Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (44 page)

Two hostages had already been killed when the lead jeep, driven by Lance Corporal “Curly” Hall, stormed into the village and opened fire at the assembled troops, roughly 250 in number. Some fifty or sixty Germans were killed or wounded, two staff cars destroyed, and several trucks burned. Among the dead was the commanding officer, an executioner killed midexecution. But the SS swiftly returned fire, killing Hall and disabling his jeep. In the confusion, the surviving French hostages fled to safety. Captain Harrison, the officer in Hall’s jeep, scrambled onto the second vehicle, which had performed a calm three-point turn, and left the way it had come.

Back at the Kipling camp, one man took the death of Hall particularly hard. Sergeant James “Jock” McDiarmid was a veteran of the SRS; it was he who, on being fired on by an Italian civilian from an upper window in Termoli, had climbed the stairs and killed the sniper with his bare hands. He had won the Military Medal for his actions in Italy but there was also something dark about McDiarmid, something murderous. After the SS had withdrawn from Les Ormes, McDiarmid drove into the village and was shown Hall’s body laid out in a coffin, with the two dead hostages on either side. The moment undoubtedly affected him deeply.

On September 22, McDiarmid’s patrol encountered a car carrying two Germans in civilian clothing. The men jumped out with hands raised. They were found to be carrying a revolver each, and were shot dead. Four days later another car, carrying four more Germans, in naval uniform, was intercepted heading east. “They were very arrogant, and as they were attempting to return to Germany to carry on the war, and it was thought they might have something to do with the murder of Captain Garstin and his party, they were shot.” The distinction between rough justice and murder was blurring. Paddy Mayne, though capable of cold-blooded killing, had given strict orders on the treatment of prisoners: “Before they surrender, the Germans must be subject to every known trick, stratagem, and explosive which will kill, threaten, frighten and unsettle them; but they must know they will be safe and unharmed if they surrender.” As the war approached its finale, the rules were evaporating.

The regiment had played an important part in the success of D-Day, causing mayhem behind the lines, impeding the flow of reinforcements to Normandy, and bolstering the French resistance. But at a high cost. Dozens of SAS soldiers had been killed and injured, and dozens more had perished as a consequence of Hitler’s Commando Order. In the grim accountancy of war, success had brought reprisal; every killing invited further vengeance. Before leaving France in the first week of September 1944, Bill Fraser presented an SAS flag to the people of Dun-les-Places, the tiny village where many of the inhabitants had been slaughtered in brutal German reprisals.

This new kind of war carried another, more intangible cost: an eye for an eye, brutality met by greater brutality. The gentlemanly, jovial, dangerous, and exciting warfare pioneered by Stirling was evolving into something harder and crueler under the pressure of a long and horrific conflict.

The SAS might be tough, and harsh when necessary, but they were human. The relentless fear, whether acknowledged or hidden, the waiting, the threat of betrayal, the uncertainty, the death of comrades, all began to fray the minds of even the most robust and spirited warriors. “Constant tension leaves its mark,” wrote Fraser McLuskey, the padre.

Bill Fraser had seen more violence than any man in the regiment. His willingness to take on the most perilous assignments never wavered. He had been badly wounded twice, yet seemed to come back more determined than before. But something was crumbling within. Withdrawn, opaque, he never spoke of his fears but saturated them with alcohol. Mike Sadler had spotted these “internal demons.” Before an operation, Fraser would drink himself into action; after the fighting, he drank himself into oblivion. Johnny Wiseman had led the attack at Capo Murro di Porco, seen seventeen of his men blown to pieces by shells at Termoli, and hidden out in the forests of the Morvan for weeks. But now he felt himself nearing the edge. Paddy Mayne, a man with enough internal demons himself to populate a small hell, summoned Wiseman and told him bluntly that he was no longer psychologically equipped for frontline action. “He was right,” Wiseman said, many years later. “I’d reached the end of my tether.” To overcome frailty is one definition of courage; to acknowledge it with honesty is another.

Paris was liberated on August 25. Mayne and Mike Sadler arrived a few days later, having driven up via Le Mans, through the advancing Allied armies. They proceeded to have a “splendid lunch” at a black-market restaurant off the Champs-Élysées, by way of celebration. The others guests at the table included several members of the French SAS and some senior French maquisards. The drink flowed in staggering quantities, with much back-slapping and singing. But as the meal wound down and coffee was served, Mayne reached into his pocket and pulled out a hand grenade. The table fell into horrified silence as he placed it on the table, and then extracted the pin. There was a puff of smoke. Some of the more quick-thinking diners dived under the table. Most, including Sadler, sat rooted to their seats. Sadler remembered thinking: “He can’t be intending to blow himself to pieces, and us?” The grenade fizzled out. Mayne put it back in his pocket. “What are you all worried about?” he said.

It was a typical macho Mayne performance, but also a leitmotif for the war the SAS was now fighting: daring bravado, with cruelty not far below the surface.

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While Mayne was celebrating the liberation of Paris, his predecessor, David Stirling, was settling into Germany’s most notorious POW camp. Colditz Castle, the vast fortress near Leipzig in eastern Germany, was used by the Nazis to incarcerate the most important prisoners, and the most incorrigible escapees. Stirling qualified in both regards: his fame as a desert warrior continued to expand, and he had spent the previous seventeen months attempting to escape from every camp he was placed in, with a singular lack of success. Stirling was very good at escaping; but he was very bad at staying escaped. In the spring of 1943, imprisoned in Gavi, a fortress south of Turin, he tunneled through an outer wall with his friend Jack Pringle, but was overpowered before he reached the perimeter. When Italy dropped out of the war, he was taken by train to Innsbruck but broke out of the cattle truck transporting him and hid in a haystack. He was recaptured after two days and transferred to a camp in Austria called Markt Pongau. A few days later, he and Pringle threw a blanket over the perimeter fence, clambered over, and dived into the river Pongau, under fire from the watchtowers. Two days later they were captured again. “David is regarded with the gravest suspicion by the prison staff and they daren’t leave him alone for a minute,” one fellow prisoner wrote in a letter home.

Taken to Mährisch Trübau prison camp in Czechoslovakia, Stirling decided to go one better than simply trying to escape himself: he attempted to organize a mass breakout of all two hundred officers in the camp. After months of elaborate planning, the escape attempt was about to be put into action when the prisoners were all moved to Brunswick. Stirling barely had time to prepare another escape when, in August 1944, he and Pringle were moved to Colditz. Situated on an outcrop over the river Mulde, Colditz, or Oflag IV-C, was regarded by the Germans as escape-proof, a claim that Stirling, and just about every other inmate, was determined to prove incorrect. The mighty castle, Stirling observed, was “the Third Reich’s most closely guarded hostelry.”

Such an obsessive determination to escape was, in some ways, the same cast of mind that had created the SAS: Stirling was still behind the lines, breaking the rules and attempting to make as many problems as possible for the enemy by lateral thinking. In between failed escapes, he wondered what had happened to the unit he had created: “My thinking time revolved around what Paddy Mayne and the boys were up to—had the SAS survived, or had it been closed down?”

Roy Farran of 2SAS was the sort of individual for whom the SAS might have been invented: he was ruthless, inspiring, and unconventional, combining a conviction in the rectitude of his own decision making with an unwillingness to take orders from others if he disagreed with them. His extreme bravery was unsettling, for there was something unmoored about Farran; by the time he joined the younger branch of the SAS his military record was already the stuff of legend.

An Indian-born, devoutly Catholic Irishman, with ferrety features and a dry wit, Farran had fought with distinction as a tank commander in the desert war, where his capacity for doing things his own way swiftly emerged. Ordered to organize the burial of four Italian soldiers killed inside their tank, he simply immolated the vehicle by pouring diesel oil into the ammunition box inside and igniting it. “As I set fire to the trail of petrol, I prayed for forgiveness,” he later wrote. During the battle for Crete in 1941, his squadron encountered a group of surrendering German soldiers: “Five parachutists came out of the olive trees with their hands up. I was not in any mood to be taken in by any German tricks. I ordered the gunner to fire.” Soon afterward, he was wounded in the legs and arm, captured, and imprisoned in a POW hospital in Athens, where the gangrene in his thigh was dug out by an efficient German doctor. As soon as he was able to walk again, Farran escaped by scrambling under the perimeter wire, hiding in a ditch, and then linking up with the Greek resistance, from whom he borrowed enough money to buy a boat. At this point he adopted the name “Paddy McGinty” as a pseudonym, after the Irish song “Paddy McGinty’s Goat” about a goat that goes to war in 1917 with the Irish Guards and swallows a stick of dynamite. With three other escaped POWs he set off across the Mediterranean, aiming for Egypt; after four days they ran out of fuel, so Farran rigged up a sail made out of blankets, and six days later, close to dying of thirst, they were picked up by a British destroyer off Alexandria. In the hospital, a doctor extracted a large piece of additional shrapnel from Farran’s right heel.

In March 1943, Farran was in Algiers, lobbying to rejoin the Eighth Army, when he learned that a new SAS regiment was undergoing training. “I had heard vague stories of David Stirling’s exploits in the desert,” he wrote. He immediately signed up.

In September, Farran was part of a five-squadron detachment of 2SAS that landed at Taranto and began pushing north in a series of jeep raids behind the German lines: blowing bridges, attacking airfields, and releasing prisoners from concentration and internment camps. With the Italian army starting to desert in numbers, the pickings were plentiful. “Found Italian army supply train in station,” recalled one report in the War Diary. “Took 40,000 military cigarettes and 100 lbs. macaroni. Enlisted Italian infantryman as cook, named Bruno.” Another patrol captured an “office truck” belonging to the German 1st Parachute Regiment, “containing many valuable papers and plenty of loot.”

Farran’s Italian campaign involved organizing reconnaissance and ambush operations ahead of the Allied advance. In October, he arrived in Termoli with twenty men, just in time to aid Paddy Mayne’s SRS in repelling the German counterattack. “It was the only pure infantry battle I fought in the war and I never want to fight another,” said Farran, who had discovered he much preferred dirtier battles inside enemy territory. A few weeks later, he and four units of SAS men were landed by torpedo boat near Ancona, and proceeded to wreck seventeen sections of the railway linking the port to Pescara. Farran emerged from the first part of his war with a dazzling reputation, lots of scars, a Military Cross with two bars, a nom de guerre, and a Stirling-like determination to follow his own lead and obey orders “when it suited” him.

While 1SAS was deployed to France immediately after D-Day, 2SAS was left training in Scotland and waiting for action, to the intense irritation of fighting officers like Farran. Operations were repeatedly drawn up, promised, and then canceled. A plan to drop an SAS team east of Nancy was postponed after a local SOE agent warned that to do so would be “criminally sadistic” since the area was crawling with Germans. Of course, an area crawling with Germans was exactly what Farran craved. On July 19, twenty men were parachuted into southern Normandy to gather information, but achieved little. Instead of operating behind the lines, they found themselves entangled with the advancing British and American troops.

A second, larger contingent of fifty-nine men under Captain Tony Greville-Bell (the officer who had survived the regiment’s Italian campaign by walking several hundred miles with three broken ribs) landed east of Rennes three weeks later, only to find themselves swiftly overtaken by the advancing US Third Army. Yet another squadron was deployed to attack road and rail lines between Paris and Rouen, but achieved only “moderate success.” The SAS was hampered by lack of firm intelligence, and by interference from advancing Allied troops. A fluid battlefield allowed free movement and ad hoc actions, but also made it harder to plan what the SAS did best: sudden assaults on strategically important targets, firmly anchored on the element of surprise.