The real hero in the Grylls family? Clue: It’s NOT Bear
More gripping than any TV stunt, how the adventurer’s grandfather led an elite unit to track down the Nazis’ greatest secrets
DESPITE being largely in rubble, the Germany of April 1945 offered rich pickings for any Allied soldier on the make. Cellars crammed with fine wines, banks stuffed with cash, mine shafts loaded with fine art — all were tempting targets for those who wished to illicitly supplement their British Army pay.
One such source of extra income was quickly identified by two members of the 5th Battalion of the King’s Regiment (Liverpool): a silk factory near the town of Celle, 25 miles north-east of Hanover.
In the words of one officer, the two soldiers visited the factory one day ‘on the look-out for a bit of silk for the missus’.
One of the soldiers, a man called Stannion, was emphatically not the type who cared about the nicety of paying for what he found. Not only did he loathe the Germans, but in peacetime he had been a poacher back home in Norfolk.
History does not recall what Stannion and his mate took from the factory — looting is seldom accompanied by documentary paperwork — but what we do know is that the two men stumbled upon a steel door in a cellar that the German workforce refused to unlock.
Intrigued, Stannion returned to base and told his officer, Major Brian Urquhart. Some time later, the two men visited the factory and, once again, the Germans refused to unlock the door. ‘ Why don’t you shoot the lock out, sir?’ Stannion suggested.
‘Doesn’t that only ever work in the flicks?’ Urquhart replied.
‘It’s got to be worth a try, sir. These b*****ds aren’t going to do it.’ Somewhat cautiously, Urquhart took out his pistol and, half-expecting to do himself an injury, fired at the lock.
The door swung open to reveal a startled, bookish-looking man, his white hair belying the fact that he was only in his early 40s. ‘What do you want?’ the man asked. ‘I want to have a look inside,’ replied Urquhart, barging past.
Accompanied by Stannion, and still clutching his firearm, the 26-year- old major entered the dim cellar. As his eyes grew accustomed to the light, he began to make out workbenches, chemistry equipment and electrical devices.
‘Who are you?’ Urquhart demanded. ‘And what exactly are you doing here?’
The white-haired man paused. He had been working on one of Nazi Germany’s greatest secrets for many years. Even though he knew the war was over, it was still a struggle to make a full admission. ‘I am Professor Wilhelm Groth,’ he declared, ‘and I am doing research on isolating isotopes of uranium.’
As soon as the word ‘uranium’ was passed up the chain of command, alarm bells started to ring with the select few who knew then what we all know today — that the element is an integral part of the construction of atomic weapons.
Within less than 24 hours, numerous British and U.S. officers and civilians descended on the ‘silk factory’. Groth was arrested and spirited away, and his laboratory was dismantled and packed up.
For Urquhart, the remarkable discovery, although accidental, was a coup for his unit, whose existence was a closely guarded secret, and which remains somewhat shrouded in mystery even today.
The unit was called Target-Force, and its job was to seize Nazi scientific secrets and personnel to stop them falling into the hands of the Soviets, and to use them instead for British advantage.
Just last week, it was revealed by the adventurer Bear Grylls that his grandfather, Brigadier Ted Grylls, was one of the commanders of the unit, often referred to as ‘T-Force’. Speaking at the Hay Festival, Grylls admitted he only found out about his grandfather’s involvement when he chanced upon old papers in an attic.
‘It was a house my grandfather had lived in,’ he said, ‘and I was helping my mother move out. We found this old World War II military trunk of my grandfather’s. There were all these old military documents wrapped in escape maps, and everything said “Top Secret” on it.’
After the documents were shown to experts at the Imperial War Museum, it emerged that Brigadier Grylls commanded the unit from early 1946 until it was wound up in late 1947. Typical of that generation, Grylls never spoke about his highly secret work.
‘My grandfather died when I was about 19,’ said Bear Grylls. ‘He was an amazing grandfather, but always very quiet.’
So what exactly did this quiet man and T-Force do? What did they find? And, as well as Grylls, what sort of men were in this clandestine unit?
Appropriately enough, the roots of T-Force lie with Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. During the war, the then Commander Fleming worked at the Department of Naval Intelligence in Whitehall, where he helped to establish a Commando unit that would work immediately behind the front lines and gather intelligence from the enemy.
Called 30 Assault Unit, Fleming’s Commandos acquired numerous pieces of valuable intelligence throughout the war. However, in the wake of the invasion of Europe in June 1944, it was appreciated that a different sort of unit was required.
The top brass realised that a larger force was needed to seize as much technical knowledge as possible. Whether this came in the form of equipment, documents, or even people, mattered little — the plan was for it all to be gathered up and sent back to Britain.
In essence, this was little more than pure plunder, although there were powerful strategic reasons to justify it. The first was immediate and pressing: with the war against Japan still raging, the Allies needed to establish exactly what access the Germans had given the Japanese to their secrets.
The second reason looked further to the future, in which it was correctly envisaged that the Soviet Union would be the West’s next enemy. The last thing the British and Americans wanted was for Stalin to piggyback on all the German advances in fields such as rocketry and chemical warfare.
In late 1944, under the command of Brigadier George Pennycook, T-Force was born. But for many months, it existed
They uncovered two secret German weapons every day
only on paper — despite everyone agreeing it was a great idea, Pennycook found it very difficult to source troops to man TForce.
Eventually, through the normal muddle of wartime military planning, Pennycook managed to find his men, many of whom were from the King’s Regiment (Liverpool). Although a perfectly decent unit, its soldiers could hardly be described as Special Forces.
Furthermore, Pennycook had to supplement their numbers with those who were partly lame and recovering from shell shock.
So even though TForce is often described as being ‘ elite’, its members were just ordinary soldiers, and very few, if any, came from the likes of the SAS.
To make TForce even more of a motley crew, Pennycook decided to employ convicted criminals. Particularly prized were safecrackers, whose skills would be used to great effect in Nazi offices.
Pennycook also required scientific experts to evaluate equipment and documents, and interview Nazi boffins to see whether they were worth putting on a plane to Britain.
Throughout its existence, there was often much tension between the civilian experts and their military colleagues. Unused to frontline life, the scientists would moan about the lack of hotel accommodation even after a town had only just been captured, and would take much exception to the offer of a barn.
From its inception, TForce was kept extremely secret. When its members arrived near the front line in early 1945, many British officers scratched their heads at the card issued by Field Marshal Montgomery’s chief of staff, which stipulated that the bearer had the authority to go wherever he pleased.
It was essential that TForce was both secret and highly mobile — if its progress was slow and its existence known to the Germans, it would give the Nazis time to destroy documents and equipment.
Thanks to this policy, TForce managed to find an Aladdin’s cave of secret inventions and weapons throughout the crumbling Third Reich.
The list is bewildering and, at times, like something out of science fiction — curved guns that could fire around corners, antiaircraft prediction systems, rocket guidance devices, poison gases such as sarin and tabun, zigzagging torpedoes, jetpowered fighter aircraft such as the Me 262, highly advanced engines, special tank hulls and superfast submarines.
At one stage, TForce estimated that it was uncovering two new secret weapons every day.
Among the equipment seized by TForce were elements of the Nazis’ atomic weapons programme.
When such material was shipped back to Britain, it was soon discovered that German scientists had thankfully been a long way behind their Allied counterparts. In many other areas, however, Nazi scientists were years more advanced.
As well as seizing the inventions, TForce grabbed the men responsible for them. Often, the unit’s methods were very rough and ready.
‘Usually, an NCO arrives without notice at the house or office of the German and warns that he will be required,’ states a disapproving memo written by a civil servant.
‘He does not give him details of the reasons, nor does he present his credentials. Some time later the German is seized (often in the middle of the night) and removed. This procedure savours very much of the Gestapo methods and is bound to create alarm and insecurity.’
But while some scientists certainly did have to be kidnapped, many others were all too willing to offer their services to TForce, in order to escape from the clutches of the Soviets. At times, scientists and other experts had to be smuggled out of the Russianheld zone.
Some scientists were so desperate to leave that they puffed up their technical knowledge to absurd levels, with one aspirant Nazi boffin even claiming to have invented a ‘death ray’ that could kill anything from fleas to humans.
Among the members of TForce carrying out this highly secret work was none other than the late legendary BBC journalist Sir Charles Wheeler, who would later become the fatherinlaw of Boris Johnson.
By early 1946, the 43yearold Brigadier Ted Grylls had taken over command of the unit.
TForce’s mission had expanded from secret raids to include the escorting of some 6,000 British, French and U.S. investigators around Germany. In total, 5,000 scientists were interviewed, of whom 1,500 were earmarked for removal to Britain, ‘whether they are willing or not’. It was hardly surprising that Bear Grylls’s grandfather described his officers’ job as being ‘a combination of industrial agent, intelligence officer, and agent of Thomas Cook’.
Even though most of the substantial finds had been made by late 1946, there were still surprises in store. In the cellars of one Krups factory, TForce found an astonishing 6,000kg of uranium ore, vital for Britain’s own atomic weapons programme.
By the time the unit was wound up in 1947, it had seized material worth an estimated £80 billion. The inventions and the men they seized would lead to the development of Britain’s jetfighter programme, and ultimately to the creation of Concorde.
However, there is perhaps a final irony to the story. While there was
One Nazi boffin said he’d made a death ray His team seized material worth £80 billion
undoubtedly a shortterm benefit to Britain in acquiring so much expertise, the success of TForce arguably allowed many British scientists simply to build on German expertise rather than innovate.
Postwar Germany, meanwhile, had to start from scratch, and as a result their scientists had to be more inventive and ultimately more successful.
Of course, such an outcome was not foreseen in the chaotic days of postwar Europe. All that mattered was to deprive the Russians, and in that, men like Ted Grylls more than did their secret bit.
T-FORCE: The Forgotten Heroes of 1945, by Sean Longden, is published by Constable at £8.99.