It was intended as one of the most daring and ambitious commando operations of the Second World Warbut it ended in a complete disaster. The plan devised by the British high command was to land behind the German and Italian lines in Africa and capture – or kill if it was impossible to take him alive – one of the most experienced and prestigious officers of the German army: Marshal Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox”which was turning the tide of the battle in the north of the black continent. The order came directly from Winston Churchill, who saw in the capture of Rommel not only a military objective but a tremendous coup d’état for war propaganda, capable of lifting the depressed spirits of the British troops and society. It was November 1941 and they baptized it with the code name “Operation Flipper”.
The British troops had just suffered a resounding defeat in May, with the failure of the Operation Brevitya British offensive that sought to be a first step in lifting the Siege of Tobruk. Devised by the commander-in-chief of the British Army in the Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, Brevity was to be a quick strike against the weak Axis front-line forces in the Sollum-Capuzzo-Bardia area of the Egyptian-Egyptian border. Libya. Although the operation got off to a promising start, most of the initial gains were lost in local counterattacks, and the operation was called off when German reinforcements quickly arrived at the front.
Churchill needed a victory and the capture of Rommel would be, at the very least, a great coup. But that imagined success turned into a terrible failure. Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, the product of a cocktail that included poor intelligence work, an incapable commanding officer, adverse weather and, as in any war operation, a considerable amount of chance.
“Flipper” began planning in mid-October and had four objectives: attack the place where Rommel’s headquarters were supposed to benear Beda Littoria, about 30 kilometers inside Apollonia, in Libya; destroy a transmission station and intelligence center that was close to the site, and attack two Italian command centers. All behind enemy lines.
The one chosen to command the mission, which was to be carried out by elite commandos of the special troops, was Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Keyesson of Admiral Sir Roger John Brownlow Keyes, a famous hero of the First World War. Beyond the prestige of his last name, he was not the right man: he had no training to be part of those troops – and even less to lead them -, he had vision and hearing problems, and he was not characterized by having much experience in combat. If he was in the special forces it was almost exclusively due to his father’s friendship with the prime minister.
Although Keyes was charged with leading the assault, The operation was under the overall command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Laycock – a man who did have experience -, who did not hide his doubts about the success of the raid, especially because the possibilities of evacuating the command, once the mission was carried out, were very low. They ordered him to keep his qualms to himself and move on. Thus, on November 10, 1941, a command made up of men from the Long Range Desert Group, volunteers and “desert rats”, true specialists in sabotage and information actions in the rear of enemy lines, placed themselves under Geoffrey Keyes to perform a mission could be classified as suicidal.
Preliminary intelligence had been carried out by Captain John E. Haselden, a man who spoke fluent Arabic and Italian and who was Getting used to moving – disguised – is easy behind enemy lines. Haselden had landed on a beach near the coastal town of Hamma by the submarine Torbay on October 10 with an Arab guide, and spent almost two weeks spying on the lay of the land. It was he who assumed, due to the constant movement of German officer vehicles, that Rommel had his headquarters in Beda Littoria. He was wrong.
With this poorly prepared leader and poor prior intelligence, the British commandos left Alexandria aboard the Torbay and Talisman submarines towards the coast of Cyrenaica, in Libya, 300 kilometers behind enemy lines. On the night of November 14 to 15, 1941, Keyes’ detachment landed in folding canoes on the beach of Khashm al-Kalbguided by two-man teams from the Special Boat Section.
The landing was another setback for the mission, due to bad weather and rough seas. Of the 59 men that made up the group, some drowned due to the strong waves at the beginning of the disembarkation, others re-embarked in the submarine exhausted by the effort and others were lost in the dead of night. Finally, 34 soldiers and officers managed to gather on the shore to start a mission that was already beginning to get complicated due to the little time they had. Their attack was to coincide with the start of Operation Crusader, set for the night of November 17-18 and whose objective was to prevent the German armored forces on the Egyptian-Libyan border and thus relieve the German siege on Tobruk.
When dawn broke, the commandos, soaked and frozen, were able to dry their clothes and clean their weapons. With his troops reduced, Keyes decided to abandon attacks on the Italian barracks and concentrate on attacking the German headquarters and Rommel’s villa, with a smaller group assigned to blow up the telegraph tower of steel at the crossroads near Cyrene. The two guides who were part of the commando had been lost during the disastrous landing, so Keyes and his team had to “buy” information from a group of Arabs. One of them guided them to Rommel’s alleged headquarters in Beda Littoria. They arrived at dawn on November 17 and hid in the surrounding area, trying to rest. They were exhausted from the forced march through the desert.
The group entered the town, evading German controls and He arrived at the house where he assumed the German headquarters was, with Rommel inside. In front were Keyes and Captain Robin Campbell, who spoke perfect German and, with an authoritarian tone, asked that the door be opened for him. When one of the sentries let him in, Sergeant Jack Terry, with a knife, was supposed to kill him silently, but he failed: The soldier resisted and shouted to his companions. Then Campbell shot him.
Without the element of surprise, a confrontation broke out with crossfire from machine guns. Keyes and Campbell managed to advance, searching for Rommel room by room. Instead of finding the marshal, the lieutenant colonel found a German bullet – although there are versions that say it fell due to “friendly fire” in the confusion – which seriously wounded him.
Campbell ordered Terry to place the explosive charges to blow up the building, and then lead the retreat. The constant rain had soaked the wicks so much that they were unusable. All they could do was drop one or two grenades down the generator vent tube. Keyes was already dead and in the retreat, the survivors of the commando had to leave Campbell for the Germans to pick up and tend to him, because they could not drag him wounded in a 30-kilometer flight to the beach.
Ambitious Operation Flipper ended in disaster. Of the 34 members of the command who had managed to disembark to carry it out, only two were able to reach the British lines alive after marching at night for more than a month and hiding in the desert. The others were killed or captured.
But the British high command still had to know the worst: that Rommel had never had his headquarters in the place where they supposed – he had only slept there twice in the last few months – but they had attacked the headquarters of a logistics barracks.
I wasn’t even in Africa. British intelligence did not know until shortly before the attack – when it was already impossible to notify Keyes’s command – that the marshal had been in Rome since November 1, where he had gone to celebrate his birthday with his family and to organize with the Italians sending weapons to the battlefield.
Upon learning of the attack on the Beda Littoria barracks and its objective, the “Desert Fox” was outraged. He could not believe that the British high command thought that he was comfortably sheltered in a headquarters more than three hundred kilometers from the front when it was known that, if there was one thing that characterized him, it was always being on the front lines of combat directing his troops.
Beyond anger, too expressed his admiration for the bravery and audacity of the commandos that he had tried to capture or kill him. To honor them, he sent his personal chaplain, Rudolf Dalmrath, to perform the service at Lieutenant Colonel Keyes’ funeral and ordered that the captured soldiers be treated as prisoners of war even though they were not wearing uniforms, which could be punishable by death. a summary shooting.
