The Daring Dozen (19 page)

The volunteers were organized into five commando ‘battalions’ – Nos 1, 6, 7, 8 and 11, with the latter better known as Scottish Commando on account of its ranks being filled from the Scottish regiments. The men of 11 Commando assembled in the Borders town of Galashiels under the command of Lieuenant-Colonel Dick Pedder, among them Mayne and a fresh-faced lieutenant from the Gordon Highlanders called Bill Fraser.

Lieutenant Mayne – now known to one and all as ‘Paddy’ – and his new comrades were posted to the Isle of Arran where they underwent rigorous training during the autumn months. One of the privates, Jimmy Storie, remembered that Mayne was ‘a rough Irishman and liked plenty of go. He was happy doing that and he didn’t like sitting around. In Arran he was known to sit on his bed and shoot the glass panes out of the window with his revolver.’
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In January 1941 it was decided to send three commando battalions to the Middle East to carry out raids against Italy’s stretched lines of communications along the North African coast, as well as targets in the Mediterranean and Balkans. The battalions selected were 7 Commando, 8 Commando and 11 Commando. They arrived at Geneifa, Egypt, on 7 March and within 48 hours they were being addressed by General Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief Middle East Forces. From now on they would be known as ‘Layforce’, under the command of Colonel Bob Laycock; the name ‘commando’ banished for fear of alerting the enemy to their presence in North Africa, particularly now that a German expeditionary force, the Afrika Korps, had recently arrived to reinforce the ailing Italian Army.

For six weeks 11 Commando idled away their time, the men growing ever more restless, before they were sent to Cyprus in anticipation of a German invasion at the end of April. But the Nazis never came and the soldiers took out their frustration on the one-shilling bottles of Cyprian wine. Mayne landed himself in trouble when he threatened the owner of a nightclub with his revolver in a dispute over the bar bill – behaviour that didn’t endear him to his commanding officer, Geoffrey Keyes, son of Sir Roger, Director of Combined Operations, and a man with whom the Irishman shared a mutual antipathy.

11 Commando eventually saw action in June, not against the Germans but against the Vichy French forces in Syria. Fearing that the airfields in Syria would be used by the Axis forces to attack Allied positions in Egypt, Churchill ordered Wavell to seize them from the French before they could be handed over to the Germans. The 7th Australian Division were given the task, with 11 Commando charged with making a seaborne landing at the river Litani, which flowed south through Syria before debouching into the Mediterranean Sea. 11 Commando was to secure a bridgehead in the face of the strongly fortified position on the northern bank of the river.

The commandos accomplished their mission but at the cost of 45 officers and men killed and a further 84 wounded. Mayne not only emerged unscathed from his first action, but distinguished himself as cool and courageous, an officer with initiative and the ability to make correct decisions quickly in the heat of battle.

Yet in spite of 11 Commando’s admirable performance at the Litani, within days the men were informed that Layforce was being disbanded. Some returned to their parent unit and others wound up at the Middle East Commando depot waiting for a decision on their future from Middle East Headquarters (MEHQ). Mayne went to the depot with a vague notion of travelling to China to teach guerrilla warfare to the Chinese Nationalist Army in their fight against Japan, but that was before he received a visit from David Stirling.

Stirling persuaded Mayne to join his new venture, provisionally entitled L Detachment of the Special Air Service Brigade, with the Irishman the last of the six officers to be recruited to the nascent Special Forces unit. Among the others were two of Mayne’s fellow officers from 11 Commando, Bill Fraser and a southern Irishman called Eoin McGonigal, as well as an ascetic Welshman by the name of Jock Lewes.

One of the 60 men recruited to L Detachment in the summer of 1941 was Reg Seekings, a Fenman who would serve alongside Mayne for the duration of the war. He recalled that ‘David and Paddy had a respect for each other’s abilities’ although socially they were opposites. Stirling was debonair and charming, imbued with the easygoing confidence of the privileged and a man with the necessary airs and graces to open doors among Cairo’s polite society. Mayne was not a man given to small talk. Though fiercely intelligent and charming when he chose to be, he could be volatile, pugnacious and brusque to the point of downright rudeness. Much of this was due to his shyness and the self-consciousness he felt over his mammoth size. ‘His appearance was a bit over-awing and he had a very powerful presence but his big trouble was he couldn’t live with his size and strength,’ reflected Seekings.
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This was particularly true with the opposite sex, a species he never learned to handle. Seekings remembered Mayne referring to himself as an ‘ugly brute’, a description not recognized by his peers. Vivian Jenkins said he was ‘magnificent-looking’ and during the 1938 Lions tour he was much in demand among the young women of South Africa. But unable to relate to women, Mayne recoiled from their subtle advances and masked his dissatisfaction in bouts of heavy drinking. Exceptionally devoted to his mother, Mayne also grew up with an almost sanctified view of women, and men who served under him soon discovered a surefire way to incur his wrath. ‘He understood people who got drunk, that was fair enough, but what he couldn’t bear were louts and bad manners,’ remembered John Randall, who joined the SAS in 1944. ‘He hated bad language and objected to rude comments about women, and if you didn’t abide by those rules you were liable to be thumped and thumped bloody hard.’
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As L Detachment took shape in the late summer and early autumn of 1941 the men saw more of Mayne than they did of Stirling and Jock Lewes – the three men credited as the driving force behind the SAS. Stirling was spending a lot of time in Cairo, using his charm to wheedle what he wanted for his unit, while Lewes was devising his eponymous bomb that would prove so destructive on future desert raids. Mayne oversaw a lot of the physical training and in a force of outstandingly fit young men he stood out for his strength and stamina.

In November 1941 L Detachment embarked on its inaugural mission, a raid that was to be executed against the backdrop of Operation
Crusader
. The aim of the Eighth Army offensive was to retake the eastern coastal regions of Libya (an area known as Cyrenaica) and seize the Libyan airfields from the Axis forces, thus allowing the RAF to increase their supplies to Malta, the Mediterranean island that was of such strategic importance to the British. But General Erwin Rommel also prized Malta and was busy finalizing his own plans for an offensive; he intended his Afrika Korps to drive the British east, take possession of the airfields and prevent the RAF reaching Malta with vital supplies. In addition, the fewer British planes there were to attack German shipping in the Mediterranean, the more vessels would reach North African ports with the supplies he needed to win the Desert War.

On 17 November, L Detachment’s task was to infiltrate between these two vast opposing armies and attack the Axis airfields at Gazala and Tmimi in eastern Libya at midnight. With Stirling in overall command of the 54-man operation, Mayne was put in charge of sections three and four with Jock Lewes commanding sections one and two. None of the raiders, however, met with success and Mayne was one of only 21 men to return from the disastrous operation. The rest were either killed or captured, victims of a violent desert storm that scuppered the Detachment’s chances of success from the moment they jumped from their Bombay aircraft.

Undeterred, Stirling changed tack and enlisted the help of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG). Parachuting was too hazardous and unreliable a means of infiltration; in future L Detachment would reach their target in vehicles driven by the LRDG. The final approach would be made on foot and once the raid had been carried out, the men would make for a pre-arranged rendezvous point with the LRDG.

L Detachment set up base at Jalo Oasis, an old fort set among palm trees and pools of water in the deep interior of the Libyan Desert. On 8 December Stirling, Mayne and nine other men boarded seven Chevrolet trucks driven by the LRDG and embarked for Sirte, a coastal town 350 miles to the north-west (and the birthplace of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi). Once within range of the target Stirling split the raiding party, taking Sergeant Jimmy Brough to attack the airfield at Sirte, while instructing Mayne and the remaining men to hit the neighbouring strip at Tamet.

Stirling had no luck at Sirte, but at Tamet Mayne wreaked a whirlwind of destruction. Not only were 24 Axis aircraft destroyed using the innovative Lewes bombs, but Mayne attacked a pilots’ mess and killed several enemy airmen with small-arms fire and hand grenades. Two weeks later Mayne returned and destroyed a further 27 aircraft, most of which had arrived just 24 hours earlier to replace those machines blown up a fortnight before.

Tamet airfield was dubbed ‘Paddy’s Own’ in recognition of the 51 aircraft destroyed by the big Ulsterman, and by the end of 1941 Mayne was acknowledged as the most effective operator in L Detachment. Malcolm Pleydell, a shrewd and thoughtful doctor who became the unit’s medical officer in 1942, enjoyed analyzing Mayne. On the one hand Mayne could be erudite and garrulous when the mood took him, talking rugby or discussing his love of literature. But then there was the other side, the side Vivian Jenkins glimpsed a few years earlier in South Africa. ‘This sort of fighting was in his blood,’ wrote Pleydell of Mayne. ‘There was no give or take about his method of warfare, and he was out to kill when the opportunity presented itself. There was no question of sparing an enemy – this was war, and war meant killing.’
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Ultimately, Pleydell was relieved to be on the same side as Mayne, not just because of his martial prowess but for the way he led his men. ‘Paddy was very courageous but he was also cautious and careful, and he never took unnecessary risks,’ recalled Pleydell. ‘He was a good leader of men and respected by all, even though he was essentially a bit of a loner who was happy in his own company. I remember the first time I was with him on operations going up towards Qara Matruh and we saw two ME 110s. Everyone jumped out of the vehicles and hid behind boulders. Well, I just followed everyone else until they disappeared. Paddy later told me that the most important thing to do if you spotted enemy planes in the desert was to be as still as possible. Get behind any cover or just lie on the floor and don’t move. Movement is what will catch the pilot’s eye.’
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Another of his men, Corporal Sid Payne, who served under Mayne from 1942 to 1945, endorsed Pleydell’s opinion: ‘Paddy loved the war but had a charmed life. I’ve seen him walking down and fire going on all around him, and he never ducked. He wasn’t reckless … he would look at an op[eration] and if he thought it was impossible he wouldn’t do it. He was a very careful man and wouldn’t take unnecessary risks.’
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Mayne’s sangfroid under fire was legendary, but another vital component in his character that served him well as a soldier was his reaction time. Rugby wasn’t the only sport Mayne excelled at; he was a fine golfer and swimmer, and as a student at Queen’s he had won the Irish Universities Heavyweight Boxing Championship. For such a big man Mayne was astonishingly nimble on his feet, and compared to the average soldier his incredibly quick reflexes gave him a split-second longer to size up a situation and react accordingly. In short, Mayne’s physique and temperament made him ideal for the guerrilla warfare he was waging against the Axis forces in North Africa.

In the spring of 1942 the Desert War had become a static stalemate after the fluidity of the preceding months. The British were busy strengthening their defensive positions at Gazala while Rommel was augmenting his thinly stretched supply lines after his successful counter-attack that had resulted in the recapture of the Libyan port of Benghazi and the eastward retreat of the British forces.

In March Stirling proposed to MEHQ a series of raids on Axis airfields in the Benghazi area as well as an attack on shipping in the port itself. Given the authority to proceed, Stirling and his men re-established base at Siwa Oasis in western Egypt, and on 15 March a raiding party departed on the 400-mile mission to Benghazi. Close to their target area the party split up to attack a string of airfields, with Mayne leading Graham Rose, Bob Bennett and Jock Byrne towards Berka Satellite airfield. Byrne later described what happened:

Carefully crossing the road in darkness we crept onto the airfield, almost at once coming across two German sentries who were standing together smoking near an anti-aircraft gun. Rose removed the cover from the barrel of the gun so that I could stuff a [Lewes] bomb into it after first squeezing the time pencil. Later, under some trees, we discovered the first of a series of bomb dumps which were dug in and covered by tarpaulins. Wasting no time we began placing our bombs, passing rapidly from dump to dump. It was dark and there was no one about. Soon afterwards Paddy decided to search for the aircraft with Bob, leaving Rose and myself to continue laying bombs in the dumps, which we found at regular intervals.
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As well as the anti-aircraft gun and bomb dumps, the raiders accounted for 15 aircraft. Throughout the weeks that followed the unit continued to attack Axis airfields, increasing their overall tally of destroyed aircraft to 143 in six months, of which Mayne was responsible for well over half.

By now L Detachment had been considerably expanded; Stirling was a major, Mayne a captain, and both wore the ribbon of the Distinguished Service Order. Elsewhere the news was bad. In June the Germans were on the move east across the desert, capturing the port of Tobruk and advancing ever-closer to Egypt. The Royal Navy began pulling out of Alexandria and at Cairo British staff officers burned papers in expectation of a German conquest. But the Axis surge was stopped by the Eighth Army at El Alamein and once more the Desert War became inert, ideal conditions for L Detachment to recommence operations.