SAS Great Escapes

by Damien Lewis

  It was 8 September 1943, a tumultuous time for Italy. The Fascist leader Mussolini was in gaol, having been ousted from power. Almost two months back, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery had landed an Allied force on Sicily, and just days ago the first troops of the British Eighth Army had crossed the Strait of Messina to land at Calabria, launching the Allied invasion of mainland Italy. The Armistice of Cassibile agreeing the terms of Italy’s capitulation had been signed in secret five days earlier, and the announcement that Italy was swapping sides was to be made later that day.

  All of that had made Colonel Cione decidedly uneasy, for his former allies, the Germans, were about to become an occupying power. He needed to get an idea of their troop numbers and positions, the better to gauge what might transpire in the chaotic days to come. Colonel Cione was a staunch supporter of the Italian royal family and had little allegiance to the Italian Fascists. He spoke excellent English, having spent many a summer in Scotland, and understood the British character well. He had taken good note of Almonds’ gift for subterfuge during the long weeks the SAS man had spent as a prisoner in his camp, hence giving him his present cloak-and-dagger mission.

  The streets of Porto San Giorgio well and truly scrutinised from end to end, Almonds slipped into a public phone booth. In his rudimentary Italian, picked up during his year as a POW, he asked the operator to put him through to the Commandant of Campo PG 70 at Monte Urano, which lay around ten miles inland from the town. When the Colonel answered, Almonds, as promised, imparted to him the results of his reconnaissance: as far as he could tell, apart from a concentration of troops in the centre of town, there appeared to be few other German forces in Porto San Giorgio.

  Colonel Cione thanked Almonds for his report, before ordering him back to the POW camp: ‘And now you return.’

  By way of answer, Almonds offered an apology that he could not do as the Colonel had asked, for he was about to take leave of him. ‘I’m going home.’

  As the Colonel began to yell down the phone, Almonds carefully replaced the handset. Not for nothing was he known within the ranks of the SAS as ‘Gentleman Jim’. He was always well-mannered and polite, even when escaping from Italian captivity. While Almonds might consider the Colonel to be ‘an officer and a gentleman’, the conditions he had endured over the past year would have justified a far less courteous farewell.

  After being captured during an SAS raid in Libya, Almonds had been shipped to mainland Italy and taken first to Campo PG 51 at Altamura, about thirty miles inland from the port city of Bari in Italy’s southern region of Apulia. Conditions in this transit camp were atrocious and they quickly worsened, for the winter of 1942 proved unseasonably harsh. Almonds and his fellow POWs were forced to live under the cover of makeshift tents, constructed from nothing more than groundsheets strung over basic wooden frames. Campo PG 51 was situated on an expanse of scrubby moorland and the ground was so hard and rocky that it was impossible to ‘dig in’ to create any semblance of comfort. Almonds had endured weeks of near-ceaseless rain and then snow and was almost always chilled to the bone and damp.

  Food was scarce. A British War Office report concluded that there was ‘a definite and increasing shortage of foodstuffs’ in the camp. Prisoners were given a small bread roll and a piece of cheese at midday, with ‘thin soup’ in the evening. Even supplementing their rations from Red Cross food parcels, it had become ‘a starvation diet’, especially as the winter began to bite. Before long, diseases flourished among prisoners weakened by hunger and many failed to last the winter. Worst of all – at least for the POWs’ morale – they were frequently reminded that no escape attempt from PG 51 had ever been successful.

  When the Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943, the Germans feared that the whole of southern Italy might soon be overrun. Together with hundreds of other POWs, Almonds had been transported some three hundred miles north by train, to Campo PG 70, which was sited in an old weaving mill fenced by barbed wire. With a shortage of water, filthy conditions and few medical supplies, disease was rife. One Red Cross report recorded that POWs suffered from ‘malaria, dysentery, pneumonia, nephritis and jaundice’.

  Life in PG 70 had proved so unbearable that, despite rumours of Italy’s imminent demise, some prisoners had opted to die at their own hands, rather than continue enduring such conditions. Others preferred to make a break for it, come what may. At least one was ‘killed on the spot . . . as he was trying to slip under the barbed wire’, the Red Cross reported. Hardly surprising, then, that Almonds had decided that he would not be returning to PG 70, and certainly not of his own free will. Once Colonel Cione had allowed him outside the wire, he was making for friendly territory, no matter what solemn reassurances he might have offered the camp commandant.

  Of course, Almonds couldn’t know for sure exactly where the Allied frontline was located, for he had heard only rumours and speculation. Unbeknown to him, at that very moment the Allies were involved in a series of major amphibious operations in the south of Italy, targeting the country’s distinctive boot-like southern profile. In a mission codenamed Operation Avalanche, forces had landed near Naples, while further Allied landings were taking place at Taranto – codenamed Operation Slapstick – and at Calabria, in Operation Baytown. All Almonds knew for certain was that he needed to head south.

  It would not be an easy journey. It was some 250 miles as the crow flies between Porto San Giorgio and the nearest Allied beachhead that he knew of, at Salerno. Almonds would have to take the greatest care to evade detection by the enemy, for although the Italians were now technically his allies, the country remained rife with danger. In addition to German troops, there were Italian Fascists loyal to Mussolini who would sell out any escaped POWs. Others might do so for fear of reprisals from the German occupying powers.

  As the lowlands were likely to be teeming with troops, Almonds’ best chance was to make for the high ground. The Apennine Mountains, which run down the Italian peninsula like a craggy backbone, offered relative safety. Adopting the same methods as he would on any behind-the-lines mission, Almonds decided to travel through the low country moving only at night, lying up in hiding during daylight. He had little with him but the clothes on his back, for he could not risk anything that might have alerted Colonel Cione to his plans. The only thing that he had dared take were a few sheets of paper surreptitiously ripped from the Bible of a visiting priest. Almonds – sensitive and contemplative – always strove to keep a diary of his activities, thoughts and feelings, and for him those few sheets of paper represented a great treasure.

  Almonds had enjoyed a rugged, outdoors childhood on a small farmstead in the village of Stixwould, close to the rolling green hills of the Lincolnshire Wolds. During winter, he had been wrapped up and sent outside to play. He had soon learned that running around was the best way to keep warm, and to eat heartily of whatever food was on the table. That was the kind of existence that he hoped for now, as he made his way across the cultivated fields of the province of Fermo, towards the purple-tinged foothills of the Apennines.

  Encouraged from an early age to make his own amusement, Almonds possessed an innate creativity and a sharp, logical mind. He had learned wood- and metal-working from his father, a farmer and a volunteer churchwarden. As a boy, he was always doing practical things, be it crafting bows and arrows from springy saplings or knocking together rafts from scrap wood, to launch on the nearby river.

  At the age of fourteen Almonds had attempted – unsuccessfully – to sign up to the army. He had to wait until his eighteenth birthday, when he joined the Brigade of Guards. He underwent basic training, before joining the 2nd Battalion, Coldstream Guards – one of the oldest regiments in the British military – where he spent much of his time guarding the various residences of the British royal family. After four years Almonds left the military, becoming a police constable. But then Britain declared war on Germany, Almonds returned to the Coldstream Guards – now with the rank of s
ergeant – and spent a year teaching new recruits the ropes.

  Curious and blessed with an inquiring nature, Almonds had appreciated the need for military discipline, but had always wondered why personal initiative and individual skills were so little valued or developed in the military. Hungering for something more, he began applying for anything that he thought might offer the kind of challenge he sought. Before long he heard of an opening in the Commandos, who were looking for men with a do-or-die attitude to lead the fight against Nazi Germany. It promised travel to distant frontiers, living off the land, undertaking amphibious assaults and marching over precipitous terrain. In short, it seemed tailor-made for a man like him.

  Almonds began his Commando training first at Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex and then at Loch Fyne and the Isle of Arran in Scotland, where his physical fitness and endurance were tested to the maximum. He was unusual among his fellows, for he always kept fieldcraft tools and hunting equipment handy and would often disappear into the wilds to go poaching. During one such expedition he was almost court-martialled for shooting a deer.

  As the war progressed into its second year, the likelihood that he would be called to fight became more and more real, and Almonds begun to wonder if, when the time came, he really would be able to shoot a fellow human being. He had never killed anything bigger than a hare, and so he decided to see how it felt to kill a more man-sized animal. Almonds had felled a young deer with one clear shot from his .303 rifle. In doing so, he had learned his first lesson: he could kill such an animal without flinching. But as he had hoisted the carcass onto his muscular shoulders, a challenge had rung out from behind. Gamekeepers had spied him making his kill.

  Attempting to evade capture, Almonds had turned uphill, moving stealthily through the trees, but the valley became a knife-cut gorge the further up he went. Almonds doubted whether he could make the climb up the steep gully before his pursuers caught up with him. So he reversed course, heading back downhill, and thus he was subsequently caught. Almonds cursed himself for taking ‘the lazy way’. He felt sure that if he had continued the difficult ascent he would have got away. In this he learned his second lesson: evading capture required the absolute application of all the mental and physical prowess that a man might possess, and unyielding resolution.

  Almonds vowed to put those lessons into practice now, on his solo escape through the Italian lowlands. Focusing body and mind on evading capture, he moved silently and under cover of darkness, skirting around the Renaissance town of Ascoli Piceno. From there he traced the course of a river leading into the foothills of the Monti della Laga mountain range, one of the lesser-explored and more sparsely populated regions of the Apennines. Due to its rugged and inaccessible nature, this made the perfect kind of terrain for a seasoned SAS veteran looking to keep out of the enemy’s clutches.

  Almonds believed he could travel more openly through this area, keeping moving during daylight hours. Traversing the precipitous hills and valleys proved hard going – he was always moving on a steep incline – but it was worth it to stay out of the enemy’s way, and after so long in captivity he relished the sense of freedom.

  Almonds had been pardoned for the deer-poaching incident, largely because no military tribunal felt like wrestling with the difficult moral issue of how a soldier might best prepare himself for the imminent possibility of having to kill a fellow human being. The case against him had been summarily dismissed. But the reality of life in the Commandos had turned out to be less than Almonds had hoped for, as their operations had been plagued by delays, false starts and cancellations. It was something of a let-down, Almonds felt: men had volunteered for the Commandos ‘to do something and apparently that was not going to be the case’.

  From the very start the SAS had felt different. Almonds, one of its founding members, summed up the attitude thus: ‘We knew we were going to go into some exciting things.’ He revelled in the companionship of the other SAS men; he appreciated that each had the back of the other; he commended their steely reliability, commenting of the typical SAS recruit that no one was going to ‘bow down’ because they had hit trouble, but would push onwards, being ‘good reliable characters’.

  When he had first arrived in the North African desert, Almonds had had to join the other SAS recruits in creating their own camp from scratch. They were intent on making it the finest there was around, and he quickly put his practical skills to good use. Almonds felt that ‘any fool could be uncomfortable’ and he was determined to make the camp at Kabrit pleasant, as well as practical. He concluded with quiet pride that it had ended up being ‘a nice tidy little encampment’.

  It wasn’t long before Almonds’ reputation for being ‘a dab hand at making things’ had caught the attention of Stirling. As the founder of a new, ground-breaking unit, Stirling was reluctant to ask bureaucratic Middle East Command for anything more than he absolutely had to – the bare minimum of rations, arms and ammunition. He reasoned the less he had to do with them, the less he and his men would have to answer to their authority. Recognising Almonds’ considerable talents, Stirling enlisted his creative enterprise and craftsmanship in the production of training equipment for the Kabrit camp.

  Almonds built frames for the men to jump from, in order to practise parachute landing techniques. From there he progressed to much taller towers that would allow for the simulation of real parachute jumps. Those towers would need to be ‘safe and strong’, Almonds wrote in his diary, or else he would be ‘responsible for someone being killed’. Stirling’s requests became ever more audacious. Almonds recalled being asked: ‘Could you make me a boat?’ Almonds said he could, if he had enough wood and an engine of some kind to power it. But inwardly he was thinking: ‘Oh God, where is this going to end?’ His experiences with Stirling forced Almonds to put complete trust in his own practical skills – something that would serve him well now, during his escape attempt.

  In addition to his abilities to design and make high-quality training equipment, Almonds had proved himself to be an excellent raider. One of his most important missions was the late December 1941 raid on Nofilia Aerodrome, Libya, for which he had been awarded the Military Medal. The mission war diary described how Almonds’ party ‘arrived at a point 16 to 17 miles from drome and walked in to find aircraft widely dispersed’. They had ‘put bombs in first aircraft’, but before they could reach the second, the first bomb ‘went off, giving the alarm’. Discovering that the enemy aircrew were sleeping in and around the warplanes, they had ‘decided to pull out’.

  But on their return journey to the SAS base camp, they were spotted by a twin-engine Messerschmitt Me 110 fighter-bomber, armed with machine guns and cannons. As the full force of this warplane was unleashed upon Almonds and his fellow raiders, he had grabbed a Bren gun and managed to hit the Messerschmitt in the tail section. But no sooner had the stricken plane disappeared than it was replaced by two Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers. The raiders were ‘subjected to a very intense strafing and bombed from 10am till 4pm’.

  During this sustained onslaught ‘four trucks [were] destroyed and another damaged,’ but worst of all, Jock Lewes, Stirling’s right-hand man and the SAS’s veteran training officer, was killed. Almonds took the death of Lewes very hard, for the two men had served alongside each other ever since their time in the Commandos. Despite this, his quick thinking and brave actions helped get the rest of the patrol back to safety. His medal citation noted how Almonds ‘took command of his party with only one casualty, although all but one of his trucks had been destroyed’.

  Somehow, he managed to evade the enemy warplanes and get the remainder of his men back to base, in just the one damaged vehicle. That night Almonds wrote in his diary, in moving and poignant terms: ‘I thought of Jock, one of the bravest men I have ever met, an officer and a gentleman, lying out in the desert barely covered in sand. No one will ever stop by his grave or pay homage to a brave heart that has ceased to beat. Not even a stone marks
the spot.’

  Lewes’ death was a huge blow to the fledgling SAS. Even so, by the end of June 1943, SAS patrols had raided ‘all the most important German and Italian aerodromes within 300 miles of the forward area’, Stirling would record, and some of them several times over. Almonds had been integral to many of those missions, proving a natural at night operations and a man who thrilled to the open desert wilderness.

  During the fateful mission to Nofilia Aerodrome, Almonds’ patrol had spent the day before the attack hiding in a large stone water cistern, its moisture long evaporated in the desert heat. He had noticed the skeleton of a desert fox that had fallen into the dry water tank and been unable to get out. Almonds wrote in his diary how he had pondered the animal’s last moments and how it made a deep impression on him. It had carried on trying to escape until it was unable to move any more. He felt the ‘deepest sympathy’, relating closely to the desert fox’s burning desire to live and to get out.

  It was that same desire that had gripped Almonds when faced with the horrors of prisoner-of-war existence. Throughout his year in captivity, he had striven to maintain his physical fitness, for it was important for the health of both body and mind. He strove to keep thoughts of his wife, Lockie, and their young son, John, foremost in his mind, to bolster his spirits. A dedicated family man, he wrote to his wife constantly, and many of his diary entries were addressed to her personally.

  Not once during his imprisonment had he doubted that he would make it home to see her again. It was Lockie and John and the simple joys of home that he pictured in his mind now, as he hurried onwards through the Monti della Laga foothills, such thoughts quickening his pace and boosting his stamina. At times he ran for hours on end during this stretch of his lonely journey, on one day covering fifty miles.