WHO DISOBEYS WINS!
Two maverick officers defied their superiors to stage a raid that helped end WWII. One was decorated, the other was fired. Now, there’s a campaign to award him a posthumous MC
WARS can be won and lost in bed, and it was pillow talk that was the surprise starting point of a military operation vital in bringing World War II to an end. It was early 1945 and, in northern Europe, the invading Allies were spilling over the Rhine into nazi Germany, bent on victory. But, to the south, in Italy, there was a serious hold-up. Hitler’s forces were defying the British and the Americans in a string of seemingly impregnable fortifications known as the Gothic Line.
Mile upon mile of concrete bunkers, gun emplacements, tunnels, minefields and razor wire stretched from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic coast. Crack German forces were dug in and, for six months, British and u.S. armies had been battering away unsuccessfully (and with huge loss of life) to force a way through.
Behind enemy lines, Italian resistance fighters were doing what they could to disrupt the German defenders, aided and organised by undercover agents of Britain’s SOE, the Special Operations Executive much loved by Winston Churchill for its expertise in subterfuge and sabotage.
It was to one of these agents, Captain Mike Lees, that a beautiful, young Italian woman (charmingly described as ‘not averse to love’) brought some crucial information. While sleeping with an enemy officer, she had learned from him the whereabouts — until then unknown — of the German army communication and command headquarters.
The Gothic Line defences she disclosed were masterminded from two villas in the remote village of Botteghe.
Lees, a larger-than-life figure known as ‘Wild Man’ and blessed with a can-do spirit, grasped the significance straight away: if he could take them out, the next Allied offensive would have a better chance of success.
And so the secret military plan known as Operation Tombola — meticulously detailed and narrated with verve in this latest book by SAS historian Damien Lewis — swung into action.
Lees set about pulling into shape the colourful characters who made up the chaotic partisan forces, bolstered by a 100-strong contingent of Russian prisoners of war who had escaped from German slave camps, some French Foreign Legionnaires and even some German deserters.
They all needed to be moulded into a disciplined fighting force.
BuT he knew it was a job they couldn’t handle alone, so he called in from Britain reinforcements: the SAS. Fortytwo dropped in by parachute, led by the seasoned and already legendary Major Roy Farran.
Farran, though, wasn’t meant to be there. A valuable veteran, his wounds sustained in various clandestine operations in France had led his superiors to ban him from any more front-line ops. But the maverick in him wasn’t having that. He went along with his men on the Dakota aircraft, ostensibly just as an observer, and then ‘accidentally’ fell out — luckily, wearing a parachute.
It was blatant insubordination and, as it turned out, not the only one in this gripping story of daredevil courage.
Together in their mountain stronghold, Lees and Farran relentlessly drilled their ragtag army of irregulars, honouring them with shoulder flashes that read ‘Chi osera vincera’ — ‘Who dares wins’ in Italian.
What neither of them knew was that, back home, the politicians were getting cold feet about any operation involving the partisans. Too many were communists and not to be encouraged.
Lees and Farran carried on oblivious, revving up their makeshift battalion until they were armed and eager, just hours before kick-off. Then, out of the blue, the commanders received a new order: stand down your men;
abort the mission. Disgusted at the instruction, both knew in their gut a crucial opportunity — a gamechanger in the war — would be missed.
So they turned a blind eye. They would claim the message hadn’t reached them. The attack was on and damn the consequences! They’d worry about the fall-out, should they come out alive, later.
And survival was the immediate issue in the epic firefight they now launched. The raiders crept up on the villas in the middle of the night and, with a piper blasting out Highland Laddie through the rasping sound of Bren guns and grenades, they stormed the doors.
(The piper’s presence was deliberate — to signal that this was a British venture, rather than a partisan one, in the hope that the Germans would not seek their revenge on the Italian locals.) In a dramatic 90-minute shoot-out, scores of German officers were mown down, some in their pyjamas, and the German command HQ put to the torch.
The raiders’ losses were light — ten dead. A dozen were wounded, including Lees, who was shot five times, with one bullet entering his leg and exiting at the knee. He was carried away on the shoulders of comrades.
Then began a helter-skelter dash to the safety of their mountain hideaways, hunted by hundreds of German troops. Crippled Lees had to sneak through checkpoints in a stolen ambulance before a plane flew into a forest clearing to evacuate him.
But it had all been worth it. Not long after, Allied forces began their latest assault on the Gothic Line and, at last, forced their way through an enemy demoralised and thrown on the back foot by the destruction of their headquarters.
Hitler had lost his last line of defence, his bolthole in the south.
And much of it was due to the dashing Farran’s raid. He expected to be court-martialled for disobedience, but his success got him off the hook. He was instead awarded a medal.
Not so Mike Lees. His bosses at SOE denounced him as ‘troublesome, insubordinate, tactless, irresponsible and high-handed’. Those very maverick qualities that had once been the hallmark of SOE agents were now held against him.
Farran recommended Lees for a Military Cross for his ‘gallantry, initiative and unequalled courage’, but he was dismissed from the service, his career in ruins.
‘Betrayed’ is Lewis’s word for the way he was treated.
SIMILARLy, those Russians who had fought beside him were ordered to be returned to Stalin’s Soviet Union — one-time allies sent to their deaths. Fortunately, an officer who had been on the raid was in charge of loading them on to a train, but he left a door unlocked so they could get away. It was the least he could do.
And the least an outraged Lewis believes he can do for the heroic, but now-departed, Lees — who was plagued by debilitating pain from his injuries for the rest of his life — is to campaign for that Military Cross so unfairly denied to him to be awarded posthumously. It would be a fitting and long overdue finale.
To Sign the petition, visit change.org and search for Captain Michael Lees.