Stirling's Desert Triumph by Gavin Mortimer

Author:Gavin Mortimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Stirling’s Desert Triumph: The SAS Egyptian Airfield Raids 1942
ISBN: 9781472807656
Publisher: Osprey Publishing

THE RAID

As 26 July wore on and the men finished fitting tyres and wheels and stripping and cleaning weapons and checking, there was nothing left to do but sit and wait for sundown. That was the worst time of all, when a man had time to think. ‘I tried to sleep,’ admitted Stephen Hastings, ‘but lay wondering what it would be like.’

The dress rehearsal had gone as well as could have been expected, but it was easy to pull it off in practice when there was no one trying to kill you from a few yards away. ‘What about the defenders,’ mused Hastings. ‘Would they be dug in? Was there any wire? With luck we should have surprise on our side. The danger could be when the planes came to look for us.’

Hastings was a relative newcomer to this form of warfare, but for an old hand like Sadler, it was exactly this threat that worried him most on each raid. ‘Going on an operation, it wasn’t the raid itself you worried about,’ recalled Sadler. ‘It was how the hell were we going to get away afterwards because the Germans were like bees in chasing us.’

As dusk approached and the shadows grew across the escarpment, the raiders began to rouse from their slumber and prepare for the off. Each jeep comprised an officer or NCO behind the wheel with a front and rear gunner. Johnny Cooper and Reg Seekings were in the lead jeep with Stirling. ‘Because of his height and his quiet self-confidence he could appear quite intimidating but he wasn’t a bawling leader,’ said Cooper of Stirling. ‘He talked to you, not at you, and he usually gave orders in a very polite fashion. His charisma was overpowering and we followed him everywhere.’

As the men clambered into the vehicles, the drivers revved their engines up and down and adjusted the goggles they wore to protect their eyes from the dust. They were well wrapped up for the evening, when the temperature would often drop below zero, wearing their battledress under their overcoats. Some were bareheaded, some wore woollen cap comforters and one or two had their own idiosyncratic sense of style. Carol Mather had in his jeep Cpl Bob Lilley, a Black Countryman who had joined the Coldstream Guards before distinguishing himself during the siege of Tobruk while serving with Layforce. ‘Lilley wore a headcloth tied in pirate fashion round his head and a long drooping moustache and a thick beard,’ recalled Mather. His other gunner was 28-year-old Cpl David Lambie, ‘a steady and uncomplaining man’ who before the war had been a shunter for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway Company in Ayr harbour, Scotland.

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