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

by Damien Lewis

  He called his men to a halt. From out of his pocket he produced a wad of paper. He unwrapped it, handing around two pills of Benzedrine to each man.

  ‘I vant you all vide avake,’ he whispered, as he watched each swallow his allotment.

  Lassen was the last to down his, once he was sure everyone had taken theirs.

  Apart from the bark of a dog woken here and there at their passing, the raiders flitted through the streets of Fira as silent and unnoticed as wraiths. Lassen, Casulli and their men reached the main thoroughfare – Theotokopoulou Square – apparently undetected. No alarm had been raised. No shot had been fired. So far, so good.

  Lassen paused. The town was a maze of narrow streets and even narrower alleyways, and without their local guides they’d have got hopelessly lost. Lassen sensed they were in the very heart of the labyrinth right now, and that getting out was going to prove as much fun as it had been getting in.

  Lassen got his men into cover so they could study the target – the Bank of Athens. All seemed quiet, and there were no sentries that he could detect. But they couldn’t afford to presume that none had been set. With news of the British raiders spreading far and wide, many of the enemy garrisons were on a permanent state of alert, which was just how Jellicoe wanted them. German and Italian soldiers had taken to sleeping fully clothed, their weapon only an arm’s reach away.

  The bank was a daunting target. In the faint light it appeared like some ancient, slumbering, thick-skinned monster – a veritable fortress. To make matters worse, the German and Italian soldiers were billeted on the first floor. Lassen and his men would have to break in, sneak through the ground floor and climb the stairs; all without being detected – and all before they could begin their attack.

  Lassen decided to hit the bank from two directions – north and south – to increase the chances of at least one force getting in. He sent half of his men, under Lieutenant Casulli, to the south side, giving them time to get into position.

  The seconds ticked by: 0045 hours was almost upon them – the time to launch their concerted attacks.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Stealing towards the bank, Lassen and Casulli’s patrols managed to link up at the foot of the stairwell which led to the billets above. After a hurried confab in bare whispers, Lassen led the twelve men up the dark staircase, treading on the outer edges of the wooden boards, in an effort to stop them creaking.

  The atmosphere was heavy with tension, adrenalin pumping through the raiders’ fast-beating hearts. None could believe that their presence in the bank hadn’t yet been detected. Whatever awaited these men in the darkness above, one thing was certain: the next few minutes would be defined by fear and brute aggression, intermixed with bloody mayhem and murder.

  At the top of the staircase rooms branched off from a landing. Lassen positioned one man on either side of each door, leaving two in the centre as a firebase, and putting one as a guard on the exit, to prevent anyone from escaping that way. His force in position, he blew a short blast on his whistle, at which moment several sets of crepe-soled boots went crashing through wooden doors.

  The first grenade was hurled into a sleeping room. ‘Grenade gone!’ yelled O’Reilly.

  All along the landing the raiders opened fire, the muzzles of their Tommy Guns and German Schmeissers sparking in the darkness. In seconds the air was thick with cordite smoke and the punching percussion of further grenades exploding, the blasts echoing deafeningly around the close confines of the bank’s interior. But then O’Reilly’s Schmeisser jammed. The big Irishman started cursing wildly, as he tried to clear it. What a time for his weapon to get a stoppage.

  In all the confusion, and with the darkness rent by blinding blasts, agonized screams and savage bursts of gunfire, Lieutenant Casulli and the medical orderly, Sergeant Kingston, kicked through their target door. As they went to rush the room, their entry was met by an immediate blast of fire from inside. One at least of the enemy had woken up to the attack, and was ready and waiting.

  Casulli was hit in the chest and blasted backwards, staggering through the darkness, while Sergeant Kingston collapsed onto the floor. Sammy Trafford – Lassen’s ‘minder’ – was the next to be hit, rounds ripping through his upper arm and left leg. He reeled under the blows. Seconds later a fourth raider went down, Guardsman Jack Harris crying out, ‘I’ve been hit! In the leg! I’ve been hit!’

  Harris managed to stagger down the stairs to the bank’s outside terrace – but there was no medic available to treat any of the wounded, for Sergeant Kingston himself was down. Kingston had taken a burst to the stomach, and he was in a bad way.

  Lassen had tried to dissuade Kingston from coming on the killing part of the raid. ‘You cannot be one of the killers and our medical orderly,’ Lassen had told him. He’d warned Kingston to stay out of the bank, when the fighting proper began. But Kingston had wanted a slice of the action, and now he was down and very badly wounded.

  Jack Nicholson and Lassen opened fire, pouring bullets into the room from where the enemy fire had come. Nicholson raked it with bursts from his favourite weapon – a big, heavy Bren gun – firing from the hip again and again, so as to keep the enemy pinned down. And when cries in German from outside the bank announced that an enemy patrol had arrived to break the siege, it was Nicholson who drove them off with deadly-accurate fire from the Bren.

  Lassen grabbed the chance to regroup his surviving forces – he had four men dead or injured, which meant a third of his patrol had been put out of action. They mustered on the bank’s terrace, before smashing their way through a pair of French doors – finding themselves in the main dining area, off of which lay three further rooms. They skirted by the large table and the rifle rack, booted open the first two doors and hurled in grenades.

  O’Reilly dashed back onto the landing area. He bent over Casulli’s prostrate, bloodied form and grabbed the man’s grenades. As far as he could tell Casulli was dead, and O’Reilly needed his Mills bombs, for in the dark chaos of this battle the grenade was the only weapon to use. Cowering in their rooms, there was nowhere for the Germans and Italians to hide from a grenade blast. A fragmenting Mills bomb spread instant terror, confusion, injury and death – giving the raiders that crucial edge.

  The middle door leading off the dining room seemed to be locked shut. It couldn’t even be booted open. Shots were fired at the lock, and the door riddled with bullets, but still it stood firm. It must have been barricaded from the inside. As Nicholson kicked in the bottom panel of the door, O’Reilly readied one of his scavenged grenades. An instant later the Irishman rolled it through the hole in the splintered wood, the raiders jumping aside to avoid the blast.

  Inside that room, as with so many of the others, terrified and panicked enemy soldiers had rushed to the windows – both in an effort to escape the blast and to put down fire onto their attackers. Many didn’t seem to realize that the raiders were in their very midst. German and Italian soldiers kept lobbing stick grenades into the streets below, and loosing off long bursts of fire. Of course, they were shooting at empty shadows.

  One Italian sergeant tried to jump from his window, but it was a forty-foot drop onto the hard cobbles below. The fall half-killed him, after which shots from the wounded raiders gathered on the terrace finished him off. Others tried to rush the exit that led to the stairway, but Lassen’s rearguard had it covered. The garrison manning Santorini were trapped, their fate doubly sealed when Lassen learned that his friend Cassuli had been gunned down.

  A cold rage rushed through the Dane. He grabbed Nicholson – after Lassen, the longest-serving and most hardened raider of the lot – and urged that they finish the job. Their orders had been to wipe out the Santorini garrison. Nicholson and Lassen went room-by-room now, hurling first a grenade and following on the heels of the blast with bursts of machine-gun fire.

  By the time they were done, their orders had been carried out pretty much to the letter. Lassen was certain that every enemy soldier in th
at billet was either dead or wounded.

  Somehow, the injured medic, Sergeant Kingston, had crawled down the bank steps onto the terrace at the front. From there he’d seen five figures jump from a lower window in an effort to escape. He’d managed to hurl a grenade after them, but his throw had proved too weak and they got away.

  The fighting over for now, Lassen gathered his surviving men on the terrace. Sentries were set, as they tried to patch-up Kingston’s wounds as best they could. Lassen went to double-check that Lieutenant Casulli was truly beyond help. The Greek officer was indeed dead, and Lassen retrieved from his body his dog tags, his gold chain and his diary – to give to a grieving wife and mother of Casulli’s young child, whenever he could make it back to Alexandria.

  But right now Egypt was a whole world away, and the battle for Santorini was far from over. Voices were heard from down a narrow alleyway close by the bank. There was no doubt they were German. Nicholson, who’d picked up a smattering of the language, tried to lure them out of hiding.

  ‘Kommen Sie hierher, Kamerad’ – come here, friend – he yelled out.

  No figures emerged, so he fired a few probing bursts from his Sten, and the voices quickly died away. It was around 0100 by now, just fifteen minutes into the fight, and Lassen and Nicholson knew that there were German and Italian soldiers unaccounted for. Some had got away by jumping from the windows; others had been out on patrol, or would have been billeted in smaller numbers elsewhere in the town.

  The element of surprise was completely blown. The advantage would shift to the defenders, especially if Lassen and his men had to fight their way out of the labyrinth that was Fira town, laden down with their wounded and their dead. With Lieutenant Casulli, Lassen made the tough decision to leave his Greek friend where he had fallen. But there was no question of leaving Sergeant Kingston behind: while there was life there was hope.

  A door had been wrenched off its hinges to act as a makeshift stretcher for Sergeant Kingston; it had to be abandoned. It was too wide to fit through some of the narrowest alleyways, or up the steepest stairways. Instead, four men had to each grab one of the wounded sergeant’s limbs, and with him spread-eagled between them they hurried into the shadows.

  Progress proved painfully slow. Sergeant Kingston was fully conscious and in terrible pain, each jolt causing him agony. They’d barely made 150 yards when they reached an open street junction. As Lassen went to cross it there was a challenge yelled in German.

  Lassen yelled back a lightning quick response. ‘Kommen Sie hierher!’

  ‘Nein! Sie kommen hierher!’ the voice retorted, an immediate burst of machine-gun fire punctuating the words.

  Lassen responded with a grenade, hurling it into the open space ahead of him. There was the crack of an explosion, a scream from out of the darkness, followed by the sound of boots pounding down the dark street and fading away. The raiders pressed onwards, heading for the Vourvoulos caves, the agreed rendezvous.

  When they were still at least half a mile short of the caves it started to get light. Lassen and Nicholson pressed onwards, leaving the rest of the patrol to bring on the injured – Sergeant Kingston, plus the two walking wounded. Lassen and Nicholson needed to reach the RV and reassure the others. They found the caves crowded. There were eight German prisoners, all of whom had been seized at the radio station on the Imerovigli headland, whereupon the radio station itself had been blown to pieces.

  Unfortunately, the team sent to capture or kill the German commander on Santorini, a Lieutenant Hesse, had just missed nabbing him. As they stole up to the front of the house, they’d heard a murmur of worried voices coming from the rear. They’d dashed around, only to discover Lieutenant Hesse making a run for it together with his orderly. The two Germans had made a clean getaway, so Lieutenant Hesse was presumably still at large somewhere on the island.

  There was more worrying news from their local Greek guides. That morning, the Germans had been sighted in the nearby Vourvoulos village. From there and from Fira itself they’d already taken hostages. They were threatening to execute them all, unless the locals revealed where the British raiders were hiding. The islanders – resolute and loyal to the last – had no intention of doing any such thing.

  Only a small handful of German and Italian soldiers had been seen out that morning. Reports filtering in suggested that well over twenty enemy soldiers had been wounded or killed at the bank – so with the eight Germans taken prisoner they had lost over thirty men. They had precious few able-bodied men with which to carry out their threatened executions, or to mount a hunt for Lassen’s patrol.

  But that didn’t mean things would remain that way for long. It was vital the raiders get away from the island as soon as possible. Lieutenant Hesse, the German commandant on Santorini, was still at large. He was reported to be a very capable infantry officer, and he would doubtless try to signal for reinforcements – that’s if there was a radio anywhere on the island that was still operational.

  Having radioed the schooners at their Christiana anchorage, and arranged for a pick-up after nightfall, the raiding force set off, retracing their footsteps to the island’s eastern shore. Trafford and Harris were walking wounded. They were just about able to make their own way, Trafford laden down with a heavy Bren gun that no one else seemed able to carry.

  By the time they reached the coast Trafford was utterly finished. Lassen told him to lighten his load, by disposing of the Bren. There was plenty more weaponry they could scavenge off the enemy. Lassen’s priority was to get his men off that island and safely into Turkish waters. Trafford broke down the Bren into its constituent parts and threw them in the sea.

  The two men – commander and bodyguard – fell into step, pressing northwards along the coastline under the punishing sun.

  Lassen eyed Trafford’s leg wound. ‘You’re no bloody good as a bodyguard now, Sammy. You’ll have to bloody go back. Go back to hospital.’ Lassen turned to another of the raiders, shaking his head in mock frustration. ‘That bloody Sammy got himself shot. You be my bodyguard now!’

  The look in the eyes of the soldier said it all. Be your bodyguard? No bloody fear!

  Sergeant Kingston had been given morphine for his pain, but few believed that he would make it. The only thing the raiders had been able to find to carry him on was a wooden gate borrowed from a local vineyard. Winston was still fully conscious, but even with the morphine the pain was killing him. And as the raiders themselves had learned, in the Jerusalem killing school – aim for his guts and he’s surely dead.

  Santorini island is bare, rocky and windswept. It was obvious that any movement in broad daylight would be seen by all – surviving German and Italian soldiers included. If the enemy force hadn’t been so comprehensively devastated – the radio station wrecked and emptied of its personnel; the bank rendered a bloody killing ground – the raiders would have been hunted to their deaths among the open rocks.

  As it was, they made the difficult descent to the black beach without being targeted. They found shelter among some caves, which echoed to the rhythmic crash of the surf. Sergeant Kingston was carried to the nearby home of a family who were known to be fervent supporters of the Allied cause. A doctor was called, but he took one look at the wounded British medic-cum-raider and shook his head. Kingston’s wounds were haemorrhaging, and without urgent surgery there was little that could be done. The doctor gave him some more morphine, the better to ease his passing.

  It was just after midday when the raiders heard the first shots. The gunfire was distant, and it didn’t sound as if it was a two-way firefight. They waited for news of what it might mean. Word was brought by the villagers. The Germans had carried through their threat: they had executed their ten hostages, one of whom was the local mayor. They had issued a further ultimatum – to shoot all the inhabitants of Vourvoulos village, if by nightfall the British raiders hadn’t given themselves up.

  The villagers were adamant: no way were the raiders going to hand themselves i
n. But Lassen was boiling up with rage. If the surviving Germans and Italians wanted to meet him in open battle, so be it. But kidnapping and gunning down the locals – it was the kind of brute cowardice and spinelessness that the Dane hated.

  Grabbing a pencil and paper, Lassen proceeded to scribble a note to Lieutenant Hesse, the German commander on Santorini. Written in German, it reminded Hesse that his name and likeness were known personally to the British raiders. It alerted him to the fact that he was going to be charged for war crimes, for he was the commander who had ordered the execution of the ten islanders.

  It finished with a dire warning against any further such actions:

  If there are [any further reprisals] we shall return with 1,000 men and kill every German on the island, and not, as at this time, only with 500.

  Lassen’s note was handed to the German commander by an enterprising and brave Greek. The threats against the villagers, plus the executions, came to a sudden halt.

  Sometime around mid-afternoon Nicholson saw Sergeant Kingston finally fall asleep. He had been in enormous pain, and he’d kept telling the others to leave him, and not to stay for his sake. Nicholson fetched Lassen and they examined the wounded man. Having drifted into a deep sleep, Sergeant Kingston had passed away. They wrapped him in blankets and placed a bible in his hand, after which the locals laid flowers upon him, assuring Lassen and Nicholson that they would give him a proper burial.

  The islanders took Sergeant Kingston’s body to the church, placed him before the altar, and the entire village emptied of its inhabitants as they went to pray for his soul. Meanwhile, Lassen, Nicholson and the raiders headed for their beachside rendezvous with their pick-up vessels. It was the night after the raid and crucial they get off the island. On the nearby, larger island of Melos there was a German garrison of very significant size, and sooner or later they would send a force to investigate the sudden silence that had fallen over Santorini.