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 B

desert: a marker for the Trig al Abd, an old Italian signpost complete with fascist symbol on top, pointing toward Egypt in one direction and Benghazi in the other, and indicating that they were just a few miles from the rendezvous point. The men cheered. Some kissed the post. Then they headed west. As they walked, Cooper could see two stationary stars on the horizon, which gradually resolved themselves into hurricane lamps posted on twin hillocks, one hundred yards apart. The password was “Roll Out the Barrel”; the men broke into a loud rendition of that old drinking song. A voice emerged from the gloom: “Over here, Pommies.” They had found R1 Patrol, a New Zealand unit of the Long Range Desert Group, their trucks encircling a small fire, and hidden in a shallow desert hollow. The welcoming feast of bully-beef stew washed down with rum-laced tea was “the best meal I have ever had in my life,” said one of the survivors. The disheveled remnants of Mayne’s team stumbled into the camp a few hours later.
    The following morning, before the rest of the camp was awake, David Lloyd Owen of the LRDG was brewing up his tea when a tall figure emerged out of the dawn gloom. “My name is Stirling,” the man said. “Have you seen any of my chaps?” Lloyd Owen had not, of course, for all of the other chaps on Stirling’s team had been captured. Under Sergeant Yates, they had taken a wrong turn and stumbled into an Italian patrol. Stirling and Sergeant Tait had managed to reach the coastal escarpment, locating the coast road but not the airfield, before turning back and trudging fifty miles through the rain to the rendezvous. They were the only members of their stick to make it back.
    Stirling remained at the desert rendezvous for two more days, scanning the horizon in the hope that other stragglers might eventually emerge. None did.
    The L Detachment survivors tried to look on the bright side. They had encountered some cruel ill luck, weather even worse than forecast and conditions “almost unbelievably unsuitable for a parachute operation.” The pilots, unable to see the coast or the drop-zone flares, had simply guessed at the right moment and altitude to drop the men, who had consequently landed “all over the bloody shop.” Not one of the sticks landed within ten miles of its intended drop zone. No one could have anticipated the biblical flood of the next day.
    Stirling pointed out that he had personally reached the coast road and seen the sea, having approached from the desert, which proved that “given the right conditions what I had thought of was possible.” The men had performed admirably, under appalling conditions. “The whole section behaved extremely well,” wrote Paddy Mayne, “and although lacerated and bruised in varying degrees by their landing, and wet and numb with cold, remained cheerful.” Cooper was philosophical: “OK, we’ve had a beating. It’s been a fiasco, but the weather did it all. The general plan was alright.” Seekings, as usual, struck an uncompromising pose: “You can’t sit around thinking about casualties. We joined to fight a war. We knew what it was about.” But behind the bravado, even Seekings was rattled.
    There was no disguising the grim truth: Operation Squatter had been an unmitigated disaster. Of the fifty-five men who parachuted into the gale on November 16, just twenty-one had returned. The rest were dead or injured, missing or captured. L Detachment had lost most of its strength without firing a shot, attacking the enemy, or detonating a single bomb. They had been defeated, not by force of arms, but by wind and rain. The mission had done nothing to support Operation Crusader. Worse than that, the failed operation had alerted the enemy that the British were conducting active sabotage behind the lines. Bonington’s party, shot down and captured, was under orders to reveal only name, rank, and serial number to their German captors. But someone had