British commandos in World War II

Terror on the European mainland – to fulfil Churchill’s instructions, Chief of the General Staff John Dill took up a suggestion from his Military Assistant Dudley Clarke. The South African-born officer envisioned a new unit that would copy the tactics of the Boers from their second war against the British Empire from 1899 to 1902. After conventional warfare had failed, the Boers had turned to guerrilla warfare in their conflict with the overpowering enemy: in accordance with the maxim “hit sharp and quick – then run to fight another day”, small squads called “commandos” – which is how the term “commando” also found its way into the English language – had carried out targeted strikes against the enemy’s military infrastructure, such as supply depots or transport routes. Such an approach was in line with Churchill’s ideas and, with the requirement that no troops intended for the defence of the British Isles should be withdrawn for this type of operation and that it should only be carried out with the minimum expenditure of resources, he agreed with Clarke’s proposal. As early as the end of June 1940, an initial operation modelled on the Boer commandos was carried out on four beaches in the Pas-de-Calais department in northern France in order to gather intelligence and take prisoners of war.

Operation Collar was only moderately successful, partly because the participating soldiers lacked the appropriate training and, of course, experience due to the short preparation time. Nevertheless, it was only the prelude to a large number of similar raids on the Atlantic Wall, carried out by a series of newly formed commandos, primarily trained at Achnacarry in Scotland, which were initially grouped together under the umbrella of the Special Service Brigades created in November 1940.

The missions differed greatly in some respects. While Operation Jubilee on 19 August 1942, the largest commando action, involved over 7,000 soldiers – although this was an exception – including contingents from Canada and the United States, several missions under the name Tarbrush in May 1944 were sometimes carried out by just two men each. The success of the 60 or so missions and raids that took place on the Atlantic Wall from 1940 to 1944 also varied. While in some cases the specified objective was achieved with no or only minimal casualties, others such as Jubilee took a heavy toll in terms of blood. Still, the overall effect on the German enemy cannot be denied, as it is shown not least by the Commando Order issued by Adolf Hitler on 18 October 1942 to kill all captured Allied commandos immediately or hand them over to the security service of the Reichsführer SS.

The nature of the missions, however, changed over time. There were still small squads that carried out special missions behind enemy lines. Yet in the course of a reorganisation in 1943, the Commandos, which had been recruited no longer only from army regiments but also from the Royal Marines and members of the Navy and Air Force since the previous year, were increasingly assigned the role of the spearhead for the Allied amphibious landing operations in Western Europe planned for the future to open up a second front against Hitler’s Germany. Now organised into a total of four Special Service Brigades, which were later renamed Commando Brigades due to the, as Peter Masters alias Peter Arany points out, obviously repugnant abbreviation “SS Brigades”, they would subsequently also take part in conventional combat operations from the Normandy landings in June 1944 until the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945. Among them was the so-called No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando. It played a special role in that it was not only the largest commando unit in terms of numbers, but its members were not recruited from members of the British armed forces, but – as the name suggests – from soldiers of allied nations.

No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando was officially established in June 1942, around two years after the start of the commando experiment, and allegedly at the suggestion of Lord Louis Mountbatten as head of the Combined Operations Headquarters responsible for special operations. Mountbatten in turn is said to have adopted the idea from a left-wing adviser as a reference to the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. This is remarkable insofar as the British, unlike the French, never decided to establish a kind of foreign legion in which the available non-British personnel were bundled into one unit, so to speak. Rather, based on a government decision from 28 September 1939, foreigners could in principle be accepted into the British Army without restriction and even be promoted to officer rank. With No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando, however, men from other nations who had fled to Great Britain because of the German advance were at least given the chance to serve with compatriots in their own commando unit, fighting together against Hitler’s Germany. As with the other commandos, enlistment was voluntary. It consisted of several sub-units called troops, which were organised according to nationality: French, Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians, Poles, Yugoslavs and “British”. In reality, the latter were mainly Germans and Austrians – in other words, members of enemy nations who had to serve under a new identity for reasons of personal safety and the element of surprise. Only the headquarters, which was superior to the individual troops and stationed in Harlech, Wales, consisted of British personnel, initially under the leadership of the experienced commando Dudley Lister.

However, this “example in a warring world of real international goodwill and fellowship”, as the Welsh officer Bryan Hilton-Jones – first commander of the “British” No. 3 Troop and later of the entire unit – was to write after the war, also brought its own problems and challenges. Due to language barriers and different country-specific structures and traditions, the headquarters sometimes struggled to bring all administrative and operational matters under one roof. This was another reason why No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando, unlike its British counterparts, hardly ever acted as a cohesive formation. Instead, the individual troops, which were also stationed at different locations, acted relatively independently or were lent to other commandos as reinforcements, so to speak. This was particularly true of No. 3 Troop, whose members were regarded as specialists and soon became intelligence experts with regard to the Wehrmacht – which is one of the reasons why their true identity was to be concealed and hidden from the Germans at all costs. In sharp contrast to their later role, their military careers usually began completely unspectacularly – with a pickaxe, axe or spade.