by Tom Keene
The progressive strengthening of the defences of the coastline of Europe makes it increasingly difficult to find targets which offer a reasonable chance of success … The garrisons guarding small objectives such as lighthouses, isolated batteries and searchlights, previously satisfactory targets, are being strengthened as a result of CCO’s operations on that coast … In the past very many promising targets have been pointed out to CCO and every effort will continue to be made to do so in the future.16
Although Combined Operations may have hurried to consolidate their new authority to raid the German-occupied coastline with a new co-ordinated procurement objective, others, like Hughes-Hallett, remained unpersuaded. As late as 13 November 1942 Combined Operations’ Director of Plans felt obliged to review both the arguments for the existing raiding policy17 and those arguments still paraded against it by the Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth, Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, who took common cause with Commodore Hughes-Hallett RN in his dislike of ‘pin-prick’ raids.
In favour of the raids, the Combined Operations’ Director of Plans echoed Appleyard’s thinking, stating that they gave participants valuable experience ‘which can be gained in no other way’. He emphasised that they provided an opportunity to gain intelligence whilst locking up large numbers of German soldiers and equipment in a passive, static role. He added:
With the enemy’s increasing manpower shortage, this aspect is highly important … Some idea of the effect of our raids on the enemy can be obtained by considering how vexatious it would be to us if the enemy were to adopt a similar policy and force us to take the same sort of precautions that they themselves have had to adopt.18
In an earlier paragraph he had emphasised: ‘There is evidence (graded A1) that, consequent upon a recent small raid, [Operation Basalt] Hitler personally has ordered the increase of garrisons of all outlying occupied islands, from Finland to Greece, since in general he considers them at present to be quite inadequate.’ Over time the new vigilance of the coast defences would be worn down ‘and a state of fatigue and strain induced all along the coastline’.
Conceding that raiding must have an adverse effect upon the work of Naval Intelligence, Director of Plans Minutes noted for the record that: ‘Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth, doubts whether the advantages accruing from the raids are sufficient to outweigh the disadvantages that result.’ He enumerated these as a tightening of security measures generally and a more frequent change of Nazi codes making the interception of German convoys in the Channel more difficult. There would be a general tightening up of ‘weak spots’ in German coastal defences and this would impact upon destroyer and RN operations generally.
None of these arguments prevailed. Besides which, observed the Director of Plans: ‘The conflict between NID (‘C’)’s interests and other operations has always existed. D of P knows of no new factor to justify the alteration of the raiding policy at the present time. It is understood that close liaison is maintained between CCO and ‘C’ [SIS].’ He concluded:
While there is undoubtedly something in Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth’s, contentions, D of P’s opinion is that the most potent of the above arguments is that by these small raids the enemy is forced to lock up his dwindling manpower in an unproductive occupation. Furthermore, since there is nothing in the Commander-in-Chief’s arguments that has not already been taken into consideration, D of P. considers that the present policy should be adhered to.19
And so it would be – for the moment, at least.
Even as the arguments flowed to and fro between Richmond Terrace and the offices of the Chiefs of Staff in sandbagged Whitehall, a further two raids had already been planned. Operation Fahrenheit, in fact, had been mounted just the day before. But Operation Gimcrack – a raid by twelve SSRF to take prisoners and wipe out the German garrison on the tiny Île Saint-Rion close inshore off the north coast of Brittany, had been cancelled: MTB 344 had been required by ‘Force J’ ‘for other operations.’20 Operation Inhabit – a raid on the Cherbourg Peninsula south-east of Omonville to recce coastal defences, take a prisoner and ‘investigate a sinister German area of activity’21 – also fell by the wayside.
Admiral Forbes’ reasons for opposing small scale raids on the Channel coast appear, on the face of it, to be petty and insubstantial; thin gruel. They suggest that something of greater moment lay behind his opposition to the proposed activities of Stirling, Appleyard and the men of the Small Scale Raiding Force. Perhaps it did.
The writ of C-in-C Plymouth extended from Exmouth in east Devon to Penzance in Cornwall, lying as it did at the south eastern edge of the Western Approaches, that vast block of water extending far out into the Atlantic and as far north and east as the Orkneys. Admiral Forbes’ command thus encompassed Dartmouth, Falmouth and the secret SOE base at Helford, whose Commanding Officer was the firebrand Gerry Holdsworth, the former ‘Section D’ SIS agent in Norway who had crossed cutlasses with Commander Slocum over the sanctioning of clandestine fishing boat missions to France for SOE rather than for SIS, and whose work Slocum had so thoroughly thwarted throughout 1942 (see Chapter 4). Although Commander Slocum as NID (C) reported, at this time, to Claude Dansey, SIS’s de facto second-in-command to Sir Stewart Menzies, his work necessarily fell within the ambit of Admiral Forbes’ influence. DoPs’ minutes suggest that Forbes may indeed have invoked, if only in general terms, the secrecy and importance of Slocum’s work for SIS as another reason to curtail the activities of SSRF. If Admiral Forbes took an overarching interest in Slocum’s activities, then he would also have been aware of, and been concerned to protect, the clandestine interests of SIS operations out of Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. He would have done so, moreover, with good reason.
Immediately after the fall of France in 1940 Sir Stewart Menzies,22 the head of SIS, set up two new staff sections to gather information from within France, together with an ‘O’ (Operations) Section to open up physical communication with occupied Europe. This, as already noted, was headed by Commander Frank Slocum. To begin with, these staff sections, led by Commanders Kenneth Cohen and Wilfred Dunderdale, did well. Soon, SIS agents working for Dunderdale’s ‘Johnny’ network had been infiltrated into France through Spain and by mid-1941 had established a useful network of agents along the French Atlantic coast and set up clandestine courier lines into neutral Spain. By the end of that year, Commander Cohen had established particularly good agent coverage on the French Atlantic ports – new home of the U-boat fleets that threatened Britain’s Atlantic lifeline. Better yet, agents in Brest had sent to one of Cohen’s most effective operatives, Colonel Gilbert Renault (alias Remy), complete plans of the harbour defences and the latest reported movements of German capital ships put in to Brest for repair. Gilbert Renault set up his own agent network, Confrérie de Notre-Dame (CND), which rapidly expanded and eventually covered most of France. One of its early notable coups was the provision of precise intelligence that became the backbone for the successful Operation Biting raid on the German radar station at Bruneval in February 1942. Thus ‘Johnny’ and CND provided two vital strings to SIS’s intelligence-gathering bow in France. Later, intelligence would come back to England by a variety of means including wireless, aircraft pick-up and courier. But, in the early days, one of the most important and reliable routes back to England for letters, reports, packets of documents and stolen German papers was across the Channel – by sea.
And then, in February 1942, one of those strings broke. A series of ship arrests and agent losses led to the falling apart of the ‘Johnny’ network. Gilbert Renault’s expanding Confrérie de Notre-Dame now assumed critical importance: CND was to go on to become ‘the largest and most productive of all the Free French intelligence networks in France’.23 In June 1942 CND had already pulled off a coup of major strategic significance that was to save thousands of allied lives. In that month, Gilbert Renault had sailed to England with more than just his family aboard the disguised fishing boat N51- Le Dinan at the successful conclusion of SIS’s
Operation Marie-Louise II. He had brought back with him a blueprint of the coastal defences along the Normandy coast just as the Todt organisation was beginning to construct them:
The map spread out on the carpet [of his flat in Square Henri Pate] was more than three metres long and 75 centimetres in width. It covered the whole of the Normandy coastline from Cherbourg to Honfleur: marked on it were a great number of concrete blockhouses, machine-gun nests, barbed wire entanglements and minefields. The calibre of the guns to be mounted was indicated.24
It was a detailed blueprint for the D-Day beach defences, handed to the allies two years before the invasion of Normandy.
It rapidly became evident that, given the increasing volume and quality of CND’s intelligence harvest, a regular monthly ‘mail-run’ between the English West Country and the south-west coast of Brittany would be essential. One of those closely involved in clandestine sea operations at that time was Sir Brooks Richards, DSC:
By September 1942 Remy’s Confrérie de Notre Dame was on a vast scale. It had for more than a year extended along the Atlantic coast and up into Brittany, with particularly good coverage of Bordeaux and Brest: now it covered the whole of France … This sea link became of such overriding importance to SIS that Slocum ruled that NID(C)’s fishing vessels must be reserved exclusively for this purpose and must not undertake operations for other organisations in the Bay of Biscay for fear of compromising the system.25
It was this clandestine sea link, this conduit for priceless intelligence anywhere across the Channel and not just into the Bay of Biscay, that those in the Royal Navy and SIS now sought to shield and protect. To those who were informed, the argument against the pin-prick, nuisance raids of SSRF spoke for itself: measured against a blueprint of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall or some yet-to-be-realised strategic prize, what price the alerting of the enemy coastline for the mere snatching of a sentry’s pay book or the cutting of a German throat on some remote, rocky out-station?26
Operation Gimcrack might have been abandoned because MTB 344 was required by ‘Force J’ for ‘other operations’. Operation Fahrenheit was not.
Notes
1. Amongst the raids dreamed up by Gus March-Phillipps and Geoffrey Appleyard that never saw the light of day was an ambitious project to attack the mighty German battleship Tirpitz with limpet mines carried by members of SSRF sitting astride a two-man submarine propelled forward by pedal power. The project was abandoned – perhaps wisely – when Tirpitz changed her mooring.
2. Geoffrey, 133.
3. He died in 1943 and was succeeded by Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham.
4. Geoffrey, 128–9.
5. Speech by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Edinburgh, 12 October 1942.
6. Minutes COS (42) 146th Mt (O) held on 13 October 1942. In ADM 116/5112.
7. No Colours or Crest, 69–70.
8. DEFE 2/109.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Promoted Major-General, June 1943. Died February 1970.
12. HS 9/888/2.
13. DEFE 2/622.
14. Interview with Lt Freddie Bourne. IWM Audio tape 11721, Reel 2. Recorded November 15 1990.
15. DEFE 2/ 1093.
16. Ibid.
17. First formalised on 9 May 1942 in CCO (CCS (42) 130 (O).
18. ADM 116/5112.
19. ADM 116/5112.
20. DEFE 2/694.
21. Ibid.
22. Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of SIS from November 1939 to June 1952.
23. Secret Flotillas, 129.
24. Ibid., 143.
25. Ibid., 142.
26. Between January 1942 and March 1943 SIS mounted fifteen sea operations to the French shore. These were Operations Valise, Turquoise, Pillar West, Mac, Marie-Louise 1, Marie-Louise II, Gilberte, Neptune, Grenville I, Grenville II, Grenville III, Hawkins, Tenderley, Tentative and Rodney.
18
Operation Fahrenheit
Additional reinforcements for the expanded SSRF at Anderson Manor arrived towards the end of October: another two officers from No 12 Commando plus a further twelve NCOs. Earlier arrivals on loan from 12 Commando, Capt. Philip Pinckney and six of his men, had already taken part in Operation Basalt. Now Capt. Peter Kemp, one of the SOE old hands from Knife days, was ordered to train up Capt. Oswald ‘Mickey’ Rooney and six men to take part in an unspecified raid scheduled for the near future which he, Kemp, would lead. Operation Fahrenheit was just a fortnight away. The men from No 12 Commando made an impressive addition to the decimated unit at Anderson Manor. ‘Rooney, a powerfully built, self-confident officer, who knew his men intimately and commanded their implicit obedience, had little to learn from me,’ recounted Peter Kemp:
In fact, apart from pistol shooting and movement at night, he and his men knew more about the business than I … we spent the next two weeks together in unremitting training by day and night. In particular, we exercised ourselves in night schemes on land and water, in soundless movement and the use of our eyes in the dark. For such intensive practice we were soon to be thankful.1
At midday on Wednesday, 11 November 1942, the ten men of Operation Fahrenheit left Anderson Manor for Lupton House near Paignton, Devon, one of the new bases recently requisitioned for SSRF. Here they ate a hurried meal, changed into their operational clothing and sorted out their weapons and ammunition. All wore leather jerkins with a toggle rope secured around their waist. They wore standard army boots and their faces were unblackened.2 This time, in addition to the usual side-arms and tommy guns, Kemp’s raiders were carrying a silenced Sten, two of the new plastic explosive No 6 grenades trialled on Operation Barricade back in August and a Bren light machine-gun to cover their withdrawal. Their target was a semaphore station on top of cliffs on Pointe de Plouézec about 15 miles north-west of Saint Brieuc on the north Brittany coast. They were to carry out the usual reconnaissance, attack the semaphore station and, if possible, take prisoners. The semaphore station was believed to be guarded by barbed wire, a sentry, a small concrete guard-house and a dozen soldiers. There were, they were told, no mines or booby-traps to worry about and the way up from the shore towards the semaphore station was by a narrow, clearly defined track that should be easy to find in the darkness. All appeared straightforward, the geography rather like Basalt, but on a smaller scale.
The SSRF, still recovering from its devastating losses on Operation Aquatint, badly needed another successful, loss-free operation on the heels of Basalt to restore collective confidence. Bill Stirling, their new commanding officer, took Peter Kemp aside before they left. ‘Rooney and his chaps are very keen and will obviously seize any opportunity for a fight,’ warned Stirling:
Naturally we want to inflict casualties and take prisoners; but not, I repeat, at the cost of losing men ourselves. It isn’t worth it at this stage. If, when you get there, you don’t think you can fight without losing men, I promise I shall be quite satisfied with a recce. Remember, Peter, I don’t want any Foreign Legion stuff on this party!3
Peter Kemp understood. He and Capt. ‘Mickey’ Rooney had already decided that, circumstances permitting, they would close with the sentry themselves and kill him silently with their fighting knives.
Leaving Paignton, the party made its way by covered lorry to Dartmouth where MTB 344 was waiting by the quay, engines running. On the quayside were Bill Stirling, Freddie Bourne, the captain of MTB 344 and Ian Darby, the unit’s newly appointed Intelligence Officer. Clumsy with weapons, the raiders filed aboard and squeezed below decks:
Eight of us had to travel in a very small hatch on the starboard bow of the craft. It was pitch black in what could well have been a paint locker. Before the door was closed on us, a sailor handed in a bucket and in answer to a question from one of us said: ‘to use as a toilet or if you are sea-sick.’4
Appleyard – his slow-healing foot now in plaster – limped up to the bridge where he assumed his customary place as navigator. The Little Pisser slipped her moorings and, engines burbling, gat
hered way slowly downstream in the gathering dusk, the fourteenth-century Dartmouth Castle standing out as dark, silent sentinel against the fading western sky.
The evening was fine with a clear sky, south-east wind Force 2–3, and visibility moderate with a moderate south-easterly swell that was soon breaking green over the boat. Captains Kemp and Rooney were sheltering against the upturned hull of the Dory lashed astern. Soon they were drenched through with freezing spray and chilled to the bone. The crossing took six hours, during which tidal drift and cross-swell pushed The Little Pisser off her dead reckoning course. It took an hour and three sides of a box search after a 3-mile over-run to establish their position with certainly before they finally picked up the light tower on Roches Douvres. Presently they made out the off-lying islands leading in to Pointe de Plouézec. The men were ordered on deck:
The sight which met our eyes as we emerged from the dark confines of our accommodation was really beautiful. On our port beam there was a high cliff rising from a beach about 500 yards away and we were heading into a large bay with a peninsula of land about ten o’clock from us. After the darkness of our position in the bow of the MTB it almost looked like daylight.5 No one had been sea-sick. As MTB 344 edged close to shore they sensed rather than saw something black rising out of the water behind them. In their heightened nervous state several on board The Little Pisser imagined it might be the first showing of the casing of a submarine closing in astern. In fact, it turned out to be the humped backs of several grey seals.6 They could breathe again. At ten minutes past midnight MTB 344, running now on silent engines, dropped anchor half a mile off-shore in 7 fathoms. ‘The target, the semaphore station, could be dimly seen against the sky,’ Appleyard reported later.7