Special operations have many of the basic ingredients for compelling war cinema. They very often consist of a small group of selected men (with only a few women) tasked with a difficult, if not suicidal, set of objectives such as the sabotage of key enemy installations, assassination, intelligence gathering, the kidnapping or capture of enemy prisoners and military diversion. To be successful, the special operation, or ‘spec op’, requires speed, a clear set of objectives, surprise and a strategy for extraction. Fulfilling all these requires a high level of coordination, based as far as possible on constant rehearsal and reliable military intelligence. As William H. McRaven has argued, ‘spec ops’ are a distinctive form of war based on surprise and relative military superiority in the first phase of combat, though this can be very quickly lost.1
Such operations tend to defy conventional military wisdom, and it is not surprising that they have often been rather poorly viewed and supported by conventional military commanders as I shall show in the course of this chapter.
What is interesting about special operations is the centrality of self-belief, a dimension far more important than ‘troop morale’ in conventional warfare. Self-belief is as important as the capacity to wage physical combat against the enemy, a point particularly well expressed by Major William Ellery Anderson, tasked during the Korean War with sending undercover units into North Korea. The men, Anderson said, faced a ‘battle within a battle in which one’s own mind becomes the field of combat, where hope, discipline and courage must fight against loneliness, fear and panic’.2 This would be a dimension that would emerge in a few post-1945 war film features.
In many cases, special operations amounted to guerrilla warfare without the politics and supplied themes that offered some appeal to cinema audiences in search of suspense and excitement. The details and risks attached to this form of war were only vaguely understood by the public while senior commanders often opposed what was they viewed as a ‘dirty’ and unethical form of war with few apparent strategic payoffs. It is possible to distinguish between ‘tactical’ special ops which are used to help a more general conventional strategy (such as SAS hit-and-run raids behind enemy lines in North Africa) and strategic special ops where a single operation can have major longer-term consequences. The latter tend to be few in number, though there are a few notable instances such as the operation using mini-submarines to disable the German battleship Tirpitz in September 1943; the Israeli raid on Entebbe on 4 July 1976 and the Special Forces raid on Abbottabad to kill Osama bin Laden on 2 May 2011.
The history of special operations in the Second World War has been emerging in recent years, though its representation on the cinema screen has remained partial and selective. A considerable number of special operations were mounted in the European and Pacific theatres; only a few have made it to the cinema screen. The criteria for selecting those deemed sufficiently cinematic often seem highly arbitrary. Several movies focused on Europe, especially Norway, France and the Eastern Mediterranean, while rather less attention was given to operations in Asia and the Pacific.
This relative indifference of cinema reflected a lack of public knowledge on plans for both guerrilla warfare and civilian resistance during the Second World War, especially in Britain. In the late 1930s the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) became interested in sabotage and a sub-section was formed called Section D to plan covert forms of warfare. A section of military intelligence called MI(R) was also established to investigate covert operations. Neither of these bodies had any significant ties to the established army high command, which remained suspicious of the proposed operations.
Following the collapse of France in April–May 1940, the British government’s interest in covert warfare markedly increased. There was now the possibility of a German invasion and some military experts began to consider mobilizing civilian resistance. Twelve days before the start of the evacuation of Dunkirk in May the government announced the creation of nation-wide Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), soon to become known as the Home Guard. The LDV was quickly swamped with huge numbers of eager applicants. The Home Guard brought together groups of older men with often extensive military experience (in some cases stretching back to late Victorian military campaigns on the fringes of empire, embodied in the fictional character Lance Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army) together with younger men, some of whom were only boy scouts. The LDV quickly acquired a reputation for bumbling amateurism that was only partly deserved. Its rather infantile image of men and boys playing at soldiers was confirmed for some, though, when Noel Coward released in 1942 the humorous song Could You Please Oblige Us with a Bren Gun, picking up on the Home Guard’s chronic lack of weaponry, while a year later Alison Utley added Hare Joins the Home Guard to her Little Grey Rabbit series of books for younger children.
The Home Guard’s place in public memory as a comic body of incompetent and elderly men is largely due to the TV comedy series Dad’s Army, which ran from 1968 to 1977. The series was written by Jimmy Perry (who had served in the Watford Home Guard) along with David Croft and made use of real experiences of LDV veterans. The success of the series (there is still a Dad’s Army Appreciation Society) owed much to its nostalgic popularization of a myth of England anchored in a pre-war society of social hierarchy frozen in time, though its three-dimensional characters also drew on traditions of post-war popular comedy.3 The series secured an image of the LDV that has remained largely unexplored in feature films either during or after the Second World War, with a few notable exceptions such as Went the Day Well in 1942 and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943).
The bumbling image of the LDV was belied by its actual operations. It provided cover for a more serious underground guerrilla movement in England organized through the Auxiliary Units of Section D under the control of a Royal Engineer, Lawrence Grand.4 The units were supplied with weapons and explosives, though it is unlikely they would have halted a German advance for more than a day or two. In the mainstream army, the number of ‘blimps’ locked into outdated ideas and practices was grossly exaggerated during the war years.5 The same was true for many in the Home Guard, despite a large component of elderly members. Some LDV members went on courses in guerrilla warfare organized by Tom Wintringham (a left-wing veteran of the Spanish Civil War) and a small group of radical associates at Osterley Park outside London, though this was taken over by the War Office in September 1940.6
By the end of 1940, the Churchill government lost interest in organizing the civilian population into popular resistance once the prospect of German invasion had eased. From now on, spec ops remained firmly in the hands of military professionals, though much of this has remained hidden behind a wall of secrecy. Operations in enemy-occupied territories certainly received the lion’s share of attention from the press and cinema, aided by rapid advances in weapons technology. Compared to previous wars, those in special ops in the Second World War had access to easy-to-use light weaponry, such as the M1 Carbine or the Thompson submachine gun, though the latter weapon, popularly associated with Chicago mobsters, could prove unwieldy in densely forested and jungle terrains.7 For some, the Sten gun was the obvious weapon of choice since it could be broken down into parts that could be concealed in a bag. The weapon sprayed bullets at up to 500 rounds a minute and was accurate within a hundred yards, though it was vulnerable to jamming if it became clogged with dirt, dramatically exemplified when Jozef Gabcik’s Sten failed when he tried to shoot Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942.8
Similarly, the emergence of plastic explosives and miniaturized bomb-making with automatic timers or pencil detonators heralded the kind of destructive technology later associated with post-war terrorism. The invention of the ‘Lewis bomb’ by David Stirling’s right-hand man, Jock Lewis, proved an especially useful godsend for this deadly weapon consisted of a wad of plastic explosive and thermite rolled up in motor oil and weighing only 1 lb.
It was heavy and bulky valve radios that presented one of the biggest headaches for commandos and the SAS struggling across difficult mountainous, desert or jungle terrains, often in appalling heat or cold, and dependent on temperamental pack animals or vehicles hard to maintain. The radios were not only heavy to carry around but their valves could fail; replacing them was often difficult in remote locations. The trope of the radio being shot up by enemy fire would be frequently used in post-war action movies, pinpointing the isolation of groups inserted into hostile territory with no obvious means of external support.
‘Special operations’ in the Second World War took two basic forms: firstly, specialized military groupings who acted as pioneers of modern ‘special forces’ and, secondly, secret intelligence operations involving the landing of trained agents into enemy-occupied territory by parachute or submarine. The two types of operations might have come together in a more integrated guerrilla-type strategy but the war-time Churchill government created several groupings with different specialisms.
The first of these were the Commandos. These were largely the brainchild of Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, who had been born in South Africa and was an admirer of the tactics used by Boer commandos in the Anglo Boer War of 1899–1902. The Commandos came into existence in May 1940 after Dunkirk when the government was open to new approaches, though they met considerable hostility from the established military hierarchy.9 After a series of botched raids in 1940 hampered by poor planning and training and inadequate weaponry, the British government formed a separate organization to gather intelligence and aid resistance groupings known as the Special Operations Executive (SOE).10
SOE was established by the war cabinet in July 1940 at a time when the Chiefs of Staff had finally begun to look to the possibility of covert warfare following the collapse of France. It was formed out of a merger of the Section D and MI(R) and had as its political master the civilian Labour politician Hugh Dalton, tasked by Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze’. Under its Chief of Staff Colin Gubbins, SOE began operations in November of 1940 in two former flats off Baker Street; it soon found itself working with various resistance groupings and exiled European governments. Its lack of trained personnel meant it could do little to define many operations and it was frequently beholden to the political aims of the exile governments, as I shall show later in the case of the decision of the exile Czech government of Edouard Benes to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich. SOE was also viewed with considerable hostility from other branches of British intelligence such as the Special Intelligence Service (SIS), even though many SOE staff had SIS backgrounds.11
After the war SOE shaped two feature films focused on female operatives in Nazi-occupied France: Odette (1950) starring Anna Neagle and Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) starring Virginia McKenna as the SOE agent Violette Szabo. In neither movie was the SOE mentioned specifically by name and it only emerged into public prominence following some television documentaries as well as the novel and the 2001 film Charlotte Gray (dir. Gillian Armstrong). It was one of the most secretive of British ‘irregular’ forces, practising various forms of terrorist activity with its ‘Jedburgh teams’ that were parachuted into German-occupied Europe. Many of its agents ended up as victims of Hitler’s 1942 Commando Order that ensured that any captured non-uniformed soldier was to be tortured and executed. Surviving SOE operatives also tended to remain silent after the war, ensuring that many never received any recognition for their war-time activities, though identifying who they are has proved difficult with the destruction of so many SOE records.12
A third group emerged during the war in North Africa in the form of the SAS and the body that often helped in its insertion or extraction, The Long-Range Desert Group (LRDG). The main driving force behind the creation of the SAS was a lieutenant of the Scots Guards, David Stirling. Coming from a well-connected upper-class background, Stirling persuaded the British army to let him establish his own small private army to operate behind enemy lines, though in the early years he faced considerable opposition from sections of British high command. Lieutenant General Arthur Smith, Deputy Chief of the General Staff in the Middle East, expressed this attitude especially clearly in March 1942 when he wrote (rather like a despairing head teacher to a house master) in a letter to Deputy Chief of General Staff, General Ritchie, that ‘Stirling’s chief value is that of commanding a parachute force. We are, therefore anxious that he should not be thrown away in some other role’. In a postscript he added that ‘Stirling needs restraining’.13
It was events in the Middle East that sustained the SAS as Rommel drove eastwards during 1942 before being stopped at El Alamein. The SAS went on to have a good war, successfully sabotaging German installations in North Africa before working with resistance movements in Europe prior to the Allied Invasion in June 1944. It operated alongside a sister organization called the Special Boat Service, or SBS, focused on maritime raiding operations involving midget submarines and canoes.
The LRDG/SAS/SBS operated on limited sufferance from the senior British high command and was wound up at the end of the war. It would be revived again to fight against guerrillas in Malaya in the 1950s, largely due to pressure from the former Chindit officer ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert.14 But, here again, there was considerable opposition from senior sections of British high command. Ferret Force, formed in 1948 by former SOE operatives to pursue Chinese communist guerrillas in the jungles of Malaya, lasted only six months before it was replaced by more conventional sweep operations, though it did have some impact on emerging British COIN doctrine.15 Two years later in 1950, the SAS was reformed to fight in Malaya. It had a very small number of actual enemy ‘kills’ – 108 – for the eight years it operated in Malaya, but developed a range of tactics and procedures that would be later employed in other terrains such as Oman.16
The Commandos were not given any extensive publicity and, when they were, they were often seen to be plagued by informers among local anti-Nazi resistance groups. The 1942 Hollywood film They Raid by Night, for instance, followed a small British commando unit parachuted into German-occupied Norway to extract a prominent Norwegian general. The team is betrayed twice, first by a Norwegian woman collaborator who betrays the team to the Germans and later by a Norwegian doctor who turns out to be a Nazi collaborator. The team is only finally successful in getting the general out when the British launch a full-scale air and ground raid to extract the Commando team. The film suggested that the Commandos were very brave but their operation extremely risky given the duplicity and unreliability of the local population, a theme in several post-war films. The message of the film was that secret operations behind enemy lines could never be a proper substitute for well-planned conventional military attacks, which the film showed using real footage of the Commando operation in Norway in 1941.
A different set of issues emerged with the 1942 film Went the Day Well, produced by Michael Balcon at Ealing Film Studios. The film was based on a story by Graham Greene published in 1940 and had a fictional English village in Norfolk fending off an attack by German paratroopers. The film was largely war-time propaganda and played on genuine public fears of confronting a real German invasion. These were partly alleviated by the device of inserting the story as a flashback told by a narrator at a future time, when we can assume the war is now over and the Germans defeated.17
The film depicts some of the central features of traditional Englishness in the form of a quiet English village coming under the occupation of Nazi paratroopers disguised as Royal Engineers. The villagers attempt to warn the Home Guard, though they are betrayed by the village squire who is a fifth columnist. The villagers rely on their own common sense and there is never any sense of panic; working-class child evacuees are told firmly to finish up their food at meal times, while it is not felt necessary to break into one house because the front door is locked. Eventually a boy scout alerts the army and the Germans are rounded up. The movie was copied by the scriptwriter John Milius in Red Dawn in 1985 – though this time a group of American teenagers adopt guerrilla tactics to resist Soviet parachutists (aided by Nicaraguans) who have taken over their town.
The genteel resistance in Went the Day Well contrasted markedly with some Hollywood war-time releases, such as the exceptionally violent Edge of Darkness in 1943 (dir. Lewis Milestone) starring Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan. The film has a mass uprising by Norwegian fishing villagers terrorized by a thuggish Nazi leader of the German occupying forces. With weapons smuggled in from Britain, the revolt starts when the villagers’ leaders are forced to dig their own graves; the village priest mows down a German firing squad with a machine gun from a bell tower of the village church and a running battle ensues in the surrounding forests. After killing the German garrison, the survivors disappear into the hills to fight on as guerrillas while women and children are loaded onto fishing boats, though it is unclear where they will go. The story was loosely based on some members of the Norwegian special operations Linge Group (trained by SOE) shooting dead two members of the Gestapo in April 1942 in the village of Telavag, south of Bergen. This led to a brutal German response involving executions, the destruction of the village and seventy-two men being sent to concentration camps, of whom thirty-one were murdered. Like many other Hollywood films of the era, Edge of Darkness preferred a stylized and full-frontal battle rather than a serious exploration of special operations.
In comparison, the violence in Went the Day Well was extremely subdued, with only the fifth columnist being shot and a German paratrooper clubbed by a woman. The film reflected how reluctant British film-producers were to engage with the brutal effects of enemy occupation, a lacuna that would help ensure a warm reception to the post-war neorealist cinema of Roberto Rossellin that seemed to many like a breath of fresh air (see Chapter 3). The insularity of British cinema continued after the war when war films tended to focus on conflicts far from British shores. Many of these films helped shape the post-war popular memory of the Second World War centred on land, sea and air battles: The Battle of Britain in 1940; The Battle of El Alamein in 1942; the victory at sea in the U Boat campaign and the sinking of the Bismarck; D-Day and the invasion of France and Operation Market Garden and the battle at Arnhem. Commando raids and special operations formed only a small part of this cinematic repertoire.
Special operations in post-war cinema
A few noted films released after the Second World War did manage to highlight some daring special operations. They would become linked with some of the most popular post-war British actors, such as Richard Burton, Trevor Howard, Peter Ustinov, Dirk Bogarde, Denholm Elliot and James Robertson Justice, along with a few American actors such as Gregory Peck and William Holden. As audience tastes started to change, these films would become increasingly spectacular as they formed the foundation for later action movies.
The general lack of public knowledge about the SAS and SBS is reflected in the film They Who Dare in 1954 (dir. Lewis Milestone), starring Dirk Bogarde and Denholm Elliot. The film was based on a real SBS operation in the summer of 1942 involving an eleven-man SBS raiding group commanded by a Captain Allot. The group attacked targets in German-occupied Rhodes, including a dozen aircraft and fuel and storage dumps. All were captured except Allot and a Marine, John Duggan, who avoided hundreds of Italian soldiers to reach a pre-arranged rendezvous and wade out to sea. They were eventually picked up by the submarine Traveller, which twice had to crash dive to avoid Italian motor transport boats.18 The mission was judged a success since twenty aircraft at the Maritsa base on Rhodes were destroyed, though there was a heavy loss of trained commandos and illustrated that the SBS was really being asked to take on too much.19
They Who Dare had just six SBS commandos tasked with crippling a German airbase used to bomb British forces in North Africa. The party has two Greek officers and two local guides and was led by Lieutenant Graham (Bogarde) playing the role of Allot along with a Sergeant Corcoran (Elliot). They are taken to an undefined Greek destination by submarine and come ashore at night, traversing some mountains to reach their targets. At a pre-designated location, the party splits and presses on in two groups towards the airfields. Eight of the group are captured and just two get away. The two surviving men make it to the beach and wade out to sea to be rescued by an invisible submarine (that could be not be shown due to the film’s modest budget). The movie did not meet a warm response from critics (one press review was titled ‘How Dare They?’), though it was a forerunner of the big-budget Guns of Navarone in 1961, especially in the way it suggested to audiences that it was ‘daring’ rather than ‘courage’ that was the key motivating factor behind a successful special operation.
They Who Dare reflected a widespread public ignorance of the SAS/SBS in the early 1950s. It has a documentary quality in the beginning as it outlined the nature of special operations at a time when the SAS lacked a clear public identity. It also revealed some of the difficulties in raiding in unfamiliar terrain. The party runs short of water and Graham considers the whole mission a failure; the group evades capture largely because of the support of local Greeks. But Milestone displayed a weak directorial hand and allowed Bogarde and Elliot to drive forward the narrative. Bogarde’s jaded and cynical character Graham drifts into an increasingly hysterical antagonism with Corcoran with no apparent relevance to the main narrative. Even the purpose of the mission becomes questioned when Westerby, implausibly, declares that he ‘did it for the kicks’. This was a weak special ops film, though it did hint at what could go wrong without careful planning.
Another special operations film was released two years later in 1955 with The Cockleshell Heroes (dir. Jose Ferrer), starring Trevor Howard, Anthony Newley and David Lodge. The narrative was based on Operation Frankton in December 1942 involving a raid by ten canoe-borne British commandos in Bordeaux Harbour. The script by Bryan Forbes and Richard Maibaum was based on a book describing the operation by C.E. Lucas Phillips.20 The film was made with cooperation of the Royal Navy and the action scenes were shot in the Thames Estuary. The real operation only managed to damage a few German ships running a blockade between Germany and Japan, but had been supported by Earl Mountbatten, chief of Combined Operations, who wanted to stop the harbour being used by the German battleship Tirpitz.21
Early on, we become aware of the tensions between the exponents of special operations and a cautious old guard. There is an angry spat between the chief proponent of the raid, Major Hugh Stinger (Jose Ferrer), with a conservative martinet Captain Hugh Thompson (Trevor Howard), who considers Stinger lacks proper leadership qualities and will put the lives of the men at risk. But he is eventually won over after a test mission goes disastrously wrong and Stringer admits to leadership failings. He asks Thompson to knock the men into an effective fighting unit and the raid succeeds in damaging enemy shipping. But, as in They Who Dare, most of the men are taken prisoner and only one man manages to escape. Six of those captured by the Germans were shot in ignominious circumstances while a seventh drowned; only Hasler and one other Marine succeeded in escaping back to Britain. The Cockleshell Heroes certainly introduced film audiences to some of the problems in unconventional warfare, though all this tended to come with the proviso that spec ops could be effective only if those engaged in it conformed to conventional standards of military hierarchy and discipline.
A rather less serious cinematic exploration of unconventional warfare occurred in the 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight, written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The narrative had no real scenes of military combat, though it was based on a real-life SOE operation to capture the General in German-occupied Crete in April 1944, described in the book by W. Stanley Moss Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe. The film portrays a small group of British saboteurs hiding among the local Cretan population and provided a good opportunity for Powell and Pressburger to continue their romantic tory imagery of local populations living in idealized communal settings under benign hierarchical authority, evident from instance in A Canterbury Tale (1944) and I Know Where I’m Going (1945) where an idealized Scottish rural community flourishes under the authority of a benevolent laird.22
This romantic toryism informs Ill Met by Moonlight. As the title suggests, the guiding literary text was Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the film attempts a comic portrayal of British guerrillas and the local Cretan population, though a voice-over at the start points out that the Cretan population suffered badly under German occupation. The moral cohesion of the local population is maintained through the constant presence of the Greek Orthodox Church, while the local guerrillas assisting the British have the comic features of ‘rude mechanicals’.
It was Emeric Pressburger who was keen to make the film after reading an extract of Moss’s book in 1950, though it took six years to complete the project. By this time, Powell and Pressburger had left Rank to work with Alexander Korda and were buoyed by the success of The Battle of the River Plate in 1956. Powell had dreams of involving big mainstream actors such as Orson Welles and James Mason but the budget did not extend this far and instead they had to be content with Rank’s contracted star Dirk Bogarde. Powell later regretted this, considering Bogarde as a ‘picture post card hero in fancy dress’ rather than the romantic Byronic bandit hero he wanted as the actor playing the role of Patrick Leigh Fermor.23 Bogarde’s rather wooden performance was offset by strong performances by Marius Goring as Kreipe and Cyril Cusack as the unwashed but astute guerrilla, Captain Sandy Rendel.
Ill Met by Moonlight was a safe film regarding special operations. The narrative pruned down Moss’s account to the basics of heroic upper-class officers conducting a successful kidnap while a young Cretan boy pretends to betray the British when he is given money by Kreipe to buy some German leather boots. The boy diverts the German search party into a trap where they are wiped out by Cretan guerrillas (not shown in the film). This never actually took place and the general was marched across the mountains to the southern part of the island, where the raiding party was picked up by a British naval vessel. Moss’s book was important for stressing the way that the party was highly dependent on the local population for food supplies; while Leigh Fermor also pointed out, in a later afterward to the book, the political and strategic objectives behind the operation, which involved more than just undermining German military morale.
Following the collapse of the Mussolini regime in Italy in 1943 the Italian general commanding the 32,000 Italian troops in the eastern part of the island, General Carta, started to make overtures to come over to the British side. Leigh-Fermor initially considered using the Cretan guerrillas to block off the one road to the eastern part of the island to protect the Italians from any German reprisals, though this was pre-empted by the Armistice in September. Carta now decided to feign compliance to the post-armistice fascist state set up in the north of Italy and, over the next few days, considerable quantities of Italian weapons ended up in the hands of the guerrillas. However, a guerrilla attack on a German detachment on 11 September led to punitive reprisals by German forces, under their brutal commander General Muller, against seven Cretan villages that left over 500 civilians dead.
Leigh Fermor came up with the idea of abducting Muller to paralyse German military morale, though this too became redundant once Muller was replaced by General Kreipe. Leigh Fermor decided to press on with the plan, seeing it as reducing the risk of high civilian casualties compared to more formal military engagements with German forces. The plan relied on the support of Cretan guerrillas, though Leigh Fermor considered it had the advantage of being ‘an Anglo Cretan enterprise with old and seasoned mountain friends, rather than a professional Allied coup de main entirely organised from outside’.24
It’s easy to see why a campaign of this kind had such an appeal to Powell and Pressburger. It had all the hallmarks of upper-class British camaraderie defined by depth of character and good understanding of the needs and values of the lower orders. Leigh Fermor describes how dependent the British team was on Cretan shepherds who ‘kept us in touch with the lower world’25 while, once captured, Kreipe – a classically educated German officer – found himself on the same wave length as Leigh Fermor, who could complete without prompting the General’s quotation from the Roman poet Horace.
Ill Met by Moonlight’s celebration of effortless upper-class amateurism was becoming rather rare by the late 1950s. A considerably different depiction of special operation emerged in Bitter Victory (1957) (dir. Nicholas Ray). The film focuses on a Commando raid on a major post of the Afrika Korps in Libya in 1942 to seize vital military documents. The raid ends up being somewhat dwarfed by a love triangle between its two central male characters, Captain Leith (Richard Burton) and Major Brand (Kurt Jurgens) and Brand’s wife Anne (Ruth Romans). The two men are bitter rivals for the same woman though this conflict is overlain by a contrast of character as it emerges that Brand is a coward, while the more heroic Leith eventually dies from a scorpion that Brand sees going into Leith’s boot but does nothing to stop.
This is a post-Suez movie that was ahead of its time as it interrogates the mythology of military heroism. It was less a British film than a Franco-American co-production made by Transcontinental Films and initially released in a truncated form with some 11 minutes involving the final scene cut out (the US version was even shorter at 83 minutes). The symbolism in the film is striking, starting with the opening scene of men training in unarmed combat on stuffed dummies, replicating mindless soldiers acting under orders. Though the film focuses on a behind-the-lines-op, the conventional chain of military command is never in doubt. The commanding officer, General Patterson (Anthony Bushell), decides to send both Leith and Brand on the operation though Brand is senior as he is a major while Leith only a captain (a rivalry later repeated in Cy Enfield’s Zulu in 1964). The audience is not encouraged to expect any great heroics in the forthcoming operation, given that this is playing out the war games the men have been constantly trained to undertake. There is a sub-text of infantilism pervading the film as the men act out childhood war games: one man at the bar emulates the action with his hands like a bloodthirsty school boy; the general holds a model wooden plane; and one of the Commandos looks at his blistered toes singing this ‘This little piggy went to Benghazi and this little piggy stayed at home’. The film at points seriously questions myths of masculinity that pervade most war films of this era.
The anti-war theme reaches a climax at the end of the film when the returning Brand is awarded the DSO by the delighted general, though in the original screen version the documents are set on fire by the captured German officer Colonel Lutze. Brand now realizes his marriage is a sham as his wife walks off in tears on hearing of the death of Leith and, in the final scene, he pins the DSO onto one of the dummies. Brand is a South African and has the same dubious moral characteristics that Anthony Quayle’s Captain Van der Poel in J. Lee Thompson’s Ice Cold in Alex a year later in 1958. The drift of South Africa away from the British Commonwealth and towards apartheid in the 1950s under its Afrikaner Nationalist government made it only too easy to use South African characters as cinematic symbols for ambivalence and treachery. We also come to realize that much military heroism is ultimately a façade – themes that became very evident a decade later in movies such Oh What a Lovely War (1969) and Too Late the Hero (1970).
Bitter Victory carried a lot of baggage as a special ops film along with an anti-war message and romantic triangle. Its British focus ensured that it did not gain much at the US box office, while its lack of any thrilling action scenes put a lot of British cinema-goers off. The anti-war themes might hold some weight in films depicting expeditionary warfare in far-flung terrains where no apparent national interest was at stake, such as Malaya, Kenya or even Korea. The same could not be said for battles closer to home, which was still remembered in the mid-1950s as a war for national survival. But French new wave cinema director Jean Luc Godard was impressed by the film’s imagery, seeing it as an example of real ‘cinema’. But this should not detract from some basic problems in the film which weighed down the action scenes with romantic tension. This is always a risky strategy to pursue in action movies. As some later film directors would realize, combat films require a limited role for women (if not their complete absence) since the resulting emotional entanglements interspersed with combat scenes always risked confusing the audience, though the eventual emergence by the 1990s of a tough group of female action heroes acted by global celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Sigourney Weaver transformed the very nature of the genre.
In 1958 a British film was at last released that portrayed in some detail the activities of the LRDG in North Africa. Sea of Sand (1958) was directed by Guy Green and starred Richard Attenborough, Michael Craig and John Gregson. It was shot in Tripolitania in Libya with the permission of the Libyan government of King Idris. The film was a ‘unit tribute’ in which it is the unit or regiment that is the main star rather than the individual characters in it (a good Hollywood example of this subgenre is The Fighting See Bees starring John Wayne). However, even when the unit concerned is well established in the public mind, there are always pressures on movie directors to heighten audience interest through individual stars. This is even more true when the unit concerned, the LRDG, has no real place in the public memory. The film starts by outlining the sort of work the unit did to audiences unfamiliar with this kind of warfare, though by the end of the movie the LRDG still remains rather shadowy. It has no clear insignia or motto or battle anthem, and the men are an odd assortment drawn from different military backgrounds and traditions.
The film takes place in the run-up to the Battle of El Alamein and here the film navigates through rather more familiar territory in the public memory of the Second World War. The LRDG had been operating in North Africa since June 1940, when it was originally formed as the Long Range Patrol (LRP) by Major A. Bagnold, brother of novelist Edith Bagnold, mainly using New Zealanders and Rhodesians. By 1942 the LRDG was tasked with long-range penetration and sabotage behind enemy lines as well as monitoring traffic (known as ‘Road Watch’), on the highway between Tripoli and Benghazi.26 The movie moves on to the attack on the airfield at Barce in September 1942. The patrol starts out with fifteen men in five trucks led by Captain Tim Cotton (Michael Craig), whose task is to drive over 400 miles behind enemy lines to blow up a fuel dump. The sabotage is planned to coincide with a big push against the Afrika Korps by British forces in Egypt.
The film follows the men in 1.5-ton Chevrolet trucks that the LRDG converted for use in desert operations. Early on, six men are killed and two of the Chevrolets destroyed when they encounter an enemy armoured car; the action scenes show vehicles circling each other rather like war ships. The patrol also faces problems from enemy aircraft before two of the men cut a path through a minefield to enable another team to move into the compound to blow up the fuel dump. They encounter new enemy Panzer tanks, something not picked up by military intelligence. Later the truck with the radio is destroyed and the remaining men face a desperate race to get back to their base to report the existence of the tanks.
Sea of Sand moves beyond a quasi-documentary into a beat-the-clock suspense thriller as the men desperately flee their German pursuers. The last truck seizes up and the squad walks the last 40 miles on foot through sand dunes, leaving one injured man behind with a Lewis gun to pick off German pursuers (to the accompaniment of Vera Lynn singing on the radio). This was a patriotic war film typical of many of the war movies released by Rank. The film establishes the tight bonds forged between the men in a narrative that celebrates a restrained idea of military heroism largely disconnected from class ties. From an early stage, we are reminded that traditional ideas of military hierarchy do not apply in this sort of unconventional war. Captain Craig lets the new member of the unit Captain Bill Williams (John Gregson) that everyone is on first name terms while it is the duty of everyone including officers to help dig out any vehicle stuck in the sand. Likewise, Richard Attenborough’s character Trooper Body ends up under arrest when he is caught drinking alcohol but this does not in the end amount to very much as the men make their desperate way back to their own lines.
This is a long way from the gentleman’s war of Ill Met by Moonlight, though Sea of Sand successfully combined a special operation with more conventional images of war-time patriotism. The Germans remain relentlessly unsympathetic, though the LRDG unit never functions as a serious partisan formation as it travels through the desert. It meets no Arab Bedouin who might provide intelligence or support. Indeed, Arabs only appear in an initial scene when they are briefly depicted sitting by the road as the LRDG convoy passes and goes into the desert. Nevertheless, this was a serious film that investigated spec ops with a considerable degree of realism.
The 1960s and growing fantasy violence
The early 1960s saw the growing emergence of a younger cinema audience lacking personal memories of the Second World War beyond perhaps those of war-time evacuees. This newer audience was largely unfamiliar with the detailed history of a war that was not yet taught at school or college, even though the influence of television encouraged a growing demand for exciting and increasingly violent action features. Much of this was reflected in the successful film The Guns of Navarone (1961), based on a novel by Alistair Maclean. This was a fictional movie, though one broadly based on special operations in the Eastern Mediterranean. The film was interesting for the way it associated special operations with partisan warfare but has largely escaped critical attention. Guns had an all-star cast including David Niven, Anthony Quayle, Anthony Quinn, Gregory Peck and the Greek actress Irene Pappas. It was directed by J. Lee Thompson, following up his previous movie success, Ice Cold in Alex, in 1958.
The film centres on a group of Commandos on a near-suicidal mission to blow up two German ‘radar-controlled guns’ on the island of ‘Leros’ in the Aegean Sea. These guns are preventing the British navy from rescuing 2,000 men stranded on the island. The Commandos achieve the near-impossible by scaling a steep cliff and shooting up seemingly limitless numbers of incompetent German soldiers (Quinn alone reaches a tally of some ninety-five). This was a fast-paced action movie that was a precursor of later Hollywood films with stars such as Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The dramatic landscape and fast pace ensured the film’s international success. With a budget of $6 million it ended up grossing nearly $29 million at the box office and became part of a series of big-budget Second World War films, including The Longest Day (1962), The Great Escape (1963) and later features such as The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Where Eagles Dare (1968). The triumphal ending of the film with a column of naval vessels blasting off victory hoots also ensured that it could be remembered as much as a conventional war narrative than one dealing with a partisan operation.
Lost in the continuing interest in The Guns of Navarone’s relentless violence are a series of important scenes that reveal something of the challenges confronting a group of raiders acting as partisans, whose survival depends upon support from an unreliable Greek underground. The group is warned from the start by Commodore Jensen of Allied Intelligence (James Robertson Justice) that they cannot expect any significant popular support from the Greek population who risk severe retaliation from the Germans. They attempt to immerse themselves among this tradition-bound Greek community, celebrating a wedding that looks forward to Zorba the Greek in 1967. The British squad are easily spotted and arrested in the village market place.
Links with the Greek underground prove to be disastrous since it turns out a young female Greek teacher in the Greek resistance is a German agent. The film dovetailed with some of Quayle’s own war-time experiences working for SOE in Albania where he found the Albanian partisans untrustworthy and politically divided, though it is doubtful if he ever really accepted the demands of unconventional warfare.27 The Guns of Navarone reinforced the historically false image that British and American special operations could best succeed when they were almost entirely self-reliant and with little or no local support. The Greek setting for the film was still controversial in the early 1960s, with memories of the Greek civil war of 1946–1949 still fresh. At the time the film was shot, the civil war was still being ignored by Greek film makers and interest only briefly resumed after 1963 during the Centre Union government of Georges Papandreou, before being once again closed off after the 1967 military coup.28
The Guns of Navarone was a landmark in cinema’s glamorization of raiding and special ops. It dramatically revealed the risks involved in any raiding venture and demonstrated that those involved needed to be multi-skilled and tightly knit; the smaller they are, the less hierarchical they tended to be, challenging the command structure of conventional militaries. The raiders disdain any common uniform and Captain Keith (Peck) turns up in a white suit. As a group, they lack respect for conventional military command and threaten one martinet British captain with reduction to the ranks and return to Britain unless he agrees to confine his servant to quarters after they catch him listening to their conversation.
Over a timespan of more than fifty years, Guns seems very dated, with predictable acting styles and poor special effects. Its conventional masculine-orientated narrative reduces women to being, at best, silent and unreliable appendages or, at worst, treacherous informers ill-suited to a rugged and dirty form of war. It stands awkwardly beside the less-well-known Five Branded Women (1960) (dir. Martin Ritt), an ambitious Italian-American co-production shot in black and white that was years ahead of its time.29 Ritt had, for a period in the 1950s, been on the Hollywood blacklist; many of his films celebrated the cohesion of rural life in the face of aggressive urban capitalism and championed those oppressed by systems of racial and class inequality and, in this instance, gender oppression.30
Five Branded Women concerns five women in a Yugoslav town in 1943 caught up in the wider war between the occupying Germans and local partisan forces. They have their hair cut for having sexual relationships with German officers (one German officer is also castrated). Forced out of town, they eventually join the partisans in the forests, where some remarkable action scenes were shot by cinematographer James Wong Howe. During the movie, the women evolve from pitiful and helpless victims into tough and resolute guerrilla fighters, exemplified by the penetrating side-lit portrait of Jovanks (played by the Italian Actress Silvana Mangano).
Ritt became a major director in the 1960s based on such films as Hud (1963) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965).31 By the late 1950s, he had become interested in European cinematic movements and the semi-documentary style that would in time be termed cinema verite. Some of this can be seen in Five Branded Women, his only war film, especially the use of a hand-held camera following the partisans in combat; as well as some memorable long shots, such as the wide-angle view of a column of German soldiers following the partisans across an ice field. The women are reluctant guerrillas and embody a feminine link to nature as they chase a lamb before encountering bodies hanging in a barn. They then see German soldiers taking away the livestock of a village, and the angry villagers attempt to drive them away, accusing them of being partisans and responsible for the loss of their animals. The women (rather implausibly) decide to act as protectors of the villagers and attack the Germans, not knowing the partisans are poised to make an attack. This leads to an alliance of convenience with the partisans, though this eventually leads to one of them being shot after an affair with a man on sentry duty.
Howe’s cinematic style had evolved over several decades since the era of silent films and his use of side lighting in dark and sombre settings had a noirish quality. He certainly brought out some of the festering anger and determination of the women in scenes that have far more depth than the flatter depictions of the women bombers in Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers I examine in the next chapter. Ritt had an international cast including the French star Jeanne Moreau, whose stare would be described as ‘jolie-laide’ or ugly beautiful and the epitome of 1960s French cool.32
Hollywood tried a more traditional approach with Sam Fuller’s Merrilla Marauders (1962), a narrative that followed the American 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional) in Burma in 1944, a group otherwise known as Merrill’s Marauders after its commanding officer General Frank Merrill. It was one of the first serious Hollywood attempts to engage with special operations, following earlier weak treatments of American guerrilla resistance in the Philippines such as Back to Bataan (1945) and Fritz Lang’s American Guerrilla in the Philippines (1950), insurgencies which were mainly intelligence-gathering operations in support of the long-expected conventional invasion under General MacArthur. Fuller’s film, by contrast, focused on a well-trained special operations force of three battalions trained in deep penetration warfare in Burma where there were few fixed battle lines.
Merrill’s Marauders was made at the request of the chief producer Warner Brothers, Milton Sperling, and was filmed on a slender budget of $1 million in the Philippines. Fuller made good advantage of support from both the US and Filipino militaries, though the result was more a conventional war movie than one that seriously attempted to get inside the complexities of deep penetration warfare, a concept developed by the mystical British officer Colonel Orde Wingate of the Chindits and ardently championed by Winston Churchill at the Quebec Conference in 1943. With no serious possibility of a major conventional invasion of the Asian mainland, since most landing craft were diverted to Britain in preparation for D-Day, a more indirect strategy became inevitable. Both the British Chindits and Merrill’s Marauders operated, however, in close collaboration with Kachin tribal irregulars trained by the OSS (The Marauders were also aided by the Kachin-speaking British missionary Father James Stuart) as well as the Chinese forces of the KMT in Burma trained under the controversial command of General Stillwell.33
Though broadly based on Charlton Ogburn’s book The Marauders, Fuller took no serious notice of these external supports for the Marauders missions. He depicted the Marauders as a largely isolated band of brothers driven to their limits by the necessities of war. This was the approach of the classic American war movie, focused as it often was on a team of men who bend and buckle under the pressures of war but ultimately endure; divergent characters emerge during the conflict and there is the usual yearning to get home as periods of dramatic conflict are interspersed with rest periods, lightened very often by fights or dark humour. The approach had worked for Fuller in previous films such as the two Korean War movies, The Steel Helmet and Fixed Bayonets (1951), though inside the United States he was never viewed as seriously as internationally, and was often dismissed as a low-budget director of B movies.34
Even before the emergence of serious political divisions in the United States over the Vietnam War, Merrill’s Marauders looks rather tired and hackneyed, though Fuller did embellish the story with stock footage and maps to point out where the Burma war was being fought. One imaginative scene, filmed among concrete blocks in a railway marshalling yard, also recreated something of the frenzied confusion of the Burma jungle war as Americans and Japanese rush past each other in an orgy of killing.35 One critic certainly saw ‘individuality and merit’ in the movie, though the conventional war movie generic framework did not work particularly well in bringing Ogburn’s narrative to the screen.36
In a film of just 98 minutes, it is clearly unreasonable to expect the three separate missions of the Marauders to be covered in any detail. Fuller and Sperling started at the end of the first mission which they incorrectly claim had started in January 1944 (it started on 24 February), so enabling them to catapult the Marauders into something resembling a full-scale battle with the Japanese who defend their position at Walawbum with artillery. But this was a conflict fought for much of the time in the jungles of Northern Burma, though there is little evidence of this in Fuller’s sets in the Philippines, which are mostly grassland and the odd swamp. The fighting was also mainly conducted with mortars, machine guns, hand guns and hand-to-hand combat with bayonets though the Japanese did have deadly howitzers. On occasions, the Marauders were only too glad to get off the elephant paths for the darkness of jungle cover, which Ogburn described as being like the ‘invulnerable refuge of childhood’s bed’.37
Most of the film deals with the extension of the advance from Naubaum to Myitkyna, to take the pressure off the British, who had come under pressure in the west after the Japanese attack on Imphal and Kohima from early March to July of 1944. This was not the real motive for Stillwell’s decision to advance on Myitkina, which was to secure a landing strip to continue supplies over the Himalayan ‘hump’ into China for Chiang’s KMT. None of the Chinese divisions ever appear in Fuller’s film which gives the impression that the Americans were mainly fighting both for the glory of the US army and in support of their British allies. Securing the support of the American army behind the film probably ensured that these sorts of issues had to be omitted, while the Cold War prevented film makers in Hollywood from developing positive images for the Chinese forces fighting then as allies. As it was, Fuller complained that his final battle scene where some of the Marauders mistakenly fire on their comrades was removed in favour of a stock footage of modern US soldiers and a voice-over announcing that the Marauders were forerunners of modern US special forces.38
Merrill’s Marauders indicated some of the difficulties Hollywood film producers had in bringing any sort of serious treatment of special operations to the cinema screen, a difficulty already evident in Edge of Darkness in 1943. As I shall show later in this chapter, Hollywood has only begun to confront this since the end of the Cold War and the release of the (commercially unsuccessful) film The Great Raid in 2005. Returning to the 1960s, it is evident that Hollywood preferred to stick to British, rather than American, special operations and in 1968 the American director Paul Wendkos made the low-budget film Attack on the Iron Coast, based on the March 1942 British Commando raid, known as Operation Chariot, on the German naval base in St Nazaire in Brittany. The raid involved the use of a destroyer encased in concrete and explosives, serving as a giant torpedo to blow up the huge gates of the Normandie Dock, large enough to shelter the German battleship Tirpitz. This was not the first film to feature the raid since it had also been depicted in the 1952 British film The Gift Horse starring Trevor Howard. The Gift Horse had focused less on the actual raid than on the destroyer (called in the film HMS Ballantrae) and its crew in a manner reminiscent of the iconic war-time film In Which We Serve (1942) starring Noel Coward. The St Nazaire raid occupied only a few minutes at the end of The Gift Horse and was marred by poor special effects based on flimsy models. There was no reference to SOE’s role in the raid’s planning and it was little more than another heroic war-time naval drama.
Attack on the Iron Coast was the first attempt to film Operation Chariot, though budget restraints led to the destroyer being down-graded to an unconvincing mine sweeper. The leader of the attack, Major James Wilson, was played by the American actor Lloyd Bridges posing as a Canadian officer fully committed to a high-risk venture called ‘Operation Mad Dog’. As in The Cockleshell Heroes, Wilson finds himself opposed by more conservative figures in military high command, especially a Captain Owen Franklin (Andrew Keir) who had lost his son in an unsuccessful Dieppe-type raid on the French coast. But this is not a simple clash of personalities, since a meeting of the heads of Combined Operations approve the raid that has the support of the prime minister and a Mountbatten figure, Rear Admiral Sir Frederick Grafton (Maurice Denham), who overrules the doubters.
Attack on the Iron Coast presented a very partial film image of Operation Chariot. It failed to show the lack of co-ordination with the RAF, who were never clear what exactly the purpose of the mission was and returned to Britain after dropping only a few bombs due to cloud cover.39 But the film at least hinted at the strategic significance of the raid which was aimed at destroying an installation that could be a base for the Tirpitz. It showed some of the senior-level strategic discussion, though no attention was given to SOE’s role in planning the operation. It was, after all, an SOE junior officer, John Hughes-Hallett, who worked out that a ship could only be propelled onto the Normandie Dock during a brief period in the spring when the conjunction of a full moon and a rare flood tide ensured a high enough water level to penetrate the Dock’s defences.40
The film opted for individual heroics typical of many Hollywood war features as a wounded Wilson stays on the ship to reconnect two lose wires that were preventing the clock timer from setting off the explosives; in the actual raid, a pencil timer was used, one of the innovative inventions of SOE. The explosion also goes off soon after the surviving men have been captured by the Germans making this a raid with some of the features of a terrorist attack given the timer went off several hours later than expected the following morning, when a considerable number of Germans were inspecting the ship. An estimated 300–400 Germans were killed in the ensuing explosion, a feature that film makers evidently found difficult to bring to screen in the late 1960s.
There were less inhibitions when it came to the making the fictional film The Dirty Dozen in 1967. This movie has proved to be particularly important in transforming the more specialized spec ops movie into a mass market commodity. The film, starring Lee Marvin and Telly Salavas, also reflected the increasingly violent trend in war movies and westerns during the 1960s. Marvin plays the wayward Colonel John Reisman of the OSS, tasked with training a group of US military convicts before parachuting with them into France before D-Day to kill German officers domiciled in a French chateau in Rennes, Britanny.41 Despite the wildly implausible story line, The Dirty Dozen proved a box office success at a time when cinema audiences appeared unconcerned about historical realism. The film caught the anti-establishment mood of the era among younger film audiences with its portrayal of group of hardened criminals being forged into a fighting group owing little allegiance to the United States but dependent on each other. Leaving out the psychopathic Maggott, played by Telly Savalas, the men learn to cooperate as a unit under Reisman’s command. They humiliate their main opponent in the mainstream US military, Colonel Everett Dasher Breed (Robert Ryan).
As in many action movies, women make only a limited appearance, first as a group of English prostitutes brought in to service the needs of the isolated dirty dozen (they are indeed filthy when the shocked women meet them) as well as the rather smarter mistresses and wives of the German officers in Rennes. This marginal depiction of women appeared to Bosley Crowther of The New York Times to confirm the ‘gutter solidarity’ of the men in a generally ‘sadistic’ movie.42 This rather high-minded dismissal fails to understand that the film was essentially reflecting a changing audience appetite by the mid-1960s for war films that moved away from the conventional heroics of the post-war years.
The last part of the film graphically depicts the coordinated attack on the chateau in which Reisman and the German-speaking Wladislaw (Charles Bronson) enter disguised as German officers, even though Wladislaw is supposed to be an American Red Indian. Once the attack commences, large numbers of the German officers and women flee to the cellars, while a gun battle ensues. The mission descends into wanton massacre as the one black member of team, Jefferson (played by ex-US football star Jim Brown), drops grenades through the ventilation shafts while Ryan pours in petrol, leading to a huge explosion that destroys most of the Chateau. This gruesome level of violence offended many critics, and the film still manages to shock, not least for the high-angle shots looking up the ventilation shafts showing Jefferson throw down grenades reminiscent of Zyklon B gas capsules at Auschwitz. These shots were removed from the version released in cinemas in Germany.
The Dirty Dozen can be viewed as a vicious revenge narrative in which Germans have become almost completely depersonalized. This was, after all, a period in which the full dimensions of the holocaust were still not properly known. The twenty-six-episode TV series The World at War would not go on air until 1973–1974 while the more detailed documentary examination of the holocaust Auschwitz, The Nazis and the Final Solution was only released in 2005 showing that not all Germans were involved in the planning of the mass extermination of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals. If there had been such public portrayals in the early 1960s it is hard to see how the film could have been made in the way it was.
The film script of The Dirty Dozen also served as a harsh reminder of what happens to a novel when it is turned into an action movie. E.M. Nathanson’s novel, The Dirty Dozen, recounts Reisman’s efforts to turn twelve marginal and mostly condemned men into a fighting unit. It scarcely rates as a combat novel since the main part of the contemplative text focuses on the lives and background of the various men involved. Reisman, for instance, develops a tender and close relationship with Tisha, a girl twenty years younger than himself, while most of the other characters have complex and troubled backgrounds. The one black character, called Jefferson in the film, is a well-educated Lieutenant called Napoleon in the novel. He has been condemned to hang for a revenge murder of a white artillery sergeant who had been involved in a racial attack leaving him half dead in a ditch. Similarly, Bronson’s film character Wladislaw is a Navaho Indian who retains close links to his cultural past.
None of this is explored in Robert Aldrich’s film. A more finely constructed movie might have used flashbacks to develop some of the characters of the men, even if this might have detracted from the pace of an action film driven towards an inevitable climactic violence. By the end of the film, all the dirty dozen, bar one, are dead in what was really a suicide mission. The preposterous idea that the US army would need to train a band of criminals for such a mission, given that it already had trained groups of Commandos, Rangers and OSS irregulars, largely passed by 1960s cinema audiences. The film reflected a continuing popular naivety concerning the use of special forces, a naivety that, arguably, changed only over the next decade with successful special forces missions such as the Israeli raid on Entebbe in June 1976 and the SAS lifting of the Iran Embassy siege in London in May 1980.
The ‘dirty dozen’ are hardly conventional soldiers, even though they are not proper special forces either. They are more kamikaze-type mercenaries in a fantastical narrative that explores some of the facets of war not covered in the conventional war movie, which to many of the younger generation was starting to look tired and shop-worn. This was exemplified all too starkly by the woefully poor Raid on Rommel, released in 1971 (dir. Henry Hathaway). The film starred Richard Burton as Captain Alex Foster, leader of a British Commando unit called The Desert Rats seeking to destroy German gun emplacements in Tobruk, though the recycled quality of the film was all too evident in footage taken from the 1967 film Tobruk. The film attempted to combine some of the themes of Burton’s classic performance in The Desert Rats (1951) with The Guns of Navarone (1961) as the commandos attack German guns located on a cliff face. The officers of the Commando group are taken prisoner and, as in The Desert Rats, come up against Rommel, this time played by Wolfgang Preiss. They destroy the guns and escape to Royal Navy ships, leaving a wounded Foster to be captured. The critic of the Radio Times dismissed the film as another example of ‘dreary Second World War action movies’.43
In 1975, Hollywood at last brought out a film that dealt quite realistically with one of the most important special operations of the war – Operation Anthropoid – involving the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942. The operation had formed the basis for a largely fictional and war-time propaganda film Hangmen Also Die (1943), directed by Fritz Lang and Arnold Pressburger, where the focus is on the aftermath of the assassination (which is not shown) and the desperate efforts of the Czech resistance to survive the Nazi reign of terror. Operation Daybreak (1975), by contrast, went into considerable detail to follow the planning before the actual operation in an action movie that is quite successful in its ability to build up audience suspense.
The film (dir. Lewis Gilbert) played fast and loose with historical events to construct a narrative that builds up a steady suspense aided by an electronic musical score. This was as much an action as a special operations movie, though it was anchored in real events. But the movie ended up once again reinforcing the myth – perhaps by now a national conceit – about the capacity of SOE to organize and largely control special operations in occupied Europe. The movie begins in late 1941 when General Cross (Patrick Wymark) of SOE invites three British-trained Czech partisans to take part in an operation that he describes as one of the most important of the war. Heydrich has now been installed as Reich Protector in Prague for a few months and Cross predicts that he may very well succeed Hitler should the Fuhrer die: an amazing assertion given how little was known about the internal political rivalries in the Third Reich or indeed the likely outcome of the war before Stalingrad. Leaving this dramatic licence aside, Cross’s interview with the Czechs in the film is important for implanting the idea that this is essentially a British military operation, even if the men chosen are Czechs who know something of the lie of land in their native country. The Czechs are dressed in British army uniforms and behave as British soldiers. As we look over Cross’s shoulder in one scene, we see the men as very much the dutiful operatives for an apparently British-designed mission.
The apparently British nature of the mission ensures that the film avoids wandering into the crucial political circumstances in which the real Operation Anthropoid took place. SOE had little influence over the decisions of exile governments in Britain such as the Czech government under Edouard Benes. Ever since the outbreak of the war, Benes had been frantically trying to assert his own government’s role and importance to counteract the possibility of the German occupation becoming permanent. Benes was haunted by the idea that Britain might decide to make peace with the Germans, leaving them in effective control of what was now called Bohemia and Moravia. This appeared rather more likely in the wake of the German invasion of Russia in June of 1941 and Benes was now even more determined to use his control over the Czech resistance, the strongest in Europe apart from the Poles, as a bargaining card in his relations with SIS, SOE and the Russians.44 He became especially keen on partisan operations to bolster links between the exile government in London and the underground as well as demonstrating the credibility of his government in any peace negotiations once the war was over.45
Benes took advantage of SOE’s minimal influence over Czech operations. Contrary to Gilbert’s film version, it was the Czech exiles in Britain who selected targets, chose operatives and organized briefings, allowing SOE little or no say. As far as the war-time Churchill government was concerned, the killing of a senior Nazi figure hardly went against any British strategic interests, though from an intelligence point of view there was considerable likelihood that a successful assassination would lead to a massive German response that might destroy most of the surviving resistance network. However, by late 1941 Benes was playing for high stakes and needed to demonstrate that the Czech resistance could achieve some results or else face the prospect that the beleaguered Russians might drop the exile resistance altogether in favour of the communist Czech exiles in Moscow led by Clement Gottwald.
Operation Anthropoid got underway in December 1941 when Gabcik and Kubis were dropped from an RAF Halifax, seventy miles off target. The operation revealed some slipshod planning. The partisans had at least one tin of bully beef with an English label and failed to establish contact with the underground. It was through sheer luck that the two men encountered a local miller with links to the underground. They were taken to a safe house in Prague where they organized the assassination after a detailed study of Heydrich’s daily route from his residence outside Prague to his office in Hradcany Castle. The film depicts the assassination with considerable realism. The two men wait by a curve in the road near a tram stop; Kubis runs out in the road ready to fire but his Sten gun jams; he runs away pursued by Heydrich’s driver; Heydrich makes the mistake of standing up to try to shoot Kubis with his luger; Gabcik throws a grenade (a modified anti-tank grenade) that explodes by the side of the car severely injuring Heydrich; the driver runs after Kubis through the streets of Prague and shots are exchanged; eventually Kubis turns and shoots dead the driver on a bridge, though, in reality, he only hit him in the leg.
This is an action movie and little attention is paid to the aftermath of the assassination involving brutal German repression. This eventually led the Czech partisan Sergeant Karel Curda, of the ‘Out Distance’ sabotage group, to give himself up to the Gestapo. In Gilbert’s film, he appears as a treacherous and tearful weakling, driven by concerns to protect his wife and baby son as he decides to walk through the doors of the Gestapo headquarters in Prague to confess all. This interpretation fails to account for the full impact of Nazi terror tactics in the wake of the assassination, perhaps reflecting the difficulties British cinema producers still had in the 1970s in dealing with terrorism themes. Curda’s betrayal occurred after an order by Hitler on 15 June 1942 for the execution of 30,000 politically active Czechs. Over 13,000 people had already been arrested and on 9 June the entire village of Lidice was destroyed with 199 men executed, 95 children taken into prison and 195 women moved to a concentration camp. In these grim circumstances, Curda broke down and wrote a note to the Gestapo identifying Gabcik and Kubis as the assassins. His decision was also a result of growing disillusion with Benes’s political leadership of the exile government, which Curda considered to be out of touch with the predicament of ordinary Czechs experiencing the Nazi terror.46
Curda’s betrayal led to a second high point in Operation Daybreak in the form of the gun battle in the Orthodox church of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Prague. Kubis and Gabcik were hiding out here along with another four partisans. The church was besieged by 750 SS troops and in the shoot-out an estimated fourteen SS were killed and a further twenty-one wounded. The film recreates the battle with some accuracy, though the partisans mostly had small-calibre pistols rather than Sten guns in the movie; also, four men eventually committed suicide in the crypt, rather than Kubis and Gabcik in the film.
For the period, Operation Daybreak was a realistic film that was generally well received by critics. It was released at a time when Hollywood found the subject of Vietnam difficult to bring to the screen. It was far safer to deal with more conventional concepts of military heroism of Second World War vintage. Despite the film’s misleading portrayal of the operation as one completely inspired and planned by the British government, this was a movie that took special operations like Operation Anthropoid rather more seriously than many previous films, despite the eventual betrayal of the Czech assassins. The monster Heydrich was also killed, though the price paid by the civilian Czech population proved to be enormous. It was these people who are often now judged to be the real heroes of the story, though they still lack a film detailing their experiences.
Operation Daybreak certainly developed a compelling narrative of special operations. It also raised interesting questions on the risks involved when inserting small groups of trained specialists with apparently little detailed knowledge of the terrain or ability to navigate on their own. The problem becomes even clearer in the 2016 film Anthropoid (dir. Sean Ellis) starring Jamie Dorman as Jan Kubis and Cillian Murphy as Josef Gabcik. The movie, interestingly, completely avoids the British background to the operation and starts with Dorman and Kubis parachuting off course into a snowy Czech landscape. They have been trained but not that well, and compare rather poorly to the professionals in modern special forces. They are fortunate to meet up with the Czech resistance, though this has already been decimated by the crackdown instigated by Heydrich. Some partisans express surprise when they hear of the intended target of the two operatives, one offering the opinion that the basic reason was to boost the credibility of the exile Czech government in London. The movie maintains its focus on the two main operatives with more historical realism than Operation Daybreak. The romantic relationship of Murphy’s Gabcik with one of the female resistance members Marie Kovarnika (Charlotte Le Bon) is only briefly touched on, while the steady build-up of tension relies on dialogue and actual settings in Prague (shot in an appropriate brown filter) rather than a dramatic musical score.
Even Heydrich barely makes an appearance in the film, having been briefly introduced via some real black and white footage at the start. There is no dramatic recreation of his domestic life with wife and children and he is only momentarily seen after the actual attack, falling back wounded into a shattered car (the grenade also blows in the glass of a passing tram). Ellis has paid scrupulous attention to historical detail and this continues into the final shoot-out in the Church of St Cyril and St Methodius. The Germans are led to this church after torturing a resistance leader to reveal their whereabouts, so tending to down-play Curda’s betrayal. Some of the resistance manage to take vials of cyanide to avoid this sort of torture and we become strongly aware in this film of the sheer scale of the German state terrorism in Prague, with propaganda leaflets and huge financial rewards for information leading to the arrest of the assassins. Ellis’s film reflects the growing importance of films focused on sub-state and state terrorism in the last two decades. Cillian Murphy had also starred as starred as an IRA guerrilla fighter Damien O’Donovan in the 2006 movie The Wind That Shakes the Barley (dir. by Ken Loach) and has the look of an urban insurgent.
Anthropoid also debunked one of the major special operations myths in the Second World War. The assassination was not inspired by an indigenous Czech guerrilla resistance able to exert some say into the strategy of the underground. The leader of this resistance Jan (Toby Jones) maintains a discreet distance from the political and personal battles being fought out. He reflects an urbane and rather resigned bourgeois commitment to violent resistance of some form, but has neither the background nor training to equip him to lead it with any effectiveness. In the end, he manages to commit suicide before being captured by the Germans, his most decisive existential act in the movie. This is a film, then, that manages to be both an action movie and one that outlines some of the problems and difficulties in special operations.
By the time Anthropoid was released, Hollywood turned to American special operations in the Second World War; particularly, the largely neglected US Ranger raid on the Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines on 29–30 January 1945. The Great Raid, released in 2005 and directed by the television writer and director John Dahl, was an important Hollywood foray into US special forces raiding, though it met with a poor audience response. The raid was undertaken by US Rangers and Alamo Scouts in early to rescue 513 allied prisoners from the Cabanatuan camp in the Philippines, many in poor shape after years of captivity. The raid briefly received extensive publicity back in the United States and helped to divert attention from a far greater disaster that had ensued a few months previously when an American submarine had mistakenly sunk a Japanese ship carrying some 1,800 American prisoners to Japan in October 1944, of which only five survived.47 Media interest in it proved to be brief for it was soon overtaken by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan and the end of the Pacific War in August 1945.
The raid had been briefly and inaccurately depicted in Back to Bataan in 1945 where the raiders are even shown wearing steel helmets, though these were avoided for fear that the sun flashing on them would alert Japanese guards. The Cabanatuan raid was briefly included as an extension to the main footage of Back to Bataan, which had been shot before the raid was undertaken. Even then, it presented an image problem for the US military since it threatened to turn attention away from the role of General MacArthur in personally ‘liberating’ the Philippines. The raid was also not driven by any clear strategic calculus beyond worries over reports of an increasing insanity among Japanese prison camp commanders, one of whom had authorized the burning alive on 14 December 1944 of some 150 prisoners herded into air raid shelters at the Puerto Princesa Prison Camp at Palawan. This atrocity reflected the bitter nature of the Pacific War with its markedly racial overtones; American troops had frequently used flame flowers to burn alive Japanese troops hiding in caves in Saipan as early as 1942.48 There were good reasons to try and forget this part of the Pacific War as the United States sought to cultivate its Japanese ally as the Cold War became entrenched in the North-West Pacific following the uncertain ending of hostilities in Korea in 1953.
US prisoners being burnt alive forms the opening scene of The Great Raid, as American forces advanced inland in Luzon in early 1945. There were worries that the Japanese would massacre their surviving prisoners as they retreated into the forests on the northern part of the island, and possibly burn them alive. The film shows barrels of aviation fuel being delivered to the Cabanatuan Camp but there is no evidence to indicate that there any actual plans afoot to burn the prisoners alive.
Nevertheless, here was an opportunity to use some of the early practitioners of special operations formed as the 6th Ranger Battalion. Many of the Rangers were former farm boys who had been muleteers in New Guinea, where their unconventional tactics had been viewed with considerable suspicion by US high command. The Rangers were also helped by intelligence collected by the Alamo Scouts and Filipino insurgents under an experienced commander Captain Juan Pajota, previously attached to the American guerrilla group known as Lapham’s Raiders.49
The Rangers advanced in silence on the evening of 29 January to attack the camp from both the front and rear; at the same time, the Filipino insurgents cut road links north and south to prevent Japanese forces coming to the assistance of the camp garrison, though this never made it into The Great Raid. The attack made full use of surprise as darkness fell. It wiped out an entire Japanese battalion with an estimated 270 Japanese soldiers and prison guards killed in the attack, though some estimates range up to 1,000 in all. The Rangers also disabled several tanks inside the prison with bazookas to clear the ground for the safe passage of weak prisoners back towards American lines, in a fleet of carts drawn by buffaloes supplied by local farmers. The raid provided an immediate heroic myth for the US media and twelve of the Ranger leaders eventually met the dying Franklin Roosevelt in the White House.
The Great Raid was a fairly accurate recreation of the real raid, based on historical accounts.50 The movie was shot in Australia and has a few scenes showing the assistance of Filipino guerrillas. Mucci outlines to his men the strategy behind the raid based on night-time surprise and the use of a low-flying plane to divert the attention of the guards while the Rangers crawl towards the camp. The film builds up tension by focusing on this slow advance as well as how coordination was achieved only on ordinary wrist watches, since there were no field radios. The start and finish of the raid was signalled by the firing of a flare while the main weapons available to the raiders are automatic weapons and rifles, along with bazookas to destroy Japanese tanks.
The generally slow pace of film put audiences off, suggesting it might have done rather better if had been released thirty years previously to more patient cinema-goers. It gained a mere £10.8 million at the box office on a budget of $80 million and was a major loss for Miramax. Roger Ebert praised the film for its realism compared to the film Stealth (which he considered to be more like a video game) though the absence of any major stars in the cast clearly did not help.51
It was British film producers who started cinema’s interest in special operations after the Second World War, releasing a series of films that depicted small groups of specially trained men plunged into hazardous escapades in enemy-occupied territory. Few of these films dealt exclusively with men from privileged social backgrounds and there were almost no gentlemen adventurers of pre-war vintage. Only Ill Met by Moonlight openly celebrated upper-class public school amateurism and it is pertinent to ask, where did upper class interest in special operations go in the post-war world? Did it just melt away in the face of changing post-war culture or did it solidify around other heroes?
One does not need to look too hard to find at least a partial answer to this question in the form of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Fleming was instrumental in establishing another special operations group known as 30 Assault Unit that took part in landings in North Africa, Sicily and Normandy. The central aim here was less sabotage or assassination than the gathering of intelligence and the group had a less spectacular war than those other branches of spec ops I have been examining in this chapter. Moreover, Fleming eventually wrote not about a group of heroes but an effortless upper-class counter-intelligence agent with impeccable tastes in wine and women, a hero broadly drawn on his brother Peter, who, unlike Ian, went from Eton to Oxford and the Bullingdon Club. Fleming published his first Bond novel Casino Royale during the Cold War in 1953 and his character quickly became, in Ian Rankin’s words, ‘a neo Elizabethan hero for an age when the British empire was dissolving and Britain struggled to remain at the top table among the world leaders’.52 This was not only a fantasy about one man’s super-human capacity to survive in near-impossible situations but also one that broadly appealed to a nation facing imperial decline. Despite immense changes in the way that the myth is now represented in recent Bond films, the myth has endured remarkably well, certainly in contrast to spec ops features which have been largely taken over by Hollywood.
Hollywood’s interest in spec ops occurred rather later than Britain. This was partly a reflection of American military suspicion of special forces stretching back to at least the Greek civil war in the late 1940s when some senior commanders worried that special forces might evolve into ‘private armies’ outside the control of central command (fears later dramatized in the Vietnam context in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in 1979).53 Raiding by Special Forces teams would over time become a staple item in Hollywood, but the subgenre became delayed by the impact of the Vietnam War.54 The draw-down from Vietnam in the early 1970s led to a sharp reduction in Special Forces from 13,000 men in 1971 to a mere 3,000 in 1974, and the image of SOF continued to suffer with the disaster of Operation Eagle Claw in Iran 1979, the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983 and the Special Forces ignominious retreat in Somalia in 1993.55 Indeed, US Special Forces really came into their own with the operation to remove the Taliban regime from power in Afghanistan only in the wake of 9/11. In this instance less appeared to be more for, unlike Iraq, the United States did not invade the country with ground forces but centred the operation on a mere 300 Special Forces together with 100 CIA personnel, working in close alliance with the Northern Alliance. In just three weeks the Taliban were removed from power in Kabul.56
Hollywood’s idea of special operations evolved over the 1980s and 1990s largely as glamorized fictions divorced from serious military realities; quite lot of emphasis was given to the establishment in 1977 of the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta, generally known as Delta Force. As series of action movies were released over the next twenty or more years involving Delta Force a series of dramatic counter-terrorism operations beginning with Delta Force in 1986, starring Chuck Norris.
During the 1980s, the training of US Rangers was also considerably revamped and its military technology transformed under the leadership of General Stanley McCrystal.57 But US special forces still ended up performing no major strategic role in Gulf War One in 1991. The US-led invasion in Operation Desert Storm lasted 100 hours and was a very brief conventional war based on the doctrine of the air-sea-land battle. It confirmed the overwhelming superiority of US forces in any conventional military conflict. US Special Forces did not perform any major role, and none of their operations were transferred to the cinema screen. It was the British SAS which won the laurels with its engagement behind enemy lines inside Iraq; building on the earlier 1982 movie Who Dares Wins, the film Bravo Two Zero (1999) narrated the fortunes of an eight-man SAS patrol deployed into Iraq to gather military intelligence.58
The cinematic image of US Special Forces continued to be hampered in the 1990s by the disastrous standoff on 3–4 October 1993 in Mogadishu, when nineteen members of Task Force Ranger were killed attempting to arrest a local warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid. The operation, known by the rather cinematic title of Operation Gothic Serpent, was judged a failure, and all US forces were eventually withdrawn from Somalia. Within a few years, the Hollywood movie Black Hawk Down (dir. Ridley Scott) was released in 2001 giving a more positive spin on the Ranger operation, likening it at points to a modern-day version of Zulu as outnumbered and encircled Rangers fight off mobs of angry Somali civilians. Black Hawk Down signalled, though, the start of a more serious approach to special operations by Hollywood culminating a decade later in three films focusing on the hunt for Osama bin Laden: the TV documentary The Hunt for Bin Laden (2012), directed by Leslie Woodhead; Zero Dark Thirty (2012), die by Katherine Bigelow and the TV movie Seal Team Six (2012) directed by John Stockwell. These films will be examined in more detail in the next chapter.