Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (28 page)

This was all a long way from Stirling’s concept of small, highly mobile attack units operating by stealth. It is not easy to maintain surprise with a couple of tanks in tow. Stirling claimed to have had deep misgivings about the operation from the start, but he made no official objection; indeed, he was not in a position to do so. An added inducement to go along with the plan may have been the promise (again, unofficial and unrecorded) that success would lead to further expansion of the SAS. The unit still had its detractors—a memo from the chief of staff to Auchinleck in July disparagingly referred to the SAS as one of several “small raiding parties of the thug variety.” There was talk of downgrading L Detachment to a “minor role.” A large-scale assault on Benghazi might not be what the unit had been invented for, but success could ensure its continuation.

Stirling needed to fight for the future of the SAS: his first sortie in this campaign would be across a formal dinner table.

—

On the evening of August 8, David Stirling shaved, bathed, climbed into his brother’s dinner jacket, and prepared to launch a charm offensive against Winston Churchill.

The invitation to a private dinner with the prime minister at the British embassy in Cairo was almost certainly the result of Randolph Churchill’s enthusiastic letters to his father, describing the exploits of L Detachment and its fearless young leader. Stirling certainly believed that “Randolph had been talking to his father in much the manner in which I had hoped.” Fitzroy Maclean, now fully recovered from the car crash, also received an invitation. The other guests included General Alexander, the newly arrived commander in chief, and Field Marshal Jan Smuts, South Africa’s prime minister and a member of the Imperial War Cabinet. In the space of a few days, Stirling went from blowing up planes with machine guns to dining with prime ministers and generals in evening dress. It was a strange war.

Churchill was stopping off in Cairo on the way to Moscow for his first face-to-face meeting with Stalin, an encounter that his wife, Clementine, characterized as “a visit to the ogre in his den.” The prime minister was in ebullient form, wearing a bow tie and his velvet “siren suit”—a military-style one-piece boiler suit that would not become fashionable again for another seventy years, until the invention of the “onesie.” From the head of the table, Churchill held forth, “pink-faced and beaming.” A great deal was eaten, and a great deal more was drunk. “It was a little unreal,” Stirling later recalled. “A table set with the best of silver and served with the best food, with the British Prime Minister at the head of the feast, just 40 miles or so from the Allied front line.” At one point, Churchill challenged Smuts to a game: who could recite more Shakespeare without stopping? After fifteen minutes the South African leader, a brilliant scholar with a prodigious memory, ran out of quotations, but Churchill continued, unstoppably. It took several minutes before Smuts realized that Churchill was not reciting genuine verse at all, but a sort of mock-Shakespeare of his own extempore invention.

After dinner, cigars were lit, brandy was poured, and Stirling and Maclean were summoned over to accompany the prime minister as he strolled around the elegant embassy gardens. The two young men were the type of adventurers Churchill adored, swashbucklers, daredevils, and, above all, amateurs. He was well aware that Maclean had used his election to the House of Commons as a ruse to get into the war, and he thoroughly approved.

“Here,” he said, turning to Smuts, “is the young man who has used the Mother of Parliaments as a public convenience.”

Stirling and Maclean had been warned that they should on no account discuss the impending attack on Benghazi with Churchill. (The prime minister was regarded by some of his staff as an inveterate gossip and a major security risk, with a habit of turning top-secret information into amusing after-dinner entertainment.) They ignored this injunction. For the next few minutes, Churchill listened intently as the two young officers described L Detachment, its methods, successes, and plans for the future. Insisting that this was “a new form of warfare we were developing” with “awesome potential,” Stirling suggested that the unit might have an important role to play behind the lines in Europe at a later stage in the war.

Churchill was “bowled over” by Stirling, intrigued by “the contrast between the young man’s gentle demeanour and his ferocious pursuit of the enemy.” When the prime minister rejoined Smuts in the embassy drawing room, he described to him Stirling’s record of destruction and quoted the famous lines from Byron’s
Don Juan
: “He was the mildest-mannered man / That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat.” The continuation of that quotation also fitted Stirling’s character: “With such true breeding of a gentleman, / You never could divine his real thought.”

Before leaving, Stirling asked Churchill, Smuts, and Alexander to sign a piece of paper, as a souvenir of the evening.

The next morning Stirling was still nursing his hangover when a note arrived at Peter’s flat. From Sir Leslie Rowan, Churchill’s private secretary, it read: “I have been asked by my chief to ask you to let me have, for him, without further delay, the short note for which he called on what you would advise should be done to concentrate and coordinate the work you are doing. I have been asked to make sure that this is in my hands today. I can be got at the embassy.” Leaving aside the civil service circumlocution, the import was clear: Churchill was intrigued and wanted to hear more, now.

Stirling immediately set to work on his brother’s typewriter, and bashed out a two-page memo, headed “Top Secret,” written so fast it included several spelling mistakes and missing words: “All existing Special Service Units in the Middle East be disbanded and selected personnel absorbed, as required, by L Detachment…Control to rest with the officer commanding L Detachment and not with any outside body…The planning of operations to remain as hitherto the prerogative of L Detachment.” In other words, Stirling proposed to take over all special forces, extract anyone he wanted for his own team, and then run operations exactly as he saw fit. This scheme, he said, would increase “versatility and resourcefulness [with] obvious advantages from the point of view of security.” But it would also leave him free from interference, with the unstated implication that the bureaucrats at headquarters were incompetent, interfering gossips. It was a power grab, pure and simple, and it worked.

That evening, Stirling was summoned back to the embassy for further discussions. Running up the embassy staircase, he cannoned into the bulky form of the prime minister himself. “The irresistible force meets the immovable object,” grunted Churchill. This is known, in philosophy, as the “sword and shield paradox,” a conundrum in which two absolute forms of power are pitted against each other. But it also captured something of Churchill’s wartime philosophy: immovability would bring victory (“We shall never surrender”), but it must be combined with overwhelming and dramatic force. War was not just a matter of bombs and bullets, but of capturing imaginations. Stirling displayed just the right combination of daring and romance. Henceforth, Churchill would allude to him as the “Scarlet Pimpernel”—a reference to the hero of Baroness Orczy’s novel, Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy, foppish Englishman on the outside, but in reality a master of the secret, undercover war. Stirling was just the sort of figure Churchill had been seeking to inject some panache into the North African war.

The encounter with Churchill would ensure the future of the SAS; it was also of immediate practical use. Stirling took the “souvenir” signed by two prime ministers and the commander in chief of the Middle East, and typed above the signatures: “Please give the bearer of this note every possible assistance.” Seekings and Cooper, the unofficial SAS quartermasters, now found that supplies, vehicles, weapons, and ammunition, hitherto so tricky to secure, could be obtained simply by flourishing this note. Stirling had no qualms whatever about this blatant forgery: Churchill had become a staunch supporter of the unit and so, he insisted, “in a sense it was authentic.”

Robert Marie Emanuel Melot was Belgian by birth, a cotton merchant by trade, a fluent Arabic speaker by dint of his many years in North Africa, and a brilliant spy by intuition and inclination. During the First World War he had been a pilot in the Belgian air force. When the second broke out, he was living in Alexandria with his wife and children, and immediately volunteered to join the British Army. Melot had traveled widely in the region, and few outsiders better understood the complex, malleable loyalties of the Libyan tribes, and the value of bribery.

Early in 1942, Melot offered his services to L Detachment as an intelligence officer, and swiftly proved his worth, liaising with other British agents in the Jebel and reporting back information gleaned from his numerous informants. Already forty-seven, portly and cheerful, Melot could not have been less like a Bedouin or Senussi tribesman in appearance and demeanor, yet he had a knack for melting invisibly into the local population. He spent months behind the lines, moving from one hiding place to another to “avoid the search parties which the enemy sent out after him” and living on food and water left at prearranged sites by the LRDG. Melot looked like a prosperous bank manager, but he was as tough as mahogany. His SAS colleagues found his name hard to pronounce, and so called him “Bob Mellor,” thus elevating him to the status of honorary Englishman.

Fitzroy Maclean was in the first party to arrive at the rendezvous point in the Jebel Mountains on September 9, 1942, five days before the scheduled attack on Benghazi. Melot emerged from the cave he had been living in for three weeks, smiling, welcoming, and ravenously hungry. Maclean fried some bully-beef rissoles in oatmeal, which Melot devoured as if they had been served up by the finest chef in Brussels. The intelligence officer had been keeping his ear to the ground, and what he had heard was not reassuring. Enemy patrols and guard points on the border of the Jebel appeared to have been reinforced, and suspicious troop movements had been seen in and around Benghazi. Some locals had started to move out. Maclean was alarmed, but not entirely surprised. Only a handful of those taking part in Operation Bigamy knew the objective, yet before leaving Cairo Maclean had seen “signs that too many people knew too much.” Melot suggested sending one of his agents, a Libyan deserter from the Italian army, down to Benghazi to investigate. Maclean watched the man depart, thinking how “singularly unreliable he looked.” The spy returned after twenty-four hours with a most disturbing report. The town was awash with rumors of an imminent attack, the civilian population had begun to decamp, and a German machine-gun detachment had arrived along with as many as five thousand Italian troops. Even more worrying, the date of the attack, September 14, was “being freely mentioned.”

By this time, the rest of the assault force had arrived in the Jebel, considerably the worse for a harrowing journey. The party, largely composed of SAS men but with an admixture of commandos and naval personnel, had set out in a mood of high optimism. Pleydell was told that he and his three newly recruited medical orderlies could expect to be running Benghazi hospital before the week was out. One of the sergeants claimed, fancifully, that he intended to hijack a German destroyer and sail back to England on it. But the expedition had run into problems almost immediately. One of the tanks became inextricably bogged down in a salt marsh just fifty miles from Kufra Oasis, and the other broke down and had to be abandoned. The trucks and jeeps repeatedly sank up to their axles in the Great Sand Sea, and had to be laboriously dug out. A lorry hit a hummock and overturned, fracturing the leg of one of the sergeants. Pleydell splinted the femur and filled the man with Pentothal, a fast-acting general anesthetic, and the convoy crawled on.

The Italians had mined the southern approaches to the hill country with Thermos bombs, air-dropped antipersonnel mines resembling vacuum flasks that were all but invisible in the sand. About sixty miles south of the Jebel, a jeep ran over one of these deadly little contraptions and burst into flames as its fuel canisters ignited. Lieutenant Commander Richard Ardley, one of several naval officers in the group, was badly burned. The driver, a man named Marlow, attempted to pull him from the vehicle and trod on another bomb, which exploded and shattered his right leg. Pleydell inspected the wound and concluded he would have to amputate. Ardley was in even worse shape, delirious with pain, slipping in and out of consciousness. Pleydell knelt in the sand, and set about removing Marlow’s leg below the knee. An anxious Stirling appeared at his shoulder and asked if the men were likely to survive. Pleydell made no promises. “How long will you be?” The doctor replied that he should be able to move the wounded men in an hour. Stirling left him a three-ton truck and a jeep to guide them to the rendezvous. “That’s the best I can do I’m afraid.” The drive was slow and hellish, with the men tied down to the floor to reduce the jolting and the naval officer bellowing in pain with every bump. Marlow lay gray and silent, in deep shock. They arrived at the rendezvous as the sun was setting. Pleydell made the wounded men as comfortable as possible. Paddy Mayne arrived with hot, sweet tea, which he gently fed to the men, holding them upright to drink, quietly reassuring.