SAS: Secret War in South East Asia by Dickens Peter;

Author:Dickens, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Asia / General
ISBN: 4498494
Publisher: Frontline Books
Published: 2016-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

THREAT TO KUCHING

‘B’ Squadron’s First Tour, November 1964 to February 1965

Major Johnny Watts hoped that his new Squadron would be spared a major enemy incursion before the men had settled into the rhythm and mastered the anxieties of operational life, in which every activity would be more difficult than it had been in training. Medics thoroughly versed in the theory of tooth-extraction found that much practice was needed to perfect their skill, their patients submitting, poor devils, ‘faute de mieux\ Signallers who had qualified well in Wales often took several hours to contact base, for incomprehensible and infuriating reasons that yielded only gradually to the fine tuning of conditioned instinct: the set was damp, the basha-site was masked by hills, hissing rain and an uncomfortable slope inhibited precise work or the aerial would be better laid out in another direction. But when at last the crackle came, ‘Pass your message’, and frustration was swallowed up in exultation, the weighty text was probably at this time, ‘Nothing to report’, and just as well. ‘They learnt on the job,’ says Watts, ‘fast’.

Watts walked the SAS frontage as his predecessors had done, but chiefly to assess his men’s problems and reactions to uncompromising reality. He found one or two weak links, men who had surmounted every selection and training hurdle whose harshness they now justified by falling at the very last. He also resolved the odd clash of personalities that could seriously impair a patrol’s effectiveness, raw nerve-endings agonizingly scraping together despite genuine efforts to sheath them. Sergeant Jimmy Daubney, ‘a barbary little NCO, first class’, could not get on with one of his men who was quickly removed, but went on to prove himself an excellent soldier too.

Apart from those few cases, Watts was greatly heartened by the potential and performance of his Squadron and urged them ever onward with his usual colourful emphasis; but, at the same time, he adopted a private policy of careful ‘pacing’, trying only to give them tasks within their growing abilities so that they would not outrun their strength or suffer some grievous blow to morale. He was only to be allowed a single year with them and conceived it his duty to hand over truly seasoned warriors with plenty of fire left in their bellies.

To begin with, therefore, cross-border patrols were few. Sergeant ‘Darkie’ Davidson investigated the Long Tapadong track again and found no sign of the enemy, a significant improvement after Billy White. At Nantakor, however, the enemy had returned, so the Salilirans’ carefree holiday was over for the time being and SAS patrols along the Pensiangan front had to resume their wary existence. Daubney’s beat was the important Bantul area through which the River Pensiangan flows south across the border to become the Sembakung and leads to Labang, where the enemy garrison had been reinforced; an incursion was suspected and a company of Gurkhas took up an ambush position on the river just over the border, guided by Daubney. When the force

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