Admission to the elite
In order to obtain new personnel for No. 3 Troop, the officers in the Alien Companies of the Pioneer Corps were instructed to look out for suitable recruits for commando training. It was also announced that men being fluent in German could volunteer for a special unit. Subsequently, members of the Intelligence Corps disguised as ordinary soldiers mingled with the potential candidates and carefully scrutinised them. A total of 142 men finally turned up at the Grand Central Hotel in London’s Marylebone district, where Hilton-Jones selected 60 soldiers for his unit after a final interview on 20 August and 7 September 1942. However, their final acceptance into No. 3 Troop, which the commandos-to-be only learnt about now, still depended on a positive security check by the British domestic intelligence service known as MI5, the Security Service, which was intended to prevent infiltration by German spies and took several weeks. The selected candidates were therefore temporarily parked in a Pioneer Corps training camp in Bradford, partly because there was still no garrison for the troop. But in the course of September, a home for the unit was found in the small coastal town of Aberdyfi, around 40 kilometres from the headquarters of No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando in Harlech.
Among the 60 men who were vetted by MI5 during the waiting period in Bradford was the young Austrian Otto Posamentier. Born in Judenburg in the province of Styria in 1922 or 1923, he was later transferred to another unit without ever having completed a commando mission – allegedly due to an injury, as can be read in his autobiography. His story vividly illustrates the vetting process, as MI5 opened a separate file on him. Posamentier had already attracted the attention of the security authorities in July 1942 because he had bragged about his adventurous past during a date with a British woman in a bar in London and had also struck up a conversation with a Ministry of Information officer who happened to be present. The latter did not want to rule out the possibility that the young Pioneer Corps soldier, who claimed to have been born in Jamaica and to have joined the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War at the age of 16, was a German spy and therefore reported the encounter to the War Office. The section of the military intelligence service responsible for field security recorded the matter as “Careless Talk” and passed it on to MI5, who then requested all available documents on the Austrian exile.
After Posamentier had applied for No. 3 Troop, he was asked about the incident from July during the selection process, in which MI5 officers were also involved. Posamentier now denied ever having belonged to the International Brigades, as a result of which the following assessment can be read in the interrogation report of 14 September: “I incline to think that there is no harm in this lad; he seemed a somewhat feeble specimen, and therefore has no doubt all the more reason to invent a romantic past to live up to the standard of some of his comrades in the Pioneer Corps.” Nevertheless, the report recommended obtaining further information about Posamentier. For this reason, the German language scholar William Robson-Scott was consulted, who collected information on the German and Austrian exile community in Great Britain for MI5. After exactly one month, Robson-Scott reported that although he had been unable to find out anything about Posamentier himself, he had been able to locate people who knew his father and confirmed that he was a true opponent of the National Socialists. For this reason, from a security point of view, there was nothing to prevent the young Austrian exile from joining the commandos.
However, it is questionable when and whether this even happened, given the sources available. Posamentier does not appear to have changed his name to “Frank Parry” and to have receive a new service number until the spring of 1943. The men waiting in Bradford for their transfer to No. 3 Troop, however, assumed their new identities as early as 23 October 1942, provided MI5 did not express any security concerns. For this, they invented new names and a fictitious past life as British citizens – due to their often strong accent, they were advised to pretend to be Welsh or Scottish so as not to be exposed in the event of capture. As a pretence, they were also assigned to one of the four regiments to be chosen from (West Kent, East Kent, Sussex, Hampshire) in order to disguise their recruitment from the Pioneer Corps – a procedure that was also kept secret from the regular army administration in order to ensure the greatest possible security for the men, but which, according to Hilton-Jones, entailed a corresponding amount of effort and repeated complications.
Three days later they were finally able to make their way to their new garrison in Aberdyfi, so that by the end of October 1942 the personnel of No. 3 Troop totalled two officers and 56 non-commissioned officers and enlisted men. Not counting Posamentier, there were at least seven Austrians-in-exile among them: Alfred Anderson (Alfred Arnstein), Evelyn Fraser (Hubert Frey), Robert Garvin (Konstantin Goldstern), Paul Streeten (Paul Hornig), Ernest Langley (Ernst Landau), Andrew Turner (Otto Pollaschek) and Richard Tennant (Richard Trojan). Viennese-born Landau was soon given a particular role, as he was appointed administrative sergeant, later promoted to officer and was even to take command of the troop in the final weeks of its existence. He was supported by Michael Kirby (Majer Kellmann), who was specially requested in November 1942 to fill an administrative vacancy. This increased the number of Austrians to at least eight, as Kirby, who was born in Bohorodczany in Galicia in 1912, had become a Polish citizen after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918, but had lived in Vienna for 15 years from 1923 onwards.
By relocating to Aberdyfi, where the soldiers were housed in private homes – which seems daring given the high level of secrecy, as their host families were of course fully aware that they were by no means English, Scottish or Welsh – and setting up his own effective administration, Hilton-Jones had laid the foundations for his new unit and could begin with the actual work. Although further soldiers were to join No. 3 Troop in small instalments over the following months, basic training had been in full swing since the end of October. As with the unfortunate Dieppe team, the focus was on physical fitness, including long marches with full equipment and obstacle courses. Apart from that, the schedule included a wide range of subjects: reconnaissance, interrogation techniques, deciphering coded messages, camouflage, handling explosives, infiltration, picking locks, training with British and also German pistols, grenades, rifles and submachine guns, close combat and self-defence without weapons as well as studying the Wehrmacht in all its details such as structure and hierarchy, rank insignia and technical terms. Hilton-Jones thus wanted to create the perfect warriors and the best-trained unit in the entire Army: “[T]he object was to produce a trained soldier, thoroughly conversant with his own and the enemy’s weapons and organisation, and capable of moving unseen and unheard by day or night with or without map or compass rapidly from any point to any other and then carry out […] reconnaissance or sabotage tasks”. The fact that most of his men had no experience in such things and he therefore had to teach them everything from scratch was made up for, as Hilton-Jones stated, by their intelligence, enthusiasm and discipline – in the weeks and months ahead, they would need these qualities badly.
