by Pete Scholey
Paddy is buried in the family grave in Movilla churchyard in his native Newtownards. In the wider world, the most decorated and outstanding British soldier of World War II is almost totally unknown, but he has not been forgotten by the SAS. In 1969 some members of D Squadron, who were then serving on operations in Northern Ireland, visited his grave and laid a wreath on behalf of the members of his other ‘family’ – the Special Air Service Regiment.
SERGEANT LEN OWENS
As I was only a youngster during World War II, I never had the opportunity to serve with Paddy Mayne, but I know a man who did – and you would struggle to find two men more fundamentally different.
Len Owens is a slightly built, short, modest and quiet sort of man, a far cry from the hell-raising Irish giant who was Paddy Mayne. The one thing that they certainly had in common was their courage. Len may be small in stature but he has got a big heart, something that he has proved time and time again not only during his wartime service, but for the more than sixty years since World War II ended. Len is a special kind of man and when he was in uniform, he had a very special role to play.
There was not much to talk about for the soldiers sitting in the belly of an aircraft shoulder to shoulder with around 20 other men, buttoned, zipped, fastened and strapped into so much kit that they could barely stand, even if there had been any room to walk about. For Len and the men of 2 SAS, conversation was pretty much redundant anyway. The noise inside the converted Stirling bomber meant that anything that was said had to be shouted at the top of the voice to be heard. Not that anyone was in the mood for a chat. The atmosphere was tense, to say the least. They were heading south over the English Channel, crossing the Allied lines to be dropped into eastern France deep inside enemy-held territory as part of Operation Loyton. It was early August 1944, two months after the momentous D-Day landings in Normandy. The Allies, having fought their way off the beaches and gained a strong foothold inland, were now poised to break out of the Normandy area. Various special forces units were operating within France behind the German lines, training and arming local resistance groups, gathering intelligence on German troop movements and, particularly in the case of the SAS, attacking the enemy lines of communication to help prevent reinforcements reaching the Normandy battlegrounds.
The Allies had almost complete control of the air, but that was little consolation for the men packed into the fuselage of the Stirling. The aircraft had been designed as a heavy bomber in the dark days at the beginning of the war and had entered service in 1941, the first of the RAF’s four-engined bombers. While it soon became apparent that the Stirling’s limitations in range, payload and service ceiling meant it fell short of the standards that could be achieved by the new Lancaster bombers, its rugged construction and manoeuvrability made it ideal as a vehicle for paratroops or as a glider tug. Inside the Stirling, however, there were no thoughts among the paratroops of its toughness or agility. Lone Allied aircraft flying fairly low at night were tempting targets for nervous gunners on Allied ships in the English Channel or manning anti-aircraft guns protecting the Allied beachhead. Everyone had heard stories about planes being fired on by ‘friendly’ gunners on the ground. Once over German lines, of course, the soldiers could expect some fireworks if they were spotted and there was always the remote possibility that a prowling Luftwaffe night fighter might pick them up. The first thing they would know about that was when the deadly tracer and cannon rounds came ripping through the Stirling’s thin metal fuselage or exploded into the fuel tanks in the wings, sending a billowing surge of fire roaring through the aircraft. Every time the constant vibration in the Stirling gave way to a clattering lurch as the aircraft passed through a pocket of turbulence, Len and his comrades suppressed all thoughts of alarm. No-one wanted to look like he was about to burst into a panic. No-one wanted to look like he couldn’t take the strain. And for everybody, the dangers of the flight were easily dispelled by thoughts of what was yet to come.
A constant stream of messages was passed over the intercom between the four crew members and the pilot as they identified what landmarks they could in the darkness below to help keep the flight on course, but the first instruction Len and the rest of the 2 SAS passengers received was when a message came through to one of the senior sergeants: ‘Twenty minutes to go.’ The flight’s wireless operator then made his way towards the rear of the plane to act as dispatcher and the men were given the signal to ‘Stand up, hook up’. Procedure and training now banished any nervousness. They stood in two lines, known as ‘sticks’, facing the rear of the aircraft and each man hooked his static line to a pulley that ran along the roof of the fuselage. When he jumped, the static line would remain attached to the aircraft, pulling open his pack and releasing his parachute. They then ran through their equipment check, each man sounding off as he ensured that the man in front of him in his stick had his parachute and static line properly fastened. As they did this, the dispatcher lowered the strop guard and locked it in place. This was a metal frame that dropped down outside the aircraft to prevent the trailing static lines and their parachute bags from flapping against the fuselage or fouling the control surfaces on the tail.
With the Stirling having descended to below 800ft (244m), the bolts at the front and rear of the two doors in the floor were slid back and the doors opened inwards, restraining clips holding them back against the walls of the fuselage. There was now a gaping black rectangular hole in the floor about the size of a large bath ... or an open grave. The signal came back: ‘Five minutes to go’ and, after the longest 4 minutes 55 seconds imaginable, the five-second red ‘Action Stations’ light flicked on followed by the green jump light. One by one in quick succession the men stepped forward to the floor hatch and dropped out of the belly of the Stirling into the night sky over France.
As Len exited the hatch the first thing that hit him was a blast of windrush and momentary buffeting from the aircraft’s slipstream that took his breath away. The Stirling’s inboard engines had been throttled back to reduce the effect, but it was over in a split second in any case. Then, as his canopy snapped open and the roar of the aero engines faded, he was overwhelmed by silence. After hours cooped up in the Stirling with the constant engine drone and ever-present vibration, these few moments of quiet as he drifted to earth were a godsend. They also meant that no one below was shooting at him. The next thing he noticed was the smell, the aromatic scent on the night air that reminded him of his first operational jump into France, for this was not Len’s first mission behind the lines. There was little time to dwell on thoughts of past adventures, though, as he knew the earth was rushing towards him, and he couldn’t actually see the ground in the darkness. He kept his knees bent and feet together – if a paratrooper can’t judge exactly when the impact is coming, then he just feels for it. The French countryside slammed into the soles of his boots and Len collapsed into a heap, absorbing as much of the collision as he could with his best attempt at a parachute roll.
Len had landed safely. He checked himself over. No broken bones and, more importantly, the precious Jedburgh radio that he carried strapped to his chest appeared intact. As he gathered his parachute, the reception committee at the drop zone helped assemble everyone from the two sticks and the Stirling circled to drop their canisters of equipment. There were a few concerned glances towards Len to check that he was okay. Len, you see, was one of a very select few. Len was a ‘Phantom’.
The Phantoms, officially designated as GHQ (General Headquarters) Liaison Regiment, consisted of experienced, specially selected men who had been drawn from other army units to provide an essential service. Their job was to work with frontline troops and reconnaissance units, even to operate behind enemy lines, in order to gather intelligence about enemy troop deployments and the actual positions of Allied troops so that the ‘bomb lines’ (areas where artillery or air strikes could be directed without endangering friendly forces) could be mapped as accurately as possible. The Phantoms, whose regimental badge was
a white letter ‘P’ on a black background, provided a constant stream of encoded radio reports, using Morse keys rather than voice communications, transmitted directly from the enemy’s back yard. The unit was formed soon after the outbreak of the war by Major-General Hopkinson (who was subsequently killed while leading the 1st Airborne Division in Italy in 1943), and although there were moves to disband the Phantoms after the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, Hopkinson persuaded the high command that there was still a need for his outfit. Phantom sections were posted all round the coast of Britain during 1940 to send instant reports of any signs of the arrival of a German invasion fleet. They also served in Greece, North Africa and Italy before playing a vital role in the invasion of France.
St James’s Park in London, a delightfully landscaped garden park with duck ponds and extensive lawns, hardly seems like the sort of place that a highly secret military unit would choose as its headquarters, but it was here that the Phantoms’ base radio sets were located and here that the pigeon lofts for the carrier pigeons also used by the Regiment were built. A note tied to the leg of a pigeon might not have been as sophisticated or as fast as a coded message tapped out on a Morse key, but the birds were a reasonably reliable last resort. Another London park, Richmond to the west of the city, was closed to the public during the war and used as a training ground for, among others, the Phantoms. It was here that Major-General (then Lieutenant-Colonel) Hopkinson, known as ‘Hoppy’, put his men through a rigorous training regime. They learned how to drive fast and also cross-country, they ran for miles round the park, swam through its freezing cold lakes in the depths of winter and would work for two days or more without a break to simulate the conditions that they would encounter on active service. Above all, they had to be expert in the use of the unit’s codes and cipher systems and be able to transmit Morse messages at no fewer than 30 words per minute. They used state-of-the-art lightweight radios. The compact Jedburgh set, powerful enough to contact London from anywhere in Europe under the right conditions, was used for transmissions, while the MCR-1 receiver dealt with incoming signals. These men were highly trained, highly specialized, highly professional soldiers; the best the army could muster. So what on earth was Len doing there? He had never even wanted to be in the army – he wanted to be a sailor.
When Len was called up for military service, his first thought was to join the Royal Navy. A life on the ocean waves away from the grime and mud of an infantryman’s existence was what he fancied, but the navy just didn’t seem to want him. The army, however, liked him just fine and claimed him for the Royal Corps of Signals. Ironically, almost the first thing the army did once they had trained Len as a soldier and signaller was to put him on a ship.
Len served in North Africa, enjoying his time on the troop transport far more than he did trudging around the desert, or being cooped up for hours on end in a radio shack. By 1943, he found himself back on board a ship again bound for the invasion of Sicily. That made his mind up to apply for a transfer to the Royal Navy, but again he was turned down. Desperate for a job that would give him a bit more adventure, a bit more of a challenge, he spotted a notice in Regimental Orders asking for volunteers for work of a hazardous nature. Len lost no time in applying and the army lost no time in sticking him on another ship, this time bound for the UK. He was put through a series of aptitude and skills tests, passed with flying colours and found himself a member of the GHQ Liaison Regiment.
The hours of tedium and routine in North Africa, although punctuated by spells of intense activity and extreme danger when the opposing forces got down to the business of fighting the war, were a world away from the frantic pace of Len’s life as a Phantom. He was whisked off to Scotland to train with the Combined Operations Group (COG) and 2 SAS, to whom he was being seconded. Such was the reputation that the Phantoms had earned for themselves that just about every other unit wanted their own Phantom detachment. Phantoms had accompanied the Canadians on the ill-fated Dieppe raid in August 1942 and they had been in North Africa when Len was there with the Royal Corps of Signals. They had been listening in to German communications and passing on information about casualty rates and unit deployments, every scrap of intelligence being analyzed to try to give the Allied commanders some kind of edge over Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Now, in the early part of 1944, volunteers were requested to undergo parachute instruction and training for amphibious landings. In the army, they say that you should never volunteer, but Len stepped up to the mark once again and, with even more British Army irony, training for amphibious assaults meant that he was back in a boat yet again.
Phantom teams were parachuted into France immediately prior to the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944 and others went in with the main assault groups. So good was the intelligence they passed back to Britain that when General Eisenhower visited the British Second Army HQ in Portsmouth during the early stages of the Normandy campaign, he was so impressed with the work of the Phantom patrols that he ordered Phantom detachments to start working with American units straight away. Len’s unit, F Squadron, was deployed with 1 and 2 SAS on their operations behind the lines in France. His first operational parachute jump came with Operation Dunhill, four weeks after the initial D-Day assault, when five patrols from 2 SAS were dropped into the area between Rennes and Laval in eastern Brittany to report on enemy activity prior to the American breakout from their Normandy battlefront. In the end, however, they were on the ground for only a few days before the Americans under General Patton, as Len puts it, ‘overran the area’. The British soldiers were quickly airlifted out and awarded seven days’ leave, which was immediately cancelled as they began preparing for their next foray into occupied France.
The men with whom Len jumped from the Stirling into the Vosges mountains in eastern France on Operation Loyton in August 1944 were part of a much larger force that arrived in a series of drops over a period of two weeks. In all, the group would eventually total over 100 men. The first to arrive were 14 men of an advance party whose job it was to find a suitable drop zone to accommodate the larger parties that were waiting back in England. The advance party also had to foster relations with the local resistance, the Maquis, some of whom were operating as guerrilla fighters in the area. The SAS team brought with them weapons intended as bribes to secure the Maquis’s cooperation, for the situation in eastern France was complicated by the bitter rivalry and divided loyalties of the various resistance groups. There were around two dozen different factions involved with the French underground movement, one of the strongest of which drew on elements from the French Communist Party whose hardliners were committed to fighting fascists, whether they were German invaders or French nationalists. The subversive atmosphere of cloak-and-dagger clandestine operations in France was intensified by the perfidy and deceit practised by many of those who had a secondary agenda to follow. In the Vosges area, the situation was further complicated by the fact that the region, close to the border between France and Germany, had been part of both countries during the lifetime of many of its inhabitants. The Germans had claimed it in 1871 following the defeat of Napoleon III and the French had taken it back at the end of World War I in 1918. When the Germans returned in 1940, most of the population saw them as invaders, but there were others of German descent who felt quite differently.
Worse still, while other SAS operations to the west had been conducted in the midst of the confused German retreat, in the Vosges area the Germans were preparing to make a stand against Patton, moving reinforcements into the area to bring the American advance to a halt. All that makes it sound as if the area was so teeming with troops that anyone descending by parachute would immediately be spotted by hordes of soldiers on the ground, or that any aircraft flying into the area would easily be heard and seen by the Germans. It should be noted, however, that the distance between Nancy and Strasbourg (which roughly straddle the Vosges region) is about the same as the distance between London and Southampton, about 50 miles (80km). Furthermore, unlike the great swathes of
Surrey and Hampshire that separate Southampton from the capital, the countryside in the Vosges is not intensely populated nor criss-crossed by motorways. It is, in fact, an area of hill forests and pastures with small, isolated villages strung out along remote valleys. It is the sort of country where you could hide an entire army in the depths of the woodland, let alone a small force of mobile raiders like the SAS.
The Loyton parachute drops, however, were not without incident. The weapons carried by the advance party were spirited away by the Maquis before they could be used as any kind of bargaining tool. There were skirmishes with German patrols prior to the arrival of Lieutenant-Colonel Brian Franks with the last of Loyton’s personnel on 30 August, and on that same night a Frenchman, whom the Maquis claimed was an informer but who maintained that he was simply out looking for mushrooms, was caught lurking around the SAS camp. It was decided to hold him prisoner until the colonel arrived. Franks was not best pleased with his reception. The Maquis were making enough noise to allow any German within miles to home in on the forest clearing chosen as their drop zone, and of the parachute-dropped canisters containing their equipment, one that was packed with ammunition exploded on impact. The ensuing fireworks caused enough of a distraction for the French prisoner to snatch a Sten submachine-gun (SMG) and make a run for it. He was shot dead. Then a horrendous howling was heard from the darkness on the far side of the drop zone, where one of the resistance fighters had managed to open a container and, spotting what he thought was some kind of cheese, had hungrily scoffed a few handfuls. His cheese turned out to be plastic explosive, which contained arsenic. He died shortly afterwards.
Far from allowing the operation to descend into chaos, however, the SAS teams continued to tackle the job at hand. Len, by then Sergeant Owens, was part of a patrol under the command of Lieutenant Peter Johnsen. By scouting the area, setting up observation posts and gathering intelligence, it soon became clear that there were far more German troops moving through the area than anyone had thought. They were able to confirm Maquis reports that up to 5,000 German troops were advancing up a valley just a few miles from the main SAS camp in a forest near the village of Moussey. General Patton’s army had halted at Nancy rather than pushing on east to Strasbourg, as they were in danger of outrunning their supply lines. This gave the Germans a breathing space of which they appeared determined to take full advantage by moving in substantial reinforcements, which included an SS Panzer division. SAS sabotage attacks and firefights with enemy patrols, meanwhile, led the Germans to believe that they were dealing with a far larger force in the Vosges countryside, possibly an advance unit of Patton’s main army. They began to mount patrols in strength, combing the countryside in search of the elusive raiders.
