Tales from the Special Forces Club. Sean Rayment
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The captured prisoner then broke the news that everyone feared, revealing that he was one of many reinforcements who had been sent into Tobruk in recent days to prepare for a possible attack.
‘After that attack, we destroyed the enemy vehicles and moved off again briefly. Then we stopped, had a meal and waited to hear from the commandos. The idea was that Haselden would get in touch and brief us on the enemy situation so that we would be able to deal with any Germans on our route in. I think after about an hour we began to realise that something must have gone wrong. The radio operator kept trying to make contact but there was nothing. So after several hours we moved off down to the escarpment at Sidi Rezegh. Movement down the escarpment was painfully slow because it was so steep and covered in boulders.
‘We eventually reached the perimeter fence well after midnight and everyone knew the plan was already seriously behind schedule. By now we could hear the sounds of battle in the distance. The RAF had flown over some hours earlier dropping their massive pay-loads.
‘Lloyd Owen came over to me and said, “Patch, where do you think we are?” I pointed to the map and said “Here.” I was absolutely certain that we were within 100 yards of the perimeter. The message then came around that we were going to stay put until dawn and then go in and destroy our first target, which was the radar station. So the vehicles moved into cover and we waited.
‘I didn’t know it at the time, but the radio operator had spent most of the night trying to raise Haselden while we either rested or mounted sentries. By the morning the battle was still raging, but without any radio contact it was impossible to know what was going on.
‘Just before dawn Lloyd Owen called us all together and explained that he had been unable to contact Haselden or any of his commandos and that consequently we had no idea what was going on. The only option was to race back to the escarpment, set up the radio antennae and try and make contact with HQ to try and get an update on the situation.
‘Within 10 minutes we were on the move, racing past these huge German tented camps. Titch Cave, a belligerent character, who was the skipper’s gunner, wanted to open fire. He was manning a .50 calibre Vickers and he wanted to shoot up the camps as we drove past, but the Skipper said we just had to push on. It was quite an extraordinary sight. We could see all these German soldiers queuing for breakfast and we were racing past them. We could see them looking at us but no one tried to stop us.’
Y Patrol moved up and over the escarpment and continued for another 20 miles before halting and trying to reach HQ again, but it would take another seven hours before they eventually made contact and were given the dreadful news that the Tobruk element of the plan had been an abject failure. The large coastal guns which the commandos had been tasked with destroying had been moved, and the Royal Navy had suffered heavy casualties, losing two destroyers and a cruiser, and had also failed to land reinforcements. Y Patrol was ordered not to return to Tobruk but to make instead for Hatiet Etla and await further orders.
‘We moved off just as it was beginning to get dark. I had managed to get a few hours’ sleep but we were all pretty tired. But the worst feeling was knowing that the mission had been a failure. We still didn’t know what had happened, only that the raid had failed and casualties were heavy. It was a huge anti-climax and we all felt very dejected. When we arrived at Hatiet we had to wait a bit and then we were told to move to a place called Landing Ground 125, an emergency airstrip near Barce, about 80 miles from our location, near the Kalansho Sand Sea. The landing ground was to be used as a rallying point and we were told that there would be a lot of injured soldiers and men who had been separated from their units heading there.
‘I plotted a route and off we went. We left in the afternoon and arrived at LG125 when it was dark. LG125 was south of Barce, which was the scene of another raid which was exclusively LRDG, executed by New Zealanders and guardsmen, and that was quite a success. The LRDG destroyed a lot of aircraft, but they again ran into some resistance and had taken some casualties, and the theory was that the injured might have made their way to LG125.
‘We eventually found them later that night. There were about eight of them under a tarpaulin, being looked after by our medical officer, Richard Lawson, who had behaved admirably throughout the whole of the Barce raid. He had been dashing around treating men under fire and was awarded the Military Cross. Popski was also amongst the wounded – he had lost his little finger. We helped in whatever way we could, gave them cigarettes, water, food and some rum. A message was also sent back to our base requesting a transport aircraft to come and pick up the wounded. The next day an RAF Bombay arrived, flown by an officer called Flight Lieutenant John Coles, a professional airman, who later became an Air Marshal. It was a masterpiece of navigation on his part. He had flown across the desert, which was flat and featureless, but he managed to find this little strip with practically nothing on it except a few oil drums to mark it out as an airfield. We didn’t know precisely when he was coming and we didn’t have any pre-arranged signals. He had a couple of men with him, but by the time he landed this old Bombay had used up all of its petrol. But it was carrying petrol for its return journey in four-gallon jerrycans. So we all helped in the refuelling and the injured were loaded on board, and by the next morning they had all arrived safely in Cairo.’
After the RAF Bombay had departed, Y Patrol were ordered to remain at LG125 for the next 24 hours to await and assist those who had become separated from their respective units during the raid. By the time Y Patrol was ready to depart, on 20 September, they had been joined by another 60 stragglers.
‘We arrived back at Kufra on 25 September. I think we were all relieved to be back but also very angry about what had happened, because there was a very strong view that the failure could have been avoided if people had kept their mouths shut. It really was a case that careless talk costs lives.
‘By the time we got back to Kufra, other soldiers who had taken part in the other raids were already there and we soon began to swap stories. The general consensus was that we had all been let down by staff officers in Cairo, because of their loose talk and bad planning.’
A few days after arriving at Kufra, one of the most extraordinary events of Jimmy’s war took place during a German bombing raid. The Germans knew that Kufra was a British base and would occasionally attack. On this occasion, eight Junker 88s attacked the airfield where the RAF Bombays were located.
‘The bombing run took the Jerry aircraft right over the top of the date palms beneath which we [Y Patrol], the New Zealanders, G Patrol and the SAS were billeted. Our guns were still mounted on our vehicles and as they passed over us we all let rip. There were dozens of machine-guns firing up at them and we managed to shoot down six out of the eight aircraft. It so happened I was on some sort of errand on foot in another part of the oasis so I didn’t take part, I just heard this huge racket. Jerry made the mistake of assuming that we would be in the great fort built by the Italians, whereas that was the last thing we would think of doing, because it was such an obvious target. The 88s were easy targets because they were so low, just a couple of hundred feet, and so were difficult to miss – especially if you have several machine-guns all firing at the same time.
‘As they came over they were met by this barrage of machine-gun fire. I was desperate to get back and have a go, but things like that are over in a couple of minutes and I was too late. It was unheard of to shoot down six aircraft.
‘During the raid Lloyd Owen was wounded by a 20mm cannon shell which caught his back and arm. It was a very serious wound and I know that a lot of us thought he might not survive. But he eventually got back to Cairo and made a pretty good recovery.’
Over the following weeks the full catastrophe of the earlier mission began to unfold. It soon emerged that John Haselden had been killed leading an assault to capture the coastal guns. The commandos did achieve some initial success during the early stages of the operation but were overwhelmed by the size of the enemy force. Because the guns were not captured, the Royal Navy were unable to land the reinforcements who were supposed to bolster Haselden’s commandos, and the mission was doomed.
The SAS also faced fierce resistance at Benghazi and the Sudanese Defence Force did not fare well at Jalo either. Only the raid on the airfield at Barce could be described