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.
Roy Bridgman-Evans (second from left) with fellow members of 2SAS in 1944
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.
An SAS training march ahead of the operations in Sicily
SAS jump training ahead of the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily
Troops of the British 5th Infantry Division passing bomb-damaged buildings in Syracuse on the opening day of the invasion of Sicily, July 10, 1943
Allied troops are seen departing a ship as they arrive for the start of the invasion of Sicily
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.
Roy Bridgman-Evans in later life in ceremonial livery
The grave of Sergeant Robert Lodge, aka Rudi Friedlander. He was killed in August 1944 during a sortie in France
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.
Despite the disaster of Operation Chestnut, the SAS did have success elsewhere in Sicily. They captured hundreds of German soldiers. Above: Some of the captured men
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.
British men on an Allied warship during Operation Husky in July 1943
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.
A view of Agrigento, near the southern coast of Sicily, Italy, July 10, 1943
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.
Historian Damien Lewis at the launch of his latest book, SAS Great Escapes Four, at the Churchill War Rooms in Westminster last month
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.
Damien Lewis’s latest book, SAS Great Escapes Four, is published by Quercus Books and is available now
