Have a read of this extract on Paddy's service - one bit doesn't read well for upper class "Wooperts"!
I also followed Ram into the SBS, the Special Boat Section (now Service). One of the first lessons on the training course was on survival.
A mountainous sergeant came into the lecture room, walked up to the front and put both his arms on the lectern.
“Right! Today you will learn survival. It’s not complicated,” he said, pulling two very ancient pieces of bread, curled up at the edges, out of one pocket of his parachute smock.
He then pulled a live frog out of the other, put it between the pieces of bread and ate it. “If you can do that,” he said, “you will survive. If you can’t, you won’t!”
It was the shortest and most effective lesson I have ever attended.
My training involved not just frog sandwiches but also, for reasons I could never understand, learning to run across the mud flats of Ports-mouth harbour in full diving kit and carrying swim fins (flippers) – about the most exhausting thing I have ever done.
When we finally got underwater, I found that our “dry” diving suits always leaked. We were diving through the early winter months for 90 minutes at a time. The only relief from the cold was to save up your pee until about an hour into the dive and then pee into your suit to warm yourself up for the last half-hour.
We learnt how to use not only the standard British Army weapons of the time but also the weapons commonly used by our enemies. I found myself proficient enough with most short-barrelled weapons, with the single exception of the pistol, with which I proved absolutely useless. It soon became clear to me that if I was armed with one of these, then by far the safest place to be was the target, for this I seemed incapable of hitting even at the closest range.
This applied most especially to the second world war Welrod silenced pistol then issued to SBS combat swimmers, a single-shot affair that took about 15 seconds to reload. If ever I had to depend on one of these, I concluded it would be easier to damage a potential enemy by throwing it at him than by trying to shoot him with it.
Towards the end of our course we were taught how to resist interrogation. Basically, interrogation is a battle of wills between the interrogator and the prisoner. The interrogator’s job is to induce in the prisoner a kind of conditional and temporary mental breakdown.
One interrogator told me that, if the situation had been real and he had enough time, he knew exactly how he could break me – make me sit for days and days in solitary confinement with absolutely nothing to do. He told me I was the kind of person who always had to be active and pushing against something, and that idleness, rather than pain, was my Achilles heel. It is not an inaccurate judgment.
One of the things I discovered in the SBS was that my colleagues divided pretty neatly into two: those who hated the claustrophobia and disorientation of diving but loved parachuting, and those who (like me) never minded the diving but hated the parachuting.
To be honest, parachuting scared me to death then and has scared me to death ever since. Although I qualified for my parachute wings and did more than 60 jumps with the SBS, I never managed to bring myself to believe that it is a rational thing to throw yourself out of an aircraft travelling at 120mph a thousand feet above the ground, on the basis that the pack on your back really contains a parachute and not just a collection of old socks somebody has absent-mindedly left there.
I got my radical political opinions from the SBS. I inherited from my father a deep dislike of the class system in Britain. I hated the large part this seemed to play in the services in general and especially, at the time, in the Royal Navy. In the SBS, people were valued and trusted according to their abilities and skills, not their origins.
I once saw this at work when a grizzled and much respected veteran of the SBS sat down for breakfast with a bowl of porridge next to a Guards officer, saying a cheery “Hullo”.
Receiving no response, he said it again and then, with increasing menace, a third and fourth time. The recipient of this cheery greeting, who was wearing a hat, said in a very drawly upper-crust voice: “Don’t y’know, old man, that in the Guards the tradition is that if we don’t want to be spoken to, we wear a hat.”
To which my friend growled: “In the Royal Marines the tradition is that if we are rude at breakfast we get to wear a plate of porridge,” and tipped the lot over his head. IN 1966 Denis Healey, then secretary of state for defence, ordered a defence review, which concluded that all British armed forces east of Suez, with the single exception of those in Hong Kong, should be withdrawn. He visited Singapore, where I was based, and we were tasked with putting on a demonstration for him involving divers exiting a submerged submarine and some SBS frogmen parachuting into the sea alongside him.