The Lost Band of Brothers (13 page)

On his return to Poole, Appleyard settled back into regular training. The men were now accommodated out on Russel Quay in two pre-war houseboats,
Dormouse
and
Yo’n’Jo
, described by Jan Nasmyth as ‘playthings for rich men in the 1930s’.
8
Tucked away from prying eyes, where today only the low-water stumps of an old wooden jetty betray the site of their mooring, March-Phillipps and his men settled down to serious training on both land and sea. Weapon handling and range firing, shore-based navigation theory at the Board of Trade offices in Poole harbour and practical seamanship out beyond Sandbanks and South Haven Point all figured strongly in a rigorous programme of self-devised training to prepare them for operations. But it was personal fitness, above all, that March-Phillipps required and expected of his men. One Saturday afternoon Appleyard ran 32 miles around the head of Poole harbour and over the hills to Swanage. He wrote home of those times:

Still at Poole, as you see, and likely to be here quite a while longer as there is much work and training to be done. However, we are learning a lot and all continues to go well. Graham [Hayes, his childhood friend from the same village of Linton-On-Wharfe] has arrived – last Sunday to be exact – and is in great form. He suits the job and the job suits him admirably, and he fits in with the party very well. Since he arrived he and I have started having a swim early each morning – at 6.45. Cold, but refreshing, and I need something pretty drastic to wake me up these days because I sleep so soundly.

Something else that woke him up was the award of the Military Cross for his actions supporting SOE’s Operation
Savanna
in Brittany. Endorsed by both Gubbins and Dr Hugh Dalton (who initially recommended an MBE), the award – ostensibly to an officer still serving with the Royal Army Service Corps and promulgated in the
London Gazette
on 23 May 1941, for ‘gallant and distinguished services in the field’ – was totally unexpected:

What an amazing surprise! I hadn’t the foggiest idea there was anything in the wind whatsoever! We came into port yesterday afternoon about 4 after a hard eight hours at sea and someone came on board and handed me three telegrams … I opened them and found they were of a congratulatory nature and was still baffled until I suddenly saw how they were addressed! But how did you know? I suppose it must have been in the
Gazette
or something but I haven’t seen a paper. With your wire was one from ‘the Brigadier and the boys at HQ’ and many others. It was such an extraordinary surprise that I haven’t quite got used to it yet. It all goes to show that the army at present must be pretty hard up for people to give medals too! … Gus, Tim and I had a night ashore to celebrate. We went to a flick and then had dinner and spent the night ashore, returning here at 1030 this morning, Sunday. Since then we have been at sea all day. We dropped anchor here again at 8.30 pm and it has been a terrific, rip-roaring day. There has been three parts of a gale of wind and torrential rain, so we have had a glorious day of immensely hard work. I am physically quite tired out now, with hands swollen and sore from ropes and water.
9

Brigadier Colin Gubbins visited Poole – presumably to congratulate Appleyard personally on the award of the Military Cross – on 1 June. He stayed at the Antelope on 8 June and inspected
Maid Honor
on 9 June. Sometime during this period Appleyard finagled his way onto a parachute course at Ringway outside Manchester: ‘It’s a remarkable business, but I don’t think anyone would pretend that actually leaving the plane is enjoyable. I was very frightened each time, but not so much as I have often been before a ski-race.’ He completed his jumps without serious mishap: ‘I am now qualified for and wearing “parachute wings” on the arm of my uniform. It’s rather a nice badge and has been authorised in Army Council Orders.’

As summer wore on, the weather improved and there were occasional days off – and time for reflection:

Last Sunday, two of the crew and I landed on Arne peninsula (our nearest bit of land) and walked a mile over the heath to Arne village where we went to service in the tiny, very old church … Afterwards I was approached by the ‘lady’ of the village who offered us the hospitality of her home, hot baths, etc., whenever we wanted one, so doubtless we shall avail ourselves of the offer soon. The weather has mostly been too good for us – hot and calm and a lot of sun. However, today there is half a gale of wind from the west and we have had a really hard day’s sailing and training in handling the ship. We are really very happily placed … In general, at present, our training for the day is just planned according to the weather the day brings forth. We are very busy at all hours of the day and night – but it’s such grand work that one doesn’t want any time off.

It was not just Appleyard and his men who were preparing for battle.
Maid Honor
, also, was being readied for war, although progress of that sort was not passed on to his family in letters home. In the weeks she lay at anchor at Russel Quay she was fitted out as a ‘Q’ ship.
Maid Honor
was given a dummy collapsible deck-house made of plywood which hinged down to reveal a two-pounder Vickers cannon; part of her weather deck was armoured and lowered to allow twin heavy machine-guns to fire through the scuppers. Fake crows’ nests were added to provide exposed Bren-gun firing platforms above the deck. There would also be four Bren guns, four tommy guns, six rifles and thirty-six hand grenades hidden on board within easy reach. Leaving as little as possible to chance, Lassen shinned 60 feet above the deck to nail a dolphin’s tail to the top of the main mast: it was a gift from a well-wisher, he said, and would bring them all luck.
10

As far as Commander Slocum was concerned, however, the men of
Maid Honor
had enjoyed about as much luck as they were going to get.

Amongst the other weapons secreted about
Maid Honor
, March-Phillipps had taken a fancy to something produced by SOE’s very own ‘Q’ Department of special weapons at Aston House, Stevenage. This was the Spigot, a stumpy, short-range, single shot anti-tank mortar also known as the ‘Blackler Bombard’. It was bolted to a steel plate on the deck and lobbed a 5lb finned charge which, it was hoped, would prove both devastating and unexpected to any unsuspecting enemy vessel lured within close range. It certainly proved devastating and unexpected on board
Maid Honor
during trials. Graham Hayes was sitting on the thwart of
Maid
Honor
, smoking his pipe, calmly watching proceedings and thinking no evil when the thing was fired for the first time. There was a very loud bang. The blast bowled him over and blew away both pipe and trousers whilst red-hot particles of the charge burned holes in
Maid Honor
’s mainsail. March-Phillipps was not amused. However, they persevered. Working with the Dutch section of SOE, March-Phillipps now devised a plan to sail
Maid Honor
close to a large enemy port. There they would heave to – and wait. Sooner or later, he reasoned, a German vessel would come out to investigate this innocent-looking fishing boat. When that happened, they would drop their disguise – and the hidden Spigot mortar would do the rest. This highly dangerous plan, perhaps surprisingly, won the approval of SOE. But it did not meet the approval of their Lordships in the Admiralty, nor with that of Commander Frank Slocum, RN. Sir Brooks Richards remembered that:

It became clear that there was a conflict of interest between SOE’s naval interests as they envisaged them at the time and those of SIS as they perceived them. Gus took this boat over [
Maid Honor
] and proceeded with his unit to try her out and fit her out and sail her. And when he was in the middle of this, Captain Frank Slocum, who was head of SOE’s effective Naval Section known by the acronym NID(C) and who had overall responsibility for SOE and SIS cross-Channel operations, said to Gus March-Phillipps: ‘What on earth are you going to do with that boat you’re fitting out?’ And March-Phillipps said: ‘Well, I’m going to lie off a French port like Cherbourg with her and wait til the Germans come to investigate and then when they get close enough to me I shall sink them because I’ve got a secret weapon on board.
11

Slocum said: ‘You’re certainly not going to do
that
in the English Channel!’ And so poor March-Phillipps was rather crestfallen and there was a haggle between SOE and SIS.
12

And not just with SIS. One file, reviewing the progress of the
Maid Honor
unit, recalled:

All this [March-Phillipps’ preparations] took much longer than expected. The Admiralty refused permission to operate outside coastal waters until a specific operation was put up and approved. When, in June, a specific plan was worked out with the Dutch Section of SOE, it was turned down. In addition to criticising the plan in detail the Admiralty made it clear that they objected to giving information of a secret character to army officers who might get captured … It was evident that, for the time being at least,
Maid Honor
would not be allowed to operate in home waters at all and the scheme for small scale raiding had to be temporarily abandoned.
13

Which raised a pressing question: what were they – SOE and March-Phillipps – going to do with
Maid Honor
? The answer lay, not in Poole, but 3,500 miles away – in West Africa.

  
1
.  The Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre.

  
2
.  HS 6/345.

  
3
.  
SOE in France
, 153.

  
4
.  AIR 8/897.

  
5
.  AIR 8/897.

  
6
.  
SOE in France
, 154.

  
7
.  
Geoffrey
, 59.

  
8
.  
Anders Lassen
, 54.

  
9
.  War Office records WO 373/16 incorrectly records his MC as awarded for Gallantry at Dunkirk. This may have been an administrative error, although that is unlikely. Since SOE activities were unavowable, it is more likely that this was a deliberate concealment of the truth.

10
.  
Anders Lassen
, 60.

11
.  The author Nevil Shute served in the RNVR and worked in the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development. He wrote a novel,
Most Secret
, based precisely upon this scenario. It was first published by William Heinemann in 1945.

12
.  Excerpt from interview with Sir Brooks Richards. Sound Archive No 27462 at the Imperial War Museum, London.

13
.  
Secret Flotillas
, 94–5.

For months, the Battle of the Atlantic had been threatening to starve Britain into defeat. With German and Italian U-boats roaming the seas, British merchant shipping losses were rising – and not just in the North Atlantic, but off the coast of West Africa as well: between June 1940 and March 1941, twenty-seven allied merchantmen had been sunk off the coast of West Africa whilst on 21 May 1941 – and while the United States was still neutral – U-69 sank the US freighter SS
Robin Moor
750 miles west of Freetown. Although carrying no war supplies, her passengers and crew were cast adrift and left to survive for eighteen days in open boats. British Intelligence suspected that U-boats and their supply mother ships might be using the creeks and rivers of neutral and Vichy territory in West Africa to lie up and reprovision before venturing out once more to harry allied shipping. If
Maid Honor
were sent to Africa, ran Admiralty reasoning, not only would she be the ideal vessel to sniff out those German hiding places, but she would also be working far away from the English Channel and those repeated conflicts of interest between SOE and SIS which were causing such friction. All in all, it seemed the perfect solution.

The rationale for such a long, perilous, open-sea voyage into seas watched by a vigilant enemy was supported by a threadbare Admiralty contention that the wooden-hulled, sail-driven vessel would be immune to magnetic mines and inaudible to anyone listening below the surface. ‘The theory was that a sailing-ship without an escort would not be worth a torpedo,’ recalled Jan Nasmyth:

But if a U-boat surfaced to attack with a gun, the
Maid
could give a good account of herself with the machine-guns and cannon. The Royal Navy, it was presumed, kept German surface raiders out of the Atlantic and so the main danger lay in attack by air patrols. That danger seemed very considerable and the Vickers cannon, although a dual-purpose weapon, might have been ineffective as an ack-ack gun through being hemmed in by masts and rigging. I should say the
Maid
was entirely vulnerable to attack by air. One just had to hope that the Germans wouldn’t notice her.
1

Nevertheless, the whole enterprise was heavy with risk. Which may well have been one of the main reasons Gubbins decided to split
Maid Honor’s
crew and senior officers, with only seven sailing to Africa while the others travelled by troopship. Appleyard – as second in command – was one of those who drew what he saw as the short straw: he would have to go on ahead by the P&O liner SS
Strathmore
. Once in Africa his job would be to ‘discuss questions connected with the employment of the ship and her personnel with the head of the Mission and to make arrangements for her reception with the Naval authorities at Freetown.’ Meanwhile, he was responsible for preparing
Maid
Honor
for the longest voyage of her life:

Everything is working up well and, barring accidents, the show is definitely on. The Admiralty have given their approval, blessing and full co-operation. The kit, equipment and stores side of things has kept me tremendously busy for ten days and is now well in control … I am going down to Poole late tomorrow night on a lorry with about three tons of food stores, etc.
2