The Lost Band of Brothers (10 page)

March-Phillipps became operative No 1442. And, later, WO1. Then, later still, MH. The day after Appleyard received his all-clear from MI5, March-Phillipps’ file records baldly: ‘Stated from M: it is proposed to employ 1442 as an instructor for Allied troops.’ ‘B’ Troop and whatever plans and ambitions he might have harboured for his hand-picked volunteers was now, evidently, a thing of the past, which, for him and Appleyard personally, turned out to be a blessing in disguise that may well have saved their lives: their former unit moved to the Middle East in February 1941 as part of Layforce, where it was intended to harry Axis lines of communication in the Mediterranean. Diverted to Crete as German invasion threatened they, along with No 8 Commando, were severely mauled in the mishandled defence of that island after the German
Fallschirmj
ä
ger
landings in May 1941. As a consequence, both No 7 and No 8 Commando were disbanded.

In early March another cryptic entry was made in March-Phillipps’ SOE file: ‘5.3.41: M. Section advised that 1442 is employed on HQ Staff.’ His move to SOE Headquarters in Baker Street may or may not have been the full story. Inspired by his training on Arran with the men of ‘B’ Troop – and especially by the possibilities of foreign-shore insertion that opened up before him once he started sailing
I’m Alone
– March-Phillipps took a further plan to Brigadier Colin Gubbins, his new boss: he and a select group of volunteers – Appleyard, of course, among them – should be authorised to form a special clandestine maritime unit that would cross over to enemy-occupied Europe from the south coast of England and make contact with those who might wish to develop some form of resistance to Nazi rule. They were to meet local patriots, gather information and then return to Britain. Brigadier Gubbins gave the idea his blessing.

March-Phillipps almost certainly was
not
told that SOE already had a similar operation elsewhere. Or that his plans, like those at SOE Helford in Cornwall down the coast, were about to sail into a full gale of troubles.

Those troubles had a number of separate but interlocking origins. The first of these lay in the stark fact of SOE’s sudden arrival in Whitehall in the urgent, fearful days of July 1940. Gubbins observed after the war:

The creation of a new and secret organisation with such an all-embracing charter aroused suspicions and fear in Whitehall. At the best, SOE was looked upon as an organisation of harmless backroom lunatics which, it was hoped, would not develop into an active nuisance. At its worst, it was regarded as another confusing excrescence, protected from criticism by a veil of secrecy. So SOE went ahead rather on its own.
9

Those suspicions were compounded – most particularly within the SIS – by a fear of territorial encroachment and a poaching of a role that stemmed from a lack of mission clarity that had surrounded SOE from its inception: in the haste and urgency of its creation, no one had thought to delineate just where SOE’s areas of responsibilities ended and those of the SIS began. They were two sides of the same coin: both agencies would have agents in the field; both would cultivate contacts in enemy-occupied territory and both would concern themselves with the gathering of intelligence, a role that had once traditionally belonged to SIS. Sir Stewart Menzies, the Head of SIS, had seen it coming. On 4 September 1940 he ‘sadly predicted the difficulties that would follow when two sets of secret agents worked independently into the same territory’.
10
They would clash, not simply because they would compete for results while working on the same side of the street, but because their methods and
modus operandi
were so diametrically opposed. SIS believed in stealth, guile and silence; SOE believed that its remit, particularly in the early days, included coastal raiding, sabotage and the creation of general noisy mayhem within German-occupied territory. A paper submitted in August 1940 – a month after SOE was created – envisaged one of SO2’s (SOE’s) principal tasks as recruiting ‘a carefully selected body of saboteurs … operating exclusively against objectives on or near the coasts … and at short notice, at widely separated points’.
11
Sir Brooks Richards witnessed the feuding between SOE and SIS at first hand:

The trouble from SIS’s point of view was that SOE, not content to wait for resistance to develop spontaneously, saw itself as a striking force whose blows would help convince opinion in occupied Europe that Great Britain was fighting on and was neither beaten nor cowed. This was why they planned small scale raids on targets accessible from the sea as well as landing agents and cargoes of arms and explosives for subsequent use.
12

That intention of SOE to carry out small raids of their own – despite the creation of Combined Operations with precisely that remit in June 1940, a month before their own creation – remained in place, despite Gubbins’ presence at a meeting with SIS on 16 December 1940 at which the SIS representative stated categorically that his organisation was ‘against Raiding Parties as they might interfere with their organisation from getting agents into enemy-occupied territory’.
13
Thus SOE and SIS went together like oil and water, their missions, aims and objectives mutually repellent. Yet both, as Brooks Richards astutely observed, had been mandated ‘at the highest level’ to pursue incompatible objectives.
14
Only Winston Churchill, perhaps, could afford to take a more pragmatic view, confiding to General Hastings Ismay later in the war: ‘The warfare between SOE and SIS is a fundamental and perhaps inevitable feature of our affairs.’
15
Yet, had there been the time and opportunity for deeper strategic thinking when SOE was created in July 1940, it might not have been.

There was a further complication, a restriction, lying in wait for March-Phillipps and his plans to take the war to France by fishing boat, although this would not become apparent for a few months. After the withdrawal from Dunkirk, the Channel was, in effect, an unregulated ‘no-man’s-water’, where a wide variety of units, army formations and shady organisations took it upon themselves to slip across and poke about on the German-occupied shoreline. The commandos had operations
Collar
and
Ambasssador
; SIS had agents to land; SOE had French evacuees they wished to slip back into France: in the absence of a developed air link – which would come later – clandestine passage by sea was the obvious way back to France.

After attempts at liaison with SIS proved unsatisfactory, SOE set up their own man in Helford to requisition French fishing vessels which could blend in with local French fishing fleets and be used to pick up agents and deliver messages, arms and supplies to the French in northern Brittany. The man behind this clandestine delivery and collection service was Gerry Holdsworth, a former advertising executive and Section D agent who had done good work for SIS in Norway before the war and who, since its outbreak, had transferred first to the Royal Navy and then to SOE. Charged by SOE with setting up their own ferry service to France because, as he put it with a characteristic lack of tact ‘other people [i.e. SIS] keep letting us down’, Holdsworth had anticipated the dangers of the enemy on the far shore but had underestimated those of the enemy closer to home. He was, however, soon to know his name: it was Slocum, Commander, later Captain, Frank Slocum, RN.

Slocum had served with the Grand Fleet in the First World War, become a navigation specialist and then ‘retired’ from the Royal Navy in 1936 as a Lieutenant Commander. He had then been surreptitiously seconded to SIS before returning to the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty in 1940 in the rank of Commander RN. Slocum’s Operations Section at the Naval Intelligence Division was responsible for arranging sea transport operations to France. Faced with the conflicting needs of both SIS and SOE, Slocum, it might be supposed, suffered from divided loyalties. He did not. He was, first and foremost, an Admiralty man who believed in the primacy of the Admiralty, the Royal Navy and SIS, in that order; an Admiralty, moreover, that quite literally ruled the waves and whose august Lordships maintained that no operations at sea could take place without what Michael Foot describes as their ‘authoritative assent’.
16
The Admiralty already enjoyed a long-established relationship with SIS and thus had little time for SOE, the upstart organisation suddenly foisted into their midst. As the months went by Holdsworth was to find himself increasingly frustrated by this man related to the famous nineteenth-century voyager who was the first to sail single-handedly around the world. Now Hollingsworth found that this twentieth-century Slocum had the power to send SOE round the houses, to veto SOE’s cross-channel missions or, at the very least, place obstacles in their path. And he would do so, moreover, whilst maintaining all the while that he was doing all in his power to help. Robin Richards, Brooks Richards’ younger brother, served with the Helford Flotilla in Cornwall and watched these two powerful personalities – Gerry Holdsworth and Commander Slocum – clash head to head:

Holdsworth was a very independent, tough-minded fellow and he regarded Slocum with great distrust and Slocum regarded him as a hothead and with great mistrust. Gerry Holdsworth was a buccaneer, a strong character. Although he was in naval uniform and had a naval rank he was very informal in his methods in the sense that if he wanted anything he would use any method that he could to accomplish it.
17

But this was wartime and Commander, later Captain, Slocum, NID(C) – Naval Intelligence Division (Clandestine) – and later DDOD(I) – Deputy Director of Operations (Irregular) – was the senior officer and the man with the ear of the Admiralty. In time, the bruising Holdsworth–Slocum confrontations could have only one ending. Gerry Holdsworth and Gus March-Phillipps shared similar traits. Had they met they might have got on, perhaps even compared notes. There is no evidence that they did. There would shortly be evidence, however, that Capt. March-Phillipps and Commander Slocum would cross cutlasses. And here too there could be only one victor.

Reviewing undercover maritime activities in the Channel during this period, it is evident Commander Slocum was struggling to meet a number of different and often conflicting mission briefs from the various clandestine organisations that looked to him for transport to and from the French coast. Between February and August 1941 there were twelve different sea transport operations to the north and west coasts of France that fell within his remit. Two of these were for the Free French and de Gaulle’s nascent Deuxième Bureau, seven for SIS and three for SOE. Most important of these perhaps was the SIS Allah mission to set up the ‘
Johnny
’ intelligence network.
18
This was based in Quimper, Brittany, and covered the vitally important new German naval base at Brest. On 21 March 1941 the two German warships
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
had moved there for repairs. That work – and the subsequent break-out date of the two mighty battle-cruisers – was of huge strategic importance to the Admiralty. Weighed against the importance of keeping ‘
Johnny
’ supplied with the agents, wireless operators, stores, equipment and money it needed to ensure that vital intelligence kept flowing back from Brest, anything March-Phillipps might wish to offer by way of a nuisance raid or two across the Channel in spring 1941 was likely to be viewed in precisely that light.

In March 1941, however, Commander Slocum’s name was still unknown to March-Phillipps. With Gubbins’ authority, he was able to recruit a few men from ‘B’ Troop together with one or two SOE men he had met during training. He then began to create his as yet unnamed new unit. His mission from Gubbins was to train his men for amphibious duties and to work out ways in which they might raid the enemy shore. So much, then, for SOE sensitivity to the operational concerns of SIS.

Moving to Poole in Dorset on the south coast, only a few miles from the family home in Blandford Forum, March-Phillipps set up a temporary base in the Antelope Hotel in the High Street. The Antelope is an old coaching inn, its brick facade the same as it must have been when Gus first saw it, a life-sized antelope poised to leap into the road below from a first-floor buttressed window set high above the portico. Here he soon made friends with the landlord, Arthur Baker, known to all as ‘Pop’, who rapidly took Gus and his growing number of recruits under his wing. One of those was then Sergeant, later Major, Leslie Prout, who remembered shortly after the war: ‘“Pop” treated us with much kindness over our many exorbitant demands. “Pop” remains today a very great friend of all who served under Gus and Apple, and the Antelope is our natural rendezvous for reunions.’
19

Units that train for amphibious operations need boats to train with and, with
I’m Alone
left astern in Scotland, the need for a boat, or boats, was pressing. March-Phillipps solved his problem with customary directness. A scouting trip took him to Brixham harbour to the west. Here he spotted three ketches –
Maid Honor
,
Tcheta
and
Our Boy
, all of which appeared suitable for what he had in mind. The shipmaster at Brixham ‘is particularly anxious to be rid of them and suggests that we requisition them at once and wire their owners’. Typically, March-Phillipps was now in a fever of impatience: ‘Upham, shipbuilders, Brixham, is standing by to receive a wire from me to put the sails and running gear aboard and will have all three boats ready for sea in a week.’

Maid Honor
, particularly, caught his eye. She was a 55-ton Brixham fishing ketch, built in 1925–6 for a local fisherman and named after his daughter Honor. She was a beautiful, wooden-hulled vessel with planks 4 inches thick. She was 70-feet long and 16 feet in the beam. She carried mainsail, topsail, mizzen, jib and foresail and was, like
I’m Alone
, a real sea boat designed to go everywhere by sail and whose four-cylinder auxiliary had been put in later almost as an afterthought. Gus fell in love with her and rapidly found good tactical reasons to justify her suitability: her reddish-brown sails would offer silent approach to the enemy shore, he reasoned, whilst her hull would not be affected by magnetic mines. He requisitioned her on the spot. You could do that then, in wartime.