Strangest Surrender!!

Kyt · Nov 28, 2008

Whilst looking for something in Flight magazine, I came across the attached picture.

A little digging and the story emerged as below:

Malta Today

85-year-old Les Wright is back in Malta, 62 years after leaving the island and ending up in Lampedusa when he last flew in the Swordfish in June 1943.

Now he’s at the Malta Aviation Museum in Ta’ Qali, hosted by the non-governmental foundation that has spent hundreds of thousands of liri to get Malta’s winged history on the ground and into a hangar in Ta’ Qali.

It’s a labour of love that has been going on since 1996 – engineers and volunteers are reconstructing a genuine WWII Hurricane. In the room adjacent is the Swordfish, an unrecognisable metal skeleton waiting to be saved from its rusty twilight, brought over to Malta by the foundation from Canada. They will rebuild the Swordfish, probably back to flying condition, just as they are doing with the Hurricane they fished up from the Zurrieq seabed. Another hangar, a memorial for the aircraft involved in the air battle of Malta, will be inaugurated in September this year.

Wright is celebrating one of the least known stories in WWII history – the capture, practically by accident, of Lampedusa, the tiny Sicilian outpost northwest of Malta, when a RAF crew composed of gunner Les Wright, navigator Sgt Peter Tait, and pilot Sgt Sid Cohen flew out on a search for a German pilot.

Another Swordfish pilot, this time a Royal Navy officer who saw action in Palestine, is chatting with Les Wright. Ken Yale confesses to having been moved to tears to once again see the Swordfish back in Malta.
But Wright has a greater story to recount, and that is the surrender of Lampedusa’s 3,000 inhabitants and troops after a botched Air Sea Rescue flight over the Mediterranean.

“Searching for a German pilot, we took off from Hal-Far, we eventually spotted the fallen pilot, dropped emergency packs, reported his position and then started off again back to Malta.”

But on their return, with visibility dropping, problems cropped up. The Swordfish’s flight instruments started playing up. Over the intercom, Sid Cohen asked, “Does that look like Malta?”

In the distance, the crew noticed US Lightnings attacking what they assumed was Lampedusa – for months now, the Allies had been trying to soften up the small Italian island of Linosa, Pantelleria and Lampedusa.

Operation Corkscrew was the Allied invasion of the Italian island of Pantelleria on 10 June 1943. Following a ten-day bombardment, the Italian garrison surrendered when the British forces landed on the island. In fact, the Italian garrisons on other nearby islands quickly fell, clearing the way for the invasion of Sicily a month later, soon after followed by the coup that drove Mussolini away from Rome.

“So we knew it wasn’t Malta and we had the choice of landing on one of the three islands, but as far as we knew they were still in Italian hands despite the raid. We were completely disorientated. We tried to work out a way of how to fly from Lampedusa back to Malta, but the poor visibility and our instruments forced us to land on Lampedusa and take our chances as prisoners of war.”

On the ground however, Wright and his two co-pilots were prepared for capture. As soon as they landed they were approached by Italian officers. Wright swung the Vickers gun towards them but it proved unnecessary. “It turned out the entire island wanted to surrender, thinking that after the raid we had come to sort out things.”

The day was 12 June, 1943 – 62 years to the day – and Wright is now standing by the ‘trusty’ Swordfish that was to secure one of the first landings on Italian land for the Allied forces.

Ken Yale says it’s the first time he has ever met a RAF officer who flew a Swordfish, an unusual crew for the plane. The two talk animatedly about the joys of seeing so much of Malta’s wartime heritage under one roof.

After Lampedusa, Wright was never to set foot in Malta again until today. “In Lampedusa, the navigator and I decided to make an in-depth appraisal of our situation and we found we were 108 miles from Malta, and 85 miles from Tunisia, so we thought our best bet was Tunisia. It turned out all we had to do was turn west and follow the sun to get to Malta.”

Ken Yale laughs. “You know what… I’ve heard about four versions of that story.”
“Well, I tell you something,” Wright says. “There is only one version, and you will only hear the true version from me.”
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Kyt · Nov 28, 2008

and

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2001/12/28/bfraf28.xml

ON June 12 1943, Syd Cohen, a young RAF pilot from the East End of London, was piloting a Swordfish bi-plane back to his base on Malta when he mistakenly headed the wrong way. Low on fuel, he made an emergency landing on the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa. Whereupon 4,300 white flag-waving Italians promptly surrendered to him.

It was one of the most bizarre incidents of the Second World War. "Lampedusa Gives In to Sgt. Cohen!" was the front page headline on the Sunday Pictorial of June 13. "London Tailor's Cutter is now 'King of Lampedusa' ", said the News Chronicle.

The mass surrender that Cohen single-handedly accepted formed the first stepping stone in the capitulation of Axis Europe during the Second World War. The young pilot became a hero in the Jewish section of the East End and his adventure became the basis for a Yiddish musical play, The King of Lampedusa, which became a big hit.

And the oddities didn't end there. The film rights were sold, but the film was never made because the producer who bought them, Walter Sistrom, suffered a burst appendix and died on the plane taking him to Hollywood and Columbia Studios, where he hoped to produce The King of Lampedusa. No one knows what happened to the rights that he bought.

Now Syd Cohen's story has been picked up by Hollywood again. Arnold Schwartzman, a British Oscar-winning film-maker, is preparing a two-fold telling of Cohen's story in the forms of both a feature film and a documentary.

Schwartzman, 65, who won his Oscar for the Holocaust documentary Genocide in 1981, has spent the past five years researching the story of both Cohen and the musical play his escapade spawned. It has a particular resonance for him because, himself the grandson of an East End tailor, Schwartzman remembers being taken by his father to see the The King of Lampedusa at the Grand Palais Yiddish theatre in Whitechapel's Commercial Road in 1944.

"It was not until six or seven years ago, when I read something about it, that I realised it was based on a true story," he says. "I started digging into it, and the story of Syd Cohen and the musical based on him really is amazing. The rights to the story are not a problem because my version is based on what really happened."

He has pieced together the story from newspapers and from talks with Cohen's friends and colleagues and surviving members of the original cast of The King of Lampedusa. He hopes to have both films ready for release by June 2003, to coincide with the 60th anniversary of Cohen's remarkable conquering of Lampedusa.

Sydney Cohen was an orphan who became a tailor's cutter, working in the sweatshops of the East End and living with his sister Lily in a block of flats in Stoke Newington. In 1941, at the age of 20, he was called up and joined the Royal Air Force. Initially based at North Weald, near Epping, he then moved to an RAF base on Malta.

On the day he captured Lampedusa, he and his two-man crew, Sgt Peter Tait, the navigator, and Sgt Les Wright, the wireless operator and gunner, had taken off from the Malta base on a search-and-rescue mission after it was reported that a German plane had crashed into the Mediterranean.

"They didn't find anything and decided to head back, when their compasses started going haywire," says Schwartzman. "They didn't know it but they were heading away from Malta instead of towards it. They were running low on fuel when they saw the island of Lampedusa below them. At first they thought it was Malta but soon realised it wasn't. They saw a big runway so they had no option but to go in to land." Unknown to them, the Allies had been bombing the island extensively.

In interviews he later gave to the press, Sgt Cohen described what happened. "The plane had a fit of gremlins so we had to make for the nearest land," he said. "As we came down on a ropey landing ground we saw a burnt hangar and burnt aircraft around us. A crowd of Italians came out to meet us and we put our hands up to surrender but then we saw they were all waving white sheets shouting, `No, no. We surrender.' The whole island was surrendering to us.

"It was a bit of a shake-up but I put on a bold heart and asked to see the commandant. I was taken to the commandant's villa but an air raid started and everybody suddenly dashed from the room. I concluded that the nerves of my hosts were a bit jagged.

"They asked me to return to Malta and inform the authorities of their offer to surrender. They gave me a scrap of paper with a signature on it."

Sgt Cohen refuelled his plane and, with his crew, took off for Tunis, where he produced the Italians' surrender note.

The news of his coup and his nickname King of Lampedusa made him a hero in the East End's Jewish community and attracted the attention of SJ Charendorf, a Czechoslovakian-American journalist who was the London correspondent for the Jewish Morning Journal of New York.

Charendorf was on his way to the Ministry of Information to send off his story about Sgt Cohen when it struck him as wonderful material for a play. He went home, sat down and started to write The King of Lampedusa.

Presumably to avoid getting into legal tangles, he changed the name of Syd Cohen to Sam Kagan and gave him parents and a fiancee, but the story was based on Cohen's adventure.

In November 1943 Charendorf took it to Meier Tzelniker, an actor, producer and director who ran the Grand Palais Yiddish theatre in Commercial Road. Tzelniker commissioned some suitable music, wrote the lyrics and, with himself and his daughter Anna in the leading roles, gave the new musical play its world premiere on New Year's Eve.

At first it was not successful, but after Charendorf managed to get newspapers interested in the story, it became a huge hit.

The BBC broadcast it in English with Sydney Tafler in the title role and its popularity reached even the ears of William Joyce, better known to the British as Lord Haw-Haw for his nightly propaganda broadcasts from Berlin. "The Yids at the Grand Palais should not be laughing for much longer at the ridiculous play The King of Lampedusa because they are earmarked for a visit from the Luftwaffe," he ranted.

Syd Cohen finally got to see it when it was performed in Hebrew at the Hamatae Theatre in Haifa at the end of 1944 when he was on leave from Malta, but he never saw the London production.

Unlike the musical, his story did not have a happy ending. As Sgt Cohen was flying home to be demobbed on August 26 1946, his plane crashed in the Straits of Dover and the wreckage was never found.

"Apparently Syd was a bit of a daredevil who liked flying low over the sea, so maybe that had something to do with the crash," says Schwartzman. "We'll never know for sure."

This is the story told in the documentary - but Schwartzman's feature film will take some liberties to send audiences home happy.

"It would be too much of a downer to have the hero die at the end so I've altered things a little bit to allow Cohen to remain on Lampedusa after the war ends," says Schwartzman, who is still looking for an actor to portray the leading role. "Somehow I think it's very likely that if he had lived, Syd would have gone back there."
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Kyt · Nov 28, 2008

All About Jewish Theatre - The great success of The King of Lampedusa : London 31 December 1943

Antipodean Andy · Nov 29, 2008

Classic stuff. A rare man to encounter too - an RAF Stringbag pilot.

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Strangest Surrender!!

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