Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (45 page)

Farran’s chance finally came with Operation Wallace, a mission to penetrate deep behind enemy lines and cause carnage. On August 19, a squadron of Dakota transport planes landed at Rennes airfield, each carrying a jeep mounted with twin Vickers guns. Farran, with sixty men (including the Frenchman Couraud, alias Captain Jack Lee, as his deputy), then set out for the Forêt de Châtillon, where an advance party had already established a forward base forty miles east of Auxerre and some two hundred miles inside enemy-held territory.

Farran split his fleet of jeeps into three groups, and headed east through a front line that was becoming more unstable and uncertain by the day as German resistance buckled. Initially, the route through the back roads seemed safe enough. At times, French civilians came forward to greet the Allied troops with gifts, even though the Germans were still in occupation: “Flowers, wine, butter and eggs, which were heaped high on the jeeps.” On the fourth day, the first pair of Farran’s extended fleet of jeeps reached the village of Villaines-les-Prévôtes, and drove directly into some old foes: a company of the Afrika Korps, recently returned from Italy and still wearing their khaki tropical battledress. The Germans immediately opened fire, destroying both vehicles and killing one man and capturing another. Farran and the rest of the squadron arrived soon afterward, to be greeted by a round fired from a 20mm gun at a range of about twenty yards. “The shell went high and the jeep crashed into a ditch and came to rest, less one of its wheels which continued down the road.” Farran posted two men with a Bren gun on top of the roadside bank and ran back to warn the rest of the convoy. A pitched battle, with mortars and machine guns, erupted in the village streets. After an hour, Farran and his men withdrew, leaving behind an estimated fifty enemy dead. Farran pressed on to the camp at Châtillon, “winkling [our] way around pockets of Germans to the open country in the enemy rear,” pausing only to shoot up a freight train and a radar station, which the Germans then evacuated and destroyed themselves, “apparently being under the impression that Major Farran’s party was the American advance guard.”

For the next month, Farran and his men harassed the retreating Germans from their forest hideout, mining roads, blowing rail lines, and launching ambushes on road transport—an activity known as “brewing up” in army parlance, an idiom more reminiscent of making afternoon tea than destroying enemy vehicles with Vickers guns and hurled explosives. With the promise of help from the local maquis (which never materialized), Farran laid siege to the German garrison at Châtillon and gloried in the cacophony: “All the sounds of war echoed in the streets—the rattle of the Brens, the rasp of the Vickers, the whine of bullets bouncing off the walls.” In the midst of battle, Farran happened to glance up at one of the buildings: “A pretty girl with long black hair and wearing a bright red frock put her head out of the top window to give me the ‘V’ [for victory] sign. Her smile ridiculed the bullets.” Farran estimated that more than a hundred Germans had perished in the battle for Châtillon.

Regular drops of supplies by the RAF enabled Farran to continue fighting without pause. Soon after the attack on Châtillon, cigarettes, clothes, ammunition, newspapers, mail, petrol, and whiskey dropped from the sky, along with twelve new jeeps. “It was like Christmas Day,” wrote Farran.

Pressing on east toward the Belfort Gap, the corridor between the Vosges and Jura mountains into which the Germans were being squeezed by the advancing First French Army, Farran found his jeeps surrounded by happy French peasants, “girls kissing our cheeks, bereaved mothers shaking our hands and everybody dancing around us with joy.” Occasionally, the elation of liberation proved excessive: “Major Farran found the enthusiasm of the locals, who heralded his arrival with the ringing of church bells, militarily inconvenient.”

Farran and his men were not the only SAS forces harassing the retreating Germans. Although the actions of the French SAS regiments fall outside the scope of this history, one episode cannot go unrecorded for its sheer, Gallic guts. Since August, the jeep-borne troops of the French 3SAS had carried out a series of successful guerrilla actions in the area south of the Loire, disrupting communications and mounting ambushes in concert with the local resistance. On September 3, the force was ordered to block the retreat of a large German column reported to be forming up at Sennecey-le-Grand, a picturesque Burgundy village ten miles south of Chalon-sur-Saône. The following day, as some three thousand German troops were assembling, a column of four jeeps led by Captain Guy de Combaud Roquebrune charged up the main street, machine guns blasting. Up to five hundred German troops were believed to have been killed or injured in the first attack. Having reached the other side of the village, Combaud Roquebrune found his escape route blocked; he turned his jeep column around and attempted to fight his way out of Sennecey-le-Grand the same way he had fought his way in. But now the Germans were ready. One after another, three of the jeeps and their occupants, including Guy de Combaud Roquebrune, were destroyed. One jeep, with two of its crew surviving, somehow made it through the fusillade and were spirited to safety by the maquis. Forty years later to the day, a memorial was unveiled at Sennecey-le-Grand, which bears the names of all SAS wartime casualties: the British of 1 and 2SAS, the French of 3 and 4SAS, and the Belgians of 5SAS. It remains the only memorial to a British regiment and the war dead of all its component parts located outside the United Kingdom.

Some brief entries from Farran’s report for the month of September give an idea of the breathless, continuous action, as the SAS engaged scattered German troops on a chaotic battlefield, dodging the artillery of the advancing Americans and the furious reprisals of the retreating Germans, until they finally found themselves encamped in the midst of a defeated but still powerful army:

4 September:
Sergeant Young brewed up two staff cars…Lieutenant Carpendale’s party bagged one ten-ton troop carrier containing 30 Germans and one staff car.

5 September:
Lieutenant Mackie laid an ambush and after half an hour a motor cycle combination carrying seven Germans was allowed to approach within 50 yards. Only one German escaped.

6 September:
Girls crowded round the jeeps with bouquets of flowers. Accordingly, when a German staff car mounting a machine gun appeared, the presence of so many girls made it impossible to give more than two bursts with a Vickers.

7 September:
Landing party at drop zone attacked by 600 SS troops with four armoured cars. Major Farran moved the six jeeps out into a small field enclosed by woods and then noticed a gap in the south west corner through which jeeps crashed. Lieutenant [Hugh] Gurney [was sent] to attack enemy’s immediate rear. He machine gunned the German infantry, especially some officers standing on a mound. Major Farran placed an ambush to attack enemy transport on the return journey…the Colonel and second in command of the attacking force were killed.

8 September:
Party attacked enemy billets…20 Germans killed whilst shaving in the farmyard, billets set on fire.

9 September:
Truckloads of Germans have been inquiring at all the villages about British parachutists…the squadron felt a little uneasy. Some women from a village ran screaming into the wood…a large body of Germans who were beating the Foret-de-Darney were burning farms in their path.

10 September:
Reports that the Germans still searching for the SAS…they were said to have burned the village of Hennezel and shot the curate.

11 September:
Farran’s party crossed the main road from Vaucelles. He considered it a pity to waste the opportunity of an ambush. Troop was told to lay mines. This had just been completed when two staff cars appeared at high speed. The first passed over the mines safely but the second blew up.

12 September:
Lieutenant Gurney brewed up a staff car containing five brass hats. The death of these senior officers, including a General, was confirmed next day by civilians…also attacked and killed some Germans standing around a broken down 3-tonner. Major Farran organised the squadron to attack transport on the roads as he was determined to make the Germans pay for the miserable night he had just passed.

13 September:
Lieutenant Gurney’s troop shot at an ammunition truck. The truck exploded. Lieutenant Gurney was hit in the back and fell; he died shortly afterwards. The French later described how the Germans kicked the body of the English “terrorist,” but eventually [they] were allowed to bury him in the village cemetery…German resistance had stiffened and the situation for Major Farran’s squadron became very precarious.

14 September:
Squadron remained in its base in the Bois de Fontaine. American shells were landing so close that slit trenches were dug. No one dared talk above a whisper, and every time somebody dropped something they expected a German to appear…another patrol was sent out to contact the Americans.

15 September:
Considerable German shouting and movement.

16 September:
By morning it was almost certain the Germans were withdrawing…at 12.00 an American armoured car crew came into the wood. The squadron nearly went mad with joy.

The SAS had finally linked up with advance units of the US Seventh Army. “We were so overjoyed to see their grinning Yankee faces that we danced a Highland reel on the spot.” After a campaign of “singular ferocity,” Farran’s men had inflicted more than 500 enemy casualties, destroyed some 65 enemy vehicles and more than 100,000 gallons of petrol, at a cost of 17 SAS troopers and 16 jeeps. Farran hailed Operation Wallace as the purest vindication of Stirling’s principles, “a text book for future SAS work,” using small units to harass the enemy behind the lines for strategic gain: “With correct timing and in suitable country, with or without the active help of the local population, a small specially trained force can achieve results out of all proportion to its numbers.” Farran was awarded a DSO to go with his other decorations, which he accepted, oddly, in the name of Paddy McGinty, the owner of the warlike Irish goat.

The SAS headquarters had by now moved to Hylands House, near Chelmsford in Essex, an imposing neoclassical villa with columned portico and surrounded by five hundred acres of estate. The officers were billeted in grand style, while the men slept in Nissen huts dotted around the park. Every evening, in the salon that doubled as the officers’ mess, the padre played the grand piano, while the men belted out the regiment’s favorite songs. The drink flowed in torrents. On one occasion, it was said, Paddy Mayne drove a jeep up the wide main staircase, possibly as a bet. The indulgent owner, Christine Hanbury, merely asked the SAS to dismantle and remove the vehicle when they had sobered up. It seemed a far cry from flyblown Kabrit, where a handful of raw, sunburned novices had once hammered out the same drinking songs, under canvas, on a stolen piano.

Soldiers, it is often said, tend to fight the last war; that military truism also applies to the last battle, the last skirmish, the last ambush. The conflict in central France had seen an enemy in confused retreat, and the Allied armies advancing, ineluctably if not steadily. The SAS had fought, with remarkable impact, in the spaces that opened up in between the armies, and behind the German lines. As the summer of 1944 wore bloodily on, and the Germans were forced back ever closer to their own borders, military planners expected that pattern to continue, with the Nazis on the back foot and Allies on the front, until the Germans were finally forced out of France, across the Vosges Mountains, and back into the Reich. SAS tactics, it was assumed, would continue to bear fruit, as one army continued to move forward and the other moved back. Both assumptions were wrong.

From 1871 until the First World War, the Vosges Mountains had marked the border between France and the German empire. Alsace-Lorraine, wedged between the Vosges and the Rhine, is a half-German, half-French hybrid, and some of the most fought-over territory on the planet; the region was annexed by the French Republic in 1918, but then seized back by Hitler’s troops in 1940. German-speaking inhabitants had been systematically deported in the twenty years before the war, but many who remained still considered themselves German, and were prepared to do whatever they could to stymie the Allied advance and help Germany to retain its hold on Alsace-Lorraine.

One evening in mid-August, a natty, multilingual, danger-seeking spy-turned-soldier parachuted into the Vosges looking for adventure and the local partisan chief, who fought under the splendid nom de guerre of “Colonel Maximum.” Captain Henry Carey Druce of 2SAS landed near the village of Moussey, forty miles west of Strasbourg, in command of a small advance party. His primary task was to find a suitable drop zone where a far larger contingent could be brought in. With the help of the French resistance, the SAS would then attack the rail lines running into Germany, hold up the retreat by blockading the passes, ambush convoys, and generally continue doing what had been done so effectively farther west. Operation Loyton was expected to last three weeks, and inflict critical damage on an already enfeebled enemy in headlong flight. It did not work out that way.