The Nazi Hunters (16 page)

The day after the airdrop, Franks sent out his first serious ambush party. It was commanded by Lieutenant Ralph ‘Karl’ Marx, a striking individual whom even Captain Druce – the past master of nonchalance – described as being ‘as cool as a cucumber’. At barely eighteen years of age, Marx – a captain both of boxing and tennis at school – had turned down a place at Cambridge University, signing up instead to join the Army at the outbreak of war.

His leadership qualities were quickly recognized and he was sent to Sandhurst for officer training. Posted to the 9th/12th Lancers, he’d been deployed to North Africa and fought in the battles for El Alamein, where he’d first got to hear about the exploits of the SAS. Twenty-two years old by the time he parachuted into the Vosges, Lieutenant Marx was a perfect example of the type whom ‘you least expected to be cool and calm, yet turns out to be . . . cool and calm and operated well’, remarked Druce.

Lieutenant Marx left the SAS’s Pierre-Percée base with nine men armed with their personal weapons, plus two Bren guns – a 7.62mm light machine gun – and eighteen ‘tyre-bursters’. They threaded their way south through the Pierre-Percée forest – passing close to their former camp, now burnt out – and at dusk they descended towards the village of Celles-sur-Plaine.

With Allied aircraft controlling the skies over occupied Europe, the Germans had taken to making road movements at night and showing no lights, in an effort to hide from marauding warplanes. One of the main trans-Vosges highways ran through the Celles Valley, constituting a major German supply line. Just to the north of Celles-sur-Plaine lay a major junction, where a side road branched north-west towards the town of Badonviller, some 5 miles away. Come nightfall, six tyre-bursters were laid on all three branches of the T-junction, so that each was covered by a charge.

At ten o’clock that evening two explosions rang out across the Celles Valley. A pair of German troop transports had driven over some innocent-looking rocks scattered across the highway, only for their undersides to be torn apart by the resulting blasts.

By then Marx and his men were well on their way, marching north-west through the night towards their next target. They were making for La Chapelotte, a tiny hamlet lying due north of Celles-sur-Plaine, on the winding road to Badonviller. The site of a major battle during the First World War, the Col de la Chapelotte – the 1,500-foot forested peak that rises above the hamlet – was peppered with heavily fortified bunkers and gun emplacements. Marx figured it would be an ideal spot to find some enemy and ambush them.

Having paused in the dawn forest to eat, and to strip and clean their Bren guns, they approached La Chapelotte to carry out a recce. The SAS soldiers were moving along a path to one side of the road, when quite unexpectedly a German foot patrol emerged from the forest on the far side. Thinking fast, Marx dived into a nearby slit trench, his men piling in after him.

Cries rang out through the still dawn air. ‘
Kommen Sie hierher!
Kommen Sie hierher!
Schnell! Schnell!
’

Marx and his party refused to leave their cover. The German troops opened fire. Rounds tore into the wall of trees to the rear of the trench, tearing off chunks of bark and scattering it over the men below. They kept their heads well down and their weapons trained on the enemy. If the Germans advanced across the open ground and got to within killing range, Marx and his men would let rip.

But for now they held their fire. Eventually the Germans must have decided that discretion was the better part of valour. The firing petered out and the grey lice disappeared noisily into the woods heading back towards La Chapelotte.

Marx took to the shelter of the trees, splitting his patrol into two groups. Seven men were to set an ambush on the approach into La Chapelotte, with the two Brens covering the road. He ordered his remaining two fighters to shadow the German patrol, in the hope of springing an ambush on them with their tommy guns.

Marx and the main force slipped into the trench position, which was set some 10 yards back from the road. With their two Brens set firmly on their tripods on the lip, they had a perfect firing position. The road was steep here as it climbed towards the Col de la Chapelotte. Any vehicles coming this way should make for easy targets, as long as that pesky German patrol didn’t raise the alarm.

The men waited, hunkered down behind their Brens. ‘Fire on my fire,’ Marx hissed. ‘Fire on my gun.’

There were a series of whispered acknowledgements. Five minutes dragged by. The five became ten, and the tension kept mounting. At any moment the SAS men expected to see an enemy force heading out from La Chapelotte, looking to hunt them down. But then Marx and his men heard it – the faint strains of a struggling diesel engine and the ponderous crunch of gears. A vehicle was approaching.

Shoulders hunched tighter behind the Brens as the distinctive shape of a five-tonne German Army truck crawled around the bend, belching thick diesel fumes. Marx fixed the iron sights of his weapon above the long, raking nose of the truck and its high grill, targeting the centre of the single, flat windscreen. When he opened fire the bullets would tear through the glass and rip into the soft rear of the truck – a combination of wooden planking topped by canvas.

The ambush force waited. The truck crawled closer. Fingers tensed on triggers. Any moment now.

The truck was no more than 30 yards away when Marx let rip. The entire magazine of the Bren – thirty rounds of 7.62mm bullets – was emptied into the cab of the vehicle, shattered glass and debris spinning through the crisp dawn air. The truck slewed to an abrupt halt, lying half off the road, but it came to rest shielded by a mound of earth.

Marx led his men in a dash for higher ground, to bring the shattered vehicle back into their line of fire. By the time they were in position, a few grey-uniformed figures were seen darting into the woods on the far side of the road. Marx and his men covered the truck with their Brens, but there was no further movement or sign of life.

Knowing that the noise of the ambush would have been heard in La Chapelotte, Marx ordered his men back into the cover of the woodland. They moved quickly, heading towards an RV point where they’d stashed their heavy Bergens. Reunited with their packs, the force turned south, pushing along an open track, aiming to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the enemy.

They’d been moving for no more than five minutes before the feared counter-attack came. A force of German troops opened fire from the valley bottom. The range was too great for the fire to be accurate, but a worrying noise could be heard echoing through the trees. It was the baying of dogs.

‘Make for the high ground!’ Marx ordered. ‘Make for the hills!’

He turned due west, aiming to head across country direct to the SAS base, and hoping to lose their pursuers in the thick woodland and over the rugged hills. But as his men dashed into the dark embrace of the forest, three seemed to have misheard him. They rushed off straight down the track that they had been following, and no amount of yelling could bring them back.

Once Marx and his remaining men had covered a few hundred yards, they hit a clearing. He ordered a halt. Below, they could still see the track, and every now and again his three errant men were visible, running hell for leather into the distance. The party on the run consisted of Sergeant Terry-Hall, and Troopers Iveson and Crozier. At their heels were German troops with dogs baying for their blood.

The effective range of the Bren is 600 yards. The Germans were well beyond that, and even if Marx did open fire it would give away their position. He had no option but to set a compass bearing for the SAS base and lead his men west, making for the high ground.

At dusk Marx called a halt. He didn’t want to enter the SAS camp before doing a recce, and it would be too dark by the time they got there. The pause was fortunate. Two hours later, long bursts of heavy machine-gun fire cut the air. The noise was coming from what could only be the direction of their base. An hour after that, Marx received a message from Colonel Franks on his Jed Set.

‘Do not return to Camp. Further instructions later.’

By dawn the following morning their predicament was clear. Trucks could be heard moving through the Pierre-Percée Valley below, and the hamlet was crawling with the enemy. On the opposite side of their hilltop position, at Celles-sur-Plaine, there were yet more Germans. The enemy was also visible on the road running west to Raon L’Etape, and on their fourth side lay La Chapelotte, where they’d just stirred up a hornets’ nest of enemy activity.

Marx and his small force were surrounded on all sides.

Chapter Ten

The heavy machine-gun fire that Lieutenant Marx had heard had indeed signalled an assault on the SAS base. Once again it was largely due to an extraordinary piece of bluff that the Op Loyton force had escaped the trap set for them, and Captain Henry Carey Druce was again at the forefront of it.

On the morning of 9 September Druce had headed into Pierre-Percée on a recce mission, dressed as a local. As he moved into the streets of the tiny hamlet, he found that they were crawling with enemy troops. This was barely five days after moving into an area that the village mayor had confirmed hadn’t seen German soldiers for many weeks. It was obvious what the grey-uniformed troops had to be there for.

At one point Druce asked for a light for a cigarette, offering one to the German soldier that he feared was about to challenge him. His apparent self-confidence and ‘friendly’ demeanour had seen him through.

Recce done, he hurried back to the SAS camp, whereupon Franks ordered the immediate collapse of the base. Barely had the SAS men begun to move when German troops were detected closing in from all sides. Franks’ rearguard started taking heavy fire, and it was only due to Druce’s early warning that the Op Loyton force managed to make their getaway, and without suffering any casualties.

Only one possible route of escape lay open to them: south across the Celles Valley, towards the DZ upon which Druce and his advance unit had originally landed. From there, the Op Loyton party was repeatedly forced to move, as they looped eastwards through the Lac de la Maix region – the site of their first, 17 August brush with the enemy. They were being chased in circles, and barely managing to remain one step ahead of the enemy.

Finally, on 14 September, they moved into the hills east of Moussey, establishing a firm base in a high-walled gully set to the south of Les Bois Sauvages – the Wild Woods. This densely forested and steep-sided valley is called the Basse de Lieumont – the base of the place of mountains. Basse de Lieumont would become the closest the SAS would have to a permanent operational headquarters in the Vosges.

In an effort to scope out an alternative safe haven, Colonel Franks had dispatched his recently arrived second in command, Major Dennis Reynolds, to check out the area north of Pierre-Percée. Remote, forest-bound and almost devoid of any roads, it seemed to offer the perfect terrain in which to hide a fifty-strong SAS party, plus Maquis guides and helpers. The recently arrived Captain Anthony ‘Andy’ Whately-Smith – Franks’ adjutant – accompanied Major Reynolds on that mission.

But as they had skirted around Pierre-Percée, Reynolds and Whately-Smith ran into a German patrol. In the firefight that followed, the two SAS officers managed to escape, but Major Reynolds was shot in the forearm. In an incredible act of bravery a French couple sheltered the two British officers, one of whom was seriously weakened by blood loss.

Freddy and Myrhiam Le Rolland were Parisians who had retired to a pretty house in scenic Pierre-Percée. They led Reynolds and Whately-Smith to a woodland cave within walking distance of their home. There the two SAS men would manage to hide under the very noses of the Germans. In a stroke of good fortune, Myrhiam was a former nurse. She managed to treat Major Reynolds’ wound and arrest the gangrene, which had fast started to take hold.

Colonel Franks radioed through several RVs to the two men, but Major Reynolds proved too weak to make a move. Eventually, Franks decided to fetch his two officers in person, once he’d got the new Basse de Lieumont base firmly established, and his men firmly on the offensive once more.

Lieutenant Karl Marx was also trying to find his way to Colonel Franks’ new Moussey base. His unit had suffered no casualties, and even the three men last seen running from the Germans with their search dogs had managed to shake them off. But for forty-eight hours Marx and his men had had nothing to eat bar a few scavenged potatoes, and they had been burning through the Benzedrine in an effort to stay one step ahead of the enemy.

Unfazed by such hardships, when Lieutenant Marx made it to the new Basse de Lieumont base he proved keen to be dispatched on offensive operations again. Colonel Franks decided to entrust the young lieutenant with one of the most audacious missions of the war, an act designed to serve as the ultimate provocation to the enemy. Carrying some very special demolitions equipment, Marx was to lead his force east across the border into Germany to blow up a train on German soil.

Marx chose to take with him three tried-and-trusted men from his previous mission – Lance-Corporals Garth and Pritchard, plus Trooper Ferrandi – along with a new addition, Trooper Salthouse. Between them they were carrying 5 pounds of plastic explosives per man, four pressure switches, detonators, primers, a dozen tyre-bursters and two boxes of the so-called ‘fog signals’, which was a very particular piece of kit indeed.