Mayne the SAS & the VC
Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne and a core of stalwarts were unwilling to let the history of this proud unit die with its dissolution. Instead, they took the Chronik of Schneeren town, unscrewed the brass bolts that held its spine together, removed the original pages – which would be carefully preserved for posterity – and within those massive leather covers they bound together the history of a unit. They included mission reports, diary entries, signals logs, newspaper clipping, photographs, humorous stories, cartoons, character sketches, maps, diagrams and more. Once complete, what became known as the ‘Paddy Mayne Diary’ was secreted in the Mayne family home, at Mount Pleasant, in Newtownards, in Northern Ireland – the secret history of a secret unit that had ceased to exist.
In the 1950s the SAS was formally re-founded, as a response to the irregular conflicts and small wars that Britain was then involved in – first in Malaysia, and then further afield. In the interim, the regiment had been kept alive by dint of a top-secret and deniable operation. At war’s end, the SAS had dispatched to Germany a small unit formally known as the SAS War Crimes Investigation Team. Their remit was to hunt down the Nazi war criminals responsible for their comrades’ murder, though in time they would achieve so much more. With the SAS’s disbandment, what then became known as ‘The Secret Hunters’ carried on their work, using a black budget massaged out of the War Office, and nursing their battered jeeps across liberated Europe as they hunted evil.
The Secret Hunters kept the SAS’s spirit and soul alive, for they openly wore the SAS uniform, beret and cap badge, hiding in plain sight and acting as if they had every right to be there, through to 1948. Re-formed as a territorial unit under the Artists Rifles, as 21 SAS Regiment (V), in 1949, the regular unit, 22 SAS, was re-formed in 1952. In time the Paddy Mayne Diary was able to come out of the shadows. Long after Mayne’s tragic early death in a 1955 car accident, it was offered to the SAS Regimental Association by his younger brother, Douglas, in 1997. It that way, and renamed the ‘SAS War Diary’, the precious founding history of this legendary unit was preserved for posterity.
In a 1947 newsletter of the SAS Regimental Association – of which Churchill, Stirling and Mayne were key figureheads – the editorial of issue No. 6 stressed the value of ‘comradeship’, something that ‘incorporates the wellbeing . . . of each individual member’. As the editorial stressed, ‘it is a thing that is so well known it becomes so easy to forget and we of the Association must not allow that to happen.’ It spoke of how Comradeship was what had glued the men together, welding them into unbreakable units, during long periods of fraught and deadly work deep behind the lines. It underlined the value of Comradeship then, in 1947, ‘a greater asset during the critical days of peace . . . let everyone of us remember this, and not just think of ourselves as individuals . . .’ It urged members to ‘regain this spirt of comradeship,’ in all their best interests.
In truth, many of those SAS veterans were troubled. Today, we would recognise their post-war trials and tribulations as being the typical behaviour and symptoms experienced by those suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – the kind of malaise that had prevented Johnny Wiseman from deploying, after his French exploits, or which had led to Joe Goldsmith’s hospitalisation post-Italy, and his then diagnosis with ‘psychoneurosis’. It accounted for the heavy drinking and signs of ‘battle fatigue’ that Padre McLuskey had noticed in the Morvan, where the stress and trauma of this type of warfare left deep scars. It accounted for Bob Lilley’s wife, Evelyn, and her fear for her husband’s ‘nerves going’. Or for Harry Poat’s January 1945 warning to Mayne that an entire squadron were ‘totally unfit bodily and mentally’ for war.
SAS Daggers Drawn is in a sense the third in a trilogy telling the story of Colonel Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne and his raiders, from the earliest days of the war until the very end (the first two volumes are SAS Brothers in Arms and SAS Forged in Hell). I have had each volume read by Ros Townsend, an acclaimed expert in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, who works with the charity PTSD Resolution, and her conclusions are telling. The cumulative effect of the drip, drip, drip of tension and trauma over five years of such operations was immense, and especially for a figure like Mayne.
As Townsend pointed out, Mayne could flip in an instant from poetry to killing, ‘from offering succour to mass destruction so rapidly and so effectively’. Those moments of instant action sent Mayne into a ‘trance state’ – just as any intensely focused state of attention is akin to a trance. Innumerable factors contributed to that trance: duty, service, doing what was right, the training, the need to safeguard his men, plus the driving imperative of survival – for him and more for his those under his command. Once the trance was broken, the wider ramifications of the action would crowd in.
Mayne was a deep thinker; someone drawn to music, verse and writing. He did not choose to ‘skim across the surface of life’. Rather, he would delve into his thoughts, his emotions, and the impacts of his actions, both from his own worldview and ‘through the eyes of others, too.’ The sheer ‘enormity of what . . . he [Mayne] had done and the losses suffered, would . . . have increased with time,’ and especially as Mayne ‘stepped away from the immediacy of the “trance” . . .’ Over time, the ghosts would have drawn closer.
The one way to banish those ghosts – at least, temporarily – was through the oblivion of drink. But of course, that way only desolation lies. This was particularly true of Mayne, who abhorred losing – failing to protect – a single one of the men he commanded. As Padre McLuskey would remark, with sagacity, of Mayne, ‘he had a natural sensitivity . . . with the men he commanded. If they were in trouble . . . if they suffered from a raid, he would suffer with them . . . More than that, he was both loved and trusted by them in a unique degree.’
After Mayne’s premature death in a road accident in 1955, several attempts were made to have the Victoria Cross awarded retrospectively, the one he was arguably denied in 1945. These included petitions to the then Queen at the time of her Golden Jubilee (2002), and several early day motions in the House of Commons. The most recent, in 2005, was signed by 105 MPs and it declared: ‘This house recognises the grave injustice meted out to Lt Col. Paddy Mayne’ in not awarding the VC.
In November 2009 The Times published an article entitled: ‘Fight for justice for Paddy Mayne, hero of rugby and battlefield, gathers pace’. It argued that the individual who downgraded Mayne’s VC appeared to be General Sir Henry Colville Barclay Wemyss (pronounced weems), assistant to the Secretary of State for War, who sat on the Grant of Honours committee, the body that oversees the granting of military decorations and civil honours. In 1941, Churchill had replaced Wemyss with Field Marshal Sir John Dill, serving as head of the British military mission to Washington. That decision had seemingly rankled, leaving Wemyss ‘deeply unhappy’; a man with an axe to grind.
When Mayne’s VC recommendation passed across Wemyss’ desk, he decreed it should be downgraded, despite Winston Churchill’s private backing for the award; by then, Churchill had been voted out of power in that month’s general election. According to The Times, Wemyss’ decision was laid out in a July 1945 letter arguing that as Mayne’s actions at Lorup were not a ‘single act of heroism’, the VC was not appropriate. That argument, of course, was flawed.
At the time of the 2005 early day motion, the Labour MP Ian Gibson complained that ‘We have had no satisfactory answers why he cannot be awarded the VC. It is small-mindedness.’ Don Touhig, then Veterans Minister, claimed it would be wrong to reverse commanders’ decisions of sixty years ago – a stunningly ill-informed position to take, one that disregarded the fact that all commanders with any direct bearing on the issue had universally endorsed the VC recommendation at the time. All such subsequent efforts have been defeated by a supposed blanket policy of government not to make gallantry awards retrospectively.
It is not good enough. It is, as the Commons early day motion declared, ‘a grave injustice’. The refusal to right this wrong is, as Ian Gibson said, ‘small-mindedness’. Or, as the author and founder of the Victoria Cross Society, Brian Best, wrote in his seminal work, Unrewarded Courage, Acts of Valour that were denied the Victoria Cross, ‘Of all the unrewarded Victoria Cross recipients, the most worthy must be Blair “Paddy” Mayne.’
Damien Lewis is a historian and the author of SAS: Daggers Drawn.
