Pat Conn OBE recalls: D Company 2 PARA deployed on Op Parthenon – the op on Zanzibar which did not happen. To `decompress’ we earned a six-weeks `posting’ up-country to Dhala in what is now Yemen. The Dhala Pass was a brute and was always a target for the baddies to mine. We had to carry out clearing drills on a regular basis. We had Saladin armoured cars and Ferrets from 4 RTR in support when we were performing with the mine clearing.

The clearing drill was a real chore, but on one occasion, the rebels had an own goal. My drill for the lads was to place an infantry block at the top of the pass with a Saladin armoured car, send another section over the mountain which was to block off the pass while the third section was the clearance section and close protection which Platoon HQ accompanied. On this occasion we were about an hour into the task when we spotted a pick-up half way down and three rebels busy digging in mines on a bend. They were pointing downhill when the saw the bottom block getting into position. They panicked, turned their truck round in a particularly dodgy place and headed up the pass towards the clearance group. They tried to avoid their own mines and failed. They blew themselves to pieces and the remnants were somewhere at the bottom of the gorge. We did not find any more mines on that occasion. Comms were extremely difficult. I had VHF manpack Larkspur radios A40s to sections and A41 to the armoured cars, but when on patrol we had to use the HF WS 62 set of WW ll vintage complete with wet batteries! Voice was hopeless in the mountains so we used morse. My signallers earned their crust!

On the same deployment, when we were recovering to Aden in convoy…open 3-tonners with sandbagged floors and a Bren gun on the cab roof, the vehicle in front of me had a chum’s (Tim Neathercoat) platoon on board. Just past Thumeir on the Aden track (road) which was rudimentary at that time but later found fame during Radfan.

Tim went over a mine and blew the whole of the rear axle off the truck. No injuries thanks to the sandbagging. We reckoned from the debris that it was an old Brit Mk V anti-tank mine of WW ll vintage!

 I wrote to the author Helen about it and told her that  in the 1960s there was a detachment from RAF Khormaksar there, and we used it as a refuelling stop in the Beverley aircraft as an alternative to Salalah if we were going to Kenya or similar. Like many WW II airfields in the region, (Wadi Halfa was another in Northern Sudan). I think that the old airfield is beneath the waters of the Aswan Dam now! Once closed at the end of WW II, sometimes they were re-activated for a short while as needed before the Brits moved out of the region during the East of Suez moves. The problems with the aircraft of the time such as Beverley, Hastings and Argosy is that they did not really have the `legs’ which often were demanded. Even using the strategic trooping aircraft the Britannia, it used to take three days to get to the Far East overnighting at RAF Gan in the Indian Ocean or perhaps RAF Khormaksar in Aden. Other Gulf airfields used were RAF Sharjah and RAF Salalah in Oman as well as RAF Muharraq on Bahrain.