SAS: Secret War in South East Asia Read online

  SAS: Secret War in South-East Asia

  A Greenhill Book

  Published in 1991 and 2003 by Greenhill Books, Lionel Leventhal Limited

  www.greenhillbooks.com

  This paperback edition published in 2016 by

  Frontline Books

  an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

  47 Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS

  For more information on our books, please visit

  www.frontline-books.com, email [email protected]

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  Copyright © Peter Dickens, 1983

  The right of Peter Dickens to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN: 978-1-47385-599-1

  PDF ISBN: 978-1-47385-602-8

  EPUB ISBN: 978-1-47385-600-4

  PRC ISBN: 978-1-47385-601-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  CIP data records for this title are available from the British Library

  Publishing history

  SAS: Secret War in South-East Asia was first published in 1983 by Arms and Armour Press, London as SAS: The Jungle Frontier. It was reprinted in 1991 by Greenhill Books and is now reproduced exactly as the original edition, complete and unabridged.

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Glossary

  Chapter 1: Incident on Melancholy Mountain

  Chapter 2: ‘It’s a Great Finger-Poking Regiment’

  Chapter 3: ‘Arcadia’

  ‘A’ Squadron’s first Borneo tour, January to April 1963

  Chapter 4: ‘Confrontation’

  ‘D’ Squadron’s first tour and ‘A’ Squadron’s second tour, April to December 1963

  Chapter 5: ‘Contact’

  ‘D’ Squadron’s second tour, December 1963 to April 1964

  Chapter 6: ‘Crush Malaysia’

  ‘D’ Squadron’s second tour continued, April to June 1964

  Chapter 7: ‘Pursuit of Excellence’

  ‘B’ Squadron raised and trained, January to October 1964

  Photo Gallery

  Chapter 8: ‘A Little Further’

  ‘A’ Squadron’s third tour, June to October 1964

  Chapter 9: Threat to Kuching

  ‘B’ Squadron’s first tour, November 1964 to February 1965

  Chapter 10: ‘Licensed to Kill’

  ‘D’ Squadron’s third tour, February to May 1965

  Chapter 11: ‘Get Back In!’

  ‘A’ Squadron’s fourth tour, May to September 1965

  Chapter 12: Squadron Ops

  ‘B’ Squadron’s second tour, October 1965 to February 1966

  Chapter 13: Envoi

  Victory in Borneo, March to August 1966

  Bibliography

  MAPS

  1. The Borneo Frontier

  2. The Long Pa Sia Bulge and Pensiangan Front

  3. Sarawak First Division Frontier

  PREFACE

  It was the SAS who suggested that I, a sailor, might like to write this book. They presumably had a reason because they are a cool, calculating lot who never do anything without one. In this case it might have been that they were increasingly vexed at being thought of as thugs, which their habitual tight-lipped security tended to encourage, and calculated that, being predisposed to admire and sympathize, I might do something to buff up their image. I could, of course, have given no undertaking as to that, having a code of sorts and knowing nothing whatever about them – which is the common lot of humanity unless they decide to talk; but I was immediately heartened to find that what they wanted was the story as I saw it, warts and all if I were to discover any, and that the high gloss finish with which they were often presented by the media nauseated them anyway. I realized then that this approach reflected their whole way of life; necessarily, for on the frontier of achievement, with life itself at stake, only truth mattered.

  This attitude was so interesting that I accepted the challenge, with elation at the honour and the prospect of telling what used to be called rattling good yarns with a fascinating environment. But there was also sombre foreboding at the daunting labour needed to master the complex facts as though I were a soldier; to relate them comprehensibly without over-simplification; and achieve what I conceived to be my overriding aim of getting even a little way under the skin of these men who assiduously claim to be just like the rest of us but are not.

  And so, for years, absorbed, wondering, and with unbounded gratitude for their unrestrained help and warm hospitality, I listened to Malcolm ‘Yank’ Allen (in the Borneo jungle), his wife Glenys, Tony ‘Lofty’ Allen (in Worcester Police Station), Paddy Baker (with awe in his RSM’s office), Roger Blackman, Steve Callan, Bill Condie, Bob Creighton (in his pub the ‘Pippin Inn’), Peter de la Billière (who set me going and kept me up to the mark in his irresistible style), Bridget his wife, John and Terry Edwardes, Ken Elgenia (in the horse cavalry lines of the Blues and Royals), Ray and Dorothy England, Keith Fames, John Foley, Alf Gerry, Terry Hardy, Norman Hartill, Nick Haynes, Bob Heslop, Pete Hogg, Jerry Hopkins, Don Large, Richard Lea, Eddie Lillico, Colin ‘Old Joe’ Lock, Malcolm and Bridget McGillivray, Fred Marafono, Willy Mundell, Dare Newell, John Partridge, Jim Penny, Pete Scholey, Mike Seale, George Shipley (who with unflagging interest arranged for me to meet many of his comrades), John Simpson (who introduced me to the SAS in the first place), Geoff Skardon, ‘Rover’ Slater, John Slim, Ian ‘Tanky’ Smith, Lawrence Smith, Philip ‘Gipsy’ Smith (with difficulty, he being engaged in an escape and evasion exercise from the VAT-man), Alf and Margaret Tasker, Ian Thomson, Maurice Tudor, Kevin Walsh, Johnny Watts, John White, Mike Wilkes, Frank Williams (in the Ulu Bar of the ‘David Garrick’ in Hereford, and through him ‘Gipsy’ Smith and several others), Mike Wingate-Gray, John Woodhouse, Roger Woodiwiss, and some who were not Borneo veterans but whose assistance has still been invaluable. Their styles and titles are omitted because those matter little to themselves, judging each other as they do by their quality as men, which is also what interests me most. Only Lieutenant-General Sir George Lea, KCB, DSO, MBE, must be accorded that respect since, as well as commanding 22 SAS in Malaya, he was Director of Operations in Borneo when the war there was won; Lady Lea also helped me considerably.

  The book being my own and not commissioned, its imperfections are mine too. One of these is my arbitrary decision to discard many good stories so that we can get to know a comparatively few men in a book of reasonable length which cannot therefore be a definitive Regimental history, and I humbly offer my apologies to both SAS and other readers who think I have strayed too far one way or the other. I hope that what I have written is true; I have certainly tried hard to ensure that it is, being uneasily aware that, for all their deadly (meaning deadly) earnestness, my informants were often possessed of a bubbling and irreverent sense of humour which might well have engendered a massive leg-pull. Therefore, I cross-checked every story, but it never happened – I think; and my only deliberate mistake is to change the names of the jungle tribesmen who played a noble part in defending their country and freedom but whose efforts might not be appreciated by those in authority across the border.

  I am enormously indeb
ted to many not in the SAS for helping me to understand the campaign at every level up to the highest, the jungle environment, and the SAS themselves as viewed from outside. They are The Right Honourable Denis Healey, CH, MBE, MP, Secretary of State for Defence during the second half of this brilliantly successful campaign; Lieutenant-General Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley, KCB, DSO, MBE, MC, Principal Staff Officer to General Lea; Colonel D. F. ‘Nick’ Neill, OBE, MC, of the 2nd King Edward VII’s Own Goorkha Rifles with whom the SAS worked closely in the decisive cross-border phase of the campaign; Group Captain P. H. Champniss, AFC, Royal Air Force, who commanded 43 Squadron (Hunters) in South Arabia and largely helped to save 8 Troop SAS from annihilation; Major Charles M. McCausland of the 7th Duke of Edinburgh’s Own Gurkha Rifles, who introduced me to the jungle with the enthusiastic thoroughness of a professional naturalist; Jennie, his wife; Gillian Standring of the London Zoo, who instructed me expertly in the private lives of orang-utans, king cobras and other denizens of the forest; and Major Pengiran Abidin of the Royal Brunei Malay Regiment, who flew me to the highest peak in his country to survey the breathtaking grandeur that is Borneo.

  Others to whom I owe much in various ways are Major General Martin Farndale, Colonel Norman Roberts and Mary Roberts, Bob Gaunt, Lieutenant-Colonel Douglas Johnson, Nigel and Diana Mossop, and Tony Geraghty, the author of Who Dares Wins and This is the SAS, who gave me the run of his SAS photographs which I thought exceedingly kind. Finally, I am greatly blessed with a family whose enthusiasm for the book has equalled my own; Debbie, who typed it beautifully on a machine selflessly borrowed by John from his father’s office, whose staff also allowed it to be duplicated to their great inconvenience; Jonathan and Marion, who guided me through the tracks and ambushes of the publishing ‘ulu’; and, most of all, Mary my wife, who has lived alongside the SAS for longer than she or I care to remember and supported me with a constancy nothing short of crucial. To all these people, strangers and intimates, who have gone to such lengths of help and encouragement, my gratitude is profound.

  And now to the nitty (always) and gritty (often) of the SAS in the jungle; no high gloss there.

  Peter Dickens, Withyham, 1983.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to copyright holders not mentioned in the Preface for permission to reproduce the following photographs: The Special Air Service Regiment, The Soldier, John Edwardes, George Shipley, Philip Smith, and Malcolm McGillivray.

  Peter Dickens

  GLOSSARY

  MILITARY

  Armalite

  5.56mm calibre light automatic rifle.

  Basha

  Hut or makeshift shelter.

  Belt

  Carried essential shortterm equipment.

  Bergen

  Main pack.

  Claymore mine

  Dished canister firing 900 steel shot in a cone.

  L-P

  Landing-point for helicopters.

  LUP

  Lying-up position.

  OP

  Observation post.

  Panji or punji

  Concealed sharpened bamboo stakes capable of inflicting serious wounds.

  RPD

  Ruchnoy Pulemyot Degtyaryov. Soviet 7.62mm calibre weapon, commonly called Degtyaryov light machine-gun.

  RTU

  Returned to unit.

  RV

  Rendezvous.

  Sarbe

  Radio search and rescue beacon for homing aircraft.

  SLR

  7.62mm calibre high velocity self-loading rifle.

  SOP

  Standard Operating Procedure.

  BORNEO

  ‘Amok’

  Run in frenzied thirst for blood.

  ‘Batu’

  Rock, stone.

  ‘Belukar’

  Overgrown ‘ladang’ with thick undergrowth, secondary jungle.

  Border tribes:

  Iban or Sea Dyak

  Sarawak, warrior race.

  Kelabit

  Sarawak, highlands centred on Ba Kelalan.

  Land Dyak

  Sarawak, 1st Division.

  Murut

  Sabah.

  Punan

  Sarawak, nomadic.

  ‘Bukit’

  Hill.

  CCO

  Clandestine Communist Organization.

  Divisions

  Administrative areas of Sarawak instituted by Rajah Brooke.

  ‘Gunong’

  Mountain.

  ‘Jarit’

  Murut delicacy of uncooked pork with salt and rice buried in split bamboo for a month.

  ‘Kris’

  Dagger with sinuous blade.

  ‘Ladang’

  Cleared jungle under cultivation.

  ‘Padi’

  Rice, wet or dry depending on how grown.

  ‘Parang’

  Jungle slashing knife, machete; often decorated with human hair.

  RPKAD

  Resemen Para Kommando Angaton Darat – Indonesian Para Commando Regiment; an élite unit.

  ‘Tapai’, ‘Tuak’, ‘Borak’

  Raw wine made from fermented rice or tapioca.

  TNKU

  Tentara Nasional Kalimantan Utara – North Kalimantan National Army. A Brunei-based guerrilla organization opposing Malaysia; launched Brunei Revolt in December 1962.

  ‘We are the pilgrims, Master; we shall go Always a little further….’

  (J. E. Flecker)

  (Inscription on The Clock, Bradbury Lines, Hereford)

  CHAPTER 1

  INCIDENT ON MELANCHOLY MOUNTAIN

  28 February 1965

  Ian Thomson from the Fifeshire coalmines, trooper in the Special Air Service and lead scout of a patrol across the enemy frontier into Indonesian Borneo, crouched motionless behind a bamboo curtain, watching, listening, sniffing. Behind him at five-yard intervals, Sergeant Eddie Lillico and the two rear men blended with the jungle, awaiting his findings.

  No leaf stirred, although leaves and the stems that bore them were the whole environment. If just one had done so the effect on the men would have been galvanic, for no breeze penetrated from the tree-tops to the jungle floor and no animal would have been so foolish as to advertise its presence, knowing man to be nearby and wanting none of him. A hornbill shrieked indeed, but from a safe distance. Even further away, a family of long-armed gibbons, high in the trees, hooted with wild intensity and volume enough to echo eerily from the mountain behind, which marked the border with Sarawak in Malaysia. Thus do gibbons proclaim their territory and menace intruders; but when man plays the territory game, he does not hoot, he shoots, and since Lillico and his men were purposely intruding into Indonesia, they were very, very quiet.

  Their vigilance was occasioned by an old camp that they had found the evening before, when a cursory survey, which was all the gathering darkness permitted, had revealed much of interest. There were bamboo lean-tos, which the Army calls ‘bashas’ though the term can be applied to anything from a makeshift tent to a sizeable hut. Significantly, these had no roofs, which natives would have made from palm leaves but which soldiers could more readily improvise with their ponchos; and the camp’s military nature was confirmed by labels on rusted tins stating the equivalent of ‘Indonesian Army, rations for the use of. The time since last occupation, six months or so, was given by the length of new shoots from cut saplings, an inch a fortnight give or take allowances for such factors as species, altitude and recent rainfall, together with other signs which to Lillico, after four years in Malaya and two in Borneo, were as informative as another printed label. But he realized that there was more to be gleaned which might be important, especially as the area had not been visited before by the British. He had accordingly withdrawn, and the full patrol of eight men basha’d up for the night on the slopes of Gunong Rawan, which Thomson translated as Melancholy Mountain.

  A commander’s job is to decide priorities, and Lillico reviewed the orders given him by his Squadron commander, Ma
jor Roger Woodiwiss, in the light of this unexpected discovery. His main task was to watch the River Sekayan, three miles over the border, which was known to be the enemy’s main line of communication. Absolute secrecy was the essence of such missions. If the enemy were to detect the least sign of the patrol’s presence, they could be expected both to harry it, forcing it to divert its energies from reconnaissance to its own survival, and to suspend any activity worth watching anyway.

  Yet another reason for avoiding contact with the enemy was that this was, in part, a training patrol, planned by Woodiwiss for the benefit of several recruits to ‘D’ Squadron, whose third tour in Borneo was only just beginning. The habitat of the SAS being beyond the frontier, whether that takes them into jungle, desert, mountains, the sectarian ghettos of West Belfast, the Iranian Embassy in London, or Pebble Island, the newcomer must end his apprenticeship by crossing it for the first time; and that is no less testing an experience for the NCO whom he follows than it is for him, and is best taken gently.

  Should the camp therefore be fully explored? Surely, yes. There was no urgency in reaching the river, and facts concerning the enemy were always useful in building up the jig-saw of Intelligence upon which active operations depend for their success, and which it is one of the tasks of the SAS, and others, to provide. Lillico’s only uncertainty lay in having to visit the same place twice, for that would contravene Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) which had evolved after long experience, and incidents such as when poor ‘Buddha’ Bexton had been killed last June (Chapter 6). On that occasion, however, the enemy was known to have been present, so circumstances were not really comparable. In any case, SOPs were not rigid rules but guides for the isolated patrol commander, who had to be free to act as he saw fit in circumstances known only to him if anything of’ value was to be accomplished.