by Damien Lewis
The Maquis led the survivors to a new camp, where they could recover and reorganise. The usually gregarious and cheery Druce was uncharacteristically sombre. ‘Feeling very depressed and very helpless,’ he wrote. However, if he was going to avenge those who had lost their lives, the only way to do so was to get more SAS troopers, weaponry and supplies dropped in. Via a radio provided by the Maquis, Druce managed to communicate the situation to Colonel Franks, and he arranged for a vital resupply drop. They were desperate for food, weapons and ammo to replace all that had been lost.
On the night of 1 September, Druce, Fiddick and the other survivors found themselves in a mountain field fringed by forest, awaiting an air-drop that might or might not materialise. Navigating to such a remote spot through such rugged terrain would test the skills of any airman. Then Fiddick, lying prone in the damp grass, caught the distant thrumming of an aircraft. He recognised the engine note at once.
‘Captain, there’s a couple of Stirlings approaching,’ he whispered.
Sure enough, a four-engine Short Stirling bomber hove into view. Druce, impressed that the Canadian could tell what type of aircraft it was by the note of its engines alone, flashed a signal to the pilot to confirm their position. To his delight the heavy warplane began to double back, presumably to drop their much-needed supplies. As the Stirling passed over, Fiddick heard the unmistakable crack of ’chutes opening. Seconds later, he became aware of a figure descending close by. A tall, athletic-looking paratrooper landed squarely in front of him. As he unhitched his harness, the new arrival eyed Fiddick – an unknown trooper dressed in SAS uniform – in surprise.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded.
This, it turned out, was none other than Lieutenant Colonel Brian Franks, the commanding officer of the 2nd SAS regiment. Franks had chosen to parachute in with twenty-three of his men, to bolster Druce’s force. As succinctly as he could, Fiddick explained how he had come to join Druce and his team. The SAS colonel listened with interest, before formally inviting Fiddick into the ranks of the SAS.
‘Don’t worry, you’ll pick it up as you go along,’ he counselled affably.
Now it was official: Canadian airman Lew Fiddick was the newest member of the illustrious SAS. Colonel Franks’ reputation as a fearless and intensely loyal Special Forces commander went before him: he had served as Signals Officer with Layforce, in the Mediterranean, and led specialised reconnaissance missions in the Middle East, before commanding a force of Army Commandos in the Italian Campaign, at Taranto and Termoli.
‘Brian Franks was super,’ Druce remarked. ‘He was imaginative, quick to understand the situation and ready to do anything . . . I must admit when he arrived I felt that we’d let him down pretty badly . . . but he appreciated the situation right from the start . . . always cool, always ready to listen to anyone’s story.’
The immediate priority was to get away from the drop zone. ‘There had been a rumour of Germans moving . . . in force, so I was very anxious to get clear of the field as quickly as possible,’ Druce noted in the Operation Loyton war diary. ‘I wanted to get Col Franks and new arrivals away immediately, but knew we did not have a camp.’
Harassed though they were, with Franks in charge and building to a force of eighty SAS paratroopers, morale rapidly improved. As more supplies, weaponry and men were dropped in, Franks established a new basecamp on the high ground. From there they began a fierce campaign to harass and ambush the enemy. German troops were massing in the area in ever greater numbers, charged by Hitler to hold the Vosges at all costs, and prevent the Allies from marching into Germany. Though his forces were massively outnumbered, Franks conceived of daring hit-and-run missions to sabotage and demoralise enemy forces, while seeking intelligence that the Allies could use to secure a breakthrough.
He despatched clandestine information-gathering teams, seeking to make the best use of the SAS’s versatility, bravery and cunning. The most effective way to discover what was going on in any area was to garner information from the locals. At one juncture, Franks sought intel about enemy activity from the nearby hamlet of Pierre-Percée. Though there had been no reports of Germans in the area for weeks, the streets were rumoured to be awash with the enemy, so they would need to approach the village using stealth and guile.
The mission rightly fell to Captain Druce. During his time with SOE, Druce had been captured while on an undercover mission, but had managed to outwit his captors and make a daring escape, jumping through the window of his Gestapo interrogator’s office and dashing off into the streets. Thanks to his talent for languages and his innate fearlessness, he’d passed himself off as a French peasant thereafter, flitting through the French countryside largely unscathed. As luck would have it, Druce’s escape had taken him through the heart of the Vosges, the exact region where Operation Loyton was now in full swing.
‘I had been there before “en passant,”’ Druce wrote, of his time in the Vosges, adding, ‘I knew fairly well what to expect.’
But when he strode into Pierre-Percée dressed in civilian clothes, hoping to mingle with the locals, Druce was met with a chilling sight. The place was swarming with German troops, any number of whom regarded his arrival with open suspicion. Druce knew it was crucial to remain calm and collected. If he were stopped and questioned, he ‘only had a gun for papers’, and there were too many enemy to shoot his way out of this one. One wrong move, and he would not only endanger his own life, but he might blow the cover of the other SAS hidden in nearby woodland.
Without so much as a falter in his step he walked right up to one of the nearest German soldiers and asked to bum a light for a cigarette. Receiving only a scowl by way of response, for a moment Druce was sure he had been rumbled, before the man produced a book of matches from the pocket of his field-grey uniform and turned away unconcerned. Druce’s bold move seemed to have worked, but danger lurked at every turn. What were these enemy troops doing here and in such numbers, Druce wondered? Surely, this increased military presence could not be a coincidence? Sure enough, it turned out that they were searching for the location of the SAS’s base.
As soon as he could Druce hurried back to deliver Franks a stark warning, prompting a quick decision to move. This led to a series of dramatic narrow escapes, as the SAS split into smaller groups and changed position repeatedly, attempting to avoid discovery, criss-crossing the high ground with hunter troops dogging their every step.
At one stage, teams of enemy soldiers led by German Shepherd search-dogs tracked the SAS. It was only the enemy’s reluctance to venture off well-trodden paths and into wilder parts, doubtless fearing ambush, that gave the SAS the edge. By sticking to remote, inhospitable and seemingly uninhabitable terrain, Franks and his men managed to evade their pursuers, but doing so had taken a heavy toll, both physically and in terms of morale. To make matters worse, the weather turned, and it began to rain incessantly – not uncommon conditions in the Vosges in autumn. At altitude the rain became icy blasts of sleet and snow. Lacking waterproofs and cold weather equipment, spirits plummeted. Franks and his men were soaked to the skin and running short of ammo, food and dry clothes.
Druce was gripped by a deep sense of unease and the feeling that he had let Colonel Franks down. ‘We were sent in to do a job, which was to bring in a large number of people to operate, and we had failed dismally . . . Whether it was our fault or not wasn’t the point.’ Every day was a struggle to survivewith , the men thrown onto the back foot. They were lacking supplies, permanently soaked to the skin, with nowhere to dry out or warm themselves. Having no safe refuge, they were forced ‘up one valley one day and up another valley the next’, Druce lamented.
A note from Druce in the Operation Loyton war diary gives a sense of the desperate straits facing them and their French brothers-in-arms. ‘We were forced to move camp owing to the possibility of German attack. Men were coming in from all corners wishing to join the Maquis [the resistanc
e], mostly because the Germans were combing the villages. The volunteers were all without arms and . . . the danger of unarmed, untrained Frenchmen became apparent to everyone.’ Though the French villagers were keen to fight, they had little with which to wage war, which meant they in turn became more of a burden.
At daybreak on 31 August Druce again found himself on the move, leading a party of some dozen SAS laden with heavy packs down into a valley, aiming to creep across one of the main highways in an effort to give the enemy the slip. Even as they pushed through the trees, they ‘heard shellfire directed onto an old camp’. The enemy were attacking those locations that the SAS parties had just vacated. ‘Most of the packs were too heavy and unnecessary material had to be abandoned . . . We crossed the valley that night and slept in the woods. It was becoming hard to sleep at night without sleeping bags.’
But by the end of the second week in September, the hue and cry seemed to have abated somewhat. Through sheer grit and determination, Franks, Druce, Fiddick and most of the Operation Loyton force had managed to evade capture. On 14 September, after nearly two weeks of being almost constantly on the run, Franks was able to report that they had ‘found an area in which we were left in comparative peace’. They established a new camp in a high-walled gully, in an area known as Les Bois Sauvages – the wild woods. There, ‘conditions appeared to be quieter’, and they regarded this inhospitable, steep-sided chasm as a secure place in which to recover, await vital resupply and from which to launch counter-strikes.
On the evening of 18 September, the men of Operation Loyton were out in the dead of night, awaiting an air-drop. They were joined by villagers from the nearby settlement of Moussey, a veritable stronghold of the resistance. ‘All the villagers of Moussey were first class,’ Franks recorded, with great admiration. ‘In Moussey we were welcomed, we were obvious[ly] looked upon as the spear-head of the Liberation Forces.’
That night the Moussey villagers were about to get a taste of the ingenuity and daring that set the SAS apart. They were expecting to intercept the usual crates of food and ammo, but Colonel Franks had requested something distinctly different – something to give his men the edge they hungered for here in the Vosges; something to enable the SAS’s mantra – speed, aggression, surprise – to be made a reality.
The assembled crowd marvelled as a clutch of jeeps, suspended from parachutes, floated down towards them from a Halifax bomber. The US-made Willys Jeep had become the SAS’s preferred means of transport behind enemy lines, ever since David Stirling had first used them in the deserts of North Africa. In the SAS war diary from that time, Stirling asserted how the ‘astonishing agility’ of the Willys Jeep allowed them to reach almost any target over almost any country, enabling his force to be very ‘much more flexible’ in how, when and where they operated.
Bristling with mounted machine guns, Stirling considered the jeep to be perfect for wreaking destruction and ‘getting away again at high speeds’. Now, deep in the French mountains, the SAS were deploying an ingenious method of delivering those versatile vehicles. Each jeep, with its steering wheel removed, was bolted onto a giant steel tray, mounted on springs. Rigging lines were attached at each corner, which were connected to a central parachute above. Four more ’chutes were set at each of the corners.
Like that, the first of the jeeps released over Moussey touched down, bang in the centre of the designated drop zone. But others floated off over nearby woodland. ‘One jeep dropped in the trees and was very difficult to extricate,’ Franks reported. Luckily for him, 2SAS now boasted a seasoned Canadian woodsman in their ranks. Thanks to his upbringing on the family farm, nestled in the temperate rainforests of British Columbia, Lew Fiddick possessed some considerable skill at woodcraft.
Having participated in a number of SAS operations, Fiddick found ‘the dropping of the jeeps’ the most fascinating yet. He was ordered to go off and find the second jeep, discovering it far up a hillside, ‘with all the parachutes caught up in trees’. Together with a party of around a dozen Moussey villagers, Fiddick observed the vehicle itself, which had ‘landed upside down, in a tree, well off the field’. They began work on cutting it down, all ‘in the pitch dark of course’. Under Fiddick’s expert instruction the Frenchmen systematically lopped the branches, enabling the jeep to drop in a controlled manner, until it ended up safely on the ground.
Exhausted, scratched but flushed with success, Fiddick recalled how they had ‘eventually got this jeep out of the tree and onto its wheels’, at which point he triumphantly ‘got in it and drove it away’. Altogether six jeeps were parachuted into the Moussey drop zone, and they would transform operations, allowing the SAS to do what they did best, striking hard and fast and disappearing swiftly before the enemy knew what had hit them.
Fiddick joined Druce’s jeep team. ‘We went around looking for German settlements – establishments they had set up to harass the French, so we harassed them with the Jeeps . . .’ Fiddick remarked, although of course ‘you were pretty exposed yourself in a jeep.’ It was a little different from flying bombing missions at high altitude. ‘You seemed so remote from things in an airplane, whereas here you were directly involved.’ Despite the immediacy and ferocity of the action, Fiddick knew it was a case of ‘either stay with Henry [Druce]’s group . . . or just stay back at the camp.’ Fiddick, with his wish to be useful, ‘found it more interesting to be involved’.
The main aim was to target senior enemy commanders – to ‘cut the head off the Nazi snake’, as the SAS termed it. From their jeeps they aimed to ambush German staff cars, cutting down the high-ranking officers who rode within. That would spread fear and uncertainty among the lower ranks, for not even the top German commanders seemed safe from the British raiders, who seemed everywhere but nowhere, all at the same time. The first such ‘jeeping’ raid would typify the tactics that were involved, and the bloody carnage that resulted.
At dusk on 22 September, Franks and his force removed the cut branches with which they had camouflaged their vehicles. Six jeeps set off from their hidden base, loaded with twenty-one fighters, pushing south of Moussey, engine fumes hanging thick and heady on the cold, dank air. Franks divided his force into three groups, each with two vehicles. The first to strike would do so on the road that wound its way through the high-sided Celles Valley. There, they set up hidden ambush positions at a crossroads, where any passing traffic would be forced to slow as it approached the junction.
Backing into the thick undergrowth, the SAS hid the two jeeps in such a way that their vehicle-mounted Vickers machine guns could still be brought to bear. Eight muzzles menaced the road . . . and so the wait began. Finally, there was the grunt of a distant engine. As all vehicles had been requisitioned by the Germans – the locals were reduced to travelling by horse and cart – only the enemy could be driving on the roads hereabouts. The ambushers heard the whine of the engine, as the driver changed down through the gears, slowing his vehicle. Fingers tensed upon triggers.
A sleek bonnet emerged around the distant bend, a black cross over white – the sign of the Wehrmacht – emblazoned on its side. As luck would have it, this was a staff car. Eight pairs of gunsights tracked the vehicle, but shortly the grunt of a second engine could be heard. Unbelievably, a second staff car followed the first. The SAS men let the first draw level with their hidden position, waiting to bring the second within their field of fire. But just as they were about to open up, as if by magic a third staff car rounded the bend. The three were travelling in convoy, the last being followed by a heavier vehicle – a three-tonne German Army truck – stuffed full of escorting soldiers.
The ambushers reckoned all three staff cars could be hit, still allowing themselves time to get away. Holding their fire until the very last moment, they opened up at the closest range possible. The twin-muzzles of the Vickers let rip, dozens of .303-inch rounds tearing into gleaming bodywork and shattering glass. Keeping their fingers hard on the triggers, and
swinging the weapons on their pivot mounts, the SAS men raked the staff cars from bonnet to boot with murderous fire. Within moments all three vehicles had ground to a halt, rent with long lines of ragged, jagged holes. The lead staff car, slumped low on its flattened tyres, burst into flames, as tracer rounds sliced into its fuel tank.
Only one figure managed to drag himself from one of those stricken vehicles, and he was cut down before he had made it a few yards. By the time the ambushers had ceased fire, hundreds of rounds had been unleashed onto the targets – the truck being the last to take the full brunt of the SAS jeeps’ guns. Above the savage crackle and pop of the flames, the throb of further engines was audible now. Further vehicles were approaching. Four more trucks hove into view, and others could be heard behind. The staff cars clearly formed the vanguard of a long enemy convoy.
In typical SAS fashion, the shoot-’em-up had been executed admirably: it was high time to execute the scoot stage of the attack. All surprise was lost, and as the SAS men fired up their engines and raced for a track winding its way into the high ground, bullets tore after them. The staff cars had been leading a twenty-five-vehicle convoy, but fortunately the heavy trucks were no match for SAS jeeps over the kind of terrain they were heading into. Shaking off any pursuers, the ambushers executed a mad dash through the mountains, making it back to their lie-up deep in the woods. They left behind them a pall of oily smoke billowing high above the Celles Valley, where four vehicles were burning fiercely.
Captain Druce proved particularly adept behind the wheel of a vehicle bristling with pairs of mounted Vickers machine guns. Colonel Franks reported of his achievements: ‘Over 400 rounds expended at different groups of Germans at close range; minimum killed 15/20.’ Speaking later of Druce’s leadership and his fearlessness during such hit and run strikes, Fiddick stated simply: ‘His job was to create havoc, which he did.’