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

by Damien Lewis

  But that night a storm blew up and the sea became grey-beaten and wild. Lassen, Nicholson and the others took turns signalling across the wind-whipped breakers with their lights, but there were no answering flashes and no schooner emerged from the dark, foaming sea. Come daybreak, the raiders took shelter in the only place they could find nearby – a monastery. The monks fed and sheltered them, as the first signs of the feared enemy activity appeared in the skies above: four Junkers 88 Schnellbombers tore overhead at around three hundred feet, accompanied by two seaplanes, plus a Messerschmitt ME109 fighter plane escort.

  The search for the raiders was underway.

  All that day Lassen and his men hid. The night proved equally stormy, but Lassen knew he had to get his men off Santorini, for any further delay could be fatal. At around nine o’clock that evening a light flashed a distant reply to the raiders’ signals, but it seemed to be coming from very far out to sea. Eventually, a rowing boat was sighted, riding in on the fierce swell. Lassen managed to get four of the German prisoners into the boat, but when it tried to make the return journey out to sea it promptly capsized.

  Lassen’s men borrowed another boat from the monks, and with that they managed to get out to the nearest ship. It was a Motor Launch, one brought in to use its powerful engines to try to effect the Santorini rescue. Lassen told the ship’s skipper that he would have to come in much closer to the shore. He assured the man that he had studied the depth of water, and it was quite safe to do so. In fact, Lassen had done no such thing – but it convinced the captain to bring his Motor Launch to within spitting distance of the beach.

  It was close to four o’clock in the morning by the time all were brought off the island. The Motor Launch and the two schooners would just have time to make the Christiana islets before daybreak. They got there, dropped anchor, camouflaged the boats with nets, and fifteen minutes later a flight of five Schnellbombers came tearing overhead searching for the British vessels.

  Flights of Schnellbombers continued to fly search transects over the Christianas for much of the day, but the boats must have remained undetected, for no bullets or bombs fell.

  Three days later, having dodged further search flights, the flotilla of ships made it back to the comparative safety of Turkish waters. They anchored at their hidden base in the Gulf of Cos, handed over the prisoners to Priestley, whereupon the surviving men from the Irish Patrol hit the bottle. They needed to drink long and hard after Santorini – which by now had earned the nickname among the men of ‘Andy Lassen’s Bloodbath’.

  As for Andy Lassen, while he seemed happy to speak of the Germans they had killed, he made little if any mention of Casulli and Kingston’s deaths. It is done. What else is there to say? Yet everyone knew how much their loss had hit him, especially that of his fine Greek friend Stefan Casulli. For two days the flags on the raiding ships flew at half-mast, in remembrance of Sergeant Kingston and Lieutenant Casulli. And Anders Lassen drank two days of sorrow, like a father who had lost a son.

  *

  A few weeks later Lassen made it to Alexandria, where he knew that a young wife had refused to accept the death of her husband. Casulli’s widow had said she would only believe it if she heard it direct from Lassen himself. Steeling himself for what was coming, he duly went round to visit her.

  ‘Is it true that Stefan is dead?’ she asked of him.

  Lassen looked her directly in the face. ‘Yes, it is true,’ he told her, gently.

  Again she asked, and again he told her it was true – Stefan, a much-loved husband and father, was gone.

  *

  A short while later a set of German orders were captured during a raid. In spite of the recent losses suffered by Lassen’s patrol and others, what they revealed was gratifying in the extreme. It proved absolutely the devastating impact the raids were having on General von Kleemann’s island garrisons. Typed across the security instructions in bold and capitals was the following phrase: ‘WIR BEFINDEN UNS IN FEINDES LAND.’

  The German translates roughly as the following: ‘WE ARE LIVING IN AN ENEMY COUNTRY’.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  In spite of the wild successes of the raiding years, Lassen had lost a good many of his dearest friends – two more now in the Santorini Bloodbath. A dozen of his closest comrades had been killed, and it may have seemed like the Danish Viking’s luck was turning.

  Perhaps as a foil to his loss Lassen decreed that his dog Pipo should be awarded his SAS wings. Pipo duly had his parade, one of the few that Lassen actually bothered to scrub up for.

  Lassen never had been one to abide by Army formalities. Throughout his time soldiering – at Fernando Po, on cross-Channel raids, and throughout the eastern Mediterranean – he and his men had little cause to rub shoulders with the wider British Army, or to conform to their rules. In any case, Jellicoe’s – Churchill’s – piratical raiders were delivering the goods. The relentless raids across these islands were working, and Jellicoe was winning the war against General von Kleemann’s forces.

  *

  The Aegean campaign culminated in an iconic victory at the raiders’ old stalking ground – the island of Symi. Fittingly, it was Major Jock Lapraik MC, who had led the previous Symi operation – during which Lassen had dived in to test the depth of the harbour – who commanded the force that would target Symi for a second time.

  This time, as at Santorini, there would be no quarter given. The Symi raid would deliver a crushing blow to General von Kleemann’s forces: for the loss of two Greek officers who drowned while coming ashore, Lapraik’s men killed 21 enemy troops and took 151 captive. The raid’s success, coupled with the wholesale defeat of the Symi garrison, delivered a devastating blow to the enemy’s morale.

  Almost of equal importance, some nineteen German caiques were sunk at anchor in Symi harbour, and the Germans’ gun emplacements and radio stations were blown to smithereens. Tonnes of enemy supplies were thrown into the sea, and by the time the Germans managed to mount a counter-offensive from Rhodes, their troops stormed ashore to find nothing but the remains of the raiders’ breakfasts, plus the bodies of twenty-one of their dead. Everyone else – the entire garrison, officers and ranks alike – had been spirited away.

  They come like cats and leave like ghosts.

  As a result of raids like those on Santorini and Symi, General von Kleemann was forced to boost the strength of all his island garrisons, thereby tying down more men, war materiel and supplies. Such sudden, violent and deadly night attacks shook his men’s morale to the core. The German officers knew that right across the region they were struggling to defend their own billets and installations, never mind trying to keep any kind of grip on the restive Greek islanders.

  In short, Jellicoe’s men had achieved what had been asked of them: the three-stage plan to imprison von Kleemann’s legions in their island bases was bearing fruit. By the time the Allies advanced to take the entirety of Greece, there would be no escape for many of von Kleemann’s garrisons – including tens of thousands of German soldiers based upon Rhodes and a string of other islands. Overrun, outflanked, demoralized and trapped, they would be taken prisoner en masse, playing no further part in the war.

  *

  It was time for Jellicoe’s force to move on. Their pirate base in Turkish waters had played its part in the battle for the Aegean. Churchill had urged Jellicoe to ‘play for high stakes’, tasking his raiders to ‘set the Aegean aflame’. Men like Lassen, Lapraik, Nicholson, Stud Stellin, Porter Jarrell and O’Reilly – not to mention those like Casulli, who had given their lives in the cause – had done just that and more.

  But despite the sacrifices made and the successes earned, there were those in the British establishment who decried the activities of the raiders. Foremost among them was the British parliamentarian Simon Wingfield-Digby. Ironically, Wingfield-Digby was the Conservative Member of Parliament for West Dorset, the area where the Maid Honour Force and the Small Scale Raiding Force had undergone so much of its early tr
aining.

  Wingfield-Digby apparently thought that war in the mid-twentieth century could still be a gentlemanly affair. He sought to upbraid Churchill in the House of Commons over the Aegean campaign. ‘Is it true, Mr Prime Minister,’ he demanded, ‘that there is a body of men out in the Aegean Islands, fighting under the Union Flag, that are nothing short of being a band of murderous, renegade cutthroats?’

  No doubt Lassen, O’Reilly, Nicholson, Stud Stellin and all – even the American medic-cum-gunman, Porter Jarrell – would have found that description somewhat apposite: they were a band of murderous, renegade cutthroats, and damn good at it they were too.

  Churchill – rarely a man lost for words – had an entirely suitable riposte for the Honourable Member for West Dorset: ‘If you do not take your seat and keep quiet, I will send you out to join them.’

  Had Wingfield-Digby accepted Churchill’s generous offer – and there is little evidence that he did – he would have joined Jellicoe’s men as they embarked upon a wholly new campaign, one marking perhaps the most audacious episode yet of all their raiding activities. The SBS – a few hundred lightly armed men in an assortment of converted fishing boats and small patrol craft; both British vessels and those seized from the enemy – were about to more or less single-handedly liberate the entirety of mainland Greece.

  Few countries in Europe have ever been won with such a light force overcoming such mighty odds.

  *

  The SBS handed over the Aegean campaign to the Greek Sacred Squadron and Jellicoe’s raiders withdrew from the Gulf of Cos. Turkish waters were to see them no more.

  Under Jellicoe, who’d just been promoted to Brigadier, the SBS and a handful of associated units – chiefly some RAF Regiment men – were regrouped to form a unit codenamed, with wonderful irony, Bucketforce. Jellicoe’s appointment as Brigadier was a deliberate stratagem, and all part of the bluff. It helped give the false impression that he commanded a full brigade of men, instead of a beg, borrow and steal force of a few hundred raiders.

  Churchill wanted Jellicoe to liberate Greece, to help relieve the pressure on Allied forces slogging it out with the German enemy as they tried to push into northern Italy. As with the previous island campaigns, the more enemy forces Jellicoe’s raiders could tie down, capture or trap, the better. Initially conceived as a minor attack on an aerodrome, Bucketforce’s assault morphed into what was to become the liberation of almost the entirety of the country.

  *

  On 24 September 1944 Bucketforce parachuted onto the south-west corner of mainland Greece, seizing the airfield at Araxos to form a bridgehead.

  Having seized Araxos, Jellicoe’s force began pushing west towards the Greek capital, Athens. Wherever German and Italian garrisons were encountered who didn’t seem inclined to surrender, the raiders used bluff, theatre and subterfuge – interspersed with some very aggressive raiding – to force a way through. With his men outnumbered many times over, Jellicoe and his key commanders demanded the Germans surrender, ‘or face annihilation’. The bluff kept working, as his raiders swept the demoralized Axis troops aside.

  Lassen, meanwhile, was given the role of leading a seaborne force island-hopping towards the Greek capital … and so the race to liberate Athens was on. Across a dozen or more islands – Spetsia, Hydra, Paros, Aegina and many more – Lassen never knew what to expect. On some, the German and Italian garrisons had already withdrawn, their will to resist utterly exhausted. On others, the German garrisons were drowning their sorrows in strong local liquor, and in their cups they were more than ready to fight.

  It was mid-October when Lassen and his fleet of ships began their approach to Athens, via the port at Piraeus. Jellicoe’s force was also making its final push on the city, and it looked as if they would arrive more or less simultaneously, from land and sea. By now Lassen’s seaborne raiders had gathered 100-odd vessels. A fleet of Greek warships had been added to the SBS’s usual motley collection of caiques, schooners and Motor Launches.

  The voyage north to Athens proved an unforgettable experience, one rich in emotion. The Greek coast was still dark – a faint band of golden light in the east presaging dawn. Many of the ships were crewed by Greeks, men who hadn’t seen their homeland since the Germans had driven them out, four long, war-torn years before. The route ahead passed through a series of minefields, and at the head of the convoy sailed the minesweepers, clearing the path.

  As the sun rose it touched the sea, lighting up the columns of water thrown up by the exploding mines with a burnished gold. Three vessels, including one minesweeper, were lost to the mines, but the convoy proved unstoppable. As the ships approached Piraeus harbour the Greek population lined the shore, shooting off rockets and coloured flares in celebration. There were German forces still in the city, but no one doubted for one moment that the liberation of Athens was at hand.

  A thick, white mist blanketed the dawn harbour. Out of its swirling mass rose the columns of the Acropolis, washed pink in the early morning light. Those Greeks aboard the ships stood in silent wonder, many with tears rolling down their cheeks. Lassen and his fellow raiders were likewise choked with emotion. They had lived, fought, suffered and bled alongside the Greeks for so long now – and finally, victory seemed to be at hand.

  There were no words for such a moment. If only Lieutenant Stefan Casulli had lived to see this day, instead of being shot to death during the Santorini raid just a few months earlier. Such were the vagaries of war.

  The Greek vessels were under the command of Andre Londos, a dark and bearded Lieutenant-Commander who’d long-served with the SBS’s fleet of raiding ships. Now, he was effectively commanding the Greek Navy in exile, as it returned to liberate the Greek nation. As the church bells rang, and the crowds cheered wildly, he searched the shore with his eyes.

  ‘Where are my children?’ he asked, again and again.

  Suddenly, he spotted them, running along the quayside to keep pace with his ship. It was just one of countless joyous reunions that early morning on the Piraeus quay, as mothers found sons, and wives found husbands they had long feared dead.

  As the ships docked, the quayside rang with the cries of: ‘Angli! Angli! Angli!’

  While Lassen wasn’t strictly speaking British, he had fought for four years in Britain’s cause. He was happy enough to be carried through the streets, to be showered with carnations and roses and to be plied with fine wine. Fittingly, Lassen linked up with Jellicoe at the Grande Bretagne – arguably Athens’s largest and finest hotel – and the liberation of the great city was complete.

  Athens was a hungry city, but far from being a ruin – and she and her people certainly knew how to celebrate. Party followed feast followed dance, and for sure Jellicoe’s men needed such distractions. For years now they had lived a hard, tough life, with few if any comforts and beset by danger on all sides. So many nights had been spent on hard mountainsides, in freezing caves, on snow-covered ridges, or in the midst of an enemy-occupied village; it had become a luxury just to sleep on the hard wooden deck of a schooner or a caique. So often, death was only ever a heartbeat away.

  For officers like Anders Lassen there had been the added burdens – the weight of command; the responsibility he felt for those under his authority. Few officers have ever nurtured such a dissolute and maverick group of fighting men, earning their love, loyalty and respect in return. Lassen had shaped and honed his Irish Patrol with great care, and for a few short weeks in ancient Athens the raiders were able to shrug off their burdens, and to celebrate life and the liberation of that magical city.

  They joined the Athenians in partying as if there were no tomorrow – which for some there doubtless wouldn’t be. Anders Lassen, the sole surviving Maid Honour original, had been in the raiding business for longer perhaps than anyone. No one partied harder than the Danish Viking. He seemed driven to extract the absolute maximum from life in the time that was available to him.

  Lassen managed to get his hands on a jeep, so he was ab
le to roar around the city streets from assignation to assignation. One night while he was carousing the jeep was stolen. No matter. In a city awash with pleasure, partying and unrest in equal measure, Lassen stole a jeep from some American forces recently arrived in town. Once the licence plates were switched, as far as the raiders were concerned the jeep had become SBS property.

  Lassen was loath to lose a second jeep, so he took to parking it in the only secure place he could think of: he drove it up the steps of the hotel, into the capacious lift, and had it transported up to the floor his room was on. All was fine until one night the lift got stuck. Lassen sent for some of his Irish Patrol, and together – via a combination of brute force, beer and ignorance – they managed to free the lift and get the jeep parked properly once again.

  A few days later Lassen swapped rooms with one of his fellow officers, a young SBS captain only recently married. That man only had eyes for his wife back home, and he seemed admirably blind to the charms of the local ladies. That night he was asleep in his room – formerly Lassen’s – when the door burst open and a furious gunman rushed in. He made for the bed, loosed off several shots and stormed out again.

  Luckily, the SBS captain had only been hit in the leg. It turned out that the gunman was a Greek officer just recently returned to Athens. Upon his homecoming, he’d discovered that a dashing blond Scandinavian SBS officer had been paying his wife very close attentions, and the only thing to do in the circumstances was to shoot him.

  Lassen loved everything Athenian, just as he had thrilled to the Greek islanders. But even here, even now, there was an undercurrent of tension and unrest deep within. Lassen seemed driven to get back to what he did best: waging war. Tiring of the Athens party scene, he hungered for action. Still he was driven to pursue and attack. And Jellicoe was about to give him the mission of a lifetime – one that would enable him to harass and confound the enemy as never before.