by Tom Keene
The Major gave orders that each man should take a room and all go in at the same time. I rushed into the room allotted to me and heard snoring. I switched on the light and saw a bed with a German asleep. The first thing I did was draw the curtains and tear the bedclothes off him. Half-asleep, he pulled them back again. I got the blankets off a second time and when he saw my blackened face he got a shock … I hit him under the chin with a knuckleduster and tied him up. Then I looked round the room for papers or cameras.
I got him to his feet still half-senseless and out into the corridor where Captain Pinckney, Andy and the others already stood; there were five prisoners all told. I covered them while the others searched the rooms once more and when this was done we took the prisoners outside.
When we were all outside, it happened. Until then, everything had gone fine but as soon as we were out in the moonlight they began to scream and shout, probably because they saw how few we were. All five of them had their hands tied behind their backs but they were not gagged. As soon as they started hollering we set about them with cuts and blows. Major Appleyard shouted: ‘Shut the prisoners up!’ and this began a regular fight.
I was not exactly sure what happened next as I had so much trouble with my prisoner – he had got his hands free and we were fighting. He was just on the point of getting away so I gave him a rugger tackle and we both fell to the ground. He got free again as he was much bigger than me but I grabbed at him and we rolled about in a cabbage patch. One of the officers shouted above the noise: ‘If they try to get away, shoot them.’
Captain Pinckney’s prisoner got free and started towards the hotel shouting at the top of his voice. The Captain went after him and a shot rang out. I had just about had enough of my German: I couldn’t manage him so I had to shoot him and found that the others were doing the same with their prisoners. All, that is, except Anders who still stood and held two Germans tightly.19
Operation Basalt was a raid that was to linger in the memory: ‘Years after the war I have had time to reflect on those moments, and situations like this are rarely understood by anyone who has never been in such a position,’ remembered ‘Stokey’ Stokes who was on the Basalt raid:
We were by now a small team of ten men, a long way from home on an enemy island miles away from our own transport facing a far superior force.
Anyone who has handled prisoners under combat conditions a long way from home on the enemy’s doorstep will know how hard this is. Especially when your prisoners know that you are outnumbered and outgunned, and that their lives are about to change forever one way or another. People can react to this in many different ways: some are subdued, which is what you hope for, others you know will fight. Once all Hell breaks loose there is only one way to deal with this and it is to be aggressive and controlling right from the start. It’s known as the shock of capture. You can’t fuck about.
Our job wasn’t to fight the whole island, our mission was to get prisoners home alive. By now everyone was being alerted to our position and we had only seconds in which to decide what to do. In the chaos two more German soldiers were killed leaving two … both of these men had been properly restrained with their hands tied. One of them was completely subdued, the other struggled wildly in response to the loud and approaching sounds of his fellow comrades who were now heading in our direction.
We were told to bugger off and make haste back to the boat. I moved towards the front of the party with two of us forcibly taking control of the first POW. What seemed like a few seconds later we heard an almighty ruckus behind us and another shot was fired.20
Fighting his way through the thick gorse on the way back to the elusive Hog’s Back, Corporal James Edgar heard the shots:
I discovered there was very, very thick gorse in front of me – shockingly sharp gorse and so I just dived into it and forced myself right through it. Whilst I’m going through it I hear: bang-bang, bang-bang, bang-bang, bang-bang and I said to myself: Oh, the boys have met up with them.21
Bombardier Redborn recalled:
More shots rang out with shouting and screaming. It was a hell of a rumpus and lights were coming on in the hotel. Anders, who had now freed himself of his prisoners, wanted to throw some grenades through the hotel windows but Major Appleyard said no, keep them, we may need them later. By now Germans were pouring out of the hotel and, when we saw how many of them there were, we decided to get away. We still had one prisoner who had seen what we had done to the others and he was stiff with fright and did everything we told him.
The most important thing now was to get back to the boat as quickly as possible. The island was waking up and the German headquarters was like a wasps’ nest. How we ran.22
Inexplicably, there were no shots, no sounds of pursuit. Racing back to the clifftop in the moonlight, Lassen brought up the rear and helped Private Smith who had been wounded. The exhausted, terrified and bespectacled German prisoner, Obergefreiter Weinrich, floundered along surrounded by the ten fit, black-faced raiders and was dragged down the cliffs and bundled into the Dory. The rest of the party scrambled in without incident and paddled away from the shore. Once aboard MTB 344, her silent engine started, The Little Pisser slipped away unscathed into the darkness. In their haste to get away the raiders left behind two commando knives, a Sten magazine, a pistol, a pair of wire cutters, torches, a woollen cap, a scarf and several toggle ropes. All these items were recovered by the Germans now busy working their way along the Hog’s Back to Pointe Chateau.
Operation Basalt was over. Not a man of the raiding party had been lost. But the controversy surrounding its execution was about to begin.
By binding the hands of prisoners who were then shot, Major Appleyard and his men presented the Germans with a propaganda opportunity they would not be slow to exploit: the Third Geneva Convention of 1929 – today’s expanded protocols only came into force in 1949 – states that non-combatants, combatants who have laid down their arms and combatants who are hors de combat due to wounds, detention or any other cause shall, in all circumstances, be treated humanely. It also states, quite specifically, that they shall not be subjected to outrages upon personal dignity, nor to humiliating and degrading treatment. Geneva protocols might be light years removed from the horrors of death at dagger-point and the close-quarter mayhem of a night raid on Sark, but those were precisely the Rights the Convention sought to enshrine. Now, those Rights had been abused. And the incontrovertible evidence lay there, tied and crumpled, in the chill light of dawn.
One sentry, Obergefreiter Peter Oswald, had been stabbed to death by Lassen; Bombardier Redborn had shot his prisoner and Capt. Patrick Dudgeon, it appeared, had been responsible for the death of a third. According to Ian Warren, an SSRF Officer who was not on the raid to Sark but who discussed it the next day with Capt. Dudgeon back at Anderson Manor: ‘He hit his prisoner with the barrel of his pistol, not the butt – and, forgetting his finger was on the trigger, blew the top of the German’s head off.’23
The German cemetery at Fort George on Guernsey reveals the plain headstones of the three German Engineers who died that night: Unteroffizier August Bleyer, aged 28, Gefreiter Heinrich Esslinger, aged 30, and Obergefreiter Peter Oswald, aged 36. German records also show that a Gefreiter Just was found, slightly wounded and that a fifth man, Gefreiter Klotz, was discovered, naked but unharmed, in a garden. The sixth man was the prisoner, Engineer Obergefreiter Weinrich, soon safely back in England.24
Lassen’s biographer, Mike Langley, writing in 1987, claimed that the tying of prisoners was standard practice with SSRF and that they were issued with strong grey cord specifically for that purpose. James Edgar claims they used fishing line. It was also claimed by the Germans that the prisoners were gagged but Lassen allegedly countered: ‘It’s not true we stuffed their mouths with mud. We used grass.’25 Appleyard, the commanding officer who gave the order for the prisoners to be tied, makes no mention of this in any of his reports whilst stating that, after attempting to escape, four priso
ners were shot and killed.
The Germans made much of their discoveries, linking the dead prisoners on Sark with the tying of prisoners on the Dieppe raid six weeks earlier and the capture of an unarmed combat leaflet showing exactly how a prisoner could be restrained without the use of ropes in such a way that the cramp which ensued would bring about his own death. At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1946, Generaloberst Alfred Jodl referred to all three incidents – Dieppe, Sark and Fairbairn’s ‘Grapevine’ technique – in an attempt to justify Hitler’s top secret Kommandobefehl (commando order), which demanded that all captured commandos should be executed immediately on capture. It availed him little.26
The German press ran with the story; the British press published their sanitised version of events and made much of Germany’s plans – discovered on the raid – to deport men from Guernsey, Jersey and Sark to Germany as forced labour: ‘Afterwards, we never thought any more about the significance of what we had done until the Press took it up,’ admitted Bruce Ogden-Smith, one of those who took part in the raid.27
Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations, was quick to distance himself from Appleyard’s actions once the German account of the raid became known, writing:
I specifically told Major Appleyard (if my memory serves me right) before he undertook the raid on Sark that he was not to tie the hands of any of his prisoners. Unfortunately this order was disregarded … One of the prisoners gave out a great cry for help and ran away in the dark. The Commandos shot him as he ran. The others were brought back to safety with their hands bound. Their hands were immediately untied when they got into the boat.28
Yet, according to Appleyard’s report, Obergefreiter Weinrich embarked alone. The Germans, it appears, were not the only artful dissemblers of misinformation.
MTB 344 returned without incident and docked at 0630 at Portland, where lorries were waiting to take them back to Anderson Manor. ‘I hadn’t been on the raid and was still asleep when they got back,’ recalled Ian Warren. ‘Andy woke me. He held his unwiped knife under my nose and said: ‘Look – blood.’29
Anders Lassen would not survive the war. Promoted Major and the recipient, by then, of the Military Cross with two bars, he would be killed with the Special Boat Squadron in Comacchio, northern Italy, on 9 April 1945, aged just 24. He would die, at night, on an ill-considered, unrecced mission storming a chain of successive German machine-gun emplacements on a narrow causeway. For this – and perhaps, for much else – the blonde Dane who had once killed a deer with a knife and who had stalked Obergefreiter Peter Oswold with such swift and savage efficiency, would be awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.
German forces in Italy surrendered on 29 April 1945: the peace Anders Lassen would never know had been less than a month away. A legend in his own short life-span, Lassen was thus spared the challenges and confusions of peacetime adjustment, when nations sometimes turn their back on the killers that become heroes and the conduct that wins wars.
Capt. Patrick Dudgeon, the officer whose pistol went off by accident when he struck his prisoner outside the Sark Annexe, would also not live to see the end of the war. He would die as part of Operation Speedwell, a mission by 2 SAS, in September 1943.
Dropped hundreds of miles behind the German lines in Spezia, Italy, and tasked with disrupting rail links south, he and SAS Trooper Bernard Brunt, 21, were captured near Parma on 2 October 1943. According to the German officer interpreter, Capt. Dudgeon was ‘the bravest of English Officers I met in all my life’. Questioned about his mission, Dudgeon countered: ‘If you were my prisoner, would you betray your country talking about your mission?’ Both victims of Hitler’s post-Basalt commando order, they were then told that – with regret – they were likely to be shot. ‘All right,’ responded 23-year-old Dudgeon, ‘I’ll die for my country.’
In a letter written after the war to Patrick Dudgeon’s parents by interpreter Leutnant Victor Schmit to honour a pledge made to the condemned man, he wrote: ‘When my Captain had withdrawn I sat beside your son on the straw and we were speaking together all night long.’ They chatted about their childhood and youth, about military traditions and about English literature and history. When they parted they shook hands and Lt Schmit saluted both soldiers, clicking his heels. Once more Dudgeon was interrogated, this time by Divisional Commander General Von Zielberg. Again, nothing was divulged:
Your son saluted militarily and left the General. He asked me to stay with him until it would be over. He gave me your address and asked me to inform you. He asked for a Protestant priest. Before he died he asked to die with free hands and open eyes. He knelt down for a short while praying with his hands in front of his face. Then he got up and died like a hero … At the end, after praying and looking at the shooting squad with a defiant expression in his face, several seconds before the execution order was given, Patrick Dudgeon began to sing ‘God Save The King’ in a loud voice, the private following him in doing so, which was touching for all the German officers, even the one who gave the final order.30
Notes
1. Geoffrey, 117.
2. No Ordinary Life, Peter Stokes, 45. This is a private unpublished manuscript, being the wartime memories of Horace ‘‘Stokey’ Stokes, of 12 Commando, SSRF and 2 SAS.
3. DEFE 2/75.
4. In August 1939, 18-year-old Horace Stokes left home to attend a Territorial Army camp in Devon. He expected to be gone two weeks. The young Territorial soldier would not put on civilian clothes again for six years.
5. No Ordinary Life, 46–7.
6. I am greatly indebted to Winston G. Ramsey’s The War in the Channel Islands: Then and Now for his detailed account of Operation Basalt and the composition of the German garrison on Sark during autumn 1942.
7. DEFE 2/109.
8. The War in the Channel Islands, 148.
9. Geoffrey, 130.
10. Ibid., 149.
11. The War in the Channel Islands, 149.
12. DEFE 2/109.
13. Anders Lassen, 120. In the aftermath of Operation Basalt, Frances Pittard would be deported to the French Mainland and an internment camp at Compiegne, near Paris (see The War in the Channel Islands).
14. Statement by James Edgar to author.
15. The War in the Channel Islands, 154.
16. Anders Lassen, 121.
17. Redborn, The War in the Channel Islands, 154.
18. DEFE 2/109.
19. The War in the Channel Islands, 154
20. No Ordinary Life, 70–72.
21. James Edgar interview with author.
22. The War in the Channel Islands, 154.
23. Anders Lassen, 123.
24. In their book ‘If I Must Die …’ French authors Fournier and Heintz claim an SOE agent, Roman Zawadski, was also recovered from Sark during Operation Basalt. However, there is no record of this in the files and there is no record of an SOE agent by that name in the SOE Files at The National Archives, Kew.
25. Anders Lassen, 122.
26. Jodl was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity. His request to die before a firing squad was refused. He was hanged on 16 October 1946.
27. The War in the Channel Islands, 156.
28. Letter from Lord Louis Mountbatten at the Broadlands Archive, Hartland Library, University of Southampton, Ref MB1/b58.
29. Anders Lassen, 129.
30. Details recorded by Oundle School, Patrick Dudgeon’s alma mater. He and Trooper Bernard Brunt are buried side by side in Florence War Cemetery, graves IX H.8 and IX H.9.
17
Friends and Enemies in
High Places
Anderson Manor remained, for them all that late summer, their place of quintessential refuge. It was their haven of calm and recovery after the fear and maelstrom of dark-night Channel crossings and incessant raiding. By early autumn 1942 – and in less than two months – they had planned or carried out eleven raids,1 killed at least seven of the enemy, wounded half a dozen more and brought home eig
ht most useful and communicative prisoners. They had returned from the enemy shore with code books and ciphers, pass books and maps, signal codes, weapons and equipment and, perhaps most important of all, they had planted fear and glance-over-the-shoulder unease in the heart of the enemy they had left behind. None of this had been accomplished, however, without cost: eleven of their own men, including their inspirational leader, were now posted as either killed, captured or missing. Appleyard was amongst those who found Anderson Manor balm for the pain of loss, sorrow and conflict, writing to Major Cholmondeley, the man whose home they had requisitioned:
I have been wanting to tell you how much we appreciate the Manor – it has proved an ideal house in every way and to this unit a real home of which we have grown very fond. There is such a quiet and peaceful atmosphere about the house and gardens and often, after a night raid, coming back in the first light next morning, tired and often rather strung-up and on edge, it has been a real relief and relaxation to get back to such a lovely place. I know that Gus felt this very strongly – he often remarked on it to me – and I think the atmosphere of this house has, in an appreciable way, contributed to the making of what has been regarded in the high places, up to date, as a very successful little show. We have a grand crowd of men here and they have universally respected the privilege of living in this house. I don’t think you would be disappointed if you could see the house now – it is kept beautifully clean and, although sparsely furnished, is very comfortable.2
Those ‘high places’ mentioned by Appleyard in that letter were, indeed, the highest in the land. Whatever the long-term implications and even embarrassments of Operation Basalt might yet turn out to be – word of the hand-tying had yet to be made public by the Germans – in local and tactical terms, the raid had been an outstanding success. The very next day after returning from Sark, Appleyard found himself ordered to London to meet both the Prime Minister and the Chiefs of Staff in Churchill’s private rooms at the House of Commons: