SBS SILENT WARRIORS EB

Saul David

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780008394561, 9780008513368
• eBook ISBN: 9780008394547
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

'A terrific book … It really is one of the most enjoyable histories I've read in many a year' JAMES HOLLAND

'Riveting … A brilliant account' DAILY MAIL

THE FIRST AUTHORISED HISTORY OF THE SBS.

Britain's SBS – or Special Boat Service – was the world's first maritime special operations unit. Founded in the dark days of 1940, it started as a small and inexperienced outfit that leaned heavily on volunteers' raw courage and boyish enthusiasm. It went on to change the course of the Second World War – and has served as a model for special forces ever since.

The fledgling unit's first mission was a daring beach reconnaissance of Rhodes in the spring of 1941. Over the next four years, the SBS and its affiliates would carry out many more spectacular operations in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Channel and the Far East. These missions – including Operation Frankton, the daredevil attempt by the 'Cockleshell Heroes' to paddle up the Garonne river and sink Axis ships in Bordeaux harbour – were some of the most audacious and legendary of the war.

Paddling flimsy canoes, and armed only with knives, pistols and a few sub-machine guns, this handful of brave and determined men operated deep behind enemy lines in the full knowledge that if caught they might be executed. Many were.

Yet their many improbable achievements – destroying enemy ships and infrastructure, landing secret agents, tying up enemy forces, spreading fear and uncertainty, and, most importantly, preparing the ground for D-Day – helped to make an Allied victory possible.

Written with the full cooperation of the modern SBS – the first time this ultra-secretive unit has given its seal of approval to any book – and exclusive access to its archives, SBS: Silent Warriors allows Britain's original special forces to emerge from the shadows and take their proper and deserved place in our island story.

Part I

Beginnings, 1940–2

1

‘A new style of warfare’

Expecting company, the armed sentries on the Commando ship HMS Glengyle were on full alert as the 10,000-ton former cargo ship sat at anchor off Inveraray, a small town at the head of Loch Fyne in the Scottish Highlands. Yet they failed to spot the low silhouette of a two-man collapsible canoe – known as a folbot – approaching through the inky darkness, propelled noiselessly by a single paddler.

Pausing briefly to chalk crosses ‘along the hull to simulate limpet mines’, the canoeist made for the ship’s bows where, belying his 38 years, he slipped his thickset but immensely strong body into the icy water and began climbing up the anchor chain. Once on deck he carefully avoided the sentries until he found what he was looking for: the canvas cover for an Oerlikon 20 mm anti-aircraft cannon, one of twelve dotted around the Glengyle’s decks. Clutching his trophy, he retraced his steps, disappearing quietly over the guard rail and rejoining his canoe which he paddled back to shore. Barely half an hour later, still dripping water and shivering with cold, Second Lieutenant Roger ‘Jumbo’ Courtney – with his ‘bashed-in kind of face’ and ‘blunt no-nonsense manner’ – barged in to a high-level naval conference at the nearby Argyll Arms Hotel and placed his trophy on the table, as if to say: I told you so.[1]

The senior officers present – including the commander of the Combined Operations Training Centre (COTC) at Inveraray and the skipper of the Glengyle – were impressed, as was Courtney’s ultimate boss Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes who, as Director of Combined Operations, had the job of coordinating amphibious assaults against German-occupied Europe. Courtney had earlier tried to convince Keyes, a hero of the daring Zeebrugge Raid in 1918, that highly trained canoe teams could be used to great effect: scouting beaches, destroying shipping with limpet mines, landing secret agents, providing vital navigational information for landing forces and sabotaging enemy infrastructure like railway lines.[2] Keyes was interested, and for a time assigned Courtney to his headquarters in London for ‘special duties’. But that project had come to nothing and in mid-October 1940 Courtney was ordered to rejoin his parent unit, 8th Commando, at the COTC at Inveraray.[3] He had not been there long when he set the navy a challenge: using his personal folbot Buttercup, he would ‘board the Commando ship Glengyle unnoticed by night and depart again, leaving incontrovertible proof of his visit’; their job was to stop him.

The gun cover, not to mention the chalk crosses on the hull, were proof that they had failed. But Keyes needed to rule out luck, so he asked Courtney to perform the same feat against the nearest submarine depot-ship. Once again, Courtney was able to approach unobserved in his canoe and leave chalk marks above the waterline. He then overreached himself when he climbed up a conveniently placed rope ladder, and was met at the top by the master-at-arms and two Marines with fixed bayonets ‘who had been lying in wait, presumably forewarned by the previous victim’.[4] But he had proved his point to Keyes that canoes could be a vital part of Britain’s offensive strategy and, as a result, was authorised to raise a small cadre of men who would be trained in the use of folding boats ‘for the purpose of carrying out raids upon enemy occupied territory’. Known initially as the Folbot Troop – later the Special Boat Section – it would be equipped with thirty canoes and, for the time being at least, remain part of 8th Commando.[5]

Thus was born, from Courtney’s fertile imagination, ‘a new style of warfare: a Special Force who came from the sea’. With Courtney’s ‘simple act of invention and circumvention’ at Inveraray, ‘the extraordinary history of the Special Boat Service had begun’.[6]

*

Roger James Allen Courtney, the acknowledged ‘father’ of the modern SBS, was born in Fulham, London, on 30 July 1902. The eldest son of a wealthy manufacturer of machine tools – himself descended from West Yorkshire gentry stock – young Roger was educated at the minor public schools of Edinburgh House in Lee-on-Solent and Berkhamsted. Narrowly missing service in the Great War, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 7th West Yorkshires, a Territorial unit based in Leeds, in 1921. But peacetime soldiering – even part-time – was not for him and he gave up his commission two years later.[7]

Intended, as he put it, for a career in finance, Courtney worked for a time at a bank in Leeds, not far from his family’s country home at Ben Rhydding, near Bradford. But the daily grind of a desk job in a provincial city held few attractions for him, and at the age of 19 he resigned to follow his dreams. ‘I am,’ he wrote later, ‘a man whom no place or set of circumstances can satisfy for long.’[8]

Since childhood he had longed to live in the ‘African wilds’. He would later recall placing his finger, as a 7-year-old, at the centre of a ‘map of Equatorial Africa and declaring that some day I should go there’. Now was the opportunity to redeem that promise and, having overcome ‘strenuous family opposition’, he set off by steamer for the Kenyan port of Mombasa with £50 in his pocket.

Arriving in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, Courtney took on a succession of poorly paid jobs, including store clerk and saw-miller. He finally got his first proper taste of Africa by becoming a ranger for a large timber concession. Forced to hunt for the bulk of his food, he quickly learned ‘about bushcraft and big game’, becoming skilled in ‘trails, sign, stalking, habits of animals, range-finding – hundreds of things’. This gave him the confidence to try big-game hunting. He began with elephants (for their ivory),[fn1] moved on to buffalo (for their hides), and was eventually licensed as a ‘White Hunter’, the best of the best, and much in demand by ‘untried people who want to go on safari in the bush – tourists, visiting scientists, big-game photographers, cinema people, rich men who have come to experience the thrills of big-game hunting’. He charged up to £50 a week for a safari that could last five months.

As well as making him a very good living, the job of White Hunter gave Courtney the material for a book, Claws of Africa, which he wrote in 1933 on one of his occasional visits back to England. It was published a year later to good reviews and solid sales, and was the first of four books on his adventures in Africa.[9]

Back in Kenya, he got ‘gold fever’ when he heard about a strike near the Tanganyika border and immediately quit his job to stake a claim with two co-prospectors. ‘Evidence of gold in abundance’, he recalled, caused the trio to work ‘like beavers’. But when it became obvious that their limited resources were ‘inadequate for the job in hand’, and that ‘modern machinery, proper organisation and capital on a considerable scale’ were necessary, they sold out to a syndicate. Courtney decided to stay on as an employee, in case the mine came good. It was a mistake.[10]

Finding it hard to stomach the transition from partner to paid hand, he drank heavily and became, as he put it, ‘mildly rebellious and strongly critical of authority’, with a ‘chip of discontent perched permanently’ on his shoulder. The final straw was the news that a former sweetheart – the one woman who might have tamed his wunderlust – had agreed to ‘marry the best-looking farmer in Kenya’. He decided to cut his losses and look for a new adventure.

As ever, he was short of money. ‘Indeed,’ he wrote, ‘after spending my final pay-packet, I had to sell my rifle to pay my remaining debts. My only possessions after squaring up were a folding rubber canoe, a repair outfit for same, some camping and cooking gear, a miniature telescope and one pound in cash.’ With these scant resources, he set off from the head-waters of the White Nile river to see how far he could get.[11]

His canoe, Buttercup, was a two-seater sports model he had bought for £22 from Selfridges department store in London on one of his trips home.[12] It was a ‘seventeen-foot vessel, slim and speedy-looking, complete with mast and sail’. He stored his kit and stores, including three Oxo cubes and a bag of potatoes, and two petrol cans for buoyancy, ‘fore and aft under the canvas decking’. Finally, after a mammoth drinking session with his fellow mine workers, during which one of them fell into the water and was almost eaten by a crocodile, he set off from the banks of Lake Victoria on an epic 4,000-mile journey up the fabled White Nile river to the Mediterranean Sea. The odyssey would take him more than six months to complete.[13]

There were two interruptions: first a spell working as a surveyor of a potential copper mine; then ‘an interesting experiment to exist for a time as closely as possible in the manner of a N’dorobo hunter, eating native food, making fire by means of firesticks, and hunting with bow-and-arrow and spear for meat’. The latter experience toughened Courtney, turning his skin a ‘deep coppery-brown’ and leaving his bare feet insensitive to pain. It also taught him vital survival skills and the value of self-reliance. But with time moving on, he resumed his journey.

Hazards were many: he encountered leopards and lions, herds of hippos, and the chilling sight of thousands of crocodiles on either bank. In Egypt he almost succumbed to the cloying embrace of quicksand, but was saved when Buttercup floated towards him on a back-eddy. Only the last crowded stretch of the river, from Aswan to Isna in Egypt, did he find unrewarding. ‘I have little affection for the human wharf-rats of the lower reaches of the Nile,’ he wrote later, ‘and I wanted to be rid of them as quickly as possible.’ So he completed the final lap to Cairo in a third-class train compartment, packed with people and livestock whose pungent odours made him ‘nauseous’.[14]

Penniless once again, Courtney headed for British-administered Palestine where Arab anger towards a rising tide of Jewish immigration had resulted in open revolt. ‘It seemed to me,’ Courtney recalled, ‘that there was an opportunity here for honourable advancement.’ Having entered the mandate illegally, he joined the Palestine Police and eventually rose to the rank of sergeant. His eighteen months of service, from July 1936 to early 1938, were full of incident and danger as he braved Arab snipers, rioters and bombs. He even worked for a time as bodyguard to the inspector general of police, and left during a lull in the violence, though the revolt rumbled on until the summer of 1939.[15]

By then, Courtney’s wild ways had been partly tamed by a beautiful and spirited woman, Dorrise, whom he married in the summer of 1938. Well matched, they spent their honeymoon paddling Buttercup down the Danube river, before settling in a cottage in East Horsley, Surrey. In March 1939, in the wake of Nazi Germany’s duplicitous annexation of Czechoslovakia, Courtney sensed that war was coming and rejoined the Territorial Army, this time as a private in the 1st Queen’s Westminster Rifles.[fn2] In the section headed Trade on Enlistment, he wrote: ‘Safari Manager’.[16]

When Britain responded to Germany’s invasion of Poland by declaring war on 3 September 1939, and the British Expeditionary Force was sent to France, the 1st QWR remained at home with the bulk of the Territorial forces. Courtney was thus spared the humiliation of defeat the following spring as Germany’s blitzkrieg sliced through the Allies’ flimsy defences in Belgium and northern France, forcing the BEF’s chaotic evacuation from Dunkirk. With France on the verge of surrender, and Britain left to fight alone, Prime Minister Winston Churchill told his military chiefs on 3 June 1940 that there was an urgent need to raise ‘specially trained forces of the hunter class’ to tie up enemy troops by raiding the German-held coastline of Europe.[17] Their response, on 9 June, was to ask all army commands to provide the names of up to forty officers and 1,000 other ranks who were prepared to join a ‘special force of volunteers for independent mobile operations’. Known as ‘Commandos’ – a nod to the Afrikaans horsemen who had given the British so much trouble during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 – they would be composed of fit young men who had seen action, could swim and, ideally, had knowledge of motor vehicles. Officers were expected to have ‘personality, tactical ability and imagination’, while the men sought were those of ‘intelligence and independence’, who could behave with minimal supervision.[18]

As the volunteers poured in, they were assigned to one of ten Commando units, each composed of a headquarters and ten troops of fifty men, led by a captain and two junior officers. Given his adventurous background, it was perhaps inevitable that Roger Courtney, now a second lieutenant,[fn3] would apply to join the Commando raised in London, No. 8. What is more surprising is that he was accepted and made a section leader of 8 Troop on 2 August. His age should have counted against him, but it was more than compensated for by his skill with a rifle, knowledge of field craft, linguistic ability and physical toughness. ‘Although 38 years old,’ noted the Commando selecting officer, ‘he is extremely hard and fit.’[19]

The contrast with his fellow officers was marked. Most were wealthy aristocrats and landowners from the elite and socially exclusive Household Cavalry and Foot Guards, causing No. 8 to be dubbed the ‘Guards’ Commando. The commanding officer was the recently promoted Lieutenant Colonel Bob Laycock of the Royal Horse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Maps
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Beginnings, 1940–2
• Part II: Cockleshell Heroes and Beachcombers, 1942–4
• Part III: Endgame, 1944–5
• Aftermath: ‘He lived hard and died early’
• Picture Section
• Footnotes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Also by Saul David
• About the Publisher