The Nazi Hunters by Damien Lewis Read Free Book Online Page A

hills.
    An even greater concern was that Seymour’s radio had been ensconced within his leg bag, and it too had been smashed upon landing. Bereft of a wireless set, Seymour and his fellows’ very specific mission here was at risk of being rendered all but redundant.
    Seymour was no SAS man. He and his two colleagues – Captain Victor Gough and Frenchman Lieutenant Guy Boisarrie – constituted a highly specialist team only loosely attached to Druce’s force. They were SOE agents, and part of a recently formed unit dubbed ‘the Jedburghs’. The 300-strong unit shared its name with the small Scottish town of Jedburgh, but it had been named largely at random, so as to reveal little of its secretive purpose to a watchful enemy.
    Seymour, Gough and Boisarrie made up a Jedburgh team code-named JACOB. Their specific mission was to link up with the Maquis leadership, serving as what we might today call ‘military advisers’, forming an army of resistance to hit the enemy from within, even as the Allied forces broke out of their beachheads. Indeed, Seymour’s Bergen, like that of his two fellow ‘Jeds’, was stuffed full of hundreds of thousands of French francs: money with which to fund the raising of a bloody insurrection across the Vosges.
    The DZ they had landed upon was controlled by one Colonel Gilbert Grandval, a man of great local prestige and a renowned Resistance leader. Grandval – code-named ‘Maximum’ – commanded a band of fighters a few hundred strong, styled the Alsace Maquis. He’d promised the SOE that some 25,000 men were ready to rise up against the hated Boche. All he needed was the raw hardware – weapons, ammunition, explosives – with which to arm such a force. It was Gough, Boisarrie and Seymour’s task to ensure that he got it, this being the unique role that the Jedburghs fulfilled within the SOE.
    But it wasn’t going to be easy. Deprived as they now were of a radio set, the biggest challenge was going to be communicating Grandval’s needs to SOE headquarters back in London.
     
    Never one to eschew unconventional warfare, Churchill had thrown his weight behind the arming of the French Resistance. In the spring of 1944 he’d ordered arms drops to the Maquis to be greatly increased. He cabled President Roosevelt to inform him that he was keen to raise guerrilla armies across France ‘à la Tito’ – a reference to the then Yugoslavia’s wartime guerrilla leader – and urging the Americans to join the party.
    Responding to Churchill’s prompting, it was to be the Americans who completed the largest of such airdrops. In Operations Zebra, Cadillac, Buick and Grassy, massed ranks of US bombers with fighter escorts had carried out a series of stunning daylight operations. In Operation Cadillac alone, some 300 American Liberator bombers, with P51 Mustangs as escorts, had dropped 400 tonnes of arms to the Resistance forces ranged across the Dordogne.
    Cadillac had taken place on 14 July, Bastille Day – which commemorates the start of the French Revolution and the founding of the French Republic – and the parachutes were symbolically painted in the Tricolour, the colours of the French flag. Brigadier Colin McVean-Gubbins, chief of the SOE, had hailed Cadillac as one of the ‘most important parachute drops of the war’.
    In 1940 McVean-Gubbins – better known to all simply as ‘M’ – had fought rearguard actions in Norway, organizing striking companies to wage a guerrilla war to hold up the advancing Germans: blowing bridges, sabotaging railways and mining roads. Both he and Churchill were diehard advocates of such tactics, and in their minds the French Resistance constituted an ideal guerrilla force in the making – one that would help them wage ‘total war’ against the enemy.
    Which is where the Jedburghs came in.
    Grassy – the most recent mass airdrop – had taken place just four days previous to the Op Loyton advance party being parachuted in. Gough’s