The Nazi Hunters (21 page)

Fortunately, Franks and his three men had been thrown clear. But there was little time to hang around and try to right the stricken vehicle. The cries of enemy troops in pursuit could be heard, as could the ring of hobnailed boots on the road.

Franks and his men clambered onto the bonnet of the one serviceable jeep and, with Lieutenant Dill at the wheel, they headed up the track into the highlands, hanging on for dear life to whatever they could find. The heavily ribbed tyres tore through the dirt, eating up the terrain.

In spite of having lost a jeep, all was going passably well until Dill rounded a corner and was forced to slam on the brakes. Ahead, the track was blocked by fallen trees. Behind, their route was crawling with the enemy. Colonel Franks, Lieutenant Dill and their men had no choice but to abandon their one remaining vehicle.

They took off on foot with the enemy at their heels, running for the uncertain safety of the high ground.

Chapter Thirteen

As the Commander of 2 SAS and his small band of men raced for the heights above the Celles Valley, so Operation Waldfest was about to wreak terrible vengeance on the villagers of the Vosges. Following on the heels of Lieutenant Marx’s strike onto German soil, Major Power’s brazen attack was as a red rag to a bull. If anything gave the lie to Waldfest’s effectiveness, it was a bunch of British parachutists driving around the Vosges in jeeps, blasting apart whatever they chose.

By now the SAS had been on the ground for six weeks, which was time enough for the SS and Gestapo to have hunted them down. In this they had failed. But they had done their homework well, and they had a good idea of exactly who they were up against. German intelligence reports from the time show how Isselhorst and his cronies had got to know their enemy in some considerable detail.

From captured . . . orders and papers it has been learned that the enemy intelligence service has tried to infiltrate single agents and teams and to build up Resistance groups in the rear of the present German front. In this work the SAS troops will share the principal role with special espionage agents.

When the troops jump they are equipped with everything they need for this penetration. Besides the equipment and weapons which the paratrooper carries with him in his jump bag, containers are dropped holding the usual supplies of food, extra weapons, ammunition, explosives . . . The intention is the interruption of railway lines, the blowing up of bridges, traffic junctions and telephone communications.

The architects of Waldfest had also come to know exactly who their adversaries in the Vosges were. ‘There are at the moment 3 SAS Regiments which belong to the 1st SAS Brigade,’ the German intelligence report stated. ‘The Commander of the Brigade is a certain McLeod. The commander of the 1st SAS Regiment is Col. Kaine. The Commander of the 2nd SAS Regiment is Col. Franks.’

Brigadier-General Roderick McLeod was indeed the SAS Brigade Commander. The 1st SAS Regiment was commanded by Colonel Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne – not the ‘Kaine’ of the German report, but close enough. And of course ‘Col. Franks’ was indeed the commander of 2 SAS, and the man on the ground in the Vosges orchestrating all the shoot-’em-up mayhem.

From captured documents and prisoner interrogations,
Standartenführer
Isselhorst had reached an assessment of just how real was the threat he was facing. ‘Experience gained in the campaigns in ITALY and FRANCE shows that members of the SAS are specially trained for this type of work. Their activities are extremely dangerous. The presence of SAS units is to be reported immediately to the divisions concerned.’

In a sense, Isselhorst and his people had overemphasized the danger posed by the SAS in the Vosges. Fifty-odd Special Forces could only cause so much havoc and ruin. But it was that very fear and uncertainty – the myth of the winged-dagger-wearing avengers – which was perhaps their single greatest asset in the Vosges. Thousands of German troops had been drafted in to hunt down a few dozen SAS operators, and that kept them away from bolstering the Vosges defences and resisting Patton’s advance.

As Franks noted in the war diary: ‘On the whole the Germans seemed very scared of us. Judging by local reports our numbers had been much exaggerated . . . Before we had been found in the Moussey area they started visiting all the farms in the [Celles] woods and then billeting soldiers in them. If they had any suspicions, they razed the house to the ground and shot the occupants.’

The adoption of jeep-borne operations had been a masterstroke. In the eyes of the enemy, the SAS had to be a large and potent force, for how else could they risk driving about launching shoot-’em-up raids in the heart of enemy territory? Surely only a force acting from a position of strength would do such a thing. It was so blatant, it spoke of a serious military potency, or so it would seem.

As Franks noted in the war diary: ‘It is quite certain that the appearance of the jeeps astounded and irritated the Germans, and made them redouble their efforts to destroy our party.’

For those orchestrating Waldfest it stood to reason that those jeeps would need to have a base of operations. And it stood to reason that some of the inhabitants of the Vosges
must
know who these brazen operators were and exactly where they were operating from.

As the SAS had not been found by ‘normal’ means – troop searches, aircraft overflights, tracing their radio signals and interrogations of prisoners – the fist of Waldfest was about to fall heaviest on those suspected of ‘harbouring’ this ‘extremely dangerous’ enemy. Thus the village of Moussey found itself bang in
Standartenführer
Isselhorst’s sights.

The first the Op Loyton force knew of the savage clampdown at Moussey was when Captain Henry Carey Druce unwittingly drove into the midst of it. It was the afternoon of 24 September 1944, and Druce was returning in a jeep from La Petite Raon, where he’d been searching for opportune targets. At three locations – La Petite Raon, Le Puid and Le Vermont – his jeeping patrol had encountered the enemy, unleashing fire from the Vickers Ks and killing a dozen or so German soldiers.

Speaking of Druce’s jeep-borne operations, on which Fiddick served as one of his gunners, the Canadian airman remarked simply: ‘His job was to create havoc, which he did.’

But the day was waning and Druce was yearning to return to SAS’s Basse de Lieumont base. He had a special reason to want to get back there; en route, he’d managed to obtain a very tasty-looking French cheese. It was about the size and shape of a large car tyre, and having nowhere else to put it, Druce had strapped it to the leading jeep’s bonnet. It struck him as lending their party a very Gallic air.

‘I paid for it at some address someone had given me,’ Druce noted of the cheese, ‘and it was a huge thing. Where the hell do you put a cheese like that? I was very proud of myself, so we put it on the bonnet of the jeep.’

As the two jeeps neared Moussey, Druce had not the slightest inkling how badly things were amiss in their ‘home’ village. Just to be sure they could pass through unmolested, he stopped a woman on the outskirts. He asked if there were any Germans on the streets. The woman told him there were none. She had either lied to him or was mistaken, and Druce never was to discover which.

The pair of jeeps pushed into the centre of the village, rounding a slight bend leading into the square. All of a sudden, Druce realized just what they had stumbled into here. Sandwiched between the village churchyard and the war memorial there were several dozen SS troopers in full uniform. They were standing to attention, with a senior officer addressing them.

Lou Fiddick was driving the second jeep, and he was right on Druce’s tail. ‘The German commander was just assembling his men when we appeared,’ he remarked. To one side stood the village school: it was crammed full of frightened-looking and cowed civilians. The SS had to be rounding up the Moussey villagers in preparation for yet another round of brutal reprisals.

‘I wasn’t expecting to see them, but they weren’t expecting to see me,’ Druce commented of the SS soldiers. At the front of the school were two large gateposts, with a sentry standing guard. He was the first to lay eyes on the British jeeps. He raised his arm to give the Nazi salute, clearly thinking that the jeep-borne force had to be a German. He would be the first to die.

Druce was at the leading jeep’s wheel. He stamped on the gas, gunning the vehicle towards the ranks of enemy troops. Even as he accelerated, his men swung around their weapons and prepared to open fire. His gunner in the jeep’s rear – Corporal ‘Boris King’; in truth a Russian called Boris Kasperovitch – hunched over his twin Vickers and took aim. He opened fire on the sentry at the school gates, blasting him off his feet with a savage burst.

Seven Vickers spat long tongues of flame, the .303-inch rounds tearing into the SS parade at some 40 yards range, and fast closing. The Vickers K has a maximum rate of fire of 1,200 rounds per minute. In Druce’s jeep they unleashed three magazines of ammo – 180 bullets – at the target, raking the ranks of the enemy from end to end. It took bare seconds to do so, and by the time of the final shots they were hammering into their targets at close to point-blank range.

The parade disintegrated. SS soldiers were blown off their feet by the intense barrage, the few survivors diving for whatever cover they could find. In the second jeep Lou Fiddick’s crew followed suit, raking the enemy lines with rounds.

For a brief moment bullets cut the air around Druce’s vehicle, as someone managed to return fire. Druce spotted the enemy gunners. The mayor’s house was set a good way back from the road, and a pair of German soldiers were positioned on the roof.

Druce’s rear and passenger-seat gunners were busy hammering fire into the devastated SS parade. Only Druce’s gun was free. He slammed on the brakes, slowing his jeep to snail’s pace, at which speed he was just about able to operate the gun. He grabbed the single Vickers one-handed, swung it around on its pivot mount, nailed the gunners on the mayor’s roof in his iron sights and opened fire.

No sane soldier armed with a rifle chooses to stand firm against a Vickers K. Druce saw one figure get hit and fall as the other dived for cover. He dropped his gun, got both hands on the wheel again and got the jeep going at full speed, steering for their exit. By the time they were thundering around the right-hand turn at the far side of the square, they had left bloody chaos and carnage in their wake.

Druce figured some fifteen to twenty SS troopers had been killed or injured in the onslaught. There had been one significant casualty on the SAS side: the cheese.

‘When we got to this group in the centre of Moussey we were shooting through this cheese,’ Druce remarked. ‘The gun that went through the cheese was on the driver’s side, my side . . . So it really looked like a Swiss cheese by the end of it!’

As the two jeeps powered away, Druce and his fellow jeepers hoped that, amidst all the chaos, the bulk of the Moussey villagers had been able to make a break for it and escape. By the time their two jeeps reached the Op Loyton base, word seemed to have reached it about what was happening at Moussey, but the details remained sketchy and unclear.

‘We heard that a lot of people had been rounded up,’ remarked Druce. ‘But I don’t think even Brian [Franks] knew at that stage. I don’t think it clicked with us that indeed there was a big German round-up taking place, and that these people were all being taken away.’ Even when the SAS men did learn of the massive scale of the deportations, ‘we had no idea where they were being taken, or whether they were being held permanent hostage or under what circumstances.’

Of course,
Standartenführer
Isselhorst knew exactly what fate awaited the 210 villagers seized in Moussey that day. In light of his failure to halt the operations of the SAS, or those of their allies in the Maquis, Isselhorst had unleashed his dogs of war. As Waldfest documents from the time noted, the aim of this Sunday 24 September mass round-up was to ‘exterminate this alarming terrorist band’ once and for all.

Einsatzkommando
Ernst – commanded by
Sturmbannführer
Hans-Dietrich Ernst, fresh from sending 800 French Jews to the Auschwitz gas chambers – had been tasked to spearhead this new Waldfest crackdown. All across the villages of the Rabodeau Valley, able-bodied males were being rounded up and shipped off to the fearsome hellhole that was Schirmek’s
Sicherungslager
.

The action had started at dawn, when
Einsatzkommando
Ernst, working with units from the SS and the
Wehrmacht
, had ‘hit’ Moussey. All those villagers not at first mass were dragged from their homes and herded towards the village school. Men, women and children were packed into the courtyard, opposite the crèche, where the Gestapo had made their temporary headquarters. Those attending Abbé Gassman’s service were dragged from the church into the square.

At neighbouring villages – La Petite Raon, Le Harcholet, Belval, Le Saulcy and Le Vermont – similar dawn raids were underway. In Moussey, it was only due to the efforts of Abbé Gassman and his cohort, the mayor, that the Germans were persuaded not to torch the village and to spare the women and children. The priest and the mayor had offered their lives to save the most vulnerable in their flock.

Even so, all able-bodied males were marched off to the local SS headquarters, situated at the grey-faced, Gothic and sinister-looking Château de Belval, a requisitioned country house lying further east along the valley. After a night of savage interrogations overseen by Commander Ernst, all men between the ages of seventeen and fifty were loaded aboard trucks and driven away. In addition to the 210 rounded up in Moussey, 309 had been taken from the surrounding villages.