by Damien Lewis
On Lassen’s call his force opened up with forty submachine-guns, plus their Brens, and the handful of weapons that the few ELAS troops who had stuck with them managed to bring to bear. For a few moments the sappers tried to return fire, but they were cut down in their droves. Again and again their positions were raked with murderous volleys of fire, the Bren gunners each burning through a dozen magazines of rounds.
Finally, with the raiders running painfully low on ammunition, the surviving sappers and their guard force turned and ran. The Germans had a column of trucks lined up at the fuel dump’s exit gate. They swarmed aboard like ants. But as they tried to pull away the raiders turned their guns on the vehicles. Bullets tore through glass, shattering it into storms of blinding splinters. Grenades punched through thin steel, finding the soft human targets clambering about inside.
By the time the battle was over, estimates of the enemy losses were as many as sixty dead and wounded. Lassen’s force had suffered just the one casualty – a raider shot in the shoulder.
*
With the battle of the Treibstofflager done and dusted, the German commander in Salonika seemed to lose all further appetite for the fight. Though his force outnumbered Lassen’s many times over, it seemed he had bought the bluff. The following morning a long column of German military vehicles began to pull out of the city, as he evacuated it to the last man.
A pall of smoke lay over the last of the German positions, his departing troops torching whatever they couldn’t take with them. But much of the city had been saved. By now the red, white and blue of Union Jacks had largely replaced the ELAS banners that had festooned the city streets: it was clear to the city’s inhabitants who the real liberators were.
On seeing the flags, Lassen turned to Solomon, who sat beside him in the jeep. ‘England’s prestige has been saved,’ he quipped. ‘Now we can have a bit of a fling!’
One of the greatest bluffs of the war – forty butcher-and-bolt raiders posing as a battalion of elite British soldiers – had paid off. But before the partying proper could get underway, Lassen had to send a cable to Jellicoe.
‘I have the honour to report that I am in Salonika,’ he wrote.
‘Give your estimated time of arrival Athens,’ Jellicoe cabled back, curtly.
Jellicoe knew that in taking Salonika Lassen had overstepped his orders, hence the message recalling him to base. But at the same time Jellicoe was well aware of the kind of men that he had under his command, officers included. His attitude to such maverick risk-taking was summed up in the phrase: all’s well that ends well.
In any case, curt message or no, Lassen wasn’t about to return to Athens any time soon. For a good week the Danish SBS major became the de facto ruler of Greece’s second city, a conurbation of some 150,000 inhabitants. Lassen upheld laws, passed verdicts on disputes, and generally tried to keep a lid on things. Salonika was a seething mass of chaos and exuberance, on a par with post-liberation Athens just a few weeks earlier. There were scores of enemy deserters in the city – Italians, Bulgarians and even a few Germans – which made Lassen’s job all the more tricky.
But there was one group of people who were noticeable only by their absence. Salonika had been purged entirely of its Jews. Since Biblical times it had had a large Jewish population, but by the autumn of 1944 every single Jew was gone. They had allegedly been shipped to Krakow, in Poland, but a captured German soldier confirmed that there were no Jews in Krakow any more. Indeed, he’d been told that the Krakow Jews had been deported to Salonika.
Lassen, Solomon and others felt deeply the suffering of the Greek nation, whether Jew or Gentile. Lassen railed at how sinister and evil was this liquidation of an entire Greek people. Yet despite such unspeakable atrocities there was work to be done. He sat side by side with Solomon in Salonika’s Hotel Mediterranean, trying to keep a lid on this wild city, particularly the ELAS fighters, who were seeking to settle old scores and take revenge for long-held grievances.
‘Andy and I prevent riots and murder, we pass laws, we pardon and we pass sentences,’ Solomon wrote, in a rare letter home. ‘If we had not come and acted as we did, much blood would have been spilt … Andy and I have experienced together the greatest joys and sorrows – in adversity, as on Leros and in victory as here in Salonika. For some reason or other he feels the same for me as I feel for him. He once said to me, almost with tears in his eyes: “Martin, you are a great soldier.” That is the best praise I have ever received.’
There were some in Salonika who had profited from the German occupation. There are always quislings, collaborators and profiteers, even among a noble people like the Greeks. Any number came to Lassen, seeking to convert their ill-gotten gains – chiefly looted art, jewellery and gold – into ready cash. In the name of punishing them Lassen took it all, telling whoever came that he would expedite their request, whereupon he promptly distributed the loot around his men. Few of the chancers felt able to complain when nothing materialized in return.
And of course, along with all the hard work came hard play. Naturally, the war-bitten but handsome and supremely confident major proved the uncontested favourite with the ladies in Salonika. One night as his men caroused in the hotel grounds, Lassen emerged naked apart from his boots, shouting: ‘Chaps, can’t you let your CO screw in peace?’
*
It wasn’t until nine days after Salonika’s liberation that the main British force – the 9,000 promised Allied troops – made it to the city. Had Lassen and his men waited for them to get there, Salonika and its people would have been in a far worse state. A British intelligence assessment of the action subsequently concluded:
But for Lassen and his band, Salonika would not have been evacuated as soon as 30 October 1944. The town would have suffered greater destruction. His solitary jeep and few troops were seen everywhere; behind the enemy’s lines, with ELAS in the mountains. Their numbers and strength were magnified into many hundreds of men with automatic weapons. Prisoners taken confirm this, their estimate never being less than one thousand men.
Jason Mavrikis, Lassen’s translator and Greek Sacred Squadron veteran, put it more succinctly: ‘The whole of Salonika was in the streets, and Anders Lassen was something to the local people, because the day before he had negotiated with the Germans and he really managed to save large and important installations, especially the harbour.’
But Lassen, the hero of Salonika, soon tired of acting as city governor. With Athens and Salonika having fallen, all of Greece would soon be in Allied hands.
In recent weeks Lassen had found himself increasingly drawn to the ‘big war’ – that which would inevitably throw him into close contact with the regular military. ‘We must go to the big war,’ he kept telling his comrades in the SBS, plus anyone in higher command who might listen. Quite what his force of maverick pirate-raiders might be called upon to do in the ‘big war’ remained unclear – but Lassen was determined that he and his men would play their part.
The nearest ‘big war’ was Italy, but in the fierce winter of 1944/45 Allied forces were bogged down in the snows and mud. Northern Italy had become a long and brutal war of attrition, in which neither side was gaining much ground. It was not a war in which Lassen could see an obvious niche for his kind of small-scale raiding operations, but with the coming spring offensive all of that was about change.
Lassen’s almost unrivalled reputation for delivering unlimited violence in the night and the darkness, ensured that his desire to go to the ‘big war’ would not fall upon deaf ears.
*
Porter Jarrell, the American medic-cum-raider, had been at Lassen’s side all through Athens and Salonika and for everything in-between. Like so many of Lassen’s raiders, Jarrell saw himself as being especially close to the man who commanded the Irish Patrol; this enigmatic leader had the ability to draw fellow warriors close, while revealing little of his private self.
In spite of Lassen’s closed, intensely self-contained nature, Jarrell could tell how mu
rderously hard the Dane was driving himself. As November 1944 in Salonika turned into January 1945 somewhere on the road to Italy, Jarrell feared where his commander’s restlessness and battle-hunger was leading him. Lassen had survived four years of constant raiding – action that had killed off every one of his original comrades, and more. Yet it was as if he felt the guilt of the survivor, and was driven by a terrible death wish.
‘It was as if a fever was burning inside him,’ Jarrell remarked. ‘He defied death and exposed himself to the greatest dangers. He was like a restless dynamo, charged with energy … When he was on leave it was as if he knew he had courted disaster too often and had to fill those short hours with the life that was running away from him.’
‘He didn’t seem to know the word fear,’ Jack Mann remarked. ‘He was a go-getter. He would organize the raids, prepare for it, and he was the real killer … You knew he never knew how long he had. He never thought about dying, but he thought – “Well, you know, I may as well have some fun when I’m not fighting …” ’
Jarrell feared for Lassen’s very survival. ‘Life had become a race against death. He had already become a legend – but a legend about a human being – full of contrasts in his many-sided character. A legend which bore the unmistakable stamp of his personality.’
That unique and compelling personality – one intensely proud of his soldiers and hugely protective of them; one largely dismissive of rigid military hierarchies – would be to the fore as Lassen led his men into combat in Northern Italy.
Chapter Twenty-five
Lassen turned up in Italy complete with a Volkswagen Kubelwagen – the open-topped jeep-like vehicle used extensively by the German military – that he had purloined from the enemy. He also had with him the veterans of his Irish Patrol, plus Pipo – the mischievous Lion of Leros. Unfortunately, the evil-smelling Dog Tom had somehow been left behind.
Yet now that his wish had been granted and he’d got to join the ‘big war’, Lassen would find himself increasingly fettered by its rules and confounded by its regulations. At first he tore around northern Italy in that Kubelwagen looking for some suitable work for his men, but only for so long. One day the British Military Police stopped him and confiscated the vehicle. They didn’t seem to understand the concept of such things being seized as the ‘booty’ of war.
Lassen’s repeatedly cabled headquarters to get Dog Tom sent on to him in Italy. ‘Kindly send Dog Tom, two jeeps and a barber,’ read the first. No response was forthcoming. A second was sent. ‘Where is Dog Tom – stop. Lassen beginning to show symptoms of anxiety neurosis – stop.’ That too went unanswered.
No Dog Tom was ever forthcoming, and in truth a newly arrived NCO had taken advantage of the Danish major and his dog being separated, and Dog Tom had been shot. Rules and regulations seemed to define and shape everything in the new world order that was Italy with the regular Army.
‘The practise of wearing unit headgear at other than the regulation angle will cease forthwith …’
‘Articles of Enemy personal apparel, toilet items, cameras etc. will in future be described in the correct terminology. They will not be referred to as “liberated”.’
All this was anathema to Lassen and his Irish Patrol, and at times they must have wondered what on earth they were doing in such a theatre of war.
‘The rest of the British Army hated us,’ remarked Dick Holmes. ‘They disliked us intensely. I mean, no doubt about it we were arrogant bastards. We walked around with scarves on, carried guns, most of us had shoulder holsters and one thing or another that we’d picked up along the way, guns concealed in our pockets somewhere – little Berettas and stuff.’
Little of this kind of behaviour seemed acceptable now that Lassen and his Irish Patrol had joined the ‘big war’. The Viking raider’s frame of mind wasn’t improved much by the attitude of some of the regular Army officers he encountered. They seemed to view his Special Duty raiders as truly a villainous bunch – a band of ragged, renegade, warn-torn desperadoes.
‘Your men are a disgrace,’ one officer declared to Lassen. ‘They are not even shaved! You are not even shaved! What will the enemy think if they see you dead looking like this?’
Lassen’s hand went to the hilt of his Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife: ‘Speak of my men like that again, and I’ll slit your throat.’
Gradually, bit-by-bit, Lassen’s way of waging war was being eroded by an Army High Command who resented the Special Duty volunteers and their unique esprit de corps. As the war shifted in focus away from small-scale operations behind enemy lines to large-scale set-piece battles, the regular Army High Command was gaining the upper hand.
Lassen found himself having to issue orders that ran against everything the Special Forces raiders had long stood for. This one was typical: ‘The flogging of kit for personal gain is prohibited.’ But he had asked to be a part of the ‘big war’ and now he was here. He’d made his bed: he was going to have to lie in it.
*
Lassen had made it to the ‘big war’ chiefly due to a request by Brigadier Reginald Tod, of the 2nd Special Service Brigade (a unit consisting largely of Royal Marine Commandos). The brigadier, who knew Lassen well, had seen an opening for him and his men in a forthcoming crucial operation – the attempt to break through the German lines and kick-start the stalled Allied offensive.
The conquest of Italy had been spearheaded by the British Eighth Army, working in conjunction with American forces. The Eighth Army had pushed as far north as the Bologna plain, capturing such towns and cities as Forli, Faenza and Ravenna, but their offensive had stalled in bitter fighting, exacerbated by the freezing winter mud and snows. To the west of their positions, the American advance had likewise come to a halt in the rugged foothills of the Apennine Mountains.
Allied forces had thus been halted some 200 miles south of the Austrian border, and just 250 miles short of German territory itself – taking them tantalizingly close to the heartland of Hitler’s Reich. Operation Husky – the liberation of Europe via Sicily and her soft underbelly – was coming up trumps, but only if the logjam on the Bologna plain could be broken, and Hitler was doing everything in his power to ensure that it wouldn’t be.
Hitler had ordered the German army to stand firm on their present lines, and not to retreat to stronger positions along the northern Italian Alps. They had twenty-seven divisions manning their front, with good supplies of ammunition. Their morale remained high, and Hitler had demanded that every last inch of Italian soil be rigorously defended. Yet Churchill was convinced that a breakthrough here would spell disaster for the Germans, opening the way for the advance on the Fatherland itself.
The River Po lay between the German forces and the refuge of the Alps. Churchill believed that defeat south of there would deliver a knockout blow – and the Allied commanders, Field Marshal Alexander and American General Mark Clark set their minds to engineering such a defeat.
‘If we could break through the Adriatic flank and reach the Po quickly all the German armies would be cut off and forced to surrender,’ Churchill argued. It was to this that Alexander and Clark bent their efforts when the stage was set for the final battle.
At the eastern end of the Bologna plain lies the Lower Romagna, a flat, marshy coastal region beginning around Argenta and terminating on Italy’s eastern coast in the Adriatic Sea. Dykes, canals and numerous rivers crisscross this region, and in the warmer months its waterways are the breeding ground for clouds of ferocious mosquitoes.
The Eighth Army’s front line terminated at its eastern end at Lake Comacchio – in truth a ‘lake’ in name only. Comacchio was but the most evil-smelling, treacherous, mud-choked patch of shallow, bog-water, among many such swamplands in the Lower Romagna. And perhaps because it ran counter to any easy logic – and thus would be the route of attack least expected by the enemy – it was at Comacchio that Allied forces had decided to attempt their spring breakthrough.
Brigadier Tod, commanding No. 9 Commando and
assorted other supporting units, held the front line at Comacchio. Lake Comacchio is some twenty miles by fifteen, and across its length and breadth the average depth of water is no more than two feet; everywhere the lake was plagued by muddy shallows and treacherous sandflats. To the lake’s eastern flank lay a narrow spit of scrub-covered sand, which was all that separated the lake from the sea. To the west, the lake petered out into a skein of waterways, quagmires and bogs.
If he could abide the stench and avoid the quicksand, a child could paddle for miles from the fringes of the lake, without the water ever reaching above his knees. Over the millennia the local inhabitants had tried to carve the odd channel through the lake, to try to ease passage from one side to the other, but with little intention of lingering on its stagnant waters. The only vaguely edible things to be caught in Comacchio were thin, tasteless eels, and otherwise it was a rank-smelling, mosquito-plagued death-trap.
But Brigadier Tod saw something else in Comacchio’s stagnant expanse. The sand spit separating the lake from the sea was heavily mined and rigged with formidable fortifications. But if a force could somehow cross the lake undetected and hit the enemy by surprise from the rear, the spit would be there for the taking. If the northern shore of the lake could be held to form a bridgehead, the German positions set to both the west and east of the lake would have been comprehensively outflanked.
Brigadier Tod believed his Commandos were capable of crossing the lake, taking the spit from the rear, and establishing a bridgehead on the northern shore. Thus Lake Comacchio was regarded as being the unlikely – but vital – point of breakthrough to kick-start the Eighth Army’s spring offensive.
What Brigadier Tod needed prior to that was a comprehensive intelligence picture drawn up of the lake, its defences and the usable routes of ingress. He also needed a force to guide his commandos onto target come the night of the attack, one capable of mounting some form of diversionary action.