Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  They soon found the assassins’ abandoned briefcase containing two more of Clarke’s grenades. These were immediately sent for analysis. The experts who defused the weapons had never seen anything quite like them. It was clear that they were ‘of British make’ and also clear that ‘they have the same kind of fuses as the anti-tank shells used by British troops in North Africa.’ Yet they had been skilfully modified by an expert, someone who was intent on wreaking maximum damage to an armour-plated car.

  Clarke’s grenade had indeed done its deadly worst. It had broken one of Heydrich’s ribs, ruptured his diaphragm and flung shrapnel deep into his spleen. The Reichsprotektor was rushed to hospital and underwent emergency surgery, but Clarke’s grenade was to prove a very dirty weapon indeed. Septicaemia soon took hold and Heydrich breathed his last on the eighth day after the attack.

  His doctors blamed the dirty bomb for his death, saying that it had been caused ‘by bacteria and possibly by poisons carried into [the vital organs] by the bomb splinters’.

  Hitler was furious about the assassination. He initially blamed Heydrich himself, saying that driving around without outriders and SS bodyguards was ‘just damned stupidity’.38 But he quickly transferred his fury to the assassins, whose identity and whereabouts were still unknown.

  Unless or until they were found, Czech civilians were to pay the price for Heydrich’s death in a series of random, brutal and senseless killings. The village of Lidice was the first to be targeted, on the spurious grounds that it had links to the assassins. The village was cordoned off and 199 male inhabitants shot by the Gestapo. The 195 women and 95 children were arrested and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp where most were gassed to death. The village of Ležáky was next to be targeted. All thirty-three villagers were shot and most of the children exterminated.

  Gabčik and Kubis had made a lucky getaway, sheltering in a number of safe houses before being offered refuge in the dank catacombs of the St Cyril and St Methodius Orthodox Church. They took shelter with five other resistance fighters who feared being captured in the extensive house-to-house searches that were now taking place. All seven were hoping to make their escape.

  What they did not know was that they were about to be betrayed by one of their fellow agents, Karel Curda. His revelations led the SS to their hiding place and the church was stormed at 4.10 a.m. on 18 June. The SS fought their way up to the choir loft in a ferocious two-hour gun battle: when they reached the top of the spiral staircase, they found two of the fighters dead and a third, Kubis, mortally wounded. He was rushed to hospital, for the SS were desperate to keep him alive, but he died of his wounds some twenty minutes later.

  The other four fighters, including Gabčik, were still hiding out in the catacombs of the church, but their whereabouts were eventually revealed to the SS by the terrified preacher, Vladimir Petrek. First, the SS tried to flood them out, ordering the Czech fire brigade to fill the catacombs with water. When that failed to work, they threw hand grenades through the vents. Eventually, in a cloud of tear gas, masked SS soldiers stormed the catacombs, opening the main entrance with explosives.

  As they waded through waist-deep water, they faced heavy gunfire from the four Czech survivors. The German troops fell back for a moment, in preparation for a renewed attack, but were halted by the sound of four shots. The defenders had used their last bullets on themselves.

  Colonel Moravec and Colin Gubbins always knew that Czech civilians would pay a high price for the assassination. Several thousand were killed in the aftermath of Heydrich’s death and there was a renewed reign of terror throughout the country. But Moravec remained convinced that the assassination was justified, arguing that the Nazi killings would have happened even if Heydrich had not been assassinated. ‘The eradication of the Czech nation and its amalgamation into the Reich, including the systematic murder of its leaders, was the assignment with which he came to Prague.’ He wrote a personal letter to Gubbins expressing his ‘congratulations and admiration’ for a job well done.39

  Winston Churchill expressed his full approval when he learned news of the attack: he was untroubled by political assassinations. When President Roosevelt asked him if the British had been involved in Heydrich’s death, Churchill winked but said nothing. There were some secrets too sensitive to be revealed, even to the American President.

  13

  Sabotage in the Mountains

  COLIN GUBBINS REALIZED that he had one significant advantage over the Nazis in the aftermath of Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination. The use of underhand tactics had transformed the game of war into an exhilarating game of risk. If he played his hand with skill, he could elevate himself from underdog to master of strategy. And that would leave him, rather than the Nazis, calling the shots. ‘If we could surpass them in design, in cunning, in surprise, in boldness,’ he said, ‘then the fruits of our labours might begin to show effect, in time, to have some influence on the war.’ He had learned an important rule from Sykes and Fairbairn: to play the game well meant always being on the offensive. He now saw his role as ‘waging a constant battle of wits against the Gestapo’ and recognizing the vital importance of retaining the initiative, ‘always with something new in preparation’.1

  Gubbins had been quick to see that Greece presented fertile territory for sabotage, with an underground resistance that had sprung into action within weeks of Mussolini’s invasion in the autumn of 1940. Peter Fleming had smuggled himself into Greece as soon as his work with the Kent Auxiliary Units was over: he managed to establish a small group of saboteurs who played merry havoc with the Italian and German armies. A few months after Fleming’s arrival in the country, Bickham Sweet-Escott was seated in the Baker Street office when he received a ‘stirring’ and characteristically colourful telegram from Fleming ‘with news that he was holding the Monastir gap’ – a valley in Macedonia – against the might of the Nazi war machine.2 As the Germans advanced, so Fleming retreated, but he did so in a trail of destruction, blowing up bridges and railways as he went.

  Fleming was not Gubbins’s only operator in Greece. His comrade David Pawson had based himself in Athens, from where he supplied Baker Street with up-to-the-minute news. The Nazi advance left him with little option but to flee the country, but not before delivering a wireless set to a trusted Greek colonel. This colonel vowed to continue Pawson’s work using the codename Prometheus, the bringer of fire.

  Prometheus was soon in regular contact with Gubbins’s office in Istanbul, whose staff arranged for the delivery of explosives. These were sent from England to Palestine and thence to Izmir, in Turkey, before being transferred by caique to Greece. Thus it was that the weapons assembled by Fairy Wond’s team of Welsh girls at the Firs ended up in the remote mountains of Thrace.

  Prometheus’s work eventually came to the notice of the Nazis and he was forced to flee for his life in the summer of 1942. But he managed to hand over his wireless to a young Greek naval officer who was to continue relaying information under the codename Prometheus II. Gubbins’s operatives in the Middle East had by this point delivered significant quantities of explosives to Greece and managed to create ‘a valuable fighting front organisation’.3

  This organization was soon to take part in a most spectacular act of sabotage, one that had its roots in North Africa. Here, the British Eighth Army’s advance on El Alamein was being hindered by the massive quantities of supplies being delivered to Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The supplies were transported by rail from Germany to Greece – forty-eight trains each day – and then shipped from Piraeus to Tobruk and Benghazi. Each train was packed with hundreds of tons of weaponry, vital tools for Rommel’s army.

  The route through Greece used a single-line standard-gauge railway that meandered across the baked plains of Thessaly before weaving upwards into the wilderness of the Roumeli Mountains. Here, miles from anywhere, was a sparse backland that looked from afar like a vast sheet of hammered pewter, beaten into sharp clefts and ridges. Roumeli was har
sh enough in the summer months, when the grass-tufted lower slopes were inhabited by itinerant shepherds. But in winter, when the mercury plunged, it was transformed into a forbidding zone of frozen scree and waterlogged gorges. The icy mountain torrents had scoured sinkholes, tunnels and caverns the size of cathedrals. Such terrain was a regular army’s nightmare. Conversely, it was a guerrilla army’s dream.

  Colin Gubbins had long argued that motorized armies such as Rommel’s Afrika Korps presented ‘a particularly favourable opportunity for guerrilla warfare’, especially if sabotage was ‘directed against their communications’.4 He was also quick to realize that the Afrika Korps was at its most vulnerable not in North Africa itself, nor even in the Mediterranean, but high in the Roumeli Mountains, where the Piraeus railway traversed three large viaducts. If any one of these could be destroyed, the principal supply line between the Third Reich and North Africa would have been spectacularly cut.

  Such an operation presented formidable challenges, as Gubbins knew only too well. It would require dropping a team of saboteurs into wholly unknown terrain that was under occupation by the Italian Army. The saboteurs would have to find their way to the viaducts and kill the Italian sentries before laying their explosive charges. To achieve this, they would require the support of the Greek andartes – guerrillas – known to be hiding out in this empty wilderness.

  In spite of the difficulties, Operation Harling was given the green light. A small team was to be parachuted into Greece with enough explosives to wreak havoc on Rommel’s vital supply line. Gubbins decided from the outset that the mission should be undertaken by his team in Cairo, which had been overseeing action in Greece and the Balkans for the previous two years. Although he was to keep a sharp eye on unfolding events, the baton was temporarily handed to Cairo.

  * * *

  Cairo was awash with British officers. Some had been posted to the city as intelligence agents; many more had fled there in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Crete. Among this latter group was Chris Woodhouse – known to his friends as Monty – an accomplished young Oxford graduate who had gained a double first in classics along with a clutch of the university’s most prestigious prizes.

  On Friday, 18 September 1942 Woodhouse was summoned to an interview at Rustrum Buildings, Baker Street’s Cairo headquarters, where he found himself being grilled by a mysterious individual who declined to introduce himself. ‘In the room to which I was directed sat a lieutenant-colonel behind a desk at right angles to the window. In the blinding light through the window I could only see his profile. I never learned his name. He looked up from the papers on his desk simply to say: “Would you be willing to be parachuted into Greece next week?”’

  Woodhouse thought about it for a moment. ‘There seemed no reason to say No, so I said Yes.’5 He reasoned that it would be a good opportunity to practise his Greek.

  He was better qualified than most to be dropped into Greece, yet he was nevertheless a strange choice for an undercover mission. He was ‘tall and conspicuously un-Greek looking’6 with a mop of ginger-blond hair that made him look more like a Scandinavian fisherman than a Greek shepherd. But he had the advantage of knowing classical Greek and he also had the stamina of a mountain goat. He was delighted by the idea of becoming a thorn in Rommel’s flesh.

  Woodhouse was to be one of the principal players in Operation Harling, but the leadership role itself went to Eddie Myers, a thirty-six-year-old Jewish sapper who had earned his spurs in Palestine during the Arab Revolt. Myers gave the impression of being gifted in everything. A fine horseman and skilled pilot, he had a ‘forceful personality’7 that was frequently deployed against his superiors. He was initially reluctant to accept the post of guerrilla leader, for he had just been granted his first annual leave in years. But his commanding officer persuaded him to have a crack at an operation that offered danger, glory and exhilaration. ‘You are just the sort of chap we are looking for,’ he said. ‘How would you like to take command of the show? It is frightfully important.’

  Myers agreed and began to gather other members of his twelve-strong team. It was to include three trained saboteurs led by a New Zealander, Tom Barnes, who was ‘fair-haired, stickily built and immensely strong’.8 There were also three wireless operators, three commandos and an officer named Thermistocles Marinos, the only Greek member of the team.

  Accurate intelligence was everything for a mission of this complexity. Gubbins’s Athens-based wireless operator, Prometheus II, had managed to keep Baker Street informed about the destruction of oil installations and army supply ships. Now, he offered to help with arrangements for Myers’s saboteurs to be parachuted into the Roumeli Mountains, assuring Cairo that Greek guerrillas would light fires on the night of the drop in order to guide the men to safety.

  This sounded promising in theory, but Prometheus II’s wireless transmissions were often faulty or corrupted. It would only take one miscommunication for Myers and his men to be landed in the wrong place, in a remote mountainous wilderness where there was no local support.

  There was an additional problem that threatened to scupper Operation Harling before it even began. Gubbins’s team in Cairo had precious little information about the three mountain viaducts in Roumeli. There were no plans, nor even photographs, until someone managed to lay their hands on an old postcard of the Simplon-Orient Express crossing the Gorgopotamos viaduct.

  Shortly afterwards, Baker Street succeeded in acquiring drawings of both the Papadia and Gorgopotamos viaducts. These were sent to Cairo and handed over to Eddie Myers, who felt a thrill of excitement when he saw pictures of the Gorgopotamos gorge and viaduct. The gorge itself was a gaping limestone fissure of such depth that the racing torrent at the bottom appeared as little more than a thinly traced line. It was spanned by one of Europe’s more spectacular viaducts, an awesome feat of structural engineering that was almost 900 feet in length and spanned the gorge at a dizzying height. Rommel’s army in North Africa depended on this vulnerable structure.

  Myers now began planning his mission in earnest. It was to require specialist equipment, for the men would be working during the rigours of a mountain winter. They would need to be dropped with stores, supplies and food, along with a large quantity of weaponry. The weapons included Sten guns, hand grenades and detonators, as well as Cairo’s entire stock of plastic explosive.

  Each man was also to be given a personal supply that included a revolver, a Fairbairn-Sykes commando knife and field dressings, along with the standard Baker Street kit: ‘a compass disguised as a button, a map disguised as a silk scarf, a leather belt containing two sovereigns’, together with rations, torches and poison pills in case of capture.9

  Myers divided his teams into three groups of four men who were to be dropped into Greece by three American Liberator aircraft. There was no time to lose, for the fight in North Africa was reaching a critical stage. By the third week of September, Myers’s men were ready for action.

  Their first attempt at dropping into the country, on 29 September, gave some inkling of the problems ahead. After a four-hour flight over the Mediterranean, the planes found themselves circling over the Roumeli Mountains in a vain search for the landing flares promised by Prometheus II. The dark folds of the mountains revealed no welcoming beacons and the men were reluctantly forced to return to Cairo.

  On the following evening they made a second attempt, having decided to land even if there were no flares. As they circled over the frozen peak of Mount Giona, gleaming milky-white in the moonlight, Myers thought he spotted a group of three fires in the valley below. ‘I spoke to the pilot on the intercommunication telephone and said that I was prepared to have a go there if he agreed.’

  The pilot dropped low from the cloud until the plane was flying alarmingly close to the surrounding peaks. He made a final arc across the valley and then signalled for Myers and his saboteurs to jump. Operation Harling was finally under way.

  It was only as Myers floated downwards, struggling with his heavy
pack, that the difficulties of a blind drop into unknown terrain become apparent. His parachute was caught in a sharp mountain updraught that sent him whirling towards a towering forest of fir trees.

  ‘I fell into the middle of a tall mountain fir, which opened and parted its arms and had some rudely broken as I crashed through it.’ He tumbled downwards through the branches, falling uncontrollably as they parted beneath his weight. ‘The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the ground on an extremely steep slope, with my parachute caught up above me.’

  His pack was dangling from the tree like some overgrown Christmas decoration and the rest of his supplies, dropped in separate metal containers, were nowhere to be seen. As he shook off the dirt, he heard the valedictory throb of the American Liberators heading back to Cairo. There was no sign of his comrades. He was alone and lost on a near-vertical mountain slope. His goal of blowing up the Gorgopotamos viaduct seemed very remote indeed.

  Gubbins had always stressed that the hallmark of a professional guerrilla was to keep a cool head under pressure. True to this creed, Myers acted with commendable calm. First, he lit a flare to attract the attention of his comrades. When this had no effect, he lit a bonfire. This, too, failed to solicit any response. Eventually he managed to stumble down the slope, using the trees for support, until he emerged into a moonlit valley. Here, he bumped into two Greek shepherds. ‘After a roundabout sort of deaf-and-dumb conversation, including a lot of pointing to the sky, we mutually agreed that we would stay where we were for the next three hours until dawn broke.’

  As soon as it was light, Myers led the two Greeks back up the mountain slope to his rucksack and parachute, both of which had mysteriously vanished. He was wondering what to do when, ‘from a parting in the trees, emerged Tom Barnes’.10