C ECIL CLARKE HAD been putting the finishing touches to his monstrous hydraulic digger when Hitler’s army swept through France and the Low Countries. The Nazi victory meant that there was no longer any need for such a machine, at least not for the foreseeable future, as the Siegfried Line had become an irrelevance. But there was most definitely a need for Clarke himself. He was immediately poached by the Intelligence Corps and sent to work at Aston House, a Hertfordshire research station.
Cecil always managed to cause a stir and his arrival at Aston was no exception. The station’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Langley, was a stickler for security and had surrounded the place with barbed wire, sentry boxes and armed guards. All visitors had to report to the gatehouse, where they were interrogated and frisked for weapons. ‘It really was most impressive,’ said Stuart Macrae after visiting the establishment.
Most visitors accepted the security as a necessity. Clarke saw it as a challenge. He ‘contrived to avoid all security measures’, inching his substantial frame through the coils of barbed wire, dodging the guards and then pushing through the phalanxes of rhododendrons. In just a few minutes, he was knocking on Lieutenant Colonel Langley’s door.
Langley was incandescent at such a breach of security and immediately blamed Macrae, ‘deploring this conduct on the part of an officer for whom I was responsible’. Macrae pointed out that Clarke alone was responsible for his conduct, leading to yet more fuming on the part of Langley. He said that while he was unable to evict Clarke from the property, ‘in no circumstance would he be allowed inside the house and he could not be served meals.’ 1 It was a punishment more appropriate to a boarding school than a government research station.
Clarke cut a strange figure at Aston: jovial to the staff, yet solitary and absorbed. His idiosyncratic habits rarely passed without comment. He was constantly muttering ‘what-what-what’ 2 and spent his rare moments of leisure writing doggerel verse. The rag that he clutched, oil-smeared and in tatters, was used for everything from cleaning spark plugs to blowing his nose.
He had left Mrs Clarke in the driving seat at LoLode, where the luxury caravans, parked out front in Tavistock Street, seemed like symbols of a happier era. Now, LoLode’s small roster of staff was preoccupied with producing limpet mines and army trailers. Clarke occasionally cycled home for an evening with the family, but it was a tiring and costly journey. He jokingly told Dorothy that he cycled eight miles to the pint, which meant that the round trip involved at least four stops in local pubs. By the time he arrived back at Aston, he was decidedly merry.
The purchasing officer at Aston, Cecily Hales, had got used to buying all manner of strange supplies for the researchers working at Aston, including ‘molybdenum, stainless steel, mild steel and piano wire’. Yet Clarke himself required even stranger materials. One day she peeked into his drawer and found it contained ‘masses of condoms’, probably on account of a new limpet mine he was developing. She began to suspect that he was obsessed with contraception, a suspicion confirmed when Max Hill, the head of supplies, confessed that Clarke had asked him to go to ‘the condom manufacturers, Durex’, and purchase ‘various sizes and thicknesses’. Cecily felt sorry that Mr Hill had had to undertake such an embarrassing task. ‘They must have imagined that he was a dirty old man.’ 3
Clarke found time to write a practical guide to sabotage during those autumn months at Aston. His Blue Book offered advice on everything from disguise to explosives and bore many of his literary hallmarks: explosives were ‘sweets’ and detonators were ‘toys’. But as always with Clarke, the clownish tone was a veneer. The advice he offered was rooted in a deep understanding of sabotage. ‘A job is a good one,’ he said, ‘if it looks like an accident, act of God or has no explanation.’ 4 Leaving no traces allowed the saboteur to flee from the scene undetected, as well as reducing the chance of reprisals.
Colin Gubbins had been keeping a keen eye on Clarke’s work and was most impressed by what he saw. His approach was so strikingly original that it seemed the perfect counterfoil to the Nazis. Gubbins was intent on poaching him from the Intelligence Corps and approached him shortly before Christmas 1940 with the offer of a new job. He was to be promoted to acting major, given the codename D/DP and made the commanding officer of Brickendonbury Manor, a country mansion that Gubbins was intending to transform into his principal training centre for all would-be saboteurs. It was to be modelled on Coleshill House, only he wanted it to be far more professional. Clarke was to be responsible for teaching new recruits the fine art of sabotage.
He signed up immediately, an acceptance that came as no surprise to Stuart Macrae. ‘It was just Nobby’s cup of tea,’ he said, ‘and enabled him to become a bigger menace than ever.’ 5 It also lifted him into Gubbins’s elite inner circle, one whose single-minded pursuit was ungentlemanly warfare.
Brickendonbury Manor was a Jacobean mansion of imposing grandeur, one that had been extended and enlarged by so many generations that its echoing chambers had become a burden rather than a pleasure. Its most recent owners had been the Pearson dynasty, whose titular head, Sir Edward, had rebuilt the south front, added yet more rooms and contrived a Jacobean-style banqueting hall. But Sir Edward had died more than a decade earlier and his widow, Lady Susannah, found the place too large for comfort. In the summer of 1939 she sold the estate to a wealthy businessman named Ernest Gocher, who had just taken possession of the keys when he was informed that it had been requisitioned by the government.
For the first few months of the war, Brickendonbury had been used by Lawrence Grand’s Section D. When Grand’s section was disbanded, the future of the house looked uncertain. Gubbins was aware of this and visited the place soon after his appointment to Baker Street. According to Kim Philby, who was living there at the time, he arrived ‘with a posse of fresh-faced officers, who barked at each other and at us’. 6 Gubbins liked what he saw and had Brickendonbury Manor swiftly transferred into his fiefdom, renaming it Station 17.
In common with the Firs, it was to become one of the country’s most secret addresses, a house that even its owner, Mr Gocher, would not be able to enter until the war was over. In the intervening time, neither he – nor any of the local villagers – was to have any idea what was taking place behind its dense screen of foliage.
Within days of taking control of Brickendonbury, Gubbins handed Cecil Clarke the keys to his new domain. He immediately stamped his idiosyncratic personality on the establishment. No sooner had his first sabotage students arrived from London than they realized that theirs was to be a training unlike any other. One of them, Peter Kemp, couldn’t work out if Clarke was mad or brilliant or both. ‘He had a disquieting habit, during lectures, of exhibiting to us one of his pets [he means an explosive device] with a large charge attached, placing it on the desk in front of him, cocking it, and announcing: “This will go off in five minutes.”’
He would then proceed with his lecture, unconcerned by the ticking bomb, while his students nervously counted the minutes. ‘During the last half of the last minute the sound of his voice was almost drowned by the shuffling and scraping of chairs, especially from the front rows. When only five seconds remained, and every head in the class was down, he would suddenly remember, pick up the infernal machine, look at it for a moment, thoughtfully, and toss it nonchalantly through the window to explode on the lawn with barely a second to spare.’ 7
Kim Philby described Clarke as having a ‘rumbustious sense of humour’. 8 This quickly became apparent to all who visited Brickendonbury. ‘He had no guards on the gates to his magnificent estate. One just drove in and then found the vehicle being battered by rounds fired from spigot mortars set off by trip wires.’ Happily for the occupants of the cars in question, these rounds were blanks. ‘Nobby [Clarke] would emerge smiling and point out that if they had been live rounds, the occupants of the vehicle would no longer be in this world.’ This was all very well, ‘but it was of little consolation to the driver, who had to explain how the bodywork of his vehicle had been badly bashed.’ 9
Clarke’s tree spigot was his latest invention, one specially designed for use by saboteurs. It was a clever adaptation of the mortar that Millis Jefferis had first demonstrated at Chequers. Clarke had equipped it with a special silencing rod that held gases, flames and smoke inside the tail of the bomb, making the point of firing almost impossible to locate. The Americans later bought large quantities of the weapon and produced an army training film to show how it worked. ‘The initial acceleration arms the special fuse, so that when the bomb hits its target, the impact drives the fuse firing pin into a detonating cap which ignites the booster charge.’ 10 Its three-pound explosive charge was powerful enough to destroy any vehicle.
There were times when Clarke used live mortars in his demonstrations, especially when he wanted to impress visiting dignitaries. He would have an old car ‘towed down the drive with a suitable length of rope, giving the driver some protection’. Then, without warning, one of his spigots would be fired by a tripwire. In a blinding flash of light, it would strike the vehicle side-on. ‘It was a nice avenue of trees down the approach to Brickendonbury and these were prettily heavily decorated with bits of old car as a result of these demonstrations of the spigot mortar.’ 11
In happier times, the flower gardens of Brickendonbury had been featured in horticultural magazines, with lavish photographs of the Dutch gardens, climbing roses and the spectacular weeping ash tree that overhung the moat. Now, the trees and flowering bushes served as targets for Clarke’s various mortars.
His favourite trick was to lead visitors to the chalk pitt, which he used for testing the most powerful explosives. Here, he would demonstrate ‘what could be accomplished with a fertile imagination, a range of devices and a bit of plastic’. He particularly excelled himself on the occasion of a visit from Hugh Dalton and a select group of Whitehall officials. ‘Various booby traps had been laid for them, with bangs going off and grenades rolling out at their feet, so that they arrived at their bomb-proof observation redoubt walking stiff-leggedly like cats on miry ground. The guests, who had had a day off in the country and had met the Jolly Roger boys, expressed themselves as highly impressed.’ 12
The head of Baker Street, Frank Nelson, may have been a workaholic, but those long hours in the office had not translated into action. Bickham Sweet-Escott had regular mid-week meetings with all the county section heads and then drafted the seven-day progress reports. ‘The meetings were grim,’ he confessed, ‘and we always looked forward to Wednesdays with a sinking feeling.’ As the new year dawned, he was able to record a few acts of sabotage in the Balkans and several more in Norway. ‘But elsewhere the work was slow,’ he admitted, ‘and my reports were gloomy documents.’
The gloom had been lifted by the arrival of Gubbins, who injected life and purpose into the machinery of Baker Street. At last, there was a feeling that someone had switched on the power. Within days of Gubbins taking his place at Berkeley Court, the veteran saboteur Tom Masterman was smuggled into Belgrade in order to establish an underground network of saboteurs. Another agent, ‘a likeable and busy barrister’ named George Pollock, was dispatched to Cairo in order to build a team that could strike throughout the Middle East. Pollock delighted in underhand work – it was not so different from being a lawyer – and exceeded his brief by planning a series of spectacular assassinations of pro-Nazi Middle Eastern politicians. He was disappointed to learn that Whitehall refused to sanction them. ‘We had to infer that cold-blooded murder was not part of our code,’ wrote Sweet-Escott. 13 Not yet, perhaps, but Gubbins was already eyeing the possibilities of assassinating leading Nazis.
Agents were dispatched to Gibraltar, Malta, Lisbon and even Cape Town. A large group of Balliol graduates were sent to join Pollock in Cairo. Gubbins even established a mission in French West Africa, under the auspices of a man named Louis Franck. He was recommended as ‘a good athlete and excellent linguist’. 14 More importantly, he was a personal acquaintance of General de Gaulle. His orders were to keep an eye on Vichy collaborators.
Lastly there was the ‘brilliant and ruthless’ George Taylor, who was smuggled into the Balkans. He was said to have ‘a mind of limpid clarity’. 15 He also had a job on his hands. His task was to arrange groups of saboteurs who could hide out in the mountains.
Gubbins had been working as hard as his agents, planning his first sabotage mission within weeks of joining Baker Street. Intelligence had revealed that German pilots of Kampfgeschwader 100, a bomber squadron in France, were driven to Vannes aerodrome each evening in two coaches. Gubbins’s idea was to parachute a small team of guerrillas into Brittany, ambush the coaches and shoot all the pilots inside.
The planned operation soon hit a snag. Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, was vehemently opposed to such ungentlemanly conduct and refused the use of RAF planes. ‘I think that the dropping of men dressed in civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force should be associated.’ He said that there was a big ethical difference between smuggling a spy into a country ‘and this entirely new scheme for dropping what one can only call assassins’.
Gubbins pressed ahead regardless and managed to parachute a small group of French saboteurs into France. But the mission came too late: the German pilots were no longer travelling to the aerodrome by coach and Operation Savanna, as it was known, had to be abandoned. But it had not been entirely in vain: the returning saboteurs brought back to England ‘a mass of intelligence about living conditions – curfew rules, bicycle regulations, cigarette prices, identity papers, ration cards’. 16 Such details were to prove of vital importance in the months ahead.
A larger and more enticing target on Gubbins’s list of targets was the huge electrical transformer station at Pessac, close to Bordeaux. This stretch of coastline, along with the rest of the Atlantic littoral, fell inside the German occupied zone of France, for it was deemed too strategically valuable to entrust to the Vichy government. Pessac had been an early goal for the German invaders, whose commanders were quick to see the importance of the power station. Its eight transformers supplied power to the principal factories in the coastal area between St Nazaire and Bayonne. They also provided energy for the chemical manufacturers in the Bordeaux area, now in the hands of the Nazis. But for Gubbins, these factors were completely overshadowed by the fact that Pessac was supplying all the power for the massive German submarine base outside Bordeaux. If his men could knock out the transformer station, they would strike a crippling blow to German U-boat operations in the North Atlantic.
An air attack on Pessac was initially considered, but quickly ruled out on the grounds that aerial bombardment was highly inaccurate. If the pilot missed the target, his bombs stood a high chance of landing on a civilian area. The only other option was to parachute a small team of saboteurs into Pessac. They would have to find their way to the transformer station, scale the perimeter fence, dodge or kill the sentries and then force an entry into the main building. If they managed to get inside without being caught, they would need to locate the key components of the plant machinery and wire them with explosives.
It sounded hard enough on paper, but there were additional obstacles. Pessac was on such an industrial scale, and so important to Germany’s submarine campaign, that it had been surrounded by a heavily fortified wall that was believed to be under twenty-four-hour guard. These guards would kill the saboteurs if they caught them.
Gubbins was enough of a realist to know that an attack on Pessac could only be undertaken by French saboteurs. He therefore turned to his newly formed Free French Section and asked for volunteers for Operation Josephine B, the codename given to the mission. Three men immediately offered their services: Sergeant Jean-Pierre Forman, Sub-Lieutenant Raymond Cabard and Sub-Lieutenant André Varnier.
There was never any doubt as to who was best equipped to lead the mission. Sergeant Forman had already proved his worth during training: he was a man ‘of courage, initiative and resource of the highest order’. 17 He also had the perfect profile of a saboteur. He was patient, ruthless and abhorred the Nazi occupation of his homeland, yet his hatred was carefully measured. In common with Gubbins, he believed that clinical strikes were the best way of hurting the German occupiers.
Gubbins had initially handed over the planning of the mission to two of his colleagues, Major Hugh Barry and Eric Piquet-Wicks, head of the Free French Section. Major Barry displayed an alarmingly breezy approach to a mission that was certain to land the men in extreme danger. ‘All we had to do was provide them with the explosives and they had to cut their way through the wire fence and attack the things and go.’ 18 He made it sound like an afternoon stroll in the park.
Cecil Clarke took a less cavalier view of the perils facing Sergeant Forman and his comrades. He put together a two-month programme of intensive training at Brickendonbury Manor, one that revealed a commitment to professionalism that placed Clarke in a different field from Barry and Piquet-Wicks. His programme had two principal goals that were to become the hallmark of all future missions: destroy the target and get out alive. The ultimate success of any mission was rated on whether or not the saboteurs made it back to England.
The French volunteers arrived at Brickendonbury Manor in the spring of 1941, by which time Gubbins’s team in London had discovered a great deal about the transformer station. Aerial reconnaissance photographs revealed the layout of the plant and the position of the various buildings. They even showed up the eight transformers. This information was to prove crucially important to Clarke as he prepared to train the men.
The transformer station stood some two miles from Pessac village, in heavily wooded countryside. This would afford the men good cover as they prepared themselves for the attack. Their greatest difficulty would be in entering the plant, with its sixteen-foot perimeter wall topped with wire. The saboteurs would have to scale this wall without attracting the notice of any workers at the plant.
Clarke knew more than most people about transformers. They usually had thin steel casings that housed the winding machinery. These casings contained oil, which was used as a coolant. It was clear that ‘maximum damage will be inflicted by damaging the windings, letting out the oil and igniting it.’ 19 If Sergeant Forman and his men could start a fire, Pessac could conceivably be knocked out for six months or more.
Clarke was in no doubt as to how best to blow up the transformers. His limpet mine was the ideal explosive. It would stick to the steel, be almost invisible if placed in the right position, and give the men ample time to make their escape.
He began by teaching the men the rudiments of sabotage and demolition. ‘Know every detail backwards.’ That was his mantra. ‘Remember that within five minutes of landing at your destination, you may be questioned by a hostile official.’ He was particularly insistent that the three men have an understanding of exactly how a transformer station functioned. Indeed he felt it was ‘very important that these foreign enthusiastic volunteers should get some “hands on” experience of trying to carry out an attack’.
There was an obvious means of getting this experience. Luton Power Station was just twelve miles from Brickendonbury and it resembled Pessac in many respects. It had a high perimeter fence, was guarded by the military and had sentries who patrolled the site at night. Its transformers, too, were similar to those at Pessac. This made it the perfect place for Sergeant Forman and his men to undertake a trial run for their forthcoming act of sabotage.
Cecil’s son, John, watched in puzzlement as his father faked a pass on War Office paper that read: ‘The holder of this pass, Major C. V. Clarke, has authority to inspect Luton Power Station.’ Equipped with this pass and a sack of blank limpets, he took the three saboteurs to Luton. He was preparing a little nocturnal surprise for the power station’s general manager.
Night had fallen by the time they reached the station. Clarke and young John hid in the damp undergrowth in order to monitor the progress of the three saboteurs as they crept towards the perimeter fence. ‘They used scaling ladders to get over the walls,’ recalled John, who was pleased to see them scale the outer fence without drawing attention to themselves. The three Frenchmen then forced an entry into the main building and placed their magnetic limpets on to the metal transformers, just as Clarke had instructed. Once done, they crept out of the transformer station, rescaled the perimeter fence and rejoined Clarke and his son in the undergrowth. They hadn’t triggered a single alarm. It was a job well done.
Clarke was impressed and now decided to have some fun. ‘He walked up to the front door of the power station and asked to speak to the Officer of the Guard. He then flourished his fake pass and said: “I want to do a routine inspection.”’
The officer was taken aback by this unannounced inspection but had little option but to allow Clarke inside: after all, he was equipped with an official War Office pass. ‘So he went round with a very big torch’ and began flashing light on to the transformers. ‘He said: “What’s that?” And this young subaltern who was in charge of the guard said: “I’m not quite sure what this is, sir. It looks to me like an explosive charge.”’
Clarke pressed on with his inspection, revealing to the nervous subaltern each of the dummy charges. The subaltern was appalled that such a breach of security could have taken place on his watch. He expected to be roundly punished.
But Clarke had no wish to land him in trouble and said he would take no further action. ‘“Alright old man”, he said. “You say nothing about this and I’ll say nothing about it. But you’ve learned your lesson.”’ 20
So had the saboteurs. A practice run could mean the difference between life and death.
Sergeant Forman and his team set off from Stradishall Aerodrome in Suffolk at around 9 p.m. on 11 May, flying to France in a specially converted Whitley bomber. There was a sharp frost in the late evening air and the men knew it would get even colder once airborne. Over the previous days, pilots had been complaining of temperatures dipping as low as minus 25 inside their cockpits, so cold they had to scratch away the ice from the inside of the glass.
The Pessac mission had been timed to coincide with a full moon, an important consideration for men being dropped blind into the French countryside. Their equipment and explosives had been carefully packed into a rigid capsule: this, too, was to be parachuted from the plane.
Clarke had planned Operation Josephine B with surgical precision, intending it to be the antithesis of the sort of raids being undertaken by Bomber Command. Just twenty-four hours earlier, the Royal Air Force had undertaken its heaviest bombardment to date on Nazi Germany, dropping ‘load after load of high explosives and incendiaries’ 21 on to the cities of Hamburg and Bremen. The raid had come at a high cost: eleven bombers had crashed or been shot down and no one could be certain if the bombs had hit their target. Clarke, like Gubbins, had long believed that bombing was a blunt-edged weapon, one that killed more civilians than soldiers. Sabotage, at its best, was clinically precise.
The men had been equipped with specialist weaponry. Forman carried an automatic pistol, four grenades and a fighting knife to be used against German sentries if caught in close combat. He also had wire-cutters, a compass, a torch and a rope ladder. His principal explosive charge was the limpet mine. Cecil Clarke’s wonder weapon was about to be put to the test.
The mission began like clockwork. The Whitley bomber reached the Bordeaux area at shortly after midnight and all three men jumped into the night, closely followed by their precious metal container. They landed some five kilometres from the target area, in an area of woodland, but managed to avoid getting their parachutes snagged in any branches. They didn’t locate the container until dawn, when they noticed it dangling in a tree. They hauled it down and then buried it, just as Cecil Clarke had instructed.
Forman led them to a safe house in Bordeaux, only to discover that their contact was not at home. This was a setback, but they successfully checked into a hotel without arousing any suspicion and on the following morning acquired bicycles and used them to travel to Pessac. Forman wanted to stake out the ground before launching his attack.
Their reconnaissance of Pessac brought both good and bad news. The transformer station was surrounded by a nine-foot concrete wall – lower than expected – but the wall itself was topped by a high-tension wire that made scaling it almost impossible. More disquieting were the sentries on constant patrol inside the perimeter fence. Their presence put Forman in a quandary. He was under specific orders that ‘fire will not be opened unless sentries of the transformer station interfere’. 22 Yet it was inconceivable that he and his men could get inside the plant without a firefight that would almost certainly leave all three of them dead.
Forman decided to postpone the attack in order to consult with Joel Letac, one of the men parachuted into France for the abortive assassination of the Kampfgeschwader bomber pilots. Letac had remained in France in order to work for the fledgling French resistance. He persuaded Forman to stake out the ground more carefully, informing him that the occupying Germans were becoming increasingly complacent in their attitude to security. He even volunteered to join him for the mission, an offer that Forman was more than happy to accept.
Sub-Lieutenant Raymond Cabard was selected to investigate the site more carefully and he displayed considerable bravado by walking up to the main gate and chatting with the French sentry on duty. From him, he learned a crucial detail. The night sentries had indeed become lax in their work and were in the habit of knocking off duty shortly before midnight. He also discovered that they slept in a billet in the north-east corner of the transformer station, leaving the main building unguarded.
Equipped with this knowledge, the saboteurs decided to attack on the following night, setting off from Bordeaux by bike under the cloak of darkness. Cabard and Varnier arrived first, at around 10 p.m., and made their way into the dripping woodland where they had buried their limpet mines. The loamy earth squelched underfoot, for it had been raining hard, and Varnier found that moisture had penetrated into the time fuses of the buried explosives. But he managed to cut out the spoiled section and rewire the detonators.
Forman and Letac joined their two comrades in the woodland at around midnight. A quick reconnaissance confirmed the information about the sentries. There was no one patrolling inside the site.
Forman followed his instructions to the letter, moving ‘as rapidly as possible, following the line of pylons to the small wood, 300 yards west of the transformer station’. He scaled the wall without the use of a ladder, swung himself over the high-tension wire and clambered on to a pylon that stood just inside the perimeter fence. He then jumped down on to the soft ground in the yard and crept towards the main gate of the station, which he was able to unlatch from the inside. ‘This made a considerable noise, but did not appear to attract any attention at all.’
His fellow saboteurs entered in absolute silence, slipping through the dark shadows towards the transformer building. It stood as a neatly defined silhouette in the pale spring moonlight. It was unlocked – amazingly – and the men got inside without difficulty. The place was deserted. The workmen were asleep. The only sound was the low hum of the transformers.
There was no light inside the factory, but the men’s night training had not been in vain. They had no difficulty in locating the eight transformers and it took just seconds to attach their limpet mines to each of the metal casings. The only slight hitch came when they discovered that some of the transformers were wet, causing the mines to slide on the surface. Yet even this problem was overcome. In the operational report, written after the event, the men expressed satisfaction with their progress. ‘During the whole period of half an hour in which the party were in the station, no one was seen and there was not the slightest attempt at interference.’ 23
They had no intention of hanging around. As soon as the limpets were secure, they skipped back through the main gates and retrieved their bicycles from the dense woodland close to the perimeter fence.
They had just mounted their bikes ‘and were pedalling with all their might’ when a series of hollow booms shook the stillness of the night. The booms were followed by ‘resounding explosions and flames reaching to the sky’. 24 As the men glanced backwards, these flames could be seen towering more than 150 feet upwards. ‘Seven other explosions were heard,’ all timed like clockwork. 25 Cecil Clarke’s limpet mines had worked to perfection.
The four of them pedalled hard, light-headed with success. They ‘rode back to their digs by the light of the burning oil and of searchlights hunting for the bomber the Germans supposed to have passed’. 26 Forman knew that the searchlights brought good news. The Germans clearly thought the attack had come from the air.
Forman and his team later learned that the damage caused to Pessac was every bit as devastating as they had hoped. Six out of the eight transformers had been crippled, cutting all power supplies to the German submarine base. The wreckage was on such a grand scale, indeed, that it would take more than a year to repair the facility.
The Germans immediately tried to restore power by rerouting electricity from the power station at Dax, some seventy miles to the south. But it ‘merely resulted in the blowing of numerous fuses, and this attempt had to be abandoned’. 27 The coastal railway from Bordeaux to Spain was also seriously disrupted, hampering the service. The electric locomotives eventually had to be abandoned and replaced with decommissioned steam trains.
When the Abwehr (military intelligence) discovered that the attack on Pessac had been carried out by saboteurs, and not aircraft, the German sentries carried the blame. All twelve were arrested and were later said to have been shot. The local French population was also punished, but not severely. Some 250 people were arrested and a fine of 1 million francs imposed on the community.
Colin Gubbins was delighted by the success of the first major act of sabotage undertaken on his watch. It triumphantly vindicated his belief in playing dirty. ‘The operation showed what could be done by a couple of gallant, well-trained men, trained for the job and equipped with the proper devices.’ 28 The best news of all came when the three original saboteurs pitched up in England in the third week of August after a daring escape across Spain and Portugal. Their safe arrival was one cause for celebration. Another was the fact that Forman had managed to establish the first significant network of undercover agents in France. He was awarded the Military Cross for having ‘contributed materially to the growth of resistance to the enemy’.
Hugh Dalton was as delighted as Gubbins with the success of Operation Josephine B and wrote a ‘most secret’ memo to Winston Churchill informing him that the scale of the destruction caused by eight small limpet mines ‘strongly suggests that many industrial targets are more effectively attacked by Special Operations methods than by aerial bombardment’.
Dalton added that the operation had fully justified the existence of a dedicated sabotage unit, as well as Cecil Clarke’s Brickendonbury training programme. ‘It is indeed most encouraging that our first action of this kind (which reflects great credit on Brigadier Gubbins, my Director of Training and Operations) should have succeeded.’ 29 Churchill was inclined to agree.