Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (52 page)

I saw it all—furnaces where thousands have been burnt alive…The pit—15 feet deep—as big as a tennis court, piled to the top at one end with naked bodies…The British bulldozers, digging a new pit for the hundreds of bodies lying all over the camp days after death…The dark huts piled with human filth in which the dead and dying are lying together so that you must step over them to avoid the sticks of arms that are thrust imploringly towards you.

This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.

The SAS soldiers who had stumbled on the camp shared that sentiment. “I had been in action for three years and was no stranger to violent death, but what I saw in that camp will stay with me forever,” wrote Cooper. It took days before Randall could get the smell of death out of his hair and remove the lingering stench from his clothing. He could never expunge it from his memory. “The smells and the sights of these dead bodies haunted me.”

—

On the day that Belsen was accidentally liberated by the SAS, David Stirling perched on the ramparts of Colditz Castle, watching the US First Army steadily advancing into the town in the valley below. This was not an entirely sensible lookout point since the Americans, unaware that the forbidding castle on the cliff top was a prison camp, had begun shelling it. The prisoners had quickly painted a Union Jack and raised it from the tower, and spread bedsheets with “POW” written on them in the courtyard in the hope these would be spotted by American reconnaissance planes. That seemed to have stopped the bombardment, for now. Stirling was pleased with his “bird’s eye view” of the advance and, as usual, entirely immune to any sense of peril.

Two days earlier, on the direct orders of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, the most prominent prisoners in Colditz, including members of the British royal family and a nephew of Winston Churchill’s, had been collected together and shipped to Laufen in southern Germany. The following day the camp commandant, Oberstleutnant Gerhard Prawitt, received an order to send all remaining British prisoners to the east. Assuming, rightly, that they were to be used as hostages, if not murdered, the senior British officer, Lieutenant Colonel William Tod, simply refused to comply. “There was nothing the Commandant could do short of slaughtering us all,” Stirling recalled cheerfully. “Willie then demanded that the Commandant surrender the castle to him.” Prawitt did so, though he asked that the surrender remain a secret for the time being, in case the die-hard SS in the town found out and decided to take over the camp themselves. That evening, as US forces neared the castle, the guards began to slip away.

On the morning of April 16, a four-man American reconnaissance team entered the castle, led by Private Alan H. Murphey of the US 9th Armored Division—whereupon Hauptmann Eggers, the most senior guard remaining in what had once been Germany’s most escape-proof prison, immediately and gratefully surrendered. “Somehow it seemed an anti-climax,” said Stirling, as acutely tuned as ever to the irony of every situation.

Stirling was flown back to Britain, placed in a camp outside London, and then, to his intense annoyance, interviewed to establish what psychological damage he had suffered in captivity. “We had to be examined and talked to by a psychoanalyst. They patronized us rotten…I was impatient to see my family and get back to the SAS.”

There were 186 Allied escape attempts from Colditz. Some 316 POWs had tried to get away, and 32 had made it home, the highest total of any camp. David Stirling had tried to escape from every camp he had ever been placed in, with a complete lack of success.

But he had one more escape attempt in him. On the evening of April 18, the day after arriving in Britain, he broke out of the psychiatric evaluation camp and, under the cover of darkness, made his way to London, where, revealing an interest hitherto hardly mentioned, he had sex.

“By twelve o’clock that evening I was in a nightclub. By 2 a.m. I was having my first roger for years.”

—

The war finished for the SAS, as most wars do, not in a blaze of glory, but in a flurry of paperwork, loose ends, and inadequate farewells.

By the end of April, the fighting had all but petered out. Even the SS were giving up in large numbers. On May 3, 1SAS reached Lübeck and was ordered to accompany the British 11th Armoured Division on to Kiel. Seekings and Cooper decided to drive on ahead of the main force. Suddenly, they found themselves surrounded by Germans, only this time the surrendering sort. Cooper nearly drove into “two German generals with their hands up,” who pointed to a nearby field packed with soldiers, mostly officers. “We parked our jeep and started to accept the capitulation of about five hundred German officers. Each came forward in order of rank from general down to lieutenant to place their revolvers on the jeep.” It was a bizarre closing scene for Seekings and Cooper. For four years they had been trying to kill these men, and doing so in large numbers. Now they were being saluted by them. Cooper knew he ought to feel jubilant, or triumphant; instead, he found the situation merely “embarrassing.” He was still only twenty-two years old.

Fraser McLuskey made his way back west to Wuppertal, his wife’s hometown, to inquire about her family. There the padre learned that her parents had been killed, along with other members of the Calaminus family, in the last Allied air raid of the war.

The Second World War in Europe came to an end on May 8. Frankforce had begun pulling out to the west the day before, through Bremen and on to the rendezvous point at Poperinghe in Belgium. There were celebrations, songs, toasts, amid encouraging rumors that the SAS would find another lease of life in the Far East, where the Pacific war raged on. In May, the newly released David Stirling and brigade commander Mike Calvert met Winston Churchill in Downing Street and obtained permission to begin planning a new SAS mission in China, aimed at severing Japanese supply lines to Malaya. But on August 6 the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Japan’s surrender nine days later brought to an end the Second World War, and with it Stirling’s plan for a final offensive operation. “They dropped the bomb,” said Jim Almonds, “and that finished it.” Instead, 1 and 2SAS were deployed to Norway, to help with the disarming and processing of 300,000 German occupation troops. The weather was warm, the beer plentiful, and the Norwegian women, at least in the recollections of later life, most welcoming. But it was not war. The three months spent in Norway were, in the estimation of Reg Seekings, merely an exercise in “flag-flying.”

Mike Calvert commended his troops for their “offensive spirit, drive, and willingness to fight in difficult conditions.” He told them: “You have reason to be proud of yourselves. I am proud of you.” The message had an unmistakably valedictory ring to it. The more observant members of the regiment knew exactly what was coming. With peace, Britain was dismantling its vast war machine with bleak bureaucratic efficiency. Cooper knew that “the writing was on the wall as soon as the war was over.” For some, the prospect of peace was considerably more alarming than that of war. “The more I think of being a solicitor again,” admitted Paddy Mayne, “the less I like it.”

The end of the wartime SAS came in a crisp, unemotional memo from the War Office: “It has been decided to disband the Special Air Service regiment.” Some, as usual, detected a conspiracy, an animus against a regiment that had always bucked the rules and had never been fully accepted by the more conventional senior officers. “A lot of high-powered people had no time for it,” grumbled Seekings. In reality, with the dropping of the bomb, military planners saw a new kind of war in prospect, one that could be won by nuclear fission and would have no need for highly specialized troops trained to operate behind the lines. That assumption was, of course, entirely wrong.

In September, the Belgian SAS was absorbed into the reconstituted Belgian army. Soon afterward, the French 3 and 4SAS ceased to be British forces and were handed over to the French army.

On October 1, 1945, the SAS paraded for the last time at Hylands House, the large estate near Chelmsford that had served as the regiment’s headquarters since March 1944. The men wore the red beret of airborne troops.

Paddy Mayne, alone, wore the original SAS beret, the color of desert sand.

The SAS officially ceased to exist in October 1945. The men returned to their regiments, or entered civilian life. David Stirling’s grand experiment was over.

Except it wasn’t. One small fragment of the regiment endured, secretly, unofficially, and quite possibly illegally. After five years of war, the regiment survived the coming of peace.

Brian Franks, commander of 2SAS, had long pondered the fate of the men left behind on Operation Loyton, that brutal, running fight with the retreating German army in the Vosges Mountains. Some thirty-one men were thought to have been captured, but only one had returned, Sergeant Kenneth Seymour, bringing with him a doubtful story of personal fortitude. In November 1944, just a month after the end of the operation, Franks began searching for evidence that the men might have been murdered in captivity. Six months later, he received a report of a mass grave near the Gaggenau concentration camp, in the French occupation zone of Germany east of the Vosges; thirty-seven bodies had been found, some of which had been identified as British servicemen. Franks sent Major Eric “Bill” Barkworth to investigate.

Barkworth had a personal interest in the fate of the missing men. As 2SAS’s chief intelligence officer, he had briefed the officers before Operation Loyton, and warned them of Hitler’s Commando Order, demanding the execution of all soldiers captured behind the lines. Barkworth, tall, spruce, and intense, spoke French and German fluently. He also had the important knack of listening intently to his superior officers, and then doing exactly what he wanted to do regardless of their orders; he tended to avoid official channels if unofficial ones seemed more likely to work.

An estimated 250 Allied servicemen, including downed airmen, perished under Hitler’s Commando Order. The vast majority of these, and certainly the SAS soldiers, were wearing uniform and identification tags and ought, therefore, to have enjoyed protection under the Geneva Convention. The Germans themselves had deployed parachute troops, and yet they had chosen to define all Allied parachutists as spies and terrorists. For Barkworth, Hitler’s execution order was not just illegal, hypocritical, and abominable, but an immoral barbarity that demanded a full legal accounting.

There was something almost messianic about the way Barkworth set about his job: hunting down evidence about the Nazis who had killed SAS personnel, one by one.

In May 1945, Barkworth, Sergeant Major Fred “Dusty” Rhodes, and four SAS troopers climbed into a truck and a single jeep, and headed for the Continent: this was the War Crimes Investigation Team (WCIT), but in effect it was the last wartime mission of the SAS, unauthorized, unconventional, and therefore, in a way, entirely apt.

For the next three years, Barkworth and his rogue unit gathered evidence of murder: interviewing witnesses, compiling dossiers, combing prison camps, taking statements, locating suspects. They traveled through the British, French, and Soviet occupation zones of Germany, as well as the areas in France and Italy where SAS men had been killed. The investigation swiftly expanded beyond Operation Loyton to include Bulbasket, Houndsworth, and the many smaller operations in which men had been captured and never seen alive again. Some of the work was grim in the extreme. Outside the town of Moussey they searched for an unmarked mass grave. Dusty Rhodes, a gardener in civilian life, spotted a patch of undergrowth that appeared slightly different, less dense and tangled than the surrounding vegetation. Beneath the patch they dug up eight bodies of slain soldiers and resistance fighters. Another twenty-eight bodies, the victims of the Bulbasket massacre, executed after Tonkin’s forest camp had been overrun, were exhumed at Saint-Sauvant, before being reburied at Rom. The body of Lincoln Bundy, the cowboy from Arizona, was immediately identifiable from his French civilian clothing.

Barkworth and his men continued to wear uniform with SAS insignia, even though the regiment had ceased to exist. It operated as if on official war crimes business, without any official authority whatever.

That Barkworth was able to do this was due to a Russian prince of royal blood. Captain Prince Yuri Galitzine could trace his lineage back to the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, the royal family of Poland, and the Tsars. With the Bolshevik revolution, the Galitzine dynasty had seen harder times: after schooling in England, Galitzine himself had become a glove maker and then an apprentice at an aircraft factory. During the war he served as a liaison to the Free French, and then in the Allied military propaganda unit, where he had witnessed Nazi barbarity at first hand as one of the first British soldiers to enter the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. The end of the war saw him working in the War Office, in the Adjutant General’s Branch 3—Violation of the Laws and Usages of War. Galitzine and Franks shared a conviction that, with so many other horrors emerging from the ruins of Nazi Germany, the fate of British soldiers murdered in defiance of international law was being overlooked.