The Lost Band of Brothers (9 page)

Late summer fitness-training near Newmarket in Suffolk for No 7 Commando was disrupted in the autumn by that move north to Scotland and the outlying islands. Apple’s security-conscious letters home did not disclose its destination, but, with the unit’s headquarters now at Girvan on the west coast of Scotland, it was probably close to Arran, off the Firth of Clyde. Some 19 miles long and 10 miles wide, the steep, rugged hills of the island’s interior would now replace the flat countryside of Suffolk. The move north, in winter, represented a ramping up of their training, its close proximity to water a reminder that commandos were primarily raiders, and that raiders would come from the sea. Their living conditions too reflected that hardening of condition. ‘This is certainly going to be a “memorable” Christmas,’ wrote Appleyard two days before Christmas:

but memorable because of its apparent lack of merriment and what-not. Actually, we shall manage to have quite a lot of fun. We are on an island, a tiny little place, with hardly any form of life whatsoever, but very picturesque and very lovely. There is no sort of amusement whatever for the troops, though, and there is not a pub within eight miles. We are living in a hotel which is only open in summer and is utterly unfurnished and empty except for tables and chairs.
17

The officers were offered better accommodation in private houses nearby. Typically, March-Phillipps, Appleyard and some of the others chose to stay with their men. There was no heating beyond wood-burning open fires and no lighting except for the candles and the small oil lamps they brought with them. Running water was invariably cold, and cooking, sleeping and living were all done in the same room. For a bed – at least until his officer’s valise and camp bed arrived – Appleyard had a pile of blankets on the wooden floor. It was all, he admitted cheerfully, ‘a bit of a shambles’.

Nearby March-Phillipps spotted a disused, laid-up, 5½ ton sailing boat owned by an ex-fisherman called up by the Royal Navy. He decided to buy it; or, rather, he decided his unit should buy it. The agreed cost of the
I’m Alone
, a yawl-rigged 32-foot vessel with a 9-foot beam and a 15hp auxiliary paraffin engine, was £35. Each man was required to stump up between 10
s
and £1. It is doubtful if they were given the option:

Her general condition is excellent, but she needs a certain amount doing before we can use her. We hope to teach the men how to sail, navigate, use a compass and run an engine and generally be ‘handy’ with a boat. But apart from that, it is an excellent thing to have her, as it gives the men a new interest – partly due to delay and postponement, and partly due to our training, the men were going very stale. This ship has really made them enthusiastic and given them a real interest. Also, it is a job of work to keep all really busy over Christmas when there will be nothing whatever to do … As you know, Gus is an experienced yachtsman and so is the ‘skipper’ whilst I have been appointed ‘first mate’! …

We are getting quite a Christmassy spirit in our room as we have Christmas cards spread across the mantelpiece and tomorrow will be getting some holly to decorate the walls. I am thinking of you all continually and wishing you the very happiest of Christmasses. And now it is past midnight and all is silent in the room except for the snores of my companions and the crackle of a few dying embers in the grate. Good night, all!

Very much Love,

Geoff.

They took
I’m Alone
out to sea in a gale of wind with a running sea and driving rain, not on Christmas Day but on 28 December:

We were soaked through all day and took many a wave right over the bows and decks, but she never showed a sign of misbehaviour and shook herself straight out of everything … She is a marvellous craft. That seems to be about all. Only 1½ hours left of 1940 so I’ll wish you the best of days for 1941. May it see a reunited family again before the year is over and the war a thing of the past.

    Good night and God bless!

    Geoffrey

  
1
.  
The Commandos 1940–1946
, 29–30.

  
2
.  
‘If I Must Die …’
, Gérard Fournier and André Heintz, 14–15.

  
3
.  
The Green Beret
, Hilary St. George Saunders, 21.

  
4
.  WO 106/1740.

  
5
.  
Green Beret
, 21.

  
6
.  
The Commandos
, 34, citing PREM 3/330/9.

  
7
.  
The War in the Channel Islands
, Winston G. Ramsey, 133.

  
8
.  Ibid., 136.

  
9
.  
The Watery Maze
, Bernard Fergusson, 49.

10
.  
March Past
, 187.

11
.  
The Second World War
, Vol. 2, Winston S. Churchill, 412.

12
.  
Geoffrey
, 51.

13
.  Ibid., 50.

14
.  
Anders Lassen
, 21–2.

15
.  BBC Henrietta.

16
.  
Geoffrey
, 54.

17
.  Ibid., 55.

While March-Phillipps and his men were learning to sail and navigate
I’m Alone
through winter gales in the Sound of Bute, toiling up and down the rugged hills of Arran beneath heavy packs and sleeping out in ditches and against hillside walls in all weathers, events elsewhere were taking place which were to have a lasting effect upon them all.

In July 1940, while No 7 Commando were still forming up in Newmarket, Suffolk, Dr Hugh Dalton, the newly appointed Minister of Economic Warfare, had been placed in charge of a new and highly secret organisation, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). SOE’s business was sabotage and subversion; clandestine warfare. It was unavowable, secretly funded and answered only to the War Cabinet and Churchill himself. It sprang from – and immediately replaced – both Jo Holland’s MI(R) in the War Office and Lawrence Grand’s Section D in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Yet SOE was, essentially, new: it embraced a new concept, ruffled old feathers. As a consequence it was disliked and distrusted, feared also for the power it might wield and the change it might bring to a Whitehall that resented and resisted newcomers.

Dalton was the political head of SOE. Supported by the able Gladywn Jebb, a career Foreign Office civil servant, ‘Doctor Dynamo’, as Dr Dalton was called – though not to his face – was its chairman (‘SO’) and abrasive, braying champion in the corridors of power and the tea rooms of Westminster. He needed two immediate subordinates, an executive director (‘CD’) and a director (‘M’) to organise and co-ordinate training and operations. For ‘CD’ he chose Sir Frank Nelson, a former businessman in India, European SIS officer and one-time Tory Member of Parliament for Stroud. For the latter he needed someone quite different: a man who understood the new form of ‘ungentlemanly’ warfare and a man who, preferably, had a wealth of military experience with which to back it up. By chance he had met Colin Gubbins at a dinner at the Polish Embassy in November 1939 and liked what he saw. When Gubbins’ name was suggested for a senior role at SOE, Dalton grabbed him: ‘I had to fight for his body against C-in-C Home Forces but, with the backing of the DMO [Director of Military Operations], I got him.’
1
Until his transfer to SOE, Gubbins had been responsible to Jo Holland and MI(R) for the AuxUnits. Now that had to be left behind. Colin Gubbins came across to SOE – then still known as SO2 – as Director of Training and Operations on 18 November 1940 with immediate promotion to acting brigadier ‘specially employed’.

The same month Gubbins moved across to SOE, the Special Training Centre at Lochailort opened its draughty doors just a little wider to permit selected army personnel to attend its courses: the days of 5th Battalion Scots Guards ascendancy, of Bill Stirling, Peter Kemp and Lord Lovat, were already on the wane. Lord Lovat reflected:

Inverailort had served a useful purpose: the significance of its toughening-up process, virtually under active service conditions, had not escaped the notice of the War Office. The
coup de main
; ambush and sabotage, forced marches, opposed landings and long swims, unarmed combat and night attacks were ruthlessly exploited. The hills echoed with the detonation of high explosives: bursts of tracer fire flattened the careless patrol – face down in the heather – should they show up against a skyline. In six months several hundred junior leaders had survived the gruelling fortnight course, emerged fitter, more determined to succeed, and with the self-confidence to do so.
2

The failure rate, however, had been high: 30 per cent of those awaiting their ‘trial by selection’ at Inverailort failed to complete the course and were RTUd (returned to unit).

It remains entirely possible that, during that winter, March-Phillipps approached Inverailort – and thus, whether he knew it or not, MI(R)/SOE – with his own ideas. He already had an entrée: When Lovat had joined Ampleforth Officer Cadet Corps, March-Phillipps had been his platoon sergeant. In the close world of special forces training in Scotland, that Ampleforth link might have been connection enough. It is also possible that the officers of No 7 Commando simply linked up on the unofficial ‘shop’ grapevine with their kindred spirits at the STC further up the coast and made the MI(R) /SOE link in that fashion. In any event, Appleyard completed the School of Special Warfare course at Inverailort between 14 August and 6 September. What
is
definitely known is that, at some stage during their winter training on Arran, March-Phillipps made contact with MI(R)/SOE when he sent in a paper on survival behind enemy lines.

During wet weather he had challenged his men to write an essay entitled ‘How To Win The War’. Jan Nasmyth – he of the one eye and that meeting with March-Phillipps on horseback one summer’s evening in Newmarket – had written a paper about self-sufficiency in enemy territory. It hit the mark:

It was an essay really about the possibility of keeping troops in being in enemy territory by making them independent of any form of human life, either for food or for shelter and next morning Gus came bursting in in full battle order, so to speak, and said to me that my essay described
exactly
what he had been trying to think of!
3

Jan Nasmyth’s paper with March-Phillipps’ endorsement found its way to Brigadier Gubbins in London – a Gubbins now constantly on the lookout for suitable material to bring into SOE. To an organisation that was unable to advertise, word of mouth and personal contact were the best, indeed often the only, form of recommendation. Gubbins already had an eye to the future when SOE would be sending its agents into occupied territory – agents who would need exactly the same sort of training and killing skills now being taught in the western highlands to the newly formed commandos. Now Nasmyth’s unorthodox paper brought the commanding officer and second in command of ‘B’ Troop, No 7 Commando, to Gubbins’ attention: it appeared that one or two of its officers and men might indeed have the makings. Between that wet November and the end of January 1941, both March-Phillipps and Appleyard travelled south and found themselves in a new role, ‘auditioning’ for and being interviewed by an organisation that did not officially exist and which operated under a bewildering number of cover names, the most usual of which was the Inter-Services Research Bureau. Evidently, early interviews went well. Both men were later described by Brigadier Colin Gubbins as ‘full of initiative, bursting to have a go, competent, full of self-confidence in their own personalities, which they had every right to be, and quite determined to get into the war just as soon as they could.’
4
They would soon have their wish. But, first, both still had to go through formal vetting and selection.

‘SOE was created by government edict in July 1940 when everything was at its blackest and government was of course searching for any possible way of getting at the Germans to help our main forces while they reformed,’ remembered Colin Gubbins after the war:

Our task was our Charter and was simply to carry out all forms of irregular warfare against the Germans that we could possibly devise or think of – mostly, of course, behind their own lines from a straight-forward act of sabotage of factories or communications right up to open guerrilla warfare.
5

The SOE files that exist in The National Archives at Kew, London, for March-Phillipps and Appleyard are sparse.
6
It is possible, however, to track their movements from No 7 Commando to the darker, more subtle and secretive world of the Special Operations Executive. SOE ran a security trace on March-Phillipps – now officially part of 3 Special Service Battalion – with MI5 on 19 January 1941 ‘with a view to employment with this Section [SO2/SOE]’. The all-clear came back four days later with a reassuring ‘Nothing Recorded Against’ stamped across the file in green ink. Interest in Appleyard followed a similar path. He signed the Official Secrets Act for SOE and by 25 January 1941 there had been ‘Nothing Recorded Against’ him either. Colin Gubbins recorded in his diary that same day: ‘Appleyard reported for duty.’
7

SOE loved to cloak itself in code-names, ciphers, symbols, aliases and numbers and, on occasion, a stifling air of often unhelpful and impenetrable secrecy. During the war Professor Michael Foot served with Combined Operations and dealt closely with SOE once it had found its feet: ‘I got on to somebody in F Section who would answer to three different names over the telephone with the same voice and was inclined to say: “I’m sorry, old boy, we can’t help you at all.” That was their general line.’
8
Now Geoff became SOE operative No 1441. Later still he would be allocated the SOE symbol MH.1. His SOE file records: ‘M advised: 1441 joined the organisation 26.1.41 and will be employed on the operational side as an instructor with Allied Armies.’ M was Gubbins. It must all have seemed rather a long way from the Workshops of ‘E’ Section, Royal Army Service Corps.