Operation Frankton

On the evening of 7 December 1942 the British submarine HMS Tuna surfaced in the Bay of Biscay, some fifteen kilometres off the mouth of the Gironde, and put five folding canoes carrying ten men of the Royal Marines into the water. So began Operation Frankton – one of the boldest raids by British special forces of the war. The target was the shipping in the port of Bordeaux, nearly a hundred kilometres from the sea up the estuary. The raid on the ships in Bordeaux harbour itself is often dated to 7 December. In fact the operation only began that day: the commandos paddled upriver for four nights and did not attach their mines to the ships’ hulls until the night of 11–12 December. Of the ten men who set out from the submarine, two survived the war.

The blockade runners’ port

In 1942 Bordeaux was one of the most important ports in occupied France. It was used by blockade runners – fast merchant ships that slipped between Europe and the Far East, bringing the Reich raw materials from Japan and the countries it had conquered: rubber, tin, and vegetable and animal oils. According to British intelligence, some 25,000 tons of crude rubber passed through Bordeaux in the twelve months from June 1941. In the other direction went machinery, weapon designs and specialists. For Britain, which had been trying for months to cut this route, the port on the Garonne was a first-class target, but also a difficult one. Bombing from the air threatened heavy losses among French civilians, and a large naval operation deep inside the estuary stood no chance of success.

The solution was proposed by Major Herbert George Hasler, known as “Blondie”, a 28-year-old Royal Marines officer and a keen sailor. Since July 1942 he had commanded a new, small unit at Southsea near Portsmouth, given the deliberately misleading name of the Royal Marines Boom Patrol Detachment. It numbered about 34 men and came under Vice Admiral Louis Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters, which had also planned the St Nazaire raid in March 1942. Hasler had long argued that a few men in canoes, travelling by night and hiding by day, could reach ships in a guarded port undetected and fix limpet mines to them.

On 21 September 1942 Hasler presented a plan for an attack on Bordeaux. It originally provided for three canoes, carried by submarine to the vicinity of the Gironde estuary. The crews were to paddle some hundred kilometres up the estuary, mine between six and twelve ships, then scuttle their canoes and escape overland to Spain. The plan was approved on 13 October, but Mountbatten increased the number of canoes to six. At first he also refused to let Hasler himself – the unit’s only small-boat specialist – take part, and gave way only when the major set out in writing why he had to go in person. From 20 October the unit trained in handling the canoes, launching from a submarine, laying mines and escaping through enemy territory. The exercises included a mock attack on ships at Deptford on the Thames.

Canoes and men

The raid was carried out in Cockle Mark II canoes – semi-rigid two-man boats with canvas sides and a flat bottom, about 4.6 metres long, which could be collapsed and passed through the narrow hatches of a submarine. Each canoe carried two men, eight limpet mines, water and food for several days, a compass, a camouflage net and a magnet for holding on to a ship’s side. The commandos had pistols and fighting knives, but combat was out of the question: the whole operation rested on nobody seeing them.

Twelve men in six canoes, divided into two divisions, were detailed for the operation, plus one reserve. Division A was led by Hasler himself, paddling with Marine Bill Sparks in the canoe Catfish; behind him came Corporal Albert Laver and Marine William Mills (Crayfish) and Corporal George Sheard and Marine David Moffatt (Conger). Division B was commanded by Lieutenant John Mackinnon with Marine James Conway (Cuttlefish); it also included Sergeant Samuel Wallace and Marine Robert Ewart (Coalfish) and Marines W. A. Ellery and E. Fisher (Cachalot). The reserve was Marine Norman Colley. Most of them were in their early or mid-twenties and had never seen action.

The night of 7 December

On 30 November 1942 HMS Tuna, commanded by Lieutenant Richard (Dick) Raikes, sailed from Holy Loch in Scotland. The operation was to begin on 6 December, but a storm and the need to skirt a minefield delayed the voyage by a day. On the evening of 7 December the submarine surfaced about 16 kilometres from the mouth of the Gironde. According to the boat’s log the canoes were launched at around 7.30 p.m.; other sources give times between 7.36 and 8.22 p.m. During the launch the canoe Cachalot caught on the edge of the hatch and tore its hull. Ellery and Fisher had to stay on board, and so did the reserve, Colley. Five canoes and ten men set off for Bordeaux.

The first night proved the hardest. At the mouth of the estuary strong tides and a crosswind piled the waves up to a metre and a half. In the darkness the canoe Coalfish went missing, and Conger capsized and could not be pumped out. Sheard and Moffatt clung for a while to two of the other canoes, which towed them as close to the shore as they could, but after that they had to swim on alone in the icy water. Both died of hypothermia; Moffatt’s body was washed up on the Île de Ré on 14 December. The remaining canoes slipped past the German escort vessels lying at a checkpoint on the river during the night, the men paddling silently and lying low in their boats. It was then that Cuttlefish became separated from the group. Mackinnon and Conway went ashore and spent several days trying to get through to Spain, but they were betrayed, arrested by the French gendarmerie in the hospital at La Réole, where Mackinnon was being treated for an infected knee, and handed over to the Germans.

At dawn on 8 December Coalfish came ashore near the Pointe de Grave lighthouse by Le Verdon-sur-Mer. Wallace and Ewart were captured that same morning. On 10 December the German Wehrmacht communiqué announced that a sabotage party had been caught at the mouth of the Gironde and “destroyed in combat”. In London nobody knew whom this concerned, and it was not until January 1943 that all ten men were posted missing.

Four nights upriver

The two surviving canoes – Catfish and Crayfish – pressed on only by night, in time with the flood tides. By day they hid in the reeds and on the bank under camouflage nets, once near Saint-Vivien-de-Médoc, sometimes a few dozen metres from French houses. On the first night they covered about 32 kilometres, on the second – 8–9 December – 35, and on the third 24. On the fourth night, 10–11 December, a strong ebb tide allowed them to make only about 14 kilometres. The plan had called for the attack to be made on 10 December, but Hasler decided to wait one more day in hiding and enter the port only the following night, on the full flood. The commandos prepared their equipment and set the mine fuses to go off several hours after placing.

The attack on the night of 11–12 December

The evening of 11 December was calm and cloudless. At around 9 p.m. the two canoes entered the port. Hasler and Sparks dealt with the quays on the western side and placed eight mines on four vessels, including a German minesweeper and barrier-breaker (Sperrbrecher). At one point a sentry on her deck shone a torch towards the water, but failed to spot the camouflaged canoe in the darkness. Laver and Mills, on the eastern side, found no targets and turned back to the port of Bassens, where they attached eight mines to two ships: five to a large freighter and three to a smaller passenger ship. At around 12.45 a.m. both crews set off downriver on the ebb, met by chance by the island of Cazeau and at dawn on 12 December landed near Blaye. There they scuttled their canoes and split up, each pair to make its own way to Spain on foot.

In the morning the mines began to explode in the port. According to current findings six ships were damaged, four of them seriously. The blockade runner Tannenfels took a heavy list and settled on the bottom; she was no longer seaworthy, and the Germans later scuttled her as a blockship in the Gironde. The stern of the freighter Dresden sank. The ships Alabama and Portland, holed by the mines – the latter also gutted by fire – were raised and repaired over several months. The fate of the barrier-breaker and the tanker Python is unclear – some of the mines may have fallen off and exploded in the water. The figures vary from source to source: older studies spoke of five damaged vessels, while research in 2010 added a sixth. All agree, however, that for many hours chaos and confusion reigned in the ports of Bordeaux and Bassens, and that the Germans had to tighten security over the whole estuary.

Escape and executions

Before the operation Hasler had been told only that once the task was done he was to make for the small town of Ruffec, about 160 kilometres from where they had abandoned the canoes, and there seek contact with the French Resistance. Hasler and Sparks walked for several days across occupied France, avoiding people, and reached Ruffec on 18 December. At the hotel La Toque Blanche they made contact with the Marie-Claire escape line, run by Mary Lindell, an Englishwoman who had lived in France for many years, and her son Maurice. For the next few weeks they were hidden on a farm nearby and then passed along the line’s successive links until they crossed the Pyrenees into Spain and reached Gibraltar. Combined Operations Headquarters learned that both men were alive only on 23 February 1943, from a message passed on by Lindell. Hasler flew back to Britain on 2 April 1943; Sparks returned much later by sea. Hasler was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, and Sparks the Distinguished Service Medal.

The others were less fortunate. After two days on the march Laver and Mills were arrested by the gendarmerie at Montlieu-la-Garde and handed over to the Germans. Wallace and Ewart, after interrogations during which, according to surviving documents, they gave little away, were shot on the night of 11–12 December – the very night on which their comrades were laying mines in the port – by a naval firing squad in a wood north of Bordeaux. It used to be said that this took place at the Château Magnol in Blanquefort, where a memorial plaque hangs, but the account of a German officer present at the execution points to a gravel pit in the woods. They were soldiers in uniform and under the Geneva Conventions were entitled to prisoner-of-war status. They were killed under the Commando Order, which Adolf Hitler had issued less than two months earlier, partly in retaliation for the raid on Sark. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder noted in the war diary of the naval high command that the execution of uniformed soldiers was “something new in international law”; some historians read this remark as ironic, or even as a sign of a guilty conscience. Laver, Mills, Mackinnon and Conway were killed in 1943, most probably in March. The exact date and place of their execution are uncertain – older studies spoke of Paris, while more recent research suggests they may have been killed near Bordeaux.

Place in the war

The military result of Operation Frankton was modest in relation to its cost. Several ships were put out of action for months and one blockade runner was lost, but the port of Bordeaux continued to operate, and blockade running, increasingly difficult because of British patrols in the Bay of Biscay, went on until 1944. The raid nevertheless showed that a small group of well-trained men could reach a target beyond the reach of the fleet and the air force without endangering French civilians. The experience of Hasler’s unit was drawn upon in creating further small-boat units, from which the Special Boat Service grew after the war. After the war Hasler himself became famous as a yachtsman, a designer of self-steering gear and the originator of the first single-handed transatlantic race in 1960.

The operation also exposed a weakness in the British war machine. At the same time a network of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) led by Claude de Baissac was operating in Bordeaux and preparing its own attack on the same ships. According to accounts cited in more recent studies, de Baissac heard Hasler’s mines exploding just as he was getting ready to carry charges on board. Neither Combined Operations Headquarters nor SOE knew of the other’s plans. In the view of some historians, among them the British politician and former SBS officer Paddy Ashdown, this was a costly blunder, after which a mechanism was introduced in London for coordinating the secret operations of the various agencies.

In British memory the operation lives on as the story of the “Cockleshell Heroes”, the name given to the men by a 1955 film and by C. E. Lucas Phillips’s book of the same title, published soon afterwards. Mountbatten wrote that of the many brave raids carried out by Combined Operations none was more courageous or imaginative than Frankton. For the history of the war, however, what happened to the prisoners matters more. The deaths of six Royal Marines, murdered instead of being treated as prisoners of war, were among the first applications of the Commando Order in the West. After the war the order was judged a war crime at Nuremberg, and its execution weighed, among others, on Raeder.