The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  Among the first Allied parachutists to drop over France were Tonkin and Crisp, with Jedburgh Team Hugh, led by Capt. Bill Crawshay. Five hours before the amphibious landings, the Tonkin stick jumped ‘blind’ – without a reception committee – into the Brenne marshes, east of Poitiers. Tonkin’s job was to locate a base and drop-zone for Bulbasket – an operation tasked to hit German lines of communication from the south of France to the Overlord beaches. The group landed safely and was joined by Capt. André Maingard, an agent of the SOE’s F Section, codenamed ‘Samuel’. Maingard was astonished to discover that the invasion had begun.

  ‘Samuel’ helped Tonkin and Crisp locate a DZ for the parachutage of nine more SAS-men under Lt. Tomos Stephens, and five tons of supplies, that night. Stephens, a short, feisty Welshman, ex-South Wales Borderers, had been captured in North Africa, where he’d met Tonkin in a rehabilitation camp, and later volunteered for the SAS. Shortly after the Stephens stick arrived, Tonkin received intelligence from the Maquis that no fewer than eleven German tanker-trains were hidden on sidings in the forest near Châtellerault. The fuel was earmarked for 2 Waffen-SS Panzer Division, Das Reich.

  It seemed too good to be true, and at first Tonkin didn’t believe it. He sent Tomos Stephens, dressed in the flannels and flat cap of a French worker, on a close target recce. When Stephens returned saying he had crawled right up to the tankers, though, Tonkin was euphoric. Das Reich was one of Rommel’s major reserve units – with fifteen thousand men and two hundred tanks, it was twice as large as any other Wehrmacht Panzer Division. It was reckoned to be only three days away from the front. If Bulbasket could take out the fuel bowsers, it would delay Das Reich’s arrival at the beach-head by hours.

  Two-and-a-half hours after Tonkin’s Bulbasket stick touched down, another SAS op, Titanic-4, went in over the Cotentin peninsula, between the US beach-heads, Omaha and Utah. A six-man group from 1 SAS, under Lts. Harry ‘Chick’ Fowles and Fred ‘Puddle’ Poole, it was a throwback to the dummy SAS brigade created by Dudley Clarke. Equipped with Lewes bombs, Very flare-pistols and noisemakers, the team was part of a scheme that included landing straw-man parachutists fitted with small-arms simulators, sand-filled weapons-containers and flare-pitching ‘pintail’ bombs. The aim was to convince the Germans that Allied paratroops were dropping south of the town of Carentan, deflecting their attention from real DZs to the north and east, where the US 101 and 82 Airborne Divisions were shortly to be inserted.

  The drop went pear-shaped when the SAS-men lost their real weapons-containers, and had to go to ground. After hiding out for a month they were located, surrounded and captured by German paras. They remained prisoners for the rest of the war. Titanic succeeded in distracting a German battalion from the beach-head, but many of the US paratroopers missed their DZs and were scattered. Some drowned in lakes and rivers, others came down among the enemy and were taken prisoner or killed.

  Around the time Titanic-4 was inserted, sixteen men of 4 SAS, under Lts. Henri Deplante and Pierre Marienne, jumped over Vannes, in Brittany. They were the advance party for Op Dingson, an attempt to raise the local Maquis in revolt against the Germans. The Deplante-Marienne stick were spotted by German Feldpolizei – three were bagged and one killed. The survivors managed to guide in a main party a hundred and fifty strong, who mustered a group of three thousand Maquis. Ill-equipped to fight a major battle, though, they were obliged to split up when the Germans moved against them in strength twelve days later.

  A second operation by 4 SAS, Samwest, was inserted at the same time as Dingson. Consisting of a hundred and forty-five men, including thirty local partisans, the op went awry when the Maquis, from rival groups, began fighting between themselves. Some of the SAS-men, overjoyed to be on native soil again, started visiting local restaurants and were eventually tumbled. The Germans ambushed their base, killing thirty-two SAS-men. Although the op’s original purpose failed, thirty men of 4 SAS remained in the area for weeks, organizing local resistance.

  53. ‘Saboteurs surprised at a rendezvous and shot’

  Mike Sadler peered out into the night as the fields of France passed under him like a moonlit ocean. It was 0145 hours on 5 July. A month had passed since the D-Day landings, but Rommel’s Fifth and Seventh Armies were still holding on in Normandy. Minutes earlier, the Stirling bomber Sadler was riding had quivered as she hit an air pocket. ‘There’s another aircraft about,’ the pilot observed. Lying full-length in the greenhouse-like forward-dome, Sadler felt suddenly vulnerable. Now he was keeping his eyes peeled for bandits, as well as the torch-flashes of the Maquis reception party lurking in the woods somewhere below. There was no sign of anything – the moonlit river went on and on.

  Sadler felt the plane’s engines doppler-out as the pilot skewed into the drop-zone area near La Ferté-Alais, thirty miles due south of Paris. He could at least take solace in the fact that he would not be jumping tonight. He was along as an observer, and to get a whiff of the sharp end. His regular job, as Assistant Intelligence Officer, 1 SAS, was briefing SAS parties going into action. It seemed a very long time since the day when Corporal Sadler, trainee navigator, had guided David Stirling and Paddy Mayne to L Detachment’s first successful strike at Sirte-Tamet.

  The twelve-man stick Sadler’s aircraft was carrying were all D Squadron, 1 SAS. Commanded by six-foot-two Captain Patrick Garstin, Royal Ulster Rifles, all but one were newcomers. The exception was L. Cpl. Tom ‘Ginger’ Jones, Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders, an ex-miner who had fought with L Detachment and 1 SRS. Three of the stick, Troopers William Young, Joseph Walker and Thomas Barker, were also from Mayne’s Royal Ulster Rifles contingent. Another, L.Cpl. Serge Vaculik, was a Czech-born Free Frenchman who had served with 4 SAS, but had been posted to 1 SAS as a linguist. Most of the others, Lt. Jean ‘Johnny’ Wiehe, an RE from Mauritius, Sgt. Thomas Varey, L.Cpl. Howard Lutton and Troopers Norman, Morrison and Castelow, had volunteered for 1 SAS from the Auxiliary Units. Sadler thought the men seemed jittery.

  The Garstin stick were reinforcements for Op Gain, whose first elements had gone in on June 14/15, and set up an operating base in the forest of Fontainebleau. Gain’s commander, Major Ian Fenwick, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, Officer Commanding D Squadron, had collected orders two days before the drop, instructing him to blow all double-track railways connecting with the Overlord beach-heads via Orléans, Tours, Le Mans and Argentan, as well as any single-track lines crossing the region.

  Fenwick, a well-known Punch cartoonist with a reputation for eccentricity, had endured a quiet war as a regional Intelligence officer for the Auxiliary Units. His lack of combat experience, though, was balanced by that of his resourceful squadron sergeant-major, ‘Gentleman Jim’ Almonds, double MM and L Detachment Original, whom Pat Riley had last clocked near Benghazi leaping from a jeep. Almonds had escaped from an Italian prison-camp, and on arrival in Britain had immediately been requested by Mayne, and promoted Squadron Sergeant–Major, D Squadron.

  Almonds was not the only Original to have rejoined SAS ranks. Among the other escapees were his friend Trooper Jim Blakeney, one of the famous ‘Tobruk Four’, ‘Great Escaper’ Cpl. Dougie Arnold, and Cpl. Roy Davies, once Jock Lewes’s batman, who had jumped on the first fateful drop at Fuka. All three had been bagged on Squatter. Operating at first on foot, later in jeeps heavy-dropped to them, sometimes trekking twenty-five miles or more in and out of target-areas, the Fenwick group had cut the Orléans–Pithiviers line repeatedly in the past three weeks. Almonds and Fenwick had banjoed trains with jeep-mounted Vickers Ks.

  Sadler saw three lights flash up, spaced a hundred yards apart. Ten yards to the right of the last light, a torch blipped out the morse letter ‘B’. The pilot read the code and brought the Stirling round for the final approach. In the cabin, the SAS parachutists were already at action stations, gear on, hooked up, braced to drop through the hatchway in the middle of the floor.

  The green light stabbed. The dispatcher yelled. ‘Go!’ One by one, Garstin’s men sli
pped into the hatchway and flopped into the night. In the forward-dome, Sadler couldn’t see the stick going out, but a split second after ‘Go!’ he saw the unmistakable flash of small-arms fire from the DZ. He caught his breath. The drop had been compromised – and by someone who knew the recognition code. The pilot was already putting the aircraft into a tight turn and heading back home. Sadler knew there was nothing they could do.

  A moment later a Messerschmitt 110 darted out of the shadows like a manta-ray, cannons gashing the night with lines of 20mm tracer. Rounds greased the Stirling’s cabin, punching through the skin and blipping out the other side. The pilot wrenched the column, going into a switchback evasion routine, bucking, dodging, flipping and rolling. The German held on doggedly, hugging his tail, thumping fire. The pilot heaved the stick forward, taking the plane into a headlong plummet, spindling through cloud. In the dome, Sadler thought the wings were going to fall off.

  Hanging from his lift webs, Pat Garstin heard rounds buzzing from the DZ. He saw muzzle-flashes and realized they’d been compromised. His leg-bag hit dirt, and he braced himself for ground-rush. He smacked soft soil, ankles and knees together, let his calves give and went into a roll. He screwed and pressed his harness-release. He came up to see canopies jellyfishing around him, and others going down in woods to the south-east. Men in civvies oiled out of the shadows towards them, shouting, ‘Vive La France!’ Garstin wasn’t taken in. He went for his M1 carbine and cocked it. Light-machine-gun fire popped out of the darkness. L. Cpl. Howard Lutton was hit. Trooper Tom Barker was wounded. Lt. Johnny Weihe took a slug in the spine. Garstin felt kicks in the neck and arm and bit the turf, squirting blood.

  Nine of Garstin’s stick were captured, four wounded. Morrison, Norman and Castelow, the last out of the aircraft, had landed in woods and escaped the cordon. The location of the drop-zone had been leaked by a traitor in the local Maquis, and the Germans had themselves set up the DZ lights. In fact, SOE’s F Section circuit in this area had been penetrated the previous year, and was now run from Berlin. Similar leaks had been responsible for the capture of several SOE teams dropped into the area. The reception committee had been organized by Sturmbannführer Hans-Joseph Kieffer, an ex-police inspector from Karlsruhe, commander of the local Funkabwehr, or Signals Counter-Intelligence – a Section of the Sipo-SD. They hadn’t been expecting to capture SAS-men. Kieffer’s tip-off had only mentioned a resupply drop.

  The prisoners were rushed to Paris before sunset, and the wounded sent to hospital, where Lutton died. The rest were held in a converted hotel in the Place des Etats Unis, then taken to Kieffer’s HQ in the Avenue Foch. Kieffer saw them briefly, then handed them over to his Funkabwehr interrogators. Ginger Jones, the ex- L Detachment man, was cuffed with his hands behind him. Every time he gave an answer his interrogator didn’t like, a man behind his chair back-handed him viciously. L. Cpl. Serge Vaculik was beaten twice. His cover story was that he was ‘Martin’, a French Canadian from Quebec. The Germans didn’t swallow it. They called him a terrorist. They told him he was going to be shot.

  According to some accounts, all the SAS-men were informed separately that they would be executed, but they didn’t believe it. It was against the Geneva Convention to execute prisoners in uniform – they might be saboteurs, but they weren’t spies. They were thrown back into a cell in their ‘hotel’. Days went past and nothing happened. There would be sudden, violent interrogations, and spells of ‘punishment’, handcuffed in darkness.

  On 8 August, almost five weeks after their capture, the Sipo-SD guards brought them a pile of ragged civilian clothing and told them to put it on. The story was that they were going to be exchanged for German prisoners in Switzerland. Ginger Jones was sceptical. He told Vaculik he couldn’t see why they needed civvies to be exchanged. Vaculik agreed that the story didn’t hang together – one of the guards had told him that their uniforms were being taken away to be washed. Vaculik told Garstin that he had a bad feeling about the new move, and suggested they make a break for it. Garstin, whose wounds hadn’t healed, was so weak he could hardly stand up. He said they should be patient – he reckoned that they were going to be repatriated.

  The Germans bullied and cajoled them into parting with their uniforms. At 0100 hours next day the Garstin stick donned ill-fitting and down-at-heel civvy togs, and were shoved, handcuffed, into a waiting truck. The truck joined a convoy of fifteen or more other vehicles heading north. Among their guards were an English-speaking SD-man named Alfred Von Kapri, and Karl Haug, a fifty-year-old ex-First World War soldier, who had been part of the group that had captured the SAS-men back in July. The party was commanded by SS-Hauptsturmführer Richard Schnur. All three worked for the Funkabwehr under Kieffer.

  At sunrise the truck came to a halt, and the men were turfed out to find themselves on the edge of a forest near Beauvais in the Somme. Jones spotted another truck parked some distance into the trees. Vaculik asked Von Kapri in French if they were going to be shot. ‘Yes, of course,’ he replied.

  Schnur, in the uniform of the Sipo-SD, ordered the guards to march the SAS-men a hundred metres into the trees, where they came across a small clearing. Here they were lined up elbow to elbow facing a squad of six Germans armed with sub-machine guns, about ten yards away. Garstin had to be propped up by Ginger Jones. Schnur drew a document from his pocket and read it aloud, while Von Kapri translated. ‘On the orders of the Führer … you know that saboteurs are punished with the death penalty,’ he droned, ‘in accordance with the rules of warfare.’

  ‘We haven’t even been given a trial,’ Garstin gasped. ‘My God, we’re going to be shot!’

  The two survivors claimed afterwards that Garstin had arranged for the whole stick to make a break for it on the word ‘shot’. Whatever the case, at that moment Serge Vaculik charged shrieking towards the firing-squad. He was followed closely by Ginger Jones and Tom Varey. Haug claimed later that he never opened fire. Schnur said that he was too busy putting the paper back in his pocket to shoot. One of the guards – perhaps Von Kapri – riddled the helpless Garstin with 9mm bullets from behind. The other three Ulstermen were blasted, one of them on the run. Germans chased Jones, Varey and Vaculik thirty metres into the wood, ratcheting off rounds as they ran. Jones tripped and fell, but the SD-men thought he had been hit and ran straight over him.

  Jones waited until they were all out of sight, then lifted his head to scope the area. He saw four bloody corpses, and realized suddenly how the scene might be construed – four dead Britons in civilian clothes, shot in the back, as if trying to escape. They had been tricked into forsaking their uniforms so that they could be shot as absconding spies. Jones didn’t linger. He jumped over a fence and vanished into the forest, emerging into a cornfield, where he went to ground.

  When Schnur returned half an hour later and found Jones’s body gone, he had a fit of hysterics. He was perfectly aware that he was contravening the Geneva Convention, and might one day be executed as a war criminal. The last thing he needed was living witnesses. He blamed Haug for letting the SAS-men get away. The guards fanned out into a line and began scouring the wood again. They had covered about five hundred yards when they spotted a prisoner – Tom Varey – sprinting through the trees. As he crouched behind a pile of wood, an SD-man named Otto Ilgenfritz shouted, ‘Halt – stand up!’ When he did so, Ilgenfritz plugged him from thirty yards.

  The Germans were convinced that Jones’s cadaver had been spirited away by the Maquis, and that only Vaculik remained at large. Later, they carted the five corpses to a Luftwaffe unit in a nearby village, asking for help to search for the remaining man. Schnur informed the officer in charge that the dead were ‘saboteurs who had been surprised at a rendezvous and shot’.

  The Garstin stick weren’t the first SAS-men to die as a result of the Kommandobefehl, the notorious ‘Commando Order’, of which John Tonkin had heard rumours at Termoli the previous year. The order stated that Allied commandos should not be afforded the rights of ordinary priso
ners of war, and should be killed on sight, even if they tried to surrender.

  How much the SAS knew of the danger at this stage is uncertain. SAS-men bagged in North Africa after the order was issued had been spared because Rommel rejected it as dishonourable. The fate of 2 SAS soldiers murdered by the Nazis after their capture in Italy was still unknown. They were listed ‘missing in action.’ Jim Almonds claimed that the SAS knew by June that if they were caught they would be shot. It is unlikely this was official, because Jedburgh teams going into action as late as July were informed that, since they were in uniform, they were protected by international law.

  In March a subaltern of 2 SAS, Jimmy Hughes, reached the UK, having escaped from a German prison-camp. He repeated to 2 SAS Intelligence Officer Major Eric Barkworth what a sympathetic German officer had told him about the Kommandobefehl. Barkworth was worried, and passed Hughes’s report on to HQ 1 Airborne Corps. They concluded that such rumours were mere ‘interrogation technique’. The fact that some missing SAS-men hadn’t been reported killed or captured by the enemy in Italy, they said, was a ploy to prevent the Allies from ascertaining the success of their missions.

  54. ‘For the life of me I couldn’t think what all the noise was about’

  In the early hours of 3 July, two days before the Garstin stick was inserted, John Tonkin returned to Bulbasket base in the forest of Verrières. Tonkin and his driver had spent the night scouting for a new base location – he had good reason to believe that the old one had been compromised. He didn’t notice anything amiss as he unrolled his sleeping-bag among his comrades. He had posted no sentries, and set no booby-traps. All seemed peaceful. He never dreamed that he had been allowed to pass through a cordon of SS Panzer Grenadiers, Sipo-SD troops and SS anti-partisan forces, four hundred and fifty strong, who had moved into place at last light the previous day.