Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (42 page)

The SAS and maquis struck camp that night. In the village of Vermot itself, the German revenge was under way. Six village men were dragged from their homes and shot and a fourteen-year-old girl raped, a foretaste of what was to come. The next morning the Germans and Russians arrived with a much larger force, and murder in mind. Finding the Vermot woods deserted, they burned the château, wrecked the medical equipment abandoned by the maquis doctors, and then set off for the nearby village of Dun-les-Places. The SAS War Diary, not usually a document to shy away from graphic detail, records only that this small French village, guilty by association with the maquis, was “given over to rape and murder.” The mayor was one of the first to die. The thirty-eight-year-old village priest, Curé Roland, was taken from the home he shared with his mother, frogmarched to the church and taken up into the bell tower. There a noose was tied around his neck, and he was flung off the building. Another seventeen of the village’s “most prominent citizens” were lined up in front of the church and machine-gunned beneath the twisting corpse of the priest. According to Fraser McLuskey, the Russian troops were particularly brutal, and largely “responsible for bad treatment to women, including rape.” Rage and lust sated, the attackers set fire to the village and marched away. In just three days the combined forces of the SAS and the maquis of the Morvan had killed at least eighty-five of the enemy, but the people of Montsauche, Planchez, Vermot, and Dun-les-Places had paid for that success with their blood and homes.

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The SAS on Operation Houndsworth needed more jeeps, which were proving as useful in the dense Morvan forests as they had been in the open desert. An early radio message complained bitterly of “trying to service [a] 5,000 square mile area with two jeeps and unreliable civilian cars.” The jeeps were parachuted in, partly dismantled, on large trays, with a parachute at each corner, and a large central parachute attached to a junction box in the middle. Dropping a 2,500-pound car out of the sky was an inexact art. And extracting a jeep from a tree is not an easy task. The couplings frequently sheered off with the weight of the vehicles or the parachute lines entangled, ensuring that the jeeps did not so much parachute into the Morvan as plummet. No fewer than seven jeeps were “pranged,” a mild euphemism for the impressive moment when a lump of metal hurtled to earth and smashed into the ground, leaving a large crater and very little in the way of usable car.

But, once safely landed, the jeep was a formidable weapon. Equipped with four separate petrol tanks, each had a range of a thousand miles. When in the forests, the German troops tended to stick to the main arteries, leaving the jeeps to travel with relative impunity along the maze of back roads. As one officer put it, with the traditional twin Vickers guns mounted and fuel tanks full “we were then in a position to take some serious action.”

This action took a variety of destructive shapes all across the region. Johnny Wiseman established a new camp near Dijon, from which he set out to reconnoiter vulnerable communication lines before calling in RAF airstrikes. A six-pounder anti-tank gun was dropped, principally intended for use against road vehicles—but the SAS found more imaginative uses. On August 14, a large German transport plane, a Junkers 52, passed overhead within range. Alex Muirhead took a shot, and reported that the aircraft was “definitely hit and believed brought down.”

Just twenty-five miles from the SAS camp, at Autun, stood a large synthetic-oil factory, producing some 7,500 gallons a day, vital to the increasingly fuel-poor German forces. Lightly guarded and located in open ground, the factory was vulnerable to attack, but the timing of any assault would be tricky. The factory workers were French, and killing civilians was not part of the SAS remit. Local intelligence, however, revealed a gap of over an hour between the end of the night shift and the arrival of the day workers; in the early hours of the morning, the place was almost deserted. A preliminary attack using mortars was carried out on July 10.

Emboldened by this success, Muirhead, Seekings, and Cooper decided to launch an altogether more elaborate assault a month later. On August 10, an attack team composed of seven jeeps drove to within two hundred yards of the factory perimeter, and Muirhead set up his mortars. At 3:30 a.m., “in full moonlight,” the first of forty mortar shells and incendiary bombs crashed down on the factory. The ensuing spectacle prompted Muirhead to lyricism. “The mortar bombs were plumping most satisfactorily into the factory area…then with a roar the seven Vickers Ks opened up at 200 yards, each pouring two full pans into the rising storm. The vivid flash of an electric discharge was plainly seen and bullets could be seen to ricochet off buildings.” The defenders of the factory believed they must be under aerial attack, and flak began arcing into the night sky. “They had no inkling they had been mortared from less than a mile away.” The oil plant burned continuously for four days.

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Much of the SAS work on both Houndsworth and Bulbasket was covert reconnaissance, gathering intelligence, assessing the movement and strength of enemy troops, and reporting back to London. Cooper described their role as “an LRDG job in Europe,” precise, secret observation, without ever being seen.

Intelligence gathered by the Houndsworth team correctly revealed that Erwin Rommel had made his new headquarters at Château de la Roche-Guyon, north of Paris. The charismatic and popular German field marshal was commander of the troops opposing the invasion, and the possibility of removing him at this vital juncture was enticing: “To kill Rommel would obviously be easier than to kidnap him, but if it should prove possible to bring him to this country, the propaganda value would be immense,” wrote brigade commander Roderick McLeod. So Operation Gaff (a gaff being a hooked spike for landing large fish) was launched on July 25, when Captain Jack Lee and five other SAS men parachuted into Orleans, with orders “to kill, or kidnap and remove to England, Field Marshal Rommel, or any senior members of his staff.” Lee’s real name was Raymond Couraud. A former French Foreign Legionnaire and sometime gangster, Couraud had helped organize an escape route for artists in France fleeing the Nazis, before joining SOE and finally signing up with Bill Stirling’s 2SAS. On landing in Orleans, Couraud’s assassination team began making its way cross-country toward Rommel’s headquarters, hiding out with various sympathizers along the route. His report for July 28 states: “Stayed for two days in a chateau…Ate plastic [explosive, presumably, though why remains unclear] and was extremely sick for two days: cured myself with six gallons of milk.”

It was while recovering from this unlikely illness, and even less likely cure, that Couraud learned that Rommel had been seriously injured when his staff car came under air attack. Operation Gaff was abandoned, but Couraud went to take a covert look at the German headquarters anyway. “I am glad that I do not have to attack this place,” he wrote after seeing the mighty fortified castle at Château de la Roche-Guyon. “I can see that it was very well protected.” Nothing daunted, Couraud and his team went on to destroy two trains, seven trucks, and a staff car driven by a Gestapo major (“got his papers”). A few days later they attacked the German command post at Monts, and killed a dozen Germans. Couraud then slipped through German lines, disguised as a policeman, and joined Patton’s advancing Third Army. “Extremely successful week,” he wrote.

Cooper maintained that SAS intelligence gathering was of “far more value than the ambushing of roads.” As if to prove the point, mid-August saw the arrival of Major Bob Melot, the irrepressible Belgian intelligence officer who had seamlessly transferred his skills from the Libyan desert to the French interior. Melot, at forty-nine the oldest but possibly also the toughest man in the SAS, dropped from the sky with two more jeeps, both of which “pranged.”

Cooperation with the French resistance was invaluable but highly complex and often perilous. Local French sympathizers set up a signals system to warn the SAS when a village was occupied by the enemy: “If we ventured out of camp, before entering a hamlet, we would check the washing line in the garden of the first house. If a pair of blue trousers was hanging there we would know that there were Germans or French Milice in the area.” The French resistance also gave advance warning of any attack on the camps, sometimes with spectacular results. On July 31, a pincer movement was attempted on Wiseman’s camp at Urcy, nine miles southwest of Dijon: a force of French fascist Milice attacked from one side of the wood while the Germans attacked from the other, and a pitched battle ensued. Wiseman, however, had already slipped away. The Germans and their French collaborators had been shooting at each other in a storm of “friendly fire” that left twenty-two dead.

At the same time, the French resisters were fickle allies, riven by internecine disputes that frequently turned deadly. “The blood feud between the maquis was terrible,” wrote Cooper. Fraser McLuskey considered even the most competent French fighters to be liabilities: “Cooperation with them in military operations is in most cases inadvisable and in many cases highly dangerous.” Spies, real and imagined, were everywhere, and as the German occupation was rolled back the score-settling intensified. Seekings, who by now gloried in the nickname “Le Maquis Anglais,” intervened after he saw a woman accused of collaborating with the Germans being dragged away by a French mob: “I threatened to shoot these people…they were after her because she spoke German.” On another occasion, a young Belgian refugee attached himself to one of the combined maquis-SAS parties. Two nights later, he was shot. “He was a member of the Gestapo,” the SAS officer in command reported blandly. But it is entirely possible that the Belgian refugee was perfectly innocent, just as the woman “saved” by Seekings may well have been guilty. In the murderously shifting loyalties of the war’s final phase in France, it was impossible to tell where the truth, and therefore justice, really lay. The SAS could only stand by, as the tide of war turned in a welter of recrimination and bloodletting.

On the afternoon of August 8, 1944, Fraser McLuskey was summoned to Bill Fraser’s tent in the forest, a sturdy construction made from timber and draped over with a parachute. Inside, “lying lazily on a sleeping bag, chatting with Bill and with Mike Sadler,” was an enormous, instantly recognizable figure, “larger than life, physically and in every other way.” Paddy Mayne had dropped in to inspect the troops.

McLuskey had first met Mayne a few months earlier. The introduction took place in the officers’ mess at around 9:00 a.m., just as the commander of 1SAS was coming to the end of an all-night boozing session. Mayne offered McLuskey a morning beer. When McLuskey accepted without hesitation, he won Mayne’s immediate and enduring approval. Like most people meeting Mayne for the first time, the padre was initially wary, but soon came to recognize the other qualities that lay behind the alcoholic aggression. “He was quite unique in his ability to win the confidence of his men….I conceived not only an enormous admiration for him, but a very great affection.” Mayne had parachuted into France with a windup gramophone player strapped to his leg and a handful of his favorite records in his rucksack. While the strains of Percy French songs such as “The Mountains of Mourne” floated through the woods, Mayne wandered around the camp with unfeigned nonchalance, as if “on an afternoon stroll.”

Mayne’s visit to the forest was hardly routine. For six months he had been shuffling paper, organizing war for others. He was determined to see the battlefield for himself. Brigadier Roderick McLeod had taken some persuading to allow the commander of 1SAS to join his men on the ground. Knowing Mayne’s insatiable thirst for combat, McLeod issued him with strict orders “to coordinate action, not lead attacks.” Specifically, he was to prepare the troops for a planned offensive in which the SAS would act as reconnaissance units for an all-out Allied assault on German forces west of the Rhine (an operation subsequently rendered unnecessary by the American advance). Mayne and Sadler had originally intended to parachute into France east of Orleans, but at the last moment they had dropped instead into the Houndsworth area of operations in the Morvan.

Mayne stayed only two days with Fraser’s squadron, long enough to learn of its successes, and some of its setbacks. A few days earlier, Captain Roy Bradford had been killed in a shootout after accidentally driving his jeep into the path of a German convoy. Undeveloped photographs in Bradford’s camera of other SAS men were later used by the Germans on posters, offering large rewards for information about the “terrorists” in the woods. A day later, a jeep carrying three SAS men and a French maquisard encountered a staff car containing five Germans in the little village of Ouroux. After a vigorous but inconclusive exchange of fire, the occupants of both cars leaped out and a hand-to-hand battle ensued, short, brutal, and to the death. Shot through the shoulder, the SAS jeep driver, John Noble, kneed one of the Germans in the testicles and then clubbed him unconscious with the butt of his revolver. Another German came to the aid of the first, and he and Noble fell, fighting, into a ditch; the German was throttled into submission, and then finished off with a bullet to the head. A beefy German sergeant major, meanwhile, was grappling ferociously with another of the SAS party. Noble, still bleeding from the shoulder, brought the bout to an end by shooting the German dead. A fourth German took to his heels and was chased and killed by the French resistance fighter, while the fifth was taken prisoner and subsequently made to do chores around the camp. The obedient prisoner-servant was known as Hans, which may or may not have been his name. This was the sort of fighting tale Mayne relished: ruthless close-quarters combat, roadside shootouts, and wanted posters reminiscent of the Wild West.