SAS Great Escapes Two: Six Untold Epic Escapes Made by World War Two Heroes by Damien Lewis

Author:Damien Lewis [Lewis, Damien]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2023-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

THE PHANTOM RAIDERS

January 1943, Tunisia

On Christmas Eve, 1942, Rommel decided to go hunting. It was a rare treat for the German general to take a day off, but he figured he had earned it, though he would end up pursuing very different prey from that which he originally sought. A gifted diarist and writer, he would pen a letter to his wife, Lucia, that morning, describing in vivid terms the day ahead and the wider, dire predicament that his forces faced in North Africa. The tide of battle was turning, and Rommel’s greatest worry was that his supply convoys were being harassed and harried at every turn, more often than not by Stirling’s desert raiders.

‘Dearest Lu,’ he wrote. ‘I’m going off very early this morning into the country and will be celebrating this evening among the men. They’re in top spirits, thank God, and it takes great strength not to let them see how heavily the situation is pressing . . . Kesselring was here yesterday. New promises were made, but it will be the same as it ever was. They can’t be kept, because the enemy puts his pencil through all our supply calculations.’ General Kesselring, the Commander-in-Chief South of German armed forces, had promised to deliver more supplies, but Rommel feared little would ever reach his frontline troops.

Despite his worries, just after dawn on 24 December 1942 he set out into the open desert, on what was ‘a beautiful sunny morning’. Flanked by an armoured car escort, Rommel’s small convoy slipped through the ‘fantastically fissured Wadi Zem-Zem’ – a vast chasm that cut through the desert, stretching 150 kilometres far to the south of the Libyan capital, Tripoli. Hemmed in by the craggy cliffs that towered to either side, Rommel and his party hoped to bag some ‘Christmas dinner’. They kept their eyes peeled for any herds of gazelle, a small species of antelope, scattered among the sparse vegetation and dry scrub.

Instead, they came across ‘the tracks of British vehicles, probably made by some of Stirling’s people’, as Rommel noted in his diary. The Desert Fox knew only too well that Stirling’s raiders were busy everywhere ‘on the job of harassing our supply traffic’. As the tracks looked fresh, Rommel and his party turned their minds to a new kind of prey, keeping ‘a sharp lookout to see if we could catch a “Tommy”.’ A lone vehicle was spotted, and Rommel and his party gave chase, thundering across the dry terrain. But it turned out to be a false alarm. It was actually one of their own patrols.

Rommel had created a bespoke force to protect his highly mobile headquarters. It was named the Kampfstaffel – combat echelon – or ‘Kasta’, for short, and it was equipped with mostly captured British vehicles. His Kasta had been busy in the Wadi Zem-Zem region during the last few days, stumbling upon ‘some British commandos’ – Rommel’s euphemism for the SAS – and capturing maps marked with locations of store dumps plus rendezvous points.

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