The Lost Band of Brothers (27 page)

They moved up the 80-foot cliff in single file, the rattle of any dislodged pebble and the chink of weapons and equipment masked by the rumble of surf and the heavy, echoing boom of the sea in the chasms and deeply cleft inlets below. Coiled dannert wire had been used to choke the gully ahead and they cut their way past this only to find their way into the courtyard blocked by a heavy knife-rest wire entanglement. Still no shots, no shout of detection. They scrambled over a wall and dropped into the courtyard, unchallenged and silent in their felt-soled boots. Here they broke off into small teams and headed for separate objectives. John Burton and Peter Kemp made for the wireless tower where, hurtling up a steep staircase, fingers on triggers, they found an empty transmitting room crammed with wireless sets, generators and electrical equipment. Nearby were an open notebook, code books and signal pads. The final haul included a code book for harbour defence vessels, signal books, records, a W/T diary of calls sent and received, procedure signals, personal letters and photographs, identity books, passes and ration cards, the station log, the ration log, the light log and even a German gas mask and cape. Rich pickings.

Appleyard and Winter’s objective was the main light tower itself: ‘The door was open and after a lightning ascent of eighty feet of spiral staircase we found the light-room empty!’ The lighthouse and the engine room were both deserted: all seven men of the German garrison were in the main building, either in bed, in the living room or getting ready to turn in. Surprise was complete: ‘The whole garrison were taken completely by surprise. I have never seen men look so amazed and terrified at the same time!’
20
There was a moment of humour too. ‘Long John,’ Captain The Lord Howard, remembered:

I was leading a German down the corridor and in those days it was unusual for people to have long hair and he had very long hair tied up in a hair net and as I was walking him down I suddenly heard Gus’s voice behind me saying: ‘F-Francis, you can’t take that! It’s … it’s a woman!
21

March-Phillipps admitted later in his official report: ‘A characteristic of those in bed was the wearing of hairnets which caused the Commander of the party to mistake one of them for a woman.’
22
Hairnets notwithstanding, not a shot had been fired, no violence had been used and the prisoners, to a man, were reported as being ‘very docile’. SS these were not. Many still in their pyjamas, the prisoners were hustled away back down the cliffs to the waiting Goatley that was being skilfully held off the rocks by Graham Hayes and Ian Warren. Re-embarkation, however, brought its own problems: the prisoners had to be slid down a 45-degree slope and then man-handled one by one into the Goatley as she rode the heavy swell with the gap between rocks and boat varying between 5 and 20 feet. This was accomplished without mishap and the raiding party then began to climb aboard. They had been ashore just thirty-five minutes.

Meanwhile, up at the lighthouse, the radio had been smashed into pieces by John Burton wielding an axe – gunfire might have alerted Germans elsewhere, for Alderney was only a few miles due east. The retreating raiders brought back down the cliffs the garrison’s old-fashioned, bolt-action Steyr-pattern rifles and an Orlikon small-calibre cannon. Two large boxes of stick grenades – one of which was open – were left behind. It had been intended to bring the weapons home as war booty but they were dumped in the sea to save weight as the overcrowded Goatley was paddled back in the darkness towards
The Little Pisser.
Luckily, she had already changed position. MTB 344 had dragged her anchor to the north and Lt Bourne had weighed anchor and was already closing down on Casquets when the Goatley began her return with nineteen on board. By this time, however, two of the raiders had been injured: Peter Kemp had been stabbed in the right thigh by a fighting knife held by one of the men as he lurched into the Goatley just as it dropped away on the swell. His wound was deep, stiff and painful. It would take a visit to the naval hospital in Portland, a shot of morphia and a minor operation to set him back on the road to full recovery. Appleyard’s injury, however, was potentially more serious and longer-lasting. He wrote breezily to his parents:

I was left as the last man [ashore] and so, of course, had no one to hold the boat in for me and no rope to slide down into it. I had to swim about twenty feet out to the boat which, as soon as the tension came off the bowline, was swirled back from the rocks by the swell and I crocked my ankle whilst sliding down the rock into the water – my leg got doubled underneath somehow. However it is nothing really and should be strong again in a week or ten days. In fact, his ankle was more than just ‘crocked’: the bottom of his tibia – the shinbone – was fractured.

The men of SSRF boarded MTB 344 at 0135. They arrived back at Portland at 0400, where Sergeant Tom Winter stepped ashore wearing a captured German helmet: ‘You look like a bloody Hun’, was March-Phillipps’ parting comment.

Winter’s sense of release, of careless, post-raid euphoria was perhaps understandable. In the cold light of dawn, however, the discovery of such an armoury of weapons in the lighthouse gave pause for sober thought: ‘If a good watch had been kept, or if any loud noises had been made on the approach or landing, the rock could have been rendered pretty well impregnable by seven determined men,’
23
wrote March-Phillipps in his after-action report. Luckily for him and his men,
Obermaat
Mundt,
Funkgefreitern
Dembowy, Kraemer and Reineck, and
Gefreitern
Abel, Kepp and Klatwitter were not men of such calibre. Back in Britain, according to Appleyard, they were all soon ‘talking quite well’.

Cross-Channel raiding would always depend upon skill, daring and a high level of training. But it would also depend upon luck, upon encountering a series of bored, slack, inattentive sentries in an army not noted for failing to learn from past mistakes or habitual inefficiencies. Perhaps sensing that it was asking a lot to expect every operation to run as smoothly as
Dryad
, Appleyard confided to his father:

Don’t tell the others about this, Dad. I tell you because if it should happen that one time I get left behind on one of these parties and so am out of action for the rest of the war, I should like you to feel that I’d had my share of the fun and that it wasn’t entirely a wasted effort.
24

This time, on Operation
Barricade
, the men of SSRF had been lucky. They would need that luck to continue.

But, in that summer of 1942, it looked like being a long war.

  
1
.  DEFE 2/109.

  
2
.  
No Colours or Crest
, 49.

  
3
.  DEFE 2/109.

  
4
.  Ibid.

  
5
.  The ‘plastic bombs’ which caused such devastation were evidently not ordinary metal-cased No 36 Mills fragmentation grenades. A possibility is that the men from SSRF were using an early variant of the No 80 WP (White Phosphorus) grenade which came into general issue early in 1943. The effect on unprotected troops of the phosphorus – self-igniting in the presence of air to a range of about 30 feet – could most certainly be described as ‘devastating’. There is also the possibility that SSRF were being used as ‘guinea-pigs’ to carry out operational trails with a new sort of anti-personnel device developed by SOE scientists under Colonel G.T.T. Rheam at Special Training School 17 at Brickendonbury near Hereford. This would certainly justify the inclusion of a detailed description in March-Phillipps’ after-action report of the plastic bombs’ effect as witnessed from both land and sea. It would also go some way to explaining why the ‘plastic bombs’ as described are not given a recognisable name at this stage. This is the explanation favoured by this author. These ‘plastic bombs’ most probably evolved into the ‘Grenades, P.E. No 6’ used on Operation
Fahrenheit
(
see
Chapter 18).

  
6
.  DEFE 2/109.

  
7
.  
No Colours or Crest
, 49–50.

  
8
.  DEFE 2/109.

  
9
.  
The Commandos 1940–1946
, 149.

10
.  Commando Veterans Forum.

11
.  Still other sources suggest that, although there was indeed a protection team charged with Nissenthall’s ‘protection’ and possible liquidation, it was not composed of members of SOE/SSRF but by ten Riflemen of A Company, South Saskatchewen Regiment (SSR).

12
.  BBC Henrietta.

13
.  Channel pilot.

14
.  
Geoffrey
, 115.

15
.  
No Colours or Crest
, 50.

16
.  
Anders Lassen
, 79.

17
.  
No Colours or Crest
, 51.

18
.  
Geoffrey
, 115–16.

19
.  DEFE 2/109.

20
.  
Geoffrey
, 116.

21
.  BBC Henrietta.

22
.  DEFE 2/109.

23
.  
Geoffrey
, 117–18.

24
.  DEFE 2/109.

No medals this time, but plenty of praise for the unit: Bourne for his boat-handling and Appleyard for his navigation. There was a telegram too from Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Chief of Combined Operations. Appleyard recorded:

The ‘battle of Whitehall' is, of course, now going a lot better. Never was the old adage ‘nothing succeeds like success' more apparent, and our few small successes have helped enormously in London. In fact, people now are only too willing to give us what we ask. Gus has had several interviews with Mountbatten, and he has written us a personal letter of congratulation and encouragement.
1

The man with a sharp, aristocratic eye to his own advancement, and who had made sure newspapermen went in with the first wave at Dieppe, authorised the publication and general release of a snappy little booklet entitled
Combined Operations
. Its Chapter Three – ‘The Steel Hand from the Sea' – lifted Appleyard's restrained account of the
Dryad
raid and turned it into the sort of breathless panegyric typical of the period:

A slight noise – it may have been the click of the door as it closed softly – caused him [Obermaat Mundt] to turn in his chair. Leaning against the door were two men with black faces [sic] wearing crumpled uniforms, somewhat damp around the ankles. Two Colt automatics, negligently poised, were in their hands. He got slowly to his feet and passed a hand across his eyes but, when he dropped it, the figures by the doorway were still there. Chief Mate Munte [sic] began to sway and, as one of the special service men stepped forward, collapsed fainting with terror on the floor.
2

There was more in a similar vein. There may have been reporters at Dieppe. There certainly wasn't one on
Dryad
. SOE in London was appalled, and not just because of
Dryad
, but because of wider-ranging concerns about Combined Operations' trumpet-blowing as it related to their mutual security. Not everything in the relationship between SOE and Combined Operations, it appears, was sweetness and light. Describing what he called ‘The more important points of difficulty' between SOE and Combined Operations, SOE's ‘CD', now Sir Charles Hambro, put on record a few months later:

I have been much exercised in my mind lately over the lack of operational security shown by the CCO [Chief of Combined Operations] Organisation in connection with those operations in which our own people have taken part. I have spoken to General Haydon who is the Deputy of CCO and Brigadier Gubbins has also written him a letter. I hope as a result that things will improve, but the thirst for publicity amongst CCO's staff is, I fear, much removed from the SOE policy of keeping their light under a bushel. As an example, I was slightly horrified to hear that CCO were producing a booklet of their achievements in which the description of a raid on Norway included details of how the local Norwegians had helped them – the local Norwegians being in some cases our own SOE people.

Hambro went on to claim current plans for co-ordination:

will avoid the two organisations making plans to attack the same objectives, but in their thirst for activity the CCO staff are inclined to make plans to attack objectives of a type that would definitely come within the SOE charter and in fact would be more successful and less expensively attacked by SOE methods.
3

Hambro was writing to SOE's Chairman, Lord Selborne, in late December 1942. Earlier that same month Combined Operations mounted Operation
Frankton
, the intrepid canoe raid by ten Royal Marines on Axis shipping in Bordeaux docks that later entered legend as the Cockleshell Heroes
.
The attack by kayak was sanctioned because it was perceived as the only way such ships could be reached. But it wasn't. From late July that same year, SOE had their own team of agents with explosives on the same docks at the same time ready to attack the same ships. The incident became notorious and was cited as an example of just how bad co-operation could sometimes become between two essentially rival organisations.
4
That December Sir Charles Hambro warmed to his subject:

I think it is difficult for the CCO staff in planning their operations to realise in every case what political repercussions, especially on SOE, result from some of their operations. In fact, the damage done to SOE and SIS is very often out of all proportion to the results achieved by the raid … CCO [Mountbatten] is always ready to consider any suggestions which we may have in this respect, but if you [Lord Selborne] get the occasion to impress on him the necessity for consulting us as early as possible in his planning it would be a good thing.
5