SAS Heroes Read online

  Self-reliance and self-confidence are part of what makes the SAS so formidable. In any other section of the armed forces, the commander can get down to the lowliest unit on a voice-link within minutes. Things get done because the big stick is being waved. It’s the opposite in the SAS: things get done despite – or possibly because – of the fact that there is no officer on your back. In the Regiment, once a soldier gets his instructions and begins the mission, there’s frequently no way for the commanders to influence what’s going on; if the soldier doesn’t do it, it won’t get done. It’s very easy to duck out of things in situations like that, but in all my time in the Regiment, no one ever turned to me and said, ‘We don’t need to do this.’ It was always, ‘How are we going to get this done?’

  On SAS operations in which I was involved, there was always a lot of talk about the best way to achieve our objectives. That discussion was often heated and sometimes furious, but when the leader closed the discussion and told us what he felt we should do, everyone accepted his decision without question. At the end of the day, there were only three things you could do: lead, follow or get out of the way. There was no complaining, whingeing or ‘I told you so’ during the mission; only when it was over and we were safely back at base would a post-mortem begin. There was always a certain satisfaction in having unsuccessfully argued a different approach and subsequently being proved right, but that was something from which to learn, not something to crow over.

  SAS soldiers come to realize that everyone is responsible for his own actions and his own life and is accountable to himself. In the Regiment, we’re trained to avoid situations where all our options are closed down. We try never to be in a situation where someone else can dictate to us, because then we have abdicated control. For example, SAS patrols prepare a hide so thoroughly that people can walk right up to it without detecting its presence. We’ll be inside it, defending it, but we always have an escape route that we’ve planned beforehand, just in case – although the hide is unlikely to be discovered, we never put ourselves in a position where we haven’t got a back door. At its crudest, we always want to be able to fight or run. If we are cornered, we have no option but to fight. Although it’s much easier said than done, keeping a cool head no matter what the danger is the surest way for an SAS soldier to escape unscathed from any threatening situation. Fear and anger are always detrimental, because they lead the soldier into rash and hasty actions. By keeping his cool, most of his problems can be solved.

  Soldiers who go through the enormous trial and immense traumas of Selection stand only at the threshold of the SAS family. Progressing through more advanced training and gaining operational experience draws them ever closer into the fold until they become completely immersed in the culture of the Regiment. Each person has different skills and talents, different strengths and weaknesses, but very few possess the determination and courage that I have seen displayed so often by so many of the men of the SAS. In my eyes, every one of them is a hero.

  LIEUTENANT-COLONEL ROBERT BLAIR ‘PADDY’ MAYNE

  It’s easy to think of the desert as a vast beach of soft sand, with only the absence of the sparkling blue water of the sea (and the beach umbrellas) making it any different from a beach resort where you might relax in the sunshine. Deserts, however, are not places where you would ever want to laze around. They are barren, desolate regions where the daytime temperatures can exceed 130°F (55°C) but drop to below freezing at night. In the great Sand Sea of the Sahara there is plenty of sand – the dunes can be hundreds of feet high – but you can also find areas where the ground is baked solid by the scorching sunshine, strewn with jagged boulders and scarred with rocky gullies or ‘wadis’. Flash floods caused by rain falling in the mountains can send furious torrents of water laden with rocky debris raging through those wadis, while sudden winds can whip up vicious sandstorms that leave you no option but to cover up, batten down the hatches and wait until it blows over. The fine sand gets everywhere – in your clothes, in your hair, in your teeth and in your eyes – unless you stay properly covered up. It will clog the air intake of a vehicle and bring it spluttering to a halt as easily as it will clog your throat unless you cover your mouth with a dampened scarf or shemagh. Staying covered up is also the only real protection from the sun, which will mercilessly scorch and blister any exposed skin. And of course, if you don’t have enough drinking water the desert will simply dry you out and kill you. All in all, you would not expect that an Irishman brought up in the moist, cool countryside of County Down would thrive in the desert; yet it was here that Paddy Mayne, one of the great heroes of the SAS, made his name.

  Paddy Mayne was already making headlines when I was less than a year old. In August 1936 he became the Irish Universities Heavyweight Boxing champion and the following spring he was selected to play rugby for Ireland against Wales. It was not as a sportsman that I first came to hear of him, though. The Paddy Mayne that I learned about was a fearless, daring fighting man, whose exploits I might well have thought came straight from the pages of a ‘boy’s own’ adventure had I not heard about them from someone who was able to give me first-hand accounts.

  I was just a kid growing up in Brighton on the south coast of England during World War II and can remember my father coming home having been demobbed from the RAF when the war was over. He used what money he had saved or had received as a gratuity to set himself up in business. He first tried his hand as an unlicensed bookmaker, then started selling fruit and veg from a barrow on the street, then worked as a ‘totter’ – a rag-and-bone man. Dad would push his barrow around the streets, collecting all sorts of junk that people wanted to get rid of, and sort through it to pick out the things he could sell on to make a few shillings. We all pitched in to help, of course – he had six children at the time – and it was while helping out on the barrow that I got to know another of the totters called Harry Warner.

  Almost all of the street traders had been in the armed forces during the war, but Harry was a bit different. He had been in the SAS. Harry had countless stories to tell about his time in North Africa with the Regiment, although back then, when I was only ten years old, I didn’t really appreciate quite how special the Special Air Service was. It all sounded hugely exciting, though, and there was one man whose name cropped up time and time again, playing a starring role in some of Harry’s most incredible stories – Paddy Mayne. As a ten-year-old, hearing tales about this superman who charged onto enemy airfields at the head of a column of jeeps, all guns blazing away at the stationary aircraft, or sneaked onto the airstrips at the dead of night carrying a satchel full of bombs to place on the parked planes, ripping out the cockpit controls with his bare hands when he ran out of explosives, I wondered why we hadn’t finished off the Germans a lot sooner with invincible warriors like Paddy on our side.

  A great deal has been written about Paddy Mayne’s exploits, fact sliding into fiction to create a legend surrounding the man. He stands, however, as one of my heroes not simply for the way he fought on the field of battle – his bravery was recognized with a series of awards that made him the most decorated British serviceman of World War II – but also for the way he fought for the Regiment from behind a desk. Without Paddy, the SAS would not have survived the war.

  Born on 11 January 1915, five months after the start of World War I, Robert Blair Mayne was named after his mother’s cousin, Captain Robert Blair of the 5th Battalion, Border Regiment, who was killed in action the following year and awarded a posthumous Distinguished Service Order (DSO). Young Robert was one of seven children, with two older brothers, Thomas and William, a younger brother, Douglas, and three sisters, Molly, Barbara and Frances. His father, William, was a successful businessman, owning property and running a retail business in Newtonards, County Down, and the family lived in a large house, Mount Pleasant, set in around 40 acres (16 hectares) of grounds overlooking the town. In the countryside around his home, young Paddy took to the outdoors life, becoming a marksman with his .22 rif
le as well as taking up fly-fishing, golf, horse riding and deer stalking. He attended a local grammar school, Regent House, where he excelled at cricket and rugby, playing for Ards Rugby Football Club Second XV when he was just 17, becoming team captain the following season and captaining the First XV the next year. By the time Paddy came to study law at Queen’s University, Belfast, he was powerfully built, 6ft 2in (1.88m) tall and weighed in at well over 15 stone (95kg), although he boasted a speed and agility that belied his impressive bulk. It was while at university that Paddy won his boxing honours and first represented Ireland as an international rugby player. He would go on to win six caps for Ireland and was selected for the British Lions on a tour of South Africa in 1938, playing in 18 of the side’s 24 matches, including all three tests. His rugby career was, however, cut short by the incredibly unsporting Herr Hitler.

  As war in Europe grew ever more likely, young men of military age were encouraged to join their local Territorial Army (TA) regiments to gain some basic military training, and in February 1939 Paddy was commissioned into the 5th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery TA, Newtonards. When war was declared, he was called up for service, but spent several frustrating months kicking his heels in Ulster, about as far away from the action as you could get without actually leaving Europe. In April 1940 he transferred to the Royal Ulster Rifles, hoping to be able to get into the war at last, but still found himself based in Ulster. Within weeks he volunteered for secondment to the Cameronians and was transferred to Scotland – hardly the sort of overseas posting which he wanted. In the summer of 1940, however, he joined 11 Scottish Commando, training to launch raids into enemy territory to destroy installations or capture strategic positions to pave the way for the advance of a more conventional force. This was work where he at last felt he could make a valuable contribution, but after months of arduous training and cancelled operations he was still waiting impatiently for the chance to have a crack at the enemy.

  That opportunity did not eventually arise until a commando force, which included 11 Commando, set sail from Scotland for the Middle East at the end of January 1941 – two years after Lieutenant Robert Blair Mayne had first donned his uniform. In March they arrived in Egypt and after another period of frustration, delay and inactivity, 11 Commando was posted to Cyprus at the end of April for garrison duties. It was reported that there was general unrest among the commandos at that time, created by what was perceived as the high command’s failure to utilize the commandos’ specific skills properly. Several officers were said to have offered their resignations or applied for transfers to other units in order to take a more active part in the war, and for someone like Paddy Mayne the situation was almost intolerable. He was a complex character, a bewildering mixture of diametrically opposed qualities. In a foreword to Rogue Warrior of the SAS: The Blair Mayne Legend by Roy Bradford and Martin Dillon (Mainstream Publishing, 2003), Colonel David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, described Paddy’s temperament.

  It is always hard to pin down the qualities that go to make up an exceptional man and Paddy could be exasperatingly elusive because his character was such a mixture of contrasting attributes. On the one hand there was this great capacity for friendship; his compassion and gentleness displayed during the war in his deep concern for the welfare of all his men and expressing itself in peacetime in his voluntary work with juvenile delinquents and boys clubs and as a regular prison visitor; his love of the countryside and the attention he lavished on his rose garden; and his essentially happy family life. Qualities like these would seem to demonstrate his belief in God. On the other hand, there was a reverse side to his character which revealed itself in outbursts of satanic ferocity.

  That ‘satanic ferocity’ was not always confined to the rugby pitch, the boxing ring or the battlefield. When Paddy had been drinking, his fiery temper could sometimes burn out of control and swapping monotony in Ulster for frustration in Scotland followed by boredom in Egypt and tedium in Cyprus led to an incident in a Nicosia nightclub. At the end of the evening, Paddy and his best friend Eoin McGonigal were the last of their party to leave. On checking the bill, Paddy believed (probably with some justification) that they were being overcharged. He demanded to see the manager who, rather unwisely, was not only unhelpful but downright rude. Paddy forced the man into the middle of the dancefloor, produced his revolver and emptied it into the floor around the terrified man’s feet. He was arrested and remained under open arrest under the supervision of another officer for 48 hours. After a month or so in Cyprus, Paddy had had enough of 11 Commando and requested a transfer to a unit in the Far East. In the meantime, however, the type of operation for which he had been longing began to take shape.

  Following the fall of France in June 1940, German forces occupied the northern part of the country, the Italians claimed part of the south-east, and most of the south of the country was administered by a collaborationist French government based in the town of Vichy. In fact, the Vichy government was technically still in control of the whole country, although the tendency of the German army of occupation to override the civilian authorities whenever they chose made any effort at central government almost impossible. Nevertheless, not only was the Vichy government in charge throughout France – and officially recognized as such by the Americans and Canadians – it also had control of French territories and French military forces abroad. By 1941 this meant that the German Luftwaffe could use French bases in Syria and Lebanon to bomb the British in Iraq, cause problems in Palestine and pose a major threat to the entire British eastern flank in Egypt. The decision was taken, therefore, to launch an offensive into Syria and Lebanon. The commandos in Cyprus were tasked with capturing a bridge over the Litani River, an important crossing point on the road for forces heading into Lebanon from Palestine, and neutralizing enemy strongholds in the vicinity of the crossing to allow the Australian 21st Infantry Brigade to advance across the river.

  Paddy was in command of 7 Troop, 11 Scottish Commando, part of three separate raiding parties that landed near the mouth of the Litani at first light on 9 June 1941. A number of problems were encountered by the raiders (not least being shot at by the Australians), but Paddy’s performance was outstanding, his troop attacking several positions manned by French colonial troops and capturing around 70 prisoners. (It is somewhat ironic that Paddy’s first major action was against the French, who would later bestow upon him their highest awards for gallantry, the Croix de Guerre and Légion d’Honneur). For his efforts at Litani, Paddy received a Mention In Dispatches (MID), but after two days of excitement and three days of rest and recuperation in Haifa, it was back to garrison duty in Cyprus with the prospect of the commando force being disbanded altogether.

  It was at this point that one of the most fateful episodes in his military service created what was to become a major part of the Paddy Mayne legend. Within a week of returning to Cyprus, Mayne was to leave 11 Commando. Some stories have it that this was the result of an altercation with his Acting Commanding Officer, Geoffrey Keyes. It was no secret that Paddy and Keyes did not see eye to eye and their antagonism came to a head when Keyes interrupted a game of chess Paddy was enjoying in the mess one evening. The more exaggerated accounts have Keyes flipping the board over and Paddy leaping to his feet, knocking Keyes out with a single punch and being placed under arrest pending a court martial. The more likely scenario is that Keyes passed comment on the game and Paddy pushed him away, knocking him over. Even this, of course, is a very serious business when a senior officer is involved. In an excellent and assiduously researched recent biography entitled Paddy Mayne, author Hamish Ross could find no evidence that Paddy was placed under arrest following his altercation with Keyes or ever had to face the prospect of a court martial. What is known is that Paddy left Cyprus and returned to Egypt where he was hospitalized in Geneifa with malaria.

  The legend would have it, however, that Paddy was languishing in some rat-infested prison cell in utter disgrace, awaiting his court martial
, when he was approached by David Stirling, who wanted to recruit him for his new SAS unit. Stirling then had the charges against Mayne dropped and Paddy became one of the founder members of the Regiment. Even David Stirling has been quoted as saying that he went to see Paddy in jail in Geneifa, although it seems more probable that the meeting actually took place in the hospital. When creating a legend, though, I suppose the truth should never get in the way of a good story. You can guess which version old Harry Warner preferred to tell me back in Brighton.

  Whichever story you choose to believe, Paddy became part of the new unit that Stirling had been given permission to form. Known as ‘L’ Detachment prior to being granted regimental status as 1 SAS in 1942, its primary role was to attack airfields and lines of communication deep in enemy territory, parachuting in close to its objectives before completing its mission and making its way to a predesignated rendezvous, where trucks would be waiting to take the troops home. The new recruits to the unit begged, borrowed or stole the equipment they needed and went through a two-month training period, including parachute training, before they embarked on their first operation on 16 November 1941. The plan was to attack airfields at Timini and Gazala, Libya, in advance of an Allied offensive, Operation Crusader, with five teams of 10–12 men dropping by parachute at night to disable as many aircraft as possible. Prior to the attack, Stirling was warned that high winds were expected over the drop zones (DZs), making parachute landings extremely hazardous. Cancelling the unit’s first ever operation, however, was not something Stirling was prepared to contemplate. ‘L’ Detachment had to prove its worth or political pressure from within the army hierarchy would ensure that the outfit was never given the chance to shine – army bureaucrats have a deep suspicion of special forces, who don’t always follow normal procedures, and they will pounce on every opportunity to highlight any shortcomings. Calling off the mission was almost unthinkable. In the end, however, it would have been the better option.