Geoffrey Keyes (VC)
Geoffrey Keyes (VC)
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Geoffrey Keyes (VC)

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Geoffrey Keyes (VC)

Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Charles Tasker Keyes, VC, MC (18 May 1917 – 18 November 1941) was a British Army officer of the Second World War and a recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest award that can be made to British and Empire forces for gallantry in the face of the enemy. At the time he was the youngest acting lieutenant-colonel in the British Army.

Keyes was the oldest son of Admiral of the Fleet Roger Keyes, 1st Baron Keyes, a British naval hero of the First World War and the first Director of Combined Operations during the Second World War. He attended King's Mead School in Seaford, Sussex, then Eton and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.

Keyes was a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club.

Geoffrey Keyes was commissioned into the Royal Scots Greys. He saw action at Narvik and was later attached to No. 11 (Scottish) Commando, which was sent to the Middle East as part of Layforce.

Following the Allied invasion of Syria on 8 June 1941, No. 11 Commando was sent to lead the crossing of the Litani River in Lebanon, fighting successfully against troops of the French Vichy régime, during which Keyes played a leading part. In this operation, Keyes earned the Military Cross. Following the action, 11 Commando returned to Cyprus, then to Egypt in August 1941, where the unit was left in limbo. Keyes, who had assumed command of the unit after his commanding officer, Colonel Richard Pedder, was killed during the Litani River offensive, was authorised to retain 110 volunteers as a troop in the Middle East Commando.

In October–November 1941, a plan was formulated at Eighth Army headquarters to attack Axis headquarters, base installations and communications. One objective was the assassination by a Commando team of Erwin Rommel, the commander of the Axis forces in North Africa. The raid was intended to disrupt enemy organisation before the start of Operation Crusader. Operation Flipper was led by Acting Lieutenant-Colonel Keyes with his superior, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Laycock, joining as an observer. Keyes, who had been present throughout the planning stage, selected the most hazardous task for himself: the assault on the supposed headquarters of the Afrika Korps in a house near Beda Littoria. Following a botched landing by submarine, where over half the raiding party and their equipment failed to get ashore, the men endured an exhausting approach in torrential rain.

Keyes tried to enter the house but was confronted by a sentry. Keyes struggled in the doorway with the sentry until the guard was shot by Keyes' second-in-command. Surprise lost, Keyes, his second-in-command and a sergeant entered the building. Keyes felt faint and collapsed. Shortly after a confused period inside the house Keyes's body was carried outside by his men and left. The official version is that Keyes opened the door to a nearby room, found Germans inside, closed it again abruptly, reopened it to hurl in a grenade and was shot by one of the Germans. Only one round was fired by the Germans during the raid on the HQ. Another possible explanation for this was that his fellow Commando Captain Robin Campbell fired several rounds at the sentry, one of which probably hit Keyes and led to his death a few minutes later.

The men retreated to a position from which they were later taken prisoner. The second-in-command also had to be left since he was shot in the leg by one of his own men. On Rommel's orders, Keyes was buried with full military honours in a local Catholic cemetery. It was later ascertained that the house was not Rommel's HQ but a supply centre that he seldom if ever visited; he had been in Italy at the time of the attack. Despite the debacle, Keyes was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, the citation read:

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