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

by Damien Lewis

  On that fateful night March-Phillipps would feel the absence of his Viking raider as never before.

  Chapter Ten

  On the night of 12/13 September 1942 Operation Aquatint went ahead without Lassen. It turned into an unmitigated disaster. Little Pisser took the raiders to the French coast, yet they failed to find the cliff they had planned to scale. Instead, they emerged from their Goatley boat onto a stretch of open sand.

  The night was as black as pitch but luck was against them. A heavily-armed German patrol was moving on to the beach, and it stumbled into the British raiding force. In the bloody firefight that ensued one raider was so badly injured that he had to be left behind, as the others retraced their path to the waiting Goatley, all the while putting down fire on the enemy in pursuit.

  The remaining ten made it back to their canvas-sided boat, but the Germans used machine guns mounted on the beach to rake the Goatley with fire. It was torn to pieces. Little Pisser tried to sneak in to pluck the survivors from the water, but she was forced out to sea again under heavy bombardment from German shore batteries.

  Eleven men had gone ashore on ‘Omaha’ beach. None would return. Three were dead, four were on the run, and the rest – many badly injured – were captured by the enemy.

  Among those who had evaded capture was Captain Graham Hayes – the Maid Honour original who had led the cut-out mission against the German vessel, the Likomba. He would make it as far as supposedly neutral Spain, only to be betrayed by the Spanish – and possibly elements of the French resistance who had been infiltrated by the Gestapo – and handed back to the Germans.

  By then Hayes’s three fellow escapees had already been captured. The two ‘foreign’ – i.e. non-British – men among them, the Pole ‘Orr’ Opoczynski and a Dutchman, Jan Hellings, were sent to the notorious prison camps Stalag 133 and Luft Dulag. At some stage they either died in those camps, or were executed. Hitler had already decreed that any man from occupied Europe found fighting with the Allies would be shot: that may well have been their fate.

  As for Graham Hayes, he was incarcerated in the infamous fortress-prison of Fresnes, south of Paris, in solitary confinement. The only break from the loneliness and abject squalor of his cell were the regular visits to the Gestapo headquarters, for interrogations that were supplemented by savage beatings, semi-drowning in icy baths, and whipping by ox-gut lashes stiffened with steel rods.

  Hayes never broke nor gave anyone away – including those in the French resistance who had genuinely done so much to try to help him escape.

  *

  Among those who lost their lives on the beach at St Laurent-sur-Mer was Major Gus March-Phillipps DSO, the founder and visionary leader of the Maid Honour Force and the SSRF. He died in the water as he tried to swim ashore from the bullet-ridden Goatley.

  In a poem penned in Africa shortly before Operation Postmaster had gone ahead, March-Phillipps had written of a bloody but noble end to a short life lived as a warrior.

  Let me be brave and gay again

  Oh Lord, when my time is near.

  Let the god in me rise up and break

  The stranglehold of fear.

  Say that I die for Thee and the King, And what I hold most dear.

  It seems as if March-Phillipps had foreseen his own death while in the steamy tropics of West Africa.

  As for the unit that he had founded and nurtured, the Small Scale Raiding Force suddenly had lost its irreplaceable figurehead. Along with Graham Hayes and Orr Opoczynski, the Free Frenchman Desgranges – he of the loincloth and piratical headscarf worn during Operation Postmaster – was also gone, as were many others. Leaderless, rudderless and deprived of those who had shaped it and made it what it was, this was the unit’s darkest hour.

  Fortunately, Appleyard had remained on Little Pisser during the mission, for it had been his duty to oversee the rendezvous with the Goatley once some German prisoners had been snatched for interrogation purposes. Due to his broken ankle he wasn’t even supposed to be on active operations. It was only Appleyard’s stubborn sense of duty that had taken him as far as he had gone on the fateful Operation Aquatint.

  Even before the raiders had reached landfall Lassen had sensed that disaster was upon his brothers-in-arms. The night of Operation Aquatint he’d paced the bedroom where he was staying, restless and unable to settle. In the middle of the night he awoke in a cold sweat, yelling out in fear and shock. He was convinced that March-Phillipps was dead, killed during the raid.

  He couldn’t rest, and early the next morning he headed over to Anderson Manor, only to learn that none of those manning the Goatley had returned. It wasn’t until the following day, 14 September, that the Germans issued an official communiqué concerning the force that March-Phillipps had led to the French coast:

  Their approach was immediately detected by the defence. Fire was opened upon them and the landing craft was sunk by direct hits. Three English officers and a de Gaullist naval officer were taken prisoner. A Major, a Company Sergeant Major and a Private were brought to land dead.

  Though he rarely spoke of it, Lassen would blame himself for the failure of Operation Aquatint and for losing March-Phillipps, his close friend, mentor and guide. March-Phillipps had been blessed with a rare quixotic genius, making him the ideal figurehead for a unit such as the Maid Honour Force/the SSRF. His loss lay heavily upon all.

  Lassen wrote poignantly in his diary about the death of a man he had idealized and tried to emulate, and to whom he was described by many as being ‘devoted’. ‘Major March-Phillipps is dead now,’ he noted. ‘The only man I sincerely liked and respected, he died in battle leading his men, a death worthy of him. At times I wish I’d been with him when things went wrong. At all the other times we fought together, but not the last.’

  The resulting guilt and anger would drive Lassen to the limits in the missions to come, as he sought to avenge March-Phillipps’ death and that of the others. But right now eleven men – the SSRF’s commander first and foremost – were gone, and the unit was in danger of losing its way and its very purpose. Command of the SSRF now fell to Appleyard, and it was chiefly due to his refusal to let grief overcome the raiders’ sense of mission that the unit survived its near-catastrophic loss.

  In a War Office cable stamped ‘Most Secret’, the change in command is reported in the driest possible terms: ‘Major March-Phillipps, the former Commander of the raiding force … is unfortunately missing, and we wish to appoint in his place W/S Lieutenant J. G. Appleyard, MC … Captain Appleyard is 26, an officer since the War began … and recently won a bar to his Military Cross.’

  In the aftermath of the fateful Operation Aquatint M visited Anderson Manor, and spent time among his agent-commandos in an effort to bolster morale. A true leader of men, he had been close to March-Phillipps – one of the earliest believers in M’s vision for the agent-commandos – and he felt his loss and that of the others as keenly as anyone.

  It was their anger and their thirst for revenge that drove M, Appleyard, Lassen and the others on. And as luck would have it, their very next mission would take these men to new levels of daring, notoriety and opprobrium.

  *

  Barely two weeks after Aquatint the raiders prepared to go into action again, on Operation Basalt. It was the night of 3 October when Appleyard, Lassen, Patrick Dudgeon – Toomai, the Elephant Boy, the German speaker who had interrogated the prisoners on Les Casquets – and nine others prepared to set sail once more in Little Pisser, their faithful ship being one of the few that had survived the disastrous raid on the French coast.

  Nerves were stretched to breaking point for Operation Basalt. This was the unit’s chance to prove that, despite their horrendous losses, they remained an effective fighting force. It was also a golden opportunity to seek revenge for those who had died, or perhaps worse still, like Graham Hayes, been taken captive.

  Tonight’s raid would take the men back to their old stalking ground – the Channel Islands. The target was Sar
k, a relatively small but heavily populated – and heavily garrisoned – landmass, one menaced by barbed-wire entanglements, and with machine-gun nests and minefields covering just about every conceivable avenue of approach.

  Just 2.1 square miles in area, Sark lies to the far south of Les Casquets and east of the main Channel Island of Guernsey. In the autumn of 1942 Sark was under the rule of Kommandant Major Albrecht Lanz, the German force commander based upon Guernsey. According to the prisoners seized from the earlier raid on Les Casquets, the garrison on Sark consisted of around 200–300 men, equipped with small arms, grenades, light machine guns and artillery pieces.

  More worryingly still, there were some twenty minefields dotted around the island. These were armed with the dreaded S-mines, the so-called ‘Bouncing Bettys’, which when triggered sprang up to knee height, exploding in a hail of ball bearings. There were also fixed flamethrowers and anti-tank guns to deter any would-be aggressors. As if that wasn’t enough, the civilian population was under a night-time curfew enforced by roving German patrols, which meant that anyone spotted during the hours of darkness would be assumed hostile.

  The German garrison on Sark was in the process of reinforcing its defences still further. The SSRF’s mission was to somehow infiltrate those defences, raid an enemy billet and seize as many prisoners as possible. Spiriting enemy soldiers away in the night was seen as being the means to spread ultimate terror among the German ranks – even more so than taking lives.

  The twelve chosen men were told they could have their pick of weaponry for the coming raid. Lassen deliberated long and hard about taking his bow-and-arrows. In the end he decided against it – most probably because the War Office had proscribed its use in battle – settling instead for his Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife.

  *

  Little Pisser ploughed through the darkened seas, each wave seeming half to swamp her, as her low-lying hull cut a path ahead. Salt spray whipped and stung the faces of those standing on the open deck. Appleyard and Lassen were in the wheelhouse, legs planted wide against the thumping impacts, and bracing themselves for what they knew was coming: revenge.

  At shortly before 2300 hours she rounded Les Casquets, and struck a southerly bearing towards Sark. As always, Lieutenant Freddie Bourne was at the MTB’s wheel, and as they neared their target he dropped their speed to around 10 knots, to dampen the earsplitting howl of the engines. Shortly, the craggy form of Sark took shape, cliffs washed a silver-grey in the moonlight.

  Bourne brought the force in from the south-east, making for a semi-circular natural harbour scooped out of the island’s south-eastern corner. On silent-engine mode the MTB puttered closer to the shoreline. From his charts Bourne knew that the water beneath his keel would remain deep and navigable almost to landfall. Making no more than one or two knots he crept under the lee of the cliffs, dropped anchor and cut the auxiliary engine.

  Before them lay two apparently easy landing points – gently shelving shingle and sand beaches, with a simple scramble leading to the island’s flatter level above. But fearing that each would be mined, the raiders intended to take a far more challenging approach. Between the bays lay a snub-nosed headland known as the Hog’s Back. Mounted atop this feature was what aerial reconnaissance suggested was a German machine-gun post with clear fields of fire into both the bays below.

  Mindful of the fate of the Operation Aquatint raiding force – whose Goatley had been machine-gunned in the water – Appleyard had decided it was crucial to make landfall unseen by the enemy manning that machine-gun post. The only way to do so was to head directly to the Hog’s Back, and to put ashore where its furthest point plummeted into the sea.

  During preparations for the mission Appleyard had discovered an old Sark guidebook – the Channel Islands being a popular tourist destination before the war – which mentioned the existence of a path leading directly from the Hog’s Back to the sea. There were caves at the shoreline, and it was likely that the path had been used by smugglers in the past. Whether it still existed and was navigable remained to be seen.

  With Lassen acting as bowman, the Goatley made its final approach to shore. Paddles kissed the water as the Dane brought them in close to the rocks. It had fallen to Lassen to be the first to scale the cliff ahead of them and deal with the German gun post above.

  Shortly before midnight the canvas-sided craft nudged against the rocks and Lassen leapt ashore. Within seconds he was swallowed by the darkness. Like a mountain goat, he trotted up the near-vertical cliff and was gone. Ten other ghostly figures followed, moving at a more cautious pace with Appleyard in the lead. Behind them, one man was left to guard the Goatley.

  As the guidebook had intimated, the start of the climb was steep and treacherous, the cliff face being sodden and weatherworn from where the sea repeatedly smashed against it, and plagued by patches of wet, loose shale. After a good hundred feet or more of scrabbling on all fours, the gradient gradually lessened. Appleyard found himself on a steep, winding path, leading to the summit of the Hog’s Back. It switchbacked through sharp gullies lined with thick bracken and gorse, but it was easy going compared to what had gone before.

  Appleyard pushed on, keen to link up with the often recklessly brave Dane. Ahead of him Lassen had already made the summit. Lying with his face pressed into the earth he surveyed the cliff-top position. It was surrounded by rolls of freshly-laid barbed wire and there was indeed a gun there. Fortunately for the raiders it was an old, disused one – something that it hadn’t been possible to ascertain from studying the aerial photos alone.

  For several seconds the stillness of the night was broken by the sharp snip of wire being cut. Lassen wormed through the crawl-hole that he’d made, and flitted into the shadows, scouting the terrain ahead as far as it seemed sensible to go. Finding it clear of the enemy, he hurried back to brief Appleyard. The raiders rendezvoused at the V-shaped summit of the Hog’s Back, then moved inland along its ridge, making for a group of houses at a hamlet called Petit Dixcart, where the nearest enemy troops were supposedly billeted.

  En route the silent force came across what appeared to be a German radio post, complete with sentries. Appleyard and Lassen crept forward, hoping for a repeat of Les Casquets – the chance to seize priceless intelligence and prisoners, and to vanish before the enemy even knew they were there. But there was something decidedly spooky about the still, moonlit scene: the sentries were impossibly quiet and immobile in the darkness.

  They turned out to be dummies, the entire set-up being a firing range where the German occupiers had been honing their gunnery skills. It was ominous. The garrison on Sark was clearly made up of businesslike and professional soldiers who outnumbered the raiders some 20–1.

  They evaded a first enemy patrol by lying motionless in the thick vegetation at the edge of the path. Minutes later the raiders found themselves approaching their target – Las Jespellaire, a large detached house said to be the billet of several German troops. They surrounded the building and burst in through the French windows, but the only occupant turned out to be a lady in her forties asleep in an upstairs bedroom.

  Mrs Frances Pittard reacted remarkably well to the fearsome-looking raiders storming into her room. She announced that she was English, the daughter of a Royal Navy commander living in England, and asked what she might do to help. While Lassen organized a guard force to keep watch for the enemy, Appleyard quizzed Mrs Pittard on enemy strengths and their positions all around the island.

  Time was against Appleyard and his raiders now. What with the cliff climb, the stealthy stalking of what turned out to be a firing range, hiding from a passing enemy patrol and now their abortive attack, it was approaching 0200 hours. They’d been in German-occupied territory for well over two hours.

  Mrs Pittard gathered together some local newspapers plus a map of Sark, and gave Appleyard an invaluable off-the-cuff briefing. She showed him where the key enemy positions were, and confirmed that both the beaches that Appleyard had chosen not to
land on were indeed mined. Disturbingly, the newspapers revealed that the Germans had ordered hundreds of able-bodied men to be deported from the Channel Islands, and that they were destined for the German labour camps.

  Many had already gone.

  The obvious place to target was the annex to the Dixcart Hotel, Mrs Pittard explained. It had a separate entrance, and there were some half-a-dozen Germans billeted there. As long as the raiders could execute their attack with silence and surprise they should be able to spirit away their prisoners undetected. But if they were discovered, the nearby Dixcart Hotel was packed with enemy troops. In no time the island would be swarming with German soldiers hunting for the tiny British force.

  Before leaving, Appleyard offered Mrs Pittard a safe passage to England aboard Little Pisser, for it was obvious she might be a target for German reprisals. She refused. She had lived in the Channel Islands all her life and she wasn’t about to leave now.

  Just a few hundred yards lay between their present position and the Dixcart Valley, the location of their new target. Appleyard set a rendezvous for his men beneath a distinctive yew tree at the edge of the hotel grounds. Once the raiders had snatched their prisoners they would regroup there, before heading directly along the valley bottom to the Hog’s Back and down to the Goatley waiting below.

  With barely a sound Appleyard’s force slipped off the higher ground of Petit Dixcart and into the wooded valley below, flitting between the trees towards the hotel grounds. Once there, Appleyard sent Lassen plus one forward, to check out the lie of the land and to search for any sentries. One was spotted, pacing backwards and forwards in a clearing. Having observed his progress for several minutes, the two raiders returned to Appleyard.

  ‘Apple, I should have brought my bow-and-arrow, after all,’ Lassen whispered, his eyes glinting in the moonlight.

  Lassen volunteered to go in and take out the lone sentry, after which the main body of men would be called forward. He wormed his way back through the undergrowth until he was close enough to the unsuspecting German to hear his footfalls. Otherwise, all was silence and stillness, but there was now a noticeably sinister edge to the quiet that sent a shiver up the spine.