The Daring Dozen (7 page)

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.
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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 congratulated 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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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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.
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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 desert 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.’
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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’.

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.’
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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.’
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