Churchill's Hellraisers. Damien Lewis
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the enemy column to approach to within twenty yards, before opening up with an utterly devastating broadside. Within seconds, a whirlwind of fire had torn into the leading vehicles, two of which happened to be laden with stores. Moments later fuel and ammunition detonated in a sea of flame, exploding rounds tearing into the vehicles further along the column.
With the telephone lines cut, the Panzergrenadiers had been taken by total surprise. They’d driven into town unawares, presuming the SAS jeeps had to constitute some kind of a friendly checkpoint. It was an easy-enough mistake to have made: who would ever have expected to encounter an enemy roadblock this far behind their own front line?
‘The first five trucks, two of which were loaded with ammunition, were brewed up and caused a great firework display,’ was how the SAS operational report described the ambush. The jeeps hammered in fire, raking the column from either side. ‘Those added to the fire, which the Germans returned, and for some time the fierce engagement continued . . . Fierce street fighting developed . . .’
Farran grabbed a Bren and, balancing it on a convenient wall, he began to hose down the trucks to the rear of the Panzergrenadier column. He watched as a German motorcycle-and-sidecar combination veered across the road and toppled over a bridge, plummeting into the river below. As Farran pumped in bursts of tracer rounds – following the red streak of the bullets to their targets – he saw figures bailing out of vehicles at the rear of the stalled column.
Machine guns opened up from the direction of the besieged convoy and mortars crashed down onto the streets. One of Farran’s men collapsed, felled by a shot to the head. A brave French civilian dashed out and dragged his bloodied form into the shelter of a doorway. A pretty, dark-haired woman wearing a dashing red dress leaned out of an upper floor window, defiantly giving the ‘V’ for Victory sign. To Farran, that woman’s smile and her poise offered the perfect riposte to the bursts of fire now tearing down the streets.
A runner approached from the direction of the chateau. He brought word that a force of Germans had broken out of the grounds and were fighting their way towards Farran’s position. One SAS jeep had been hit, in a situation that was fast-moving and confused. The enemy had even begun to mortar their own side, mistaking the fire from the chateau as being that of the mystery Allied attack force.
Even so, Farran’s men were going to be hard-pressed to defend their positions. He sent a jeep to reinforce those at the chateau, with orders that they should hold firm. His priority was to decimate what was left of the Panzergrenadier column, and to do that they had to stop the two forces uniting. At the same time his chief concern was becoming the absent Maquis. Where on earth was Colonel Claude and the five hundred fighters that he had promised?
As the battle intensified, Farran sensed his SAS squadron was in danger of becoming trapped – sandwiched between the Germans advancing from the chateau, and the Panzergrenadiers now mustering fierce resistance. He and his men had been embroiled in fierce combat for approaching two hours, and the Maquis were nowhere to be seen. Accordingly, he decided it was time for the ‘scoot’ period of the assault to be enacted.
With a gallant wave to the girl in the red frock – Farran was very much a charmer and a ladies’ man – he strode into the centre of the road and fired two flares from a Very pistol. They looped a fiery arc through the sky, scorching a fierce scarlet across the battle-torn town – two red flares being the signal to withdraw.
As Farran and Captain Hibbert led the force in a helter-skelter retreat they finally ran into the vanguard of the Maquis, mustering on the outskirts of town. Two hours late and less than an eighth of the number that Colonel Claude had promised, at least they were here. The Maquis seemed desperate for a slice of that morning’s action, so Farran and Hibbert decided they would lead a second push into Châtillon.
This time their numbers would be swollen to one hundred and twenty fighters, but the element of surprise was entirely gone. Even so, Farran was banking on the enemy mistaking his larger force for the vanguard of General Patton’s 3rd Army, those American troops and armour that had spearhead the thrust east through France. If that happened, the entire enemy force – those at the chateau and the Panzergrenadiers –might break and run.
It was an audacious gamble, but hardly the first by this veteran SAS commander. Already one of the most highly decorated soldiers of the war, Farran would earn a DSO, MC and two bars (three MCs) during the war, among many other decorations. Of Irish descent, he was known to all as Major Patrick McGinty, after an irreverent and somewhat ribald Irish ballad entitled ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’.
Like many a former prisoner of war – Farran had escaped German captivity in 1941 – he’d adopted a nom de guerre, knowing that the Germans kept detailed records of all POWs. Major Patrick McGinty had become Farran’s official war name, and indeed his DSO was issued in that name. The ballad about the goat gives something of a sense of Farran’s nature: colourful, distinctly Irish, rebellious, unconventional, contemptuous of mindless bureaucracy and decidedly merciless towards his enemies.
Mr Patrick McGinty, an Irishman of note,
Fell into a fortune and brought himself a goat.
Says he, ‘Sure, of goat’s milk I’m goin’ to have me fill.’
But when he bought the nanny home he found it was a bill.
The goat goes on to woo several of the young beauties in the Irish village of Killaloe, before it got shipped off to France as a mascot for the Irish Guards regiment in the Great War, whereupon it decided to fight, the enemy ranks breaking before its charge:
The Germans retreated, hurriedly they fled.
Holding their noses they tumbled over dead.
‘Ach,’ says the Kaiser, ‘There’s poison gas afloat.’
But it was only the effluvium from Paddy McGinty’s goat.
Just twenty-four years of age by the time of the Châtillon attack, Major McGinty – short, sandy-haired and blue-eyed – had been born into a devout Roman Catholic family in England, but educated in India, where his father had served in the military. He’d been sent to the Bishop Cotton School, in Shimla – a province of India – the oldest boarding school in Asia, renowned for turning out judges, politicians and senior military commanders.
The alumni of the school were known as ‘Old Cottonians’, and its motto was ‘Overcome evil with good’. Arguably, it was one that Farran had applied to the war with single-minded rigour.
In 1941 Farran – then serving in the 3rd King’s Own Hussars, an armoured (cavalry) regiment – had been injured in both legs and an arm, in what became known as the battle of Cemetery Hill, in Crete. Farran was taken captive and held as a POW, but only for as long as it took for him to recover enough to walk on crutches, after which he managed to crawl under the camp’s wire. Linking up with fellow escapees, he’d made a daring bid for freedom in a caique – a traditional wooden fishing boat. After an epic voyage and being marooned at sea, Farran and his fellows had finally made it to British-held Egypt.
He would win his first MC for his heroic actions on Crete and a bar – a second – for this daring escape. ‘Throughout the whole of the operations this officer had shown courage, resource and initiative,’ read the citation for his first award. ‘He has set a very fine example of determination and leadership to the men of his command.’
Farran’s physical courage and his apparent recklessness would lead him back into enemy fire, and in July 1942 he was wounded in the first battle of El Alamein. This time, his injuries were so serious as to require his medical evacuation to Britain. But via a judicious pulling of strings he managed to convince an Army medical board that he was fit to serve in a front-line role.
Not only that, but in February 1943 he’d volunteered for the SAS. Brought into the regiment by a mutual friend, Farran was hugely impressed. He delighted in the no-nonsense, freewheeling and aggressive nature of the unit, and felt he had found his true home. In the regiment’s founders he recognised true kindred spirits.
‘The Stirlings did not leap over red tape; they broke right through it,’ Farran