Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII (27 page)

Jason Mavrikis, Lassen’s translator and Greek Sacred Squadron veteran, put it more succinctly: ‘The whole of Salonika was in the streets, and Anders Lassen was something to the local people, because the day before he had negotiated with the Germans and he really managed to save large and important installations, especially the harbour.’

But Lassen, the hero of Salonika, soon tired of acting as city governor. With Athens and Salonika having fallen, all of Greece would soon be in Allied hands.

In recent weeks Lassen had found himself increasingly drawn to the ‘big war’ – that which would inevitably throw him into close contact with the regular military. ‘We must go to the big war,’ he kept telling his comrades in the SBS, plus anyone in higher command who might listen. Quite what his force of maverick pirate-raiders might be called upon to do in the ‘big war’ remained unclear – but Lassen was determined that he and his men would play their part.

The nearest ‘big war’ was Italy, but in the fierce winter of 1944/45 Allied forces were bogged down in the snows and mud. Northern Italy had become a long and brutal war of attrition, in which neither side was gaining much ground. It was not a war in which Lassen could see an obvious niche for his
kind of small-scale raiding operations, but with the coming spring offensive all of that was about change.

Lassen’s almost unrivalled reputation for delivering unlimited violence in the night and the darkness, ensured that his desire to go to the ‘big war’ would not fall upon deaf ears.

*

Porter Jarrell, the American medic-cum-raider, had been at Lassen’s side all through Athens and Salonika and for everything in-between. Like so many of Lassen’s raiders, Jarrell saw himself as being especially close to the man who commanded the Irish Patrol; this enigmatic leader had the ability to draw fellow warriors close, while revealing little of his private self.

In spite of Lassen’s closed, intensely self-contained nature, Jarrell could tell how murderously hard the Dane was driving himself. As November 1944 in Salonika turned into January 1945 somewhere on the road to Italy, Jarrell feared where his commander’s restlessness and battle-hunger was leading him. Lassen had survived four years of constant raiding – action that had killed off every one of his original comrades, and more. Yet it was as if he felt the guilt of the survivor, and was driven by a terrible death wish.

‘It was as if a fever was burning inside him,’ Jarrell remarked. ‘He defied death and exposed himself to the greatest dangers. He was like a restless dynamo, charged with energy … When he was on leave it was as if he knew he had courted disaster too often and had to fill those short hours with the life that was running away from him.’

‘He didn’t seem to know the word fear,’ Jack Mann remarked. ‘He was a go-getter. He would organize the raids, prepare for it,
and he was the real killer … You knew he never knew how long he had. He never thought about dying, but he thought – “Well, you know, I may as well have some fun when I’m not fighting …” ’

Jarrell feared for Lassen’s very survival. ‘Life had become a race against death. He had already become a legend – but a legend about a human being – full of contrasts in his many-sided character. A legend which bore the unmistakable stamp of his personality.’

That unique and compelling personality – one intensely proud of his soldiers and hugely protective of them; one largely dismissive of rigid military hierarchies – would be to the fore as Lassen led his men into combat in Northern Italy.

Lassen turned up in Italy complete with a Volkswagen
Kubelwagen
– the open-topped jeep-like vehicle used extensively by the German military – that he had purloined from the enemy. He also had with him the veterans of his Irish Patrol, plus Pipo – the mischievous Lion of Leros. Unfortunately, the evil-smelling Dog Tom had somehow been left behind.

Yet now that his wish had been granted and he’d got to join the ‘big war’, Lassen would find himself increasingly fettered by its rules and confounded by its regulations. At first he tore around northern Italy in that
Kubelwagen
looking for some suitable work for his men, but only for so long. One day the British Military Police stopped him and confiscated the vehicle. They didn’t seem to understand the concept of such things being seized as the ‘booty’ of war.

Lassen’s repeatedly cabled headquarters to get Dog Tom sent on to him in Italy. ‘Kindly send Dog Tom, two jeeps and a barber,’ read the first. No response was forthcoming. A second was sent. ‘Where is Dog Tom – stop. Lassen beginning to show symptoms of anxiety neurosis – stop.’ That too went unanswered.

No Dog Tom was ever forthcoming, and in truth a newly arrived NCO had taken advantage of the Danish major and his dog being separated, and Dog Tom had been shot. Rules and
regulations seemed to define and shape everything in the new world order that was Italy with the regular Army.

‘The practise of wearing unit headgear at other than the regulation angle will cease forthwith …’

‘Articles of Enemy personal apparel, toilet items, cameras etc. will in future be described in the correct terminology. They will
not
be referred to as “liberated”.’

All this was anathema to Lassen and his Irish Patrol, and at times they must have wondered what on earth they were doing in such a theatre of war.

‘The rest of the British Army hated us,’ remarked Dick Holmes. ‘They disliked us intensely. I mean, no doubt about it we were arrogant bastards. We walked around with scarves on, carried guns, most of us had shoulder holsters and one thing or another that we’d picked up along the way, guns concealed in our pockets somewhere – little Berettas and stuff.’

Little of this kind of behaviour seemed acceptable now that Lassen and his Irish Patrol had joined the ‘big war’. The Viking raider’s frame of mind wasn’t improved much by the attitude of some of the regular Army officers he encountered. They seemed to view his Special Duty raiders as truly a villainous bunch – a band of ragged, renegade, warn-torn desperadoes.

‘Your men are a disgrace,’ one officer declared to Lassen. ‘They are not even shaved! You are not even shaved! What will the enemy think if they see you dead looking like this?’

Lassen’s hand went to the hilt of his Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife: ‘Speak of my men like that again, and I’ll slit your throat.’

Gradually, bit-by-bit, Lassen’s way of waging war was being eroded by an Army High Command who resented the Special
Duty volunteers and their unique
esprit de corps
. As the war shifted in focus away from small-scale operations behind enemy lines to large-scale set-piece battles, the regular Army High Command was gaining the upper hand.

Lassen found himself having to issue orders that ran against everything the Special Forces raiders had long stood for. This one was typical: ‘The flogging of kit for personal gain is prohibited.’ But he had asked to be a part of the ‘big war’ and now he was here. He’d made his bed: he was going to have to lie in it.

*

Lassen had made it to the ‘big war’ chiefly due to a request by Brigadier Reginald Tod, of the 2nd Special Service Brigade (a unit consisting largely of Royal Marine Commandos). The brigadier, who knew Lassen well, had seen an opening for him and his men in a forthcoming crucial operation – the attempt to break through the German lines and kick-start the stalled Allied offensive.

The conquest of Italy had been spearheaded by the British Eighth Army, working in conjunction with American forces. The Eighth Army had pushed as far north as the Bologna plain, capturing such towns and cities as Forli, Faenza and Ravenna, but their offensive had stalled in bitter fighting, exacerbated by the freezing winter mud and snows. To the west of their positions, the American advance had likewise come to a halt in the rugged foothills of the Apennine Mountains.

Allied forces had thus been halted some 200 miles south of the Austrian border, and just 250 miles short of German territory itself – taking them tantalizingly close to the heartland of Hitler’s Reich. Operation Husky – the liberation of
Europe via Sicily and her soft underbelly – was coming up trumps, but only if the logjam on the Bologna plain could be broken, and Hitler was doing everything in his power to ensure that it wouldn’t be.

Hitler had ordered the German army to stand firm on their present lines, and not to retreat to stronger positions along the northern Italian Alps. They had twenty-seven divisions manning their front, with good supplies of ammunition. Their morale remained high, and Hitler had demanded that every last inch of Italian soil be rigorously defended. Yet Churchill was convinced that a breakthrough here would spell disaster for the Germans, opening the way for the advance on the Fatherland itself.

The River Po lay between the German forces and the refuge of the Alps. Churchill believed that defeat south of there would deliver a knockout blow – and the Allied commanders, Field Marshal Alexander and American General Mark Clark set their minds to engineering such a defeat.

‘If we could break through the Adriatic flank and reach the Po quickly all the German armies would be cut off and forced to surrender,’ Churchill argued. It was to this that Alexander and Clark bent their efforts when the stage was set for the final battle.

At the eastern end of the Bologna plain lies the Lower Romagna, a flat, marshy coastal region beginning around Argenta and terminating on Italy’s eastern coast in the Adriatic Sea. Dykes, canals and numerous rivers crisscross this region, and in the warmer months its waterways are the breeding ground for clouds of ferocious mosquitoes.

The Eighth Army’s front line terminated at its eastern end at Lake Comacchio – in truth a ‘lake’ in name only. Comacchio was but the most evil-smelling, treacherous, mud-choked patch of shallow, bog-water, among many such swamplands in the Lower Romagna. And perhaps because it ran counter to any easy logic – and thus would be the route of attack least expected by the enemy – it was at Comacchio that Allied forces had decided to attempt their spring breakthrough.

Brigadier Tod, commanding No. 9 Commando and assorted other supporting units, held the front line at Comacchio. Lake Comacchio is some twenty miles by fifteen, and across its length and breadth the average depth of water is no more than two feet; everywhere the lake was plagued by muddy shallows and treacherous sandflats. To the lake’s eastern flank lay a narrow spit of scrub-covered sand, which was all that separated the lake from the sea. To the west, the lake petered out into a skein of waterways, quagmires and bogs.

If he could abide the stench and avoid the quicksand, a child could paddle for miles from the fringes of the lake, without the water ever reaching above his knees. Over the millennia the local inhabitants had tried to carve the odd channel through the lake, to try to ease passage from one side to the other, but with little intention of lingering on its stagnant waters. The only vaguely edible things to be caught in Comacchio were thin, tasteless eels, and otherwise it was a rank-smelling, mosquito-plagued death-trap.

But Brigadier Tod saw something else in Comacchio’s stagnant expanse. The sand spit separating the lake from the sea was heavily mined and rigged with formidable fortifications.
But if a force could somehow cross the lake undetected and hit the enemy by surprise from the rear, the spit would be there for the taking. If the northern shore of the lake could be held to form a bridgehead, the German positions set to both the west and east of the lake would have been comprehensively outflanked.

Brigadier Tod believed his Commandos were capable of crossing the lake, taking the spit from the rear, and establishing a bridgehead on the northern shore. Thus Lake Comacchio was regarded as being the unlikely – but vital – point of breakthrough to kick-start the Eighth Army’s spring offensive.

What Brigadier Tod needed prior to that was a comprehensive intelligence picture drawn up of the lake, its defences and the usable routes of ingress. He also needed a force to guide his commandos onto target come the night of the attack, one capable of mounting some form of diversionary action.

There was only one unit he could think of with the experience, the skills, the bravery and the sheer gall to undertake such a mission – one that would entail working under the very noses of the enemy in impossible terrain and with absolutely zero cover. This was a job for Anders Lassen and his Irish Patrol.

*

The mission to take Comacchio was codenamed Operation Roast. The challenges in Operation Roast – both for Lassen’s men and those of 9 Commando – were legion. On the night of the assault 1,000 heavily armed men would need to cross many miles of lake undetected. Only the southern fringes of the water lay in Allied hands. The western, northern and eastern shorelines were held by the enemy. Few if any of the
channels across the lake had been charted, even in the memory of the locals.

In the centre of the lake lay a handful of ‘islands’ – uncertain mounds of earth rising barely above the waters, and thickly wooded. One or two ancient buildings lay on the islands, but these had long fallen into disrepair and ruin. The islands were believed to be held by the enemy, but no one on the Allied side knew for certain.

Across such terrain watched by the enemy from all sides Brigadier Tod’s Commandos would have to go, with neither sight nor sound of their progress being detected. Lake Comacchio would offer zero cover. If unusual movement or abnormal sounds were detected from the water, the enemy scouts would fire flares, illuminating the desolate expanse of stagnant lake for miles around.

If the men of 9 Commando, or Lassen’s Irish Patrol, were so caught, they would be annihilated.

Clearly, if any engine noise were detected on the lake it would attract a barrage of murderous fire from the enemy. Thus, Lassen and his men – plus the Commando force to follow – would have to cross such terrain in Goatley boats, canoes and on floats, using only silent, human means of propulsion – the paddle. When empty, a Goatley has a draft of about one inch. When loaded with ten heavily armed commandos its draft is approaching two feet – the average depth of Comacchio.

It was absolutely vital to the mission’s success that Lassen and his men explore and map Comacchio’s deep channels – those that might exist – and somehow mark such passages across the deathly shallows.

*

At the end of March 1945 Lassen’s force moved up to the nearby city of Ravenna, bringing with them their folbots, Goatleys and ‘Jellicoe’ Inflatable Intruders – their rubber assault craft. Lassen immediately made himself busy, zipping about in a jeep to get a sense of the terrain they would be operating over. Briefing followed briefing, as senior officers queued up to give their input into this vital first stage of the planned Allied breakthrough.

Lassen was used to operating more or less in isolation from senior officers, and unburdened by the chain of command. At Ravenna, things were very different. Where Operation Roast was concerned, everyone and their dog seemed to want to put their proverbial oar in, and it wasn’t much to the Dane’s liking.

At one briefing, and in the midst of a long speech by a colonel, Lassen rose abruptly to his feet. ‘I go now,’ he announced.

With that he turned and left the room. Lassen’s legendary reputation, not to mention the sheer force of his persona, meant that no one thought to try to stop him.

In the last days of March the Danish major broke away from this suffocating environment, and got down to business. He busied himself on the lake with his men. The days were spent sleeping and updating the intelligence files, the nights out on the water. On one occasion Lassen pushed as far north as Comacchio town itself. There, as in Venice, many of the ‘streets’ consisted of waterways, and it was possible to paddle right into the centre of the town.

As a result of such night-time sorties, the large map in Brigadier Tod’s headquarters became full of coloured pins, each noting a particular feature of the lake, a navigable channel or an
enemy position. The full picture on Lake Comacchio was slowly being pieced together, but there were few among Lassen’s men who liked what they saw. The lake was nigh on impossible to operate on covertly, and even the veterans of the Irish Patrol felt a growing sense of unease.

If he could help it, Lassen never went on a mission without the unshakeable O’Reilly. He believed it a bad omen if he were forced to sally forth without the Guardsman at his side. But out on Comacchio’s haunted waters even O’Reilly felt a cold, clawing sense of dread. Fred Crouch was another old hand who was daunted by the mission that lay before them. He confided to one of his fellows that he’d had a vision of his own death out on the cursed lake, his body sinking into the dark and fetid waters.

Even their veteran commander’s actions were starting to be a source of worry to the men. Lassen had always been a risk-taker, but here at Comacchio he seemed to be actively courting danger. During his night visit to Comacchio town he had only narrowly escaped capture.

On another foray he’d paddled his canoe close enough to the enemy sentry positions to eavesdrop on their conversations. He hadn’t done so with any intelligence-gathering aim in mind. He’d done so almost to bait the enemy. He’d proceeded to smoke a cigarette as the German voices had drifted across to him, and when one of his fellow raiders had asked what on earth he thought he was doing, Lassen had practically bitten the man’s head off.

The wholly unnecessary risks that he was taking horrified many in his patrol. Porter Jarrell, Jack Nicholson, Sean O’Reilly,
Martin Solomon, Dick Holmes, Stud Stellin, Sammy Trafford – none of Lassen’s hardcore of operators had ever seen him like this before.