Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War by Ben Macintyre

hear as he descended was the wind howling though the rigging lines of his parachute. Below was pitch-darkness. The sudden impact with the ground knocked the wind out of him but, staggering to his feet, Cooper was astonished to find he had broken no bones. The dozen men in his team all survived the jump uninjured, despite discovering that extrication from a parachute harness in a raging wind was “a job for Houdini.” Only two of the canisters were located, but at least these contained Lewes bombs and machine guns. They were still combat capable. “Well, fellows,” said Lewes with unfeigned cheeriness, “I don’t know where we are, so we can only carry out the operation assuming that we may be within five to ten miles of our original dropping zone.” Led by the burly and reassuring figure of Pat Riley, they headed north, in what they hoped was the direction of the airfields.
    The plane carrying Charles Bonington and his party was flown by Charlie West, a regular RAF pilot from Devon and a favorite with the men of L Detachment. With black storm clouds rolling in off the Gulf of Bomba, West flew in low, crossing the coast at three hundred feet, and immediately came under heavy attack from the ground; antiaircraft fire tore through the port engine, the cockpit instruments, and the fuel tanks. With the plane crippled, the mission was aborted and West wheeled eastward toward home—or what he thought was east, unaware that a piece of shrapnel had lodged beneath the compass. The plane was flying in a circle. Running low on fuel, West landed on a patch of scrubby desert, in the dark, in the teeth of the worst storm in the area for thirty years, an achievement later cited as an “impeccable feat of flying.”
    As dawn rose, the party discovered that they had come down just a few miles from the coast. They now faced imminent attack from the very planes on the Gazala airstrip they were supposed to be destroying. West immediately took off again, with what little fuel remained, in the hope of being able to “flop” the Bombay into Tobruk harbor, still in British hands, some thirty miles to the west. West had wrestled the plane to a height of about two hundred feet when an Italian Breda gun opened fire from below, sending bullets thudding into the fuselage. Moments later a Messerschmitt 109, dispatched from Gazala, joined the attack. West’s navigator was killed beside him. Several of the men were hit. West attempted evasive action and then somehow managed to land the stricken plane, which hit a series of low sandhills and slewed to a stop after a “violent tobogganing over the rough sandy ground.” Some of the men were thrown clear; several more were trapped beneath the burning fuselage; West himself, with a fractured skull, broken ribs, and internal injuries, was still in the cockpit, miraculously alive. The soldier who had walked forty miles in his socks during training was mortally injured and would die the next day. The men prepared to make a fighting stand, but when the plane came under attack again from ground forces it became clear that the situation was hopeless. The unit surrendered to a Luftwaffe pilot at 7:00 a.m. Lieutenant Charles Bonington and the other survivors were all made prisoners. (West spent a year in various POW camps, before escaping from a train taking him from Italy to Germany by cutting through the floorboards.)
    Eoin McGonigal’s party was doomed from the moment of landing. McGonigal himself appears to have broken his neck on hitting the ground, and may never have regained consciousness. The team laid up overnight. By morning, McGonigal was dead. He was twenty years old. The others quietly buried him in the sand and then struck out for the rendezvous point. Lost, they wandered onto the Timimi airfield and were captured by Italian guards.
    Back at Kabrit, Gentleman Jim Almonds fretted over the fate of his comrades.
The lads are now 280 miles inside enemy territory, hiding in the sand and awaiting