‘I like a man who grins when he fights.’
WINSTON CHURCHILL
An Allied aircraft – a Halifax bomber – flies low over the skies of occupied France. Two commandos parachute out, attached to the plane by a static line that will engage their chutes almost immediately.
Their target is a remote field where, they hope, they will rendezvous with their hosts: a small group of French Resistance fighters. They make an accurate landing, but their arrival causes a commotion among the Resistance. ‘Boss!’ one of them is heard saying about the new arrivals from the sky. ‘There’s a French officer and he’s brought his wife!’
Right on one count: one of the new arrivals was indeed French – a soldier named Michel, who had escaped his homeland before the Nazis arrived.
But he hadn’t brought his wife, although it’s easy to see why the confusion arose. Because the second guy was Tommy Macpherson of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, and he’d parachuted into occupied France in full ceremonial battle gear.
Which included his kilt.
Maybe the Resistance fighters took him less seriously for that. They’d have been wrong to do so. Because this guy had already waged a private war that would have broken most people.
And, by the time he parachuted into France in 1944, he was only just getting started.
*
Tommy Macpherson’s first acts of bravery took place a long way from his native Scotland. At the start of the Second World War he fought against Vichy forces in Lebanon, and saw action in Crete and Cyprus. He was shot at, shelled and stabbed – in short, he had been given a brutal introduction to the harsh realities of war. A hero before he was even 21 years of age.
In 1941 he was part of a four-man unit. Their mission: a covert reconnaissance mission into North Africa. They were to insert by submarine, then row to the beach in two-man canoes known as folbots. Once they’d made land, they needed to recce the area and ensure it was suitable for a larger force to land. It was an important mission: the Allies were sending in troops to kill Rommel. Once the four-man unit had completed their initial beach task, they were to return to the sub.
But it didn’t happen like that.
They had no problem inserting into North Africa. The problems came when they tried to leave. As they paddled out to sea in their folbots they headed on a bearing directly towards where the submarine was supposed to break the surface to meet them.
But when they got to the RV point, there was no sub. Just a German transport ship, full of troops.
They evaded the ship, but now they were alone at sea. Their only option was to return to the coast.
The unit split up into two groups. One headed inland and was quickly captured. Tommy and his mate lasted a little longer. When they came across a German encampment Tommy had the courage to break inside and steal some food. Then they trekked further on into the Libyan desert – stopping only to blow up an enemy communications centre on the way.
They moved further into the desert in their attempt to evade capture, ignoring their cracked toenails and septic feet. Their thinking was good: in the desert they’d be able to hear any German trucks approaching and find somewhere to hide.
Unfortunately, they didn’t take into account the possibility of a troop of Italian soldiers on bicycles.
The enemy silently surrounded them.
They were captured.
Tommy didn’t panic. Unseen by his captors, he removed the magazine from his Colt automatic pistol and slipped it into his pocket.
They were whisked away for a long, gruelling interrogation. Tommy found himself faced with four interrogators and six armed police. He wasn’t fazed. When one of his interrogators produced his Colt and, somewhat naively asked him to explain how it worked, Tommy slipped the magazine back in and held all ten men at gunpoint.
His plan was to escape the interrogation room, steal the Italians’ car and get out of there. But his trek through the desert had wreaked havoc with his legs. When he tried to make his move, he was suddenly crippled with cramp. He collapsed. The Italians pounced on him.
His first ever escape attempt had ended in failure. But he’d marked himself as one to watch. The enemy duly dispatched him to the grim POW camp at Montalbo in Italy.
The camp was overcrowded and there was never enough to eat. As a non-smoker, Tommy was able to swap his cigarette rations with another prisoner for a few potato peelings, but he still developed jaundice.
He endured the winter there before being moved to a new POW camp – one for particularly dangerous prisoners – in the town of Gavi, outside Genoa. There he spent his days trying to keep fit and learning Italian, which he knew he would need if he ever managed to escape. But when the Italian armistice occurred in 1943, things changed. These category A prisoners were transferred to yet another POW camp.
But, as ever, Tommy was on the lookout for a way to escape.
He managed it when they were at a transit camp near the Austrian border – by the gutsy method of joining a group of French prisoners who were being sent out to work in the surrounding fields, donning a French uniform and simply walking out of the camp with them.
Together with two other escapees, Tommy broke free and made a brave trek across Europe, through snow and biting wind, up and over treacherous mountain ranges – only to be captured once again and delivered straight into the hands of the Gestapo.
They were lucky not to be shot on the spot. The Gestapo imprisoned Tommy in a tiny, cramped cell too small for him to stand up or lie down. Then they delivered him directly to a new POW camp on the Polish border: Stalag 20A.
He escaped from Stalag 20A on his 23rd birthday, part of a daring night-time escape party that cut through the wire and made a brazen run north for the Baltic coast, where Tommy stowed away in the dirty coal bunker of a goods ship heading for neutral Sweden. From Sweden he boarded a flight back to Scotland, where he arrived precisely two years after his initial capture on the North African coast.
Was Tommy Macpherson ready for a long period of R & R? Um, no. He was a fighter, and a good thing too, because the British had earmarked him for greater things.
He was about to join Operation Jedburgh.
Operation Jedburgh was a highly secretive unit of small patrols who were to parachute into France, fire up the French Resistance and conduct sabotage missions against the occupying Germans.
And the Resistance needed firing up, especially in the south. When a few plucky guerrillas had destroyed a railway line between Toulouse and Bordeaux, the Germans had retaliated by taking twenty hostages and hanging them on meathooks along the railway, where they left them to die. Having witnessed atrocities like that, many ordinary French people no longer had the stomach for resistance.
The Jedburghs needed to turn that situation around.
Unlike other members of the Special Operations Executive, who tried to work under the radar, the Jedburghs were instructed to carry out highly visible attacks – proof that the Allies were coming, and that they weren’t afraid for the Germans to know it. They were made up of people who had demonstrated that they had grit in adversity. As Tommy Macpherson had.
Tommy had a three-month period of intensive training to supplement his commando skills. He became proficient in demolitions, coding and firing enemy weapons – not to mention man-to-man combat. And then he was parachuted in to France to start winding the Germans up, right under their noses.
Not for the faint hearted. But, then again: nothing ventured, nothing gained. And Tommy knew that if you are going to make a difference in a war you have to go all in – no holds barred. Total commitment, total courage.
It was 1944. The war was not going Germany’s way and everybody knew it.
But a wild animal is at its most dangerous when it’s backed into a corner.
The Jedburghs were guerrillas. Spies. They didn’t have the protection of POW status. If they were caught, they’d be tortured. And when they’d been forced to give up every last bit of information they’d be shot.
Make no mistake: kilt or no kilt, when Tommy Macpherson jumped out of that Halifax bomber in June 1944, he was parachuting straight into the lion’s den.
Tommy and his comrades had parachuted in very heavily armed: they had Sten guns, mortars, a light machine gun, grenades and a massive amount of plastic explosive.
Unfortunately, the eight-man Resistance unit they joined was less impressive. Four of them were just boys, and they had never actually hit back in any way against the Germans.
That was about to change.
Tommy got to work immediately. Their first targets were bridges, which they destroyed under cover of night, resulting in logistical chaos and mass confusion for the Germans. But, within days, this tiny guerrilla unit would have a much bigger task on its hands.
*
The D-Day landings of 6 June 1944 were a turning point in the war. Tens of thousands of Allied troops spilled on to the Normandy beaches.
The shockwaves reverberated throughout Europe, including south-central France, where word reached Tommy Macpherson that a massive German tank division was about to crush its way through his patch, on its way to reinforce the German troops in Normandy and take on the Allies.
And this was not just any German tank corps. This was the 2nd SS Panzer Division. Also known as Das Reich.
The Das Reich Division were justly feared. They were battle hardened from the Eastern Front, where they’d learned a thing or two about how to deal with civilians who dared to resist them.
As they made their way up through France in June 1944 they left in their wake a trail of horrific war crimes. In one village they rounded up nearly two hundred men, machine-gunned the men’s legs so they were unable to walk, then, when their bones were splintered and the blood was oozing out of them, the Panzer division poured petrol over their shrieking, wounded victims and burned them to death.
On another occasion they imprisoned nearly 500 women and children in a church. Then they set it alight. If anyone tried to escape, they mowed them down with machine guns. Only three survived.
This was the kind of force Tommy Macpherson and his band of inexperienced Resistance fighters were up against. If they were caught, they would be brutally killed. But Das Reich had to be stopped. By any means necessary. The war effort depended on somebody having the sheer guts and ingenuity, somehow, to stop them.
Tommy Macpherson was that man. He hardly had the resources to take on an entire Panzer division.
His methods, though, were simple but effective.
Overnight, Tommy and his tiny band of men cut down thick tree trunks and used them to make several blockades along the roads which the Panzer division would need to pass on their way north. At each of these blockades they planted a different booby trap.
At one, there was an anti-tank mine, bolstered with extra explosives. At another, Tommy hung grenades from trees which exploded as the Germans disturbed them. At a third he armed his guys with Sten guns so they could perform devastating hit-and-run attacks before disappearing quickly into the surrounding countryside.
Now it was Das Reich’s turn to scream. At each blockade, the booby traps worked, maiming and killing the enemy forces who had previously committed such awful crimes.
For a handful of men to take on an entire division like this took true courage. And Tommy Macpherson was leading from the front.
Their mission was successful. It should have taken Das Reich three days to reach northern France. Thanks to Tommy and his men it took them three weeks.
By which time they were too late.
*
Tommy Macpherson continued to wreak havoc across France. He hijacked German supply vehicles. He blew up bridges and railway lines. His speciality was demolishing pairs of electricity pylons, so that they fell together and created a massive firework display.
And all the while, his habit was to drive round the French countryside, wearing his kilt and with his traditional Scottish dagger tucked in his socks. He even boldly pinned a Union Jack and a croix de Lorraine to his car. He was making the very clear point that Germans could not suffocate the pluck of the Allies, no matter how hard they tried.
He wound the Nazis up so much with his antics that they put a price on his head of 300,000 francs.
It didn’t put him off.
Day after day after day he continued his relentless campaign of guerrilla tactics, and the Germans were simply unable to stop him. He became known as the ‘lunatic Scotsman who keeps blowing up bridges’.
But Tommy Macpherson was no lunatic. He was a man with untold reserves of bravery and a total refusal to let the bad guys win.
But perhaps his greatest act of courage was yet to come.
By late July 1944 it was clear that the Nazis’ plans for European domination were being scuppered by the Allies. The Germans were retreating.
But a retreating army can cause just as much bloodshed and mayhem as an advancing one. Not to mention the fact that they can always turn round and attack again. These retreating Germans needed to be stopped.
Trouble was, there were a lot of them.
When a German garrison of 100 heavily armed men came marching over the horizon Tommy knew he couldn’t defeat them by force of arms. But he could, perhaps, defeat them by cunning.
He had discovered that if you held a Sten gun with a wet handkerchief, it made a sound not unlike a heavy machine gun. And plastic explosives, properly detonated, could be made to sound like mortar fire. Tommy and his guys let rip with their mock armaments.
And then, carrying a large white flag, Tommy walked straight up the hill to meet the Germans head on.
Adopting his best poker face he told the German commanding officer that he had a heavily armed force up ahead who could call up the RAF at any moment to blow the enemy to smithereens. The Germans’ only option was surrender.
Which they did. En masse. Tommy waited for some French reinforcements to arrive and loaded the German soldiers into trucks to get them to a POW camp.
The bluff had worked. But it was only 100 men. What if he was faced with a considerably stronger enemy force?
Like, 23,000 strong.
That was the size of the army Tommy Macpherson and his band of French Resistance fighters soon found themselves facing. It consisted of more than 15,000 regular troops and more than 7,000 front-line troops, who were highly experienced in battle. If it came down to a fight, they’d make mincemeat of the French.
And a battle was looking very likely.
The army needed to cross a small bridge over the river Loire. It was manned by the French, but they had no chance of holding this bridge when push came to shove.
Their only chance was if the Germans could somehow, miraculously, be persuaded to surrender on the spot.
It was time for Tommy to bluff his way to victory yet again.
In order to approach the German command Tommy needed to make his way through five miles of road lined with trigger-happy German troops, not to mention their 1,000 vehicles. And so he commandeered a French Red Cross van. It was just about the only vehicle that could potentially make it through the massed ranks of the retreating German army without coming to harm. If he got lucky.
Tommy donned his full Scottish regalia, including his kilt and hat. He had good reason to do so. Dressed in his official Highland gear he could perhaps persuade the German commanders that the lie he was about to tell them was true: that, just over the bridge, he had a full Highland brigade, complete with tanks, heavy artillery and a full detachment of French troops.
Not only that, but he repeated the gambit he’d used before: one call and the massed ranks of the British RAF would be strafing overhead, reducing the 23,000 German troops to a pile of twitching corpses.
They swallowed it. Hook, line and sinker. Thanks to the gutsy effrontery of a single man, all 23,000 German troops laid down their arms and surrendered.
Now, that bluff took grit.
*
But even then Tommy’s war wasn’t over. Fresh from his experiences in France he was sent back to Italy, where his enemy were no longer the Nazis but communist partisans loyal to the Yugoslavian dictator Tito, who had his eye on vast swathes of Italian territory.
The enemy might have been different, but Tommy’s methods of dealing with them were the same. In Italy, however, he came closer to death than he’d ever been when an Italian Fascisti took a potshot at him with his pistol.
An inch in any other direction and Tommy Macpherson’s war would have ended right there, but luck was on his side: it bounced off his notebook and gave him a mere flesh wound. Leaving Tommy to deal – terminally – with the soldier who’d shot him.
He also dealt terminally with Tito’s designs on the Veneto region of Italy. Tommy Macpherson wreaked such havoc with the dictator’s plans that Tito went so far as to put a death sentence on the head of the man he contemptuously referred to as the ‘Scottish major’.
You can tell a lot about a man by the nature of his enemies. To have Nazi war criminals and communist dictators baying for your blood, you must be doing something ‘right’.
Without doubt, Tommy had pitted himself against some of the most ruthless and violent men of the modern era. That he came out on top is a testament to his remarkable persistence, his refusal to bow down in the face of superior numbers and firepower.
Above all, Tommy Macpherson showed an almost superhuman amount of sheer old-fashioned bottle, and, to me, he embodies everything that is best about the courageous men and women who fought for our liberty during the Second World War.