Behind Enemy Lines

By James Dean Sanderson

Terror, Torture, Death…It was kill first or be killed for these men who fought their own private hit-and-run war.

True accounts of World War II heroic secret raiders whose daring missions behind enemy lines changed the course of the war. Ten accounts of high courage and dedication—stories of the suicidal missions of the World War II.

““Courage knows no nationality"—and it might be added—bounds—which a collection of now-it-can-be-told tales attempts to prove. Mr. Sanderson's stories focus on surpassing daring, audacity and cunning—to match any act of heroism on the field of battle. Usually these intrepid escapades were the work of one ingenious planner; sometimes, however, whole crews engaged in death-defying sorties. The writing catches the spirit of these men with realism and drama, whether the story deals with an incredible plot to kill Rommel (which didn't come off); the disposal of an embryonic Nazi A bomb in Norway in 1943; a "cockleshell" raid along a Nazi-held river; or the grim humor of Britain's only private, "independent" army—Popski's Army, fighting alongside the Tommies in Tunisia.... Good cloak-and-dagger stuff that points up the fact that even the Armed Services had great need of wildly imaginative non-conformists.... For the boys—or men—who are commandos in spirit.”-Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Release date: Jul 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781786259226

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Text originally published in 1959 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

BEHIND ENEMY LINES

BY

JAMES DEAN SANDERSON

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

1—The Raid to Kill Rommel 4

2—Human Torpedo. 14

3—...And the Walls Came Crashing Down 32

4—War in a Canoe 47

5—The Man Who Shot General Student 60

6—The Greatest Ace of All Time 72

7—The A-Bomb That Never Was 88

8—Wild Man in the Philippines 101

9—The Midget of Singapore Bay 113

10—Popski’s Private Army 124

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 164

1—The Raid to Kill Rommel

Geoffrey Keyes knew that he was taking a long chance. As a lieutenant colonel in the Commandos, Keyes was well aware of the danger of jamming a sub-machinegun into a sentry’s stomach. But the door had to be forced, and nine out of ten men freeze in surprised terror when the barrel of a gun pokes cold and hard into them.

Nine out of ten, but Keyes had no luck that night.

The German sentry grunted and swung his arm in a reflex action. He caught the short muzzle by the tip and yanked it past him in a single stroke. And hung on. Body to body, he and Keyes grappled for the gun in the doorway. A torrential North African rain thundered down as a backdrop.

It was a ludicrous situation, says Captain Robin Campbell, who stood helplessly just behind Keyes. "They strained and heaved like wrestlers for about ten frantic seconds. The German fought for his life; Keyes struggled desperately to get rid of the man without rousing the whole headquarters.

Before I could move around Keyes the sentry had pulled him back against the wall, still holding the gun, and with his either side protected by the doors at the entrance. I thought we had better get on with our job.

Campbell jerked out his Colt 45. He leaned over the dripping, struggling Keyes and shot the German through the left eye.

The roar of the Colt echoed and re-echoed down the long dim corridor. The German’s steel helmet clanged as his head hit the stone floor. And Keyes, freed of the quickest-thinking sentry he had ever encountered, raced down the long hallway—with Campbell just behind. There was no question now of silent guile. The raid against Rommel was on. It was kill or be killed first, and if the sentry’s holding action had prevented them from finding the general...well, there was no time to think of that now.

The raiders on Rommel did kill. They jerked or kicked open door after door, spraying the occupants of the room with bullets and tossing in short-fused grenades. In all they killed some thirty Afrika Korps officers and men, several of them key planners on Rommel’s staff.

But they failed to get Panzer General Erwin Rommel.

And, in turn, the raiders themselves were killed. Nearly all of them. Keyes, leader and originator of the operation, was spun around by a burst from a machine-pistol when he threw open a final door at the end of the corridor for the grenade-tossing Campbell. The grenade exploded, silencing the occupants of the room, and Campbell bent over the crumpled Keyes for an instant.

Keyes’ face was a mass of blood. Get Rommel, he breathed, and closed his eyes. Campbell straightened and raced for the stairs, hoping to do just that.

* * *

It is an accepted irony of war that blood and extreme bravery are often expended uselessly.

Rommel at this moment sat comfortably in Rome, his wife at his side, raising a glass of champagne at a birthday party in his honor. A thousand miles away men sought him, and died, in one of the most audacious single actions of the war.

Who planned the midnight stalking of an enemy general five hundred miles behind the lines? What kind of man carried out this sardonic birthday-party attempt to shatter the Rommel myth of invincibility, a mission his superior officer told him plainly was sheer suicide? Who was the man praised in death by the King himself for his fearless daring, and why did he insist that stormy night on personally pulling open the doors which might put him face to face with the dominating human factor in the North African War?

Geoffrey Charles Tasker Keyes was a major at twenty-three and four months later a lieutenant colonel, and yet he hated war. As a youth he was shy and introverted, with intellectual pretensions, and yet at Eton he took up boxing and jujitsu. He swore he would never enter military service and yet he went to Sandhurst, which graduated him a subaltern in the Royal Scots Greys, fourth in his class of two hundred.

The trouble with Geoffrey Keyes was his ancestors. A Keyes had defended England and her empire in every generation since the Spanish Armada of 1588. Keyes’ own father was a hero of World War I’s Battle of Jutland, and as a boy Geoffrey had cruised on the admiral’s yacht in the Mediterranean.

He couldn’t forget the family tradition, and neither could his superior officers, who pushed him ahead of other junior officers despite his shyness with troops and an entirely unprepossessing military appearance (including a near-sighted squint caused by an early bout of scarlet fever, a round moon face and a tiny, affected moustache).

Keyes got into the Commandos because his father, a personal friend of Churchill’s, had helped organize them. That, at least, was the general feeling in the officers’ mass of No. 11 Scottish Commando and in the ranks. Keyes, despite the tradition of his name, was looked on as a bit too delicate and dull for rough-riding No. 11.

June 8, 1941, changed that. German airborne troops were reported landing in Syria with Vichy French connivance and the Allied High Command moved fast to forestall a coup. The highly underrated French, however, resisted savagely and repulsed the Australians on the frontier Litani River after a bloody assault which cost the Aussies twenty-five percent casualties.

The next morning the Royal Navy landed No. 11 Commando at 4 a.m. with orders to seize a bridgehead on the north bank. Heavy fire forced the Navy to land No. 11 on the south bank. The Commandos borrowed two four-man rubber rafts from the Australians and started across. A direct hit from a French 75 wiped out one raft, making Keyes CO of the assault.

Four times Keyes personally paddled the raft furiously across the river under fire from machineguns, mortars and the 75s. Finally, with eighteen men and two other officers across, he stormed and captured a fortified redoubt, turned its guns on another battery commanding the crossing and knocked it out. Then the Commandos proceeded to mop up the machinegun nests and the mortar squads. They held the beachhead against French counterattacks until the next day when the Australians swept across into Syria.

Keyes deserved—and got—the Military Cross and the respect of his men for that.

A tough trooper in No. 11 named David S. Brodie recalls: On parade he was a stickler for discipline and polish, and at first we figured he was like many more, just getting along on his famous father’s reputation. However after Litani every man in the unit would have followed him to hell and back. I was with him and can honestly say he did not know the meaning of fear.

It might have been enough for an ordinary man. But there was something more in Keyes, something that demanded that he go on. These were the days of the growing Rommel legend. In February 1941 Britain’s Army of the Nile had advanced five hundred miles in two months against the Italians, capturing one hundred thirty thousand prisoners, four hundred tanks and twelve hundred guns at a mere cost of two thousand casualties. Britain had stood flushed with victory beyond Benghazi, apparently ready to plunge another five hundred miles forward into Tripoli.

The Army of the Nile had only waited to regroup and resupply and there had been small worry when toward the end of February a few German troops had been landed in the Gulf of Tripoli. There was not much more concern with the news that General Erwin Rommel had arrived and assumed command, in effect, of Axis forces. Who was he but another panzer division commander? He had fought in France, but here in Africa he faced a battle-tried and victorious army. He would find things different here.

But by March 31, Rommel had unleashed a series of dazzling thrusts and end runs that put him five hundred miles east, well inside the Egyptian border, and he easily brushed off Wavell’s weak counterattacks in the next few months while he organized supply and built up reserves. Rommel did these things with one German motorized division and a panzer regiment, plus the same Italians so easily beaten two months earlier.

Thus the Rommel legend grew, even among the British. And thus Keyes began to think about Rommel. If one man was responsible for all this, why not eliminate him—and do it just at the moment when Empire forces were ready to strike a crushing blow? Perhaps in the resulting confusion Africa could be cleared of the Axis once and for all time.

At Cairo, Keyes buttonholed everyone in Army of the Nile Headquarters. They promoted him to lieutenant colonel but they only listened to his plan with one ear. For one thing, it wasn’t honorable. One didn’t just go about shooting down enemy generals in their own headquarters far behind the lines in the dead of night. But it wasn’t very honorable, either, to creep up behind an unsuspecting sentry and cut his throat or garrote him, Keyes answered, although the Commandos had been trained to do just that—and did it at fairly regular intervals.

In modern war battle lines are flexible, Keyes argued, and if the British were prepared to face the fact that sometime, some place the Germans might try to kill their generals, then there was no reason why Rommel—the most important single enemy soldier in Africa—should not be shot when and where he could be found.

Slowly the impersonal logic of Keyes’ position began to sink in, and after months of pleading he won a grudging go-ahead. The assassination of Rommel as a man and legend would take place at midnight November 17. The offensive would begin at dawn six hours later.

Keyes was jubilant, recalls Colonel (now Major-General) Robert Laycock, at that time chief of all Commando operations in the Mediterranean. "But I gave it as my considered opinion that the chances of being evacuated after the operation were very slender. The attack on Rommel’s house, even if successful, meant almost certain death for those who took part in it.

I made these comments, Laycock says, in the presence of Keyes, who begged me not to repeat them lest the operation be cancelled.

Keyes’ enthusiasm was so contagious that Laycock finally broke down and joined the active planning of the raid. In the end he went along to handle the tricky landing and pickup from the submarines along an enemy coast, a technique in which he was particularly skilled.

The two analyzed every bit of intelligence information available and even sent a special agent, an Arabic-speaking British captain, to scout the area several months ahead of time. His report: the staff headquarters at Beda Littoria. First building on the right as you enter the village from Cyrene is a grain silo, then a row of bungalows, then back from the road among cypresses is a large two-story building, dark and gloomy outside. That’s it.

This was where Geoffrey Keyes would kill Erwin Rommel and as many of his staff as possible, spreading panic and dismay among Axis forces in Africa as the Allies unrolled their new and climactic offensive.

It was a nice theory, but terribly wrong. Even if Rommel had not been in Rome, Keyes would likely not have found him in the gloomy mansion at Beda Littoria which served as supply headquarters. The general sometimes conferred with his staff here but his own personal HQ had been moved to a cave a few miles outside town. The cave was never discovered by British Intelligence.

The Germans’ own spies were better: Rommel knew, for example, that British Empire forces would launch an offensive sometime between the 15th and 25th of November. (A Nazi agent disguised as a nursing sister had overheard a chance remark of an Army of the Nile headquarters clerk hospitalized in Jerusalem, according to Rommel’s son Manfred, editor of the general’s papers.)

This is one reason why the leader of the Afrika Korps flew to Rome. He wanted permission from Colonel General Alfred Jodl to crush an irritating Australian division still holding out far in his rear in by-passed Tobruk. This would release four Italian divisions and three battalions of the German Fifth Light (Motorized) Division to meet the expected attack. The birthday party was his wife’s idea. It was one of the very few times Rommel permitted himself to relax completely from the cares of his campaigns.

Thus the empty stage was set at Beda Littoria, a stage on which a drama of futility, daring and death was to be enacted by Geoffrey Keyes and his Commandos.

At 4 p.m. Nov. 10, 1941, they filed down the mole at Alexandria harbor and clambered through the conning tower of the submarine Torbay. Besides Keyes, Colonel Laycock and Captain Campbell there were twenty-five men. A second submarine, the Talisman, carried Lieutenant Guy Cook and twenty-seven more men.

Of the group only Campbell was not a Commando, and in the end he probably paid for this fact with the loss of a leg when he forgot one of Keyes’ orders at the mansion. Campbell, a close friend of Keyes, was attached to GHQ in Cairo and had pestered Keyes for weeks to take him along, until he finally got his way.

Once at sea there was much speculation among the Commandos as to their destination. Trooper Brodie, aboard the Torbay, recalls that we finally agreed that the job was to be on Crete or Rhodes in the eastern Mediterranean.

After two days at sea Keyes read the orders to the men. We were amazed and not a little shocked when he told us our objective was General Rommel’s house, with instructions to get Rommel himself, Brodie says.

On the morning of the thirteenth the Torbay cautiously upped periscope at the appointed landing place, a small inlet in the Cyrenaica coast. Laycock, however, was suspicious of Arab flocks and their herders in the distant hills above the bay, and the two subs moved submerged out to sea.

They tried again the next morning, Laycock satisfying himself that the cove was deserted. Due to a rising sea, however, the submarine commander advised against a landing that night; but a further delay would have jeopardized the whole raid. With heavy swells rolling in and no moon, the sub surfaced just after dark in the small inlet. As predicted, the storm blew up rapidly. By the time the fourteen two-man dinghies were brought on deck and inflated the sea was washing over the submarine. Suddenly a big gust of wind blew four dinghies off the sub, taking Spike Hughes with them, Brodie says. "The sea was so rough that we gave up hope of seeing him again; however, he appeared none the worse after twenty minutes or so, paddling his own dinghy and towing another which he had managed to rescue.

With the submarine’s crew we battled the storm all night; in the early hours of the morning I finally got off in boat No. 13, having capsized five times. The Torbay landed twenty-six men out of twenty-eight; one man was hurt trying to disembark and the other lost his nerve and refused to climb into the boat in that sea.

About 2 a.m. the Talisman was signaled to come in, but when she reached landing position the gale had grown even worse. Laycock nevertheless paddled out to her, bobbing like a balsa cork in a maelstrom. Every attempt to disembark from the Talisman resulted in an upset; in all only Lieutenant Cook and five men got ashore. Laycock himself was thrown into the water, after deciding that the Talisman would have to try again the next night, and reached shore only after a difficult swim.

It was the beginning of the bad luck.

The cold and gray morning of the fifteenth dawned and the Commandos took stock. With fewer men than planned, changes had to be made. Laycock would stay at the beachhead with five men, most of the supplies and ammunition, and wait for the Talisman that night. Cook would take six men, cut telephone and telegraph wires at a crossroads south of Cyrene and blow up a communications center at the edge of town.

This left Keyes and Campbell with seventeen men to make the actual raid against Rommel. It meant less security during the twenty-three-mile night approach and withdrawal but would not affect the actual attack; it had already been decided that only four men would enter the building, for fear of getting in each other’s way.

The four: Keyes, Campbell, Brodie, and a tough, cool little Yorkshire sergeant named John Terry, like Brodie an artist with a Sten gun.

I spent the day with Keyes going over and over the plans, Laycock says. I begged him several times to let someone else lead the point of the raid inside the headquarters. I tried to show him that he was much too valuable to the Commandos to be lost in what was essentially a gunman’s job. Keyes, of course, refused.

Two Arab guides hired by the advance agent appeared during the day, and at 8 p.m. that night the two parties moved out. The narrative of the main raid is picked up here by Campbell:

The rain had stopped but low clouds completely obscured the moon and we stumbled and cursed our way through the bush. About 10 p.m. the Arab guide disappeared and we had a moment of panic that we were about to be ambushed. Keyes, however, was cool and cheerful. He scouted the trail ahead himself and then led us off, using only a vague Italian map and a compass. About 1 a.m. we came on a small hill grove of scrub and decided to camp for the day.

A steady drizzle began but some of the men managed to fall asleep. Shortly after dawn of the sixteenth, however, a lookout gave the alarm. With long practice the Commandos snapped into a defense perimeter. From behind every bush they found themselves looking down the barrels of short Italian rifles.

We were surrounded by as rascally a crew of Arabs as I’ve ever seen, Campbell says. The chief was blind in one eye and had a red cloth wound around his head at a raffish ‘angle. If they hadn’t been so dirty they might have been picturesque.

Keyes was equal to the situation. He waved a document and induced a truce parley. The document was a command from the head of the Senussi Arab tribe (now King Sayed Idris I of Libya) to give all aid and comfort to the English, allies in the Senussis’ twenty-year battle against the Italian oppressors.

But the chief’s one good eye never had been able to read, and none of his band could do better with two.

Persuasion and glittering promises of gold finally won the day for Keyes. The Arabs agreed to cooperate. They led the Commandos to a nearby cave and even furnished a roast kid for supper. Still afraid of treachery, however, Keyes led his men out of the cave just before dawn of the seventeenth. The raid was scheduled for midnight and there was still some distance to go. Keyes decided that jumping-off time would be just after darkness at 6 p.m. All equipment except weapons and ammunition would be left in the cave with one man to guard them.

The raiders moved out at 6:15 p.m. in a bitter thunderstorm. That night we had the worst lightning and rainstorm I have ever seen, Brodie says. It was so dark that each man had to grasp the bayonet scabbard of the man in front of him to keep the party intact. When one man fell, all fell. With two Arabs in the lead, they slid and scrambled inland for four hours.

At 10:30 p.m. they reached the bottom of an escarpment and rested briefly in the mud. At 11 p.m. the Arab guides pointed out a track which they said led to the rear of Rommel’s house. The guides then disappeared. Lieutenant Cook and his little party left for Cyrene crossroads to blow up lines of communication.

Colonel Keyes then set out alone to reconnoiter the house, Brodie says. When he returned Sergeant Bruce and three men were dispatched to immobilize all vehicles in the car park. The method was simply to put a time pencil, in each petrol tank, which would explode sometime after zero hour. Bruce told me afterwards that they found the enemy guard tent with all the occupants asleep, so (the guards) shared a hand grenade among them.

At 11:30, after an extremely cautious approach, the Commandos reached headquarters outbuildings. Keyes and Terry set off to reconnoiter but had hardly gone a dozen yards before a dog began to yap and growl.

An Italian soldier and an Arab stepped out of a small guard hut. The Italian began to search the area with a flashlight. Keyes, hiding behind a bush, cursed at him in German and, in broken Italian, promised to shoot him if the Italian swinehound dared question a German patrol. Heeding these very SS sounds, the Arab and the Italian immediately returned to their guard hut and went inside.

Keyes and Terry continued their patrol. At 11:45 they were back with bad news: the back door to Rommel’s mansion was barred tight, and there was no apparent way to get in the windows. Keyes grinned slightly.

We shall have to pay the general a formal call, he said. Front door.

There was nothing more to be said, and so at 11:55 the raiders took their posts. Two men to destroy the electric plant; four to guard the garden and car park to prevent any reinforcements after the action had begun; two to handle the sentry hut; two outside the nearby hotel to keep anybody from leaving; two to guard the gate and path up to the front door; two for the rear of the house.

Brodie says: The colonel stationed Joe Kearney and Spike Hughes at the rear door with orders to shoot on sight anyone who came out that way without giving the password, which was ‘Lamlash’ (for a Commando training ground).

At 11:59 p.m. Keyes, Campbell, Terry, and Brodie, in that order, walked up to the front door of the mansion to kill Rommel.

Keyes stepped to the door and tried the knob. It didn’t open. He turned and made a droll, Italian kind of shrug. Then he began to hammer on the door and bawl in German for someone to open. It was raining hard and the people inside may not have heard him. He shouted louder and for good measure began to kick at the door.

But still no one came.

It was a terrible feeling, standing there uselessly in the rain, Campbell says. Finally Keyes began to laugh and the irony of it hit me too. Here we’d come all this way, at so much trouble and peril, and we couldn’t even get into the house.

Keyes stopped laughing in an instant, however, as a chain rattled behind the door. The door was jerked open.

Keyes leaped into the door frame with a barked command in German. The sentry was a powerful man in helmet and boots, Campbell remembers, "and he never seemed to hesitate a second. He had the barrel of the gun past him and was grappling with Keyes. I thought Geoffrey might