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The SAS played a vital role in defeating Hitler – so why did Britain disband them?
Britain’s War Office thanked the SAS for its remarkable efforts in WW2 by abolishing it – yet soon realised the error of its ways. Gavin Mortimer tells the story of how the elite unit reinvented itself to confront the challenges of the postwar world
“Light-hearted banditry”, “ruthless pirating”, a “phantom army” – it’s fair to say that the Special Air Service (SAS) didn’t always attract the most complimentary headlines. In the white heat of the Second World War, when this and other British special forces achieved unlikely successes through a series of daring raids, disparaging press reports could be discarded as merely tomorrow’s chip paper. Nonetheless, they fuelled the impression that the SAS operated outside the rules of the regular British army, and were used as ammunition by some who aimed to whip special forces into line – or even shut them down altogether. That threat became a reality after the conflict ended. David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, coined a description – “freemasons of mediocrity” – for a certain kind of staff officer who looked upon his men with suspicion and, in some cases, hostility. These ‘freemasons’ regarded the SAS and other irregular outfits – the Long Range Desert Group and the Chindits – at best as private armies, at worst “café gangsters”. This view extended to the Special Boat Squadron (SBS), which spent the spring of 1944 waging a bloody guerrilla campaign in the Aegean to tie down German troops ahead of the invasion of France. Its actions prompted a sharp exchange between Winston Churchill and Simon Wingfield Digby, the Conservative MP for West Dorset. “Is it true, Mr prime minister,” enquired Wingfield Digby, “that there is a body of men out in the Aegean Islands, fighting under the Union Flag, that are nothing short of being a band of murderous, renegade cut-throats?” “If you do not take your seat and keep quiet, I will send you out to join them,” retorted Churchill. One could argue that Churchill was the founding father of Britain’s special forces. It was he, shortly after coming to office in May 1940, who instructed the formation of a commando force to launch a “vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive” against the Axis. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-106756195webready-3acc480-e1769169656193.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Winston Churchill with wife, Clementine, and their son Randolph, in 1940. Randolph served briefly in the SAS in 1942, accounts of which made his father “terribly proud” (Image by Getty Images)" title="Winston Churchill with wife, Clementine, and their son Randolph, in 1940. Randolph served briefly in the SAS in 1942, accounts of which made his father “terribly proud” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Men such as Stirling, Paddy Mayne (Stirling’s second-in command) and George Jellicoe (the commanding officer of the SBS) first learned the art of guerrilla warfare with the commandos. Churchill’s son Randolph served briefly in the SAS in 1942, and wrote to his father describing how they were destroying dozens of enemy aircraft in daring raids – accounts that made the PM “terribly proud”. When Churchill visited Cairo in August 1942 to discuss the next phase of the north African campaign with his generals, he found time to lunch with his son and Stirling. Churchill dined with Stirling again at the end of May 1945, following the latter’s release from Colditz, having been captured in January 1943. Stirling had plans to re-deploy the SAS Brigade to the far east, and he wanted to sound out their principal benefactor. But within weeks Churchill was gone, voted out of office by a British public who believed a new leader was required to rebuild the country. The SAS would soon follow the wartime leader into temporary retirement. Read more | The real SAS Rogue Heroes: the true stories behind the WW2 drama Uncertain future Even if Clement Attlee hadn’t been elected prime minister in July 1945, the SAS and Britain’s special forces might still have faced an uncertain future. The country was practically bankrupt, having spent almost £7bn (a quarter of the national wealth) on the war effort. Defence spending would obviously be slashed, and those ‘private armies’ were an obvious place to start. After all, what was the point in maintaining a guerrilla force now that the war was over? The SAS paraded for the final time at their Essex HQ on 8 October 1945. Four days later, Brigadier Michael Calvert, commanding officer of the SAS Brigade, sent a memo to 12 of the most senior officers of the SAS, SBS and Long Range Desert Group entitled ‘Future of SAS Troops’. He explained that the War Office had asked for his “recommendations for the future of SAS in the next war and its composition in the peace-time army” as part of its review into Britain’s military capabilities. Calvert feared that the bureaucrats within the War Office – those “freemasons of mediocrity” – were determined to disband the SAS. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-154417103webready-51d1025-e1769169399236.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Members of the Long Range Desert Group in 1942. By the end of the Second World War, their new brand of warfare was attracting hostility from some elements of Britain’s military (Image by Getty Images)" title="Members of the Long Range Desert Group in 1942. By the end of the Second World War, their new brand of warfare was attracting hostility from some elements of Britain’s military (Image by Getty Images)" /> One of the most forceful and erudite replies came from Major Roy Farran, DSO and MC, a senior SAS officer who had served in north Africa, Italy and France. He began by stating that, though special forces warfare was still in its infancy, its potential was enormous – particularly because it could exploit the rapid recent developments in air power, communications and motorised transport. “Since it is now so easy to place troops across the enemy lines of communication, I feel that it is important to have a unit of the Special Air Service-type trained to operate individually with the minimum support and with the maximum amount of improvisation,” he wrote. Farran had already identified Britain’s likely next foe and envisaged how special forces could be used in the event of a conflict. “I believe there will be great opportunities for guerrilla troops in the event of a war against the Soviet Union, which I suppose is the only possibility at the moment,” he told Calvert. Such a war would be either a defensive or offensive one. “In the former case a unit like the Special Air Service could inflict damage on the enemy and slow up his advance out of all proportion to its size… In an offensive war the SAS would increase the speed of our advance by spreading panic and confusion in the enemy’s rear.” But the prescient Farran also envisaged that, before a large-scale war with the Soviets, Britain could well find itself entangled in insurgencies as its empire began to break up. Counter-insurgency, he declared, was a role to which the SAS and SBS were ideally suited, adding: “If the principle of the SAS does not continue, I cannot believe that the army is thinking along progressive lines.” Another important figure contacted by the War Office was Lieutenant Colonel Tony Simonds, the commander of MI9’s A Force, who had worked with the SAS in Italy in the autumn of 1943. The main task of MI9 – a secret department within the War Office – was to assist Allied military personnel in enemy territory to evade and escape. Simonds recommended the establishment of three SAS regiments: one for Europe, based in Britain; a second for the Middle East, based in Cyprus; and a third for the far east, based in Singapore. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/standard-3Michael-Calvert-cmykwebready-6c7040b-e1769169955638.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Michael Calvert (left) gives orders after the capture of Mogaung in Burma, June 1944. The following year, as commanding officer of the SAS Brigade, Calvert fought for the unit’s survival (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" title="Michael Calvert (left) gives orders after the capture of Mogaung in Burma, June 1944. The following year, as commanding officer of the SAS Brigade, Calvert fought for the unit’s survival (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" /> Simonds wrote that “the role of guerrilla forces in any future war is to defeat the enemy, behind his defended front lines, while the orthodox forces prevent the enemy from advancing”. However, he also suggested that the SAS should “familiarise themselves topographically, militarily, socially and politically with the area. To know and to study the various factions and elements of their area… and to know which personalities should be eliminated should it become necessary in British interest.” That latter role had been the modus operandi of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War – acting more like secret agents than special forces. Read more | “They changed the way war is run”: Ben Macintyre on the early SAS Ultimately, however, the arguments put forward by Calvert and other senior special forces officers fell on deaf ears, and their regiment and units were disbanded. End of an error It didn’t take long before the War Office realised its mistake. In January 1946, Jewish paramilitaries in Mandatory Palestine derailed a British train – the first serious guerrilla act in an insurgency that grew increasingly violent as the fight for the establishment of a Jewish state intensified. It was the first of many such insurgencies as Britain’s empire began to fracture. In 1947, Major Pat Hart, a staff officer in the SAS during the war, learned that the SAS was going to be revived as a territorial regiment under the command of Colonel Brian Franks. Hart was appointed Franks’ second-in-command of 21 SAS – a designation that merged the 1st and 2nd Regiments of wartime fame. According to Hart’s recollection, a War Office study group had been formed in 1946 to re-examine the future of Britain’s special forces. “The result of the study was the recommendation there should be a continuing presence in the army, so the knowledge gained should not be lost, and whilst it could be called anything, probably the best thing was to call it SAS,” he said. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-79043094webready-e676d4c-e1769170186832.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="At the end of the Second World War, Britain was facing bankruptcy and defence spending needed to be cut. ‘Private armies’ were an obvious place to start (Image by Getty Images)" title="At the end of the Second World War, Britain was facing bankruptcy and defence spending needed to be cut. ‘Private armies’ were an obvious place to start (Image by Getty Images)" /> Recruitment began in September 1947. Of the first 200 soldiers signed up, 59 had served with the SAS during the war. One of those was Pat Duggan. “While the majority in the forces were pleased to return to their former lifestyles [in 1945], many of us, hemmed in by the norms of a peaceful civilisation, felt only frustration and spent our time dreaming of, or searching for, something that resembled our wartime role,” he reflected. “When the SAS was reformed as part of the TA [Territorial Army], we homed in like pigeons – a roll-call of the dispossessed.” Having so many experienced soldiers in their ranks made it easier to train the new recruits in their unorthodox methods. “We were creating an SAS unit that would be available to do any sort of SAS job once it was trained,” explained Hart. “We went off on Nato exercises, as part of the training, and it was very helpful for Nato command to have an SAS unit there.” The first active deployment of 21 SAS was to Malaya (then a British colony, today peninsular Malaysia) to help quell a two-year-long communist insurgency. The uprising – which the British knew as the Malayan Emergency – threatened colonial rubber plantations and tin mines, so the government called on the talents of men skilled in guerrilla fighting. “There were a few contacts,” recalled John Gardner of the SAS. “A few seconds, perhaps minutes, of intense shooting, then silence. Blood trails were followed, and some CT [insurgent] bodies were found and brought in, but many blood trails led to nothing… during these weeks we lived in a general state of alertness, even at night half awake, of dirt and sweat, our blood sucked by the many leeches.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/1.47-CMYKwebready-f500202-e1769170640593.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Rhodesian troops served in the Long Range Desert Group in WW2 and went on to form their own SAS squadron, some of whom are seen here in the 1950s. C (Rhodesia) Squadron operated with the SAS from 1951–53, largely in Malaya (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" title="Rhodesian troops served in the Long Range Desert Group in WW2 and went on to form their own SAS squadron, some of whom are seen here in the 1950s. C (Rhodesia) Squadron operated with the SAS from 1951–53, largely in Malaya (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" /> The SAS remained in Malaya throughout the 1950s – years that proved a crucial learning curve for a regiment that was intent on mastering all environments, whether desert, jungle or Arctic. Johnny Cooper, one of the original 66 recruits to the SAS when the unit was formed by Stirling in 1941, was a squadron commander in Malaya. “We were carrying out trials to develop a two-week ration that was possible for a man to carry,” he recalled. “The object was to avoid the weekly air drops which were a complete give-away and lost us the vital element of surprise.” As a result, the SAS produced a ‘starvation ration’ consisting of dehydrated rice-based food carried in a four-gallon petrol tin. Read more | He shot down 3 planes in 4 minutes: meet the WW2 pilot you won't have heard about A global audience It was no coincidence that in 1952 – shortly after Winston Churchill had been returned to Downing Street – it was decided to raise a regular-army SAS regiment: 22 SAS. Over the following decades, the SAS was sent to fight insurgencies in other remote corners of the British empire and spheres of influence – Aden, Borneo, Oman – before being deployed to Northern Ireland in the 1970s. But perhaps the most high-profile of all its operations occurred in the spring of 1980 when it ended the Iranian embassy siege in London in dramatic style, watched by a global television audience. It was a feat that underlined the regiment’s reputation as the world’s pre-eminent special force. Throughout these operations, one aspect of the SAS was immutable, and that was the temperament of each recruit. In 1956, Dare Newell, the SAS regimental headquarters major, wrote to several wartime special forces officers to ask what characteristics they thought essential for an SAS soldier. From their answers he compiled the selection criteria. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1241653502webready-85c1750-e1769170516483.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Members of the SAS on a training exercise in Hereford, c1970. By now, the regiment was intent on mastering all environments, whether desert, jungle or Arctic (Image by Getty Images)" title="Members of the SAS on a training exercise in Hereford, c1970. By now, the regiment was intent on mastering all environments, whether desert, jungle or Arctic (Image by Getty Images)" /> “A man’s personal qualities and make-up count more than technical efficiency in his own arm of the service. Technical efficiency can be taught; the personal qualities required for long-range, long-term operations in enemy territory, however, are part of a man’s character and, although they may be developed over a period, they must be learnt in childhood.” The qualities deemed essential were initiative, self-discipline, independence of mind, ability to work without supervision, stamina, patience, and a sense of humour. These characteristics continue to underpin the SAS ethos today. Warfare and weaponry evolve, but not human nature. One of the 12 recipients of Mike Calvert’s worried memo in October 1945 was Major John Verney of the SBS. “We came to know one another’s physical and mental capacities, and with them our own,” he said of his wartime service. “Strength and skill were respected, and a fair degree of both were essential, but there were other qualities, such as a cool head, or a good temper, that might well prove more valuable.” CLONE WARS Countries worldwide have established forces based on the British SAS template The reputation of the SAS, encapsulated by its ‘Who Dares Wins’ motto, is global. Its influence is evident in France’s 1er Régiment de Parachutiste d’Infanterie de Marine (1erRPIMa), the US Delta Force and Germany’s GSG 9. New Zealand and Australia have their own SAS regiments, both raised in the 1950s and using the same motto as their British counterpart. It is also alleged that the SAS has trained Ukrainian special forces for many years. The wartime SAS included two regiments of French troops who fought under British command. In June 2024, to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, President Emmanuel Macron visited the French SAS memorial in Plumelec in Brittany. According to France’s Ministry of Defence, the 1erRPIMa “has its roots in the SAS of World War II, [and] is based on daring, determination and endurance”; its motto is Qui ose gagne – a direct translation of that of the British SAS. The founder of Delta Force, Charles Beckwith, was one of America’s most innovative military thinkers in the late 1950s. A member of the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Beckwith was posted to 22 SAS as part of an exchange in 1962. During that time, he conceived the idea of an American equivalent. On his return to the US, Beckwith received encouragement from General Sam Wilson, a Second World War veteran who had been trained by the British Chindits in south-east Asia. In a 2016 interview, Wilson explained that he had met David Stirling in the course of helping to establish Delta Force. Like Delta Force, Germany’s counter-terrorism unit GSG 9 was formed in the 1970s in response to a series of high-profile terrorist atrocities. When GSG 9 rescued all hostages from a hijacking at Mogadishu airport in Somalia in 1977, it was assisted by two SAS soldiers. Over the course of three decades, David Stirling’s band of “renegade cut-throats” had become a blueprint for special forces units across the globe. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/NZ-females-CMYKwebready-cdfea04-e1769170865434.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Members of New Zealand’s SAS female engagement team. Along with Australia’s SAS, they use the same motto – ‘Who Dares Wins’ – as their British counterpart (Image by New Zealand Special Air Service)" title="Members of New Zealand’s SAS female engagement team. Along with Australia’s SAS, they use the same motto – ‘Who Dares Wins’ – as their British counterpart (Image by New Zealand Special Air Service)" /> This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
Gertrude Ederle: the first woman to swim the English Channel
In 1926, 19-year-old New Yorker Gertrude Ederle made history by becoming the first woman to swim the English Channel – and in a faster time than the five men who had already achieved the feat. As Daisy Ridley stars in film Young Woman and the Sea, Gavin Mortimer shares the remarkable story of Ederle’s swim and how she inspired a generation of sporting women…
The 1920s was a decade made for explorers and adventurers. After the horrors of the Great War, the world needed heroes as it entered a glamorous new age – and it found them in the likes of Charles Lindbergh, Percy Fawcett, George Mallory and Amelia Earhart, whose exploits remain vivid more than 100 years later. But one such hero has faded from memory: Gertrude Ederle (pronounced ‘Ed-er-ly’), a shy 19-year-old New Yorker who was the most famous woman in the world in the summer of 1926. Who was Gertrude Ederle? Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel – an achievement in itself, and one made all the more impressive by the fact that she swam it faster than any of the five men who had gone before her. Although her feat has become commonplace today, she deserves recognition for inspiring a generation of young women. What drove Gertrude Ederle to attempt to swim the Channel? Ederle was a gifted swimmer who represented her country in the 1924 Paris Olympics. It was during this time, as the American team's ship sailed up the channel, that Ederle had the idea to swim across it. The previous year in 1923, Henry Sullivan had become the first American to swim the 21 miles that separated Dover from Calais, although he had actually swum more than 50 miles because of the strong currents – a factor that accounted for the 1,000 failed attempts by 200 swimmers since Matthew Webb's historic first crossing in 1875. Read more | 9 people you didn’t know made history swimming in the River Thames There were other challenges, too – such as the debilitating temperature of the water and the capricious weather – but the main problem was the fact that the tide shifted direction every six hours. This meant that anyone brave enough to take on the channel would need to swim in a zigzag fashion, changing direction with the tide. When did Gertrude Ederle first try to swim the English Channel? Ederle first tried to swim the channel in 1925, but after nine hours she was pulled from the water by her support team. It had been a bitter lesson for the young American, and one from which she vowed to learn. The swim became personal, a fight between her and the channel, but at the same time Ederle was aware that it represented more than just a sporting challenge. In August 1920, the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified and the vote was officially extended to women. It was a historic moment in American history, and it ushered in a vibrant generation of young women who were independent and more assertive than their forebears, taking much of their lead from the sassy women depicted in the burgeoning motion picture industry. Ederle belonged to this generation of 'Flappers', whose trademark was the bobbed haircut (so much more practical for the young woman always on the go). Their photographs became a staple of the new tabloid newspapers, and when Ederle announced she was going to have another crack at the channel she was contracted to write an exclusive weekly column for the New York Daily News, for the eye-watering fee of $5,000 (with an additional $2,500 if she succeeded). Read more | Flappers, sanitary pads and public drinking: was the 1920s a time of increased liberation for women? Ederle's first ghost-written column appeared on 3 June, 24 hours after she had sailed for France. "I don’t get half-a-million dollars for my efforts," she informed Americans. "So if I dance in the evening or pick up a ukulele for pleasure I don’t think it should be reported as a scandal… I don’t want to be nagged at my training. I want to talk about clothes and shows and the Charleston [dance].” Once again, Ederle set up camp on the Calais coast. Remembering her failure the previous year, she spent several weeks training, learning about the currents and acclimatising to the cold. She was overseen by her English coach, Bill Burgess, who had become the second person to swim the channel when he crossed in 1911. In the meantime, four other female swimmers (three American and one Englishwoman) arrived to try and beat Ederle across the channel, but none was able to tame the challenging route. Their failures only strengthened the belief in Britain that a woman was incapable of swimming a stretch of water that had defeated scores of strong men, including General Bernard Freyberg, who had a Victoria Cross to his name. If a war hero couldn't swim the channel, then what hope had a woman? Covered in grease: how Ederle prepared to swim the channel Ederle, who labelled these chauvinists 'Channel Croakers', set out for England shortly after 7am on 6 August wearing a specially designed two-piece swimsuit made of silk. It was barely visible, however, under her three layers of grease: a base layer of olive oil; then lanolin, a heavy yellow-white grease; and on top of that a coat that combined lard and Vaseline. She looked more like a basted chicken than a swimmer as she dived into the channel, quickly striking up a rate of 28 strokes per minute using her powerful overarm crawl. After two hours in the water, Ederle was four and a half miles north-west of her starting point and about to swing north-east on the flood tide towards the middle of the channel. On her support boat, her coach handed her a bottle of chicken broth in a children's fishing net, while her sister, Margaret, played Ederle's favourite records on a gramophone. After five hours Ederle had swum 11 miles and Dover was 10 miles to the north-west. She continued to make steady progress throughout the afternoon, but then at around 5pm the weather turned on the American. Within an hour a storm had descended and waves were rocking the support boat and pummelling Ederle's tired body. The deteriorating conditions forced Bill Burgess to plot a new course, heading away from Dover with the current, and going north up the Kentish coast. The next four hours pushed Ederle to the limits of her endurance, as she battled strong seas and chilly temperatures, but at 9.48pm her toes touched the pebbly beach at Kingsdown, five miles north of Dover, 14 hours and 39 minutes after she had set off from France. Ederle had not only become the first woman to cross the channel, she had smashed the existing record of 16 hours and 33 minutes, set in 1923 by the Argentine swimmer Enrique Tirabocchi. Despite the miserable weather, there were an estimated 4,000 people waiting to greet her – Britons who had been drawn to the beach in the giddy excitement of witnessing a slice of sporting history. It did not matter that Ederle was an American; the men and women who welcomed her ashore were there to celebrate the triumph of the human spirit. Women who changed the world Gertrude Erdele came in at number 58 in our 100 Women Who Changed the World Poll. Find out more about the other women who have had significant impact on history What was the reaction to Ederle's successful swim? When Ederle woke the next morning in a Dover hotel it was to global superstardom. Newspapers in the USA, Britain, France and across Europe hailed her feat as a historical event. Carrie Chapman Catt, leader of the American Suffragists, said it was "a far cry from swimming the channel to the days to which my memory goes back, when it was thought that women could not throw a ball or even walk very far down the street without feeling faint". It was later reported that more than 60,000 women had gained the American Red Cross swimming certificates in the 1920s, many of whom had cited Ederle's swim as their inspiration. Perhaps no one articulated the impact of Ederle's feat better than the well-known American columnist Heywood Broun in an article for the New York World. He wrote: "When Gertrude Ederle struck out from France she left behind her a world which has believed for a great many centuries that woman is the weaker vessel. Much of government, most of law and practically all of morality is based upon this assumption. And when her toes touched the sands of England, she stepped out of the water into a brand-new world." Is Young Woman and the Sea a true story? The 2024 film starring Daisy Ridley, Young Woman and the Sea, is based on the true story of Gertrude 'Trudy' Ederle, who became the first woman to successfully swim across the English Channel in August 1926. 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The battle for Normandy: what happened after D-Day?
HistoryExtra Academy D-Day and the Normandy Campaign course
By the time D-Day had drawn to a close on the night of 6 June 1944, the Allies had secured a hard-won foothold in northern France. But the fight was far from over. Here, Gavin Mortimer explains how the battle to liberate France raged on as Allied forces were tested to their limits by fierce German resistance while they attempted to push through the Normandy countryside
Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel had little sleep on the night of 6 June. He had spent the day in his staff car, urging his driver to keep his foot on the accelerator as they drove the 500 miles between his home in Herrlingen, south-west Germany, and his HQ in La Roche-Guyon. But before dawn had broken on 7 June, Rommel was already in conference with General Geyr von Schweppenburg, commander of Panzer Group West. The Allied landings the previous day had caught the German military unawares; the führer’s unshakeable certainty that the invasion would be in the Calais region had been shattered. Rommel blamed Hitler and his equally inept chief of operations, Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, for their failure to release the two reserve Panzer divisions that, if they had been sent straight to the beachhead, might well have pushed the invaders back into the chill waters of the English Channel. Read more | D-Day on screen: 5 TV and film depictions of the Second World War operation Not that Rommel was in a position to berate his superiors; he was embarrassed at having left France on 5 June to celebrate his wife’s birthday. Such a miscalculation would be difficult to live down among his growing number of detractors within Hitler’s inner circle. But 7 June was not the time for recriminations. Only action would suffice and Rommel had already identified from the map of the invasion zone what he believed was the Allies’ most vulnerable point. He had considered attacking the Omaha beachhead, which the American V Corps had secured at such a terrible price, but instead settled on launching his counterattack around Caen. The British had failed in their objective of capturing the city on D-Day, but only just, and should they seize Caen, only 125 miles of flat, unobstructed countryside would lie between them and Paris. Read more | Your guide to D-Day: what happened, how many casualties were there, and what did it accomplish? General Bernard Montgomery, in command of Allied ground forces, had arrived off the Normandy coast in the early hours of 7 June, having sailed from Portsmouth the previous evening on board the destroyer HMS Faulknor. He ordered 3rd British Division and 3rd Canadian Division to press their attack against Caen, but, as he wrote in his memoirs: “It quickly became apparent that the enemy was concerned for the security of this nodal point, and was quick to bring forward reserve formations to hold us off from the town and prevent the expansion of our bridgehead south of the Caen-Bayeux road.” The first reserve formation to arrive was ‘Battlegroup Meyer’, an element of the 12th SS Panzer Division. Commanded by the notorious Colonel Kurt Meyer, many of its soldiers were recent recruits from the Hitler Youth, fanatics who committed several atrocities against their enemy as they pushed back the Anglo-Canadian advance with the help of the 21st Panzer Division. The bloody fighting of 7 June was a grim foretaste of what lay ahead for the Allies as they continued inland from the beachhead. They were now entering ‘bocage country’, characterised by sunken lanes and high hedgerows: good defensive terrain for tanks and for men armed with Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons. Montgomery’s plan was to encircle Caen with the 51st Highland Division and the 7th Armoured Division, the latter the ‘Desert Rats’ of the North Africa campaign. Read more | Desert raiders: the Long Range Desert Group in the Second World War But when they advanced on 10 June they ran into the tanks of the Panzer Lehr Division. “Obviously the attacking troops were at a disadvantage because they had to move forward,” said Leslie Dinning of the 1st Royal Tank Regiment. “Poke their nose round corners where sitting a few yards up the road was a bloody big Tiger, Panther or a self-propelled gun, literally waiting for us and BANG! You had no chance. It only needed one shot from an enemy tank.” A fearsome adversary No German commander was as lethal as Michael Wittman of the 501st SS Heavy Tank Battalion. In the Soviet Union he had destroyed 117 enemy tanks, and on 13 June his company ambushed the Desert Rats outside Villers-Bocage, destroying 25 tanks and 28 other vehicles. Panzers weren’t the only problem General Montgomery faced in the middle of June. On the 19th of the month a ferocious storm swept through the Channel, wrecking the two artificial ‘Mulberry’ harbours that had been towed from England. Prior to the storm, 22,000 tons of supplies and equipment were being unloaded each day at the British and US harbours of Arromanches and Colleville-sur-Mer; during the four days that the storm raged only 12,000 tons were brought ashore at both sites. The British repaired the damage and were able to continue using Arromanches, but the Americans were forced to concede defeat and reverted to beaching craft to bring ashore their supplies. In pictures | D-Day in numbers: 5 infographics that show the big picture In contrast to the war of attrition being waged around Caen, US troops had made good progress in the fortnight since D-Day. The V Corps beachhead at Omaha and that established by the VII Corps at Utah had been joined so that the American invaders now presented a united front to their enemy. The immediate objective had been the town of Carentan, which blocked the Americans’ path south and east, and was defended by the seasoned troops of the 6th Parachute Regiment. The 101st Airborne captured Carentan on 12 June but the Germans, reinforced by the 17 SS Panzer Grenadier Division, counter-attacked the next day. Easy Company of the 506th Regiment was in danger of being overrun by Panzers when suddenly 60 of their own tanks appeared. “What a wonderful sight it was to see those tanks pouring it to the Germans with those heavy 50-calibre machine guns and just ploughing straight from our lines into the German hedgerows with all those fresh infantry soldiers marching along beside,” recalled Lieutenant Dick Winters. Dark days for Rommel The capture of Carentan was another serious blow for Rommel. For several days his mood had been darkening as fresh reports reached him of the slow progress north of reinforcements. The 17 SS Panzer Grenadier Division had managed to make the journey from south of the Loire, but other divisions were being held up and weakened by repeated enemy attacks. “Our operations in Normandy will be rendered exceptionally difficult and even partially impossible by the extraordinarily strong, and in some respects, overwhelming superiority of the Allied Air Force,” he wrote in a report on 12 June. “The enemy has complete control over the battle area and up to 60 miles behind the front.” It wasn’t only Allied aircraft that were hindering the progress of German reinforcements towards the battlefront; guerrilla fighters of the French Resistance, often working with small units from the Special Air Service, were ambushing convoys and destroying railway lines to disrupt the supply of men and munitions to the front. So serious was the situation in Normandy that Adolf Hitler arrived on 17 June, making his first visit to France since October 1940. The assessment he received from field marshals Erwin Rommel and Gerd von Rundstedt was pessimistic. As if to underline their gloomy prognosis, on the same day the 9th Division of VII Corps advanced six miles across the Cherbourg Peninsula and on 18 June captured Barneville on the coast facing the Atlantic. It was clear that Cherbourg, a crucial port, was doomed, and despite Hitler’s command to “fight until the last cartridge”, the town surrendered on 26 June. On the same day, Montgomery, under increasing pressure, mounted Operation Epsom, the objective of which was to envelop Caen. The 15th Scottish Division led the attack and suffered 2,500 casualties in five days of ferocious fighting. An entry in the war diary of the 2nd Battalion The Glasgow Highlanders on 26 June gave an idea of the resistance encountered by all the Scottish regiments. “C Company on the right became pinned by machine-gun fire from the many lines of trees on their front,” ran the entry. “[We] could not produce artillery fire owing to D Company’s progress. The tanks were being held up to an extent by the minefield. C Company was told to get on with its own weapons and it got forward to the next hedgerow where it suffered much heavier casualties.” Operation Epsom failed in its aim of capturing Caen, but the Scots’ sacrifice hadn’t been in vain: their enemy, the II SS Panzer Corps, had also suffered heavy losses in armour and men. It was no longer in a position to be deployed as Hitler had intended – offensively against the invaders at the junction of the American and British armies at Saint-Lô. Hitler removed Gerd von Rundstedt as commander-in-chief and replaced him with Günther von Kluge. “From then on,” wrote Montgomery, “Hitler’s personal and, as it proved, fatal interference in the strategy and even the tactics of the battle for France was unchecked.” There were other reasons for this interference. On 17 July, Rommel’s staff car was strafed by an Allied aircraft, and while the field marshal survived, the severity of his wounds removed him from the chain of command. Three days later, on 20 July, Hitler was also injured, although not by an enemy but one of his own officers, Claus von Stauffenberg. The briefcase bomb failed to kill the führer and as a result he became ever more convinced that it was his “great destiny” to lead Germany to victory. Why listen to generals, whom he no longer trusted (Kluge and Rommel later killed themselves after being implicated in the assassination attempt), when only he had the ability to save the Fatherland? Read more | Should we be glad the 1944 July Plot to kill Hitler failed? Rommel’s nemesis from the war in North Africa, Bernard Montgomery, was himself under strain. Progress had been slower than his political masters in London and Washington envisaged, and there were murmurs of discontent within Allied command at the way Montgomery was conducting the campaign. On 12 July he wrote a letter of reassurance to General Eisenhower, with a promise of an impending offensive. To Field Marshal Alan Brooke, chief of the imperial general staff, Montgomery also sent correspondence regarding his intention to deploy three armoured divisions: “We are fighting in ideal defensive country... so I have decided that the time has come to have a real ‘showdown’ on the eastern flank and to loose them into the open country about the Caen-Falaise road.” This showdown, the aim of which was to expand the bridgehead established by the Airborne brigade on 6 June, was code-named Operation Goodwood. It began in the early hours of 18 July with a fearsome aerial bombardment by 2,000 Allied bombers. Those on the receiving end endured hell. “It was a bomb carpet... the most terrifying hours of our lives,” remembered Werner Kortenhaus of the 22nd Panzer Regiment. “Among the thunder of the explosions we could hear the wounded scream and the insane howling of men driven mad.” Read more | The 11 most significant battles of the Second World War But the bombs didn’t destroy all of the German tanks or artillery, nor did they account for Colonel Hans von Luck of the 21st Panzer Division. Von Luck returned from a brief leave in Paris just as the bombardment stopped and the British armour began its advance down a narrow corridor, and ordered a battery of five 88mm anti-tank guns to open fire on a squadron of British Sherman tanks. The officer in charge refused. Von Luck drew his revolver. “Either you’re a dead man,” he told the recalcitrant officer, “or you can earn yourself a medal.” The crews inside the British Shermans were amazed at what they saw as they advanced. “Trees were uprooted, fields pitted and littered with dead cattle...nothing could be left alive on this lunar landscape,” recalled one eye-witness. “Yet suddenly there came evidence that the enemy was there and very aggressive, too.” Major Chris Nicholl’s tank was the first to be hit by Von Luck’s 88mm guns, and within a few minutes 11 more Shermans had been destroyed. Read more | 7 must-see Second World War films In total during Operation Goodwood the British lost an estimated 300 tanks. And for what? They had advanced just seven miles from their original position and had failed to capture Caen and the high ground on the Bourguébus Ridge. Criticism of Montgomery grew, and some British newspapers added their voices to the groundswell of discontent. What none of the Allies knew, however, was that Operation Goodwood had cost the Germans 109 tanks, nearly half its complement of anti-tank guns, and many hundreds of soldiers. The spectre of defeat On 22 July, Kluge wrote to Hitler to warn him that “the moment is fast approaching when this overtaxed front line is bound to break, and when the enemy once reaches the open country a properly co-ordinated command will be almost impossible”. Three days after Kluge’s letter the Allies launched another major offensive, this time on the western side of the bridgehead. Like Goodwood, Operation Cobra was preceded by a massive aerial bombardment and the bombs that rained down on the German positions in the Saint-Lô area were followed by an advance of three infantry divisions of General Omar Bradley’s First Army. The going was tough on the first day as German armour held up the American advance. “Good God!” yelled one tank commander as he opened fire on a Panzer. “I fired three rounds and they all bounced off.” They were his last words as the German tank returned fire, the shell slicing the commander in two. “Just his legs and hips were there,” recalled one of the crew. “One arm, with the wrist watch on it, lay near the house.” The Americans advanced just two miles on the first day of Cobra. The Germans had fought with courage and tenacity, but they were spent, unable to continue resisting the 120,000 troops ranged against them on a five-mile front. When the line finally broke – as Kluge had warned in his letter – the surge south was unstoppable. By 28 July the hole punched by the Americans was 15 miles deep and to turn the breakthrough into the breakout, Bradley looked to Lieutenant-General George S Patton. On 1 August, Patton received a written order from Bradley to lead the Third Army out of Normandy and into Brittany. There could now be only one victor in the battle for France. German troops counterattacked on the night of 6 August, but their Operation Lüttich was repelled by the Americans (who had been forewarned of the attack by Bletchley Park code-breakers). On 8 August the Canadians launched Operation Totalise, the first act in the closing of the Falaise pocket (where trapped German troops were encircled by Allied forces). It required two more weeks of bitter and intense fighting before Canadian and Polish forces linked up with American troops advancing from the west. The German Army Group B was shattered. Two hundred thousand were in Allied captivity and a further 50,000 had been killed in the 10 weeks since D-Day. Two of the 11 Panzer divisions – Lehr and the 9th – had lost all their tanks. There was nothing for the survivors to do but trudge wearily east towards Germany, chased all the while by Patton, until his Third Army ran out of fuel outside Metz on the last day of August. By then Paris had been liberated. The honour had been seized by General Leclerc’s armoured division, attached to Patton’s Army, on 25 August. Two days later, General Dwight D Eisenhower visited the French capital and told reporters that he had come to “pay the tribute of the Allied forces to the indomitable spirit of Paris”. It was a diplomatic gesture by the Allies’ supreme commander, for the tribute was in fact owed by Parisians to the bravery, boldness and sheer bloody-mindedness of the American, British, Canadian and Polish soldiers who had fought to liberate France. This article was first published 'D-Day and the Battle for Normandy', a unique special edition from the makers of BBC History Magazine Discover more learning from the fourth and final week of the HistoryExtra Academy course on D-Day and the Normandy Campaign HistoryExtra Academy video lecture: launching Operation Overlord – watching time 19 mins D-Day: 24 hours that changed the world – reading time 10 mins History explorer: D-Day beaches – reading time 6 mins D-Day: the WW2 battle through the eyes of the men who were there – reading time 14 mins “Free people everywhere should remember them": the Canadians' role in D-Day – reading time 10 mins Your guide to D-Day: what happened, how many casualties were there, and what did it accomplish? – reading time 7 mins Podcast series: D-Day: Land, Air and Sea
Desert raiders: the Long Range Desert Group in the Second World War
In June 1940, a science writer named Ralph Bagnold was authorised to create a British special forces unit which would operate in Italian-occupied Libya during the Second World War, gathering intelligence and carrying out raids behind enemy lines. Bagnold called the unit the Long Range Desert Group – and it would become a vital part of the 8th Army's desert operations. Writer and historian Gavin Mortimer explores the formation of the innovative unit…
Ralph Bagnold was not your typical special forces commander. Slight of build, studious by nature and in his early forties in 1939, he was earning a living as a science writer when the Second World War began. Yet within a year he had raised Britain's special forces unit, the Long Range Desert Group, and earned a reputation as an intrepid innovator of warfare. Bagnold had explored large swathes of the North African desert in the late 1920s and early 1930s when he was stationed in Cairo with the British army. Travelling into the brutal terrain in Model T Fords, he and a small group of like-minded adventurers had been the first Europeans to penetrate into the heart of the Libyan Desert. When he was recalled to the army on the outbreak of war, Bagnold was posted once more to Egypt and he quickly saw the possibility of forming a small reconnaissance force to enter Italian-occupied Libya and spy on the enemy. When was the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) formed? Authorised by Middle East Command in June 1940 to raise such a unit – which Bagnold called the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) – he recruited his men from the ranks of the New Zealand division and stipulated that: "Every vehicle, with a crew of three and a machine gun, was to carry its own supplies of food and water for 3 weeks, and its own petrol for 2,500 miles of travel across average soft desert surface, and each patrol was to carry a wireless set, navigating and other equipment, medical stores, spare parts and further tools." The LRDG embarked on its first patrol in August 1940, reconnoitring Italian positions in the Libyan desert (roughly the same size in land mass as India) and so successful were the missions that followed that in November that year, Bagnold was promoted to acting Lt-Colonel, given permission to form two new patrols and instructed to launch a series of hit-and-run raids against Italian targets in Libya. For his new recruits, Bagnold turned to the British army, forming two new patrols from the Guards (G Patrol) and from the Yeomanry Divisions (Y Patrol). For its inaugural operation, G Patrol was placed under the command of 44-year-old captain Pat Clayton, and given a target of Murzuk, a well-defended Italian fort in south-western Libya with an airfield close by. The fort was approximately 1,000 miles west of Cairo, a gruelling two-week journey for 76 raiders, who travelled in 23 vehicles. On 11 January, the raiding party stopped for lunch just a few miles from Murzuk and finalised their plan for the attack; Clayton would lead the attack on the airfield while G Patrol targeted the fort. Michael Crichton-Stuart, commander of G Patrol, recalled that as they neared the fort they passed a lone cyclist: “This gentleman, who proved to be the Postmaster, was added to the party with his bicycle. As the convoy approached the fort, above the main central tower of which the Italian flag flew proudly, the Guard turned out. We were rather sorry for them, but they probably never knew what hit them.” Opening fire 150 yards from the fort’s main gates, the LRDG force split, with the six trucks of Clayton’s patrol heading towards the airstrip. The terrain was up and down, and the LRDG made use of its undulations to destroy “a number of pill boxes scattered about, including an anti-aircraft pit”. By the time his patrol withdrew, they had destroyed three light bombers, a sizeable fuel dump and killed or captured all of the 20 guards. Meanwhile G Patrol had subjected the fort to a murderous mortar barrage, and after a brief firefight, the garrison surrendered. Clayton selected two prisoners to bring back to Cairo for interrogation and the rest were left in the shattered remnants of the fort. In February 1941, the demoralised Italian force in North Africa was bolstered by the arrival of General Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps. Within a few weeks of his arrival, Rommel – soon to be dubbed the ‘Desert Fox’ by his adversaries – had regained much of the territory lost by the Italians in the previous months. LDRG and the SAS Bagnold, meanwhile, worn down by the heat and the stress of raising the LRDG, handed over command of the unit in August 1941 to Lt-Col Guy Prendergast. Prendergast’s first challenge was to organise five LRDG patrols for a new large-scale Allied offensive in November 1941, the aim of which was to retake eastern Libya and its airfields. The LRDG’s role was the observation and reporting of enemy troop movements, alerting General Claude Auchinleck, commander of the 8th Army, as to what Rommel might be planning in response to the offensive. But they had an additional responsibility: to collect 55 British paratroopers after they had attacked enemy airfields at Gazala and Tmimi, a small unit which had been raised four months earlier by a charismatic young officer called David Stirling and had been designated L Detachment Special Air Service (SAS) Brigade. Read more | The real 'Rogue Heroes' of the early SAS Stirling had convinced Middle East HQ that the enemy was vulnerable to attack along the line of its coastal communications and various aerodromes and supply dumps, by small units of airborne troops attacking not just one target but a series of objectives. Stirling and his men parachuted into Libya on the night of 17 November and into what one war correspondent described as “the most spectacular thunderstorm within local memory”. Many of the SAS raiders were injured on landing, others were caught by the Germans in the hours that followed. The 21 storm-ravaged survivors were eventually rescued by the LRDG and driven to safety, among them a bitterly disappointed Stirling. Seeing Stirling's disappointment, Prendergast suggested that in future it might be more practical if the LRDG transported the SAS to their targets On 8 December, an LRDG patrol, comprising 19 Rhodesian soldiers and commanded by Captain Charles ‘Gus’ Holliman, left Jalo Oasis to take two SAS raiding parties (one of which was led by Stirling, the other by his second-in-command, Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne) to the airfields at Tamet and Sirte, 350 miles to the north-west. Although Stirling's party didn't meet with success, Mayne and his men wreaked havoc on Tamet, blowing up 24 aircraft and killing a number of aircrew as they relaxed in their billet. More successful cooperation between the LRDG and the SAS ensued with a five-man raiding party led by Lt Bill Fraser destroying 37 aircraft on Agedabia airfield. Mayne returned to Tamet at the end of December, laying waste to 27 planes that had recently arrived to replace the aircraft he’d accounted for a couple of weeks earlier. What was Bernard Montgomery's involvement in the Long Range Desert Group? Stirling and the SAS continued to rely on the LRDG as their ‘Libyan Taxi Service’ for the first six months of 1942, as they launched hit-and-run raids against German targets. But in June 1942 Rommel launched a major offensive that pushed the Allies out of Libya and into Egypt. One consequence of the German advance was the removal of General Auchinleck as 8th Army commander, replaced by Bernard Montgomery. ‘Monty’, as the new commander was known, instructed the LRDG and the SAS “to do everything possible to upset the enemy’s communications behind the Alamein line and to destroy aircraft on his forward landing grounds”, preparatory to an offensive of his own which would come to be known as the battle of El Alamein. By July the SAS had acquired their own transport, allowing the LRDG – now comprising 25 officers and 278 other ranks – to focus on their crucial role as Montgomery's eyes and ears. For weeks, the LRDG carried out reconnaissance patrols in the heart of the Libyan desert, penetrating enemy territory through the ‘Qattara Depression’, an astonishing natural feature 150 miles long, half as broad, and 450 feet below the Mediterranean at its deepest point. It was a pin-prick on the earth’s surface but a crueller, more desolate spot would be hard to imagine, particularly in July under the midday sun. The Axis forces believed the Depression was inaccessible to vehicles so it was left unguarded, enabling the LRDG to drive through and observe enemy troop dispositions. Noting everything they saw, from the weight of traffic on the road to what the trucks were carrying, their intelligence provided Montgomery with important information about the strength of the enemy. "Not only is the standard of accuracy and observation exceptionally high but the Patrols are familiar with the most recent illustration of enemy vehicles and weapons," concluded the director of military intelligence in Cairo in December, adding: "Without their reports we should frequently have been in doubt as to the enemy’s intentions, when knowledge of them was all important." By December 1942 the battle of El Alamein had swung the desert war decisively the way of the Allies, and as the 8th Army pursued the Germans west across Libya towards Tunisia, so the LRDG was in the vanguard of the advance. Rommel was compelled to pull back all the way to the Mareth Line, approximately 170 miles west of Tripoli, so in January 1943, Montgomery ordered the LRDG to reconnoitre the country to the south of the Line where he intended to outflank the Germans with what he called his ‘left hook’. This the LRDG carried out with their customary diligence and determination, blazing a trail for the 8th Army that eased their advance into Tunisia, and contributed to the defeat of the Afrika Korps. In a letter to Colonel Guy Prendergast on 2 April, Montgomery thanked him for the work of his men in winning the war in North Africa. “My dear Prendergast … I would like you to know how much I appreciate the excellent work done by your patrols and by the SAS. Without your careful and reliable reports the launching of the ‘left hook’ by the NZ Division would have been a leap in the dark; with the information they produced, the operation could be planned with some certainty and as you know, went off without a hitch. Please give my thanks to all concerned and best wishes from Eighth Army for the new tasks you are undertaking. B.L. Montgomery” Gavin Mortimer is a best-selling writer, historian and television consultant and the author of The Long Range Desert Group in World War II, (Osprey Publishing 2017) This article was firs published by HistoryExtra in 2017
“Their name liveth for evermore”: the difficult task of locating, identifying and honouring the dead of WW1
The First World War forever changed not only how wars were fought, but how nations honour their fallen soldiers. Gavin Mortimer explores how this was down to one man who wanted to ensure that the dead would never be forgotten...
On 18 November 1918, one week after the armistice had finally brought an end to the First World War, George Macdonogh, the Adjutant-General of the British Army, chaired a conference to examine how best to locate and bury the hundreds of thousands of war dead. One measure agreed at the meeting was to divide the Western Front into sectors: the Canadians would be responsible for searching the Albert/Courcelette area and Vimy Ridge; the Australians for Pozières and Villers-Bretonneux; the French for the Aisne/Marne battleground of 1914; and the British would take charge of the rest. It would be grisly work, stated Macdonogh, so volunteers would paid an extra two shillings and six pence a day. The exhumation companies, who with the customary dark humour of the British Tommy dubbed themselves ‘Travelling Garden Parties’, were composed of squads of 32 men each. Their tools were “two pairs of rubber gloves, two shovels, stakes to mark the location of graves found, canvas and rope to tie up remains, stretchers, cresol [a poisonous and colourless compound] and wire cutters.” Read more | Remembering the First World War: blood, poppies and poetry The men who volunteered for the exhumation companies had all fought in the trenches, so they knew the tell-tale signs of where bodies may be found. They looked for grass that had turned slightly blue indicating a body underneath, holes in the ground made by rats digging out a bone, or the butt of a rifle just visible in the mud. When they located a corpse, the men retrieved the identity discs and personnel effects, then placed the remains on a canvas sheet soaked in cresol. “Working in the fields digging up the bodies, a very unpleasant job,” wrote Australian Private William McBeath in his diary on 15 April 1919. Two days later, he described how his work was interrupted by an unwelcome visitor: “Working in cemetery. An English lady came over to see her son’s grave, found him lying in a bag and fainted.” The English poet and writer John Masefield, who had worked as an orderly in a field hospital in France, believed the work of the exhumation companies would prove futile. "The places where they lie will be forgotten or changed," he wrote in his book The Battle of the Somme. "Green things will grow, or have already grown, over their graves. It may be that all these dead will some day be removed to a national graveyard." But Masefield’s scepticism was misplaced, for he had not reckoned on the efforts of one of the unsung heroes of the war, Fabian Ware. More than any other person, he ensured that a century after “the war to end all wars”, the graves of the fallen would remain immaculate and honoured. One man's war The Bristol-born Ware was 45 when the war began. His professional life hitherto had been varied, including a stint as an educational administrator in South Africa, a spell editing The Morning Post newspaper and, in 1914, a post as the special commissioner to the Rio Tinto mining company. He was desperate to do his bit for the war effort, but he was too old to fight. Undeterred, he used his contacts to travel to France as the head of a mobile unit of the British Red Cross. Along with a band of volunteers, men in possession of automobiles, he drove around the northern French countryside collecting the wounded at a time when the war had yet to develop into static trench warfare. As Ware went about his work, he grew increasingly concerned at the way the army was dealing with its dead. Soldiers would be buried where they fell in shallow graves and with a rudimentary wooden cross, if even that. There was no attempt to log the burials and Ware believed the graves would be destroyed in future fighting. Read more | All Quiet on the Western Front historian’s review: An ambitious, visceral exploration of life and loss in WW1 Remembering the fallen around the world Thanbyuzayat War Cemetery The cemetery in the rugged foothills of Myanmar (formerly Burma) is a testament to the brutality experienced by Allied POWs under Japanese rule. It contains the graves of 3,149 Commonwealth and 621 Dutch men who died building the notorious Burma-Siam railway. Kohima War Cemetery With more than 1,400 British and Indian graves, this cemetery in Nagaland stands on the scene of bloody fighting in the spring of 1944 when Japan tried to invade India. Inscribed on the memorial to the dead is: “When you go home / Tell them of us and say / For your tomorrow / We gave our today.” Beach Cemetery, Gallipoli To the ANZAC troops (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), the beach below the cliffs at Gallipoli, Turkey, would become known as ‘Hell Spit’. At Beach Cemetery, nearly 400 bodies now lie near the sea from which they had come ashore on 25 April 1915. London Cemetery, Somme There are few places better to remember the horrors of the First World War, and bear witness to the unlearned lessons of the 20th century, than the Somme. Nearly 4,000 from that war are buried here, plus 165 from the Second World War, mostly men from the Highland Division killed in 1940. Devonshire Cemetery Also on the Western Front, this cemetery contains 163 graves, the majority from the regiment after whom it is named. They were killed on 1 July 1916, the first day of the battle of the Somme. A memorial at the entrance reads: “The Devonshires held this trench; the Devonshires hold it still.” Grave Island Cemetery One of the most inaccessible cemeteries is on Grave Island, a tiny coral off the coast of Zanzibar. It takes 20 minutes by boat to reach the island, and visitors have to wade ashore. The 24 graves there are for sailors from HMS Pegasus, killed in action on 20 September 1914. So in October 1914, he persuaded, with the support of the Red Cross, the army to allow his unit to expand its remit. They would not only collect the wounded, but keep an official register of the location of every grave, placing a permanent marker on the spot. It hadn’t been difficult to win over the military. The war was evidently not going to be the short all-over-by-Christmas affair everyone had initially believed and hoped, but would last months, even years, and public opinion was becoming more critical as the casualties mounted. Before the 20th century, the British had attached little importance to honouring their fallen soldiers, with most being buried in mass graves and only the social elite and wealthiest accorded individual recognition. This had caused anger and distress in the Second Boer War (1899-1902) and the army acknowledged that it would be beneficial for morale if more humane methods were introduced. On the podcast | Robert Sackville-West describes attempts to identify the bodies of the dead after the devastating battles of the First World War In March 1915, Ware's unit – now comprising 121 vehicles – was rechristened the Graves Registration Commission. The Times ran a piece on their work the following month, which was no doubt intended as a fillip for worried families. "The first of these mobile units was formed in September, and has since been attached to the French Cavalry Division," commented the article. "Members of this unit have rendered excellent services in searching for the graves of British soldiers. In many cases the graves are marked by wooden crosses, upon which, however, such evidence of identity as could be traced had been often only pencilled. To these crosses metal plates are now being fixed, and records are being kept, so that the graves may be easily identified after the war." By now, the nature of the fighting on the Western Front had changed. It was no longer the fast, fluid conflict of the early autumn of 1914. The protagonists had dug in, constructing a complex trench system that stretched from Switzerland to the Channel. Heavy artillery attempted to blast the enemy out of their fortifications and when, in 1915, the infantry tried to seize trenches with the aid of poison gas – at the Second Battle of Ypres and Loos – the numbers of casualties were reaching appalling heights. Read more | Revolution on the western front Ware and his unit registered some 27,000 graves that year, which prompted General Douglas Haig, then a corps commander and later the commander of the British and Commonwealth Armies, to remark that their work has “an extraordinary moral value to the troops as well as to the relatives and friends of the dead at home”. In recognition of their role, the Graves Registration Commission was transferred from the Red Cross to the army and, on Ware’s insistence, a principle of ‘equality of treatment’ was agreed. For the first time, the dead would not be treated differently according to their rank, social status or wealth, meaning that every fallen soldier was to be honoured in the same way. What’s more, there would be no repatriation of bodies. An innovation in a soldier's identity Perhaps one of Fabian Ware’s most important innovations was the double identity disc. Made of compressed fibre – which was also used during World War II – they became standard issue in September 1916, replacing the thin aluminium dog tags that had been in use since in 1907, but had become harder to produce due to stocks of aluminium running low. The durable discs were red and green, and each carried the same information: the soldier’s name, number, rank and religion. The circular red tag could be retrieved by cutting its short string, leaving the eight-sided green tag on the body. So if a body was found with only the green, it meant that the death had already been reported. The details on it could then be used to prepare a grave marker. France facilitated the new policy in December by "ceding in perpetuity land for Allied graves in France", as reported in The Times. The paper also noted that Ware had been part of an official British Army delegation that called upon General Joseph Gallieni, Minister of War, at Christmas to express the "sincere thanks" of the nation. A National Committee for the Care of Soldiers’ Graves was established in early 1916, with the Prince of Wales as its president and Ware a committee member. By this point, the Graves Registration Commission had grown to an organisation employing 700 staff, a sombre testament to the scale of the task they had faced in the first 18 months of the war. Little did Ware know, however, as he moved his office to London in May, that the slaughter had only just begun. The battles of the Somme, Verdun and Passchendaele cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers – many blown to bits, drowned in mud or left to rot in no man’s land. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2010/12/6-GettyImages-515508880-bee17b3-e1576072344125.jpg" width="1024" height="764" alt="Many bodies were left where they fell and quickly lost in no man’s land, such as here in the destroyed forests of Alsace-Lorraine. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="Many bodies were left where they fell and quickly lost in no man’s land, such as here in the destroyed forests of Alsace-Lorraine. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> Honouring the dead There was only so much that could be accomplished while the fighting continued. When the guns finally fell silent on 11 November 1918, Ware’s work began in earnest. He was now a Major General and vice-chairman of the Imperial War Graves Commission (rechristened the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1960). It had been granted a Royal Charter in May 1917 and the Prince of Wales appointed the inaugural president. Ware was faced with a staggering list of 500,000 missing soldiers, nearly the same figure as those men with a grave. His first task was to start the search for remains, while at the same time beginning the long, complex and sensitive task of how best to honour the fallen. The War Graves Commission had discussed the issue in its first meeting in November 1917, at which Sir Frederic Kenyon, then Director of the British Museum, accepted an invitation to act as architectural advisor. Answering to him were four principal architects: Sir Edwin Lutyens, Reginald Blomfield, Herbert Baker and Charles Holden. Read more | 11 November 1918: The day the world turned upside down Kenyon spent that winter visiting the Western Front and in January 1918 he wrote a report in which he stated: “The general appearance of a British cemetery will be that of an enclosure with plots of grass or flowers (or both) separated by paths of varying size, and set with orderly rows of headstones, uniform in height and width.” There would be no distinction in death between officers and their men. An aristocrat might lie next to a miner, a Muslim next to a Catholic, an Englishman next to an Indian, and their headstones would be identical save for the inscription on each giving the soldier’s name, rank, regiment and date of death. It was agreed that families could choose a personal inscription at the foot of the headstone, although it was not to exceed 66 letters, and each grave would bear a Christian cross unless requested otherwise. The Star of David was engraved on headstones of Jewish soldiers and in each cemetery there would be a Cross of Sacrifice and a Stone of Remembrance, made from Portland limestone wherever possible. Inscriptions were initially charged at three and a half pence per letter, but the fee was later made voluntary after an outcry. Cemetery and memorial inscriptions: Kipling finds the right words When the Commission needed suitably respectful and timeless inscriptions for the cemeteries and memorials, they turned to famous writer Rudyard Kipling. Some, like Tory MP Hugh Cecil, objected as he was “not a known religious man”, but Kipling had plenty of emotional attachment to the project. His only son, John, had died at the Battle of Loos in 1915 and had no known grave. For the Stones of Remembrance in each cemetery, he chose the biblical words "Their Name Liveth For Evermore" and headstones of the unknown were inscribed with "A Soldier of the Great War – Known Unto God". He also put forward "The Glorious Dead" for the Cenotaph. The Commission was accused by newspapers and relatives in 1920 of being bureaucratic and cruel for refusing personalised headstones, to which Kipling retorted: “I wish some of the people who are making this trouble realised how more than fortunate they are to have a name on a headstone in a named place.” He died in 1936, but his son’s grave was not identified until 1992. This policy didn’t meet with universal approval. In 1919, a petition was handed to the government, having been backed by sections of the press, demanding that “relatives of those who fell in the war should be allowed to erect monuments of their own choosing over the graves”. On the eve of the House of Commons discussing the motion in April 1920, Sir George Perley, High Commissioner for Canada, wrote to the Chairman of the Imperial War Graves Commission, Winston Churchill, warning that “this motion seems to me to strike directly at the root of the principle of equality of treatment of war graves”. Churchill agreed, as did the majority of the House, and in throwing out the motion, he said: “There is no reason why, in periods as remote from our own as we ourselves are from the Tudors, the graveyards in France... shall not remain an abiding and supreme memorial.” While the architects, accountants and administrators worked – managing to keep to the original estimate of £10 per grave – it was left to the exhumation companies to locate the dead. None would ever forget the horror of their task. “For the first week or two I could scarcely endure the experiences we met with,” recalled Private McCauley. “Often have I picked up the remains of a fine brave man on a shovel. Just a little heap of bones and maggots to be carried to the common burial place... I shuddered as my hands, covered in soft flesh and slime, moved about in search of the [identity] disc.” The work of the Commission today The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) has responsibility for the graves of nearly 1.7 million servicemen and women killed during the two world wars. In total, there are 23,000 locations across more than 150 countries, with the largest cemetery being in Tyne Cot, Belgium (almost 12,000 burials) and the smallest in Ocracoke Island, US, where four British sailors killed in 1942 are buried. While the CWGC holds historical workshops at home and abroad to increase awareness of its work and the sacrifice of the men and women it honours, it also continues to bury the dead. In August 2018, four Canadian soldiers were laid to rest in Loos British Cemetery in France. Their remains had been discovered during a munitions clearing process in 2010 and 2011. After years of historical, genealogical, anthropological and DNA analysis, the quartet – all killed during the Battle of Hill 70 in 1917 – had been identified. Such diligence extends to the team of more than 850 CWGC gardeners who work to keep the cemeteries so immaculate. Among them, until his death in 2017, was Ibrahim Jaradah, who tended the Gaza War Cemetery in Palestine for 60 years. The bulk of the work would not be completed until 1937. By then, there were nearly 1,000 cemeteries across France and Belgium, containing some 600,000 headstones and 18 larger memorials to the missing. That same year, the Duke of Gloucester succeeded the Prince of Wales as president of the Commission. In his inaugural speech, he described the “great privilege” of his appointment and added: “I have heard, on many occasions, of the comfort which the work of the Commission has brought to relatives overseas as well as at home.” One of those headstones marked the grave of 21-year-old Second Lieutenant Walter John Warrell-Bowring, who was killed on 29 July 1916 and buried in the Aveluy Communal Cemetery Extension on the Somme. His parents chose an inscription that was also a plea: “Let those that come after see to it that his name is not forgotten.” Through the ongoing efforts of the Commission, a century after the end of World War I that plea is still being answered. Gavin Mortimer is a writer and historian. His latest book is David Stirling: The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS (Constable, 2022) This article was first published in the November 2018 issue of BBC History Revealed
How the early SAS became heroes of the Second World War
Gavin Mortimer explores how Britain’s daring commandos brought down Hitler’s empire in the Second World War
It was only fitting that a unit that would finish World War II as a byword for boldness began its life with an act of audacity. In July 1941, a tall, slender Scots Guards officer limped up to the front gate of Middle East Headquarters (MEHQ) in Cairo. Lieutenant David Stirling wasn’t long out of hospital, and he still carried the scars of a parachute accident the previous month. The 25-year-old officer had spent his convalescence working on an idea that he now intended to present to General Claude Auchinleck, commander-in chief of the Middle East Forces. The trouble was that Stirling didn’t have a pass to present to the sentries stationed outside the entrance to MEHQ. And no pass meant no entry. Having failed to sweet-talk his way past the guards, Stirling shuffled away in dejection, but then something caught his eye. A flap of the wire fence that encircled the headquarters was loose. Was it big enough to squeeze through? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, thought Stirling, and in an instant he was through the flap and making his way as fast as he could into MEHQ. Pitching in Once inside, Stirling located the office of General Neil Ritchie, the deputy chief of staff and a family friend of long-standing. The breathless young officer saluted, handed Ritchie the memo, and briefly explained its contents. The General ran an eye over the memo, then over Stirling, and said he would show it to Auchinleck. Three days later, Stirling was summoned to MEHQ. This time he did have a pass, and an appointment with General Auchinleck. He wanted to know more, so Stirling elaborated on his idea. “I argued the advantages of establishing a unit based on the principle of the fullest exploitation of surprise and of making the minimum demands. on manpower and equipment,” he wrote shortly after the war had finished. “I sought to prove that, if an aerodrome or transport park was the objective of an operation, then the destruction of 50 aircraft or units of transport was more easily accomplished by a sub-unit of five men than a force of 200.” And his force wouldn’t just attack one target on a given night, but several, sowing fear and confusion into the mind of the enemy. Auchinleck liked what he heard. He was new to his job, having replaced General Wavell as commander-in-chief the previous month, and the war in North Africa against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps was not going well. It was clear to Auchinleck that desert warfare offered opportunities to the bold and unconventional, and Stirling’s proposal was certainly that. Promoting Stirling to captain, Auchinleck authorised him to recruit six officers and 60 other ranks to a unit that was designated ‘L’ Detachment of the Special Air Service Brigade – that way, if one of the myriad enemy spies lurking in Cairo got wind of the force, he would report back to his German masters that the British now had an airborne brigade in Egypt. Read more | Did appeasement cause the Second World War? The men Stirling recruited to his new unit were representative of Great Britain – there were Scots, Welsh, Irish and English. Some were regular soldiers before the war, others hotel managers, tile fitters and solicitors. What united them was a thirst for adventure. “We were just hanging around in the desert getting fed up,” recalled Jeff Du Vivier, a Londoner who had worked in the hotel trade before enlisting in 1940. “Then along came Stirling asking for volunteers. I was hooked on the idea from the beginning, it meant we were going to see some action.” From painter to warrior: Colonel David Stirling David Stirling was 23 when World War II broke out. An aristocratic dreamer who had failed in his ambition of becoming a Bohemian painter in Paris, he was commissioned into the Scots Guards, and soon his quest for romantic adventure led him to volunteer for the new unit formed in 1940 called the British Commandos. Among Stirling’s fellow commando officers were the novelist Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill, the Prime Minister’s son. Shipped to the Middle East in early 1941, the Commandos spent several frustrating months launching a series of largely unsuccessful seaborne raids against German and Italian targets in Libya, Syria and Crete. At 6ft 6in, Stirling was not physically a natural commando, but had the intelligence, innovation and adaptability of a man ideally suited to guerrilla warfare. In war, Stirling found his vocation, and it was inevitable that peace would once more leave him feeling restless and unfulfilled. He dabbled in business in Africa and Britain, but never found anything to match the excitement of the war years. Knighted in 1990, Stirling died a few months later aged 74. Another of the recruits, Aberdonian Jimmy Storie, enjoyed the philosophy of the new force, commenting: “In the SAS you were treated as men; in the rest of the army you did what your sergeant said or the lieutenant said, but in the SAS... you got your say.” Throughout the rest of the summer and into the autumn, the SAS trained at their base at Kabrit, a desolate desert location 90 miles east of Cairo. The unit was divided into One and Two Troops under the command of Jock Lewes, a former president of the Oxford University Boat Club, and Blair ‘Paddy’ Mayne, a 6ft 4in Ulsterman who had. played rugby before the war for Ireland and the British Lions. Mission complete: the SAS hit list Agedabia, Libya: December 1941 Five men creep onto a German airfield and, in the darkness, plant bombs on 37 aircraft, managing to withdraw unseen as the explosions rock the desert. Sidi Haneish, Egypt: July 1942 Eighteen heavily armed jeeps appear out of the desert darkness and lay waste to a remote German airfield, destroying or damaging 40 aircraft in a blizzard of gunfire. Murro di Porco, Sicily: July 1943 The SAS are in the vanguard of the Sicily invasion, landing in darkness and capturing three powerful coastal guns ahead of the arrival of the main invasion fleet. Op. Baobab, Italy: January 1944 Ten SAS raiders land on the Italian east coast by canoe and blow up the railway bridge on the line linking Ancona and Rimini. OP. Houndsworth: June – August 1944 In three months of guerrilla warfare in occupied central France, an SAS squadron kill 220 Germans, derail six trains and destroy 23 vehicles. The training was brutal and relentless, but by the end of October the men were survival experts, masters of navigation, explosives specialists and certified paratroopers. They were now ready for their first operation. It was timed to coincide with a major British offensive, codenamed ‘Crusader’, the aim of which was to retake the eastern coastal regions of Libya that had been lost to the Germans just the previous June. Bumpy start The task of the SAS was to parachute into enemy territory and attack the airfields at Gazala and Tmimi, in eastern Libya, at midnight on 17 November. They took off in five aircraft in the early evening of 16 November, and flew straight into one of the fiercest storms to sweep the region in years. In his report on the operation, a laconic Blair Mayne described the landing as “unpleasant,” adding: “I estimated the wind speed at 20-25 miles per hour, and the ground was studded with thorny bushes.” In his diary, Jeff Du Vivier recounted how the wind had dragged him 150 yards until finally he snagged on a thorn bush. “When I finally freed myself, I was bruised and bleeding and there was a sharp pain in my right leg,” he wrote. “When I saw the rocky ground I’d travelled over, I thanked my lucky stars that I was alive.” Enemy number 1: how Hitler reacted to the SAS Special forces were a new phenomenon to Adolf Hitler, a veteran of World War I when the nature of trench warfare made such soldiers unnecessary. Consequently, like many men of his generation, he regarded special forces as little more than terrorists, and his prejudice became murderous in the autumn of 1942. The Nazi leader was incensed by reports that Canadian troops who had raided the French port of Dieppe in August 1942 had bound the hands of Germans prisoners, some of whom drowned. Then, on the night of 4 October, a 14-strong commando raiding party landed on the Channel Island of Sark and killed a number of Germans. News of the deaths provoked Hitler into issuing the same month what came to be known as his Commando Order, in which he instructed his military that all captured Allied commandos or similar units were to be “annihilated to the last man”. The Order, issued in the utmost secrecy, was ignored by a small number of senior German officers, most notably Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who continued to adhere to the Geneva Conventions. But he was in the minority. The first SAS soldiers to die as a consequence of the Order were a group of raiders who parachuted into Italy in September 1943 to sabotage railway lines. The British learned of the Commando Order in April 1944, when one of their offiers returned to the UK having escaped from a German military hospital in Italy with the connivance of a sympathetic German doctor, who had been ordered to hand the wounded SAS officer to the SS. Initially, his testimony was treated with scepticism by British authorities, but in August 1944 two SAS soldiers escaped execution in a French forest by sprinting into the trees before their executioners had organised themselves into a firing squad. They eventually returned to the UK and revealed all. By then, more than 70 SAS and SBS soldiers had been executed, and more would die in 1945 as a result of the Commando Order. After the war, an SAS War Crimes Investigation Team spent three years pursing those responsible and bringing them to justice, which in some cases meant the gallows for Nazis who had murdered on the orders of their Führer. Then it began to rain, a deluge that turned the dried river beds (‘wadis’) into raging rivers. The temperature dropped and suddenly the mission became not a daring raid but a fight for survival. “I was shivering, not shaking,” described Du Vivier. “All the bones in my body were numbed. I couldn’t speak, every time I opened my mouth my teeth just cracked against one another.” Of the 54 men who took part in the inaugural SAS raid, only 21 returned to British lines. The rest were killed or captured. Not one enemy plane was destroyed. Stirling gathered the survivors, and with characteristic confidence, told them it was a setback but certainly not the end. He promised there would be “a next time,” prompting Du Vivier to tell his diary: “I don’t fancy a next time if this is what it’s going to be like.” Down to earth Stirling fulfilled his promise. There was a “next time”, and it was only a few weeks after the disastrous first raid. The targets were the same – German and Italian airfields in Libya – but the modus operandi was different. Instead of parachuting, the SAS would be driven in trucks to the target by the Long Range Desert Group before making the final approach on foot. Read more | Why December 1941 was the most important month of the Second World War Paddy Mayne scored the first success for the SAS in December 1941, leading eight men onto the airfield at Tamet. As the huge Irishman passed a building en route to the aircraft, he heard voices. The special forces expand… The idea for a seaborne special forces unit came from Roger Courtney in the summer of 1940. A former big-game hunter and adventurer in Africa, Courtney envisioned sending canoeists to raid German targets in occupied France. Once established, this small unit – called the Special Boat Section (SBS) – were sent in early 1941 not to Europe but to the Middle East. However, within the year, Courtney’s health broke down and he returned to the UK, leaving the SBS in the hands of David Stirling and his SAS. In the summer of 1942, the SBS launched a series of raids on the Mediterranean islands of Crete and Rhodes, the men paddling ashore from submarines, before moving inland on foot and attacking airfields. Dozens of aircraft were destroyed, but at a high cost of men killed or captured. In September 1942, Stirling was given permission to increase the size of the SAS to regimental strength, enabling him to form a squadron dedicated to seaborne guerrilla warfare. They were rechristened the Special Boat Squadron, and throughout the rest of the war they operated with ferocious audacity, attacking German targets in the Aegean before taking the war onto the European mainland in Greece, Yugoslavia and Italy. Their methods weren’t to everyone’s tastes. One British MP described them during a Commons debate as “a band of murderous, renegade cut-throats,” to which Churchill replied: “If you do not take your seat and keep quiet I will send you out to join them.” “I kicked open the door and stood there with my Colt 45, the others at my side with a Tommy gun and another automatic,” he later recalled. “The Germans stared at us. We were a peculiar and frightening sight, bearded and unkempt hair. For what seemed an age we just stood there looking at each other in complete silence. I said: ‘Good evening’. At that a young German arose and moved slowly backwards. “I shot him… I turned and fired at another some six feet away. He was standing beside the wall as he sagged… the room was by now in pandemonium.” Leaving four men to deal with the German air crew, Mayne and the rest of the raiders moved onto the airfield and festooned 24 planes with bombs. Then they withdrew, calmly striding off the airfield and melting into the darkness as the 30-minute fuses started to detonate. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2016/11/GettyImages78988607-cee5a8b-e1666700915592.jpg" width="620" height="412" alt="British troops of the Special Air Service (SAS) drop from a helicopter, into a jungle clearing in search of bandits (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)" title="British troops of the Special Air Service (SAS) drop from a helicopter, into a jungle clearing in search of bandits (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)" /> A fortnight later, another SAS raiding party surpassed Mayne’s tally, wreaking havoc at the airfield at Agedabia. Jeff Du Vivier was among the party, describing in his diary the “blood-curdling deafening roar” as the bombs on 37 aircraft exploded. “Though we must have been at least half a mile away by this time,” wrote Du Vivier, “we felt the concussion press on our lungs.” The raids continued in 1942, and by June the SAS had destroyed more than 150 enemy aircraft along with supply dumps and enemy vehicles. Pushing boundaries: other special forces Long Range Desert Group The pioneers of British special forces in World War II, the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) were formed in June 1940 by Ralph Bagnold, a desert explorer in the. inter-war years. Their primary role was the reconnaissance of enemy positions, although later in the Desert War the LRDG navigated SAS raiders to their targets. Chindits Determined to strike back at the Japanese in the Far East, the British Army raised a special forces unit to penetrate deep into the Burmese jungle, waging a guerrilla war against their enemy in 1943 and 1944. Commanded by Orde Wingate, the Chindits were named after the mythical Burmese creature. Z Special Unit An Anglo-Australian unit formed to attack Japanese targets in the Far East, Z Force carried out dozens of missions by sea and parachute. The most successful operation was in 1943, when six men paddled into Singapore’s harbour and sank or damaged seven Japanese ships using limpet mines. Marine Raiders The first US unit to be formed for purely guerrilla warfare, the US Marine Raiders Battalion was established in 1942 under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson. They took part in a number of raids on Pacific islands, using their jungle skills to good effect during the bitter battle for Guadalcanal. Fallschirmjäger Formed in the 1930s, German airborne units played a significant role in the rapid occupation of the Low Countries in May 1940. A year later, a mass airborne drop captured the island of Crete, but the heavy casualty rate deterred Hitler from using his paratroopers again in similar operations. Tenth Light Flotilla Italy’s underwater special forces unit used 22-feet mini submarines to attack British shipping in the Mediterranean. The flotilla’s biggest coup was in December 1941, when three subs, each crewed by two frogmen, slipped into Alexandria Port and sank two British battleships by placing limpet mines on their hulls. The Germans responded by strengthening airfield defences, so Stirling altered the SAS tactics, procuring a fleet of jeeps armed with heavy machine guns capable of firing 1,200 rounds a minute. Sidi Haneish airfield was attacked in the early hours of 26 July with the 18 jeeps emerging out of the darkness in two columns. “Gun discipline was vital,” recalled Jimmy Storie, a gunner on one jeep. “We had to keep in a strict formation, two abreast, firing outwards the whole time.” Read more | The eastern front in WW2: how it all went wrong for the Germans More than 40 aircraft were destroyed or badly damaged as the SAS drove methodically up and down the airfield. It was a pattern repeated in the weeks that followed, the British raiders accounting for 86 enemy aircraft downs in the space of a month. New horizons Stirling’s luck eventually ran out in January 1943. The previous October, General Montgomery’s Eighth Army had gone on the offensive at El Alamein, sending the Germans into a headlong retreat west across Libya towards Tunisia. Stirling was captured as he led a reconnaissance patrol into Tunisia, and the founder of the SAS spent the rest of the war in Colditz, Germany. Read more | A short history of long-distance warfare It was a heavy blow to the SAS at a time when their existence was being discussed at the top level. Though they had expanded into regimental size in September 1942, the SAS was still considered a guerrilla force by many senior British officers, ideally suited for desert warfare but not on mainland Europe. With Stirling captured, it was left to his replacement, Paddy Mayne, to argue for their continuation. The Irishman was successful, leading the SAS ashore during the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, and then taking them into Italy where they fought a series of bloody engagements as the Allies pushed slowly north. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2016/11/96c.GettyImages-154422434-bcf356c-scaled-e1666700443487.jpg" width="620" height="412" alt="Photo of a SAS jeep patrol" title="A Special Air Service jeep patrol is greeted by its commander, Colonel David Stirling, on its return from the desert, 18 January 1943. (Photo by Capt. G Keating/ Imperial War Museums via Getty Images)" /> In 1944, the SAS reverted once more to guerrilla warfare to complement the main Allied landings in Normandy. A typical SAS operation in the summer of 1944 was the one codenamed ‘Houndsworth’, undertaken by the men of ‘A’ Squadron, 1SAS. Parachuting into the wooded countryside approximately 80 miles west of Dijon, their tasks were to cut railway lines between Lyon and Paris, arm and train the French Resistance, and generally harry the German reinforcements being sent to Normandy, where the main Allied invasion fleet was fighting its way inland. In three months, ‘A’ Squadron killed or wounded 220 Germans, derailed six trains and destroyed 23 vehicles. Jeff Du Vivier was partly responsible for one of the trains. “We found a suitable spot and set about laying the charge,” he wrote in his report on the incident. “I had decided that we should make three charges and join them together with cortex at 50 feet apart and all under the same rail.” The first train that came down the line triggered charges, “completely wrecking” the engine and derailing and damaging ten wagons laden with munitions. Red-Letter day In total the SAS Brigade was estimated to have killed 7,733 German soldiers during operations in France. Around 740 motorised vehicles were destroyed, seven trains, 89 wagons and 29 locomotives. 33 trains were derailed and railway lines were cut on 164 occasions, and the SAS called in more than 400 air strikes on German targets. So impressed was General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, that he expressed his gratitude in a letter to the SAS, commenting: “I wish to send my congratulations to all ranks of the Special Air Service Brigade on the contribution which they have made to the success of the Allied Expeditionary Force. “The ruthlessness with which the enemy have attacked Special Air Service troops has been an indication of the injury which you were able to cause to the German armed forces both by your own efforts and by the information which you gave of German disposition and movements.” An end to the horror By the time the last of the SAS squadrons had withdrawn from France, the Allies were well on the way to winning the war in Europe. In March 1945, elements of the SAS were in the vanguard of the advance into Germany – several soldiers were veterans of the first raid of November 1941, men who thought that they had seen the very worst war had to offer. Then on the morning of 15 April, an SAS patrol drove through a pine forest and saw up ahead a signpost to a place called Belsen. New challenges: the SAS post-WWII Despite vigorous campaigning by the SAS to remain a part of the British Army, the regiment was disbanded in October 1945, with the new government believing that the postwar world had no need for a special forces unit. Its optimism was soon brutally shattered as the British Empire began to crack under the pressure of countries demanding independence. In the summer of 1947, it was decided that a territorial regiment should be raised, and within 12 months it numbered 200, with a third of those veterans of the wartime SAS. Their first deployment was to Malaya (now known as Malaysia) to fight a communist insurrection, which launched its guerrilla attacks from jungle bases. In 1952, a regular SAS was formed – 22SAS – which today comprises four squadrons of approximately 60 soldiers. Once Britain granted Malaya its independence in 1957, the SAS spent the next 20- odd years fighting other insurgencies in far-flung outposts of the Empire, including Aden and Oman, away from the glare of publicity. It was the emergence of Irish and Islamic terrorism in the 1970s and 80s that propelled the SAS into the global spotlight, most memorably when live on television they spectacularly ended the siege at the Iranian Embassy in May 1980. Heavily involved in the conflicts in the Falklands, Afghanistan and Iraq, the SAS remain the world’s most secretive and most elite fighting force. “We imagined that a concentration camp was similar to a barracks,” recalled Sergeant Duncan Ridler. The SAS drove up to the main gate and peered through the three-metre wire fences. “We had never seen people looking like this,” said Ridler. “They were all trying to say something – not shouting – their faces dull, exhausted, emotionless, not capable of expressing joy or excitement as had everyone else in Europe.” It was a sight those SAS men present never forgot. A unit that had been formed to fight in the chivalrous theatre of North Africa had come face to face with the depravity of the Nazi regime. Yet because of their audacity, their ingenuity and their initiative, the SAS had played a small but significant part in bringing down Hitler’s evil empire. Gavin Mortimer is the author of David Stirling: The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS (Constable, 2022), which he discusses on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast This article was originally published in the November 2016 edition of BBC History Revealed
How was Britain's elite special forces unit formed, and what part has it played in history? Gavin Mortimer discusses the SAS's role over the previous 80 years...
What is the SAS? The SAS (Special Air Service) is Britain’s elite special forces unit, formed in the summer of 1941 by two Scottish brothers, David and Bill Stirling, who were stationed in Cairo. The war in North Africa was not going well for the British, and the Stirlings came up with the idea for a small parachute unit of volunteers to undertake guerrilla raids deep inside enemy territory. The first operation was launched on 16 November 1941, but it coincided with a fierce storm, and of the 55 men who parachuted into Libya to attack German and Italian airfields, 34 were killed or captured. Undeterred, David Stirling changed tactics for their next raid in December and hitched a lift to the target in lorries driven by the Long Range Desert Group, another special forces unit which was adept at reconnaissance. This time, the SAS destroyed 24 aircraft and a petrol dump on Tamet Airfield without suffering any loses. What made it ‘special’? Although the British Army had in 1940 formed a parachute battalion in the UK (which would become the Parachute Regiment), the SAS was ‘special’ because it was much smaller in size and focused on guerrilla warfare, such as attacking enemy airfields and disrupting their lines of communication. Military parachuting was still in its infancy, but the Germans had demonstrated its potential during the invasion of the Low Countries. The SAS learned to parachute at its base 90 miles east of Cairo. Read more | Opinion: Why December 1941 was the most important month of the Second World War But, as the failure of the inaugural raid showed, the desert was not suitable for parachuting at this time. However, a second SAS regiment formed in 1943 and undertook several successful parachute operations in enemy territory in Italy. Both 1SAS and 2SAS parachuted into France after D-Day to support the Maquis (rural French Resistance fighters) in their guerrilla warfare. Where did the SAS go after North Africa? After the Allies’ defeat of the Axis forces in North Africa in May 1943, the SAS was involved in the invasions of Sicily and mainland Italy that summer. One of its most important tasks was the destruction of some powerful Italian guns on the southeast coast of Sicily, hours before the arrival of the main invasion fleet. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/10/2BWBTH2-078c054-e1666688967394.jpg" width="620" height="412" alt="2BWBTH2 Soldiers of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), a reconnaissance and raiding unit of the British Army during the Second World War. It was formed specifically to carry out deep penetration, covert reconnaissance patrols and intelligence missions from behind enemy lines. Because they were experts in desert navigation, they were sometimes assigned to guide other units, including the Special Air Service and secret agents across the desert. During the Desert Campaign between December 1940 and April 1943, the vehicles of the LRDG operated constantly behind the Axis lines." title="Soldiers of the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), a reconnaissance and raiding unit of the British Army during the Second World War. It was formed specifically to carry out deep penetration, covert reconnaissance patrols and intelligence missions from behind enemy lines. Because they were experts in desert navigation, they were sometimes assigned to guide other units, including the Special Air Service and secret agents across the desert. During the Desert Campaign between December 1940 and April 1943, the vehicles of the LRDG operated constantly behind the Axis lines." /> After taking part in operations in Italy, the SAS returned to the UK in early 1944 and began training for the invasion of France. Both 1 and 2SAS took part in missions deep inside Occupied France, where they waged an effective guerrilla war against the Nazis. Their heroic exploits earned the praise of Supreme Allied Commander (and future US president) Dwight Eisenhower, who praised the “ruthlessness” of the SAS in harassing the Germans. The SAS subsequently played an important role in Germany, acting as a motorised reconnaissance force for the Allied armour in the final weeks of the war in Europe. What happened to the SAS in 1945? The SAS was disbanded at the end of World War II because it was believed the new era of peace would have no place for such a unit. That view was soon proved naive. Not only did the Cold War begin, but many British colonies began agitating for independence. One of the colonies, Malaya, erupted into conflict in 1948 when the local communist party attempted to overthrow the British. The previous year, 1947, a territorial unit of the SAS – 21 – had been formed, and some of its soldiers were deployed in what became known as the Malayan Emergency. As the fighting intensified, it was decided in 1952 to raise a regular regiment – 22SAS – and in the next 20 years it fought in Malaya, Borneo, Yemen and for over a decade in Oman, where the SAS lost a dozen soldiers in fighting to protect the sultan from communist insurgents. Can anyone join the SAS? Only serving members of the Armed Forces can join the regular 22SAS Regiment, and few who attempt the notorious ‘Selection’ course make the grade. Applicants are tested psychologically as well as physically, and the course criteria that exist today were first laid down in the 1950s. Drawing on the wartime experience, the SAS listed the seven characteristics of the ideal recruit: initiative, self-discipline, independence of mind, an ability to work without supervision, stamina, patience and a sense of humour. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/10/G5EP0M-a836efe.jpg" width="4096" height="2731" alt="An SAS recruit for the territorial wing tackles a fence, weighted down with a 45lb pack, during endurance marches in the Brecon Beacons, Wales (Picture by Alamy)" title="An SAS recruit for the territorial wing tackles a fence, weighted down with a 45lb pack, during endurance marches in the Brecon Beacons, Wales (Picture by Alamy)" /> Today, ‘Selection’ comprises three stages, beginning with a three-week endurance test in the Brecon Beacons, Wales, in which candidates must prove themselves fit and good at navigation. Those that pass then head to the Belize jungle to see how they react in an alien environment, and if they survive that experience, they undergo ‘Escape & Evasion & Tactical Questioning’, a simulation of what would happen if they were caught. Only then has one earned the coveted SAS beret. What is the SAS most famous for? For many years after the war, few people knew of the SAS, but that changed on 30 April 1980 when six terrorists entered the Iranian Embassy in London and took 26 people hostage. The terrorists demanded the recognition of the Iranian province of Khuzestan, and the negotiations continued for six days until they murdered a hostage. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ordered the SAS to end the siege and the television footage of it storming the embassy and successfully freeing the hostages was beamed around the world. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/10/G4TJXW-e37f802-e1666688827875.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Members of the Special Air Service (SAS) enter the Iranian Embassy May 5, 1980, to end a six day siege in Central London. Nineteen hostages were rescued, and three gunmen shot dead (Picture by Alamy)" title="Members of the Special Air Service (SAS) enter the Iranian Embassy May 5, 1980, to end a six day siege in Central London. Nineteen hostages were rescued, and three gunmen shot dead (Picture by Alamy)" /> A decade later the SAS was in action in Iraq, operating behind enemy lines, and one of its patrols ran into trouble. The patrol’s exploits spawned a bestselling memoir by one of its men, Steven Billy Mitchell (writing under the pseudonym Andy McNab), entitled Bravo Two Zero, which was made into a television movie. Are there SAS legends? Plenty. Every SAS soldier is exceptional for having passed the gruelling selection process, but even among the elite there are some who stand out. Blair Mayne assumed command of the SAS after the capture of David Stirling by the Germans in 1943. A giant of a man, the former Irish rugby star combined courage with initiative and agility, and he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) on four occasions. Another superb wartime SAS man was Roy Farran of 2SAS, who received a DSO and three Military Crosses. Johnny Cooper joined the SAS in 1941 and served with the regiment for 18 years, fighting in Malaya and Oman after the war. Talaiasi Labalaba also fought in Oman, in 1972, when he was killed in the successful defence of the fort at Mirbat. A statue of the Fijian was unveiled at the SAS HQ in Herefordshire in 2009. Why is it so secret? The role of the SAS radically changed in the 1970s: instead of fighting insurgents in far-off countries, it now engaged a new enemy much closer to home. Terrorism as we know it today took root in Europe during the 1970s, most graphically when a group of Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 members of the Israeli Olympic squad in Munich in 1972. It arrived in Britain in 1974 when an Irish Republican Army (IRA) terror cell launched a bombing campaign. The cell was finally cornered in a London flat in December 1975 and surrendered after a six-day siege when it heard that the SAS had been summoned. Read more | Bullets and ballot boxes: a history of Anglo-Irish relations since the Easter Rising The following year, the SAS was deployed to Northern Ireland as the ‘Troubles’ intensified. It was a new type of war, one that required covert surveillance and stealth. Publicity, as much as the terrorists, became the enemy of the SAS, and the government adopted a policy that continues to this day of refusing to comment on special forces’ operations. What is the role of the SAS in the 21st century? The SAS continues to operate in many trouble spots around the world, but the exact nature of its activities is shrouded in secrecy. It was deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan at the beginning of the century, and is also believed to have been sent to Syria and Iraq in 2014–15 to help fight the Islamic State. Read more | Russia-Ukraine crisis: 9 milestone moments in history that explain today’s invasion In April this year, some media outlets claimed that the SAS had been training Ukrainian special forces in sabotage in their war against Russia, but as ever, there was no official confirmation. WATCH: SAS Rogue Heroes, a dramatisation of the history of the SAS by acclaimed writer Steve Knight, will air on BBC One on Sunday 30 October at 9pm, with episodes available on BBC iPlayer Gavin Mortimer is the author of David Stirling: The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS (Constable, 2022), which he discusses on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast This article was first published in the July 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
Special forces historian Gavin Mortimer casts a critical eye over David Stirling, who is renowned as the founder of the SAS in World War Two
Special forces historian Gavin Mortimer casts a critical eye over David Stirling, who is renowned as the founder of the SAS in the Second World War. Speaking to Rob Attar, Mortimer argues that Stirling’s wartime record was far less impressive than he claimed and that his legend has obscured the achievements of those around him. Gavin Mortimer is the author of David Stirling: The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS (Little Brown, 2022) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
Creating fake Paris: how one man built a mock city to fool WW1 German bombers
As German aircraft attacked Paris during WWI, one man had an idea: what if you could fool the enemy into dropping their bombs elsewhere? Gavin Mortimer tells the story of an audacious wartime ruse...
Tucked away in a British newspaper called The Globe in its edition of 4 October 1920 was a short story with an intriguing headline: “A Mock Paris: French Plan to Hoodwink German Raiders.” The ruse, explained the paper, had only just come to light, and it was almost too fantastical to be true. “Camouflaged streets, factories, dwelling houses, railways, with stations and trains complete, and in fact a camouflaged capital, was the gigantic task on which French engineers were engaged when the Armistice put an end to military operations,” ran the report. It was the brainchild of an electrical engineer called Jacopozzi; a way to draw German aircraft away from the capital and onto a fake conurbation where bombs could fall without causing death and destruction. But the Germans sued for peace as the city began to take shape and Jacopozzi’s ingenuity was never put to the test. Paris was first bombed by German aircraft on 30 August 1914, the first time that a capital city had been attacked in such a manner. Four small bombs were dropped from the hands of Ferdinand von Hiddessen and his observer from their Rumpler Taube monoplane. The casualties were minimal, but the wider psychological damage was profound. A little over a decade after the Wright brothers had made the first brief flight in an airplane, the Americans’ invention was a new and terrifying weapon of war. The home front was now a battlefront, and women and children were no longer safe from enemy fire. Death from above There were other sporadic attacks in the 18 months that followed, including the first attack by Zeppelins (named after their inventor, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin) in March 1915. The airships came from their bases in Belgium, but none caused serious casualties. However, on 29 January 1916, two Zeppelins appeared in the grey winter sky over the French capital. Their bombs wreaked havoc, killing 24 and wounding 30. The funerals of the dead were held on 7 February 1916 in a service that brought Paris to a standstill. Thousands of mourners lined the streets as six gun carriages carried the coffins to the Church of Notre-Dame de la Croix, and politicians and other dignitaries walked behind. The service was conducted by Cardinal Leon Adolphe Amette, the archbishop of Paris, who delivered what one British newspaper described as a “moving oration”. “Before you lie the victims of German barbarity, who fell on no field of battle,” he proclaimed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/04/GettyImages_104409919-d0cb0ae.png" width="1025" height="731" alt="Boulevard Voltaire in rubble following a raid by a German Gotha" title="Buildings along the historic Boulevard Voltaire are reduced to rubble following a raid by a German Gotha. The heavy bomber, which entered service in 1917, brought widespread carnage to the French capital (Photo by Getty Images)" /> “Their death will help the cause of mankind and will strengthen the vigorous determination to conquer, to reduce the enemy to impotence, and to prevent a repetition of his crime.” But the impotence was all French as the air attacks increased in the months that followed. Paris had a respite in 1917 when the Germans switched the focus of their air attacks to London, using their latest bomber aircraft, the Gotha. One raid in June left 162 Britons dead. The French knew their turn would come. But how could they defend themselves? How Fernand Jacopozzi built a fake Paris A man who thought he had a solution was an electrical engineer called Fernand Jacopozzi. A Florentine by birth, Jacopozzi had previously worked on the Paris International Exposition in 1900, a world’s fair that celebrated the achievements of the past century and looked forward to what the next 100 years held. Jacopozzi believed it would be a century of progress, one which could prove lucrative for an electrical engineer such as himself. He remained in Paris and, according to one contemporary newspaper, “made a special study of electric lighting”. How Jacopozzi became involved in this secret project is unclear - for obvious reasons. But at some point in late 1917, he was commissioned by the DCA [Défense contre Avions, the War Office department charged with protecting France from air attacks] to build a fake Paris in order to fool German bombers. As outlandish it sounds to modern minds, the plan made sense at the time. Enemy aircraft navigated their way to the capital at night not by technological aids but by topography. They simply followed the River Seine and then dropped their bombs. But the Seine is a meandering river that, once it cuts through the heart of Paris, under its famous bridges and past landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, then doubles back on itself not once, but twice, like the humps of a camel. It was on the second of these ‘humps’, in the suburb of Maisons-Laffitte, that the French instructed Jacopozzi to construct his phoney city. However, there were to be two other “zones of false objectives”: a fake industrial zone would be created at Vaires-sur-Marne, situated 10 miles east of the capital, while the suburb of Saint-Denis would be relocated to Villepinte in the northeast. Light railway system Jacopozzi began his work at Villepinte in 1918, constructing a replica of the Gare de l’Est railway station - one of Paris’ busiest - and even fabricating a moving train. Drawing on his years of study of electrical lighting, the Italian used wooden boards for the train’s carriages, and for the interior lights he rigged up an ingenious system of lights on a conveyor belt. From the air it appeared that the train was moving. The industrial zone was next. Jacopozzi once again used wooden boards for the shell of the factories and for the roofs he used canvases craftily dappled with various hues of paint. With a clever combination of different coloured lamps - whites, yellows and reds - he recreated the fires and vapours emitted by a factory during the manufacturing process. The key was subtlety; he didn’t want to arouse the Germans’ suspicion by lighting up his fake creations like a Christmas tree. It was painstaking work but Jacopozzi had all but finished when German Gotha aircraft raided the capital on 16 September, dropping 22,000 kilos of bombs that left six dead and 15 wounded. Next time the bombers returned the subterfuge would be put into operation. But there wasn’t a next time. Two months later the war ended and Jacopozzi was denied the chance to see if his ingenuity had outsmarted the German pilots. Nonetheless, the French government believed they had created an important form of defence should enemy bombers appear over Paris in a future war. A veil of secrecy was thrown over Jacopozzi’s creation, one which was lifted in 1920 when the British press got hold of the story. The Globe had the scoop at the start of October, but it was The Illustrated London News in its edition of 6 November 1920 that really brought Jacopozzi’s invention to life in a photo essay headlined: “A False Paris Outside Paris — a ‘City’ Created to be Bombed.” There were photographs, maps and explanations, all of which amounted to what the newspaper called “remarkably interesting revelations”. Read more | Moustaches, Cossacks and an inland lighthouse: a brief history of the Royal Air Force Towering achievements What they didn’t disclose, however, was the name of the man behind the sham city. But Jacopozzi was honoured by the French government with the presentation of the Legion d’Honneur, and he enjoyed great success in the 1920s. Having illuminated the Eiffel Tower, he also installed floodlights on the Place de la Concorde and lit up several other popular landmarks in the city. The corporate world spotted the potential in Jacopozzi’s talent and Citroën hired him to create a large luminous advertisement of one of their motor cars on the Eiffel Tower. Jacopozzi died in Paris in 1932. “He attracted world interest by his illumination of the Eiffel Tower, and did much to make Paris the City of Light,” remarked The People newspaper in a short paragraph about his passing. There was no mention of Jacopozzi’s contribution to the French war effort but no news is better than fake news. Or in his case, a fake city. Read more | From 'eyesore' to icon: a brief history of the Eiffel Tower World War II's phantom army Deception would also play a crucial role during the Allied invasion of France in 1944 There was also a cunning plan to hoodwink the Germans during World War II, although this time it wasn’t a city but an army that was crafted to deceive. Planning for the invasion of France – D-Day – by the Allies began in earnest in late 1943. Once the landing beaches in Normandy had been selected, an operation was conceived to fool the Germans into believing that the landings would actually occur 150 miles east, close to Calais, where the Channel is at its narrowest between England and France. Read more | Masters of disguise: the story of the Allies' WW2 'Ghost Army' To carry off the ruse, a fake army dubbed the First US Army Group (FUSAG) was ‘formed’ under the command of the legendary General George S Patton, and it started to mass in East Anglia and the southeast – or so it appeared to German reconnaissance aircraft that flew over England. In fact, the sprawling camps they photographed were all empty: just tents and hastily constructed prefab buildings. And those tanks and lorries? They were made of rubber and wood. Gavin Mortimer is a historian and author. His books include Guidance from the Greatest (Constable, 2020) and David Stirling: The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS (Constable, 2022) This article was first published in the April 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed Magazine
As part of our occasional series profiling remarkable yet unheralded characters from history, Gavin Mortimer introduces Johnny Hopper, the British lone-wolf fighter who embarked on a campaign of violence that made him one of the most wanted men in Nazi-occupied France...
Johnny Hopper and his wife, Paulette, arrived at the cafe on the rue Beaubourg on schedule. They chose a table at the end of the long narrow cafe, their backs to the wall and with an unobstructed view of the entrance. It was Paris, 8 May 1942, a dangerous place to be for an Englishman who was the subject of a nationwide manhunt having slain two policemen the previous year in Caen. Hopper ordered two coffees and waited for the arrival of a doctor, a member of the Resistance. He claimed he had information about Paul Cole, a former British soldier who had been captured in 1941 and turned by the Gestapo into one of their agents. The doctor arrived on time and Hopper rose to greet him. But as he advanced he noticed another man coming into the cafe. Then two soldiers came into view on the street outside. Hopper reached for the pistol in his pocket; at the same time the man accompanying the doctor went for his weapon. Within seconds, shots were being exchanged across the cafe as terrified customers dived for cover. Hopper felt a blow to his arm. “I didn’t know at first how badly I was wounded,” he recalled. “I ducked back through a door next to our table, to take stock and to get a fresh gun unstrapped from my leg. It was only a sort of closet back there, but the Germans must have assumed it was a rear door to the alley. I had hit all of them more or less badly, and when I kicked my door open, they were all running out the front door to get help.” Hopper glanced round the cafe. Everyone was still hiding under their tables. Everyone except his wife. She was slumped in her seat, blood flowing from her mouth. They had been married three years, had a young son and were deeply in love. Hopper examined her wound. It was almost certainly fatal, yet he couldn’t bear to think of her in the hands of the Gestapo. He placed his pistol to her temple and fired. “I have relived that moment every day of my life,” he said 48 years later. “Always asking myself the same question.” Read more on the Special Operations Executive: Churchill's secret army Never give up Ian Kenneth ‘Johnny’ Hopper’s remarkable life began on 25 May 1912. Born in King’s Lynn, his parents moved to Normandy when he was 12 and settled in the village of Varaville. He struggled at school and recalled the only worthwhile education he received as a child came from the local priest, who instilled in him two philosophies to take through life: never complain and never give up. When war broke out, Hopper neither returned to England nor enlisted in the French army. But when Germany marched into France, some martial spirit within him stirred. Assembling a dozen local men, Hopper began to carry out acts of resistance against the invader. They were small at first – like laying a wreath on 11 November 1940 at the Caen war memorial, to stealing wheels off German motorbikes – but soon Hopper and his men had become an irritant. Several were arrested and deported to Germany, but Hopper remained at large, more determined than ever to strike at the enemy. A week into August 1941 and the Englishman was one of the most wanted men in France, described by newspapers as the “Bandit Hopper” with a price of 5,000 francs on his head. His first crime was to gun down Edouard Bénard, deputy police chief of Caen, on 27 July 1941. “He had stopped my car and ordered me to drive him to police headquarters,” recalled Hopper. “When he saw that I was heading for open country, he pulled out his gun. I was quicker. I shot him in the head. I dropped him off at a hospital with a word of advice about keeping his mouth shut.” Hopper did indeed deposit the dying Bénard at a hospital, but only after shooting him again in the stomach. Four days later, Hopper was approaching his lock-up garage when he became aware he was being followed. Hearing the click of a weapon being cocked, he spun round, whipping the two pistols from his pockets, and opening fire. The man he shot dead was Bénard’s superior, Adolphe Morin, and although Hopper escaped on a bicycle from a hail of bullets, he left behind his identity card, providing police with his name and photograph. A description circulated nationwide of a man of “athletic physique, long face and extremely pale”. Read more: Paddy Ashdown on the French resistance during the Second World War Acts of arson By now, the local press were labelling Hopper “a dangerous criminal”. One paper, Journal de Normandie, furnished its readers with an account of his activities, pieced together by the police after a search of his property. Not only did they hold him responsible for several acts of arson against government buildings, but in his garage were 10,000 kilos of sugar and 250,000 francs’ worth of clothing. In addition, police believed he had been collecting information on German military installations and transmitting it to London. Hopper and Paulette lived rough in the forest for a fortnight, eventually joining the growing Resistance network in Paris. He furthered his reputation as a cold-blooded killer by assassinating an SS officer he described as a “nasty piece of goods”, but also lived up to his reputation as a bandit, robbing a Normandy bank of nearly two million francs, money that was used by the Resistance to buy arms and equipment. Hopper’s freedom came to an end on 25 July 1942, when he was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon during a routine stop-and-search at a metro station. Taken to Gestapo headquarters at Rue des Saussaies, Hopper spent eight months in their hands, although curiously he avoided execution. Instead he was transported to Mauthausen concentration camp, and then to Dachau, from where he was liberated by the Americans in April 1945. Hopper settled in East Anglia after the war, remarrying and becoming a mushroom farmer. He granted few interviews about his wartime exploits, though in 1991, the year of his death, he told a journalist that “you don’t need technique, you need nerve”. Nonetheless, the question remains: was Hopper a freedom fighter or a common criminal? Undoubtedly some of his acts were for personal gain but he also exhibited defiance at a time when few in France dared stand up to their conqueror. The contemporary French press described him as a bandit; he called himself a Resistance fighter. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Asked why he did what he did, Hopper replied: “I don’t believe in taking things lying down.” Gavin Mortimer is a military historian. His latest book is The Long Range Desert Group in World War II (Osprey, 2017) This article was first published in the September 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine