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

Team Jacob had been sent in with clear instructions to launch an Operation GRASSY for the Vosges. They’d been met on the ground by the 800-strong force of the Alsace Maquis, but only fifty of them appeared to be armed, and mostly with obsolete French rifles somehow kept hidden from the Germans during four years of a brutal occupation. There was clearly a great deal of work to be done.
    Team Jacob was typical of the Jedburghs’ make-up – a three-man unit, including a native French speaker (Boissarie), a radio specialist (Seymour) and an officer, Captain Gough. Many of the Jed teams would be Anglo-American in composition, because the Jedburghs were in part an American innovation. The Americans had recently formed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was loosely based upon the SOE model, and the Jedburghs were a joint SOE-OSS enterprise.
    The Jeds – like the SAS and the Phantoms – were a wholly unorthodox lot. One of their oldest recruits was also one of their most renowned. At fifty-something, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Hutchinson had had an eventful war already, being captured and escaping at least once. Fearing the enemy would possess a photo of him, Hutchinson not only adopted a nom de guerre , but he went as far as altering his face with plastic surgery, subjecting himself to a ‘nose job’, and getting a piece of bone removed from his hip and grafted onto his chin to alter his profile. His appearance suitably disguised, Hutchinson would lead one of the first Jed units into action in France.
    In essence, the Op Loyton advance party was a classic Special Forces unit of the time: the Jedburghs, tasked to link up with the Maquis; the Phantoms, tasked to establish communications with London; and the SAS, tasked to fight the enemy.
    The 26-year-old Captain Gough was a typical Jedburgh. Dark haired, dark eyed and of mesmerizing appearance, Gough had spent the early part of the war in a shadowy force known as the British Resistance Organisation (BRO). The BRO was an early brainchild of McVean-Gubbins, and its remit was to wage a war of resistance should – as had seemed likely in 1940 – the Germans invade mainland Briton.
    In essence, the BRO was a very British version of the Maquis. The BRO fighting units were made up of those who knew the countryside intimately – gamekeepers, poachers and agricultural workers – with caches of arms and explosives hidden throughout the forests, dells and dens of the mother country. There were a smattering of professional soldiers serving as a leadership cadre, and Gough – a country lad born and bred – had been one of those.
    As the threat of invasion had receded, Gough had cast around for a new role, finding his way into the Jeds. He had received a fine education, first at Hereford Cathedral School and then Temple Technical College, Bristol, where he trained as a mechanical engineer. Something of an amateur cartoonist, it was Gough who had designed the Jedburghs’ distinctive cap badge, which consisted of a pair of white parachute wings flanking a red disk, with the letters ‘SF’ (for Special Forces) stamped in silver across it.
    In his recruitment questionnaire Gough had stated his hobbies as ‘Wireless, Riding and Shooting’. He also expressed interest in learning foreign languages, undertaking ‘outdoor work’ and ‘going abroad’. In getting recruited into the Jedburghs and deployed on Op Loyton, it seemed as if – for now, at least – all of Gough’s Christmases had come at once.
    During their rigorous pre-deployment training, the Jeds had adopted their own battle cry: the very un-British sounding ‘Some shit!’ It had been inspired by a bunch of American recruits who were put through the brutal selection course at the grand, 600-acre country estate of Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire. Jed selection had a very high dropout rate, and anyone stepping out of line was forced to perform rigorous PT exercises. The American recruits had responded to