How 34 members of the SAS evaded 5,000 Nazi troops

Captain Bob Walker-Brown had parachuted into this remote part of northern Italy with 33 members of the SAS under his command. Their mission was to wreak utter havoc and mayhem in the enemy’s rear, so provoking Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, Hitler’s commander in chief in Italy, to send in thousands of troops to hunt them down. As the bait in a trap, the SAS commander and his men were poised to launch their first, fearsome ambush.

There was no better man to lead such a mission. The twenty-five-year old Captain Walker-Brown was a veteran of both the North African desert campaign, and recent SAS missions behind enemy lines in France. Not only that, he had escaped from an Italian prisoner-of-war camp the previous year, so much of the terrain of northern Italy was familiar to him. It was late December 1944, and he and his men were hidden amongst the trees of a night-dark Italian hillside, their machineguns and mortars menacing the roadway that snaked below.

Getting here from their remote mountain base had proven enough of a challenge, the heavy mortar tubes and bombs being carried by stubborn-spirited mules on snow-bound mountain trails. But it was all to prove worth it, as a first stab of light cut through the darkness – the glint of headlamps. The grunt of engines echoed through the valley, as a German military convoy rounded the far bend. Walker-Brown waited until the leading trucks had driven into the heart of the ambush, before giving the order to open fire.

A phalanx of Bren light machine-guns let rip, bullets ripping into the cabs and flanks of the leading vehicles and shattering their windscreens. Moments later the first mortar bomb slammed down, the 10lb projectile spraying jagged shrapnel amongst the enemy convoy. As troops tried to leap from the vehicles and to find cover, so the first truck exploded in a violent burst of flame, the glare lighting up the dark night sky, thick clouds of oily smoke barreling into the air. 

Walker-Brown pressed home his attack, seeking to annihilate the convoy. But the sound of gunfire and exploding vehicles drew out enemy reinforcements from the nearby town of Borghetto. An armoured car rounded the far bend, its 20mm gun searching for targets. While the Brens didn’t have the power to pierce its armoured flanks, a fearsome storm of tracer rounds ricocheted off its sides. The enemy gunners loosed off in wild abandon, unable to see or to target their attackers amongst the thick tree cover.

Finally, Walker-Brown signaled a cease-fire. Now was the time for the ‘scoot’ phase of a classic SAS ‘shoot-n-scoot’ attack. Melting away into the hills, the raiders were burdened with crushing loads and struggling against ice and snow. Worst still, their present mission – codenamed Galia – had been launched with such haste that no Alpine white winter uniforms had been available, so they stood out starkly against the terrain. ‘Scrambling up an absolutely snow-white background was rather bad for the adrenalin,’ as Walker-Brown would report.

Having left behind a string of burning vehicles, they made the comparative safety of a friendly village where they could lie low. It was dawn on the 31 December 1944, and he and his men had drawn first blood. They were here to poke the hornet’s nest and to provoke the enemy into a fury, so as to draw in as many of their troops as possible. They were baiting the trap, intending to weaken the defences of the Gothic Line, a string of machine gun bunkers, minefields and concrete gun emplacements, built by 15,000 slave labourers as Nazi Germany’s last bulwark in Italy.

If enough enemy troops could be pulled away from the Gothic Line, the Allies could punch their way through, or at least that was the intention. Little did Walker-Brown know just how successful he and his men would prove.

Seeking to strike hard, fast and wide, he’d split his men into smaller groups, each charged to ambush the enemy wherever possible. That way, the German commanders would be fooled into thinking a far greater number of British parachutists had landed in their rear. At least, that was the plan. Upon returning to the relative safety of the Rossano Valley – a seat of Italian Partisan operations, aided by agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Churchill’s Ministry for Ungentlemanly Warfare – Walker-Brown learned the worst.

One of his patrols, commanded by Lieutenant Shaughnessy, had been captured. They’d been betrayed by a local spy. News reached Walker-Brown of his men being horribly beaten, and of their Italian Partisan guide being savagely executed. Stripped naked, his body had been hung from a lamp-post to discourage others from joining the Partisans or from assisting the British parachutists. Incensed, Walker-Brown decided to strike back hard.

They’d return to the site of their first ambush, only this time they’d attack the garrison town of Borghetto itself, from where the armoured car had issued forth. Not only that, they’d do so on the most unexpected night imaginable – New Year’s eve. He led sixteen SAS aided by a similar number of Partisans, and shortly they were in position on the high ground overlooking the town. With his mortars and Bren guns zeroed in, Walker-Brown waited until first light – enough illumination to see their targets – and then gave the order.

Moments later the first of the mortar rounds were winging their way through the air, and the target – the German garrison block – was hit hard. As the blasts shook the town, so an enemy staff car tried to escape from the carnage, only for a mortar to score a direct hit, blasting it into a heap of twisted metal. Wherever enemy soldiers tried to flee, the Brens did their deadly work. Spying two trucks on the move, Walker-Brown ordered his Bren gunners to dash ahead. Drawing close to the road, they sprayed the vehicles with fire, and both began to burn fiercely.

Shortly, the entire German garrison began to flee, chased all the way by Bren fire and by the Partisans, who had formed hidden ambush groups. So ferocious had been the SAS attack, the enemy abandoned Borghetto for a full twenty-four hours. Over the coming days Walker-Brown and his men would mine key road bridges, ambush further convoys, blown up a railway tunnel and shoot up further German staff cars, ‘killing a high Fascist official and wounding three others.’

Hitting far and wide, and striking the fear of God into the enemy, this was exactly what SAS headquarters had intended. As the coup de grace, Walker-Brown returned to Borghetto, and hit the garrison town a devastating blow for a second and a third time – shooting up an enemy convoy and leaving the road strewn with corpses, before wreaking havoc amongst the German garrison once again.

Still not content, Walker-Brown radioed headquarters and asked for tripod-mounted Vickers heavy machineguns to be parachuted in. After his men somehow lugged them through increasingly treacherous blizzard-like conditions, Walker-Brown planned his most audacious attack yet. Already, hundreds of enemy troops had been sent in to hunt the SAS down. They were gathering their forces at Pontremoli, but the SAS commander was determined to hit them first.

With the Vickers machine-guns in position, Walker Brown realized he had hit the jackpot. Two enemy convoys were converging on the road below him, directly in the line of the Vickers’ fire. Columns of armoured cars, truck-born infantry and artillery units crammed the road below. From the dark snow-bound slopes, the hidden ambushers unleashed hell, and shortly streams of fiery .303 inch bullets were tearing into their targets. ‘It was an absolute massacre,’ Walker-Brown would reflect later.

But as he ordered his men scoot from the ambush, so the enemy hunter forces were unleashed upon them. From one side a mass of German alpine troops – moving fast on skis and dressed in all-white mountain warfare gear – closed in. Ordering his men to collapse the Vickers guns and get moving, they grabbed the 50-pound weapons and began to clamber up the ice-bound slopes in a desperate attempt to escape the trap. Even as they cursed and fought for every yard of ground, so a second enemy forced closed in from the other side. They were about to be caught in a trap.

In the face of such threat, Walker-Brown was a study in cool and calm. Hailing from Morayshire, in the far northeast of Scotland, when asked why he had chosen a military career, he’d remark, with typical humility: ‘Probably too stupid for anything else.’ Decisive under fire, he’d been wounded and left for dead in North Africa. It was only when a German tank had practically ran him over, and Walker-Brown had twitched, that the enemy realized he was still alive and took him captive.

That was in June 1942. Months later he’d escaped from an Italian POW camp, made it back to Allied lines and promptly volunteered for the SAS. Now, as the enemy closed in, Walker-Brown reminded himself this was exactly what he and his men had been sent in to achieve. They were here to provoke the enemy into mounting just such a hunt. So be it – the chase was on.

As the SAS commander urged his men to ever greater efforts to reach the snow-blasted height of Monte Gottero, the peak of which rears to over 5,000 feet, they were forced to abandon the Vickers guns, or face capture. Pushing his men to ever greater efforts, they reached the wilderness of the summit, even as gunfire chased them up the mountainside and mortar rounds blasted apart the snow and ice.

The SAS were destined to spend days on the run in atrocious conditions, hounded on all sides. With no way to make radio contact, they were also cut off from SAS headquarters in Italy. From there, Major Roy Farran, the legendary SAS commander who had sent them in, radioed a desperate message: ‘To Bob, from Roy. My hair is going grey and I really am beginning to think you might have become a wooden soldier…’ A wooden soldier – code for dead. There was not a sniff of a reply from Walker-Brown of course.

In desperation, Farran dispatched a search party, led by Sergeant Sidney Guscott, and codenamed Operation Brake. His mission was to discover the fate of Walker-Brown and his men, and to see if Operation Galia was still in action. Farran needen’t have worried. After days on the run, Walker-Brown returned to the Rossano Valley – which itself had been attacked by the enemy, the Italian villagers paying the brunt of the price – having lost not a man.

Re-establishing radio contact, Farran ordered Walker-Brown to escape and evade back to Allied lines. Op Galia had been a wild success, 10,000 German troops having been pulled out of the Gothic Line to hunt for the SAS. Typically, Walker Brown put a characteristic spin upon his orders – his would be a decidedly fighting withdrawal, during which his troops would cause carnage and devastation on both flanks of La Spezia, the main city in the region.

As Major Farran would report, on February 10, 1945: ‘Bob now pulling out, ambushing en route.’ The SAS escape route lay across wild mountainous terrain. At times linking arms to ford raging mountain torrents, Walker Brown and his men would have to scale the 5,200-foot-high Monte Altissimo, amidst freezing winter conditions. Across its heights ran the frontline, so Walker Brown would also need to lead his men through the massed German defences, and to brave the Allied lines that lay beyond.

At one stage in their epic escape, the SAS hit upon a massive chance bonus. Climbing into the foothills of Monte Altissimo, the sound of female giggling was detected in some bushes. There, they captured a German hauptmann – captain – in a very compromising position with a young Italian woman. Caught in flagrante, the captain rapidly hoisted his trousers and thrust his hands in the air.

Marching that enemy officer at the fore of their column at gun-point, Walker-Brown ordered him to talk their way through any enemy checkpoints, or face the consequences. The full gripping story of SAS Operation Galia and the incredible escape that followed is told in my new book, SAS Great Escapes Three. Suffice to say, Walker-Brown made it safely back to Allied lines with all of his men, on February 15, 1945.

By Early March 1945 the first breaches of the Gothic Line were made by the Allies, in fierce fighting. By the following month the line had fallen, in what turned out to be the final Allied offensive of the Italian campaign.

Following the success of Operation Galia, Walker-Brown was promoted to major and awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for commanding the mission. His citation, written up by Major Farran, is a fitting testament to Walker-Brown’s courage and the achievements of those he commanded.

‘Although handicapped by deep snow and very rugged terrain, he marched his men over the mountains, attacking enemy transport columns, mortaring enemy held villages, mining roads and ambushing marching columns, until the enemy was compelled to reply with a total of ten thousand troops… Captain Walker-Brown succeeded in avoiding the enemy net and preserving his force intact by a display of unparalleled guerrilla skill and personal courage.’

‘During the months behind the lines, Walker-Brown’s force destroyed twenty-three enemy vehicles, carried out … mortar attacks on enemy billets and machine-gunned at short range two large columns of marching troops. This magnificent record would not have been possible in the mountains in winter if Walker-Brown had not led his men with such vigour, enterprise, and complete disregard for personal safety.

‘When ordered to withdraw, Walker-Brown successfully exfiltrated his party intact through the enemy lines to safety. It is considered that his activities were perfect examples of how guerrilla operations of this sort should be carried out.’

SAS Great Escapes 3 is published by Quercus on from today. To book tickets for Damien Lewis’s book tour, head to https://geni.us/SASGE3-EVENTS