Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII (26 page)

Lassen and his men stole through the darkened woodland. They discovered three German soldiers in a clearing, gathered around an armoured car. They were chatting away unconcernedly. Unsurprisingly, they had not the slightest idea that British raiders might be in the area, and they must have presumed the jeep was one of their own. When Lassen and his men burst forth from the shadows, Tommy Guns, Schmeissers and a Bren levelled at the Germans, all three surrendered immediately to the cries of ‘
Hände hoch!
’

The prisoners were crammed aboard the already overloaded jeep, and Lassen put his foot to the floor for the journey back to Potidaea. Upon reaching the harbour, the German prisoners were worried to see a number of heavily-armed Greeks among the raiders’ party. The Germans knew full well how much the Greeks detested them. They gave up their watches, gold rings and cigarette lighters to the Greek fighters without so much as a murmur of complaint.

From the captives Lassen learned what he needed to know. For more than a week now the German forces in Salonika
had been blowing apart the city’s harbour. The port area had been comprehensively destroyed. Two massive ships had been sunk in the harbour entrance; the main seawall had fifteen massive holes blasted in it; forty smaller vessels had been scuttled along the quayside; all the wharfs, derricks and associated harbourside facilities had been burned down and demolished.

Earlier that day Lassen had been in radio contact with Raider Force HQ. He’d been told that a force of 9,000 British and Allied troops was mustering, preparing to set sail for Salonika to seize it from the enemy. The trouble was, with the port lying in ruins, there would be nowhere for that force to land. Moreover, by the time they reached Salonika there would be precious little of any value or wartime significance worth saving.

In light of what he now knew Lassen sent a cable back to HQ: ‘If you do not get here fast we intend to take Salonika ourselves.’

By ‘ourselves’ he meant Scrumforce – some forty assorted Special Forces raiders.

With that idea now firmly implanted in his mind, Lassen briefed Mavrikis on what he intended, for the Greek would have a vital role to play. The following morning they set off up-country, to launch stage one of the grand deception to assist with taking the city. It was four o’clock by the time they had located the headquarters of the resistance, who here consisted of the communist ELAS (the Greek People’s Liberation Army), a group closely allied to the Russians.

In recent weeks ELAS had proven themselves woefully unenthusiastic about fighting the Germans. They seemed happy to let them withdraw from Greece largely unmolested – as if fighting the Nazis was someone else’s war now. Their attitude
infuriated Lassen, and he proceeded to give their leader, one Colonel Papathanasion, a stiff tongue-lashing. Lassen challenged the Colonel and his men to prove their honour and to fight. Shamed by his words and stung into action, the ELAS were whipped into a force willing to do battle once more.

But Lassen wasn’t done yet. It was now time for what he’d called Operation Undercut, the first part of his great deception. He asked the ELAS commanders to point out to him exactly where the German minefields were situated. Poring over a map, he feigned a keen interest in an area far to their east – the seaport of Kavala, towards the Bulgarian border. During a break in the conversation, a couple of ELAS fighters drew Jason Mavrikis to one side. They asked him why Lassen was so interested in minefields and the defences up around that one particular area – Kavala?

It was now that Mavrikis played his part to perfection. ‘A very large Allied convoy with an armada of warships and at least three Army divisions has just set sail,’ he confided to his fellow Greeks. ‘They have heavy armour and artillery in support, and they are awaiting our signal to start the invasion of northern Greece – either here at Salonika or at Kavala. We’re here to complete a recce and to call them in.’

Mavrikis claimed that the British III Corps – a Corps that existed pretty much in name only; one used extensively for deception purposes during the war – was positioned to sweep in and seize the entirety of northern Greece. He sketched out on a scrap of paper the order of battle of the Corps, which consisted of the fearsome 34th and 57th Infantry Divisions, plus the elite 5th Airborne Division (none of which in truth existed).

Mavrikis had let this ‘slip’ in the knowledge that the ELAS would feed the information back to their Russian allies, and knowing that word would almost certainly reach the Germans stationed in and around Salonika. By sleight of hand, Lassen’s force of forty with two converted fishing-boats had just grown to one of 30,000 men, backed by warships, artillery and armour. Hopefully by the time news of it reached German ears, it would have been boosted to 100,000-strong.

The following morning Lassen moved his force up to the outskirts of the city, using the caiques. There was the odd exchange of gunfire, but for now his men were ordered to avoid any major confrontations or pitched battles. Having established a temporary base in a deserted schoolhouse on the outskirts of the city, Lassen decided a closer recce of Salonika was required – to better plan their means and route of entry.

During the advance on Athens, Lassen had procured for himself a battered grey suit and hat, of the kind worn by the locals. The hat was a vital part of his disguise, for he’d used it to cover up his hair on the previous occasions when he’d had to pose as a Greek villager. Now, on the outskirts of Salonika, he donned suit and hat again, this time accepting a novel modification to the disguise – a brace of chickens offered him by Mavrikis. They were tied at the feet, so he could carry them slung over his arm.

With Mavrikis swinging a basket of eggs and Lassen his chickens, the two men strode into town, acting as if they were locals off to the marketplace. Lassen didn’t for one moment underestimate the dangers of heading into Greece’s second city in this way. But he needed hard, actionable intelligence with
which to plan the next, most audacious stage of the Salonika deception – and that made the risks worth the taking.

‘He gave a fine example to people,’ was how Jack Mann described Lassen’s apparently fearless behaviour. ‘No one could stop him. Once he was going he was going, and once they saw what he did his men followed him anywhere. He was in the front and he never gave an order which he wouldn’t do himself. That was Andy.’

So it was that Lassen and Mavrikis wandered into the centre of Salonika, along narrow, twisting passageways thronged with street traders hawking every kind of ware imaginable. Complete with their chickens and eggs they blended in perfectly. While the two men strolled back and forth Mavrikis asked the questions of the locals, providing whispered translations of the few snippets that Lassen failed to catch.

From this Lassen learned that the Germans had withdrawn to the west of the city, in preparation for pulling out completely. They were intending to take the road north-east to Bulgaria, but their number had been considerably weakened already, especially by desertions. A good number of the German commander’s men had baulked at the long retreat north towards Germany. There were many unfortunate Poles, Serbs, Russians and other non-Germans press-ganged into Hitler’s military. Any number had seen the writing on the wall and slipped away.

Even some of the diehard German Nazis were sensing the way the wind was blowing. The locals were able to relate to Lassen-the-chicken-seller a revealing story. A team of German demolition experts had been sent to blow up Salonika’s main
power station. But they’d offered the city’s inhabitants an alternative: if they could pay them off in gold, they’d make sure the explosive charges did no damage. A loud bang might be heard, but that was easy enough to manufacture. For the equivalent of £100 in gold, they’d keep the power on in Salonika.

Lassen sensed a rare
legitimate
use here for some of their gold sovereigns. If the price could be bargained down to something more reasonable – say £25 – then he’d pay it. As Lassen and Mavrikis turned eastwards to return to their base, a series of loud blasts rocked the city. A pall of black smoke rose high above the area of the airport. It was a powerful reminder – if one were needed – of the urgency of taking the city before all was laid waste.

The intelligence that Lassen had gained via his walkabout proved crucial: the eastern part of the city was devoid of enemy; the battalion garrisoning Salonika had been seriously weakened by desertions; morale – even among the most ardent Nazis – was low. In the SBS major’s view, if the right elements could be pulled together, Salonika was there for the taking.

All that day Lassen got his lone jeep blasting back and forth across the high ground, from where it was bound to be seen by the enemy. From various vantage points they loosed off shots against known enemy positions, even using a pair of PIAT anti-tank bazookas to mimic artillery pieces. The PIATs were fired by launching their grenade rounds in a high arc over the city, as opposed to how they were intended to be used – in a flat trajectory against tanks, bunkers or armour.

The impression given by Lassen’s jeep-borne raiders was of a major force gathering on the eastern high-ground overlooking
the city. Next, Lassen sent an ultimatum to the German commander in Salonika. It warned him that a Brigade of elite British troops had the city largely surrounded, being an advance force for the 30,000 men and war machines of the British III Corps, now sailing north into the Gulf of Thermaikos. He demanded the Germans surrender.

A message was returned care of the Swiss Red Cross worker who was stationed in Salonika, and acting as Lassen’s go-between. The German commander asked for forty-eight hours to vacate the city. If the British held off from attacking him for two days, then he would withdraw his forces without a fight. Lassen sensed a bluff here, in response to his own breathtaking gamble. The German commander was trying to play for time, most likely in an effort to establish if the British really did have him surrounded.

Lassen was having none of it. If he granted the German commander the time he’d asked for, he had little doubt that what remained of Salonika would be blasted into further ruin. The Dane rejected the German commander’s terms outright.

Lassen issued a counter-ultimatum:
surrender, or prepare to be annihilated.

Martin Solomon set out that evening in Lassen’s jeep, to see if they could secure the first victory of the coming battle – the surrender of a German garrison manning a gun emplacement that blocked their advance. Under cover of darkness Solomon and his men ambushed and destroyed a German truck carrying supplies to that position, after which Solomon penned a note in German demanding that the battery commander surrender, as his position was ‘completely surrounded’.

While one of the Greeks scurried off to deliver the note, Solomon and his small force found themselves with unexpected company. Two German soldiers had been drinking Ouzo at a local café, and had presumed that Solomon and his men – with their Schmeissers and German forage caps – were fellow brothers of the Thousand Year Reich. Solomon promptly took the two Germans prisoner.

But that was to be the last of their good fortune that night. Throaty growls echoed out of the darkness, and suddenly Solomon and his raiders found themselves face-to-face with a pair of German tanks, plus six self-propelled guns and several truck-loads of grey-uniformed infantry. These enemy troops and their war machines certainly looked businesslike enough! Driving the two prisoners before them at gunpoint, Solomon
and his men hurried off in the other direction and made good their escape in the darkness.

But an awful realization now hit Solomon. In his haste to get away he had left behind Anders Lassen’s beloved jeep. He and his men sat in the woods all night long, shivering in the cold and trying to keep their prisoners quiet. Just prior to dawn they were able to sneak back to where they’d left the jeep, and repossess it. They loaded the prisoners aboard, fired up the engine and tore back towards their base.

Once there, Solomon briefed Lassen about the strength of German armour and troops that he had encountered, plus the prisoners he’d seized for interrogation. To round things off, he confessed somewhat sheepishly to having almost lost Lassen’s jeep.

‘Well done, Martin, very well done!’ Lassen replied. Then his eyes flashed dangerously. ‘But had you not brought back the jeep I would have slit your throat.’

For the liberation of Salonika Lassen needed transport to get his men into the city. The only thing he could lay his hands on were four of the city’s fire engines. Never averse to a bit of theatre, Lassen ordered his men to mount up their dusty red steeds. With his jeep taking the lead and with the Lion of Leros – Pipo – beside him, Lassen led Scrumforce towards the German-held city.

But even a parade of fire engines bristling with weaponry wasn’t enough for the Dane. Lassen knew he had to give the impression that a major force was liberating Salonika for his bluff to stand any chance of working. It was a Sunday, the weather was warm and balmy for the time of year, and Lassen’s sense of occasion demanded more.

‘We need a scout!’ he declared. ‘A rider in the vanguard!’

A horse was commandeered. Sammy Trafford – Lassen’s ‘minder’ – confessed to having a degree of riding experience from before the war, gained while working on a farm. He mounted the horse bareback and rode ahead of the column, his trusty Bren gun in one hand and an improvised bridle in the other, looking like a Hollywood Injun chief leading his braves into battle.

The parade took on a carnival atmosphere as the procession made its way along the city’s main thoroughfare, the Via Egnatia, fire engines ringing their bells for victory. It appeared as if the long-awaited liberation was at hand, and the tanned and war-bitten warriors were showered with gratitude: flowers rained down, bouquets of fragrant herbs were pressed into their hands, and pretty girls climbed onto the running-boards and the fire-ladders to join them. Scores of ELAS partisans had come to join the liberation parade, bandoliers of ammo slung around their chests in distinctly war-like fashion.

Elderly Greek women pressed gifts of eggs, goat’s cheese and honey upon the raiders. Bottles of Ouzo were passed around, as the men toasted Salonika’s freedom, and grabbed the chance of a quick snog with a local lady delirious with liberation. Oiled by the Ouzo, the raiders started singing a popular comic song of the war, Bing Crosby’s 1943 hit ‘Pistol Packing Momma’. Somehow, it captured absolutely the spirit and the essence of the moment.

At the main square the ELAS political leadership had gathered for a spot of speechifying and parades. This was a golden opportunity for the communists to claim some of the glory for
driving the hated Nazis out of the nation’s second city. But even as they prepared to speak, a series of deep, powerful explosions rolled across the city from the dockside. The demolition was continuing, the Germans intent on leaving little in Salonika that wasn’t a blasted ruin.

Sniffing danger; the enemy;
war
… Lassen completely ignored the assembled speechmakers. He waved his column of fighters forward. As they passed out of the square and headed into the narrow maze of streets that led towards the docks, so the atmosphere began noticeably to darken. The girls, the cheering crowds, the gift-laden grandmas – all gradually melted away as the column pushed westwards. Sammy Trafford abandoned his horse, and climbed aboard the lead vehicle.

Lassen ordered his men to thunder about in their fire engines, honking their horns and sirens and blowing up any opportune targets they could find – using grenades, Molotov cocktails or simply torching them with cans of petrol. The appearance he wanted to give was that a large British force was moving through the city and that serious battle had been joined. Columns of thick black smoke rose above the skyline, adding to that impression.

From his position atop his fire engine, Sammy Trafford swept the terrain to their front with his Bren gun. To either side there were piles of shattered masonry, fields of broken glass and heaps of blasted machinery.

Among Jellicoe’s officers, Lassen was known as the one blessed with the most incredible luck. In spite of the near-insanity of many of his missions, rarely had Lassen lost men under his command. He was also blessed with an instinct that
seemed to enable him to sense the presence of the enemy in that crucial split-second before the enemy detected him.

That extraordinary sixth-sense came to the fore now.

All of a sudden he yelled: ‘
Stop!
’

He signalled his colourful column to a halt. To either side of the road there were death’s heads crudely daubed in black paint on rough boards, marking the borders of minefields. Rolls of barbed Dannert wire had been slung around strategically-important installations, one of which – a fuel dump – was signposted in the distinctive German gothic script used by the
Wehrmacht
, the German military: ‘
Treibstofflager
’.

That fuel dump was no more than fifty yards away, and Lassen sensed that here they would find their first enemy. The force of forty-odd raiders dismounted from their engines, their bright red flanks glinting somewhat inappropriately in the warm sunshine, and they crept through the narrow confines of the streets. Lassen was at the fore, Sammy Trafford with his Bren on one shoulder, and the solid form of Martin Solomon on the other.

Lassen led his men to within such close range of the German enemy that they could overhear their conversations. A unit of sappers – demolitions experts – were busy laying their charges at the fuel dump. To the outer edges of the
Treibstofflager
were a few dozen German guards, keeping watch as the sappers went about their work.

Some of the raiders, eager for battle and fuelled up with the Ouzo, wanted to charge the enemy in a frontal assault. The irrepressible O’Reilly was in the vanguard, but Lassen argued against it. Such an attack over open ground would be almost
suicidal. Instead, he split his force into two, one part of which would hit the fuel dump from the rear. He got his men into good cover, from where the ambush could be sprung. He wanted every weapon to be brought to bear in a scything attack. They needed to win a decisive victory in keeping with the bluff – that a thousand crack British troops were in the process of taking the city.

On Lassen’s call his force opened up with forty submachine-guns, plus their Brens, and the handful of weapons that the few ELAS troops who had stuck with them managed to bring to bear. For a few moments the sappers tried to return fire, but they were cut down in their droves. Again and again their positions were raked with murderous volleys of fire, the Bren gunners each burning through a dozen magazines of rounds.

Finally, with the raiders running painfully low on ammunition, the surviving sappers and their guard force turned and ran. The Germans had a column of trucks lined up at the fuel dump’s exit gate. They swarmed aboard like ants. But as they tried to pull away the raiders turned their guns on the vehicles. Bullets tore through glass, shattering it into storms of blinding splinters. Grenades punched through thin steel, finding the soft human targets clambering about inside.

By the time the battle was over, estimates of the enemy losses were as many as sixty dead and wounded. Lassen’s force had suffered just the one casualty – a raider shot in the shoulder.

*

With the battle of the
Treibstofflager
done and dusted, the German commander in Salonika seemed to lose all further
appetite for the fight. Though his force outnumbered Lassen’s many times over, it seemed he had bought the bluff. The following morning a long column of German military vehicles began to pull out of the city, as he evacuated it to the last man.

A pall of smoke lay over the last of the German positions, his departing troops torching whatever they couldn’t take with them. But much of the city had been saved. By now the red, white and blue of Union Jacks had largely replaced the ELAS banners that had festooned the city streets: it was clear to the city’s inhabitants who the real liberators were.

On seeing the flags, Lassen turned to Solomon, who sat beside him in the jeep. ‘England’s prestige has been saved,’ he quipped. ‘Now we can have a bit of a fling!’

One of the greatest bluffs of the war – forty butcher-and-bolt raiders posing as a battalion of elite British soldiers – had paid off. But before the partying proper could get underway, Lassen had to send a cable to Jellicoe.

‘I have the honour to report that I am in Salonika,’ he wrote.

‘Give your estimated time of arrival Athens,’ Jellicoe cabled back, curtly.

Jellicoe knew that in taking Salonika Lassen had overstepped his orders, hence the message recalling him to base. But at the same time Jellicoe was well aware of the kind of men that he had under his command, officers included. His attitude to such maverick risk-taking was summed up in the phrase:
all’s well that ends well
.

In any case, curt message or no, Lassen wasn’t about to return to Athens any time soon. For a good week the Danish SBS major became the de facto ruler of Greece’s second city, a
conurbation of some 150,000 inhabitants. Lassen upheld laws, passed verdicts on disputes, and generally tried to keep a lid on things. Salonika was a seething mass of chaos and exuberance, on a par with post-liberation Athens just a few weeks earlier. There were scores of enemy deserters in the city – Italians, Bulgarians and even a few Germans – which made Lassen’s job all the more tricky.

But there was one group of people who were noticeable only by their absence. Salonika had been purged entirely of its Jews. Since Biblical times it had had a large Jewish population, but by the autumn of 1944 every single Jew was gone. They had allegedly been shipped to Krakow, in Poland, but a captured German soldier confirmed that there were no Jews in Krakow any more. Indeed, he’d been told that the Krakow Jews had been deported to Salonika.

Lassen, Solomon and others felt deeply the suffering of the Greek nation, whether Jew or Gentile. Lassen railed at how sinister and evil was this liquidation of an entire Greek people. Yet despite such unspeakable atrocities there was work to be done. He sat side by side with Solomon in Salonika’s Hotel Mediterranean, trying to keep a lid on this wild city, particularly the ELAS fighters, who were seeking to settle old scores and take revenge for long-held grievances.

‘Andy and I prevent riots and murder, we pass laws, we pardon and we pass sentences,’ Solomon wrote, in a rare letter home. ‘If we had not come and acted as we did, much blood would have been spilt … Andy and I have experienced together the greatest joys and sorrows – in adversity, as on Leros and in victory as here in Salonika. For some reason or other he feels
the same for me as I feel for him. He once said to me, almost with tears in his eyes: “Martin, you are a great soldier.” That is the best praise I have ever received.’

There were some in Salonika who had profited from the German occupation. There are always quislings, collaborators and profiteers, even among a noble people like the Greeks. Any number came to Lassen, seeking to convert their ill-gotten gains – chiefly looted art, jewellery and gold – into ready cash. In the name of punishing them Lassen took it all, telling whoever came that he would expedite their request, whereupon he promptly distributed the loot around his men. Few of the chancers felt able to complain when nothing materialized in return.

And of course, along with all the hard work came hard play. Naturally, the war-bitten but handsome and supremely confident major proved the uncontested favourite with the ladies in Salonika. One night as his men caroused in the hotel grounds, Lassen emerged naked apart from his boots, shouting: ‘Chaps, can’t you let your CO screw in peace?’

*

It wasn’t until nine days after Salonika’s liberation that the main British force – the 9,000 promised Allied troops – made it to the city. Had Lassen and his men waited for them to get there, Salonika and its people would have been in a far worse state. A British intelligence assessment of the action subsequently concluded: