The Daring Dozen (5 page)

Neither did Stirling endear himself to those senior officers whose job it was to lecture their young protégées on the art of war. In Stirling’s view, most of them held opinions that had changed little since World War I and were ‘quite irrelevant to tackling the Hun’, and none of them were interested in dialogue or the exchange of views. It was a pupil/master relationship that Stirling deplored and his response was to spend an increasingly large amount of his time drinking and gambling in London’s clubs.

When Stirling eventually left Pirbright he was described by his instructors as an ‘irresponsible and unremarkable soldier’, a description with which he would not have demurred. ‘I think I just wanted to be off to join the war,’ Stirling told his biographer, Alan Hoe, in the late 1980s. ‘I didn’t mind where.’
²

In January 1940 it appeared that Stirling was going to get his wish, for the British government had decided to come to the aid of Finland in their ‘Winter War’ against the invading Russians. The 5th Battalion Scots Guards were sent on a mountain warfare course in the French Alps and Stirling, already a skilled skier, was promoted to instructor. The battalion returned to Britain dubbed the ‘Snowballers’, but the mission to Finland never materialized because of objections raised by Sweden and Norway.

Back in his favourite London club, White’s, in the early summer of 1940, Stirling learned that volunteers were wanted for a special service force. Unsure of the exact nature of the force, Stirling nonetheless applied in the hope it might break the monotony of his own ‘phoney war’. In fact what Stirling had joined was the nascent Commandos, raised on the orders of Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself.

Stirling took an instant shine to his new unit. The commanding officer of 8 Commando (there were five commando units in total) was Robert Laycock and the instructors were men whose ideas on how modern warfare should be conducted were similar to Stirling’s.

Laycock’s 8 Commando was sent to the Isle of Arran off the west coast of Scotland to undergo training and Stirling, now a lieutenant, found himself a section commander in 3 Troop under the command of Major Dermot Daley. The youngest man in the section was Guardsman Johnny Cooper, who had just turned 18. ‘Because of his height and his quiet self-confidence he could appear quite intimidating but he wasn’t a bawling leader,’ recalled Cooper. ‘This quietly spoken young lieutenant commanded far more respect and confidence with his ability to put soldiers at their ease and his willingness to help.’
³

The training on Arran challenged the commandos physically and mentally. As well as the emphasis on physical fitness, they were schooled in explosives, unarmed combat, navigation and weapons. The instructors wanted the men to become self-sufficient and initiative was encouraged; it was the opposite of everything that had been drilled into Stirling at Pirbright.

For a man who had grown up on the family estate of Keir in the wilds of central Scotland, Stirling thrived on Arran and demonstrated an uncanny ability for such a gangly man to move noiselessly across the countryside.

‘There was a tremendous air of expectancy,’ Stirling said later. ‘We didn’t know where we were to be deployed or when, but we knew damned well that we were going to be good … the constant exercises, broken by short periods of equally hard play, kept one pretty well occupied.’
⁴

In January 1941 it was decided to send three of the five commando units to the Middle East. The reason behind the decision was simple: the Special Forces had been raised to operate in conjunction with a large-scale offensive but in 1941 the British Army was not in a position to launch such a strike in Europe. But in the Middle East it could, particularly against Italy’s lines of communications along the North Africa coast and against their lightly defended islands in the Mediterranean.

In February 1941, 7, 8 and 11 Commandos sailed from Scotland for the Middle East. On board one of the troop ships were Stirling and two other notable officers of 8 Commando, the novelist and satirist Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill, son of the Prime Minister. The trio whiled away the voyage playing cards, drinking pink gins, and doing their utmost to escape the signalling courses and physical training organized by their commanding officer.

The Commandos arrived in Egypt on 11 March and were soon in camp in Geneifa near the Great Bitter Lakes, under inspection from General Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief Middle East Forces. He told them that they were now to be known as ‘Layforce’ under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Laycock.

The commando units separated, and while 7 Commando took part in a botched raid on the Libyan port of Bardia and 11 Commando were posted to Cyprus (and then attacked Vichy French forces in Syria), 8 Commando spent their time in more mundane pastimes. There were daily route marches into the hills, lessons in map reading and fatigue duties such as mending fences blown down by the frequent sand storms. In what free time they had the men went swimming in the Suez Canal.

On 9 April, 8 Commando boarded a troop ship and sailed for Port Said from where they entrained to Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city. They were not there long before being ordered to move once more, to Cairo, where they were allowed to spend a day at the race track. Stirling lost a lot of money on the horses but some of his men had better luck and later blew their winnings in the city’s many bars.

By early May Stirling and his men had still seen no action. They idled away their time on the banks of the Suez Canal and on 3 May Evelyn Waugh, Layforce’s Intelligence Officer, wrote in the brigade war diary: ‘Repeated cancellations and postponements of LAYFORCE is engendering an attitude of cynicism in all ranks.’ As to prove his point, Waugh noted some graffiti found scrawled on the
Glengyle
, one of their troop ships: ‘Never in the whole history of human endeavour have so few been buggered about by so many.’

Not long afterwards 8 Commando sailed to Mersa Matruh, an Egyptian port approximately 150 miles from the border with Libya. They began practising for a raid on a German airfield 30 miles from Tobruk but the mission was then scrubbed because of bad weather. The sense of frustration was palpable and it was almost too much to bear for David Stirling, but at least he had a haven to which he could escape when the opportunity presented itself – his brother’s flat in Cairo.

Peter Stirling was a secretary at the British Embassy in the city who was in the habit of throwing wild and raucous parties for the expatriate community. David was present whenever possible and after one particular shindig discovered the elixir of life. ‘I chanced, after a somewhat vigorous party, to be in the company of a charming young nurse from the Scottish Hospital,’ recounted Stirling in his biography. ‘And I must have bemoaned the fact that the next day was going to be quite intolerable because of the inevitable hangover. She told me to pop around to the hospital the next morning and ask for her. This I did and was introduced to the magical effects of taking a couple of deep snifters from the pure oxygen bottle. Wonderful. The hangover vanished in seconds.’
⁵

In June 1941 Middle East HQ (MEHQ) informed Laycock that his force of commandos was being disbanded and its men either returned to their original unit or used as replacements for undermanned regiments in North Africa. The decision by MEHQ had been prompted by two factors: first, Layforce had taken heavy casualties during operations in Syria, Crete and Bardia. There just weren’t enough men to replenish their diminished ranks, particularly as the British were launching a large offensive against Rommel’s Afrika Korps called Operation
Battleaxe
. Secondly, British intelligence reported that since Layforce had begun raiding targets along the Mediterranean coasts, Axis forces had strengthened their defences and they were now largely immune to the type of raids envisioned by the British commandos.

While Laycock wrote to Major-General Arthur Smith, Chief of the General Staff, Middle East Forces, expressing his ‘bitter disappointment at witnessing the disbandment of a force on which they had set their hearts’, Stirling wrote to his family in Scotland to tell them: ‘The Commandos are no more. I am not sure what I shall do now but I am attempting and may succeed in establishing a permanent parachute unit. It would be on a small scale but would be more amusing than any other form of soldiering.’
⁶

Dismayed as he was by the breakup of Layforce, Stirling was far from despondent. He had seen in 8 Commando the potential capability of small bands of highly-trained soldiers, but he had also glimpsed their weaknesses. So had Jock Lewes, a puritanical officer in the Welsh Guards, whose inspiration for a force of paratroopers came from the recent history of Crete and what the German Fallschirmjäger had achieved in capturing the island from the Allies in May 1941.

Lewes and Stirling were granted permission to intercept a consignment of parachutes destined for India and experiment with their idea of forming an airborne unit. Mick D’Arcy of the Irish Guards accompanied Lewes and Stirling as they collected the parachutes from an RAF officer at a base near Fuka. ‘He showed us the parachutes we were to use,’ recalled D’Arcy, who wrote a report on the first parachute exercise by British troops in North Africa:

From the log books we saw that the last periodical examination had been omitted but Lt Lewes decided that they were OK. Next along with Lt Stirling and Sgt Stone who were hoping to do a job in Syria, we made a trial flight. The plane used was a Vickers ‘Valencia’. We threw out a dummy made from sandbags and tent poles. The parachute opened OK but the tent poles were smashed on landing. Afterwards we tried a 10ft jump from the top of the plane and then a little parachute control.

The following afternoon we flew inland in the Valencia which was used to deliver mail. We reached the landing field towards dusk, landed, fitted on our parachutes, and decided to jump in the failing light. We were to jump in pairs, Lt Lewes and his servant Gdsn Davies
*
first, the RAF officer was to despatch. The instructions were to dive out as though going into water. We hooked ourselves up, circled the aerodrome, and on a signal from the RAF officer, Lt Lewes and Davies dived out. Next time round I dived out, and was surprised to see Lt Stirling pass me in the air. Lt Lewes made a perfect landing, next came Davies a little shaken. Lt Stirling injured his spine and also lost his sight for about an hour; next myself, a little shaken and a few scratches, and lastly Sgt Stone who seemed OK.
⁷

Stirling’s parachute had caught on the aircraft’s tail section as he jumped into the slipstream, an error that proved common among inexperienced army paratroopers. With a section of his canopy torn, Stirling descended at high velocity and hit the ground with a sickening thud. Temporarily blinded and paralysed (the injuries to his spine would plague Stirling in later years), Stirling was rushed to Cairo’s Scottish General Hospital while a telegram was despatched to his parents in Scotland informing them that their son had been admitted to hospital on 15 June ‘suffering from contusion of the back as a result of enemy action’.

As he lay in bed, slowly recovering the feeling in his legs, Stirling put his enforced rest to good use. The ‘job in Syria’ that D’Arcy tantalizingly referred to has been lost to posterity, but whatever Stirling and Sergeant Stone (a 31-year-old Londoner in the Scots Guards who was killed on the first SAS operation in November 1941) were planning it was now shelved.

But Stirling’s enthusiasm for a parachute unit remained as strong as ever despite his accident. Propping himself up in bed, Stirling drafted a memo:
Case for the retention of a limited number of special service troops, for employment as parachutists
. In a subsequent summarization of the memo Stirling wrote:

I argued the advantages of establishing a unit based on the principle of the fullest exploitation of surprise and of making the minimum demands on manpower and equipment. I argued that the application of this principle would mean in effect the employment of a sub-unit of five men to cover a target previously requiring four troops of a Commando, i.e. about 200 men. I sought to prove that, if an aerodrome or transport park was the objective of an operation, then the destruction of 50 aircraft or units of transport was more easily accomplished by a sub-unit of five men than by a force of 200 men. I further concluded that 200 properly selected, trained and equipped men, organized into sub-units of five, should be able to attack at least thirty different objectives at the same time on the same night as compared to only one objective using the current Commando technique. So, only 25% success in the former is equivalent to many times the maximum result in the latter.
⁸

Stirling spent several weeks in hospital and upon his release resolved to put his memo into the hands of a senior officer at MEHQ. How Stirling actually achieved this has been shrouded in myth and hearsay ever since the publication of Virginia Cowles’
The Phantom Major
in 1958. Cowles interviewed Stirling and several other SAS veterans in the course of her research and produced a colourful description of Stirling, complete with crutches, sneaking into MEHQ in Cairo through a gap in the fence, having been denied entry because he lacked an official pass. This seems far-fetched in the extreme.

MEHQ was tightly guarded (the British were paranoid about spies in Cairo) and it is inconceivable that a 6ft 6in officer on crutches could have slipped through a gap in the wire and disappeared inside headquarters without being apprehended. Furthermore, according to Cowles, Stirling evaded an armed guard on his tail by slipping through the first door he encountered inside MEHQ. By an amazing coincidence it was the office of one of Stirling’s lecturers from the Guards Depot at Pirbright, who recognized his former pupil at once and harangued him for his impertinence. Fleeing his abuser, Stirling tried the next office and found himself face to face with Major-General Neil Ritchie, Deputy Chief of General Staff (DCGS), Middle East Forces, who liked what the young lieutenant had to say about the potential of a parachute unit.