Commando General

by Richard B Mead

  Unbeknown to anyone except Bob, the first five weeks of 8 Commando’s stay at Burnham was a period of great uncertainty, reflected in the fact that recruitment had stopped abruptly on 22 August, before 9 Troop could be raised. At just that time Bob heard confidentially from the War Office that there was even a possibility that the Commandos would be completely disbanded, and the uncertainty continued into early September, causing him considerable concern about his own future. He wrote to Angie: ‘I shall be furious if I have to go back onto the Gilded Staff as a Capt.’7

  The problem lay with a growing movement of opposition to the Commandos among conservatives in the Army. With invasion believed to be all too likely, a number of officers, including some who were very senior, argued that it made no sense to post good officers and men to units which were the antithesis of the traditional battalions in their structure and training and which were not committed to Home Forces for the defence of the British Isles. Although Dill and others remained supportive of the Commandos, these sentiments were widely voiced, both at the War Office and in Home Forces, as a result of which there was a hiatus whilst the whole project was reconsidered. The situation was saved by the Prime Minister, who was deeply unhappy with the failure to satisfy his demands. He later wrote:

  The idea that large bands of favoured ‘irregulars’ with their unconventional attire and free-and-easy bearing should throw an implied slur on the efficiency and courage of the Regular battalions was odious to men who had given all their lives to the organised discipline of permanent units … It was easy to understand their feelings without sharing them. The War Office responded to their complaints. But I pressed hard.8

  The Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, who was himself generally sympathetic to the Commandos, was on the receiving end of the opposition. Churchill made it quite clear to him in a series of minutes that he was not going to be swayed in his determination to see his directive to Dill fully enacted and, by the end of the second week in September, the threat had been lifted, although the War Office tried later to have the special allowance stopped. After a considerable battle, Keyes managed to have this proposal abandoned, but he was less successful in obtaining permission for the men to wear a distinctive headdress. The Commandos had been saved from disbandment, but antagonism towards them would continue in the War Office and some other parts of the Army right up to and beyond the end of the War.

  Keyes paid his first visit to 8 Commando on 13 September, accompanied by the ACIGS, Major General Laurence Carr, one of the leading sceptics at the War Office. Bob had arranged for the two senior officers to be greeted by an immaculately dressed and expertly drilled guard. Carr, expecting a scruffy band of licensed killers, was somewhat taken aback and accused Bob of borrowing regular troops from elsewhere; Bob replied that these were men from his own Grenadier troop, who were according to an Admiral of the Fleet the honours due to his rank.

  Carr and Keyes went first to look at a demonstration of folbots, folding canoes which would become one of the most useful pieces of equipment, not only of the Commandos, but of all special forces. The Folbot Section, independent of the ten troops, had been formed under the leadership of Roger Courtney, who before the War had paddled one of these frail craft along the length of the White Nile from Lake Victoria to Egypt and who would be largely responsible for its widespread adoption.

  For the next demonstration, in the knowledge that Carr was particularly keen on weapons training, Bob had prepared a surprise. The ACIGS was taken to see instruction being given on an unfamiliar machine gun. On being asked what it was and how it had been acquired, Bob replied that it was a German MG15, going on to explain that the Commando, which had not even been equipped with Bren guns at this stage, had collected many such weapons, together with a good supply of ammunition, from German bombers shot down in the vicinity, of which there was no shortage. After later seeing a demonstration of a raid from the sea, which was executed to a very tight timetable, Keyes and Carr departed, the latter grudgingly impressed.

  The acquisition of the machine guns was a consequence of the Battle of Britain, which was at its height during 8 Commando’s stay in Burnham. The town lay on the route from Belgium to the RAF airfields at North Weald and Hornchurch and later to London during the Blitz. Bob instructed that a watch be kept for downed German bombers and that any surviving crew should be taken prisoner, also that any RAF pilots who had baled out should be returned to their squadrons as quickly as possible.

  On the night of 21 September Burnham itself was hit by a land mine dropped by a returning German bomber. Six civilians were killed and twenty-seven injured. There were no casualties in the Commando, which was called out to rescue people buried under houses and subsequently to provide guards against looting; this was, for most of the men, their first real taste of war.

  With invasion believed to be imminent, in mid-September 8 Commando was temporarily placed under the operational control of Eastern Command, which allocated to it a number of localities to defend, mostly on high ground overlooking possible landing beaches. It was ordered not to man these until the receipt of the code word CROMWELL, whereupon vehicles from a neighbouring battalion would provide the necessary transport. One evening Bob received a call from the local divisional HQ with the code word, and the Commando was duly deployed, only to be stood down on the next day.

  As autumn set in, however, the threat of invasion receded and 8 Commando was ordered north for more advanced training. On 10 October it boarded a special train, which left Burnham at 05.00 and arrived in Greenock at 00.30 on the following morning, to be met by Bob, who had driven up with Harry Stavordale, staying a night at Wiseton on the way. At Greenock the Commando boarded MV Ulster Monarch, formerly a passenger ferry on the Liverpool to Belfast route. The ship’s officers were expecting only personal packs, whereas baggage for a whole month had been brought, together with operational stores. All this had just been stowed away when another train, with No 3 Commando aboard, arrived at the quayside for embarkation in the same ship.

  Later that night the Ulster Monarch set sail for the short journey to Inverary on Loch Fyne, where the Combined Training Centre had recently been established. It was commanded by a naval officer, Vice Admiral Sir Theodore Hallett, who had retired in 1933 but had then been recalled, initially to serve as a beachmaster in Norway and at Dunkirk, and then to form the CTC.

  The only raids carried out until then, near Boulogne in Operation COLLAR and subsequently on Guernsey in Operation AMBASSADOR, had been damp squibs, with very little accomplished. Little or no opposition had been encountered, but it was abundantly clear to those who had participated in them that landing even a small force on hostile beaches would require a great deal of specialized training. Whereas the early operations had been mounted in RAF Air-Sea Rescue boats, borrowed from the Air Ministry, the first effective assault landing craft, the LCA, capable of carrying forty men, including a crew of four, was now being delivered and would be used for all future landings. Inverary was ideal for training on these craft. It was so remote that there was little likelihood of being interrupted by the enemy, as was all too possible at Burnham and other East and South Coast locations, whilst Loch Fyne was endowed with both good beaches and deep water for the new class of Landing Ship Infantry (‘LSI’), which would carry the men and the LCAs. The training took the form of frequent exercises, by day and by night, involving embarking in the LCAs from the LSIs, landing on a variety of beaches and then moving inland, sometimes to a distance of several miles over mountainous country, with times recorded at each stage. This process was then repeated until it became second nature. It was very exhausting, but also exhilarating, and the competition between the troops of 8 Commando to get furthest quickest was intense. The training continued until 30 October, when 8 Commando embarked in one of the LSIs, HMS Glengyle,9 for Gourock, before travelling on to its new base at Largs by bus and train.

  On the day on which 8 Commando moved up to Scotland, the first part of a major reorganizati
on took place. The Commandos, which had until then been only loosely associated with each other under the umbrella of COHQ , were now formally grouped into the Special Service Brigade. This was inevitably abbreviated as ‘SS Brigade’, a name which had sinister connotations and was universally disliked by all who served in it, although it was not changed until four years later. The newly appointed Brigadier was Charles Haydon, who had commanded the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards in the defence of Boulogne in May, for which he had won a DSO. Bob knew him slightly from their service together at the War Office, where Haydon had been Military Assistant to the Secretary of State for War. Haydon would be closely associated with the Commandos for the next three years and would become a good friend of Bob’s, who respected him greatly, writing later that Haydon ‘combined stern discipline with great sympathy for our problems. He grew to be inordinately proud of the Commandos and championed us with unshakeable loyalty against the machinations of Whitehall and the antagonism of Home Forces.’10

  The machinations of Whitehall were responsible for the second part of the reorganization, in which each Commando became a company within one of five Special Service Battalions, 3 Commando as A Company and 8 Commando as B Company of 4 Special Service Battalion. Bob was appointed to command the battalion, which had a small HQ separate from the two companies, whilst B Company was now commanded by Walter Curtis, with Daly as his second-in-command, himself succeeded at No. 4 Troop by Frank Usher. The two companies each retained their ten troops. In Bob’s own words, ‘a more impracticable and unwieldy an organization it would be difficult to conceive’.11 Bob’s new appointment upset the CO of 3 Commando, John Durnford-Slater, who had actually formed it earlier than 8 Commando and, moreover, had some active experience from Operation AMBASSADOR. Durnford-Slater continued to reply to all War Office communications as ‘CO 3 Commando’, notwithstanding that they had been addressed to him as ‘OC A Company, 4 Special Service Battalion’.

  The association of the two former Commandos within a single unit was not a happy one. Durnford-Slater had formed his Commando out of volunteers from Southern Command who came from very diverse backgrounds. The officers were as different from their distinctly patrician 8 Commando counterparts as it was possible to be. As one of them, Peter Young, later wrote, ‘The officers of 3 Commando seemed practically like Roundheads – horrid thought – by comparison with this glittering band.’12 Whilst the officers of each company kept to themselves, the men were very inclined to fight whenever they met each other in the public houses of Largs, even though their billeting areas were kept separate, A Company to the north of the town and B Company to the south. The sole compensation for Bob was that he only needed only one Administration Officer, and he acceded readily to Durnford-Slater’s urging that this should be Captain J. E. ‘Slinger’ Martin of 3 Commando, who had served as a trooper in the 9th Lancers in the Great War and stood no nonsense from anyone, rather than the inefficient and occasionally drunken Major Gardner.

  Bob announced the reorganization to 8 Commando on 13 November, when the officers and men were given the opportunity to return to their original units, an offer which very few accepted. On the same day, Lieutenant Evelyn Waugh reported for duty. On arrival at Largs from Inverary, Bob had received a letter from Brendan Bracken, then Minister of Information, asking him to give sympathetic consideration to Waugh’s application to join. Bob, who had met Waugh on a couple of occasions at country house parties before the War and had read Decline & Fall, Vile Bodies and Scoop, agreed, on the grounds that ‘often even funnier in fact than in fiction, (he) could not fail to be an asset in the dreary business of war.’13 Waugh, at the suggestion of Bracken, had already been in touch with Bob towards the end of August, but in the meantime had participated, as an officer in a battalion of Royal Marines, in the abortive expedition to oust the French from Dakar. He was dismayed by the expedition’s failure and yearned for a more glorious role in the War, which he felt the Commandos might provide. He was to be seriously disappointed.

  Waugh’s immediate impression of his new unit was far from entirely favourable. In Memorandum on Layforce, written by him privately at the end of 1941, he commented on what he found:

  When formed they had been exceptionally zealous: discipline was already deteriorating when I joined. After RM Brigade the indolence and ignorance of the officers seemed remarkable, but I have since realized that they were slightly above normal Army standards. Great freedom was allowed in costume; no one even pretended to work outside working hours. Troop leaders never sent in returns required by the orderly room at the proper time or in the proper form. Officers took their leave when the troops were not allowed it. The special lodging allowance did little to cover the high expenditure in No. 8. Two night operations in which I acted as umpire showed great incapacity in the simplest tactical ideas. One troop leader was unable to read a compass. The troops, however, had a smart appearance on inspection parades, arms drill was good, the officers were clearly liked and respected.14

  These are serious criticisms, although it must be said that they were written by someone who was highly disgruntled at the time he wrote them. Jellicoe was to say later that Waugh never really fitted in.15 In spite of his fame as a writer, he was essentially a middle class intellectual, quite different in background from the landowning ‘smart set’ who formed much of 8 Commando’s officer group. Moreover, whilst most of them were flush with money, which they splashed out on visits to Glasgow and gambling in the mess, Waugh was far from wealthy and had to be very careful in his expenditure. He had been an outsider in the Royal Marines for entirely different reasons and now he was an outsider again. The fact that Bob failed to recognize him when he reported for duty also rankled.

  Officer discipline was almost certainly adversely affected by the presence of a number of wives, notably those of Dunne, Stavordale, Nicholson, Churchill and Campbell, who had arrived in Largs to stay at the Marine Hotel. Waugh had not been able to bring up his own wife, Laura, who was in the last stages of pregnancy. The child, a girl, was born on 1 December, but died twentyfour hours later, just before Waugh arrived to see her. In such circumstances the presence of the other ladies in Largs was unlikely to be conducive to good humour.

  The hopes of Bob and his officers for action were raised by the prospect of their first operation. Operation WORKSHOP, the capture of the Italian island of Pantelleria, was the brainchild of Keyes, proposed to the Chiefs of Staff at the end of October. The plan involved three of the new Special Service Battalions, including No. 4, with Keyes himself leading the expedition and Haydon as the military force commander. Bob and Dudley Lister, the CO of 3 Special Service Battalion (4 & 7 Commandos), were summoned down to London for an initial briefing. They were met by Haydon, who told them that he was not permitted to divulge the identity of the target and produced some Admiralty charts from which all the names had been expunged. Shortly afterwards Keyes himself entered, saying that he proposed in the case of the two Commando officers to disregard the Chiefs of Staff ’s strictures regarding the identity of Pantelleria. An outline plan was agreed and Bob and Lister returned north to carry on with the detailed work and begin the rehearsals. These were carried out on the Isle of Arran, to which 4 Special Service Battalion was relocated, Bob setting up his HQ in the Brodick Bay Hotel.16 Lister also brought his battalion over to the island, as did Lieutenant Colonel Saegert of 2 Special Service Battalion (9 & 11 Commandos), with whom Bob was less than favourably impressed.

  Two days later a package arrived, containing aerial photographs of the target. Bob and Robin Campbell spent hours poring over them, but experienced considerable difficulty in correlating some of the beach defences with the latest intelligence summaries. After hours of frustration Bob asked Haydon if he might invite Tom Churchill, who after leaving staff college had specialized in the interpretation of aerial photography, to come up to help. Haydon agreed, and Churchill was located and summoned to COHQ , where he was shown the photos. From the characteristic lake in the middle of the islan
d, he immediately recognized it as Pantelleria, which he had been asked to study by the Air Ministry before the War. Enjoined to complete secrecy, he set off for Arran, where his impressions over four days were very different from those of Waugh:

  This was long enough for me to become profoundly impressed with the organization and system of the commandos; I liked their realistic approach to the work that lay ahead of them, their absence of red tape, and their terrific enthusiasm and keenness; every officer and man was a volunteer and their physical fitness, self-reliance and specialist training made them a corps d’élite. In an England hardly recovered from the Dunkirk retreat and hourly expecting invasion from the French coast, it was a tonic to meet troops who had the prospect of offensive operations, and were so eager to undertake them.17

  In the meantime, Bob had been joined by a new recruit in the shape of Peter Beatty, like George Jellicoe the son of one of the two foremost naval commanders of the Great War and himself a sub-lieutenant in the RNVR. Beatty, whom Bob had only met relatively recently, but who was an old friend of Angie’s, arrived unannounced and asked to be taken on in 8 Commando. Bob told him that he was not allowed naval officers on his establishment and that, moreover, Beatty would be unsuitable because of his very poor eyesight. Undeterred, Beatty went straight off to see Keyes, who was a friend of his father, and persuaded him to create the new post of Naval Liaison Officer.

  This provided the excuse for another, much more senior naval officer to join 11 Commando as an NLO. Admiral Sir Walter Cowan had commanded a battlecruiser at Jutland and led a light cruiser squadron with great distinction in the Baltic shortly after the Great War, eventually becoming C-in-C Americas and West Indies. Still eager for action at the age of sixty-nine, he was delighted with the new job to which he was appointed by his old friend Keyes, accepting with alacrity the reduced rank of commander. Bob was to see much of him before the War was over.