Also by Sean Longden
To the Victor the Spoils
Hitler’s British Slaves
Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind
THE RACE FOR
NAZI WAR SECRETS, 1945
CONSTABLE • LONDON
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2009
Copyright © Sean Longden, 2009
The right of Sean Longden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-84529-727-5
Printed and bound in the EU
Chapter 1: The Birth of an Idea
Chapter 2: Normandy and Beyond
Chapter 3: The Birth of T-Force
Chapter 4: Operation Plunder and Beyond
Chapter 6: Kiel – Into the Unknown
Chapter 7: Liberators – T-Force in Denmark and the Netherlands
There are two men whose hard work and eager assistance were fundamental in my writing of this book. These men, Ken Moore and Michael Howard, offered documents, support and guidance, giving a personal touch that went far beyond anything to be found in the reams of documents publicly available on this subject. Indeed, it was their knowledge that allowed me to make sense of the official documents – most of which are somewhat confusing when viewed in isolation.
Ken Moore fought in Normandy with the Royal Artillery before being posted to the 5th Battalion of the King’s Regiment, which formed part of the infantry element of T-Force. As the editor of the unit’s newsletter, Freelance, during 1945 and 1946, Ken Moore had a broad knowledge of this unusual unit. During the 1990s he resurrected Freelance as the newsletter for the ‘5th King’s/No.2 T-Force Old Comrades Association’. The formation of the association was entirely due to Ken’s drive and enthusiasm to ensure the work of the unit was not forgotten.
As an organization, T-Force first came to my attention in 2001 when I was researching my book To the Victor the Spoils, a social history of the British Army in the last year of the Second World War. Ken invited me to a reunion in London where I listened to the tales of a number of veterans, including Tommy Wilkinson, Norman Farmer, Len White, John Longfield and Ken himself. Some of these interviews were used within To the Victor the Spoils, leading Ken to make contact with me again. Our discussions over my book resulted in his suggestion that I should consider telling the complete story of T-Force. The more I examined the subject, the more I realized this would cover a vast unknown story of the Second World War, a story that, if I did not write it now, would be lost forever. In the months that followed Ken provided me with vast numbers of documents and contact details without which I could never have completed my book.
Included among these were elements of the story of T-Force’s bomb-disposal engineers as collected by Daniel Kington. Mr Kington’s grandfather, Edward Kington had served in No.19 Bomb Disposal Company. Quotations within my text from Fred ‘Sapper’ Tapper are taken from Mr Kington’s research. Fundamental to my research was The T-Force Story, produced by 5th King’s/No.2 T-Force Old Comrades Association. This was privately printed by the association and formed the starting point for my research.
Since then I have attended two more reunions and travelled to the port of Kiel with a delegation from the Association. Tony Hibbert MC kindly spared four hours of his time to tell me his life story. His experiences in Germany during the 1930s, then at Dunkirk and Arnhem Bridge, gave me a great understanding of his eagerness to reach Kiel as swiftly as possible. Among others who have kindly given up their time to be interviewed by me include: Tom Pitt-Pladdy, Harry Henshaw, Tommy Wilkinson, Jack Chamberlain, Vic Woods (now deceased), Harry Bullen, Bob Brighouse, Ron Lawton, David March, Ted Tolley, Willy van der Burght and John Longfield. Through Ken I was also able to make contact with Reg Rush, a veteran of 30 Advanced Unit, Royal Marines, who worked alongside T-Force during 1945. I have also made use of an interview with the late Ken Hardy that I carried out for my book To the Victor the Spoils. At the time I had not heard of T-Force, nor realized the relevance of elements of his story.
Whilst Ken Moore was essential for establishing contacts among veterans of No.2 T-Force, Michael Howard played a similar role for No.1 T-Force. During 1946 and 1947, as a rather young captain, Michael had run the Intelligence Office for No.1 T-Force. Without his input my study of the postwar period would have been seriously hampered. Not only did he provide me with introductions to his former comrades but he offered advice and guidance on documents and his own clear memories of the period. His studies of T-Force activities in the Ruhr, carried out over many years, both enlightened me and shaped my final chapters. Numerous email exchanges also helped to clear up many areas of confusion and I have liberally quoted from Michael’s messages. Michael also introduced me to other veteran officers including Tony Lucas and John Bendit, both of whom had served as subalterns at No.1 T-Force. Michael also kindly put me in touch with Julia Draper (formerly Jean Hughes-Gibb) who was the first civilian on the staff at T-Force HQ and shared both her wartime and postwar memories with me.
I have also been fortunate enough to receive assistance from Jane Weston, the daughter of Admiralty scientist John Bradley, who kindly provided her father’s photographs and letters detailing his experiences as a scientist attached to T-Force. In exchange, I was able to offer her information on her father’s role with T-Force, about which she had previously known little. Mrs Ruth Lambert, widow of Major George Lambert MC, kindly provided photographs of her husband and a copy of his written memoirs. My thanks must also go to Renate Dopheide of the Kiel archives whose own book on the events in Kiel in 1945 provided a valuable German perspective. I must also thank Margrete Thorsen-Moore, Ken Moore’s wife, for providing me with a translated copy of Renate’s book.
Unless otherwise stated, the quotations used within the text come from interviews I carried out with these veterans of T-Force or the correspondence supplied to me via veterans of the unit and their families.
I must also offer thanks to my editor Leo Hollis and my agent Andrew Lownie, both of whom have offered support throughout this project. My thanks also go to Sam Evans and Hannah Boursnell at Constable for their hard work on my previous book, Dunkirk: The Men They Left Behind, and to the Constable sales team for helping make that book a success. As ever, thanks to Beth and Bethan at MGA for all their efforts to ensure effective publicity.
C Company of the 5th Battalion in Denmark. Photograph, 1945. © Courtesy of Ron Lawton.
B Troop of 30 Advanced Unit, Royal Marines in Germany. Photograph,1945. © Courtesy of Reg Rush.
Jeep of B Troop, 30AU, Royal Marines at Minden, Germany. Photograph, 1945. © Courtesy of Reg Rush.
German Type XVIIB U-boat. Photograph. © Courtesy of the National Archives.
Dr Helmut Walter, detained by T-Force. Photograph, 1945. © Courtesy of the National Archives.
The ‘Walterwerke’ factory. Photograph. © Courtesy of the National Archives.
Soldiers of No.1 T-Force with a German Panther tank. Photograph, 1946/7 © Courtesy of Tony Lucas.
Jean Hughes-Gibb at her desk. Photograph, 1946. © Courtesy of Julia Draper.
The skyline of the Ruhr. Photograph, 1947. © Courtesy of Tony Lucas.
Key Expeditions by the T-Force Units, March to May 1945
Headquarters of 8 Corps, outside Hamburg, Germany,
5 May 1945
The major was in no mood for waiting. The war may have been drawing to a close but he was eager to move his men forward. In fact, despite the inactivity around him and the ‘Stop Order’ issued to all British units in Germany, he had specific orders to advance. They came directly from the Allied High Command – he had his instructions and intended to follow them.
Major Tony Hibbert was a man of action, a former commando who had been at the head of the beleaguered 1st Parachute Brigade during the doomed operation to snatch the bridge at Arnhem, and, if he had learnt anything from the failure of Operation Market Garden, it was the desperate need for speed. Now, however, the dangers were very different. It was not only the Germans who were the enemy. The Allied High Command was already looking to the future and had passed on instructions that would determine the future of Europe.
However, down in the frontlines, no one else realized the sense of urgency. After six long years, the war was coming to an end – the ceasefire had been signed and the field commanders were not about to take any chances with their men’s lives. The moment General Miles Dempsey, commander of the British 2nd Army, had heard the news that a ceasefire was about to come into effect, he had issued an order for the four corps under his command to stand fast on the line between the towns of Dömitz, Ludwigslust, Schwerin, Wismar, Neustadt, Bad Segeberg, Wedel, Stade, Bremervörde and Bremen. His personal order went out: ‘No advance beyond this line to take place without orders from me.’
Dempsey’s order to halt was confirmed throughout the army and at Hamburg the commander of 8 Corps refused permission for anyone to advance beyond their current positions. Despite this, Major Tony Hibbert had no intention of waiting. He was a veteran of Dunkirk and Arnhem, had just over 500 men under his command and his target was over 60 miles away. He had been warned there were two SS divisions ahead of him – converging on the road he would be using – and that he would be advancing towards a city firmly occupied by over 40,000 German soldiers and sailors. Still Hibbert refused to wait. The Germans were not his concern and his authority came from way above the Corps commander.
The High Command believed the Russians were intending to advance on Denmark, which would make the Baltic a Russian sea. Fearing that the Russians would stop at nothing, Hibbert’s brief had been simple: he had received the order ‘get to Kiel before the Russians’ and was going to follow it. As far as he was concerned, it did not matter that a Corps commander had refused him permission to advance. Nor was he worried by the messages from General Dempsey’s HQ. His orders came from the very top and if the Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower believed Kiel needed to be occupied, he and his men were going to do it.
Major Hibbert needed just one signature to move through the front-lines and advance on Kiel. Returning to the 8 Corps HQ, with the seconds ticking away and a bottle of whisky, just one strategy remained – to ply the officer with liquor. In the hours that followed, Hibbert poured out glass after glass, ensuring his companion consumed the lion’s share of the bottle. It was not a quick operation, but Hibbert was nothing if not persistent and finally he had what he wanted – one very drunk staff officer and the written permission to advance.
Now it was time to go. At 7 a.m. on the morning of 5 May 1945 the men of T-Force climbed into their vehicles and headed out on the road towards Kiel. Among their targets that morning was the Walterwerke factory and, within it, its founder – Germany’s foremost expert on hydrogen peroxide rocket engines, Dr Hellmuth Walter.
In the spring of 1945 as the Allied army advanced into German there was one objective paramount for the vast majority of its troops – the prompt defeat of the Germans on the battlefield and the swift restoration of peace. However, there was one unit in and around the frontlines whose aim was very different. Unlike their frontline colleagues, these men were actively discouraged from engaging with the enemy or indulging in heroics. The truth of the matter was that these soldiers, surging across northern Germany in vehicles marked with a simple T sign, were not actually fighting the same war.
As the men of T-Force sat in the spring sunshine, excited but nervous as they awaited their orders, few of them understood exactly what they were doing. They were not actually engaged in the final surge against Nazism but were unwitting players in the overture to the next great conflict of the era – the Cold War. All they knew was that they had been given a target and that they would soon be getting into their vehicles to head off into the unknown. It was a simple routine but very few of them understood the significance of the orders they were being given. The fact was that, at that moment and for much of 1945, the future security of the western democracies hung in the balance and, had the men of T-Force failed in those tasks, the entire future of the western world might have been very different.
There is little doubt that the Nazis had been victorious on the technological battlefield of the Second World War. With the world’s first operational jet fighters, ballistic missiles, high-speed submarines, rocket planes, infra-red gun sights, new chemical weapons such as Sarin and Tabun, flying bombs and even guns that fired around corners, German scientists had provided the blueprint for military development in the postwar years. By May 1945 the drawing boards of these scientists were covered with designs for a variety of new weapons, all of which the competing former Allies were keen to exploit. In the years after the war, these designs resurfaced on the world’s battlefields in the form of Cruise missiles and Stealth fighters, among others. During the Cold War, the US used radar systems developed from German wartime designs as part of its worldwide ‘early warning’ system. Unforgettably, it was German rocket scientists who eventually put man on the moon while German aviation researchers even provided the impetus for the development of Concorde.
However, in spring 1945 no one in the West knew the truth about the Nazi’s atomic research programme; nor did they know the realities behind the rumours of deadly new military gases under development within Germany. What they did know was that even as the Allies advanced Nazi scientists were still hard at work at their desks and drawing boards and what they might achieve could still be significant. These were the same men, after all, who had brought the new weapons to the battlefield. While the Third Reich was collapsing, who could tell what horrors they might still inflict upon the world, what secret weapons they could have already passed on to their Japanese allies or what other potential enemies could do if they got hold of this technology?
The western leaders had no choice but to seize these weapons, find the scientists, uncover their research, and put them to work before someone else did. And for that they needed a special force – an ‘elite unit’ in the parlance of the postwar world – one that could secure the factories and research establishments of Germany, detain their research scientists and ensure the western Allies could profit from their knowledge.
With this in mind, in July 1944 General Eisenhower issued a secret order from the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) to raise a ‘Target-Force’. This force was so steeped in secrecy that its role has all but disappeared from the histories of both the Second World War and the Cold War. Yet, despite this secrecy, the British Target-Force – most commonly known as T-Force – was the least assuming of all the ‘elite forces’.
This was not the SAS, and few among its number were commandos or paratroopers. Nor were they the ‘spit ‘n’ polish’ Guardsmen, so adored by tourists visiting London. Instead, they were ordinary infantrymen, pioneers and engineers from unglamorous regiments – the 5th Battalion of Liverpool’s King’s Regiment, the 1st Buckinghamshire Battalion, the 30th Battalion of the Royal Berkshire Regiment, the Pioneer Corps and the Royal Engineers. They had come from hospitals, some physically wounded, others mentally wounded by shellshock. Some were hardened infantrymen, who had landed on D-Day in the first waves and had seen the horrors of war in the frontlines. Others were ‘surplus’ artillerymen, whose units had been broken up to supply desperately needed reinforcements for an army depleted by the vicious slog through Normandy. Elsewhere among them were ex-landing craft crews, men who had braved enemy fire to deliver the infantry to Normandy on D-Day. They were joined by teenagers just out of training depots, who had been rushed to the continent, ready for the advance into Germany. Unfashionable as it might seem, these ‘waifs and strays’ were the soldiers who made sure the western Allies were prepared for the Cold War.
In the final months of the conflict in Europe and the first years of peace, these soldiers were responsible for one of the war’s most unlikely success stories – the securing of military and civilian technology now estimated to be worth around £10 billion at today’s prices. Nuclear scientists, gas technology, advanced submarine engines, jet-fighter technology – all passed through the hands of T-Force as the Allied armies occupied the ruins of Germany. In the years that followed, the western powers used the military technology they seized to ensure their future safety.
Despite the groundbreaking research carried out by German scientists, and the importance of their work for postwar development, the story of how this most unlikely of elite forces helped secure these men and their work is all but unknown. The creation of this secret unit remained forgotten for many years. Yet this was the unit that, in the final weeks of the war, had entered Germany to secure nuclear scientists, rocket research, chemical weapons production plants and U-boat designers, ensuring they did not fall into the hands of the Russians. Furthermore, T-Force made the British Army’s final advance of the war in Europe, reaching Kiel to secure the city’s naval research facilities.
It is no surprise if all this sounds like something from a James Bond novel. One of the influences behind T-Force operations was the author Ian Fleming. He was the driving force behind the creation of 30 Assault Unit, a unit of Royal Marines which provided the model for T-Force operations and served alongside it during the advance into Germany. Fleming also sat on the committees that provided the intelligence targets and determined the priority for T-Force operations.