Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII (13 page)

With Allied forces gearing up for the coming D-Day landings, the centre of gravity of small-scale amphibious raiding operations had shifted to the Mediterranean. It was there that Churchill’s butcher-and-bolt raiders were to be massively expanded in number, and where their unorthodox means of waging war was truly to come of age.

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Even then, in its formative years, the SAS was a unit with a certain distinctive dash. Nourished by success and prestige, and unconstrained by SOE-levels of secrecy, it carried an air of romantic mystery. By nature of their clandestine status the
Maid Honour
Force and the SSRF had had no specific insignia, while the SAS possessed its own, unmistakeable cap badge, one designed by David Stirling himself. It showed a white dagger, somewhat reminiscent of a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife, with the words ‘Who Dares Wins’ superimposed beneath it. The badge was worn with the distinctive set of parachutist’s wings, which together would become the famous winged dagger.

When Stirling had first bumped into General Claude Auchinleck – then Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East Theatre – after adopting that early cap badge design, the General had stared at it for a long moment, before announcing: ‘Good heavens, Stirling, what’s that you have on your shirt?’

‘Our operational wings, sir,’ Stirling replied, smartly.

‘Well, well,’ Auchinleck murmured, ‘and very nice too … Very nice too.’

The soon-to-be famous SAS insignia had just got its formal blessing.

Sadly, David Stirling hardly got to wear the iconic badge for long. In January 1943 – just weeks prior to Lassen and the larger SSRF contingent joining his unit – Stirling was captured during a raid in North Africa. He was to spend the rest of the war in captivity, and would end up being incarcerated in Colditz, in an effort to try to foil his repeated escape attempts.

Thus Stirling and Lassen – two of the foremost pioneers of British Special Forces soldiering – would never get to meet, but in any case, in Earl Jellicoe, Lassen had a superlative commander under whom to operate. With Stirling in captivity, Jellicoe became the overall commander of the amphibious element of Special Forces, while the land-based arm of the SAS fell under
the command of another towering Special Forces legend, Robert Blair Mayne, better known to all simply as ‘Paddy’.

The two men could hardly have been more different. Earl Jellicoe, then just twenty-three years of age, was blessed with pronounced features beneath a shock of curly dark hair and a biting wit. The son of the 1st Earl Jellicoe, former Admiral of the Fleet, he listed a string of royals and former top military commanders as his godparents. Educated at a Broadstairs, Kent, preparatory school, Winchester College and then Trinity College, Cambridge, George Jellicoe could hardly have hailed from a more privileged and genteel English background.

His sang-froid and irony were characterized by the way he greeted one of his returning operators, who’d escaped from German clutches after 134 days in captivity.

‘Ah, you’re back,’ Jellicoe remarked. ‘Damned slow about it, weren’t you?’

By contrast, Blair Paddy Mayne was a red-haired giant of an Ulsterman, and both an Ireland international rugby player and a heavyweight-boxing champion. When Stirling had invited Mayne to become one of his six founding SAS officers, Mayne had little other choice. It was either that or face a court martial, for he was under close arrest after knocking out his commanding officer.

Lassen was likewise known to be quick to anger and quick with his fists. In time, he’d flatten his new commanding officer, Earl Jellicoe, throwing a punch utterly from out of the blue in a Tel Aviv bar.

‘I think I must have said something that annoyed him,’ Jellicoe explained. ‘I wasn’t aware of it, except the next thing I
was aware of I was flat on my back on this bar floor, and I must have been out for quite a bit. He carried quite a big punch if he wanted to punch. I said: “Well, I don’t know what on earth this is all about, Andy” … And in any case we had a few more drinks and drove back to my camp. He was too valuable a person for me to make too much of a fuss about it.’

Fortunately for Lassen, Jellicoe had by then developed a soft spot for the Dane, not to mention a keen appreciation of his abilities as a piratical raider par excellence, and he chose to let the matter drop.

Another commander who would come to love and cherish the wayward Dane was David Sutherland, Jellicoe’s second-in-command. Slender, sandy-haired and with a light, freckled complexion, Sutherland was a still-waters-run-deep type. He spoke only when he had something to say, and as a result he was listened to. Sutherland was known to all as ‘Dinky’, for he seemed able to sleep in a ditch for a week and still come out looking freshly shaven and well groomed. In time, Sutherland would nickname Lassen ‘The Viking’.

‘Anders Lassen was the master Viking,’ Sutherland remarked. ‘He was true to the trait. He had all the tricks and the tradecraft of the Viking raider; all the seamanship, the mastery of weapons and everything else.’

Lassen’s reputation preceded him – and most notably concerning Sark. The outrage in Germany over Operation Basalt continued, as did the tit-for-tat reprisals against Britain. Indeed, Lassen quickly became known for his tongue-in-cheek refutation of the most damning accusations made against him
and his fellow raiders – that they had stuffed the German prisoners’ mouths with mud, to gag them and keep them quiet.

‘It is not true that we stuffed the mouths of the prisoners with mud,’ he would declare, with mock imperious outrage. ‘We stuffed their mouths with grass!’

When Lassen was appointed commander of one of the D Squadron patrols, it was at first with some degree of trepidation on the part of his commanding officers. Sutherland called Sergeant Jack Nicholson – the SSRF veteran, and like Lassen only a recent recruit to Jellicoe’s amphibious raiding unit – to his tent to have words.

‘I’m putting Lieutenant Lassen in charge of your section,’ Sutherland announced, quietly.

‘Very good, sir,’ Nicholson replied.

‘Lieutenant Lassen needs watching,’ Sutherland added, somewhat cryptically. ‘He’s been in trouble. Something about killing a prisoner in a raid on France. I want you to keep an eye on him. Restrain him.’

Nicholson was somewhat taken aback. He’d rarely had such an unusual introduction to a new section commander. More to the point, from what he knew of Lassen, Nicholson suspected the admonition would very likely prove impossible to observe. While he was an inspired leader of men, Lassen was, more than anything, a force of nature – wild and unstoppable.

In the very first coming raid, he was to prove his destructive powers as if a hurricane had been unleashed upon the enemy.

Geoffrey Appleyard arrived in North Africa shortly after Lassen. Sadly, this signalled the end of Appleyard’s long-lived and highly effective partnership with the Dane. While Lassen was sucked into Jellicoe’s outfit, the much-sought-after Appleyard was claimed by the mainstream SAS, as was Patrick Dudgeon – ‘Toomai, the Elephant Boy’ to his raider mates.

With March-Phillipps dead, Graham Hayes incarcerated under the Gestapo, and Appleyard and Lassen going their separate ways, the
Maid Honour
founding originals had ceased to exist as a fighting force – but their legacy would drive amphibious raiding operations to new heights of daring and glory across the Mediterranean.

Appleyard, Lassen
et al.
remained under SOE auspices for the time being, but M was rapidly losing sway over his agent-commandos. Claimed by Special Forces, they arguably had little need for the kind of deniability and ultra-secrecy that SOE-agent status had allowed them. Before them lay the spectre of Operation Husky, part of the Allied grand invasion plan for Europe – and that would require their skills as fast-evolving raiding forces, not as agents of high-level deception.

Operation Husky was masterminded by the Allied High Command as a means to penetrate Europe via her southern
‘underbelly’, and to thrust north towards Berlin. The stepping-stone into Southern Europe was to be Sicily, and in order to take Sicily, Crete – the largest of the Greek Islands – needed to be wrested from German and Italian control, or at the very least the warplanes stationed at her airbases had to be put out of action.

It was from Crete’s dusty airstrips that the Axis powers were able to dominate the skies over the eastern Mediterranean. En route to Sicily the Husky invasion convoys would pass close to the Crete coast, making them doubly vulnerable to warplanes based on the island. If Jellicoe’s raiders could go in behind enemy lines and sabotage those airbases, then the 8th Army could move on Sicily largely without fear of such attack. If Sicily fell, Italy would follow, and if Rome were taken so Berlin would fall. That, at least, was the theory.

Whether Husky was actually conceived as a master plan or as a grand deception remains unclear. It was most likely a belt and braces approach. If the Axis powers could be convinced that the liberation of Europe would be driven from the south, then the Normandy landings would stand a far greater chance of success. On the other hand if the drive through Italy proved wildly successful, then the liberation of Europe might well be achieved from there.

Either way, to set the stage for Operation Husky a small group of very determined men needed to land on Crete, trek through the mountains, evade the numerous enemy forces stationed there and blow up the German and Italian warplanes and airbases. It was just the kind of mission that Lieutenant Anders Lassen MC, and his fellow former SSRF raiders lived and breathed for.

In a cypher message marked ‘MOST SECRET’ – most radio messages were sent doubly encoded and in Morse; in ‘cypher’– Allied High Command laid out what was expected of Jellicoe’s men: ‘Attacks on enemy aerodromes by small parties of saboteurs on the lines of the S.A.S. Regiment in the Western Desert … Small scale raids against selected airfields in Crete to diminish enemy air effort against HUSKY convoys.’

In light of such a directive, Lassen gathered a core group of fighters around him. He was due to be given command of the Irish Patrol, described by many as ‘an incredible collection of hoodlums’. They included Sean O’Reilly, Sidney Greaves, Les Stephenson, Dick Holmes, Douggie Pomford, Ray Jones, Hank Hancock, Douggie Wright, Fred Green, Gippo Conby and Patsy Henderson. Lassen would have no shortage of volunteers for the coming raids – but first, the training.

The base for Jellicoe’s new amphibious raiding force was at Athlit, in what was then Palestine (in the far north of modern-day Israel). Athlit Bay consists of little more than a crescent shaped stretch of golden sand fringed by azure sea. To the north the dramatic ruins of a thirteenth-century Crusader castle – Château Pèlerin, once a famed seat of the Knights Templar – perch on a promontory, which juts out into the waters of the Mediterranean.

Jellicoe established his training camp under a cluster of canvas tents, pitched on the flower meadow to the rear of the beach. Rising steeply behind lie the Carmel hills, a range of mountains reaching to just short of 2,000 feet in height. Carpeted in expanses of olive groves, oak and laurel forest,
scrub and grassland, the Carmel hills provided the perfect terrain in which to practise one of the key skills that would be required of Jellicoe’s raiders – long-range penetration on foot through dry, largely waterless terrain, to strike distant targets.

As training got underway Jellicoe had under his command some 130 officers and men, but his force would expand to several hundred strong as operations intensified.

In Lassen’s section were several men who would grow close over the coming months. First and foremost was SSRF veteran Sergeant Jack Nicholson – he who had been cautioned to do the seemingly impossible and to ‘keep an eye on’ Lassen and ‘restrain him’. Nicholson was a tall, taciturn Scot, without an inch of fat on his sparse frame. He possessed a shock of wild, dark hair atop slender features, and there was something distinctly calming about the man’s look, which belied his ferocity in battle.

In the months that lay ahead Lassen and Nicholson were to become inseparable, especially as the tempo of raids, plus their audacity and daring grew exponentially. Another man that Lassen would form a close bond with was Southern Irishman Sean O’Reilly. At 41 years of age, O’Reilly was truly the grandfather among the raiders. An Irish Guards veteran, O’Reilly – like Lassen – was good with his fists, and was reputed to survive largely on women and beer, though he’d opt for the latter if he absolutely had to choose.

Over time O’Reilly would develop something close to a father-and-son relationship with Lassen, becoming the Dane’s de facto bodyguard. It was somehow natural that Scousers like
Douggie Pomford, a Liverpool native, would also graduate to the Irish Patrol – the Irish homeland lying just across the water from that city where so many Irish immigrants had made their home. If anything, the 22-year-old Pomford was even more accomplished a scrapper than O’Reilly.

Pomford had won Britain’s Golden Gloves amateur middleweight boxing championship in the year before the war, winning five fights, including one in which he’d knocked out the Irish Guards’ contender in the first round. He was refreshingly open about his misspent youth, describing himself as something of a rascal, one who’d ran away to the circus with only his dog for company. He’d taught his dog to do some tricks, while he stood in a boxing booth challenging all-comers to a bout.

Pomford had left the fairground at the start of the war to join the Lancashire Fusiliers. But the rigours of boxing had taught the young soldier traits that didn’t particularly endear him to the regular armed forces: self-reliance, self-discipline and the ability to focus on an aim come what may. Of course, those were exactly the kind of qualities that Earl Jellicoe was looking for in the force that he was raising at Athlit. Like everyone else at Athlit, Pomford was a volunteer, and he was to prove himself a five-star SAS recruit.

‘We wanted self-reliant men with initiative and self-discipline,’ Jellicoe explained, ‘not the imposed discipline of the barrack square. Above anything else I sought self-starters, men not dependent on an officer telling them what to do.’

Another accomplished boxer and self-starter was the 21-year-old Guards veteran Dick Holmes. Hailing from the
East End of London, Holmes was one of the few Englishmen tolerated in the Irish Patrol. Tall and broad shouldered, his ability to trek across the hills would become legendary. Holmes and Lassen, both strong characters, would sometimes clash in the coming months.

‘Everything with him was instinct,’ Holmes explained. ‘And so if somebody argued with him or pointed out something that he was doing wrong he didn’t like that, so he would immediately shout back at them, without considering the consequences of what he was saying.’

Holmes had volunteered for the SAS because in his parent unit he’d been spooked by the kind of nonsensical orders, as he saw it, that officers were sometimes wont to visit on their troops. He hated mindless discipline and having no sense of control over his own destiny, and it was hardly surprising that he’d ended up in the punishment block on several occasions. But in Jellicoe’s outfit Holmes thrived.

‘I felt that anything happening to me would be my own fault,’ was how Holmes described the experience of joining the force now gathering at Athlit. ‘I found my niche … I enjoyed it, I was good at it, and it was the war I wanted to be fighting.’

Then there was Gunner Ray Jones. Jones was a stocky, barrel-chested man, with an unruly mop of wild brown hair topping off a cheeky, but open and honest-looking face. He’d joined the SAS from the Royal Artillery, his aim being to get away from what he described as the bullshit rules and regulations of the regular armed forces. Jones spoke with a broad Birmingham accent, and like many a Brummie he was a salt-of-the-earth
type. Jones would end up being willing to follow Anders Lassen to the ends of the earth.

The training regime at Athlit was a rerun of Anderson Manor, though it was even more relentless. Here the assault course came complete with sections that could be set aflame: somehow the recruits had to crawl through and over blazing walls of fire and clouds of choking smoke. The 60-mile treks now had to be completed in the heat of a burning Mediterranean early summer, and across terrain mercilessly devoid of water.

Athlit proved brutal on the recruits, and the dropout rate was high. Training was deliberately harsh, being designed to weed out those who lacked the physical and mental stamina for what was coming – extended periods spent behind enemy lines on sabotage missions. It sought to push men to the limit, and to find their breaking point. New recruits found themselves collapsing and even falling unconscious with exhaustion, but there was little sympathy for any who fell behind.

One of the youngest was 19-year-old wireless operator Jack Mann, originally of the Royal Corps of Signals. Brought up and schooled overseas, Jack Mann had a natural gift for languages, speaking French, Italian and some German, which made him a real asset for raiding operations. He’d come to Athlit fresh from the Long Range Desert Group (the British raiding unit that had distinguished itself alongside the SAS, in the North African deserts), but unlike most grizzled LRDG veterans he’d found it impossible to grow a proper beard – and everyone had one in the LRDG.

‘Put some chicken shit on it,’ one old LRDG hand had joked. ‘It’ll grow thick as a bush.’

Upon joining Jellicoe’s unit Mann compensated for his lack of stubble by growing his hair ‘as big as a bush’. Jellicoe himself led the fashion for longer hair, which was driven by practical needs as much as anything. ‘We could be out on operations for weeks on end,’ explained Mann, ‘and of course we had no barbers.’

At Athlit, Mann had drummed into him the ‘train hard – fight easy’ mentality – something that would become a catchphrase of the SAS. ‘The harder and harsher the training, the more likelihood there was of beating the enemy,’ Mann recounts. ‘I realized that all the mountain trekking and swimming I used to do as a child with my mother – that gave me an edge. I learned the value of total self-reliance, plus the value of your fellow raiders – those who quickly became your closest mates.’

He also realized that in Jellicoe’s outfit officers couldn’t expect to lead simply by dint of rank alone; they had to earn the right to command. On one exercise Mann was climbing a cliff and his handhold gave way, a chunk of rock falling and puncturing the wooden dinghy below. They had a brigadier’s nephew in their patrol, an officer who was there pretty much to get a feel for the unit. The officer seemed to take a dim view of Mann’s ‘damaging Army equipment’.

Later, Mann was cooking up an evening meal – an ‘all-in’: several tins of food emptied into a billie and boiled up together – and the officer ordered Mann to serve him.

‘Oh no, not in this outfit,’ Mann countered. ‘In this outfit, you get your own.’

By the time they were back at base camp Mann had been put on a charge by the officer. He was relieved of his gun and his
fighting knife and locked in the military gaol. For sheer devilment as much as anything Mann had recorded his religion on his Army papers as ‘Russian Orthodox’. He spoke English with a foreign accent, so he figured he could pass as Russian anyway. He called the head gaoler and demanded to see the Russian Ambassador, claiming he was a Russian citizen seeking to complain about the conditions of his imprisonment.

‘We had all sorts of nationalities in the unit, so the gaoler wasn’t to know any different,’ Mann explained. ‘No one wanted trouble with the Russians, and within hours I was out of there. I got a riotous reception when I made it back to camp. They all wanted to know how I’d got myself out of gaol, what trick I’d pulled. But it just goes to show the kind of self-reliance the unit taught you, and of what an individual is truly capable when needs must.’

Weapons training had to encompass every type of arms imaginable – including the guns and the ammo of the enemy, which the raiders would be expected to scavenge and utilize as they saw fit. In nearby Jerusalem, Jellicoe’s men had access to their very own equivalent of Experimental Station 6, the SOE’s school for bloody mayhem, wherein Lassen had refined his skills of silent murder.

Dubbed the ‘Killer School’, the main aim of the Jerusalem establishment – situated in a former police station – was to prepare the new recruits for the physical and psychological rigours of what lay ahead, as small raiding forces went into battle against far larger formations of regular German and Italian troops.

Recruits went through the Killer School in batches of thirty, and they were left in no doubt as to what lay ahead. ‘When you
burst into a room full of enemy soldiers, you must remember …’ an instructor cautioned. ‘Shoot the first man who moves, hostile or not. His brain has recovered from the shock of seeing you there with a gun. Therefore he is dangerous. Next shoot the man nearest to you. He is in the best position to cause you trouble.’