The Lost Band of Brothers (6 page)

Thus it was in Keir, not in London, after they learnt that MI(R)’s Operation
Knife
was cancelled, that Bill Stirling had the idea of setting up a training school for Special Forces personnel. It was from Keir that Stirling and others took their idea of a special training school to Jo Holland in Whitehall only to find that he and Gubbins had embraced the same idea. Holland, Gubbins and MI(R) gave them their blessing. In return, Stirling and his friends offered skilled instructors – mostly from 5th Scots Guards – and an ideal location with no landlord problems: the hills for miles around were owned by the School’s chief fieldcraft instructor, Lord Shimi Lovat.

They settled in, but there was little time to admire the stunning Highland scenery: the first course for twenty-five recruits was scheduled to start in early June. Two of those who would pass that course were David Stirling and Fitzroy Maclean, both destined to survive the war and become legends, one in Egypt, the other in Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, in Scotland, the midges were bad, they were short of rations, transport and cooks and there were never enough tents. They just got on with it.

Gubbins was not there to see the first Special Training Centre or School of Special Warfare take shape. German troops and armour were on the Channel coast and daily aerial reconnaissance missions showed that barges were being collected in ports and harbours facing England. Invasion appeared imminent. Any measure that would help Britain defend herself either before or after German troops landed in Britain – that was the overwhelming national priority. Gubbins, with his experience in Russia, Ireland, India, Poland and Paris, and with a recent DSO earned in Norway, was a man whose military currency had suddenly increased in value. Something else kept him in Whitehall, too.

In 1936 General Adam, the then Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had set up a department known as GS(R) within the War Office. The letters stood for General Staff (Research) and the purpose of the unit was nowhere near as anodyne as it sounded. The idea behind Adam’s creation was to free up a single officer within GS(R) to spend a year studying a specific subject of current interest to the Army Council, to think ‘out of the box’ as they would not have described it at the time. In October 1938 the officer appointed to GS(R) was Lt Col Jo Holland and, by then, advanced thinking within the supposedly hide-bound War Office – despite what might be said elsewhere in Westminster and in the leader columns of
The Times
newspaper – was that Hitler was likely to invade Eastern Europe before turning his attentions to the west. If he were to do so, they reasoned, then revolt inside the occupied countries was likely. And resistance from
within
that expanded German empire was something that might be turned to the advantage of Hitler’s enemies. Ostensibly, Holland’s formal brief within GS(R) was to study recent guerrilla warfare in both China and Spain. But there was a deeper, top secret layer to Holland’s briefing that very few knew about: he was to report on the possibility of providing clandestine support to any Eastern European country that might be overrun by Hitler.

Holland’s first report was ready in January 1939 and, whatever it contained, it must have been persuasive for, as a result, he was permitted to recruit two more officers to GS(R), one to be an expert in explosives and demolitions and the other to be in charge of organisation, recruitment and training. For the first he chose an eccentric Sapper Major, Ellis Jefferis. For the second he chose Colin Gubbins. Jo Holland already knew Gubbins well and knew of his experience and language skills in Russia and Ireland. Remembered Colin Gubbins:

A cold hand took me literally by the back of the neck and a voice I knew said: ‘What are you doing for lunch today?’ I whipped round – it was Jo Holland – and I replied that I was going to my regimental race at Sandown; there, beside me, were my field-glasses. ‘No, you are not’, he replied. ‘You are to lunch with me; the CIGS says so.’ We knew each other very well and I naturally agreed. In a private room at St Ermin’s Hotel I found that the real host, who was waiting for us there, was another sapper officer whom I also knew well [Laurence Grand]. Over lunch he told us that he was the head of Section D and explained his charter … He [Holland] started me off on the preparation of secret pamphlets on guerrilla warfare which were entitled
The Art of Guerilla
Warfare
,
The Partisan Leader’s Handbook
and
How To Use High Explosives
, and which were intended for the actual fighting partisan, tactical and not strategic.
21

In the late spring of 1938, Holland and Gubbins worked together producing papers on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare. By April 1939, Gubbins had been formally established as Holland’s assistant. The next month Holland was authorised to further expand his department and recruit and train suitable potential saboteurs, whilst GS(R) now came under the Director of Military Intelligence and assumed a new acronym as anodyne as the last: MI(R), Military Intelligence (Research). In June 1939 Holland’s newly named unit produced a report entitled
GS(R) Report No 8: Investigation of the Possibilities of Guerilla Activities
, which enclosed Gubbins’ training manuals. The next month he was told that, if he were mobilised, he would be sent to Poland as part of Britain’s military mission. Gubbins had been in Poland when the Germans invaded. He made contact with Polish Intelligence but, so swift was the German advance, he and his mission were unable to achieve anything. They pulled out via Bucharest and were lucky to get home. After a further fruitless MI(R) mission in Paris chasing underground contacts, Gubbins returned to London at the start of 1940. And then there had been Norway. Now, back in Britain, Jo Holland, Gubbins’ friend and mentor within MI(R), offered Gubbins a further clandestine post: to set up Britain’s top secret quasi-military guerrilla ‘stay behind’ forces that would go to ground after the Germans had invaded Britain. After being overrun by invading forces these small, four- to eight-man operational patrols would then rise up from their secret camouflaged operational bases buried deep in the woods and farmland of rural Britain and attack the Germans in the rear. Their task would be to destroy stores, blow up aircraft, bridges and fuel dumps, cut rail lines, disrupt convoys, kill senior German officers and even assassinate British collaborators. They were to be called Auxiliary Units – Auxunits – and their chances of long-term survival were slim indeed. Would Gubbins care to organise and lead them? Gubbins accepted. It was a desperate plan conceived in desperate times, times when speed, decision and, above all, action were of the critical essence. For what was at stake was Britain’s very survival.

Meanwhile, as Stirling and his instructors began whipping each of MI(R)’s ten Independent Companies into shape on Stirling’s home-devised, two-week course of intensive training at Lochailort, their future client-base was taking shape to the south.

On 9 June 1940 the War Office ordered Northern and Southern Commands to issue a call for ‘volunteers for Special Service’ from their sub units. It was a call that did not meet with universal approval: many conventional units feared the attraction of ‘special service’ would strip them of their best men. The orders of compliance they themselves received did little to ally such fears: ‘Commanding Officers were to ensure that only the best were sent; they must be young, absolutely fit, able to drive motor vehicles and unable to be seasick. It was a leap in the dark for absolutely nothing was said as to what they were to do.’
22
Predictably, there was a huge response from regular, territorial and reservist alike, from every corps, support unit and front-line regiment. Here, perhaps, was a way of striking back; something that offered challenge, danger, excitement and a change from the boredom inherent in barrack-room duties: ‘The great majority had never been under fire. They were just fed up with being told that the Germans were supermen and that they themselves were “wet”. And so they revolted against their age and went to war in a new spirit of dedicated ferocity.’
23
Most may have done, but not everyone: in addition to those who volunteered out of patriotism, boredom, a yearning for excitement or a combination of all three, some turned up at the Special Training Centre for selection and found themselves under commando scrutiny whilst entirely ignorant of what sort of unit they might be joining.

The day after General Sir Alan Bourne was appointed Director of Combined Operations, the Director of Military Operations and Plans, Major General R.H. Dewing, put out a secret memorandum spelling out precisely how these newly named ‘commando’ units were to be created, formed and deployed. It was a timely, clearly reasoned attempt to shed a little light into an area already generating much heat, undirected excitement and not a little resentment and suspicion:

Irregular operations will be initiated by the War Office. Each one must necessarily require different arms, equipment and methods, and the purpose of the commandos will be to produce whatever number of irregulars are required to carry out the operations. An officer will be appointed by the War Office to command each separate operation and the troops detailed to carry it out will be armed and equipped for that operation only from central sources controlled by the War Office.

The procedure proposed for raising and maintaining commandos is as follows: One or two officers in each Command will be selected as Commando Leaders. They will each be instructed to select from their own Commands a number of Troop Leaders to serve under them. The Troop Leaders will in turn select the officers and men to form their own Troop. While no strengths have yet been decided upon, I have in mind commandos of a strength of something like ten Troops of roughly fifty men each. Each Troop will have a commander and one or possibly two other officers.

Once the men have been selected the commando leader will be given an area (usually a seaside town) where his commando will live and train while not engaged on operations. The officers and men will receive no Government quarters or rations but will be given a consolidated money allowance to cover their cost of living. They will live in lodgings, etc., of their own selection in the area allotted to them and parade for training as ordered by their leaders. They will usually be allowed to make use of a barracks, camp or other suitable place as a training ground. They will also have an opportunity of practising with boats on beaches nearby.

When a commando is detailed by the War Office for some specific operation, arms and equipment will be issued on the scale required and the commando will be moved to the jumping off place for the operation. As a rule the operation will not take more than a few days, after which the commando would be returned to its original ‘Home Town’ where it will train and wait, probably for several weeks, before taking part in another operation.

To many officers rusticating in some administrative backwater counting water-bottles, supervising the whitewashing of curb-stones or training reluctant recruits with two left feet, that appeal for volunteers for ‘special service of a hazardous nature’ came not a moment too soon. One of those who heeded the call was Capt. Gus March-Phillipps, MBE. After the shame of Dunkirk, he had a score to settle.

  
1
.  March-Phillipps’ personal SOE file HS 9/1183/2.

  
2
.  Henrietta March-Phillipps made a BBC radio programme about her father in August 1970. This is the first of several excerpts. Others will be noted as ‘BBC Henrietta’.

  
3
.  Interview with the author, 2013.

  
4
.  BBC Henrietta.

  
5
.  Brooks Richards Audio, IWM 9970.

  
6
.  
Anders Lassen
, Mike Langley, 21.

  
7
.  CAB 66/7/48.

  
8
.  Prime Minister Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons, 4 June 1940.

  
9
.
  Finest Years
, Max Hastings, 63.

10
.  
The Death of Jean Moulin
, Patrick Marnham, 90.

11
.  
British Commandos 1940–1946
, Tim Moreman, 9.

12
.  
Commando Country
, Stuart Allan, 84, and Cabinet Records CAB 120/414 at The National Archives, Kew.

13
.  
The Commandos
, 9.

14
.  Ibid., 27.

15
.  
The Commandos 1940–1946
, Messenger, 26–7.

16
.  
All Hell Let Loose
, Max Hastings, 48.

17
.  
Ian Fleming’s Commandos
, Nicholas Rankin, 71.

18
.  
March Past
, Lord Lovat, 175.

19
.  Ibid., 177.

20
.  Ibid.

21
.  
Gubbins & SOE
, Peter Wilkinson & Joan Astley, 34.

22
.  
British Commandos 1940–1946
, 11.

23
.  Ibid., 12.

Each Command was responsible for raising commandos from troops within their own area and for selecting and appointing their own commando leaders. These leaders would appoint their own troop commanders who, in turn, would select their own volunteers:

•
  No 1 Commando, it was envisaged, would be formed from disbanded Independent Companies. In fact, this commando never actually formed because the Independent Companies remained in being for some months to come.

•
  No 2 Commando was to be raised as a parachute unit with volunteers stepping forward from both Northern and Southern Commands.

•
  Nos 3 and 4 Commandos would be formed from troops with Southern Command.

•
  Nos 5 and 6 Commandos would be formed from Western Command.

•
  No 7 Commando would be made up of volunteers from Eastern Command.