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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
Keep calm and carry on singing: why Britons fell in love with opera during World War Two
As the conflict with Nazi Germany raged on, British tram drivers tuned in to Tchaikovsky and waitresses revelled in Wagner. But why? Alexandra Wilson explores the surprising Second World War obsession with opera
Glasgow, 1942. The Carl Rosa Opera Company was in town to perform Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Tickets had been snapped up by local people – including many who didn’t really know what an opera was. The soprano Joan Hammond, who sang the title role that night, later recalled that there were always newcomers in the audience wherever the Carl Rosa performed, searching for something different to do – but also for some kind of transcendental escapism. Invariably, they cheered the singers to the rafters. Surprising though it may seem to us today, opera was hugely popular during the Second World War. This was part of a broader surge of interest among the British in the so-called high arts – a sudden and rather urgent desire to ‘become cultured’ and to enjoy the best that life had to offer – when every day might be your last. Guy Ramsey reported in the Daily Mail in 1943 that “every day in every way Britain’s musical and dramatic taste is becoming more and more ‘highbrow’”. Tram drivers were listening to Tchaikovsky, waitresses were revelling in Wagner, and operas were drawing large audiences at provincial theatres. This war, Ramsey wrote, was more personal than any before it, and felt closer to home. Serious times called for serious art, and popular variety shows no longer seemed in step with the national mood. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/2X2FXR2webready-9f2accf-e1767623285427.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph shows a man in a cap with round glasses and a cigarette in his mouth sitting on one of many stools outside a theatre. In front of him to the right, a billboard advertises the Sadler's Wells Opera" title="Stools for hire by people queueing for Sadler’s Wells Opera Company performances at the New Theatre, 1943. Tickets started at just 1/6 (about £4 today) (Image by Alamy)" /> Workers’ playtime Opera had already enjoyed reasonably wide popularity in Britain during the interwar years. In London, the enterprising impresario Lilian Baylis had set up companies at the Old Vic in the 1920s and Sadler’s Wells in the 1930s that were explicitly aimed at fostering a love of opera among local working-class communities. And over in the East End, people could regularly watch operas at the People’s Palace, a large entertainment complex on the Mile End Road. Touring opera companies regularly visited towns and cities around the country, and were eagerly anticipated by people of all social classes. Operatic music could also be widely heard in restaurants, hotel foyers and cinemas, and broadcasting and gramophone records had done a great deal to popularise and democratise the art form. But the opera boom of the early 1940s was in a different league. It would have been logical if opera had ground to a halt during the war, given the large resources conventionally needed to stage performances. To be sure, the most prominent venues did close: the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden was turned into one of the most popular wartime dance halls, and Glyndebourne in East Sussex became a home for evacuees from London. Read more | The War of the Operas: new money vs old in The Gilded Age Sadler’s Wells soldiered on during the early months of the war, staging matinees to get around the problem of blackouts, but soon enough the Blitz put paid to this, and the theatre became a refuge for the newly homeless. However, the company moved its operations to Burnley and toured extensively from there, putting on works including The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro, Rigoletto and La bohème with a scaled-down cast, piano accompaniment, a simple painted backcloth and a sofa. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/La-Traviata-9c942fb-e1767623963300.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing two women sharing an afternoon tea on a tray, in a theatre auditorium" title="Audience members sip tea during the interval in a 1943 matinee performance of La Traviata at the New Theatre in London’s West End. The soaring appetite for opera among all classes fuelled a wartime renaissance in Britain (Image by Imperial War Museum)" /> The Times praised Sadler’s Wells for “Making converts to the art of music-drama” in places such as Oldham, Accrington and Stockport. Performances were so popular that theatres were desperate to book the company. The manager of the Hull New Theatre reported that his postbag was constantly full of letters from audience members “representing a cross-section of the community” who wanted to see the troupe. Periodically, when it was safe to do so – and even when it wasn’t – the company returned to London to perform in the West End. The soprano Elisabeth Parry recalled a performance at the Haymarket Theatre in 1944 when the show went on even while alarms rang and ‘Doodlebugs’ (V1 flying bombs) could be heard buzzing overhead. Audience members remained in their seats, and the singers and orchestra carried on as if nothing was happening. The success of the Sadler’s Wells tours showed that the British would happily embrace opera if only they were given the opportunity. Journalists expressed frustration that there had never been a move to set up a similar opera company in every major city around the country, because there was clearly plenty of demand. “No doubt there are as many busmen as there are butchers, bakers, baronets and bankers who enjoy a good opera when they can get it,” argued The Times. And the Times Literary Supplement proposed that, with a dozen more companies along the lines of Sadler’s Wells, “we should have a genuine art of opera in England as we already have a genuine public for it”. Sadler’s Wells worked in partnership with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), which also arranged concerts in which professional musicians, including opera singers, performed in factories, air-raid shelters and hospitals. CEMA’s broad aim was to “carry music, drama and pictures to places which otherwise would be cut off from all contact with the masterpieces of happier days and times”. Operatic performances also featured in the Holidays at Home initiative organised by the Ministry of Labour, which turned open areas in cities into makeshift seaside resorts, and put on a wide range of entertainments. One such scheme in Liverpool, which included performances of opera, ran for 11 weeks in 1942 and attracted an audience of three quarters of a million. Arias on the airwaves Of course, there was also plenty of opera on the radio. In 1941, regular monthly broadcasts of studio operas resumed for the first time since the outbreak of war. The emphasis was primarily on well-known classics such as La Traviata and The Barber of Seville because, as the conductor Sir Adrian Boult said, “The evidence is general that the musical public turns to these sources for mental and spiritual recreation more eagerly than ever today.” BBC listener research from 1943 revealed that the numbers listening to variety shows were down by 20 per cent, whereas audiences for classical music and serious drama were on the rise. Read more | The biggest misconceptions about WW2 evacuees? This historian has the answers Victor Hely-Hutchinson, the BBC’s director of music from 1944, wrote that one of the few benefits of the war was the rise of an immense public enthusiasm for good music. “Go to an orchestral concert, or a fine operatic performance,” he said, “and you will find a corporate appreciation and desire for music of a kind, and on a scale, that has never been seen in Britain before.” Radio broadcasts allowed audiences to enjoy the highest standards of singing, which were not always evident in rough-and-ready touring productions. “Stayed at home tonight to listen to Faust – complete – on the wireless,” wrote one unnamed office worker in a diary submission for Mass Observation in 1942. “Feel very grateful to the BBC for giving us first-class opera; it is not often we get first-rate opera in Manchester, and there is nothing worse than good music badly executed.” Many people, men in particular, first encountered opera in the forces. Some took part in amateur operatic productions of works such as Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at military bases in Britain. Others stationed in the Middle East with Paiforce (the Persia and Iraq force) had the opportunity to hear operatic arias in concerts organised by the Entertainments National Service Association. Some of the most respected British opera singers of the day, such as Walter Widdop, Dennis Noble and Miriam Licette, toured that region. But by far the most significant boom in enthusiasm for opera among soldiers was seen in Italy. In 1944, the Daily Express reported that “one of the biggest surprises of our ‘invasion’ of Italy has been the way the men have become opera fans”. Some enterprising army captains reformed the mothballed opera company at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. Word soon spread that watching opera was a good way to spend an evening, and British troops took to queueing around the block to get tickets. The 1,600-seat theatre was always full to capacity, and two performances a day had to be scheduled to meet demand. A similar enterprise was also set up at the bomb-damaged and abandoned Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania, Sicily and, as the Allies moved north, more companies were founded in major cities across the country. Naomi Jacob, who in 1948 wrote a book about opera aimed specifically at the soldiers who had come to love it in Italy, recalled that when the idea had first been mooted, there had been a lot of scepticism about whether British and American troops would be willing to listen to opera. But houses sold out in advance, and audience members often came back several times. Jacob reported that “no better audience ever existed… they were punctual, they gave rapt attention, and their appreciation was unstinted”. From September 1943 to the end of the war, countless British servicemen watched performances of opera in Italy. The composer and broadcaster Spike Hughes reported that “in every town the same thing happened: the British soldier took to grand opera as if it were in his blood”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1754686839webready-9635b10-e1767623396598.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a stage show. A large ensemble crowd stands at the back of the stage, while one man stands at the front, crouched down with his arm held backwards" title="A 1940s opera performance in Rome. Many British servicemen first experienced – and came to love – opera while stationed in Italy during the war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Exposure to Italian opera in Italy helped soldiers to become more discerning listeners. In Britain before the war, opera was performed in English translation everywhere except Covent Garden and Glyndebourne, two ‘luxurious’ venues that sat apart from the national norm. But here, suddenly, was an audience that had shown itself perfectly capable of appreciating opera in the original language. The Rome correspondent for the Sunday Express reported that “an ‘opera-conscious’ audience is being created for Britain after the war, but if any theatre magnate wants to cater for them he must offer something better than a third-rate touring company”. Optimism for opera Hopes were high, then, for what Britain’s operatic landscape might look like in the postwar period. Even the most sceptical commentators were coming round to opera: the Daily Express reported that “the most ridiculous art-form ever invented” was “proving more popular than anybody ever imagined”. Of course, many people who had encountered opera in pared-back productions during the war had no idea what it really could be. The public was, as The Liverpool Daily Post put it, “as ignorant of the real taste of opera as a wartime infant is of the taste of bananas”. But appetites had been whetted, and Britons emerged from the war wanting to see not only more opera but better opera. To a large extent, these expectations were met. The theatre director Tyrone Guthrie argued after the war that London was becoming the musical centre of the world, with opera at its heart. In the autumn of 1947, audiences in the capital had the opportunity to watch no fewer than 23 different operas performed by five companies. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1360190650webready-ae6a690-e1767623509642.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing five women dancing on a stage, in front of a large crowd of men in military uniform, who are all sitting on the floor" title="Servicemen watch a wartime rehearsal by the Entertainments National Service Association, which toured combat zones (Image by Getty Images)" /> A new company based at the Cambridge Theatre in Seven Dials performed Italian opera in Italian to groups of former servicemen and West End shopworkers. For a while, even glamorous Covent Garden presented a form of “opera for the people”, running regional auditions and recruiting talented opera-singing coalminers, secretaries and milkmen as soloists for a new company. Read more | "Hooray! The war is ended": 5 people's recollections of VE Day Some of these initiatives were only short-lived. Even so, there was very much a buzz in the air around opera after the war, with the Musicians’ Union declaring in 1947 that classical music had become “a necessary part of the life of the people”. The wider acceptance of opera as bona fide popular entertainment seemed to be summed up by the fact that when the San Carlo Opera Company from Naples visited just after the war, it performed not only at Covent Garden but also at Butlin’s holiday camps in Filey and Skegness. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/San-Carlo-Opera-Companywebready-ce0beda-e1767624438971.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a crowd of women, dressed in dresses and frilly white pinafores. One sits at a piano, surrounded by the others" title="Members of the San Carlo Opera Company of Naples perform at a Butlin’s holiday camp in the mid-1940s. Classical music was now, so the Musicians’ Union declared, “a necessary part of the life of the people” (Image by The Butlin’s Heritage Collection, History of Advertising Trust Archive (HAT))" /> Sadler’s Wells, meanwhile, made a triumphant return to its Islington home, where on 7 June 1945 it staged the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes – a rapturously received work that seemed to signal a hopeful new beginning for British operatic composition. New troupes formed to take touring opera around the country in the late 1940s. The 1940s also saw the foundation of Welsh National Opera – a group of talented amateurs at the outset but later a major player on the British operatic scene. Perhaps most importantly, thanks to the huge explosion of interest in the high arts that had taken place during the war, the nation was far more open-minded towards the possibility of funding it afterwards. Up to this point, public subsidy had only ever been a pipe dream. Now CEMA provided a model for the new Arts Council of Great Britain, which leaned heavily towards favouring opera. Thanks to subsidies, opera could be staged at Covent Garden year-round rather than just for a three-month summer season, and prices could be kept low. The Arts Council also undertook local measures to foster music-making and music appreciation, setting up clubs in workplaces and lending gramophone records. Meanwhile, opera featured prominently on the BBC’s new Third Programme. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/WNO-Chorus-in-Ebenezer-Chapel-1946-Idloes-Owen-front-6th-from-the-leftwebready-12658e1-e1767624255173.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photograph of a large crowd of men and women, sitting in rows" title="Singers with the Welsh National Opera in the 1940s. The company made its debut with a double-bill of Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci in 1946 (Image by Welsh National Opera)" /> “Fifteen years ago I should have felt obliged to defend opera as a form of art,” said the critic and academic Edward J Dent in a lecture delivered at Liverpool University in 1945, “but that is no longer necessary.” Opera continued to be enjoyed by large, socially mixed audiences through the 1950s, sixties and seventies, and was drawing record audiences in the eighties and nineties. But by those later decades, the media had begun to circulate a simplistic idea that opera was elitist, and by the turn of the millennium the idea was so entrenched that it was deterring newcomers to the genre. Opera was also becoming more expensive, declining on television and disappearing from the school curriculum. Today, opera still has something for everyone, but it has receded from the mainstream cultural conversation. Regrettably, it has become necessary, once again, to defend it as a form of art. Alexandra Wilson is a senior research fellow at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Her latest book is Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British (Oxford University Press), published in September 2025 This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
A hill to die on: why the Allies almost failed in the battle of Monte Cassino in WW2
In early 1944, the Allied advance in Italy was brought to a halt at a rocky outcrop called Monte Cassino. And at the heart of the bloodbath that followed, writes James Holland, was flawed leadership
For the men of the US 34th ‘Red Bulls’ Infantry Division, just getting up onto the Monte Cassino massif was an achievement. To reach this rocky outcrop, in late January 1944 those troops had crossed a two-mile-wide flooded valley, an area laced with enemy mines and overlooked by German troops in the mountains above. The weather was cold, wet and miserable, and the Americans’ route had taken them across a badly smashed causeway that offered an easy target for enemy artillery. Those troops had then traversed the bed of the Rapido river, which was impossible for tanks to cross, and clambered up into the hills and gulleys that comprise the lower reaches of the towering massif. Finally, they had slipped and scrambled their way up onto two of the ridges that cross Monte Cassino. By 6 February, the Second Battalion of the 135th Infantry, one of the three regiments of the Red Bulls, was within a stone’s throw of Point 593, the rocky outcrop at the end of one of these long ridges dubbed ‘Snakeshead Ridge’ by the Americans. The Germans launched a frenzied assault to displace them, only for the Red Bulls to counter-attack. Read more | Hell in Italy: the Allies' hardest fight of WW2? Bayonets fixed, shooting from the hip, they moved from rock to rock, picking their way through the increasingly loose and stony terrain along the narrow ridge. Bullets were zipping and pinging all around, mortars and grenades were exploding, and shrapnel and lethal shards of razor-sharp rock were fizzing through the air. “There was a lot of screaming and cursing,” recalled 23-year-old Sergeant Ralph Schaps from Minnesota. “We were not going to let the goddam krauts push us off the hill.” So close was the fighting that a rifle butt smashed into Schaps’ jaw but, somehow, he survived. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/12/GettyImages-1193060764-bf5e784.jpg" width="4516" height="3009" alt="The Benedictine abbey on Monte Cassino, established in the sixth century and destroyed by Allied bombing. Unreliable intelligence had suggested that the monastery was a key German observation post." title="The Benedictine abbey on Monte Cassino, established in the sixth century and destroyed by Allied bombing. Unreliable intelligence had suggested that the monastery was a key German observation post. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> The Red Bulls prevailed, though Point 593 itself remained tantalisingly in enemy hands. Schaps found an abandoned bottle of brandy, which he swilled around his mouth. After spitting out some blood and fragments of teeth, he took a couple more swigs and started to feel better. A costly campaign The Americans were now looking down over the far side of the Monte Cassino massif, directly onto the Liri Valley and, more importantly, onto Highway 6, the ancient Via Casilina – the main road north. If they could reach it, the entire German Gustav Line – the system of defences constructed across Italy from the mouth of the Garigliano river on the Tyrrhenian Sea to the mouth of the Sangro on the Adriatic, south-east of Pescara – would be unlocked and the route to Rome, around 75 miles to the north-west as the crow flies, laid wide open. All of which raises the question: if things were going so well at this point, why did the battle result in such a waste of lives, with the Allies suffering at least 55,000 casualties? It can be partly explained by difficult terrain and awful weather conditions; heavy rain fell almost continuously through much of the previous winter. Yet, though this was clearly a terrible place and time to fight, there were sound reasons to do so – and, were it not for lamentable failures of leadership, casualties might have been far fewer. The Allied invasion of mainland Italy in September 1943 had four key aims: to ensure that Italy was knocked out of the war for good; to draw German troops away from the eastern front and soon-to-be-opened western fronts; to capture Rome; and, perhaps most importantly, to take control of the airfield complex around Foggia, in Puglia near the spur on Italy’s heel, from where heavy bombers could further tighten the noose around Nazi Germany by bombing the southern Reich. Three of these four aims had been achieved swiftly after the initial landings at Salerno, south-east of Naples, on 9 September. However, by early 1944 Rome still eluded the Allies. In addition, having captured Foggia in September 1943, they needed to ensure that it wasn’t retaken by the Germans, who had more divisions in Italy than the Allies did. Establishing a buffer of at least 50 miles north of Rome was, therefore, a priority. That’s why, in early 1944, the Allies were desperately trying to break through mountain defences to clear a route to the capital. Read more | How Italian dictator Benito Mussolini became the first face of fascism By the time the Red Bulls approached Point 593, the German forces had already suffered a battering at the hands of a polyglot international force led by General Mark Clark, commander of the US Fifth Army. The ferocity of the onslaught had so depleted the troops of the German 44th Hoch und Deutschmeister Division, which was defending the Monte Cassino massif, that its numbers were down to about 800 men from a full-strength complement of 15,000. That high level of casualties explains why, all things considered and despite the privations their troops had endured, the Americans had enjoyed a comparatively easy time getting up onto the massif. Though they’d mounted a highly effective defence up to that point, almost every senior German commander in Italy now believed that the time had come to pull back. In the north of the country, mountains stretched almost continuously across the peninsula between Pisa and Rimini, forming a natural barrier. Defences were already being built along this new front, where supply lines were shorter and positions easier to maintain.With German forces in retreat on the eastern front, and with an Allied assault imminent west of the Reich, it made sense to cut losses and withdraw to this defensive line far north of Rome. The führer’s folly Hitler, though, refused to cede ground – and his supremo in Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, was determined to do the führer’s bidding. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/12/GettyImages-3293961-801febb.jpg" width="2200" height="1466" alt="Field Marshal Albert Kesselring (centre), commander of German forces in Italy, in March 1944. His decision to stubbornly hold Monte Cassino, following Hitler’s refusal to cede ground, led to the battle. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="Field Marshal Albert Kesselring (centre), commander of German forces in Italy, in March 1944. His decision to stubbornly hold Monte Cassino, following Hitler’s refusal to cede ground, led to the battle. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> On the podcast | Keith Lowe tells the story of the liberation of Naples, the first major European city to be freed by the Allies during the Second World War The result was an appalling misuse of infantry divisions: units were pulled apart, sent hither and thither, filling holes and gaps, and being butchered as a result. The replacements that arrived were largely older men and teenagers with little training. So worried was General der Panzertruppe Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, the German XIV Corps commander, that he decided to risk the wrath of Kesselring and Hitler, and made one more personal appeal to withdraw. “This proposal,” von Senger noted tersely in his diary, “was not approved.” By doggedly defending the Gustav Line, Kesselring was committing his troops to ever more sacrifice – and for no tangible long-term benefit. Whatever the shortcomings of the overall German approach, the situation at Monte Cassino was being bolstered. Reinforcements were hurriedly sent forward, including the 90 Panzergrenadier Division and First Fallschirmjäger (Airborne) Division. Sent to take command was General Ernst-Günther Baade, a highly intelligent, experienced and skilful leader. Baade immediately organised the defence of Monte Cassino far more effectively. He created two linked rings of defence, rather like a figure of eight, with Point 593 where the two circles met. This meant that, should it be overrun, heavy fire could be directed on the attackers from each side, allowing the defenders to quickly retake it. Manning machine guns and mortars effectively required some skill and training, but the key was to avoid giving up ground and to keep firing. The newly arrived Fallschirmjäger, though hideously understrength, were ideally placed to do this, with enough experienced warriors to ensure that the under-trained teenage replacements could provide stout defence. Among those now defending Point 593 were Major Rudolf Kratzert and his Third Battalion of the Third Fallschirmjäger Regiment, which reached Monte Cassino with just 236 troops rather than the 1,000 he should have been commanding. (It was one of his men who walloped Ralph Schaps.) Time and again, the Red Bulls tried to take Point 593 and the parallel Phantom Ridge and Colle d’Angelo. Every time, they were pushed back. Down in the valley, US commanders reckoned that one more push would do it – but they had no idea of Baade’s defensive system, and could not see how these narrow ridgelines were canalising the attackers. Rather than attacking on a broad front and overwhelming the enemy, the Americans were forced to inch forward companies of 100 or fewer men across bare rock, while being mown down by mortars, grenades and machine guns. The Red Bulls were rapidly running out of steam. So General Sir Harold Alexander, the Allied Army Group Commander, created the New Zealand Corps comprising men from the New Zealand Second Division, Fourth Indian Division and British 78th Division. Leading that new force was New Zealand Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg VC, the most senior divisional commander, who had already briefly led a corps in Tunisia. He’d won his Victoria Cross on the western front during the First World War, but he was no great intellect – and, compounding this deficiency, he’d been given no corps staff. Read more | Operation Mincemeat: how a corpse duped Hitler and got the Allies onto Sicily Political sensitivities As General Clark quickly discovered, Freyberg had been horribly over-promoted. Yet the Fifth Army commander’s hands were tied because of political sensitivities. The New Zealanders represented a British dominion, and were punching significantly above their weight in the war. There were also morale problems. Some 6,000 Kiwi veterans of the North Africa campaign had been sent home on furlough – only to discover that large numbers of their compatriots had avoided the draft. Most of these experienced soldiers refused to return for a second stint until those exempted had done their first. News of this mutiny spread to New Zealanders in Italy, and Clark had been warned to tread carefully. Freyberg’s shortcoming shouldn’t have been an issue, because commanding the Fourth Indian Division was the extremely able Major-General Francis Tuker, a soldier who could provide the strategic thinking that Freyberg lacked. Having arrived at the front ahead of Freyberg, Tuker soon realised that the only rational option was to abandon the Monte Cassino massif and to instead attack farther north. There the ground was higher but wider and less scored with gulleys, fissures and narrow ridges. It was also significantly less well defended. Tuker additionally suggested mounting a crossing of the Rapido where the Texans had earlier attempted, but this time with properly planned fire support (which the Texans had, inexplicably, not used). Freyberg readily supported these suggestions – then disaster struck: Tuker was hit by a crippling bout of rheumatoid arthritis, and had to be taken to hospital. Left without Tuker’s strategic vision, the easily swayed Freyberg was influenced by the views of the US II Corps commander General Geoffrey Keyes and General Charles ‘Doc’ Ryder, commanding the Red Bulls, who both questioned Tuker’s plans. Neither had been on the mountain, and were unaware of the situation on the ground. Freyberg was persuaded to continue the assault on the Monte Cassino massif. When Tuker learned of this change of tack, he forced himself from his hospital bed to plead with Freyberg – but found the New Zealander deaf to his arguments. Tuker pointed out the problems of troops attacking along narrow ridges, and suggested that the only way to break the German defences was with an overwhelming bombardment of the entire massif using high-capacity 2,000lb and 4,000lb ‘bunker buster’ bombs. Among other things, this would be necessary to destroy the tall, thick stone walls of the ancient Benedictine abbey perched at the end of the massif, which the Allies believed housed a German observation post. “The 1,000lb bomb,” Tuker told Freyberg in a follow-up note, “would be next to useless to effect this.” Heavy four-engine bombers were needed, not fighter-bombers, and the bombing should be carefully co-ordinated with an immediate infantry attack to follow. “The essence of the bombardment,” Tuker added, “should be its obliterating weight, suddenness and duration and the immediate continuance of the bombing by artillery bombardment and infantry attack early in the night under the artillery bombardment.” Read more | Mussolini's willing followers? The Italians devoted to Fascism and the duce Fatal misunderstanding Tuker’s intention had been to shock Freyberg into readopting his original plan. Instead, the New Zealander headed to Clark’s command post, where he demanded an air assault using single-prop ‘Kittybombers’ and 1,000- pounders to destroy the abbey. How Freyberg could have so badly misunderstood Tuker’s suggestions is hard to fathom: the latter had followed up his personal visit, conducted in acute pain, with written instructions so that there was no chance of mistaking his very specific plans. Clark was, understandably, opposed to destroying the abbey for what seemed to him to be no good reason. The way Freyberg presented it, there was no co-ordinated plan involving the infantry or the destruction of other German positions on the massif. Moreover, the historic site was originally founded in the sixth century, and the Allies aimed to portray themselves as liberators, not cultural vandals. Clark appealed to Alexander, who backed Freyberg. Had Freyberg been American, it’s clear, Clark would have kicked this plan into the long grass. The bombing itself was a catastrophe. The Fourth Indian Division was delayed in getting onto the mountain, because so many of the surviving Red Bulls had to be carried back down, and because different ammunition had to be brought up. In addition, in Tuker’s absence his command had passed to Brigadier Dimoline, the division’s artillery commander, who had neither the experience nor the strength of character to impose himself. Having finally ascended onto the massif, the Fifth Indian Brigade discovered that – despite being told otherwise – Point 593 was still in German hands, and hatched plans to capture it first in a preliminary assault on the night of 15 February. That morning, however, without any warning from Freyberg or anyone else, they learned that the bombers would arrive to unleash their loads at any moment. There was to be no co-ordination between air and ground forces. The strategic air forces had a weather window and a gap in action elsewhere, so flew over quickly, dropping a handful of 1,000-pounders but mostly 500-pounders – far less powerful than the bombs that Tuker had insisted would be necessary. True, the abbey was destroyed, leaving a shattered wreck of tumbling debris and killing hundreds of civilians sheltering there – though not, it seems, a single German. But when the First Royal Sussex tried to take Point 593 that night, they failed. So did a subsequent attack the following night and, with it, the chance of swiftly clearing Monte Cassino. The Germans held firm in their figure-of-eight positions, with the Fourth Indian Division, supported by the Texans on their right flank, holding the Allied half of the massif. A subsequent German counter-attack in Italy – Operation Fischfang, launched on 16 February at Anzio on the coast between Cassino and Rome – was thwarted by the Allies. This only served to re-emphasise the challenges of launching a successful offensive in this inhospitable terrain during a savage winter. Alexander thus decided to wait for better weather before the next push, and to bring both the Eighth Army – mainly on the Adriatic flank of Italy – and Fifth Army side by side, to hammer German supply lines with air power and then to strike along a broad front once he had built up overwhelming strength. Read more | The thorns in Mussolini’s side: the anti-Fascists who opposed the Italian regime Alexander was, though, persuaded to make one more attempt on Monte Cassino and at capturing the town below. Rain fell solidly for more than three weeks, so the attack was not launched until 15 March. Freyberg was still in place – a situation that Clark, much to his frustration, was unable to change, such were Allied politics. This time, Freyberg insisted on obliterating Cassino town with the same weight of bombs and shells Tuker had suggested for the mountain above. The town was destroyed but, instead of sending in overwhelming numbers of tanks and infantry immediately after, as Clark had instructed, a couple of battalions carefully inched into the town from one direction only. Overnight, the Germans reinforced – and the chance to sweep through the town was lost. What followed was a brutal attritional battle amid the ruins. After this debacle, the New Zealand Corps was finally dissolved and Freyberg posted away from the immediate firing line. With the arrival of spring, the ground hardened. Alexander was able to bring his two armies side by side and, with the advantages in men and materials he had always wanted, on the night of 11 May he launched Operation Diadem. Monte Cassino fell on 18 May to the Polish II Corps in what was their first battle. It was the Poles, after their initial assault had failed, who finally discovered the secret of the figure-of-eight defences. Once Monte Cassino was taken, the entrance to the strategically vital Liri Valley – and the route to the capital – was secured, and the Allies pushed rapidly north. Rome fell on 4 June. Diadem was a great Allied victory – an operation that showed what could be achieved when skies were cleared, the ground was dry, and commanders had time to plan and prepare properly. Yet it is the earlier setbacks, and especially the images of the shattered abbey and the utterly obliterated town below, that continue to define the campaign in Italy, rather than the enormity of the victory two days before D-Day. The tragedy is that these dark stains on the campaign were so very avoidable. This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Is The Six Triple Eight a true story? The real WW2 history, as told by the movie’s historical consultant
Netflix’s historical film The Six Triple Eight tells the story of the all-woman, predominately-Black 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion in the Second World War. Molly Sampson, one of the film’s historical consultants, describes the true history seen on screen
How did one battalion almost-entirely staffed by Black women solve a crisis that affected the morale of millions of US servicemen during WW2? Netflix’s The Six Triple Eight is the story of a WW2 group, the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the first and only Women’s Army Corps (WAC) unit of colour to serve overseas in the Second World War. Written and directed by Tyler Perry, the film stars Kerry Washington as Major Charity Adams, the commanding officer of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion. Despite facing racism and sexism – and gruelling working conditions – they were committed to serving their country with honour and distinction. Molly Sampson, a historical consultant on the film, spoke to HistoryExtra about these unsung heroes who were united in their determination, and in doing so they delivered hope and shattered barriers. Is The Six Triple Eight, based on a true story? Yes, though some details have been adapted for the screen, The Six Triple Eight is based on a true story. It tells the tale of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, a ground-breaking unit of 855 women who volunteered to serve their country during the Second World War. The movie highlights their extraordinary mission: clearing a staggering backlog of undelivered mail for US troops stationed in Europe. It also addresses the systemic racism and sexism they faced, as well as their resilience and unity in overcoming these challenges. During the Second World War, US military policies and societal norms enforced rigid racial classifications, shaping the experiences of service members. Women of Latinx heritage serving in the WAC were often required to choose between identifying as Black – thereby being placed in segregated units – or White. Lydia Thornton, a member of the Six Triple Eight and of Afro-Mexican descent, faced this decision during her enlistment. She chose to serve under the strict rules of segregation, a testament to the complex interplay of race, identity, and military policy during the era. While the film dramatises certain events for storytelling purposes, its foundation is a true account of these unsung heroes’ service and dedication. Why was the Six Triple Eight formed? The Six Triple Eight was created to solve a US Army crisis: the backlog of over 3.7 million undelivered letters and packages for troops in Europe. It might not sound like one of the most pressing problems in a time of war, but mail sent during the conflict provided soldiers with a vital connection to home, and was a major morale booster. The situation demanded urgent attention, and so the War Department responded by forming the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, an all-Black, all-female unit led by Black officers. Their mission: clear the backlog, restore the mail system, and boost soldier morale. The Six Triple Eight’s creation marked not only a solution to a logistical problem but also a significant step forward in racial and gender integration within the military. Read more | An army of women: adventures in the Auxiliary Territorial Service The Six Triple Eight was part of the US Army’s Women’s Army Corps. This branch had been created in May 1942 as the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) – an emergency reserve without full military status enlisted women to serve in support roles and fix a growing manpower crisis. In July 1943, additional legislation was passed, eliminating the auxiliary status and creating the Women’s Army Corps. By late 1944, nearly 14,000 Wacs were serving overseas. However, due to the US Army’s segregation policy, Black Wacs were excluded from these deployments, confined to stateside roles despite their training and qualifications. This exclusion was challenged by civil rights leaders like Mary McLeod Bethune, whose advocacy with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt highlighted the capabilities of Black Wacs and pressured the War Department to act. The Six Triple Eight’s creation answered Bethune’s campaign that there should be “a role for black women in the war overseas,” and in February 1945, they set sail for Europe. Who was the real Major Charity Adams? In The Six Triple Eight, Kerry Washington portrays Major Charity Adams, the trailblazing commander of the 6888th. Born in North Carolina and raised in South Carolina, Adams was a teacher and graduate student in Ohio before joining the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942. She was part of the first WAAC officer training class, where she graduated as a Second Lieutenant and quickly distinguished herself as a training officer at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. While at the training centre, Adams experienced the realities of discrimination. Following her first visit to the Officer’s Club, she was berated by an unnamed white male Colonel for socialising in a desegregated space. Her experience would be echoed in the Officer’s Club at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, where the Six Triple Eight were stationed while training for overseas service. Adams later recalled how these instances, handled with necessary grace, fuelled her motivation for her remarkable career. Her leadership and exceptional service led to rapid promotions, and by the time she took command of the Six Triple Eight, she had risen to the rank of Major. By the time she left the army in 1946, she was a Lieutenant Colonel, the second-highest rank available to women in the Corps. Known for her professionalism and unwavering dedication, Adams not only ensured the success of the Six Triple Eight’s mission but also served as a role model for the women under her command, navigating the dual challenges of racism and sexism with her reputation for dignity and determination. How was the Six Triple Eight received overseas? The Six Triple Eight’s arrival in Europe was both celebratory and fraught with challenges. Disembarking in Glasgow in February 1945, the women were greeted by the sound of bagpipes and the presence of Brigadier General Davis, who conducted an onboard inspection. Their journey continued to Birmingham, England, where they were welcomed warmly by US troops and British citizens. The women were billeted at King Edward’s School, where American troops had prepared their accommodations. A parade reviewed by US Lieutenant General John CH Lee drew large crowds, reflecting both the curiosity and respect of the British public. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/12/GettyImages-1438109388-f984198-e1734711473347.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Captain Mary Kearney and Major Charity Adams inspect the first arrivals to the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion at a temporary post in Birmingham, England" title="Captain Mary Kearney and Major Charity Adams inspect the first arrivals to the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion at a temporary post in Birmingham, England" /> What did the Six Triple Eight do in the Second World War? The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion took on the enormous task of clearing a massive backlog of mail for US troops in the European theatre of operations. Upon their arrival at the First Base Post Office in Birmingham, England, they faced 3.7 million pieces of undelivered mail. These ranged from letters from home, to care packages filled with food and gifts – some dating back to Christmas 1943. Using a sophisticated system of locator cards and Central Directories, the women worked in three eight-hour shifts around the clock, cross-referencing and updating outdated locator information to ensure accurate delivery. When addresses could not be verified, undeliverable mail was returned to the sender. What discrimination did the women of the Six Triple Eight face? Within the military, the women faced ongoing discrimination. While the segregation that existed stateside – such as the water fountains labelled “colored” at Fort Oglethorpe – were resolved, in the UK new issues existed. Beauty parlours were readily available in the US, even at smaller installations without one on base. However, no hair salon or shop was stocked with the necessary hair treatments and cosmetics in Birmingham. Instead, Adams and her Special Services officer, Captain Mildred Carter, had to acquire all the materials and equipment necessary to create their own beauty parlour. This facility would also be used by members of the Army Nurse Corps, who sometimes used leave passes to make an appointment. Read more | Wrens at war: life in the Women's Royal Naval Service in WW2 The unit also faced other challenges. While in Birmingham, the American Red Cross tried to prevent the Six Triple Eight members from using service clubs. In one instance of discrimination, a member of the unit was not allowed to stay overnight, instead having to stay with a local English family (who in turn welcomed her warmly). The Red Cross’s response was to eventually offer another facility to the unit – one that was wholly separate and segregated – which was promptly boycotted by the Six Triple Eight. Tensions escalated further when an unnamed general demanded a review of the battalion. Because of their duty schedule – three eight-hour shifts – only one-third of women were available for the parade. The general demanded the rest of the women quit either working or sleeping. When told this was impossible, he threatened to replace Major Adams with a lower-ranking white officer. Her defiant response – “Over my dead body” – has come to represent the unit’s wartime reputation for resilience and resolve in the face of systemic bias. Adams was warned she would be facing a court-martial for insubordination. Her defence came down to a counter-court-martial based on directives that banned the use of racially charged language. The general dropped his charge, and Adams continued her command. What difference did the Six Triple Eight make? In just three months, the Six Triple Eight had cleared the backlog of letters and packages in Birmingham. That is half the time that they had been allotted. Their success led to their reassignment to Rouen, France, where they continued their work under similar conditions. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/12/6888Day04202301121817r-970a896-e1734712138890.jpg" width="620" height="423" alt="Milauna Jackson as Lt. Campbell, Kerry Washington as Major Charity Adams and Ebony Obsidian as Lena Derriecott King in The Six Triple Eight" title="Milauna Jackson as Lt. Campbell, Kerry Washington as Major Charity Adams and Ebony Obsidian as Lena Derriecott King in The Six Triple Eight. The unit cleared a huge backlog of delayed post destined for US soldiers during WW2" /> Despite the gruelling schedule, the women participated in community events (including a parade celebrating French saint Joan of Arc) and hosted an open house to showcase their facilities. Members of the unit also participated in several sports events; the basketball team made it to the championship tournament but faced difficulties securing transportation due to segregation. In the end they won – but only after Lieutenant General John CH Lee was informed and provided his private train car for their use. Tragedy struck the battalion in Rouen when three members – Mary Bankston, Mary Barlow, and Dolores Browne – were killed in a vehicle accident. A testament of the esprit de corps of the Six Triple Eight was the fact the women were not given a typical military burial. Instead, the unit collected money to purchase caskets, women with prior experience handled the preparation of the bodies, and Protestant and Catholic funeral services were held. Today, these three are among only four women buried at the Normandy American Cemetery. In October 1945, the unit moved to Paris. By the time the Six Triple Eight was disbanded in March 1946, they had processed an estimated 17 million pieces of mail, ensuring soldiers remained connected to their loved ones. What happened to the Six Triple Eight after the Second World War? After the war, the Six Triple Eight returned to the United States, and the unit was formally disbanded at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, in March 1946. Major Charity Adams received a promotion to Lieutenant Colonel upon her return, making her one of the highest-ranking women in the Corps. For many of the women, military service was a temporary chapter. While some stayed in the armed forces, most returned to civilian life. Despite their extraordinary contributions, the Six Triple Eight’s story faded into obscurity for decades, overshadowed by larger narratives of the war. What is the legacy of the Six Triple Eight today? In recent years, the Six Triple Eight has gained greater recognition. A monument dedicated to the battalion was unveiled at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas in 2018, sparking renewed interest in their story. In 2019, the unit was awarded the Meritorious Unit Commendation for its exceptional service in the Second World War. This recognition highlighted their impact on the morale and welfare of US troops and their professionalism in the face of adversity. Through the efforts of advocates including retired Army Colonel Edna Cummings, the Six Triple Eight was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2022, the highest civilian honour given by Congress. These commemorations ensure that the story of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion – their service, sacrifices, and triumphs – continue to inspire future generations. The Six Triple Eight is available on Netflix. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV and film to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week Molly Sampson is the Executive Director of the Maritime Museum of Sandusky. She is also a historian focusing on the Women’s Army Corps during the Second World War and served as historical consultant for The Six Triple Eight
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
10 surprising facts about First World War uniforms
The camouflage uniform donned by soldiers during the First World War is, to many, instantly recognisable, but how much do you really know about the garments? Jane Tynan, the author of British Army Uniform and the First World War: Men in Khaki, reveals 10 surprising facts about the wartime apparel
Khaki was first adopted in India The word ‘khaki’ comes from the Persian portion of the Hindustani language. The use of khaki for military camouflage is thought to have begun with Harry Lumsden, who raised the Corps of Guides in 1846, a regiment of the British Indian Army. He bought up white cotton cloth at the bazaar at Lahore, which was then taken down to the riverbank, where his troops soaked the cloth in water and rubbed mud into it. Lumsden’s second in command was convinced that khaki would make his men “invisible in a land of dust”. By the First World War, the British Army had transitioned from red to khaki uniforms in response to new technologies: aerial reconnaissance and smokeless guns were making soldiers’ visibility a real problem on the battlefield. Read more about WW1 beyond the western front: David Olusoga shines a light on forgotten clashes in distant lands, and on the extensive contributions of Africans and Asians <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-3170981_cmyk-a2fa96b.jpg" width="1967" height="1447" alt="A British officer stands alongside two of his Japanese counterparts in 1914 in Tsingtao (now Qingdao). Japanese troops played a key role in the capture of that strategic German concession in north-east China. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="A British officer stands alongside two of his Japanese counterparts in 1914 in Tsingtao (now Qingdao). Japanese troops played a key role in the capture of that strategic German concession in north-east China. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> British khaki dyes came from Germany Before the war, Germany was the centre of the synthetic dyestuffs industry. By 1913, it was exporting more than 20 times the volume of dyes coming out of Britain. During the First World War the only khaki dye available for British Army uniforms was manufactured in Germany, which, at first, it secretly imported. Read more | 10 WW1 generals you should know about For a time, khaki was replaced by ‘Kitchener blue’ ‘Kitchener blue’ was the collective name given to replacement uniforms used by the British Army when it ran out of khaki in 1914. The War Office had failed to obtain enough khaki uniforms in the opening weeks of the war, and early recruits were forced to wear replacement uniforms. They were obtained from a range of unlikely sources: 500,000 suits of blue serge uniforms from Post Office stocks, and approximately 500,000 greatcoats purchased from the clothing trade. The War Office also ordered a huge volume of jackets, trousers and greatcoats from Canada and the United States. Some soldiers were issued with old full-dress parade tunics – scarlet with colourful facings and blue trousers from various reserve stores. A 1914 article in the trade periodical the Tailor and Cutter reported that one of the alternative outfits was “not at all liked, the first men to wear it being mistaken for inmates of an industrial home”. Why are poppies worn, plus 4 more things you need to know about Armistice Day Most uniforms were not made by the army Most were, in fact, made by various civilian tailoring firms. War Office plans for dealing with an outbreak of war were insufficient for the scale of this conflict. In August 1914, reserves were capable of supplying no more than the original expeditionary force and first-line units of the Territorial Force for a few weeks. Clothing an expanding volunteer army overwhelmed the official army factories. By November 1914 a new director of army contracts had reorganised the system of supply, which led to a boom in ‘khaki contracts’ in the British tailoring trade – a system the war office regulated by public competition. It seems that war was good for business. Official knitting patterns were introduced to discourage ‘rogue knitters’ Civilians were busily knitting garments for British soldiers during the First World War. The gloves, socks, mittens, jerseys and balaclavas made by civilians became affectionately known as ‘comforts’. But what started as a response to small gaps in uniform supply became a mass knitting frenzy, which made the government very nervous about the colourful, quirky garments reaching soldiers at the front. Hence knitting patterns were issued, warning women – thought to be the typical knitters – to narrow the range of garments, and to use only khaki wools. But the success of the knitting projects often highlighted army failures. The First World War was a step into the unknown – much of the war effort had to be improvised. When the efforts of volunteer knitters threatened to expose official shortcomings, the state intervened; one such gesture was the issue of the official Kitchener stitch, which improved the comfort of knitted socks for men in the trenches! Turbans were worn by soldiers on the western front By November 1914, one third of the British Army on the western front came from India and fought with the Indian Expeditionary Force (serving from September 1914 to December 1915). An official photograph taken in France depicts Indian troops marching along the road while young women rush up to pin flowers on them as they pass. They wear turbans and have long tunics –resembling the Indian Kurta – falling to their knees. For Sikh soldiers, these distinctive features described their colonial status, but it also became part of war propaganda. In July 1915 The Graphic newspaper ran a feature to celebrate the spectacle of Indian soldiers marching to battle, in which they reported that the Germans “themselves admit their surprise at this rally of India”. Photographs were a bit more realistic; one from July 1916 shows Indian cyclists – despatch riders – at the crossroads on Fricourt-Mametz Road wearing khaki service dress with traditional Sikh turbans. Unfortunately, rather than reflect a proud military tradition, their distinctive clothing often symbolised their lowly rank on the western front. Listen | Santanu Das explores the experiences of Indians who fought in and were affected by the First World War The First World War saw the invention of the trench coat Well, not really, since this weatherproof sports coat had been around since the late 19th century, but as the name suggests, its re-invention as the trench coat is certainly attributed to its use in the First World War. It was an optional item of military kit for officers on the western front. Initially, soldiers were kitted out with the greatcoat, which was far too heavy for the rain and mud. When uniform manufacture went out to the trade, a range of civilian outfitters began to supply mass-produced garments to officers. This was how various firms, including Burberry and Aquascutum, began to sell versions of the trench coat. The coat was a practical garment for British officers enduring the muddy conditions of the trenches, and was a great improvement on the heavy, cumbersome greatcoat. The light fabric gave soldiers mobility, while water-repellent material protected them from wet weather: large pockets kept maps dry, and cleverly placed flaps offered ventilation. Protecting the body, and keeping mobility at a maximum, was vital in trench conditions – this light, weatherproof sports coat was the ideal solution. Conscientious objectors were forced to wear uniforms against their will Following conscription, conscientious objectors who were arrested for failing to respond to the call to military duty often refused to wear the uniform. Treated as enlisted soldiers, their disobedience brought the full force of the law upon them, and they could then be sentenced to imprisonment. COs might refuse to strip for a medical examination or resist having their measurements taken. Often, soldiers would forcibly remove their clothes, or attempt to dress them in military uniform against their will. Fred Murfin recalls his arrival in France, when he defied the authorities by deliberately and mischievously leaving his puttees on the ship. Their refusal to wear khaki was a powerful protest, and the penalty was often violence and humiliation. An outfit allowance was introduced for officers who could not afford a uniform As the war progressed, it became clear to British Army authorities that officers’ uniforms would have to be subsidised. Many new army officers struggled to meet the expense of getting a uniform made. Hence outfit grants were issued to them, so that they could be commissioned from the ranks, without concern as to how they might meet the cost of the uniform. Heavy losses meant that officers were being recruited from a wider range of social classes than before the war, and many of these men could not afford the traditional trip to the tailor. The introduction of an outfit grant ensured their continued recruitment. This might be why the established officer class were quick to label them ‘improvised officers’ or worse, ‘temporary gentlemen’. More than 1 million civilian suits were issued to discharged soldiers at the end of the war Legally, a man could not wear his uniform more than 28 days after discharge, so upon demobilisation they were supplied with civilian suits by the Royal Army Clothing Department. Before he left his unit, each man was given a plain clothes form and a certificate of employment. When he went to a dispersal centre he received a protection certificate, a railway ticket to get home, a pay advance, a fortnight’s ration book, and a voucher for the return of his greatcoat. Here he had the option of a clothing allowance or a suit of plain clothes. What happened to the 8 million people who were disabled during WW1? The army issued a total of 1,413,760 suits to demobilised men at the end of the war, in dark blue, brown or grey. However, the trade press were quick to criticise the quality of the suits, which were thought to be an insult to returning war heroes. Jane Tynan is a lecturer in design history at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and author of British Army Uniform and the First World War: Men in Khaki (Palgrave, 2013) This article was first published by HistoryExtra in 2014
Innocence under fire: how children were used in warfare of the past
From medieval times to the modern day, young children have been put to tragic use in warfare. Emma Butcher and James Rogers tell their story
Children of “hard flesh” Wrenched from their homes at the age of seven, Sparta’s boys were battle-ready by 20 The ancient Greek city of Sparta was a military superpower, and its children were enveloped within this fighting ethos from a very early age. Soon after birth, a council of inspectors would judge a male infant’s physical attributes; if he was deemed unfit, the baby would most likely be abandoned on a nearby hillside. At the age of seven, Spartan boys were removed from their parents’ homes and conscripted into the ‘agoge’, a military training scheme. The first-century AD Roman historian Plutarch detailed their regime: “Their training was calculated to make them obey commands well, endure hardships and conquer in battle… When they were 12 years old, they no longer had tunics to wear, received one cloak a year, had hard flesh and knew little of baths.” Despite the boys’ early military education, the Spartans didn’t entertain the concept of a child army. From a practical perspective, children weren’t strong enough to handle the heavy weapons of the time. Instead, the youthful recruits served by conducting menial chores, such as bearing shields and mats for the more senior warriors. It was only when he turned 20 years old that a Spartan man would be deemed fit to serve as a soldier of the state. Read more: Were there really only 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae? The fearless fledglings of God Armed with the gospel, a young Christian army set off on a crusade to Jerusalem. It turned out to be mission impossible In 1212, around 30,000 children from across Europe banded together and marched towards Jerusalem. Although the facts are marred by mythology and a lack of historical sources, we know that their aim was to peacefully convert Muslims to Christianity. Versions of the story – over 50 of which have been found dating back to the 13th century – tell us of various child leaders marching to the Holy Land. One was a young French boy, Stephen of Cloyes, who believed he’d been chosen by Jesus to lead the divine mission. He gathered followers by performing miracles and portents, and claiming that the Mediterranean Sea would part for his followers on their journey. Across the continent, droves of children joined the cause, taking the crusader’s vow, which was both militant and legally binding. Sadly, their mission was to end in disaster. Once the band of children reached the coast and the sea remained unmoved, those who chose to continue their journey on ships were either taken to Tunisia and sold into slavery or died in shipwrecks. Despite their failure, however, their quest could be considered as the first mass European youth movement. Noble warriors Boy pages were often seen on medieval battlefields and were deadly with a crossbow In medieval Europe, boy pages were a regular sight in the homes of aristocrats. At the age of seven, noble boys would be sent from their family homes and stationed in another aristocratic household, where they would dutifully serve the lord of the estate through menial chores and personal service. In return, they received hospitality and education. They also underwent military training, learning how to use weapons and ride. The children would mount wooden horses, learn how to handle lances and conduct target practice. Boy pages witnessed their fair share of conflict, dressing and arming their lords on the field. They mainly performed minor auxiliary roles but, in the event of a siege, were expected to know the basics of how to defend a castle with a crossbow. This was one of only a few weapons a child could use; the string could be pulled back with a lever, or by winding a crank, giving the bow tension, power and the ability to travel long distances – all of which meant a child could kill without engaging in direct combat with an adult. Despite their military training, even in the heat of battle it was bad form to consider the boys a target. In the 1415 battle of Agincourt, it is rumoured that Henry V was so enraged by the French targeting his army’s boy pages, that he retaliated by slitting the necks of his prisoners. Trained to die for their sultan masters As the Ottoman empire flourished, non-Muslim children were rounded up and forced into military slavery Between the 14th and 19th centuries, the Ottoman empire trained elite infantry units known as Janissaries. These units were populated by strong children, aged 7–18, who had either been kidnapped from local non-Muslim families or taken during military campaigns against Christian communities. This system of abduction and enlistment became known as ‘devshirme’, which is Ottoman Turkish for ‘lifting’ or ‘collecting’. Upon capture, the children were dressed in red so that they would be recognised in the event of an escape. They would then be circumcised and converted to Islam. As the sultan’s personal slaves, the children were trained for a life of service; indoctrinated to fight and die for their master. They were known in society as ‘kapikulu’, servants who were neither free nor ordinary slaves. Over the centuries, Janissaries were used in all major campaigns, including the 1453 capture of Constantinople and the Battle of Mohács in 1526. Despite their life in captivity, many considered their high standing in the Ottoman administration an honour. In the powder keg of war Children endured tough conditions while serving in some of history’s most famous naval battles The British Royal Navy first began using the term ‘powder monkey’ in the 17th century. In the golden age of sail, young boys would be recruited or press-ganged to service artillery guns on warships. Their job was to ferry gunpowder from the magazine in the ship’s hold to the gun crews. It was a dangerous job: gun carriages would regularly dismount and maim crewmembers, scalding iron rained from misfired guns and giant splinters would penetrate flesh. Brief autobiographical accounts from powder monkeys survive. One such account is from a boy named Robert Sands, who worked on Admiral Nelson’s ship during the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. He explained that “the smoke sofecated us… our skreens took fire and burnt the Leftanant of mereans [marines] badley. I had jest left thair wen the exploshon took place. The men inside the skreens was burnt to deth… Then I had to go to the fore magesene for my powder.” Despite his age and lower-class status, Sands’ unlikely memoir is one of the few accounts that exist from the battle. Beating hearts Historically, drummer boys have played a central role on the battlefield, especially in the American Civil War The use of drummer boys on the battlefield has been a longstanding western tradition. These musical mascots had a practical role to play, using different drum rolls to enable officers and troops to communicate with each other. Despite their wide-spanning history, drummer boys have become synonymous with 19th-century American warfare: sentimentalist poetry, art, sculpture and autobiography from the era juxtaposed these innocent children with sweeping battlescapes. The American Civil War propelled drummer boys to semi-celebrity status. The youngest recruit of the war, nine-year-old John Clem, rose to fame after he opened fire on a Confederate colonel who’d ordered him to surrender, and managed to escape. ‘The Drummer Boy of Chickamauga’, as he became known, was subsequently promoted to sergeant, making him the youngest soldier ever to become a non-commissioned officer in the US army. Other notable Civil War drummer boys include 13-year-old Charles King, the youngest recruit to be killed in the war; 12-year-old William Black, who lost his left arm during battle; and Louis Edward Rafield, who inspired the sentimental Confederate song ‘The Drummer Boy of Shiloh’, written by Will S Hays in 1863: On Shiloh’s dark and bloody ground The dead and wounded lay; Amongst them was a drummer boy, Who beat the drum that day. The teenage Tommies Children as young as 12 and 13 lied about their age to fight for Britain in the First World War During the First World War, British youth movements such as the Boy Scouts, the Sea Scouts and the Girl Guides militarised the youth of the nation and provided them with practical medical and survival skills. These children were quick to volunteer their services. One such child, nine-year-old Alfie Knight, pleaded with the then-secretary of state for war, Lord Kitchener, to let him join the army: “I want to go to the front. I can ride jolley quick on my bicycle, and would go as a despatch ridder. I wouldint let the Germans get it.” Kitchener replied to thank the lad, but noted that he was a little too young to fight. Many young boys did, however, find their way into the army. Approximately 250,000 British soldiers were under the legal age limit of 19. The youngest recognised soldier was 12-year-old Sidney Lewis, who fought in the battle of the Somme. Another young recruit, 13-year-old George Maher, lied about his age and was sent to the front line. His true age was revealed after he was found crying during heavy shelling. Punch magazine satirised this epidemic of willing youths with a cartoon. In it, an officer points to a young boy in a soldier’s uniform and booms: “Do you know where boys go who tell lies?” The applicant replies: “To the front, sir.” Hitler’s final hope Only lightly trained, the youthful soldiers recruited to support the Nazis’ last stand were essentially cannon fodder The Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls were among the primary tools used by the Nazi regime to control Germany’s future generation. Despite the compulsory gender roles attributed to each movement, the militant rhetoric that implored young subjects to devote themselves to the strength and defence of the ‘Fatherland’ was similar. The Hitler Youth received only quasi-military training as part of their political programme, learning how to march, drill, throw grenades, dig trenches and escape through barbed wire reels under pistol fire. And when they were ordered to join the fight against Allied forces in the final months of the war, the boys were woefully inexperienced and ill-prepared. They were sent out in lightly armed ambush squads, fulfilling their vow to “be ready as a brave soldier, to stake my life at any time for this oath”. Fifteen-year-old Heinz Shuetze was put in an SS uniform and sent to fight Soviet forces on the front line after being given just half a day’s training. He was armed with a panzerfaust, an anti-tank rocket. A survivor from some of the Soviet confrontations, Guenter Dullni, noted: “They [the Soviets] had no mercy for child soldiers, particularly when you were slapped into an SS uniform.” Tragically, many of the children who lost their lives in battle were sent to fight after the fate of the war had effectively been decided. Young guns How the proliferation of assault rifles gave birth to a new breed of child warriors While children were once of little use in combat roles, the invention of assault rifles like the Kalashnikov and the M-16 – smaller, lighter and with less recoil than previous guns – has enabled youngsters to be deployed as deadly ‘soldiers’. The Cold War marked the emergence of this trend, El Salvador in the 1980s being a prime example. Fighting between government troops and the rebel FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) resulted in the kidnap and rape of children, but also their conscription into the military by both sides. It’s reported that more than one in five of the FMLN’s troops were children, while 80 per cent of the government’s forces were under 18. In other words, children fighting children. The FMLN would send ‘kids units’ into villages to recruit even younger children, but also deployed them in active fighting. The government forces reportedly sent children to kill or injure members of their own family to ‘prove’ their loyalty. Like the FMLN, they also used children in overt active combat roles. One former child soldier recalled “eight-year-olds carrying M-16s and losing their whole families”. “Eyes wide, screaming in pain, fear and hatred” Child soldiers in recent conflicts in Africa have been forced to participate in a number of terrible atrocities The impact of child soldiers was ramped up to brutal new levels during the African civil wars of the 1990s, with mercenaries, gangs, arms dealers, militias and weakened governments all incorporating children into their ranks. In Liberia, ‘Small Boys Units’ were frequently used by the warlord/president Charles Taylor. Armed with Uzis or AK-47s, children would be used to engage against UN peacekeepers, pillage and plunder communities, or commit mass atrocities. One former child soldier recalled “the scent of gunpowder, eyes stinging from smoke, your friend crying… it was terrible. I missed my mother at that moment.” Children were also used by the FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda) to take part in the country’s devastating 1994 genocide. Boys aged 14 and younger, many of them orphaned and desperate for protection, were drugged, kidnapped and sold, then forced to act as combatants taking part in rape, mutilation and the killing of civilians. A staggering 800,000 people were murdered in the space of just 100 days. As the commander of the UN mission in Rwanda said at the time: “Those child soldiers’ eyes were wide and brilliant, screaming in pain and anguish, fear and hatred.” For these fresh-faced fighters, the innocence of youth is short-lived. Emma Butcher is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker 2017. James Rogers is associate lecturer in international politics at the University of York. They are both investigators on the Wellcome-funded project, ‘Legacies of War Trauma’ This article was first published in the July 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine
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