The Nazi Hunters (6 page)

There was no answering cry of, ‘
Bamboula vous attend!
’

Instead, the Maquis got to work disentangling his parachute – it constituted dozens of yards of highly prized silk – while trying to cadge some cigarettes. One grabbed Hislop’s Bergen, another his helmet, and a third the downright murderous leg bag, and together they made their way towards the firelit muster point, where dozens of excitable figures could be seen flitting through the shadows.

Unbeknown to Hislop, their stick commander, Druce, had suffered a similar, yet far more debilitating equipment malfunction. Druce’s leg bag had dropped only as far as his right foot and then become stuck fast. He’d landed heavily, the weight forcing him to fall backwards and suffer a savage blow to his head. In spite of his helmet, Druce had suffered a bad case of concussion, and he could be heard ‘babbling nonsense’ to anyone who would listen.

On the opposite side of the DZ, one of the stick’s ‘old sweats’, SAS man Ron Crossfield, was also in trouble. Crossfield had joined the Army in 1934 and had several brothers in uniform. While trying to avoid one of the raging bonfires, the veteran operator had landed in a mature stand of trees. As he crashed through the thick branches his helmet and leg bag were torn away, and he came to rest swinging to and fro, with no idea of the extent of the drop below him.

Regardless, Crossfield punched the quick-release catch on his parachute harness . . . and fell. It was a good 15 feet, but at least his landing was cushioned by a thick carpet of pine needles. He came to his feet, only to see a shadowy figure dashing towards him through the trees. He grabbed his pistol, but the cry of ‘
Très bien, Angleterre!
’ (Very good, England!) stayed his hand.

Druce’s force represented the first Allied parachutists ever to drop into the Vosges, an area of mountainous terrain of approaching 2,500 square miles. The names of the tallest peaks attest to the mixed Franco-German heritage of the region. The highest basks in the very French moniker of the Grand Ballon, but the next two in line are the entirely Teutonic-sounding Storkenkopf and Hohneck – testifying to just how close the airdrop would bring these men to German soil.

Just 20 miles due east of the drop zone lay the border, marked by the line of the mighty River Rhine. Very few navigable passes cut through the Vosges, but if the British soldiers – together with the Maquis – could sow havoc and confusion here, then they were to switch to a very specific task: they were to seize and hold one of those passes, so enabling Patton’s armour to punch through, and to reach the Rhine before the bridges across it could be blown.

Such grand designs were very far from the minds of Hislop, Crossfield and a dazed Druce as they took stock. They found themselves surrounded by a hugely curious and excitable crowd. From the way in which the Maquis poked and fingered them, grabbed and pumped their hands and kept repeating the same enthusiastic greetings –
‘Bienvenus! Bonne chance! Bonne chance!’
 – it seemed to Hislop that they might as well have been Martians descended from a spacecraft.

It was approaching three o’clock in the morning before some semblance of order was wrestled out of the chaos. As the parachutists mustered, so others reported in with injuries. One SAS man had burned his hand while fighting with the stubborn cord of his leg bag. Another had sprained his knee. But no one – the babbling, incoherent Druce included – seemed incapable of walking, which was of utmost importance right now.

Priorities had to be established, and quickly. Another aircraft was due any minute, so the marker fires had to be re-stoked. Once the second airdrop was complete, the party needed to load up, move off and melt into the hills. Come daybreak, there had to be zero evidence that a force of parachutists had landed here, which meant dragging the silk chutes down from the trees, stamping out and scattering the fires, and clearing away all debris.

The majority of the second aircraft’s cargo was to be non-human – weaponry and war materiel for the Maquis. But one of the first signs that the drop was underway was a piercing cry that rang out from the darkness.

A figure had descended under his chute, the cursed leg bag causing him to badly twist his ankle and break his toes upon landing. The injured man was Sergeant Kenneth Seymour, and he found that his pain was so acute that he was unable to move without removing his right boot. He would need to be stretchered if he were to make the journey into the hills.

An even greater concern was that Seymour’s radio had been ensconced within his leg bag, and it too had been smashed upon landing. Bereft of a wireless set, Seymour and his fellows’ very specific mission here was at risk of being rendered all but redundant.

Seymour was no SAS man. He and his two colleagues – Captain Victor Gough and Frenchman Lieutenant Guy Boisarrie – constituted a highly specialist team only loosely attached to Druce’s force. They were SOE agents, and part of a recently formed unit dubbed ‘the Jedburghs’. The 300-strong unit shared its name with the small Scottish town of Jedburgh, but it had been named largely at random, so as to reveal little of its secretive purpose to a watchful enemy.

Seymour, Gough and Boisarrie made up a Jedburgh team code-named JACOB. Their specific mission was to link up with the Maquis leadership, serving as what we might today call ‘military advisers’, forming an army of resistance to hit the enemy from within, even as the Allied forces broke out of their beachheads. Indeed, Seymour’s Bergen, like that of his two fellow ‘Jeds’, was stuffed full of hundreds of thousands of French francs: money with which to fund the raising of a bloody insurrection across the Vosges.

The DZ they had landed upon was controlled by one Colonel Gilbert Grandval, a man of great local prestige and a renowned Resistance leader. Grandval – code-named ‘Maximum’ – commanded a band of fighters a few hundred strong, styled the Alsace Maquis. He’d promised the SOE that some 25,000 men were ready to rise up against the hated Boche. All he needed was the raw hardware – weapons, ammunition, explosives – with which to arm such a force. It was Gough, Boisarrie and Seymour’s task to ensure that he got it, this being the unique role that the Jedburghs fulfilled within the SOE.

But it wasn’t going to be easy. Deprived as they now were of a radio set, the biggest challenge was going to be communicating Grandval’s needs to SOE headquarters back in London.

Never one to eschew unconventional warfare, Churchill had thrown his weight behind the arming of the French Resistance. In the spring of 1944 he’d ordered arms drops to the Maquis to be greatly increased. He cabled President Roosevelt to inform him that he was keen to raise guerrilla armies across France ‘à la Tito’ – a reference to the then Yugoslavia’s wartime guerrilla leader – and urging the Americans to join the party.

Responding to Churchill’s prompting, it was to be the Americans who completed the largest of such airdrops. In Operations Zebra, Cadillac, Buick and Grassy, massed ranks of US bombers with fighter escorts had carried out a series of stunning daylight operations. In Operation Cadillac alone, some 300 American Liberator bombers, with P51 Mustangs as escorts, had dropped 400 tonnes of arms to the Resistance forces ranged across the Dordogne.

Cadillac had taken place on 14 July, Bastille Day – which commemorates the start of the French Revolution and the founding of the French Republic – and the parachutes were symbolically painted in the Tricolour, the colours of the French flag. Brigadier Colin McVean-Gubbins, chief of the SOE, had hailed Cadillac as one of the ‘most important parachute drops of the war’.

In 1940 McVean-Gubbins – better known to all simply as ‘M’ – had fought rearguard actions in Norway, organizing striking companies to wage a guerrilla war to hold up the advancing Germans: blowing bridges, sabotaging railways and mining roads. Both he and Churchill were diehard advocates of such tactics, and in their minds the French Resistance constituted an ideal guerrilla force in the making – one that would help them wage ‘total war’ against the enemy.

Which is where the Jedburghs came in.

Grassy – the most recent mass airdrop – had taken place just four days previous to the Op Loyton advance party being parachuted in. Gough’s Team Jacob had been sent in with clear instructions to launch an Operation GRASSY for the Vosges. They’d been met on the ground by the 800-strong force of the Alsace Maquis, but only fifty of them appeared to be armed, and mostly with obsolete French rifles somehow kept hidden from the Germans during four years of a brutal occupation. There was clearly a great deal of work to be done.

Team Jacob was typical of the Jedburghs’ make-up – a three-man unit, including a native French speaker (Boissarie), a radio specialist (Seymour) and an officer, Captain Gough. Many of the Jed teams would be Anglo-American in composition, because the Jedburghs were in part an American innovation. The Americans had recently formed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was loosely based upon the SOE model, and the Jedburghs were a joint SOE-OSS enterprise.

The Jeds – like the SAS and the Phantoms – were a wholly unorthodox lot. One of their oldest recruits was also one of their most renowned. At fifty-something, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Hutchinson had had an eventful war already, being captured and escaping at least once. Fearing the enemy would possess a photo of him, Hutchinson not only adopted a
nom de guerre
, but he went as far as altering his face with plastic surgery, subjecting himself to a ‘nose job’, and getting a piece of bone removed from his hip and grafted onto his chin to alter his profile. His appearance suitably disguised, Hutchinson would lead one of the first Jed units into action in France.

In essence, the Op Loyton advance party was a classic Special Forces unit of the time: the Jedburghs, tasked to link up with the Maquis; the Phantoms, tasked to establish communications with London; and the SAS, tasked to fight the enemy.

The 26-year-old Captain Gough was a typical Jedburgh. Dark haired, dark eyed and of mesmerizing appearance, Gough had spent the early part of the war in a shadowy force known as the British Resistance Organisation (BRO). The BRO was an early brainchild of McVean-Gubbins, and its remit was to wage a war of resistance should – as had seemed likely in 1940 – the Germans invade mainland Briton.

In essence, the BRO was a very British version of the Maquis. The BRO fighting units were made up of those who knew the countryside intimately – gamekeepers, poachers and agricultural workers – with caches of arms and explosives hidden throughout the forests, dells and dens of the mother country. There were a smattering of professional soldiers serving as a leadership cadre, and Gough – a country lad born and bred – had been one of those.

As the threat of invasion had receded, Gough had cast around for a new role, finding his way into the Jeds. He had received a fine education, first at Hereford Cathedral School and then Temple Technical College, Bristol, where he trained as a mechanical engineer. Something of an amateur cartoonist, it was Gough who had designed the Jedburghs’ distinctive cap badge, which consisted of a pair of white parachute wings flanking a red disk, with the letters ‘SF’ (for Special Forces) stamped in silver across it.

In his recruitment questionnaire Gough had stated his hobbies as ‘Wireless, Riding and Shooting’. He also expressed interest in learning foreign languages, undertaking ‘outdoor work’ and ‘going abroad’. In getting recruited into the Jedburghs and deployed on Op Loyton, it seemed as if – for now, at least – all of Gough’s Christmases had come at once.

During their rigorous pre-deployment training, the Jeds had adopted their own battle cry: the very un-British sounding ‘Some shit!’ It had been inspired by a bunch of American recruits who were put through the brutal selection course at the grand, 600-acre country estate of Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire. Jed selection had a very high dropout rate, and anyone stepping out of line was forced to perform rigorous PT exercises. The American recruits had responded to the physical punishment with the comment, ‘Some shit!’, and it had stuck.

But right now, as the first light of dawn touched the skies over the Vosges, Jedburgh team Jacob was in some degree of ‘shit’ of its own: no radio; a signaller too injured to walk; and facing a long hike into the high ground, where the Alsace Maquis had sited their remote and most easily defended bases.

Running roughly north–south and parallel to the Rhine, the Vosges constitute a solid barrier of granite and red sandstone barring any easy movement west-to-east or vice versa. Over the aeons, these mountains have been eroded into a series of dome-shaped massifs. Though densely forested, conditions on the highest reaches are so harsh that tree cover tends to peter out, leaving bald patches atop a shaggy mane. Snow sits on the summits for nine months of the year.

It was on one of those inhospitable peaks that Gilbert Grandval had established the local Maquis headquarters. And it was there that Druce’s force were to head, carrying the heavy supplies that even now were thumping down all around, as the aircraft made repeated runs over the DZ, dropping dozens of parachute-borne containers.

Those containers were simply constructed and designed to fit into the aircraft’s quick-release clamps, which had once unleashed salvoes of bombs. Each was fitted with a shock absorber at the tip, one designed to cushion the landing. The ‘C Type’ container was a bomb-shaped cylinder 68 inches long by 15 wide, and hinged down its length to aid opening. The ‘H Type’ was of similar dimensions, but compartmentalized internally, and designed to carry more delicate loads. Each weighed some 500 pounds and came complete with a shovel, so it could be buried and hidden, once emptied of its load.