Authors: Ben Macintyre
Tags: #World War II, #History, #True Crime, #Espionage, #Europe, #Military, #Great Britain
The route to the forward positions of the First Army at Gafsa required a wide sweep south of Tripoli, through some of the harshest terrain encountered so far. Where the sands of the Great Sand Sea had taken the form of mighty ocean rollers, here the rutted desert waves were “short and choppy like a rough Mediterranean sea.” As the convoy made its juddering way northwest, often reduced to driving at no more than one mile an hour, word came over the radio that Tripoli had fallen to the Eighth Army. As the convoy neared the Gabès Gap, the going became ever harder, with boggy marshes and furrowed dunes alternating with steep, boulder-filled ravines. At dusk on January 22, two German reconnaissance planes buzzed overhead. Stirling pressed on; in the early hours of the morning, they reached the tarmac road and passed through the gap “absolutely on tiptoe,” as Stirling put it. A mile or so farther on, a German armored division was encamped by the roadside, and in the process of waking up. “We’re going to bluff it,” Stirling told Cooper. “Just look straight ahead.” As they passed a group of German soldiers drinking coffee in the morning sun, Cooper gave a friendly nod: “Nobody challenged us…Nobody shot us. Nobody did anything.” They now needed to get away from the coast road as quickly as possible, and find somewhere to hide for the day. Sadler headed for the foothills of the Jebel Tebaga, only to cross another dirt road that was not marked on his map. They turned into open country. A little farther on, Stirling spotted a long, narrow ravine dotted with bushes that “seemed to offer perfect cover.” The troop was exhausted after more than thirty-six hours without rest, food, or sleep. The jeeps were hurriedly camouflaged, and the men settled down to sleep, spreading out in the nooks and corners up and down the gully, many too tired even to remove their boots. Before turning in, Cooper and Sadler climbed to the lip of the ravine to survey the road. Through binoculars, they saw a column of troops halt and climb down from their vehicles. “We assumed they were all getting out just to pee,” Sadler later recalled.
Mike Sadler was woken by the crunch of boots on stones, and opened his eyes to see a pair of German paratroopers standing over him pointing Schmeisser submachine guns. Cooper, who had been asleep alongside Sadler, began to extricate himself from his sleeping bag and struggle to his feet. “Down!” ordered one of the Germans. Cooper and Sadler lay still. Their guns were thirty feet away, hidden in the camouflaged jeeps. The two paratroopers indicated that Sadler and Cooper should stay where they were, and dashed off down the ravine to help round up the rest of the British party. Cooper and Sadler did not need to formulate a plan: “The only thing to do was to leg it.” The moment the Germans were out of sight, they started running up the steep side of the ravine. Moments later, they were joined by the Frenchman, Freddie Taxis. All three sprinted for the lip of the gully. Behind them they heard gunfire, and cries of
“Raus! Raus!”
(Out! Out!)
Stirling and the rest of the troop were captured without a fight. A tubby, red-faced German officer (who, to Stirling’s indignation, turned out to be the unit dentist) pointed a Luger at the SAS leader and marched him out of the ravine. At the top, a grim sight awaited: a force of some five hundred German soldiers with guns trained, and an armored personnel carrier blocking the exit from the wadi. The captors were a special Luftwaffe paratroop force, Company z.b.V. 250, sent out to track down the raiders and alerted to the presence of the SAS following a skirmish with Jordan’s troops the day before (the French party was captured a few days later). The eleven prisoners were searched, marched to the roadside, and then herded onto lorries under heavy guard as the sun was setting. After driving south for almost two hours, they were ordered into what appeared to be a large garage and locked inside. The jubilation of the guards suggested they had discovered the identity, and value, of their captives. Stirling estimated they must be somewhere in the vicinity of Medina. One of the buttons on his jacket concealed a compass: he was formulating an escape plan.
Sadler, Cooper, and Taxis, meanwhile, were heading in precisely the opposite direction. After their lung-bursting sprint to the top of the ravine, they had hurled themselves beneath bushes in a small gully. For several hours, they hid as the Germans combed the area. Sadler extracted a piece of paper from his pocket on which he had scribbled the latest signals from HQ and buried it in the sand. “It was the longest afternoon I have ever spent,” he said. By good fortune an Arab arrived with a large herd of goats, which milled around their hiding place, helping to conceal them. “We never knew whether the herder did it on purpose, to hide us.” As night fell, they heard the Germans withdraw.
All three had been sleeping fully dressed, but they had no weapons, map, compass, water, or food. Sadler had made a careful study of the geography. The First Army, he calculated, was still more than a hundred miles away to the northwest. If they walked, keeping the salt lakes to their west, they should eventually reach the oasis town of Tozeur. “With any luck, I reckoned this ought to be in the hands of the Allies by now,” Sadler later recalled. “So we set off.”
They walked all night, and at dawn encountered a group of friendly Berbers, who gave them some dates and a goatskin, which they sewed together with bootlaces to create a makeshift water container. They walked on, until the punishing heat forced them to halt. When night fell they walked again, and at first light fell asleep in the fissures of a large rock. A burly Arab brandishing a shotgun appeared a few hours later, looking not much more welcoming than the Germans who had woken them two days earlier. Within minutes, they were surrounded by tribesmen and boys carrying rocks. “Give them your jacket,” Taxis instructed Cooper. “They are saying we should give them our clothes because they are going to kill us anyway.” A rock flew. Cooper was struck on the forehead above the left eye. Stunned and temporarily blinded by pouring blood, Cooper was seized by the other two and half dragged across a wide expanse of loose rock, which the barefoot Arabs could not easily cross. Then they ran.
On the fourth day, they were nearing collapse. In the distance, Sadler was sure he could see the faint green smudge of the oasis at Tozeur. But it seemed certain they would die of thirst, or go mad, before reaching it. Taxis had drunk salt water from the marsh, and was vomiting and hallucinating wildly. He could barely stand. To the surprise of his British companions, he turned out to have six toes on each foot, and after four days marching in ill-fitting boots he was all but crippled. The polydactyl Frenchman lay down and demanded to be left behind to die. With a combination of bullying, encouragement, and force, the others pulled him to his feet and they struggled on.
Sadler had himself entered the strange twilight of delirium, where reality and fantasy merge, when two very large black men wearing First World War helmets appeared out of the desert. Sadler wondered if this could be another mirage. The apparitions spoke in French, and pointed ancient rifles with fixed bayonets. Moments later, the ragged trio were being plied with wine and white rum, goat meat and potatoes, while Cooper’s head wound was stitched by a French medical orderly: they had encountered Senegalese soldiers of the Foreign Legion, part of the Free French forces, the very tip of the advancing First Army.
The
New Yorker
’s celebrated war correspondent A. J. Liebling had been hanging around Gafsa for days in search of a scoop. The forward point of the American advance, he calculated, was the most likely place for the two Allied armies to connect, a moment he wanted to witness. The little desert town looked “like a set in an old Beau Geste movie,” with a mixed population of Europeans, Jews, and Arabs, and a newly arrived battalion of American infantrymen, which had done wonders for trade at the local brothel, whose girls Liebling described as “sort of French.” Lieutenant Colonel Bowen had taken over the yellow stucco Hôtel de Ville, which boasted a bath and running water, as his headquarters. Liebling was there, buttering up the signals officer in the hope of sending a story by telegraph, when an officer of the French Foreign Legion entered the building followed by a trio of tramps.
Their shoes were wrapped in rags, and I deduced that their feet must be a mass of blisters. Two of the men wore long beards and one, whose head was wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage, looked as if he badly needed a shave. All three were wearing khaki battledress, from which great swatches of material were missing, torn off to make bandages. One of the men carried a goatskin watersack, with the long hair outside; it reminded me of Robinson Crusoe. Their faces were sunken and their eyes seemed preternaturally large, and in one case really protuberant. The eyes of this fellow were round and sky blue and his hair and whiskers were very fair. His beard began well under his chin, giving him the air of an emaciated and slightly dotty Paul Verlaine.
“We’ve been walking for five nights and five days,” said Mike Sadler. “Have any of the others come in? Have you heard anything about Big Dave?”
Liebling was incredulous: “Are you really from the Eighth Army?”
Colonel Bowen was even more dubious. He took one look at the hairy, ragged trio and ordered them to be placed under guard, on the grounds that “they might be spies.” For the three men, whose sense of reality had already been loosened by a combination of exhaustion, dehydration, and rough Algerian wine, the situation lurched into the surreal: they were now prisoners of their own allies, and much too tired to argue. Waiting to be escorted under guard to the American headquarters at Tebessa, Cooper fell into conversation with the American journalist. His tumbling, half-delirious description of the work of the SAS was reproduced verbatim by Liebling:
When we were first formed, we used to specialize in German airplanes on the ground. Get back behind their lines, get onto an airfield at night—do in a sentry, you know, or something of that sort; it’s easy—and then attach pencil bombs to as many planes as we could get to. The bombs are timed to go off in a short time. We do a bunk, the bombs go off, and all the planes burn. Quite a good idea. Colonel Stirling, the one we call Big Dave, really thought of it first. Bright chap. Colonel Stirling thought of using jeeps. Wonderful things jeeps, absolutely fine. They go anywhere in desert country. Our fellows come in behind the enemy lines, and then simply live in the desert for weeks, annoying them. One chap in SAS has got a hundred and twenty planes with his own hands. Big Dave must have got nearly a hundred. But Jerry got onto that airport dodge. Now there are too many guards and booby traps. So on this last trip we just did mines, traffic disruption, and general confusion. Glorious fun, really. We went along for weeks without any trouble. We would always hide out in the daytime and sleep, and then do all our moves at night. We would find deep wadis or crevices to hide away in. We would come out onto the roads at night and shoot up enemy convoys. We made a shambles of the enemy’s line of supply. One of our best tricks was to come onto a road and move along it toward the front, so they would never suspect us of being intruders…But we got to feel too safe. We had gone so long unobserved that we thought it would last forever. We were lying up in deep wadi about ten miles north of Gabès. Some Arabs must have spotted us going in there and told Jerry. There wasn’t a chance to fight our way out of that position. We managed to climb up a cliff. We waited around to see if any of the others would get away, but nobody did. There was a lot of shooting in the wadi, and then silence.
Cooper’s ebullience suddenly evaporated. “Big Dave must have been killed.”
A. J. Liebling’s report was published in the
New Yorker
on November 17, introducing American readers to a new sort of warfare, in which bearded, scruffy Brits fought behind the lines and found it all glorious fun.
David Stirling had not been killed, although he had come very close. At 10:00 p.m. on the evening after his capture, he demanded to be allowed outside in order to urinate. Two of the guards escorted him, smoking cigarettes. Some twenty yards from the building, Stirling simply started running. Shots rang out, but in the darkness the sentries fired blind. Stirling had decided to head south, an escape plan based almost entirely on wishful thinking: the area was densely populated, he had no idea where he was, and a single, exceptionally tall, unarmed foreigner was certain to be spotted. Even so, he covered some fifteen miles and then hid in a bush as dawn broke. The next day, he was discovered by an Arab herder who led him to a small ravine and indicated he would bring water. A few minutes later, he returned, accompanied by an Italian patrol. Stirling was back in captivity. This time he was bound and taken under heavy guard to the village of El Hama, and then on to the Italian headquarters at Menzel.
There he was interrogated by Colonel Mario Revetria of Italian military intelligence. Revetria was so excited to have captured the SAS leader that he could not resist showing off, and instead of pumping Stirling for information he described everything he knew about the SAS, although not how he knew it. Stirling was duly impressed: “You know as much as I do about my own organization,” he said.
A few hours later, Stirling was marched onto a Junkers 52 and flown to Sicily. Here he was interrogated once more, in a cavalry barracks, first by the Italians, and then by a German staff officer. He gave only his name and rank.
On February 11, Stirling’s mother was officially notified that he was missing in action. “I am hopeful that David may yet turn up,” Randolph Churchill wrote to her. “At worst he is a prisoner.” Rommel himself wrote to his wife, describing how the man who had made so much trouble for him, for so long, was finally in captivity: “The British lost the very able and adaptable commander of the desert group which has caused us more damage than any other British unit of equal size.”
Stirling was moved to another POW camp, outside Rome. The Caserma Castro Pretorio was “well equipped and comfortable,” but after so many months of frenetic activity, Stirling found the inertia boring beyond description. During the day, the prisoners remained in cells, but in the evening they were allowed out to eat together and socialize. There were kindred souls about. The man in the next cell, another officer awaiting interrogation, introduced himself as Captain John Richards of the Royal Army Service Corps and explained that he had been captured in Tobruk in November 1942.