On 28 May, 21 Army Group issued the amended order for the SAS Brigade in the impending Operation Overlord; Bill Stirling hadn’t fallen on his sword in vain. Instead of the suicidal mission laid down by SHAEF in its original order of March, the SAS Brigade would carry out 43 missions in France involving the two British regiments, two French regiments and the squadron of Belgian troopers. With the exception of one operation – Titanic (involving a six-man party dropping into Normandy a few hours ahead of the main invasion fleet to spread confusion with dummy parachutes) – all missions would occur deep behind enemy lines with the objective of harassing German forces heading north and attacking their lines of communication.
The honour of leading 1SAS into France went to A and B Squadrons. A Squadron’s operation was codenamed Houndsworth and entailed dropping into the Massif du Morvan, west of Dijon, to cut railway lines between Lyon and Paris, arm and train the numerous local groups of Maquis, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. Operation Bulbasket involved a party of men under the command of Captain John Tonkin parachuting into the Vienne region of France, between Poitiers and Chateauroux, and attacking the Germans whenever possible. Specific orders were flexible with squadron commanders told to use their judgement in the selection of targets.
At the end of May a small trickle of SAS soldiers left their base in Darvel and travelled south to Fairford aerodrome in Gloucestershire, among them lieutenants Ian Stewart, Norman ‘Puddle’ Poole and Ian Wellsted. When they arrived at Fairford they were told of their mission: Poole would be leading Operation Titanic and Stewart and Wellsted would be the advance reconnaissance party for Houndsworth. ‘From then our days were spent in studying maps and aerial photographs,’ recalled Wellsted, ‘[and] in learning ways to avoid being tracked by trained police dogs and other methods of eluding the enemy.’1
On 3 June, Poole, Stewart and Wellsted, along with two officers from B Squadron – John Tonkin and Richard Crisp – were driven to London for a final briefing in the presence of Special Operations Executive (SOE). They provided the SAS officers with the ‘griff’ on the ground, information about the strength of the German presence in their operational area and the quality, reliability and political affiliations of the Maquis groups with whom they would come into contact. Escorting the SAS officers was the regiment’s intelligence officer Mike Sadler. ‘I accompanied a lot of officers on these briefings and it was always an interesting insight into human behaviour to see how the men reacted on the eve of the operation’ he reflected.2
After their briefing from the SOE, Wellsted and the others were treated to lunch at an upmarket restaurant in Regent Street, and in the evening they took in a cabaret. The next day they were driven to Hassells Hall, near Sandy, Bedfordshire, only to learn shortly after their arrival that the invasion of France had been postponed from 4 June to the following day because of poor weather in the Channel. The delay was excruciating. ‘We fitted our chutes, talked to the pretty Fanys [The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry], listened to the radio and heard the king’s speech,’ recalled Wellsted. ‘How we blessed those girls whose pleasant chatter kept our minds off what was in store.’ Mike Sadler remembered Puddle Poole showing off his skills as a pianist by playing the ‘Warsaw Concerto’, composed by Richard Addinsell for the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight. The effect on his audience was ‘amazing’.
On the evening of 5 June, Wellsted and Stewart, along with three SOE officers, were driven to RAF Tempsford where they boarded a Halifax bomber. Strapped to their legs were cylindrical duffle bags which contained the men’s equipment; the bags were hooked to the men’s legs and were released once they were floating to earth, the bag then being paid out on the end of a 15ft length of rope. Wellsted and Stewart wore the red airborne beret (though a helmet for jumping) as well as the airborne Dennison smock over standard issue battledress and rubber-soled boots.
The five men dropped into the Morvan in early hours of 6 June, just as the Allied invasion fleet crossed the Channel towards Normandy. Their task was to ensure the area was safe for a second SAS party to land two or three days later under the command of Bill Fraser, but for the first two days they were unable to make contact with the local Maquis. When they did they radioed SAS Brigade HQ with the map coordinates of a DZ close to the hamlet of Vieux Dun.
On 11 June Fraser and 18 others parachuted into the area in two sticks as part of the main reconnaissance party of Operation Houndsworth. As Fraser described in his operational report it was by no means a tidy drop:
Planes unable to find Vieux Dun DZ, scatter men over wide area. Major Fraser and tpr [trooper] Kennedy land near Lormes. German troops with guns seen and they lay up in woods. Eureka [a radar beacon] destroyed by drop. Lt Moore landed a little more to the east and subsequently made his own way to the Vieux Dun area. Lt [Johnny] Cooper dropped at 0210 hours near Fetigny and had contacted all his men including [Reg] Seekings, Maclennan and Sgt Zelic by 1100 hours except for tpr Docherty who was not picked up till that evening. His w/t [wireless] was working OK and he managed to get in touch with London. He also contacted Maquis through a farmer.3
By 12 June Cooper had gathered up his stick and was told to sit tight for 24 hours while the Maquis organised transport. The following night the French arrived to collect the SAS men. ‘This big bus appeared out of the darkness with Wellsted on board,’ remembered David Danger. ‘It was one of those steam buses that ran on brushwood fed into a cylinder at the back. Most of the boys piled onto the bus and went off back to the Maquis camp. Me, Johnny [Cooper] and Reg Seekings remained on the DZ to await the arrival of the rest of the squadron the following night. Not long after the bus had gone a German patrol appeared on the road but they didn’t see us.’4
In fact the arrival of the rest of A Squadron, under Johnny Wiseman and Alex Muirhead, was postponed to 17 June. On that night Fraser, Wellsted and Seekings drove to the DZ in a Maquis car to prepare the fires that would guide in the three aircraft. At the same time back at Fairford the 64 SAS soldiers were preparing for take-off. One of them was Sergeant John Noble, a Scot who had won the Military Medal at Cape Murro di Porco. ‘I admit here and now, I was afraid,’ he wrote in the journal he was keeping for his girlfriend back in Edinburgh. ‘My chief fear was getting shot down in the drink.’5
Once they were over the Channel, Noble’s aircraft came under fire from German anti-aircraft guns and the pilot was forced to take evasive action as the men crammed into the fuselage listening to the sounds of shells exploding all around. ‘Eventually we were told half an hour to go and for the next fifteen minutes chaos reigned supreme,’ wrote Noble. ‘There were blokes in all sorts of positions, testing chutes, strapping on leg bags etc. At last all was ready and in take-off positions … after circling around for 20 minutes and no sign of lights, we had to return to England. Still in our take off positions on the plane, the order gave us a bit of a shock. Personally I had a feeling of relief mixed with fear. We were crossing back over the Channel at dawn.’
Noble and a second aircraft touched down in England at 0700 hours but the third plane never returned. Lieutenant Les Cairns and his 15 men had vanished, never to be found. ‘The men on that plane are all posted missing presumed dead,’ wrote Noble. ‘It was a great blow to the unit.’
Down on the DZ Fraser and the reception committee had looked up in dismay as the three aircraft passed overheard. Mist and heavy rain prevented them from glimpsing the aircraft and the pilots from spotting the recognition fires on the ground.
Four nights later, on 21 June, they tried again, this time with more success, though one trooper broke a leg in landing and another, L Detachment original Chalky White, injured his back. On the same day that the main party of A Squadron inserted into France, RSM Graham Rose posted the same typed letter to the families of every soldier. It read:
The following information is available regarding your [Rose added by hand the name and number of each soldier]. He was dropped by parachute into France on 21.6 and up to the time of writing was quite safe and well. You may take it for granted that he is safe unless you hear to the contrary from us.
He will not be able to write to you for some time but will be able to receive your letters, so please keep writing.
Cheerio, keep smiling, and don’t worry.6
With his squadron all present and correct, Bill Fraser established his HQ at the Vieux Dun camp, which included the sections belonging to Johnny Wiseman and Roy Bradford. Close by was the forest hideout of Maquis Camille.
Approximately ten miles south, not far from the village of Montsauche, Alex Muirhead’s Two Troop was camped in a dark forest near to Maquis Bernard. Ian Wellsted was in this camp and described the Maquis as lightly armed and poorly trained. In addition, ‘although full of enthusiasm, none of the Maquisards, even the most military of them, had any idea of true discipline and were liable easily to be discouraged. Their true worth depended entirely upon the capacity of their leader and the use of their local knowledge.’
The Maquis had other uses, too, as David Danger remembered from his time at Vieux Dun. ‘We got most of our food from the Maquis and on one occasion one of them said he would kill a cow for me. He borrowed my pistol and told another chap [a Frenchman] to hold the horns of this cow while he shot it. The bullet passed through the cow’s head and into the other chap’s arm!’
What was undeniable was the efficiency of the Maquis’ bush telegraph. Little went on in the heavily forested and hilly Morvan without it coming to their attention. On the afternoon of Saturday 24 June a Frenchman came racing into Muirhead’s camp to breathlessly inform the SAS that a detachment of Germans and so-called White Russians (Soviet troops fighting for Germany) had arrived in the village of Montsauche. John Noble later described to his girlfriend the reaction of the SAS:
It appeared that this patrol had been sent out to ambush ‘Canadian’ troops, reported in that vicinity. So we proceeded to ambush them. We just toddled off to a road that they would have to pass back to their camp. We waited four hours on that road until at long last they came. We were spread over two hundred yards along the road and on a pre-arranged signal we opened up. Their order of march was a truck with a 20mm [cannon] on it, a private car, another truck with a 20mm, followed by a motorcycle. I had the first truck to deal with. As I opened fire with a Bren, an ex-Russian POW (more anon) very thoughtfully chucked a grenade in the truck.
Further up the ditch from Noble were Ian Wellsted and Peter Middleton. It was Wellsted’s first time in action and he was glad to have the experienced trooper for company. Middleton was a 23-year-old Yorkshireman, a former clerk with the Sheffield Coal Control Office who had joined the SAS from the Royal Artillery in the summer of 1942. Wellsted later recalled how Middleton had nursed him through his baptism of fire.
‘Take a shot at those Germans in the ditch, sir.’
‘Where?’
‘There! Look, that one’s popping his head up, sir.’ Bang
‘I think I got the bastard, sir. Look, just beyond him, have a go at that one, sir.’
Bang, bang, bang.
‘Oh, you missed, sir. Better luck next time.’
With the vehicles ablaze and the motorcyclist killed, the ambushers emerged from the ditch to mop up any survivors. Wellsted, encouraged by Middleton, emptied his revolver into the canvas side of a truck and ‘heard a satisfactory yelp’, and then threw a grenade at a cluster of Germans cowering behind a stack of timber on the other side of the road.
Noble suddenly dropped to his haunches and fired a burst from his Bren into a thick bush, wounding a German corporal. ‘The ambush was a complete success,’ wrote Noble. ‘Three prisoners were taken, the rest were killed. We destroyed the trucks and the car, and kept the motorcycle.’
The German and Russian dead lay on the road until their comrades came to collect them the following day. En route the German salvage squad paused at the village of Ouroux and murdered three Frenchmen on their way to Mass in reprisal for the ambush. They continued on their way towards Montsauche only to be ambushed themselves by the Maquis; 14 of their number were killed. Now the Germans arrived in force, eight truck-loads of soldiers burning the villages of Montsauche and Planchez to the ground and killing indiscriminately.
In all probability the Germans forced some unfortunate local to talk for at 1800 hours on Monday 26 June they attacked the camp of Maquis Camille. Nearly 300 Germans and White Russians began mortaring the woods, exchanging fire with the Frenchmen within. The SOE agent with the Maquis relayed a message to Bill Fraser suggesting it might be an idea for the SAS to set up an ambush on the forest road down which the enemy had launched their assault. Fraser instructed Johnny Wiseman to cover one stretch of the road while he took care of another section. As Fraser moved his men into position, he spotted two Germans on the road about 200 yards away. ‘He held his fire and decided to await developments,’ ran the Operation Houndsworth report. ‘In ones and twos more enemy arrived until about 50 men assembled in the area, and forming threes they marched back up the road. At this moment, Major Fraser ordered both his Brens to open fire, and SQMS [Squadron Quartermaster Sergeant] Maclennen had an absolute field day. It was afterwards estimated that not more than 10 men escaped injury from the fracas.’7
Wiseman’s section, meanwhile, had used the heavy rain and gathering dusk to crawl to within a few yards of the road. Though Reg Seekings had with him Sergeant Jack Terry, a desert veteran, there were also several men who had never before seen action with the SAS. ‘I said to Jack “Look across there, there’s some trucks and machine gun about 800 yards away, we’ll go across and deal with it”,’ recalled Seekings. ‘As we had green men I never told them. We were going down into dead ground and I thought well, if I tell them they’ll get all bloody shaky, so we’ll come up and then I’ll give them a brief before we attack.’8
Seekings led his men on their stomachs through the forest undergrowth towards the trucks. At one point he peeked his head up to check the lie of the land, and found himself face to face with the enemy. ‘I misjudged it a bit and came up practically straight in front of this bastard machine gun,’ reflected Seekings. ‘I was just turning my head to shout to the chaps “Get round to the left” and it caught me [the bullet]. I tried to find my rifle and fire left handed but I couldn’t move my arm.’
Seekings had been shot in the neck but the next bullet jammed in the chamber of the machine gun. Terry dragged Seekings under cover while Lance Corporal Gibb shot the German as he tried to clear the blockage in his weapon. ‘The way my battledress was smothered in blood I thought my arm had been blown off,’ said Seekings, who remained conscious throughout the drama. ‘I said [to Terry] try and get a tourniquet on my arm. Then I got up and ran 50 or 60 yards to where there was a tree blown down. The funny thing is I remember dropping my pipe and running back to pick it up. But that was the last time I ran for a bit because everything seized up.’ Seekings, swearing profusely, was carried back to the SAS hideout whereupon he was examined by the Maquis doctor. Also present was Fraser McLuskey, the 6ft 2in 1SAS padre who had parachuted in with the main party a few days earlier. The 29-year-old McLuskey was an extraordinary character, a man with a German wife and a strong conscience. At the outbreak of war he was chaplain to Glasgow University but in 1942 volunteered for military chaplaincy because he believed his faith would be better employed on the front line. ‘For the first time in my life I assisted at a surgical examination,’ he wrote later. ‘We laid him [Seekings] under the tarpaulin and with the somewhat uncertain light of a torch we found that a bullet had entered the back of his neck and lodged itself deeply near the base of his skull. Probe as he might, the doctor could not get hold of it, and so he decided to leave whatever it was where it was.’9*
* Seekings had the bullet removed back in England when the surgeon declared him a ‘miracle’, not just for surviving the bullet but also the probing of the Maquis doctor!
McLuskey, who was later awarded the Military Cross for his gallantry in France, was admired and respected by every man in 1SAS. David Danger remembered the role he played during Operation Houndsworth. ‘He was a marvellous man who held these services in the fields whenever possible and we’d sing a few hymns in a very low key! If morale dipped he was always on hand to boost it.’
McLuskey remembered later that ‘the favourite hymn was “Stand Up for Jesus” and each Sunday Scottish and English voices belonging to men of all denominations sent the words of this hymn ringing out over German-held fields.’ A number of soldiers of A Squadron became more spiritual during their time in France and were later confirmed by McLuskey back in Britain.
Reg Seekings wasn’t one of them, even though he and McLuskey had a mutual regard for one another’s diverse talents. ‘The Padre was a great chap,’ recalled Seekings. ‘When we got our first containers he was dishing out these little prayer books, the New Testament, and he said to me ‘Your chaps don’t seem to be interested in anything like this, what would they be interested in?’ Seekings told him that the men loved to read thrillers, the bloodier the better, so McLuskey arranged for a consignment to be dropped in the next resupply. ‘He wanted to know if he should carry a gun,’ added Seekings, ‘and I said “you ever carried a gun?” He said no and I said “well don’t start now. We’ll look after you”… He said what happens if we’re in the jeeps and the driver and gunner get wounded do you think I’m justified in using the guns to defend my comrades? I said yes so he asked me to teach him to use the guns, so I did, but he still never carried a gun.’
The Germans slunk from the forest, carrying their dead and vowing revenge. They took out their fury on the village of Vermot that evening, shooting dead six French civilians and raping a 14-year-old girl. The next morning they returned to the forest but the Maquis had abandoned their camp and, along with the SAS, moved to a new location. Lusting for vengeance, the Germans drove to Duns-les-Places and rounded up 19 men. They executed them in the village square and raped their women. Then they dragged the village priest to the top of his church, tied a rope round his neck and hurled him from the belfry. In a letter to his girlfriend John Noble described the Germans as ‘a lowdown lot of snakes’.
For the rest of June and into the beginning of July heavy rain fell in the Morvan and there was little activity, either from the SAS or the Germans. Fraser described the weather as ‘N.B.G’ (No Bloody Good) in one of his reports, but his mood improved on 5 July when they received a resupply of food and equipment, along with three jeeps dropped by parachute. There were also letters from home, prayer books for Reverend McLuskey and a selection of cheap paperbacks to amuse the men.
The day after the resupply, Johnny Wiseman left in one jeep to set up a new base in a pine forest just west of Dijon, where more than 30,000 Germans were stationed. His mission was to observe and whenever possible call up RAF air strikes on suitable targets. ‘My role was communications,’ recalled David Danger, Wiseman’s signaller. ‘When we had a good target such as a train bringing ammo, we’d get Typhoons to come over and attack. We were also to try and rescue any pilots that had been shot down and put them on to the escape line. We got one or two in the Dijon area.’
The Germans soon realised that there were spies in the forest so they set out to track them down. One day in late July Danger was sending a message when he spotted a man in civilian clothes wandering through the forest. Danger sensed something wasn’t right. ‘I gave a hasty message to say I was closing down and while my companion pulled the aerial down we started to withdraw. The jeep went with some of the kit and I was running with my wireless set on my back; they weren’t small things, and I’d just about had it after a few miles. The others got me by the shoulders and carried me until we found somewhere to lie up.’
The man Danger spotted was a scout for the Milice, the French paramilitary unit that served the Nazis. A couple of days later the Germans and the Milice attacked the camp, unaware that Wiseman’s SAS unit was no longer there; in the confusion of the assault the two groups opened fire on each other. Wiseman gleefully reported the incident to HQ, saying: ‘They must have been enjoying themselves for they didn’t stop before they had succeeded in killing twenty-two of their own men!’10
Back in the Morvan, the dropping of jeeps had provided the SAS with the means to range far and wide in harassing the enemy. In the most brazen strike Alex Muirhead had mortared a synthetic oil factory at Autun, 25 miles from the SAS camp, in the presence of an impressed Johnny Cooper. ‘I recced the plant a couple of days prior to the attack and discovered that there was about a two hour quiet period in the early hours of the morning between the end of the night shift and the start of the morning shift,’ recalled Cooper.
We got there in good time and while Alex selected a suitable place from which to fire the mortars I helped prime the bombs. Once that had been done, and Alex had set up the base plate and set the sights, we waited for the end of the night shift. He fired a couple of smoke bombs to find his range and then we popped about 30 incendiary and HE bombs over. It was a complete success and by the time we’d dug out the base plate the factory was ablaze and the Germans’ ground defences were blasting away at the planes they thought must have bombed them. They had no inkling they had been mortared from less than a mile away.11
John Noble led a sabotage party to cut the railway line between Luzy and Nevers, while another section of men blew the tracks that linked Nevers to Paris, both of which hampered the Germans as they tried to convey men and equipment north to where the Allies were gradually fighting their way inland. An ambush resulted in the discovery of some Gestapo mail and Fraser radioed England with ‘information about position and defence of Field Marshal Rommel’s HQ [and] details of flying bomb dumps and assemblies near Paris’.
One of the most dramatic incidents occurred in the middle of July when an SAS jeep containing Noble, Peter Middleton, Bob Langridge and a Maquisard ran slap bang into a German staff car in the village of Ouroux. There was an exchange of fire, then the occupants of both vehicles leapt out and began grappling hand to hand. Noble was shot through the shoulder but still managed to club one of the Germans into unconsciousness with the butt of his Colt revolver; a second German went for Noble and was shot dead by Middleton, who was also trying to extinguish a fire after a stray bullet ignited the jeep’s exterior petrol tank; one of the enemy fled and was chased and killed by the Maquisard; Langridge was rolling around on the dusty road with a sergeant-major. The German was a ‘big bloke and a tough man’, recalled Noble, ‘who wasn’t going to surrender. So I said “to hell with it” and shot him.’ The SAS soldiers took the sole surviving German – whose name was Hans – back to their camp and he became the squadron’s unofficial dogsbody for the rest of their stay in France. (When A Squadron left France they took a grateful Hans with them, handing him over to the Military Police in England.)
But Operation Houndsworth wasn’t without its tragedies. On 4 August Noble wrote to his girlfriend to tell her of a distressing incident that had occurred on 20 July:
Chalky [White] has been shot up. They ran into nine truckloads of Germans. Captain Bradford, the O i/c [officer in charge] gave the order to shoot their way through. The rear gunner [Bill Devine] and Captain Bradford were killed immediately. Chalky was shot through the leg, the arm and had three fingers shot off his left hand. The jeep conked out 150 yards past the German truck. The driver, sgt Maggie Maginn [sic], Chalky and a French kid (he had one through the elbow) all got out and ran into the woods. They just went in two hundred yards and lay down but the Jerries wouldn’t come in. That same night, Maggie contacted a Maquis. The Maquis took them back to Maquis ‘A’; the first thing Chalky said when he got in was ‘Maude will give me hell for losing her ring’. An unconfirmed report says that Chalky killed 62 Germans that day.
Bradford – an architect before the war – and the men of Three Troop had been on their way to establish a new base in the Foret de Dames, 40 miles north of Fraser’s HQ, when they were attacked. While Bradford had travelled by jeep, seven men under Lieutenant Ball were heading to the RV on some collapsible bicycles. One of the seven was Jeff Du Vivier who, upon finding no sign of Bradford at the RV, persuaded Ball to let him take a couple of soldiers on a ‘scheme’. Du Vivier discovered from a local fisherman the whereabouts of the local Maquis and soon he was in possession of the news that a German ammunition train was due to pass through the area the following day. ‘It consisted of two large engines and about 40 wagons and 25 personnel as guard,’ recalled Du Vivier. The three men set out on their bikes, accompanied by a Maquis guide, pedalling nine miles through villages and countryside. ‘We hid our bikes and taking our rucksacks walked some 500 yards along the track,’ he remembered. ‘We found a suitable spot and set about laying the charge. I had decided that we should make three charges and join them together with cortex at 50 feet apart and all under the same rail.’12 It took the saboteurs two hours to lay the charges, Du Vivier insisting that their handiwork had to be completely camouflaged so it wouldn’t be noticeable at daybreak.
It was, remembered Du Vivier, ‘a very ticklish job making camp again as every road, path and even the farms were watched by the SS’ but they eventually succeeded. There he was informed by Fraser of the results of his sabotage mission: ‘Both engines had been completely wrecked and turned over on their sides together with a 40’ wagon loaded with Ack-Ack guns,’ wrote Du Vivier later. ‘10 wagons behind this were derailed and lying over the track… Unfortunately the carriage containing the Germans was at the rear of the train and they were unscathed, but, according to the Maquis, very frightened and demoralised.’
A Squadron continued to demoralise the Germans in the Morvan throughout August though Peter Middleton was lucky not to join the casualty list on the penultimate day of the month. Together with Tom Rennie, Middleton had accepted an invitation from the Maquis to watch as the French fought a sporadic gun battle with the Germans at the village of Corancy. As the pair strolled towards the village in the company of the Maquis chief – who was proudly describing how his men had all but routed the Germans – a burst of heavy machine-gun fire sent them diving into a ditch.
‘I’m hit!’ yelled Middleton.
Rennie examined his friend and discovered a bullet had passed through both cheeks of Middleton’s backside and out again without causing any serious damage, other than to his underpants. As Middleton later explained to his amused comrades it was the third time his backside had stopped a German bullet. That evening Fraser wrote in his report: ‘Middleton is wounded in an embarrassing though not dangerous place!’13
A week after Middleton’s lucky escape A Squadron set off for England, having been replaced by Tony Marsh’s C Squadron. Before they went Bill Fraser presented a regimental flag to the people of Duns-les-Places in tribute to their courage and stoicism. Despite what the French villagers had suffered as an indirect result of the SAS attacks against the Germans, not one of them bore the British any resentment. France was in the process of being liberated, that was all that mattered.
A Squadron had certainly done their bit to drive the Germans out of France. In three months they had killed or wounded 220 Germans, derailed six trains, destroyed 23 motorised vehicles and mortared a synthetic oil refinery. Their casualties – excluding the aircraft that had disappeared in June – were two dead and seven wounded, one of whom was Chalky White. ‘He looks rather pale,’ John Noble wrote to his girlfriend, shortly before the squadron left France, ‘but otherwise he is just the same as when you met him. The man’s positively inhuman. With an army of men like him we could have finished the war three years ago.’
Three months earlier, at 0137 hours on 6 June, lieutenants John Tonkin and Richard Crisp had parachuted into France, 20 miles south-west of Chateauroux. It was a perfect drop, recalled Tonkin; not only were the local Maquis there to greet them but ‘it was such a gentle landing that I doubt if I’d have broken an egg if I’d landed on it’.14
The insertion of B Squadron into their operational zone followed a similar pattern to Houndsworth; once Tonkin and Crisp were satisfied with the arrangements on the ground, they radioed SAS Brigade and the main reconnaissance party dropped. On the night of 7/8 June Lieutenant Tomos Stephens and eight men landed and on 12 June the main party arrived, though its strength had been depleted by a last-minute change of orders: four small sticks of men had been dropped blind in other areas to sabotage railways lines before making their way to the main camp. Tonkin was furious that he had not been informed.
Later he made his feelings known in the post-operation report but for the time being he contented himself with informing brigade HQ that instead of 50 men under his command, he had just 23, and this in an area ‘lousy with Germans’.
From its auspicious beginnings, when Tonkin had executed a perfect landing, Operation Bulbasket became dogged by misfortune. Just as they had intended to launch a series of sabotage attacks, the SAS party found themselves in the middle of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, Das Reich, travelling up from the south to fight in Normandy.
Forced to act with extreme caution, Tonkin also found the local Maquis jealous and distrustful and even his Phantom signaller, a Captain Sadoine, was uncooperative. A couple of resupply drops were cancelled because of bad weather and poor communication so that by the end of June morale was low in the Bulbasket camp. On 30 June Lieutenant Peter Weaver arrived. He was one of the leaders of the four sabotage sticks that had dropped elsewhere on 12 June. Weaver was 33, considerably older than Tonkin, and though he had seen less action than his commanding officer he was experienced enough to read the danger signs. With the Das Reich division having moved on there was a slackness to the camp; soldiers were making frequent trips to a farm to collect eggs and young women from the nearby village of Verrieres were wandering into the SAS hideout to flirt with the British soldiers. Weaver thought Tonkin ‘was getting a little out of his depth with his responsibilities’.15
The news that two of Tonkin’s most experienced soldiers, Dougie Eccles and Ken Bateman, had failed to return from a sabotage mission a day earlier left Weaver with a sense of foreboding. ‘I thought the camp was becoming far too well known,’ he recalled, ‘and suggested to John we should split up and disperse in small parties to another area, but he was against the idea. I think he thought he would lose control.’
On 1 July, however, Tonkin did agree to Weaver’s suggestion, and they moved camp, only to discover the water supply was inadequate. The 50 men – which included nine Maquisards and a shot-down American pilot – returned to their hideout near Verrieres with Tonkin intending to relocate to another camp on 3 July.
But at first light on 3 July the men of Bulbasket came under attack from an SS Panzer Grenadier Division. Peter Weaver was woken by the sound of an explosion. ‘For the life of me I couldn’t think what all the noise was about in my semi-sleepy state,’ he reflected. ‘Then it dawned on me: “Christ, we’re being mortared!”’
The word went round the camp that they were surrounded by 500 Germans. There was panic among the Maquisards and the SAS, many of whom were young and inexperienced. Most rushed en masse down a slope towards a valley and into the arms of the Germans. The seven men who survived, one of whom was Tonkin, kept their heads and thought about which direction offered the best hope of escape. Peter Weaver ‘shot off into the trees and turned south’ before crawling through a field of corn. He was spotted by four Germans and chased but Weaver, a former first-class cricketer, outpaced them and evaded capture.
Thirty-one of his comrades, including the American pilot, weren’t so fortunate. They were taken to Poitiers for interrogation and then, on the evening of 6 July, the prisoners were loaded into trucks and driven deep into the forest of Saint Sauvant. There they were machine-gunned.
A similar fate befell some of the men on Operation Gain, a 1SAS mission carried out by 58 members of D Squadron that commenced on the night of 13/14 June. Gain’s objective was to cut the German lateral railway communications in the bottleneck area of Rambouillet – Provins – Gien – Orleans – Chartres, all towns south of Paris that took trains to Normandy. Under the command of Ian Fenwick, the SAS established camp in the Foret d’Orleans and for the first couple of weeks the operation was a great success. Several railway lines were blown, a railway locomotive and 30 wagons were destroyed in their sidings and a motorized patrol was ambushed. ‘We went out in small groups, between two and four men usually,’ recalled Vic Long.
A scheme [to blow a railway line] would last four or five days and when we returned to camp there wouldn’t be many people around. We’d rest for a while, more would return, and then we’d go off again, and that’s the way it went. The station master at Nibelle, which was just down the hill from where we were in the forest, used to let the Maquis know which trains were leaving and when, and that made life easier. The main trouble at night was dogs, not Germans. You went through the village and just as you got on the outskirts you heard this yapping and then windows opened. You would remain still, the window closed, you go on another 100 yards and then another dog started yapping!16
On 4 July a 12-man stick under the command of Captain Pat Garstin left England to reinforce Operation Gain. The DZ was near a little village called La Ferte-Alais, 30 miles south of Paris and some distance from the Foret d’Orleans, so it was arranged that a party of Maquisards would collect them and bring them to their D Squadron comrades.
Mike Sadler decided to accompany the soldiers on the flight to France, not just because he was a good friend of Garstin’s but also for a spot of excitement. ‘My role at this time [as intelligence officer] was to take the chaps to the aircraft, see them off, and then get a debrief from the pilots when they returned from the drop. But I thought it was much easier and quicker to go myself, and I still liked a little bit of adrenaline.’
As the Stirling bomber approached the DZ Sadler, situated in the aircraft’s bomb aimer’s seat below the pilot’s floor, searched for three lighted fires down below spaced 100 yards apart and the recognition letter – B for Bertie – flashed from a torch. With the recognition letter correct and the fires on the DZ well lit, the men jumped from 800 feet at 0153 hours (5 July) on a moonlit night. Garstin was first out, followed by Lance-Corporal Howard Lutton. The last three men to leave the aircraft were troopers Morrison (his first name has been lost to history, but the initial was ‘R’), Leslie ‘Titch’ Norman and Herbert Castelow, the latter a brick maker from Stockton-on-Tees.
The moment Garstin hit the ground the firing started. Having extracted the information about the DZ from a captured Maquisard, the Germans had prepared a reception committee of their own with a combined force of around 50 security police and French Milice. Garstin was shot in the neck, Lutton was mortally wounded and a bullet hit the spinal column of Lieutenant Jean Wiehe, a French officer from Mauritius known as ‘Johnny’. The last three men to jump – Morrison, Norman and Castelow – landed in some woods just outside the DZ. ‘Realising things had gone wrong, I cut off my parachute and hid as quickly as possible,’ recalled Castelow who had lost sight of his comrades.17
Norman and Morrison had made contact, however, and advanced towards the gunfire. As they approached the edge of the woods they heard a voice call, ‘Who’s there?’ It was Wiehe. In hushed tones he explained that he was lying on the edge of the clearing, badly wounded and unable to move. Norman said he was coming to his aid, Wiehe ordered him to remain where he was. There was no point risking their lives on his account. Norman later explained that ‘Wiehe gave instructions for [us] to make off and endeavour to reach the beachhead.’18
Norman and Morrison did as ordered, running through the woods in a north-westerly direction. On the outskirts of the woods they encountered some Germans scouring the area for any parachutists they might have missed. The Germans fired wildly into the trees but Norman and Morrison were already on their stomachs, crawling noiselessly for 200 yards before slithering into a corn field and continuing in a north-west direction. During the next three hours the pair crossed a railway line, crept through a village, skirted the banks of a river and climbed a wooded slope before deciding to lie up for a few hours. They chanced upon a cave and settled down to sleep.
When they woke Norman and Morrison observed the countryside from their vantage point on the hillside as they shared a tin of milk and a bar of chocolate. They then discussed their next course of action. The official SAS report on the ‘Garstin Stick’ incident described what followed:
Norman volunteered to do a recce and Morrison would remain at the cave and keep a lookout. Off Norman went, heading into the wood. After travelling about a mile he came across a house and just as he reached it a woman came out to feed some chickens that were running around the yard. Norman beckoned the woman into the wood and explained that he was a British parachutist, had a fellow parachutist in the wood, and that both were very much in need of food. The woman looked around and after assuring herself that the coast was clear, took Norman into the house and gave him bread, milk and some very fat bacon. Norman, feeling very much happier at the thought of a reasonably good meal, returned to Morrison and soon the old Tommy cooker was going hard at it. After the meal a consultation was held us to whether or not they should move that night. They agreed that possibly patrols would be on the lookout since it was known that they had landed and therefore they decided to lie up in the same place for a second night.19
For the next few days the men continued cautiously in a north-west direction, relying on the munificence of locals for food and water. On the night of 11 July they bedded down in a small wood between a road and a river and at one point were woken by a great commotion on the road. At first light Norman and Morrison watched through the trees as a battalion of German troops broke camp and climbed into their trucks, leaving behind a mass of empty rations tins and ripped envelopes. The SAS men inspected the abandoned camp and surmised that the Germans had just come from the Normandy beachhead and were heading for a rest, happy to have received their first batch of mail from home in weeks.
Norman and Morrison trekked north-west again and that evening (12 July) climbed out of a wood and onto a road. ‘Norman turned left and Morrison looked to the right,’ stated the SAS report. ‘Norman could not speak and Morrison seeing the expression on Norman’s face looked in his direction. He too must have felt queer for there was a road block (of barricade type) and a German sentry. Fortunately for our men the sentry was looking in the opposite direction so Norman and Morrison nipped across the road and went across country.’
At 1100 hours on 14 July the pair came to an isolated farm near the village of Saint Cheron, approximately 14 miles from where they had landed. Inside the farm was a woman of about 30, cheerfully preparing a large meal for that evening. She fed the SAS men and then directed them to a nearby wood where they could rest, telling the pair she would return later. When the woman reappeared she was carrying a basket of food and some wine, and she had in tow five members of her family and four of her friends. It was Bastille Day, explained the woman to Norman and Morrison, and she thought it only fitting they should celebrate with their British allies. Over supper the soldiers were persuaded by their French hosts to remain hidden in the wood rather than strike out north-west again; the Allies would soon be here and in the meantime they would contact the local Maquis to see if they could help.
The Maquis sent a bespectacled, bookish man who turned out to be the headmaster of the local school. He gave Norman and Morrison some civilian clothes and told them he’d contacted London and plans were afoot to extricate them by air, but on the day he promised to return the headmaster never showed. A few days later, resigned to the fact the man had broken his word, the two soldiers walked out of the wood for their daily meal at the farm. ‘They were just coming out of the house,’ recounted the SAS report, ‘when they walked bang into a German officer. Morrison just calmly walked passed him and down the garden path, and Norman turned to the right and “shooed” some ducks away from a nearby pond. Both men made their way back to the wood and fortunately all was well.’
A few days later the farmer appeared in the wood with two young women, both of whom were schoolteachers and fluent English speakers. They explained that the headmaster had been captured by the Gestapo, interrogated and then shot, though he hadn’t talked before his death. There would be no airlift, said the women, but the Americans would soon arrive so it was just a question of patience. They handed a collection of English-language books to the soldiers expressing the hope that they would help pass the time of the day. Three weeks later, at 1900 hours on 15 August, the two women arrived at the farm in the back of an American jeep. ‘The officer in the jeep told them [Morrison and Norman] that the Americans had just arrived and that if they had a look around they would soon find someone who would take them back… On hearing the news our two men dug up their uniforms, had them dried at the farm, and on the following morning set off in search of the Americans. Morrison went towards the village and Norman in the opposite direction. Norman met a jeep, the driver of which took him to a headquarters.’
At the time Norman and Morrison’s ordeal was drawing to a satisfactory conclusion, Herbert Castelow was 18 miles to the east in the village of Vert-le-Petit. Having remained hidden in the wood for 24 hours after the initial drop, Castelow broke cover on the morning of 7 July and walked north until he came to Vert-le-Petit. There he had the good fortune to encounter Michel Leduc, the village butcher, who knew the head of the local Maquis and for six weeks – wearing the garb of a civilian – Castelow operated as a resistance fighter while living above the butcher’s shop. ‘We were mainly engaged in ambushing transport on the roads,’ he recalled. ‘I travelled about quite freely, and spent two weeks in Paris. About mid-August, however, the Gestapo got to know I was in the vicinity and it became too dangerous to remain.’
Castelow was given a bicycle and advised to head south-west, in the direction of the Allied forces now pushing east after the battle of the Falaise Pocket. Unfortunately the SAS trooper found himself in the middle of the retreating Germans. He stopped at a village for refreshment and while he was eating someone made off with his bicycle. ‘On discovering this I swore in English,’ recalled Castelow. ‘This was overheard and I was immediately arrested by a German patrol. At first I was going to be shot out of hand as a spy but the officer present decided to send me behind the lines for questioning.’
Castelow was bundled into a lorry and driven 200 miles east to Verdun. ‘I was put in a cell and given a little food once a day, and made to stand all the time during questioning, and at one period I was kicked about,’ he recalled. ‘I refused, however, to tell them what I had been doing or that I was a paratrooper.’
In early September Castelow was removed from his cell, put in a truck and driven east. On 9 September the vehicle crossed the river Moselle between Metz and Nancy, and a few miles further on it stopped in a village. ‘I was put in a cottage with one SS guard to look after me,’ recounted Castelow. ‘I was not tied down, and at about 2359 hours I killed the guard and took his rifle. I then walked out of the cottage and climbed the wall into the street. I was not challenged and was able to make my way without opposition to the river. I swam the Moselle and started walking back towards the Americans.’
Castelow reached safety not long after and was taken first to Paris. Then on 21 September he was repatriated to the UK where he was reunited with Norman and Morrison, as well as two other members of the Garstin Stick – Thomas ‘Ginger’ Jones, a desert veteran of the SAS, and Serge Vaculik, a Frenchman. Theirs was a dreadful tale.
Having been captured on the DZ on the night of 5 July, they and the rest of the stick were taken to Gestapo headquarters in Paris and brutally interrogated for four weeks.* By the time they were ordered to change into civilian clothes on the evening of 8 August, Captain Garstin – in addition to his serious neck wound sustained during the exchange of fire on the DZ – had sustained a double fracture to his right arm and one to his leg.
* Lieutenant Johnny Wiehe was taken to a Paris hospital to be treated for his wounds. Though he survived captivity, Wiehe succumbed to his injuries shortly after the war and is buried on his native Mauritius.
Jones, Vaculik, Garstin and four other troopers were driven to a forest and marched into a clearing whereupon they were informed they were terrorists. ‘Oh God, we are going to be shot,’ moaned Garstin, at which point Vaculik, Jones and Tom Varey bolted for freedom. Caught off-guard by the spontaneous and audacious reaction of the trio, the firing squad shot Garstin and the other three men but failed to prevent their comrades disappearing into the trees.20
Varey was tracked down and slain but Vaculik and Jones escaped execution, finding shelter with locals who in turn handed them over to the Maquis. The testimony of the pair, once back in England, was the first definitive proof of Lieutenant Jimmy Hughes’s claim in March 1944 that the Germans were executing captured SAS personnel. In late September Mike Sadler and Harry Poat visited the area where the execution had occurred and, with the assistance of the local Maquis group, the pair were led to the clearing. Villagers had laid flowers on the shallow grave that contained the corpses of Garstin and his four men. Sadler, who had been a good friend of Garstin, was horrified by what he found under the soil. The bodies were badly decomposed but it was still possible to identify Garstin ‘because of his height, it was more than six feet, and by the shape of his head which was somewhat unusual’.
The bodies were disinterred and removed to Beauvais, where they were buried in the Marianne cemetery.*
* The fate of the SAS soldiers executed during Operation Bulbasket wasn’t discovered until December 1944 when a Frenchman searching for mushrooms in the forest stumbled upon the mass grave.
On 7 August, the day before the murder of Pat Garstin, Paddy Mayne had parachuted into France along with Mike Sadler and two other SAS soldiers. ‘Our aircraft actually crashed on take-off because the undercarriage collapsed,’ recalled Sadler. ‘It was all pretty dramatic but they quickly loaded us into another aeroplane minus all our stores and minus our despatcher [who had been injured in the crash]. So we had to throw the panniers out of the plane and then jump out after them without anyone to supervise us, which was a bit nerve-wracking.’
Mayne’s original intention had been to drop east of Orleans, where D Squadron was still engaged on Operation Gain, to inform them of their impending role in a new mission codenamed ‘Transfigure’. Transfigure would involve D Squadron as well as Bill Fraser’s A Squadron, acting as reconnaissance troops in a major Allied offensive aimed at crushing German resistance west of the Rhine. In fact, Transfigure was never put into operation because of the American breakout from the Cotentin Peninsula that began in late July. Mayne parachuted into France, not just to personally brief Ian Fenwick and Fraser on Transfigure but also to assess the strength and morale of German troops in the area before committing his men to the scheme.
Mayne was forced to reorganise his plans, however, when he learned from Fenwick early on the morning of 7 August that D Squadron’s camp in the Foret d’Orleans had been overrun by a large force of Germans. Fenwick, along with some of his men (including Vic Long and Jim Almonds, one of the SAS ‘originals’) had been absent during the attack, instead preparing a DZ for Mayne’s imminent visit. Fenwick radioed Mayne to tell him to abort his drop and then set off in a jeep to investigate exactly what had happened at the camp. With him in the vehicle were four men, three SAS soldiers (one of whom was French) and a Maquis guide.
The jeep was spotted by a German reconnaissance plane as it drove along the narrow country roads and an ambush was set up at a T-junction just outside the village of Chambon-le-Foret. A woman flagged down the jeep as she fled from the village, warning Fenwick of the ambush and informing him that the Germans were holding a large group of men hostage inside the village church. On being informed of the Germans’ presence, Fenwick told the woman: ‘Thank you, Madame, but I intend to attack them.’21
Fenwick sped towards the village, shooting his way past one German machine gun nest before being killed by a round from a 20mm cannon. The two Frenchmen also died and the two badly wounded SAS troopers were taken into captivity. Vic Long says the rest of the squadron were shocked when they learned of Fenwick’s brave but reckless behaviour. ‘We thought it was bloody stupid and Jim Almonds said he was sure if he had been with him he could have talked him out of it. The SAS had said you do not want to be caught [and] you do not fight unless you can get out of it.’ Instead of dropping into Gain’s operational area, Mayne landed in the Morvan, where Bill Fraser met him. He didn’t remain long in the company of A Squadron, however, and on 9 August motored north towards Orleans. ‘It wasn’t really a morale booster when Paddy arrived, just another face passing through,’ recalled Long. ‘He told me to go and do a listening patrol on the Orleans-Pithivers road.’
Mayne informed Jock Riding, Fenwick’s successor as OC of Operation Gain, to increase road watching patrols ahead of the planned Operation Transfigure and radio back all information. This they did before they were overrun by the vanguard of the American breakout from the Cotentin Peninsula. Vic Long sold his silk map of the area (provided to all SAS troops prior to insertion into France) to a GI for $50 and American trucks transported the men of D Squadron to the coast from where they were flown back to England. In the two and a half months of Operation Gain they had cut 16 railway lines, derailed two trains, destroyed two engines, wiped out 46 enemy vehicles and killed at least six Germans. In addition, they had provided invaluable information on the strength and movement of German forces south of Paris.
The purpose of Operation Haggard was purely aggressive and to that end it was overwhelmingly successful. Comprising those men of B Squadron who hadn’t been involved on the ill-fated Bulbasket, Haggard began on 15 August under the command of Major Eric Lepine. They dropped west of the Loire and established a base between the towns of Bourges and Nevers, an area described by SHAEF as ‘extremely important following the destruction of the Seine bridges below Paris’.22 One of the men who dropped with Lepine was Lance-Sergeant Albert Youngman. ‘Our orders were to cause mayhem and we were told to choose our own targets,’ he remembered. ‘The phrase they used was “alarm and despondency”; that’s what we were to spread among the Germans.’23
By the time Operation Haggard was wound up on 9 September, B Squadron had more than fulfilled its objective. They had killed or wounded an estimated 233 Germans, destroyed 37 motorised vehicles and blown up two bridges. In his assessment of Haggard, Brigadier Roderick McLeod, commander of the SAS Brigade, wrote: ‘It is clear that one or two highly successful ambushes were arranged and that this Operation no doubt assisted in the general German collapse south of the Loire.’24
While B Squadron was involved in Operation Gain, to the north-east Tony Marsh’s C Squadron was conducting Operation Kipling. The initial insertion had been made by Captain Derrick Harrison and five men in the early hours of 14 August. They landed in Foret de Merry-Vaux with orders to establish a suitable landing zone for the rest of the squadron, who would come in by glider, and carry out reconnaissance patrols. Four days after Harrison’s arrival 13 more men of C Squadron dropped by parachute with the news that the glider operation had been scrapped and instead Major Marsh would bring the men in on Dakotas, landing at Rennes and then driving down in jeeps.
Marsh’s 40-strong detachment arrived at the Foret de Merry-Vaux on the day that the squadron suffered its first fatality of the operation. Two jeeps, one driven by Jimmy Hall and containing Harrison and the other consisting of Lieutenant Stewart Richardson and two troopers, inadvertently drove into the village of Les Ormes just as an SS unit were in the process of executing 20 civilians. Two had already been shot when the SAS vehicles appeared and in the ensuing firefight Hall was killed and Harrison wounded in the hand. Several Germans were killed and the 18 hostages had taken advantage of the confrontation to escape with their lives. ‘Harrison was pretty shaken up when he came back,’ recalled Sid Payne, who had just returned to their forest camp with Sergeant James McDiarmid after an all-night listening patrol.25
The death of the popular Hall infuriated McDiarmid, a desert veteran of the SAS who had joined from the Black Watch Regiment. McDiarmid was a curious character, the life and soul of the party when the mood took him whose celebrated ‘Puddle Dance’, a sort of highland fling interspersed with forward rolls, always had the men in stitches. He had a young daughter on whom he doted, and was inspiringly brave in combat. In Bagnara he had been awarded the Military Medal for his outstanding leadership when wounded but now learning of Hall’s death, McDiarmid’s dark side emerged.
A couple of days later while leading a two-jeep patrol McDiarmid ran into a small enemy convoy. Those Germans not killed by the fire from the jeeps’ Vickers were dragged up against the wall of a nearby house by McDiarmid and machine-gunned. In a subsequent incident, McDiarmid stopped a car carrying two men in civilian clothes who were discovered to be German officers. Both were shot.
On 28 August, five days after Marsh’s arrival at the Foret de Merry-Vaux, Peter Davis appeared with a second contingent of C Squadron troops. The following day Marsh led his men south to the Morvan where they took over operations from Bill Fraser’s A Squadron; Davis and 34 men, meanwhile, remained to continue Operation Kipling, ranging far and wide, carrying out reconnaissance and engaging the enemy whenever possible. Bob Lowson, now a sergeant, destroyed three trucks full of German troops on 7 September – for which he was awarded the Military Medal – and five days later Lieutenant Mike Mycock and his patrol, working with the French First Army, accepted the surrender of 3,000 demoralised German troops at Autun. On 24 September, C Squadron were withdrawn from their operational area and ordered north towards Brussels. They were the last soldiers of 1SAS to depart France, nearly four months after Ian Wellsted and Ian Stewart had dropped into the Morvan at the start of Operation Houndsworth.
