The Lost Band of Brothers (42 page)

In its final configuration two teams of ten men from 2 SAS – HQ Teams PINK and BRIG – would be dropped on the north of the island on the night of 12–13 July. Their mission would be to disrupt communications in the German rear, attack convoys, shoot up Axis vehicles, blow up the Catania–Messina rail link, cut telephone wires and attack the German Headquarters near Enna. They were then to radio in for main force airborne reinforcements. Classic SAS raiding, in fact, but without the jeeps. Or, as it turned out, the luck.

Two Albermarle aircraft of 296 Squadron took off from Kairouan, Tunisia, at 2000 for the two and a half hour flight to the drop zones north of Randazzo, and Enna,
54
Sicily, with Major Appleyard flying as observer with HQ Party PINK. The green lights went on and both teams shuffled forward and dropped into the night through the hole in the floor. PINK was dropped low, 50 miles off course, at 300–400 feet onto steep hilltops of volcanic rock. Several of the men were injured. One went missing on the drop – Signaller Carter was later found unhurt, but it took the stick commander, the experienced Capt. Philip Pinckney, twenty-four hours to find out where he was. And only four of the six containers were recovered. BRIG fared worse. Given the green light 5 miles off target, the BRIG party was released far too high – one report suggested they exited the aircraft at 2,000 feet. They were scattered on the drop, recovered none of their containers and were spotted by the Italians during their descent. Capt. Roy Bridgeman-Evans and his team of four were captured shortly afterwards. It later transpired that an electrical fault on BRIG’s aircraft had triggered the green light prematurely. As a result, ‘S.S.M. Kershaw left the pilot’s compartment to warn them to be ready to jump and found the plane empty’.
55
Once on the ground, the Eureka homing beacons that survived the drop failed to establish contact with Allied aircraft and the few radios that had dropped with them had been either lost or smashed on landing. The men of Operation
Chestnut
now had no way of calling in reinforcements.
56
Apart from shooting up a few lorries and blowing a few phone and telegraph poles, the raid was a washout. Concluded the official report: ‘The value of damage and disorganisation inflicted on the enemy was not proportionate to the number of men, amount of equipment and planes used.’
57
Having achieved nothing of consequence, the survivors of Operation
Chestnut
worked their way back to the allied bridgehead.

The aircraft carrying Major Appleyard, however, did not return. Armstrong Albermarle PMP 1446 vanished without trace. Geoffrey Appleyard, together with the pilot, Wing Commander Peter May, AFC, and four crew – F/Lt G. Hood, F/O J. Clarke, DFM, F/Lt T. de L’Neill and W/O F. H. H. Elliott – were posted Missing, Believed Killed.
58

Despite an extensive search, no trace of their bodies or their twin-engined aircraft have been found.

Today Geoffrey Appleyard’s name is inscribed on Panel 12 of the Commonwealth War Graves Memorial at Cassino, Italy.
59

†††

On the very same day that Appleyard disappeared, Capt. Graham Hayes, the childhood friend from the same Yorkshire village Appleyard had recruited into Maid Honor Force in 1941, was taken out of his cell at Fresnes Prison and executed by firing squad. Today, the body of Capt. Graham Hayes, aged 29, of the Border Regiment, Service No 129354, lies in Row B, Grave 1 of the Viroflay New Communal Cemetery, Versailles, outside Paris.

  
1
.  ADM 116/5112.

  
2
.  Ibid.

  
3
.  Ibid.

  
4
.  Ibid.

  
5
.  Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke.

  
6
.  COS (43) 4th Meeting (Minutes 13 & 14) 4 January 1943.

  
7
.  DEFE 2/694.

  
8
.  See this author’s
Cloak of Enemies
for a detailed account of this needless duplication.

  
9
.  
SOE in France
, 26.

10
.  ADM 116/5112, ‘Most Secret’ Memo from ACNS(H) to CNP 9 January 1943.

11
.  DEFE 2/957.

12
.  ADM 116/5112.

13
.  A raid on the island of Stord near Leirvik involving men of Nos 10 and 12 Commando.

14
.  Brief for CCO dated 10 January 1943. In DEFE 2/957.

15
.  DEFE 2/957.

16
.  Ibid.

17
.  Capt. Pat Porteous, VC, would survive the war. He died in October 2000, aged 82.

18
.  ADM 116/5112.

19
.  DEFE 2/957.

20
.  WO 373/93 (Microfilm).

21
.  That second DSO was never actually awarded. The wartime Awards Committee decided – in their wisdom – that the Bar to the DSO would only be awarded if it were discovered Gus March-Phillipps had in fact survived Operation
Aquatint
. If he were posted Killed in Action, then a Mention in Despatches would suffice. In another mission – Operation
Frankton
in December 1942 – the two Cockleshell Heroes who accompanied Major Hasler and Marine Sparks to attack German shipping in Bordeaux harbour were also simply awarded a Mention in Despatches. Had they survived and not been executed by German firing squad, both would have been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. Both rulings appear perverse: the higher award, this author would argue, should better reflect the sacrifice of men who had nothing more to give.

22
.  HS 8/818.

23
.  
The Commandos 1940–1946
, 237.

24
.  Their commander,
Generalfeldmarschall
Erwin Rommel, would not be among them.

25
.  HS 3/61.

26
.  HS 3/61.

27
.  The BRANDON mission was a Special Detachment raised by SOE for sabotage behind enemy lines using saboteurs who spoke the language and who could pass as locals. HS 3/61;
Secret Flotillas
, 582.

28
.  HS 7/237.

29
.  The files hold conflicting evidence regarding Operation
Backchat
. DEFE 2/694 claims it was abandoned. HS 8/818 claims it was successfully completed.

30
.  DEFE 2/694.

31
.  Combined Operations Pilotage Parties.

32
.  
The Phantom Major
, Virginia Cowles, 255.

33
.  
Geoffrey
, 144–5.

34
.  
The Regiment
, Michael Asher, 222.

35
.  
Geoffrey
, 146.

36
.  The oblique stroke between SSRF and SAS [SSRF/SAS] is deliberate. As late as June 1943, Geoffrey Appleyard was suggesting to his family that letters addressed to SSRF would still find him.
Geoffrey
, 170.

37
.  
The Regiment
, 222.

38
.  
The Regiment
, 223.

39
.  
Geoffrey
, 149.

40
.  
Geoffrey
, 150.

41
.  
No Ordinary Life
,
‘
Stokey’ Stokes, 84.

42
.  
The Day Of Battle
, Rick Atkinson, 7.

43
.  Admiral Roger Keyes, first Director of Combined Operations, July 1940–October 1941. He died in 1945. His son, Lt Col Geoffrey Keyes, MC, was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross after leading the abortive Operation
Flipper
raid on Rommel’s Headquarters in Libya in November 1941 with the intention of killing the Panzer general. It later transpired that the target building was
not
Rommel’s HQ, that he was away in Italy at the time and that Keyes may have been killed by a pistol round fired by a fellow British officer.

44
.  
Watery Maze
, Bernard Fergusson, 239.

45
.  
No Ordinary Life
, 91.

46
.  
Geoffrey
, 165–6.

47
.  
No Ordinary Life
, 93.

48
.  
No Ordinary Life
, 92. Herstell’s body was never found. He is commemorated at the Medjez-el-Bab Commonwealth War Graves Commission Memorial in Tunisia.

49
.  
The SAS at War
, Anthony Kemp, 99.

50
.  
No Ordinary Life
.

51
.  HMS
Unshaken
survived the war. She was scrapped at Troon in 1946.

52
.  
Geoffrey
, 172.

53
.  
No Ordinary Life
, 97.

54
.  HS 7/238.

55
.  WO 218/98.

56
.  Both PINK and BRIG took carrier pigeons on the drop. Released on landing, one flew north and disappeared, the other was later found in southern Sicily, dead.

57
.  
The Regiment
, 224.

58
.  AIR 27/1645.

59
.  That of Wing Commander Peter Rodriguez May, Service No 28048, is inscribed on the Malta Memorial, Panel 6, Column 1.

For many months, the families of Graham Hayes and Geoffrey Appleyard held tight to hope.

In 1946, after exhaustive inquiries, Graham Hayes’ mother made contact with an RAF pilot, J.E.C. Evans, who had been shot down over France in June 1943. He too had been sent to Fresnes Prison, Paris. There, by tapping morse code on the pipes in his prison cell, he had managed to make contact with Graham Hayes in a cell nearby. Hayes told him he had been on a raid that had failed, that he had escaped to Spain and that the Spanish had then handed him back to the Germans. When they established contact, Graham had been in solitary for eight months but was in good spirits; he had been promised he would soon be sent to a POW camp in Germany.
1
Each morning and each night the two British officers sustained one another by shouting greetings in English. And then, one day, Evans shouted but there was no response. Graham Hayes had been taken from his cell and executed. Malcolm Hayes, his nephew, remembers:

During the war when my uncle Graham had been missing for many months … my father, Denis Harmer Hayes [Graham Hayes’s brother] was alone, driving to a meeting on the west coast connected with a torpedo testing range. For no apparent reason my father had the most terrible feeling of apprehension regarding his brother Graham. It was so strong that he felt sick, stopped the car and got out.

Sometime after the end of the war when the German records had been looked at, it was seen that Graham had been executed by firing squad on the 13th July 1943 after nine months solitary confinement in Fresnes prison. When my father was told this, he asked his secretary to bring him the file re the torpedo range meeting to check the date: it was 13th July 1943.
2

Major-General (as he then was) Colin Gubbins chose to break the news to Graham’s father Herbert in his own hand, writing on 1 August 1945:

I am deeply sorry to have to inform you that I have just received information that your son was shot by the Germans in France on the 13th July 1943 …

I would like to extend my deepest sympathy to you and your wife. Your son’s fate is all the more tragic in that he had been at liberty for some time after the gallant raid in which he had taken part and which had left him stranded in enemy-occupied territory. I have not yet received details of his death but am still endeavouring to obtain them …

I knew your son very well personally; he was a grand soldier and a very gallant gentleman, and I am so sorry that he has gone. I lost my own son in Italy last year and know only too well how much it means.
3
But we can be proud that our sons never flinched from danger and saved our country and our people from the worst of fates. They will live in our hearts for ever.
4

Before Graham Hayes left Linton to go to war, the promising young wood-carver had laid down a few choice pieces of oak to season for the duration. He planned to return and work these once the war had been won. Those pieces of oak were used by the village he came from to create his memorial, a memorial he shared with six others from the same village who had lost their lives – including his brother Malcolm, an RAFVR Halifax bomber pilot shot down over France in February 1943, when he was in Fresnes Prison, and the childhood friend who had died on that same day, Geoffrey Appleyard.

On 17 July 1942 Ernest Appleyard, Geoffrey’s father, recorded: ‘there arrived the saddest tidings that ever reached [our] family.’ It was a letter from one of Appleyard’s friends, Major Ian Collins, informing them that he was missing. After outlining what was known of that last mission his letter continued: ‘You will see there is still real reason for hoping Geoffrey may be all right, and every effort will be made to find out.’ Those efforts, however, proved fruitless. Unconfirmed reports that wreckage of the aircraft and aircrew had been found, recorded in the Operation
Chestnut
Casualty Returns, came to nothing. Other leads proved equally, cruelly, false: ‘I am certain that my father [Ernest] would have followed any trail to the end in requesting information about the death,’ affirms John Appleyard, Geoffrey’s half-brother.
5

The Operations Record Book for 296 Squadron records the loss of Albermarle 1446, Appleyard’s aircraft, and adds: ‘The returning aircraft [from Operation
Chestnut I
] reported flak from our own naval forces from Malta to Catania [on the eastern flank of Sicily].’ That aircraft was not shot down by what we have now learned to call ‘friendly fire’. It is at least possible that Appleyard’s aircraft was less fortunate.
*
In March 1944 his family received official War Office notification that their son was now presumed killed in action.

As the war drew to a close J.E.A. Appleyard began compiling
Geoffrey
, the slim volume of Geoffrey Appleyard’s wartime letters home which, seventy years later, has provided the invaluable backbone to this story.
6
Geoffrey
– which was privately published in 1946 and reprinted in 1947 – concludes with a section entitled ‘As Others Knew Him’. The renowned English Christian theologian and member of the Oxford Group, The Revd Leslie Weatherhead wrote: