Churchill's Hellraisers. Damien Lewis
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villages were put to the torch by a vengeful enemy.
Somewhere to the north of the town of Vesoul, Farran was forced to go to ground in a tiny patch of woodland no more than two miles square. It was mid-September by now and to all sides lay the enemy. It was last light by the time Farran had sorted his encampment, and he was gripped by a sense of unease. To left and right he could hear the sound of grunting engines – hostile forces on the move.
He ordered Lieutenant Gurney to take a jeep and push to the western fringe of the woods. Might it offer an avenue of escape, should there be trouble? Gurney was under firm orders not to ‘brew up’ any traffic on that side, but he’d been gone barely five minutes when the distinctive rasp of the jeep’s Vickers machine-guns tore apart the dusk. As the war diary recorded, he’d ‘brewed up a staff car containing five brass hats. The death of those senior officers, including a general, was confirmed . . .’
In short, the target had proved just too tempting. Farran had got his signaller to break out their wireless set, to send that evening’s scheduled radio report to London, but he sensed that Gurney’s action spelled trouble. The lone jeep came charging back and Gurney had disturbing news. The vehicle he’d shot up was at the vanguard of a large enemy column, which had followed their jeep. As if to reinforce his warning, a sudden burst of fire tore through the woodland. ‘The cover was thin . . .’ the war diary recorded. ‘More firing came through the trees, the bullets cutting the branches overhead.’
Any doubts that Farran had entertained vanished: the Germans knew the SAS were there and were coming in to get them. Worse still, with such a small patch of cover to hide in there would be little means to escape or evade the enemy. Farran yelled orders at his men to start up their engines and move out, as jeeps began to hammer out return fire, the smog of cordite fumes drifting thick beneath the trees.
The incoming fire intensified, as Farran kept yelling orders. It was then that he noticed Corporal Cunningham, his radio operator, calmly rolling up his W/T cable, a look of cool determination on his features: just another night’s work in the SAS. Cunningham’s steely calm was like a bucket of cold water in the SAS commander’s face. As at Châtillon, when they’d been pinned under that hedge by ferocious machine-gun fire, it was time for Farran to get a grip.
He steeled himself to lead the column of jeeps onto the lone track that cut through the trees – the same one that the enemy were advancing along. He turned right, pushing ahead at top speed, the jeeps bucking over the rough ground as they raced away from the enemy. They reached the far end of the phalanx of woodland, turned right again onto a rutted farm track, finding their way into some thick bushes. Farran had just managed to steer them into cover, when the lead vehicles got bogged in deep mud. Now they were well and truly for it.
He ordered the engines cut. Frantically, desperately, men tore down branches and vegetation and threw it over the jeeps to camouflage them, while others hurried along the track to obliterate their tyre tracks, using the foldable spades that each of the vehicles carried. If they were discovered here they would fight, but there was little hope of getting mobile any time soon. There was nothing for it but to lie low and wait.
Noises drifted across to them. Cries in the night-dark woodland. The odd burst of gunfire. The sound of figures crashing about among the trees. The SAS men were afraid even to cough, let alone to drop a tin of food. One tell-tale sound might give them away. It began to rain – a cold, hard rain frosted by the high ground of the Vosges. There was no option but to sit in those jeeps mired in the mud, shivering, as the rain soaked everyone to the skin.
A long column of enemy vehicles began to move down the nearby road, less than a hundred yards away. They could hear a German military policeman directing the traffic, and yelling out warnings to each passing vehicle to be wary of ‘terrorists’. It proved to be a night of knife-edge tension, deep discomfort and very little sleep and by first light the enemy half-tracks and trucks were still thundering past.
‘It was the most unpleasant night ever spent,’ Farran recorded in the war diary. ‘The party was faced with a situation which almost seemed hopeless; if they were attacked at dawn as seemed probable, they would have lost their mobility, as three jeeps were completely stuck and the remainder behind in the bottle neck.’
But at eleven o’clock that morning the woods finally fell silent. Farran reckoned almost 2,000 vehicles had passed in the night, but now the highway was deserted. He ordered his men – sodden, fatigued and chilled to the bone – to wrestle the jeeps free of the mud. That done, they had to push them by hand down the track, as he dared not risk starting their engines. It was back-breaking work. Only when they had finally reached the road and could make a dash for uncertain safety, did he order his men to fire up the jeep’s straight-four ‘Go Devil’ petrol engines.
The squadron took to the highway, racing further east, following the enemy’s line of retreat. They’d motored for some thirty-five kilometres, when, on the approach to the town of Luxeuil-les-Bains, they encountered a sizeable patch of woodland. It appeared to be deserted, and Farran seized on it as their new base of operations. By luck, they managed to link up with a new band of Maquis, commanded by a surgeon called Docteur Topsent. With his help and guidance, Farran selected a slew of targets for the coming night’s operations. He ‘was determined to make the Germans pay for the miserable night he had just passed,’ the war diary recorded.
Lieutenant Gurney was despatched to Velorcey village, about ten kilometres south of their hideout, where a column of enemy were said to be holed up. Gurney had one of Docteur Topsent’s Maquis riding with him, as guide. Farran sent Lieutenant Burtwhistle, another officer newly arrived with the squadron, to Fontaine-lès-Luxeuil, ten kilometres in the opposite direction, where a German horse-drawn artillery column had recently set up camp. And Big Jim Mackie led an attack towards Luxeuil-les-Bains itself.
Gurney’s team were the first into action, but they were dogged by bad luck. As fate would have it, their jeeps rounded a bend and came face-to-face with the enemy column at a range of no more than ten yards. Gurney got the drop on the enemy, but his initial burst of fire cut through a truck loaded with explosives. It detonated in an almighty explosion, both the enemy troops and the SAS jeeps being caught in the blast.
Both sides in the confrontation – SAS and Germans – were ripped to pieces. Gurney managed to extricate himself from the carnage, but he was cut down by a burst of fire as he dashed up the village street. ‘Lieut. Gurney was hit in the back and fell; he died shortly afterwards,’ the war diary recorded. ‘The French . . . described how the Germans kicked the body of the “English terrorist”, but eventually they were able to bury him in the village cemetery.’
Lieutenant Burtwhistle’s patrol fared little better in Fontaine-lès-Luxeuil. Opening fire on the horse-drawn column, his guns tore into the enemy ranks and set a line of carts ablaze. But in the process, three of his men were wounded, and one jeep totally destroyed. They were lucky to make it out of there alive.
Typically, Jim Mackie’s attack at Luxeuil-les-Bains went better, but after that night’s losses Farran didn’t doubt that luck was turning against them. By now, he could hear the thunder of American artillery somewhere to the west, and the roads were bumper-to-bumper with retreating enemy vehicles. There was little question of mounting any further offensive operations. Instead, they needed to shrink further into the depths of the forest and hide. ‘The German resistance had stiffened,’ the war diary recorded, ‘and the situation . . . had become very precarious. ’
No sooner had Farran’s squadron camouflaged their vehicles, than a German artillery column drew into the cover of some nearby trees. It consisted of a unit of Panzerabwehrkanone 43 anti-tank guns, which had earned a fearsome reputation among Allied troops. The 88mm cannon could penetrate the armour of any British, American or Russian tank and it was accurate up to a thousand yards. It would make mincemeat out of the SAS’s unarmoured jeeps, especially as the nearest guns were no more than a hundred yards away.
For three days Farran and his men hunkered down, listening to the voices of the 88mm crews filtering through the trees. Other than sending out the odd patrol on foot, to try to make contact with US forces, there was little they could do but keep silent, hide and wait. In the war diary Farran described