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This contribution to WW2 People's War was received by the Action Desk at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Norfolk. The story has been written by Sergeant Arthur Wood and has been submitted to the site by Mrs. Iris Hagan and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs. Hagan fully understands the sites terms and conditions.

STORIES FROM THE MEN OF PHANTOM

Part Two — OPERATION HOUNDSWORTH

It was cat and mouse all the time during our time in the forest we had been constantly on the move, but with help from the French Underground we were always one step ahead of the enemy. Although there was a garrison of Germans on the other side of the mountain we weren't bothered by them much, until the latter part of the operation when we moved camp at least five times. We had two very good Maquis groups in the area who were very active and kept us informed, but there were others who were not so good. They tended to skulk in the woods, so we decided not to involve them in our operations. Anyway we worked quite independent of the Maquis and so we didn't really have much co-operation with them as such. The Maquis was really the realm of the SOE who were in the area. They were dealing with them and the French underground more than we were. We were there on our own, doing our own thing.

Once one of our out-stations met a German Staff car and in hand-to-hand fighting they killed two of the officers and took the driver prisoner, he was brought back to our camp and stayed there until we went back to England. He was treated quite well and helped the cook, well when I say he helped the cook all our food was tinned and heated up on a wood fire. On another occasion when the men who were out met up with Germans and there was hand-to-hand fighting we had men shot. One had a bullet through his shoulder, one through his ankle, one broke his pelvis when the Jeep he was in overturned, and we had a broken femur from a bad parachute landing, but the worst was when a Jeep was out looking for an airfield so we could evacuate our wounded. They went round a bend on the road and alongside the road was a German convoy. They couldn't turn around so accelerated past the convoy, but when they had passed it a German machine gun opened up from the rear and Captain Bradford and Private Devine were both shot and killed. One of the sergeants who was on the Jeep got bullets in his back and had his fingers blown off, but two of the men escaped and came back to tell us what had happened. That was the worst incident as far as casualties were concerned.

Our living conditions in the forest had been pretty basic and uncomfortable sleeping in sleeping bags on the ground, and, in the early stages we didn't have any medics so it was a little bit difficult at first but after a while two did join us, but until then any of our seriously wounded, who could not be evacuated, were operated upon on a kitchen table in a village home by a French surgeon. That was all the medical attention that we could have.

I was never nervous, I didn't have time to be because we were so busy, we had a job to do and we got on with it. All of this time we were in uniform, battledress with a red beret, but with no insignias. We were armed with a .45 revolver and an American carbine rifle, and all carried water purifying tablets. Very important they were. We didn't really have any problems with the radios all the time we were out there. The arduous thing was that the messages had to be put into code and the messages received had to be encoded, which took a considerable amount of time. While two men operated the wireless the other two would do the encoding. We used to take turns at that. It was a five letter code, all groups of five letters. I still have the silk handkerchief that I used in France with a table on and lots of short phrases that could be put into code using just three letters and we used this and a code book to put all the messages into code. The corresponding code book was in the UK at base.

In my opinion Operation Houndsworth was a great success, it achieved all it set out to do and more besides. It pinned down the German troops who would normally have been in Normandy, they were in the area looking for us. The railway lines were destroyed and the oil refinery was destroyed and numerous other smaller targets were destroyed, In fact the main railway line in the area that carried the German forces was blown up over 20 times. Many Germans were killed or wounded, and some taken prisoner. Over 30 bombing raids by the allied air forces were carried out on information supplied from Phantom SAS.

On the 6th September we commandeered a number of old cars from the area, and escorted by Paddy Mayne and his Jeep, we travelled overland to Arromanches and we got on board ship and came back to Newhaven. From there we travelled by rail to Victoria Station where our commanding officer, Major Astor came down to meet us. He took us back to Moor Park, the main base in England at that time. Major, The Honourable J J Astor was a wonderful CO and a very nice man. At Moor Park I was called to Major Astor's office where he congratulated me on the job we had dome on Operation Houndsworth, and set us on a months leave. When we came back he called me into his office again and said that he didn't think that he would send my patrol on any more operations because we had done enough, but I was to keep my patrol fit. We went on long marches, lived out in the open and worked our wireless.

When the Allies were crossing the Rhine the SAS were involved in an entirely different role. Instead of parachuting they were mobile with Jeeps and crossed the the Rhine. We were sent out to join them. The ideas would then be that we were forward of all the other troops doing reconnaissance, finding out what Germans were in the area and relaying the messages back, and finding any pockets of resistance to mop them up. This is what the 1st and 2nd SAS were doing all across Germany, I was involved in that as well. The Germans were now in full retreat and some days we were moving ten to twenty miles a day. It was a little bit difficult once we crossed the Rhine, but the American Airborne Division and the British parachute troops had made a bridgehead where we crossed, and after a while it wasn't quite as arduous as it might have been.

When we'd finally reached Hamburg and the peace was signed on Luneburg Heath a message came through to the SAS to say we were to return to England immediately. We returned and were then flown out to Norway. The idea was to round up some of the hundreds of thousands of Germans still left in Norway. It was up to us to round them up and send them back to Germany. The Germans realised that it was all over for them and they came quietly. They never gave us any problems whatever. When this was done the war would be over for us too. First we were at Bergen then my squadron went up to a small town on the Sogne Fjord called Vadheim, near where there was a large German camp. We also went to Stavanger.

Our patrol at the end was the same as I had started with, Lieutenant Moore, and the three original, Rifleman Ralli, Trooper Harris and Private Brinton they had expanded my patrol in Germany to ten men and they were with me in Norway as well. Lieutenant Moore was a Captain by now and had been awarded the Military Cross after France, and I had been promoted to Sergeant and awarded the Croix de Guerre.

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