The Nazi Hunters (22 page)

Of those 519 deportees, few were destined to return. They would be swallowed up by the
Nacht und Nebel
 – the night and the fog.

During the Moussey round-up the Gestapo chief had harangued the villagers, making it clear that the Germans knew there were British parachutists operating in the region, and even driving about in jeeps. The most severe punishment was about to be meted out to the Moussey inhabitants, as a warning to others who might be tempted to harbour ‘terrorists’. No mercy would be shown.

‘But we will allow for one exception,’ the Gestapo chief announced. ‘Any man who will step forward with information about these parachutists, he will be allowed to go free.’

Everyone knew where the SAS base was situated. The Gestapo chief repeated his offer. Not a single Moussey villager stepped forward to speak.

Later, during the Château de Belval and Schirmek interrogations, the same offer was put to the men, in more private and undoubtedly more persuasive circumstances. But even under torture, the villagers held firm. No German forces arrived at the SAS’s deep mountain base. Indeed, Colonel Franks’ men were able to keep operating from their Basse de Lieumont hideout, and there wasn’t the slightest suggestion that they had been given away.

Colonel Franks had only made it back to that base by the skin of his teeth. Running from the enemy above the Celles Valley, Franks, Lieutenant Dill and their small force had made for the rough but ready sanctuary of Père George’s farm. They’d lain low in the staunchly communist smallholder’s barn as the manhunt ran its course all around them. Finally it had petered out, and the 2 SAS commander and his men had been able to return to their Basse de Lieumont redoubt.

They were minus their two jeeps, which meant that only four remained, and the Rabodeau Valley in which they had made their base of operations had lost some 500 of its inhabitants, but Colonel Franks remained undaunted. Indeed, he was burdened by a sense of guilt at the fate visited on the largely innocent villagers, and a part of him felt as if they had to redouble their efforts so that the people of Moussey might be avenged.

Writing immediately after Op Loyton, Colonel Franks made his feelings very clear. ‘All the villagers of Moussey were first class . . . In Moussey, where we were welcomed, we were obviously looked upon as the spearhead of the Liberation Force. The fact that we have now left the area and brought such misery and unhappiness to the villagers, is a point which should not be overlooked, and I feel they will consider themselves let down by us.’

In the immediate aftermath of the 24 September mass deportations, Colonel Franks thirsted for one thing only: vengeance. Henceforth, those who had targeted the French villagers would in turn get hit hard by the SAS. They would cut off the head of the snake. No German officer should be able to sleep soundly in his bed or travel the roads of the Vosges in comfort, as long as the SAS had bullets with which to fight.

First blood came quickly. On 25 September – the day after the mass deportations – one of Franks’ foot patrols made it back to base. The force had been running low on explosives, especially tyre-bursters. But a superlative SAS operator and demolitions man named Lieutenant Silly had managed to improvise some DIY tyre-bursters, using plastic explosives combined with fog signals.

Placed on one of the main resupply routes running up the valley, Lieutenant Silly had got lucky. Two vehicles approached his home-made mines; both were German staff cars. He’d used a generous amount of PE. The two vehicles were ripped asunder. Those few who’d escaped death in the explosion were cut down by the patrol’s Bren gun, as they stumbled from the burning vehicles. A truck acting as escort was also hit by the blasts and all its occupants killed.

That same day Major Power was back in action, and his ‘jeeping activities’ were to score another direct hit on the enemy’s high command. Travelling in two jeeps they came to a road junction and spotted their prey: a staff car passing west to east. It was travelling at around 65 mph and was 400–500 yards away – at the far end of the Vickers’ accurate reach.

They opened fire regardless. Multiple Vickers hammered rounds into the target, Major Power seeing tracer sparking all around the staff car and blanketing it with fire. The vehicle careered around the far bend, disappearing from sight, but already it had been peppered full of holes.

By now, Op Loyton had eight staff cars in the bag, and counting. The message had been sent: no German officer could travel the roads of the Vosges in safety.

And fate was to press another opportunity for revenge into Major Powers’ hands. Returning to a temporary hideout in the woods, he was approached by a local Frenchman. He introduced himself as being a Maquis commander called Marcel. Marcel produced a sheaf of documents from deep inside his jacket. It was the entire order of battle (orbat) of the 21 Panzer Division, which had been passed to him just two days before.

The 21 Panzer Division had distinguished itself in the North African Campaign, when it had spearheaded many of Rommel’s assaults. Again under Rommel’s command, the 21st had been heavily engaged in the fighting on the Normandy beachheads, being the only Panzer division to engage Allied forces on the first day of the landings. And right now, the 21st was one of the key armoured units bolstering Himmler’s desperate defence of the Vosges.

The papers listed the division’s command structure, its armour, its positions, their major defences, and the distribution of the unit’s men-at-arms. This kind of information was priceless. With the papers in hand Major Power thanked Marcel, loaded up the jeeps and headed direct for their Basse de Lieumont base.

Colonel Franks’ radio report to London, sent the following morning, reflects the vital import of these papers. ‘Have captured documents re order of battle, ammunition stats etc. . . . Two-One Panzer. One and Two Panzer Grenadier regiment. Document . . . states 112 Panzer Brigade has two Panthers, 17 PZ KW, four expecting five Panthers . . . Any hope RV American patrol to hand over.’

The ‘PZ KW’ was the Panzer IV medium tank, the workhorse of the German armoured divisions; the Panther was its more modern, and potent replacement.

As Franks’ message made clear, such a thick wad of papers could not be transmitted via radio. But if they could get the orbat into General Patton’s hands, it could prove a game-changing piece of intelligence. Of course, Patton’s advance having stalled, no ‘American patrols’ were anywhere near the Op Loyton party right then – so it would need a volunteer to carry the priceless intel across the lines.

There was only one sensible candidate: Captain Henry Druce, of course.

Chapter Fourteen

Captain Druce had become rather blasé about wandering around the Vosges hoodwinking Germans. He’d taken to riding a bicycle about Moussey and nearby villages, dressed in civvies – battered top hat included – to recce potential targets. Druce believed that bluff and front were all that he needed to ease his way through checkpoints.

On one occasion he’d stopped for a drink in a bar where he had a regular source of intelligence, in the form of the barman. He’d gone to use the loo, only to hear a gun being cocked outside the door. Fearing he was about to get cornered, he’d dived out of the loo window. The only means of escape was a child’s bicycle propped against one wall. He’d jumped on it and peddled off as shots rang around his ears, so making his getaway.

From Colonel Franks’ note in the war diary, a casual reader could be forgiven for thinking that Druce’s new mission to cross enemy lines was going to be a walk in the park: ‘I decided to send Cpt. Druce through to contact the Americans, explain our position to them, and to give them . . . the captured documents that Major Power had brought in.’

Druce chose Lou Fiddick – Canadian airman-turned-SAS Vosges veteran – to accompany him on this special mission. These two men were about to attempt to sneak through terrain where two mighty armies were locked into a grim and brutal confrontation, the German forces hunkered down behind massive fortifications, gun emplacements and booby-trapped bridges and roads. But, if anything, Druce was even more offhand about the mission’s risks than his colonel.

‘I awoke at 0300 hours . . . and prepared to leave for the Americans . . .’ Druce noted in the war diary. ‘F/O [flight officer] Fiddick came with me and we reached St. Prayel by 1900 hours. Here we met two Milice who only had pistols to our Tommy Guns, so they ran away. After dark we bumped into a patrol . . . who heard us but could not find us, although they passed within a yard. We could not shoot them owing to the proximity of the river Meurthe, which we were about to cross.’

Fiddick was slightly more expressive about their desperate attempt to sneak through the enemy lines. ‘Suddenly, we were challenged by a couple of sentries. They were armed and we were armed, and so we had this kind of cowboy-style stand-off where we just stared at each other. Then they backed slowly off. The tension levels were pretty high by now.’

‘We clung to our guns and were ready to shoot our way out,’ Druce conceded of this incident, which occurred on the approach to the bridge over the River Meurthe, ‘which I’m glad to say we didn’t have to do because we were not very good shots and we couldn’t see in the dark. Anyhow, they disappeared and we went on to cross the bridge.’

The Germans had set their heaviest defences along both banks of the River Meurthe. If Druce and Fiddick were challenged while midway across, they would be sandwiched between those two defensive lines, and there would be little chance of escape. As they sneaked onto the bridge, a cry of alarm rang out in the darkness.

‘I had a very bad time – fear – when that bloody man on the river challenged us,’ Druce admitted. ‘I thought we really had had it at that stage . . . We had this patrol walking backwards and forwards; really, they were within a couple of yards of us, and that was a bad moment. But they didn’t hear us; they didn’t see us. It was mousey-quiet. And anyhow they moved off and we moved over across the bridge.’

Having somehow sneaked across the River Meurthe without getting killed or captured, the two men found themselves in amongst the Germans’ main defences in the depths of the night. They only realized that they’d reached the enemy’s front-line positions when they tumbled into one of their trenches.

‘Stumbling into the German trench was a little bit unsettling,’ conceded Fiddick. As he and Druce crouched there in the darkness wondering if they’d been detected, they could hear German patrols moving to either side of them. The labyrinthine trench system was like something out of the First World War, and somehow Druce and Fiddick had to find a way through.

‘We retired back into the bush a little distance,’ Fiddick recalled. From there the two men tried to work out a safe route. Beyond the trenches lay no-man’s-land, on the far side of which lay their second greatest challenge: approaching the Allied lines. It would be a pity to make it past the enemy, only to be shot by their own side.

‘A thing I guess I’ll always remember was crawling across that open field just on the far side of the trenches,’ Fiddick recalled. ‘I’m not sure if it was planted with potatoes or whatever it was, but we more or less had to crawl across this open field to avoid being seen by anyone who was in the trench.’

Having slithered through the darkness undetected, Druce and Fiddick stumbled into a second trench system. This, it turned out, was occupied by the 1st Spahis Regiment, part of General Leclerc’s Free French forces, known as ‘La Division Leclerc’. Leclerc had been one of the first to make his way to Britain under General Charles de Gaulle, raising a French army in exile – which was now fighting shoulder to shoulder with General Patton’s 3rd Army.

Against all odds, Druce and Fiddick had made it.

Lou Fiddick’s sojourn in the Vosges would end with the handing over of those precious documents to the American high command. He was ordered to return to his Canadian Air Force regiment. Not so Henry Carey Druce. As Colonel Franks’ last working radio set had just gone on the blink, he’d had no choice but to ask the ever-resourceful Druce to sneak back across the lines, bringing some radio spare parts to the SAS base set in the heart of the Vosges.

Yet at that base things were looking increasingly troubled. In the forty-eight hours that it had taken Druce and Fiddick to cross the lines, Franks’ force had been in action, but not all of it was by any means successful. A foot patrol had returned to base, having derailed a train. They’d struck some 10 miles south of Moussey, to the east of the town of St. Dié – showing how far and wide the SAS were still able to launch such attacks.

Strike one to the SAS.

But a jeep patrol led by Colonel Franks had driven into a savage ambush, and the colonel and his men had been lucky to escape alive. Indeed, they’d barely made it out of their base before the attack had hit them. Franks had been forced to abandon his mission – an attempt to reach Pierre-Percée and link up with Major Dennis Reynolds and Captain Whately-Smith. The two SAS officers – one of whom was still nursing his wounds – had been hidden in their cave for weeks now, and their every effort to reunite with the main force had been stymied.

Strike two to the enemy.

By now – 28 September – it was becoming increasingly clear that mounting further jeeping operations would be tantamount to suicide. Every village along the valley was garrisoned by heavy German forces – amounting to several thousand troops all told.

‘All roads . . . were therefore barred to jeeps,’ noted the war diary. ‘Although jeeps could shoot their way out, they could not return, as presumably Germans would have strong M.G. [machine gun] posts in anticipation.’