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Chapter 4

From the shelter of the rutted field beyond the bullet-torn hedgerow, Major Farran saw the distinctive form of an SAS jeep nose into view, with the redoubtable Big Jim Mackie at the wheel. It was the most welcome sight that he had ever seen. They now had its vehicle-mounted machine guns to counter the Germans’ fire.

Under the cover of their smoking barrels, Farran and his men rushed the wounded Sergeant Roberts to the vehicle and bundled him aboard. Figures jumped on wherever there was space. The heavily laden jeep moved out, engine howling, its thick mud-eater tyres making short work of the ploughed field. Once they’d reached the nearby lane, the priority had to be to get as far away as possible from the hornet’s nest that they had kicked – and kicked hard – in Châtillon, and to get Roberts some medical treatment.

They headed for the nearest friendly farmstead. There, Farran himself proceeded to dress Roberts’ wounds, while he lay on the kitchen table and a bevy of farm-maids bustled about with hot water and towels. Once the SAS sergeant was stabilised, he was loaded aboard a vehicle and despatched to the nearest location where the Maquis were known to keep an operational field hospital. There, he’d be in good hands.

That done, Farran led his jeep column back through isolated country to their remote, deep-woodland base. Reports filtered in from Châtillon of one hundred German dead and many more injured, plus scores of trucks, cars and motorcycle combinations destroyed. Almost of more importance, the entire German force occupying the town was said to be preparing to withdraw from what it believed was advancing US troops.

Farran had lost one SAS soldier killed and several wounded. By anyone’s reckoning, the battle for Châtillon-sur-Seine had been a spectacular victory. The SAS’s official report – marked ‘SENSITIVE’ – would declare that ‘this must rank as one of the most successful sorties ever carried out by a small harassing force behind enemy lines.’

But Farran’s greatest fear now was reprisals. The Gestapo and SS were bound to learn of the attack, and they were known to wreak terrible vengeance on the locals, as ‘punishment’ for the role the Maquis may have played. He decided to make himself scarce. If his entire force melted away, it would lessen any chance of any such savagery. If no SAS could be found, who was to say it wasn’t forward elements of the US 3rd Army that had attacked the town?

He sent out a signal for his entire squadron to return to their woodland base: other elements had been out hitting a variety of targets. They gathered as one unit, boasting eighteen jeeps in all, before moving out to establish three separate bases, from where to plot further mischief and mayhem. They left behind them the one casualty, Parachutist Holland, who’d been killed in the initial stages of the battle. Unbeknown to Farran the enemy had found his body, which served to dissuade them from executing the fifty-odd locals they had taken hostage. As it was clearly a British-led raid, such reprisals against ‘the Maquis’ were deemed unjustified.

Farran led his patrol 150 kilometres east, to a patch of woodland not far from the town of Grandrupt-de-Bains. En route they reconnoitred key targets, radioing through coordinates for Allied airstrikes. ‘Urgent. Recced today railway station at 14H/373305 . . .’ read one such message. ‘Petrol train on track being used as refuelling point . . . Impossible attack from ground as 200 enemy with heavy weapons dug in . . . bomb whole area immediately to prevent escaping convoys from refuelling.’ There were many such messages.

Grandrupt-de-Bains lay on the western border of the Vosges region of France, an area of thick woodland and rain-washed mountains that straddles the Franco-German border. Hitler had vowed that on the western wall of the Vosges his Panzer divisions and infantry would make a heroic last stand, hurling the Allies back into France and preventing them from marching into the Fatherland. It seemed a fitting area in which Farran and his SAS might cause trouble, but things weren’t quite to turn out as he had planned.

It was the second week of September 1944 when Farran linked up with a new resistance group at Grandrupt. This one – somewhat implausibly – was based around a Boy Scout troop. The members of the Grandrupt Maquis struck Farran as being a little young to go to war, although those in command were seasoned resistance fighters. They’d set up base in a cluster of white canvas bell-tents pitched beside a mountain stream, and the whole scene struck Farran as being reminiscent of a scout camp in peacetime.

It was somehow so incongruous, yet their spirit to fight appeared to be unmatched. Farran delivered a stirring speech in his best schoolboy French and was mobbed by a crowd of young would-be warriors. He decided to arrange an air-drop of much-needed arms and supplies onto the boy scouts’ drop zone, which if nothing else would give them some direct experience of a ‘lancée’, as the Maquis tended to call such an event.

The DZ was a large flat field fringed by trees, so well screened from any watchers. There was a cold wind blowing, as September ushered in the autumn and winter storms so typical of the Vosges. Farran explained in detail the configuration of signal lights and fires that were required to guide the aircraft in, but he doubted if the scouts had completely grasped it. He was just giving up hope of any aircraft appearing, when, at around 0200 hours, the distant drone of a Handley Page Halifax’s four Rolls-Royce Vulture engines cut the skies.

The Halifax was designed for use as a heavy bomber, but specialised versions had also been built for parachute and cargo operations. It had become the work-horse of special forces resupply missions. As the pair of aircraft homed in on the DZ, Farran figured they were making their approach at too high an altitude. Sure enough, when they released their loads the wind blew a good proportion of the parachutes off course, which plummeted into the trees.

By now, Farran and his men were shivering with the night’s cold, but there was urgent work to be done. Three human parachutists had also dropped in, alongside the supplies. Lieutenant Hugh Gurney, Lance Corporal Challenor and Parachutist Fyffe had gone missing weeks earlier, shortly after Farran’s column had crossed the lines. Somehow, they’d made it back to friendly forces and were now parachuting in to rejoin their unit. Unfortunately, the wind had driven Fyffe into a stand of tall pine trees. It was three long hours before Farran and his men finally got him safely to the ground.

The resupply containers were so widely scattered that by daybreak several were still to be found. A somewhat disgruntled Farran took a break for some much-needed breakfast, leaving the boy-scout Maquis in charge. It was around 0900 hours when a youth of no more than ten came tearing over to Farran in something of a panic. He’d been sent with an urgent message: some 600 German soldiers, supported by armoured cars plus Sonderkraftfahrzeug half-tracks – troop-carriers fitted with machine guns – were converging on the DZ.

There was, as Farran well knew, a crack SS battalion based at Grandrupt-de-Bains. They must have learned of the resupply drop and set out early intending to spoil Farran’s day. Equipped as they were, the enemy were going to heavily outnumber his force, not to mention outgun it.

Farran ordered his men to mount up their jeeps. As he scanned their surroundings, searching for an escape route, the DZ seemed to be completely enclosed in thick, impenetrable woodland. There would be no slipping away via jeep through any of that. One rutted track led out of the clearing, but that was the direction in which the SS battalion were fast approaching.

Opting to stand and fight would be suicide. The half-tracks – known as ‘Hanomags’ to Allied troops – boasted half-inch-thick armour and pairs of pivot-mounted machine guns, and each could carry ten soldiers in full combat gear. Advising the boy-scout Maquis to disperse into the woodland, Farran set about trying to find some means for his jeep-borne force to escape. As if to underscore the dire nature of their predicament the first bursts of fire erupted from the eastern fringes of the DZ, from where the enemy were making their approach.

Farran led his column of jeeps in a desperate dash around the perimeter of the DZ, searching for an elusive means to make their getaway. Here and there expanses of white parachute silk still cloaked the odd tree top, if ever the enemy needed a marker to guide them to their prey. As they gunned the jeeps’ engines, figures came charging out of the woodland – young Maquis, fleeing from the approaching convoy.

To the north of the DZ Farran spied a river cutting through the trees: it would be impossible to ford that in the jeeps. East lay only the enemy, and south and west rose dark walls of pinewoods. Giving up any hope of escape, Farran ordered his men to place their jeeps in the ‘hull-down’ position – so with their bodywork sheltered behind a low ridge, but with the vehicle-mounted machine guns able to menace the line of approach of the enemy.

As they waited, Farran wondered whether they might be better off doing a Last Charge of the Light Brigade, as opposed to something more akin to the heroic stand of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. It was then that he noticed what appeared to be a small break in the wall of trees, in the far south-western corner. As the grunt of powerful engines rose to a crescendo to the east, Farran led his column in a mad dash for that tantalising promise of escape.

With bursts of fire chasing after them, the jeeps crashed through a wire fence and careered onwards through a copse of young saplings, mowing them down like a herd of crazed elephants put to flight in the jungle. Farran led the column across a small field, the jeeps bucking over the rough ground, before they made the better going of a small lane on the far side.

A mile or so later, they emerged onto a tarmacked road. Farran’s thoughts now were all for the fate of the young Maquis. Facing an SS battalion was some baptism of fire. He ordered Lieutenant Gurney, freshly parachuted into theatre, to take two jeeps to hit the enemy’s rear, by motoring up the Grandrupt road. More jeeps were placed in ambush positions along the highway, intent on catching the SS as they withdrew from the DZ.

Lieutenant Gurney was the first to draw blood. Taking the enemy by complete surprise, he was able to strafe a group of officers positioned on a hillock, knocking out their command vehicle. Meanwhile, one of Farran’s jeeps lying in ambush got lucky. Two staff cars were motoring for the DZ, intent on witnessing the success of the operation. Instead, they drove into a withering hail of fire.

Not a man riding in those vehicles was allowed to get out alive. As luck would have it, they were carrying the top commanders of the SS assault force – their colonel and his officers. While the SS had succeeded in seizing the drop-zone and some of the remnant supplies, Farran and his SAS had definitely cut the head off the snake. Having done so, his fear, once again, was of the reprisals.

He ordered his column to move out. They probed south, seeking a new patch of forest in which to hide. Over several days they covered just eighty kilometres, the enemy were so thick on the ground. Retreating from the advancing Allied forces, the Germans were converging on the western wall of the Vosges, being funnelled into the very area where Farran had chosen to operate. In short, at every turn the ground was thick with their forces.

Farran’s patrols left more burning vehicles and dead Germans – as often as not, officers – in their wake. Their war diary gave the flavour of one such bloody confrontation. ‘Two jeeps met an enemy six-wheeled car, which halted; two officers got out, one armed with a Schmeisser. Dvr. Beckett, expecting them to be Americans, walked towards them. One officer with a Luger pointed it . . . and said “Haende Hoch”. Beckett pushed the gun away and fell into the ditch to escape the tracer fired from the jeep . . . The remaining officers in the car tried to get out. Two succeeded and attempted to climb over a wall, but were killed against it. The others perished in the car, which caught fire.’

But as the war diary reflected, the hue and cry was up for Farran’s patrol. ‘Truck loads of Germans had been inquiring at all villages to the south of the forest about British parachutists, and there were rumours that the maquis at Grandrupt had been betrayed by one of their own officers. The squadron felt a little uneasy.’ To all sides the search intensified, and villages were put to the torch by a vengeful enemy.

Somewhere to the north of the town of Vesoul, Farran was forced to go to ground in a tiny patch of woodland no more than two miles square. It was mid-September by now and to all sides lay the enemy. It was last light by the time Farran had sorted his encampment, and he was gripped by a sense of unease. To left and right he could hear the sound of grunting engines – hostile forces on the move.

He ordered Lieutenant Gurney to take a jeep and push to the western fringe of the woods. Might it offer an avenue of escape, should there be trouble? Gurney was under firm orders not to ‘brew up’ any traffic on that side, but he’d been gone barely five minutes when the distinctive rasp of the jeep’s Vickers machine-guns tore apart the dusk. As the war diary recorded, he’d ‘brewed up a staff car containing five brass hats. The death of those senior officers, including a general, was confirmed . . .’

In short, the target had proved just too tempting. Farran had got his signaller to break out their wireless set, to send that evening’s scheduled radio report to London, but he sensed that Gurney’s action spelled trouble. The lone jeep came charging back and Gurney had disturbing news. The vehicle he’d shot up was at the vanguard of a large enemy column, which had followed their jeep. As if to reinforce his warning, a sudden burst of fire tore through the woodland. ‘The cover was thin . . .’ the war diary recorded. ‘More firing came through the trees, the bullets cutting the branches overhead.’

Any doubts that Farran had entertained vanished: the Germans knew the SAS were there and were coming in to get them. Worse still, with such a small patch of cover to hide in there would be little means to escape or evade the enemy. Farran yelled orders at his men to start up their engines and move out, as jeeps began to hammer out return fire, the smog of cordite fumes drifting thick beneath the trees.

The incoming fire intensified, as Farran kept yelling orders. It was then that he noticed Corporal Cunningham, his radio operator, calmly rolling up his W/T cable, a look of cool determination on his features: just another night’s work in the SAS. Cunningham’s steely calm was like a bucket of cold water in the SAS commander’s face. As at Châtillon, when they’d been pinned under that hedge by ferocious machine-gun fire, it was time for Farran to get a grip.

He steeled himself to lead the column of jeeps onto the lone track that cut through the trees – the same one that the enemy were advancing along. He turned right, pushing ahead at top speed, the jeeps bucking over the rough ground as they raced away from the enemy. They reached the far end of the phalanx of woodland, turned right again onto a rutted farm track, finding their way into some thick bushes. Farran had just managed to steer them into cover, when the lead vehicles got bogged in deep mud. Now they were well and truly for it.

He ordered the engines cut. Frantically, desperately, men tore down branches and vegetation and threw it over the jeeps to camouflage them, while others hurried along the track to obliterate their tyre tracks, using the foldable spades that each of the vehicles carried. If they were discovered here they would fight, but there was little hope of getting mobile any time soon. There was nothing for it but to lie low and wait.

Noises drifted across to them. Cries in the night-dark woodland. The odd burst of gunfire. The sound of figures crashing about among the trees. The SAS men were afraid even to cough, let alone to drop a tin of food. One tell-tale sound might give them away. It began to rain – a cold, hard rain frosted by the high ground of the Vosges. There was no option but to sit in those jeeps mired in the mud, shivering, as the rain soaked everyone to the skin.

A long column of enemy vehicles began to move down the nearby road, less than a hundred yards away. They could hear a German military policeman directing the traffic, and yelling out warnings to each passing vehicle to be wary of ‘terrorists’. It proved to be a night of knife-edge tension, deep discomfort and very little sleep and by first light the enemy half-tracks and trucks were still thundering past.

‘It was the most unpleasant night ever spent,’ Farran recorded in the war diary. ‘The party was faced with a situation which almost seemed hopeless; if they were attacked at dawn as seemed probable, they would have lost their mobility, as three jeeps were completely stuck and the remainder behind in the bottle neck.’

But at eleven o’clock that morning the woods finally fell silent. Farran reckoned almost 2,000 vehicles had passed in the night, but now the highway was deserted. He ordered his men – sodden, fatigued and chilled to the bone – to wrestle the jeeps free of the mud. That done, they had to push them by hand down the track, as he dared not risk starting their engines. It was back-breaking work. Only when they had finally reached the road and could make a dash for uncertain safety, did he order his men to fire up the jeep’s straight-four ‘Go Devil’ petrol engines.

The squadron took to the highway, racing further east, following the enemy’s line of retreat. They’d motored for some thirty-five kilometres, when, on the approach to the town of Luxeuil-les-Bains, they encountered a sizeable patch of woodland. It appeared to be deserted, and Farran seized on it as their new base of operations. By luck, they managed to link up with a new band of Maquis, commanded by a surgeon called Docteur Topsent. With his help and guidance, Farran selected a slew of targets for the coming night’s operations. He ‘was determined to make the Germans pay for the miserable night he had just passed,’ the war diary recorded.

Lieutenant Gurney was despatched to Velorcey village, about ten kilometres south of their hideout, where a column of enemy were said to be holed up. Gurney had one of Docteur Topsent’s Maquis riding with him, as guide. Farran sent Lieutenant Burtwhistle, another officer newly arrived with the squadron, to Fontaine-lès-Luxeuil, ten kilometres in the opposite direction, where a German horse-drawn artillery column had recently set up camp. And Big Jim Mackie led an attack towards Luxeuil-les-Bains itself.

Gurney’s team were the first into action, but they were dogged by bad luck. As fate would have it, their jeeps rounded a bend and came face-to-face with the enemy column at a range of no more than ten yards. Gurney got the drop on the enemy, but his initial burst of fire cut through a truck loaded with explosives. It detonated in an almighty explosion, both the enemy troops and the SAS jeeps being caught in the blast.

Both sides in the confrontation – SAS and Germans – were ripped to pieces. Gurney managed to extricate himself from the carnage, but he was cut down by a burst of fire as he dashed up the village street. ‘Lieut. Gurney was hit in the back and fell; he died shortly afterwards,’ the war diary recorded. ‘The French . . . described how the Germans kicked the body of the “English terrorist”, but eventually they were able to bury him in the village cemetery.’

Lieutenant Burtwhistle’s patrol fared little better in Fontaine-lès-Luxeuil. Opening fire on the horse-drawn column, his guns tore into the enemy ranks and set a line of carts ablaze. But in the process, three of his men were wounded, and one jeep totally destroyed. They were lucky to make it out of there alive.

Typically, Jim Mackie’s attack at Luxeuil-les-Bains went better, but after that night’s losses Farran didn’t doubt that luck was turning against them. By now, he could hear the thunder of American artillery somewhere to the west, and the roads were bumper-to-bumper with retreating enemy vehicles. There was little question of mounting any further offensive operations. Instead, they needed to shrink further into the depths of the forest and hide. ‘The German resistance had stiffened,’ the war diary recorded, ‘and the situation . . . had become very precarious. ’

No sooner had Farran’s squadron camouflaged their vehicles, than a German artillery column drew into the cover of some nearby trees. It consisted of a unit of Panzerabwehrkanone 43 anti-tank guns, which had earned a fearsome reputation among Allied troops. The 88mm cannon could penetrate the armour of any British, American or Russian tank and it was accurate up to a thousand yards. It would make mincemeat out of the SAS’s unarmoured jeeps, especially as the nearest guns were no more than a hundred yards away.

For three days Farran and his men hunkered down, listening to the voices of the 88mm crews filtering through the trees. Other than sending out the odd patrol on foot, to try to make contact with US forces, there was little they could do but keep silent, hide and wait. In the war diary Farran described this time as ‘absolute hell. No one dared talk above a whisper, and every time somebody dropped something they expected a German to appear.’

At one juncture a tin of bacon spontaneously exploded. It must have been damaged during a drop and the contents gone off, the pressure of the gas caused by decomposition building up inside the tin. It sent everyone into a panic, diving for their weapons. If the German gunners heard it, they didn’t seem inclined to respond. US artillery was hurling forward a constant barrage of fire, so what was a tin of exploding bacon between enemies?

On the morning of their fourth day in hiding, the Maquis led a group of figures into Farran’s position. Overnight, the 88mm gunners had collapsed their camp and melted away. Docteur Topsent had brought with him the crew of an American armoured car, who were riding at the vanguard of the advancing US forces. Farran and his men were so overjoyed at seeing them that they danced a highland jig on the spot.

During a month of such operations deep behind the lines, the SAS commander and his men had been under enormous nervous strain. It wasn’t a moment too soon to have been relieved. So began the squadron’s long drive back through liberated France, during which Farran was able to observe the burned-out skeletons of staff cars and trucks that they had destroyed, as they’d wrought carnage among the enemy across northern France.

Farran would be awarded a DSO for his actions, the citation for which speaks volumes: ‘Confirmed damage, inflicted upon the enemy by the small force under Major Farran, amounted to approximately 500 killed or wounded, 23 staff cars destroyed, 6 motorcycles, and 36 vehicles including trucks, troop-carriers and a petrol wagon. In addition a dump of 100,000 gallons of petrol was destroyed, a goods train taken out, and . . . much essential information and bombing targets passed back by W/T.’

‘W/T’ stood for wireless transmission – reflecting the ability of Farran’s signallers to radio back target coordinates.

Of the Châtillon attack in particular, Farran’s citation stated: ‘at least 100 Germans killed and a considerable number wounded, while SAS casualties were 1 killed and 2 wounded. This well-conceived and brilliantly-executed operation caused the enemy to mistake Major Farran’s squadron for the advance elements of the US 3rd Army and therefore to withdraw from Châtillon sooner than necessary. His personal courage, initiative and tactical sense, enabled him to direct his small force with minimum loss.’

A week or so after linking up with those advance US troops, Farran and his men arrived back in the UK. They were looking forward to some much-needed leave, before the next behind-the-line mission, most likely northern Europe again – possibly the Netherlands or Norway.

But for Major Roy Farran an entirely different future beckoned, on a mission of untold sacrifice and daring.