Читать книгу The Paras - The Inside Story of Britain's Toughest Regiment - John Parker - Страница 14

In Churchill’s view, one of the significant areas still lacking in the development of Britain’s airborne forces was the key to the whole operation: the military glider. The Germans, as the Prime Minister had forcefully pointed out on numerous occasions, were well ahead of the game and had used gliders effectively in all their airborne operations. The enemy had been testing their use as a potential military tool since the end of the First World War. Prohibited from developing military aircraft under the Treaty of Versailles, German engineers turned instead to the study of glider flight, and by the early 1920s they had developed gliders with advanced designs.

The first gliding school in the USA was established at South Wellfleet, Massachusetts, by German pilots in 1929. When, ten years later, war came again, the Germans were ready with large gliders towed by Junkers to transport soldiers, artillery and light vehicles. In 1940 Germany became the first country ever to use gliders in war. Britain was years behind and even when its designers began to catch up, production was a slow business, partly because all factories capable of building gliders were already working full time on other wartime projects.

Churchill was given a demonstration of Britain’s first prototype glider during a combined airborne exercise on 26 April 1941, but the first would not come into service until the end of the year. Without gliders, the airborne brigades’ hands were tied. At that time only a limited amount of weapons and equipment could be dropped by parachute, and gliders were needed to supply such essential items as jeeps, light tanks and light artillery as well as acting as personnel carriers taking troops direct to battle fronts. The glider was a relatively fast and economical way of flying in reinforcements in support of parachute landings, the scale of which was limited by the carrying capacity of the old Whitley bombers. Stripped out, this aircraft could carry a stick of only ten men, and that at a pinch. As the Bruneval raid demonstrated, it was a hugely expensive business to carry such a small number of men in a single converted bomber: in that instance, 12 aircraft to move 125 men to the target in very cramped conditions. Even now, two years into the war, RAF resource managers maintained that they could not justify releasing decent planes for the purpose of large-scale deployment of airborne troops, and for the time being it was unthinkable to move a whole battalion by air and drop it into the target area in the way that the Germans had done in taking Crete.

Nor was Britain’s first glider, the Hotspur, any better than the Whitley in its carrying capacity – and it was certainly no match for the German gliders. It could carry eight men but not heavy loads such as a jeep, or even small artillery. The Mk I had been designed as a true glider, capable of soaring. It was quickly superseded by the Mk II, whose wingspan was clipped so that it glided directly to its target once released from its towline. Only the Horsas and Hamilcars, which came into use in late 1942, would be capable of carrying cargo as well as troops. Four hundred Hotspurs had been ordered, and although there was still a shortage in the latter part of 1941 and early 1942, it hardly mattered because at first there was also a shortage of pilots to fly them. As luck would have it, the 31st Independent Infantry Brigade was on its way back to England from India. On their arrival on 10 October 1941, the officers and NCOs of the brigade were informed that, as of that moment, they were all glider pilots. This came as something of a shock because few of them had ever clapped eyes on a glider, let alone flown one. They were trained infantrymen, not fliers. But they accepted the challenge with not a little apprehension and henceforth would be known as the 1st Airlanding Brigade.

The raising of airborne units was not the sole preserve of the Parachute Brigade. Several other regiments had volunteer parachute and airborne companies, many of which were used on specialist operations in the Far East and Burma. One group of 750 volunteer officers and men was selected from infantry regiments in India in 1941 to form what was then called the 151st Parachute Battalion. They trained in extraordinarily primitive conditions, using cotton parachutes and, equipped with a handful of antiquated aircraft, they took quite a few casualties in training. Although temporarily trapped by the war in India, they moved with the Indian Army contingents to the Middle East in 1941, picked up additional recruits and became the 156th Parachute Battalion. This was eventually incorporated into the 1st Airborne Division as part of the 4th Parachute Brigade, commanded by Brigadier (later General Sir) John Hackett. It was a battalion largely composed of tough regular soldiers who had not seen England for years, veterans of Indian Army campaigns on the North-West Frontier and desert campaigns in the early part of the present war. Many were on the point of returning to England at the time war was declared, having been abroad for seven or eight years, and so never got home. One company commander, through a succession of circumstances, was away for 13 years before he returned to see his family.

Even the Gurkhas, who were never the best of fliers, took up parachuting. There is a famous story which alleges that when a Gurkha battalion was first asked to provide volunteers for an airborne unit, the Gurkha officer, having listened quietly to his British counterpart giving a short talk on the need for their assistance, went into a huddle with his riflemen and came back to ask apologetically: ‘Would it be possible to drop the men from a lower height so as to reduce the risk of injury?’ He had missed a vital part of the talk, and it was then hastily explained that each one of the men would be equipped with a parachute and taught how to use it. They all breathed a sigh of relief. The story may have been true, sometime, somewhere in the jungles of Burma, but one similar incident actually happened, at Imphal in May 1942. The Gurkhas, who had already suffered heavy losses during the Allied retreat from Burma in the face of a massive invasion by the Japanese, were asked to volunteer for parachute duty for raids in preparation for a new offensive. Shown a short silent film, the Gurkhas were fascinated, until a caption in Gurkhali came on the screen that sparked loud murmurs and worried looks. If they did their job well, this informed them, 95 per cent of them would be dead before they hit the ground. The captions had been wrongly placed: this one should have appeared with the film that demonstrated how to repel a Japanese parachute attack. When the mistake was explained, they roared with laughter. To a man, they volunteered for parachute duty and went on to make some courageous airborne attacks as part of the 14th Army’s return to Burma, as well as in Malaya and Borneo after the war. There was, however, another side to this story, as many would later discover: Japanese and German infantrymen were no doubt being shown similar movies about how to kill parachute troops as they floated down to earth and no one, whatever side he was on, could think too deeply about it or he would never have set foot outside the aircraft that was carrying him and his fellow soldiers to the DZ.

Humorous stories abounded among the Paras, leading a regimental chaplain to suggest that the laughter was, if studied closely, of the nervous variety and simply a cover by tough guys to mask the reality of a deadly serious business. It was frequently argued by the Paras that, compared with infantrymen, their chances of being hit by enemy fire were several times greater because:

(a) the aircraft carrying you into battle may be shot down or the powerless glider may hit an unforeseen landscape (as often happened) before it got there;

(b) even if you make it through the ack-ack fire, the parachute might not open properly and you will crash to earth and never get up again;

(c) even if the parachute functions properly, you might break your neck, or a least a leg, landing on rough terrain, be speared through the heart by a broken tree branch or electrocuted by uncharted high-power cables (not uncommon);

(d) you might be shot coming down or possibly eaten by wild animals on landing if the pilot has dropped you in the wrong place.

All of which might occur even before the Paras went into battle. But, with a couple of daring, spectacular and costly operations behind them, British airborne forces still being put through their paces over the English countryside were finally called upon to take part in a major campaign in the autumn of 1942. They were judged to be ready and able for what was to become the classic role of the Paras, jumping into the battle zones ahead of the herd, capturing key positions and ‘unlocking the door’ as the ground forces moved forward. The Parachute Regiment, working in conjunction with the other airborne elements, now had a clearly defined operational objective. What was more, the big new transport gliders were coming on stream.

In two years the regiment had grown from nothing to a well-trained, well-briefed force whose first major test had yet to come. In the autumn of 1942, this lay dead ahead. There were still problems: a lack of recruits of the right calibre and a serious shortage of transport. Powered aircraft assigned to airborne troops still tended to be of the wing-and-a-prayer variety. The RAF, heavily committed in all the war theatres, struggled to provide even those needed for the airborne operations pencilled in for the coming months.

The situation was eased somewhat by the arrival of the USAAF’s No. 60 Group, who brought with them the newer American Dakotas. Though these were not perfect for British Paras’ needs, they were welcomed – initially at least – because paratroops could make their exit through a door instead of through a hole in the floor of their own converted bombers. Nevertheless, this very facility caused problems and deaths in early jumps. British Paras, who used different parachutes from those of the Americans, were forced to retrain to use the Dakotas after a tragedy during the first trial drop of 250 men on 9 October 1942. Four men were strangled when their canopies snagged the aircraft’s tail wheel. The static line on the British X-Type parachute was too short for use on the Dakota, and after some trial-and-error tactics, pilots found that raising the tail of the aircraft made the soldiers’ exits less prone to accident.

Most of these problems were overcome by the end of October, as indeed they had to be. The rush was on and the 1st Parachute Brigade was already on standby for ‘the big one’ – immediate mobilization – ready to move out at any moment for operations for which they had had no real time to prepare. In addition they had to borrow men and equipment from the 2nd Parachute Brigade and other units of the 1st Airborne Division to get them up to strength and in good order. Many had guessed that they were on their way to the North African coast as 1000 guns of General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army thundered into action against the Germans’ Afrika Korps at El Alamein on 30 October. One week later the second phase in the Allies’ reclamation of the region, Operation Torch, would be ready to start. For the invasion of North Africa, the largest-ever number of Allied ships and aircraft had been assembled. The Paras had been invited to the party, although they were few in number compared with the overall strength of the landings, which consisted of some 65,000 men in 670 ships, 1000 landing craft and a planned build-up to around 1700 aircraft to attack a 900-mile front. The command team included men soon to become famous, among them America’s Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Major General George Patton and, on the British side, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, hero of Matapan and many a Malta convoy, and Vice-Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, who had masterminded the miraculous evacuation from Dunkirk.

The Operation Torch battle plan called for the landing around Casablanca, in Morocco, of 25,000 US troops who, with 250 tanks, had sailed directly from their home ports in America. Another 18,500 men with 180 tanks sailed from Britain via Gibraltar to land around Oran, in Algeria, and it was intended that these two forces would combine to form the 5th Army. A joint US force of 20,000 men would simultaneously secure the Algerian capital, Algiers, and, as the 1st Army, this would move swiftly to capture four key ports of Bône and Philippeville in Algeria and Bizerta and Tunis in Tunisia.

On an operation of that scale there were bound to be problems, and the Paras seemed to encounter quite a few of them. First, there were not enough aircraft to convey them, alongside their partners the 503rd US Parachute Infantry, to their eventual destination on the North African coast and to inland DZs. The payload of the Dakotas had to be reduced to accommodate extra fuel tanks. Two battalions, the 1st and 2nd, along with the 3rd Battalion’s Headquarters Company, two companies and the mortar platoon, were rushed to Greenock on 29 October to join a convoy of ships en route to Gibraltar and onwards towards North Africa. Their immediate strategic objective was northern Tunisia, and the plan was to cut the line of retreat of the Axis troops, who were fleeing from the advancing British Eighth Army in the Western Desert. With Axis power decimated along the southern shores of the Mediterranean, the way would be open to invade Europe through Sicily and Italy.

The remainder of the 3rd Battalion were delayed for two days by fog but eventually flew from RAF St Eval in Cornwall to Gibraltar in the early hours of 10 November. Almost as soon as they arrived they were on alert to move out for a parachute assault on the vital airfield at Bône, an operation that was to be launched from an airfield at Maison Blanche, near Algiers. By then the bulk of the Allied beach landings had forged ahead, with some hefty losses of manpower and machinery on both sides. The Vichy French commander, with 120,000 troops spread across the region who had put up a token defence, was already seeking ceasefire terms. The Germans, meanwhile, were sending in reinforcements from Europe.

The 3rd Battalion’s assault party took off from Maison Blanche at 04.30 hours on 12 November and were over their target at Bône at 08.30. Unbeknown to them, the Germans had the same idea, and a battalion of Fallschirmjäger arrived in their Ju 52s just as the Paras were making their drop. The Germans abandoned their own operation and were redirected elsewhere. The 3rd took their target with little trouble, and more casualties were caused by landing on hard ground than by enemy fire. One man accidentally killed himself with fire from his own Sten gun during the drop and several sustained broken legs. The heaviest enemy fire came from marauding Stukas but the Paras held their position until they were joined by No. 6 Commando, with overhead support from a squadron of Spitfires. The mission successfully completed, the 3rd Battalion pulled out after three days and travelled west to its new position, the village of St Charles, where it was reunited with A Company and the rest of the unit, which had travelled by sea.

Meanwhile the 1st Battalion had made successful drops near the airfield at Souk el Arba and was now given orders to move north to take the town of Beja, 90 miles west of Tunis. There was a dash to prepare for the move. The battalion’s stores, which had come with it by ship, were slow to be unloaded and then had to be broken down and repacked into containers, and parachutes had to be inspected and ammunition sorted. Nor was there much in the way of transport vehicles because ship space had been at a premium owing to the amount of personnel and stores. Even so, as Harold ‘Vic’ Coxen, then a young officer, 2iC (second in command, and later Brigadier) of the 1st Battalion’s T Company, remembers:

The operation was fairly straightforward. If there was a problem, it was that we had no great knowledge of the ground and the only maps available were for tourists travelling by road. The commanding officer rode in the cockpit of the aircraft in front, searching for a flat piece of ground. We had a fairly good drop [there was one fatality: a soldier strangled by rigging that snagged the Dakota’s tail]. We commandeered motor cars and trucks and began our move up to the border between Tunisia and Algeria.

As they reached a strategic crossroads towards Beja, which was the first of their objectives, the battalion was confronted by 3000 French troops heavily dug in around the main approaches and for a while there was an uncomfortable stand-off. ‘We hadn’t taken the French completely by surprise,’ said Coxen, ‘but they had not really decided whose side they were on and were holding a line there largely with their colonial troops.’ Delicate negotiations were pursued and it was clear that the French had been threatened with reprisals by their German-controlled masters if they allowed the Allies to get past them and enter Beja. Lieutenant Colonel (later Brigade Commander) James Hill lied and told the French commander that they were the advance party for armoured divisions advancing towards them at pace. The French stood aside. ‘We stuck ourselves in the middle of them,’ Coxen recalls:

and every time the Germans came close we attacked and the Germans attacked the French and so eventually they put their helmets on and joined us, although a good many of them were somewhat reluctant. We were dropped 400 miles ahead of our ground forces. The objective of our company was to move to confront the Germans, to be a thorn in their side. We were coming in on the flank of them behind their lines; we were there to be a nuisance, which we were in spite of a fairly light weaponry. Our heaviest weapons were three-inch mortars, Vickers machine-guns and Bren guns. The mortars and the machine-guns were difficult inasmuch as that we could only carry a certain amount of ammunition and we had to get resupplied very quickly otherwise we were in trouble.

The first of their operations came in the first 24 hours, when Hill discovered that a German convoy was coming through, as it did most evenings, on its way to Bizerta on the coast. The battalion’s S Company laid a classic ambush and knocked out the entire convoy, killing many of the German soldiers and capturing the rest. Several similar disruptive operations followed against both German and Italian parties, although one of them did not go quite according to plan. Hill had moved the battalion towards a position north-east of Sidi N’Sir, in hilly country beyond Medjez al Bab, where a force of around 350 Italians with a few tanks had been located. Hill’s second in command, Major Alastair Pearson, was to organize a blast of heavy fire from the three-inch mortars while the rest of the battalion and a company of French and Senegalese troops advanced towards the Italian position. Meanwhile a detachment of 27 sappers from the 1st Parachute Squadron Royal Engineers, accompanying Hill’s unit, were to move around and mine the exit roads with No. 75 Hawkins grenades. As the sappers were about to mine the road, there were three explosions – one of the grenades, which were being carried in sandbags, had accidentally detonated, setting off the others in a chain reaction. All but two of the sappers were killed.

The blast also alerted the enemy troops to the advancing British battalion, and what turned out to be a mixed force of Germans and Italians were engaged on a hillside position. Meanwhile Lieutenant Colonel Hill took a small group of men towards the tanks – there were just three – below the main battle position. Leading the section himself, he crept alongside the first tank and stuck the barrel of his revolver into the observation slit and immediately the Italian crew surrendered. He repeated the procedure with the second tank, this time rapping on the turret with the walking stick he always carried and shouting, ‘Come out with your hands up’, which they did. At the third tank, three Germans jumped out, guns blazing, and shot him four times. His adjutant, Captain Whitelock, was also wounded, hit by shrapnel from grenades thrown by the escaping Germans, who were shot or captured. Hill and Whitelock were immediately dispatched to the medics in Beja by a motorcycle and sidecar driven by a team from the 16th Parachute Field Ambulance along a rail track leading to the town. Later, recovered from the wounds, Hill returned to the fray.

Alastair Pearson took over as battalion commander and pursued an equally aggressive policy of assault patrols on enemy positions throughout the regions before they were relieved by the main force and sent back to base to rest and stand by for further orders. Meanwhile the 2nd Battalion under Johnny Frost – now a lieutenant colonel – along with other recent heroes of Bruneval, had been given a much more difficult sector. Whereas the 1st Battalion was moving mostly in hilly terrain, Frost’s group was in open country that was alive with German tanks and a fair amount of heavy artillery. After several false starts he was finally given orders to gather up his battalion, a troop of 1st Parachute Squadron Royal Engineers and a section from the 16th Parachute Field Ambulance, and drop into action, close to a German airfield 40 miles south of Tunis, and blow up any aircraft on the ground.

They were then to advance to Depienne and perform a similar operation, and finally move to a third airstrip at Oudna. Just as they were about to board the 44 USAAF Dakotas revving up on the runway at Maison Blanche, Frost was told that two of the target airfields had just been abandoned by the Germans. The new orders were to drop at Depienne and to destroy enemy aircraft on the ground at Oudna. Then the battalion was to march to a location 30 miles north, towards Tunis, to link up with the 1st Army. Because there had been no time to perform a new recce for a DZ, Frost flew in the cockpit of the lead Dakota with the rookie American pilots, many of whom had never flown on military missions before, to select a new location. He chose a decent site near Depienne and the battalion came down unopposed, though scattered over a couple of miles, and suffered only seven casualties, one of which was fatal.

Frost sounded his hunting horn – a familiar sound to all who travelled with him – to call his men together. They set off on the thrust from Depienne towards Oudna, across difficult terrain and with the soldiers laden down with ammunition and equipment, all of which had to be carried on their backs. The only transport they managed to acquire were some donkey carts. Four miles down the road, a recce team reported a heavy force of Germans blocking their path, so Frost and his men laid up until the early hours, in bitterly cold conditions, and then made a detour.

The objective was to attack the airstrip, not engage a German unit; but in the end they had no choice. The following day, moving en masse through a valley, they came under heavy and prolonged machine-gun fire. Even so, A Company managed to reach the airstrip, but even as they arrived, they were met by an onslaught from six German tanks, strafing attacks from Messerschmitts and finally a bombardment from six Stuka dive-bombers. The spirited response by the battalion and excellent camouflage allowed them to withdraw without great loss, and Frost directed his men towards a good defensive position on the hillside. A recce of the area determined that it was swarming with German units. Frost decided to lie up and try to hold out until the arrival of the 1st Army, which, if all went according to schedule, could surely not be far away.

Unbeknown to him, that plan had already been scrapped and the news was eventually relayed to him over the radio – the 1st Army would not be coming his way; the advance on Tunis had been postponed for two days. Frost blew his top. Macleod Forsyth remembers:

We were really dropped in it. We were constantly told that the 1st Army would be coming up to meet us. But it was the old story: they didn’t and we had to fight our way back to our own lines. The Americans thought they could plant the US flag and the Germans would run away. But the Germans hadn’t read the script. They [the 1st Army] hadn’t moved a damned inch. The Germans were harrying us all the while.

The 2nd Battalion was marooned 50 miles or so behind the enemy lines, virtually surrounded by German heavy stuff, lightly equipped, short of ammunition, food and water and facing a long march to the nearest Allied positions. As the Paras began the journey back to safer territory, Frost decided to head for higher ground, but almost immediately they came under heavy artillery and mortar fire in a fierce battle for the summit of Djebel Sidi Bou Hadjeba. They took positions in rocky terrain, but even before they had a chance to dig in for battle heavy fire was raining down on them. Losses mounted and included the commander of B Company, Major Frank Cleaver, and one of C Company’s platoon commanders, Lieutenant the Hon. Henry Cecil. At nightfall, during a respite, Frost performed a head count: 150 killed or wounded. His force was depleted to such an extent that he decided the only way forward was for each company to move independently towards a village called Massicault, where they would lie up and plan the next stage. He ordered the destruction of the three-inch mortars, for which he now had no ammunition, and the radio sets, whose batteries had expired.

The journey ahead threatened to be so hazardous that Frost decided he had no alternative but to leave the wounded behind and rely upon their being able to make contact with the 1st Army when it eventually arrived. A section of the 16th Parachute Field Force was left behind to attend them, along with a platoon from B Company under Lieutenant Pat Playford for protection.

Frost and his men pressed on, coming under constant enemy fire. They took ten-minute rests wherever possible, but starving and without water, they were soon in bad shape and almost dying of thirst. Macleod Forsyth:

Our battalion commander used his hunting horn when we were ready to move off. That was the signal. And my God, it was a real haul. We lost men simply through exhaustion. We didn’t have much water. I had hallucinations. I looked up at the sky and I could see this big bar and a man pulling pints of beer. Then we came to a river [the Medjerda] and we just marched in and sat down in it. Unfortunately the water was pretty awful, and when we got on the march again, people were vomiting and really suffering. However, we carried on. Frost picked the spot where we would rest up. The Germans knew we were around and were searching for us. We were resting up once when a couple of German soldiers on a motorbike and sidecar pulled up at a farmhouse ahead, questioning the people there if they had seen the British. The coincidence was that after the war, when a group of ex-German soldiers came to a Chesterfield reunion and we were discussing these incidents, one of them said, ‘That was me. I was on the motorbike.’

The force having been split to move in companies, by night, Frost found that his own group, now down to 200 men, was once again confronted by a ring of German forces. He decided to send three men on ahead, led by another Bruneval veteran, Lieutenant Euen Charteris, the 2nd Battalion’s intelligence officer. Charteris was to attempt to make contact with the nearest Allied land force to get help. Frost never heard from the three men again; they were spotted and shot by the Germans before they reached their objective. He decided the only way forward was to try a mass breakout under cover of darkness and to rendezvous on a ridge two miles away. They eventually made it out of the hot zone and, spurred on by Frost’s hunting horn, they arrived at Medjez el Bab two days later with only five rounds of ammunition each. As the remnants of the remaining companies straggled in, the final cost of this appalling excursion was high: overall the 2nd Battalion lost 16 officers and 250 men. The Oudna operation had been a disaster from the start: badly planned by the war managers and doomed from the outset by faulty intelligence which stated that enemy aircraft were parked on the three landing strips they had pinpointed yet overlooked the fact that, in the meantime, these planes might be moved. They were, and not a single enemy aircraft was attacked. Thus a whole battalion was mobilized against a non-existent target and those in command compounded this blunder by demonstrating a complete lack of interest in its fate, effectively leaving it abandoned far behind enemy lines.

Out of this totally unnecessary decimation of the 2nd Battalion came many stories of outstanding bravery, especially by those captured, some of whom managed to escape and return to the fold in dramatic style. Others distinguished themselves in the attempt. Among them was the battalion’s redoubtable Padre MacDonald. He and Lieutenant Jock McGavin, after touching down at Rome en route to their POW camp, set fire to an aircraft while they were momentarily left unattended by their captors. They were about to be shot by angry Italians when a Luftwaffe officer intervened. It was the second time that members of that party of POWs from the 2nd Battalion were saved by a German officer – and as on the first occasion, just in the nick of time.

One of the outstanding stories from that period focuses on another instance where a group of British Paras were saved from execution. This event became something of an obsession in post-war years with one of those who was saved, a tough professional soldier named Gavin Cadden. The author makes no apology for breaking the general narrative to publish Cadden’s recollections here in full for the first time. He had joined the Army in Scotland, signing on with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in 1931. He saw service in India, was demobbed in 1938 and returned home, got married and, when war broke out shortly afterwards, was recalled to the colours. He was in the British Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk and, kicking his heels in the aftermath, he and some chums decided to volunteer for the newly formed Parachute Regiment. He was on the Bruneval raid and was with Johnny Frost again when they set off for Algiers on Operation Torch and were dropped at Depienne at the end of November 1942.

Cadden told his story calmly and quietly, to the point of nonchalance, his tone belying the drama experienced by the party of wounded Frost had reluctantly left behind after the first major confrontation with the Germans:

We were a small platoon because some of our boys never managed to take off from Algiers for Depienne and we were detailed by Lieutenant Colonel Frost to stay behind and guard the wounded until the elements of the 1st Army came up. But, of course, the 1st Army cancelled their advance for 48 hours and that left us out on a limb, 60 miles behind the German lines and they had no way of getting back with our wounded. So we had to stay there, and took up a defensive position. Next day we saw a column coming, advancing towards us about a mile or so away. We knew we were in for it. We took up a position around Depienne village, and our wounded were in the school there – with one dead body. Anyway we were attacked by the tanks and the 5th German Parachute Regiment, and in charge of them was a Lieutenant Colonel Koch and his second in command was Major Jungwirth.

After a short battle – and some of us were wounded, including myself – we were forced to surrender for the sake of the wounded. They’d have all been annihilated. German paratroopers collected all the wounded and with their help we bandaged them as best we could. Lieutenant Colonel Koch meanwhile made off in pursuit of Lieutenant Colonel Frost and his party. They knew all this had been going on. They were watching our drop from two miles away. We actually saw them – three Arabs with a donkey. Little did we know then they were three Germans in disguise and on the donkey’s back was a radio set through which they were giving details of our drop and the number of men. I had chased them away and they were quite happy to get away without a scratch.

And so now we and our party of wounded were left with Major Jungwirth while Lieutenant Colonel Koch attempted to catch up with our battalion, or what was left of it. Jungwirth, in turn, jumped on a tank and left us with a group of Italian soldiers. In due course a German staff car drew up from the road to Tunis and an SS officer got out and surveyed our forlorn group and decided there and then that we should be executed although we had Parachute Regiment regulation dress on. We were marched into a farmyard and lined up against a wall and a machine-gun was placed ten yards from us, and a German or Italian got down and took aim at the first man – which was me – and was going to sweep right down the line.

At that moment, one of our officers, Lieutenant Buchanan, stepped forward and asked the German officer for permission to shake hands with us all before we were executed. Permission granted. So he shook hands with us all and he said: ‘Don’t forget, when I step back into the ranks, give them the V sign and let the bastards see that we’re not afraid of them.’

When he went back into line, we all gave the V sign and the German officer lost his temper and shouted at the gunner to fire. At that very moment Lieutenant Colonel Koch reappeared on the scene, to find out what had happened to his adjutant and the rest of the party. He saw immediately what was just about to happen and even before his armoured car stopped he jumped off, ran across to the execution party, kicked over the machine-gun and pushed the gunner aside, and turned round to the SS officer and shouted at him in German. He turned round to us and said: ‘You’ve no need to be afraid, gentlemen, you are paratroopers and brave men and we’ll look after you safely.’

Lieutenant Colonel Koch put us all on to a German lorry and he got on the top along with us and told the driver to drive into Tunis. We left the dead body behind in the school with the French schoolmaster. But we drove back into Tunis with the wounded and we were put into a fort there. General Nering came out to inspect us. We all stood in line and then we were put in a cell for that night. There were no windows about, so actually we were beginning to think that we were going to be gassed. But in fact the ventilation came through the big door. And after about an hour or so a German came down with a big container of food for us and we settled in for the night.

In the morning they took us in parties of five upstairs for ablutions and we washed and shaved the best we could. The German paratroopers’ sleeping quarters were up there. And the first party were away so long that we began to wonder what had happened to them. The Germans came down for another party of us, the last of us and the officer, Buchanan, and as we walked up and we looked through into the barrack room here were our friends sitting round one of the Germans’ beds – all the Germans were round them – talking about how many jumps they’d done. The Germans were boasting they’d done as many jumps as us. They were giving them cigarettes, they lent us their shaving gear and everything to get cleaned up. They treated us like honoured guests.

The next day we were taken on to an airport in Tunis to be flown to a prison camp in Italy. And while we were sitting in the plane American Lightning bombers came over and bombed the airport and the plane that we were in was raised right off the ground about ten feet and crashed back down again. Some of the ammunition boxes strapped to the side of the fuselage inside fell down on some of the lads and split open their heads. A German medical officer came rushing out in a car and asked if any of us had been wounded or hurt. Anyway, he bandaged some of their heads up and before we took off they gave us life-preservers, life-jackets; they were just fitted on like a waistcoat.

The pilot told us that if we did get attacked by the Americans, which he expected, he would fly low over the water at the first sign of attack and pancake. We were to swim around until we were picked up by rescue launches. The day before we were doing our damnedest to kill one another and now they were doing their best to save our lives. We landed safely in Italy and went to a prison camp nearby called Capua. It was a small tented encampment and the fellows already there were out sitting in the sun, had their shirts off. I went up to one of them and I says, ‘What’s that you’re doing?’ He was delousing and he said, ‘Don’t worry, Jock, tomorrow you’ll be out doing the same as me.’ And as sure as God, the next morning I was. The camp was lousy, in the truest sense.

Fortunately we were moved from that camp after a week and we were put in a top-security place, a new camp that had been built about 500 yards up the road. This place, we noticed, had a big drainage system which started inside the camp. It had an iron grating over it so that you couldn’t get down. We had already formed an escape committee with the officers in charge. We soon found a way of breaking through the grating and pulling it up. It had been newly laid and it led right away out to the main road. Six of us paratroopers decided that we’d get into this drain and crawl along the piping and come out at the main road and make our escape. Little did we know that the piping ran right under the sentry’s box and the sentry heard the scraping of our boots on the concrete pipe above and he gave the alarm. They were waiting at the other end and we were marched back, and sent into solitary confinement.

When we came out, we were kept in a wired compound. We decided that the only way out was to volunteer for a working party. There were about ten of us – and we were to go away to a place called Bergamo, outside Milan, to work in a large factory. It was terrible work, cleaning up old Italian uniforms taken off the dead and wounded in the Abyssinian war. So you can imagine the stench that was coming off the cloth. Civilians would not touch them. We got extra food for it … and it gave us the chance to look around for a new escape route.

Every Sunday we used to get marched out to go to church. I got friendly with the Italian sentries and with the officer in charge – we called him Colonel Pappi. The Germans killed him when they took over the camp because they believed he had been too friendly with the British. The colonel asked if any one of us wanted to go to confession and he gave us a wink. Being a Catholic, I went in and soon discovered that the priest was in the Italian Resistance. I made several visits, over time, and used them to plan an escape.

He promised to give me and one other soldier refuge – he could only take two of us at the church. Several of us planned to escape – to climb the compound wall at the first opportunity and make a run for it; this we achieved on the night of a bombing raid on Milan. The Italian sentries were running about like blue-arsed flies, so it was quite easy to make a break for it. Some of the boys made for Milan and they were caught by the Germans the next day at the cathedral. They were brought out and they were shot just in front of the main doorway of the cathedral. We were told about it by the priest who was hiding us at Bergamo. We were up in the belfry. He brought us up food and water and we stayed there for three weeks. Every night we used to look out of the bell tower and we saw a big glow in the sky – which was Switzerland, 60 miles away. We decided we would try to reach the border and told the priest.

On the following Sunday he brought us down to a café and then took us to a school and he showed us what the Italian Resistance were doing. There were a lot of girls in the cellar of this school. They all had typewriters, copying propaganda against the fascistas and the Germans – young schoolgirls and boys risking their lives every night, distributing their leaflets. That very afternoon a German lorry drove up to the school. A fascista spy had given away their headquarters; we sat, meanwhile, in the café not far away, planning how to get to Switzerland. We heard shooting and there was a panic. The place cleared and I couldn’t get out the front way because of the Germans who were swarming all over the place. I ran to the back door and in panic, tried to bash it open… if I’d looked down I would have seen the bolt. Then, one of the women at the café came and lifted up the bolt and I just flew out into an alley, into the toilets, and closed the door. Within a minute or two there was a knocking, and the Italian woman was saying, ‘Come, come, come!’ We ran into her house, where she told me to get into her bed. I was to be her husband, home from the front and wounded. The houses were being searched and I nearly died when a German officer came in with two soldiers. I was laying in bed, eyes closed. She explained that I had just returned home. They hovered and I was saying to myself, ‘I wish to God that they would give me a burst of bullets.’ You see, the tension was so high I was only hoping he would kill me. But then I corrected myself: it would have meant the woman would have been killed too for sheltering me. Anyhow, the German officer saluted me, saluted the bed and left.

The woman who saved my life wanted me to stay there. She said she would hide me until our troops arrived. Her next-door neighbours were not so helpful. They got to know I was there and they made her send me away; they were right, too. If I’d have been caught there the whole row of buildings would more than likely have been blown up and all these people would have been killed.

Gavin Cadden made his way back to the church and the priest at Bergamo arranged for some clothes to be brought in and eventually for him to be taken to Milan’s main railway station. They got him as far as Lake Como without incident. There he was met by another priest and two young boys and a girl. He was dressed in an old civilian suit which needed some attention because it had become ripped. They took him to a house and the girl patched it up. He stayed the night and the next morning an Italian Resistance man came in and told the priest that they were going to attempt to walk Cadden to the border and get him into Switzerland. Two young girls and two young boys were to go along with him, the girls either side of him, holding each hand as if they were related. They walked boldly up a mountain track to a point where they could see the barrier and border checkpoint. On the other side was Switzerland. Cadden continued his story:

I said to myself, ‘My God, will I ever make it?’ The nearer I got the worse I got… ‘I’ll likely be shot now.’ And here down the path came an Italian sergente. He stopped. Well, he knew right away what it was – and they pleaded with him to let us go on. He looked at us very sternly and it seemed to be touch and go whether he was going to call the sentries and escort us back to the village. But I pulled up my shirt and I showed my tattoo [of the crucifix] and the Italian Resistance member said, ‘Cattolico.’ The Italian sergeant nodded and gave us a sign to carry on. We walked away, up a dirt track, and it came right to the wires; there were sentry boxes 100 yards away. If you touched the wire rather roughly it set off a bell in the sentry box. The two young boys crawled up and dug a hole under the wire and made enough room for me to get through, and they crawled back again. The two girls had been sent back home in case anything happened at the last minute. They kissed me on the cheek and said something about God. The two boys, they risked their lives again … but it didn’t seem to worry them. All they wanted to do was to help the British. They dug a hole big enough for me to get through without touching the wire, and they said, ‘Right, go now.’ I managed to squeeze through without touching the wire. And I was ready to run away and he called me back, this fellow, the head one. What he wanted to do was to shake my hand, and what I wanted to do was to run like hell out of it as fast as I could. But that’s what he wanted to do, shake my hand. So we shook hands all round and I made for the valley.

As I did so, the sentries opened up with their guns. I don’t know if they were aiming at me or making me run faster, but they couldn’t do that; I was already running as fast as I could. I ran down into the valley and there was a Swiss soldier. He took me to a nearby farm and the woman there made me coffee while he called his headquarters. Two armed sentries came up and escorted me down into the town. They were very rough about it. I was put in a cell and still I was not right sure I was in Switzerland until someone came from the British consul and asked me where I’d been. He interrogated me just to make sure I wasn’t a plant. Eventually he said, ‘You’ve done well.’ I replied, ‘Now, how can I get back to my regiment?’ He told me I’d need a good rest before I could think of that. Anyway that was me in my heaven, and looking all round and the people all smiling and walking about the street and not worrying about bombers or shooting.

It was several months before Cadden’s evacuation to England could be arranged. By that time there were a lot of British and American troops coming in and they were all worrying about getting back. He finally made it back to his regiment in early 1944, just before Arnhem. He asked to see his old company commander, Lieutenant Colonel Frost, and to get back among the action. But after debriefing and medical, he was told: ‘You’ve had enough action.’ He was soon taken to hospital and eventually discharged with a full war disability pension, because of wounds to the head and neck and major operations on his ulcerated stomach caused by bad prison-camp food. ‘My gall bladder went missing too, so I came back just a shell of the man and my wife didn’t know me when we finally met up. She just cried.’

But that was not the end of the story, and to complete Cadden’s account we must jump forward momentarily to the post-war years. He could not get out of his mind the bravery of the German officer who had saved him and his colleagues from the firing squad. Determined to try to make contact with Lieutenant Colonel Koch, he made enquiries, only to discover that Koch himself had been shot by the Gestapo for countermanding the order of a senior officer, so allowing British Paras to escape the firing squad despite the fact that Hitler had personally ordered that raiding parties should be shot. When he found out about this, Cadden laid a wreath at the Cenotaph in London and became the first British soldier, or indeed British man, to lay a wreath there in memory of a German officer. For years afterwards he sent anonymously a wooden poppy cross to the West German government to place on Koch’s grave. Cadden never signed his name, but eventually the Germans identified him as the sender through one of the German soldiers involved in the original incident.

The German Embassy in London got in touch with Cadden. Koch’s brother and sister visited him and in 1987 he was a guest of honour at a reunion of the German 5th Parachute Regiment, where he met some of the soldiers who had helped save him. Later he went to visit Koch’s grave in Bonn.

Throughout those years Cadden also worked to establish and maintain contact between German, British and French ex-soldiers and, partly as a result of his efforts, British and German paratroopers initiated an annual meeting of friendship. As he quietly continued these efforts, he learned that he had been selected to receive the Order of Merit, one of Germany’s highest awards, as well as the European Peace Cross for his work since the war in establishing a bond of friendship between the soldiers who had once fought on opposite sides. He refused both honours: ‘I asked them to withdraw my name. I didn’t want any honours. All I wanted was the satisfaction of laying a wreath at the grave of an officer who gave his life for us, and that was a German officer.’