The Lost Band of Brothers

by Tom Keene

  Leslie Prout remembered watching Blake Glanville, the man who had taught them all to sail but who, with a wife waiting at home and with his age against him, elected not to accompany his boat to Africa: ‘With many waves and exhortations the Maid gradually disappeared behind Old Harry, watched by a silent Blake, who never took his eyes off his beloved ship until she was out of sight.’6 One of those watching and waving ‘again and again’ from the shore at Sandbanks was Gus’ aunt. Concerns about security, evidently, did not extend to the next of kin of the autocratic unit commander.

  Maid Honor turned away into a strong wind and battled her way westwards through heaving seas. Most of the crew were seasick. At Dartmouth March-Phillipps put ashore two of the passage crewmen, a Danish navigator whose work was not up to scratch and another Dane he described as ‘a chronic puker’. He also carried out repairs to the ship’s two-pounder, although why these were necessary so soon after departure when everything should have been in perfect working order remains unclear. Maid Honor departed Dartmouth two days later. Her new, blue, cloth-bound ‘Log Book For Yachts’ recorded: ‘12 August 1941. Left Dartmouth at 6 pm, covered thirty miles, average speed five knots.’ They were on their way.

  The two Danes joined Appleyard and Lt Leslie Prout at Oban where they boarded SS Strathmore for speedy passage under naval escort to the British colony of Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa, arriving there at the height of the wet season at the end of August 1941.

  When they arrived Appleyard and his small team began preparing the main camp for the rest of the party. Freetown itself – with a rainfall of 9 inches a day just before he arrived – was ‘very one-eyed, ramshackle, and quite an outpost of Empire’. Nevertheless, he appeared to have soon found an ideal, secluded site for their camp on Lumley Beach 9 miles outside Freetown at the end of Cape Sierra Leone. There, cooled by a sea breeze, free from mosquitoes and in a tropical bay with clumps of palm, coconut and banana trees nearby, they put up a few canvas bell tents and persuaded the Royal Navy to erect some wooden huts for the stores and more explosive supplies that were now en route aboard Maid Honor. Appleyard even arranged for the officers to mess with the local Royal Artillery unit. By the end of September he was in Lagos further around the coast towards the Equator where, one may presume, he made contact with SOE’s local agent and Head of Station Lt Col Louis Franck. While he was there:

  I got the best piece of news I have ever had in my life, that is, that Graham and M-P and the others have arrived in Freetown after an ‘excellent’ voyage. Not having seen any of them yet (they arrived two days after I left Freetown) I don’t know any more about their voyage than that. But I was enormously thrilled and literally shouted with joy!7

  Appleyard hurried back to Freetown:

  It was grand to arrive here and find Graham and Gus and the others. They had a magnificent trip with no particular excitements and a great deal of interest. Gus had found Graham a magnificent First Mate and was full of praise for his tireless energy and his seamanship. They were very warm at times, their record temperature being when the thermometer in the galley went off the scale at 135 degrees F! However, in spite of such things they were pretty comfortable, fed well and had plenty of drinking water, and a lot of flying fish which landed on board each night.

  The first week out from Devon they had battled strong winds and big seas with Maid Honor leaking continuously. As the seas eased down on 18 August, March-Phillipps recorded in their newly purchased Log: ‘Time to clear ship and dry everything. Much needed.’ A few days later he added: ‘Monday, August 25 (after 1, 267 miles by patent log) sighted Madeira. Good landfall.’8 Here they put in for water, fruit and eggs. Fresh trade winds then pushed them south and, in the first five days out of Funchal, Maid Honor sailed 2,000 miles in her first twenty days at sea before the trade winds began to ease down. Then, on the edge of the Doldrums, it was found that the engine had rusted solid with seawater and had to be stripped down. The hero of the day was ‘Buzz’ Perkins, who earned this accolade from his exacting, short-tempered Skipper. The case of the engine appeared hopeless but he removed the cylinder heads, fitted new gaskets, reground the valves with home-made valve paste, and unstuck the pistons, which had rusted solid in twenty-four hours, by removing the big end bearings and reassembling the engine, again all in a heavy swell and with a temperature of 120°F in the engine room. He has proved the most reliable man on the ship, even though the youngest by several years.9

  ‘Buzz’ Perkins – saddled with the nickname from childhood because his sister pronounced ‘brother’ as ‘buzzer’ – was just 17 years old. His technical triumph was short-lived for shortly thereafter they were plagued by further engine problems. Their progress south slowed to a miserable 1,000 miles in sixteen days and at one stage left them dangerously becalmed 300 miles north of the Cape Verde Islands. Dangerous, because it was near Vichy-controlled Dakar in September 1940, during Operation Menace, that General de Gaulle and the British Royal Navy had conspicuously failed in their attempt to occupy the port. Shots had been fired, British battleships and cruisers damaged, and Vichy French ships sunk before the British withdrew. It was the second time British units had fired on their erstwhile allies: in July the Royal Navy opened fire on French ships anchored at Mers-el-Kabir off what was then French Algeria to prevent French warships falling into German hands, leaving 1,300 Frenchmen dead. The Royal Navy had not been forgiven, and nor had the allies. If Maid Honor had been spotted and then intercepted by the Vichy French off Dakar, she could have expected a most hostile reception. However, she slipped past, silent and unnoticed, to arrive in Freetown on 20 September, six weeks and 3,185 miles after leaving England. They had been lucky: at no time had they seen, or been seen by, an enemy aircraft, submarine or surface vessel. The only vessel that had ordered them to heave to had been a Royal Navy battleship, HMS Barham, which had taken part in Operation Menace, the thwarted attack on Dakar almost exactly a year earlier. Now she was living on borrowed time. In less than two months 841 of her crew of 1,184 would die in a spectacular explosion after three torpedo strikes fired at close range by U-321. With no way of guessing the fate that awaited her, on this occasion she stopped abeam Maid Honor, guns trained, and sent over a boarding party. Having established who they were, and then offered hot baths, fresh fruit and good wishes, they had sent Maid Honor on her clandestine way. When she had first appeared, unrecognised, hull down on the horizon, Maid Honor cleared away for action. Had HMS Barham been the enemy, then Maid Honor and her crew would, quite literally, have gone down with all guns firing. Standing Order No 5, written in longhand by March-Phillipps when Hayes assumed temporary command of Maid Honor during March-Phillipps’ absence, stated: ‘Avoid a fight if humanly possible, but resist capture to the last [author’s italics].’ Now he wrote pithily in the ship’s log shortly after meeting HMS Barham: ‘4.30pm. Hove to. Boarded and questioned. English. D.G.’ The last two letters are Latin: Deo Gratias (God be thanked). If that warship had been the enemy it would have been a slaughter. And March-Phillipps knew it.10

  The remainder of Maid Honor Force, who had neither sailed with March-Phillipps nor come out aboard the SS Strathmore with Appleyard and Prout, arrived quietly in Freetown, dressed in civilian clothes, in early October after completing the SOE sabotage and explosives course in the Western Highlands. That brought the full complement of Maid Honor Force to thirteen. Unlucky for some.

  Maid Honor may have sailed triumphantly into the still waters of Freetown harbour and rattled out her anchor chain quarter of a mile off the camp at Lumley Beach, but around her there now swirled undercurrents of significant political turbulence and sensitivity. Their origins lay in a matter of simple geography: the British Crown Colonies of Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Nigeria, British Cameroon and the Proctorate of Gambia rimmed the Gulf of Guinea and the eastern South Atlantic and were surrounded by the French colonies of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa to the north and east. Most of that vast territory now owed at least token alleg
iance to pro-Nazi, Vichy France, although French Equatorial Africa had declared itself for de Gaulle and the Free French. There were Spanish territories nearby also. If Vichy France and Franco’s pro-German Spain were to enter the war, then Britain’s much smaller African territories – including the vital staging port of Freetown – would become immediately threatened. Any incident, large or small, could be enough to trigger an end to the fragile non-belligerent status of both Spain and Vichy France. The British Admiralty and the Foreign Office recognised the need to handle the region with kid gloves. Both senior officers in theatre concurred: there were to be no ‘big bangs’ and neither army General Sir George Giffard, Commander-in-Chief West Africa, nor Vice Admiral Algernon Willis, the Royal Navy’s Command-in-Chief, South Atlantic, would encourage or support anything which threatened the precarious political balance. Giffard, indeed, had imposed what SOE referred to as a ‘ban on bangs’11 and took precisely the same view of SOE’s proposed activities in West Africa as SIS did of SOE’s ambitions for the English Channel. In West Africa, however, SOE’s anger and frustration glowed like a flame in the dark. An undated Most Secret memo of that time states:

  It is felt that the G.O.C.-in-C should be asked to justify his attitude towards SOE … He has enunciated and through his right of veto, applied a policy of passivity which conflicts with that of H.M.G. in sending an SOE mission to West Africa and authorising it to take action along certain lines. […]

  It is clearly necessary for SOE to work in the closest harmony with the military. The idea that the price of harmony should be a complete negation of SOE functions is farcical. It is no doubt reasonable that Giffard should hope to preserve absolute calm within the borders of the four colonies. SOE however is an aggressive organisation which fails in its purpose when the overriding consideration is passivity and passive defence.12

  Yet SOE did have plans to disrupt that comfortable status quo in West Africa. Soon after he arrived at SOE Headquarters in November 1940, Brigadier Colin Gubbins had set up ‘W’ (West Africa) Section based in Lagos, the capital of the British colony of Nigeria. Its head of station – a Belgian named Louis Franck – flew out to Lagos in December and set to work. His target area was all of those Vichy French territories to the north and east of Nigeria. His mission? To do what he could to support the Free French: to change the loyalties of the people who lived there and to swing their allegiance away from Pétain to General de Gaulle. At his disposal was propaganda, coercion, subversion, blackmail and the use of ‘ungentlemanly’ warfare – sabotage – those ‘bangs’ so recently vetoed by General Giffard. Franck was 32, married with children and a former banker. He spoke fluent English, French, Dutch, Flemish and German. Recruited by the War Office in May 1940, he had been sent to Dunkirk as a special courier to the King of Belgium.13 Like March-Phillipps and Appleyard, he had shortly afterwards been evacuated through Dunkirk and returned to England where, unsurprisingly, he had come to the attention of the fledgling SOE. Franck was now also code-named ‘W’ after his station and began feeding information back to London by wireless. Some of this involved the tiny volcanic island of Fernando Po (now called Bioko), a part of Spanish Guinea tucked away in the Bight of Biafra (now the Bight of Bonny). Some 20 miles from the mainland of what is now Equatorial Guinea, and just 44 miles long and 20 miles wide, Fernando Po boasted a shallow-water harbour, Santa Isabel. It was this port – and its contents – that warmed the air waves between Lagos and SOE Headquarters in London during that summer of 1941.

  One of those who Louis Franck relied upon for information was the British Vice Consul in Fernando Po, Colin Michie. His office overlooked the port. On 10 June 1940, Italy had entered the war on the side of Germany. That same day an Italian cargo liner of 7,651grt, the Duchessa d’Aosta, had sought sanctuary in Fernando Po’s harbour, ostensibly because her master feared capture on the high seas by their new enemy, the Royal Navy. She had been moored there, 50 yards from the western end of the quay, ever since. Her master had been recalled to Spain but her crew of forty to fifty men – and one woman, a 55-year-old stewardess – remained on board, incarcerated in port.

  Michie sent a series of detailed intelligence reports back to Lagos for onward transmission via Franck to SOE in London. He managed to obtain details of the cargo manifest14 – wool, copra, hides, copper and coffee – and reported that her ship’s radio still appeared to be working, suggesting that she appeared capable, at least, of sending reports of British shipping movements back to Italy and Germany. Rumours that she might also be carrying armaments were fuelled by the acting Chief Officer’s refusal to produce for inspection the top page of the cargo manifest. If there was nothing to hide, ran the argument, why not produce the missing page? It did not appear. By January 1941 Michie was reporting back to Franck that two small German vessels had also now sought shelter in Santa Isabel, the Likomba, a German tug, and the Bibundi, a German diesel-driven barge. At the end of August 1941 Lagos cabled London that Michie had found it impossible to bribe the Captain or the crew of the Duchessa d’Aosta and ‘it was therefore suggested to send a “Maid Honor” party with a canoe at night to immobilise the ship and at the same time to try to bring back the tug. An attempt would be made to put the blame on anti-Axis Spaniards.’15

  In London, Michie’s news and Franck’s stream of reports caused interest and not a little consternation. Setting aside the missing page of cargo manifest and the possibility, however remote, that the Duchessa d’Aosta might be carrying armaments and using her radio to transmit shipping movement details to Italy, her very presence in Fernando Po represented, to SOE London, both a challenge and a threat. A challenge because, though she lay at anchor within a neutral harbour, both she and the German tug Likomba represented valuable trophies of war that, if seized rather than sunk or immobilised, could augment Britain’s rapidly depleting shipping fleet. And a threat because, although she sheltered under Spanish ‘neutrality’ laws and should by international maritime law remain impounded for the duration of hostilities, that Spanish ‘neutrality’ was extremely lopsided: the Spanish Governor of Fernando Po, Capt. Victor Sanchez-Diez, was known to be ‘violently pro-Nazi,’ reported Michie.16 Were Duchessa d’Aosta to decide to up-anchor and sail – perhaps to support German or Italian U-boats out in the South Atlantic – it was almost certain Spain would do nothing to prevent her leaving. It was equally clear that there was little that Britain could do to stop her … or was there?

  By early January 1941 Brigadier Gubbins, ‘Caesar’ – Lt Col Julius Hanau, his deputy on matters relating to West Africa – and Head of Lagos Station ‘W’, Louis Franck, had begun considering ways in which the potential threat posed by the Italian passenger liner might be countered, especially as it appeared that the Spanish authorities in Fernando Po were increasing both the armaments that overlooked the harbour and the size of the Spanish garrison committed to defend it. Options included simply blowing her up or boarding her in port at night, capturing her crew, starting her engines and simply steaming out of harbour into international waters. In May SOE sent a further four officers out to West Africa to support the Franck mission in the field and to train black African recruits in the demolition and sabotage skills devised and perfected in the SOE special schools in the misty highlands of Scotland. In the following weeks there were more detailed reports from Michie in his office overlooking the harbour: the tug Likomba had been noticed taking fuel on board – perhaps she was getting ready for sea; the Duchessa d’Aosta was taking on fresh drinking water; she had painted the top of her funnel red; her radio was not prevented from transmitting and had been sending messages to a German/Swiss shipping company in Las Palmas. Straws in the wind. All these little signs could presage departure – or nothing at all. In London, SOE formed the view that all three vessels in Port Isobel – the Duchessa d’Aosta, the German tug Likomba and the German barge Bibundi – now represented what they considered a ‘supply fleet in being’ and asked ‘W’ – Louis Franck in Lagos – for his ideas as to how they mig
ht move against all three ships. He replied on 12 July that, given the present situation and the ramping up of readiness amongst the Spanish garrison, ‘action was almost impossible’.

  That same day, 12 July 1941, Gubbins met March-Phillipps in London and the two had lunch together. There was a further meeting two days later after which Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, agreed to the relocation of Maid Honor from Poole to West Africa to ‘undertake subversive operations on both land and sea’. Twelve days later Godfrey’s proposal that the now named ‘Maid Honor Force’ should be detached from Poole and sent to West Africa on SOE duty was endorsed by the Admiralty. Five days after that and ten before Maid Honor sailed from Poole for Dartmouth, Admiral Godfrey sent a signal to Admiral Sir William James, Commander-in-Chief Portsmouth, stating that Maid Honor was to be detached from his command and sent to the South Atlantic to ‘carry out such sabotage operations as may be ordered by SOE … No definite project is yet in view, but plans are at present being drawn up for her.’17 In fact, Gubbins had given March-Phillipps ‘a general direction’18 that the crew should be made available for whatever purposes ‘W’ (Franck) might wish, provided always that a reasonable crew was kept available for her at the shortest notice. It was further requested that C-in-C South Atlantic, Admiral Willis, ‘afford this ship any assistance she may require. At the same time, SO2 [SOE] would like to place Maid Honor at the disposal of the Admiral to carry out any operations he may think fit.’ No mention at this stage, then, of any cutting-out operation involving an Italian merchant vessel moored in neutral waters.

  Reading between the lines, it appears likely that the Admiralty gave their approval to Admiral Godfrey’s proposal, not because they supported possible plans to attack enemy shipping in a neutral harbour – such an idea was still in its early stages and unlikely to have been brought before their Lordships in embryonic form – but because his proposal removed the troublesome Maid Honor to distant waters. There may indeed have been discussions as to what she might do when she arrived, but sanctioning a long, slow 3,000-mile sea voyage to West Africa was not at all the same thing as sanctioning clandestine attacks in a neutral port when she got there. It was a distinction that may perhaps have been lost on March-Phillipps in the flurry and excitement of imminent departure.