The Nazi Hunters (19 page)

On the night of 18–19 September, Colonel Franks’ Eureka would come up trumps. So, too, would the long-suffering inhabitants of Moussey.

The only feasible DZ not then in enemy hands was a small field lying on the northern outskirts of Moussey village, one surrounded on all sides by the beckoning forest. Immediately to the north lay the 2,500-foot ridge that dominates the Moussey skyline, one more often than not shrouded in grey mist and rain. To the south and east lay further peaks and ridges – Côte du Mont, Côte des Chênes, le Roitelet – of a similar height.

The RAF aircrews were going to have to fly into a patch of grassland less than 500 foot square, sandwiched between high and glowering peaks on all sides. It would be a feat of flying just to get the Halifaxes in there safely, let alone to make several passes at 1,000 feet, dropping supplies and jeeps by parachute.

The Moussey villagers knew that a ‘
parachutage
’ or a ‘
droppage
’ was in the offing, and that the SAS required volunteers to help retrieve the loads and carry them into their rocky fastness. In spite of the risks, they turned out in their droves. The villagers were chivvied along by Etienne and the rest of his band of gnarled and aged warriors.

According to Captain Druce, who’d worked closely with Etienne’s Maquis, ‘Etienne and his thirty men were first class. Etienne himself was a really good leader.’

Tonight, Etienne seemed to have outdone even himself. The entire population of Moussey appeared to be streaming across the silver moonlit grass, disregarding the fact that there were German troops billeted no more than a mile away. This demonstration of the villagers’ solidarity served to lift the SAS men’s spirits enormously. They knew how the people of the Vosges were being made to suffer, and it troubled many of them mightily.

Typically, Etienne and his men had brought with them several bottles of
eau de vie
(‘water of life’) a locally distilled raw spirit, for ‘keeping out the damp and the cold’. They yelled their greetings to friends and family across the night-dark expanse of the DZ as the bottles were passed around.

There was nothing the British force could do to quell the high spirits, even had they wanted to. At one point Chris Sykes warned Etienne that the noise really had to stop. The Maquis leader promptly agreed that it should.

‘
Silence!
’ he bellowed across the field. ‘
Tais-toi! Un peu de discipline, ou je te claque!
’ (Shut up! A little discipline or I’ll slap you!)

His threat was met by a round of raucous applause.

But with the first beat of the approaching aircraft’s engines, the DZ fell still. An expectant hush settled as the signallers flashed their torches from the ground, and the first of the Halifaxes responded, circling back around at a lower altitude. As the first parachutes were released, the villagers began to remark: ‘
Ce sont des hommes
.’ ‘
Ce sont des conteneurs
.’ ‘
Ce sont . . . un jim!
’

Men (
hommes
) and containers they were expecting, but seeing the first
jim
(a jeep) drifting to earth beneath its four parachutes was a truly miraculous sight to behold. As loads landed with a sharp crackling of branches and a lone jeep drifted earthwards, figures darted in all directions to retrieve the war materiel.

Moments later, Etienne’s voice rang out again. ‘
Mon Colonel! Ici il y a un jim suspendu dans les arbres!
’ (Colonel! Here’s a jeep stuck in the trees!)

By the second and third pass of the aircraft, the repeated drops had spread chaos across the field. Figures darted hither and thither, seeking missing chutes. The clang of hammers rang out as containers were split open, the noise echoing back and forth across the still valley. And to the northern end of the DZ, a human snake could be seen slithering into the forest, moving in the direction of the SAS base, each ant-like figure laden down with a crushing load.

As the hours wore on, tiredness killed discretion. Etienne and his fellows’ cries grew more brazen and arresting as they sought those loads that had drifted deeper into the woods. Exhausted figures staggered uphill under their fourth or fifth load. And, at one end of the DZ, the first of the prized jeeps was being loaded to the gunwales with the heaviest equipment of all.

Six jeeps had been expected, but the drop was limited to three, owing to the adverse flying conditions. Of those three, one had touched down perfectly in the very centre of the DZ. The second had drifted slightly, landing in a side valley. But the third had ploughed deep into the woodlands. It had come to rest at a crazy angle, snagged in some branches, and all its oil had drained out.

Lou Fiddick was sent to try to retrieve it. ‘We had quite a chore. I had a number of French people with me to try to salvage this jeep . . . We eventually managed to get it down, but it was hard work . . . But even worse was getting rid of the parachute, so the Germans wouldn’t know we had been there. It was all tangled in the branches.’

As the first of the three vehicles was driven up the winding track leading towards the SAS’s Basse de Lieumont redoubt, the door to an isolated house opened and a hot meal was offered to the famished soldiers.

Every villager knew about the
droppages
. And there were few in Moussey who weren’t aware of where Colonel Franks had made his new headquarters. What was incredible was that nobody in this village had thought to give the British force away.

Once the jeeps were safely ensconced in the thick and rugged forest, there was much to be done to make them ready. Guns had to be cleaned and tested, for they’d been stowed, greased-up, in the rear of the vehicles. Magazines had to be reloaded, as some of the ammo had been fouled. The jeep that had landed in the trees needed a shot of replacement oil, and even then its brakes needed to be got working again.

With the first of his vehicles in place, Colonel Franks was keen to launch shoot-’n’-scoot attacks across the widest possible expanse of the Vosges. In doing so he aimed to give the impression that the vanguard of the American forces had broken through the German lines. This would sow panic and fear amongst the ranks of the enemy, and so help contribute to the crumbling of their lines.

That, at least, was the theory, and it was supported by a radio message just in. ‘A signal had been received that the Americans were expected to reach our area by the 19th,’ Colonel Franks recorded in the war diary. ‘I therefore decided to deploy my forces as follows . . .’

Two six-man patrols were to be sent out to harry the enemy on foot. The remainder of his force – bar a small headquarters element – was to take to the jeeps under Franks’ direct command, and drive out to war.

The nineteenth of September was the day the first jeeps had arrived. If the intelligence was correct, then the American forces should be on Moussey’s very doorstep. Now was the time to set forth on a highly visible offensive. Franks warned his men to prepare for the coming American breakthrough, and to be alert for friendly forces; they didn’t want to shoot up their own side.

But, in truth, there had been a major breakdown in either intelligence or communications – quite possibly both. Following a rapid advance over the previous few days, General Patton’s forces were once more well and truly stalled. Right now, at the end of the third week of September, the tanks, personnel carriers, trucks and self-propelled guns of the 3rd and 7th Armies were actually going nowhere, for resistance along the western wall of the Vosges had proved far more ferocious than Allied commanders had ever anticipated.

‘The Germans appear to want to prevent at all costs a crossing of the crest of the Vosges,’ a US 7th Army document recorded. ‘They have set up a fortifications plan . . . Thousands of youths belonging to the Hitler Jugend, plus young men from Alsace 12–15 years old and conscripted by force, have been made to work on the first trenches . . .’

The Todt Organization – a notorious ‘civil engineering’ outfit, named after its founder, senior Nazi Fritz Todt – had overseen the building of the Vosges defences. By September 1944, the Todt Organization had 1.4 million forced labourers under its control, of which 1 per cent were Germans rejected for military service, 1.5 per cent were concentration camp prisoners, and the rest were POWs and compulsory labourers from occupied territories, including children.

‘Numerous artillery pieces have been brought forward,’ the US 7th Army report continued. ‘All the bridges and footbridges over the Meurthe have been mined. Sentries guard those bridges both day and night. All the roads crossing the Meurthe are . . . cut across in two and sometimes three places by large and deep trenches covered by heavy planks, thus forming anti-tank barriers. Even these second bridges are mined and guarded.

‘New troops numbering three Divisions – one armoured, one motorised and one infantry – have been brought into the sector. Traffic has occurred almost exclusively at night and it has been heavy in men, material and supply columns. The arrival of heavy tanks (Panther and Tiger) indicate that the Germans will not be content to stay on the defensive, but will seize the right moment to push to the offensive.’

By late September 1944, Patton’s armies had come up against a second enemy, in addition to the defences strung along the Vosges. For weeks after D-Day an extraordinary American initiative had kept Patton’s gas-guzzling armoured columns on the move. The Red Ball Express – named after a railroad expression; to ‘red-ball’ something was to speed it through – was a truck convoy system designed to keep supplies rolling post D-Day, no matter what.

Priority routes marked with the Red Ball symbol had been strung across liberated France, each closed to all but military traffic. Some 6,000 trucks similarly marked worked to the Red Ball slogan – ‘Keep ’em rolling!’ – driving day and night to and from the front lines.

But on an average day of operations Patton’s forces consumed some 800,000 US gallons of fuel. By late September 1944 they had outrun the reach of even the Red Ball truckers.

In the final push for the Vosges, General Patton’s forces had ground to a halt owing to a lack of fuel. Yet for some reason – most likely the ever-present ‘fog of war’ – Colonel Franks and his men had received no warnings about this. Quite the contrary; they had been told to expect the US cavalry to come riding over the hills at any moment.

‘Liaison between the different Intelligence branches was markedly imperfect,’ remarked Chris Sykes. ‘In consequence we got instructions to prepare for an advance which had, in fact, been cancelled.’        

In truth, General Patton’s forces wouldn’t cross the Vosges for more than a month. And in the interim, Colonel Franks and his men were driving out to a very lonely and one-sided war.

Chapter Twelve

At six o’clock on the evening of 21 September Colonel Franks led the first jeep-mounted sortie out of the SAS’s ‘bandit’ base. The colonel was behind the wheel of the first vehicle, with Major Power serving as his front gunner and Roger Souchal as guide. Lieutenant Dill drove the second jeep, with three gunners poised over the menacing forms of the Vickers twin machine guns.

As darkness fell they sneaked through Moussey village, turned left and then right, snaking their way between knife-cut hills on a narrow, winding road. They were making for La Petite Raon and Vieux-Moulin, where Druce’s advance force had originally parachuted in. They’d received reports that the Germans had a tank unit positioned in the woodlands, and Colonel Franks was keen on hunting down those high-value targets.

Sure enough, the distinctive tracks of Tiger tanks were found on the road leading into Vieux-Moulin. The German Tiger was a 55-tonne behemoth boasting a fearsome 88mm main gun, 7.62mm machine guns, plus 120mm-thick armour. There was nothing the two jeeps carried which could so much as put a dent in that, not unless the SAS men could get close enough to hurl a Gammon bomb through the tank’s open turret, or stuff it full of grenades.

Colonel Franks halted in Vieux-Moulin to get some directions from the locals. He was told that five Tiger tanks were parked up nearby, hidden amongst the thick woodland. The only way to attack such a formidable target was to launch an ambush while the tanks were powered down – their engines switched off and their crews at ease. If they could kill or scatter enough of the German ‘tankies’, they might just get close enough to blow up their armour.

Colonel Franks and Major Power headed off into the woods on a foot recce, to see if the Tigers could be hit from the rear. From the cover of the trees they spotted what seemed to be German sentries and the silhouette of a well-camouflaged Tiger tank. The faint noise of hammering echoed out of the darkened woodland. Steel was slamming against steel as the tank crews carried out what sounded like running repairs. Here and there the glow of cigarettes could be seen through the trees.

The two SAS commanders returned to their jeeps. Working from what they’d just seen, they steered their two vehicles towards where they figured the first Tiger was situated. The jeeps crawled along a forest track, moving barely above walking pace to mask the noise of their approach. When they’d got to within 100 yards of the German position, they parked up with their guns brought to bear and switched on both sets of headlamps, full-beam.

In the glare of the illumination they hoped to spot movement as the tank crews reacted to the sudden, blinding light. Most likely they would presume it was a friendly force, for the very idea that British soldiers might be driving around in the Vosges would appear preposterous to the Germans right now.