The Lost Band of Brothers (30 page)

‘Coming out again the boat, I think, would have sunk anyhow,’ recalled Howard:

Whether it was actually holed or a shell landed nearby, I don’t know. But certainly, long before we got anywhere near the naval boat [MTB 344], the ship sank. Turned over, in fact … It was a small boat with a canvas bottom. It was really very unsuitable … And Gus and several of the others tried to swim out to the boat [MTB 344]. The only person I’ve met since who got anywhere near it told me that he actually got fairly close to the boat but it was, of course, dark. The boat didn’t see him … and though they didn’t see him he saw it sailing away … The only reason I survived was that I actually was swimming about in the dark, being tossed around, I hit something and it happened to be the over-turned boat.
19

The man who got close but not close enough to MTB 344 was Tom Winter. ‘It was, of course, very difficult swimming because the tide was still on the flow [
sic
] and we could not make much headway. The Germans were firing at us all the time.’
20
Winter somehow made it back to the beach. Weapons lost to the sea, exhausted, floundering ashore in sodden battledress, he was fired on again at very short range. The shots missed. He was then taken prisoner and dragged off to German headquarters.

Some 400 yards off-shore staring out from the bridge of MTB 344, Appleyard and Bourne could do nothing but wait and watch in an agony of uncertainty as the fate of their friends played out on the enemy shore. After the initial flurry of tommy-gun fire and grenade explosions seen at 0050, Appleyard reported – although perhaps unsurprisingly, timings between MTB and shore party survivors do not mesh precisely – that red and green Verey lights, grenade explosions and more machine-gun fire spread up and down the coast for the next half hour. To begin with, MTB 344 remained unseen. Then, at 0120, she was spotted in the light of flares as she lay out at the edge of darkness and came under accurate machine-gun fire from three machine-guns on the clifftop. One of these rounds put the starboard engine out of action and a larger gun on shore – perhaps a 3-pounder – started firing heavier shells at the gunboat, all of which exploded harmlessly further out to sea. Aboard MTB 344 they then heard English voices calling from somewhere ahead but the messages were confused and indecipherable: ‘As the MTB was now fully illuminated by flares and under considerable fire at 400 yards range, the anchor cable was cut and the MTB steamed 2 miles directly away from the coast.’
21
Hidden once more by her cloak of darkness,
The Little Pisser
’s engine was declutched and the power throttled down slowly to give the audible impression that she was moving out to sea. The firing then ceased. Verey lights continued to illuminate the sea close inshore.

The men on MTB 344 were not about to abandon their friends. A pause – and then
The Little Pisser
began to creep back towards the danger zone at slow speed on silent engines and with her infrared contact light burning at the masthead. She came to within half a mile of the beach and stopped again. She stayed there, rocking to the swell as they watched and listened, straining for sight and sound, for forty-five minutes. There was no more firing but the Verey lights continued to be sent up while, on the clifftop, the Germans attempted without success to bring a searchlight into action. Appleyard, Bourne and the Vickers gunners on either side of the bridge scanned the darkness. Nothing. No signals, no sign of their friends. What might possibly have been the Goatley was spotted in the fizzling light of one of the flares. It was lying broadside on to the right of the beach above high water mark and almost up against the sea wall. No one was with it and the sighting could not be confirmed in the uncertain light.

At 0225 MTB 344 came under fire again but this time from the sea
.
She had been picked up in silhouette against the shore in the light of the flares. Now seven or eight shells exploded between her and the shore, fired apparently from at least two unseen German patrol craft closing in astern from the north and north-west to cut off her line of retreat. A dozen more shells screamed over from seaward, one of which landed 20 feet off the starboard beam, drenching the ship with a cascade of water: ‘E-boats were well-armed, fast. We wouldn’t have had a chance with them. We had two twin Vickers on each side of the bridge, .303 only. We wouldn’t have stood an earthly against them.’
22
Now the machine-gunners on the cliffs spotted them and opened fire, too. It was time to leave. MTB 344 swung away to the east down the coast and slid once more into darkness. Lt Freddie Bourne recalled:

We had to cut and run … No way we could have got the Commandos back. One of the chaps tried to swim out. We heard them in the water but they were too far off for us to do anything and by that time we’d got a searchlight on us and we couldn’t rescue them.
23

A mile eastwards and then they altered course north, deliberately cutting across the top of a German minefield to ensure they were back in the safety of home waters before dawn broke. What passed between Lt Bourne and Capt. Appleyard on the bridge as MTB 344 bashed home during that miserable return with dawn lightning the sky off the starboard beam is not recorded. Perhaps they shared little more than silence as each absorbed the impact of such sudden, catastrophic loss; perhaps they discussed the possibility of a swift return on another night, infrared contact light burning at the masthead, to pick up survivors who, even now, might be going to ground to await rescue in a day or two. There would have been time to spare for such thoughts, such discussion; under-powered and on only one engine, MTB 344 made only 12 knots as she limped back across the Channel in a lumpy sea and swell with the wind now rising F4. She docked at Portsmouth at 1035.

Hobbling ashore, Appleyard made his way to HMS
Hornet
to make that initial single page, raid notification report to C-in-C Portsmouth. He then caught the late morning train to London to report directly to Brigadier Gubbins at SOE Headquarters in Baker Street. After that, he knew, there would be other people he would have to inform. For the sensitive young officer who had just lost all his closest friends, it was the end of what must surely have been the most harrowing twelve hours of his life.

By then it was mid-morning in Normandy, too. Company Sergeant Major Tom Winter had been dragged to the local command post. There he had found Captain The Lord Howard lying wounded on the floor. There too was André Desgrange who was unhurt. All three were told they were to be shot. There was no sign of the others.

Not all had struggled ashore to capture the previous night. Capt. Graham Hayes – always a strong swimmer – had worked out his own salvation and, jettisoning his weapons, had swum away from the lights westwards up the coast. He had then landed near Vierville-sur-Mer, crawled ashore, walked inland and presently found warmth and refuge with a brave French farmer. It would be the first stage of a lengthy and courageous escape attempt.

The Germans reported Lt Tony Hall dead. In truth, he was lying unconscious in a German hospital with a serious head wound that would lead to his eventual repatriation. Capt. Burton, Private Hellings and Private Orr initially evaded capture. John Burton’s widow recalled:

The Germans had the beach very well defended and the raid was a disaster. John, a Dutchman [Hellings] and a Pole [Orr] managed to get off the beach and swim for the MTB but that was under such heavy gunfire that it had to leave before they could reach it. They swam down the coast for some way and then went ashore. In the daytime they hid and were given clothes and food by the French, and at night they walked. One night they walked right into a German patrol [Fallschirmjager on exercise], so that was the end of that. They had been trying to get to the Spanish border, but found out that they had been going round in circles. They were handed over to the SS who put them up against a wall and said they were going to shoot them but then, for some unknown reason, changed their minds. John was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Germany. He didn’t know what happened to the other two.
24

Jan Hellings and Adam Orr had been captured near Rennes. Adam Orr – alias Polish Jew Abraham Opoczynski – was sent to Dachau concentration camp and from there to the Bad Tolz Kommando, an SS work camp. He died on 12 April 1945, aged 23, and is buried in the military cemetery in Durnbach, 30 miles from Munich. Jan Hellings was sent to two different Stalags, one of which was in Fallingbostel, Lower Saxony. He appears to have survived the war.
25

Major Gustavus March-Phillipps (34), Serjeant Alan Williams (22) and Private Richard Lehniger (42) were all dead, killed by gunshot wounds and/or drowning.

‘The next morning I was taken out and had to drag up the beach the bodies of Major March-Phillipps, Sgt Williams and Pte Leonard,’ reported Tom Winter many months later:

I had not seen or heard anything further of the fate of Lt. Hall, only that the Germans reported him as dead and brought in his shoulder titles. I was taken back to the headquarters again, where we waited for a lorry to take us to Caen. The bodies were taken away and buried at St. Laurent, according to an Intelligence officer. Lord Howard had been taken to hospital during the night and Lt. Desgrange and I were taken to Caen in the charge of a guard and the Intelligence Officer, where we underwent a very stiff interrogation.
26

Winter was kept at Caen for eight days. When he was escorted up to the hospital to see Captain The Lord Howard recovering from his wound he found Lt Tony Hall, still unconscious. After the war, Winter, the man who had moved March-Phillipps’ body, was asked about the manner in which the Major had met his end: ‘It’s been said that he drowned, but I don’t think so. I am sure that he died of wounds.’
27

Marjorie March-Phillipps heard the news of her husband’s death at Dunham Massey where she had started her parachute course. She was also – although she did not know it at the time – two months pregnant with her daughter Henrietta: ‘I
knew
something had gone wrong. Anyway, we did our training and then on Monday evening somebody had left the evening paper and I found this paper and I saw the paragraph which was a German communique …’
28

That communiqué, issued at 1250 on 14 September by the Official German News Agency stated:

During the night of the 12–13 September, a British landing party, consisting of five officers, a Company Sergeant Major and a private, tried to make a footing on the French Channel coast, east of Cherbourg. Their approach was immediately detected by the defence. Fire was opened on them and the landing craft was sunk by direct hits. Three English officers and a de Gaullist Naval officer were taken prisoner. A Major, a Company Sergeant Major and a Private were brought to land dead.
29

Appleyard returned to Anderson Manor. Among those who greeted his return, anxious for news, was James Edgar:

Appleyard told me that the whole outfit were to look at the horizon where they were landing to see if there was a break in the horizon, a dip in it, up which they were possibly able to make their way inland. And Appleyard told me that, if they didn’t find that little dip, silhouetted, as it were, they were to put off the operation. Well, this is what Appleyard told me himself. And March-Phillipps didn’t obey their original plan … We were simply told by Appleyard that they had all been shot up. A Verey light was sent up by the Germans – that’s what did for them … Appleyard was quite devastated, there’s no doubt about it.
30

Peter Kemp remembered the mood amongst the men when the news broke at Anderson Manor:

We had been prepared for casualties, but not for such a catastrophe as this. The death of the gallant idealist and strange, quixotic genius who had been our commander and our inspiration, together with the loss of so many good friends, all in the space of a few hours, was a crippling calamity which nearly put an end to our activities. Indeed, it probably would have done so but for the energetic reaction of Appleyard who refused to let our grief for our comrades arrest his determination to avenge them.
31

James Edgar was right. Some time later Appleyard wrote to Major Cholmondeley, the man whose manor house home they had appropriated with such high hopes back in March and admitted:

His death was a tremendous blow to me … Gus meant a very great deal to me and he was my closest personal friend. We had been together for over two years and the occasion when he was killed was the one and only occasion in all that time that we were not actually alongside each other in every ‘party’.
32

Now, for Appleyard, there was a debt to settle, a dead friend to avenge. There would be another raid. Soon.

  
1
.  PhotoRecon pic in DEFE 2/365.

  
2
.  DEFE 2/109.

  
3
.  BBC Henrietta.

  
4
.  Ibid.

  
5
.  Audio tape loaned to the author by the family.

  
6
.  BBC Henrietta.

  
7
.  
No Colours or Crest
, 57.

  
8
.  German wartime meteorological charts kindly made available by the Met. Office, Exeter.

  
9
.  Tony Hall. BBC Henrietta.

10
.  DEFE 2/365.

11
.  Ibid.

12
.  Tom Winter statement in DEFE 2/365.

13
.  
Geoffrey
, 124.

14
.  Tom Winter statement in DEFE 2/365.

15
.  ‘
If I Must Die …
’, Fournier and Heintz.

16
.  Tony Hall. BBC Henrietta.

17
.  
Anders Lassen
, 108.

18
.  DEFE 2/365.

19
.  Lord Francis Howard. BBC Henrietta.

20
.  DEFE 2/365.

21
.  Appleyard after-action report written at HMS
Hornet
directly after he had returned from the failure of Operation
Aquatint
. In DEFE 2/365.