The Regiment

by Michael Asher

  Melot was waiting for them on the DZ with partisans from Maquis Chevrier, a well-disciplined unit mostly made up of ex-regular French soldiers. Within minutes of landing, Melot and a plump, dark-haired Maquis girl had splinted Harrison’s broken finger with a lightweight file from his own escape kit. In the next few days, another eighteen men and five jeeps arrived.

  Melot’s instructions from Mayne were to ensure that the Maquis kept quiet in the lead-up to Transfigure. This proved difficult, because he was unable to reveal details of the forthcoming operation. On 18 August, though, everything changed. Melot got word from Moor Park that Transfigure had been cancelled. The Americans had broken through at the Cotentin peninsula, rendering the Airborne plan obsolete. As Harrison’s jeeps passed through local villages over the next days, the SAS-men were taken for liberators, fêted and garlanded by the villagers. After running unexpectedly into the forward battalion of the US 4 Armoured Division, they loaded up with ‘K Rations’. They returned to the Kipling base at Merry-Vaux on 22 August. Bob Melot was astonished to hear that the Americans had arrived.

  That afternoon, Harrison’s second-in-command, Lt. Stewart Richardson, Royal Tank Regiment, discovered that one of the pintle-mounts for his rear Vickers K was cracked. He asked Harrison if he could drive to the neighbouring village of Aillant to get it welded. Harrison agreed, but decided to accompany him in a second jeep. Stewart’s driver was Trooper Tony Brearton, another ex-RTR-man, and Harrison took with him L.Cpl. John ‘Curly’ Hall, Yorkshire Hussars, who had been with him at Termoli. The fifth man was an interpreter, Fauchois, attached from 4 SAS.

  They roared out of the forest purlieus into the cultivated land – a flat patchwork quilt of blond wheat-fields and green trees in majestic leaf. Scanning the way ahead, Harrison noticed a guff of black smoke hanging over the village of Les Ormes, not far away. As they moved forward, the pall of smoke grew thicker. Harrison stopped at a crossroads a hundred yards from the village and heard the distinct chuckle of small-arms fire. Seconds later, an old lady wobbled up the track from the village on a bicycle, tears streaming down her face. She told Fauchois that the ‘Boche’ had occupied the village and were torching it. She was on her way to alert the Maquis in Aillant. When Harrison inquired how many Boche there were, she answered that there might be two or three hundred. ‘Too many for you, Monsieur,’ she said.

  Harrison told her that they would inform the Maquis, but after she had gone, he realized that by the time the partisans arrived, it would be too late to save the village. The SAS-men held a quick powwow. ‘I say attack,’ said Fauchois. ‘We’ll have the element of surprise,’ Harrison said, ‘and should be able to shoot our way out of anything we meet. The odds are something like fifty-to-one but I hope they’ll get such a shock that we’ll pull it off.’ The others agreed.1

  Harrison gripped the front twin-Vickers. Hall gunned gas. The two jeeps fried rubber, spooned dirt, shrieked into the village square with Union Jacks up. A Waffen SS officer in field-grey stood in the road, pistol in hand. Harrison saw his eyes go big with shock, and squeezed twin-triggers. The Vickers K rasped, the German lurched and fell. The pistol clattered into the gutter. Harrison took in houses, an orchard, a church, a truck, two staff cars, a bunch of Boche in field-grey. He stood up in his seat, pulled iron, traversing the Germans. Twin-Vickers streaked, incendiary rounds socked metal, chugged petrol tanks. Cars and trucks threw up steel shards, spurls of flame and smoke. Germans twitched, lurched, spattered blood, dropped Schmeissers, hurdled through smoke, and clawed for cover. ‘Many of them died in those first few seconds in front of the church,’ Harrison said, ‘lit by the flickering flames of the burning vehicles.’2

  Harrison screamed at Hall to reverse, but the jeep caromed on. It stopped smack in the middle of the square, thirty yards from the church. The Germans were recovering. Schmeissers and rifles chirred out from cover, rounds scraping air. There were German faces at the windows of a nearby high building.

  Harrison dekkoed Hall and saw his driver face-down on the steering-wheel, pulsing blood. He toed the starter. The engine was dead. He squeezed twin-triggers again. Nothing happened. Both guns were jammed. He pivoted into the back of the jeep, grabbed the Bren. It popped a burst and stuck hard. German rounds wheezed, spiked bodywork. He vaulted to the single Vickers on the driver’s side, double-tapped. The gun bleared flame twice and stopped. ‘A dud jeep and three jammed guns,’ Harrison thought. ‘Hell, what a mess!’3

  He had almost forgotten Richardson, until he realized that covering fire was whomping over his shoulder. He flashed a glance, saw the other jeep halted by a wall, took in the twin-Vickers yomping, Richardson cracking .45 calibre rounds from his Colt at the Germans in the windows. He grabbed his M1 carbine and pumped off fifteen .30 calibre slugs at the enemy. He switched mags painfully with his splinted hand, and fired again. ‘I fired whenever I saw movement,’ he said. ‘A German made a dash for safety. I fired from the hip and he pitched forward on to his face.’4

  He lugged Hall’s body from the jeep, dragged him to the centre of the square. A shooter appeared in a doorway to his right. He fired one-handed, slapped the enemy back. He kept on dragging Hall’s body as 9mm bullets rasped and croaked around him. He saw brilliant tracer-trails like lightning streaks homing in, dancing like a boxer as if he could dodge them. ‘Look out!’ someone bawled in English. ‘The orchard on your left!’

  Harrison saw Germans doubling towards him through the trees. He sprinted for the orchard wall, crouched down, sprayed fire. He ran back to the jeep. He saw Fauchois trying to hump Hall’s body to the second jeep, and yelled at the Frenchman to stop. Skulking behind the jeep, he lobbed off more rounds. Suddenly it came to him that it was his wedding anniversary. ‘Lord, my wife will be furious if I get myself killed today of all days,’ he thought.

  His hand kicked, spurted blood. He had taken a hit. The Germans saw it and buzzed thick fire. The covering tattoo behind him faltered. He told himself to keep shooting. He fumbled for a mag with his bloody hand and clicked it in place shakily. The carbine was slick with his blood. He shot at a German who had emerged from the orchard. The carbine jammed. The German’s rifle clacked. A slug zipped his knuckles.

  He felt for the butt of his Colt .45. It wasn’t there. He wrangled the bloody mag out of the carbine. More German rounds whipped and clanked. He ejected cartridges, cleared the stoppage, got the fresh mag in. He lifted the carbine. A jeep engine growled behind him. ‘Dash for it!’ someone screamed. He turned and played hopscotch towards the other jeep, still whacking off .30 calibre rounds. He made the jeep. It was already moving as he jumped for it. Hands helped him in. The motor shrieked. Jeep wheels screwed, roiling dust. At the rear Vickers, Fauchois sent a goodbye tattoo splurging across the square. Tony Brearton stamped gas, the jeep spurted forward, careened round a bend, plunged into trees.

  Back at Kipling base in Merry-Vaux, Harrison reported to Melot that Hall was dead. After dark, Richardson led a recce back to Les Ormes. He returned with the news that the Germans had skedaddled. Harrison’s patrol had come on the SS-men in the act of executing twenty villagers. The first two had been shot a moment before they had whaled into the square, but the other eighteen had run for it when the SAS started shooting. Richardson had seen Hall’s body, placed in a coffin by the locals, next to their two dead hostages. He was able to report that during their action that day they had snagged a truck and two cars, and sixty enemy dead and wounded. Harrison was feeling bad about Hall, who had been with him ever since he had first joined 1 SAS in North Africa. ‘The news [Richardson] brought back gave us some consolation,’ he wrote.5

  There was no time to rest. That night a villager rushed into the camp to say that a big convoy was making a beeline for Kipling base. Two jeeps went out to set up an ambush. Back at camp, with both hands bandaged, Harrison waited for gunfire in vain. To his surprise, the two jeeps returned with a string of vehicles behind them. Moments later, Harrison found himself face to face with Major Tony Marsh, Duke of Corn
wall’s Light Infantry, C Squadron’s OC. ‘Hello Harry. Hear you’ve been getting yourself in a mess,’ Marsh said. Harrison was surprised – he’d thought Transfigure was off. Marsh confirmed that it had been cancelled. Instead of being inserted by glider, he’d begged a ride on a fleet of US Dakotas. His men had driven through American lines from Orléans, and had bumped a German column on the way.

  Four days later, Marsh instructed Harrison to drive back to Orléans, pick up the rest of C Squadron, and guide them to Kipling base. As he passed through a local village, Harrison’s jeep almost collided with a black Citroën. The car stopped, and out stepped Paddy Mayne, who invited him into one of the houses for lunch and a chat. Marsh and Melot joined them there later.

  Since leaving Gain, Mayne had been weaving in and out of Allied lines, visiting SAS operations. Harrison had last seen his commanding officer at Fairford, but found that his experience under fire had changed his perspective. ‘When I first met [Mayne] he was Zeus. He was a god,’ said Harrison, ‘… [Now] he was just one of the gods … Zeus on earth.’6

  58. ‘Why don’t we just fuck off quietly because we’re not going to do any good here’

  Another ‘Zeus on earth’ was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. The British had tried and failed to take him out in Libya in 1941. They tried again in July 1944, when Gaff, a six-man unit of 2 SAS, was inserted between Chartres and Rambouillet, tasked to infiltrate the château Rommel was using at La Roche-Guyon, west of Paris. Their orders were to kidnap or kill him. The Gaff commander, Lt. Jack ‘Ramon’ Lee, was a Franco-American who had served with 62 Commando. One of his men was English, but the other four were attached from 3 SAS, and, like Lee himself, ex-Foreign Legionnaires.

  The intel on Rommel’s location was sound. It had come from Bill Fraser at Houndsworth via his Maquis contacts. Fraser was desperate to have a crack at Rommel himself, but was overruled by Rory McLeod, who insisted that the op should be launched from the UK by 2 SAS. Like the earlier 11 Commando attempt, though, Gaff was redundant before it started. Eight days earlier, Rommel had suffered a fractured skull when his car crashed during a strafing run by RAF Spitfires on the Vimoutiers road. He would never see active service again.

  Six days after Harrison’s shoot-out in Les Ormes, Mayne arrived back at Fraser’s camp in the Morvan, with Marsh and Melot. He told Fraser that the Allied front line was now fluid. The Normandy break-out had been successful. Three days earlier, Paris had been liberated. Orléans had also been taken, and Kipling was enveloped by the advancing Allied cohorts. Mayne proposed to move Marsh’s C Squadron boys to the Morvan, and pull Fraser’s A Squadron out. They had done a superb job – Houndsworth was the most successful of SAS ops in France – but they had been in the field for three months and Mayne reckoned they needed a rest. German divisions were streaming towards the frontier. There would be less scope for SAS dirty-work as the Allies advanced, and C Squadron would convert to a counter-intelligence role, in Holland and Belgium, once the front line had passed them by. All other 1 SAS teams would be extracted.

  Next day Marsh returned to Kipling base, where he met Derrick Harrison, who had guided in two dozen jeeps carrying the main C Squadron party. Five hours later they were in the deep wooded valleys of the Morvan. Marsh set up his own camp, a mile and a half from Brassy. On 1 September he dispatched two jeeps under Lt. Peter ‘Monty’ Goddard to bring back a trailer of three-inch mortar bombs, damaged and left behind the previous day.

  Goddard, an ex-Royal Army Pay Corps officer and former chartered accountant, had never been in action before, but was keen to have a bash at the Hun. Because of his lack of experience, Marsh sent with him his veteran squadron sergeant-major, Bob Lilley, and another SAS veteran, Sgt. Bob Lowson, the man who had ferried mortar bombs for Muirhead at Termoli. The fourth man was Trooper ‘Titch’ Howes.

  That night, Harrison and Marsh were woken up by the groan of a jeep engine. Big Bob Lilley loped out of the shadows, squatted down with them, and lit a cigarette. He said that Goddard had been killed. At Tannay, they’d been having a quiet lunch in a café with some Maquis, when artillery fire had started up nearby. A German column was, said Lilley, ‘leathering shite out of this chateau on the hill’ – a Maquis base. Goddard agreed to help the partisans ambush the German column. The plan was that the Maquis would attack from the front, while the SAS crew hit the enemy from the rear. Lilley was with Howe in the leading jeep when they turned a bend and saw the column stretching away in front of them. The last enemy vehicle was a truck carrying a 3.7cm flak gun.

  Shells whooshed and crumped into the distant building. Goddard’s jeep pulled up alongside him, and the ex-accountant announced that he was going to capture the gun. Lilley scanned the column, and saw no sign of the Maquis. ‘Look, sir,’ he said, ‘why don’t we just fuck off quietly because we’re not going to do any good here.’1

  Goddard insisted. He pulled on a pair of leather gloves, and hoiked the single Vickers K from the driver’s side of Lilley’s jeep. ‘You cover me,’ he told the sergeant-major. Lilley unclipped the Bren from behind his seat, and lay prone on the verge. He popped off covering fire. Goddard sprinted down a ditch, his Vickers cackling, manically spliffing tracer. Lilley whacked bursts. The Germans clocked Goddard, and enfiladed him before he had got within a hundred yards. Lilley said he’d been hit so many times his body was carved to shreds. ‘I suppose I should have gone and got myself killed but I didn’t want to,’ he said later. ‘I’d given up trying to be heroic by that stage. It was terrible, a waste of life.’2

  Goddard had ignored the ‘old operator’s’ advice, and got whacked out. Though Goddard received no posthumous decoration, his action demonstrated that the standard of SAS recruits had been diluted in the desperate quest to fill the ranks. Goddard, like Ian Fenwick, had broken Mayne’s axiom of confidence without rashness.

  Brian Franks thought that some of the new SAS recruits shouldn’t have been there at all. ‘They were either so scared as to be useless or so confident that they were extremely careless,’ he wrote. ‘Most of these men … were clearly not of the right type and hadn’t had sufficient training … the experienced men were good and could almost always be guaranteed to get away with it.’3

  The Germans were fighting their way back home, with US divisions in hot pursuit. The SAS job was almost done. On 7 September, Frederick Browning broadcast a message to SAS troops, declaring that they had done more to hasten the destruction of the German Fifth and Seventh Armies than any other single effort in the army. ‘To say that you have done your job well is to put it mildly,’ he said. ‘You have done magnificently.’4 For his command and coordination of SAS ops, Paddy Mayne was awarded his third DSO, and the Croix de Guerre with palm. ‘It was entirely due to Lt. Col. Mayne’s fine leadership and example,’ ran the citation, ‘and his utter disregard of danger, that the unit was able to achieve such striking successes.’5

  Some 2 SAS ops would stay in the field until October. One of these was Loyton, commanded by Brian Franks himself. The Loyton advance party had gone in on 1 September, with the intention of harassing the retreating German columns in the Vosges area until the Americans arrived. Franks later claimed fifteen enemy vehicles destroyed, one train derailed, and fifty Germans killed – a poor return for the hundred SAS-men involved. Loyton was an ambitious strategic operation that might have worked had it not been sent in too late. As it was, Franks lost two men killed and twenty-eight captured, all of whom were murdered in cold blood by the Germans. The inhabitants of the town of Moussey, who had offered every possible assistance to the SAS, suffered heavy reprisals. Over two hundred of them were herded into concentration camps from which most did not return.

  Loyton would not be extracted until 19 October. By then Houndsworth was long over. Leaving their jeeps for Marsh’s crew, the A Squadron boys had hared off towards Orléans in a motley convoy of requisitioned civilian cars powered by gasogene. Using side roads they dodged through the German lines. ‘The first indication of Allied troops,’ Johnny Coop
er wrote, ‘was an American military policeman on point duty … the MP was dumbfounded and let us through.’6

  At the airbase, the Houndsworth team found a squadron of USAF Liberators disgorging tons of flour for the people of Paris. Reg Seekings, the 9mm round still lodged in his neck, went off to see the base commander, who turned out to be a Texan weapons enthusiast. Seekings offered him a Bren-gun in return for places on the Liberators going back to the UK. The USAF-man said they could hitch a ride on the aircraft leaving the next morning.

  They took off through galleries of cloud and watched the sun strobing the French countryside beneath them. Ian Wellsted was shocked at the devastation he saw – villages bombed and shelled to rubble, the frames of wrecked aircraft amid patches of burnt sienna, reminding him of ‘moths that had singed their wings at a candle’s flame’.7 The battlefields of France gave way to the deep azure of the Channel, then to the cliffs of England – green meadows, dwarf cows, toy houses. ‘How beautiful it looked in the sun, and how peaceful,’ Wellsted wrote. ‘… It was good to be back in English skies.’8

  59. ‘In the face of enemy machine-gun fire’

  On the morning of 9 April 1945, Paddy Mayne’s signaller, David Danger, received an urgent wireless message. It came from Cpl. Eddie Ralphs, the man who had scragged nine Germans at Termoli with his Bren. Ralphs was pinned down in a ditch with other B Squadron men, and his OC, Major Dick Bond, had just been shot dead by a German sniper. ‘Paddy almost blew up,’ recalled Billy Hull, Royal Ulster Rifles, Mayne’s driver. ‘[He] just kept saying, “Poor Dick, poor Dick”.’1

  They were crossing the flatlands of north Germany, wooded fens, criss-crossed with ditches and canals, that made tough going for their newly-armoured jeeps. Heading for the city of Oldenburg en route to the U-Boat docks at Wilhelmshaven, B and C Squadrons, 1 SAS, were pathfinding on the left flank of 4 Canadian Armoured Division, whose tanks were rumbling far behind. The SAS had taken over from an armoured recce squadron the previous day. For the German ops, they had left their SAS insignia behind. They were disguised in black berets with Royal Tank Regiment badges, and had even been issued with RTR paybooks. By now, the fate of the missing Bulbasket men was suspected, and the murder of the Garstin stick known from the survivors, Jones and Vaculik. The SAS knew what would happen to them if they were captured, and their identity revealed.