Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (46 page)

By the time Druce landed on August 12, German troops were already pouring into the area to reinforce and hold the Vosges; the American advance would stall. With the benefit of hindsight, the commander of 2SAS, Colonel Brian Franks, observed: “The difficulties of the Vosges terrain, coupled with the sentimental consideration of the incorporation of Alsace Lorraine into the Reich, indicated that a considerable stiffening of German resistance would occur on the western slopes of the Vosges.” The Germans were not running away, and Druce and his men, instead of stalking a fleeing enemy, would find themselves the quarry, chased and harried across the woods and ravines of the Vosges like hunted animals.

Born in Holland to a Dutch mother and an English army officer, the twenty-three-year-old Druce was a Sandhurst-trained professional soldier who had volunteered to be a glider pilot before being seconded to MI6 in 1942. His career as a spy in occupied Holland came to an end when he was betrayed by a double agent, and he was forced to escape through occupied France, disguised by his civilian clothes and fluent French. Druce was witty, insouciant, and flamboyant, an eccentric with a “predilection for risk” and a peculiar fashion sense who favored corduroy trousers and a top hat. He was told he would be commanding the advance party just twenty-four hours before he jumped, when the appointed team leader pulled out after suffering a bad attack of fear. He was accompanied by a French officer attached to SOE, Captain George Baraud.

Druce landed upside down, shortly before 2:00 a.m. Badly concussed, he “talked nonsense,” by his own account, for the next two hours. The wireless operator, Sergeant Kenneth Seymour, had broken his left foot on landing: he could not put on his boot, and could walk only with extreme difficulty. Druce was still feeling “a bit muzzy in the head” when his group was greeted by partisans commanded by Colonel Maximum, real name Gilbert Grandval, who would go on to become labor minister under President Charles de Gaulle. The Frenchmen immediately helped themselves to all the guns brought by the SAS, and then escorted Druce and his men to their hilltop camp, containing about eighty French fighters armed with a handful of rusty rifles, fifteen escaped Russian POWs, and a downed Canadian pilot named Lou Fiddick, who had grown up on Vancouver Island and was perfectly at home in the wilds. In exchange for the weapons already expropriated by Maximum’s men, “it was agreed that we were to be fed and housed and also defended by them…it seemed a fair bargain.”

Druce had visited the Vosges before the war “and knew fairly well what to expect in the way of terrain.” He behaved as if he was on holiday, taking “a stroll through the countryside” and enjoying the local cuisine. “We had an excellent meal and slept the clock round,” he wrote. Druce awoke to discover that German troops were flooding into the valley below, but he declined to be rattled. “I was not unduly worried since the Germans might have been there for any reason at all.” Had he known the real reason they were there even Druce’s sangfroid might have gone up a few degrees: an informer had already reported the arrival of the SAS to the Germans, and the area was being combed.

All day and well into the evening, unarmed Frenchmen, fearing reprisals, poured into the camp. “This was a nuisance,” wrote Druce. But not enough of a nuisance to interrupt his sleep. “We doubled the guard and went to bed.” By the following morning, thousands of German troops, including elements of the SS 17th Panzer Grenadier Division, were swarming through the Celles Valley. Druce now had to admit that the Germans were “alive to the situation” and hunting for them in “unpleasantly large numbers.” It would be safer, he concluded, to establish a new base higher up the mountains and put some distance between himself and the large crowds of loud and overenthusiastic Frenchmen. “The French were quite incapable of moving without a tremendous noise.”

After two hours of marching, the fourteen SAS troops found a mountain path, and immediately ran into a forty-strong patrol of Germans, who “were busy eating” and initially failed to spot the approaching British. Druce tried to back quietly away, but “unfortunately one German saw the last man in our column and shouted ‘Achtung,’ whereupon he was shot by the man he had seen.” Although tempted to launch an attack, Druce reluctantly decided to beat a hasty retreat: “My task was to bring in reinforcements and therefore I was not keen on risking our necks for a few Germans. Unfortunately this meant leaving Sergeant Seymour as a prisoner of war, for he still could not walk.” The injured Seymour was exceptionally displeased to be abandoned.

For the next two weeks Druce and his band of men were on the run, forced to dodge around the Vosges, hiding in hay barns or camping in the open despite the increasing cold as autumn neared. “In all it seemed there were about 5,000 Germans chasing us,” wrote Druce, who remained in contact with the maquis despite deteriorating relations with the fickle and demanding Colonel Maximum. The French resistance chief could not understand why SAS troops were evading the enemy rather than launching immediate, albeit suicidal, attacks on the Germans. “I explained that my task was to bring in more SAS and it helped if I was alive to do it,” wrote Druce. The uncertainty and strain were compounded by “horrible rumours of Sergeant Seymour having a) shot himself, b) been shot and c) been bayoneted to death.”

Food was running out. The Germans, in reprisal, had begun rounding up the male inhabitants of Moussey and marching them off to forced-labor camps. The stress was beginning to tell even on Druce, who confessed to “feeling very depressed and helpless, and with strong temptation of going off and shooting up what we could find.” Finally, Druce located a suitable drop zone, in a remote corner of the plateau. Ten SAS reinforcements were parachuted in on August 26, followed by a wireless message to the effect that the commander of 2SAS, Colonel Brian Franks himself, would land with another twenty-five men in four days’ time. Druce was waiting for his commanding officer to arrive, accompanied by a large contingent of maquis, including several Russians, when a Frenchman named Fouch was found in the woods. He claimed to be “looking for mushrooms.” Highly suspicious, Druce ordered that Fouch be interrogated.

At 3:00 a.m. on August 31, planes were heard overhead, and moments later canisters of supplies and weapons began drifting down to the drop zone, followed by Franks and his men. Then pandemonium erupted. One canister filled with ammunition exploded as it hit the ground. The maquis began looting the supplies before the SAS men had even landed. In the confusion, the captive Fouch seized a Sten gun and rushed off. The Russians, who spoke some German but no French, shouted “Achtung!” The French, hearing German voices in the darkness, assumed they must be under attack and began shooting wildly. The looters meanwhile were gorging themselves. “One Frenchman died of over-eating,” Druce recorded. Another of the maquis extracted what he took to be a hunk of soft cheese from one of the containers and devoured it, only to discover that it was plastic explosive, which contains arsenic. He then “died noisily.”

Over the next hour, Druce rounded up as many of the parachutists as he could find, including Colonel Franks, who had taken to the woods immediately on landing, convinced that the “unbelievable noise” must indicate an ambush. “The area was too hot for us to remain,” wrote Druce. At that moment the maquis dragged in Fouch, who had been recaptured after a long pursuit through the woods. Druce was in no mood for clemency. “I ordered Fouch to be shot. Captain Baraud shot him through the heart at point blank range.” The body of the presumed spy was left where it had fallen, but by the next morning the corpse had vanished. “Afterwards it was said that he had been wearing a bullet-proof waistcoat.”

With the arrival of six jeeps over the next few days, the unit achieved some mobility and began to fight back, using now-familiar guerrilla tactics. Three German staff cars and a truck were destroyed on the road into Moussey. When an elderly car appeared moments later, it was attacked too and forced into a ditch. Later it was found to have contained the village mayor, a leader of the resistance who somehow emerged unharmed from the wreck of his ancient electric carriage and sent two bottles of champagne to Colonel Franks along with a cheerful message: “Thanks for the salvo fired in my honour this morning.”

After six weeks of frustration, Druce got his chance to take the fight to the Germans. One morning he led a three-jeep convoy into Moussey just as an SS commander was assembling his men; he opened fire at forty yards, and, having expended several pans of ammunition, raced back into the mountains. In the chaos, the 250 German troops occupying Moussey withdrew, believing Druce’s attack must be the herald of an assault by a far larger force. Two French Arabs, suspected of spying for the Milice, were intercepted by Druce and shot out of hand.

By the end of September, the advancing Americans—General George Patton’s Third Army—had outrun their supplies and temporarily ground to a halt. Colonel Maximum announced that his maquis did not intend to do any more fighting “until the arrival of the Americans.” The Germans continued to scour the area for the SAS.

A strange stalemate set in. Food was running low, as was morale. At least twenty of Franks’s men were missing, believed to have been killed or captured on operations. But at this moment an unexpected intelligence windfall arrived from one of the French resistance leaders: the detailed order of battle of the 21st Panzer Division. The 21st were old adversaries from the desert war, decimated in Normandy and now re-formed by amalgamation with two other panzer divisions. Quite how this secret document was obtained remains unclear, but in Allied headquarters a precise description of the strength of the 21st Panzer would be greeted as a pearl of great value. Franks detailed Druce to head west in civilian clothes, accompanied by the Canadian airman, Fiddick, link up with the Americans, and pass on this vital piece of information. Druce was also to “explain our position to the Americans and give them any information they might need.”

Two days later, Franks received a radio message that Druce had safely reached the Third Army, after passing through the German lines three times. Druce was immediately flown to SAS headquarters at Hylands House to be debriefed. Just twenty-four hours later, he parachuted back into eastern France with a new radio, orders for Franks, some letters for the men and a case of whiskey. He then began retracing his steps back to the Vosges camp, where the situation was growing worse by the day.

Over the preceding weeks, German military intelligence had built up, from interrogated prisoners and local informers, an increasingly accurate picture of who and what they were fighting in the Vosges. A report by the intelligence section of the 2nd Panzer Division, labeled “secret” and headed “Appearance of SAS units,” gave chapter and verse on the unit’s mission, equipment, and strength. The British troops, it reported, specialized in “single combat, characterized by ambush, deception, utilization of the weapons in hand to hand fighting (brass knuckles, daggers etc),” and warned: “Experience gained in the campaign in Italy and France shows that members of the SAS are specially trained for this kind of work. Their activities are extremely dangerous. The presence of SAS troops is to be reported immediately.” The Germans even had names, albeit misspelled, to go with the shadowy forces operating behind the lines: “The commander of the 1st SAS Regiment is Colonel Kaine [
sic
]. The Commander of the 2nd SAS Regiment is Colonel Fanks [
sic
].” The Germans were remarkably—even suspiciously—well informed about what the SAS was up to.

By the time Druce arrived back in the Vosges, Franks had already come to the conclusion that Operation Loyton, which was intended to run for three weeks and had so far lasted two months, would have to be abandoned. The Germans had reinforced along the Moselle, and the US Third Army was static. “We were really boxed in,” admitted Druce. The SAS had tied up several thousand German troops, wrecked a number of rail lines, and put heart, albeit briefly, into Colonel Maximum and his maquis. But the idea of harrying the retreating German army had not worked for the simple reason that the German army had stopped retreating. By October 9, the men had only enough rations to last another twenty-four hours. “We had no explosives and the likelihood of having a resupply drop appeared negligible.” The autumn weather was closing in, with a freezing wind whipping through the hills. “I decided to end the operation and instruct parties to make their way to the American lines as best they could,” wrote Franks. The troop was split into parties of four and six, while a six-man rearguard was left behind to await a sabotage team that had failed to return. SS troops attacked the next day, led to the camp by a French informer, just hours after the departure of Franks and the others. After a ferocious hour-long resistance, the six SAS men and a lone maquisard surrendered, and were imprisoned at Saales. Six days later, the prisoners were driven into a pine wood alongside the road to Grande Fosse; the men were taken off the truck, led away in handcuffs, one by one, and shot.

Franks, Druce, and about two dozen others made it back to the American lines. A total of 210 male inhabitants of Moussey were marched into captivity in Germany, of whom only seventy returned.

Of the thirty-one SAS men captured during Operation Loyton, all were murdered save one. The unlikely survival of Sergeant Kenneth Roy Seymour, the wireless operator captured at the outset of the operation, has been the subject of speculation, and accusation, ever since.

Seymour was a twenty-two-year-old heating and lighting engineer from Sutton in south London. Nothing in his life had prepared the young signaler for capture, imprisonment, and Nazi interrogation. The account he gave of his ordeal after the war was extraordinary in its testimony to human resilience. On August 17, unable to walk due to his broken foot, Seymour was left by Druce to await capture on the twisting mountain path in the Vosges. Seymour described how, instead of meekly surrendering, he had crawled to a jutting rock just off the path and “dug himself in to fight a lone action against a large German force,” armed with a Bren gun, a carbine, and his .45 revolver. For an hour he held off the attackers, who apparently believed they were facing a formidable force of men; when the Bren gun ran out of ammunition, he resorted to his carbine and then the revolver. Finally, some fifteen Germans attacked in a semicircle and forced him out by lobbing grenades. Seymour wrote that as he was dragged past a line of jeering German soldiers, “each one assisted me with a clout of his revolver.” He was still carrying his left boot, and hobbling with one bare foot. A soldier grabbed the boot and tossed it into the undergrowth. When Seymour protested, “by signs they replied that I would not require it as I was to be shot.”