The Rat Patrol

The Rat Patrol loses a member in combat. So, the British 8th Army assigns their desert expert - Sgt. Jack Moffitt of the Scots Greys - to the Rat Patrol to ensure the success of a crucial mission behind enemy lines. But, he must prove himself to a resistant Sergeant Troy, the American head of the unit. Moffitt tells Troy that the British 8th Army buried a cache of munitions and petrol at an abandoned oasis while retreating from the advancing Germans. Only his desert expertise can find the dune-covered location to destroy the stockpile before it falls into the enemy's hands. The Afrika Korps' Hauptmann Dietrich is also determined to find the rumored cache. Familiar with the Rat Patrol's tricks, he devises a trap to shadow them to the oasis, destroy them, and capture the supplies necessary for the upcoming German offensive. The Rat Patrol gets delayed by a broken axle, and, in the end, it is a race to see who will reach the supplies first.

During a desert battle, Hitchcock is badly wounded. Troy decides to risk taking him to a nearby German field hospital to save his life as their own hospital is too far away. Upon arriving at the hospital, he and Moffitt nearly pull off the masquerade, except for a paranoid patient - Captain Friedrich - who tells everyone they are American spies. No one believes him, but during the delay, the doctor notices a tattoo on Hitch's arm from Ft. Benning, Ga. Troy forces him, at gunpoint, to finish the operation. They escape in a hail of gunfire after the surgery.

The Rat Patrol gets itself captured as a prequel to capturing Africa Korps General Ernest von Helmreich. They plan to use the general to infiltrate and destroy a heavily guarded German ammunition depot to stop an upcoming attack. However, the general manages to attract the attention of a distant Nazi search party, and the Rat Patrol ends up trapped in a ravine, cut off by Capt. Dietrich's mobile squad. They construct a "fake panzer unit" of their own to escape, tricking the Germans into a retreat. They then make it to the largest of the Germans' ammo dumps and blow it.

Using his fluent German, knowledge of Arabian lore, and disguised as a German officer, Sgt. Moffitt infiltrates Colonel Schweiger's headquarters to decipher and destroy an ancient map detailing a lost oasis deep in the desert with an ancient water source. Meanwhile, Sgt. Troy must overwatch the mission with orders to kill Sgt. Moffitt if he is discovered and captured. This is, of course, precisely what then happens. Troy faces the decision to kill his comrade and friend or find some way to disobey his orders and rescue the mission.

The Patrol captures a German truck at the end of a partially destroyed convoy. In the process, though, Troy and Dietrich end up alone in the desert - a stand-off until Arab slave traders arrive and capture both, hauling them deeper into the southern desert on the first leg of the slave trail. Troy and Dietrich escape but are chained together and must make their way back to "civilization" through the heat, the sand, and the enemy - both enemies. They agree after both are nearly dead from exposure to cooperate. The truce ends when they arrive at Dietrich's column, but before they get down to the convoy, Troy trips, and Dietrich becomes unconscious. Troy frees himself, and Dietrich is picked up by his people. Troy rejoins Hitch, who has been driving along at the end of the column. They reach an oasis, and Troy places the explosives, which was their mission in the first place. The oasis blows up, and the Rat Patrol escapes.

A large Panzer unit has a map showing a strategic oasis occupied by the Eighth Armored Division. U.S. Intelligence wants the map exchanged for a phony one to show the oasis as empty, setting an ambush for the Panzers. Sgt. Griffin, a veteran map expert, accompanies Troy and his men into the German HQ. They enter the area at midnight, using bows and arrows for weapons, but Griffin has a heart attack picking the lock of a safe. The team is trapped in the commander's office. In the end, Troy bullies the "expert" into keeping up the effort until they complete the mission, after which Troy ends up endangering his own life to get Griffin out of the town.

Troy suffers a concussion from an explosion during a skirmish with the Germans. He ends up alone and lost in the desert. By the time he is found, he has a terrible case of sun blindness. Unknown to Troy, though, his "rescue" has been by a German unit pretending to be Americans, so they can coax Troy to tell him where the rest of the Rat Patrol is. Dietrich is the engineer behind this ploy. In the end, recovering from the sun blindness in the nick of time, Troy escapes.

The Patrol manages to ambush a German unit carrying US POWs. Three of these POWs are apparently out to kill each other. Sgt. Gribs, whose cowardliness caused his men to become captured, is fighting against Tex and Eddie, two privates who want revenge. Gribs bargains with Troy for protection, telling Troy that he has information vital to US Command about Nazi troop movements. Gribs parcels out slight hints of his "vital" information to keep himself safe. They start back to HQ, but one of the unit's jeeps breaks down. They continue to travel slowly across the desert until they can capture a German vehicle. It all ends in heroism or something close.

The Rat Patrol must destroy a very prized German radar station, clearing the way for an Allied bombing raid. The Rat Patrol receives a new, special kind of explosives to do it. Troy is apprehensive about carrying this dangerous cargo, which can explode with the slightest bump. Dietrich learns of the mission and tries to beat the Patrol to the area by utilizing an old Arabic legend of an unknown "trigh" (road) through the jebels (mountains). The Patrol is also in search of this trigh. But Moffitt gets them lost, and Dietrich beats them there. Troy then manages to plant some explosives -- and bluffs Dietrich out of the radar station by telling him that he's willing to die himself rather than let the station do its work.

Fanatical Arabs, wanting to end the war on their land and rid it of all infidels, simultaneously attack the Rat Patrol and the German convoy led by Dietrich. Both units are trapped in a small desert ruin, forcing them into an uneasy truce. One of the Germans, a liaison to the Arabs, tries to talk Dietrich into betraying the Rat Patrol to the Arabs, but he refuses. Later, the liaison attempts to go over to the Arabs himself, but they kill him. Dietrich and Troy construct a trap of their own, killing many of the Arabs and escaping.

Moffitt and Tully allow themselves to be captured to get information from Craig -- an American POW -- about Rommel's new battle plans. However, Marston, another POW, tells them that Craig died. However, Dr. Phillips, the camp medic, supposedly has some information about the plan. When the doctor treats Moffitt's arm, he puts the code name of the mission on the underside of the bandage: Operation Nachtigall. However, it soon becomes evident that either Phillips or Marston is a traitor, and it is up to the Patrol to figure out which, as they are both now giving the Patrol conflicting information.

An Arab convoy, disguised as Americans, traps and captures the Rat Patrol. The convoy's leader, Ned Cunningham, is an embittered American airman and hero turned traitor and gunrunner. He is about to sell Deitrich captured American weapons and equipment. He now sells to the highest bidder from his lavish desert compound, no matter which side. Ned feels that the Rat Patrol is costing him too much business and plans to eliminate them. But he then decides he likes the Patrol and will take them into the deal as partners if they cooperate. In the end, though, his duplicitous behavior causes his own death.

The Rat Patrol undertakes an ambitious mission: They must rescue an ailing French Resistance general from a Nazi stronghold. Tully and Moffitt transport the liberated general to a rendezvous at a German-held lighthouse. Hitchcock stands lookout, disguised as a German guard. However, Troy is held captive inside the lighthouse, betrayed by the lighthouse keeper Mathias, who wants the reward the Germans will pay for the general. Moffitt tries to reach him but ends up unconscious. In the ensuing fight, Mathias dies, and Troy manages to signal a trawler into the area to smuggle the general to safety.

German artillery traps 2000 Allied soldiers, and their only chance of rescue is an Allied armored attack. However, the necessary equipment can only reach them in time via an ancient Roman road now hidden by sand, a road only Moffitt's father can find. Moffitt's father's plane crashes enroute to its landing site. The Rat Patrol finds the burned-out plane and Moffitt's father missing. Moffitt wants to find him, but Troy insists their priority is to find the road themselves. Troy thinks the elder Moffitt must be dead, but Moffitt believes the Germans captured him. Moffitt escapes the team and rescues his father. The team saves them, and they find the road.

After each Allied bombing of their harbor, the Germans use Allied POWs to rebuild it. HQ sends the Rat Patrol to liberate 5,000 POWs and halt the harbor's usefulness. Troy must coordinate his plans with Major Indrus, an American who is inside the camp. They use an explosive-laden boat to get into the harbor but the Germans stop it halfway in. The captain, Bertaine, doesn't allow the Germans to board his boat. Troy and his men are able to fight off the boarding party and escape into town but at the cost of Bertaine's life. They are followed by El Gamil, a sympathetic Arab merchant and black marketeer, who provides a car and uniforms for Moffitt and Hitchcock to go to the German Officer's Club in search of Bertaine's daughter Marianne. She is regarded as a traitor by locals because she performs at the club, but Troy has no choice but to seek out her help. The episode ends with Moffitt and Hitchcock entering the club.

Moffitt and Hitch (dressed as Germans) find Bertaine's daughter Marianne, a suspected collaborator, singing at the German Officer's Club. After telling her of her father's death, they drive her home and inform her who they really are. They also tell her they must use the local fishing fleet to accomplish their mission. Meanwhile, Troy secretly meets with American POW liaison officer Major Indrus. Troy then joins Moffitt at the house of El Gamil. Informed of the plan, El Gamil dispatches his men to the various harbor areas to alert the fishermen. El Gamil and the Rat Patrol raid a German warehouse to regain their captured munitions to aid the escape, but the Germans catch and execute El Gamil. Troy sets the action to begin at dawn to evacuate 5,000 Allied POWS. 

The plan is for the fishing fleet to bring out the Allied POWs, Dunkirk-fashion. The fishermen believe that Marianne is a collaborator. Sgt. Troy, though, disagrees, and he's right. Marianne talks the fishermen into cooperating, and the prisoners make good their escape to freedom. Unfortunately, Marianne is killed in the evacuation. 

Gustav Luden, a German radio operator who wants to defect, sends secret information on supply shipments to the Americans on a frequency that the Rat Patrol listens to. The Patrol goes in after him. They get inside the German base and, once there, find that the Gestapo have seized Luden for questioning.

Valuable German ammunition has been dropped by parachute to an Arab farmhouse for a convoy to pick up, and the Rat Patrol must destroy it. On destroying the building, Troy discovers that there is no ammo--but there is a confused 16-year-old boy. The boy proves out to be the son of the German convoy commander. Even while the Rat's prisoner, the youth desperately tries to get word to the convoy so his father won't be killed. Troy is going to kill the commander, but when the boy pleads with him not to, Troy remembers what it felt like to lose his own father, who died when Troy was this boy's age. Troy captures the German instead of killing him. Then, the Rat Patrol destroys the convoy with the ammo. 

The Rat Patrol discovers German tank reinforcements have arrived in the area of a planned Allied offensive. But a German ambush wrecks the Patrol's radio, and Troy cannot warn HQ of the Nazi unit. Troy knows El Jebel has a large Nazi propaganda radio station and heads there. Troy, Moffitt, and the others make their way into the radio room and prepare to broadcast their warning to the British. However, Captain Deitrich walks in on them and takes them prisoner. Troy and Moffitt manage to escape. They free Hitch and Pettigrew and get their message back to London, preventing the Allies from losing a lot of tanks.

Moffitt gets seriously wounded during a raid on a German convoy with the Rat Patrol far behind enemy lines. So Troy decides to obtain blood from a nearby German field camp. Dietrich is in charge of the base; Troy encounters him and orders him to help him find a donor. Dietrich sends for Corporal Pennell, a captured American deserter. Pennell refuses to cooperate, but Troy takes him at gunpoint. On the way back to Moffitt, Dietrich catches up to them, and Pennell must do the "impossible" to prevent them from all being recaptured. He rises to the occasion, and they make it back to Moffitt and Tully in time to save Moffitt's life. As for Pennell's future, Troy will say the corporal was, unfortunately, separated from his unit by accident.

Troy and Hitchcock capture Col Beckmann, an infamous Nazi POW camp commander. Beckmann denies that he is the man. In a fight, Troy gets knocked out, and Hitch is wounded. Using Troy's gun, Beckmann kills the other German captured with him, exchanges dog tags with him, and places the pistol near Troy's hand. Thus, Troy gets falsely accused of the murder. Moffitt and Tully only arrive afterward. To prove to a court-martial board that Beckmann is Beckmann, the rest of the Rat Patrol must infiltrate a German division's headquarters to find the evidence to prevent Troy's court-martial--at considerable risk to their own lives.

Hauptmann Dietrich executes a plan to sway the Arab desert tribes to the German side by using a fake Rat Patrol to abduct their marabout or religious leader. He will then "rescue" the holy man so the Arabs will give their help to the Germans. The actual Patrol is captured by the Arabs, though, and when they convince the Arab leader, a friend of Moffitt's, that they aren't guilty, Troy and Moffitt go to find the holy man. To do so means a horse trip across the desert.

Using a telephoto lens, Moffitt and Troy photograph a map inside Captain Dietrich's office from the roof of the adjoining Nazi HQ. It shows the location of a top-secret German ammo dump. The Patrol must reach the site, enter it, and destroy it before half of the German army arrives. The Patrol arrives to find the storage area--an old mine--surprisingly deserted. They plant the explosives, but just before they blow it, Dietrich (who has laid this all out as a trap) turns up. Shots are exchanged, and Dietrich and Troy are trapped inside. Meantime, outside the mine, assuming that the cave-in killed Troy, Moffitt and the Patrol prepare to finish blowing it up. Working together, Troy and Dietrich escape through a back entrance moments before the dump blows.

The British and the American high command scheduled a top-secret conference in a desert town. On the day before the event, the Rat Patrol sights a German motorcyclist and chases him, but he gets away. Assuming that the Nazis know about the conference, Troy tries to talk the commanders out of the meeting. But instead, they assign him to be in charge of the security. Troy gets jumped while in town by a knife-wielding Arab. Sgt Roberts, one of the other "security" men, rescues Troy. Unknown to them, Roberts is a double agent planning to blow up the meeting--a fact that Troy learns.

Troy raids German HQ and kidnaps Dr. Schneidermann, a prominent Nazi scientist. At the same time, Captain Dietrich captures Moffitt, Pettigrew, and Hitchcock. Dietrich reveals that Troy is carrying a vial of deadly radium. He urges Moffitt to divulge Troy's destination, bargaining the Rat Patrols' unconditional freedom for the return of Schneidermann. Moffitt, disbelieving the radium story, keeps quiet. However, Troy is carrying the fatal vessel. The three Patrollers escape and trail Troy back to the rendezvous, with Dietrich trailing them.
 

The Rat Patrol stumbles on a German staff car, but before they can attack it, a soldier (apparently an American major) kills the driver and a guard. This Major Lansing claims the Germans captured him en route to divisional headquarters. He orders the Patrol to take him there for a secret high-level meeting. They do so, unaware that he is a German officer and Dietrich is trailing them. After he arrives at headquarters, he is to assassinate an Allied general. On the way, however, they stumble on a unit of severely injured Italians. Their officer returns with the Patrol to get his men some help and recognizes that the Major must be German. After which, the German attempts to kill the Italian arousing Troy's suspicion.

Moffitt is about to be executed for "espionage against the Third Reich" when suddenly the Rat Patrol comes to his rescue. A commandeered German truck unsuccessfully attempts to scoop up Moffitt but manages to take a Nazi captain in his place for exchange. Negotiations for a prisoner exchange are fruitful, but Troy doubts that the Germans will obey their own rules. Indeed, the Nazi's Colonel Voss wants to see the Patrol wiped out and uses the exchange as a trap. The captured captain tries to escape the Patrol and gets himself killed. Now Troy has no one to exchange for a seriously wounded Moffitt and must attempt to pass himself off as a German.

After capturing Dr. Anderson, a skilled Allied physician, Dietrich turns over his staff car in a ravine (during a blinding sand storm). Troy wants to attempt to rescue the doctor but can't because of the storm. He hears Dietrich's distress call but suspects it is a trick. Ultimately, they try as they hear that the Germans will do the same. They get Dr. Anderson, who is unhurt, but Dietrich is trapped under the car and badly injured. The doctor tells them that Dietrich is dead, but the German groans just before the Patrol leaves. When Troy ends up saving Dietrich's life, the doctor is about to kill him with a lethal dose of morphine. Dietrich tells Troy that Anderson is a double agent who gets killed just as the Germans arrive to help their captain.

Lieutenant Klinger, a wounded Luftwaffe ace, is the only German who can identify the location of the Allied troops preparing to invade Sicily. The Rat Patrol captures him, and then Moffitt takes his place to convince the Germans to watch the wrong place for the upcoming attack. Troy, meanwhile, infiltrates the military hospital. Gestapo Major Bruder, however, suspects Moffitt and exposes him, but by the time he does, Moffitt manages to get Bruder killed in his place and escape.

Troy and his men plant explosives with 3-minute fuses in an Arab winery the Germans use as an ammo depot. While trying for a hasty getaway, they run into Dietrich, who orders them to surrender. Knowing they are safely surrounded by explosives, Troy and Moffitt defuse the charges and wait for nightfall to escape. Not wanting to blow the depot sky high, Dietrich's men use bows and arrows and shoot Hitch in the shoulder. The two Germans are quickly taken care of by Troy. Moffitt uses smoke grenades and tries to reach a truck, but Dietrich captures him. With the help of the Arab winery owner, the Rat Patrol finally dashes to safety. When the American grenade fails to blow up the ammo depot, the winery owner does it for them.

A young French Resistance fighter named Michele survives the Patrol's quick assault on a small German convoy. She explains Germans captured her during her group's attempt to stop the convoy carrying radar equipment. However, Michele is a double agent and will deliver the Patrol to her lover, German Colonel Leske. She convinces the Patrol to accompany her on a raid to destroy a German radar base. Leske captures the Rat Patrol, but he gets killed, saving Michele during their escape while blowing up the radar base.