In memory of all the members of the special forces who sacrificed their lives during the Second World War

For Luca and Rafe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

In Memory

Dedication

Introduction

1 The Secret Life of Noreen Riols

2 The Two Wars of Jimmy Patch

3 The Greatest Raid of All

4 ‘The Best Navigator in the Western Desert’

5 Popski’s Private Army

6 The Moonlight Squadrons

7 Jungle Warfare behind Enemy Lines

8 The Jedburgh Teams

9 ‘We weren’t bloody playing cricket’

10 A Radio Operator at War

Acknowledgements

Picture Section

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

When I joined the Parachute Regiment in 1986 as a young officer I entered a world where the exceptional was commonplace and every soldier, no matter what rank, was always expected to perform to the highest possible standard.

Back then, my battalion, 3 Para, was still basking in the success of the Falklands War and was rightly regarded as one of the best, certainly one of the toughest infantry battalions in the entire British Army. It was an elite organisation, full of men who, just four years earlier, had marched across the demanding terrain of East Falkland and fought the Battle of Mount Longdon with bullet and bayonet.

I was a fresh-faced, inexperienced, 24-year-old lieutenant expected to take command of 27 hardened paratroopers, half of whom had served in the Falklands, where they had taken life and seen life taken.

Life in 3 Para was an unforgiving and at times humourless existence, where only professional excellence mattered and those unfortunate souls who could not deliver the goods fell by the wayside – and many did.

As a young platoon commander I was cut a bit of slack, but not much. While it was accepted that I might make mistakes, I was also expected to learn from them – second chances were a rarity. But with the help and understanding of a good but tough sergeant and excellent soldiers I survived that initial apprenticeship. Anyone who wants to serve in the Parachute Regiment, irrespective of rank, class, colour or creed, must pass the gruelling pre-parachute selection course, and that creates a special bond of mutual respect between the officers and other ranks.

But while we in the Paras rightly regarded ourselves as an elite force, none of us would have referred to ourselves as ‘special forces’. That title was reserved for a very select few, those within the Army who were prepared to take another step and test themselves further.

In the late 1980s the special forces consisted of the Special Air Service, the Special Boat Service, the Force Research Unit, which ran agents in Northern Ireland, and the 14th Intelligence Company, a cover name for specially trained covert operatives who would spy on and monitor some of the most dangerous members of the IRA.

Those who undertook the various selection courses to join one of these special units were either successful and were rarely seen again or would return, having failed to make the grade for some reason or another, perhaps feeling sheepish, but admired by most for having the guts to give it a go.

Although I was obviously aware of the existence of the special forces, it wasn’t until I served in Northern Ireland that I met members of those units in the flesh. In 1989, 3 Para was posted to Palace Barracks in Belfast on a 24-month residential tour. After a brief period training recruits at the Parachute Regiment depot I was posted to Belfast, where I became the second-in-command of B Company, 3 Para. Some weeks later I was offered the job of Close Observation Platoon (COP) commander, a position which was widely regarded as the best job for any young officer in Northern Ireland. COPs were usually composed of soldiers from the reconnaissance platoons of infantry battalions and can perhaps be described as being at the lower end of the covert intelligence-gathering operation in Northern Ireland. The Belfast COP was effectively an autonomous unit which, although housed within Palace Barracks just outside Belfast, was under the control of the Belfast Tasking and Coordination Group, known as TCG, a part of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s Special Branch. The Belfast TCG consisted of two experienced warrant officers from the SAS and 14 Int, together with a senior Special Branch detective.

That 12-month period also instilled within me a lifelong interest in the special forces and those men and women who have served in their ranks. But after five years’ Army service, during which time I had reached the rank of captain, I decided to resign my commission. Although I enjoyed the Army, I was never a ‘lifer’ and wanted to explore pastures new. In 1991 I embarked on a new career in journalism. By the mid-1990s I was reporting on the Balkans conflict, and I soon began to specialise in war reporting – a role which took me back to Northern Ireland and on to Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf, Africa, the Middle East and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Western governments had hoped that the end of the Cold War would deliver an era of global stability, but instead a much more pernicious threat began to emerge with the rise of militant Islam across much of the Middle East, a phenomenon which would ultimately lead to the 9/11 attacks and the concept of ‘asymmetric warfare’.

Those units in the British Army best equipped to deal with this new threat were the special forces, namely the SAS, the SBS, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment and the Joint Communications Unit, the last two being formed from units which had previously existed as the 14th Intelligence Company and the Force Research Unit in Northern Ireland, as well as the covert civilian agencies such as MI5, MI6, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the Metropolitan Police’s anti-terrorist squad.

For reasons of security, virtually all SF operations are classified, just as they were during the Second World War. But every so often a diamond emerges from the dust and allows one to understand why the special forces are so, well, special.

One such diamond, known as Operation Marlborough, came across my path in 2005, while I was reporting on the war in Iraq. Back in those dark days Baghdad was the most dangerous place on earth. Suicide bombers were routinely murdering hundreds of innocent civilians every week. The country was in anarchy and the West’s ‘war’ was being lost.

Operation Marlborough was a ‘take-down’ – a hit on an al-Qaeda suicide bombing operation involving teams of British SAS snipers embedded with ‘Task Force Black’ – the joint British/US special forces unit operating in Baghdad with the sole aim of defeating al-Qaeda.

The Task Force had received specific intelligence suggesting that al-Qaeda were about to launch a series of coordinated suicide bomb attacks across the city. Three bombers were being fitted with devices at an al-Qaeda bomb factory within the city and targets were already being reconnoitred – street markets and schools had been chosen by the bombers.

The intelligence was passed to the SAS, who immediately began planning the ambush. I understand that a 15-man SAS team covertly observed the target house for several days, watching everyone who entered and left. Listening devices were used to monitor the plans being hatched, while a Reaper Unmanned Air Vehicle tracked the suspected terrorists as they moved around the city.

After several days of covert surveillance, the order for the ‘take-down’ was given.

Early one morning, as the sun began to climb over the city, three SAS sniper teams watched and waited. When all three suspects emerged, the SAS opened fire. The three bombers, each wearing a suicide vest impregnated with ball bearings, were killed by a single head shot. A follow-up operation also led to the arrest of several key al-Qaeda bomb-makers.

It was a classic special forces operation which, estimates suggest, may have saved the lives of over 100 civilians.

* * *

The modern SAS soldier is a highly trained, intelligent, excellently equipped, well-paid fighter who would have notched up several years in the ranks before being allowed to undertake the special forces selection. At the outbreak of war 70 years ago, by contrast, the majority of those who served in the special forces had very limited combat experience. Those ‘originals’ had to learn their skills very quickly, and once in the field largely had to survive on their wits. I wanted to find out what motivated thousands of young men and women to risk all in the service of their country, when many could have probably served out the war in a safe, comfortable operations room, many miles from the front line.

My search began at the Special Forces Club in London in early 2011. I had attended various functions at the club over the last few years and one or two of my friends were members.

The club was created in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in August 1945, just as the various ‘private armies’, or special forces, which had evolved during the previous five years of conflict were disbanded. Within a year the Long Range Desert Group, the Jedburgh Teams, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the Chindits, Popski’s Private Army, the Commandos and the original Special Air Service all ceased to exist. The move was partly driven by ‘old school’ generals and the heads of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), who were never entirely comfortable with seemingly autonomous military or quasi-military organisations operating outside the established sphere of command.

Those who had served in these clandestine units were either posted back to their original units or, as in the majority of cases, returned to ‘Civvy Street’, seeking fresh challenges in a changed world. They were warned never to speak of covert operations, and some, especially those who had worked with foreign agents, were made to sign the Official Secrets Act. They were aware that to divulge any of their wartime activities could, in theory, result in imprisonment.

It was against this backdrop that the Special Forces Club was established in 1945 by Major-General Sir Colin Gubbins, KCMG, DSO, MC, the last chief of the Special Operations Executive. The general wanted to create a club where former members of the SOE could meet over lunch or dinner and chat about their wartime experiences, keeping alive the ‘spirit of resistance’, a phrase that became the club’s motto. He wanted to preserve and develop the bonds of comradeship and mutual trust which had been forged between a special group of men and women in the war years.

Together with a small group of former SOE agents, he leased from the Grosvenor Estate a large townhouse in Knightsbridge, central London. Then, as today, the building gave little away, for the club never liked to advertise its existence. Like its members, the club has always preferred anonymity, a desire to remain in the shadows, out of prying eyes. It is quite possible even today that many people living and working in the Knightsbridge area know nothing of the club’s existence. There has never been a name plaque to distinguish it from any other house in the same smart, leafy crescent.

The club was an immediate success and, unlike many other London clubs at the time, its doors were open to women, as many female soldiers and civilians had fought and died while serving in the SOE. Members were also welcomed from the wartime SAS, the Long Range Desert Group, the Jedburgh Teams and a host of organisations who had served behind enemy lines.

Only one covert unit was initially excluded from the club, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), which throughout the war years had been regarded as both a rival and an enemy of the SOE. I should add that the prohibition which prevented MI6 membership has since been lifted, and the club is used today by members of Britain’s modern secret establishment – MI5, MI6, the SAS, SBS, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment and the various covert police organisations which have been created to fight organised crime and Islamist terror groups – as a secure meeting place.

Over the decades since the end of the Second World War the club was one of the few places, if not the only place, where former members of the SOE – indeed agents from all the Allied countries – could meet and reminisce about their lives some 70 years ago when they fought a secret war against Nazi Germany in occupied Europe. Within the club’s secure walls, former saboteurs, assassins, radio operators and those who trained agents in the secret arts of espionage and guerrilla warfare could meet and recount tales of derring-do among friends, over a glass of whisky, knowing that their secrets would be safe.

It was during many of these meetings, sometimes at the bar, late in the evening, or over lunch sharing a good bottle of claret, that the stories of what the special forces did during the Second World War began to emerge. Often those stories were never fully documented, which means that no historical record exists, and with the passing of time many of them have been lost for ever. That is why it seemed to be a good idea to interview a selection of those ‘originals’ and collect their stories in a book. Thanks to the club, it was possible to get in touch with some of them.

The Special Forces Club is one of the most friendly and least fussy of all London clubs – I don’t think its members would have it any other way. It isn’t large or grand and consists of a library, a bar, some rooms for meetings and a few bedrooms where members can spend the night at a pretty reasonable rate. The walls of the staircase which leads up to the bar are adorned with portrait photographs of members of the SOE who perished on operations, while most of the rooms have original paintings depicting clandestine meetings of agents in Nazi-occupied Europe.

It was during one of the various events I was attending at the club that I first heard the name of Noreen Riols, who had helped in the training of agents during the war. I eventually made contact with Noreen, one of the few surviving members of the SOE, and some time later we agreed to meet at the club so that I could learn about her secret wartime activities.

And so began a fascinating journey, during which I learnt of the heroics of men like Jimmy Patch, who was called up in 1940 before being sent to fight in the desert as a gunner in the Royal Artillery. To escape the drudgery and routine of the regular Army, he volunteered for special duties and was eventually accepted into the fabled Long Range Desert Group, taking part in some of the most celebrated covert operations of the North African campaign. Later, during an ill-fated operation in the Greek Islands, Jimmy was captured by the Germans but escaped to fight on in Yugoslavia.

Also serving in the North African campaign was Mike Sadler, who left England in the late1930s with the intention of becoming a farmer in what was then Rhodesia but ended up becoming the ‘best navigator’ in the SAS. Mike served with soldiers whose names are now part of the historical fabric of the special forces, such as Lieutenant-Colonel Paddy Mayne and Lieutenant-Colonel David Stirling, the founder of the SAS. Mike took part in many of the early SAS missions, in which the elite fighting force built its reputation attacking German airfields deep behind enemy lines in North Africa. ‘My resounding memory is that it was such tremendous fun,’ Mike explains in the book.

The adventures of Captain John Campbell, who was erroneously branded a coward at El Alamein but later went on to win the Military Cross and bar, while in Italy serving with Popski’s Private Army, make another remarkable story. He was later described by Popski, a charismatic British officer of East European heritage, as the ‘most daring of us all’. John is the only surviving officer who served with that elite force.

Among the most dangerous ventures of the war were the night missions to occupied France flown by the RAF’s Moonlight Squadrons, of which Leonard Ratcliff is a rare survivor; Corran Purdon recalls his part in the daring St Nazaire Raid, which led to imprisonment and the MC; and Bill Towill, a pacifist until Dunkirk, describes the horrors of jungle warfare behind enemy lines with the legendary Chindits.

Men who served in the Jedburgh Teams, a secret SOE unit, recall their experiences in France and the Far East. All were young volunteers who wanted to see some real action before the war ended. The soldiers were trained in covert communication, silent killing and sabotage, before being parachuted into occupied France just before D-Day to assist in organising the Resistance movement. Some of those who survived volunteered to serve in Burma, including men like John Sharp, who won the Military Medal, Fred Bailey, who fought alongside both the Maquis and Burmese guerrillas, and Harry Verlander, who escaped death by a hair’s breadth when he was attacked by a Japanese officer wielding a samurai sword.

Tales from the Special Forces Club presents their unique stories of courage, conviction and fighting spirit. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

CHAPTER 1
The Secret Life of Noreen Riols
Training SOE Agents

‘The disruption of enemy rail communications, the harassing of German road moves and the continual and increasing strain placed on German security services throughout occupied Europe by the organised forces of Resistance, played a very considerable part in our complete and final victory.’

General Eisenhower, May 1945

It was on a Monday morning in August 2011, when a black London taxi cab dropped me at the corner of a leafy crescent in Knightsbridge, that I made my first visit to the Special Forces Club as a guest of one of its original members.

The club is as anonymous today as it was when it opened after the Second World War, its address only known to a select few. I press a small bell fixed to the building’s outer wall adjacent to a heavy, tan-coloured oak door, and a few seconds later the door clicks open.

‘Yes, sir, can I help you?’ a young receptionist enquires helpfully.

‘My name is Sean Rayment and I’m here to see Noreen Riols,’ I respond. A few elderly club members milling around in the lobby immediately turn and look at me, with a mixture of suspicion and interest.

‘She is waiting for you through there,’ responds the receptionist, pointing at a half-open door through which the morning sun is starting to shine. As I walk past another office two middle-aged men look up from behind their computer and stare unsmiling as I pass. I feel as though I have just been frisked.

Looking into the room, I see that Noreen Riols is reclining in a slightly worn, red velvet armchair which has the effect of diminishing her delicate frame. She is sipping a cup of breakfast tea while reading a copy of The Times and appears perfectly at home in the cosy, peach-coloured drawing room.

‘Noreen?’ I ask hesitantly as I enter the room.

‘Yes?’ she replies, looking slightly confused before a smile fills her face. ‘You must be Sean. I’m sorry, I was expecting someone older. Please, come in and sit down. Now, would you like a cup of tea?’

After months of research, searching and seemingly endless emails and telephone calls, I have come face to face with Noreen Riols, one of the very few members of the SOE still alive.

As a journalist and former officer in the Parachute Regiment, I have met members of covert intelligence agencies, such as MI5, MI6, the SAS and more obscure organisations such as 14 Intelligence Company, which operated exclusively in Northern Ireland from the 1980s and whose existence was never officially acknowledged by the British government, on numerous occasions. I have always been struck by the physical ordinariness of those who inhabit the covert world. They might be super-fit and have brilliant analytical minds, but from the outside they tend not to stand out from the crowd; they are mostly neither too tall nor too short, fat or thin, handsome or ugly – just ordinary. For those who live their lives in the covert world of espionage and counter-espionage, blending in, being almost invisible within the crowd can be a life-saving quality. And Noreen is no exception. Sipping tea in the Special Forces Club she looked like everyone’s favourite granny, with a kind, smiling, gentle face. It was curious, therefore, to think that some 70 years earlier Noreen was one of a select band of SOE personnel who were training agents to conduct assassinations and sabotage across Europe as Britain and its allies fought for their very existence.

Noreen and I shake hands before she adds: ‘There aren’t very many of us left, you know.’ By that she means members of the SOE, the wartime clandestine force created in July 1940 on the orders of Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, and Hugh Dalton, the Minister for Economic Warfare, with the aim of conducting sabotage, espionage, assassinations and forming resistance movements against the Axis powers in occupied countries.

Noreen was one of the many women employed by the secret organisation during the war. Today, aged 86, she is one of the few surviving members of F Section – the department which dispatched more than 400 agents, including 39 female spies, into France between 1941 and 1945. The methods of infiltration included parachuting, landing by aircraft and using fishing boats and submarines.

The section was one of SOE’s most successful and was responsible for creating dozens of underground networks across France. Many of the agents were Britons who were fluent in French and were recruited from a wide range of backgrounds and occupations. Some were already serving in the armed forces, while others were recruited because of their knowledge of France, all united by their loathing of the Nazi ideology and the desire to strike back at a regime which had already enslaved millions of civilians.

But it was a dangerous and demanding occupation, and newly trained agents were warned that they had a 50 per cent chance of surviving the war. Those who were captured faced torture at the hands of the Gestapo followed by almost certain execution.

SOE’s primary role was to help organise the French Resistance into a fighting force capable of mounting sabotage, with the primary targets being the rail and telephone networks.

‘Isn’t it funny that now that there are so few of us left we are in more demand than ever?’ Noreen adds before returning to her seat. ‘Now tell me, what do you want to know? There are no secrets any more.’

* * *

Noreen Riols was born into a naval family on the Mediterranean island of Malta. From an early age she had decided that she too wanted to lead an adventurous life which would begin with taking a degree at Oxford. War broke out before she was ready to go to university, but she was already becoming a capable linguist at the Lycée, the French school in South Kensington.

‘The plan was this: before the war I had wanted to go to Oxford, take a degree in literature, then I was going to study medicine, then I was going to astound the world with my incredible medical knowledge and then I was going to marry a tall, dark handsome man, who would whisk me off to a thatched cottage in the country, which was suitably staffed and had a pony paddock, and then I was going to have six children, all boys with red hair. I had arranged the whole thing; the only thing I hadn’t arranged was the bridegroom, but that was a detail which could be sorted out later – then the war came.

‘The Lycée was evacuated early in the war, but a few girls remained in one class and I was one of those – but I can’t remember doing any work at all and I seemed to spend the whole of my life tearing around South Kensington on the back of a Free French airman’s motorbike.

‘Life in London at that time was pretty dreadful because it was being bombed all the time and people were being killed, as you would expect, but I don’t think we, girls of my age, ever realised how much danger we were in.

‘I remember being in the Lycée when it was bombed in 1941. The school had been occupied by the Free French Air Force, and one day I heard a plane coming over and I’d just looked out of the window very excitedly when suddenly a French airman leapt on top of me and both of us were flat on the floor. Seconds later the bomb exploded and the window came crashing in. If he hadn’t knocked me to the floor I would have been seriously injured or worse. That’s why I say I don’t think we really had any appreciation of the danger we faced daily. I don’t ever remember being frightened – I don’t think you do get frightened when you are young.’

‘I got my call-up papers when I was 18. The papers said that either you joined the armed forces or you go and work in a munitions factory, but the idea of working in a munitions factory did not appeal to me in the slightest.

‘All of my friends knew that we were going to be called up when we reached 18, and I thought I’ll follow in my father’s footsteps and I’ll become a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, WRNS. I thought the hat was very stylish and I could see myself in the uniform. But when I went to join up I was told that the only vacancies for women in the Royal Navy were for cooks and stewards, and the idea of making stew or suet pudding for the rest of the war was not the Mati Hari image I wanted to give to the waiting world, so I declined.

‘My instructions were to report to a Labour Office somewhere in west London and when I was told by the female clerk behind the counter what my options were I said, “I’m not doing that or that,” and frankly this woman wasn’t having any of it, she got a bit ratty and said, “Make up your mind – it’s this or that, and if you can’t make up your mind I’ll put you down for a factory.”

‘Well, you can imagine how I felt, and I started to cause a bit of a fuss and said, “I will not work in a factory,” and stamped my feet and so on. At which point a door opened and a slightly irritated man looked out and said: “OK, I’ll take over this one.” He then proceeded to ask me a lot of questions which had nothing to do with the warship I intended to take charge of.

‘He then picked up on my schooling and said, “I see you went to the Lycée. You speak French?” I said yes, and then he started speaking to me in several different languages. He was leaping about from one to another like a demented kangaroo and he seemed quite surprised that I could keep up with him in French, German and Spanish. After the interview he sent me to the Foreign Office, where I was ushered into a windowless room, where again I was questioned by a high-ranking officer. Of course I had no idea what I was being interviewed for at that stage, but looking back I think there was obviously some kind of liaison between the Lycée, the SOE and the Labour Office. At that stage there was a requirement for people who could speak languages to carry out secret work – but it’s not the sort of thing you can advertise for.

‘After that interview I ended up at 64 Baker Street, the headquarters of SOE, but I had no idea where I was or what the building was for or the work they were doing. It was at Baker Street that I met Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, who was a major then and was in charge of SOE’s French section.’

The SOE recruited people from all walks of life, with the primary requirement being a thorough knowledge of the country in which the agent was to operate. Fluency in the native language was vital, especially French for those entering France; thus exiled or escaped members of the armed forces of various occupied countries proved to be a fertile recruiting ground. Agents needed to be both ruthless and diplomatic, callous enough to slit a man’s throat or execute an informer, while also able to master the politics of, say, the French Resistance movement and motivate members of it accordingly. Training was tough and, as we shall see later in the chapter, trainees could be failed at any stage.

While Baker Street was the main headquarters, the organisation’s various branches and departments were strewn across London and much of England. Wireless production and research departments were based in Watford, Wembley and Birmingham. The camouflage, make-up and photography sections, Stations XVa, XVb and XVc, were largely based in the Kensington area of west London. Station XVb, a camouflage training base and briefing centre, was located in the Natural History Museum. In addition to the various stations there were over 60 separate training centres across Britain, where agents would be taught a wide variety of field skills, including demolition, sabotage and assassination techniques.

Station XV – The Thatched Barn – was one of the most important establishments within the SOE. It was a two-storey mock-Tudor hotel built in the 1930s in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, and had been acquired by Billy Butlin, the holiday camp entrepreneur, before being requisitioned by SOE.

The Thatched Barn was the place where agents would be kitted out with clothing and equipment which was appropriate for the country in which they were about to infiltrate. Every item of clothing had to be an exact fit with what was expected for that particular country, or even region. So if the French in Brittany, say, stitched hems in a particular way, then that method needed to be used when fitting clothes for an agent about to be sent to that region. Nothing could be left to chance.

‘At the time the headquarters was called the Inter-Allied Research Bureau – well, that meant absolutely nothing to me, as you can imagine. I was hopping from one office to the other. Buck sent me to another office and said this captain is expecting you – and he may have been, but by the time I’d got there he’d forgotten that he was meant to be interviewing me. He looked at me as though I had walked in from outer space and then said, “Nobody, but nobody must know what you do here. That includes brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles.” Then an immensely tall man called Eddie McGuire, an Irish Guards officer, shot into the room making very funny, squeaky sounds. It really was quite a bizarre scene. Then the two of them suddenly stopped talking and ran out of the room and down the corridor. I wondered where I was – I was only just 18 at the time and it felt like I was in a lunatic asylum being run by the Crazy Gang.

‘I looked down the corridor and I could see that all the doors were open and people were running around. I learnt later that these two men had just returned from the field and were a bit on edge, and Eddie had been shot in the throat while escaping, which is why he spoke like a ventriloquist’s doll.

‘There was a FANY* inside the room who seemed to be completely unperturbed by everything that was going on, so I said to her, “Is it always like this here?” and she said, “Oh no, it’s usually much worse, but don’t worry, you’ll get used to it,” and I did.

‘After that interview, I was in, although I didn’t really know what I was in. I only knew that I was involved in something secret, because I kept being told not to reveal anything about what went on and not to ask questions. The view then, and it holds true today, is that the less you know, the less you can reveal, and if the worst happens, and the worst was of course a German invasion, then the less you could reveal under interrogation. I didn’t know it at the time but everyone who worked for SOE was on the Gestapo’s hit list.’

The interview was concluded and Noreen was asked if she could begin work immediately – by which she thought they meant the following morning, but inside the SOE immediately meant immediately. Within the hour she was ensconced inside an office in Montague Mansions, another building taken over by SOE as it grew almost daily, a few streets away from the Baker Street headquarters.

‘I was a bit of a runaround at first, until I got to know how things worked. One of my first jobs was to ensure that special coded messages which were broadcast every evening by the BBC at Bush House were in the right place at the right time. That meant taking them down to the “Basement”, as it was known somewhat sinisterly, which was run by a sergeant who was a veteran of the First World War. He wasn’t a particularly happy person and he seemed to have a cigarette permanently glued to his top lip, but we seemed to get on after a while.

‘Probably my most important job at that time was to get all the messages from all the various sections to him by 5pm, so that they could be sent over to the BBC – it was crucial that the messages went out so that the Resistance units could get their instructions.’

Noreen was working alongside living legends of the secret world such as Leo Marks, a cryptographer in charge of agent codes, and Forest Yeo-Thomas, codename the White Rabbit, one of the organisation’s most celebrated agents. The two men were great friends, according to Noreen.

‘Leo Marks’s office was on the ground floor and mine was on the first floor but I saw a lot of him. He was a very nice chap, but his popularity was further increased because his mother was always sending him cakes, biscuits and freshly made sandwiches, which, because he was so nice, he always shared with other people so there was always a bit of a party taking place in his room.

‘After a few months I was given better and more interesting jobs, and one of the most interesting was to attend agent debriefing sessions. There was a fairly straightforward routine when an agent came in. First of all they were given a huge cooked breakfast at the airport, after which they were taken to a place called Orchard Court, in Portman Square, close to the SOE headquarters. It could sometimes take months to get an agent back from the field for a debriefing session because of the complexities of living in occupied France. It was about at that stage that I really began to understand the sort of pressures the agents were under.

‘It was always fascinating to see them just hours after they had left France. Some would be shaking and chain smoking, and others who had witnessed or suffered much worse experiences were as cool as cucumbers. I think it was awfully easy for a lot of people in England to say at the time, “I’d never talk if I was captured.” But when you are actually over there none of us could tell what our reactions would be, and I suppose a time would come when the human spirit can no longer take any more punishment.

‘The debriefing sessions were very relaxed, the agents were never rushed or pushed too hard, but the interviews were very detailed and could last several hours because the agents had so much information.

‘A wireless operator for example was under enormous pressure, because he would have only about 15 minutes to send his message, which had to contain a lot of information about sabotage or enemy movements, but other information couldn’t be included because it wasn’t as crucial as operations.

‘The idea of the debriefing sessions was to get into the real detail, such as the need to have a permit to put a bike on a train, or indeed the need for more bikes. The information was often the sort of detail a radio operator wouldn’t be able to send because the need wasn’t urgent. Every little bit of information helped in the preparation and briefing of agents who were just about to deploy on an operation. All of the agents had to be 100 per cent convincing all of the time, and it might be very small, almost insignificant details such as only being able to have coffee twice a week – that little bit of detail could be really important for a new agent going into an occupied country. Just imagine a new agent being lifted by the police and being asked a simple question like “How many cups of coffee do you drink a week?” The wrong answer could be a death sentence.’

By the middle of 1943 Noreen was a fully-fledged member of the SOE. She would begin work every morning, dressed in civilian clothes, at around 8am and work through until 6pm or later, depending on whether there was some sort of emergency. It became second nature never to talk about her work, and even her own mother was convinced Noreen was a secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. With her almost perfect French, Noreen worked exclusively in F Section, the department which looked after agents in France. SOE now occupied several buildings in central London, all close to the headquarters in Baker Street. Working in the headquarters were citizens of every country occupied by the Axis powers – but there was, according to Noreen, an unwritten rule, which was that there could be absolutely no contact between people from the different sections for security reasons.

‘We were all very aware that the agents’ security, their lives in fact, depended on secrecy. One word, one slip of the tongue could result in a disaster. I loved the job, the people were fascinating and there was a real sense of purpose to the work.’

Then, in February 1944, Noreen was asked to go and work at what was known as the secret agents’ finishing school at Beaulieu, the country seat of the Barons Montagu of Beaulieu.

By the time Noreen joined the SOE, the secret organisation has grown into a vast network of more than 60 training schools located across Britain, where at any one time hundreds of students were under training. There were also schools in Canada, for the training of US and Canadian agents, as well as in Palestine, at the Ramat David air base in Haifa, and in Singapore.

The training programme began at the ‘Preliminary Schools’, such as the Special Training School 5 (STS5) at Warnborough Manor, near Guildford in Surrey. The courses generally lasted two to three weeks, and it was here that they assessed the recruit’s character and suitability for clandestine operations, without actually revealing what SOE did. (Interestingly, this same technique was adopted by 14 Intelligence Company during the initial selection when recruiting operatives for ‘special duties’ in Northern Ireland.)

Those potential SOE agents who passed were sent to one of several paramilitary schools, based at, amongst other establishments, the ten shooting lodges of Arisaig House (STS21), a forbidding granite country residence in Inverness-shire, which was requisitioned by the Army in 1941 and where Odette Churchill, one of the heroines of the SOE, was trained.

The locations were chosen for their remoteness and the gruelling terrain. Physical training was one of the key elements of the training, including many marches over the rugged Scottish countryside. For reasons of security, nationalities were kept separate, but virtually all students followed the same courses. Days were long and sleep was often in short supply, as the instructors piled on the pressure and assessed the recruits’ ability to make decisions and think clearly under extreme duress.

The courses lasted for five weeks and included lessons in physical training, silent killing, weapons handling, demolition, field craft, navigation and signals. Weapons training was based on close-quarters combat, with two ex-Shanghai officers, William Fairbairn and Eric Anthony Sykes, teaching unarmed combat and silent killing. The two men gave their name to the FS fighting knife – a small knife used mainly by the Commandos – and the Fairbairn Fighting System, which was also taught to members of the CIA and FBI. The students learnt to master the Colt .45 and .38 and the Sten gun, a weapon regarded by many as being of dubious reliability. The recruits were taught the ‘double tap’ system of killing, firing two shots at a target, ideally the head, to ensure certain death.

Instructors also made use of the local train network, and trainees were given missions to ‘sabotage’ the West Highland Line using dummy explosives. Later in their training, the student agents also had to undertake a number of parachute jumps, six for men and five for women, at Ringway airport near Manchester.

Once these stages of training had been successfully mastered, agents moved to Beaulieu in Hampshire, the location of the Group B training school – ‘the final stop before they drop’, as some wag once observed.

Beaulieu was the perfect training school. It was located within the seclusion of the New Forest and the estate had numerous houses and outbuildings where students could perfect and hone their skills in relative secrecy. The training staff were housed in a central headquarters while the trainees were accommodated in a variety of different houses depending on their country sections.

Those destined for France were expected to know about all things French and adopt various customs, quirks and national idiosyncrasies, likewise for those being dispatched to Denmark, Belgium, Holland or other occupied countries. Each house had its own ‘house commandant’ whose job was to monitor and occasionally mentor the agents and keep them on the straight and narrow. The one golden rule was that the trainee agents only ever associated with members of their own house for reasons of security, which meant that the training staff would come to each of the houses to give lectures.

During the course of the war more than 3,000 agents went through Beaulieu, whose vast rambling estate was built around the ruins of Beaulieu Abbey, and whose centrepiece is Palace House, the imposing Gothic grey stone mansion which was still used by members of the Montagu family.

‘The gardener’s cottage where I lived was really two cottages back to back. When we lived there we were three plus the housekeeper. Whoever was sleeping in the other (smaller) cottage had to go out and in through the front door to go to bed at night. And the winters were cold! “The House in the Woods”, where the 25 officers lived – which had been a secret weekend rendezvous for Edward VIII and Mrs S. before he abdicated – was about ten minutes’ walk away from the cottage, across the forest.

‘In the middle of the estate was our HQ, a rather ugly stockbroker Tudor house called “The Rings”, which has since been demolished and replaced with an equally ugly modern bungalow. The students were billeted in various houses away from us. We couldn’t see their houses and they couldn’t see us. The women were housed in “The House on the Shore”, while the French students were mostly housed at “Boarman’s” or “The Orchard” or “The Vineyard”. The different nationalities were kept strictly apart, for security reasons. As were men and women – no unisex houses.’

The Beaulieu training houses were subdivided into five departments covering areas such as agent technique, clandestine life, personnel security, covert communication, cover story techniques and counter-surveillance. Agents were also taught how to change their appearance by using disguises. One of the instructors at the school, Peter Folis, who had trained as an actor, would often tell his students not to think ‘false beards’ but instead make small changes to the face such as wearing glasses, and part the hair differently.

‘I was a little disappointed to be leaving London, because it was the heart of everything, but Buck said to me, “I want you to go to Beaulieu,” so I just got on with it. I went home, packed my bags, got on a train and that was it. I was at Beaulieu. My new home was a gardener’s cottage on the estate and was shared by three of us: a South African FANY and a woman of about 35 who was very distinguished, and we had a splendid housekeeper who looked after us like a mother hen. It was a very gender segregated set-up, but that didn’t stop all sorts of secret romances taking place.

‘There was another house where 25 instructors were based, and they were mainly ex-agents. At first I didn’t really know why I had been sent to Beaulieu, but after a very short time it became clear that I was going to help to instruct the students or agents, and that was a very exciting prospect. The men and women attending the courses were known as “students” while training, “bods” when they were sent on a mission and reached the rank of human being – if they made it back. It was all sort of light-hearted, designed, I suppose, to remove some of the fear.

‘Kim Philby† had served as an instructor at Beaulieu for a short time and was very well liked. When I arrived he had already returned to London, but everyone spoke of him as being very charming, pleasant and efficient.

‘But Kim was recalled to London; maybe his superiors were already a little suspicious. Another of the trainers was Paul Dehn, who became an art and theatre critic, and there was another one called Jock who was always very nice to me. Socially the set-up was very public school. For example, the instructors changed into service dress or black tie for dinner, so it was a little bit stiff. But Jock was different. He was always dressed in battledress and hobnail boots. The days were long and all of the staff worked seven days a week, but we finished at 1pm on a Sunday. Jock would come to our cottage after lunch and would bang on the door and say, in a very thick Glaswegian accent, “Does anyone want to come for a walk?” There was always a twinkle in his eye. I would often go for a walk with him and he might try and get a bit romantic. One only had to say “Shift it, Jock” – he never insisted. But what I didn’t know at the time was that Jock was a specialist in silent killing. If I had known that at the time I’m not sure I would have had the courage to resist his advances.’

Noreen’s main duty at Beaulieu was to help in the training of agents in a role known as a ‘decoy’. All agents had to be able to follow targets and conduct close surveillance without being noticed. It was a specialist skill which took time to perfect. During the various exercises the student agents were ordered to follow Noreen and report on her movements, supposedly without being seen. The majority of the exercises took place in either Bournemouth or Southampton, the two large towns closest to Beaulieu.

‘On a particular training day, we were given a scenario and told to head to a particular landmark in either Southampton or Bournemouth. I always worked in Bournemouth, and the agents were told, “You will see a girl in a headscarf and a dirty macintosh and a shopping basket, and she’ll probably be wandering along in front of the pier at about 3pm: follow her and find out what she is up to.” The idea was for them to try and follow me, find out who I met, where I went shopping and whether I had any sort of routine – exactly the sort of thing they might have to do in France. But the trick for them was not to be seen by me, and that was a very difficult skill to master. It was obviously easier for me to spot them than for them to spot me. It was wartime and there were a lot of women about, and most of them had baskets, because as soon as a woman in wartime saw a queue she would join it, because a queue would usually mean fresh food. But there was a shortage of men of a certain age. Most men between the ages of 19 and 40 were serving in the forces, so people looked very strangely at a man who was dressed in civilian clothes who was in his twenties or thirties, and quite often the agents would get abuse hurled at them. People, especially women who might have sons or husbands serving overseas, would walk right up to them and say things like, “It’s disgusting, there’s a war on and there you are wandering around Bournemouth in the middle of the afternoon – you should be ashamed of yourself.”

‘At the beginning of their training the agents were a bit ham-fisted. They would often stand very close to me, or if I was looking in a shop window then they would come and look in the window one shop along, but I wouldn’t go, and in the end they would have to move on. And if they stopped to tie a shoelace – which usually wasn’t undone – then I would know that I had got my man.

‘There was a big department store called Plummers which I would often head straight for. I’d make for the ladies’ lingerie department, and of course none of the men would like walking around that particular department. The students would come in following me and it would suddenly dawn on them that they were getting some very odd looks from other women and from the girls at the counters. I used to hold up a few unmentionables just to make them look a little more embarrassed. After that I would saunter up a few steps towards the lift and press the lift button. The target would then do one of two things: either he would get in the lift with me, or he would race up to the floor of the button I had pressed so he could continue following me. If he did that, I would quickly rush out of the lift and run down the stairwell by the side of the lift, and this is where my basket would come in useful, because I would whip off my headscarf and my mackintosh and put them in the basket, so all of a sudden I looked like someone different, and by the time he realised what had happened I had disappeared.

‘Once I had gone through the door and was outside, that was it, he had lost me. Even if he realised what had happened, by the time he got outside I was gone. It was tremendous fun and, although in many respects it was a bit of a game, it was also deadly serious. You couldn’t have an agent who stuck out like a sore thumb, either because he was just being clumsy or because he was being too suspicious, so the trick was to act as normally as possible and to try and blend in. There were some who were very good. In some cases you would report back and say, “He didn’t turn up,” and the instructors would say, “Ah, but she did.”

‘One of the other key skills an agent had to be adept at was using “live” and “dead” letterboxes – the passing of messages. A message might read: “Somebody will be sitting on a bench in the pier gardens about 11pm or 3pm and he’s got a message for you,” and you’d have to hope that somebody else, not a person taking part in the exercise, hadn’t got on the bench too, because that could be a bit confusing.

‘You’d be told that the contact would be reading a newspaper, so you would go and sit down and take out a cigarette – I’ve never been smoker but I didn’t mind puffing away – and he would fold up the paper and put it down and I would pick it up, and that was quite normal because there were very few papers published and it was first come, first served, and everyone wanted to read a paper, so if you saw a paper lying around you always picked it up.

‘We would also pass messages in cinemas and tea rooms, which was quite difficult because you had to make sure you found the right person, especially if you were a woman. If you started passing messages to a strange man you could be had up for soliciting, so you had to make sure you were giving the messages to the right person.’

Noreen also had to become proficient at the so-called ‘honey trap’, a tactic in which female agents use their feminine allure to ‘convince’ enemy agents to confess or at least admit their activities. It was a demanding task, not least because if Noreen was successful it might mean the end of an agent’s career even before it had begun. Curiously, some male agents did give some indication that they were involved in covert activities, often within just an hour or so of meeting Noreen.

‘During this stage of the training we would work very closely with the students’ conducting officer. He wasn’t part of the Beaulieu staff, instead his job was to act as a sort of mother hen to the students, giving them a bit of inspiration when needed but also listening to their troubles and soothing their fears, reassuring them, when needed, that they were up to the task and also explaining the risks of the job. I think that certainly some of the students, as time went on and news came in of field agents who had been captured and killed, would think about their own mortality – that was only natural. There was nothing wrong with agents worrying about being killed; at the very least it demonstrated that they had grasped the reality of what they were about to do.

‘Of most concern, however, were agents who might talk or give away what they were up to, either by boasting or through fear or torture, and who might display characteristics which would ultimately compromise their role. The conducting officer would sit in on various exercises and watch the students, and he would pick out anybody he thought might be likely to talk. This wasn’t a test which all of them had to pass. He would approach one who he thought might be a bit suspect and say, “Let’s go out for a drink, or dinner or something – you’ve been working hard and deserve a bit of a break.” He would often do this to students, so there was nothing that unusual in it.

‘Together, the conducting officer and I would act out a couple of different scenarios which we had worked out beforehand, planning down to quite a lot of detail. One was known as the Royal Bath Dinner, named after the hotel where we often worked. I also worked at the Lincoln Hotel, but I preferred the Royal Bath because it had a terrace off the dining room and if there was a full moon shining on to the sea it was very romantic and much easier for me to work.

‘The two men would go off and have dinner and I would wander into the dining room out of the blue and the conducting officer would say, “Oh, Noreen, what are you doing in Bournemouth? How lovely to see you.” He would explain that I was some old friend of the family or something believable and would then ask me to stay for dinner. And the three of us would chat for a while and then someone would come along and say to the conducting officer, “Sir, there is a phone call for you” or something like that, and he would return and say, “I’m frightfully sorry, I’ve been called away, but you two stay here and have some fun and if I can I’ll come along and join you later.” And that’s how it began.

‘We had another scenario where he would say to one of the agents, “I met a girl today, I used to be at school with her brother, and I’ve invited her to join us for a drink.” And the students never minded. Well, the Brits minded a bit, because they were looking forward to a good old boozy evening and along came this blasted woman who was going to spoil everything. But agents with other nationalities were very accommodating, they quite liked it because they didn’t get the chance to meet many English women, so they were quite pleased.

‘I found that the Brits didn’t talk much. My job was to try and get them to talk. The Brits were very stuffy and came out with a series of stories without actually saying anything. One told me that he was a representative for a toothpaste company, which was a bit daft because we didn’t have any toothpaste, we used to clean our teeth with soot or salt. They pretended they were all sorts of things, but the most obvious excuse they gave was that they were on a very boring course with the War Office. The clever ones would always try and steer the subject of conversation back to me, so that I had to talk about myself or what I did, so I had to be careful too.

‘But the foreign agents were different, especially the younger ones. I think they were lonely, they were often far from their families and their culture – it was isolating for them. It must have been very flattering for them to have a young English girl chatting away to them, hanging on their every word. I remember one, a Dane, a beautiful blond Adonis. I managed to get him out on to the terrace – he didn’t need a lot of persuading actually, I think he was rather taken with me. I weighed about 18 kilos less then, and didn’t have white hair, and I didn’t need glasses in those days.

‘As we chatted on the terrace, he asked me if we could spend Sunday together. I took a little persuading, just so that he didn’t get suspicious, but I knew of course that we couldn’t. I became a very accomplished liar, I lied to everyone – my family, my friends – I just lived a lie. But once he said that, I felt a real surge of adrenaline because that was my lead, it was wonderful feeling that I might be on to something. I said, “Yes, I’d love to meet up on Sunday. But what is going to happen afterwards? Am I just the sort of thing you pick up on one day and then off you disappear, or are you going to be around?”

‘He looked slightly crestfallen and told me he was going away, so I responded, “Oh, you’re going away. Well, where are you going? Could we write? Could we meet again? I don’t particularly want to get involved unless we could meet again.” This went on for a while as we chatted over coffee and perhaps a whisky or two. After a while he told me that he would be going back to Denmark, which at the time was still occupied by the Nazis – and the only people who did that sort of work were agents. It was almost like a bit of a confession or perhaps he just wanted to unload some of his concerns. He said, “I won’t be able to write, I won’t be here, I’m being repatriated back into my country.”’

The Danish agent had committed a cardinal sin. Although the trainee spy hadn’t actually admitted that he was a member of the SOE, he had provided a clue, and in the world of espionage that is often all that is needed. Had his admission been made in the field he could have jeopardised himself, his team and an entire network, leading to the deaths of hundreds of men and women.

‘I felt terrible when he said that, because I knew I was going to have to betray him. That was my job – it was the sort of job you hoped you would never succeed at. It was exciting up until the end, when you felt awful. But the reality was that I was helping to save the agent’s life and possibly the lives of many others. It was a horrible job but it had to be done.’

Noreen kept up the pretence all evening, which ended with a gentle kiss on the Dane’s cheek. The student spy returned to his quarters while Noreen headed straight to her house to write up her report. Once written, it was submitted that same evening to the debriefing officer, Colonel Woolrych, known to everyone as ‘Woolly Bags’, an intelligence specialist who had served in the First World War and later went on to become the commandant at Beaulieu.

‘Like many people in that world, Woolrych didn’t suffer fools gladly, but I found that he had a very compassionate side. All the reports from all the different spy schools were sent to Woolly Bags. He then made an assessment and sent the final report to the head of section. For French students it would have been Buck, and he would have the final say as to whether the student should be sent into the field. But if someone had spoken about their role, that was a very different matter.

‘The following morning I was called into an office, and sitting there was the Dane. I stopped in front of him and we both looked at each other and I think it slowly began to dawn on him what had happened. At first there was a look of confusion and then, when Woolly Bags said, “Do you know this woman?” the look on his face turned to complete hatred. On previous occasions when I had done this, I had found that most of the students took it well, even if it meant that their careers in the SOE were compromised. But the Dane was different.

‘He leapt to his feet with this infuriated look on his face and he said, “You bitch!” Well, no woman likes to be called a bitch. I was quite upset. I was then asked to leave the office and the two officers continued with the debriefing.

‘Afterwards I was called back into Woolly Bags’ office and in his very blunt way he said: “There’s no point being upset about it. If he can’t resist talking to a pretty face in Denmark he won’t last an hour. He more or less told you that he was going to be an agent after dinner and a few drinks. Imagine what you could get out of him if you had a week, or if he was threatened with torture or execution. And remember it’s not only his life he’s putting in danger, he could bring down an entire network.” I did realise that, of course, but Woolly Bags’ words were of little comfort to me. The poor chap had gone through six months of very tough training, and Beaulieu was by no means a holiday camp.

‘Beaulieu was known as the Finishing School for Spies – it was where everything they had learnt for the last six months was supposed to come together, so that the agents could deploy into the field and hopefully survive and carry out the tasks for which they had been trained. But it was also a very tough place, and if the students weren’t up to the task then they could be failed at any moment. Some students were failed on the last day because the instructors could not be sure that they would survive as an agent.

‘But Buck could be very generous – and even for those students who talked it didn’t always mean the end. Buck used to say, “They’ve learnt their lesson, they won’t do it again.” Of course Buck had to be absolutely sure about this, because it was his reputation on the line also. His attitude was that lots of agents made mistakes in training, and it was better to make the mistakes in training rather than on an actual live mission. But this attitude was always a risk and I’m not sure that the other section heads had such an enlightened approach as Buck.’

Noreen never saw the Danish student again and never discovered whether he actually became a spy.

* * *

The students at Beaulieu were also taught how to pick locks and enter buildings and factories without being heard or seen. The instructors were former spies, but some rehabilitated criminals, often ex-burglars, also served at Beaulieu and they were known as Method of Entry (MOE) men. One of the trainers was Johnny Childs, a lock-picker extraordinaire.

‘Johnny was always easy to recognise because he was always driving around in a truck and on the back of this truck was a huge door covered in locks – every conceivable type of lock you could imagine. His job was to teach the students how to pick the locks, so there were locks from every country, French, German, Dutch, Danish. As an agent you might have to enter a building to which you didn’t have a key – it might be in an emergency so this was a really vital art. Johnny had learnt his skills from a burglar. The story was that the burglar was serving a long stretch in Pentonville Prison.’

When the war broke out the SOE realised they needed help to enter buildings, and the experts of the trade were burglars. A senior SOE officer approached the authorities and asked for an expert burglar to be released into their care on the condition that he willingly passed on his skills – or so the story goes.

The lessons in ‘breaking and entering’ took place towards the end of the course when the students were preparing for the final exercise – a 96-hour test which all students had to pass. On one occasion Noreen was sent to accompany one of the students taking part in the exercise whose task was to travel to London and reconnoitre a certain address.

‘The student who asked me to accompany him was very dashing, a member of the Parachute Regiment, and very handsome. And so I was delighted to go along. I also thought it would be fun and a chance to be in London for a few hours. We got the train up to London and went to the address, which was in central London close to Westminster Cathedral. I thought we were just going to look at the building so that he could say he had been there, but he wanted to go up to the fourth floor, which was fine, but when we got to the door he began to pick the lock and then went inside the flat.

‘It was a Saturday afternoon, about 4pm, and I had never been so terrified in my life. He looked at me shaking and said, “Don’t just stand there dithering, come in.” I went in and I thought he was just going to have a quick look and then leave. Not a bit of it. He went into the bedroom and bounced on the bed, went into the bathroom and turned on taps, went through some drawers and cupboards. It was awful, every time we heard the lift I thought Wormwood Scrubs here we come. Then he started fiddling with the curtains, examining the photos on the piano – it probably lasted 10 minutes but it felt as if it was about four days. I was almost fainting by the end of it.

‘As part of the compensation for this ordeal he took me to an underground pub in Piccadilly where he managed to revive me. We had a few drinks and then he took me to the theatre. What amazed me, when I thought about it afterwards, was how cool he was, completely unflappable. I was almost rigid with panic and my only thought was to get out, but he was completely comfortable.’

The experience was both fascinating and frightening for Noreen, who now fully realised how agents in the field had to work under conditions of almost unimaginable stress and still be able to think clearly.

There were occasions during the 96-hour exercise when events seemed to become almost tragically real. The agents were now so close to deploying into occupied countries that they no longer regarded themselves as students – the lines between exercise and reality became blurred. One such occasion involved a French SOE member who excelled in sabotage and silent killing in training.

‘When he went on his 96, one of the decoys had been ordered by Buck to see if she could get him to talk about what he was doing. She met him in a bar, a classic scenario, and they spent the whole evening chatting, and the next day they had lunch together and went on a romantic walk together in a forest somewhere. She was chatting to him and becoming more and more romantic and they got into some sort of passionate embrace, at which point he grabbed her by the throat and began to squeeze until this poor girl almost fell into unconsciousness. At that point he released his grip and as the girl gasped for breath he said, “Now go back and tell Buckmaster to be more careful next time.”’

Everyone was fully aware of the risks involved with being an agent, although, according to Noreen, the knowledge that death and torture would almost certainly follow capture was not something anyone dwelt upon.

‘We weren’t told about deaths or executions immediately after they happened – the news sort of filtered down. For example, if a radio op came up on schedule every day and then one day he didn’t, Baker Street might suspect that he was wary that the Germans were on to him and he was trying to find a safe house. But if there was still silence after six or seven days you had to accept that he or she had been killed or captured. Everyone was obviously very sad when the news came through, but no one made a fuss. There was never any real outpouring of emotion. I think we mourned privately.

‘I always thought the work was particularly dangerous for the radio operators. They were told that they had just a 50 per cent chance of surviving the mission – imagine what that must have been like. They received no extra pay for the work they were undertaking, it would have been the same rate as anyone of equal rank.

‘The radio operators must have had nerves of steel – it was the most dangerous job, and they were highly valued and looked after very carefully. If a group lost their radio operator they lost all contact, because he was the only one who knew how to encode and decode messages.

‘The golden rule for radio operators was never to transmit for more than 15 minutes, because it took the Germans 20 minutes to get a fix on a location.

‘One radio operator told me that he had a horror of transmitting from inside a house, because he had this terrible feeling that the door would one day burst open and the Germans would catch him in the act, so to avoid this he always tried to transmit in the open. He would throw his aerial over a tree and always had two members of the Resistance with him who stood with guns at the ready and would warn him if there were any Germans approaching.’

Noreen also recalled the exploits of one agent called Benny Cowburn who was parachuted into occupied France four times between 1939 and 1941. He was awarded the MC and Bar, the France and Germany Star, the Defence Medal War medal, 1939–45, the Légion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre avec Palme.

Cowburn was extremely self-reliant and even used to make his own bombs. His base was a hut in the mountains.

‘Benny played a very dangerous game, because he pretended to be friendly with the Germans. He must have had a tremendous confidence in his Resistance group, because they could have shot him for being a traitor. But he became quite friendly with the Germans, and one night, when he had been busy making his bombs, at about 3am, there was a terrible banging on the door. He opened the door and the German soldiers wanted to come in for a drink and a smoke, saying words to the effect of, “What are you doing up at this time of night?” and he said, “Oh, I’m making some bombs to blow up a bridge.”

‘But the Germans didn’t take any notice because they thought he was joking, obviously, and said, “Have you got any beer?” He let them come in and gave them some beer. They asked him if he was going to have one and he said, “No, you have to keep a clear head when you are playing with dynamite,” and they all thought he was terribly funny and screamed with laughter. After they had their beer they left. I think Benny was probably the coolest man I knew.’

Noreen harboured a secret ambition to become an agent herself, but two critical facts were against her – she was too young and the war was coming to an end. The youngest female agent was Anne-Marie Walters, who was aged just 21 when she arrived in France, but Noreen was only 20 at the end of the war in Europe.

Walters was recruited into the SOE from the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in July 1943, aged just 20. She was born in Geneva to a French mother and an English father. The family left Switzerland at the outbreak of war, and two years later Walters joined the WAAF. Her SOE codename was Colette and she parachuted into south-west France in January 1944, where she remained until the invasion of Normandy. She survived the war and was decorated by both the British and French governments for her work in occupied France.

‘One of my last memories from life at Beaulieu involved a little Cockney corporal called Frank, whose job seemed to be getting us girls out of scrapes. Frank was engaged to a girl called Doris who worked in Woolworths. On VE Day we had a party and I was staggering over to The Rings, our HQ, a rather ugly stockbroker Tudor house in the middle of the estate. I was rather worse for wear because I had danced until dawn and had a few drinks. Suddenly out of a rhododendron bush appeared Frank and he said, “As it’s VE Day, could I kiss you?” and I said, “Frank, what about Doris?” and he said, “I’ll tell her that it’s my last sacrifice for the war effort.” Not really very flattering for me.’

As the Allied forces began pushing through France the need for agents to be sent into Europe decreased rapidly, but there was still a need for volunteers for service in the Far East, especially Burma, where Force 136, also part of SOE, were harrying the retreating Japanese.

‘We all knew that the war in Europe was coming to an end. By the end of 1944, or even as early as D-Day, there was a certain inevitability about it. But when the end came at Beaulieu it was all a bit sudden. But there was still a war to be fought in Burma and I hoped to be sent there. In fact I was actually on embarkation leave when the atomic bomb was dropped in August 1945.

‘By October 1945 Beaulieu had pretty well closed down, and by January 1946 SOE had ceased to exist. MI6 didn’t like the organisation, I think they saw SOE as a threat to their existence, and after all both organisations were competing for the same meagre resources. We in SOE all knew that MI6 regarded us as a “load of amateur bandits” – well, we were all amateurs and we were bandits. SOE was made up of lawyers, accountants, teachers, businessmen, bankers and future housewives. None of us were professional spies, but I think we were pretty good at what we did.’

Noreen had left the SOE in September 1945 and, like all agents and members of the organisation, she was sworn to secrecy. They were ordered to sign the Official Secrets Act and effectively told to keep their collective mouths shut.

After the war she put her language skills to good effect and joined the BBC’s French Service, where she remained for five and a half years.

‘Occasionally you would come across an agent from F Section, and we would acknowledge each other and perhaps have a quiet word over lunch or a cup of tea in the canteen, where we’d talk about our time in SOE and catch up on news of old friends such as Harry Ree,‡ Eddie McGuire, George Millar, Odette Churchill, Peter Churchill and Bob Maloubier.

‘Then one day Buck turned up and it was a bit like being back on home ground. Some time later my future husband, Jacques, arrived at the BBC. Jacques had served as a captain in the French 1st Army and under Général de Lattre de Tassigny with the 19th battalion of the Chasseurs Alpins, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre with Bar. We got to know each other and we later married and I moved to France, where I have now lived for 56 years.’

Noreen remains an active member of the Special Forces Club, regularly attending reunions and meetings, where she often hears previously untold stories from her former colleagues of 70 years ago.

* First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.

† British double agent who spied for the KGB.

‡ Member of the SOE who started the war as a conscientious objector.

CHAPTER 2
The Two Wars of Jimmy Patch
The Long Range Desert Group

‘Danger has some kind of satanic appeal to me. I am drawn towards it in an octopus-like grip of fear.’

Major-General David Lloyd Owen, the commander of the Long Range Desert Group

In addition to the SOE, the Second World War saw the emergence of private armies, those units which became the special forces. This was partly because the rules of warfare had changed, and the vast distances over which the conflict was being played demanded something new. In the North African campaign, for example, the theatre of operations was the size of Europe, with most of the fighting taking place along or in close proximity to the Mediterranean coast. This meant that small, self-contained military units could disappear into the vastness of the desert and monitor the activities of the enemy unseen and unheard.

Every commander wanted to know what his enemy opposite number was doing or planning, and any unit which could help achieve this was worth its weight in gold. The Long Range Desert Group was created during that campaign in July 1940, about the same time that the SOE became operational, specifically to conduct long-range reconnaissance and raids deep behind enemy lines. It was founded by Major Ralph Bagnold and originally called Long Range Patrol.

When I began carrying out research for this book and inquired amongst veterans of the Second World War who, if anyone, might be able to help me paint a picture of what life was like operating deep behind enemy lines in one of the most hostile environments on earth, one name kept surfacing.

‘Speak to Jimmy Patch,’ I was told by members of the Special Forces Club. ‘He was there, he did the business. Fought in the desert,’ said one veteran who got to know Jimmy after the war, ‘and was captured by the Germans but escaped.’ ‘He’ll have a good tale to tell, if you can get him to talk,’ said another. Clearly Jimmy Patch was something of a legend within the Long Range Desert Group.

So on a cold January morning in 2011 it was with a keen sense of anticipation that I visited Jimmy, now 92, at his wonderfully serene hillside home in rural Kent.

‘I’m not sure there’s very much I can tell you,’ said Jimmy diffidently. ‘But why don’t we have a cup of tea and then we can chat.’

Fortified by a cup of tea and some of my wife’s home-made cake, Jimmy began to talk.

* * *

Jimmy’s life in the special forces began while he was stationed in a large, tented camp on the outskirts of Cairo in the summer of 1941. One day as he walked through the pristine, whitewashed headquarters of the Royal Artillery Depot at Al Maza with his friend Bill Morrison, he saw a note pinned to a noticeboard bearing the following typed message: ‘Volunteers required for special duties with the Long Range Desert Group. Details from the orderly room clerk.’

The two wiry young Royal Artillery gunners, who had long been in search of wartime adventure, looked at each other and smiled.

Almost from the moment of their call-up, a year earlier in May 1940 in the wake of the British Expeditionary Force’s calamity in France, Jimmy, who was born in east London, and Bill, a proud Cornishman of Scottish descent, had been seeking an escape from the drudgery which typified the life of the private soldier during the early war years.

On that early summer’s day within the vast training camp on the outskirts of Cairo, both men thought their prayers had been answered as they joined a growing queue of volunteers who were being assessed for their suitability for ‘special operations’ by Lieutenant Paul Eitzen, a young, diminutive South African who spoke with the clipped, confident tones of a public school boy. Eitzen, a member of the Royal Artillery attached to the Long Range Desert Group, wanted suitable volunteers to boost numbers of a covert unit which had begun experimenting with a 25lb artillery field gun while on operations behind enemy lines.

‘Eitzen was very pleasant to both of us,’ recalled Jimmy, 70 years later. ‘He asked us a few questions, made a quick assessment of our intelligence and our suitability to operate in small groups. He must have been satisfied with Bill and myself because we learnt within a day or so that we were in, or at least attached to, the LRDG. It was probably the easiest interview of my life. I think he sensed our suitability very quickly. We were two young, impressionable men, happy to try anything and full of initiative, and that is what Eitzen was after.’

A few days later Jimmy, Bill and Lieutenant Eitzen left Al Maza in a 15cwt Ford truck, one of several in an LRDG replenishment convoy, and began the long, arduous journey across the scorching desert to the group’s main base at the Siwa Oasis, which was about 350 miles south-west of Cairo and just 30 miles from the Libyan border.

Despite the demands and dangers of undertaking such a mission, Jimmy and Bill were gripped by a sense of excitement which they had not previously experienced as soldiers in an army at war. As the convoy entered the Sahara, Jimmy was immediately struck by the colossal expanse of the North African desert.

‘I was 21 and had never left Britain. Now I was in the desert and the natural beauty was staggering. It was something you couldn’t possibly hope to imagine. I had read about the Sahara in books but to see it with one’s eyes was breathtaking.’

Back in 1941 the wider Army knew little about the LRDG, or any of the so-called ‘private armies’ emerging during the North African campaign. But gradually stories revealing their exploits began to seep out, often in the bars of Cairo, and for men with a sense of adventure the LRDG held a certain allure.

‘We knew precious little about the LRDG and we didn’t find out much more after the interview with Eitzen. But we knew it would be something different, and that would have to be better than our current situation. For the first time since being called up, I did feel a sense of excitement.’

* * *

Jimmy Patch was born in 1920 and attended the Aldersbrook Elementary School in Wanstead before winning a scholarship to the Wanstead County High School where he was educated until the age of 16. Although he possessed the intellectual ability to attend university, his father, who had served in the First World War and won the Military Cross, had other ideas. After being demobbed in 1919, Jimmy’s father was employed in the Ministry of Labour during the depression and, after seeing hundreds of men join the dole following the collapse of the economy, decided that his son would get a ‘nice steady job’.

‘I left school and joined the Post Office as a counter clerk. I worked there for three years, based in Loughton, Essex; then I passed a clerical exam and was transferred to London. It was a very comfortable existence; the hours were nine to four, and nine to twelve-thirty on Saturday.’

When war was declared in September 1939, Jimmy, like hundreds of thousands of young men of his generation, soon began to accept the inevitability of being called up to train, fight and possibly die in a war of national survival.

‘I was 19 at the outbreak of war. I didn’t volunteer to serve in the Army, I waited until I was called up, which happened in May 1940, at the time of Dunkirk. I was told that I would be going to the Royal Artillery and would be a signaller – there was no option. Basic training took place in Scarborough at the Royal Artillery Signals Training Regiment. Obviously the threat of invasion at the time was very real. With practically no training at all – we certainly hadn’t fired a rifle – we were marched up to Scarborough Castle dyke every evening and spent the night guarding England. We each had a rifle and 50 rounds of ammunition in a cardboard box. We were the only thing that stood between Britain and being invaded by Hitler.’

For Jimmy, life in the Army was everything he had feared. He found the discipline and the endless inspections tiresome beyond belief, although he did enjoy the signals training, which taught him how to use a Number 11 radio* and how to send messages by radio or light-flashes using Morse code.

‘I didn’t regard being called up as an adventure, I just looked upon it as something that was inevitably happening to me. I had to submit to the discipline of the Army, of course, which I found very tiresome. In fact at one stage in 1941 I volunteered to be transferred to the RAF, because volunteers were called for, but nothing happened.’

The training continued until the late spring of 1941, when both Jimmy and Bill learnt that they were to be sent to fight in the North African campaign. Both men were given embarkation leave, but Jimmy’s leave was extended by another week after his parents’ house was damaged during a German bombing raid. ‘It was pretty scary. The house was badly damaged, but no one was injured and I got an extra week’s leave before being sent up to Liverpool to board a troopship bound for the Middle East.’

The Mediterranean Sea was a war zone in 1941, and the only relatively safe way for ships to reach Cairo was to travel in convoys via the Cape of Good Hope and up the east coast of Africa. For Jimmy and hundreds of others aboard, it was a journey into the unknown from which many would never return.

‘We were packed cheek by jowl on the troopship. There were dozens of us in a huge dormitory, each with a hammock. It was impossible to sleep. The atmosphere was hot, fetid and noisy. Every night a group of us would collect our blankets and try and find a sheltered spot on the deck and sleep there, and we did it in all weathers.

‘We all soon settled into a routine. There was a bit of training and PT to do, but we also played a lot of housey-housey – now called bingo. The voyage seemed to take an age but it ended up being quite enjoyable. We steamed almost to the other side of the Atlantic before heading back to the West African coast and pulling into Sierra Leone to refuel. Then we travelled down to Durban, where we transferred to another ship, the New Mauritania. In a convoy of three ships we moved up the east coast of Africa, into the Red Sea and on into the Suez Canal and Port Tufic.’

The LRDG was the creation of Major Ralph Bagnold of the Royal Signals, a man regarded by many within the new world of special forces as a genius. In the late 1920s and 30s, Bagnold, together with a collection of friends such as Bill Kennedy Shaw, Guy Prendergast and Rupert Harding-Newman, spent a great deal of time exploring the region of desert between the Mediterranean and Sudan. During those years Bagnold designed and perfected expeditionary equipment which would later be used by the LRDG. He created a simple sun compass to make navigation easier, perfected the condenser to conserve water in car radiators, thought up the idea of sand mats to help extricate vehicles stuck in soft sand, and developed properly balanced rations when travelling in such austere conditions.

Bagnold originally came up with the idea for the LRDG in November 1939, but it wasn’t until Italy entered the war, in June 1940, that his proposals were taken seriously and approved by the Middle East commander-in-chief, General Sir Archibald Wavell. Following a meeting between the two men, Wavell asked Bagnold if he could create an operational unit within six weeks.

Bagnold’s aim was to build a force capable of mechanised reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, navigation and mapping vast areas of the North African desert.

It was a massive undertaking but Bagnold set about achieving his mission with his customary zeal and over the next six weeks he recruited a force of New Zealanders who were regarded as both self-reliant and full of initiative and therefore perfect for working in enemy territory in small groups for weeks on end. While Bagnold began to select the men for his force, Harding-Newman, who had also been recruited into the unit, was given the responsibility of acquiring transportation.

The British Army in the Middle East in 1940 had no vehicles remotely suitable for desert warfare, and so Bagnold approached the Chevrolet company in Alexandria and acquired 14 vehicles, while Harding-Newman managed to obtain a further 19 from the Egyptian Army. The vehicles were quickly modified for the desert and long-range patrolling and repainted in camouflage colours.

The vehicles were fitted with a variety of weapons. These included the old Lewis machine-guns, which were initially fitted to 11 of the trucks and later replaced by the twin Vickers machine-gun, as well as four Boys anti-tank rifles and one 37mm Bofors anti-aircraft gun.

During those six weeks the men also had to be trained in desert navigation. This required detailed knowledge of how to calculate one’s location with sun compasses and theodolites, which use the position of the sun and the stars respectively.

Once all the men and equipment had been gathered, Bagnold took his force on two exercises into the desert to test their newly acquired skills and tactics. It was a tough ask, and many mistakes were made during that hectic period. Days were long and sleep was always welcomed. For some the demands of desert life proved too much, and they either asked to be returned to their units or were told their services were no longer required. Bagnold wanted to test his unit on every eventuality they might find in the desert, but their future success would depend above all on their ability to navigate and survive in one of the most hostile terrains on earth. Despite the huge challenges, however, by August 1940 the LRDG was operational.

* * *

Despite being accepted by the LRDG, Jimmy was only ‘attached’ to the unit; he would become a permanent member within a few months only if he proved his worth. In those early days the LRDG was composed of two squadrons, A and B. A Squadron consisted of four New Zealand patrols, while B Squadron was composed of two Yeomanry and two Rhodesian patrols, and two patrols from the British Brigade of Guards.

The composition of the patrols varied slightly according to the commander, but essentially they consisted of a variety of 15cwt and 30cwt Chevrolet trucks and, later on in the campaign, US jeeps. All the trucks were unarmoured and stripped down to their bare essentials. Having no doors or windshields, the vehicles offered little protection to the crews if they were attacked, but they were fast and manoeuvrable. The strength of the patrols also varied but was somewhere between 15 and 20 men. The vehicles were repaired, modified and improved after each mission. Every patrol had to be self-sustaining and contained a medic, navigator, mechanic, signaller and cook.

The Siwa Oasis base was close to the Libyan-Egyptian border and a world away from the regular Army. It was a long journey through the dust and the heat of the North African desert, but Jimmy and Bill were not bothered by the discomfort, and a week after leaving Al Maza the convoy arrived at the base.

Siwa was unlike any military establishment either Jimmy or Bill had previously experienced. The oasis was composed of a small village with a number of dwellings and an Arab hotel, used by some of the French forces who were also camped at the oasis.

Most of the LRDG troops chose to make their camp beneath the shade of a collection of lush date palms growing close to the numerous ponds which provided the Arab population and the military units with vital supplies of clean, fresh water. The oasis was also the perfect location for a forward operating base. It was in Egypt, 150 miles south of the coast, which was the main fighting area, and therefore relatively safe. But its presence was not secret, and the Italian forces certainly knew of its existence. Italian reconnaissance flights would fly over the oasis every week, and there was the occasional bombing run, but despite the threat the soldiers felt quite safe.

Discipline was different from the regular Army. Members of the LRDG were expected to be professional at all times; those who weren’t were sent back to their original units. It was, Jimmy thought at the time, like a breath of fresh air. There was hardly any saluting, no drill, no inspections. All patrol commanders were called ‘Skipper’, while all other ranks were on first-name terms.

The two new arrivals quickly settled into the relaxed atmosphere of desert life, and it hardly seemed that a violent war was raging across North Africa and much of Europe. In fact, life was so idyllic at Siwa that the troops called it ‘Hollywood’. Within the privations of desert warfare, the LRDG at Siwa wanted for nothing – there was always a plentiful supply of fresh water, and rations were brought in by the unit’s Heavy Section on regular administration runs.

‘Life in Siwa was very comfortable and we were a tight-knit, self-contained unit,’ Jimmy recalled. ‘Everyone was very professional and got on with what they had to do. There was no shouting and no punishments – the only punishment was to be sent back to your unit, and no one wanted that. We even had a little pond where we could go for a swim and keep cool and wash.

‘We wore whatever we liked and, more often than not, it was a mishmash of uniforms. We soon learnt what was practical for the conditions and what wasn’t, and that’s how we operated.

‘We had army rations we cooked ourselves and we had a rum ration every night – some people didn’t have it so there was a little bit more for others. We received the rum in bulk but it was rationed out. There was one character, an ex-tank soldier in his 40s, who was older than the rest of us and he used to take damn near a mug full every night and would go to bed stupid. The only real threat was from aircraft, which would come over most days either to take pictures or sometimes drop a bomb from a height well out of range. Life was also made a little bit more comfortable because the LRDG was issued 50 per cent more rations than other units because we worked in small patrol groups.

‘The Sahara is a vast area; you can fit the entire sub-continent of India into it, and we had behind us all the experience Ralph Bagnold had gained from his various expeditions into the desert in the late 1920s and 30s.

‘Bagnold developed the sun compass, which was a beautifully accurate instrument and it would give navigators a precise fix of the patrol’s location providing they knew what they were doing. Behind enemy lines you could keep way away from the fighting line, which was around the coast, but the danger was always aircraft. There were occasions when the LRDG were attacked by friendly aircraft and men were killed because the aircraft couldn’t distinguish between friendly forces and the enemy. You can’t fire effectively at an aircraft if you are on the move in vehicles, but if you are stationary then you become an easy target, so it’s one or the other and you would choose what to do depending on the terrain.’

Speed in the desert depended on terrain and the vehicles being used. In areas where the terrain was particularly difficult the speed could fall to just 10mph, usually in rocky and hilly areas. But there were other areas, such as the Kalansho Seria, which were almost perfectly smooth, allowing convoys to travel at speeds of 60mph.

‘Normally the terrain would be hilly and strewn with rocks, and it was often impassable, making navigation difficult. Then there was the sand sea, comprised of vast sand dunes. We tried to avoid the dunes, but sometimes you couldn’t. The dunes were shaped by the wind; on the windward side the slope would be quite gradual and you could sail up them very easily, and then suddenly they would end in what amounted to a precipice. The gradual slope would stop and you would be confronted by an almost vertical drop the other side, which you couldn’t see if the sun was shining in your eyes. There were one or two nasty accidents.’

Jimmy’s first mission took place a few weeks after arriving at Siwa. The target was an Italian occupied fort called El Gtafia, about 25 miles south of Agedabia in an area 200 miles behind enemy lines. But as Jimmy was soon to learn, being located behind enemy lines was often much safer than being in front of them. It was the autumn of 1941 and, after the spectacular earlier success of the German Afrika Korps and their inspirational commander Erwin Rommel, the tide of the desert war was turning in favour of the Allied forces.

General Claude Auchinleck had replaced General Wavell as Commander-in-Chief Middle East theatre, and reinforcements in the form of a new Corps had arrived, which allowed the creation of the soon-to-be 8th Army.

‘We didn’t do a great deal of training prior to the first operation, because we were perfectly confident and trained in what we had to do. It was also quite an easy function to take the gun, a 25-pounder, out into the blue† and fire it. The gun was always ready for action. We made ourselves familiar with all of the equipment. There was a Number 11 wireless set and field telephones, and we just made sure that we had all the equipment we needed to do whatever was asked of us.’

Prior to departing, the vehicles were loaded with water, rations, food, radios, spare parts and ammunition. To cope with the loads, the trucks were fitted with reinforced springs, spares of which were also carried.

The convoy took around three days to reach its target. Progress was slow because of the 10-ton Mack truck which was needed to carry the 25lb artillery piece. When the patrol arrived at the target location, Jimmy and Paul Eitzen moved up to the top of a hill to get a better view of the fort, while at the same time laying a telephone cable back to the gun, so that the two observers could relay information back to the gun team.

‘The fort was like one of those from the film Beau Geste which the Italians were very fond of building. It was being used to cache supplies for enemy troops on the move. It was a sitting duck – there were no troops outside covering the vulnerable points. Paul Eitzen gave direction orders to the gun team and we banged away for a pre-arranged number of rounds and minutes and then ceased. The first round we fired was a dud; it hadn’t exploded and we later found it in the middle of the fort.

‘Once the firing had ceased, some of the Rhodesians from S Patrol who had accompanied us went forward and captured the fort, which wasn’t that difficult because after the first round the four Italians occupying the fort ran away, so the place was empty, but they were quickly captured. The structure hadn’t been badly damaged because the 25-pounder isn’t really a big gun.

‘Once the fort had been captured, we withdrew into the desert with the four prisoners while the Rhodesians headed towards the coast on another reconnaissance mission. We made camp and tried to relax and explain to the Italians, as best as we could given the language problem, that we were going to look after them and that they would come to no harm. They responded to our friendship but I have to say they were a pretty unimpressive bunch – I think they were probably quite happy to have been captured because it meant they were out of the war. In fact, later that night we got out the rum ration and had a bit of a party. They couldn’t speak English and we couldn’t speak Italian, but it was all very friendly.

‘After the Rhodesians came back from their reconnaissance patrol we started making our way back to Siwa, but on the way this dreadful 10-ton Mack truck kept getting stuck in the soft sand. It was very difficult to get it out, because it was too heavy for the sand trays – a device used to free vehicles stuck in soft sand. The vehicle also had brake problems, and the thing became such a nuisance that eventually the Rhodesian officer in command of the patrol lost his patience and said, “Leave it.” We took the gun off the back of the truck and towed it behind one of the patrol vehicles and abandoned the 10-tonner.’

The LRDG had a limited number of vehicles at that stage of the war, and the difficulties with transporting even a relatively small gun such as a 25-pounder across the desert were immense. When the patrol arrived back at Siwa the artillery unit was given an Italian lorry to transport the gun, but it proved fairly ineffective, and after Christmas the unit was disbanded. Most of the gunners who had been recruited for the specialist unit were sent back to their former regiments. Jimmy and Bill were desperate to remain with the LRDG, but unfortunately Bill was taken ill with pleurisy.

‘Bill was very ill. I don’t think any of us thought that he was going to make it, and at one point his grave was dug; that was how close he was to death. Bill spent all his time back in the MO’s truck, and the only thing which saved him was one of the new sulphur drugs. When he was cured, he went back to the LRDG but joined one of the New Zealand patrols as a signalman and stayed with them until the end of the desert campaign.

‘Captain David Lloyd Owen, the skipper of the Yeomanry, or Y Patrol, asked me if I would like to join his patrol and I jumped at it. I became a Lewis gunner initially, but some time later the patrol navigator was selected for a commission and I began training to take his place, first as assistant navigator and then doing the full role.

‘The main role of the LRDG was doing reconnaissance and “road watch”. This involved monitoring the movements of enemy forces along the main coast road in the Benghazi area. The patrol would position itself a couple of miles from the road, camouflage up, and each evening two men would walk up to the road to a hide, rather like a birdwatching hide. They would sit there for 24 hours, making a note of everything which went past. All of this intelligence would be passed back up the chain of command to the staff officers at General Headquarters to help formulate future offensives or withdrawals.

‘Apart from the enemy, one of the other great challenges of desert warfare is coping with the heat. In the summer the temperature often reached 120°F, while dropping to below zero at night. In the winter the weather could be miserable.

‘The stripped-down vehicles kept the soldiers cool on long patrols and the men quickly acclimatised to the heat. To cope with the heat we dressed accordingly and often wore sandals – which were given to us as a special issue – instead of boots. We found that the standard issue baggy shorts were much more comfortable than long trousers, too. We were issued with these Arab headdresses which we folded into a triangle and fixed with a ring of black material known as an egal. These were meant to protect our heads but I didn’t often wear one. I personally wore a cap comforter, a woollen thing which folded up into a cap. In the winter we wore full-length sheepskin coats, woolly hats, gloves and a thick jumper to keep out the cold.

‘We’d have a variety of devices to keep ourselves warm. We would take an Italian water bottle, which was quite a capacious thing made of aluminium, fill it with water and break up a bar of chocolate into it and hang it over the exhaust and within five miles we would have a hot drink. We each had a blanket roll, no beds or sleeping bags, and we would just unroll that by the wheel of the truck. We had a rum ration every evening and some lime powder. We would mix the rum and lime with water and when we woke up we would have a nice cold drink.’

The LRDG continued with their reconnaissance operations and before long Jimmy was established as Lloyd Owen’s personal navigator. It was at this stage that rumours began to surface about a large raid involving many different units – a major departure from the type of operations usually conducted by the LRDG.

It was widely believed that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, known as the Desert Fox, and the commander of the Axis forces in North Africa, was planning a major offensive eastwards along the coast.

One of those working on the British plan was Colonel John ‘Shan’ Hackett, who would later command the 4th Parachute Brigade at Arnhem. In essence the plan would involve members of the LRDG, the SAS, Army Commandos, Royal Marines, Popski’s Private Army,‡ the RAF and the Royal Navy launching simultaneous attacks on the Libyan coastal city of Benghazi, where a large German garrison was based, Tobruk and Barce. Once these attacks had succeeded, the Sudanese Defence Force were to attack the Jalo Oasis. If everything went to plan, Rommel’s bold aggressive thrust to move east and destroy the 8th Army would lie in tatters.

But the plan quickly became over-ambitious and too complex. In simple terms, the plan was as follows: at Tobruk, Lieutenant-Colonel John Haselden,§ a highly decorated British officer, would lead a force composed of around 80 commandos, engineers and Royal Artillery gunners, who were to capture the harbour and facilitate the landing of reinforcements by sea. Those reinforcements would then destroy underground fuel stores, release British POWs being held in the area and attack two airfields close to the city.

Meanwhile the SAS, supported by two Rhodesian LRDG patrols, would attack the harbour at Benghazi, destroying shipping and fuel storage tanks.

The raid on the Barce airfield was to be conducted by the LRDG, who would also be supported by the commander of Popski’s Private Army, Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Peniakoff.

Four days later the Sudanese Defence Force were to secure Jalo, which would then be used by David Stirling for further desert operations. D-Day for the operation was 13 September 1942.

But with so many staff officers now involved in the operation, security became a major concern. Gossip and rumours were rife in both Alexandria and Cairo, with some senior officers chatting openly about the operation over a gin and tonic in many of the bars and clubs which played host to the Allies.

In David Lloyd Owen’s excellent memoir Providence Their Guide: The Long Range Desert Group, 1940–45, the author recalls his fears for the success of the operation because of the loose talk in the bars and cafés of Cairo.

‘Even before I had first been put in the know by John Haselden in Cairo I had heard rumours; and I had heard these through gossip at parties and in the bars of Cairo. I was very suspicious that security had been blown, and I told John Haselden of my fears when he arrived in Kufra the day before we were due to set off on the 800-mile journey to Tobruk.

‘There was little that John, or indeed myself, could do at that stage except to tell all those involved with us what was planned, in order to scotch all the rumours that were current. This did not help, however, to allay our fears that we would be walking into a trap.’

Despite the bond of trust which existed amongst and between members of the LRDG, Lloyd Owen refused to brief his troops on the operation until just a few hours before D-Day. The soldiers knew that something was afoot, but they also understood that surprise, and therefore secrecy, was vital if any behind-the-lines raid was to succeed. On 24 August the five vehicles and 20 men of Y Patrol left the Fayoum, 80 miles south of Cairo, for the first stage of the operation.

‘We set out from the LRDG base at Fayoum and drove down to Asyut. We spent one night in a house which belonged to John Haselden. It was very comfortable, with a swimming pool and nice gardens. At that time we didn’t really have any idea what the target was. We had heard the rumours, of course, and we knew something big was going to come off.

‘At Asyut we met up with Haselden’s force of commandos. There were about 80 of them in seven 3-ton trucks, together with some sappers and gunners. We didn’t know it at the time, but the ruse was that the commandos were supposed to be POWs and their German guards were actually German Jews from the Special Interrogation Group (SIG). A great deal of planning had gone into making this work. The guards had proper German uniforms, faked papers, faked letters from girlfriends, and of course they spoke perfect German. Although the 3-tonners were British, they were painted with Afrika Korps markings. It was common practice at the time for both sides to use captured vehicles, so their presence should not have aroused suspicion.

‘After we picked up the commandos, we travelled across the desert to Kufra. It was a four-day trip, made slower by seven lumbering 3-tonners which kept getting stuck in soft sand. By now we had covered around 1,000 miles when the desert heat was at its most fierce.

‘We didn’t know any detail, we didn’t know where we were going. We just knew that something was coming off. We were to escort the commandos to the scene of the action, and that was to be done via Kufra.’

On 31 August Y Patrol and the commandos arrived at Kufra, the staging post for the combined operation, and the next six days were spent preparing for the mission. It was a relaxed yet busy period, and the troops quickly made themselves at home amongst the date palms which dotted the oasis.

As days passed, more men from other units began to arrive at Kufra, and rumours again began to surface. Haselden flew into the base on 5 September, and Lloyd Owen convinced him that the time had come to brief everyone on the mission.

Jimmy continued: ‘We were eventually briefed the night before we left Kufra, and it was a great relief. D-Day was 13 September and everyone was very relieved that it didn’t fall on a Friday.

‘John Haselden briefed us on the operation on the night before we were due to leave Kufra. He unfurled a map and explained in detail what we were going to do. Everyone was very enthusiastic, there were no morbid thoughts, and we were all utterly convinced that the mission would be a total success.

‘Our job was to deliver the commandos to Tobruk, secure the perimeter, then, at a given signal, move into the town and attack a radar station and then finally free some British POWs who were being held there. The idea was that the commandos would run amok, destroying as much as possible before being evacuated by sea.

‘The thing I was most concerned with was making sure that I had the right maps. I would be navigating, so that was obviously on my mind. It was another six-day trip but although it was routine for the LRDG it would have been pretty tough for the commandos, who weren’t use to these long-range desert patrols.

‘At one stage we had to find our way between the oasis of Jalo, which was occupied at the time, and the Sand Sea. So we had to steer a very accurate passage through a narrow corridor and we couldn’t show any light and had to be careful about noise.’

One of the main risks was being spotted by enemy aircraft and so some of the movement was conducted at night. The pace was slow and comfortable and the convoy arrived at Hatiet Etla on 10 September, where the small force took cover amongst the scrub and sand dunes. Y Patrol was now just 90 miles from Tobruk, and D-Day loomed ever closer.

‘You get to a stage where you just want to get on with things, and that was the case at Hatiet Etla. There was a lot of scrub in the area, which was ideal for camouflaging our vehicles, and we remained there for the next two days, completing our final preparations. The plan was rehearsed several times so that everyone knew what part to play and also what to do if things went wrong.

‘Everyone was making sure that their personal equipment was in perfect working order and that the vehicles were sound. It was that sort of thing, resting as much as possible and passing the time.’

The convoy moved off again on the morning of 13 September to an area called Ed Duda, 20 miles from the Tobruk perimeter. It was at this location that Haselden and his commandos went their separate way on what was ultimately to become a fatal mission. As the four 3-ton lorries containing the commandos departed, the men of the LRDG waved silently, many of them wondering what fate awaited their comrades.

As Haselden’s party moved off to the north, a small party of German troops were spotted and the two groups passed within two miles of each other. Rather than hide and risk being reported to German intelligence, Lloyd Owen decided to bluff it out and ordered Y Patrol to spread out and advance, hoping that the Germans would assume they were friendly forces given that they were 300 miles behind enemy lines.

‘We got right in amongst them before we opened fire. I think right up until that point they must have thought we were friendlies. We never gave them a chance, we just kept firing until all but one was dead and we captured him. It was kill or be killed. If we had let them go they would have reported us and we would probably have been bombed. That was the first time I had seen a dead body. It was the sort of thing you expect. If you are going to be involved in a war there are going to be dead bodies, but it didn’t affect me at all. I didn’t feel any sympathy, I didn’t feel any fear. I was detached. I had grown used to war.’

The captured prisoner then broke the news that everyone feared, revealing that he was one of many reinforcements who had been sent into Tobruk in recent days to prepare for a possible attack.

‘After that attack, we destroyed the enemy vehicles and moved off again briefly. Then we stopped, had a meal and waited to hear from the commandos. The idea was that Haselden would get in touch and brief us on the enemy situation so that we would be able to deal with any Germans on our route in. I think after about an hour we began to realise that something must have gone wrong. The radio operator kept trying to make contact but there was nothing. So after several hours we moved off down to the escarpment at Sidi Rezegh. Movement down the escarpment was painfully slow because it was so steep and covered in boulders.

‘We eventually reached the perimeter fence well after midnight and everyone knew the plan was already seriously behind schedule. By now we could hear the sounds of battle in the distance. The RAF had flown over some hours earlier dropping their massive pay-loads.

‘Lloyd Owen came over to me and said, “Patch, where do you think we are?” I pointed to the map and said “Here.” I was absolutely certain that we were within 100 yards of the perimeter. The message then came around that we were going to stay put until dawn and then go in and destroy our first target, which was the radar station. So the vehicles moved into cover and we waited.

‘I didn’t know it at the time, but the radio operator had spent most of the night trying to raise Haselden while we either rested or mounted sentries. By the morning the battle was still raging, but without any radio contact it was impossible to know what was going on.

‘Just before dawn Lloyd Owen called us all together and explained that he had been unable to contact Haselden or any of his commandos and that consequently we had no idea what was going on. The only option was to race back to the escarpment, set up the radio antennae and try and make contact with HQ to try and get an update on the situation.

‘Within 10 minutes we were on the move, racing past these huge German tented camps. Titch Cave, a belligerent character, who was the skipper’s gunner, wanted to open fire. He was manning a .50 calibre Vickers and he wanted to shoot up the camps as we drove past, but the Skipper said we just had to push on. It was quite an extraordinary sight. We could see all these German soldiers queuing for breakfast and we were racing past them. We could see them looking at us but no one tried to stop us.’

Y Patrol moved up and over the escarpment and continued for another 20 miles before halting and trying to reach HQ again, but it would take another seven hours before they eventually made contact and were given the dreadful news that the Tobruk element of the plan had been an abject failure. The large coastal guns which the commandos had been tasked with destroying had been moved, and the Royal Navy had suffered heavy casualties, losing two destroyers and a cruiser, and had also failed to land reinforcements. Y Patrol was ordered not to return to Tobruk but to make instead for Hatiet Etla and await further orders.

‘We moved off just as it was beginning to get dark. I had managed to get a few hours’ sleep but we were all pretty tired. But the worst feeling was knowing that the mission had been a failure. We still didn’t know what had happened, only that the raid had failed and casualties were heavy. It was a huge anti-climax and we all felt very dejected. When we arrived at Hatiet we had to wait a bit and then we were told to move to a place called Landing Ground 125, an emergency airstrip near Barce, about 80 miles from our location, near the Kalansho Sand Sea. The landing ground was to be used as a rallying point and we were told that there would be a lot of injured soldiers and men who had been separated from their units heading there.

‘I plotted a route and off we went. We left in the afternoon and arrived at LG125 when it was dark. LG125 was south of Barce, which was the scene of another raid which was exclusively LRDG, executed by New Zealanders and guardsmen, and that was quite a success. The LRDG destroyed a lot of aircraft, but they again ran into some resistance and had taken some casualties, and the theory was that the injured might have made their way to LG125.

‘We eventually found them later that night. There were about eight of them under a tarpaulin, being looked after by our medical officer, Richard Lawson, who had behaved admirably throughout the whole of the Barce raid. He had been dashing around treating men under fire and was awarded the Military Cross. Popski was also amongst the wounded – he had lost his little finger. We helped in whatever way we could, gave them cigarettes, water, food and some rum. A message was also sent back to our base requesting a transport aircraft to come and pick up the wounded. The next day an RAF Bombay arrived, flown by an officer called Flight Lieutenant John Coles, a professional airman, who later became an Air Marshal. It was a masterpiece of navigation on his part. He had flown across the desert, which was flat and featureless, but he managed to find this little strip with practically nothing on it except a few oil drums to mark it out as an airfield. We didn’t know precisely when he was coming and we didn’t have any pre-arranged signals. He had a couple of men with him, but by the time he landed this old Bombay had used up all of its petrol. But it was carrying petrol for its return journey in four-gallon jerrycans. So we all helped in the refuelling and the injured were loaded on board, and by the next morning they had all arrived safely in Cairo.’

After the RAF Bombay had departed, Y Patrol were ordered to remain at LG125 for the next 24 hours to await and assist those who had become separated from their respective units during the raid. By the time Y Patrol was ready to depart, on 20 September, they had been joined by another 60 stragglers.

‘We arrived back at Kufra on 25 September. I think we were all relieved to be back but also very angry about what had happened, because there was a very strong view that the failure could have been avoided if people had kept their mouths shut. It really was a case that careless talk costs lives.

‘By the time we got back to Kufra, other soldiers who had taken part in the other raids were already there and we soon began to swap stories. The general consensus was that we had all been let down by staff officers in Cairo, because of their loose talk and bad planning.’

A few days after arriving at Kufra, one of the most extraordinary events of Jimmy’s war took place during a German bombing raid. The Germans knew that Kufra was a British base and would occasionally attack. On this occasion, eight Junker 88s attacked the airfield where the RAF Bombays were located.

‘The bombing run took the Jerry aircraft right over the top of the date palms beneath which we [Y Patrol], the New Zealanders, G Patrol and the SAS were billeted. Our guns were still mounted on our vehicles and as they passed over us we all let rip. There were dozens of machine-guns firing up at them and we managed to shoot down six out of the eight aircraft. It so happened I was on some sort of errand on foot in another part of the oasis so I didn’t take part, I just heard this huge racket. Jerry made the mistake of assuming that we would be in the great fort built by the Italians, whereas that was the last thing we would think of doing, because it was such an obvious target. The 88s were easy targets because they were so low, just a couple of hundred feet, and so were difficult to miss – especially if you have several machine-guns all firing at the same time.

‘As they came over they were met by this barrage of machine-gun fire. I was desperate to get back and have a go, but things like that are over in a couple of minutes and I was too late. It was unheard of to shoot down six aircraft.

‘During the raid Lloyd Owen was wounded by a 20mm cannon shell which caught his back and arm. It was a very serious wound and I know that a lot of us thought he might not survive. But he eventually got back to Cairo and made a pretty good recovery.’

Over the following weeks the full catastrophe of the earlier mission began to unfold. It soon emerged that John Haselden had been killed leading an assault to capture the coastal guns. The commandos did achieve some initial success during the early stages of the operation but were overwhelmed by the size of the enemy force. Because the guns were not captured, the Royal Navy were unable to land the reinforcements who were supposed to bolster Haselden’s commandos, and the mission was doomed.

The SAS also faced fierce resistance at Benghazi and the Sudanese Defence Force did not fare well at Jalo either. Only the raid on the airfield at Barce could be described as a success, so overall, as an attempt to delay Rommel’s build-up for the offensive at El Alamein, the operation was a failure.

For Y Patrol the war seemed to be trundling along as they settled into a routine of road watch and long-range reconnaissance. Then planning began for a raid on the oasis at Hon, which at the time was occupied by the Italians.

‘We set off from Kufra and it was planned to be a two- or three-day trip. The journey was very routine and went without a hitch. The idea was to see what sort of garrison the Germans had there, beat it up, see how the enemy would respond and get as much intelligence as we could so we could plan future operations. It was like a fighting reconnaissance patrol. The skipper, who by that time was a chap called Captain Spicer, went forward in his jeep to check things out at the oasis, while we took cover amongst a rocky outcrop.

‘They went in and had a good look around, but they must have been spotted because some time later an Italian Caproni 309 Ghibli, a bomber, came over. We all opened fire at the aircraft and it veered away and that was the last we saw of it. But it was replaced by a number of CR42 biplanes. By now the Chevrolets had scattered and moved into defensive positions beneath a hill, with the sun behind us, so anyone attacking us would have to dive into the sun.

‘Then these damn planes started attacking us, but we opened up with these wonderful twin Vickers and that kept them away. When a plane is diving straight at you, it is pretty terrifying. I remember thinking, “I don’t want to be killed because of the effect it would have on my parents.” That was all I was thinking about; I wasn’t thinking about myself as such, just the grief it would cause my parents. It was a 50–50 chance that I would be killed. The bullets were coming in very close, and there was a sort of wop, wop sound as they hit the ground around me. As far as I was concerned, the pilot was trying to nail me. The sound of a round hitting the ground close to you is pretty terrifying, I can tell you, but the planes were put off by our shooting and they were unable to keep a direct course straight down to us. It was happening over and over, waves of planes attacking us. It was a very frightening incident indeed and that was about the closest I came to being killed, it was a pretty narrow squeak. If they had managed to get a bead on us for any length of time it would have been curtains, but to hit us they had to fly straight, and the pilots knew they were vulnerable when flying straight. The idea was to force them to twist and turn, which we did, and eventually they gave up and we hot-footed it back to Kufra.’

* * *

By May 1943 the whole of the North African coast was under Allied control. The LRDG had developed into a force of great renown. The challenge was to decide how the organisation should be used in the future and in what theatre.

One evening in late May, as the members of Y Patrol relaxed, the news came through that the LRDG were to be retrained for missions in Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia and Northern Italy.

The top brass had decided that there was no better force in the British Army than the LRDG to help train, equip and organise the various partisan groups fighting the Germans and Italians. But it would be a totally different type of warfare from that which the organisation had experienced in the vastness of the Libyan desert, where there was always plenty of room to hide.

The LRDG’s mountain base was to be the Cedars Hotel in Lebanon, the British Army’s Mountain Warfare Training Centre. The plan, for these one-time desert warriors, was to learn how to ski, climb and navigate in the mountains. For Jimmy and his colleagues it was an opportunity to recover from the months of arduous desert living, and although the training was going to be tough, the change, in many respects, was as good as a rest.

‘It was quite different to anything we had done before and a lot of fun although the training was extremely hard. The officers lived in the hotel and we were billeted in large Indian tents and it was all quite comfortable. The officer in charge of the training school was a character called Jimmy Riddle. He was said to have been an Olympic skier, and I can well believe it having seen him perform. The instructor of our little group was a Czech, a private soldier. He took us in hand, but not very effectively as far as I was concerned because I was never any good at skiing. I was also set to learn Greek, at which I tried my best. As well as skiing, there were long hikes through the mountains, and we learnt how to live off dried rations. We also had to learn how to navigate and fight in this new environment which was obviously very different from the desert.

‘We remained at the Cedars until early September 1943, at which point we were told that we were going to be trained as parachutists. Again, everyone thought this was great fun. But first of all we needed to have a colour-blindness test because when it came to jumping out of aeroplanes we needed to be able to see the difference between red and green lights. We were all lined up ready to do this test at the medical officer’s office, but all he had to test us with was the coloured cover of a magazine.

‘He pointed to different colours and you had to say what they were. I was colour blind so I obviously got it wrong, but it didn’t seem to matter – the medical officer said something like “Oh my God, you’ll have to follow the man in front.” That was my colour-blindness test.’

The Parachute Training Course took place at the Ramit David Airfield, close to Tel Aviv in what was then Palestine, now Israel. The soldiers were put through their paces and were taught how to fall and roll, a skill which would come in handy later when Jimmy had to make a quick exit – from a moving train!

‘The training had to be quite relentless, and so the powers that be decided that we should be allowed an afternoon off before our first jump, which was supposed to take place the following morning. Free time was quite rare, so a group of us went into Tel Aviv for a few drinks and a bit of sightseeing. By the time we got back to camp that night there was a panic going on and we were told to grab our kit and be ready to leave for an unspecified location.

‘We got our kit together, just what we could get into a little pack on our backs – a change of underclothes, socks, that sort of thing – together with our rifles, or whatever your weapon was, and we were taken down to Haifa harbour and were put on a Greek sloop bound for the Dodecanese Islands. It was quite clear that something big was going on because it was absolutely chaotic and no one seemed to have the slightest idea what we were doing or where we were going. One minute we had been enjoying ourselves looking forward to our first jump, and the next we were caught up in the whirlwind of confusion.’

On the evening of 13 September 1943 B Squadron of the LRDG, now commanded by David Lloyd Owen, who had recovered from the injuries he had sustained at Kufra, arrived at the Greek island of Kastelorizo. The Italian Armistice had just been signed, and Army headquarters in Cairo decided to send small garrisons of British troops to various Greek islands to try and encourage those Italian troops still based in the region to thwart any attempt by the Germans to seize them.

‘We were greeted with great enthusiasm by the Greek inhabitants, but I was completely overcome by the poverty on the island. The Italians had kept the locals very poor, and I remember this one poor lady with a baby and the child was just skeletal. It was quite shocking and I think we all had a very low opinion of the Italians after witnessing that. But we did what we could for the locals, who were very appreciative, and in those first few days we became aware of the beauty of our surroundings. The islands were idyllic and we had a chance of swimming in this beautiful clear water every morning and you could almost forget that there was a war on.’

Within a matter of days of arriving, the squadron was ordered to move with all possible speed to the island of Leros. The island was important to whoever was going to control the Aegean Sea because of its strategic position and its natural harbour.

‘We had hardly arrived at Leros when we were again ordered to move to an equally small island called Kalymnos. That was when the air raids on Kos began. The Germans were after a squadron of Hurricane aircraft, manned mainly by South Africans. We would watch these air battles taking place, with the Germans flying in from their base on Rhodes, and one by one the Hurricanes were shot out of the sky. The air battle lasted about a month or so – it was a terrible sight, and by then we realised that this whole operation was a complete mess.

‘Then we woke up one morning to find that the strip of water between Kalymnos and Kos was full of enemy shipping and the Germans were invading Kos. We anticipated that we were going to be next, so it was decided to move back to Leros to concentrate our forces. We stowed all our gear on to a schooner and sailed from Kalymnos to Leros, which was no more than a mile or two so didn’t take too long, but while we were unloading our gear we were attacked by Stukas. I don’t know if the Germans were just lucky or whether they had a reconnaissance unit on the island, but we were sitting ducks and an easy target.

‘All we had to hit back at them was our rifles and a few Bren guns. It was terrifying. I was behind this sort of low wall firing at the Stukas with my rifle as they dive-bombed.

‘One of our chaps, “Pusher” Wheeldon, was killed in the bombing. He was in his early 20s and came from Chesterfield – a very fit, active chap who would have a go at anything. As the bombing was going on, he jumped back on board our boat and grabbed a Bren gun and set it up on a tripod on the quay so he could shoot at the planes. But he was completely in the open. Bombs were exploding everywhere and he was caught by the shock wave of a blast, which severely damaged his lungs. His face and chest were covered in red frothy blood – he was lying on his back coughing up his lungs, a dreadful sight. He was clearly on his way out, his lungs had been destroyed. The medics came and took him away in a jeep and I think he died about an hour later.’

Once the Stukas departed, the troops began to count the cost of the attack. Many soldiers had been killed and injured, some with appalling wounds. But the casualties amongst the LRDG were remarkably light.

‘There was a row of bodies along a wall near where I had been shooting during the attack. The bodies were all in a line and had been blown there by the force of the blast. I noticed a chap moving along the row and checking for pulses. I don’t know if he was the medical officer or a medical orderly. I saw him pick up the hand of one poor soul and I said, “It’s no good checking his pulse, he hasn’t got a head.” It was carnage, and I think largely brought about by the confusion of that operation.’

On 23 October 1943 the LRDG were ordered to carry out a raid on the nearby island of Levita, which was believed to be in the hands of escaped German POWs. The mission was to typify the lack of intelligence which ultimately condemned the entire operation.

‘We went over to Levita on these Royal Navy motor launches. Y Patrol and some Rhodesians went to the south-west of the island and a New Zealand patrol went to the north-west. We made for a meteorological complex, which we thought might be occupied, and prepared for a bit of a firefight. The building was empty so we moved into the area quite easily. We began digging slit trenches and preparing the defensive position, which was just as well because we soon learnt that rather than just a few POWs there was a strong force of German mountain troops just a few hundred yards away across the valley and they must have spotted us pretty quickly because we were soon under attack.

‘Fortunately, by the time the enemy attacked most of us were in cover. I was in a slit trench firing across the valley when suddenly the Germans started using a mortar. The first round overshot and the next one landed in front of the trench. I thought, “Oh Lord, the next one’s going to come in between.” I could hear it coming in and it landed on the parapet of my trench but didn’t go off – it was about a foot away from my head. Had it gone off I would have been cut in half.’

The battle raged for several hours and it was also clear to Jimmy and his patrol members that bitter fighting was taking place on the other side of the small island.

‘Our force was commanded by John Olivey, a Rhodesian who had already won the MC and was regarded as a very competent officer. Later that morning he sent a party to see what could be done about having a go at the Germans but they returned soon after with a wounded man and had made little impact. Then it was my turn. John Olivey turned to me and three others and told us to go and have a look and try and get an assessment of the enemy positions and strengths. So off we set, knowing that it was going to be pretty dangerous, but also convinced it was the right course of action.

‘In our team we had one Bren gun and the rest had rifles. I was a lance-bombardier at this stage – it was only acting rank, but it meant that I was in charge. So we moved off and I decided to detour off a little and try and reach the Germans’ flank. We were moving across open ground when a German flying-boat armed with machine-guns appeared and it was quite obvious that the aircraft had spotted us. The aircraft was flying over the top of us, mainly so that we kept our heads down. I couldn’t move forward any further, so I decided to go back to the meteorological station and had just got within sight of the buildings when I saw a lot of people moving around. I obviously thought they were our chaps, but in fact Jerry had captured the meteorological station. I didn’t know that at the time.

‘We were just casually walking over this stretch of open ground, making our way back, when a German machine-gun team suddenly appeared. It would have been damn silly to try and do anything – they would have cut us to ribbons – so we just had to give up.

‘I was absolutely furious because I thought, “That’s it. War over.” We didn’t put our hands up, we thought that would be undignified. This one Jerry who they sent out to round us up indicated that we should put our rifles on our shoulders. We didn’t even do that. We just carried the rifles in our hands and just walked up to where the Germans were and threw our weapons on to a dump. That was that, we were POWs. The rest of the men at the meteorological station had all given up – they must have given up pretty easily, because by the time we arrived they were being marched down to where the Germans had set up their HQ. The whole lot of us had been captured. Meanwhile the New Zealanders on the other side of the island were having a tremendous battle, so much so that they eventually ran out of ammo and they had to give up too. My friend Ron Hill was with them and he was also captured.

‘The overriding sensation after being captured was one of disappointment and anger, but it was quite difficult to analyse one’s feelings. You are in a situation and you have to make the best of it. The full force of being a POW hadn’t hit me by then.’

Jimmy, Ron Hill and the other members of Y Patrol were all marched to the harbour at Levita. There they learnt that they were to be flown by seaplane to Piraeus, then taken to a German prison camp.

After arriving in Athens, the POWs were taken to an old Italian barracks where they were held for several days and questioned by two English-speaking German officers who wanted to discover whether any of the captured British were willing to change sides and fight with the Germans.

‘The officers were very polite, very decent. My attitude was: what the devil are you on about? You can’t possibly win this war. The Russians were well on the go, the US were in the war, Germany was being bombed to hell and it was quite clear what the outcome was going to be eventually. I didn’t say that to them directly, I just implied it, but they wouldn’t have any of it and they wanted us to switch sides and join them. “Germans and British are far too close to be enemies,” they said. Our races were so similar that it was ridiculous that we were fighting one another. That was their attitude. They wanted us to fight against the Russians. Their argument was based on the grounds that the Jews were running our side in the war and that everything could be blamed on the Jews. Our attitude was “Don’t be so bloody silly.”’

By the time the POWs arrived in Athens, Ron Hill and Jimmy were determined to make their escape. Other members of the LRDG had managed to slip past the German guards while being marched through Athens.

‘I, for one, was absolutely up for escaping, especially after a few days in the compound, which I soon became pretty fed up with. Right from the start, Ron and I said we were going to escape. But not before we had some fun with the guards. They were funny little gnome-like men from the Black Forest and they were armed with the most ancient of rifles, great long things which were as tall as they were.

‘We used to make fun of them unmercifully. We would start a bit of a rumpus at one side of the compound and these poor little blokes would start shouting to one another and rush round to one side of the compound where the noise was. Then we would start a similar thing on the other side so they would have to rush back. And we’d sing funny songs to them. At the time, the Americans had a song which had rude noises in it which went like this: “When the Führer says we are the master race we heil, (raspberry noise), heil, (raspberry), right in the Führer’s face. Not to love the Führer is a great disgrace so we heil, (raspberry), heil , (raspberry), right in the Führer’s face.” And these blokes loved it, though they didn’t really understand what was going on.’

After a few days in Athens, rumours began circulating that the POWs were to be transported to Germany, and Jimmy and Ron knew that the opportunities for escape would soon be limited.

‘We were put into cattle trucks with one kilogram of sour black bread and two small tins of Italian bully beef for a four-day journey. There were about 30 of us in each truck, the toilet was a bucket and one poor soul had dysentery, so you can imagine what it was like. As the train went through the villages and towns we were able to plot the route on a silk escape map which was sewn into my beret as part of my escape kit – most people in the LRDG had one. I also had a hacksaw blade sewn into the flies of my trousers and a small button compass hidden in the collar of my battledress tunic. There was no excuse for not at least trying to escape. I had managed to avoid being searched and the Germans never found my escape kit.

‘Inside the trucks there were little openings in the four corners of the carriage which were criss-crossed with barbed wire, so I began sawing away at the barbed wire and then Ron and I took it in turns. The train frequently stopped and we were allowed out to go to the toilet, but we had to do our business in front of all these civilians who were passengers on the train and the whole thing was quite humiliating.

‘The night before we planned our escape two LRDG men on the other truck kicked out some panels and managed to escape but they were later recaptured. The Jerry commander was furious and lined us all up in the morning and was walking up and down, bellowing at us, making all sorts of threats.

‘By now the train had entered Macedonia, and that night, on 6 November 1943, just after we left the town of Veles, 13 days after we were captured, I managed to saw through the barbed wire. Ron and I tossed a coin to see who would get out first and I won. We bent the wire back and I climbed out and was hanging on to the side of the train as we passed through a tunnel, at which point I saw Ron’s boots appearing through the opening and so I jumped. The train was moving at about 25mph but my parachute training helped break my fall and I landed safely.

‘The rest of the train passed and when I saw the red light on the back of the train disappearing into the distance I must say I felt pretty lonely. I didn’t regret getting out at all, I was delighted to be free, but there I was in the middle of occupied Europe all by myself at that stage – Ron still hadn’t jumped out. His jump was delayed and he was quite a little way from me. I walked up the track and found him hiding behind a telegraph pole because he thought I was a guard from the tunnel. Every tunnel and bridge we passed was guarded – but this one wasn’t, fortunately. I spotted Ron and said something like, “Hello Ron, are you OK?” But he’d hurt his leg when he landed. He’d twisted a muscle in his thigh and had taken a couple of chips out of his lower leg when he hit the track.

‘Ron and I used to speak quite openly about escaping and the extraordinary thing was that everyone in that truck could have got out, everyone, but they just didn’t. I think they were just resigned to the fact that they were POWs and that was how they were going to spend the rest of the war. I felt very disappointed that no one else attempted to escape.

‘Ron also had a map in his beret and he gave it to a couple of Scottish commandos who were with us in Y Patrol, but I don’t think they used it. I think it was the shock of capture, and a sort of inertia developed in some people, but not in me. I deeply resented that I was a prisoner and I wasn’t going to put up with it.

‘It was raining, dark and cold. All we had to eat was a few items from a Red Cross parcel we had been given and in front of us was a very long journey through the Macedonian mountains. I asked Ron if he could walk. He said yes, so off we went – into the mountains on a compass bearing – and that was how our escape began.

‘We figured that if we walked on a bearing slightly south of west we would eventually get to the Adriatic Sea, but that meant walking through the whole of Albania. The plan was to get to the Adriatic, steal a boat, row across the Adriatic and get to Italy, which was where the action was. What we wanted was to get back into the war.

‘We didn’t know what Albania was like but we soon found out that the country was really quite mountainous and swarming with enemy soldiers. We didn’t know what to expect so we started off walking at night so that we wouldn’t be spotted by the Germans, but poor old Ron’s leg was getting worse all the time.

‘The going was very rough, steep wooded hills and valleys made all the worse at night. One night we were on an open hillside, very rocky and blowing a gale. There was freezing rain, more like sleet, and we took it in turns with the compass to go on the right bearing. It was my turn to lead and I turned round to see how far behind Ron was and he wasn’t there. I went back to see where he was and he was sitting on a rock. “Sorry, old son,” he said, “I can’t go any further.” I believed him because he was a tough little bloke – quite small was Ron, about five foot six, but very tough. He’d seen active service in the tank regiment before the LRDG and had been injured when his tank was destroyed, so he knew what it was all about.

‘I looked round for somewhere to spend the rest of the night, to see if I could find a dry spot. I found an area where there was an overhanging rock with a dry place underneath it, but with just room for one, so I installed Ron and I went to look for somewhere for myself, which I found but it wasn’t as comfortable. By then I was very, very tired and went to sleep in spite of the conditions. I woke up at first light, freezing cold, and I couldn’t move – I suppose I was close to hypothermia. I started moving my fingers and eventually got movement back in my body and went to find Ron and he was OK, he’d managed to recover a bit, and then off we went again.

‘On about the fifth day it was clear that Ron’s leg wasn’t getting any better – we had virtually no food and so there was nothing for it but to get some help. We decided to enter a village called Belica in western Macedonia. It was a risk, but we thought that the locals might help us. I have to say that by that stage we were at a pretty low ebb; we were cold, exhausted and malnourished, and we needed some food and shelter.

‘When we arrived in the village there were lots of locals filling water buckets from the stream, so we went over and filled our water bottles. I think it was obvious to them that we were soldiers, and they looked astonished to see us. We waved and smiled and walked off and were heading in the direction of some houses when this character appeared, waving his arms at us and making it quite clear that we couldn’t go any further and that it was dangerous.

‘Ron looked up at this house and saw uniformed men walking about, and they must have been Bulgar soldiers. We took this individual at his word and left the road, pushed up into the hills as fast as we could and disappeared. Fortunately no one fired at us or followed us. We went on walking for the rest of the day and came to a river flowing roughly in the direction we wanted to go, so we continued to walk beside it along a towpath. We walked on until it started getting dark. Ron’s leg was getting no better so we continued until we came across this very primitive hut, which appeared to be occupied.

‘We approached the hut cautiously and using sign language we tried to make it clear to the people inside who we were and how we had jumped off the train. But it was also clear that they didn’t want us there. After a few minutes they got up and beckoned us to come with them; they led us outside and pointed up to a hill and just kept pointing. They wanted us to push off up the hill, so off we went, feeling very dejected. But after a few hundred yards it became apparent that the path wasn’t going anywhere, so we thought bugger this and went back to the hut, and when we banged on the door for a second time the two men seemed to have had a change of heart and invited us in.

‘It was the most primitive human habitation you could imagine. It had an earth floor, with a fire burning in the middle. The smoke rose up through the thatch – it was medieval.

‘There was a cooking pot hanging by a chain from one of the roof timbers, with some water boiling in it, and that seemed to be the sole means of cooking and heating. The dwelling itself was divided by a wall and on the other side were cattle. The only furniture was a couple of little three-legged stools, wonderful things cut out of the trunk of a fir tree at a place where there were three side branches, so that you could stand it up.

‘There were no cupboards, tables or chairs. Just these two men, who I think must have been father and son. It was all very odd, but we were so tired and hungry that to us it seemed like the lap of luxury. I think they took pity on us, and they invited us to a meal which consisted of what we later discovered was called katchemak – at least that’s what we called it. The stew consisted mainly of maize flour dumped into the pot by the handful until it had piled up into a pyramid shape. The mixture was stirred until it took on the consistency of a thick porridge, and at some stage meat – mutton or pork or anything available really – would be added, and we would pick at it with our fingers. It tasted fine that night because we were so hungry and relieved that we would be spending the night somewhere dry and warm. After the food was finished they invited us to lie down by the fire and sleep, which we did with consummate ease.

‘At some stage during the night some sort of official arrived at the hut, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, shouting, “Documenti, documenti!” Word must have circulated that there were two strangers in the area.

‘We showed him our pay books, which was all we had. He looked through them but clearly couldn’t find what he was looking for. He produced a Bulgarian banknote, and along the bottom it said “Thomas de la Rue, Angleterre”, which was clearly the printers’ name, and Angleterre was the word he was looking for.

‘It then clicked that he wanted us to produce something showing Angleterre, but we had nothing. He must have trusted our word, because in the end he made a series of gestures which showed us that he was satisfied.’

Just after dawn Jimmy and Ron left the hut with their new friends, walked along the river they had followed the previous day, up through a deserted village and into a large cave which was occupied by Chetniks.¶

The commander of the group of 30 guerrilla fighters was a Serb regular Army colonel called Stoyan Markovic. Markovic had learnt English from a book and was able to make himself understood to the two British soldiers. He explained to Jimmy and Ron that they were welcome to stay, and said he hoped that they would be prepared to join his band of fighters.

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