Plans for Operation Maple had been submitted to 15th Army Group on 10 December 1943, and permission to proceed was given on 17 December. The objective of Maple was to cut specific sections of the railway lines north and east of Rome in the Orte-Terni area, and also the line from Ancona to the plain of Lombardy. To achieve this, Maple was divided into two parts – Thistledown (commanded by Lt D.G. Worcester, Highland Light Infantry) and Driftwood (Capt J.St.G. Gunston, Irish Guards).
Thistledown was itself sub-divided into four parties. In charge of No. 2 Party was Jack Lloyd, with Cpl Davis, and Parachutists (Pct) Pepper and Todd. Their task was to cut the railway line between Orvieto and Orte. Party No. 4 was led by Paul Hill, with L/Cpls Roberts and Hughes, and Pct Medlin, their objective being to cut the railway between Terni and Perugia.
After two false starts due to poor weather, the seventeen men of Thistledown and the eight men of Driftwood assembled at Gioia del Colle airfield on 7 January 1944, where three Douglas C-47 Skytrain aircraft of 8th Troop Carrier Squadron USAAF were waiting to drop the men behind enemy lines. C-47s number 439 and 681 took the four Thistledown parties to their DZ north west of Aquila at Colle Futa, while number 391 took the two Driftwood parties to a DZ north east of Ancona. In bright moonlight, the Thistledown troops were dropped into four feet of snow near Terni, about 100 miles inside enemy lines.
The deep snow made for heavy going, and it was not until 16 January that Jack Lloyd’s party completed its task. Paul Hill’s party had, however, reached its objective on schedule on 13/14 January. Lt Worcester’s party, having found that their stretch of railway line had already been bombed by the Allies, did what damage they could with their plastic explosives to targets of opportunity, mostly vehicles (twenty-five of which were destroyed) and roads. Once the tasks had been accomplished the SAS were to make their way to a rendezvous on the coast where light coastal craft would wait for them on three consecutive nights. It was winter, very cold, and snow lay deeply all around. Though these inconveniences could be overcome with little difficulty in normal circumstances, the SAS faced the additional hazard of an extremely alert enemy, put on their guard not only by the Anzio landings on 22 January 1944 but also by increased partisan activity and by large numbers of escaped POWs circulating in the area, some of whom were found by the Thistledown parties.
In the event, neither Lt Worcester233 nor any of the other sixteen men managed to avoid capture, though the last man to stay free did so until the beginning of June. Paul Hill was captured on 5 February 1944 at Artena after he had been betrayed by an Italian farmer, and had had the distasteful sight of watching the farmer being paid off by the Germans. Jack Lloyd, having accumulated a number of POW strays during his wanderings, split them up into smaller groups to give everyone a better chance. He himself headed for Rome, but became embroiled with partisans, and made several attacks with them on the enemy. Continuing on his way to Anzio, he was nearing the British lines when he was found by a British patrol, which he joined. They were on their way back to Allied lines on 24 April 1944 when, within sight of safety, all were captured by a German patrol.
The Thistledown men at least were alive, unlike the eight Driftwood men. On 7 March 1944 Capt Gunston’s party left from a point a little south of Porto San Giorgio in a 22-foot boat which, it is believed, was either attacked by Allied aircraft (pilots were instructed to fire on craft off the enemy coast) or capsized and drowned its occupants.
There is, however, a third possibility. The Times of 10 November 1945 carried an In Memoriam notice for Capt Gunston, which included the words ‘… previously reported missing in Italy, March, 1944, now believed to have been shot by the Germans after capture’. This would suggest that some, if not all, of the Driftwood men had managed to gain dry land, only to be captured and shot by the Germans. The eight were: Capt John St. George Gunston, Irish Guards (124477); 2043553 Cpl (Bombardier) Albert Henry Pugh, Royal Artillery, age twenty-five; 2135077 Pct. (Sapper) William Dodds, Royal Engineers, age twenty-five; 4698891 Pct. (Private) Herbert Loosemore, Durham Light Infantry, age twenty-one; 4121828 Sgt (Serjeant) Robert Thomas Benson, Cheshire Regiment, age thirty; 1443815 Sgt (Serjeant) William Osborne Glen, Royal Artillery, age twenty-nine; 1987141 Pct. (Sapper) Alan Lockeridge, Royal Engineers, age twenty-four; and 4130239 Pct. (Private) John Evans, Cheshire Regiment, age twenty-six. All are commemorated on the Cassino Memorial, Italy.
If it were indeed the fate of Capt Gunston and his men to have been shot by the enemy, then Lloyd and Hill were fortunate not to have suffered that fate too. Paragraph 3 of Hitler’s notorious ‘Kommando Befehl’ secretly issued on 18 October 1942 stated, inter alia, that:
‘Anyone operating against German troops in so-called Commando raids in Europe or in [North] Africa, are to be annihilated to the last man. This is to be carried out whether they be soldiers in uniform, or saboteurs, with or without arms…’
Paragraph 4 continued:
‘Should individual members of these Commandos… fall into the hands of the Armed Forces through any other means – as, for example, through the Police in one of the Occupied Territories – they are to be instantly handed over to the S.D.’
The Sicherheitsdienst (SD), a secret police force as brutal as the Gestapo, had, therefore, the authority to execute any ‘irregular’ soldier without trial.
Paul Hill was held under Gestapo supervision at the Regina Coeli prison in Rome. On 1 April 1944 he and three other ‘parachutists’ were taken from that prison to the Nahkampfschule (close combat school), fourteen kilometres from Rome on the Via Casilina, to be shot. It was only because they had Red Cross parcels with them – apparently a sign that their capture had been notified to the International Red Cross – that SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff gave them a stay of execution.234 Hill remained in the prison for several more weeks until, towards the end of May, he was released to Dulag Luft, Oberursel. On 2 June 1944, after eight days there, he was purged to Luft 7.
Jack Lloyd had spent a very unpleasant three-and-a-half weeks (26 April-21 May) in the hands of the Gestapo at their Rome HQ at 145, Via Tasso, before he, too, was released to Luft 7.