by Damien Lewis
Meanwhile, in France, two of the objects of that investigation were even now embroiled in the fight of their lives. On paper, the original battle plan for the Bresles Resistance had been a sound one: they had built a fortress-headquarters of giant haybales, each weighing about 220 pounds, to the rear of the German positions. To any casual observer, they’d appeared to be just another group of farm labourers laying in a store of hay for the winter. But inside the haystack, they’d built up their armoury and prepared to wage war.
The haybale fortress was to form a fire platform, from which they would strike at the enemy from behind. Initially, it performed just as intended. As the American forces assaulted Bresles from the north, the Bresles Resistance – plus the SAS men embedded in their number – opened fire from their haystack fortress. The German troops eventually cottoned on, at which stage they launched a ground assault. But with its thick walls the haystack soaked up bullets, leaving those perched atop it a fine vantage point from where to rain down fire upon the approaching enemy.
The haystack defenders held firm ‘for three hours against a party of 40 German paratroopers’, Vaculik noted. All seemed well until the enemy troops sited a machine gun in a nearby tree, with the elevation to rain down fire. With the defenders taking casualties, something had to be done. After several near misses, the haystack warriors managed to slot a Bazooka round directly into the branches of that tree. ‘There was a violent explosion . . . [and] at least one body [was] flung into the air,’ reported the SAS men. ‘The machine gun nest had been rubbed out.’ But more trouble was coming.
A German mortar team began to lob in rounds. Soon they had the haystack’s range. A direct hit set the bales alight. Fighting for their very lives now, the haystack warriors faced either being burned alive if they stayed where they were, or exposing themselves to the enemy guns if they broke cover. It was clear that the German troops hadn’t exactly appreciated being hit by surprise from the rear, and it was now that the fearsome form of a Tiger tank rumbled onto the scene.
‘It rolled towards us with its long sinister muzzle pointed in our direction,’ Vaculik observed. The very sight spread panic amongst the Resistance fighters, who began to drop their weapons as if ready to flee.
‘The very first man to run I’ll shoot,’ de Rouck, the former French soldier, roared, his gun levelled.
The effect was salutary, especially since the figureheads of the Bresles Resistance – SAS brethren included – were determined to stand and fight. As thick smoke billowed up from the burning hay, it spread a smog across the battle scene. All of a sudden, the haystack defenders realised it could serve to hide their escape. Using it as a makeshift smokescreen, the entire force dashed to a nearby cluster of farm buildings, making the cover of the farmhouse to find it deserted. For now at least they should be out of the Tiger’s line of fire.
The enemy kept slamming the haystack fortress with fire, unaware that their prey had moved. But it was now that the dynamics of the battle began to shift markedly. A second tank rolled onto the scene. This was an American Sherman, and just as soon as the haystack warriors spotted it, so too did the crew of the Tiger. They watched, aghast, as the Tiger swung its 88mm gun around and fired. The Sherman had been taken by surprise, and it was hit fair and square, a jagged hole appearing in its side. Moments later it erupted into a blaze of smoke and flame.
Enraged, four of the haystack warriors decided the Tiger had to die. Vaculik led the charge, as they scuttled from patch of cover to cover, weaving in and out of the shifting miasma of smoke, creeping closer all the time. But by the time they were within range and had readied the Bazooka, the Tiger was on the move. Its exhausts belched smoke, as it swung around and began to thunder southwards, away from Bresles. The town was being abandoned to the Allies. Vaculik fired a round, but it ‘whistled through the air and exploded harmlessly in a clump of trees’. Already, the Tiger was out of range.
Not long thereafter church bells began to peal out from Bresles, ringing in the changes, and the men of the Resistance made their way into the centre of the town. By three o’clock the first American troops rolled onto the scene, and the roads were clogged with US military convoys – Sherman tanks, armoured carriers, truckloads of infantry and vehicles piled high with all types of war materiel. Cigarettes, chocolate and gum were handed out by the American soldiers, as people shook hands and marvelled that the hour of liberation had finally come, after four dark years.
In the town square Vaculik came across a bizarre-seeming confrontation. Ginger Jones had accosted a US infantry sergeant. There was tension in the air, and Jones kept repeatedly trying to thrust something into the American soldier’s hands.
‘You smoke it, you bloody Yank!’ Jones declared, threateningly. ‘I saved it up for you.’
The American soldier seemed completely at a loss. ‘But what do I want to smoke that dirty little stub for?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got plenty of cigarettes of my own.’
Vaculik stepped in now, explaining to the US infantryman the promise that Jones had made all those weeks back, in the cellar of the Place des États Unis prison – that at the very least he would offer the American liberators one of his precious dog-ends. He was simply trying to make good on that oath now.
‘In that case, here goes!’ declared the sergeant. He grabbed Jones’s dog-end, sparked up and with ‘terrible grimaces’ smoked it to the very end, with Jones slapping him on the back delightedly all the while.
Here and there groups of German troops stood around, hands clasped to their heads. The American commander approached the Resistance leaders. He needed to speak to the town mayor, he announced. His forces must roll on real quick, and he would have to hand over security and administration to the local authorities. Vaculik explained that the town’s mayor had been deported by the enemy, so there wasn’t one right now. The US commander wanted to know who Vaculik was, a guy dressed like a French Resistance fighter but who spoke such good English. Vaculik explained.
‘If you’re a parachutist, how come you’re not in uniform?’ the commander demanded.
‘We were taken prisoner by the Germans and escaped,’ Vaculik said, gesturing at Jones. ‘This is Corporal Jones, of the same unit.’
The US commander declared that Vaculik would make the perfect stand-in mayor, while Jones and the Bresles Resistance leaders should organise a security force for the town. And that was exactly what happened. Over the next few days Vaculik heard a flood of denunciations against supposed collaborators, as figures presenting themselves as stalwarts of the Resistance kept coming forward. Meanwhile, the real Bresles Resistance – a redheaded fighter foremost amongst them – patrolled the streets, and sent parties to comb the surrounding forests, from where groups of German captives were brought in.
But for Jones and Vaculik, something else was preying on their consciences. As the tide of war turned, in the back of both men’s minds there was the hunger for a reckoning; for justice. Though they had no idea exactly how it might be achieved, somehow justice ought to be done for Captain Garstin, Paddy Barker, Varey, Young and Walker – men in the prime of their lives, gunned down in cold blood – and very likely for Lieutenant Wiehe too, a man left to die in a Paris hospital.
A week after the liberation of Bresles, Jones and Vaculik took action. Having bid farewell to their friends, on 6 September, in a car driven by the local garage owner, they set off for the site of their would-be executions, which lay some 15 miles south of town. They headed first for Noailles itself, where they made contact with the local Resistance leader, who rejoiced in the magnificent name of Louis Gaston Emile Liger de Chauvigny.
De Chauvigny was a forty-six-year-old former French military officer, and he’d heard rumours about the mystery executions of 9 August at the time. They’d taken place in an area of woodland known as the Bois de Mouchy, around a mile outside Noailles town. Apparently, the bodies had been buried in the grounds of the nearby Château de Parisis-Fontaine, which had served as the headquarters of a local Luftwa
ffe unit. De Chauvigny offered to take Jones and Vaculik to both locations.
After a short drive, they pulled over in the same place where the Gestapo’s Opel staff car had halted, almost a month earlier. From there, the small party retraced the steps of the death march. Struck dumb with emotion, Jones and Vaculik stepped into the woodland, seeking the very spot where five of their number had met such a brutal end. Finally, they arrived. ‘On the trees there were some fine marks of the bullets,’ de Chauvigny noted, and as they searched amongst the fallen leaves Vaculik and Jones retrieved spent casings.
This was the place alright. From there, the two SAS men traced the route along which they had fled. Jones showed Vaculik the tree behind which he had taken cover, after playing dead. Vaculik showed Jones the tall hedge, marvelling at how the devil he had ‘managed to get over such a formidable obstacle’. With a handful of ‘empty cartridge cases’ – those unleashed by the killers – stuffed deep in their pockets, Vaculik and Jones turned away from the grim scene. There was an even darker task ahead of them, but it had to be done.
Back in the car, they drove the few miles towards the Château de Parisis-Fontaine, situated on the outskirts of the village of Berthecourt. En route, they were joined by a Monsieur André Lemain, the director of the local gasworks, and a mover and shaker in the Berthecourt Resistance. The thirteenth-century chateau lay within a grand sweep of deciduous woodland, the ornate stone entranceway rising before them, wrought-iron gates barring their path. No one was present, save the caretaker and his wife, and de Chauvigny signalled the car to a halt at their cottage.
An aged figure, weighed down by the war and his advanced years, Monsieur Paul Clément received the unexpected visitors graciously. After being told why they had come, Madame Berthe Clément, the caretaker’s wife, proved particularly forthcoming. She’d been at the chateau when the truckload of bodies had arrived, she explained, and she knew of the burial site. Even then, there had been dark rumours that the dead were British parachutists. In a mark of respect, she’d started taking flowers to the grave, which was set a way into the woodland.
Madame Clément led the small party along the route that she had grown accustomed to using. It looped around the chateau, past a clutch of farm buildings and some 400 yards into the woods. Lying to the right of the track, about 20 yards away, was the gravesite. She indicated the patch of bare earth that showed where the men had been buried.
Jones and Vaculik – plus de Chauvigny and Lemain – came rigidly to attention as they stood there, silent, choked up, contemplating all that had led up to the moment when the bodies of five brave SAS soldiers had been dumped here in an unmarked grave. ‘Garstin, Paddy Barker, Varey, Walker and Young,’ Jones enunciated, his voice choked with emotion, listing the names of their dead comrades. Tears that they could no longer hold back rolled down the cheeks of both men.
Of course, there was still just a chance that this was not the final resting place of the SABU-70 murder victims – just a chance. Vaculik and Jones needed to be certain. They asked the caretaker to show them around the chateau. It was locked and shuttered, but even so they managed to pry their way into the ground floor. Yet it was in the hallowed grounds of the chapel, which was attached to the chateau, that they made the crucial discovery.
Jones was searching one corner of the building when he called out to Vaculik: ‘Hey, this looks like the boots he was wearing.’
Before him sat a pair of footwear. It was instantly recognisable to Jones, being the pair of rubber-soled Commando boots that he had spent so many mornings lacing up, when helping the wounded Captain Garstin to dress at the Place des États Unis dungeon. Jones would know them anywhere. Outside, in the chapel grounds, they found the shoes that the Gestapo had issued to Trooper Walker – the ones with the odd low-cut profile, and which had holes in them.
There was little doubt any more. The bodies of their comrades had been brought here, where some at least had been stripped of their footwear, before being buried in the chateau’s grounds. Jones and Vaculik had the answers they had come for. But were they any closer to a reckoning, to securing justice for their fallen comrades, which was what they hungered for with a vengeance? Very possibly not.
As they took the road north towards the beaches at Arromanches, they ruminated on all that they knew, and just what they didn’t know. They knew the identity of those murdered and their final place of resting. Of course, of Lieutenant Wiehe’s fate they were none the wiser, and likewise of the whereabouts of those who’d escaped capture at the DZ. But most frustratingly of all, they had little idea of the identities of the Gestapo killers.
At all stages – capture, incarceration, questioning, torture and during the final death drive – their captors had been careful not to use their names in front of the captives. Rack their brains as they might, neither man could remember any of the identities of the Avenue Foch killers. They could remember their hideous faces – how could they forget? – but what was a face without a name to put to it? How was a hunt to be launched, how were suspects to be sought, without even one name to go on? How was anyone to be brought to justice without a name for a wanted poster or an arrest warrant? Whichever way they looked at it, there were no obvious leads. They seemed to have reached a dead end.
Even so, upon arriving at the Normandy coast, they managed to get the first formal report of their discoveries telegraphed to SAS headquarters, ahead of their own arrival. Dated 7 September 1944, it read: ‘SECRET . . . two from 1 SAS Cpl JONES and NU PONTES reported . . . to 60 Transit Camp . . . they state SEVEN captured and put before firing squad near NOAILLES’ (‘Nu Pontes’ should of course have read Dupontel, Vaculik’s Canadian cover name). The first official record of the Noailles atrocity had been filed. But to what end?
The Avenue Foch killers seemed to have slipped away into the shadows, like ghosts.
Chapter 20
Barely two months after their return to Britain, Vaculik and Jones found themselves in a London courtroom. For Jones, who was not unaccustomed to having the odd brush with the law, it made a refreshing change to find himself in the witness box, giving evidence in such a high-profile case and amidst such rarefied surroundings. Once they had made it back from France to SAS headquarters and been debriefed in detail, the wheels had spun into motion remarkably quickly.
On 7 November 1944, Major Thomas Langton, MC, a long-time stalwart of the SAS, had written to the Under-Secretary of State at the War Office concerning ‘the deaths of the 1st SAS party under Capt. Garstin’. His letter included detailed statements from Vaculik and Jones on the Noailles Wood killings, plus one from Captain Mike Sadler, who, along with Major Poat, had completed his own investigation on the ground in France.
Sadler and Poat had reached the area on 20 September, barely two weeks after Vaculik and Jones. For both men this had been an intensely personal quest, for Captain Garstin had been a close friend. That had proven particularly useful when they had come to open the grave at Château de Parisis-Fontaine, in order to identify the bodies. De Chauvigny, the Resistance leader, had acted as their guide, and there had been fresh flowers on the graveside when they had reached it, courtesy of the caretaker’s wife.
Fittingly, De Chauvigny had fetched some German prisoners to do the spade-work. Even though the POWs were made to do the lion’s share of the exhumations, ‘digging up Pat Garstin and his men wasn’t particularly pleasant,’ Sadler remarked, with typical understatement. In truth, it proved a harrowing experience, especially as the suffering endured by the SAS captives was plain to see. Sadler observed that ‘the men’s wrists had been close together at the time of their death and have stiffened in that position’, showing how they had been handcuffed when they were gunned down.
The bodies having been in the ground for seven weeks, ‘the stink was enough to knock you over,’ noted Major Poat. Captain Garstin’s corpse was ‘readily identifiable’ owing to his distinctive head of thick, curly dark hair, but the other four were not. Though the bodies were badly d
ecomposed, Sadler could tell that Garstin’s ‘right arm was quite broken . . . almost detached. I think his leg was broken as well. They were in a hell of a mess.’ Garstin’s suffering, during those weeks spent incarcerated in the Paris hospital and the Gestapo dungeons, did not bear thinking about.
Other grim discoveries were made in that woodland in September ’44. ‘While Capt. Garstin’s grave was being opened, we found two other diggings of the same size in the wood,’ Sadler noted. ‘They were older, but were almost certainly graves, probably of the FFI.’ The French Forces of the Interior – FFI – was the formal name given to the Resistance during the latter stages of the war. It seemed as if Captain Garstin and party were not the only victims to have been buried in the chateau’s grounds.
The bodies of the five SAS men were taken from the chateau to the nearby town of Beauvais, and buried in the Cemetery Marianne, in graves numbers 325–9. But even then, Sadler and Poat’s investigations were far from done. They were particularly keen to learn how the SABU-70 party had dropped right into the hands of the enemy. ‘It was the first flop we had had,’ remarked Poat, ‘and the thing that interested us was how the Germans had got there and what happened when our men landed.’ If they could work out how it had all gone wrong, they could try to prevent any more such disasters, for many long and punishing months of operations lay ahead.
In the La Ferté-Alais area they made contact with Jean Bourget, the local Resistance leader. Bourget had received several arms drops organised by SOE, with whom he had been in regular – if not always reliable – wireless contact. He confirmed that a BBC message had alerted them to the 5 July drop, but that the DZ had been staked out by the enemy long before they had reached it. The Gestapo and Waffen SS cordon thrown around the area had been impenetrable, the trap being well baited and set.