Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

It sounded hard enough on paper, but there were additional obstacles. Pessac was on such an industrial scale, and so important to Germany’s submarine campaign, that it had been surrounded by a heavily fortified wall that was believed to be under twenty-four-hour guard. These guards would kill the saboteurs if they caught them.

  Gubbins was enough of a realist to know that an attack on Pessac could only be undertaken by French saboteurs. He therefore turned to his newly formed Free French Section and asked for volunteers for Operation Josephine B, the codename given to the mission. Three men immediately offered their services: Sergeant Jean-Pierre Forman, Sub-Lieutenant Raymond Cabard and Sub-Lieutenant André Varnier.

  There was never any doubt as to who was best equipped to lead the mission. Sergeant Forman had already proved his worth during training: he was a man ‘of courage, initiative and resource of the highest order’.17 He also had the perfect profile of a saboteur. He was patient, ruthless and abhorred the Nazi occupation of his homeland, yet his hatred was carefully measured. In common with Gubbins, he believed that clinical strikes were the best way of hurting the German occupiers.

  Gubbins had initially handed over the planning of the mission to two of his colleagues, Major Hugh Barry and Eric Piquet-Wicks, head of the Free French Section. Major Barry displayed an alarmingly breezy approach to a mission that was certain to land the men in extreme danger. ‘All we had to do was provide them with the explosives and they had to cut their way through the wire fence and attack the things and go.’18 He made it sound like an afternoon stroll in the park.

  Cecil Clarke took a less cavalier view of the perils facing Sergeant Forman and his comrades. He put together a two-month programme of intensive training at Brickendonbury Manor, one that revealed a commitment to professionalism that placed Clarke in a different field from Barry and Piquet-Wicks. His programme had two principal goals that were to become the hallmark of all future missions: destroy the target and get out alive. The ultimate success of any mission was rated on whether or not the saboteurs made it back to England.

  The French volunteers arrived at Brickendonbury Manor in the spring of 1941, by which time Gubbins’s team in London had discovered a great deal about the transformer station. Aerial reconnaissance photographs revealed the layout of the plant and the position of the various buildings. They even showed up the eight transformers. This information was to prove crucially important to Clarke as he prepared to train the men.

  The transformer station stood some two miles from Pessac village, in heavily wooded countryside. This would afford the men good cover as they prepared themselves for the attack. Their greatest difficulty would be in entering the plant, with its sixteen-foot perimeter wall topped with wire. The saboteurs would have to scale this wall without attracting the notice of any workers at the plant.

  Clarke knew more than most people about transformers. They usually had thin steel casings that housed the winding machinery. These casings contained oil, which was used as a coolant. It was clear that ‘maximum damage will be inflicted by damaging the windings, letting out the oil and igniting it.’19 If Sergeant Forman and his men could start a fire, Pessac could conceivably be knocked out for six months or more.

  Clarke was in no doubt as to how best to blow up the transformers. His limpet mine was the ideal explosive. It would stick to the steel, be almost invisible if placed in the right position, and give the men ample time to make their escape.

  He began by teaching the men the rudiments of sabotage and demolition. ‘Know every detail backwards.’ That was his mantra. ‘Remember that within five minutes of landing at your destination, you may be questioned by a hostile official.’ He was particularly insistent that the three men have an understanding of exactly how a transformer station functioned. Indeed he felt it was ‘very important that these foreign enthusiastic volunteers should get some “hands on” experience of trying to carry out an attack’.

  There was an obvious means of getting this experience. Luton Power Station was just twelve miles from Brickendonbury and it resembled Pessac in many respects. It had a high perimeter fence, was guarded by the military and had sentries who patrolled the site at night. Its transformers, too, were similar to those at Pessac. This made it the perfect place for Sergeant Forman and his men to undertake a trial run for their forthcoming act of sabotage.

  Cecil’s son, John, watched in puzzlement as his father faked a pass on War Office paper that read: ‘The holder of this pass, Major C. V. Clarke, has authority to inspect Luton Power Station.’ Equipped with this pass and a sack of blank limpets, he took the three saboteurs to Luton. He was preparing a little nocturnal surprise for the power station’s general manager.

  Night had fallen by the time they reached the station. Clarke and young John hid in the damp undergrowth in order to monitor the progress of the three saboteurs as they crept towards the perimeter fence. ‘They used scaling ladders to get over the walls,’ recalled John, who was pleased to see them scale the outer fence without drawing attention to themselves. The three Frenchmen then forced an entry into the main building and placed their magnetic limpets on to the metal transformers, just as Clarke had instructed. Once done, they crept out of the transformer station, rescaled the perimeter fence and rejoined Clarke and his son in the undergrowth. They hadn’t triggered a single alarm. It was a job well done.

  Clarke was impressed and now decided to have some fun. ‘He walked up to the front door of the power station and asked to speak to the Officer of the Guard. He then flourished his fake pass and said: “I want to do a routine inspection.”’

  The officer was taken aback by this unannounced inspection but had little option but to allow Clarke inside: after all, he was equipped with an official War Office pass. ‘So he went round with a very big torch’ and began flashing light on to the transformers. ‘He said: “What’s that?” And this young subaltern who was in charge of the guard said: “I’m not quite sure what this is, sir. It looks to me like an explosive charge.”’

  Clarke pressed on with his inspection, revealing to the nervous subaltern each of the dummy charges. The subaltern was appalled that such a breach of security could have taken place on his watch. He expected to be roundly punished.

  But Clarke had no wish to land him in trouble and said he would take no further action. ‘“Alright old man”, he said. “You say nothing about this and I’ll say nothing about it. But you’ve learned your lesson.”’20

  So had the saboteurs. A practice run could mean the difference between life and death.

  * * *

  Sergeant Forman and his team set off from Stradishall Aerodrome in Suffolk at around 9 p.m. on 11 May, flying to France in a specially converted Whitley bomber. There was a sharp frost in the late evening air and the men knew it would get even colder once airborne. Over the previous days, pilots had been complaining of temperatures dipping as low as minus 25 inside their cockpits, so cold they had to scratch away the ice from the inside of the glass.

  The Pessac mission had been timed to coincide with a full moon, an important consideration for men being dropped blind into the French countryside. Their equipment and explosives had been carefully packed into a rigid capsule: this, too, was to be parachuted from the plane.

  Clarke had planned Operation Josephine B with surgical precision, intending it to be the antithesis of the sort of raids being undertaken by Bomber Command. Just twenty-four hours earlier, the Royal Air Force had undertaken its heaviest bombardment to date on Nazi Germany, dropping ‘load after load of high explosives and incendiaries’21 on to the cities of Hamburg and Bremen. The raid had come at a high cost: eleven bombers had crashed or been shot down and no one could be certain if the bombs had hit their target. Clarke, like Gubbins, had long believed that bombing was a blunt-edged weapon, one that killed more civilians than soldiers. Sabotage, at its best, was clinically precise.

  The men had been equipped with specialist weaponry. Forman carried an automatic pistol, four grenades and a fighting knife to
be used against German sentries if caught in close combat. He also had wire-cutters, a compass, a torch and a rope ladder. His principal explosive charge was the limpet mine. Cecil Clarke’s wonder weapon was about to be put to the test.

  The mission began like clockwork. The Whitley bomber reached the Bordeaux area at shortly after midnight and all three men jumped into the night, closely followed by their precious metal container. They landed some five kilometres from the target area, in an area of woodland, but managed to avoid getting their parachutes snagged in any branches. They didn’t locate the container until dawn, when they noticed it dangling in a tree. They hauled it down and then buried it, just as Cecil Clarke had instructed.

  Forman led them to a safe house in Bordeaux, only to discover that their contact was not at home. This was a setback, but they successfully checked into a hotel without arousing any suspicion and on the following morning acquired bicycles and used them to travel to Pessac. Forman wanted to stake out the ground before launching his attack.

  Their reconnaissance of Pessac brought both good and bad news. The transformer station was surrounded by a nine-foot concrete wall – lower than expected – but the wall itself was topped by a high-tension wire that made scaling it almost impossible. More disquieting were the sentries on constant patrol inside the perimeter fence. Their presence put Forman in a quandary. He was under specific orders that ‘fire will not be opened unless sentries of the transformer station interfere’.22 Yet it was inconceivable that he and his men could get inside the plant without a firefight that would almost certainly leave all three of them dead.

  Forman decided to postpone the attack in order to consult with Joel Letac, one of the men parachuted into France for the abortive assassination of the Kampfgeschwader bomber pilots. Letac had remained in France in order to work for the fledgling French resistance. He persuaded Forman to stake out the ground more carefully, informing him that the occupying Germans were becoming increasingly complacent in their attitude to security. He even volunteered to join him for the mission, an offer that Forman was more than happy to accept.

  Sub-Lieutenant Raymond Cabard was selected to investigate the site more carefully and he displayed considerable bravado by walking up to the main gate and chatting with the French sentry on duty. From him, he learned a crucial detail. The night sentries had indeed become lax in their work and were in the habit of knocking off duty shortly before midnight. He also discovered that they slept in a billet in the north-east corner of the transformer station, leaving the main building unguarded.

  Equipped with this knowledge, the saboteurs decided to attack on the following night, setting off from Bordeaux by bike under the cloak of darkness. Cabard and Varnier arrived first, at around 10 p.m., and made their way into the dripping woodland where they had buried their limpet mines. The loamy earth squelched underfoot, for it had been raining hard, and Varnier found that moisture had penetrated into the time fuses of the buried explosives. But he managed to cut out the spoiled section and rewire the detonators.

  Forman and Letac joined their two comrades in the woodland at around midnight. A quick reconnaissance confirmed the information about the sentries. There was no one patrolling inside the site.

  Forman followed his instructions to the letter, moving ‘as rapidly as possible, following the line of pylons to the small wood, 300 yards west of the transformer station’. He scaled the wall without the use of a ladder, swung himself over the high-tension wire and clambered on to a pylon that stood just inside the perimeter fence. He then jumped down on to the soft ground in the yard and crept towards the main gate of the station, which he was able to unlatch from the inside. ‘This made a considerable noise, but did not appear to attract any attention at all.’

  His fellow saboteurs entered in absolute silence, slipping through the dark shadows towards the transformer building. It stood as a neatly defined silhouette in the pale spring moonlight. It was unlocked – amazingly – and the men got inside without difficulty. The place was deserted. The workmen were asleep. The only sound was the low hum of the transformers.

  There was no light inside the factory, but the men’s night training had not been in vain. They had no difficulty in locating the eight transformers and it took just seconds to attach their limpet mines to each of the metal casings. The only slight hitch came when they discovered that some of the transformers were wet, causing the mines to slide on the surface. Yet even this problem was overcome. In the operational report, written after the event, the men expressed satisfaction with their progress. ‘During the whole period of half an hour in which the party were in the station, no one was seen and there was not the slightest attempt at interference.’23

  They had no intention of hanging around. As soon as the limpets were secure, they skipped back through the main gates and retrieved their bicycles from the dense woodland close to the perimeter fence.

  They had just mounted their bikes ‘and were pedalling with all their might’ when a series of hollow booms shook the stillness of the night. The booms were followed by ‘resounding explosions and flames reaching to the sky’.24 As the men glanced backwards, these flames could be seen towering more than 150 feet upwards. ‘Seven other explosions were heard,’ all timed like clockwork.25 Cecil Clarke’s limpet mines had worked to perfection.

  The four of them pedalled hard, light-headed with success. They ‘rode back to their digs by the light of the burning oil and of searchlights hunting for the bomber the Germans supposed to have passed’.26 Forman knew that the searchlights brought good news. The Germans clearly thought the attack had come from the air.

  Forman and his team later learned that the damage caused to Pessac was every bit as devastating as they had hoped. Six out of the eight transformers had been crippled, cutting all power supplies to the German submarine base. The wreckage was on such a grand scale, indeed, that it would take more than a year to repair the facility.

  The Germans immediately tried to restore power by rerouting electricity from the power station at Dax, some seventy miles to the south. But it ‘merely resulted in the blowing of numerous fuses, and this attempt had to be abandoned’.27 The coastal railway from Bordeaux to Spain was also seriously disrupted, hampering the service. The electric locomotives eventually had to be abandoned and replaced with decommissioned steam trains.

  When the Abwehr (military intelligence) discovered that the attack on Pessac had been carried out by saboteurs, and not aircraft, the German sentries carried the blame. All twelve were arrested and were later said to have been shot. The local French population was also punished, but not severely. Some 250 people were arrested and a fine of 1 million francs imposed on the community.

  Colin Gubbins was delighted by the success of the first major act of sabotage undertaken on his watch. It triumphantly vindicated his belief in playing dirty. ‘The operation showed what could be done by a couple of gallant, well-trained men, trained for the job and equipped with the proper devices.’28 The best news of all came when the three original saboteurs pitched up in England in the third week of August after a daring escape across Spain and Portugal. Their safe arrival was one cause for celebration. Another was the fact that Forman had managed to establish the first significant network of undercover agents in France. He was awarded the Military Cross for having ‘contributed materially to the growth of resistance to the enemy’.

  Hugh Dalton was as delighted as Gubbins with the success of Operation Josephine B and wrote a ‘most secret’ memo to Winston Churchill informing him that the scale of the destruction caused by eight small limpet mines ‘strongly suggests that many industrial targets are more effectively attacked by Special Operations methods than by aerial bombardment’.

  Dalton added that the operation had fully justified the existence of a dedicated sabotage unit, as well as Cecil Clarke’s Brickendonbury training programme. ‘It is indeed most encouraging that our first action of this kind (which reflects great credit on Brigadier Gubbins, my Director of Trainin
g and Operations) should have succeeded.’29 Churchill was inclined to agree.

  8

  Killing School

  COLIN GUBBINS’S DECISION to attack the Pessac transformer was at one level blindingly obvious. Deprive the U-boat base of power and you deprive the enemy of his ability to function. But it was also a clever piece of lateral thinking, one that opened up a whole new realm of possibilities. Military factories, aerodromes and industrial docks: suddenly, the Nazis’ soft targets looked enticingly vulnerable.

  The only problem with Operation Josephine B was that it failed to address the fleet of German U-boats that were already at sea. Admiral Donitz had almost a hundred in service and they were wreaking a terrible toll on shipping. Nearly every day brought news of another catastrophe. On 1 March the Cadillac was sunk by U-552. On 2 March the Augvald and Pacific were sent to the bottom. Five days later saw the sinking of no fewer than seven ships, including a huge whaler that had been converted into a supply vessel. It was attacked by the veteran U-boat commander Günther Prien, the first to win the Knight’s Cross for mastery of submarine warfare.

  Deep in his bunker below Whitehall, Winston Churchill kept a grim tally of the statistics. ‘My mind reverted to February and March 1917,’ he wrote, ‘when the curve of U-boat sinking had mounted so steadily against us that one wondered how many months’ more fighting the Allies had in them.’1 It was these U-boats – the scourge of the Atlantic – on which Millis Jefferis now set his sights.

  He was well equipped for planning sabotage at sea, for his country establishment, the Firs, had expanded greatly over the previous months. The tumbledown brick outhouses, once used to store flowerpots, had been converted into specialist labs and Macrae had set up a fledgling weapons’ factory, ‘snatching a dozen automatic machines and a raft of other machine tools from under somebody’s nose and putting Leslie Gouldstone’ – a gifted radio sound-recordist – ‘in charge of the outfit’. Two huge water-pools had also been dug in the back garden, raising hopes among the staff that they would be able to go swimming in their leisure time. Macrae soon put them right, informing them that the pools were ‘not for bathers but for underwater experiments with various devices’.