The Green Beret: The Story Of The Commandos, 1940-1945

By Lt. Hilary St. George Saunders and Earl Mountbatten of Burma

“I am not worried about the fighting. I know you’re fairly bloody-minded. But I want to speak of discipline during the battle.”

“You must get ashore, if you have to swim, and I hope some of you will return as you’ll be very useful for the next show.”
The words of a Commando officer to his men before they stormed the beaches of Sicily under heavy machine-gun fire sum up the swashbuckling, devil-may-care spirit of the toughest fighting men produced—the Commandos.

For their raids and battles far behind enemy lines in France, North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Burma the men in the Green Beret have become a legend.

This book shows how this legend was forged.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Release date: Jan 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781786258090

Lt. Hilary St. George Saunders

Lt. Hilary Aidan Saint George Saunders, a British author, was commissioned into the Welsh Guards and served with 1st battalion on the Western Front during World War I. He was awarded the Military Cross for an action on 6 November 1918 near Bavay in northern France. [Source: Wikipedia] Admiral of the Fleet Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma (born Prince Louis of Battenberg)—known informally as Lord Mountbatten—was a British statesman and naval officer, an uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and second cousin once removed to Elizabeth II. During the Second World War, he was Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia Command (1943-46).

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Text originally published in 1949 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

This edition is published by PICKLE PARTNERS PUBLISHING—www.pp-publishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – [e-mail]

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1949 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE GREEN BERET: THE STORY OF THE COMMANDOS 1940-1945

BY

HILARY ST. GEORGE SAUNDERS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

FOREWORD 6

PREFACE 8

CHAPTER ONE—Twenty Men and a Battery 8

CHAPTER TWO—The Force is Conceived 13

CHAPTER THREE—What Manner of Men were These? 25

CHAPTER FOUR—Lofoten to Vaagso 34

CHAPTER FIVE—The Exploits of Layforce 46

CHAPTER SIX—The Greatest Raid of All 60

CHAPTER SEVEN—A Classic Operation of War 75

CHAPTER EIGHT—The Hand of Steel 85

CHAPTER NINE—The ‘Majestic Enterprise’ 93

CHAPTER TEN—Re-enter the Royal Marines 111

CHAPTER ELEVEN—No. 3 Commando Bridge 119

CHAPTER TWELVE—Bova Marina 127

CHAPTER THIRTEEN—The Pass of La Molina 135

CHAPTER FOURTEEN—Termoli 146

CHAPTER FIFTEEN—Expansion and a Miscellany 152

CHAPTER SIXTEEN—Small Raids and Friendly Foreigners 159

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN—The Long Italian Trail 169

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN—Anzio and Anzio 174

CHAPTER NINETEEN—The Island of Vis 180

CHAPTER TWENTY—The Hilltop of Brac 190

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE—Overlord 200

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO—The Isles of Greece 216

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE—The Seizure of Walcheren 223

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR—Water Water Everywhere 235

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE—From the Maas to the Elbe 242

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX—The Hill in the Jungle 257

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN—The Battle to the Strong 267

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 271

FOREWORD

The Green Beret covers the period of my illustrious and gallant predecessor, Admiral of the Fleet the Lord Keyes; of my own; and also that of my successor, Major-General R. E. Laycock, one of the original Commando soldiers and in my opinion perhaps the greatest of them.

The author of this book was the Recorder on my staff at Combined Operations Headquarters. No one is better qualified to write the story, and surely few could have produced a more thrilling book; for in reading it I have recaptured the thrill and the pride which I felt during the war, in having under my command the gallant men whose exploits the book commemorates. They gave a new meaning to the Commando: and the name requires no explanation from me, for it is now known in every language—I have even come across, in Burma, a Chinese Unit whose Commander proudly proclaimed that they were the ‘Chinese Commandos.’

When they were first raised, Commandos were composed almost entirely of soldiers, with just a sprinkling of Marines; and this seemed to me to be a mistake, for it was above all the Marines who, by virtue of their sailor-soldier training, should be eminently suited for Combined Operations and Raids. I therefore raised a number of Commandos composed entirely of Marines; and I am glad to think that the Admiralty have retained the Royal Marine Commandos, who fought alongside the Army Commandos in the war, and who are now keeping alive the amphibious traditions which for so long have been theirs, and of which the proud symbol is now the green beret which they have retained.

Force and Fraud are in war the two Cardinal Virtues.—Thomas Hobbes, THE LEVIATHAN

The stealthy terror of the sinuous pard.—Francis Thompson, AN ANTHEM OF EARTH

"I’ll have you learn to sleep upon the ground,

March in your armour through watery fens,

Sustain the scorching heat and freezing cold,

Hunger and thirst, right adjuncts of the war,

And after this to scale a castle wall,

Besiege a fort, to undermine a town,

And make whole cities caper in the air."—Christopher Marlowe, TAMBURLAINE (to his sons)

PREFACE

THIS BOOK may, I hope, be described as the authentic story of the Commandos. It is not the official history. That will, no doubt, one day be written by one able to consult the records of the War Office, the Cabinet Office, the Admiralty, the Air Ministry and other departments of State which had directly or indirectly a voice in their activities.

The Green Beret is based partly on information contained in the wartime pamphlet Combined Operations of which H.M.S.O. has very kindly allowed me to make use, partly on the diaries and letters of a large number of Commando soldiers placed most freely by them at my disposal, partly on personal interviews and partly on answers to a questionnaire. By these means I acquired a mass of information which has been carefully checked by those best qualified to assess its accuracy.

At the risk of seeming to make an invidious choice, I must mention the names of some of them. They were conspicuous among the many hundreds who helped me to collect the material for this history. My thanks are therefore due in special measure to Major-General R. E. Laycock, C.B., D.S.O. (Royal Horse Guards), Major-General G. E. Wildman-Lushington, C.B., C.B.E. (Royal Marines), Brigadiers T. B. L. Churchill, M.C. (The Manchester Regiment), J. F. Durnford Slater, D.S.O. (Royal Artillery), D. Mills-Roberts, D.S.O., M.C. (Irish Guards) and P. Young, D.S.O., M.C. (Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment), Colonel A. C. Newman, V.C., T.D., D.L. (The Essex Regiment), Lieutenant-Colonel C. E. Vaughan, O.B.E. (The Buffs), Majors P. R. Kay, M.B.E. (Royal Marines), A. D. C. Smith (Intelligence Corps), Captain C. N. Jupp (Royal Artillery), Regimental Sergeant Major C. L. G. Bryen and Staff Quarter-master-Sergeant H. Brown, M.B.E. (both of the Royal Army Service Corps), and Company Sergeant Major E. C. Roddis. My gratitude is due also to Mr. P. W. K. Johnson for his help in reading the proofs.

I must also thank the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, O.M., C.H., M.P., his publishers, Messrs. Cassell & Co. Ltd., and the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph for permission to quote extracts from Their Finest Hour.

Lastly, I owe a very great debt of gratitude to my friend and colleague Strathearn Gordon, who laboured for two years to collect and arrange the very great quantity of evidence on which this book is based. Without his unfailing support I doubt if I should have been able to complete my task.

HILARY ST. GEORGE SAUNDERS

CHAPTER ONE—Twenty Men and a Battery

AT 04.10 hours on the morning of the 19th August, 1942, Landing Craft Personnel No. 16, an unarmoured wooden vessel called by its designer a Eureka, was approaching the coast of France. A few minutes earlier Lieutenant H. T. Buckee, R.N.V.R., her commander, had seen a steam gun boat, the S.G.B.5, reel across his bows, out of action and out of control. The gun boat had been leading a flotilla of landing craft, having on board the officers and men of No. 3 Commando, and they were making for two beaches at Berneval and Belleville-sur-Mer, two small villages on the coast east-north-east of Dieppe, with orders to land and destroy a battery of 5.9-inch coastal guns to which the code name Goebbels had been given.

The passage across the Channel had been uneventful until the small force—there were twenty-three landing craft sailing in two lines abreast—had the misfortune to encounter some four or five miles from Dieppe a German tanker, escorted by armed trawlers. They were making down channel, probably towards Le Havre, and their crews were alert and vigilant. The action could have but one ending. The steam gun boat had no armament heavier than an Oerlikon; the landing craft none at all except the small arms carried by their passengers. The German trawlers opened fire, choosing as their main target the steam gun boat, which at the end of ten minutes was reduced to a floating wreck, every gun silenced, all wireless equipment destroyed and four out of every ten on board wounded.

Before the flotilla set out it had been decided that, should the enemy be encountered at sea, its units were to scatter and make for home. Some landing craft, however, held on. Among them was Lieutenant Buckee’s. Through the tracer-lit darkness he resolutely maintained his course and presently the fire died away. A promise of dawn appeared to port, but it was still very dark when Buckee turned to Major Peter Young, M.C., the senior Commando officer on board, and pointed ahead.

‘There you are,’ he said, indicating a dark line scarcely visible against the slowly lightening sky, ‘there’s your beach.’

‘What do we do now?’ replied Young.

‘My orders,’ said Buckee, ‘are to land even if there’s only one boat.’

‘Those are my orders, too: we are to land whatever happens, even if we have to swim.’

Five minutes before zero hour the landing craft touched down and those on board stepped ashore.

All told they numbered twenty, and belonged to No. 6 Troop of No. 3 Commando. In addition to Young in command, there were two other officers, Captain J. J. Selwyn (13/18th Hussars), the officer commanding No. 3 Troop, and Lieutenant A. F. Ruxton (Royal Ulster Rifles). With them was Lance-Corporal White and Lance-Corporal Bennett. The rest were Commando soldiers and formed part of the Headquarters party of the Commando. They had with them a 3-inch mortar with four bombs and a 2-inch with six; one Garand rifle,{1} nine Service rifles, one Bren gun, six Tommy guns, and three pistols. With these arms they set out to attack a battery held by some two hundred of the enemy.

Buckee very staunchly offered to go with them with his four men but Young asked him to keep off shore as long as he could so as to take them back to England if, against all probability, they ever returned to the beach. Above it rose cliffs and rocky ledges, up which a footpath led inland through a very narrow gully to the road running from Belleville-sur-Mer to Dieppe. The gully held in its mouth a formidable obstacle, a fence of rabbit wire, ten feet high, backed by rolls of stout barbed wire. More wire choked the cleft in the cliff behind.

Leading the way, Young began to climb the fence, but almost immediately fell backwards into the arms of Selwyn, who, doubtless mindful of the orders issued at the start, urged that they should return. This not unreasonable suggestion so angered Young ‘that I was more than ever determined to carry on.’ Once more he addressed himself to the fence, this time successfully, and surmounting it led the way up the cliff beside the gully, more barbed wire found there being used as a fixed, if prickly, climbing rope. A further aid was provided by Driver J. Cunningham, a Commando soldier from the Royal Army Service Corps, who joined together the toggle ropes carried by each man of the party. With these aids it took Young twenty minutes to reach the top of the cliff followed by all his men. They at once took cover in a small wood, and Young harangued them, telling them that though they might find it impossible to accomplish their full purpose, they would still be able to inflict hurt upon the enemy, which ‘was the only reason for their existence.’

He then divided them into three parties, placing each in charge of an officer, and they advanced south through cornfields, Young in the van, until they reached the edge of the road leading to Dieppe. Here they met a sixteen-year-old boy on a bicycle. A few questions told them exactly where they were, and Young dismissed him. The boy stared at him for a moment and then, leaning forward, quickly kissed him on the cheek.

As though to emphasize this salute, the guns of ‘Goebbels’ battery roared out a short distance away. They were firing, as Young knew, at the main attack, now making for the beaches of Dieppe itself. He must hurry. The small band pushed on down the road towards the village of Berneval, cutting the telephone wires on the way, and eventually reached the neighbourhood of the church. Here they met with a man wheeling his mother in a wheelbarrow; she had, it appeared, been wounded by a fragment of a bomb dropped by the Royal Air Force which had attacked the battery at dawn. The inhabitants began to come out of their houses, including some wearing the bright brass helmets of the local fire brigade. They seemed friendly and one of them undertook to shew the Commandos exactly where the battery was situated. As they were talking, fire was opened upon them from the right flank; Ruxton and Selwyn replied with their Tommy guns, and the shooting ceased. Young then entered the church and made for the tower, hoping to climb to the top and there set up his Bren gun. He could not, however, find the staircase, which was not altogether surprising, for it began ten feet up inside the tower, the gap between the floor and the first stair being bridged by a ladder which had been removed. Abandoning the church, all three parties stalked on through orchards and in a few minutes came across a dummy gun which had been clearly visible on the air photographs, and which they knew as ‘Pansy.’ The crucial moment had arrived.

A man as brave, but less clear-headed than Young, might have led a charge. It would assuredly have failed, for what could twenty men inadequately armed have accomplished against ten times their number, entrenched, alert, and prepared to defend their guns to the last? Young therefore adopted a plan which did honour to his intelligence and his training. He formed his men in two lines thirty yards apart; each line was a hundred yards long and two hundred yards from the enemy. The standing com gave the men good cover and they set about sniping the battery looming ahead through the smoke, firing from the knee and frequently changing position. ‘It was harassing fire, more or less controlled,’ reported Young later. ‘The guns were about twenty to thirty yards apart and well concreted.’ The Germans fired back and it was presently found that about fifteen feet of standing com successfully stopped a bullet.

All this time the battery continued to fire but at a very slow rate, discharging between twenty and thirty rounds. None of them did any damage to the main force of destroyers and landing craft off Dieppe. Throughout this period, which lasted for more than an hour and a half, neither Young nor his men saw a German, for they were well dug in. Nevertheless, the fire of the Commando soldiers must have proved most galling, for about eight o’clock the Germans swung one of their heavy guns round and tried to shell their attackers, who continued to pour small arms fire into the black and yellow fumes which rose whenever the gun fired. It could not be sufficiently depressed and the shells went whining overhead to burst somewhere in France.

So this strange combat continued. The dawn had long come. How thin Young’s men were upon the ground could now be clearly seen, and some Germans began to move round their right flank.

The Commandos’ ammunition was almost exhausted; they could do no more. It was time to go back to the beach. Selwyn was sent back to form a bridgehead, and to enter into contact, if he could, with Buckee. He was to fire three white Very lights when he had done so. He moved off, and Young with Ruxton and two or three others continued to fight with dwindling hopes and dwindling ammunition. The minutes went slowly by. The Germans were now in Berneval itself. At that very critical moment three lights flashed for a moment, white against the blue of the summer sky. ‘I never saw a more heartening sight,’ records Young.

He gathered his men together and they retreated across the fields towards the gully, ‘followed at a respectful distance by some of the enemy.’ The gully down which they scrambled was found to be mined at its foot, and had they used this natural passage up the cliffs when climbing them in the darkness three hours before, they must have suffered many casualties. As it was, only one of them was hurt, Lance-Corporal H. A. R. White (the Devon Regiment) who trod on a mine which exploded, wounding him in the foot. This did not prevent him from bringing the 3-inch mortar, left at the foot of the cliff, into action. He fired all the four bombs with unobserved results, and then with the rest stumbled out to sea, for the gallant Buckee was still there.

He had remained offshore, taking what shelter he could from the intermittent smoke screens laid by aircraft and destroyers to cover the main force. Soon after 08.00 hours he made for shore, coming in as close as the tide permitted, covered by the fire of Motor Launch 346.

Young’s men waded out to his craft. ‘It was,’ said Young, ‘like those dreams you have of trying desperately to walk and making no progress.’ Under fire from the cliff, they scrambled on board; Ruxton laid his Bren gun on his ‘Mae West,’ and pushed it in front of him. Together with Private Abbott, and Young himself, he strode through the water for several precarious minutes in the wake of the rest. A line was thrown from the landing craft and the three men were towed half a mile out to sea, before being dragged, exhausted, over the side of the Eureka.

Soon after mid-day they were all of them on the quayside at Newhaven, and before tea-time Young had made his report in person to Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations, at his headquarters in London.

What the authorities thought of this gallant action against ‘Goebbels’ battery may be conjectured from the number of decorations the King was pleased to award. Young and Buckee were admitted to the Distinguished Service Order; Selwyn and Ruxton each received the Military Cross; Driver Cunningham, a ‘tough, cunning type,’ the Distinguished Conduct Medal; and Lance-Corporal White, Privates Hopkins and Abbott, Adderton, Craft, and Clark the Military Medal.

The exploit of Young and his men at Berneval was one of the long series of amphibious assaults made between June 1940 and January 1945. They were carried out in places as far apart as Stamsund in the Arctic circle, and Akyab off the coast of Burma; during those five years assault craft carried to battle armed and determined men over the waters of the North Sea, the Channel, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean. The grey pebbles of Dieppe, the white sands of Madagascar, the glutinous mud of Myebon, felt the impress of their feet, and the firs of Norway, the oaks of Normandy, the mangroves of Arakan were mute witnesses of their prowess. Within their ranks were men from every quarter of the Empire, and from many Allied and even enemy nations. They came from all classes, from all occupations. Among them were cracksmen and peers, poachers and bank clerks, bookmakers and university graduates. They fulfilled the precept of Hobbes ‘that force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues,’ and in so doing aroused such a passion of hate and fear in the heart of their enemies that first von Rundstedt, then Hitler, ordered their slaughter to the last man. They were young, they were strong, they were able, and the spirit of adventure was hot in them. How that spirit was trained and directed, what exploits it caused them to perform, must now be set down. Like all tales of war it is a record of triumph and disaster, of caution and enterprise, of frustration and accomplishment. But through it runs a strand of the very stuff of life; the courage of the simple soldier, that fortitude which, since England became a nation, has been displayed on a hundred battlefields and has brought her victory not once but many times.

Here is their story.

CHAPTER TWO—The Force is Conceived

ON THE EVENING OF 4th June, 1940, Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley Clarke (Royal Artillery), General Staff Officer, first grade, with some twenty years of soldiering behind him, was walking back from the War Office to his flat in Stratton Street, Mayfair. At that time he was Military Assistant to Sir John Dill, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. His thoughts, he records, were grim, for ‘in the War Office on that night it was not easy to view the future with optimism,’ and indeed though the great bulk of the British Army had been withdrawn ‘out of the jaws of death and shame to their native land’ from Dunkirk, they had lost all their guns and equipment, and would be in no condition to fight for many weeks to come.

In the brief space of forty-nine days the Wehrmacht had over-run and occupied Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Belgium, France was now on the verge of collapse, and the Channel ports were in the hands of the enemy. What, Dudley Clarke asked himself, had other nations done in the past when their main armies had been driven from the field and their arsenals captured by a superior enemy? His mind, roving back through history, recalled the guerillas of Spain in the Peninsular War, and ninety years later the Boer Commandos which for two years had harried more than 250,000 British troops. Coming still nearer to the present day, the Colonel recalled his own experiences as a Staff Officer in Palestine in 1936. In that year he had seen with his own eyes ‘how a handful of ill-armed fanatics’ had been able to ‘dissipate the strength of more than an Army Corps of regular troops.’ Could something of the same kind be attempted at this grim hour? Could desperate men, armed only with the weapons they could carry, disdaining artillery, baggage trains and all the paraphernalia of supply, carry on guerilla warfare against an enemy whose forces were stretched out from Narvik to the Pyrenees? One form of transport they would, of course, need, and one only; ships of some kind would have to take them across the Channel or the North Sea to the conquered coasts of Europe, take them across and bring them back again. His imagination stirred, took wing, and ‘before I went to bed I tried to marshal my ideas into the outline of a plan jotted down in note form on a single sheet of...writing paper.’

Dudley Clarke had the ear of the all-powerful Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John Dill, who, in his turn took fire and promised to speak to the Prime Minister on the very next day. He did so and Clarke was given a free hand provided that his proposals did not run counter to two fixed conditions. These were simple: first, that no unit should be diverted from its most essential task, the defence of Britain, which might very soon have to face invasion; and secondly, that this force of amphibious guerillas would have to make do with the minimum quantities of arms. Both conditions, particularly the second, were inevitable, for to such straits had twenty years of uneasy peace culminating in the inglorious surrender of Munich brought us, that our arsenals were empty, our factories but beginning to replenish them, and our whole economy most ill-prepared for sudden and desperate battle. Two days later Dill informed Dudley Clarke that his Commando scheme was approved, and that he was to mount a raid across the Channel ‘at the earliest possible moment.’ That afternoon Section M.O.9 of the War Office was brought into being, under the general direction of Brigadier Otto Lund, Deputy Director of Military Operations.

Fortunately the first recruits lay ready to hand in the ranks of the Independent Companies. Composed of volunteers they had been formed in haste to take part in the Norwegian campaign, and it had been determined that they should be self-contained in their own ship, which was to be at once their floating base and their means of transport to the scene of action. Of these companies, ten in number, one half under the command of Colonel C. McV. Gubbins, M.C., had already seen service in the rugged mountains and valleys of Norway at Bodo and Mo. At that time they were still in Norway in the Narvik area. The other five companies had been left behind in Scotland employed in training and guard duties in Glasgow and elsewhere, and on garrison duty in various coastal towns.

Clarke then approached the Navy. ‘What!’ exclaimed the Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff, he records, ‘the Army want to get back to fight again already? That’s the best news I’ve heard for days. For that you can have anything you like to ask for from the Navy.’

The Second Sea Lord was equally enthusiastic, and in a few days Captain G. A. Garnons-Williams, D.S.C., R.N., fresh from an expedition to block the port of Zeebrugge, had established his headquarters in the yacht Melisande lying in the Hamble. He soon gathered round him a collection of craft, mostly private motor boats, some of which had passed many quiet years ploughing the Norfolk Broads. Their design and sea-going qualities were as varied as the reliability of their engines. The assault landing craft which was afterwards to take so many Commando soldiers on so many raids, though it had been designed in prototype as far back as 1936, was not yet in production.

The officers and ratings of this strange navy were as varied as the craft in which they sailed. Very few belonged to the Royal Navy. ‘Some came from the Royal Navy Reserve, but most belonged to the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Among them were many enthusiastic and capable yachtsmen. The hands were mostly fishermen—capable, willing, but at first somewhat surprised at naval discipline.’

Five days after Clarke had voiced his plan, the preliminary preparations in London were complete. On the 12th June, Lieutenant-General Sir Alan Bourne, K.C.B., D.S.O., Adjutant-General of the Corps of Royal Marines, was placed by the Prime Minister in charge of raiding operations. He had as Chief of Staff Lieutenant-Colonel A. H. Hornby, M.C. (Royal Artillery). They were housed, together with their small staff, in a vacant set of offices in the Admiralty. The choice of General Bourne was not fortuitous. He was a Marine, and since the raids had by the nature of things to be amphibious, a Marine was not unnaturally considered to be the best person to be put in charge of them. Bourne was able to take over an organization already at work, if a trifle experimentally, and comprising among others the film actor David Niven, that energetic and debonair figure, who had once served as a regular officer in the Highland Light Infantry, and whose father had been killed at Gallipoli. ‘David Niven,’ writes one who worked with him at the time, ‘who never took Whitehall very seriously, used sometimes to get bored with the number of telephone calls he received asking for this or that; so he developed the habit of disguising his voice (by putting a handkerchief over the mouthpiece) and telling the caller that he had the wrong extension and would he call extension 414, or 424, or whatever it was—whatever it was, it was the number of the Military Assistant to the C.I.G.S.’

Nor must three ladies be forgotten who in these early days proved invaluable to this small party in whose hands lay for the moment the sole offensive power of the whole Army. Constantia Rumbold, daughter of Sir Horace Rumbold, who had been our Ambassador in Berlin and Madrid, typed the early minutes and orders, using her father’s house in Grosvenor Crescent as an office. To it would repair the various officers concerned, Clarke included, wearing plain clothes and pretending to be members of the board of a mythical charity committee. Such precautions against a leakage of information may seem far-fetched, but they might well have been necessary, and it was certainly wise to err on the side of caution. With Constantia Rumbold was ‘Buster’ Marling, a relative of Brigadier Lund, whose duty it became to see the raiders off at the beginning of an operation, take charge of all their personal possessions, and return them to such as came back to claim them. She soon became well known to the troops, who entrusted her with messages for their relatives and other personal matters. The cheerfulness of her demeanour and the nonchalant efficiency with which she carried out her duties made her much beloved. The third member of this feminine trio was Joan Bright, afterwards to work in close collaboration with General Ismay and other members of the Prime Minister’s personal staff and to attend most of those momentous conferences which took place at various stages on the long road to victory.

Thus the new organization came into being with most commendable speed. Even before it could carry out its first raid, however, one point of importance had to be settled: what was this new raiding body to be called? Someone in the War Office had already rechristened the Independent Companies, Special Service Battalions, unmindful or careless of the fact that the initials ‘S.S.’ also stood for the infamous black-shirted Schutzstaffel of Hitler. From the beginning Clarke, supported by Lund, pressed for the name ‘Commando,’ and pointed out that the role the new force was to play closely resembled that of the mounted Boer troops, commanded, among others, by General Smuts, in the South African War. The question was eventually settled by the C.I.G.S. himself, who decreed that the new forces were to be known as Commandos.

While these high matters were under debate in Whitehall, in the Hamble preparations were being pushed on for the first raid, which, it will be remembered, was to take place at the earliest opportunity. This proved to be the night of the 23rd/ 24th June, not quite three weeks after the notion that such a force might be of use had sprung up in the nimble brain of Dudley Clarke. By then a No. 11 Commando, a wholly fictitious name, had been born. It was made up of officers and men chosen by Clarke, Tod, and Rice, and sent to Southampton for training. Two factors limited the numbers who could take part in this first raid: the quantity of boats, and the quantity of Tommy guns available. Both were scarce. Of Tommy guns there were but forty in the whole country. The difficulty of boats was temporarily overcome by the address of Garnons-Williams who, distrusting the capabilities of his gimcrack fleet, borrowed from the Air Ministry half a dozen air-sea rescue craft or crash boats, ‘fast, reliable, and seaworthy.’ True, they were too small to accommodate all whom it was desired to send against the enemy, but they were far better than any other craft which could be obtained or borrowed at short notice. Thirty was the maximum number which could be taken on board each boat, and accordingly one hundred and eighty officers and men were detailed for the raid, this number being reduced to one hundred and twenty at the last moment through failure of the engines in two of the boats.

The raiders included Major Tod in command, and Dudley Clarke who went as an observer, having been forbidden to land. The flotilla was commanded by Lieutenant-Commander J. W. F. Milner-Gibson, R.N., who had been put ashore nine times in the three weeks preceding the operation in order to spy out the land.

The question of Tommy guns proved more difficult, but eventually half were issued, the remaining half being placed in a central store in London. All guns brought back from the raid were to be returned to it.

No. 11 Commando sailed from Dover, Folkestone, and Newhaven. The sea was calm, the sky was cloudy, and a light breeze was blowing from the north east. All went well and the men on board the crash boats were in high spirits. Arrived at mid-channel, a number of Spitfires of the Royal Air Force dived upon them, and for a moment it seemed that the R.A.F. launches had been mistaken for patrol boats of the enemy, and that No. 11 Commando’s baptism of fire would be received from their own side. Each aircraft flew low over the boats in a south-westerly direction but made no attack. It was subsequently discovered that so great had been the secrecy maintained that the pilots on patrol had not been warned of the raid and were, therefore, not unnaturally curious concerning the identity of the small vessels moving steadily in the now almost gathered darkness towards the French coast.

This contretemps delayed the small armada for some time, with the result that it lost an hour and thus the elaborate timing of the raid was upset. After dark a rum ration was issued and the men made up their faces with black greasepaint supplied by a ‘Wardour Street costumier.’ Still in high spirits they were soon exchanging wisecracks in nigger minstrel language. By now, however, the naval commander was somewhat worried. He had lost touch with the boats coming from Folkestone and Newhaven, was uncertain of his exact position, for the crash boats were not fitted for accurate navigation, and his compass seemed unreliable. Nevertheless, he held on his course until the sudden exposure of a searchlight showed him that he was about to enter Boulogne harbour. The launch turned abruptly and made off parallel to the coast until those on board could see ‘the dark outlines of sand dunes showing up against the sky.’ A moment later the boat grounded and Tod and his men jumped on shore, the first to set foot on what was then Hitler’s Europe.

They disappeared into the darkness and Dudley Clarke and Milner-Gibson were left waiting. Nothing happened save the appearance about a hundred yards away of a dark shape which seemed to be a small vessel of some kind. Very lights and the sounds of small arms fire a mile to the south shewed where another of the boats had gone ashore, and was in action. At last a figure carrying a Tommy gun was observed moving towards the boat. Clarke jumped on to the sand, approached him, and whispered to Tod—for it was he—the news that an unknown vessel was close at hand. Tod turned back to collect his men as Clarke made for the boat, when at that moment a German cyclist patrol was reported by the look-out to be moving along the beach. Realizing that he had not been seen, Tod determined to attack them; but being unpractised with a Tommy gun, a weapon which he had had in his hands for the first time only a day or two before, he contrived when cocking it to knock off the magazine. It fell with a clatter. The German patrol opened fire and Dudley Clarke received a violent blow on the side of the head which knocked him backwards into the boat. A bullet had struck him a glancing blow behind the ear. Once more there was silence, and then after about half an hour, as the sky was growing rapidly lighter in the beams of a rising moon, the look-out whispered that more men were approaching the beach.

‘At first,’ reported Clarke, Ί did not know who they were. They might have been the German patrol. All I could see in the moonlight—for the clouds had by now disappeared—was a number of sinister figures moving slowly and purposefully towards me with out-thrust bayonets. It was only when they were near enough for me to see their blackened faces that I knew them to be our own men. That is one of the main difficulties about raiding at night. It is so hard to tell friend from foe.’

The men were got aboard, many of them having to wade up to their armpits, and some to swim for it, because of the change in the tide. The crash boat then made out to sea, troubled first by a low-flying aircraft and then by the unknown vessel which Milner-Gibson thought to be an E-boat. To the relief of the Commandos she moved off in the opposite direction. Dawn found the crash boat eight miles from the French coast, and with the sun came fighter aircraft of the Royal Air Force to escort them home. Clarke’s wound was bound up, and the thirty men presently reached Dover. ‘Grimy, dishevelled, and triumphant, and accompanied, appropriately enough, by a bandaged officer with bloodstains, they were cheered by every ship in the harbour.’ Clarke went off to hospital to have his ear, which was partially severed, sewn on again. The man who conceived the Commandos was the first of them to be wounded in action.

As the morning wore on other boats returned, some to Dover, others to Folkestone. The fortunes of the men they bore had varied. Two boats had landed their troops on a waste of sand dunes where they had encountered no one, but had listened throughout the night to the sound of German aircraft constantly flying to and fro a short distance above their heads. A third boat had run into the midst of a seaplane anchorage near Boulogne, and the officer in charge had decided to stalk a seaplane. The chosen victim was about to be attacked when with a roar its engines started and it took off, missing the boat by a few feet. The men on board another boat had better fortune. They landed at the Plage de Merlimont, four miles south of Le Touquet, and approached a large building surrounded by barbed wire. It was filled with the enemy and may have been the headquarters of the local garrison, or possibly an officers’ mess. Two sentries were on guard outside it, and they were set upon and killed. One died silently, but the other screamed and his death-cry gave the alarm. The wire was too thick for the attackers to charge the house, and they therefore contented themselves with lobbing grenades through the windows, and withdrew with one of the corpses. So crowded was the boat, however, that they were forced to tow it behind, and it sank before England was reached.

The boats which arrived at Dover were cheered, but one which put into Folkestone was accorded a different reception. Again, owing to the secrecy maintained, no one had any inkling of the raid. Thirty men, dishevelled, with black, grimy faces, maintaining that they were newly come from France, seemed highly suspicious. They were refused permission to enter the harbour and made to lie off the boom under the guns until their identity was satisfactorily established. This took time and the men were wet and tired. To ward off possible ill-effects they broached the rum jars, of which there were two on board, and when they were finally allowed on shore a number shewed signs of having consumed more than the official ration. Their troubles were not over, for some officious military police, mistaking them for deserters, took them into custody.

So ended the first raid. It had accomplished little, and yet at the same time much. The military information brought back had no very great value, but the raid had a most heartening effect on the people of England. The communique issued made few claims, but the bald fact that within a month of the humiliation of Dunkirk the Army had been able to strike back, even on so small a scale, gave courage and hope to not a few, and the cheers which greeted Dudley Clarke and his fellows as they entered Dover harbour echoed round England.

By then the word Commando was already an inspiration to many. It had been the intention of M.O.9 to form ten Commandos of ten troops each; and to this end a circular letter was sent to the military commands in the United Kingdom, asking them to collect the names of all who, possessing certain qualifications, were prepared to volunteer for special service of an undefined but hazardous nature. The men had to be fully trained soldiers, be physically fit, able to swim, and immune from sea and air sickness. ‘Courage, physical endurance, initiative and resource, activity, marksmanship, self-reliance, and an aggressive spirit towards the war,’ were among the qualities demanded. The Commandos would have to become accustomed to longer hours, more work, and less rest than the regular members of His Majesty’s Forces, and must also become expert in all the