The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  Since D-Day, Tonkin’s party had cut the railway twice, and derailed a goods train. His greatest success, though, had been the destruction of Das Reich’s fuel-tankers. After Tomos Stephen’s recce, he had relayed the coordinates of the hidden trains to Moor Park. The reaction had been swift. On the night of 11 June, an Allied Mosquito squadron had swooped over the hidden siding in three waves, demolishing the trains with five-hundred-pounder bombs and cannon-fire. It was a brilliant coup.

  Shortly, though, Tonkin had taken a parachutage of four jeeps and had shifted his base to the Verrières forest, about twenty-five miles from Poitiers. Here, things had started to go wrong. On 28 June two NCOs, Sgt. Douglas Eccles, Welsh Guards, and Cpl. Kenneth Bateman, Wiltshire Regiment – both ex-1 SRS – failed to return from a mission to blow points in a railway marshalling yard at St Bénoît. The jeep driver came back without them, and reported hearing no gunfire. Tonkin should have assumed they’d been bagged, and that his base was exposed. Instead of moving out, though, he stayed put.

  Three days later, two Frenchmen were led into the camp by Trooper John Fielding, an ex-Auxiliary Units soldier, who had spotted them pushing a punctured motorcycle and sidecar along a nearby road. The men claimed to belong to the Maquis. A long interrogation failed to confirm their identity, but still the SAS let them go. They were almost certainly spies of the pro-German Milice – the French Gestapo.

  Two more disquieting incidents happened that day. First, lookouts reported an unidentified vehicle drifting back and forth along the roads around the forest. Then, a Maquis group hustled in a man who claimed to be a US fighter pilot, Lt. Lincoln Bundy, whose Mustang P-51 had been taken out by ack-ack fire. Though Bundy eventually turned out to be kosher, Tonkins received no positive ID from Moor Park.

  These episodes together added up to a case for scrapping the camp, and in fact Tonkin did order his men to move out to an alternative site, in the Bois de Cartes. When the well at the new location turned out to be dry, though, he decided to move back to the old site. He reasoned that since it was now four days since Bateman and Eccles had disappeared, they either hadn’t cracked or were already dead. This reasoning was faulty. In fact, the two SRS veterans had been tortured by Sipo-SD and had broken that same day, disclosing the location of the base. The following day, while Tonkin had finally gone to look for a new camp, German troops encircled the area. They brought with them mortars, artillery, and heavy machine-guns.

  At first light two Maquisards who had spent the night with their girlfriends in Verrières ran into a German sentry in the woods. He opened fire. One of the Frenchmen, Marcel Weber, took a bad hit in the thigh. The German party heard the gunfire and assumed it was the signal to attack. The B Squadron men awoke to the tremor of mortar shells churning the forest floor. ‘For the life of me I couldn’t think what all the noise was about,’ said one of the survivors, Lt. Peter Weaver, ex-Dorset Auxiliary Units. ‘Then I realised, Christ, we’re being mortared!’1

  SAS-men and Maquisards, pale-faced, wide-eyed, wrestled free of sleeping-bags, rammed on boots, groped for carbines and escape-belts. Spandau rounds whiplashed the campsite, kicking dirt, whiffling leaves, thunking trees. Half-dressed men rolled for cover. Shells quivered, roils of earth blew, bullets whirred and seared, smoke spiralled. Bits of shrapnel smacked into Troopers Joe Ogg and John Williams as they tried to dress. They spasmed, lashing blood. Medic Cpl. Bill Allan crawled over to them, ripping open shell-dressings, his bloody fingers probing their wounds.

  Sgt John Holmes, Royal Armoured Corps, an SRS and desert veteran, yelled at Troopers Bob Guard, Ed Richardson and Tom Cummings to take up all-round defence. Two minutes later, Marcel Weber clawed through underbrush towards them, ghost-faced, his thigh pulsing blood. ‘The Boche are coming!’ he croaked.

  Tomos Stephens pulled Weber into cover and two SAS-men braced him, half-carrying him towards John Tonkin’s position. Rounds clittered and sissed past them, but no Germans appeared. A minute later, Pete Weaver had twenty-seven SAS-men stood-to in defensive positions. Stephens monkey-ran back to Holmes. ‘Every man for himself,’ he hissed.

  Most of the men followed Weaver, Stephens and Richard Crisp south. They ran into a firewall, shifting closer, bullets drubbing past their ears, sprattling dirt. They wheeled away from it. They scrammed south-west through trees. They cut across a road and ducked south-east, straight towards a mortar battery. Shells hacked and split, foliage flamed, bullets ticktacked. They raced back the way they’d come. More rounds blistered them. A 9mm slug blagged Richard Crisp’s thigh. Blood gouted. The men milled, trapped on all sides. ‘Come with me, or stay where you are,’ Weaver said. ‘I’m not ordering you to do anything. It’s your choice.’

  John Holmes’s party split off, rushed down a slope to a stream, hit a bridge. Trooper Vic White crouched and let rip covering fire with his carbine, slatting .30 rounds. Holmes told him to pull out. White said he’d be there in a minute. Holmes and his party sprinted across open ground towards another limb of woodland. Cpl. John Kinnivane stopped, winded. Holmes and three others hit the trees and crept into cover. White and Kinnivane never made it.

  Pete Weaver hared off into the trees with Stephens, who was doubled over with stomach cramps. They were running south, yellow corn gaping in brilliant sunlight through gaps in the forest. Stephens told Weaver the cramps were agony. He had to stop. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ Weaver spat. ‘They’re here!’

  Stephens told him to go on. He cut back into the woods. Minutes later rounds slapped his thigh, hurling him off his feet. SS-men in field-grey skulked out of the trees. Stephens put his hands up, his thigh blebbing blood. An SS-man swung his rifle, crunched his skull. Stephens rolled over. A German put the muzzle of his rifle against his head. He shot him point-blank.

  Weaver ran into the corn. He dropped on all fours. He animal-crawled through wheat-stalks, bellying and scrabbling along. Others followed. Halfway across, Weaver staggered to his feet. Shells wheezed and plumped, columns of smoke sprouted. There were screams behind him, as Trooper Pascoe was scythed by shrapnel. The others wheeled again, running through corn. Weaver ran the other way, out of the field, across grassland towards another spur of forest. Four SS-men swarmed after him, crashing through corn-stalks. The forest seemed miles away. Gunshots beheaded wheat and grated grass. Weaver dropped over a stile, beelined for a bramble-patch, crawled in, lay still. A moment later SS-men spurted past and disappeared.

  John Tonkin crashed through undergrowth with Cpl. Rideout and Troopers Keeble and MacNair. He stopped short when he remembered he hadn’t secured the cipher books. He went back for them. The camp was seething with SS-men, helping themselves from SAS ration-packs. Tonkin crawled up and stuck time-pencils on PE blocks. He came so close to the Germans that discarded chocolate wrappers fell on his head.

  Medic Bill Allan had stayed with the wounded Ogg and Williams, and had been taken prisoner. Cpl. Pascoe was dragged up, half-comatose, blood-drenched. The Germans bundled the wounded into a truck and sent them to Hôtel de Dieu hospital in Poitiers. Six of the Maquis had been captured. The SS handcuffed them, kicked them to the side of a road, and mowed them down in cold blood. They moved the cadavers to Verrières, half a mile away, and dumped them in the village square. They hung up Tomos Stephens’s body for the villagers to see. Some witnesses said that Stephens was still conscious, and that the SS-men bludgeoned him to death in front of them.

  Twenty-eight other SAS-men had been captured. Together with the US pilot, Bundy, they were taken to the German army Feldkommandatur in Poitiers, shoved in cells and interrogated. The army tried to hand them over to Sipo-SD, who didn’t want them. Hitler’s Kommandobefehl hung over them, but no one wanted to take responsibility.

  In the end, the buck was passed to Oberleutnant Vogt of 80 Corps, a former priest. Vogt recced a site in the St Sauvant forest, twenty miles south of Poitiers, where he ordered three pits dug beside a track. Just before first light on 7 July, while the Garstin stick were being interrogated in Paris, thirty-
one men were lined up by the track, with their hands cuffed behind them. Their number included US pilot Bundy, Eccles and Bateman, who had been tortured into revealing the location, and Bob Bennett’s best mate, SAS Original ‘Lofty’ Baker. A firing-squad faced them. Weapons clacked. Vogt snapped the order to fire. The Germans blubbed out 9mm shells at close range, cutting down the helpless men. The bodies sprawled, still cuffed. The Germans scooted around giving coups de grâce with pistols. They yanked the dog-tags off the corpses, dumped them in the pits and shovelled dirt over them. Six days later, in the Poitiers hospital, the three wounded – Ogg, Williams and Pascoe – were murdered by morphine overdose.

  On 5 July John Tonkin, Pete Weaver, John Holmes and five others met up at an emergency RV at a small farm near their former base. All of them escaped. Tonkin would not discover the fate of the Bulbasket crew until January 1945, when their bodies were unearthed by local villagers.

  55. ‘A marvellous killing-ground’

  The Morvan was a region of rolling wooded hills in the middle of Burgundy, lying on the north-eastern rim of the Massif Central, between the Loire and the Saône. It was an ideal hideout for Op Houndsworth, a scheme run by Bill Fraser, whose aim was to cut the railway line between Paris and Lyon, and the Le Creusot–Nevers line to the south. One of the most backward regions of France, the Morvan was sparsely inhabited, with few villages or farms. Its main industry was logging – its dense forests supplied firewood and charcoal for Paris and Dijon.

  Paddy Mayne was inserted into the Morvan on the night of 8 August, with his batman Cpl. Tommy Corps, Mike Sadler and a Jed officer. As there was no RAF dispatcher on board, they had to dispatch themselves. Earlier, during take-off at RAF Northolt, their aircraft had spun laterally and caught fire. None of the stick had been hurt.

  Mayne took some satisfaction in reporting to Moor Park later that it had been ‘a superb drop’. He had jumped in his formal service-dress uniform complete with medal ribbons, with a wind-up gramophone and records in his leg-bag. He had worn the uniform, he said, to outdo Bill Fraser, whom he’d heard was in the habit of wearing his Gordon Highlanders kilt to ‘impress the locals’.

  Ex-Yeomanry trooper Capt. Johnny Wiseman, whose section had been wiped out at Termoli, was on the DZ to meet them. He escorted Mayne to the camp of Capt. Alex Muirhead, his former mortar officer in Italy. In the morning they motored to Fraser’s base, up twisting hairpins that led them deeper into the hills and forest. When the cars could go no farther, they cammed them up in the trees, and trekked two and a half miles on foot along a valley that climbed at right-angles from the village of Mazignen. The main Houndsworth base lay in a forest clearing, by a stream – a cluster of tents crudely constructed from hanging parachute canopies, covered by a large tarpaulin against the incessant rain. A couple of lopsided huts were the cookhouse, presided over by self-appointed chef, ex-L Detachment NCO Sgt. Cornelius McGinn.

  Fraser came to greet Mayne, looking pale and tired. Mayne and Sadler sprawled on sleeping-bags in his tent, where they were joined by Major Bob Melot, who had been inserted twelve days earlier, and the chaplain, Captain Fraser McLuskey. The padre thought Mayne looked happy to be back in the field. ‘He’d had to stay at base for the first month or six weeks,’ he observed, ‘but he’d been fretting to get into action himself – this was his life.’ McLuskey felt that Mayne was a man who could only live to the full in the open air. ‘He looked awkward in the mess, or anywhere indoors,’ he added. ‘Outside, all his awkwardness fell away.’1

  Mayne told Fraser that he had only decided to drop to Houndsworth at the last minute. His plan had been to visit Ian Fenwick with Gain in the Orléans forest, sixty miles further north. The previous day he had signalled Fenwick for drop-zone coordinates. Fenwick had sent them, but then advised him to cancel the drop. Moor Park had subsequently lost comms with Gain, and Mayne was worried that the op had been compromised. Fraser couldn’t help him, as none of the SAS teams was in direct contact.

  Fraser gave Mayne a sitrep on the Houndsworth operation. Fraser was now the single most experienced operator in the SAS apart from Mayne himself, and the animosity between them had long since vanished. No one cared if he was gay. His squadron sergeant-major, the blunt-spoken Reg Seekings, said that he used to think that Fraser was ‘scared’ before an operation, and felt he had to keep an eye on him. He had stopped doing that a long time ago. Now, he rated him as one of the best soldiers he had ever known.

  Padre McLuskey noticed a certain similarity between Fraser and Mayne, despite the fact that Mayne was by far the more powerful personality. They had, he thought, the same gift for making the necessary decision instantly. ‘Both had the same intuitive knowledge of where to go and what to do when there was trouble,’ he commented. ‘Both appeared to be careless at times, but each had a feel for the essential … with Bill and Paddy I was never inclined to worry … when it came to soldiering in their own type of warfare, they had a good deal in common.’2 It might have been this similarity that had prevented Mayne from making Fraser second-in-command of the Regiment. The honour had gone to Capt. Harry Poat, the ex-tomato-grower from Guernsey.

  Houndsworth had been in place since D-Day, when its recce party, under Lts. Ian Wellsted and Ian Stuart, had dropped in with Jedburgh Team Harry. The advance party had been inserted four days later. Apart from Fraser himself and a couple of other SAS Originals, Cooper and Seekings, the advance group consisted of fourteen signallers of F Squadron GHQ Liaison Regiment, known as Phantom.

  The SAS had its own organic W/T ops, but the Phantoms were there to ensure close comms with TAC HQ at Moor Park. Phantom used MCR 1 sets powered by a hand-generator. While one man turned the wheel, the operator transmitted by TG – Morse code – with a one-time pad to encrypt messages. Some men were issued with an individual Jedset, the eighteen-inch-long receiver-component of the MCR 1, with a thirty-six-hour battery. The Jedset was designed so that the men could tune into the BBC Forces Network, known as ‘Sabu’, and receive simple instructions in code allotted to their call-signs. It was not, their instructors had warned them fiercely, ‘for listening to Vera Lynn’. SAS units were also equipped with an S-Phone, a walkie-talkie with a ten-mile range for ground-to-air contact, and a Eureka beacon – a six-kilo portable homing system for drop-zones, with a fifty-mile range. As a last resort, the teams had a pair of homing pigeons, trained to carry messages encrypted on rice paper in capsules on their legs.

  Three more Houndsworth sticks under Johnny Wiseman, Alex Muirhead and Scotsman Lt. Leslie Cairns, an ex-Gunner, took off on 17 June. All three aircraft missed the DZ. The first two turned back, but Cairns’s plane vanished and his sixteen-man stick was lost.

  Wiseman and Muirhead tried again four days later, together with a third stick commanded by Captain Roy Bradford, an ex-Devon Auxiliary Units officer, and accompanied by the Regiment’s medical officer, Captain Mike McReady, and padre Fraser McLuskey. The drops suffered two casualties – SAS vet, ex-ME Commando man Sgt. Fred ‘Chalky’ White crashed through the roof of a farm and was paralysed, and Trooper Bill Burgess broke a leg. Fraser told Mayne that his A Squadron boys had bumped the railway no fewer than twenty-two times. Before the first consignment of jeeps was dropped, though, his squads had operated with the local Maquis cell, Bernard, hitting German troops and convoys.

  On 24 June, a seven-man troop under Alex Muirhead, with fifteen partisans, had laid an ambush on the road between the Morvan’s chief town, Château-Chinon, and Montsauche Les-Settons. The ambush-party included Cooper, Wellsted, L.Cpl. John ‘Nobby’ Noble, Royal Army Service Corps, L.Cpl. Frank ‘Silvo’ Sylvester, Wiltshire Regiment, Trooper Pete Middleton and a Yugoslav-born Free French sergeant named Zellic, attached from 3 SAS as a linguist.

  Muirhead chose the ambush-site carefully. ‘The place selected was an excellent one,’ Cooper recalled, ‘as there was a gentle incline which meant that large lorries would have to change gear and slow down. On the western side there was deep forest and on the opposite side of the r
oad, open fields.’3 There was a blind bend a little further along the road. Beyond it, Wellsted, an ex-Royal Tank Regiment officer whom Mayne had poached from the Airborne, stretched piano wire from tree to tree to decapitate motorcyclists outriding the convoy.

  The ‘bomber’ group, led by Maquis mechanic ‘Roger’, armed with Gammon bombs, concealed themselves behind a pile of cut pit-props where a logging track hit the road. The rest of the Maquis, under their chief, ‘Bernard’, fanned out in the forest either side. Cooper, Zellic, Noble, Middleton and Muirhead sited two Bren-guns on the slope overlooking the junction. It was, said Cooper, ‘a marvellous killing-ground’.4

  The convoy came into view at about 1640 hours, led, as expected, by a motorcyclist, followed by a couple of three-tonners, two civilian cars, and a light armoured vehicle bringing up the rear. There were at least fifty soldiers in the trucks, most of them ‘Grey’ Russians – ex-Soviet Red Army prisoners who had volunteered for service with the Wehrmacht. To the SAS-men and the Maquis, they were all Boche.

  Wellsted and Sylvester were proned-out in undergrowth with face-veils over them, waiting patiently to behead their motorcyclist. Wellsted heard a heavy truck change gear on the incline. An instant later, he recalled, there came the ‘hellish melody of chattering Brens’ as the gun-groups opened fire, followed by the ‘unmistakable roar of a [Gammon] bomb’.5