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Paddy Mayne
Lt Col Blair 'Paddy' Mayne, 1 SAS Regiment
By Hamish Ross The History Press
Copyright © 2011 Hamish Ross
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-6965-2
CHAPTER 1
The Legend
Ransom Stoddard: You're not going to use the story, Mr Scott? Maxwell Scott: This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
from the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, directed by John Ford
An Irish solicitor, Blair Mayne – or Paddy Mayne as he was more widely known – became one of the most outstanding soldiers and leaders of the Second World War. He had been an international rugby player, who represented Ireland and played for the British Lions before the war; and after serving in a Commando and seeing action in Syria, he joined the new unit that David Stirling was establishing – the Special Air Service. The record of Mayne's achievements in little over twelve months with the SAS in the North African Desert reads like fiction; yet it is factual and well recorded. The groups he led destroyed over one hundred enemy planes on the ground. These raids, with few exceptions, were carried out on foot and by stealth. Luck was an element in these successes, but the one common factor was Mayne's ability to read the situation on the ground, anticipate how the enemy would react, and then attack. He was twenty-seven years of age when he won the DSO for the first time. Over the next three years, Mayne led the unit in Sicily and mainland Italy in a very different kind of warfare; then in France, behind enemy lines; and in Germany, where the unit was the spearhead of an armoured thrust. In each of these three campaigns, he added a further bar to the DSO, then received the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d'Honneur. At the end of the war, after a short period with an Antarctic Survey, Mayne returned to the law, becoming a senior official in the Law Society of Northern Ireland. In 1955, he died in a car accident at the age of forty.
Heroic military figures have long been the subject of public interest, not only because of their achievements, but for what motivates them. There is fascination with the heroic contempt for personal safety that defies common experience; and there is something of an aura of mystery about the hero, which often gives rise to legend. In Mayne's case, the newspapers began the trend during the war: he was compared to Bulldog Drummond, the fictional hero of spy thrillers of the twenties and thirties; and he was also described as a famous pre-war international sporting figure, coolly strolling into an enemy officers' mess and attacking its occupants, before moving on to the next job; and by the time he was decorated by the king with the third bar to the DSO, they had increased his height by four inches to six feet six. Decades later, first a radio series and then a television programme about Mayne made their contribution with hyperbole.
At the end of the war, though, the first personal accounts began to emerge from those who had served in the SAS. A maxim that has long been established in combat units is that comrades know those who are truly worthy of recognition. Two of Mayne's colleagues wrote of their time in the SAS: Malcolm James Pleydell, its first medical officer, and Fraser McLuskey, its first padre. Both men wrote insightfully of Mayne, what manner of man he was, and of the respect and regard in which he was held by his men.
But soon after his death, however, misinformation about Mayne began to appear, first of all in books about others. Keyes somewhat pejoratively attributed to him the authorship of an operational report of a troop's actions at a Commando raid in Syria, which in fact had been written and signed by another officer. Two years later, Cowles erroneously claimed that Mayne's progression from the Commando to the SAS came about when he was rescued after some weeks under close arrest for having punched his superior officer. In reality, Mayne had left the unit the previous month.
The first book about Mayne was written by Patrick Marrinan and appeared two years after the claim by Cowles. Marrinan approached his material very much in the tradition of a Boy's Own account. He had read Cowles' account of the early SAS and cited from it; and he simply accepted the fanciful tale of how Mayne came to join the SAS, and went on to create a scenario for it. To be fair to Marrinan, at the time he would not have had access to the war diaries which would have given evidence to refute the claim. But, on the other hand, Mayne was his subject (since Marrinan had been a barrister, Mayne was also in a sense his client) and he had read his letters, which, if he had cross-checked with published accounts about No. 11 Commando, at least would have made him question the unfounded claim. Instead, he consolidated a legend: the future leader of the SAS was brought into the light from prison to be offered the opportunity to prove himself and become its greatest warrior. Throughout, Marrinan treated Mayne as a larger-than-life character, personally motivated, whose actions happened to coincide in general with the Allied war effort. It all very neatly fitted the tradition and style from which it was derived. But Marrinan was also nearly contemporary with his subject; and in writing about Mayne's postwar life, he found that it was too dull to be of interest, for he devoted only ten pages to it. However, he left two references about Mayne which were to prove prescient. He wrote that during Mayne's lifetime, exaggerated stories about him were widely circulating; and, secondly, he did his best, according to the way society perceived it at the time, to encapsulate Mayne's state of mind after the war. And there things may well have remained.
However, twenty years later the SAS attack on the Iranian embassy was filmed by television cameras and the regiment became the subject of intense public interest. A generation after Marrinan's book appeared, Bradford and Dillon wrote about Mayne. They too presented him in heroic mould, but they gave their subject a more modern treatment, portraying him as a flawed hero. Not only did they accept the received version of Mayne's entry to the SAS – via a prison cell – but with them the tale reached its apotheosis; for they postulated that it might have occurred because he was not selected to take part in what became known as the Rommel Raid, and lashed out in anger. In truth, of course, by the time the idea of an attempt to kill or capture Rommel was discussed as an option for No. 11 Commando, Mayne had been out of the unit for three and a half months. Although their treatment was modern, it had overtones of the classical tragic hero of drama who is fatally flawed. Now even assuming a punch had been thrown at a senior officer (junior officers have punched their superiors in the past and will do so in the future), it is hardly an indication of a deep character flaw. But according to Bradford and Dillon's account, the tendency recurred throughout Mayne's career, the evidence for which came from anecdotal accounts collected over forty years after the events. Moreover, they portrayed him as something of a serial assailant. For example, they produced a new tale that was not in circulation in Marrinan's time, the events of which were supposed to have occurred at the end of the desert war. The plausibility of these tales is heightened by their association with a well-known figure – the son of the Director of Combined Operations, or the well-known broadcaster, Richard Dimbleby – but this is also where they fall apart, when dates and movements are analysed. Nonetheless, Bradford and Dillon's interpretation of Mayne passed into the canon of books about the desert war and the SAS Regiment.
No research into Mayne himself had ever been carried out. And what has characterised references to him in more recent writing has been an uncritical acceptance of a fiction about how he came to join the SAS; and the transference of assumed underlying anger and aggression to the battlefield – with connotations of a latter-day Viking berserker – to account for his heroism. But Stirling did not invite Mayne to join the unit expecting an undisciplined killer: he had been told about Mayne's leadership of his troop and his tactical skills during a Commando operation at the Litani river. And right from the beginning of the SAS, there was a philosophy concerning the qualities they looked for:
An undisciplined TOUGH is no good, however tough he may be. Most of 'L' Detachment's work is night work and all of it demands courage, fitness and determination of the highest degree and also, and just as important, discipline, skill and intelligence and training.
One of the earliest written assessments of Mayne by an insider included the quality of Mayne's judgement and his firm conviction that 'to take unreasonable risks was to invite disaster'. The SAS Regimental Association obituary of him stated that 'In spite of his great physical strength, he was no "strong-arm" man.' Then, from the evidence of actions for which he was decorated, the personal capabilities which made him so successful were not blind fury or brute strength, but insightfulness, coolness of execution and the willingness to expose himself. Mayne's first DSO was won in stealth raids, where he achieved the destruction of a great amount of enemy equipment, fuel and bomb dumps – strategic targets – hitting Rommel's capabilities very heavily; in the early phase of the unit's operation direct contact with enemy troops was usually avoided, although some specific attacks were made on them. Then one bar to Mayne's DSO was received for a coolly conceived and brilliantly executed raid on a coastal battery, followed the next day by the audacious first daylight amphibious raid in the European theatre. The third bar to his DSO (his superior officers signed a citation for the VC) was for an action in which Mayne, by then the Colonel of 1st SAS Regiment, drove his Jeep under heavy and sustained enemy fire, while one of his officers manned its machine-gun, to rescue some of his men, who were wounded and pinned down.
There was also a strong oral tradition which developed around the SAS desert raids. One of the most frequently cited stories concerned an attack on a building containing enemy troops that Mayne carried out during his first successful raid on an airfield. Over the decades, however, the storytelling tradition became corrupted to such an extent that when it appeared in the official biography of David Stirling, it was in the form of a vivid eyewitness account by someone who did not even take part in the raid (but who was with Mayne two weeks later when he raided the same airfield again). Indeed, this particular operation turns out to be almost a case study of the way Mayne's reputation has become dramatised and isolated. Reporting of Mayne's action that night first emerged, fashioned by the wartime press, as a description of nonchalant blood-spilling at close quarters; it diversified through frequent retelling, with versions appearing in numerous accounts of the Special Services; then it became part of late postwar reassessment, with airbrushing here and there; and sixty-one years after the event, it resurfaced in the correspondence columns of a newspaper as item number one in a litany of infamy about Mayne. But, as we shall see, the record shows that Mayne's actions were neither different in kind nor distinguishable morally from those of several of his contemporaries; they were but one element in a wider strategy – an element that had, even before the SAS was formed, the approbation of the scholarly General Wavell.
The zenith of the legendary Mayne is associated with the desert war. Thereafter, interpretation of him tends to fall into stereotypical attributes and characteristics. For example, such a first-rate exponent of irregular warfare, who, it was asserted, had a matching rebellious disposition, would not ordinarily be expected to conform to authority. True to pattern, claims were made that he was resentful and contemptuous of higher command. So it is somewhat surprising to read that, in September 1944 after the BBC broadcast news of General Montgomery's elevation to field marshal, Mayne had a message of congratulations transmitted from his base in occupied France to be passed to the field marshal.Even more surprisingly, the following year, in north-west Germany, when the unit was not being used to best advantage and Mayne was making representations about the integrity of the SAS role, his brigadier signalled to him to be assertive in dealing with higher authority.
That the dominant interpretations of Mayne have been built up from second-hand account, anecdote and assertion is quite astonishing. It is also a matter of some concern that historical accuracy has been abandoned for versions of events, built round a number of accounts, which, as we shall see, in many cases are refuted by the contemporary documentation. Above all, that these have concentrated on placing him somewhere between a superman and a dissident in an elite unit means that there has been no proper consideration of the impact Mayne made on the continuation and development of the SAS. For after Stirling's capture – less than eighteen months after he had founded it – in no sense could it have been assumed that, like an established battalion, the unit had an ongoing existence that superseded any individual leader. There was pressure that it should be disbanded or absorbed into the Commandos, because its usefulness had been confined to desert warfare. Mayne resisted that, but he had to compromise to some extent until he had opportunity to prove the unit's calibre in Sicily and mainland Italy. Mayne's understanding of what had to be done in the changed circumstances, before the unit's original concepts were reestablished for its role in France, is clearly discernible. All of which means that over the decades Mayne the leader has remained inscrutable.
Fortunately, a large amount of contemporary evidence exists; so it is possible to get much closer to the man than at first might have seemed likely. Trained as a lawyer, Mayne kept good records. In No. 11 Commando, he was schooled by Lt Col Pedder, who was meticulous about report writing (Mayne's report of the first SAS raid on the Gazala and Timimi airfields reflects the style). In 1943, when he took command of the unit, he opened a personal file in which he kept correspondence from contemporaries and drafts of letters he sent. His family, too, kept his papers; his most vivid letters, containing detail of the desert raids, were written to his younger brother Douglas; and his sister Barbara compiled a scrapbook of wartime newspaper cuttings about him and the unit. Then, most recently, on the death of his sister Frances, Mayne's own journal, which he kept immediately after the war, was discovered. Frances had been a teacher who had risen to a high level in the ATS during the war and then returned to teaching. On Mayne's death, all his papers passed to Douglas, but Frances must have read her brother's journal and kept it as a memory of him, for Douglas knew nothing of its existence until 2002. It is a remarkable journal, written with candour, expressing Mayne's feelings about others, reflecting on himself, and giving insights into his own personality. But it also reveals the extent to which he was thoughtful about leadership; and when considered alongside some of his wartime reports and analyses, it certainly enhances an understanding of the man.
At the level of official documentation, detailed war diaries exist for No. 11 Commando, although little seems to have survived from the early period of the SAS – particularly the unit's activities in the North African desert. But there is a valuable source, now known as the 'Paddy Mayne Diary', which belongs to the SAS Regimental Association. It is not really a diary, more a chronicle of the unit, entitled 'Birth, Growth and Maturity of 1st SAS Regiment'. The document was compiled in the summer of 1945 by Mike Blackman, Intelligence Officer with the unit at the time, and was presented to Mayne. It contains the names of the original members of L Detachment, structured in two troops: No. 1 Troop, commanded by Jock Lewes, and No. 2 Troop, commanded by Mayne. There is an editorial introduction describing David Stirling's founding of the regiment and a brief overview of it, followed by an encomium to Mayne and to the way he led the unit. It is a compilation of the reports of many of the desert raids that Mayne undertook; as such it was selectively put together. It contains some press cuttings and details of personnel who would have been of particular interest to Mayne; it has reports that are copies of documents from war diaries held in The National Archives (occasionally Blackman used editorial discretion, making a phrase read more felicitously than the official record), in themselves quite valuable, particularly in view of the lack of war diaries covering the desert raids. After his death the 'Diary' passed to Mayne's brother Douglas. Douglas gave access to it to Cowles (who described it as a scrapbook assembled by Mayne), to Marrinan (who did not refer to it but made use of it) and to Bradford and Dillon (who claimed that it had been appropriated by Mayne). Later, Douglas donated it to the SAS Regimental Association. Then there are, from 1943 onwards, the war diaries of the unit and the reports and evaluations Mayne himself wrote. Contemporary documentation can be illuminated by personal accounts, and this work is informed by written transcripts of extended interviews with a number of people who knew Mayne. These transcripts then became the basis of further dialogue with the respondents, and were cross-referred to contemporary documentation.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Paddy Mayne by Hamish Ross. Copyright © 2011 Hamish Ross. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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