The Nazi Hunters (11 page)

‘Have no W/T set. Contacted SAS team Loyton here. Got them to arrange arms drop on
Pedal
with you. Could not receive arms – were attacked on DZ – many casualties . . .’

The situation was fast moving and horribly confused. Just five days after parachuting into the Vosges, Captain Gough was on the run with the Maquis and being remorselessly pursued. He’d requested an airdrop of arms onto Pedal – codename for one of their isolated DZs – but they’d been attacked there. And at Druce’s hideout, equally dire news would filter in about the fate of his missing men.

Faced with sharing the uncertain food supplies of Père George’s chamber pot, Lieutenant LeFranc had suggested they move to an altogether more beneficent protector. Madame Rossi lived with her daughter, Odette, in a tall, shuttered house on the outskirts of Moussey village – the last before the forest took over. Mme Rossi’s abode came complete with a giant iron waterwheel, and an unqualified welcome for all who might resist the despised Germans.

Mme Rossi and her daughter were generous of physique, larger than life, and indomitable. They didn’t baulk at hiding and feeding Druce and his fellows, in spite of the fact that some 500 German troops were camped out in the village nearby. So high-spirited and full of vitality was Mme Rossi, that Druce suspected she actually thrilled to the danger that sheltering British parachutists inevitably brought.

Her house lay at the confluence of the main valley with a narrow, V-shaped gorge. Beside it ran a path that snaked into the hidden reaches of the forest, making it a perfect hiding place for both Maquis and British soldiers. Mme Rossi was incapable of hiding how much she loathed the enemy. Mirthful and forthright, her house had been searched by the Gestapo numerous times, yet she never once suggested that Druce and his fellows shouldn’t hole up there.

‘
Oh, la! Les Boches!
’ she would trumpet, as she stood over a freshly baked quiche, beefy arms crossed and blue eyes sparkling. ‘Boh! Those filthy creatures! They’re brutes, that’s what they are.’

Then she’d dissolve into peals of laughter. If anyone ever suggested she might be a little quieter, for fear of attracting unwanted attention, she’d roll her eyes and quiver. ‘
Mon Dieu!
’ she’d cry, with renewed indignation. ‘
Les salauds! A bas les Doryphores!
’

‘
Les Doryphores
’ were a potato-infesting bug, one of her favourite nicknames for the Germans. ‘
A bas les Doryphores!
’ Down with the potato bugs! And ‘
Les salauds!
’ The bastards.

Mme Rossi was irrepressible and she would not be cowed. Right now her house offered a vital refuge for Druce and the rump of the Op Loyton force. The forests all about were being scoured by the enemy, so there was no way that Druce and party could make for the agreed RV. It was time to lie low.

‘The Germans were in and out of there all the time,’ Druce remarked of Mme Rossi’s abode. ‘But she was literally getting us hot food three times a day. She really didn’t give a damn about the Germans and she had absolutely no fear, no thought as to her own safety, her own security, and she looked after us better that you’d look after your own children. She was superb.’

With movement largely impossible for British soldiers in uniform, Lieutenant LeFranc offered to make his way to Colonel Grandval’s location to try to get a radio message through to London. LeFranc’s papers were in order, so he stood a chance of making it. Druce asked him to explain the reasons for the delay in calling in the main body of the Op Loyton force. At the same time he wanted SFHQ to stand by for coordinates for a new DZ, so those reinforcements could be parachuted in.

Nothing seemed to faze Druce, and he had far from given up on Operation Loyton. He viewed the predations of Waldfest as a temporary setback. To his way of thinking, the Vosges remained ideal for launching hit-and-run attacks, and with the influx of enemy troops it had become a wonderfully target-rich environment.

In most battlefield situations, one of the key objectives of any commander is to disrupt the enemy’s supply and communications lines, without which no army can function for long. Such attacks fall into two broad categories: either flanking manoeuvres by the main force, or long-range penetrations by small-scale, independent units. The SAS had been formed in 1941 to fulfil the latter role, hitting enemy supply lines in the North African desert.

At that time, news had been grim for the Allies on all fronts, but the SAS had helped turn those fortunes around. Enemy headquarters camps, transport convoys and aerodromes were hit by surprise, and with enormous success. With the arrival of the American jeep in theatre, such efforts were redoubled, the jeep being an ideal cross-country load carrier and gun platform, and perfect for launching the SAS’s speciality: the hit-and-run attack.

In the Vosges, Druce’s force, scattered and battle-scarred though it might be, sat astride the few road and rail routes that linked the German front line to the heartland of the Reich. Though newly recruited to the Regiment, Druce was no stranger to the SAS’s means of waging war. He remained determined to get the right men, machines and weaponry dropped in, so as to wreak havoc.

Following Lieutenant LeFranc’s departure on his vital mission, news reached Druce that Robert Lodge was dead. There was some confusion as to how exactly the German-Jew-turned-SAS-veteran had died. His body had been delivered by the enemy to the house of the local priest, Abbé Gassman, who was ordered to dispose of the corpse.

A second body was brought to the priest. As yet unidentified, Abbé Gassman feared it was also that of a British parachutist. Druce decided he needed to go and see for himself. With Mme Rossi’s help he dressed himself in the kind of worn and workmanlike clothes a local might wear, and set off on the quarter-mile journey into the village.

Druce had walked these hills before. He spoke French like a native and he figured he could talk his way out of most trouble. More to the point, the dead and the missing men were
his men
. He may not have known them for more than a few days, but they were soldiers in a unit under his command. Druce felt a burning sense of responsibility; plus he needed to know exactly how many fighters he had left alive.

Druce was also spurred to act by Mme Rossi’s description of the key role that Abbé Gassman fulfilled in the village. As with Albert Freine, the gamekeeper-cum-Maquis intelligence chief, the Moussey priest was playing a dangerous and duplicitous game. Ostensibly a ‘good Frenchman’ and a friend to Nazi Germany, Gassman was in reality the linchpin of the Moussey Resistance.

‘Without him,’ Mme Rossi commented, darkly, ‘things might have turned out very differently around here.’

Moving through the woods under cover of night, Druce made it to the rear of Abbé Gassman’s house unchallenged. The Moussey priest seemed remarkably unfazed by the SAS captain’s arrival at his back door. Cool as a cucumber, he invited Druce in and insisted he be his guest for dinner. Though they conversed mostly in French, Druce learned that Gassman spoke almost perfect English, and he was immediately intrigued by the man.

Gassman had the air of a cleric of ancient times, when the calling of holy man was more often closely allied to that of a warrior. Tall, lean and cadaverous, his warrior-monk demeanour was softened by a merciful and ready smile, and a gentle humour. Gassman was an intensely human individual. This was a man who had witnessed the very heights and the depths of his fellow man’s behaviour, making the risks that he was taking in his present role seem paltry by comparison.

Gassman treated Druce to a hearty dinner, after which the grim details of Lodge’s death were recounted. On the evening of 20 August, Lodge’s body had been delivered to the church for ‘disposal’. Gassman had detailed some loyal churchgoers to dig the grave and assist with the burial. He reckoned that Lodge had been dead for less than twenty-four hours, and he noticed bayonet wounds to his stomach, plus a gunshot wound to the head, seemingly inflicted at close quarters.

At first Druce figured that Lodge, wounded and faced by imminent capture, had taken his own life. ‘If he was about to be captured, he might well have committed suicide,’ Druce mused. ‘The talk of bayonet wounds and things . . . I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if Lodge had blown his own brains out. He was a Jew. He knew . . . and I think he would have decided that,
well, it’s time to blow my own brains out
.’

From Gassman’s description of the second body, it appeared to be that of Gerald Davis, Hislop’s fellow Phantom. According to the priest, Davis’s corpse had been delivered to the village churchyard after its retrieval from Schirmek. Davis had a small, half-inch-wide bullet hole in the front of his skull, and a large exit wound at the back. Davis too seemed to have been shot in the head at close range.

Druce was beginning to suspect that both men might have been executed under Hitler’s top secret and shadowy ‘Commando Order’, something that had come to the SAS’s attention only in recent months.

In the spring of 1944 Lieutenant Quentin Hughes of 2 SAS had parachuted into Italy as part of a team targeting enemy aircraft at San Egido airbase, in the centre of the country. While setting Lewes bombs on the warplanes, one went off prematurely, deafening and blinding him. Hughes was taken captive and treated for his wounds, but once he had recovered his senses he was told that he would be handed over to the Gestapo, for execution as a ‘saboteur’.

One of the doctors at the hospital, assisted by a recovering German staff officer – both of whom had befriended Hughes – managed to sneak him aboard a train bound for the main German clearing camp for prisoners of war. They hoped that the long arm of the Gestapo would fail to reach him there. But Hughes, still only partially recovered, had other ideas. Together with an American POW, he jumped the train and they made their way back to the Allied lines.

Hughes had written a report about his experiences, warning in particular about Allied parachutists being branded as ‘saboteurs’ and handed over to the Gestapo to be shot. That report had landed on the desk of Bill Barkworth, 2 SAS’s intelligence officer – the same individual who had given Druce his eleventh-hour briefing. Barkworth had alerted Colonel Franks, and Franks in turn had warned his officers about what fate might await their men if they were ever captured.

But Hughes’ report gave only an
inkling
of what might befall those who ended up in enemy hands. In the late summer of 1944, the Allies knew precious little about the machinery of death implemented by the Nazis across so much of occupied Europe. Few had any concept of what a ‘concentration camp’ might be, other than that these were places where Hitler gathered together and incarcerated those opposed to his regime.

All the same, it made the wearing of a clearly identifiable uniform absolutely vital for those dropped behind enemy lines. Hughes had deployed in old-style battle dress, plus plimsolls and a balaclava. His ‘non-standard’ appearance had allowed the Gestapo to argue that he had gone into action out of uniform, and thus could not be afforded the treatment extended to bona fide prisoners of war.

If Druce was caught dressed as a villager wandering the streets of Moussey, or dining at the priest’s house, he knew he faced almost certain death.

‘I realized that if I was caught in civilian clothes, I would have my head chopped,’ Druce remarked. ‘And frankly, we were all brought up knowing that if you were caught spying you were going to get shot. Of course, the crime of being caught is . . . to get caught.’

It struck Druce that the bodies of Lodge and Davis had been dumped in Moussey almost as a warning to any would-be Maquis:
pour encourager les autres
. But, under Abbé Gassman’s guiding hand, the villagers were not about to be turned aside from their path. The Moussey priest proved to be fervently pro-British, and over dinner it became ever more clear why.

‘You know I would do anything for the English,’ Gassman announced. ‘You see, I have only once been to England and it was there that I was made your debtor . . . The English are a very formidable people. I recognised in a flash that we must be formidable too, and that it was possible; above all, that is was possible.’

Serving as a priest in the French Army, Gassman had been at Dunkirk. It was on those war-blasted beaches that he had first witnessed and come to admire the dogged British spirit of resistance; the ‘
flegme britannique
’: the British phlegm, or stiff upper lip, as he called it.

He’d seen British troops under withering fire, but waiting calmly in line on the beach, and he’d begun to wonder whether perhaps all was not lost. He’d waded towards one of the waiting boats as German warplanes tore into them, only to see the private soldier in front of him calmly trying to light his pipe as he stood in the chest-deep water. It was but one of many such examples, and each had helped give Gassman the strength to continue the fight.

But in Britain Gassman had found himself torn. On the one hand he wanted to join the struggle to liberate France, as a soldier; on the other, he felt drawn to his flock: the Moussey parishioners. His loyalty to the village and the Church had finally won through, and Gassman had quietly returned to the Vosges and to his calling. It had been then that he had set about founding the local Resistance.

In truth, Gassman was the linchpin of the Maquis, together with the village mayor, Jules Py. The two men had likewise established a ratline: a network through which downed Allied airmen could be smuggled back to Britain. Few French villagers ever played more of an active role in these two endeavours than did those of Moussey.