Into combat, part 1: Italy & France
Compared to the genesis of No. 3 Troop, its deployment is far more difficult to explore. The reason for this is the fact that the unit did not operate as a closed formation and therefore no war diary exists in which all the operations carried out are recorded. Instead, the troop’s members went into combat alone or in small groups together with other units. There is also no centralised register that can provide information about who was deployed when, where and for what purpose. In this respect, the documentation of the troop’s operational phase is largely dependent on statements and the recollection of its members. This poses a further problem: the available memoirs of Peter Masters, for example, mainly deals with the members – but by no means with all of them – of the group who joined the unit in the autumn of 1942 and during the spring of 1943. The men who joined later, such as the soldiers recruited in Italy in early 1945 and assigned to the commandos of No. 2 Special Service Brigade in the Mediterranean theatre of war, are not mentioned. That is why their history remains obscure apart from the fact that they belonged to the unit.
It is equally difficult to determine when after Operation Jubilee, the disaster at Dieppe, No. 3 Troop was deployed again. According to Peter Terry, a member of the troop called Richard Leonard – alias Richard Lehniger, born on 9 June 1900 in Petschau, then Austria-Hungary – is said to have taken part in Operation Aquatint in mid-September 1942, which was carried out by No. 62 Commando, also known as Small Scale Raiding Force (SSRF), and ended in disaster as well. While attempting to gather information about the area for a potential invasion, three of the eleven soldiers who went ashore at Saint-Laurent-Sur-Mer, including Leonard, were killed in a firefight after being spotted by a German patrol. The rest were captured on the beach – part of the D-Day section “Omaha” – or later on the run, with only one officer remaining on the landing craft escaping unharmed.
The question of whether Leonard, who was buried in the courtyard of a church in Saint-Laurent-Sur-Mer, was actually a member of No. 3 Troop is difficult to answer due to the lack of detailed personnel lists. If he was, however, there is only one explanation: in addition to the five members of the troop deployed at Dieppe, he must have been the sixth private not yet known by name, who, as previously mentioned, together with George Lane and Hilton-Jones himself, formed the nucleus of the unit. This theory is supported by the fact that Leonard, like the other five, came from the Sudetenland and, like the Jewish socialist Maurice Latimer, was also a Jewish communist and politically far to the left. It is possible that his advanced age – at 42, he would have been the oldest of the group – prevented his deployment at Dieppe. However, it seems logical that the responsible planners for Aquatint at Combined Operations Headquarters chose a similar approach to that previously taken with Jubilee and wanted at least one German-speaking soldier to be present, as part of the mission was to capture and interrogate a German guard – and in fact Leonard appears to have been the only “enemy alien” in the team. It was No. 3 Troop which could provide such language specialists, and with four men dead, wounded or missing – Platt, Bate, Rice and Smith – Hilton-Jones was left with only Latimer and Leonard apart from Lane, so he went for Leonard. Given the fact that the latter was born and socialised in the Habsburg Monarchy until his 18th birthday, the latter could certainly also be considered a German-speaking (cultural) Austrian according to Ernest Wilder Spaulding’s definition, which is to be explained later, even though he had become a citizen of Czechoslovakia in 1918. As a communist, however, he probably rejected such thinking in national categories anyway, as the inscription on his gravestone shows, which quotes the refrain of the socialist movement’s anthem: “Die Internationale wird die Menschheit sein” – “The Internationale unites the human race”.
Further missions similar to Aquatint followed over the next few months, such as another disastrous attempt to sabotage the hydroelectric power station in Vemork, Norway, in November 1942, in which heavy water was produced for the construction of an atomic bomb. Yet it is not clear from the sources whether a member of No. 3 Troop – allegedly Geoff Broadman – was actually involved in this operation titled Freshman. In the spring of 1943, as already mentioned, a first detachment of the troop was finally sent to Algiers to No. 2 Special Service Brigade to take part in Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily. It consisted of four soldiers, including the Austrian Paul Streeten. He was assigned to No. 41 (Royal Marine) Commando, with which he had previously trained for a month, and had the primary task of supporting its men as an interpreter and interrogator. On the night of 9/10 July 1943, armed with a Thompson submachine gun, the Tommy Gun, Streeten went ashore at Punta Castellazo in south-eastern Sicily shortly after midnight under enemy fire as part of the first wave of Allied amphibious assault. After cutting through the barbed wire, his unit made its way through the dunes and was finally able to overpower the Italian defenders of the beach section. It was Streeten’s personal baptism of fire – not taking into account the exercises in Scotland, where live ammunition had been fired over the men’s heads – and he survived it physically unscathed. A little later, however, his luck ran out. After being temporarily assigned to the Long Range Desert Group, he was seriously wounded by a grenade near Mount Etna while trying to cut off the enemy troops’ retreat to Messina in the north-east of the island and was evacuated to Egypt.
After Streeten’s loss, who fought for his life in a military hospital in Cairo, was then transferred to England and left the army in early 1944 with severe physical injuries, the detachment of No. 3 Troop in Italy was reduced to only two men, as the German Claus Ascher alias Colin Anson, who was deployed with No. 40 (Royal Marine) Commando, had also been severely wounded in the head by shrapnel. So, while the men who had remained in England continued their training in Eastbourne or were transferred to Littlehampton, a further eleven members of the troop made their way to the Mediterranean theatre at the beginning of September 1943. Among them were the Viennese Steven Hudson (Stephan Hirsch) and Harold “Nobby” Kendal (Günther Knobloch), who is sometimes considered to have been Austrian, but who, as a native of Breslau, was more likely German. Nevertheless, he should be mentioned briefly because later, in the winter of 1943/44 in Abruzzo, he organised the first, albeit short-lived, Allied ski patrol in Italy. Kendal allegedly organised some old skis made of chestnut wood and white frocks from a monastery as equipment for the Belgian troop of No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando, to which he was assigned. It is said that he and his winter warriors even had a brief skirmish in the deep snow at 1000 metres above sea level with a group of Austrian Wehrmacht soldiers who had entrenched themselves in a hut but retreated again after a short time due to the weather.
No. 3 Troop remained active in Italy, even taking part in a mission beyond the Adriatic on the island of Brac together with Yugoslav partisans in Operation Flounced and recruiting further soldiers directly in the Mediterranean theatre, but in spring 1944 the focus was on Western Europe. There, the raids on the Atlantic Wall had been reduced so as not to alarm German defences too much. Only a series of smaller reconnaissance missions – Operation Tarbrush already mentioned at the beginning – still took place in mid-May 1944, four of them under the supervision of Hilton-Jones from Dover. Most of them were carried out by members of No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando and No. 3 Troop, who were tasked with investigating and capturing a supposedly new type of mine on beaches near Dunkirk and the Somme estuary respectively, which ultimately turned out to be just an ordinary plate mine and therefore did not jeopardise the Allies’ invasion plans. The last of these missions on 18 May with a “direct bearing on the final plans for ‘OVERLORD’”, the Battle of Normandy currently in preparation, was commanded by George Lane, who was captured by the Germans. He was subsequently interrogated personally by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and then imprisoned first near Paris and later at Spangenberg Castle. However, Lane managed to conceal his true identity and was later released – but he was to miss the big day No. 3 Troop had been waiting for so long.
