Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII

by Damien Lewis

  Before the vehicle had stopped Lassen was running for the nearest machinegun nest, crying out: ‘Partisans! Schnell! Schnell! Schnell!’

  The machine-gunner swung his weapon around towards Lassen, but the yelled German words made him hesitate for just an instant. In that moment Lassen fired with the Luger from the hip, three bullets spitting out of the weapon in rapid succession and smashing into the German gunner. It was a classic ‘double-tap’ – two to the body and one to the head, as he’d been taught – the gunner slumping forward over his weapon.

  An instant later Lassen vaulted into the machinegun nest, heaving the dead man to one side. In one smooth move he swung the Maschinengewehr 42 around, and opened fire with the belt-fed 7.92 mm weapon.

  As he did so, all hell broke out across Kastelli airfield.

  Chapter Two

  25 August 1941, The Atlantic Ocean, 400 miles off the Coast of North Africa

  In the blackness of the open water a battered ship rolled on the oily swell – her tall twin masts, four knife-cut sails, vertical prow and finely-raked stern marking her out as an old but graceful-looking fishing trawler. At first sight she appeared utterly deserted, but upon closer inspection a number of shadowy figures could be seen moving across the night-dark deck.

  Feverish preparations were underway.

  Bare-chested and dressed in a motley collection of civilian clothing, each member of the ship’s crew bristled with half-hidden weaponry – pistols, grenades, coshes and knives lashed to belts and stuffed into trouser pockets – so much so that they looked more like a gang of bloodthirsty pirates than the honest fishermen one might expect to find on such a vessel.

  In reality, the mystery boat was no standard Brixham trawler. She was a small, clandestine British warship – a ‘Q-Boat’, the ‘Q’ standing for secrecy and bluff more often than not perpetrated in breach of all the known and accepted rules of war.

  She had been selected and modified for the present mission with extreme care and attention to detail. Brixham trawlers are strong and robust for their size, having a three-skin hull, with four-inch planking on the outside covered in cement up to the waterline. She was judged as being seaworthy enough to make a 3,000-mile journey across the capricious Atlantic Ocean without breaking up – that’s if her crew could avoid the enemy and successfully navigate her to their target.

  The eight-berth ship possessed sails as well as an engine, making her perfect for undertaking long voyages on limited supplies of fuel, or silent night operations under the very noses of the enemy. With her wooden hull she could ply the world’s oceans largely immune to the magnetic mines that menaced steel-skinned vessels. But most importantly, to any marauding enemy warplanes she would appear as a harmless fishing boat, one hardly worth a bombing or a strafing run.

  Yet her innocent-looking deck could be collapsed within minutes at the tug of a lever, the plywood wheelhouse folding away to reveal a 40mm QF (quick-firing) Vickers cannon, capable of unleashing 115 rounds-per-minute of high explosive, armour-piercing shells. Twin Lewis machineguns had been mounted on a specially lowered section of the deck, so they could be fired unseen through the scuppers – the openings that allow water to drain off a ship’s deck.

  As if that weren’t enough, four experimental Blacker Bombard spigot mortars – a short-range anti-tank weapon developed chiefly for Home Guard use – could be fired from her deck. Armed with a 20-pound airburst shell, the spigot mortars were intended for short-range attack against enemy submarines. Lastly, high above the deck a fake crow’s nest had been erected, constituting a fire-platform from which the crew could rain down bursts from their Thompson machineguns – the so-called ‘Tommy Gun’ favoured by 1930s gangsters and 1940s elite operators alike.

  In theory, the ship could hold her own against an enemy U-boat, should one decide to surface and use its deck gun to try to sink her. But fighting wasn’t her first line of defence: that lay entirely in trickery and deception.

  In short, she was the perfect ship for the kind of small-scale, guerrilla operation such as that on which she was presently embarked – taking a handful of highly trained elite operators far behind enemy lines, to sabotage, plunder, murder and steal. Some 2,000 miles away lay a target of breathtaking audacity, one that her six-man crew were tasked to neutralize, while at all costs avoiding any responsibility being laid at Britain’s – and Winston Churchill’s – door.

  To that end each man had signed an agreement prior to departure, recognizing that they were to be disowned by the British government in the event of their death or capture. In effect, they were on their own. Being taken alive didn’t bear thinking about, for they would very likely be treated as spies – tortured and executed. Indeed, one of the first standing orders in the ship’s log read: ‘Avoid a fight if humanly possible, but resist capture to the last.’

  Incongruous words, considering they were scribbled in a standard hardback Log Book For Yachts, printed by Thomas Reed publishers and carried by many a weekend sailor.

  Tonight the atmosphere aboard ship seemed unusually tense – more so than at any stage of the perilous journey so far. The tiny vessel was nearing her first landfall. Ahead of her in the darkness lay the neutral Portuguese territory of Madeira, an island lying some four hundred miles off the coast of north-west Africa. There the ship intended to put into the Port of Funchal – undoubtedly the greatest test yet of the crew’s cunning and nerve, not to mention the Q Ship’s bluff and disguise.

  At the wheel of the ironically named Maid Honour stood a whippet-slim, aesthetic-looking figure, his moustache unable to hide the scar disfiguring his lip where a horse had once bitten him. In another life Gus March-Phillipps might have been the ace thriller-writer and professional horseman that he aspired to be. But not now. Now the world was at war, and Captain March-Phillipps – a battle-scarred veteran of Dunkirk – was leading a band of brigands and desperadoes on a mission the likes of which the world had never seen: the very first deniable operation of the Second World War.

  Ahead of March-Phillipps and beneath the main mast stood the distinctive figure of Anders Lassen, a fearsome ‘Danish Viking’ who alone would account for more Germans than just about any other soldier of his kind in the war. But right now Lassen – the twenty-year-old scion of an aristocratic Danish family – had yet to see any action. The coming mission would constitute his first taste of battle.

  To further the bluff and subterfuge they would employ tonight, Lassen proceeded to run up the Swedish flag. It was left fluttering from the masthead – a yellow cross against a bright blue background silhouetted against the barely lightening sky. Some years prior to March-Phillipps requisitioning the Maid Honour, her owner had converted her into an ocean-going pleasure cruiser, and the six men now crewing her were posing as a group of Swedes embarked upon a sailing holiday. Sweden being a neutral country the cover story was seen as having merit, and the flag might at least add a little extra authenticity.

  Lassen however refused to put all his trust in their claims to Swedish neutrality. Before setting sail from Poole Harbour, in the south of England, Lassen had shinned up the sixty-odd feet to the apex of the topmast, and there nailed on a piece of dried dolphin’s tail. He swore that he’d been given it as a sailor’s lucky charm, and he for one believed they were in dire need of any good-fortune it might bring.

  ‘We are doomed,’ Lassen had pronounced. ‘I will never see any of you again. We are sailing without an escort. We haven’t a hope.’

  Lassen’s gloomy fatalism didn’t reflect any lack of keenness on his part to go to war. Quite the reverse. In spite of his youth he was actually one of the most experienced seamen aboard the Maid Honour. After school, he’d more-or-less run away to join the merchant navy, and it was via that route that he’d found his way to Britain. But from his experiences on the high seas he was convinced that any ship sailing without an escort was dead in the water.

  Yet so far, Lassen’s worries had proved distinctly ill-founded. Without any form of escort
, operating on strict radio silence and with no qualified navigator – prior to departure March-Phillipps had undergone a largely self-taught crash course in sea navigation – the Maid Honour had succeeded in making her way 1,267 miles to this remote island outpost, where they needed to take on fresh water and food. The hectic preparations now taking place above and below decks were to make the ship appear as much as possible like an innocent Swedish pleasure cruiser, once dawn and landfall were at hand.

  Across from the shadowy figure of Lassen, Lieutenant Geoffrey Appleyard and Lieutenant Graham Hayes busied themselves stowing away the Maid Honour’s weaponry and ammunition. It would need to be very well-hidden. Upon entering Madeira’s Funchal Harbour the Maid Honour was bound to be subjected to a rigorous inspection by the Portuguese naval authorities. In a war that was fast spreading to the four corners of the world, the Portuguese – like their Spanish neighbours – were desperate to preserve their neutrality.

  Known to all simply as ‘Apple’, Appleyard was a strikingly handsome twenty-three-year-old Yorkshireman. Like March-Phillipps he was a nature-lover and keen amateur ornithologist. He was also supremely fit and combat hardened, being another veteran of the retreat from France. In fact, Appleyard had first met March-Phillipps purely by chance, as both men had sheltered in a foxhole on the bloody beaches of Dunkirk. March-Phillipps and Appleyard had hated the taste of impotence and failure that Dunkirk had left in their mouths. They had vowed to strike back hard against the German enemy, and it was their chance meeting that had given birth to the present, daring undertaking.

  March-Phillipps was an inspired and driven commander, one forever inclined to think the unthinkable – qualities that made him well suited to the task at hand. His deputy, Appleyard, was the calmer, more methodical planner and thinker, though no less brave and spirited for it.

  Graham Hayes, the man now helping Appleyard stow away the Maid Honour’s guns, was third-in-command of the diminutive vessel. Lieutenant Hayes had grown up alongside Appleyard in the Yorkshire village of Linton-on-Wharfe, and they’d formed a close childhood friendship. A wood-sculptor before the war, Hayes was a quiet, charming, fearless dynamo of a man, and he’d been recruited for the present mission at Appleyard’s personal behest.

  To aid in their collective subterfuge – that this was nothing but a Swedish trip – March-Phillipps had recruited Private Frank ‘Buzz’ Perkins, a boyish-looking seventeen-year-old, as the fifth member of the crew. He’d been stuck with the childhood nickname Buzz, all because his baby sister, unable to pronounce ‘brother’, had taken to calling him ‘buzzer’. Blond, fresh-faced and gangly, Buzz was the son of a good friend of the Maid Honour’s captain – one who’d somehow been persuaded to grant permission for his child to set sail on such a perilous venture.

  As they neared Portuguese waters, Buzz was ordered to act like a ship’s boy for all he was worth.

  His other job aboard ship was to keep her single engine in good working order – something that had become a thankless and excruciating task. The underpowered four-cylinder petrol motor was deeply unreliable, but somehow Buzz had managed to nurse it across a thousand-plus miles of storm-swept sea.

  In the months leading up to their departure each of these men had been taught to wage war in what was then a very un-British way – fast and dirty, with no holds barred. At the revolutionary Experimental Station 6, the codename for the seemingly genteel Ashton Manor, just south of Stevenage, in Hertfordshire, they’d been taught to fight ‘without a tremor of apprehension, to hurt, maul, injure or kill with ease’. Their instructors were the legendary William Fairbairn and Eric ‘Bill’ Sykes, veterans of policing British interests in what was then the wild Treaty Port of Shanghai, which lies at the mouth of China’s mighty Yangtze River.

  On that city’s lawless waterfront and in its twisting streets and alleyways Fairbairn and Sykes had learned how to injure and kill at close quarters. At the outbreak of war they had been recalled to Britain, to teach all they knew to the crew of the Maid Honour, and others volunteering for such missions. From Wilkinson Sword they’d commissioned a specially made knife, with a seven-inch blade, a heavy handle to give firm grip in the wet, a cross-guard to prevent hand slip, plus two razor sharp edges and a sharp, stiletto stabbing profile.

  Some 250,000 of these knives would roll off Wilkinson Sword’s London production line during the war years, each etched with the words ‘The Fairbairn Sykes Fighting Knife’ on its square head. Fairbairn and Sykes taught the Maid Honour crew how to stalk a man silently from behind, to snake an arm around his neck choking off any cry, while jerking the head sideways and driving the blade deep into the soft area between the neck and shoulder blade in a savage down-thrust.

  They demonstrated how if a main artery was severed, a man would quickly lose consciousness and die – drowned within seconds in his own blood. Most importantly, Fairbairn stressed, there was no more deadly a weapon at close quarters than the knife, ‘and it never runs out of ammunition.’ In what became known as their ‘school for bloody mayhem’ they demonstrated methods of silent strangulation, how to disable with a single blow from fist or boot targeting vulnerable points like the kidney or spine, and how to wield a pistol fast and deadly from the hip, ‘Shanghai Style’.

  They stressed how most pistol duels take place at very short range, a matter of a few feet separating the two sides. They showed how the man who was quickest on the draw would doubtless win, no matter how accurate was his aim. By drawing and firing Shanghai Style – bracing the pistol butt against the hip and aiming from there – the shooter could get the drop on his opponent. They taught the double tap – two bullets fired rapidly from the hip, in the general direction of the target’s torso, to disable, then one fired with more careful aim into his head.

  In short, they emphasized how in war, ‘one cannot afford the luxury of squeamishness.’ What they taught at Station 6 wasn’t fair and it wasn’t pretty, but it certainly delivered. And Anders Lassen for one had taken to this school for bloody mayhem like a fish to water.

  But right now as the sun rose above the glittering ocean and March-Phillipps set a course for Madeira’s Funchal Harbour, it was subterfuge and deception that was needed most of all.

  Landfall was approaching.

  With the jagged profile of Madeira hoving into view – the volcanic peaks of the island rise to over 6,000 feet at their highest – even Lassen was persuaded to discard and keep hidden all of his weaponry. Being a fluent Swedish speaker, the blond-haired Dane – along with Hayes, who spoke a smattering of Swedish, and Buzz the ‘cabin boy’ – would spearhead their Scandinavian deception.

  Cover papers were hastily gathered together. These included false passports and fake seaman’s documents, all of which identified the crew as Swedish civilians off on a transatlantic jolly.

  With weapons concealed and papers made ready, the Maid Honour swept into the seemingly idyllic harbour, which lies at the southern end of the island. The distinctive white steeple of Santa Clara church seemed to keep watch over the harbour’s breakwater, which reaches like a crooked arm far into the bay. But it was other watchful eyes that March-Phillipps feared. Madeira had attracted the unwanted attention of the Germans during the First World War, and she was bound to have done so again now.

  In December 1916 the German submarine U-38 had sailed undetected into Funchal Harbour and torpedoed and sunk three British and French ships. She’d then bombarded the town with her gun, before shore batteries had forced her to withdraw. In that war Portugal had fought alongside the British, and the German enemy had been unwelcome in all Portuguese territories. But right now, in August 1941, Portugal remained neutral. As with many neutral nations, its capital, Lisbon, was known to be crawling with German spies. Likewise, Funchal, this strategically placed mid-Atlantic harbour was bound to have its own complement of enemy agents.

  If the Maid Honour’s true nature and purpose were discovered, a British Q Ship bristling with concealed weaponry would be far from welcome
here. The vessel would be impounded; her crew seized, imprisoned and left bereft of any hope that the British government would come to their rescue. But without replenishing their fresh water and food supplies, the crew wouldn’t last the two thousand miles of their epic journey to come.

  It was Funchal Harbour or bust.

  On March-Phillipps’ order the vessel drifted to a halt, and dropped anchor in the lee of the breakwater. Now the wait.

  The first vessels to appear on the water were the traditional ‘bum-boats’, crewed by locals and carrying fresh provisions – fruit, eggs and vegetables – to sell to the visiting seamen. But among their number the crew could make out the sleek form of a Portuguese coastguard launch, complete with her uniformed officials.

  The launch bore down on them fast. Playing his part to perfection, Lassen welcomed the Portuguese captain aboard, deliberately adopting a thick accent and faltering English, which seemingly convinced the man that this was indeed a Swedish vessel. For a long and tense moment the captain seemed to linger by the fake wheelhouse – the 40mm QF Vickers cannon just one pull of a lever away from erupting into view. In spite of its fake door, the ‘wheelhouse’ could only be entered from below, and if the Captain asked to see inside Lassen would have to come up with some cock and bull story as to why it couldn’t be opened.

  As luck would have it, Lassen – with Hayes and Buzz Perkins in support – managed to steer the coastguard party past the main danger points. By the time the inspection was over the Funchal authorities seemed happy that this vessel was what the crew claimed her to be – an innocent pleasure yacht, one crewed by fellows from a sister neutral country, Sweden. The coastguard captain urged the crew to take on-board whatever supplies they required for the journey ahead, stamped their – entirely false – documents and wished them ‘bon voyage’.