Churchill's Band of Brothers

by Damien Lewis

  Securing such minutiae could also be used against the individual in question, during interrogations. Small personal details, slipped into the flow of questioning, could prove hugely unnerving, leaving the captive wrong-footed and wondering how on earth his inquisitor might know that. By apparently befriending his captives – finding aspects of common ground, like sport, with Jones – Kieffer sought to inveigle and beguile. But in truth, any who fell for Kieffer’s charms were only ‘befriended’ for as long as they served his ends: the Funkspiel’s ends. Once any usefulness had been exhausted, the captive was shipped off to Germany, to be sucked into the Nacht und Nebel – the night and the fog.

  Supposedly befriending such captives when they were at their lowest ebb, feeling terribly fearful and vulnerable, was of course the cruellest cut of all. Those ‘befriended’ were to be disposed of – without mercy; without trial; without trace even – once they’d served Kieffer’s ends. By comparison, those German agents captured on British soil – and there were many – were given a stark, but fair choice. Swap sides and work for the Allies, or face trial before a properly constituted court as a spy, for which the sentence was death. If they chose the former option, their lives would be spared and at war’s end they would be repatriated to Germany as ‘undesirable aliens’.

  Incredibly, there was one SOE agent – codename ‘Emile’ – who had been acting as Kieffer’s ‘friend’ for many months now. He had even been granted the dubious honour of being allowed to reside at 84 Avenue Foch full-time. A graphic designer by trade, on occasion he was allowed to dine with his Gestapo pals at fine Paris restaurants. But most often, he could be spied at ‘his’ desk in the 84 Avenue Foch guard-room, working on detailed sketches of the Gestapo’s operations, delineating both their Funkspiel-controlled ‘ghost circuits’ and those still genuinely in SOE hands. That shadowy figure was present at 84 Avenue Foch, even as Vaculik, Jones, Walker, Young and Varey faced their interrogations.

  And he would go on to play the most extraordinary role in the SAS captives’ fortunes.

  Chapter 14

  Even as the Avenue Foch captives were facing their first, brutal inquisitions, the three of the SABU-70 raiders still at large were intent on executing their getaway. Having skirted around the hamlet of La Ferté-Alais, Troopers Morrison and Norman –numbers ten and eleven on the drop – discovered that a second, more daunting obstacle lay in their path, the wide sweep of the main Orléans to Paris railway. Oddly, only two of the six sets of tracks seemed to be polished with use. The rest looked unused.

  In truth, due to sabotage operations by Major Fenwick’s raiders – located to the south of SABU-70’s DZ – ‘considerable material damage was done to rolling stock and railway lines’. Indeed, SAS reports would conclude of Operation Gain that ‘the German Army . . . was not safe from attack in the middle of villages from Dourdan to Orléans’, a stretch of terrain some 50 miles across.

  Even more surprisingly to Morrison and Norman, no guards seemed to have been set, and the railway looked deserted. Seizing their chance, the two fugitives crept across, on the far side finding themselves on the outskirts of Bouray-sur-Juine, some 3 miles to the northwest of their DZ. They had two options: turn back, or brazen it out and push through the darkened streets. As north towards the Normandy beaches lay their only hope, they turned in that direction, heading deeper into the sleeping town.

  At first Morrison and Norman tried to make their way from garden to garden, vaulting railings and gateways. But the cacophony of dogs barking and the inevitable curses from those rudely awakened soon dissuaded them from that course of action. Neither man understood the slightest French, but they clearly were not making the townsfolk of Bouray-sur-Juine particularly happy. So they took to the open road and dashed north at speed, making for the comparative safety of the fields on the far side of town.

  Shortly a new obstacle blocked their way – the River Juine. Morrison waded in to see if it could be forded, but within the first few steps he was waist deep, the riverbed proving soft and treacherous underfoot. By now it was getting light and the two fugitives urgently needed to find a crossing point and somewhere to lay up in hiding. They spied a mill that forded the river, but shadowy figures could be seen moving about in the half-light. Nearer at hand lay a rowing boat, fastened by a sturdy padlock. For a few moments they considered trying to cut the chain using their ‘issue escape file’ – part of their escape kit – but the time it would take and the noise it would make dissuaded them.

  As luck would have it, a small track lay a little further ahead, which crossed the river via a narrow bridge. It seemed deserted. The two men flitted across, skirted around a house lying at the bridge’s far end, dashed across the main road beyond and made for the forest on the other side. The terrain rose steeply, and having climbed to a vantage point Morrison and Norman decided ‘to make this their lying-up point’. They searched around and found an ancient-looking cave that seemed ideal for their purposes.

  Having crawled inside, the two men – famished and exhausted – tried to take stock. Given the small amount of food they had on their person, they discussed cutting their daily rations to the bare minimum, ‘one tin of milk and bar of chocolate each’ per day. But with 150 miles lying between where they were now and the Normandy beaches, as the crow flies, that clearly wasn’t going to be enough to keep them going. Desperate times called for desperate measures. Norman volunteered to head off in search of some extra provisions, while Morrison stood guard at the cave.

  Norman disappeared deeper into the woods. A mile from the cave he came across a house, and as he watched from the trees a woman came out to feed her chickens. Seeing no other option, he beckoned her over. Via sign language and gestures, Norman managed to make her understand that he and another British parachutist were hiding in the woods. Having checked that they were unobserved, the woman led Norman into her house, where she proceeded to press upon him some ‘bread, milk and some very fat bacon’.

  Hardly daring to believe his good fortune, Norman returned to the cave, where he and Morrison soon had ‘the old Tommy cooker going hard at it’ – their portable stove. Knowing that the enemy was bound to have patrols out in force searching for any escapees, they decided to lie up all that day plus the following night, 6 July, and to see what the fates might bring thereafter. And so, having feasted courtesy of the farmer’s generosity, they settled down to an exhausted sleep.

  Meanwhile Trooper Castelow – number twelve on the jump –was busy executing a lone escape and evasion that would prove even more of a daredevil enterprise. As soon as the hue and cry had died down, the sound of enemy vehicles fading into silence, Castelow had got moving. Pushing north – the only sensible direction to take – he’d crept along the marshy, thickly vegetated banks of the Essonne, a tributary of the Seine. After covering a good 10 miles, he’d reached the small village of Vert-le-Petit, where he was duly introduced to the head of the local Resistance, who ‘gave me civilian clothes and a French pass’.

  With the massive urban expanse of Paris lying directly to his north, there was little point going any further that way. Instead, Castelow – who would go on to be awarded the Military Medal – was about to join the locals in their battle to expel the Nazi occupiers. ‘I remained . . . and worked with the Resistance,’ Castelow would report, of his time with the partisans of Vert-le-Petit. He would put his SAS training to very good use now: ‘We were mainly engaged with ambushing transport on the roads.’

  Eventually, the Gestapo would learn of Castelow’s existence and role, and he would be forced to move on. But for now, he was relatively safe and engaged in the kind of activities that would wreak suitable vengeance for what had transpired at their DZ. For all Castelow knew, he was the only one of Garstin’s stick to have made it out of the ambush alive.

  After several visits to the Hôpital La Pitié-Salpêtrière, Untersturmführer von Kapri appeared convinced that none of the wounded men was likely to pull through. Despite receiving ‘the best treatm
ent and care’, they were barely fit for any further questioning, he reported to his boss, Kieffer. The best treatment and care – Captain Garstin, Paddy Barker and Lieutenant Wiehe would beg to disagree. Denied any official recognition as POWs, they had been informed they were ‘terrorists’ in the eyes of their captors, and were to be treated as such.

  Lieutenant Wiehe – the suspected Frenchman – was subjected to the very worst. His treatment was torture, pure and simple. The Gestapo plagued his bedside like devils, seeming ‘determined to make him speak by all means, but the worst torture he had to endure was the lack of medical care’. Still fully conscious, he knew that the wound at the base of his spine was ‘serious and getting infected’, and he cried and winced in pain. But all care was reserved for the German patients, who filled up the vast majority of the hospital.

  There was one notable exception to this, as surprising as it proved uplifting. Unteroffizier (Corporal) George Richard was a German orderly serving on Wiehe’s ward. In the deepest of ironies, Richard – 6 feet tall, bespectacled, and a student in Munich before being conscripted into the Wehrmacht – was a fervent anti-Nazi. ‘He did everything he possibly could to help me and to make life easier,’ Wiehe reported. But his greatest single gesture of kindness was to return to the grievously injured man his rosary. That simple act reminded the SAS lieutenant that while he had lost everything – his dear friends and comrades, his freedom, his very mobility – ‘his heart was still beating’, and ‘life-blood pumped through his weakened body’.

  The return of the rosary gave Wiehe ‘tremendous courage’ to endure. Whenever he found himself drifting into a ‘state of semi-coma’, or twisting in agony and trying ‘desperately to find a more comfortable position to relieve his torment’, his hand would reach involuntarily for that precious string of beads. He thought then of his fellow captives: where were they now? What were they enduring? He imagined them being spirited away to Germany, to face unimaginable horrors. And he thought of those back at SAS HQ, ‘wondering how they were reacting to news of their capture’.

  In truth, no one at SAS headquarters was any the wiser as to what might have happened to Captain Garstin and his men. The sole means of their discovering the grim truth – those pigeons set free by Vaculik – had never reached Britain. Instead, before they were able to properly take flight, the messenger-birds had been scooped up by the Gestapo . . . and unfortunately their fate would propel Vaculik deeper into the darkness.

  ‘You had carrier pigeons,’ Hauptsturmführer Schnur announced, his voice smug and self-satisfied. ‘We’ve got four of them. I suppose you don’t know anything about them either?’

  It was the afternoon of his second day in captivity, and Vaculik was back before his chief inquisitor. At midday, they’d been given some coffee, ‘a black and bitter brew’, plus soup and coarse bread. It wasn’t much, and the five captives had wolfed it down. The questioning had begun shortly thereafter, and mostly Schnur had been asking about their signals. From somewhere, he’d produced a Jed set, and he kept demanding to be shown how it worked. Vaculik played dumb, arguing that he was nothing more than a ‘pot and bottle washer’. But now had come the issue of the birds. Somehow he felt utterly cheated that even those pigeons had failed to make a bid for freedom and for home.

  ‘We brought them with us to supplement our rations,’ Vaculik retorted. ‘To eat.’ It was a piece of barefaced insolence, and he knew it, but he hadn’t felt able to resist.

  His reward was a blow around the face from Schnur, which was delivered with all the force that he could muster. ‘Perhaps that will teach you to behave yourself,’ he snarled, his face puce with anger. Then he turned to his SS assistants. There were two now. ‘Take him away, and brighten up his ideas a little, will you.’

  Vaculik was propelled into a neighbouring room, where there were two baths filled with water. One was steaming hot, the other ice cold. Schnur, who had followed him in, ordered Vaculik to strip. He refused, so Schnur’s lackeys beat him until he had no choice but to obey. Naked, Vaculik stood before them, his mind clouded with fear. The two flunkies grabbed him and dumped him in the scalding water, forcing his head under, until he felt as if he were going to drown. When he was on the verge of blacking out they dragged him out, and shoved him into the ice-cold bath.

  The freezing water after the boiling was sheer torture, and all the while Schnur was yelling at him to talk. The process continued until Vaculik lost consciousness. It wasn’t until the following morning that he properly came to. He was back in his cell. There was vomit on the bed and his head was ringing horribly. By now, all five of the SAS captives were in ‘bad shape, depressed and full of aches and pains’. For hours they sat in silence, no one finding the energy or spirit to talk much.

  Vaculik drifted off again. Sometime later he was woken by the guard. Midnight. Interrogation time. The questioning went on for hour after hour, until Vaculik lost all sense of night and day. The torture became more inventive, more sinister and agonising. Cigarettes were stubbed out on Vaculik’s flesh. Other means were used to cause unspeakable pain. All the while Schnur kept warning Vaculik to talk, or he was very likely going to breathe his last. Finally, Vaculik realised he would have to say something – to invent some credible story – or they would finish him.

  He signalled that he was ready to speak. ‘Our mission was to prepare the way for an airborne division,’ he whispered, exhaustedly. ‘It was to be dropped shortly, near Paris, to take the German troops in Normandy in the rear.’ It was complete rubbish of course, but he just had to hope and pray that Schnur would find it convincing.

  A smile flitted across the Gestapo man’s features. ‘That’s better. Now, what about the radio codes?’

  Vaculik shook his head. ‘I’ve already told you. I wasn’t anything to do with communications.’ Vaculik had repeatedly argued that radio procedures were well above his pay grade. ‘I didn’t know the codes.’

  Schnur studied Vaculik for a long moment, sizing up what to do next. Then he turned to the guards. ‘Put the handcuffs on him and let him go to the devil.’ With that, Vaculik was dragged from the room ‘with trembling legs’ and propelled back to the cell.

  Schnur had been personally trained by Horst Kopkow, the Berlin maestro, in ‘radio counter-espionage’ (Funkspiel). As he was finished with the five SAS captives, he issued a detailed report, based in part on the questioning, but more on a close study of the captured maps, kit and the ‘one-time pad codes’, the means by which SABU-70’s radio messages would have been encoded. From that he had deduced several things. The SAS unit was a sabotage squad: that was clear from the amount of captured explosives. The lack of a Jed set and the SAS’s intentions to link up with the Resistance reflected their plans to rely on local French forces for communications back to England.

  ‘The squad had no wireless connection to their own to headquarters,’ Schnur concluded. ‘The transmission set of the Resistance group . . . was to be used.’ The plan at 84 Avenue Foch was to continue with the Op Marbois ‘decoy transmission, which had been sent out many times by the Commander of Paris [Kieffer]’. If possible, the Funkspiel that had led to Captain Garstin and his men’s capture was to be amplified, but the key to that lay with the wounded Lieutenant Wiehe, and there was little help he could provide right now. As for the rest of the captives, it was for Berlin to decide their fate.

  The immediate priority was to get them out of 84 Avenue Foch. They would be sent to a nearby Gestapo detention centre, just a few minutes’ drive away. Kieffer was adamant that if prisoners whose assistance might be required for a Funkspiel were kept together, it was ‘at the cost of prejudicing the security of individual radio deception projects’. Accordingly, each of the SAS captives was to be placed in ‘solitary confinement’, if room could be found, for ‘all the cells were occupied by prisoners’.

  There were three main Paris holding centres for captured SOE agents, Resistance members and, more recently, Allied special forces. One was Fresnes, where SOE radio op
erator Marcus Reginald Bloom, source of Kieffer’s first ever Funkspiel attempt, had been held – the largest and longest-established such facility, on the southern fringes of the city. Then there was Cherche-Midi, a former French military prison, but that was used mostly by the Wehrmacht; and then there was 3 Place des États Unis, where the SAS captives were destined to go.

  In the greatest of ironies, 3 Place des États Unis was the former residence of the American ambassador to France. The historic square of the same name housed numerous memorials to Franco-US relations, including a bronze model of the Statue of Liberty, a statue of George Washington and, most recently, the Memorial to the American Volunteers (dedicated in 1923), those US citizens who had stepped forward to fight on behalf of France in the First World War.

  Since the seizure of 3 Place des États Unis, its large airy rooms had been converted into bricked-up holding cells. But with space there limited, Kieffer had wanted to send the SAS captives to the much larger Fresnes, where conditions were notoriously –suitably – harsh. Berlin had intervened. A teleprint – a typed message, sent via the telephone network – had arrived from Kopkow, ordering Kieffer to place the prisoners in individual cells at the nearest detention facility: Place des États Unis. Berlin was taking a very active interest, and clearly wanted them kept close at hand.