Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (23 page)

Stirling contacted Buck in late May and laid out a proposal: the SIG, in their German uniforms, would transport the French forces, posing as prisoners, in captured German vehicles through the enemy-occupied zone and onto the airfields. Buck was delighted to accept a mission he believed to be “well within the capabilities of his small unit.” Augustin Jordan, the commander of the French forces, also embraced the idea, which seemed to reflect a certain flamboyant French élan.

—

Lying up in the foothills of the Jebel, with an hour to spare before the attack on Benina, David Stirling gave an impromptu lecture on the art of deerstalking. The key, he told Seekings and Cooper, was to stay downwind of the stag at all times, use all available camouflage, and move with sufficient stealth that the quarry never saw you coming. Above all, the stalker should never take a shot unless certain of a kill, for anything else was unsporting. “Absorbed in his Highland exploits, we could forget the job in hand [and] time passed very quickly,” wrote Cooper. For that hour, Stirling was back in Keir. “Right,” he said at last, glancing at his watch, “ready to go.”

The stalkers stole onto Benina airfield. Each man carried twenty Lewes bombs. For the next half-hour, they crept from one hangar to another: the first two sheds contained a Messerschmitt, two Junkers transport planes, and a pair of Stukas. Seekings stood guard by the door with a tommy gun, while Cooper and Stirling planted the bombs. The third hangar was packed with spare parts, technical equipment, and at least thirty new aircraft engines. Here the last of the bombs were planted.

As the trio prepared to retreat, Stirling spotted a small guardhouse set apart from the hangars, with a faint light gleaming under the door. Perhaps it was the memory of Mayne’s actions at Tamet, or perhaps it was simply a rush of battle blood, but Stirling now did something that, he later admitted, was “out of character.” Turning to the other two, he suggested they give the Germans “something to remember us by.”

Taking the pin out of at least one grenade (the official report refers to “grenades”), he opened the door of the guardhouse. Inside were some twenty German soldiers, and an officer apparently writing a report at a small table. “Share this among you,” Stirling shouted, threw in the explosives, slammed the door, and ran. According to Seekings, the horrified German officer may actually have caught one of the grenades just before it detonated. “The explosion shattered the guardhouse,” wrote Cooper. Moments later, the Lewes bombs began to go off inside the hangars. The three men slipped back into the darkness.

An hour earlier, Stirling had been giving a lecture on the ethics of stalking deer. Now he had just killed and injured at least a dozen people in an attack that may have been justifiable as an act of war but was hardly sporting. He could never fully explain what had motivated him in “wiping out the guard,” and the episode haunted him for the rest of his life. “It was a silly show of bravado, I suppose,” he told his biographer. “In a fight I would shoot to kill with the same enthusiasm as the next man, but I was not at ease with that action. It seemed close to murder.”

The three were climbing back up the escarpment when Stirling suffered a sudden and crippling migraine, brought on by the stress of what had just taken place, and collapsed. Below them, a “fantastic fireworks display” erupted on Benina airfield. “The whole thing just boiled up, because there was so much petrol, oil and lubricants.” The heat from the fire set off the Messerschmitt’s 20mm cannon, sending brightly colored tracers (ammunition with built-in pyrotechnic charges that enabled more accurate fire, particularly at night) shooting across the runways. In the darkness, Cooper and Seekings dragged Stirling, “staggering and half blind,” up the hill. Soon after dawn they were picked up by the LRDG.

—

At the same moment, forty miles to the east, a French team had successfully ignited the fuel dumps on Barce airfield, while another, under Lieutenant André Zirnheld, was fighting a pitched battle with German troops on the main airfield at Berka.

Zirnheld was a character straight out of French central casting: intellectual, poetic, handsome, and unfeasibly brave. Before the war he had been a professor of philosophy in Tunis, but with the fall of France he immediately took up arms and volunteered as a paratrooper under Georges Bergé. Of all the French recruits, none had adapted so completely to the SAS way of life. In an article for a French magazine, Zirnheld wrote: “I need not complain about the war. Because of it, I have had to learn to live through anything…After the war, the problem will be to discover a similar peace.”

Zirnheld and his team had managed to plant explosives on six German bombers, before being spotted by the guards. In the running firefight that followed, several sentries were killed or wounded, but the French team miraculously battled their way off the airfield without casualties, and returned intact to the rendezvous.

—

The submarine
Triton
of the Greek navy surfaced in the Gulf of Malia in the dead of night. Two rubber boats paddled slowly toward the coast of Crete, towing a third boat weighed down by a cargo of Lewes bombs, rations, and water. Aboard were Georges Bergé, three French SAS men, and a single officer of the Royal Hellenic Army, a native Cretan. They were accompanied by another new recruit to L Detachment: Captain George Jellicoe, the 2nd Earl Jellicoe, possessor of one of the most famous names in warfare.

Admiral John Jellicoe had commanded the British fleet at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. The admiral had a bust in Trafalgar Square, a grave in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and a string of honors and titles; he died in 1935, leaving his seventeen-year-old only son an earldom, George V as a godfather, and a lot to live up to.

In 1939, Jellicoe signed up for the commandos, and sailed out to the Middle East with Layforce. With his taste for danger, his intelligence, and a “thick cloak of self-deprecation” lightly worn, he was a man in Stirling’s mold. They met in the long bar of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo; on April 30, 1942, Jellicoe was posted to L Detachment as Stirling’s second in command, and immediately volunteered for the Heraklion assault.

All six men were disguised as Cretan peasants, and heavily armed with Beretta submachine guns and Colt .45 revolvers. The only common language was French.

On the night of June 13, they cut through the perimeter barbed wire around Heraklion airfield and planted bombs on the fleet of parked Junkers 88 bombers. As the first bombs went off, pandemonium erupted. A German patrol rushed out of the front gate; the SAS team fell in behind them and then “peeled off into the darkness.” Bergé paused after half an hour and formally announced that they would all be awarded the Croix de Guerre for the night’s work. He then led the party south. Or rather north, because in the excitement he had been reading the map upside down. “All right, you take the lead if you’re so clever,” he said resentfully when this was pointed out. Having sorted out their bearings, they again set off, heading for the beach near Krotos on the south coast, where a British caique, the
Porcupine,
should be waiting to pick them up. At dawn on June 19, they took refuge in the hills. A few hours later, a Cretan stumbled across the men in their hiding place. He seemed friendly and offered to bring food and drink, but Bergé later said he “did not like the cut of his jib.” That afternoon, a few hours before the rendezvous, Jellicoe and the Greek officer walked down to Krotos to link up with the local partisans and check that all was ready for the pickup. At 7:00 that evening, Bergé ordered the three Frenchmen to pack up and prepare to head to the beach to join the other two. A few minutes later, he shouted: “Look out! We’re surrounded.” A brief, intense gun battle followed. The youngest of the Frenchmen, seventeen-year-old Pierre Léostic, was shot dead. Outgunned and encircled by German troops, the only option was surrender.

The sounds of battle from the hills alerted Jellicoe and the Greek officer to the betrayal of their party; they were picked up by rowboat and ferried to the waiting caique. Halfway across, they were hailed, in upper-class English, by the occupant of a boat heading the other way. This was Paddy Leigh Fermor, writer, intelligence agent, and one of the great adventurers of the Second World War, who was on a mission to link up with the Cretan partisans. He and Jellicoe “exchanged shadowy greetings” in the twilight, and paddled on.

The raid had destroyed at least twenty-one planes, two trucks, a dozen aircraft engines, several fuel dumps, and a bomb depot. The following day, in reprisal for suspected collaboration by the local Cretans, the Germans shot fifty inhabitants of Heraklion.

—

On June 12, a small convoy rumbled along the road toward Derna. It consisted of one Kübelwagen (the military Volkswagen), one Opel car, a German lorry, and a British lorry painted with the Nazi swastika, indicating that it had been captured. Nothing about the convoy was as it seemed. The British truck had not been captured by the Germans, but all the German vehicles had been captured by the British. The driver of the first lorry, in the uniform of a German private, was Captain Herbert Buck of the Scots Guards and chief of SIG. The men alongside him were Herbert Brückner and Walter Essner, former soldiers of the Afrika Korps, now working for the other side. The French prisoners in the back were Free French paratroopers, led by Augustin Jordan. Hidden carefully out of sight were the machine guns, grenades, and Lewes bombs with which they intended to lay waste to the airfields. The men standing guard over them, armed with machine guns and Luger pistols, were Jews.

At the first Italian checkpoint, a major demanded the weekly password: Brückner, playing his part to perfection, threatened to have the Italian reported to his superiors for delaying an important convoy of prisoners. The barrier was lifted. The convoy was similarly ushered through at the next checkpoint by an overweight German corporal who advised Buck to park at the nearby transit camp for the night, as there were “British commandos about.” At the camp, the French sat around trying to look like disconsolate captives while the soldiers of SIG mingled with the Germans, purchased some provisions, and refueled the lorries at German expense. Corporal Adolf Schubert (real name: Ariyeh Shai, of Jerusalem) queued up for a plate of lentils and dumplings at the canteen.

The next morning, Brückner drove the French commander to reconnoiter the airfields at Derna. Jordan was encouraged by what he saw: a squadron of Messerschmitt 110s sitting on the western airstrip and at least a dozen Stukas on the eastern airstrip. Buck would remain at the rendezvous to coordinate operations: a small team of French SAS men would attack nearby Martuba, while Jordan would lead a larger team of nine SAS and three SIG men, including Brückner, to raid the Derna airfields.

Something was wrong with the truck driven by Brückner. The engine stalled repeatedly. They set off at around 9:00 a.m., but an hour later the vehicle had still not covered the six miles to the airfields. Each time it stopped, Brückner jumped down, swearing, and after tinkering under the hood, got it moving. Then it would stop again. Jordan, sweltering under a tarpaulin with the other men in the back, was becoming increasingly exasperated. Near the Derna airstrip cinema, the German driver jumped out once more and stomped off toward the nearby guard post, saying he had lost the key to the toolbox. “It’s OK,” whispered Peter Haas, one of the SIG men, “he’s going to ask the Germans for a spanner.” Jordan and the others waited tensely as the minutes ticked by.

Inside the guardhouse, the following scene (pieced together from the testimony of two captured Luftwaffe pilots) was taking place.

Brückner was a turncoat. He saluted the commanding officer of Derna garrison and explained that he was a captured German prisoner of war, driving a lorry filled with enemy saboteurs intent on blowing up aircraft. The officer was suspicious. Brückner became increasingly agitated, urging the officer to “organize as many men as possible with all speed and as heavily armed as possible to disarm the raiding party.” He went on to explain that he had been captured back in November, and that the British had offered him money to drive them behind the lines. Initially he had refused. “However the sum increased and he accepted as he felt it was the best way of getting back his freedom.” The garrison commander was now convinced. He summoned his men. Quietly, several dozen heavily armed German sentries surrounded the truck.

Jordan, unable to bear the suspense any longer, emerged from beneath the tarpaulin and peered through the back flap. He was immediately dragged out and held. “All Frenchmen out now!” What happened next is disputed. Some of the French may have surrendered. Some may have opened fire. The next moment the truck exploded. According to Jordan, Peter Haas was the last man left aboard. Knowing that as a Jew he would soon be tortured and murdered, Haas fired his machine gun into the stack of explosives, blowing it, and himself, to fragments. “He decided to try and save us by sacrificing himself,” said Jordan. In the smoke and chaos, Jordan wrenched free of his captors and ran.

Brückner was later flown to Germany, and awarded the Deutsches Kreuz, the German Cross, for his brave action in exposing the team of French assassins. Something about the companionship of life in the desert had concealed the traitor. If a man shared the hunger, thirst, and heat, it was easy to imagine that he must be a friend. Brückner had sung around the campfire as lustily as any. But the German had always intended to lead the SAS into a trap. Brückner was the first quisling to use the unit’s esprit de corps to conceal his real intentions, and he would not be the last.

—

For once, Paddy Mayne was out of luck. The Berka satellite airfield was not the sitting duck it had been a few weeks earlier. Guards had been posted on each aircraft, and by attacking the main airfield ahead of schedule, it was later claimed, the Zirnheld-led French, who tended to disdain timetables, had alerted the defenders. As Jellicoe remarked of the Free French forces: “They were very, very free; and very, very French.” Approaching the airfield, Mayne and his team were spotted by sentries, who immediately opened fire. After a short and vicious firefight, the SAS men withdrew without injuries, pausing only to plant bombs on a petrol dump. A “desperate game of hide and seek” followed in the dark, as enemy patrols fanned out and combed the area. Before dawn, the unit split into two groups of two men each. Mayne and his companion eventually reached a Senussi encampment, where, after a meal of goat stew, they remained for the night. The next morning they awoke to see another member of their party pedaling across the desert toward them on a bicycle.