The Lost Band of Brothers (2 page)

At first the SSRF was given two motor launches for passage across the Channel, but these were replaced by a Motor Torpedo Boat – MTB 344 – known as ‘
The
Little Pisser
’ because of its speed.
The
Little Pisser
carried a dory or a collapsible canvas-sided Goatley assault boat in which the raiders made their final approach to the beach from the MTB anchored or loitering offshore.

Starting on 14 August 1942, the SSRF carried out three successful raids over a period of twenty-four days. The fourth, set for 11–12 September 1942, but delayed until the night 12–13 September because of fog, was a different story. By now the enemy, who were not stupid, were on high alert after the abortive Dieppe Raid a month before. The beach selected for the SSRF landing was an ideal invasion beach; it became Omaha Beach eighteen months later. It was well defended. The raid was a disaster. But this should not be allowed to detract from the reputation of the ‘proper people’, the men of the SSRF, including March-Phillipps, killed in the raid, described by SOE agent Peter Kemp as ‘the gallant idealist, and strange quixotic genius who had been our commander and inspiration’. The force remained in being, led by Appleyard, mounting its last raid in April 1943. By then the reconnaissance plan for the forthcoming invasion of France was tightly controlled and mainly done by the Combined Operations Pilotage Parties, the COPPs, the forerunners of today’s SBS. The SSRF was disbanded, but many of its members joined other organisations and continued to engage the enemy to the end, some dying in the process, including Appleyard and Anders Lassen, VC.

Tom Keene is to be congratulated on his book and for telling us about these gallant men.

0531: the first pale flush of sunrise.

Soon, this beach will become famous as ‘Bloody Omaha’, a gently shelving killing ground to the east of the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy, France. Here, on another dawn, green American troops from the unblooded 29th and veterans of the US 1st Divisions of V Corps will slog ashore in the face of withering enemy fire from the bluffs behind the beach. Here they will endure the worst losses of D-Day as they attempt to claw a fingertip’s hold on Hitler’s
festung Europa
. An estimated 1,900 Americans will die on this beach on that single day.
1
But not yet, for this is 13 September 1942 and D-Day is almost two years away.

The beach is long, flat and billiard-table smooth: like Rommel himself, his anti-invasion obstacles have yet to be put in place. As dawn breaks along this 5-mile strand of empty, golden sand that stretches from Vierville-sur-Mer in the west to Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes in the east, a slight haze lifts slowly from the flat, gun-grey sea and the low, crumbling waves that roll in on the last of the ebbing spring tide. Now, this morning, this dawn, this same tide brings with it to the gleaming shore the broken, sea-tumbled detritus of war: three bodies that now lie still, humped and sodden, rolled in on the falling tide. They wear British khaki battledress but have lost their boots and pistol belts. Two were wounded before drowning; a third has died from a gunshot wound to the head. Faces waxy pale and drained in death, they lie in crumpled abandon on this, the enemy shore.

†††

The dawn light gathers strength; visibility lengthens. Very soon the three bodies are spotted by the binoculars of the German sentries of 726th Infantry Regiment who man the six concrete strong points –
Stützpunkt
– that overlook this sector of beach within the prohibited coastal zone. Later this same morning German troops will recover a bullet-ridden assault boat containing 2 gallons of drinking water. They will also recover twelve wooden paddles, five sub-machine-guns, several primed Mills No 36 hand grenades – some in a small bag – three British army webbing belts, each with pistol and dagger attached in webbing holster and leather sheath, and a British naval anchor tied to 40 feet of hemp rope whose standing end has been severed by the sharp blow of an axe. Later that same day two British prisoners, their battledress still damp and caked in salt, will be ordered to drag the bodies of their three comrades above the high tide mark. They will be filmed doing so by a German film unit and this sequence will form part of the Nazi propaganda film entitled
Midnight at Cherbourg
. A further sequence, filmed on the morning of 15 September, will show sheaves of flowers and three coffins being lowered into the ground whilst the synchronised rifle shots of a Wehrmacht firing detail provide full military honours in the civilian cemetery of Saint Laurent-sur-Mer.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

All three men who died were members of Britain’s Special Operations Executive and were on loan to Combined Operations’ Small Scale Raiding Force. Their mission, as so often before, had been straightforward, if hardly simple: to gather information, destroy enemy installations and capture prisoners to bring back to England for interrogation. That mission failed. Of the eleven raiders who had embarked on MTB 344 at Portsmouth at 2012 the previous evening, not one would return to Britain before the end of the war. And some would lie in the soil of France for eternity.

Today, in England, there is little trace of their passing: a wind-swept secret mooring among the shelduck, heron and curlews of the Arne peninsula; a tiny hilltop church where brave men once hunched in prayer; a lawn of moles who garnish their burrowings with the tarnished .45 cartridge cases of Colt automatics and Thompson submachine-guns once ejected onto a home-made firing range in the kitchen garden above their heads; a haunted seventeenth-century manor house whose ancient oak staircase still echoes to the shouts of hurrying men, the clatter of cleared weapons and the skitter of hob-nailed boots; names remembered in a Yorkshire village hall and, in Dorset, a simple brass plaque, golden in lamplight, that pays tribute to men once needed but who have now stepped back into the shadows of history.

This, then, is their story, written in detail for the first time before those shadows fade into darkness. There is no fiction. It is the story of the men of
Maid Honor
and the Small Scale Raiding Force. It is the untold story of Britain’s own Band of Brothers.

  
1
.  The National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia, USA, has painstakingly confirmed 1,258 US deaths on Omaha Beach on D-Day. The research continues with many more names still awaiting confirmation. My thanks to April Cheek-Messier, Co-President, National D-Day Memorial, Virginia.

Dunkirk. It was not a miracle, it was a disaster.

Committed across the Channel to honour a promise, block an enemy and support an ally, British troops moved to northern France in autumn 1939, with advanced units crossing into France the day after war was declared. By the end of September 1939 more than 152,000 troops of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) were on French soil. By early October the first two BEF divisions had moved up to the front line on the Franco-Belgian border. The BEF: the very title of the formation of under-equipped, under-armoured units hints at a glance back to the reassuring certainties of Empire that were to have no place in the fast-moving battlefield of this new war that now awaited them, hull-down over the horizon.

To begin with, of course, very little happened. War may have been declared, but it was hardly being waged. In one of the wettest and coldest winters on record, British troops simply dug in and waited out a miserable, muddy
Sitzkrieg
, their line of further advance hindered by Belgian neutrality: only if German troops invaded Belgium would French and British troops move forward in the execution of ‘Plan D'. To the British left and right were the French Seventh and First armies, units of what was commonly recognised to be the best army in the world. But, as cursing British troops hunched down into their greatcoat collars, stamped frozen feet on wooden duckboards and rubbed wet, gloved hands together for warmth, they were aware of a niggling and growing unease about the calibre of the much-vaunted
poilus
on their flanks: the French soldiers
they
saw manning concrete defences and on muddy route marches did not look to them like the best soldiers in the world, not at all. Slovenly, ill-disciplined, permitted to smoke on duty, poorly dressed, the word that came down the line was that some sentries even stood guard
in bedroom slippers.
And no one seemed to mind. Senior officers noticed too. General Alan Brooke of 2 Corps and subsequently 2 BEF wrote after watching a parade of French troops:

Seldom have I seen anything more slovenly and badly turned out. Men unshaven, horses ungroomed, clothes and saddles that did not fit, vehicles dirty and complete lack of pride in themselves and their unit. What shook me most however was the look in the men's faces, [their] disgruntled and insubordinate looks, and, although ordered to give ‘Eyes Left', hardly a man bothered to do so.
1

It was not just the French rank and file who preferred not to look their allies in the eye. The malaise of martial disinterest, of a basic reluctance to
fight
, it transpired, was a contagion that infected the entire French chain of command; a chain of command, moreover, that Britain had agreed could control the tactical deployment of all British troops in France. It was an agreement that was based upon the premise, the unquestioned British assumption, that France would fight and that France would hold. Yet it was a premise that would prove to be fatally flawed. That process of realisation began on 10 May 1940 when
Sitzkrieg
exploded into
blitzkrieg
. The waiting war was over.

As the German High Command had both hoped and predicted, France's generals fell for the sucker punch, the feint. As
Generalfeldmarschall
Von Manstein's
Fall
Gelb
(Plan Yellow) kicked into action, the twenty-nine divisions of General von Bock's Army Group B stormed across Holland and the northern Belgian frontier supported by massed formations of Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers, the Luftwaffe's aerial artillery. As they did so the BEF carried out their pre-planned Operation
David
: they left their carefully prepared defensive positions and lumbered forward obligingly towards the River Dyle in Belgium to block the threat to their front. Even as they abandoned those carefully prepared positions, far to their right, the
forty-five
divisions and massed armoured units of von Rundstedt's Army Group A poured through Luxembourg and the supposedly impenetrable forests of the Ardennes to hook right into the British rear and crash north-westwards towards Calais and the coast. It was what
Generalfeldmarschall
Erich Von Manstein, the author of
Fall Gelb
, called
Sichelschnitt
– the ‘sickle cut' – and sickles have sharp edges. In the days of terror, rout and onslaught that followed, French units collapsed and British forces found themselves in chaotic, headlong retreat westwards towards the coast, their corridor of access through to the channel port of Dunkirk held open by an ever-shrinking British and French rearguard who sacrificed their own chances of escape so that comrades could move back to the coast. These harassed units retreated down a pinched and shrinking corridor that initially was 60 miles deep and between 15 and 25 miles wide. They struggled north-westwards under constant attack from three sides as German artillery, infantry and armoured units hacked into the retreating columns where a rag-tag of jumbled, exhausted and often leaderless units wrecked and then abandoned their weapons, stores and vehicles as they edged closer to the sea.

The leading German Panzer units of General Heintz Guderian's XIX Panzer Korps reached the Channel coast at Abbeville, west of Dunkirk, on 20 May after just ten days of brutal, exhilarating advance. To those dust-caked, red-eyed, sleep-starved, deafened tankers gazing out across the Channel in sudden, bruising silence as engines were switched off after advancing 180 miles since crossing their start lines on 10 May, it must have seemed that the end of the war was in sight.

Yet, if there
was
a miracle of Dunkirk, then perhaps it was the controversial German ‘halt order' of 25 May that stopped German armoured units at Gravelines south-west of Dunkirk for three days to regroup and permit their rear echelon of supplies, ammunition and replacements to catch up. That, and the gift of good Channel weather that ensured mostly light winds and flat seas, permitted that armada of ‘little ships' and Royal Navy warships to pluck a weary BEF from those sandy, smoke-shrouded beaches and shuttle them back to England. Most returned with their personal weapons, yet many came home with little more than helmet and damp, salt-stained battledress to be greeted with buns and sandwiches, hot tea, survivor postcards and a cheering crowd at every railway halt who hailed them as the returning victors they manifestly were not.

At the outset it had been hoped that perhaps 30,000 men might be evacuated in two days by the Royal Navy's well-organised Operation
Dynamo
before German intervention made further evacuation impossible. In the event – and after nine days and nights of heroic endeavour, shared by the French whose First Army, surrounded at Lille, fought on alone for four vital days thus delaying the advance of seven extra German Divisions to Dunkirk – 338,226 French and British troops were lifted off the French beaches and moles of Dunkirk and spirited away to England. Yet 68,111 members of the BEF did
not
return home. Excluding combat casualties, 41,030 British soldiers were left behind to be either wounded or marched into a long captivity. Also left behind were most of the British army's weapons, cased food, ammunition and vehicles. The statistics of loss make sober reading, for every round of ammunition, every Bren gun and rifle, every hand grenade, mortar round and field gun would be needed in the fight to repel the invasion of Britain which must now surely follow. Yet left behind in France were 2,500 artillery pieces, 377,000 tons of stores, 162,000 tons of petrol and 68,000 tons of ammunition. Britain's military cupboard was now bare. Little wonder then that the early Local Defence Volunteers drilled with broom handles while troops on the south coast practised rapid deployment from corporation omnibuses. And 65,000 vehicles and 20,000 motorcycles had also been left behind for the Germans.