The Daring Dozen Read Online Free PDF Page A

back of them [the Germans] and opened fire. I must have fired a dozen magazines of Bren gun as they were stood there. When they started throwing flares up, we pulled out leaving behind a lot of dead and wounded.’ 20
    The surviving Germans hastily fled Salonika and a subsequent British Intelligence report said of the SBS action: ‘But for Lassen and his band, Salonika would not have been evacuated as soon as the 30th October 1944. The town would have suffered greater destruction. His solitary jeep and few troops were seen everywhere; behind the enemy’s lines, with E.L.A.S. and in the mountains. Their numbers and strength were magnified into many hundreds.’
    Lassen next took his men to Athens for a spot of rest and recuperation, where for three weeks they partied hard on drink and women. On one occasion a jealous husband came looking for Lassen with a pistol, but fortunately for the Greek his quarry had already fled from the scene. After Athens Lassen left for Crete as commander of a Special Forces unit tasked to maintain order on the island. As well as the thousands of German prisoners to marshal, there were also rival Greek factions among the islanders whose politics made them mortal enemies. For Lassen it was an opportunity for more carousing and he became a frequent visitor to the island’s brothels and taverns. When David Sutherland came to visit Lassen at Christmas he was treated to ‘the most extraordinary party … a lot was drunk. He was a great example of how to live up to the limits in all respects.’
    Sutherland had recently assumed command of the SBS following Jellicoe’s promotion and appointment to a Staff College in Haifa, but at the start of 1945 he was unsure of the squadron’s future role. Some patrols were sent to Yugoslavia to help clear the Croatian coastline of stubborn German outposts, but it wasn’t until the early spring that Sutherland received orders to move back into Italy.
    Lassen arrived at Lake Comacchio in April 1945, having spent a few days on leave in Rome with a pretty English WAAF girl. Opinions vary on his state of mind. Some comrades said he was his usual self, eager to kill more Germans after several months of inactivity, while others remembered him tired and listless, as if he was reaching the end of his tether after nearly four years of fighting. In addition, his pet dog had not come north with him from their base in Monopoli, and two weeks earlier James Henshaw had been killed while attempting to blow a bridge that linked the islands of Cherso and Lussin. Henshaw was a good friend of Lassen’s, and perhaps his death, coming so near the end of the war, made the Dane more aware of his own mortality. His spirits would hardly have been improved by his new posting. The landscape around Comacchio is flat and lifeless, and its waters a putrid haven for mosquitoes.
    Lake Comacchio was also shallow, in some places only between 6in and 3ft deep. In order for 9 and 62 Commandos to cross the lake and establish a bridgehead for V Corps, they required a channel deep enough to take their Goatley floats – engineless vessels that could each accommodate ten men and their equipment. The first task for Lassen and his SBS men was to reconnoiter a passage across the lake.
    One of the SBS men was Corporal Ken Smith. ‘We used to go out each night in our canoes,’ he recalled. ‘Now on the lake, on the right [eastern shore] was the spit, a narrow neck of land that separated the lake from the sea and that was where the Germans had some machine gun battalions.’ It required a steady nerve and a lot of skill with the paddle for a canoeist to negotiate his way unseen across the shallow waters. ‘As you were paddling what we had to be careful about was the phosphorous on the paddle,’ recalled Smith. ‘So we had to make long gliding strokes to make as little noise and phosphorous as possible.’ 21
    The SBS patrols searched the lake only at night and at first light they took cover,