The Maid Honour, a 65 ton Brixham yacht trawler, left Poole harbour on 9 August 1941, bound for West Africa. [5] The five man crew were under the command of Major 'Gus' March-Phillipps. [6] The remainder of the SSRF under the command of Captain Geoffrey Appleyard had departed earlier aboard a troop transport ship. On 20 September 1941 after six weeks under sail the Maid Honour arrived at Freetown, Sierra Leone. [7] Freetown was the agreed rendezvous for both groups, Appleyard's party having arrived at the end of August. [7] After the Maid Honour's arrival in Freetown the search for the German submarine bases started. Sailing into the many rivers and deltas in the area, they failed to locate any submarines or evidence of a submarine base. [6] In his last novel, Ace High Gus had already created a hero called John Sprake, who fitted the James Bond mould. Describing John Sprake, Gus had written: “It was unusual for him to be moved by sentiment in others, for it was something he did not understand. In women he looked upon it as a necessary evil. In men he ignored it.” Captain Graham Hayes, MC. 1 They engaged in training the newly formed force at Wareham (Dorset) and later teamed up with Coastal Command's

Perhaps it would not be out of place to observe that one of the chief reasons for the creation of SOE was the desirability of an organization whose actions could be disowned by His Majesty’s Government. Winter and Hayes then set off the charges. Similar actions took place on the second smaller craft and the larger liner, boarded by a small party led by Major March-Phillipps. The story of Operation Postmaster is fascinating but a bit thin for a full length book. It makes for sometimes trite story-telling... even though the risks and the daring involved were truly impressive for that point in the war. But it was, after all, a commando raid to steal a passenger liner and a tugboat from a Spanish island harbor off the coast of West Africa. The raiders left Lagos in their two tugs on the morning of 11 January 1942, and while en route they practised lowering Folbots and boarding ships at sea under the command of Captain Graham Hayes. They approached Santa Isabel harbour and at 23:15 and 23:30 hours on 14 January 1942; both tugs were in position 180 metres (590ft) outside of the harbour. Onshore, Lippett had arranged for the officers from Duchessa d'Aosta to be invited to a dinner party; 12 Italian officers as well as two German officers from Likomba attended. [16] Operation Postmaster was launched in January 1942. During this, No. 62 Commando carried out a raid in neutral Spanish Guinea, when they seized an Italian liner, a German tanker and a yacht from Santa Isabel. [24]In November No. 1 and No. 6 Commandos formed part of the spearhead for the Allied landings in Algeria as part of Operation Torch. [33] 1943 [ edit ] Gus and his men planned a raid on neutral Spanish Fernando Po (now Equatorial Guinea), where a German and Italian ship were known to be sheltering. SOE placed secret agents on the island, and on the night of 14 January 1942, Gus and his team carried out a remarkable and totally successful raid – Operation Postmaster – making off with three enemy ships including a large liner, and leaving the Spanish with no clue as to who had done it, or how it had been done. Holidays from Herlufsholm, Denmark’s foremost boarding school, were spent shooting on his father’s estate with his younger brother Franz. They made their own bows and arrows and became so expert with them that they could kill a bird in flight. In the games they described innocuously as ‘Snakes and Arrows’, the weapons were no playthings: the arrows would pass right through a stag and penetrate a tree beyond! Sadly, on the night of 12 and 13 September 1942, their fortune changed. A raid on the Normandy coast went badly wrong. MTB 344 could not locate the intended landing point, and finding themselves off an inviting beach, Gus asked his men: “What do you think chaps, shall we have a bash?” The morale of the SSRF was so high that all instantly agreed with their commander. Less than nine months later, on the night of September 2, Winter was part of a 12-strong raiding party, including March-Phillipps, for Operation Dryad.

lighthouse, seven miles west of Alderney, which was being used by the Germans as a radio listening post. Bourne lowered an 18 ft dory from the boat and the Channel Islands. He left 344 in May 1943 on appointment to Flotilla 11 at Felixstowe. In January 1943 the SSRF raids were coordinated by This was exactly the sort of highly dangerous mission for which the Special Operations Executive was created, a force of highlytrained but unconventional commandos to, as Churchill put it, “set the lands of the enemy ablaze.” Operation Postmaster was just the start of it.

Debriefing

Gus returned to London with Geoffrey Appleyard in February 1942. Within a few weeks, he had obtained permission to set up a new unit, the Small Scale Raiding Force (SSRF). This was to operate as a part of Lord Mountbatten’s Combined Operations, but M remained Gus’s direct boss. Into the SSRF Gus recruited a true cross-section of agents – both British and from the Occupied Countries. Under Gus’s leadership, men of such diverse views as Peter Kemp (a convinced anti-communist who had fought for General Franco in the Spanish Civil War), and Richard Lehniger (a Sudeten German and convinced communist who had fled to England from Nazi oppression) were moulded together as comrades in arms. The SSRF based themselves at Anderson Manor, and carried out a series of seaborne operations against selected targets. The details of the raid were being kept secret even from the British Chiefs of Staff, who were only informed on 18 January 1942, that Duchessa d'Aosta had been intercepted 230 miles (370km) offshore and was being taken to Lagos. [8]