Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (43 page)

On August 9, a two-jeep convoy threaded its way north along the back roads: Mayne drove the first vehicle, with Sadler navigating, while Bob Melot drove the second. Their destination was the Forêt d’Orléans in the Loire Valley, the biggest French state-owned forest, where D Squadron was engaged in Operation Gain, the third of the major SAS operations under way in occupied France. Mayne was anxious to find out what had happened to this mission, and with good reason. The story of Operation Gain was a grim one.

The aim of Operation Gain was to disrupt any and every rail link carrying supplies to the German forces in Normandy. The first elements of the squadron, led by Major Ian Fenwick, had landed in the Orleans area on June 14; over the next five days, a total of nine officers and forty-nine other ranks arrived by parachute. Allied bombing of the French railway system had created a bottleneck south of Paris, ensuring that trains heading north had to pass through the area between the capital and Orleans. The pickings were rich, but, being so close to Paris, the area was also teeming with German troops and their French collaborators.

Fenwick’s team of parachutists included a familiar face: a man who had last seen action with the SAS outside Benghazi, when he blasted through a roadblock before being captured by the Italians and paraded through the streets in chains. Jim Almonds, “Gentleman Jim,” was as resilient as before, but a little grayer and more reticent than he had been in the desert. He seldom spoke about the experiences of the previous eighteen months, even though what had happened to him was the sort of story another man might have dined out on for life.

After three months in the Altamura POW camp, starved, frozen, filthy, and lice-infested, Almonds had escaped by ambushing his guards and then tying them up with rope made from the entwined string of Red Cross parcels. He walked south for two weeks, living off the land, before he was recaptured, placed in solitary confinement, and then taken three hundred miles north to another POW camp at Ancona. His final escape was remarkably unspectacular. Following the armistice that formally ended Italy’s war, the Italian camp commandant, now the soul of bonhomie and insisting that Britain and Italy were allies, asked Almonds to reconnoiter a nearby port and report on the strength of German forces there. Almonds agreed to do so, left the camp, and then immediately absconded. In the hope of encountering the advancing Allies, he began walking down the Apennines or, more accurately, running. Having covered some 230 miles in thirty-two days, he bumped into the American vanguard, and was finally reunited with the British Army in Naples, after thirteen months of brutal captivity, two escapes, and a long jog down the spine of Italy. He referred to it ever afterward as his “Italian picnic.”

“What job would you like to do next?” Almonds was asked by the officer receiving escaped POWs.

“I would like to rejoin my regiment,” he replied unhesitatingly.

Instead, bizarrely, he was first posted as head of security at Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, a wholly inappropriate job from which he was eventually extricated by the direct intervention of Paddy Mayne. “Pleased to see you back,” said Mayne, as if Almonds were returning from holiday. “How did it go in Italy?”

Almonds, now squadron sergeant major, was in the first stick to jump on Operation Gain. He landed west of Pithiviers, with one leg in a ditch, and dislocated a knee. Half limping and half hopping, with the aid of the local resistance network, he was brought before a rustic maquis doctor, who administered anesthetic in the form of a pint of homemade brandy; this rendered Almonds so drunk that he barely noticed when his knee was wrenched back into its socket and roughly bandaged in place.

Word of Hitler’s Commando Order had by now permeated the ranks of the SAS, and everyone on Operation Gain knew they would probably face execution if captured. Some, at least, must have wondered if it was worth the risk. But none tried to pull out. “I never heard of anyone refusing to go,” said Almonds. “Some were frightened to back out on account of what other people might think of them.” As in the desert, the combination of adrenaline, optimism, and peer pressure proved more than equal to the force of realistic fear.

At first Operation Gain lived up to its name, as the squadron launched a series of successful sabotage missions against rail lines and attacked a motorized patrol. Scouts who spoke French were sent out on bicycles in civilian clothes to explore and report back on German troop movements. Occasionally they got too close. One Lieutenant Anderson headed off for an evening ride through the French countryside:

All went well and I was enjoying myself fine until just as I was passing three Jerry soldiers, who were out walking, the pump fell from my bike, engaged itself in the chain, and I went head over heels, hit the deck, and then the bike hit me. I let go one mouthful: “Fuck me you bastard.” Suddenly I remembered the Jerries and when I saw them walking towards me, I immediately started to curse in French but all the time thinking I had had it. However, they just laughed, helped me pick up my bike, and off I went, pedalling like hell.

The commander of Operation Gain, Major Ian Fenwick, was a
preux chevalier
from another age, a figure more reminiscent of the First World War than the Second. A brilliant and handsome product of Winchester and Cambridge, he was a distinguished cricketer and tennis player, a natural warrior descended from a long line of soldiers, and a fine artist. In between raids Fenwick sat happily in the Forêt d’Orléans, sketching and smoking. After a successful attack on a night train carrying troops and ammunition, he sent a wireless message to headquarters: “We are happy in our work.”

After three weeks in the forest, that contentment suddenly evaporated. On July 4, an additional twelve-man team, under Captain Pat Garstin, was sent out to reinforce Fenwick’s Operation Gain squadron. As the plane circled over the drop zone at La Ferté-Alais, thirty miles south of Paris, the recognition signal lights on the ground twinkled through the thin clouds, indicating that it was safe to jump. But the moment Garstin’s men hit the ground, shortly before 2:00 a.m., a force of thirty German security police and a unit of French Milice surrounded them. The commander of the ambush, one Obersturmführer Schubert, ordered Garstin, who had fractured his leg, to assemble his men. Garstin refused and was immediately shot in the neck and arm. Four other men were wounded, one mortally. Just three, who had dropped into trees outside the ambush cordon, managed to escape. The rest were rounded up, loaded into trucks, driven to Gestapo headquarters on the Avenue Foch in Paris, and subjected to “third degree” interrogation as “terrorists.” Serge Vaculik, a Czech-born Frenchman attached to the squadron as an interpreter, was beaten with particular viciousness. Then they were transferred to a prison, stripped naked, and handcuffed. Some said a captured French maquisard had been tortured into revealing the drop zone.

On August 8, the seven remaining captives were handed a pile of civilian clothes and some shaving utensils and told to make themselves presentable as they were being taken to Switzerland to be exchanged for German prisoners. Garstin, crippled by his wounds and barely able to stand upright, believed this was true. Vaculik did not. At 1:00 a.m. the following day they were loaded on to a lorry and driven northwest out of Paris. One of their guards was Karl Haug, a fifty-year-old Wehrmacht timeserver who had been taken prisoner by the British in the last war and spoke some English and French. Three hours later, in a deserted forest clearing near Beauvais in the Oise they were ordered to climb down.

“Are we going to be shot?” Vaculik asked Haug.

“Of course you are,” Haug laughed.

Vaculik, who had loosened his handcuffs with a spring from his watch, whispered to the others, “They’re going to shoot us—when I shout, all make a run for it, and perhaps some of us will survive.”

With Garstin complaining furiously that there had been no trial, the men were lined up in front of a five-man firing squad.

Seconds later, Vaculik emitted a piercing yell and sprinted toward the woods. The Germans opened fire. Garstin was shot before he had hobbled a few yards, killed by a burst of machine-gun fire in the back. Three other men were gunned down on the spot. Vaculik and one other man made it to the tree line. Another lay pretending to be dead, and then escaped as the Germans searched the woods. The officer commanding the execution squad was so frustrated at losing three of his victims that he “had a hysterical crying fit from sheer anger.” Sheltered by the maquis, Vaculik would eventually testify at the war crimes trial of his would-be executioners.

Shortly before the execution of Garstin’s team, several hundred German troops, acting on another tip-off, surrounded the Gain operating base in the Forêt d’Orléans. Fenwick and Almonds were both absent from the camp, preparing the drop zone for the expected arrival of Paddy Mayne. The handful of remaining SAS men in the base camp managed to slip past the encircling troops. Fenwick, however, believing that Almonds and the others had been captured or killed, radioed Mayne to warn him of the drastic turn of events, and then headed back toward the camp to find out what had happened. Mayne and Sadler shifted their drop zone to the Morvan.

En route to the Forêt d’Orléans, a German reconnaissance plane spotted Fenwick’s jeep and its four occupants, and alerted the SS troops on the ground. Outside Chambon-la-Forêt, Fenwick encountered an elderly Frenchwoman on a bicycle, fleeing the village as fast as she could pedal. She stopped just long enough to warn the SAS team that they were driving into a German ambush. Fenwick’s response was polite, almost chivalric, and in keeping with the long British tradition of needless sacrifice: “Thank you, Madame, but I intend to attack them.”

With Fenwick at the wheel, the jeep screeched into Chambon-la-Forêt with the twin Vickers guns blasting. The first German machine-gun nest was silenced. Then a 20mm cannon shell passed through Ian Fenwick’s forehead and brought his charmed thirty-three-year-old life to a sudden and very messy end. Of Fenwick’s demise, a fellow officer wrote with suitable grandiloquence, “Thus died a very gallant Englishman.” Some of the other men were less impressed, regarding Fenwick’s final act as “bloody stupid.” Almonds believed that, had he been there, he could have prevented Fenwick’s last, suicidal charge.

There were still more losses to be sustained in Operation Gain. Mayne arrived with Sadler after a long and circuitous jeep journey from the Morvan, and was consulting with Fenwick’s successor, Jock Riding, when word came that two signalers, Privates Leslie Packman and John Ion, had failed to return from a patrol. News soon arrived from the resistance: the two men had been ambushed in their jeep by the SS and taken to the château at Chilleurs-aux-Bois. Twenty-four hours later, by the château moat, they were executed, each with a shot to the head. Some said their hands had been cut off. A week later, after the Germans had pulled back, Almonds was sent to investigate. Near the execution site, he found a tuft of Ion’s blond hair.

The losses were mounting, in grisly fashion, but the SAS War Diary offered an encouraging tally of the unit’s successes. Fraser’s Houndsworth team blew the rail lines linking Paris, Dijon, Nevers, and Beaune twenty-one times, derailed six trains, destroyed sixty-seven vehicles of different sorts, shot down at least one plane, and blew up a goods yard, a petrol plant, and the synthetic-oil factory, twice. At least 220 of the enemy had been killed or wounded, and between 2,000 and 3,000 maquis had been armed, and trained after a fashion. Leaving aside the plane that had vanished with Cairns and his men, Houndsworth casualties amounted to just two dead and seven wounded. Operation Gain cut sixteen railway lines, hit forty-six enemy vehicles, and killed at least six Germans, while furnishing vital intelligence on troop movements south of Paris.

As in the desert, however, the real value of SAS operations lay in their unquantifiable impact on human confidence. Houndsworth had given a “considerable fillip to Maquis morale and corresponding decrease in German morale,” the official SAS report noted. Local intelligence confirmed that the retreating German troops were, in some cases, close to despair. “Enemy morale throughout is extremely low, almost zero,” one report observed. “This is a confirmed fact.” The SS were the exception. The same report noted: “SS troops proud, with good morale, and well-clothed and transported.” As the end approached, for some in the British ranks the war seemed to be reducing into a conflict between two ruthless military elites: the SS and the SAS.

—

Two more SAS operations were launched in mid-August, as the Allied advance into France and the German retreat created a fluid, fast-moving situation ideal for SAS hit-and-run tactics. Operation Haggard established a base between Bourges and Nevers, west of the Loire, with orders to spread “alarm and despondency” by attacking the German troops retreating east. In less than a month the squadron killed at least 120 Germans in ambushes and coordinated air attacks, destroyed twenty-five motor vehicles, and blew up two bridges. “This operation no doubt assisted in the general German collapse south of the Loire,” wrote Brigadier Roderick McLeod, commander of the SAS Brigade. Operation Kipling, based in the Forêt de Merry-Vaux, carried out reconnaissance operations in central France, attacked roads and railways, and provided intelligence to the advancing US divisions under General George Patton.

Kipling was the coda to 1SAS operations in the wake of D-Day, and it provided one incident that may stand as emblematic of how far the SAS had traveled from the “war without hate,” as Rommel had characterized the desert campaign. On August 22, two SAS jeeps drove toward the village of Les Ormes, looking for a garage to weld a broken Vickers mounting and intending to make contact with the local maquis. In an eerie echo of Ian Fenwick’s last moments, an elderly Frenchwoman intercepted them outside the village and warned that the SS—“hundreds of them”—were still in occupation, and about to execute twenty French hostages in the main square. Smoke could be seen rising from burning buildings in the village.