CHAPTER 20

Small Raiding Intensified

Among admirals, Sir Bertram Ramsay was probably best versed at this time, by operational experience, in getting craft and men on and off beaches. The evacuation from Dunkirk had been his masterpiece of improvisation. Since then he had had a finger in several small raids across the Channel and also been privy to plans which had been stillborn. When Sledgehammer was mooted, it was Ramsay the Allies appointed as Naval Commander, mainly on the advice of Mountbatten to the First Sea Lord. And when Torch replaced Sledgehammer as the main Allied effort for 1942, Ramsay again took the top naval job.

In this capacity, in the aftermath of Jubilee, Ramsay wrote to Mountbatten expressing concern about raiding:

 

My dear Dickie,

Raids on the occupied coastline have not done very well in the last 12 months. The Germans no doubt welcome these raids for nothing shows more clearly the weakness of defences than an attack with a very limited objective. Every time we find a weak spot on the enemy’s coast we point out its weakness, and there is ample evidence that he is taking full advantage of this information to increase the strength of his defences both at sea and on land. If it is our intention at some future date to make an attack in force upon the enemy’s coast, we are now doing, or proposing to do, our best to make that attack less likely to achieve success.

 

This, of course, ran counter to the spirit of the Chiefs of Staff directive of 12 May which had called for substantial air and coastal raiding, culminating in the capture of the Cotentin peninsula followed by Round-Up – a large-scale descent on Western Europe in the spring of 1943. Mountbatten’s response, reminiscent of Keyes only a year previously, was to attack obstruction at source. A Memorandum from his Headquarters stated, ‘It appears that our small raids are frequently cancelled by the Naval C-in-C concerned on the grounds that the value of the objective does not warrant the risk of the Naval covering force’, and went on to show ways of overcoming such obstruction. Mountbatten declared that, if small raiding ceased, the enemy’s suspicions might be aroused as he came to analyse the large shipping movements associated with the mounting of Operation Torch. Insisting that raids must continue, Mountbatten did all in his very considerable power to step up their frequency and improve their effectiveness.

To defeat half-heartedness, Mountbatten succeeded in getting the Royal Navy fully involved in Combined Operations in order to eliminate a professional tendency to regard them as a spare-time occupation. The craft which had taken part in Jubilee and which were unsuitable, due to their short range, for inclusion in Torch, were kept together under Captain J. Hughes Hallett RN in the Solent, which was an ideal training area for landing techniques. Mountbatten wrote on 2 October that Force J, as this command was called, was intended to be ‘reasonably self-contained as a potential raiding force’, including specially trained coastal craft, needed as leaders, and a permanent Headquarters ship. Unless this was done, Mountbatten foresaw ‘a miniature upheaval in the naval Command’ whenever an expedition was to sail. As he pointed out, ‘While the Army and RAF are so organized that they can employ formed and trained units for any operation … in the case of the Navy the landing craft and small craft have to be specially collected together and organized as an ad hoc force’.

Mountbatten sought to regularize organization and procedures under ‘Fighting Instructions’ which would simplify and shorten the mounting of future amphibious operations, and would be adopted by the US Navy in the Pacific. He also insisted upon the need for Force J to operate against the enemy:

 

Unless this is done I regard it as certain that there will be a progressive decline in its discipline and morale … the craft which will comprise the proposed raiding force are, in their nature, only suitable for offensive operations. If such operations are not undertaken, therefore, the personnel … are bound to feel that their services are being wholly wasted… From this point of view, it is largely immaterial whether raiding operations achieve complete success or not, since the essential thing is to give as many of our fighting forces as possible a periodical battle.

 

This somewhat spine-chilling lapse into a blood-letting World War I attitude was not in accord with the views of senior officers who rejected, from bitter experience, the pointless inculcation of offensive spirit by trench raiding. At times Mountbatten may have taken his brief to attack a little too single-mindedly. Imbued with enthusiasm and a sense of urgency, he could be compared to a man with both hands on the engine telegraphs, demanding full-speed, but in need of somebody to help steer the ship. Fortunately both Churchill, in the case of Imperator, and the Chiefs of Staff, on various occasions, deftly took the tiller. For example, Mountbatten’s support for Operation Aflame, a spoof demonstration to draw the Luftwaffe into battle in October by deploying a large naval force off the French coast and dropping dummy parachutists near Berck, south of Boulogne, led to nothing because the navy said it had its hands full. Excuses were subtler than blank refusals, it was sometimes felt, when dealing with the eager CCO.

Yet Admiralty unwillingness to collaborate was brought about in some part by a disinclination to surrender their traditional right to rule the waves, but also by unserviceability of landing craft caused, as Mountbatten was quick to tell his own Service, by loss of naval control under the extreme pressures of mounting Operation Torch in addition to its other vital tasks. Dissatisfaction with his own Service is as plain in Mountbatten’s letters as it had often been in those of his predecessor. Casting about for allies, he joined hands with SOE, an organization which not only shared his enthusiasm for coastal raiding but had been denied the right to do so by the Chiefs of Staff Directive of 12 May which instructed it to ‘conform to the general plan by organizing and co-ordinating action by patriots in the occupied countries’, and yet deliberately excluded raiding. The relationship between Combined Operations and SOE, although theoretically natural, had its difficulties, as Foot describes:

 

The nature of the clandestine weapon was ill understood by most of Mountbatten’s staff who sometimes asked SOE to do the impossible… On another and less vital naval front, CD [the executive director of SOE] and the CCO were more easily able to work together. The CCO (because of his key seat among the Chiefs of Staff) had little difficulty in mounting operations when and where he wanted, and by a series of personal accidents SOE could provide a small force of highly skilled and intelligent toughs of several nationalities … who were looking for targets.

 

This reference is to the Small Scale Raiding Force, assembled within SOE by ex-commando Major G. H. March-Phillipps and including Appleyard (who wrote ‘every time you get that tight feeling round your heart and the empty feeling in your tummy, you are mentally and nervously tougher than the time before, and so are better fitted for real military action’) and Pinckney (who was inspired to propose Airthief and volunteered to sacrifice his life to ensure its accomplishment in the stealing of an FW 190). Under the name 62 Commando, it was lodged at the beautiful, secluded Anderson Manor in Dorset, administered by SOE but loaned to CCO for such raids as he wished to make. In effect it was SOE’s disciplined striking arm for tasks which irregular, often undisciplined, indigenous guerrillas were neither willing nor able to attempt. Already SSRF had undertaken a number of daring ventures, including the cutting out from port at Fernando Po of a German liner (Operation Postmaster). Appleyard concurred with what Mountbatten had in mind when he wrote, for propaganda purposes, about the need for a vast number of small raids every night (possibly several a night), involving only a few British troops, and all over the whole length of the occupied coast, forcing the enemy to strengthen his coastal defences and make substantial alterations in the disposition of his forces in Europe.

In striving to loosen the departmental bonds hindering raiding, particularly those of the kind with limited objectives, Mountbatten managed to establish with the COS Committee, on 27 July, the principle of Force Commanders whose task it would be to process, under CCO’s responsibility and with the C-in-C’s approval, the detailed planning, operations orders, preparation, training and launching of intensified small raids.

By also obtaining the exclusive use of MTB 344, CCO was able to put his and SSRF’s theories into practice, and, in opposition to Admiralty wishes, launch a private offensive which was to revolutionize small raiding and, incidentally, trigger Ramsay’s protest already referred to. Four nights prior to Jubilee, March-Phillipps with ten companions, armed to the teeth, crept ashore, paddling four abreast, in a new collapsible Goatley dory, 3 miles north of St Vaast. Launching from MTB 344 had been well rehearsed, and the navigation accurate – by a soldier (Appleyard), just to underline the competence and degree of inter-Service collaboration established. Operation Barricade’s aim, like that of almost all those to follow in quick succession during the coming months, was the acquisition of information, allied to the capture or killing of enemy soldiers. On this occasion they ran up against a familiar barrier – wire which had to be cut before reaching their objective which turned out to be a camouflaged Freya radar station, alongside a largish enemy camp. Mildly daunted, but fortuitously assisted by the enemy, who began to stalk them, the raiders found themselves close enough to throw three plastic bombs among the enemy, followed by generous squirts of Tommy-gun fire. ‘Altogether,’ wrote March-Phillipps, ‘some 5 lbs. of explosive went off within three feet of the enemy and nothing was heard afterwards except a few strangled coughs.’ After that it was a comparatively simple matter to hose the camp with machine-gun fire and retreat in good order to the boat, disturbed only by a few Verey lights in the sky from a shaken enemy.

Often MTB 344 would be at sea night after night waiting for clear weather to enable a landing. Operation Dryad was attempted several times before 2/3 September when 12 men landed on the Casquets rock and stealthily climbed the 80 steps leading to the lighthouse. As Appleyard said, ‘I have never seen men look so amazed and terrified at the same time … Three (wearing hair nets and taken for women) were in bed (it was 1:00 in the morning), two who had just come off watch were turning in, and the two on watch were doing odd jobs… Not a shot was fired and no violence had to be used.’ The haul comprised a collection of weapons (dumped into the sea); communications equipment (destroyed); documents and codes plus seven prisoners who, back in England, ‘are talking quite well’. Meanwhile the Germans spent all the next day calling up the Casquets by radio and getting no reply.

Operation Branford, carried out on 7/8 September, was simply a reconnaissance of the island of Burhou to see if it would be suitable as a battery position to support an attack upon Alderney, and was uneventful. But Operation Aquatint, five nights later to the north of St Honorine, near Port-en-Bessin, was quite another matter. As at St Vaast, March-Phillipps, caution tempering his daring, thought the objective was too strong and decided to retreat. Also as at St Vaast, the enemy obliged by following, to be ambushed at short range, losing seven men. But this was not an end to the incident. The Germans pursued them to the shore-line, put up a flare when the Goatley was still only 100 yards out to sea and raked the craft with devastating fire. March-Phillipps and three others were killed at once, the Goatley sunk and the rest, over a period of days, captured on foot. One French member did manage to escape to Spain where he was incarcerated by the authorities before escaping again to England and returned later to France as an agent. Another managed to swim to within 50 yards of MTB before Appleyard, who, as usual, was navigating and had not gone ashore because of a fractured leg sustained on Dryad, had to haul off under heavy coastal battery fire which hit the MTB and put one engine out of action.8 

As the autumn nights lengthened, attention could again be paid to Norway where some very special targets demanded destruction. On the night 15/16 September Operation Musketoon got underway as Captain G. G. Black, South Lancashire Regiment, nine other members of 2 Commando and two Norwegian corporals specially employed by the War Office, stepped ashore from a Free French submarine at Bajaering Fjord and trekked across the formidable Swartisen glacier to their objective, the Glomfjord hydro-electric power station. It was a singular feat to cross the glacier undetected in a single day’s march, even though it has to be noted that local security was lax. ‘There was no proper blackout at the power station; several lights were showing, door was wide open,’ said the report. The three Norwegian guards did nothing to interfere after one of the German guards had been shot and the other had escaped into a tunnel which the raiders at once filled with smoke. Dividing into two, Black’s party laid charges against two of the three turbines, while the others, 100 yards up the penstock path, tackled the pipeline. Shortage of time made it impossible to do more. The explosions were expertly laid. Immense damage was done to the machinery, and a landslide of sand and stone, brought down by an onrush of water, buried the third turbine.

Then things began to go wrong. Unnecessarily delayed in making off in the direction of Sweden, Black’s men ran into a German patrol which killed a Norwegian and a British soldier. Six men, including Black, were captured, put in chains and taken to Oslo. Four got away, the first to arrive in Sweden being the Norwegian, Corporal Christiansen, followed by Guardsman Fairclough and Private Twigg on 27 September and by Sergeant O’Brien on 3 October. Their endurance through harrowing journeys, with enough adventure to fill a book, were epics in themselves. Speedily and informally repatriated to England by the Swedes (‘who did not ask too many questions and whose press gave out a highly inaccurate account of what had happened’), they brought with them a vast amount of extremely valuable information.

Musketoon produced solid results by using a simple formula with a low outlay, and it hit the Germans at a critical moment in the war’s development. The drive on the Suez Canal had been decisively broken at Alam Halfa. Crushing defeat at El Alamein was a month distant; the armada carrying Torch to North Africa was assembling; the struggle in Russia had yet to grind to a halt before Stalingrad and in the Caucasus; the U-Boats were still winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Yet those in the know in Berlin already sensed that the days of runaway victories were over. In the immediate aftermath of victory at Dieppe and the almost total repulse of a series of badly co-ordinated raids against supply ports in North Africa, Hitler became even more sensitive. He had been considerably angered by a paragraph in the orders for Operation Jubilee which stated that, ‘Whenever possible, prisoners’ hands will be tied to prevent destruction of their documents’. A denial by the War Office on 2 September that hands had been bound was followed by a naïve instruction that ‘any such order, if it was issued, will be cancelled’. Already Hitler was threatening to chain prisoners’ hands as a reprisal.

In this state of mind he came to hear about Operation Basalt, the next and certainly the most momentous of all raids carried out by SSRF. With Appleyard in command and Sark the objective, detailed information about the defences was the aim. Landing on a deserted part of the islands, Appleyard was astonished to meet, in an apparently empty cottage,

 

an old lady fast asleep in bed! On being awakened she was naturally terrified to find her room full of tough-looking men with knives and pistols… It transpired that she was English but had lived on the island from childhood… For about two hours she described in detail every German strongpoint on the island… Other useful evidence obtained was copies of the island newspaper and also some proclamations issued by the Germans giving details of the proposed deportation of the Channel Islanders.

 

This final item of news was of great interest, confirming that the forced labour programme initiated by the Germans in the previous March was now widespread. Proof, too, of the extent to which the German economy was under strain as those in charge endeavoured to cope with the stupendous demand for armaments, and to build up the Atlantic Wall which, in the aftermath of the St Nazaire and Dieppe raids, was making vast calls upon labour and material. This was what Churchill, Keyes and Mountbatten had hoped for, yet even they probably did not envisage the degree of hatred which this programme would create. As people were taken to work and die far from home, the collaboration or placid acquiescence to German occupation which until recently had prevailed, was replaced by passive resistance, or even by active strife, by those dedicated few to whom death was preferable to slavery.

With the information obtained from the English woman Appleyard might have been satisfied. But his patriotic fervour was stronger than March-Phillipps’s prudence. Impulsively extending the duration of the raid by two hours, and thus risking being left ashore if a message, asking MTB 344 to wait beyond the agreed time failed to reach the captain, he began hunting for a prisoner to provide corroboration of the old lady’s story. Breaking into a nearby camp and seizing five sleepy German soldiers proved easy; leading them away when one of them kicked up a fuss and attracted the attention of an enemy patrol was quite another matter. In the confusion Appleyard tied the prisoners’ hands and then shot three of them on the way to the boat when the recalcitrant one continued to make a noise. Meanwhile the skipper of MTB 344, even though the message to wait had not reached him, hung on until dawn because he could not believe Appleyard would not make it. They were lucky to do so, but thrilled by the extent of their success. Most of all, Appleyard was delighted by their surviving captive who ‘proved a winner’, the most useful prisoner obtained by anyone to date: ‘He has proved very chatty and nothing is too much trouble for him.’ Extremely useful, too, was the news of the deportations which British propagandists instantly turned against the Germans.

Almost as damaging in reverse was the use the Germans could make of Allied treatment of prisoners of war. Reporting the discovery of soldiers’ bodies that proved that the British did tie prisoners’ hands and that the declarations of 2 September were worthless, they announced what became infamous as ‘The Hitler Commando Order’:

 

From October 8 at 12 noon all British officers and men captured at Dieppe will be put in chains… In future, all sabotage and terror tactics by the British and their accomplices, who behave like bandits rather than soldiers, will be treated as such by German troops and will be ruthlessly exterminated wherever they appear.

 

The timing was wrong, a typical battlefield error in the heat of the moment. The Commando Order was the expression of a man who rated himself above existing Conventions dealing with prisoners, and of a military caste which, since it had elevated its code of military conduct to what it considered a higher plane than that of guerrilla warfare, rejected all such irregular acts as breaches of honour and decency. There were those among the German military hierarchy who avoided obedience to the Order and those who denounced it after the war. But few protested at the time and many implemented it on the spot. Moreover, it was applied retrospectively. Soon those captured on Musketoon would be executed under its terms. Instantly the British and Canadian response to manacling of prisoners was tit for tat; Mountbatten at once obtained from Churchill permission to chain 100 Germans. Inevitably this figure was raised as if at auction until, for example, 1,376 Germans had been manacled in Canada – and without the slightest deterrence to either side. The war was whirling inextricably into a vortex of bitterness and cruelty, and to no positive advantage. For although the Swiss Government was able to negotiate an end to manacling, ultimate reprisals against raiders, partisans and anybody thought to have associated with them continued unabated. Few commandos, who put their lives on the line the day they volunteered for the job, were deterred, estimating execution by firing squad as just another hazard in an already dangerous occupation.

The adventures of SSRF in MTB 344 might have provided valuable propaganda material for the uplift of British morale at a time when the war seemed to be going badly and the likelihood of a Second Front delayed indefinitely. But when radio intercepts indicated how puzzled the Germans were about the way the raids were being carried out, it was decided, for the time being, to maintain silence. Instead, Mountbatten exploited the positive results obtained from Basalt as a pretext for persuading the Prime Minister and Chiefs of Staff to intensify small scale raiding. On 13 October he introduced Appleyard to Churchill, Eden, the Chiefs of Staff and other senior officers and allowed this remarkable officer’s enthusiasm to infect them. On the spot, it seems, CCO was given the green light to expand SSRF (eventually to about 60 men) and instruct his Search Committee to widen its enquiries among various departments and come up with all manner of economic and military targets for attack.

Meanwhile Appleyard carried on where Basalt left off, although there are indications that the manacling business upset him and that, subsequently, his cavalier approach to raiding lost its edge. Operation Facsimile, scheduled for 16 October against Morlaix airfield in Brittany, was called off due to ‘insoluble weather’; and a few days later Inhabit, against Cap Levy, Cherbourg Peninsula, came to nothing because the force ‘could not make the correct landfall’” On 11 November, however, Fahrenheit, under Appleyard’s direction but executed by 12 Commando in the style of March-Phillipps, was carried out.

Again the objective was in Brittany, this time the Semaphore Station at Pointe de Plouézec. The post-action report is unusually vivid:

 

The party went ashore under command Capt. P. Kent, Intelligence Corps. At once they found mines across the path leading to the Semaphore Station. They carefully took their time getting through these, cut the telephone cables from a pill box to the Station, reconnoitred round about and placed guards before advancing in three groups. The night was uncannily still, the slightest sound being audible. The two leading groups managed to crawl within ten paces of the sentries, who were very alert, trip wires alongside the path being noticed. It was not possible to get any closer. After lying still for 16 minutes, Capt. P. Rooney unscrewed the top of a No. 6P grenade. The sound attracted the attention of the sentries who stopped talking and listened carefully. As soon as they recommenced talking, Capt. Rooney threw the grenade. There was a blinding flash and a shattering explosion followed by cries from the sentries. Capt. Rooney’s party were first over the wire followed by Capt. Kent’s party and the third group. A dog was seen to scuttle round the corner of the guard house. The sentries were on the ground, one silent and covering his face with his hands, the other crying ‘Nicht Gut; Nicht Gut, Kamerad,’ all the time. Both the sentries were finished off with Tommy-gun fire… A man was seen to leave the Station house and come down the path towards the wire. He whistled, at which the party opened fire, Sgt. Barry bringing him to his knees, continued firing until he was brought to the ground and silenced. Men started to come out of the door, leaving the light on inside, and on this magnificent target Sgt. Brodeson opened up with two bursts of silent Sten. A man fell on his face and Cpl. Howell put in about ten rounds of Tommy-gun fire. After this it seemed reasonable to retire. No losses were suffered by the landing party.

 

The epitome of hit-and-run raiding and a very satisfactory night’s work, it could be claimed – of a sort which inspired Churchill to exult about ‘a hand of steel which plucks the German sentries from their posts’. But fatigue and adverse winter weather were beginning to tell on Appleyard and the men of MTB 344. Four days later when, once more, he, two officers from SSRF and an officer and seven men from 12 Commando approached the Cherbourg Peninsula, conditions again precluded action. The report on Operation Batman explaining its abandonment on the grounds that there was a ‘sea running’ and ‘a lot of rocks’, has an air of weary resignation about it, almost of relief. The original SSRF men and, perhaps above all, the crew of MTB 344 who can have had very little rest during three months of persistent danger, had probably moved into reverse from the point at which, according to Appleyard, ‘a fighting man got nervously tougher than the time before’. In due course he and a few select colleagues would be transferred to North Africa.