Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII

by Damien Lewis

  If March-Phillipps was successful, Britain – Churchill – needed to be able to deny absolutely all knowledge and culpability. Otherwise, Spain might be provoked into granting Germany access to invade the British territory of Gibraltar, and her vital ports. If Germany took Gibraltar, that would mean the war for the Mediterranean would be all but lost; defeat only be a matter of time.

  Accordingly, there needed to be a plausible explanation as to how on earth two German and one Italian ships had fallen into British hands. Working closely with Ian Fleming, then SOE’s liaison at the Admiralty – and the future author of the James Bond books – M set about coming up with just such a ruse. The cover story finally agreed upon by M, Fleming and others in the know consisted of several sophisticated and interlocking elements.

  The British destroyer HMS Violet, stationed in the West African port of Lagos, in Nigeria, would steam into the Gulf of Guinea to intercept the three vessels once they had been ‘cut-out’ of port. It would be claimed that the Italian and German crews had mutinied, severing their own anchor chains and sailing away of their own accord. Officially, Violet would seize the ships and their crew in international waters, and escort them into British custody at Lagos harbour.

  Need-to-know and convincing theatre was absolute paramount with this element of the cover story. The captain of HMS Violet would be given sealed orders for his eyes only, and told to open them only once at sea. He wouldn’t know the nature of his mission until he had embarked upon it. The entirety of his officers and crew would be left believing they were tasked to intercept a genuine ‘enemy flotilla’, and heavily-armed boarding parties would be sent to disarm and subdue all aboard.

  Once the three ships had been ‘seized’, the captain of HMS Violet was to send a coded radio message: ‘Postmaster Successful’. That would trigger the next stage of the cover story, to be orchestrated from London. The BBC would broadcast a story in English, Spanish and Portuguese, based upon a press-release issued by the Admiralty. It would detail how three enemy vessels had been intercepted by a Royal Navy warship. The crews had mutinied due to poor pay and conditions in Fernando Po, and the vessels had been seized as prizes of war.

  *

  The success of this clandestine raid, and of the cover stories, was of paramount importance. In recognition of this, during recent weeks M had visited the Maid Honour Force at their Poole base on numerous occasions. As a result, he was convinced that if anyone, March-Phillipps and his crew had the training, the skills and the sheer guts to pull off such a mission.

  However, the Admiralty remained suspicious of a force that it viewed as something of a ‘loose cannon’. Shortly before the Maid Honour’s departure Ian Fleming had been sent down to Poole to do his own investigation. Whatever Fleming’s conclusions about Maid Honour Force, the Admiralty had chosen not to stand in the way of their setting sail for Fernando Po – perhaps believing the raiders could do little harm if sent off on such a harebrained scheme so far from home.

  Yet, as the Maid Honour made her way towards her target, other powerful forces conspired to block her path. Admiral Willis, the Navy’s overall commander in the South Atlantic – the waters through which the Q Ship was steaming – was not best pleased upon learning of her coming mission. General Giffard, the British Army’s overall commander in West Africa, was even less enamoured with the proposed raid on Fernando Po. Both commanders bemoaned the potentially ruinous ramifications should Operation Postmaster fail.

  Even as the Maid Honour sat becalmed off West Africa, General Giffard and Admiral Willis made it clear to London that in their view the risks were unacceptable, and neither commander had much if any desire to assist with such an undertaking – one that might turn the very fortunes of the war.

  Of course, for those crewing the Maid Honour the consequences of failure would be far more immediate and deadly. Perhaps inevitably, some twelve months on from its formation the existence of the SOE had become known to Hitler, as had its mission to send agents deep into enemy territory. In a chilling order issued in response to its earliest activities, Hitler decreed that SOE operatives and their resistance colleagues were to disappear into the Nacht und Nebel – into the Night and Fog.

  Captured SOE operatives were to be shown no mercy. After unspeakable torture, they were to be hanged – on specific instructions issued by the Führer – using piano wire, to make their deaths as slow and degrading as possible. The aim of this was two-fold: one, pour décourager les autres; and two, to extract every last drop of intelligence from those agents, to aid in the tracking down of their SOE colleagues.

  As the Maid Honour lay becalmed with a warship fast approaching, her crew feared they were about to disappear into the night and the fog.

  Chapter Four

  March-Phillipps – the man braced at the Maid Honour’s wheel urging his men to a spirited, if hopeless defiance – was also known as SOE agent W.01. ‘W’ stood for West Africa, the region to which he was deployed, and ‘01’ denoted that he was the first SOE agent assigned to that territory. The ‘0’ prefix also signified that March-Phillipps was a ‘zero’-rated agent, meaning that he was trained and licensed to use all means to liquidate the enemy.

  But right now March-Phillipps’ means of liquidating the enemy were somewhat limited. In spite of his standing order in the ship’s log – avoid a fight if humanly possible, but resist capture to the last –the Maid Honour appeared doomed. Becalmed, there was nowhere that she could run to using her one small and unreliable motor. She had no option but to stand and fight, even against the fearsome weaponry of the fast-approaching La Galissonniere-class cruiser.

  Or at least March-Phillipps presumed that was the identity of the mystery warship, for as he swept his field glasses across her deck he noted the massive guns set in twin-turrets forward of the superstructure, the rear-most battery positioned higher than that in front, so they could put down devastating salvoes in unison. Agents W.02 and W.03 – otherwise known as Appleyard and Hayes – were equally convinced that this had to be one of the Vichy French warships that had survived Operation Menace, Britain’s abortive attack on Dakar.

  Minute by minute the powerful battle cruiser bore down upon the diminutive Q Ship. Five sets of eyes scanned the vessel for clues as to her identity, while the tension mounted and the men remained poised at their battle stations.

  It was then that those armed with field glasses noticed an anomaly. As she drew closer, her prow cleaving the water in a furl of white, it became clear that the mystery vessel was bigger and more potent than a French cruiser – more akin to the size of a full battleship. Surely, the 9,000 tonne Montcalm and Georges Leygues were smaller than the approaching vessel, which appeared to be more the size of a 30,000 tonne behemoth. The massive superstructure placed amidships also didn’t fit the sleeker, lower profile of the modern French La Galissonniere-class cruisers, and neither did the almost vertical cut of her prow.

  It was the distinctive form of the White Ensign fluttering from the ship’s rigging – a red St George’s cross against a white background, with a Union Jack set in one corner – that finally decided it: she had to be of British origin.

  A yell of relief echoed across the Maid Honour’s deck, as news of the warship’s likely identity was relayed among her crew.

  The clipped style of March-Phillipps’ entry in the ship’s log typically downplays the moment: ‘4.30 p.m. Hove to. Boarded and questioned. English.’

  Under cover of the battleship’s guns, a heavily armed party was sent across to the Maid Honour and her captain questioned rigorously. March-Phillipps was able to satisfy the boarding force commander to such a degree that he and his men were invited aboard the British battleship. Hot baths, drinks and a supply of fresh food were provided to the five hardy seamen, before the companies parted and their vessels went their separate ways.

  But the Maid Honour’s onward journey proved far from easy. As she rounded Africa’s western bulge and began to push east towards the Gulf of Guinea the temperatu
re soared to a debilitating 135 degrees Fahrenheit. Alternately becalmed, roasted and suffering repeated bouts of engine failure, fresh water became a real problem, as did food. The experienced merchant seaman Lassen had his own answer to the latter problem – homemade fish bombs. He removed a piece of calcium carbide from one of the ship’s carbide lanterns – which burn acetylene gas – placed it inside an old but shiny tin, and tossed the whole lot over the ship’s side.

  ‘Look! Vatch!’ he called to his shipmates. ‘Fish steaks coming up!’

  The warm sea was teeming with life, especially shoals of barracuda. They were drawn to the shiny glitter as the tin slowly sank, before the water made contact with the carbide, releasing acetylene gas in a violent explosive reaction. Fish stunned by the blast floated to the surface. They were gathered up, finished off with a cosh, gutted and sent below to the ship’s galley to be filleted and barbecued.

  By such unorthodox means and with the wind finally freshening, the crew were sustained and the Maid Honour made it to their destination port – Lagos Harbour, in the British colonial territory of Nigeria (after a stop-over in Sierra Leone). The Maid Honour had completed an epic journey of over 3,000 nautical miles.

  As Lassen recorded in his diary of their arrival: ‘I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that in a small boat it was a distinctive achievement. One of the finest of its kind performed in recent years.’

  Their target destination, Fernando Po, lay four hundred miles east across the Gulf of Guinea. Santa Isabel Harbour and the three enemy ships were well within their grasp. Six more of the Maid Honour Force stalwarts were flown out to Lagos, to reinforce the existing Operation Postmaster crew – including Leslie Prout, making the fourth officer among them. Prout had been a schoolboy champion at rugby and boxing. After school he’d trained as a mechanic, but at the outbreak of war he’d joined up with the Army. He’d served alongside Appleyard in France, and as with the others he’d been recruited by personal recommendation.

  Prout was accompanied by five more junior ranks – Thomas Winter, Ernest Evison, Jock Taylor, Dennis Tottenham and the Free Frenchman Andrew Desgranges. The eleven Maid Honour crew were boosted by a further six SOE agents now permanently based in Lagos – making seventeen in all. One of those, Agent W.10 Leonard Guise, had already played a crucial role in furthering the aims of Operation Postmaster. Guise wasn’t a ‘0’-rated agent, so unlike the Maid Honour Force he wasn’t trained to kill. What Guise and other SOE agents like him excelled in were the subtle arts of subterfuge, trickery and deception.

  Under the cover of being a British government courier delivering post to the British Consulate, located in Santa Isabel Harbour, Guise had been dispatched to Fernando Po. There he’d busied himself rowing ‘mail’ to and fro across the baking hot harbour, pausing at the anchor chains of the three target vessels, apparently to catch his breath. In the process he’d managed to use his handspan to make a working measurement of the thickness of each of the chains – crucial information if the ships were to be freed from their moorings.

  The assault force could ill afford to get such matters wrong. All the charges would need to explode at exactly the same moment, to maintain the vital element of surprise. But if any one charge failed to detonate or to cut its target chain, setting replacement explosives would take precious seconds. Once the first blasts had been heard, the ships’ crews and the harbour defence force would surely be alerted to the raiders’ presence.

  The more March-Phillipps studied the targets and the harbour defences, the more it became clear that while the Maid Honour would have been perfect for sneaking into the harbour and sabotaging the vessels, she could play little role in towing them away. With hostile crews potentially locked below decks, the only means to steal a ship like the Duchessa d’Aosta would be to use a tugboat to drag her out of the harbour and onto the high seas. The same was true of the Likomba and the pleasure yacht tied up next to her.

  Fortunately, there were vessels stationed in Lagos Harbour that would be ideal for the job. One was the powerful British tugboat the Vulcan, captained by a very able and willing commander, Tugmaster Coker. The Operation Postmaster plan was re-written. The Vulcan would be used to tow out the large passenger liner-cum-cargo-ship, the Duchessa d’Aosta. Meanwhile a smaller tugboat, the Nuneaton, under Lieutenant Goodman would haul off the German ship, the Likomba. Thereafter the tugs would tow their charges to the planned rendezvous with the British destroyer, HMS Violet, at which stage Britain could formally ‘seize’ the vessels and their ‘mutinous’ crew.

  The Duchessa d’Aosta had eight officers plus some forty crew aboard, and the Likomba was likewise manned by German officers. Once the element of surprise was lost, the men of the Duchessa in particular could mount a sustained defence, potentially fighting a running battle across her twin steel decks, plus there were hundreds of mixed Spanish and local soldiers and police ashore. Bearing in mind how heavily outnumbered the raiders were, further layers of deception were written into the Operation Postmaster plan, to even up the odds a little.

  A second SOE agent, W.25 Richard Lippett, was dispatched to Fernando Po, with a very special mission to fulfil. Under the cover of being a businessman working for the Santa Isabel office of the British trading company, John Holts, Lippett’s role was to discover some means via which he might spirit the Italian and German officers off their respective ships on the night of the assault. Without their officers to lead them, it was hoped the ships’ crew would put up less of a fight when faced by piratical British commandos bristling with weaponry.

  Lippett set about being sociable and making himself as well-liked as possible among the Santa Isabel locals. In particular, he sought out any Spaniards who might be anti-Franco and anti-Falangist – the kind of people who might have fought on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish civil war. Those kind of Spaniards might be sympathetically inclined to the sort of sabotage and skullduggery March-Phillipps and crew intended – although Lippett, like all involved in Operation Postmaster, knew only as much as he needed to carry out his side of things.

  Lippett struck up a friendship with the assistant manager of the Santa Isabel hardware store, a young Spaniard called Abelino Zorilla. Zorilla spoke fluent English, and over many a game of badminton or a pleasant stroll around the Santa Isabel harbour, Lippett deduced that Zorilla was sympathetic to the British cause. The first thing that Lippett sought was a means to neutralize Governor Sorulace, the Spanish overseer of Fernando Po, whose police and soldiers maintained a round-the-clock watch on the premises of the British Consulate.

  Such hostile scrutiny hampered enormously the work of SOE agents Lippett and Guise, plus others in the Consulate working to further the Operation Postmaster cause. The method the SOE hit upon to neutralize the Governor was the tried and tested means of blackmail. The Governor was found to have a local mistress – a very beautiful black African lady. Unbeknown to him he was duly photographed stark naked in an upstairs bathroom showering his beloved from a watering-can, prior to whatever else he might have in mind.

  Once the Governor was confronted with the compromising photographs he agreed to cease forthwith any surveillance of the British on Fernando Po. He was even persuaded to allow some over-flights of the harbour using his private aircraft, for the supposed purposes of taking photos of its ‘scenic beauty’.

  Those photos were sent back to Lagos and used to brief March-Phillipps and his team. From those images the exact location of the three vessels was plotted, as were the key buildings ranged around the harbour at which the Spanish defenders, with their machineguns and 4-inch cannons were stationed. The house of the British chaplain then resident on Fernando Po was identified, from which would be sent a pre-arranged message on the night of the assault, to signal the all-clear for the raiders to enter the harbour.

  But Lippett’s most important task remained to get the German and Italian officers off their ships come the night of the attack. The ruse he finally set upon was to organize a dinner part
y at one of Santa Isabel’s best restaurants, to which all notables in the local community – ship’s officers included – were to be invited. To help deflect suspicion from the British, Lippett’s Spanish friend, Zorilla, agreed to act as the party’s apparent host. He also agreed to drag Heinrich Luhr, a doctor and notable German island resident, into the fray, by allowing him to be seen to pay for the party – unwittingly handing over money that was in truth SOE funds.

  Agent Guise – W.10; the man who’d rowed about the harbour gauging the width of the anchor chains – was to guide the tugboats in during the night of the attack. Presuming Lippett had succeeded in luring the officers ashore, he and Guise would have accounted for two absolutely vital elements of Operation Postmaster. Without those elements being in place M, and all at SOE headquarters, believed the mission would have a less than fifty percent chance of success – without which it would not be given the go-ahead.

  In one last crucial act of preparation March-Phillipps and his team of licensed-to-kill agents were sent up-country, deep into the Nigerian bush. There, at a tiny jungle settlement called Olokomeji, they joined a secret SOE school training black Africans in guerilla warfare. The Operation Postmaster plan called for the anchor chains to be blown from the ship-side, as opposed to shore, so that none of the raiding force ever set foot upon Spanish soil. Using shaped charges of plastic explosives the raiders set about blowing apart different diameters of chain, while trying to ensure that the blasts would do minimal damage to the ships themselves.

  Hinged ‘bracelet’ charges were found to be the most effective. Three such charges could be slipped around an anchor chain, detonators and fuses inserted, with the whole lot wired to explode simultaneously. But even if all the charges exploded and cut the chains, simply spiriting away the Duchessa d’Aosta in particular represented a massive challenge. She was a 7,872-tonne rudderless deadweight, and she would need to be towed out of the shallow harbour via the one narrow channel leading to the open sea.