by Damien Lewis
More to the point, they’d have to hope that no train came steaming down the tracks to crush them where they lay.
Chapter 6
The minutes ticked by. Eventually a second set of boots was audible, this time tramping up the tracks from the direction of the tunnel. The inbound figure exchanged greetings with the sentry – ‘Gute Nacht’ – before the latter slung his rifle over his shoulder and, still whistling ‘Lili Marlene’, prepared to depart. It was the changing of the guard, and the two watchers figured that this momentary distraction offered them the chance to sneak away.
Keeping on their bellies, they broke cover and crawled a short distance, before halting to watch and observe. It was one o’clock dead, so clearly they switched guards on the turn of the hour. After a few words, the ‘Lili Marlene’ whistler wandered off towards a patch of nearby forest, and Vaculik and Jones decided to follow. With any luck, he should lead them to the sentries’ quarters.
With the two SAS men moving ‘as silently as Red Indians on the war-path,’ they reached a hut set in a clearing in the trees. The lone sentry slipped inside, but hardly a chink of light was visible, apart from what had been let out by the momentary opening and closing of the door.
‘Stay here and give cover,’ Vaculik whispered to Jones. He was going forward, to try to get a peek inside. That way they might gauge how many enemy soldiers there were in total.
Vaculik crept ahead. If he were captured, there was little chance his French might save him now. He reached the wall of the hut, and risked a peep through a small window, spying a dozen figures ranged around the room. Some were asleep, others were playing cards, and several bottles of empty wine lay upon the table. It struck Vaculik how easy it would be to lob a grenade through the window, to shower the occupants with lethal shrapnel. But of course they had much bigger fish to fry.
Silently, he stole back to where he’d left Jones and reported what he’d seen. They decided it was time to split up. They still needed to find the ammo dump, which by rights should be situated in the woodland somewhere thereabouts. Two could search faster than one, and they agreed to rendezvous at this spot in an hour. Time was running out, and they had little margin for error if they were to make it back to their camp come daybreak.
They scurried off in opposite directions, moving towards the black wall of trees. Alone, the silence proved ever more intimidating, but each man pushed onwards into the forest’s dark embrace. It made sense for the ammo dump to be nearby, for the trees would hide it from any marauding warplanes, and for sure, by the summer of ’44, the Allies had mastery of the skies.
It wasn’t long before both men stumbled upon a series of massive, shapeless heaps, roped over with tarpaulins. When they lifted the first corners, huge stacks of landmines, bombs and 88mm shells were revealed. Those 88s were the ammo not only for the German’s superlative anti-tank guns but also for the Tiger II tank, a 70-tonne behemoth only recently introduced into service, plus the Elefant and the Jagpander heavy tank destroyers, all of which boasted an 88mm main gun. Those shells had been piled up here so locomotives could haul them north towards the Normandy beaches.
The oddest thing was that there didn’t seem to be a single guard placed upon the heaps of munitions. Vaculik had counted ten giant piles, Jones eight. But upon reflection, maybe it did make some kind of sense to leave them unguarded? The raiders were 150 miles behind enemy lines, and what German soldier in their right mind would expect Allied troops to be wandering about here, in the depths of night, with havoc and mayhem in mind? Which meant that this was a target going begging.
‘Eight whacking great dumps of bombs and not a sentry anywhere, ’ Jones whispered, once they were back together. ‘Can’t make it out.’
Vaculik concurred. He couldn’t fathom it either. ‘Never mind,’ he added. ‘Let’s get cracking, or it’ll be light before we can get away.’
With that, they set off on a compass bearing heading due east, hoping to navigate back to their camp by the most direct route, even though both men felt plagued by fatigue. Barely a word was said between them as they pushed on, but gradually the luminous dial of their compass grew less and less bright, as the sky above them lightened, presaging dawn. Sweat-soaked, munching chocolate for energy, they sensed all around them the land was coming to life. It would be a disaster to be seen now, after all the night’s achievements.
Finally Vaculik and Jones stumbled into the woodland where they had their camp. As far as they could tell, they hadn’t been spotted. Everyone was there, barring Captain Garstin and Paddy Barker. Their absence was worrying, especially as it was broad daylight by now. It wasn’t quite so dire for Vaculik, or even Wiehe, to be out and about amongst the locals – at least they could speak French. But neither Garstin nor Barker could manage more than a few words. After chain smoking cigarettes in an effort to calm their nerves, Vaculik and Jones gave into the inevitable, crawled into their doss-bags and were shortly fast asleep.
The two missing men finally reached the camp around midday, having had something of a misadventure. En route, Garstin had been set upon by a German shepherd belonging to a local farmstead. He’d had no choice but to kill the dog with his Fairbairn–Sykes fighting knife, the iconic blade issued to all Commandos and special forces. With its 7-inch tapered blade and its two razor-sharp edges, heavy handle to give grip in the wet, plus cross-guard to prevent slippage when driving the blade in, it was designed to slip between an enemy’s ribs or to thrust down through his clavicle.
Sadly, Garstin had had no option but to use it on the dog, in an effort to silence him and to get them back to their base undetected. Three years earlier, Vaculik had faced a similar dilemma, when escaping from the clutches of the Carabineros, the armed, quasi-military police force in Spain. Having faked a stomach upset, he’d managed to crawl out of a toilet’s rear window and slip away. But as he’d headed into the mountains, a large dog had set upon him. Though he had hated having to do it, it was either ‘kill or be killed, a struggle to the death without mercy’. Such were the dark and fearsome necessities of war.
After the night’s activities, Garstin and Barker were ‘just about all in’ and they craved sleep. But first the SAS captain wanted to learn how Vaculik and Jones had got on. On hearing of their adventures, he figured that all was set for tonight’s attack. Between them, they had garnered every snippet of intel they might possibly need. There were two sentries set on the rail track but none on the ammo dumps, of that they were certain. Garstin announced that he’d issue his orders that evening, after all had got some rest.
There was also the small matter of making up the explosive packages they would need for the night’s attack. Vaculik and Jones would need eighteen separate charges, for the ammo dumps they’d found, and as Garstin and Barker had discovered twenty-five heaps during their recce, that made forty-three in all. Garstin decided they’d knock-up forty-five one-pound charges, so ‘two for luck’, plus another four for the railway itself.
Those charges placed on the ammo dump would need delay-action fuses, so that Garstin and his men could set them, then move to their ambush positions on the rail line, the ammo dump only being blown after they were long gone. They figured that four-hour delays should allow for any eventualities. While some crawled into sleeping bags and settled down to sleep, others began working on the explosives.
With typical British ingenuity the boffins at SOE had developed any number of specialist charges, disguised as everyday items. The so-called ‘tyre-bursters’, for laying on roads used by enemy convoys, had to look as realistic as possible. Explosives had been developed that resembled lumps of rock, and even dog or horse muck. But the most bizarre invention of all was the infamous exploding rat, about which the SOE instruction manual was very particular.
‘A rat is skinned, the skin being sewn up and filled with PE to assume the shape of a dead rat. A standard No. 8 primer is set in the PE.’ PE stands for plastic explosive, and the classic means of deploying the rat was to hide it in the
coal scuttle of a locomotive. In due course the rat would be shovelled into the furnace, along with the coal, at which point it would detonate, perforating the steam boiler, which would trigger a devastating secondary explosion.
As Garstin and his men would be striking by stealth, no such items of subterfuge were necessary, barring one particularly ingenious SOE invention. Experience in North Africa, Italy and elsewhere had taught the SAS there was little point in simply blowing up rail tracks. The locomotive driver would likely spot the break in the rails and bring his train to an emergency halt, so defeating the object of the exercise. The damaged tracks could be lifted out and a new section dropped into place. It might delay the train for a few hours, that was all.
The answer the SOE had come up with was the ‘fog signal’. Already a century-old design, the fog signal was a tried and tested piece of technology used on the railways to warn a train driver if a stop signal might be obscured by fog. It consisted of a small metal bowl and a pressure plate, which clamped to the rail. The bowl was full of black powder and detonators, and whenever the fog came down the signalman would attach fog signals to the rails ahead of the stop sign. As the locomotive went over them, they would detonate, the sharp crack warning the train driver to slow down.
The SOE’s version of the fog signal was a cunning adaptation. A snout was added to the bowl, attached to a length of detonation cord. Hot gases produced by the explosion gushed out of the snout, triggering the detonation cord, which was connected in turn to a charge placed further ahead on the rails. The fog signal would detonate, triggering the explosion up ahead of the speeding train, and giving the driver no time to slow down. His locomotive would plough into the section of wrecked track at high speed, causing a catastrophic derailment.
‘It was found that about 16–20 ft of cordtex from the fog signal to the charge was almost certain to derail the train,’ an SAS report concluded (cordtex is another term for detonation cord). And that was exactly what Garstin and his men intended to do tonight.
In the evening, they gathered for the final briefing. ‘We leave here at nine o’clock,’ Captain Garstin began, portentously. ‘At midnight we should be planting the first charges. If all goes well, an hour should be enough for the job.’ By one o’clock in the morning, all forty-five charges should have been set on the ammo dump. ‘Then, we deal with the sentries at the time the relief takes place. Ten minutes for that, and for setting up the Bren guns on the embankment. Open fire on the Jerries, then beat a retreat in groups.’
Garstin had split his force into four parties, each with a specific objective. Once the train had been hit, they were to make themselves scarce, moving back to a woodland rendezvous.
‘Does everyone know exactly what he’s got to do?’ Garstin demanded, his eyes scanning the figures ranged before him. Eleven men nodded their assent.
‘Okay, sir.’
‘Everything’s in order.’
‘We ought to have some fun.’
At nine o’clock the parties set out, trying to stick to the trees and the deepest shadows. At that time it was still light, and farmers could be seen working in their fields. Occasionally a German military convoy rumbled past on a not-too-distant road. Wearing their jump-smocks, and with their red berets removed, the raiders had to hope that at a casual glance they’d be mistaken for a German foot patrol. By 11.50 p.m. all had converged on the rendezvous point, and they gathered for a few final words.
‘Above all, silence,’ Garstin stressed, as he reminded all of their roles. ‘Silence and a cool head. We’ll meet again here in an hour.’
That agreed, Garstin dispatched Jones to execute a quick recce of the ammo dumps, to check that nothing significant had changed. The eleven men waited in a tense and expectant silence, as Jones flitted off into the gloom. Minutes later he was back, with news that all was as it should be.
‘The Jerries are all safely in their little hut, playing cards and drinking – lucky devils,’ he reported, wistfully.
‘We’ll soon see about that, Ginger,’ Captain Garstin replied, evenly. ‘Now, let’s get going.’
Upon Garstin’s word, the SAS raiders slipped noiselessly into the trees. Vaculik, Jones and Barker – the three musketeers –formed one party. They picked their way through the forest towards where they knew the ammo dump had to lie. Now and again they paused to listen, checking for any sign of the enemy. To left and right the occasional rustle of leaves betrayed where the other parties were stealing towards their targets, but other than that all they could hear was the sound of their own hearts, pounding in their ears.
Though the night was noticeably chilly, each of the raiders was sweating. Vaculik made it to the first of the heaps, the one nearest to the guard hut. Kneeling down, he lifted one corner of the black sheeting, hardly daring to believe that it could all be this easy. Vital supplies for the enemy’s Normandy offensive were within their reach, utterly unguarded. As he peeled the thick tarpaulin back further, it crackled alarmingly, the noise sounding like gunshots, loud in the silence. For a moment he froze, convinced the guards must have heard, but there was no answering cry of alarm from the hut.
Sweating profusely, he used his sleeve to wipe the drops from his brow, before biting down hard on the delayed-action timer. Each of their ‘timer pencil’ fuses consisted of a brass tube, topped by a copper cap – the thing Vaculik had just flattened with his teeth. Crushing that served to release acid into the tube, which ate away at its internal components, chiefly a steel wire that held a firing pin at the ready. When the wire was eaten through, the spring-loaded firing pin would shoot down the tube, striking a percussion cap and so detonating the charge. Differing combinations of acid strength and thickness of wire gave the timer pencils their varying durations.
If they’d got their sums right, these timer pencils should take four hours to go off. Fuse set, Vaculik thrust the charge deep into the heap of munitions, as far as he could reach. That way, it should detonate in the heart of the pile, triggering scores of secondary explosions. His first charge sorted, instinctively Vaculik made the sign of the cross. He wouldn’t like to be in that guard hut when this little lot went off. In fact, he wouldn’t particularly want to be within half a mile of the place when the explosions were triggered.
As Vaculik crawled towards the next dark pile, he reflected that to left and right other figures were engaged in similar stealthy work – placing delayed-action charges on the enemy’s ammo dumps. He felt suddenly elated. ‘They were all fine fellows,’ he reflected, though of course ‘a mistake on someone’s part could blow us all to smithereens’. All it would take was for one of the charges to have been made up with a ten-minute delay, as opposed to a four-hour one, and they’d all be toast.
Just as he’d indulged such thoughts, the door to the guard hut swung open and a figure stepped out. As the German soldier strode purposefully towards Vaculik’s place of hiding, he tried to flatten himself further into the vegetation and the gloom. He could hear the sentry’s individual breaths as he drew ever closer. What the devil could have happened? What had aroused his suspicions, Vaculik wondered?
The German stopped. Vaculik felt as if his ‘heart stood still’. But then there was the distinctive sound of a man relieving himself in the bush, and all Vaculik’s fears subsided. They were replaced by a flash of rage. What a swine, he told himself. Was that the best place the man could find? Spurred by his anger, Vaculik crept around the other dumps, placing all of his charges with a grim determination. On the way back to the rendezvous point, he ran into a shadowy figure. It was Paddy Barker.
‘How did it go?’ Vaculik whispered.
‘Couldn’t have been better,’ Barker replied, in his distinctive Irish tones, ‘except I wanted to sneeze all the time. I must have got a cold, or hay fever or something.’
‘Let’s hope our luck holds. It seems almost too good to be true. We’re a bit behind schedule though.’
‘Half an hour before the sentry’s relieved,’ Barker pointed out, rea
ssuringly. ‘Plenty of time.’
An indistinct gleam of light drew them back to the rendezvous. It turned out to be one of the men studying his compass. He got a rocket for his pains: the faint light could have been spotted by the enemy. With all present and correct, the twelve raiders made their way towards the railway line, heading for the point where the tracks were swallowed up by the tunnel. Now for the bloodiest of tonight’s work – taking out the sentries, without which it would be impossible to get to work on the rails.
Vaculik and Jones had been ordered to deal with one sentry, Wiehe the other. Stealth and silence were all now. The guards would have to be killed without a sound, and that meant using the knife. Over the years the men of the SAS had learned just how hard it was to dispatch a man with a blade. It was a deeply personal, up-close, bloody way of killing, and could often prove somewhat hit and miss. It was far easier to shoot an adversary in the head with a pistol. But with silence being at a premium, that left only the knife.
Jones and Vaculik had talked through how they would do this. They’d set upon a ruse. Jones – something of a bold and brazen figure by nature – would step out into full view and throw out a challenge. With the sentry distracted, Vaculik would spring from behind, sinking his Fairbairn–Sykes blade down through the man’s neck, at the clavicle. If executed correctly, it was a move that should prove quick and lethal, but also extremely bloody.
Vaculik didn’t much relish the thought of having to ‘strike a man down like a beast’, even if he were the enemy. For his part, Wiehe had set upon a similar plan, recruiting one man to play the role of the distracting party while the other wielded the blade. Plan set, the four men settled down in the thickest shadows near the tunnel entrance to wait.
As the minutes ticked by, Vaculik’s guts felt knotted up with anxiety and tension. He reflected upon how he was about to ‘stain his hands with another man’s blood’. It was one thing shooting a man at a distance, quite another to slide in the blade at close quarters, and to feel the victim’s life blood ebb away. War, he figured, could be ‘a rotten thing’.
