2 Back with a bang
JOCK LEWES’ return from the sidelines changed the course of the war in north Africa
In the early summer of 1941, Dudley I
Clarke decided to boost his deception efforts by staging genuine parachute drops over Egyptian airfields. In the meantime, a determined, God-fearing young commando officer, Jock Lewes, (pictured above right) was planning his own parachute drops in the same area. The two men’s plans overlapped fortuitously.
Lewes had arrived in the Middle East as a member of Layforce, a composite commando force that had recently taken part in a series of failed raids on targets such as Crete and the Libyan port of Bardia, and which now found itself sidelined. Some frustrated members, such as the 70-year-old Sir Walter ‘Tich’ Cowan – surely the army’s most unlikely fighting commando – transferred elsewhere. Others returned to their original units or languished in the Guards Depot. A few enterprising souls – like Jock Lewes – dreamed up new roles for themselves.
Lewes’ plan was to create a desert-based parachute unit capable of mounting surprise raids on enemy targets. Having assembled a small group, he was granted permission to carry out trial jumps – which could double as Clarke’s deception drops – from a Vickers Valentia over Fuka airfield on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. In the event, however, the authorities put an abrupt end to Lewes’ experiment. The jumps, they decided, were not demonstrating sufficient potential. Lewes’ scheme seemed finished.
Yet the project was soon saved from the scrap heap by an unlikely scavenger. David Stirling was an aristocratic Scottish idler whom Lewes had grudgingly allowed to join his party. The ‘Giant Sloth’, as Stirling was known to his fellow Commando officers, was unlike Lewes in almost all respects – but he possessed talents and advantages that Lewes lacked. He was, notably, immensely persuasive and hugely well-connected.
Stirling had been injured while jumping from the Valentia and, as he lay in his Cairo hospital bed, he formulated a more detailed version of Lewes’ plan. On his discharge, with the help of his brothers, he drafted a memorandum intended to sell the idea to Sir Claude Auchinleck, newly appointed commander-in-chief in the Middle East.
Desert drops
Stirling’s plan involved parachuting small groups behind enemy lines to raid lines of communication, aerodromes and other vulnerable sites. The men – sidelined commandos desperate to put their skills and initiative to productive use – would lie up unobserved in the desert before striking. The scheme would be economical in terms of manpower and supplies.
Stirling had to win the support of Lewes, whose knowledge and technical ingenuity would be essential. Initially, Lewes refused: in his eyes, Stirling’s idea was merely an extension of his own – and he feared placing it in the hands of a half-hearted socialite. But as he recalled in a letter to his father: “I trusted in God that night… and when David came again in the morning I said yes though I know not why, for I had made no decision in the night.”
Auchinleck also agreed to the plan, and the unit took shape. As it did, Lewes’ respect for Stirling grew, praising his new-found “enthusiasm, his energy, his confidence”, and admitting that “he appreciated the longterm value of my experiment more accurately than I.” Stirling was happy to give credit for the formation of the unit to Lewes.
Whoever founded it, the organisation needed a name – and who more appropriate to provide it than Dudley Clarke? He wanted the new organisation to merge seamlessly with his elaborate fake. So, as his most recent fiction had been ‘K Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade’, the next unit formed would logically be ‘L Detachment, Special Air Service Brigade’.
Jock Lewes duly became L Detachment’s training officer, turning his vision into a reality. His entirely improvised but immensely gruelling training programme set about creating an organisation in his own image. When army ordnance experts decreed that a light and simple bomb could not be provided for SAS use, Lewes simply invented his own. His mixture of plastic explosive, thermite and engine oil – dubbed the Lewes bomb – was pivotal in unlocking the unit’s potential. He even designed the SAS parachute badge, inspired by a codEgyptian motif above the reception desk at Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo.
Jock Lewes was killed at the end of 1941 while returning from a raid on Nofilia airfield near Libya’s Mediterranean coast. His loss was a great blow to the young organisation – as well as a huge personal loss for his co-founder, David Stirling.