by Tom Keene
Thus, within two days, Clarke had the Premier’s authorisation to create exactly the sort of ‘commando’ strike force he was proposing. Colonel Clarke was appointed to head a new section of the War Office secretariat of Military Operations – MO9 – and to organise ‘uniformed raids’.13 Churchill imposed only two conditions: first, that no unit should be diverted from its primary task of defending the shores of Britain against invasion and, second, that this new strike force should make do with a minimum of weapons. Which, given the quantity of arms of every description left behind at Dunkirk, was probably just as well:
So urgent was the need of every sort of arm and equipment to refit the BEF that raiding had to be carried out on a Woolworth basis. For this reason the Commandos were armed, equipped, organised and administered for one task and one task only – tip-and-run raids of not more than 48 hours from bases in England against the continent of Europe.14
So short, in fact, was the supply of weapons in England that tommy guns and other weapons used on the early commando raids had to be issued and later returned to a single communal store.
But … commando! The name stuck:
I suggested the name ‘commando’ from the very start. At least, it was arrived at without much effort and I don’t remember any rival titles having been seriously considered – although it was a long time before War Office circles would unbend sufficiently to use the word in official papers without visible pain … but it did seem at once to suggest exactly what was wanted … A little further thought seemed to show one conditions far more favourable than most guerrillas had had to contend with. First, we had in England a safe and well-stocked base from which to operate within close range of many tempting targets; second, we had plenty of intelligent and trained soldiers who could individually be just as well armed as their opponents and, third, we had in the sea lines of approach and retreat where we could expect to be more mobile and more secure than our opponents.15
The troops Clarke needed were, indeed, close at hand. He had only to look to Norway.
Like Dunkirk, the British Norwegian campaign of April 1940 had been a disaster, its comprehensive mishandling shovelled under the carpet, eclipsed by Chamberlain’s mauling in the Commons Norway debate, his subsequent departure from office and the German launch of European blitzkrieg on 10 May. The land campaign overall in Norway may have been a failure but the deployment and handling of what had become known as the ‘Independent Companies’ had shone a pale gleam of light onto an otherwise bleak landscape of confusion and gross senior officer incompetence. Britain had been wrong-footed by the speed, precision and brutal professionalism of the long anticipated but, in the event, unexpected German seizure of key ports and strategically important, widely scattered towns in the Germans’ unprovoked simultaneous invasion of both Denmark and Norway on 9 April 1940. It was an assault aimed at securing German naval bases from which, in their sea war with Britain, Germany could break out of the confines of the North Sea.
Britain’s makeshift response, according to one leading historian, ‘defied parody’.16 But someone, somewhere, had been thinking ahead. Military Intelligence had been ordered to make plans for amphibious raids on Norway’s western coast. Accordingly, MI(R) – one of the early forerunners of the soon-to-be-created Special Operations Executive – had set about the creation of a number of irregular units whose task would be to prevent German troops from setting up those air and submarine bases and to harry the extended lines of German supply and communications. Proposed by the head of MI(R), Lt Col Jo Holland, DFC, RE, on 15 April 1940, he envisaged a number of special units, each lightly equipped and capable of operating alone for up to a month at a time. His proposal was immediately approved.
Called initially ‘Guerilla Companies’, then ‘Special Infantry Companies’ and finally ‘Independent Companies’, ten of these new units were formed in haste from those Territorial Army formations that had not been sent to France with the BEF. Each consisted of 21 officers and 368 other ranks drawn from units across the British Isles. Each company was to be self-sufficient and allocated a mother ship which would be both its floating base and its means of transport to and from its area of operations. Soon, five of those companies – Nos 1,2, 3, 4 and 5 – were on their way to Norway.
All five seaborne Independent Companies – the other five remained in Scotland and were intended to follow later – were commanded by Lt Col Colin Gubbins. His formation was given the name ‘ScissorsForce’. If Admiralty signals reflected the uncertainty of times dominated by little more than confusion and a lurching, impulsive reaction to German military initiatives, then the Norway briefing on 4 May in Whitehall of the Officer Commanding No 4 Independent Company was of a piece: Major Patterson returned to his unit clutching ‘maps’ which consisted of little more than an illustrated pre-war guide to Norway as a holiday destination.
For Gubbins’ men, the Norwegian campaign that ensued was chaotic and largely reactive. ScissorsForce sprang a successful ambush on German bicycle troops on the main road near Mosjøen and staged hit-and-run raids along the deeply indented coastline using commandeered Norwegian vessels. These limited, small scale successes did nothing, however, to halt the German advance and were followed by a series of withdrawing actions north to Bodø. Picked up and evacuated by the Royal Navy, by 10 June 1940 all five Independent Companies, unsure of what they had actually accomplished, were back in Scotland where they were reunited with the other five Independent Companies, most of whom had moved little further than garrison duties in Gourock and Glasgow. For those units that had bloodied themselves in Norway, their homecoming represented a lucky escape from which few senior officers had emerged with credit. One of those who had, however, was Colin Gubbins. Already the holder of the Military Cross from the First World War, Gubbins was awarded a DSO for his deft command and control of the ScissorsForce Independent Companies and for his part in an otherwise disastrous land campaign that had seen him relieve of his command a Scots Guards colonel who had shown a marked and persistent reluctance to hold his ground and engage the enemy. Gubbins cut a deceptively mild, well-mannered figure in peacetime and in his immaculately tailored colonel’s service dress uniform with its highly burnished brasses appeared a ‘slight, dapper full Colonel with a small moustache’. But beneath the surface stirred darker waters. For Gubbins was also – and most proudly – half Scots and the chieftain’s love of mayhem, of smoke and battle and bloody murder was never far beneath that placid surface:
A naval officer who met him during the 1940 Norway campaign described a brute in a khaki shirt with the sleeves cut off, snoring prodigiously in a twenty-minute squirt of sleep, then waking up alert and talking coherently ‘an extraordinary man, very short and thick, with vast hairy arms that looked as if they could crush rocks and hung down almost to his knees’.17
Peter Kemp, a later SOE agent who, according to commando leader Lord Lovat, was ‘hell bent on adventure’18 – he had fought on Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War – was one of those destined to become closely involved with both March-Phillipps and Appleyard. He observed later:
The invasion of Norway showed clearly the possibilities of partisan warfare. Paramilitary formations known as ‘Independent Companies’ had been employed in the last stages of the Norwegian fiasco. In spite of angry controversy, they were considered to have proved their usefulness. There was, however, no organised instruction in this kind of warfare, no school or centre where troops could be trained in its principles.19
One of those aware of just that failing was Colonel Gubbins. At the end of the First World War Gubbins had served as ADC to General Ironside, who in 1940 was Commander-in-Chief of UK Home Forces and then GOC of the Archangel Expeditionary Force to North Russia. That was in 1919 and Gubbins had seen the work of the Bolsheviks at first hand. A few years later he had served in Ireland fighting Michael Collins and those who championed the cause of Sinn Féin and Irish independence from Britain; he had fought, survived and learned much about unconventional
warfare, of fighting round corners. In 1931 he began working with the British Military Intelligence Directorate specialising in Soviet intelligence. Now, returned home from Norway, Gubbins had written a far-sighted paper that urged the War Office to embrace the idea of guerrilla warfare and, moreover, provide a training ground and instructors. These men would give those freshly blooded soldiers of the Independent Companies the training they had shown they needed in Norway and would now need most certainly in the new world of clandestine, irregular warfare that was just developing. There was, he knew, an untapped reservoir of outdoor experts – explorers, soldiers, skiers, adventurers, frontiersmen – just waiting to be approached. As a Scot brought up in part on the island of Mull, opposite Oban, he knew just the place, too: western Scotland. There was water for amphibious training, there was rugged, demanding countryside, a broken, jagged coastline where they could practise small boat insertion techniques and derelict houses that could be requisitioned for accommodation. Best of all there was space – lots and lots of space and isolation far away from prying eyes.
A similar idea had occurred to former Scots Guards officer and MI(R) ‘Sleeper’ Bill Stirling whose brother, David, would later go on to form the Special Air Service Regiment. It was Bill Stirling’s idea to take six friends – Peter Kemp among them – with a particular outdoor interest and expertise, reinforced by a few carefully chosen officers and NCOs, and set up a new Special Training Centre at Inverailort for those engaged in irregular warfare. In time his idea would evolve into the legendary Commando Depot, later renamed the Commando Basic Training Centre at Achnacarry. In May and June 1940, however, that was still a little way in the future. ‘As the Battle of Britain opened,’ wrote Peter Kemp:
provisional agreement had been obtained from the War Office for our establishment, the selection of training areas and setting requisitioning machinery in motion. [Lord] Lovat, an officer who owned property in the West Highlands, was sent ahead to requisition all available premises astride the Fort William–Mallaig Road and railway line which, in fact, meant six deer forests and their lodges covering a land mass for training purposes of not less than 200,000 acres of wild country.
Better yet, this vast potential training area for Gubbins’ Independent Companies – and anyone else who might be sent north to sharpen their killing skills, learn small boat work, close-quarter combat, stalking, cross-country navigation, explosive demolitions, weapon handling and endurance – lay within the Protected Area established that same year. It stretched in a diagonal line from Mull to Inverness and took in everything to the north, excluding the Isle of Skye, as far as John O’Groats. Anyone wanting access to that remote area of bleak, desolate, rain-swept beauty needed a permit: reasons to the Military Permit Office in London, in writing. Kemp and Lovat and others – with Stirling as Chief Instructor – moved up to Scotland at the end of May: ‘With the help of the War Office, Stirling had been able to recruit some outstanding officers and NCOs to bring our staff of instructors to full strength. Three stalkers – great rifle shots and expert telescope men – were provided from the Lovat estate wearing their civilian plus fours.’20
Perhaps with an ear and an eye to the security concerns of the time in which he was writing – No Colours or Crest was published by Cassell in London in 1958 when the Cold War was chilling down by degrees – Kemp is being a little economical with the truth. ‘The War Office’ he refers to was, in fact, rather more than that. It was Jo Holland, Colin Gubbins and MI(R) in that most secret part of the War Office far from public gaze that stood behind Bill Stirling’s Special Training Centre in its various guises. It would become the clandestine military alma mater from which so many future members of Maid Honor, the commandos and the Small Scale Raiding Force were to graduate.
Many of their instructors and experts had been members of the 5th (Supplementary Reserve) Battalion Scots Guards, the British Army’s first unit of ski troops. Initially created to support the Anglo-French expedition to Finland during the Finns’ Winter War with Russia, that war had ended before 5th Scots Guards could deploy in anger and the unit, to their dismay, had been disbanded. A further mission during the Norwegian campaign had been Operation Knife, an ambitious plan to land six ex-5th Scots Guards volunteers, now rebadged as MI(R) agents, from the submarine HMS Truant with orders to help Norwegian resistance fighters destroy the road and rail bridges that linked Oslo with the north. Attacked by an enemy U-boat and damaged, HMS Truant promptly turned about, limped home and never reached Norwegian waters. Disembarked at Rosyth, the unused but still optimistic MI(R) Knife team responded with enthusiasm to Bill Stirling’s idea that they wait out the mission’s new start date, not in London, but at his ancestral home estate at Keir some 30 miles west. They did so, taking with them the weapons, explosives and equipment they had planned to use in Norway. It was while they were honing their sharpshooting and explosive skills in Keir, not in London, that MI(R)’s ski-experts and recent passengers aboard HMS Truant leant that their days of undersea adventure were over: with the collapse of the British campaign in Norway their mission too had been overtaken by German success. There would no longer be a mission to blow up railway tracks near Oslo. Operation Knife was cancelled.
Thus it was in Keir, not in London, after they learnt that MI(R)’s Operation Knife was cancelled, that Bill Stirling had the idea of setting up a training school for Special Forces personnel. It was from Keir that Stirling and others took their idea of a special training school to Jo Holland in Whitehall only to find that he and Gubbins had embraced the same idea. Holland, Gubbins and MI(R) gave them their blessing. In return, Stirling and his friends offered skilled instructors – mostly from 5th Scots Guards – and an ideal location with no landlord problems: the hills for miles around were owned by the School’s chief fieldcraft instructor, Lord Shimi Lovat.
They settled in, but there was little time to admire the stunning Highland scenery: the first course for twenty-five recruits was scheduled to start in early June. Two of those who would pass that course were David Stirling and Fitzroy Maclean, both destined to survive the war and become legends, one in Egypt, the other in Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, in Scotland, the midges were bad, they were short of rations, transport and cooks and there were never enough tents. They just got on with it.
Gubbins was not there to see the first Special Training Centre or School of Special Warfare take shape. German troops and armour were on the Channel coast and daily aerial reconnaissance missions showed that barges were being collected in ports and harbours facing England. Invasion appeared imminent. Any measure that would help Britain defend herself either before or after German troops landed in Britain – that was the overwhelming national priority. Gubbins, with his experience in Russia, Ireland, India, Poland and Paris, and with a recent DSO earned in Norway, was a man whose military currency had suddenly increased in value. Something else kept him in Whitehall, too.
In 1936 General Adam, the then Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had set up a department known as GS(R) within the War Office. The letters stood for General Staff (Research) and the purpose of the unit was nowhere near as anodyne as it sounded. The idea behind Adam’s creation was to free up a single officer within GS(R) to spend a year studying a specific subject of current interest to the Army Council, to think ‘out of the box’ as they would not have described it at the time. In October 1938 the officer appointed to GS(R) was Lt Col Jo Holland and, by then, advanced thinking within the supposedly hide-bound War Office – despite what might be said elsewhere in Westminster and in the leader columns of The Times newspaper – was that Hitler was likely to invade Eastern Europe before turning his attentions to the west. If he were to do so, they reasoned, then revolt inside the occupied countries was likely. And resistance from within that expanded German empire was something that might be turned to the advantage of Hitler’s enemies. Ostensibly, Holland’s formal brief within GS(R) was to study recent guerrilla warfare in both China and Spain. But there was a deeper, top secret layer to
Holland’s briefing that very few knew about: he was to report on the possibility of providing clandestine support to any Eastern European country that might be overrun by Hitler.
Holland’s first report was ready in January 1939 and, whatever it contained, it must have been persuasive for, as a result, he was permitted to recruit two more officers to GS(R), one to be an expert in explosives and demolitions and the other to be in charge of organisation, recruitment and training. For the first he chose an eccentric Sapper Major, Ellis Jefferis. For the second he chose Colin Gubbins. Jo Holland already knew Gubbins well and knew of his experience and language skills in Russia and Ireland. Remembered Colin Gubbins:
A cold hand took me literally by the back of the neck and a voice I knew said: ‘What are you doing for lunch today?’ I whipped round – it was Jo Holland – and I replied that I was going to my regimental race at Sandown; there, beside me, were my field-glasses. ‘No, you are not’, he replied. ‘You are to lunch with me; the CIGS says so.’ We knew each other very well and I naturally agreed. In a private room at St Ermin’s Hotel I found that the real host, who was waiting for us there, was another sapper officer whom I also knew well [Laurence Grand]. Over lunch he told us that he was the head of Section D and explained his charter … He [Holland] started me off on the preparation of secret pamphlets on guerrilla warfare which were entitled The Art of Guerilla Warfare, The Partisan Leader’s Handbook and How To Use High Explosives, and which were intended for the actual fighting partisan, tactical and not strategic.21