On February 10th, 1941, the most evil operation ever ordered by Winston Churchill was executed.
It was called Operation Colossus and it was the first ever British airborne operation.
The target? An aqueduct in Calitri, Italy, which supplied drinking water to not only
the Italian armed forces, but a large chunk of the Italian population as well.
This is the story about how Churchill, though personally backing Operation Colossus,
completely abandoned the men involved and left them to die even before the mission failed.
At the beginning of the war, Churchill didn’t imagine that airborne units would
be necessary for victory. It wasn’t until the Germans paved the way in
the skies during the Battle of France in 1940 that his eyes were opened.
In particular, during the Battle of Fort Eben-Emael in Belgium,
during which the Fallschirmjäger successfully assaulted and captured Fort Eben-Emael. They
flew on gliders and parachuted into the fortress and then used explosives and
flamethrowers to destroy its outer defenses. After successfully gaining control of the fortress,
the paratroopers held off Belgian counter-attacks on the bridges leading
to the fortress until they were able to link up with the German ground units.
The operation, along with a few others, was such a massive strategic success for the Germans,
it really changed the course of the rest of the war as the Allies realized they
needed to step up their air force game if they wanted to have any chance of winning.
It took no time at all for Britain to establish two airborne divisions along with several smaller
units. On June 22nd, 1940, Churchill ordered the War Office to put together a parachute
troop of 5,000 men. The War Office got to work on it right away but quickly ran into problems.
First, there weren’t enough gliders like the ones the Germans had used in all of Britain at the
time to support 5,000 parachute troops. Gliders were seen as vital because they are engineless,
make very little noise, and allow paratroopers to land in enemy territory undetected. And if
the Germans were already using them with great success, Britain needed them too.
But the problem was further exacerbated by the fact that Britain also didn’t
have enough aircraft suitable for transferring gliders from other places.
So even though 3,500 volunteers had been selected to train with the parachutes by August,
they only had enough aircraft and equipment to be able to train 500.
Nevertheless they got to work with what they had, training the 500 volunteers at the RAF
Ringway in Manchester. The RAF gave them Armstrong Whitworth Whitley medium bombers
to convert into appropriate aircraft for the new paratroopers. They also had engineers working on
designing gliders for the airborne units, but the gliders wouldn’t see combat until November 1942.
Still, the new paratrooper unit faced a host of problems throughout its training. Even though
the War Office was demanding that two airborne units be fully functional by 1943 at the latest,
they faced push-back from senior officers in the British Army who felt that it was a waste to have
500 able-bodied men training to be in a unit that wouldn’t see action for another two years.
Their concern was based on the imminent danger of an Axis invasion of Britain, during which
they would need all hands on deck. They believed that an airborne force could never have any real
effect on the outcome of the war. These attitudes bottlenecked a lot of the paratroopers’ training.
Additionally, British industry was struggling to keep up with the material demands of the
British Army, which meant that it was extremely difficult to get the
airborne unit the equipment it needed for sufficient training.
And to top it all off, there was no cohesive organization within the airborne unit. No one
knew who should be in charge of what and whether the unit should fall under the command of the Army
or the RAF. This caused many heated disputes between the War Office and the Air Ministry
and meant that the airborne forces couldn’t expand beyond the 500 men they already had.
By the early days of 1941 the British had a fully formed airborne unit,
No. 11 Special Air Service Battalion which had 350 paratroopers and officers ready for action.
But getting to that point hadn’t been easy.
No. 11 Battalion was formed from No. 2 Commando, a unit of the British
Army that had been selected to be converted into a parachuting unit.
The men of the unit struggled amidst rigorous training initially, with most failing because they
refused to jump for fear their parachutes wouldn’t deploy. Perhaps, it may have been smarter for the
British to convert a Royal Air Force unit instead of an Army unit, but that’s just our opinion.
It took some time, but the battalion eventually achieved readiness and they
were even able to do demonstrations for other members of the military come December 1940 and
they were ready for active duty, yet difficulty was never far off.
No. 11 Battalion was the only airborne unit ready for action by late-1940. While there
were other smaller airborne units, they were undertrained. And while there were RAF soldiers
training in parachuting, none had operational experience. Britain had no facilities overseas
equipped to take on an airborne battalion. So even though they were properly trained and ready
to go out in the field, there was nowhere for them to go. But they couldn’t just sit
around and wait for everyone else to catch up. Officers agreed that No. 11 Battalion needed to
carry out some kind of airborne operation. Otherwise, what had they been trained for?
They needed to do a sort of test run in order to understand the full range
of capabilities that airborne units could bring to the table,
even if they didn’t have all their ducks in a row regarding equipment and organization.
So the British military set its sights on Italy.
They decided to attack an aqueduct in the Tragino River in the Campania region of southern Italy.
The aqueduct was extremely important as it provided drinking water to the two million
residents of the Apulia province as well as to the port of Taranto. The port was of major
strategic importance as it held the main base of the Italian Navy, the Regia Marina.
The hope was that by damaging the aqueduct, the British could cut off the drinking supply to the
people who relied on it, thus damaging civilian morale. And, more importantly,
they hoped that it would damage the Italian war efforts in Albania and North Africa.
It was the perfect test for an airborne unit as the aqueduct was located too far away from the
sea for the Navy to reach it in time to stop the British if they were noticed. Additionally, the
aqueduct was too well-constructed for any aerial units to do the kind of damage they needed done.
They needed boots on the ground and to make that happen, they needed No. 11.
The mission was dubbed Operation Colossus, and for it, they assembled a small force of
38 men called the X-Troop. Besides the names of its members, there’s not much information
out there on who was part of it. What we do know is that it was made up of seven
officers and 31 other paratroopers, plus an additional 3 Italian-speaking interpreters.
X-Troop spent several weeks training for the operation starting in January
1941. This allowed time for the six Whitney bombers needed for
the mission to be converted to be able to drop parachutists. During training,
they built a life-size model of the aqueduct to practice conducting the assault with.
The X-Troop, unfortunately, lost one of its members during one practice run when he missed
the target and landed in a frozen pond, where he drowned before he was able to be rescued.
Still, despite all its setbacks, Operation Colossus was ready to go on February 7th,
1941. The plan was this: the X-Troop would take the Whitney bombers to Malta first and from there,
they would head to the aqueduct. While they flew to their target, two other bombers would
conduct a raid on a railway yard 60 miles north of the aqueduct in Foggia to create a diversion.
X-Troop was to be dropped at the aqueduct at 21:30, where they would demolish it before
heading 50 miles downriver to the coast, where the HMS Triumph, a submarine, would pick them up.
But that’s not how things went. Here’s what happened.
On February 7th, X-Troop took off for Malta in the Whitney bombers. They arrived without a hitch,
which was a success in its own right because they had to fly over German-occupied France.
They spent three days making the final preparations for the mission.
They were shown photos of the aqueduct, which had been taken during a reconnaissance mission
conducted by the RAF. In the photos, they learned that there were actually two aqueducts,
one larger and one smaller. This gave X-Troop pause because that wasn’t what
they had practiced with, but after discussing it, they felt it would be
better to just attack the larger aqueduct as that would do the most overall damage.
At 18:30 on February 10th, they took off from Malta and headed for Italy.
Each of the six Whitney bombers had one officer and five paratroopers. For all six aircraft,
the flight to the target was blessedly uneventful. They were blessed with clear skies and good
visibility the whole way. The leading plane dropped the first six paratroopers at 21:42,
500 meters away from the aqueduct. All six men landed with their equipment containers within
250 meters of the drop zone, and all the men in the following four aircraft did the same.
However, things soon began to go wrong when two of the planes were unable to
release their equipment containers because of ice that had formed on the release mechanisms.
And the sixth bomber missed the drop site entirely,
eventually dropping the men hours later in a valley two miles away from the aqueduct.
This was a major problem because the six men on that last bomber were Royal Engineer snappers
and it was their job to rig the aqueduct for the explosion. In fact, most of the explosives for
the operation were with them on that bomber. But for the men who made it to the aqueduct, there was
nothing to be done about it, so they got to work with the equipment and knowledge they had on hand.
But, wouldn’t you know it, they ran into yet another problem.
They had been told that the aqueduct was constructed using brick, when in fact,
it was made with reinforced concrete, meaning that it was going to be much harder to demolish it,
especially since they were short their demolitions experts and explosives.
The commander of the unit, Major T.A.G. Pritchard, ordered most of the explosives to be placed on the
western pier with the rest to be placed at the abutment, which supports the superstructure.
He hoped against hope that this would be enough to damage the aqueduct enough.
And at first, they believed they had succeeded. The bombs exploded at 00:30, cracking the aqueduct
in half and destroying a nearby bridge. All but one man, who had broken his ankle and stayed with
a local farmer, took off by 01:00. They split off into three groups and headed for the coast where
the submarine was supposed to be waiting, but all three groups were caught before they could arrive.
One of the groups had been spotted by another local farmer and alerted the police.
As the groups had dropped all but their personal weapons, they were severely
outnumbered when they were discovered and surrendered without putting up a fight.
The second group tried to resist capture but was easily overpowered and forced to surrender
as well. The final group was apprehended by a group of civilians and the men attempted to
fool them by pretending to be German soldiers on a field exercise. But when they couldn’t
pull out any German identity papers, they were handed over to the Italian police.
The men in all three groups were sent to a civilian prison in Naples before then being
transported to a POW camp. The only exception was one of the translators, who was Italian.
He was transported to Rome, where he stood trial for treason and was ultimately found
to be guilty. He was sentenced to death and was shot while at the Forte Brevatta military prison.
Now you may be thinking, “This is all terrible, but what makes it evil on Churchill’s part?”
Well, the intention of cutting off drinking water to millions of civilians aside,
he actually abandoned his own men to their fate.
Even though escaping by submarine had been part of the plan,
it was never going to happen, even if the groups had made it to the coast.
One of the bombers in charge of attacking the railway yard as a distraction had problems
with the engine after the raid and had to abandon the pilot had to abandon the aircraft.
He radioed Malta to let them know that he would be jumping,
not knowing that he was doing it at the exact spot of the rendezvous point.
Fearing that the Italians could have intercepted the message,
they canceled the pickup with no alternative given, completely abandoning the airborne unit.
To add insult to injury, the entire operation ended up being a colossal failure.
Sure, most of the X-Troop landed where they were supposed to and they were
able to detonate the aqueduct, but they were unable to do any lasting damage.
It took a relatively short amount of time for the Italians to fix the aqueduct, during with time,
locals were able to get their drinking water from a nearby reservoir. And as for hurting the Italian
war effort in North Africa and Albania, attacking the aqueduct did absolutely nothing. Operations in
both regions continued exactly as they were. The attack did damage morale and the Italians updated
their air raid precautions as a result, which stayed in place until they surrendered in 1943.
Most of the men from X-Troop remained in the POW camp for the remainder of the war. Three
of the paratroopers managed to escape and made it back to England in 1942,
where they joined the 1st Airborne Division.
Operation Colossus was heavily criticized by the British military,
both in the absent extraction and the fact they didn’t have accurate information about
the aqueduct until just days before the attack. Veteran and military historian Major
General Julian Thompson said that information would have been “hardly difficult to obtain.”
The one positive that came from the failure of the operation was the lessons the British military
took from it. There were big-picture lessons like the immense potential for airborne attacks because
of their flexibility and the ability to reach deep into enemy territory. But also smaller,
more specific lessons, like how the supply containers dropped with the paratroopers should
be made of metal instead of soft materials because they snagged and caused blockages.
All of these lessons were important because they informed future airborne operations,
operations destined to be more successful. One such mission was Operation Biting,
during which British paratroopers dismantled a German radar installation in France that had
been responsible for several German attacks on RAF bombers. Operation Biting was successfully
completed with very few British casualties, and they were later picked up by landing craft. None
of that would have been possible without what was learned from Operation Colossus.
Operation Colossus, though a relatively small-scale operation, left an indelible
mark on military history. It served as a blueprint for future airborne operations, demonstrating the
effectiveness of paratroopers in sabotaging enemy infrastructure deep within their territories.
Conversely, the failure of Operation Colossus boosted morale among Allied
forces as they saw what airborne raids had the potential to accomplish if done correctly.
Operation Colossus is often remembered fondly because it served as the blueprint
for countless successful airborne raids since.
What people don’t tend to remember is how Churchill ordered his men to be left behind,
essentially using them as an experiment and then discarding them after without a second thought.
But what do you think? Should we remember Operation Colossus as an example of Churchill’s
ruthlessness in the war, even against his own troops? Or should we remember it as an
unfortunate failure that led to better things? Also, do you think there could
have been another way to extract X-Troop after the submarine had been canceled?
If so, how could have been done? Tell us in the comments below!