The Lost Band of Brothers (22 page)

Hugh Dalton, SOE’s chairman, describing
Postmaster
as a ‘good show’,
4
lost no time in writing to Churchill, the prime minister he admired but who disliked him, enclosing in a three-page letter not simply a full account of the raid and its potential political repercussions but generous thanks to the other agencies – excluding General Giffard – who had assisted SOE along the way. He too was in the business of building bridges:

I should like to express my high appreciation of the attitude of the Foreign Secretary in allowing the operation to proceed in spite of the political risks involved, and my gratitude to the Admiralty and to the Governor of Nigeria for their invaluable assistance. Great credit, I think, also attaches to SOE West Africa, who planned the operation in minute detail and successfully carried it out.
5

In time, there would be medals: a Distinguished Service Order for Gus March-Phillipps for his leadership of an operation of ‘a most delicate and difficult nature’, during which he displayed ‘military qualities of a very high order’. He was also promoted to Major.
6

Appleyard, as already stated, received his second Military Cross for leading the explosives’ party aboard
Duchessa
and for carrying out the setting and firing of explosive charges ‘with complete disregard of his own personal safety’. His childhood friend from the same village, Graham Hayes, the man whose after-action report heaps praise upon everyone but himself, also received the Military Cross for leading the attack on
Likomba
and for fighting another endless battle – that with the troublesome tug
Nuneaton
. He too was promoted, from Lieutenant to Captain.

Anders Lassen got his commission: ‘Put your pips up, Andy,’ ordered March-Phillipps. Lassen did so, by-passing all the recognised channels of selection and officer training. His commission as Second Lieutenant was confirmed later that May.
7

SOE’s men in West Africa were also remembered in December 1942, with Guise and Lippett being awarded the MBE and Laversuch, Michie and
Vulcan
tugmaster Thomas Coker receiving the OBE.
Nuneaton
’s Captain, H.M. Goodman, received a much-deserved MBE. Brigadier Colin Gubbins pushed the additional awards to his civilians through the Colonial Office. ‘They would be informed officially through the Colonial Office but if Laversuch could do so without endangering security he should congratulate them heartily from SOE. Laversuch replied that he could do this without endangering security and added that the awards had greatly pleased the Governor.’
8

With March-Phillipps and Appleyard on the way home it was left to Lt Col Julius Hanau, SOE’s ‘Caesar’ and Gubbins’ West Africa deputy, to reflect upon the real success and lessons to be learned that had been left bobbing in the wake of Operation
Postmaster
:

The operation not only achieved more than its material object, but it achieved it in such a way that the task of the Foreign Office and the Admiralty in meeting the political and legal aftermath has been reduced to a minimum.

We hope that SOE will be permitted to demonstrate that what was possible in Fernando Po is possible elsewhere: perhaps on the next occasion, it will not be found necessary to preface twenty-five minutes compact and decisive action by over four months of prolonged and desultory negotiation.
9

Touché.

Burned the colour of teak by the African sun, March-Phillipps and Appleyard returned to a drab, rationed, stone-cold England in early February 1942. They were debriefed by Gubbins personally on Thursday 12 February and Monday 16 February. Much time had been spent on the journey home discussing plans to expand Maid Honor Force into something larger, harder hitting, more substantial. March-Phillipps took their ideas to Brigadier Gubbins, a man now favourably disposed to listen to his newly decorated champions.

March-Phillipps planned the creation of a small scale raiding force of 50–100 men equipped with a couple of motor launches and a few ‘Goatley’ assault boats. The task of these raiders would be to slip across the Channel at night by gunboat, kill sentries, seize prisoners,
10
lift documents to order and steal interesting bits of German military kit for the other fighting services. Above all, his idea was to broaden the base of front-line experience for selected personnel, tie German troops to the coast and generally undermine any German sense of shoreline invulnerability. His idea for a lightweight strike force independent of the cumbrous complexities of higher-echelon planning or air support received, we are told, ‘immediate support’
11
from Combined Operations and went forward over the next month to the Chiefs of Staff for their rubber-stamping of the creation of yet another small ‘private army’. Other accounts suggest the idea was Mountbatten’s own,
12
but the original idea of what would shortly become known as the Small Scale Raiding Force came, almost certainly, from the newly promoted and decorated men of Operation
Postmaster
. Those other accounts suggest Lord Louis Mountbatten, the newly appointed Chief of Combined Operations, approached the Chiefs of Staff himself on 19 February with what
he
thought was an interesting idea: to form a permanent group of fifty men as an ‘amphibious sabotage force’ who would, naturally, operate under his command.
13
The Men of Maid Honor Force, he considered, would be ideal.

But Maid Honor Force came under SOE, not Combined Operations. A certain amount of negotiation took place, after which it was decided that the new force, while still administered and financed by SOE, would come under Mountbatten’s operational control. As mentioned, it would be known as the Small Scale Raiding Force and would operate under the cover name of No 62 Commando or, to SOE, ‘Station 62’. It was all part of Mountbatten’s ‘new broom’. Under Admiral Keyes there had been no centralised European raiding system: raids on the enemy shore were the responsibility of the army commander-in-chief defending the English territory opposite, with the Channel itself seen as a sort of First World War no-man’s-land. The poorly thought-out theory was that the army would obtain the assault boats they needed for each raid through the local naval commander-in-chief who, in turn, would ask for the boats from Combined Operations. It didn’t work. Now, with Mountbatten at the helm of a newly centralised, reinvigorated system, raids across the Channel became more numerous.

As his proposal worked its way swiftly through the various layers of Higher Command within SOE, Combined Operations and the Chiefs of Staff, there was now another distraction that took March-Phillipps’ eye off the dangerous business of planning to raid the enemy coastline. Her name was Marjorie Stewart.

One evening at SOE Headquarters in Baker Street, a discreet little party was held to welcome home the
Maid Honor
heroes of Fernando Po. One of those invited to attend to add glamour to drab khaki was SOE agent-in-training Marjorie Stewart, an attractive actress who had volunteered for SOE the year before. About to go away on parachute training to Ringway, she had met Gus earlier in the day – in the Baker Street lift in Norgeby House on her way to her desk at the Polish and Czech Section of SOE. When he asked her later what she did she replied she was the lift girl. Baker Street, after all, was a house of duplicity and many secrets:

I had no idea who this rather eccentric but highly characterful and bright-coloured figure I met was … He was very brown, very sunburned and he had high colour and the whites of his eyes were startlingly blue … and although he was dressed in a uniform which is khaki, he had britches and rather beautiful boots and a bush hat and the boots naturally were beautiful leather because he always made a great fuss about having his boots made at Maxwell and so they were beautiful horse-chestnut, wonderful colour … In the evening I was going to a party and Gus’s sister Diana had come into our office and said they were having a party for the Maid Honor people and would I go … I’d heard about it because everybody was talking about Maid Honor when I first joined SOE and I didn’t understand what they were talking about for a long time because I thought it was
May Donna
, and then I eventually saw papers about it and realised it was
Maid Honor
and I’d heard about it and I’d read the report … and it was an interest and an excitement to everybody that they’d done very well and they were coming safely back … and then we went on to the party for the Maid Honor people at Nell Gwynn house and I arrived rather late with Alfgar [her escort] and Gus [said] almost immediately: ‘Are you married to that man?’ And I said no I wasn’t … He said ‘I’ve seen you before’ and I said: ‘Yes, indeed you have. I took you up in the lift this morning. I work the lift at 74 Baker Street.’ He believed for quite a long time that I
was
the lift girl. And it was a very splendid party and very chatty then we went on to dinner at the Gargoyle and I remember dancing with Gus … Yes, I liked him. He was a very attractive personality to meet: good looking and quick and I suppose he did stammer although I didn’t notice his stammer for ages … it was sort of inevitable. I’m trying to think what happened then … Oh, yes: he asked me to go and have dinner with him so we went and had dinner at the
Ecu de France
. And I can remember – again, one always does – exactly what I wore and it was a very nice dress and I thought I looked splendid and so fortunately did he! But, anyway, we went and had this splendid dinner at which he asked me to marry him. So I said that was ridiculous and he didn’t know anything about it. That I think was the third time we met.
14

Impatient as always, March-Phillipps was in no mood to take prisoners. He launched his unremitting amorous assault from within the offices of SOE Headquarters: ‘There was also an occasional visitor,’ remembered SOE agent Patrick Howarth:

a tall man with a sun-tanned complexion, a stammer and a generally distinguished appearance of the kind most readily described as soldierly. This was Major Gus March-Phillipps. It soon became apparent that his visits were mainly for the purpose of seeing Marjorie Stewart, and I began to feel my presence was something of an embarrassment to them. In this I was right.
15

‘He was a man of quick decisions, certainly,’ Marjorie remembered:

And we chatted and had a splendid time and that was all very enjoyable and very nice and very exciting and I suppose he wanted probably to find someone to be attached to and I always felt the whole thing was completely inevitable … it literally just happened. I can remember saying, rather pompously, perhaps: ‘Oh, you don’t mean you want to marry me, all you mean is I’m an attractive young woman. You’ve come back from a wearing time that’s gone very well … all you want to do is go to bed with me.’ ‘Not at all, not at all, shouldn’t dream of it. Sharn’t until I’ve married you.’
16

For all, it was a time of sudden passions, of whirlwind courtships and quick marriage in which each day might be the last. Thirty years on, and the memories remain undiminished:

I saw a lot of him for a few days. You have to remember that, in a war, everything was speeded up … He came with me to look at Aldford Street, my cousin’s house where I was going to go and live and we had the most wonderful Saturday afternoon.
Piercing
cold it was at that time – bitter, bitter – and we had a lovely look at this shut-up empty house with gleams of very cold wintry sun coming in and he was enchanted by the house which was a very pretty one where you [Henrietta March-Phillipps] were born … and then we went for a lovely walk in St James’s Park. He certainly didn’t mind breaking rules. The lake was frozen, so we just didn’t see the notice saying nobody was to go on the ice and had the most exciting, lovely walk round the island in the lake. But it was thick ice and we walked across the ice rather rapidly not to get caught by stray keepers and had a wonderful exploring walk round the little island in the lake. It was a
heavenly
afternoon altogether.
17

Gus and Marjorie were married on 18 April 1942 at the church of Our Lady of the Assumption, Warwick Street, London W1. The reception was held afterwards at the house they had visited that cold February afternoon at 2, Aldford Street, London W1. Colin Gubbins’ private diary recorded simply: ‘Marjorie and Gus. 2 o’clock.’

†††

Although March-Phillipps’ plans for a significantly expanded Maid Honor Force had still to be ratified by the Chiefs of Staff, it appeared from an early stage that approval would be something of a formality. Accordingly – and with Gubbins’ support – March-Phillipps and Appleyard set out from London to find a suitable base for their secret new raiding force. They headed first of all back to the Antelope Hotel in Poole harbour, scene of their departure to West Africa and Operation
Postmaster
six months ago. It seemed like a lifetime: ‘We stayed in Poole at the old Antelope Hotel which was our shore HQ last summer’ wrote Appleyard. ‘They gave us a great welcome.’
18
Landlord Arthur ‘Pop’ Baker, it seems, remembered his friends. From there they set out to explore the local countryside. March-Phillipps already knew much of it well: he had lived at Bere Regis, just a few miles away, before the war when he had been making a living as a novelist. Luck, providence or local contacts led him now to a sixteenth-century manor house.

  
1
.  
Duchessa d’Aosta
was sailed to Scotland and renamed as the allied transport
Empire Yukon
. She was scrapped at Spezia, Italy, in 1952.
Maid Honor
, however, sails on. It is the name of an Appleby family-owned Southerly 42RST sailing yacht commissioned by Geoffrey Appleyard’s niece Penny and her husband, Adrian Heyworth, out of Herm in the Channel Islands.

  
2
.  HS 3/87.

  
3
.  
The Secret History of SOE
, William Mackenzie.

  
4
.  HS 3/87.