The Lost Band of Brothers (12 page)

One morning in the spring of 1941, Lassen and two of his Danish colleagues, each in loose-fitting, unpressed British Army battledress but with a small red and white Danish flag stitched proudly beneath their ‘Denmark’ shoulder flashes, caught the early morning train from Market Harborough to St Pancras Station, London. There, amidst the noise and chaos of a dirty, crowded mainline railway station in wartime, they were met by Sergeant Tom Winter, late of 2 Commando, who had collected another soldier, cook Ernie Evison, at the barrier. Presently this party of five were approached by an officer coming down the platform towards them. Winter came smartly to attention. So did two of the three Danes. But not Lassen. He was still smoking. As the officer approached, Winter noticed he was smiling. It was Geoffrey Appleyard.

Presently all six were heading south, out of London – towards Poole, March-Phillipps and a Brixham trawler called
Maid Honor.

  
1
.  
Gubbins & SOE
, Peter Wilkinson and Joan Astley, 76.

  
2
.  
March Past
, 188.

  
3
.  BBC Henrietta.

  
4
.  
Anders Lassen
, 20.

  
5
.  BBC Henrietta, interview with Sir Colin Gubbins.

  
6
.  Gus March-Phillipps: SOE PF File HS 9/1183/2; Geoffrey Appleyard HS 9/48/1.

  
7
.  Colin Gubbins’ personal diary for 1941 in the Gubbins Papers, 12618, Documents and Sound Section, Imperial War Museum.

  
8
.  Interview with the author.

  
9
.  
Hugh Dalton
, Ben Pimlott, 306–7.

10
.  
The Secret History of SOE
, William Mackenzie, 70.

11
.  
SOE in France
, Michael Foot (2004), 61.

12
.  
Secret Flotillas
, Brooks Richards, 91.

13
.  
SOE in France
, 64.

14
.  
Secret Flotillas
, 91.

15
.  PREM 3 185/1.

16
.  
SOE in France
, 64.

17
.  
Forgotten Voices of the Secret War
, Roderick Bailey, 77, quoting Sub Lt Robin Richards in audio interview.

18
.  
Secret Flotillas
, 307.

19
.  
Geoffrey
, 66.

20
.  HS 8/806.

21
.  
Geoffrey
, 67.

22
.  
Anders Lassen VC
,
MC
, Langley, 56.

23
.  
Geoffrey
, 105.

24
.  HS 9/ 1215.

25
.  
Anders Lassen
, 30.

26
.  Ibid., 24.

27
.  Ibid., 53.

It was not just Gus March-Phillipps and Geoffrey Appleyard who were eager to get back into action: SOE as a wider organisation also badly needed to make its mark and answer those critics who believed that supporting SOE was little more than a waste of scarce, misdirected resources. Yet SOE’s first air operation into France was to pitch SOE into a controversy that struck at the very heart of the arguments about ‘ungentlemanly warfare’ which had dogged the early days of SOE’s existence.

By the end of 1940 the Battle of Britain was over, the Luftwaffe had been repulsed and the Local Defence Volunteers – renamed the Home Guard in July 1940 – had been cheated of their invasion. The Battle of Britain might have been won but, by winter, the killing of civilians and the bombing of British cities – mainly at night – had become a feature of wartime Britain with London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Hull, Coventry and the industrial West Midlands being particularly hard hit by accurate bombing.

In December 1940 the Air Ministry had discovered – almost certainly through the interrogation of captured Luftwaffe aircrew – that most of that navigational accuracy was provided by marker flares put down by Pathfinders of the Luftwaffe’s
Kampfgeschwader
100, an elite Luftwaffe bomber formation equipped with Heinkel IIIs and based at Meucon airfield near Vannes in South Brittany. The Air Ministry approached SOE.
Coup de main
, it appeared, was their line of country: could they perhaps do something about those Pathfinders?

The answer, assuredly, was yes. The SOE plan, formed and developed in January and February 1941, was brutal in its simplicity: it was known – presumably through the sophisticated electronic eavesdropping of POWs at CSDIC, Cockfosters
1
– that the pilots and navigators of
Kampfgeschwader
100 travelled from their hotels to the aerodrome 9 miles away each night by a commandeered bus.
2
So, SOE would drop agents into France by parachute, who would set up an ambush, block the road, bomb the bus and murder the German Pathfinders’ crews while they sat in their seats with grenades and small arms fire and thus put out the Luftwaffe’s eyes. That, at least, was the plan. But first they needed volunteers. SOE ‘F’ Section had no one ready for the mission. After some delay, distrust and prevarication, General Charles de Gaulle finally agreed that five of his men, all trained parachutists who had gained valuable experience in Norway, might be loaned from Free French forces. The perfidious British would supply the aircraft, weapons and a special ‘road trap’
3
to halt the bus.

After the attack, the five men of Operation
Savanna
– variously also referred to as Operation
Savannah
or
Savana
– would withdraw south and west to the Golfe-de-Morbihan where they would be picked up and brought home to England by a French fishing boat, the
La-Brise
, operating out of Newlyn, Cornwall, on behalf of de Gaulle’s newly formed Deuxième Bureau. One of the agents, Sergeant Joel Le Tac, had some claim to seamanship and local knowledge and, in early March, it was decided that he and an SOE officer should liaise to discuss the outward crossing from Cornwall and the extraction of the five agents from Brittany. That other officer was to be Lieutenant (now Acting Captain) Geoffrey Appleyard, now attached to SOE.

Leaving March-Phillipps with his dozen men in Poole to begin early training and to set about transforming
Maid Honor
into something more than just a simple Brixham fishing trawler, Geoff went down to Newlyn with Joel Le Tac. However, rows and disagreements between SOE and General de Gaulle’s Head of Intelligence and Operations, Colonel André Dewavrin (‘Passy’), were never far below the surface. One of these now surfaced and, as a consequence, extraction by
Le-Brise
was suddenly no longer an option. There was a change of plan: Appleyard would still be involved, but now he and his right-hand man, André Desgrange, would make the RV from a British submarine. They would paddle ashore in Folbot rubber inflatable canoes and bring the French agents out to the submarine off a beach to the south of Saint-Giles-Croix-de-Vie near Les Sables d’Olonne. Only now there was another problem, another delay. And this time it came, not from the French, but from the Royal Air Force. They wanted the SOE agents to be dropped in uniform. Gladwyn Jebb, Dr Hugh Dalton’s CEO, wrote to Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff:

Dear Portal

I hear from the Head of SO2, Sir Frank Nelson, that at mid-day today Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman sent for our Liaison Officer, Squadron Leader Redding, and informed him that operation ‘
Savanna
’ must at once be cancelled owing to the fact that it involved what amounted to the assassination of certain crews of KG.100 …

What I would like to say here is that our Organisation was definitely asked by the Air Ministry to go ahead with the project and we have, as a result, devoted much time and thought to it during the past few weeks. Certain very brave men have volunteered for the job, even though it is unlikely that they will escape with their lives, and they have gone through a course of intensive training … we do not, ourselves, wish to have any views on the political or moral issues involved; all we want to do is to carry out any project which may be confided to us by the service departments. We regard this particular project as one put up to us by the Air Ministry and if it is now the Air Ministry’s view that we should not go ahead with it after all we can, of course, only call it off. At the same time, I must repeat that from our point of view it would have been considerably more convenient if we had known at a rather earlier stage that there were objections on general grounds to the operation being proceeded with at all …
4

Portal replied to Jebb the same day and referred to a meeting between himself, Nelson, Jebb and the Chiefs of Staff on 1 January when the operation had first been proposed:

You will remember that surface [sea] transport was to be used, and that we were told that the men who would do the job were desperate men of the Apache type who were to receive large sums of money if they carried out their work. Two days ago I learned for the first time that the whole nature of the operation had been changed and was now dependent upon RAF aircraft for its execution … You must therefore not be surprised that I was unable at an earlier date to inform you of my views on the operation in the form now proposed. I think that the dropping of men in civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated. I think you will agree that there is a vast difference, in ethics, between the time-honoured operation of the dropping of a spy from the air and this entirely new scheme for dropping what one can only call assassins. If we are to be used to carry them, my view is that they must be dressed, and must conduct themselves, in accordance with the laws of war.
5

It would be a distinction that might well have been lost upon the women and children lying beneath the rubble of their bombed-out homes in London, Coventry and Hull. To SOE, Portal’s ‘laws of war’ was a dangerous and irrelevant oxymoron.

Eventually, the objections of Sir Charles Portal and Arthur Harris [not Redding] were overcome, but by the time all was resolved the weather-window for early March had closed. It would be the evening of 15 March 1941 before the five would-be assassins – dressed in civilian clothes – boarded a Whitley bomber and took off for France.

They dropped blind near Elven, 8 miles east of Vannes and 5 from their target. They landed under cover of a light bombing raid on the Meucon airfield. They buried their parachutes and gear and, at dawn, made their way to the target area undetected, only to discover that their mission was now impossible: the Luftwaffe KG 100 Pathfinders had changed their way of travelling to the aerodrome. Now, instead of a bus, they travelled in several cars. Delay, argument and prevarication had cost SOE dear: the opportunity of a single, surgical strike had been missed.

Nothing ventured, the unit split up into a series of reconnaissance missions that would prove almost as useful as the mission itself. This was the first time SOE had the opportunity to discover what conditions were like in occupied France, how General de Gaulle was viewed in his homeland and how the German forces of occupation were controlling everyday life. One agent stayed near Vannes, one went to Brest. Another went to Paris, Nevers and Bordeaux. Their leader, Capt. G. Berge, took the opportunity to slip across the border into the unoccupied zone to present himself to the father of the girl at de Gaulle’s headquarters in London whom he intended to marry. That part of the mission, at least, was a resounding success.
6
All five agents were to meet at Les Sables d’Olonne at the end of the month.

In the event, only three of the five got to the beach in time. Flashing the agreed light signal out to sea on the appointed night, there was no response.

HMS
Tigris
surfaced between 2 and 3 miles off shore to carry out her part of what the Royal Navy knew as Operation
European
. Appleyard and Desgrange launched their inflatable canoes. Paddling strongly to shore, both landed undetected on a rocky shoreline although it was there, according to Appleyard, that Desgrange’s canoe was holed on submerged rocks and had to be abandoned. Crawling up and down the beach searching for the flickering torchlight of contact with
Savanna
’s agents, they stayed on enemy territory for an hour but found nothing and nobody. In fact, they had landed on the wrong beach. Disappointed – and paddling now two-up in a single double canoe – they returned to HMS
Tigris
. As agreed, there would be another chance four nights later.

HMS
Tigris
surfaced a second time on the night of 4/5 April. This time conditions were very different and there was a heavy sea running. Watching from the conning tower of the trimmed-down submarine, Appleyard
thought
he saw the briefest gleam of torchlight on shore. The signal was not repeated, nor was it seen by anyone else. The captain of the submarine, Commander H.F. Bone, DSO, tried to dissuade Appleyard from attempting to paddle to shore in the heavy swell, but he was adamant: the rescue mission should be attempted.

His father recalled: ‘Geoffrey had an inward assurance that the agents were at the appointed place and that he must try to go and bring them off. His request that he should be allowed to make the attempt was finally agreed by the Commander.’
7
The two remaining rubber canoes were brought up on deck and assembled: the idea was that both Appleyard and Desgrange would paddle a double each and bring back two agents on each trip. Before they could launch, however, a rogue wave washed over the casing and carried away one of the canoes. It disappeared into the heaving, wave-flecked darkness and was lost. Now, if he went at all, Appleyard would have to go alone. Despite discouragement, he insisted the attempt must be made. Time and time again they tried to settle him into the Folbot and launch him away from the submarine. Time and again the boat broached-to and capsized, flinging him into the dark, freezing water. Finally, soaked to the skin, teeth chattering with cold, he managed to paddle away from the submarine and strike out for the shore 3 miles away, salt-rimmed eyes searching for that telltale flicker of light. He saw nothing. Landing finally on the shore, Appleyard dragged himself above the surf-line and began casting up and down the beach, searching for the agents who must be waiting. He saw nothing. And all the while, time was slipping by: HMS
Tigris
would dive, regardless, at 0300. Throwing caution to the winds, he ran up and down the shoreline shouting and waving his torch. Finally, at last, there was an answering flash of light and three of the five
Savanna
agents stepped out of the darkness to greet him. But time was running out. Appleyard offered them a stark choice: there could be no second trip, no second rescue before Moonrise. If they wanted to come with him now, then two of the three would have to take their chances and cram into the double canoe with him and brave the waves and rising seas for that 3-mile paddle out into the darkness where the submarine might – or might not – be waiting. The third man would have to stay behind. Sergeant Joel Le Tac elected to stay ashore, holding the canoe’s head to sea while Capt. Berge and Jean Forman squeezed aboard. The surf was running too high for a safe paddle out so Appleyard swam the boat out beyond the breakers and then clambered aboard over the stern. Punching out into the dark waves and heaving swell, the frail canoe battled towards the hope of safety with Appleyard paddling hard and both passengers bailing as each dark, looming wave threatened to capsize their frail craft. Finally, through the darkness, they made out the dark fin of the submarine’s conning tower. It was 0300. As she had warned, HMS
Tigris
was about to submerge. As they closed the final yards to the submarine, the canoe capsized and all three were pitched into the sea. Swimming to the flank of the submarine they were hauled aboard, exhausted, and bundled below. HMS
Tigris
slid below the surface of the Atlantic. It had been a very close run thing indeed.