Following the disaster of Operation Aquatint and the death of Gus March-Phillips, Combined Operations Headquarters decided not to attempt the French coast again, but rather to return the SSRF to the Channel Islands for their next raid. These raids had several objectives, the principal of which was to capture one or more German prisoners. A German prisoner who was knowledgeable and who gave up information under questioning by MI19, the section of Military Intelligence responsible for prisoner interrogation, was worth his weight in gold.
It must be remembered that there were limits to what British and other Allied military commanders could learn about the state of German defences from aerial reconnaissance and other intelligence gathering methods at the time. Talking with a German soldier who had experience on the ground was invaluable. It was highly unlikely that any of them would be voluntarily coming over to England any time soon, which is why it was deemed necessary to capture some of them, and bring them over by force.
It may be hard to imagine today how little was actually known in London about life on the Channel Islands in 1942. The islands were completely cut off. All wireless sets had been confiscated (though some remained hidden, including one held by the Dame of Sark). The only letters allowed out or in were the rare and very short Red Cross messages, which were heavily censored. These sometimes took months to reach their destinations. Fishermen on the islands were severely restricted in how far they could take their boats out for fear they would sail off to England, as some had done in the very early days of the occupation.
Attempts early in the war to land British commandos on some of the Channel Islands to leave them there to gather intelligence had failed. And despite rumours that there had been an SOE operative based on Sark, or the suspicions that the unfortunate Major Skelton may have worked for British Intelligence, in reality the islands had ‘gone dark’. Even the large-scale deportations of 2,000 islanders in September 1942 had gone unnoticed in Britain.
In short, the Allied commanders in London were twenty months away from the D-Day landings in Normandy without enough hard intelligence about the state of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall defences, not only in France, but even in the small part of Britain the German forces occupied. The capture of a live prisoner was the main reason for carrying out the small-scale raids on the Channel Islands, even if that was not fully understood at the time by many, including the islanders themselves. This is made clear by something Julia Tremayne wrote in her secret wartime letters. Complaining about a later raid on the island, she wrote that she could not:
… see myself what good the landing down here does. The last one was October 1942 and brought us nothing but misery … If it meant shortening the war we did not mind but all this is nerve-racking and I am afraid even my own shadow sometimes makes me jump.1
What Mrs Tremayne did not understand was that the raids were designed precisely to do just that – shorten the war – by ensuring that the Allies had the best possible intelligence on German defences in the territories they occupied.
Fortunately, the commandos themselves understood the reasoning behind the raids, and this was clearly expressed by one of the men who took part, Horace ‘Stokey’ Stokes. As he put it in his diary, ‘The main purpose of the mission was to take prisoners and get them back to England for questioning about German defences along the French coast and the state of their equipment and morale.’2 In weighing up whether the raid was a success or not, the principal test is whether a live German prisoner was taken, and what information he gave up.
Though capturing a prisoner was the main purpose of raids like Operation Basalt, it was not the only purpose. Other reasons for doing the ‘butcher and bolt’ raids included terrorising the enemy, compelling the Germans to waste men and resources beefing up defences in places of no strategic value, stirring up local resistance in territories they occupied, and finally, raising morale on the home front.
German propaganda at the time played up just how comfortable their soldiers were on the English Channel Islands. This was not entirely inaccurate, for Wehrmacht medical orderly Werner Rang and his friends considered Sark to be a ‘kleine Paradies’, while Baron von Aufsess wrote that Sark was ‘the island of one’s dreams’. It infuriated Churchill that German soldiers could feel so unthreatened on occupied British territory. It was time to turn ‘the island of one’s dreams’ into a nightmare.
A good illustration of the ‘butcher and bolt’ strategy working very effectively was the aftermath of the commando raid on the Casquets Lighthouse, where the entire German garrison was taken without firing a shot. The garrison sent in to replace them was considerably larger.
By mid-1942, there were approximately 37,000 German troops tied down occupying the Channel Islands. This was a staggering waste of more than an entire infantry division loaded down with heavy weapons at a time when the German Army was fighting for its very survival in Russia. As Madeleine Bunting writes, this was ‘a higher concentration of armed forces per square mile than in Germany itself. The islands’ population after the evacuation was just over sixty thousand, so there was more than one German to every two islanders.’3 In Sark, the ratio was even higher. Churchill is said to have called the German bases on the Channel Islands ‘the biggest and cheapest prisoner-of-war camps behind Allied front lines’.4
Where the raids proved to be somewhat less successful was in stiffening resistance to German rule. Opinions differ as to how the locals reacted to commando raids. Looking back after many years, everyone welcomed the raids, delighted that Britain had not forgotten what Churchill would later call ‘our dear Channel Islands’. But at the time, as Mrs Tremayne’s letters and other documents show, rather than help to ‘set Europe ablaze’, commando raids made daily life worse for the victims of Nazi occupation, and turned some islanders against the British for doing so.
One final aim of raids such as Operation Basalt was to raise morale on the home front, though this was complicated by the fact that the raids needed to be kept secret. The October 1942 raid on Sark had a different character, due to the German decision to publicise their version of what happened. As a result, the British public learned for the first time of the daring raid, and the newspapers were full of accounts of what the commandos had done. And at a time when the British Army was recovering from the stinging defeat in France more than two years earlier, and the more recent disastrous raid on Dieppe, good news was most welcome. Raids like Basalt proved that the British Army was still standing, fighting and inflicting pain on the Germans.
By mid-September 1942, the SSRF, now under the command of Appleyard, began getting ready for the next in its series of raids. This one targeted Sark, and like the other raids had as its primary goal the capture of one or more German prisoners. Because of the disaster of Operation Aquatint, the SSRF could not carry out the raid on its own. There were seven officers and men from the SSRF ready to go. Five men from ‘E’ Troop of No. 12 Commando under the command of Captain Philip Hugh Pinckney joined them.5
It is not known today how Sark was picked as the target, but it is likely that Appleyard himself suggested it. SSRF officers had a say in choosing where they would go next, and Appleyard knew Sark quite well from pre-war visits he’d made with his family. All the Channel Islands, including Sark, were popular tourist destinations for British people in the 1930s. The well-off Appleyard family were regular visitors to the island, where Geoffrey and his siblings would explore the island’s paths, beaches, caves and cliffs. Geoffrey’s sister, Jenny, had only the fondest memories of Sark, ‘where we spent long days exploring caves and rock pools, and swimming and diving in the astonishing sapphire depths of Venus Pool’.6 Jenny Appleyard loved the Channel Islands so much that after the war, she and her husband moved permanently to Herm, the island that she could see from Sark.
A few weeks before the October 1942 raid, Appleyard wrote to his father mentioning that he’d seen the Sark light during a raid on another Channel Island. ‘I should like to land on Sark again sometime,’ he mused.7 Weeks before the raid took place, Appleyard had a chance to visit his parents. As his father later recalled:
We couldn’t, at that time, understand why he was so keen to see a cinema film which we had taken on a family holiday in the Channel Islands some years before the war. But after the raid was announced in the papers, we realised that he had been refreshing his memory of one of the islands so that he could land with his men by night and lead them with sureness and certainty across the same beaches and up the same cliffs as he played upon as a boy.8
In addition to the Appleyard family home movies, the commandos would certainly have relied on guides to the island, none more important than La Trobe’s Guide to Sark, which was first published in 1914. The guide encouraged visitors to swim in the bay and added that afterwards:
After a fairly stiff climb the top of the curious headland, called the Hog’s Back, is attained. From the sea the origin of the name can be better seen, and from there one can easily recognise the high curved back and the nozzle thrust out to sea.9 [In maps prepared by the German occupiers years later, they renamed the Hog’s Back ‘Schweinsrücken’.]
The La Trobe Guide added that ‘a descent can be made with care at the point of the Hog’s Back, the Point du Château, but care must be taken with the crumbling rocks’.10 The inspiration for the decision to land the commandos at Pointe Château and climb to the top of the Hog’s Back is clearly to be found in this guide, which is still available today. (The La Trobe family produced a 100th anniversary edition in 2014.)
In addition to personal memories, family home movies and a popular walking guide to the island, the commandos would also have had access to aerial reconnaissance photos. Unfortunately, these proved to be of rather poor quality, indicating, for example, the presence of a German machine-gun emplacement on top of the Hog’s Back – which turned out to be something rather different. Later in the war, the Royal Air Force would become much better at this sort of thing, but in September 1942 the aerial photos at the disposal of the commandos were not particularly helpful.
Finally, it appears that some intelligence about Sark may have been collected from one of the prisoners captured at the previous raid on the Casquets Lighthouse. That man, the 21-year-old wireless operator Funkgefreiter Reineck, gave a very detailed, if not entirely accurate, account of the German garrison on Sark.11
In mid-September 1942, Appleyard summoned the commandos into his office where he had laid out on a table dozens of aerial photos of Sark. In addition to these, there was a model of the island.12 One cannot overstate the importance of a physical model, for the route the commandos would need to take was a series of steep climbs and descents up and down Sark’s cliffs and valleys. A two-dimensional photograph or map would not give an accurate impression of the lay of the land.
As the commandos made their preparations, studying the intelligence they had, there was at least one German who had a premonition that the peace on the little paradise island of Sark might soon be shattered. Just five days before the commandos landed on Sark, Hitler made a three-hour speech to a conference attended by very senior Nazi officials. He was concerned about possible breaches in the Channel Islands’ defences:
Above all, I am grateful to the English for proving me right by their various landing attempts. It shows up those who think I am always seeing phantoms, who say, ‘Well, when are the English coming? There is absolutely nothing happening on the coast – we swim every day, and haven’t seen a single Englishman!’13
Hitler demanded that all the Channel Islands be turned into fortresses, and that the Atlantic Wall defences be strengthened.
Some of the weapons deployed by the Germans to defend Sark were truly fearsome. For example, the Wehrmacht put in place remote-controlled flamethrowers that would burn alive any attacking troops. In addition, the island was defended by thousands of mines, including the terrifying ‘bouncing Betties’, kilometres of barbed wire, armed patrols throughout the night, spotlights, anti-tank weapons and hundreds of well-trained, heavily armed infantrymen.
The first attempt to carry out Operation Basalt took place on the night of 19–20 September 1942, just six days after the disastrous Aquatint raid in which Gus March-Phillips had been killed. The original plan had been to go a day earlier, but was postponed due to bad weather. Though the weather wasn’t perfect, Appleyard didn’t want to delay a second time, so on the 19th the men readied themselves to raid Sark.
The raiders set out as usual from Portland on MTB 344, commanded once again by Lieutenant Freddie Bourne. The departure from Portland was quite late, at nearly 2200hrs, as the boat headed out passing Alderney and the Casquets, scene of the earlier, highly successful SSRF raid. By midnight, land was spotted and identified incorrectly as Sark. The boat was, in fact, far off course and had seen various rocks, the small island of Herm and the much larger island of Guernsey. As Sergeant Stokes later put it, ‘These sort of f***-ups happened all of the time.’14 After correcting course, they approached Sark at the ‘semi-silent’ speed of 10 knots and reached the place where they intended to anchor only at 0135hrs. At that point they cut off the main engines entirely, slowing down to just 5 knots on the auxiliary engine.
But now the sea turned against them. The swell began to rise, and what Appleyard later referred to as ‘patches of confused sea’ made the going very difficult. The boat was pulled away by a very fast-moving stream in the sea, and they estimated that they’d not be able to successfully anchor in the right place until 0300hrs. Five hours had passed since leaving Portland. As they needed to begin their return voyage no later than 0330hrs in order to reach the safety of Portland before daybreak, it was no longer possible to complete the mission. In addition to that, the strong winds and ‘confused sea’ meant that the tiny Goatley landing craft may not have successfully made the short trip back and forth from the MTB to the shore.
Stokes wrote:
Our life was operating out of small boats so we knew how to read the weather and the sea, and on this occasion we could sense a number of things that didn’t feel right. There was a strong wind, very strong current and big swell. Simply to get into a position from which we could get ashore would have taken us until about 3am and we knew that we needed to have the operation completed and be heading home at 03.30hrs.15
Appleyard then took the painful decision to abort the mission, and the boat sailed back to England, arriving in Portland Harbour by 0530hrs. The men were debriefed and returned to their billets at Anderson Manor. Stokes probably spoke for all the men when he later wrote: ‘This was how it was sometimes, in fact more often than not, and if you were going to risk the lives of men then it takes as much courage to abort an operation as it does to give the thumbs up and to proceed with it.’16
This first abortive raid on Sark was not without value. They’d circled the island, and learned more about the sea there, its currents and the dangers they would face navigating those waters. When they came back, they would be better prepared to make a perfect landing on Sark.
On that same morning, as the commandos returned to Portland, Obergefreiter Hermann Weinreich and four of his comrades from the Wehrmacht’s Pioneers (combat engineers) were transferred from Guernsey to Sark. Their job there was to fix a boom defence across the entrance of Creux Harbour on the eastern coast of the island. This defence consisted of two buoys, 1.5m high, which sink about half-way down into the water, and connected at the top and bottom by a thick wire strand, running into rings. This project, like all the other aspects of the Atlantic Wall, seemed designed to deter a full-on, frontal assault by enemy troops, and would not in the least have affected a commando raid. As it turned out, Weinreich would only have two weeks in Sark, and would spend the rest of the war in British captivity. Two members of his team had only two weeks left to live.
A day after the raiders came back, on 21 September, Appleyard had a meeting in London with ‘M’. At this point, the SSRF had two masters, both the SOE and Combined Operations, headed by Mountbatten. It was their first meeting after March-Phillips’ death, and Appleyard was now running the SSRF on his own.
It is not known what Appleyard and ‘M’ discussed, but within a few days Appleyard sent a handwritten note marked ‘MOST SECRET’ to his commander (addressed to SOO, HMS Southwick), in which he wrote:
I should like to have another shot at operation ‘BASALT’ on the night of 3rd/4th Oct., or failing that the first suitable subsequent night. M.T.B. 344 would be used, sailing from Portland. If you concur, would you please send the necessary signals … Apart from the date, I think these will be exactly as before.
Appleyard, though actually commanding the SSRF at this time, was still signing his reports as ‘2nd in Command’ in honour of his close friend, the late March-Phillips.
A week after the first attempt on Sark, ‘M’ paid a visit to Anderson Manor, meeting all the men in the SSRF and presumably the new additions from No. 12 Commando as well. A few days later, Appleyard’s commanding officer at HMS Southwick scrawled on the bottom of his message: ‘3rd Oct. is one day after last quarter of moon. Propose to lay on.’ The raiders had needed to wait until the moon was in the right phase. This was confirmed on 1 October in a message from the base commander in Portsmouth on 1 October, just two days before the raid. The message was concise: ‘Carry out OPERATION ‘BASALT’ night of 3rd/4th October or first suitable subsequent night.’
Operation Basalt was now set for a second attempt.
1 Tremayne, p.160.
2 Stokes (ebook), loc. 686.
3 Bunting, p.50.
4 Bunting, p.243.
5 WO 218/41. This then refers to S.T.S. 62 War Diary.
6 Wood, Jenny, Herm, Our Island Home (London: Robert Hale, 1972) p.14.
7 Keene, p.178.
8 Appleyard, p.129.
9 La Trobe Guide, p.43.
10 La Trobe Guide, p.43.
11 Unfortunately, I was not able to find evidence of this in the official record of Operation Dryad in DEFE 2/109. According to a report there, he is not listed as having actually served on Sark.
12 Saelen, p.1.
13 Cruickshank, p.203.
14 Stokes (ebook), loc. 692.
15 Stokes (ebook), loc. 697.
16 Stokes (ebook), loc. 702.