Suicidal Valour
Wired for destruction, a bridge in Germany defied capture until King George VI’s former bodyguard pulled off a wartime ‘mission impossible’ in an act of near-suicidal daring.
The war was rushing towards its scrappy conclusion as Ian Oswald Liddell scribbled a hurried letter home to his parents. It was cryptically tantalising in its suggestion of a leading role during the British Liberation Army’s charge into Germany. Dated 6 April 1945, it was written somewhere between the villages of Mittelohne and Remsel, where the Coldstream Group of the Guards Armoured Division was battling on, hampered by land mines, road blocks, and woods thick with enemy troops:
“Just a note to tell you I am still well and enjoying life, but finding it rather hard to get time to write,” he started apologetically, before hinting of more exciting news. “My Company did rather a good performance three days ago and today I have had the very embarrassing performance of being pursued by press photographers who wanted pictures of us all. We had both movies and stills taken of us, so you will probably hear all about it soon. It was hot while it lasted, but we were very lucky and had very light casualties. I cannot tell you more for the moment but you will hear in due course.”
Indeed they would, though not from him. For the time being, they would have to make do with reports filling the newspapers and wireless air waves. Though short on detail, they spoke of a German army in full retreat and a war hastening towards its inevitable end.
Four years earlier, the boot had been firmly on the other foot as a 21-year-old Acting Lieutenant Ian Oswald Liddell found himself tasked with a critically important new job in the event of a feared German invasion. Retreats and defeats in Norway and France were a recent memory when, in February 1941, the Old Harrovian was posted to a small
‘special force’: the Coats Mission. Formed in the wake of Dunkirk, it was to serve as a personal bodyguard to the Royal Family. By the time Liddell reported for Royal protection duties, the Coats Mission had grown to company strength with five officers and 124 men - almost all Coldstreamers, with support by armoured car troops of the 12th Lancers and Northamptonshire Yeomanry.
Born in Shanghai, Liddell had been called up in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry in May 1940 and commissioned a second lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards six months later. However, rendered redundant by the rapidly receding threat of invasion, the King’s bodyguard was disbanded in November 1942.
TOUGHEST CHALLENGE
Ian Liddell found himself posted to the 5th Coldstreams, a motorised infantry battalion in the 32nd Guards Brigade of the Guards Armoured Division, and given command of the motor transport platoon. It was in this role that Liddell landed in Normandy in the last week of June 1944. By early September, he was just short of the Dutch border. Along the way, he revelled in the routing of German troops and rejoiced in their headlong flight from Brussels where uproarious celebrations were beyond compare. Later, he confided to his parents: “I can truthfully say that I was nearer killed by the joy of the people of Brussels than I have been since we landed.”
Not long afterwards, Temporary Captain Ian Liddell was given command of 3 Company, 5th Coldstream Guards. It was in this role that he faced his toughest challenge.
By 2 April, three days after crossing the Rhine and capturing Enschede, the battalion was approaching Lingen where attempts to force crossings over the Ems near Shepsdorf were thwarted by the demolition of bridges. Plans were immediately laid for a full-scale assault, but before this could take place reconnaissance patrols by armoured cars of the Household Cavalry reported finding an un-blown bridge. The discovery changed everything.
The potentially bloody river crossing was postponed and orders issued for the Coldstream Group, comprising Sherman tanks of the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards and motorised infantry of the 5th Battalion, to seize it intact. Command of the hastily organised operation was given to Lieutenant Colonel ‘Dicky’ Gooch, CO of the 1st Battalion, his idea being for ‘C’ Squadron to rush the bridge, supported by infantry of Liddell’s 3 Company, who would follow-up and secure its capture.
However, arriving on the wooded slopes overlooking the bridge, Gooch was quickly disabused of that notion. Captain Jocelyn Pereira, the 5th Battalion’s Intelligence Officer, was with Gooch as he spied out enemy positions beyond a stretch of open meadow that fell away before rising to the near side of a bridge thoroughly sealed with a ten foot tall stack of tree trunks. The block wasn’t the only obstacle as Pereira noted:
“The bridge was a modern concrete one which looked as though it would blow up easily enough. Placed along the roadway there were several large aerial bombs that had obviously been put there for that purpose.
“Immediately beside the far end of the bridge there was a static ack-ack post, all banked about with protective sandbag walls, and no doubt full of well-dug trenches. Inside the post there were three 88s, as large as life, manned by a crew who at times were also as large as life. It was obviously not a place that tanks could rush. The only prospect was the hope that we could give the Germans such a surprise that it might be possible for some infantry to get across before it could be blown.”
The main difficulty in what seemed an
overly optimistic enterprise was shortage of time. It would take several minutes to blast away the road block, but only the press of a plunger to blow the bridge sky-high.
To buy time, Gooch came up with a fire-plan to panic and cow the defenders while covering the infantry as they burst onto the bridge. An artillery barrage would fire a sudden concentration on German positions while two troops of 3 Squadron rumbled up, astride the ridge. Then, as the gunfire lifted, the tanks would drench enemy defences with fire from guns, machine guns, and 60lb rockets purloined from the RAF and fitted in Heath Robinson contraptions to the sides of the Sherman turrets. To this desperate scheme, Liddell added his own extraordinary twist. It was one so daring as to be well-nigh suicidal in sheer audacity but breathtaking in simplicity.
Rather than risk all his men in a headlong rush across a bridge that could be demolished in an instant, he would scale the block under cover of the bombardment and, with his men blazing away at enemy positions, dash across alone to cut the wires connecting the bombs, thus rendering them safe. Accounts vary as to how his plan was received.
According to Lieutenant Robert Laurie, a young, recently-arrived subaltern, the company officers were astonished into unquestioning silence by his confidence and calm authority, though an attempt was made to dissuade him by an officer of the 1st Coldstreams. Fellow 3 Company subaltern Everard ‘Lump’ Windsor-Clive remembered it rather differently:
“We … told him we thought he was mad and hadn’t a hope in hell of succeeding, but he told us to shut up and so we did.”
Whatever the truth, Liddell was not to be swayed, and in the last moments before the attack, with rain and hail falling in sheets, Pereira took shelter with Liddell behind a straggle of bushes. After some thought, Pereira finally asked: “Do you think it will work?” Lidell replied: “Well, it’s the only way it can be done. Oh yes; I think it will certainly work – as long as I don’t forget the wire cutters!”
In fact, the issue of the wire cutters was a serious one. Liddell had none and was uncertain whether the company possessed any or, if it did, where they were. The solution came from WindsorClive, who after much indecision said: “I’ve got some wire cutters but I’m very fond of them because they were my father’s in the First War”.
And so it was, with a pair of borrowed antique wire cutters, that Liddell led the way through squalls of hail and rain and smoke laid down by mortars while a furious bombardment screamed overhead to smash German positions on the opposite bank.
ASTONISHING FEAT OF ARMS
Lieutenant Laurie led one of two platoons providing covering fire either side of the bridge entrance. To him, it sounded as though “all hell was let loose”. Behind him, 200 yards back, came Windsor-Clive at the head of a third platoon whose job was to charge across the bridge as soon as Liddell cut the wires.
Splashing through floodwater on the meadows leading to the river, WindsorClive sensed “an extraordinary feeling of elation” creeping over him, in spite of a shower of shells falling short, their blast deadened by the soft ground. The line of the river was obscured by smoke as the platoons began pelting the far bank with rifle and Bren gun fire. As they did, Laurie watched Liddell scrambling up the log block. “I noticed he’d dropped his precious Tommy gun getting over the barricade,” he later recalled. “Then, he ran like a lamplighter across the bridge and cut the wires on the enemy end and [then came] back again and cut the wire at our end.”
The suicidal nature of the mission, coupled with the sudden explosion of fire, initially took the Germans by surprise and helped account for the fact that Liddell was able to kneel down in full view
without any enemy reaction.
Vital seconds passed before, as Windsor-Clive put it, “the Germans recovered sufficiently to start shooting at him”. It was truly incredible he was not hit. Bullets skipped across the bridge and ricocheted off stanchions as Liddell turned to repeat the exercise in front of the now fully alerted defenders. Yet, running back, he seemed oblivious of the heavy fire as he again knelt to cut the wires on the bombs there. At that point, according to Windsor-Clive, he noticed more wires leading to bombs beneath the bridge and climbed down to disconnect them too.
“Why he wasn’t hit as he calmly knelt there, presenting a stationary target at point-blank range, I can’t say,” wrote Windsor-Clive. “To us who were watching, it seemed a miracle. Looking back … it still seems a miracle.”
His remarkable feat complete, Liddell clambered back on top of the barricade, shouting to Windsor-Clive to “hurry up and get on over”. It was the beginning of a pell-mell rush. John Royal, a corporal in the leading group, recalled:
“I had about eight or nine men in my section and only a couple had seen much action. It was just a case of running straight for the guns as fast as we could. But it seemed a hell of a long way … I never thought we’d get across. I remember some bazookas were firing at us, but we didn’t stop for anything.”
By now, covering platoons had joined the fracas. At that point, Lauire noticed Liddell standing on the end of the bridge, completely unarmed, his gun still missing. Suddenly, Laurie spotted a German soldier clambering out of his trench. “I didn’t know whether he was armed or what his intentions were, but he was behind Ian who was between me and him, so I said, ‘Ian, look behind you!’ And he saw this chap coming out, so flung the wire cutters at him and hit him. Both soldier and wire cutters disappeared below ground.”
It was almost the closing act in an astonishing feat of arms. A few minutes later, the leading troop of tanks smashed through the barricade and the bridge secured for the cost of one guardsman killed and four wounded. For the Germans, it was a different story.
In the bombardment and attack, more than 40 were killed and 42 taken as POWs, including their commander, a young captain. “He was … very shaken, and profusely anxious to explain why the bridge had not been blown,” remembered Pereira. “It had all been very difficult; he was in the wrong dug-out and couldn’t get back to the one where the switch [to blow the charges] was; when he managed to, it was too late, nothing happened.” It later emerged that the bombs had been wired in series so that when the first wire was cut the circuit was broken and all the others rendered impotent.
Most remarkable was Ian Liddell’s survival. Few expected his desperate plan to work. Fewer still dared hope he would return alive, let alone unscathed.
Word quickly spread of the extraordinary action, the press descending on 3 Company. By the time photographs and reports were published, the war was over. However, in one of the cruellest of ironies, the hero of the Ems River was dead, victim of a stray bullet 18 days after a supreme act of valour earned him, posthumously, one of the most richly deserved Victoria Crosses of the Second World War.