Your book SAS Forged in Hell, tells the story of the part 1 SAS played in the Sicily and Italian campaigns of World War II. Could you start by telling us about the role they carried out under their commander Major Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne in those campaigns, which were very different to the operations they carried out in North Africa and the context around it?
After David Stirling’s capture in February ‘43 there were fresh attempts made to disband the SAS. They were never particularly popular and branded as ‘raiders of the thug variety’ and various other disparaging epithets.
Major Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne fought a rear guard action, as it were, to keep the SAS alive and he ended up with some 300 odd recruits; including most of the diehard original, which he was given the task of training to prepare for the invasion of Europe. That information was not widely shared.
So what began was an intensive unrivalled training mission which lasted several months. A lot of the men especially the originals grew to resent it quite significantly.
Mayne knew what was coming and knew that their mission was to do something they’d never done before, which was to attack in large numbers. Not small hit and run operations behind enemy lines, but to attack as a full Squadron and to do so on foot.
What they were preparing for was the assault on Capo Murro di Porco headland on Southern Sicily. Where there were massive shore guns and the fear was unless these guns could be taken out the invasion fleet would be spotted and blasted out of the water.
So their mission was to land on a heavily defended shoreline, scaling vertical cliffs, laden down with massive amounts of weaponry and to assault an enemy that outnumbered them fifty to one. This was not a mission to be undertaken lightly to put it mildly.
Mayne realised that if they failed they were finished as a unit, this was make or break, on a completely new way of making war. You could argue that the stakes had never been higher, that’s why he pushed his men so relentlessly prior to the mission.
How important do you think the SAS’S role was in the successful invasion of Sicily? Did they help tip the balance?
They were absolutely vital. They deployed as part of a wider élite forces cadre, with hundreds of glider and parachute born troops and because the weather turned unseasonably awful literally, as they all were just going in, hundreds of glider born troops dropped short and landed in the sea and they died these terrible death drowning. Of those that did make it to land, the majority were killed because the terrain had not been properly reconnoitred and was completely unsuitable for landings. So it was a desperate fight to take the key bridge that had to be secured and the other targets were not reached.
Mayne and the SAS’s ability to get ashore and to takeout the shore guns, then move on from there and take the first major German and Italian naval port in Europe at Augusta was vital. They were sent in to do a job you could argue was undoable. Mayne was the first out of the landing craft, a daylight landing into the teeth of the enemy guns, in one of the most heavily defended ports in all of Italy.
After the two operations General Dempsey, who was the overall commander of these kind of operations, said words to the effect that you have achieved more than I can imagine and I can see why you’re as highly valued as you are. He was a First World War veteran and said “of all the troops I’ve commanded no other unit comes close”.
Mayne knew they had to achieve the unachievable and they did in remarkable fashion. In those first two operations they really enabled the Allies to break through and establish that vital foothold.
The Italian campaign saw the hardest fighting that the SAS took part in during the war, but the mystic of the desert war will always be how the SAS is remembered, why do you think their role in Italy does not get as much coverage?
I think Italy is generally less well known. I don’t understand why that is, I mean the troops sent into Italy were nicknamed D-day dodgers. Churchill called it the soft underbelly of Europe that was the plan it didn’t turn out that way. Hitler vowed that Italy would not fall and sent some of his best troops there and he sent General Kesselring, a highly respected and feared commander so it wasn’t as if this was a secondary front at all.
In terms of SAS operations they certainly carried out some of their most daring and extraordinary operations in Italy. What they did in Italy is easily on a par with what they did after D-day in France and certainly with the operations in the North African Desert.
One example is the high jacking of a train to attack a concentration camp, deep inside enemy territory, rescue the inmates, seize the camp commandant and steam the train back to friendly territory. That is like the SAS’s great train robbery, I’ve never read anything like it. When I unearthed those files in the National Archive I didn’t believe it. The first file I got, I thought this can’t be true. I got another file and it corroborated it completely and a third file corroborated that. Italy gave birth to some really extraordinary missions so I don’t understand why it is less well known.
Certainly in Termoli in particular, to my knowledge, was the single greatest loss of life suffered by the SAS in one incident and it really was horrific. It took a terrible toll, I know that from reading the accounts and from interviewing the son of Joe Goldsmith, who was there at the time. He never recovered and was plagued by it afterwards. He was deployed on D-day and just couldn’t make it through. He was hospitalised and had to be pulled out because he was so traumatised and his story was not alone. So Termoli was absolute hell and the fact that it didn’t fall – they were surrounded and attacked by a whole panzer division – is a miracle and a testimony to the most unbelievable courage, bravery, tenacity and determination.
The record of the SAS in Italy deserves to be far better known and remembered. We talk of the courage and heroism, but rarely do we recognise the immense cost for many if those there.
Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne the leader of 1 SAS Regiment is a fascinating character, whose usually portrayed as a wild, hard drinking, cold blooded killer. That’s always illustrated by the raid on Tamet airfield, when Mayne shot a number of German pilots in their mess.
It’s not illustrated by that, I don’t agree. Let’s analyse that raid and work out if he was a cold blooded killer or not. The SAS had just been formed. They’d been on their first operation and it’s a disaster. They know they’re on the verge of being disbanded and they decided to go in, pretty much without sanction and have one more go.
Paddy Mayne gets onto Tamet airbase as far as he knows his is the only patrol that gets on enemy territory. What’s the first thing he sees? He sees the officer’s mess what is an officers mess at an airbase full off? It’s full of pilots, what is more effective in terms of destroying enemy airpower, blowing up their warplanes or killing their pilots? It takes longer and costs more to train a pilot than build an aircraft. Therefore it’s better to kill pilots than blow up their aircraft.
In their final exercise, when Mayne and others were with the commandos, they broke onto an airbase, got to the officers mess and hurled grenades through the window. That’s what they were trained to do on the orders of their commanding officers and they had been told by Winston Churchill to spread a trail of terror in their wake. They were doing exactly what they had been ordered to do and they were doing exactly what made sense in terms of destroying enemy airpower so how that makes Paddy Mayne a cold blooded killer escapes my comprehension. It doesn’t, it makes him extremely effective and it makes him a commander who delivered exactly what he’d been asked to do. It makes him a stand out raider and a hero. That’s the truth.
You show a more rounded view of ‘Paddy’ Mayne in your book, in the treatment of prisoners in Sicily, making sure they were not shot and were well treated. What is your overall take on Mayne?
I had the first book I wrote in this series, SAS Brother’s in Arms, read by Roz Townsend, an expert in post-traumatic stress disorder. She basically said just one of these missions for several weeks behind enemy lines seeing the kind of things that they would have seen and doing the kind of things they had to do, would leave you traumatised. Five years of doing those operations it’s inconceivable that you wouldn’t end up with PTSD.
This is fascinating, as she said the kind of people that are most susceptible to PTSD are those with imagination and empathy, because if you have imagination, you can imagine what it’s like for your friend to be captured, tortured and executed. You can also imagine what it’s like for Germans soldiers to be fried alive in a truck, when you shoot it up from a distance in the desert. And if you have empathy you can feel that in your heart and your soul and it really affects you.
What kind of individuals did it take to join the SAS and soldier in the desert? You had to have the most amazing imagination possible because you had to think of the most extraordinary missions that the enemy would never think you would do and then carry them out, and by God you needed empathy because you can’t order men to do those kind of operations with authority alone. You can only take individuals on those kind of suicidal operations when they believe in you absolutely.
I interviewed Alec Borrie and he said of Paddy Maine “we would have followed him into hell, because with Mayne more than anyone else you at least believed you had a chance that he would bring you home alive”.
Mayne was affected very deeply and traumatised repeatedly by the loss of his men. He believed he could and had a responsibility to bring them out alive and every time he didn’t, it was a personal failure. He was haunted and increasingly traumatised and sort to burry that in drink but who didn’t? Who wouldn’t in that situation? He became unreasonable and sometimes violent when he drank too much but is that to be wondered at?
He was a multi-faceted character and for those who wish to portray him as a thug the people he forged the closest friendships with were often the most educated, erudite and well read under his command. So he’s not an easy character to understand, because he’s not a stereotype. The men he commanded would have wished for no one else to command them.
Your books are very intricately written, weaving first-hand accounts around your narration in a kind of mosaic of texts. How do you put it all together?
I carry out all the research and then I take all that material and put it in to a plan. Every single point of the narrative and all the sources are there. The plan sometimes runs to 100,000 words, which is the same length as the book. You have to do that before you write the book, because there is too much information to hold in your head.
The writing takes far less time, it takes months to pull the research together and I probably write in about three months because once I start I’m on the journey and it’s relentless.
You have to synthesis reports, diaries from the time, accounts written at the time, accounts written afterwards, with interviews with survivors, with interviews of family. It’s an awful lot of material to distil down into a book, but that’s the alchemy I guess.
Are you currently working on the next book in the series, I’m assuming it will be a trilogy?
Who knows? I honestly don’t know, when I was invited to look at Paddy Mayne’s war chest, it was to write one book. When I looked at it all and sat down to write, it ended up being one book on the first 18 months of the SAS and then I sat down to write the second book and it ended up being one book on 1943. So presumably there will be a third book and no more, that’s innately the way I write. The story finds itself. It’s where the narrative takes me. Paddy Mayne at the end of Forged in Hell is back in Britain prior to D-day and its going to pick up the thread there and follow it to wherever it gets.
Damien Lewis is a historian and the author of SAS Forged in Hell. Alan Bardos is a novelist and the author of Rising Tide.
