The Royal Engineer cleaned the plunger, unscrewing the terminals and polishing and replacing the wires, but that had no effect. Lassen looked at his watch. Dawn soon. He swore at the plunger, and at the sapper, but, ignoring the insults, the Royal Engineer scrambled down to the bridge to put Plan B into place. Running a safety fuse from the detonator back to the rock, he reached into his pocket for a box of matches. They watched the fizzing fuse for a few moments, then prudently crouched down behind the rock. ‘Lassen was starting to get impatient again,’ explained Holmes. ‘He wanted to go down and have a look for himself. Then suddenly the whole lot goes up and great chunks of masonry begin raining down on us. One bloody big piece flew past over our heads. It’s amazing no one got killed.’12
Leaving behind a thick pall of yellow dust, the British raiders hurried high into the mountains until they reached the sanctuary of the partisan HQ. There was a delicious hot stew waiting for them when they arrived, and once that had been polished off the men lay down to rest. But at first light the next morning their slumber was shattered by a breathless sentry, who ran into the camp to warn that a large force of Germans and Ustaše were close at hand. The Ustaše were the fascist Croat force, whose reputation for brutality surpassed that of the Nazis.
In the grey dawn light, Holmes saw between 50 and 75 Germans and Ustaše advancing up the mountain towards their hideout, the officer in charge blowing a whistle and exhorting his men to move quicker. Lassen ordered his men to take up defensive positions along the rim of a hollow. ‘He decided to engage the approaching enemy troops, to the disgust of the rest of us,’ said Holmes. ‘I believe he was anxious to impress the partisans … we had done what we had been asked to do. Nothing would be gained by staying to fight.’13
The partisans, however, had no intention of staging a last stand. They took off up the mountainside and Lassen, realizing they were hopelessly outnumbered, ordered the SBS and LRDG to withdraw. Fred Leach was shot in the arm as he pulled back, and consequently was ‘not a lot of use’. He, Captain Skipworth, the Royal Engineer and a partisan were captured, fortunately by the Germans and not the Ustaše.*
The British prisoners were driven to Mostar, north of Dubrovnik, and there they were separated. ‘I was then taken to a room for questioning,’ recalled Leach. Waiting for him were three officers from the SS. ‘Having heard more than enough of the reputation of the SS I confess to being very unhappy indeed. However, these three turned out to be officers and gentlemen.’14 It appeared to Leach that the trio knew the war was lost and were anxious to curry favour with any Allied soldier they encountered. Above all, they were relieved to be in Yugoslavia and not Russia.
‘Having heard more than enough of the reputation of the SS I confess to being very unhappy indeed. However, these three turned out to be officers and gentlemen.’
Ron Crossfield
The LRDG continued to operate in Albania throughout September, with the ubiquitous Stan Eastwood blowing up roads, attacking vehicles and generally making a nuisance of himself at every opportunity. Despite his success, however, and that of other Rhodesian patrols, relations between the LRDG and the partisans were deteriorating. ‘Albania had been a very successful phase of LRDG operations, but that had been due more to their own initiative and exertion than to so-called cooperation of the partisans,’ commented Stuart Manning, the Southern Rhodesia observer. ‘Throughout the local commanders, themselves willing to cooperate and be generally helpful, were everlastingly ruled by orders from above, which, as had been the case in Yugoslavia territory, they carried out blindly.’15
Captioned ‘Dick, Joe, Dod, Skinny’, this photo was taken in Istria and shows Rhodesian members of the LRDG. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
By now it was evident to all – not just the three SS officers who questioned Sergeant Leach – that the Third Reich was crumbling. Squeezed on two fronts, Germany began recalling its troops from the Balkans to defend its border from the Soviet troops advancing westwards, who had already captured the Ploieşti airfields, entered Bucharest and made the first push into Yugoslavia. As German soldiers streamed north from Greece, through Albania and Yugoslavia, Winston Churchill demanded his chiefs of staff act quickly to ensure British troops reached Greece before the Soviets. The problem faced by Britain was a lack of resources; with so many soldiers fighting their way up Italy or across France, there simply were not enough troops in the Mediterranean theatre to meet Churchill’s insistence that a force of 5,000 march on Athens. Instead, an amalgamation of units was raised under the moniker Foxforce. Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Ronnie Tod of No. 9 Commando, Foxforce comprised the LRDG, SBS, Commandos, Greek Sacred Squadron and the Raiding Support Regiment. Tod was answerable to the 2nd Special Service Brigade, which came under overall control of Brigadier Davy’s Land Forces Adriatic.
On 15 September Foxforce occupied the island of Kythira, six miles south of the Peloponnese, the large peninsula in southern Greece. The island was a good place from which to launch operations on the Greek mainland and the British established a naval base on the south of the island. From here the SBS and LRDG began reconnoitring the islands in the Bay of Athens, eradicating the last pockets of resistance, before, on 24 September, it was deemed the Peloponnese was sufficiently clear of the enemy to land a 450-strong force – codenamed ‘Bucket Force’ – at Araxos airfield in a fleet of Dakotas.
A shave breaks the monotony of life on Istria. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
Lloyd Owen was asked to provide an LRDG patrol to act as Bucket Force’s ears and eyes as they advanced east from Araxos, so he called on John Olivey and his Rhodesian Z1 Patrol. Olivey’s 11 jeeps arrived in Greece by landing craft on 26 September, roaring ashore in their jeeps at Katakolon, 40 miles south of Araxos. The patrol soon became bogged down, however, Olivey noting as they drove north that ‘the roads [are] very bad after the recent rain’. Four of the jeeps in the patrol pulled trailers, on each of which was 1,000lb of equipment for Bucket Force, and within a day of landing Olivey began to doubt that all the vehicles would stand the ordeal if the condition of the roads did not improve.
On 30 September Olivey’s patrol arrived at Bucket Force’s Forward HQ, a few miles west of Patras. L Squadron of the SBS were positioned on the high ground overlooking the port, and their commander, Major Ian Patterson, was endeavouring to persuade the garrison of 900 Germans and 1,600 Greeks from a collaborationist security battalion to surrender. During the night of 3/4 October word reached Bucket Force HQ that the Germans had started withdrawing from Patras. At first light a patrol of the SBS, travelling in the LRDG jeeps, raced into the port and discovered that all but a German rearguard had indeed sailed out of Patras, heading east up the Gulf of Corinth towards the Corinth Canal.
The SBS and the LRDG now set off in pursuit of the Germans. In a convoy of jeeps they roared along the headland overlooking the gulf, a captured 75mm German field gun hitched to the back of one of the jeeps. ‘Chased the enemy who were withdrawing by boat,’ wrote Olivey in his log, ‘firing with .5 Browning and 75 mm gun, from positions on the Corinth Road.’16
They reached Corinth on 7 October, exchanged desultory fire with the Germans on the other side of the canal and then accepted the surrender of another battalion of Greek collaborators. From Corinth Olivey received instructions to push on to the town of Megara, several miles to the north-east over a mountain road, but to leave two jeeps’ worth of men in Corinth to help in the clearance of German mines. Olivey’s Z1 Patrol reached Megara on 9 October and at dawn the next day assisted an SBS unit to ‘blow the escape road that the enemy were using’. With that done, they set about preparing a landing strip for the arrival of the 4th Independent Parachute Brigade led by Colonel George Jellicoe. They dropped into Megara on 12 October, a day when the wind was particularly stiff. ‘We were rushed to Megara airfield to help by driving alongside the paratroopers on the ground with open chutes, swinging left or right to collapse the chutes, to enable them to get to their feet,’ re
called Tommy Haddon, a Rhodesian trooper in Z1 Patrol. ‘Even so, many parachutes were not collapsing and men were swept onto the rocks along the coast running alongside the airfield.’17
The next day, 13 October, Z1 Patrol was among the first Allied troops to enter the Greek capital. ‘We proceeded over the Corinth Canal to Athens in convoys,’ recalled Haddon, ‘all the way being greeted by singing and joyful Greeks, shouting words of welcome.’18 Once in Athens, Haddon and Z1 checked into the Grand National Hotel, though it wasn’t for long. They were soon billeted in less salubrious surrounds – the old Ford factory on the main road to Piraeus.
A group of partisans on Istria. The female fighters were often more ferocious than the men. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
Foxforce was now subsumed into ‘Pompforce’, a 1,000-strong amalgamation of the LRDG, SBS, 4th Independent Parachute Battalion, a unit from the RAF Regiment and a battery of 75mm guns. Commanded by Jellicoe, ‘Pompforce’ drove north towards Larissa, driving past the detritus of a large-scale German retreat. Glimpses of the Germans were rare, and what resistance was encountered was quickly crushed, as at Kozani and Florina.
John Olivey’s patrol ‘proceeded south of Florina and harassed the withdrawing enemy and proceeded to the flat country … firing at a range of 2,000 yards, at the enemy force withdrawing up the Florina–Havrokhoma Road. Florina was occupied/captured at 1600 hours.’19 Hours after the capture of Florina, Jellicoe received a signal ‘instructing us not to go into Yugoslavia or Albania, presumably as a result of a pact with the Russians’.
An LRDG soldier (left) with two partisans on one of the Adriatic islands in the spring of 1945. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
At the end of October Lloyd Owen withdrew most of the LRDG patrols from Albania, leaving behind Eastwood ‘chasing the enemy where he could’. Much of his work was calling up air strikes on retreating Germans, such as the convoy moving south to reinforce the town of Tirana. Having first blown a bridge with his patrol, Eastwood radioed the RAF, who attacked the convoy as it waited for the bridge to be repaired. The convoy of ‘1,500 men, a few tanks, guns, MT and horse-drawn vehicles’ was all but wiped out. Tirana subsequently fell to the partisans on 17 November, and a fortnight later Eastwood’s patrol finally withdrew after four months of superlative work that only a unit with the LRDG’s unique skills could have accomplished. Eastwood had been awarded a Military Cross for leading the raid on the observation post in Orso Bay, and his sergeant, Andy Bennett, was decorated for his work in Albania, the citation for his Military Medal describing his role during a battle with 200 Germans on the Elbasan-Tirana road:
In a battle lasting some hours he showed magnificent courage under extremely heavy fire. He refused to leave his position only a few hundred yards from the road and thus enabled the combined force to compel the enemy to withdraw, leaving behind eighty dead and much valuable equipment. During the whole of these operations Bennett displayed great gallantry under fire.20
Back in Greece, the Germans had been chased out of the country by November and on the 12th of the month the LRDG, together with the SBS, returned south to Athens for what they imagined would be some well-earned rest and recuperation. Greece, its islands and its people, were hugely popular with both units, and in the preceding 15 months a strong bond had developed between the British special forces and the Greeks. It was a bond forged in war, unbreakable, or so the British assumed.
But it was quickly apparent in Athens that the indolent days of the past had evaporated. The antagonism was palpable between the government of ‘National Unity’, who were pro-monarchy, and EAM, the predominantly communist National Liberation Front, whose military wing was ELAS, the Greek People’s Liberation Army. At first it was assumed that the trouble could be easily contained by the Greek authorities, and so Major Stormonth Darling led B Squadron (who had also been in Greece) back to Italy on the same day that John Olivey’s Z1 Patrol arrived back in Athens, the men relishing the ten days’ leave they had been promised.
An aerial reconnaissance of Zara harbour, from where the Royal Navy departed to attack German shipping identified by the LRDG shipping watches. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
On 13 November leave was cancelled because of ‘trouble, which was expected from ELAS’, and six days later the LRDG were placed under the command of 23rd Armoured Brigade. A short while later they moved their base to Osiphoglion Orphanage, on the main road to Athens, but they rarely ventured out, their presence more symbolic than practical. Tommy Haddon ‘witnessed many sordid events, as one does in a civil war’, and it was Captain Stuart Manning’s job to condense an unpleasant few weeks into a report on Z1 Patrol’s stay in Athens.
They were in Athens when the trouble with ELAS started and their jeep patrols rescued police from posts under fire and raided an ELAS headquarters to capture petrol and arms. Several of the party were wounded and had to be evacuated. A Greek National Guard was then being hurriedly formed, and the Rhodesians and their colleagues helped to train them while assisting in maintaining order in Athens and the neighbourhood.21
When the LRDG visited Zara, 200 miles north of Dubrovnik, it bore the scars of heavy fighting. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
In December ELAS began to consider the British fair game. On the 11th an LRDG truck taking sick men to the 97 General Hospital was ambushed. No one was killed, but one of the LRDG men in the cab was hit in the shoulder. ELAS claimed later it was a case of mistaken identity, they’d thought it was a pro-Royalist vehicle, but later on the same day John Olivey and his driver, Artie Botha, drove into Athens to stock up on supplies. As they turned up a quiet side street, a machine gun opened up from a window above. Botha was shot in the head and Olivey hit as he dragged his wounded driver to cover. The pair were rushed to the 97 General Hospital but Botha died on the operating table. Olivey was evacuated to Italy by air, and doubtless as he left behind Greece the irony wasn’t lost on him that he had come through four years of fighting the Germans and Italians with barely a scratch, only to be shot by people who were supposed to be on the same side.
C HAPTER 17
UNTIL THE BITTER END
The LRDG withdrew from Athens at the end of 1944 and returned to their base in Italy. It had been a dispiriting few weeks in the Greek capital, and the Balkans campaign had had its unsavoury moments too. It made the veterans of the North African campaign appreciate the desert and its indigenous people all the more; no politics there, no treachery or deceit from spiteful, small-minded, self-important panjandrums.
The LRDG are forced once more to dig out a vehicle, but on this occasion on the Riete to Aguila Road in Italy, January 1945, it’s snow rather than sand causing the problem. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
Nonetheless, the LRDG wouldn’t have swapped roles with any other army unit. They enjoyed their existence and appreciated their life. ‘Firstly,’ commented David Lloyd Owen, ‘we practically never suffered the horror of a heavy barrage, the menace of a bombing raid or the carnage of the infantry run over by tanks. We did not live with constant gunfire, in touch with an enemy a few hundred yards away.’1 But the real beauty of serving in the LRDG, considered Lloyd Owen, was that one was among like-minded fellows, who chaffed at the pettiness of army routine and sought not medals or glory but adventure. Above all, ‘no one depended on us save ourselves. Our failure would reflect on us alone. We could move largely where we wished, and not just in conformity with some wider plan. There was no front line for us, because we were always behind and among the enemy.’2 Yet by the very nature of their existence, the LRDG sometimes found themselves confronted with dangers no British infantryman would have encountered.
These two photographs, believed to be somewhere in the Balkans in the winter of 1944/45, show some LRDG men loading an aircraft with one of their jeeps prior to their return to Italy. (Courtesy of the SAS Regimental Archive)
As the war entered its final year, the LRDG were scattered among the Dalmatian I
slands, observing enemy troop and shipping movements from well-situated vantage points. One such patrol was situated on Ist, a sparsely populated island just 3¾ miles square that lay 20 miles west of the city of Zadar on the Croatian coast. Codenamed Kickshaw, the 14-man patrol drawn from both Y1 and Y2 was commanded by Sergeant Anthony ‘Tich’ Cave, one of the very first recruits to Y Patrol exactly four years earlier.
‘Life on Ist was pretty good and light-hearted,’ remembered Corporal Gilbert Jetley. ‘The locals were extremely friendly and their loyalty extended to learning the patriotic song of the Allies.’3 The men of Y Patrol allowed their mischief to get the better of them one day, tricking the locals into learning the words to ‘She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain’ in the belief it was the British national anthem. They all then stood solemnly to attention, the British saluting the Union Flag while the villagers sang the words of the folk song with due reverence.
On the evening of 10 January, most of the patrol were in their billet playing cards. It was 2115 hours and Cave was about to turn in for the night. Suddenly he heard four shots. Thinking it might be the MFV La Palma arriving at the jetty, Cave went outside, but saw no lights in the sea, nor did he notice anything untoward coming from the radio room where he knew Ken Smith, the signaller, and Jock Watson to be. He returned to the billet and went upstairs to bed. Jetley, who was sick in bed with a fever, pieced together subsequent events from the testimony of his comrades. ‘Something disturbed Watson and he went to the front door,’ recounted Jetley. ‘As he opened it, he heard something clank behind it. He saw that it was a large time bomb, which was ticking. There was a booster of extra explosive alongside in a canister.’4
The Long Range Desert Group in World War II Page 19