The Paras - The Inside Story of Britain's Toughest Regiment. John Parker
on the thrust from Depienne towards Oudna, across difficult terrain and with the soldiers laden down with ammunition and equipment, all of which had to be carried on their backs. The only transport they managed to acquire were some donkey carts. Four miles down the road, a recce team reported a heavy force of Germans blocking their path, so Frost and his men laid up until the early hours, in bitterly cold conditions, and then made a detour.
The objective was to attack the airstrip, not engage a German unit; but in the end they had no choice. The following day, moving en masse through a valley, they came under heavy and prolonged machine-gun fire. Even so, A Company managed to reach the airstrip, but even as they arrived, they were met by an onslaught from six German tanks, strafing attacks from Messerschmitts and finally a bombardment from six Stuka dive-bombers. The spirited response by the battalion and excellent camouflage allowed them to withdraw without great loss, and Frost directed his men towards a good defensive position on the hillside. A recce of the area determined that it was swarming with German units. Frost decided to lie up and try to hold out until the arrival of the 1st Army, which, if all went according to schedule, could surely not be far away.
Unbeknown to him, that plan had already been scrapped and the news was eventually relayed to him over the radio – the 1st Army would not be coming his way; the advance on Tunis had been postponed for two days. Frost blew his top. Macleod Forsyth remembers:
We were really dropped in it. We were constantly told that the 1st Army would be coming up to meet us. But it was the old story: they didn’t and we had to fight our way back to our own lines. The Americans thought they could plant the US flag and the Germans would run away. But the Germans hadn’t read the script. They [the 1st Army] hadn’t moved a damned inch. The Germans were harrying us all the while.
The 2nd Battalion was marooned 50 miles or so behind the enemy lines, virtually surrounded by German heavy stuff, lightly equipped, short of ammunition, food and water and facing a long march to the nearest Allied positions. As the Paras began the journey back to safer territory, Frost decided to head for higher ground, but almost immediately they came under heavy artillery and mortar fire in a fierce battle for the summit of Djebel Sidi Bou Hadjeba. They took positions in rocky terrain, but even before they had a chance to dig in for battle heavy fire was raining down on them. Losses mounted and included the commander of B Company, Major Frank Cleaver, and one of C Company’s platoon commanders, Lieutenant the Hon. Henry Cecil. At nightfall, during a respite, Frost performed a head count: 150 killed or wounded. His force was depleted to such an extent that he decided the only way forward was for each company to move independently towards a village called Massicault, where they would lie up and plan the next stage. He ordered the destruction of the three-inch mortars, for which he now had no ammunition, and the radio sets, whose batteries had expired.
The journey ahead threatened to be so hazardous that Frost decided he had no alternative but to leave the wounded behind and rely upon their being able to make contact with the 1st Army when it eventually arrived. A section of the 16th Parachute Field Force was left behind to attend them, along with a platoon from B Company under Lieutenant Pat Playford for protection.
Frost and his men pressed on, coming under constant enemy fire. They took ten-minute rests wherever possible, but starving and without water, they were soon in bad shape and almost dying of thirst. Macleod Forsyth:
Our battalion commander used his hunting horn when we were ready to move off. That was the signal. And my God, it was a real haul. We lost men simply through exhaustion. We didn’t have much water. I had hallucinations. I looked up at the sky and I could see this big bar and a man pulling pints of beer. Then we came to a river [the Medjerda] and we just marched in and sat down in it. Unfortunately the water was pretty awful, and when we got on the march again, people were vomiting and really suffering. However, we carried on. Frost picked the spot where we would rest up. The Germans knew we were around and were searching for us. We were resting up once when a couple of German soldiers on a motorbike and sidecar pulled up at a farmhouse ahead, questioning the people there if they had seen the British. The coincidence was that after the war, when a group of ex-German soldiers came to a Chesterfield reunion and we were discussing these incidents, one of them said, ‘That was me. I was on the motorbike.’
The force having been split to move in companies, by night, Frost found that his own group, now down to 200 men, was once again confronted by a ring of German forces. He decided to send three men on ahead, led by another Bruneval veteran, Lieutenant Euen Charteris, the 2nd Battalion’s intelligence officer. Charteris was to attempt to make contact with the nearest Allied land force to get help. Frost never heard from the three men again; they were spotted and shot by the Germans before they reached their objective. He decided the only way forward was to try a mass breakout under cover of darkness and to rendezvous on a ridge two miles away. They eventually made it out of the hot zone and, spurred on by Frost’s hunting horn, they arrived at Medjez el Bab two days later with only five rounds of ammunition each. As the remnants of the remaining companies straggled in, the final cost of this appalling excursion was high: overall the 2nd Battalion lost 16 officers and 250 men. The Oudna operation had been a disaster from the start: badly planned by the war managers and doomed from the outset by faulty intelligence which stated that enemy aircraft were parked on the three landing strips they had pinpointed yet overlooked the fact that, in the meantime, these planes might be moved. They were, and not a single enemy aircraft was attacked. Thus a whole battalion was mobilized against a non-existent target and those in command compounded this blunder by demonstrating a complete lack of interest in its fate, effectively leaving it abandoned far behind enemy lines.
Out of this totally unnecessary decimation of the 2nd Battalion came many stories of outstanding bravery, especially by those captured, some of whom managed to escape and return to the fold in dramatic style. Others distinguished themselves in the attempt. Among them was the battalion’s redoubtable Padre MacDonald. He and Lieutenant Jock McGavin, after touching down at Rome en route to their POW camp, set fire to an aircraft while they were momentarily left unattended by their captors. They were about to be shot by angry Italians when a Luftwaffe officer intervened. It was the second time that members of that party of POWs from the 2nd Battalion were saved by a German officer – and as on the first occasion, just in the nick of time.
One of the outstanding stories from that period focuses on another instance where a group of British Paras were saved from execution. This event became something of an obsession in post-war years with one of those who was saved, a tough professional soldier named Gavin Cadden. The author makes no apology for breaking the general narrative to publish Cadden’s recollections here in full for the first time. He had joined the Army in Scotland, signing on with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in 1931. He saw service in India, was demobbed in 1938 and returned home, got married and, when war broke out shortly afterwards, was recalled to the colours. He was in the British Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk and, kicking his heels in the aftermath, he and some chums decided to volunteer for the newly formed Parachute Regiment. He was on the Bruneval raid and was with Johnny Frost again when they set off for Algiers on Operation Torch and were dropped at Depienne at the end of November 1942.
Cadden told his story calmly and quietly, to the point of nonchalance, his tone belying the drama experienced by the party of wounded Frost had reluctantly left behind after the first major confrontation with the Germans:
We were a small platoon because some of our boys never managed to take off from Algiers for Depienne and we were detailed by Lieutenant Colonel Frost to stay behind and guard the wounded until the elements of the 1st Army came up. But, of course, the 1st Army cancelled their advance for 48 hours and that left us out on a limb, 60 miles behind the German lines and they had no way of getting back with our wounded. So we had to stay there, and took up a defensive position. Next day we saw a column coming, advancing towards us about a mile or so away. We knew we were in for it. We took up a position around Depienne village, and our wounded were in the school there – with one dead body. Anyway we were attacked by the tanks and the 5th German Parachute Regiment, and in charge of them was a Lieutenant Colonel Koch and his second in command was Major Jungwirth.
After a short battle – and some of us were wounded, including myself – we were