Vladimir Peniakoff, perhaps history’s oldest lieutenant, was the leader of Popski’s Private Army. Note his artificial left hand.

Darkness veiled the two-mile-wide Strait of Messina separating Sicily from Italy as a convoy of ships carrying elements of General Bernard L. Montgomery’s British Eighth Army prepared to launch the first invasion of Adolf Hitler’s vaunted Festung Europa (Fortress Europe). It was September 3, 1943.

In the spearhead of Montgomery’s force would be a curious outfit known to the British high command as Popski’s Private Army. Its dynamic leader was forty-six-year-old Vladimir Peniakoff, a Belgian citizen of Russian origin. His unit’s mission in southern Italy was to infiltrate behind German lines, identify enemy formations, and determine their strengths.

Born to wealth, Peniakoff had been privately tutored until entering St. John’s College in Cambridge, England, during World War I as a self-styled “precious intellectual prig with high scientific ambitions, and conscientious objections to the war.” However, he left Cambridge, enlisted as an artillery private in the French Army, was badly wounded on the Western Front and invalided out of the service.

Peniakoff trained as an engineer in civilian life, but found no satisfaction in a series of jobs he considered to be boring. In 1924, he settled in Egypt and spent many years manufacturing sugar products. Meanwhile, he became fond of the endless desert and regularly drove around the trackless wasteland in a seemingly indestructible Model A Ford nicknamed Pisspot.

After war broke out and the British army began battling Italian forces in the Libyan desert of North Africa in mid-1940, Peniakoff rushed to the headquarters of the Army of the Nile in Cairo, Egypt, and volunteered to fight. Although desperate for “bodies,” as the British military called its soldiers, Peniakoff was rejected: too old, too flabby, too many nagging ailments.

Undaunted, the resourceful Peniakoff located a sympathetic British medical officer who, by adroit “doctoring” of a few records, converted him from a physical reject to a rugged human specimen. Perhaps because Peniakoff spoke Arabic and Italian fluently and had an intimate knowledge of the North African desert, he was commissioned a second lieutenant.

Because British headquarters in Cairo had difficulty spelling his name, he became popularly known there as Popski. His first assignment was to recruit a company of Senussi tribesmen who inhabited the desert, and to harass the enemy. Perhaps the oldest combat officer for his modest rank in the British Army, Popski plunged into his task with typical alacrity and ingenuity. He began to create an intelligence network and, along with twenty-four Senussi and a British sergeant, established a command post behind Italian lines.

Popski’s primary source of intelligence was gained from the Arabs who had been given menial jobs in Italian headquarters and messes. These servants were dedicated to the British because they were treated with contempt by Italian officers, who discussed military plans openly, unaware that the Arabs spoke and understood Italian. At various headquarters, secret documents were left lying around in the open; the Arabs read them and relayed their contents to Popski.

Periodically, Popski led nighttime raids across the vast desert to blow up Italian fuel and ammunition dumps. These hazardous excursions were led by the lieutenant in his venerable Pisspot, which eventually broke down and was given burial rites in the desert.

In August 1942, Popski was called back to Cairo and instructed to form a company-sized unit of British personnel. It was called the Number 1 Long Range Demolition Squadron. Soon that designation was changed to Popski’s Private Army in official records at Middle East Headquarters in Cairo.

Traveling in jeeps with mounted machine guns and carrying extra containers of food and large amounts of explosives, Popski’s raiders roamed behind enemy lines to gain intelligence, blow up enemy installations, and ambush small units.

Now, after General Montgomery’s spearheads went ashore in southern Italy against minimal opposition, Popski and his men rapidly infiltrated enemy lines and set up a base in a town that contained a commercial central telephone exchange for the entire region. Giving himself the rank of colonel in the Italian Army and a phony name, Popski used the exchange to telephone various enemy units and spoke to Italian officers in their native tongue. He demanded answers to many questions, and in nearly all instances, he received detailed replies.

Popski was especially eager to pin down the locations and strength of German units in the region, and the Italian officers provided him with that top-secret information on the telephone.

There was a lone exception—and a crucial one. None of the Italian officers knew the whereabouts or strength of the elite German 1st Parachute Division, which Allied intelligence thought was in southern Italy. So Popski was told by his superiors to find the “missing” German airborne outfit.

Popski hatched a wild scheme—and a dangerous one. He removed his British insignia and replaced it with one “borrowed” from an Italian prisoner. Then he pinned an Italian colonel’s insignia onto his uniform and put on an Italian officer’s headgear. Hopefully, none of the enemy would notice that the “Italian colonel” was clad in British shirt and trousers, which were roughly similar to those worn by Italian officers.

Leaving his men and jeeps behind, Popski reached the town of Gravina where a German headquarters was located. His scheme would depend on boldness; he had to convey the impression that he actually “belonged.” Should his Italian colonel masquerade be penetrated, Popski expected to be shot as a spy.

Assuming the air of purposeful endeavor, Popski bustled into the German headquarters. Because of his senior rank, German officers, who were unaware that at the moment Italian leaders were plotting to defect from their partnership with Adolf Hitler, treated him with a degree of deference. While the Germans went about their duties, the bogus Italian colonel meandered about the building at will.

Suddenly Popski’s eyes fell onto a document that sent a shiver of excitement through him: The ration list for the 1st Parachute Division, together with the town where the food was to be delivered. The list reflected the total number of men in the airborne outfit.

Popski cast furtive glances in each direction. No one seemed to be watching. So he quickly snatched up the ration list and stuffed it inside his shirt. Then he strolled as casually as possible toward the door of the building. All the way he felt his heart thumping furiously.

At the door, Popski gave his best imitation of an Italian salute to the two German guards and walked away, fighting off a nagging urge to look back to see if anyone was following him.

A few days later, Eighth Army elements, armed with the secret information they had been provided by Popski, were battling the 1st Parachute Division at Foggia, a major city near the eastern coast of Italy.

In the meantime, Vladimir Popski and his private army were driving northward ahead of Montgomery’s advancing force. They reconnoitered routes for British units, gained intelligence from Italian civilians, and launched hit- and- run attacks against German supply convoys.

During a shoot-out with the Germans halfway up the Italian boot, Popski’s luck ran out: his left hand was shot off. After a stay in the hospital, he demanded to rejoin his private army, but doctors recommended that he be given a medical discharge.

Popski would have none of that. Rather, he fled from the hospital and was soon back with his men battling the Germans. The steel hook he wore where his hand had been did not handicap him.

“Hell, I can shoot just as good with one hand as I could with two,” he said many times.