Sicily '43. James Holland

international for both Ireland and the British Lions, he was known for his utter fearlessness, stamina, and imperturbability in the face of extreme danger. Davis had been struck first by Mayne’s sheer size. ‘His form seemed to fill the whole tent,’ he noted.7 ‘Standing well over six feet, every part of his body was built on a proportionately generous scale: his wrists were twice the size of those of a normal man, while his fists seemed to be as large as a polo ball.’ At the time, he had been wearing a reddish beard and had looked at Davis with keen, piercing blue eyes – but then had spoken in a soft voice, with a hint of an Irish brogue, that was totally at odds with his immense physicality. Davis thought he seemed rather shy, albeit perfectly courteous and charming.

      As it happened, Davis was about to see a lot more of him because 1 SAS was then split into two, 250 of them – including himself – joining the newly created Special Raiding Squadron under Mayne’s command, and the remaining 150 making up the new Special Boat Squadron under Major George Jellicoe, another desert stalwart and son of the First World War admiral. Both units were to take part in HUSKY: the SBS to launch diversionary raids on Sardinia, the SRS to attack the battery at Capo Murro di Porco – not that any of them knew that then. The idea was for the SRS to parachute into battle, and the SBS to get there by sea.

      The SRS was, from the outset, Mayne’s unit, although on paper they were answerable to a colonel commanding HQ Raiding Forces, who arrived at Kabrit and gave a speech that impressed no one very much. ‘It hardly mattered,’ noted Davis, ‘as we hardly saw anything of him.8 To all intents and purposes Paddy was the boss and took no orders from anyone.’ Mayne’s mission was to shape this new unit and train it as he saw fit, so long as the training involved stifling heat, endurance, scaling cliffs, close-quarters fighting and firing mortars. He decided to divide his men into three troops of three sections each, which were divided down again into half-sections and then three-man teams. Davis was put in No. 2 Troop under Captain Harry Poat, whom he liked and respected immediately. In fact, he liked all his new fellows.

      On 20 March, Mayne had briefed his men in a soft, faltering voice that could barely be heard. They were, he told them, in for a very intense period of training – for what, no one knew, not even he; but it was going to be important. Within a week, after one last drunken party, they set off for Palestine, where they began training with a 45-mile march in oven-like heat. Over the next two months, there was no let-up; at the beginning of June, by now physically honed, they boarded the converted Irish Sea ferry HMS Ulster Monarch to begin a month of intensive training in seaborne assault, involving getting ashore in LCAs – landing craft, assault – climbing cliffs and carrying out night-time research assaults; plans for a parachute assault had been quietly dropped. That this was the kind of operation for which Jellicoe’s SBS had been established was never mentioned. At the end of June came further endurance marches and experiments with Benzedrine, an amphetamine – ‘speed’ – that was trialled on No. 3 Troop. Mayne had been quite impressed with its effect: the men had been dragging their heels, but after taking the drug perked up enormously, picking up their feet, swinging their arms and singing merrily. Finally came their last training exercise: a mock assault on a British anti-aircraft battery 2 miles or so from where the Ulster Monarch was docked. ‘The attack’, noted Peter Davis, ‘was an outstanding success in every way.9 I do not think it any exaggeration to say that those gunners were completely at a loss.’

      By early June, then, the Allies had a decent number of supremely well-trained and highly motivated troops. There were also British Commandos, created and designed for raiding operations. Really, these men were among the very best soldiers anywhere in the world at this time. It was in the delivery of these troops where differences emerged, for while the SRS and Commandos were in pretty safe hands with the navy, the same could not be said for Allied paratroopers, whether those under Gavin’s command or the British training for later operations on the Primosole Bridge; for while the state of glider training was absolutely deplorable, training for the troop carrier commands was hardly sufficient either. In part this was because delivering paratroopers into combat was just one of their many roles; transports were constantly busy, especially given that the Allies were preparing for HUSKY from bases stretched as far apart as Palestine, Malta and French Morocco.

      It meant, though, that troop carrier aircrew simply had not had the same levels of combined training as had those being delivered into battle by the navy. This amounted to a grave flaw in the development of the airborne arm: that while so much thought had been given to training the elite troops themselves, the same concentration had not been applied to those charged with delivering them to the battle zone. The British had not developed a troop transport, and while the Americans had successfully developed the DC-3 into the C-47 – called the Dakota by the British – some important adaptations had not been made, such as providing the military aircraft with self-sealing fuel tanks, which helped prevent the fatal spread of fire should one of them get hit. Furthermore, the cream of the crop among pilots and navigators tended to fly fighters or bombers, not transport aircraft. This led to the paradoxical situation where some of the very best troops were being delivered into combat by among the least trained and least skilled pilots. There were, of course, exceptions; but 52nd Troop Carrier Wing, who would be delivering the 505th Parachute Combat Team into Sicily, had conducted only two night-time parachute drop exercises. Of these, one had become badly dispersed while the second went rather better; it was hard to know what could be gleaned from these results, but even an optimist could only conclude they now had a fifty–fifty chance of getting it right on the night. A better option would be to have the troops dropped in daylight, but that simply wasn’t possible. The invasion fleet needed to approach the coast under cover of darkness because of the threat of enemy aircraft and coastal batteries, which meant the invasion had to be launched at very first light. The whole point of the airborne operations was to take out strongpoints and secure ground before the landings. And that meant dropping in darkness.

      Colonel Jim Gavin had wavered continually during this training and waiting period. Jump exercises on to the hard, stony desert near their training base in Morocco had led to one too many injuries, which was frustrating. His men were in fine fettle; but despite this, one moment he felt confident, the next dark doubts crept into his mind. ‘I feel quite certain that I will also get an opportunity for advancement if I survive,’ he confided to his diary.10 ‘I may not. I am going to keep the parachute tradition in mind. Chances will be taken, risks run, and everything ventured. If I survive, well and good. If I am killed at least I have been true to myself, my convictions … At the moment, I haven’t the slightest fear.’

      He worried, too, about his subordinate commanders. One in particular, Major Gray of the 2nd Battalion, troubled him. Gavin just didn’t feel he was cutting it. Despite these concerns, he’d not thought to relieve him before the assault; but then Gray had gone AWOL for a few days. As it happened, he had been on a legitimate fact-finding operation – but for Gavin it was enough to wield the axe. ‘More bad judgement than AWOL,’ Gavin had conceded.11 ‘I should have replaced him in the States.’ Gray had been one of just three battalion commanders in the 505th, and Gavin had to feel totally confident in all of them. Major Mark Alexander, the highly competent battalion XO – deputy – took over the command on 21 June. Despite Gavin’s doubts, Gray had been popular with the men, making Alexander’s task, just a couple of weeks before the jump into action, an invidious one. ‘It really put pressure on me,’ said Alexander, ‘as I had a lot to do to get on top of things.12 There were a lot of good men in the battalion, but some of them were still Gray’s men and I had to fight that issue because they didn’t understand why he was being relieved.’

      None the less, Alexander, at thirty-one, was older than most, tall and athletic, and had a natural aura of authority; he was also, like Gavin, the kind of man who would never dream of asking any of his men to do something he would not do himself. Gavin gave him a very able West Pointer, Captain Jack Norton, as his new XO, and together the two men swiftly got the battalion back on an even keel. Even so, Alexander had not been too happy with how the night exercises had gone, and so had spoken to the commander of the troop carrier group that would be taking them to Sicily. No matter where they were dropped, Alexander emphasized, he wanted to make sure the battalion was dropped together. That way, they would at least have the opportunity to organize themselves and fight as a battalion. It was hardly a resounding vote of confidence in the Troop Carrier Wing.