Churchill's Secret Warriors_The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII

by Damien Lewis

  Unfortunately, he’d broken his thumb during the melee, and he was in agony as he started to paddle. Ahead of a man already racked by malaria lay a forty-mile journey across often intemperate seas. But Lippett had little choice. It took him fifteen exhausting and painful hours to complete the crossing, before finally he made the Nigerian shoreline.

  In a cable from the British Consulate in Fernando Po, shortly after Lippett’s escape, his dire predicament is made clear: ‘W.25 was in a highly nervous state when he left Fernando Po and we are of the opinion that … if he had remained for the Courtmartial, under pressure from cross examination he would most likely have confessed his complicity in the affair.’

  Lippett had escaped by the skin of his teeth, as – arguably – had the grand deception behind Operation Postmaster. With the crucial witness having disappeared, Captain Binea’s case against the Spaniards fell apart. None were ever found guilty. Instead, the focus of inquiries shifted onto Heinrich Luhr, who was seemingly the paymaster for the dinner parties, and he was to face accusations of being a British spy.

  In a delicious irony, responsibility for SOE’s Operation Postmaster was laid at the door of a German.

  *

  With Postmaster’s success the SOE had pulled off its most daring coup of the war so far. Postmaster was an accomplishment that few in the know could afford to ignore. Much of the Regular Armed Services – the Army, Navy and Air Force – still resented these lawless agent-commandos, but grudging respect did have to be paid for a mission that was so utterly remarkable.

  March-Phillipps recommended Appleyard – ‘a great gift for organization and command’ – and Graham Hayes – ‘a most accomplished all around fighting soldier’ – for promotion. M rubber-stamped both their promotions to Captain. As for Private Anders Lassen – in March-Phillipps’ words ‘the most outstanding in the operation on the Duchessa’ – he received his formal officer’s commission.

  In his diary Lassen wrote of the cut-out operation and his promotion – which March-Phillipps had bestowed upon him informally, as they sailed away from Fernando Po with their prizes – with lighthearted understatement. ‘Went straight into a foreign harbour. Snatched a big ship and sailed off with it. The Jerries and the Italians made a hell of a row. Was promoted officer on the bridge by Captain March-Phillipps.’

  In the SOE’s signature way, without requiring any officer’s training whatsoever, Lassen was directly appointed a Second Lieutenant, the pips simply sewn onto his uniform. ‘They just gave the pips to me,’ Lassen explained laughingly, to one of his fellow raiders. To another, Tom Winter, who along with Hayes had seized the Likomba, he confided: ‘The greatest promotion I ever had before this was being made up to able seaman!’

  *

  Before his departure from Africa, Lassen had again gone up-country to help train the guerilla forces at Olokomeji – where the raiders had trialled their anchor-chain charges, prior to the attack. There he’d fallen for a young and decidedly lissom African girl.

  Lassen had just completed negotiations with her father to buy her for £10 and two bottles of gin, when he was recalled to London to receive his promotion. As he commented in his diary: ‘Unfortunately had to leave Africa when I was just completing negotiations to buy an exceedingly pretty wife … A great pity for that and other reasons I was recalled.”

  One other comely maid was to be left behind by the raiders in West Africa – the Maid Honour herself. Stripped of her hidden weaponry, the ever-faithful Q Ship reverted to being a simple fishing trawler, and she was sold off for civilian use. She had served her purpose and had not been found wanting, and she would hold a special place in the hearts of the raiders long after the unit whose name she shared had ceased to exist – for the Maid Honour Force’s days were numbered.

  Operation Postmaster had raised March-Phillipps’ stock to new heights, and his agent-commandos were moving on to bigger and better things.

  Back in England, marriage seemed to be generally in the air, in spite of Lassen’s failure to bag his African bride. March-Phillipps – now promoted to Major – had met and fallen in love with Marjorie Stewart, a striking-looking actress who had signed up as an agent in the SOE. Barely two months after his return from Operation Postmaster, March-Phillipps married his lovely agent-bride. M attended the wedding, as did Appleyard, Hayes and Lassen, and most of the Maid Honour Force regulars.

  A cascade of honours followed Op Postmaster’s success: a Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for March-Phillipps; a Military Cross (MC) for Graham Hayes and a bar to Appleyard’s already existing Military Cross. The citations for these decorations talk euphemistically of being in ‘recognition of services while employed on secret operations.’ Anders Lassen was also written up for an honour, but it was yet to be bestowed upon him.

  Churchill was known to be delighted at the raid’s outcome. A buccaneer at heart, he’d been the driving force behind Postmaster from the start – and the high stakes only seemed to quicken his appetite for such undertakings. While there was widespread dismay expressed by rival politicians and amongst the top brass at the ‘piratical’ and decidedly ‘un-British’ nature of the operation, Churchill was unrepentant.

  As to the three ships seized in the iconic mission, the foremost prize, the Duchessa d’Aosta was sailed back to Britain with a Royal Navy prize crew aboard. She was re-named the Empire Yukon, and used as a troop transport until the end of the war. Together with her cargo, she was valued at some £300,000 for requisitioning purposes, a significant amount when considering that 23 Spitfires could then be built for such a sum. The two German ships were also renamed, and they remained at work in British West Africa until the war’s end.

  The Italian prisoners seized during the raid were sent to South Africa, for interrogation, and to be kept well out of the public eye. Yet as late as January 1944, the powers that be were still considering mounting a second mission to Fernando Po, to seize the Italian ship’s officers who had escaped capture. Whatever secrets the Duchessa d’Aosta had harboured, the British Government seemed determined to discover them in their entirety.

  *

  After March-Phillipps’ nuptials there was much work to be done. March-Phillipps – Maid Honour Force’s guru, master and commander – was older than most of his men, and he was also highly intelligent and idealistic in the sense that he would stop at almost nothing to further his ideals. In Anders Lassen he had found a very different individual, but each was drawn to the other irresistibly. Upon joining the SOE Lassen had been found too ill-disciplined to learn any drill, and too aggressive to perfect his spycraft, but by now March-Phillipps knew him to be perfect for ‘leading a boarding party,’ and for the kind of missions that he had in mind.

  Together with Appleyard and Hayes – the calming, steadying influence to March-Phillip’s fiery vision – these men formed the corners of a immensely strong pyramid, and the base of a new unit that was to rise out of the ashes of the Maid Honour Force. Maid Honour was sacrificed on the altar of deniability: it was the unit that never was. In its place rose phoenix-like the Small Scale Raiding Force (SSRF). Equally secretive, the SSRF was the means by which March-Phillipps would realize stage two of his grand plan.

  Using similar tactics to those they’d employed in Fernando Po, his men would strike fear and terror into the German enemy where they least expected it – on the French beaches from where British forces had only months earlier fled before the might of the German blitzkrieg.

  *

  When Lassen had first signed up as a Special Duty volunteer, he had done so simply in the name ‘A. Lassen’. In reality, his full name was Anders Frederik Emil Victor Schau Lassen, and he hailed from a long line of Danish landed-gentry adventurers. Before the war his father was wont to visit London and summon their chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce from the steps of the Hyde Park Hotel with a blast of his hunting horn.

  Throughout his unrivalled wartime career Lassen never once let on to his closest comrades about his highborn, moneyed backgro
und. All he ever wanted was to be known as ‘Andy’ and to be at one with the mixed band of fellow rebels and mavericks with whom he would wage war.

  But all of that was to come. For now, the tiny unit that had become the SSRF was riding high on the success of the Fernando Po raid. A major recruitment drive ensued. One of the first new arrivals was Ian Warren, a British soldier ‘recruited’ into the force in Africa. During the Maid Honour’s stopover in West Africa March-Phillipps and Warren had got into a fight because Warren wouldn’t stop singing along to the smash wartime hit, ‘Stardust’, as he played it over and over again on the gramophone. March-Phillipps had ordered him to cease his crooning, or he’d throw him out of the mess window. In spite of being a few inches shorter than March-Phillipps, stocky Warren had squared up to the Maid Honour commander, and thrown him out of the window instead.

  March-Phillipps had climbed back in and told Warren, with typical sporting good grace: ‘You bloody little man – you’d better come and join us!’

  Warren would become one of Lassen’s roommates, a position not without its risks to life and limb. Warren would return from one bit of training or the other, only to find a knife quivering in the wooden doorframe inches from where he stood, or to hear the thud of an arrow embedding itself in the leg of his bed. It was an occupational hazard of sharing a room with the Dane, who was forever honing his skills with the blade, and testing the mettle of his fellow operators.

  From the original force of a dozen agent-commandos, their number grew to approaching sixty. It included John Gwynne, recruited to join them as the operations planner, but known to all simply as ‘Killer’. Gwynne was a vegetarian and a teetotaler who shaved only in cold water, and he had an absolutely fanatical gleam in his eye.

  Peter Kemp was another incurable war-seeker. He’d failed the British Army medical due to wounds he’d suffered while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. A mortar had exploded, injuring both his hands and shattering his jaw. But Kemp’s being ‘unfit for military service’ didn’t stop March-Phillipps from taking him, especially as he had such a wealth of frontline experience.

  Another combat veteran was Sergeant Jack Nicholson, a Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) winner. Nicholson, a Scot, had soldiered with No. 7 Commando, the unit in which March-Phillipps and Appleyard had originally served, as they’d suffered a series of defeats and were driven off the beaches of France.

  For the majority of March-Phillipps’ men a return to mainland Europe – albeit temporary – was long overdue.

  Chapter Nine

  In order to prepare for the coming cross-Channel sorties, the SSRF was assigned a new base. Previously, they’d been operating out of the Maid Honour, anchored at a Poole dockside. The SSRF’s new headquarters was set in the fading grandeur of an SOE-requisitioned country house – Anderson Manor, lying on the banks of the Winterbourne River, in north Dorset.

  Codenamed ‘Fyfield’ by the SOE, it was at Anderson that March-Phillipps forged his unit’s unique esprit de corps. At Fyfield he imbued his new recruits with the same contempt that he felt for the petty rules and regulations that so often plagued the wider military. Rank was subordinate to a soldier’s merit, and smartness and neatness of uniform – such that they wore – were secondary to a man’s ability to wage the kind of warfare that was coming.

  In truth that warfare – isolated, without back up or support, often deep behind enemy lines – left little chance for long-term survival. As Lassen explained to some fellow Danish recruits: ‘I’ll make it quite clear you have less than a 50 per cent chance of coming through alive.’

  In spite of such warnings, all sixteen prospective Danish recruits signed up to join the SOE agent-commandos. To better prepare the newbies for facing such daunting odds, March-Phillipps had them train with detonators stuck in potatoes, which they hurled at each other; you either ducked out of the way, or you risked being blown up and hurt.

  From Anderson Manor March-Phillipps, Appleyard, Hayes, Lassen, Warren, Gwynne, Kemp, Nicholson and several dozen others began training among the many estuaries and rivers of the Dorset coastline. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these rough-looking men dressed in a motley collection of British and foreign uniforms aroused enormous suspicion among the locals, especially when they were spotted canoeing up the rivers in the dead of night.

  Lassen in particular, with his white-blond hair and foreign accent, was forever being seized by the Home Guard as a suspected German spy. After a phone call to the SOE’s headquarters he would be verified as one of Churchill’s Special Duty volunteers and released back to his unit.

  In raiding the French coast March-Phillipps knew they would be going up against a far tougher enemy than those faced in Fernando Po. The German troops stationed in France had very likely fought across Europe. Accordingly, he devised a crash-training regime reminiscent of today’s SAS Selection. It involved forced marches of up to sixty miles in length, prolonged night navigation, unarmed combat, hand-to-hand fighting, marksmanship, as well as movement by water.

  Teams were dropped in the remote Dorset countryside at night, and told to find their way back to Fyfield, with no money nor even any idea where they might be. It was during such epic marches that the city slickers among them first introduced their fellow recruits to Benzedrine, an amphetamine then popular in London’s glitzier nightclubs and known colloquially as ‘bennies’.

  With its euphoric stimulant effect, Benzedrine could keep an operator alert and clear-headed for long periods without any need to sleep.

  There were the highly realistic simulated missions to penetrate an ‘enemy headquarters’, with hunter forces in pursuit and manning the supposed target. Throughout all of this Lassen’s skill as a born fighter was to the fore. Under the heading ‘Bow and Arrow Use in Modern Warfare’ he petitioned the War Office to be allowed to develop it as the ultimate silent killing weapon.

  ‘Having attended different training schools … I have no doubt that the bow and arrow would in many cases prove of great value,’ he wrote to the War Office. ‘I have considerable experience hunting with bow and arrow. I have shot everything from sparrows to stags, and although I have never attempted to shoot a man yet it is my opinion that the result would turn out just as well …’

  He then listed its advantages:

  The arrow is almost soundless.

  The arrow kills without shock or pain, so it is unlikely that a man would scream or do anything like that.

  A well-trained archer can shoot up to fifteen shots a minute.

  The arrow is as deadly as an ordinary bullet.

  In a typical fudge the War Office provided Lassen with two hunting bows complete with arrows, but not the permission to use them against the enemy, for in the age of the machine gun and the flame thrower the humble bow-and-arrow was somehow viewed as being an ‘inhuman weapon’. That didn’t stop Lassen from training with his newly acquired weaponry around the Dorset woodlands and meadows, where villagers started to speak of him as ‘the Robin Hood Commando’.

  By the summer of 1942 Anders Lassen was poised to justify his nickname.

  The SSRF were about to launch Operation Dryad, their debut raid in Europe. They were allocated two Motor Torpedo Boats (MTBs), one of which was designed to present a particularly low profile when powering through the sea, making her difficult to detect from land. An ‘experimental-type’ boat made by the shipbuilders Thorneycroft, she’d been nicknamed ‘Little Pisser’ by the men of the SSRF, due to the continuous bubbling noise made by her submerged – and therefore largely silent – exhausts.

  Little Pisser – formally MTB 344 – would become indispensable on the coming missions. She was a hotted-up MTB of diminutive size that had been stripped of all weaponry, bar a pair of machine guns, to boost her speed to some thirty knots. She boasted twin Thorneycroft engines and as long as the weather remained relatively calm there was little could catch her on the open sea. She was skippered by Lieutenant Freddie Bourne who would become a stalwart of SSRF operations.

&nbs
p; The plan for Operation Dryad involved an SSRF team crossing the Channel in Little Pisser, kidnapping the Germans garrisoning Les Casquets – one of the most northerly points of the Channel Islands, and one of the German-occupied outposts closest to Britain – and leaving the place in total ruins. Les Casquets was used as a signal station for the German Navy, so this was a target of real strategic value.

  The Channel Islands were the only part of the United Kingdom to have been taken by the Germans. They had been abandoned by British forces after the fall of France because they were seen as being indefensible. In range of the shore batteries stationed along the French coast, they could be pounded into oblivion and, after a raid by Heinkel bombers killed over forty islanders, they had surrendered in June 1940.

  Les Casquets – a jagged line of humped rocks – forms part of a series of barren outcrops where an underwater sandstone ridge emerges from the waves. Blasted by the elements, they are devoid of vegetation. The name Les Casquets is thought to be a derivation of the French word ‘cascade’, alluding to the fierce tidal surges that swirl around the islands. The raiders’ chief interests were the lighthouse built upon the rock’s highest point, plus the all-important radio station and German garrison.

  The sea around Les Casquets boasts a long and fearsome history of shipwrecks, making a successful approach challenge enough in itself. The raiders would only be in a position to scale the 90-foot rock and launch their attack once they’d navigated a series of treacherous shoals, through which the tidal race surges like the flushing of a giant toilet.

  As with Fernando Po, March-Phillipps’ plan of attack called for striking under cover of darkness, absolute secrecy, shock and surprise. Key to the raid’s success was subduing the island’s garrison before they were able to use their radio to call for help from the German forces sited on neighbouring islands.