It was the afternoon of April 11, 1945 – day three of Paddy Force.
Urged to ‘achieve deeper penetration through the enemy lines’, Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne’s SAS unit had a mammoth task as they continued their push into Nazi Germany.
In a bitter and bloody showdown amid the defeat of the Third Reich, they faced hordes of fanatical Hitler Youth diehards, Volkssturm German militia units, elite paratroopers and members of the Waffen SS.
Spearheading ‘the killer thrust against an enemy determined to defend the soil of the Fatherland,’ little quarter would be given on either side.
Mayne’s men had suffered death and injury in the last 48 hours, with SAS Major Dick Bond and several others being killed after their Willys jeeps had hit mines or been shot to pieces in ferocious ambushes.
As the German town of Friesoythe loomed on the horizon, their column of heavily-armed remaining jeeps crawled through a patch of flooded woodland, the convoy being channeled onto the only usable road.
They reached the outskirts of the town, hemmed into the one, narrow street – perfect ambush territory.
Out of nowhere, there was the howl of incoming rounds, as mortar bombs began to rain down, targeting the lead vehicles with murderous accuracy.
Corporal Peter Payne and his wife Anne on their wedding day, January 1944. The SAS soldier was part of the elite force who miraculously escaped near certain death inside Nazi Germany, as DAMIEN LEWIS reveals
Corporal Peter Payne (left) seen with SAS comrades in Cairo, Egypt
While some of the SAS drivers managed to swing their jeeps around and make a mad dash for cover, two vehicles were raked by murderous shrapnel.
Those who survived dived into the cover offered by the flooded ditches at the roadside.
Major Tony Marsh was one of those who ended up to his neck in water, hunkered down under murderous fire.
With the SAS’s open-topped jeeps being largely unarmoured, they’d been nicknamed, scornfully, the ‘little mechanized mess tins’ by the American and Canadian tank commanders who’d watched Paddy Force form the spearhead.
They provided zero protection from heavy fire, including mortar blasts.
From the convoy’s rear, Captain Derrick ‘Happy’ Harrison’s led his jeeps forward, to race to the aid of those who were trapped.
Attacking from the flank, Harrison and his men began to lay down a barrage of blistering fire from their mounted Vickers-K and heavier Browning machineguns.
With the town in plain sight, they poured in the rounds, hosing down any position that might harbour the enemy mortar team.
As all realized by now, they were facing no Volkssturm or Hitler Youth unit here. The fire was too accurate, the resistance too disciplined.
In fact, Friesoythe was held by the battle-hardened troops of the 7th German Parachute Division, and today’s fight would prove hard-fought in the extreme.
One patrol bailed out of their jeeps, even as mortar rounds began to target to Happy Harrison’s men.
Undeterred, Lieutenant Gordon Davidson led his seven-strong force forward on foot, aiming to take the enemy mortar unit by surprise.
Threading a path through the marshy terrain, Davidson sought to get behind the enemy position, to hit them a killer blow from the rear.
They’d not gone far when a German motorised column roared to a halt, not a hundred yards away.
As Davidson and his men went to ground, enemy paratroopers disgorged from the transports and fanned out across the terrain.
Corporal Payne was a serial escapee – and not always from the enemy. He had lied about his age to sign up at sixteen with the Royal Artillery, at Bovington Camp, Dorset
Corporal Payne (kneeling, left) with SAS comrades as they pose with their weapons and a smiling young boy
Corporal Payne and some of his comrades in August 1941
Moments later, Davidson found himself surrounded. He was trapped in a ditch, with only a ‘Schmeisser before and behind me,’ as were his men.
Shortly, the entire patrol was overrun and taken captive.
At gunpoint, Davidson and his men were loaded aboard an ammunition truck. They’d been put there as human shields, to deter the SAS from pressing home their attack.
Suddenly, a jeep roared out of the nearby woodland with the unmistakable figure of Paddy Mayne himself hunched over the Vickers-K guns.
‘That’s Paddy, and we’re in the shit,’ one of the captives declared. Sure enough Mayne opened fire, but to their immense relief he avoided the ammo truck, and Davidson and his men survived.
By the time Paddy Force had taken Friesoythe, it had proved a costly battle. They’d lost six jeeps, suffered wounded, and had Davidson’s entire patrol taken captive.
As SAS veteran Alec ‘Boy’ Borrie would remark, they were ‘suffering casualties, so replacing jeeps was not so much of a problem.’
They simply took over the vehicles of the dead or those who’d been captured.
Davidson and his men were driven to the nearest enemy base. Taken to a farmhouse, the interrogations began, as a ‘mini-Himmler’ – an SS officer – fired questions at them.
‘Small… sallow faced, with sharp malevolent eyes lurking behind rimless steel frames, he exuded menace.’
Refusing to talk, the captives were beaten, before being thrown into a pigsty.
The ‘mini-Himmler’ informed them they were to be shot at dawn.
As all SAS knew by now, such a grim fate was only to be expected. Recently, a copy of Hitler’s notorious ‘Commando Order’ had fallen into their hands.
Issued on October 18, 1942, and classified ‘MOST SECRET’ – all copies were supposed to be memorized and destroyed – it decreed that ‘German troops will exterminate’ SAS captives ‘without mercy wherever they find them… they are to be exterminated to the last man… If such men appear to be about to surrender, no quarter should be given to them.’
Knowing this, the Paddy Force raiders had sanitized themselves, discarding any SAS insignia and sporting instead the black Tank Corps beret, as opposed to their regular head gear.
An emaciated prisoner seen at Stalag XB near Sandbostel in Germany after it was liberated by British forces, April 29, 1945
An SAS jeep patrol in Nazi Germany in the dying days of Adolf Hitler’s regime, 1945
An SAS jeep patrol inside Nazi Germany. The jeeps were largely without armour
SAS jeeps seen in the city of Kiel at the end of the war
The SAS’s Willys jeeps had hit mines or been shot to pieces in ferocious ambushes
But still these eight captives had been unmasked for who they were and condemned to execution.
Hitler had taken personal umbrage against the SAS, whose daring hit and run attacks and targeted assassinations had ignited his ire.
One German intelligence report concluded of the SAS: ‘Their activities are extremely dangerous.’
Another identified senior SAS commanders by name, describing the unit’s role as being ‘the blowing up of bridges, traffic junctions and telephone communications… combat, characterised by ambush, deception, utilisation of all the weapons of hand-to-hand fighting.’
Davidson and his fellow captives were saved from execution by a stroke of incredible good fortune.
Overnight, their SS captors were ordered to move out, for they were sent to plug a gap in the German lines.
According to one of the captives, Corporal Peter Payne, they were then saved by ‘a good German’.
A senior paratrooper officer, he’d found a pair of Afrika Corps binoculars in one of the captured SAS jeeps.
Realising exactly who the captives were – for 18 months the SAS had battled the Africa Korps in the deserts of North Africa – the German officer was determined they would not be harmed.
After he was captured, Corporal Payne’s wife received a message from SAS headquarters telling her that her husband was missing
The report to Corporal Payne’s wife insisted the news ‘does not necessarily mean that he has been killed’
That officer spoke impeccable English. In the spirit of the brotherhood of airborne warriors, he explained that he’d ordered the captives to be marched east, as prisoners of war.
As their Volkssturm guards kept pace on their bicycles, the SAS men trudged through village after village.
At each, Lieutenant Davidson and his men were beaten, insulted and spat at, as furious locals took vengeance on those who had dared to invade the Fatherland – Hitler’s Reich.
As the eight captives realised, their lives were hanging by a thread.
Meanwhile, a message winged its way from SAS headquarters to a ‘Mrs Payne, 16 Kenauld Cottages, Currie, Mid-Lothian’, alerting her to the fact that her husband had been ‘posted as “Missing”… in Western Europe… The report that he is missing does not necessarily mean that he has been killed…’
Corporal Payne was a longstanding veteran of Paddy Mayne’s wartime operations.
Recruited to the SAS in September 1942, a year later, during the last-ditch battle for Termoli, in Italy, his patrol had been surrounded and most had been captured or killed.
But not Payne. He’d managed to crawl into a thick patch of scrub. There he’d lain ‘doggo’ for hours, even as the enemy yelled out warnings and sprayed the bushes with fire.
Payne had remained hidden and got away. In fact, he was a serial escapee – and not always from the enemy.
After a difficult childhood, Payne had lied about his age to sign up at sixteen with the Royal Artillery, at Bovington Camp, Dorset.
Bored, he’d ‘borrowed’ an officer’s car and gone AWOL. After being caught, he absconded from custody and was eventually tracked down in London.
He was finally sentenced to six months in prison ‘without hard labour.’
Discharged from the military ‘with ignominy’, he’d re-enlisted at war’s outbreak, having listened to Churchill’s ‘we shall fight on the beaches’ speech.
‘In the circumstances, the Army were prepared to have him back!’, his grandson, Ian Thompson, was able to tell me, in an interview from his native Australia.
Volunteering for special service, Payne had joined No. 11 (Scottish) Commando, and began jumping off Scottish piers at night in full kit, as part of the rigorous training.
Unable to kick the AWOL habit completely, ‘and getting into bother for it’, he’d absconded several further times, mostly to visit his sweetheart, Annie, whom he’d married in the spring of 1944.
Even as he was getting wed, Payne still had a piece of shrapnel lodged in his eye socket, and his face was peppered with smaller fragments, from where he’d been blown up in Termoli, the previous year.
As the Volkssturm and the German villagers hounded Payne and his fellow SAS captives across Germany, escape was once again foremost on his and the other captives’ minds.
After a harrowing march, the eight men were thrown into Stalag XB, at Sandbostel, 60 miles to the east of where they had been captured.
There, Lieutenant Davidson and his deputy, Sergeant Albert Youngman, were separated from the ‘other ranks’ to be held separately.
Just days earlier, Paddy Mayne had rescued Sergeant Youngman from a ditch at the German village of Lorup, where Major Bond and the others had been killed and injured.
Now, Youngman and Lieutenant seemingly faced certain death, for they’d fallen under the control of the Gestapo.
Time and time again they were threatened with death and faced mock executions.
If they were going to be killed, they reasoned ‘we might as well be killed trying to escape.’
A few days after reaching Stalag XB, which doubled as a slave labour and extermination camp, they found a means to slip away.
Youngman and Davidson decided to use the camp’s dual purpose to their advantage.
They were smuggled out of the camp by some French prisoners who were serving on a forced labour party.
Once out of the camp, the pair slipped away from their guards, whereupon they proceeded to move only at night, sticking to the thickest woods and remote heathland.
Like that, they’d flitted back through war-ravaged Germany, executed an incredible escape and finally making it back to Allied lines.
Reunited with Paddy Force, they brought jaw-dropping horror stories. Stalag XB was known to those held there as ‘Little Belsen,’ and with good reason.
Those like Corporal Payne – the serial escapee – were aghast at what they had found there; ‘enormous numbers of badly-dressed, half-starving poor souls, half out of their minds, crammed in behind high wire fences.’
First built as a POW camp, Stalag XB had morphed into a concentration camp in 1943. In 1944 the SS had seized full control.
While Allied POWs were held in very basic conditions, Soviet prisoners were treated far worse.
And the 8,000-odd concentration camp inmates were kept in an ‘utterly horrifying’ state.
Payne noted that ‘everywhere the dead and dying sprawled amid the slime of human excrement.’
On April 30, 1945 – nineteen days after their capture – Davidson and Youngman would return to Little Belsen, leading a column of Canadian Sherman tanks.
They were there to recue their brethren, if they were still alive.
As luck would have it, somehow the other six captives – Corporal Payne included – had endured the interrogations and terrible conditions, and avoided execution.
The armoured column reached the camp in time to release the ‘remainder of the men who were captured,’ as the SAS War Diary noted.
While the camp was being thus liberated, Payne and his comrades witnessed inmates turn on their guards, beheading one. The head was then ‘kicked around like a football.’
While it was revolting, so too had been the savage treatment those guards had inflicted on all who had been held there.
Corporal Peter Payne’s SAS certificate. The soldier later moved to Australia
A telegram to Corporal Payne’s wife, telling her that her husband had been rescued – ‘now safe in Allied hands’
In June 2005, when Corporal Payne passed away, and the SAS Regimental Association wrote to his family to express their condolences
Davidson, Youngman, Payne and the others had cheated death twice – once when captured and condemned to death, and now, having emerged from the hell of Stalag XB alive.
Reunited with the SAS, Payne would go on to form part of the SAS force who were the first into the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, witnessing the full, unimaginable evil of the Nazi death camps.
Moving to Australia after the war, Payne would suffer with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for the rest of his life, although it was only in his later years that it was diagnosed.
‘How could all those lads not have [suffered]?’ his grandson told me, about those who had witnessed the horrors of places like Stalag XB and Belsen at first hand.
In June 2005, when Corporal Payne passed away, and the SAS Regimental Association wrote to his family to express their condolences.
‘Peter served with 1 SAS during the war, and he like others of his era, helped to establish the high standards of the Regiment that have stood as an example to those who have followed. I am sure you must be very proud of him and his service.’
Corporal Payne’s full story is covered in my newly published book, SAS Daggers Drawn, as are those of Paddy Mayne and his band of warriors as they fought to liberate France and to seize Nazi Germany.
As Ian Thompson told me, ‘I’m pleased that my grandad has earned his small place in history alongside his old comrades.’
SAS Daggers Drawn, by Damien Lewis, is published by Quercus.
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