BRITAIN’S FIRST COMMANDOS
Special forces expert Gavin Mortimer recounts the first raids on occupied Norway
On the evening of 24 April 1940 a Royal Navy submarine departed Rosyth in Scotland bound for Norway on what was codenamed ‘Operation Knife’. On board HMS Truant were seven men described by the vessel’s captain, Lieutenant Commander Christopher Hutchinson, as “a bunch of cutthroats”, armed with plastic explosive and a variety of “ghastly looking” weapons.
The seven were led by a Scots Guards officer, Bryan Mayfield, and included Peter Kemp, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and Bill
Stirling, a former Guards officer and one of the wealthiest landowners in Scotland.
Fifteen days earlier, on 9 April, Germany had invaded Norway, occupying the capital Oslo as well as Bergen, Trondheim and Narvik. The Norwegians, assisted by a hastily assembled British Expeditionary Force, had offered spirited resistance, and the seven men in the Truant were on their way to Sognefjord, north of the western city of Bergen, to embark upon a sabotage campaign against Nazi lines of communications.
Eight hours after its departure from Scotland, the Truant was rocked by a powerful explosion. The damage caused by the mine was bad enough for Hutchinson to abort the mission and return to Rosyth.
The Admiralty promised the seven men that a second attempt would be made to transport them to Norway, but it might take a day or two to provide a replacement submarine. In the meantime Stirling invited his comrades to stay at his lavish estate at Keir, close to the town of Dunblane. They were soon informed that Operation Knife had been cancelled because of the collapse of Allied resistance in Norway. So what were they to do now?
To a degree, they were relieved that the operation hadn’t materialised: they had military training but there was a world of difference between guerrilla fighting and what one learned at the Guards’ depot. Stirling took the initiative. “It was Stirling’s idea that the six of us, reinforced by a few selected officers and NCOS, should form the nucleus of a new training school,” said Kemp. “We should begin with cadre courses for junior officers from different units of the army. Mayfield was to be commandant, Stirling chief instructor.”
Stirling and Mayfield travelled to London in the first week of May 1940 and presented their idea to the War Office to establish a training centre in Scotland where soldiers could be schooled in the art of guerrilla fighting.
“ON BOARD HMS TRUANT WERE SEVEN MEN DESCRIBED BY THE VESSEL’S CAPTAIN, LIEUTENANT COMMANDER CHRISTOPHER HUTCHINSON, AS ‘A BUNCH OF CUT-THROATS’, ARMED WITH PLASTIC EXPLOSIVE AND A VARIETY OF ‘GHASTLY LOOKING’ WEAPONS”
Action not appeasement
Their timing could not have been better. On 10 May Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister. Britain now had a leader of boldness and pugnacity, determined to fight back against the Nazis by any means possible.
On 3 June Stirling and Mayfield were released from the Scots Guards with permission to establish the Commando Special Training Centre at Lochailort in the north-west of Scotland.
There to greet them upon their arrival was Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat, Stirling’s cousin, who owned the land around Lochailort.
Fraser was appointed senior instructor in fieldcraft, one of a team of experts recruited to Lochailort. Others included mountaineers, explorers, an Olympic shooting gold medallist in Cyril Mackworth Praed, and two former Shanghai policemen, William Fairbairn and Eric Sykes, who taught students the art of close-quarter combat.
Also in the first week of June, Churchill issued a memorandum to his chiefs of staff instructing them to establish Britain’s first special forces: “We have always set our faces against this idea but… enterprises must be prepared, with specially trained troops, who can develop a reign of terror down these coasts, first of all on the ‘butcher and bolt’ policy, but later on, or perhaps as soon as we are organised, we should surprise Calais or Boulogne, kill or capture the Hun garrison.”
Churchill’s thinking was in line with Lt-colonel Dudley Clarke’s, the Military Assistant to the
Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Lt-general Sir John Dill. Clarke had spent some of his childhood in South Africa and was an admirer of the Boer commandos, who had fought so bravely and innovatively against the British in the war of 1899-1902. It was Clarke who suggested calling this new force ‘commandos’.
Men volunteered for a variety of reasons. Bernard Davis, from the ranks of the
Royal Artillery, was still smarting from the humiliation he had suffered in France and Belgium the previous month. “We had been back from Dunkirk about one month… and we were fed up,” he recalled. “We had no weapons to speak off, we were just doing routine marching and swimming. And one day a smart young officer from the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry arrived.”
The officer explained the role of the commandos and then asked for volunteers. Davis was one of about 20 who became part of D Troop, No4 Commando. “For a lot of us it was a desire to get our own back for the defeat we had suffered in Belgium,” he said.
There were initially 12 Commando units, each one comprised of eight assault Troops, a heavy weapons Troop and a signals Troop (approximately 600 men and 40 officers). On 17 July Admiral Sir Roger Keyes was appointed Director of Combined Operations and his son, Geoffrey, was one of the early recruits to the commandos.
John Price of the Royal Warwicks, who had been evacuated from Dunkirk, volunteered for the commandos without knowing anything about their purpose. “We were reassembled (after Dunkirk) at Hereford and there was a notice for volunteers for special duties, but it did not specify what it was for,” he said. “To be honest I wanted to get out of that unit. I felt it was like a flock of sheep being led to the slaughter.”
There was also the lure of extra pay: 13 and fourpence for officers and six and eightpence for the men.
Price became a member of A Troop No4 Commando, based in Weymouth. “We spent most of the time on the beaches, getting fit, and we gradually worked up doing longer marches, and we got bicycles and went on long bicycle tours,” he said.
Throughout July and into early August the threat of a German invasion was Britain’s main concern. “We were to be first line defence and we used to sleep down on Portland beach every night with hand grenades,” remembered Price.
Failure and frustration
Once the prospect of a German invasion had receded by the early autumn, the commandos were sent north to Scotland to broaden their training. Many of the officers and senior NCOS passed in small parties through the Special Training Centre at Lochailort while the men were billeted across the country: No4 Commando was in Troon, for example, No2 in Ayr, No3 and No8 in Largs and Nos 1 and 9 in Irvine.
“We used to go away in troops,” recalled Price. “We would go mountaineering in North
“FOR A LOT OF US IT WAS A DESIRE TO GET OUR OWN BACK FOR THE DEFEAT WE HAD SUFFERED IN BELGIUM”
Wales, cliff climbing in Cornwall, potholing in Derbyshire, and doing exercises up the West coast on and off ships.”
A significant event occurred on 30 October 1940 when the commandos were reorganised into the Special Service Brigade and, somewhat thoughtlessly, abbreviated to the SS Brigade. There were five battalions within the Brigade, each composed of two Commando units. No3 (A Company) and No8 (B Company) became
4 SS Battalion, and this was one of three earmarked for Operation Workshop, along with 2 and 3 Battalions, under the overall command of Lt-colonel Bob Laycock.
The object of the mission was to capture the Italian island of Pantelleria in the Mediterranean, but after weeks of hard training and rehearsals, Workshop was cancelled. “Despondency was the order of the day,” wrote Laycock, although Major Alan Smallman of
4 SS Battalion was relieved at the outcome.
“It would have been a disaster because we were not ready for an operation on that scale,” he recalled. “Up until that time the only raids had been small scale raids across the channel: a not particularly successful raid on Guernsey and a lot of training exercises. But Roger Keyes, being the type of sailor he was, was determined to let the commandos see blood. Fortunately the chiefs of staff saw the lights before the blood and the operation fell through.”
To recompense the men for all their hard work, Keyes sent the commandos on a fortnight’s leave; when they returned they
discovered that the Special Service Battalions had been dropped and the Commando Units restored. Three of them – Nos 7, 8 and 11 – were designated Force Z and on the night of 31 January sailed for North Africa. Among their number were several men who would go on to find fame fighting in other units: David Stirling, Blair Mayne and Bill Fraser in the SAS; David Sutherland, Roger Courtney and George Jellicoe in the SBS; and Geoffrey Keyes and Tommy Macpherson, who took part in the ‘Rommel Raid’ of November 1941, the former receiving a posthumous Victoria Cross.
Meanwhile, recalled Smallman, “No3 Commando went back to Largs… and I became adjutant just about the time when we were lined up to take the Azores. That was an operation [codenamed ‘Brisk’] that again did not come off.”
The cancellation of Workshop and Brisk, coupled with the unsuccessful raid on Guernsey the previous July, when the commandos had failed to find a single German, further eroded morale. Spirits were just as low among the commandos who disembarked in the Middle East in March 1941. As the novelist Evelyn Waugh – a member of No8 Commando – recorded in his diary shortly after arriving in Egypt: “The feelings of the Bde [Brigade] were well summed up by an inscription found on the troop decks of Glengyle. ‘Never in the history of human endeavour have so few been so buggered about by so many.’”
Brief but bloody
In the same month that Waugh was tickled by the wit of one of his commando comrades, Smallman and the men of No3 Commando were “delighted” to be briefed about an imminent raid on the Lofoten Islands in the north of Norway. Almost a year earlier the islands had been seized by the Germans, and the herring- and cod-oil factories in the ports of Stamsund, Henningsvaer, Svolvaer and Brettesnes were now supplying the Nazis with this precious commodity. No3 and No4 Commando were tasked with landing on the islands, destroying the factories, capturing Quislings and Nazis, and bringing back to Britain those locals wishing to enlist in the Norwegian forces exiled in London.
Not long before dawn on 4 March 1941 two infantry landing ships and their escort of five Royal Naval destroyers spotted the lights of the Lofoten Islands in the distance. “When we arrived in the [Vest] fjord… we found the fishing fleet coming out from Lofoten towards us, so we sailed towards them to be greeted by lots of waving from the Norwegians when they realised what was going on,” recalled Smallman.
Price and his comrades in No4 Commando made for the ports of Svolvaer and Brettesnes. “We got into the landing craft from the mother ship and sailed into Svolvaer, and all was quiet,” he remembered. “We were wondering when somebody was going to open up and do something about it, but we pulled up alongside the quay and one or two Norwegians said ‘good morning’ to us.”
Price said that with no enemy in sight the commandos had “to go looking for them”. What Germans they found were asleep and when roused they meekly assembled in the fish market. “The whole raid, which was supposed to take until about one o’clock, was done by about nine o’clock in the morning or just after,” recalled Price. “So I spent the rest of the time fraternising with the locals.”
Bernard Davis of No4 Commando said the most action he experienced during the raid was when he and some of his pals had a ‘finders keepers’ squabble over an enemy radio discovered in one ship.
Smallman and No3 Commando had also achieved total surprise upon landing at the ports of Stamsund and Henningsvaer. What Germans they rounded up were “technical experts”, either overseeing the production of the oil that would be shipped to U-boat bases, or engineers in the process of constructing an airfield to speed up the delivery to the submarines that were causing such damage to Allied shipping in the North Atlantic. “We were there for about three or four hours and Norwegians were rushing down to the quayside, clammering to come with us,” said Smallman. “Originally we had said we wouldn’t bring any girls away but finally we brought quite a bevvy of girls who wanted to be nurses.”
While the commandos socialised with the locals, a party of Royal Engineers set about destroying 11 factories, an electric-light plant and approximately 800,000 gallons of oil.
Five ships of a maximum tonnage of 18,900 were sent to the bottom of the sea, and 225 prisoners were brought back to Britain.
The response to the raid was rapturous. Price recalled that Sir Roger Keyes greeted the commandos upon their return, and “he was highly delighted”. So, too, was Churchill
“NEVER IN THE HISTORY OF HUMAN ENDEAVOUR HAVE SO FEW BEEN SO BUGGERED ABOUT BY SO MANY”
and the King of Norway, Haakon VII, who came to Scotland to offer their congratulations and watch the commandos go through their paces in training.
But the morale and the momentum fostered by the raid on the Lofoten Islands dissipated over the months that followed. In April a commando attack was launched on Boulogne but one landing craft was lost in the rough seas and the raid was aborted. They tried again a few days later. “But it was not a successful raid,” said Davis. “One of the objects of the exercise was to capture the German radar installations, but we couldn’t find them… we got soaking wet and nearly froze to death, that was the closest we got to being killed.”
Blooded at Vaagso
The commandos received fresh impetus on 29 October 1941 when Keyes was succeeded as Director of Combined Operations by Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten. He changed the point of attack from France back to Norway, a coastline less vigorously defended and where opportunities for a morale-boosting raid were more plentiful. Vaagso, on the south-west coast, and the nearby island of Maaloy, were chosen as the targets.
The raiding party of 51 officers and
525 other ranks comprised No3 and No2 Commando, as well as a contingent from the Norwegian Royal Army. And to ensure maximum publicity Mountbatten attached a film crew of Harry Watt, a civilian film director, and Lieutenant Harry Rignold, Official Cinematographer to the War Office.
The pair embarked in the landing craft with the rest of the commandos just as dawn broke on 27 December 1941 and headed up the Vaags Fjord. Overhead RAF Blenheim bombers dropped smoke bombs on Vaagso. “We could see the anti-aircraft guns on the top of these cliffs shooting at the RAF,” said Watt. “The
RAF were bombing the island on which were a large number of very big guns… it was very frightening to realise that if anybody saw us those guns could be turned down on us and our open boats. What was tremendously British was from one of the boats a man started playing the bagpipes.”
The only casualties suffered by the commandos as they neared the shoreline were from the RAF. “One of the Blenheims unfortunately was hit as it was flying in to drop its smoke canisters, and one of the canisters landed on our landing craft,” recalled Smallman.
“The phosphorus ignited and we had a number of casualties in the landing craft.”
On landing the raiders split into five groups and undertook their prearranged instructions. Watt and Rignold attached themselves to Group Two, whose orders were to attack the town of South Vaagso and destroy a number of military and economic objectives, including a fish-oil factory and a power station. “There was some very severe fighting as we fought our way up through the town, though as adjutant I was more or less out of the fighting,” said Smallman. “They had to fight their way more or less building by building and we did have some casualties. We lost two extremely good officers.”
Captain Herbert Forrester was killed as he led a charge on the German HQ, and the death of Captain John Giles was witnessed by Watt at a farmhouse. “There was a magnificent young British officer who had been a light heavyweight champion of the Territorial Army, and he went to the door and it was pretty well suspected that there were Germans inside,” said Watt.
“He kicked the door open but he didn’t jump to the side at the same time… and a burst of machine gunfire came from inside, right across his chest, and he fell dead.”
The fiercest resistance came in the northern part of the town, where the Germans sniped at the commandos from the windows of warehouses and factories. “It was while
I was organising the job of burning down the warehouse, as opposed to rushing it, that I suddenly saw Lieutenant O’flaherty and Trooper Sherington dash into the building by the front door,” recalled Captain Peter Young. “They were both armed with Tommy guns… I felt I had to go, too. I was at the bottom of the stairs leading to the second floor when I heard two shots and both O’flaherty and Sherington fell.”
Both men survived their wounds and, as they were dragged to safety, their comrades threw a bucket of petrol into the room where the sniper was concealed, followed by a firebomb.
By early afternoon, South Vaagso was in British hands, as was Maaloy Island, after a short sharp fight in which Captain Martin
Linge, commander of the Norwegian Royal Army force, was killed at the head of his men.
Just how many casualties the commandos had suffered became apparent to Smallman when they arrived back at Largs by train to be greeted by scores of wives who had been living with their husbands in private accommodation. “When the train drew into Largs we were met by quite a number of wives anxious to know what had happened to their husbands,” said Smallman. “And I had the sad task, as did one or two other people, of explaining to wives whose husbands had been wounded, and one wife in particular, whose husband had been killed, what had happened.”
Nonetheless, the raid had been a success, destroying a wireless station, four coastdefence guns, one anti-aircraft gun, a tank, nine ships and several factories. More than 150 of the enemy were killed and a further 98 taken into captivity. “Everybody was so utterly exhausted there was no celebration,” recalled Watt, who with his cameraman had captured the intensity of the fighting. “There was a feeling the raid had been a success but it had paid pretty heavily. It was a prestige raid more than anything. Militarily it was not worth much at all, but from publicity and prestige it was worth it.”
Indeed. In the days that followed the British press lauded its lion-hearted commandos, with photos of the raid and heart-warming stories from some of the 77 Norwegians rescued from Vaagso. “None of us,” Harald Hansen told reporters, “will ever forget how the commandos came and gave us our freedom and new hope for the future.”
“THEIR COMRADES THREW A BUCKET OF PETROL INTO THE ROOM WHERE THE SNIPER WAS CONCEALED, FOLLOWED BY A FIREBOMB”