Читать книгу Death Before Dishonour - True Stories of The Special Forces Heroes Who Fight Global Terror - Nicholas Davies B. - Страница 7

SOLDIERS SPECIALLY TRAINED to complement the use of regular armed forces are not a new phenomenon. Military historians have come to realise that over hundreds and even thousands of years groups of highly skilled fighting men have carried out the same type of operations as are entrusted to today’s Special Forces. The Bible recounts how King David’s special soldiers carried out surprise night raids against the Philistines. In the twelfth century the Mongol leader Genghis Khan often sent bands of irregular horsemen on covert missions behind enemy lines.

During the past thirty or forty years, in response to the spread in many countries of terrorism, sedition and underground activities by disaffected groups, the tasks of the modern special soldier have become more demanding, yet his function has remained remarkably constant. Today’s Special Forces soldiers understand that the only ‘special’ part of their role are the particularly demanding tasks that their unit is ordered to carry out, the training necessary to undertake these and the character of the men performing them.

Throughout the world these soldiers are defined by the role they perform and the training they receive. Almost always they operate in small groups, frequently under cover of darkness and often behind enemy lines. They usually rely on the latest technology for both communication and subversive action. The Special Forces soldier therefore has to be skilled in the latest military techniques, which he uses mainly in reconnaissance, raiding missions and other irregular operations.

But Special Forces commanders agree that what is important above all else about this breed of soldier is the character, the quality of the man. Many of them believe that such soldiers are adventurers at heart, men who, having volunteered to take part in daring, front-line actions, can face the prospect of death or injury with equanimity. They look for men who have certain basic qualities – courage, intelligence, tenacity, common sense and, indispensably, a sense of humour.

Colonel Charlie Beckwith, the founder of America’s Delta Force, put it this way, ‘I had to articulate that before a soldier could become a good unconventional soldier he’d first have to be a good conventional soldier. He had to understand what a rifle squad was all about, what a platoon could do, what a rifle company needed to know. You can’t be unconventional until you are conventional first.’

Basic advice to American Special Forces soldiers was laid down in 1759 and remains much the same today. Indeed the original list of instructions is still displayed in some barracks of the US Rangers:

1. Don’t forget nothing.

2. Have your musket as clean as a whistle, hatchet scoured and sharp, sixty rounds of ball ready. Be ready to move at a minute’s notice.

3. When on the march, act as if you are hunting a deer. Get your shot in first.

4. Tell the truth on what you see and do. The army depends on us for information. Never lie to a Ranger officer.

5. Don’t take any chance you don’t have to.

6. When on the march go single file, far enough apart that one shot won’t kill two men.

7. On soft ground, spread out so it’s hard to track us.

8. When we march we keep moving until dark, so the enemy can’t get at us.

9. When we camp, half sleep while the other half watch.

10. Don’t ever march home the same way; take a different route to avoid ambush.

11. In big parties or little ones, keep a scout twenty yards ahead or behind and to either flank, so we won’t be surprised.

12. Every night you will be told what to do if attacked by a superior force.

13. Don’t sit down to eat without posting sentries.

14. Don’t sleep beyond dawn; that’s when the enemy likes to attack.

15. Don’t cross rivers by the regular ford.

16. Ambush the folks that are trying to ambush you.

17. Don’t stand when the enemy is coming against you; kneel down, lie down, get behind a tree.

18. Let the enemy come close, close enough to touch. Then let him have it and finish him off with your hatchet.

Even today most of the world’s Special Forces, including Britain’s Special Air Service, or SAS, and the US Rangers, make use of this wisdom in their operations.

The history of the past few hundred years is dotted with missions undertaken by special soldiers using these tactics, which demonstrates that ambushing and skirmishing can prove highly successful against a large regular army. For example, in the Peninsular War of the early nineteenth century, the Duke of Wellington realised his British forces were not sufficient to tackle Napoleon’s French army and used Spanish irregular forces to harass the enemy. In Spanish, those men were called guerrillas and the name stuck.

A few years later, during Napoleon’s famous retreat from Moscow in 1812, it was Cossack skirmishers who harried and ambushed the great French army as it headed back home through the snow, inflicting far more damage than the regular Russian forces had.

In the American Civil War of 1861–5 both Union and Confederate generals employed skirmishing tactics and used guerrillas behind enemy lines to cause maximum damage with little loss of life. In the Boer War of 1899–1902 the South African Boers used ‘commandos’ – small units of horsemen – to harass the might of the British Army to great effect.

During the Great War of 1914–18, when the massive French and British armies repeatedly failed to penetrate the enemy network of defences in massive frontal assaults, Allied Special Forces played a very limited role in the Allied victory. It was sustained deployment of regular forces, with a huge loss of life on both sides, that eventually defeated the Germans.

The idea of Special Forces remained very much alive, however, not least in Germany. In 1935, two years after Hitler had come to power, a naval captain, Wilhelm Canaris, was appointed Chief of the Abwehr, or Counter-Intelligence. Over the following years, with the prospect of another major war certain, Canaris established a large Intelligence apparatus which included a section responsible for special military units and sabotage. It was within this section that Germany’s first Special Force, the Brandenburgers, came into being on the eve of World War Two. In planning the role of these soldiers, military advisers studied the exploits of Colonel T.E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – during the previous war. They examined how Lawrence and a small, elusive band of saboteurs had been able to create chaos among the Turkish enemy in Arabia, bring confusion to the Turkish forces and win victories out of all proportion to their numbers even though they had no armour, no heavy weapons, no guns and no back-up.

Canaris decided that the new force would consist of small, highly mobile units and that this mobility would be the key to defeating a much larger enemy. He now needed to select the right type of men for the job. Recruits should be men who had lived overseas and been engaged on the land or in open-air activities, where they would have become tough, independent and strong-willed and gained a knowledge of foreign languages, cultures and customs. Naturally these young men should be super-fit, but Canaris further decreed that they should all be volunteers. This rule of accepting only volunteers into the Brandenburg units was to be maintained throughout World War Two.

The first recruits were all racial Germans who lived in German communities outside the borders of the Third Reich. Many lived in small towns and villages close to the German and Austrian borders, where most people spoke German and the language of the neighbouring country, for example, Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia. Indeed Canaris, by now promoted to the rank of Admiral, would boast that there was not an area or country in Europe with which Brandenburgers were not familiar, nor a language they could not speak fluently.

The training was severe. Recruits were taught the usual Special Forces skills, such as parachuting, weapons handling, skiing, marksmanship and the use of small boats and canoes. Their instruction also included fieldcraft, which involved having to survive on food they gathered from the wild. All exercises were undertaken using live ammunition; all recruits were schooled in producing explosives using only flour, icing sugar and potash; and methods of silent killing included the garrotte and the hunting knife. Much of this training was conducted in the coldest weather to hone the volunteers into first-class soldiers and saboteurs capable of spearheading battles, gaining vital objectives and generally seizing the initiative.

There was, however, one major difference between this German formation and most of the other Special Forces that would be created during the next half century. The Brandenburgers carried out many of their operations fully or partly disguised and, in some cases, wearing no item of uniform whatsoever. Full disguise meant that every soldier wore an enemy uniform; partial disguise meant wearing an enemy helmet or trench coat. On some occasions Brandenburgers would wear civilian clothes but carry concealed weapons.

This elite body of fighting men won their spurs in May 1940, during the first vital hours of Hitler’s strikes into new territory. At the forefront of the main German attacks were Brandenburg units tasked with seizing and holding four bridges until the huge conventional forces of Panzer (tank) troops and infantry arrived to drive across the bridges without hindrance.

The ground had been prepared thoroughly. Detachments of Brandenburgers fluent in the languages of the countries to be invaded and disguised as local farmers and peasants had spent the previous three months slipping back and forth into enemy territory to report back to their commanders on enemy numbers and defences. By the time of the invasion the German high command had an intimate knowledge of all aspects of the resistance they would face.

The four hundred-metre-long Gennep bridge, near the Dutch town of that name, carried the railway line from Goch in Germany across the River Meuse and into the Netherlands. The Germans had learnt that the bridge had been primed with explosives which could be detonated by one sentry in a matter of seconds. Senior officers believed that if the Dutch were given time to destroy it the first phase of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg would be a failure. The German plan was for the Brandenburgers to attack and kill the sentries before the bridge could be blown up. This achieved, two fully laden troop trains would cross it and begin the war on the western front.

At midnight on May 9 a dozen Brandenburgers dressed as Dutch military policemen crossed the Meuse two kilometres upstream of the bridge and made their way to the river bank. No one challenged them. At 1 am they were in concealed positions, and remained there until dawn, when they heard the steam trains making their way towards the bridge. As the Germans approached the bridge, the Dutch sentries on duty ran to intercept them, raising their rifles ready to shoot. But the sentries stopped when they realised the six men facing them on the other side of the bridge were wearing the uniform of the Dutch military police. Within seconds the sentries had been grabbed from behind by the Brandenburgers, who slit their throats. The Germans now controlled the eastern side of the bridge.

On the Dutch side of the bridge, other sentries then heard the train approaching from Germany, and they were under orders to blow up the bridge if any trains approached. On duty in the middle of the bridge – from where the explosives could be detonated – was a lone elderly sentry. He watched spellbound as the train approached and before he realised that he should detonate the charge six men had leapt from the slowly passing train. He was killed and the detonator defused. The invasion of the Netherlands had begun without a single German soldier being killed or wounded. The operation, the first major mission carried out by Germany’s Special Forces, had been a complete success. In fact this was only one of the attacks by Brandenburgers in the war’s Blitzkrieg phase, during which the new units proved to be highly effective. The daring of these special soldiers had opened the way for the invading German armoured and infantry divisions to make their extraordinary dash to the English Channel, sweeping aside the defences of western European countries within a few weeks.

Just a few weeks after the invasion, a Brandenburg officer, Lieutenant Klaus Grabert, was tasked with a special mission. He was to select twelve of his best men for an audacious raid which would prevent the Belgians opening sluice gates and flooding the entire area around the town of Nieuwpoort, as this would halt the German advance. Exactly the same strategy by the Belgians had thwarted the Germans in the Great War.

Within twenty-four hours the chosen twelve arrived in Ghent for briefing. Their task was to foil the Belgian plan by capturing the pumping station on the south bank of the River Yser. Belgian army greatcoats and caps had been collected and the men were taken to Ostend in a captured Belgian military bus. In the chaos of the ongoing fighting the bus passed unchallenged through thousands of unarmed Belgian troops who clogged the roads and Ostend itself. Once in the city, a French-speaking Brandenburger asked what was going on and was surprised to hear that the Belgians had surrendered and the British forces had dug in at Nieuwpoort and were still fighting. The Germans also learnt that charges had been laid at the bridge into Nieuwpoort.

The Brandenburgers drove on, though the road was so clogged with traffic, fleeing refugees and Belgian troops making their way back to Ostend that the twenty-five-kilometre journey took four hours. But still no one stopped the bus to ask questions. The British garrison at Nieuwpoort was small, consisting of a few Lancers in armoured cars and some infantry platoons. Heading at speed towards Nieuwpoort behind the Brandenburgers was the powerful German XXVI Corps, which had orders to attack the British forces now concentrating on Dunkirk and wipe them out in the town and on the beaches.

As the sun began to sink in the west the bus arrived at the bridge and immediately came under fire from British troops on the other side of the river who were guarding the vital crossing place. The driver brought the vehicle to a skidding halt on the bridge, swinging it broadside so that it formed a barrier. Out leapt the twelve men, who tore off their Belgian greatcoats and began returning fire with machine guns and rifles.

Lieutenant Grabert and a corporal made a plan of action. The two of them would wait until dark and then crawl across the bridge towards the British position. When they came across any wires which they suspected led to the explosive charges they would cut them and keep moving forward. When they finally reached the other side of the bridge they would open fire with their machine pistols, the signal for the other Brandenburgers to storm across the bridge. On reaching the British side the twelve men would then spread out, shout orders and fire weapons from different angles at different targets, so as to give the impression that they were only the forward unit of a much larger force. It was the sort of desperate, some would say suicidal, gamble that many other Special Forces would copy in future years.

Sliding along on their stomachs, Grabert and the corporal each carried insulated wire cutters in one hand and a machine pistol in the other. It wasn’t long before they discovered the wires leading to the explosive charges. To their anguish, the charges had been fixed to the structure of the bridge, which meant they would have to crawl along the footpath rather than the road. This, they feared, could put the entire operation at risk, because if any Very lights were fired over the bridge and illuminated them, they would be exposed to British fire

Each time a Very light was fired the two Germans froze, praying that the British machine-gunners would not spot them. Sporadically, the British gunners would lay down some rapid fire and these bullets passed only centimetres above the heads of the two Germans. They continued to move forward on their bellies, but only immediately after a Very light had expired, because then there were a few moments of absolute darkness. They discovered another pair of wires and then, some twenty metres further on, a third pair; they cut both. They were now certain they had made safe the bridge and they put the next part of their bold plan into operation.

Sheltering behind a girder near the British-held end of the bridge, they opened fire with the machine pistols, each firing three magazines at the enemy positions. Grabert also threw three grenades at the machine-gun post. At the sound of their comrades’ machine pistols the ten other Brandenburgers leapt to their feet and ran flat out across the bridge, firing as they went.

Sixty seconds later the twelve Germans had formed a group and all began firing at will, hurling hand grenades and causing confusion among the British soldiers. One enemy position after another was taken by storm as the dozen fearless soldiers threw grenades and followed these with rapid machine-gun fire. The tiny group of defenders were soon pushed back from the pump house and three Brandenburgers checked that the sluice gates had not been opened or primed with explosive charges.

Expecting a counter-attack, the twelve men took up defensive positions, but none came. One hour later Grabert and his corporal cautiously moved forward to check the British positions, only to find that the British soldiers had disappeared into the night. Not one Brandenburg man had been killed or seriously wounded and the mission had been a complete success. In a short, sharp mission executed with skill and courage, the twelve Brandenburgers had prevented the Allies from flooding the area along the Flanders coast – and the way was now wide open for the Germans to advance to the Dunkirk beaches some forty kilometres to the south.

Brandenburg units were also used extensively in Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941. Their tasks were made much easier by the fact that Finland had sold Germany scores of tanks, trucks, uniforms and greatcoats captured during its war with Russia in 1939–40. The German high command had listed a hundred separate targets along the Russian frontier which Brandenburg special soldiers could be tasked to take by any means. This would prepare the way for the mass of German armoured and infantry divisions, which could once again employ the same Blitzkrieg tactics as had proved so successful against the western allies. By capturing key airfields, bridges and road junctions, the Brandenburg detachments would allow the Panzer divisions to roll into Russia that much faster.

Being equipped with Russian military vehicles and uniforms made it easier for the Brandenburgers to operate behind the enemy lines. No questions were asked as they went about their clandestine missions inside Russian territory. Indeed the success of the German invasion of Russia was due in large measure to the myriad of missions the Brandenburgers had carried it in those crucial first few days of the offensive.

But there would be further tasks in quite different theatres of war for the Brandenburg units. One such area was North Africa, although no one in the German high command believed this was an ideal location for their particular skills. A German army under the great General Erwin Rommel had been sent to North Africa to support the broken Italian forces, which had been all but crushed by the British army under General Wavell. So fast had been Wavell’s advance against the Italians that most of Mussolini’s so-called African Empire was on the verge of defeat. Rommel saw that what was needed was men with knowledge of Africa from families who had lived and worked in the German possessions in East and South West Africa; Germans who could speak Arabic, Swahili and English and who understood the African way of life. Volunteers were invited to join the Brandenburgers’ new Afrika Kompanie and within weeks sixty former émigrés had been selected and trained. Rommel wanted the Afrika Kompanie to work behind British lines, reporting back by wireless on the location, size and equipment of the British forces they came across.

Small groups from the Afrika Kompanie carried out such operations in the desert, but because most of them were unable to speak English without a distinct German accent, much of the information they gathered was not particularly crucial or even accurate.

However, in 1942 Rommel believed he was on the verge of crushing the British Eighth Army, and he planned, after achieving this, to drive on through Egypt to the Nile and grab the vital link, the Suez Canal. For this campaign he would need skilful Special Forces men. Rommel called the Brandenburg commanders and outlined the tasks he would want the Afrika Kompanie to carry out. Their first task would be to seize the bridges over the Nile and the Suez Canal to prevent their destruction by the British, and then to hold them until Rommel’s Panzer divisions could break through and join up with the Brandenburgers. It was a tough mission but one which never materialised, for General Montgomery would rally his troops, defeat Rommel and his Panzers in the critical battle of El Alamein and then, some three months later, smash the German defences and drive them out of North Africa.

But now, as he faced Montgomery’s Eighth Army, Rommel gave the Afrika Kompanie a new, vitally important but extraordinary task – to locate and trace the route the British were using to supply reinforcements to Montgomery. He had been informed by German Intelligence that the British were landing tanks, guns, small arms, ammunition, spares and other equipment in Nigeria and transporting them across some fifteen hundred miles of rough terrain, as well as the Sahara Desert, to Cairo. Rommel charged the Afrika Kompanie with the task of determining the exact route of this supply line so that it could be harried by German forces and cut.

First, the Afrika Kompanie needed to acquire British vehicles, uniforms and weapons so that any British troops they came across would believe they were members of the British Long Range Desert Group. Most of the route would pass through countries friendly to Britain, so it was necessary for the Germans to portray themselves as British. The Afrika Kompanie also acquired a British Spitfire, which they would use as a long-distance reconnaissance plane as Brandenburgers on the ground made their way from Egypt to Nigeria. The Spitfire, with Royal Air Force markings, would fly several hundred kilometres ahead of the group, circle and return to the Brandenburgers. It was hoped that the aircraft might come across British reinforcements making their way to Cairo and return to the group each day with vital information on such troop movements.

The Afrika Kompanie left Libya with twelve fifteen-hundredweight trucks, twelve half-tracks fitted with two-pounder guns, four jeeps carrying anti-aircraft machine-guns, a staff car, a wireless vehicle, a petrol tanker, a workshop vehicle and a rations vehicle. The column travelled due south to Al Qatrun, some two hundred kilometres from the border with Niger, the country between Libya and Nigeria, and set up their headquarters, which included a communications base and a rough airstrip for the Spitfire. They also left at Al Qatrun two half-tracks equipped with machine guns in case of attack from Arab brigands. They waited four days for the all-important Spitfire to arrive but to no avail. It never turned up, which meant the Afrika Kompanie now had a much more hazardous and difficult task. Apparently, the German aero engineers were unable to get the captured aircraft into the air.

One small group of Afrika Kompanie soldiers drove west from Al Qatrun into Algeria to carry out a recce of the French colony in case supplies for Montgomery’s army were being brought through southern Algeria. Another group drove south-east to the Tibesti mountains in northern Chad. A third group, the largest, would search for supply lines in southern Algeria’s Tassili mountain range, some six hundred kilometres in length and reaching more than fifteen hundred metres in places.

If any of the three groups failed to discover the Allied supply route, their orders were to continue the search, criss-crossing the arid, desolate wastes of the Sahara desert on foot and in the searing heat of summer. All that they managed to discover was that French forces controlled the two mountain ranges. They had found no supply routes and no evidence of one having existed. Rommel was not impressed. The mission was remarkable, however, because it showed the extraordinary resilience, tenacity and adaptability to exceptional circumstances that tough, well-trained Special Forces could display in the most inhospitable terrain.

The final mission of the Brandenburgers in World War Two was a gallant, heroic battle fought with extraordinary courage despite the utter futility of the orders they had been given. The manner in which those men carried out the orders was a magnificent example of bravery, a quality which has continued to characterise special soldiers to the present day.

At the end of March 1945 the 600 Brandenburg Paratroop Battalion was put into the German bridgehead on the eastern bank of the River Oder at Zehdenick, sixty kilometres north of Berlin. For three exhausting weeks the Brandenburgers managed to hold their positions against massed Russian attacks, despite the fact that battalions to the left and right of them had been overrun and destroyed. But, running low of ammunition, the 600 Battalion took a terrible battering and when they finally withdrew there were only thirty-six of the original eight hundred men still alive.

The survivors were reinforced by a few hundred trainees who had been rushed from Berlin in a desperate last effort to push back the Russian advance. Some wounded Brandenburgers rejoined their unit from their hospital beds, so strong was their commitment to their unit. Then the 600 Battalion was ordered to pull back to Neuruppin, some fifty kilometres to the west, and to defend the town to the last man. At dawn on April 3 1945 a single company of eighty-four Brandenburgers was facing two Russian tank divisions and two infantry divisions. It was an extraordinarily gallant defence by Special Forces soldiers under the most extreme battle conditions. The battle raged for eight hours as the Russians sent in wave after wave of tanks, backed up by hundreds of infantry.

After four hours the Germans had used up all their rocket-propelled weapons. In the final hours of this extraordinary battle the thirty surviving Brandenburgers had only hand grenades and satchel charges to hold back more than a hundred T34 and JS tanks. They still had some ammunition for their machine guns and personal weapons to keep the Russian infantry battalions at bay, but even that they had to fire sparingly.

When all their anti-tank rockets had been used, the Brandenburgers adopted a new tactic. They would wait in ditches until the first Russian tanks had passed by and some would then scramble out and on to the rear decks of the vehicles, dropping grenades into the open hatch to blast the crew. Others would run alongside the tanks, planting magnetic, hollow-charge grenades with a nine-second fuse on the sides. Having done this, the soldier would dive back into the ditch to escape the blast before moving on to the next tank.

Sometimes the Brandenburgers would wedge plate-shaped Teller mines between the tank’s tracks and running wheels. These exploded with tremendous force, blowing the tank track apart and rendering the vehicle useless. Some soldiers stopped the advancing tanks instantly by simply flinging their satchel charges under the tracks. Within two hours more than sixty Russian tanks were at a standstill, wrecked by the audacious Brandenburgers.

Five separate assaults were launched by the Russian commanders and five times they were repulsed by the tiny band of men who were taking enormous risks, putting their lives on the line during every enemy assault. Because only some thirty Brandenburgers were alive after the fourth assault, they took up defensive positions only and used only machine guns, sub-machine guns and rifles. The Russian infantry had stopped trying to advance behind the protection of their tanks because they were being mowed down by the Brandenburgers. They let the tanks take the brunt of the German gunfire and waited for the inevitable victory.

Although they knew they were staring death in the face, the Brandenburgers held their ground and their nerve. Somehow they managed to stop the fifth tank assault, and the Russian crews leapt from their tanks and scrambled back to safety as bullets zipped around them. But such a one-sided battle could not last much longer. The sixth tank attack, at dusk, finally overran the German position and, ironically, it was at the very moment of defeat that the Brandenburgers’ commander was given the order by radio to withdraw.

He had only about twenty men left. There were no wounded to take back. As the tiny band struggled away from the area in the darkness, they left behind the hulks of dozens of blazing or burnt-out Russian tanks. It was the final battle of World War Two for the German Special Forces. They had been utterly defeated, but in their defeat their remarkable courage could only be saluted.