by Tom Keene
At least one senior naval officer put the delay in large part down to March-Phillipps’ administrative incompetence and his apparent inability to work through proper naval channels. Commodore John Hughes-Hallett RN, a strict, unmarried disciplinarian allegedly known to his subordinates as ‘Hughes-Hitler’ was, in spring 1942, Mountbatten’s naval adviser at Combined Operations Headquarters. Later that summer he would become Naval Force Commander for the ill-fated Dieppe raid in August 1942. Hughes-Hallett was later to claim that for some weeks, after providing SSRF with the boats they required, ‘nothing happened’. He added:
As far as I know, the chief difficulty before had lain in the inability of the Small-Scale raiders to produce an operation order in a form which would inspire reasonable confidence! … We did find it necessary to go into considerable detail in connection with navigational problems and escort and cover, and it was not in the least surprising that SSRF should have failed to achieve anything so long as they were entirely independent.32
Condescending to a fault, Commodore, later Vice Admiral, Hughes-Hallett RN and the unconventional men of the Small Scale Raiding Force were to clash again later that summer.
Meanwhile, Appleyard was becoming increasingly frustrated, not simply by the continuing absence of any raids to chalk up on a personal tally-board, but by the penny-packet thinking further up the command chain that lay behind the original concept that passed for raiding policy. Echoing March-Phillipps’ idea of a series of nightly raids along the whole coastline of enemy-occupied Europe, carried out by an ever-expanding chain of small scale raiding groups that would force the enemy to redeploy their forces in Europe and thus take pressure off Russian allies on the Eastern Front, Appleyard wrote home: ‘Personally, of course, I still feel strongly that at the present time our contribution to the European situation ought to be in the nature of a vast number of small raids up and down the length of the European coastline.’33 He expanded upon his ideas later that summer in a further letter to his father:
Every single little operation you go on helps. Every time you get that tight feeling round your heart and the empty feeling in your tummy, you are mentally and nervously tougher than the time before and so are better fitted for real continuous military action … No, it is not spirit we are lacking, but experience …
Well, I think I’ve burbled on long enough. You must be very tired of reading it!
God bless, Dad.
Very much love,
Geoff.34
June became July and July eased gently into August. It was time – and past time – for their first mission, their first pin-prick into the flank of the slumbering enemy. Now, at last, they were to have their chance. Their first raid took place on the night of 14–15 August 1942: Operation Barricade.
Notes
1. Geoffrey, 112.
2. HS 8/806.
3. HS 8/818.
4. HS 7/ 229.
5. BBC Henrietta.
6. Recollections courtesy of Philip Ventham.
7. No Colours Or Crest, Peter Kemp, 43.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 45–6.
11. Ibid.
12. HS 8/220.
13. Anders Lassen, 96.
14. Philip Ventham to author.
15. Geoffrey, 114.
16. Philip Ventham.
17. Anders Lassen, 98.
18. Ibid., 99.
19. Ibid., 101.
20. Anders Lassen, 94.
21. No Colours or Crest, 47.
22. HS 8/220.
23. Lt Freddie Bourne interview. IWM Audio No 11721.
24. Anders Lassen, 96–7.
25. Authorised, at Mountbatten’s request, for all Commandos in May 1942. Today, it remains the symbol of the completion of a rite of passage and lifelong membership of an elite fighting force.
26. Anders Lassen, 102.
27. BBC Henrietta.
28. Ibid.
29. HS 8/220.
30. No Colours Or Crest, 49.
31. DEFE 2/694.
32. Paper: ‘The Mounting of Raids’, by Vice-Admiral J. Hughes-Hallett, Journal of the United Services Institute, November 1950. Broadlands Papers, University of Southampton. Paper in MB1/BS8.
33. Geoffrey, 113.
34. Ibid., 121–3.
12
Raiders
It would be tempting to suppose that Gus March-Phillipps’ Small Scale Raiding Force was the only unit dedicated to raiding the enemy shoreline. That would be incorrect. Partly because of the original haste and confusion in which the role of raiding was conceived and allocated, many other units were also now sharpening their knives, oiling their weapons and waiting impatiently for the opportunity to take the fight to the enemy across the Channel. Amongst these were Gerald Montanaro’s No 101 Troop, Special Boat Section of No 2 Commando and the men of Nos 4, 9, 10 and 12 Commando, whilst as far back as February 1942 Major John Frost’s men of ‘C’ Company – it would later become 2 Para of the British 1st Airborne Division – had scored something of a coup by pulling off the successful Operation Biting against the German Wurzburg, short-range radar station at Bruneval on the French coast near Le Havre.
Operation Barricade was a second-hand raid originally intended for someone else; the subject of countless aerial reconnaissance sorties, it had been on the books for months, certainly since before the creation of the Small Scale Raiding Force. Since early summer 1942 the Germans had been building ship-locating stations along the Channel coast. Combined Operations’ Search Committee in Richmond Terrace – the group in COHQ responsible for choosing targets for Combined Operations’ raiders – decided that the locating station on Cap Barfleur, high on the top right-hand corner of the Cotentin peninsula due east of Cherbourg, would make a suitable target. Early in June the RAF flew three photographic reconnaissance missions and began building up a target dossier. As initially envisaged, the raid was to be anything but small: ‘not more than 120 men’1 were to be carried to the target area by an Infantry Assault Ship. They were to recce the area between Barfleur and St Vaast to the south. As originally conceived, the aim of the mission was to kill and capture German troops and destroy military installations, including a direction-finding station, anti-aircraft gun site and machine-gun nests approximately 800 yards from the beach. They might encounter perhaps as many as a company – 100 men – of German troops billeted at the nearby hamlet of Jonville to the north of St Vaast inland from Pointe de Saire. British forces, landing in eight assault craft carried to within 10 miles of the beach objective by HMS Prince Albert, would be supported by five gunboats as close escort and, during the withdrawal, by Intruder aircraft from No 11 Group. In addition to the fighting men from the East Yorks, who were scheduled to spend ‘not more than 76 minutes ashore’, there would be a Beach Gradient party, a representative of the Royal Engineers to report on the DF station and, finally, a gentleman of the press. In concept this might not be a large raid, like Dieppe or St Nazaire. But it was hardly small, either. Operational orders for this conspicuous, front-door attack on Hitler’s Festung Europa were issued as late as Friday, 17 July 1942.
And then, quite suddenly, Operation Barricade as originally envisaged simply disappeared, cancelled at the last moment by C-in-C Portsmouth, ostensibly because of the ever-present threat of interdiction by German E-boats. Now, instead of 120 men from a Yorkshire Infantry Regiment storming ashore from eight landing craft supported by Royal Navy gunships as they charged head-on into the teeth of waiting German machine-guns, there would be Major March-Phillipps and ten hand-picked men from Anderson Manor. They would slip ashore in silence from a single canvas-sided Goatley assault boat, powered only by wooden paddles that would be delivered close to the enemy shore, in darkness, by The Little Pisser. Sometimes, less really is more.
Operation Barricade, evidently, had been downgraded, its mission reduced to just three lines: ‘To carry out a reconnaissance raid on the French coast NW of Pointe de Saire and to capture and kill enemy
in A.A. gun-site.’
March-Phillipps picked his men. One of those left behind – cliff-scaling might have been involved and the man’s clumsiness on cliff-work had been noticed – was Peter Kemp: ‘With envy and anxiety we watched the party set out in the dusk for Gosport, each of them festooned with tommy-gun, Colt .45 automatic and hand grenades.’2
The eleven men of the Small Scale Raiding Force embarked at Gosport and set sail at 2045 in calm, cloudy weather. MTB 344 set direct course for Point de Barfleur. The engine broke down three times during that lonely passage and, even though they travelled at an average 18 knots, such delays while they lay dead in the water put them more than a hour behind schedule. There was another problem, too. MTB 344 carried no hand-bearing compass. Consequentially, every cross-bearing on the approaching coast-line had to be taken by immovable ship’s compass after slowing The Little Pisser to point her bows directly at the land. Meanwhile, the ship drifted helplessly in the tidal set. ‘The provision of a hand-bearing compass with light is strongly recommended for MTBs employed in such work’ March-Phillipps observed afterwards. ‘They are supplied by O.M. Watts.’
Three miles east of Barfleur the starboard engine was cut and the silent engine started. They then moved in to the drop-off point fighting a 2½-knot current. The Goatley was lowered over the side and the raiders clambered in for the three-quarters of a mile paddle to shore. With four men working on each side in absolute silence, wooden paddles dipping in silent rhythm to the dark sea, the approach took twenty long and exposed minutes. Passing between great outcrops of rock, the Goatley hissed at last up onto a gently shelving, sandy beach.
It is a mistake easily made when navigating at night both on land and at sea to make a mistake and then compound that error by forcing the land to fit expectations. Which is what happened now. Unbeknownst to March-Phillipps, the powerful current had set them almost a mile further north up the coast towards Barfleur. It was a navigational error whose importance would not be realised until they examined air photographs back at base once Operation Barricade was completed.
They had landed on a falling spring tide. Leaving the Goatley pulled up well below the high water line and with one man left behind to guard their only means of retreat, the remaining ten raiders set off briskly through the fields that bordered the shoreline. Then, suddenly, just beyond a low stone wall they ran into a barbed wire fence. There seemed to be a house beyond, but that was all. Cutting the wire carefully, they moved forward, cautiously aware that, if only by estimating the distance they had covered on foot, the enemy must now be very close. There were grazing cows tethered in the grass, moving restlessly as the intruders approached. The men thought they had perhaps been placed there to give warning of just such an advance. Then came another barbed wire fence with another house beyond, more sensed than seen in the darkness. Then they realised that the object in front of them was not a house at all but some military instrument, or wagon, even, covered with camouflage netting and that the second apron of wire covered an encampment of considerable size. Evidently, they were nowhere near their primary target, the anti-aircraft gun emplacement: ‘The head of a sentry, near what appeared to be a guard hut, was plainly visible and an assault was made immediately on the wire fence with the intention of attacking the encampment and destroying as much of it as possible. But the fence proved a formidable obstacle and at least fifteen minutes elapsed while the first half was being cut through.’3 British issue single-handed wire-cutters proved inadequate for the task, but they persevered. It was all they had: now the party divided and one section moved up [to] the fence with the intention of getting through it and attacking what seemed to be a large house further away to the right. This section returned with the report that the hut was the size of a hanger and it was then that the true size of the encampment was first realised.
It was still thought possible, however, to attack at any rate a section of it, and renewed efforts were made to cut a way through the fence but the noise was now attracting attention and the sentry was seen to go into the guard hut and return with other men. Finally, four men made a detour round the guard hut and approached the attacking party down the inside of the fence.
It was getting dangerously late by this time, and for this reason and because of the size and toughness of the fence it was decided to deal with the guard and return as quickly as possible to the boat. The party accordingly crawled towards the guard who was advancing very silently with rifles at the ready.4
The Germans approached and challenged once in a low voice. There was no response. The challenge was repeated, twice. Still no response. Now, the Germans’ slackness, their cautious movement towards an unidentified, underestimated threat with weapons which were not cocked, was to cost them their lives: ‘The guard had not got rounds in the breeches of their rifles, as when the challenge remained unanswered, rifle bolts could be heard being drawn back.’ They would have no more chances. The order was given to open fire as the bolts clicked back:
three plastic bombs landed right in the middle of the enemy together with a volley of tommy-guns and automatic fire. The effect of the plastic bombs was devastating. Altogether some five pounds of explosive went off within a few feet of the enemy and not a sound was heard afterwards but a few strangled coughs.5 Fire was then opened on other parts of the encampment which showed signs of activity and a retreat was made at the double to the boat.6
Apart from firing white Verey lights and the occasional rifle and pistol shot – no automatic weapons opened fire – March-Phillipps and his men made their way back to the boat on the beach without interference from the garrison they had ambushed. They had been ashore less than an hour. They made their way out to sea towards where they imagined MTB 344 was waiting but, once again, the set of tide and current were misjudged and it was not before 0345 that all were safely aboard the mother ship. The Little Pisser then made her way out to sea and raised St Catherine’s Head at 0700 the following morning. They made their way back to Anderson Manor where Peter Kemp was amongst those waiting to greet them: ‘before breakfast they returned, strained and exhausted but content with their night’s work … Although they had taken no prisoners, we all felt it was an encouraging start.’7
Writing up his after-action report on Operation Barricade, March-Phillipps estimated that three Germans had definitely been killed, with another three probably killed and a further three or four wounded ‘as the range was almost point blank’. One of the raiding force had been badly bruised after falling on a metal stake. There were no other British casualties. He went on:
Though the operation was only partly successful, because no prisoners were taken, it has proved beyond doubt that a handful of men and one M.T.B. can cause damage on the occupied coastline.
The casualties inflicted on the enemy were not heavy, but they were sufficient to have a very demoralising effect. It is doubtful if the Germans ever realised who or what was attacking them, as the explosion of the plastic bombs used was far exceeding their size. The M.T.B. commander, one mile away, reports seeing distinctly bits of debris flying up in the flames and smoke, and states that the explosion resembled that of a much heavier bomb.
At the time of writing March-Phillipps was evidently still unaware that they had overshot their intended target by almost a mile:
The navigation, with no more than a compass, was exceedingly accurate, and the actual target was only missed in the final approach. But this fact serves to show that a small party of determined men can find some target or other by moving along the coast … Small parties are better than large parties. It is not easy to keep touch in the dark and a large party of men cannot move quickly for this reason … The ideal size for such a party is ten or a dozen men and such a party can produce an effect out of all proportion to its size …
He concluded his first raid report with a plea for further expansion of a concept both he and Appleyard had come to believe in passionately:
The effect of such raids, though small in itself, [sic]
can be cumulative if they are continuous. If carried out frequently and over a wide area they would have a demoralising effect on the enemy and corresponding heartening effect on our own troops. They present the best form of training both for commandos and home forces.8
Operation Barricade took place on the night of 14–15 August 1942. Operation Jubilee, the raid on Dieppe, took place four days later. At least one source suggests that six members of SSRF took part in this raid as part of X Troop, a mixed party including, in addition to SOE, members of both MEW and SIS.9 Their task was to move ashore to the town hall and German headquarters behind the assaulting formations and remove documents and interesting pieces of German equipment. The failure of the main assault, however, also led to the failure of their mission. Yet one on-line unverifiable source10 suggests SSRF were there for a darker reason altogether, and that amongst those tasked to land at Dieppe was Freya radar expert, Flight Lieutenant Jack Nissenthall. His task – had the assault been a success – would have been to inspect and remove secret German Freya radar equipment from a nearby radar station on cliffs between Dieppe and Pourville. It was, it is claimed, vital that Nissenthall should not be captured – not, one may presume, because he might have told his captors why he was there but because, under interrogation, he might have disclosed to the Germans what Britain knew about the Wurgburg and Freya radars and the counter-measures, post-Operation Biting, that had been put in place. Nissenthall, it is claimed, carried a green cyanide capsule he was prepared to take in the event of imminent capture. To make certainty doubly sure, the claim stands that the SOE men from SSRF were there to act as both bodyguard and executioners, with orders to kill him if his capture appeared inevitable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no mention of this particular mission briefing in any of the SSRF papers seen by this author.11 In the event, Jack Nissenthall lived to return safely to England with members of No 4 Commando.