CHAPTER 16

Canoeists, Raiders, Rangers and Marines

A good case is made by those who argue that among the most vital functions of the Directorate of Combined Operations and the Special Operations Executive was the promotion of new ideas in the teeth of opposition from the established Service Directorates and Government Departments, an opinion with which those in America who favoured unorthodoxy would have concurred. In peacetime the regular forces contained their share of revolutionary mavericks; in wartime the number was greatly increased by bright, disrespectful, armed civilians who were eager to experiment and get on with the war. Their task in obtaining new weapons, such as Tommy-guns, sophisticated demolition devices, canoes and the like, would have been much harder had they not benefited by assistance from the new novelty organizations led and staffed by men with open minds.

If it had not been for Keyes wasting not a moment in July 1940 to form the Small Boat Section, a valuable weapon system might have been seriously hampered, instead of being amply proven by Courtney in 1941 in the Mediterranean. As it was, work in Britain to develop the original Folbot was most fruitful. With the failure of the Folbot Company Mr Goatley of Messrs Goatley Ltd began to design and manufacture in large numbers several types of greatly improved craft, notably, in September 1941, the two-man Cockle Mk I and in July 1941, the 11-man, later increased to 12-man, Goatley collapsible assault boat.

By November 1941, No. 101 Troop, which had been formed in 6 Commando under Captain G. C. Montanaro, RE, from hand-picked men of the SS Brigade, was ready for action. On a grey November night two canoes were launched outside Calais harbour with the task of searching for and sinking an enemy ship (Operation Astrakhan). It failed when one canoe, caught in rough water, capsized, the two men managing to get ashore where they were made prisoner. No. 101 Troop was by now much better equipped with cockles and with improved 1¼-pound limpet mines developed by SOE’s experts – devices which could be attached to a ship’s bottom and exploded by timed fuses.

The next attempt (Operation JV) was more precisely planned than Astrakhan and was made on the night of 12 April in a canoe manned by Captain Montanaro and Trooper F. A. Preece, RAC; their target a 4,000-ton tanker anchored in Boulogne harbour. Carried to within paddling distance by ML 102, and escorted by MGBs, they cautiously paddled their way into the harbour, guided by sounds from a Saturday night drinking party ashore. Groping about in the dark, they at last found the ship at 0200 hours. Notes from their report tell of grim determination to succeed despite repeated mishaps:

 

Got stuck on a concrete edge and that holed the canoe which began leaking fast. Anyway, got alongside the ship 15 minutes later with one of the paddles split. Found limpets could be got on at 0220 hours, although the ship was rather foul. Had trouble due to a large hole in the ship caused previously by a torpedo. More limpets laid along the side. Paddling out to sea and well behind time, water in the canoe was by now about four inches, we arrived at the pick-up position at 0320 hours with the canoe rapidly filling – one paddling the other bailing. Sea was rising and things looking black while we shifted stores on the canoe to assist buoyancy until, at 0400 hours, the ML appeared and took us home.

 

The next day the ship was seen to be low in the water with her funnel missing. The following month Courtney, who had recently returned from the Middle East, formed No. 2 Small Boat Section, absorbing 101 Troop. Canoeists had won their spurs; another ‘Private Army’ was in existence.

Anathema though the existence of private armies and Commandos may have been to inflexible traditionalists, an irrefutable need for them in specialist employment in a war unlike any other was unanswerable. They could strike accurately and reconnoitre closely where aircraft, for example, could not; they had enormous potential as the spearheads of the major invasions yet to come; and they were romantically attractive to both the public and to statesmen. Churchill’s thrill in their swashbuckling exploits, when he managed to overcome his reservations, were the guarantee of their continued existence in Britain and of their emergence in the US, where he found a kindred spirit, so far as raiding went, in Roosevelt.

Raider forces in the US came about from the interweaving of several different strands of initiative. Both the army and the navy, with the Marine Corps, had a tradition of hit-and-run attacks dating back to the Revolution, but it was the Marines who had studied raiding in the 1930s and had formed ‘Provisional Rubber Boat Companies’ in February 1941. In May 1940, inspired by the German use of parachutists in Holland, Lieutenant-General T. Holcomb, Commandant of the Marine Corps, initiated a study of this new way of warfare and came up with a proposal for a battalion whose tasks might be reconnaissance, raiding, with a limited capability to return to the parent organization, spearhead operations to seize vital terrain and strategic installations, or as ‘an independent force operating for extended periods, presumably in a guerrilla role in hostile territory’. Volunteers, of whom there was no shortage, had to be of Commando-like physique and motivation; but unlike Commandos, officers would be paid an extra $100 a month and enlisted men $50. Training of the first men began in October 1940, but was delayed by shortages of parachutes and suitable aircraft. It was spring 1942 before the first battalion was ready. In 1940 the army also formed its first parachute platoon which would act as the cadre for 501st Parachute Battalion, whose role initially, like that of the Marines, would place emphasis upon sabotage missions but in 1941 would turn to large-scale operations of divisional size.

At the Arcadia Conference the criss-cross strands were woven together. Marine and Combined Operations officers talked shop and some of the discussion was of the emerging change of scene in the Pacific, where the Japanese advance bit deep among the myriad islands and coastlines, presenting opportunities which amounted to a positive necessity to raid until the tide of defeat was turned. From the President and his closest advisers, through his Chiefs of Staff, came the urge to create special Commando-type units. As already seen, Roosevelt, too, had a kitchen cabinet, notably Colonel Donovan and Major E. F. Carlson, the latter a Marine officer with a distinguished career in the 1920s who, during his third tour of duty in China (1937/38), had marched with the Communist guerrilla 8th Route March Army under Chu Teh. Resigning his commission in 1938, Carlson concentrated on the study of China and in a stream of letters to Roosevelt enthused the President, who welcomed novelties, with the potential of irregular, populist forces organized loosely, governed by democratic methods and proficient in hit-and-run tactics – be they against Japanese or Chinese Nationalists. But the strongest voice was Donovan’s, as he endeavoured to build a raiding capacity into his own special organizations.

Threatened by the menace of wild men such as Donovan and Carlson, the latter having rejoined the Marines as a reservist in April 1941, and by the President whose son, Major James Roosevelt, had recently been attached to the British in London and the Middle East and was strongly advocating raider operations, on 6 January 1942, the Marines redesignated 1st Battalion 5th Marine Regiment as 1st Separate Battalion. At once attitudes within the American hierarchy assumed a similarity to those within the British. Holcomb, while willing to permit what were soon known as ‘Raider Battalions’ to be ‘identical to that of the Commandos’, also entered the reservation that ‘the training of all units in the two Marine Divisions prepares them to carry out either offensive operations on a large-scale, or small-scale amphibious raids of the type carried out by the Commandos’.

Simultaneously Holcomb sought allies who would help snuff out the suggestion from ‘a very high authority’ that Donovan, of whom he utterly disapproved, should be placed in command of raider operations as a brigadier general USMC. Luckily for Holcomb, Admiral Nimitz, who refused to have Donovan within his Pacific Area, prevented this. From the Marine commanding generals in the Atlantic (Major-General H. M. ‘Howling Mad’ Smith) and in the Pacific (Major-General C. F. B. Price) also came standard objections to raiders. Smith said that ‘All Amphibious Force Marines are considered as commandos’ and that the Marine Corps, already an elite, did not require its own elite. Price worried over the manner in which a rapidly expanding Corps would be sapped of its best officers and NCOs at a time when they ought to be spread evenly and not concentrated in one place.

The Donovan threat concentrated Marine raider thinking marvellously and led to a compromise. When 1st Raider Battalion was placed under command of Lieutenant-Colonel M. A. Edson, he took as second-in-command Major S. B. Griffith, who had been sent by Holcomb to England to study the Commandos. Griffith was enthused by all he saw and told Edson about Commando recruiting methods as well as tactics. Bitterly the commander of 1st Marine Division, Major-General A. A. Vandegrift, recalled: ‘Merritt Edson, armed with appropriate orders, arrived to comb our units for officers and men deemed suitable… Edson’s levy against our division, coming at such a time, annoyed the devil out of me, but there wasn’t one earthly thing I could do about it.’

So Edson took his pick and also favoured new and exotic equipment such as riot-type shot guns, collapsible bicycles, Bangalore torpedoes and sufficient pistols to issue one per raider. Despite this, however, he retained his battalion in the form and philosophy of any other Marine battalion. But when 2nd Raider Battalion was authorized on 4 February, it was given to Carlson, whose second-in-command was James Roosevelt. And while Edson continued to train his four-company units as a spearhead force on conventional lines, a seaborne equivalent of Marine parachutists, Carlson raised his number of companies to six, similar to six British Commando troops, and trained them with a guerrilla emphasis, Chu Teh’s way. Of course, Carlson’s relaxed methods appealed to the young and inexperienced among those he recruited as volunteers from West Coast Marines, but the older Leathernecks were either unsure or frankly disapproving of relaxed discipline and informal planning and ‘forums’, as Carlson called them, in battle. A lot of publicity would be generated by Carlson and for his warcry ‘Gung ho’ – a Chinese phrase which means ‘work together’ but which later generations have come to regard, as one American historian says, as meaning the way ‘to win the approval of higher authority by energetically doing far more than the situation realistically requires’.

The hot breath of war would soon put the old and new systems to the test. In April Edson’s Raiders were moved to Samoa and, in May, Carlson’s to Hawaii where the C-in-C Pacific Fleet, Admiral C. W. Nimitz, found himself with a unit ‘which I had not requested and which I had not planned for’, or so he wrote in 1957. On 28 May 1942, however, he proposed that Carlson’s unit should raid Tulagi.

Strains of resentment permeated the American hierarchy as they had in Britain and, no doubt, were fuelled by the known advocacy of Churchill, now firmly attached to Roosevelt’s kitchen cabinet, when he wrote to the President on 5 March, praising Roosevelt’s intention to form Commando units on a large scale: ‘… I felt you had the key. Once several good outfits are prepared, any one of which can attack a Japanese-held base or island and beat the life out of the garrison, all their islands will become hostages to fortune’, perhaps forgetting how often he had vetoed such raids himself.

In Britain the drive by the Americans for raiders came from a different direction and for different reasons. There Marines were a rarity and the navy was dragging its feet, so the army stepped in to fill a hole. Reflecting Roosevelt’s determination to have American soldiers in action in Europe at the earliest opportunity, Marshall set in motion, through Colonel L. K. T. Truscott, the senior US Army Officer at COHQ, the formation of special units which, at the earliest possible moment, could become involved in the fighting alongside the British. In the absence of a full-blooded invasion, that could only mean hit-and-run raiding by the equivalent of Commandos or parachutists; and, since training had to be expedited, it had to be carried out by the much more experienced British. It also made sense to ask for volunteers from the divisions of V Corps, then arriving in Northern Ireland.

Many American officers shared the British viewpoint that Commandos diverted key men from field force units, but Marshall overrode them. He desired selected American troops to acquire combat experience on a rotating basis and seems to have envisaged a US ‘commandos unit’ (as he referred to it) as a temporary expedient which could be disbanded once its initial purpose had been satisfied. Towards the end of May orders for what would become known as 1st Ranger Battalion were finalized and the unit began to assemble at Carrickfergus on 9 June, soon to be sent to Achnacarry Castle to endure the rigours of training under the redoubtable Lieutenant-Colonel Vaughan. Despite a remark by Mountbatten that it was he and Marshall who settled on the name ‘Ranger’, it is much more plausible that Truscott originated it after hearing General Eisenhower remark: ‘I hope that you will find some other name than “Commandos”, for the glamor of that name will always remain – and properly so – British.’

Named after Roger’s Rangers, a group which carried out hit-and-run raids against the French and Indians in pre-Revolutionary days, 1st Ranger Battalion was commanded by Major W. C. Darby, a West Pointer and artilleryman, and its men were all volunteers, 60 per cent from 34th Infantry Division, 30 per cent from 1st Armored Division and 10 per cent from the Engineers, Signal and Quartermaster corps. The questions put by Darby at interviews surpassed those of Carlson. While the latter might ask, ‘Could you cut a man’s throat?’ Darby might demand, ‘Did you ever kill a man?’ This was a question not normally put to British Commandos, but in every other department the Rangers had to be equal to their trainer’s requirements. Many were mid-Westerners and included a lion-tamer and a Sioux Indian. They were a big hit with British landladies, one of whose daughters called them ‘Texas Rangers’ and herself later became engaged to a full Choctaw Indian who was killed in action.

‘To give them the full benefit of the course,’ said Vaughan, ‘they were made to eat British food, which caused howls of anguish.’ They were put through their paces by men who had fought at Vaagso and on several smaller raids.

‘Those bastards tried to kill us, or so we thought,’ said one Ranger. ‘We always manoeuvred under live fire. They used snipers dressed as Germans who fired just to miss. We learnt fast!’

Organized into six fighting companies like a British Commando, they retained their American characteristics and equipment. It was a partnership that worked well, both in training and in battle.

By default, the armies of both America and Britain had usurped the role of Marines in amphibious warfare. But in Britain it was now time for Royal Marines to halt the slide, in effect to become Commandos even though their ranks were not wholly filled by volunteers, and therefore did not tally with the army Commando in method of recruitment. They nevertheless maintained a very high standard, and were experts in amphibious techniques. Due to their prominent part in Menace, Pilgrim, Ironclad and an uncountable number of training exercises and trials, they were second to none. Following the dispersal of the three Commandos sent to the Middle East in 1941, Churchill was insistent that they should be reformed. But his wishes were denied, leaving only eight standard Commandos and 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando for employment in 1942. Moreover, No. 5 was absent from Europe taking part in Operation Ironclad and destined never to return to the UK during the war. Expeditiously the Royal Marines stepped in to fill the breach from their existing battalions. First to be converted was the all-volunteer 40 (RM) Commando, in February 1942, as trail-blazers in the re-assertion of the Royal Marine domination of amphibious warfare at the expense of the army Commandos. Typical of the Mountbatten method, this process was actuated by degrees and only much later, in 1943, codified by an official re-definition of the Royal Marines’ function, making them responsible for providing “Units to undertake amphibious operations. Units for the rapid establishment and temporary defence of Naval and Fleet Air Arm bases.”

That this drift in favour of the Marines was used by some to pave the way to eradication of the army Commandos is beyond doubt. Churchill hinted at it in a letter to the Secretary of State for War on 30 August:

 

It is natural that there should be some resentment in the Army at the undue emphasis laid upon the work of the Commandos by the Press… At the same time it must be most clearly understood that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is to maintain and develop the Commando organization with the utmost energy and to make sure that the wastage and losses are replaced with good quality men. There can be no question of going back on the decisions taken in favour of the Commando system for a portion of our troops.

 

A suspicion that the standard of recruit reaching the Commandos towards the end of 1942 was declining provoked the Vice-Chief of Combined Operations (VCCO), Major-General Haydon, into drafting a letter of complaint in February 1943. Up to then magnificent material had been received, including in 1942 a wonderful draft of policemen called up direct into the Commandos instead of passing through the regiments. Haydon wrote that he appreciated the difficulty of allocating men of quality – everybody had the same sort of problem – but he did feel time was being wasted:

 

For example, quite a lot of those being eliminated were not just flat-footed or suffering from other physical ailments, but actually in some cases just about blind or very badly cross-eyed. I cannot understand any Commanding Officer, bearing in mind all that has been written in ACIs, daring to send men of this type… The number of bad crime sheets is legion. On the other hand I quote for your information a sergeant of the Queen’s Cameron Highlanders who volunteered three or four times with a very good recommendation and was not allowed to join.

 

As a sailor, Mountbatten probably favoured the Royal Marines, but there is no evidence that he opposed army Commandos – quite the opposite, in fact. As CCO he was far more intent on drawing attention to the Combined Operations organization as a whole and it was this which prompted him early in 1942 to put forward a proposal for a distinctive arm badge to be worn by everybody, regardless of branch of Service, within the organization. He ran a competition for the best design, which was won by Lieutenant D. A. Grant, RNVR, of HMS Tormentor, whose design featured an anchor, Tommy gun and eagle. This was officially adopted in September after the file on the subject had grown thick in the wrangle over who should or should not be entitled to wear it. On 1 May 1942 Mountbatten also suggested the head-dress which was to become the most prized possession of everybody in the raiding business – the Green Beret which Commandos wear to the present day, and which was adopted at about the same time as the Parachute Regiment took to wearing the famous Red Beret.

Also towards the end of 1942 Mountbatten fought a prolonged battle to obtain permission for the Commandos to retain an unofficial shoulder flash they had worn since 1940, the struggle being waged at the highest level, as extracts from a draft letter to Lieutenant-General Sir Ronald Adam, the Adjutant General, goes to show:

 

I feel I should tell you in confidence that the whole question of the Combined Operations badge and flash which the Commandos now wear came up for discussion many months ago in the course of ordinary conversation when I was with the King.

H.M took the liveliest interest in the whole idea of the badge and himself suggested that the various multi-coloured Commando flashes then in existence should be changed to a single one, red lettering on a blue background, to conform with the Combined Operations badge, which is red on blue.

As the King himself had selected the colours and the general layout for the flash (and I am sure H.M will remember the incident, although it was some while ago, because he took so much interest in it) I feel it would be wrong not to let you know about this, since from the wording of your letter – ‘the whole matter is under discussion at a very high level’ – it is clear that you are going to refer the matter back to His Majesty.

Finally may I assure you that I am not trying in any way to prevent this matter being referred to the King; on the contrary I entirely concur that this is the right course.

 

The letter was never sent. Perhaps Mountbatten thought that he was laying it on a bit thick! In due course he would have his way, although by discussion and with a subtler approach through regular channels, but it was not to happen until April 1943.