Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (41 page)

The rest of the SAS squadron for Operation Houndsworth, sixty-four men in total, climbed into three planes at Fairford airbase on June 17 and headed for the Morvan, the ideal territory from which to target the rail links and roads south of Dijon. Fraser’s advance party laid out flares at the drop zone, and waited. “In the early morning, planes were heard passing over in the mist and rain. They had not seen the flares and had turned back.”

Only two of the planes returned to Fairford. The third, carrying a force of sixteen men led by Lieutenant Leslie George Cairns and a six-man aircrew, was never seen again. Its fate has never been fully ascertained, although a wreck in a Normandy field was identified in 2015 by amateur investigators as the missing aircraft and has since been designated a war grave by the French authorities. The disappearance of Cairns and his men was a hammer blow to SAS morale—reminiscent, for some, of the disastrous Operation Squatter.

Four days later, the two surviving planes returned to the Morvan and successfully dropped the remainder of the squadron. Their number included Johnny Wiseman, the decorated veteran who had lost his false teeth in the Murro di Porco raid, and Alex Muirhead, the mortar specialist. Here, too, came a less martial figure: the Rev. Fraser McLuskey, the first chaplain to 1SAS. Known as “the parachute padre,” he crashed to earth through a tree and was found lying unconscious.

McLuskey was the thirty-year-old son of an Edinburgh laundryman, a cheerful, self-mocking Scot with a wide, open face and an unshakeable, deeply examined faith. He was also one of the few men in the ranks of the SAS to have witnessed prewar Nazism at first hand. In 1938, as a young divinity graduate, he toured Germany on a travel fellowship and became interested in the Confessional Church, a Protestant denomination set up to defy Nazi efforts to control the established church. There he met Irene Calaminus, the daughter of one of the church pastors; they married soon afterward. The start of the war saw McLuskey appointed chaplain to the University of Glasgow, but by 1942 he had become convinced that he could no longer stand aside from a conflict he knew to be righteous. “I realized I must take some share in the burdens,” he wrote.

Save for the odd hasty prayer muttered over the grave of a dead comrade, religion had played little part in the early history of the SAS. Few of the men were devout, though with death all around them some were more prepared to give the Almighty a hearing. “I could not preach—in the bad sense of that word—to these men,” said McLuskey. “I had to talk to them.” Most of the squadron welcomed the smiling, calming Scottish padre. “He smoothed the feathers of fear,” said Johnny Cooper. “Just his presence.” The unfailingly truculent Reg Seekings, however, had no time for religion. “Parsons didn’t particularly interest me,” he said.

Officers like David Stirling and Paddy Mayne were assiduous in caring for the physical welfare of their men, but McLuskey provided something the SAS had never had before: someone prepared, without sentimentality, to tend to their spirits, even their hearts. Over the next two months he held regular open-air services in the woods, attended by all, whether or not they held any religious conviction. The men sang hymns, sotto voce: “The enemy were never close enough to keep us from singing, although their distance from the camp dictated the singing’s strength.” McLuskey helped the medical officer to tend the wounded, and treated “a fairly widespread outbreak of boils” caused by lack of fresh fruit; he ordered a stock of paperback thrillers to be dropped by parachute to keep the men occupied, and essential extra supplies: “In work of this character there can never be too many cigarettes or too much tea,” he observed. Even morale-lifting letters from home got through to the forest camps, thanks to McLuskey. The men were not permitted to write back, and the rote letters sent to the families of SAS men were less than wholly reassuring: “You may take it for granted that he is safe unless you hear to the contrary from us.” Paddy Mayne did his best to provide some comfort for the families, telling Alex Muirhead’s pregnant wife, for example, that he was “in fine form [and] doing terrific work…try not to worry unduly.”

McLuskey was seldom far from the action, hastening to the side of anyone whose confidence and courage might need reinforcement. In his backpack he carried an altar cloth and a large crucifix in sections, which could be assembled in seconds should the need for an impromptu service arise. He worried about the psychological health of some of the men, noting that prolonged tension interspersed with fierce fighting caused “carelessness, impatience, edginess, and depression.”

The war behind the lines could be dirty, yet McLuskey joined it with a clean conscience. “I had no doubt the war was necessary…I didn’t see any ethical problem.” Only in one respect did the padre experience moral uncertainty: whether, and in what circumstances, he could, or should, take up arms himself. “Perhaps this is an academic question as there are many combatant jobs which do not involve shooting,” he reflected. But if his comrades came under attack, would he pick up a gun and fight back? McLuskey knew how to fire his revolver but opted not to carry it. Speaking of himself in the third person, he wrote: “In this case, the chaplain did not carry arms, but whether rightly or wrongly, he was not always sure.” The ordinary soldiers took particular care to protect the unarmed chaplain whenever the shooting started. “We were all unanimous that we would look after the padre,” said one NCO. In time McLuskey came to believe that, as the lone noncombatant, his presence held additional significance for the SAS troops. “I think the men were glad to see the padre as a kind of symbol of the will of God for peace for all men.” A man who fights with a gun can be brave, but a man who opts to take part in a shooting war without one may be braver still.

—

On June 24, local French informants reported that enemy troops were approaching the Bois de Montsauche, where Alex Muirhead was encamped with his section. The column consisted of German troops and Russian soldiers captured on the Eastern Front who had switched sides to fight for the Nazis. The British called them “Grey Russians,” being neither Soviet Red nor fully White Russians, but somewhere in between, men of indeterminate loyalty serving alongside the field-gray Wehrmacht. The enemy column was on a training exercise, practicing ambushing techniques, and wholly unaware that the woods were seething with SAS and maquisards eager to give their own, practical lesson on how to conduct an ambush. At 8:00 p.m. Muirhead, Seekings, Cooper, and four more SAS troopers, along with a small posse of resistance fighters, concealed several Bren guns alongside a straight stretch of road leading to Château Chinon, primed a handful of bombs, and settled down to wait. A thin steel wire was strung from two trees at shoulder height.

At about 10:00 p.m., in fading light, two German motorcyclists roared into view, the vanguard of the column heading back to the barracks at Château Chinon; both outriders were spectacularly decapitated, their motorcycles slewing across the road. The convoy slammed to a standstill. Two plastic bombs thudded into the lead truck, and the Bren guns opened fire. The German staff officer in the first truck, who had “come down from Nevers to instruct the ‘grey Russians’ in the art of laying ambushes,” was killed in the first burst. As the troops spilled out of the other three vehicles, they were scythed down. “It was a massacre,” said Cooper. The survivors dashed for the open fields.

When the smoke had cleared, Muirhead counted thirty-one enemy dead; one Frenchman had been killed. All four trucks were destroyed, and five French hostages were released. Only one light vehicle, bringing up the rear, had managed to escape by means of a desperate U-turn. A second officer, a seriously wounded Russian, was captured. The French made it perfectly clear that if and when they got their hands on the prisoner, he would be tortured into revealing whatever he knew, and then killed. “The military maquis were very, very strict,” said Seekings, with a flicker of admiration.

The captive officer, interrogated by a Russian-speaking SAS soldier, explained that he had been captured at Stalingrad by the Germans, who had presented him with a very nasty choice: if he agreed to fight for the Nazis in France, his life would be spared; if not, then not. “What would you do?” he asked his captors. “If I go back to Russia, I’ll be shot. If I go back to my German masters, I’ll be shot. And now these Frenchmen want to shoot me too for what I’ve done here.” According to Cooper, the wounded man “implored us to dispatch him rather than hand him over to the French.” Seekings obliged. “Reg shot him through the back of the head.”

German retaliation for the ambush was swift, merciless, and directed firstly at the innocent. The villages of Montsauche and nearby Planchez were burned to the ground; the villagers, knowing they would be the first target of German fury, had already fled. Surrounding farms were attacked, and any remaining inhabitants killed: a man fishing was shot dead with his fishing rod in his hand. Three civilians leaving church were gunned down. The French resistance swiftly struck back, with SAS help. As a German and Russian contingent traveled down the Château Chinon road to collect their dead from the first ambush, a second team of concealed maquis opened fire, with similar effect. Another eighteen enemy soldiers were killed.

The next day, Sergeant “Chalky” White, who had been injured in the parachute jump, was lying in a large bed in the makeshift maquis hospital at Château de Vermot, not far from the resistance camp in the Bois de Montsauche, when the headboard above him was “riddled by a burst of machine gun fire.” The German counterattack had begun in earnest, with an all-out assault on the maquis camp by some 250 German and Russian troops, armed with mortars, grenades, and machine guns. White and the other injured men were swiftly evacuated into the surrounding forest. Instead of entering the woods, however, for the next hour the attackers contented themselves with pouring fire into the trees, which made plenty of noise but otherwise had little effect. In the meantime, an SOE agent alerted the SAS to another ambush opportunity: there was only one road into the woods, and the German-Russian retribution force had come up it; at some point, therefore, they must drive back down it again. News of the attack on the French camp arrived as Fraser McLuskey was conducting an open-air service. The hymn singing came to an abrupt halt, and in the pouring rain a force under Bill Fraser set out to attack one section of the vulnerable road, while Wiseman’s unit, including Reg Seekings, headed for another.

Fraser had crawled to a point about two hundred yards from the road when he spotted two men in German uniforms on the roadside, idly smoking and chatting. “He held his fire and decided to await developments.” In ones and twos, soldiers returning from the inconclusive assault on the Vermot woods drifted back to what was apparently a rendezvous point. When about fifty men had assembled, they formed into ranks, and began marching along the road: at that point, the two SAS Bren gunners, having had ample time to take aim, opened fire from just a few yards away. The gunners had “an absolute field day,” wrote Fraser, who estimated that “not more than ten men escaped injury from the fracas.”

A few minutes earlier, Wiseman’s team had gingerly approached a section of the same road a little way to the north. The place seemed deserted, save for a line of empty trucks. Reg Seekings, as usual, took the lead and crawled through the undergrowth to get a better look. When he popped his head up, he found he was looking down the barrel of a machine gun manned by the lone German soldier who had been left behind to guard the vehicles. “I misjudged a bit,” Seekings later said, the first and only time he admitted an error. Luckily, the German machine-gunner was as surprised as he was, and for a moment seemed paralyzed. Seekings turned to the rest of the men and shouted, “Look, enemy!” This statement of the obvious prompted Wiseman to remark in his official report: “The rest of the party, more sensibly, sank to the ground.” At that exact moment the machine-gunner opened fire, loosing off a single burst before his gun jammed. He then tossed two hand grenades, which landed wide, on either side of Seekings, who tried to raise his own gun to fire back but found his left arm was hanging uselessly at his side. “I thought, Oh good God, my bloody arm’s gone.” A bullet had lodged in Seekings’s neck, at the base of the skull.

As the attacking force retreated, pulling Seekings with them, the wounded man experienced a succession of disjointed memories, images of his home in Cambridgeshire, his family, and an early girlfriend. He felt he was “in an underground river with the water going faster and faster.” It was a three-mile hike back to camp: Seekings recalled being forced to run at one point, wading through swamps, dropping his pipe and insisting on returning to pick it up. He continued to bark orders. When someone attempted to bind his neck wound, he shouted: “It’s my arm, you stupid bastard, not my head.” Fraser McLuskey carried his kit bag. A thunderstorm suddenly broke, and Seekings felt his head clear momentarily. Then “everything seized up.” He was half dragged, half carried back into camp.

Naked and delirious, Seekings was laid out on a table under a tarpaulin to keep off the slashing rain and inspected by the maquis doctor. Fraser McLuskey acted as assistant surgeon, while the doctor (who was actually a dentist) probed around in the bloody hole between the injured man’s skull and the top of his spine. “Under the tarpaulin, and with the somewhat uncertain light of a torch,” McLuskey recalled, “we found that a bullet had entered the back of his neck and lodged itself deeply near the base of his skull.” The doctor digging in half-darkness around Seekings’s spinal cord could easily have caused greater injury than the wound itself. Finally the French medic announced that he could not reach the bullet: “So he decided to leave it where it was.”

Seekings was made of some resilient substance that seemed capable of withstanding almost any kind of physical or psychological punishment. McLuskey nursed him and shaved him. Their conversation became friendly, and then almost spiritual. “The last few days, I’ve seen religion lived,” McLuskey confided. “Men helping one another, no thought of reward.” The neck wound healed with remarkable swiftness. Within weeks, Seekings was back on active duty, as cantankerous and cussed as before. Months later, the bullet would be removed in a British hospital, having apparently done him no lasting harm whatever. But it did change him in one respect. He would insist thereafter, and quite wrongly, that the regimental padre had saved his life. His view of religion remained unchanged, but he was now a committed convert to the Reverend McLuskey.