Operation Loyton - Aftermath

Aftermath

At the end of the war Franks began investigating the fate of his missing men. All that was known for certain was that three men accompanying Lieutenant Johnson had been killed, and that 10 men had been buried in the cemetery at Moussey. The SAS was officially disbanded in October 1945. Prior to this the 2nd SAS War Crimes Investigation Team (2 SAS WCIT) had been formed to, amongst other things, look into the events after Loyton. 2nd SAS Intelligence Officer Major Eric 'Bill' Barkworth had been informed of the existence of the Commando Order, which called for the execution of all captured commandos when he was interviewing captured German officers in 1944. In July 1945 Franks was informed by the French that the bodies of some SAS men had been found in the French occupation zone at Gaggenau. Franks ordered 2 SAS WCIT, under the command of Major Beckworth, to travel to the area. Their investigation discovered that of the 31 missing SAS men, 30 had been murdered by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), some of them at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in the Vosges mountains. One man's fate was never discovered.

In 2003 a memorial was erected at Moussey to commemorate those who had been murdered. It details the three men from Phanton, the 31 SAS men, the 140 French civilians and one British and two French service women of the Special Operations Executive that had also been caught up in the search for the SAS camp.