At midday on 17 September 1st Airborne Division began dropping. In his C-47 Dakota over Drop Zone ‘S’, Captain Killick helped pass containers to the RAF loadmaster and then jumped, but dropped his Sten when he became briefly entangled in the rigging. Corporal Gately was soon interrogating Dutch Home Guard SS but as 1 Parachute Brigade set off for Arnhem and met unexpected resistance from a Waffen-SS training battalion near Wolfsheze, he then interrogated Germans. Meanwhile, 3 Parachute Battalion broke the block and ambushing a German Army Citroen, killed its four occupants, including Major General Kussein, the Arnhem town commander. The Dutch commando Captain Knottenbelt later searched it for documents. Meanwhile, Killick linked up with Captain Hodgson and CSM Armstrong, who had both landed by glider, and with Sergeant Chambers who had parachuted, intending to join Sergeant Pinquet’s detachment in the village of Heelsum but when he learnt that 1 Parachute Brigade was advancing to Arnhem, he found an abandoned German motor cycle, passed Hotel Tafelberg and linked up with Brigade HQ at Oosterbeek, where several Dutch civilians helped the FS detachment. Returning to search the hotel with Corporal Gray as a pillion, they assembled documents of intelligence interest to be collected later and, finding a second German motor cycle, caught up with the Brigade and met Chambers, but not the detachment.
Ahead, Sergeant Pinquet and Corporal Maybury were in a doorway near Arnhem Cathedral during the late afternoon when they heard a German motor cycle. In an attempt to capture it, Pinquet stepped onto the road but as he tried to seize it, the motor cyclist shot him at point blank range, the bullet nicking his lung. Hauled into a doorway by Maybury, he was occasionally treated by civilians and passing British troops until he was captured and taken to the Municipal Hospital, where he rejected an offer to escape because he was so seriously wounded. Corporal Maybury was later also seriously wounded by a machine gunner and dragged himself into a school where he was found by the Dutch Dr Zwolle but died the next morning. Zwolle found his Arrest List. Meanwhile, at Brigade HQ, Killick had instructed 100 prisoners to dig latrines and bring in food but was shocked when a Waffen-SS told him about the two SS divisions. Then learning that Maybury was missing and knowing he had an Arrest List, Killick and six soldiers from B Company, 2 Parachute Battalion were searching for him when a Dutch-Jewish photo-journalist took several photos of Killick in Arnhem. Meanwhile, Dr Zwolle had been arrested while searching for food and was summarily executed next day when he was found in possession of the List, an event that is commemorated by a plaque in Bakkerstraat.
During the night, 1 Air Landing Brigade fought a tough battle with a Dutch SS Home Guard battalion threatening the 4 Parachute Brigade drop. At Divisional HQ in the Hartenstein Hotel in Oosterbeek, CSM Armstrong, deputizing for Killick, divided the available Field Security into pairs to translate documents, including those found in General Kussein’s car, and support the Dutch commandos and the locally-raised Orange Battalion hunting for collaborators and searching houses for items of intelligence interest previously occupied by the Germans. In Arnhem, Captain Killick had collected an ad hoc platoon of his two NCOs, paras, military police, signallers and a cook, who was also a crack shot, and moved into the former Dutch Military Police Station, where they found three Dutch policemen. They later described Killick as unafraid, wearing his beret and armed with four automatic weapons. When a Resistance leader suggested that the Division should use the Philips Company private telephone network to compensate for failing communications, the advice was rejected at Divisional Headquarters on the grounds that conversations could be intercepted. Although information from the policemen was often contradictory, on 19 September Captain Killick telephoned Divisional HQ to brief Major General Urquhart on his observations. In another telephone conversation with Captain Knottenbelt later in the day, he said that the situation at the bridge was getting progressively bleak. Meanwhile, 30 (3rd Division) FSS had been detached to XXX Corps and, with 1013 Reserve Detachment and a former Philips manager, was instructed to secure the Philips Factory in Eindhoven because technical experts suspected it had been used in the production of V-weapons.
Reaching the 1 Parachute Brigade perimeter, Killick disbanded his platoon and took up a defensive position with a Bren gun he had picked up. Sergeant Chambers was noted for directing artillery fire. Early on 21 September the men at the bridge abandoned their positions and, splintering into small groups and leaving the wounded behind, attempted to break out to Oosterbeek. Killick and another soldier were captured by the Waffen-SS while hiding in a vehicle inspection pit full of rubbish. He later interpreted for British and German doctors.
After delays caused by rain and fog in England, the 1 Polish Independent Parachute Brigade landed east of Driel. Lieutenant Wladsylow Brzeg, the Brigade FSO, and his Field Security Section, who had been told not to trust the Resistance, arrested collaborators and German agents. Next day, 43rd (Wessex) Division linked up with the Poles. Across the Rhine, the Airborne Division was being squeezed into a withering perimeter around the Hartenstein Hotel. CSM Armstrong and Corporals Foster, Gorrie and Corporal Zitman were wounded, with the latter having a leg amputated. A noted killer of snipers, he later married a Dutch nurse who treated him. Commander Arnoldus Wolters, Royal Dutch Navy, the ‘official representative of Dutch government’, helped interrogate prisoners held in the hotel tennis courts and then, on 24 September, as ‘Johnson’, translated for Colonel Graeme Warwick, the senior medical officer, negotiating a truce to evacuate the British wounded into German hands. Next night, as 2,000 men were shepherded across the Rhine in Operation Berlin, 89 (Airborne) FSS provided guides and brought up the rear with the Divisional HQ Defence Platoon. Six Field Security crossed; however, Corporal Philip Scarr, who had swum the river, died from sheer exhaustion at Nijmegen on 28 September. Just two unharmed NCOs returned to their billet in Hill House, Wellingore. Of those who were captured, Sergeant Pinquet was hospitalized until he was liberated from Stalag 383 near Munich. Sergeant Chambers reached Soviet lines after escaping from a prison camp in Poland. Captain Kragt and his radio operator played a crucial role in helping to organize the escape of evaders in Operations Pegasus 1 and 2.
On 27 October, 49 (Lines of Communication) FSS arrived in Brussels to join several other sections preparing for the 2nd Army advance into Germany. Corporal Vila was admitted to No. 8 British General Hospital in Brussels in December with chronic sinusitis and was flown back to England where he was discharged in August 1945. Air raids were frequent and when a V-2 hit a building occupied by Intelligence Corps (Field) preparing for afternoon lectures on 10 November, Lance Corporal Shlomo Rosinoff, of 273 (Lines of Communication) FSS, was killed and twenty-four others were wounded. In November, Colonel Stevens established No. 1 Detachment, Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (UK) at Diest as an advanced interrogation centre for non-military prisoners.
On 15 December, three German armies took advantage of snowy, low cloud and, bursting from the Ardennes forests, struck the 3rd (US) Army in the general area of Bastogne with Antwerp their objective in the engagement that became known as the Battle of the Bulge. As XXX Corps moved to Dinant to blunt the attack, on 20 December Captain Hockliffe was instructed by HQ Intelligence Corps (Field) to form a FS Group of five Field Security sections and cover the freezing River Meuse, from Givet on the French border to north of Liege, and to liaise with the US Counter Intelligence Corps. Knowing that FSOs were protective of their independence, he emphasized that he was the force commander and appointed Lieutenant Tim Gash to liaise with the Americans. To prevent the Germans using barges as stepping stones across the river, 30 FSS covered three bridges and forced the bargees to moor on the western towpath.
As Twenty-First Army advanced to the River Maas, HQ 2nd Army G Intelligence (B) deployed along its western banks, and Field Security, helped by the Resistance and the Belgian Independent Brigade Group, hunted infiltrators and saboteurs, including all forty agents from one Abwehr unit. Willem Copier was a Dutch journalist rejected from serving with the Waffen-SS because he
had myopia; nevertheless, in late January 1945, he was one of two Abwehr agents dropped from a German aircraft. His colleague was killed on landing. Copier surrendered to an elderly Belgian farmer but when he was transferred to HQ Field Security in Antwerp, his arrogance led to his transfer to Camp 020 where a Dutch inmate convinced him that resistance was pointless. After Captain T.J. Galloway had interrogated three captured members of a German raiding party, he lured their exfiltration party across the river by using their recognition signal and, although under fire from across the river, killed or captured them. For this act of gallantry he was awarded the Military Cross. A depiction of the incident hangs in the Officers Mess.
During the snowy cold of winter, Twenty-First Army Group divided with 2nd Army striking into Germany on a three Corps frontage while the 1st (Canadian) Army, accompanied by the Polish Corps and British 49th Infantry Division, swung north to liberate the Netherlands. The Divisional section, 60 FSS, was among the first Allied troops to enter Hilversum and intercepted Gestapo attempting to escape in cars full of loot. Other searches were harassed by snipers firing from houses marooned by flooding. Sergeant Jewson arrested an agent who had spied in Gibraltar.
The tripartite meeting at Yalta in February 1945 saw the Allies agree a Protocol of Proceedings that once Germany was defeated:
• Germany and Austria be divided into four zones.
• Reparation commissions would be formed.
• The provisional Polish Government would be formed.
• War criminals brought to trial.
• Help would be given to aid liberated countries re-establish elected governments.
• Humanitarian assistance organised.
Ideological tensions, particularly over the future of Poland and Stalin’s aspirations to build a buffer zone of pro-Soviet states to protect its western borders, led to Churchill writing to Roosevelt that ‘The Soviet Union has become a danger to the free world’. Nevertheless, while he and Roosevelt were criticized for being weak, Stalin was needed to help defeat the Japanese. Roosevelt then caused some anxiety when he announced that once Germany was defeated, US forces would withdraw from Europe within two years.
Germany
During the preparations to cross the Rhine in Operation Varsity, during the night of 28 February 1945 two Intelligence Corps, Sergeants H.J. Saunders and L.M. Gilbert, posing as ‘Ernst Bauer’ and ‘Hans Schriber’ of the German 13th Anti-Tank Company, 12th Panzer Grenadier Regiment, paddled across the icy River Rhine on an intelligence gathering mission using the cover story that their unit was at Xanten and they had been sent to collect gun spares from a factory in Essen. Mingling with soldiers and refugees, shortly before midnight on 3 March after walking 125 miles, they arrived at a barracks in Essen claiming that they had been separated from their unit. They remained in the city for a week but as they were returning to the Rhine, a German military police sergeant major, suspicious of their documents and lack of spare parts, locked them up in a guardroom. Next day the pair convinced a military police major that they had lost the spares when the boat taking them across the Rhine was hit by the wreckage of an aircraft being washed downstream. Swimming across the river, they were challenged by a Scottish sentry and debriefed at HQ Twenty-First Army Group. Both NCOs were awarded the Military Medal.
For Operation Varsity on 25 March, Captain Philip Rogers, the FSO 317 (6th Airborne Division) FSS divided his section into the usual parachute, glider and Sea Tail elements. When air photographs enabled a detailed model to be made at HQ 2nd Army of the drop zones landing sites and crossing points for the armour, General Montgomery commented that there were not enough depictions of poplar trees; matchsticks solved the problem. During the drop, Divisional Tactical HQ, which included Rogers, were cornered in a farm and faced several counter-attacks. The Gibraltarian Sergeant Lewis Stagnetto was attached to Divisional HQ but his glider landed about twenty-three miles from the landing zone. The forty occupants also took refuge in a farm and defended it until relieved by a Canadian unit forty hours later, all but seven having been wounded. Since there were few targets of security interest and no identified German counter-intelligence presence, the section interrogated prisoners of war and later in the day, entered Hamminkeln and imposed martial law.
For the next six weeks as 2nd Army swept through Northern Germany, the Field Security sections arrested officials and searched suspect buildings. Interrogations provided insight into the Nazi Party structure and assisted occupying British Military Government detachments. On 4 April, 74 FSS entered Osnabruck with XXX Corps and had little difficulty in confining those on its Arrest List in the cellar of a requisitioned house because most were compliant, even a Gestapo officer suspected of murdering several RAF in 1942. Sergeant Colin Chamberlain was on a lonely road returning to the town in the section lorry when there were shouts from the prisoners. When he stopped, Chamberlain found two prisoners treating a guard who had been hit by a tree and another was looking after his rifle.
In March 1945, the Intelligence Corps supplied several officers, including Lieutenant Colonel Cammaerts and Major Leigh Fermor, to the Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force, which had been formed by the SOE and Office of Strategic Services to collect information on prison and labour camps, and for radio operators to make contact with the prisoners. One of those involved was Humphrey Searle, now a captain, who returned to Special Training School 6 to train anti-Nazi Germans. In the event only four teams dropped, with mixed results.
On 12 April, when VIII Corps was the near the town of Winsen, in Lower Saxony, a German colonel told Corps HQ that nearby was a political prisoner camp called Bergen-Belsen and that typhus had broken out inside. Corps HQ ordered that a cordon be placed around the camp and instructed that the German Army camp staff were to leave as prisoners while the SS were to surrender the camp. Three days later, 63 Anti-Tank Regiment, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Taylor (Royal Artillery), arrived at the camp accompanied by Lieutenant Derek Sington, with his psychological warfare No.14 Amplifying Unit. A delegation of officers led by SS-Captain Josef Kramer, the camp commandant, said there were 190,000 inmates in the four compounds but entry was not permitted without the agreement of the German Army. Lieutenant Colonel Taylor disagreed and Sington used his loudspeakers to announce the liberation. When a SS guard fired several shots over the heads at a group of curious inmates approaching the gates, Sington drew his revolver and ordered him to stop. He then broadcast that before food would be distributed, the inmates should return to their compounds. That evening Sington interpreted at a meeting between Lieutenant Colonel Taylor, Brigadier Glyn Hughes, the senior medical officer, and Kramer, and learnt the inmates were fed turnip soup twice a day and the bombing of power stations in Hannover had resulted in the water supply being cut off, which had resulted in several static tanks being filled with foetid water. All documents had been destroyed on orders from Berlin. Throughout Kramer was arrogant. During the meeting, reports of the kitchen being stormed turned out to be inmates raiding a potato patch, several of whom were beaten by SS guards. Sington ordered Kramer to carry a body away. When asked about the camp and the inmates at the trial of Kramer and forty-four members of his staff in September 1945, Sington described the camp:
The general state was one of unbelievable congestion when one went into the blocks. There were masses of dead, placed for the most part away from the main thoroughfare of the camp. I used to see people walking about, and then, one by one, they would lie down, and the verges of the footpaths were littered with people, still living, but who never appeared to move. There was a complete lack of sanitary facilities. Whenever one went into certain blocks there were always cries for help from the women in there. With few exceptions, (the inmates’) condition was one of extreme weakness and in the majority of cases an almost unbelievable lack of flesh on the bones.
Among the early liberators were Captain Rogers and Sergeant Stagnetto, who took some of the earliest still photographs of conditions inside the camp. A British Mil
itary Government detachment took control of the camp, set up water supplies, requisitioned food and clothing and transferred the fit to the German tank barracks at Hohne, which had also become a large hospital. The Jewish Sergeant Norman Turgel, from 53 (VIII Corps) FSS, was one of nine FS sergeants who interrogated the camp staff, including Kramer. He met his future wife, Gena, a Pole, who had survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald and was working in the camp hospital.
When Sweden learnt that Stalin intended to ignore the Yalta Agreement and that the 3rd Guards Tank Corps had been instructed to occupy Denmark, Montgomery ordered 2nd Army to cross the Elbe to prevent the Russians advancing to Denmark. Moving swiftly, 11th Armoured Division not only occupied Lubeck twelve hours before the Soviets appeared, it also prevented the German forces in the west from reinforcing Berlin. Sergeant Fraser Edwards, who spoke Russian, and his 317 (Airborne) FSS detachment attached to 3 Parachute Brigade crossed the River Elbe in a Buffalo and, during house searches in Wismar, found that two wanted Nazi officials had committed suicide. The detachment met the Soviets but lost a motor cycle stolen by an officer. Captain Rogers was involved in the surrender of the German 84 Division.
On 3 May, as XII Corps entered Hamburg, Captain Hockliffe, who had been appointed the Area Security Officer (ASO), joined 30 FSS, commanded by Captain Harold Harris, and with the advance guard of a Field Security Group of five sections advanced behind the leading platoons advancing into the shattered city. Harris had been wounded in Normandy a week after D-Day. Fortunately, a sergeant who had been in business in the city before the war found a hotel that was requisitioned for the Group. Gestapo HQ was captured, fully equipped with its telephone intercept equipment. Hockliffe and Harris arrested Regional Leader Karl Otto Kaufmann in his office and transferred him to the British Military Government, to whom he supplied valuable information on the port and River Elbe. When 273 (Lines of Communications) FSS then requisitioned Kaufman’s office, the FSO, Captain Prior Parker, requisitioned his Auto-Union staff car and a pair of his trousers, complete with the novelty of a zip fly. Meanwhile, 30 FSS was guided to a badly damaged train north of Soltau and learnt that Hitler Youth had shot 140 political prisoners sheltering from the strafing by RAF aircraft. Sergeant MacKenzie found the bodies in a shallow grave, Sergeant Dicky Bell instructed the burgermeister and local civilians to give them a Christian burial. When Prior believed that some suspects on his Arrest List returned home at night, he organized several raids and netted a SS-Lieutenant-General, naked except for his jack boots, in bed with his wife. Over the next few weeks, 243 Nazi officials responded to letters that they report for interrogation. Seven failed to turn up.
Sharing the Secret Page 22
