Commando General

by Richard B Mead

  Even before the break-out from Normandy cut off the U-boat bases in France, their threat had much diminished, and Bob and Angie considered that it was sufficiently safe to bring Young Joe and Tilly back from Canada, where they had been staying with their maternal grandfather since 1940. They sailed with their nanny from Philadelphia at the end of March in the Portuguese ship, SS Serpa Pinto, which was best known for conveying thousands of Jewish refugees to the New World.3 On arrival in Lisbon, where they were to board a flying boat back to England, the two children managed to escape from their nanny and, having accepted some food from gypsies, contracted food poisoning. As a result they missed the plane, which was just as well, as it was shot down. They arrived back safely, but the ship on which they travelled was torpedoed on its return journey. The nanny, perhaps unsurprisingly, collapsed from anxiety, pernicious anaemia and diabetes on their return, but subsequently recovered.

  Later in the year Bob himself went to Canada, as a participant in the OCTAGON Conference in Quebec. He travelled up to Greenock on 5 September to board the RMS Queen Mary, which sailed that night, escorted initially by four destroyers and then by a single cruiser, which found it hard to keep up with the liner. Bob was allocated a spacious stateroom, with a sitting room and two bathrooms. Chiefs of Staff meetings were held every day, followed on some days by meetings with the Prime Minister, who was not at all well and frequently in a bad mood. He proved to be extremely difficult on a number of relatively minor diversions from the main thrust of the War, which nearly drove Brooke and the others mad. Bob and the Chiefs of Staff had lunch with him and Mrs Churchill on 7 September, but the Prime Minister was on poor form due to the sulphonamides he was taking. At least the members of his party were able to enjoy films every evening in the ship’s cinema.

  The Queen Mary docked in Halifax on 10 September and the party transferred to a comfortable train, which arrived on the following morning in Quebec, where the British found President Roosevelt and their American counterparts waiting to greet them on the platform. The Churchills, the Roosevelts and their immediate entourages were staying with the Governor General, the Earl of Athlone, at the Citadel, whilst the Combined Chiefs of Staff took over the whole of the Chateau Frontenac Hotel, where the conference itself was held. Bob shared an enormous suite with Antony Head.

  In spite of Churchill remaining very difficult to his own side, the conference itself was one of the most productive of the War, so much so that Bob described it to Angie as ‘an unqualified success’.4 The main achievements as far as the British were concerned were an undertaking by the Americans to leave their divisions in Italy for Alexander to conduct his autumn offensive against the Gothic Line and, in the face of strong opposition from Admiral King, who was overruled by Roosevelt and his fellow Chiefs, their acceptance of a British fleet in the Pacific.

  Although Bob enjoyed the conference itself, he became tired of the pomp and ceremony, which included a state dinner at the Citadel and numerous other receptions and dinners. The conference ended on 16 September, when Brooke, Portal and Cunningham left for a few days fishing in Northern Quebec. Bob had intended to go with Head to Montreal to meet Angie’s father and pick up those of her belongings which she had left behind on her return to England in 1941. Dudley Ward, however, cancelled at the last moment, so Bob and Head went to New York instead. They returned from there with the Prime Minister on the Queen Mary, sailing on 19 September and arriving back on the Clyde six days later.

  There was never again to be a combined operation on the scale of OVERLORD, but there were many smaller ones. In north-west Europe the next significant landings were on the island of Walcheren. The port of Antwerp had been captured intact on 4 September, but the long approach from the sea up the estuary of the Scheldt continued to be held on both sides. First Canadian Army was unable to clear the southern shore until late October, but Walcheren could only be taken by a joint attack from the South Beveland peninsula and from the sea.

  The first wave of landings were carried out on 1 November by ‘Jumbo’ Leicester’s 4 Special Service Brigade, with 41, 47 and 48 RM Commandos landing near Westkapelle on the western tip of the island and 4 Commando near Flushing on the south coast. The former were accompanied by the Belgian and Norwegian Troops of 10 (IA) Commando and the latter by the two French Troops and part of the Dutch Troop,5 which had returned from the Far East. With so many of his men involved, Peter Laycock, who had recently succeeded Dudley Lister as CO, decided to accompany them. The landings, assisted by the full panoply of combined operations inventions, including an impressive array of specialized landing craft, went substantially to plan and the island was taken.

  Combined Operations were by no means confined to north-west Europe, however, and in late November, Bob decided that he should lead a COHQ mission, consisting of himself, Robertson, Long, Commander N. H. G. Austen RN and Stavordale, to the Mediterranean and Far East theatres. His initial Directive had referred to his responsibility for a common doctrine on combined operations both in the UK and overseas, but a revised Directive, issued in September, was explicit that, although they were under the orders of local commanders, Directors of Combined Operations overseas were to be regarded as his representatives and would apply a doctrine of combined operations approved by him.

  The party left on 14 November and flew initially to Naples, then on to Bari. Since Bob had left Italy at the end of September 1943, 2 Special Service Brigade had been continuously employed, initially on the Adriatic coast at Termoli and then on the Garigliano, at Anzio and in the fighting to take Monte Ornito. Most of the brigade’s attention had thereafter been diverted to the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic, where it acted in support of Marshal Tito’s partisans amongst the islands, carrying out raids which were far closer to the original activities of the Commandos than to their new role in support of conventional troops. One of these islands, Vis, was held by the Allies and, for a time, the brigade HQ was established there. There had been many successes and one disaster, the latter in June 1944 on the island of Brac, when ‘Pops’ Manners had been killed and Jack Churchill captured. Subsequently, elements of the brigade had operated in Albania and, more recently, in the liberation of Greece.

  Until shortly before Bob’s arrival, 2 Special Service Brigade had been vigorously commanded by Tom Churchill, but he had fallen out on a matter of principle with his superior, Brigadier G. M. O. Davy, Commander Land Forces Adriatic, and had been succeeded by Ronnie Tod, the longstanding CO of 9 Commando.6 The brigade HQ had by then returned from Vis to Molfetta in Italy, and it was there that the COHQ delegation met Tod and visited both 2 Commando under Lieutenant Colonel F. W. Fynn and 40 RM Commando under Lieutenant Colonel R. W. Sankey. They also met Davy and the Commander of the Balkan Air Force, Air Vice Marshal W. Elliott.

  The party flew on to Cairo on 16 November, where they stayed overnight at Shepheard’s Hotel, before continuing the next day to Baghdad and Shaiba, near Basra, where they were delayed by heavy rain for three days. They arrived in Delhi on 20 November, where Bob stayed with Auchinleck, the C-in-C India, whom he had not seen since leaving Egypt nearly three years earlier. Bob was particularly taken with Lady Auchinleck, whom he described as ‘very gay and amusing and most outspoken with a strange vocabulary in which the word “bloody” figures emphatically and frequently!’7 The party were invited to dinner by Lord Wavell, another old sparring partner of Bob’s from Layforce days, before flying off to Bombay in the company of the DCO (India), Major General A. R. Chater, a Royal Marine. Chater’s directive followed Bob’s very closely, but made him responsible to the three service C-in-C’s in India rather than to the COS Committee.

  The party visited the CTC at Mahd, thirty miles north of Bombay, the Combined Signals School, two landing craft bases and a bombardment unit, and met a number of senior naval officers. On 28 November they flew to Kandy in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where they were met in person by Mountbatten, with whom Bob and Stavordale stayed in the Royal Pavilion. Their visit coincided with those of th
e newly appointed C-in-C Allied Land Forces South-East Asia, Bob’s old friend Oliver Leese, and Arthur Power, rejected as a possible CCO by Churchill and now C-in-C East Indies; so a number of birds were killed with one stone. Mountbatten had his own Head of Combined Operations, Brigadier D. W. Price, who had no responsibility for training and was primarily concerned with advising the SEAC planners.

  At the beginning of December the COHQ mission returned to India to visit the two other CTCs, at Kharakvasla and Cocanada, before flying on to Burma and visiting Teknaf in the Arakan, where 3 Special Service Brigade was based. The brigade had hitherto seen little in the way of action, other than clearing up after the Japanese HA-GO offensive in early 1944 and holding the Silchar Track from Manipur into Assam against a possible Japanese attack during the siege of Imphal. Brigadier Nonweiler had been invalided back to the UK, and the deputy commander, Peter Young, who had commanded 3 Commando with distinction in Normandy, was acting pending the arrival of Campbell Hardy, fresh from leading 46 RM Commando in the same campaign. In addition to visiting 1 (still under Ken Trevor), 5, 42 RM and 44 RM Commandos, Bob was able to meet Lieutenant General Sir Philip Christison of XV Corps and Major General C. E. N. Lomax of 26 Indian Division, under whose command 3 Special Service Brigade would operate, to hear of their plans for the forthcoming campaign to drive the Japanese out of the Arakan.

  The COHQ Mission arrived back to England on 15 December, having stopped once again in Egypt to visit the CTC at Kabrit and in Italy to meet Alexander, recently promoted to Field Marshal and appointed Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean. In one month much had been learnt and a great deal achieved by way of implementing a unified doctrine.

  There was one more significant overseas journey for Bob, this time to attend the ARGONAUT conference in Yalta. The British and Americans met initially in Malta, whither Bob flew on 29 January 1945. The key issues for the Chiefs of Staff were Eisenhower’s strategy in north-west Europe – the British favoured a concentrated thrust north of the Ruhr, the Americans a broad front approach all along the Rhine – and the question of the withdrawal of further divisions from Italy. On neither did the British receive satisfaction.

  The parties flew on to the Crimea on 3 February, Bob travelling in a York which was very comfortably appointed. A four-and-a-half-hour journey by road took the party from the airfield at Saki to Yalta, where the senior members of the British delegation, numbering over thirty, were staying in the Vorontsov Palace, which Bob described as ‘A vast Czarist era house in Scottish Baronial style, but only one bath-room for the whole of the Chiefs of Staff organization’.8 All the heating was from wood-fired stoves and the grounds were patrolled by security troops, who never stopped saluting. Those at the Vorontsov were at least accommodated in better conditions than the rest of the delegation, who slept six or eight to a room in ramshackle outbuildings. ‘Pug’ Ismay summed the conference up best:

  From the gastronomical point of view, it was enjoyable; from the social point of view, successful; from the military point of view, unnecessary; and from the political point of view, depressing.9

  It was the last of these for which the Yalta conference has been remembered, particularly for decisions taken on post-war Europe, notably the frontiers of Poland, the splitting of Germany into four zones and the commitment to democratic elections in liberated countries. The first was to remain highly controversial and the last was reneged on by the Russians.

  Little was achieved on the military side, as there was no expectation of direct military cooperation between the widely separated Anglo-American and Soviet fronts. Bob, in particular, found himself with little to do, as Combined Operations were not under specific discussion. There was, however, an enjoyable day off visiting the battlefields of Balaklava and Inkerman and hearing about the capture of Sebastopol by the Germans in 1942 and its recapture in 1944.

  Bob had been hoping to return as soon as the conference finished, but, with the crossing of the Rhine now imminent, he and Head were instead ordered to go to Moscow to obtain as much information as possible from the Russian General Staff on river-crossing techniques. The two of them and their batmen travelled by train from Simferopol with Rear Admiral Ernest Archer, the Head of the British Military Mission. The train was excessively crowded except for their carriage, a pre-War model from Belgian Wagons-Lits with eight compartments, one for each member of the party and one for their luggage. The journey took nearly four days and they arrived nineteen hours late.

  In spite of Bob’s misgivings, the meeting, which took place on 16 February, was a success, with the Russians proving unusually helpful. After another day in Moscow, during which they saw ‘Giselle’ at the Bolshoi Ballet, Bob and Head travelled to Leningrad by train and then flew to Helsinki and on to Stockholm, where Bob met Mountbatten’s sister, the Crown Princess of Sweden, arriving back to England on 19 February.

  In December 1944 the much disliked ‘Special Service’ nomenclature had at last been dropped in favour of ‘Commando’ for both the Group and the four brigades. There were two major operations in the latter stages of the war in Europe, by 1 Commando Brigade in Montgomery’s crossing of the Rhine on 23 March, in which it was instrumental in the capture of Wesel, and by 2 Commando Brigade at Lake Comacchio in support of Eighth Army’s last and highly successful offensive in Italy in April. Many smaller operations also took place, and both 1 and 4 Commando Brigades were committed right up until the German surrender. In late 1944 Bob had also been given control of 30 Assault Unit, formerly 30 Commando, but in practice this was invariably employed by force commanders, its teams entering liberated towns in the forefront of the Allied troops to seize all valuable documents and equipment and to take prisoner and interrogate managers and technicians.

  The German surrender on 8 May brought increased pressure on Bob to reduce his staff. However, a great deal of experimental work continued to be carried out in respect of new types of landing craft required for the very different conditions of the Far East, for which theatre new training manuals were required, and new CTC staff were being trained to relieve those who were about to be released back into civilian life. He accordingly obtained the agreement of the Chiefs of Staff to a 25 per cent immediate cut, with an additional 25 per cent at the end of the war with Japan.

  * See Appendix I.

  Chapter 20

  Peace

  Following the end of the war against Germany, and in spite of continuing hostilities with Japan and major obligations elsewhere, there was immediate pressure, both from politicians on the grounds of cost and from the millions of temporary servicemen, to reduce the size of the armed forces by demobilization.

  A number of individuals were demobilized very quickly, among them Lovat, who wrote to Bob to thank him ‘for all the loyal support you gave to a very amateur and tactless subordinate’.1 Lovat was persuaded by Churchill to accept a role in the Government as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He was not to hold that position for long, as Churchill was defeated in the General Election of July 1945, in which Bob himself stood as the Conservative candidate for Bassetlaw, the constituency in which Wiseton Hall stood.

  Bob had been approached by the local Conservative Association that April. His initial response was that he thought that the days of Members of Parliament combining their duties with an active military career would soon be at an end, and thus he questioned his suitability. After meetings with the Chief Whip and the local party chairman, the Duke of Portland, he was asked not to reject the offer until he had at least established that he would be able to take two weeks’ leave to campaign. He discussed the matter with Brooke, who thought that leave could be arranged, but advised him to consult Churchill. The Prime Minister responded that he should not decline the invitation and that two weeks’ leave would be granted to all those not actually engaged in battle. Bob agreed to stand and, from his initial response, it seems that he was prepared to resign his commission if elected.

  Bassetlaw had been held by Labo
ur or National Labour since 1929 and the sitting member was Frederick Bellenger, who had served early in the War as a captain in the Royal Artillery in France and Flanders, but had returned to Westminster after Dunkirk. He was personally popular with the electorate, and when the results were declared on 26 July he held Bassetlaw with an enlarged majority of 12,377, in line with the enormous national swing to Labour. Bob was thus unable to emulate the feat of his grandfather Robert, who sixty-five years earlier had been elected one of the two MPs for North Lincolnshire. Churchill, at least, was grateful, sending a telegram which said simply: ‘Thank you so much dear Bob’.2

  One of the successful candidates was Antony Head, elected as MP for the safe Conservative seat of Carshalton. Due to the delay in declaring the result, Head was able to accompany Bob to the last conference of the War, at Potsdam. They stayed in a pleasant and undamaged villa, whose other occupant was Alexander, but took the opportunity to go into the centre of Berlin. Bob was horrified, writing to Angie: ‘There is nothing – literally nothing – left except the shells of some of the buildings.’3 The weather was hot and sticky and the conference was dull from a military perspective, so he was glad to return to London.

  Following the end of the war against Japan in August Bob was to spend much of the next eighteen months looking at the future of Combined Operations, but it was immediately clear that, whatever he recommended, there would be considerable pressure on him to trim the organization yet more, for budgetary reasons if no other. By the summer of 1946 the numbers were down to 126, as a result of which COHQ moved out of Richmond Terrace to a block of flats in Prince’s Gate.