Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (37 page)

French rural gossip is among the most contagious in the world, and the arrival of a large contingent of British soldiers did not stay secret for long. Just three days later, a visitor arrived in the woods: “A small, very frightened, and therefore very courageous French civilian.” A railway employee, this minuscule hero brought the military equivalent of gold dust: in the railway siding southwest of Châtellerault he had spotted eleven petrol trains, loaded, guarded, and camouflaged. Petrol was an Allied priority target. Moving the Das Reich Division from Montauban to Normandy would require an astonishing 100,000 gallons of petrol; starved of fuel the panzers’ advance could be slowed for days. While Tonkin set about calling in an airstrike, a team cut the railway south of Poitiers, immobilizing some one hundred trains for the next three days. At 8:00 p.m. on June 12, six hours after Tonkin had radioed in the coordinates, twenty-four Mosquito bombers swooped low over the sidings at Châtellerault, spraying the area with 20mm cannon fire and dropping ten tons of bombs. The resulting petrol explosion soared eight thousand feet into the sky, and the ensuing fire covered an area of six thousand square feet. From their forest hideout Tonkin and his men watched the livid glow in the sky. Their satisfaction would have been even greater had they known that two days earlier a battalion of the Das Reich Division had entered the village of Oradour-sur-Glane and, in reprisal for the sniper killing of a German company commander, rounded up and murdered 642 of its inhabitants, including more than 200 children.

On June 25, a message arrived by carrier pigeon in the military lofts and was swiftly conveyed to London: “Tonkin reports being chased from position by Germans who are looking for them.” That day, the SAS team moved camp to a new site in the forest about a mile from the town of Verrières. The place was heavily wooded, with plentiful water from a stream, but it was barely fifteen miles from the nearest German troops stationed at Poitiers. A last-minute decision at headquarters had led to small units of SAS men being dropped to attack other targets, some a considerable distance from Verrières, before making their own way to the rendezvous point. It would take three weeks for the full complement of Bulbasket forces to gather at Tonkin’s base camp.

Most military action involves extended periods of boredom and inactivity, interspersed with brief moments of extreme violence. The life of the SAS behind the lines was no different. The summer was hot and humid, and for much of the time the men were sedentary. In some ways, the atmosphere recalled the desert war, with the SAS hidden deep in enemy-held territory, sailing out from time to time to attack targets of opportunity. But in other respects life in the woods was very different. Several maquisards lived permanently in the camp alongside the SAS soldiers; sometimes dozens might arrive for training, and then disappear again. Among the British troops there was considerable admiration for the French resistance fighters, but also some suspicion. The SAS had never fought alongside civilians before: the maquisards were good company, dedicated to the liberation of France, but “singularly ill-disciplined” in Tonkin’s view, militarily incompetent and savage toward anyone suspected of disloyalty. “The possibility of Gestapo agents was always a great source of worry to us,” said Tonkin. One evening a girl was dragged into the camp, accused of fraternizing with the Germans. To the British, she seemed oblivious of having done anything wrong, and spent the evenings sewing shirts for the SAS men out of parachute silk. After a few days she and another alleged collaborator were marched to the edge of the forest by the maquisards. The girl asked that her ring be given to a friend in the village. Then she was shot and buried in an unmarked grave. The SAS men were hardly squeamish types, yet some were deeply shocked.

Tonkin grew worried, overworked by the administrative demands of running a substantial military camp inside enemy-held territory. From time to time, small parties sallied out to attack bridges and rail lines and to ambush convoys. As a result, the Germans appeared to be sticking to the main roads, but local intelligence indicated that a full-scale hunt for the British saboteurs was under way. Tonkin’s messages to headquarters reflected his mounting anxiety: “lousy with enemy”; “troop movements through the area day and night”; “situation serious 400 Germans looking for [us]”; “area unhealthy.” Parties were sent out to try to find a more isolated and obscure place to hide. The men were becoming jaded, incautious, lusty, and thirsty. “The local wine and cider is stronger than one thinks,” Tonkin noted. On operations, passing through the friendly local villages, the soldiers’ minds were not fully on the job in hand. “The girls looked very nice,” wrote Tonkin. “There was a general tendency to relax. The highest discipline must be maintained to prevent them wandering away from camp.” Two men even headed into Verrières and drank a glass of wine at the village café. Others slipped away to scrounge eggs, cheese, and other foodstuffs from local farms. Tonkin would later be criticized for security lapses, and for failing to understand the complex local loyalties. But he had one attribute that arguably outweighed any failings: he knew how to keep up the spirits of his troops, when most men ought, by any objective standard, to have been paralyzed with fear.

By the end of June, the Verrières camp had expanded to include some forty SAS men, a dozen French resistance fighters, and a single American cowboy.

Lincoln Delmar Bundy was a rancher from the strip of Arizona on the edge of the Grand Canyon. The seventh of fourteen children, Bundy had grown up in Cactus Flat, attended school until the age of fourteen, and always planned, insofar as he troubled to think about the future at all, to become a cowboy like his grandfather, father, and brothers. A “dancing-eyed, square shouldered boy,” in 1942, at the age of twenty-four, Bundy signed up for war, left Arizona for the first time in his life, and began training as a pilot in the US Army Air Corps at Napier Field, Alabama.

Soon after daybreak on June 10, Second Lieutenant Lincoln Bundy of the 486th Fighter Squadron took off in his P-51 Mustang, nicknamed “Rustler,” from the airfield at Bodney in Norfolk, crossed the Channel, and headed deep into France. His task was to strike railways, junctions, bridges, airfields, crossroads, convoys, and any other targets that might slow the German advance to the front. Shortly before 10:00 a.m. he diverted from the rest of his formation and swooped down to strafe a convoy of German trucks, destroying one of them. Minutes later, his Mustang was hit by antiaircraft fire, and Bundy baled out, parachuting to earth beside a small wood. For the next four days, he was sheltered by the local villagers, before announcing that he intended to head south, on foot. His plan, inasmuch as he had one, was to make for neutral Spain and then somehow get back to England. After walking for nearly two weeks, living off the land and whatever he could steal or beg from friendly farmers, he encountered a group of maquis near the town of Verrières. On July 1, a ragged figure, footsore, hungry, and cheerful, was led into Tonkin’s forest camp.

“Captain, I see no reason why the lack of an aircraft should stop me from fighting,” Bundy told Tonkin. The young American was immediately and unofficially enrolled in the SAS.

The day after Lincoln Bundy joined the SAS troop, Tonkin ordered his men to shift camp. They packed up and set off for a new site in the nearby Bois des Cartes, taking the American with them. But within twenty-four hours they were back in Verrières again, having discovered that the new site lacked sufficient water to maintain such a large group. The same evening Tonkin set out on yet another reconnaissance expedition in search of a safer place to hide his men. He even considered dispersing the unit. His anxieties redoubled when two NCOs, Sergeant Eccles and Corporal Bateman, failed to return from a sabotage mission. If they had been captured, as seemed likely, they would be undergoing “hard interrogation,” and it was only a matter of days or hours before they revealed the whereabouts of the camp. That the local maquis had known where to bring the downed American pilot was proof enough that the camp’s location was common knowledge. According to one account, there was even some suspicion that the newest addition to the force might be an enemy agent, although it seems highly unlikely that the Germans would have sent an American cowboy to infiltrate the SAS when numerous French collaborators were available for the job. Tonkin radioed London for confirmation of the newcomer’s identity, but received no reply.

In any case, the Germans had no need to spy on the camp: they knew exactly where it was.

At first light, the mortar shells came crashing through the forest canopy. Most of the men were still dozing in their sleeping bags when the air exploded. In the darkness, some four hundred German troops had stealthily taken up position around the woods: men of the SS Panzer Grenadiers, the SD (the intelligence agency of the SS), and a bicycle reconnaissance squadron engaged in antipartisan operations. Tonkin ran to the edge of the wood and saw a line of gray-uniformed soldiers advancing along the hedgerows, less than two hundred yards away. The heaviest weapons available to the SAS squadron were the Vickers guns mounted on the jeeps, but trying to fight their way out would have been tantamount to suicide. Tonkin planted a time pencil in the explosives cache and ordered the men to scatter. For the second time in a year he shouted: “It’s every man for himself.” Most of the Bulbasket troop, Lincoln Bundy among them, fled down the slope into the valley. Tonkin and a handful of others headed west, uphill, deeper into the woods. Then, realizing he had left behind his wireless and codebook, Tonkin doubled back alone, only to discover that the Germans were already ransacking the camp. He hid behind a rock. Bursts of gunfire could be heard from different parts of the wood: nine captured French resistance fighters were murdered on the spot. The explosives bin detonated with a roar. In the confusion, Tonkin crawled away through the undergrowth.

The men who had run into the valley were all captured. One SAS lieutenant, badly wounded, was beaten to death by a German rifle butt. Lieutenant Crisp was shot in the leg. In total, twenty-eight captive SAS men and the American pilot were bound, loaded on, trucks and driven to Poitiers.

A flurry of alarming wireless messages reached London from the various informants scattered through the region. “Tonkin attacked this morning Foret de Verriers [
sic
] 100 Maquis dispatched to assist him…unconfirmed Tonkin captured wounded…Reliable report from wine merchant 20 or 30 prisoners…Tonkin betrayed and surrounded by 400 Jerry, including SS and 2 field guns, ordered base to scatter, planted time pencils in explosives result 20 Boche dead, many wounded.” Some of the British survivors believed they had been betrayed by a spy, but German sources suggest that the two captured SAS men, Eccles and Bateman, had been broken under interrogation by the SD three days before the attack and revealed the camp’s location. The local SOE team, code-named Hugh, sent in the most laconic, but probably the most accurate, verdict: “Sorry about SAS, but not surprised. Too close to Poitiers.”

Only eight men managed to evade capture, and they were eventually reunited at the fallback rendezvous, a farm east of Verrières known as La Rocherie. “Thank God you got through,” Tonkin said, as he greeted the only other surviving officer. The rest of the squadron, he reported, had been “rounded up and taken to Poitiers for interrogation.”

The irrepressible Tonkin fought on. “Tonkin and men in good spirits,” the official Bulbasket log recorded. Now a much leaner group, far easier to conceal, they acted as radio liaison between the local French resistance forces and SHAEF HQ in Britain. On July 14, perhaps with revenge in mind, Tonkin called in an airstrike on the barracks of the SS Panzer Grenadiers who had taken part in the attack on the camp at Verrières. Up to 150 enemy troops were reportedly killed, and some fifty vehicles destroyed, in what may have been the first operational use of napalm in the war. On August 1, Tonkin reported a pitched battle between 1,800 Germans and 1,000 French fighters: “Maquis request immediate air support cannot hold out much longer.” RAF Mosquitoes attacked once more, successfully dispersing the German troops.

The twenty-nine men captured in the attack on the Bulbasket camp were driven to the stone-built military prison in Poitiers, where they joined Eccles and Bateman. Held in groups of eight, they were interrogated, one by one, but not ill treated. Three of the most seriously injured captives were transferred to the Hôtel de Dieu hospital, and held there under close guard.

In the German LXXX Corps headquarters in Poitiers, a particularly grim game of pass-the-buck was under way. Among the Wehrmacht officers, there was little appetite for fulfilling Hitler’s Commando Order to execute any and all captured SAS men. In theory, carrying out the
Kommandobefehl
should have been the responsibility of the SS security police, but the SS claimed they lacked the men to do the job. The commander of the corps, General Gallenkamp, was out of town, perhaps deliberately, inspecting troops on the Atlantic coast. That left his chief of staff, Colonel Herbert Köstlin, and an intelligence officer, Dr. Erich Schönig, to decide the fate of the captives. An attempt to palm them off on the Luftwaffe as airborne troops failed; a military judge declined to get involved, saying the Commando Order did not require any legal process; the pressure increased when an official German news report announced that the captured enemy commandos had already been liquidated. Köstlin and Schönig were in a bind: failure to comply with Hitler’s express order could easily mean their own heads would be next on the block. And so they did what craven bosses always do when faced with an unpleasant task: they shoveled responsibility onto someone further down the chain of command.

Oberleutnant Vogt, a former clergyman who had led the bicycle troops in the Bulbasket assault, was detailed to carry out the execution. A little over a week earlier, Vogt and his men had been ambushed by the maquis in Saint-Sauvant Forest, some twenty miles south of Poitiers. Twenty-seven Germans and more than thirty Frenchmen had died in the ensuing battle. Apparently with symbolic reprisal in mind, Vogt chose Saint-Sauvant as the execution spot. On the evening of July 6, three long pits were dug beside the track running through the forest. The next morning, trucks carrying the twenty-seven SAS men and the American pilot drew up in the predawn darkness. Each prisoner, with hands bound, was accompanied by two German soldiers of Vogt’s unit, and lined up in front of the pits. Richard Crisp was called out of the line, and limped forward to hear an interpreter read out the execution order.