Group 3, 105 men of Troops 5 and 6 under 3 Commando’s second-in-command Major Jack Churchill, were waiting for the Maaloy batteries to open up as the craft ran towards the beach. Major Churchill, affectionately known as ‘Mad Jack’, stood in the leading LCA playing ‘The march of the Cameron men’ on his bagpipes. This Group were only 50 yards from the shore when the Kenya’s bombardment lifted, her job well done with the German guncrews keeping in their dugouts, and before the batteries could come into action Jack Churchill’s men had overrun Maaloy. Captain Peter Young came with his men through a gap in the wire cut by shells from Kenya, with nobody stepping on a mine, although these were expected. One German clerk, rather foolishly perhaps, tried to disarm this Troop officer and was shot for his indiscretion; other Germans were captured and a few shot during the brisk action.
The 50 men of Group 1 had landed without opposition; eight of the Germans defending the strongpoint at Hellevik having gone to Vaagsö for breakfast. The villages were cleared and two wounded Germans made prisoner. The leader of this Group, Lieutenant R. Clement, having signalled the colonel by way of HMS Kenya—communications by radio were always difficult in this or any other hilly country—was then told to move up the coast road and form a reserve for the Troops attacking the town. By now, about 1030, they needed reinforcement, even though they had lodged a foothold from their beach headquarters in spite of meeting fiercer opposition than expected: some 50 men of a crack regiment were spending Christmas in the town.
South Vaagsö lies on a narrow strip of shoreline beneath a sheer rock face several hundred feet high, the town’s unpainted wooden buildings straggling along the three-quarters of a mile of main road running parallel to and some 50 yards from the shoreline. Down this road No.3 Troop were led by their Troop officer, a giant of a man, making a series of wild charges. They had taken several houses when the Troop officer—Captain Johnny Giles—was working his way room by room through another. He and his men had killed three Germans in this house when he burst into a back room and was probably killed by a fourth German hiding there, although he may have been hit from across the street. Such is the confusion of street fighting that bullets can appear to come from anywhere and everywhere.
No.4 Troop had caught a section of German defenders early in the battle as they ran to their alarm posts, but other Germans, many of whom had seen action in Norway in 1940, tenaciously defended the strongpoints, including the improvised fortifications of the Ulvesund Hotel. Headquarters personnel were pressed into this defence, in Peter Young’s words, ‘to give it a bit of depth’.
No.4 Troop followed Captain Algy Forrester as he charged on down the high street. Along with Lieutenant Bill Lloyd he had perfected the techniques for getting ashore among rocks; but now Bill Lloyd was badly wounded, hit in the neck almost as soon as they began their grenade-tossing dash, firing tommy-guns from the hip. Algy Forrester, something of a fire-eater, stormed on, reaching the hotel, now the centre of German resistance, where he was about to throw a grenade when a shot from the hotel knocked him down and he fell on his own grenade, which exploded to kill him. No. 4 Troop was stalled for only a moment. Captain Martin Linge, a Norwegian intelligence officer with the Troop, kept up the momentum of the attack, leading a second assault on the hotel, until he, too, was killed trying to force open a door.
During the fighting around the hotel, Sergeant Johnny Dowling and Sergeant Cork of No.1 Troop went to find the tank known to be nearby, for had this been brought into action, its 12 tons or more could have tipped the scales against the commandos. Sergeant Cork made more than sure it would not enter the battle: setting off a large demolition charge, he was killed in the blast.
For a while No.4 Troop were held up, but Corporal ‘Knocker’ White took charge and was awarded the DCM for his part in the action. The Colonel, from his open air headquarters on the beach, called over reinforcements from the Maaloy Group and Peter Young, with 18 men of his No.6 Troop, came across to the rock-shielded beach where Group 2 had landed some two hours before. He was sent along the quayside to keep the attack moving, and Brigadier Haydon committed the floating reserve (Group 4) in a landing at the north end of the town.
No. 1 Troop had acquired a 3-inch (76mm) mortar which increased the Troop’s firepower beyond its establishment. The mortar men were not trained as Heavy Weapons Troops would be later in the war, but this did not prevent Sergeant Ramsey from getting off a bomb that appeared to go down the hotel chimney, reportedly causing a dozen or more casualties. This was the turning-point at the hotel, and with grenades and tommy-gun fire Corporal White led the remains of No.4 Troop and a few Norwegians into the blazing building. Resistance at this strongpoint was over.
The radios of the 1940s being comparatively delicate valve affairs prone to water damage, radio contact had been lost with the forward Troops, so the Colonel walked boldly down the road to see the position for himself. A daring horseman, whose racing and pig-sticking had developed strong nerves in his robust frame, he scorned Charley Head’s suggestion—and the signals officer was not battle-shy—of looking out for snipers. The Colonel was in a hurry, realising how essential it was to keep the momentum of the attack rolling; otherwise the resistance might become coordinated into a strong, interlocked series of defence positions. He reached the hotel unscathed, although the burns on his jacket showed where he had beaten out the phosphorous splashes with his leather gloves, and as he followed Peter Young there were, as he later described, ‘different sounds, from the various calibres of small arms, artillery exchanges between Kenya and a coast defence battery somewhere down the fjord, anti-aircraft fire from the ships against attacking Messerschmitts, the demolitions, and the crackling roar of flames’. There were also those smells of battle; the sharp tang of cordite, choking smoke, and the sickly whiff of death.
With the advantage of hindsight, we can take stock of the position at this point, but at the time the Colonel had only runners to keep him in touch with his headquarters and forward Troops, whose wirelesses had been knocked out. He had, however, seen his demolition squads begin their work at a cod-meal (?) factory and had had its Quisling owner arrested. Group 1, as we have seen, had cleared the south coast villages and were in positions on the south side of the town. Group 3 had cleared Maaloy and sent a party of sappers, men of 6 Commando attached to ‘No.3’ for this raid, over to Mortenes on the east shore of the fjord, where they landed unopposed and destroyed a fish processing factory. The demolition squad from No.6 Troop were blowing up the guns, four Belgian 75mm field pieces, their wheels shackled to turntables for anti-ship fire. This squad also exploded a store of mines which the Germans had not laid behind the beach—an extraordinary piece of dilatoriness for them, although they were probably complacent, in part at least, because their propaganda had written off the British. Group 4—65 men—were landing at the north end of the town, putting the defenders under pressure from two sides, while 30 men of Group 5 had landed from HMS Oribi at about 1000 hours. This Section from 2 Commando had set up a road-block ambush, while the destroyer joined others in her flotilla in attacking an armed tug and other ships. The German defences north of South Vaagsö had been bombed by three Blenheims an hour or so earlier, no doubt adding to the confusion at the German 181 Division’s headquarters for they had no clear picture of events and a patrol sent down from the northern defences lost two men at the road-block. These commandos then blew a gap in the road and withdrew under covering fire from HMS Oribi and HMS Onslow, the former picking them up in her ship’s boats as they came off the beach. Far away from this foray, Blenheim bombers were heading for Herdia airport, which they attacked at midday, cratering its timbered runway, while others bombed Stavanger.
The Colonel’s force (Group 2) was down to probably 100 men as their reinforcements arrived. He came up to Peter Young’s men who had advanced, after some losses, through a quayside warehouse and reached a yard. There, cramped between a store house (‘D’ on the diagram) and a woodpile (‘C’), the party had to move to get
space so that they could reorganise. This meant capturing the red warehouse (‘F’) across a bare patch of snow and some 60 yards north of the woodpile. A rifleman hit two men crouching near the Colonel, who later wrote that ‘this was the first time in warfare that I truly felt fear. I didn’t like it.’ Whenever there was a movement by the woodpile, the sniper fired, and soon he hit a third man. Everyone fired back. Sergeant George Herbert slipped into the storehouse and found some petrol. The small party—Peter Young by now had about half the men he had brought from Maaloy—opened fire on the warehouse, the Colonel having already emptied his revolver in firing at a sniper’s window, and they kept the German from the window long enough for George Herbert to splash a bucket of petrol over the wooden walls. A couple of grenades then set a nearby house alight. Meanwhile Lieutenant Denis O’Flaherty and Trooper Sherington made a determined effort to reach the warehouse (‘F’) with Peter Young, who saw three stick grenades flung towards him in quick succession; the first two missed and the third did not go off. Both O’Flaherty and Sherington were severely wounded as they got into the warehouse, but with grim determination they staggered clear, leaving a few equally determined Germans in an inner room of the building. There were a few moments’ stalemate, then more petrol was thrown, this time into the warehouse, and two men with a bren gun were left to cover the building as Peter Young led his men on.
The Colonel went towards the road to press forward the attack down the main street, a grenade that fell between his feet putting a few splinters in his hand, after he had dived for cover, and seriously wounding his runner. The next minute the grenade thrower appeared with his hands up. John Durnford-Slater would have accepted this sailor’s surrender, but a more angry commando shot the bomber dead. The Colonel’s cool compassion showed his command of the situation: no moment of fury distorted his fearless and level-headed view.
The commandos had been able to keep up their grenade-throwing sorties because civilian volunteers from the town carried sacks of grenades forward to the men in action. With this help, No.1 Troop had fought their way from building to building up the landward side of the road and were attacking a house when Sergeant Culling was hit in the face and killed by a percussion grenade exploding on impact. Sergeant Ramsey’s 3-inch mortar was again brought into action, and a direct hit on the building’s roof with the third round was followed by a score of bombs through the resulting hole which set the place ablaze. This ended the most severe part of the operation, although the air battles overhead continued to keep enemy bombers from the ships.
By now, 1345 hours, the Colonel had been up with the leading Troops for more than two hours, and as the short Arctic day was drawing to a close he ordered the withdrawal to begin. No.2 Troop led the way back down the road towards the beach headquarters, followed by No.6 with No.1 as rearguard. Many buildings along the road were burning fiercely and, as he counted 12 dead Germans around the house just destroyed by mortar fire. Colonel Durnford-Slater encouraged the men to run through the flames by leading the way. Apparently they feared the burning timbers more than the bullets, but no doubt they were feeling some reaction after more than four hours in action: four hours of dodging snipers’ bullets and bursting open doors that all too often concealed a rifleman who fired, while around the houses a grenade could be dropped from any window.
Throughout the fighting the intelligence section had been searching houses and the German headquarters, and naval parties had boarded ships in similar searches—a dangerous task because several were killed as they rowed towards the quays in ships’ whalers. After an exchange of rifle shots with the crew of the Föhn. Lieutenant-Commander A.N.F. de Costabadic DSC got aboard this armed trawler.
Sam Corry and his medics carried the wounded who could not walk to the top of the rock above the landing beach, to which they were then lowered, down the rock face, on stretchers. Moreover, between tending the wounded, the doctor managed to loose off a few shots at snipers. Despite them the withdrawal went smoothly, with the Colonel, who had been the first man ashore, the last man off, just behind Charley Head, who, as signals officer, had kept up a stream of essages, 40 an hour at one point, that included reassuring but unproven ‘going well’ reports. He later explained that he had not wished to distract the Colonel during the fighting with enquiries on its actual progress.
Back in Britain, the Norwegian government exiled there felt this raid had done nothing to ease Norway’s plight; a problem for any raiders attacking an ally’s occupied shore. But against this destruction must be set some solid achievements, including the Press Unit’s making as much as censorship would allow in a morale-boosting report. German reaction after the raid was to later over-stretch their Atlantic Wall, with some 30,000 extra troops and material being deployed in Norway, which Hitler took to be ‘the zone of destiny in this war’. There was also a small bonus, for among the documents captured—when the Lieutenant-Commander from CCO’s planning headquarters boarded Föhn—was part of the German navy’s master code which the Allies added to their information in breaking its secrets.
The raids against Norway continued through the next three years. 1942-44, and were mounted in other theatres as more raiding parties were trained. The Vaagsö raid had proved that a landing was possible against a defended port, while Lord Mountbatten’s test pilots, as he called them, had proved the mettle of his command. A modest naval force, a dozen squadrons of aircraft, and 600 commandos with their Norwegian allies, had favourably influenced the strategy of the war at comparatively minor cost—five aircraft were lost with their crews, and 19 other raiders killed and 52 wounded. Some, like Denis O’Flaherty, who was in hospital for two years, would be a long time returning to the fight. But the days of aimlessly wandering on enemy beaches were over and specific targets could be raided despite their defences: targets the scientists and planners calculated as most likely to influence the war.
Among these targets were small components whose size bore no relation to their great importance in the technology of war, and great installations considered indestructible by the air bombardment of those years. Many of the smaller technological targets were in the province of SOE, but one, the new components in radar equipment of a German site some hundred yards from the top of a 300-foot cliff near Bruneval, was attacked by a small force of paratroopers supported by a seaborne commando party covering the withdrawal. Although the Germans had used a warning radar since before 1939, the Bruneval station included a new Würzburg set with its 20-foot (6cm) dish aerial able to range guns and direct planes on to a single aircraft. It was protected by 15 machine-gun posts along the cliff top and had, therefore, to be entered by the ‘back door’. A hundred parachute troops from the 2nd Parachute Battalion made this entrance on 27 February 1942, fighting their way into the station and coming out with the vital gear dismantled by Flight-Sergeant Cox, a radar expert.
They withdrew down a gulley to the beach under fire that intensified as they remained below the cliffs, a sea mist shrouding their signals to the landing craft. However, three LCA crews saw a Very light above the mist and came in with three motor gun boat escorts. Each LCA had the added firepower of four brens manned by men from 12 Commando, and in their fight with the Germans on the cliff top the commandos kept the defenders at bay until 0330 hours—some two and a half hours after the paras had landed—when the last craft left the beach under heavy fire. The equipment enabled scientists to develop ‘window’, a successful counter to radar. After the War General Student who had commanded German airborne forces congratulated Lord Mountbatten on the raid as the ‘best example of the use of airborne forces with other forces’, and Lord Mountbatten considers this raid ‘the most 100% perfection of any raid I know’.
The CCO’s position underwent a fundamental change in March 1942 when Lord Mountbatten ‘was made an Acting Vice-Admiral, an Honorary Lieutenant-General, an Honorary Air Marshal, with a seat on the Chiefs of Staff Committee itself, and was thus one of the four military leaders in charge of the higher direction of t
he War as a whole and in my case Combined Operations in particular’—to quote Lord Mountbatten. He goes on to explain that this change was fundamental to the development of Combined Operations as he was then able to order the ships and craft, and requisition bases among the other resources controlled by the Minister of Defence (Winston Churchill).
The success of December 1941 and February 1942 were crowned in March by the most profitable amphibious raid of modern times, in terms of effective damage with an economy of force. The achieved aim was to destroy the dry-dock at St Nazaire, a success in no small part due to the bond between officers and men. A hallmark of Commandos, such relationships avoided the discourtesies of familiarity lapsing into slackness in command. Moreover, in 2 Commando which carried out this raid, there was, in its commanding officer’s words’ an extra scruple of endurance’ that turned the seemingly impossible into the possible. Like almost all commando colonels. Colonel A. C. Newman was a man with technical as well as military ability: a civil engineer of cheerful but quiet character, seldom seen without his pipe. He was 38 years old at the time of this raid. His second-in-command—Major W. O. Copland—was, at 44, getting on in years for commando work, but as a works manager in civilian life he had the experience of technical organisation needed for such ventures. Indeed they required as much brain as brawn, and among the demolition parties at St Nazaire, drawn from eight different Commandos, were a curator of a fine arts museum, a member of the London Stock Exchange, a Nottingham miner, an economist, and several regular soldiers. These last include Sergeant Tom Durrant, Royal Engineers, one-time butcher’s boy and, although only 23, a man with granite determination.
Commandos and Rangers of World War II Page 5