SAS Shadow Raiders by Damien Lewis

Author:Damien Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus Editions Ltd
Published: 2019-09-20T15:57:48+00:00

Chapter 11

Along the remote, sparsely populated expanse of Loch Fyne, Frost and his raiders could train without risk of being watched or spied upon. RAN Commander Cook was there, together with his Tormentor flotilla. Two dozen men from the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) were there, for they had been chosen to travel in the assault boats. Casualties were expected, and there was only so much medical care the paratroopers could perform for themselves.

Combined Operations had decreed that each assault boat should double as a medical station, ‘equipped with one or two stretchers, a medical satchel, thermos flasks of hot tea or soup and at least one medical orderly’. Of Frost’s men, four in each platoon were given basic medical training and issued with bandages and morphine, in case any life-saving care was required on the field of battle, and before the wounded could be got to the boats.

A force of men from the South Wales Borderers and the Royal Fusiliers – tough infantry regiments, each with two-and-a-half centuries of tradition to their names – were there, selected to act as fire teams on the assault boats. Each would carry four men armed with Bren light machineguns or Boys anti-tank rifles, a .55-calibre long-range weapon capable of penetrating light armour, which came complete with a bipod, but had the kick of a mule. As the assault boats approached the shore, the gunners were to rake the German positions with murderous fire, so as to doubly secure the beach. The boats were fitted with ‘armoured shields’ as added protection for those riding in them.

A group of about a dozen sappers were also at Loch Fyne. Hailing from the Royal Engineers (RE), they were a recent addition to Frost’s party. With their mottos Ubique (Everywhere) and Quo Fas et Gloria Ducunt (Where right and glory lead), the Royal Engineers had a two-hundred-year history of providing their specialist skills to whatever unit might need them. They had long been at the cutting edge of technological developments in the military, pioneering the use of mapping, telegraphy, observation balloons, tanks and aircraft in warfare.

The party of RE sappers was commanded by twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Dennis Vernon, who’d been educated at the Leys, a Cambridge boarding school, and after that Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Smart, bright, quick-thinking, Vernon had a lively interest in technology. He’d picked up the essentials of the groundbreaking field of radar pretty swiftly. While some of Vernon’s sappers were to act as an anti-tank party, laying mines on the road leading to the beach, most were to concentrate on dismantling the radar.

Like Preist, the scientist now slated to ride in an assault boat brandishing his radio receiver, Vernon and his men had been schooled by Schonland, using his replica paraboloid. Under his expert tuition they’d been treated to ‘a practical trial of “robbing” a mock up R.D.F. set’. They’d been warned about the dangers of electric shocks; how those working ‘in the proximity of H.T. wires should have rubber gloves and insulated-handle implements’. They’d been provided with the tools of their new trade: ‘for opening doors and windows .

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