The Daring Dozen (20 page)

At Mayne’s suggestion it was decided to change the unit’s
modus operandi.
No longer would they rely on the LRDG (or the ‘Long Range Taxi Group’ as they were affectionately known); instead they would be self-sufficient. ‘Capt. Mayne suggested to Major Stirling that jeeps should be provided,’ recalled Captain George Jellicoe, a recent addition to L Detachment. Stirling embraced the idea wholeheartedly and procured 15 American jeeps, known as Willie Bantams, and fitted them with a dozen Vickers K machine guns, capable of firing 1,200 rounds per minute. Stirling also managed to prise from the grasp of the LRDG Mike Sadler, a brilliant desert navigator who had worked with L Detachment on several previous occasions. He and Mayne were to become staunch comrades in the years to follow, and by the end of the war few men knew the Irishman as well as the softly-spoken Englishman who shared Mayne’s fondness for practical jokes.

There was no doubt that Mayne enjoyed the first jeep attack carried out by L Detachment on 26 July, though in that he wasn’t alone. The target was Sidi Haneish, an airfield approximately 30 miles east-south-east of Mersa Matruh, and the outcome was a savage triumph for Stirling and his men. Having driven on to the airfield at night in two columns, the jeeps unleashed a tornado of fire that destroyed or damaged 30 aircraft. British casualties were two dead. One of the men on the Sidi Haneish raid was Johnny Cooper, one of the original members of L Detachment from its formation a year earlier. He said of Mayne:

I never saw him scared. He hadn’t the same sort of fear the rest of us had. You can never really get into a person that deeply but he was as near as you can get to being fearless. He didn’t have any problem about his own safety, and it seemed that he accepted death was part of the job and if it happened, then it happened.
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By October 1942 L Detachment had been expanded to regimental status and was known now as 1 Special Air Service (1SAS), comprising 29 officers and 572 other ranks in four squadrons. Mayne, now a major, led A Squadron into the interior of the Libyan Desert in October, where they passed a fruitful three weeks cutting railway lines and attacking vehicle convoys in an area between Tobruk and Matruh. Following the commencement of the Eighth Army offensive at El Alamein, Mayne and his men began attacking the retreating Axis forces. In his subsequent report on their activities Mayne described some of their successes:

About the 24th October the railway was blown up at Fuka, mined east of Piccadilly and blown up further to the west. A convoy was attacked on the Siwa track and Italian prisoners were taken.

A similar operation, not located, took place about the 26th October.

On the night 29th/30th October, the railway line was blown up in nine places north [actually north-west] of Sidi Aziz over a stretch a quarter of a mile long.

The main and looplines at Niswel el Suf were blown up on the 31st October; and fifteen Italians and five Germans were captured. The same patrol also destroyed four machine guns, one W/T installation and three trucks.

On 29 November, A Squadron was joined at their remote base at Bir Zelten by Stirling and his B Squadron. Stirling briefed Mayne on forthcoming operations: A Squadron would attack enemy transport between Sirte and El Agheila while he and his men would head 200 miles west and harry the retreating Germans around Tripoli. With the military objectives clear, Stirling and Mayne joined their men in a sing-song around a campfire, and Malcolm Pleydell watched as ‘Paddy, with his bushy beard and massive shoulders … [started] giving way to the mood of the moment and joining in with his strange unmusical singing to each song in turn’.
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A squadron inflicted further damage on the increasingly ragged Axis forces before returning to Egypt in the first week of January 1943. Mayne and his men enjoyed a spot of leave, a repose ruined for Mayne by news from home informing him that his father had died. A month later he received another blow, this one felt by the whole of the regiment, when it was confirmed that a B Squadron patrol led by Stirling had been captured during their attempt to link up with First Army in Tunisia.

Stirling’s capture couldn’t have come at a worse time for 1SAS. The Desert War was all but won and the regiment was facing an uncertain future regarding deployment. Stirling had been contemplating operating in the mountains of the Caucasus (hence the reason Mayne and A Squadron had in late January undergone a ski course at the British Army Mountain Warfare training centre in the Lebanon) but like many of his best ideas he kept them in his head rather than in a file. One recent arrival to the SAS, Lieutenant Peter Davis, was sure that ‘the regiment would now be disbanded since it no longer had Stirling’s powerful personality to hold it together’.

Yet Mayne’s own personality was nothing if not powerful; he just lacked Stirling’s charm as well as his social standing. Perhaps some people who didn’t know Mayne well, who were unaware he was a graduate of law from Queen’s University, were deceived by his bear-like physique and gruff manner into believing he was all brawn and no brain. Anthony Greville-Bell wasn’t one of them. The young cavalry officer (who would win a DSO in 1943 serving with 2SAS before commanding a squadron in Malaya) had a great respect for Mayne and reflected that his impatience with dithering staff officers was his Achilles heel. ‘Paddy was useless with dealing with senior officers because if they did something to annoy him he threatened to punch their noses. He wasn’t the right man to command the regiment really but who else could you put in charge when he was there because he was so outstanding … the epitome of an SAS officer.’
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With the SAS no longer required in North Africa, Mayne oversaw the restructuring of the regiment. 1SAS was reorganized into two squadrons: Mayne took command of the Special Raiding Squadron (SRS), while the remaining half of the regiment was reconstituted into the Special Boat Squadron (SBS) under the command of George Jellicoe.

Mayne divided his force of approximately 280 men into three troops – 1, 2 and 3 Troops – and took them off to Palestine where they underwent several weeks of punishing training in preparation for their next operation – wherever that might be. Mayne proved himself a brutal commanding officer, setting exacting standards in all aspects of training and demanding they be met. He divided the three troops into two equal sub-sections and these were then further sub-divided into three-man squads of specialists: Bren gunners, riflemen and rifle bombers. In addition, to each troop was assigned a mortar section, an engineers’ section and a signallers’ section. ‘Each sub-section was a highly efficient little fighting unit, capable of providing its own support in many of the usual situations which one expects to meet in battle,’ wrote Davis, who had discovered that Mayne was not only a brilliant soldier, but was also an astute judge of character. All the time in Palestine Mayne was ‘silently watching with those sharp, penetrating eyes of his … making a mental picture for future reference of the individual, inner character of everyone he observed’.
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No man that Mayne deemed unsuitable lasted long. Johnny Cooper recalled that ‘if a soldier wasn’t doing his job properly he wouldn’t tolerate it, that man would be RTU’d. He was quite ruthless in getting rid of those soldiers he felt let down the regiment.’ It wasn’t only in training that Mayne expected his men to follow his example. Sid Payne, who had joined the SAS at the end of 1942, recalled one time in Palestine when a fellow soldier rushed into their tent one evening with a warning to make themselves scarce. ‘He said “Out, quick, Paddy’s looking for someone to booze with”, so we all shot out the tent. He was like that, looking for someone to booze with. He was a hard drinker, he’d fill a tumbler half full of whisky and expected everyone to be the same.’
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On one occasion Johnny Wiseman had the misfortune to be caught in Mayne’s bacchanalian net, and soon wished he hadn’t: ‘We were in the mess and I said something that upset him so he threw me on the ground,’ he remembered. ‘At this stage we all had beards and he was a big chap and he put his knees on my arms and called for a razor. Then without water and soap he shaved off half my beard. He was as drunk as a lord.’
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The training in Palestine was hard, but it was effective, too, and when the Special Raiding Squadron went into action for the first time they accomplished their task with conspicuous success. The mission had been the elimination of a coastal gun battery at Capo Murro di Porco (Cape of the Pig’s Snout) on the south-eastern tip of Sicily on 10 July 1943. It was impressed upon Mayne and his men that it was imperative that the battery was destroyed without delay, as the main British invasion fleet would be sitting ducks if the guns remained operating. The SRS suffered just one fatality, but two days later when they landed in assault craft at the port of Augusta (erstwhile base of Junio Valerio Borghese’s Italian naval commandos of the Tenth Light Flotilla), resistance was stiffer. Here they encountered not Italian defenders such as those at Murro di Porco, but hardened fighters from the Hermann Göring Division.

As the SRS scrambled up the beach and sought refuge among the narrow streets of Augusta, Mayne stepped serenely ashore. ‘He had one hand in his pocket, his cuffs – as was his habit – turned back and behind him trotted his signaller,’ remembered Bill Deakins, one of the unit’s explosives experts. ‘It was never done out of bravado but simply to give the men confidence.’
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Mayne’s self-possession was on display two months later when the SRS took part in the invasion of Italy. Tasked with seizing the seaside resort of Bagnara, on the southern tip of Italy, the SRS approached the beach in the early hours of 4 September. The assault craft landed and the doors opened, but still there was no incoming fire. Did that mean the pristine white sand was laced with mines? ‘No one knew if the beach was mined or not,’ remembered Alf Dignum, a signaller in the SRS. ‘Paddy was first up the beach, walking all the way, and by the time we’d followed him up there was still only one set of footprints!’
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Such had been the speed and stealth of the SRS landing at Bagnara that the Germans were taken utterly by surprise. Those in the town surrendered, while their comrades in the hills above fought on for 24 hours before withdrawing under fire from a Royal Navy cruiser.

The SRS pulled back to Gallico and enjoyed some well-earned R&R, during which time they heard of the Italian armistice. The men celebrated with wine and song and Davis remembered how Mayne ‘would lean back, glass in hand, like some Roman emperor watching his gladiators prove their worth in the arena’.

The following month the SRS proved their worth during the ferocious battle for Termoli, an Adriatic port 20 miles above the spur of Italy’s boot. The object of the assault, carried out in conjunction with 3 Commando and 40 Royal Marine Commando, was to secure Termoli for the 78th Division; thereby hastening Fifth Army’s progress towards Naples along the road that led from Termoli to Campobasso, approximately 40 miles south. The raiders came ashore shortly before dawn on 3 October and by dusk Termoli was in their hands, for the loss of just one man. But the Germans didn’t intend to cede Termoli without a fight and on 5 October, as elements of the 78th Division began advancing inland, the 16th Panzer Division counter-attacked. The 78th fell back in confusion, and it was left to the SRS and commandos to halt the German attack. Casualties were heavy, and in one devastating incident a cluster of shells landed in a side street just as a section of SRS were boarding lorries to reinforce a threatened sector. Eighteen men were blown to bits.

Mayne participated in little of the fighting in and around Termoli during the 48 hours it took to halt and then repel the German counter-attack; instead the Irishman showed his skill as a battle commander, deploying his three troops as and when they were needed to bolster creaking flanks or to fill gaps in the line vacated by fleeing British infantrymen. Then at dawn on 6 October the 38th Irish Brigade landed, along with four Sherman tanks, and the Germans fell back for good.

The SRS had triumphed, but at a heavy price. Of the 207 men who landed at Termoli, 21 were dead, 24 wounded and 23 were in captivity. Four days after the battle the men received a visit from General Miles Dempsey, commander of XIII Corps, under whose auspices the SRS had been operating. In his address Dempsey told the SRS: ‘In all my military career – and in my time I have commanded many units – I have never yet met a unit in which I had such confidence as I have in yours.’ He then listed six reasons why he held the squadron in such high esteem: the training, their discipline, fitness, their confidence, their planning and lastly ‘you have the right spirit, which I hope you will pass on to those who may join you in the future.’
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It was a glowing endorsement, not just of the Special Raiding Squadron but also of Paddy Mayne and all the principles he had drilled into his men in the preceding nine months.

The SRS reverted to 1SAS upon its return to Britain in January 1944 and Mayne, now with a Bar to his DSO after his exemplary leadership in Italy, was under the command of Brigadier-General Roderick McLeod. The SAS Brigade of approximately 2,500 men included 2SAS, two French regiments (the 3rd and 4th) and 5SAS, comprising a squadron of Belgian paratroopers.

Now that 1SAS was to consist of four squadrons, each of 12 officers and 109 other ranks (in addition there was a squadron HQ comprising two Troops), Mayne’s priority was to expand the 200 men of the SRS into a full-blown regiment so that they would be ready for the expected Allied invasion of France. He was allocated a car and undertook a great deal of ‘arduous motoring’ as he scoured the country’s barracks and depots in search of suitable recruits to the regiment. Other officers and men heard of the recruitment drive and presented themselves at Darvel, 1SAS’s base in south-west Scotland. One such soldier was a signals officer, Lieutenant John Randall:

I joined the regiment on the same day as Fraser McLuskey [the regiment’s chaplain who won a Military Cross in 1944] and we were both marched into see Paddy Mayne. I don’t know if he was all that keen to have either a signals officer or a padre. Fortunately this was on a Thursday and on the Saturday there was an inter-squadron rugger match. I must have acquitted myself rather well on the wing because from then on I always had a good relationship with Paddy. From the very day I joined the regiment Mayne always appeared to be the man in charge. He had a very physical presence. He didn’t shout and yell, he had a quiet voice but when he spoke you knew jolly well he meant what he said. He said he expected officers to work hard at being good soldiers and expected them to behave as gentlemen. We admired him and we always felt that he would never commit any member of the regiment to an operation he felt didn’t have at least a 50/50 chance of succeeding and he would never ever commit to an operation that he wouldn’t be prepared to undertake himself. With a leader like that you had the basis for a fantastic regiment and that’s what we were.
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