5. British Commandos Tried to Kill Rommel in 1941
On the night of November 17-18, 1941, British Commandos carried out Operation Flipper, a daring raid to try and capture or kill Erwin Rommel. The raid sought to disrupt the Axis command on the eve of Operation Crusader, an ambitious British offensive intended to lift the siege of Tobruk and relieve a mostly-Australian garrison that had been cutoff and surrounded there during a British retreat. Had it succeeded, Operation Flipper would have nipped the career of the “Desert Fox” in the bud, and reduced him to a historic footnote, before he had established himself as a warfare legend.
59 Commandos set out from Alexandria in two submarines on November 10th, 1941, but one submarine ran aground, and the other encountered such rough seas that only 7 raiders made it ashore. They met up with an advance team that had been parachuted in earlier, and pressed on to Rommel’s HQ, a villa in the Libyan town of Bayda. They struck at midnight, August 17th, in a perfectly executed attack, only to discover that they had been fed bad intelligence: Rommel was not at the HQ, but in Italy, where he had been since November 1st. He would not return until November 18th – the day after the raid. Only 3 German supply officers and an enlisted soldier were killed, and a fuel depot was destroyed. In exchange, the raiders were wiped out, with only two managing to evade pursuit and reach British lines 37 days later. All the rest were either killed or captured.
