WWII’S GREATEST ESCAPE FROM THE GREATEST RAID OF ALL
On paper, they didn’t stand a chance. One hundred raiders, only 20 of whom were official Allied troops, were to assault a supposedly impregnable German Army headquarters, deep behind enemy lines. Several hundred soldiers armed with MG 42 Spandau machine guns (nicknamed Hitler’s Buzzsaw due its fearsome noise), anti-aircraft weaponry and armour defended the HQ, against which the raiders could muster only the arms they could carry on their person, the heaviest being an American-made M1 bazooka. It had the feel of a suicide mission, even if few had ever put that into words.
Their commander on the SAS side, Major Roy Farran DSO, MC and two bars had made it crystal clear in his briefings – no prisoners were to be taken. They were to target senior German officers, to “cut the head off the Nazi snake”. His oppo in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) – Churchill’s so-called Ministry for Ungentlemanly Warfare – Captain Mike Lees, was equally blunt. The two fortress-like buildings housing the headquarters, Villa Calvi and Villa Rossi, were to be left blasted, gutted ruins.
It was the winter of ’44/45, and Italy had proven far from being the “soft underbelly of Europe” that all had intended. The Allied advance had stalled on the Gothic Line, a string of machine-gun posts, concrete bunkers, tunnels, heavy guns, razor wire and minefields stretching across northern Italy’s mountains. Manned by the 1st and 4th Parachute Divisions, arguably some of the finest in the Reich, plus two Panzer Grenadier (mechanised infantry) divisions, it was a fearsome barrier.
All of Italy south of there had been seized, but territory to the north remained in German hands, excepting pockets of remote, mountainous terrain held by the Italian partisans. If was from one of those that Farran and Lees had mounted their mission, leading their motley band – mixing Italian Resistance fighters with escaped Russian POWs, a handful of former French Foreign Legion veterans, plus a smattering of German deserters.
At the tip of the spear were Farran and his 20 men from
