Marine B SBS

by Ian Blake

  The submarine submerged and ran at periscope depth.

  In Christophou’s caique the voyage of twenty miles or so had taken much of the day. In the submarine it took under two hours. When it surfaced they could see from its bridge the hump of Alemnia on the horizon on their starboard side.

  The white-flecked waves had gone now, for the meltemi had long since blown itself out and had been replaced by a gentle offshore breeze which hardly ruffled the water. The captain of the Papankolis kept the profile of his submarine as low as possible and its decks were almost awash as the crew opened the torpedo hatch to bring out the cockle.

  The north-west coast of Rhodes, where the Marizza airfield lay, loomed straight ahead in the darkness. Tiller remembered the massacre on Alemnia and regretted he was only on a reconnaissance patrol. He was itching to use his explosives, but Larssen had expressly forbidden any attacks on the airfield. Information was what was needed. Any attack would lessen the chances of the two men returning with it and could jeopardize the safety of the submarine when it returned to pick them up the following night.

  ‘Are you going to use RG equipment?’ the captain asked, referring to the infrared lamps with their invisible beams of light which canoeists sometimes used to rendezvous with a submarine.

  Tiller shook his head. ‘No. We now use what we call the bongle’, and he explained how it worked.

  ‘Good. The Mountain will come to Mahomet, then. Make sure you’re at least three miles offshore. Good luck.’

  The cockle was carefully extracted from the hatch by two of the submarine’s crew and laid on the deck. Their faces blacked with camouflage cream, and dressed from head to foot in their rubberized paddler’s suits with rope-soled boots, the two SBS men carefully checked for a final time that everything was in place.

  They moved the cockle under the barrel of the submarine’s four-inch gun. Beneath the barrel was clamped a steel girder, rather as a bayonet was to a rifle. They placed the craft gently into a specially designed sling and attached it to a rope tackle which hung down from the end of the steel girder. Then they climbed carefully into the two circular cockpits, Tiller in front, Barnesworth behind him, and two members of the submarine’s crew then hauled in on the tackle and lifted the cockle from the deck. The gun was elevated slightly, and then swivelled sideways before the craft was lowered carefully into the water so that it floated alongside the slowly moving submarine.

  ‘Don’t keep the warps too taut,’ Tiller called up to the crew. In the choppy water this could have caused the cockle to hit the sides of the submarine and capsize. They unshipped their double paddles, ensured they were properly locked in the middle so that the blades at either end were at right angles to each other, and then with fierce, quick strokes moved the cockle away.

  Dispatching the SBS team was a vulnerable moment for everyone involved. Tiller knew this and he had been trained to leave the submarine’s side with the utmost speed. He was pleased to see how quickly Barnesworth acted, too.

  The submarine, which had remained with its deck nearly awash throughout the launching, now began sliding silently into the depths. The water boiled for a moment around the top of its conning tower and then it was gone.

  The submarine had submerged slowly but its bulk created a wash that made the cockle yaw violently. Tiller flicked his paddle expertly into the water to steady it while Barnesworth took a bearing with the hand compass on a prominent headland off the port bow and then on Alemnia, now hardly visible on the horizon on the starboard side. He jotted the two bearings on a slate and then tapped Tiller twice on the shoulder to indicate that he was ready.

  Tiller adjusted the grid of the P8 compass – which was fixed to the cockle in front of Tiller – to 160 degrees and then propelled the cockle forward with steady, powerful strokes. By locking the blades of the paddles at right angles the two men were able to ‘feather’ the blade that was in the air. This kept down wind resistance and gave the craft a lower silhouette.

  If the submarine had dropped them in the right place this would bring them to a beach just three miles from Marizza airfield. It was always a big ‘if’. After an hour they stopped for a few minutes to take new bearings and to rest, and to subdue the hallucinations that commonly haunted canoeists at night. Then they struck out for the shore again and within an hour they had reached the right spot. Silently Tiller thanked the Greek captain. He might have been a dour bastard but his navigation had been superb.

  They stayed offshore for a short while, scanning the beach and its surroundings for any movement. They saw nothing, and could only smell the fresh scent of sage wafted on the breeze. They then unlocked their double paddles, stowed the female half, and manoeuvred the cockle closer to the shore using the single paddles. This gave them a much lower profile and a completely silent approach.

  They were only too aware that a sharp rock could wreck the operation, and approached the beach with great caution. When the cockle was fifty yards from it Barnesworth shipped his single paddle, leant back and extracted his legs from beneath the canvas cover. He lifted himself up carefully, straddled his cockpit, and then expertly flipped himself over and into the water before swimming to the bow and guiding it on to the beach. The craft grounded gently and Tiller extracted himself with a quick, practised movement.

  Both men now worked in silent unison, for their training had made it second nature to them. They lifted the cockle, ran up the beach with it, and hid it among rocks. Tiller stripped off his paddler’s suit and donned shorts, SAS beret and a service shirt with his sergeant’s stripes on both sleeves. If the Germans found them the fact that they were in uniform might save them from execution, but Tiller knew all about Hitler’s Commando Order and would not have put his back pay on their surviving if they were captured.

  So far as intelligence knew there were no Gestapo on Rhodes, just regular Wehrmacht troops, but the orders were for all ‘saboteurs’ to be handed over to the Gestapo for ‘questioning’. All those undertaking special operations were under no illusion that this encounter invariably meant a bullet in the back of the head. Only recently Tiller had heard that the French resistance had reported back that this had been the fate of two of the canoeists on the Gironde raid.

  Barnesworth returned to the water’s edge and eradicated any footmarks with a rake he had designed for the purpose. Then, as Barnesworth stripped and changed, Tiller extracted their haversacks, Stens, revolvers, rations and water bottles from the cockle before camouflaging it with netting. With a brief nod to his companion, Tiller turned inland, his pocket compass in his hand.

  The ground was rocky at first but then became flat and fertile. There were plenty of olive trees and the occasional scrub but nothing that would hinder their approach to the airfield. It would take them, Tiller calculated, not much more than an hour to reach it. That would give them plenty of time to find a convenient observation point before dawn broke. A game-bird bursting from under their feet with a clatter of wings gave them an unpleasant shock, but otherwise they neither heard nor saw anything. They might as well have been on the moon. After an hour Tiller beckoned his companion.

  ‘It’s in a shallow valley under that mountain,’ he said in an undertone, ‘so it should be over the next brow, I reckon.’

  Barnesworth nodded. Close to the crest they dropped down on all fours and wriggled forward.

  The airfield was bigger than they had anticipated. It was surrounded by wire and there was a cluster of huts at the far end. At one time it must have been a civilian strip, for there were a couple of hangars and a petrol pump. At first they could not see any aircraft but as their eyes became accustomed to the dark they could see the outlines of two parked on one side of the field.

  ‘Eyetie bombers,’ Tiller whispered. He lowered his night binoculars. ‘Reckon this is as good a place for a hide as any.’

  They found a rock behind which they could observe the airfield, ran a small camouflage net over the dip in the ground behind it and stuck dried grass, twigs, and sm
all branches in the netting, and then settled down in the dip. It just held the two of them and was swelteringly hot when the sun came up.

  For several hours nothing much happened. They saw guards patrolling the perimeter, but no sign of any aircraft apart from the two triple-engined Savoia-Marchetti bombers. Tiller scrutinized each part of the airfield with great care while Barnesworth drew a diagram of it in his notebook, divided it into nine squares, and gave each square a letter of the alphabet. Methodically, Tiller described what he saw in each. When he got to ‘G’ he muttered: ‘Eh, what have we here?’

  It was, Tiller guessed after studying it carefully, an ammunition dump of some kind, but it was well screened by netting. He handed the binoculars to Barnesworth, who said: ‘Bombs. Those are bombs. Hundreds of them. What load can those Eyetie bombers carry?’

  ‘About 1500 kilogrammes each – no more. Perhaps less.’

  ‘It would take them months to get rid of that lot, then.’

  ‘So there must be others around.’

  ‘There are,’ said Barnesworth, looking skyward. ‘Can’t you hear them?’

  Tiller listened intently, and soon caught the beat of aircraft engines. Then he saw the first. It was flying directly towards him and as it grew larger its gull-shaped wings and fixed undercarriage made its identification simple. Behind the first was another and another.

  ‘Stukas,’ he said.

  ‘Even I recognize that bastard,’ said Barnesworth softly. ‘Once seen, never forgotten. Ever been bombed by one?’

  Tiller shook his head. He had only seen the German Ju87 dive-bomber in action on the newsreels. Even in the cinema the scream of the aircraft as it descended on its target almost vertically had been impressive. But it was, he knew, a slow and, by now, obsolete fighting machine. If they managed to base Hurricanes on Leros the Stukas wouldn’t stand a chance.

  The first one swept overhead, circled behind them and came into land. It taxied to the other end of the field and up to the bomb dump, where it was soon joined by the other two. They watched as the crew clambered down from the aircraft and disappeared into one of the huts. Soon afterwards a lorry approached and disgorged what must have been the German ground crews. With them were two fuel lorries which moved along the line of aircraft and then the SBS men saw the German armourers fitting bombs to the Stukas’ bomb racks under their fuselages, and then priming them. They wondered uneasily what the planes’ first target was going to be.

  Two hours later, as the sun was low in the sky, three more Stukas came in and the operation of fuelling and arming was repeated. Then the ground crews departed in the lorry, though some stayed behind as guards. Two had Alsatians on leashes and the two SBS men watched them release the dogs outside the perimeter wire. The animals began to quarter the ground systematically and the whistles of their handlers drifted up to the two men in their hide. Both knew that a man could pass within ten yards of them and suspect nothing, but a trained dog could pick up their scent from five times that distance. At least they had taken the elementary precaution of building their hide downwind.

  The sun seemed to sink very slowly. The guards’ shouts of encouragement to the dogs were wafted clearly to the two men on a breeze which stirred the dried grasses in front of their hide.

  The dogs barked occasionally as they criss-crossed the ground outside the perimeter, slowly working their way towards the crest. But they were still half a mile away when darkness closed in and their handlers recalled them.

  Cautiously the two men folded the netting and eradicated any sign of their presence, then withdrew from the crest. They followed the reverse compass bearing and were at the beach in just over an hour. At exactly the right time three bearded figures emerged out of the darkness, shook their hands, thrust an envelope into Tiller’s hand, and vanished into the night.

  They changed back into their paddle suits, launched the cockle into the calm water and an hour later reached the approximate point where the submarine had dropped them.

  Barnesworth now set up the ‘bongle’ by lowering its rod into the water and propping the box containing the hammer on to the side of the canoe. Then he began cranking the handle – coffee-grinding, it was called – which governed the hammer hitting the rod. Tiller wondered at the ingeniousness of whoever had invented this simple device. It radiated sound waves of a recognized pitch which the submarine’s hydrophones could pick up and home in on. No longer did canoeists have to try and find the submarine; instead the submarine came to the cockle.

  Half an hour later the submarine rose slowly from the depths. The SBS men paddled quickly over to it and were hauled aboard by the same method as they had been launched the previous night.

  The captain was in the conning tower scanning the horizon with night binoculars. ‘Your little gadget is very effective,’ he said with grudging approval as they passed him to go below. In the mess deck, hot cocoa was thrust into their hands. It was gratefully received for, despite their paddlers’ suits, the cold had begun seeping into them as they waited for the submarine.

  The effect of the benzedrine tablets they had taken before leaving the beach now began to wear off. They both slumped on to bunks and fell asleep at once, only to be woken, or so it seemed, as soon as they had closed their eyes.

  ‘No time to go into the bay,’ said the Greek captain as they joined him in the conning tower. ‘You boys will have to paddle a little bit further.’

  It was a lot further but they made it as the first sliver of light began to show over the mainland. Lieutenant Kosti was there to greet them with a warm handshake, and within a few minutes Larssen had joined them. Tiller turned to him wearily, handed him the envelope, and said: ‘I think you’d better get everyone prepared for air raids, skipper.’

  7

  In the following days they did what they could to prepare for the Stukas, and warned the other islands that they might be raided. But it seemed extremely unlikely that Simi would be the Germans’ target for they still did not appear to know that the SBS were on the island.

  Nevertheless, as a precaution, both the caique and the MAS boat were moved out of the port. The caique was moored under a cliff, where its netting made it virtually invisible from the air, and the MAS boat was anchored in a small bay and crudely, but effectively, camouflaged. Those inhabitants with cellars were advised to turn them into shelters and those without were warned to be prepared to move into the hills.

  Though Simi was not yet a target, one morning Larssen told his men that once the Germans knew the SBS were there it would be vulnerable to a landing by German troops. ‘So we cannot allow the Germans to take over the outlying islands from which they might possibly launch an attack on us here. The Italian garrison on Piscopi have just radioed the castle that a German patrol has landed on the far side of the island from their headquarters. It will take some time for the Germans to get to them but they need to be reinforced. Quickly. I want you, Tiger, to take Billy and four men to Piscopi with additional arms and stores for the garrison, and make sure the Krauts are driven off.’

  ‘Who will take us? One of the Schooner Flotilla?’

  Larssen shook his head. ‘It would take too long. I have spoken to Balbao. He will take you and pick you up.’

  ‘But he still has no fuel,’ Tiller objected.

  ‘We’re going up to the castle now,’ Larssen replied grimly. ‘No more shilly-shallying with our Italian friends. We get the fuel. Now.’

  Salvini, when they arrived at Colonel Ardetti’s office in the castle, blustered and prevaricated. He had, he said, still not received permission to release the fuel. When Perquesta translated this Larssen unslung his Sten and said: ‘Tell Captain Salvini that if he does not produce the fuel – now – I shall take it myself.’

  Salvini’s expression darkened and he almost spat out his reply.

  ‘He asks how you propose to do this,’ Perquesta said. He looked distinctly uncomfortable at being the go-between.

  Larssen smiled pleasantly at Salvini and sai
d to Perquesta: ‘Tell him I shoot him first. Then I shoot whoever else stops me,’ and he lifted the barrel of his Sten a few inches. It was a small gesture but an unambiguous one. In the silence that followed, one of the SBS men could be heard putting the garrison through its daily exercises.

  ‘Your pistol, please,’ Larssen said, nodding at the holster strapped to Salvini’s thick, glossy leather belt. Salvini’s hand lingered momentarily over the holster but the butt of his pistol was covered by a leather flap which was buttoned to the holster. He would have been dead before he had even undone the flap. Instead he shrugged, undid his belt, and dropped it and the holster on to the colonel’s desk, then snapped something at Perquesta.

  ‘Captain Salvini says that he will lay a formal complaint before the Italian Armistice Commission.’

  ‘Fuck the Italian Armistice Commission,’ said Larssen pleasantly.

  ‘Prego, signore?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Captain Salvini and I understand one another.’

  Larssen nodded to one of the SBS men. ‘Take him down to the port and lock him up somewhere that’s safe from the locals. I want him on the next boat out of here.’

  Tiller stepped forward, undid the flap of Salvini’s holster and withdrew the pistol. He slid the magazine from the butt, flicked the cartridges on to the table with his thumb, and pocketed them before returning the pistol to its holster. It would make a nice souvenir.

  Larssen turned to Perquesta: ‘Where do you keep your fuel?’

  Perquesta took them out of the castle and up a path which led towards the hills. Around a corner they found a steel door let into the hillside which was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by two Italians with sub-machine-guns.