Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII (11 page)

It was shortly after midnight when March-Phillipps led his men over the western perimeter wall. It was thankfully free of wire, and nowhere near as high as the one on the Anderson Manor assault course. As they landed soft-soled in the interior of the compound, they knew time was against them. They had just seconds until they were discovered, and they had to strike fast while the enemy were still off-guard.

March-Phillipps split his men into four groups – signalling one to take the lighthouse tower, another to hit the accommodation block, a third to secure the engine building, and the last to hit the all-important radio room. March-Phillipps led the assault on the accommodation block. He kicked open the main door and burst into the central room, Tommy Gun at the ready. The first thing he saw were two German soldiers on sentry, an open box of stick grenades lying at their side.

Menaced by the barrels of four Trench Sweepers wielded by a murderous-looking adversary, and taken by utter surprise, the Germans opted not to reach for their grenades. They were taken prisoner, and left in no doubt that one word of alarm
from them would be fatal. That done, March-Phillipps ordered his men to move further into the building. Sleeping quarters branched off a main corridor. Presumably, the rest of the garrison was in there, relying on their two comrades on watch to raise the alarm should there be any sign of trouble.

Outside, two raiders stormed through the door to the radio room, where a light could be seen burning the midnight oil. For some reason the place had been temporarily vacated, the wireless operator perhaps heading out to use the bathroom. Either way, it was an absolute Aladdin’s cave. Scattered across the desk were a treasure trove of German codebooks, notebooks full of scribbled information and instructions, plus signal pads used for compiling messages, wireless diaries and logs. It was exactly this kind of material – hard, usable intelligence – that the raiders had come for.

It was around 0100 by now. In the accommodation block Patrick Dudgeon surprised two German telegraphers, those who had just vacated the radio room. They were in the process of preparing for bed when he slammed open their door and the gaping barrel of his Tommy Gun swept the room. Dudgeon was a fearsome figure of a man, nicknamed ‘Toomai, the Elephant Boy’ by his raider-mates, after the 1937 British adventure film. He started snarling questions at the telegraphers in his schoolboy German, demanding to know where the rest of their comrades were located, and how heavily armed they might be.

Almost before the bewildered radio operators could answer, March-Phillipps and his men were at work further down the corridor. They booted open the door to a final room, and discovered three figures still asleep. Dragging two out of their
beds, March-Phillipps objected to the third being seized, because the figure that was lying there was wearing a hairnet.

‘You can’t t-t-take that!’ he cried out. ‘It’s a w-w-w-woman.’

It soon transpired that all three Germans had been sleeping in hairnets, and so the one mistaken for a woman was seized as well! One of them had actually fainted upon seeing the fierce, staring eyes of the raiders appear from out of the night. The scramble down the cliff to the sea would surely revive him.

By the time all the garrison had been rounded up, the raiders had netted four Navy men – three of whom were Leading Telegraphists – under the command of Chief Petty Officer Mundt, plus three Army men who were there to stand guard over the remote outpost. Position secured, March-Phillipps ordered a thorough search and anything of intelligence value to be taken. Ration books, identity cards, the station and light log, plus personal letters and photos – everything was loaded up as the raiders prepared to make their getaway.

In the radio room they gathered up a final hoard of documents, after which came the moment that gave them greatest pleasure – smashing apart the German radio sets with an axe.

The only challenge now remained how to get seven prisoners down the slippery rock face and into the waiting Goatley. March-Phillipps had also seized the Germans’s weaponry – so his men were laden with the 20mm Oerlikon, boxes of grenades, several long Steyr rifles, as well as helmets and other items of German uniform. Trying to get off again with this lot aboard the Goatley would risk sinking her.

March-Phillipps ended up with seventeen shadowy figures crouched on the slimy rock slab, waves sweeping back and forth
and eager to pluck both raiders and their captives into their icy clutches. There was clearly no room in the boat for the purloined weaponry, so it was tossed unceremoniously into the depths.

The only way into the waiting Goatley – for prisoners as well as raiders – was to slide down the 45-degree angle of the rock slab, and leap across the water into the fragile craft. Two raiders were injured doing so, the second being Appleyard. He was last man off, jumping with the rope into the crowded vessel’s bows. He landed awkwardly, hearing a sharp crack from his lower leg, followed by a jab of pain at shin level. There was little time to investigate his ‘crocked ankle’, as every man had to paddle like hell for the waiting ship.

With bare inches of her canvas hull protruding above the waves, the Goatley made it back to the waiting MTB, under the power of her exhausted but exultant raider-crew. Upon rendezvousing with Little Pisser the prisoners were herded into the front of the boat, where they could be covered by a couple of Tommy Guns. As the MTB crept silently away from Les Casquets, the quizzing of the German captives had already begun.

March-Phillipps and his men had just abducted the entire garrison of Les Casquets – an important German naval signal station – wrecking the wireless room and dumping all their weaponry in the sea, and they had secured a bonanza of intelligence materials to boot. After the success of Operation Postmaster, Operation Dryad was as fitting a follow-up as they could have wished for.

The raiders had a two-hour crossing ahead of them, and by the time Little Pisser rounded Portland Bill, the jubilant raiders
had dressed themselves in assorted items of captured German uniform, including the enemy soldiers’ distinctive helmets.

They were greeted by their fellow SSRF brothers with cries of ‘You look like the bleedin’ Hun!’ and ‘Here comes Jerry!’

The words were uttered in jest, of course, but a seed had been planted in the minds of several of the raiders, Lassen first and foremost. If they could lay their hands on enough German kit, surely they could go about their raiding business posing as the enemy? With Lassen and his Danish and Polish comrades fluent in German, surely they could do so convincingly? The idea would take some finessing, but it was one that the Danish Viking was determined to make a reality.

At 0400 hours the prisoners were handed direct to Military Intelligence (M19), along with all the documentation the raiders had secured. The telegraphists among them – first and foremost Chief Petty Officer Mundt, a forty-one-year-old veteran of the First World War – would prove remarkably talkative. They were able to furnish accounts of enemy positions along a vast sweep of the French coastline from Calais in the east through the Cherbourg Peninsula in the west, and across the expanse of the Channel Islands – intelligence that would prove invaluable to the SSRF on future raids.

In some aspects their accounts were incredibly detailed. They recalled a carrier pigeon that had been driven into Les Casquets during that August’s storms. The exhausted bird had settled under the lighthouse and been caught in a snare. Attached to the bird’s leg was a tiny green canister containing a roll of paper and a message in pencil. It was in French, and began with the words ‘Pigeon 28/8/42 15 hours’.
The message spoke about locations at Bologne, Dieppe, Avions and Hangars. The pigeon and its message – presumably linked to the French resistance – had been handed over to German intelligence.

*

It took twenty-four hours for the Germans to discover why their naval signal station on Les Casquets had fallen silent. The unit sent to investigate discovered a veritable ghost-station. There were no signs of resistance: no blood or bullet holes. Some of the missing, seized as they were in their pyjamas, had even left their uniforms behind.

Hitler’s initial reaction upon hearing the news was to declare Les Casquets indefensible, but the German Navy argued that it was too vital to lose. When Les Casquets was reoccupied by the Germans the garrison was increased five-fold, and the outpost’s defences significantly strengthened.

March-Phillipps’ own report on the mission expressed a quiet satisfaction in a job well done. ‘Great credit is due to Lieut. Bourne for his handling of his ship … [in] hazardous and difficult undertakings in close proximity to reefs and sunken rocks, and to Captain Appleyard, whose navigation made them possible. Also, to Private Orr, a German speaker, who marshalled the prisoners and did much to make the search successful.’

As much as anything, Operation Dryad proved a major propaganda victory for a British military still to set foot again in any significant numbers upon European soil. Churchill’s subsequent words of praise for the mission – and similar cross-Channel raids – were telling: ‘There comes out of the sea from
time to time a hand of steel which plucks the German sentries from their posts with growing efficiency.’

*

Shortly after Operation Dryad Anders Lassen was back wielding Churchill’s ‘hand of steel’, as he led a six-man team onto the island of Burhou, a rocky outcrop at the eastern end of the sandstone ridge that forms Les Casquets.

His was a reconnaissance mission designed to see if light artillery could be landed on Burhou, with which to launch a lightning strike against the German positions across the water on the Channel Island of Alderney. Burhou proved to be another bare and windswept outpost, which the Germans were using solely for target practice.

The raid yielded useful intelligence, and March-Phillipps was able to recommend that a force equipped with mortars and pack-artillery – man-portable guns – could land on Burhou and put down barrages onto the enemy, before melting away into the night.

Lord Louis Mountbatten – Commodore and later Admiral of the Fleet – was then Britain’s Chief of Combined Operations. Strictly speaking SOE agent-commandos like March-Phillipps and his men didn’t fall under Mountbatten’s area of responsibility, but after Operations Postmaster and Dryad he was well aware of their actions.

Mountbatten decreed there should be a minimum of one cross-Channel raid every two weeks, to keep the German coastal forces on their toes, and to demoralize and terrorize them. At the same time, the raiding forces were to gather intelligence for any forthcoming invasion fleet heading towards the French beaches.

The SSRF was involved in several other cross-Channel missions – including some vicious night-time skirmishes with the enemy, as well as clandestine probing of their defences. But it was now that March-Phillipps, Appleyard, Lassen and the other veteran raiders began preparing for the mission that would truly cross the line.

In the forthcoming Operation Aquatint they planned to target mainland France, landing on the coastline from where months before British forces had been driven into the sea by the German blitzkrieg. They planned to put ashore at the village of St Laurent-sur-Mer, at the eastern end of what was to become known, in the D-Day landings to come, as ‘Omaha Beach’.

As always with such raids, Operation Aquatint was heavily weather-dependent. It finally got the go ahead on a Saturday in September 1942 when Anders Lassen was off on a rare weekend’s leave, most probably with a lady friend.

On that fateful night March-Phillipps would feel the absence of his Viking raider as never before.

On the night of 12/13 September 1942 Operation Aquatint went ahead without Lassen. It turned into an unmitigated disaster. Little Pisser took the raiders to the French coast, yet they failed to find the cliff they had planned to scale. Instead, they emerged from their Goatley boat onto a stretch of open sand.

The night was as black as pitch but luck was against them. A heavily-armed German patrol was moving on to the beach, and it stumbled into the British raiding force. In the bloody firefight that ensued one raider was so badly injured that he had to be left behind, as the others retraced their path to the waiting Goatley, all the while putting down fire on the enemy in pursuit.

The remaining ten made it back to their canvas-sided boat, but the Germans used machine guns mounted on the beach to rake the Goatley with fire. It was torn to pieces. Little Pisser tried to sneak in to pluck the survivors from the water, but she was forced out to sea again under heavy bombardment from German shore batteries.

Eleven men had gone ashore on ‘Omaha’ beach. None would return. Three were dead, four were on the run, and the rest – many badly injured – were captured by the enemy.

Among those who had evaded capture was Captain Graham Hayes – the
Maid Honour
original who had led the cut-out mission against the German vessel, the
Likomba
. He would make it as far as supposedly neutral Spain, only to be betrayed by the Spanish – and possibly elements of the French resistance who had been infiltrated by the Gestapo – and handed back to the Germans.

By then Hayes’s three fellow escapees had already been captured. The two ‘foreign’ – i.e. non-British – men among them, the Pole ‘Orr’ Opoczynski and a Dutchman, Jan Hellings, were sent to the notorious prison camps Stalag 133 and Luft Dulag. At some stage they either died in those camps, or were executed. Hitler had already decreed that any man from occupied Europe found fighting with the Allies would be shot: that may well have been their fate.

As for Graham Hayes, he was incarcerated in the infamous fortress-prison of Fresnes, south of Paris, in solitary confinement. The only break from the loneliness and abject squalor of his cell were the regular visits to the Gestapo headquarters, for interrogations that were supplemented by savage beatings, semi-drowning in icy baths, and whipping by ox-gut lashes stiffened with steel rods.

Hayes never broke nor gave anyone away – including those in the French resistance who had genuinely done so much to try to help him escape.

*

Among those who lost their lives on the beach at St Laurent-sur-Mer was Major Gus March-Phillipps DSO, the founder and
visionary leader of the
Maid Honour
Force and the SSRF. He died in the water as he tried to swim ashore from the bullet-ridden Goatley.

In a poem penned in Africa shortly before Operation Postmaster had gone ahead, March-Phillipps had written of a bloody but noble end to a short life lived as a warrior.

It seems as if March-Phillipps had foreseen his own death while in the steamy tropics of West Africa.

As for the unit that he had founded and nurtured, the Small Scale Raiding Force suddenly had lost its irreplaceable figurehead. Along with Graham Hayes and Orr Opoczynski, the Free Frenchman Desgranges – he of the loincloth and piratical headscarf worn during Operation Postmaster – was also gone, as were many others. Leaderless, rudderless and deprived of those who had shaped it and made it what it was, this was the unit’s darkest hour.

Fortunately, Appleyard had remained on Little Pisser during the mission, for it had been his duty to oversee the rendezvous with the Goatley once some German prisoners had been snatched for interrogation purposes. Due to his broken ankle
he wasn’t even supposed to be on active operations. It was only Appleyard’s stubborn sense of duty that had taken him as far as he had gone on the fateful Operation Aquatint.

Even before the raiders had reached landfall Lassen had sensed that disaster was upon his brothers-in-arms. The night of Operation Aquatint he’d paced the bedroom where he was staying, restless and unable to settle. In the middle of the night he awoke in a cold sweat, yelling out in fear and shock. He was convinced that March-Phillipps was dead, killed during the raid.

He couldn’t rest, and early the next morning he headed over to Anderson Manor, only to learn that none of those manning the Goatley had returned. It wasn’t until the following day, 14 September, that the Germans issued an official communiqué concerning the force that March-Phillipps had led to the French coast:

Though he rarely spoke of it, Lassen would blame himself for the failure of Operation Aquatint and for losing March-Phillipps, his close friend, mentor and guide. March-Phillipps had been blessed with a rare quixotic genius, making him the ideal figurehead for a unit such as the
Maid Honour
Force/the SSRF. His loss lay heavily upon all.

Lassen wrote poignantly in his diary about the death of a man he had idealized and tried to emulate, and to whom he was described by many as being ‘devoted’. ‘Major March-Phillipps is dead now,’ he noted. ‘The only man I sincerely liked and respected, he died in battle leading his men, a death worthy of him. At times I wish I’d been with him when things went wrong. At all the other times we fought together, but not the last.’

The resulting guilt and anger would drive Lassen to the limits in the missions to come, as he sought to avenge March-Phillipps’ death and that of the others. But right now eleven men – the SSRF’s commander first and foremost – were gone, and the unit was in danger of losing its way and its very purpose. Command of the SSRF now fell to Appleyard, and it was chiefly due to his refusal to let grief overcome the raiders’ sense of mission that the unit survived its near-catastrophic loss.

In a War Office cable stamped ‘
Most Secret
’, the change in command is reported in the driest possible terms: ‘Major March-Phillipps, the former Commander of the raiding force … is unfortunately missing, and we wish to appoint in his place W/S Lieutenant J. G. Appleyard, MC … Captain Appleyard is 26, an officer since the War began … and recently won a bar to his Military Cross.’

In the aftermath of the fateful Operation Aquatint M visited Anderson Manor, and spent time among his agent-commandos in an effort to bolster morale. A true leader of men, he had been close to March-Phillipps – one of the earliest believers in M’s vision for the agent-commandos – and he felt his loss and that of the others as keenly as anyone.

It was their anger and their thirst for revenge that drove M, Appleyard, Lassen and the others on. And as luck would have it, their very next mission would take these men to new levels of daring, notoriety and opprobrium.

*

Barely two weeks after Aquatint the raiders prepared to go into action again, on Operation Basalt. It was the night of 3 October when Appleyard, Lassen, Patrick Dudgeon – Toomai, the Elephant Boy, the German speaker who had interrogated the prisoners on Les Casquets – and nine others prepared to set sail once more in Little Pisser, their faithful ship being one of the few that had survived the disastrous raid on the French coast.

Nerves were stretched to breaking point for Operation Basalt. This was the unit’s chance to prove that, despite their horrendous losses, they remained an effective fighting force. It was also a golden opportunity to seek revenge for those who had died, or perhaps worse still, like Graham Hayes, been taken captive.

Tonight’s raid would take the men back to their old stalking ground – the Channel Islands. The target was Sark, a relatively small but heavily populated – and heavily garrisoned – landmass, one menaced by barbed-wire entanglements, and with machine-gun nests and minefields covering just about every conceivable avenue of approach.

Just 2.1 square miles in area, Sark lies to the far south of Les Casquets and east of the main Channel Island of Guernsey. In the autumn of 1942 Sark was under the rule of Kommandant Major Albrecht Lanz, the German force commander based
upon Guernsey. According to the prisoners seized from the earlier raid on Les Casquets, the garrison on Sark consisted of around 200–300 men, equipped with small arms, grenades, light machine guns and artillery pieces.

More worryingly still, there were some twenty minefields dotted around the island. These were armed with the dreaded S-mines, the so-called ‘Bouncing Bettys’, which when triggered sprang up to knee height, exploding in a hail of ball bearings. There were also fixed flamethrowers and anti-tank guns to deter any would-be aggressors. As if that wasn’t enough, the civilian population was under a night-time curfew enforced by roving German patrols, which meant that anyone spotted during the hours of darkness would be assumed hostile.

The German garrison on Sark was in the process of reinforcing its defences still further. The SSRF’s mission was to somehow infiltrate those defences, raid an enemy billet and seize as many prisoners as possible. Spiriting enemy soldiers away in the night was seen as being the means to spread ultimate terror among the German ranks – even more so than taking lives.

The twelve chosen men were told they could have their pick of weaponry for the coming raid. Lassen deliberated long and hard about taking his bow-and-arrows. In the end he decided against it – most probably because the War Office had proscribed its use in battle – settling instead for his Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife.

*

Little Pisser ploughed through the darkened seas, each wave seeming half to swamp her, as her low-lying hull cut a path
ahead. Salt spray whipped and stung the faces of those standing on the open deck. Appleyard and Lassen were in the wheelhouse, legs planted wide against the thumping impacts, and bracing themselves for what they knew was coming:
revenge
.

At shortly before 2300 hours she rounded Les Casquets, and struck a southerly bearing towards Sark. As always, Lieutenant Freddie Bourne was at the MTB’s wheel, and as they neared their target he dropped their speed to around 10 knots, to dampen the earsplitting howl of the engines. Shortly, the craggy form of Sark took shape, cliffs washed a silver-grey in the moonlight.

Bourne brought the force in from the south-east, making for a semi-circular natural harbour scooped out of the island’s south-eastern corner. On silent-engine mode the MTB puttered closer to the shoreline. From his charts Bourne knew that the water beneath his keel would remain deep and navigable almost to landfall. Making no more than one or two knots he crept under the lee of the cliffs, dropped anchor and cut the auxiliary engine.

Before them lay two apparently easy landing points – gently shelving shingle and sand beaches, with a simple scramble leading to the island’s flatter level above. But fearing that each would be mined, the raiders intended to take a far more challenging approach. Between the bays lay a snub-nosed headland known as the Hog’s Back. Mounted atop this feature was what aerial reconnaissance suggested was a German machine-gun post with clear fields of fire into both the bays below.

Mindful of the fate of the Operation Aquatint raiding force – whose Goatley had been machine-gunned in the
water – Appleyard had decided it was crucial to make landfall unseen by the enemy manning that machine-gun post. The only way to do so was to head directly to the Hog’s Back, and to put ashore where its furthest point plummeted into the sea.

During preparations for the mission Appleyard had discovered an old Sark guidebook – the Channel Islands being a popular tourist destination before the war – which mentioned the existence of a path leading directly from the Hog’s Back to the sea. There were caves at the shoreline, and it was likely that the path had been used by smugglers in the past. Whether it still existed and was navigable remained to be seen.

With Lassen acting as bowman, the Goatley made its final approach to shore. Paddles kissed the water as the Dane brought them in close to the rocks. It had fallen to Lassen to be the first to scale the cliff ahead of them and deal with the German gun post above.

Shortly before midnight the canvas-sided craft nudged against the rocks and Lassen leapt ashore. Within seconds he was swallowed by the darkness. Like a mountain goat, he trotted up the near-vertical cliff and was gone. Ten other ghostly figures followed, moving at a more cautious pace with Appleyard in the lead. Behind them, one man was left to guard the Goatley.

As the guidebook had intimated, the start of the climb was steep and treacherous, the cliff face being sodden and weatherworn from where the sea repeatedly smashed against it, and plagued by patches of wet, loose shale. After a good hundred feet or more of scrabbling on all fours, the gradient gradually lessened. Appleyard found himself on a steep, winding path, leading to the summit of the Hog’s Back. It switchbacked
through sharp gullies lined with thick bracken and gorse, but it was easy going compared to what had gone before.

Appleyard pushed on, keen to link up with the often recklessly brave Dane. Ahead of him Lassen had already made the summit. Lying with his face pressed into the earth he surveyed the cliff-top position. It was surrounded by rolls of freshly-laid barbed wire and there was indeed a gun there. Fortunately for the raiders it was an old, disused one – something that it hadn’t been possible to ascertain from studying the aerial photos alone.

For several seconds the stillness of the night was broken by the sharp snip of wire being cut. Lassen wormed through the crawl-hole that he’d made, and flitted into the shadows, scouting the terrain ahead as far as it seemed sensible to go. Finding it clear of the enemy, he hurried back to brief Appleyard. The raiders rendezvoused at the V-shaped summit of the Hog’s Back, then moved inland along its ridge, making for a group of houses at a hamlet called Petit Dixcart, where the nearest enemy troops were supposedly billeted.