Across Bordeaux in the footsteps of Britain’s wartime saboteurs

Wreathed in the gloom of a December evening, the submarine rose from the inky depths a short distance offshore and began to silently disgorge its cargo. Five two-person canoes were lifted through the forward hatch and lowered into the water. Taking their places in the craft were 10 young men, their faces blacked out and bodies insulated by camouflaged rubber suits.

A few kilometres to the east, so close that the men could hear the deadened thump of waves striking the shore, lay the coastal hamlet of Montalivet and the golden sands of the Côte d’Argent, stretching in an almost unbroken ribbon 200km south to Biarritz. A beach holiday, however, was the very last thing on their minds.

In the footsteps of . . . 

This is the latest in a series in which writers are guided by notable earlier travellers. For more, see ft.com/footsteps

It was December 7, 1942, and the 10 young commandos had been tasked with paddling deep into German-occupied France to place mines on enemy ships docked in Bordeaux — and blow a hole in the occupier’s growing sense of invincibility.

It was a raid so emblematic it would spawn its own special forces unit; so consequential that Winston Churchill reportedly said it shortened the second world war by up to six months; and so dangerous that only two of the commandos would make it home alive.

“In war,” Napoleon once asserted, “the finest calculation of genius is audacity.” As their escort disappeared beneath the waves and the commandos — members of the Royal Marines’ embryonic Boom Patrol Detachment, later the Special Boat Service — set a course for the Gironde estuary, it must have seemed like this was all they had going for them.

Operation Frankton, few were in any doubt, was tantamount to a suicide mission. The strategically vital estuary was heavily guarded. Bordeaux lay 100km upstream — the team would need to spend multiple nights paddling their canvas and plywood “cockles”. And should they succeed, the tellingly vague “extraction plan” was to trek a similar distance overland to a rural town from where the French Resistance would attempt to assist them.

I’d come to this serene tranche of western France to trace the extraction route — now a hiking and cycling trail named after the operation — and to see the key locations around which this remarkable mission played out.

From Montalivet beachfront, where an immaculate tricolore flapped audibly in the breeze above a white-stone memorial to Frankton, I drove north. The sand-dusted coastal road weaved through pristine forest of dense, squat pine. As the trees thinned out, the Pointe de Grave appeared and, with it, the sparkling expanse of Europe’s largest estuary.

Despite the benign conditions, isolated patches of white water scuffed the estuary mouth. These are the notorious tidal rips, or “overfalls” — the maelstroms that, directly and indirectly, were to claim the lives of six of the Frankton team. One canoe capsized, with its crew succumbing to hypothermia; two others were split from the group and forced to make premature landfall whereupon their occupants were captured, interrogated and later executed.

In the first 10 hours of the mission, Major Herbert “Blondie” Hasler, the Dublin-born leader, had lost three-fifths of his team — and, he must have feared, the all-important element of surprise. As he and his No 2, Marine Bill Sparks, in the cockle codenamed Catfish, and Corporal Albert Laver and Marine William Mills, in Crayfish, hid up in the reeds beneath a brightening sky, they would have known that their odds of success had lengthened significantly. 

A heartening legacy of Operation Frankton is the Anglo-Franco bond it has forged in this idyllic corner of France. “We are frères de guerre — brothers in war,” local gendarme-turned-military historian David Devigne told me. The 52-year-old is a member of the Frankton Souvenir, which works with the Special Boat Service Association to perpetuate the memory of the mission, in part through strategically placed memorials.

One of the most affecting of these I found across the estuary mouth in Royan, among the smattering of exquisite belle époque villas that survive from the town’s 19th-century heyday. It stands just west of the ferry port, on the pebbled coastal path, and features the outlines of five canoes, four of them translucent cyan, fanned out like a poker hand. I watched two passers-by approach, read its display, contemplate the photos of the smiling young Royal Marines, then puff out their cheeks in admiration.

I spent a couple of days in and around Royan and the adjacent Côte Sauvage, or wild coast. Come summer, this is one of western France’s most alluring coastlines. There’s an almost primeval feel, with dunes segueing into forest, and knotted arms of sun-blanched driftwood being gently subsumed by the unrestrainable sands. Lured by the protracted sunsets, beachgoers linger late into the evening.

But as it did for the surviving commandos, the estuary was drawing me inland. Close up, it’s quite something: a huge, swollen tongue of water the colour of milky coffee into which both the mighty Dordogne and Garonne drain. I pictured the two cockles making their halting nocturnal progress, weaving in and out of estuarine islands sculpted into slender shards by the implacable current.

On the night of December 11, having evaded a disjointed German search effort for four days, Catfish and Crayfish slipped into Bordeaux. The commandos placed limpet mines on six enemy ships then fled, riding an ebbing tide and shortlived wave of elation. Splitting up to reduce the chance of detection, the two crews came ashore within 400 metres of one another near Blaye, on the northern bank.

I arrived in the town early morning. The pretty, plane-tree-shaded main street was deserted, its caramel-hued stone buildings inscrutable behind closed shutters. Beyond, low-set and imposing, was the town’s sprawling 17th-century citadel.

The Frankton Trail begins on Blaye’s western fringes near the 19th-century Château de Segonzac. It was the sight of its commanding silhouette, standing atop a vine-striped hill, that greeted Hasler and Sparks as they landed in a clearing between two traditional “carrelet” fishing cabins.

Here, as the first mines started to detonate in the distance, they scuttled their cockle and contemplated their next challenge: a 110km overland trek north-east to the town of Ruffec, pursued by a vengeful enemy.

“It must have been so frustrating for Hitler,” says Laurence Moore, 43, a former army officer who re-enacted the full Frankton route with a team of Royal Marines in December 2022 to mark the 80th anniversary. “You can imagine the Germans scratching their heads and saying ‘How the hell have they done that?’”

British ex-servicemen and women are among those who come to tackle the Frankton Trail. It’s part hike, part homage — and, fittingly, it’s by no means easy to follow. There’s no signage and maps are incomplete, not least because the exact path of the fleeing Hasler and Sparks is impossible to know.

A misty haze hung over the countryside as I cycled on traffic-free lanes. Every dozen or so kilometres, a modest spire poked through the trees heralding the presence of another soporific stone-built settlement: Donnezac, Montendre, St Germain.

Midway between Cognac and Charente’s hub city of Angoulême, with bodies and morale faltering, Hasler and Sparks made the decision to roll the dice. Risking betrayal, they started knocking on doors. This led to an encounter with a character later immortalised by Hasler as the “fiery woodsman”.

The woodsman’s cottage still stands, a short distance south of the pretty, vineyard-encircled hamlet of Saint-Preuil. Here, despite an initially hostile welcome from the theatrically volatile owner, the men enjoyed their first hot meal and night under cover since leaving the submarine nine days before.

I found the cottage at the end of a secluded track and tentatively knocked. A man with long, swept-back hair, goatee and an easy-going manner opened the door. This was Michel Landreau, the current owner, who was quickly joined by his wife Dany. Enthused to have a Frankton pilgrim at their door, they showed me the room, with its creaking staircase and huge stone fireplace, where the men slept. “No change,” said Michel proudly — it’s exactly as it was.

I was offered a drink and we gathered around the garden table as the couple carefully laid out the contents of their Operation Frankton binder. One photo stood out. It was of a grey-haired man wearing a green beret and black shoes buffed to a high sheen. He was sitting by the fireplace I’d just seen, his breast furnished with an implausible number of medals: Bill Sparks, returning to the cottage decades later. “Many fond memories of these lovely people that sheltered us at the risk of their own lives,” he’d written alongside. “God bless.”

I left, as Sparks and Hasler did, heartened and refreshed for the final push north to Ruffec. On December 18 1942 at around 11am they entered the market town and made for a modest hostel and restaurant called La Toque Blanche. Now boarded up, it stands on the corner of a busy junction. Here, hiding in plain sight, they were concealed by the French Resistance in preparation for repatriation.

I bedded down a few kilometres south at Le Palais, a boutique hotel on the fringes of the village of Verteuil-sur-Charente. A stately avenue of oaks leads to the 400-year-old manor house, which has been characterfully refurbished by British owners Will Froude and Jasmine Harvey. Views stretch across a sunflower field to the willow-stroked waters of the Charente river and conical slate roofs of Verteuil’s château.

The house was originally built to serve monks and pilgrims passing through en route to Santiago de Compostela. And it was to Spain that Hasler and Sparks were also bound — smuggled across the Pyrenees to Gibraltar, and thence home. Mills and Laver were not so fortunate. Caught after 36 hours, they were tortured and later shot.

With the sun dipping below Verteuil’s rooftops, I sat out on Le Palais’ poolside terrace with Froude and discussed Frankton’s legacy. Only four ships were severely damaged but the symbolism of the actions of the “Cockleshell heroes”, as they became known, was far greater, emboldening both British forces and the French Resistance.

In the peace of the lavender-scented evening, I was reminded of the plaque erected in the waterside clearing in Blaye in memory of the eight men who didn’t return — its words serving as a challenge to the complacency into which remembrance can all too easily sink. “They have no known graves. Their average age was 23. Think on that, as you stand here in freedom.”  

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