Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII (4 page)

Cover papers were hastily gathered together. These included false passports and fake seaman’s documents, all of which identified the crew as Swedish civilians off on a transatlantic jolly.

With weapons concealed and papers made ready, the
Maid Honour
swept into the seemingly idyllic harbour, which lies at the southern end of the island. The distinctive white steeple of Santa Clara church seemed to keep watch over the harbour’s breakwater, which reaches like a crooked arm far into the bay. But it was other watchful eyes that March-Phillipps feared. Madeira had attracted the unwanted attention of the Germans during the First World War, and she was bound to have done so again now.

In December 1916 the German submarine U-38 had sailed undetected into Funchal Harbour and torpedoed and sunk three British and French ships. She’d then bombarded the town with her gun, before shore batteries had forced her to withdraw. In that war Portugal had fought alongside the British, and the German enemy had been unwelcome in all Portuguese territories. But right now, in August 1941, Portugal remained neutral. As with many neutral nations, its capital, Lisbon, was known to be crawling with German spies. Likewise, Funchal, this strategically placed mid-Atlantic harbour was bound to have its own complement of enemy agents.

If the
Maid Honour
’s true nature and purpose were discovered, a British Q Ship bristling with concealed weaponry would
be far from welcome here. The vessel would be impounded; her crew seized, imprisoned and left bereft of any hope that the British government would come to their rescue. But without replenishing their fresh water and food supplies, the crew wouldn’t last the two thousand miles of their epic journey to come.

It was Funchal Harbour or bust.

On March-Phillipps’ order the vessel drifted to a halt, and dropped anchor in the lee of the breakwater.
Now the wait.

The first vessels to appear on the water were the traditional ‘bum-boats’, crewed by locals and carrying fresh provisions – fruit, eggs and vegetables – to sell to the visiting seamen. But among their number the crew could make out the sleek form of a Portuguese coastguard launch, complete with her uniformed officials.

The launch bore down on them fast. Playing his part to perfection, Lassen welcomed the Portuguese captain aboard, deliberately adopting a thick accent and faltering English, which seemingly convinced the man that this was indeed a Swedish vessel. For a long and tense moment the captain seemed to linger by the fake wheelhouse – the 40mm QF Vickers cannon just one pull of a lever away from erupting into view. In spite of its fake door, the ‘wheelhouse’ could only be entered from below, and if the Captain asked to see inside Lassen would have to come up with some cock and bull story as to why it couldn’t be opened.

As luck would have it, Lassen – with Hayes and Buzz Perkins in support – managed to steer the coastguard party past the main danger points. By the time the inspection was over the Funchal authorities seemed happy that this vessel was what
the crew claimed her to be – an innocent pleasure yacht, one crewed by fellows from a sister neutral country, Sweden. The coastguard captain urged the crew to take on-board whatever supplies they required for the journey ahead, stamped their – entirely false – documents and wished them ‘bon voyage’.

The
Maid Honour
had passed her first real test – the deception had held good. Hastily re-provisioned, the crew wasted no time in setting sail once more, heading south towards the coast of West Africa. Fresh trade winds whisked the ship along at a spanking pace, and the crew was more than a little relieved to leave Portuguese waters behind them. By the time she was two days out from Funchal the
Maid Honour
was making seven or eight knots. A day later she topped ten knots, and the crew were able to indulge in a meal of fresh flying fish, which had made the mistake of blundering into the ship’s rigging.

Averaging 146 miles a day the
Maid Honour
swept further southwards. As she approached the Cape Verde islands she was forced to turn west, to give the West African nation of Senegal a wide berth. With the Germans victorious in France, a significant proportion of the French people had opted to throw their lot in with the German invaders. Vichy France had been formed and those parts of France in league with the Axis powers encompassed swathes of southern France, plus many of her overseas colonies. Senegal was in Vichy hands, as was the French Colonial Navy stationed at Senegal’s Dakar naval base, and the Vichy French administration was known to be virulently anti-British.

In September 1940 a powerful British fleet had set sail to seize Senegal by force of arms if the Vichy French defenders
refused to capitulate. In Operation Menace the aircraft carrier HMS
Ark Royal
, accompanied by two battleships, several cruisers, destroyer escorts and troop carriers laid siege to Dakar naval base. But the Vichy French defenders had used their shore batteries, plus their own light cruisers
Georges Leygues
and
Montcalm
to repulse the attack. With the help of a hundred or more shore-based warplanes the British task force was finally beaten off.

Eleven months later Senegal remained in Vichy French hands, its fleet of warships still a potent fighting force – hence March-Phillipps’ detour west, to avoid her waters. Just when he least needed it, the
Maid Honour
drifted out of the corridor of southerly trade winds and found herself becalmed. She was still some three hundred miles north of the Cape Verde islands, and well-within interception range by the Vichy French warships sailing out of Dakar. The
Maid Honour
was a sitting duck. Should an enemy vessel steam onto the horizon, becalmed as they were, their puny, unreliable petrol engine would give them little chance of escape.

March-Phillipps urged his crew to keep an eagle-eyed watch on sea and sky, as they rotated their sentry duties, standing six-hours on and six off. Tired though they all were from the constant need for vigilance, the last thing they could risk right now was to let an enemy warship sneak up on them before they could un-mask and bring to bear their guns.

The
Maid Honour
was six days out from Madeira and still marooned in a windless calm, when the lookout on the masthead fire-platform cried out the dreaded warning.

‘Ships off the port bow! Ships off the port bow!’

The two vessels were as yet too distant to be identified, but one was clearly a merchant ship, while the other had the unmistakable – and chilling – silhouette of a battle cruiser. From the direction of their approach it was most likely that these were Vichy French vessels. If so, the warship had to be either the
Georges Leygues
or the
Montcalm
. Light cruisers of some 9,000 tonnes, each boasted a 31-knot top speed, nine massive 152mm guns, plus twenty-four 40mm cannons.

There seemed no way in which the cruiser would pass them by. Indeed, the more March-Phillipps studied the course set by the commander of the distant warship, the more he became convinced that it was sailing on an interception bearing.

The
Maid Honour
’s captain considered his options. They may have fooled a handful of Portuguese coastguard officials back at Funchal Harbour, but a Vichy French cruiser was a completely different matter. Even if she didn’t identify the
Maid Honour
as a hostile vessel from distance, she was sure to send across a boarding party to thoroughly check her over.

March-Phillipps made a snap decision. The hour for deception was clearly past.

‘Man the guns!’ he cried. ‘Man the guns!’

Figures dashed across the deck. The dummy wheelhouse was collapsed, and the Vickers 40mm cannon loaded and brought to bear. She had an accurate range of around 4,000 metres, though what damage her two-pound shells might inflict on a Vichy French cruiser with 120mm-thick side-armour was open to debate. The Lewis machineguns were unmasked, and the crew took up battle stations as they waited for the warship to come within range.

March-Phillipps was determined to be the first to open fire, but he could only do so once he’d made a positive identification that this was indeed an enemy warship. Even then it was surely only a matter of time before the
Maid Honour
was blasted out of the water. It looked as if Anders Lassen’s grim prediction –
we are doomed; we are sailing without an escort; we haven’t a hope
– was about to be proved horribly accurate.

And so the six men waited, hunkered down behind their weapons, and determined to go down all guns blazing.

Even as the crew of the
Maid Honour
awaited a seemingly deadly confrontation, a power struggle was playing out at the highest level in London, and all concerning the diminutive vessel’s daring mission. As the British Expeditionary Force had retreated from the French beaches, so Churchill had issued an extraordinary order to his Chiefs of Staff: ‘prepare hunter troops for a butcher-and-bolt reign of terror.’

Under Churchill’s order the British military was tasked to do something that didn’t quite come naturally to it – to raise a raiding force to strike the enemy in hit-and-run attacks, using all possible measures. Every man aboard the
Maid Honour
was one of Churchill’s ‘volunteers for Special Duties’, and March-Phillipps had been given ‘absolute power’ to pick and choose his number. He’d gone for individuals formed in his own image: fiery, disdainful, rebellious and individualistic, and with little respect for the formal hierarchies that defined the established military.

Indeed, March-Phillipps’ authority – and that of his entire crew – flowed not from the regular armed forces, but from an organization born of Churchill’s iron will and formed wholly in the shadows. In the summer of 1940 Britain’s wartime leader had given the green light for the founding of the highly-secretive
Special Operations Executive (SOE). Its remit went way far beyond butcher-and-bolt raiding. Its mission was to set ablaze enemy-held Europe – and the wider world – launching subversion and sabotage missions wherever possible.

The SOE wasn’t part of the wider military. It was formed under the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and it was more akin to a separate branch of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). So clandestine was its existence that it operated under a cover name – the innocuous sounding ‘Inter-Service Research Bureau.’ Those who began working at its grey, nondescript 64 Baker Street, London, headquarters referred to the SOE as variously ‘The Firm’, ‘The Org’ or, perhaps most suitably, ‘The Racket.’

Officially the SOE didn’t exist, and neither did its agents nor its missions, which meant that
anything was possible
. The
Maid Honour
’s key crew – March-Phillipps, Appleyard, Hayes and Lassen – had been exhaustively checked and vetted, and contracted to utmost secrecy prior to their departure for Africa.

The Official Secrets Act, signed by all four of the
Maid Honour
stalwarts, warned them that: ‘Any person who is guilty of a misdemeanour under the Official Secrets Acts 1911 and 1920 shall be liable upon conviction or indictment to imprisonment with or without hard labour …’

Lassen’s ‘Minute Sheet’, detailing his SOE vetting, recorded him as ‘Danish – passed by M.I.5 and Scotland Yard’. His MI5 vetter, a Captain Strong, wrote of Lassen: ‘NOTHING RECORDED AGAINST’ – i.e. no negative trace had been found on the prospective SOE recruit.

The SOE operated on a strict need-to-know basis and it wasn’t bound by the regular military’s labyrinthine rules and
red tape. Its agents were paid in cash, to prevent banking and wage slips leaving any kind of a paper trail. It had its own James-Bond-like dirty tricks department, producing exploding attaché cases and pistols disguised as pens, and numerous other similarly innovative means of doing harm to the enemy.

In truth, the SOE was formed to carry out operations seen as being too politically explosive, illegal or unconscionable as to be embraced by the wider British establishment. This was Churchill’s answer to his edict to set the lands of the enemy ablaze – though he’d perhaps little-imagined that his extraordinary call to arms would manifest itself in the form of a wooden trawler sailing half-way around the world, crammed full of such an odd assortment of piratical raiders and desperadoes.

As well as being highly-trained commandos, the
Maid Honour
crew were secret agents working under direct orders from the SOE. The
Maid
’s present mission had first been dreamt up in the bowels of the SOE building, by March-Phillips and Appleyard, working together with Brigadier Colin McVean Gubbins, the SOE’s Operations and Training Director – better known to all as simply ‘M’.

In the previous year Gubbins had been sent into Norway to organize Striking Companies to fight a guerrilla war to hold-up the advancing Germans. They had blown up bridges, sabotaged railway lines, mined tracks and generally spread as much destruction and mayhem as possible. In Norway Gubbins had learned the craft of guerilla warfare well, and he was one of its diehard advocates. And as far as Gubbins saw it, the
Maid Honour
’s mission absolutely fitted the bill.

But when he’d rubber-stamped the founding of the SOE, Winston Churchill had little appreciated the resentment and anger that it would cause in some circles. Having trained his special agents, M had experienced grave problems actually getting them deployed. The
Maid Honour
Force had been no exception. In scoping out various options for the Force’s inaugural mission – and the very first deniable operation of the SOE – M had run up against some spirited opposition from the highest echelons of the British military, not to mention Churchill’s foremost political adversaries.

Decrying the lawless nature of the
Maid Honour
’s master and crew, not to mention their modus operandi and intentions, the Royal Navy had managed to get them banned from all European theatres of operations – but not from Africa.

Gubbins, and all involved in the conception of the mission, knew that the stakes were high. If the crew of the
Maid Honour
succeeded in their present task, it would be proof that the SOE’s concept of high-octane risk, coupled with an absolute disregard for international law, was workable, and capable of achieving spectacular results and reaping stupendous rewards. But if it failed, the consequences were unthinkable …

*

The target of the tiny Q Ship now becalmed off the coast of West Africa lay some two thousand miles eastwards, on the small Spanish colonial territory and island nation of Fernando Po (now called Bioko). Lying in the Gulf of Guinea – the very armpit of Africa – Fernando possesses Santa Isabel harbour, a port of equal strategic import to that of Funchal, the
Maid Honour
’s recent re-supply stop-over.

The British powers feared that Santa Isabel harbour was being used as a covert re-supply point for German U-boats stalking Allied shipping along the African coast. A mission to raid Santa Isabel risked stirring up a hornets’ nest of international outrage, for in theory at least Spain remained a neutral party in the war. But recent developments in the region had convinced Brigadier Gubbins, Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet that such a raid –
if fully deniable
– might actually be worth the risk. If all went well, it would also represent an invaluable propaganda coup for a British nation desperately in need of positive news from the war.

The war in the North African desert was presently in full swing, and victory hung in the balance. Air cover was seen as being crucial to the fortunes of both sides – the British on the one hand, and the German-Italian Axis Powers on the other. With the Mediterranean menaced by enemy U-boats and warplanes, the safest route to get aircraft and spare parts into North Africa was via convoys to Britain’s West African ports, from where they were flown north to those airstrips still in British hands.

Or at least it had been. But by the summer of 1941 German U-boat attacks along the West African coast were threatening the safety of those convoys – many of which had been forced to re-route thousands of miles across the Atlantic.

Spain’s Falangist government under General Franco was seen as being neo-Fascist, and an enthusiastic, if secretive supporter of the Axis Powers. During the Spanish Civil War Italian troops had fought alongside Franco’s forces, and German Stuka dive-bombers had provided devastating air support. In
short, while Franco’s Spain paid lip service to her much-vaunted neutrality, Fernando Po’s Santa Isabel port was suspected of being a clandestine German U-boat refuelling and rearming depot.

What gave added weight to those suspicions were the three enemy ships – one flying the German Swastika, one the Italian flag – seemingly permanently anchored in Santa Isabel harbour. The largest, the
Duchessa d’Aosta
was an 8,000-tonne Italian passenger liner-cum-cargo ship, manned by an Italian crew of between forty and fifty. Her hold was stuffed full of valuable war materials – including copper ingots, plus a quantity of materials any further details of which the ship’s Captain had refused to divulge.

A copy of the ship’s manifest had been obtained by the SOE, but it was the missing page that proved most tantalizing: ‘The manifest as forwarded contains six pages,’ the SOE reported, ‘It is understood, however, that a seventh page is missing … The Spanish port authority requested a copy of the missing sheet from the ship’s master, who declined to produce it but offered no explanation.’

The repeated refusal by the
Duchessa
’s captain to divulge the nature of the materials detailed on the seventh page of the manifest fuelled speculation that his ship was in truth carrying weaponry, and possibly even spare parts for German submarines.

The second largest vessel moored in Santa Isabel harbour was a modern German tugboat, the 200-tonne
Likomba
, which came complete with German captain and crew. The
Likomba
was the perfect kind of vessel for going to a crippled U-boat’s
aid, and towing her to the shelter of the nearest hidden tropical lagoon or ‘neutral’ harbour. Moored alongside the
Likomba
was a luxury pleasure yacht, the
Bibundi
, which was also presumed to be a German vessel.

Whatever the three ships and their crew might be up to – with the suspected connivance of the Spanish port authorities – a decision was made that they had to be stopped.

The SOE had been formed entirely so that its actions could be disowned by His Majesty’s Government. It was clear that any mission to raid Santa Isabel Harbour and to take out the three enemy vessels would have to be carried out by SOE agents – for this of any mission called for absolute secrecy coupled with total deniability.

At the SOE headquarters various options for the assault – codenamed ‘Operation Postmaster’ – had been considered. Bombing the ships from the air was unthinkable, for British warplanes would be wholly identifiable. Such a wanton breach of neutrality would almost certainly provoke Spain into joining forces with the Axis powers, after which Portugal would very likely be forced to follow suit, with potentially disastrous consequences for Britain’s fortunes in the war.

Infiltrating the port and sinking the vessels where they lay at anchor was the next most obvious option, but that wouldn’t provide the knockout blow. The harbour was comparatively shallow with a firm, rocky bottom, and a vessel the size of the
Duchessa d’Aosta
would simply settle a few feet onto the seabed. It would be possible to repair and re-float her, and possibly also the German tugboat. And so the mission had become a ‘cut-out’ tasking – one designed to free the vessels
and spirit them into British hands, and all without any responsibility being laid at Britain’s door.

The plan for the cut-out mission involved March-Philipps sailing his ship into Santa Isabel Harbour under cover of darkness, whereupon he and his men would overpower the ships’ crew, seize the vessels, blow their anchor chains and spirit them away to one of the nearest British ports, lying some 1,500 miles across the Gulf of Guinea.

If spotted, the
Maid Honour
would simply appear as an unidentifiable fishing trawler, albeit one sporting some unusual weaponry for such a ship. If she was captured – and this was to be avoided at all costs – the
Maid Honour
might still maintain the bluff of being of Swedish origin. If any of her crew were taken alive – death was considered far preferable; like all SOE agents the crew carried what had been nicknamed ‘holy communion’, a hidden suicide pill to be taken in case of capture – they were to stick to their cover story at all costs. If all of that failed the mission would be vehemently denied by the British government, who would blame ‘rebel elements’ for carrying out the attack wholly without official sanction.

Upon first consideration such a mission appeared nigh-on impossible; looking at the port’s defences there was every likelihood of failure. There were reports of increasing numbers of Spanish troops and armaments arriving on Fernando Po. Its vital strategic position made the island a tempting target for both Germany and Britain – for whoever controlled Fernando Po pretty much controlled the Gulf of Guinea. The Spanish had garrisoned the island with forty of their officers, commanding
some five hundred native troops, with one hundred or more reservists of European nationality to call upon if need be.

There were a dozen 4-inch guns stationed around the island, and in Santa Isabel itself the Customs House, barracks and main public buildings had machine guns positioned overlooking the harbour. The Spanish Governor of the island was known to be strongly pro-Nazi and thus hostile to British interests.

Needless to say, if
Maid Honour
Force made it to Fernando Po their mission would entail violating just about every rule of war. The cut-out job would represent an outrageous act of piracy and kidnapping on the high seas; it would violate the ‘neutrality’ of Spain; and in wearing no uniforms the raiders ‘deserved’ only to be treated as spies, if captured.

If March-Phillipps was successful, Britain – Churchill – needed to be able to deny absolutely all knowledge and culpability. Otherwise, Spain might be provoked into granting Germany access to invade the British territory of Gibraltar, and her vital ports. If Germany took Gibraltar, that would mean the war for the Mediterranean would be all but lost; defeat only be a matter of time.

Accordingly, there needed to be a plausible explanation as to how on earth two German and one Italian ships had fallen into British hands. Working closely with Ian Fleming, then SOE’s liaison at the Admiralty – and the future author of the James Bond books – M set about coming up with just such a ruse. The cover story finally agreed upon by M, Fleming and others in the know consisted of several sophisticated and interlocking elements.