Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (35 page)

As the seventeen men climbed into the truck, with seventy-eight grenades in their packs, a German spotter hidden in the town clock tower tapped out a message to the panzer gunners in the hills. The German shells landing on Termoli were being directed from within.

Reg Seekings fastened the tailgate on the truck. “Let’s get moving,” he said. Wiseman saw Mayne’s messenger appear around the corner and jumped down from the front seat to see if there had been a change of plan. An Italian family, a man and wife with a teenage daughter and a son of about eight years old, watched the activity from the doorway of their home. They had taken in some washing for the troops, and had become friendly with the SAS soldiers.

Then the shells landed: five of them, targeted with precision by the spotter in the tower. What had been a scene of bustle seconds earlier dissolved into a series of hellish images.

The lorry and its human cargo seemed to disappear under a direct hit from a 105mm shell. Pieces of smoking human flesh lay scattered across the side street. “Here lay a man with half his head blown off, an arm lay there, and elsewhere an unrecognizable lump of flesh,” one witness recalled. Bill Fraser sat dazed in the middle of the road, blood pouring from a shoulder wound. Reg Seekings had been standing by the tailboard. His tunic was splattered with blood and human pulp. By some fickle magic, he had lost only a fingernail. In the telegraph lines overhead hung a piece of Chris O’Dowd’s skull. A torso was found blasted into the second floor of a building sixty yards away. The medical officer clambered among the dead and dying, with nothing he could do. One body lay still and burning in the street. Seekings decided, irrationally, that he must find a jug of water to put out the flames and headed for the nearest building. That was when he saw the little boy.

The Italian family lay in the doorway, the mother and father both dead, torn to pieces. The teenage girl had vanished. The boy lay amid the shambles, alive, but with his intestines spilling out.

“Suddenly he got up and ran around screaming,” Seekings later recalled. “Terrible sight. There was absolutely no hope for him, and you couldn’t let anybody suffer like that. So I caught him, and I shot him.”

A few minutes later, Seekings spotted the boy’s teenage sister, shell-shocked but uninjured, tending the wounded amid the rubble; she wore an expression of peculiar, dreadful calmness he would never forget.

The fight for Termoli raged for another twelve hours, but then the attack suddenly ceased and the panzers began to pull back. The German commander, Field Marshal Kesselring, later commended “the toughness of the enemy’s defence,” but no one was quite sure why the assault had ended so abruptly: “The Germans had ample forces and a heavy support to smash the light forces that were there [but they were] unable to do so. It seems as if their troops were without the morale to advance far (for fear of being cut off) and the attack was abandoned when the threat to the town was greatest.” The target spotter was seen scrambling across the roofs away from the church tower and shot down with a Bren gun. His signaling equipment was discovered in the belfry.

The dead were buried in the monastery garden, overlooking the sea. Someone got a pole and knocked down the remains of smiling Chris O’Dowd from the overhead wire. It rained for a week, but still the stench of burning flesh hung over the town.

The top brass were delighted by the successful defense of the port. The SRS, the commandos, and some of the regular infantry had held up the entire 16th Panzer Division. The landing at Termoli had upset the balance of German forces by introducing a threat to the north of Rome, easing pressure on the US Fifth Army and forcing Kesselring to send his reserve panzers to the east coast in a fruitless attempt to dislodge the British forces. “I have never met a unit in which I had such confidence,” General Miles Dempsey, the commander of XIII Corps, told the SRS.

The unit had lost twenty-one men killed, twenty-four wounded, and twenty-three taken prisoner. But there was another, invisible toll. The war in the desert had been harsh and dangerous, but exciting and memorable. After Termoli, most men just wanted to forget. The theatrical war pioneered by Stirling had given way to something far darker and dirtier. It took one sort of courage to attack an enemy airfield in the middle of the night, but quite another to kill a little boy with his insides blown out.

Mayne never spoke about Termoli. Some thought the horror had renewed his internal fury, manifested in an unnerving external calm. As Seekings observed: “He just grew colder and colder and colder.”

—

Twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant John Tonkin, prisoner of war, was somewhat surprised to receive an invitation to dine with General Heidrich, the German divisional commander. A guard politely asked whether the British captive would prefer chicken or pork.

Cut off after advancing too far during the Termoli operation, Tonkin had been captured by the German 1st Parachute Regiment and taken to the divisional headquarters at Campobasso: there he was subjected to interrogation by a German officer with a limited grasp of English. “Goodbye,” said the officer, by way of introduction, an opening gambit that gave Tonkin a fit of the giggles. “I defy anyone to carry on after that,” he later wrote.

Born in Singapore to parents of French Huguenot descent, Tonkin had joined the SAS from the Royal Engineers during Stirling’s last recruiting drive. He was a “classic English public schoolboy” in the eyes of his contemporaries, a keen sportsman, and an excellent shot. On the way to Italy he had taught the other ranks to play bridge. But there was more to Tonkin than the conventional tastes and attitudes of the English upper-middle class. Humor was an essential ingredient of the SAS ethos, but Tonkin’s sense of the absurd went far beyond the banter and ragging of the mess. Englishmen use humor for all sorts of purposes: aggression, defense, as a cover for shyness or contempt. In Tonkin’s case, it was both armor and weapon, a central constituent of his courage. “But who in war will not have his laugh amid the skulls?” wrote Churchill. Other men stiffen the sinews with exhortation, or comradeship, or through fear of exposing their own cowardice. Tonkin used jokes. He simply found the war very funny.

Escorted by two officers to the German officers’ mess at Campobasso, Tonkin was struck by the extreme courtesy of his captors. He wondered if the “wings” on his uniform, denoting his status as a trained parachutist, explained the “excellent treatment” he seemed to be getting from the German 1st Parachute Regiment. He was offered a plate of delicious sandwiches, and chatted happily with some German doctors who spoke fluent English. Then came the dinner summons from General Heidrich. A decorated veteran of the First World War, a professional soldier, and a parachutist himself, Heidrich (not to be confused with war criminal Reinhard Heydrich) insisted on having a meal with every captured parachutist, whether or not they had arrived by parachute. The invitation, Tonkin wrote, “came as a bit of a shock as I wasn’t at all sure of the etiquette between a junior British officer and a German general…Topics of conversation were obviously going to be tricky.” But it was not the sort of invitation that could be declined. “So chicken it was.”

The two men sat down and, far from being awkward, the conversation flowed comfortably for the next few hours, ranging over the full landscape of the war: the battles on the Eastern Front, the British withdrawal from Crete, and the landings at Termoli, which the German general described as “a beautiful stroke [that] had inconvenienced them a great deal and was perfectly timed.” Cigars were produced. Like many old-fashioned German officers, Heidrich believed that in waging war against Britain Hitler had made a rash mistake. He told Tonkin that “it was madness for the two great western powers to be wasting their strength when in 50 years’ time they would be fighting for their lives against the hordes of Asia.” Tonkin could not help admiring the general with his old-world manners, though he sensed that the tubby, genial figure before him “could be very ruthless” if the occasion demanded. Heidrich handed Tonkin five more cigars as they parted and wished him good luck.

As Tonkin was being driven back to his cell at the Campobasso headquarters, the German major escorting him turned and said gravely, “It is my unfortunate duty to inform you that we have orders that we must obey, to hand you over to our special police. I must warn you that from now on the German army cannot guarantee your life.”

Exactly a year earlier, Hitler had issued his infamous Commando Order, the
Kommandobefehl,
ordering the immediate summary execution, without trial, of any captured enemy soldiers found operating on Nazi-occupied soil:

From now on all men operating against German troops in so-called Commando raids in Europe or in Africa, are to be annihilated to the last man. This is to be carried out whether they be soldiers in uniform, or saboteurs, with or without arms; and whether fighting or seeking to escape; and it is equally immaterial whether they come into action from ships and aircraft, or whether they land by parachute. Even if these individuals on discovery make obvious their intention of giving themselves up as prisoners, no pardon is on any account to be given.

Some German commanders, such as Rommel, had refused to relay this order to their troops, considering it dishonorable, illegal, and contrary to the accepted conventions of war (which it was). But as the conflict entered a more brutal and desperate phase, those rules had changed, and anyone operating behind enemy lines could expect no quarter. Captured commandos would no longer dine on chicken with their captors. Hitler had passed a death sentence on the SAS.

Tonkin realized that the major was sending him a coded warning. “When a man knows he is going to be shot, it sharpens his mind wonderfully,” he later wrote. The next evening, he was taken by lorry up a frozen pass, northward into the hills. No one had said where they were going. He realized he “must escape, or die.” When the lorry parked for a moment, Tonkin unclipped the canvas at the front, scrambled out and over the driver’s cabin, and sprinted into the darkness. For the next two weeks he walked south until, by pure chance, he stumbled into an advancing British patrol. On October 18, barely a fortnight after his capture, Tonkin was back with the unit.

—

The 2nd SAS Regiment had been formed by David Stirling’s elder brother, but in many ways (and certainly in the eyes of Mayne’s leathery veterans) it was a younger sibling, liable to be patronized and ignored. Bill Stirling is described in the SAS War Diary as a “man from the shadows,” and compared to his younger brother he remains a distant and enigmatic figure, without David Stirling’s eccentricity and flair. Yet they shared precisely the same approach to the SAS, insisting that it should operate behind the lines for strategic, not merely tactical, purposes. The best use of his regiment, Bill Stirling urged the bosses, was for it to be deployed in small units deep into Italy, where they would employ “any means available…for the disruption of Italian communications.”

Initially based in Algeria, 2SAS was largely composed of new recruits with only a handful of L Detachment veterans. Their initial operations, a series of seaborne raids around the Mediterranean, were uniformly unsuccessful. At the end of May 1943 a raiding party attempted to land on Sardinia to seize a prisoner for intelligence purposes, and was forced to retire under heavy fire. A similar mission to the island of Pantelleria, west of Sicily, did result in the capture of a solitary sentry, but the poor man was dropped while the team were climbing back down the cliff and broke his neck. An attempt to destroy the radar station on Lampedusa failed to anticipate that the radar would pick up the raiding party on approach: the attackers were forced to withdraw as the garrison opened fire. An operation to parachute two teams into northern Sicily in July to attack a variety of targets also foundered when the unit’s radio was damaged beyond use. One participant called it a “bloody balls-up.”

There is some grim irony here. Mayne’s raiding force, packed with veterans trained in the techniques of small-force penetration, was being used in a traditional commando role. But 2SAS, brave men with less experience behind the lines who might have been better employed as straightforward commandos, were being used as Stirling intended and were carrying out strategic raids, but with little impact.

The opportunity to demonstrate the mettle of 2SAS came in early September with Operation Speedwell, a plan to attack rail links across northern Italy in order to slow the German forces heading south to repel the Allied invaders. One of the most colorful members of the team was Lieutenant Anthony Greville-Bell, an upper-class former tank commander with a swaggering, swashbuckling air and a tungsten constitution. The team parachuted into the Apennines on the evening of September 7, then split into smaller groups in order to attack different sections of the northern Italian rail network.

Greville-Bell broke two ribs after landing in a tree, and could find no trace of his commanding officer. He later recalled the “unpleasant grating noise” that came from his chest when he walked. Five days later, tanked up on morphine, he and two other men blew a train off the rails inside a tunnel on a stretch of the Bologna-to-Florence line. The feat was repeated twice more. Despite frostbite, dysentery, intense hunger, and a 10,000-lira bounty on their heads put up by the Germans in active pursuit of the saboteurs, Greville-Bell and his two companions continued south through the mountains, occasionally cadging food and shelter from friendly local peasants. In Fiesole, outside Florence, the fugitives, now close to starvation, threw themselves on the mercy of a local Italian noble who was said to have been critical of Mussolini and might therefore prove sympathetic: the aristocratic Italian turned out to be married to an Englishwoman whose sister had been in the Pony Club with Greville-Bell back in Devon. They were sheltered “royally” for three days, before setting off south once more. Having linked up with a group of partisans and derailed another train near Incisa, the party finally reached the British advance line on November 14, after seventy-three days on the run. Greville-Bell had lost forty pounds.