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

by Damien Lewis

  The Maid Honour had passed her first real test – the deception had held good. Hastily re-provisioned, the crew wasted no time in setting sail once more, heading south towards the coast of West Africa. Fresh trade winds whisked the ship along at a spanking pace, and the crew was more than a little relieved to leave Portuguese waters behind them. By the time she was two days out from Funchal the Maid Honour was making seven or eight knots. A day later she topped ten knots, and the crew were able to indulge in a meal of fresh flying fish, which had made the mistake of blundering into the ship’s rigging.

  Averaging 146 miles a day the Maid Honour swept further southwards. As she approached the Cape Verde islands she was forced to turn west, to give the West African nation of Senegal a wide berth. With the Germans victorious in France, a significant proportion of the French people had opted to throw their lot in with the German invaders. Vichy France had been formed and those parts of France in league with the Axis powers encompassed swathes of southern France, plus many of her overseas colonies. Senegal was in Vichy hands, as was the French Colonial Navy stationed at Senegal’s Dakar naval base, and the Vichy French administration was known to be virulently anti-British.

  In September 1940 a powerful British fleet had set sail to seize Senegal by force of arms if the Vichy French defenders refused to capitulate. In Operation Menace the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, accompanied by two battleships, several cruisers, destroyer escorts and troop carriers laid siege to Dakar naval base. But the Vichy French defenders had used their shore batteries, plus their own light cruisers Georges Leygues and Montcalm to repulse the attack. With the help of a hundred or more shore-based warplanes the British task force was finally beaten off.

  Eleven months later Senegal remained in Vichy French hands, its fleet of warships still a potent fighting force – hence March-Phillipps’ detour west, to avoid her waters. Just when he least needed it, the Maid Honour drifted out of the corridor of southerly trade winds and found herself becalmed. She was still some three hundred miles north of the Cape Verde islands, and well-within interception range by the Vichy French warships sailing out of Dakar. The Maid Honour was a sitting duck. Should an enemy vessel steam onto the horizon, becalmed as they were, their puny, unreliable petrol engine would give them little chance of escape.

  March-Phillipps urged his crew to keep an eagle-eyed watch on sea and sky, as they rotated their sentry duties, standing six-hours on and six off. Tired though they all were from the constant need for vigilance, the last thing they could risk right now was to let an enemy warship sneak up on them before they could un-mask and bring to bear their guns.

  The Maid Honour was six days out from Madeira and still marooned in a windless calm, when the lookout on the masthead fire-platform cried out the dreaded warning.

  ‘Ships off the port bow! Ships off the port bow!’

  The two vessels were as yet too distant to be identified, but one was clearly a merchant ship, while the other had the unmistakable – and chilling – silhouette of a battle cruiser. From the direction of their approach it was most likely that these were Vichy French vessels. If so, the warship had to be either the Georges Leygues or the Montcalm. Light cruisers of some 9,000 tonnes, each boasted a 31-knot top speed, nine massive 152mm guns, plus twenty-four 40mm cannons.

  There seemed no way in which the cruiser would pass them by. Indeed, the more March-Phillipps studied the course set by the commander of the distant warship, the more he became convinced that it was sailing on an interception bearing.

  The Maid Honour’s captain considered his options. They may have fooled a handful of Portuguese coastguard officials back at Funchal Harbour, but a Vichy French cruiser was a completely different matter. Even if she didn’t identify the Maid Honour as a hostile vessel from distance, she was sure to send across a boarding party to thoroughly check her over.

  March-Phillipps made a snap decision. The hour for deception was clearly past.

  ‘Man the guns!’ he cried. ‘Man the guns!’

  Figures dashed across the deck. The dummy wheelhouse was collapsed, and the Vickers 40mm cannon loaded and brought to bear. She had an accurate range of around 4,000 metres, though what damage her two-pound shells might inflict on a Vichy French cruiser with 120mm-thick side-armour was open to debate. The Lewis machineguns were unmasked, and the crew took up battle stations as they waited for the warship to come within range.

  March-Phillipps was determined to be the first to open fire, but he could only do so once he’d made a positive identification that this was indeed an enemy warship. Even then it was surely only a matter of time before the Maid Honour was blasted out of the water. It looked as if Anders Lassen’s grim prediction – we are doomed; we are sailing without an escort; we haven’t a hope – was about to be proved horribly accurate.

  And so the six men waited, hunkered down behind their weapons, and determined to go down all guns blazing.

  Chapter Three

  Even as the crew of the Maid Honour awaited a seemingly deadly confrontation, a power struggle was playing out at the highest level in London, and all concerning the diminutive vessel’s daring mission. As the British Expeditionary Force had retreated from the French beaches, so Churchill had issued an extraordinary order to his Chiefs of Staff: ‘prepare hunter troops for a butcher-and-bolt reign of terror.’

  Under Churchill’s order the British military was tasked to do something that didn’t quite come naturally to it – to raise a raiding force to strike the enemy in hit-and-run attacks, using all possible measures. Every man aboard the Maid Honour was one of Churchill’s ‘volunteers for Special Duties’, and March-Phillipps had been given ‘absolute power’ to pick and choose his number. He’d gone for individuals formed in his own image: fiery, disdainful, rebellious and individualistic, and with little respect for the formal hierarchies that defined the established military.

  Indeed, March-Phillipps’ authority – and that of his entire crew – flowed not from the regular armed forces, but from an organization born of Churchill’s iron will and formed wholly in the shadows. In the summer of 1940 Britain’s wartime leader had given the green light for the founding of the highly-secretive Special Operations Executive (SOE). Its remit went way far beyond butcher-and-bolt raiding. Its mission was to set ablaze enemy-held Europe – and the wider world – launching subversion and sabotage missions wherever possible.

  The SOE wasn’t part of the wider military. It was formed under the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and it was more akin to a separate branch of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). So clandestine was its existence that it operated under a cover name – the innocuous sounding ‘Inter-Service Research Bureau.’ Those who began working at its grey, nondescript 64 Baker Street, London, headquarters referred to the SOE as variously ‘The Firm’, ‘The Org’ or, perhaps most suitably, ‘The Racket.’

  Officially the SOE didn’t exist, and neither did its agents nor its missions, which meant that anything was possible. The Maid Honour’s key crew – March-Phillipps, Appleyard, Hayes and Lassen – had been exhaustively checked and vetted, and contracted to utmost secrecy prior to their departure for Africa.

  The Official Secrets Act, signed by all four of the Maid Honour stalwarts, warned them that: ‘Any person who is guilty of a misdemeanour under the Official Secrets Acts 1911 and 1920 shall be liable upon conviction or indictment to imprisonment with or without hard labour …’

  Lassen’s ‘Minute Sheet’, detailing his SOE vetting, recorded him as ‘Danish – passed by M.I.5 and Scotland Yard’. His MI5 vetter, a Captain Strong, wrote of Lassen: ‘NOTHING RECORDED AGAINST’ – i.e. no negative trace had been found on the prospective SOE recruit.

  The SOE operated on a strict need-to-know basis and it wasn’t bound by the regular military’s labyrinthine rules and red tape. Its agents were paid in cash, to prevent banking and wage slips leaving any kind of a paper trail. It had its own James-Bond-like dirty tricks department, producing exploding attaché cases and pis
tols disguised as pens, and numerous other similarly innovative means of doing harm to the enemy.

  In truth, the SOE was formed to carry out operations seen as being too politically explosive, illegal or unconscionable as to be embraced by the wider British establishment. This was Churchill’s answer to his edict to set the lands of the enemy ablaze – though he’d perhaps little-imagined that his extraordinary call to arms would manifest itself in the form of a wooden trawler sailing half-way around the world, crammed full of such an odd assortment of piratical raiders and desperadoes.

  As well as being highly-trained commandos, the Maid Honour crew were secret agents working under direct orders from the SOE. The Maid’s present mission had first been dreamt up in the bowels of the SOE building, by March-Phillips and Appleyard, working together with Brigadier Colin McVean Gubbins, the SOE’s Operations and Training Director – better known to all as simply ‘M’.

  In the previous year Gubbins had been sent into Norway to organize Striking Companies to fight a guerrilla war to hold-up the advancing Germans. They had blown up bridges, sabotaged railway lines, mined tracks and generally spread as much destruction and mayhem as possible. In Norway Gubbins had learned the craft of guerilla warfare well, and he was one of its diehard advocates. And as far as Gubbins saw it, the Maid Honour’s mission absolutely fitted the bill.

  But when he’d rubber-stamped the founding of the SOE, Winston Churchill had little appreciated the resentment and anger that it would cause in some circles. Having trained his special agents, M had experienced grave problems actually getting them deployed. The Maid Honour Force had been no exception. In scoping out various options for the Force’s inaugural mission – and the very first deniable operation of the SOE – M had run up against some spirited opposition from the highest echelons of the British military, not to mention Churchill’s foremost political adversaries.

  Decrying the lawless nature of the Maid Honour’s master and crew, not to mention their modus operandi and intentions, the Royal Navy had managed to get them banned from all European theatres of operations – but not from Africa.

  Gubbins, and all involved in the conception of the mission, knew that the stakes were high. If the crew of the Maid Honour succeeded in their present task, it would be proof that the SOE’s concept of high-octane risk, coupled with an absolute disregard for international law, was workable, and capable of achieving spectacular results and reaping stupendous rewards. But if it failed, the consequences were unthinkable …

  *

  The target of the tiny Q Ship now becalmed off the coast of West Africa lay some two thousand miles eastwards, on the small Spanish colonial territory and island nation of Fernando Po (now called Bioko). Lying in the Gulf of Guinea – the very armpit of Africa – Fernando possesses Santa Isabel harbour, a port of equal strategic import to that of Funchal, the Maid Honour’s recent re-supply stop-over.

  The British powers feared that Santa Isabel harbour was being used as a covert re-supply point for German U-boats stalking Allied shipping along the African coast. A mission to raid Santa Isabel risked stirring up a hornets’ nest of international outrage, for in theory at least Spain remained a neutral party in the war. But recent developments in the region had convinced Brigadier Gubbins, Winston Churchill and his War Cabinet that such a raid – if fully deniable – might actually be worth the risk. If all went well, it would also represent an invaluable propaganda coup for a British nation desperately in need of positive news from the war.

  The war in the North African desert was presently in full swing, and victory hung in the balance. Air cover was seen as being crucial to the fortunes of both sides – the British on the one hand, and the German-Italian Axis Powers on the other. With the Mediterranean menaced by enemy U-boats and warplanes, the safest route to get aircraft and spare parts into North Africa was via convoys to Britain’s West African ports, from where they were flown north to those airstrips still in British hands.

  Or at least it had been. But by the summer of 1941 German U-boat attacks along the West African coast were threatening the safety of those convoys – many of which had been forced to re-route thousands of miles across the Atlantic.

  Spain’s Falangist government under General Franco was seen as being neo-Fascist, and an enthusiastic, if secretive supporter of the Axis Powers. During the Spanish Civil War Italian troops had fought alongside Franco’s forces, and German Stuka dive-bombers had provided devastating air support. In short, while Franco’s Spain paid lip service to her much-vaunted neutrality, Fernando Po’s Santa Isabel port was suspected of being a clandestine German U-boat refuelling and rearming depot.

  What gave added weight to those suspicions were the three enemy ships – one flying the German Swastika, one the Italian flag – seemingly permanently anchored in Santa Isabel harbour. The largest, the Duchessa d’Aosta was an 8,000-tonne Italian passenger liner-cum-cargo ship, manned by an Italian crew of between forty and fifty. Her hold was stuffed full of valuable war materials – including copper ingots, plus a quantity of materials any further details of which the ship’s Captain had refused to divulge.

  A copy of the ship’s manifest had been obtained by the SOE, but it was the missing page that proved most tantalizing: ‘The manifest as forwarded contains six pages,’ the SOE reported, ‘It is understood, however, that a seventh page is missing … The Spanish port authority requested a copy of the missing sheet from the ship’s master, who declined to produce it but offered no explanation.’

  The repeated refusal by the Duchessa’s captain to divulge the nature of the materials detailed on the seventh page of the manifest fuelled speculation that his ship was in truth carrying weaponry, and possibly even spare parts for German submarines.

  The second largest vessel moored in Santa Isabel harbour was a modern German tugboat, the 200-tonne Likomba, which came complete with German captain and crew. The Likomba was the perfect kind of vessel for going to a crippled U-boat’s aid, and towing her to the shelter of the nearest hidden tropical lagoon or ‘neutral’ harbour. Moored alongside the Likomba was a luxury pleasure yacht, the Bibundi, which was also presumed to be a German vessel.

  Whatever the three ships and their crew might be up to – with the suspected connivance of the Spanish port authorities – a decision was made that they had to be stopped.

  The SOE had been formed entirely so that its actions could be disowned by His Majesty’s Government. It was clear that any mission to raid Santa Isabel Harbour and to take out the three enemy vessels would have to be carried out by SOE agents – for this of any mission called for absolute secrecy coupled with total deniability.

  At the SOE headquarters various options for the assault – codenamed ‘Operation Postmaster’ – had been considered. Bombing the ships from the air was unthinkable, for British warplanes would be wholly identifiable. Such a wanton breach of neutrality would almost certainly provoke Spain into joining forces with the Axis powers, after which Portugal would very likely be forced to follow suit, with potentially disastrous consequences for Britain’s fortunes in the war.

  Infiltrating the port and sinking the vessels where they lay at anchor was the next most obvious option, but that wouldn’t provide the knockout blow. The harbour was comparatively shallow with a firm, rocky bottom, and a vessel the size of the Duchessa d’Aosta would simply settle a few feet onto the seabed. It would be possible to repair and re-float her, and possibly also the German tugboat. And so the mission had become a ‘cut-out’ tasking – one designed to free the vessels and spirit them into British hands, and all without any responsibility being laid at Britain’s door.

  The plan for the cut-out mission involved March-Philipps sailing his ship into Santa Isabel Harbour under cover of darkness, whereupon he and his men would overpower the ships’ crew, seize the vessels, blow their anchor chains and spirit them away to one of the nearest British ports, lying some 1,500 miles across the Gulf of Guinea.

  If spotted, the Maid Honour would simply ap
pear as an unidentifiable fishing trawler, albeit one sporting some unusual weaponry for such a ship. If she was captured – and this was to be avoided at all costs – the Maid Honour might still maintain the bluff of being of Swedish origin. If any of her crew were taken alive – death was considered far preferable; like all SOE agents the crew carried what had been nicknamed ‘holy communion’, a hidden suicide pill to be taken in case of capture – they were to stick to their cover story at all costs. If all of that failed the mission would be vehemently denied by the British government, who would blame ‘rebel elements’ for carrying out the attack wholly without official sanction.

  Upon first consideration such a mission appeared nigh-on impossible; looking at the port’s defences there was every likelihood of failure. There were reports of increasing numbers of Spanish troops and armaments arriving on Fernando Po. Its vital strategic position made the island a tempting target for both Germany and Britain – for whoever controlled Fernando Po pretty much controlled the Gulf of Guinea. The Spanish had garrisoned the island with forty of their officers, commanding some five hundred native troops, with one hundred or more reservists of European nationality to call upon if need be.

  There were a dozen 4-inch guns stationed around the island, and in Santa Isabel itself the Customs House, barracks and main public buildings had machine guns positioned overlooking the harbour. The Spanish Governor of the island was known to be strongly pro-Nazi and thus hostile to British interests.

  Needless to say, if Maid Honour Force made it to Fernando Po their mission would entail violating just about every rule of war. The cut-out job would represent an outrageous act of piracy and kidnapping on the high seas; it would violate the ‘neutrality’ of Spain; and in wearing no uniforms the raiders ‘deserved’ only to be treated as spies, if captured.