The Lost Band of Brothers (36 page)

Immediately after the fall of France in 1940 Sir Stewart Menzies,
22
the head of SIS, set up two new staff sections to gather information from within France, together with an ‘O’ (Operations) Section to open up physical communication with occupied Europe. This, as already noted, was headed by Commander Frank Slocum. To begin with, these staff sections, led by Commanders Kenneth Cohen and Wilfred Dunderdale, did well. Soon, SIS agents working for Dunderdale’s ‘
Johnny
’ network had been infiltrated into France through Spain and by mid-1941 had established a useful network of agents along the French Atlantic coast and set up clandestine courier lines into neutral Spain. By the end of that year, Commander Cohen had established particularly good agent coverage on the French Atlantic ports – new home of the U-boat fleets that threatened Britain’s Atlantic lifeline. Better yet, agents in Brest had sent to one of Cohen’s most effective operatives, Colonel Gilbert Renault (alias Remy), complete plans of the harbour defences and the latest reported movements of German capital ships put in to Brest for repair. Gilbert Renault set up his own agent network, Confrérie de Notre-Dame (CND), which rapidly expanded and eventually covered most of France. One of its early notable coups was the provision of precise intelligence that became the backbone for the successful Operation
Biting
raid on the German radar station at Bruneval in February 1942. Thus ‘
Johnny
’ and CND provided two vital strings to SIS’s intelligence-gathering bow in France. Later, intelligence would come back to England by a variety of means including wireless, aircraft pick-up and courier. But, in the early days, one of the most important and reliable routes back to England for letters, reports, packets of documents and stolen German papers was across the Channel – by sea.

And then, in February 1942, one of those strings broke. A series of ship arrests and agent losses led to the falling apart of the ‘
Johnny
’ network. Gilbert Renault’s expanding Confrérie de Notre-Dame now assumed critical importance: CND was to go on to become ‘the largest and most productive of all the Free French intelligence networks in France’.
23
In June 1942 CND had already pulled off a coup of major strategic significance that was to save thousands of allied lives. In that month, Gilbert Renault had sailed to England with more than just his family aboard the disguised fishing boat
N51
-
Le Dinan
at the successful conclusion of SIS’s Operation
Marie
-
Louise II
. He had brought back with him a blueprint of the coastal defences along the Normandy coast just as the Todt organisation was beginning to construct them:

The map spread out on the carpet [of his flat in Square Henri Pate] was more than three metres long and 75 centimetres in width. It covered the whole of the Normandy coastline from Cherbourg to Honfleur: marked on it were a great number of concrete blockhouses, machine-gun nests, barbed wire entanglements and minefields. The calibre of the guns to be mounted was indicated.
24

It was a detailed blueprint for the D-Day beach defences, handed to the allies two years before the invasion of Normandy.

It rapidly became evident that, given the increasing volume and quality of CND’s intelligence harvest, a regular monthly ‘mail-run’ between the English West Country and the south-west coast of Brittany would be essential. One of those closely involved in clandestine sea operations at that time was Sir Brooks Richards, DSC:

By September 1942 Remy’s
Confrérie de Notre Dame
was on a vast scale. It had for more than a year extended along the Atlantic coast and up into Brittany, with particularly good coverage of Bordeaux and Brest: now it covered the whole of France … This sea link became of such overriding importance to SIS that Slocum ruled that NID(C)’s fishing vessels must be reserved exclusively for this purpose and must not undertake operations for other organisations in the Bay of Biscay for fear of compromising the system.
25

It was this clandestine sea link, this conduit for priceless intelligence anywhere across the Channel and not just into the Bay of Biscay, that those in the Royal Navy and SIS now sought to shield and protect. To those who were informed, the argument against the pin-prick, nuisance raids of SSRF spoke for itself: measured against a blueprint of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall or some yet-to-be-realised strategic prize, what price the alerting of the enemy coastline for the mere snatching of a sentry’s pay book or the cutting of a German throat on some remote, rocky out-station?
26

Operation
Gimcrack
might have been abandoned because MTB 344 was required by ‘Force J’ for ‘other operations’. Operation
Fahrenheit
was not.

  
1
.  Amongst the raids dreamed up by Gus March-Phillipps and Geoffrey Appleyard that never saw the light of day was an ambitious project to attack the mighty German battleship
Tirpitz
with limpet mines carried by members of SSRF sitting astride a two-man submarine propelled forward by pedal power. The project was abandoned – perhaps wisely – when
Tirpitz
changed her mooring.

  
2
.  
Geoffrey
, 133.

  
3
.  He died in 1943 and was succeeded by Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham.

  
4
.  
Geoffrey
, 128–9.

  
5
.  Speech by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Edinburgh, 12 October 1942.

  
6
.  Minutes COS (42) 146th Mt (O) held on 13 October 1942. In ADM 116/5112.

  
7
.  
No Colours or Crest
, 69–70.

  
8
.  DEFE 2/109.

  
9
.  Ibid.

10
.  Ibid.

11
.  Promoted Major-General, June 1943. Died February 1970.

12
.  HS 9/888/2.

13
.  DEFE 2/622.

14
.  Interview with Lt Freddie Bourne. IWM Audio tape 11721, Reel 2. Recorded November 15 1990.

15
.  DEFE 2/ 1093.

16
.  Ibid.

17
.  First formalised on 9 May 1942 in CCO (CCS (42) 130 (O).

18
.  ADM 116/5112.

19
.  ADM 116/5112.

20
.  DEFE 2/694.

21
.  Ibid.

22
.  Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of SIS from November 1939 to June 1952.

23
.  
Secret Flotillas
, 129.

24
.  Ibid., 143.

25
.  Ibid., 142.

26
.  Between January 1942 and March 1943 SIS mounted fifteen sea operations to the French shore. These were Operations
Valise
,
Turquoise
,
Pillar West
,
Mac
,
Marie-Louise 1
,
Marie-Louise II
,
Gilberte
,
Neptune
,
Grenville I
,
Grenville II
,
Grenville III
,
Hawkins
,
Tenderley
,
Tentative
and
Rodney
.

Additional reinforcements for the expanded SSRF at Anderson Manor arrived towards the end of October: another two officers from No 12 Commando plus a further twelve NCOs. Earlier arrivals on loan from 12 Commando, Capt. Philip Pinckney and six of his men, had already taken part in Operation
Basalt
. Now Capt. Peter Kemp, one of the SOE old hands from
Knife
days, was ordered to train up Capt. Oswald ‘Mickey’ Rooney and six men to take part in an unspecified raid scheduled for the near future which he, Kemp, would lead. Operation
Fahrenheit
was just a fortnight away. The men from No 12 Commando made an impressive addition to the decimated unit at Anderson Manor. ‘Rooney, a powerfully built, self-confident officer, who knew his men intimately and commanded their implicit obedience, had little to learn from me,’ recounted Peter Kemp:

In fact, apart from pistol shooting and movement at night, he and his men knew more about the business than I … we spent the next two weeks together in unremitting training by day and night. In particular, we exercised ourselves in night schemes on land and water, in soundless movement and the use of our eyes in the dark. For such intensive practice we were soon to be thankful.
1

At midday on Wednesday, 11 November 1942, the ten men of Operation
Fahrenheit
left Anderson Manor for Lupton House near Paignton, Devon, one of the new bases recently requisitioned for SSRF. Here they ate a hurried meal, changed into their operational clothing and sorted out their weapons and ammunition. All wore leather jerkins with a toggle rope secured around their waist. They wore standard army boots and their faces were unblackened.
2
This time, in addition to the usual side-arms and tommy guns, Kemp’s raiders were carrying a silenced Sten, two of the new plastic explosive No 6 grenades trialled on Operation
Barricade
back in August and a Bren light machine-gun to cover their withdrawal. Their target was a semaphore station on top of cliffs on Pointe de Plouézec about 15 miles north-west of Saint Brieuc on the north Brittany coast. They were to carry out the usual reconnaissance, attack the semaphore station and, if possible, take prisoners. The semaphore station was believed to be guarded by barbed wire, a sentry, a small concrete guard-house and a dozen soldiers. There were, they were told, no mines or booby-traps to worry about and the way up from the shore towards the semaphore station was by a narrow, clearly defined track that should be easy to find in the darkness. All appeared straightforward, the geography rather like
Basalt
, but on a smaller scale.

The SSRF, still recovering from its devastating losses on Operation
Aquatint
, badly needed another successful, loss-free operation on the heels of
Basalt
to restore collective confidence
.
Bill Stirling, their new commanding officer, took Peter Kemp aside before they left. ‘Rooney and his chaps are very keen and will obviously seize any opportunity for a fight,’ warned Stirling:

Naturally we want to inflict casualties and take prisoners; but
not
, I repeat, at the cost of losing men ourselves. It isn’t worth it at this stage. If, when you get there, you don’t think you can fight without losing men, I promise I shall be quite satisfied with a recce. Remember, Peter, I don’t want any Foreign Legion stuff on this party!
3

Peter Kemp understood. He and Capt. ‘Mickey’ Rooney had already decided that, circumstances permitting, they would close with the sentry themselves and kill him silently with their fighting knives.

Leaving Paignton, the party made its way by covered lorry to Dartmouth where MTB 344 was waiting by the quay, engines running. On the quayside were Bill Stirling, Freddie Bourne, the captain of MTB 344 and Ian Darby, the unit’s newly appointed Intelligence Officer. Clumsy with weapons, the raiders filed aboard and squeezed below decks:

Eight of us had to travel in a very small hatch on the starboard bow of the craft. It was pitch black in what could well have been a paint locker. Before the door was closed on us, a sailor handed in a bucket and in answer to a question from one of us said: ‘to use as a toilet or if you are sea-sick.’
4

Appleyard – his slow-healing foot now in plaster – limped up to the bridge where he assumed his customary place as navigator.
The Little Pisser
slipped her moorings and, engines burbling, gathered way slowly downstream in the gathering dusk, the fourteenth-century Dartmouth Castle standing out as dark, silent sentinel against the fading western sky.

The evening was fine with a clear sky, south-east wind Force 2–3, and visibility moderate with a moderate south-easterly swell that was soon breaking green over the boat. Captains Kemp and Rooney were sheltering against the upturned hull of the Dory lashed astern. Soon they were drenched through with freezing spray and chilled to the bone. The crossing took six hours, during which tidal drift and cross-swell pushed
The
Little Pisser
off her dead reckoning course. It took an hour and three sides of a box search after a 3-mile over-run to establish their position with certainly before they finally picked up the light tower on Roches Douvres. Presently they made out the off-lying islands leading in to Pointe de Plouézec. The men were ordered on deck:

The sight which met our eyes as we emerged from the dark confines of our accommodation was really beautiful. On our port beam there was a high cliff rising from a beach about 500 yards away and we were heading into a large bay with a peninsula of land about ten o’clock from us. After the darkness of our position in the bow of the MTB it almost looked like daylight.
5
No one had been sea-sick. As MTB 344 edged close to shore they sensed rather than saw something black rising out of the water behind them. In their heightened nervous state several on board
The Little Pisser
imagined it might be the first showing of the casing of a submarine closing in astern. In fact, it turned out to be the humped backs of several grey seals.
6
They could breathe again. At ten minutes past midnight MTB 344, running now on silent engines, dropped anchor half a mile off-shore in 7 fathoms. ‘The target, the semaphore station, could be dimly seen against the sky,’ Appleyard reported later.
7

Kemp and his men launched the 18-foot Dory over the side without a sound and paddled the fifteen minutes to their agreed landing place at the foot of the cliffs at Pointe de Plouézec. Here they had expected to find shingle. Instead, they found boulders. While the men went into all-round defensive positions, Capt. Rooney went off in search of a better landing place. Ten minutes later he returned: there wasn’t one. With the tide now on the run they decided to leave one man with the Dory to ensure it did not become rock-bound and turned inland to find the track up the cliffs. Like the shingle they thought they had identified on the photo-reconnaissance photographs, the path too turned out not to exist. Instead they were faced with a steep and difficult 100-foot climb up through sharp gorse and loose shale with slippery grass underfoot. The Bren-gunner, Sergeant Nicholson, turned his toggle-rope into a sling, slung the Bren over his back and climbed hands free. Weapons at the ready, they forced their way up, the sharp-barbed gorse tearing at uniform, hands and faces. In the fear of exposure and discovery, the tiny rattle of shale slipping down the cliff behind them sounded, thought Kemp, like an avalanche.