Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War (27 page)

Deployed to North Africa at the beginning of 1941, Lutterotti took part in the May offensive, and then ran a small tented hospital at Bardia, behind the German lines. Perfectly bilingual, his language skills made him sought after as a translator for both Italian and German officers. He had even translated for Rommel and deeply admired the Afrika Korps commander. A man of liberal convictions and professional dedication, he insisted on treating North Africans, Allied prisoners, and his own comrades with precisely the same level of care. Gentle, inquisitive, and scholarly, Markus Lutterotti was not made for the blunt brutalities of war. During the advance, he had come across a mortally wounded soldier screaming in a trench, beyond help. He put him out of his pain with a massive dose of morphine. The incident would mark him forever.

Germany would win the war, Lutterotti was sure of that, but the prospect did not fill him with particular elation. He was twenty-nine. He wanted the fighting to end, he wanted to resume his study of tropical medicine, and he wanted to return to the mountains of South Tyrol. But first he wanted to see the open desert. It had been easy to persuade his commanding officer to lend him a reconnaissance plane and a pilot for the afternoon.

The Fieseler Storch touched down gently in the sand, a few hundred yards from two burned-out trucks, relics from the British retreat. Lutterotti and the pilot climbed down, lit cigarettes, and set off “laughing and talking,” to inspect the wrecks. At that moment a vehicle suddenly hurtled into view, painted a peculiar combination of pink and green and manned by bearded, shouting men wearing Arab headdresses. Assuming this must be a German patrol, albeit an odd one, Lutterotti stepped forward to greet them, only to be stopped dead by a deafening burst of gunfire. The bearded gunners were strafing the stationary plane. The “look of astonishment” on Lutterotti’s face was comical to behold. He whipped a red-cross armband out of his pocket and waved it above his head. “You can’t shoot me,” he shouted in English. “I’m a doctor.”

Lieutenant Nick Wilder of the LRDG had been returning from a diversionary raid on Bagush airfield, timed to coincide with the massed jeep attack, when this unexpected prize dropped from the sky. Wilder’s men planted bombs on the riddled Fieseler Storch, as the two amazed prisoners were bundled into the back of the truck. Lutterotti watched the plane explode as they sped away.

—

The two doctors lounged in the cooling sand after supper, discussing medicine, the war, and luck. “It was a joy cruise,” Markus Lutterotti explained to an amused Malcolm Pleydell. “I went up for pleasure, and it ended unhappily…
C’est la guerre
.” This earnest, bespectacled German doctor was “a good chap,” Pleydell decided.

Captives were not part of the SAS remit. “Generally we didn’t take prisoners,” Seekings later recalled. “I don’t mean by that we shot them out of hand.” Usually they were disarmed, briefly held, and then released; but out in the deep desert, simply abandoning prisoners would have been tantamount to killing them. Instead, Stirling had offered Lutterotti “parole,” the ancient military convention under which a captive would be left unguarded in return for a solemn promise not to escape.

Lutterotti had smiled at this quaint suggestion. “What would you do in my position?” he asked.

Stirling laughed: “I certainly wouldn’t accept parole.”

“Then nor will I.”

Lutterotti was handed over to Pleydell, with orders to keep the prisoners under close guard at all times. The two captain-doctors discovered they had much in common. Lutterotti had spent several childhood holidays in Clacton-on-Sea, spoke excellent English, and seemed more intrigued than alarmed to find himself in an enemy camp so far behind the lines. At one point during supper, the Tyrolean aristocrat overheard the name Jellicoe, and piped up: “Not Lord Jellicoe?” George Jellicoe nodded. “I think you know my wife,” said Lutterotti. It is a small world, even in the vast desert. The Earl Jellicoe and Baroness Lutterotti, it transpired, had become acquainted at a formal luncheon in Hamburg in 1936. Jellicoe was an energetic ladies’ man, and word swiftly spread around camp that the earl had done rather more than just lunch with the baron’s wife.

The camp at Bir el Quseir was becoming too comfortable for comfort. The heavy traffic of vehicles had left deep tracks in the sand around the wadi, visible to enemy spotter planes. Wireless reports from Cairo appeared to indicate that the Germans, in response to the Sidi Haneish raid, were sending out scouting patrols to try to intercept the raiding parties. After nearly five weeks, the buildup of human waste in the latrine hole had attracted disgusting swarms of flies. Stirling announced that they would be shifting camp again, thirty miles to the west, before launching another intensive series of raids on the German supply lines. The targets, Stirling promised, would be “very enticing.”

The German doctor and his pilot were model prisoners. “If you require any medical assistance, you have only to let me know,” Lutterotti told Pleydell. “I will be only too happy to be of some use.” The German-Italian doctor was amused at the way tea was drunk, with British regularity, at exactly four o’clock every day; he never missed teatime, and insisted on clearing away the mugs.

As they settled into the new camp, the doctors’ unlikely friendship deepened. They talked of tropical diseases, the problem of flies, the role of the Red Cross, and the BBC, which Lutterotti had often listened to, in secret, back in Bardia. They even began to pool medical expertise on the subject of desert sores. Only when the conversation shifted to the future of the conflict did the atmosphere turn chilly.

“Do you think you are going to win the war?” asked Pleydell.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Soon?”

“In about two years.”

Lutterotti’s bland certainty was unsettling, and nettling. The possibility of defeat had never been broached during Pleydell’s time with the SAS.

“Well, how about Egypt, now? Do you think you will conquer us here?”

“Yes. I think we will take Egypt in two months.” Lutterotti was not aggressive, merely confident. “It was said quite quietly,” Pleydell noted, “without a hint of swagger.”

The embarrassed silence was eventually broken by Lutterotti. “And you say you will win the war?”

“Yes,” said Pleydell defensively.

“Then how are you going to beat Germany?”

Pleydell was about to launch into a passionate prediction of inevitable Allied victory, but then stopped himself.

“When I thought of our present situation—of the way we were just hanging on for our dear lives to a little strip of desert in front of Alexandria; of how we seemed to have our backs to the wall everywhere—I became aware that I had not got the vaguest notion as to how we would win the war.”

The thought was somehow very funny. Pleydell snorted with laughter. Suddenly, both men were rolling around in the sand, giggling helplessly.

“I do not think he really understood what I was laughing about,” Pleydell later wrote. “And for the life of me I could not have explained it.”

—

Stirling had hoped to remain in the desert indefinitely, on permanent offensive. But the military planners in Cairo had other ideas—rather ambitious ones. At the beginning of August, a wireless message from Middle East Headquarters instructed the unit to return to Kabrit. Stirling was told to report to Cairo for further orders. He responded with a vigorous objection, and a request to be left to continue operations that were proving most effective. During the last month, the unit had destroyed at least eighty-six planes and several dozen enemy vehicles. The reply was immediate and insistent: L Detachment must return to base at once. Stirling later claimed to have been infuriated by the order, but the tone left him in no doubt that something important was afoot.

After loading up the trucks, the men were told to get a few hours’ sleep and to be ready to depart at around 1:00 a.m., in order to drive in the darkest phase of the night. The two doctors and Jim Almonds lay on their backs, smoking cigarettes before turning in. The night was clear, and the sky flooded with stars. Lutterotti’s Jesuit education had included astronomy and as a boy in the Tyrol, he explained, he had enjoyed “walks across the country by starlight.” He ticked off the constellations in German—Grosser Bär, Schwan—and the Milchstrasse galaxy.

Pointing north, he picked out the brightest star in Ursa Minor: “The little pole star, very small but very important.”

The astronomical conversation dwindled into silence, and the men turned in.

“Good night,” said Lutterotti, as he and the pilot headed off to their sleeping patch beside a truck, accompanied by the guard.

“Good night,” called the English doctor over his shoulder.

“Good night indeed,” thought Pleydell. “A fine time to be saying good night when in three hours’ time we would be bumping and jolting back on one of the ghastly night drives.” But Lutterotti was not saying good night; he was saying good-bye.

Pleydell had laid out his blanket and was about to stretch out when Almonds reappeared, breathless. “The Germans…they’ve vanished.”

The two prisoners had executed a simple ruse. The Luftwaffe pilot told the guard he was going to fetch his blanket from the back of the truck. A minute passed, and when the man did not return, the guard went to investigate. The pilot was nowhere to be seen. The guard rushed back to where Lutterotti had been lying, apparently asleep. By now, the doctor had also disappeared.

Lutterotti had planned carefully. Once the trucks were on the move, he knew, there would be no chance of escape. The nearest German troops must be at least sixty miles to the north. He had been surreptitiously gathering tea for days, pouring the dregs from the cups into a water bottle he had found and hidden under a truck. By the night of his escape, he had more than a pint of liquid and a bar of chocolate. He and the pilot agreed to split up, to increase the chances that at least one of them might get away. The British would expect him to head north; instead, he walked to the western side of the camp, before sprinting away. He had run perhaps three hundred yards when the first flare went up behind him, bathing the ground in light, including a patch of scrub to his right. Lutterotti dived into the bushes and lay still, panting.

Back at camp, the entire force had been woken and mobilized to hunt for the escaping Germans. Pleydell loaded his revolver, wondering if he would be able to shoot his new friend. “I sent up a little prayer that someone else might catch them,” he wrote.

The search party fanned out and began scouring the surrounding area. But, as the SAS knew from experience, hiding in the desert was easier than it might seem, and in the darkness the advantage lay with the fugitives. Two hours later, with extreme reluctance, Stirling called off the search. They could not afford any more delay; two escaped prisoners were not worth the risk of driving in daylight. “Cheer up, David,” said Paddy Mayne, with an attempt at levity. “The Jerries will [soon] have a full description of us. It’s just as well we’re leaving.”

Lutterotti heard the convoy depart. Then he gingerly emerged from the undergrowth, took a sip of cold, stale tea, and began walking toward the North Star.

—

“You were incredibly stupid,” Field Marshal Rommel told the exhausted, sun-blistered doctor four days later. Then the Desert Fox grinned: “But the fact that you managed to get back is pretty impressive,
sehr anständig
.”

Lutterotti reckoned that on the first night he had covered no more than ten miles before dawn came up and the stars disappeared. He lay up all day, in the scanty shade of a camel thorn. The desert stretched away relentlessly on every side. He ate a small piece of chocolate, but lacked the saliva to swallow it without a precious gulp of tea. Around midnight, the North Star reappeared, and Lutterotti set off once more. He began to lose track of time. The second day was the worst. The heat was brutal, and Lutterotti began to experience the first symptoms of heatstroke as he lay waiting for nightfall. The third night of walking, he knew, must be the last, one way or the other. He had no more tea, and the chocolate was long gone. Around dawn, he heard an animal, somewhere out in the darkness. “If that is a dog,” he reflected, “then humans must be close too.” He headed toward the noise. Three hours later, he was back in the German lines, and undergoing the first of multiple debriefings.

—

In later life, Pleydell often wondered what had happened to Dr. Lutterotti, whether he had survived the desert and returned to South Tyrol. What was he doing now, the Englishman wondered, as the trucks jolted back toward Kabrit? “Working in a tented ward? Drinking with his colonel? Had he been interviewed by the high officials? Anyhow, I bet he gave us a good write-up.”

Pleydell would have won that bet. Lutterotti (and the pilot, who had encountered a German patrol and returned to camp in comparative comfort) gave a detailed and extremely favorable description of the British desert raiders, their courteous commander, and their rigorous adherence to the tradition of afternoon tea. For Rommel and his officers, the hitherto shadowy British commandos were coming into sharper focus. Lutterotti reported that Stirling commanded a mixed force of “British, New Zealand, Free French and Free German troops”; he described the vehicles, weapons, and camps. RAF reconnaissance duly reported that German armored cars were “scouring the desert” in the area the SAS had just vacated.

—

Winston Churchill, frustrated by the stasis in the Middle East, decided to ring the changes, as he usually did when advised to be patient. General Auchinleck was sacked, and replaced as commander in chief of the Middle East by General Harold Alexander. Command of the Eighth Army would soon be handed to a bristling, sharp-faced martinet, General Bernard Montgomery. A new air of anticipation and urgency gripped Middle East Headquarters. The reinforced Alamein line was expected to withstand whatever Rommel hurled at it; a mighty new Allied offensive was planned for October. But in the meantime Axis forces continued to rely on sea convoys from Italy for supplies of food and matériel. Stirling’s plan to launch an all-out assault on the ports of Cyrenaica may have had its origin in his hitherto fruitless efforts to blow up shipping in Benghazi—but in his absence the idea had been inflated and stretched into something far more radical. Stirling was ordered to attack Benghazi once more, but this time, instead of slipping in at night with a tiny force, he would be leading an army of more than two hundred men, over half of whom were not SAS-trained, in a convoy of eighty vehicles across a thousand miles of desert. He was even allocated a pair of Honey tanks. Once inside Benghazi, his orders were to “destroy everything in sight.” A simultaneous seaborne raid would be launched against Tobruk by commandos and infantry, while the Sudan Defence Force, the British Army unit originally created to maintain the borders of Sudan, would attempt to retake Jalo Oasis from the Italians, and the LRDG would attack the airfield at Barce, sixty miles northwest of Benghazi. The Benghazi raid, code-named Bigamy, was a classic combined-operations commando raid: naval personnel would take part in order to commandeer whatever ships were in the harbor, and would sink some to block the entrance; Allied POWs in the town would be liberated and armed.