SAS Great Escapes

by Damien Lewis

  They flitted through a maze of streets. A moment of real panic came as they approached what Farran knew to be the Italian military barracks. His fears deepened, as the guard standing gate duty seemed to scrutinise them far too closely. But of course, it was the woman on his arm who was drawing the sentry’s eye, for beside her magnetic beauty Farran was all but invisible.

  Once past the barracks, the brother – who had dashed off in front – returned, bringing a mystery figure with him. That man – a Greek using the nom de guerre ‘Sorties’ – started delving further into Farran’s story, exploring who he was, where he had been captured and what unit he hailed from. If his story didn’t add up, Farran sensed Sorties might just as easily kill him as a suspected Gestapo agent. With his blond hair and blue eyes, Farran could easily have passed for a classic Aryan.

  On the spur of the moment, Farran decided to lie about where he really hailed from, choosing Birmingham as an English city Sorties was sure to have heard of. Thankfully, his story seemed to pass muster. Interrogations done, he turned to thank his guides – the mysterious woman-in-white first and foremost – but she and her family had quietly slipped away, leaving Farran in the hands of his new protector.

  Sorties ushered him up the stairs of a nearby house, where he found four Greek men gathered around a kitchen table. Upon seeing Farran, one jumped to his feet and threw his arms around him, enthusiastically hugging him as if they were old friends. It took a moment for Farran to realise that this was fellow escapee Ken Maxwell, for the man had been utterly transformed. With his hair dyed black, newly grown sideburns and thick moustache, Maxwell would have drawn the ire of any parade ground sergeant.

  ‘It was a perfect disguise,’ Farran remarked, who was ‘staggered’ by Maxwell’s transformation. He figured that soon he too would be adopting the look, in order to pass for a man of Athens.

  Overjoyed at meeting up with Maxwell again, Farran quizzed him on the details of their mass escape. Maxwell told how they had used the cover of that wild storm – for when it rained in Athens, the heavens truly opened – to slither beneath the wire. Even so, a guard had flashed his torch along the perimeter, pinning one of the escapees in its glare. But for whatever reason – the rain or maybe shock – he had failed to bring his weapon to bear, and they had made their getaway. Ever since then they had been hiding with members of the Greek underground – Maxwell in this house, Savage in the home of a jeweller a few miles south, and Sinclair at another location close to the docks.

  It was approaching a month since his friends had escaped, and they ‘exchanged reminiscences far into the night’, Farran recalled, while their Greek hosts kept them well fed and watered. Maxwell explained that Sorties was the leader of the local resistance. Publicly, Sorties was a simple fruit seller from Nikaia, but secretly he had gathered a group of friends ‘to aid escaped British prisoners’. Exhausted from his breakout and the excitement of seeing his friend again, eventually Farran was shown to a bed by a plump and respectable-looking dentist named Tino, who turned out to be the owner of the house.

  Sometime later he was awoken with worrying news. German troops were carrying out house-to-house searches. Farran feared it was his escape that had prompted the combing of the city, for his breakout was bound to have caused a considerable hue and cry. But Tino, their host, appeared disarmingly calm and collected. In an extraordinary show of sangfroid, he told Farran and Maxwell to go and sit on the balcony so they could watch the unfolding spectacle, as grey-clad troops dashed around the streets. Somewhat dumbfounded, they took up their positions, as locals were accosted and dragged this way and that, and their ID cards demanded. Those who couldn’t produce their papers were thrown into the backs of waiting trucks.

  The closer the troops got, the more apprehensive Farran and Maxwell became, until, with the enemy only two houses away, it looked certain they would be captured. Unable to speak more than a few garbled words of Greek and with no papers, they seemed to stand not the slightest chance. At this point Tino ordered them inside and gestured to a drainpipe: if the situation demanded it, they were to shin down that and slip away. He then ushered them into a false compartment hidden beneath the floorboards. They crawled inside and waited. Concealed in the darkness, Farran wondered how fast his injuries would allow him to shin down the drainpipe, should they need to.

  From downstairs came the crash of rifle butts on the front door: jack-booted troopers demanding entry. Tino opened up. Thankfully, he was a man of some substance in this part of Athens. Indeed, the enemy believed him to be a ‘good Greek’ firmly on the side of the Nazi occupiers. It was a dangerous game that Tino was playing, but one that he managed with remarkable aplomb. So convincing was he that the German soldiers did not even venture across his threshold.

  For now, at least, Farran and his fellows were safe. But their luck couldn’t last. That evening, Sorties, the resistance leader, came, bringing dire news. His brother, Elias, had been arrested. Elias was a fellow member of the resistance; the Gestapo were sure to make him talk. Names would be divulged and with them addresses. There was little time to lose. Farran and Maxwell would need to be moved, as soon as it was dark. The next few hours seemed interminable, a horrible psychological torture. If Elias failed to hold out, capture and worse were bound to follow. As dusk cloaked the city, none could wait to get on the move.

  There was a sudden rapping on the door. Farran felt his heart lurch. Was it the enemy at the gates? Tino opened up to find a young woman standing there. He introduced her to all as ‘Dolly’. Already a legend in the Greek resistance, Dolly would prove a key ally for the next and most dangerous leg of Farran’s journey. She was renowned among the Greeks as being a lioness in the face of the enemy. Her favourite trick was to drop ‘V for Victory’ signs onto the seats of unoccupied German staff cars, to strike fear into their senior officers.

  Farran and Maxwell split up, for it was safer for each to make their own way across the city. Farran’s guide was to be Dolly. She would lead Farran a wild dance through the Nikaia streets, as everywhere German troops hurried this way and that. At first, he tried his best to keep his distance from them, but Dolly knew better: that would only arouse suspicion. Linking arms, she led Farran through the heart of the threat, acting as if they had every right to be there, their shoulders brushing against those of the enemy. They were hiding in plain sight, and for Farran this was to prove a nerve-racking and unforgettable experience.

  Eventually they boarded a bus, Dolly steering Farran to a window seat. He concentrated on gazing out over the crowds, apparently unconcerned. But a man in a seat near him couldn’t help but catch Farran’s eye. Dressed in a white gabardine trench-coat, there was something about him that was oddly sinister. He appeared to find Farran of unusual interest, regarding him with piercing blue eyes. When Dolly realised that Farran was staring, she jabbed him in the ribs. He averted his gaze.

  Finally, the bus pulled out of Nikaia, making its laborious way towards Piraeus, the city’s port. Though the journey was less than three miles, that was still plenty of time for the stranger in the trenchcoat to take an unhealthy interest in Farran. They got out at the port, but so too did their mystery watcher. By now Farran felt certain he was a Gestapo tail. If he could follow one Allied escapee – Farran – he might find his way to a whole group of them, so boosting his haul.

  As Dolly led Farran along a series of winding alleyways, the mystery figure tracked their every move. Farran pointed out that the man was still in hot pursuit. Dolly told him not to worry. Asking him to continue walking, she slipped away into the shelter of a shop window. Farran pressed ahead, trying not to allow his tension to show, for he was alone in a strange place with a mystery man in pursuit, and he was at a loss as to what direction the harbour might lie.

  Fear and tension rising, he was relieved to see Dolly again. With a few whispered words, she reassured Farran that all was fine. The sinister man in white had been dealt with, she explained.
Farran had no idea what that might mean. Had he been wrong about the identity of their tail? Or was that mystery figure now a corpse slumped in a doorway, bloodstains blooming across his white coat? Farran didn’t dare enquire further as to what exactly Dolly might have done, ‘for she was quite capable of sticking a knife in his ribs’. Either way, this was war.

  Dolly led him to a safe house, set deep within the maze of narrow streets around the port. This, it turned out, was where Kazarsis, the jeweller, had been hiding Robin Savage since his escape. Farran and Savage were reunited, the latter apologising for having left Farran behind on the night of the mass breakout. Praising his host, Kazarsis, for his fearlessness and hospitality, he advised Farran that the area was ‘getting too hot to be safe’, especially as the captured Elias would be facing horrendous torture to make him talk. Word was that the net was closing.

  Shortly Farran had to move again. ‘It was a long walk,’ he recalled of the journey to the next safe house, and by the time they had got there the wound in his leg was ‘bleeding profusely’.

  It took days for Farran’s leg to fully recover, during which time Dolly taught him to ride the Athens trams like any local: they might well have need of them, if they had to make a swift getaway. Dolly’s inventiveness and sheer courage never ceased to amaze him. On one tram excursion, she employed a crowd of ragged street urchins to act as their ‘family’. Farran opened a newspaper, making a pretence as if he were reading it. A Greek man sat next to him tapped him on the knee and fired off a question. Farran froze. He had no idea what the man had said.

  The man repeated what he’d asked. At that moment one of Dolly’s urchins intervened, causing a diversion that drew the focus away from Farran. But a second man, this one seated opposite him, still seemed curious. He eyed Farran searchingly. Farran turned bright red under the stranger’s gaze. He wondered whether it would be possible, given the severity of his injuries, to jump from the moving tram. But just as he was feeling increasingly desperate, the stranger rose to his feet and disembarked.

  As he climbed off the tram, he ‘winked one eye and put up his thumb’, Farran recalled. ‘So much for my disguise!’

  Should Elias break under torture, none of the escapees was safe – that they all knew. But incredibly, Elias never did, despite the savagery that was visited upon him by his Nazi captors. He endured horrific torture at the hands of the Gestapo, Farran remarked, ‘but [he] refused to talk’. His act was so convincing that the Gestapo finally had no option but to release him.

  Elias was far from an isolated case: there were scores in the Greek resistance who withstood torture, rather than disclose what they knew of the whereabouts of escaped prisoners. But despite such immense fortitude and courage, Farran and his fellows could sense that they were living on borrowed time. Their newest hiding place might be discovered at any moment. They had to complete their escape from Greece and make it back to Allied lines. The challenge was deciding how exactly they should go about it. The streets were crawling with a wrathful and suspicious enemy.

  With the noose tightening, only one option seemed open to them: the sea. Egypt lay in British hands and it was a little under seven hundred miles away. If they could navigate a ship across the Mediterranean, they could make their way back to friendly lines. The trouble was finding a vessel to undertake such a journey, for the enemy had requisitioned just about every seaworthy ship. A dozen plans were mooted and just as rapidly abandoned.

  Savage’s proposal turned out to be the most outlandish. He suggested they load a rowing boat with grenades and machine guns, courtesy of the Greek resistance, and row out into the centre of the harbour, close to the enemy’s torpedo-net. That net – a mesh webbing suspended underwater, designed to ‘catch’ torpedoes before they could do any damage to shipping – was patrolled by German E-boats, fast attack craft similar to British motor torpedo boats or MTBs. Once within yelling range, Savage suggested they remove the cork that plugged the hole in the stern of their boat – used to drain any water from the craft when on dry land – so causing it to sink. As it went down, they would cry for help. Presuming the nearest E-boat would steam to their rescue, they would assault it with guns and grenades, like ­latter-­day pirates. Few craft could catch a German E-boat: they were capable of over forty knots. But they were crewed by thirty-odd sailors, and even if the escapees did manage to kill or overpower her crew, the chances of such a ship being fuelled for a long voyage across the Mediterranean were slim.

  A part of Farran thrilled to the wild dash and daring of such a plan. But equally, he remembered how he had almost lost his life aboard a similar vessel, just a few months back. On 18 May 1941 – days before the Battle of Crete – a friend of Farran’s in the Royal Navy had taken him out on an MTB for a joyride. Almost immediately, they had come under attack from a squadron of German Stuka dive-bombers. The commander attempted to steer the MTB back to land, while his crew levelled their deck-mounted twin Vickers machine guns at the attacking warplanes. One of the crew was wounded in a blast from a near miss and Farran had to crawl along the boat to help him. As bullets flew and bombs exploded, he bound the sailor’s wounds in an attempt to stop the bleeding. Somehow, the MTB had made it back to shore in one piece, but with that memory fresh in his mind Farran deemed the E-boat hijack plan not worth the risk.

  The crunch moment came for Farran a few days later, when visiting a local cinema. Spending weeks locked inside was driving him crazy. The trip to the movies was designed as a little light relief. When he was next to his redoubtable Greek minder, Dolly, a German officer suddenly plonked himself down at Farran’s side. Farran spent the entire movie torn between fear of discovery and marvelling at the incongruity of it all. But it underscored the desperate need to get away.

  After various further twists and turns in their fortunes, a local fisherman made an approach. He offered the escapees his boat, one of the few that hadn’t been requisitioned for war work by the Germans, but explained that he would need something to replace his lost livelihood. Farran offered him a ‘promissory note’ – a signed document which he swore had the backing of His Majesty’s Government, and which promised to pay the fisherman a set fee once the escapees had reached British territory. The fisherman finally agreed, but only once the resistance had rustled up an extra fee in cash, to be paid just as soon as Farran signalled that the escape party had reached friendly shores.

  Farran’s MC citation recorded of this moment: ‘Eventually, with the help of money supplied by friendly Greeks, a caïque was hired.’ A caïque is a traditional fishing boat used primarily on the Aegean and Ionian seas, featuring a sharply pointed prow, one or more masts and a wooden hull. Robin Sinclair, the tough Commando lieutenant from New Zealand and one of the prison camp’s original escape committee, was keen to chance the long journey by sea with Farran. Others demurred. Farran and Sinclair teamed up together and all seemed set.

  But shortly before their departure, the plan hit the buffers in spectacular fashion. A member of the Greek resistance named Lefteris had volunteered to be the caïque’s engineer, charged with keeping the engine running on the long journey. Lefteris had set out to procure enough diesel for the voyage – no easy matter, with fuel strictly rationed by the occupying powers. He was promptly arrested by a Greek policeman for dealing on the black market. Now their engineer – and their precious fuel – were both in police custody.

  ‘It seemed that all was lost,’ Farran noted despondently.

  But the following day Lefteris turned up unexpectedly, and smiling broadly, accompanied by the very policeman who had arrested him. Sensing the man’s political leanings, Lefteris had explained that he was buying fuel in order to help some British escapees get back to friendly lines. By luck, the policeman hated the Nazi occupiers just as much as anyone. Not only had he allowed Lefteris to keep the black-market fuel, but he had also managed to procure some extra food to help the escapees on their way.

  The Greek police
man had brought the escapees some precious loaves of bread, and, with ‘tears running down his face, gave me his pistol’, Farran recalled of the highly charged moment. He also promised to start a deception action at the docks, the night of their planned getaway. This was a stroke of real good fortune, for as Farran remarked, with the local police on board it increased the chances that ‘there would be no further monkey business . . .’ Finally, the gods did indeed seem to be smiling upon them.

  At the eleventh hour Farran and Sinclair were joined by two more escapees. One was an Australian Army sergeant who had been a musician in Sydney before the war, a man whom Farran initially assessed as being a real ‘tough egg’. The other, Staff Sergeant Charles Wright, was from the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC), and he had developed terrible sores from drinking bad water while in captivity. In addition to Lefteris, their resourceful engineer-cum-black-marketeer, the escapees were joined by Elias, a local Greek whose role it was to captain the caïque on the long voyage across ahead. There were also a half-a-dozen mystery passengers that the Greek resistance intended to sail on the caïque. One at least appeared to be a Polish Jew, and doubtless they were fleeing from Nazi persecution, their flight – like that of Farran and his fellow escapees – courtesy of the brave Greeks.

  The night of their departure, the group of escapees and crew crept along the twisting streets that led to the dockside in ones and twos. It was well after curfew and the last thing they wanted was to draw unwelcome notice. The vessel turned out not only to be a traditional Greek fishing caïque – brightly painted, with a wooden hull around thirty feet long – but it was also positively ancient. Among other things, Farran noted with dismay the ‘gaping hole where the mast should have been’. It looked as if they would be relying on the diesel engine for the entire journey.