This is about the secret service mission to kill Hitlers greatest General in Operation Flipper. 1/7/22
The object of this was to disrupt communication behind the enemy and get Rommel.
Soon after this Operation Crusader followed it was a push by Sir Alan Cunningham (later last governor of Palestine 1945 to 1948) to push into Cyrenaica..
The commando concept came about soon after Dunkirk when Chirchill wanted to go onto the offensive. Colonel Dudley Clerk born in South Africa and was in Palestine to deal with the Arab rebellion of 1939. Denys Reits's book "Kommando" on the Boer War gave the concept. Volunteers with individual initiative were needed. British officers came from the upper class while German served in the ranks before becoming officers. Thus the British officers were not the most ideal.
This was to stop the German blitzkrieg across North Africa. Training was done on the Isle of Arran in the Clyde in Scotland.
Evelyn Waugh wrote about this in the novel "Officer and Gentleman "
1941 February Mussilini's 10th army surrendered to General O'Connor, and so Lieut General Alan Cunningham had restored Haile Salassi to his throne of Ethiopia at the same time Rommel 's Afrika Korps landed to help the Itlaians.
Germany was also moving into Russia, Vichy territory gave Germany help and provided the Luftwaffe with airfields, Iraq was having a German supported revolution and the Germans appeared to be moving towards the oil fields of the gulf. Crete was taken by German paratroopers where 600 of the 800 British commando troops were killed or captured only 156men escaped of them 23 were officers this was a scandal.
1941 April landing on the Litani River in Lebanon was a failure but the commando troops got training from that.
1941 June Rommel defeated Operation Battleaxe, Wavelle and put 2/3 of his troops out of action. British Matilda tanks were no match for the Panzers. Where Rommel was there was the front, Rommel shared Hitlers contempt for the land owning aristocrats of WW1. Rommel admired Hitler, and Rommel seen invincibility was affecting British morale.
1941 July Churchill replaced Wavelle with Achinleck. Rommel was obsessed with Tubruk and dismissed reports of the British planning an offensive. Captured S. African command vehicles indicated that British troops, if attacked must retreat.
SAS was made up of volunteers with subgroups of about 5 each with a specialized skill, medic , navigator, mechanic , explosives. No frontal attacks. John Haselden had been raised in Egypt and spoke Arabic dialects, French and Italian. You had a lot of European expatriates living in Egypt before the war who could be recruited with their Arabic skills.
1912 The Italian annexed Libya and between 1922 and 1931 the Italians were determined to break the Senussian power. Italian General Rudolfo Graziani by bombarding and rounding up in concentration camps where many died of starvation and illnes till they caught the rebel leader Omar el Muktar and hanged him in front of a crowd of 20 thousand. In Alexander the Senussi leader in exile was Sayid Idress who later on became \king of Libya in 1951 till he was deposed by Muhammad Gadaffi in 1969.
Beside Rommel headquarters there was the Italian Intelligence centre at Apollonia and the Cyrene crossroads carried the phone and telegraph for the whole region. They wanted to attack the German airfields at Gazala and Timimi.
One group landed in stormy weather and were dragged along the ground by their parachutes, most of their supplies had blown away completely. Today each soldier has all their supplies connected by a rope to their para harness. The torrential rainstorm turned the waddis into rivers. This weather ruined their operation but it also meant that German planes could not take off. It was the worst rain that Cyrenica had seen in 40 years.
Commando 11 had Avisholem Drori and Palestinian Jew who spoke Arabic and Italian. They landed by submarine on the coast with rubber dinghies.
British correspondent, explorer and writer Alan Moorhead travelled with British mobile columns.
1941 17 Nov.They attacked Rommel headquarters and killed a group of German officers and men who in fact were the people in charge of the German quartermaster stores. Rommel would be returning on 18th Nov. he had been on holiday in Rome with his wife for 3 weeks and celebrated his 50th Birthday on 15Nov. This was information that Bleckley Park had from Ultra, who knew that Rommel was not in Africa before this unit Ultra also knew that Rommel was to attack Tobruck on 21 Nov. so Cunningham had scheduled Operation Crusader for 18th Nov. When Rommel heard about the attempt to get him he was indignant that the British thought he had his operation headquarters 250 miles behind the front lines.
They attacked the crossroads cable mast that joined Derna ,Slonta Bardia, and Benghazi, surprisingly it had no guard but their explosives were very poor and the damage they did was easy to repair in a few days.
When patrols got back to the beach they could not find the rubber dinghies and Laycock had a poor grasp of morse code and the messages were misunderstood. The next night when the submarine came to search for them they were not there. Except for 3 men the rest were captured. Those 3 hid and waited for the British invasion to arrive a few weeks later.
The Rommel raid was one man's ambition to gain glory and ordinary enlisted men who had no part in the planning played their parts in this fiasco.
Later 3 men patrols were taken at night to sabotage and later met a prearranged position where the vehicle was, these were well trained SAS patrols who learned from the previous fiascos.
This book give details of the background of every one of the individuals involved.
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