Inside the British Raid on Rommel

On the night of November 13, 1941, the British submarine Torbay, accompanied by the Talisman, broke the surface of the Mediterranean off the Cyrenaican coast of Libya and rolled violently in the running seas. Weather was bad, swells running higher than normal, and a stiff breeze painted the water with whitecaps. On Torbay's bridge, the officer of the deck scanned the dark African coast a half-mile away and saw the blinking signal of an Aldiss lamp cutting through the gloom. He motioned for the landing party on his submarine to assemble on the pitching, slippery deck and begin boarding a number of rubber dinghies. Most of his passengers were now thoroughly seasick. It was an inauspicious beginning to what would go down in history as one of the most famous commando raids in history—the attempted assassination of Lt. Gen. Erwin Rommel, the famed leader of Germany's Afrika Korps.