Horace Stokes with son Peter holding his journal (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster / Express)
As he lay dying of cancer in his bed Sergeant Horace Stokes told his son Peter to go into his wardrobe and look for a “little box”.
Inside was a battered old journal containing a truly remarkable story he had kept secret from everyone apart from his wife Joan for almost half a century.
Peter, who had recently graduated as a RAF officer at the time, struggled to believe what he read in his father’s memoir.
He says: “My father died far too young, he was only 66. My sister phoned me and told me he only had two weeks left to live but had not wanted me to know he was dying.
“At the time I had just finished (a stint) serving with the Army, so I went home and spent the last two weeks of his life with him, and in the middle of the night he said, ‘I went you to go to the back of my wardrobe, there is a little box in there, open it’.
“I went to the box and opened it, and in there was a battered old journal. He said I want you to read that.
“I then had the great privilege of talking about some of that stuff in the last two weeks of his life, and then he died. Like many of his generation writing books about what he had done was just not his thing.
“So none of his family knew anything about his wartime service.”
His story features in the latest book by bestselling war historian Damien Lewis, SAS Great Escapes Five, which is out now.
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Peter Stokes holding a photo of his father Horace and the journal revealing his story (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
Horace was born in 1921 and was one of 11 kids who grew up in a two-bedroom house in Small Heath, a tough area of Birmingham where the Peaky Blinders street gang was founded, which inspired the BBC drama starring Cillian Murphy.
His journal revealed when the war broke out he volunteered to join the Royal Artillery regiment of the Territorial Army and while he was away on TA duties he was mobilised, at the age of 17.
Shortly after this he joined 12 Commandos in Northern Ireland where he met a young officer he served without throughout the war, Captain Philip Pinckney, who was a real maverick.
After going on missions in northern France they took part in a raid on the Island of Sark that prompted Hitler’s famed Commando Order – to execute all secret agents and special forces soldiers captured behind enemy lines – which we’ll return to later as a key part of Horace’s story.
The duo were part of a small number of men from the Small Scale Raiding Force to then join Bill Stirling, the brother of David, the founder of the SAS, in North Africa.
This group became 2 SAS commanded by Bill to carry out raids in Italy. One of these, codenamed Operation Speedwell, saw 13 men in two teams parachute deep behind enemy lines in September 1943 to destroy the enemies’ rail network.
Horace was in the team commanded by Pinckney that dropped almost 200 miles north of Rome to take out the Bologna to Florence, and the Boretta to Pistoia lines.
Sergeant Horace Stokes in uniform during WW2 (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
When they jumped out of their plane a shroud of mist covered the landing site, making it difficult to see and a sudden gust of wind slammed Horace into the chimney of a house, leaving him dangling there with a shooting pain in his groin.
After hitting the release button on his chest harness and sliding down the roof to the ground, he released he was seriously injured.
He ignored the pain to escape with two comrades and a week later they successfully blew up a railway tunnel near Vernio.
Pursued by the enemy and knowing his injury was slowing them down, Horace left his friends and disguised as a local, found a bicycle and cycled about 150 miles to the Vatican in Rome – with a ruptured groin – where he was taken in by a priest and a young Yugoslav surgeon saved his life by amputating his left testicle.
After recovering Horace trained local resistance fighters and went on raids with them, spending seven months on the run operating behind enemy lines – until he was captured and handed to the Gestapo for interrogation.
He knew he would be executed if he told them who he was, so he claimed to be an escaped POW. His captors tortured and beat him daily for weeks, but Horace did not break.
During the next year he was sent to three POW camps, one in Italy and two in Germany, escaping each time and in May 1945 making it home across the Channel.
Peter, 64, who retired from the RAF Regiment in 2002 as a Wing Commander, says: “I found it unbelievable when I read his journal. I wanted to know why he had never told anyone and he said, ‘we just did not do that. We signed the Official Secrets Act, there were people that helped me who I would not want to get into trouble. It was not my job to tell the story, it was my job to keep it a secret’.
“I would have liked to have had longer to explore that part of his life, but when I have thought about it since I don’t think he wanted to. I think sitting down and talking about it would have brought back too many memories.”
He adds: “Some of the stuff in there I struggled to believe was true. Who cycles 150 miles behind enemy lines to be taken in by a priest in Rome? How could that have happened? But it was all true.”
Horace Stokes with son Peter later in life (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
eter, who has three children and two step-children, and lives in Truro, Cornwall, says he only knew his father as a publican in Birmingham. Immediately after the war Horace also worked as a greengrocer and met his wife Joan during one of his delivery rounds.
Peter adds he was proud to receive three commendations and a MBE for his own military service, but this was always tinged with slight “guilt” that his father was never decorated for his unrelenting bravery, which he attributes to his association with Pinckney, whose unorthodox tactics were frowned on by high command.
Damien says: “Horace was an absolutely extraordinary figure who was involved in some of the seminal moments of special forces history but then was repeatedly unbreakable from Operation Speedwell and the physical tribulations he went through to his capture, and then the repeated escapes.
“He was unbreakable and super human.”
He adds: “Very much tends to be made of senior ranks in history and very little tends to be written about NCOs and those below that rank, and Stokes is a mind-blowing story abut overcoming seemingly impossible odds.
“To have gone through all of that and not be decorated just beggars belief, it really does.”
Only being granted access to Horace’s journal allowed him to tell his story in his latest SAS Great Escapes book.
Damien says: “I first came across Stokes 14 years ago when I wrote The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and I knew about him through the raid on Sark and the Commando Order, but like with so many of these I could not have written Horace Stokes’s story without Peter finding the manuscript.
“You know there is a great story there but unless you can see some source material it is impossible to bring it to life these days.”
*SAS Great Escapes Five by Damien Lewis (Hardback, £22) is out now. For details and tickets to Damien’s book tour visit geni.us/DamienLewis_Events