The Daring Dozen (2 page)

However, for Lassen’s fellow Danes, it was not his self-belief that most impressed them on Arisaig but rather his skill as a hunter. One of them recalled how they were on a map-reading exercise when Lassen spotted among the gorse two red deer 50 yards away. ‘We knew he was a hunter and, seeing one animal move off, we left him to it,’ one of the Danes later told Lassen’s mother. ‘He ran round the bushes, got up close and stabbed it with his knife.’
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Richards said that Lassen’s SOE instructors were as ‘astonished’ as everyone else by his stealth and ruthlessness. The SOE knew they had someone special in their midst, but a man whose temperament was perhaps more suited to combat than espionage. In the late spring of 1941 Lassen and two other Danes were posted south, to Poole Harbour, where they were met by Major Gus March-Phillips and Captain Geoffrey Appleyard.

Lassen at once felt at home in the company of the pair, both of whom were inclined to care less about the finer points of army etiquette, while placing great emphasis on a man’s self-discipline and initiative. There wasn’t an HQ as such in Poole; instead March-Phillips based himself in the
Maid Honor
, a 70ft ketch that had been converted from a cup-winning racing yacht into a mini-warship with a 2-pounder cannon concealed beneath a dummy deckhouse and two heavy machine guns with a field of fire through the scuppers.

Lassen initially assumed the objective of
Maid Honor
Force, as the unit was known, would be to attack enemy shipping in the English Channel but March-Phillips soon explained the real nature of their role. Disguised as a fishing boat they were to sail 3,000 miles south and wage a war of piracy in the seas off West Africa.

Lassen was among the five men selected by March-Phillips for the mission. The commander had already confided to Appleyard his belief about Lassen, saying ‘unless I’m very wrong that young man will go far’, while Appleyard had described the Dane in a letter home as ‘a splendid seaman and a crackshot with any kind of weapon … he’s good-hearted and good at everything – even [if] he does dislike discipline’.
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The
Maid Honor
left England on 12 August 1941 with March-Phillips at the helm and Lassen the only Dane on board. They arrived at Freetown after 41 days at sea, and after a refit and rest they departed on 10 October having loaded their vessel with four depth charges in case they should spot a German submarine.

For weeks the
Maid Honor
patrolled fruitlessly along the coasts of Sierra Leone and Portuguese Guinea before, on 15 January 1942, March-Phillips decided to attack a German tanker and an Italian liner at anchor on the Spanish colonial island of Fernando Po. The mission was a success with Lassen, as ‘lithe as a cat’, and his fellow raiders (reinforced by the crews of two British tugboats) capturing the two vessels without any bloodshed. The prizes were sailed to Lagos with the raiders feted upon their arrival. Congratulatory telegrams were sent from London and March-Phillips rewarded Lassen with a commission and a promise that there would be more adventure to come in 1942.

Upon their return to Britain the men of
Maid Honor
Force were renamed by SOE as the ‘Small Scale Raiding Force’ (SSRF) and based at Anderson Manor, a Jacobean house on the banks of the river Winterborne in Dorset. From the original nine men the SSRF grew to a strength of 55, and the new recruits underwent a punishing training regime similar to that which Lassen had experienced in Scotland a year earlier. They trained at sea, on Exmoor and on the firing ranges set up around the manor. Soon the men were all proficient with explosives, grenades and small arms, but Lassen believed the SSRF should also revive a weapon from Britain’s martial past. Writing to the War Office, he stated: ‘I have considerable experience in hunting with bow and arrow. I have shot everything from sparrows to stags, and although I have never attempted to shoot a man yet it is my opinion that the result would turn out just as well.’
⁴
Lassen added that such was his skill with a bow he could fire 15 arrows in a minute. The War Office rejected the idea, describing the weapon as ‘inhuman’.
⁵

It wasn’t all work and no play, however, for the SSRF in Dorset. The nearby village of Winterborne Kingston boasted a fine country pub and in addition there was a plentiful supply of energetic Land Army girls working the surrounding fields. Lassen, often with Appleyard in tow, ploughed a rich furrow through their ranks. ‘Apple and Andy were both good-looking, and Andy’s broken English charmed the girls,’ remembered Ian Warren, one of the SSRF. ‘Whenever they turned up at a dance … the rest of us knew we’d probably be going home by bus because Apple and Andy would walk off with the best girls.’
⁶

One woman who was off-limits, however, even for Lassen, was the new wife of Gus March-Phillips, who was a frequent visitor at Anderson Manor in the early summer of 1942. She remembered Lassen as having ‘straight yellow hair, a high complexion that was also sunburned, and a rather gappy grin because a lot of front teeth had been bashed out’. Majorie March-Phillips was able to spot that even among a force of young, aggressive and highly trained men Lassen stood out: ‘Andy behaved impeccably while I was there but you could see he was pretty wild,’ she said. ‘One of the wildest of the lot.’

The SSRF was blooded in August 1942 when they launched a night raid on the Cotentin Peninsula, killing three German soldiers they found patrolling the coastline. In material terms the raid achieved little, but psychologically it reminded the Germans of Winston Churchill’s taunt a few months earlier: ‘there comes out of the sea from time to time a hand of steel which plucks the German sentries from their posts.’

The SSRF next struck at the Les Casquets lighthouse, eight miles northwest of Alderney, scaling an 80ft cliff and capturing the seven Germans in the lighthouse without a shot being fired. Lassen led a reconnaissance raid on the Channel Island of Burhou in early September and was then sent on leave while March-Phillips took a party to Normandy to test the enemy defences.

It was a good raid to miss. When Lassen returned from leave he was to learn that none of the 11-strong party had returned. Word later reached the SSRF that the men had had the misfortune to come ashore just as a German patrol was passing. Three men – including March-Phillips – were killed in the initial exchange of fire and the rest were all rounded up in the days and weeks that followed. One of the men, Graham Hayes, who had sailed with Lassen to West Africa, got as far as the France–Spain border, before being betrayed and subsequently executed by the Gestapo.

Hayes was a victim of Adolf Hitler’s infamous Commando Order, issued in October 1942, that instructed that all captured Allied Commandos be treated as terrorists and shot. The Order was in retaliation for two incidents that had occurred earlier in the year. The first came after the failed raid on Dieppe in August 1942, when German troops learned of an Allied order to ‘bind prisoners’ captured on the raid. The second incident concerned a commando attack on the Channel Island of Sark on the night of 4 October – a raid in which Lassen was instrumental in incurring Hitler’s wrath.

The Channel Islands had been in German hands for 16 months when Lassen, Appleyard and a combined 14-strong team from SSRF and 62 Commando landed on Sark with the intention of snaring several prisoners. With Appleyard leading the way – he had holidayed on the island pre-war – the raiders soon had five German engineers in their possession, while Lassen had disposed of the solitary sentry with his knife. None of the captives were manacled but their thumbs were tied together with cord and the string on their pyjama bottoms cut, so the prisoners had their hands occupied if they wished to protect their modesty. But on their way down to the beach the Germans made a bolt for freedom and four of the five were shot. The Germans were outraged when they found the four bodies at dawn and their Supreme Command declared that following the incident, ‘all territorial and sabotage parties of the British and their confederates, who do not act like soldiers but like bandits, will be treated by the German troops as such and wherever they are encountered they will be ruthlessly wiped out in action.’
⁷

This statement formed the basis for Hitler’s subsequent Commando Order, though with once crucial difference – the Führer demanded the liquidation of all commandos, whether in action or once they were captured.

Lassen evidently had no remorse about what had happened on Sark. Once the remaining German prisoner had been turned over to the authorities, the raiding party returned to Anderson Manor and Ian Warren recalled being woken by an excited Lassen. ‘He held his unwiped knife under my nose and said, “look, blood”.’ The Dane’s conduct in the Channel Island raids resulted in a Military Cross, the citation praising Lassen’s ‘dash and reliability’.

By the end of 1942 the SSRF had served its purpose. Defences on the Channel Islands had been bolstered in light of the earlier raids (13,000 more mines were planted in the Sark beaches) and there seemed little point in raiding the French coast for the sake of a handful of prisoners. In addition, the war in the Mediterranean was reaching a critical stage and it was decided that a man of Lassen’s ability should be sent somewhere where he could help inflict far greater damage on the enemy.

Lassen arrived in Cairo in February 1943, and was sent on a ski course at the British Army ski school at the Cedars of Lebanon. From there he went to Beirut, giving a lift to a young Special Air Service (SAS) officer called Stephen Hastings. Hastings had spent weeks operating deep in the desert behind German lines, but for the first time he felt real fear as Lassen negotiated the precipitous track that led down from the ski school. ‘I have never been more terrified and well understood later how Andy got so many medals,’ reflected Hastings. ‘We hurtled down to sea level on two wheels. Fear was simply left out of his disposition.’
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Lassen had arrived in Egypt just as the SAS was being re-formed. The regiment’s founder, David Stirling, had been captured in January 1943 just as the Desert War was reaching its successful denouement. There was no longer a role for the SAS in North Africa and so the regiment was split in two, with half forming the Special Raiding Squadron (SRS) under Major Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, and the other half designated the Special Boat Squadron with Captain the Rt Hon George, Earl Jellicoe as their CO.

Jellicoe was the son of the famous admiral who had led the British fleet at the battle of Jutland in 1916, but his own speciality lay in guerrilla warfare. Throughout 1942 Jellicoe had led a series of audacious raids against Axis targets in both Libya and Crete under the auspices of the Special Boat Section. This had in fact been the seaborne wing of the SAS but in 1943 they were reconstituted as the Special Boat Squadron (SBS) and their 55-strong ranks swelled to include the 250 officers and men from the SAS.

Their base was at Athlit and the training was ferocious. One recruit, R.A.C. Summers, recalled that their PT instructors were a ‘mad sadistic bunch’ who took them out on night marches carrying packs that became progressively heavier as the weeks went by. Captain David Sutherland recalled that ‘Lassen out marched us all, he had a quite extraordinary capacity for marching … it so happened that he was far better than all of us at all the martial arts – shooting, thinking tactically, physical endurance, bravery. He really outdid everyone.’
⁹

The only aspect of the SBS training that troubled Lassen was the parachute jump. He had first learned how to parachute as part of his SSRF training in England and the experience left him unsettled; on the ground Lassen felt in control of his own fate but in the air, jumping from an aircraft or a tethered balloon, he was at the mercy of a silk canopy.

As the men trained Jellicoe, organized the SBS into three detachments, each one comprised of 70 men and seven officers. L Detachment was put under the command of Captain Tommy Langton, while Fitzroy Maclean took charge of M Detachment (though Ian Lapraik assumed command when Maclean was recalled to London), and Sutherland was given command of S Squadron with Lassen as one of his officers.

The culmination of the SBS training coincided with the next stage of the war in the Mediterranean – the invasion of Sicily and Italy, what Churchill described as the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’. Before the main invasion could take place the SBS was tasked with carrying out a series of reconnaissance raids on Crete, Sardinia and Sicily. S Squadron was ordered to Crete on the night of 22 June to attack the airfields of Heraklion, Kastelli and Tymbaki and destroy as many enemy aircraft as possible.

The SBS party came ashore without problem and split up, but the two sections whose targets were Heraklion and Tymbaki airfields soon discovered that neither was in use. Lassen’s patrol, however, was in luck at Kastelli, with a fleet of aircraft on the airfield including eight Stuka dive-bombers and five Ju 88 bombers. Lassen took care of the sentry with his knife while his comrades began planting bombs on the aircraft. But another guard appeared, and Lassen had no choice but to shoot him. The shot brought the airfield’s defenders running out of their billet and the SBS melted into the darkness. Half an hour later Lassen returned with Corporal Ray Jones, but as they crept onto the airfield they were spotted. What ensued was described in the citation for Lassen’s second Military Cross:

The enemy then rushed reinforcements from the eastern side of the aerodrome and, forming a semi-circle, drove the two attackers into the middle of an anti-aircraft battery where they were fired upon heavily from three sides. This danger was ignored and bombs were placed on a caterpillar tractor which was destroyed. The increasing numbers of enemy in that area finally forced the party to withdraw.

Despite the faulty intelligence on Crete, Sutherland’s men destroyed several aircraft, killed a number of Germans and blew up a 50,000-gallon petrol dump at Peza, and all for the loss of one man. For his part Lassen had shown great courage and boldness in returning to Kastelli for a second crack at the airfield but one of the soldiers on the raid, Les Nicholson, said it was the act of a ‘stupidly brave’ man.