Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  Zorilla was more than happy to help, for he was deeply opposed to fascism and also disliked the presence of Germans on his island home. Now, he excelled himself in preparing a dinner the two captains would never forget. His attention to detail was particularly impressive. His seating plan for the Casino Restaurant ensured that all the officers had their backs to the windows that overlooked the harbour. He also made sure that the alcohol flowed in unusually abundant quantities. And he supplied the restaurant with Tilley Paraffin lamps, so that the party need not be disrupted when the town’s generator was switched off at 11.30 p.m.

  On the evening scheduled for Operation Postmaster, Richard Lippett sauntered down to the Casino Terrace Restaurant in company with the town’s Spanish bank manager. Here, they had a few drinks. When Lippett settled his bill at around 9 p.m., he feigned innocence and asked the manageress about the dinner party upstairs. She said she knew only that it had been booked in advance and that an unusually large quantity of alcohol had been bought. Lippett smiled inwardly: Zorilla’s dinner was going according to plan.

  Lippett next wandered down to the harbour and was pleased to see that the Colonial Guard had no inkling of what was set to take place that night. ‘There were no preparations of any kind, in fact several of the sentries were sleeping.’20

  He looked up at the evening sky and noted with satisfaction that it was punctuated with flashes of lightning and there was the occasional drum-roll of thunder. With luck, the thunder would mask the sound of the explosions to come.

  * * *

  Gus March-Phillipps’s two tugs, Vulcan and Nuneaton, were inside the harbour within minutes of the main town lights snapping off. The Nuneaton came to a stop some ninety metres from the harbour-mouth to enable the Folbot canoes to be lowered. The Vulcan, meanwhile, nudged slowly towards the Duchessa. The tugmaster, Mr Coker, managed to align the port side of the vessel with the starboard side of the Duchessa. Although a few lights were still shining from the portholes, no one had noticed their approach.

  As soon as the two vessels were in contact, March-Phillipps and five of his team leaped aboard, their movements covered by the Bren guns on the Vulcan’s bridge. The Vulcan recoiled slightly as she nudged the Duchessa and had to be inched forward again to allow another six men to board. A third manoeuvre enabled the last of March-Phillipps’s team to clamber on to the ship. There was ‘no resistance worthy of the name’, or so March-Phillipps later wrote in his report.21 In fact, the only casualty occurred when one of the men tripped over a pig that was waddling around on deck.

  Securing the vessel proved easier than expected. Lassen ‘the Viking’ lashed a rope to one of the Duchessa’s bollards and then threw the other end to his comrade Robin Duff. ‘Pull, Robin! Pull like fuck!’22

  March-Phillipps and ‘Haggis’ Taylor had meanwhile reached the bridge, ‘knife in one hand and pistol in the other’.23 They found it deserted. The rest of the team headed below decks and took prisoner all the Italians who had not been invited to the Casino Restaurant. A few tried to resist, but March-Phillipps’s men were ready with their truncheons, or ‘persuaders’, as they called them. One ‘had to take his persuader and play a quick arpeggio on their heads’.24 It quickly persuaded the resisters to surrender.

  The only surprise of the night came when the boarding party kicked down one of the locked doors and found a woman stewardess, Gilda Turch, cowering inside the cabin. When confronted by a band of distinctly ungentlemanly commandos, with truncheons and blackened faces, she fainted.

  While March-Phillipps secured the bridge, Geoffrey Appleyard was laying explosives on the ship’s cables. This was the crucial moment of the entire operation, when it would either succeed or fail. None of the men could be sure that the plastic explosive would sever the heavy metal hawsers.

  When the charges detonated, they did so with massive explosive force. Leonard Guise described it as ‘a titanic roar and a flash that lit the whole island’.25 Even so, one of the chains failed to be cut by the charge and Appleyard had to lay a second charge on a very short fuse. There was another flash as the last cable was broken. Further explosions cut the chains that were securing the Likomba and Burundi to the harbour wall.

  The Duchessa had by now been roped to the helm of the Vulcan. As the tug’s propellers started churning the water, her skipper, Mr Coker, performed a deft nautical manoeuvre. He ‘gave the Duchessa two slews, one to starboard, one to port, like drawing a cork out of a bottle’.26 Appleyard watched transfixed as ‘the huge liner lurched and began to slide forward.’ He leaped on board just in time. The Duchessa, ‘without the slightest hesitation, and at the speed of at least three knots, went straight between the three buoys to the open sea’.27

  Moments later, the Nuneaton was also heading out to sea with both the Likomba and Burundi in tow. In less than a minute, March-Phillipps’s two vessels, together with their towed prizes, had been swallowed by the night.

  * * *

  All hell had broken out on shore. The series of explosions had echoed throughout Santa Isabel and caused absolute panic. Bugles sounded the alarm and people were running through the town screaming, ‘Alerto! Alerto!’ Most townsfolk thought that the harbour was under attack from raiding aircraft. ‘Immediately after the detonations were heard, the anti-aircraft guns went into action and blazed into the sky.’

  No one realized that the harbour, still blacked out and moonless, had come under attack from the sea. Local Spaniards dashed across to the Guardia Colonial to arm themselves with rifles. The guard’s captain was also seen running towards the building shouting, ‘Que pasa? [What’s happened?]’28

  In the Casino Terrace Restaurant, the explosions and anti-aircraft fire had caused confusion rather than panic. Most of the men were so drunk they could scarcely walk. Some had taken themselves off to the local brothel, only to find their dalliances disturbed by the mayhem outside. Now, all of them staggered down to the harbour only to find their ships were missing. Blurry-eyed and still dazed by the heady fumes of cognac, they rubbed their eyes and looked again. They were not deceived: the ships had gone.

  The ensuing uproar was witnessed by the British consul, Peter Lake, and his new deputy, Vice-Consul Godden. They overheard peals of laughter coming from both local Africans and Spaniards as they realized what had happened. Altogether less amused was Captain Specht of the Likomba, who, at around 1.30 a.m., marched over to the British Consulate and burst through the unlocked front door. ‘Where is my ship?’ he screamed.

  ‘He was very drunk and quarrelsome,’ wrote Consul Lake, who promptly ordered him out of the building. ‘In reply, he struck me in the face.’29

  Vice-Consul Godden was more attuned to the fine arts of diplomacy than late night pub brawls, but on this occasion he proved himself a master of the left hook. He ‘rushed to the affray and put some heavy North of Scotland stuff on Specht, and literally knocking the s—t out of him’. When Specht realized that Godden was about to shoot him, ‘he collapsed in a heap, split his pants and emptied his bowels on the floor.’ Godden called for his steward, who handed the soiled and ‘dilapidated Specht over to the police’.30

  By the following morning, the news of the stolen ships had spread far and wide. When Richard Lippett went to the badminton courts in order to play a game with his Spanish friend, Senõra Montilla, he found the place surrounded by soldiers. They told him what he had known for hours: that three ships had been seized from the harbour and spirited away. Senõra Montilla said to him: ‘Well done, the English are very smart.’ Lippett replied: ‘No, the English would never do such a thing like that, especially in a Spanish port.’ Senõra Montilla smiled. ‘Just wait and see,’ she said.

  Consul Peter Lake was delighted to discover that no one had been able to pin the blame on the British. ‘The following day was full of rumours,’ he recalled. ‘Free French, Vichy, USA, British and even anti-Falange Spanish pirates were all equally possible culprits.’ He added that the sheer bravado of the perpetrators was causing a sensation. �
��Admiration and amusement for the way in which the job was performed and timed was shown openly by many Spaniards.’31

  The German shipping agent Heinrich Luhr contended that it was such a masterful operation that only the Germans themselves could have pulled it off. If so, he felt sure that each man would be awarded the Iron Cross. But the discovery of Free French caps floating in the harbour – a little parting gift from March-Phillipps – suggested that it had perhaps been a Gaullist operation.

  March-Phillips had conducted a textbook cutting-out operation, one that had left absolutely no trace. The hours that followed the seizure of the ships were not without their difficulties. The Nuneaton had scarcely left the harbour, towing the Likomba and Burundi, when the stolen vessels began smashing into each other. The Nuneaton was forced to cut her engines while the Burundi was secured at the end of a longer rope. But this soon frayed, prompting a dazzling display of acrobatics from Anders Lassen. Using skills learned from Sykes and Fairbairn, he performed a tightrope walk along the line that joined the Nuneaton to the Burundi. ‘With a heaving line tied around his waist, he swarmed across the fraying tow rope.’32 Several times he was flung into the air and was lucky to regain his balance. But he eventually made it to the Burundi and attached a new rope to the ship.

  The Duchessa d’Aosta had been placed under the command of Geoffrey Appleyard and a skeleton crew, who were so delighted with their prize ship – and their Italian prisoners now locked below decks – that they hoisted a skull and crossbones from the mainmast. March-Phillipps exploded when he saw it fluttering in the dawn breeze. ‘We all got a rocket and we were told we weren’t to fly the Jolly Roger,’ recalled Leonard Guise. ‘He was a great stickler for etiquette, old Gus.’33

  The Duchessa d’Aosta had been theoretically untouchable while she lay at anchor at Santa Isabel, for she was sheltering in a neutral harbour under the protection of international law. But now that she was out on the high seas, albeit unwillingly, she was fair game for any Allied vessel that happened to chance upon her. And this is where the second part of March-Phillipps’s mission came into play. It had been previously agreed that the HMS Violet would intercept the Duchessa d’Aosta while she was at sea. She would then be seized and impounded as an enemy vessel. If all went to plan, the Italians would have been worsted for the second time in just a few hours.

  The HMS Violet was late for her rendezvous with March-Phillipps’s flotilla, not closing with them until the afternoon of 20 January. But her lateness made no difference to the outcome. Soon after being captured, at just after 6 p.m., all six ships sailed into Lagos harbour, where March-Phillipps and his men were given a hero’s welcome.

  ‘We had a tremendous reception,’ said one of the men.34 They were met by His Excellency Governor Sir Bernard Bourdillon, who stood at the end of his private landing stage cheering wildly, whisky and soda in hand.

  A more surprising welcome came from General Giffard. He had done everything he could to scupper the mission, but now that it was a success he was keen to claim the credit. ‘[He] came down and looked upon us as his chaps, having pulled off a successful operation.’35

  As March-Phillipps surveyed the cheering crowds, he felt deep pride in his men. They had worked ‘almost without sleep for a whole week, under difficult and dangerous conditions, with the utmost cheerfulness and disregard for themselves’.36

  News of the mission’s success was rapidly sent to Colin Gubbins, setting it out in bold terms. ‘Casualties, our party, absolutely nil. Casualties enemy, nil, except a few sore heads. Prisoners, German, nil; Italians, men, 27, women, 1, natives, 1.’

  Gubbins immediately sent a telegram back to Lagos. ‘Best congratulations to all concerned on complete success of a well-thought out, carefully planned and neatly executed operation.’

  As congratulatory telegrams arrived from the Foreign Office and even the Cabinet, General George Giffard saw fit to compose his own, somewhat embarrassed message, addressing it to one of the principal agents involved in the planning. ‘For reasons which I was unable to explain to you, I felt I had to oppose our project,’ he said. ‘It does not lessen my admiration for skilled [word missing], daring and success with which you have succeeded.’ He added his ‘hearty congratulations, and hope in the event of similar projects in future, circumstances may permit me to assist and not oppose’.37

  There remained one outstanding issue that had to be tackled head-on. It was imperative that the Spanish should never discover that a British raiding party had flagrantly breached their neutrality by cutting out three vessels. March-Phillipps’s first task on arriving at Lagos was to silence the Italian prisoners. To this end, all those aboard the Duchessa d’Aosta were marched to an internment camp situated deep in the jungle, more than 150 miles inland from Lagos. They were to languish there for the rest of the war.

  The next thing was to propagate a series of lies that would mask what had taken place. Hugh Dalton began this process with a message to Churchill. ‘There is reason to suppose that the Spanish authorities are aware that a large tug of unknown nationality entered the harbour and took the vessels out; but that is probably all they know.’ He said that March-Phillipps had covered his tracks with such skill that ‘we do not believe they will be able to prove that the tug was British, and the greatest precautions have been taken to see that no information leaks out at Lagos.’38

  Britain’s first official response came within hours of the operation having taken place: it was a masterpiece of dissimulation. A communiqué was issued at midnight on 19 January spelling out the British position. ‘The British Admiralty considers it necessary to state that no British or Allied ship was in the vicinity’ of Fernando Po. It added that German accusations of British involvement were of such a serious nature that the British commander-in-chief in West Africa had dispatched reconnaissance vessels from Lagos in order to search for the real culprits.

  In Spain itself, there was outrage at what had taken place. Although there was no proof that the British had conducted the operation, the pro-Nazi Foreign Minister, Serrano Suner, pointed the finger of blame squarely at Britain. Long before March-Phillipps’s vessels reached Lagos, he was calling the cutting-out operation an ‘intolerable attack on our sovereignty’. He added that ‘no Spaniard can fail to be roused by this act of piracy committed in defiance of every right and within waters under our jurisdiction.’39

  The Nazi press was no less indignant, with the Völkischer Beobachter openly accusing the British of undertaking an illegal and outlandish act of piracy.

  The British consul in Madrid, Sir Samuel Hoare, rose majestically above the fray, expressing deep disappointment that the Spanish government ‘should so readily have assumed that His Majesty’s Government were concerned with any events which may have taken place in Santa Isabel or on the Duchessa d’Aosta’. He reiterated that the British government was ‘in no way responsible for what happened prior to the capture of the enemy vessels on the high seas’.40

  This, like all the other British communiqués, was completely untrue. After two years of war, the British government and its servants were finally learning to behave like cads.

  10

  A Deadly Bang

  COLIN GUBBINS’S WEST African triumph led to a subtle change in the way he was treated by his enemies in the War Office. For more than a year, senior generals had spoken to him as if he were ‘a somewhat disreputable child’, one whose goals were ‘not deemed worthy of serious attention’. Some had even dismissed his team as ‘harmless, back-room lunatics’1 and argued that the entire Baker Street organization should be dismantled. Only now did they awake to the fact that Gubbins had been steadily establishing a network of agents and saboteurs that stretched from tropical Africa to the Arctic Circle.

  Operation Postmaster was one success. Another, less spectacular, was the so-called Shetland Bus. Gubbins had succeeded in establishing a regular link between the Shetland Islands and Norway, using fishing skiffs to smuggle agents and explosives into Nazi-occupie
d territory. By the spring of 1942, almost a hundred saboteurs and 150 tons of explosives had been infiltrated into the country. An array of bold sabotage operations was now being planned.

  But there was one Norwegian target that Gubbins’s men were unable to attack, even though it lay at anchor in a coastal fjord. The Tirpitz was the latest addition to Hitler’s fleet and she also happened to be the most powerful warship in the world. A veritable leviathan of 52,600 tons, she was bristling with torpedoes and anti-aircraft guns. If ever she were to be deployed in the North Atlantic, she would be able to wreak havoc on convoys already suffering massive losses from German U-boats.

  ‘No other target is comparable to it,’ wrote Churchill in a memo circulated to his chiefs of staff on 25 January. ‘The whole strategy of the war turns at this period on this ship.’ As far as he was concerned, ‘the destruction or even crippling of the ship’ was a matter ‘of the highest urgency and importance’.2 To this end, he called for active cooperation between Bomber Command, the Fleet Air Arm and the Royal Navy’s destroyers, but he was also prepared to consider any scheme that might prevent the Tirpitz from being deployed in the North Atlantic. And that included sabotage.

  The Tirpitz herself could not be sabotaged, not even by Gubbins’s Norwegian agents, for she was heavily defended, surrounded by support vessels and too large to be easily sunk with limpet mines. But her greatest strength – her size – was also her most significant weakness for it left her vulnerable and exposed. Every captain knows that a battleship is only as good as the docks in which she is serviced, and the only Atlantic dock large enough to service the Tirpitz was the Normandie Dock at St Nazaire. Admiralty officials had long believed that Hitler would not dare to deploy his greatest battleship in the Atlantic if the Normandie Dock were to become unavailable, for she would have to return to Germany for repairs, and that meant exposing her to unacceptable risk as she made her way up the English Channel. Sabotaging the Normandie Dock now jumped to the top of the agenda and Colin Gubbins was tasked with planning his most daring adventure to date: an amphibious assault on the biggest dry dock in the world.