by Tom Keene
Operation Barricade, though modest, had been an undoubted success. It established precedent, created a point of reference and gave credence, both within SOE and Combined Operations, to a new concept. Had it failed, cross-channel pin-prick raiding by SSRF might have been put back several months, perhaps even cancelled altogether. As it was, Operation Barricade served as a prelude, an appetiser, for what was to come.
†††
What was to come, a fortnight later, after a series of frustrating delays and cancellations due to what became known as ‘Dryad weather’, was Operation Dryad, a raid whose skilful execution, untarnished success, lack of British casualties, audacity and amusing, operational postscript perhaps temporarily blinded those who did not have to brave dark nights in small boats to the intense danger inherent in night raiding. As Peter Kemp put it years later:
There was a tremendous tension before any raid. It was frightening because either you pulled it off without any loss to yourselves or you were inclined to lose the whole party, because if the enemy spotted you coming in you were a sitting duck. And so the actual paddle, the paddling in was very, very tense indeed. And it was essential, of course, to do it without making any sound at all. And that was very frightening.12
Operation Dryad took place on the night of 2–3 September 1942.
Casquets is a group of tide-scoured rocks 6 miles west of Alderney in the Channel Islands and forms part of a sandstone ridge that has proved to be the graveyard of many merchant ships over the centuries. The largest island among these outcrops is 280 yards long and 150 yards wide. From 1724, Casquets had boasted a lighthouse 80 feet tall, with two further distinctive coal-fired stone towers built to prevent confusion with other lighthouses on the French mainland nearby. After the German occupation of the Channel Islands in June 1940, Casquets lighthouse had been turned into a naval signal station manned by a tiny garrison of German troops. Isolated, cut off from the mainland and the possibility of rapid reinforcement, Casquets’ best defence lay in the swirling strength of the 6–7 knot spring tides that tore and swirled around its barren rocks. That same isolation, however, meant that in the summer of 1942, it might have been tailor-made for the attentions of the SSRF. They thought so, too.
The objective of Operation Dryad was very simple: to take prisoners. A secondary objective was to remove whatever code books, documents and naval papers they might find lying around. The raid was to be commanded by March-Phillipps with Appleyard second in command. Also on the raid were Hayes, Lassen and Winter.
Planning for the raid had begun, as usual, at Anderson Manor with all ranks spending hours in the conference room studying charts, aerial photographs and even a large-scale plasticine model of the rock, lighthouse and adjoining buildings. Appleyard carried most of the initial responsibility: it would be up to him to find their way through the heavy swell and fierce tide-race they could expect as they approached the rocks. Casquets guarded its lighthouse well with the Channel Pilot warning mariners: ‘The great rates attained by the tidal stream in the neighbourhood of the Casquets renders approach to them in thick weather hazardous.’13
Having been turned back by fog within a few hundred yards of their objective, bad weather or mechanical breakdown aboard MTB 344 – yet again – repeatedly frustrated their attempts to land. At last, as Appleyard wrote to his parents shortly afterwards, referring to the Casquets raid as ‘another successful little party’, it went ahead: ‘You remember I said that some time ago we went somewhere and were beaten by fog at the last moment and although we knew we were within a few hundred yards of our objective we couldn’t find it? … Well … last Wednesday night, which was the ninth or tenth night on which we have tried this particular job, we got it in the bag.14
As so often with these things, it was the waiting beforehand that the men found difficult: all were highly trained, highly motivated and intelligent. Which meant they also had imagination. Sometimes, that did not help. ‘We spent the morning in the conference room and the afternoon resting,’ wrote Peter Kemp, now on the eve of his first raid:
Although we had the greatest confidence in our commanders and in each other, it was difficult not to contemplate the numerous possibilities of disaster. Once we were in the MTB I should feel all right, but I found this period of waiting very hard to bear. We spent the time between tea and supper in drawing and preparing our equipment. There was plenty of it. I was carrying a tommy-gun with seven magazines, each with twenty rounds, a pair of wire-cutters, two Mills grenades, a fighting knife, a clasp knife, a torch, emergency rations and two half-pound explosive charges for the destruction of the wireless transmitter; on top I had to wear a naval lifebelt, an awkward and constricting garment that might save my life in the water but seemed very likely to lose it for me in action. We wore battle-dress, balaclava helmets and felt-soled boots.15
No mention of blackened faces smeared with soot or cocoa to tone down the gleam of white faces in the darkness: ‘If I am to die on one of these parties,’ March-Phillipps had announced to the men aboard Maid Honor in Africa, ‘I’ll die looking like an Englishman and not like a damned n*****.’16 In that England in September 1942, it would have taken a brave man indeed, one suspects, to black up in the face of such an attitude – accepted at the time – from a short-tempered commanding officer. Peter Kemp takes up the story:
After a hurried supper we climbed into our lorry. The whole unit turned out in the stable yard to see us off; Tony Hall in an old suit and peaked cap, was ringing the mess dinner bell and shouting in the accents of an American railroad conductor: ‘All aboard! All aboard! Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Chicago and all points east!’ We sang lustily, all tension now relaxed, as we drove through the green and golden countryside towards Portland. The lorry swung into the dockyard, drove onto the quay and halted close alongside the boat; we hurried aboard and dived out of sight below … At nine o’clock we sailed.
With the forecastle hatch battened down to show no light, it was oppressively hot in our cramped quarters. The small craft bounced jarringly across the waves for the wind, which had been Force 3 when we started, was rising to Force 4 with occasional stronger gusts. My companions lay down to sleep on the two wooden seats and the floor; I sat up and tried to read a thriller.17
Others suffered agonies of sea-sickness in the hot, cramped, claustrophobic cabin as they crashed, pitched and rolled across the Channel.
Moving out into mid-Channel from the shelter of land, MTB 344 developed engine trouble and had to reduce speed. It was thus after 2230 before Appleyard knocked on the forecastle hatch and warned the raiders to be ready to come out on deck when called. When they did so it was to ‘a beautiful clear night, bright with stars. The wind had dropped and the sea was moderating.’
Appleyard remembered: ‘I navigated again for the whole job. It was pretty nerve-racking as it’s a notoriously evil place and you get a tremendous tide-race round the rocks. However, all went well and we found the place all right, and pushed in our landing craft.’18
MTB 344 closed on Casquets at 2245. Manoeuvring to within 800 yards of the rocks, she put down an anchor on 50 fathoms of line and the raiders then transferred to the Goatley for that moment of helpless exposure, the final approach. They left the gunboat at five minutes after midnight. The original plan had proposed that two Goatleys would be launched by two separate motor launches, each carrying six raiders. On the day, only one gunboat was used and therefore only one Goatley was lowered carefully off the stern. The men dropped silently into their places. ‘Right! Push Off!’, March-Phillipps called softly: ‘Paddle up!’ They moved away silently into the darkness. It took twenty-five minutes of hard paddling to reach a small bay where waves were breaking white on dark rocks. ‘Many and conflicting eddies of tide were experienced on the approach which took considerably longer than was anticipated, probably because the approach was later than had been calculated and the NE-going flood tide was by then running hard’ reported March-Phillipps. The plan had assumed the Goatley would make f
or a recognised landing point but, instead, she let out a kedge anchor of her own as the boat was paddled in close to a face of shelving rock directly below what was marked on their charts as the engine house tower. Timing their leap to the surge of the swell in the darkness, all eleven raiders led by Appleyard with the bow line scrambled away after a moment’s precarious imbalance up the slippery rocks, leaving Capt. Graham Hayes aboard to keep the boat from surging forward onto the rocks, with Lt Ian Warren now manning the bow line which Appleyard had tied off. Encumbered by our weapons we slithered about, trying to get a purchase on the rock, until March-Phillipps hissed angrily: ‘Use the rope, you b-bloody f-fools, to haul yourself up!’ They hauled themselves up, ten men against a lighthouse, the black brooding mass of the signal station towering over them in the darkness.19
They moved up the 80-foot cliff in single file, the rattle of any dislodged pebble and the chink of weapons and equipment masked by the rumble of surf and the heavy, echoing boom of the sea in the chasms and deeply cleft inlets below. Coiled dannert wire had been used to choke the gully ahead and they cut their way past this only to find their way into the courtyard blocked by a heavy knife-rest wire entanglement. Still no shots, no shout of detection. They scrambled over a wall and dropped into the courtyard, unchallenged and silent in their felt-soled boots. Here they broke off into small teams and headed for separate objectives. John Burton and Peter Kemp made for the wireless tower where, hurtling up a steep staircase, fingers on triggers, they found an empty transmitting room crammed with wireless sets, generators and electrical equipment. Nearby were an open notebook, code books and signal pads. The final haul included a code book for harbour defence vessels, signal books, records, a W/T diary of calls sent and received, procedure signals, personal letters and photographs, identity books, passes and ration cards, the station log, the ration log, the light log and even a German gas mask and cape. Rich pickings.
Appleyard and Winter’s objective was the main light tower itself: ‘The door was open and after a lightning ascent of eighty feet of spiral staircase we found the light-room empty!’ The lighthouse and the engine room were both deserted: all seven men of the German garrison were in the main building, either in bed, in the living room or getting ready to turn in. Surprise was complete: ‘The whole garrison were taken completely by surprise. I have never seen men look so amazed and terrified at the same time!’20 There was a moment of humour too. ‘Long John,’ Captain The Lord Howard, remembered:
I was leading a German down the corridor and in those days it was unusual for people to have long hair and he had very long hair tied up in a hair net and as I was walking him down I suddenly heard Gus’s voice behind me saying: ‘F-Francis, you can’t take that! It’s … it’s a woman!21
March-Phillipps admitted later in his official report: ‘A characteristic of those in bed was the wearing of hairnets which caused the Commander of the party to mistake one of them for a woman.’22 Hairnets notwithstanding, not a shot had been fired, no violence had been used and the prisoners, to a man, were reported as being ‘very docile’. SS these were not. Many still in their pyjamas, the prisoners were hustled away back down the cliffs to the waiting Goatley that was being skilfully held off the rocks by Graham Hayes and Ian Warren. Re-embarkation, however, brought its own problems: the prisoners had to be slid down a 45-degree slope and then man-handled one by one into the Goatley as she rode the heavy swell with the gap between rocks and boat varying between 5 and 20 feet. This was accomplished without mishap and the raiding party then began to climb aboard. They had been ashore just thirty-five minutes.
Meanwhile, up at the lighthouse, the radio had been smashed into pieces by John Burton wielding an axe – gunfire might have alerted Germans elsewhere, for Alderney was only a few miles due east. The retreating raiders brought back down the cliffs the garrison’s old-fashioned, bolt-action Steyr-pattern rifles and an Orlikon small-calibre cannon. Two large boxes of stick grenades – one of which was open – were left behind. It had been intended to bring the weapons home as war booty but they were dumped in the sea to save weight as the overcrowded Goatley was paddled back in the darkness towards The Little Pisser. Luckily, she had already changed position. MTB 344 had dragged her anchor to the north and Lt Bourne had weighed anchor and was already closing down on Casquets when the Goatley began her return with nineteen on board. By this time, however, two of the raiders had been injured: Peter Kemp had been stabbed in the right thigh by a fighting knife held by one of the men as he lurched into the Goatley just as it dropped away on the swell. His wound was deep, stiff and painful. It would take a visit to the naval hospital in Portland, a shot of morphia and a minor operation to set him back on the road to full recovery. Appleyard’s injury, however, was potentially more serious and longer-lasting. He wrote breezily to his parents:
I was left as the last man [ashore] and so, of course, had no one to hold the boat in for me and no rope to slide down into it. I had to swim about twenty feet out to the boat which, as soon as the tension came off the bowline, was swirled back from the rocks by the swell and I crocked my ankle whilst sliding down the rock into the water – my leg got doubled underneath somehow. However it is nothing really and should be strong again in a week or ten days. In fact, his ankle was more than just ‘crocked’: the bottom of his tibia – the shinbone – was fractured.
The men of SSRF boarded MTB 344 at 0135. They arrived back at Portland at 0400, where Sergeant Tom Winter stepped ashore wearing a captured German helmet: ‘You look like a bloody Hun’, was March-Phillipps’ parting comment.
Winter’s sense of release, of careless, post-raid euphoria was perhaps understandable. In the cold light of dawn, however, the discovery of such an armoury of weapons in the lighthouse gave pause for sober thought: ‘If a good watch had been kept, or if any loud noises had been made on the approach or landing, the rock could have been rendered pretty well impregnable by seven determined men,’23 wrote March-Phillipps in his after-action report. Luckily for him and his men, Obermaat Mundt, Funkgefreitern Dembowy, Kraemer and Reineck, and Gefreitern Abel, Kepp and Klatwitter were not men of such calibre. Back in Britain, according to Appleyard, they were all soon ‘talking quite well’.
Cross-Channel raiding would always depend upon skill, daring and a high level of training. But it would also depend upon luck, upon encountering a series of bored, slack, inattentive sentries in an army not noted for failing to learn from past mistakes or habitual inefficiencies. Perhaps sensing that it was asking a lot to expect every operation to run as smoothly as Dryad, Appleyard confided to his father:
Don’t tell the others about this, Dad. I tell you because if it should happen that one time I get left behind on one of these parties and so am out of action for the rest of the war, I should like you to feel that I’d had my share of the fun and that it wasn’t entirely a wasted effort.24
This time, on Operation Barricade, the men of SSRF had been lucky. They would need that luck to continue.
But, in that summer of 1942, it looked like being a long war.
Notes
1. DEFE 2/109.
2. No Colours or Crest, 49.
3. DEFE 2/109.
4. Ibid.
5. The ‘plastic bombs’ which caused such devastation were evidently not ordinary metal-cased No 36 Mills fragmentation grenades. A possibility is that the men from SSRF were using an early variant of the No 80 WP (White Phosphorus) grenade which came into general issue early in 1943. The effect on unprotected troops of the phosphorus – self-igniting in the presence of air to a range of about 30 feet – could most certainly be described as ‘devastating’. There is also the possibility that SSRF were being used as ‘guinea-pigs’ to carry out operational trails with a new sort of anti-personnel device developed by SOE scientists under Colonel G.T.T. Rheam at Special Training School 17 at Brickendonbury near Hereford. This would certainly justify the inclusion of a detailed description in March-Phillipps’ after-action report of the plastic bombs’ eff
ect as witnessed from both land and sea. It would also go some way to explaining why the ‘plastic bombs’ as described are not given a recognisable name at this stage. This is the explanation favoured by this author. These ‘plastic bombs’ most probably evolved into the ‘Grenades, P.E. No 6’ used on Operation Fahrenheit (see Chapter 18).
6. DEFE 2/109.
7. No Colours or Crest, 49–50.
8. DEFE 2/109.
9. The Commandos 1940–1946, 149.
10. Commando Veterans Forum.
11. Still other sources suggest that, although there was indeed a protection team charged with Nissenthall’s ‘protection’ and possible liquidation, it was not composed of members of SOE/SSRF but by ten Riflemen of A Company, South Saskatchewen Regiment (SSR).
12. BBC Henrietta.
13. Channel pilot.
14. Geoffrey, 115.
15. No Colours or Crest, 50.
16. Anders Lassen, 79.
17. No Colours or Crest, 51.
18. Geoffrey, 115–16.
19. DEFE 2/109.
20. Geoffrey, 116.
21. BBC Henrietta.
22. DEFE 2/109.
23. Geoffrey, 117–18.
24. DEFE 2/109.
13
‘A small and very
unobtrusive party …’
