by Giles Milton
A lifetime of fighting had left its mark. He had a broken nose and a long scar that stretched from ear to chin. Yet most people were struck by ‘his flashing white teeth that no amount of punching had ever loosened’.23
His principal interest in life, apart from fighting, was his prize goldfish. He had the finest collection in China – more than 100,000 in total – which he kept in specially constructed pools.
Fairbairn came to know Eric Sykes through his work with Colt and Remington. By 1926, he had drafted him into his Riot Squad, where Sykes swiftly proved himself a valuable addition to the team. The two men shared a passion for dirty killing and together wrote the seminal work on pistol shooting, Shooting to Live. This was followed by other books: All-in Fighting, Get Tough and Self-Defence for Women and Girls.
* * *
When Sykes and Fairbairn explained their skills to the War Office, it was immediately apparent that there was no place for them in the British Army. The idea of a good clean fight was anathema to them. They were brought to the notice of Colin Gubbins, who immediately hired their services and sent them briefly to Brickendonbury Manor before dispatching them to the Highlands of Scotland. By the spring of 1941, they had become key members of his inner circle and as important to his forthcoming operations as Millis Jefferis and Cecil Clarke.
On first arriving at the sparsely populated west coast of Scotland, they found themselves entering a secret zone, one that was forbidden to anyone without the requisite military permission. The Protected Area had been established within a few weeks of Gubbins’s Independent Companies returning from their Norwegian adventure. Gubbins himself had been sanctioned to requisition a vast slab of Scottish wilderness, along with a dozen or so country properties.
Lord Lovat, whose residence was not far from Gubbins’s childhood home, was sent north to take possession of ‘all available premises astride the Fort William–Mallaig road and railway line’. He also requisitioned the surrounding moorland and mountains, including ‘six deer forests and their lodges, covering a land mass for training purposes of not less than 200,000 acres of wild country’.24
And wild it certainly was. Gubbins’s childhood stamping ground was a land of lochs, watery bogs and mountains of sparse beauty, where the shadows of clouds scudded at speed over the empty landscape. Such wilderness was perfect for honing skills in stalking, endurance, orienteering and small boat work.
The first property to be commandeered was Inverailort House near Lochailort, a Victorian shooting lodge that stood at the head of Loch Ailort. Inverailort was where Gubbins’s Independent Companies were billeted after their bruising experience in Norway.
While still nursing their wounds they were given lessons in field-craft by David Stirling (who went on to found the SAS) and Lord Lovat (who was to become captain of the Lovat Scouts). They were also taught survival techniques by the polar veteran George Murray Levick, who had accompanied Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole and survived to tell the tale.
‘I know a man who always cut a hole in the skull of a seal as soon as he had shot it and sucked out the nice warm brains,’ he would tell his students. ‘Young foxes and dogs are quite palatable, but they are improved with Worcester Sauce or Tomato Ketchup.’25 He neglected to tell them how to find Tomato Ketchup when fighting behind enemy lines.
Inverailort House was to remain an endurance training centre for the duration of the war, while nearby Arisaig was to be the principal killing academy for Sykes and Fairbairn. This was their private domain, a Victorian lodge whose gabled ends stood solid against the blustery shores of Loch nan Ceall. There was no architectural frivolity to be found in Arisaig’s hewn walls, no baroque twirls and fancies. On the rare fine days of the year, the Sound of Arisaig would reveal a Spartan beauty of scoured rock and glassy water. But when the wind whipped at the chimneys and lashed the stunted trees, the sombre austerity was all-pervading. Bonnie Prince Charlie had fled to France from this remote outpost, his whereabouts kept secret by the loyal local fishermen. ‘A price was put on his head of thirty thousand pounds,’ said one local, ‘and nobody gave a whisper away.’26 Now, those same locals had another secret to keep.
Gubbins ordered Sykes and Fairbairn to set up a training school unlike any other. Indeed he gave them complete freedom to teach whatever methods they thought necessary. ‘Take no bloody notice of anyone but me,’ he said.27
True to his word, the two trainers informed their pupils that the rule book had been cast into the dustbin. ‘We were to be gangsters with the knowledge of gangsters,’ said one, ‘but with the behaviour, if possible, of gentlemen.’28
Sykes and Fairbairn switched between Arisaig and Inverailort on a daily basis, preparing men for the most dangerous missions of all. New recruits were given a typical Fairbairn welcome. ‘In this war,’ he would say, ‘you can’t afford the luxury of squeamishness. Either you kill or capture or you will be killed or captured. We’ve got to be tough to win and we’ve got to be ruthless.’
He would recount eyebrow-raising anecdotes from Shanghai before glaring at the men through his pebble glasses. ‘What I want you to do is get the dirtiest, bloodiest ideas in your head that you can think of for destroying a human being.’ He told them to forget all notions of fair play. ‘The fighting I’m going to show you is not a sport. It’s every time, and always, a fight to the death.’
New recruits were toughened up with a gruelling regime of physical training: endurance runs over empty moorland, hiking with heavy packs and lessons in the martial arts. The men were told how to induce a heart attack, snap the coccyx and strangle a sentry. It was not for the faint-hearted. Fairbairn would teach each new recruit ‘a dozen edge-of-the-hand blows that break a wrist, an arm or a man’s neck; twists that wrench and tear; holds that choke and strangle; throws that break a leg or a back; kicks that crush ribs, shins and feet bones’.29 He bragged that he could kill a man with a folded newspaper, and his finger-jab to the eye had blinded many a Shanghai gangster.
Fairbairn particularly relished his dining room routine, showing them how to whisk up a tablecloth as you dived over a table and then ‘wrap it round your opponent’s head as he crashes down under you and, finally, how to push it into his mouth with the remains of the bottle meanwhile smashed over his skull’.30
Knife-fighting was one of the great specialities of Arisaig: Fairbairn and Sykes had designed their own double-edged commando knife – an eight-inch blade with a cross-piece and a ribbed centre on both sides. Now, their recruits were taught to slash and stab. But Fairbairn knew that it was one thing to stab a straw-filled dummy, quite another to plunge a blade into flesh. ‘We’ve got to get you bloodied,’ he would say with a devilish grin as he led the men to the local slaughterhouse.
‘Each of us had to plunge a knife into a recently killed animal to get the feel of human flesh that was still quivering,’ said one new recruit. There was a reason for this practice. ‘It was to make us realize that when you put a knife into any living creature, the contractions of the sinews is such that it’s very difficult to get it out.’31
Such training was vitally important for the missions that lay ahead. Gubbins’s goal was to produce the most elite guerrillas in the world. In Sykes and Fairbairn, he had the best tutors in the world.
The two men faced constant criticism from the War Office, but Gubbins always championed their cause. This became more difficult when the criticism came from senior generals, as it often did. On one occasion, Fairbairn had taken his best pupil, William Pilkington, to a Home Guard training session in Glasgow. They had just been teaching their audience how to sever someone’s carotid artery with a sharpened trowel when there was a furious cry from the back of the room: ‘Stop this at once!’
Unbeknown to anyone, the training session had been brought to the attention of Major-General Sir Edward Spears, a senior army officer of the old school. He was appalled by what he had just heard.
‘This is monstrous,’ he bawled. ‘Don’t pay attention to this dr
eadful teaching. Remember, we are British. We do not stoop to thug-element tactics. We do not stab in the back. We fight as men. We do not slash. Now this must cease.’
Fairbairn was furious. He had never respected authority and was so angered by Major-General Spears’s outburst that he answered back in the most colourful terms, hurling abuse at the general and telling him he was an idiot. He might have been court-martialled on the spot, had it not been for the arrival of someone of even greater stature. Unseen by anyone, Winston Churchill had slipped into the room just after Major-General Spears: the two men had been visiting Glasgow together. Churchill was grinning widely, very much the worse for wear, with saliva dripping from his cigar. Steadying himself with a walking cane, he called out: ‘Come on Teddy, for Christ’s sake, you’ve said enough. Come and have a drink.’ He then grabbed Spears and pulled him outside.
‘Good work,’ he shouted to the room at large. ‘Keep it up.’32
* * *
Winston Churchill knew something that Major-General Spears did not. Four months before Gubbins made his trip to Arisaig, he had been sanctioned to form his own private strike force: a small group of men who could be used for private hit-and-run attacks. The idea was that they should never number more than twelve. In the event, Gubbins was to settle on eleven. The size of the force was perhaps no accident. Eric Sykes always liked to tell his men that they were in Arisaig to unlearn the rules of a game of cricket. Eleven was indeed the same as the number of players in a cricket team, but cricket was the very last game that Gubbins’s men were going to be playing.
Gubbins interviewed the potential captain of the team shortly before Christmas 1940, and was immediately struck by his towering self-confidence. Gustavus (‘Gus’) Henry March-Phillipps was a thirty-two-year-old survivor of the Dunkirk catastrophe, a man with guts of granite and a contempt for rules. He had previously served with a remote hill battery on the North-West Frontier, fighting a dirty war against rebellious tribesmen. The long hours spent staring into the Himalayan sunlight had left their mark. ‘His eyes, puckered from straining against tropical glare, gave him an enquiring, piercing and even formidable expression.’33
Twelve months earlier, he had joined the newly formed commandos, an elite force being created out of Gubbins’s Independent Companies. Churchill himself had encouraged the formation of such a force, calling for ‘specially trained troops of the hunter class, who can develop a reign of terror’ along the northern coastline of France.34
March-Phillipps had always been the first among equals and his unremitting professionalism soon brought him to the attention of his superiors. He was appointed to lead B Troop of 7 Commando. But his drive for perfection was such that even the commandos failed to satisfy him. Within weeks, he began to gather a small team of like-minded professionals who he hoped to forge into an elite brotherhood.
No one who met March-Phillipps ever forgot the experience. His young wife found him ‘frightfully good looking, if you got him at the right angle, and very beaky if you got him at the wrong one, and this marvellous, scarred, beautiful mouth’. He practised everything to extremes, even his faith, having an unshaken belief in his Roman Catholic god. He prayed for ten minutes every night, fervently, yet he was at heart an iconoclast with ‘a complete contempt for small regulations that sometimes make life in the army tiresome’.
Slothfulness offended him, as did obesity. He had ‘great scorn of anyone who was carrying an ounce too much fat’. His friends saw him as an archetypal Renaissance man, bold, quick-witted and highly cultivated. ‘By tradition an English country gentleman,’ said one, ‘he combined the idealism of a Crusader with the severity of a professional soldier.’35 In reality, he was a freelance adventurer who secretly hoped to strut the globe like some lineal descendant of Sir Francis Drake. Gubbins interviewed him in Baker Street and was deeply impressed. ‘Full of initiative, bursting to have a go, competent, full of self-confidence.’36 He hired him on the spot and put him in charge of the eleven-strong band.
March-Phillipps’s second-in-command was Geoffrey Appleyard, a man who sailed through life trailing an embarrassment of riches. He gained a first at Cambridge, where he was Head of Boats (at Caius College), and he was also a skiing blue. He was one of the great skiers of the age, leading Britain to an unprecedented victory against Norway in the winter championships of 1938.
Appleyard had originally been appointed section commander to March-Phillipps in 7 Commando. Now, hired by Gubbins, he became second-in-command of the as yet unnamed strike force. He loved the freelance approach to warfare as much as the piratical element of their work. ‘No red tape, no paperwork, none of all the things that are in the army,’ he wrote. ‘Just pure operations, the success of which depends principally on oneself and the men one has oneself picked to do the job with you. It’s terrific! It’s revolutionary and one can hardly imagine it happening in this old Army of ours.’37
One by one March-Phillipps hired men for his elite band. By the late spring of 1941, there was just one place left vacant. Gubbins knew that March-Phillipps was looking for an eleventh member and, while visiting Arisaig, asked Sykes and Fairbairn if they had a suitable candidate for a mission into uncharted territories. The two men had no doubts as to their best student. Anders Lassen, ‘the Viking’, was one of the ten Danish recruits currently being put through their training programme. Pale-eyed, aristocratic and alarmingly wild, he shared March-Phillipps’s contempt for army rules. ‘The most remarkable aspect of Lassen was the strength of his self-belief,’ said his childhood friend, Prince Georg of Denmark. ‘Indeed, it was more than self-belief.’38 He had a vaunting air of invincibility.
He had certainly made an impression on everyone at Arisaig. One day, he was out on the moors with his fellow trainees when he spotted two huge stags in the distance. ‘I want that one!’ he roared, as he set off in hot pursuit, his Fairbairn-Sykes dagger at the ready. Fleet of foot and spurred on by hunger, he was soon bearing down on the unfortunate beast. His comrades watched on aghast. ‘He stabbed it with his knife,’ said one, slaughtering it in an instant. ‘It was a fine, big animal and the next few days we had lovely roast.’39
Bold, fearless and fast – they were the very attributes Gubbins most appreciated. Indeed, his behaviour was more like a pirate than a soldier. Gubbins informed Sykes and Fairbairn that he was taking Lassen back to London. A pirate was exactly what he needed.
9
Gubbins’s Pirates
THE ANTELOPE HOTEL in Poole was an Elizabethan coaching inn that served a decent array of ales and, considering it was wartime, a reasonable selection of food. Its proprietor, Arthur ‘Pop’ Baker, had wisely stocked up on supplies in the months before the outbreak of war. Now, in the second summer of conflict, he still had luxuries in his cellar.
Colin Gubbins arrived at the hotel just after 10.30 a.m. on 10 August 1941, having made an early start from London. The news that morning had been as grim as ever. Just seven weeks after Hitler’s spectacular invasion of the Soviet Union, his forces had reached within striking distance of Leningrad. Further south, in Ukraine, two entire Soviet armies had just been crushed, with the capture of 100,000 prisoners. Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, the Red Army’s most senior battlefield commander, found the situation so desperate that he issued a call for outright guerrilla warfare. ‘Join guerrilla detachments, attack behind the lines and destroy German convoys and supply columns,’ he said. ‘Wreak merciless, complete and continuous vengeance on the enemy.’1 They were sentiments that could have been uttered by Gubbins.
Gubbins had travelled down to Poole in order to bid farewell to a pioneering mission destined for tropical waters. Gus March-Phillipps and his team were about to set sail on the biggest adventure of their lives.
From the outset, Gubbins had conceived of his private strike force as one that could conduct coastal raids, amphibious sabotage missions and hit-and-run attacks on Nazi bases. Such operations required a vessel, one that would arouse no suspicions when under sail. March-P
hillipps had found just the craft at anchor in Brixham harbour. Maid Honour was a fifty-five-ton local trawler ideally suited to such missions. Her hull was wooden, rendering her immune to magnetic mines, and her dark brown sails meant that she was almost invisible at night. She looked like what she was: an unremarkable fishing vessel.
March-Phillipps now ‘pulled off a feat that only he could have got away with’. He requisitioned the vessel from its owner and then, once it was done, telegrammed Gubbins and asked for the necessary authority. Gubbins was no stranger to breaking rules, but he was nevertheless impressed at the panache with which March-Phillipps had overstepped the mark. According to one of the team, he immediately sanctioned March-Phillipps’s actions and ‘won the everlasting gratitude of the crew by backing us up through thick and thin’.2
Once the Maid Honour was acquired, Gubbins enlisted the services of Millis Jefferis and Cecil Clarke to help transform her from fishing ketch to special operations’ vessel. Although she continued to look like any other trawler in the harbour, she was equipped with weaponry designed to catch rather more than fish. Her plywood deckhouse concealed a formidable arsenal that included a Vickers Mark two-pounder gun, four Bren light machine guns, four tommy guns and a stockpile of hand grenades. She was also well stocked with specialist detonators supplied by the Firs, along with a large supply of plastic explosive. More importantly, she carried four spigot mortars designed by Jefferis and perfected for use at sea by Clarke.
The Maid Honour’s inaugural combat mission had been planned some four weeks earlier, when Gubbins invited March-Phillipps to luncheon in London. His team was to head from Poole to equatorial West Africa, where they were to ‘undertake subversive operations on both sea and land’. In particular, they were to target Admiral Dönitz’s U-boats that were prowling the coast of West Africa and had sunk no fewer than twenty-seven Allied merchant ships over the previous months. The U-boats had been spotted lurking in the muddy creeks and mangrove swamps of Vichy-controlled territory there: this was where they came to refuel and re-victual. This, too, was where they were most vulnerable to attack. March-Phillipps declared that if he so much as sighted one, he would ‘blow a hole in her with the spigot mortar’.3