[Bodston]

Hello read and welcome.. Op Bulbasket was a nasty business. From 'The IWM book of War Behind Enemy Lines' by Julian Thompson

The final SAS party to drop on the eve of D-Day, was to set up Operation Bulbasket near Poitiers. Their task: to disrupt the railway lines Limoges-Vierzon-Poitiers-Tours, which German formations stationed in southern France would use to reach the Normandy battlefront. Before the main body arrived, thanks to the Resistance they located their first target, consisting of eleven trains of petrol wagons in a siding at Châtellerault. The radio message from the Bulbasket team resulted in the total destruction of all eleven trains of this vital commoditity by twenty-four Mosquitoes of the RAF, RNZAF and RAAF. The loss of this fuel was to impose serious delays on the move north of 2nd SS Panzer Div (Das Reich). For the next three weeks the Bulbasket team cut the railway line in twelve places. They carried the demolition teams to widely dispersed points on the rail system, in jeeps dropped to them. At the end of these three weeks, most of the Bulbasket team were at their base in the Forêt de Verriers when they were attacked by a large force of Germans. The SAS, armed only with .45 pistols and a few Vickers K guns on their jeeps, were no match for mortars and dozens of machine-guns which blasted and raked their camp. Only eight SAS men survived by escaping in the confusion, including Captain Tonkin, the commander of the team. Thirty-one including four wounded, were taken prisoner by the Germans, One of the wounded, Lieutenant Stephens, was tied to a tree in Verriers, and after the villagers had been paraded past, the Germans beat him to death with their rifle butts. All the others were shot.