by Hamish Ross
However, while the Boer Commando usually recruited from a town or district,2 volunteers from existing units cut across the traditional regimental strengths of the British Army. This would forever be a source of tension. One of the Commandos was drawn principally, but by no means exclusively, from Scottish regiments. It was called No. 11 (Scottish) Commando and its rallying point was the Borders town of Galashiels.
In previous centuries, Galashiels had been a staging post for the Border Reivers; in mid-1940, volunteers for a new unit of seaborne raiders began to assemble in its quiet streets; and since selection for No. 11 Commando was to lead to a new direction in their soldiering, many of the volunteers would always associate its starting point with the place where they gathered. Edwin Muir described the town at that time as giving
an appearance of having been dropped completely into a pastoral landscape, where it pursues a life at once cut off and autonomous. One gets a somewhat similar impression from the little towns which decorate medieval and early Renaissance Flemish landscapes.3
Blair Mayne was one of those for whom Galashiels was a landmark in their military career. For three years later, long after No. 11 Commando had been disbanded and by which time he commanded the Special Raiding Squadron, he wrote in a letter to his family that one of his soldiers had been killed; and he identified him as a man who ‘had been with me right since the time we started as a Commando in Galashiels’.4 The boredom of the preceding months began to evaporate.
Those who volunteered had no preconceptions of what they were joining: there was no existing model, nor had special service troops become glamorised in the press or on newsreels – indeed their existence was not public knowledge at this stage. But the criteria were challenging and that was sufficient. Volunteers were to be trained soldiers, physically fit and able to swim, and their personal attributes had to include endurance, self-reliance and initiative.5 The first part of the process was one of self-selection: all recruits had to be volunteers. Jimmy Storie, Royal Scots Fusiliers, was stationed in Forres; his reason for volunteering was, ‘There seemed to be more scope, more freedom in the idea of the Commandos.’6 Reg Harmar came along with eight or nine others from the Wiltshire Regiment, who were stationed in Scotland at the time. Sir Tommy Macpherson, now President of the Commando Association, was a lieutenant in the Cameron Highlanders.
I was then with 5th Camerons up in Caithness and not very enthralled with defending the coast of Caithness. So I volunteered and I myself picked from the various companies the other ranks that I thought suitable. I went down to Galashiels, clocked in and found that the administrative man was a Major Ramsay, also a Cameron Highlander who had been my Company Commander in September 1939. He was a First World War veteran with a Military Cross and one arm and so was considered the bee’s knees by all concerned; he was also very convivial and liked his dram. He was responsible for assembling all the personnel.
The first thing that happened to me was that my Commanding Officer – of the Camerons – decided that the people I picked were too good and he wasn’t going to let them go and signalled down that a substantially different body of men was about to be sent. I got Major Ramsay to call in higher authority and got 90 per cent of the personnel I selected and they remained my troop throughout the active period of Scottish Commando – and very good they were.7
Macpherson’s experience of the reluctance of his parent regiment to part with some of its best men was an indication of the feelings in other units. So the men who had to lead these Commandos had to be capable of standing up to higher authority.
One of the early leaders who was chosen by Dudley Clarke to lead a Commando was Dick Pedder, Highland Light Infantry (HLI).8 Pedder was a strong character, single-minded and, as a young subaltern, had shown that he was not prepared to conform to the rigid patterns of behaviour expected of an officer in the peacetime regiment. But such attitudes could cause friction in the mess; and he was regarded in the regiment as something of an eccentric.9 Early indications of his character emerged when the regiment was stationed in Cairo in the mid-twenties. There had been a political assassination of a British official and in an attempt to reduce risk to military personnel, neither officers nor men were supposed to go out alone after dark in Cairo. But Pedder was no conformist and one Saturday night absented himself from the mess.
Consequently, when Pedder, a newly joined subaltern, was found to be absent without leave on church parade – a commanding officer’s parade held every Sunday with considerable ceremonial – a great deal of anxiety was caused and all military and civil police in Cairo were alerted. It was therefore something of an anti-climax when, as the 74th swung along the road to the Kirk, it passed Pedder sitting in the back of an open taxi by the side, dressed in a dinner jacket, somewhat dishevelled, with a dazed expression on his face. The instant the battalion returned from church he was summoned to the presence of the Colonel, whom he attended in understandable trepidation after being assisted into his uniform and sword by some sympathetic friends. He reported on his return, however, that the Colonel had been so interested in the tale of his adventures that he had quite forgotten to issue any reprimand.10
Both by background and predisposition, he was a very appropriate choice to lead a Commando. In this, his first command, he was entirely focused on the unit; he knew exactly what he wanted and how to go about getting it. He left it to his second-in-command, Maj Ramsay, a territorial officer with experience of the First World War, to act as the buffer with higher levels, and he devoted his priorities to the selection and training of his men. He led by example: he was as demanding on himself as he was on others. Like school pupils probing their new teacher, the soldiers assessed this CO who was so much among his men, enduring the same rigours – and they were impressed. As Reg Harmar put it, ‘Pedder was a great soldier: he would not ask a soldier to do what he could not do himself. He was a soldier through and through.’11 His officers had opportunities to assess him closely. Tommy Macpherson recalled him:
Yes, we had to pass muster with Pedder (HLI), the first Commanding Officer. It’s worth recording a few things about Pedder. Of course over the period of the Commando training in Arran, we got to know Pedder very well – all of us. Nobody liked him; he was an unlikeable man; he was a loner; he was extremely authoritarian, with a very quick temper. But he was a good man in welding and training the battalion, the Commando, and he was extraordinarily detailed: he even produced and distributed to every man in the Commando a list of what they should take in their pocket if they went into action – string, lavatory paper, all this sort of thing. But he was not liked. It was sad that he was killed at the Litani river action, where the extent of the casualties eventually led to the disbandment of the Commando, because I think he would have been able to hold it together. He had a very strong personality and he was not afraid at all to stand up to higher authority outside.
No, he was very clear on what the Churchillian remit for the Commandos was, as passed on by Adm Keyes, and he stuck to it; that was his remit and higher authority should not interfere with it.
But it was typical of his character – you remind me of rank – that second lieutenants who had been commissioned before or at the very beginning of the war were due, under wartime regulations, to get their second pip on the 1 January 1941. He refused flatly to allow us to have it until he had decided for himself that we should have it. Now, that was typical in a way of his authoritarianism, his independence and his fundamental meanness. So, as I say, he was not liked, but everybody considered him efficient and efficacious. And he certainly created a unit that could function, for we were trained in everything we should be trained in: a great deal of night work. In retrospect, possibly a slight lack of emphasis on sheer physical fitness, which he thought would come in the arduous exercises, but, in fact, you have to do more direct things to obtain complete physical fitness.12
Pedder’s first test of his men is still recalled by veterans. Their early training began in Galashiels, and while it w
as strenuous, it was only a series of warm-ups for what lay ahead. The Commando role envisaged assault from the sea on enemy positions – they would be seaborne raiders; they needed beaches on which to practise. Galashiels was but a mustering point; their Commando training was to take place on the Isle of Arran; and Pedder’s first test of the volunteers was simple and effective: he marched them from Galashiels to Ayr. Opinion among the officers varied as to the arduousness of the march: Geoffrey Keyes referred to the first day’s march as ‘a shocker’.13 But some were unimpressed: ‘A number of the men had had difficulty on that, mainly with their feet rather than with any arduousness of the march. But they, the officers themselves, did not think it a very powerful test.’14
As an indicator of physical endurance it was perhaps not overly demanding, but it had another element as well. The second day’s march was as gruelling as the first, but for those who dropped out trucks came along, picked them up and drove on, overtaking their marching comrades. Those who continued marching, however, were now tested by the tantalising spectacle of an easy alternative mode of transport; and some on the trucks, thinking that they had cracked the system, threw a few taunts to their footslogging mates: ‘I remember them crowing to us as they passed.’15 But they were deceived: those who had dropped out of the march, on reaching Ayr, received the chit from Pedder, RTU (Return to Unit).
How did Mayne fit in to this regime? The idea of Commandos strongly appealed to him and suited his temperament. He found it far more stimulating than the earlier months; and the year he spent in No. 11 Commando was to be an important period in his military service: the training developed his potential and allowed the tactical genius that he was to be known for to begin to emerge. And his effectiveness during the large-scale raid that the Commando was to carry out brought him to the attention of those who were able to advance his career in Special Services. For it was not the result of serendipity – as has been assumed – which caused him to be approached to join the unit in which he was to find fame. Time was also to show that Mayne was not just a brilliant exponent of the aggressive spirit: he was a reflective individual. The leadership characteristics of those he served under interested him.
Mayne respected Pedder and he cited the subsequent change of regime after Pedder’s death as his reason for leaving the Scottish Commando.16 However, in the early months of training, Mayne did not draw a lot of attention to himself. But what was noticed, by both officers and men, was the bond of friendship between Mayne and Eoin McGonigal.
Blair and Eoin McGonigal came together; they were absolutely inseparable friends, although one came from the north of Ireland and one from the south. They came from the same regiment and they couldn’t have been more different: Blair, a very large Irish forward, fair-haired, open-faced; Eoin McGonigal, dark-haired, dark-faced, slim and neat. They had slightly different tastes in young ladies; Blair liked dark ones and Eoin liked fair ones, but apart from that they seemed to have almost every other taste in common. When they came, perhaps because of the different atmosphere, the predominance of Scotsmen and so on, they were in fact very quiet in the early days in Arran and one didn’t see or hear a lot of them.17
The Commando was based at Lamlash on the Isle of Arran; they were billeted with the local population, who soon adopted them and made them feel welcome in the community. Mayne’s billet was at Landour. One of his letters to his mother in this early period is redolent of a young man freed from the constraints of living at home:
I like this place – we are very comfortable here and the mess is fine. I don’t live in the mess, as I think I told you. Five of us are in a small parlour house, only for sleeping of course. I prefer it. We keep a fire going, have a gramophone, and there is a pot of tea made in the evening. I think this is the sort of place I’ll live in. No women about it, and clothes lying about all over the place, dirty teacups on the floor, wet boots on the fender, a perfect existence. We have lots of labour-saving devices also, e.g. the coal is in very large lumps. To split it we just fire a revolver shot into it; it cracks it wonderfully.18
By definition, Commando training had to be arduous, but it also had to include a wide range of skills such as canoeing, rock climbing, unarmed combat and night landings. Mayne found no difficulty in acquiring new skills. He had excellent hand-and-eye coordination, and the level of physical fitness he had reached in the world of sport meant that the endurance tests were well within his capability. Being wet through seemed to become a part of everyday life. Their training, however, gave them more than physical fitness and new skills: it promoted a keen sense of esprit de corps; they felt themselves to be something of an elite and their morale was high, as this vignette from Mayne’s letter to his mother shows. It is headed, ‘Sunday Night, Machrie Bay’:
We left Lamlash about two o’clock and walked over here, about seventeen miles. For the first four miles there were odd showers. They didn’t hinder us much since we quickly dried, but after it wasn’t so good, as the final shower lasted for the last thirteen miles and there was a regular gale blowing off the sea into our faces. I waded through a river the other night and I don’t think it was any wetter!
This book was in my pocket and is still wet. We got in here about seven o’clock and then started to find somewhere to sleep. We were carrying nothing except some food; we would not demean ourselves by carrying blankets. It is a smallish hamlet, eight or nine houses, and I started going to them to find somewhere for my twenty-five men to dry their clothes. They were all decent; one old lady reminded me of you. I knocked at the door and the girl who opened it seemed scared. I think at first she thought I was a Jerry parachutist, though Father Christmas would have been more like the thing, what with all the equipment I had on. At any rate, I told her who we were, that we intended sleeping out and wondered if she could get some clothes dried.
She rose to her feet – ‘You’ll not stop outside as long as I’ve a bed in my house’. – and then went into a huddle with her two daughters and her clatter of children and then announced that she could take six. To cut a long story short, I am sitting in borrowed pyjamas and an overcoat made for a much smaller man than myself, so much so than when one of my lads saw me he said, ‘Let Burton dress you!’19
One of Mayne’s strengths as an officer, which comes across in the letter, is the relaxed relationship that he was able to generate with his men. But they were impressed with him too.
Adm Keyes visited the unit two or three times during its training and on one occasion was accompanied by Churchill. That the son of the Director of Combined Operations was a lieutenant in the unit did not unduly trouble Pedder, although he may have shown him a little more favour at times than he did the other officers. Geoffrey Keyes, unlike most of his fellow officers in the unit, was a regular officer, and in October 1940 he was made Acting Captain. There were by then two other Commando units training in the north of the island, Nos 7 and 8 Commando. The War Office was against the idea of special headdress for the Commandos, wrongly assuming that men would rather wear their regimental headwear and insignia.20 But No. 11 (Scottish) Commando wore the balmoral into which was inserted its distinctive emblem, the Black Hackle. (The Green Beret, which in time became the issue for Commandos, was not then in use.) It adopted for its motto the slogan ‘No Quarter’. The battalion piper composed a 6/8 march and asked Pedder’s permission to have it called Colonel Pedder. Pedder refused. Instead it was titled No. 11 (Scottish) Commando.
However, in time the high level of training began to lead to frustration that the Commando was not being used. Keyes, in a letter to his father on 19 November, referred to ‘The men longing for a show’.21 After all, the reason for raising Commando forces had been to bring the war to an enemy who already controlled most of Central Europe, Norway and Denmark. An opportunity seemed to present itself in December:
In December, it appeared that we were going off on a raid: the rumour was ‘into Norway’ and we were all mounted, not once but twice, I think, on two ships. Mine was a fast ferry
ship called the Royal Scotsman and all I can recall of that was that it was extremely comfortable. The first time, I think, was an exercise, and we did a landing at Lochranza; the second time we believed it was for real. But after a few hours we were recalled to Arran, disembarked and sent on Christmas leave.22
Then options for using Commandos in the Middle East surfaced: Churchill urged that the island of Pantelleria be stormed and occupied; and the Director of Combined Operations felt that its capture was an essential element in dominating the central Mediterranean.23 Plans for an attack on Pantelleria, code-named ‘Workshop’, were drawn up; and Nos 7, 8 and 11 Commando would be used. First it was postponed, then it was on again and the three units embarked on 29 January, only to be told that ‘Workshop’ had been cancelled: the Luftwaffe had arrived in Italy and an assault fleet would be vulnerable to air attack.