by Eric Meyer
Joffre showed me out of his office, chatting as we walked outside into the barracks square.
“Sergeant, think about it again. See if there’s any way you think it could be done, without getting yourselves killed in the process. I could offer you whatever you wanted. Men, equipment, air support, you name it. Just think about it a little more, fair enough?”
“Fair enough,” I agreed.
Just then, Manfred von Kessler came running up to us.
“Excuse me, Colonel,” he saluted and turned to me. “Jurgen, we’re wanted. Phat Diem, a few kilometres north of here, it’s under attack. We’re to reinforce them immediately, and Captain Leforge is assembling the company now. They’re sending two companies, and B Company is coming with us.”
“Talk to me when you get back, Sergeant. Remember, anything you want!” Joffre called after me.
I waved an acknowledgment, and we doubled towards the vehicle park where our company was already loading onto four trucks. Captain Leforge climbed aboard the leading vehicle, and almost immediately it roared away. Paul Schuster was driving, and he smiled at me.
“I get the impression I’m driving a fire engine, Jurgen. All we ever seem to do is put out fires that someone else has started.”
I thought about his words, and he was right. Was I wrong to refuse Joffre, his mission to assassinate Giap; the Viet Minh military architect, Ho Chi Minh’s right hand man, the evil guerrilla leader behind so many of the atrocities we’d witnessed in this country? Of course, whatever the merits and demerits of the mission, it would be certainly asking the legionnaires to attempt a suicide mission.
We roared into Phat Diem, another depressing little village, another French military outpost, and another pile of bodies. Unlike Nhi Khe, we found no butchered, crucified bodies of French soldiers, but the bodies of eleven men, the post garrison. All apparently killed by the Viet Minh in a surprise attack. Bodies of the villagers littered the ground, and this time murdered where they stood, men, women and children, for daring to refuse support and sustenance for the Viet Minh. Another communist ‘example’ to make sure the next village cooperated. More women and children, together with their men, sacrificed for the teachings of Karl Marx. More soldiers sacrificed by the military geniuses of France on the altar of their South-East Asian Maginot Line.
We had time to bury the soldiers, but there were too many villagers, so we stacked them in a heap, leaving them for locals to attend to. It was the best we could do for the poor devils. The local area was probably still infested with Viet Minh, and time for giving a decent burial to all of them was a luxury we just didn’t have. We mounted the vehicles and returned to Hanoi.
I was very thoughtful. Unlike Phu Ly, these last two villages were beyond fire fighting, and we were just acting as a burial detail for the victims. Surely, there must be a better way to fight this war than counting our own dead? As we dismounted in the barracks in Hanoi, a soldier ran up to me.
“Colonel Joffre needs to see you, Sergeant. He said to call in as soon as you returned.”
I returned his salute and walked over to Joffre’s office. When I walked in, he wasn’t alone. There was another Legion sergeant with him and Joffre’s second in command, Major Schumacher, who was a Frenchman, despite the German name. Apparently, his father was German, but he was born and brought up in France by his French Parisian mother. I knew Schumacher slightly, a good officer, and always ready to lend assistance to any of the men under his command.
“Jurgen, it’s good to see you safely back. Major Schumacher you know, and this is Sergeant Werner Muller.”
We shook hands.
“Muller,” Joffre continued, “like you, was a member of the Waffen-SS. He was with Otto Skorzeny, a part of the SS-Sonderverband z.b.V. Friedenthal, Skorzeny’s own unit.
Otto Skorzeny was an SS-Obersturmbannführer, Lieutenant Colonel, in the Waffen-SS during World War II. After fighting on the Eastern Front, he commanded a rescue mission that freed the deposed Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, from captivity. Skorzeny was also the leader of Operation Greif, in which German soldiers were to infiltrate through enemy lines, using their opponents' uniforms and native language. At the end of the war, Skorzeny was part of the Werwolf guerrilla movement.
“That’s very interesting, Sir,” I replied to Joffre, “but I’m not quite certain what you mean, what are you telling me?”
“I’m telling you, Sergeant, that Muller was one of the team who rescued Mussolini from Gran Sasso, after he was imprisoned by the Allies.
Mussolini was held in the Campo Imperatore Hotel at the top of the Gran Sasso Mountain, and only accessible by cable car from the valley below. Skorzeny flew over Gran Sasso and took pictures of the location with a handheld camera. General Kurt Student and Skorzeny formulated an attack plan.
On September 12, the Gran Sasso raid was carried out according to plan. Mussolini was rescued without firing a single shot. Flying out in a Storch airplane, Skorzeny escorted Mussolini to Rome and later to Berlin. The exploit earned Skorzeny fame, promotion to Major, and the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.
Joffre smiled. “I’m also asking you, Sergeant, asking you, not ordering, to talk to Muller, with a view to mounting a similar mission on Giap.”
“You mean kidnap Giap, and lift him from under the noses of the Viet Minh High Command?”
“Exactly, Jurgen, that’s exactly what I mean. Kidnap him, and bring him back here, if possible. If not, well, there’s the other solution, so talk to Muller. I believe it could be done, and without unnecessary risks to the men. Just talk to him. Major Schumacher is here as liaison between you and myself. His job, his only job, is to advise and facilitate on this mission. Speak to Sergeant Muller, introduce him to your NCOs, and then let me know if it can be done. Any questions you have, Major Schumacher will advise. Report to me by noon tomorrow. Dismissed.”
We saluted, and I left the office with Muller. I was reeling with surprise. I’d been thinking about the problem of how to hit the Viet Minh, for once to take the initiative. Now Joffre had produced this tough-looking SS veteran to show us how it could be done. Was this a stroke of fortune, or was it to be chiselled on my gravestone?
I took Muller straight back to our quarters to talk to the NCOs, Bauer, von Kessler, Vogelmann and Schuster. I could imagine their surprise. Skorzeny was one of the real stars of the SS, and anyone who had taken part in the Mussolini rescue would have a good tale to tell.
* * * * *
CHAPTER FOUR
Muller did indeed have a good story to tell. Like many in post-First World War Germany, he remembered the hard times. Born in 1917, his father had been killed during the spring offensive of 1918 when our German forces had spent the last of their strength in a futile effort to break through the Western Front. His mother brought him up in Leipzig, where he remembered the hunger and poverty that followed the Versailles reparations, cruelly reducing an already bankrupt Germany into almost total ruin.
The Treaty of Versailles was signed at the end of World War I, finally ending the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It took six months of negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude the peace treaty, and laid the foundations for the Nazis to sweep to power in the shattered state that was Germany, following the economic collapse of the 1920’s. Germany was obliged to accept sole responsibility for causing the First World War and, under the terms of the treaty to disarm, make substantial territorial concessions and pay reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente Powers. The total cost of these reparations was assessed at 31.4 billion US dollars, and many economists estimated it would have taken Germany until 1988 to pay. The result of the treaty was a weak compromise that left none contented. Germany was not pacified or conciliated, nor permanently weakened. This would prove to be a factor leading to later conflicts, notably and directly, the Second World War.
Even before the treaty was signed, during the influenza pandemic that swept a war-worn and starving Europe
after the war, Muller’s two sisters and brother died, leaving him an only child of a single mother.
The 1918 flu pandemic, known as Spanish Flu, spread widely across the world. Many victims were healthy young adults, in contrast to most influenza outbreaks which predominantly affected young, elderly or weakened people. The pandemic lasted from March 1918 to June 1920, spreading even to the Arctic and remote Pacific islands. An estimated fifty million people died; about three per cent of the world's population.
In the later 1920’s, Muller was fascinated by the constant street battles between the right wing groups of former solders, the Frei Korps, the Stalhlhelm, the SA, when they met their communist party opponents.
And, of course, there was Adolf Hitler, the mesmeric Austrian, saviour of Germany, and the one man who could ‘save’ Germany. His mother idolised the Austrian corporal, and so did Werner Muller. In 1935, he joined the SS-Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler, proudly wearing the uniform of an SS-Schütze. One of his officers in the LAH was Otto Skorzeny. When Skorzeny formed the SS-Sonderverband z.b.V. Friedenthal, Muller followed him. Then came an intensive period of training, during which Muller became a competent parachutist. His final mission was Operation Greif, conceived by Hitler; a false-flag operation led by Waffen-SS commando Otto Skorzeny, during the Battle of the Bulge.
Wounded during the battle by bullet wounds to both legs, Muller spent the last few months of the war in a hospital bed outside of Berlin. When the Russians arrived in Berlin, Muller managed to escape, following little known trails until he reached Allied lines and eventually the safety of Switzerland.
It was a story familiar to us all. We had all, in one way or another, had to find our own way to escape the Allied plans to revenge themselves on the SS, blaming them for all the bad things that happened during the war. Then, like us, he joined the Foreign Legion, and finding himself once more fighting the communists.
We all questioned him extensively on his ideas to kidnap, or kill if necessary, Giap.
“There are several factors you need to consider,” Muller told us.
“Firstly, security. Skorzeny’s previous missions were plagued by lapses of security. When we took Mussolini, the operation was very, very tight indeed. Apart from Hitler, Himmler and Skorzeny, the only people who knew the purpose of the mission were us, the troops who were actually involved in it. Security in this place is a joke, and that is your first problem.”
We all murmured agreement. Everyone in Indochina seemed to be either actually, or potentially, sending information on the French military directly to the Viet Minh.
“Secondly,” he continued, “the planning and intelligence needs to be first class, and beyond anything I’ve seen in this place, anyway. What you need is...”
He hesitated to say it, but we knew what he meant, German planners and German intelligence, people with the skills and ruthlessness of the SS, the SD, and the Abwehr and German military intelligence.
The French, our masters, seemed to be only good at one thing, maintaining the status quo, and repeating the mistakes their forbearers had made time and time again.
“Thirdly, you need a crack SS unit to go in there and snatch the bastard, or finish him off.”
We all laughed loudly, but it was true. French military methods would not suffice. The hard, ruthless efficiency of the Waffen-SS was needed. We’d been one of the best fighting units the world had ever known, before being frittered away in a series of useless operations that decimated our ranks. But if you asked the SS to do the job, they got it done, or died in the process. Our infantry and panzer units had been the most feared in Europe, for good reason.
“Is that it?” I asked Muller.
He nodded. “That’s it, really. Keep it totally secret, first rate intelligence and planning, and send in the SS. That’s about it. Of course, I’ll be able to help with plenty of operational detail, but those three things are the most important.”
He looked at us with interest.
“Do you intend on doing it?”
“We’re considering it, Werner. Men, what do you think,” I asked them.
Bauer answered first.
“Jurgen, I’m totally sick of seeing the men whittled down in a series of Viet Minh raids. All we ever seem to do is go in to repair the damage after the enemy has disappeared into the jungle. Take out Giap, and we hit them where it really hurts, right in the balls. If it can be done, I’m for it.”
Von Kessler spoke up.
“That’s true, Jurgen. Taking out Giap could do some real damage, and give them a taste of it.”
“Werner,” I asked Muller, “strategically, what do you think it would achieve, taking out Giap?”
He thought for a moment.
“Before the Mussolini affair, we had an operation planned, Operation Long Jump. It was the codename for a mission to assassinate Stalin, Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt at their 1943 meeting in Tehran for a conference to discuss plans for dividing up Europe after the War ended.”
He grinned. “The arrogant bastards knew even then they were going to win.”
The Tehran Conference, codenamed Eureka, was the meeting of Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill between November 28th and December 1st, 1943; most of which was held at the Soviet Embassy in Tehran, Iran. It was the first major conference amongst the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom, in which Stalin was present. The central aim of the Tehran conference was to plan the final strategy for the war against Nazi Germany and its allies. The chief discussion was centred on the opening of a second front in Western Europe. It was a major opportunity for Nazi Germany to strike a fatal blow against the leadership of its principal enemies.
“Hitler was keen for us to do it,” Muller continued. “Kaltenbrunner was the mission planner. Our intelligence had learned of the timing of the conference in October 1943, after we broke an American Navy code. The Fuhrer chose Otto Skorzeny, with the agreement of Kaltenbrunner, to lead the mission. I recall at the time wondering about that mission. Remember, the Sixth Amy had been thrown to the Russian animals at Stalingrad, and Operation Citadelle, the battle of Kursk, had ripped the guts out of what was left of our forces on the Eastern Front. We had to admit it, the Ivans had got us beaten, no question. The only real issue was when would they arrive on the border of the Reich. None of those three, Stalin, Churchill or Eisenhower, was a military genius, and the Fuhrer had by then managed to show what a cock up he could make of making military decisions, so all of those leaders were expendable. But Giap.”
He stopped to think.
“That operation at Cao Bang near the Chinese border, was a masterstroke, he really caught the French with their pants down. Since then, he’s been attacking our outposts, knocking them down like ninepins. Essentially, he’s a whisker away from owning the whole of Indochina north of the Red River. Genius or not, he’s a very, very clever leader. It’s unlikely they have anyone who could replace him. If we could kidnap or kill him, yes, it could certainly affect the whole course of the war.”
He looked at us challengingly. “Will you do it?”
I ignored him.
“Karl-Heinz,” I looked at Vogelmann, “what do you think?”
“One thing is for sure,” he replied, “if it’s going to be done, it will need an SS unit to do it, and in Indochina we’re the closest thing to an SS unit they’re likely to get. So it’s us, or nobody. And yes, I think it’s worth doing. I’m in.”
“Ok, that leaves you, Paul,” I said to Schuster. “What do you think?”
“Definitely,” said the former soldier of SS-Totenkopf, “it’ll be like old times. Get in, hit them hard, and get out.”
I laughed at him. “Paul, that’s exactly the tactics Giap himself uses.”
“Then perhaps he learned from the SS,” he replied, smiling. “But that’s the way to do it. Count me in.”
“It seems your men are all for it,” Muller smiled.
“True, but the final decision will be mine,
Werner, and I’ve got a lot to think about. I’m not convinced it could be done without risking the lives of the whole unit. Could we rely on you for advice and support during the planning and operational stages, start to finish?”
“That’s why I’m here,” he said, “all the way. I’d go with you, if you decided to go, but Joffre has already turned me down for the operation. He wants me on his staff, not rushing off getting ‘my stupid Nazi head blown off,’ so he said.”
“That’s fine. Any suggestions on unit strength?”
“I understand you’d be going in as Russian advisors?” I nodded.
“Then a small unit, a maximum of twelve men. You’d want to be parachuted in, and as near to Giap’s HQ as possible. That’s the first obstacle, to find the bastard.”
“And the extraction?” I asked him.
“No mountaintop strips to land a Fieseler Storch and take off again, so you’ll need to think of something else.”
The Fieseler Fi 156 Storch, or stork, was a small German liaison aircraft built by Fieseler before and during World War II. The Storch could be found on every front throughout the European and North African operations in World War II. It will probably always be most famous for its role in Skorzeny’s Operation Eiche, the rescue of deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from the boulder-strewn mountaintop near the Gran Sasso, surrounded by Italian troops. Skorzeny dropped with ninety paratroopers onto the peak and quickly captured it, but the problem remained of how to get away. A Focke-Achgelis Fa 223 helicopter was sent, but it broke down en route. Instead, pilot Walter Gerlach flew in a Storch, landed in thirty metres (one hundred feet), took aboard Mussolini and Skorzeny, and took off again in under two hundred and fifty feet, even though the plane was overloaded.
We chatted about the extraction, and the most difficult part of the operation. Giap’s absence would be noticed immediately, and from that moment on, we would be hunted down like dogs. We had two choices, immediate extraction, or find somewhere where we could hide until the hunt died down. After a while, it became obvious that immediate extraction was the only answer. Hiding for any length of time in enemy held territory was virtually impossible.