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

by Damien Lewis

  That peace was broken by an agonized groan, which carried clearly to the waiting raiders. As Lassen lowered the dead German to the earth, he yanked his knife out, the blade glistening a sickly red in the silvery light.

  For a moment he hesitated. Knifing a man to death – even one of the reviled enemy – had been very different from killing a wild animal. The intimacy of what he’d just done, juxtaposed to the savagery, chilled Lassen to the bone.

  He shook himself out of his stupor.

  Signalling the others forward they moved swiftly as one body, surging across the mown lawn of the hotel grounds. Bursting through the main door to the annex, they found the lights on in the room before them, but it was deserted. A door opened off the far end. Lassen slipped through it, finding a corridor with several further doors – leading into what had to be bedrooms.

  Appleyard mustered his men. On a word of command they kicked open the doors in unison, discovering five Germans sound asleep in their beds. The shock and surprise were total. One of the comatose figures had to be cracked across the jaw with a knuckleduster, just to show him that the raiders were for real and not some nightmare apparition.

  Appleyard decided they could manage all five captives. After all it was two fewer than they’d seized on Les Casquets. But between them and the Goatley lay a trek of several hundred yards through a dark and wooded valley, and to all sides there were German positions plus, very possibly, mobile patrols. As a precaution he ordered the prisoners’ hands to be tied, the better to keep them under control as they were stolen away.

  During the process one or two of the prisoners had to be duffed up a little, to keep them docile and cooperative. All five were engineers working on the nearby harbour defences. They hailed from the Pioneer Corps Engineer Unit, and like engineers everywhere they were strapping fellows. Obergefreiter Weinrich – the equivalent of a lance-corporal and the group’s commander – seemed a passive enough individual. But one or two of the Gefreiters (privates) were giants, and they dwarfed several of the wiry raiders.

  The quarters were searched, all useful documents gathered up and the prisoners frogmarched outside. Almost as soon as they reached the rendezvous under the yew tree, one of the Gefreiters, who must have realized how few raiders there were, made a break for it. He was immediately rugby-tackled by his guard, but a fight broke out, and amid the cries and the blows the German soldier could be heard yelling for help.

  ‘Keep the prisoner quiet!’ Appleyard cried.

  Chaotic scenes unfolded, as Lassen tried to gag the captives to prevent them yelling out. The three remaining Gefreiters followed their fellow’s lead and made a bid to escape. A shot rang out, one of the fleeing prisoners crashing to the ground. More shots split the darkness, as the Gefreiters tried to fight their way free and the raiders sought to stop them.

  Only Lassen kept a firm hold of his man, the bloodied blade of his knife convincing Obergefreiter Weinrich of the futility of trying to run. But the alarm had well and truly been raised. There were the bangs and crashes of doors being thrown open from the direction of the main hotel, as sharp cries and orders rang out in German.

  Thinking like a true butcher-and-bolt raider, Lassen saw an opportunity here to spread real mayhem and terror. He grabbed a couple of grenades, and turning to Appleyard explained in hurried tones what he had in mind. The main hotel building was even now a seething mass of German soldiers, readying themselves for battle.

  Lassen was going to dash forward and hurl a grenade through each of the windows, sowing bloody chaos among the lot of them.

  Chapter Eleven

  For a long moment Appleyard – as calm and unflappable as ever – considered Lassen’s proposal. The grenades would certainly wreak carnage among the German soldiers. But Appleyard’s priority had to be to get his men back to the boat, together with their one prisoner and the documents they had seized, which he hoped would yield vital intelligence.

  ‘Keep the grenades,’ Appleyard told Lassen. ‘We might need them later.’

  He signalled his force to move out. As they hurried through the trees – running for the Hog’s Back, the Goatley and relative safety – they kept to an open patrol-formation, Lassen bringing up the rear with the precious grenades in hand. Lassen was a natural with the Mills bomb. Few could match him in terms of strength of throw or accuracy. Should an enemy patrol come doubling after them, he would transform the ground to their rear into a whirlwind of deadly blast and shrapnel.

  The escape was all about speed and stealth now. With the petrified Obergefreiter Weinrich in their midst, they kept to the cover of the thick gorse and bracken, avoiding the main paths – for those were the most likely route for the enemy hunter patrols to take. They made the ridge of the Hog’s Back with the shouts of German forces echoing in their ears from all sides.

  *

  Out to sea, Freddie Bourne, the captain of Little Pisser had heard all the shooting and commotion ashore. Though the raiding force was well overdue, he was determined not to leave them. With the memory of Operation Aquatint still raw and fresh in his mind, he was going to keep his little boat on station for as long as she was still afloat.

  Closer to shore, the lone raider manning the Goatley was equally determined to hold his position and await his fellows’ return.

  *

  Back at the Dixcart Hotel, one at least of the Gefreiters who had escaped from the raiders’ clutches was uninjured. He was able to brief the German commander on Sark, Oberleutnant Herdt, on all that he knew. A patrol was sent to search the Hog’s Back, all defensive batteries around the island were alerted by field telephone, and a boat armed with a machine gun was sent to search for a landing craft in the bays to the south of the island. The hunt was well and truly on now.

  Meanwhile Appleyard led his men – plus their one prisoner – in a helter-skelter descent of the cliff, arriving on the shoreline at around about 0300 hours. Thankfully, the Goatley was waiting for them, and they were able to bundle Obergefreiter Weinrich and themselves aboard. With thirteen men crammed into the little boat they began to paddle furiously, all the while fearing that the cliff tops behind them or the sea to either side would become alive with the enemy, and tensing for the burst of bullets in their backs.

  The thin sliver of the moon was now high in the sky, and by its faint light the low-lying form of Little Pisser was clearly visible. This moment – paddling through the open, silvery water in their flimsy craft – was when they were at their most vulnerable. But tonight luck was on their side. Appleyard’s raiders made it to the comparative safety of the MTB without a shot being fired, and they were able to clamber aboard. The Goatley was instantly collapsed and stowed aft, whereupon a much-relieved Bourne slipped anchor and made haste for the open sea.

  Three hours later Little Pisser docked at Portland, the lone prisoner was handed over to MI9 for interrogation, and the twelve raiders headed back to Anderson Manor. They were in jubilant mood, each man looking forward to a large plate of fried eggs and bacon. The raid was seen by all as being an immense success. They’d grabbed a German captive, plus bundles of intelligence materials; they’d killed maybe half-a-dozen of the enemy and not one of them had suffered the slightest injury.

  But more importantly, in spite of the recent loss of March-Phillipps, Hayes and the others, tonight on Sark they had proved themselves still a potent fighting force. As a unit, they were very much back in business.

  Lassen returned to his room at Anderson Manor and produced his Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife with a flourish. He ran it under the noses of those who hadn’t been on the Sark raid.

  ‘Look: blood.’

  Yet the aftermath of Operation Basalt would also leave the German hierarchy thirsting for blood. Although the damage wrought on Sark had been relatively light, the rage of the German High Command knew no bounds. Two days after the attack the headlines in the Guernsey Evening Star set the tone for what was to come: ‘British Attack and Bind German Troops in Sark. Immediate Reprisals for Disgra
ceful Episode.’

  Hitler was said to be apoplectic, and the line of the article came direct from the Führer himself. Sark spawned a propaganda war that would eclipse the achievements of the raid, and forever cement the notoriety of the SOE and its agent-commandos. First strike went to the Germans, when three days after the raid Hitler declared the following, as a direct response to the Sark raiders having bound the German prisoners’ hands.

  From noon on October 8th all British officers and men taken prisoner at Dieppe will be bound … In future all territorial and sabotage parties of the British and their confederates, who do not act like soldiers but act like bandits, will be treated by the German soldiers as such and wherever they are encountered they will be ruthlessly wiped out.

  Ruthlessly wiped out: the phrase was deliberately unambiguous. In the aftermath of Sark, any raiders caught by the enemy could expect no mercy. The raid on Dieppe had been an attack in August on the German-occupied French port of Dieppe. In contrast to the tactics being refined by the SSRF, the Dieppe operation had involved landing a force of some 6,000 soldiers, the vast majority of whom were Canadian infantry, with British and American commandos in support, plus armour, warships and warplanes. In short, Dieppe had been no small-scale, clandestine operation striking by surprise.

  The main objective of the operation had been to seize and hold the port of Dieppe, before blowing up the main facilities and withdrawing. The force had put ashore at 0500 and just five hours later their commanders had been forced to order a retreat, with none of the objectives having been achieved. Pinned down on the beach, over 3,000 troops had been killed, wounded or captured.

  Now, in the aftermath of the Sark raid all prisoners from Dieppe were to be held in chains, on Hitler’s orders. The Allies reacted by ordering a similar number of German prisoners to be likewise held in shackles.

  The British media then took up the fight. On the day after Hitler’s proclamation of 8 October, the Daily Telegraph headline ran: ‘Germans Deport Channel Island Britons – Sark Raids Reveals Labour Camp Round-up.’ The Daily Mirror reported how hundreds of males between the ages of 16 and 70 were being deported to Germany with their families. It added that the German prisoner who had been seized during the Sark raid had confirmed that these deportations were for forced labour.

  The war of words continued to escalate. In retaliation for the ‘cold-blooded execution of bound prisoners’, as the German press portrayed the Sark incident, Hitler went on to draft his infamous Sonderbehandlung – what became known among Allied troops as his ‘Commando Order’. In this order all raiding forces captured were to be singled out for ‘special treatment’, a euphemism for cold-blooded execution.

  In that top-secret order – which was marked ‘In no circumstances to fall into enemy hands’ – the Nazi leader spoke of raiders behaving in a ‘particularly brutal and underhand manner’, and of the British military deliberately recruiting ‘criminals’ and ‘convicts’. Hitler decreed that henceforth raiding forces were to be ‘annihilated to the last man, whether in uniform or not … whether in combat or in flight’.

  Any raiders captured were to be handed over to the feared SD – the Sicherheitsdienst, the Security Service of the SS and the Nazi Party, from whom nothing could be expected but an agonizing death under torture. Any German commander who failed to abide by the Sonderbehandlung would be summoned before a war tribunal. The execution of captured commandos was at all times to be kept secret, and they were to be buried in unmarked graves.

  On Sark itself, fortifications were strengthened still further. Some 13,000 extra mines were laid, beaches and cliffs were closed to residents and the curfew extended. The local German commander, Oberleutnant Herdt, was court-martialled on a charge of allowing his men to sleep in ‘undefended quarters’. Mrs Pittard – the courageous English lady who had provided such vital intelligence to the raiders – was sent away for questioning. Eventually, she was deported to the labour camps, along with some twenty other Sark residents who were seen as being ‘unreliable elements capable of giving information to British Commandos’.

  Sark, then, had sparked a murderous reaction from the Nazi hierarchy, one entirely out of proportion to the impact of the raid. It had yielded just a single prisoner, had caused barely a handful of casualties and had done no lasting damage. Yet Hitler’s reaction to Operation Basalt reflected how the ability of British forces to emerge from the night and strike at German positions seemingly at will had shaken the enemy, exactly as Churchill had envisaged.

  In the British Parliament there were those who railed against the lawlessness and anarchic actions of the raiders, especially as evidenced on Sark. But when he was challenged by one of his political detractors to rein in his clandestine raiding forces, Churchill gave no quarter in defending their actions.

  In the aftermath of Sark, he invited Appleyard for a private audience in his chambers in the House of Commons, as a special gesture of appreciation. He congratulated Apple on his inaugural raid as the SRRF’s new commander, and for furthering the concept of butcher-and-bolt raids. Clearly, their most recent operation had Hitler seriously rattled.

  Churchill went on to taunt Hitler personally: ‘The British raids along the coast, although only the forerunner of what are to come, inspire the author of so many crimes and miseries with a lively anxiety.’

  Honours for the Sark raid followed in good measure. Appleyard received a DSO and Patrick Dudgeon an MC, as did Anders Lassen. Lassen’s decoration was in recognition of his role in the still top-secret Operation Postmaster, plus the Channel Island raids that had followed.

  The citation, signed off by Mountbatten, was marked ‘on no account to be published’. It described Lassen as ‘An inspiring leader … and brilliant seaman possessed of sound judgment and quick decisions.’ Mountbatten sent a personal letter of congratulations to the Danish Viking.

  Dear Lassen,

  I was delighted to see the announcement of your MC and send you my heartiest congratulations. Any decoration won with the Small Scale Raiding Forces is thoroughly well deserved. Good luck with your future ventures.

  Yours sincerely,

  Louis Mountbatten

  In spite of such honours, even Lassen had found some elements of the Sark raid disquieting. In contrast to his Anderson Manor bravado with the bloodstained blade, it was in his diary that Lassen confided most candidly his feelings upon first knifing to death a fellow human being: ‘The hardest and most difficult job I have ever done – used my knife for the first time.’

  Lassen had always intended that his diary go to his mother if he were killed in action. He’d clearly found that silent killing at close quarters troubling: the reference to using the knife is his last diary entry; the remaining pages are left blank.

  Lassen’s hunger to fight and to kill the enemy was self-evident, but it wasn’t based upon a hatred of the German people per se. Many of his cousins and second cousins were German, and a number of them were fighting in Germany’s cause. What he hated was that the Germans had invaded and subjugated his homeland – he would have fought any invader of his native Denmark just as fiercely.

  But more than that Lassen despised the Nazis’ elitism, their cruelty and their warped concept of world-domination, not to mention their misguided belief in themselves as a master race. Anders Lassen MC was desperate to fight back against their deluded ideology, and he was about to be given a golden opportunity to do just that.

  *

  In the North-African desert another elite unit of raiders had also been scoring a string of spectacular victories. The highly mobile jeep-borne raiding operations of David Stirling’s Special Air Service (SAS) had been credited with helping turn the fortunes of the war in North Africa, aided by their sister unit, the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG). But with the conflict there all but won, a new role needed to be found for the SAS, one not solely predicated upon desert operations.

  The next stage of the Allied offensive would involve seaborne sorties striking into the sof
t underbelly of Europe – Italy, Greece, Crete and the Aegean Islands, butting up close to Turkey’s western coastline. As the SAS had little amphibious experience, officers would have to be drafted in from other units to help train and lead them in their intended missions – most notably from the Small Scale Raiding Force.

  A cable of 20 January 1943 marked ‘HUSH – MOST SECRET’ sets the scene for what is to come: ‘Agreement reached for dispatch of special force of 200 all ranks … Please dispatch earliest possible by air to Cairo two officers with experience of amphibious operations small scale raiding force to assist SAS amphibious training and operations.’

  Stirling’s Special Air Service – in which every man was parachute-trained – consisted of four Squadrons: A, B, C and D. D Squadron was to form the new seaborne element of Special Forces. Earl George Jellicoe – the son of the famous World War One sea admiral – would command this new amphibious raiding force, and he personally requested Lassen’s transfer to his unit. He and Lassen had met by chance in London shortly after the Sark raid, and Jellicoe was convinced that he needed the Dane to help shape his new force.

  On 8 February 1943 Lassen flew out to Cairo in an American-made Liberator long-range bomber, to join the 1st SAS Regiment, as it was formally known. He was to be the vanguard of the main body of SSRF operators, who were mostly now to be taken into Special Forces. Shortly after Lassen’s arrival Appleyard was ordered to follow on by sea, bringing with him some fifty of the remaining SSRF men. A small rump was to be left at Anderson Manor, as the unit was effectively subsumed into the SAS.

  With Allied forces gearing up for the coming D-Day landings, the centre of gravity of small-scale amphibious raiding operations had shifted to the Mediterranean. It was there that Churchill’s butcher-and-bolt raiders were to be massively expanded in number, and where their unorthodox means of waging war was truly to come of age.