Commandos and Rangers of World War II

by James D. Ladd

  Large and small raids continued, with the SBS 101 Troop sending a canoe into Boulogne on the night of 11–12 April, three weeks after the St Nazaire raid. Originally Stan Weatherall and Guardsman R. Sidlow were to accompany Captain Gerald Montanaro RE with Trooper Freddie Preece RAC, in two canoes. But as the weather was rough, the Troop commander went with his paddler and the other canoe team stayed ashore. Launched from ML 102, the two raiders had a mile or so to paddle on a compass course through choppy water into the harbour where, as the canoe surged on the swell alongside a large ship, they reached down underwater to fix their eight limpet mines. Tightening the butterfly nuts on these magnet limpets broke the glass phials, so setting chemical time-fuses (see Appendix 3) before the raiders turned their canoe back to sea on a reciprocal course for the motor launch. They barely reached it, for the seas had got up and the waterlogged canoe was foundering as they were hauled to safety. A few days later the Troop were shown aerial photographs of five tugs towing the sinking ship towards a sandbank, where she settled with her cargo of 5,000 tons of copper. The Germans are said to have shot 100 French hostages in reprisal for this sinking which they thought was the work of the Resistance.

  Raiding was now growing apace with Lord Mountbatten’s wish for ‘a raid every fortnight’ in addition to the smaller raids of the SBS and other units who were joining the ranks of commandos. On 21—22 April, 100 men of 4 Commando, with 50 Canadians, landed from six LCAs at the village of Hardelot in a reconnaissance in force. Their leader Lord Lovat thought their safe return was due to ‘the opposition being half-hearted or badly trained’ and not to any skill on the raiders’ part. Three sailors were killed nevertheless by the defenders.

  In May, following these forays, Hitler had his first top-level meeting to discuss the western defences with the Todt Organisation, and plans were begun for the so-called Atlantic Wall, although there already existed a series of defended ports and the original defence arrangements set up when fleets of craft were being assembled for an invasion of England. The Wall itself never became a complete line of defences.

  Among those who would join the commandos in probing these defences were the men of the Small Scale Raiding Force (SSRF), responsible jointly to Lord Mountbatten and SOE. In the spring of 1942, Major Gus March-Phillips, Major J. Geoffrey Appleyard, who served with 7 Commando in the autumn of 1940, and Captain Graham Hayes had the SSRF in training at Wareham (Dorset), where they did a lot of boat work, especially in dories. They trained to land in various numbers, although in later years some nine men made up the team in a powered dory. With their SOE connexions, the SSRF found a dory more suitable than canoes when landing an agent who wanted to melt into the local scene rather than stagger ashore dripping wet from a canoe. In collecting agents, however, canoes were quite suitable and Geoffrey Appleyard made several ‘collections’ from enemy beaches. Once, landing from the submarine HMS Tigris, his fellow canoeist—a Free French soldier—lost his boat in rough water, but they managed to get back to the submarine. The next night Geoffrey Appleyard went in alone, and after scouting round for the two agents he was to meet, he abandoned all caution, running up and down the beach shouting for them and waving his torch. They appeared at last and he got them safely off in one canoe. The Germans could not man every half-mile—never mind every yard—and campaign in Russia. However, the ambiguities under the SOE cloak of secrecy, had repercussions for all commandos, for they were strictly uniformed troops, even if they sometimes appeared off enemy coasts under flags of convenience.

  Two of these raids, however, had special significance to our story. On the night of 12/13 September 1942, Gus March-Phillips and Graham Hayes, with nine men, were landed in a Goatley boat (see Appendix 4) at St Honoriné near the Cherbourg peninsula. Geoff Appleyard was in the MTB—he had an injured leg from a previous raid—when he heard the landing party ambush some seven Germans in a patrol before the raiders were in turn ambushed by a larger force. They reached their boat, but the Germans were there before them and Gus March-Phillips was killed along with three others. The flimsy canvas-sided boat sank, leaving Graham Hayes to swim along the coast. With the help of several Frenchmen he eventually reached Spain, but this neutral country’s police handed him back to the Gestapo. This incident proved the danger to Special Forces when they sought sanctuary in a neutral country, for Graham Hayes was shot in a Paris prison in the summer of 1943. Also in 1943, in July, Geoffrey Appleyard, who had gone on to help form the 2nd SAS Regiment in the Middle East, was reported missing presumed killed over Sicily where he was supervising an airdrop.

  The second small raid of significance to the commando story came on 3—4 October 1942, When a few of the Small Scale Raiding Force and some men of 12 Commando landed on Sark in the Channel Islands. They took several prisoners, two of whom were killed in a later skirmish. There seems no doubt that the dead prisoners were handcuffed and this infuriated Hitler, who in October ordered that ‘all enemy troops taking part in the so-called Commando operations … in uniform or not … whether in battle or whilst escaping … will be destroyed to the last man’.

  The valour of these raiders was recognised after the destruction of the docks at St Nazaire by the award of the Victoria Cross to Lietenant-Commander S.H. Beattie, Sergeant Tom Durrant, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Newman, Commander R.E.D. Ryder, and Able Seaman William Savage. In the words of the citations for Sam Beattie’s and ‘Red Ryder’s awards, these recognised: not only the individual’s valour but also that of a very gallant ship’s company and the valour shown by many others of coastal forces. In all, 4 DSOs, 17 DSCs, 11 MCs, 4 Conspicuous Gallantry Medals, 24 DSMs, 14 MMs, 51 Mentions-in-Despatches, and 4 Croix de Guerre were awarded for this raid alone. One example may illustrate the nature of these awards: Michael Burn, who crossed the docks alone, had barely got ashore, being half-drowned by the weight of his equipment as he tried to swim to the dockside, and being rescued by Lance-Corporal Young. Yet the commando captain shook off the discomfort of this experience and went on to reach his objective. He was awarded the Military Cross. After the previous year’s visits to Lofoten and Vaagsö, John Durnford-Slater and Peter Young had won decorations for their skill and bravery, and Gerald Montanaro and Trooper Preece were decorated. Men of the Small Scale Raiding Force on one raid alone were led by five officers none of whom survived the war, who would all earn awards for gallantry, including a VC, DSO, and six Military Crosses. The valour is unquestioned, and although only the decorations of those officers and men mentioned in the unit histories of Appendix 7 are shown in this book, commandos would be—I believe—the first to accept that those who received awards usually owed a good deal to the support of their fellows, in spirit if not by arms.

  Raiding dory, inflatable and lines of SN6 Surf Boat.

  Planning these raids had moved a long way in a few months, as explained in Chapter 10. This was in large measure due to their senior commanders; men like Brigadier Charles Haydon, whose report of February 1941 had done much to shape the commandos from an unwieldly collection of Troops expected to act independently, to a cohesive force of raiders in units suited to their various roles—the SBS for recce, the complete Commando for raids in force. There were no longer the possibilities for ship-based guerrillas to flit along enemy coastlines, but now small parties could be landed and withdrawn in a fast-moving or underwater approach. The traditional British verve for raiding had been restored after too many years under the shadow of the World War I failures at Gallipoli.

  Not all early raids were successful and the plan to raid Bayonne failed through lack of information on beach conditions. This raid would have cut all railway and road bridges in this area between France and Spain, on the same night that St Nazaire was raided, in the original plans. But when the LSIs Princess Beatrix and Queen Emma with 1 and 6 Commandos had ‘crept along the north coast of Spain undetected’ in their disguise as Spanish merchantmen, the LCAs came in to find long and heavy Atlantic swells pounding a bar across the target beaches in the river Ardour e
stuary. Many of the craft would have been lost and commandos were not hazarded in foolish risks, although often taking calculated chances. They re-embarked and returned to the UK after more than a month at sea.

  SOME NAVAL ASPECTS OF AMPHIBIOUS WARFARE IN WORLD WAR II

  Allied navies were equipped for hydrographic surveys by submarines and other ships measuring offshore currents and scouting the channels to a landfall. But new techniques were needed to find landing points for assault craft and ships, for not only minor craft and major craft (LCTs etc) would be put ashore but also Landing Ships Tank (LSTs) of over 300 feet (90 + m) weighing 4,080 short tons would beach. Assault craft and ships on a beach too shallowly shelved might ground by the stern, leaving their bows in water too deep for vehicles or men to cross without risk of drowning, while vehicle-carrying craft on a steeply inclined beach might not ground firmly enough to offload their cargoes.

  Once the landing points had been selected, the navies had to escort the assault troops’ ships to their dropping zones, sweeping mine-free passages for both LSIs and assault craft. These were marshalled into their landing sequence before the run inshore while a bombardment by naval and air forces covered the approach. Pre-assault bombardments were made when surprise was unnecessary, as in most Pacific island assaults when the Japanese could not reinforce a garrison. The American army engineer Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT)s and US Marine Corps recce squads worked near beaches under the cover of such bombardments often begun several days before a landing. Naval tactics early in the war avoided such ship-to-fort confrontations; but by 1943 the accepted practice was to blast coast defences, stripping them of camouflage, if not destroying their guns in sea and air bombardments that were timed so navy shells did not cut the path of straffing planes. The majority of aircraft in both Europe and the Pacific amphibious assaults were land-based, but carrier aircraft played their part.

  In support of the build-up of beachheads, naval ships, directed by observers ashore with assault forces, fired on shore targets. Refuelling and re-ammunitioning these vessels and those protecting an anchorage involved a complex fleet-train of ships in the Pacific, sometimes operating nearly 2,000 miles (3,700 + km) from its nearest land-base.

  CHAPTER 3

  Assault Pilotage

  The Allied raiding forces would include many units with special skills, landing not only on the Channel coast of France but across the world from northern Norway to the South Pacific, Belgians of 10 Commando would land in the Adriatic. US Marine Corps raiding battalions operated in the Pacific: and American Army Rangers landed alongside the commandos in Europe and spearheaded the Phillipines landings. All depended on the navy and sometimes on the air force to land them at least somewhere near their target beaches.

  Lieutenant-Commander Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott RN, navigating officer of the force intended to raid Rhodes in the summer of 1941, thought of his uncle with the Australians, while planning the beach reconnaissance. They had landed with the Anzacs at Gallipoli, when the battleships were deterred by fear of mines after HMS Irresistible and HMS Ocean were mined in the Dardanelles on 18 March 1915. Other ships had also been lost in World War I while navigating other narrows where there is the added risk of going aground. Indeed, more than half the Allied ships lost off Norway in 1940 foundered on shoals or rocks, as Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott knew from his service aboard a Q-ship in that compaign. With searoom a prerequisite of safe ship handling, naval training and other deep-water seamanship has always been more concerned, therefore, with keeping clear of land than with approaching beaches. There would be precious little searoom off the beaches in amphibious landings, and putting a 4,000-ton assault ship ashore was at one time thought so hazardous that none was expected to survive. Yet they did. However, such risks could be taken only with very exact knowledge of the shore—where changes of the undersea bed are highly variable in comparison with the unchanging contours ashore. In the Pacific, coral reefs were even less adequately charted than the beaches of North Africa or the fjords of Norway, but as the techniques of assault pilotage developed, more details of the natural hazards became clear.

  A ship could nevertheless be navigated accurately, especially when up-to-date hydrographic data was available from offshore surveys by submarines. The problem, therefore, was not one of technique, as much as training, for there were relatively few fully trained navigators in the Allied navies of 1940-41 and many training facilities were needed for air force navigators. These constraints put out of the question any prospect of training fully fledged navigators for the thousands of landing craft crews. At best they had a few lectures in coastal pilotage before joining the minor craft—those carried aboard ships. Officers in the major craft—the LCTs and LCIs (see Appendix 4)—had a little more training but not very much: navigation is a science not learnt in a four-week course.

  In European waters there were coastal pilot handbooks, but these cautioned the sailor away from rocky beaches, the forbidding shores on which commandos expected to land. Many charts gave details only to the low-water lines, while maps cut off their contours at the high-water mark.

  Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott, caught up in something of the optimism in the British Imperial Headquarters at Cairo after General Wavell’s sweeping desert victories of December 1940, was aware of these and many more problems as he completed a survey through the periscope of a mine-laying submarine off the island of Rhodes, which lies close to the Turkish coast. As the submarine nosed around the island’s waters for three days, often making one and a half knots or less, there were a number of unanswered questions. Was that apparently empty fisherman’s hut an abandoned home or a gun emplacement? Were there any hidden sand-bars a dozen yards from the beach, for a man could drown easily in the eight feet of water beyond them as in eighty?

  In time, beach reconnaissance would become a scientific study of landing areas and their immediate hinterland—the littoral across which Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott’s men would lead raiders and the van of invasions, guiding the landing craft crews with marker canoes and other devices that in part at least made up for these flotillas’ limited experience of coastal navigation. However, there was nothing over-scientific about the Commander’s first beach reconnaissance. Nor were some of the earlier beach reconnaissances the most encouraging of precedents, although Clogstoun-Willmott did not know this at the time. Another officer, Lieutenant-Commander Milner Gibson RN, who led in crash boats on the raid near Boulogne in 1940, had made nine reconnaissances in the three weeks before that raid, going ashore alone probably in a dinghy. An officer who had lived on Guernsey also made a reconnaissance of that island before Ronnie Tod and John Durnford-Slater visited it in their July raid the same year. But in both cases the pre-raid recces were not much help on the night, for Milner-Gibson’s compass failed and the German dispositions on Guernsey were changed by the time of the raid.

  In preparing for his reconnaissance of Rhodes, the Commander had set himself an exacting routine of training, with long-distance swimming and other exercises hardening his physical endurance: habits of training his men would later find exhausting almost to the point of mutiny. That January in 1941 the plans were entirely personal, however, because Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott had difficulty persuading the Force Commanders that there was anything to be gained from beach reconnaissance. All too easily they feared, a recce might leave traces of the visit which, even if the lone navigator was not captured, could give away the intended landing point for an assault force. Throughout these reconnaissances, therefore, the raiders went to extreme lengths—even possibly to self-destruction—to avoid being caught on their special gear falling into enemy hands, for its nature made clear the purpose of the visit. However, Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott, swimming into the beaches at Rhodes, with his army compass covered in periscope grease and his water-proofed torch in its rubber sheaths of issue contraceptives, was unlikely to reveal his purpose.

  He made this reconnaissance with Captain Roger Courtney, of the SBS, who had been in the Mediterranean for
some months after training around Arran in Scotland. They were introduced by the commanding officer of Layforce, Brigadier Laycock, other exploits of Roger Courtney are described later in Chapter 8. The army Captain taught the Commander the knack of hoisting himself aboard a canoe over its stern, and how to vault astride one steadied by a paddler already aboard. He learnt then and in later practice how to jump into a bobbing canoe, letting his feet give under him without capsizing the frail Folbot. He became adept at launching himself over the canoe’s side; first leaning back with legs outstretched athwart the cockpit, a quick flip of the body brought him face down towards the water before lowering himself onto it. Although this may sound a simple piece of gymnastics it was no parlour trick at night with a sea running and the canoe’s stability always in doubt.

  The first action using any new technique is usually one of the most interesting, for the simple principles can be seen without any complications of secondary purposes or complicated gear, and this is true of the first beach reconnaissance at Rhodes. The army captain and the naval navigator practised swimming ashore at night, taking turns to act the part of a sentry while the other stalked around the acting guard until this could be done without the swimmer being detected. A stone hurled at a raised arm splashing casually in the approach, or the noise of stones crunched underfoot, was sufficient reminder of more deadly missiles that would come the way of a careless visitor on an enemy beach. In these practice runs the characters of the two canoeists contrasted: Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott, tall, good looking, and in his early thirties, meticulous over details with the mathematical approach of a navigator in facing the problems; Roger Courtney, as we have seen in training off Arran, a heavily built man, something of the adventurer with the flair for improvisation in a tight corner. For all their mutual confidence in each other and their shared patience—although one suspects from the records that the navigator had more of this essential quality than the adventurer—each brought his own special talents to this technique of beach reconnaissance. Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott has described it as an art ‘needing the patience of an animal’, and undoubtedly there would be times when physical strength and endurance were the key to survival, for survive they must to make any contribution from their efforts. For men on beach reconnaissance had further to go than the saboteur or the raider bent on mere disruption: the reconnaissance report had to reach the main force.