The old trimotor Junkers Ju52/3m transport aircraft
droned south just skimming the waves of the Mediterranean Sea, using the
darkness to avoid the roving British fighters based on the island of Malta.
Somewhere inside the
rattling fuselage of the Iron Annie,
a Luftwaffe Herferinnen; a member of
the Women’s Air Force, in a blue, open-necked uniform under a leather jacket to
keep out the biting cold, huddled deeper into a pile of sacks and boxes.
Terribly air-sick after two hours of enduring the shaking and the vibration caused
by the aircraft’s unsynchronized engines, Elsa was already regretting her
decision.
Elsa Frick had boarded a
train at Berlin and traveled in some comfort to Rome via Switzerland thanks to
the cozy arrangement the Reich had
with the Swiss. Smartly transferred to another train in the Italian capitol,
although with just enough time to send a brief, cryptic message on a postcard
to her friend Greta, she ended her long and tiring journey at a military
airfield in Southern Italy near the straits linking the mainland with Sicily,
where she was added to the manifest for an immediate flight to Tripoli,
together with half a dozen other replacements, several bags of mail and other
more mysterious, though no doubt vital, parcels and boxes. Elsa had never flown
in an aircraft before and it turned out that her stomach was not well-suited to
the activity, and her fellow passengers thought it quite amusing to see an air
force auxiliary throwing up. At least it took their minds off the distinct
possibility that they were likely to end up in the drink after being riddled by
British bullets and cannon shells.
The proposition Thomas Kolb
had dangled before Elsa that night barely a week before at Schloss Wewelsburg
had been the putting into action of a scheme devised by the Abwehr to assassinate General Charles de
Gaulle. As the self-proclaimed leader of the Free French forces, after having
escaped to England after the fall of France in 1940, de Gaulle had already been
sentenced to death, in absentia by a
French military court for treason. There were many Frenchmen who saw the
general as a traitor rather than a patriot, and the Abwehr was keen to exploit these rifts in Allied solidarity while
the rival SD, for the moment, seemed to have less interest in the
matter.
At last the transport
aircraft bumped down at Castel Benito airfield near Tripoli, and thankfully
Elsa disembarked, her dignity in tatters and her legs wobbly. She was given
little time to collect herself before she found herself sitting next to an
Italian driver in the cab of a dusty, overloaded Lancia 6-ton truck moving
slowly eastward along the coastal road towards Benghazi. The convoy she was a
part of was fortunate to avoid being caught up in the activities of the British
SAS and Long Range Desert Group
raiders who were active in the area at that time. They crossed the bridge at
the Wadi Tamet nervously but safely. The night before the airfield at Tamet had
been attacked and a number of parked bombers destroyed by daring raiders
placing timed bombs onto the tails of the aircraft, and they could see the
Italian Ghiblis reconnaissance
aircraft flying over the low hills to the south in search of the fleeing
British. There were even raids by British patrols along the coastal road at
night, with machine-gun fire poured into the roadside bivouacs and supply
dumps. As a result, everybody seemed nervous and trigger-happy. There was an
enforced halt at Nofilia for no apparent reason with the truck being directed
to the side of the road by a military carabiniere.
In the rear areas the Germans seemed to be heavily outnumbered by their
Italian allies. Elsa grew hot and bored sitting in the cab, unlike her driver
who was soon settling back to catch up on his sleep. As nothing seemed to be
happening, she clambered down from the truck to stretch her legs and take a
closer look at the white, sandy beach stretching out along the shore to her
left. In the peaceful, sparkling blue-green waters of the Gulf of Sirte there
was a compagnia of Italian bersaglieri splashing about happily. Their
naked bodies, apart from their deeply tanned legs, heads and lower arms, were a
stark white. Their clothes, weapons and sun-helmets, with their distinctive
decoration of black cockerel feathers, lay in disorderly piles on the sand
where they had been discarded.
On a whim, Elsa raced down
to join them, stripping off her uncomfortable uniform as she went. She was
naked by the time she dived headlong into the surf. At first her presence went
unnoticed as she happily swam and dived and even exchanged splashes with the
men closest to her. Finally, one infantryman noticed that the figure almost
waist deep in water next to him was not one of his fellow soldiers but a
beautiful woman. Rubbing the water out of his eyes in disbelief, he beheld the
vision as only an Italian can. Playfully, Elsa scooped up twin handfuls of
water and drenched him, laughing. Soon she was surrounded by a score of
female-deprived soldiers gesturing to her and urging her to likewise splash
them. All too soon, an officer, himself stark naked, blew a shrill call on his
whistle and reluctantly the company waded ashore. Obeying the command herself,
Elsa ran dripping out of the surf and onto the sparkling white beach, shaking
her head vigorously to dry her blonde hair as she went. The soldiers were
presented with a magnificent view of their uninhibited and unexpected visitor,
and watched appreciatively as she recovered her discarded clothes. Clutching
them to her chest, Elsa returned to her transport where her now wide awake
driver, as well as admiring the view, was tooting his horn to indicate that
they had to move off.
Slamming the door behind
her, Elsa waved and blew kisses to the bersaglieri
company who enthusiastically responded in kind, then put on her clothes
awkwardly in the confines of the cab, much to the distraction of the driver.
As they motored east
however they noticed an increase in the amount of traffic coming from the
opposite direction. In the late afternoon, after rounding Agedabia at the base
of the Djebel Akhdar: the ‘Bengazi Bulge’
as the British called it, the convoy moved north towards Benghazi itself,
but the town was already burning. The outlying Arab quarter had been much
damaged by bombing while the port was wrecked, both by the RAF and German
demolitions. The Germans and their Italian allies were being bundled back
westwards by the British, and before Elsa could reach her destination at the
base of the Jebel Akhdar (the Green Mountain) it had been captured by the
enemy. Stocks of fuel and ammunition that had been brought over from Sicily at
great cost were destroyed, and the German Afrikakorps
had the job of holding off the confident enemy while the Italians and the
German rear-area units pulled back towards El Agheila, with the local Senussis
people once again caught in the middle of a battle. These Bedouin tribes had
long detested the Italians: their colonial masters since before the First World
War, and were happy to welcome the arrival of the Allies, especially after
their exiled leader in Egypt, Idris Al-Mahdi, had been recognized by the
British as Amir and promises of
self-rule had been made after the Axis forces had been thrown out. The
organization Idris led, the Sufi
Brotherhood, formed a century before in Arabia, had originally been a purely religious movement, but more
recently had become political in its nationalistic aims.
Meanwhile, small German
garrisons left behind in the retreat at Bardia, Sollum and Halfaya Pass were
quickly surrounded and obliged to surrender.
It was just another chapter
in the see-saw war between General Erwin Rommel: the Desert Fox, and a succession of lackluster British generals. It was
not territory that they needed to conquer, but destruction of the striking
power of their foe. And in the desert it was the tank that ruled supreme.
It was at El Agheila, after
two more days of confusion that Elsa finally caught up with the unit she had
been brought to Africa to join.
At the start of the war the
Abwehr had organized a specialist
unit of troops to undertake clandestine missions behind enemy lines. Known as Brandenburg, various elements had
already fought successfully in Poland and the Balkans. Now, with the Germans
becoming involved in North Africa, an Afrika
Kompanie had been formed to work in that theatre of operations. Part of the
unit, under the command of Oberleutnant von
Koenan, had been landed in Tripoli the previous October. Since then, they had
begun to do some useful work behind the British front lines spotting enemy
build-ups and counting vehicle numbers. Made up of men from former German
possessions in East or Southern Africa, Palestinian Germans and one-time
members of the French Foreign Legion, as well as the necessary experts in
communications, its members were quickly adapting to the harsh conditions in
the desert.
Having been forced back,
together with the rest of the army, to a new base, their role was now being
reevaluated.
The German army as a whole
had little experience of desert fighting before 1941, unlike the British and
the French who both had a long history of colonial involvement in the area. Since
the 1920s, for example, British units had traveled and mapped much of the
Sahara, often as a form of recreation; producing ‘going maps’ which detailed the types of terrain and its
suitability for various kinds of transport. This experience had been found to
be invaluable when it came to fighting the Axis powers using units such as the
Long Range Desert Group, and the Germans had thus a lot of ground to make up
before they could begin to match their opponents.
Despite this huge
disadvantage, which extended beyond mere desert know-how to equipment, tactics and logistics, a more ambitious
mission had already been assigned to the still small Afrika Kompanie.
Elsa was not welcomed
warmly, as she was not the only complication for their operations early in
1942, but at least the unit was learning some lessons, and so Elsa was provided
with an Italian desert field-blouse to wear in place of the hot European Luftwaffe uniform which had been her ‘cover’ so far. The Italians might not
have been as effective in combat as the Germans, but their uniforms, including
the sahariana had been developed
after much time spent in North Africa. Almost as popular, and especially useful
for a unit destined to spend much of their time behind enemy lines, was the Luftwaffe’s tropical uniform, which
closely resembled British khaki in
color and cut. Now suitably kitted
out, all Elsa had to do was await the go-ahead for the task ahead.
It was to be a
breathtakingly ambitious mission. Alongside Elsa, the contingent included two
male Abwehr agents, also recently
flown out from Germany, whose job it was to infiltrate Cairo and radio back
information on Allied preparations and strength to their German masters. Now
that the British had recaptured Benghazi, it was no longer possible to simply
parachute them into Egypt, as had been originally intended as it was beyond the
range of all suitable aircraft, and so a long overland journey had to be
planned and undertaken. At the same time, Elsa was to also travel to the
Egyptian capital to make contact with the man who could assassinate General de
Gaulle.
A military associate and
friend of the French general before the war, his name was Reny Parelle, and he
had been posted to Syria, then a French Protectorate, in 1939, and had, for
personal and political reasons, sided with the pro-German Vichy Government
rather than de Gaulle’s embryonic Free French. He had been assumed killed when
Allied and Free French forces had invaded and taken over Syria in May 1941 but
had resurfaced later that year in Egypt and been persuaded, with the inducement
of a large cash payment, to eliminate de Gaulle.
Parelle was prepared to
meet a German representative in Cairo, where some of the payment he had been
offered would change hands. He would then travel back to Tripoli and from there
to Algeria where he would announce a conversion to de Gaulle’s cause and from
there to London where he was confident of again getting close enough to de
Gaulle in order to assassinate him. It was a typically wild Abwehr scheme, and it was Elsa’s task to
lubricate the negotiations in Cairo
after handing over an amount in gold. Parelle was understandably paranoid about
betrayal and it was felt that a female with a genuine swastika brand on her
breast would be proof enough of her credentials. The fact that Elsa spoke
perfect French, and passable English, was a bonus.
The operation was codenamed
Salam.
Elsa had found herself
attracted to the affair partly because of the sheer romance of the proposition as much as Thomas Kolb’s insistence that
it was an operation vital to Germany, and one, moreover, which required Elsa’s
particular talents. The fact that the
mission was a huge gamble at best and would involve her in great personal risk
did not enter her head.
Hauptmann von Steffens, an experienced Africa-hand, was to be the
military leader the group, with Hauptmann
Count Almasy the man responsible for getting the party to the Nile and
back. Count Almasy was one of the few Germans who had traveled in the Sahara before
the war. A wiry sun-burnt veteran, he was hardly typical of the Prussian
aristocrat. He had profited greatly from the Nazis in the years prior to the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. Hitler
had vigorously pursued and supported any number of crackpot schemes of his own creation or those suggested by others
in the Party, and Count Almasy had received generous payment to lead an
expedition into parts of Syria and the Palestine Territories in search of the
ancient Ark of the Covenant. Not surprisingly, nothing came of the venture, but
it was typical of a host of similar officially sanctioned ventures in the
Middle East, Asia Minor and beyond. Substantial university backed and
government funded digs sprang up
overnight to find evidence of what were in reality little more than myths. The
Holy Grail was another of a number of relics that consumed the Nazis. At least Count Almasy was spared
involvement in some of the other more occult
researches which the Nazis became
obsessed with. The department responsible for such activities was the Deutsches Ahnenerbe, or German Ancestral
Society. With its headquarters at Dahlem, outside Berlin, its main
responsibility was to prove the superiority of Aryan Man and collect Germanic antiquities for study and display.
After the war it was estimated that such fringe
activities cost the German treasury more money than the Americans spent
developing the atomic bomb. But Count Almasy was hardly complaining. Such work
financed his other, more practical, activities.
Von Steffens interviewed
Elsa in his tent on her second day in the Brandenburg
camp. He was not impressed by the presence of a woman in the party.
“I can take care of myself,
captain,” Elsa informed him, although if that reassurance was intended to
convey her military competency or her ability to defend herself from the
attentions of his men, she did not specify.
Von Steffens knew nothing
of Elsa. To him she was just one more potential source of trouble for an
expedition he already knew had the odds of success stacked against it.
“Your presence alone will
not be good for morale,” he insisted.
“Disciplining your men is
your job,” Elsa pointed out to him. “But if it is of any consolation: I only
fuck officers.”