The Nazi Hunters (17 page)

Experience had taught the SAS that there was little point in simply blowing up a railway. An approaching train driver might well spot the break in the tracks and bring his locomotive to a halt. The buckled and twisted tracks could be removed relatively easily and new rails slotted into place. It might only disrupt rail transport for a few hours. What was needed was a much more significant interruption to services, and the ‘fog signal’ was the answer.

In developing this cunning piece of kit, the SOE had opted to adapt a well-proven device to their purpose, one that was already half a century old. The original ‘fog signal’ was designed to warn a locomotive whenever a stop sign ahead was obscured by fog – hence the name. It consisted of a metal bowl attached to a pressure plate, which clamped onto the top of the rail. The bowl was filled with black powder and percussion caps. Whenever the fog came down the signalman would fix three onto a rail ahead of a stop sign. An approaching locomotive would detonate the signals as it went over them, each exploding with a loud bang and warning the driver to slow down.

Otherwise of similar design, the SOE’s version had an added ‘snout’ protruding from the metal bowl, set to the outside edge of the track and attached to a length of detonation cord. The hot gases from the exploding powder would rush through the snout, igniting the detonation cord, which was connected to an explosive charge set several dozen feet in front.

As detonation cord ‘burns’ at 23,000 feet per second, the fog signal and the main charge would explode bare microseconds apart, giving the train driver no time to take evasive action. Unable to stop, the train would be derailed, causing massive destruction and significant delays as a result.

In an effort to counter the fog signal, the Germans had fitted their locomotives with wire brushes to ‘sweep’ the track ahead of an engine. The ‘Torpedo A3’ version of the standard SOE fog signal was the answer to that: it was an American-designed improved version, which gripped the track so firmly it could not be dislodged.

With fog signals at the ready, Lieutenant Marx and his four-man team set out heading east, towards Hitler’s Germany. It was some 15 miles as the crow flies to their intended target, the railway line leading north-east from the French town of Saales into the German Rhineland, forming a vital artery to bring war materiel to the embattled German front on the Vosges.

Their target lay well beyond Schirmek, the location of
Standartenführer
Isselhorst and his deputies’ field headquarters. If Marx and his men could reach the railroad and destroy it, it would help give the lie to Isselhorst’s ability to achieve Himmler’s bidding and crush the forces of insurrection in the Vosges. In short, striking into Germany itself would constitute a massive psychological blow.

No one figured the mission was going to be easy. The rail track was guarded by pairs of sentries set at 100-yard intervals on a round-the-clock watch rotation. Presumably their vigilance would be greater the further Lieutenant Marx was able to push on to German soil, prior to launching his attack.

En route, Marx took the opportunity to sow chaos in his wake. He and his four-man team laid tyre-bursters boosted with lumps of PE on the first major road junction they encountered. A German troop transporter was blown up, losing a wheel and careering into a roadside ditch. They laid a pressure switch-operated charge on another road, complete with a one-pound lump of PE. A German half-track – an armoured troop carrier, with wheels at the front and tank-like tracks at the rear – triggered the device, with the resulting explosion tearing apart the vehicle.

At Champanay, just south of Schirmek, Lieutenant Marx paid a visit to a particular house in an effort to contact the local Resistance leader. But the SAS lieutenant was warned that the Maquis chief had been arrested, along with several of his deputies. And the further east that Marx and his men pressed, the less willing anyone seemed to support their efforts or give them any kind of sanctuary.

They went in search of that ever-pressing need: food. Marx and Ferrandi turned up at a household they had been led to believe was friendly. They only managed to escape by the skin of their teeth. Marx revealed himself to be a master of sangfroid and understatement when he wrote about the incident in the war diary.

‘We walked out of the back door as the Germans walked in the front. We had been sold by the woman in the house.’

Moving further east, he and his team were involved in an incident that was clearly seen as being of sufficient controversy post-war to warrant the censoring of the Operation Loyton war diary. Originally marked ‘CLOSED UNTIL 2019’ on the front cover, a version of the war diary was released in 1994, but certain sections had been redacted.

One of those concerns the actions taken by Lieutenant Marx and his men, as they prepared to hit the railroad around the ‘German’ town of Wildersbach. Needing to cross the then border – following the outbreak of war, much of the eastern Vosges had been ‘reincorporated’ into Germany, the border moving some way west of the Rhine – Marx sent Lance-Corporal Pritchard and two men to recce the way ahead.

Pritchard returned with more than Marx had bargained for. The section censored from the 1994 war diary reads: ‘They returned at 1500 hours with food, and a German Sergeant Major. Pct. [Parachutist] Ferrandi and Salthouse took him into the woods and shot him.’

It appears that Pritchard had grabbed a German border guard, so they could interrogate him and gain intelligence about the planned border crossing. For whatever reason – and presumably at some time during his interrogation – the man was shot dead. No further explanation is given in the war diary, or any other available documentation.

Perhaps he’d tried to escape; perhaps he’d tried to resist; perhaps he’d tried to give the SAS men away; or maybe they’d shot him in cold-blooded revenge. Or could it have been that they couldn’t afford to take a prisoner with them on the onward mission, but nor could they afford to set him free and thus disclose their whereabouts and strength?

The war diary offers no answer. But what is abundantly clear is that the absence of the German soldier was duly noted, for the frontier guard force was immediately strengthened from fourteen to twenty-one. Yet by then Lieutenant Marx and his men had slipped across the border anyway. Under cover of darkness they’d made their way onto German soil, pressing onwards towards their target.

They chose to hit a rail junction just to the west of Wildersbach, where three separate tracks converge. On each was clamped a fog signal, attached to a one-pound charge of PE. At fifteen minutes past ten that night a train hit one of the fog signals, triggered the PE charge ahead of it, and careered into the length of blown-up track.

Moving at speed, the locomotive ploughed across the broken section of rails, tearing up further lengths of track as it slid along uncontrollably, before eventually tumbling down the embankment’s steep slope. It came to rest lying on its side, a steaming, wheezing wreck, with scores of broken and buckled carriages concertinaed up behind it. Marx and his fog signals had done their work; the train was destroyed, the track was blocked and a long length of line was left in utter ruin.

By first light Marx and his team had slipped back across the border into France, and called in a flight of RAF ground-attack aircraft. They proceeded to strafe and bomb whatever remained of the train and its cargo, which might otherwise have been salvageable. It was a perfect outcome to the mission devised by Colonel Franks, if one ignores the mysterious shooting of the German border guard.

The response from the enemy was immediate and extreme. Teams of German troops began combing every conceivable stretch of woodland in which the saboteurs might have gone to ground, wreaking revenge on the local French villagers. At one hamlet where Marx and his men tried to scavenge for food, they learned that the Gestapo had arrived to cart off all the male residents, and in their place had billeted six truckloads of German troops.

One such sweep made by those soldiers came very close to cornering Marx and his force. But – ‘cool as a cucumber’ – Marx decided that he was far from done. He and his men still had PE and detonators to get rid of. Splitting his unit into two, they laid 12 pounds of PE on the roads in the neighbouring area. The first charge was triggered when a German Army truck set off one of the tyre-bursters. Sympathetic detonations – the triggering of further explosions by the first – ‘scattered the truck everywhere’, Marx recorded.

In a final act of sabotage, the last of their explosives were used to take out a sleek-looking German staff car – one used to ferry officers about their business. Hopefully, it contained the senior commanders who had been sent into the area to coordinate the hunt for Marx and his fellow saboteurs.

With noticeably lighter Bergens, Marx led his men in a forced march west, heading fast towards the SAS’s Moussey base. Behind them they could hear German forces searching the woodlands they had just vacated, and the odd burst of probing gunfire, but the enemy was shooting at ghosts.

For his command of this singular mission, Lieutenant Marx would be awarded the Military Cross. The citation would state of his actions: ‘Throughout this operation Lieutenant Marx showed himself to be imbued with a determination to cause damage to the enemy. His skill and personal courage during the whole period were an example to all ranks and deserving of high praise.’

But for now, Marx led his team west through the Wild Woods, heading towards the SAS base set in the hills above Moussey. There was worrying news to greet him when he got there. While en route to their rendezvous with Colonel Franks, the three men from his previous mission – those last seen running from the Germans’ search dogs – had taken shelter in a sawmill, the Scierie de la Turbine, in the Celles Valley.

Five other SAS men had joined them there – a sabotage party led by a Lieutenant James Black. Sadly, they had been betrayed. Their presence was reported to the local Gestapo, and the forces of the enemy had surrounded the sawmill. In the firefight that followed, the eight-strong SAS force, already running low on ammunition, had run out of bullets with which to fight. All had been taken captive, with at least one – Lieutenant Black – being wounded.

Chris Sykes – the 2 SAS intelligence officer – had managed to glean as much detail as possible from his contacts in the Resistance. Foremost amongst those was Albert Freine – the gamekeeper-cum-Maquis-intelligence-chief – who had become Sykes’ most trusted source. Ominously, Freine had learned that the eight captured SAS men had been taken to Schirmek’s
Sicherungslager –
the security camp where the one-legged, morphine-addicted Karl Buck held sway. As to their fate thereafter, that was in the lap of the gods.

Sykes and Freine had taken to meeting daily beneath a certain tree. By mid September the weather in the Vosges was starting to turn, the balmy days of late summer giving way to those conditions so much more common in the region – incessant drizzle and rain. ‘Weeks of shared misery made us life-long friends,’ Sykes remarked of his relations with Freine.

The gamekeeper’s knowledge of enemy movements proved encyclopaedic and invaluable; on several occasions it would prove a lifesaver. In the damp conditions of early autumn the ground was wetter underfoot, and the SAS’s boots left imprints on muddy tracks and paths. The Germans had learned to recognize the distinctive markings made by their rubber-soled footwear, so as to better track the Op Loyton force. Alerted to this by Freine, the SAS men opted to cut away their boots’ tread pattern, but still the heels remained as conspicuous as ever.

Sykes could tell that Freine was under pressure. His nerves were stretched to breaking point. In the aftermath of Lieutenant Marx’s strike onto German soil, the iron fist of Waldfest was grinding ever harder into the valleys of the Vosges. Chief amongst its targets were those like Freine, from whom a confession extracted by torture would yield a bonanza of intelligence.

In the neighbouring Celles Valley, a
garde de forêt
(state forester) was playing a similar role to Freine. He was serving as the go-between for Colonel Franks and Major Reynolds, the wounded SAS officer ensconced in the Pierre-Percée cave, along with Captain Whately-Smith. Strong and absolutely silent, the forester was imbued with a very different kind of courage to the chest-thumping Freine. Indeed, he exhibited the type of ‘
flegme britannique
’ that had so impressed the Moussey priest, Abbé Gassman, on the beaches of Dunkirk.

Sykes had taken to meeting with this forester regularly, seeking news of the two SAS officers. In response, the lean and weather-beaten man would remove his wooden clog and, without a word, withdraw a tiny note secreted between his toes: a message from Major Reynolds. Sykes would scribble a reply, the forester would insert it between his toes again, and quietly slip his clog back on. His silence was eloquent: it spoke of a rock-like firmness in the face of adversity.

In truth, these pillars of the local Resistance were up against it now. The indomitable Mme Rossi had suffered her own predations, but typically she remained tight-lipped on the matter, and unbowed. Of course, Sykes had made her acquaintance, and amazingly her loud laughter and merriment remained undimmed, as did her desire to feed, shelter and assist the SAS men at every turn.

The Germans had come to suspect that Mme Rossi’s house lay beside the path that led to the new SAS base, which indeed it did. The Gestapo paid ever more frequent visits to her home. On one occasion they searched it from top to bottom, while the redoubtable madame had six SAS men hidden there, some of whom were lying beneath the water wheel at the rear. Such experiences would have tested the toughest of nerves, but she never once baulked at her house being used as a refuge and a rendezvous for the SAS and the Maquis.