Lt Col Mitchell aka Mad Mitch

t the crusade in which he most desired success and to which he brought all his flair for publicity, the campaign to Save the Argylls at the end of the 1960s, fell short of complete victory.
In 1967 "Mad Mitch", as he was affectionately known, cut through the British policy of neutral peacekeeping in Aden by leading his Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders to retake the terrorist-dominated Crater district of the city.
On June 20 British forces had been repulsed from the district with the loss of 22 lives. Mitchell determined to reoccupy it, though he had been warned that 500 well-armed police mutineers and terrorists had taken up positions there and were prepared to fight.
On the night of July 3 he ordered Pipe Major Kenneth Robinson to sound the Regimental Charge, "Monymusk". As Mitchell recalled: "It is the most thrilling sound in the world to go into action with the pipes playing. It stirs the blood and reminds one of the heritage of Scotland and the Regiment. Best of all it frightens the enemy to death."
A burst of machine gun fire rattled out from the edge of the town, but the Pipe Major played on undeterred while his comrades flung themselves to the ground. None of them knew how much resistance would be encountered; as it turned out, the only man to be shot dead that night was an Arab who had been challenged and made to run away. The Treasury building containing the whole of the currency reserve for southern Arabia was taken from the police mutineers by negotiation. By the end of the night it was clear to Mitchell that his determination to push on into the Crater area had utterly demoralised the enemy.
He sensed success in the air. "To me that single moment in Crater was worth all my quarter century of soldiering", he said. At dawn on July 4 the pipes and drums sounded again from a rooftop overlooking Crater.
The Argylls kept the peace there for five months by terrifying the rebels. "They know that if they start trouble we'll blow their bloody heads off," was Mitchell's characteristic comment.
Of his style of leadership he said: "I took flamboyant risks in order to demonstrate to my own officers and NCOs that we led from the front." Not one British soldier was lost in the operation.
The feeling of relief in Britain was, in Mitchell's opinion, best expressed in a leading article in The Daily Telegraph: "British troops have shown the combination of skill, tact and cool courage for which they are unequalled. . . .A dangerous and humiliating state of drift, which the British Government permitted to continue for a fortnight, has been ended." But Mitchell's troubles were just beginning.
He rubbed the GOC up the wrong way, annoyed the Ministry of Defence, and proved a thorn in the flesh of the Labour Government - which at that time was anxious to withdraw from the remaining outposts of Empire - by capturing the imagination of the British newspaper-reading public.
In return Mitchell was denied the expected DSO, and given to understand he would not be made brigadier. With the very future of his regiment under threat, he decided it was time to leave the Army.
Mitchell went on to become the Conservative MP for West Aberdeenshire from 1970 to 1974, but did not seek re-election.
Colin Campbell Mitchell was born in south-west London on Nov 17 1925, the eldest son of Lt-Col Colin Mitchell, MC, also of the Argylls. When accompanying his father to the Presbyterian church in West Croydon on Sundays he wore the kilt.
Young Colin was educated at Streatham Grammar School and Whitgift, where he was a voracious reader as well as being captain of swimming and a useful rugby footballer.
He joined the Army in 1943 after a spell in the Home Guard. He was commissioned into the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and joined the 8th Battalion in Italy, just in time for the final campaign.
Mitchell saw fierce fighting on the route up through San Patrizio, Bastia and Consandolo; and as the battalion advanced through the Argenta Gap he was wounded, though not seriously. As this wound was not entered in his records, he did not qualify for the 1939-45 Star, but only for the Italy Star.
Mitchell was then posted to Palestine and had an extremely lucky escape when on his way to lunch at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem; it was blown up just before he arrived.
By now Mitchell was with the 1st Argylls, with whom he learned to fly and operate from gliders. In Palestine he had several narrow escapes from death, but was eventually wounded by one of his own Bren-gunners, when he was doing some personal reconnaissance and was mistaken for a terrorist.
The Australian surgeon who operated on him commented: "You'll have a lot of arthritis in those ankles, and I fear you're going to be pretty short-tempered in your old age."
In Palestine Mitchell learned the importance of maintaining friendly and close relations with the press. He also made friends among both Arabs and Jews, and met General Moshe Dayan, who later became one of his heroes.
After recovering from his wounds, Mitchell became aide de camp to Lt-Gen Sir Gordon Macmillan, GOC Scottish Command. But when the Korean War broke out in 1950, he was allowed to rejoin his regiment.
He took part in the first advance northwards during which he had some bloody close-quarter fighting before reaching Taechon near the Manchurian border. But when the Chinese crossed the Yalu river in vast numbers, the regiment was forced to take part in the general retreat.
They held what became known as Frostbite Ridge, where shaving brushes froze solid in the time it took to lift them from boiling water to the chin. Mitchell recalled that even anti-freeze froze.
When the thaw came, they moved to a new position on the ridge, only to find that their new trench was swarming with black rats, as this was an old battlefield. When they were relieved and withdrawn in 1951 they had just begun advancing again.
After Korea Mitchell was posted home, but at the end of 1957 he returned to the 1st Battalion of the Argylls as a company commander in Cyprus. The Eoka terrorist campaign was then in full swing, but the Argylls faced greater danger from forest fires than from enemy snipers.
Some of these conflagrations were started by villagers who knew they would then be paid half-a-crown a day to fight them; others were lit by terrorists to engulf British troops. In windy conditions fires raced along at 30 mph.
After Cyprus, Mitchell returned with the regiment to the British Army of the Rhine, and then applied successfully to serve with the King's African Rifles in Kenya. He was soon engaged in restoring order in Zanzibar, where there was fierce fighting between Arabs and Africans, with accompanying atrocities; all this had begun with a general election.
Several thousand rioters were arrested and the disorder ended in two days. Keeping the peace in the Northern Frontier District was a lengthier process, as cross-border raids with Uganda were a traditional occupation. The frontiers with Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia were scarcely more peaceful.
During the latter part of his time in Kenya, Mitchell was brigade major to Miles Fitzalan-Howard (now the Duke of Norfolk), whose appreciation of the need to press on with the Africanisation of the King's African Rifles did much to smooth its ultimate conversion into the Kenya Army.
Mitchell had an extraordinary experience when flying in a helicopter less than 20 ft above the ground, looking for Somali guerrillas. He encountered a herd of elephants, all of which scattered, except for the bull, which, rearing up, nearly caught the helicopter with its tusks.
When the Argylls were preparing to join in the Borneo campaign, Mitchell was sent for, and after evading an attempt by the MoD to send him to the Joint Services Staff College at Latimer, engaged in a series of jungle operations and battles.
Officially this was not a war at all, as the British Government did not wish for out-and-out hostilities with Indonesia, but those on the ground thought otherwise.
After six months of jungle warfare, the regiment was sent back to recuperate in Singapore, from where Mitchell was posted back to Whitehall as a staff officer to the Chief of Defence Staff, at that time Earl Mountbatten of Burma. Mountbatten, whom he found an exacting taskmaster, sent most of Mitchell's papers back to him covered with scathing comments in green ink.
When the proposals to cut the strength of the Army were being debated in the 1960s, Mitchell felt that the Services were being asked to achieve the impossible with limited resources.
He therefore began writing articles on the subject (passed reluctantly by the censors) which were published in the Royal United Services Institute journal, as well as in Punch and other papers. Then in 1968 he learned that his own regiment was due to be disbanded in 1972.
Meanwhile the Argylls were sent to Aden, where Britain was establishing a strong military base to make up for the loss of bases in the Canal Zone and Kenya.
However, subversive elements financed by Egypt and Russia helped to convince both the Ministry of Defence and the Labour Government that Britain should withdraw from the area and that Aden should become independent as soon as possible.
Mitchell had scant respect for his political or service superiors. Subsequently he wrote of the GOC: "General Tower, for some reason I can never understand, always wanted to talk about infantry tactics as if he understood what it was like to be a fighting infantryman."
Tower was, of course, an ex-gunner, but a very experienced soldier. But in Mitchell's view his voice carried "a note of veiled sarcasm which I was to hear often".
Although Mitchell and his Argylls handled the military situation with skill and courage, Mitchell's forthright attitude, readiness to spout for the benefit of the media and contempt of authority, both military and civilian, did little for his career.
He was mentioned in despatches, but the omission of a DSO caused considerable public indignation.
At the time, however, Mitchell was more concerned with the fact that his beloved Argylls, whose fighting record was unsurpassed, were to be abolished in the Army cuts, as being the junior Highland regiment. Mitchell disputed the "junior" claim, but, realising that he could fight for their survival better outside the regiment than within it, resigned in 1968.
In his efforts to gain support for the "Thin Red Line" of the Argylls, Mitchell recruited Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, to the cause.
In later life Mitchell probably regarded the Save the Argylls campaign as his greatest achievement. But, though the regiment was given a reprieve from disbandment or amalgamation in 1971, it was reduced to a single company.
A week after resigning from the Army, Mitchell landed in Vietnam as civilian war correspondent for the Daily Express.
During his four years as MP for Aberdeenshire, from 1970, Mitchell served as parliamentary private secretary to the Secretary of State for Scotland, and on the Select Committee on the Armed Services. He sought, unsuccessfully, parliamentary candidatures for Carshalton in 1976 and Bournemouth in 1977.
In 1975 he had taken up the first of a series of consultancy posts. In Rhodesia, in 1976, he advised the Prime Minister, Ian Smith, on dealing with African terrorists. In Afghanistan in 1983 he advised the Mujahideen on how to attack Russian positions. In 1986 he went to Pakistan and the North West Frontier Province.
He was given the Freedom of the City of London in 1979.
Colin Mitchell was a brave, clear-headed, loyal and intensely patriotic man. He had a gift for publicity, but was impatient of opposition or incompetence. This is apparent in his lucid and absorbing account of his experiences in Having Been a Soldier (1969).
Mitchell's experience in Afghanistan led him to set up the Halo Trust (Hazardous Areas Life Support Organisation) to clear mines and allow refugees to return to their homes.
In 1991, when he led a British operation to clear thousands of mines left behind in the 13-year-long civil war in Cambodia, he observed that the charity was being starved of cash by the Overseas Development Admin-istration.
"They're all bureaucrats," he complained. "They can't make a decision. They don't seem to understand that 250 people a month are being injured by these mines."
The ODA responded by saying that their funds for that year were already committed and that they were trying to raise money for the project from the UN. Mitchell had heard such excuses before.
Colin Mitchell married in 1956 Susan Phillips. They had two sons and a daughter.