by Tom Keene
In the late spring of 1938, Holland and Gubbins worked together producing papers on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare. By April 1939, Gubbins had been formally established as Holland’s assistant. The next month Holland was authorised to further expand his department and recruit and train suitable potential saboteurs, whilst GS(R) now came under the Director of Military Intelligence and assumed a new acronym as anodyne as the last: MI(R), Military Intelligence (Research). In June 1939 Holland’s newly named unit produced a report entitled GS(R) Report No 8: Investigation of the Possibilities of Guerilla Activities, which enclosed Gubbins’ training manuals. The next month he was told that, if he were mobilised, he would be sent to Poland as part of Britain’s military mission. Gubbins had been in Poland when the Germans invaded. He made contact with Polish Intelligence but, so swift was the German advance, he and his mission were unable to achieve anything. They pulled out via Bucharest and were lucky to get home. After a further fruitless MI(R) mission in Paris chasing underground contacts, Gubbins returned to London at the start of 1940. And then there had been Norway. Now, back in Britain, Jo Holland, Gubbins’ friend and mentor within MI(R), offered Gubbins a further clandestine post: to set up Britain’s top secret quasi-military guerrilla ‘stay behind’ forces that would go to ground after the Germans had invaded Britain. After being overrun by invading forces these small, four- to eight-man operational patrols would then rise up from their secret camouflaged operational bases buried deep in the woods and farmland of rural Britain and attack the Germans in the rear. Their task would be to destroy stores, blow up aircraft, bridges and fuel dumps, cut rail lines, disrupt convoys, kill senior German officers and even assassinate British collaborators. They were to be called Auxiliary Units – Auxunits – and their chances of long-term survival were slim indeed. Would Gubbins care to organise and lead them? Gubbins accepted. It was a desperate plan conceived in desperate times, times when speed, decision and, above all, action were of the critical essence. For what was at stake was Britain’s very survival.
Meanwhile, as Stirling and his instructors began whipping each of MI(R)’s ten Independent Companies into shape on Stirling’s home-devised, two-week course of intensive training at Lochailort, their future client-base was taking shape to the south.
On 9 June 1940 the War Office ordered Northern and Southern Commands to issue a call for ‘volunteers for Special Service’ from their sub units. It was a call that did not meet with universal approval: many conventional units feared the attraction of ‘special service’ would strip them of their best men. The orders of compliance they themselves received did little to ally such fears: ‘Commanding Officers were to ensure that only the best were sent; they must be young, absolutely fit, able to drive motor vehicles and unable to be seasick. It was a leap in the dark for absolutely nothing was said as to what they were to do.’22 Predictably, there was a huge response from regular, territorial and reservist alike, from every corps, support unit and front-line regiment. Here, perhaps, was a way of striking back; something that offered challenge, danger, excitement and a change from the boredom inherent in barrack-room duties: ‘The great majority had never been under fire. They were just fed up with being told that the Germans were supermen and that they themselves were “wet”. And so they revolted against their age and went to war in a new spirit of dedicated ferocity.’23 Most may have done, but not everyone: in addition to those who volunteered out of patriotism, boredom, a yearning for excitement or a combination of all three, some turned up at the Special Training Centre for selection and found themselves under commando scrutiny whilst entirely ignorant of what sort of unit they might be joining.
The day after General Sir Alan Bourne was appointed Director of Combined Operations, the Director of Military Operations and Plans, Major General R.H. Dewing, put out a secret memorandum spelling out precisely how these newly named ‘commando’ units were to be created, formed and deployed. It was a timely, clearly reasoned attempt to shed a little light into an area already generating much heat, undirected excitement and not a little resentment and suspicion:
Irregular operations will be initiated by the War Office. Each one must necessarily require different arms, equipment and methods, and the purpose of the commandos will be to produce whatever number of irregulars are required to carry out the operations. An officer will be appointed by the War Office to command each separate operation and the troops detailed to carry it out will be armed and equipped for that operation only from central sources controlled by the War Office.
The procedure proposed for raising and maintaining commandos is as follows: One or two officers in each Command will be selected as Commando Leaders. They will each be instructed to select from their own Commands a number of Troop Leaders to serve under them. The Troop Leaders will in turn select the officers and men to form their own Troop. While no strengths have yet been decided upon, I have in mind commandos of a strength of something like ten Troops of roughly fifty men each. Each Troop will have a commander and one or possibly two other officers.
Once the men have been selected the commando leader will be given an area (usually a seaside town) where his commando will live and train while not engaged on operations. The officers and men will receive no Government quarters or rations but will be given a consolidated money allowance to cover their cost of living. They will live in lodgings, etc., of their own selection in the area allotted to them and parade for training as ordered by their leaders. They will usually be allowed to make use of a barracks, camp or other suitable place as a training ground. They will also have an opportunity of practising with boats on beaches nearby.
When a commando is detailed by the War Office for some specific operation, arms and equipment will be issued on the scale required and the commando will be moved to the jumping off place for the operation. As a rule the operation will not take more than a few days, after which the commando would be returned to its original ‘Home Town’ where it will train and wait, probably for several weeks, before taking part in another operation.
To many officers rusticating in some administrative backwater counting water-bottles, supervising the whitewashing of curb-stones or training reluctant recruits with two left feet, that appeal for volunteers for ‘special service of a hazardous nature’ came not a moment too soon. One of those who heeded the call was Capt. Gus March-Phillipps, MBE. After the shame of Dunkirk, he had a score to settle.
Notes
1. March-Phillipps’ personal SOE file HS 9/1183/2.
2. Henrietta March-Phillipps made a BBC radio programme about her father in August 1970. This is the first of several excerpts. Others will be noted as ‘BBC Henrietta’.
3. Interview with the author, 2013.
4. BBC Henrietta.
5. Brooks Richards Audio, IWM 9970.
6. Anders Lassen, Mike Langley, 21.
7. CAB 66/7/48.
8. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons, 4 June 1940.
9. Finest Years, Max Hastings, 63.
10. The Death of Jean Moulin, Patrick Marnham, 90.
11. British Commandos 1940–1946, Tim Moreman, 9.
12. Commando Country, Stuart Allan, 84, and Cabinet Records CAB 120/414 at The National Archives, Kew.
13. The Commandos, 9.
14. Ibid., 27.
15. The Commandos 1940–1946, Messenger, 26–7.
16. All Hell Let Loose, Max Hastings, 48.
17. Ian Fleming’s Commandos, Nicholas Rankin, 71.
18. March Past, Lord Lovat, 175.
19. Ibid., 177.
20. Ibid.
21. Gubbins & SOE, Peter Wilkinson & Joan Astley, 34.
22. British Commandos 1940–1946, 11.
23. Ibid., 12.
3
Commando Training
Each Command was responsible for raising commandos from troops within their own area and for selecting and appointing their own commando leaders. These leaders would appoint their own troop comma
nders who, in turn, would select their own volunteers:
• No 1 Commando, it was envisaged, would be formed from disbanded Independent Companies. In fact, this commando never actually formed because the Independent Companies remained in being for some months to come.
• No 2 Commando was to be raised as a parachute unit with volunteers stepping forward from both Northern and Southern Commands.
• Nos 3 and 4 Commandos would be formed from troops with Southern Command.
• Nos 5 and 6 Commandos would be formed from Western Command.
• No 7 Commando would be made up of volunteers from Eastern Command.
• No 8 Commando was also supposed to take its volunteers from Eastern Command but in fact recruited from London District and the Household Division.
• Nos 9 and 11 Commandos would come directly from Scottish Command.
• No 10 Commando was intended to be raised from Northern Command, although – perhaps curiously given the mood of bellicose enthusiasm elsewhere in the country for ‘special service of a hazardous nature’ – this unit did not attract enough initial volunteers to take its place in the new Order of Battle. It would be summer 1942 before it did so.
• No 12 Commando was also formed in Northern Ireland in early 1941 but, with only 250 men, it was roughly half the strength of the other commandos. Selected men from this commando, however, were to make a significant contribution to the units at the centre of this history.1
Capt. Gus March-Phillipps, meanwhile, was languishing, under-used and bored, within Eastern Command. Here the very inertia he wished to escape nearly thwarted his own attempts to respond to that appeal for ‘hazardous service’ volunteers that appeared on his unit notice board. Fearful that he might have left his application too late, he enlisted the help of a well-placed contact within Southern Command. This was Tim Alleyn, with whom he had once shared that cottage in the Thames Valley when he returned from India:
Dear Mate –
I’ve been recommended for the post of a commando leader, but owing to a fatuous Major in A [Administration] Branch I was unable to get the forms directly to Eastern Command. It has to go round the Corps tip and they take a week. So HO won’t get it until too late unless you can tell them what has happened. The thing arrived here late in the first place, and they sat on it in the office. My God, they are awful. Anyway, I’ve been recommended a second time, and could you tell them that? If I come up for an interview, we’ll have a terrific dinner. I’m feeling much too well, terribly fit and nothing to do …2
Whilst others dragged their heels, officers elsewhere worked in haste to carry out Churchill’s orders to strike back, to mount that all-important first raid across the Channel. To this end, a further special Independent Company, No 11, was formed on 14 June and began training around Hamble and Southampton Water. Less than three weeks after Colonel Dudley Clarke had his ‘commando’ idea whilst walking home from the War Office, Churchill’s order became reality. Operation Collar was mounted on the night of 23/24 June 1940. It achieved little, claimed just two German lives and became dangerously close to making the concept of cross-channel raiding a risible joke. Its only British casualty was Colonel Dudley Clarke himself.
The objective of Operation Collar was to cross over at night to the Hardelot, Stella Plage and Berck areas of Boulogne by fast motor boat and make several landings to obtain information on German defences, destroy enemy outposts and kill or capture enemy soldiers. The raiders, under Major Ronnie Tod with Colonel Clarke along as Observer, would land at midnight, spend no more than eighty minutes ashore and then return by sea. Initially 180 men of No 11 Independent Company were detailed to take part in the raid but a shortage of weapons – there were just forty tommy guns in the whole of Britain at the end of June 1940 – and suitable raiding craft reduced that number to 120 after the failure of two of the engines of half-a-dozen air–sea rescue craft borrowed for the night from the Air Ministry. The sea was calm, the sky cloudy with a light north-easterly breeze. Mid-Channel a rum ration was issued to the black-faced raiders. Soon after that the naval commander became unsure of his position until a sudden German searchlight obligingly revealed that he was about to motor straight into Boulogne harbour. They swung away into the safety of the darkness and landed a little further down the coast among sand dunes.
Tod and his men disappeared purposefully into the darkness. Nothing was heard for a while. Then Tod returned, armed with a tommy gun with which he was less than familiar. As Clarke disembarked to warn him that a darkened vessel had been seen nearby, a German bicycle patrol was reported moving along the beach towards them. As they prepared to open fire, Tod managed to knock the magazine off his unfamiliar weapon. It fell to the ground with a clatter. The Germans heard the noise and opened fire. Colonel Clarke was knocked back into the boat by the impact of a bullet that caught him behind the ear. He was not seriously wounded.
Major Tod’s men returned without loss, and waded out into a rising tide to clamber back into their boat. They then headed back out to sea. Elsewhere, two boats had landed among the sand dunes. One had bumped into a German patrol and been fired on without loss and had not returned fire. The second had seen nothing; a third boat of armed raiders had not actually landed but attempted to stalk a seaplane which had then suddenly taken off over their heads like a startled goose. A fourth had landed at Merlimont Plage, 4 miles south of Le Touquet. Here they stumbled upon a large hotel surrounded by barbed wire which, they thought, might have been some sort of local headquarters. An enemy patrol of two soldiers was encountered. Both were killed with sten-gun fire from a range of 15 yards. Despite post-war claims that a German corpse was carried back to the beach3 and then towed towards England behind a crowded boat only to be lost mid-Channel, the two bodies were left where they lay and nothing was removed.4 A fifth landing party achieved nothing at all. Dawn found Colonel Clarke’s crowded rescue boat approaching Dover: ‘Grimy, dishevelled and triumphant and accompanied, appropriately enough, by a bandaged officer with bloodstains, they were cheered by every ship in harbour.’5
Men returning elsewhere suffered mixed fortunes. Outside Folkestone – unexpected, unannounced and evidently bearing the smoke-grim of distant battle – one boat of raiders was refused permission to enter harbour and ordered to lie off under the muzzles of Folkestone’s defences whilst checks were made. All of which took time. Again, the rum ration was opened and two stone jars of SRD – Service Rum Dilute – were passed round the boat-load of weary heroes. Eventually permitted to proceed, upon arrival on terra by now not so very ferma they were arrested by the military police who believed them to be deserters.
The raid was reported in the newspapers the next day with only the vaguest of details. It proved a timely tonic for the battered British public – and caused near apoplexy amongst members of the British Cabinet who had no idea Operation Collar had been authorised to take place. It hadn’t. Fearful of security leaks from high places, Director of Combined Operations General Bourne had told no one. He was only saved from court-martial by the timely intervention of the Minister of War, Anthony Eden.
German troops occupied the Channel Islands on 30 June 1940. Two days later General Hastings Ismay, Churchill’s Chief Military Assistant and critical point of liaison between the Prime Minister and his Chiefs of Staff, received a memorandum from the Prime Minister. This stated: ‘If it be true that a few hundred German troops have landed on Jersey or Guernsey by troop-carriers, plans should be studied to land secretly by night on the Islands and kill or capture the invaders. This is exactly one of the exploits for which the Commandos would be suited.’6
Thus began Operation Ambassador, Britain’s formal second raid upon a shore occupied by the enemy. It took place twelve days later on the night of 14–15 July 1940. The target this time was Guernsey. Its objective? To inflict casualties on the German garrison, capture prisoners and destroy any German aircraft and equipment found on the island. To carry out this operation No 11 Independent Company was joine
d by members of the newly formed No 3 Commando commanded by Major John Durnford-Slater. He and 140 of his men were to land at three separate points on the southern side of the island: the Major at Moulin Huet Bay supported by the destroyer HMS Scimitar, No 11 Independent Company at both Le Jaonnet Bay and Pointe de la Moye. The landing parties were to be transported by the destroyer, then transferred to an RAF launch whilst still some distance off to make their own silent and unobserved approach to the enemy shore.
Durnford Slater and his men moved to Dartmouth, using the gymnasium at the Royal Naval College above the town as a makeshift gun room where naval cadets helped them load magazines for the precious Brens and tommy guns that had been sent down on loan from London. The attacking force left Dartmouth at 1845 on 14 July and arrived off the coast of Guernsey a few hours later in poor visibility, mist, drizzle and with a slight swell running. So far so good. But that, really, was as good as it got.
The two parties from No 11 Independent Company never made landfall. The coast was too rocky and the compasses of both boats, apparently, had been knocked out of true during degaussing. One vessel headed off smartly, in error, towards Sark. The other developed engine trouble and barely managed to struggle back to the mother ship, HMS Scimitar. An earlier postponement of forty-eight hours now meant that the anticipated half-tide landing onto smooth sand was now a high tide landing onto rocks and boulders from wooden, V-hulled boats that were anything but flat-bottomed: ‘I jumped in, armpit-deep. A wave hit me on the back of the neck and caused me to trip over a rock. All around me officers and men were scrambling for balance, falling, coming up and coughing salt water. I doubt there was a dry weapon amongst us,’ recorded Major Durnford-Slater. He led the way towards the enemy, battle-dress heavy with seawater: