Commandos and Rangers of World War II

by James D. Ladd

  In March 1941 the drill was very simple, but in later years all manner of complexities were necessary. Nevertheless, landing in heavily greased jerseys and long-john underwear, with a revolver in a supposedly waterproof packet and carrying the waterproofed torch and compass, was difficult enought after several days in the confined quarters of submarine HMS Triumph while she made a periscope survey of Rhodes’ beaches, often having to dive below 60 feet (18m), because in these clear waters a submarine at shallower depth is plainly seen from the air. On reconnaissance nights, the submarine had to use precious hours of moonless darkness while she charged her batteries before trimming down in the water with her saddle-tanks awash, the slight swell breaking occasionally over the casing. Ratings now steadied the canoe as it was put over the side, lying on the hydroplanes. They took a soaking no doubt relieved in an attitude of ‘rather you than me, mate’ as they watched the canoeists jump and sit in one motion the way they had practised boarding. Already aboard were a tommy-gun, grenades, a thermos of coffee laced with brandy—they would need this—and the infra-red signalling gear. This ‘RG’ equipment (see Appendix 3) sent a beam of invisible infra-red light from an Aldis-type lamp, the signal being visible only when the beam was on the little black box camera-sized receiver with a screen which, when the beam was intercepted, showed a green spot against a speckle of green pin-pricks of infrared light from the stars.

  Once cast off from the submarine they began the steady rhythm of paddling that took them along their course with a mile and a half to the beach, their sweat-raising stroke giving 3 knots—equal to a steady walking pace. A hundred yards from the beach Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott followed the drill and went over the side. The sharp cold, after his warm exertions, took his breath away for a moment as he hung on the stern of the canoe, but as soon as he had recovered his breath, the Commander struck out for the shore in a strong breaststroke that did not disturb the phosphorescence more than he could help, and barely ruffled the water. As his feet touched the bottom he was thinking of the tanks the Allies had intended to land on the rocky promontory before him; clearly this was not possible, for now in the starlight he could see its rock face was impassable.

  He swam back into the bay and along the coast some hundred yards before swimming in again. The sand felt firm here under his feet and he dog-paddled while checking the depth before easing on shore to lie with his chin on pebbles at the water’s edge, hearing the talk of sentries and just able to make out two figures behind a wall beyond the beach. In the surge of each wave he slithered forward until, for a moment, he felt the sentries’ eyes turned towards him; he froze clenching his teeth to stop their chattering. Several minutes rock still and the sentries no doubt mistook him for part of the shore over which the seas were gently breaking. The Italians moved off, and the Commander crossed the beach to a road. Making four landings in this way at different points along the shore. Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott discovered a number of things. There was a false beach 15 yards (13m) from the shore, the water on the shore side deep enough to drown a tank. In the grounds of the hotel used as an Axis headquarters, he heard a sentry yawn but found no guns. Shingle samples were stuffed under the navigator’s jersey. From these scientists could calculate whether a metal road was needed across the beach or if tanks could pass over it without help from engineers, and what size of wheeled vehicles could pass over the pebble bank. Next time he came on one of these recces he would bring a bag for these trophies, but the chinagraph pencil had worked well in noting on his slate the depths of water and the position of that false beach.

  Checking his watch he saw it was time to swim back to the canoe and his rendezvous with Roger Courtney, who had been paddling offshore for the last few hours, keeping the canoe head or stern towards the beach so that it was less likely to be seen. The stimulus of the Commander’s benzedrine tablets was wearing off as he swam out to sea after three hours creeping and sliding around the beach, and now, his senses dulled by a chilling exhaustion, he felt the first pangs of doubt: would Roger Courtney see the flickering torch among the waves before an enemy patrol boat caught sight of it? He summoned all his will power, forcing numbed fingers in his upstretched arm to flash again the morse ‘R’. Out of the darkness came Roger Courtney with firm, fast paddle strokes bringing the canoe alongside the Commander. The commando had been waiting with disciplined patience some 400 yards (365m) out. Every time he lifted the cap of his luminous watch the hands seemed to have barely moved, but now he hauled Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott into the canoe and passed him the flask of coffee. The swig merely prickled the swimmer’s gums—beach reconnaissance teams usually spoke of ‘the swimmer’ as the man who went ashore and ‘the paddler’ as the man staying with the canoe. A gulp from the coffee thermos, however, brought the first faint warmth to his bones as they paddled into a thickening mist. This cleared and the submarine picked up their infra-red signals, taking them back aboard before continuing her patrol.

  They made landings on each of the following four nights, the last when Roger Courtney was the swimmer, being a near disaster. Gripped with cramp at the water’s edge he could not move, and the furious barking of a dog drew Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott inshore, his tommy-gun cocked. The swimmer’s great frame was contorted in agony, yet he struggled out to the canoe and with a supreme effort of will got aboard in a tortuous heave. As they returned from these reconnaissances with a good deal of useful information, authority was pleased. However, the invasion of Rhodes was cancelled when German troops came into the fighting in Greece. Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott went back to his planning duties, although he did one more beach reconnaissance ahead of ships’ detachments of Royal Marines landing on Kupho island (off Crete) in a modest raid that destroyed a radar station, and might have brought back code books had not their metal safe been lost as a ship’s boat tilted in being hauled aboard a destroyer gathering speed. Roger Courtney went back to the raiding of the SBS which we will follow in later Chapters.

  The Combined Operations’ planners were in Richmond Terrace near Whitehall, yet conveniently distant from service ministries. Here in May 1942—before the raid on Dieppe that August—plans were being made for the landings in North Africa that would put an American Task Force ashore on the Atlantic coast near Casablanca, a second force ashore at Oran in the Mediterranean, and a third further east at Algiers, Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott was ordered home to the United Kingdom that summer as beach reconnaissance was part of the Allied plans for these ‘Torch’ landings, but final approval for training the necessary teams was not cleared until 8 September, a mere eight weeks before the date for this invasion. This illustrated the urgency of many commando and other wartime activities when the time needed to set up a special operation was almost impossibly short, but the official records do not show the efforts behind the scenes in preparing the ground. The Commander, having decided the personnel he hoped might join him, contacted several, but needed official approval and Lord Mountbatten’s support in recruiting Lieutenant Neville McHarg RN, a conscientious navigator and Lieut Norman Teacher RN to the teams. In October, an increase in the number of landing points for Torch led to Roger Courtney’s brother coming to assist with the training of the beach reconnaissance canoeists.

  The equipment they had at Rhodes hardly justified the risks in getting ashore to use it, but the Commander had improved the original ideas and over the next two years a comprehensive yet simple range of tools would be devised for this survey work. The training would also become increasingly complex, with landings from midget submarines late in 1943 and early in 1944, but in October 1942 the best that could be produced were canoes to get the swimmer inshore and a cumbersome rubberised canvas suit of the type used by charioteers riding human torpedos. The canoes were improved in a seamanlike fashion with a canvas canopy buttoned round the paddlers and air bladders around the cockpit and sides (see p. 25 and Appendix 4). But all their training that October was put to limited use, for after they had flown to Gibraltar, the Admiralty forbade any landings, the Fla
g Officer Gibraltar considering these would compromise security and warn the French of the invasion. The teams of paddlers (some of them from the SBS) and the navigators therefore spent two weeks making periscope reconnaissances, drawing the profiles of the hinterland to target beaches. Copies of these could be used by landing craft flotillas and at least one survey showed an intended landing point for trucks was backed by impassable cliffs—shades of Rhodes. After these reconnaissances during October, a final reconnaissance was made a few days before the invasion, by the teams going inshore one night so that each navigator could show the paddlers their canoes’ positions as navigational marks guiding in the assault waves on D-day. (For convenience planners referred to D-day, or Z-day early in the war, as the day of a landing and H-hour as the time of landing. The day after landing was then D + 1, the minute after landing ‘H + 1 minute’ and so on.)

  Guiding in a main force became the second phase of assault pilotage, for having reconnoitred a beach some weeks or months before a landing, these teams had the most up-to-date knowledge of local conditions. At the Torch and some other landings they also supplied navigators on the leading assault waves in the Mediterranean; men of the US Engineer Special Service Brigades did a somewhat similar job in the Casablanca part of the operation. During the final canoe position recces for Torch, a sudden storm caught those of the eastern reconnaissance, and Lieutenant L.G. (Geoff) Lyne RN with Commando Thomas as paddler were in its teeth. Fight as they did to keep the canoe on course they were driven westward of Castiglione (near Sidi Ferruch) when they should have been east of this port. They strove to keep the canoe’s bows heading into steep seas while they baled with tin mugs whenever there was a moment’s let-up in the fury. They had an hour to get back to the rendezvous with their submarine when the storm strengthened, tossing them high on one wave before they slithered off its back to meet the next great sea, all the time in danger of broaching-to across the waves that could then roll them over. One great comber filled the canoe before she shook free from the cascading crests; now they could not expect to make much headway and had to fight even harder to avoid broaching-to. They flashed signals more in hope than expectation of catching the submarine’s attention before dawn broke and the wind abated, giving them their first chance to force free fingers locked around the paddle handles in a muscle-spasm grip. Two miles offshore they were seen by a French trawler and taken aboard, not before Geoff Lyne had time to slit the airbags, sinking the canoe with its tell-tale gear.

  Others were on the edge of the storm and Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott had a wild ride with young Sub-Lieutenant White, who was having his first introduction to canoe reconnaissance. The canoe of Edwards and Mangnall—200 miles to the west of the Commander—found the only way to escape the playful attentions of porpoises was to stop paddling. For another team, more dangerous company appeared when the local fishing fleet came out, and the paddlers bent over, face down in the canoe, keeping her stern-on to the newcomers by deft tweaks of the paddles as they drifted less than 30 yards from two boats. These fishing fleets would continue to be a hazard for reconnaissance parties, and by the summer of 1943 there were often several German guards with each fleet to prevent the smuggling of people or information between the Allies and occupied territories.

  On the night of 7 November the teams were again off the North African coast ready to flash their signal lights and RG infra-red beams along the limit lines on the flanks of target beaches. In deteriorating weather the force commander aboard the transport USS Samuel Chase was considering whether to carry his craft inshore before launching them, and Lieutenant-Commander Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott’s advice was sought. He insisted the force keep to their plan, and aboard the leading assault craft he led the flotilla from confusion caused when the carriers, drifting on a current, launched the craft some way from the intended dropping zone. The landing craft’s compass was not properly ‘swung’, and using the north star for a back-bearing the Commander brought this LC Vehicle (LCV) on to the correct beach. Among the five teams working that night was Stan Weatherall with Sub-Lieutenant Peter Harris RNVR, marking the limit of Arzew beach where the American Rangers would land. His canoe was launched at 1900 hours on Saturday night, 7 November, and paddled the six miles (10km) inshore while their submarine, HMS Ursula, steamed further out to act 11 miles (18km) offshore as a beacon for the approaching troop convoys. There was a fresh breeze and the canoe shipped water in a choppy sea as it was launched, forcing the paddlers to ditch all their gear except a tommy-gun, a Colt 45, and their signalling equipment. The baler was washed forward into the bow so they baled with their berets, taking turns to paddle and resisting the temptation to lean forward and clout the porpoises darting at the bow. They dropped their kedge anchor 200 yards offshore and settled down to await the first wave of assault craft. In the next three hours they heard and saw nothing ashore before setting up the signal light and infra-red beam at 0015 that Sunday morning: an hour or so later the first craft—carrying the Rangers—came past, some 10 minutes late. As they had no receiver to check the RG gear, they also flashed a Z by red torch signalling the centre of Z beach. The final wave of the initial assault, LC Mechanised carrying jeeps and tanks, went by at 0415, making a bow wave that flirted the canoe aside, and a quarter of an hour later this canoe team followed the craft ashore. Anyone who has been alongside a ship when he or she is in a small boat knows the way she towers over you at a dockside. At sea the ship can appear enormous, and even minor landing craft travelling at a brisk trot were a hazard to canoes, for the minor LC’s blunt bow pushed out a small wall of water. A tank landing ship (LST) bow’s wave could be one or two feet high.

  Developments in COPP beach reconnaissance gear measuring beach inclinations and contours.

  Ashore, Stan Weatherall and Peter Harris followed the general practice in a beach-head: lending a hand where they could. They paddled out carrying some kedges for craft that would then tow themselves off to these anchors, and with nothing more to be done on Z Red beach they paddled round to Z Green. Here they were ‘captured’ by Rangers who thought the canoeists were enemy torpedo riders—human torpedoes. The confusion cleared up, the paddlers left the beach at 0625, nearly 12 hours after they had been launched from their submarine. A tow to the SS Reina Del Pacifico was followed by a wash in the Chief Petty Officers’ quarters, interrupted by two hits on the ship from a French battery, and when the canoeists came back on deck they found the canoe had been stripped by souvenir hunters, who now began asking for autographs. Other pilotage parties had seen mixed fortunes: Don Amer’s help was spurned by one flotilla officer who managed later to put his cargo personnel ashore 1½ miles (over 2km) off their target. However, the value of assault pilotage was recognised at Combined Operations headquarters.

  Many other lessons were learnt from the Torch landings, which would never have succeeded against serious opposition. The problems became clear in marshalling hundreds of landing craft as big as single-decker buses, but without any brakes, in a continued seaway. They would need all the help they could get from beach surveys and marker canoes, so 50 Combined Operations Assault Pilotage Parties (COPPs) were proposed. However, there were never the trained navigators nor Royal Engineer specialists available to recruit this number, and in all some 11 teams were trained. Their organisation (see Appendix 2) was flexible so that any man could do most of the jobs. All were trained canoeists and they were, in Commander Clogstoun-Willmott’s words, to become ‘Rolls Royce equipped commandos’. Before they reached this happy state, however, they were to carry through several operations and long hours of dangerous training from their base at the Hayling Island Sailing Club on an isolated spit of land called Sandy Point on Hayling Island (near Portsmouth, Hampshire). Near there one night their training officer, Geoff Galwey, had one—probably of several—anxious moments while his swimmer, Major Scott-Bowden, was stuck fast in mud before an incoming tide, but the canoe floated the stuck swimmer and his paddler free when the tide rose. The base was run in the manner ex
pected from Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott, with no concessions to careless habits or moments of inattention which could cost lives on a beach.

  In February 1943 two parties went to reconnoitre the Sicily beaches, after some frustration in Algiers. There senior officer, Lieutenant-Commander Norman Teacher RN, was only thirty years old and one of COPPs’ greatest difficulties in the early days was persuading senior command staffs to listen to the young navigators. The sometimes lethargic HQ at Algiers needed a prod from Lord Mountbatten before COPPs 3 and 4 were sent on to Malta for the submarine approach to their recce. Here they met up with a team from the Combined Operations base in the Suez Canal Zone, with two canoe parties under Lieutenant Robert Smith RN. These seven officers and ten or so ratings had done rudimentary training with gear they bought mostly in the Cairo bazaar, and they were most interested in the COPPist’s equipment, which included some new suits designed by Siebe Gorman but not tested fully by the wearers. The reconnaissance parties divided up their gear, to share out the better UK equipment, before COPP 3 sailed in HMS Unbending for a reconnaissance of the beaches between Sciaco and the river Belice, some 15 miles (24km) of coast on the south-west shores of Sicily.