In 1940 the British were bustled unceremoniously out of Europe. The Battle of France and the Norwegian Campaign had been humiliating disasters for a nation unaccustomed to such obvious military defeat. Britain would not surrender – national pride insisted on that – and the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force provided immunity from invasion, but with her army in the UK reduced to just one fully equipped division, neither could she contemplate taking on the might of the German Wehrmacht on land for a very long time to come. The British had to be seen to be prosecuting the war, but with what? One solution might be by a massive bombing campaign, designed to destroy German industry and break the morale of her people, but it would be some time before there were the bombers with the range, the navigation equipment and the load carrying capacity to have much effect, never mind the long range fighters needed to escort them. The immediate response to the need to hit back and to be seen to be hitting back was to have recourse to what the British considered that they always did rather well – subversion, raids and sabotage, allowing full rein to that streak of eccentricity and individualism that has long been supposed to form part of the quintessential British, or at least English, national character. Particularly attractive to a political establishment that had always hoped to spend as little as possible on its armed forces, and to chiefs of staff who found that they had few assets with which to do anything else, was the premise that butcher-and-bolt operations carried out by small numbers of men would cost little, not only in terms of money, but in equipment and lives too. Successful operations could be trumpeted to the international rooftops, those that failed (in the event, most) could easily be hushed up.
The means by which the British intended to carry the war to the enemy were military, in the shape of what came to be called Special Forces, and clandestine, as epitomised by the Special Operations Executive. Eventually there were Army Commandos, Marine Commandos, the Special Air Service, the Special Boat Sections, the Special Boat Service, the Boom Patrol Detachment, the Long Range Desert Group and a whole plethora of splinter groups including such delightfully named organisations as Popski’s Private Army (not its official name but the one that it was always referred to by), the members of all of which wore uniform (of a sort and some of the time). The aims of these organisations were broadly similar – to establish ‘a reign of terror’ in enemy occupied territories and ‘leave a trail of German bodies behind’, as the Prime Minister’s memo directing the formation of commando units so graphically put it. A more shadowy organisation was the Special Operations Executive, formed in July 1940 in great secrecy from existing intelligence organisations, but while the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, existed to gather intelligence abroad, generally (although not always) passively, the SOE would add subversion, assassination, sabotage, the creation of industrial unrest, propaganda and the support and encouragement of indigenous resistance groups to the gathering of intelligence about enemy deployments and intentions. The conventional foreign intelligence gathering organisation, MI6, did not necessarily welcome these innovations. Rather than derring-do that would alert the enemy, they rather hoped for sleepy policemen and dozy occupation troops that would allow the gathering of intelligence in the normal, clandestine way. It was not to be.
Much of what was accomplished by Special Forces and the SOE, their military efforts loosely coordinated by Combined Operations Headquarters, has become the subject of books, films and plays. We all know of the bravery of Violet Szabo and Odette Churchill; Heroes of both Telemark and the Cockleshell variety are regularly the subject of television documentaries and newspaper articles, and the greatest raid of all, that on Dieppe, still spawns memoirs or reassessments to this day. There can be no doubt that the men and women who took part in raids behind enemy lines in North Africa, who parachuted into occupied France, who paddled flimsy canoes up German patrolled rivers, who tried to coordinate the activities of feuding resistance organisations, in many cases being betrayed and tortured for their pains, or who stumbled ashore, cold, wet and seasick on a Norwegian shore, were courageous, highly motivated and resourceful individuals. What is in question is whether the tasks upon which those carefully selected soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians were engaged upon made any difference to the result of the war, rather than providing the British with an excuse for claiming that they were doing something when faced with yet another Russian, or American, demand for a Second Front Now. It must also be asked whether the planning and preparation for many of these operations was as thorough as it should have been, or whether men’s lives were considered expendable once the immediate operational aim had been achieved. It is not unreasonable to accept that men are expendable if the results are sufficiently important to warrant it, but did the planners seriously think that sending two gliders full of Royal Engineers to Norway and then expecting them, having carried out their task, to escape on foot 200 miles to neutral Sweden over a sparsely populated plateau under several feet of snow, in temperatures forty below zero, with little knowledge of the language and scanty instruction in skiing, was giving them a sporting chance? Expendable they may have been, but they were entitled to better opportunities of escape than they actually had.
The Dieppe raid, Operation Jubilee, probably one of the greater fiascos from which its architects – Mountbatten and Montgomery – escaped blame, was originally to be launched in July 1942 as Operation Rutter. Due to bad weather and a possible sighting of the embarkation by the Luftwaffe it was cancelled and the troops returned to barracks. In an extraordinary lapse of common sense and security it was revived in August. The stated aims were to examine the feasibility of capturing a port in occupied Europe, testing various drills and equipment and obtaining some information about the German development of radar, all in preparation for a return to the continent when the build up of American and British troops, and the provision of landing craft, allowed. Having held the port for a short time the force was then intended to withdraw. Over 6,000 men and a regiment of tanks were landed and in a very short space of time more than half the men were dead, wounded or prisoners of war. Most tanks could not even get off the beach and had to be abandoned. Air support was limited by the reluctance to detract from the bombing of Germany and the Royal Navy would not deploy capital ships to provide shore bombardment where the British did not have air superiority. As it was, the RAF lost over one hundred aircraft compared to the German fifty, and the navy lost a destroyer and several landing craft. While Combined Operations HQ claimed that valuable lessons had been learned which would contribute to the ultimate success of D Day, those lessons could equally well have been learned on exercises, rather than by throwing men’s lives away in what was always far more likely to fail abjectly than to succeed. The sceptic might ask whether the real aim was to show the Americans and the Soviets that the Second Front that they were espousing could not yet be launched.
One has to ask whether the planning, the training and the conduct of such operations were as good as they might have been, and whether their seemingly romantic nature and their appeal to the love of individualism has obscured the often cavalier way in which brave men and women’s lives were thrown away.
A very good question and one that isn’t asked enough. I for one have become something of an SOE heretic. Whilst admiring the remarkable achievements of some individuals, I’m not sure that the overall intended strategic result was achieved or the ultimate effect was worth it. However, we also need to recognise that what isn’t in doubt - asking the question of those who took part - is that many saw the threat from Germany to be existential, and needful of their direct, personal and individual sacrifice. Thousands of individuals volunteered to make a personal sacrifice in the face of overwhelmingly poor odds. This is a question that to my mind hasn’t been satisfactorily answered. There are some amazing letters from individuals going on the St Nazaire raid, recognising that they didn’t think they’d survive, but willing nevertheless to sacrifice their lives in an operation their country considered necessary