by Damien Lewis
Athens lies towards the southern tip of the Greek mainland. At the opposite end of the landmass lies Salonika (Thessaloniki), Greece’s second city, on the far eastern coast. With its superlative port facilities, Salonika was a vital trading and commercial hub. It was known to be heavily garrisoned by the enemy. The mission given to Lassen by Jellicoe – codenamed with suitable irreverence Scrumforce – was to clear Greece’s eastern coastline of the enemy from one end to the other, an expanse of territory leading up to Salonika.
Athens was one of the first European capital cities to be liberated by the Allies, and it was much in the news. War correspondents had descended on the city en masse. As a result, Donald Grant of Look magazine no longer had the scoop on Jellicoe’s raiders. After years of semi-secrecy – there had long been whispers in newsrooms of ‘the long-haired boys’, the ‘secret raiders of the Aegean’, and to ‘rings of steel’ being thrown around this or that island – the full glare of publicity was turned upon the unit.
For Lassen, arguably the most famous – or infamous – raider of all, it was time to be moving on. A reporter like Grant – one who carried a gun and shared with them the rigours and dangers of a mission – was Lassen’s kind of man. He didn’t care a great deal for the regular, mainstream press pack. And anyway, Lassen had his new mission: Scrumforce was calling.
Scrumforce was part of a larger operation, codenamed – with Jellicoe’s characteristic dry humour – Pomforce. Pomforce consisted of an army cobbled together from whatever was available, and spearheaded by the raiders. Bolted onto the SBS were the 4th Independent Parachute Battalion, an RAF Regiment unit, plus a battery of 75mm field guns. In all it amounted to some 950 men, under the overall command of Jellicoe.
Its mission – ‘a mad expedition’ according to many – was to harass and hound the retreating enemy and to chase them out of Greece. Small, fast-moving raider forces were to attack the Germans’ rear, and block the roads leading northwards – cutting off the enemy’s retreat, and forcing those troops so trapped to capitulate, with Lassen doing similar along the coast.
Lassen – who had just been promoted to Major – departed Athens on 22 October, with forty raiders under his command. In Motor Launches they sped northwards, island-hopping once again as they searched for any enemy who wished to capitulate, or those who might choose to stand and fight. Frustratingly for Lassen, there were few of the latter: the greatest danger they seemed to face was stumbling onto enemy minefields – for in their retreat, the Germans had sown the ground liberally with mines.
On one island Lassen and Stud Stellin went ashore, only for one of them to trip over a wire laid at ground level. They knew instantly that this was a minefield. Frozen in their tracks, they glanced all around, noticing the silvery threads of wires strung across the earth in all directions. They proceeded to tie a piece of string to one of the wires, and with eyes peeled they gingerly backed away, moving as if treading on razor blades.
They took cover behind a stone wall and gave a quick tug on the string. The next instant there was a massive explosion and blasted stones and earth rained down upon them. Lassen and Stellin locked eyes. If that first tripwire had triggered the mine as intended, the consequences would have been dire indeed. It was sheer luck that the trigger mechanism had malfunctioned. Typically, Lassen and Stellin had a good laugh about it. They could laugh, of course, having escaped without getting their legs blown off.
They come like cats. Indeed they had, but Lassen was fast using up all of a cat’s nine lives.
Chapter Twenty-three
Other than minefields, the retreating German forces had left behind scorched earth and burned houses, and a traumatized local population. Everywhere were villages plagued by hunger. Lassen called a halt outside of one. Tired, hungry and cold, he and his patrol brewed up some tea. Children were drawn to the fire. One of Lassen’s men sliced open a big tin of biscuits with his fighting knife. The children formed a circle, hungry eyes staring silently at the tin.
‘Give them the biscuits,’ Lassen ordered.
The tin was handed over, without properly thinking through the consequences. As famished kids thrust their hands in to get some, several ended up cutting themselves on the sharp, jagged edges. Lassen was furious, but his anger soon turned to concern. He got the children to form a line, and with iodine and dressings he began to treat each one. Having suffered so many traumas at the hands of foreigners, it was testament to Lassen’s innate affection for these people that none of the kids flinched before him, or ran. They could read the heartfelt kindness in his eyes.
It was as Lassen led his Irish Patrol island-hopping along the Greek coast that an extraordinary confrontation arose, one that perfectly defines the Danish commander’s unique relationship to his men. Lassen’s patrol had formed a scouting party for a unit of British troops who were landing on a small and largely uninhabited island. Few if any enemy were expected, but still it had to be cleared.
The SBS raiders came ashore first, and they soon established that there were no enemy forces present on the island. Nevertheless, the captain of the main force came charging off his landing craft, plunging into chest-high water, pistol in one hand and cane in the other, and urging his men to follow his lead. Two of Lassen’s veteran raiders, Dick Holmes and Roger Wright, watched him storm ashore, struggling to contain their laughter.
‘Best get out of those wet clothes,’ Wright shouted over. ‘You’ll get your death of cold.’
The officer tried his best to ignore the remark, ordering his men to dig in on the beach. But soaked to the skin, and most likely incensed at Wright’s words he finally came marching over. Wright and Holmes were sheltering behind a dry stone wall having a ciggie and getting a brew on, while they prepared to cook up some breakfast.
‘Why aren’t you men digging in?’ the officer demanded.
‘We don’t do that sort of thing,’ Holmes replied, ‘especially when there are no enemy in the vicinity.’
‘Anyway, we’ve got nothing to dig with,’ Wright added.
The officer fetched an entrenching tool – a small, foldable spade – from one of his men. He handed it to Holmes. ‘You have now.’
Holmes took it, dug out a shovelful of earth, handed the tool to Wright and smiled. ‘Your turn.’
Wright took a swift dig, threw the dirt over his shoulder, then handed the shovel back to the officer. ‘Why are we digging in? There are no fucking Germans anywhere on the island.’
The officer stared at the two men dumbfounded, as they went about preparing their morning feed. He seemed utterly lost for words. He stormed over to his commanding officer, and started gesticulating angrily in the raiders’ direction. The senior officer, a major, came marching over, Wright and Holmes coming to an easy kind of attention.
‘Don’t you men salute officers?’ the major barked.
‘Not often, sir,’ Holmes replied.
‘Never on active service, sir,’ added Wright.
The commanding officer was steaming. ‘And why is that?’
‘Might provide enemy snipers with a target,’ Wright ventured.
‘You said there are no enemy on the island,’ the major snapped.
Wright shrugged. ‘We’ve been wrong before.’
The major looked the men over from head to toe, an expression almost of revulsion spreading across his features. Holmes was dressed in his massive calf-length Canadian paratroop boots, topped off by shorts and a windproof, hooded smock stained with the detritus from several raids – including food, gun oil, sweat, mud and the odd spot of blood (not his own). A webbing belt at his waist supported a water bottle, a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife, a holster carrying a Colt .45 pistol, plus a homemade canvas pouch holding three spare Tommy Gun magazines.
Wright was equally snappily dressed.
‘Who – are – you?’ the major demanded.
‘Sergeant Holmes.’
‘Sergeant Wright.’
‘Do you always dress like this?’ he snapped.
‘Only on active service, sir,’ Wright replied.
‘Well, why aren’t you men digging in?’ the major blustered.
Holmes shook his head. ‘We don’t do that sort of thing.’
‘I’m ordering you to,’ the major thundered.
Holmes looked at Wright, and Wright looked at Holmes.
‘Well, we’re not doing it,’ they replied.
That was it, the major snapped. ‘Mr Watson, put these men under close arrest!’
Two riflemen hurried over. ‘Disarm them!’ the major barked.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Holmes remarked, with quiet menace.
The major stood facing the two SBS men, steam practically coming out of his ears. ‘But you are in the Army!’ he cried.
Holmes smiled. ‘Well, only sort of, you know, in a way …’
‘More of it, than in it,’ Wright added, cryptically. ‘Look, sir, to settle all of this, our major’s just along the beach. Send someone along for Lassen and he’ll sort things out.’
Seeing as though he was at something of an impasse, the major agreed. A runner was sent for Lassen.
Minutes later he appeared. He strode across the beach dressed in similar fashion to his men, only with the ribbon of his MC sewn over his left breast, with the two silvery shapes cut from the lid of a Players cigarette tin to denote the bars.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ Lassen asked, as an opener.
The major was staring at Lassen all agog at his ‘unconventional’ appearance. ‘Are these two of your men?’ he demanded.
Lassen nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, they refused to obey a direct order.’
‘What was the order?’ Lassen asked.
‘I told them to dig in.’
Lassen snorted, derisively. ‘Oh, we don’t do that sort of shit. We’ve got better things to do with our time.’
The major opened his mouth and closed it again, like a fish drowning. ‘But look how they’re dressed!’ he blurted out.
Lassen took a long, hard look up and down the man. ‘You don’t need to get dressed up to kill Germans,’ he grated. He pointed in Holmes’s direction. ‘That’s Sergeant Holmes. He won the MM for singlehandedly destroying a fuel dump in Crete in 1943 … as well as many other successful raids. The other man is Sergeant Wright, also an MM. Both of these men have been in the army since the outbreak of the war and they have probably killed more Germans than you have ever seen.’
The major couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Now, if you’ve finished with my men I’ll take them with me. We’ve got better things to do than dig fucking holes’. With that he turned on his heels and strode away.
Holmes and Wright picked up their folbot and followed after, plodding along the sand of the seashore.
Holmes glanced ahead at the distinctive figure of Lassen, then back at Wright. ‘You know, sometimes I love that man.’
*
Landing on islands that the enemy had already evacuated didn’t exactly satisfy Lassen’s all-consuming desire for battle; to fight, or to die in the cause. Accordingly, he decided to seize the initiative and advance on Salonika itself. Strictly speaking, his orders only allowed for him to recce the region, but he gambled upon Jellicoe backing him if he were successful in taking the city. However, he faced one seemingly insurmountable problem. He’d just received orders to leave half of his men behind on the island of Skiathos, to consolidate the territory he and his men had seized.
Moving on Salonika involved a push into totally uncharted territory. No Allied forces had operated that far north, yet not a man on Lassen’s patrol wanted to be left behind. While Lassen sometimes bent and twisted the rules, and often exceeded his orders, he never directly disobeyed them. He had far too much respect for Jellicoe to do that. But if Salonika – still garrisoned by hundreds of German troops – was to be taken, he would need every fighting man that he could muster.
During the months and years spent operating in the Mediterranean, Lassen’s patrol in particular had gathered a coterie of camp followers – people who had attached themselves to the Irish Patrol, almost as Pipo had attached himself to Lassen. Indeed, Lassen had gathered several more strays by now, his second favourite after Pipo being Dog Tom, one whose evil smell seemed to pre-announce his arrival. His assorted human camp followers consisted of volunteer barbers, cooks, mechanics and the like – and when Lassen considered his orders to ‘divide his force’, it was the camp followers that he chose to leave behind (temporarily).
By such a subtle reinterpretation of his orders Lassen managed to muster some forty men-at-arms. He decided to sail north in two caiques – as opposed to the Motor Launches – for the caiques could easily pass as the local fishing vessels they once were. They would be pushing one hundred miles beyond any other Allied forces, and the last thing the Germans would be expecting was Lassen’s raiders to appear in their midst at Salonika.
One of the two caiques was captained by Lieutenant Alec McLeod, a very capable operator from the Royal Marine Commandos. McLeod would need all his seaborne experience for the coming mission, for the route ahead lay across some of the most heavily mined stretches of water in the entire Mediterranean. The other caique was commanded by a Lieutenant Martin Solomon, a man who would play a key role in the coming action, which at times would do justice to a Hollywood movie script.
Over the preceding weeks Solomon had become an apparently unlikely companion to the Danish Viking. He was short, chubby and forever cheerful, in contrast to Lassen’s tall, lean, icy wolfishness. There was nothing about Solomon’s appearance or pre-war background that suggested a particular toughness: after studies at Cambridge University, he had been a manager for some up-and-coming actors before the war.
But looks can be deceptive. Solomon had won the Distinguished Service Cross in 1940 at Dunkirk, and a bar to the DSC when commanding a Motor Torpedo Boat off North Africa in 1942. Since then he’d distinguished himself during several seaborne raids across the Greek Islands, and Lassen knew well Solomon had the heart of a steely-eyed warrior.
It was dusk when Lassen’s patrol set sail, with his purloined American jeep lashed down on one of the caiques and camouflaged under a tarpaulin. Pulling around the northern tip of Skiathos, the caiques were able to hug the coast, for the water remained deep right up to the shore. They sailed past the wooded spit lying on the island’s northern tip, the waters ahead appearing millpond-calm and mesmerizing in the evening light.
All of a sudden a sound pierced the stillness, as unexpected as it was moving. The lilting tones of bagpipes rang out from the wooded shoreline, echoing across the sea, the water lit almost blood red with the sun’s dying light. One of those Lassen had been forced to leave behind was piping a plaintive farewell.
*
Disguised as local fishermen, Lassen’s force pushed through sixty miles of seas menaced by minefields. Staring through his field glasses Lassen was able to study the German positions along the shore – for the approach to Salonika was heavily fortified. Lassen could see German troops evacuating their gun emplacements, in preparation for what had to be a full-scale withdrawal. His greatest fear was what havoc the retreating enemy might wreak on Salonika and its people; his challenge how he might insert his force into the heart of that city, to try to stop them.
Four days after setting sail, the two caiques pulled into the tiny harbour of Potidaea, lying some thirty miles to the south-east of Salonika in the Gulf of Thermaikos – the long finger of sea that stretches north to Salonika itself. Lassen’s caiques pushed up the Roman-era Potidaea Canal, a short stretch of man-made waterway linking the Gulf to the Bay of Toroneos on the far side, where they were able to moor up and hide well out of sight of any prying eyes.
Once his ships were safely hidden, Lassen found he had other priorities on his mind. It was dawn, and he fancied making a deep-penetration recce up country.
With some difficulty his men managed to manhandle the jeep ashore, whereupon L
assen set off at his customary murderous pace. He had with him Sammy Trafford, his ‘minder’ – now fully recovered from his Santorini Bloodbath injury – Martin Solomon, his somewhat portly, but nonetheless fearless comrade, plus a Greek fighter called Jason Mavrikis, who had long been part of their company.
Lieutenant Mavrikis hailed from the Greek Sacred Squadron, but in early 1944 he’d been attached to Lassen more or less permanently as his translator. The Greek officer had bonded with the Danish Viking, especially over their shared sense of humour.
‘Lassen had the real type of humour, not just jokes,’ Mavrikis explained. ‘Real humour – meaning he could see things from the other side; understand and laugh about what he was doing. He could laugh about himself, which is the hardest thing a person can do.
‘He was collecting somehow, respect; a bit of fear of what he would do next, and definitely we would follow him blindfolded wherever he wanted to go. Whatever he wanted to do we were with him – no question about that … knowing that he was the best leader of all.’
Lassen, Solomon and Mavrikis headed north on the coastal road that links Potidaea to Salonika, passing through territory still entirely controlled by the enemy. Greek villagers they encountered along the route mistook the blond-haired soldier at the jeep’s wheel for a German, and everywhere they fled before him. It was hardly surprising: the rest of Allied forces were one hundred miles or more to the south, and none were expected here any time soon. More to the point, German atrocities in this region had been no less extreme than elsewhere, and in some villages there were rumours of children being deliberately burned to death.
Just after nightfall Lassen and his men stopped in some thick forest to answer the call of nature. As the rumble of the jeep’s engine died away, they caught the sounds of voices in the trees. Whoever it was, they were speaking German. Lassen’s eyes lit up. Here was the very thing he sought: the chance to seize some captives for interrogation.