The Nazi Hunters (12 page)

But for the war, few outsiders might ever have heard of Moussey. Tucked away from all major roads, its houses trace the course of a small mountain stream running along the valley floor. Before the war some 1,100 villagers lived there, subsisting on farming, forestry and the local textile factory. There was a
mairie
(the mayor’s office), a few shops and one or two cafés lining the village street, and Abbé Gassman’s church.

On the surface there was nothing to mark this place out as the abode of heroes.

Chapter Seven

It wasn’t until 22 August – approaching a week after the launch of Waldfest – that matters began to take a turn for the better for Druce and his men. As Moussey was the heartland of the Resistance, sooner or later the scattered remnants of the Op Loyton advance party were drawn into its embrace.

At dusk, Druce said a fond – and, he suspected, temporary – farewell to Mme Rossi, and set off once more for the forest. Guided by a recently returned Lieutenant LeFranc, he was taken to a midnight rendezvous in the hills above the sleeping village. Camped in the deep woods were the operation’s survivors, including downed Canadian airman and now honorary SAS man Lou Fiddick, Jedburgh Victor Gough, Hislop and the baby-faced but fearless SAS Lieutenant, David Dill.

Three men were missing: Lodge and Davis, who Druce knew for sure were dead and buried in the Moussey churchyard, and Hall, who had been killed in the initial firefight by a burst of fire to his chest. With the addition of Fiddick, Druce’s party stood at thirteen. It could have been far worse. With thousands of German troops scouring the valleys and the woodlands, it was a wonder that this many had escaped death or capture.

Lou Fiddick sums up the feelings of those gathered in the forest: ‘After we came down from the hills after being ambushed . . . I felt fear, attached to a desperation really. Sitting in the woods just outside of Moussey not really knowing which way to turn. David Dill and I lay there for about two days not knowing whether to go ahead or to go back. I think that was one of the worst moments.’

Their forest camp was a rough-and-ready affair, compared to the Maquis log cabin base at Lac de la Maix. It consisted of little more than some branches woven together at head height, with a tarpaulin thrown over for shelter. Vegetation laid on the ground formed a sleeping platform and kept the worst of the chill away. In the damp early morning, and especially after rain, a fire could be kept burning, the smoke mingling with the low cloud and mist.

But there had been little chance to tend such cheering fires over the past few days. Ever since the first attack, Hislop and his group had been on the run, flitting from one makeshift camp to another. They had moved only at night so as to avoid the German troops, who seemed unwilling to set foot in the forests after dark. A Maquis guide would lead the way as they formed a human chain, each holding on to the man in front’s belt and shuffling ahead into the impenetrable moon shadows.

This would be the way of things for several days now. Since they were bereft of radios to make direct contact with London, all messages had to be routed via the French underground, who had a wireless set secreted at a top-secret location. After his visit to Abbé Gassman, Druce had every confidence in the ability of the local Resistance to hold firm under Waldfest; sure enough, confirmation was duly received via the Maquis’ radio of a planned resupply airdrop.

This time, Druce had chosen a DZ set some 10 miles to the west of Moussey – at Veney, a tiny hamlet just to the east of the village of Neufmaisons – in the hope that this area might be less heavily patrolled by the enemy. He was given the date and time of the airdrop, plus details of a series of coded signals to pass to the aircraft, using torch flashes, to confirm that the DZ was in friendly hands.

For five nights in succession Druce’s party waited in the thick tension and darkness on the Veney DZ, flashlights at the ready – but the only aircraft to pass anywhere near them were identified as being German. Lou Fiddick could recognize an Allied warplane by its engine beat alone, and likewise one of the enemy. The sense of disappointment and frustration was becoming unbearable for Druce and his men.

The unfortunate truth – one of which the SAS captain was painfully unaware – was that this vital airdrop had already gone ahead. The much-needed resupply, plus a stick of fresh SAS fighters, had been parachuted in – only they’d been released over a DZ positioned 20 miles to the west of where Druce’s force was presently waiting.

Veteran SAS Major Peter Power had landed with his nine men in a clearing set on the fringes of the Meurthe-et-Moselle region, which borders the Vosges. Major Power was a renowned SAS operator with a full squadron of sixty men under his command. He’d picked a crack force for what was supposed to be a crucial resupply mission for Operation Loyton, but he’d ended up being dropped in completely the wrong location.

According to the mission’s war diary, the confusion was caused by a series of conflicting messages passed via the French underground to London. ‘Captain Druce had requested reinforcements, but . . . his message was confused with another received the same day . . . We had decided to act on the last, as this was the DZ mentioned in the later signal, although it was considerably further from the area where Capt. Druce was thought to be.’

Of course, none of this would prove much consolation to Druce, Hislop, Gough, Fiddick et al, waiting on the Veney DZ for an airdrop that would never materialize.

Major Power’s SAS stick, plus the dozens of containers carrying weaponry, food and radios, had landed in a forest clearing, to be received with enormous surprise by the assembled Maquis. They had ringed their DZ with signal fires, anticipating a three-man SOE team to drop from the darkened skies. Instead, they’d got ten SAS and several tonnes of war materiel.

Major Power and his stick had been mistakenly released over a Jedburgh drop zone. This was confirmed fairly shortly when a second aircraft flew overhead and three figures descended by parachute. One, a twenty-stone, bearded giant of a man turned out to be Major Oliver Brown, the commander of Jedburgh Team Alastair and the former chief training instructor of the unit.

Having gathered the scattered resupply containers, Major Power rendezvoused with another Jedburgh officer, Arthur ‘Denny’ Denning, whose team had long been embedded with the local Maquis. With the Jedburgh officers’ help, Major Power took stock of the unexpected situation that he now found himself in.

Druce’s force, he knew, was in dire straits. He had a reasonable fix on their location: they were camped out in the forests somewhere around Veney. While he and his men could hardly manhandle the supplies across the rugged mountains that lay in between, they could at least try to get to Druce, so as to bolster his beleaguered party.

Sensing perhaps how difficult that push eastwards might prove, Colonel Franks sent a radio message ordering Major Power to make the best of a bad job. He was to stay put and to work with the local Maquis to sow chaos in the enemy’s rear. That signal was never received. Leaving Major Denning to sort out the vast heap of weaponry and stores, and to distribute it around a very eager Maquis, Major Power prepared to lead his force east into the forest.

The 32-year-old Major Power’s full name was Peter Lancelot John Le Poer Power. A former tea planter from what was then Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka), he’d already been awarded a Mention in Dispatches during SAS operations in Italy and a Military Cross (MC) during a more recent mission in Normandy. He sported a scar on one cheek, the result of a bullet wound received in North Africa, which made his features seem both stronger and more inscrutable. If anyone could get through to relieve Druce, it was Major Power MC, but in pushing eastwards he would be heading into the jaws of Waldfest.

Prior to setting out, the SAS major decided to strike a first blow. Working on information supplied by the Maquis, he ‘selected as the two best bombing targets an SS HQ at Vincey, and a dump of 3 million litres of petrol, at Nomexy’. He radioed through their coordinates to London, and each was hit by an RAF bombing raid.

‘Four hundred SS were killed while parading to move out,’ Major Power reported of the first target in the mission war diary. And of the second: ‘The petrol was all destroyed, and the glows of the fires could be seen over two successive nights.’

Op Loyton had drawn its first blood. The second strike wasn’t long in coming.

Using the plastic explosives and timers delivered in the misplaced airdrop, Major Denning and his Maquis began to make mischief. Under cover of darkness, small charges were dropped into the petrol tanks of German ammunition trucks parked up at a nearby military depot. Fitted with twelve-hour delays, they detonated the following morning, the powerful blasts transforming the now-busy base into a seething fireball.

In the blistering conflagration – the burning petrol ‘cooked-off’ the ammunition in a series of massive explosions – and the firefight that followed, the Germans suffered some eighty casualties. By way of retaliation, their forces surrounded the nearby village of St Remy-aux-Bois, which they suspected of being a hotbed of Maquis activity, and torched it.

Meanwhile, Major Power and his nine SAS men were pushing eastwards on foot. Driven by a burning sense of urgency, the major had managed to borrow enough bicycles from the Maquis to enable his force to up their pace considerably, but taking to the open road while dressed in British uniform increased the risk factor exponentially.

What Major Power needed right now was a reliable guide, one who knew the back routes and the forest tracks that might lead his party safely through the mountains. While camped in the thick cover of the forest some 20 miles west of Druce’s Veney hideout, Major Power met up with a young Maquis girl called Simone, whose reputation amongst the Vosges Resistance had come to rival that of the legendary Jeanne d’Arc.

Barely seventeen years of age, with golden hair and delicate features, Simone combined the grace of a deer with the strength of an ox. Her stunning looks, legendary endurance over the hills, plus her courage and skills as a mountain woman, were coupled with the kind of innate sense for danger more commonly found in a wild animal. Simone offered to guide Major Power through the forests of Baccarat, over the closely guarded River Meurthe, and into the very heart of the Vosges highlands.

With Simone taking up the lead, Major Power’s force struck eastwards with a renewed sense of purpose. But it was now that they received a surprise radio message. According to the war diary, it ordered their force ‘to blow up railway Lunéville – St. Dié at all costs’.
At all costs
: such a missive could not be ignored, no matter how pressing the rendezvous with Druce might be.

The town of St. Dié lay 20 miles south-west of Druce’s area of operations, and the railway offered the enemy a major resupply route through the Vosges Mountains. Major Power decided to split his force. He sent a team of four under one of his best operators, Lieutenant J. McGregor, to sabotage the railway and to block it with a blown-up train. He was to follow on only once that had been achieved. Major Power would continue to push east, to RV with Druce.

By the time McGregor’s force had laid multiple charges along the Lunéville–St. Dié railway line, German units with machine gun posts had taken up positions guarding every bridge spanning the River Meurthe. The route east was now closed to them. Thus McGregor resorted to doing what came naturally to many an SAS operator: causing havoc to the enemy wherever his small band of warriors might find them.

In one instance they felled a massive pine tree to block a major road. The SAS were trained to target high-ranking German officers, for little spreads more terror and confusion amongst the ranks than witnessing your commanding officer getting blown away. In the ensuing ambush McGregor’s force wiped out a senior German commander and his entire entourage. ‘Carbines scored a ½ inch group in the officer’s head,’ McGregor reported, reflecting how accurately he had been targeted.

But McGregor’s supplies were running desperately low. ‘Tightened our belts and took Benzedrine,’ reads his classic war diary entry.

Hunted by an enraged enemy, running low on ammo and explosives, and constantly weakened by lack of food, the tiny force seemed to stumble into Germans at every turn. McGregor decided he had no option but to lead his men towards the only place of relative safety, if they could make it: west towards the Allied lines.

Meanwhile, under Simone’s guidance, Major Power was still pressing eastwards in an effort to reach the beleaguered Op Loyton force. And at their Veney DZ things were looking black indeed for Druce and his men.

There had still been no resupply airdrop, and Druce’s force was constantly being harried by the enemy. Far from chasing a rag-tag army of soldiers retreating in disarray across the German border, the SAS found they were very much the hunted in the Vosges.

‘We were really boxed in trying to save our own skins,’ Druce remarked. ‘The Germans had sent a division from Strasbourg to find us and we were pretty oppressed . . . I was only twenty-three and at that age you don’t really think too hard about what you are doing. But pressure affects men in different ways.’

Matters weren’t helped by the fact that the ranks of the Maquis were awash with wild rumour, much of which was terribly dark. ‘There were fantastic reports of dead, wounded and prisoners,’ recorded Druce in the war diary. ‘Also horrible rumours of Sergeant Seymour having (a) shot himself, (b) been shot and (c) been bayoneted to death. All these stories put us all on our guard.’