The Lost Band of Brothers (11 page)

He wrote to Colin Gubbins on 11 March 1941:

Permission is asked to wire Upham to start work immediately and to wire the three owners. Authorities at Brixham will co-operate to the fullest extent – both civil and naval … No 1 Commando is now stationed at Dartmouth. Without giving away any trade secrets, I learned that the Colonel and 2nd in command would fall in with almost any project and, I believe that, if approached, they would attach men and officers with sea experience unofficially to form crews and possible raiding parties. The men could live on board on their extra ration allowance, and it would be very much in their own interest to keep silent … I talked with many NOs [Navigating Officers] on M.L. [Motor Launches] duty and what I gathered from them of conditions in the Channel made me a great deal more confident of success. It seems that the enemy patrols are keen but very thin and do not operate much in bad weather. I could operate these boats in dirty weather, without undue risk. If given powers and the word ‘go’ I believe I could have at least one of these boats ready for operations in a fortnight from now.
20

To March-Phillipps, every day counted. Britain was fighting for survival; he was desperate to play his part in her struggle.

‘Having obtained agreement in principle to the proposal of small-scale raids Gus pulled off a feat that only he could have got away with,’ remembered Leslie Prout:

Although having no authority to proceed, he calmly requisitioned a Brixham trawler whose attractive name was
Maid Honor.
With her he secured her Skipper, Blake Glanville, and sailed her from Brixham to Poole. Safely berthed in Poole, Gus informed an astonished Navy of the requisition who in turn informed an astonished Brigadier [Gubbins], who won the everlasting gratitude of the crew by backing us up through thick and thin.

Blake Glanville, a softly spoken, portly sailor in his fifties, stayed with his ship. He would go on to become the unit’s chief sailing instructor and, like ‘Pop’, become devoted to Gus and his band of would-be young raiders who, in the evenings below decks, would be held spell-bound with his tales of life at sea in the old trawler days – ‘I only exaggerate a little, mind’ee!’
21
He would also teach them, as all old sailors should, the business of knots and cordage. ‘Always with us was the vast, rock-like and beloved figure of Skipper Blake Glanville,’ remembered Leslie Prout:

He fathered all of us, and taught us all we ever came to know in the handling of the
Maid
. We all owe a great debt of gratitude to Blake, for the success of his young pupils on the sea was very largely due to the thoroughness of his teaching.

Maid Honor
, before conversion to ‘Q’ ship, could sleep five to eight below decks but, wherever they were to sleep, it could not be alongside at Poole harbour, with the busy town and port just a line’s throw off the bows. It was too public. Just as in Scotland, somewhere more private, more secretive was needed; somewhere far from prying eyes. And, just as in Scotland, the answer lay close to hand.

Poole Harbour itself offered 14 square miles of shallow, enclosed water – it was, in effect, a flooded valley – and was one of the world’s largest natural harbours. Seen from seaward and from above, it appeared to represent an apple cut in section with the harbour entrance to the south-east being the stalk of the apple and the largest of several islands – Brownsea – slightly above or to the west, representing the apple’s core. Across the water from Poole town and jutting out into Wareham Channel was Arne Peninsula, the western edge of which ran down past low water mud flats to the River Frome and Wareham town. Today Arne is an RSPB nature reserve that looks north across half a mile of grey water to a distant rash of gleaming summer chalet homes with, to the east, the moored present-day brown and black camouflaged Landing Craft,
Assault
, of the Royal Marines Special Boat Service at Hamworthy. Back in 1941, Arne was a lonely and secluded wasteland of heathland and heather, of gorse, old oak and silver birch. March-Phillipps moored
Maid Honor
off Russel Quay. Jan Nasmyth remembered it as a place of ‘sandbanks covered with heather and a little sandy cliff that we used for a firing range’.
22
Appleyard makes no mention of the firing range. A keen bird-watcher from childhood, he evidently felt completely at home, describing the area where they were moored as ‘right out in the wilds, miles from anywhere, up a creek. It is very quiet and lonely, but very lovely. Thousands of all kinds of waders and sea birds all around – especially shelduck, herons and curlews. There is a big heronry nearby.’ He later recalled:

One night, Gus and I sailed the dinghy five miles up the river to Wareham, had a meal at the Black Bear and then sailed back again on the ebb in the late evening. It was a still, warm evening and it was one of the most lovely experiences I have ever had – just ‘ghosting’ down in the twilight between great reed-beds, sandbanks and mud-flats with the lovely evening light and no sounds at all but the cries of the warblers and waders and the lapping and rustle of the water against the boat. It really was beautiful.

Appleyard’s warm, lyrical letters home may have made gentle reading, but did little to allay a family’s underlying fears, for they disguised but did not conceal the deadly serious purpose that had brought their son and his particular friend to this remote and beautiful part of Dorset. They were there to train for war. Soon, they knew, the time must come when they would lead the men they had chosen out across the Channel towards the dangers that awaited them all in the darkness beyond the harbour’s mouth. Those men were now arriving.

March-Phillipps’ formation – still unnamed – would be a small unit with never more than a dozen or so volunteers in its present form. Some would come from No 7 Commando, some from SOE. Not all would be British. There would be three Danes, a Frenchman and a Yugoslav to add spice to the mix and interest to the mess deck. Early on both officers realised the need for another officer, someone with professional maritime experience who could shoulder some of the sea-going responsibilities of navigation and watch-keeping. Appleyard knew just the man. Graham Hayes was a childhood friend from the same village, Linton-On-Wharfe; his family home, Kiln Hill, was less than half a mile from Geoffrey’s at Manor House. A skilled craftsman with a talent for working in wood who nurtured post-war ambitions of becoming a sculptor, Hayes had eschewed the family engineering business and served in the merchant navy instead. In 1934–5 he had sailed around the world as a deck-hand aboard the SV
Pommern
, a Finnish-owned, four-masted, 2,376grt, steel-hulled barque on the grain run from Australia, a voyage unforgettably captured in Eric Newby’s
The Last Grain Race
in which, as an 18-year-old, he too shipped out before the mast aboard the windjammer
Moshulu
to sail round Cape Horn in 1939. Hayes had served in the Borderers before volunteering for No 2 Commando, the all-commands unit earmarked for parachute training. Now he transferred again, this time to Poole, bringing with him eventually – after a letter, two telegrams and a great deal of wrangling – his trusted ‘oppo’, Sergeant Major Tom Winter, aged 36. Like Appleyard, Winter had started military service in the Royal Army Service Corps before transferring to No 2 Commando where he had met Hayes. In time, that unit evolved into 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment. A paratrooper with more than 150 jumps to his credit, he had enjoyed none of them. ‘He is a special protégé of Graham’s and the two always work together,’ wrote Appleyard. ‘He is a very good scout, and has seen a lot of different parts of the world and done a lot of tough jobs, and is an expert engineer.’
23

Leslie Prout was one of the older originals too, a man of 29 in 1941 with ‘an adventurous personality’, described by Brigadier Gubbins as ‘a good, sensible officer, very loyal and steady’.
24
His wartime service with March-Phillipps’ unit saw him rise from Sergeant to commissioned Major within four years. There was André Desgrange, aged 30, described by Appleyard as:

my special protégé [and] one of the very finest chaps with whom I have ever had anything to do … He is a Frenchman, was a deep-sea diver in the French Navy before the war and is also a good engineer … He is big, strong as a horse and has black curly hair and a perpetual grin! He never gets flurried, and is always cheerful and willing for the hardest and filthiest jobs that are going. He really is a wizard and I feel tremendously fortunate to have such a stalwart with me as my right-hand man.

There was March-Phillipps’ diminutive batman, Jock Taylor, nicknamed ‘Haggis’; Dennis Tottenham, 24, a tall, experienced seaman; ‘Buzz’ Perkins, youngest in the unit but very sound, willing and tough, who had an uncle, a major, at SOE Headquarters who had pulled strings to get him into the unit. At just 17 himself, Buzz may have had something to prove on his own account. There was also a ship’s cook aboard
Maid Honor
, Ernest Evison, who had trained in France and Switzerland and took a real pride in his work. He was young – only 23 – bilingual and described by Leslie Prout as ‘invaluable and unbeatable … the cook of all cooks’, a man with good sea legs whose ‘artistry so often made the fastidious Gus wax lyrical over food and was responsible for sighs of utter satisfaction from Apple and Graham, whose appetites had to be seen to be believed!’

There were also, at the outset, three Danes. Two made no particular or lasting impression. The third did. His name was Anders Lassen.

In four short years Anders Lassen would be awarded the Military Cross
three times
and become the only member of the wartime Special Air Service Regiment (the SAS) to be awarded Britain’s highest medal for valour, the Victoria Cross. To Danes everywhere he would become the personification of courage and a national legend whose fame in Denmark endures to this day. He would also, under March-Phillipps’ command, become an ice-cool, merciless killer. He was a phantom of swift, silent movement, an expert with knife, dagger, cross-bow and longbow – his preferred weapons.

To begin with, he was just another Danish professional seafarer. But Lassen had travelled to England the hard way. Caught at sea when his country was invaded on 9 April 1940, his ship, the 16,500-tonne Danish tanker
Eleanora Maersk
, had sailed on to Oman, the Persian Gulf, Colombo, Singapore, Borneo, Durban and Cape Town. Here his ship turned away from the war, away from Britain. That was not what Lassen wanted. He broke his cadetship contract, paid off and signed on again as deckhand on the
British Consul
, a 10,000-tonne tanker heading directly for Britain. She left Cape Town on 26 October 1940.
British Consul
was par for the course for merchant ships of the period and conditions on board were grim. Norman Fidler, one of the crew, remembered that like her sister ship,
British Councillor
:

they crawled with cockroaches. There was no running water or shower for the crew, but only a hand pump fed from a tank of rust-brown water. We had no freezer but only an ice-box which kept food fresh for a week at best; after that, we lived on tinned and barrelled food such as salt pork. Except for our dry tea and condensed milk, the diet couldn’t have been much different from the
Mayflower
.
25

Lassen took it all in his stride. After two years at sea as cabin boy, dishwasher and deckhand, he had seen worse.

Whatever else she may have been,
British Consul
was a lucky ship that year. She took her chances, sailed due north up the west coast of Africa and on into the stormy North Atlantic before making UK landfall in Oban on Christmas Eve 1940. When Anders Lassen stepped ashore with £19 14
s
2
d
, his two months’ pay doubled by war bonuses, he was just 20 years old. Tall, fair-haired and with a disconcertingly direct gaze from eyes that were of the palest blue, Lassen made his way to Newcastle-upon-Tyne where he volunteered for the Royal Air Force: like March-Phillipps and Appleyard making
I’m Alone
seaworthy a little way down the coast at Arran, Lassen burned to avenge his country, to erase the shame of invasion and Danish capitulation. The RAF turned him down for Aircrew: his mathematics was not good enough. On New Year’s Day 1941 Lassen headed south, to London. There he joined the British Army. But not before he and fourteen other young Danes, patriots all, had signed their names to a solemn pledge recorded for posterity in the cover of a pocket Bible:

In the year 1941, on the 25th day of January, the undersigned Free Danes in England swore, sword in hand, to fight with their allies for Denmark’s liberation from a foreign yoke.

I hearby swear that I will stay true to my King, Christian X. I also swear that I am ready to serve loyally whatever authority is working against the enemy that occupied my Fatherland. I swear that I will never disclose whatever military secrets are entrusted to me.
26

The solemnity of that vow appeared, at first glance, to be at curious odds with the casual, silent young man whose neat signature appeared ninth in alphabetical order on the soft cover of that Bible, as their escorting officer, Capt. Werner Iversen, prepared to shepherd his party of Free Danes into the British military machine. For Lassen appeared distinctly unmilitary. He was scruffy, unkempt and, from the very beginning, took no trouble to conceal a total abhorrence of British Army ‘bullshit’, in all its many triplicated forms; of creased uniforms, polished brasses, burnished toecaps, drill by numbers and army regulations of whatever description. ‘I came to fight, not parade,’ announced Lassen succinctly and often. By then, he was actually closer to the fight than he realised. Posted with the other Free Danes to Arisaig for commando training, Lassen and his fellows were actually being assessed, not for some line rifle battalion, but as to their suitability for the Special Operations Executive. And SOE did not care about burnished toe-caps. Anders Lassen was passed on with sparing praise: ‘A professional seaman. Skilled with weapons. Aggressive enough to lead a boarding party.’
27
They got that right.