Churchill's Wizards (32 page)

‘The Dunkirk spirit' transforms such a defeat into a victory. But this particular blow, devastating in its losses and psychic impact, stunning in its revelation of vulnerability, also galvanised Britain into new ways of protecting itself. Necessity is always the mother of invention, and the glaring weakness of 1940 required a bigger show of strength; hence more camouflage, more deception, more propaganda.

On Tuesday, 4 June 1940, Harold Nicolson MP wrote to his wife Vita Sackville-West, wishing her courage and hope: ‘This afternoon Winston made the finest speech I have ever heard. The House was deeply moved.' The famous Dunkirk speech to the House of Commons begins as an historical narrative of the events leading to Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk, praises the armed services and everyone involved in the miraculous deliverance of 335,000 men ‘out of the jaws of death and shame' and then turns to the imminent threat of military invasion, a reality unknown for a thousand years. Its peroration is justly renowned, ‘… we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…' and it ends by invoking the New World. But there are less well known elements in it. Readying British citizens for Nazi invasion, Churchill said:

Immediately after making his speech, Churchill suggested to General Ismay, the head of the military wing of his Cabinet War Secretariat, that ‘we should immediately set to work to organise raiding forces on these coasts … How wonderful it would be if the Germans could be made to wonder where they were going to be struck next, instead of forcing us to try to wall in the Island and roof it over!'

With Britain on the back foot, everyone was discussing what the country was going to do, including people like Dudley Clarke in the CIGS Secretariat at the War Office. In
Seven Assignments
, Clarke says
that he began thinking of historical parallels of countries overrun, like Spain under Napoleon from 1808 to 1814, when the bandit-like resistance movement gave the world the name ‘guerrilla'. Ninety years later the Boers had found the same solution, harrying the British Army with loosely organised groups of horsemen, the Boer ‘Commandos'. This idea of the irregular armed band, led by a man like Smuts, took Clarke on to his own experience in 1936 of unorthodox warfare in Palestine where ‘a handful of ill-armed fanatics' had run rings round an army corps of regular troops. Perhaps the Spaniard, the Boer and the Arab had something to teach the stodgy British Army. Archibald Wavell had talked about this, observing that attack was the easiest form of warfare, and that it paid to be more aggressive when you were weaker. Mobility was crucial to all guerrillas, and the British had the advantage of their traditional element, the sea, with an enemy stretched out along thousands of miles of European coastline from Bodø to Biarritz. Clarke first sketched out the idea of an amphibious ‘commando' in three hand-written sheets dated 30 May 1940.

On Wednesday, 5 June, General John Dill inspected some soldiers who had returned in good order from Dunkirk. Their morale was surprisingly high, and he was keen to harness their ‘offensive spirit'. Clarke says that it was then that he suggested the idea of ‘commandos', and the CIGS said he would put it to the Prime Minister the next day. He asked Clarke to rough it out on paper, bearing in mind two limitations: no existing unit could be diverted from Home Defence, and thrifty use was to be made of the meagre stock of arms remaining after the losses in France.

Dill took Clarke's idea to the chief of staffs meeting and the cabinet, and before lunch that Thursday summoned Clarke to tell him ‘Your Commando scheme is approved, and I want you to get it going at once. Try to get a raid across the Channel mounted at the earliest possible moment.' The same day, ‘flushed with a sense of deliverance', Winston Churchill wrote a vigorous minute on organising the Striking Companies:

Clarke was to drop his staff duties and take charge of a brand new section in the Directorate of Military Operations responsible for every sort of raiding. That afternoon, under the direction of Brigadier Otto Lund, Clarke began setting up MO9. For recruits, he began looking to the ‘Independent Companies' which had been formed in April 1940 from Territorial Army volunteers, lightly armed and equipped to operate behind enemy lines or on his flanks for several days. Five of the independent companies (each with twenty officers and 270 other ranks) were then fighting in Norway under Colin Gubbins, but another five were facing disbandment in Scotland, and from these he could have a free choice.

The next problem was transport. On 7 June, Dudley Clarke talked to the assistant chief of the Naval Staff at the Admiralty, who, he said, ‘fairly bounced from his chair' with enthusiasm at the idea of this piratical enterprise and introduced Clarke to the Second Sea Lord. The Second Sea Lord said he had the very man, G. A. Garnon-Williams, at the time busy sinking blockade ships in Zeebrugge harbour. Clarke took the sleeper to Scotland, found two officers at the independent companies' camp outside Glasgow, and asked them each to pick a hundred volunteers for ‘independent mobile operations' in a unit to be known for the moment as ‘No. 11 Commando'. They were to bring them south to go on a raid in the next two weeks.

Clarke later explained the principle behind this in a November 1948 BBC Home Service talk, ‘The Birth of the Commandos':

On Monday, 10 June, Clarke met Garnon-Williams, who suggested the Hamble river near Southampton was a good place to collect men and motor boats. On the 12th the soldiers arrived from Scotland for the first of several exercises, invading Hampshire against a friendly infantry battalion. The boats were not good and Garnon-Williams
came up with a solution: six RAF ‘crash-boats', the kind that T. E. Lawrence had worked on, designed for the speedy rescue of airmen who came down in the water. The date for the first raid was set for 24 June 1940. By now the raiding concept was gaining ground elsewhere too, and Major General Alan Bourne of the Royal Marines was being put in charge of a new Combined Operations HQ. Rumblings of organisational discontent and flashes of service rivalry marked the opening skirmishes of a Whitehall turf war.

Dudley Clarke got permission to go on the first raid, operation
COLLAR
, but was forbidden to land. Four boats set out from Dover, Newhaven and Folkestone with 120 men, faces blackened with makeup from Willie Clarkson's theatre shop in Wardour Street, heading for points on the enemy coast south of Boulogne. They were not equipped for exact navigation, the compass was unreliable and they were delayed by buzzing RAF fighters who had not been told about them. At two o'clock in the morning of 24 June their boat hissed into the beach and the men waded ashore and disappeared into the sand dunes.

Clarke says it was alarming just waiting in the lapping craft. A German plane flew directly overhead and a German patrol boat hovered ominously nearby. Then firing broke out a mile down the coast: machine guns and rifles, the thump of grenades. A German cyclist patrol came along the beach. Ronnie Tod, the officer, dropped the drum of his unfamiliar.45 Thompson sub-machine gun and the noise caused the German patrol to open fire wildly into the darkness. Clarke felt a stunning blow to his head and fell to the deck, sore and shaken. He had a pain in his hip where he had crushed his silver tobacco box. The implication in his account is that he was hit by a stray bullet, but Ernest Chappell (who was also there) says there was no firing. Perhaps Clarke's injuries were caused by falling over in the boat in the darkness.

The German patrol had made off, but it was possible they would return with reinforcements. Then sinister dark figures appeared on the beach and started wading quietly towards the boat, bayonets out-thrust. In a voice strangled with fear, Clarke asked for a password and got an unintelligible answer. Was it the enemy? But the ordinary English name of an NCO dissipated the intense excitement. They backed carefully out into deep water and edged away to the north. It was growing light by now and when the German plane came back
they cut the engine to show no wake. Then the mysterious German boat moved off, and they headed for home. Daylight showed the left side of Dudley Clarke's head, neck and coat to be caked with dried blood, and his left ear almost severed. Patched up, he was treated as a hero when the commandos returned to Dover. Only one of the four boat crews had actually done anything, landing at Le Touquet, clumsily killing two sentries and throwing some grenades.

This first attempt of the commandos was small beer, but the Ministry of Information put out a slim communiqué the next day that hinted at great games afoot.

The second commando raid, on occupied Guernsey on 14 July, was not very successful either, once again owing to faulty compasses and inadequate boats. One party landed on the wrong island and two weak swimmers were left behind to be captured. But Churchill was keen on the concept and three days later appointed the fire-eating Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Roger Keyes, who had led the famous raid on the U-boat bases of Zeebrugge and Ostend in April 1918, to be the new head of Combined Operations Command. Keyes cancelled the ‘little-and-often' policy and prepared for a big commando raid. On 25 August 1940, Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden, his Secretary of State for War, urging the development of ‘storm troops' on German lines.

Dudley Clarke stayed with MO9 from June to November 1940. One of his key ideas was to get away from the comfortable staples of army ‘herd' life, instead making individuals responsible for their own food, transport and shelter. In addition to his pay, each commando was given an allowance of six shillings and eightpence a day (an officer received double, thirteen shillings and fourpence), and how he spent it was up to him. If the order was ‘Assemble tomorrow at Dover docks at 10 a.m.', no transport was laid on, but every man had to make his own way there. Thus the individual commando was encouraged to be self-reliant and self-confident, free to put forward a good idea or a new technique, but also to pair up: one assault course was called ‘Me and My Pal' because it was far harder to do alone. These men were physically fit, could swim, climb or march, and had been trained with every kind of portable weapon, including the enemy's. Majors Fairbairn and Sykes, formerly of the Shanghai Police, taught close-quarter combat and developed the commando dagger. Wavell had said in the 1930s that he saw the ideal infantryman as a mixture of cat-burglar, poacher and gunman, and in 1940 Clarke wanted the amphibious commando to be a cross between an Elizabethan pirate, a Chicago gangster and a Frontier tribesman. These cinematic references did not always go down well with traditional authority, but they were a powerful lure to recruits.

Once again Clarke's love for showbiz and the theatrical came up trumps. He managed to enlist the actor David Niven, who had been an officer in the Highland Light Infantry but had to resign in disgrace after raising his hand to ask, at the end of a long and boring lecture by a visiting major general, ‘Can you tell me the time, please? I have to catch a train.' He had then escaped close arrest by charming his captor, going on to become famous in Hollywood. It was a brilliant idea of Clarke's to make the debonair star of
The Dawn Patrol
the link between the MO9 office and the hard nuts of the Commandos, because it made ‘special service of a hazardous nature' seem even more appealing and amusing to the men. According to his colourful 1971 reminiscences
The Moon's a Balloon
, Niven once came down to London from hush-hush commando training at Lochailort Castle and was arrested by Special Branch and questioned by MI5 about the telegram he had sent to a female foreign national: ARRIVING WEDNESDAY MORNING WILL COME STRAIGHT TO FLAT
WITH SECRET WEAPON. He explained that his urgent mission was fornication, not espionage.

Niven suggested to Clarke that his new uncle by marriage, Bob Laycock, would do well in the commandos. Indeed, after they got him in, Major General Sir Robert Laycock rose to become chief of Combined Operations from 1943–7. On his way to the top, and largely selecting men out of White's Club in London's St James's Street, Laycock raised No. 8 Commando, which included David Stirling as well as the writer Evelyn Waugh, whose experiences in Crete with ‘Layforce' would become central to his great three-part novel of WW2,
Sword of Honour
.