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Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Daily Mail
The most remarkable escape of WWII? SAS soldier's journey to safety through FIVE countries after unit was dropped over occupied Sicily too high and in the wrong place, historian DAMIEN LEWIS reveals
As Roy Bridgeman-Evans drifted down through the moonlit Sicilian sky, he could tell immediately that he and the rest of his men were in serious trouble. They'd been dropped far too high, and the rugged terrain below bore no resemblance to what he'd been told to expect. Worse still, the supply canisters carrying their weapons, food and explosives were nowhere to be seen. It was the evening of Monday 12 July, 1943, and Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, was just three days old. To the south, British and American troops were engaged in brutal combat as they battled to wrestle the island from Axis control. Sicily was more than just a strategic target. It was the gateway to Italy, 'the soft underbelly of Europe' as Churchill famously described it. Opening a new front here was intended to stretch German forces thin, ahead of the ultimate objective - D-Day; the full-scale invasion of Nazi occupied France. But that operation was still a year away. In a mission codenamed Operation Chestnut, Bridgeman-Evans and his team of nine SAS troopers were being parachuted into enemy-held territory to cause havoc and mayhem. Their key objective was to disrupt enemy lines of communication by sabotaging radio installations, destroying fuel dumps and attacking supply lines. But without their all-important drop-canisters packed with their weapons and explosives, their mission was all but doomed from the moment they had dropped - as revealed in my latest book, SAS Great Escapes Four. Jumping from such a height made it near impossible to avoid being spotted by the enemy, while the winds scattered members of the stick - a group of paratroopers dropped from an aircraft – far and wide. By sunrise, Bridgeman-Evans had managed to find four of his men, but enemy forces could be seen closing in. Within hours they were surrounded and forced to surrender, being more or less unarmed as they were. Hailing from Richmond, Surrey, Bridgeman-Evans stood six feet tall, with brown hair and grey eyes. Already a seasoned special forces officer, before the war he'd worked in his father's cigar business. Like so many of his generation, he'd answered the call to serve and do his bit to rid the world of Nazi tyranny. Having been taken captive, he was not the kind of man to accept being a prisoner of war. Like all SAS, he was trained to resist and escape at every opportunity; it was ingrained in them. Interrogated by their Italian captors, and at times bound together with chains, the five 'dangerous' captives were ferried across the Strait of Messina, to mainland Italy. Bridgeman-Evans was already scanning the coastline, searching for a way to break free. Arriving in the town of Gioia Tauro, on Italy's western coast, they were herded into a railway yard to await transport, along with hundreds of other Allied POWs. When their Italian captors were momentarily distracted, Bridgeman-Evans seized the moment. With three of his men, including Sergeant Robert Lodge, aka Rudi Friedlander, a German Jew who was fluent in the enemy's language, they scaled the rail yard's wall and dropped into the shadows beyond. Dressed in SAS jumpsuits, and moving quickly, they were mistaken for a German patrol. Their guise was helped by Lodge jabbering away in German, as the others nodded vigorously and pretended to understand. Slipping along the dark-night coastline, Bridgeman-Evans sought out a tiny fishing village, which he'd spotted from the Italian ship that had brought them here. He'd noted the boats drawn up along the beach. His plan was to steal one, and row across the sea back to Sicily, to rejoin the advancing Allied forces. With bluff and daring to the fore, Lodge managed to use his fluent German to bluff their way across a heavily guarded bridge. Shortly, they reached the clifftop overlooking the beach. From there they watched troops enemy patrolling the sands below, and noted the machine-gun nests menacing the coastline. At sunset, the four men made their move. Silently, they crept down to the beach, their hearts pounding furiously. Italian sentries moved to and fro, but the men stayed low, keeping to the shadows. Shortly, they reached the fishing boat they were aiming for. Under the noses of the enemy and working in silence, they manhandled the vessel to the water's edge and pushed it in. Then disaster struck. In their haste to get moving, the sound of the oars in the rowlocks must have been heard. Moments later the night erupted with gunfire. Machine-gun rounds and rifle fire tore into the wooden hull, churning up the water all around. The only way to escape the murderous onslaught was to dive into the sea. With one man badly injured and the boat sinking, Bridgeman-Evans realised all was lost, and he struck out for shore. He had to stop the Italians from killing them all. As he swam for his life, bullets cut perilously close. Somehow, he reached the beach unscathed, shouting at the Italians to stop firing. The gunfire ceased. The injured man, Private Sharman, was rushed to hospital. For the rest, it was back into captivity. Of course, Bridgeman-Evans remained determined to break free. Taken to a POW camp at Capua, north of Naples, he discovered a kindred spirit in fellow prisoner Frederic Long, an officer of 3 Commando, who had also been captured in Sicily. The two joined in a daring tunnelling escape attempt. But before the underground shaft could be finished, the prisoners were moved on to another POW camp, this one just 120 miles short of the German border. As they were shipped further and further away from Allied lines, Bridgeman-Evans' desire to get free only grew stronger. Split up from the rest of his men – officers and other ranks were separated – September 8 offered another chance to break free. Italy had surrendered to the Allies, and the Italian guards had mostly abandoned their posts. The senior British officer at the camp, Brigadier Mountain, prepared to lead a mass breakout. With the gates unguarded, the prisoners rushed through en masse towards what they hoped would be freedom. But a large body of German troops had arrived to seize control. Spying the breakout, they opened fire. The escape attempt was crushed, with some Britons gunned down. For a third time, Bridgeman-Evans' attempted getaway had been foiled. Days later, the prisoners were on the move again, heading into Nazi Germany. They arrived at their new POW camp, Fort Bismarck, just outside Strasbourg, in north-eastern France. It was a grim, forbidding place that had been garrisoned by the French Army, until France's fall in June 1940. The Germans had converted the fort into a POW camp. Located to the west of the city, most of Fort Bismarck was set underground. Encircled by a dry moat, watchtowers and thick walls topped with razor-sharp barbed wire, it was said to be escape proof. Undeterred, Bridgeman-Evans, and his 3 Commando companion, Fred Long, began plotting their escape. Noticing a blind spot where the wall seemed screened from the guards, they devised a simple yet audacious plan, gaining the all-important backing of the camp's escape committee. On the evening of October 1, 1943, they scaled the wall, being screened by other prisoners who'd crowded all around, after which they dropped to the far side, slipping into bushes at the side of the guardhouse. 'The whole thing took about a minute,' Bridgeman-Evans would later recall. There they lay, awaiting nightfall, and being forced to lay stock still as guard dogs passed close by. As darkness fell, they stole away, heading deeper into France and further from Allied lines. But Bridgeman-Evans and Long had a plan: they'd seek out sympathetic locals, and make their way to Britain via France, Spain and Gibraltar. They had one major advantage: Bridgeman-Evans was married to a French woman, and he was pretty much fluent in the language. With help from friendly farmers, they managed to contact the French Resistance who had links to what was known as the Burgundy Escape Line – a well-established route for getting downed Allied airmen and escaped POWs back to Britain. Disguised as French civilians, they were on their way - first by train to Paris, and then south to the Pyrenees, dodging Gestapo patrols and SS checkpoints, and with their Resistance comrades risking all if they were unmasked. After a gruelling crossing over the snowbound mountains, the two men would finally make it to Gibraltar and, from there, back to Britain. In the process of escaping, Bridgeman-Evans had crossed five countries, covered thousands of miles on foot, by bicycle, truck, train, tunnel and boat, yet made it despite all the odds. Bridgeman-Evans embodied the spirit and essence of the SAS. From the moment of his capture, he refused to resign himself to spending the rest of the war as a POW. He constantly sought a means of escape, no matter the odds, driven by a fierce determination to make it back to Allied lines and get back into the fight. The full story is told in Damien Lewis's latest book, SAS Great Escapes Four, published by Quercus Books and available now. SAS Daggers Drawn has just been published in paperback by Quercus at £9.95.
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Roger Muirhead, veteran of El Alamein, the invasion of Sicily and the Normandy landings
Roger Muirhead, who has died a few days short of his 104th birthday, was awarded campaign medals for his Army service in North Africa, Italy, Normandy and Burma. Roger Hedderwick Muirhead was born in Scotland on April 17 1921. His father, Brigadier Sir John Spencer Muirhead, DSO, MC, served in both world wars, and taught Roman law at Glasgow University. His great-grandfather, James Hedderwick, founded and published The Citizen, Glasgow's evening newspaper. He was educated at Fettes and enlisted in the Army in 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War. Commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC), he joined his unit, part of 151st Brigade, British 50th (Northumbrian) Division at El Alamein, Egypt, in September 1942. He commanded a platoon in the Second Battle of El Alamein, the turning point of the North Africa campaign, and in the Battle of the Mareth Line. In July 1943, he commanded an ammunition platoon in Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. He and his men embarked from Port Said on a passenger liner before transferring to a landing craft. He landed south of Capo Murro di Porco. There was little opposition but he was involved in a skirmish in the dark with American paratroopers who had landed in the wrong place. He said afterwards that he narrowly escaped being shot. A merchant ship which he saw being bombed was carrying all the alcohol for the Officers' Mess. He was the Messing Officer and had spent all the funds for its purchase in Alexandria. After the fighting, he took some of his men to the top of Mount Etna and they camped there for the night. The next morning, a German bomber came over them, flying very low, pursued by an RAF fighter. Muirhead and his platoon crossed to mainland Italy with their lorries and moved up to Bari on the Adriatic coast before returning to England in December to re-equip and train for the Normandy landings. He landed at Arromanches on August 12 1944. Within a few days he was hospitalised with a recurrence of malaria and it was October before he was able to rejoin his unit, part of an anti-aircraft brigade, at Terneuzen in the Netherlands, on the southern shore of the western Scheldt Estuary. He took part in the battle to open up the Scheldt between the strategically vital port of Antwerp and the North Sea to enable shipping to bring supplies to the Allies. He came across 20 Canadian Army three-ton lorries. They were under-employed and he commandeered them for several weeks before returning them to their base. The 21st Army Group was badly in need of infantry officers to replace casualties. Muirhead was posted to the Isle of Man to re-train but in May 1945 he volunteered to serve with the RASC in the Far East. He was based at Comilla in Assam (now Bangladesh), a transit camp for the 14th Army in Burma, before moving to Rangoon. In August, the Japanese surrendered and for the next nine months he managed a British Military Government food supply depot at Teluk Anson in Perak State, Malaya. In August 1946, he was demobilised in the rank of captain. He went up to Glasgow University to read law but he could not stand listening to lectures in Roman law by his father; after two terms, he emigrated to Canada. He returned to Britain in 1949 and went to the Royal (Dick) Veterinary College, Edinburgh, as a mature student. For 20 years he served as a veterinary officer at the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries (Maff). Following extensive research, he played a notable part in the identification of tuberculosis in badgers as a cause of bovine TB and in demonstrating how transmission of the bacteria could be eliminated by controlling the movements of these animals. In 1972, his findings were published in the State Veterinary Journal. In 1975, he was part of a team that went to Malta to deal with an outbreak of foot and mouth disease and, in April 2001 Maff asked him to help with the British foot and mouth crisis. Aged 80, he worked on farms full-time for six months. On his retirement, he was appointed MBE for his services to agriculture. Settled in a village in Gloucestershire, he enjoyed walking his dogs and adding to his considerable knowledge of old motor cars. In his later years, he was cared for by his business partner, Peter Robertson, and subsequently by Peter's son, Jay. Roger Muirhead, born April 17 1921, died April 11 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
