Lassen’s War
The story of a young Dane who fought in Africa, the English Channel, Italy and the Aegean during World War II
Anders Lassen (left) and Lieut. Kenneth Lamonby. Lamonby was killed in action during Operation Albumen.
By Tassos Telloglou, Kathimerini, 29 June 2021
https://www.kathimerini.gr/culture/561412012/o-mikros-polemos-toy-lasen/
Denmark is a small country, one that Hitler’s war machine occupied almost without firing a shot. To many Danes, this was distasteful. Twenty-year-old Andy Lassen was one of them. Lassen was part of the crew on a Danish tanker when the Germans invaded his homeland. After disembarking in Britain, he headed for the Scottish Highlands to train with the British Special Forces.
Lassen’s first operation was against Axis commercial vessels off the coast of West Africa. He subsequently saw action with 62 Commando/Small Scale Raiding Force on the Channel Islands and the north coast of France. He and his fellow raiders would go ashore, attack German garrisons, place explosive devices and withdraw – not always without casualties.
When 62 Commando/SSRF was disbanded, Lassen joined the Special Boat Service (SBS) in the Mediterranean. His biographer, Thomas Harder, tells Kathimerini that he wants ‘to present the man behind the myth’. He describes Lassen, who died aged 24 towards the end of the war during an operation in Comacchio, Northern Italy, as a key figure in the birth of the Special Forces. ‘His war was a small one , compared to Stalingrad and Normandy, involving maybe fewer than two hundred combatants,’ says Harder.
So why were these two hundred men so important? ‘Because what they did was deception,’ says Harder. ‘They misled the enemy about British intentions and priorities.’ One of the high points of the book is an SBS operation in Crete code-named ‘Albumen’ (22 June–12 July 1943). The British drew up a complicated plan that included letting a dead body with a briefcase full of forged documents fall into German hands. The idea was to create the impression that the landing in the southern Mediterranean would take place on Crete or Sardinia, rather than Sicily. Accordingly, the SBS carried out operations on the two islands a few days before the Sicily landing (10 July 1943) in order to convince the Germans that operations here were the Allies’ top priority.
The objective of Operation Albumen was to sabotage three German military airfields (Tympaki, Kastelli Pediadas and Herakleion). Lassen, along with 13 comrades, landed at Trypiti on the south shore of the island. The men split into three groups to attack the airfields, but only at one of them, Kastelli Pediadas, were any aircraft to be found (as was often the case, for example on Paros in May 1944, the British intelligence was not accurate). After ten days of marching across Crete, spending the night in caves and eating what the locals brought them, Lassen’s unit mounted an assault on Kastelli airfield. Four men placed explosives on eight aircraft (of which only one was destroyed) and exchanged fire with German and Italian guards, killing one or two of them before escaping through the mountains. In his report, Lassen multiplied by five the damage inflicted. He had no way of knowing that the Germans had managed to remove most of the bombs from the aircraft and detonate them at a safe distance.
Author Thomas Harder: “Lassen was a key figure in the birth of the Special Forces”. (Photo Vita Korsgaard)
While the outcome of the operation did not match the risks taken and effort expended (especially considering that the Germans executed 60 locals in reprisal), it nonetheless contributed to the false impression that the British were focusing on Crete.
Following Italy’s surrender in autumn 1943, operations of this kind were expanded to the Dodecanese, where the SBS attempted to prevent the Germans from occupying islands previously controlled by the Italians. Lassen and his unit, operating on caiques from the Turkish coast, fought some deadly battles, particularly on Symi, but failed to secure the islands. Ultimately, the Germans took the Dodecanese.
The graves of Lassen and two of his SBS comrades in the old cemetery inside the town Comacchio. The site is now the playground of a local nursery.
During mid-1944, Lassen and his men carried out multiple raids on the islands of the Central Aegean, aided by members of the Greek Sacred Squadron, who had a better knowledge of local conditions. However, while they succeeded in wrecking German infrastructure on Santorini, they tragically failed on Paros, where their attempt to destroy an airfield under construction at Molos led to widespread reprisals against the local population.
In the ensuing mayhem, Lassen’s teams began shooting at each other and lost their bearings on their way to the unfinished airfield. The Germans captured their guide, Nikolas Stellas, and hanged him. Another 125 men from the Marpissa region were also supposed to be executed, but the German commander decided not to go ahead with the reprisals.
A teenager who came of age in the thick of war
Harder does not sugar-coat his hero. ‘His sister sometimes complains that I have depicted her brother as much too brutal. But he lived and acted under extreme stress, and it was inevitable that, as the war went on, year after year, he would become more hard-skinned and callous. So my reply has to be that “I am certain he was very brutal”’.
Indeed, cold-bloodedness became a way of life after the multiple operations in the Central Aegean and the 50 skirmishes and battles Lassen and his unit fought, pushing them to the brink of physical exhaustion. Based on material including documents from military archives, interviews with Lassen’s comrades (the Danish original was written between 2002 and 2010) and memoirs, Harder takes into account the likelihood of systematic amphetamine use among certain (or most) special forces men, including Lassen. The RAF survival kits on display at the Imperial War Museum of London include amphetamines. We now know that Field-Marshal Montgomery encouraged their mass use on the North African front, as ‘they were liked by the men and made them fight tougher’ (James Pugh: ‘Amphetamines and the Second World War: Stimulating Interest in Drugs and Warfare’, https://defenceindepth.co/2017/08/11/amphetamines-and-the-second-world-war-stimulating-interest-in-drugs-and-warfare/).
Map of Paros drawn by men of the Grrek Sacred Squadron, two months after the attack on the airport. (Photo: Hellenic Army History Directorate Archive)
Several of Lassen’s fellow fighters described him as a ‘killing machine’. However, Harder points out that ‘even though his persona assumed mythic proportions, Lassen was a teenager who came of age in the thick of war’. At first, given his family roots in the Danish upper class, he stood out for his refined bearing – but he was gradually hardened by combat and by seeing friends losing their lives on the battlefield. His brother Frants was also trained by the British and sent to Denmark as an SOE agent, but he was captured by the Germans, tortured, and forced to disclose information that resulted in the arrest of several fellow members of the resistance.
In late 1944, following an operation in Croatia, Lassen returned to Greece as the Germans began to withdraw from the Balkan peninsula. Harder describes in vivid detail the frantic British race to catch up with ELAS (the Communist-controlled guerrilla army) in Athens and Thessaloniki and to inflict as much damage as possible on the retreating German forces.
In October 1944, Lassen was promoted to Major. After Thessaloniki, he took up an important command in Crete, where the remaining German garrison was virtually cut off owing to the lack of transport links. An SBS force commanded by Lassen was charged with pinning the Germans down in their enclave and mediating between the various Greek armed groups – a role that required qualities quite different from those of a raider.
In the 1960s, the British comic book adventure series "The Victor" published at least two stories starring Lassen.
With the end of the war in sight, Lassen perhaps dreamed of returning to Denmark, but his life was abruptly cut short in the swamps near Comacchio, Northern Italy, during a battle with the Germans and their Turkmen volunteers.
During a visit to Comacchio in April 2002, Harder decided to revisit Lassen, the man. His biography differs from previous accounts, as Harder does not eschew ‘hard subjects’ (e.g. Lassen’s frequent use of his knife and his sometimes erratic behaviour).
(Translated by Ioannis D. Stefanidis and Tam McTurk)
[The English version of Harder’s book, Special Forces Hero – Anders Lassen VC, MC**, was translated by Tam McTurk and contains a foreword by General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith KCB, CBE, ADC Gen. The Greek version, Ο Πόλεμος του Andy - Η ιστορία του Δανού Anders Lassen, ήρωα του Β΄ Παγκοσμίου Πολέμου (Αφρική, Γαλλία, Ελλάδα, Γιουγκοσλαβία, Ιταλία), was translated by Panagiota Goula in collaboration with Professor Ioannis Stefanidis, who also wrote the foreword.]
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