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In the fourth instalment of his SAS Great Escapes series, Damien Lewis recounts, among others, an overlooked LRDG operation in occupied Yugoslavia
SAS Great Escapes Four recounts five thrilling stories of escape, evasion and survival behind enemy lines during the Second World War. From the vanguard of Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily in 1943, to supporting partisan activity in Yugoslavia, Damien Lewis narrates the build-up to these covert SAS missions and the intense events that transpire when carefully laid plans hit the proverbial.
Seamlessly threading first-hand accounts from the escapees themselves – details of which shocked even a seasoned historian such as Lewis – each chapter follows a different special forces team on their daring mission, their hardships in enemy captivity and their audacious, hair-raising escape attempts. Far from the dash and derring-do depicted on the big screen and TV, these stories contain perilous, nail-biting and often heartbreaking examples of human endurance. Here, Lewis discusses his research into these great escapes and their unique cast of characters.
Where do you begin when you’re choosing which stories to tell in your book?
The sources are absolutely crucial, because obviously there are very few if any witnesses to the original events left alive, sadly, so you can’t get those first-hand testimonies. The sources are absolutely essential. It’s almost the sources that guide the selection of the stories, rather than the other way round.
With Chapter 4, the Archie Gibson story: about three years ago, out of the blue, an email dropped into my inbox via my website and it was from Gibson’s son. He said his father had been in the Long Range Desert Group, the SAS and SOE [Special Operations Executive], and he had his memoir as a manuscript [that] had been typed out sometime after the war, but it had never seen the light of day… You don’t know until you read it, of course, but potentially that’s gold dust. He sent it to me and it was absolutely gobsmacking, amazing, glorious – written in incredible detail… and the guy could really write as well.
Something like that immediately selects the story, because you’ve got this incredible source material and it’s also an amazing great escape story.
Amazingly the family sent me all of his wartime memorabilia, including the diaries he kept while he was at war, and incredible sketches of battlefield scenes and the poetry he wrote and all the letters. It was an absolute richness of material you could hardly begin to imagine. That selects the story rather than the other way round.
While putting the book together, were there any gaps in your research, or a loose end that you couldn’t tie up?
There’s always a moment where you reach a section of somebody’s story and several thoughts cross your mind. One might be: “Is this really true?” Because some of the stuff is mind-blowingly crazy, mad, brilliant, unthinkable. The second thing is you always come to parts of a story where three different individuals tell it in three different ways, and so, as the author and the historian who’s seeking to bring the history alive, you have to choose which example is most likely to be true
You have to select the most likely scenario and you do that from which has the ring of truth about it, which is most corroborated and which has the most kind-of authoritative source material behind it. At least sometimes it’s a subjective viewpoint. Often you don’t have anything other than your instinct as the author to tell you which is the most likely and truest version of the story. Invariably when people are in the fog of war, with the emotions and the tension and the trauma on the ground, people always tell the same events in different ways. It’s pretty much a given from these kind of situations.
Is there a chapter in the book in particular that stands out for you?
Chapter 4, which takes place in Yugoslavia… I’ve literally never read an account of British special forces being in Yugoslavia at all, let alone at that time [WWII]. I knew SOE was there, but I didn’t know that we had special forces patrols on the ground doing that kind of incredible work… It was incredible not just because the Yugoslav mountains were, by their very nature, hellish places to operate, but mainly because it was such a bloody and brutal war between the partisans and the Ustasie and then the Germans and Italians thrown into the mix. It was horrific.
There are a number of times in that story where Gibson and his patrol are in a firefight, or they set an ambush, or they call in air strikes and then they’re hunted in terrifying ways [by] Ustasie or German forces. There are so many times that they end up in a village and get shelter and then they flee from the village as the enemy attacks, and then the entire village gets raised to the ground and everyone is slaughtered. It’s really, really dark stuff. So not only getting that window into that world, which I knew nothing about, but also then seeing them get out alive and seeing the incredible missions they pull off. Yeah, the whole thing is just mind-blowing. That chapter is magical.
(Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
Resistance or non-combatant civilian support is an often overlooked aspect in many accounts from behind enemy lines. How important were these good samaritans in helping the escapees reach safety?
Very – especially in Italy. We tend to have this narrative whereby the Italians were the enemy and they were fascists, and that’s a pretty broad-brush view of things, or it tends to be in our Western narrative of the war. But of course Italy was a nation that was divided. There were the fascists, of course, but there were many who were not fascists and, especially when Italy signed the armistice, many thousands of Italians rose up against the enemy and they did incredible work.
To give you an indication of how useful and how impactive they were: Field Marshal [Albert] Kesselring, who was the overall German commander in the region, said that they had accounted for tens of thousands of German troops. So enraged were he and Hitler at what the Italian partisans were doing that Hitler decreed that for every German soldier who was killed or wounded by an Italian, ten Italian civilians would die.
In fact, they raised whole villages and killed everyone: men, women and children… That really tends to be overlooked because of the geopolitics of the war at that time. Even less is known about what those rural Italian communities did to help our special forces and our escapees. Time after time they put their lives on the line to shelter, feed, clothe and help these Allied POWs, or escaped prisoners of war, or special forces guys behind the lines.
For any of our forces… as long as they were in uniform, there was a good chance that they would be protected under the laws of Geneva Convention as prisoners of war… For Italian civilians: nothing. They knew only that they would be treated in the worst possible way and death and slaughter and destruction in their village would follow. So their bravery was off the scale, and of course in the most part they weren’t trained military operatives at all.
How important was it to include detailed backgrounds for your escapees? How did you pick what to describe of their pre-war lives, and why was it key to telling their stories?
War is about characters, or it should be. Any historian who does their job should realise that’s what war is about, and that’s why people read accounts of war or watch war movies. It’s about the characters involved. Nobody wants to read about cardboard cutout heroes.You want to read about real people with flaws and peccadillos and the kind of things that you can relate to because most people will not have been at war – certainly most modern-day readers – or have any direct experience of it, and why should they?
Therefore you’re going to need anchor points to make them relate to the characters in the story and that’s those little seemingly inconsequential things which really bring a human being alive or bring their character alive.
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