Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII by Damien Lewis Read Free Book Online Page B

embarked upon it. The entirety of his officers and crew would be left believing they were tasked to intercept a genuine ‘enemy flotilla’, and heavily-armed boarding parties would be sent to disarm and subdue all aboard.
    Once the three ships had been ‘seized’, the captain of HMS
Violet
was to send a coded radio message: ‘Postmaster Successful’. That would trigger the next stage of the cover story, to be orchestrated from London. The BBC would broadcast a story in English, Spanish and Portuguese, based upon a press-release issued by the Admiralty. It would detail how three enemy vessels had been intercepted by a Royal Navy warship. The crews had mutinied due to poor pay and conditions in Fernando Po, and the vessels had been seized as prizes of war.
    *
    The success of this clandestine raid, and of the cover stories, was of paramount importance. In recognition of this, during recent weeks M had visited the
Maid Honour
Force at their Poole base on numerous occasions. As a result, he was convinced that if anyone, March-Phillipps and his crew had the training, the skills and the sheer guts to pull off such a mission.
    However, the Admiralty remained suspicious of a force that it viewed as something of a ‘loose cannon’. Shortly before the
Maid Honour
’s departure Ian Fleming had been sent down to Poole to do his own investigation. Whatever Fleming’s conclusions about
Maid Honour
Force, the Admiralty had chosen not to stand in the way of their setting sail for Fernando Po – perhaps believing the raiders could do little harm if sent off on such a harebrained scheme so far from home.
    Yet, as the
Maid Honour
made her way towards her target, other powerful forces conspired to block her path. Admiral Willis, the Navy’s overall commander in the South Atlantic – the waters through which the Q Ship was steaming – was not best pleased upon learning of her coming mission. General Giffard, the British Army’s overall commander in West Africa, was even less enamoured with the proposed raid on Fernando Po. Both commanders bemoaned the potentially ruinous ramifications should Operation Postmaster fail.
    Even as the
Maid Honour
sat becalmed off West Africa, General Giffard and Admiral Willis made it clear to London that in their view the risks were unacceptable, and neither commander had much if any desire to assist with such an undertaking – one that might turn the very fortunes of the war.
    Of course, for those crewing the
Maid Honour
the consequences of failure would be far more immediate and deadly. Perhaps inevitably, some twelve months on from its formation the existence of the SOE had become known to Hitler, as had its mission to send agents deep into enemy territory. In a chilling order issued in response to its earliest activities, Hitler decreed that SOE operatives and their resistance colleagues were to disappear into the
Nacht und Nebel
– into the Night and Fog.
    Captured SOE operatives were to be shown no mercy. After unspeakable torture, they were to be hanged – on specific instructions issued by the Führer – using piano wire, to make their deaths as slow and degrading as possible. The aim of this was two-fold: one,
pour décourager les autres
; and two, to extract every last drop of intelligence from those agents, to aid in the tracking down of their SOE colleagues.
    As the
Maid Honour
lay becalmed with a warship fast approaching, her crew feared they were about to disappear into the night and the fog.

Chapter Four
    March-Phillipps – the man braced at the
Maid Honour
’s wheel urging his men to a spirited, if hopeless defiance – was also known as SOE agent W.01. ‘W’ stood for West Africa, the region to which he was deployed, and ‘01’ denoted that he was the first SOE agent assigned to that territory. The ‘0’ prefix also signified that March-Phillipps was a ‘zero’-rated agent, meaning that he was trained and licensed to use all means to liquidate the enemy.
    But right now