by Tom Keene
Yesterday was a very thrilling day … partly spent at the House – in the Prime Minister’s private room. He unexpectedly congratulated me. The CIGS [Chief of the Imperial General Staff] shook hands and said ‘It was a very good show!’ That was General Sir Alan Brooke, of course. General Sir Ronald Adam [Churchill’s Adjutant General and close confidant of Sir Alan Brooke] was also present (as were Pound [Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, First Sea Lord],3 Anthony Eden [Foreign Secretary], and quite a few other well-known people) and he said almost exactly the same thing. The Chief of Staff has directed the Chief of Combined Operations to make Small Scale Raiding a major part of his policy and has said that we are going to be given every assistance and facility! Wouldn’t Gus have been thrilled! That is the type of recognition for which he was always working.4
The unit conceived by March-Phillipps was giving the Prime Minister exactly what he wanted. Undeterred by stories of trussed prisoners – some reports suggest he was actually delighted – Churchill’s growl rang out from Edinburgh a week later on the day he was made a Freeman of that city:
The British Commando raids at different points along this enormous coast, although so far only the forerunner of what is to come, inspire the author of so many crimes and miseries with a lively anxiety. His soldiers dwell among populations who would kill them with their hands if they got the chance, and will kill them one at a time when they do get the chance. In addition, there comes out from the sea from time to time a hand of steel which plucks the German sentries from their posts with growing efficiency, amid the joy of the whole countryside.5
The Chief of Staff minutes of the following day, 13 October, reflected Churchill’s mood for Action This Day and declared, under ‘Future Operations’:
Raiding Operations
THE PRIME MINISTER stated that he wished the Chief of Combined Operations to intensify his small scale raids, as he was certain that the Germans were being worried by them.6
That intensification took immediate effect. By the middle of October 1942 Mountbatten had announced that, with SOE agreement, the Small Scale Raiding Force would be increased dramatically in size. Anderson Manor would remain the headquarters of No 62 Commando, SSRF’s cover name, but there would now be an additional four troops based in four more requisitioned manor houses scattered along the south coast. These would be at Scorries House in Redruth, Cornwall; Lupton House in Dartmouth, Devon; Wraxhall Manor in Dorchester, Dorset; and Inchmery in Exbury, Hampshire. The new troops would be staffed by a core of experienced SSRF soldiers augmented by trained commandos joining SSRF on temporary attachment, bringing the unit strength now to 18 officers and about 100 other ranks. Evidently, the newly expanded force would now need a more substantial chain of command and Major Bill Stirling – brother of David, founder of the SAS – was posted in as lieutenant colonel with Major Appleyard in charge of operations. More boats would be allocated to the unit, too.
On 18 October Hitler issued his Top Secret commando order. From now on, any subordinate commander who failed to execute immediately or pass to the Gestapo (which amounted to the same thing) any commandos, special forces or saboteurs who fell into their hands would be liable to face charges of negligence and punishment under military law.
Two days earlier Combined Operations Headquarters had indefinitely postponed a raid by SSRF which, had it taken place, would almost certainly have provided Hitler’s Kommandobefehl with its first scapegoats. Operation Facsimile was finally abandoned because of prevailing weather conditions and the ending of summer. The onset of autumn gales and moonlit conditions notwithstanding, it is difficult to see, from this remove, why Operation Facsimile was permitted to progress from being one of a hundred hair-brained schemes destined for the waste-paper basket to a project that merited its own code-name and which, but for the weather, would definitely have been mounted.
Major Gwynne, the SSRF planner at Anderson Manor known as ‘Killer’ Gwynne because of his eagerness to take part in the raids from which his administrative role precluded him, was now to have his chance.
The plan – on paper – was simple: a party of two officers and two other ranks from SSRF was to be carried across to the Brittany shore by MGB 312. There they were to paddle ashore by Goatley on the north coast of Brittany near Beg-an-Fry, land on rocks to avoid leaving footprints and move overland towards the German airfield at Gaël, north-east of Mauron. Gaël was approximately 30 miles inland. The team was then to spend up to a week lying up in enemy territory. During this time they would first recce and then attack Gaël aerodrome, destroying whatever aircraft they found there with special 2lb bombs of plastic explosive armed with six-hour fuses. Ludicrous steps were taken during planning to enable Gywnne and his men to carry out their reconnaissance deep inside enemy territory without detection. According to Peter Kemp – who erroneously places this raid after rather than before Operation Fahrenheit – Gwynne spent much of his time before the raid away from Anderson Manor:
visiting various SOE experimental stations, in particular one concerned with camouflage. He reappeared at the end of his tour with two unusual pieces of equipment. One of them was a lifelike cow’s head in papier mâché with holes pierced through the eyes; the other was a curious arrangement of fine-meshed camouflage netting … The mask was for road-watching … he would lie up in a field beside a main road and push his head, enveloped in the mask, through the hedge; thus disguised, he would be able to keep a watch on the road and observe the number and nature of enemy troops using it.
The purpose of the netting was even simpler: ‘It enables a man to disguise himself at will as a rubbish heap or a pile of sticks,’ explained Gywnne.7 Today’s SBS would recognise the use of the netting, if not the cow’s head of papier mâché whose composition presumably, would become interesting after heavy rain.
With recce and airfield attack successfully completed, Major Gywnne and his merry band were then to escape overland down the length of France into neutral Spain almost 400 miles away to the south. Not all of France was occupied by the Germans at that time (it would be, however, in less than a month’s time), but the Zone Non-Occupée was still the best part of 100 miles away.
Lord Mountbatten designated Major Appleyard the overall force commander with Major J.M.W. Gwynne officer commanding the landing party. By that stage, one may presume, Appleyard had proved himself too valuable to risk on a mission which, from the outset, must have had little chance of success and from which the odds on a safe return were slender indeed. Briefing notes8 disclose that the men would take sleeping bags, tommy cookers and four forty-eight-hour ration packs apiece. They were blithely expected to supplement these bulky rations with ‘fruit, vegetables and nuts from the country’. A country, moreover, that was occupied by elements of 17 Infantry Division and 6 Panzer, while at Gaël itself ‘the usual aerodrome garrison of 640 men may be expected, although it is considered possible that the garrison will be much under strength here owing to the relative inactivity of the aerodrome in the past’.9
By summer 1942, raids on enemy airfields in the vast empty spaces of the western desert, conceived by David Stirling, were becoming the stuff of legend. But Brittany was more than just western desert without sand and the thickly populated, heavily occupied hinterland of Brittany offered a more complex tactical challenge than Egypt’s Qattara Depression. It is possible, of course, that there were other, more intelligent, secret orders that tied Facsimile in with SOE agents and saboteurs with strong local knowledge who were already on the Breton ground. If such orders exist, they remain untraced by this author; it is also possible that a direct para-drop of saboteurs into the area was also considered to obviate the dangers of a lengthy approach march by four heavily armed men weighed down with rucksacks containing rations, explosives, cookers and sleeping bags. Again, no trace of such a possibility has been discovered. It still remains difficult to understand, however, why Gaël aerodrome was not simply bombed to SOE markers; why SOE agents in place were not involved or, most particularly, why extra
ction home by sea was rejected in favour of that lengthy and extremely risky evasion south to Spain whilst living off nuts and fruit plucked from the sparse autumn hedgerows of wartime France.
There were several attempts to land Facsimile on the Brittany coast on the nights of 10–16 October. On 10, 11 and 12 October, MGB 314 was turned back because of weather and sea conditions. On 13 October the operation was cancelled by C-in-C Plymouth (Admiral Forbes) owing to what were termed ‘other activities’ in the Channel. On 14 and 15 October the weather was unsuitable. The briefing officer safely back in Combined Operations Headquarters suggested ‘a slight or moderate wind is desirable for landing’. On 16 October – the last sailing opportunity of the autumn offering the right moonless conditions – they got rather more than that. After meeting wind Force 5–6 increasing on the outward leg with a heavy westerly swell, the frail, wooden-hulled gunboat that was MGB 314 wisely turned for home. After slamming through rough seas for three and a half hours Appleyard – who, as usual, had sailed as navigator – reported: ‘Owing to the weather which may be expected in the next four months and the fact that from now on, owing to the falling of the leaf, cover ashore will be considerably reduced, it is no longer considered possible to carry out this operation before spring.’10 Brigadier Godfrey Wildman-Lushington,11 Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff, concurred. On 20 October Operation Fascimile was postponed indefinitely. It was a wise decision. It was also, quite possibly, a merciful deliverance.
For the men of Operation Facsimile, the attempted escape overland to Spain, however risky, would at least have been part of their post-operation evasion planning. It would thus have been something they would have had time to consider and prepare for. Capt. Graham Hayes, however, the evader from the disastrous Operation Aquatint a month earlier, had not enjoyed the same luxury of preparation. For him, heading south inland deep into enemy territory had been the one desperate option that might conceivably lead towards safety and survival.
Hayes had been brave – and lucky. After swimming more than a mile westwards up the coast in the dark towards Cherbourg – away from the gunfire, the shouting, the lights and the flares that engulfed his companions – the peacetime tall-ships’ deep-sea mariner and aspirant wood-sculptor who had once kept a tame jackdaw named ‘Grip’ on his shoulder had stumbled ashore in the early hours of 13 September 1942. He then made his way inland to the village of Asnières en Bessin just to the east of Pointe du Hoc. Here, exhausted, soaked through and with dawn not far away, he had chanced all by knocking on the door of a farmhouse. His luck held, as he found himself befriended by French farmer Marcel Lemasson who, heedless of the dangers to himself and his family, ushered him in and closed the door.
While Hayes was being fed by his wife, Lemasson slipped out to confer with Paul de Brunville, the local Mayor who lived in the chateau across the lane. He too was a loyal Frenchman. After consulting his two children, Oliver (22) and Isabelle (20) – both of whom spoke English – Paul and Oliver de Brunville brought Hayes back to the chateau in the darkness that evening where he was hidden in the hayloft in the farm attached to the chateau’s grounds. The next morning, at his father’s instruction, Oliver de Brunville went to another trusted contact, Septime Humann in Jouay-Mondaye, who in turn promised to feed the stranded English captain further down the Resistance pipeline towards Spain and safety. A journey first by bicycle and then by train followed with Hayes at every stage watched, escorted and guided through check-points and barriers in a land thick with the grey-green uniforms of his country’s enemies. From Asniëres, Oliver de Brunville and Hayes cycled to Bayeux. From Bayeux Hayes caught the troop-crowded train to Caen and then on to Lisieux, further still to the east, a journey that, from its start point at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, carried him diagonally across what would, in two years’ time, become the Normandy D-Day beachhead. Here, just to the east of Liseaux north of Moyaux in the Le Manoir home in Le Pin of French resistant Suzanne Septavaux, Hayes was to be laid up by illness and a knee infection for the next six weeks. He did not know it, but by luck, good fortune and the selfless courage of others, he had hooked up with SOE’s Donkeyman circuit.
Meanwhile, back in England, that same October, Second Lt Lassen was awarded the first of his three Military Crosses. Described as ‘a very gallant and determined officer’,12 Lassen was awarded the MC for his inspiring leadership and outstanding contribution to Operations Postmaster, Branford, Barricade and Basalt. His face still battered and bruised from the fight on Sark and with front teeth missing after a collision with the rail of MTB 344 a few months earlier during some mistimed re-embarkation, he was then posted to the Commando Training Centre at Achnacarry. Here he conveyed a sense of realism, urgency and purpose to fellow Danes sweating their way towards course completion. Thanks to Lassen’s powers of persuasion and recruitment, all sixteen Danes volunteered for onward deployment into SOE and SSRF.
The unit he had temporarily left behind in Dorset was now hugely expanded – it received a new and more formal charter of operations from Mountbatten on 22 October 1942.13 It expanded not just with men, but with boats too, the essential means by which they would be carried to the enemy shore. Now The Littler Pisser – MTB 344, that veteran of previous raids – was joined by Coastal Motor Boats 103, 104, 312, 316, 317 and 326, all from the 14th Flotilla which, from the day of Churchill’s ‘hand of steel’ speech in Edinburgh on 12 October, had became part of ‘Force J’ with its headquarters at HMS Vectris at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. ‘Force J’ consisted also of most of the surviving ships that had taken part in the raid on Dieppe – Operation Jubilee – and which had been kept together ever since. Perhaps unfortunately for Stirling, Appleyard and their men, ‘Force J’ was under the command of Captain, now Commodore, John Hughes-Hallett RN (‘Hughes-Hitler’), the officer who had written so disparagingly about March-Phillipps’ organisational skills in the early days of Anderson Manor. In future, although SSRF operations would be carried out under the ‘unified command’ of Lt Col Bill Stirling, who would submit plans for raids directly to Mountbatten, those plans would have to be copied to Hughes-Hallett and final operational control would rest with him. It was an arrangement and an appointment, evidently, which found no favour with the skipper of MTB 344, Lt Freddie Bourne, DSC, who, as a motor torpedo boat commander, came directly under Hughes-Hallett’s command. He remembered bitterly:
He [Hughes-Hallett] made it absolutely clear to me, which I got very cross about, that he felt all these pin-prick raids over on the French coast which I had been partly responsible for were a total waste of the war effort. That was his personal view and he said it to me. I’ll never forget that. I knew his Flag Lieutenant very well and Tim took me outside and said I wouldn’t make too much of that, that’s obviously just his own view. I said, well, that’s not how we viewed it in the months I was working with the army and I’ll never forget it.
I shot out of Cowes harbour in my MTB 344 back to Hornet [Coastal Forces Base HMS Hornet at Gosport, Hampshire] and created a bit of a furore because I went out far too fast and started rocking a few too many boats but I was in a fair old state at that stage … We felt it was all worthwhile; it was keeping the enemy on his toes, he never knew where we were going to strike. Albeit it was very small stuff, but it was obviously a forerunner for something that could become much bigger.14
Once again, there was that apparently unavoidable clash between conventional naval thinking and those who had thrown away the rule book. Despite the high opinion of SSRF held by Brigadier Gubbins and Lord Mountbatten, by the Chiefs of Staff and even by Churchill himself, not everybody, it appears, thought the men of the Small Scale Raiding Force worth their rations.
Combined Operations moved fast to consolidate their authorised expansion in the minds of other agencies. On 31 October Colonel ‘RN’ – Robert Neville, one of Mountbatten’s advisers and Chief Planning Co-Ordinator at COHQ – wrote to the Director of Military Intelligence reminding him of SSRF’s existence and outlining their own plans to parti
cularise and add to the strategic value of future missions:
The targets for these raids have been selected, hitherto, somewhat at random, the broad objective being that we should kill or capture Germans and obtain intelligence. In other words, there has been little relation of the objectives with definite requirements.
In accordance with the Prime Minister’s and the Chiefs of Staff’s Directive, it is now intended to increase the scope and activities of this Small Scale Raiding Force. It may thus be possible to select targets with the object, over and above that of killing Germans, of bringing back, for instance, some particular technical or other equipment, a specimen of which may be required by one or other of the services … It would greatly assist us in this connection if you could inform us of any targets in which the War Office would be interested.15
Be careful what you wish for: Combined Operations presently received, from a wide variety of sources, a veritable shopping list of suggestions as to what they might capture and bring home for examination. This embraced everything from sea mines and the latest 25-hundredweight, multiple-barrel flak unit in its entirety (failing that, the latest anti-aircraft gun-sight would do nicely!); specimen rounds of ammunition, sniper rifles, grenade discharger cups for rifles, machine-gun mountings, details of beam transmission stations, gun dials, range tables, pay books and office records. In fact, ‘Practically any documents which can be seized will be worth carrying home’.
From the Director of Naval Intelligence, however, SSRF received a word of timely caution: