Das Reich (35 page)

When he awoke, it was a beautiful morning. He climbed to his feet and walked into the yard of a nearby farmhouse to find, to his astonishment, John Tonkin. ‘Thank God you got through,’ said Tonkin. Only eight of his men had survived. Thirty-one – four of them wounded, including Richard Crisp – had been taken prisoner, together with Lieutenant Bundy of the USAAF, and the two SAS troopers captured four days earlier on the railway. The next afternoon Tonkin walked into the village of Verriers, almost dazed with shock, to find that the Germans had gone, taking their prisoners. Twm Stephens had been wounded and captured. The Germans tied him to a tree, paraded the village past and then beat him to death with their rifle butts. The other SAS prisoners, together with Lieutenant Bundy, were executed on 7 July, presumably in accordance with Hitler’s ‘Commando order’. Their secret mass graves were uncovered after the Liberation. In all, of 100 SAS captured by the Germans in France during the operations after D-Day, only six survived.

John Tonkin wrote thirty-six years later: ‘I have always felt that the Geneva Convention is a dangerous piece of stupidity, because it leads people to believe that war can be civilized. It can’t.’ There were many paradoxes about Bulbasket. Trooper John Fielding remembered that when they were briefed before they dropped, the SAS were clearly informed that they could not take prisoners, because there were no means of holding them. It is extraordinary, first, that no one reflected that such a policy might be reciprocated; and second, that the SAS were allowed to drop into France under the illusion that the war they were being sent to join had something to do with ordinary soldiering. Special Forces HQ failed to emphasize to the SAS their likely fate if they were captured. Had they been aware of it, it is unlikely that so many men would have surrendered.

SOE agents who met SAS parties in the field, notably Philippe de Vomécourt, considered that they behaved with some carelessness in the thick of enemy territory. They were sent knowing little of France or of the Resistance war, and according to Colonel Barry of SOE, regimental pride made them reluctant to accept overmuch guidance from Baker Street. The SAS of that period were better trained and certainly men of higher abilities than British line infantry, but they were not remotely comparable in quality and expertise with the post-war SAS. Bulbasket’s lack of armament is a measure of the misconceptions surrounding the operation. John Tonkin said: ‘We were simply not intended to fight pitched battles with the Germans.’ But it was absurd to imagine that a party of fifty men in enemy territory ran no risk whatever of encountering the enemy. The
maquis
lacked the training and ability to protect them. After the disaster at Verriers, the British searched bitterly for evidence from which they could pin blame for their betrayal. John Tonkin believes to this day that a foreign-born officer of the SAS (not mentioned in this story) betrayed Bulbasket to the Germans to take pressure off his own team. John Fielding thinks that two men on a motor cycle who passed the
camp one day when he was on guard were in reality German agents.

The truth will never be known. But it seems much more likely that, when thousands of villagers over a wide area knew of the existence of the SAS party, the Germans received a local tip-off. Resistance historians in the Vienne who have studied the episode remark that the SAS were incautious, for instance in taking a jeep into Poitiers. The Germans at that period were not seeking confrontation with the Resistance unless it was thrust upon them, but the presence of a uniformed British force, flaunting its presence around the country, was evidently an intolerable challenge to their authority. It cannot have required very ingenious intelligence work to locate the camp at Verriers, when the SAS had been there on and off for eight days. Although contemporary SAS reports speak of the final attack being carried out by SS units, Resistance historians say that, in reality, Verriers was taken by the 158th Security Regiment from Poitiers. Seizing thirty-three men armed only with pistols was scarcely a demanding task, and it was a tribute to the Germans’ fumbling that Tonkin and eight others escaped.

The survivors of Bulbasket, at last joined by the Phantom team, remained in France for almost five weeks after the disaster at Verriers. For much of that time they were awaiting fresh supplies of explosives and equipment from England. The shock of the attack lifted surprisingly quickly from the minds of the eighteen young Englishmen who survived, but their mission’s back was broken. ‘We’d written ourselves off,’ Weaver said. ‘I never expected to get back to England.’ Tonkin, unfailingly energetic, made four more railway attacks, but with only one jeep – which had escaped Verriers because it was away for repairs – they lacked mobility for more ambitious operations. On 7 and 10 August the SAS group, together with Samuel and eight USAAF aircrew, were
evacuated to England in two airlifts by Hudson, from an improvised landing ground.

Contemporary opinion on Bulbasket was divided. In a War Office report dated 10 August 1944, the Director of Tactical Investigation who compiled after-action assessments wrote brusquely:

But he added:

Hindsight suggests that the report should have been inverted: Bulbasket probably did little more to occupy the attention of German troops in the Vienne than the Resistance could have done without them. But Stephens’s pinpointing of the German petrol trains at Châtellerault was a classic example of liaison between an air force and behind-the-lines observers.

Yet could not Tonkin with a tiny handful of officers and NCOs have accomplished as much, or more, without risking the disaster that took place at Verriers chiefly because a large body of men required a conspicuous fixed base? Hislop wrote, after his own experience with SAS in France: ‘In retrospect, it seemed to me that the same result could have been achieved with fewer and more carefully selected men.’ There was a fundamental confusion among the planners who deployed uniformed regular soldiers –
albeit with special forces training – in a profoundly irregular situation.

But war is about the balance of advantage, the final net gain or loss when the casualty returns are in. The Director of Tactical Investigation did not possess the advantage of seeing the desperate signal intercepted by the British Ultra decrypters at Bletchley Park: ‘Urgent request for allocation of fuel for 2 SS Pz Div from army fuel depot Châtellerault addressed to AOK I at 1100, 13 June.’ In the cold accountancy of battle, this alone was an achievement purchased cheaply by the loss of a platoon.

The Das Reich Division’s battle against Resistance effectively ended at Bellac, on the road to Poitiers.
Maquis
groups further north did not attempt to attack such an overwhelmingly powerful force in unfavourable country. London had never expected that
résistants
would be able to achieve much against major formations in areas approaching the battlefront. The division was not even aware of the existence of the SAS detachment which caused the destruction of their petrol depot. To most of the men of the Das Reich, there was simply another of the interminable checks and delays which had wasted so much time since Montauban.

Now, as the division approached the Loire, they entered the region of France in which most havoc was being achieved by the Allied communications bombing. ‘Our operations in Normandy’, wrote Rommel, ‘are rendered exceptionally difficult, and in part impossible to carry out, by the . . . overwhelming superiority of the enemy air force.’ Between 6 March and D-Day, the Allied air forces had poured 62,000 tons of bombs on to the ninety-three key rail centres chosen for attack by Eisenhower’s air and transport specialists. By ruthlessly sweeping aside civilian traffic throughout the French rail network, the Germans continued to be able to run some priority trains, but the chaos and delays were appalling. All the lower Seine bridges were destroyed. 2nd Panzer Division arrived in Normandy only on 13 June after a journey of 150 miles, and required a further seven days to regroup before going into action; 17th SS Panzergrenadiers did not arrive until 17 June, having struggled the 200 miles from Bayonne; 9 and 10 SS Panzers arrived from the Eastern Front only on 25 June.
German wireless networks were overwhelmed with pleas for fuel, transport, new routings, bridge repairs and locomotives. The Wehrmacht was bleeding terribly in Normandy, losing an average of 2,500 and 3,000 men a day, yet the reinforcements were crawling across France with fatal sluggishness, lapsing into confusion after they crossed the Loire and entered the most deadly fighter bomber target zone. The Allies were dispatching an average of almost 600 fighter bomber sorties a day on roving commission to attack moving trains and convoys wherever they were found in northern France. These inflicted terrible damage on the Germans. North of the Loire, the Germans were compelled to resort almost exclusively to the roads for the last phase of their forward movement, becoming even more vulnerable to air attack. Almost every German who fought in Normandy conceded that the Allied air attack was the decisive factor in the Wehrmacht’s defeat. It was the air forces which inflicted the most important delays upon most German reinforcements approaching Normandy. No other major battlefield formation was permitted to waste as much time upon Resistance as the 2nd SS Panzer.

The Das Reich Division trickled into the rear areas of the battlefront piecemeal, between 15 and 30 June 1944. The elements which had remained at Toulouse under Major Wisliceny followed on 7 July. To the intense chagrin of its officers, units were committed independently to shore up the sagging German front. The division did not begin to fight as an integral force under Lammerding’s command until 10 July, by which date it had already suffered heavy losses.

Sufficient petrol was found to move the reconnaissance battalion and the Der Führer regiment across the Loire on 13 June, by the bridges at Saumur and Tours, which were still intact despite the intensive Allied air bombardment. Other units followed as they could over the next week. The tank units did not even begin to move from Périgueux until 15 June, a great tribute to Resistance and the Allied air forces. On the sixteenth, a SHAEF G-3 report stated: ‘In spite of our efforts to delay it, Panzer division Das
Reich, units of which reported Périgueux, left in fifteen trains, thirteen last night, two this morning, for Poitiers.’ Their progress up the railway was painfully slow. Fritz Langangke, coming from Germany with his newly equipped Panther company, travelled a great circle around France for a fortnight before catching up with them. The tanks were compelled to detrain at Angers, more than a hundred miles from the battlefront, and to move forward by night, with all the delays and breakdowns made inevitable by another prolonged road march.

From the moment that they crossed the Loire the Germans were appalled by the utter dominance of Allied air power, the ‘
Jabo
⁸
fairground in the sky’, as Ernst Krag called it. In Russia, the enemy air force had presented no serious threat to movement. But in France, questing fighter bombers fell on them ceaselessly. The convoys of the Das Reich were compelled to abandon daylight movement after Saumur and Tours, and crawl northwards through the blackout. At dawn on 14 June they were halted by the roadside near La Flèche. A signal was handed to Colonel Stadler. The commander of the 9th SS Hohenstaufen Panzer Division had been killed in action. Stadler was to replace him immediately, handing over command to Major Weidinger. The headquarters group were making hasty arrangements for the transfer when an Allied fighter bomber section smashed into the column, firing rockets and cannon. Within minutes, as men struggled to train the light flak guns and swing the vehicles under cover, sixteen trucks and half-tracks were in flames. Thereafter, they camouflaged the vehicles with deadly care. The tanks moved only as a ‘walking forest’, as they called it, blanketed in foliage. When Otto Pohl’s company lagered in an orchard, he had his men scythe the grass behind the tanks to conceal the tracks. The crews cursed that ‘they couldn’t even step into a field for a crap’ without drawing a
Jabo
. Again and again, as they inched forward through the closely set Norman countryside, the tankmen were compelled
to leap from their vehicles and seek cover beneath the hulls as fighter bombers attacked. Their only respite came at night. To their astonishment, after Russia where much of the most bitter fighting took place at night, they found that ‘after 10 pm the Americans left us strictly alone’. In the merciful peace of darkness they could redeploy, rest and re-arm until daybreak brought the return of shelling and the fighter bombers. There were other lessons about a new kind of war. Moving into action in his Panther for the first time in Normandy, the young Das Reich tank officer Fritz Langangke swung around the corner of a building to find an extraordinary panorama stretched out before him: a Norman village street littered with the debris of fierce fighting – burning vehicles, American and German infantry and anti-tank guns confronting each other 200 yards apart. But not a man was firing. Between the lines, American and German stretcher-bearers were scuttling to and fro, removing the wounded. ‘It was the first hint that this war would be different,’ said Langangke. ‘In Russia, we would have driven straight over them . . .’