If Dudley Clarke had done nothing else in the war, his final job in London in 1940 would have secured him a place in history. On his return from Ireland he’d been appointed as military assistant to Sir John Dill, the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Dill and Clarke were old comrades. In Palestine a couple of years earlier, they’d been flying in a plane together and Clarke had leaned out to point to something, only to be thrown from his seat in the open cockpit by a moment of turbulence. In the version of the story that Clarke liked to tell, Dill had caught him ‘by the ankles’ and hauled him back into the plane.
Now Dill had been put in charge of the country’s military just as it was at its lowest ebb. The army had been defeated first in Norway and then in France and Belgium. The evacuation of troops from Dunkirk might have been more successful than anyone had dared hope, but it had still involved the soldiers fleeing, their guns left behind them on the beach. There was no escaping the reality that the German army was winning battles and the British army was losing them.
Two days after the retreat from Dunkirk, Dill went to meet some of the soldiers who had escaped. He returned to the War Office troubled. Clarke followed him into his large corner office, with its view towards Trafalgar Square. For a minute or two the general stood at the window, deep in thought. It had been a pleasant summer afternoon, and in the distance behind Nelson’s Column, the barrage balloons that were supposed to deter low-flying planes glittered silver in the evening sunlight.
Eventually Dill returned to his desk, and told his aide what was on his mind. The defence of Britain lay now in the hands of the air force and the navy. Unless the Germans attempted an invasion, there was little for the army to do. But his soldiers needed to recover their ‘offensive spirit’ – to get fighting again.
As it happened, Clarke had been approaching this problem from a different direction, thinking about how other armies had dealt with defeat. He reminded Dill how in South Africa the Boers had retreated and then formed small bands of mounted warriors to terrorise the force that had beaten them. It was the same tactic that people around the world had adopted to make life difficult for the British.
When Clarke and Dill had been in Palestine, they’d spent months dealing with bands of Arabs who struck fast and then disappeared before the better-armed British could chase them. Now they discussed how they could use the same approach against the Nazis, to launch ‘a war of continual mosquito tactics which, at small cost to the marauders, would wear down and sicken the ponderous bulk of the more powerful side’.
This wasn’t how British soldiers usually fought. It was, as Clarke knew from experience, how lesser forces fought against the British. But then the British army didn’t have much experience of being the smaller force in a war. To get regular soldiers to operate as insurgents would require them to unlearn as much as they would learn. They would have to be able to act independently and without support.
At Dill’s request, that night Clarke drafted a paper on the subject, proposing the formation of a small aggressive troop of soldiers who could launch swift raids into occupied Europe and then disappear into the night. He even had a name for them, taken from the South Africans he so admired: ‘The Commandos’.
It was an unorthodox, eye-catching idea, exactly the sort of thing to appeal to the prime minister, Winston Churchill, who had encountered the Boers himself decades earlier. Clarke was ordered to raise a Commando force and send it on a raid as fast as possible.
Clarke found no shortage of soldiers and sailors eager to strike back at the all-conquering Nazis. His idea wasn’t quite as original as he had thought: a few months earlier, a few ‘independent companies’ had been formed with the idea of training men in guerrilla warfare. These were being disbanded, and the men were keen to carry the work into Clarke’s new unit.
In his recruits, he looked for ‘intelligence, self-reliance and an independent frame of mind’ as well as another somewhat nebulous quality: ‘dash’. Anyone wondering what he meant by that had only to look at one of the first officers to volunteer for Clarke’s new outfit, David Niven.
Before Niven had been a movie star, he had been a bored junior army officer, the kind of man for whom peacetime soldiering had no attraction. He’d quit and gone to Hollywood, but on the coming of war, he’d immediately returned to Britain to join up. Clarke saw in him a fellow unconventional thinker, someone who could set the perfect tone for the crew of gentlemen pirates and gangsters that he wanted to assemble. But he wanted Niven on his team for another reason, too.
Clarke was a snob. He liked the finer things of life, and he liked to think of himself as someone who mingled with top people. He had a flat in Mayfair that he couldn’t have afforded without his father’s help. He had a weakness for dropping names even in official reports. To have a Hollywood celebrity on his staff was an obvious thrill. When Clarke wrote later about his time setting up the Commandos, every other man was referred to by his surname. Niven was ‘David’. Stardust aside, the work of setting up the new unit was serious.
If some senior officers liked the sound of giving the enemy a bloody nose, others were much less enthusiastic when it came to handing over men or equipment. In particular, there was a desperate shortage of weapons, and army units weren’t going to hand back what little they had. Clarke wanted Thompson submachine guns for his soldiers, ideal for close-quarter surprise attacks, but there were only forty in the country – the military hadn’t imagined such a weapon would be necessary a year earlier. He was given them, so long as he promised that only twenty would be taken on operations at a time, with the rest to stay in London in case they were needed to fight off a German invasion. It was a mark of how desperate the shortage of weapons was after Dunkirk that anyone thought twenty guns might make a difference to the defence of England.
On 24 June, less than three weeks after Clarke was given the go-ahead, the Commandos launched a cross-Channel assault. As raids go, it wasn’t a great one, memorable only for being the unit’s first. Just over a hundred men landed on French beaches, a couple of German sentries were killed, and the only British casualty was Clarke himself, his ear nearly shot off by a stray enemy bullet.
But it was a start, and meant that a month after the retreat from Dunkirk, the War Office was able to announce that ‘naval and military units yesterday carried out successful reconnaissances of the enemy coastline’. The press release went on to claim that ‘much useful information was obtained’, which reflected mainly what the Commandos had learned about the logistics of coastal raids, rather than any useful intelligence collected on the ground. But the public were delighted to see that Britain hadn’t given up. ‘Its tactical significance may be small,’ The Times wrote of the raid, ‘but the tiniest thorn thrust into the heel with which the enemy is grinding down Western Europe has a moral importance which is not to be despised.’
If the first Commando raid was a bit of a damp squib, the second, a few weeks later, was an embarrassment. The target was supposed to be the Channel island of Guernsey, but malfunctioning compasses meant one unit landed on a different island altogether. Others were let down by faulty motorboats. The soldiers that did manage to get ashore failed to find any Germans, though they did knock one islander unconscious. When it came to leaving, their boats were unable to get close enough to the shore to retrieve them. At this stage, three of the soldiers revealed they had lied about being able to swim. Left behind, they were eventually captured.
It was hardly a surprise that the army should have teething troubles when experimenting with fighting in this new way, but for those in the War Office who had thought the whole idea ridiculous, these failures were all the excuses they needed to begin sabotaging the Commandos. There was a bigger problem, too.
Clarke’s vision of the Commandos had been of small independent units carrying out ‘little and often’ attacks that did damage out of proportion with their size and then fleeing before the German army could bring its weight to bear against them. But Churchill now decided he disliked ‘pinprick’ raids. A senior admiral was put in charge of what were named ‘Combined Operations’ – because the navy or air force were used to deliver the soldiers to their targets.
From now on, the Commandos would mount the sort of big attacks with which the top brass were more comfortable. But planning such raids proved cumbersome, and getting approval for them impossible. They required more support from other services, which meant they needed to have a great purpose. The vision of a dozen or so men nipping across the Channel to cut throats and make the Germans nervous was dead.
Clarke could feel his project slipping away from him. As summer turned to autumn, he found himself sitting in meetings trying to justify the continued existence of a force that seemingly wasn’t allowed to go on any missions. It was at this point, just as he feared his unit might be strangled at birth, that he was ordered to Cairo.
It doesn’t seem that anyone was trying to get him out of the way. In other circumstances, this would have been a plum posting: Egypt was the one place where the army was still fighting anyone. But opponents of the Commandos would have been pleased to see Clarke departing. He certainly feared the project might not survive in his absence. There was, however, no point in trying to resist. His presence had been personally requested by the commander-in-chief of forces in the Middle East.
Clarke left London, then, in complicated circumstances, his highest-profile achievement one of unproven value. He was a maverick figure, but was he a useful one, or was he simply another crackpot whose wizard schemes didn’t survive contact with reality? Some soldiers were, like Tony Simonds, in awe of Dudley Clarke.
Others found his ideas too strange. Out in Egypt, though, one very senior general thought he was exactly the man he needed.
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