Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (49 page)

At the Villa Calvi, on the other side of the road, another vicious battle was still raging. Finding the door locked, the raiders used a bazooka and Bren gun to blow off the lock, then rammed open the door, tossed in a handful of grenades, and crashed inside. The delay had given the defenders more time to prepare, and another brutal close-quarters battle took place. “The din was deafening,” said one of the SAS participants. After several minutes of “furious fighting,” the Germans again withdrew up a spiral staircase to the upper floor leaving behind eight dead, including the chief of staff himself, Colonel Lemelsen. From the lawn, the raiders poured a torrent of Bren-gun and bazooka fire into the upper floors. Wooden furniture, files, and curtains were dragged into piles in the registry and map rooms downstairs, and then ignited with plastic explosive and a bottle of petrol. Farran was in his element: “Bullets were flying everywhere, and over it all, the defiant skirl of the pipes.” As the raiders withdrew, the building was “burning furiously.”

As expected, German troops had swiftly emerged from their barracks and rushed north in an attempt to relieve the besieged occupants of the villas, only to meet Victor Modena and his men spread out across the road. “The Russians returned fire very accurately and their ring was never broken during the attack,” wrote Farran with somewhat surprised approval.

On Farran’s signal, the raiders first headed west, then south, taking a wide circle back to the rendezvous at Casa del Lupo with dawn beginning to break. As the force pulled out, Villa Calvi exploded. “The sky was red from the blazing villas,” wrote Farran.

Carrying their wounded on stretchers, fueled by Benzedrine tablets, pummeled by driving rain, the party made its way across country “buzzing with Germans” and back into the hills. They reached the base camp in the Villa Minozzo valley twenty-two and a half hours later, by which time Farran’s old leg wounds had rendered him unable to walk, and he was brought in, much to his embarrassment, on the back of a pony. The partisans, “cheering over and over again for McGinty and Battaglione Alleata,” immediately threw a party: “Fried eggs, bread and vino by the gallon.” With the piper playing, the SAS men gave the partisans a demonstration of the eightsome reel, a traditional Scottish dance, a spectacle that Farran described as “one of the greatest moments” of the campaign.

Farran calculated that at least sixty Germans had been killed in the attack on Albinea. The LI Corps command center had been utterly destroyed, along with “the greater part of the headquarters’ papers, files and maps.” Villa Calvi had been demolished, and Villa Rossi damaged beyond repair. A joint force of British parachutists and partisans had successfully penetrated and then devastated a German base far behind the lines that had seemed, to its occupants, so heavily guarded and so far from the battlefield as to be invulnerable. The crushing effect of the raid on German morale was doubtless reinforced by the death of Lemelsen, a relative of the overall commander of the German Fourteenth Army in Italy. Gratifying reports reached the SAS camp of the raid’s impact on the German troops. “The Germans in the whole area are now in a state of alarm.”

For his troubles, Farran narrowly escaped a court-martial. He was given a “rocket” by 15th Army Group headquarters for launching a “premature attack disregarding orders,” which he cheerfully disregarded.

Throughout the spring, as the 15th Army Group offensive got under way, Farran’s mobile “guerrilla battalion,” now reinforced by the arrival of several jeeps, fought a series of actions against the retreating Germans. Farran left a memorable description of his men preparing to go into action from their base in the little village of Vitriola.

Long, greasy-haired pirates were sitting on the steps, cleaning their weapons in the streets. Jeeps dashed about everywhere with supplies. The night air was broken by the tap-tap-tap of Morse from our wireless sets and the Russians sang as they refilled their magazines. At night one could hear Modena’s tame accordionist and occasionally Kirkpatrick’s pipes, which were now suffering from lack of treacle, an essential lubricant for the bag, I am told.

On April 22, he learned that an extended column of German lorries, carts, and tanks was slowly crossing the ford at Magreta, an ideal ambush site. The raiders hid in the foothills, and then opened fire at 2:30 in the afternoon: trucks exploded, horses stampeded, the convoy ground to an appalled halt, sitting ducks in the water. “The shooting was very good,” wrote Farran grimly. “It was obvious the Germans were really on the run.”

Farran’s picaresque little army had inflicted damage out of all proportion to its size and his own expectations: at least three hundred Germans killed and fifteen trucks destroyed. “There is little doubt that the actions considerably accelerated the panic and rout of some three or four German divisions,” wrote Farran. As in North Africa and France, the essential value of the operation lay in tying up enemy troops, fomenting fear and uncertainty, and the demoralizing “effect of the presence of so formidable and enterprising a force in the immediate rear of the enemy.”

On May 2, Field Marshal Alexander sent out a “Special Order of the Day” to Allied forces in the Mediterranean theater:

After nearly two years of hard and continuous fighting which started in Sicily in the summer of 1943, you stand today as victors of the Italian campaign. You have won a victory which has ended in the complete and utter rout of the German armed forces in the Mediterranean. By clearing Italy of the last Nazi aggressor, you have liberated a country of over 40,000,000 people. Today the remnants of a once proud army have laid down their arms to you—close to a million men with all their arms, equipment and impedimenta.

The second phase of war for the SAS, which had started almost two years earlier at the other end of Italy with the assault on Capo Murro di Porco, was over.

A month before Farran’s attack on Albinea, Brigadier Mike Calvert became commander of the SAS Brigade. Calvert had fought with the British special forces known as the Chindits during the Burma campaign, and had seen ferocious action behind the lines. On his appointment “Mad Mike” Calvert sent a message to the men now under his command: “You are special troops and I expect you to do special things in this last heave against the Hun.”

The SAS had fought desert war, guerrilla war, and conventional war, a war in forests, mountains, and fields, on freezing snow, clinging mud, and baking sand. It had fought Germans, Italians, French, and Russians, against uniformed troops, collaborators, spies, and irregulars. But as the war entered its final bloody chapter, the SAS found itself fighting against people defending their own land, staunchly and desperately, albeit in a heinous cause.

On March 25, 1945, the SAS crossed the Rhine at the tip of an army invading Germany itself. Hitherto, they had fought to liberate lands occupied by Hitler’s armies; now they were themselves the occupiers. Some of the German forces, wrote Johnny Cooper, were “running like hell,” but others were fighting for every inch of German soil: the fanatical SS and others implicated in the crimes of Nazism, but also ordinary men of the German home guard, the Volkssturm, young boys and older men between the ages of thirteen and sixty recruited to give their lives in one last, suicidal defense of the doomed Third Reich. The combination of the ardor of youth and the misguided patriotism of older age would ensure that the subjugation of Germany came in a last deluge of wasted blood, young and old.

The SAS, having launched so many devastating ambushes in France and Italy, now faced the prospect of being ambushed at any moment. “It was as if our Maquis role in France was reversed,” said one member of 1SAS. This was a war fought from behind hedgerows and in ditches, messy and unorganized, and nastier than anything the SAS had experienced hitherto.

The SS seemed “happy to fight and die,” and the SAS often seemed happy to oblige them. “We never took prisoners on those occasions.” The reactions of German civilians to this army of occupation varied widely: some were cowed, most were petrified, some rushed to surrender, and some remained defiant. One moment the SAS troops would be sharing their rations with half-starved German women and children; the next, a teenage boy would emerge from behind a wall and take aim with a Panzerfaust, the handheld, high-explosive, antitank weapon, an act of fanatical, self-destructive bravery so naive that only an adolescent could be persuaded to do it. Often these child-soldiers had no other weapons. The SAS had not signed up to kill teenagers. For many, the last ghastly episode of the war was the worst.

Frankforce, named after Brian Franks, commander of 2SAS, consisted of two reinforced squadrons, one each from the 1 and 2SAS regiments, numbering about three hundred men in all, mounted in seventy-five armed jeeps. Initially they would support the parachute landings across the Rhine, and then act in concert with armored divisions pushing into Germany. The jeeps were stiff with weaponry: in addition to the twin Vickers, each carried twelve spare drums of ammunition, with a bazooka and Bren gun in the rear; every third jeep was armed with a .50-caliber Browning with a mounted searchlight. Some were armed with three-inch mortars. The SAS rode into Germany on small, mobile arsenals, bristling with highly concentrated killing power.

The end of the war was plainly in sight for the SAS, but that knowledge brought with it a flicker of superstitious dread, not fear exactly, but the intuition that having cheated the odds for so long, death might yet come at the very end. Reg Seekings was not easily unnerved, but as he lay under his jeep one night, he felt a stab of apprehension when his gunner, a tough Glaswegian named Mackenzie who had served time for arson, remarked calmly: “I’m going to cop it. I want you to promise to write to the wife and tell her I went down shooting your guns.” Like many soldiers, Seekings believed in a military sixth sense: “People have a premonition and pretty often it’s bloody true,” he said.

As a defense against identification, and execution under Hitler’s Commando Order, the SAS were ordered to wear black berets, rather than the distinctive red beret of airborne forces, and to identify themselves as tank corps troops. All references to the SAS were to be excised from their pay books. In effect, they would be fighting under cover, camouflaged as ordinary soldiers. The disguise was appropriate enough, for the role assigned to the SAS had departed, once again, from the script laid down by David Stirling: they were to act as forward reconnaissance, assault troops to weed out pockets of resistance, draw enemy fire, clear the roads, and keep the tanks and ground troops rolling forward. “Our job was to speed up the attack,” said Seekings. “To hit hard, drive through the German lines, turn back and shoot them up the rear, and make a gap for the ordinary army to come through….We were just driving a wedge all the time.”

After crossing the Rhine on the amphibious landing craft known as Buffaloes, the forces of the two regiments split up. The 1SAS unit would carry out reconnaissance patrols for the 6th Airborne Division northeast of Hamminkeln; 2SAS was attached to the 6th Independent Armoured Brigade to head east from Schermbeck.

Pat Riley, the American-born desert veteran, had spent the previous year recruiting and training troops for the various French operations, and now rejoined the regiment just before the Rhine crossing. He recalled the forward skirmishing as an erratic, piecemeal affair, “a scrap here and a scrap there,” confused and overlapping engagements that never quite cohered into pitched battle. There was “nothing by way of a standup fight,” wrote Cooper. The men recalled the slog into Germany in a series of bloody vignettes.

Two days after crossing the Rhine, 1SAS made its first contact with German forces. Bill Fraser’s squadron was called forward to tackle a densely wooded area where the enemy was dug in. Canadian paratroopers had already lost eight men to accurate fire from a Spandau machine gun concealed among the trees. A force of twelve jeeps, with Fraser taking the lead, drove slowly up the left flank into a small clearing and crept forward to within thirty yards of the Germans before they were spotted. The Spandau opened up, sending bullets thudding into the leading jeep, which flipped over. Alex Muirhead’s mortars took out the machine-gun position, and then the other nests were knocked out, one by one. The attack advanced the front by some two thousand yards, but Bill Fraser’s war was over. A bullet had passed through his hand. It was hard to tell whether he was disappointed because he had “wanted to see it through,” or whether he was pleased to have a Blighty wound that would take him out of battle and send him home. If anyone deserved some peace, it was Bill Fraser, but as ever he remained inscrutable, distant, lost.

A few days later, Seekings was passing through another wooded area when he felt the odd sensation of being watched. A moment later a boy, perhaps fourteen years old, emerged from nowhere holding two hand grenades, the long-handled variety known to the British as “spud-mashers.” Seekings trained his gun on the teenager, preparing to shoot the second he moved. A long, slow second passed as the boy and the old soldier stood locked in eye contact. Slowly the German boy lowered the grenades and surrendered. Only later, from a surrendering colonel, did Seekings learn that throughout that wordless confrontation, a group of concealed German paratroopers had their guns trained on him. “If you’d shot him, we would have fought to the death.”