by Ian Blake
Contents
Prelude
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Epilogue
Prelude
August 1943
The British Chiefs of Staff committee listened to the Prime Minister with a mixture of resignation and indignation. After more than three years at the helm the old man was still at it with his impossible schemes. Impossible on this occasion because their great American allies were not interested.
The First Sea Lord reminded the meeting that the navy’s strength had been shifted from the eastern Mediterranean for the proposed invasion of the Italian mainland; the Chief of the Imperial General Staff remarked on the burden of the British commitment to the Italian campaign; the Chief of Air Staff just took his pipe from his mouth and shook his head.
Operation Accolade, however many attractions it may have had, was now impossible.
Churchill glared at them through his cigar smoke. The heat of a Canadian summer’s day had not improved his temper and the Quebec Conference was turning out to be a wearing, knock-down affair. It had taken much argument before the Americans had finally agreed to increased British participation in the Pacific War and their scepticism of Churchill’s policy of bringing Turkey into the conflict and striking at the guts of Germany through the Balkans, had remained undiminished.
The previous day at the conference the British contingent had raised the advantages of snatching the Italian-occupied Dodecanese Islands from under the noses of the Germans in order to encourage Turkish entry into the war. But the Americans had remained adamant: if the British wanted to pursue such a policy they could not stop them. But no help was to be expected from them, and there was to be no draining of resources from the great undertakings the Allies had jointly set in motion elsewhere.
In short, paddle your own canoe up shit creek. It had not been either a friendly or a successful session.
‘Come, gentlemen,’ said Churchill, ‘we must have a special force capability in the Middle East which could move swiftly into these islands until regular troops can be sent to garrison them. The Italians are about to surrender. They are not going to oppose us. I need not remind you how great the rewards will be if Turkey – to whom the islands once belonged – can at last be brought into the war.’
The Chief of the Imperial General Staff reluctantly opened the file in front of him. As always, the brief given to him was meticulous in its detail and range. It covered every possibility, every Churchillian vagary.
‘There is, Prime Minister. It is a unit called the Special Boat Squadron.’
There was a satisfied grunt. ‘Good!’ At last, the Prime Minister felt he was getting somewhere.
‘It will need to be Special.’ His joke fell flat. ‘Who commands this body of men?’
The Chief of the Imperial General Staff glanced again at his brief. ‘An ex-SAS officer, Prime Minister. Named Jarrett.’
Another grunt of satisfaction. As an ex-First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War as well as the Second, the Prime Minister knew the man’s father well. The provenance of a good fighting man was as important as it was for a painting.
‘And how do we transport Jarrett and his men?’
The bulldog face now fixed itself on the First Sea Lord, who pressed the tips of his fingers together and pursed his lips. He did not need to open the briefing file in front of him: he knew every word. Nevertheless, he hesitated. Should he argue, or should he not? His duty got the better of his common sense.
‘I must protest, Prime Minister. Alone, we simply do not have the resources. The reaction of the Italian garrisons will be unpredictable and they have airfields on Rhodes which the Germans may well seize. They also have others on Crete. Our nearest airfield is on Cyprus. Air and ground reinforcements are easily available to the Germans from Athens and Crete. Most importantly, without air supremacy what naval forces we have will be in jeopardy.’
The other two Chiefs of Staff murmured their agreement. Regrettable as it was, without American support nothing could be done.
Churchill ignored them, and barked: ‘What naval forces would be available?’
The First Sea Lord resigned himself. He had done his best. ‘Currently perhaps half a dozen destroyers, nothing more.’
‘But these could be reinforced when the opportunity arose?’
‘Naturally, Prime Minister. But ... ’
‘And there are coastal forces?’
The First Sea Lord nodded. In this mood he knew there was nothing that would stop Churchill. He certainly couldn’t.
‘Anything else?’
It was like squeezing blood from a stone, but the First Sea Lord said reluctantly: ‘The Flag Officer Levant and Eastern Mediterranean informs me that in pursuance of your policy for capturing the Dodecanese – and in particular Rhodes – he has already formed a small naval raiding force. It is similar to one which has been mounting clandestine operations into these islands for some months and is therefore familiar with the area.’
‘Its name?’
‘It’s called the Levant Schooner Flotilla, Prime Minister.’
‘And this could transport special troops to the islands at short notice?’
The Admiral’s sigh was audible. ‘Yes, Prime Minister.’
The cherubic face beamed. ‘There we are, then, gentlemen. Accolade can proceed. Another problem solved.’
And a larger one created.
1
The only sound was the slight slap of water on the canvas sides of the cockle as it slid up the dark tunnel of river. The paddles dipped silently. They left – for a second or two – small phosphorescent pools that glittered in the blackness, tell-tale signs for any alert German sentry.
It was like being moved inexorably into a cone of perpetual and impenetrable night. It pressed in on either side, squeezing the cockle forwards into a cul-de-sac, a trap from where it would be impossible to turn back, to even move.
He could feel the tingling sweat on his forehead, and beads of it ran from under his arms down his side. It was not the sweat of exertion but of fear, of knowing what would happen, of knowing there was nothing he could do about it.
Then, on cue, it did. The searchlight, the screaming siren, the shouts of ‘Hände hoch! Hände hoch!’ and the high, frantic chatter of a machine-gun. Splinters flew up from the plywood deck of the cockle and he felt one pierce his cheek. Bullets struck the blade of his paddle and spun it out of his hand.
The cockle tilted and as it did so he saw fleetingly, but with awful clarity in the blinding light of the searchlight Matt’s blackened face as the force of the bullets twisted his body round towards him: the dead eyes, the open mouth with its shattered teeth, the two small black holes in the forehead already seeping blood.
Then he was in the water under the cockle, and the water and the cockle and the darkness bore down hard on his chest with suffocating force. He thrashed out with his arms, but he seemed paralysed, already dead.
It was cold. Icy cold.
Sergeant Colin ‘Tiger’ Tiller, Royal Marines, woke, as he always did from this recurring nightmare, to find himself on the floor. He was bathed in sweat. He lay there for a moment, as he always did, taking in the fact that he wasn’t dead, that he was lying on a cold stone floor in Eastney Barracks, Portsmouth, very much alive.
But Matt’s face was still there in his mind’s eye. He cursed silently and wondered if the nightmare would ever stop haunting him, would ever lessen in intensity with time. How could the unconscious retain such details so vividly? He didn’t know and the surgeon commander, the only
person he had ever told about his recurring nightmare, hadn’t known either. The mind, the surgeon commander had said kindly, was still largely an unknown area to medical science. Otherwise, he had said cheerfully, Tiller was in good shape considering the prolonged ordeal he had been through. The nightmare would fade with time, he had said reassuringly. But it hadn’t.
Tiller got up from the floor, staggered to the wash-basin, and slopped cold water into his face. Dawn was breaking, but the early-morning light of a late-summer day was only just beginning to show behind the blacked-out barracks window. Tiller shivered and threw a blanket over his bare shoulders, and sat on the bed. Another hour to go before reveille, but he wasn’t about to go to sleep again.
He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Slowly the intensity of the dream faded. He wondered if the inner trembling he felt showed outwardly. He held his hands out in front of him and was relieved to see they were as steady as a rock. He showered and dressed, had another cigarette, and walked over to the sergeants’ mess for breakfast.
A squad of new recruits was already on the parade ground in front of the officers’ mess. They looked a right shower, but he knew that within days they would be marching as one man, and within weeks efficient, self-contained, fighting units. The Corps, as the Royal Marines was called by everyone in it, did that to you. Tiller didn’t know quite how it did it, but it did. Perhaps it was a mixture of fostering a man’s pride in himself before taking him to what he thought was the limit of his endurance, and then deliberately pushing him beyond it. Whatever it was it worked.
In the sergeants’ mess the buff envelope he had been expecting was waiting in his pigeon-hole. He tore it open and read through it as he sipped his tea.
‘Movement order?’ his mate, Ken ‘Curly’ Watson, asked.
Tiller nodded. He had been expecting it for days, ever since his CO, Major Henry ‘Blondie’ Tasler, had called him into his office and had said that Combined Operations had asked for a volunteer from the unit for special duties in the Middle East. The ideal candidate would be a senior NCO, a canoeist with operational experience who was trained in the latest explosives techniques.
‘You seem to fit the bill, Tiger,’ Major Tasler had said to Tiller. ‘That is, if you can tear yourself away from the delights of Pompey,’ and he had treated the sergeant to that wry smile of his.
The difference in rank between a major and sergeant is large at the best of times. In the Marines it was a yawning chasm, but that did not stop the two having a healthy respect for one another based on knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and on appreciating the former while making allowances for the latter. They had fought together in that shambles of a campaign in Norway in 1940, where they came to rely on one another totally, and had taken part together in the raid up the Gironde. So when the Royal Marines Office at the Admiralty had announced that volunteers were wanted for hazardous service, and that men were wanted who were ‘eager to engage the enemy’ and were ‘free of strong family ties’, Tiller had guessed that Tasler had been mixed up in it somewhere.
But before Tiller had even had time to respond to the call Tasler had approached him about volunteering. Right up his street, Tasler had assured him, though he couldn’t tell him what it was about, of course. Because they knew each other so well Tiller also knew exactly to what – or rather to whom – the major was referring when he had asked his question about Tiller being able to drag himself away. He had been ‘free of strong family ties’ when he had first joined Tasler’s unit, and had been determined to remain so. But somehow, he wasn’t sure how, it had become increasingly difficult to stay that way ...
Nothing, of course, had actually been said. But Tasler had not looked surprised when Tiller had replied immediately that he would go. Nor could the major keep his face entirely straight when Tiller had added fervently: ‘Thank you, sir.’
But Tiller now read the movement order again with mixed feelings. Even in wartime, Pompey wasn’t a bad place to be and being part of Tasler’s secret organization made life more than usually interesting. Besides it was his home town, where he had grown up.
However, the hard fact was that, apart from the raid up the Gironde – the scene of Tiger’s persistent nightmare – he had not seen any action since joining Tasler’s organization, which had been formed to find different methods of raiding enemy shipping in harbour. There had been no more operations, just constant rumours of them. So the truth was – and he and Tasler both knew it – that, his little local personal difficulties apart, Tiller had been bored out of his frigging mind for some months and had been only too glad to volunteer. It was, after all, pointless knowing everything there was to know about explosives unless you could put that knowledge to good use.
But Athlit in Palestine? And this so-called Special Boat Squadron? What the hell was that? He shrugged. They were flying him out, so it must be operational, must be urgent. He felt a tremor of excitement run through him as he passed the movement order to Curly.
Curly and he had grown up together as kids, had both sat at the feet of Tiger’s grandad, who told them tales of the action he had seen with the Marines in Burma and west Africa, and then in the Boer War. Curly knew all about the various special forces units that were fighting their own individual campaigns in the Middle East and the Mediterranean because, for a short while, he had served with the Special Boat Section under its founder, Major Roger Courtney.
‘Is this the same outfit?’ Tiller asked.
Curly scratched his head and said: ‘Don’t think so, as a lot of them were wiped out in a raid on Rhodes. We seem to have been trying to lay our hands on that place for most of the war. The rest were absorbed into Colonel Stirling’s unit after Major Courtney came back here to form a second section. That’s why I left. I like water, not the fucking desert. Remember the old ditty your grandad used to sing to us, Tiger?
When years ago I listed, lads,
To serve our gracious Queen,
The Sergeant made me understand
I was a Royal Marine.
He said they sometimes served on ships
And sometimes served on shore,
But never said I should wear spurs
And be in the Camel Corps.’
They both laughed. Tiller’s grandad had been quite a character. He liked to entertain visitors by strumming on his banjo and singing various ditties he had picked up. It had been Tiller’s grandad who had encouraged them both to join the Corps. Their dads had been pleased enough. But they hadn’t shown it, of course – just said: ‘You could do worse.’
As the great depression of the 1930s was then at its height – the Jarrow hunger march was splashed across all the newspapers – both young men knew they could have done a lot worse. It was Tiller’s grandad who had sneaked them both into the pub to celebrate, though the landlord must have known neither of them was yet eighteen, and, to the embarrassment of the two young men, had entertained the saloon bar with a rendition of a poem by Rudyard Kipling.
‘Do you remember when he took us to the local?’ Tiller said to Curly. ‘Thought I’d sink through the bleeding floor.’
‘Two pints of beer, mate, and you were almost stretched out on it,’ Curly replied with a chuckle. ‘But he was that proud of you, Tiger, and of the Corps. What was that ditty he stood up and quoted about the Corps?’
Tiller knew it by heart, of course, for his grandfather had made him learn it all.
‘’E isn’t one o’ the reg’lar Line, nor ’e isn’t one of the crew.
’E’s a kind of giddy Harumfrodite – soldier an’ sailor, too!
For there isn’t a job on the top o’ the earth the beggar don’t know,
For you can leave ’im at night on a bald man’s ’ead to paddle ’is own canoe –
’E’s a sort of bloomin’ cosmopolouse – soldier an’ sailor, too.’
‘That’s the one.’ Curly laughed and then indicated the movement order. ‘Well, looks like you’ll be paddling your own canoe again befor
e long, mate.’
Tiller nodded but his mind was still back with his grandad and the time when he had been a raw recruit. His first months in the Corps all seemed a long time ago now, but he remembered how its rituals, its history, its traditions, had swallowed him whole. He had slept, eaten, and drunk it, and had loved every waking moment of it. A King’s Badge man – first in his passing-out squad – and a crack shot who had represented the Corps at Bisley, he was, from the start, marked out for promotion.
In any other regiment – and that included those poofters in the Guards – he’d be a sergeant-major by now. But the wheels of the Corps ground slowly. NCOs, the corporals and sergeants, and colour-sergeants, were the backbone of the Corps and the Corps knew it. However good a man was, however thorough his training – and by Christ it was thorough – he still needed time to mature to become the kind of leader the Corps required – no, demanded.
Yes, the wheels ground slowly. And they ground very small. Tiller had never forgotten, as a small boy, the sight of his father on the parade ground, the scarlet sash of a colour-sergeant across his chest, the glitter of his medals and his buttons and his cap badge, the precision with which he had moved, the band thumping out the regimental march of the Corps, ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’.
Tiller knew he was as steeped in the traditions of the Royal Marines as a pickled onion was in vinegar, with their centuries-old connection with the Royal Navy. Per Mare per Terram was their motto, ‘By land, by sea’, and they were, as every recruit had drummed into him, the country’s sheet anchor. That was how some admiring monarch – Tiller had forgotten which one – had described them, and they had battle honours that went back to the capture of Gibraltar in 1704.
Some of the young wartime conscripts – the HOs or ‘Hostilities Only’ – had thought tradition and discipline, and the spit and polish that went with it, was all so much crap. But Tiller knew better. In battle a man had to rely on others and that reliance came from the parade ground.
‘I must say I’d like to know more about this frigging outfit I’ve volunteered for,’ Tiller said, his mind snapping back to the present.
