The Lost Band of Brothers (39 page)

But what had
not
been directly addressed – for the moment, at least – was Mountbatten’s question regarding raiding west of the Cherbourg peninsula and, during that brief hiatus, the first raid of the SSRF in the New Year attempted to slip under the wire. Members of the SBS had now joined No 62 Commando. Operations
Criticism
and
Witticism
on the night of 8–9 January 1943 were one and the same thing: attempts, on separate nights by four members of No 2 SBS attached to SSRF, to paddle into St Peter Port, Guernsey, by canoe and destroy enemy shipping with limpet mines. All attempts were frustrated by bad weather.
7

Operation
Frankton
8
– the iconic Royal Marines’ raid on Bordeaux docks in December 1942 by canoe-borne raiders who later gained immortality as the Cockleshell Heroes – had by then become ‘notorious’
9
because of the lack of mission co-ordination between Combined Operations and SOE. As a result of this needless duplication on a mission which cost eight brave men their lives, the Admiralty set up a ‘Clearing House’ to ensure such wasteful duplication could never be repeated. Run by ACNS(H) – Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Home), Rear Admiral Eric Brind – it was he who now bound the Small Scale Raiding Force’s operational restraint still tighter, writing the same day SSRF/SBS abandoned Operation
Witticism
:

The Operations now being undertaken by ‘C’ are of such importance as to make it necessary to refrain from small raids west of Cherbourg Peninsula for the present. Any particular operation required by CCO [Mountbatten] in the Bay will be considered according to the circumstances at the time.
10

On the bottom of that handwritten memo from ‘E.J.P.B.’ – Admiral Brind – an unidentified hand has added a bitter note to the Vice Chief of Combined Operations the next day:

I may have got it all wrong, but the situation implied in the last paragraph of ACNS(H)’s letter appears quite unacceptable. The suggestion, as I see it, is quite clearly that CCO [Mountbatten] can carry on planning and mounting raids for submission to ACNS(H) who has the right of last minute rejection.
11

A pencil-corrected draft response for Mountbatten to send to the Admiralty from Combined Operations on 11 January 1943 states:

I am assuming that this restriction does not apply to islands west of Cherbourg peninsula … I will now be obliged to inform the Chiefs of Staff that, as a result of ACNS(H)’s decision, my small scale operations are being practically completely stopped … I have no alternative but to submit that, for the reasons given in my memorandum attached, I am unable to implement the instructions of the Prime Minister COS (42) 146th meeting to intensify small scale raiding unless this decision is altered.
12

A penned footnote in an unknown hand adds: ‘Consider that the Norwegian situation (e.g.
Cartoon
) which is also being sabotaged [sic] by ‘C’ must also be mentioned.’
13

Operations
Weathervane
and
Promise
had been cancelled by C-in-C Plymouth in December 1942. The New Year would see the cancellation of Operations
Underpaid
(a recce/prisoners raid on Cap Fréhel, Brittany),
Woodward
(Île Vierge),
Hillbilly
(Plouguerneau) and
Mantling
(Île Renouf).

The writing was on the wall, some of it put there by Major Ian Collins, Chairman of the Small Scale Raiding Syndicate. Briefing Mountbatten on 10 January 1943 about the implications of Channel restrictions that would leave the activities of SSRF ‘very considerably curtailed’,
14
he reviewed SSRF’s bleak Channel options for February, recording on 14 January:

I am submitting the programme for February, but the following facts must be faced.

1.  It is unlikely that more than one or two operations at the most will take place as the Brittany coast is still closed to us … MTB 344, after six months more or less continuous work, is going in for overhaul … This would take from 3 to 4 weeks which more or less covers the non-moon period. MGBs (Class C) are not really suitable for operations in the Cherbourg Peninsula or the Channel Islands

[…]

7.  There is no doubt that with the few operations taking place the less risk we are inclined to take in attacking objectives, since as the effect of policy (series of small scale raids) is barred, one is less inclined to risk a force unless the object is very worthwhile, and the force itself cannot have the same confidence if only operating every two months.

8.  As long as the present ban exists on any force operating every alternate night in the Channel west of the Isle of Wight, the number of days on which operations could take place is very limited.
15

An undated draft letter for Mountbatten to send to the Chiefs of Staff at this time stated:

A decision has been given by the Admiralty that I must refrain from any operations west of the Cherbourg Peninsula meantime … I have no alternative but to submit that … I am unable to implement the instructions of the Prime Minister to intensify small scale raiding unless this decision is altered … I submit that the number of seaborne operations carried out by SIS in this area will be found to be so few that I still hold very strongly the opinion that this decision should be reconsidered.
16

It was not.

Effectively forbidden from raiding west of the Cherbourg Peninsula, Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff, Brigadier Godfrey Wildman-Lushington, fought a valiant rearguard action, pressing ACNS(H) on 21 January 1943 for confirmation that the
islands
west of the Cherbourg Peninsula were not included in his ban. He attached to his letter a summary of the planned raids which had been – or might yet be – affected by his decision. Operations
Woodward
,
Weathervane
and
Promise
– as already stated – were on the list; three unnamed raids against the Brittany coast were now ruled out and a further five raids against islands west of Cherbourg planned for the next non-moon period – i.e. between 30 January and 14 February – also now hung in the balance. Combined Operations Planning Staff waited anxiously for the Admiralty’s reply. So too did Stirling’s SSRF raiders in their five scattered out-stations along the south coast. The no-moon period passed with no decision. Most of February came and went in a shoal of bad weather – and still there was no reply. Nothing ventured, Combined Operations decided to press ahead with Operation
Huckaback
anyway.

In concept,
Huckaback
was originally planned as a recce-in-strength on three islets close to Guernsey: Brecqhou, Herm and Jethou. Bad weather scrubbed the original mission; when it was revised
Huckaback
– like Operation
Branford
on Burhou in September 1942 – was to discover if it would be feasible to land artillery to support a possible invasion, not of Alderney this time, but of Guernsey. Operation
Huckaback
was led by Capt. Pat Porteous of Lord Lovat’s No 4 Commando, a man who had stepped into legend during the raid on Dieppe in August 1942. Shot through the hand during the initial assault on the Varengeville battery set back to the east of Orange 2 Beach on the western flank of the invasion area, he had first bayoneted his assailant, saved the life of his sergeant and then led his men in a desperate bayonet charge in the face of withering enemy fire before collapsing wounded on the objective. Two months later he had heard that he had been awarded the Victoria Cross.
17
Now he was leading ten commandos ashore on Herm, an island just 2,500 yards long and 800 yards wide. Scrambling up a steep cliff, they established that Herm was unoccupied and that Shell Beach on the north-east of Herm would support artillery. The party withdrew after three hours ashore without seeing anyone, German or civilian, and returned to Portland without incident.

And still no formal word from ACNS(H). Finally, prods from a Rear Admiral of equal rank in Combined Operations on 3 March 1943 elicited a grudging response eleven days later. But it was a response which failed to address directly the crucial question relating to those islands west of Cherbourg. Were they on or off limits? It did not say. But its bleak, concluding paragraph to Mountbatten left little room for doubt:

In present circumstances I should feel bound to advise the First Sea Lord that the danger to SIS communications caused by very small raids would outweigh the value of those raids. I feel, therefore, that it is within the spirit of the Chiefs of Staff decision that these very small raids should give place to SIS communications for the present.
18

Eighteen months earlier, when March-Phillipps’ pygmy force had been thwarted by Commander Frank Slocum in their plans to use their spigot-armed ‘Q’ ship
Maid Honor
against unsuspecting German shipping outside Cherbourg, they had turned their gaze towards the distant shores of West Africa. Now SSRF found itself looking towards Africa once more. With the Channel effectively closed to them – again – might there not be a role for the SSRF harrying Rommel’s Afrika Korps in North Africa?

In fact, even before Operation
Huckaback
, SSRF had taken matters into their own hands. A month earlier, on 23 January 1943, Lt Col Bill Stirling had sent Lt Anders Lassen and Capt. Philip Pinckney to Cairo to assist his brother with amphibious operations and sense out the raiding possibilities in what, for SSRF, would be a new theatre of operations. SSRF was to become part of ‘a special raiding force [under General Eisenhower] in North Africa on the same lines as that now operating under General Alexander in the Middle East.’
19
The name of that unit was the SAS, formed by Bill Stirling’s brother, David, in 1941. Already, it seems, the Stirling name was opening doors.

But, before one set of doors was finally closed, there was a final tribute to all that had been achieved by SSRF under March-Phillipps when it had been based at Anderson Manor. On 28 January 1943 the
London Gazette
20
announced the recommendation that a Bar to the DSO be awarded to Major Gustavus-Henry March-Phillipps, Service No 39184, for ‘gallant and distinguished services in the field.’
21

†††

And so to Africa.

For months, David Stirling’s SAS had been harrying the German’s extended supply lines along the coastal rim of North Africa as the fortunes of Rommel’s Afrika Korps and Montgomery’s Eighth Army swung back and forth between Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. First on foot – then carried deep into the desert behind enemy lines by the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), whose peace-time experts had long mastered the arcane arts of desert survival, sand-dune driving, soft-sand extraction, and sun-compass and astro-navigation – Stirling’s now jeep-borne, twin Vickers-firing raiders attacked airfields, blew up fuel dumps, shot up transport and destroyed hundreds of German aeroplanes on Axis airfields. In November, US and British First Army forces had landed far to the west in Operation
Torch
with Allied troops coming ashore in French Morocco and Algeria. Now both British armies – Anderson’s First and Montgomery’s Eighth – planned to squeeze Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the jaws of an allied vice whose screws would be turned from both ends of the Mediterranean.

To David Stirling, that expanding and contracting Axis supply line stretching across Tunisia and Libya and eastwards to threaten Cairo had offered limitless scope for small scale, behind-the-lines, hit-and-run raiding operations. Sending his own SSRF into the same theatre, reasoned Bill Stirling – who had sat in his younger brother’s flat in Cairo all those months ago, in July 1941, when David had first conceived the idea of the SAS – might perhaps offer his own men similar opportunities on the North African coast. Bill Stirling’s early ideas found favour with Brigadier Charles Haydon, the Commanding Officer of the Special Service Commando Brigade. He wrote just before Christmas:

I feel and always have felt that there is a genuine need for the formation of a unit to carry out irregular warfare in the true sense of the word by putting into practice a policy of long range sabotage … The activities of such a unit should primarily be conducted in strategic support of a large scale operation such as the re-entry into France or the Invasion of Italy, though its employment should not necessarily be limited in this respect … Thus, whilst the employment of the commandos proper should be tactical in aspect, that of No 62 Commando should be strategic … No 62 Commando would undertake to paralyse communications 200 or 300 miles behind the enemy lines. Establishing themselves by any conceivable methods in close proximity to their objectives considerably prior to D +1 of a major operation, their activities would be directed against airfields, industrial targets, etc., in enemy base areas … In conclusion therefore, although I am very adverse to the formation of new specialised or semi-technical units whilst we have yet to find full-time employment for those already formed, I am nevertheless convinced that No 62 Commando could and would make a really valuable contribution to the war effort, provided that its terms of reference are widened and its war establishment increased as indicated in Lieutenant Colonel Stirling’s report.
22

Copied to Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Chief of Combined Operations and one of Stirling’s two commanding officers, Brigadier Haydon’s memo was a useful endorsement.

Mountbatten, it transpired, had already been to North Africa on a high-powered salesman’s drive on behalf of SSRF and Special Forces. There he had met both General The Honourable Sir Harold Alexander, the British Commander-in-Chief, Middle East Command, and General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander in North Africa. At a meeting at Camp Amfa on 16 January, Mountbatten opened by saying experience suggested Combined Operations could offer Eisenhower considerable assistance when it came to small scale raiding – particularly amphibious raiding once the Germans had been pushed out of Tunisia – and pressed the American general to decide whether or not he intended to create another SAS-style unit. If he did, then he, Mountbatten, would undertake to provide the men and equipment the American needed. Eisenhower stated that, yes indeed, he would welcome the addition of a force in his command along the lines of 1 SAS. General Alexander concurred. It was all Mountbatten needed to hear.