One Day in August

by David O'Keefe

  Robert Ryder was a rare character in the annals of military and naval history, the almost perfect classic hero. He was as resolute, determined and courageous in battle as he was reserved, humble and self-effacing in its afterglow. Uncomfortable with small talk and ceremony, he remained, as his biographer put it, “a reluctant hero.” On the occasion of his investiture at Buckingham Palace to receive his Victoria Cross, he chose to sneak out afterwards through a side door rather than deal with the throngs of reporters who waited to shower him with adoration and praise.46

  Born in 1908 in Dehra Dun, India, where his father, Colonel Charles Henry Ryder, held the prestigious post of surveyor general for that subcontinent, Robert, or “Bob” as he was known to family and close friends, was the youngest of six children. Unlike his father and older brothers Lisle and Ernle, who held commissions in the army, he chose to buck family tradition and join the Royal Navy, driven by his love of sailing and his penchant for adventure. After he won the King’s Dirk as the outstanding cadet in his final year, he went on to a spectacular career that led eventually to his command of the raiding force for St-Nazaire—as well as the “Cutting Out Force” for Dieppe and, eventually, Ian Fleming’s creation, 30 Assault Unit, his Intelligence Assault Unit.

  First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound was one of Ryder’s biggest fans, though Ryder initially was unaware of the old admiral’s regard. Pound appears to have marvelled at the exploits of his young subordinate as far back as 1934, when “Red” Ryder successfully piloted a Royal Navy yacht on a wild, year-long journey from Kowloon harbour in Hong Kong to Dartmouth, England. Ryder then signed on for a twelve-month stint with the famous British Graham Land Expedition, which explored Antarctica for three years, before finally crossing paths with Pound on HMS Warspite just before the outbreak of the war. Among his many hobbies were painting, writing and intelligence work—and this last interest was about to become very useful indeed.

  During the First World War, the Germans had developed the concept of the Q-ship, which the British readily adopted, where a tramp steamer outfitted to carry concealed weapons and disguised to resemble a merchant vessel was used to lure submarines and their crews to their fate. Early in 1940, Ryder was given command of his own vessel, the Special Services ship HMS Edgehill (X-39), and he personally designed its camouflage to include two pigs roaming the decks for full effect. In February he set out on the high seas in search of prey. To succeed, he first had to put his ship in harm’s way, even absorbing a torpedo hit if necessary to bring the U-boat to the surface. Once the submarine was above the waterline, Ryder intended to unleash his nine concealed four-inch guns on his enemy in a torrent of fire designed to sink the vessel. Nothing, however, went according to plan when the Edgehill met its first U-boat off the coast of Ireland in June 1940. Instead, Ernst-Günther Heinicke, the wily captain of U-51, sent Ryder’s ship to the bottom, leaving the captain alone in the water for four harrowing days until a passing ship rescued him from certain death.

  From there, Ryder was given command of HMS Prince Philippe, a large landing craft of the type later employed at Dieppe. She too was lost, in 1941 off Scotland, when, in the dead of night and thick fog, another vessel rammed her amidships and nearly cut her in half, despite Ryder’s best attempts to avoid collision. Much to his dismay, Ryder ended up in a shore posting, until he was offered the opportunity to command the seemingly impossible St-Nazaire Raid. Notwithstanding his string of bad luck, nothing had tarnished his reputation with the First Sea Lord, who seems personally to have chosen him to command the naval force for St-Nazaire. By all accounts, Pound was not disappointed by the results.

  The success of this raid made Ryder a reluctant media star, but it also established him within the Combined Operations framework as a heavy hitter—the “go- to guy” for tough raids of extreme importance. If a raid required the utmost in leadership, skill and intrepid courage amid the risk of heavy cost, Ryder was the man. As such, his inclusion in any operation warrants close scrutiny.

  The St-Nazaire raid firmly planted a series of lessons learned—and perhaps mislearned—in the minds of the Combined Operations planners which directly shaped the developing concept for Dieppe, and in particular Ryder’s role in the raid. The very success of St-Nazaire validated the brand that Mountbatten brought to the table, leaving the Chief of Combined Operations glowing in his assessment:

  I know of no other case in naval or military annals of such effective damage being inflicted so swiftly with such economy of force … This brilliant attack was carried out at night, under a vicious enemy fire, by a mere handful of men, who achieved, with certainty and precision, what the heaviest bombing raid or naval bombardment might well have failed to do.47

  With raiding and pinching concepts still emerging, however, this was the critical time for Mountbatten and his planners to draw the right lessons from Operations Chariot and Myrmidon. Unfortunately, with Myrmidon aborted at the eleventh hour, Combined Operations learned precious little that challenged or qualified the concept of storming into an enemy port with commandos and boarding parties ready to strike targets and pinch vital material. At St-Nazaire, David slew Goliath, but instead of recognizing it for what it was—an outlier—the Combined Operations planners adopted it as the norm, embracing a daring and adventurous attitude without reservation or qualification. And at this crucial point, this opinion was supported by both Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the chiefs of staff.

  Unfortunately, with Mountbatten’s Combined Operations relying increasingly on daring “mission impossible” operations to offset their limited assets, they were neglecting the very basics of strategy—the balance between firepower and manoeuvre—as they tried to reach their goals. From this point forward, deception, boldness and fighting spirit underpinned by surprise supplanted rather than enhanced the basics. The earlier operations in Norway and more recently at St-Nazaire had shown how much could be achieved with few resources when, and if, all elements came together like clockwork. Now they were poised to rely far too much on the elusive element of luck and the overwhelming need for surprise, particularly in pinch raids. If these elements worked at St-Nazaire, they reasoned, and would presumably have worked at Bayonne, why would they not be effective for other, larger operations?

  EIGHT

  “AUTHORIZED LOOTERS”

  Speaking on behalf of the Admiralty, Commander Fleming stated that there was an urgent requirement for personnel who could be intensively trained to carry out special naval intelligence duties … Commander Fleming went on to say that the Admiralty had pointed out the urgency of this requirement as long ago as March, and he emphasised the now increasingly urgent need for a permanent body to which this type of naval intelligence work could be entrusted.

  —MINUTES OF A MEETING AT COHQ TO DISCUSS THE FORMATION OF SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE UNITS, JULY 22, 19421

  In the daring and costly raid at St-Nazaire, the army commandos had once again proven their worth in spades, as they had during several small amphibious assaults stretching from Norway to the Mediterranean. At this darkest point of the war, they were highly sought after, and it was difficult for any commander to get them without friction, delay and even cancellation of future operations.

  For Mountbatten, it was frustrating not to have them directly under his control; like many of the forces employed by Combined Operations Headquarters, the commandos had been seconded from the army’s Special Service Brigade.2 The confident Dickie Mountbatten refused to be dependent on other branches of the armed services, and he determined to create his own force to carry out his objectives.

  Already, at the end of 1941, he had tasked Jock Hughes-Hallett with planning a series of raids along the northwestern coast of France for strategic and intelligence purposes. Now he pressed the Admiralty to create a well-trained and cohesive group of “naval” commandos to carry out these amphibious raids. By January 1942 he had succeeded. And where better to find the men for this top unit—the first Royal Marine Commando, designated A Commando—th
an in Mountbatten’s own beloved Royal Marine Division.3

  The Royal Marines had grown slowly but surely in stature over three centuries, acting as the assault force for the Royal Navy. They were legendary. Tracing their origins back to the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1685–87, they had played a dual role on His Majesty’s ships: ensuring discipline among the crew and leading boarding attacks on enemy ships or raiding shore facilities. Fighting in all major Royal Navy engagements, their long and stellar history included chapters in the Seven Years’ War, the American War of Independence, the War of 1812 (where they carried out raids along the Virginia and Maryland coasts) and the Crimean War. As sail power passed to steam and oil, the Marines added another duty to their list: manning the aft (rear) turrets on Royal Navy cruisers.

  During the First World War they were transformed into the Royal Naval Division—which Winston Churchill observed in action as they defended Antwerp from German attack in 1914—and later played vital roles in both the Gallipoli campaign and the Zeebrugge Raid; all told, five of their men earned the Victoria Cross. Not long after, however, scandal hit, when one battalion mutinied in Murmansk while serving in the tumultuous Russian Civil War, until finally, during the interwar retrenchment years, the Marines succumbed to the budgetary axe, which left them with fewer than ten thousand men—down from nearly sixty thousand during the Great War. In 1939 they reformed into the Royal Marine Division but had no real role in the Royal Navy’s order of battle, and instead of keeping together as a unit, their battalions spread around the globe in “penny packets” fighting independently in Asia, North Africa, Norway and on the island of Crete. Despite proving themselves on the field of battle, this once-proud division seemed destined to be broken up and used only to reinforce other units.

  Hoping to stave off their dissolution, Roger Keyes, Lord Louis Mountbatten’s predecessor at Combined Operations, had already suggested converting the Royal Marines into a series of battalion-sized commando units, each roughly five hundred strong, for use in raiding operations. Mountbatten now took up the torch, arguing that the Royal Marines were Britain’s natural amphibious commando force, one that could and should be equal to the army commandos.4

  Right from the formation of this new force, the “commando concept” transformed the face of the Royal Marines into the elite unit they are today. Initially there was tension within the unit itself: some of the officers refused to lower themselves and undergo the same gruelling regimen as their men in the “rough fun and games” of commando-style training.5 Other officers pushed convention aside and saw merit in combining the commando role with the ethos of the Royal Marines. “The commandos are tough,” their own journal, the Globe and Laurel, proclaimed. “Vaagso is proof of that. The Marines are tough. Crete and Norway—where they fought two hopeless Thermopylaes*— are the proof of that. Wait till they mill together.”6 For Mountbatten, however, a commando unit from a naval bloodline not only provided a tangible role for the Royal Marines—a goal he had championed for months—but also gave Combined Operations and the Admiralty their own private army of sorts, to be used as they saw fit.*

  Training for the three hundred men of the first Royal Marine Commando started in early February in Deal, on the Channel coast near Dover. To pay tribute to their naval heritage, the commando unit was divided into three fighting companies entitled A, B and X—corresponding to the turrets on His Majesty’s cruisers—and one “headquarters company” (comprising the commander, his staff, communications and heavy weapons). Each of the fighting companies was further broken down into three platoons of thirty officers and men, numbered 1 to 3 for A, 7 to 9 for B, and 10 to 12 for X.7

  These platoons became the homes—the surrogate families—for the fresh-faced recruits, mostly aged between eighteen and twenty-one (some weren’t even shaving yet), who flowed in from commands throughout England. They volunteered to come, attracted by the adventure, the challenge of hazardous duty and a modest raise in pay. Greeted by an officer review board, the tone was set immediately with one sobering question: “What makes a young lad like you tired of living?”8

  Once through the initial interview, the men paraded before the commanding officer, the diminutive thirty-two-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Picton-Phillips, rumoured to be a descendant of Wellington’s General Picton, who had been shot through the temple by a musket ball at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.9 A career Royal Marine officer with a high-pitched voice, pencil-thin moustache and fiery temperament, he was always immaculately dressed. When he arrived on the back of a white stallion to inspect the men, he only reinforced the new recruits’ belief that he suffered from a “small man’s complex.” He was a “sight to behold and his mannerisms, to many of us they were hilarious,” recalled one Marine. “We knew then that we had someone very different.”10

  In one of his many attempts to inculcate his version of Spartan-like discipline and initiative among the men, Picton-Phillips forbade the use of the main gate, forcing them to scale an eight-foot wall every time they entered or exited the barracks. Later he dispatched them into the wilderness for a three-day survival exercise, simply stating, “Fend for yourselves.”11 Soon his antics became the stuff of comic legend, forever ensconced in Royal Marine “dits”—those cautionary tales told to while away the off-hours.* Within the first few months, recruits who survived their initial training without being returned to unit, or RTU’d—the ultimate disgrace—became accustomed to maintaining an almost twenty-four-hour vigil for their tightly wound commander, “Tiger” as they called him, who habitually prowled the grounds at night, hoping to catch an unwary sentry off guard. At one point the overzealous Picton-Phillips’s bizarre actions nearly got the better of him when a startled sentry unloaded the full weight of his rifle butt on the colonel’s collarbone, leaving him to cry out in pain, “It’s your commanding officer. Carry on!” The next day, when summoned to Picton-Phillips’s office, the young Marine expected revenge but emerged minutes later with a promotion to lance corporal—the reward for his ruthless vigilance.12 Picton-Phillips may have appeared “daft as a half-penny,” but at least there was some method to his legendary madness.13

  Idiosyncratic or not, “a general hardening up” started immediately, designed to weed out those considered physically, spiritually or psychologically unfit. “It rained all the time, so we were never dry, and then there were the speed marches, six or seven miles in an hour for hour after hour, in full kit with platoon weapons,” recalled one recruit; “many would have fallen out, but were helped on by their mates.”14 Another hallmark of commando training, in addition to the near-death forced marches with sixty-five-pound packs, called for the use of live ammunition in exercises to simulate conditions on the battlefield—a policy that sometimes claimed “friendly fire” casualties but reinforced in the most powerful fashion the violent nature of the business at hand. “Climbing cliffs, crawling through bogs, under barbed wire, while the staff shot over us with Brens, or chucked grenades about” was all part of the daily routine for the prospective commandos.15 Today, “precise application of will” rather than mere violence defines the ethos of a Royal Marine commando, but this modification developed during the peacekeeping era. For the Marine commandos in 1942, the violent application of will was front and centre.

  By the end of the first week of training, nearly 20 percent of the recruits voluntarily returned to unit—a rate of attrition that held throughout the formation period. One did not simply join the Royal Marine Commando; one became a Royal Marine Commando. The extremely hazardous nature of the job, particularly with men so young, required full immersion in the new elite ethos that demanded high standards, unity, fortitude, humility, adaptability, and the wry and at times irreverent sense of humour essential for psychological survival in this stressful environment.16 As the training regime increased in intensity and realism, the basic instruction in the handling of small arms, mortars and hand grenades evolved into advanced subjects such as the recognition and disarmament of enemy land mines and boo
by traps, and then to the use of Hawkins grenades or “sticky bombs” designed to disable enemy tanks. The recruits also took courses in demolition and counter-demolition, learning how to use timed and untimed explosive charges to destroy a multitude of targets.17

  In the end, the result was a tight-knit cohort at the platoon level ready to take on all comers. The very nature of commando-style special operations called for the platoon to be prepared to operate independantly during a raid. Of necessity they had to work together as a well-oiled machine, the senior commanders continually warning that “there will come a day when you will depend on each other.”18 The Royal Marine Commandos wisely permitted the platoon commander and his sergeant to have the final say on whether a man made it as a commando or not. If they, or the group, lacked full confidence in an individual or felt that his attitude was not right, they immediately cut him loose with no reason offered besides one simple comment: “Unsuitable.”19

  By Easter Sunday, the same day that Operation Myrmidon was planned for Bayonne, the first cadre of Royal Marine A Commandos, who had survived six weeks of indoctrination at Deal, moved on for further gruelling training to the Combined Operations training centre at Acharacle in Argyll, Scotland, known as HMS Dorlin. This isolated former naval base now became the elaborate training ground for Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters. Despite its name, it was not a ship; the Dorlin estate included six luxurious houses and offered the commandos a half-dozen demanding assault courses over a seventeen-mile radius, pitting them against natural and artificial obstructions and challenging them to hone their tactical skills, particularly their street-fighting smarts, which were expected to be a key part of their deadly raiding repertoire on shore. In addition, the landing craft, cutters and drifters, as well as a former French fishery protection vessel at the base, gave ample opportunity for the commandos to practise assault landings, boarding of enemy ships and simulated pinch operations.