The Lost Band of Brothers (35 page)

For the men of Operation
Facsimile
, the attempted escape overland to Spain, however risky, would at least have been part of their post-operation evasion planning. It would thus have been something they would have had time to consider and prepare for. Capt. Graham Hayes, however, the evader from the disastrous Operation
Aquatint
a month earlier, had not enjoyed the same luxury of preparation. For him, heading south inland deep into enemy territory had been the one desperate option that might conceivably lead towards safety and survival.

Hayes had been brave – and lucky. After swimming more than a mile westwards up the coast in the dark towards Cherbourg – away from the gunfire, the shouting, the lights and the flares that engulfed his companions – the peacetime tall-ships’ deep-sea mariner and aspirant wood-sculptor who had once kept a tame jackdaw named ‘Grip’ on his shoulder had stumbled ashore in the early hours of 13 September 1942. He then made his way inland to the village of Asnières en Bessin just to the east of Pointe du Hoc. Here, exhausted, soaked through and with dawn not far away, he had chanced all by knocking on the door of a farmhouse. His luck held, as he found himself befriended by French farmer Marcel Lemasson who, heedless of the dangers to himself and his family, ushered him in and closed the door.

While Hayes was being fed by his wife, Lemasson slipped out to confer with Paul de Brunville, the local Mayor who lived in the chateau across the lane. He too was a loyal Frenchman. After consulting his two children, Oliver (22) and Isabelle (20) – both of whom spoke English – Paul and Oliver de Brunville brought Hayes back to the chateau in the darkness that evening where he was hidden in the hayloft in the farm attached to the chateau’s grounds. The next morning, at his father’s instruction, Oliver de Brunville went to another trusted contact, Septime Humann in Jouay-Mondaye, who in turn promised to feed the stranded English captain further down the Resistance pipeline towards Spain and safety. A journey first by bicycle and then by train followed with Hayes at every stage watched, escorted and guided through check-points and barriers in a land thick with the grey-green uniforms of his country’s enemies. From Asniëres, Oliver de Brunville and Hayes cycled to Bayeux. From Bayeux Hayes caught the troop-crowded train to Caen and then on to Lisieux, further still to the east, a journey that, from its start point at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, carried him diagonally across what would, in two years’ time, become the Normandy D-Day beachhead. Here, just to the east of Liseaux north of Moyaux in the Le Manoir home in Le Pin of French
resistant
Suzanne Septavaux, Hayes was to be laid up by illness and a knee infection for the next six weeks. He did not know it, but by luck, good fortune and the selfless courage of others, he had hooked up with SOE’s
Donkeyman
circuit.

Meanwhile, back in England, that same October, Second Lt Lassen was awarded the first of his three Military Crosses. Described as ‘a very gallant and determined officer’,
12
Lassen was awarded the MC for his inspiring leadership and outstanding contribution to Operations
Postmaster
,
Branford
,
Barricade
and
Basalt.
His face still battered and bruised from the fight on Sark and with front teeth missing after a collision with the rail of MTB 344 a few months earlier during some mistimed re-embarkation, he was then posted to the Commando Training Centre at Achnacarry. Here he conveyed a sense of realism, urgency and purpose to fellow Danes sweating their way towards course completion. Thanks to Lassen’s powers of persuasion and recruitment, all sixteen Danes volunteered for onward deployment into SOE and SSRF.

The unit he had temporarily left behind in Dorset was now hugely expanded – it received a new and more formal charter of operations from Mountbatten on 22 October 1942.
13
It expanded not just with men, but with boats too, the essential means by which they would be carried to the enemy shore. Now
The Littler Pisser
– MTB 344, that veteran of previous raids – was joined by Coastal Motor Boats 103, 104, 312, 316, 317 and 326, all from the 14th Flotilla which, from the day of Churchill’s ‘hand of steel’ speech in Edinburgh on 12 October, had became part of ‘Force J’ with its headquarters at HMS
Vectris
at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. ‘Force J’ consisted also of most of the surviving ships that had taken part in the raid on Dieppe – Operation
Jubilee
– and which had been kept together ever since. Perhaps unfortunately for Stirling, Appleyard and their men, ‘Force J’ was under the command of Captain, now Commodore, John Hughes-Hallett RN (‘Hughes-Hitler’), the officer who had written so disparagingly about March-Phillipps’ organisational skills in the early days of Anderson Manor. In future, although SSRF operations would be carried out under the ‘unified command’ of Lt Col Bill Stirling, who would submit plans for raids directly to Mountbatten, those plans would have to be copied to Hughes-Hallett and final operational control would rest with him. It was an arrangement and an appointment, evidently, which found no favour with the skipper of MTB 344, Lt Freddie Bourne, DSC, who, as a motor torpedo boat commander, came directly under Hughes-Hallett’s command. He remembered bitterly:

He [Hughes-Hallett] made it absolutely clear to me, which I got very cross about, that he felt all these pin-prick raids over on the French coast which I had been partly responsible for were a total waste of the war effort. That was his personal view and he said it to me. I’ll never forget that. I knew his Flag Lieutenant very well and Tim took me outside and said I wouldn’t make too much of that, that’s obviously just his own view. I said, well, that’s not how we viewed it in the months I was working with the army and I’ll never forget it.

I shot out of Cowes harbour in my MTB 344 back to Hornet [Coastal Forces Base HMS
Hornet
at Gosport, Hampshire] and created a bit of a furore because I went out far too fast and started rocking a few too many boats but I was in a fair old state at that stage … We felt it was all worthwhile; it was keeping the enemy on his toes, he never knew where we were going to strike. Albeit it was very small stuff, but it was obviously a forerunner for something that could become much bigger.
14

Once again, there was that apparently unavoidable clash between conventional naval thinking and those who had thrown away the rule book. Despite the high opinion of SSRF held by Brigadier Gubbins and Lord Mountbatten, by the Chiefs of Staff and even by Churchill himself, not everybody, it appears, thought the men of the Small Scale Raiding Force worth their rations.

Combined Operations moved fast to consolidate their authorised expansion in the minds of other agencies. On 31 October Colonel ‘RN’ – Robert Neville, one of Mountbatten’s advisers and Chief Planning Co-Ordinator at COHQ – wrote to the Director of Military Intelligence reminding him of SSRF’s existence and outlining their own plans to particularise and add to the strategic value of future missions:

The targets for these raids have been selected, hitherto, somewhat at random, the broad objective being that we should kill or capture Germans and obtain intelligence. In other words, there has been little relation of the objectives with definite requirements.

In accordance with the Prime Minister’s and the Chiefs of Staff’s Directive, it is now intended to increase the scope and activities of this Small Scale Raiding Force. It may thus be possible to select targets with the object, over and above that of killing Germans, of bringing back, for instance, some particular technical or other equipment, a specimen of which may be required by one or other of the services … It would greatly assist us in this connection if you could inform us of any targets in which the War Office would be interested.
15

Be careful what you wish for: Combined Operations presently received, from a wide variety of sources, a veritable shopping list of suggestions as to what they might capture and bring home for examination. This embraced everything from sea mines and the latest 25-hundredweight, multiple-barrel flak unit in its entirety (failing that, the latest anti-aircraft gun-sight would do nicely!); specimen rounds of ammunition, sniper rifles, grenade discharger cups for rifles, machine-gun mountings, details of beam transmission stations, gun dials, range tables, pay books and office records. In fact, ‘Practically any documents which can be seized will be worth carrying home’.

From the Director of Naval Intelligence, however, SSRF received a word of timely caution:

The progressive strengthening of the defences of the coastline of Europe makes it increasingly difficult to find targets which offer a reasonable chance of success … The garrisons guarding small objectives such as lighthouses, isolated batteries and searchlights, previously satisfactory targets, are being strengthened as a result of CCO’s operations on that coast … In the past very many promising targets have been pointed out to CCO and every effort will continue to be made to do so in the future.
16

Although Combined Operations may have hurried to consolidate their new authority to raid the German-occupied coastline with a new co-ordinated procurement objective, others, like Hughes-Hallett, remained unpersuaded. As late as 13 November 1942 Combined Operations’ Director of Plans felt obliged to review both the arguments for the existing raiding policy
17
and those arguments still paraded against it by the Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth, Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, who took common cause with Commodore Hughes-Hallett RN in his dislike of ‘pin-prick’ raids.

In
favour
of the raids, the Combined Operations’ Director of Plans echoed Appleyard’s thinking, stating that they gave participants valuable experience ‘which can be gained in no other way’. He emphasised that they provided an opportunity to gain intelligence whilst locking up large numbers of German soldiers and equipment in a passive, static role. He added:

With the enemy’s increasing manpower shortage, this aspect is highly important … Some idea of the effect of our raids on the enemy can be obtained by considering how vexatious it would be to us if the enemy were to adopt a similar policy and force us to take the same sort of precautions that they themselves have had to adopt.
18

In an earlier paragraph he had emphasised: ‘There is evidence (graded A1) that, consequent upon a recent small raid, [Operation
Basalt
] Hitler personally has ordered the increase of garrisons of all outlying occupied islands, from Finland to Greece, since in general he considers them at present to be quite inadequate.’ Over time the new vigilance of the coast defences would be worn down ‘and a state of fatigue and strain induced all along the coastline’.

Conceding that raiding
must
have an adverse effect upon the work of Naval Intelligence, Director of Plans Minutes noted for the record that: ‘Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth, doubts whether the advantages accruing from the raids are sufficient to outweigh the disadvantages that result.’ He enumerated these as a tightening of security measures generally and a more frequent change of Nazi codes making the interception of German convoys in the Channel more difficult. There would be a general tightening up of ‘weak spots’ in German coastal defences and this would impact upon destroyer and RN operations generally.

None of these arguments prevailed. Besides which, observed the Director of Plans: ‘The conflict between NID (‘C’)’s interests and other operations has always existed. D of P knows of no new factor to justify the alteration of the raiding policy at the present time. It is understood that close liaison is maintained between CCO and ‘C’ [SIS].’ He concluded:

While there is undoubtedly something in Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth’s, contentions, D of P’s opinion is that the most potent of the above arguments is that by these small raids the enemy is forced to lock up his dwindling manpower in an unproductive occupation. Furthermore, since there is nothing in the Commander-in-Chief’s arguments that has not already been taken into consideration, D of P. considers that the present policy should be adhered to.
19

And so it would be – for the moment, at least.

Even as the arguments flowed to and fro between Richmond Terrace and the offices of the Chiefs of Staff in sandbagged Whitehall, a further two raids had already been planned. Operation
Fahrenheit
, in fact, had been mounted just the day before. But Operation
Gimcrack
– a raid by twelve SSRF to take prisoners and wipe out the German garrison on the tiny Île Saint-Rion close inshore off the north coast of Brittany, had been cancelled: MTB 344 had been required by ‘Force J’ ‘for other operations.’
20
Operation
Inhabit
– a raid on the Cherbourg Peninsula south-east of Omonville to recce coastal defences, take a prisoner and ‘investigate a sinister German area of activity’
21
– also fell by the wayside.

Admiral Forbes’ reasons for opposing small scale raids on the Channel coast appear, on the face of it, to be petty and insubstantial; thin gruel. They suggest that something of greater moment lay behind his opposition to the proposed activities of Stirling, Appleyard and the men of the Small Scale Raiding Force. Perhaps it did.

The writ of C-in-C Plymouth extended from Exmouth in east Devon to Penzance in Cornwall, lying as it did at the south eastern edge of the Western Approaches, that vast block of water extending far out into the Atlantic and as far north and east as the Orkneys. Admiral Forbes’ command thus encompassed Dartmouth, Falmouth and the secret SOE base at Helford, whose Commanding Officer was the firebrand Gerry Holdsworth, the former ‘Section D’ SIS agent in Norway who had crossed cutlasses with Commander Slocum over the sanctioning of clandestine fishing boat missions to France for SOE rather than for SIS, and whose work Slocum had so thoroughly thwarted throughout 1942 (see Chapter 4). Although Commander Slocum as NID (C) reported, at this time, to Claude Dansey, SIS’s
de facto
second-in-command to Sir Stewart Menzies, his work necessarily fell within the ambit of Admiral Forbes’ influence. DoPs’ minutes suggest that Forbes may indeed have invoked, if only in general terms, the secrecy and importance of Slocum’s work for SIS as another reason to curtail the activities of SSRF. If Admiral Forbes took an overarching interest in Slocum’s activities, then he would also have been aware of, and been concerned to protect, the clandestine interests of SIS operations out of Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. He would have done so, moreover, with good reason.