by Tom Keene
Despite an extensive search, no trace of their bodies or their twin-engined aircraft have been found.
Today Geoffrey Appleyard’s name is inscribed on Panel 12 of the Commonwealth War Graves Memorial at Cassino, Italy.59
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On the very same day that Appleyard disappeared, Capt. Graham Hayes, the childhood friend from the same Yorkshire village Appleyard had recruited into Maid Honor Force in 1941, was taken out of his cell at Fresnes Prison and executed by firing squad. Today, the body of Capt. Graham Hayes, aged 29, of the Border Regiment, Service No 129354, lies in Row B, Grave 1 of the Viroflay New Communal Cemetery, Versailles, outside Paris.
Notes
1. ADM 116/5112.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke.
6. COS (43) 4th Meeting (Minutes 13 & 14) 4 January 1943.
7. DEFE 2/694.
8. See this author’s Cloak of Enemies for a detailed account of this needless duplication.
9. SOE in France, 26.
10. ADM 116/5112, ‘Most Secret’ Memo from ACNS(H) to CNP 9 January 1943.
11. DEFE 2/957.
12. ADM 116/5112.
13. A raid on the island of Stord near Leirvik involving men of Nos 10 and 12 Commando.
14. Brief for CCO dated 10 January 1943. In DEFE 2/957.
15. DEFE 2/957.
16. Ibid.
17. Capt. Pat Porteous, VC, would survive the war. He died in October 2000, aged 82.
18. ADM 116/5112.
19. DEFE 2/957.
20. WO 373/93 (Microfilm).
21. That second DSO was never actually awarded. The wartime Awards Committee decided – in their wisdom – that the Bar to the DSO would only be awarded if it were discovered Gus March-Phillipps had in fact survived Operation Aquatint. If he were posted Killed in Action, then a Mention in Despatches would suffice. In another mission – Operation Frankton in December 1942 – the two Cockleshell Heroes who accompanied Major Hasler and Marine Sparks to attack German shipping in Bordeaux harbour were also simply awarded a Mention in Despatches. Had they survived and not been executed by German firing squad, both would have been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. Both rulings appear perverse: the higher award, this author would argue, should better reflect the sacrifice of men who had nothing more to give.
22. HS 8/818.
23 . The Commandos 1940–1946, 237.
24. Their commander, Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel, would not be among them.
25. HS 3/61.
26. HS 3/61.
27. The BRANDON mission was a Special Detachment raised by SOE for sabotage behind enemy lines using saboteurs who spoke the language and who could pass as locals. HS 3/61; Secret Flotillas, 582.
28. HS 7/237.
29. The files hold conflicting evidence regarding Operation Backchat. DEFE 2/694 claims it was abandoned. HS 8/818 claims it was successfully completed.
30. DEFE 2/694.
31. Combined Operations Pilotage Parties.
32. The Phantom Major, Virginia Cowles, 255.
33. Geoffrey, 144–5.
34. The Regiment, Michael Asher, 222.
35. Geoffrey, 146.
36. The oblique stroke between SSRF and SAS [SSRF/SAS] is deliberate. As late as June 1943, Geoffrey Appleyard was suggesting to his family that letters addressed to SSRF would still find him. Geoffrey, 170.
37. The Regiment, 222.
38. The Regiment, 223.
39. Geoffrey, 149.
40. Geoffrey, 150.
41. No Ordinary Life, ‘Stokey’ Stokes, 84.
42. The Day Of Battle, Rick Atkinson, 7.
43. Admiral Roger Keyes, first Director of Combined Operations, July 1940–October 1941. He died in 1945. His son, Lt Col Geoffrey Keyes, MC, was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross after leading the abortive Operation Flipper raid on Rommel’s Headquarters in Libya in November 1941 with the intention of killing the Panzer general. It later transpired that the target building was not Rommel’s HQ, that he was away in Italy at the time and that Keyes may have been killed by a pistol round fired by a fellow British officer.
44. Watery Maze, Bernard Fergusson, 239.
45. No Ordinary Life, 91.
46. Geoffrey, 165–6.
47. No Ordinary Life, 93.
48. No Ordinary Life, 92. Herstell’s body was never found. He is commemorated at the Medjez-el-Bab Commonwealth War Graves Commission Memorial in Tunisia.
49. The SAS at War, Anthony Kemp, 99.
50. No Ordinary Life.
51. HMS Unshaken survived the war. She was scrapped at Troon in 1946.
52. Geoffrey, 172.
53. No Ordinary Life, 97.
54. HS 7/238.
55. WO 218/98.
56. Both PINK and BRIG took carrier pigeons on the drop. Released on landing, one flew north and disappeared, the other was later found in southern Sicily, dead.
57. The Regiment, 224.
58. AIR 27/1645.
59. That of Wing Commander Peter Rodriguez May, Service No 28048, is inscribed on the Malta Memorial, Panel 6, Column 1.
20
Endings
For many months, the families of Graham Hayes and Geoffrey Appleyard held tight to hope.
In 1946, after exhaustive inquiries, Graham Hayes’ mother made contact with an RAF pilot, J.E.C. Evans, who had been shot down over France in June 1943. He too had been sent to Fresnes Prison, Paris. There, by tapping morse code on the pipes in his prison cell, he had managed to make contact with Graham Hayes in a cell nearby. Hayes told him he had been on a raid that had failed, that he had escaped to Spain and that the Spanish had then handed him back to the Germans. When they established contact, Graham had been in solitary for eight months but was in good spirits; he had been promised he would soon be sent to a POW camp in Germany.1 Each morning and each night the two British officers sustained one another by shouting greetings in English. And then, one day, Evans shouted but there was no response. Graham Hayes had been taken from his cell and executed. Malcolm Hayes, his nephew, remembers:
During the war when my uncle Graham had been missing for many months … my father, Denis Harmer Hayes [Graham Hayes’s brother] was alone, driving to a meeting on the west coast connected with a torpedo testing range. For no apparent reason my father had the most terrible feeling of apprehension regarding his brother Graham. It was so strong that he felt sick, stopped the car and got out.
Sometime after the end of the war when the German records had been looked at, it was seen that Graham had been executed by firing squad on the 13th July 1943 after nine months solitary confinement in Fresnes prison. When my father was told this, he asked his secretary to bring him the file re the torpedo range meeting to check the date: it was 13th July 1943.2
Major-General (as he then was) Colin Gubbins chose to break the news to Graham’s father Herbert in his own hand, writing on 1 August 1945:
I am deeply sorry to have to inform you that I have just received information that your son was shot by the Germans in France on the 13th July 1943 …
I would like to extend my deepest sympathy to you and your wife. Your son’s fate is all the more tragic in that he had been at liberty for some time after the gallant raid in which he had taken part and which had left him stranded in enemy-occupied territory. I have not yet received details of his death but am still endeavouring to obtain them …
I knew your son very well personally; he was a grand soldier and a very gallant gentleman, and I am so sorry that he has gone. I lost my own son in Italy last year and know only too well how much it means.3 But we can be proud that our sons never flinched from danger and saved our country and our people from the worst of fates. They will live in our hearts for ever.4
Before Graham Hayes left Linton to go to war, the promising young wood-carver had laid down a few choice pieces of oak to season for the duration. He planned to
return and work these once the war had been won. Those pieces of oak were used by the village he came from to create his memorial, a memorial he shared with six others from the same village who had lost their lives – including his brother Malcolm, an RAFVR Halifax bomber pilot shot down over France in February 1943, when he was in Fresnes Prison, and the childhood friend who had died on that same day, Geoffrey Appleyard.
On 17 July 1942 Ernest Appleyard, Geoffrey’s father, recorded: ‘there arrived the saddest tidings that ever reached [our] family.’ It was a letter from one of Appleyard’s friends, Major Ian Collins, informing them that he was missing. After outlining what was known of that last mission his letter continued: ‘You will see there is still real reason for hoping Geoffrey may be all right, and every effort will be made to find out.’ Those efforts, however, proved fruitless. Unconfirmed reports that wreckage of the aircraft and aircrew had been found, recorded in the Operation Chestnut Casualty Returns, came to nothing. Other leads proved equally, cruelly, false: ‘I am certain that my father [Ernest] would have followed any trail to the end in requesting information about the death,’ affirms John Appleyard, Geoffrey’s half-brother.5
The Operations Record Book for 296 Squadron records the loss of Albermarle 1446, Appleyard’s aircraft, and adds: ‘The returning aircraft [from Operation Chestnut I] reported flak from our own naval forces from Malta to Catania [on the eastern flank of Sicily].’ That aircraft was not shot down by what we have now learned to call ‘friendly fire’. It is at least possible that Appleyard’s aircraft was less fortunate.* In March 1944 his family received official War Office notification that their son was now presumed killed in action.
As the war drew to a close J.E.A. Appleyard began compiling Geoffrey, the slim volume of Geoffrey Appleyard’s wartime letters home which, seventy years later, has provided the invaluable backbone to this story.6 Geoffrey – which was privately published in 1946 and reprinted in 1947 – concludes with a section entitled ‘As Others Knew Him’. The renowned English Christian theologian and member of the Oxford Group, The Revd Leslie Weatherhead wrote:
I knew Geoffrey from his school-days onwards. At the time of his early manhood I said to a friend: ‘If a visitor dropped down from Mars and visited each country to find out what earth’s inhabitants were like, and if I had the chance to suggest whom such a visitor should meet in England, I should suggest Geoffrey Appleyard … His body he may have given for England, but his soul lives on, part of the wealth of the universe, for it possessed qualities that do not die and over which war has no power.7
At war’s end Graham’s mother, Lillian Hayes, wrote to Marjorie March-Phillipps about the enduring, life-long friendship of Graham and Geoffrey: ‘So those two who had played as boys together and faced life and death together, went on their way to start a new and free life, continuing, I feel sure, to wage war against the evil that is the cause of all this unhappiness and sorrow.’8
J.E.A. Appleyard wrote of his son:
Although he may not come back, he never seems far away. Often indeed he seems very near; not least so when we are tramping over his beloved Yorkshire fells, the wind carrying the varied sounds of the moorland – the splash of a nearby stream, the whisper of the long grass, the bleating of lambs and suddenly, the lovely, bubbling cry of a curlew – the bird he loved above all others. Then we recall what Geoffrey said one day as the same call came faintly across the moor: ‘That’s how I’d like to return to earth when my time comes.’
Perhaps he has.
Ernest Appleyard – ‘J.E.A.’ – died in Torquay, Devon, in 1966, aged 83. The family business prospered, expanded and benefitted from a public flotation in the early 1960s. The Manor House at Linton was sold in 1950 and has since passed through several hands, its current owners apparently disinterested in its past. Although Kiln Hill still exists, the Hayes family has dispersed and left Linton. The Linton-on-Wharfe Memorial Hall, with its handsome oak tribute to the fallen of distant times, still thrives.
In May 1989 there was a summer fete and reunion at Anderson Manor for those who had served there as part of the Small Scale Raiding Force. A small brass plaque was dedicated in St Michael’s chapel, where Tony Hall and Gus March-Phillipps had sought spiritual strength just before Operation Aquatint.
Etched into the oft-polished brass are the words:
IN MEMORY OF THE SMALL SCALE RAIDING FORCE (62 COMMANDO) AND ALL THOSE WHO SERVED WITH THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE AT ANDERSON MANOR DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR.
That ceremony of dedication was attended by Henrietta March-Phillipps, the daughter Gus never knew, together with Peter Kemp, Tom Winter and a handful of other veterans.
Henrietta had been working in theatrical production and had gone into a Bristol antique shop looking for props. The shop was owned by Tony Hall. The fortuitous meeting that resulted led to the 1971 BBC radio documentary If Any Question Why We Died: A Quest For March-Phillipps, produced by the daughter he never knew, who had grown up believing her father had been some sort of pirate. She was not entirely wrong.
Henrietta’s brief marriage in 1978 ended in divorce. There were no children. She died of cancer in 1991 at the age of 48. Peter Kemp, the Spanish Civil War veteran haunted by the screams of those German sentries on Pointe de Plouézec, became a writer and published author. His book about wartime service in SOE, No Colours Or Crest, was published in 1958. It became a classic of its genre and changes hands, today (2013) at anything up to £200. Peter Kemp died in 1993. Tom Winter, survivor of Operation Aquatint, died in 1996, aged 92, on the Isle of Wight after running a taxi business with former SSRF officer Ian Warren. In peace, as in war, the pair supported one another into the softening shadows of old age: both attended the Anderson Manor reunion in 1989. ‘I interviewed both of them,’ recalled local historian Philip Ventham. ‘They were at that stage both looking out for one another. It was very touching, really.’9
Post-war, Major Oswald ‘Mickey’ Rooney worked for Courages and then Charrington Breweries before returning to the family brush-making business and becoming a member of Lloyds. Married with five children, he later moved first to Little Laver, near Ongar, in Essex and then to Chipping Warden, near Banbury, claiming that all he ever wanted after the war was to ‘live a normal life’. He died in 1995 aged 79, a few years after telling his son, Chris, ‘I never expected to live this long.’10
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Anderson Manor itself still remains beautiful, weathered and unchanged. It appears, from the outside, exactly as Gus March-Phillipps and Geoffrey Appleyard must have viewed it that first fine spring morning in March 1942 when the gardens were alive with primroses, scented purple violets and crocuses. The Manor has, however, changed hands. Its current owners know its history and are reminded of its wartime past in gentle ways: digging up mole hills in the kitchen garden, they unearthed spent cartridge cases from Bren, tommy gun and .45 automatics – the kitchen garden had been a shooting range. There have been other reminders, too. One morning their young daughter came down for breakfast and announced ‘that man’ had been in her bedroom again. ‘Man? What man?’ asked her mother with a casualness she did not feel. ‘The man,’ said the little girl, ‘standing in the corner of her room’. He had been there three or four times before. She then described a man dressed in commando clothing. The girl was 3 years old. She had never seen or heard of a commando.
The Small Scale Raiding Force
Appleyard, Geoffrey,
DSO, MC and Bar, MA
Killed
13 July 1943
Dudgeon, Patrick, MC
Executed
3 October 1943
Hayes, Graham, MC
Executed
13 July 1943
Herstell, Ernest
Killed
29 May 1943
Lassen, Anders, VC,
MC and two Bars
Killed
9 April 1945
Lehniger, Leonard
Killed
13 September 1942
> March-Phillipps,
Gustavus, DSO, MBE
Killed
13 September 1942
Ogden-Smith, Colin
Killed
29 July 1944
Opoczynski, Abraham
(serving as Adam Orr)
Murdered
12 April 1945
Pinckney, Philip
Executed
7 September 1943
Williams, Alan
Killed
13 September 1942
‘Proper people’, all
Notes
* The same night Major Geoffrey Appleyard disappeared, 2,000 British paratroopers and glider-borne infantry mounted a disastrous airborne operation to seize Primosole Bridge 7 miles south of Catania on the east coast of Sicily. This was approximately 35 miles due south of Appleyard’s intended DZ. Allied shipping opened fire on the British aircraft before they reached the coast and German guns joined in once they made landfall. Out of those 2,000 troops, only 200 were left to assault the bridge. This was seized and held for just twelve hours before they were forced to retreat. The night before, the men of Major General Matthew B. Ridgway’s 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82rd US Airborne, suffered catastrophic ‘friendly fire’ losses, with twenty-three aircraft shot down and at least 410 killed when nervous Allied shipboard gunners opened up on approaching Allied aircraft. Five days later, Ridgway could still only account for 3,900 of his 5,300 paratroopers. (The Day of Battle, Rick Atkinson, 110)
1. ‘If I Must Die …’, 215.
2. Malcolm Hayes in letter to the author.