by Giles Milton
Heavily equipped with explosives, his team crept to the bridge, reconnoitred it and laid their charges. They blew with a tremendous bang and had a dramatic effect on the Frenchmen, just as Macpherson had anticipated. ‘From that moment on, they were enthusiastic participants, eager to strike a blow against the Germans at every opportunity.’22
They were soon to find themselves with a far more spectacular target. Macpherson and his team were taking shelter in a farmyard when two members of the local resistance pitched up on a motorbike. Breathless with excitement, they brought news that a huge, heavily armoured panzer division was grinding its way northwards along the route nationale. It made for an unforgettable sight: some 1,400 tanks and armoured cars churning the highway into a thick cloak of dust. The air was filled with the roar of engines, the stench of diesel and the metallic crunch of tank tracks on tarmac. The infantry was following in the wake of the vehicles: 15,000 men dragging their military hardware northwards along the D940.
If Field Marshal Rommel had got his way, General Lammerding’s division would have reached Normandy within hours of the Allied landings. But the German high command was in such a state of confusion – and its communications system so crippled by sabotage – that fully twenty-eight hours passed before the general received his orders to head for Normandy. The delay was regrettable but not disastrous. The Das Reich division operated like a well-oiled machine, driven with ruthless determination by its much decorated commander. It could still reach northern France in time to avert a catastrophe.
General Lammerding’s senior staff officer, Albert Stuckler, immediately swung into action, issuing an order that all tanks and heavy guns were to be transported to Normandy by rail transporter. It was an order that could not be fulfilled. He was brought the unwelcome news that every single transporter had inexplicably seized up. Their axles were locked and their wheels refused to budge. It was as if they had been fused by rust. Tony Brooks’s pots of carborundum had worked their lethal magic, just as he had hoped, and Obersturmbannführer Albert Stuckler had the unenviable task of informing General Lammerding that the entire armoured column of the SS Das Reich would have to grind its way northwards by road. It was a disastrous and wholly unexpected setback.
It was 450 miles to the north coast, a journey that was likely to take a minimum of seventy-two hours. General Lammerding’s map revealed but one route to take as he prepared to thrust his panzer division northwards. The route nationale struck like an arrow through central France, spearing its way through the towns of Brive, Limoges and Poitiers. The road crossed a landscape of loosely folded fields, scooped valleys and dramatic escarpments, crossing bridges and viaducts that ought to have interested General Lammerding, an engineer by profession. They also ought to have interested him as an army commander, for such countryside was a guerrilla’s dream.
News of Tommy Macpherson’s presence in the area soon reached local resistance leaders, one of whom approached him and asked for help in staging a rapid frontal attack on the Das Reich column of vehicles. Macpherson refused point-blank. ‘It is the absolute antithesis of guerrilla warfare to group people together,’ he told the man, ‘because the moment they’re grouped together, they’re easy meat for regular forces to mop up.’ He added that attacking the bridges and viaducts of the route nationale was likely to prove more effective – and less costly in human lives – than targeting Hitler’s most battle-hardened troops.
The French leader went away in a fury, hurling accusations at Macpherson and saying that the British ‘weren’t pulling their weight’.23 He decided to press ahead with his attack without Macpherson’s support, leading his men into action at the little village of Bretenoux. They paid a high price for their valour. Eighteen of the French fighters were killed in a shoot-out with the crack troops of Das Reich.
Macpherson’s training at Milton Hall had taught him that guerrilla warfare was about hitting hard and running fast. Now, as dusk fell over the Massif Central, he planned a textbook sabotage operation that he intended to put into action with immediate effect: ‘a whole series of daring ambushes to slow down the Germans’. His priority was not to attack the convoy, nor even to engage it, but to slow it to a snail’s pace. ‘Lots of small operations, hit over a wide area of ground.’ He had his own mantra, one he transmitted to his French comrades-in-arms. ‘Don’t get caught. Get away. Be a will-of-the-wisp.’24
General Lammerding knew that his division was at its most vulnerable while on the move and had therefore taken the decision to bring it to a standstill each evening. On this particular night, the tanks and armoured carriers were parked in makeshift camps and placed under heavy guard. Then, after a snatched supper, the Germans bedded down. They were oblivious to the fact that they were being spied on by Tommy Macpherson.
‘I was able to move through the thick screen of trees and bushes that flanked the road.’ He was pleased to note that ‘as well as trucks and partly armoured half-track trucks, there were tanks and armoured cars stretching out as far as we could see down the road.’
In the low moonlight, Macpherson reconnoitred the road ahead in order to work out the best places to ambush the column. The division had halted in three separate encampments and there was a considerable distance between each. Macpherson decided that striking in these gaps would cause maximum chaos and confusion. He and his team spent the rest of the night preparing a series of surprises for General Lammerding.
As the sun rose on the following morning, the air was filled with the ‘almighty noise of every engine in the column starting up’.25 One by one the vehicles swung on to the route nationale as they continued their journey northwards. It was not long before they were brought to a halt at the first of Macpherson’s roadblocks. Two felled trees lay across the road and blocked the convoy’s passage, bringing every tank to a standstill. The lead vehicle – an armoured car – was followed by a half-track containing half a dozen troops. The men got out and ‘walked up to the barrier, scratched their heads and talked to the armoured car chaps’. The driver then tried to use his vehicle to push the trees out of the way, but Macpherson’s men had brought down two of the biggest trees and the armoured car didn’t have the necessary power.
There was then a wait of several hours as a much heavier vehicle was summoned from the rear of the convoy. This was a powerful tank support vehicle that was equipped with a bulldozer and scoop. It succeeded in clearing the trees, but only with great difficulty and the whole operation took more than three hours. As the troops made their way back to their vehicles, one of Macpherson’s men, who had been watching the entire debacle from the wooded roadside, opened fire with his Sten gun. The Germans dived for cover and then prepared to return fire, but they could not work out where the bullets were coming from. Macpherson’s man was able ‘to skip into cover, disappear down the hill and get away safely’.26 Macpherson’s first surprise had delayed the Germans by more than four hours.
His next trap concealed a nasty sting. A few kilometres further along the road, his men had felled two more trees, once again blocking the convoy’s passage, ‘only this time I put our only two anti-tank mines underneath them, well-camouflaged with dust and gravel’. When the convoy was forced to stop for a second time, the troops were so worried about being ambushed again that they remained in their vehicles until the entire roadside had been swept by infantry brought up from the rear. ‘All this took a nice lot of time,’ noted Macpherson. Only once they had given the all-clear could the tank support vehicle be brought into action and shift the trees. As it began to push the heavy tree trunks from the road, there was a blinding flash and devastating blast as the anti-tank mine exploded underneath the vehicle’s tracks, ‘causing it to slew across the road and rendering the road completely impassable’.27 Macpherson felt a satisfying sense of glee. ‘It meant a very long delay while they sent for another heavy vehicle.’28
And so his devious game continued for the rest of the day: trees felled, booby traps hidden in the branches and the occasional bu
rst of Sten gunfire to hinder the Germans yet further. After just two days on the road, General Lammerding was in a state of despair. Even the Eastern Front hadn’t been this bad. His panzer division had set off from Montauban in an orderly column. Now, after repeated ambushes and breakdowns, it had covered less than fifty miles and was dispersed across three French départements. The true picture was even bleaker. After consulting with his regimental commanders, he learned that six out of every ten tanks had broken down due to driving on tarmac. The half-track vehicles had fared a little better, but at least a third of them had become unserviceable. In a progress report, Lammerding said that the tanks alone would require four days for repairs, assuming that spare parts were forthcoming. But this seemed increasingly unlikely, for he had been brought intelligence that widespread sabotage to the railway system had cut all the main lines. In a note of rage, he said that ‘terrorists’ – his word for the resistance – had achieved ‘the complete crippling of rail movement’.29
Das Reich continued to lurch its way northwards at an agonizingly slow pace, hindered by ambushes, blown bridges and an almost total lack of spare parts. It eventually staggered into the town of Tulle, at which point it was beyond the reach of Tommy Macpherson and his area of operations. He and his men had done all they could to slow its progress. Now, the work was passed to a new group of guerrillas, who scored the singular coup of kidnapping one of General Lammerding’s senior officers, Major Helmut Kämpfe. He was never seen again.
Das Reich had a reputation for ruthlessness and it now revealed this as it passed through the village of Oradour. In retaliation for the capture of Major Kämpfe – and a blaze of partisan activity around the town of Tulle – 624 inhabitants of Oradour were slaughtered in cold blood.
Macpherson remained coolly detached from such reprisals, aware that they were part of the price of war. ‘We were there for a major objective of helping win a singularly bloody war,’ he said. ‘If we could expedite the end of the war by making the landings more successful, then we were saving more casualties than we could possibly have caused.’30
Das Reich’s journey to Normandy should have taken no more than seventy-two hours. Instead, it took seventeen days for the main body to arrive, and it was even longer before the last of the vehicles reached the battlefield. By the time General Lammerding’s men and tanks were ready for action, it was too late. The Allied beachhead was secure.
* * *
As the Allied armies began the long thrust eastwards towards the frontiers of the Third Reich, even Gubbins accepted that the time for sabotage and guerrilla warfare was almost at an end. He had always hoped that France would prove his finest hour. This had indeed proved to be the case.
‘A spectacular success’, was Joan Bright’s assessment of Gubbins’s Jedburgh teams: they had pulled off audacious acts of sabotage across the length and breadth of France. Gubbins himself was quietly satisfied. ‘We are in good heart,’ he admitted in a memo to an absent Peter Wilkinson. He added that he no longer had ‘to cheat and crawl’ – his expression for dealing with Whitehall officials – and had been at the receiving end of ‘the highest unsolicited testimonies’.31 These had come from General Eisenhower, the chiefs of staff and even General Montgomery, who had mistrusted guerrilla warfare ever since Gubbins’s men had sabotaged one of his lectures back in the summer of 1940.
It was to take many weeks for a full assessment of the contribution that the Jedburgh teams had brought to the Allied landings, but when it came, it vindicated Gubbins’s belief that carefully planned sabotage could cripple a modern army. General Eisenhower’s staff at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force said that the Jedburghs had ‘succeeded in imposing more or less serious delays on all the divisions moved to Normandy’. This had prevented Hitler from striking back in the crucial opening hours of Operation Overlord.
Eisenhower’s staff singled out the work of Tommy Macpherson and his comrades-in-arms for particular praise. The most ‘outstanding example was the delay to 2nd SS Panzer Division’, they said, and added that such operations had ‘made a substantial contribution to the victory of the Allied Expeditionary Force’. General Eisenhower added a very personal endorsement, agreeing that the work carried out under Gubbins’s leadership played ‘a very considerable part in our complete and final victory’.
Others were swift to add their praise. Lord Mountbatten had worked closely with Gubbins ever since the triumphant raid on St Nazaire. Now, as he read the official report on the Jedburghs’ triumph, he expressed his wholehearted agreement with its conclusions. He said it was ‘one of the most thrilling accounts of operations in this war and must make you and your whole organisation feel very proud’.
Hugh Dalton, the first ministerial head of Baker Street, laid all his praise at Gubbins’s feet. In a private letter, he wrote that ‘the growth of this great instrument of yours, from my small beginnings, reflects very great credit on you who planned its growth and triumph.’ Even King George VI wrote to Gubbins to express ‘his hearty congratulations’. It was a job well done.
Gubbins was anxious to share the praise, aware that his wartime successes would not have been possible without his inner circle of experts: Millis Jefferis, Cecil Clarke, Eric Sykes, William Fairbairn and George Rheam. He was also quick to point out the real heroes were the men and women who had dared to operate behind enemy lines. Their work had been ‘one long continuous struggle, with torture and unbelievable suffering and death waiting round every corner and at every moment’. Yet for all the risks, he had never been short of volunteers, fearless heroes who ‘dedicated themselves to a cause they knew to be higher than self’. They had risked their own lives in order to save those of others.
The final word went to Edward Grigg, Minister Resident in the Middle East. He met some of those who had taken part in Gubbins’s sabotage missions and could scarcely believe the eye-stretching stories that spilled from their lips. They were more exhilarating than any novel, more colourful than any film. ‘I trust the epic for which they were responsible will be written and published as soon as possible,’ said Grigg. ‘They have worked and dared with such amazing secrecy that few at home have the remotest inkling of their existence, far less of their achievements.’
He felt sure that their spectacular acts of destruction would one day go down in history ‘as proof that the spirit of Elizabethan times is still alive in all its brilliant daring’. But until that happened, he could only be grateful to have had the honour of paying tribute to ‘a most Gallant Company of Gentleman Adventurers’.32
Epilogue
MILLIS JEFFERIS’S TEAM at the Firs continued to work a sixteen-hour day right through to the armistice on 8 May 1945: in the months that followed the Normandy landings there had still been the need for mortars, detonators and booby trap devices. Not until Jefferis received confirmation that the war in Europe was finally over was everyone permitted to lay down their tools.
Stuart Macrae felt sure that after five long years of intense work, the team would celebrate with equal intensity, yet even he was surprised by the scale of the revelries. ‘Everybody went mad,’ he said as he watched all 250 staff head straight to the bar. He assumed that Jefferis would play no part in the celebrations – wrongly, as it transpired. It was Jefferis who set the tone for the antics that were to follow. ‘Millis, having stoked up nicely in the bar, collected a Sherman tank from the ranges and contrived to get it into our front drive.’ Then, cranking up the engine – and with him at the controls – he slammed it into a constant spin, with spectacular results. As it whizzed round and round at increasing speed, it flung all the gravel outwards in an arc of flying stones. He then hit and burst the water mains, putting it completely out of action. Macrae was relieved when Jefferis ‘got tired before knocking down any walls and decided to go home without the tank’.
But the tank’s role in the festivities was not over yet. Macrae’s wife, Mary, had been busily sluicing her way through the bar, along with one of the Firs�
�s old hands, Brian Passmore. When they spied the tank outside, they ‘thought it would be a good idea if they went off for a ride in this machine, although Brian had no idea how to drive it’. Off they went, clattering down the main street in Whitchurch towards the village of Oving, accompanied by a boisterous crowd of revellers until – as Macrae put it – ‘they came over all religious and decided to go to church to give thanks.’ Macrae only learned what happened next when he received a frantic phone call from an Oving local who reported seeing a large tank charging towards the main door of the church, where its passage was blocked by the low lintel. The revellers, Macrae was told, were ‘having trouble to get the tank to go inside’.1 But the church’s woes were not yet over. One of the Firs’s senior staff, Norman Angier, fired off a powerful rocket that he had brought with him and managed to score a direct hit on the crypt. ‘Oh what fun,’ noted a sardonic Macrae in his diary.2
The revelry continued until the early hours. Explosives were detonated and spigot mortars fired into the skies above Whitchurch. On that joyful armistice night, many people up and down the country watched fireworks’ displays. But the villagers of Whitchurch were treated to a spectacle they would never forget. It was as if the sky itself were exploding.
Everyone awoke the next morning with sore heads, only to discover that Jefferis had reinstated the sixteen-hour day. The war in the Far East was far from over and the Americans were placing orders on a scale that outmatched even Baker Street. Yet even with the new workload, there was a sense that the end was finally in sight. Macrae and his team felt ‘like people who had been pushing a bus up an incline for a long while and now saw it disappearing over the top’.3
