The Daring Dozen

by Gavin Mortimer

  Early on the morning of 6 June, word reached von der Heydte of enemy paratroopers landing north of Carentan. He jumped on his motorcycle and raced to investigate, discovering on arrival that his men had captured more than 75 American paratroopers belonging to the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment and 101st Airborne Division. Von der Heydte radioed his superiors that he believed the invasion was underway. Next he drove to Sainte-Marie-du-Mont and scaled the church steeple at around 0630hrs to scan the horizon through his binoculars. What he saw was unforgettable. ‘All along the beach were these small boats,’ he recalled nearly 50 years later. ‘Hundreds of them, each disgorging thirty or forty armed men. Behind them were the warships, blasting away with their huge guns, more warships in one fleet than anyone had ever seen before.’11

  Racing down from the church, von der Heydte headed two miles north to Brecourt Manor but the four guns of the German battery positioned in the grounds of the manor were abandoned. He hurried back to Sainte-Marie-du-Mont and instructed his men to man the battery and open fire on the beaches. Meanwhile von der Heydte attempted to drive back the Allies as they advanced cautiously forward from the beachhead, launching an attack through Sainte-Marie-du-Mont and Turqueville. But his paratroopers encountered heavy fire from American airborne troops who had landed well ahead of the main invasion fleet and von der Heydte ordered his men to take up defensive positions and repel the Allied advance from the beaches. Fierce fighting raged for the rest of the day, and into D-Day+1, as gradually von der Heydte’s men began to withdraw across the marshy ground towards Carentan.

  Von der Heydte was wounded in his arm, and the damage to the nerves meant he wore it in a sling as he led the remains of his regiment towards Carentan. On the evening of 8 June the German paratroopers took up positions on the northern and eastern outskirts of the town with orders from Field-Marshal Rommel to ‘defend Carentan to the last man’.

  For two days von der Heydte and his men held up the American advance despite the heavy casualties they sustained. On 10 June, however, the American 29th Division arrived from Omaha Beach to join forces with the 101st Airborne and a call was made on von der Heydte to surrender. He declined, sending back a message politely asking the Americans, ‘What would you do in my place?’ The following day the Wehrmachtbericht (the German armed forces report broadcast daily on the wireless) declared that ‘during the difficult fighting in the enemy beachhead and the elimination of the enemy paratrooper and air-landed forces that were dropped in the rear area, the 6th Parachute Regiment of Major von der Heydte distinguished itself tremendously’.12

  Not that the acclaim was of much material use to the remnants of von der Heydte’s regiment. That same day, 11 June, with his men down to the last of their ammunition and two of his three battalions terribly depleted, he ordered his regiment to pull back from Carentan to prepared positions further south, leaving behind one company of 50 men to hinder the American advance with heavy machine gun and mortar fire. The decision was in defiance of an order from SS Major General Werner Ostendorff to remain at Carentan until he arrived with his 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division, to which von der Heydte’s regiment had been temporarily attached. Heydte’s disobedience, motivated as much by his hatred of the SS as his wish to escape entrapment, nearly resulted in his court-martial.

  At dawn on 12 June the 101st Airborne attacked Carentan with Easy Company, led by Captain Richard Winters, in the vanguard. The assault, subsequently immortalized in the best-selling book Band of Brothers, developed into a series of bloody engagements between two elite detachments of paratroopers.

  Eventually the Americans triumphed and Carentan was theirs. At first light the next day, 13 June, they prepared to push south-west towards the high ground. But before they could, von der Heydte counter-attacked, catching the Americans off-guard and causing one company of the 101st to fall back in confusion. Carentan was on the brink of being retaken by von der Heydte’s shattered and depleted forces when at 1630hrs 60 American tanks appeared, accompanied by infantry from the 29th Division.

  Von der Heydte withdrew his men from Carentan once and for all. Throughout the weeks that followed the 6th Parachute Regiment fought courageously among the fields and hedgerows of the Normandy countryside; in one instance, 20 of their number on bicycles and supported by one tank ambushed a battalion of American infantry.

  But inexorably the Allied advance continued until, at the end of July, they broke out from the Cotentin Peninsula and wheeled west, encircling thousands of German troops. Von der Heydte and his men fought their way through the Allied encirclement at Coutances, and on 12 August the 6th Parachute Regiment was finally withdrawn from Normandy, having been involved in fighting on an almost daily basis since 6 June. Casualties had been heavy with 3,000 men either killed, wounded or missing. The survivors who entrained for Güstrow were no longer the bright-eyed idealists or adventurers of six months earlier.

  By November 1944 von der Heydte had been promoted to lieutenant-colonel and awarded the oak leaves to the Knight’s Cross. He was also in charge of a parachute combat school in Aalten, the Netherlands, an assignment cut short in early December. On the 9th of that month von der Heydte was summoned to see General Student and ordered to assemble an airborne battle group to participate in an imminent large-scale German offensive. Von der Heydte was not informed of where the offensive would occur, until on 15 December Field Marshal Walter Model revealed the nature of the mission.

  The offensive would be in the Ardennes, the forested region on the Belgian border, along a front that ran from Monschau in the north to Echternach in the south. The aim was to punch through the Allies’ front line, splitting the British and American forces, and then seizing the port of Antwerp. Ultimately, Hitler hoped that the offensive would force the Allies to the negotiating table. If the strategic objectives seemed far-fetched to von der Heydte, it was nothing compared to the timescale in which he had to prepare his men for their role – 24 hours.

  Model explained to von der Heydte that on 16 December he would drop into the Ardennes with his men and seize and hold a number of roads and bridges to facilitate the rapid advance of the 6th SS Panzer Army. It was to be a nighttime drop – the first and only such jump by German paratroopers in the war – and von der Heydte’s concerns over the limited intelligence supplied to him about the strength of Allied force in the region were dismissed. So too were his complaints about the lack of arms and ammunitions, the unreadiness of his men and the poor communications equipment.

  Recognizing that he was being asked to lead his men on an exceptionally dangerous mission, von der Heydte decided to lead from the front. Shortly before midnight on 16 December, he and 1,200 paratroopers took off in 80 aircraft for the drop zone 50 miles behind enemy lines. In a post-war interview with author Franz Kurowski for the book Jump Into Hell, von der Heydte described the mission:

  I was firmly convinced that in that type of operation the commander had to be the first one to jump. Not so much to make a good impression but rather to get a first impression on the ground of the terrain and the enemy situation and to assemble the forces that followed.

  The scene at the drop zone was eerily beautiful. Above me, like lightning bugs, were the position markers of the aircraft and, whipping up towards me from below were the tracers of the light American anti-aircraft weapons. Beyond the black trees, like the fingers of a hand, were the probing beams of the searchlights. Then impact. The roll forwards worked. I unhooked. Initially I was alone. I ran to the designated fork in the road that was a collection point. On the road I encountered the first of my soldiers. There were only a few – far too few. There was also only a few at the collection point. What had happened to the rest?13

  Von der Heydte only learned much later that many of the pilots who had transported the paratroopers to their DZ had lost their nerve in the face of heavy anti-aircraft fire and dropped them far too early. As dawn broke on 16 December, von der Heydte assembled his men at the fork that was seven miles north of Malmédy and co
unted 250 out of the original force of 1,200. ‘We pulled back from the fork in the road into the woods and formed an all-round defence,’ he remembered. ‘The radio equipment was damaged and did not work, with the result that we could not establish contact with our own forces. I had no way at all of forwarding the most important results of our reconnaissance.’14

  Lacking the men to carry out the original mission of seizing roads and bridges, von der Heydte sent out patrols to reconnoitre, and in one engagement with the enemy the German paratroopers retrieved the corps order (battle instructions) for the US XVIII Corps. But with no communications, and 50 miles behind enemy lines, there was no way to inform their superiors. Oblivious as to the progress of the main offensive, von der Heydte decided to head east in the hope of reaching German lines, but by now the Americans were hunting them down and they spent much of 21 December skirmishing with the enemy. Realizing that their best chance of survival was to split into small groups, von der Heydte instructed his men to head east as they saw fit. By now von der Heydte was suffering from the effects of cold and hunger as well as a fractured arm. On 24 December, unable to continue his slow trek east, von der Heydte knocked on the door of a farm near Monschau and asked the farmer to send a message to the Americans saying he wished to surrender. Three and a half years after the wounded English soldier at Crete had told von der Heydte that he hoped his war would soon be over, it was – and in the most ignominious fashion.

  Von der Heydte remained a prisoner of war in England until July 1947 during which time he angered many of his fellow inmates with a series of outspoken attacks on the crimes of the Nazi regime. Upon his release, von der Heydte returned to West Germany and became a professor of law at the University of Würtzburg. His war memoirs were published in 1958 to much acclaim and from 1966 to 1970 he served as a member of the Bavarian State Parliament for the Christian Social Union. All the while he retained his links to the military, rising to the rank of brigadier general in the Reserves and teaching successive generations of young men about airborne warfare.

  Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte was still alive to witness the reunification of Germany in 1990, a joyous moment for a patriot who had emerged from the shameful years of the Third Reich with his honour intact. Now von der Heydte had also witnessed the fall of Communism in his country. He died in July 1994 aged 87, a death largely unreported in the new Germany, although the handful of men who had served under the ‘Rosary Paratrooper’ honoured the passing of one of the greatest airborne commanders of any nation.

  ADRIAN VON FÖLKERSAM

  BRANDENBURGERS

  Like Friedrich von der Heydte, Adrian von Fölkersam came from blue-blooded stock and was a soldier of great courage and resourcefulness. There, however, the similarities ended. Whereas von der Heydte was a fervent anti-Nazi, Adrian von Fölkersam served in the Waffen SS and fought alongside SS Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny in his elite commando unit.

  There was another difference between the two men; whereas von der Heydte despised Russia, von Fölkersam was born in St Petersburg, the son of an admiral who had served in the Tsarist Russian Navy, fighting against the Japanese in the war of 1904–05.

  Adrian von Fölkersam’s family fled Russia when the Revolution started and they settled in Germany. After school he completed a bachelor’s degree in economics at Berlin University, and lived for a while in Vienna. Von Fölkersam was 25 when World War II started, a thin, wiry man with the air of an academic. It was his gift for languages that led him to become a Brandenburg commando.

  The Brandenburgers were the brainchild of Captain Theodor von Hippel, a World War I veteran who had served under General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in German East Africa. During the campaign against the British, the Germans had operated as guerrilla fighters with stunning success and von Hippel believed the German Army should once again employ such tactics, creating small units of highly-trained men to operate behind enemy lines.

  As Ralph Bagnold would discover when he first took his idea for the Long Range Desert Group to the British high command, von Hippel also learned that senior officers within the Germany Army were dismissive of the idea of an irregular unit. Undaunted by the rejection, in the summer of 1939 von Hippel approached Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, commander of the German intelligence service, the Abwehr, and received permission to form a 900-strong force. Canaris informed von Hippel that the force would be based at Brandenburgan-der-Havel, just an hour from Berlin and within easy reach of Canaris’ HQ.

  Throughout the winter of 1939/40 von Hippel recruited the men for his unit, now known as the ‘Brandenburgers’ because of the location of their base. Some he found within the Abwehr, others were from the Free Corps of Sudetenland, and many were bored soldiers who had missed out on the invasion of Poland.

  What von Hippel sought were men who had more than just toughness. His experiences in East Africa in World War I had taught him that it was the man who could think for himself, the man of initiative, who made the most effective Special Forces soldier. He also wanted soldiers who were fluent in English and Russian, useful for when Germany looked to attack those two nations.

  One of the first to join the Brandenburgers was Adrian von Fölkersam. Fluent in English and Russian, he was a lieutenant in the autumn of 1939 and though the exact details of his recruitment are imprecise, there might have been a personal connection between von Hippel and the young officer.

  Von Fölkersam joined 4 Company, one of three companies based at Brandenburg with another one at Cologne and a fifth in Austria. One of the men who served under von Fölkersam at this time was Hans-Dietrich Hossfelder, a 19-year-old from Breslau in the German-held region of Silesia. ‘My superior officer during this period was Adrian von Fölkersam, a wonderful officer who spoke the cleanest Russian I had ever heard,’ recalled Hossfelder in an interview in 1985.1

  Von Fölkersam, Hossfelder and the other men of the Brandenburgers underwent a rigorous training programme at Quenzgut, the Abwehr training school just outside Brandenburg. In a thickly wooded area bordering Lake Quenz, Quenzgut was where the men were drilled in sabotage, explosives, weapons, unarmed combat and parachuting. They were also schooled in how to pass themselves off as Russian army officers and members of the Soviet secret police – the NKVD – and they learned how to drive Russian and British vehicles.

  ‘This camp was run by the Abwehr with SS instructors,’ remembered Hossfelder. ‘We were up at four in the morning, running ten kilometres, then coming back, have a shower, eat breakfast, attack the obstacle course, then do a ten mile rucksack run. After this it was about 1600 hours so we had dinner. We would receive political indoctrination on the tenets of National Socialism, why we were fighting the war, how great Hitler was, and why we had to swear an oath of allegiance to him. They showed us propaganda films, mostly illustrating why the Jews were our greatest enemy.’2

  In April 1940 von Fölkersam’s 4 Company, under the command of Lieutenant Wilhelm Walther, had been moved to Münstereifel in the Rhineland in readiness for the invasion of the Low Countries. When the attack started on 10 May, 4 Company was tasked with seizing a number of bridges over the Juliana Canal, the 22-mile long waterway in the south of Holland near the town of Gennep, to facilitate the advance of the 7th German Infantry Division.

  Among the bridges captured by the Brandenburgers on the night of 9/10 May was the Gennep railway bridge, across which roared two motorized divisions in the hours that followed. There were failures, however; at the Buggenum railway bridge near Roermond, a unit from 4 Company disguised as Dutch railway workers arrived to inform the Dutch soldiers on guard that they were there to inspect the structure. In fact they planned to remove the explosive charges put in place by the Dutch and then overpower the guards. At first the Dutch believed their story, but when they saw the Germans tampering with the charges, they detonated the explosives, killing three Brandenburgers and wounding three more. Nonetheless, von Fölkersam’s 4 Company’s had contributed much to the successful invasion of the Low Cou
ntries and their reward was a letter of thanks from General Albert Wodrig, commander of the XXVI Corps, and a Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for Lieutenant Wilhelm Walther. It was the first such decoration for a Brandenburger, but an award that in time would also be bestowed on von Fölkersam.

  Months of frustration followed for the Brandenburgers after the successful conquest of Holland, Belgium and France. In late June the unit moved to Normandy in readiness for the invasion of Britain, training for a seaborne assault on Dover ahead of the main German task force. As they trained throughout the summer of 1940 they witnessed the aerial dogfights between the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force, a battle in which the British eventually triumphed. The invasion of England was postponed and von Fölkersam and the other commandos returned to their barracks at Brandenburg.

  For the next 18 months the Brandenburgers fought in a variety of theatres, from Greece to Yugoslavia to Romania, but by the early summer of 1942 the entire unit was deployed to the mountainous Caucasus region of south-west Russia to seize the oil facilities of Maikop and Baku. With the German Army fighting on two fronts in 1942, against the Russians in the East and against Anglo-American forces in North Africa, their war machine was badly in need of oil. Hitler had told General Friedrich von Paulus, commander of Sixth Army, that the seizure of the oilfields was a priority.

  In August three German divisions – the 5th SS Panzer, the 13th Panzer and the 16th Motorized Infantry – launched an all-out offensive to capture the city of Maikop in the northern Caucasus. Two units of Brandenburgers were assigned to the attack. One, led by Lieutenant Ernst Prohaska, had orders to seize and hold the bridge over the river Bjelaja so that the three divisions could race into Maikop, while von Fölkersam’s unit had a far more challenging mission. Leading a 63-strong team of commandos disguised as members of the NKVD, von Fölkersam was to enter Maikop and capture the oil storage tanks before they could be blown up by the Russian defenders. It was an operation fraught with danger and one that had only two possible outcomes: success or death. To be captured wearing the uniform of the NKVD would result in torture and execution.