On this day 16th November 1941.

 On this day 16th November 1941.

British Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Keyes led the daring Operation Flipper commando raid to either kill or capture Rommel at his Afrika Korps Headquarters at Beda Littoria.

 He was mortally wounded and the other commandos were forced to withdraw. Only two men made it back, the rest being either killed or captured.

 Keyes would be awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross even though the raid was doomed from the start -Rommel was not even at Beda Littoria.

The overall failure of Operation Flipper was put down primarily to a lack of pre-raid intelligence. 

Rommel actually made little use of the headquarters at Beda Littoria, having stayed there on only two separate occasions, and he never stayed for the night.

 At the time of the raid, he was at his forward headquarters at Gazala, 33 miles from Tobruk, planning yet another attack on that besieged outpost.

He had just returned to Africa that afternoon after attending a birthday celebration in his honor two days earlier in Rome. 

When he did visit Beda Littoria with his staff, a house was reserved for his use which became known locally as the Rommel-Haus, and Arab intelligence sources assumed that Rommel lived there on a regular basis.

 On the night of the attack, the villa was occupied by a lowly supply officer.

Rommel himself appreciated the daring of Operation Flipper, sending his personal chaplain, Rudolf Dalmrath, to conduct the funeral for Keyes and four German soldiers killed in the fighting.

 He also ordered that the captured British commandos be treated as prisoners of war, even though the men were not in uniform and their status as legal combatants was highly questionable.

 Dalmrath drove over rain-soaked roads and through flooded wadis for 36 hours to make the service, arriving just 10 minutes before the funeral was set to begin. 

The chaplain preached a sermon calling for peace and understanding between nations and consecrated the five graves, Keyes’s being located farthest on the right.

 Wreaths were laid by an officer of the German general staff, the honor guard presented arms and fired three salvos, and crosses of cypress wood were erected over the graves. 

For his part in the disastrous but ambitious raid, Keyes was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.