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Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall by Spike Milligan (1978)

I was determined to pursue the matter to its illogical conclusion.
(Spike summarises his methodology in Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall, page 8)

I was getting twitchy, doing nothing positive for so long. I had started talking to myself and I wasn’t satisfied with the answers.
(Spike beginning to lose it, page 60)

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall is the fourth of Spike Milligan’s seven (!) volumes of war memoirs. It covers the period from his regiment’s landing in Salerno, Italy, on 23 September 1943 to the date he was invalided out of the front line with nervous exhaustion in March 1944.

Longer, seriouser

Although covering a period of just under six months, the text, at 288 pages, is longer than the two previous volumes put together. Although the relentless gags and wisecracking are similar, the Hitlergams have, mercifully, ended (actually, he sneaks a few through, e.g. p.139) and there are far fewer visual elements i.e. photos, sketches, cartoons and so on, than in previous volumes.

There are still quite a few photos but they are documentary and factual, in the sense that they show members of his brigade, tanks, lorries crossing Bailey Bridges and so on. Mind you, although of military subjects, Spike still comes up with some funny captions. I laughed at the photo of squaddies working on setting up a Bailey bridge across a river where the caption tells us that ‘the ugly soldiers’ were told to face away from the camera.

But overall the tone is quite a bit more serious than in the previous volumes and quite a few passages are entirely serious in intent such as the description of: air attacks, of devastated Italian villages, of the fury of Allied attacks on German positions, the terrible scenes after a direct hit on a neighbouring battery, and so on. It has a permanent edge, a barely suppressed anger which I didn’t feel in the previous volumes (see final section, below, for examples) all building up to the intense and unhappy final passages of him being wounded and psychologically traumatised, returned to the front too soon, bullied for being a coward and then his final collapse.

Spike is peeved

The more earnest tone is set by the surprisingly cross preface or author’s note preceding the text. Spike had been really nettled by a review by Clive James of one of the previous books which jovially referred to it as ‘an unreliable history of the war’. This upset Spike who, in this preface, goes to great lengths to insist that, on the contrary, the text is very heavily researched and completely factual.

All that I wrote did happen, it happened on the days I mention, the people I mention are real people and the places are real…I wish the reader to know that he is not reading a tissue of lies and fancies, it all really happened…I’ve spent a fortune on beer and dinners interviewing my old Battery mates, and phone calls to those overseas ran into over a hundred pounds…Likewise I included a large number of photographs actually taken in situ…

He goes on to mention 18 former colleagues by name for their help with documents, maps, photos and recollections. There are lots of photos but, as I mentioned, most of them are documentary i.e. factual photos of individuals in his battery or contemporary scenes – the silly Edwardian photos with humorous captions which littered the earlier volumes have disappeared.

He also gives excerpts from Alf Fildes’s diary and regularly includes written anecdotes from his best mate Harry Edgington (e.g. pages 120, 142, 234). In fact he mentions ringing up Harry (who had emigrated to New Zealand) and also calling Ken Carter (p.232), to confirm specific facts and memories.

This irritated preface ends with another (i.e. they also appeared in the previous volumes) tribute to his mates and their ongoing closeness, mentioning their twice-a-year reunions, and the text is sprinkled with references to meeting old comrades at reunions or at other events, decades later. These links to old comrades matters a lot to Spike and their importance comes over with far more urgency, and need, than in the previous volumes.

Day-by-day diary format

As with the previous three, it’s done in diary form. But in line with his irritation Spike’s diary entries are given in capitals and preceded by MY DIARY just to ram home the message that it all actually happened.

So what we read is the daily account of how Spike and the boys lived, day to day, with very little analysis, little overview of the campaigns he took part in, no detachment or distance. Instead this happens, and they take the mickey out of it – then that happens, and they make gags about it – then this happens and they all have a larf about it, and so on, for a surprisingly long 288 pages in the Penguin paperback edition.

Gags

Kidgell looks pensively out towards Italy. ‘I was worried about the landing.’
‘Don’t worry about the landing. I’ll hoover it in the morning.’ (p.9)

‘I thought you were a champion swimmer.’
‘Yes, but you can’t swim in army boots.’
‘You’re right, there isn’t enough room.’ (p.9)

Lunch was a mangled stew, lumps of gristle floating on the surface. Edgington said if you held your ear to it you could hear an old lady calling ‘Helpppp.’ (p.13)

Budden tells us, ‘We’ll walk to HQ and get fresh orders.’
I tell him I don’t need fresh orders. I’m perfectly satisfied with the ones I’ve got. (p.29)

Edgington is speaking heatedly. It’s the only way to keep warm. (p.68)

Ernie Hart was a nice lad with a quiet sense of humour, so quiet no one ever heard it. (p.123)

Outside I rubbed my hands with glee. (I always kept a tin handy.) (p.245)

Incidentally the boys themselves are aware that many of these gags are corny or stretched. He often recalls the bit of repartee then writes ‘(groans)’ afterwards (pages 102, 218).

‘I’m too bloody tired to smoke,’ he said.
‘Try steaming,’ I said. ‘It’s easier.’ (p.253)

They were joking on the battlefield, whistling to keep their spirits up, trying to encourage and cheer each other up and fairly often it seems stretched and contrived. I’ve pointed out in some of my reviews of thrillers that many of the classic thriller writers of the 50s and 60s carried the intense atmosphere of the war, its threat and peril, into civilian life; their protagonists carry it around with them. In the same way, maybe, we can say that Spike carried the rather desperate gagging which kept him and his mates going through the war into his civilian career, to great effect in the Goon Show but with diminishing returns after that.

(Incidentally, more, if very casual, information is thrown on the origin of the term when Spike tells us that it was a common nickname for Gunners like himself to be referred to as Gooners or just Goons. And at one point he parodies someone referred to as Florence Nightingale, saying they were more like Florence Nightingoon, the Lady of the Lump, p.135.)

(A few days after reading Spike I was reading Fitzroy Maclean’s war classic, Eastern Approaches’, and came across references to him and fellow members of the SAS listening to Tommy Handley and It’s That Man Again on the wireless and went to listen to some on YouTube. It’s immediately obvious that Handley’s humour uses the same kind of bad puns and deliberate misunderstandings as Spike – ‘I’ve been taking a walk, and if anybody else wants to take it, they can have it. I’ve finished with it’ – making me realise that Spike was peddling the same kinds of gags into the late 1970s that he’d grown up listening to in the 1930s. A proper appreciation of where he was new or innovative would have to start with a really thorough understanding of the British comedy landscape of the 1930s, something which is way beyond my scope.)

(Deliberately?) bad proofreading

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall is written in a deliberately flaky style. Lots of the sentences contain three or four or five clauses just separated by commas which would be better broken up into shorter sentences by full stops. There are unnecessarily hyphenated words, unnecessarily capitalised words:

  • He stayed for launch, a lovely Stew (p.108)
  • Bentley has diagnosed his own illness as Malaria only to have another doctor diagnose it correctly as Jaundice. (p.136)

Both together:

In the dark night the war went on, being able to sleep peacefully, dry, snug and warm was I suppose, Luxury. (p.144)

There are occasional grammar errors (‘This bloody army were food mad!’, p.98) and erratic typographical gaps or breaks between main text and quotations (from other people’s diaries or letters etc). And regular outbreaks of multiple exclamation or other punctuation marks:

An OP has been established on Monte Croce. Not again! Rain!!! Where does the stuff come from?? (p.104)

The overall effect is of deliberate scrappiness, like a scrapbook, like a kind of student mag or fanzine, as if this adds to the spontaneousness and wackiness of the text, as if breathless sentences and random capitals make it all more wacky and humorous.

Same goes for the misspellings. He talks about ‘the Scotts’ (p.47) or a ‘recoco chair’ (p.67), describes his Major playing the clarionet (although that one’s debatable, p.82), refers to ‘the Bosche’ (p.94), writes ‘Above us the battle was going on full belt’ (p.278). My point being some of these are such egregious errors no professional proofreader would have missed them, so it must have been a conscious editorial choice – all of it, the caps, the misspellings, the bad punctuation, the random caps…

Maybe the manuscript arrived like this from Spike and the editors decided to leave them in to increase the sense of wackiness and improvisation. But then the whole thing was supposedly ‘edited’ by Jack Hobbs, so it was clearly a high-level decision to let it be like this.

Sex

They’re young, fit, healthy men so they think about sex all the time, a great deal of the banter is about sex and, being men, this means rude observations about the size, shape and state of each other’s penises. Any woman – our nurses or Italian civilians – will be mercilessly ogled.

‘Buon giorno, Maria.’
She smiled and blushed, the innocence of Italian country girls was something to see. Something else to see was the top of her stocking tops when she bent over. (p.171)

Travelling on the back of a lorry, the sight of a pretty girl immediately erupted into mass drooling until she was out of sight. (p.194)

There were loads of pretty girls who came under fire from the tailboard. The cries ranged from ‘I can do you a power of good, my dear’ to the less poetic ‘Me give you ten inches of pork sword, darlin”. (p.218)

Not just unacceptable but illegal, these days.

There are the usual half-disguised references to masturbation, which must have been rife (and again I refer the reader to Eric Newby’s mention of men masturbating every night in his prisoner of war camp) (pages 154, 265).

There’s a running joke that Edgington doesn’t join in chatting up every ‘bird’ they see and certainly doesn’t go to the two brothels described in the text; instead he writes long letters to his sweetheart back home, Peg, the joke being that the more he writes the more he remembers having sex with her, the more aroused and frustrated he becomes, for example pages 86 and 87:

At the mention of Peg his eyes went soft and his trousers boiled.

Some of the sex slang was new to me. A simple-minded soldier refers to squeezing liquid mud through the holes in a hessian sack so as to create little worms of mud spaghetti as ‘sexy’. To which:

‘Sexy?’ said Bombardier Fuller. ‘You must be bloody hard up for it if you get the Colin’ watchin’ that.’ (p.130)

‘Get the Colin?’ Later he refers to vaseline by its navy nickname ‘starters’, as in ‘a pot of starters’ and goes on to explain that if the reader doesn’t understand this they should contact Royal Navy PR, as ’70 per cent of the officers are Gay up there’ (p.137). So he is aware of homosexuals, I had been wondering (and p.158).

Race

Spike refers to Indians as wogs (pp. 16, 133) and to Black people using the n word (pages 133, 195) and ‘coon’ (as in ‘Coon-type singing’, p.265) – though not all the time, he also refers to Blacks as ‘negroes’ (p.182) or ‘coloured’. In other words he used (or was depicting) the idiom of the time. It feels done without malice, because (re. ‘wogs’) he was raised in India and liked the culture and people and (re. the n word) he was a massive fan of Black jazz music. Still, the modern woke reader should be warned.

The politically correct would also be incensed by the three or four times the lads do cartoon impersonations of imagined Black servants on a southern plantation from a Hollywood movie (‘Gone with the Wind’ had been released just four years earlier, 1939). Thus, when his mate Edgington turns up at a new billet:

‘Welcome home, young massa,’ I said. ‘De plantation ain’t been de same widout you.’ (p.254)

It’s the idiom of the day and it’s spoofing a popular movie (1943) but it does, admittedly, have an extra edge of satire or sarcasm or needle. Given a choice Spike always prefers the slangy or disrespectful term for anything (the Germans, the army, officers, soldiers as a whole, the Brits, himself, anything if it’ll raise a laugh). It was part of the humour of the day, but double edged. He can never mention Gunner Kidgell without called him ‘short-arse Kidgell’. And he refers to the Italians throughout as ‘Itis’.

Spike is also very aware when people are Jewish and, again, invokes stock stereotypes of Jews i.e. being tight with money or being in the rag trade in the East End (pages 160). I think I remember from the 70s that calling someone a ‘Jew’ was an insult indicating that they were tight (with money). Unacceptable these days, and has been for some time. He mentions someone being Jewish or Jews in general, often emphasising their alleged tightness with money, on pages 160, 193, 198, 202, 223, 258, 271, 274.

At one point an attack by German Messerschmitts forces him and comrades to run naked from showers and jump into nearby slit trenches for protection. But what bothers him is not the risk of getting killed but that he left all his money in his battledress hanging up outside the shower. The second the danger’s over, he goes running back.

Thank God! Money was safe! I just have Jewish blood. (p.258)

Events

The journey aboard ship from North Africa to Italy. Landing on Salerno beach, unopposed because it’s secure, but with the wreckage of fierce fighting all around. Journey up into the hills and then a long slog of positions taken up by his artillery battery, Battery D.

Almost immediately he comes down with sand fly fever and is taken off to hospital for a week long interlude of clean sheets, decent food and pretty nurses. But he starts to go round the bend with boredom and is relieved to be one day collected by a truck and taken back to his mates on the battery. Here, as in every memoir I’ve ever read about war, it’s about friendship, mateship and camaraderie rather than any grand cause.

The new-found seriousness extends as far as an argument he gets into with a northerner who sings the praises of Gracie Fields and George Formby who Spike cordially loathes, explaining that he is a devotee of the Marx Brothers and Bing Crosby (p.54). (Regarding styles of humour, later he hears a broadcast by ITMA and thinks ‘corny bastards’, p.256).

There’s still quite a lot about music, they hear the kind of big band jazz they like on the radio, in an Italian church they discover a piano and play Cole Porter (in fact they perform and sing some Cole Porter but then the Italian priest sings plays and sings some Verdi opera thus trumping them). Othertimes they perform with what they have, including one night they have a little performance with an ocarina, guitar and shaken matchbox, with the others joining in banging mugs (p.138).

He visits the ruins of Pompeii (pages 51 to 53).

Spike’s job

I’d read his descriptions of his duties in volume 2 but it was only in this one that it was made unmistakably clear that Spike’s job was ‘wireless operator’ for an artillery battery (p.46) i.e. laying (or retrieving) phone cables, then using radio sets to co-ordinate with other observation posts to target artillery fire accurately at enemy positions, as described pages 76 to 77.

His battery constantly move to new positions as the front line advances, and enemy planes fly over and occasional shells land nearby but he is repeatedly grateful that he’s not in the poor infantry, sent forward into withering machinegun fire.

The Germans slowly retreat into the mountains which the poor bloody infantry have to storm while Spike’s battery and many others lob shells up into the mountains. The main event is the rain: it rains incessantly, the tents, the men, their uniforms and equipment become sodden. The artillery stands become so sodden that the guns slip backwards or sideways when they fire. All their efforts become devoted to trying to find somewhere dry to shelter and sleep.

Maybe the most vivid scene, possibly the longest lasting all of three pages, is his vivid recreation of a concert he and his mates organised and staged on Christmas Day 1943, giving us the full list of acts, an impressive series of farcical performances and musical interludes.

Just days later they’re given four days’ leave in Amalfi which seems like Disneyland after the muddy farms they’ve been staying in. Memorable evening, standing on the garden terrace watching night fall over the bay, and then onto a cafe kept by a Cockney-speaking Italian momma who lays on an unprecedented feast.

In Amalfi he’s invited into a brothel and initially refuses all offers, preferring to sit relaxed, drink and get pissed, until – according to his account – the lady of the house dragged him into a bedroom and not only screwed him but paid him.

On 5 January they are moved to a new forward position just outside the village of Lauro.

15 January a direct hit on a gun emplacement, exploding munitions and burning four gunners he knows to death, with many other burns casualties. Happens in the middle of the night, Spike is up and running round helping as best he can.

He develops piles (‘the curse of the Milligans’), goes see the medical officer (MO) but there doesn’t seem to be any treatment short of having them operated on and removed. They go from painful to actively bleeding. Normally irrepressibly chirpy, this throws him into a depression (p.271).

The climax, Spike is wounded

On 20 January 1944 Spike is in pain from bleeding piles, depressed, and hasn’t had much sleep for two nights when a lieutenant asks for a volunteer to go and replace a signalman up at Tac HQ, which is near the front lines, also where their commanding officer, now regularly referred to as ‘Looney’ Jenkins, is based. Very reluctantly Spike volunteers and sets in train the sequence of events which will see him wounded and invalided out.

Alf Fildes drives him to Tac HQ which entails crossing the makeshift bridge across the river Garigliano, shrouded in camouflage smoke because the Jerries are throwing over lots of artillery. They pull up outside a cluster of farmhouse buildings which is Tac HQ. All round are dead German bodies no-one’s had time to bury.

the moment Spike arrives Major Jenkins puts him on the headphones and keeps him at it for 17 hours without a break (‘the bastard’), monitoring and sending radio signals, he even has to argue for permission to go for a piss. Machinegun bullets whine over the roof and shells land, some scarily close, shaking the buildings. His piles start to bleed and he feels at the end of his tether.

Then Jenkins orders him and three colleagues to go forward, under fire, to the observation post (OP) carrying batteries and a new 22 wireless set. They cross a field containing a recently hit Sherman tank, scramble up a gully full of cowering infantry and emerge into the open to climb up the hillside, tiered for agriculture, as machine gun bullets and mortars land all around.

They all throw themselves to the ground then Spike remembers lying on his front, then a terrific explosion and he’s lying on his back, regaining consciousness, seeing red, strangely dazed (p.278).

He knows if they stay there they’ll be sitting ducks and turns and scrambles back down the mountain. Next thing he knows he’s talking to Major Jenkins crying his eyes out – the major tells him to get his wound dressed and he realises he’s wounded in the right thigh, couple of inches long quarter of an inch deep, but it’s not the wound, it’s the shaking and the crying – he’s put into an ambulance, given pills, in a gesture of kindness he’ll never forget, comforted by another wounded man – then he’s on a stretcher, loaded into a Red Cross truck – arrives at a camp and tent and bunk…

Next morning he’s woken up by an American band playing reveille – an orderly tells him he’s at camp 144 CS and has been categorised as suffering from Battle Fatigue – bereft of any kit he goes to the American camp where, true to form, the Yanks are fantastically generous, giving him a towel, razor soap etc and Spike starts crying Thanks – it’s not the wound that bothers him it’s the way he can’t stop crying…

He’s taken to see a psychiatrist who’s an army captain who tells him, rather threateningly, that he will get better, understand? He’s given a hot dinner and more tranquilisers –

On 27 January, just a week later, far from rested and recuperated, Spike finds himself back with his battery, still in the same position outside Lauro but he feels broken…

I was not really me any more

The spring that made me Spike Milligan was gone (p.284)

He has stopped crying but can’t stop stammering – Major Jenkins gives him a dressing down for being a coward and he is stripped of his one stripe i.e. demoted from Lance Bombardier back to Gunner. He is taking the pills prescribed him at the hospital which deprive him of his old personality.

I am by now completely demoralised. All the laughing had stopped. (p.284)

In retrospect, Spike thinks that if they’d given him a couple of weeks rest he might have bounced back, but being sent straight back and then shouted at by the martinet Major finished him off. After a couple of days he can’t take it any more and is driven away from the Battery, no longer to serve, never to see his mates again…

I felt as though I were being taken across the river Styx. I’ve never got over that feeling. (p.285)

Psychiatric hospital

10 February 1944. He is sent to a proper hospital, bright, light, clean, airy, miles behind the lines. Psychiatric ward. About 50 patients, most doped to the gills. Silence.

He is seen by a Major Palmer, a tough former boxer who suffers no malingerers but who accepts he is in shock. He is sent to a rehabilitation camp north of Naples.

Final collapse

Cut to a month later, 9 March 1944. Spike is now out of his unit and far from the front. He is taken to a terrible muddy camp outside a suburb of Naples called Afrigola. He is given a job in ‘reception’ i.e. in a tent at the gateway to the camp where he asks the same questions of new arrivals, fills in and files their paperwork. The last paragraph of the book tries to put a brave face on it:

Will Milligan recover? Will he get back to the big time among the Lance-Bombardier set? Above all, will he lose the stammer that makes him take four hours to say good morning? All this and more in Vol. 5, Goodbye Soldier, to be serialised in Gay News. (p.288)

So he ends the narrative by trying restore the cheeky chappy, zany character of the preceding text but, well, it doesn’t work.

(Incidentally the last gag isn’t homophobia, I think, just surrealism. It’s an off-the-cuff gag citing just about the last place the memoirs of girl-mad shagger Milligan were likely to be serialised.)

Shall I read volume 5? Volume 4 is not as funny as its predecessors and, at 288 pages, turned into quite a grind. Plus I always knew it was heading for this sad denouement. According to the blurbs volume 5 is just as long at 280 pages, and devoted to Spike’s personal battle with depression and psychiatric problems… Not a thrilling prospect, is it?

Class animus

Spike really hates their new commanding officer, the over-officious unbending Major Jenkins, ‘Fuck him’ (p.128) and this dislike curdles into outright hatred, citing everyone under Jenkins’ command who gave him the nickname ‘Loony’ for his impenetrably stupid orders.

He enjoys retailing stories of officers making wallies of themselves, like the officer who very grandly swanked into view of the battery, took out a shooting stick, unfolded it, sat squarely on it, and then it sank slowly into the quagmire till he fell on his back in the mud. How they laughed (p.76).

He is also thrilled to bits when the officers’ mess catches fire and gleefully describes how hated Major Jenkins runs into the flames to retrieve his belongings into a pile which some of the men (who all hate him), as soon as his back is turned, promptly throw back into the fire (p.152).

He contrasts Churchill meeting Roosevelt in the warmth and Cairo in some luxury hotel with the plight of him and his mates, living for weeks in soaking tents, wearing sodden clothes which start to fall apart and riddled with lice.

(Anti-officer stories or reflections on pages 164, 165, 202)

Spike doesn’t need to comment when he and a few comrades, who are billeted in farm outbuildings covered in centuries or ordure lay a phone line up to headquarters and open the door to the officers mess to find it a cosy clean billet with a warm fire and the officers all swigging whisky and laughing (p.195). The class resentment bubbles off the page.

Seriouser

I mentioned that, although Spike continues to blitz us with gags, he also shares quite serious opinions, much more so than in the previous three volumes:

We drive through Sparanise, badly shelled and bombed, some buildings still smouldering. The inhabitants are in a state of shock, women and children are crying, men are searching amid the ruins for belongings or worse, their relatives. It was the little children that depressed me the most, that such innocence should be put to such suffering. The adult world should forever hang its head in shame at the terrible, unforgivable things done to the young… (p.80)

This reminded me of the description in ‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’ of a German artillery attack on the Italian town of Termoli which wiped out a civilian family except for the little boy who was running round screaming with his intestines hanging out of a terrible stomach wound, till SAS hard man Reg Seekings grabbed him and shot him dead on the spot.

Any leader who declares war, whether in Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar, is committing to blowing up little children and should be damned forever.

Half a dozen times he refers to coming from an Irish family and having been raised a Catholic but, in the face of the suffering he’s seen, he has suffered a fairly predictable loss of faith:

A Catholic priest visited us this evening and asked if anyone wanted Confession and Holy Communion. I nearly went but since the war started my belief in God had suffered a reverse. I couldn’t reconcile all the killing by two sides who both claimed to be Christian societies… (p.83)

Undertones of madness

Because I know this is the volume which ends with him getting invalided out with shell shock or PTSD, I noticed the increased number of references to madness littered throughout the text. If he’d been a literary author i.e. one who carefully planned his narrative and effects, I’d say he had carefully seeded the notion, or references to different types of madness, in a cunning preparation for his eventual collapse. In practice, the text is so chaotically assembled I doubt there was that much calculation. Conscious or not, they’re there.

At one point there’s a shortage of fags and Spike goes four days without a puff. The pupils of his eyes dilate and ‘I spoke in a high strained voice on the edge of a scream’ (p.48).

‘There’s a bloke in a truck waiting for you.’
‘Is he wearing a white coat.’ (p.60)

Inside the farm an Italian an Italian baby was crying and the mother was trying to calm it in a hysterical high-pitched shriek. (p.63)

From the distant hill we hear the dreadful sound of Spandaus and Schmeisers that are spraying the early morning with bullets, and I can’t but wonder at the courage of these lads in the Guards brigade going forward into it. What a terrible, unexplainable lunacy. (p.75)

‘How?’ said Gunner White looking down at the brown sea of mud, ‘how can we get out of this before we all go stark ravin’ bloody mad?’ (p.82)

And on pages 200, 204, 228, 229, 265, 272…

‘See?, we’re not the only ones who’ve lost our marbles,’ said Edgington. (p.228)

‘Your power to bend words will one day end you in the nick, nuthouse or graveyard.’ (p.229)

On page 193 the boys discuss the random theory that Hitler was driven mad due to piles. In which case a tube of Anusol would have prevented the whole war.

There are also rumbling references to suicide. They are kept so long at a position on the hill in the endless rain that Milligan wonders if some of the men will commit suicide to escape and, in fact, a soldier at HQ does (p.178).

Part of it is the cognitive dissonance of war. He and his mates enjoy a hot meal, stew and potatoes, huddled round a fire in their freezing dugout. Down in the plain they hear a sudden outbreak of machinegun fire, first theirs, then ours (they can recognise the different makes of machinegun by the sound). Down there, two patrols have clashed and are murdering each other.

I slide another spoonful of dinner in. I really can’t get it all together, us dining, them dying… (p.257)

You can hear the mental strain, the same insanity of war which Kurt Vonnegut struggled to manhandle into the fantastical storyline of Slaughterhouse Five and Joseph Heller transformed into the masterpiece of bureaucratic craziness, Catch-22.

Il Duce

Volume 3 is named after Montgomery who is never actually mentioned in the text (just in one picture caption). Mussolini, by contrast is, I think, mentioned three times, pages 55, 63 and 197.

Evelyn Waugh

Why has he got it in for Evelyn Waugh? There was a fantasy scene depicting Waugh getting drunk and buggering Randolph Churchill in the previous book. In this one he envisions Waugh, pissed off his face, standing up during an air raid in Yugoslavia shouting abuse at Randolph Churchill (p.175). Are they symbols, for Spike of upper class privilege.

Angry or grumpy?

When does justifiable anger against the world morph into sounding like a grumpy old man? At what point do you cross the line from righteous indignation to sounding like a tirade in the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph, homes for people who can’t adapt to a changing world? Spike and this book are a kind of test bed for that question.

Pity the children

One morning after roll-call I was exploring the environs of the camp when I discovered the remains of what had been a big bonfire. The surviving pieces were interesting: Fascist uniforms worn by schoolchildren during indoctrination training, Bambini della Lupa (Children of the Wolf) and along with them were little wooden rifles and kindergarten books praising Mussolini, Il Duce nostra Buona Padre … etc etc. How in God’s name can adults do this to children? To pervert their minds… (p.56)

And the passage quote above, from page 80.

General misanthropy

During the brief R&R in Amalfi they watch fishermen kill octopuses they’ve captured by turning them inside out.

It was obscenely cruel, but then Man is. (p.238)

Reunions

The reunions with his old army pals were obviously important to Spike. He goes out of his way to mention, in his irritated preface, that he and his comrades have not one but two reunions a year ‘something no other British Army unit have’, before spelling out that he’s referring to D Battery, 56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery. And he repeats this again at the very end when he’s spelling out what esprit de corps means, how his mates had it and their hated CO, Major Jenkins, absolutely didn’t (p.285).

He tells us that in December 1976 he organised a reunion at the Medusa Restaurant of those involved in the fighting in and around Steam Roller Farm, 26 February 1943. Strikingly, they invited one of the Germans who’d been fighting opposite them to the meal (p.63).

On a particularly freezing wet night one of the lads. Gunner Trew, asked for a sip of Spike’s tea and ended up draining it.

Now, whenever there’s a reunion, I walk straight up to him and say ‘Gi’s a sip’, take his beer and drain it to the bottom and say ‘Remember Italy’. (p.89)

Vindictiveness

This points to another aspect of the text which feels new, which is that Spike never forgets a grudge. The Trew story is, if you read it briskly, funny – but it chimes with other places which aren’t funny and where resentment smoulders on after 35 years. For example, he doesn’t let up in his criticism of their unbearable commanding officer, Major Evans.

In another, surprising, passage he has it in for his Dad. He says that his Dad’s letters from home become an increasing pain in the arse. This is because his Dad relentlessly nags him to reply to his Mum’s letters. But Spike insists to the reader that he does answer all his Mum’s letters. He goes on to tell us that, after the war, he sent every letter to his Mum registered post and kept the receipts and pasted them into a book and showed his Dad the book – at which he claims his Dad said the book could be a fake! It reveals Spike’s inability to let it go.

And he also emphasises to the reader that it cost him a ‘fortune’ in registered letters, an indication of his own ‘tightness’ with money which, as we’ve seen, he tends to attribute to Jewish people. (Compare the phrase in the preface which emphasises that calling up old comrades who live abroad, to check the facts, ‘ran into over a hundred pounds’. Money was obviously an issue for Spike who never really made it big, not ‘big’ like his frenemy Peter Sellers.)

Post-war sadness

A number of remarks are more redolent of 1970s Britain than 1940s Italy, especially the references to Britain going down the tubes, no longer being ‘Great’ and so on. Daily Mail territory.

…even today the indoctrination goes on. China. Russia. Out own democracies corrupt with pornography and Media Violence… (p.56)

Combined with the sense, which comes over in the references to contemporary reunions, that they will never recover that carefree esprit de corps, they will never be so young or so free again, which takes shape as quiet despair at the dullness of suburban life. For example, they bunk down in an abandoned farmhouse and Spike records the graffitti including ‘The Tebourba Tigers’.

The latter refers to the name they conferred on themselves after a savage action at Tebourba in Tunisia. Where are those tigers now? Watching telly? Washing up?… (p.67)

At moments like this the book reflects the general sense of frustrated malaise widespread across the Britain of the 1970s, see the Reginald Perrin novels, or the exasperated frustration at the start of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or any number of 70s sitcoms like Rising Damp. ‘Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,’ as Pink Floyd sang in 1973.

And then throw Spike’s own, personal, depression into the mix. It doesn’t explicitly appear that often in this long text, but it’s a strong, depressive tone which flavours the whole thing.

The ugly English

Related to the sense of Britain going down the tubes and the dullness of suburban life goes a passage about the sheer crapness of English ‘cuisine’.

the Anglo-Saxon will devour stale bread, bully beef, hard rolls, food boiled to death and obliterated with artificial seasoning – yet delightfully cooked octopus in garlic? No! You are what you eat, that’s why we all look so bloody ugly. (p.238)

Similarly, tea. I, personally, hate tea but the soldiers lived for mugs of the sweet brown dishwater. But even so:

As I walk I sip the life-giving tea – why do we dote on tea? It tastes bloody awful, it’s only the sugar and milk that make it drinkable. It’s like fags – we’ve got hooked… (p.261)

Emigration

All this explains why he sympathises with the idea of emigrating away from poor old Britain…

His brother Desmond is 17 and has a crappy job. No wonder he emigrated to Australia p.263

The Russian threat

It’s not untrue but Spike’s warnings against Russian threat reminded me of another radical turned grumpy old man, Kingsley Amis, who wrote several novels warning against a Russian conquest of Britain p.249

Other complaints

He complains that in a village they came to, the British were allowing suspect collaborators to be kept packed in the tiny local police station in inhumane conditions.

Why this situation was allowed to exist can only be put down to the wonderful ‘I’m alright, Jack’ attitude of the British. We are not cruel but, by Christ, sometimes we come very close to it. (p.251)

He describes a local woman cook, Portence, who helps out in the cookhouse, working from dawn till one in the morning and then compares her with:

some of the soppy females of today who get a charlady to clean their flat of three rooms while they phone their friends and eat chocolates. (p.252)

These examples go to show, I hope, that although there are still loads and loads of quickfire gags, there is also a lot more moaning and complaining about the modern (1970s) world. That’s what I meant by the way his anger against a world which started a world war and destroyed entire cities and killed so many civilians and good blokes and damaged little kids forever morphs and mutates into general ranting against the modern world, modern women, modern TV and porn and video nasties etc etc, into a general rant.

Some of the rants can be funny. Many are interesting as examples of social history. But between the rants and the grim descriptions of (distant) battles and death, it feels like we have travelled a long way from the relative innocence of the first volume, Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971).

Credit

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall by Spike Milligan was published by Michael Joseph in 1978. References are to the 1978 Penguin paperback edition.

Related reviews

  • Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971)
  • ‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’: A Confrontation in the Desert (1974)
  • Monty: His Part in My Victory (1976)
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Posted by Simon on May 10, 2024

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SAS: Rogue Heroes by Ben Macintyre (2016)

Courage, like death, seldom appears where it is expected.
(One of Ben Macintyre’s reflections in ‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’, page 178)

This is the official history of the Special Air Service (SAS) during the Second World War, from its inception in July 1941 to its disbandment in October 1945.

Among all the other textual paraphernalia there’s a two-page ‘select’ bibliography which includes no fewer than 25 other books which had already been written about the SAS when this one was published (2016) and I bet more have been published since. So it’s a very popular and well-trodden subject. Indeed, Macintyre writes that as the Second World War reached an end, and the British press discovered the SAS:

The hints of roguish derring-do, combined with a distinct lack of hard detail, created a hunger for SAS stories that has never abated. (p.273)

What distinguishes this book from its competitors is its official status and therefore the access Macintyre was given to a mass of material including: the regimental diary (the SAS War Diary), personal accounts, top secret reports, memos, private diaries, letters, memoirs, maps, never-before-released archival material and hundreds of photos. The result is a 310-page Penguin paperback which is presumably as close to the definitive account as we’re likely to get.

The narrative is surrounded by textual apparatus, including a Foreword by the Right Honourable Viscount Slim, patron of the SAS Association; seven good, clear maps; a list of all the SAS operations during the war; a regimental roll of honour; a chapter giving the post-war careers of the book’s leading figures; numerous photos; the bibliography and an index.

Overshadowing all this is the fact that the book was made into a big-budget BBC drama series, broadcast in 6 episodes at the end of 2022, well reviewed in the press and watched by millions. I bought the book after watching the series, probably like tens if not hundreds of thousands of others. So it’s not only a popular history of then, the Second World War, but very much an artefact of our times, of now.

Part 1. War in the Desert

‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’ is immensely readable, clearly, authoritatively, grippingly written, a perfectly calibrated entertainment. I couldn’t put it down and read it in two highly enjoyable evenings. No wonder it was a Sunday Times bestseller.

You can read the basic facts on the SAS Wikipedia article and countless other web pages. My blog posts are always too long because I summarise everything; this time I’m just going to give the most striking, dramatic or funny elements in note form:

David Stirling

The SAS was founded by Sir Archibald David Stirling who came from a grand, landed Scottish aristocratic family. His family connections helped at key moments drum up support from Scottish grandees high up in the British Army: ‘This was an age when family and class connections counted for much’ (p.23). And:

Stirling was possessed of a profound self-belief, the sort of confidence that comes from high birth and boundless opportunity. (p.10)

Apparently, the decisive moment in Stirling’s life was when he was rejected from a Paris art school for being no good. He became determined to prove himself some other way (pages 9 and 91).

Stirling prided himself on being a renegade, a rebel against traditional army discipline and authority, an opinion vouchsafed by everyone who knew him plus all subsequent biographers. After completing officer training his report summarised him as ‘irresponsible and unremarkable.’

In return he powerfully disliked army discipline and hierarchy, calling military bureaucracy ‘a freemasonry of mediocrity’ and ‘layer upon layer of fossilised shit’ (p.22).

Surprisingly (or maybe not) everyone who worked with him said he was quietly spoken, respectful of his men, got to know them all, rarely raised his voice or lost his temper. He presented comrades in the group with challenges or missions and somehow made them feel like it was their duty to do it.

He was also very against boasting and swank which he described as being ‘pomposo’ (p.126).

Alternative tactics

Traditionalists still thought of wars in terms of huge armies clashing across defined fronts. Stirling conceived of a small agile force working behind enemy lines to sabotage enemy resources.

This was war on the hoof, invented ad hoc, unpredictable, highly effective and often chaotic. (p.172)

This ended up working dramatically well in the North African desert where civilisation amounts to a thin strip along the roads by the coast, inland from which stretch truly vast areas of desert, many of which were unexplored and unmapped in the 1940s.

I was staggered to learn that the Libyan desert covers half a million square miles, nearly half the area as India (1.269 miles²) (p.58).

Stirling badly damaged his back on his first parachute jump, losing consciousness and, when he awoke, unable to walk. Doctors thought he’d be crippled for life. Slowly feeling returned but later he suffered from blinding migraines.

Operation Squatter

Notoriously, the first SAS ‘mission’, Operation Squatter, on 16 November 1941, was a catastrophic blunder. The aim was to parachute at night behind German lines in the Libyan desert, infiltrate five enemy airfields on foot, plants explosives on as many German and Italian airplanes as possible, then head south to a rendezvous with the jeeps of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) deep in the desert.

But a fierce storm blew up just as the planes were due to depart. At that point, and then again when they were over the drop zone and due to jump, Stirling was warned to abort, but he took the pig-headed decision to proceed. 1) One of the aircraft carrying the SAS men was shot down – all 15 soldiers and the crew were killed. 2) The pilots were flying absolutely blind in a howling desert storm, had no idea where they were and told the soldiers to jump blind. 3) Some members of the remaining four teams were killed when they landed badly or were dragged across rocky, thorn-bush-full landscape by their chutes. Half a dozen were so badly injured they were left with pistols and told to fend for themselves. At least one shot himself there and then. Three of the teams couldn’t find the packs of ammunition, food and explosives that were dropped with them so were rendered useless. One by one they stumbled south to the rendezvous point. The mission failed to destroy a single enemy aircraft and of the 65 SAS men who set off only 21 made it back (p.55).

It was such a traumatic incident that Macintyre covers it twice, once in the brief prologue to the entire book, designed to drum up excitement (pages 1 and 2), then in an entire chapter (chapter 4, pages 47 to 56) which makes very grim reading.

Amazing that the powers that be let Stirling continue with his experiment. After this fiasco the only way was up.

Paddy Mayne

Top international rugby player. Notorious drunk with a terrible temper. Only close friend he had was Eoin MacGonigal with whom he forged a close, possibly homoerotic, bond, but who was killed during Operation Squatter. Mayne was never the same. Six months later Mayne took leave to go look for MacGonigal’s grave in the desert (p.116). Mayne was a core member of the early group but he and Stirling were never close.

Mayne seemed to take pleasure in slaughter: ‘Fighting was in his blood: he thrived on it.’ (p.115)

The attack on Tamet airfield, designed to knock out Axis planes, but when Paddy heard sounds of merriment from the pilots hut he and two others kicked the door open and opened up with machine guns massacring all the Germans and Italians within. Just one of many such incidents.

Jock Lewes

The exact opposite of Mayne, John Steele ‘Jock’ Lewes was a strict disciplined Englishman. Macintyre says he toured Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and even fell in love with a German woman, but when she introduced him to hard core fascists the scales fell from his eyes and he behave ever afterwards like a man angry at having been fooled.

Lewes was a key player in the formation of the unit with whom Stirling developed the idea of a special force which could be parachuted behind enemy lines and after seeing action in the defence of Tobruk, he joined the unit as Stirling’s second in command.

He was involved in the design of the unit’s badge and motto and was an inveterate tinker, designing the ‘Lewes bomb’ which could be attached to enemy planes or vehicles with an inbuilt timer. To cite his Wikipedia page:

To destroy Axis vehicles, members of the SAS surreptitiously attached small explosive charges. Lewes noticed the respective weaknesses of conventional blast and incendiaries, as well as their failure to destroy vehicles in some cases. He improvised a new, combined charge out of plastic explosive, diesel and thermite. The Lewes bomb was used throughout the Second World War.

He was killed by enemy airplane fire after leading an attack on Nofilia aerodrome, on 30 December 1941 aged 28 (p.79). Stirling later stated that Lewes had a better right to be the founder of the SAS than he did. Lewes’s death in the TV series is very upsetting and feels like the end of an era. It’s only by reading this book that you realise the entire North Africa era was just the first part of a much, much longer story.

Amateurishness

Throughout the book there’s a tension between the initial amateurishness of the group Stirling assembled and its home-made training regimes (for example, his bonkers idea that jumping out the back of a jeep travelling at 30 miles per hour was good training for making a parachute jump) and the tremendous commitment of everyone in the group to their leader and their methods.

Unlike most officers, who thought in linear terms, and care about promotion, medals and the steady progression of the battlefront, Stirling approached warfare sideways and from an amateur perspective. (p.99)

Fitzroy Maclean

Also from a grand family, Fitzroy Hew Royle Maclean, 1st Baronet, (1911 to 1996), unlike Stirling, was a scholar and an intellectual (p.83). When war broke out he transferred to the army from a successful career in the diplomatic service. He was with the SAS for about a year, in 1942, taking part in numerous raids, including the farcical attack on Benghazi. Later that year he was transferred to the Middle East as part of the Persia and Iraq Command before, in 1943, Churchill chose him to lead a liaison mission to Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia in 1943. After the war he served as a Conservative MP and recorded his extraordinary career in the classic book ‘Eastern Approaches’. Maclean is routinely cited as a possible inspiration for Ian Fleming’s creation of the character of James Bond. He is quoted delivering a classic English attitude to foreigners (uncharacteristically philistine for a man fluent in numerous languages):

‘I have always found that in dealing with foreigners whose language one does not speak, it is best to shout.’ (p.105)

The motto

He describes the debate about designing a badge for the unit and choosing a motto. ‘Who dares wins’ motto beat alternative suggestions ‘Strike and destroy’ (too blunt) and ‘Ascend to descend’ (obscure) (p.85).

The French

Surprisingly ‘French troops would play a vital role in the evolution of the SAS’ (p.87). This remark is à propos the arrival of 52 Free French paratroopers under the command of Colonel Georges Bergé and it is, indeed, surprising to learn the extent to which Free French troops were involved in SAS operations.

The farcical raid on Benghazi

Featuring Maclean and Randolph Churchill. Chapter 9, pages 97 to 110, a) from a base in the Jebel mountain range and b) using the ‘Blitz Buggy’. This was a Ford V8 station wagon with a top speed of 70 mph containing two rows of 3 seats, with the roof and windows removed and painted Wehrmacht grey. (p.94).

On the evening of 21 May 1942 the Blitz Buggy, containing Stirling, Maclean, Randolph Churchill (Winston’s son) and three others bluffed their way past German then Italian guards and into Benghazi where they hid out in a ruined house while planning to row dinghies out to ships in the harbour and attach limpet mines. Everything went wrong starting with the fact that the drive across the desert and up and down gullies etc damaged the rods or something in the buggy which led to it making a howling racket wherever it went. Their night-time attempt to blow up the ships is fouled by heavy guards and the fact that the two inflatable dinghies they brought along both have punctures (and the pumping equipment makes an incredibly loud racket). They nearly get caught umpteen times and are forced to hole up in the ruined flat all day, twitching with nerves as enemy patrols pass by neighbours interfere and, at one point, a drunken Italian blunders in, only to run off at the sight of filthy bearded men with guns. Eventually they drive back out of town in the racketing Blitz Buggy after a very intense 24 hours. The whole thing is like a comic movie and makes for a tense but hilarious scene in the TV series.

In fact Randolph Churchill wrote a highly dramatic ten-page account of the day to his father, Winston, precisely the kind of buccaneering adventure designed to appeal to the wartime PM, and which helped bolster his support for Stirling and the SAS (p.110).

Car crash

It’s typical of Stirling, who really was reckless, not just in military sense, that the four days later, safely back behind British lines, Stirling was driving the Blitz Buggy far too fast, took a corner at speed and, to avoid an oncoming lorry, swerved and ended up rolling the vehicle resulting in: the death of Arthur Merton the distinguished war correspondent; Maclean suffering a broken arm, collarbone and fractured skull; Randolph Churchill receiving three crushed vertebrae; and Sergeant Rose having his arm broken in three places. Maclean quipped that:

‘David Stirling’s driving was the most dangerous thing in World War Two.’ (p.109)

I know he’s a great hero and everything, but quite regularly Stirling comes over as a reckless idiot, the death toll in Operation Squatter and incidents like this providing a powerful indictment.

Captain George Jellicoe

George Patrick John Rushworth Jellicoe, 2nd Earl Jellicoe (1918 to 2007) sailed out to the Middle East with Layforce, met Stirling in the bar at Shepheard’s hotel in April 1942, and signed up for the SAS (p.120). He joined the raiding party of 13 June 1942 which attacked fortifications at Heraklion on Crete. It was led by Colonel Georges Bergé. Disguised as Cretan peasants they cut through the perimeter barbed wire surrounding Heraklion airfield and planted bombs on the fleet of parked Junkers 88 bombers. As they started exploding, the team escaped back to the perimeter fence in the confusion.

Bergé paused after half an hour and announced that they would all be awarded the Croix de Guerre for the night’s work. He then led the party south. Or rather north, because in the excitement he had been reading the map upside down. (p.121)

We get a lot of detail about Jellicoe’s time with the SAS but the most memorable remark is his comic comment on the Free French:

‘They were very, very free; and very, very French.’ (p.124)

An independent force

By June 1942 what had started as L Detachment had raided all the important German and Italian airfields within 300 miles of the forward area. It had long ago dropped the idea of parachuting behind enemy lines and instead had worked closely with the Long Range Desert Group which, basically, drove them to within walking distance of targets, dropped them off, then hung around for a day or two to pick up the returning survivors of each attack.

But during this period it had itself got to know and understand all kinds of desert terrain and benefited from the inspired navigating skills of Mike Sadler.

With its own transport base and navigators, and the ability to attack at will from a forward base, L Detachment was fast becoming what Stirling had always intended it to be: a small, independent army, capable of fighting a different sort of war. (p.132)

Stirling discovers from intercepted messages that the Germans are calling him ‘the Phantom Major’ (p.138).

Sidi Haneish

The extraordinary story of the massed jeep attack on Sidi Haneish airfield. Eighteen jeeps drove 50 miles across the desert from their hideout in Bir el Quseir and then overran the airfield, driving along the main runway in two columns, each jeep armed with Vickers K machine guns, incredibly powerful weapons originally designed for RAF aircraft, causing incredible destruction (pages 139 to 142).

Dinner with Winston Churchill

On pages 153 to 156 Macintyre describes Stirling, back in Cairo, washed and scrubbed and attending dinner with Winston Churchill, with Field Marshall Jan Smuts and General Alexander, C-in-C of the African front. Churchill was, predictably, bowled over by Stirling’s enthusiasm and asked him to write a memo laying out aims of the SAS, a document which still survives.

Stirling asked the three eminent leaders, Churchill, Smuts and Alexander, to sign a piece of paper as a souvenir. Later, with typical chutzpah he typed above it ‘Please give the bearer of this note every possible assistance’ and use it shamelessly to cajole quartermasters into supplying immense amounts of new equipment (p.156).

Expansion

In September 1942 the SAS was recognised in the official British Order of Battle. It was expanded to include 29 officers and 572 other ranks. It was divided into four squadrons, one under Stirling, one under Paddy Mayne, one devoted to the French forces, and a newly commissioned Special Boat Service put under George Jellico (p.167).

At the age of 26 Stirling had become the first man to create his own new regiment since the Boer War. (p.167)

At the end of 1942 a second SAS regiment came into being, commanded by Stirling’s brother, Bill (p.179).

Battle of El Alamein November 1942

The final actions of the SAS in North Africa took place within the much larger event of the (second) Battle of El Alamein, October to 1942. The Germans had advanced inside the borders of British Egypt, and to within forty miles of Alexandria. Not only Egypt was at stake but the country contained the Suez Canal which was the lifeline to the entire British presence in the Far East, as well as controlling access to the oil fields of Persia, also vital for the Allied war effort.

Over two months the new commander of British Forces Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery led the Eighth Army to a victory which was the beginning of the end of the Western Desert Campaign. Victory eliminated the Axis threat to Egypt, the Suez Canal and the Middle Eastern and Persian oil fields. It revived the morale of the Allies, and coincided with the Allied invasion of French North Africa far to the West, thus trapping Rommel’s Afrika Corps in a classic pincer movement.

Stirling is captured

Stirling was desperate to make a contribution to this vast effort. On 16 January a force of 14 men in five jeeps set off from their base in the Tunisian desert aiming to link up with the fast-moving First Army near the coast. The Germans had, of course, for some time been aware of a roving force of saboteurs operating behind their lines and Rommel had ordered sweeps and searches to be made of desert areas close to his main forces. And so it was that, at a rest stop in a ravine en route to the coast, Stirling and his force were surrounded and arrested by a much larger German force. (In fact three of the group managed to escape in the initial confusion and trekked west through the desert to meet up, more dead than alive, with American forces advancing from the West, which I mentioned above.)

But for Stirling the war was over. He was sent to bases in Africa, then Italy, interrogated at all of them. He made some notable escapes but always managed to be recaptured until he was eventually sent to the impregnable fortress of Colditz near Leipzig in East Germany.

Because his capture happened at more or less that same time that the Desert War came to an end (with Allied victory) it coincided in a significant change in the personnel and purpose of the SAS. Macintyre has an elegiac page remembering the members who died during the desert campaign, before turning to the fact that the regiment was now to have a new leader, the dedicated stone-cold killer Paddy Mayne, and was now to operate entirely in occupied Europe.

Part 2. War in Europe

As I mentioned, I bought the book after watching the hugely enjoyable BBC TV series. which, I now realise, only dramatised part one of the book, the Desert War section, pages 1 to 189. It turns out that pages 193 to 310 describe the completely different environment the unit faced fighting in Europe, first up through Italy, then playing their part in the D-Day landings and the push across France, then fighting in Germany itself. All this leads up to the surprising fact that it was SAS men, some of whom we met way back in the early part of the desert campaign, who were the first to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 which tends to cast a grim nihilistic shadow over everything which preceded it.

As I mentioned, the thing about the army, especially in wartime, is that it continually chops and changes and rearranges its units to suit changing needs. Thus, at the end of the desert war, in 1943, 1SAS was split into two parts, a Special Boat Squadron (SBS) under Jellico and a Special Raiding Squadron under Mayne. 2SAS continued in existence under the command of Stirling’s brother, Bill. I imagine for an author like Macintyre the main challenge is which activities of which unit to include.

Sicily

July 1943 Mayne’s SRS was tasked with knocking out defences on beaches on Sicily, ahead of the main allied invasion. In the event:

The Italians surrendered with indecent haste. ‘They gave up very easily,’ said [Johnny] Wiseman. (p.197)

During the assault they had had to paddle their dinghies past Allied paratroopers who were intended to land behind enemy lines but whose gliders got blown off course, crashed in the sea, and now they were drowning. Hard man Reg Seekings describes how they had to paddle straight past them, as stopping to pick them up would wreck their own mission, upon which lives depended.

Seeking emerges, in the second half of the book, as a barely controlled psychopath and hard man. He becomes the Spirit of Killing.

Seekings stormed the machine gun post, hurled in a grenade and then killed the occupants with a revolver as they staggered out, one after the other. ‘I enjoyed the killing. I was scared but I would have gone into action every day if I could.’ (p.197, and cf the massacre on page 293)

If war with Russia comes, then we will want lots of Reg Seekings.

Italy

The assault on Bagnara, a port on the Italian mainland. Then they’re tasked with taking Termoli on the opposite, northern coast of Italy. The Germans were pulling out when an SRS force of 207 men landed and seized the town. The German C-in-C, Field Marshall Kesselring was furious and ordered a counter-attack. Enemy spotters guided artillery fire into the town. There was a direct hit on a lorry loading up with 17 men and bags of grenades. After a huge explosion, not a single body was left intact, with heads and legs and other body parts strewn around the street. Seekings had just walked away from the lorry, Wiseman had just jumped down from the cab, and so both survived but were badly traumatised. An Italian family had been at a doorway watching. the mother and father were both killed instantly but then Seekings saw the little boy running round screaming with a his intestines hanging out of a bad stomach wound, so Seekings grabbed him and shot him dead on the spot. Yes, we want the Reg Seekings on our side.

Hitler’s commando order

On 18 October 1942 the German High Command had issued the ‘Commando Order’ which stated that any Allied soldiers captured in Europe and Africa should be summarily executed without trial, even if in proper uniforms or if they attempted to surrender. Any commandos or similar unit not in proper uniforms should be executed on the spot (p.208).

Three points:

1) This meant men in units like the SAS fought harder to avoid falling into enemy hands, and then made every effort to escape (and Macintyre describes some mind boggling escapes). Many others were caught and executed according to the Order (the execution of Sergeant Bill Foster and Corporal James Shortall, page 210).

2) It indicated a general darkening of the war. In the desert the unit had felt like it was having tally-ho adventures, a freewheeling band of buccaneers. In Europe the fighting got a lot dirtier, darker and more sadistic (p.205).

3) This last relates to the way the SAS found itself being used more and more as a commando i.e. an extension of the proper army, going ahead to defuse enemy defences, and not the band of pirates Stirling conceived of, operating for long stretches behind enemy lines to distract and demoralise the enemy. The tension between the two roles waxed and waned over the next two years (pages 201, 209).

An estimated 250 Allied servicemen, including downed airmen, perished under Hitler’s Commando Order. (p.311)

France (pages 212 to 274)

D-Day was 6 June 1944. The SAS had grown. 1SAS and 2SAS, combined with two French SAS regiments, a Belgian contingent and a signals squadron brought the total of the SAS Brigade to 2,500, commanded by a new, regular brigadier.

When Bill Stirling learned that a lot of these SAS forces were to be parachuted in ahead of the landings to act as shock troops ahead of the main attack he was furious; this was the climax of ‘ordinary’ military thinking and completely against the spirit of the SAS, so he resigned, an act which ‘signalled the end of the Stirling brothers’ leadership of the SAS’ (p.215).

The maquis

The following chapters depict the many adventures of the many different units of the SAS parachuted in to work with, lead and train, the French Resistance, or maquis as it was more commonly referred to.

Main learnings:

1) The maquis contained a surprising number of fighters from other nations, above all Russians, prisoners of the Germans who had somehow escaped and headed west.

2) There was a continual risk of treachery and betrayal; quite a few SAS-led hideaways in forests and mountains were betrayed to the Germans, who surrounded, captured and then, as per the Commando Order, executed everyone.

3) Some of this was because the maquis was riddled with internal politics, in fact the maquis was the continuation by other means of normal French politics and that politics was riddled with extremist factions who hated each other, notably the die-hard communists at one end of the spectrum and right-wing Catholic nationalists at the other. These were the dire political and social divisions which undermined the French republic throughout the 1930s, weakened France’s resistance to the initial German invasion, and would return to dog French politics even after the war. As Reg Seekings put it, the maquis were:

‘really political parties who had run away into the woods.’ (p.228)

And as Macintyre comments:

By 1944, the conflict in rural France had taken on many of the aspects of a civil war, with all the treachery and cruelty which that entails. (p.229)

4) Lack of proper military training or discipline often hampered the maquis’ usefulness.

The French resisters were fickle allies, riven by internecine disputes that often turned deadly. ‘The blood feud between the maquis was terrible,’ wrote [Johnny] Cooper. Fraser McLuskey considered even the most competent French fighters to be liabilities: ‘Co-operation with them in military operations is in most cases inadvisable and in many cases highly dangerous.’ Spies, real and imagined, were everywhere, and as the German occupation was rolled back the score-settling intensified. (p.240)

The book includes eye witness descriptions from our boys of watching the resistance hold quick kangaroo courts and then execute civilians accused of ‘collaboration’, often on no evidence apart from gossip and malice. For all these reasons the straight-down-the-line British SAS often found them difficult allies to work with. See my review of:

There was another aspect to all the SAS operations in occupied France which was German reprisals; almost every SAS-led attack on rail lines or fuel dumps or tank camps was met a few days later by the Germans’ wholesale slaughtering of entire nearby villages, farmsteads and so on, for example the rape, murder and burning the Germans inflicted on the village of Vermot (p.236).

The parachute padre

1SAS received its first chaplain, the Reverend Fraser McLuskey, who came to be known as ‘the parachute padre’ (p.230). This figure slowly grows in importance, getting to know the men, listening in private to their fears and concerns, holding (quite) services in their forest or mountain hideouts, helping improve morale and cement bonds.

Paris

Head of the SAS Paddy Mayne and seasoned navigator Mike Sadler arrived in liberated Paris on 25 August 1944.

It’s a recurring theme of this period that SAS groups entering towns were surrounded by deliriously happy civilians and especially young women throwing flowers and kisses but that, occasionally, enemy snipers or forces had remained behind, opened up firing, and then all these civilians got in the way of effective armed response.

SAS killings

Macintyre makes much of the illegality and immorality of the Hitler Commando order and yet, as the France chapters proceed, the objective reader notices quite a few times when SAS men have gone on the record, either in writings or interviews, as shooting dead surrendering opponents, for example this, from Roy Farran. During the Battle for Crete of 1941, his squadron encountered a group of surrendering soldiers:

‘Five parachutists came out of the olive trees with their hands up. I was not in any mood to be taken in by German tricks. I ordered the gunner to fire.’ (p.253)

Operations were now so continual that Macintyre includes a diary of Farran’s: 4 September destroyed two staff cars and a ten-ton troop carrier; 5 September ambushed a motorcycle convoy killing 6; 6 September surrounded by girls with flowers so not able to properly engage a German staff car making a getaway; 7 September attacked by 600 German troops, counter-attacked killing the German colonel and second in command – every day like that, for months.

SAS headquarters were moved to Hylands House near Chelmsford in Essex.

The Vosges

the campaign in the Vosges mountains led by Captain Henry Carey Druce of 2SAS, who went by the nom de guerre of ‘Colonel Maximum’. There’s no point detailing their actions which are too long and complicated, but they, like almost everything in the book, read like scenes from the most action-packed war movies.

North Italy

Back to Italy and a detailed account of Operation Tombola to shoot up German headquarters in the town of Albinea.

Into Germany

SAS forces followed the main Allied advance into Germany. the key learning here is that, in the desert and in France the Germans had been operating in neutral or opposition territory where the SAS or resistance could move freely to the indifference or active support of the native populations, could find good hideouts and strike at will.

When they entered Germany the tables were turned. Now the entire civilian population was against them, now the Germans were on home soil, now it was the Allies who drove along the main roads in large convoys and were vulnerable to sudden ambushes by small, mobile enemy units. Plus, of course, the fanaticism of the real die-hard Nazis.

The SS seemed ‘happy to die’ and the SAS often seemed happy to oblige them. (p.289)

The other thing was the child soldiers. In its dying months Hitler’s regime press-ganged tens of thousands of boys under 18 into uniform and forced to fight. You might think these children, some only 14 or 13, pitiable victims, but the accounts here show that many of them were as much if not more fanatical than their often demoralised elders (p.292). Macintyre gives accounts of children shooting not just machine guns but Panzerfaust single-shot man-portable anti-tank weapons at them. And the SAS responding in kind. An anonymous SAS soldier is quoted as saying:

‘If you shot one little bastard the others would all start crying.’ (p.292)

Big question: Did the Nazis pioneer the use of indoctrinated child soldiers (which I have recently been reading about in Africa, Sierra Leone and Uganda)? Did Germans invent the phenomenon?

Operation Howard

Worth mentioning this incident, on 10 April 1945, near the village of Börger, where a unit of SAS driving in jeeps came under fierce attack from a wood and where Paddy Mayne – still alive and still leading from the front – displayed unbelievable courage in leading the attack on the ambushers (pages 296 to 300). By this stage in the narrative Mayne has emerged as a beyond larger-than-life figure, as a force of nature, a whirlwind of cold-eyed death and destruction wrought on the enemy. He was nominated for the Victoria Cross (VC) but in the end received another bar to his Distinguished Service Order.

Macintyre contrasts Mayne’s action with that of a Dane, Major Anders Lassen, who in April 1944 led an SAS action against the Greek island of Santorini and was the only non-Commonwealth soldier in the Second World War to be awarded a VC.

Bergen-Belsen

The war narrative climaxes with the SAS unit which came across Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, described in chapter 23, pages 303 to 306. It seems like something from a movie that among the unit which discovered it were individuals we’ve come to know very well throughout their previous operations and escapades, including Johnny Cooper, the Reverend Fraser McLuskey, the hard case Reg Seekings, and officer in charge Major John Tonkin. Amazing that they all survived this long.

Among the horror and evil of the Nazi death camp, the most telling moment is when the SAS officer in charge, Tonkin, ordered the camp guards and officer not to be shot on the spot. God knows they’d killed enough Germans in the preceding years. Instead:

Calmly and quietly, Tonkin chose to demonstrate what civilisation meant. (p.305)

Eight months later the commandant and warden of women prisoners were tried, convicted and hanged in Hamelin prison. He doesn’t mention what happened to the guards.

Colditz

On the same day that Belsen was liberated, so was Colditz Castle where Stirling had spent two long years as a prisoner of war. Two days earlier the camp commandant had received orders to ship the entire population of POWS East. Suspecting they would be used as bargaining chips or simply murdered, the senior British officer refused. Stirling was back in England by 17 April. Next day he broke out of the psychiatric evaluation camp where he was being held, headed for London, hit a nightclub and by 2 in the morning was having his ‘first roger for years’ (p.308).

But fighting continued up to the final German surrender on 8 May 1945. On 1 October the combined SAS forces paraded for the last time at Hyland House and were then officially disbanded.

War Crimes Investigation Team

There’s an odd coda which is that after the fighting ended, the head of 2SAS Brian Franks, sent Major Eric ‘Bill’ Barkworth to find the burial places of all SAS men listed as lost during the war and to track down all the German officers responsible for their murders as a result of the Commando Order. Macintyre calls it the last operation of the wartime SAS and describes it, along with the trials and punishments it led to, in fascinating detail pages 311 to 315.

The SAS idea spreads

Initially, after the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, the Army chief of staff thought we were entering an entirely new era of warfare and so disbanded the SAS. However, just two years later they realised that a host of small conflicts had sprung up around the world, not least in Britain’s efforts to hang onto its empire, and so the SAS was re-established in January 1947.

Not only that but the idea of a small armed force of soldiers trained in survival behind the lines and sabotage spread to Allie countries and was replicated in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and, after some delay, in America, taking the form of what became known as Delta Force. Right at the end of this splendid book Macintyre give a quick summary of the unit’s rationale:

In tactics and intentions, American and British special forces still follow the principles pioneered by the SAS in the desert more than seventy years ago: attacking the most valuable strategic targets without warning and then melting way again, forcing the enemy to remain on constant, debilitating alert. (p.317)

Afterlives

This wonderfully researched, brilliantly written, absolutely riveting book comes to a logical conclusion with six pages on the post-war lives and careers of the main characters we’ve got to know well during the main narrative, including David Stirling, the man who really emerges as the embodiment of SAS values Paddy Mayne, and others such as Roy Farran, Mike Sadler, Jim Almond, Reg Seekings and Johnny Cooper, the reverend Fraser McLuskey, John Tonkin and Bill Fraser. Not all these lives had happy endings, a kind of muted indication of the long-term psychological damage caused by the terrible scenes they’d witnessed and sometimes dreadful things they’d done.

I liked it that Reg Seekings for many years ran a pub in Cambridgeshire. There’s one landlord you wouldn’t want to have an argument with about chucking out time.

Many of them, like Reg and Stirling, went on to serve or lead forces in various parts of the British Empire, against communists, insurgents and nationalist forces, but that is another, and morally far more complicated story.

Within the context of this book and this war these men really were amazing heroes, models of unbelievable bravery and daring. And this book is an outstanding tribute to them.

Unexpected comedy

Macintyre has some nice comic timing and phrasing. Stories which made me laugh include the Churchill faked request form, plus:

1) When Dr Malcolm Pleydell was assigned as medical officer to the group, he expected to find a bunch of cold-eyed killers. Instead Stirling showed him round the camp like the host of a village garden party, explaining that the distant bangs were because some of the group were about to go out ‘on a party’ i.e. attacks on coastal defences, and were just practicing the explosives.

Pleydell had been expecting a man of blood and steel, a ruthless trained killer; instead he was made to feel as if he had just joined a particularly jolly beachfront house party, with bombs. (p.113)

2) Of the storming of Italian defences on Sicily, Macintyre writes:

A Cambridge graduate and former spectacles salesman, [Johnny] Wideman lost his false teeth but won a Military Cross that day. (p.197)

3) A lot later, in August 1944 in occupied France, Henry Druce was leading a group of SAS hooked up with a large party of French Resistance (which in fact included renegade Russian soldiers). The Resistance was generally referred to as the maquis, referencing the tough scrubland found in the south of France which made for good hiding places. The problem with the maquis was their lack of discipline, their poor training, and their fierce internal squabbles. Anyway, they light flares for an RAF drop of ammunition and food but, with typical indiscipline, members of the maquis rip the canisters of supplies open before Druce and the Brits can gather and guard them. Some of the French, starved from long months in hiding, ripped open the provisions in the canisters and started gorging themselves.

‘One Frenchman died of over-eating,’ Druce recorded. Another of the maquis extracted what he took to be a hunk of soft cheese from one of the containers and devoured it only to discover that it was plastic explosive, which contains arsenic. He then ‘died noisily’. (p.265)

4) At the end of 1944, operating in north Italy, SAS forces are joined by Captain Bob Walker-Brown, the son of a Scottish surgeon who had joined the SAS after tunnelling out of an Italian POW camp, crawling through the main sewer then walking to Allied lines.

He had an enormous moustache, a bluff sense of humour, an upper-class accent so fruity that the men barely understood his commands, and a habit of saying ‘what what’ after every sentence, thus earning himself the nickname ‘Captain What What’. (p.279)

So there is, throughout the book, a thread of very English humour, Macintyre entering into the spirit of self-deprecating humour and understatement evinced by so many of these soldiers, both at the time and in later memoirs and interviews.

A non-British account?

Once the SAS started working alongside the Americans, after D-Day, I began to wonder what the Yanks made of the determinedly upper-class, stiff-upper-lip, committed but often ramshackle and amateurish shenanigans of the Brits described in this book.

Most of the books about the SAS and its leading figures are written by Brits who share their private school and Oxbridge background (Macintyre attended a private school, then Cambridge) and so buy into their values, assumptions and banter – so they tend to be eulogies which draw you into that world.

I wonder if an account exists written by a complete outsider, say an American, which doesn’t buy into the self-reinforcing mythology surrounding this group, and gives a more objective and possibly critical account of their actual military achievement?

Credit

SAS: Rogue Heroes by Ben Macintyre was published by Viking in 2016. References are to the 2022 TV tie-in Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on April 19, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on April 19, 2024

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