The Daring Dozen Read online

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  ANDERS LASSEN SPECIAL BOAT SQUADRON

  DAVID STIRLING SPECIAL AIR SERVICE

  EDSON RAFF 82ND AIRBORNE

  EVANS CARLSON MARINE RAIDERS

  ROBERT FREDERICK 1ST SPECIAL SERVICE FORCE

  PADDY MAYNE SPECIAL RAIDING SQUADRON

  RALPH BAGNOLD LONG RANGE DESERT GROUP

  JUNIO VALERIO BORGHESE TENTH LIGHT FLOTILLA

  BARON VON DER HEYDTE FALLSCHIRMJÄGER

  ADRIAN VON FÖLKERSAM BRANDENBURGERS

  ORDE WINGATE CHINDITS

  CHARLES HUNTER 5307TH COMPOSITE UNIT

  ENDNOTES

  GLOSSARY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  World War II was the first conflict of the modern age. While the Great War of 1914–18 had much in common with the American Civil War of the 1860s and the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, World War II benefited from the rapid technological advances of the 20th century. There were modern aircraft (even jet aircraft by the end of the war), powerful radio communications, light and rapid motorized transport, mobile armoured vehicles and new and destructive weapons, from Germany’s flying bombs to sub-machine guns such as the Sten and the Schmeisser MP40.

  Unfortunately many senior officers, irrespective of nationality, failed to grasp the potential of the innovations, or how soldiering might change in this new world. For them, war was still fought along the lines of the massed infantry attacks of World War I.

  The man who did much to alter this moribund mindset, certainly on the Allies’ side, was British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. After German paratroopers had jumped into the Low Countries in May 1940 with such devastating effect, Churchill knew the British must produce their own Special Forces to counter them and to inspire fear among the enemy. On 5 June 1940 he ordered his Chiefs of Staff to ‘propose me measures for a vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive’. What sprang from the memo was the first Commando unit.

  Yet despite the enthusiastic endorsement of the Prime Minister, the formation of these special units was viewed with distaste by many senior officers within the British Army and, later, in the American high command. This cabal of Luddites considered Commando units as ‘irregular’ or ‘renegades’, an affront to civilized soldiering.

  Fortunately there were enough younger officers with sufficient boldness and determination to pursue their vision of what modern warfare should entail. One of the most famous was a 25-year-old Scottish lieutenant called David Stirling, the founder of the Special Air Service; he called the superannuated staff officers ‘freemasons of mediocrity’.1

  In North Africa, in 1941, Stirling saw that the Desert War was ripe for irregular warfare; the vast, uninhabited regions of the Libyan Desert could be exploited by small units of highly trained, motivated and well-equipped men. It was a theatre made for hit-and-run raids, as was the war in the Pacific, the fighting in Burma and much of the conflict in Western Europe. And it wasn’t just on land that the nature of warfare had irrevocable changed. At sea the mechanical and technological progress of the 20th century had opened up new opportunities for destruction. One of the first to recognize this was the brilliant Italian naval commander Junio Valerio Borghese, whose human torpedo unit caused grave trouble for the Royal Navy in 1941–42. The following year the British Special Boat Squadron wreaked havoc of its own kind on Axis forces using lightweight kayaks and small but powerful explosives.

  The men featured in this book fully deserve to be called ‘daring’. But there was more to the Daring Dozen – arguably the 12 most important British, American, German and Italian Special Forces leaders of the war – than just personal audacity. Between them, these men pioneered the concept of Special Forces, often struggling to establish and maintain their special units against opponents within their own armed forces. They were determined enough to press on despite what Stirling called the ‘fossilized shits’ among the top brass who stood in their way. They were courageous enough to put their theories into practice against the enemy, but above all they had the self-belief to persevere when – as in the early days they often did – their plans went awry.

  They had something else in common, too. They shared a common attitude, a creed best encapsulated by one of World War II’s finest guerrilla fighters, ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert:

  If we have got to fight in this world we prefer to fight where any skill or initiative counts a lot, and where even on the smallest scale it is possible to practice the art of war against a personal opponent rather than just being pawns in a very large operation.2

  ANDERS LASSEN

  SPECIAL BOAT SQUADRON

  Lake Comacchio has been likened in terrain to the Fens, that marshy land leaking out from the Wash on England’s east coast. Situated between Rimini to the south and Venice to the north on Italy’s Adriatic coast, the shallow and fetid waters of Lake Comacchio are a haven to the myriad breeds of fish as well as a million and more mosquitoes. A thin strip of sand, known as ‘the spit’, separates the eastern edge of the lake from the Adriatic Sea and several small islands are dotted across the lake, which stretches for five miles at its widest point and 20 at its longest.

  In the spring of 1945, as the Allies swept north through Italy, Lake Comacchio was still in the hands of the Germans, whose seasoned troops under the command of General Heinrich von Vietinghoff were well dug in among the reeds and alongside the causeways of the lake’s shores. The eastern side was defended by the 162nd Turkoman Division with dozens of mines sewn into the thin strip of sand.

  The lake posed a problem for the Allies, blocking as it did the progress north of Lieutenant-General Mark Clark’s V Corps and of the British Eighth Army as they sought to overrun the retreating Germans. The solution was Operation Grapeshot. On 6 April a southern promontory was seized by the British 56th Division and 700 enemy soldiers fell into Allied hands as the first stage of the operation was accomplished successfully. Now Clark was nearly ready to launch the next stage of his assault on Comacchio, sending 2 Commando and 9 Commando to secure a bridgehead on the northern shore of the lake preparatory to the main attack.

  Appreciating the hazardous nature of his task, the brigadier of the Commandos, Ronnie Tod, instructed the Special Boat Squadron (SBS) to create a diversionary raid on the German positions on the eastern shore in the hope of fooling the Germans into deploying troops from the north shore to repel the assault.

  The man chosen to lead the diversionary raid was Major Anders Frederik Emil Victor Schau Lassen, or as he preferred to be called, ‘Andy’. The 25-year-old Dane was a holder of a Military Cross and two Bars, and a reputation as the finest fighter in the Special Boat Squadron. His commanding officer, George Jellicoe, considered Lassen to have ‘all the qualities of the buccaneering Viking – extraordinary courage, physical endurance, devil-may-care and keenness’.

  In the wake of the raid on Comacchio Lassen would have something else – a Victoria Cross, the first for a member of the British Special Forces, but it would come at a terrible price.

  Lassen was born on 22 September 1920 to Emil, a captain in the Danish Lifeguards, and his wife, Suzanne, a writer whose children’s books had earned her fame and fortune throughout Scandinavia. Lassen was born in the family home, a mansion near Mern in South Zealand that boasted nearly as many rooms as it did acres, an ideal stamping ground for a young boy to grow up in.

  As boys Lassen and his younger brother Frants spent hours roaming the woods that encircled the family home, exploring as far as the coastline that lay two miles from the house, and learning how to fire a rifle and use a bow and arrow. Their parents did little to check their behaviour and Anders developed a reputation as a wild boy at school, charming but
occasionally cruel in his humour. He felt imprisoned by the classroom, lessons bored him – except nature studies – and he resented having to wear a school uniform. One female childhood acquaintance of Lassen’s described him thus many years later: ‘I remember very clearly his incredible beauty, the looks of the perfect hero – but I was repelled by his aggressive, macho behaviour.’

  Tall, athletic, blond and blue-eyed, Lassen conformed to the Danish stereotype, but there was far more to him than beauty. Though he had not done particularly well at school, Lassen was intelligent and forceful, and imbued with the self-confidence of the privileged. To no one’s great surprise, Lassen declared peremptorily at the start of 1939 that he was going to sea to discover the world. He sailed from Denmark in June that year aboard the Elenora Maersk, a merchant tanker skippered by Captain P.V.J. Pedersen. Lassen was just 18, but a few months later he was the ringleader of a mutiny.

  On 9 April 1940 the 16,500-ton Elenora Maersk was en route towards the Persian Gulf when news reached them of the German invasion of Denmark. Captain Pedersen said there was nothing they could do and ordered the oil tanker to continue on its way. But Lassen demanded they hold a council of war among the ship’s company, the outcome of which that the vessel sailed out of neutral waters to British-held Bahrain. ‘Mutinied in the Persian Gulf,’ wrote Lassen in his diary.

  It took Lassen a further eight months to negotiate his passage to Britain, but on Christmas Eve 1940 he stepped ashore at Oban on the west coast of Scotland. From there he travelled to Newcastle, then on to London where, on 25 January 1941, he became one of the 467 Danes who would enlist in the British armed forces during the war. On joining the Free Danes, as they were then known, Lassen swore an oath of allegiance to King Christian X and also vowed ‘to serve loyally whatever authority is working against the enemy that occupied my Fatherland’.

  If Lassen had been expecting imminent action he was sadly disabused. The war in early 1941 was not going well for Britain, which stood alone against Nazi Germany in Europe and against Italy in Africa. The only glimpse of an enemy that Lassen saw in those first, dragging months were the Luftwaffe bombers overhead, targeting Britain’s cities and docks.

  Instead of seeing action, Lassen was ordered to Scotland to undergo weeks of training at Arisaig, a remote spot on the west coast of Scotland just south of the Isle of Skye. Lassen and 16 other Danes were put through a series of demanding physical and mental tests as their British instructors assessed their suitability for Special Operations Executive (SOE). One of the assessors was Brook Richards, a former naval commander who had joined the organization a few weeks earlier. He described Lassen as ‘a remarkable young Dane’ and remembered in particular his unshakeable conviction as to the outcome of the war. ‘He started telling everybody how important it was for Denmark’s future that Denmark should be fighting [for] the Allied cause because the Allies were going to win,’ reflected Richards. ‘For a 19-year-old (he was actually 20 at this time) this is really rather a remarkable vision.’1

  However, for Lassen’s fellow Danes, it was not his self-belief that most impressed them on Arisaig but rather his skill as a hunter. One of them recalled how they were on a map-reading exercise when Lassen spotted among the gorse two red deer 50 yards away. ‘We knew he was a hunter and, seeing one animal move off, we left him to it,’ one of the Danes later told Lassen’s mother. ‘He ran round the bushes, got up close and stabbed it with his knife.’2

  Richards said that Lassen’s SOE instructors were as ‘astonished’ as everyone else by his stealth and ruthlessness. The SOE knew they had someone special in their midst, but a man whose temperament was perhaps more suited to combat than espionage. In the late spring of 1941 Lassen and two other Danes were posted south, to Poole Harbour, where they were met by Major Gus March-Phillips and Captain Geoffrey Appleyard.

  Lassen at once felt at home in the company of the pair, both of whom were inclined to care less about the finer points of army etiquette, while placing great emphasis on a man’s self-discipline and initiative. There wasn’t an HQ as such in Poole; instead March-Phillips based himself in the Maid Honor, a 70ft ketch that had been converted from a cup-winning racing yacht into a mini-warship with a 2-pounder cannon concealed beneath a dummy deckhouse and two heavy machine guns with a field of fire through the scuppers.

  Lassen initially assumed the objective of Maid Honor Force, as the unit was known, would be to attack enemy shipping in the English Channel but March-Phillips soon explained the real nature of their role. Disguised as a fishing boat they were to sail 3,000 miles south and wage a war of piracy in the seas off West Africa.

  Lassen was among the five men selected by March-Phillips for the mission. The commander had already confided to Appleyard his belief about Lassen, saying ‘unless I’m very wrong that young man will go far’, while Appleyard had described the Dane in a letter home as ‘a splendid seaman and a crackshot with any kind of weapon … he’s good-hearted and good at everything – even [if] he does dislike discipline’.3

  The Maid Honor left England on 12 August 1941 with March-Phillips at the helm and Lassen the only Dane on board. They arrived at Freetown after 41 days at sea, and after a refit and rest they departed on 10 October having loaded their vessel with four depth charges in case they should spot a German submarine.

  For weeks the Maid Honor patrolled fruitlessly along the coasts of Sierra Leone and Portuguese Guinea before, on 15 January 1942, March-Phillips decided to attack a German tanker and an Italian liner at anchor on the Spanish colonial island of Fernando Po. The mission was a success with Lassen, as ‘lithe as a cat’, and his fellow raiders (reinforced by the crews of two British tugboats) capturing the two vessels without any bloodshed. The prizes were sailed to Lagos with the raiders feted upon their arrival. Congratulatory telegrams were sent from London and March-Phillips rewarded Lassen with a commission and a promise that there would be more adventure to come in 1942.

  Upon their return to Britain the men of Maid Honor Force were renamed by SOE as the ‘Small Scale Raiding Force’ (SSRF) and based at Anderson Manor, a Jacobean house on the banks of the river Winterborne in Dorset. From the original nine men the SSRF grew to a strength of 55, and the new recruits underwent a punishing training regime similar to that which Lassen had experienced in Scotland a year earlier. They trained at sea, on Exmoor and on the firing ranges set up around the manor. Soon the men were all proficient with explosives, grenades and small arms, but Lassen believed the SSRF should also revive a weapon from Britain’s martial past. Writing to the War Office, he stated: ‘I have considerable experience in hunting with bow and arrow. I have shot everything from sparrows to stags, and although I have never attempted to shoot a man yet it is my opinion that the result would turn out just as well.’4 Lassen added that such was his skill with a bow he could fire 15 arrows in a minute. The War Office rejected the idea, describing the weapon as ‘inhuman’.5

  It wasn’t all work and no play, however, for the SSRF in Dorset. The nearby village of Winterborne Kingston boasted a fine country pub and in addition there was a plentiful supply of energetic Land Army girls working the surrounding fields. Lassen, often with Appleyard in tow, ploughed a rich furrow through their ranks. ‘Apple and Andy were both good-looking, and Andy’s broken English charmed the girls,’ remembered Ian Warren, one of the SSRF. ‘Whenever they turned up at a dance … the rest of us knew we’d probably be going home by bus because Apple and Andy would walk off with the best girls.’6

  One woman who was off-limits, however, even for Lassen, was the new wife of Gus March-Phillips, who was a frequent visitor at Anderson Manor in the early summer of 1942. She remembered Lassen as having ‘straight yellow hair, a high complexion that was also sunburned, and a rather gappy grin because a lot of front teeth had been bashed out’. Majorie March-Phillips was able to spot that even among a force of young, aggressive and highly trained men Lassen stood out: ‘Andy behaved impeccably while I was there but you could see he was pretty wild,’ s
he said. ‘One of the wildest of the lot.’

  The SSRF was blooded in August 1942 when they launched a night raid on the Cotentin Peninsula, killing three German soldiers they found patrolling the coastline. In material terms the raid achieved little, but psychologically it reminded the Germans of Winston Churchill’s taunt a few months earlier: ‘there comes out of the sea from time to time a hand of steel which plucks the German sentries from their posts.’

  The SSRF next struck at the Les Casquets lighthouse, eight miles northwest of Alderney, scaling an 80ft cliff and capturing the seven Germans in the lighthouse without a shot being fired. Lassen led a reconnaissance raid on the Channel Island of Burhou in early September and was then sent on leave while March-Phillips took a party to Normandy to test the enemy defences.

  It was a good raid to miss. When Lassen returned from leave he was to learn that none of the 11-strong party had returned. Word later reached the SSRF that the men had had the misfortune to come ashore just as a German patrol was passing. Three men – including March-Phillips – were killed in the initial exchange of fire and the rest were all rounded up in the days and weeks that followed. One of the men, Graham Hayes, who had sailed with Lassen to West Africa, got as far as the France–Spain border, before being betrayed and subsequently executed by the Gestapo.

  Hayes was a victim of Adolf Hitler’s infamous Commando Order, issued in October 1942, that instructed that all captured Allied Commandos be treated as terrorists and shot. The Order was in retaliation for two incidents that had occurred earlier in the year. The first came after the failed raid on Dieppe in August 1942, when German troops learned of an Allied order to ‘bind prisoners’ captured on the raid. The second incident concerned a commando attack on the Channel Island of Sark on the night of 4 October – a raid in which Lassen was instrumental in incurring Hitler’s wrath.

  The Channel Islands had been in German hands for 16 months when Lassen, Appleyard and a combined 14-strong team from SSRF and 62 Commando landed on Sark with the intention of snaring several prisoners. With Appleyard leading the way – he had holidayed on the island pre-war – the raiders soon had five German engineers in their possession, while Lassen had disposed of the solitary sentry with his knife. None of the captives were manacled but their thumbs were tied together with cord and the string on their pyjama bottoms cut, so the prisoners had their hands occupied if they wished to protect their modesty. But on their way down to the beach the Germans made a bolt for freedom and four of the five were shot. The Germans were outraged when they found the four bodies at dawn and their Supreme Command declared that following the incident, ‘all territorial and sabotage parties of the British and their confederates, who do not act like soldiers but like bandits, will be treated by the German troops as such and wherever they are encountered they will be ruthlessly wiped out in action.’7