Churchill's Band of Brothers

WWII's most daring D-Day mission--and the hunt for vengeance on Hitler's war criminals

Damien Lewis

• Publisher: Citadel Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780806541389
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

One of WWII's most daring Allied D-Day missions and the hunt for Hitler's war criminals is brought to breathtaking life by award-winning, bestselling war reporter Damien Lewis. Award-winning, bestselling author Damien Lewis explores one of WWII's most remarkable Special Forces missions during the Normany landings on D-Day—and the extraordinary hunt that followed to take down a cadre of fugitive SS and Gestapo war criminals. On the night of June 13th, 1944, a twelve-man SAS unit parachuted into occupied France. Their objective: hit German forces deep behind the lines, cutting the rail-tracks linking Central France to the northern coastline. In a country crawling with enemy troops, their mission was to prevent Hitler from rushing his Panzer divisions to the D-Day beaches and driving the Allied troops back into the sea. It was a Herculean task, but no risk was deemed too great to stop the Nazi assault. In daring to win it all, the SAS patrol were ultimately betrayed, captured, and tortured by the Gestapo before facing execution in a dark French woodland on Hitler's personal orders. Miraculously, two of the condemned men managed to escape, triggering one of the most-secretive Nazi-hunting operations ever, as the SAS vowed to track down every one of the war criminals who had murdered their brothers in arms... all with Churchill's covert backing. With Nazi Germany's lightning seizure of much of Western Europe, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had called for the formation of specially trained troops of the "hunter class." Their purpose was to incite a reign of terror across enemy-occupied Europe. Churchill's warriors were to shatter all known rules of warfare, taking the fight to the enemy with no holds barred. In doing so, the Special Air Service would be tested as never before during the pivotal D-Day landings, and the quest for vengeance that followed. Breathtaking and exhaustively researched, Churchill's Band of Brothers is based upon a raft of new and unseen material provided by the families of those who were there. It reveals the untold story of one of the most daring missions of WWII, that not only had ramifications for the war itself, but lead to the most extraordinary and gripping of aftermaths.

Chapter 1

Barely a week after the D-Day landings the shadowed form of the Short Stirling heavy bomber clawed into the unseasonable June skies, getting airborne under cover of darkness. Hunched over the controls in the dimly lit cockpit of this often underrated yet peculiarly graceful warplane was the pilot for tonight, Flight Sergeant Sutherland, a man who would go on to win a Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) before the year was out, during the ill-fated airborne missions over Arnhem, on Operation Market Garden.

Sutherland and his crew were on no bombing mission this 13 June night. The first four-engine ‘heavy’ to see service with the RAF, the Stirling had been deemed largely obsolete by 1942, as the Avro Lancaster came into service. But this iconic warplane had gone on to acquire a second lease of life, as the foremost aircraft delivering SAS raiding parties, plus agents of the SOE –the Special Operations Executive, more commonly known as Churchill’s Ministry for Ungentlemanly Warfare – deep into enemy-occupied lands.

Tonight’s was a hybrid mission born of those two outfits: it was very much an SAS undertaking, but one orchestrated by the SOE, who had arranged both the drop-zone and the reception party that should be waiting on the ground.

As a lone aircraft flying low at night across hundreds of miles of hostile airspace to an – at best – uncertain rendezvous, the Stirling had proven a remarkably tough and reliable workhorse, one able to take considerable punishment. Despite her size and weight, the aircraft had also shown herself to be surprisingly nimble and manoeuvrable when forced to shake off the Luftwaffe night-fighters, or evade the enemy’s deadly radar-directed searchlights and flak. Considering the Stirling’s sheer dimensions – at just short of 70 feet from nose to tail, she was a good 16 feet longer than the Lancaster, and stood higher off the ground – this was no mean achievement for such an imposing warplane.

As with all aircrew of 190 Squadron – one of the few RAF units dedicated to special forces operations – Sutherland and his fellows knew precious little about tonight’s mission or the brave men they were flying into war. Codenamed ‘SABU-70’ – SABU being this unit’s radio call-sign, and very likely an abbreviation for the SAS catchphrase ‘Safe All Business As Usual’ – this was the first ‘stick’ (patrol) of several that would follow. With each, the aircrew would know only the bare bones of the operation: timings, destination and the criteria upon which to determine if the drop should go ahead or not.

Aircrew logbooks generally recorded scant details for such ‘Sunflower’ flights, as the RAF codenamed these top-secret missions. Pilots were deliberately kept in the dark, for obvious reasons. If a Stirling were to be shot down and its crew captured, the enemy had ways of forcing even the toughest to talk. Any knowledge aircrew might possess of an SAS patrol’s intentions could prove fatal, and what a man didn’t know he couldn’t tell. On the rare occasions when pilots such as Sutherland did learn more – a mission objective; the specific target details – it meant that someone had been talking out of turn. And in the summer of ’44, careless talk really did cost lives.

As the Stirling swooped across the Sussex coastline, powering on towards the cliffs of France, Sutherland took the aircraft down to just a few hundred feet above sea level, the warplane’s elusive silhouette flitting across the ink-black seas. During an English summer sunset can be as late as 9.30 p.m., and normally the light lingers long in the skies. The June ’44 weather had proven storm-lashed and overcast, but it was still well after last light by the time Sutherland got airborne. All being well, his human cargo would be plunging into the war-torn skies in the early hours of the morrow – 14 June 1944.

There was little doubt that they would jump – every man jack of them, and no matter what the conditions might be like over the drop-zone. While they might know precious little about tonight’s mission, Sutherland and his men had few illusions as to the calibre of those riding in the Stirling’s hold. One glance at their distinctive berets, mysterious winged-dagger cap badges and the medal flashes many wore on their uniforms testified to the single-minded determination and courage – not to mention the long years at war – of the SAS raiding party.

All the 190 Squadron aircrews shared that same appreciation. ‘These special troops are the most decorated men I have ever seen,’ one pilot would remark, ‘especially the officers – quite a number have the DSO and bar. There is quite a collection of “vets” in the mess these days.’

The Stirling powered onwards through the darkness, speeding SABU-70’s commander, Captain Patrick Bannister Garstin, MC, and the eleven men under his command to war, the sonorous thunder of the warplane’s four Bristol Hercules powerplants reverberating through the hold, providing a steady soundtrack to the coming mission. The fact that there were four engines – capable of propelling the aircraft through the skies at some 270 mph –was, of course, a distinct bonus: it meant they could afford to lose one at least to enemy action, and the Stirling should still remain airworthy. Compared to what had gone before, that was a real blessing.

Prior to the Stirling making an appearance, such missions had mostly been flown by the twin-engine Armstrong Whitworth Whitley, a medium bomber more affectionately known as ‘the Flying Barn Door’. Compared to the Whitley, the Stirling was almost luxurious. There were seats ranged in rows down either side, offering space for twenty-plus paratroopers – more than enough for Garstin and his men. By contrast, in the Whitley they’d been forced to squat on the icy metal of the fuselage, legs concertinaed against the far side. Fitted with seats, weapons racks and stowage bays for packs and personal gear, the Stirling felt positively made for airborne operations.

But the very best thing was the Stirling’s exit point, known to all as ‘the trap’. In the Whitley, the dorsal (ventral) gun turret had been replaced by a narrow steel tube not dissimilar to a dustbin. Through that horribly constricting orifice each parachutist had had to drop vertically, arms tight by his sides, risking smashing his forehead against the far side – known fatalistically as the ‘Whitley kiss’ or ‘ringing the bell’. By contrast, the Stirling’s trap – which resembled a large bathtub sunk into the floor where the bomb-bay used to be – was a positively cavernous aperture through which to jump.

As the Stirling thundered across the night-dark waters of the Channel, the interior grew positively chilly, and Captain Garstin and his men drew their distinctive jump-smocks closer, to ward off the icy cold. Somewhere there would be the rum-jar to warm bellies and stiffen spirits. It was Lieutenant John H. Wiehe’s job to remember the all-important rum, and he was usually a stickler for such things. Garstin’s second-in-command, Wiehe had spent four long years at war, during which time he’d soldiered his way across half the world, earning the nickname ‘Lt Rex’ in the process, for few could pronounce his surname properly.

One of two French-speakers on Garstin’s team, Wiehe would have a crucial role on the coming mission. Hailing from Mauritius, the tropical paradise islands set in the midst of the Indian Ocean, Wiehe’s family had Danish heritage – hence the surname – plus French and British colonial roots, leaving him fluent in both languages. When his Danish forebears had journeyed to Mauritius to set up home, they’d established vast sugarcane plantations, building up a considerable family fortune and founding the Labourdonnais estate, the centrepiece of which was a beautiful, colonnaded colonial-style mansion.

Mauritius had been a British colony since 1810, and come war’s outbreak, Wiehe – not yet twenty-four years of age – had answered Churchill’s call to arms, sailing via South Africa, arriving in Egypt on 7 January 1941, whereupon he’d signed up with the Royal Engineers and trained in the hazardous duties of bomb disposal. His war journal would record his tumultuous North African experiences: while ‘bullets, bombs and shells cause death . . . or mutilate bodies . . . it doesn’t take as much to mutilate minds.’

From there, via an extraordinarily tortuous route, Wiehe had made it into the SAS, and he could have wished for no better commander than Captain Pat Garstin to lead him and the others into war. Around 6 feet 2 in height, athletic of build, with sweptback, somewhat unruly dark brown hair, Garstin had a rare intensity to his coal-black gaze and striking good looks. He also had a singularly impressive combat record, plus he was possessed of more reasons than most to hunger to take the fight to the enemy.

Born in Bombay in July 1919, Garstin hailed from a long-lived military and ecclesiastical tradition. The family was descended from ‘the ancient house of Garston . . . Lords of the Manor of Walton in the 13th Century’, Walton then being a parish in the northeast of England. After emigrating to Ireland, the Garstins settled in County Meath, to the north of Dublin, though Patrick Garstin’s father, Richard Hart Garstin, was born in Randalstown, in County Antrim. Having joined the Royal Indian Marines, Richard Hart Garstin fought in the First World War, before serving in the Royal Indian Navy during the inter-war years, during which time his son, Patrick, was born.

Richard Garstin had already won a Croix de Guerre – a French decoration for acts of heroism – in the First World War, and the entire Garstin family had been heavily involved from the earliest months of the Second. While Patrick Garstin had earned his Military Cross in spring 1940, serving with the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium, he also had two younger brothers serving in the military, and his father would go on to be awarded the CBE in August 1941, for his role in a top-secret naval operation.

That mission, Operation Countenance, was the joint Anglo-Russian seizure of Iran. A senior naval officer commanding the seaborne side of Countenance, Richard Garstin had led the assault from the waters of the Persian Gulf, striking in a swift and surprise attack. Iran was taken within days, securing her precious oilfields from Nazi Germany’s predations. But a year later, Richard Garstin was lost to enemy action in horrifying circumstances.

It was October 1942, and while serving as the Vice Commodore of Ocean Convoys he had been sailing from West Africa to Britain aboard the SS Stentor, a merchant ship carrying a cargo of palm oil. For seven days and seven nights the forty-strong convoy was stalked by German U-boats. When U509 unleashed her torpedoes on the lead vessel, the Stentor, one struck on the starboard side, the massive explosion throwing up the palm oil in a horrific, fiery conflagration, rendering the entire ship and surrounding water a mass of boiling flame.

Those who could dived into the sea to save themselves. The lucky ones were hauled onto one of the escorts, the Royal Navy corvette HMS Woodruff. But amongst the 200-odd survivors –many of whom were terribly burned – Vice Commodore Garstin was nowhere to be found. Badly injured in the blast, he had gone down with the ship, as did both the Stentor’s captain and the ship’s surgeon, William Chisholm. Chisholm had remained at Garstin’s side to the very last, tending to his wounds, even at the risk of his own life. He would be awarded the Albert Medal posthumously.

Having lost his father so tragically, Captain Patrick Garstin was even more determined to play his part in the war. He was twenty-four years of age in the summer of 1944, and his and his wife’s first child, named Patrick after his father, would very likely have his first birthday while his father was away on operations. Regardless, Captain Garstin was heading deep into enemy-occupied France with fiery havoc and mayhem in mind.

Tellingly, Captain Garstin had had to fight every inch of the way to be allowed a frontline role. Having enlisted in the Royal Ulster Rifles (RUR) in July 1939, Garstin had first seen action in May 1940, in the battle for the medieval city of Louvain in Belgium. As Major General Bernard Montgomery had positioned his forces along the city’s main railway line, Garstin – then only twenty-one, and known to all as ‘Pat’ – had found himself leading the defence of the city’s main railway station, holding the entrance hall and Platforms 1 and 2, plus the subways.

At dusk on 14 May the Germans had attacked. For many of the defenders, this was their first experience of being on the wrong end of the fearsome MG 34 machine gun – the ‘Spandau’ as it would become known – a weapon with so rapid a rate of fire that the human ear was unable to distinguish between each gunshot, earning it the nickname ‘Hitler’s buzzsaw’. By dawn on the 15th, German forces had succeeded in penetrating the rail yard, and had taken up firing positions amongst the shattered remains of the rolling stock, but still Garstin and his platoon held firm.

Dashing from subway to subway, his small force kept popping up all over the station to unleash bursts of fire, giving the impression they were far greater in number than they really were. As bullets tore apart the glass roof above them, Garstin led from the front, repeatedly driving back the enemy, which led to headlines in the British press – ‘The Battle Now Raging on Platform 1’. Up and down the railway track troops had fought with incredible bravery, often to the last round, and the battle for Louvain would earn for the Durham Light Infantry the first Victoria Cross of the ground war.

By the time Montgomery ordered a withdrawal to new defensive lines, Garstin was among several men to be decorated in the field, earning a Military Cross for the heroic stand. Full of fighting spirit, but hugely outnumbered and outgunned, British forces executed a fighting withdrawal to Dunkirk. There, during nine incredible days, 338,226 men were taken off the beaches and spirited back to Britain. But the losses were staggering. Almost 70,000 were listed as killed in action, missing or prisoners of war. Along with the hundreds of tanks and field guns left behind, 288 ships had been sunk and 372 aircraft lost to enemy action.

In Britain, the government propaganda machine cranked out the message that Dunkirk was somehow a heroic victory. Heroic it certainly had been, but it was no victory, as Winston Churchill was at pains to point out. On 4 June 1940, even as the Dunkirk evacuation came to an end, Churchill delivered a rousing speech to Parliament, lauding the rescuing of so many, ‘out of the jaws of death and shame’. But he added a stinging note of caution: ‘We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuation.’

As for Captain Garstin, it was all but a miracle that he had made it off the Dunkirk beaches at all. Already suffering partial deafness due to a grenade blast at Louvain, he was wounded by shrapnel while awaiting pick-up by the minesweeper, HMS Skipjack. Worse still, as the heavily laden warship had pulled away from the gently shelving shoreline, she was struck by a series of bombs and rapidly sank, most aboard being killed.

Garstin, though injured, managed to slip away from the sinking ship and to struggle back to land. He finally made it to Britain aboard another vessel, and by September of that year he felt recovered enough from his injuries to travel from his home in Canterbury to Buckingham Palace, to receive his Military Cross. Three months later, he found himself in East Africa attached to the 1st Battalion, the Northern Rhodesia Regiment, a unit raised in what was then Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) whose ranks combined black and white soldiers under the motto Diversi Genere Fide Pares –Different in Race, Equal in Fidelity.

Barely weeks into that posting Garstin was admitted to a local hospital suffering from acute appendicitis. Given two months’ sick leave, he instead chose to return to his unit, whereupon he was promoted to lieutenant and became embroiled in the fierce fighting of the East African campaign. Though heavily outnumbered, a mixed force raised from Britain, South Africa, India and across the African continent defeated the Italian East African Command, which combined units of the Regio Esercito (Royal Army), Regia Aeronautica (Royal Airforce) and Regia Nautica (Royal Navy), plus some 250,000 soldiers of the Regio Corpo Truppe Coloniali (Royal Corps of Colonial Troops).

This little-known campaign represented the first significant Allied victory of the war, but throughout the fighting – which in the remote African bush often assumed a guerrilla-like intensity, with wild skirmishing and hit-and-run attacks – Garstin was dogged by ill health. By June 1941, the abdominal pains were back to plague him. A medical board dispatched him to Britain, ominously for ‘treatment and final disposal’.

Garstin, however, was having none of it. Deftly sidestepping that ‘final disposal’ order, he instead volunteered for airborne operations, earning his parachutist’s wings by March the following year. Abdominal surgery and several months of convalescence followed, after which he married Susan Nicola Beresford-Jones in the autumn of 1942, before embarking for North Africa, where he was to serve with the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), the intelligence-gathering and raiding force that pre-dated the SAS. Raids on German airfields and transport followed, before Garstin suffered two further hospitalisations, first in Tunisia and then in Algeria.

Once again he was returned to Britain, so his injuries could be treated and to convalesce. Instead, and demonstrating a truly indomitable spirit, on 15 February 1944 Garstin volunteered for 1 SAS, a unit commanded by a fellow Irishman of towering repute, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne. Of course, it was no exaggeration to say that Pat Garstin shouldn’t have been in any position to put himself forward for special service duties: in truth, he should have been invalided out of the military some three years earlier. It was the mark of the man that he volunteered, regardless of the dangers that were to come.

Equally, it was no secret that Mayne – already the recipient of two Distinguished Service Orders (DSO and bar), plus a Mention in Dispatches – cast a favourable eye on any Irishmen applying for the ranks, regardless of whether they hailed from north or south of the border. Indeed, during the earliest days of the SAS it had been Lieutenant Eoin (pronounced ‘Ian’) McGonigal, a southern Irishman and a Catholic, who had argued most persuasively that there was room for a man like Mayne in the fledgling Special Air Service.

Forging a friendship long before the war, via Eoin’s brother Ambrose, and at Queen’s University, Belfast, McGonigal and Mayne had shared a passion for rugby, Mayne going on to play for both Ireland and the British Lions prior to the war. When hostilities were declared, McGonigal and Mayne had been the first two officers from an Irish regiment to join No. 11 Commando, in 1940, seeing fierce and bloody action in Syria in June 1941. Over the years they had truly become inseparable, until McGonigal was killed during a disastrous parachute jump over Libya, on one of the fledgling SAS’s first ever missions.

Mayne was said to have been shattered by the loss of McGonigal, a man who, like himself – and Pat Garstin – had enlisted first in the Royal Ulster Rifles. Bearing in mind Garstin’s distinguished war record, not to mention his experience of guerrilla-style warfare and his dogged refusal to let injury stand in his way, his application to join the SAS was welcomed by Mayne, especially since he was desperately short of experienced officers, after nearly three years of the SAS being at war.

Following a relentless series of North African and Italian missions, plus raiding operations that had spanned the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, the SAS had been pulled back to the UK for a period of recuperation and expansion, in preparation for the hardest battles of all – the D-Day landings and the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe. A unit that had originated in North Africa in the summer of 1941 with seventy-odd recruits –‘the originals’ – was to be grown into four regiments, composed of some 2,500 troops.

In theory two of those regiments – 1 and 2 SAS – were made up of the British contingent, but in reality the SAS had returned from the long months overseas with just about every conceivable nationality within its ranks. Basically, anyone possessed of the right qualities and who hungered to take the fight to the enemy had been welcome. Mayne’s command, 1 SAS, was described as some kind of piratical ‘foreign legion’, boasting scores of Irishmen, a good dose of Russians, one or two Americans and even a smattering of Germans within its ranks. Upon their return to the UK, many of Mayne’s men proved to have no record of ever having served within the British Army at all.

Two French regiments – 3 and 4 SAS – plus a Belgian parachute company were also being raised, while F Squadron of the GHQ Liaison Regiment – specialist signallers, better known as ‘the Phantoms’ – were being attached, to make up the shortfall in radio operators.

Widely experienced in behind-the-lines raiding and sabotage, most of the SAS old hands hadn’t seen Britain for years and were little accustomed to the rigours of regimental soldiering –drill, spit and polish and the adherence to rigid military convention – which did little to win them any easy friends within the top brass. Mayne, 1 SAS’s commanding officer, was foremost amongst them. All too often portrayed as a psychopathic Irishman with a famously volcanic temper, especially when he’d been drinking, Mayne was in truth far from that. Recruited into the SAS...