by Damien Lewis
Farran was roused in the small hours by one of the Greeks, who had detected the thrum of engines. He listened hard and soon he could hear it too. Taking it to be aircraft, he gave orders that they light the first of their makeshift flares. It was only when the engine noise grew louder, drifting across to them on the open sea, that Farran realised this was no aircraft: it was the rumble of a ship’s engine.
He could barely believe it as he spied ‘two long black shapes coming towards us out of the darkness’. The crew, forgetting momentarily their utter exhaustion, scrambled to light the remaining flares, waving them in the direction of the ships, which they could now make out to be men o’ war of the Royal Navy. But they were forced to watch in agonised frustration as the vessels stuck to their course, ignoring the boatload of desperate escapees.
‘We screamed and wept to see them pay so little heed to us,’ Farran recalled of this dark moment, when even he began to lose all hope. But it was then that the second ship altered course and headed back towards them. That vessel was a sleek J-Class destroyer, some 350 feet in length, with the number ‘F22’ emblazoned on its side. No sight had ever been more welcome to Farran’s parched, cracked and painful eyes.
The ship hove to. A voice carried across the waters: ‘Ahoy there, who are you?’
Through cracked lips Farran yelled a reply that they were British POWs hailing from Greece. ‘Who are you?’
‘The Jackal,’ the voice replied, adding that they were about to board the caïque.
Farran’s MC citation recorded that ‘some 40 miles out of Alexandria they were sighted by a destroyer and picked up.’ He and his emaciated crew were carried aboard HMS Jackal, all barring Lefteris, who opted to man the caïque as it was towed into port. In an epic of sheer determination and superhuman endurance, they had made it 1,300 miles across the Mediterranean, and were just a few dozen miles short of friendly shores.
For his action during the Battle for Cemetery Hill, Farran earned his first Military Cross. For his incredible escape from Greece he would be awarded a bar to that medal. The citation would praise his ‘inspirational leadership, inventiveness and daring in escaping from enemy captivity and piloting a local vessel hundreds of miles through hostile seas’, adding that ‘it is largely due to his perseverance that this party eventually reached safety.’ Farran’s citation continued that ‘this officer has shown courage, resource and initiative. He has set a very fine example of determination and leadership to the men under his command.’
The story of Roy Farran’s epic getaway offered many vital lessons to those tasked to ensure would-be escapees stood the best chance of making it back to Allied lines. MI9 – Britain’s so-called ‘Escape Factory’, a top-secret branch of military intelligence, whose mission was to aid Allied escapees across all theatres of the war – worked closely with men like Farran, to perfect the most ingenious and usable escape aids. First and foremost, they needed kits including cleverly disguised maps and compasses, which could be secreted in Red Cross and other charity food parcels, so escapees wouldn’t have to rely on loo-roll maps, school atlases or the like.
As the boffins at MI9 got busy perfecting such equipment, Farran would go on to earn a legendary reputation in the SAS, commanding many daring missions. During those later operations, the lessons learned in his long weeks on the run would be put to good use: self-reliance, bluff, disguise, resourcefulness and nurturing the unbreakable spirit. Official reports would write of Farran how, ‘commanding a Special Air Service Squadron, he directed his officers and men in parachuting behind enemy lines . . . and was conspicuously successful in supplying their needs for sustained harassing operations’.
Farran would end the war as one of the most highly decorated members of the SAS, for in addition to his Military Cross and two bars he would be awarded the Distinguished Service Order, as well as the Legion of Honour and Croix de Guerre for his services in France, plus a Legion of Merit from the USA. Indeed, his final big mission of the war – the March 1945 raid on a German Army headquarters in northern Italy – would be hailed as ‘one of the most dangerous and effective attacks ever undertaken by this Regiment against the enemy’.
The recruits that David Stirling – the founder of the SAS – had assembled embodied Farran’s maverick, do-or-die spirit. It was just such men that Stirling sought, to enable the SAS to rise from the obscurity of their earliest desert operations and to revolutionise warfare. Stirling was not interested in those who would blindly follow orders; he wanted independent spirits and self-starters, individuals who could think for themselves. Almost by chance, he created in the SAS a band of men who were naturally more inclined to escape and evasion than your average soldier.
Our next great escapee’s story embodies just the spirit that Stirling sought.
Great Escape Three
From the African Desert to the Frozen North
Two raiders moved cat-like through the darkness along the perimeter of Berka Satellite Airfield, pausing every few feet to insert their explosive charges into the ammunition dump. Their primary objective had been to destroy enemy aircraft. But when the mission’s commander, Lieutenant Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, discovered stores of munitions stashed in tarpaulin-covered dugouts spaced around the airfield’s limits, he saw an opportunity to create extra chaos and mayhem.
Mayne – a legendary figure who had a reputation for knowing exactly how to exploit surprise – had split his team of raiders into two parties, instructing Corporal Jack Byrne and Lance Corporal Johnny Rose to lay explosives in the bomb dumps, while he himself, accompanied by Corporal Bob Bennett, would hit the warplanes lined up on the runway. It was well after 0300 hours on the morning of 21 March 1942, and the men moved quickly, for they knew they were running out of time.
This raid was one of several planned that night. All across the Benghazi Plain, deep in enemy-occupied Libya, small SAS units four or five strong were targeting key German and Italian military bases. The raiders had traversed over five hundred miles of sun-baked Sahara to get here, advancing from their desert base camp at Siwa Oasis, just beyond the Egyptian border far to the east. They had been guided across this vast sea of sand by another band of Special Forces operatives – the Long Range Desert Group, known as the LRDG.
The LRDG were primarily an intelligence gathering unit, undertaking reconnaissance missions and gleaning information on enemy activities, all the while honing their desert survival and navigation skills. They had been operating across the vast sun-blasted interiors of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia for almost two years now, travelling in convoys of heavily adapted Willys Jeeps and Chevrolet light trucks, with .30-calibre Brownings and Lewis Guns mounted on pivots. The modifications and weaponry made the LRDG a superlative fighting unit.
The former Commander-in-Chief of the Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, had written of the LRDG: ‘In conditions of indescribable hardship these patrols constantly scoured the desert, shooting up convoys, destroying petrol dumps and generally harassing Italian desert garrisons,’ adding, with great admiration, ‘for obvious reasons patrols were unable to use recognised tracks and have found their own ways over sand, seas, uncharted desert, outcrops of rock and other difficulties previously considered . . . to be totally impassable.’
Despite their wild appearance – skin tanned russet-brown by the sun, beards bushy and unkempt, heads wrapped in traditional Arab keffiyeh headwear to keep off the flies – the LRDG were the ‘supreme professionals of the desert’, averred the SAS’s founder, David Stirling. Able to find their way through seemingly impossible terrain with pin-point accuracy, the LRDG had been enlisted by Stirling to ‘taxi’ his raiders to and from their objectives.
For the 21 March raids, an LRDG patrol had ‘dropped off’ Mayne and his men five miles east of the target, but they had been hampered by unexpectedly rough terrain, delaying their progress by several hours. But despite this, none had considered abandoning the operation. Paddy Mayne hail
ed from Newtownards, in Northern Ireland, and had played rugby at international level prior to the war, representing both Ireland and the British Lions. A born fighter, tough as nails, he possessed an unrivalled ability to lead from the front, forging ahead in situations where others might consider the risks too great. Bennett believed that Mayne could take on anything, and that with him in command his men seemed to have no fear at all, following their ‘ruthless’ commander into even the most impossible situations.
The wider strategic importance of tonight’s mission was not lost on the raiders. If they could blast apart the aerodrome and warplanes, it would hamper the enemy’s aerial bombardment of the British stronghold of Malta. The island fortress’s fate hung in the balance, as German aircraft pummelled it unrelentingly, using the full advantage of their air superiority to hit convoys shipping in desperately needed supplies. Malta constituted a vital British base in the Mediterranean, providing harbours from which Allied warships could attack the enemy’s supply lines. If it fell, General Erwin Rommel, the formidable commander of the Afrika Korps – the German expeditionary force in Africa – would be free to bring in more troops and weaponry.
Under siege as it was, Malta would not hold out without desperately needed food and ammunition. Many of the aircraft that bombarded the Allied supply ships flew out of Libyan airbases, so if the SAS could destroy those warplanes on the ground, the convoys would have a greater chance of reaching Malta and breaking the siege. To fulfil that aim, Mayne and his men had travelled for days across the desert. Turning tail was never going to be an option, no matter how far behind schedule they might find themselves.
As they stole onto the enemy airbase and set their fuses, Mayne’s raiding party knew they were running out of time to make it back to their pre-arranged rendezvous with the LRDG, waiting in the foothills of a rocky escarpment lying to the east. With every minute that passed, it became more and more likely that they would be left behind, stranded deep inside enemy-held territory.
Just as Byrne and Rose reached the last of the airfield’s bomb dumps, the silence of the desert night erupted in a rush of light and heat: the first dugout full of munitions had ignited with spectacular ferocity. Byrne recalled a ‘terrific continuous roar’, with ‘dump after dump belching out flames and smoke’, as one after the other they blew themselves to pieces. Moments later, there followed another series of blasts towards the centre of the aerodrome, confirming that Mayne and Bennett had also found their targets: they would destroy fifteen aircraft that night.
With their mission complete, the raiders’ thoughts turned now to escape. Over the roar of the flames they could make out the cries of their enemies. Byrne and Rose, their position illuminated by the burning carcasses of warplanes and ammo stores, dashed from the airfield into an adjacent petrol dump, where they paused to dispose of the last of their bombs. Then they threw themselves behind the cover of a low wall to consider their options.
One thing was clear: there was no way they could make the rendezvous with the LRDG. But as the Berka Airfield ammo dumps threw out massive clouds of thick, oily smoke, Byrne and Rose congratulated themselves on taking out a sizeable chunk of the munitions being used to bomb the Maltese convoys. Even so, in the absence of their iconic commanding officer, they couldn’t seem to reach a decision on what to do next. Rose was keen to head to the LRDG rendezvous, on the chance that the patrol was still there, waiting. Byrne figured that to be a waste of time, for those desert warriors had a ruthlessly pragmatic attitude. So too did the SAS: every man knew when he signed up to the unit that they were not above leaving their own men behind if they had to.
Byrne argued they should head for a second set of coordinates issued by the LRDG, a point roughly thirty miles east, where the vehicles were scheduled to regroup before returning to Allied lines. This was the back-up plan. But neither man could be persuaded of the wisdom of the other’s viewpoint, and so they decided to separate – Rose hurrying off towards the original rendezvous, while Byrne took a different route at a far steadier pace.
John Vincent ‘Jack’ Byrne thought little of striking out on his own. Born in Preston in April 1921, he had spent his childhood in ‘a tough Lancashire orphanage’ where he had quickly learned to take care of himself. From there he had attended the Army Apprentices College, in Chepstow, Wales, an institution created to train the next generation of soldiers, to replace those lost in the First World War. He’d learned a mix of practical skills – carpentry, metalwork and electronics – plus warcraft, including ‘leadership’, ‘adventure training’ and ‘character development’.
In February 1939, Byrne had lied about his age in order to join the Scottish regiment the Gordon Highlanders. He was only seventeen. ‘I couldn’t get a job. That’s why I joined the army,’ he remarked later, to explain the subterfuge.
The Gordon Highlanders deployed to France the following year, forming part of the spirited yet ill-fated British Expeditionary Force, which battled the forces of Nazi Germany as their Blitzkrieg – lightning war – ripped through the French countryside. Byrne fought courageously, being wounded twice, first by shrapnel and then at close quarters, during savage hand-to-hand combat with a German soldier, in the defence of the Dunkirk beaches. Wounded in the right hip by a bayonet thrust, he’d been left for dead. Incredibly, he was discovered in a state of semi-consciousness by some French civilians. Realising Byrne was still alive, they hurried him to the beachhead, from where he was evacuated to the UK.
Just as soon as his wounds were healed, Byrne volunteered for the Commandos, joining Number 11 (Scottish) Commando. Promoted to the rank of corporal in France, he was accepted into the Commandos on the condition that he revert to private. Byrne was fine with that, having little interest in moving up through the ranks. After five months of intense training, 11 Commando was despatched to the eastern Mediterranean, along with several other Commando units. Under the command of Colonel Robert Laycock, they were known collectively as ‘Layforce’.
Deployed to Vichy-occupied Syria, 11 Commando ‘stormed the beaches north of the Litani River’, Byrne’s brave actions quickly earning him promotion back to the rank of corporal. But the Syrian campaign would prove a rare triumph. The Commandos spent most of their time in the Middle East in a frustrating state of limbo, waiting for assignments that were called off at the last moment. When the decision was made to disband Layforce, it left a glut of elite warriors with little to do.
Many of them, Byrne included, hungered for the action that Commando life had failed to provide. From among those remnants of the Middle East Commandos, Stirling selected many of the original members of ‘L-Detachment, the first Special Air Service Brigade’, Byrne recalled, ‘myself among them’.
Founding a new kind of elite unit in the desert, Stirling’s selection process was uncompromising, remaining resolutely firm in rejecting those who were ‘unable to reach that standard’ that was required. Stirling cherry-picked the best and brightest, selecting those who were truly ‘first class material’, all of whom had ‘considerable operational experience’. He sought men with ‘courage, fitness and determination in the highest degree’, but equally important were ‘skill, intelligence, and training’.
Reverting to the rank of private once more, Byrne was accepted into the SAS, arriving at their camp in Kabrit on 4 September 1941. In this remote set-up, situated on the shores of the Great Bitter Lake in north-eastern Egypt, he started four months of gruelling training. These earliest SAS recruits underwent some of the most intense and ground-breaking instruction in the history of warfare. They jumped from the back of fast-moving trucks to simulate parachute landings; they marched for hundreds of miles through the desert; they learned to get by on the most meagre of rations of food and water – all under the eagle eye of the SAS’s relentless training officer, Lieutenant John Steel ‘Jock’ Lewes.
Lewes was the very finest of training officers, early recruits recalled, one who led from the front by exa
mple. Formerly of 8 Commando, Lewes was second only to Stirling in terms of his influence upon the SAS at this time. His nerves, stamina and discipline were seemingly without parallel. The aim of Lewes’ training was to make it ‘as hard as humanly possible’ for all recruits. That way, when his men found themselves on real operations they would be ready for anything.
Lewes trained the recruits in parachuting, explosives, sabotage, guile and all the elements of ‘ungentlemanly warfare’, plus desert survival skills. He wanted his trainees to be so familiar with these qualities that they became innate, the subconscious brain knowing automatically what was required in a given situation, so the trooper’s conscious brain was free to deal with any dangers and opportunities for wreaking havoc and mayhem that arose. Such training would be tested to its very limits by Byrne, as he attempted to escape and evade capture and get back to friendly lines, following the Berka raid.
Byrne marched at a constant pace all that first day, reaching the foothills of the escarpment at dusk. He skirted the edge of the hills until he found the distinctive tyre tracks of the LRDG. From there he turned east-south-east, navigating using his compass and the positions of the stars. Keeping a steady course was challenging, particularly at night, but by dawn he could see where the hills gave way to the vast desert beyond. The LRDG had planned to converge at the point where the foothills met the flat expanse of sand, before beginning the long drive back to base. Byrne settled down to wait. Although he could not be sure of his precise location, he had a good view from his vantage point and felt certain he would be able to see the LRDG column arriving.
Noon came with no sign of the LRDG. Alone in the wilderness, Byrne’s thoughts turned to his ‘long walk back from the Marble Arch airfield’ the previous December. ‘Marble Arch’ was the rascally nickname given by Allied troops to the Arch of the Philaeni, a high stone monument that straddled the Libyan coastal highway, marking the border between the Italian colonial provinces of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. Mussolini revered Caesar Augustus, who had reputedly ‘found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble’. He indulged similar grandiose visions for Italy’s colonies, erecting the lavish edifice of the Arch of the Philaeni a few years earlier, to celebrate Italian mastery over Libya. The British, ever eager to poke fun at such delusions of grandeur, likened it to London’s Marble Arch, which stands at the top of Oxford Street.