by Tom Keene
We had to cut and run … No way we could have got the Commandos back. One of the chaps tried to swim out. We heard them in the water but they were too far off for us to do anything and by that time we’d got a searchlight on us and we couldn’t rescue them.23
A mile eastwards and then they altered course north, deliberately cutting across the top of a German minefield to ensure they were back in the safety of home waters before dawn broke. What passed between Lt Bourne and Capt. Appleyard on the bridge as MTB 344 bashed home during that miserable return with dawn lightning the sky off the starboard beam is not recorded. Perhaps they shared little more than silence as each absorbed the impact of such sudden, catastrophic loss; perhaps they discussed the possibility of a swift return on another night, infrared contact light burning at the masthead, to pick up survivors who, even now, might be going to ground to await rescue in a day or two. There would have been time to spare for such thoughts, such discussion; under-powered and on only one engine, MTB 344 made only 12 knots as she limped back across the Channel in a lumpy sea and swell with the wind now rising F4. She docked at Portsmouth at 1035.
Hobbling ashore, Appleyard made his way to HMS Hornet to make that initial single page, raid notification report to C-in-C Portsmouth. He then caught the late morning train to London to report directly to Brigadier Gubbins at SOE Headquarters in Baker Street. After that, he knew, there would be other people he would have to inform. For the sensitive young officer who had just lost all his closest friends, it was the end of what must surely have been the most harrowing twelve hours of his life.
By then it was mid-morning in Normandy, too. Company Sergeant Major Tom Winter had been dragged to the local command post. There he had found Captain The Lord Howard lying wounded on the floor. There too was André Desgrange who was unhurt. All three were told they were to be shot. There was no sign of the others.
Not all had struggled ashore to capture the previous night. Capt. Graham Hayes – always a strong swimmer – had worked out his own salvation and, jettisoning his weapons, had swum away from the lights westwards up the coast. He had then landed near Vierville-sur-Mer, crawled ashore, walked inland and presently found warmth and refuge with a brave French farmer. It would be the first stage of a lengthy and courageous escape attempt.
The Germans reported Lt Tony Hall dead. In truth, he was lying unconscious in a German hospital with a serious head wound that would lead to his eventual repatriation. Capt. Burton, Private Hellings and Private Orr initially evaded capture. John Burton’s widow recalled:
The Germans had the beach very well defended and the raid was a disaster. John, a Dutchman [Hellings] and a Pole [Orr] managed to get off the beach and swim for the MTB but that was under such heavy gunfire that it had to leave before they could reach it. They swam down the coast for some way and then went ashore. In the daytime they hid and were given clothes and food by the French, and at night they walked. One night they walked right into a German patrol [Fallschirmjager on exercise], so that was the end of that. They had been trying to get to the Spanish border, but found out that they had been going round in circles. They were handed over to the SS who put them up against a wall and said they were going to shoot them but then, for some unknown reason, changed their minds. John was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Germany. He didn’t know what happened to the other two.24
Jan Hellings and Adam Orr had been captured near Rennes. Adam Orr – alias Polish Jew Abraham Opoczynski – was sent to Dachau concentration camp and from there to the Bad Tolz Kommando, an SS work camp. He died on 12 April 1945, aged 23, and is buried in the military cemetery in Durnbach, 30 miles from Munich. Jan Hellings was sent to two different Stalags, one of which was in Fallingbostel, Lower Saxony. He appears to have survived the war.25
Major Gustavus March-Phillipps (34), Serjeant Alan Williams (22) and Private Richard Lehniger (42) were all dead, killed by gunshot wounds and/or drowning.
‘The next morning I was taken out and had to drag up the beach the bodies of Major March-Phillipps, Sgt Williams and Pte Leonard,’ reported Tom Winter many months later:
I had not seen or heard anything further of the fate of Lt. Hall, only that the Germans reported him as dead and brought in his shoulder titles. I was taken back to the headquarters again, where we waited for a lorry to take us to Caen. The bodies were taken away and buried at St. Laurent, according to an Intelligence officer. Lord Howard had been taken to hospital during the night and Lt. Desgrange and I were taken to Caen in the charge of a guard and the Intelligence Officer, where we underwent a very stiff interrogation.26
Winter was kept at Caen for eight days. When he was escorted up to the hospital to see Captain The Lord Howard recovering from his wound he found Lt Tony Hall, still unconscious. After the war, Winter, the man who had moved March-Phillipps’ body, was asked about the manner in which the Major had met his end: ‘It’s been said that he drowned, but I don’t think so. I am sure that he died of wounds.’27
Marjorie March-Phillipps heard the news of her husband’s death at Dunham Massey where she had started her parachute course. She was also – although she did not know it at the time – two months pregnant with her daughter Henrietta: ‘I knew something had gone wrong. Anyway, we did our training and then on Monday evening somebody had left the evening paper and I found this paper and I saw the paragraph which was a German communique …’28
That communiqué, issued at 1250 on 14 September by the Official German News Agency stated:
During the night of the 12–13 September, a British landing party, consisting of five officers, a Company Sergeant Major and a private, tried to make a footing on the French Channel coast, east of Cherbourg. Their approach was immediately detected by the defence. Fire was opened on them and the landing craft was sunk by direct hits. Three English officers and a de Gaullist Naval officer were taken prisoner. A Major, a Company Sergeant Major and a Private were brought to land dead.29
Appleyard returned to Anderson Manor. Among those who greeted his return, anxious for news, was James Edgar:
Appleyard told me that the whole outfit were to look at the horizon where they were landing to see if there was a break in the horizon, a dip in it, up which they were possibly able to make their way inland. And Appleyard told me that, if they didn’t find that little dip, silhouetted, as it were, they were to put off the operation. Well, this is what Appleyard told me himself. And March-Phillipps didn’t obey their original plan … We were simply told by Appleyard that they had all been shot up. A Verey light was sent up by the Germans – that’s what did for them … Appleyard was quite devastated, there’s no doubt about it.30
Peter Kemp remembered the mood amongst the men when the news broke at Anderson Manor:
We had been prepared for casualties, but not for such a catastrophe as this. The death of the gallant idealist and strange, quixotic genius who had been our commander and our inspiration, together with the loss of so many good friends, all in the space of a few hours, was a crippling calamity which nearly put an end to our activities. Indeed, it probably would have done so but for the energetic reaction of Appleyard who refused to let our grief for our comrades arrest his determination to avenge them.31
James Edgar was right. Some time later Appleyard wrote to Major Cholmondeley, the man whose manor house home they had appropriated with such high hopes back in March and admitted:
His death was a tremendous blow to me … Gus meant a very great deal to me and he was my closest personal friend. We had been together for over two years and the occasion when he was killed was the one and only occasion in all that time that we were not actually alongside each other in every ‘party’.32
Now, for Appleyard, there was a debt to settle, a dead friend to avenge. There would be another raid. Soon.
Notes
1. PhotoRecon pic in DEFE 2/365.
2. DEFE 2/109.
3. BBC Henrietta.
4. Ibid.
5. Audio tape loaned to the author by the family
.
6. BBC Henrietta.
7. No Colours or Crest, 57.
8. German wartime meteorological charts kindly made available by the Met. Office, Exeter.
9. Tony Hall. BBC Henrietta.
10. DEFE 2/365.
11. Ibid.
12. Tom Winter statement in DEFE 2/365.
13. Geoffrey, 124.
14. Tom Winter statement in DEFE 2/365.
15. ‘If I Must Die …’, Fournier and Heintz.
16. Tony Hall. BBC Henrietta.
17. Anders Lassen, 108.
18. DEFE 2/365.
19. Lord Francis Howard. BBC Henrietta.
20. DEFE 2/365.
21. Appleyard after-action report written at HMS Hornet directly after he had returned from the failure of Operation Aquatint. In DEFE 2/365.
22. Lt Freddie Bourne interview. IWM 11721.
23. Ibid.
24. Anders Lassen, 111–12.
25. ‘If I Must Die …’, 231.
26. Tom Winter statement post Operation Aquatint. In DEFE 2/365.
27. Anders Lassen, 110.
28. BBC Henrietta.
29. DEFE 2/365.
30. James Edgar interview with the author, 2012.
31. No Colours or Crest, 58.
32. Geoffrey, 133.
15
Loss and Condolence
When Appleyard reported back to COHQ in London on the disaster that was Operation Aquatint, there was an extensive debrief. That same day Combined Operations’ Intelligence Officer GSO2 Major Ian Collins issued a memorandum entitled: ‘Lessons Learnt and Notes for Future Consideration Ref: S.S.R.F.’1
Top of the list of twelve points was a statement of the painfully obvious that ‘The risk of carrying out a frontal assault even on a supposedly lightly defended objective is considerable.’ Having stated that the plan had to be changed once it was found impossible to identify the small beach and narrow gully that had been their primary landing objective, Collins went on to note the need for choosing a landing place where ‘a safe and quick get away can be effected’. With hindsight, it should perhaps have been noted at the early planning stage that, on the exposed Normandy coast, there were likely to be precious few of those once the German defences had been alerted and started putting flares or starshell up over the flat and open sea. Yet alerting the German defences was the implicit and desired consequence of all such raids. In any event, noted Collins, the raiding force should in future be backed up by two Goatleys, not just one.
There should also be an agreed recovery plan in case raiding parties got left behind. Lt Bourne and Capt. Appleyard received a mild rap over the knuckles for hazarding their boat: ‘MTB incurred too great a risk in lying so close off-shore and was lucky not to be sunk’, but there was praise for their navigation throughout which he described as ‘excellent’. At that early stage the morning after the raid, however, the true extent of the navigational error that put the Goatley so far west of their objective had yet to be realised.
News of the disaster that had befallen the men of Operation Aquatint – that the entire raiding party of six officers and five other ranks were now to be posted missing – was distributed four days later by Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Chief of Combined Operations. Stating that ‘it is particularly requested, for operational reasons, that further circulation of this report may be severely restricted’,2 Mountbatten sent it to the C-in-Cs Portsmouth, Plymouth, Portland and Dover, to Gubbins at SOE, to their friend and mentor Brigadier Robert ‘Lucky’ Laycock at the newly formed SS Brigade and to the Air Officer Commanding Nos 11 and 12 Group, Royal Air Force. It was also circulated to a host of smaller commands and organisations.
Two days later Mountbatten made time to write another, more private letter in his own hand. It was to Marjorie, the newly widowed wife of Gus March-Phillipps. By then his death, at least, had been confirmed. Mountbatten wrote to her at the home she and Gus had just made in Alford Street:
I write to you to express my deep sympathy in the loss of your husband.
There is little I can say except to tell you of our impressions of him during the short time he operated under my command and it is because these impressions were so strong that I wish to write to you.
He was convinced that the spirit that had led so many Englishmen into many dangerous ventures was still alive and his determination to attack the enemy and carry out the kind of raids he had in mind was so strong that he overcame every obstacle; and having done so carried out three brilliant and successful raids.
This success was very largely due to his own skill and leadership and to the fine spirit he had infused into the special force he commanded. We can ill afford to lose someone of his character and ability.
Both myself and my staff had grown personally very fond of him during the short time we came to know him. We shall miss him very much, and I would like to express our sympathy to yourself in your greater loss.
Yours sincerely
Louis Mountbatten3
There was also the standard war casualty letter of elegant condolence from King George VI:
The Queen and I offer you our heartfelt sympathy in your great sorrow.
We pray that your country’s gratitude for a life so nobly given in its service may bring you some measure of consolation.
George RI
Gustavus March-Phillipps had been a firebrand patriot seemingly from an earlier, Elizabethan age who had marched to the beat of Drake’s drum. Once he had nursed plans to raid Harfleur on St Crispin’s Day, the anniversary of the battle of Agincourt. Now, the inspirational, short-tempered visionary who Peter Kemp said combined ‘the idealism of a Crusader with the severity of a professional soldier’, the former novelist who had knelt by his bed in prayer each night, was gone.
Peter Kemp wrote to Marjorie:
[A]lthough I only knew him for so short a time, he made an impression on me that will last all my life. His sincerity, personality and power of leadership, his magnificent ideals and his personal charm and kindness made him one of the finest men I have ever had the privilege of knowing and I am proud to have served under him.4
According to one account, Lassen sensed his leader’s death. He had been granted weekend leave and had spent the night at the home of a Mrs Knight in Bournemouth. Earlier that evening he had taken to pacing the room restlessly and gazing out at the weather. In the middle of the night he had woken up ‘with a loud yell’ convinced, in that moment, that Gus had been killed.5
Desmond Longue remembered March-Phillipps from the Postmaster days: ‘He was a tremendous patriot. Almost to … to the point that one looked at him and wondered whether he was really true.’ Henrietta, the daughter he would now never see, agreed: ‘Yes – sometimes I wondered if Gus and Apple were really true too – they were so very idealistic – above all, so very patriotic. Looking back from now it would be easy to laugh.’6 The nervous ex-Indian Army officer who kept himself dosed with Sanatogen and whose papers included a 1938 certificate from the Pelman Institute for ‘The Scientific Development of Mind and Memory’, the Elizabethan buccaneer born into the wrong age, left a legacy that perhaps echoes some of that ambivalence expressed to Brigadier Gubbins by Julius Hanau in London before Operation Postmaster. What was it that made Gus March-Phillipps impressive, enabled him to elicit such fierce loyalty from some men and yet repel others in equal measure?
‘I’ve spent … I suppose I’ve spent thirty years it is now, jolly nearly, trying to work out the answer to that question and one knows that one invents all sorts of false reasons,’ reflected Jan Nasmyth in 1972:
One thinks of him as being a great commander and a great leader of men and that sort of thing … But in many ways he wasn’t. In many ways he was an extremely bad one. I’ve met people who said they couldn’t get on with him at all, and some people thought he was a snob, obviously, and other people said he’s so nervy that he had a terrible effect on people, and he certainly did that to me. I mean, in the end I quit the outfit becaus
e I was more or less nervously demoralised by Gus. He had this terrible temper, besides being very nervous. But – and I think, you see, it’s very hard to describe – that Gus seemed to be able to live almost an inspired life at times. These were times when he had reached some sort of level of balance inside himself.7
Tony Hall, the man left on the beach in Normandy after being struck on the head by a German stick grenade as he tried to grab a prisoner during Aquatint had no such ambivalence, no such doubts, not even thirty years later:
He [Gus] somehow wrapped up for one all that one loved in this country and all that one loved when going to the aid of other people. He represented to me exactly what I wanted for one and a half years … I wanted a hero to lead me. And he was a hero.8
In Africa, Gus March-Phillipps had sometimes whiled away the hours of boredom writing poems. Perhaps one of these might stand as his epitaph:
If I must die in this great war
When so much seems in vain
And man in huge unthinking hordes
Is slain as sheep are slain
But with less thought: then do I seek
One last good grace to gain
Let me die, Oh Lord, as I learned to live
When the world seemed young and gay
And ‘Honour Bright’ was a phrase they used
That they do not use today
And faith was something alive and warm
When we gathered round to pray
Let me be simple and sure once more
Oh Lord, if I must die
Let the mad unreason of reasoned doubt
Unreasoning, pass me by,
And the mass mind, and the mercenary,