The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Boys’ Own heroes
The Navy’s SAS, the Special Boat Service, secretly saved the world in midget subs and leaky canoes
SBS: SILENT WARRIORS by Saul David
528pp, William Collins,
T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £14.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Just after midnight on April 12 1942, a single canoe, made of wood and canvas and known as a “folbot”, was lowered into the English Channel from a Royal Navy motor launch three miles from Boulogne. The two-man crew, Captain Gerald Montanaro and his paddler, Sergeant Freddie Preece, were equipped with their wits and eight limpet mines, each with a four-hour delay fuse. Their target: a 4,000-ton German tanker full of copper ore moored in Boulogne’s outer harbour.
Despite battling heavy winds, a rising swell and a hole in their canoe (a gash they tried to stem with one of their Commando woolly hats), they managed to breach the defences of a major enemy port, having reached their target, set the mines, escaped again and rendezvoused with the launch only minutes before their canoe sank. The mines exploded and the freighter sank, the mission a complete success. For reasons of operational security, however, their heroics were kept out of the press and so, like almost all of the Special Boat Service’s wartime operations, it was largely forgotten about.
What a terrible, brutal conflict the Second World War was: some 60 million dead, cities laid waste, many more millions displaced, the horrors of the Holocaust and unspeakable misery. Saul David’s last book dealt with the ghastly Battle of Okinawa, probably the bloodiest most brutal battle of them all, so it is incredibly refreshing to read of these fabulously daring missions: of men of astonishing courage blowing up bridges, surveying invasion beaches, sinking ships in harbour and making clandestine rendezvous with secret agents – all by canoe and midget submarine. Each adventure is relayed with all the relish of a Commando comic.
This authorised history was originally to be written by Paddy Ashdown before his untimely death in 2018, but while David has had access to the former’s research and much more beside, it is very much his own book, begun again from scratch. The resulting story is one of evolving special forces and what became the Special Boat Service – the Navy’s closest equivalent to the SAS.
This evolution means that we also follow the adventures of the Special Boat Section, Royal Marines Boom Patrol Detachment (RMBPD), Combined Operations Pilotage Parties (Copp), Special Boat Squadron, and the Small Operations Group (SOG) – a lot of acronyms, with the eventual SBS standing for at least three different units – and the book is undoubtedly richer for including them all. David’s retelling, in particular, of the RMBPD’s raid on Bordeaux harbour – the “Cockleshell Heroes” – is thrilling, as are the stories of the Coppists in the Sicily and Normandy invasions.
Perhaps inevitably, the wartime SBS units attracted adventurers and mavericks, as well as men of astonishing resilience and single-minded determination. A training exercise in Scotland, for example, involved a 140-mile paddle and survival trip, which, as David points out, was “a gruelling physical and mental challenge of which only very few people, then and now, are capable”. The men were taught how to survive on grass and hedgerow plants as well as how to handle explosives.
Sprinkled through the book is a cast of Boys’ Own heroes: Roger Courtney, a former bush ranger, big game hunter and gold prospector in East Africa; his equally adventurous burly brother “Gruff ”; the ruthlessly ambitious and intellectual Montanaro; the charming and athletic Norwegian campaign veteran Herbert “Blondie” Hasler; Stan Weatherall, who before the war pleaded guilty to manslaughter in a
drunken brawl but was acquitted.
Among the impressive episodes described is an attack on a bridge over the River Pendada in Sumatra in September 1944. Lieutenant Teddy Wesley, leading one of two teams sent to destroy two bridges vital for Japanese supply lines, recorded in his diary feeling “happy, scared, brave and amused, in turn” as he paddled in the darkness towards the exotic coastline; it striking him as ridiculous to be heading towards the enemy in just a
frail, folding canvas canoe. As it happened, a faulty compass led his team astray and the second team failed to land at all. Miserably admitting failure, they were picked up by submarine but given the chance to try again the following night.
This time, Wesley led them up the right creek, they hid their folbots, found the railway bridge, laid their charges and captured five local men to be taken back for questioning about the Japanese. Despite comic moments, narrow escapes and a bungled attempt to persuade one of the locals to get into a folbot, as they neared their rendezvous with the submarine the night was ripped apart by a massive blast. Spinning round in the folbot, Wesley saw “the two ends of the bridge heated to a glowing red by the explosion”.
This is a terrific book, written with all the gusto, thrills and heady excitement these SBS operations richly deserve. It really is one of the most enjoyable histories I’ve read in many a year. Ashdown, a former SBS man himself, would be proud.