by Damien Lewis
Three attempts were made to execute the raid in July and August 1942, but each was foiled by a combination of bad weather and the unmanageable approach to the target. Yet such aborted runs weren’t entirely wasted. They enabled close recces of the target to be carried out, and for a scale model of it to be built at Anderson Manor so the raiders could better plan their attack.
By the time of the fourth attempt, March-Phillipps had scaled down his plans, utilizing a more nimble, manageable force. Instead of using two MTBs, only Little Pisser would go, carrying a force of twelve. Crucially, two of those would be German speakers – a Polish Jew called Abram ‘Orr’ Opoczynski, and Patrick Dudgeon, a Briton who had learned enough of the language to get by at school. As with Fernando Po’s ‘friendly Spaniards’, they would be placed in the vanguard, to shout confusing orders in German and confound the rocky outpost’s defenders.
The morning of the raid – 2 September 1942 – dawned bright and clear. As March-Phillipps and his cohorts gathered around the scale model of Les Casquets for one final planning session, the decision was made not to go in on one of the three easier landing points – small rocky beaches formed at the base of the rocks. It stood to reason that those could be mined, or sentries set guarding their approach.
Instead, they would go for the most difficult landing, putting ashore at the base of a sheer, 80-foot rock face immediately beneath the lighthouse itself, with a view to scaling that and attacking with ultimate stealth and surprise. Laden down with weaponry – each would carry a Tommy Gun plus half-a-dozen magazines of ammo, Mills bombs, charges to blow their targets, plus the indispensable Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife – it was going to be some climb.
After a day thick with nerves the men ate a last meal and dressed for the coming mission. Each wore dark combats, a black balaclava and silent, felt-soled boots, while any exposed skin was given the obligatory ‘blackening-up’ using British Army camo cream. Just before dusk the army lorry set out from Anderson Manor, the raiders singing softly to themselves as it bumped along the Dorset lanes and they psyched themselves up for what was coming.
At Portland Harbour, lying just off the coast at Weymouth, Freddie Bourne was ready and waiting with Little Pisser. Under the cloak of darkness Bourne powered up the low-lying MTB and set a course for the Channel Islands. Bar March-Phillipps and Appleyard, who remained with Bourne on the bridge, all the raiders went below decks. Like most MTBs Little Pisser had a habit of smashing her way through the waves like a battering ram, lurching from one to the next with bone-shaking impacts, plus the noise from her twin engines was as if a Spitfire was taking off to either side of her hull.
She was showing no lights, and the men made the best of the journey they could, getting their eyesight adjusted to the darkness in readiness for the assault.
At 2245 the faint silhouette of Les Casquets – a sea-serpent’s humped back rearing out of the night-dark waters – came into view, with the knife-thin form of the lighthouse stabbing above it. With Appleyard helping navigate, Bourne steered the MTB as close as he could to the northern side of the rocks, where the raiders would attempt to make their ascent.
As she made her final approach, Little Pisser was switched to silent-operation mode. In addition to her powerful twin Thorneycroft engines, she was fitted with a more sedate, auxiliary Ford V8, for sneaking in close to enemy targets. She puttered in quietly to within 800 yards of the rocks and dropped anchor; it was now all up to March-Phillipps and his crew.
For tonight’s operation the chosen close assault craft was a Goatley, a collapsible, wooden-bottomed rowing-boat-cum-canoe with canvas sides. Some 1,000 Goatleys would be ordered by the War Office by the war’s end, but at this stage in proceedings their use was restricted largely to unconventional raiding forces.
March-Phillipps gave the order for the off. Appleyard knelt in the prow, signalling directions to left and right, as the four men on either side paddled for all they were worth. A powerful current was trying to force the craft north-eastwards, threatening to sweep them past the eastern edge of the rocks and into the open sea. With the Goatley’s canvas prow set into the teeth of the tide, backs bent to their task, sweat pouring down blackened faces despite the cool of the night.
Some fifteen minutes later the low-lying craft crept into the lee of the dark, uninviting island. Appleyard had detected a slab-sided, sloping rock lying directly below the engine house tower that he figured they might just use as a makeshift landing-platform. With the crashing of the sea masking the noise of their approach, the Goatley was brought in as close as he dared, lest her flimsy sides be dashed against the cliff and holed. The kedge anchor – a light anchor used to help a craft manoeuvre in narrow, treacherous spaces – was released. The Goatley was now fixed at the stern.
Appleyard took a line from the bows and prepared to make the jump. Timing it to perfection, he leapt across to the slimy, seaweed encrusted rock, and made the bowline fast. The Goatley was now secured in place from both ends, which made it slightly easier for the remainder of the heavily-laden raiders to follow him.
Graham Hayes – the hero of the cutting-out of the Likomba – plus one other remained in the Goatley, to safeguard her both from the sea and rocks, and from enemy discovery. The ten remaining men scrambled across to their slippery landing and onto enemy territory.
The night was clear and star-bright, with just the faintest sliver of a moon. The men surveyed the route ahead. The first half of the rock face was stained almost black from the constant pounding of the sea. Above that, the humped folds of sandstone took on a greyer hue, with here and there a slash of brighter yellow reflected in the moonlight, showing where stubborn lichens clung to cracks and crevices.
Ten men hauled themselves up the rock face, the noise of their climb being inaudible among the heavy booming of the sea in the chasms and gulleys. Fortunately, the cliff offered plenty of generous – if at first slimy – handholds. As they neared the top the raiders hit their first obstacle – coils of barbed wire, forming a defensive perimeter. With his body hugging the earth to keep well hidden, the lead man cut through the wire, the roaring of the surf below drowning out the sharp clips of his snipping.
With muscles burning from the long paddle across the sea, plus the climb under heavy loads, it was now that the rigours of their Dorset training really stood the raiders in good stead. No sentries were visible, but the base of the lighthouse tower was a mass of barbed-wire entanglements, concrete bunkers and blockhouses, with a shoulder-high wall encircling the lot. A 20mm Oerlikon cannon was positioned against one wall, which could put down devastating fire onto the raiders.
It was shortly after midnight when March-Phillipps led his men over the western perimeter wall. It was thankfully free of wire, and nowhere near as high as the one on the Anderson Manor assault course. As they landed soft-soled in the interior of the compound, they knew time was against them. They had just seconds until they were discovered, and they had to strike fast while the enemy were still off-guard.
March-Phillipps split his men into four groups – signalling one to take the lighthouse tower, another to hit the accommodation block, a third to secure the engine building, and the last to hit the all-important radio room. March-Phillipps led the assault on the accommodation block. He kicked open the main door and burst into the central room, Tommy Gun at the ready. The first thing he saw were two German soldiers on sentry, an open box of stick grenades lying at their side.
Menaced by the barrels of four Trench Sweepers wielded by a murderous-looking adversary, and taken by utter surprise, the Germans opted not to reach for their grenades. They were taken prisoner, and left in no doubt that one word of alarm from them would be fatal. That done, March-Phillipps ordered his men to move further into the building. Sleeping quarters branched off a main corridor. Presumably, the rest of the garrison was in there, relying on their two comrades on watch to raise the alarm should there be any sign of trouble.
Outside, two raiders stormed through the door
to the radio room, where a light could be seen burning the midnight oil. For some reason the place had been temporarily vacated, the wireless operator perhaps heading out to use the bathroom. Either way, it was an absolute Aladdin’s cave. Scattered across the desk were a treasure trove of German codebooks, notebooks full of scribbled information and instructions, plus signal pads used for compiling messages, wireless diaries and logs. It was exactly this kind of material – hard, usable intelligence – that the raiders had come for.
It was around 0100 by now. In the accommodation block Patrick Dudgeon surprised two German telegraphers, those who had just vacated the radio room. They were in the process of preparing for bed when he slammed open their door and the gaping barrel of his Tommy Gun swept the room. Dudgeon was a fearsome figure of a man, nicknamed ‘Toomai, the Elephant Boy’ by his raider-mates, after the 1937 British adventure film. He started snarling questions at the telegraphers in his schoolboy German, demanding to know where the rest of their comrades were located, and how heavily armed they might be.
Almost before the bewildered radio operators could answer, March-Phillipps and his men were at work further down the corridor. They booted open the door to a final room, and discovered three figures still asleep. Dragging two out of their beds, March-Phillipps objected to the third being seized, because the figure that was lying there was wearing a hairnet.
‘You can’t t-t-take that!’ he cried out. ‘It’s a w-w-w-woman.’
It soon transpired that all three Germans had been sleeping in hairnets, and so the one mistaken for a woman was seized as well! One of them had actually fainted upon seeing the fierce, staring eyes of the raiders appear from out of the night. The scramble down the cliff to the sea would surely revive him.
By the time all the garrison had been rounded up, the raiders had netted four Navy men – three of whom were Leading Telegraphists – under the command of Chief Petty Officer Mundt, plus three Army men who were there to stand guard over the remote outpost. Position secured, March-Phillipps ordered a thorough search and anything of intelligence value to be taken. Ration books, identity cards, the station and light log, plus personal letters and photos – everything was loaded up as the raiders prepared to make their getaway.
In the radio room they gathered up a final hoard of documents, after which came the moment that gave them greatest pleasure – smashing apart the German radio sets with an axe.
The only challenge now remained how to get seven prisoners down the slippery rock face and into the waiting Goatley. March-Phillipps had also seized the Germans’s weaponry – so his men were laden with the 20mm Oerlikon, boxes of grenades, several long Steyr rifles, as well as helmets and other items of German uniform. Trying to get off again with this lot aboard the Goatley would risk sinking her.
March-Phillipps ended up with seventeen shadowy figures crouched on the slimy rock slab, waves sweeping back and forth and eager to pluck both raiders and their captives into their icy clutches. There was clearly no room in the boat for the purloined weaponry, so it was tossed unceremoniously into the depths.
The only way into the waiting Goatley – for prisoners as well as raiders – was to slide down the 45-degree angle of the rock slab, and leap across the water into the fragile craft. Two raiders were injured doing so, the second being Appleyard. He was last man off, jumping with the rope into the crowded vessel’s bows. He landed awkwardly, hearing a sharp crack from his lower leg, followed by a jab of pain at shin level. There was little time to investigate his ‘crocked ankle’, as every man had to paddle like hell for the waiting ship.
With bare inches of her canvas hull protruding above the waves, the Goatley made it back to the waiting MTB, under the power of her exhausted but exultant raider-crew. Upon rendezvousing with Little Pisser the prisoners were herded into the front of the boat, where they could be covered by a couple of Tommy Guns. As the MTB crept silently away from Les Casquets, the quizzing of the German captives had already begun.
March-Phillipps and his men had just abducted the entire garrison of Les Casquets – an important German naval signal station – wrecking the wireless room and dumping all their weaponry in the sea, and they had secured a bonanza of intelligence materials to boot. After the success of Operation Postmaster, Operation Dryad was as fitting a follow-up as they could have wished for.
The raiders had a two-hour crossing ahead of them, and by the time Little Pisser rounded Portland Bill, the jubilant raiders had dressed themselves in assorted items of captured German uniform, including the enemy soldiers’ distinctive helmets.
They were greeted by their fellow SSRF brothers with cries of ‘You look like the bleedin’ Hun!’ and ‘Here comes Jerry!’
The words were uttered in jest, of course, but a seed had been planted in the minds of several of the raiders, Lassen first and foremost. If they could lay their hands on enough German kit, surely they could go about their raiding business posing as the enemy? With Lassen and his Danish and Polish comrades fluent in German, surely they could do so convincingly? The idea would take some finessing, but it was one that the Danish Viking was determined to make a reality.
At 0400 hours the prisoners were handed direct to Military Intelligence (M19), along with all the documentation the raiders had secured. The telegraphists among them – first and foremost Chief Petty Officer Mundt, a forty-one-year-old veteran of the First World War – would prove remarkably talkative. They were able to furnish accounts of enemy positions along a vast sweep of the French coastline from Calais in the east through the Cherbourg Peninsula in the west, and across the expanse of the Channel Islands – intelligence that would prove invaluable to the SSRF on future raids.
In some aspects their accounts were incredibly detailed. They recalled a carrier pigeon that had been driven into Les Casquets during that August’s storms. The exhausted bird had settled under the lighthouse and been caught in a snare. Attached to the bird’s leg was a tiny green canister containing a roll of paper and a message in pencil. It was in French, and began with the words ‘Pigeon 28/8/42 15 hours’. The message spoke about locations at Bologne, Dieppe, Avions and Hangars. The pigeon and its message – presumably linked to the French resistance – had been handed over to German intelligence.
*
It took twenty-four hours for the Germans to discover why their naval signal station on Les Casquets had fallen silent. The unit sent to investigate discovered a veritable ghost-station. There were no signs of resistance: no blood or bullet holes. Some of the missing, seized as they were in their pyjamas, had even left their uniforms behind.
Hitler’s initial reaction upon hearing the news was to declare Les Casquets indefensible, but the German Navy argued that it was too vital to lose. When Les Casquets was reoccupied by the Germans the garrison was increased five-fold, and the outpost’s defences significantly strengthened.
March-Phillipps’ own report on the mission expressed a quiet satisfaction in a job well done. ‘Great credit is due to Lieut. Bourne for his handling of his ship … [in] hazardous and difficult undertakings in close proximity to reefs and sunken rocks, and to Captain Appleyard, whose navigation made them possible. Also, to Private Orr, a German speaker, who marshalled the prisoners and did much to make the search successful.’
As much as anything, Operation Dryad proved a major propaganda victory for a British military still to set foot again in any significant numbers upon European soil. Churchill’s subsequent words of praise for the mission – and similar cross-Channel raids – were telling: ‘There comes out of the sea from time to time a hand of steel which plucks the German sentries from their posts with growing efficiency.’
*
Shortly after Operation Dryad Anders Lassen was back wielding Churchill’s ‘hand of steel’, as he led a six-man team onto the island of Burhou, a rocky outcrop at the eastern end of the sandstone ridge that forms Les Casquets.
His was a reconnaissance mission designed to see if light artillery could be landed on Burhou
, with which to launch a lightning strike against the German positions across the water on the Channel Island of Alderney. Burhou proved to be another bare and windswept outpost, which the Germans were using solely for target practice.
The raid yielded useful intelligence, and March-Phillipps was able to recommend that a force equipped with mortars and pack-artillery – man-portable guns – could land on Burhou and put down barrages onto the enemy, before melting away into the night.
Lord Louis Mountbatten – Commodore and later Admiral of the Fleet – was then Britain’s Chief of Combined Operations. Strictly speaking SOE agent-commandos like March-Phillipps and his men didn’t fall under Mountbatten’s area of responsibility, but after Operations Postmaster and Dryad he was well aware of their actions.
Mountbatten decreed there should be a minimum of one cross-Channel raid every two weeks, to keep the German coastal forces on their toes, and to demoralize and terrorize them. At the same time, the raiding forces were to gather intelligence for any forthcoming invasion fleet heading towards the French beaches.
The SSRF was involved in several other cross-Channel missions – including some vicious night-time skirmishes with the enemy, as well as clandestine probing of their defences. But it was now that March-Phillipps, Appleyard, Lassen and the other veteran raiders began preparing for the mission that would truly cross the line.
In the forthcoming Operation Aquatint they planned to target mainland France, landing on the coastline from where months before British forces had been driven into the sea by the German blitzkrieg. They planned to put ashore at the village of St Laurent-sur-Mer, at the eastern end of what was to become known, in the D-Day landings to come, as ‘Omaha Beach’.
As always with such raids, Operation Aquatint was heavily weather-dependent. It finally got the go ahead on a Saturday in September 1942 when Anders Lassen was off on a rare weekend’s leave, most probably with a lady friend.
