by Damien Lewis
For his escape, and for his minefield discovery, Almonds was awarded a bar to his existing Military Medal. As the citation made clear, at all times Almonds had been unbreakable, whether as a soldier, raider, escapee, or on any other task put to him. He had beaten the odds by courage, audacity and his willingness to walk through fire in an effort to secure his freedom.
During the period of Almonds’ imprisonment, SAS commander David Stirling had been captured on a raid in the Tunisian desert, being imprisoned in Colditz camp in eastern Germany, where he would make many an escape attempt of his own. Unfortunately, none would prove as successful as Almonds’, and Stirling was repeatedly thwarted. Almonds learned that during the campaign in the North African desert the actions of the SAS had played a key role in the defeat of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. He also learned that the SAS had expanded to become two regiments. William ‘Bill’ Stirling – David Stirling’s brother and a lieutenant colonel in the Scots Guards – had taken command of the second unit, dubbed 2 SAS, while Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne remained in command of the original unit, 1 SAS.
Hearing of Almonds’ escape, Mayne wrote a letter to one of the SAS’s medical officers, Malcom Pleydell, a close friend of Almonds. Almonds had ‘got through to our side’, Mayne reported, adding that he was ‘trying to meet him’. With Mayne’s help, Almonds was able to rejoin the SAS in February 1944, whereupon he was promoted to the rank of squadron sergeant major and tasked to help get new recruits up to scratch, in the run-up to the D-Day landings. Almonds himself played a key role in the SAS’s subsequent missions in France, for which he was awarded a Croix de Guerre – a French high-valour medal – with silver star. His citation describes how Almonds ‘N’a pas cessé durant sa mission d’être un magnifique exemple pour ses hommes’ – that is, throughout the entire mission, Almonds never ceased to be a magnificent example to his men.
Towards the end of the war, Mayne came to Almonds’ aid once more, living up to the SAS’s wartime claim of the unbreakable spirit and bond forged between officers and men. With no prior warning, Mayne presented Almonds to the foremost British commander, General Bernard L. Montgomery, declaring simply: ‘I want this man commissioned.’ Despite his distinguished war record, Almonds remained a non-commissioned officer with ‘other-ranks’ status. There and then, Almonds received his promotion in the field, being given the rank of second lieutenant.
Almonds ended his prestigious military career in 1961, with the rank of major. At this point he found himself in Ghana, where he decided to hand-build a ketch that he named Kumasi, this being the two-masted boat that he had designed and committed to memory while in solitary confinement in an Italian POW camp. He proceeded to navigate Kumasi all the way back to the UK, a distance of some 4,500 nautical miles, proving once again his incredible ability for exceeding all normal expectations.
Likewise, our next great escapee would demonstrate such qualities par excellence, embodying the SAS motto to ‘always go a little further . . .’
Great Escape Six
Defeating Hitler’s Commando Order
‘Halt! Wer da?’ The harsh challenge rang out into the cold night air.
On hearing it, the six-strong team of Operation Pomegranate scattered, hiding themselves in the shadows between the farm buildings. Three nights earlier, on 12 January 1944, these SAS paratroopers – two officers and four men – had jumped from a C47 Dakota aircraft into the Italian countryside. They had landed under cover of darkness, ‘in the valley running eastwards near Magione’, the official mission report recorded. Their drop zone lay adjacent to the turquoise waters of Lake Trasimeno, situated a hundred miles due north of Rome.
Since then, they had spent the best part of a week laid up in patches of thick undergrowth amid lonely mountain passes, moving only under cover of darkness. They’d stuck to the wildest terrain, for they were deep within German-occupied Italy and enemy troops were everywhere. ‘The going was very difficult,’ one member of the team reported, ‘as the hillsides were steep and wet,’ and they were loaded down with heavy packs, crammed with explosives, fuses and detonators.
In addition, those rucksacks contained ‘C-rations, a quantity of dried raisins, sugar, chocolate’, one trooper reported, plus special water-purification tablets. Each man also carried an American-made M1 carbine – a weapon favoured by the SAS when they could get their hands on them, due to its light weight and ease of use. Each man also had a .45 Colt pistol.
After traversing Lake Trasimeno via its western shoreline and scaling the 3,000-foot summit of Mount Tezio, they had headed east and approached the River Tiber. British military intelligence had briefed them that the waterway would be fordable at this point, something crucial to their present mission. Yet recent heavy rainfall in the mountains had transformed the otherwise shallow, meandering waterway into a raging torrent. Having reached the river, the six men regarded it with dismay, noticing the swirls of white water, where menacing rocks broke the surface. It would be impossible to wade across.
They’d advanced cautiously downstream, until they had spotted a wire suspended over the water, shining silver in the moonlight. The near end of it disappeared into a small, brick-built hut, and concealed inside they discovered a possible means to cross: a very basic and rickety-looking cable car. The device was hand-operated and ‘never devised for a secret crossing’, one of the raiders reported. They had hoped the fast-rushing water would mask the noise of their passage, but no such luck. The cable car rattled and the cables thrummed ‘as we went across two by two’.
Despite all the racket, the six had made it across seemingly undetected. But they were just moving off, making their way between the darkened buildings, when they heard the sentry’s challenge. Though their knowledge of German was rudimentary, there could be no mistaking the meaning: ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ Hence they all flung themselves into cover.
From his position concealed between two buildings, James ‘Jimmy’ Quentin Hughes, a young lieutenant, strained to detect any sound that might indicate the size of the force they were facing, but the freezing January night remained stubbornly still and silent. He awaited a steer from their troop commander, Major Antony Widdrington, who lay beside him in the alleyway, as to what they should do next. As all were well aware, the enemy already knew about their presence in the area and would be actively hunting them.
The day after dropping into Italy, they had stumbled upon some woodcutters, deep in the mountains. They had given the SAS men some food and had seemed friendly enough, for, like many Italians, they resented the Nazi occupation of their homeland. Yet they had also brought the alarming news that the Germans had found their SAS team’s parachutes and were combing the terrain. Most likely, it was the passage of their lone C47 Dakota that had prompted the enemy to mount a search. As the mission report noted, ‘the presence of a single aircraft over enemy territory was liable to arouse the suspicion of parachutist activity.’
It stood to reason that the Germans would have increased their security at every possible crossing point of the Tiber – hence the sentry’s challenge. After several minutes’ tense silence, Hughes and Widdrington concluded there could be no enemy troops in active pursuit. Perhaps the sentry was alone and, on hearing the approach of several unknown figures, had regretted his temerity in crying out a challenge.
Slipping away in the darkness, Hughes and Widdrington found themselves separated from the other four men of their patrol. They skirted around a cluster of farm buildings, reaching the relative safety of the open land beyond. Their main problem now was finding the rest of their team. Tentatively, Hughes began to imitate the calls of a nocturnal bird. This was the way SAS operators had been trained to locate each other, if separated. Yet other than the steady rush of the nearby river, no response came.
‘Where the bloody hell are they?’ Hughes whispered under his breath.
The two officers began to probe the surrounding area, alert for any sign of the missing
men. Although this was Hughes’ first mission with the SAS, he had few problems slipping silently through the night. During a childhood spent at a Welsh boarding school he had been a ‘secretive and withdrawn’ young boy, teaching himself ‘to move about in the dormitory’ when everyone else was sleeping, doing so ‘in complete silence’. He had been inspired in part by the depictions of Native Americans that he’d seen in Hollywood ‘cowboy and Indian’ films.
After three-quarters of an hour Hughes and Widdrington were forced to abandon their search. ‘We walked on, stopping to whistle at intervals,’ Hughes would later report, but there was still no sign of the others. With their force reduced from six to two, there were only two options remaining: abandon their mission, and head south on foot towards Allied lines, or press on to the target, just the two of them.
Their mission, Operation Pomegranate, was no small undertaking, and it represented exactly the kind of task the SAS had been formed for: dropping a specialist team of paratroopers behind enemy lines to support a main military offensive. In this instance that larger mission – codenamed Operation Shingle – aimed to provide the impetus the Allies needed to wrest Italy from German control. Even since first landing on Italian soil in the summer of 1943, Allied troops had met fierce German resistance, bolstered by massively fortified defensive lines. The British, American and Commonwealth troops were bogged down, unable to punch through the fearsome German defences. Operation Shingle was devised to break the deadlock, by landing Allied infantrymen on Italy’s western coast, near the city of Anzio, thereby leap-frogging ahead of the enemy’s Gustav Line, a string of defences lying to the south of Rome, which included the ancient hilltop monastery of Monte Cassino Abbey.
Just over a month earlier, in December 1943, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had met American General Dwight Eisenhower, and other top Allied commanders, to discuss plans for Operation Shingle. The minutes of their meeting noted: ‘There seemed to be general agreement among the Commanders-in-Chief that an amphibious landing of no less than two assault divisions behind the enemy’s right flank . . . should decide the battle of Rome and possibly achieve the destruction of a substantial part of the enemy’s army.’ Eisenhower had predicted that such a surprise attack would critically weaken the enemy’s defences, thus allowing Allied troops to punch through, stressing that ‘there was no likelihood of the Germans suddenly breaking, except under conditions which would be created by a successful Shingle.’
Operation Shingle was scheduled to start on 22 January 1944, just a few days hence. In part, its success hinged on the six-man SAS patrol that had just crossed the Tiber. Their target was the San Egidio Airfield, strategically placed in the dead centre of Italy, where ‘all the reconnaissance planes, of the type Junkers 88 and Me 410, were known to be based’. Allied commanders had assessed that one of the primary threats to Operation Shingle was being spotted in open waters by the Luftwaffe, before the assault flotilla made landfall.
The aircraft most likely to detect the Operation Shingle fleet were those that flew out of San Egidio. Hence the SAS raiders getting dropped in tasked with infiltrating the airfield and laying enough explosives to render any reconnaissance flights impossible – ‘putting out the eyes of the Germans’, as Hughes called it. Without spotter planes to reconnoitre the area, the enemy would be unaware of the approaching Allied fleet until it was too late.
To many, continuing with such a mission when reduced to only two men would have seemed insane. But Widdrington and Hughes were no ordinary soldiers. Major Widdrington, already a decorated veteran at twenty-nine years of age, had had an illustrious military career, being awarded the Military Cross for his brave actions with the Queen’s Bays (2nd Dragoon Guards), a cavalry regiment with over two hundred years’ history behind it. His medal citation described how, when his ‘leading Squadron was held up on an impassable wadi which was covered by enemy HE [high-explosive] and AP [armour-piercing] fire’, Widdrington had ‘volunteered to carry out a recce on foot [when] he came under heavy mortar and MG [machine-gun] fire’.
With shells and bullets exploding all around, Widdrington had acted ‘with great coolness’, making his way back ‘with full information on enemy dispositions’. Returning to his unit, Widdrington had found his Squadron commander badly wounded. He’d proceeded to take command of the troops and ‘led the Squadron forward with great dash and skill and gained the next objective’. Widdrington had gone on to volunteer for 2SAS, where he was considered by all to be a natural leader. His confident attitude and ‘cool manner’, combined with a tall frame, bristling moustache and steely gaze, helped inspire those who served under him, Hughes included.
Hughes had a somewhat less distinguished military record, and he hungered to prove his worth. Born in Liverpool in 1920, at the outbreak of war he had cut short his university studies at age nineteen to join the Army. Following a year’s officer training, in September 1940 he had reported to the 208 Anti-aircraft Training Regiment, in Yeovil, Somerset. Germany had begun its bombing campaign of Britain and the skies overhead were thick with enemy warplanes. Hughes was in Yeovil to learn how to shoot them down.
But longing for something a little more immediate and challenging, he’d volunteered to soldier abroad, stating his preferences for either India, Hong Kong or Singapore. Instead, he had been despatched to join an anti-aircraft battery on besieged Malta, which he described as ‘no haven of peace’. When the SAS had been busy raiding aerodromes on the Libyan coast to prevent enemy aircraft from bombing the supply convoys heading for Malta, Hughes had been on the other end of that siege.
He’d remained in Malta for sixteen months, while the island endured a near-constant bombardment. In December 1941, he’d noted in his diary how they had watched dive bombers swooping to attack at night, only to be caught in the searchlights and ‘riddled by a Hurricane cannon’. One enemy aircraft burst into flames and went howling towards earth, leaving ‘a trail of bright sparks across the sky’. The aerial assault went on for weeks, both ‘day and night’, the bombs raining down and then ‘flash – several flashes – buildings shake and we watch the smoke’.
Finally, in November 1942, the siege of Malta was lifted and the island was left largely unmolested by the enemy. With the battle over, Hughes volunteered for the Special Forces. He was selected to join the newly formed 2 SAS, under the command of David Stirling’s older brother, Bill Stirling. Hughes had sailed from Malta to Tunisia, where he stuffed himself with all the good food he could find, after the long years under siege. Then he headed two hundred miles west along the coast, to 2SAS’s base in Philippeville (now Skikda), Algeria, where he began his intensive training.
It proved relentless and hugely varied, including explosives use, physical fitness, demolitions, languages, firearms and – most bizarre of all – learning to drive a train. The SAS also continued the long-standing tradition – first thought up by Jock Lewes in Kabrit – of jumping from the back of a moving truck, to learn how to land in the proper way after a parachute jump. With Allied forces moving on from the vast deserts of North Africa to liberate Europe, it would no longer be possible for the SAS simply to drive their jeeps to their targets – they would need to be able to parachute deep behind enemy lines.
Hughes had long found parachuting fascinating, writing in his Maltese diary of how he’d watched, mesmerised, as ‘little puffs of white appeared’ one by one and ‘slowly swayed towards the ground’ – Luftwaffe aircrew, bailing out of a stricken warplane. In the SAS, he quickly fell in love with the craft. Of his first jump he noted how the noisy interior of the plane seemed to ‘evaporate’ as he flung himself through the hatch, after which he felt as though he were ‘lying on a feather bed of indescribable softness’, experiencing ‘a joy so profound that he burst into song’. Hughes would sing at the top of his voice during all of his training descents.
Now, at the age of twenty-three, and sporting a rakish pencil moustache and a newly acquired elite forces mi
ndset, Hughes had been deployed on his first behind-the-lines mission. But, separated as they were from the rest of their party, his and Widdrington’s chances of success were rapidly diminishing. Yet if they failed in their mission and a German scout aircraft spotted the Operation Shingle flotilla, the Allied troops might be annihilated on the beaches, rendering the whole operation a failure. On balance, Hughes and Widdrington believed they had no option but to continue with their mission, regardless of their slim chances both of success and survival.
Decision made, they pressed on through terrain thick with German troops, marching only at night and lying up through the hours of daylight. Even with the help of Benzedrine – an amphetamine favoured by the SAS to boost their stamina during long, arduous marches – Hughes struggled to keep up with the seasoned operator, Widdrington. Though he would later describe Benzedrine as ‘a wonderful drug’, still Hughes was forced to jettison non-essential items from his kitbag to make the going easier.
After sixty hours on the move, the two men finally neared their target. Late on 17 January 1944 – five days before Operation Shingle’s zero hour – they set out to recce the airfield, stashing all non-essential gear in a hiding place in the woods, including their American carbines. They also swapped their sturdy boots for tennis shoes, to muffle the noise of their footfalls. The winter light was fading fast by the time Hughes and Widdrington arrived in sight of the airfield, making ‘the details and disposition of the aircraft . . . not clearly visible’.
Although they had spent hours memorising every detail of the aerodrome from maps and aerial photographs, it proved hard to get their bearings in the gathering darkness, and they ran the risk of misjudging the attack. Just then they had a stroke of luck. ‘While we were watching [the airfield], four Ju 88s came into land,’ Hughes reported. ‘One of them crashed and caught fire. The flare path and the boundary lights showed the perimeter of the field clearly.’
