I have been to Warsaw, examined the spot where they finally hanged Stroop, looked upon the memorial to the dead of the Ghetto. As for Steiner, when I mentioned the events of that day to my host, an ex-member of the Polish Home Army, he remembered the story well. Brana Lezemnikof, the little Jewish girl Steiner saved, had jumped from the train seven miles out of the city and had been found in a ditch with a broken ankle by members of a partisan unit. She survived the war and was last heard of in 1947 on leaving Warsaw for Marseilles with a group of other Jews, their intention being to take passage on one of the boats attempting to run the British blockade into Palestine. I hope she made it.
.
There are few official records covering anything I've mentioned earlier. An item here, another there. Tiny pieces of a vast jigsaw. Vereker stated the British point of view very adequately, while the debacle of Shafto's attack on the village and the shattering losses suffered by his men were enough to make Washington put down a blanket security cover just as tight.
Germany in November 1943 needed victories, not defeats. Studley Constable was not Gran Sasso and so Himmler used all his extraordinary powers of life and death to make sure that it had never happened at all.
That Max Radl survived until December 1945 can only be put down to the extraordinary fact that when Rossman and his Gestapo aides arrived in Holland to arrest him he was already in an Amsterdam hospital under intensive care after suffering a massive heart attack. As he was not expected to live, he was left to die in peace.
He survived, as an invalid, for almost two years with his beloved Trudi and their three daughters in the beautiful village of Holzbach in the Bavarian Alps. Here, he spent much of his time completing and editing his diary account of those crucial weeks, the diary that his widow, after much persuasion, finally allowed me to read during one memorable weekend in June 1973.
Armed with such detailed information, the rest was comparatively easy, for people who were not prepared to talk about the affair at first usually changed their minds when I told them how much I already knew.
So many were dead, of course. Ritter Neumann was killed fighting as a sergeant in a French Foreign Legion parachute regiment at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and Paul Koenig, the brave young sailor who took the gamble of his life that dark night, died three days after D-day making a torpedo run on British transports using Mulberry Harbour when his E-boat was blown out of the water by the guns of an American destroyer.
Erich Muller survived, however, and I traced him to Rotterdam where he is now managing director of one of the largest deep-sea salvage operations in Europe and also a naturalized Dutchman. He talked easily enough over dinner on one of the canal boats that run through the city and told me pretty well everything.
It was towards the end that he made the remark that seemed so extraordinary to me. 'Tell me,' he said, 'because after all these years I'd love to know. What was it all about?'
'You honestly don't know?' I said.
'All we were told was where to pick them up. Nothing about the purpose of the whole thing. Reich security and so on. Not to be talked about under any circumstances or else, as those Gestapo bastards who turned up when we got back made very clear.'
I told him and when I was finished, he said, 'So that was it?'
'The biggest prize of all.'
He shook his head. 'In the salvage game we have a saying. No save, no pay. It doesn't mean a damn thing if you don't bring the boat back with you.' He shook his head, echoing Koenig's words. 'All those fine men and all for nothing.' He reached for his glass. 'At least we can drink to them and to Paul Koenig, the best sailor I ever knew. And here's luck to you too, my friend, because you're going to need it.' He grinned. 'Nobody will ever believe you.'
John Amery, founding father of the British Legion of St George, was sentenced to death for high treason by Mr Justice Humphreys in No. 1 Court at the Old Bailey in November 1945, and Harvey Preston's comrades of the British Free Corps fared no better. In spite of intensive recruiting, the SS never succeeded in raising it beyond a strength of two platoons. Those who survived the war received sentences varying from life down to a year or two. An interesting photo still exists showing twenty men and a sergeant serving with the SS Panzer grenadier division Nordland. When this unit was sent to Berlin to take part in the last terrible battle for the city, the British contingent was ordered to Templin on 15 April 1945, and their names disappear from the Division's records. Preston was, perhaps, in some ways luckier than he knew.
After one brilliant commando exploit following another, Otto Skorzeny stood in the dock at Dachau in 1947 for no greater crime than that he had been responsible for operations in which his men had worn American uniforms. The prosecution was discomfited to find that the chief witness for the defence was a British officer and holder of the George Cross, Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas, the brilliant secret service agent known as the White Rabbit. Betrayed to the Gestapo, tortured, he had escaped from Buchenwald and disclosed to the court that he had known of operations in which British agents and members of the French resistance wore German uniforms. The case against Skorzeny collapsed and he was acquitted of all charges against him. He was luckier than those of his men captured wearing GI uniforms in the Ardennes in 1944, who were executed out of hand by the Americans for this breach of the Geneva Convention. Vereker had known what he was talking about.
Karl Hofer disappeared as if wiped off the face of the earth, a victim of Rossman and his Gestapo aides, no doubt, for if ever a man knew too much, it was Hofer.
But Harry Kane's luck held, for he finished the war a full colonel, as they told me when I checked with the Pentagon Records Department in Washington. He was living in California, it seemed, so I flew to San Francisco, hired a car and took a chance by driving down to the house at Big Sur on the first Sunday and throwing the whole thing right at him.
It worked beautifully, for he was vastly intrigued. He'd been a writer for years. Filmscripts to start with, then television, and he was now more involved in the production side. He'd married Pamela Vereker in 1945. He spoke quite openly about it as we walked on the beach that afternoon. My impression was that it had not worked out too well, but in any event, she had died of leukaemia in 1948.
He was fascinated to hear my story, the German side of the affair that he'd never known anything about, and willingly filled in gaps for me, not only as regards the final stages of the battle at Studley Constable, but subsequent events at Meltham House later that night.
'It's ironic when you think of it,' he said. 'I saved the life of one of the greatest men of my generation with half a second to spare and because of the security clampdown, I didn't even get a mention in dispatches.'
'Was it as bad as that?'
'Brother, you've got no idea. Every single individual interviewed personally where it was made plain that the whole thing had the highest possible security classification. Ten years in the stockade for any guy who opened his mouth. Not that it mattered. After the Studley Constable affair, the outfit was officially disbanded, then regrouped as a kind of elite airborne pathfinding unit which, in case you don't know, is just a highly specialized way of committing suicide. There were only about ninety in the outfit before Studley Constable, remember. The way I see it, some bright boy at the Pentagon thought it was a good way of getting rid of the rest of us.'
'Did he succeed?'
'You could say that. On the night before D-day we went in as pathfinders for the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions near St Mere Eglise. There was too much wind and on top of that somebody got his navigation slightly wrong. Anyway, we were dropped five miles off target right in the lap of a crack German outfit. Panzergrenadiers.' He shook his head. 'The worst hand-to-hand fighting I've ever seen. Most of our guys were dead before morning.'
'Was Dexter Garvey there?'
'Still is. I visited his grave when I was in France last year. Sergeant Thomas. Corporal Sleeker. A bad business.'
It began to rain so we started back towards the house. 'But surely,' I said, 'after all these years, haven't you ever felt tempted to write the whole thing up?'
'Still classified information. Not that that would worry me after thirty years, but I'll show you something when we get back.'
Which he did. A typewritten memoir of the affair, the edges of the paper yellow with age. 'So you did write it up?' I said.
'About twelve years ago; and then this happened around the same time.' He tossed across a magazine, one of the how-I-won-the-war variety with a girl on the front in her underwear spraying a bunch of Gestapo men with a Tommy-gun held in one hand, while she cut the bonds of her rugged GI lover with a knife held in the other.
'Page twenty,' Kane said.
The article was entitled: 'How I saved Winston Churchill'. It was a hair-raising and inaccurate account of events in which even the place names were wrong. The writer had placed the action, for example, in Melton Constable, a small Norfolk market town, obviously confusing this with Studley Constable. Steiner had become Oberst von Stagen of the SS and so on.
'Who on earth wrote this rubbish?'
He showed me the name which I'd missed because it was right under the title and to one side in the small print. Jerzy Krukowski. Shafto's radio man. The boy who had shot Joanna Grey. I passed it back. 'Did you get in touch with him?'
'Oh, yes. Found him living on his disability pension in Phoenix. He sustained a bad head wound on that D-day drop. The poor devil actually thought this was going to make his fortune.'
'What happened?'
'Nothing.' Kane waved the magazine at me. 'Who ever believes what's in these things?' He shook his head. 'Let me tell you something, Higgins. In spite of everything the army tried, that story leaked almost as soon as it happened. You used to hear it around in distorted versions, but nobody believed it. The air was full of stories like that in those days. Otto Skorzeny was going to get Eisenhower, someone had tried for Patton. In the end, there was so much fiction around, the truth kind of drowned in it, I guess.' He tossed his script to me. 'Anyway, you can have that and good luck to you, but I haven't said a word. Now, let's have another drink.'
Sir Henry Willoughby had died in 1953. but Brigadier William Corcoran I found living in retirement at Rock in Cornwall across the Camel estuary from Padstowe. He was eighty-two years of age and received me courteously enough. Even allowed me to tell my story. At the end, he just as courteously and firmly told me that I must be stark, staring, raving mad and showed me the door.
I fared no better with ex-Inspector Fergus Grant of the Irish Section of the Special Branch, now managing director of one of the largest private security companies in the country. When I wrote asking for an appointment, I received by return a letter informing me that under no circumstances did he wish any kind of communication with me, so somebody had got to him. On the other hand, he'd obviously taken Devlin's advice to heart and got himself into a better class of work entirely.
.
And Devlin? Strangely enough I got on to him through Peter Gericke, who was, I discovered, living in Hamburg; improbably, for an ex-flyer, a Planning Director with a shipping firm specializing in cruises. He was in the Far East when I first tried to see him and it was two months before we had our first meeting. He had a house at Blankenese on the Elbe, a pleasant enough place, and took me for a meal in one of the restaurants that is built out over the river on pilings.
And the difference between Gericke and most of the others was that he knew everything. Almost as much as I did. for it seemed that into the private ward where he lay in the hospital in Amsterdam they had carried Ritter Neumann and Liam Devlin. From all accounts, a high old time of it the three of them had during the time they were cooped up in there. It was over the coffee that he dropped his bombshell.
'I'm surprised Liam has lasted as long as he has. I saw him in Sweden at a party last year, quite by chance, taking a rest from Belfast.'
'Belfast?' I said.
'But surely you knew? Here, just a moment.'
He opened his wallet, went through the contents quickly and produced a folded newspaper clipping. I opened it out and my heart turned to stone. The face was that of a man I'd heard of since childhood, one of the great mythological figures of the underworld of Irish politics, a prime architect of the Provisional IRA movement, chased by the British Army from one end of Ulster to the other for four years now.
'And he is Liam Devlin?' I said, stunned by the enormity of it.
'Yes, since 1943 I've seen him a dozen or fifteen times. We've kept in fairly close touch.'
'What happened to him? Afterwards, I mean?'
'We all expected the worst the Reichsfuhrer could offer. What saved me personally. I think, was that my right leg gave such trouble they had to take it off.' He tapped his knee and smiled. 'You hadn't noticed. It kept me in hospital for over a year. The same thing applied to Ritter to a certain extent. He had six months in bed, but Liam was on his feet in a matter of a few weeks and feared the worst, so he simply walked out one night. He told me years later that after considerable difficulties, he made his way to Lisbon where he took ship for America. He stayed there for some years, teaching, I believe, in a small Indiana college. He returned to Ireland for a brief period during the IRA campaign of the late fifties. When that failed, he went back to America.'
