Sliding along on their stomachs, Grabert and the corporal each carried insulated wire cutters in one hand and a machine pistol in the other. It wasn’t long before they discovered the wires leading to the explosive charges. To their anguish, the charges had been fixed to the structure of the bridge, which meant they would have to crawl along the footpath rather than the road. This, they feared, could put the entire operation at risk, because if any Very lights were fired over the bridge and illuminated them, they would be exposed to British fire
Each time a Very light was fired the two Germans froze, praying that the British machine-gunners would not spot them. Sporadically, the British gunners would lay down some rapid fire and these bullets passed only centimetres above the heads of the two Germans. They continued to move forward on their bellies, but only immediately after a Very light had expired, because then there were a few moments of absolute darkness. They discovered another pair of wires and then, some twenty metres further on, a third pair; they cut both. They were now certain they had made safe the bridge and they put the next part of their bold plan into operation.
Sheltering behind a girder near the British-held end of the bridge, they opened fire with the machine pistols, each firing three magazines at the enemy positions. Grabert also threw three grenades at the machine-gun post. At the sound of their comrades’ machine pistols the ten other Brandenburgers leapt to their feet and ran flat out across the bridge, firing as they went.
Sixty seconds later the twelve Germans had formed a group and all began firing at will, hurling hand grenades and causing confusion among the British soldiers. One enemy position after another was taken by storm as the dozen fearless soldiers threw grenades and followed these with rapid machine-gun fire. The tiny group of defenders were soon pushed back from the pump house and three Brandenburgers checked that the sluice gates had not been opened or primed with explosive charges.
Expecting a counter-attack, the twelve men took up defensive positions, but none came. One hour later Grabert and his corporal cautiously moved forward to check the British positions, only to find that the British soldiers had disappeared into the night. Not one Brandenburg man had been killed or seriously wounded and the mission had been a complete success. In a short, sharp mission executed with skill and courage, the twelve Brandenburgers had prevented the Allies from flooding the area along the Flanders coast – and the way was now wide open for the Germans to advance to the Dunkirk beaches some forty kilometres to the south.
Brandenburg units were also used extensively in Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941. Their tasks were made much easier by the fact that Finland had sold Germany scores of tanks, trucks, uniforms and greatcoats captured during its war with Russia in 1939–40. The German high command had listed a hundred separate targets along the Russian frontier which Brandenburg special soldiers could be tasked to take by any means. This would prepare the way for the mass of German armoured and infantry divisions, which could once again employ the same Blitzkrieg tactics as had proved so successful against the western allies. By capturing key airfields, bridges and road junctions, the Brandenburg detachments would allow the Panzer divisions to roll into Russia that much faster.
Being equipped with Russian military vehicles and uniforms made it easier for the Brandenburgers to operate behind the enemy lines. No questions were asked as they went about their clandestine missions inside Russian territory. Indeed the success of the German invasion of Russia was due in large measure to the myriad of missions the Brandenburgers had carried it in those crucial first few days of the offensive.
But there would be further tasks in quite different theatres of war for the Brandenburg units. One such area was North Africa, although no one in the German high command believed this was an ideal location for their particular skills. A German army under the great General Erwin Rommel had been sent to North Africa to support the broken Italian forces, which had been all but crushed by the British army under General Wavell. So fast had been Wavell’s advance against the Italians that most of Mussolini’s so-called African Empire was on the verge of defeat. Rommel saw that what was needed was men with knowledge of Africa from families who had lived and worked in the German possessions in East and South West Africa; Germans who could speak Arabic, Swahili and English and who understood the African way of life. Volunteers were invited to join the Brandenburgers’ new Afrika Kompanie and within weeks sixty former émigrés had been selected and trained. Rommel wanted the Afrika Kompanie to work behind British lines, reporting back by wireless on the location, size and equipment of the British forces they came across.
Small groups from the Afrika Kompanie carried out such operations in the desert, but because most of them were unable to speak English without a distinct German accent, much of the information they gathered was not particularly crucial or even accurate.
However, in 1942 Rommel believed he was on the verge of crushing the British Eighth Army, and he planned, after achieving this, to drive on through Egypt to the Nile and grab the vital link, the Suez Canal. For this campaign he would need skilful Special Forces men. Rommel called the Brandenburg commanders and outlined the tasks he would want the Afrika Kompanie to carry out. Their first task would be to seize the bridges over the Nile and the Suez Canal to prevent their destruction by the British, and then to hold them until Rommel’s Panzer divisions could break through and join up with the Brandenburgers. It was a tough mission but one which never materialised, for General Montgomery would rally his troops, defeat Rommel and his Panzers in the critical battle of El Alamein and then, some three months later, smash the German defences and drive them out of North Africa.
But now, as he faced Montgomery’s Eighth Army, Rommel gave the Afrika Kompanie a new, vitally important but extraordinary task – to locate and trace the route the British were using to supply reinforcements to Montgomery. He had been informed by German Intelligence that the British were landing tanks, guns, small arms, ammunition, spares and other equipment in Nigeria and transporting them across some fifteen hundred miles of rough terrain, as well as the Sahara Desert, to Cairo. Rommel charged the Afrika Kompanie with the task of determining the exact route of this supply line so that it could be harried by German forces and cut.
First, the Afrika Kompanie needed to acquire British vehicles, uniforms and weapons so that any British troops they came across would believe they were members of the British Long Range Desert Group. Most of the route would pass through countries friendly to Britain, so it was necessary for the Germans to portray themselves as British. The Afrika Kompanie also acquired a British Spitfire, which they would use as a long-distance reconnaissance plane as Brandenburgers on the ground made their way from Egypt to Nigeria. The Spitfire, with Royal Air Force markings, would fly several hundred kilometres ahead of the group, circle and return to the Brandenburgers. It was hoped that the aircraft might come across British reinforcements making their way to Cairo and return to the group each day with vital information on such troop movements.
The Afrika Kompanie left Libya with twelve fifteen-hundredweight trucks, twelve half-tracks fitted with two-pounder guns, four jeeps carrying anti-aircraft machine-guns, a staff car, a wireless vehicle, a petrol tanker, a workshop vehicle and a rations vehicle. The column travelled due south to Al Qatrun, some two hundred kilometres from the border with Niger, the country between Libya and Nigeria, and set up their headquarters, which included a communications base and a rough airstrip for the Spitfire. They also left at Al Qatrun two half-tracks equipped with machine guns in case of attack from Arab brigands. They waited four days for the all-important Spitfire to arrive but to no avail. It never turned up, which meant the Afrika Kompanie now had a much more hazardous and difficult task. Apparently, the German aero engineers were unable to get the captured aircraft into the air.
One small group of Afrika Kompanie soldiers drove west from Al Qatrun into Algeria to carry out a recce of the French colony in case supplies for Montgomery’s army were being brought thro
ugh southern Algeria. Another group drove south-east to the Tibesti mountains in northern Chad. A third group, the largest, would search for supply lines in southern Algeria’s Tassili mountain range, some six hundred kilometres in length and reaching more than fifteen hundred metres in places.
If any of the three groups failed to discover the Allied supply route, their orders were to continue the search, criss-crossing the arid, desolate wastes of the Sahara desert on foot and in the searing heat of summer. All that they managed to discover was that French forces controlled the two mountain ranges. They had found no supply routes and no evidence of one having existed. Rommel was not impressed. The mission was remarkable, however, because it showed the extraordinary resilience, tenacity and adaptability to exceptional circumstances that tough, well-trained Special Forces could display in the most inhospitable terrain.
The final mission of the Brandenburgers in World War Two was a gallant, heroic battle fought with extraordinary courage despite the utter futility of the orders they had been given. The manner in which those men carried out the orders was a magnificent example of bravery, a quality which has continued to characterise special soldiers to the present day.
At the end of March 1945 the 600 Brandenburg Paratroop Battalion was put into the German bridgehead on the eastern bank of the River Oder at Zehdenick, sixty kilometres north of Berlin. For three exhausting weeks the Brandenburgers managed to hold their positions against massed Russian attacks, despite the fact that battalions to the left and right of them had been overrun and destroyed. But, running low of ammunition, the 600 Battalion took a terrible battering and when they finally withdrew there were only thirty-six of the original eight hundred men still alive.
The survivors were reinforced by a few hundred trainees who had been rushed from Berlin in a desperate last effort to push back the Russian advance. Some wounded Brandenburgers rejoined their unit from their hospital beds, so strong was their commitment to their unit. Then the 600 Battalion was ordered to pull back to Neuruppin, some fifty kilometres to the west, and to defend the town to the last man. At dawn on April 3 1945 a single company of eighty-four Brandenburgers was facing two Russian tank divisions and two infantry divisions. It was an extraordinarily gallant defence by Special Forces soldiers under the most extreme battle conditions. The battle raged for eight hours as the Russians sent in wave after wave of tanks, backed up by hundreds of infantry.
After four hours the Germans had used up all their rocket-propelled weapons. In the final hours of this extraordinary battle the thirty surviving Brandenburgers had only hand grenades and satchel charges to hold back more than a hundred T34 and JS tanks. They still had some ammunition for their machine guns and personal weapons to keep the Russian infantry battalions at bay, but even that they had to fire sparingly.
When all their anti-tank rockets had been used, the Brandenburgers adopted a new tactic. They would wait in ditches until the first Russian tanks had passed by and some would then scramble out and on to the rear decks of the vehicles, dropping grenades into the open hatch to blast the crew. Others would run alongside the tanks, planting magnetic, hollow-charge grenades with a nine-second fuse on the sides. Having done this, the soldier would dive back into the ditch to escape the blast before moving on to the next tank.
Sometimes the Brandenburgers would wedge plate-shaped Teller mines between the tank’s tracks and running wheels. These exploded with tremendous force, blowing the tank track apart and rendering the vehicle useless. Some soldiers stopped the advancing tanks instantly by simply flinging their satchel charges under the tracks. Within two hours more than sixty Russian tanks were at a standstill, wrecked by the audacious Brandenburgers.
Five separate assaults were launched by the Russian commanders and five times they were repulsed by the tiny band of men who were taking enormous risks, putting their lives on the line during every enemy assault. Because only some thirty Brandenburgers were alive after the fourth assault, they took up defensive positions only and used only machine guns, sub-machine guns and rifles. The Russian infantry had stopped trying to advance behind the protection of their tanks because they were being mowed down by the Brandenburgers. They let the tanks take the brunt of the German gunfire and waited for the inevitable victory.
Although they knew they were staring death in the face, the Brandenburgers held their ground and their nerve. Somehow they managed to stop the fifth tank assault, and the Russian crews leapt from their tanks and scrambled back to safety as bullets zipped around them. But such a one-sided battle could not last much longer. The sixth tank attack, at dusk, finally overran the German position and, ironically, it was at the very moment of defeat that the Brandenburgers’ commander was given the order by radio to withdraw.
He had only about twenty men left. There were no wounded to take back. As the tiny band struggled away from the area in the darkness, they left behind the hulks of dozens of blazing or burnt-out Russian tanks. It was the final battle of World War Two for the German Special Forces. They had been utterly defeated, but in their defeat their remarkable courage could only be saluted.
CHAPTER 2
DESERT WAR
ONE OF THE MOST influential Special Forces units of modern times, largely because it spawned Britain’s world-famous Special Air Service, or SAS, was the Long Range Desert Group, set up in North Africa during World War Two. Unlike the SAS, however, the LRDG was never intended to carry out offensive operations but to simply gather information about the enemy behind their lines. As the war intensified the LRDG did indeed carry out many offensive missions, harassing German forces in North Africa, but this was always a secondary role.
The needs of those who served in the LRDG provided a valuable guide to what the SAS would require to ensure that the new unit became a first-rate fighting force. In the case of the LRDG, those needs were basic but crucial, for most operations were carried out over weeks or months in desert conditions and in enemy territory, and self-sufficiency in everything from food and water to vehicles, fuel, weapons and ammunition was an absolute necessity. A further challenge was navigation, as there were no accurate maps of the deserts of North Africa and indeed scarcely any maps at all; the only navigational guides were the night stars and a compass.
One of the first offensive operations undertaken by the LRDG took place during the Eighth Army’s major drive against the Germans in December 1941. The unit’s officers were under orders to do whatever they could behind enemy lines to disrupt the Germans’ efforts and distract them from their aims.
In his book Providence Their Guide, a history of the LRDG, Major General David Lloyd Owen writes:
One LRDG unit under Lt-Colonel Tony Hay came across a very inviting kind of target – a troops’ road house – with some thirty enemy vehicles in the car park. That evening, as the sun went down, Tony led his patrol along a track which would join the main road about half a mile from the building. He drove fairly slowly towards it, and in doing so passed several vehicles going north along the road. They were mainly Italian but there was one anti-aircraft gun with a crew of four steel-helmeted Germans sitting to attention!
As they reached the building Tony Hay closed his trucks together and turned into the car park. At this moment they opened fire with their guns and hurled grenades into the trucks wasting no time in escaping from the hullabaloo that they had stirred up. It was getting dark, and he took his patrol off into the desert for the night.
Tony Hay and his small band of men in their eight vehicles continued to harass the enemy, setting fire to petrol tankers, knocking out aircraft on the ground, attacking convoys and terrorising the enemy by swift, night-time attacks on their camps and supply lines. The material damage caused to the Germans and Italians was not great, but these LRDG raids created an alarming effect on the enemy, who, more often than not, believed they were the advanced guard of a much greater British force heading towards them. Such operations gave the senior Axis officers many a headache. They were reluctant to order front-line
soldiers to roam the desert searching for the British troublemakers, nor did Luftwaffe officers want their valuable aircraft to be seconded to searching the desert for pinpricks of nuisance.
Then, in 1942, the problem for the Axis desert armies intensified when the SAS and the LRDG joined forces to create a brilliant partnership. The plan was that the LRDG, the more experienced partner, would take several SAS units of four men to carry out raids, sabotage and sometimes parachute operations against the Axis forces. The main aim of both Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief Middle East Forces, and his successor Montgomery was to knock out as many German aircraft as possible because these were having a devastating effect on Allied equipment and troops.
One of the first joint battle plans was to attack two German airfields at Sirte and Tamet, some three hundred and fifty miles from Jalo in Libya. Major Paddy Mayne, a former Irish rugby international, was in command of one patrol of four vehicles and eight men which made its way under cover of darkness to within three miles of the target at Tamet.
Major General Lloyd Owen again:
Mayne found himself with his men, all carrying some 70lbs of explosives on their backs, in full view of an airfield with aircraft parked all around the edges… Paddy Mayne was to take full advantage of the setting.
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