Tales from the Special Forces Club. Sean Rayment
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build-up for the offensive at El Alamein, the operation was a failure.
For Y Patrol the war seemed to be trundling along as they settled into a routine of road watch and long-range reconnaissance. Then planning began for a raid on the oasis at Hon, which at the time was occupied by the Italians.
‘We set off from Kufra and it was planned to be a two- or three-day trip. The journey was very routine and went without a hitch. The idea was to see what sort of garrison the Germans had there, beat it up, see how the enemy would respond and get as much intelligence as we could so we could plan future operations. It was like a fighting reconnaissance patrol. The skipper, who by that time was a chap called Captain Spicer, went forward in his jeep to check things out at the oasis, while we took cover amongst a rocky outcrop.
‘They went in and had a good look around, but they must have been spotted because some time later an Italian Caproni 309 Ghibli, a bomber, came over. We all opened fire at the aircraft and it veered away and that was the last we saw of it. But it was replaced by a number of CR42 biplanes. By now the Chevrolets had scattered and moved into defensive positions beneath a hill, with the sun behind us, so anyone attacking us would have to dive into the sun.
‘Then these damn planes started attacking us, but we opened up with these wonderful twin Vickers and that kept them away. When a plane is diving straight at you, it is pretty terrifying. I remember thinking, “I don’t want to be killed because of the effect it would have on my parents.” That was all I was thinking about; I wasn’t thinking about myself as such, just the grief it would cause my parents. It was a 50–50 chance that I would be killed. The bullets were coming in very close, and there was a sort of wop, wop sound as they hit the ground around me. As far as I was concerned, the pilot was trying to nail me. The sound of a round hitting the ground close to you is pretty terrifying, I can tell you, but the planes were put off by our shooting and they were unable to keep a direct course straight down to us. It was happening over and over, waves of planes attacking us. It was a very frightening incident indeed and that was about the closest I came to being killed, it was a pretty narrow squeak. If they had managed to get a bead on us for any length of time it would have been curtains, but to hit us they had to fly straight, and the pilots knew they were vulnerable when flying straight. The idea was to force them to twist and turn, which we did, and eventually they gave up and we hot-footed it back to Kufra.’
* * *
By May 1943 the whole of the North African coast was under Allied control. The LRDG had developed into a force of great renown. The challenge was to decide how the organisation should be used in the future and in what theatre.
One evening in late May, as the members of Y Patrol relaxed, the news came through that the LRDG were to be retrained for missions in Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia and Northern Italy.
The top brass had decided that there was no better force in the British Army than the LRDG to help train, equip and organise the various partisan groups fighting the Germans and Italians. But it would be a totally different type of warfare from that which the organisation had experienced in the vastness of the Libyan desert, where there was always plenty of room to hide.
The LRDG’s mountain base was to be the Cedars Hotel in Lebanon, the British Army’s Mountain Warfare Training Centre. The plan, for these one-time desert warriors, was to learn how to ski, climb and navigate in the mountains. For Jimmy and his colleagues it was an opportunity to recover from the months of arduous desert living, and although the training was going to be tough, the change, in many respects, was as good as a rest.
‘It was quite different to anything we had done before and a lot of fun although the training was extremely hard. The officers lived in the hotel and we were billeted in large Indian tents and it was all quite comfortable. The officer in charge of the training school was a character called Jimmy Riddle. He was said to have been an Olympic skier, and I can well believe it having seen him perform. The instructor of our little group was a Czech, a private soldier. He took us in hand, but not very effectively as far as I was concerned because I was never any good at skiing. I was also set to learn Greek, at which I tried my best. As well as skiing, there were long hikes through the mountains, and we learnt how to live off dried rations. We also had to learn how to navigate and fight in this new environment which was obviously very different from the desert.
‘We remained at the Cedars until early September 1943, at which point we were told that we were going to be trained as parachutists. Again, everyone thought this was great fun. But first of all we needed to have a colour-blindness test because when it came to jumping out of aeroplanes we needed to be able to see the difference between red and green lights. We were all lined up ready to do this test at the medical officer’s office, but all he had to test us with was the coloured cover of a magazine.
‘He pointed to different colours and you had to say what they were. I was colour blind so I obviously got it wrong, but it didn’t seem to matter – the medical officer said something like “Oh my God, you’ll have to follow the man in front.” That was my colour-blindness test.’
The Parachute Training Course took place at the Ramit David Airfield, close to Tel Aviv in what was then Palestine, now Israel. The soldiers were put through their paces and were taught how to fall and roll, a skill which would come in handy later when Jimmy had to make a quick exit – from a moving train!
‘The training had to be quite relentless, and so the powers that be decided that we should be allowed an afternoon off before our first jump, which was supposed to take place the following morning. Free time was quite rare, so a group of us went into Tel Aviv for a few drinks and a bit of sightseeing. By the time we got back to camp that night there was a panic going on and we were told to grab our kit and be ready to leave for an unspecified location.
‘We got our kit together, just what we could get into a little pack on our backs – a change of underclothes, socks, that sort of thing – together with our rifles, or whatever your weapon was, and we were taken down to Haifa harbour and were put on a Greek sloop bound for the Dodecanese Islands. It was quite clear that something big was going on because it was absolutely chaotic and no one seemed to have the slightest idea what we were doing or where we were going. One minute we had been enjoying ourselves looking forward to our first jump, and the next we were caught up in the whirlwind of confusion.’
On the evening of 13 September 1943 B Squadron of the LRDG, now commanded by David Lloyd Owen, who had recovered from the injuries he had sustained at Kufra, arrived at the Greek island of Kastelorizo. The Italian Armistice had just been signed, and Army headquarters in Cairo decided to send small garrisons of British troops to various Greek islands to try and encourage those Italian troops still based in the region to thwart any attempt by the Germans to seize them.
‘We were greeted with great enthusiasm by the Greek inhabitants, but I was completely overcome by the poverty on the island. The Italians had kept the locals very poor, and I remember this one poor lady with a baby and the child was just skeletal. It was quite shocking and I think we all had a very low opinion of the Italians after witnessing that. But we did what we could for the locals, who were very appreciative, and in those first few days we became aware of the beauty of our surroundings. The islands were idyllic and we had a chance of swimming in this beautiful clear water every morning and you could almost forget that there was a war on.’
Within a matter of days of arriving, the squadron was ordered to move with all possible speed to the island of Leros. The island was important to whoever was going to control the Aegean Sea because of its strategic position and its natural harbour.
‘We had hardly arrived at Leros when we were again ordered to move to an equally small island called Kalymnos. That was when the air raids on Kos began. The Germans were after a squadron of Hurricane aircraft, manned mainly by South Africans. We would watch these air battles taking place, with the Germans flying in from their base on Rhodes, and one by one the Hurricanes were shot out of the sky. The air battle lasted about a month or so – it was a terrible sight, and by then we realised that this whole operation was a complete mess.
‘Then we woke up one morning to find that the strip of water between Kalymnos and Kos was full of enemy shipping and the Germans were invading Kos. We anticipated