The Nazi Hunters (23 page)

Strike three to the enemy.

With ‘jeeping’ rendered all but impossible, Franks sent out multiple foot patrols – led by Lieutenants Marx, Dill, Silly and others. But the SAS colonel could sense the enemy circling like sharks around a bloody wreck at sea. Sure enough, Corporal Boris Kasperovitch – the Russian SAS man who’d shot up the SS parade in Moussey – was shot dead while out on one of those missions. Trooper Fred Puttick disappeared on the same patrol, either captured or killed.

Strike four to the enemy.

‘We were gradually reduced to ambuscading on foot from the woods,’ Chris Sykes, the 2 SAS intelligence officer, remarked. ‘We had the consolation of knowing we had hurt the enemy and compelled them to withdraw considerable numbers of troops from their front line . . . in order to counter-attack their invisible foe in the Vosges.’

Worse was to come. As the weather grew colder and more bitter, the supplies of both the SAS and the surviving Maquis had dwindled to near zero. Maquis commander Joubert – whose young guns had fought so valiantly – was cornered while out collecting some urgently needed food and ammo. The Germans didn’t know for sure that this was the Maquis leader they had so long sought, but with every able-bodied male having been shipped off to the concentration camps, they had their suspicions.

Standartenführer
Isselhorst was keen for Joubert to confess quickly. He decided that torture would be the best way to ‘persuade’ the Frenchman to reveal the location of the SAS base. The Gestapo started on the captive’s feet, battering them with a heavy club until all the bones were smashed. Then they worked upon the rest of his body. Joubert never cracked. He knew everything and yet he told nothing. But even so, with his capture, Joubert’s Maquis were finished as a fighting force.

A day or two later, Etienne – the seemingly indestructible and ageless leader of the ‘old drunkards’ Maquis – was found dead in the woods. No mortal enemy had vanquished him. He’d fallen victim to a sudden stroke. But, like Joubert, his wonderfully irreverent and unorthodox band of Maquis died with him.

And, high in the hills above Moussey, the Gestapo finally paid a visit to Père George’s isolated farmstead. The gnarled and moustachioed farmer and diehard communist was duly arrested and carted off to Natzweiler. Although Père George would never break or talk, in two fell strokes Colonel Franks’ force had been deprived of much of their operational infrastructure in the Vosges: the two local Resistance groups that had proved such steadfast allies, and one of their key points of sanctuary.

The Op Loyton war diary records their situation thus: ‘area full of enemy, food short and the French too frightened to help’. No doubt about it, Isselhorst’s Waldfest appeared to be working.

On 30 September, Captain Gough turned up at Colonel Franks’ Basse de Lieumont base. Gough had been forced to accept that the Maquis were a spent force, which meant that the Jedburghs’ role had become largely redundant. He was about to depart on a similar journey to that undertaken by Fiddick and Druce and attempt to make his way through to the American (and French) lines.

Gough’s last radio message reflected the kind of difficulties he’d faced in the past days. ‘Gave ground. SAS will liaise with you. Great difficulty working alone. Can’t come up on regular skeds. Will come up on emergency channel when can . . .’

After bidding a farewell to Colonel Franks and his men, Gough set out westwards. At some stage in the next few days he was captured by the men of
Einsatzkommando
Ernst. Following violent interrogations by the Gestapo, Gough was shipped out to Schirmek’s
Sicherungslager
to join the other Op Loyton captives enjoying Camp Commandant Karl Buck’s hospitality, in his underground cells.

It never rains but it pours – especially in the Vosges. On 2 October Lieutenant’s Silly’s patrol returned from operations. They had succeeded in blowing up two German half-tracks, and better still a staff car, which raised Op Loyton’s tally to nine. But they’d had to strike as far east as Belval to score such a rare success, and the terrain on all sides was reported to be crawling with the enemy.

So thick were the grey lice on the ground that Franks had been forced to send a very reluctant message to SFHQ: ‘Re-supply impossible until further notice.’ With no airdrops possible, and with the Rabodeau villages robbed of their populations, the SAS men were starting to freeze to death, to starve, and to run out of bullets.

The state of Franks’ men can be gauged by a message sent in response to their final resupply by air. ‘Send what you are asked to send . . . On the last re-supply it must have been obvious that food was the main item required, yet the first two containers opened contained Bazookas and bombs, which had NOT . . . been asked for.’

Hollow-eyed, shivering and with their weight falling off them, Franks could tell that his men were approaching a state in which they would no longer be able to fight. He’d been promised the American cavalry would come riding over the horizon. In fact, by rights they should have reached Moussey days ago. But there was zero sign of them and, as the weather worsened, the chances of a breakthrough plummeted in the increasingly snow-bound Vosges.

Incredibly, Isselhorst wasn’t done yet. As September blew through to a freezing October, and fresh falls of snow carpeted the high ground, so a fresh wave of purges was launched in the suffering villages strung along the Rabodeau Valley. Determined to up the incidence of searches, arrests, deportations and executions, the forces of Waldfest struck again and again.

By the end of the first week of October some 1,000 villagers had been seized across the valley, earning it the haunting name of ‘the Vale of Tears’. Shipped off to the concentration camps, 661 would never return. At some stage during the process of rounding them up, it seems the location of the SAS base was given away.

On 6 October, what Isselhorst doubtless intended to be his final assault was launched against Colonel Franks’ Basse de Lieumont headquarters. Captain John Hislop – Phantom commander, champion jockey, and one of Druce’s original advance party – was at the base that late afternoon when the enemy were first detected. From all around, the noise of a force of approaching troops filtered through the thick woodland.

It being pine forest, the trees hadn’t lost any of their greenery with the coming of winter, and the pine needles served to deaden the sound. Even so, the telltale clink of metal upon metal, the crunch of a fallen branch underfoot and the faint rustle of bodies forcing a way through thick undergrowth carried clearly to the assembled men. Worse still, they could hear the spine-chilling whine of dogs. Completely surrounded, their only option was to remain utterly still and silent, in the hope of somehow evading the search.

Hislop feared there was no way they could avoid discovery, at which point they ‘would be outnumbered beyond reasonable hope of survival . . . I thought, “this looks like the finish,” and considered how best I could meet it.’ While not greatly fearing death, Hislop doubted if he could stand up to interrogation by the Gestapo. He vowed instead to go down fighting.

He was hunched over a fire, together with fellow Phantom Peter Johnsen and Major Power. The smoke was drifting into the thick rain and fog, so it would hardly be visible. Johnsen was turning his socks over the fire, in an effort to dry them, but the young man’s hands had started to tremble with the tension. Over the past few weeks Johnsen had distinguished himself as a cool, level-headed and courageous operator, and it struck Hislop as being an utter waste that such a fine young man should lose his life at a time and place as this.

Hislop felt that to some extent he’d lived his life. He was reconciled now to making a last-ditch stand and meeting a bloody end. As for Major Peter Power, he was leaning back against a tree, as inscrutable as ever. He had a cigarette glued to his lower lip, the tip barely glowing, and his face was as expressionless as if he was scrutinizing a particularly promising hand at poker and awaiting the next play.

The tense quiet was shattered by a noise that was as unexpected as it was unwelcome. Someone had dropped an empty tin. It went clattering downhill, deafeningly. In the ringing silence that followed, everyone expected the enemy to close for the kill. The noise of pursuit continued, and even through the thick screen of trees it sounded as if the hunters were drawing ever closer.

The British soldiers tensed over their weapons. No one could quite believe it when the sound of the approaching force gradually seemed to fade away. The forest all about fell silent once more. It was inconceivable that the German troops hadn’t heard that tin clan clanking as it fell. For several long minutes the men remained still and quiet, listening intently. But much as they strained their ears, the enemy force seemed to have departed.

Dusk was upon the forest now, and Colonel Franks ordered his men to collapse the base immediately. Once more they were on the run, only this time they were forced to abandon their much-loved jeeps. They needed to travel light and fast, using the remotest, most inaccessible terrain possible. They moved out at nightfall, flitting through the deepening darkness, and in doing so they escaped all but certain death.

The enemy approach had been a recce, and at first light the following morning they returned in force. They hit the base with overwhelming force, including armour and field guns brought up for the purpose, but by then the SAS had disappeared, ghost-like, into the hills. Or rather, not quite all of Colonel Franks’ force had departed. Seven brave and courageous men, commanded by the redoubtable David Dill – the baby-faced but fearsome SAS lieutenant from Druce’s original drop – had been left at the base as a rearguard.

Their mission was to wait there for Captain Druce, who was expected to arrive at any moment, having crossed back across the lines with the radio spares. Instead, they were surrounded by a massive force of German troops. In the ferocious firefight that followed, Dill and his men held out for four hours, before the last of their ammunition was exhausted.

The German officer who accepted their surrender shook Dill by the hand. ‘You are my prisoner,’ he announced. ‘You are a soldier and so am I.’

Along with Dill, Sergeant Jock Hay – Druce’s long-standing right-hand man –Lance-Corporals George Robinson and Fred Austin, and Troopers Jimmy Bennet and Edwin Weaver, plus their young and indomitable French guide, Roger Souchal, were all taken captive. Sadly, they weren’t to be held for long by the
Wehrmacht
. Instead, they were handed over to the men of
Einsatzkommando
Ernst.

Dill and his companions were sent to the same processing centre as the other SAS captives: Schirmek’s
Sicherungslager
. In the subterranean cells they
were reunited with
Captain Victor Gough, plus several other SAS men who had been captured.
One of Dill’s men, Trooper
Edwin Weaver, was to distinguish himself mightily at Schirmek; he refused to stop yelling ‘Fucking Germans!’ whenever one should enter their cell.

The seventeen-year-old Roger Souchal tried to convince his captors that he was a bona fide member of the SAS Regiment, so he could remain in the company of those with whom he had so faithfully served. He argued that he was a French Canadian member of the unit. Indeed, his details had been radioed through to SAS headquarters, so that his name could be formally recorded on the 2 SAS orbat, as an added form of protection.

But Souchal was soon denounced by a local Frenchwoman who identified him as a member of the Maquis, at which moment he was carted off to a concentration camp. Souchal would survive the horrors that lay ahead, and after the war he was awarded the King’s Medal for Service in the Cause of Freedom, given to foreign civilians who had aided the British in the war.

The citation stated: ‘Monsieur Roger Souchal . . . served as a courier and guide to a detachment of SAS in the Vosges . . . He took part in ambushes against German convoys . . . and the manner in which he employed his knowledge of the locality was of vital importance to SAS detachments whereby an error in the choice of route could have cost the life of the detachment.’

There had been many times when Roger Souchal had held the lives of Colonel Franks’ men in the palm of his hand and the young Frenchman had not been found wanting. Now, bereft of their fearless and spirited guide, the main SAS force was left to fend for itself in the forests of the Vosges as the enemy closed in.

And somewhere in those benighted hills, the lone figure of Captain Henry Druce was making for a camp that had been seized by the enemy.

Chapter Fifteen

True to his word, Druce had returned to the Vosges. He’d used the same route as Fiddick and he had come out on, crossing over from the French lines. If anything, his war diary entry is even shorter than that concerning his outward journey, and downplays things magnificently. ‘I decided to return to the Colonel and put him fully in the picture of the situation for our future operations. Also to take Capt. Hislop’s badly needed [radio] set and new crystals.’

The ‘situation for future operations’ was really very simple: no American forces were about to punch through the Vosges any time soon. Just as the weather over the rugged mountains had rendered resupply flights all but impossible, so conventional military operations there had become ever less feasible.

Of recrossing the lines Druce wrote that he was ‘escorted by a French patrol as far as the edge of the woods . . . There was a German M.G. post here, but the enemy must have been asleep because it did not fire. We went a mile or so into the woods and waited there until daylight.’