The Nazi Hunters (48 page)

SAS board a Bristol Bombay aircraft.

In August 1944 some sixty men would parachute 500 miles behind enemy lines into the Vosges Mountains of northeastern France, on the fateful Operation Loyton, in what would become known as ‘the SAS’s Arnhem’.

Members of 2 SAS muster.

The censor has blacked out the SAS cap badge in the photo, to prevent identi, cation. The inclement weather of June and July 1944 would delay their mission for several weeks, with fatal consequences for many.

In the Summer of 1944 Winston Churchill and American President Roosevelt ordered a series of massive operations to drop weapons to the French Resistance, alongside Special Forces to train and fight with them. In Operation Cadillac alone some 300 American Liberator bombers parachuted 400 tonnes of arms to the Resistance forces ranged across the Dordogne.

Hauptsturmführer
Karl Buck, Camp Commandant at Schirmek’s security camp, where those SAS and SOE agents captured during the Vosges mission were taken for processing.

Josef Kramer, formerly of Auschwitz and Belsen, and then Commandant of Naztweiler Concentration Camp, where those Special Forces members taken prisoner in the Vosges were sent for extermination.

Reinhard Von Gehlen, Hitler’s powerful commander of intelligence on the Eastern Front, who would become a foremost CIA asset, like so many Nazi war criminals, including some of the chief architects of the Vosges atrocities.

Oberwachtmeister
Heinrich ‘Stuka’ Neusch wanger – named Stuka after the hated German divebomber. A brutal sadist, he led the torture and murder of Special Forces captured in the Vosges.

Captain Victor Gough commanded a three-man SOE ‘Jedburgh’ unit, tasked to link up with the Resistance and raise bloody insurrection in the Vosges. Taken captive, he was one of those who would never return.

Major Peter Lancelot John le Poer Power MC, a former tea-planter from Ceylon, who would prove himself an SAS raider par excellence, taking out the enemy’s top commanders.

Captain John Hislop (pictured after the war), a champion horseracing jockey, was accused by the regular army of having a ‘regrettable lack of military aptitude’. His actions with the SAS in the Vosges would prove otherwise.

Captain Henry Carey Druce, of the SAS and SOE, who earned renown for heading into battle in a black silk top hat. He escaped from the Gestapo’s clutches, and specialized in sneaking through enemy lines dressed as a French peasant.

Hit-and-run jeep-mounted operations were the SAS’s speciality. Amazingly, the RAF air-dropped jeeps into the rugged Vosges mountains, so the SAS could wreak havoc on the German lines, so enabling Allied forces to break through into Germany itself.