The terrible fate of SAS heroes who landed in France ahead of D-Day

D-Day was never just about the beaches.

For the landings to have any chance of success, the Allies knew they had to convince the German high command the action in Normandy was a diversionary attack, the main thrust to come elsewhere; across the Dover Strait into Calais, for example, the shortest distance from to France.

Allied commanders reckoned they had only a few days, perhaps a week at best, before the Germans realised they had been deceived and started to move reinforcements against the fragile Normandy bridgehead.

To blunt the movements of any reinforcements, SAS operations were launched into areas well away from northern France to attack logistic lines and slow down the movement of reserves.

Tragically, one such mission, Operation Bulbasket, although militarily successful, resulted in the capture and murder of 33 SAS soldiers.

However, if the manner of the men’s deaths spoke of the darkest side of human nature, the outpouring of love and respect that followed from the locals offers hope for the future.

In June 1944, members of B Sqn, 1st SAS, were parachuted into central France in numerous secret and risky nighttime missions.

The first drop was from a Halifax aircraft of “B” Flight, 161 Special Duties Squadron, a few hours before the main D-Day invasion on the morning of June 6.

Under the command of Capt John Tonkin, the group of 36 men set up a base in the Forêt de Verrières, the thickly wooded countryside about 60 miles east of La Rochelle.

From there, they deployed in small groups to carry out acts of sabotage against German forces.

So successful were they that the Germans came to realise that a highly efficient group of allied commandos or special forces troops were operating in the area.

Eventually, on July 3 1944, the SAS forest camp was attacked by about 400 German troops, based around the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division.

A small number escaped, but 30 SAS men taken prisoner were subsequently murdered on July 7 in the Bois de Guron by the recce squadron of the German 158th Division.

A further three SAS men, wounded in the forest attack and taken for treatment in a hospital in nearby Poitiers, are believed to have been murdered by lethal injections administered by a German military doctor.

Also killed was Lt Lincoln Bundy, a Mustang pilot of 486th Sqn, 352nd Fighter Group of the United States army air force.

He had been shot down and was making his way to Spain through the escape lines when he was captured and murdered alongside the SAS men.

On Dec 17 1944, local hunters discovered three mass graves in the Bois de Guron while investigating an area in which they believed wild boar had been rooting.

The soldiers and Lt Bundy were exhumed and taken to nearby Rom, where they were reinterred in the village cemetery on Dec 23 1944.

‘These people died for our freedom’

After the war, as fallen allied service personnel were grouped in the large cemeteries we see today, the townspeople in Rom refused to allow the graves to be moved, preferring, instead, to commit themselves and future generations to caring for the men who – in their eyes – had died for their futures.

Ludovic Malecot, deputy mayor and museum director in the town of Rom, where the soldiers are buried, said: “We have to remember that these people died for our freedom.”

“It’s very important to maintain these tombs and to receive people from England and America to commemorate the memory of those soldiers.

“They are sons of the earth, of freedom. They are not ‘our English soldiers’, they are soldiers of our freedom.”

The soldiers buried in Rom came from all walks of life and from all parts of the country, as a snapshot of their personal histories reveals.

Cpl William Allan – Bill Allan, as he was known – had added two years to his age in order to join the Royal Engineers Territorial Army in 1933.

He later became a medic and in 1943 joined the Special Raiding Squadron – which reconstituted the following year as 1st SAS.

Cpl Allan jumped into Western France in June 1944, aged 29.

His patrol was immediately contacted by German troops and one man, Trooper O’Neill, had his hand trapped under an overturned Jeep.

Having escaped, and using only a pair of scissors, Cpl Allan had to amputate two of Tpr O’Neill’s fingers in order to save his arm.

The soldier had nothing but a cigarette for anaesthetic; others held his arm behind his head so he could not watch.

Tpr O’Neill later wrote to Cpl Allan’s sister, saying: “For 48 hours, he never left my side except to make tea for me, and changed dressing after dressing every 30 minutes.”

For his action in treating Tpr O’Neill, Cpl Allan was awarded the Military Medal, which was presented to his wife and two-year old daughter by the King at Buckingham Palace on Dec 3 1946.

Lt Richard Crisp parachuted into France in the early hours of D-Day.

After a number of actions to disrupt the enemy, Capt Tonkin, the commander of Operation Bulbasket, later wrote: “Lt Crisp seems now to have been the usual leader of convoy harassing parties. I must have thought he had quite a gift for it!”

Pte Michael Brophy, known to his comrades as Mick or Mike, was a barber before the war. He was known to have never gone anywhere without a set of clippers in his kit to cut his fellow soldiers’ hair.

Pte Alan Ashley had been a butcher for Sainsbury’s before the war.

In a cruel twist of fate, Pte Gordon Budden was reported as having been found alive in March 1945 in No 8 Canadian Field Hospital. His parents had to be told later that the report was, tragically, wrong and that he was dead.

Pte David Gray, formerly of the Royal Scots Greys, had served with the regiment when it made its last charge on horseback while quelling Arab rioters in Palestine in February 1940.

Pte Harry Hill, known to friends as Busty or Ginty, was a former Army boxer. He attended parachute course number 111A at No 1 Parachute Training School, Ringway, in April 1944. His instructor noted he was “above average in performance, cheerful and confident”; impressive given he had been shot clean through the throat in Sicily the previous July.

Pte Donald Livingstone was the second eldest of 13 children from the Isle of Islay.

Around the time of his death, although it was not then known, his mother, tending the family croft in Scotland, had returned home very anxious one morning, reporting that she had seen a soldier with a long coat and a hat walking slowly down the line of the fence.

She had shouted at the man and rattled the bucket she was carrying, but the soldier kept walking until he drifted into the distance.

The shallow forest graves where the men were murdered are now signposted and marked by stones, just to the rear of the Saint-Sauvant Memorial in the Bois de Guron that commemorates the men.

A memorial stone in the Rom cemetery honours Cpl “Reggie” Williams and Privates Joe Ogg and Sam Pascoe, who were wounded in the attack on the Verrières forest camp and subsequently taken prisoner.

Treated at a hospital in Poitiers, they were reportedly given lethal injections by Hauptmann Dr Georg Hesterberg and have no known graves.

The exhumation of the forest graves showed all but one of the men had been laid on their sides, most of them arranged with their uppermost arm resting over the man in front.

According to Albert Charron, one of those in attendance at the exhumation, the last man was “lying on his back with his legs spread over the length of the others”.

M Charron said he believed this ninth man of the last group to be murdered “had placed his comrades in the grave and had been killed just as he finished”.

After the war, the “Poitiers Case”, as it became known, was put before a military court in Wuppertal in March 1947.

Gen Curt Gallenkamp, who had ordered the murders, was sentenced to death shortly after trying to take his own life. His sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, although he was released in 1952 and died six years later.

Dr Hesterberg, who had administered lethal injections to three of those captured, was also sentenced to death but walked free after Lord Sholto Douglas, Commander-in-Chief Germany, quashed the charge.

Oberleutnant Vogt, a pre-war clergyman who had commanded the firing squad, had been killed before the end of the war.

‘They’re proud they can still take care of these soldiers’

Deborah Pitt, a resident of Rom who previously served in the Australian army, says the fallen servicemen have become “almost like family” to local residents.

“The fact that they could be buried and their graves kept here in Rom meant an extreme amount to the residents at the time.

“Even today, it is still important to the residents. They’re very proud that they can still take care of these soldiers.”

Ms Pitt, the standard bearer for the local veterans association, says schoolchildren in the area grow up hearing about the soldiers and why they are buried in Rom.

“They’ve grown up hearing about the injustices of war. They’ve grown up hearing about how it doesn’t just impact the soldiers; it impacts the families, it impacts business, economy, everything to do with everyday life.

“When they see, for example, the war in Ukraine, they link the troubles, because we have had refugees from Ukraine come to France.

“They have a real empathy, much more than children from a country that [hasn’t been] touched so immediately by conflict.”

On Sept 29 each year, the village celebrates St Michael’s Day, the patron saint of parachutists.

Military delegations come from afar to mark the occasion and remember, in particular, the sacrifice of the Operation Bulbasket men. Family members of the fallen often attend.

“It really is a day that we put these men before everybody else in the village, before everybody else in the region,” Ms Pitt said

“We show our appreciation for their sacrifice and the fact that because of them, we are free.”

Special thanks to Lance Corporal X [name withheld] for permission to use research from the SAS and LRDG Roll of Honour 1941-1947