All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know from what you do.
Duke of Wellington
As with most operations, the 317 (6th Airborne Division) FSS assault did not pass without incident. Sergeant Leon Butcher broke his shoulder hurtling through a greenhouse. Sergeant Emil van Laer was wounded in the head by flak, broke both ankles as his glider landed ten miles from its Landing Zone and was captured. Sergeant Dick Burgess (HQ 3 Parachute Brigade) dropped twenty miles from Drop Zone V after his Dakota was attacked by a fighter and was also captured. Sergeant Rene Howse (HQ 5 Parachute Brigade) was captured and placed on the bonnet of a German lorry until the driver was shot and he fell off as it careered out of control. He met Sergeant Fraser Edward, who was Brigadier Poett’s interpreter, and made his way to the Chateau de M. Cheron, which was a German headquarters, captured four Germans and sifted through a mass of abandoned documents. Nevertheless, by the end of D-Day, 6th Airborne Division and 4 Special Service Brigade, which had landed on Sword Beach, were defending the Orne Bridges on the beachhead left flank.
For CSM Weaver of 19 (50th (Northumberland) Division) FSS on a Landing Craft Tank off Gold Beach near Arromanches, D-Day was his third landing:
5 June. Again to experience that feeling of uncertainty as to what fate had in store for us on the morrow. We sailed, everyone thinking the same thoughts but none expressing them. We played Bridge to pass the time.
6 June. The day (D Day) – the sea full of shipping – the warships shelling any sign of enemy life. Our LCT was shelled as it nosed its way offshore and we all flattened on the deck as the shells straddled the ship. My feeling of thanks to the Navy as they silenced the gun. Going ashore at Le Hamel in a Rhino (tracked amphibious APC) – the sign of recent battle – the dead – the ambulances. The march to our first halt a few miles inland – the noisy night as we lay in a farm and listened to the Jerry planes attacking our shipping – the beauty of the tracers (if one could appreciate beauty at such a time) gratefully going up to meet the attacking planes.
A 33 (3rd Division) FSS sergeant is thought to have landed with 8 Infantry Brigade on Sword Beach and another sergeant was with 185 Brigade; 8 Brigade nearly faltered getting off the beach due to the cautious nature of its Brigadier.
Early next morning, 19 FSS collected their motorcycles from Gold Beach and by next morning were based in the German Secret Field Police HQ in Bayeaux. Several suspects were sent to Camp 020 under the agreement that any operational intelligence gained in London would be disseminated within the week. A tenacious liar, former film extra and salesman, Georges Laurenger was denounced by a woman who heard tapping from his room. The former soldier, Yves Guilcher, was exposed by the Resistance. Incriminating torn paper found during the search of his house led to his radio buried in his garden. He admitted to being associated with the SD and supplied a long list of fellow collaborators.
Captain MacMillan established HQ 317 FSS in a school where he was joined by Major Fred Adams, a Canadian with responsibility for Civil Affairs, a decision that led to an effective relationship that lasted until the end of the war. Ignoring an agreement reached between Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force and the French Provisional Government that national identity cards would not be defaced, 317 FSS applied a scheme devised by Divisional HQ of authenticating French identity cards with British 2d postage stamps. Several days after D-Day, MacMillan was at HQ I Corps when he was asked by correspondents how had the airborne landing gone and he replied, ‘We caught the Hun with his trousers down’. The story appeared in British newspapers from a non-attributable source, apparantly much to the annoyance of Rommel and Hitler. The Division was meant to withdraw after seven days but Twenty-First Army Group failed to capture Caen, which led to more than two months of some of the fiercest fighting on any front and it had no alternative but guard the left flank.
After a grim battle to seize Breville a week after the landings, MacMillan investigated allegations that two paras had been executed after several had driven into Herouville in German vehicles and had been captured. He established from a householder that an Army motor cycle company commanded by a decent captain was billeted in the village and had two SS lieutenants attached to it. It was they who insisted that captured commandos and parachute troops were to be executed under the infamous Hitler Order, but the captain had not shared the directive with his men. MacMillan later learnt that one of the SS had been killed. The other was eventually hanged for the murders. On 14 June, Captain MacMillan attended a briefing in which 3 (X) Troop, No. 10 (Inter Allied) Commando was to escort three Caen Resistance members through German lines opposite 4 Special Service Brigade. Two successfully infiltrated; however, the Troop commander, Captain Hilton-Jones, was badly wounded and captured and the third Frenchman was shot dead by 1 (French Troop) near Amfreville after he forgot the password. In the last week of June, Sergeant Reg Ribton-Turner broke his leg and was evacuated. MacMillan was accidentally shot by one his men while cleaning his pistol and was treated by a visiting Intelligence Corps NCO, who had previously served with the Small Scale Raiding Force. The persistent shelling and mortaring affected morale and inevitably led to civilians being accused of communicating with the enemy. Shortly after the Light Armoured Regiment had been heavily mortared, two civilians wearing white helmets seen heading for the German lines were arrested, but they turned out to be firemen. It was recommended by 317 FSS that Battalion intelligence officers place observation posts in no man’s-land.
On D-Day, 49 (Lines of Communications) FSS heard about the landings from the BBC and a week later were loitering off Arromanches. Corporal Jean Vila, a former French Railways manager, had a brother who was a French Army prisoner in Germany. While he was waiting to land, a German aircraft strafing the anchorage was shot down by anti-aircraft guns and, exploding as it crashed alongside the ship, caused several casualties when shattered timber planks collapsed into the holds crowded with soldiers. Late next afternoon, 49 FSS scrambled down nets into a landing craft that crunched onto Gold Beach and the NCOs revved their motor cycles through the surf and drove about two miles inland to their assembly area in a field. Next day, the section deployed to protect the oil installation near Port-en-Bessin against sabotage from raids and pro-German collaborators. Billeted in the village school, regular contact was made with local authorities, the Gendarmerie and those villagers who had returned after the D-Day bombardment. On 1 August, detachments took over Port Security at Arromanches and the British Mulberry Harbour ‘B’ and covered the lines of communication to Bayeaux.
A few days after a deception, in which 6th Parachute Division turned their red berets inside out to show the inside black lining more associated with the Royal Tank Regiment, a French civilian brought to FS HQ claimed that he had crossed from the German lines in an attempt to reach his family in Caen. MacMillan sent the suspect to HQ I Corps in the belief that he probably had information of intelligence interest. When it then turned out that he was on the Corps Black List and was suspected of being sent to discover which unit had replaced the Division, it prompted a disagreement on the need to share counter-intelligence information. On 12 July, CSM Roberts arrived with the Sea Tail, and the sleeping bags. Sergeant Howse, a veteran of North Africa, Sicily and Normandy, was badly wounded and should have been evacuated; however, MacMillan agreed to his request to stay with the section so long as, in future, he deployed with the Sea Tail.
By mid-August, Twenty-First Army Group had broken out of the beachhead, crossed the River Seine and was advancing towards Belgium. HQ Intelligence Corps (Field) landed on 2 August and was supporting the Field Security sections experiencing the euphoria of liberated towns and villages as they worked their way through their Arrest Lists, unearthing agents and stay-behind groups, checking out displaced people and intervening in attempts at retribution when French women accused of collaboration were having their heads shaved. Behind them, Lines of communications sections and Reserve Detachments mopped up and handed internal security over to mayors. Sergeants Edwards, Kershaw and Hornby, of 317 (Airborne) FSS, were among the first Allied troops to liberate Deauville and Trouville. In one village, Edwards gave his cap badge to a girl. Years later he returned and, by chance, met her. She still had the badge. On 17 August, 6th Airborne Division reached the River Seine and returned to England for leave and refitting. After sustaining injuries in a motor-cycle accident and a parachute jump on exercise, MacMillan took no further part in the war.
Soon after Caen was liberated, Claude Collomb, a line-crosser despatched by his German handlers to report on security controls, the state of civilian morale and food distribution, and assess the effect of naval bombardments, defected and was transferred to FS HQ and admitted to being a SD agent, who had penetrated several Resistance groups and had betrayed three Allied escapers near the Spanish border. He also betrayed his good friend, Daniel Crombe, who arrived with a letter from a Resistance leader commending his integrity, until it turned out it had been written by the SD. One section found they were part owners of a cow rented from a farmer by the German Secret Field Police.
Meanwhile, 1011 FSRD crossed the Seine over demolished bridges at Elbeuf. Raised in 1943 to support HQ Western Command in Chester, with 1010 and 1012 FSRDs it reinforced 45 (XXX Corps) FSS in Caen before being switched to the 2nd (Canadian) Corps spearheading the advance to Rouen. During the night of 29/30 August, as part of R Force, the equivalent of S Force in the Mediterranean, that included five FS sections and six Reserve Detachments, it entered the city. Tasked by the Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub Committee and with HQ FS based in the Marie and some wooden huts overlooking the cathedral, the sections seized documents and equipment and rounded up collaborators, Gestapo and German soldiers while deterring enthusiastic Resistance, whose sole idea was ‘to undress and brand or shave the head of as many women as possible’.
Meanwhile, when the SOE was instructed to stir up trouble in areas still occupied by the Germans, several uniformed Jedburgh Missions, Inter-Allied Missions and Operational Groups parachuted to support the Maquis with advice and supplies. The Maquis were mainly young Frenchmen who had fled into the high scrublands of south-eastern France to avoid Vichy conscripted forced labour in Germany. Jedburgh teams usually consisted of two uniformed Allied officers and a NCO wireless operator asked to support the Resistance conducting guerilla warfare and sabotage. Captain Godfrey Marchant was the only member of the Corps who served with a Jedburgh, Team Aubrey, operating in the northern suburbs of Paris in August. When the Maquis ambush of a German armoured column near Rougemont was unsuccessful, he hid near a lake for eight hours. He was later killed in a plane crash in India. Captain Desmond Hubble was a Gunner who had served as the Cipher Officer to the British Military Mission in the Belgian Congo before he transferred to the Intelligence Corps in 1942. After spending a year in West Africa on SOE operations, he was invited by Wing Commander Forrest Yeo-Thomas to join the RF Section and, during the night of 5/6 June, dropped as part of the eight-man uniformed Inter-Allied Mission Citronelle to support Maquis groups in the Ardennes region. Six days later, he was returning from a reconnaissance of a supply drop zone with US Army Lieutenant Victor Layton when they ran into a German patrol about to attack the Maquis. Layton escaped, however, Hubble was captured and ruthlessly interrogated in Charleville. In August, he was one of thirty-seven shackled SOE men and women prisoners, including Captains Macalister and Pickersgill, transferred to Block 17, Buchenwald concentration camp. Singled out by guards because he was in uniform, he was particularly pleased when a pocket chess set was returned to him. To compete with the inhumanity of the camp, the group imposed military conduct in everything they did. Chess became a focal point of recreation.
Supporting the 7th (US) Army and 1st (French) Army that landed west of Monaco on 15 August was the 2 Independent Parachute Brigade, detached from XIII Corps in Italy, and a three-man 89 (Airborne) FSS detachment commanded by Sergeant Glanville. He jumped while Corporal Benjamin arrived with the Sea Tail. Corporal Burnley remained with the Brigade Provost Unit. Seventeen photographic interpreters were attached to 7th Army with Captain Gilbert landing with the 1st Free French Division.
Meanwhile, in Algiers, Supreme Headquarters had amalgamated SOE and the US Office of Strategic Services to form ‘Massingham’, with responsibility to ensure that Maquis operations were co-ordinated to support the invasion of Southern France in Operation Dragoon. In late 1943, Captain Xan Fielding had arrived in Great Britain and, joining F Section, then jumped into Provence in August 1944 with orders to contact Lieutenant Colonel Cammaerts, who was controlling the Jockey Circuit north of Marseille, and mobilize the Maquis to secure the route through the Alps to Grenoble. But they and a French officer were arrested at a French Milice police check point near Digne after Fielding’s documents were found to be inaccurate. When the police then discovered a large amount of money in the car boot, Fielding claimed he was a black marketeer and all three were imprisoned in the town. When the remarkable Polish Krystyna Skarbek, also known as Christine Granville, the longest-serving of all SOE women agents, heard about the arrests, she delivered some supplies to her ‘husband’, namely Cammaerts, and convinced the Alsatian, Albert Schenck, who was the liaison officer between the French Prefecture and the SS, that not only was she General Montgomery’s niece, she was also an agent and, with the Allies in southern France, it was in his best interests to secure the release of the prisoners. Several days later, expecting to be shot, the prisoners were bundled into a car and driven to freedom. Fielding returned to Greece just as the country descended into civil war and participated in Jedburgh operations in the Far East, finally ending an adventurous war in French Indo-China.
In 1940, the French-speaking Australian Edward Bisset joined 20 FSS and transferred to 64 (SOE) FSS until he was commissioned in June 1941 and then spent two years as an F Section conducting officer, with a reputation as a meticulous examiner of students. In July 1944, he dropped with the Inter-Allied Tilleul Mission near Poitiers to co-ordinate Maquis activity in the Correze region. On 23 September, he and the US Captain Fraser left for Paris by jeep, but while they were loading their jeep after an overnight stop, one of their sub-machine guns fell onto the pavement, cocking as it did so, and a bullet killed Bisset almost immediately. Two days later he was buried, with the Maquis forming an honour guard while five Allied officers and a sergeant were pall-bearers.
During the evening of 2 September, as 1011 FSRD joined the XXX Corps advance to Brussels, Sergeants Arthur Britton and Wasley were in the section lorry when it broke down. By next morning, they had repaired the lorry and were following Route 240 to Amiens. Britton recalls:
As I knew the country very well, I suggested going via Lille to have a better through road once we got beyond Arras. About 10 miles before Lille, we saw anti-tank guns in ditches on both sides of the road, pointing in the direction towards which we were going and some gunners, we thought, were waving at us in greeting. We entered Lille, widely acclaimed, just as it was getting dusk and not a little surprised at the enthusiasm displayed. We were shown the best hotel and told the room was ‘on the town’; it then dawned on us that we had mistakenly ‘liberated’ Lille. We slept the sleep of the wicked to the sound of rifle and LMG fire all around, caused by the FFI (French Forces of the Interior) mopping up nests of German resistance, and awake in time to greet the first armoured cars to enter Lille. We set off for Brussels early on 4 September, stopping for lunch at a café at the entrance of Hal. Fortunately the truck had been parked at the side of the garden, for while we were enjoying the Belgian publicans’ hospitality, a tank with an enormous black cross lumbered across the road, fortunately free of soft-skinned vehicles.
Corporal Freddie Hensby also claimed to be first into Lille when he rode his motorcycle to the outskirts of the city, collected two gendarmes as pillion and arrived at the Hotel de Ville. On the way to Brussels, Captain Pertwee briefly led his 50 (HQ Twenty-First Army Group) FSS into enemy-held territory until he realized his map reading error and then sheltered overnight with a bemused tank troop. Further embarrassment followed when Corporal John Hitchen on his motor cycle in front of a column of tanks was stung by a bee and struggled to remove his jacket. On 4 September, the section joined R Force in Brussels as the City FS section and working directly with Captain Donald Loudoun, now the Civil Security Officer (Belgium), moved into the Flemish branch offices of Gestapo HQ at 128 Avenue Louise. Meanwhile, 33 (3rd Division) FSS and two Reserve Detachment had been specifically tasked to capture the headquarters before the Germans destroyed their documents. Meanwhile, 50 FSS had guided HQ Intelligence Corps (Field) to several requisitioned houses in Avenue de Tervuren.
Left behind at Dunkirk with 1 Czech Brigade containing the German garrison was 1017 FSRD, which spent most of its time searching for collaborators with a French officer and two NCOs from the 5th (Psychological Operations) Bureau.
By the time that Twenty-First Army reached Belgium, the APIS had proven to be of immense value with its Corps and divisions each having an interpretation section of two officers operating from an office truck that was usually equipped with two Type D stereographs, a magnifying measurer, a book of logarithm tables and a drawing table and office equipment needed for the draughtsman. The delivery of photographs from airfields to the Corps headquarters was sometimes slow and consequently the interpreters used their powers of persuasion to speed up the process, particularly if their commander was impatient for results. In most instances, photographic interpreters had direct access to formation commanders and were expected to anticipate likely courses of action and contribute to briefings. Major General Lewis Lyne, who commanded the 59th (Staffordshire) Division, kept a folder of air photographs in his command caravan which Captain Groom enhanced with panoramas to accompany the mosaics. Some commanders still needed to be convinced. A Polish divisional commander in 1945 dismissed the findings of his photographic interpreter, Major J. Robinson, who believed that a battery of 88mm guns covered the axis of his planned attack and proposed an alternative route. The Pole declared he was going to take the shortest route to Berlin and charged; however, the attack failed with heavy casualties. As the advance penetrated deeper into Europe, B3 Section, Allied Central Interpretation Unit concentrated on providing intelligence for Twenty-First Army Group while separate sections were formed for specialist tasks. For instance, B7 examined the island of Walcheren and the flooded countryside around Antwerp. The demand for censors and code-breakers in liberated countries led to advanced bases being established in Bruges in Belgium and Tilburg in Holland, where they were joined by Intelligence Corps trained at the Foreign Office code-breaking department in London.
The Field Security protection of the 300-mile long lines of communication from Normandy to the leading divisions grew in importance, but by mid-September it was near to collapse. When 11th Armoured Division seized Antwerp on 4 September and then stopped, as did XXX Corps, the trapped German 15th Army escaped from northern Belgium to Walcheren and made for the Rhine bridges at Arnhem. With British commanders focusing on striking deep into the Ruhr, Montgomery planned an airborne carpet (Operation Market) over which 2nd Army would advance the sixty miles from the Belgian/Dutch border and bounce the Rhine at Arnhem (Operation Garden).
The story of Operation Market Garden has been told many times, in particular that the bridge was one too far, and that it was a classic example of credible intelligence being rejected by a commander with disastrous results. In particular, Resistance reports of the presence of the battle-hardened 9th SS Panzer Division and 2nd Army Intelligence identifying 10th SS Panzer Division resting in an area that Field Marshal Walter Model, who was commanding the defending Army Group B from his headquarters at the Tafelberg Hotel in Oosterbeek, believed to have little strategic value.
As the planning took shape, at HQ I British Airborne Corps, Captain Jack Bryden, the GSO 3 (Counter-Intelligence), remained with Corps Rear in England. Lieutenant R.A. Beal, the senior photographic interpreter, commanded the five-strong Army Photographic Interpretation Section. Captain P. Hodgson had taken over from Captain de Silva as the Intelligence Officer. Commanded by Major General Robert Urqhuart, 1st Airborne Division barely had a week to plan the seizure of the bridge. Selecting drop zones seven miles east of Arnhem at Oosterbeek, lack of aircraft forced him to compromise the drop to happen over three days between 17 and 19 September. Captain John Killick commanded 89 (Airborne) FSS with detachments of a sergeant and two JNCOs supporting the three Brigades and two JNCOs attached to 52nd (Lowland) Division, which was expected to reinforce the Division. Accompanying 1 Parachute Brigade, tasked to seize the Arnhem bridges, was Sergeant Bob Pinquet. Born to French parents in Hong Kong, he had read modern languages and law at Cambridge University and was a tennis Blue. Joining the Intelligence Corps in February 1942, he joined 23 (42nd Division) FSS in 1942 and was briefly attached to 317 (Airborne) FSS in UK before joining 89 FSS in North Africa. Arrest lists were issued and German headquarters identified. As with all Intelligence Corps at risk of capture, the several Jewish NCOs selected codewords to be used to decode information passed by letters to families. The 1 Polish Independent Parachute Brigade had its own FS section. The Dutch Liaison Mission of 2 (Dutch) Troop, No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando, commanded by Captain Martin Knottenbelt and which had recently returned from Burma, joined the Division.
At midday on 17 September 1st Airborne Division began dropping. In his C-47 Dakota over Drop Zone ‘S’, Captain Killick helped pass containers to the RAF loadmaster and then jumped, but dropped his Sten when he became briefly entangled in the rigging. Corporal Gately was soon interrogating Dutch Home Guard SS but as 1 Parachute Brigade set off for Arnhem and met unexpected resistance from a Waffen-SS training battalion near Wolfsheze, he then interrogated Germans. Meanwhile, 3 Parachute Battalion broke the block and ambushing a German Army Citroen, killed its four occupants, including Major General Kussein, the Arnhem town commander. The Dutch commando Captain Knottenbelt later searched it for documents. Meanwhile, Killick linked up with Captain Hodgson and CSM Armstrong, who had both landed by glider, and with Sergeant Chambers who had parachuted, intending to join Sergeant Pinquet’s detachment in the village of Heelsum but when he learnt that 1 Parachute Brigade was advancing to Arnhem, he found an abandoned German motor cycle, passed Hotel Tafelberg and linked up with Brigade HQ at Oosterbeek, where several Dutch civilians helped the FS detachment. Returning to search the hotel with Corporal Gray as a pillion, they assembled documents of intelligence interest to be collected later and, finding a second German motor cycle, caught up with the Brigade and met Chambers, but not the detachment.
Ahead, Sergeant Pinquet and Corporal Maybury were in a doorway near Arnhem Cathedral during the late afternoon when they heard a German motor cycle. In an attempt to capture it, Pinquet stepped onto the road but as he tried to seize it, the motor cyclist shot him at point blank range, the bullet nicking his lung. Hauled into a doorway by Maybury, he was occasionally treated by civilians and passing British troops until he was captured and taken to the Municipal Hospital, where he rejected an offer to escape because he was so seriously wounded. Corporal Maybury was later also seriously wounded by a machine gunner and dragged himself into a school where he was found by the Dutch Dr Zwolle but died the next morning. Zwolle found his Arrest List. Meanwhile, at Brigade HQ, Killick had instructed 100 prisoners to dig latrines and bring in food but was shocked when a Waffen-SS told him about the two SS divisions. Then learning that Maybury was missing and knowing he had an Arrest List, Killick and six soldiers from B Company, 2 Parachute Battalion were searching for him when a Dutch-Jewish photo-journalist took several photos of Killick in Arnhem. Meanwhile, Dr Zwolle had been arrested while searching for food and was summarily executed next day when he was found in possession of the List, an event that is commemorated by a plaque in Bakkerstraat.
During the night, 1 Air Landing Brigade fought a tough battle with a Dutch SS Home Guard battalion threatening the 4 Parachute Brigade drop. At Divisional HQ in the Hartenstein Hotel in Oosterbeek, CSM Armstrong, deputizing for Killick, divided the available Field Security into pairs to translate documents, including those found in General Kussein’s car, and support the Dutch commandos and the locally-raised Orange Battalion hunting for collaborators and searching houses for items of intelligence interest previously occupied by the Germans. In Arnhem, Captain Killick had collected an ad hoc platoon of his two NCOs, paras, military police, signallers and a cook, who was also a crack shot, and moved into the former Dutch Military Police Station, where they found three Dutch policemen. They later described Killick as unafraid, wearing his beret and armed with four automatic weapons. When a Resistance leader suggested that the Division should use the Philips Company private telephone network to compensate for failing communications, the advice was rejected at Divisional Headquarters on the grounds that conversations could be intercepted. Although information from the policemen was often contradictory, on 19 September Captain Killick telephoned Divisional HQ to brief Major General Urquhart on his observations. In another telephone conversation with Captain Knottenbelt later in the day, he said that the situation at the bridge was getting progressively bleak. Meanwhile, 30 (3rd Division) FSS had been detached to XXX Corps and, with 1013 Reserve Detachment and a former Philips manager, was instructed to secure the Philips Factory in Eindhoven because technical experts suspected it had been used in the production of V-weapons.
Reaching the 1 Parachute Brigade perimeter, Killick disbanded his platoon and took up a defensive position with a Bren gun he had picked up. Sergeant Chambers was noted for directing artillery fire. Early on 21 September the men at the bridge abandoned their positions and, splintering into small groups and leaving the wounded behind, attempted to break out to Oosterbeek. Killick and another soldier were captured by the Waffen-SS while hiding in a vehicle inspection pit full of rubbish. He later interpreted for British and German doctors.
After delays caused by rain and fog in England, the 1 Polish Independent Parachute Brigade landed east of Driel. Lieutenant Wladsylow Brzeg, the Brigade FSO, and his Field Security Section, who had been told not to trust the Resistance, arrested collaborators and German agents. Next day, 43rd (Wessex) Division linked up with the Poles. Across the Rhine, the Airborne Division was being squeezed into a withering perimeter around the Hartenstein Hotel. CSM Armstrong and Corporals Foster, Gorrie and Corporal Zitman were wounded, with the latter having a leg amputated. A noted killer of snipers, he later married a Dutch nurse who treated him. Commander Arnoldus Wolters, Royal Dutch Navy, the ‘official representative of Dutch government’, helped interrogate prisoners held in the hotel tennis courts and then, on 24 September, as ‘Johnson’, translated for Colonel Graeme Warwick, the senior medical officer, negotiating a truce to evacuate the British wounded into German hands. Next night, as 2,000 men were shepherded across the Rhine in Operation Berlin, 89 (Airborne) FSS provided guides and brought up the rear with the Divisional HQ Defence Platoon. Six Field Security crossed; however, Corporal Philip Scarr, who had swum the river, died from sheer exhaustion at Nijmegen on 28 September. Just two unharmed NCOs returned to their billet in Hill House, Wellingore. Of those who were captured, Sergeant Pinquet was hospitalized until he was liberated from Stalag 383 near Munich. Sergeant Chambers reached Soviet lines after escaping from a prison camp in Poland. Captain Kragt and his radio operator played a crucial role in helping to organize the escape of evaders in Operations Pegasus 1 and 2.
On 27 October, 49 (Lines of Communication) FSS arrived in Brussels to join several other sections preparing for the 2nd Army advance into Germany. Corporal Vila was admitted to No. 8 British General Hospital in Brussels in December with chronic sinusitis and was flown back to England where he was discharged in August 1945. Air raids were frequent and when a V-2 hit a building occupied by Intelligence Corps (Field) preparing for afternoon lectures on 10 November, Lance Corporal Shlomo Rosinoff, of 273 (Lines of Communication) FSS, was killed and twenty-four others were wounded. In November, Colonel Stevens established No. 1 Detachment, Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (UK) at Diest as an advanced interrogation centre for non-military prisoners.
On 15 December, three German armies took advantage of snowy, low cloud and, bursting from the Ardennes forests, struck the 3rd (US) Army in the general area of Bastogne with Antwerp their objective in the engagement that became known as the Battle of the Bulge. As XXX Corps moved to Dinant to blunt the attack, on 20 December Captain Hockliffe was instructed by HQ Intelligence Corps (Field) to form a FS Group of five Field Security sections and cover the freezing River Meuse, from Givet on the French border to north of Liege, and to liaise with the US Counter Intelligence Corps. Knowing that FSOs were protective of their independence, he emphasized that he was the force commander and appointed Lieutenant Tim Gash to liaise with the Americans. To prevent the Germans using barges as stepping stones across the river, 30 FSS covered three bridges and forced the bargees to moor on the western towpath.
As Twenty-First Army advanced to the River Maas, HQ 2nd Army G Intelligence (B) deployed along its western banks, and Field Security, helped by the Resistance and the Belgian Independent Brigade Group, hunted infiltrators and saboteurs, including all forty agents from one Abwehr unit. Willem Copier was a Dutch journalist rejected from serving with the Waffen-SS because he had myopia; nevertheless, in late January 1945, he was one of two Abwehr agents dropped from a German aircraft. His colleague was killed on landing. Copier surrendered to an elderly Belgian farmer but when he was transferred to HQ Field Security in Antwerp, his arrogance led to his transfer to Camp 020 where a Dutch inmate convinced him that resistance was pointless. After Captain T.J. Galloway had interrogated three captured members of a German raiding party, he lured their exfiltration party across the river by using their recognition signal and, although under fire from across the river, killed or captured them. For this act of gallantry he was awarded the Military Cross. A depiction of the incident hangs in the Officers Mess.
During the snowy cold of winter, Twenty-First Army Group divided with 2nd Army striking into Germany on a three Corps frontage while the 1st (Canadian) Army, accompanied by the Polish Corps and British 49th Infantry Division, swung north to liberate the Netherlands. The Divisional section, 60 FSS, was among the first Allied troops to enter Hilversum and intercepted Gestapo attempting to escape in cars full of loot. Other searches were harassed by snipers firing from houses marooned by flooding. Sergeant Jewson arrested an agent who had spied in Gibraltar.
The tripartite meeting at Yalta in February 1945 saw the Allies agree a Protocol of Proceedings that once Germany was defeated:
• Germany and Austria be divided into four zones.
• Reparation commissions would be formed.
• The provisional Polish Government would be formed.
• War criminals brought to trial.
• Help would be given to aid liberated countries re-establish elected governments.
• Humanitarian assistance organised.
Ideological tensions, particularly over the future of Poland and Stalin’s aspirations to build a buffer zone of pro-Soviet states to protect its western borders, led to Churchill writing to Roosevelt that ‘The Soviet Union has become a danger to the free world’. Nevertheless, while he and Roosevelt were criticized for being weak, Stalin was needed to help defeat the Japanese. Roosevelt then caused some anxiety when he announced that once Germany was defeated, US forces would withdraw from Europe within two years.
During the preparations to cross the Rhine in Operation Varsity, during the night of 28 February 1945 two Intelligence Corps, Sergeants H.J. Saunders and L.M. Gilbert, posing as ‘Ernst Bauer’ and ‘Hans Schriber’ of the German 13th Anti-Tank Company, 12th Panzer Grenadier Regiment, paddled across the icy River Rhine on an intelligence gathering mission using the cover story that their unit was at Xanten and they had been sent to collect gun spares from a factory in Essen. Mingling with soldiers and refugees, shortly before midnight on 3 March after walking 125 miles, they arrived at a barracks in Essen claiming that they had been separated from their unit. They remained in the city for a week but as they were returning to the Rhine, a German military police sergeant major, suspicious of their documents and lack of spare parts, locked them up in a guardroom. Next day the pair convinced a military police major that they had lost the spares when the boat taking them across the Rhine was hit by the wreckage of an aircraft being washed downstream. Swimming across the river, they were challenged by a Scottish sentry and debriefed at HQ Twenty-First Army Group. Both NCOs were awarded the Military Medal.
For Operation Varsity on 25 March, Captain Philip Rogers, the FSO 317 (6th Airborne Division) FSS divided his section into the usual parachute, glider and Sea Tail elements. When air photographs enabled a detailed model to be made at HQ 2nd Army of the drop zones landing sites and crossing points for the armour, General Montgomery commented that there were not enough depictions of poplar trees; matchsticks solved the problem. During the drop, Divisional Tactical HQ, which included Rogers, were cornered in a farm and faced several counter-attacks. The Gibraltarian Sergeant Lewis Stagnetto was attached to Divisional HQ but his glider landed about twenty-three miles from the landing zone. The forty occupants also took refuge in a farm and defended it until relieved by a Canadian unit forty hours later, all but seven having been wounded. Since there were few targets of security interest and no identified German counter-intelligence presence, the section interrogated prisoners of war and later in the day, entered Hamminkeln and imposed martial law.
For the next six weeks as 2nd Army swept through Northern Germany, the Field Security sections arrested officials and searched suspect buildings. Interrogations provided insight into the Nazi Party structure and assisted occupying British Military Government detachments. On 4 April, 74 FSS entered Osnabruck with XXX Corps and had little difficulty in confining those on its Arrest List in the cellar of a requisitioned house because most were compliant, even a Gestapo officer suspected of murdering several RAF in 1942. Sergeant Colin Chamberlain was on a lonely road returning to the town in the section lorry when there were shouts from the prisoners. When he stopped, Chamberlain found two prisoners treating a guard who had been hit by a tree and another was looking after his rifle.
In March 1945, the Intelligence Corps supplied several officers, including Lieutenant Colonel Cammaerts and Major Leigh Fermor, to the Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force, which had been formed by the SOE and Office of Strategic Services to collect information on prison and labour camps, and for radio operators to make contact with the prisoners. One of those involved was Humphrey Searle, now a captain, who returned to Special Training School 6 to train anti-Nazi Germans. In the event only four teams dropped, with mixed results.
On 12 April, when VIII Corps was the near the town of Winsen, in Lower Saxony, a German colonel told Corps HQ that nearby was a political prisoner camp called Bergen-Belsen and that typhus had broken out inside. Corps HQ ordered that a cordon be placed around the camp and instructed that the German Army camp staff were to leave as prisoners while the SS were to surrender the camp. Three days later, 63 Anti-Tank Regiment, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Taylor (Royal Artillery), arrived at the camp accompanied by Lieutenant Derek Sington, with his psychological warfare No.14 Amplifying Unit. A delegation of officers led by SS-Captain Josef Kramer, the camp commandant, said there were 190,000 inmates in the four compounds but entry was not permitted without the agreement of the German Army. Lieutenant Colonel Taylor disagreed and Sington used his loudspeakers to announce the liberation. When a SS guard fired several shots over the heads at a group of curious inmates approaching the gates, Sington drew his revolver and ordered him to stop. He then broadcast that before food would be distributed, the inmates should return to their compounds. That evening Sington interpreted at a meeting between Lieutenant Colonel Taylor, Brigadier Glyn Hughes, the senior medical officer, and Kramer, and learnt the inmates were fed turnip soup twice a day and the bombing of power stations in Hannover had resulted in the water supply being cut off, which had resulted in several static tanks being filled with foetid water. All documents had been destroyed on orders from Berlin. Throughout Kramer was arrogant. During the meeting, reports of the kitchen being stormed turned out to be inmates raiding a potato patch, several of whom were beaten by SS guards. Sington ordered Kramer to carry a body away. When asked about the camp and the inmates at the trial of Kramer and forty-four members of his staff in September 1945, Sington described the camp:
The general state was one of unbelievable congestion when one went into the blocks. There were masses of dead, placed for the most part away from the main thoroughfare of the camp. I used to see people walking about, and then, one by one, they would lie down, and the verges of the footpaths were littered with people, still living, but who never appeared to move. There was a complete lack of sanitary facilities. Whenever one went into certain blocks there were always cries for help from the women in there. With few exceptions, (the inmates’) condition was one of extreme weakness and in the majority of cases an almost unbelievable lack of flesh on the bones.
Among the early liberators were Captain Rogers and Sergeant Stagnetto, who took some of the earliest still photographs of conditions inside the camp. A British Military Government detachment took control of the camp, set up water supplies, requisitioned food and clothing and transferred the fit to the German tank barracks at Hohne, which had also become a large hospital. The Jewish Sergeant Norman Turgel, from 53 (VIII Corps) FSS, was one of nine FS sergeants who interrogated the camp staff, including Kramer. He met his future wife, Gena, a Pole, who had survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald and was working in the camp hospital.
When Sweden learnt that Stalin intended to ignore the Yalta Agreement and that the 3rd Guards Tank Corps had been instructed to occupy Denmark, Montgomery ordered 2nd Army to cross the Elbe to prevent the Russians advancing to Denmark. Moving swiftly, 11th Armoured Division not only occupied Lubeck twelve hours before the Soviets appeared, it also prevented the German forces in the west from reinforcing Berlin. Sergeant Fraser Edwards, who spoke Russian, and his 317 (Airborne) FSS detachment attached to 3 Parachute Brigade crossed the River Elbe in a Buffalo and, during house searches in Wismar, found that two wanted Nazi officials had committed suicide. The detachment met the Soviets but lost a motor cycle stolen by an officer. Captain Rogers was involved in the surrender of the German 84 Division.
On 3 May, as XII Corps entered Hamburg, Captain Hockliffe, who had been appointed the Area Security Officer (ASO), joined 30 FSS, commanded by Captain Harold Harris, and with the advance guard of a Field Security Group of five sections advanced behind the leading platoons advancing into the shattered city. Harris had been wounded in Normandy a week after D-Day. Fortunately, a sergeant who had been in business in the city before the war found a hotel that was requisitioned for the Group. Gestapo HQ was captured, fully equipped with its telephone intercept equipment. Hockliffe and Harris arrested Regional Leader Karl Otto Kaufmann in his office and transferred him to the British Military Government, to whom he supplied valuable information on the port and River Elbe. When 273 (Lines of Communications) FSS then requisitioned Kaufman’s office, the FSO, Captain Prior Parker, requisitioned his Auto-Union staff car and a pair of his trousers, complete with the novelty of a zip fly. Meanwhile, 30 FSS was guided to a badly damaged train north of Soltau and learnt that Hitler Youth had shot 140 political prisoners sheltering from the strafing by RAF aircraft. Sergeant MacKenzie found the bodies in a shallow grave, Sergeant Dicky Bell instructed the burgermeister and local civilians to give them a Christian burial. When Prior believed that some suspects on his Arrest List returned home at night, he organized several raids and netted a SS-Lieutenant-General, naked except for his jack boots, in bed with his wife. Over the next few weeks, 243 Nazi officials responded to letters that they report for interrogation. Seven failed to turn up.
Shortly before he committed suicide in Berlin on 30 April, Hitler expelled Himmler from the Nazi Party because of his attempt to broker a peace deal with the Allies through Count Bernadotte, a Swede, and appointed Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz to succeed him as President and Supreme Commander. Himmler also had visions of surrendering to the Americans and being given a senior police appointment. Next day, Doenitz formed a provisional government at Flensburg and, after telling Himmler there was no room for him, concentrated on ensuring that German units surrendered to the British and Americans and not to the Soviets. Meanwhile, FS sections continued to patrol the lines of communication from Antwerp, while sections containing Danish and Norwegian linguists accompanied British forces liberating occupied Denmark and Norway, including the reformed 89 (Airborne) FSS.