The Paras - The Inside Story of Britain's Toughest Regiment. John Parker
for future reference. In this instance recovery was to be made by a submarine, HMS/M Triumph, which would be waiting for them off the west coast of Italy.
X-Troop was hand-picked: seven officers and 31 other ranks under the command of Major Trevor ‘Tag’ Pritchard, whose parent regiment was the Royal Welch Fusiliers, with Captain G. F. K. Daly of the Royal Engineers in charge of demolitions. Three Italian-speakers, including a civilian named Fortunato Picchi, were attached to the troop, to help get them out of any trouble they might encounter on the long march from the attack site to the coast. Training and work-ups for the operation continued through to 6 February 1941. The planners hoped they had covered every eventuality, having constructed a full-scale mock-up of the part of the aqueduct to be attacked. Aerial reconnaissance photographs and maps of the region were studied; routes from target to RV were worked out in fine detail; and one of the planners, Lieutenant Anthony Deane-Drummond of the Royal Signals, flew out to Malta to make the final preparations for X-Troop’s onward journey to Italy.
On 7 February the group was transferred to Malta in eight Whitley bombers from 91 Squadron, six of which were to be used to put the men on to their DZ (dropping zone), while two were designated to make diversionary bombing raids on railway yards at Foggia at the time of the attack on the aqueduct. Once the mission was completed, X-Troop would split into groups and make their way to the coast, guided by the River Sele to its mouth in the Gulf of Salerno. There they would rendezvous with the Triumph, which was to gather them up and speed them back across the Mediterranean to Malta. It was an ambitious first raid that had more to do with testing the effectiveness of such operations than the safe return of the men. Nor could it be said that the operation, if successful, would be anything more than a bee sting to the Italians. No great military advantages would be won.
At dusk on the night of 10 February, Operation Colossus was launched from Malta under clear skies and perfect visibility. The eight Whitleys took off for their night flight and aimed to reach the DZ at around 21.30 hours. Two of the aircraft carried bombs to drop on the railway yards at Foggia. The remaining six carried sticks of six or seven men who would be dropped with canisters containing their weapons, food, equipment and explosives at given sites around the target. The first Whitley reached the aqueduct at 21.42 and zoomed in low to drop the troops and their equipment within 250 yards of it. By 21.50 the next four aircraft had dropped their men within 400 yards of the target, but release mechanisms on two of the Whitleys had iced up, with the result that the canisters of weapons and equipment failed to drop immediately and only one was recovered by the force on the ground. The Whitley which was carrying Captain Daly and five sappers missed the DZ entirely and put the men out over the wrong valley, 20 miles away.
The remainder of the force, now with only 800 pounds of explosive, less than half that needed for the mission, had to pare down their original plan to blow up the main supports of the aqueduct, built of tough reinforced concrete, and instead set their charges around a smaller pier and bridge. Despite this setback, the charges blew out the pier and a huge chunk of the aqueduct came down with it, causing water to pour through the gaping sides. X-Troop had done its work. Now all that remained was to get the hell out of it and make their way back to the Gulf of Salerno by the night of 15–16 February, across rough, mountainous terrain.
They split into three groups, commanded by Major Pritchard, Captain C. G. Lea of the Lancashire Fusiliers and 2nd Lieutenant G. Jowett of the Highland Light Infantry. The plan, as always with clandestine missions, was to lie up by day and travel at night. Sometimes the soldiers were lucky, sometimes not. In this case they were not. Each of the three groups was spotted and captured on the first night of their return journey, 12 February. Captain Daly and his sappers, having missed the target, fared better. They travelled for three nights and got within 20 miles of the coast before they were surrounded by Italian troops. Their interpreter Fortunato Picchi tried to talk his way out of the situation with the prearranged cover story that they were German troops on a special operation. He almost managed it, until the Italians insisted on seeing his papers. Daly and his men were taken prisoner. Picchi was tortured under interrogation but apparently gave nothing away. He was court-martialled and executed by firing squad. And so, by the end of the third day, the entire X-Troop had been captured. They were transferred to prisoner-of-war camps, from which several eventually escaped and made their way to England and back into service. It was only then that they discovered the devastating irony: that even if they had reached the Gulf of Salerno, the Triumph would not have been there to collect them
By a cruel quirk of fate, one of the returning Whitley bombers had suffered engine failure and was forced to ditch over the very area of the rendezvous at the mouth of the River Sele. Since his radio message to Malta may have been picked up by the Italians, it was decided that it would be too risky to expose the submarine to possible detection and the rendezvous was cancelled. The men of X-Troop would have been left high and dry to make their own way home as best they could.
And so ended the first-ever parachute mission into enemy territory, costly in terms of manpower and of little value because the water supplies to the three key Italian ports were soon repaired. Nevertheless, lessons were learned and morale boosted and it became the forerunner of and model for many operations by land, sea and air that followed in its wake. Winston Churchill was reportedly not impressed. This was not why the paratroops were brought together. Where was his corps of 5000 men? And where were the gliders to carry them and their machines? The Prime Minister was getting rather angry.
By the early spring of 1941 the British had made little progress towards establishing a fully fledged parachute brigade. There were still some doubters who worried that much-needed aircraft and men would be diverted to a dubious cause. But all that was about to change. On 17 April Yugoslavia buckled to the Nazis in the face of a massive Blitzkrieg. That disaster was followed almost immediately by the fall of Greece, where the Allies were forced to retreat after ferocious battles which overwhelmed Australian and New Zealand forces. By then the Enigma decrypts supplied by the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park revealed that the Germans were planning a massive invasion of the strategically important island of Crete.
Churchill ordered General Wavell to send reinforcements and more guns to Crete, but the commander wired back that he could spare only six tanks, 16 light tanks and 18 anti-aircraft guns. After the fall of Greece, however, Allied manpower on the island was bolstered to around 30,000 men, with British, Australian and New Zealand troops under the command of General Bernard Freyberg. Even so, Churchill, having viewed the Germans’ precise order of battle – courtesy of the Enigma decrypts – clearly had doubts that the Allies had sufficient firepower to hold on. Freyberg was desperately short of heavy equipment, much of it having been abandoned during the retreat from Greece.
Churchill’s worst fears were realized on the morning of 20 May, when, as predicted by Enigma, German Stuka dive-bombers and artillery aircraft roared and screamed over the horizon and began pummelling the Allied troops’ positions. They were followed by wave after wave of stinging aircraft attacks and landings, including Ju 52s towing huge DFS 230 gliders packed with troops, vehicles and guns. Suddenly the skies were filled with the greatest airborne invasion force ever assembled in the history of warfare. By late afternoon almost 5000 men had been dropped or landed on the island and one of the most costly battles of the war to date was under way as more German paratroopers and mountain troops were delivered to the island hour after hour, eventually to total 22,040. They met unexpectedly spirited resistance, the Allies’ strength having been hugely underestimated by German intelligence. Even so, Freyberg was in dire trouble from the outset owing to his shortage of heavy artillery and, the greatest weakness of all, an almost total lack of air power to meet the Germans’ massive aerial bombardment.
After five days of unrelenting attack, Wavell pleaded with Churchill to allow an Allied withdrawal from Crete. It had been impossible, he said, ‘to withstand the weight of enemy air attack which had been on an unprecedented scale and has been through force of circumstance practically unopposed’. Churchill reluctantly agreed.