May 4, 2020

An Excerpt of Churchill’s Shadow Raiders by Damien Lewis

Chapter 1

The six men were wedged into the aircraft’s narrow hold like the proverbial sardines in a tin. No one ever had parachuting in mind when designing the Armstrong Whitworth Whitley, a medium night-bomber nicknamed the ‘Flying Barn Door’, due to the square, hard-edged – some might argue downright ugly – appearance of the warplane, with its large, angular wings.

Aerodynamic the Whitley was not. Obsolete by the start of the war, by now – 10 February 1941 – the aircraft was increasingly being withdrawn from frontline service. Oddly, airborne operations somehow fell into that category – non-frontline duties – even when, like now, these troops were preparing to parachute some six hundred miles behind enemy lines.

Being one of the earliest airborne recruits, Major Trevor Alan Gordon Pritchard – a long-serving volunteer with 11 Special Air Service – was resigned to the several hours of cramped, freezing conditions that lay ahead, riding the Flying Barn Door. A rare bonus were the inflatable Li-Los – rubber mattresses – with which his men had been issued, to insulate themselves from the cold metal of the fuselage, as they sat nose-to-tail, their backs pressed against one side, their boots jammed against the other.

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From the initials of his first three names – Trevor Alan Gordon – the men had coined the nickname ‘Tag’ for their commander, but it was never one they’d use to his face. Several of Pritchard’s officers were on first-name terms with their men, in keeping with the informal, egalitarian nature of their unit. But Pritchard, a ten-year Army veteran and a tough-as-old-boots regular, was only ever going to be addressed as ‘Sir’ by those under his command.

The product of a typically robust British public-school education, Pritchard had been commissioned into the Royal Welch Fusiliers – an infantry regiment with two-and-a-half centuries of history behind it – but had hungered for more action. In the summer of 1940 Winston Churchill had called for the formation of ‘troops of the hunter class’, to foment ‘a reign of terror down the enemy coast’. Pritchard had answered Churchill’s call, signing up as one of the earliest volunteers. Tonight’s mission was all about making Churchill’s urgings a reality, striking further and harder than had ever been done before.

Tag Pritchard was square-faced, with prominent eyebrows and a solid, level gaze. There was a no-nonsense look about him. An Army heavyweight boxing champion, those who had tried to go twelve rounds in the ring with him had learned to their cost that he didn’t take prisoners. In uniform, he was known as a quiet, somewhat gruff leader; a man of few words, but when he spoke others tended to listen. Out of uniform, he had the one surprising quirk: he was never to be seen without a monocle – a single eye-glass – attached to a long black ribbon. Never one to cuss, Pritchard was known to be fiercely loyal. He was a leader who commanded respect, not one who sought out friendship or affirmation.

Via his earphones, Pritchard listened in on the chat, as the pilot of his Whitley, Wing Commander J. B. ‘Willie’ Tait, chatted to his crew. While the aircraft was hardly state-of-the-art, Pritchard could have no greater confidence in those flying her.

Tait had already won a Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) for the long-range bombing sorties he’d executed over Berlin, rising to command 51 Squadron RAF, the unit tasked to deliver Pritchard and his raiders to target.

The sun was setting over the island of Malta – Britain’s besieged Mediterranean outpost, lying fifty miles off the coast of southern Italy – as Tait and his crew prepared to get airborne, running through their flight-checks with the calm thoroughness that Pritchard had come to expect. On tonight’s mission Tait would earn for himself a Distinguished Service Order (DSO), and by war’s end he’d have won that decoration three times over, plus the DFC twice, making him one of the RAF’s most decorated pilots.

But all of that lay sometime in the future. Tonight, Tait was leading a flight of eight Whitleys packed full of would-be parachutists – plus their loads of weaponry and explosives – into the untested and the unknown. Their mission was fittingly codenamed Operation Colossus, after the ancient mythical god that bestrode the world: it was to be the first ever British airborne raid, no Allied parachutists having ever flown into combat before. As firsts went, Colossus was one hell of an ambitious and daring undertaking, especially when launched from aircraft such as these.

Due to a design quirk, the Whitley flew with a pronounced nose-down attitude, making the hold pitch at a bizarre angle, like the deck of some storm-tossed ship. With no viable side-door, the only means for the men to exit was via a dark, narrow hole sunk into the floor of the fuselage. Under normal conditions, that hole would have contained a ventral gun-turret, one from which one of the Whitley’s crew could unleash fire. But in winter 1940/41, desperate times called for desperate measures. With no other planes available to raise Britain’s fledgling airborne forces, the Whitley’s gun-turret had been removed and replaced with a round dustbin-like jump tube.

Leaping through it was not without its dangers, so much so that those who were forced to train on the Whitley had come to refer to the aircraft as the ‘Flying Coffin’. Jumping with too much enthusiasm risked smashing one’s head against the far side of the hole, nicknamed – with typical fatalism – the ‘Whitley kiss’. Conversely, leaping with too little vigor risked the paratrooper getting jammed in the hole, complete with all his airborne and combat paraphernalia. The Whitley was known as ‘The Elephant’ by those who were forced to jump from her, the hole via which they exited earning a very obvious associated nickname.

But as Wing Commander Tait brought the Whitley’s twin Rolls-Royce Merlin engines up to speed, readying the aircraft for take-off, Pritchard felt a certain sense of confidence. He was commanding a force of thirty-six men, some of the British Army’s finest, deemed ‘capable of the greatest bodily and mental strain’. Of the thousands who had stepped forward to answer Churchill’s call, less than 5 per cent had made it through to the Commandos and associated outfits, including No. 11 Special Air Service.

From that elite group, Major Pritchard had had the luxury of hand-picking his team. He’d done so in a manner designed to foster the independence and self-reliance for which such outfits were becoming famed: he’d selected five junior officers, each of whom was allowed to pick his best operators in turn. All had to be volunteers.

In early January 1941 the 450 men of 11 SAS had been called on parade. An operation was being planned with ‘the intention of penetrating deep into enemy territory’, they were told. It was ‘top-secret’ and they were honour-bound ‘not to speak a word of it to anyone’. The chances of coming out alive were slim, and any captured might well be shot as spies. Those who wished to volunteer were asked to take one step forwards. Every officer and man did just that, as if in one smooth movement. It spoke volumes about 11 SAS and the incredible esprit de corps that had been fostered.

A period of intensive training had followed, as from those several hundred volunteers Pritchard’s cadre of raiders – codenamed X Troop – had taken shape and been formed. Despite the icy conditions, the average day began with pre-dawn PT, daily runs, and fifteen-mile fast marches under full loads of kit. Nights were occupied with shooting practice using the kind of weapons the raiders would take into action: the Colt automatic – ‘Browning’ – handgun, plus the iconic ‘Tommy Gun’, the favoured weapon for Allied special forces.

Although it was a twenty-year-old design, the American-made Thompson sub-machinegun was famed for its reliability and its pure grunt and punch. Synonymous with gangsters and the mafia, it had earned various nicknames – ‘The Annihilator’, the ‘Chicago Piano’, the ‘Chopper’ and the ‘Trench Sweeper’. Fitted with a 30-round stick magazine, or a 50-round drum, it spewed out its heavy, .45 calibre rounds at over 800 per minute. It wasn’t lightweight and it wasn’t particularly accurate at over 150 yards, but at close quarters it was lethal.

Specialists drew up a diet to maximize stamina and build up reserves of energy. Bespoke rations were manufactured for the first Allied airborne raiders to take into battle. They included slabs of ‘pemmican’, a concentrated mixture of meat fat and protein, which could be boiled in water to make a thick, sludgy ‘porridge’. Pioneered as a food for Polar explorers, each raider was to carry two pounds of pemmican per day, the standard cold-climate ration.

Once the X Troopers had exhausted the opportunities at their para-training school, they were shipped north to the Scottish Highlands. There, the Lovat Scouts had put them through a course of Irregular Warfare, based at a country house a few miles from Fort William, on the rugged western coast. Formed during the Boer War in South Africa, the Lovat Scouts had drawn recruits from the gamekeepers of the Highland Estates. Experts in fieldcraft, survival and mountain warfare, their first commander, American Major Frederick Burnham, had described the Scouts as ‘half-wolf, half-jackrabbit’.

Their official motto was ‘Je suis prest’ – an archaic spelling of the French for ‘I am ready’. The unofficial motto coined by Burnham was: ‘He who shoots and runs away, lives to shoot another day.’ The British Army’s first ever snipers – or ‘sharpshooters’ as they were then called – Lovat Scouts had served in the First World War with distinction. The Scottish Highlands were not too dissimilar to the kind of terrain that Pritchard’s SAS were about to deploy to, and they were there to learn how to fight and survive in such an environment.

On meeting their first Lovat Scout instructor, a grey-haired and gnarled figure, he had announced enigmatically that they’d just ‘go for a wee walk together’. Many of the younger SAS men had scoffed. ‘Don’t worry, Dad,’ one of the upstarts quipped, ‘we’ll wait for you at the top.’ When they finally reached the summit of Ben Nevis, that ‘father figure’ was waiting for them, quietly puffing away on his pipe.

‘What kept ye?’ he enquired. Then he told them to do it all over again, only quicker this time.

Self-reliance was as crucial as toughness and aggression, for the kind of mission that was coming. The raiders were taught to be happy with only themselves for company in the mountains. ‘Fight and survive alone, if you are separated from your mates,’ was the order of the day. They were taught to track and kill a wild animal. ‘If you can stalk a deer, you can hunt a man,’ one veteran Scout told them.

The training was unrelenting. A ‘day off’ involved just a ‘wee run’ to the summit of Ben Nevis. Finally, two middle-aged Scotsmen arrived at the camp. One was short and portly, the other tall and beanpole-like and both were dressed in smart suits. They looked like . . . accountants. What on earth were they doing there, the X Troopers wondered?

The two mystery figures introduced themselves as William Fairbairn and Eric Sykes. Appearances can be misleading: they were both former policemen from the tough streets of Shanghai, then an Anglo-American colony. Fairbairn and Sykes taught the skills they’d learned at close quarters in China’s largest city: knifefighting, hand-to-hand combat, and how to wrest a pistol from an assailant before he even had a chance to fire.

They taught to kill using fair means or foul; via the back of the hand; via a matchbox even. Their weapons – knives, pistols – were kept concealed beneath a jacket until the last possible moment, so the enemy had no idea what was coming. ‘Remember, gentlemen, go for the ears, eyes or testicles,’ was one of their oft-repeated refrains.

The men of X Troop returned to their airborne school feeling invincible. There they learned how to execute night-drops, parachuting under cover of darkness. Training was unrelenting, and one man was to pay the ultimate price. On 22 January Sergeant Dennis found himself drifting in strong winds towards an ice-covered lake, lying to one side of the landing zone. Despite efforts to avoid it, he cracked into the ice, plunged into freezing water and mud, becoming stuck fast. In spite of being a strong swimmer, he was unable to free himself and drowned before help could reach him.

Operation Colossus had claimed its first victim, and before they’d even got boots on the ground. Shaking off the dark shadow cast by Sergeant Dennis’s death, the X Troopers were charged to put on a show for the top brass, to demonstrate just what Britain’s airborne forces might be capable of. They were to drop over Salisbury Plain and seize an ‘enemy-held position’ – in reality a quaint Wiltshire village manned by regular infantry.

Landing barely yards from the observers, the paratroopers were in no mood to waste time, let alone their newly acquired Lovat Scout and Fairbairn-Sykes training. They commandeered a vehicle at knifepoint, which just happened to be a top VIP’s limousine, forcing the chauffeur to drive them to the village. Using that as their Trojan Horse, plus a truck in which to hide under a tarpaulin, they surprised the defenders and liberated the village in short order.

The limousine happened to belong to Prince Olaf, the Crown Prince of Norway, who was in Britain to lead the Norwegian Government in exile, acting as a rallying point for the Norwegian resistance. Watching the demonstration along with a score of field marshals and top generals, Prince Olaf had been delighted at the theft of his vehicle, buying the raiders a celebratory round of pints in the village pub.

A few select and trusted journalists had been invited to the demonstration, although they would not be permitted to report on it for some months. One would write: ‘Our parachute men are, as might be supposed, of considerable resource, initiative and daring. Some of the men who came down near me were busy “inducing” the driver of Prince Olaf of Norway’s car at bayonet point to take them across the country. The men certainly looked pretty tough.’

Just how ‘tough’ and ‘daring’ they were was about to be tested in the hostile skies and over the snow-bound mountains of Italy, then the heartland of Fascist Europe. For the mission, two of the eight Whitleys were slated to carry no parachutists. Instead, their bomb racks would be loaded with 7,000 pounds of munitions. They were to fly diversionary raids, hitting targets adjacent to the paratroopers’ landing zone. That way, if the fleet of aircraft was heard passing overhead, the enemy should conclude it was simply a bombing raid.

Whitleys had flown bombing missions over Italy before, so the ruse had form. On the night of 11/12 June 1940, just hours after Italy had sided with Nazi Germany, declaring war on Britain, the RAF had mounted Operation Haddock, a fleet of Whitleys bombing the northern cities of Turin and Genoa, via a refuelling stop in the Channel Islands, which at that point still lay in British hands.

As the Whitleys prepared for take-off from their Malta airstrip, Wing Commander Tait testing his engines’ thrust against the aircraft’s brakes, Major Pritchard tried to make himself as comfortable as possible, straightening his para-smock (then called a ‘jumping jacket’), and adjusting the lie of the parachute at his back, but at five-foot-ten and with the broad physique of a rugby player and boxer, it was never going to be easy.

When Pritchard, a real lion of a man, had volunteered for airborne operations, some had suggested he was too bulky for parachuting. He had gone on to prove them wrong. As with all his men, he would leap through the Whitley’s narrow tube unburdened by most of the paraphernalia of war. All he had strapped to his person was a pistol, a Commando knife, a water bottle, and a small backpack containing basic rations. Everything else that he and his men needed for the raid – Bren guns, Tommy guns, grenades, high explosives – was packed into containers held in the Whitley’s bomb-racks, to be released by parachute.

There were certain other top-secret devices secreted on Pritchard’s person, but they were invisible to even the closest scrutiny. A few days prior to leaving the UK, the raiders’ battle tunics had been taken away, so that covert items could be hidden among them. Each man had 50,000 lire – a veritable king’s ransom in Italy – sewn into either the collar or the waistband of his tunic, plus the officers were given a fistful of gold sovereigns, so they could buy their passage through any territory no matter what the local currency.

In the seam above the left breast pocket was sewn a tiny, flexible hacksaw blade, and in the lining of the sleeves were hidden two silk escape maps, each a foot square – one showing the northern part of Italy, the other the southern half. Each had a metal collar stud, which, when the white paint was scraped off the underside, would reveal a tiny, but usable, compass.

As the Whitleys began to move, taxiing towards the runway, Pritchard took a firmer grip of his core of inner calm, reflecting upon the naming of their mission: Operation Colossus. It was peculiarly appropriate: tonight’s raid was, by anyone’s reckoning, a colossal undertaking.

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About CHURCHILL’S SHADOW RAIDERS: The Race to Develop Radar, World War II’s Invisible Secret Weapon –

From award-winning war reporter and internationally bestselling author Damien Lewis, a blistering account of one of the most daring raids of WWII—and the top-secret weapon that changed the course of history. Based on the never-before-seen World War II archive of those who masterminded Britain’s air defenses, Churchill’s Shadow Raiders reveals the untold story of Operation Colossus – the Allies first successful airborne raid, and the forgotten heroes of World War II.

About the Author:

Damien Lewis is an award-winning historian, war reporter, and bestselling author. He spent over two decades reporting from war, disaster, and conflict zones around the world, winning numerous awards. He has written more than a dozen books about World War II, including The Ministry for Ungentlemanly Warfare, The Dog Who Could Fly, SAS Ghost Patrol, and The Nazi Hunters. His work has been published in over forty languages, and many of his books have been made, or are being developed, as feature films, TV series, or as plays for the stage. Visit him online at DamienLewis.com.

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This excerpt from Churchill’s Shadow Raiders has been sponsored by Kensington Publishing Corp., New York, NY. Photo Credit: Andrew Millard