Churchill's Band of Brothers

by Damien Lewis

  From their base at Les Bois Sauvages (the Wild Woods), deep in the densely forested Vosges Mountains, they struck time and time again, in fast, jeep-mounted operations. On 8 October 1944 – eight weeks into the mission – they ambushed their final German staff car, making eleven in total that had been blasted to pieces. In short, no enemy officer had been able to travel the precipitous, winding roads of the Vosges in safety, or devoid of fear. Amongst many of Loyton’s daring exploits, SAS man of steel Lieutenant Ralph ‘Karl’ Marx and his small team would cross the border to blow up a train, in what was the first mission of its kind to strike on German soil.

  The reaction of the enemy was extreme. The very presence of the winged-dagger raiders was enough to send the German high command apoplectic. Their response was to launch Operation Waldfest – ‘party in the forest’ – in which two complete German divisions were sent to hunt down eighty British paratroopers. As Colonel Mayne had done on Op Gain, the commander of 2 SAS, Lieutenant Colonel Brian Morton Forster Franks, had parachuted in, to lead Op Loyton on the ground. But on 9 October ’44, with little ammo, explosives, food or cold weather gear remaining, he had bowed to the inevitable.

  ‘I decided to end the operation,’ Franks recorded in the Op Loyton war diary, ‘and instructed parties to make their way to American lines as best they could.’

  Weeks later, back in Britain, Colonel Franks was counting the cost of the mission. The French populace had paid a terrible price for hiding, and supporting, the SAS raiders operating in their midst. Thousands of villagers had been rounded up and carted off to the nearby concentration camp, Natzweiler-Struthof, which sat high in the hills just to the French side of the border, as German commanders sought to ‘exterminate this alarming terrorist band’. So few would return at war’s end that the area would become known as the ‘Valley of Widows’ and the ‘Vale of Tears’.

  There were also thirty-one SAS listed as missing in action –more than a third of the Op Loyton force. Colonel Franks was determined to find out their fates and if possible to bring them home. He assembled a team to investigate, and if necessary hunt down the guilty parties, if indeed the missing SAS men had met with a dark and bloody end. There was only one possible candidate to lead such an effort, as far as Franks was concerned –Major Eric ‘Bill’ Barkworth, the unflappable SAS intelligence supremo, who had been fond of marching up and down on his Cairo hospital bed to matron’s great annoyance.

  Barkworth had forged a reputation as being brilliant, tireless, eccentric and scrupulously fair, but with a streak of the ruthless to boot. He’d also demonstrated a healthy lack of respect for unnecessary rules, hierarchies and bureaucracies, which were just the kind of qualities that Franks felt he needed in the man to head up his grandly titled ‘SAS War Crimes Investigation Team’ (WCIT). In truth it consisted of Barkworth, plus the SAS major’s trusty cohort, Sergeant Fred ‘Dusty’ Rhodes, together with half a dozen other long-standing SAS veterans – truth-seekers on a mission.

  Rhodes had left school at age fourteen with no qualifications, to start work with his father as a gardener in Locke Park, a 47-acre green space in Barnsley. He was just twenty years old when he signed up in February 1940. Slim, wiry, sandy-haired and blue-eyed, Rhodes spoke with a strong Yorkshire accent in tones that were surprisingly firm and commanding, considering his youth. In 1942 he’d volunteered for ‘special duties’, discovering in the SAS ‘a marvellous organisation . . . the work and ideas and the creative ideas . . . were tremendous’. It was a unit of ‘loners [who] didn’t believe in relying on other people. They relied on their own men.’ It suited the tough, phlegmatic Yorkshireman absolutely, and ‘promotion in the ranks came quickly’.

  The contrast with Barkworth’s upbringing could hardly have been more complete. The SAS major hailed from an independently wealthy family – his father, who’d been a student of law, had listed his profession simply as ‘Gentleman’. Having studied at Oxford and then Freiburg University in Germany, Barkworth was fluent in seven languages. He’d spent much of the pre-war years travelling Europe, at one time meeting Hermann Goering, the future Reichsmarschall – the most senior ranking member of Germany’s armed forces and Hitler’s chosen successor. Goering had inquired of Barkworth what the English thought of him.

  In a rare act of diplomacy, Barkworth had decided not to tell Goering the unvarnished truth. ‘They say you are a very good pilot,’ he’d demurred. Goering’s response was to slap his own thigh, uproariously.

  Barkworth didn’t just aim to learn a language: he immersed himself in it. He used to maintain that the best way to imbibe a new tongue was to go to the marketplace in the morning, in order to listen to bartering and everyday conversations, then to the law courts in the afternoon, to hear the formal, well-spoken form, and then to the nightclubs in the evening, to learn the latest in-vogue expressions – in the process imbibing the national culture too. He’d done all of that and more in Germany, where he liked to challenge himself by conversing with someone in a language other than English – French, say –while listening in on a neighbouring table where they were speaking German.

  Upon volunteering for special duties, Barkworth had been asked to phone a certain number, and when the caller answered, to speak only in German. This he had proceeded to do. On the other end of the line was a German-speaking Swiss woman who worked for the British. She reported back to Barkworth’s recruiters that she ‘was sure he must be German, his language skills were so convincing’. He combined all of that with an unconventional and ingenious mindset, which meant that nothing was out of bounds. That combination – in-depth language skills and cultural familiarity, plus the ability to think outside the box –would make Barkworth a Nazi-hunter almost without compare.

  During the war Barkworth and Rhodes – these two men from such very different backgrounds – had grown inseparable. The Barkworth clan’s roots lay in Yorkshire, so perhaps that was what drew them together. The family home had been in Tranby, Yorkshire, and the last Barkworth to live there had been Uncle Algernon, who typified the family’s do-or-die spirit. A first-class passenger on the Titanic, he’d proceeded to jump overboard wearing a thick fur coat over his lifejacket, even as the ship went down. He’d found an overturned lifeboat, clambered aboard and stood on the keel all through the night, until he was rescued by the RMS Carpathia come daybreak.

  Or perhaps Barkworth and Rhodes had bonded most over taking the surrender of seventy SS officers, using nothing more than a good dose of bluff and chutzpah, plus a little long-lived regimental tradition. In May 1945, the SAS intelligence teams had ‘moved to Germany, to have one grand slam at the Nazis’, Rhodes recorded, in his handwritten notes of the war years. In the process, they’d stumbled across a squadron of SS holed up in an ancient castle. In his fluent German, Barkworth had talked his way inside, seeking the garrison’s capitulation. The commanding officer had retorted that Barkworth was now his prisoner, and that he would surrender to nobody but a member of the ‘Brigadier Guards,’ a colloquial term for the Brigade of Guards, the parent unit of a dozen Guards battalions, generally held in high esteem by the German armed forces.

  ‘That’s alright,’ Barkworth had responded, ‘I’ve got one right here for you.’ He’d promptly thrust forward Rhodes, for by luck the Yorkshireman’s parent unit was the Coldstream Guards.

  ‘Right, then, Dusty, come on, here goes,’ Barkworth had enthused, ‘show them what the Brigadier Guards can do!’

  The ‘whole bloody lot surrendered’, Rhodes recalled, in astonishment. ‘This officer surrendered, and he surrendered the whole garrison to one former member of the Brigadier Guards.’

  Barkworth would be awarded an MBE for this action, the citation for which read: ‘On 1 May 1945, Major Barkworth . . . was ordered to interrogate an SS officer . . . Major Barkworth went . . . with the German officer to the SS HQ in an attempt to negotiate a surrender. Final negotiations broke down and Major Barkworth found himself disarmed and a prisoner. Nevertheless, he escaped and returned
to our own lines, bringing with him 70 SS troops whom he had persuaded to surrender.’ By the time the MBE was awarded in early 1946, Barkworth and his team would be deep inside post-war Germany, hunting war criminals.

  In May 1945 Sergeant Rhodes had found himself at home, enjoying some rare leave – ‘a pint or two’ – as the war in Europe was over. But not for long. ‘Major Barkworth was ordered to see Colonel Franks, who then ordered him to reform his team and return to France and Germany and not to return until the 31 missing SAS men had been found, plus the people who had in any way been responsible for the deaths and disappearances.’ A copy of Hitler’s Commando Order now lay in Allied hands, and all feared the worst, ‘knowing the instructions from the top people in the German Army and Adolph Hitler, [to] the Gestapo – that SAS were to be murdered, were to be shot.’

  Franks had every reason to spur Barkworth and his team on. A mass grave had just been discovered in the Erlich Forest, in Gaggenau, southwest Germany, and it was thought to hold the bodies of some of the Op Loyton missing. With Germany split into British, American, French and Russian zones of occupation, Gaggenau lay under the French purview, and British troops were not often to be found there. It would take all of Barkworth’s and Rhodes’s particular skills to negotiate – or force – a passage through. There was no time to delay: no one knew what state the bodies were in, for the purpose of making identifications.

  On 16 May the small team set out, driving one war-worn jeep and one battered British Army truck. There were strict regulations about travelling through post-war Europe. ‘Authority to move . . . had to be approved by the military,’ Rhodes noted. ‘Six men, one officer, and one sergeant made light of the journey.’ As would become their trademark, the SAS WCIT circumvented the regulations wherever possible. From the start, Barkworth appreciated that if you were hunting Nazi war criminals, it was best not to forewarn them of your intentions. ‘Extreme care should be taken to ensure that no news that the SAS are searching for [X suspect] should reach the wanted man’s ears,’ Barkworth cautioned. Far better to pitch up out of the blue, having flitted through the backroads and avoided any checkpoints, to take him by surprise.

  On reaching Gaggenau, Barkworth and his team made themselves known to the town’s authorities. Of their arrival Rhodes noted: ‘Gaggenau Rathaus [town hall]. Bürgermeister [mayor] good chap. Row between Captain B. and jumped-up French Lt.’ As all who knew him appreciated, Barkworth tended not to suffer fools. ‘No digs for the night. Told the men . . . to find their own and if any man returned 0700 hrs without a smile on his face, some 252s would fly about.’ A ‘252’ was slang for an army charge sheet, otherwise known as being put ‘on jankers’.

  Expecting the men to beg, borrow or steal their lodgings was fine for the first night, but clearly something more permanent needed to be found. The answer lay in the town’s Villa Degler, the expropriation of which had about it a delicious irony. The imposing house was home to the Degler family, who owned the local brewery. A prominent Nazi, Herr Degler had been arrested by the French. In a neat role reversal, Barkworth took the villa over, co-opting Herr Degler’s wife and daughters as his and his team’s domestic staff. As a bonus, the Villa Degler possessed a deep and roomy cellar, which was perfect for what Barkworth intended – to fill it with prisoners.

  The next entry in Rhodes’s notes reads: ‘The bodies cemetery Gaggenau.’ During the war, the main employer in Gaggenau had been the Daimler-Benz factory, which produced trucks for the Wehrmacht. In the Bad Rotenfels district of Gaggenau, a camp had been built to house 1,500 prisoners – slave labour for the Daimler-Benz vehicle plant. The Rotenfels labour camp was actually a satellite of Natzweiler, a concentration camp some 80 miles to the west, in the Vosges Mountains. Prisoners were shipped east to Bad Rotenfels to work, then back to Natzweiler when they were too exhausted and sick to be of any use, for ‘final disposal’.

  Germany in early June 1945 was a land of utter chaos and misery. The nation’s cities had been pounded into rubble. Across the British zone alone there were eighty concentration camps, work camps and sub-camps. At the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp some 15,000 inmates had died following liberation, from starvation and typhoid. An entire population was on the move, as families returned to ruined cities and towns, carrying what few possessions they could cram onto rickety carts. Everywhere famished civilians queued for what little food the Allied powers were able to muster, as mass starvation threatened. In the fields, hundreds of thousands of German POWs laboured under the watchful eyes of guards, working to bring in the harvest.

  As Gaggenau’s Daimler-Benz factory had proved a magnet for Allied air raids, some 70 per cent of the town had been flattened. Amongst this morass of human suffering, Barkworth had somehow to start the hunt. Fortunately, it was a very concrete lead that had drawn him to Gaggenau. Adjacent to the vehicle factory lay the Erlich Forest – the site of the recently discovered mass grave. On 25 November 1944 the commandant of the Rotenfels camp had received an order to liquidate all Allied prisoners held there. Ten British and American POWs, plus seventeen French citizens – three of whom were priests and one of whom was a woman – were taken to the Erlich Forest and shot, their bodies tumbling into a bomb crater and being heaped over with earth.

  Upon taking control of Gaggenau, the French authorities had excavated the grave, leading to the first reports reaching Lieutenant Colonel Franks that there might be SAS men amongst the dead. But the evidence had been fragmentary. Shortly after their arrival in Gaggenau, Barkworth, Rhodes and his team began the horrendous task of unearthing the mass grave for a second time, to carry out rigorous, forensic identifications that would stand up in a court of law. Fortunately they had on hand a team of American military pathologists, photographers and legal experts, commanded by Colonel David Chavez Jr. As Gaggenau lay just a few miles west of the border with the American zone of occupation, it was easy enough for Chavez and his team to get there.

  Fittingly, the former managers of the Daimler-Benz factory were made to dig up the bodies, as the steely figure of Rhodes stood over them. ‘We felt that they had been responsible for the people being shot and killed,’ Rhodes remarked. ‘So many of them said that they didn’t know anything about it. Well, I don’t believe that.’ In the nearby Waldfriedhof – a cemetery located in the Erlich Forest – the chief US pathologist, Lieutenant Colonel Edwards, set up a temporary morgue in the Chapel of Rest, which in normal times was where families would come to view the body of the deceased, before burial.

  Rhodes asked the helpful and friendly Gaggenau Bürgermeister to ‘produce some men to . . . carry the bodies to the morgue, where Lieutenant Colonel Edwards was doing the autopsies – a man smoking a meerschaum [clay] pipe and wearing a rubber apron. Men’s skulls were being sawn in half, searching for the cause of death (a bullet). Identification by teeth, broken bones . . . This was a task that was beyond what had been expected but must be done. Several bottles of Schnapps were consumed each day, all put down to the Bürgermeister’s expenses.’

  It was grim work. ‘The bodies were three-quarters decomposed,’ Rhodes noted. ‘What a terrible sight and smell. The Germans knew we were after them. We had word through the system that they were spreading out. They knew that stones would be turned to find them. The Major was now planning ahead – looking for clues and information.’ The wanted men were busy changing names, procuring fake identity cards – the black market for false ID documents was booming – and altering their appearances, in an effort to avoid getting caught. But as the twenty-seven dead were exhumed and painstakingly identified, the hunt proper was about to begin.

  First of the SAS to be named was twenty-year-old SAS Lieutenant David Dill, a man who’d parachuted into the Vosges on the night of 13 August 1944, on the initial Operation Loyton drop. The hugely capable and keen-spirited Lieutenant Dill had been tasked to command the rear party, as the main body of raiders had split into smaller groups, to slip back to Allied lines. Dill’s mission had been to link up with some of t
he missing – Op Loyton’s second-in-command, Major Dennis ‘Denny’ Reynolds, first and foremost – and to ‘kill a German before he left’, to make it appear as if the SAS were still operating in the area.

  Instead, Lieutenant Dill, together with his six men and one young Resistance fighter, had been captured when the Germans had surrounded their base. After a prolonged firefight, the Waffen SS officer who took Dill captive shook his hand, and declared: ‘You are my prisoner. You are a soldier and so am I.’ But the initial, supposedly gallant and honourable treatment had somehow ended with the SAS lieutenant being dumped in the Gaggenau mass grave. It didn’t exactly bode well for the rest of Dill’s men, who were also numbered amongst the Op Loyton missing.

  Lieutenant Dill had been identified by his military-issue wristwatch, which had a unique serial number. That on Dill’s timepiece matched his records. Alongside Dill were buried several US airmen, including Curtis E. Hodges and Michael Pipcock, plus the very man that the SAS lieutenant had been ordered to wait behind for, Major Dennis Reynolds. Reynolds had been injured in a firefight with the enemy, and forced to take refuge in a cave in the Vosges, in the company of Captain Andrew Whately-Smith. The latter’s corpse was also present in the Gaggenau grave. Both men were easy to identify, as they still had their military-issue dog tags.

  From his dental records, Captain Victor Gough was also identified. Gough had served with the Jedburghs, a unit set up to liaise with the French Resistance and most often consisting of three-man teams, including a Frenchman, an American and a Brit. The specific mission of ‘the Jeds’ had been to act as what would now be termed ‘military advisers’, calling in supplies of weaponry and advising on targets and tactics. As such, Captain Gough had been only loosely tied in with Op Loyton.