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 Page A

dark to start their reign of terror and destruction. After the massacre is over and the enemy planes blown up, there remains that terrible march back through the desert. No one who is sick or wounded can possibly make it, and none can afford to help…I am not there. I sit back here in the safety of the camp and wish I were…Reality beats fiction for sheer, cold, calculating courage. Some of the lads cannot be beaten. Films and books of adventure fall far short of the real thing. More will be heard of the SAS should this raid go through as planned. My mates are somewhere in enemy territory…poor devils, they need all the luck possible.
    For a few hours after the landings, the wind had seemed to abate, as the two teams under Mayne and Lewes set off in the dark, marching north. Then the skies opened. Not the spitting rain of the previous evening, but a blinding, soaking deluge. A desert storm and flash flood is a terrifying experience: dry riverbeds, or wadis, transform in minutes into raging torrents. “The water was up to your chest,” recalled Johnny Cooper. Lewes ordered his men to a section of higher ground, now an island in the flood, and announced that he and Sergeant Riley would push ahead to try to locate the target airfield. They returned after a few hours, having seen nothing but an endless damp horizon of desert and convinced they must have been dropped far to the south of their target. “To get to the airfield before light is now out of the question,” said Lewes. Using blankets as makeshift tents, the men huddled together for a sodden, freezing, hungry, sleepless night. “With constant wringing out of blankets and the occasional sip at the old rum stakes we managed to survive,” one man recalled. As dawn broke the rain eased, but it was clear the operation would have to be aborted: the explosives were soaked and useless. Lewes ordered the men to turn around and head toward the rendezvous point. “At least we won’t die of thirst,” said Lewes brightly, as the men set off, alternately marching and wading across the still-sodden sands. Riley led the way, bullying, urging, and cajoling: forty minutes’ marching, then twenty minutes’ rest, then another forty minutes’ marching, hour after hour.
    Mayne’s team was in a similar plight, although, unlike Lewes, Mayne had a good idea of where he was. In the five hours of darkness after landing, his team marched six miles. At dawn, they laid up in a wadi about five miles south of the target, Timimi airfield. Mayne conducted a swift reconnaissance and declared that they would attack that evening. Then the downpour started. “In the middle of the desert we had this raging torrent,” recalled Seekings. “I’ve never been so cold in my life.” Several haversacks were washed away. “It rained as I have never seen it before—clouds broke by the score, and our nice dry little wadi was transformed in a matter of minutes into a lake.” The men were soaked to the bone; even their cigarettes were waterlogged, a source of deep annoyance for soldiers who craved tobacco more than food.
    Mayne ordered the men to salvage what they could and scramble to higher ground, but the rain had already done irreparable damage to the sabotage equipment. “I tried two of the time pencils and they did not work….I tried the instantaneous fuses and they did not work either.” Mayne was prepared to continue, and attack the planes using only grenades. “We had a hell of a time talking him out of it,” said Seekings. “But there was no point getting knocked off in a hopeless cause. You couldn’t knock an aircraft out with a grenade.” With ferocious reluctance, Mayne aborted the mission, and as night fell once more, the men set off on the thirty-five-mile slog to the pickup point.
    Lewes and his men trudged south. It was beginning to grow dark, on the evening of November 19, the third day of the operation, when Johnny Cooper spotted a pole incongruously sticking out of the