disastrous mission, now marked the northernmost point of the British line. No-man’s-land stretched away to the west. Mayne hitched a lift to Gazala with the RAF, and then spent several days “making enquiries and searching.” McGonigal had died from his injuries six months earlier; since the men under his command were all either dead or in captivity, no one knew for sure where in the wide desert he had been buried. Mayne’s quest was romantic, quixotic, and, as he probably knew before setting out, wildly unrealistic. On his return to Kabrit, he wrote to McGonigal’s mother, explaining what he had done. Margaret McGonigal replied: “It was good of you to have gone to Gazala and taken so much trouble to try to find Eoin’s grave. I know he did not have an identity disc—I think he just wanted to be an unknown soldier…so it is perhaps better as it is—just as he wanted.” Mayne never told anyone else about his secret attempt to find the remains of his beloved friend, for that would have revealed the other, gentler side to Paddy Mayne, and a hidden broken heart.

—

The thirteenth of June, 1942, was the most frenetic and furious day in the short history of the SAS, as the small units mounted simultaneous operations against enemy airfields from Benghazi to Crete. Most military operations involve a single, identifiable objective; Stirling’s miniature army was about to attack seven different targets, with units under seven distinct leaders, over land and sea, with multiple vehicles, various weapons, and variable success. But the ultimate aim was the same: to smash as much of the enemy airpower as possible in a single day, and help ensure the Allied convoys got through to embattled Malta.

The French patrols, under the overall command of the soigné former civil servant Augustin Jordan, now promoted to captain, faced a particularly steep challenge. Unlike the Benghazi airstrips, reaching the targets in Derna and Martuba would mean driving long distances through numerous roadblocks and across territory swarming with enemy soldiers. The area roughly a hundred miles west of Tobruk was used as a staging post for German and Italian troops heading to and from the front. Some additional form of disguise would be necessary.

Captain Herbert Buck had been wounded and captured by the Germans at Gazala the year before. A fluent German-speaker, he contrived to escape by acquiring an Afrika Korps uniform, strolling out of the front gate of his POW camp, and walking to the British lines. Buck’s escape had given him an idea, which he put to the planners in military intelligence: a unit of German-speakers, dressed in genuine German uniforms, could penetrate undetected behind the lines, circulate among enemy troops, and gain valuable intelligence. Buck set about recruiting German Jews from Palestine, several of whom had found their way into the recently disbanded No. 51 Middle East Commando, as well as German-speaking Frenchmen and Czechs. These extraordinary men, who often nursed a deep hatred for the Nazis, signed up with Buck’s outfit in the certain knowledge that if they were caught behind the lines wearing German uniform, they would be shot as spies. The force, with a total strength of between twenty and thirty men, was given a deliberately misleading and meaningless name: the Special Interrogation Group, or SIG. Buck housed his men in an isolated camp on the edge of the Middle East commando base in Geneifa and put them through rigorous training: they spoke only German and were drilled with German military commands; each man was issued with German identification papers, pay books, and even love letters, written in German, from fictional German sweethearts. Two of the most important recruits were German prisoners of war, Herbert Brückner and Walter Essner, both of whom had served in the French Foreign Legion before being drafted into the Afrika Korps on the outbreak of war. Captured in November 1941, the pair professed to be committed anti-Nazis, and after careful vetting by military intelligence they were pronounced “wholly trustworthy.” Some of the Jewish recruits were unhappy at having Germans in their midst, but Brückner (“big, brash and fair-haired”) and Essner (“quiet and good-natured”) swiftly blended in, for “both were light-hearted companions.” The Germans brought an important additional element to Buck’s training program: having recently been part of the German army, they were able to pass on the latest military slang, gossip, songs, and obscenities. The men of SIG not only dressed, marched, and spoke like real German soldiers, they swore like them.