Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (50 page)

“Some of the poor little blighters were only 13 or 14 years old,” recalled Cooper. “They were crawling out of holes everywhere. The Germans put schoolboys in uniform and forced them to fight, when their chances of survival were minimal. It was inhumane.” Yet the SAS was prepared to kill children if necessary. “If you shot one little bastard the others would start crying,” a trooper grimly recalled. At one point, under sporadic fire, two captured teenage Germans were made to sit on the hood of a jeep, as human shields. During a pause one of them leaped down and tried to run away; he was shot dead. The youngest German recruits displayed an arrogance that had, by and large, been crushed out of their elders. On April 10, Muirhead’s squadron encircled a group of Germans that had opened fire from behind a ridge. They turned out to be twenty marine cadets attached to an SS unit. The NCO in command was twenty-four, the rest were all under twenty years old. “They were very cheeky,” the War Diary reported. “One asked us to light his cigarette, another for chocolate and another for a comb. He had his hair parted with a .45.” That could mean a revolver was fired over his head, or it could indicate that he was shot in the head for his insolence. The diary does not go into detail.

As the front advanced, Paddy Mayne toured the different squadrons, usually accompanied by the padre, Fraser McLuskey. A soldier in John Tonkin’s squadron remembered how Mayne’s arrival was greeted by the production of a tin bath, into which was poured every kind of alcohol available, mostly Schnapps, to create a vast and terrifying cocktail. McLuskey played the piano. Everyone got blind drunk, and Mayne the drunkest.

The 1SAS force was commanded by Harry Poat, the tomato grower from Guernsey, who left a vivid account of the days in late March and early April as the SAS advanced, field by field, village by village, hedgerow by hedgerow. “The fighting is very hard and we have ‘mixed it’ many times with the Hun. They are all SS and the real thing, and although they no longer have an organized defence, they are fighting cleverly in a guerrilla role, and I can assure you they are better at it than our friends the maquis…the chaps have fought magnificently, and killed many SS.” On April 2, the Allies took Münster after some ferocious street fighting by the US 17th Airborne Division and the British 6th Guards Tank Brigade. More than 90 percent of the Old Town had already been destroyed by bombing. On Easter Day, Fraser McLuskey held an open-air service some fifteen miles north of the city.

Seekings, reunited once more with Cooper, played the role of grizzled, cranky veteran, terrorizing his superior officers as he had once tried to bully Cooper. “The young officers weren’t prepared to argue the toss with me,” he later bragged. “They were shit-scared of me.” Yet the killing may have begun to affect even Seekings. East of Erle, driving slowly along a country track, he spotted a line of uniformed soldiers approaching on the other side of the hedgerow. Quickly backing the jeep into a culvert, Seekings cocked the Bren gun and waited. The soldiers came into view, a line of eleven German home guardsmen, trudging in single file, mostly middle-aged and wholly oblivious of what was about to happen. Seekings waited until the Germans were within a few feet of his hiding place. “I opened up with a whole magazine, chopped them down, riddled the bloody lot.” Once he would have gloried in the butchery. Not now. “The slaughter was terrible.”

The SAS were also frequently the targets of ambush, not the architects. For most of the war they had relied on concealment. Now they were usually advancing, and at the mercy of an invisible enemy. “The country up ahead is very woody and not our cup of tea at all,” Poat wrote in a letter to headquarters on April 13. “Open country is the only place for us.” But in the land they now traversed, open country was rare. Seekings and Cooper were leading a column of jeeps through a small copse when bullets started to fly around them. “Reg, we break!” shouted Cooper, as he gunned the engine and reversed at high speed. Seven men had been injured and one killed. “We belted out of there like shit off a shovel,” wrote Cooper. “I don’t think we saw a single German.”

Two days earlier, 1SAS had experienced the full peril of this new terrain and this new form of combat. On the Nienburg-to-Neustadt road, one of the armored cars up ahead was suddenly hit by a Panzerfaust fired by a teenager who had leaped from a ditch. The next moment, heavy fire erupted from the woods to the left of the road. “We were at a terrible disadvantage standing high on the road firing our Vickers while the enemy were lying in the undergrowth,” wrote Poat, who ordered the jeeps to form a defensive circle, firing outward. He swiftly realized they were in danger of being surrounded. “It was absolutely impossible to see the enemy as the woods were too thick. The chaps fought like devils, firing everything they had. After about ten minutes I saw we were outnumbered and out-positioned and the casualties were mounting rapidly, so I gave orders for us to form a body of all the jeeps still serviceable, get the wounded on board, and make a dash for it to our own lines.” The advancing Germans were barely thirty yards away when the ragged convoy screeched away in headlong retreat. “I never thought the old jeeps were so slow,” wrote Poat. “50 mph seemed like snail’s pace.”

Mackenzie, the tough little Scottish gunner who had predicted his own death, was shot in the armpit and would undoubtedly have bled to death had Seekings not stuffed a field dressing into the wound and driven the jeep back to a dressing station. Mackenzie lost his arm, but lived, rather to the surprise of Seekings, whose sense of foreboding grew sharper even as victory seemed more assured.

By April 11, Frankforce had pushed east as far as Esperke, near Celle, and Poat sent back an accounting to the adjutant at SAS headquarters, for all the world as if he was reporting on his holiday shopping. “To date we have killed approximately 189 enemy, captured 233, and taken much equipment….Well, cheerio for now, let’s have your news. I would like you to forward this letter to Paddy who, I believe, is off in battle, though I have no definite news of him.”

Paddy Mayne was not merely in battle, but plunging into his last conflict with a fervor that was either supremely brave or suicidal, and possibly both.

—

Two days earlier, two squadrons of 1SAS assembled at the German town of Meppen, near the Dutch border, to begin what would be the final SAS operation in Europe. The mood was strange. The men knew that the end of the European war was near, but there were rumors of imminent redeployment to the Far East. Suppressed elation was mixed with a chill of trepidation.

Mayne laid out the mission, code-named Operation Howard. The two SAS squadrons would press into Germany as the “spearhead” for the 4th Canadian Armoured Division, clearing the way for the tanks, rooting out remnants of resistance, and conducting forward reconnaissance while “causing alarm and disorganization behind enemy lines.” They would drive northeast toward Oldenburg, and then continue north to the U-boat base at Wilhelmshaven, a potential final target. Intelligence suggested they would encounter minimal opposition, and it was optimistically predicted that, with the tank division “on their heels,” the SAS should be able to cover as much fifty miles a day. The Canadians cheerfully patronized the SAS in their jeeps, referring to them as “our friends in the little mechanized mess tins.” But they had a point: tanks were far better equipped for what lay ahead.

The terrain south of Oldenburg was far from ideal for jeep warfare. “Crossed and re-crossed by dykes and canals” that made navigation difficult, it was too wooded and boggy to permit the vehicles to operate effectively off-road. Some thought the mission misguided, the men inadequately trained and underarmed for their allotted role. Still, when the plan had been put to Mayne by the Canadian commander of the 4th Armoured Division, he had “accepted with alacrity and enthusiasm.” Mayne had not been in the thick of the action since Termoli. He was itching for a fight and, like Farran, he had brought along his own musical accompaniment. The windup gramophone player had survived the French campaign and was now installed in the back of his jeep with a loudspeaker attached: Paddy Mayne would invade Germany to the strains of his favorite Irish music, the ballads of Percy French.

The troop set off at dawn on April 10, and made good progress, crossing the river Hase at around midday. Traveling on parallel roads, the two squadrons, B and C, pressed on toward the town of Börger. This was grim, low country, suffused with tragic recent history. In 1933, at nearby Börgermoor, the Nazis had established one of the first concentration camps, holding socialists, communists, and other “undesirables” regarded as enemies of the Third Reich. The prisoners had composed their own song, which became popular as a rallying anthem for German volunteers in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

Up and down the guards are marching,

No one, no one can get through.

Flight would mean a sure death facing,

Guns and barbed wire block our view.

We are the peat bog soldiers,

Marching with our spades to the moor.

On the very day that the SAS set off on Operation Howard, the prisoners of Börgermoor were assembled and began a grueling death march to another camp farther east, at Aschendorfermoor, which only a few would complete. The SAS was entering a world of horror.

Squadron B, under the command of Major Dick Bond, was approaching Börger when suddenly the middle of the jeep column came under fire from Panzerfaust rockets, machine guns, and snipers. Some of the shooting emanated from the second of two farm buildings, ranged in an L-shape on the right-hand side of the road, as well as from a dense copse of trees behind and a little way beyond the farmhouse. Bond and the three men in his jeep baled out and scrambled into a deep drainage ditch on the other side of the road, where they were joined by the men from three other jeeps. The vehicles ahead of the attack accelerated out of range and came to a halt. Those behind reversed quickly.

Bond was a recruit from the Auxiliary Units, formed to resist the Nazi invasion of Britain that never happened. Separated from the rest of the men, he attempted to scramble over a large drainage pipe running at right angles into the waterlogged ditch, but as he did so, his head appeared above ground level: a single sniper’s bullet killed him instantly. Bond’s driver, a Czech Jew named Mikheil Levinsohn, attempted to reach him, also by climbing over the pipe, but the sniper now had a perfect bead on the spot. Levinsohn was also shot dead. Two men south of the drainage pipe managed to scramble down the ditch to where the rest of the column was waiting and reported what had happened. A radio message was immediately sent to Paddy Mayne, who arrived within ten minutes of the ambush. “Poor Dick,” he repeated quietly. “Poor Dick.”

Mayne’s driver, a fellow Ulsterman from the Shankill Road named Billy Hull, had come to know his commander well and understood his moods. “Mayne was in one of those silent rages,” said Hull. The commander of 1SAS picked up a Bren gun and magazine. “Poor Dick,” he muttered again. Hull followed him with a tommy gun. Eight men, two of them seriously wounded, were still lying in the ditch, pinned down by sporadic fire from one of the farm buildings and the woods. On Mayne’s instruction, Hull entered the adjacent farmhouse, climbed the stairs, and fired a single burst from his tommy gun at the windows of the second building. This drew a hail of fire in response, as Hull flattened himself on the floor. “Bullets were ricocheting off the walls and ceiling, and in seconds the ceiling was set on fire by tracers.” But the ambushers had now revealed their positions. On the ground, Mayne raised the Bren gun to his shoulder (no easy task with a weapon almost a yard long and weighing more than twenty-five pounds) and began firing “burst after burst” into the house, which gave Hull time to escape and rejoin the main party. Having apparently silenced the attackers, either by killing them or forcing them to retreat through the back door, Mayne beckoned for a jeep with a twin Vickers to come forward to take up his position and continue pounding the German positions. Then he walked back to the squadron.

Firing continued from the German forces concealed in the copse. “Who wants to have a go?” Mayne asked.

John Scott, a young lieutenant recruited from the SBS who had been commissioned the previous November, immediately stepped forward. He was never quite sure why. During an earlier firefight, Scott had come across a German, badly wounded in the stomach; instead of getting the man medical attention, he had shot him. “I regretted it, but I suppose my nerves were frayed at the time.” Scott had also ordered Levinsohn to try to reach Bond in the ditch, and had inadvertently sent him to his death. Two different strains of guilt seem to have impelled him to volunteer.

Mayne took the wheel of a jeep, and Scott clambered into the back and manned the twin Vickers. Mayne said nothing. “There was a coldness about Paddy, and it was that coldness that allowed him to sum things up quickly,” Scott later observed. Mayne had calculated that it would be impossible to outflank the Germans in the woods, so the only way to relieve the trapped men would be to blast them out. At little more than walking pace, Mayne drove up the road while Scott poured fire into the trees and buildings on the right. As they passed the pinned-down men in the ditch, Mayne shouted above the din: “I’ll pick you up on the way back.”

These Germans were not the uniformed civilians of the home guard, but remnants of the 1st Parachute Division, the hardened force last encountered by the SAS in Italy—soldiers who, as the report of the engagement later acknowledged, “fought well and even fanatically.” They responded to Mayne’s assault in kind, pouring down fire on the lone jeep; miraculously, neither man was hit, as Mayne continued to give “cool, precise orders” to his gunner. “There can be only one explanation why Colonel Mayne was not killed,” wrote one of his officers. “The sheer audacity and daring which he showed in driving his jeep across their field of fire momentarily bewildered the enemy.” One hundred yards beyond the abandoned jeeps, Mayne performed a U-turn. Scott swapped the Vickers for the .50-caliber Browning, a heavy machine gun capable of firing up to six hundred rounds a minute, and moved into the passenger seat. Then they performed the same procedure as before, but in reverse, while Scott continued to blast away at the woods. The German firing slowed; then their guns fell silent. “By this time half their number must have been wiped out,” wrote one eyewitness. “By now the enemy had had enough.” Mayne drew parallel with the stranded men and stopped. Scott wrote: “He jumped out of the jeep giving me orders to continue firing, lifted the wounded out of the ditch, placed them in the jeep and drove back to the main party.” The rescue operation had taken less than four minutes. This action was later described, in official reports, as “virtually suicidal,” but Mayne would later insist that he had weighed up the odds: “People think I’m a big, mad Irishman, but I’m not. I calculate the risks for and against and then I have a go.”