Sicily '43. James Holland

tearing his hair out in frustration since being warned earlier in the year to get his men ready for overseas deployment. The unit was still new; and although the British had developed the Horsa glider, there had yet to be enough of them for his small force to train adequately. It was all well and good being sent overseas, but what about training? And what about the gliders that would be needed? His questions were met with obfuscation or, worse, silence.

      On 3 April, Chatterton had finally been told the regiment were to be posted to North Africa. Still no one could tell him how many gliders might be available, and he boarded their ship with his men none the wiser. Most of his pilots had between six and twelve hours’ flying time logged over the previous six months; it was as though the British had returned to the bad old days of the last war when they’d sent young pilots up in their Sopwith Camels with just a handful of hours in their logbooks. They reached Oran in Algeria on 22 April after two weeks at sea. ‘I was full of foreboding,’ said Chatterton.4 ‘There was indeed a great gulf between those in authority and myself as to our proper role in battle.’ That was something of an understatement.

      In Algeria, Chatterton discovered to his horror that there were still no gliders, which meant his 240 pilots had now not flown for at least three months. It was a ludicrous situation, and makes Hopkinson’s manic lobbying of Montgomery all the more bizarre, because by 7 May, when he had his audience with the Eighth Army commander, he would have been well aware of how deplorable the state of glider pilot training was and also of the total lack of any gliders with which to hurriedly lick themselves into shape. Neither factor was mentioned to Monty. As far as Montgomery was concerned, airborne forces were to be used, and here, in front of him, was the commander of the 1st Airborne Division advising him on how best they should be deployed. It did not occur to him that Hopkinson could be so woefully reckless as to promote something for which his men were ill-prepared and unequipped.

      Within a day of his meeting with Montgomery, Hopkinson had briefed Chatterton and shown him photographs of the planned landing zones, with their rocks, walls and almost total lack of any kind of flat and open ground.

      ‘You know, sir,’ Chatterton interjected, ‘that the pilots have had no flying practice for at least three months and little or no experience of night flying at all?’

      Hopkinson brushed aside his concerns. The Americans were going to provide both tugs and gliders.

      ‘American gliders?’ Chatterton asked.5

      ‘Yes, what difference will that make?’ Hopkinson replied.

      ‘Difference, sir?’ Chatterton answered, scarcely believing what he was hearing. ‘Why, they hardly know our own gliders, let alone American!’

      Hopkinson then warned Chatterton that if he didn’t start playing ball, he would be sacked and sent home. After a short consideration, Chatterton decided, with a heavy heart, that it would be better to stand by the men, even though he thought Hopkinson’s plan insane.

      When the American Waco gliders did eventually turn up, they were in crates spread over a number of different ports, and when they were unpacked, it was discovered many had suffered damage during the crossing. Key assembly tools were also lacking – as was any sense of urgency. At Blida, for example, assembling the gliders was sixth priority, and the task of putting together the twenty-five crated gliders delivered there was given to one officer and twenty GIs, none of whom had any previous glider assembly experience. By 25 May, a little over six weeks before HUSKY D-Day, only thirty gliders had been assembled. Eventually, as it was at last realized a crisis was looming, glider assembly was given greater priority, so that by 13 June some 346 gliders had been put together and delivered to the airfield at La Sénia. Many were then damaged by strong winds and so grounded for repairs, causing further training delays. By 30 June, most of the gliders had developed weaknesses in the tail wiring, and so all were grounded yet again for a further three days.

      In addition, thirty-six Horsa gliders, which were quite different and with which the British pilots were familiar, were being flown out from England twelve at a time by A Flight, 295 Squadron, using ageing Halifax bombers. From the outset, the operation was beset with problems. First, 295 Squadron did not fly Halifaxes and so the pilots and crews had to convert in quick order. Three pilots didn’t cut the mustard in time and a fourth crashed in bad weather. Towing the Horsas all the way from England to North Africa took around seventy-seven hours for each Halifax and crew, an amount of flying time that meant the Halifaxes required a huge amount of servicing; but the stores for this, although sent ahead, had not arrived in North Africa when the Halifaxes turned up with their Horsas. Then there was the added problem of extreme turbulence while flying over the Atlas mountains, which did nothing to improve the state of either the Halifaxes or the gliders they were towing.

      In all, one Halifax and Horsa were shot down en route, another pairing disappeared entirely, one Halifax crashed, one Horsa became detached and fell into the sea, another was brought back and another had to be written off on arrival. One pilot suffered six engine failures during the six weeks of ferrying flights, others experienced several – and almost all were due to oil leaks. As one of the ferrying pilots, Flight Lieutenant Tommy Grant, noted, ‘An oil leak may easily force the Halifax to jettison his glider, and two oil leaks on a long sea journey may cause complete loss of the Halifax.’6 One of the Horsa pilots – Chatterton’s adjutant, Captain Alistair Cooper – had been attacked over the Bay of Biscay by Focke-Wulf Condors, released himself from the tug and ditched in the Atlantic, been picked up, sailed back to England, collected another Horsa and ferried it out to North Africa. By the time he walked into Chatterton’s Nissen hut, it was almost time to fly to Sicily. Although an extremely competent pilot, he had zero hours’ night-flying experience.

      The net result was that by the beginning of July only nineteen out of the thirty-six Horsas had been delivered, and there was almost no time at all for training in flying them loaded even by day, let alone by night. Nor had there been much training on the Wacos. Chatterton had first flown one on 14 May, and on the basis of this a rough training syllabus was prepared. His men flew as much as they could, but that was not saying very much. By 9 July, Chatterton’s glider pilots each had an average of 1.2 hours of night flying and just four and a half hours of flying time in Wacos. It was nowhere near enough. But the die had been cast.

      A further operation was being planned for the early hours of 10 July, and that was to take out an Italian coastal defence battery on Capo Murro di Porco – the Cape of the Snout of the Pig – which lay on a peninsula that stretched out into the sea directly south of Syracuse. This battery, which contained four guns of what appeared from aerial photographs to be at least 150mm calibre, posed a serious threat both to the invasion beaches immediately to the south and to an assault on Syracuse. It was essential they were destroyed, and in quick order, before the landings occurred.

      The men given this task were some of what had been 1 SAS – the Special Air Service – who had caused havoc against the enemy the previous year in Libya. Operating independently and deep behind enemy lines, they had made a series of daring raids on enemy landing grounds, supply columns and other targets. However, since their maverick commander, Lieutenant-Colonel David Stirling, had been captured in January in Tunisia, an environment not so well suited to such hit-and-run tactics, the men of the SAS had been at something of a loose end, sent back to their training camp at Kabrit in Egypt, their future uncertain.

      Among those wondering whether he would ever see any action was 21-year-old Lieutenant Peter Davis. He had been posted to the Middle East straight from officer training back in England the previous autumn, and after being sent to the vast Infantry Base Depot next to the Suez Canal at Geneifa had volunteered to join C Squadron, 1st Special Service Regiment, which despite its name had in fact been at the time the only squadron in this still embryonic unit. Set up the previous summer, initially to help develop guerrilla warfare on the Syrian border with Turkey in case Rommel’s forces should reach the Suez Canal, it too had been at a loose end and so had eventually been merged into 1 SAS. By March 1943, however, rumours were flying around that the SAS would be broken up entirely. Stirling was a prisoner of war, while his right-hand man, Major Paddy Mayne, had gone on a drunken spree in Cairo, had had one too many fights and bust up one too many bars, and had ended up in a cell.

      Davis had first met Mayne