The Elite

by Ranulph Fiennes

  However, the journey across the Channel was fraught with danger. On the morning of 27 March, they crossed paths with a German U-boat that had risen to the surface. Avoiding conflict was vital to ensure that St Nazaire wasn’t notified of the incoming commando invasion. Thankfully, the commanders of HMS Campbeltown were well versed in German signals. This bought them some time as the U-boat tried to work out if the flotilla was friend or foe. But, with any response seeming to take an eternity, the British boats became nervous. Opening fire, they caused the U-boat to dive and attempt to escape. As a game of cat and mouse ensued, the escorting destroyer, the Tynecastle, dropped a pattern of depth charges across the area but could not verify if the U-boat had been hit. The bombs had in fact missed, and the U-boat had escaped, but it reported that the flotilla looked to be heading for Gibraltar rather than St Nazaire. For now, at least, the route remained clear.

  As the day wore on, the sky became overcast and the clouds descended to give some much-needed cover to the raiding force. It now made a steady 8 knots and pressed on towards the French coast. At 8 p.m., they began to close directly on the port.

  To provide cover, as well as a distraction, at about midnight the RAF began to drop bombs on St Nazaire. As the bombers droned overhead, the boats of Operation Chariot passed through the dark waters towards the estuary of the River Loire. All was quiet, with no searchlights probing the sea.

  Entering the wide mouth of the river at fifty minutes past midnight, the convoy passed the ghostly wreck of the liner Lancastria, sunk in 1940, the scene of the greatest loss of life in British maritime history. Yet something else soon caught their attention. Up ahead were German search towers. Nevertheless, the disguised HMS Campbeltown, and its convoy, sailed past them unopposed. All German eyes looked to be directed towards the RAF. The only issue the convoy seemed to face was the possibility of running aground in the shallow waters. But for now Campbeltown’s momentum carried her forward whenever she did touch the bottom.

  However, the German command at St Nazaire soon grew suspicious of the RAF’s movements. At this, they put out a call to all units to be on the lookout for any enemy boats. The game was soon up. All searchlights on both sides of the river immediately came to life and picked out the Campbeltown. Again, the Germans hesitated opening fire. The ship looked to be a German destroyer and they did not want to sink one of their own. When challenged about its intentions, the Campbeltown’s signalman flashed back that it was proceeding to St Nazaire as two of its craft had been damaged by enemy action. Still it was allowed to continue, and was now just six minutes from its target, entering the Loire proper. But the Germans were now certain that the convoy was hostile.

  Soon every German battery and gun placement opened fire. In response, the Campbeltown and its convoy blasted back with all it had. They just had to survive a few more minutes to reach their target, but the barrage of gunfire was unrelenting. The blasts tore through commandos and crew, and the boiler and engine rooms took direct hits, bringing some ships to a standstill and making them sitting targets. At this, the casualties rapidly mounted and the impossible mission looked to be slipping away.

  However, with the Campbeltown still thrusting forward under the relentless bombardment, a call suddenly went out, ‘Stand by to ram!’ Everybody on board now braced themselves for the shock of collision. Ahead, looming out of the darkness but lit with the flashes of guns and swept by searchlights, was the low dark strip of black steel that marked the entrance to the Normandie Dock. Suddenly, the 1,000-ton Campbeltown hit the anti-torpedo net that protected the lock. The warship’s momentum saw it tear through the steel mesh and the destroyer leapt forward unchecked. Seconds later, with a grinding low groan, it hit the gates of the dry dock at 20 knots, lodging itself in such a position that the 4 tons of explosives in her forward compartments rested right up against the wall of the caisson. The charge could not have been better placed if it had been positioned there by hand. They just had to hope it would detonate as planned in a few hours’ time.

  But there was no time to think about that. Now the commandos on the Campbeltown and the other ships in the convoy had to somehow get onto the dock, all the while under an almighty barrage of gunfire. Some were already wounded on deck, but determined to press on, while others had no choice but to jump into the water and swim for it, as their boats were unable to land. Many were shot, others drowned, but soon small teams of commandos were on dry land, engaging with the enemy, dodging gunfire and racing to their target points to set off explosives and damage whatever they could.

  Commando Corran Purdon told Sean Rayment in his book Tales from the Special Forces Club:

  As we emerged into the night, the whole of the sky seemed to be illuminated by tracer fire. The battle going on around us was tremendous. The noise was deafening . . . There was blood all over the place but we hardly gave it a second thought. One chap, Johnny Proctor, whose leg had more or less been blown off, was cheering us on.

  Such was the intensity of the fighting that it took on a surreal quality, as Hugh Arnold recalls:

  It was the only time in my experience of the war that the reality approached the fiction that you see on television . . . The enemy had an enormous advantage. We couldn’t really see anything. The searchlights blinded us. All we could do was to fire at the searchlights.

  The pump house, and its propeller pumps that emptied the dry dock, was a particularly important target. However, the commando team responsible for this was in trouble. Its leader, Lieutenant Chant, had already been wounded in the legs. Despite the agonising pain and being under attack, Chant courageously led his team to the doors of the pump house, which they proceeded to blow open. The countless dry runs in Cardiff and Southampton soon proved invaluable as everything inside was just as they had planned. Under flickering lights, Chant and his men descended to the basement and set about placing the charges at strategic points on the pumps. With the explosives set, all that remained was to ignite the ninety-second fuse and run for it.

  Despite Chant’s wounded legs, he was the last to leave, ensuring the fuses were lit. Then, straining everything he had, he staggered up the stairs in the darkness, as the seconds ticked away. Just as the charges exploded, tearing the pump house apart with a roar that was heard throughout the dockyard, Chant threw himself out of the door. Bloodied, bruised and panting hard, he looked back with satisfaction at the scene of total devastation. Soon further explosions followed as other commando teams blew up the winding sheds and the dock gates, but things were growing increasingly precarious.

  Out on the river, craft were sinking, boats were on fire and blazing pools of petrol and blood had spread across the water, with the cries of wounded men screaming for help reverberating over the sound of gunfire. The means of evacuation for the onshore commandos was also gradually being destroyed.

  Yet still the mission continued, as Ryder gave the word for torpedoes to be fired at the outer lock gates of the submarine base. With a great roar, the motor torpedo boat ran at speed towards the closed dock and launched its missiles through the water, crashing them against the gates. With a reassuring clang, the torpedoes sank slowly to the bottom to await the moment when their time-delay fuses would activate.

  With his part of the mission complete, it was now clear to Ryder that any successful evacuation plan for most of those commandos on land was going to be out of the question. He had no choice but to order the surviving boats to evacuate, leaving the commandos behind.

  On land, Newman was now aware that they were on their own, and that most of the men who reported to him were injured. As Purdon told Rayment, upon reaching Newman, ‘I said, “Sir, we have destroyed the northern winding house and we are ready to return to England.” The colonel turned to me and said, “I’m afraid, old boy, the transport home has rather let us down. Have a look at the river.” ’

  There were two options available to them: flight or surrender. Everyone agreed that surrender was out of the question. They would go down fighting tryin
g to escape. Sadly, they were unable to take their wounded compatriots with them, having to leave them behind to face the prospect of a POW camp.

  At this, Newman split up the surviving commandos into teams of twenty and told each of them it had to engineer its own way out of the docks, through the town and into the open country, with the aim of making for Spain and on to Gibraltar. It was a long shot but it was the only option left to them.

  As the groups tried to make their way out of the docks, many were shot down, and others had to surrender, unable to move any further due to their wounds. While some crept into hiding places, hoping to move on once the fuss had died down, others somehow made it past the enemy and into the town, where German troops were now on patrol. Many of the men were apprehended but Newman and fifteen others, including Corran Purdon, sheltered in a cellar to wait for nightfall. But they were soon discovered, as were virtually all the others who were scattered through the town. However, against all odds, five commandos somehow evaded the Germans, made their way to Spain and then back to England. They were the lucky ones. Of the 611 men who had entered the Loire in the early hours of 28 March 1942, 169 were killed. But their losses were not in vain.

  With the coming of daylight, the results of the raid could be clearly seen. Fires burnt everywhere, buildings were destroyed and ships were sunk in the harbour. On the river, the bodies of the dead floated downstream and were washed up all along the shores of the Loire. Any survivors were pulled from the river by German boats and sent to captivity. Meanwhile, the Campbeltown remained stuck fast on the outer caisson, her bows pointing skywards and stern settled in the mud.

  As the hours passed, swarms of German sightseers climbed on board, along with naval troops and experts. Not checking the boat properly, they reasoned that its aim had merely been to ram the dock gates. It never occurred to them that the Campbeltown might be loaded with explosives.

  By the middle of the morning, hundreds of curious people had arrived to take a look at the vessel. However, at 10.35 a.m., the pencil fuses, set by the now dead Lieutenant Tibbits, fired the 4 tons of depth charges in her bowels. The massive explosion that followed split the destroyer in two, while the caisson on which she lay collapsed into the dry dock.

  While the explosion caused debris to cascade down across the town, on board the ship, hundreds of Germans were blown to oblivion, their body parts festooning the cranes and masts around the dockyard. Operation Chariot had achieved its prime objective, and then some.

  With this explosion, a new wave of panic and paranoia overtook the Germans. They seemed to see enemies on every street corner and false reports that concealed British troops were pouring into German headquarters soon swept the town. Two days later, their paranoia went into overdrive when the delayed-action torpedoes blew up the outer lock gate to the submarine base. The Germans truly went out of their minds at this, with the British also now winning the psychological battle.

  The Normandie Dock and its port installations were rendered completely useless to the Germans for the rest of the war. The Tirpitz never did venture out into the Atlantic and was finally destroyed by the RAF in a Norwegian fjord. The commandos had pulled off one of the most daring raids in military history. It was clear that unconventional warfare by elite soldiers could ensure monumental results, and this was something the Germans looked to replicate, albeit in the face of one of their commanders trying to sabotage their missions . . .

  21

  HITLER’S BRANDENBURGERS

  AD 1942

  It is quite ironic that the man put in charge of one of Germany’s most controversial special forces, the ‘Brandenburgers’, despised Hitler and actually tried to sabotage the regime from within.

  Fluent in six languages, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris had won the Iron Cross during the First World War for his intelligence work. With a stellar reputation, Canaris’s work in post-war Osaka, overseeing the secret construction of the U-boat, saw him appointed as head of the Abwehr, one of six different intelligence services in Hitler’s Third Reich, in 1935. However, the rise of Hitler made Canaris very uneasy. His subordinate, Erwin von Lahousen, would later say of him during testimony at Nuremberg:

  He was a pure intellect, an interesting, highly individual and complicated personality, who hated violence as such and therefore hated and abominated war, Hitler, his system and particularly his methods.

  As such, Canaris began to explore ways to undermine the nation’s leadership in order to prevent another conflict. His first attempt included the staging of deception operations that clearly showed Germany mobilising troops to invade neighbouring Austria. However, his attempt to rouse Austria failed, and Hitler was able to annex it with relative ease in 1938.

  While all-out conflict did not follow, Canaris was convinced that, if Hitler succeeded in his next objective, taking Czechoslovakia, then war would be unavoidable. Once more, Canaris tried to sabotage the operation from within. Falsifying intelligence, he told the German High Command that the Czech military force was not only far larger than had been envisaged but they were also well prepared for any invasion attempt. To assist him in his sabotage mission, he also began to recruit fellow anti-Nazi officers into the Abwehr. Meanwhile, plans were afoot for a new German special forces formation that specialised in infiltration and sabotage.

  Despite losing the First World War, the conflict had proved to the Germans that small groups of elite soldiers, trained in guerrilla warfare, could achieve startling results. Not only had T. E. Lawrence and his band of Arabs defeated the Ottoman and German forces in Arabia through such means, Germany had also seen success in its east Africa colony. Like Lawrence, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck’s Schutztruppe – ‘protection force’ – had successfully used guerrilla tactics, and locally recruited Askaris, to defeat much superior forces.

  However, Germany had already tried to employ such tactics during the 1939 campaign in Poland with mixed results. The OKW (Armed Forces High Command) had formed a unit of Polish-speaking ethnic Germans, called Bataillon Ebbinghaus. While it had conducted irregular missions, such as infiltration, sabotage, securing roads, bridges and similar assets, it had also facilitated German progress by sowing confusion within enemy ranks. Yet their unorthodox methods and heavy casualties, as well as incidents involving the killing of civilians, proved too much for the Prussian High Command, who disbanded the unit soon after. Despite this, some still believed that such special service units would be vital to German success.

  One such man was Dr Theodor von Hippel. Von Hippel had not only served under Lettow-Vorbeck in east Africa, but he was also a student of Colonel T. E. Lawrence and his exploits. Now von Hippel sought to emulate them by creating the first German ‘special forces’, who would operate behind enemy lines and specialise in psychological warfare. But his proposals were rejected by his military superiors, including Canaris. Not only did he view von Hippel with suspicion, believing him and his proposals to be pro-Bolshevik, but he also told him that psychological and ideological warfare were the prerogative of the ruling political party, not the military.

  Unswervingly committed to his idea, von Hippel turned to his former commander, Helmuth Groscurth. Having long advocated the formation of ethnic German sabotage units, Groscurth strongly backed von Hippel’s suggestion and brought pressure on OKW to consider the idea more carefully. With this added impetus, authorisation was soon received to create the unit, which became known as the ‘Brandenburgers’, due to it being formed and trained in the German state of Brandenburg.

  The unit was to be placed under Abwehr command and, once Canaris was reconciled to this decision, he changed his stance, seeing it instead as a way to potentially enhance his own subterfuge goals. Working from the inside, he commenced a gradual but systematic removal of National Socialist officers from von Hippel’s command. Fellow anti-Nazi, Erwin Heinrich Rene von Lahousen, head of the so-called Abwehr II, who would be overseeing the Brandenburgers, said of Canaris’s goals for him:

  Beginning with
his very detailed conversations with me relative to me taking over Abt. II of the Abwehr (beginning of 1939) up until my departure from the Amt./Ausland Abwehr (middle of 1943), Canaris had spoken constantly – whether by paraphrases and hints or quite openly – of the necessity of doing away with Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich and of disposing of the whole criminal gang. He also explained therewith my appointment as head of Abwehr II and the real reason for forming the Brandenburg Regiment . . . The role that he had destined for my Abteilung, specifically for me and the Brandenburger Regiment, was as follows: I was to prepare myself at a given time for the acquisition of material (explosives and time fuses) for the accomplishment of the ‘action’. On the other hand, the Brandenburg Regiment was, to a degree, to be set up as Special Troops at the disposal of that first, powerful occupation by certain ‘key units’ of the National Socialist juggernaut (the RSHA, radio network, intelligence branch of the OKW etc).

  Despite Canaris’s ulterior motives for the Brandenburgers, he couldn’t take complete control of all aspects without giving himself away. While he could recruit anti-Nazis at a high level, it would be all but impossible to do so across the whole unit, particularly with von Hippel put in charge of calling for volunteers.

  While von Hippel appealed to existing Wehrmacht formations to join this burgeoning elite force, he already had a certain idea of the kind of recruit he was looking for. An aptitude for foreign languages was a prerequisite if they were to work behind enemy lines, but any candidate also had to be motivated, adventurous and physically fit and show ability in improvisation, marksmanship and self-control, as well as having a sound knowledge of foreign customs and cultures. The optimal recruit thus tended to be college-educated and had usually worked in civilian occupations before the war. This generally ensured that such a person possessed a degree of maturity, experience and self-sufficiency. As the war expanded, recruits from occupied Europe, and areas slated to be captured, were also invited to join. Moreover, with the Brandenburgers’ reputation for conducting daring, dangerous missions spreading, regular army soldiers also increasingly applied to what they viewed as an elite formation.