Paddy Ashdown: True heroes who defied the odds in the shadow of death

It all depends on who you are, where you are and what the context is.

Those who represented Britain in the Olympics, especially the winners, and everyone in the Paralympics, have all been called heroes – and who would question their right to the title?

But it meant something very different 70 years ago, when Britain was desperately struggling for survival against a Germany which was triumphant on all fronts. It probably means something else today in Afghanistan too.

The 10 Royal Marines who paddled 70 miles up the Gironde estuary right through the middle of 10,000 German troops to attack enemy ships in Bordeaux harbour in December 1942 were christened “The Cockleshell Heroes”. Of the 10 who left their submarine that dark cold night, two drowned on the way in, six were captured and shot and two, their leader Blondie Hasler and Marine “Ned” Sparks, made it home through occupied France, over the Pyrenees to Spain and Gibraltar. The Germans called what they did “the outstanding Commando raid of World War Two”. Blondie Hasler hated the title “hero”. And it’s true that they were not everyone’s idea of what heroes are made of – as I discovered writing my recent book about the raid.

If you had met them in a pub, you probably wouldn’t have given them a second glance. One, David Moffatt, worked in a Halifax mill before the war; another was a milkman from Stockport whose best friend was his horse; a third was a coal merchant’s clerk from Glasgow. And that was the point – they were just ordinary guys who, through training, an unbreakable determination and belief in themselves and each other, were able to carry out one of the most remarkable and courageous military operations of the entire Second World War, known at the time as Operation Frankton.

Lord Mountbatten, who sent them, believed none would come back. And they knew it. I have found the last letters they wrote to their loved ones on board the submarine, the night before they left. They bring the tears to my eyes every time I read them.

But they were not the only heroes of this extraordinary operation. For lying under the “Cockleshell Hero” story which many of my generation knew so well, I found another which no one knew about at all.

Though they didn’t know it at the time, the Marines were not the only people attacking German ships on the Bordeaux quays 70 years ago. In a café a hundred yards from the ships the Cockleshell Heroes were attacking, six British secret agents who had linked into the French Resistance were planning to do exactly the same thing the following night. Thanks to a cock-up of mighty proportions in London, however, neither knew the other was there. It was not the first time – nor will it be the last – that heroism by our soldiers is sacrificed by the stupidity of those who run things back in London. It happens still today. Look at Afghanistan.

Those secret agents on the Bordeaux quays in 1942 – and the French who worked with them – were heroes too; but of a different sort. Theirs was the courage not of explosive action but of the patience and sustained alertness required to live a double life in a hostile country for long, nerve-jangling days, weeks, months and years. And their story is different too. This is not a tale of stealth and shadows and arduous physical endurance, this is a much more human story; of personal tensions, betrayals, silent assassinations and lovers’ promises made before the firing squad. I found one of these agents – an 18-year-old French girl at the time – still alive. But the balance of her mind had become so disturbed by age and the privations she suffered in Ravensbruck concentration camp that she thought I was a Gestapo officer when I flew down to the South of France to interview her two years ago. The wounds of war are not always physical.

The catalogue of heroes from those distant days does not stop there.

Perhaps all of us can imagine how an unattached young man of 18 might volunteer for such an operation when his country was under mortal attack and thousands were dying daily in the London blitz. It does not diminish the Marines’ courage to add that we can perhaps all understand how such an extraordinary feat might be achieved.

But now imagine that you have had no preparation. That you are not single, but married with two young children upstairs in bed and a wife who depends on you to see the family through the tough, difficult years of wartime occupied France. And suddenly, at midnight, there is a knock on your door and you open it to find a British soldier standing there in uniform begging you for help.

You have seconds to make up your mind. And you know that if you say yes, you risk not just your life but that of your whole family, too. These French people – one of them a girl of 16 at the time who I also found while writing my book – are the unsung heroes of this tale. True, in one case, a Frenchman betrayed the Marines to the Germans. But he is outnumbered 10 or 20 times over by the ordinary French men and women who put their lives and those of their loved ones in jeopardy by saying yes to those desperate appeals from strangers in the middle of the night. These were acts not just of courage, but also of transcendental humanity.

So you see, heroes come in many types. But, whether they are the heroes of the Paralympics, our modern service heroes in Afghanistan or the Cockleshell Heroes of 70 years ago, they have one thing in common. They have all won our respect and admiration by surmounting obstacles that most of us would have found impossible. That’s what a hero is.

Paddy Ashdown is a former leader of the Liberal Democrats and author of A Brilliant Little Operation: The Cockleshell Heroes and the Most Courageous Raid of World War Two, published by Aurum, price £25.