Page 233 - They Also Served

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Roy Farran 1940.
The son of an RAF warrant officer, Roy
Alexander Farran was born in India on
2nd January 1921. Educated in Shimla,
he was commissioned from Sandhurst in
1940 into the 3rd Carabiniers (Prince
of Wales’s) Dragoon Guards. Posted to
the 3rd Hussars, he took part in some
of the early battles against the Italians in
the Western Desert. During the German
invasion of Crete, Farran was wounded
and captured leading a counter-
attack, for which he was awarded the
MC. He subsequently escaped from a hospital in Greece and, with a small group, commandeered a small boat which they set sail for Egypt. Eventually picked up by a British destroyer, he was awarded a bar to his MC.
By January 1942, he was ADC to Major-General Jock Campbell VC, the commander of the 7th Armoured Division. Rushing to a meeting, and urged by the general to go ever faster, the car Farran was driving overturned, and Campbell was killed. Wounded again in early 1943, he returned to the desert and joined 2nd SAS. Operating behind enemy lines, he was awarded a third MC. During the Italian campaign, he was ordered not to take personal control of troops on the ground, but hitched a flight on an American resupply plane and ‘fell out’ of the aircraft while helping to drop supplies to his men. Raising the Battaglione Alleato, comprising an SAS squadron, partisans, and escaped Russian Wehrmacht deserters, the force, again against orders, attacked a German divisional headquarters in Albania. Expecting to be court-martialled, Farran was awarded the DSO and US Legion of Merit.
Serving as second in command of the 3rd Hussars in Palestine immediately after the war, he was then posted to Sandhurst as an instructor. However, bored of peacetime soldiering, he volunteered for secondment to the Palestine Police Force. After the kidnap and murder of two British sergeants, three covert teams were created to give the enemy ‘a bloody nose’. Despite opposition from professional policemen and the fact the British already intended to leave Palestine, the groups operated undercover with ruthless effectiveness. On 6th May 1947, a teenage activist, Alexander Rubowitz,
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