From Arctic Snow to Dust of Normandy: The Extraordinary Wartime Exploits of a Naval Special Agent

249 Pages·2002·8.28 MB·English

by  Patrick Dalzel-Job

To the memory of a blue-eyed little girl from the Arctic

First published 1991, reprinted 1992. Sixth impression 1998.

Published 2002 in this format by
Leo Cooper
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Limited
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS

Copyright © Patrick Dalzel-Job, 1991, 2002
9781783033065
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British
Library
Printed in England by
CPI UK
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Foreword
Introduction
1 - North-Eastwards to Norway
2 - The Arctic – Prelude to War
3 - Frustration
4 - Return to Norway
5 - Narvik
6 - Operation ‘VP’
7 - Midget Submarines
8 - Alone on a Norwegian Island
9 - Parachuting
10 - NID 30 and 30 AU
11 - Behind Enemy Lines
12 - Onwards into the Reich
13 - Heinschenwalde and Bremerhaven
14 - Journey’s End
Epilogue
Appendix
MAPS
Foreword
It may have been Ian Fleming himself who launched the story that his celebrated
fictional hero, Commander James Bond RN, was modelled on Lieutenant-
Commander Patrick Dalzel-Job. In his book, Dalzel-Job dismisses the
suggestion as preposterous. I am less sure. I suspect that Bond was a composite
character, owing something to Dalzel-Job and the exploits described in this
book; something to the late Dunstan Curtis, a dashing figure who was the real
commander of Fleming’s private army of naval intelligence officers and Royal
Marine commandos (Fleming was desk-bound at the Admiralty); and much more
to a vivid imagination. A month after D-Day, on a brief visit to Normandy,
Fleming was palpably envious of his highly independent charges in the field,
living it up in brilliant summer weather and obviously enjoying their war. Who
knows, he may have asked himself, what they got up to after dark.
To this happy little band of warriors I was loosely and all too briefly attached
at the age of twenty-one. Over-promoted and under-employed after the landings,
I joined up with Dalzel-Job and followed him to Brittany, where I slowly
discovered that in spite of his impetuous sorties into enemy territory his
companions were in safe and capable hands. Dalzel-Job was a veteran, and
marvellously equipped – mentally and mechanically – to do his own thing in
war. Somewhere along the line he had learned the value of button-holing
civilians: in France we scarcely moved a step without finding out from a farmer
how to avoid unwelcome encounters with German troops.
Patrick never told me where he had been and what he had done earlier in the
war. Having read his remarkable book it’s clear to me that I ought to have asked.
I was vaguely aware that he’d served in Norway – there was a story that he’d
spent part of a winter sitting alone on an Arctic iceflow reporting German
convoy movements by radio to London. This was an exaggeration but see
chapter eight for a vivid account of what it’s like to be marooned on an island –
in darkness and in rain, and apparently forgotten – with only a sodden sleeping
bag for company.
One of my earliest memories of Patrick is set in an orchard somewhere near
Carteret in the Cherbourg Peninsular. A stark naked, pink and white figure is
Carteret in the Cherbourg Peninsular. A stark naked, pink and white figure is
standing ankle deep in a stream, scrubbing himself from head to foot with a face
flannel. This done, he carefully wrings out the flannel and uses it to dry himself.
I offer to lend him a towel: ‘Thank you. I am using a towel.’
‘It looks like a face flannel.’
‘It’s a pocket towel.’
But if his personal gear could be contained in a pack, the military
accoutrements of Dalzel-Job and his two devoted companions, Marines Wright
and Fraser, filled a jeep and trailer. Lashed to the front bumper was a folding
airborne forces motorbike; mounted on a tripod bolted to the bonnet, an outsize
captured German machine-gun; inside, under a line of jerricans of petrol, pound
upon pound of plastic explosive. At the wheel of this lethal instrument, the red-
headed Fraser would take bends at fifty miles an hour.
Shortly after the fighting in Europe stopped the three of them vanished from
our headquarters in Hamburg. It transpired that Patrick, determined to end the
war where, for him, it had begun, had persuaded the Navy to put his jeep and its
crew on a destroyer bound for Norway. There he had left a girl, waving from a
quayside as he went back to England in September 1939. Within a few days
there was a wedding, followed by a blissfully happy naval and civilian life. Now
please read on.

Charles Wheeler, 1991
Introduction
Although it happened more than seventy years ago, I remember nothing in my
life more clearly than when my mother told me that Father had been killed in the
Battle of the Somme. She did not say it exactly like that, for I was barely three
years old, but I knew exactly what she meant. In those terrible days, even young
children could not altogether escape from the tragedies and disasters which
surrounded us.
We were living in cheap lodgings at the very top of a narrow house in
Hastings. Mother liked to be there because she could sometimes hear the sound
of the guns in France. She was a pretty little woman, just five feet tall, with
green eyes and – in those days – luxuriant dark hair. Before she was married, she
bore a striking resemblance in appearance, and perhaps also in character, to that
other dark-haired young woman, Etta Place, who accompanied the notorious
nineteenth-century American bank robbers, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid. Mother was an excellent shot, and was very proud of having killed a
running mouse in an aviary with an air rifle. She was afraid of nothing.
To finish her education, such as it was for girls in those days, Mother was sent
to school in Germany. With her musical ear, she became fluent in German and
also in French, but it was the time of the Boer War and adult Germans spoke
scornfully to her about the British Army – ‘Your Lorrd Robairrts’.
We forget, these days, how militaristic the Germans were at the end of the
nineteenth century. When an officer in uniform came into a public place, such as
a restaurant, all the civilian men stood up until he had found a seat, and civilians
always stood to one side to let any officer in uniform pass.
At morning assembly in her school, the girls and teachers of course sang
‘Deutschland über Alles’. Alles, we are now told, means ‘everything’, not
‘everybody’; but from the enthusiasm of their singing it was clear that the
German girls favoured the latter interpretation. With equal enthusiasm, my
mother sang ‘Deutschland unter Alles’. On the whole, however, I think my
mother enjoyed her time at the German school.
I was still only two when I last saw my father, but I have a clear recollection