The Nazi Hunters (15 page)

With their Bergens of explosives propped by the kitchen table, Hislop and Johnsen awaited the inevitable meal. Over a dish of potatoes – simple fare, but delicious to those surviving on sparse military rations heated over an open fire in the mountains – Hislop and Johnsen were given the low-down on German troop dispositions, checkpoints and places of particular danger, plus any obvious targets.

Once they’d eaten their fill, the two men gathered up their means of waging war and slipped out quietly, with Mme Rossi’s whispers of ‘
Bon courage!
’ ringing in their ears.

The night was still and quiet. Hislop and Johnsen flitted through the deserted streets of Moussey as silent as ghosts. Two miles out of the village, they came to a halt. To their left they could hear the pounding of metal on metal. There was the glimmer of arc lamps breaking through a skeletal black latticework of trees.

The two men crept closer, sticking to dense patches of undergrowth and the thickest darkness. Once they were near enough for voices to be heard, they settled down to listen. Soon enough they recognized the language as German. A maintenance unit was at work carrying our repairs to some heavy armour. Position duly noted, Hislop and Johnsen made their careful way back to the road.

They pressed on. Eventually, only the sounds of nature broke the night. It was the early hours of morning by the time they reached the target location – a road junction.

Hurriedly, they laid their explosive charges, before melting back into the darkness.

Chapter Nine

Twenty-five miles to the west of Colonel Franks’ mountaintop base, Jedburgh Team Archibald’s Major Arthur ‘Denny’ Denning had been waging a highly successful form of guerrilla warfare. Having armed his Maquis with the weaponry dropped with SAS Major Peter Power’s stick, the Jedburgh major and the local Maquis had fought a series of running battles in the western foothills of the Vosges.

General Patton’s forces were presently some way to their west, and bogged down in vicious warfare. At one stage Denning and the Maquis had seized the village of Charmes, killing some forty Germans. They’d taken possession of the bridge over the River Moselle, intending to hold it until Patton’s armour could punch their way through and cross this major waterway.

But at the last minute, Denning and the Maquis were driven back by 400 German infantry, supported by tanks. The worst of their injured had to be abandoned.

‘One or two wounded were left behind, and were later found with their heads crushed in, probably by rifle butt,’ Major Denning recorded in the Team Archibald war diary. The dead had been left for all to see, to ‘show what happened to terrorists’ – which was what the Germans had branded the Maquis.

Should one of the Jedburghs fall into enemy hands, doubtless he would also be branded a ‘terrorist’, and face a similar fate. During the fierce fighting Major Denning had been shot in the thigh, but he had carried on regardless, earning a fearsome reputation amongst the Maquis.

Of course, he was fortunate enough to be operating in an area where the allegiances of the locals were mostly with the Allies. Even so, in recent days Major Denning and his Maquis had been forced onto the back foot. ‘Conditions became so impossible that [Maquis] activity, other than information services, was instantly and ruthlessly quelled,’ Denning wrote, in the war diary.

As the Germans grew increasingly desperate, so their responses to Resistance activity became ever more brutal. In particular, Denning feared that any attempts at operating further east – moving into Op Loyton territory – would prove disastrous. ‘Reprisals, shootings, burning and deportations became too common to attempt to arm any men further east.’

But somewhere further east, and sandwiched between Major Denning’s Maquis and the Op Loyton force, were SAS Major Power and his unit, although nothing had been heard of them for approaching two weeks now. In the depths of the Vosges Mountains, Major Power and his small band of SAS men seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth.

Colonel Franks’ Op Loyton force was about to elicit a similarly violent reaction to that faced by Major Denning and his Resistance fighters. Their road-mining activities, small-scale hit-and-run attacks, plus the RAF air strikes that his men had called in, had stirred the cauldron of Waldfest mightily.
Standartenführer
Isselhorst’s SS and Gestapo units were determined to ensure that any Resistance activity was ‘instantly and ruthlessly quelled’.

On 4 September Colonel Franks and Captain Druce were busy arranging a major airdrop of arms for the Maquis. With Colonel Grandval’s help they’d worked out exactly what was needed to equip an initial force in excess of 1,000 men. Once that many Maquis were armed and trained to use their weaponry, Franks would be ready to switch to more daring, large-scale sabotage and guerrilla operations.

But before that airdrop could happen, the Alsace Maquis made a fatal move. While Joubert’s young fighters were far too shrewd to launch themselves into such a rash endeavour, and Etienne’s old drunkards far too wise and canny, there were still plenty of partisans whose trigger fingers remained decidedly itchy. On the afternoon of 4 September several hundred men of the Alsace Maquis launched an ambush that was to have devastating consequences. They hit a lone German truck on the road into Veney, raking it with fire and killing eight soldiers.

The ambush was well executed, apart from the fact that the Maquis had ignored the ‘golden rule’ of such an attack: always be certain of your route of escape, and always cover your tracks. After destroying the German truck, the Maquis had returned to their base of operations – a deserted farm at Viambois, on the outskirts of the Forêt de Reclos. The Germans tracked them to it, and their response was swift and decisive.

They threw a cordon of steel around the Maquis’ position, trapping hundreds – and so a bitter fight to the death began. In the battle for Viambois the Maquis were caught utterly by surprise. The German forces positioned machine guns in the fringes of the forest, and when they opened up on the tumbledown farm, the Maquis were torn apart by intense bursts of fire. Those with weapons tried to fight back, but they were still only lightly armed.

The Alsace Maquis were hopelessly outgunned. It was only by a stroke of good fortune that they weren’t utterly annihilated. By chance, a flight of passing Allied aircraft was drawn to the firefight. Seeing the ‘grey lice’ in action they dived to attack, strafing and bombing the German positions. Those Maquis who could, escaped in the resulting confusion, but scores of wounded were left behind – and they were finished off wherever they had fallen.

Captain Gough – Jedburgh Team Jacob’s commander – was one of those who managed to get away. But his Jedburgh colleague, Frenchman Lieutenant Guy Boisarrie, was killed. He suffered a single shot to the head, suggesting that he too may have been captured and summarily executed.

Gough’s subsequent radio message reflected the desperate straits he found himself in: the sole member of Team Jacob still at large, harried by a determined and remorseless enemy.

Skye captured 17th August. Reported shot as reprisal . . . Please check with Red Cross. Connaught killed. I am now sole member of Team Jacob. 100 Maquis killed. 100 captured in same battle. Rest dispersed . . .

‘Skye’ was the code name of Gough’s signaller, Seymour. Of course, Seymour had been captured on 17 August, and Gough had heard reports that he had since been executed. ‘Connaught’ was Boisarrie’s code name. Approximately 200 men from the Alsace Maquis were dead or captured – and under Waldfest, ‘captured’ was as good as dead.

As the Maquis had tried to escape the trap, weapons were thrown into the bush and abandoned. In the eyes of the SAS, the Alsace Maquis had jumped the gun in launching their ill-fated ambush, and they had been punished accordingly. The way the French saw it, their young and spirited fighters were understandably desperate to hit back against the enemy, and the ambush was a natural – if perhaps not entirely prudent – course of action to have taken.

Either way, the results were the same. The effect on the Alsace Maquis – the main body of the Resistance in the area – was little short of disastrous. The Loyton war diary doesn’t pull any punches: ‘This decisive defeat, due . . . to a poorly conceived commitment of a partially-armed force is believed to have completely broken their spirit and rendered them useless for future efforts.’

The effects of the battle for Viambois spread across the region like ripples from a stone dropped into a still pool. Some Maquis were forced to talk before they were executed. That very evening a company of ‘grey lice’ was spotted, approaching Colonel Franks’ hilltop base. The fifty-odd soldiers were 600 yards away and advancing with great care, which at least gave the Special Forces operators and their Maquis helpers time to make their getaway.

Colonel Franks and his men knew their role here. It wasn’t to stand and fight pitched battles with scores of German troops, as the Alsace Maquis had been forced to do; it was better to vanish into the dusk forest to live to fight another day.

Fortunately, that very morning Captain Druce, again dressed in civilian attire – it was becoming something of a habit with him – had crossed the hills heading north, to visit the isolated village of Pierre-Percée. It consisted of a clutch of houses lying at the end of a V-shaped, dead-end valley, with steeply forested slopes crowding in from all sides. At its western edge the village clustered along the shoreline of a beautiful expanse of water – the Lac de la Pierre-Percée – with verdant forest sweeping down to the waterline.

In peacetime Pierre-Percée had been a popular holiday spot, but of course the war had changed all that. Druce met with the village mayor, Monsieur Michel, who confirmed that no Germans had been seen in the area for a month or more. The mayor made it clear to Druce that he and his band of SAS fighters would be very welcome there.

En route back to base Druce tried to steal the car belonging to Fouch, the suspected German spy that he’d shot dead at the Veney DZ. By now it had been confirmed that Fouch had indeed been working for the enemy – which would explain why he’d still possessed a car, when all other motor vehicles had been requisitioned by the Germans.

Druce had failed to nab Fouch’s wheels, but did succeed in making it back to Colonel Franks in time to deliver the good news about Pierre-Percée. Franks set out, leading his force north across country toward their planned new base of operations. Behind them, a thick pall of smoke rose from the location they had just vacated, the Germans having torched what remained of their camp.

The men marched all night. It was one of brilliant and ethereal moonlight, so there was little need this time to hold on to the belt of the man in front. The light cast the forest into stark patterns of silver and ebony, tree trunks assuming grotesque shapes as the men passed, their shadows seeming to writhe on the ground.

The new camp was hewn out of the living bush above the lake of Pierre-Percée. Franks’ force knocked down a couple of trees, propped them at a 45-degree angle across a horizontal bough, and threw a few canvas groundsheets over the top, forming a makeshift roof. The camp was small-scale, primitive and impermanent – they didn’t even bother to dig a latrine – for at any moment the grey lice might appear, at which point they would be on the run again.

For now, Hislop made contact with London headquarters, and sent the prearranged code word, ‘Wren’ – the signal for the planned arms drop to go ahead. Two Stirlings flew in that night, the first releasing dozens of para-containers over an open field above Pierre-Percée. Each aircraft was packed with enough weaponry to equip a hundred fighters, but with the Alsace Maquis having been decimated in the battle for Viambois, had the arms arrived too late to be of use?

No one knew for sure. It remained to be seen whether the Alsace Maquis would regroup and re-energize themselves, or not. And in the meantime, there were targets aplenty for the SAS.

By the time the first aircraft had finished releasing its load, fingers of ground fog had reached out of the forest and gripped the isolated DZ. The mist thickened, obscuring the lights that Franks’ men were using to mark the rallying point. A stick of fourteen SAS reinforcements – led by Colonel Franks’ intended second-in-command on Op Loyton, Major Dennis Reynolds – dropped with the supplies, but three men must have been driven off course owing to the terrible visibility. Sergeant Fitzpatrick, plus Troopers John Conway and John Elliot were nowhere to be found. It was as if they had been swallowed up by the cold and clammy fog.

The following morning there were reports that a German patrol had recovered parachutes from the forest to the west of the DZ. Presumably these were the missing men’s chutes, as all other debris from the airdrop had been cleared away before daybreak. The three parachutists must have got lost in the fog, and the hope was that they would find their way to the SAS base in due course.

In fact, Trooper Elliot had drifted off course, landing badly and breaking one of his legs. Fitzpatrick and Conway had carried him to what appeared to be the nearest place of sanctuary – a farmhouse on the outskirts of the village of Pexonne. It lay on the far edge of Bois de Bon Repos – the wood of good rest – on the opposite side of the Pierre-Percée lake. But those three men were betrayed by a local Frenchwoman, and captured by one of Isselhorst’s infamous
Einsatzkommandos
.

Colonel Franks and Major Reynolds remained unsure of what had happened to them, but there was little time to dwell on their fate. There was a war to fight, and right now, with approaching fifty SAS operators on the ground, well stocked with arms, explosives and ammo, they were a force to be reckoned with.