SAS Great Escapes

by Damien Lewis

  Months earlier Farran had been wounded during the battle of Crete, while commanding a force of light tanks – ‘battered ancient hulks’, as he described them. On 28 April 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had cabled the then Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, warning him that ‘a heavy air-borne attack by German troops’ was to be expected on Crete. To this Churchill added: ‘It ought to be a fine opportunity for killing the parachute troops.’ Churchill saw the coming confrontation as a ‘heaven sent opportunity of dealing [the] enemy a heavy blow’.

  Crete’s defences were duly stiffened. Farran, in command of thirty men, sailed from Alexandria as part of the reinforcements, landing at Crete’s Souda Bay. His actions on the Greek island over the coming days would earn him a Military Cross for outstanding bravery – the first of three MCs he was awarded during the war.

  Just after dawn on 20 May 1941 the enemy began their attack. As hordes of enemy paratroopers darkened the skies, the Luftwaffe bombed Farran’s position and raked with long bursts of machine-gun fire the olive groves in which he and his men had taken cover. Thousands of elite German Fallschirmjäger – paratroopers – had dropped, aiming to take the key British positions, thus allowing the main invasion force to seize overall control.

  Farran’s medal citation recorded that he was ‘sent to mop up parachutists’, first using his .45 Smith & Wesson pistol on one stricken German paratrooper, before opening fire with the tank’s Vickers machine gun. When all the enemy he could find had been suitably despatched, he spied ‘a party of Germans escorting about 30 or 40 of our [men] who had been taken prisoner’. Farran led the attack, killing the German guards and freeing all the captives. Altogether, some 3,500 enemy parachutists had dropped from the skies and messages despatched to the War Office in London declared how ‘practically the whole of these were accounted for, the greater proportion being killed’.

  Churchill had been right – they had dealt the enemy a heavy blow – and he sent further telegrams, urging that ‘the Crete battle must be won’. The island was a vital stronghold in the Mediterranean, constituting a refuelling point for Allied ships and aircraft. But it was also a potential stepping-stone from which the forces of Nazi Germany could do real damage – for Crete’s capital, Heraklion, was less than four hundred miles by sea from the Suez Canal, in Egypt, a crucial Allied shipping route.

  The following day, 21 May 1941, Farran led his men to seize the high ground at Cemetery Hill, in an effort to drive off the enemy. He was acutely aware that he and his troops ‘had been in action almost non-stop for forty-eight hours’ and he felt that to go on ‘was almost certain suicide’. But with Allied forces vastly outnumbered, and despite extreme battle fatigue, Farran’s actions were ‘largely instrumental in the attack being successful’.

  Incredibly, Farran – then a second lieutenant – led his men through three further days of intense combat, culminating in the battle for Galatos village, the control of which was bitterly contested. At dusk, he experienced ‘a blinding flash inside the tank’ in which he was riding, an enemy round from an anti-tank rifle punching through the thin armoured skin, sending shrapnel tearing apart the vehicle’s innards. The driver, gunner and Farran himself were wounded, the tank careering into a ditch.

  They remained there trapped in the turret, while the anti-tank rifle ‘carved big chunks out of the top,’ Farran recalled. ‘I was hit twice more – in both legs and in the right arm.’ Despite being badly wounded, Farran managed to drag his two fellows free of the burning vehicle before collapsing from his injuries. Shortly, Crete fell to the enemy, and Farran, unable to walk and wrapped in bloodied, dirty bandages, was taken captive.

  A German doctor duly examined Farran’s wounds, announcing that his leg was riven with gangrene – a bacterial infection that damages the blood supply, causing the affected limbs to die. He would need to be evacuated to a hospital on mainland Greece. The diagnosis ‘accounted for the stink’, Farran remarked, drily. He was loaded into a Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft, together with others who needed urgent medical attention, and flown directly to Athens.

  There, a German surgeon removed the gangrenous necrotic tissue from the most severe wound in his thigh, and gradually it began to heal, though Farran still described it as a gaping hole. That was how he’d ended up incarcerated in the Athens POW hospital, making a painfully slow recovery and scheming daily about how he might break out. Bearing in mind the severity of his injuries, Savage and his fellow escapees doubtless had been right to leave Farran out of things, on the night of their storm-lashed breakout.

  But after that escape, camp security was stiffened, the perimeter wire being strengthened and the camp commandant imposing harsh rigours on those who remained. In protest, the POWs embarked upon ‘a programme of passive disobedience’, Farran recalled. They would let down the tyres of the prison guards’ bicycles, drop rotten fruit and rubble onto passing sentries from the roof, and confuse the roll-call by answering to different names.

  Farran, possessed of a fiercely rebellious streak, claimed famously: ‘I did not care for orders when it suited me.’ He typified the POW’s spirit of resistance, setting a pile of packing cases ablaze in the camp courtyard. But despite such subversive activities, life remained grim, and Farran was desperate to break free. He watched the camp perimeter intensely, scanning the nearest houses, wondering how the inhabitants might respond to an Allied POW turning up on their doorstep. Those dwellings offered the first potential sanctuary for anyone who made it through the wire, but they were also the places most likely to be searched. With the locals under threat of savage reprisals if caught harbouring Allied fugitives, Farran wondered which – if any – might offer refuge.

  One house in particular stood out. Every evening at roughly the same time a woman’s voice could be heard singing from the rooftop. She would croon ‘South of the Border, Down Mexico Way’ – a syrupy love song made famous in the popular 1939 movie South of the Border, by the ‘singing cowboy’, American songster Gene Autry. Over time Farran became convinced that whoever the mystery singer was, she must know the POW camp was full of Allied prisoners and that singing that iconic ‘all-American’ song had to signal solidarity with those inside.

  Surely that house, if any, had to be friendly. Farran scrutinised it more closely. Once he fancied he saw a flash of bright red hair inside, which he figured might belong to one of the New Zealand escapees. Determined to break free, Farran gathered a DIY ‘escape kit’. It was paltry enough: a map of Greece traced onto a few sheets of toilet paper, some local currency – the drachma – plus a little surplus food, all stashed in an old pillowcase. But even with such kit, he was in no physical state to outrun the guards with his leg not yet fully healed – hence guile and cunning would be needed, if he were to slip away.

  His best chance lay in adopting a convincing disguise. Farran managed to dye some pyjamas dark blue using the ‘gelatine violet ointment used for [treating] sprained ankles’. He swapped an overcoat he’d had since the Battle of Crete for a ‘pair of Australian brown boots’ and stole a ‘panama hat’ from a Greek plumber who was repairing a pipe in the hospital. He added all this to his pillowcase of escape kit and stashed the lot under his bed. That done, he resolved to work on the last, vital part of his disguise – his tan.

  Lying there in the hot August sun, Farran may have appeared relaxed, but he never stopped scanning his surroundings, waiting for some kind of an opportunity. One day he spied a group of local women sifting through a refuse heap set to one side of the camp, searching for anything vaguely edible. Their shapely forms had caught the attention of the gate guard, whom Farran knew from months of observation to be in charge of the western side of the wire.

  Farran’s pulse quickened. With the sentry distracted by ogling the ladies, might he seize his chance? Moving as swiftly as he could while still on crutches, he came down from the roof and headed for the ward, grabbing his pillo
wcase escape gear and slinging it over one shoulder. He hastened out of the back door, but there he stopped short. Hurrying – hobbling as rapidly as possible – would be unwise, he reasoned. Any frenzied movement would only serve to attract unwelcome attention. He needed to blend in, allowing nothing to draw the guard’s focus away from the women at the refuse heap.

  He took several deep breaths, getting his pulse back to something like normal, and, adopting a seemingly relaxed gait, did his best to stroll away from the building. Bit by bit, he strayed ever closer to the wire. He kept one eye on the guard, the other on his route to freedom. Somehow, he remained undetected, even as he stepped up to the fence. The time for pretence was gone. Any man seen at the camp’s perimeter was clearly an escapee, so this next part was all about speed. He dropped to the dirt and began to wriggle under the strands of barbed wire.

  ‘Something had snapped in my brain,’ Farran would remark of this moment.

  He had no memory of fighting his way through the cruel tangle of barbs, failing to notice how they ripped the dressings from his wounds. The bandages were left hanging – bloodied and dirtied – on the strands of wire. Having made it to the far side, he scrambled to his feet and limped out into the open, study­ing the terrain in front of him. Just as the guard’s gaze finally strayed from the women, he dived for a shallow undulation in the ground, landing face-down in the dirt. He hugged the earth, hoping that this dry gully was deep enough to conceal his half-naked form – for he was still dressed only in the shorts he had been wearing to sunbathe.

  As he lay there unmoving, the stony ground bit into his bare skin. Dry summer dust filled his nostrils. But one move, one choked breath, and he was bound to be detected and drilled with a burst of machine-gun fire. Farran’s eyes followed the guard’s visual sweep until his gaze moved across his very hiding place and then . . . nothing. The sentry, clearly feeling he had done his duty, returned to studying the women at the refuse heap. Farran sensed he could breathe once more.

  He felt overjoyed that he had stolen out of the camp, but he still had to reach the cover of the nearest houses, and before the guard glanced his way again. Farran hobbled forwards as fast as his injured leg would carry him, but once he reached the shadows beside the first Greek house his mind was plagued with uncertainties. He was deep inside enemy territory in a suburb of occupied Athens, and in the midst of a populace that might prefer to sell him out for a fistful of drachmae, rather than help him.

  He turned briefly to scan the camp wire. Had his flight been noticed? He caught a brief glimpse of a figure waving a handkerchief in his direction. A fellow POW had watched his dash to freedom and was signalling good luck. Spirits stiffened, Farran risked a brief wave in return – something to encourage others to follow. To Farran, who hailed from a well-known military family, it seemed only natural that a prisoner would go to any lengths to break out from captivity and return to the fight.

  Just twenty years old at the time of his escape, Roy Alexander Farran was born into a devout Roman Catholic family. He was educated in India, where his father had served in the military. Sent to the Bishop Cotton’s School, in Shimla – the capital of Himachal Pradesh, nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas – he had benefited from a tough martial education, for Bishop Cotton’s was famous for turning out senior military commanders. At the age of eighteen, he’d moved to the Sandhurst Academy in the south of England, to complete his officer’s training.

  War broke out three months later and shortly Farran was commissioned as a second lieutenant and sent to fight. He would go on to become one of the most renowned commanders of the Special Air Service in the Second World War, but little did he know that the skills he would develop during this escape – adopting disguises, travelling clandestinely deep inside enemy territory, linking up with underground resistance movements, keeping on the move despite the almost constant risk of capture – would serve him admirably during his time with the SAS.

  Turning his back on the POW hospital/camp, Farran – still clad only in shorts – hurried into a narrow, unpaved alleyway. He was spotted by a group of local women gathered at a fruit barrow. They regarded him with undisguised curiosity. Ignoring their quizzical stares, he decided this was as good a place as any to change into his ‘Greek’ costume. Much to the surprise of the locals, this scantily dressed stranger reached into his pillowcase and began to pull on a new set of clothes in the middle of their street.

  Halfway through his brazen performance, a woman approached Farran and beckoned him into her house. Might it be a trap? He had no way of knowing. He reckoned he had little choice but to place his trust in her. So, with trousers in hand he followed her into the shadowed interior. Once inside, Farran finished dressing, before managing to communicate that he was an escaped POW and that he hadn’t been spotted by the camp guards. By way of response the mystery woman handed Farran over to a little girl, who grabbed him by the hand and set out, leading him through a maze of twisting streets.

  Soon they reached the house of another woman, who introduced herself as Maria. She was busy painting the ceiling of her simple, two-room cottage, and minding some children, but exhibited little surprise at the escaped British officer’s unexpected arrival. Calmly she ushered him into a back room, closed and bolted the front door and drew the curtains. She gestured for Farran to take a seat, in a room which seemed as if it doubled as the local crèche. So it was that he found himself amid an utterly surreal scene – an escaped British officer, ‘still panting with the excitement’ of his daring breakout, surrounded by ‘babies of all ages’.

  Edgy and nervous, he reasoned that either he had been scooped up by some form of resistance-cum-escape network, or he was about to be handed over to the Gestapo. Despite the homely domesticity of the scene, every noise from outside made him jump. The sound of a truck engine rumbled down the street, the vehicle drawing ever closer to his place of hiding, Farran imagining it crammed full of enemy troops. He feared the sudden crunch of tyres on gravel as it came to a halt; the thud of boots hitting the ground and rifles being made-ready; the crack of butts smashing open the door, as grey-uniformed figures burst in, only to drag him back to the camp and to solitary confinement or worse. But finally, the truck rumbled by without stopping.

  An hour passed. Farran’s suspicions gradually dissipated, especially as the woman’s husband – an orange seller – plus her entire family and several members of the village came to gawp at this novelty: a British escapee. Some greeted him with kisses and brought small presents, mostly cigarettes. One, a widow, made him an immediate proposition of marriage, and before long Farran was in no doubt that the locals were utterly genuine.

  ‘We would have received the same help in nine Greek houses out of ten,’ Farran would later remark, concluding that the Greek people were ‘the kindest and most hospitable race in the world’.

  While he was incredibly grateful for them taking him in, Farran was far too close to the camp to remain safe for long. He described to Maria and her husband the house adjacent to the prison camp, from where he had heard the woman singing her cowboy songs. He felt drawn to that place, sensing that it must be connected to the Greek underground somehow. Maria’s husband led Farran back outside, for be believed he could navigate his way to the house of the singing lady.

  They set off. Nikaia district was crammed with fruit stalls and flower markets, but as the two men entered a square, they came upon cafés full of German soldiers supping frothing glasses of lager. Farran pulled his Panama hat lower, attempting to look casual, as they edged past the noisy bars, his senses on high alert.

  They darted down a side street, and suddenly Farran found himself face to face with the perimeter of the very POW camp from which he had escaped. Doing their best to keep their cool they slipped past the nearest guard tower. Farran could barely believe it when no harsh words of challenge rang out. His leg wounds were beginning to cause him real pain, but he forced himself to keep moving. Fin
ally, they found it: they had reached the singing lady’s house.

  They made their way to the rear of the building. Gritting his teeth against the agony of his injuries, Farran clambered over the garden wall, together with his escort. The two figures lowered themselves silently onto the far side, only to find the homeowner busy in his garden. For a moment the man stared at the two strangers, seemingly petrified. Farran could hardly blame him. They had materialised silent as wraiths. Farran crept closer, whispering ‘English’ in the man’s ear. Moments later they had been hurried inside, as the householder explained that there were neighbours thereabouts who would happily sell them out to the Germans.

  Once inside the small cottage, Farran was struck by one thing most powerfully: standing in the kitchen was a striking-looking woman. Dressed all in white and with bare feet, she was utterly arresting. Farran described her later as being ‘the most beautiful woman’ ever. He figured she had to be the householder’s daughter and he wondered if it had been her voice that he had heard singing from the prison camp. At first, she eyed Farran with undisguised suspicion, but her attitude seemed to soften as he popped his first question, asking if by chance she’d seen Ken Maxwell, one of the POW camp’s original escape committee.

  By way of response, the woman-in-white stepped forward and kissed Farran full on the lips. ‘I blushed scarlet like a self-conscious schoolboy,’ Farran recalled of the moment.

  Swapping Farran’s Panama hat for a Greek fisherman’s-style flat cloth cap, she explained that it was time to reunite Farran with his fellow escapees – for, sure enough, Maxwell, Savage, Sinclair and the others had passed through this house. Within moments they set forth into the night to link up with the others, who were apparently billeted near by.

  Along with the woman-in-white came her mother and her brother, who pushed on a few paces ahead, scouting out the route. Farran realised what a cunning disguise their party constituted: Farran was the woman-in-white’s beau, and the mother the ever-present chaperone – it was customary for courting Greek couples to be accompanied by a family member at all times.