Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (51 page)

“Throughout the entire action Colonel Mayne showed a personal courage that it has never before been my privilege to witness,” wrote Scott, whose own astonishing bravery has never been fully recognized, largely because he hid it. “I don’t think that my part in the action was worth mentioning,” he said later.

Bond and Levinsohn were buried a few miles from where they had died, and the SAS pressed on, through the village of Esterwegen and into the flooded woodland beyond, terrain so waterlogged that it was, in Mayne’s words, “absolutely bloody to work in.” By the afternoon of April 11, they were just thirty-five miles west of Bremen. A sudden mortar attack offered a reminder of how deeply they had penetrated into Germany. Two jeeps were destroyed. An eight-man patrol that attempted to move forward on foot was surrounded and captured by men of the German 7th Parachute Division, which had been deployed to halt the Allied advance. The remaining German forces were said to be massing around Oldenburg for a counterattack. In a dense patch of conifers, a sniper shot one trooper through the head and badly injured two more. The roads were heavily mined, requiring the SAS to pick their way forward. The Canadian tanks had yet to turn up, and the unit was running low on food and ammunition. “Enemy opposition was far stronger than had been anticipated [and] no deep penetration was possible.”

Mayne sent back a message to HQ: “The battle is turning into a slogging match and ourselves into mine detectors.” He called a halt and waited for the tanks to catch up. In all, the Canadians reported, the SAS had taken “over 400 prisoners of assorted shapes and sizes, disarmed the lot and held about 100 of the toughest type, mostly paratroopers.”

Mayne was recommended for a Victoria Cross, the highest British award for valor. The citations competed to laud his feats during the fight outside Börger. “By a single act of supreme bravery [he] drove the enemy from a strongly held village, thereby breaking the crust of the enemy defences in the whole of this sector,” wrote the new SAS brigade commander, Mike Calvert. “His cool and determined action and his complete command of the situation together with his unsurpassed gallantry, inspired all ranks. Not only did he save the lives of the wounded but also completely defeated and destroyed the enemy.” Major General Christopher Vokes, the commander of the Canadian 4th Armored Division, praised his “leadership and dash” and added, “this officer is worthy of the highest award for gallantry.” Field Marshal Montgomery himself signed the medal recommendation.

And yet Mayne was not awarded the Victoria Cross; instead, “VC” was crossed out, without explanation, and “bar to DSO” was added. Mayne had accumulated a DSO and three bars, each bar indicating that he had met the medal criteria in different theaters of war. He was now one of the most highly decorated soldiers in the British Army.

Why Paddy Mayne was denied the VC was, and remains, a source of deep controversy. Jim Almonds, now a commissioned officer, was baffled: “He earned it more than once. Probably his character was against him. His face didn’t fit, but his actions did.” David Stirling later described the omission as a “monstrous injustice,” and with his characteristic eye for an official conspiracy blamed “faceless men who didn’t want Mayne and the SAS to be given the distinction.” Perhaps Mayne’s history of drinking and brawling counted against him. He had few supporters among his superiors. Perhaps the rumors of his homosexuality had reached higher up. But the explanation may be more mundane: there was an understanding that, to merit a VC, the recipient should have materially assisted the outcome of a battle, with actions verified by independent witnesses. In SAS operations—covert, fast moving, and self-regulating—such criteria were often hard, if not impossible, to fulfill. Mayne may have been denied this venerable honor because he was fighting a new sort of war.

The action for which many believed Paddy Mayne should have won the VC took place at the precise moment another special forces soldier was winning that medal in the final weeks of the Italian campaign. Major Anders Lassen was a twenty-four-year-old Dane who had signed up with the commandos in 1940 and joined the Special Boat Service when it was still attached to the SAS. In April 1944, he had led a highly successful raid on the Axis-held Greek island of Santorini, eliminating most of the garrison and blowing up the radio station. A year later, at Lake Comacchio in Italy, Lassen was ordered to lead a raid with just eighteen men that would give the impression that a major landing was under way. The raiding party immediately ran into entrenched German positions. Like Mayne, Lassen favored the direct approach. The subsequent citation read:

Major Lassen himself then attacked with grenades, and annihilated the first position containing four Germans and two machine guns. Ignoring the hail of bullets sweeping the road from three enemy positions, he raced forward to engage the second position under covering fire from the remainder of the force. Throwing in more grenades he silenced this position which was then overrun by his patrol…Lassen rallied and reorganized his force and brought his fire to bear on the third position. Moving forward himself he flung in more grenades which produced a cry of “Kamerad.” He then went forward to within three or four yards of the position to order the enemy outside, and to take their surrender. Whilst shouting to them to come out he was hit by a burst of Spandau fire from the left of the position…By his magnificent leadership and complete disregard for his personal safety, Major Lassen had, in the face of overwhelming superiority, achieved his objects. Three positions were wiped out, accounting for six machine guns, killing eight and wounding others of the enemy, and two prisoners were taken.

Lassen was the only non-Commonwealth soldier in the Second World War to be awarded the VC. But, unlike Mayne, he did not survive: Anders Lassen refused to be evacuated, insisting that this would endanger his men, and died of his wounds.

On April 21, a week after the end of Operation Howard, a message was relayed to SAS units in the field: “David Stirling in great heart sends many messages and congratulations to all, and hopes to come out and visit you soon.”

Stirling was free, and back on the warpath.

The smell hit them first. On April 15, 1945, the SAS jeeps were driving through the dense woods of pine and silver birch outside Celle, heading for Lüneburg Heath, when they caught the first whiff, a cloying stench of rot and excrement that seemed to hang in the air like a plague miasma. The reek of pure evil, it grew steadily stronger as they advanced. “We’d been coming up through the forest,” said Reg Seekings, “and for a day or so we’d had this horrible stink.”

Lieutenant John Randall and his driver were on a reconnaissance foray ahead of the main force when they came to a pair of impressive iron gates, standing open at the entrance to a sandy track. Randall was intrigued, wondering if this might be the gateway to some grand country house, and ordered the driver to turn in. After half a mile, they reached a barbed-wire fence ten feet high, and another gate. If this was a POW camp there might be Allied servicemen inside awaiting liberation. The smell grew ever more powerful. A handful of SS guards stood idly by, and stared listlessly as the SAS jeep drove through. Machine-gunners in the watchtowers spaced along the fence looked down but made no move. Randall drew his revolver as a precaution. He was struck by the neatly tended flowerbeds on either side of the gate, and the gleaming whitewashed curbstones.

One hundred yards beyond, they entered a surreal tableau. In a wide clearing, beside rows of low, shuttered huts, wandered an aimless army of ghosts, shuffling, withered semiskeletons with sunken eyes and parchment skin, some clad in black-and-white striped prison garb, but many almost naked. The prisoners converged on the jeep, plucking at the men’s uniforms in supplication, speaking a multitude of languages, including English, pleading for food, help, protection. “There were hundreds of them and an overpowering stench,” recalled Randall. The guards looked on, without apparent interest. A little farther on was what Randall initially took to be a potato patch, which some of the starving, half-naked figures seemed to be picking over, as if in search of sustenance. On drawing closer, Randall saw it was a pile of dead bodies; the living were pulling off the ragged garments of the dead to clothe themselves. Some fifty yards beyond that was a spectacle that made Randall gasp and retch: a vast pit, fifty feet square, containing a contorted mass of bodies, a charnel pit filled to overflowing with the dead, and the main source of the appalling smell.

Randall and his driver were the first Allied soldiers to enter Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a place that would become synonymous with Nazi barbarity. Some 60,000 prisoners were still packed into a camp designed to accommodate 10,000; the bodies of another 13,000 people lay all around the site, victims of disease, starvation, and brutality. Some 70,000 people perished at Belsen. Just over a month before the arrival of the SAS, the fifteen-year-old Anne Frank had died here, most probably of typhus, leaving behind a diary that would go on to become the most widely read testament to the crimes of the Holocaust.

A few minutes later Randall was joined by others from the troop: Reg Seekings and Johnny Cooper, along with the chaplain, Fraser McLuskey, and Major John Tonkin, the commander of Operation Bulbasket. “We stood aghast,” wrote Cooper. “We simply could not comprehend how it was possible for human beings to treat their fellow men in such a brutal and heinous way.” The remaining prison guards, either oblivious to the arrival of Allied soldiers or unconcerned by it, were carrying on the business of murder as usual. Taking advantage of the distraction caused by the arrival of the British soldiers, “a woman prisoner thrust her hand under the wire to try to grab a rotten turnip.” A guard stepped forward and casually shot her dead. The padre had been standing just a few dozen feet away. Cooper saw the look on his face, as the woman slumped. McLuskey had wondered long and hard about whether he could ever take up arms. “McLuskey would have shot the first German he could have got his hands on that day,” thought Cooper.

At that moment there appeared a smiling figure in SS uniform who introduced himself as Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer, the commandant of Bergen-Belsen. Alongside him stood a blond woman in the neat dark-blue uniform of a female camp guard: he introduced her as Irma Grese, the warden in charge of women prisoners. Kramer politely inquired if the visitors would like a tour of the camp. “He seemed most willing to oblige,” wrote Cooper, “and declared that he was not responsible for the condition of the inmates.”

Kramer ushered his visitors into the nearest hut. It was gloomy inside, and eerily silent, save for the occasional groan. “We were overpowered by the stench,” recalled Randall. “Emaciated figures peered out at us, in fear and surprise, from the rows of bunks. Lying among them, on the same bunks, were dead bodies.”

The SAS men reeled back out into the sunshine, to be met by another shocking sight. In the yard, a camp guard was methodically beating a prisoner with a rifle butt. Cooper glanced across to his old friend. “The effect on Reg Seekings was one of utter rage. I could see that he was on the verge of pulling out his pistol and shooting.” Instead, Seekings turned to Tonkin and asked for permission to “teach the guard a lesson.” Tonkin nodded his assent. Seekings walked up to the SS guard and punched him in the face with all the power and precision of a regimental boxing champion, combined with the fury of a man whose core morality has been outraged. When the man had staggered back to his feet, Seekings punched him again. This time he did not get up. Tonkin gave orders to arrest Kramer and Grese, and lock them in the guardroom: “We are now in charge, not you, and any guard who attempts to treat a prisoner with brutality will be punished.” It would have been only too easy to unleash the SAS on the remaining SS inside the camp; instead, calmly and quietly, Tonkin chose to demonstrate what civilization means. Eight months later Kramer and Grese, nicknamed the “Beast of Belsen” and the “Beauty of Belsen,” were tried, convicted of crimes against humanity, and then hanged in Hamelin prison.

The rest of the patrol set about distributing whatever rations they had to the prisoners, while an intelligence officer tried to explain in English, French, and German that they were now free. He was struck by the apparent lack of response to this moment of liberation: “Their faces were dull, exhausted, emotionless, not capable of expressing joy and excitement as had everyone else in Europe.” Cooper fell into conversation with a Jewish Belgian journalist, a prisoner in Belsen for only a few months, who explained: “We might be able to restore some of the inmates to bodily health but their minds would be distorted for years to come—perhaps forever.”

The SAS men found it hard to put into words the horror they had witnessed, but a few hours later there arrived at Belsen a man who could. Richard Dimbleby’s report for the BBC would stun the world with its vivid, heartsick, furious depiction of Nazi brutality.

Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which…The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them…Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live…A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.