The Daring Dozen (3 page)

As was the case with Paddy Mayne, arguably the only other member of the wartime British Special Forces whose martial prowess was equal to the Dane’s, Lassen was imbued with exceptional courage. But whereas Mayne was a supremely calculating operator, blessed with the gift of being able to assess a risk to any given action in the blink of an eye, Lassen relied more on luck and his monumental self-confidence to see him through. Arthur Walter, a chaplain to the Parachute Regiment, came to know Lassen later in the war and reflected that: ‘Without denigrating his bravery, I think he was one of those people who act without foreseeing the consequences. Something had to be done so they go out and do it.’
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There was another marked difference between Paddy Mayne and Anders Lassen, and that concerned appearance. Mayne could be ‘regimental’ when the mood took him, bawling out a soldier if his beret was half an inch astray. But Lassen rarely cared about his appearance, leading even his mother to describe it as ‘haphazard and careless’. Having been awarded a Bar to his Military Cross, Lassen was entitled to wear two small rosettes on his medal ribbon. Instead he cut two circles from a tobacco tin and had a friend sew them to the ribbon. ‘Rough and ready, maybe,’ said Lassen, ‘but according to regulations, properly dressed!’

The month after the raid on Crete, the Allies invaded Sicily and, in September 1943, they crossed the Strait of Messina into Italy. The armistice between Italy and the Allies was announced on 8 September and within days British forces were sweeping through the Aegean, taking possession from the Italians of Dodecanese islands such as Leros, Samos, Kos, Icaria and Simi. A force of SBS landed on the latter on 17 September 1943, Lassen among them, and for three weeks they were left alone to enjoy the sea and sun in the company of the small and nervous Italian garrison. But the German High Command was determined to wrest control of the islands back from the British, and particularly those with airstrips that played an important role in safeguarding German interests in the Balkans. On 7 October a force of 120 Germans landed on Simi.

Lassen was suffering from dysentery and a scalded leg when the Germans came ashore but he rose from his sickbed and joined in the heavy fighting in the ramshackle old town of Simi. For his conduct throughout the fight, Lassen was awarded a second Bar to his Military Cross, the citation describing how:

The heavy repulse of the Germans from Simi on 7 Oct 1943 was due in no small measure to his inspiration and leadership on the one hand: and the highest personal example on the other. He himself crippled with a badly burned leg and internal trouble, stalked and killed at least three Germans at the closest range. At that time the Italians were wavering and I attribute their recovery as due to the personal example and initiative of this officer … he himself led the Italian counter attack which finally drove the Germans back to their caiques [fishing boats] with the loss of 16 killed, 35 wounded and 7 prisoners.

In contrast, the SBS lost only one man in fighting off the attempted invasion. The next day the Germans adopted a new tactic – air attack. Wave after wave of Stuka dive-bombers swooped down on the town, sirens shrieking, to drop their bombs from as low as 100ft. It was a terrifying experience for the defenders. ‘They Stuka-ed us to bloody death,’ recalled Doug Wright, a former Guardsman who had volunteered for the SAS in late 1942. ‘The noise they made was horrible, that’s what scared you most, and they came in so low we could see the pilots looking at us. It was the only time I ever saw Andy looking a little frightened.’
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Miraculously only one SBS soldier was killed during the air assault (in addition to the one fatality from the previous day’s street fighting) but on 12 October the SBS withdrew from Simi. Over the course of the next few weeks a similar situation unfolded across the Aegean as the Germans retook the islands one by one: Kos, Leros and then Samos at the end of November – where Lassen and his SBS comrades helped in the evacuation of 5,000 civilians and soldiers. It brought down the curtain on a period of intense frustration for Lassen and the SBS in general. Although trained as guerrilla fighters, in the Dodecanese campaign that autumn the SBS had been serving as glorified garrison troops.

Lassen’s health was also troubling him and he spent much of December 1943 in the 8th General hospital in Alexandria recovering from dysentery and his scalded leg. When he was discharged from hospital in January 1944, Lassen, now promoted to captain, rejoined the SBS and sailed on the
Tewfik
to a coastal base in neutral Turkey. The
Tewfik
was a 180-ton caique and the command ship from which small SBS parties embarked to raid German targets in the Aegean throughout the early spring of 1944. One of the men, John Lodwick, described life on board the
Tewfik
in his 1947 book
The Filibusters
:

Picture the deep, indented Gulf of Cos, with uninhabited shores and sullen, fir-covered mountains rising abruptly from the water’s edge … entering this bay you would at first judge it to be empty. Closer inspection would show you a large, squat, ugly schooner lying close to one shore, with her gangplank down and a horde of dories, folboats [collapsible canoes], rubber dinghies and rafts nuzzling one flank like kittens about the teats of their mother … in her vast stern a naked figure is crouching, and whittling at something with a knife. It is Lassen, and he is making a bow with which to shoot pigs. Down below, in the murky cabin at the foot of the steep companionway, David Sutherland, pipe in mouth, is writing an operational order. Beside him are rum bottles, magnums of champagne from Nisiros reserved for special occasions.
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Idyllic it might have appeared, but life for the SBS in the Gulf of Kos was punctuated by frequent raids against German-held islands, and none was more violent than that of Lassen’s visit to Santorini, the southernmost island of the Cyclades. It became known as ‘Lassen’s Bloodbath’ and a detailed account was written of the raid in its aftermath (according to David Sutherland, although it was signed by Lassen, it was penned by another member of the raiding party).

Lassen split his force into two patrols, ‘P’ and ‘Z’, the former led by himself and comprising nine men in total, and the other consisting of nine men under Lieutenant Keith Balsillie. The two patrols came ashore at Santorini in the early hours of 23 April 1944, and spent the daylight hours lying up in a cave overlooking the inland village of Vourvoulos. At nightfall Lassen ordered everyone to take two Benzedrine pills, known colloquially to British troops as ‘stay-awake pills’, and shortly before midnight the raiders moved off.

Balsillie’s target was the wireless station at Imerovigli, while Lassen and his men headed a mile south to Thira where the main German garrison was billeted on the first floor of a bank. Lassen’s information indicated there were 38 Italians and ten Germans in the bank, but this turned out to be false as the operational report noted: ‘There were less than 35 men in the billet. We succeeded in getting the main force into the billet unobserved, in spite of barking dogs and sentries. The living quarters comprised twelve rooms.’

Lassen cleared the rooms one by one, Sergeant Jack Nicholson kicking in the door so that the Dane could throw in a pair of grenades. The second after the grenades exploded, the sergeant swept the room with machine-gun fire before Lassen entered the room to dispatch any survivors with his pistol. It was a bloody business, and at the end of it more than 30 of the enemy lay dead. ‘That was the only time I was in action side-by-side with Lassen and it’s one of the reasons why I’m trying to forget the war,’ said Nicholson in 1987 when interviewed by Mike Langley for Lassen’s biography. ‘It’s no fun throwing grenades into rooms and shooting sleeping men. That garrison could have been captured.’

But for Lassen the war, and particularly killing Germans, did seem to be fun. Everyone who ever served with him – even experienced soldiers who had accounted for numerous Germans themselves – were struck by the depth of Lassen’s hatred for the enemy. ‘He was a killer and he really hated Germans,’ said Doug Wright, who himself was reputed to have killed nine Germans with his bare hands during the war. ‘He liked to kill them most with his knife.’
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Wright believed Lassen’s attitude to the Germans was directly due to their occupation of Denmark – a view not shared by Porter Jarrell, an American who served with Lassen in the Aegean campaign as a medical orderly. He saw a deterioration in Lassen as the war progressed. ‘At the beginning he was not a killer,’ said Jarrell, ‘but once the action started he was out to kill. Basically he was a sensitive, decent person whom the war made tough.’
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Lassen and his men arrived back at the Gulf of Kos on 29 April. Though they had lost two men on the Santorini raid, the SBS had killed more than 40 of the enemy and brought back 19 prisoners (eight of which were taken during Balsillie’s successful attack on the wireless station). The result of the raid on Santorini was the arrival in the Aegean of an additional 4,000 German troops to bolster the islands’ defences. At a time when the Germans were trying to stem the inexorable advance of the Allies in Italy, these were resources the German High Command could ill afford to spare. But their arrival persuaded the SBS it was time to move on; as Lassen put it: ‘You can do some of it, part of the time, for quite a while, but you can’t do all of it all the time for very long.’
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By the middle of August 1944 the SBS had left the Special Forces role in the Aegean theatre to the Greek Sacred Squadron and were establishing a base in Italy in readiness to attack targets in Yugoslavia. Already in the Balkans was the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), which was proving as effective a reconnaissance force in the rugged hills of Yugoslavia as they had been in the immense deserts of North Africa. A five-man LRDG patrol had discovered a large railway bridge close to Karasovici and the task of destroying it fell to Lassen. He set out with 41 men on the night of 27 August, and when he returned to the SBS base over a week later he made a verbal report to Jellicoe that purportedly ran: ‘We landed, we reached the bridge, we destroyed it.’ When Jellicoe asked for a bit more detail, Lassen shrugged and said, ‘What else is there to say?’
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In fact there was a lot more to say. From the moment the SBS saboteurs landed just north of the Yugoslav–Albanian border, they were in the midst of a heavy enemy presence – not just Germans but also their notoriously savage Croat allies, known as the Ustachi. Tales of their brutality towards captured Allied personnel were legend, but Lassen’s men avoided contact with the enemy and at 2300hrs on 30 August two of the bridge’s spans were blown. ‘The job itself was easy,’ remembers Doug Wright. ‘There were about 12 of us carrying a hundredweight of explosive each so we had no trouble blowing it. The problem was how to get back to the RV afterwards.’
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From the landing point, Lassen and his men headed north up the valley, covering ten miles in the hours before dawn. They made contact with some friendly partisans, remembered Wright, ‘and when day broke the partisan girls gave us a good feed, a cauldron of stew, and then we all got our heads down.’ The plan was to move off at nightfall, but before they could depart their mountain position was attacked. ‘There were hundreds of them,’ said Wright, ‘and there was no point in standing and fighting against 400 so we split up into twos and made for the RV. But they were a vicious lot the Ustachi and we heard later that the partisan girls were caught and chopped into bits.’
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After operations in Yugoslavia, the SBS was ordered back to Greece in late September, where the German hold was being weakened on an almost daily basis. With Romania and Bulgaria now out of the war, the Third Reich was being squeezed on two fronts and German troops in Greece were being withdrawn to defend the Fatherland. Welcome as the news was in London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was desperate to keep Greece out of Stalin’s hands; on 13 October 1944 Athens was liberated by British troops. Lassen, meanwhile, recently promoted to major and given command of M Squadron, was sailing from Volos in the east to Salonika in the north. His 50-strong force disembarked at the Potidia Canal, 30 miles south of the city, in a region fraught with tension; not only were there still some Germans in the throes of evacuating Salonika, but the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS) were claiming the area as their own and starting to prepare for the struggle for power in post-war Greece. None of this, however, concerned Lassen, who made it clear to the ELAS leaders that he would not hesitate to use force if his passage to Salonika was impeded.

With 9,000 British troops steaming towards Salonika, Lassen wanted to be the first Allied soldier to enter the city, even though Greek intelligence warned that the Germans had at least two tanks and some artillery among their defences as Wehrmacht engineers began demolishing the city’s breakwater. Commandeering four local fire engines, Lassen ordered his men on board and off they raced towards the city centre. ‘It was great,’ recalled Doug Wright. ‘The welcome we received was unbelievable and there were women everywhere wanting to kiss us!’
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The western half of the city was free of Germans, but the Greeks told the SBS that the enemy was still in the eastern side, preparing to withdraw in a large convoy. Lassen ordered his men to dismount from the engines and divided them into two patrols, one under his command and the other led by Lieutenant James Henshaw. ‘I was in Henshaw’s patrol,’ recalled Wright, ‘and we took a farm boy with us who knew where the minefields were. We got round the back of them [the Germans] and opened fire. I must have fired a dozen magazines of Bren gun as they were stood there. When they started throwing flares up, we pulled out leaving behind a lot of dead and wounded.’
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The surviving Germans hastily fled Salonika and a subsequent British Intelligence report said of the SBS action: ‘But for Lassen and his band, Salonika would not have been evacuated as soon as the 30th October 1944. The town would have suffered greater destruction. His solitary jeep and few troops were seen everywhere; behind the enemy’s lines, with E.L.A.S. and in the mountains. Their numbers and strength were magnified into many hundreds.’