Escape from a Nazi firing squad: Handcuffed and led into the woods at dawn, two SAS men prepared to die...

Escape from a Nazi firing squad: Handcuffed and led into the woods at dawn, two SAS men prepared to die...

It was approaching dawn on August 9, 1944 and the seven prisoners of war caught operating behind enemy lines in German-occupied France thought they knew their fate.

After weeks of imprisonment, including brutal interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo, their end was near. 

German SS men, armed with automatic weapons, led the seven SAS men, all of whom were in handcuffs, from a lorry to a clearing some 100 yards into a wood.

'Are we going to be shot?' asked Corporal Jean Dupontel, one of the prisoners.

'Of course you're going to be shot. What do you think this is, a picnic?' said one of the guards, with a snigger. 

Dupontel, who was dark-haired and slightly built, had spent the previous three years serving in the British Armed Forces. 

Now he had been weakened by torture and a lack of food. He was also so scared that his knees began to tremble and he half fell to the ground but the butts of several SS rifles propelled him forwards.

As Dupontel was lined up to be shot, his thoughts turned to his younger brother, Antoine, whom he had not seen for five years but who he knew was fighting with the French Resistance. 

Then, as he listened to the birdsong, he thought of his parents, who lived in a tiny house in Brittany.

'God help me,' he whispered under his breath. 'I'm too young. I don't want to be shot down like a dog under these trees.'

As the men prepared to be executed, Dupontel glanced at his best friend Corporal Thomas 'Ginger' Jones, short and stocky, who was the last man in the line. 

An SS captain read out a statement, first in German, before one of his sergeants translated it into English: 'Having been tried and found guilty before a court martial of collaborating with French terrorists and in this way endangering the security of the German Army, you have been sentenced to death by shooting.'

Moments earlier, Dupontel had managed to work his right hand free from the handcuffs but he kept his arms in front of him to pretend that they were still restricted.

As the group of SS soldiers raised their weapons to fire, Dupontel let out a roar like a wild beast and rushed forward, breaking through a gap between one of the German officers and a civilian who was watching the execution. 

In the darkness, he raced forwards and as one of the SS soldiers opened fire, he fell to the ground – not shot because, in fact, he had tripped on the root of a tree. He picked himself up and ran through trees, brambles and foliage as bullets whistled by his head and body.

'Dear God, help me,' he shouted. But at the edge of the forest he came to a tall, thick hedge. 

He could hear the Germans were on his heels and so he launched himself, arms first, through the top of the hedge, briefly remembering what he had been taught at his commando training course in Inverness, Scotland.

Landing with a roll forwards, he glanced at a surprised horse standing close by, picked himself up and, once again, ran for his life towards another wood.

Eventually, Dupontel was free – alone in the French countryside just over two months after the D-Day landings. 

Dressed in civilian clothing, he was also limping from a badly swollen right ankle that he had injured as he frantically made his escape.

Out of desperation, he sought help from French villagers, some 40 miles north of Paris, hoping that they would take pity on him and not turn him over to their German masters.

He was in luck: he was befriended by a French butcher who had a cousin in the Maquis, the French Resistance.

As he prised off the second handcuff, his thoughts turned to his six comrades who he imagined had been shot and buried in the wood. Distraught and frightened as he sheltered in a farmhouse, the slightest noise made him jump.

Soon Dupontel linked up with the butcher's cousin and his Resistance friends. And days later, as his ankle began to heal, his new friend told him that three miles away villagers had found a man who didn't speak any French but who was gesturing for help. 

At first, Dupontel feared it was a trap, but he agreed to accompany the Frenchman to see the stranger. The two men slipped into a house and listened to the stranger talking in English.

The voice coming from the kitchen was unmistakable to Dupontel: it was Ginger Jones, so he entered the room. The two friends stared at each other as if they had both seen a ghost, then they shook hands and hugged each other warmly. 

'Is it really you, old man?' Jones said. 'It can't be. I was sure you were dead.' Dupontel told Jones he had been equally sure that he was dead.

As the excitement calmed down, Jones explained that in the commotion caused by Dupontel's dash for freedom, he too had raced away from his position at the end of the line before tripping and falling.

Jones was originally a miner. He was something of a rough diamond from Wigan and was one of the SAS originals, among the 70 or so men who formed it.

“He soldiered all through the war in various theatres. He was a man of superlative fighting spirit. He saved his patrol several times.

“He had a real sense of black humour but often that was what was needed in that situation. He was someone you would be very pleased to have on your shoulder.

“When morale was sinking he would be able to crack the right joke at the right moment to keep spirits up.

“When they were captured in Paris he would insult the German guards in his thick Wigan accent so they couldn’t understand a word he was saying.”

Corporal Jones’ patrol was one of dozens of SAS groups parachuted into occupied France and charged with the job of disrupting the Nazi forces as they headed towards the beaches to fight the soldiers who had landed.

Corporal Jones acted heroically when the group had to blow up a train, holding off the enemy on the tracks with a gun so the rest of the group could get away.

Lieutenant Colonel Paddy Mayne, commander of 1st SAS, charged SAS veterans Captain Mike Sadler and Major Harry Poat to leave for France immediately to investigate.

Back in Bresles, Vaculik and Jones were readying the French Resistance to hit the Germans from behind when Arne1ican forces assaulted the town. On September 6, having vanquished the enemy, Vaculik and Jones made an emotional return to the site of their would-be executions, finding spent bullet casings and their comrades’ unmarked grave. The Gestapo had been careful not to use their names in front of the SAS men and had covered their tracks. But when Sadler and Poat arrived, they exhumed the bodies which were re-buried with full military honours.

Returning to Britain, the investigation gathered pace – Vaculik and Jones giving evidence to a London inquity into the Noailles Woods shooting. The court concluded the killing “was in violation of the well-recognised laws and usages of war and the terms of the Geneva convention…and was murder”.

Jones and Vaculik would return to SAS operations in September 1944, first to help airborne troops besieged by enemy forces during the failed Operation Market Garden, and later in Belgium. Vaculik would end up being wounded by a German sniper near Bremen, and spent VE Day in hospital. But Jones would fight to the bitter end.

After a period cooperating with the Resistance, Trooper Castelow, one of the three SAS who had escaped the original Gestapo ambush, had been captured by the enemy. Finding himself locked in a room with a single SS guard, Castelow managed to kill the man, steal his rifle, and swim across the wide River Moselle to meet advancing US forces.

The terribly injured Lieutenant Wiehe was found alive by US troops liberating Paris and flown home, though he would spend the rest of his shortened life in a wheelchair. Yet the identities of the Gestapo and SS men respon­sible for the massacre remained unknown.

Then in January 1945, a breakthrough: captured SOE agent Captain John Starr emerged from the shadows. He had spent 11 months at 84 Avenue Foch, the Gestapo’s Paris headquarters, and was either an out­standing SOE double agent or a stand-out traitor. Either way, he knew the Gestapo’s Paris operations inside out by the time he was dispatched to Mauthausen concentration camp, for “final disposal”.

Starr miraculously survived. And in his interrogations back in Britain, he delivered chapter and verse on the Noaillcs Wood killers. Now it only required a team to hunt down the suspects. It was time for the SAS to look after its own.

In May 1945, SAS Colonel Brian Franks set up an SAS War Crimes Investigations Team (WCJT), led by Major Eric “Bill” Barkworth, to discover the extent of Nazi atrocities against captured British special forces. By the autumn, Barkworth knew Sturmbannführer Hans Kieffer, head of the Gestapo in Paris, had orchestrated murders in which SAS men had been forced into civilian clothing. But in September, the SAS was summarily disbanded and with it the work of the WCJT, Colonel Franks was having none of it: the WCIT “went dark”, becoming the Secret Hunters, a unit that officially did not exist.

The key breakthrough came when one of Kieffer’s henchmen, Karl Haug, who had escaped with him to the Bavarian ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, made the error of returning to northwest Germany to visit his wife and children. Arrested, he confessed all and a string of SS and Gestapo men were seized and put on trial. The accused argued they were only following Hitler’s orders on pain of death but they failed to convince. Nearly three years after the murder of the SABU-70 raiders, their killers finally faced justice.

Kieffer, Schnur and Haug would be hanged, Others would be jailed for life, Yet Jones and Vaculik, who had given evidence, felt no sense of resolution. Their “proud and bitter memories” would remain for life.