Das Reich (34 page)

Tonkin’s officers and NCOs were working desperately hard at all hours of day and night. But for the men, many of whom did not go out on the sabotage operations, the greatest problem was the boredom of life in the camps. They ate eternal tinned steak and kidney puddings, varied with some local produce. Once they bought a calf, although nobody enjoyed the necessity of clubbing it to death and butchering it, to avoid the noise of a gunshot. They learned to light fires with the ferocious local spirit,
gnole
, and to barter with soap, which was almost non-existent in the area. They found that hard cash was also an essential lubricant to Resistance cooperation. They cooked, occasionally patrolled, but mostly lay on their backs smoking, talking to the
maquisards
in broken French or English among the trees. They thought little about the distant battle in Normandy, but took it for granted that they would be overrun by the advancing Allies within a matter of weeks. They lived in their own private world. The chief excitements of each day came at radio schedule time. As their code tune, ‘Sur le Pont d’Avignon’, echoed across the clearing, it became a standing joke for the men to jive to the beat.

John Tonkin himself was very tired and some of his men thought that he tried to do too much. The size of the party made it essential for him to spend much of his time grappling with administration and supply problems. 38 Group missed half Bulbasket’s resupply drops during their time in France. Petrol for the jeeps was always chronically short, and so sometimes were explosives. They found that the German habit of running either an
empty wagon or an explosives scoop in front of their railway engines made impact detonators useless. The lines could be very quickly repaired. Instead, Tonkin or one of his men would lie, sometimes for hours, with an ear to the line listening for a train, before connecting a pull switch to be fired from cover, or setting a timer. Then one of the jeeps overturned after a brief clash with a German patrol. The driver, O’Neill, badly injured his hand. Tonkin’s medical orderly amputated some mangled fingers with a pair of scissors, but the wound became gangrenous. In desperation one night, Tonkin, a local Resistance leader named Jean Dieudonné and one other trooper drove O’Neill by jeep into Poitiers to leave him with a doctor. As they drove home, they stopped to wire up a railway bridge on the edge of the city with explosives and time pencils.

They moved camp four times, when the
maquis
said that the Germans were coming too close. The British had been warned at briefings that informers were a deadly threat, and they saw five alleged double agents shot by the
maquis
during their time in France. For some days, a girl who had fraternized with the Germans was held prisoner in the camp. She was in her thirties, a graduate of Poitiers University who spoke perfect English. She had no great fear for her own fate, for she did not think her crime serious. She sewed shirts from parachute silk for some of the SAS men, and they chatted amicably enough to her. Then early one morning a
maquisard
woke Sam Smith and asked if he wanted to see an execution. They walked to a clearing where the
maquisards
dug two graves. The girl was brought first. She simply asked that her ring be given to the local farmer’s wife. Then a Belgian prisoner was brought, dragged screaming on his knees for mercy. When he realized that there would be none, he stood up quite calmly and said: ‘Don’t shoot me in the throat.’ Then five
maquisards
shot them with rifles. Smith felt guilty later that he had watched without attempting to stop the executions, but at that moment he was merely a spectator of other men’s war. The
maquisards
often remarked that it was easy for the SAS to be
merciful, for if they were captured they faced only a POW camp. For themselves, capture meant death. Smith tried to show solidarity by sewing FFI flashes in his tunic. Perhaps the root error that the British made was to think of themselves simply as soldiers doing an exciting and romantic job. They had scarcely glimpsed a German since arriving in France. They found the French that they met overwhelmingly friendly, despite all the cautious advice they had received before leaving England. Their Phantom officer wrote a charming and enthusiastic description in his report of a characteristic evening with the
résistants
.

The
maquis
‘should be treated unreservedly as friends and Allies’, the same officer continued in his report, ‘and the greatest trust can be put in them. Any mistakes they make are from over-enthusiasm and willingness to help.’ Once Weaver and two others went to attend the funeral of three Canadian airmen of Bomber Command whose bodies had been found near a village thirty miles away. They were deeply moved to find the entire community in the little street, following three oxcarts heaped with flowers to the graves. The Germans now appeared confined to the major roads and cities, overwhelmingly preoccupied with the battle for Normandy. Tonkin wrote in his report:

There were breaches of security that might have been acceptable in the inaccessible reaches of the Lot, but were highly dangerous in the Vienne. A local Resistance leader reported to Tonkin that two SAS men had wandered into a local café for a glass of wine. The SAS, in holiday mood, photographed each other around the camp. Much more seriously, one night when Sergeant Eccles and two troopers attempted to place charges at a railway junction just south of Poitiers, the NCO returned to report that the other two had disappeared, and almost certainly been taken prisoner.

One evening, Sam Smith and two troopers were driven by jeep with a Resistance guide to a drop-off for another railway attack. Smith and his mate, Trooper Fielding, had approached Tonkin, and asked to be allowed to take on a demolition job to relieve the monotony of the camp. Tonkin warned them: ‘You may be flogging a dead horse, because the Resistance say there are no trains running on the line.’ But they set off with rucksacks and explosives and their pistols. To their fury they found that the jeep driver had lost his way, and put them down even further from their target than the camp. They began walking fast, soon leaving their guide far behind – they never saw him again. They passed a black-pudding factory. Once they saw a man lowering his trousers in a field, who glared up in astonishment as he saw them. They caught sight of a patrolling German, riding a white horse. Then, as they approached the railway line in the darkness, there was a sudden hammer of machine gun fire close at hand. They beat a hasty retreat, and lay up for the rest of the night and through the following day. The next evening, Smith worked his way to the edge of a cutting some way south of their original attempt. The next sensation he remembered was waking from a doze to find that he had slipped over the edge, and was rolling down the bank. He heard feet moving towards him, set his charges, broke the time pencils, and ran for it. Like most of the SAS railway attacks, this one only damaged a straight stretch of line which could be repaired in a few hours. But Tonkin had concluded that stations and junctions were now too dangerous to attack. It was the repetition of attacks – for Samuel’s
maquisards
were maintaining a steady flow of rail-wrecking operations parallel with those of the SAS – that interrupted traffic. The wilder claims of the
maquis
, that rail traffic had stopped altogether, usually proved unfounded. Some trains carrying priority loads almost always kept moving. But German schedules and troop movements were hopelessly dislocated.

The three Englishmen began the long walk back to the camp. They found it hard to keep to their road, for the
maquis
had turned
around many signposts to confuse the Germans. When Smith knocked on farmhouse doors to ask for directions, to his fury the inhabitants again and again closed them in his face. But at dawn, in the garden of a house they saw a group of civilians deep in conversation, and asked for help. The French told them simply that they should not go near the camp in the forest of Verriers, because there had been trouble there. After some discussion, they set off for a farmhouse near the drop zone for their jeeps, where they assumed that they would find friends and news. Smith knocked. An almost hysterical woman appeared. She identified them, and shouted something about her son having been caught and shot with the British. Then she slammed the door. They were walking away, confused and alarmed, when by extraordinary good fortune a car loaded with
maquisards
overtook them. They hailed it, and were taken at once to a farmhouse where they found Samuel, a group of Resistance leaders and a wretched captured
milicien
pedalling the generator for the SOE wireless. They fell asleep in the barn. When they woke, one by one a handful of other SAS men arrived to join them, and reported the news of the catastrophe that had overtaken Bulbasket.

Tonkin had always been aware of the dangers of remaining too long in one place, where rumour and German radio direction-finding might pinpoint the camp. But he was restricted by the need to remain within reach of supply dropping grounds, and the difficulty of finding camps close to water for a hundred men, in that exceptionally dry summer, for there were anything up to a hundred
maquisards
with them at any one time. Tonkin had also summoned all the shot-down Allied airmen from camps in the area, and offered them the chance to join the SAS. One, an American fighter pilot named Bradley, at once volunteered for operations: ‘Captain, I see no reason why the lack of an aircraft should stop me fighting,’ he told Tonkin, and became a popular and respected member of the unit. Most of the others preferred
either to return to the
maquis
camps from which they had come, or to press on down the escape line towards Spain. But when disaster struck there was one American, Lieutenant Lincoln Bundy, in the SAS camp, along with thirty-nine British soldiers and some fifty
maquisards.

They had been camped for some days in the forest of Verriers, in a thinly wooded valley beside a stream. They moved for security reasons to another base, only to find the lack of water a chronic problem, so they moved back to Verriers. Tonkin went out to reconnoitre a site for a new base, and did not return until the small hours of morning.

Soon after first light, mortar bombs began to burst upon the men in their sleeping bags, and machine gun fire started slashing through the trees. Peter Weaver sprang up to see a cook running half naked through the trees, shouting: ‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’ Tonkin, followed by Weaver and Jean Dieudonné, ran to the edge of the trees and saw scores of German troops working rapidly along the hedges towards them, under heavy covering fire. Tonkin dashed back into the camp and shouted to his men to scatter and make their own way to safety. By one of most extraordinary, indeed almost fantastic misjudgments of the operation, the entire SAS party had been sent from England with only .45 pistols as personal weapons. Beyond the Vickers guns on their jeeps, they had no means whatever of resisting the German attack. Weaver glimpsed Richard Crisp bandaging a wounded man’s leg, and heard somebody shout to him that there was no time for that – it was every man for himself now. Of the fifty-odd
résistants
in the camp, seven were killed in that panic-stricken action in the wood. Many more, with most of the SAS troopers, disappeared in a milling herd into the valley and into the arms of the German cordon. Almost all surrendered.

Tonkin broke the time pencils into their explosives bin, and vanished westwards into the forest. He lay motionless behind a rock as a line of advancing Germans passed before him, listening to the bursts of fire in the woods as little parties of
maquisards
and
British troopers were rounded up. Two other officers and six men who made a dash for safety uphill, away from the stream in the same manner as Tonkin, also escaped. Peter Weaver watched his section run downhill with the main body, but himself moved in the opposite direction. At the edge of the trees he met Twm Stephens ‘almost berserk with rage’. Weaver said to him: ‘There’s nothing we can do. I’m going through this cornfield.’ They parted, and Weaver crawled into the wheat as a line of Germans began sweeping towards him. They fired. He ran zigzagging into some trees, the Germans in his wake. He felt a passionate thirst. Jumping a stile, he saw a small waterfall before him and paused for a second to splash his face in the blessed cool water. He was revived. Choosing a thick thorn bush he scrambled into its centre. There he lay for many hours, pistol in hand, ‘feeling that I was prepared to stay there for the rest of the war’. Night came. It began to rain. He crawled across a field, and suddenly found himself eyeball to eyeball with a large dog. He moved hastily away into cover, and fell mercifully asleep.