by Damien Lewis
With that means of rescue firmly ruled out, Langton considered their options. Only two remained – to go and risk getting through, or to stay and await the coming ‘push,’ that was if the ‘push’ – the Allied advance – actually materialised. The only information Langton had was hearsay, passed to them via the Senussi villagers. He was not even certain ‘if the Line was still at Alamein’. Perhaps Rommel had pushed the British back still further; at that very moment the Afrika Korps might well be marching on Alexandria or Cairo, for all he knew.
The dysentery-stricken Evans’s condition worsened. Finally, Langton advised him that he would have to give himself up, in order to receive life-saving medical treatment. That night, with heavy hearts, Langton and Walter – the plucky mechanic – helped Evans to the road, though he was barely able to put one foot in front of the other. They left him with the hope that he would be picked up by an Italian patrol and receive the care he so gravely needed. While Evans was normally a tall, tough individual, by the time they left him he looked like ‘a haggard old man’, Langton noted sadly.
In the days after Evans’s departure, the North African sky transformed into a boiling mass of storm clouds. Lightning flashed and the heavens opened, the rain pouring down in torrents, uprooting bushes and dragging debris. Their haven was transformed into a raging flood, their sleeping caves swamped. For half a mile out to sea there was a muddy plume, where sand and sediment had been washed into the ocean. That, combined with worrying developments in the nearby Senussi settlement, convinced Langton that they had to leave.
Two of the Senussi had been arrested and were being held prisoner. The villagers feared that the Italians had somehow got wind of the British escapees. They informed Langton that, regretfully, they could no longer provide food. With their very presence in the wadi endangering their Senussi protectors, Langton made the difficult decision to press on. They could not attempt to cross over two hundred miles of open desert without a supply of food and replacement boots, so Langton and the Senussi villagers cut a deal. If the Senussi could provide new boots and supplies, Langton and his party would set out for the Allied lines in five days’ time, so ridding the area of their presence.
The escapees began their preparations for the long march, Langton feeling ‘most eager to get cracking’. They busied themselves with stockpiling food, gathering anything that could be used to carry water, and walking barefoot over the rough ground to toughen the soles of their feet. Happily, Hillman’s injured foot was largely healed. Langton felt huge admiration for the young Austrian, declaring that his courage, endurance and cheerfulness ‘was a great example to the rest of us’.
They had set the date of their departure for 20 October 1942. But the very day before, the Leslie twins were struck down with dysentery. Their condition rapidly worsened, until there was no option but for the two men to follow Evans to the road, to give themselves up. After a great deal of indecision, Rowat also decided not to join the escapees on their coming journey. He ‘thought little of [their] chances of getting through’, and did all he could to persuade Langton to stay. Langton was saddened to part from Rowat, for he had proven to be a good friend and great company. Evidently, Rowat felt similarly, doing his best to hide the ‘tears of grief streaming down his face’ at their parting.
That evening Langton made one final visit to the village above the wadi, having got Hillman to translate a short speech into Arabic and write it out for him phonetically. To the ‘amused delight and with loud encouragement’ from the assembled villagers he stumbled through the words, thanking them for all they had done and promising that if he reached safety, he would ‘see they were well rewarded’.
As they were readying themselves to leave, fate smiled upon Langton and his party one last time. Rowat appeared from the top of the wadi, with a dead goat slung over his shoulders. It had been killed the night before, most likely by a jackal. Langton decided to delay their departure, so the goat could be properly prepared. Having made a meal of the roasted offal, they boiled the flesh in saltwater to preserve it as provisions for the journey.
With the salted goat meat added to their rations, Langton eyed his much-depleted party. From the group of nine who had come together at the Wadi Kattara weeks earlier, only four remained. There was Private Walter, the Commando mechanic who’d tried to help Langton start the beached MTB; Corporal Wilson, the only soldier not affiliated with Special Forces, but who had survived thus far, proving himself not quite as ‘ineffectual’ as Langton had first feared; Private Hillman, the Arabic-speaking Austrian-Jewish member of the SIG, a man who had already displayed ‘the greatest calmness and courage’ in the face of the enemy; plus Langton himself.
Though the way ahead promised to be gruelling in the extreme, three of the four had already spent weeks traversing many hundreds of miles of desert, on the long journey from Cairo to Tobruk. They knew from first-hand experience how veteran members of the LRDG and the SAS not only survived in those sun-blasted wastelands, but thrived there, pursuing a cutthroat campaign against the enemy and striking where they were least expected. Their exploits alone proved that what lay ahead had to be possible.
At nightfall on 26 October – fully six weeks after their ill-fated raid on Tobruk – the four men set out on what the SBS’s war diary would later refer to as ‘Langton’s and Walter’s epic march’. They moved south, navigating by the stars and with the help of a compass that Hillman had managed to keep safe thus far. They were only about twenty miles west of the border with Egypt, but the frontier was said to be formidable, bristling with coils of vicious barbed wire. Their objective was to reach the railway line that crossed the border. Once they found the train-tracks they would follow them to the wire, for if a train could pass through, Langton felt convinced they could too.
Having something ‘to occupy our minds, and a goal to work for’ cheered everyone up mightily, Langton observed. They crossed the coast road and skirted around the city of Bardia, Langton finding the flat desert beyond offering far easier going than the steep wadis of the coast. They made good time and, after spending the first day lying up in a burnt-out armoured car, they reached the railway line the next evening. Then they began to trace the tracks directly east towards the border.
But as they pushed on through the darkness, they ‘bumped into a camp and were fired on’, which triggered a number of other positions to open fire. Backing away from the railway line, they doubled back around the enemy encampments – a trick they had perfected when dodging Italian positions earlier in their journey. Creeping ahead through sand dunes, they finally reached the border, which consisted of ‘coils of barbed wire piled into a pyramid’, Langton noted, disappearing into the darkness to left and right.
He crawled forward to take a better look. At close quarters it seemed ‘formidable indeed’, the tangled strands of wire being almost too thick to see through, let alone prise a way past. Pulse quickening, he inched along the perimeter, searching for any kind of a gap. After some time, he came to a patch where the wire seemed to have been pulled apart and he figured it would be possible, ‘given time and patience’, to wriggle through.
Lying as flat as possible, Langton took hold of the nearest coil and shook it vigorously. The fence rang as the movement reverberated down its length, but it provoked no other reaction. Convinced there were no enemy in the immediate vicinity, Langton gestured to the others. Though fearful of discovery at any moment, especially as their every move sent ‘jangling messages down the wires’, eventually they all made it through – clothes shredded and skin torn, but without any serious injuries.
Elated to be out of Libya, the four escapees made their way to an abandoned truck to rest. Though they had made it across the border, there were still well over two hundred miles to El Alamein, the last known location of Allied forces. Somewhere ahead in the vast desert, General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army was even then engaged in an epic struggle with Rommel’s Panzerwaffe, in the
Second Battle of El Alamein. It would leave 13,800 dead, 24,000 wounded and decide the fate of the war in North Africa, though Langton and his three fellows knew nothing about it at the time.
Langton’s diary entries in his notebook grew sparse now. He had saved a page torn from a contemporary textbook, with its poetic description of the terrain thereabouts. It read: ‘The stony desert, waterless, barren or rocky land, interspersed with patches of sand and a few stunted camelthorn bushes.’ Faced with such a wilderness, Langton and his men made the decision to press south, making for the Qattara Depression, a notoriously treacherous expanse of low-lying cliffs, salt pans and sand dunes covering over 7,500 square miles. Though the Qattara Depression was considered to be impassable by most, Langton knew the SAS and LRDG operated there.
In order to get behind Rommel’s lines, the SAS and LRDG ‘simply went through the No Man’s Land of the Qattara Depression’, as David Stirling recorded in one of the war diaries from the time. Langton and his fellow escapees hoped to stumble upon one of those patrols, which would spell rescue. Adopting the desert raider’s preferred means of navigation, known as ‘dead reckoning’, Langton used Hillman’s compass and ‘a small German map’ to keep a rough track of where they were, though the map, at 1:5,000,000 scale, gave too little detail to get any real sense of their exact location.
Like this, they walked for eleven days, heading further and further towards the furnace of the Qattara Depression. Finally, they stumbled across what they assumed to be the Siwa Track, one of the main routes via which the SAS and LRDG navigated the supposedly impossible terrain that lay ahead. They took it, heading south-east. Sometime later Langton reported seeing in the distance a convoy that appeared very much like an SAS patrol. But just as quickly as the jeeps had appeared, they vanished into the haze of heat and dust. Later, David Stirling would largely confirm Langton’s suspicion that this had been one of his units on the move.
Langton, Walter, Wilson and Hillman had come so very close to being rescued by the SAS, but now they had to push onwards unaided, or perish. Their route skirted the area that General Rommel had nicknamed the ‘Devil’s Garden’, lying immediately west of El Alamein. This vast swathe of desert was peppered with minefields and barbed wire, where the Afrika Korps had dug in their defences. Langton’s party stumbled ever onwards, the scars of war all around them – yet it remained eerily, spookily quiet. Other than sighting those distant jeeps, they saw no further sign of any human presence.
‘We did not see anyone from the day after we climbed through the frontier wire,’ Langton noted. They ‘picked up odd tins of bully beef and mouldy biscuits off the ground’ – rations discarded by those who had fought across this cursed land. They were able to fill their water bottles, ‘twice from rainwater pools and once from the radiator of a [wrecked] German tracked troop carrier’, and as a result ‘weren’t in bad shape for water’. They ‘reached the Depression, climbing down into it one evening’, continuing eastwards along its treacherous, sunken floor.
By luck, taking a route through the Qattara Depression meant they missed the big retreat, for close by in the desert Rommel’s forces – badly mauled by Montgomery’s Eighth Army in the Second Battle of El Alamein – were making a hasty withdrawal. As the four escapees picked their way through the alien-seeming terrain, so the Afrika Korps were falling back through the Devil’s Garden directly to the north of where they were now.
Langton’s diary notes reflected the tortures of their journey: ‘Thirst. Water (Petrol. Rat. Salt. Sand.) . . . Gradual change from physical to mental deterioration. Mental strain . . . But our amazing luck relieves . . . Our feast in the tank.’ Before long, his scribbles – like their water supply – dried up completely. He, Walter, Wilson and Hillman grew increasingly disorientated, as they wandered this wasteland twisted by heat and warped by shimmering mirages, propelled onwards by sheer force of character and an iron inner will, in what had become a Herculean effort of stamina and endurance.
After an epic twenty-six-day march, the four exhausted, skeletal figures reached Mount Himeimat – a highpoint on the landscape, where distinctive-looking rocks rise from the desert, sculpted over millennia by the bombardment of wind, salt and sand. They arrived there in darkness, and at dawn they spied some distant trucks. Langton forced himself to go on ahead, approaching one of the vehicles, whereupon he was greeted with a friendly wave. It was Friday 13 November 1942, and this turned out to be one of the Eighth Army’s frontline positions.
The four escapees rejoined Allied forces exactly two months after the Tobruk raid, having covered over three hundred miles of some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world. Langton was awarded a Military Cross for his superhuman efforts, both during the invasion of Tobruk and during his subsequent escape. His citation, written by the SAS’s founder, David Stirling, stated simply: ‘Lieut.Langton showed great courage and initiative during the raid itself, while his resource and leadership were chiefly responsible for bringing a party on foot through 350 miles of enemy territory to safety.’
After a short period of rest and recuperation, Langton rejoined the SAS and became commander of the HQ Squadron, where he served throughout the D-Day landings and until war’s end. His wartime exploits are perhaps best summed up by his Jesus College Boat Club History entry: ‘T. B. Langton, twice Head of the River, twice a rowing blue and President of the CUBC, was the hero of an epic escape across the African Desert to Alamein.’
Hillman was also awarded a Military Cross for his part in the Tobruk raid and subsequent escape. In his MC citation, penned by Langton, he was listed simply as a member of the SAS. The citation ends with a telling note: ‘No details of the above operation may be published owing to their secrecy and the fact that Pte Hillman was dressed in German uniform.’ Hillman went on to have a long and distinguished career with the SAS, winning a Military Medal on future operations behind enemy lines.
Five days after Langton and Hillman’s return to Allied lines, Lieutenant David Russell – second-in-command of the SIG – also stumbled out of the desert, after his own incredible escape. He too was recommended for an immediate Military Cross, the citation stressing how his ‘escape was eventually carried out in the face of enemy opposition and under extreme hardship’, in ‘circumstances of extreme danger and difficulty’.
The commander of the SIG, Captain Herbert Buck, though wounded in the Tobruk raid, had attempted to steal a vehicle and bluff his way out again, along with others of the raiding party. Captured after days on the run, Buck was sent to POW camps in Italy, where, typically, he became a serial escapee. Despatched to a high-security camp in Germany, Buck established a fencing club and ran Highland dancing classes, before being freed upon the camp’s liberation by Allied forces. Returning to Britain, Buck was slated for SAS operations in the Far East but was tragically killed when a Liberator aircraft carrying him crashed shortly after take-off from Britain.
At the end of the war Langton and Evans – the dysentery-ridden escapee they had been forced to leave at the roadside – were reunited, when Evans returned to England, his health fully restored, despite the long months spent in POW camps. Lieutenant Barlow – the artillery officer they had lost contact with, while slipping out of the Tobruk defences – was sadly never found and presumed killed in action at Tobruk.
During Langton and party’s extraordinary escape march, the tide had turned in the battle for North Africa, and perhaps the wider war. After Rommel’s defeat by the Eighth Army at El Alamein, Winston Churchill would remark: ‘Before Alamein we never had victory. After Alamein we never had defeat.’ As the fighting across Egypt, Libya and Tunisia ended, the SAS’s unique abilities, forged in the fires of the Sahara, evolved to suit new theatres of war. The conflict in Europe brought with it fresh challenges, but whenever and wherever the men of the SAS found themselves captured, the burning desire to escape was always at the forefront of their minds.
First and foremost this would be in the
soft underbelly of Europe, as Churchill famously christened it – Italy.
Great Escape Five
Unbreakable
To any casual observer, John Edward ‘Jim’ Almonds appeared like any typical Italian local, with his dark hair and deep brown eyes. Dressed in borrowed black jacket and khaki trousers, he carried himself a little awkwardly as he moved around the streets of Porto San Giorgio, a small town situated on Italy’s east coast. Look again, and the clothes were a little too short for his six-foot-three frame. For Almonds it was a challenge to make the ill-fitting garments seem as if they really were his clothes.
It was vital that he appear to be just another local labourer going about his business. In reality, of course, he was anything but. In truth, Almonds was a twenty-nine-year-old SAS veteran undertaking a highly sensitive reconnaissance mission. A former sergeant in the Coldstream Guards, he had been recruited as one of the earliest members of the SAS, arriving at their training ground in Kabrit, alongside Private Jack Byrne and others of the ‘Originals’. Almonds had since proved his mettle on many a raid, earning a towering reputation and winning a Military Medal in the process.
David Stirling himself would remark to Almonds’ daughter, Lorna Almonds-Windmill, years after the war, that her father had been among the fittest and most self-disciplined men he had ever met. The ruse that Almonds was presently employing was not at the behest of Stirling, nor any Allied commander. On the contrary, he was quartering the streets of Porto San Giorgio on the orders of Italian Army Colonel Vincenzo Cione, commander of a nearby Prigione di Guerra (PG) or POW camp.
Almonds had been a prisoner of Axis powers for just a few days shy of a year now. Officially, it was Colonel Cione’s job to keep Almonds and his ilk securely locked up in conditions that were little short of hellish. Unofficially, Italy was about to announce the signing of an armistice with the Allies, which meant that former friends – the Germans and Italians – were about to become enemies, and former enemies – the British and Italians – were poised to become friends.