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Great and Bold World War II Raids

Khalid Elhassan January 3, 2025 16 min

Raid - Italian frogmen in manned torpedoes launched from submarine near Alexandria Harbor, by Ivan Berryman. World Naval Ships

9. Getting Rid of Rommel

Erwin Rommel in North Africa. Bundesarchiv Bild

Operation Flipper was a daring British Commando raid to kill or capture Erwin Rommel. Had it succeeded in its objective, it would have nipped in bud the career of the Afrika Korps commander nicknamed the “Desert Fox” by his foes, and reduced him to a bit of historic trivia and footnote before he had cemented his reputation as a legendary commander. The raid was a prelude intended 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 retreat, and eliminate the Axis threat to Egypt and the Suez Canal once and for all. It was thought that eliminating the brilliant German general who had chased the British out of Libya and led the Axis to Egypt’s border would be a good start.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.