Into combat, part 2: from France to Germany
Operation Tarbrush, which both Hilton-Jones and Lane were awarded the Military Cross for, was the last stopover on the way to the Allied landing in Normandy and the opening of a further Western Allied front – after Italy – against the German Reich. The experience gained in the Mediterranean theatre was very valuable regarding the way how the troop should be deployed as part of Operation Neptune, the Allied landing in Normandy. In order to make optimum use of the unit’s skills – interrogating enemy soldiers immediately after their capture on the front line and communicating with them in regional German dialects, as well as interpreting enemy documents, markings on roads and enemy vehicles, or military abbreviations on signposts immediately and correctly – its members were once again assigned to other units. A total of 40 men – according to other accounts, 43 soldiers and one officer or 45 men are said to have been present on D-Day – were evenly distributed between the two participating Special Service Brigades with their total of eight commandos.
However, the operations in Normandy took its toll of blood, both among the troops as a whole and among the Austrians. Max Laddy, deployed with No. 47 (Royal Marine) Commando, who had once been shipped to Australia on the Dunera for internment and whose daughter was to be born a month later in Aberdyfi, and Ernest Webster did not even reach the beach on 6 June 1944 and were killed in the landing craft. Richard Arlen alias Richard Abrahamowicz, a Jewish sports teacher and boxer from Vienna and also a “Dunera Boy”, assigned to No. 45 (Royal Marine) Commando of No. 1 Special Service Brigade, was killed a day later during combat operations in Merville-Franceville-Plage when he approached the enemy with a white flag in order to persuade him to surrender.
Deployment also ended tragically for Eugene Fuller alias Eugen Kagerer-Stein, who was born in Czernowitz and grew up in Vienna and was also assigned to No. 47 (Royal Marine) Commando. A daredevil like Richard Arlen, he is said to have stood in the bow of the landing craft “as if he were on the ghost train in the Prater”, the famous amusement park in Vienna, and cheered on his comrades with shouts of enthusiasm. As exaggerated as this portrayal may seem, Fuller, who was a used car dealer with the typical Viennese sort of humour and who had been in England for professional reasons already before the German annexation of Austria, had stayed there and had also completed SOE training before being transferred to No. 3 Troop, was certainly not an introverted character. And he knew how to use his communication skills in battle, for example by “attacking” the crew of an enemy gun position not with a weapon but with words and actually persuading them to surrender. This episode – which is repeated in variations – shows that the men of No. 3 Troop were not so much Jewish angels of revenge à la Inglourious Basterds but were actually able to save lives thanks to their linguistic skills, both on the Allied and the German side. However, the fact that this also required a portion of luck and that this luck could desert the men at any time can also be seen in the fate of “Didi”, as Fuller was called by his comrades. After he had fallen into the hands of German soldiers twice in succession, but had managed to escape again, he volunteered for a reconnaissance mission to direct American bombers to a heavy German gun and take it out. To this end, Fuller hid near the target with a radio on 13 June 1944, passed on the coordinates – and was killed by a U.S. bomb that was dropped too soon.
Peter Masters and Peter Terry had more capable “guardian angels”. Masters had landed on Sword Beach with the bicycle troop of No. 6 Commando and was later shot at while trying to persuade a German position to surrender without cover. Terry, as part of No. 47 (Royal Marine) Commando, had also been entrusted with reconnaissance tasks, temporarily in a team with Fuller. Among other things, he took a group of around 20 enemy soldiers into custody near the village of La Rosière, who turned out to be Poles in German uniform. On the evening of 6 June, his unit had to retreat after fierce fighting with German paratroopers, during which he was shot in the left leg and later even caught up in an ambush. Terry was now threatened with becoming a prisoner himself, but he managed to hide in a house where the residents tended to his wound. The next day he was able to reach the Allied lines and was evacuated to England actually against his will, but returned to France and No. 47 (Royal Marine) Commando after a short time – only to be wounded again in fighting near Sallenelles on 23 July 1944, and this time much more seriously than the first time. A projectile, probably fired by a British soldier, hit him below the left shoulder. Terry survived, but for him the fighting was over for good. He was categorised as “medically unfit” and discharged from the Army in December 1944.
However, the losses suffered by No. 3 Troop in Normandy were not limited to the ranks. If Hilton-Jones had only asked his men to do things in training that he himself had done, it was no different in the actual operations. On 12 June, a group of the troop, including Peter Masters, infiltrated the village of Bréville under the skipper’s leadership in order to launch the general attack on the settlement. The team completed the mission unscathed, but three days later, while attempting to infiltrate three members of the Résistance into the fiercely defended village of Varaville for reconnaissance purposes – again with the help of Masters – Hilton-Jones was seriously wounded by a shot in the stomach and taken prisoner. It was probably due to his tremendous tenacity that he held out long enough to be taken to a German military hospital and treated by a surgeon who probably saved his life. Back on the road to recovery, he was finally liberated by British troops when they overran the military hospital in August 1944.
Taking part in Operation Neptune and Operation Overlord, No. 3 Troop had finally passed its baptism of fire – and it was to remain the most casualty-laden part of its history. Of the members of the troop who were deployed in the Normandy landings, more than half – 27 – were either killed, wounded or captured. Of the original core of the unit – those eight men who had come together in July 1942 – only one (Latimer) was still fully fit for duty two years later and another was working as a storekeeper (Platt); the rest were also either dead (Bate and presumably Leonard), wounded (Hilton-Jones) or in captivity (Lane, Rice, Smith). Despite this actually disastrous outcome – or perhaps precisely because of it, as it demonstrates the unit’s willingness to sacrifice and suffer – it continued its work with the support of new recruits such as the Viennese Henry Roberts (Heinrich Riemer) and Bertram Stevens (Berthold Silberbusch), who joined in September 1944, and under the leadership of the German-born James Griffith (Kurt Glaser), who had just been promoted to lieutenant and had attended officer’s school on D-Day, replacing the convalescent Hilton-Jones. Other significant stages on the way to defeating the Third Reich after the breakout from the bridgehead in Normandy were the battle for the strategically important Walcheren peninsula in the Netherlands at the beginning of November 1944, in which the Austrian Robert Hamilton alias Salo Weich was killed, and the crossing of rivers such as the Rhine, Weser and Aller after the advance into German territory.
On the Aller, Griffith fell victim to a German sniper just a few weeks before the end of the war, and on the Weser (according to other sources also on the Aller), Ian Harris alias Hans Hajos from Vienna, who had already been wounded several times in Normandy, suffered the loss of an eye on 6 April 1945 after a daring action. The letter accompanying the Military Medal he received for this reads: “[Corporal] Harris was always to the fore seeking to engage the enemy at close range with his Thompson Machine Carbine. […] The courage of this [non-commissioned officer] has seldom been surpassed”. This was indicative of the pattern of how the unit operated, which remained the same from the beginning: it was split up among other commandos to spearhead the British attack on a specific target or for reconnaissance missions by day and night, while its members continued to act as translators and interrogators of prisoners of war directly amidst the battle. Film footage by the British Army (starting at minute 1:56) impressively shows how a cheerful Harris sitting in a jeep – before he was seriously wounded on the Weser – let a column of German soldiers, whom he had previously persuaded to surrender, march into captivity. Another Austrian, Kenneth Clarke alias Kurt Goldschläger, saw action in Osnabrück as well, although he did not serve in No. 3 Troop, but with one of the Dutch troops of No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando. While the city was actually little contested, the enthusiastic swimmer and water polo player, who is even said to have been a member of the respective Austrian national teams before the German annexation of Austria, was ambushed together with his unit in early April 1945. A daring Clarke succeeded in organising reinforcements and medical supplies by bicycle, for which he later received a commendation.
One month later, the members of No. 3 Troop witnessed the end of the war together with the units to which they were assigned in various locations in now defeated Germany or in Italy. On 8 May, the headquarters with three officers and 26 men was located with No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando in the Hamburg district of Niendorf, where it remained stationed for the time being and was partly responsible for military government affairs in the district of Eutin in Schleswig-Holstein. This was accompanied by a sometimes radical change in the duties of the individual soldiers – the Tommy Gun, which was popular with the commandos, was no longer needed. For some, army service was soon to end anyway, some were transferred to the translator pool of the British Army of the Rhine, which in principle emerged from the 21st Army Group in August 1945. For others, the focus was on the hunt for war criminals or on the denazification process. That was true for Keith Douglas (Kurt Dungler) in the Disbandment Control Unit (DCU) or for Robert Kent (Robert Karpeles) and Charles Mackay (Karl Krumbein), who had only joined the troop in November 1944, in the Field Security Section (FSS) of the Intelligence Corps. With the Commando Interrogation Team, there was a proper FSS unit headquartered in Hamburg that was apparently made up exclusively of members of No. 3 Troop – but in which the Austrians were clearly underrepresented compared to the Germans, possibly for geographical reasons. Of the 15 men assigned to the Commando Interrogation Team in February 1946, Kent was the only one from Austria. Taking part was also the Sudeten German Latimer who thus had the honour of being the only member of No. 3 Troop to serve continuously in an operational capacity from its formation in July 1942 until the immediate post-war period. The tasks of the team as well as FSS teams 346, 347 and 348 – the genesis of which is somewhat unclear due to a lack of records, but FSS team 346 appears to have emerged from the Combat Interrogation Team – included the screening of 250,000 German prisoners of war before their release from the Rheinberg and Wickrathberg camps, the search for underground groups resisting the Allied occupation, or the denazification of parts of the German industry. Targets included the Benzene Association, the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate and the headquarters of the steel manufacturer Krupp.
Geoff Broadman, on the other hand, was one of the few Austrians in No. 3 Troop to return to his old home. The former judoka and close combat instructor of the troop may have initially returned to his native Vienna – without, however, finding his parents Emilie and Viktor at their old address in Josefinengasse in the second district, who had been deported and killed by the Nazis in October 1941. From February 1946 at the latest, he was stationed in Carinthia, where he worked for the British military government in Spittal an der Drau in “Public Safety” and also as a ski instructor for the West Yorkshire Regiment until the early 1950s. He also partake in army ski races himself and often won them, including the Inter Service Championship in St. Moritz in Switzerland – his obvious affinity for winter, snow and cold means that the idea that he could have been involved in the aforementioned failed Commando attack on the heavy water production plant in Vemork, Norway, in 1942 is not so far-fetched.
Back to No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando: it had already been disbanded on 4 September 1945, including its “British” Troop – thus, probably one of the most remarkable chapters of the British Army’s history in the Second World War had been officially closed. Of course, the events described on the previous pages were not the only ones in which the members of No. 3 Troop had become involved, and they were certainly not the only missions of this kind undertaken by British forces during the Second World War. Similar operations also took place in North Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia, carried out by legendary units such as the Long Range Desert Group, the Special Air Service or the Special Boat Service, but also by the lesser-known Special Investigation Group, the 21st and 22nd Independent Parachute Companies or the (almost) all-Jewish No. 51 Middle East Commando. Among their members, there were Austrians-in-exile as well – but this story will be told another time.
