SAS Great Escapes

by Damien Lewis

  Having worked out their best route of attack, Hughes and Widdrington rested up for the remainder of the night hidden in some woodland, vowing to strike during the hours of darkness the following day. Sure enough, once it was well and truly dark, they crept towards the northern boundary of the airfield, laden with explosives and timers. Each man carried twelve Lewes bombs, a lightweight incendiary device designed specifically for the SAS by Jock Lewes. Ingenious, practical and comparatively lightweight, the charges were made from a mixture of ‘plastic explosive and aluminium and thermite . . . combining the incendiary aspect with the explosive,’ recalled David Stirling. The addition of thermite produced a localised exothermic reaction, keeping the burning going long after the initial explosion, thus enabling an aircraft to be blown up and set on fire all at once.

  Now was the moment to prime their charges. Widdrington and Hughes were using L-delay pencil detonators – a cylindrical brass tube containing a copper wire. Crushing the cap released acid into the tube, which ate away at the wire holding a spring-loaded firing pin at the ready. When the wire snapped, the firing pin would hammer down the tube, striking a percussion cap and so detonating the charge. Varying combinations of acid strength and wire thickness lent the timer pencils their differing durations. The SAS had drawn up charts explaining how, as the outside temperature varied, the detonation time altered accordingly. Widdrington had chosen L-delays that at 18°C would cause the Lewes bombs to explode after one hour. But with the night-time temperature in Italy in January being around freezing, they figured they would have roughly two hours before detonation.

  Widdrington and Hughes paused on the airfield’s perimeter, where they triggered all their L-delays. In a post-mission report this was described as ‘a risky procedure, but a very brave one’. By triggering all the charges before laying them, that should ensure that they would all explode at the same time, giving the enemy no chance to disarm any of them once the first explosion had ripped across the airfield.

  With their Lewes bombs thus primed, they crept forwards, using the dim light of a quarter moon to navigate, the perimeter proving surprisingly easy to penetrate. Following the success of the SAS’s raids on the airfields of North Africa, the enemy had taken their defence far more seriously in Italy, sometimes assigning a sentry to each individual plane. Hughes had expected San Egidio to be bristling with enemy defences: gun emplacements, pillboxes, barbed-wire fences, minefield and guards. Yet they had spied nothing more worrisome than an occasional sentry patrolling the perimeter – easy enough to identify and avoid. Presumably, the Germans thought San Egidio so far behind their lines that there was little need for tighter security.

  ‘There were four Ju 88s in a row,’ Hughes reported. ‘Their engines were still warm. At 23.00 hours we prepared our bombs and placed them on the starboard wings . . .’

  The Junkers Ju 88 – the so-called Schnellbomber, or fast bomber – was a multi-use combat aircraft, serving as a night-fighter, a bomber and in a reconnaissance role. With each standing at 15ft 5in off the ground, Hughes was forced to climb upon Widdrington’s broad shoulders, in order to place the charges on the warplanes. He set them adjacent to the fuel tanks, so when they exploded they would ignite the aviation fuel inside. By targeting the same spot on each plane, it made it impossible for the enemy to splice together damaged aircraft using cannibalised parts, so ensuring the maximum number would be kept out of the sky ahead of the Anzio landings.

  Hughes and Widdrington ‘continued down the east side of the aerodrome and put bombs on two Fieseler Storch co-operation planes and a three-engined Ju 52’. The Fieseler Storch (Stork) ‘spotter’ planes constituted a particularly important target, for these lightweight, slow-flying aircraft – which Hughes would later describe as ‘frail, beautiful creatures looking like elegant gazelles’ – were perfect for flying reconnaissance missions. With their task complete, the two raiders headed for the southern side of the airstrip, to slip through the perimeter.

  Once they were clear of the aerodrome, Hughes flung himself down and began to deactivate his unused charges. Near by, he could make out Widdrington doing the same to the Lewes bombs that he still carried. Hughes had little idea how long their dash around the airfield had taken. To his adrenaline-flooded senses it had felt like mere minutes, but may have been far longer. Either way, it was well short of the two hours they had allowed for the fuses to detonate. Having stripped the L-delay mechanism from his final bomb, he turned to his commanding officer, but at that very moment there was a flash of blinding white light and heat.

  Tragically, one of Widdrington’s charges had blown up even as he was deactivating it. Most likely, he had carried the Lewes bombs secreted on his person, and the mere presence of his body heat had served to warm them, shortening the time the detonators would take to trigger. Either way, Widdrington was engulfed in a devastating explosion, Hughes himself being blown off his feet by the blast. Dazed and bloodied, Hughes struggled to stand, checking himself tentatively for any signs of damage, feeling ‘the torn flesh and the matting blood’. He touched his face. It was crisscrossed with deep lacerations, and when he felt for his eyes all he could sense was ‘a mass of pulp’.

  ‘I was blinded and nearly completely deaf,’ Hughes recalled, of the nightmarish moment.

  Remembering Widdrington, he sank to his knees, patting the ground ahead of him and shouting his commander’s name. Over the ringing in his ears he heard a moan. Following it to its source, he located his friend. As he pawed the man’s body, in order to ascertain the extent of the damage, he smelled the scent of burning flesh mingled with the metallic stench of the bomb. Shortly, he realised that the explosion had blown off both of Widdrington’s hands. Hughes held the man’s shattered body, wondering how on earth he was still alive. He could feel a gaping hole that the blast had ripped in his commander’s abdomen, where the ‘slimy flesh’ spilled out ‘like oozing jelly’.

  At that instant, the airfield all around them erupted into flames. As aircraft after aircraft exploded, Hughes realised that against all odds, their objective had been achieved. Realising that there was very little chance of saving his commanding officer’s life, unless he could be rushed to a hospital, he took his pistol and raised it above his head. Shakily he fired every bullet it held into the air, hoping he could draw the German sentries’ attention to himself and to his terribly wounded comrade.

  With his eight-round magazine spent, Hughes’ SAS training took over. Operational security was paramount now: the enemy could not be allowed to discover the full details of their mission. He needed to destroy all evidence, first and foremost by burning their mission maps – but, of course, the explosion had blinded him. Hughes had always possessed what he described as a ‘methodical mind’. He would often draw the ‘complicated mechanisms of various guns and weapons’ from memory, for fun. Similarly, while blindfolded he could ‘strip down a Lewis gun to its many small parts and reassemble them’. Such activities had, unbeknown to Hughes, prepared him for this exact moment.

  He groped around trying to locate whatever papers and maps they carried. Finding a pack of matches, he succeeded in kindling a small fire between his legs and there proceeded to incinerate the documents, relishing having a task to focus on and to distract his mind from the terrible reality of the moment. With the job of incineration done, he allowed himself to drift into unconsciousness, all the while hoping that his actions had been enough to save the life of his commanding officer, and to ensure their mission was not compromised.

  When eventually Hughes came back to his senses, he found himself in a German military hospital just outside Perugia, an ancient city in central Italy. There he discovered what had transpired in the interim. Sadly, the guards who had found him had been unable to save Widdrington. The distinguished SAS commander had died from his wounds. His conduct during his final raid echoed his original MC citation: ‘He carried out his long and dangerous task displaying complete disregard for danger.
’ Though it was a devastating loss, at least Widdrington’s final mission – which Hughes would later claim to be ‘the most important SAS operation in Italy’ – had been a success. Certainly, the landings at Anzio on 22 January had taken the Germans almost completely by surprise.

  With both eyes bandaged and his hearing severely damaged, Hughes was still of great interest to the Gestapo agents who were keen to interrogate him. As if from a great distance, he could hear the arguments in German raging at his bedside. The head doctor was refusing to allow the Gestapo to get near his patient, or at least not before he was well enough to be questioned. Oddly, Hughes found himself reliant on a German now – his physician – to shield him from the worst enemy predations.

  The Gestapo had decreed that Hughes, a potentially dangerous paratrooper-raider, not be allowed near any of the other Allied prisoners. Accordingly, he had been moved to a ward reserved for German officers, where he could be isolated from his own kind. Alone, with no one to talk to, Hughes’ thoughts switched back and forth from images of the haunting night on the airfield to an uncertain future without the use of his eyes. ‘I had been a moody, single child,’ he remarked, and during the long, lonely days of his childhood he had developed ‘an introspection that was almost unhealthy’. He returned to that state now, wondering if he would survive the war, and if, as a blind man, he would ever know love again.

  It was his German military physician, Dr Hansgunger Sontgerath, who offered Hughes some respite from his inner turmoil. In time Hughes would grow to consider Sontgerath a ‘kind and generous friend’. Every evening after work, he would come and sit by Hughes’ bed and they would talk. In halting English to begin with, but with greater fluency as Sontgerath practised the language, they discussed the various details of their lives before the war. ‘We talked of fishing, walking and playing in the woods,’ Hughes recalled, as he began to recognise in the doctor a kindred spirit.

  As a token of their growing trust and respect, Hughes agreed to give Sontgerath his ‘parole’. In military terms, ‘offering parole’ is a concept that has existed for many centuries. By offering parole to a fellow officer, a prisoner becomes honour-bound not to attempt to escape while in his charge. The practice harked back to a time when a captured soldier could be released under parole and was allowed to return to home and family, as long as he vowed not to take up arms again. If he broke his promise and was recaptured, he could be lawfully executed as a man without honour.

  By giving his parole, Hughes had sworn that he would not attempt to escape while under Sontgerath’s care. In return, the doctor did everything he could to save Hughes’ sight, even calling in a specialist eye surgeon. Gradually, Hughes’ vision returned in the one eye, and he found that he was able to see his champion for the first time. Dr Sontgerath had kind, intelligent eyes, which twinkled from behind wire-rimmed glasses. He wore the crumpled uniform of a man whose medical work was all-consuming, and pinned to his chest was the unmistakable form of an Iron Cross Second Class, a German award for bravery in battle. Sontgerath told Hughes that he had won the decoration when serving in the depths of a Russian winter, two years earlier, on the Eastern Front.

  With Hughes’ sight partially restored, Sontgerath ‘brought a book of architectural photographs’ for him to peruse, for the Englishman had talked of his hopes of returning to Liverpool after the war was over, to study as an architect. Yet, as the German surgeon privately feared, the Gestapo had little intention of letting this British saboteur see the end of the war unmolested.

  As Hughes’ health improved, Sontgerath could no longer legitimately prevent the Gestapo agents from getting access to him. Before long, a softly spoken officer came to his bedside and declared that his sole purpose was to glean as much information about the innermost working of the SAS as possible. Hughes knew that under the Geneva Convention, all a POW was obliged to divulge to an enemy was his name, rank and serial number. Hughes, like any bona fide soldier, should be extended such protections. All he had to do was adhere to that mantra, he reminded himself: name, rank and serial number, no more.

  But his German inquisitor would quickly shatter Hughes’ illusions that he might be treated properly, shaking his certainties to the core. ‘You are not considered a prisoner of war,’ the man announced to Hughes, with sinister quiet. A ‘Kommando Order’ had been issued by the Führer, he added, under which all ‘saboteurs, whether wearing uniform or civilian clothes, will be shot’. Hughes’ only hope ‘for clemency’ was if he answered all questions put to him ‘entirely and without deceit’.

  Hughes was dumbfounded. Certainly, he had never heard of any such ‘Kommando Order’. In truth, the order had been issued by Hitler himself, in utmost secrecy, in October 1942. But Hughes, like all in the SAS, had yet to learn of its sinister and deadly intent. Whatever the case, if any of this was true and he was now categorised not as a POW but as some kind of illegal saboteur, his only option was to appear to give his interrogator exactly what he sought, without actually revealing anything that could be used against his SAS comrades.

  First off, Hughes decided that he would divulge the location where he and Widdrington had stashed their excess kit the night of the attack – there was nothing much of interest there anyway. Then he regurgitated all he could think to say about his previous posting, in Malta, for the battle had moved on from that once-benighted island many months ago.

  Hughes spoke quickly, his inquisitor scribbling on a pad held in front of him, recording his every word ‘about a place over which the tide of battle had long since passed’. Finally, the Gestapo officer seemed satisfied, but then he gave the final twist to the knife. He left Hughes with the chilling promise that once he had made a full recovery, the Gestapo would return to execute him, regardless.

  Despite his seeming death sentence, over the coming weeks Hughes grew to almost enjoy his time at the hospital. As well as Dr Sontgerath, he forged another highly unlikely alliance. Major Gerhard Schacht was an officer in the Fallschirmjäger, the German equivalent of the British Parachute Regiment, and he was also a patient under Sontgerath’s care. He introduced himself to Hughes after hearing of the Englishman’s daring raid on San Egidio airbase, the two men bonding over their shared experiences as paratroopers.

  ‘He was very friendly and pleasant,’ Hughes reflected of Schacht, despite being an elite enemy soldier fighting in ‘a bloody, total war’.

  As the sole English patient on a German ward, Dr Sontgerath invited Hughes to meet the other German officers, for although ‘the war had to be fought’, as Hughes noted, ‘there was no hate between us’. There were parties, Hughes describing them as ‘gay, rambunctious affairs’. They would listen to the wireless – including German and British news programmes – talk, drink and sing together almost as friends. Often these parties would be held in Sontgerath’s office, where a detailed map of Italy hung on the wall. Hughes would do his best to memorise it, for although he had given Sontgerath his parole, he hoped that at some point, when no longer beholden to his German doctor, he might find the chance to escape.

  ‘Roy Farran was my hero,’ Hughes would later remark, of the SAS commander. Stories of Farran’s escape from enemy captivity in Greece were by now the stuff of legend within the ranks of 2SAS, where Farran, now a major, was a seasoned commander. Hughes vowed that when the opportunity arose, he would do his best to emulate Farran and make a break for freedom. But until that moment he had to remain a seemingly benign and harmless guest of the enemy.

  His situation was absurd; ‘crazy’, Hughes would remark of this time. Befriended by these mostly decent German officers, he was being ‘nursed back to health’, only so that he could be ‘taken out and shot by the Gestapo’. It was a time pregnant with paradoxes. During their social gatherings, tongues loosened by German beer, Hughes saw another side of the otherwise kindly Dr Sontgerath. Spurred by the alcohol, the doctor, an ‘ideologist and a crazy romantic’, as Hughes described him, ‘firmly supported
the National Socialist [Nazi] line’.

  ‘I’d like to kill every Englishman and American,’ Sontgerath declared drunkenly, one evening. It was bizarre, especially since these were the utterings of a man who had spent so many hours ‘tenderly nursing a wounded English saboteur’. For Hughes, it only served to highlight the gulf that lay between the two sides of the German doctor’s character. Either way, Hughes could not find it in himself to resent the man. He understood the nuanced contradictions men had to accept in order to fight an ‘enemy’ who in peacetime could well have been a close friend. For his part, Hughes had signed up to join the British Army and had pledged his allegiance to Britain, but his key loyalties lay with himself and with his fellow SAS operators.

  ‘If I was to be faithful, it would be to myself,’ he averred.

  Before long Major Schacht, the Fallschirmjäger officer, recovered and left the hospital. Despatched to join the staff of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Germany’s commander-in chief in Italy, a short while later Schacht invited his old friends Hughes and Dr Sontgerath to dinner. Over a sumptuous feast, at least by wartime standards, Schacht propositioned Hughes. He wanted the SAS man to desert the Allied cause and join that of the Axis.

  ‘Why don’t you work for us?’ Schacht asked. Hughes was an elite forces professional, one that Schacht and his ilk could well use. Not against the British or the West, he was quick to add, but on the Eastern Front, against the Russians.

  For a moment Hughes was tempted, if only by the quality of friendship that had been bestowed upon him by these men, yet he knew in his heart that he could not do it. He avoided directly answering the question, saying simply that it was a kind offer, one that he’d consider most carefully once fully recovered. But in truth, Hughes would have precious little opportunity to do so, for he was living on borrowed time.