The Nazi Hunters (13 page)

And the pressure kept mounting. At a 24 August meeting,
Standartenführer
Isselhorst and his deputies decided to ‘industrialize’ Waldfest: the deportations of the 18th were to be expanded across all villages of the high Vosges, until the Resistance had been utterly crushed. Such a policy was driven by a directive issued by Himmler to his SS and
Wehrmacht
chiefs of staff, in which they were ordered to defend the western wall of the Vosges to the last man.

On the night of 26–27 August, Druce was certain he heard an aircraft flying over the Veney DZ at low altitude. He consulted Lou Fiddick, who assured him it was a Stirling – a four-engined heavy-lift bomber often used for glider-towing and resupply duties. The men rushed into the open with their torches and signalled for all they were worth, but no parachutes came drifting out of the clear, starlit skies.

Following night after night of repeated no-shows, morale was reaching an all-time low. It was even affecting Druce – a commander possessing otherwise unshakeable self-possession and poise. Druce was desperate to hit back and strike a blow against the enemy, and to turn the hunters into the hunted.

‘Feeling very depressed and very helpless,’ Druce recorded in his 29 August war diary entry, ‘and with strong temptation of going off and shooting up whatever we could find’.

Druce wasn’t alone in feeling so disempowered. Jedburgh Captain Gough had been tasked to arm and equip the Maquis for war, but with the skies above the Vosges remaining stubbornly empty of Allied aircraft, he had failed to deliver on his mission. Understandably, the pressure – and the sense of disappointment – was getting to him, as reflected in the increasingly desperate messages he was sending to SOE headquarters.

‘Arms, ammunition, grenades urgently needed for 600 men. Can take maximum of 70 containers. Send also Jed Set, 2 rucksacks. Area getting hotter daily.’

‘Have no W/T set . . . Could not receive arms – were attacked on DZ – many casualties. Team Loyton having resupply drop here in few days. Please contact them and send me rucksack and further 100,000 Francs. Food difficult.’

‘Do not drop . . . tonight. DZ in Boche hands.’

The Op Loyton force had been on the ground for well over two weeks now, and Druce and his men were beginning to starve. Under the iron fist of Waldfest, free movement was banned, which meant that there were few opportunities for villagers to bring food to those in the forests.

More to the point, the villagers had little to spare and they too were going hungry. ‘You could go down and ask for a couple of potatoes from a dear old lady,’ Druce remarked, ‘but that doesn’t go far when trying to feed eighty to one hundred men.’

Eventually, Druce and his fellows managed to corral an ancient-looking and emaciated cow. They shot the wretched beast and tried to gut and joint it, but none amongst their number was much of a butcher. It was the toughest meat any had ever had to chew on, but at least it was food.

With no reliable means of making radio contact, Druce couldn’t even be certain which of his reports were getting through to SF Headquarters. Just how much did Colonel Franks know? Did he understand how mission expectations and the reality on the ground had proved so utterly mismatched? Did he realize what his men would be getting into if further SAS were dropped into the Vosges? Druce remained convinced that their mission was achievable, but he wanted his commanding officer to be fully in the picture before committing more men and materiel to such a challenging theatre of war.

‘What he was coming to and what he expected to come to were two quite different things,’ Druce remarked. In a sense, he felt he had failed in the task that his colonel had set him. ‘He was expecting to come to an organized headquarters, somewhere in the hills away from the Germans, which he could use, which could be supplied and re-supplied and which he could operate out of.’

The reality was far different. ‘We had to be on the move all the time . . . If you had a parachute drop of arms in the valley, to get it up the hill was a major operation in itself. Then to move it again would have been totally impossible.’

In an effort to get a clear message through, Druce sent one of his French SAS officers, Captain Lesseps, east on foot to cross over to the Allied lines. He was to give Colonel Franks a full briefing on what he would be committing to in the Vosges, for Druce felt that the 2 SAS Commanding Officer had to be forewarned.

But events were about to overtake such efforts in the most unexpected of ways.

Chapter Eight

On the evening of 30 August 1944 a suspicious figure was spotted by Druce and his men. What drew their attention was his decidedly odd behaviour. He was carrying a basket and kept bending to inspect the undergrowth, as if collecting mushrooms. Nothing so unusual there: the forests of the Vosges were rich in edible fungi, if you knew how to identify them. What made it all so bizarre was what followed on the man’s heels:
a German patrol
.

It looked to Druce almost as if the ‘mushroom collector’ was leading the enemy towards his makeshift camp. A short and savage exchange of fire ensued, but with the SAS in the cover of the forest and with darkness falling, the enemy showed little inclination to venture further into the uncertain woodland. Druce grabbed the chance to send some of his men around the flanks to seize the ‘mushroom picker’ and to hold him for questioning.

He claimed to be a Frenchman called Fouch, though the name sounded more German to Druce. Fouch swore blind he was a local villager and a bona fide ‘mushroomer’, but before the SAS captain could question him fully some Maquis arrived with urgent news. Breathless, they came with an important message from Colonel Grandval (Maximum): an airdrop was due that very night, for sure.

With a German patrol in the vicinity, Druce reasoned that great care would need to be taken to defend the Veney DZ. A wall of steel would have to be thrown around it. The location of their camp was clearly compromised, so he ordered his men to abandon it, pack everything and to make directly for the DZ. The Maquis, who were located in a sister encampment, were to follow as soon as they could strike camp and move.

The suspect, Fouch, was placed under guard and marched towards the DZ. Recently, Druce’s force had been bolstered by the arrival of a handful of escaped Russian prisoners of war. They were tasked with keeping a close watch over Fouch. Druce and Fiddick went forward to recce the DZ – an open, grassy area lying between two dark fingers of forest. They crawled around the grassland in the gathering darkness, but could detect no obvious signs of an enemy presence.

‘I was very anxious to get clear of the field as quickly as possible,’ Druce remarked. ‘It was dangerously close to the Germans, but it was all that we had.’

At three o’clock on the morning of 1 September the faint drone of an approaching aircraft was heard. To Fiddick’s finely attuned ear it was most definitely British. The shadowy form appeared overhead, like a great black bat swooping out of the night. Hurriedly, the agreed recognition signal was beamed to the aircraft, and an answering signal was seen flashing from its hold. With a mounting sense of excitement the beleaguered soldiers figured that the long-awaited airdrop was finally on.

The lone aircraft made a ponderous turn and came around for its run-in. Druce, Hislop, Gough, Fiddick, Dill and all waited anxiously as the tension built to unbearable levels. All it would take was for the Germans to attack the DZ and the aircraft might abort the drop, or the resupply be captured. Not a man amongst Druce’s force was willing to give up these precious supplies: they would fight to the death to get them in.

As the aircraft passed overhead there was a distinctive crack in the skies above, and the first chute blossomed silver-white in the moonlight. Dark silhouettes floated earthwards, but to the surprise of the waiting soldiers the initial drop didn’t consist of resupply containers at all. Instead, one of the first shadowy shapes turned out to be Colonel Brian Franks, leading a stick of SAS reinforcements.

Franks had jumped with twenty-three men. It was a hugely daring move by the 2 SAS Commander. Leaving veteran SAS man Major Sandy Scratchely in charge at headquarters, he’d opted to parachute into a volatile region deep behind enemy lines, with no transport and surrounded by the enemy. He’d done so as good as blind, for few of Druce’s warning messages had got through.

Colonel Franks landed in a heap pretty much at Lou Fiddick’s feet. He righted himself, gathered in his chute and eyed the Canadian-airman-turned-SAS-fighter suspiciously. This certainly wasn’t a figure that Colonel Franks recognized, though he did appear to be wearing the SAS insignia.

‘Hello, who the hell are you?’ Franks demanded of Fiddick.

Fiddick gave a hurried explanation as to how he’d ended up with Druce’s force, whereupon Franks formally invited him to join 2 SAS.

‘Don’t worry, you’ll learn as you go along,’ Franks told him. ‘Now, where are the porters?’

In a sense it was a fair question: tonnes of supplies were even now being kicked out of the aircraft, as it made another pass over the DZ. Figures dashed about, searching for the resupply containers as they fell. Druce ordered his men to redouble their vigilance, while he took Colonel Franks into the cover of the trees to give him a hurried heads-up.

Druce was gripped by a certain sense of unease. ‘I felt we’d let him down pretty badly,’ Druce recounted. ‘We were sent in to do a job, which was to bring in a large number of people to operate, and we had failed dismally. We had not achieved any of the objectives . . . Whether it was our fault or not wasn’t the point.’

Druce was being overly harsh on himself, and he needn’t have worried about his commanding officer’s reaction. Franks – tall, lean, athletic and the archetypal unflappable commander – would prove clear-headed and decisive, and he instantly comprehended the situation. It was the measure of the man.

‘He quickly appreciated we had been given a bum steer right from the start,’ Druce remarked. ‘He was imaginative, quick to understand and ready to do anything. He understood the picture and was always cool; always ready to listen.’

The arrival of Colonel Franks massively boosted morale, and galvanized all of the men ahead of the coming action. But for now, things were about to go seriously awry at the Veney DZ.

As the resupply containers started to thud and thump into the grassy terrain, one promptly exploded. Carrying a load of PE, fuses and detonators, it proceeded to cook-off, spontaneously combusting in a massive fireworks display. On the opposite side of the DZ, one of the panniers collided with some trees and it too burst into flames.

If the Germans weren’t aware of the drop before, they most certainly would be now. Worse still, amidst all the confusion caused by the explosions, Fouch – the ‘mushroomer’ and suspected German spy – grabbed a Sten gun and made a run for it. Fouch’s Russian guards yelled out a warning in German – the only language they spoke apart from their native Russian.

At the cries of, ‘
Achtung! Achtung!
’ the Maquis feared the enemy had discovered the DZ, and they opened fire. In the ensuing melee one of their men was injured. As Fouch tried to make good his escape, bolting for the open ground, Druce knew for sure that he couldn’t be allowed to make it to the German lines.

‘One couldn’t allow him to escape,’ Druce remarked. ‘By that time not only was he the suspect traitor, but he also knew exactly what had gone on with this landing. Clearly he had to be removed . . . I have no qualms about having shot him.’

Druce had charged after Fouch and gunned him down. That done, he’d just about managed to calm things and restore order at the DZ, when a horrifying series of screams rent the darkness. It turned out that one of the Maquis – who, like Druce’s men, were starving hungry – had mistaken a lump of plastic explosives wrapped in greaseproof paper for some type of cheese. He’d torn off a ravenous mouthful and swallowed it, before realizing his mistake.

Wartime PE contained arsenic. The maquisard was in a terrible state. He’d consumed a lethal dose, and in his death throes he was writhing and twisting with agony.

‘It was terminal for him,’ Druce recounted, ‘and he was screaming like nothing on earth. It was really very uncomfortable . . .’

That maquisard was the second man that Druce had to shoot dead that evening. The first he had gunned down as a suspected traitor; the second was a mercy killing.

With dawn fast approaching, it was of utmost urgency that they vacate the DZ and find somewhere safe to establish a new base. The last of the parachutes were got rid of and Druce began to muster his greatly enlarged force in preparation for moving out. With the new contingent of SAS, there were some thirty-five Special Forces fighters on the ground now. This was a force to be reckoned with.

The food, ammunition, explosives, warm clothing and sleeping bags would transform the lives of those who had been on the ground for approaching three weeks. But, almost of more importance, Colonel Franks had brought several new Jed Sets with him, which meant that direct and reliable radio communications could once again be established with London.

Captain Hislop’s Phantoms had been reinforced by a three-man unit, commanded by Lieutenant Peter Johnsen, who had already seen action in occupied France. In the immediate aftermath of D-Day, Johnsen had parachuted into Normandy to call in Typhoon ground attack aircraft, so as to hit German trucks and trains. He’d ended up rescuing one hundred Allied POWs, for which he had won a Mention in Dispatches.