The day the SAS entered Hell: Towards the end of the war the elite force was fighting its way across Germany, facing boy soldiers and starving civilians - then it came across the horror of Belsen

By the spring of 1945, the SAS was an established covert force, charting successes in every theatre of war, from deserts to freezing wastelands. 

Official historian Ben Macintyre reveals the unimaginable horror that members of the regiment encountered in the last days of the war...

Roy Farran was the sort of individual for whom the SAS might have been invented. Ruthless, inspiring and unconventional, he much preferred to fight a dirty war inside enemy territory than take part in any ordinary battle.  

He was a renegade who combined a conviction in his own decision-making with a refusal to take orders from others with whom he disagreed.

Starving internees at Belsen concentration camp waiting at the cook house gate for their rations of potato soup

In March 1945, he was put in charge of Operation Tombola, the grand and savage finale to the SAS campaign in northern Italy, which he was ordered to mastermind himself — but safely from Army headquarters in Florence.

Instead, he flew with his men as they prepared to parachute into the heart of enemy-occupied country and, as he claimed, 'fell out of the aeroplane by mistake'. It would take more than a mere order from on high to prevent Farran from leading his troops into battle.

Once on the ground, he and his 40 troopers set about fashioning a guerrilla unit out of the 140-odd Italians and 100 Russians who'd escaped from PoW camps. They were a rum lot, clad in a bewildering variety of uniforms, with bushy beards, bandanas and non- military hats.

In the secret SAS War Diary — whose contents I have been privileged to see and draw on more than 70 years later — Farron noted: 'Many had only one eye. Several lacked shoes and all were armed to the teeth with knives, pistols, tommy guns and rifles.'

There were also 15 women partisans, led by 'a tall, raven-haired girl with blue eyes, as brave and dangerous as a tigress and completely devoted to the British company'.

In camp, she wore a red beret, a battledress blouse and a skirt sewn out of an Army blanket with a pistol tucked into the waistband. Farran was not scared by much, but he was a little afraid of her, and more than slightly smitten.

To induce team spirit, he sent a message back to base requesting a consignment of SAS berets and a Scottish bagpiper to lead them into battle. A somewhat more practical 75mm howitzer was dropped at the same time.

Concentration camp survivors waiting for relocation from Belsen camp after liberation

His objective was to destroy the German HQ in the town of Albinea — a target his superiors had vetoed. Farran ignored the command, and later wrote, with ringing insincerity: 'Unfortunately, I had already left when the cancellation was received on my wireless set in the mountains.'

A few minutes after 2am, there was an explosion of gunfire, mixed with the eerie wail of bagpipes as the piper added his own, surreal element to the assault with a loud rendition of Highland Laddie.

The sentries died 'before they knew they were being attacked', and the raiders stormed in, firing wildly and hurling grenades. A frantic battle took place in the hall of the first building, bullets screaming off the marble walls until the ground floor was taken.

But the Germans resisted fiercely from the upper floors, firing and throwing grenades down a spiral staircase. An attempt to charge the stairs was repulsed; a second attack was also beaten back, leaving two SAS men dead — one officer and an NCO.

The surviving Germans tried to fight their way out: six were gunned down on the stairs. Two surrendered. The Italian partisans 'dealt' with them: Farran's code for summary execution.

The battle for a second building was just as intense. The raiders blew out the front door with a bazooka, tossed in a handful of grenades and crashed inside.

After several minutes of 'furious fighting', the Germans again withdrew up a spiral staircase to the upper floor, leaving eight dead. From the lawn, the raiders poured in a torrent of Bren gunfire.

John Randall in 1943 in the uniform of the Royal Artillery

Farran was in his element: 'Bullets were flying everywhere, and over it all, the defiant skirl of the pipes.'

As the raiders withdrew, the building was 'burning furiously'.

Carrying their wounded on stretchers, fuelled by Benzedrine (amphetamine) tablets, pummelled by driving rain, the party made its way across country 'buzzing with Germans' and back into the hills. When an old leg wound flared up, Farron, to his embarrassment, had to ride home on the back of a pony.

Back at base camp, they threw a party, with 'fried eggs, bread and vino by the gallon' and eightsome reels to the sound of the pipes, a spectacle which Farran described as 'one of the greatest moments' of the campaign.

Farran calculated that at least 60 Germans had been killed and the command centre destroyed. But it was the effect on German morale that was so crushing.

A joint force of British parachutists and partisans had successfully attacked a German base far behind the lines, one that had seemed, to its occupants, so heavily guarded as to be invulnerable.

Here was the SAS doing what it did best — the impossible.

That same month, March 1945, two other SAS squadrons numbering about 300 men in all crossed the Rhine at the tip of an Allied army invading Germany itself.

For three-and-a-half years, the regiment had fought Germans, Italians, French and Russians, against uniformed troops, collaborators, spies and irregulars.

But as World War II entered its final bloody chapter, it found itself fighting against people staunchly and desperately defending their own land. It would be no picnic.

They were mounted in 75 Jeeps, each carrying twin Vickers machine-guns and 12 drums of ammunition, with a bazooka and Bren gun in the rear. Every third Jeep was armed with a .50-calibre Browning plus a mounted searchlight.

This extensive armoury was essential as they came up against an enemy fighting for every inch of home — from the fanatical SS implicated in the crimes of Nazism to old men of the home guard and even children.

Commandant of Belsen horror camp, Joseph Kramer, now under guard and in ankle chains after his arrest

'Some of the poor little blighters were only 13 or 14 years old,' one trooper recalled. 'They were crawling out of holes everywhere. The Germans put schoolboys in uniform and forced them to fight, when their chances of survival were minimal. It was inhumane.'

The reactions of civilians to this army of occupation varied widely: some were cowed, most were petrified, some rushed to surrender and some remained defiant.

One moment the SAS troops would be sharing their rations with half-starved German women and children; the next, a teenage boy would emerge from behind a wall and take aim with an anti-tank warhead, an act of self-destructive bravery so naive only an adolescent could be persuaded to do it.

Often these child-soldiers had no other weapons. The SAS had not signed up to kill teenagers. For many, this last ghastly episode of the war was the worst.

They were at risk, too, from Hitler's order to kill Commandos on sight. As a defence, they wore ordinary black berets and all references to the SAS were excised from their pay books. They were fighting under cover, camouflaged as ordinary soldiers.

The disguise was apt since by then they were a far cry from the hit-and-run teams operating behind far behind enemy lines in North Africa that their founder David Stirling had envisaged.

Instead, as they made their way though Europe, their principal job was as forward reconnaissance and assault troops, weeding out resistance, drawing enemy fire, clearing the roads and keeping the main Allied force of tanks and ground troops rolling forward.

It was in this capacity that, on April 15, 1945, Lieutenant John Randall and his driver were motoring through forests of pine and silver birch in northern Germany when a terrible smell hit them, a cloying stench of rot and excrement that seemed to hang in the air like a plague miasma.

The reek of pure evil, it grew stronger as they advanced.

They came to a pair of impressive iron gates, standing open at the entrance to a sandy track. They drove in and, after half a mile, reached a barbed-wire fence.

A handful of SS guards stood idly by and stared listlessly at them. Machine-gunners in watchtowers looked down but made no move. Randall was struck by the neatly tended flower beds on either side of the gate, and the gleaming whitewashed kerbstones.

One hundred yards further on, they were in hell itself.

In a clearing, beside rows of huts, shuffled an aimless army of ghosts: withered semi-skeletons with sunken eyes and parchment skin, some clad in black-and-white striped prison garb, but many almost naked.

The prisoners converged on the Jeep, plucking at the men's uniforms, pleading for food, help, protection. 'There were hundreds of them and an over-powering stench,' said Randall.

A little further on was what Randall initially took to be a potato patch, which some of the starving, half-naked figures seemed to be picking over, as if in search of sustenance. On drawing closer, he saw it was a pile of dead bodies. The living were pulling off the ragged garments of the dead to clothe themselves.

Emaciated allied prisoners of war released from Stalag 11B, near Fallingbostel and Belsen, after SAS moved in on the camp

Some 50 yards beyond was a spectacle that made Randall retch: a vast pit, 50ft square, containing a contorted mass of bodies, a charnel pit filled to overflowing with the dead, and the main source of the appalling smell.

He and his driver were the first Allied soldiers to enter Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Some 60,000 prisoners were still packed into an area designed to accommodate 10,000.

A few minutes later Randall was joined by others from the troop. 'We stood aghast,' one recalled. 'We simply could not comprehend that human beings could treat their fellow men in such a brutal and heinous way.'

The remaining prison guards, either oblivious to the arrival of Allied soldiers or unconcerned by it, were carrying on the business of murder as usual. A woman prisoner thrust her hand under the barbed wire to grab a rotten turnip, and a guard casually shot her dead.

At that moment there appeared a smiling figure in SS uniform who introduced himself as Josef Kramer, the commandant. He offered the visitors a tour of the camp, declaring absurdly that he was not responsible for the condition of the inmates.

Blinded by continuous beatings and long suffering at Belsen, this man drinks water from a rusty tin

Ushered into the nearest hut, a horrified Randall recalled: 'Emaciated figures peered out at us, in fear and surprise, from the rows of bunks. Lying among them, on the same bunks, were dead bodies.'

The SAS men's instinct was to obliterate every one of the guards in a burst of gunfire, but somehow they managed to control their fury. They locked the commandant in the guardroom and set about distributing whatever rations they had to the prisoners.

An officer explained to the inmates that they were now free, but few could take it in. 'Their faces were dull, exhausted, emotionless, not capable of expressing joy and excitement. Their minds would be distorted for years to come — perhaps for ever.'

The SAS soldiers who stumbled on the camp recalled that day as the worst in their lives. Randall could not get the smell of death out of his hair or the lingering stench from his clothing. He could never expunge it from his memory. 'The smells and sights of these dead bodies haunted me.'

AND SO, in unimaginable horror, the SAS's part in World War II came to an end. A few days later the SAS's founder, Colonel David Stirling — captured in the desert in 1943 — was freed from Colditz, where he'd been a PoW.

In London, he went on a bender, had 'my first roger for years', then bearded Churchill in Downing Street. He got permission to begin planning a new SAS mission in China, aimed at severing Japanese supply lines to Malaya.

But in August the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan surrendered. Britain began dismantling its vast war machine with bleak bureaucratic efficiency. Shortly after, a crisp, unemotional memo from the War Office decreed: 'It has been decided to disband the Special Air Service regiment.'

Private W Buchanan of Glasgow who is suffering from malnutrition, with some of his comrades at Stalag 11 after the liberation of Belsen

On October 1, 1945, the SAS paraded for the last time at the regiment's HQ in Essex, and the men returned to their ordinary regiments or entered civilian life. Stirling's experiment was over.

Except it wasn't. Not totally. One small fragment of the regiment endured — secretly, unofficially and quite possibly illegally.

Questions were being asked about the fate of SAS men who had fallen into German hands. There were reports that a number had been murdered in captivity.

When 37 bodies were found in a mass grave, Major Bill Barkworth, the regiment's chief intelligence officer, was sent to investigate. He and five other SAS men established themselves as a War Crimes Investigation Team (WCIT).

This was, in effect, the last wartime mission of the SAS — unauthorised, unconventional and therefore, in a way, entirely apt.

For the next three years, Barkworth and his rogue unit travelled around Europe interviewing witnesses, compiling dossiers, combing prison camps, taking statements, finding unmarked graves, locating suspects. They operated as if on official war crimes business, with no authority to do so.

They continued to wear uniform with SAS insignia, even though the regiment had ceased to exist.

They were protected by a former Russian prince, Yuri Galitzine, who worked in the British War Office and was determined to expose Nazi atrocities.

They worked on until 1948, when they, too, were finally disbanded.

A dying woman in the hospital of the camp who was found as the Allied troops moved in to liberate it

By that time, however, the SAS itself had come back to life. British military commitments were changing in a post-war world, and the authorities belatedly realised that such a unit would be not only useful, but essential.

The 21st SAS Regiment (so called because it amalgamated 2 and 1 SAS) came into being in January 1947, as part of the Territorial Army.

The idea swiftly spread, with many other nations forming their own versions of the SAS.

Today, U.S. and British special forces still follow the principles pioneered by David Stirling in the desert more than 70 years ago: attacking the most valuable strategic targets without warning and then melting away, forcing the enemy to remain on constant, debilitating alert.

The SAS changed the face of warfare for ever, by pioneering techniques of long-term, deep penetration that are more important now than ever. 

A version of this article was originally published by the Mail on August 9, 2017. 

• Adapted from SAS: Rogue Heroes — The Authorised Wartime History by Ben Macintyre, published by Viking. © Ben Macintyre 2017. To buy a copy for £8.99 call 020 3176 2937 or visit books.mailshop.co.uk. P&P is free on orders over £25.