The officer who succeeded Bill Stirling as OC 2SAS was Lieutenant-Colonel Brian Franks, who had been at the battle of Termoli as brigade-major of the Commando Brigade. Franks came from the same social set as the Stirlings – Ian Fenwick and the actor David Niven were close friends – and he was terribly well-connected having worked as assistant manager at London’s Dorchester Hotel in the 1930s. ‘We were lucky to get Brian Franks, who was a brilliant officer,’ reflected Tony Greville-Bell.1
When Franks assumed command of 2SAS SHAEF had agreed to amend their original plan for the regiment in the impending invasion of France so his immediate concern was to continue the recruitment of new soldiers. High calibre officers were in particular demand and Franks was fortunate to unearth two in Henry Druce and Bob Walker-Brown. He encountered Druce on a train bound for Manchester, where the pair were scheduled to undergo a parachute course at Ringway. Druce was a former officer in the Middlesex Regiment whose linguistic abilities – French, Flemish and Dutch – had led to a secondment to MI6.
Walker-Brown was an ever so slightly eccentric Scot, who had distinguished himself during the war in North Africa as an officer in the Highland Light Infantry. ‘I happened to be in the Caledonia Hotel in Aberdeen one day when I saw a very glamorous-looking officer covered in wings and pistols and God knows what,’ remembered Walker-Brown. ‘I asked him what unit he was in and he said the SAS. “Right,” I said. “What’s your CO’s name and telephone number?” I phoned up Brian Franks and joined the SAS.’2
Experienced officers such as Druce and Walker-Brown were invaluable to Franks and 2SAS; when the regiment returned from the Mediterranean in late March, Paddy Mayne had already toured the Auxiliary Units and the Airborne depots to cream off the talent. Franks was still able to recruit some very well-trained soldiers into 2SAS but when the regiment left their Ayrshire base for Salisbury Plain in late June 1944, 140 men had yet to be blooded in battle.
The next few weeks in southern England were ones of immense frustration for Franks as he tried to obtain a role for his regiment similar to that of 1SAS. Operation Rupert, to be launched near Nancy, eastern France, in mid-July, was cancelled at short notice because of objections from Special Forces Headquarters (SFHQ). Franks was furious at what he perceived as outside interference and said so in a letter to Brigadier McLeod, writing:
I have been trying to mount the initial operations of this regiment, which in each case entailed the dropping of a reconnaissance party into areas which you have ordered me to go. Although the personnel of these parties are perfectly prepared to drop blind, it is obviously preferable that in every case they should be received by a S.F.H.Q. reception committee. The difficulties and time wasted in endeavouring to arrange [these] reception committees satisfactorily has been appalling to say the least of it.3
Finally, 2SAS were given a mission – Operation Defoe – though Franks sensed it was designed to keep him quiet rather than achieve any worthwhile aims. Nonetheless on 19 July 22 men dropped into southern Normandy and spent the next few weeks on listening patrols, radioing back information to disinterested British and American regiments. A fortnight after Defoe, Tony Greville-Bell led 59 men into France on a scheme codenamed Dunhill. ‘I didn’t know what the operation was called,’ he recalled. ‘But I know it was a complete waste of bloody time.’ Having landed east of Rennes, the SAS party was quickly overrun by the American Third Army pushing towards Paris and 16 days later they were back in England.
Operation Rupert finally got the go ahead in late July, their orders being to sabotage the railway lines in eastern France between Nancy and Chalons-sur-Marne. The advance party left Fairford on board a Stirling bomber on the night of 23 July only for their aircraft to smash into a hillside as it approached the DZ.
It was a further fortnight before a replacement advance party was dropped and by the time the bulk of men on Operation Rupert jumped in late August, the American Third Army was sweeping through the countryside. For a brief while the Americans encouraged the SAS to act as their eyes and ears, but then General Patton arrived. ‘We hoped to move east and link up with those 2SAS boys on Operation Loyton,’ recalled Cyril Radford, one of the soldiers on Rupert. ‘But when Patton came along he put a stop to that. He didn’t like the British so he gave orders for us to be escorted out of the Third Army area by US MPs [military policemen].’4
Unbeknown to Radford, the ‘2SAS boys’ on Operation Loyton were in sore need of the support of their comrades from Operation Rupert. From the start there had been ominous signs for Operation Loyton; the officer initially scheduled to lead the mission backed out at the eleventh hour and so Brian Franks turned to Captain Henry Druce, as it transpired an inspired decision. ‘With the men standing by the aircraft I was telephoned in Scotland and told to rush down to Fairford,’ remembered Druce.5
Druce arrived at Fairford on 12 August and was briefed on the operation: now that the Allies had broken out of the Normandy beachhead the German Army was making a rapid retreat through France towards their homeland. Before they reached the German border, however, they had to negotiate the Vosges, a wooded range of hills that run north to south on the French side of the river Rhine: Loyton’s role was to drop into the Vosges and attack the retreating Germans. Druce was familiar with the terrain having passed through the Vosges before the war; he knew therefore that it was a landscape ripe for guerrilla warfare with its thick forests, deep ravines and flowing rivers. Druce knew too that the Vosges was a region of divided loyalty, an area long fought over by the French and the Germans with a minority of its inhabitants harbouring affection for the Nazi cause.
Druce led the advance party of Loyton into the Vosges in the early hours of 13 August. Packed into the plane were several canisters containing over 200 weapons with which to arm the local Maquis in the hope they would provide additional firepower during the operation. There were 14 men in total, none more experienced than Ronald Crossfield, better known as ‘Dusty’, an ‘Old Sweat’ who had joined the army in 1934 and whose seven brothers were all in uniform. He wrote an account of their insertion:
All lights were doused as we approached the coast and I remember that as we flew over my home town, Brighton, thinking about my wife and three year old son down there and wondering whether this was going to be a one way trip. We were to be dropped in the forests of Vosges, roughly fifty miles from Strasbourg near the village of Petit Renou [in fact it was the village of La Petite Raon]. A tot of rum each warmed us up just before we got the order to ‘Hook up’ – I followed Captain Druce and Hislop [captain John Hislop was the leader of a three-man Phantom signalling team] out and breathed the usual sigh of relief as my parachute opened with a welcome crack.
Not the best landing for me as I could see that I was drifting towards the trees and pulling hard on my rigging lines didn’t help. Both helmet and kitbag were wrenched off as I crashed through the branches and came to rest swinging gently with no idea of the distance between me and the ground. I punched my quick release and dropped heavily to the deck – it must have been about fifteen feet. Someone was running towards me and I reckon I had my [colt] 45 out faster than John Wayne, but the cry of ‘Tres Bien, Angleterre’ saved the lad from being shot. I fared better than some: Captain Druce had concussion and Ginger had damaged his knee so it was a slow march to cover the nine miles to the first camp.6
Druce recalled that it had taken him a couple of hours for his senses to unscramble, by which time the Maquis had made off with several of the SAS containers. ‘I think straight away we got to realise the Maquis weren’t playing the game,’ said Druce.
Nor did it take much time for Druce to appreciate the strength of the German forces in the area into which they had been dropped. On 15 August he radioed SAS Brigade to report that ‘between one thousand and five thousand’ enemy soldiers were moving east through a neighbouring valley.
Deciding that they needed a more secure base, Druce divided his party in two and set off on a scouting patrol. With him went the Phantom signallers and a Jedbergh team* while a French captain called Robert Goodfellow was given command of four SAS men comprising Crossfield, Hay, Ginger Hall and 36-year-old Robert Lodge. Lodge was actually Rudolf Friedlaender, a German Jew who had fled his country with his family in the 1930s and settled in Twickenham. Lodge had won the Distinguished Conduct Medal earlier in the war and despite being significantly older than the average SAS trooper, he was considered one of the finest men in the regiment. In addition a shot-down Canadian pilot, Lou Fiddick, who had been brought to Druce by the Maquis, was attached to the second party.
* Nearly 100 Jedbergh teams dropped into France in the summer of 1944. Each team comprised three men from either the SOE or the American Office of Strategic Service (OSS) and their job was to coordinate attacks on the Germans with the aid of the Maquis.
Lodge was leading the patrol through the forest when he froze and signalled for the men following to do likewise. ‘Suddenly all hell broke loose and everyone dived flat,’ remembered Crossfield. ‘Schmeissers, Lugers and rifles were all firing at us. We retaliated with our Brens and carbines. I know I used up three magazines very quickly. The Germans, firing through thick scrub, were not more than thirty yards away. They could not see us but we heard a scream or two.’
Goodfellow, in fact a Frenchman called Robert de Lesseps, a grandson of the man who constructed the Suez Canal, ordered the men to withdraw but as Crossfield began to crawl back through the trees he spotted Ginger Hall lying wounded. ‘I went to drag him away but he moaned “leave me, I’ve had it. Get away.” He had been hit twice in the chest and we no choice to leave him. It was a fiercely fought withdrawal and at some point Lodge disappeared through the bushes never to be seen again.’ The body of Lodge, bearing a bullet wound to the head and bayonet wounds to the stomach was later buried by locals in a nearby cemetery.
Druce, meanwhile, had also run into some Germans and some of the party became separated in the flight across the hills. Sergeant Seymour, a member of the Jedbergh team, was captured, and signaller Gerald Davis sought sanctuary in a village church. The priest departed promising to return with the Maquis but it was the Germans he brought and Davis was shot.
Druce and Goodfellow were finally reunited on 23 August. The two groups exchanged stories but were interrupted by the arrival of some Maquisards, dragging by the hair two young women whom they accused of betraying their presence to the Germans. Crossfield said the Maquis were all for shooting them but Druce, unconvinced as to their guilt, argued for leniency. ‘A compromise was reached,’ recalled Crossfield, ‘and their hair was shaved off and they were set to work on camp duties.’
On 26 August Druce should have welcomed in a ten-strong reinforcement party under Major Peter le Power but a breakdown in communication resulted in their landing 25 miles west of the DZ. With Druce increasingly concerned by the competence of the local Maquisards, as well as Captain Goodfellow, and with Germans swarming through the Vosges, Operation Loyton teetered on the edge of calamity. ‘We were really boxed in trying to save our skins,’ recalled Druce. ‘The Germans had sent a division from Strasbourg to find us and we were pretty oppressed.’
As a result Lieutenant-Colonel Brian Franks decided to take personal charge of the operation, leaving Sandy Scratchley in charge of 2SAS as he and 23 men dropped into the Vosges on the night of 30 August. It was a daring decision by Franks, and not one his predecessor Bill Stirling would have taken. Even Paddy Mayne – who had parachuted into the Morvan three weeks earlier to gather specific strategic information – might have thought twice about parachuting into such a volatile region without transport and surrounded by Germans.
Franks landed just after 0300 hours, to be met on the DZ by Dusty Crossfield. ‘“Hello Dusty”, I said, “where are the porters?” I remember thinking “Christ, this isn’t Victoria Station”, when a tremendous racket started: one of the canisters had exploded and it was like bloody Guy Fawkes Night. Things had just quietened down when suddenly there was a burst of gunfire right in the middle of us. A German collaborator had infiltrated the Resistance group, seized a Sten gun and fired at random and then bolted.’ The man was caught and shot but then more screams erupted. One of the Maquisards, on pilfering the contents of a canister, had taken a bite out of what he thought were army rations. ‘He had eaten great chunks of plastic explosive,’ recalled Druce, ‘and the explosive had arsenic in it so he died really quite an uncomfortable death.’
Franks arrived in the Vosges at the moment the Allied advance lost momentum. So rapid had their drive east been that the Americans overstretched their supply chain and the battlefield became temporarily static. The Germans needed the respite and used it to strengthen their new defensive positions along the banks of the Moselle, 15 miles west of where the men of Loyton were trapped. On 5 September the US Third Army relaunched their advance east, liberating the city of Nancy ten days later; but the Germans had been bolstered by the arrival of the Fifth Panzer Division from Brussels and the Allied advance became painstakingly slow.
More men and supplies were dropped to Loyton in early September but on the 9th of that month the SAS camp was attacked and they were forced to withdraw leaving behind much of their equipment. Throughout September the Germans captured a steady trickle of SAS soldiers, some through misfortune others through betrayal. Often the locals were forced to reveal information at the point of a gun though many refused to talk in spite of the inevitable consequences. One of the Maquis couriers was a middle-aged spinster called Madame Bergeron, who lived with an elderly aunt in a remote cottage. ‘There were few things they [the Germans] wanted to know which she could have told but she never gave in,’ remembered the 2SAS intelligence officer Christopher Sykes. ‘They heaped every humiliation on her to break her spirit and they failed absolutely. They made her house into a brothel, they beat her, they tortured her, with no avail. This quiet, prim, very ordinary-looking, well-dressed woman had the strength of a tiger. Their final revenge is too disgusting to describe: in the same house there lived her invalid aunt, about 80 years old … they dragged this wretched old woman out of her bed and made her dance for them in her nightgown. She died. They smashed up the house, and left.’7
On 19 September three jeeps were dropped to Franks and he could barely contain his fury at their state: faulty brakes, dirty guns and no spare fuel. He ordered three more vehicles and they arrived two days later, along with a further 20 men. Finally the SAS were able to go on the offensive and patrols were sent out to harass the Germans; three staff cars and a lorry were shot up on the Celles-Raon L’Etape road and Druce attacked a unit of SS troops as they formed up in the village square of Moussey. The Germans retaliated by transporting the male population of Moussey to concentration camps; only 70 of the 210 men returned.
Even with six jeeps, Franks recognised by the start of October that Operation Loyton had run its course, particularly now that the American advance was held up west of the river Meurthe. It had been a botched operation all in all, chiefly the fault of SHAEF who had instructed 2SAS to operate in the wrong area at the wrong time. Added to that fundamental problem was the unreliable Maquis, the shoddy resupplies and the poor quality of some of the latter reinforcements. ‘They arrived very nervous,’ Franks said in his operational report, ‘and were either so scared as to be useless or so confident that they were extremely careless. Most of these men were new recruits who were clearly not of the right type and had not had sufficient training.’8
Druce had already been sent through the lines on 29 September to hand to the Americans important enemy documents they had captured, and on 6 October the exfiltration began of Operation Loyton. Franks split his men into five parties, all of whom would withdraw independently, departing their camp at staggered intervals. Dusty Crossfield set off in the company of four men, including Jock Robb.
The colonel saw us all off and scrounged a packet of fags from me as he wished us goodbye and good luck. All went well for us over the next couple of days despite some very close calls with the enemy. We then came up against a fairly wide river [the Meurthe] and as we undressed to swim across I became aware that Jock Robb was doing nothing. He then told me that he was staying where he was because he couldn’t swim. He’d lied during training and got through somehow without being found out. It was too difficult a crossing for me to ferry him over and I was damned if I was going to leave a good pal so I got dressed again and we decided to find our own way by a different route back to safety.
Splitting from their three comrades, Crossfield and Robb headed cross-country, spending the night in a barn before scrounging some eggs and bread from a farm at first light. The farmer put them in contact with the Maquis, who provided them with civilian clothes and informed them that some of the SAS comrades had been caught by the Germans earlier in the day. In the company of a Maquis guide, Crossfield and Robb crossed the river Meurthe by bridge, continuing into the town of Baccarat which was teeming with Germans. ‘They sat on doorsteps, leaned against walls chatting away and taking no notice of us at all,’ recalled Crossfield. ‘I had a bit of tension when a German approached me but he was obviously asking for a light. After I had done this from my box of matches I realised that I had displayed a box of “Blue Cross” [a brand of British safety match].’
The pair eventually made it through the Germans lines where they were reunited with Franks and the others who had returned safely. Others weren’t so fortunate, however, including the six men who were the last to leave the SAS base near Moussey. They were caught and executed. In total, 31 soldiers on Operation Loyton were murdered by the Germans.
In direct contrast to the misery endured by the men on Operation Loyton, Roy Farran’s C Squadron enjoyed a rich harvest throughout the six weeks of operations Hardy and Wallace. The advance party codenamed ‘Hardy’, under Captain Grant Hibbert, dropped 40 miles east of Auxerre at the end of July and established a base in the Foret de Chatillon from where they carried out reconnaissance and built up a supply dump. Farran landed at Rennes in Dakotas on 19 August before motoring east across France in a convoy of 20 jeeps and 60 men to link up with Operation Hardy.
From the moment Farran landed on French soil to launch Operation Wallace he attacked the enemy with singular ferocity, aided in his work by the fluidity of the Allied advance and the confusion of the enemy retreat. Unlike the Vosges, where the Germans were determined to dig in and defend, the countryside between Auxerre and Dijon was perfect for Farran to launch hit-and-run raids against an already demoralised opponent.
On 8 September a section of approximately 20 men under Lieutenant Bob Walker-Brown, acting on a tip-off from the Maquis, ambushed five German petrol bowsers en route from Langres to Dijon. ‘We took the advice of the French and chose the position at a point where the country road crossed the main road,’ remembered Walker-Brown. ‘We took up positions on a bank overlooking the road, probably 20 feet above the road. It was a good field of fire but in retrospect it was a thoroughly bad position and I should have recced it myself but time was short and of course we didn’t want to appear to the French that we were chickening out.’
Charlie Hackney was behind a Bren gun waiting for the word from Walker-Brown to launch the attack. The first vehicle in the convoy was a motorcycle sidecar, followed by a truck. Hackney let them pass and then fired on the first of the five bowsers. ‘I was first to open up as the bowsers came round the bend and that was the signal for the ambush to start,’ he said. ‘We murdered that convoy. My opening burst hit the driver of the leading vehicle and he slumped over the wheel. Then I got the passenger next to him as he tried to jump clear. I remember seeing bits of his tunic flying off as he was struck by the bullets. We killed them all and you could see this thick black smoke for miles.’9
Despite the success of the initial onslaught the Germans didn’t react as the 2SAS had expected. ‘We allowed the German leading escort vehicles to run through the killing area, thinking they would continue south towards Dijon,’ said Walker-Brown. ‘As we opened up on the fuel bowsers, which went up in quite a cloud of smoke, we were suddenly fired on from the rear and we found that the German escort had turned right and then right round us and we had a very unpleasant job extricating ourselves.’
On 16 September, Farran made contact with the US Seventh Army, bringing to an end operations Hardy and Wallace. In his report Farran estimated that he and his men had killed or wounded 500 Germans, destroyed 59 motorised vehicles, plus a train, and blown up 100,000 gallons of enemy fuel. The casualties of 2SAS were seven dead and seven wounded. Wallace had succeeded, wrote Farran in an operational report, for exactly the same reasons that Loyton failed, namely: ‘This operation proves that with correct timing and in suitable country, with or without the active help of the local population, a small specially trained force can achieve results out of all proportion to its numbers. This operation must surely rank as one of the most successful operations carried out by a small harassing force behind enemy lines.’10
Overall, the SAS Brigade including the two French regiments and the Belgian squadron achieved considerable success in France though it could have been greater. Instead of reverting to the small units that caused so much damage in the desert – and which had been for David Stirling the guiding principle of the SAS – the regiment was inserted into France in units so large they became vulnerable to enemy attack. They were instructed to train and arm disparate Maquis groups, some of which were effective and some of which were not, containing men who were politicians more than soldiers and who hated rival Maquis groups more than the Germans.
In addition, some of the SAS units – particularly in 2SAS – contained soldiers who had neither the training nor the temperament for guerrilla warfare. This was not the fault of the senior officers such as Paddy Mayne and Brian Franks but the upper echelons of the British military who had sacrificed quality for quantity by expanding the SAS into a brigade too quickly.
Yet despite these handicaps the SAS Brigade were estimated to have killed 7,733 German soldiers during operations in France. Some 740 motorised vehicles were destroyed, as were seven trains, 89 wagons and 29 locomotives. Thirty-three trains were derailed and railway lines were cut on 164 occasions. SAS troops also called in 400 air strikes on German targets and carried out countless valuable reconnaissance patrols for the advancing Allied forces.
General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, expressed his gratitude in a letter to Brigadier Roderick McLeod: ‘I wish to send my congratulations to all ranks of the Special Air Service Brigade on the contribution which they have made to the success of the Allied Expeditionary Force,’ wrote Eisenhower. ‘The ruthlessness with which the enemy have attacked Special Air Service troops has been an indication of the injury which you were able to cause to the German armed forces both by your own efforts and by the information which you gave of German disposition and movements.’11
As for the SAS Brigade’s casualties, they were 330 killed, wounded or missing. But what that figure didn’t take into account was the mental toll of operations in Occupied France.
It had proved an oppressive and claustrophobic environment, utterly different to the desert. There the sun shone on a never-ending vista; in France the rain was relentless, the summer of 1944 was exceptionally wet, and the dark forests felt at times like a prison. There was also the constant fear of betrayal, another factor absent from the desert. ‘It was so much more open in the desert that you felt freer and able to escape,’ reflected David Danger, who was highly commended for his signalling work during Operation Houndsworth. ‘In France you were on your toes the whole time, and the first few weeks we were there we had the most terrible weather. Morale went down very quickly. I had to [send and receive by radio] the messages and bring them to Fraser and the men would always ask me if a resupply was coming.’12
In his report on 1SAS operations in France the regimental padre, Fraser McLusky, stressed the importance of regular resupplies from home in lifting the spirits, particularly those that contained letters and reading matter. He went on to say:
The morale shown in A Squadron was on the whole very high, but in quite a number of cases the cumulative effect of the strain imposed by this and previous campaigns of a similar nature was clearly observed. It would be unwise to keep men working behind the enemy lines for longer than three months, and probably a much shorter period would pay much higher dividends … the men can never relax and the resultant state of constant tension leaves its mark. After a certain period, varying with the men concerned, but ascertainable in the case of each, this tension reaches a danger point. Thereafter, men should be withdrawn for good from operations of this character.13
Johnny Wiseman later admitted that by end of Houndsworth he had reached the end of his tether. ‘I preferred operating in Italy I think because we were so well trained and we could take the initiative the whole time,’ he said. ‘In France, being supplied from the air, it’s always difficult to control the situation. They [the containers] had to be accurately dropped to be within reach of you and secondly someone’s got to carry the drop. It’s quite a tough game and of course by morning there had to be no sign of any drop. So physically it was quite an exhausting business.’14
Wiseman wasn’t the only officer to suffer. Derrick Harrison, Harry Poat and Bill Fraser were also feeling the strain of operations with the latter increasingly turning to alcohol to stave off thoughts of his mortality. By the end of 1944 no other officer, Paddy Mayne included, had seen as much action with the SAS as Bill Fraser but there was a heavy price to pay for his combat experience. ‘Fraser was brave, a kind man who understood people and he could sum up a man very quickly … but he deteriorated,’ recalled David Danger.
None of this, of course, was of interest to the newspapers when they ran a series of sensationalist articles about the SAS in August 1944. After years of secrecy and media blackouts concerning the regiment, General Eisenhower issued a directive in the summer of 1944 authorising his commanding officers to talk to war correspondents (provided they didn’t compromise ongoing or future operations) ‘in order to visualise and transmit to the public’.15 British newspapers couldn’t believe their luck having been forbidden by their government from mentioning the SAS since its inception. The headline in the Evening News was ‘Hush-hush Men at Rommel’s Back’ with an accompanying photograph of Paddy Mayne. The Sunday Graphic described the SAS as a ‘Ghost Army’ and explained how ‘a secret force of daredevil British parachutists created panic and chaos behind the enemy’s lines’. But no paper rivalled the Sunday Express for entertainment (if not exactitude). Calling the SAS ‘Britain’s most romantic, most daring, and most secret army’, the paper described how the regiment had triumphed by ‘introducing a kind of Robin Hood system of operations against the German and Italian fascists’.
It was nonsense, but welcome nonsense that put a smile on the faces of the SAS soldiers returning from France after weeks of demanding operations.
