The Nazi Hunters (24 page)

Aware that a rearguard party was awaiting him, he made for the SAS’s Basse de Lieumont base, only to discover that it had been overrun, and that Lieutenant Dill and his men had been captured. Druce asked the locals about Père George’s farm, hoping that Franks and his men might have gathered there. He was told that German troops had burned it to the ground.

With no way of discovering the present location of the Op Loyton force, Druce could conceive only one course of action: the man who had started it all with that 12 August airdrop turned around and prepared to cross over the lines for a third time, heading back to General Leclerc’s forces.

Druce had one other urgent reason to make for the Allied lines. From his contacts around Moussey he had discovered some vital intelligence, information that he believed would radically alter General Patton’s plan of attack, and the SAS captain felt a pressing need to get it into the Allied commander’s hands.

‘Captain Jean [a Maquis leader] had procured information about the arrival of three new German Divisions near St. Dié, where I knew the Americans were supposed to be starting their attack,’ Druce noted in the war diary. ‘The information I had on the three Divisions was so important that it had to be transmitted to the Americans immediately . . . I set out in the morning on the same route for the third time . . .’

As Druce struck out for Allied lines, matters had reached their lowest ebb for the main body of the Op Loyton force. A few hours’ rest in comfort and safety; a nourishing meal; a warm, dry place in which to sleep – these were the kind of things the men could only dream of. The worries of normal civilian life didn’t touch these war-weary, harried soldiers any more. The future barely concerned them, for they lived from day to day.

Colonel Franks and his men no longer had a base of operations. They were more or less permanently sodden wet and bitterly cold, and forever on the move. Even so, they weren’t quite done with their raiding yet. An SAS Lieutenant Swayne and his patrol had been in action. They’d struck on the road leading south from Neufmaisons – the village lying just to the east of Veney, where Druce and his men had been forced to wait for so long for their resupply airdrop.

Lieutenant Swayne’s attack was the last significant action of Op Loyton, and it proved wonderfully apposite; they had hit and destroyed two German staff cars, which meant that the tally now stood at eleven. In large part the SAS’s mission in the Vosges had been to target senior enemy commanders:
to decapitate the snake
. After destroying eleven staff cars and their occupants, few could argue that the Nazi serpent hadn’t had its head significantly hacked.

Swayne’s force was reunited with Franks’ nomadic headquarters unit on 8 October 1944. That same day, General Eisenhower himself wrote to SAS headquarters, his letter one of fulsome praise regarding the Regiment’s achievements in occupied France:

I wish to send my congratulations to all ranks of the Special Air Service Brigade on the contribution which they have made to the success of the Allied Expeditionary Force.

The ruthlessness with which the enemy have attacked Special Air Service troops has been an indication of the injury which you were able to cause to the German armed forces both by your own efforts and by the information which you gave of German disposition and movements.

Many Special Air Service troops are still behind enemy lines; others are being reformed for new tasks. To all of them I say ‘Well done, and good luck.’

Amidst the freezing fog in the hills somewhere to the east of Moussey, Franks and his men were in need of all the luck they could get.

On 9 October 1944 the SAS colonel bowed to the inevitable. With little ammo, explosives, food or shelter available to his men, he ordered that Operation Loyton to be brought to a close. A mission originally scheduled to last from two to three weeks – the time it was expected in which US forces would reach the Vosges – had morphed into an eight-week epic.

‘I decided to end the operation,’ Franks noted in the war diary, ‘and instructed parties to make their way to the American lines as best they could.’

Franks split his men into four- and six-man units. Each was to leave at different times and via different routes, to try to maximize their chances of making it through alive. Franks would remain with a headquarters element – consisting of Major Power, Captains Sykes and Hislop, plus two others – at an RV sited in the Celles Valley. There they would wait for forty-eight hours, hoping to link up with David Dill’s rearguard, Captain Henry Druce and others.

Of course, Lieutenant Dill and his men had been taken captive, and Druce was headed back towards the lines, but in the chaotic and hunted situation that Franks found himself in he knew none of that. The SAS colonel also wanted to make one last attempt to bring Major Dennis Reynolds and Captain Whately-Smith in from the cold, and to get those two officers on their way back to friendly lines.

Wishing each other
bonne chance
, the remaining Op Loyton warriors split up. Some forty men turned westwards, slipping into the dank and dripping forest and heading towards enemy and, hopefully in due course, friendly, lines. Franks’ party of six turned north, making for the Celles Valley. It had been raining solidly for days now, the downpour turning to sleet and snow on the high ground. The conditions were the most miserable and soul-destroying yet.

On arrival at their RV grid, Franks’ party took shelter in a deserted sawmill. It was safer to billet themselves in the forest, but even the hardiest of souls couldn’t sleep out in such conditions – not for days on end. That evening they helped themselves to some apples stored in a barn owned by some villagers who had helped the SAS in the past.

Sykes went to speak to the family, but he found them utterly terrified. The Gestapo had discovered their sympathies and they had come to arrest the man of the house. Not finding him, they had delivered an ultimatum: either he gave himself up, or they would return and burn down the family home. His wife was distraught; with an elderly mother and a baby, what was she to do?

Franks’ force slept the night in the sawmill. The following morning they paid a last visit to the forester who had been acting as their go-between with the two SAS officers hidden in the Pierre-Percée cave. The forester was adamant: with the Celles Valley crawling with Germans, if Major Reynolds and Captain Whately-Smith broke cover, it would probably prove the death of them.

Franks asked the forester to pass them a final message. They were to lie low in their cave and await the arrival of the Americans. It couldn’t be long now. The forester gave what little food he could to the SAS men as sustenance for their onward journey, and each party bade the other farewell. By the time Franks and his men made it back to the sawmill, the Gestapo had arrived in the neighbourhood.

It was late in the afternoon, and the six Special Forces men were forced to watch from their place of hiding as the Gestapo interrogated the French family. Their questions were all about the whereabouts of the missing husband and the ‘British parachutists’. The woman of the house answered, but she clearly didn’t satisfy Isselhorst’s men; they proceeded to round up her livestock and throw it into their military truck, after which they smashed up her home and set it ablaze.

Franks and his men were itching to gun down the five Gestapo bully boys. They could so easily have killed Isselhorst’s Nazi thugs. But what then? They could hardly take an old woman, a mother and a baby with them to cross the front lines. Alternatively, if they left them here surrounded by Gestapo corpses, the family’s fate would be sealed. It seemed that the only way to at least save their lives was to do the most difficult thing of all and to not intervene.

Burning up with rage and anger, Franks ordered his men to hold their fire. It would have been so easy for the woman of the house to slip the Gestapo a quiet word:
the men you seek are hiding in the sawmill
. But not a word was said. Instead, she watched in silence as her home and all her worldly possessions were destroyed before her eyes. The last the SAS men saw were two tearful, forlorn figures carrying a baby, walking north into the pouring rain.

With Druce departed, and scattered SAS teams making their way across the lines, John Hislop was the last remaining member of those ‘originals’ who had dropped with Druce onto the 12 August DZ. Chilled to the bone and with a dull hunger gnawing at his guts, Hislop’s nerves were on edge. To make matters worse, the sole surviving Jed Set was most definitely on the blink.

The morning of 12 October dawned blissfully fine and clear – perfect conditions for making radio contact with London. Hislop managed to raise SFHQ to ask if there was any final task required of the rump of Op Loyton, before they too departed for the lines. The reply was the one that all had hoped for: the last men on the ground were to return forthwith.

Message received, Hislop smashed up and buried the Jed Set and burned the code books. There was an air of finality about doing so, one replete with promise and menace in equal measure. Promise, because they were finally homeward bound; menace, because of what lay between these men and safety: several thousand German troops resorting to ever more desperate measures to stem the tide of the Allied advance.

The SAS parties that had gone ahead of Franks’ force had run the gauntlet of that menace. Extraordinarily, in some cases they had continued to battle alone, surrounded and running short of everything needed to sustain life and to wage war.

In one case, Lieutenant Swayne – the man who had destroyed the eleventh German staff car – had discovered that the enemy was running ammunition supplies to the front using ‘ambulances’ marked with a Red Cross. This was against all the rules of war. Vehicles marked with that universally respected symbol were granted unhindered access to the battlefield, for they were presumed to be carrying wounded.

Swayne had three men under his command. Two couldn’t swim, so they needed to find an unguarded bridge to cross the Meurthe. There were none. Trapped on the wrong side of the river, they were forced to go to ground. But upon rumbling the enemy’s ‘ambulance deception’, they decided to have one last strike and blow up an ambulance-cum-ammo-truck. The massive explosion tore apart two other ‘ambulances’ travelling in convoy and likewise packed full of war materiel.

Swayne’s men were also confronted by thirty Tiger and Panther tanks moving through the forest, many of which were likewise marked with the Red Cross symbol. This time, there was little the SAS men could do to stop them. Indeed, they would only make it through to safety with the help of the locals, who dressed them in women’s clothing and make-up to hide them from the rampaging enemy troops.

Driven to ever more desperate extremes of brutality, the local SS officer ordered the ‘evacuation’ of the village in which Lieutenant Swayne’s men were hiding. Once the villagers had taken to the road, the SS proceeded to machine-gun the evacuees. Scores of innocents were mown down on the streets.

Into such bloody mayhem headed Colonel Franks and his force of six. They reached the Meurthe at nightfall, only to find that the railway bridge they had intended to cross was guarded by hyper-alert sentries. Franks, Hislop, Sykes, Power and their two fellows were chased away by a salvo of grenades. Franks’ party also had a man who couldn’t swim – Squadron Sergeant Major (SSM) White – and they encountered similar trouble in finding an unguarded bridge.

Eventually, Colonel Franks and Major Power decided they would have to risk swimming the Meurthe with White held between them. They reached the far bank, to discover that the forest thinned noticeably. As day broke the six men found themselves moving through sparse cover, compared to the dense forests they had grown used to in the Vosges.

They had to move with extreme caution now, skirting around enemy positions and diving flat in the bush at the approach of any vehicle. By dusk they’d reached a position where they figured the German front line had to lie. They paused in a patch of woodland to do a map check. Gathered closely around a shaded torch, they tried to work out exactly where they were. Suddenly, an arm emerged from the darkness, a finger jabbing at a spot on the map.

‘
Du bist hier.
’
You are here.

Unnoticed, some German soldiers had approached to help what they presumed was a friendly patrol unsure of its location. For a split second Franks and his men were frozen to the spot, before they took to their heels. They thundered out of the wood and into a ploughed field. Major Power promptly tripped on a telephone wire and went flying, but being a seasoned rugby player he was up and running again in a flash.

Shots rang out of the darkness, which spurred the six to run even faster. They’d put 500 yards between themselves and the enemy gunners when finally they paused to catch their breath. The firing had ceased now, but on all sides they could detect signs of an enemy presence, including what sounded like a ration truck doing the rounds.

They pressed onwards through the freezing night, pausing just before dawn to grab a few of hours’ desperate rest. By now Chris Sykes was hallucinating with the cold and the hunger, and imagining Germans at every turn. At first light the party was on the move again, brushing off the thick crust of frost that had settled onto their torn, blood-and-mud-spattered uniforms.

It was past midday when Colonel Franks, in the lead, whipped around and started running back the way he had come, his eyes staring wildly, cheeks cadaverous and jaw jutting bonily from his skin.