Das Reich (32 page)

Early in 1944, the survivors were brought home to prepare to take part in the invasion of France. Reinforced by volunteers from Home Forces, they were now designated the SAS Brigade, with strong French and Belgian elements. They were based in central Ayrshire in Scotland, and put under the command of Brigadier Roderick McLeod, a regular gunner. In the Scottish mountains they began intensive fitness, parachute and battle training in readiness to go into Europe.

But where and for what to send them? General Montgomery inspected SAS without enthusiasm one morning. He was shown the Phantom GHQ reconnaissance squadron, attached to provide radio links for SAS in the field. ‘Don’t use ’em!’ snapped the general, and passed on. Beyond the conventional sceptics, there were other thoughtful officers who believed that if ‘private armies’ were to make an economic contribution to the war, they must be kept small and intimate. David Lloyd Owen, the brilliant commander of the Long Range Desert Group, wrote of SAS in North Africa: ‘I believe that after David Stirling began to expand the SAS, the balance sheet showed too great an excess of expenditure over achievement.’ John Hislop, who parachuted into France with an SAS Phantom team in 1944, wrote later:

Hislop suggested that Brigadier McLeod in the spring of 1944 was ‘quite out of his depth with SAS officers and men, and simply did not know what had hit him when he took over’.

Any regular officer might have been forgiven for finding difficulty coming to terms with such men as the commanding officer of the 1st SAS, Lieutenant-Colonel Paddy Mayne. A pre-war rugger international of enormous size, physical strength and courage, Mayne had personally destroyed more German aircraft than any British wartime fighter ace in his raids on the African airfields with Stirling. He treated the regiment as his personal fiefdom. Those of his men who did not adore Mayne were utterly awed by him. He landed on the fire-swept beach in Italy at the head of his unit, with his hands in his pockets. Sober, with his
slow upper-class Irish drawl, his Irish songs and sentimentality, his charm was famous. Drunk, he could be ruthless and very dangerous. ‘Where’s so-and-so?’ he asked mildly, looking around one evening in the mess to find an officer missing. ‘Has he gone to bed without saying goodnight?’ He led the others purposefully upstairs, slipped into the room of the sleeping officer, lit a bonfire under the bed and opened the betting on how long it would take the man to wake up. Under Mayne’s captaincy, regimental football games were fought out with terrible violence. He was one of the great fighting machines of the war, a man who found himself perfectly in his element at the head of men in battle.

‘He was everything that we all wanted to be,’ said one of his men, Corporal Sam Smith. Smith was another soldier who had achieved complete happiness in the SAS. A tough young Liverpudlian who left school at fourteen, he escaped a court-martial after a brawl by volunteering for the commandos, and later transferred to SAS in Egypt. He became almost a professional ‘only survivor’ of operations. On one occasion, he and another man were left alone in a sandstorm with a broken-down vehicle, to discover later that the other twenty-five men in their party had all been captured or killed.

It was a ruthless war. One day, they stopped a truckload of Italian soldiers, searched their vehicle, and then allowed it to proceed. But they had quietly dropped two Mills bombs in the back as it drove off. Smith remembered a morning in Italy, with the troop pinned down by fire on a hillside. A brick-tough former booth boxer lying beside him suddenly noticed all the women of the nearby village sheltering under a bridge fifty yards away. Scorning shouted protests, the man ‘belted for the bridge, had one of the women, and was back inside three minutes’. Their small arms instructor punctuated his lectures with shots into the ceiling, and once indented for the use of some nearby Italian prisoners for target practice (he was refused). Their pride in their unit, and in their style of warfare, was intense. Sam Smith, a veteran at twenty-one, was perfectly content: ‘I was in love with
the SAS. It was my life. Our greatest fear was that we might be sent back to our units.’

But many of the men posted to the SAS Brigade early in 1944 had no battle experience. At thirty-two, Lieutenant Peter Weaver was older than most. His father, a regular Indian Army officer, had been killed in World War I. After public school, he enjoyed a chequered career through the 1930s, trying various small businesses, a spell as a private soldier in the army (from which he bought himself out) and a great deal of rugger and cricket, to which he was devoted. ‘The war came as a great relief to me,’ he said. He was briefly commissioned in the Dorset Regiment in 1940 before being transferred to one of the secret auxiliary units that were formed as ‘stay-behinds’, to continue resistance to a German invasion if the regular army had to give ground. They were intensively trained in fieldcraft and demolition, but as the threat of invasion receded, monotony set in. In vain they sought a transfer to the commandos. At the beginning of 1944, when they were at last given the chance to go to SAS, Weaver and most of his men seized it eagerly.

But as the Brigade entered its last weeks of training at Darval, the argument at SHAEF and at Special Forces HQ about its employment continued more fiercely than ever. SHAEF was consumed by one overwhelming preoccupation: the need to get the Allies ashore on 5 June, and to keep them there. For security reasons, 21st Army Group would not entertain any plan that involved putting uniformed Allied troops into France before D-Day. But when the moment came, the French Resistance could not be expected to concentrate to much effect in the immediate battle area. Small groups of highly trained SAS dropped into Normandy on the night of D-Day might wreak havoc behind the immediate fighting front.

It was a clearly suicidal assignment, and senior Special Forces officers argued that it was not even the most useful way of employing SAS troops. All forms of irregular warfare must be regarded as strategic, not tactical weapons. SAS should be dropped
far behind the lines, where they would have the freedom and flexibility to operate for months, attacking the enemy’s communications with the front. SHAEF now asked what SAS could do to interdict the first, critically important German units expected to move towards the battlefield, the Das Reich prominent among them. ‘2nd SS Panzer Division will be concentrating in a forward area by D + 3,’ argued a pessimistic SAS appreciation of 19 May, ‘and SAS troops cannot affect that move unless dropped on D–1, which is impossible.’ The SHAEF proposal that SAS should impede the German armour by defending road blocks with small arms exasperated the Brigade.

In the middle of the row Bill Stirling, the volatile CO of 2nd SAS, was compelled to resign. One of his officers, Roy Farran, wrote:

In the last days before D-Day, plans for the use of SAS changed repeatedly. Bill Stirling’s resignation stood. But only a handful of men – five three-man Titanic teams – were to be dropped immediately behind the beaches to spread confusion among the defences. A larger (finally costly but useful) operation was to be mounted by 115 men of the French SAS Regiment in the Breton peninsula, to cause maximum uncertainty to the enemy about Allied intentions. The bulk of SAS was to be dropped deep behind the lines as aircraft became available after D-Day.

Something of the flavour of the argument about the use of the
Airborne Army in the last months of 1944 had crept in. SAS were demanding to be employed because they were ready and keen. The case for the French operation in Brittany was self-evident. But the rest of the Brigade were to be used as large-scale Jedburghs – stiffening Resistance forces and carrying out sabotage and target-finding missions. The value of small parties of officers and NCOs in this role was obvious. But the decision to drop SAS squadrons in parties large enough to attract urgent German attention, but too small to be capable of self-defence, flew in the face of every principle of irregular warfare. It was the end-product of a succession of bad-tempered arguments and compromises. After many months in which other units had prepared for their invasion role in minute detail the Brigade moved to Fairford in Gloucestershire at the end of May in the confusion of a first-rate ‘flap’. They were imprisoned under tight security in a heavily wired camp close to their airfield, still ignorant of their part in the assault on Europe.

For Captain John Tonkin, the young officer who spent the evening of D-Day making jigsaws with Violette Szabo, the monotony of idle waiting was broken on the morning of 30 May. Paddy Mayne informed him that he was to be dropped with his troop of four officers and thirty-nine men, a five-man Phantom wireless team and an RAMC corporal, near Poitiers, in the Vienne. The SAS’s ‘Amended Instruction No.6’ ordered: ‘You will now concentrate on building up secure bases in the area north-east of Château Chire, codename Houndsworth, and west of Châteauroux, codename Bulbasket, from D-Day onwards with a view to strategic operations against the enemy lines of communication from the south of France to the Neptune area as occasion may occur, or as developments in the main battle may dictate . . .’ Tonkin was about to start briefing his men when another ‘flap’ broke out. He was summoned to the CO and told that he himself would be dropped into France that evening with Lieutenant Richard Crisp, as a reconnaissance party. They worked far into the night, drawing and preparing equipment, maps and money. Then they received the message: ‘All scrubbed.’ The Titanic teams were also told that
their operations were cancelled. Tonkin and his colleagues who had been telling the young Titanic officers for days how much they envied their exciting assignment, at last dropped the mask and shared their relief that these suicidal missions had been dropped. Then two Titanic commanders were told that they were ‘on’ again. ‘I can remember the two of them coming out of Paddy’s tent as white as sheets,’ wrote Tonkin. Of six SAS men who dropped with an army of parachute dummies at the south-east corner of the Cherbourg Peninsula to double-bluff the German defences, three miraculously survived. They diverted an entire German brigade for the morning of 6 June.

Tonkin and Crisp were sent to London with other key SAS officers destined for France, to be briefed by some of SOE’s experts. John Hislop remembered being invited to choose equipment from an exotic assortment of edible papers and pens that used invisible ink – ‘as if, when a boy, I had been taken into the novelties department of a large store and been give
carte blanche
’. Tonkin and Crisp, each escorted everywhere by a security officer, were told to memorize the faces and codenames of SOE agents whom they would meet in central France. A Jedburgh team was being parachuted with them, but would operate independently on the ground. A middle-aged Frenchman who was in London ‘resting’ talked to Tonkin for some hours about the laws of survival in Occupied France: ‘He gave me much useful advice that I recognized as being from the horse’s mouth, and paid good heed to.’ Hold a gun in your right hand and a bar of chocolate in your left, advised the Frenchman figuratively. If you must seek help or advice from a farm, wait for the old mother of the family; do not accost the young. Expect nothing from those
maquisards
who are merely avoiding the STO; look to the FTP and AS to do the fighting, but remember the mutual jealousy and ambition that dog them.

On 3 June Tonkin, Crisp and a handful of other SAS officers who were being dropped in advance of their main parties moved to Hasell’s Hall, the house near Sandy in Bedfordshire from which
SOE dispatched so many of its agents into Europe. There they waited through the three long days of expectation and postponement, to final departure. ‘The fifth came, and we learned that Titanic and ourselves were definitely “on”. It was a horrible day for a jump – low dark clouds and far too strong a wind – but the complete absence of any sign of activity, our peaceful house with its jigsaw puzzles, and the general holiday atmosphere made the greatest operation in history seem completely unreal,’ Tonkin wrote afterwards. At 8 pm the cars came to take them to Tempsford. The RAF dispatchers fitted their parachutes and equipment. Then they waddled out to the waiting Halifax, In the darkness of the fuselage, they lay drinking coffee and chewing sandwiches as the aircraft slowly gathered height over the Channel, and below them the vast invasion armada closed upon the coast of Normandy.

For Tonkin, there was no novelty about going into action. At twenty-three he was a veteran of extraordinary adventures with the SAS in Italy. He had been born in Singapore of Huguenot stock, studied civil engineering at Bristol University, and volunteered for the Royal Engineers in 1939. He spent a frustrating three years searching in vain for action – with the RE, the Northumberland Fusiliers, and the Middle East Commando. Then in June 1942 he joined 1st SAS in North Africa. He spent four months on raids behind enemy lines in the desert, and later took part in four assault landings in Sicily and Italy. On the last of these, at Termoli in October 1943, his squadron was cut off after pushing too deep behind the German lines. They were surrounded by the German 1st Parachute Division, and compelled to surrender when they ran out of ammunition. To Tonkin’s astonishment, as a fellow-parachutist he was invited to dine with General Heidrich, the German divisional commander, who talked for hours about the Russian campaign, and how the British withdrawal from Crete began just after he had ordered his own men to start pulling out of the bloody battle. Then Tonkin was removed to another headquarters. A German major told him: ‘It is my unfortunate duty to
inform you that we have orders that we must obey, to hand you over to our special police. I must warn you that from now on the German Army cannot guarantee your life.’ It was the first that Tonkin knew of Hitler’s ‘commando’ order. He realized that he must escape, or die. The following night, when the lorry carrying him northwards up the frozen mountain roads stopped for a moment in the darkness, he slipped through the canvas at the front, on to the cab, and away into the hills. He walked for two weeks towards the sound of gunfire before he heard feet stumble on rocks, and a single brief English obscenity. He had walked into a British night attack. A few weeks later, he was back with 1st SAS.