No. 3 Troop, No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando

No. 3 Troop was officially formed on 11 July 1942 and was also known as “X Troop” – a name that is said to have been coined by Winston Churchill himself. As the true identity of the unit’s members was to be kept secret even within the British armed forces, the Prime Minister felt that the X, which in mathematical equations stands for the unknown, was appropriate – although this designation was never used by the members of the troop themselves. Command was given to the aforementioned Welsh officer Bryan Hilton-Jones, who had an extremely interesting and tailor-made CV for this task. Hilton-Jones was a keen mountaineer, had studied languages at Cambridge and was fluent in German, which he had learnt during an extended stay at the University of Bonn. Because of his abilities, he had been transferred to the Intelligence Corps two years after joining the Army in July 1939. But just six months later, in December 1941, he had volunteered for the Commandos, apparently out of boredom, and had taken part in raids across the English Channel with No. 4 Commando before being entrusted with command of No. 3 Troop.

Immediately after its formation, the troop was still attached to No. 1 Commando and stationed in Kilwinning, Scotland. Apart from Hilton-Jones, its entire unit consisted of just one sergeant from the Pioneer Corps, the Hungarian-born, German-speaking George Lane alias György Lanyi, and six privates who had transferred from the Pioneer Corps to the Intelligence Corps. Barely two weeks later, this small group moved to Harlech, where the staff of the superior No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando was also in the process of being formed. Even though Hilton-Jones lacked almost everything at this point – men, equipment and accommodation – he began basic training. The schedule included map reading, swimming, physical training and reconnaissance – including night-time reconnaissance of Harlech Castle, which, according to Hilton-Jones, caused slight irritation among the Home Guard men posted there on guard. The highlight was a 53-mile march from Harlech to the 1085 metre summit of Mount Snowdon or Yr Wyddfa and back again in 17.5 hours, including a three-hour rest at the summit.

The fact that training began immediately although only provisional infrastructure was available was possibly because the troop was already sent on its first mission in August 1942 – and it may have been the preparation for this very mission that had prompted the unit’s formation in the first place. As part of the aforementioned Operation Jubilee, also known as the Dieppe Raid, around 6,000 Canadian soldiers, 1,000 British commandos and 50 U.S. Army Rangers, supported by the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy, attempted to take possession of the northern French town of Dieppe on 19 August 1942 in order to cause confusion among the German troops, boost the morale of the Western Allies and test a major landing of troops on the European mainland. However, five members of No. 3 Troop were also involved, who may have had a particular mission within this special operation. Researchers have long held the opinion that the main purpose of Operation Jubilee was to capture a German Enigma encryption machine, and that the large-scale attack was merely intended to distract the German defenders from this main objective – following the calculus of the planner of this ruse, who was none other than the later James Bond author Ian Fleming, then an officer in the Naval Intelligence Division. A new theory even claims that the nucleus of No. 3 Troop was set up specifically to fulfil this mission. A team of German-speaking commandos would have been required to penetrate from the landing beaches to the Hotel Moderne in the city centre, where the German headquarters were located, to distinguish essential from non-essential documents, interrogate prisoners on site if necessary, identify the code books and transport them away together with the Enigma machine.

Even if there is no definitive evidence for this hypothesis in the sources currently available, it does not seem far-fetched. Maurice Latimer, one of the five men involved on behalf of No. 3 Troop, stated afterwards that his team’s task was to go immediately to the German general headquarters in Dieppe and take all documents of value and, if possible, a new German “respirator”, which may have been a code name for the Enigma. In any case, what is certain is the disaster with which the Dieppe Raid ended. Not only did the operation have to be cancelled after a few hours because the losses were too high – in the end, 1,000 Allied soldiers were dead, a further 2,400 wounded and almost 2,000 taken prisoner by the Germans; the men trained by Hilton-Jones were also unable to achieve their alleged goal of securing an Enigma. All five – Brian Platt (Bruno Platek), George Bate (Gustav Oppelt), Charles Rice (Karl Kutschka), Joseph Smith (Josef Kugler) and Maurice Latimer (Moritz Löwy), the only Jew in the team – were Sudeten Germans who had previously received parachute and explosives training by the SOE; Latimer even had been sent on several missions already. Unlike his team-mates, he survived the Dieppe Raid unscathed, at least physically. Platt was wounded, Bate was killed and Rice and Smith were reported missing – in fact they were also presumed dead, but they survived the war in captivity.

Thus, the Dieppe Raid was a more than bitter experience for No. 3 Troop. After all, Hilton-Jones had lost more than half of his men with Bate, Rice, Smith and temporarily Platt, who was only able to work as a storekeeper after his return. Now, however, the actual organisation of the unit began – and it would not be long before the first Austrians made their way to the troop’s headquarters in Wales.