Commandos and Rangers of World War II
Page 3
During the winter of 1940–41, the days of what had become Keyes’s private army were over when the War Office reasserted their authority and the command of the Special Service Brigade passed to Brigadier (later Major-General) J.C. Haydon. A small man whose charm belied his determination, he had proved his abilities in action in France, and—what was probably more important at this stage of the commandos’ ill-fortunes—he knew his way around the Whitehall ministries.
The Commando idea was established but would continue to have its critics, including the colonels of regiments resenting the poaching—as they saw it—of some of their best men. The reasons for the Special Forces not proving more effective in this desperate year of 1940, lay as much in the political problems and strategy as in shortages of equipment. But many of their future commanders—John Durnford-Slater, Peter Young, Mike Calvert among them—were preparing their men for a new type of soldiering. The Royal Marines had not landed at Dakar because, without adequate craft for an overwhelming initial assault, any piecemeal landing could have led to prolonged fighting with potential allies. A proposed landing in Pantelleria was aborted when German dive-bombers arrived in Sicily. The Canaries were no longer considered essential once Spanish political pressures eased on Gibraltar. Whether or not the commandos might have landed in strength on the French coast, there seems little likelihood that they would have achieved any worthwhile military objective, and every possibility the force would have been destroyed. To land a large, lightly armed force was dodging the realities of amphibious warfare when the difficulty of landing supporting weapons must be faced squarely.
On the other hand, the idea of small, general reconnaissance and sabotage raids was to prove practical and effective to a limited extent, as the next chapter illustrates. Once the British had been driven from the European mainland, they had lost virtually all of the general intelligence that armies gather on their enemy’s positions, his deployment, and his defences. Regaining this knowledge involved a long and hazardous series of amphibious raids in which the clandestine activities of SOE and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), as well as the commandos, became involved.
EUROPE, JANUARY 1941 TO DECEMBER 1943
During these years a number of small and some large Allied raids were made against Norway, and the French Channel and Biscay coasts. In March 1941, the first of the major raids landed unopposed in the Lofoten Islands (north Norway). The following month a German army advanced into the Balkans and in the three weeks occupied Yugoslavia and Greece, drawing British forces from North Africa into battles in Greece and Crete, which was captured by 1 June 1941. On 22 June, 136 German divisions with 3,000 tanks invaded the USSR, the German believing that the quality of their war machine would defeat the Russian masses. Moscow, 700 miles (1,000km) from the border, was almost reached but the first snows slowed the Germans who, at the end of November, froze 20 miles (30 + km) west of Moscow, and by December the Russian front ran 2,000 miles (3,200km) from Leningrad to the Caucasus.
On 7 December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and America entered the now global war. The war in North Africa saw further Allied setbacks. In Europe, the British mounted their first opposed raid against Vaagsö Island (central Norway) that December. In the spring of 1942 they carried out the most effective sabotage raid of modern times, destroying the St Nazaire (French coast) battleship dock and preventing the Tirpitz—the most powerful battleship then afloat—from moving to this possible base for raids on American troop and weapon convoys. That summer there was the Canadian raid on the French Channel port of Dieppe, with its consequent tragedies and subsequent lessons (see Chapter 5).
The British Isles became, in 1941–43, a giant aircraft-carrier punished by German raids but giving more than was received as the air war was intensified by 1943. Amphibious raiding along the Channel coast and elsewhere became a coordinated intelligence gathering operation in preparation for the opening of a Second Front by the invasion of Europe, plans for which entailed amphibious training for large armies, pre-empting men and equipment from possible large raids.
CHAPTER 2
General Reconnaissance
and Sabotage
Stan Weatherall and ‘Darkie’ A. Harrison paddled their two-man canoe from Salen down the broad, rocky loch Sunart into the open sea on a clear day in February 1941. Their civilian Folbot canoe had no added buoyancy of Mae-West lifebelts, no navigation aids, not even a spray cover as they crossed the sound from the Scottish mainland to land on the isle of Mull. Anyone using the double-paddle of these canoes for the first time finds his (or her) chest expanded in a strain on shoulder muscles he never knew were there until he started canoeing. With legs stretched out and with no space to flex a muscle—or so it seems to the beginner—a sneeze might unbalance the boat. With practice, however, the canoe becomes an extension of the canoeist although his muscles never quite adjust to hours in its cramped confines. Nor, as these raiders paddled towards an enemy shore, was there more than a canvas skin on its wooden frame between them and a hostile reception.
The men of No. 1 Troop, all volunteers, included Territorials (men who had been civilians doing part-time army training), some regulars, and reservists like Lance-Corporal Weatherall who were recalled to the colours. Having served with the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment in two campaigns on the north-west frontier of India, the Corporal was recalled briefly in 1938, went to France in 1939, and spent five days coming out over the Dunkirk beaches. In the summer of 1940 he was volunteered for parachute training by friends who added his name to a list for this course. But to stay with two friends, he and half a dozen of his regiment were recruited for sea raiding with 6 Commando (‘No.6’) on its formation in July 1940. For some months this Commando, with their small arms, a few petrol bombs, and an old 4.7 inch gun, stood between the Germans and their possible foothold on the Kent coast near New Romney. The invasion scare passed and the Troop went north to do independent training, as all Troops did at that time.
Toughening their endurance by frequent climbs to nearly 3,000 feet (900m) up the crags of Goat Fell on Arran they saw, when it was not raining—a rare occasion in west Scotland—Lieutenant Roger Courtney at sea, training his canoeists around the island’s choppy waters where a short sharp sea comes up with little warning. The broad Firth of Clyde runs north from the island, with Goat Fell on the east shore appearing to fall in a sheer drop into the sea, making ideal conditions for commando training.
Courtney’s canoeists with ten Folbots were the first of what became the Special Boat Section, formed after their leader had given a practical demonstration of the canoe’s military potential, a potential doubted by even the adventurous characters in Combined Operations headquarters until Courtney paddled out one summer night in 1940 to a carrier ship moored in the Clyde. Stealing a gun cover undetected, he brought it ashore and presented it dripping wet to the ship’s captain in a conference. The gift was accepted and plans made—although never fulfilled—to have some 30 canoeists with each Commando, and in July 1940 the first Special Boat Section was formed. They, among others, would gather intelligence on enemy strengths and fortifications. Although descriptions of these defences on Atlantic and North Sea coastlines could in part be gleaned from aerial photographs, much lay hidden; as the Canadians were to find at Dieppe.
Through the winter of 1940–41, Lieutenant Courtney trained his Special Boat Section attached to 8 Commando, and with a second-in-command and 15 men he went to the Middle East in February 1941. For Courtney this was a return to Africa, for he had been a big-game hunter and had once canoed down the Nile from Lake Victoria. A big man in every sense of the word, with a bellow of a laugh, he displayed irrepressible confidence. (His Section’s Mediterranean operations, where his cheerful courage discomforted the Germans and Italians, are dealt with in later chapters.)
Through most of 1940 and 1941, a complex command system made raids from the United Kingdom difficult to organise, for each Army
1Buoyancy air bags or table tennis b
alls in netting/bags
2Rubberised canvas cover
3Stowage forward
4Frame in assembled sections
5Footrests adjustable for leg length
6Thompson sub m/c gun between knees of ‘swimmer’ (the front paddler) on floor boards
7Coaming about 3in deep hard wood
8Cockpit
9Back rests
10P8 compass—as in Spitfire aircraft
11Stowage for limpets etc. (some might also go forward to 3)
12Approximate cross-section showing ribs taped to frame (ferrule-ends of rib joints also taped into sockets)
Note: other canoes had Mae West life-jackets for smaller buoyancy at bow and stern and an inflated collar around cockpit, allowing more space forward for rucksack and a ‘deck’ load could be carried behind the aft (no. 1) paddler. A map case with attached parallel rule usually mounted behind forward backrest, and mugs for bailers on hooks under coaming. SBS crews carried a hand compass to port of No. 1 paddler, two grenades on floor beside each man, used square bungey rubber to hold T-gun etc. The cockpit cover—secured by bulldog clips in early Mks—fitted around paddlers.
Command was responsible for raiding shores opposite their area in the United Kingdom, and the Navy had a final say on any seaborne raid. Only Norway, the reserve of the C-in-C Home Fleet, escaped this web of conflicting red tape. Thus, while Corporal Weatherall and a growing force of commandos were on interminable training exercises, or standing by for operations that were cancelled before they got afloat, very few slipped the mesh of authority. The only significant raid, apart from some SOE operations, was a sortie in the early spring of 1941 by some 500 men of 3 and 4 Commandos with 52 Royal Engineers and a like number of Free Norwegian forces.
They sailed in comparatively mild weather for the Lofoten Islands aboard two carrier ships with assault landing craft (LCAs) on their davits, and escorted by five destroyers although without air cover once in North Norwegian waters. The ships were ex-Channel ferries, now Landing Ships, Infantry (LSIs) HMS Princess Beatrix and HMS Queen Emma. The force met the submarine HMS Sunfish stationed as a navigation check for the assault force, and at 0400 hours on 4 March the ships were piloted into Stamsund, as at other landing points, by local seamen of the Free Norwegian Navy.
At least one landing craft commander was for ‘giving her the gun’ to speed the tense minutes as they approached the enemy shore, but Lieutenant-Colonel John Durnford-Slater (Commanding Officer of 3 Commando) made him maintain a steady speed. The sequence of landing was planned to put the raiders ashore in a fighting formation, and although all went to plan at Stamsund, indiscipline among boats’ crews would on other occasions cause difficulties for commandos landed late or ahead of their supporting Troops. Even the fishing fleet came down the harbour as expected from intelligence reports, and might have choked the narrow 100 yards wide entrance if a burst of tracer from a destroyer had not turned them aside as they grasped the situation. They hauled up their Norwegian colours, forbidden by the Germans whose only presence was an armed trawler, pulling away from a jetty and prepared to fight. She was quickly set on fire by the destroyer HMS Somali and the LCAs came alongside the quay. The town seemed deserted until a postman appeared and willingly explained that the only Germans there were Gestapo and a few businessmen. The small party of Norwegians with each commando Troop acted as interpreters for this and other intelligence, leading to the Gestapo chief—a fat man in a dark suit—squealing his protest at capture within a quarter of an hour of the landing. Men set off in a local bus commandeered to take them to the factories on the edge of the town. The telephone exchange was occupied, Lieutenant Richard Wills using its land-line to the mainland to send a telegram to A. Hitler, Berlin: ‘You said in your last speech German troops would meet the English wherever they landed stop where are your troops?—Signature Wills 2-Lieut.’ Such direct communication, if not with Hitler, might have summoned German naval reinforcements, but no aircraft was available north of Trondheim, more than 400 miles and two flying hours to the south, because all the northern airfields early that spring were operational only for transport aircraft fitted with skis.
The commandos landed at three harbours besides Stamsund—Henningsvaer, Svolvar, and Brettesnes—each on a different island in this compact group. None of the landings was opposed except by the gallant action of the armed trawler Krebbs, and by midday the oil factories were burning. Demolition charges had also been carefully set on machinery in the fish meal and other factories; these small charges of gun cotton being placed so that they destroyed equipment without the risk of causing needless casualties. Electric installations were smashed with sledgehammers and then switched on, melting connexions in complete destruction. Some 800,000 gallons (3.5 million litres) of oil and petrol burned fiercely and 11 small ships, totalling more than 20,000 tons, were sunk.
They gathered in 315 volunteers for the Norwegian forces, 60 followers of the Norwegian traitor Quisling with Nazi sympathies, and 225 German prisoners. The only commando casualty before the Force set sail for an uneventful passage home, was an officer accidentally shot in the foot. They were not to learn of the German reaction for some nine months, when the commandos again visited the Lofoten Islands, but the world heard for the first time of British commandos that night in German broadcasts: ‘Light naval forces destroyed several fishing boats and landed commandos in the Norwegian skerries where they took prisoner some Germans and Norwegians.’ The word was out, for until then the British had kept secret their special raiding forces.
Lofoten was chosen for this first large raid because it offered a chance to hit back at the enemy as well as such economic targets as the destruction of fish oil supplies, which might impair German manufacture of nitro-glycerine and would reduce supplies of vitamin A and B capsules issued to German troops. And as an undefended or so-called ‘soft’ target it offered a chance of a much-needed success. Lofoten apart, though, Keyes’s private armies were to chafe at the bit of ministry reins throughout the summer of 1941, while remaining dependent on these masters for the very shoe-string of their existence as Commandos.
Locations of Special Forces’ European operations showing large forces’ actions in capitals (date and code name) in alphabetical order by year. Coastal raids are shown (with the Depot) by numbered locations from north to south:
1940
Boulogne & Berch (23/4 June, Collar)
18
Guernsey (14/5) July, Ambassador)
40
1941
Ambleteuse (27/8 July, Ches)
17
Courselles (27/8 Sept, Chopper)
30
Houlgate (E of, 22/3 Nov, Sunstar)
28
Les Hemmes (12/3 Nov, Astrakhan)
16
LOFOTEN Isl (4 Mar, Claymore)
2
LOFOTEN Isl (26 Dec, Anklet)
2
Merlimont Plage (30/1 Aug. Cartoon-Aciddrop)
20
St Vaast (27/8 Sept)
35
SPITZBERGEN (17 Aug-8 Sept, Gauntlet)
1
VAAGSO (27 Dec, Archery)
5
1942
Achnacarry Depot
10
BAYONNE (5 Apr, Myrmidon)
50
Bordeau (7 Dec, Franklin)
49
Boulogne (11/2 Apr, JV)
18
BRUNEVAL (27/8 Feb, Biting)
26
DIEPPE (18 Aug, Jubilee)
24
Glomfjord (20/1 Sept, Musketoon)
3
HARDELOT (21/2 Apr, Abercrombie)
19
Isle Burhou (probably Isle Brechou, 7/8 Sept, Branford)
41
Isle Casquets (2/3 Sept, Dryad)
38
Omonville (SE of, 15/6 Nov, Batman)
37
Pointe de Plouezec (11/2 Nov, Farenheit)
44
Pointe de Saire (14/5 Aug, Barricade)
36
St Cecily—probably an Anglicised Ste Cécile—(3/4 June, Bristle) not numbered
Ste Honorine (12/3 Sept, Aquatint)
31
St Laurent (11 Jan, Curlew)
33
St NAZAIRE (27/8 Mar, Chariot)
47
Sark (3/4 Oct, Basalt)
43
Vermork (19 Nov, Freshman)—approx location
9
1943
Biville (5/6 July, Forfar Dog)
23
Biville (24/7 Nov, Hardtack Dog)
23
Biville (26/7 Dec, Hardtack 4)
23
Dunkirk pier (3/4 Aug, Forfar Love)
14
Eletot (3/5 Aug, 1/2 Sept & 3/4 Sept, Forfar Beer)
27
Gravelines (24/5 Dec, Hardtack 2, repeated 25/6 Dec)