Chapter 217
The report Felix was reading right now traced its roots back to an undisclosed MI6 source that had to be somewhere around the Headquarters of
Heeresgruppe Süd. From ammount, form and how the Information was coming in, it was most likely a servant of some sort, even though the daily courier that carried the information back and forth between the SOE and MI6 stations for the European Front professed to do nothing. These days paperwork was what Felix and Ian spent their time with, and even though both loudly and publicly claimed that they hated it, for them it was a welcome change from having to risk life and limb for King and Country.
When Felix came to a paragraph near the bottom of the one-page report, he creased his eyebrows and decided that he had to show this to Ian. After a look at the clock hanging over the door of his Office he saw that it was near 1 o'clock in the afternoon, so by now Ian was definitely down in the large and long room that acted as the mess hall of the station's twenty regular Officers and Enlisted alike, the training camps where the man were trained for Operational Deployment were located elsewhere on grounds of operational security. Felix rose from his chair and walked out of the Office and down the corridor to the staircase not without locking the door behind himself. As he walked past the others streaming to lunch he quietly whistled 'Anything goes' to himself without really noticing, a bad habit he had picked up after his rescue where it had been the first song he had heard on the radio, and now it was permanently stuck in his head. The 'crew' of the station, considered to be a Navy one as evidenced by the White Ensign that was run up the flagpole every morning still consisted of a mixture of men from all the services, for example Ian had brought over Lennox of the South Essex Light Infantry, and even the Air Force had some Officers here which sometimes made for very tense conversations for Ian when he had to back the men under his command against superiors who were either ignorant of Operational Security or simply didn't bother with it. He found Ian in his usual seat and sat down in his own usual just opposite.
Without a word Felix gave Ian the paper and rose again to get his own food, today Curry Chicken with rice (Ian insisted that they keep to standard Navy rations) and selected a normal water to drink. Back at the table Ian had ready the underlined paragraph and made up his mind.
“Just what does that tell us? I mean the Germans travel back and forth between the staffs as much as our Officers do, that's nothing special.”
Felix knew that Ian was not ignorant and the man would never be a bureaucratic pencil pusher either, so that meant that he was merely trying to sound out Felix' opinion and arguments.
“Well, you see that this isn't normally done by full Colonels wearing the uniform of their paras and are thought to be attached to the Abwehr, in the dead of the night and just when we are launching a massive offensive. The last is probably a true coincidence, but the rest?” Felix shook his head to emphasize his point.
Ian thought it over while eating several more forkfulls of the chicken. He swallowed the last bit and then said:
“How to we know he is working with the Abwehr?”
Felix crawled through the backs of his memory. He knew he had the answer somewhere, and after a minute or so he had it. Oh dear god.
“We should discuss this somewhere more private, Ian.”
Ian understood and waited patiently while Felix ate his own food with slow, deliberate motions – something else he had started doing after his rescue.
Once back in the Office Felix wasted no time.
“Remember back before the war when the Germans topped off the Duke of Windsor?”
Of course Ian remembered, after all it had been the first time he was shot at.
“Well, we still had something of a spy network in Germany at the time, and afterwards one of the sources reported that an Officer of that name was thought to be involved in training and mission planning. He popped up again later, during the attack on the Low Countries, where he was reportedly spotted behind our lines by one of our very own during the evacuation of Brussels.”
“That's very, very thin.” Ian said. “But then again, we have acted on even thinner hunches before, so we might want to report this to London. While Mountbatten makes up his mind, we can ask our friends of MI6 to automatically forward everything further from that source. Somehow I feel as if we'll need them.”
“Done.”
“How's the battle going up north?”
Felix had spent the last day reviewing the 'Behaviour when captured' booklet as a sort of mental exercise at his own insistence and was out of touch, since he tended to lock himself in his Office when he did work like that.
Ian just snorted – it was the fourth day and in his opinion it was unlikely that much more was going to happen.
“The Army connected with the Paras just in the nick of time and apparently they are considering pulling them out. This whole stupid attack was one grand failure from the start. Three times the number of troops couldn't have done it, not with the Germans almost expecting the attack at that spot.”
It was true. Field Marshal Alexander had called off further attacks, and now all that Jubilee had yielded now was a bulge that extended to a point two miles north of the edge of Modena, hundreds of British and Allied soldiers dead and very little else to show for. The Grand Breakthrough would have to be made somewhere else, and now perhaps Aldershot was willing to listen to Alexander who had opposed the scheme after hearing of how many troops he was allowed to use, and now perhaps they would increase his operational freedom and finally cease from running the particulars of the war from England, even thought that happened rarely enough these days. The Imperial General Staff was beyond the blame game at this point in the war, but it was clear that someone would have to bear the responsibility. In the meantime however there were plans to be made on how the impasse in Italy was to be broken, and before the planning group could even begin to go to work again. Major Hackett had taken over C Squadron in the 8th King's Royal Irish Hussars and was no longer involved in operational planning due to OpSec, but the plan was very loosely based on a proposal he had written even before the fall of Rome. The details and plans were known only to a select few[1], but a paradrop was not included and the number of units involved almost approached Market Garden itself. In the opinion of Field Marshal Alexander and many others it was far less reliant on good luck and the enemy acting just as expected, it was reliant on nothing but brute force, smashing the enemy to pieces which then allowed rested allied units to drive towards their objectives.
Neither Ian nor Felix could know this at this point and therefore they didn't speculate on the matter any further. For the moment they had more important work to do. At the moment the biggest operations being run from here were the resistance movements in occupied Yugoslavia. The situation there was even more confused than in France, mainly because the Communists had lost their leader long ago, and now were running headless, still refusing to give in, even though they were eroded away since the British had a policy of not supporting Communist Groups. The biggest and most representative group were the Royalist rebels, a group that consisted of mostly serbs and croats, but since the new and elected Regent had pledged a return to Democracy once the war was over and had even gone so far as to have the Government in Exile, residing first in Algiers and now in London, draft a constitution of the Federal Kingdom of Yugoslavia, both facts that were appeared extensively in the broadcasts aimed at their occupied country. Resulting from this was a greater number of recruits from the other ethnicities in the country as they slowly began to rally to the flag, but even so many of the battles where they used British weapons were not fought against the Axis but rather with each other, since they still hated each other more than the enemy, and that the occupying forces had their own group of locally recruited counter-insurgency militias didn't help matters much. It was a mess, but Ian had been tasked with sorting it out, so that was what he would do. Of all the resistance movements within his area of operations the Yugoslavian Royalists were the most potent, even more so since the Soviets had taken over the occupation of the country and proven to be even worse masters than the Germans. With a population so deeply rooted within the land and such a warlike history the normal methods such as they were did not work, especially when your first act had been to shoot the ruler of the country (the Germans) and start pulling down churches and hanging priests in retaliation (the Soviets). All of this made the work for the British Intelligence Services rather easy when compared to Germany or even northern Italy, all that remained to be done was to sort out which group was following which little local village and prayed to whatever incarnation of the almighty. The only thing that combined them was their hatred for the Soviets and their German friends, and a dubious and sometimes shaky loyalty to the Government in Exile in London. One had to be very, very careful about whom to support, because this might turn a even more powerful group ten miles down the road hate you almost as much as the occupation.
Something else was the budding Italian resistance in northern Italy. The problem there was that most of the Italian soldiers that had not followed the King's and Governments order to lay down their arms after the fall of Rome and many had joined the Italian SS legion which was conducting counterinsurgency behind the lines and was reputed to be exceptionally cruel. What form of Italian resistance there was was often more than reluctant to accept help from the British who had been their deadly enemy only a few months ago, and the ideological splintering there was almost as bad as in Yugoslavia. Again there was a part which was the 'official' one, supported by the Italian caretaker Government and the Allied Powers, but there was also a sizeable Communist scene which recruited itself from those industrial cities that had not yet fallen into Allied hands and claimed that they were the only ones fighting for Italy and pointed to the crackdowns on communist groups in the Allied zone of occupation where they were sought for like the members of the old Fascist party, in compliance with the British Policy of regarding the Communists and the Nazis/Fascists as the two sides of the same coin. And still the SOE was tasked with aiding whoever fit the criteria set by London, and that was what he was going to do.
When Ian looked at the clock over his own door by pure chance, he saw the time and bolted from his chair.
“Bloody hell, we have to meet the new SAS Liaison!”
Felix glanced at his wristwatch and soon the other members of the station saw their two bosses walking down the corridor and out of the house as fast as dignity and protocol allowed. Outside a lorry was waiting with four soldiers standing about and unloading their belongings, and from the red berets with the dagger he could see that they were SAS.
The Lieutenant in charge was of reasonable height and brown hair with green eyes and a thin moustache in his average face. The most important thing however was that Ian could see in the way the Lieutenant carried himself that he was a relatively inexperienced Officer by the standards of the Special Air Service, and he could see why Colonel Stirling had sent them here.
The Lieutenant meanwhile quietly looked over the two Naval Officers, who were most likely the station commander and his 2IC, if one was to judge them by their rank. He had been with the Royal Canadian Army for some years before being seconded to the SAS, and as an Army man he wasn't too happy to be under Navy command, never mind that it wasn't even his own. Still, he did what he was told and so walked over to them to meet them halfway. He came to attention and threw a crisp salute. “Captain Mathew Cribbs and No.77 Commando Wing reporting, Sir.”
When he heard who the Captain and the Commander were he did a double take. Yes, they might only be lowly squids, but the Colonel had often used their names in the same sentence of such legends as the men of 12 Patrol or the old SIS security team. In fact, these two had been on one of the earliest missions with Drake and the others and some other things that were so secret that even the Colonel claimed he did not know all of it. So these two....
Whatever had happened that they had taken on a desk job like this one? A mental shrug followed and instead he listened to the Captain holding what had to be the introductory lecture. It seemed to him that they hadn't had a Commando Wing stationed near here ever since Major Drake and the 6th had moved to the Far East, and now he and his men were selected to be the enforcers for the SOE. At least that was what the men would say, and he was inclined to agree with them, but then again the SOE directed all the Special Operations of the British Empire and most of the allies, and the Regiment always was a the beck and call of these Gentlemen anyway. When he had conducted his first patrol as Wing Leader a while back, in support of a SBS raid on an RDF station on the coast of France the SOE had also been in command, even though back then the Wing hadn't been on detached duty but rested with the rest of the Regiment at Hereford. Now he was having his first permanent 'overseas' deployment since he had joined up with the Regiment and transferred out of the 48th Highlanders of Canada. He would have preferred to fight with a unit from his native Vancouver, but when he had gotten the chance in the Highlanders for immediate deployment after Officer School, he had taken the opportunity and now here he was.
He knew that he would most likely soon have to go into action again, but as he was led through the barracks that had sprung up around the mansion he saw that this operation was run by someone who had an idea what he was doing, and he hoped that his men would be properly supported. In a somewhat strange way he was looking forward to it all.
[Notes: Up next: Some new Friends, and at last the combat I promised. ]
[1] Even yours truly only has a vague idea so far, the security is that strict.