“Colossus had the personal backing of Churchill, who doggedly believed that airborne forces were vital to winning the war.”

(Originally published on Feb 19, 2020)

By Damien Lewis

ON JUNE 4, 1940, even as the smoke of defeat still hung thick over the Dunkirk beaches, Winston Churchill delivered a stirring speech to Parliament. In it, Britain’s new prime minister hailed the rescuing of so many, “… out of the jaws of death and shame, to their native land …”

But tellingly he added: “We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuation.”

One man with whom those words struck a powerful chord was Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke. Known as a maverick free-thinker, Clarke had first come to notice when General Archibald Wavell had recognized his, “unorthodox outlook on soldiering,” and “ingenuity.”

Clarke had grown up during the Second Boer War, his family braving the 1899 Siege of Ladysmith by Boer forces. Across South Africa 250,000 British troops had been tied down by Boer commandos, loosely organized bands of horsemen some 50,000 in strength.

The Boers formed militias, each fighter carrying whatever weaponry and kit he could muster. Dressed in regular khaki farming clothes, they were expert hunters and survivalists. Largely equipped with what they could capture from the enemy – in this case, British troops – the Commando bands were held together by the charisma of their leaders.

The stories of their thrilling exploits were burned into Clarke’s mind, and it seemed to him there was no reason why the Boer commandos shouldn’t be “reborn,” in Britain, to aim “mosquito stings upon the ponderous bulk of a German army.”

He scribbled down the defining aspect of commando operations: mobility – the ability to strike swiftly, in hit-and-run attacks – was key

On June 5, Clarke presented his commando proposal to Churchill, with the support of General John Dill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS). Churchill, of course, had direct experience with the Boer War. Despatched to South Africa as a foreign correspondent, he was once travelling on an armoured train when it was ambushed by Boer commandos. Under fierce fire, Churchill was eventually captured.

Carted off to captivity in the Boer capital of Pretoria, Churchill’s daring escape would become the stuff of legend. Scaling the prison fence, he moved only during the night hours, stealing food and drinking from streams. The Boers launched a manhunt, posters offering a reward for Churchill, “dead or alive.” The future PM managed to cross hundreds of miles of enemy territory and escape, the dash and daring of the Boer Commandos having been etched deep in his mind.

The day after submitting his proposal, Clarke received Churchill’s enthusiastic backing. He was ordered to set up a “raiding headquarters,” to be given the innocuous sounding cover-name Section MO9, short for Military Office 9, and to “get a raid across the Channel at the earliest possible moment.”

Clarke knew exactly what he sought from his Commandos: “We looked for the dash of the Elizabethan pirate, the Chicago gangster, and the Frontier tribesman.” His men would need to be self-starters, pressing on to their objective no matter what might have befallen their fellows.

He was inundated with volunteers, but there was precious little equipment at hand. His earliest recruits had to train with RAF crash boats, small rescue craft designed to pluck downed pilots from the sea.

Yet even as the first raid was being planned, the War Cabinet balked at Clarke calling his force commandos. The name connoted the Boer irregulars, with their lack of military orderliness and discipline. Incredibly, they decreed that Clarke’s unit should instead be known as Special Service troops, or “SS” for short. Thankfully, General Dill stepped in to “give Commando an authoritative blessing.”

On the night of June 24 to 25, 120 men of No. 2 Commando set sail in four crash boats led by Major Ronnie Tod, one of Clarke’s earliest recruits. Clarke himself rode with them, although he was strictly-forbidden from going ashore.

The raiders crept towards the night-dark French coast, off Le Touquet, in the Pas-de-Calais region. Just 20 days earlier, the last of the little ships had fled in the opposite direction, carrying the remnants of a defeated British army. It was a herculean feat to be striking back again so swiftly. The raiders landed successfully, and there were fierce skirmishes ashore, as the commandos targeted a hotel known to billet German troops.

The crash boat in which Clarke was riding came under fierce fire from a German patrol. It was also menaced by an enemy E-boat, a heavily-armed fast-attack craft capable of speeds approaching 50 knots. Fortunately, the raiders gave the Axis vessel the slip.

Operation Collar, as it was known, was hailed as a success. The Germans had taken casualties, and the commandos had lost not a man. Ironically, one of those injured was Dudley Clarke himself, who had had his ear shot almost in half. To a British nation desperate for positive news, Operation Collar proved a real tonic. A communique was issued to the press:

“Naval and military units yesterday carried out successful reconnaissance of the enemy coastline. Landings were effected at a number of points and contact made with German troops. Casualties were inflicted and some enemy dead fell into our hands. Much useful information was obtained. Our forces suffered no casualties.”

On the far side of the Atlantic, U.S. newspapers hailed the bulldog spirt of this new breed of piratical British raider. In time, Hitler would claim the commandos were “terror and sabotage troops,” who, “acted outside the Geneva convention.” Nazi propagandists would label them “murderous thugs and cut-throats,” who preferred to kill their enemies rather than to take prisoners.

In Britain, Clarke was soon inundated with volunteers who wished to join the ranks of his daring volunteers for Special Service. At Churchill’s urging, 10 separate Commandos were to be formed, each made up of 500 men. One would be an exclusively airborne unit.

Earlier in the war, Churchill had been hugely impressed when Nazi Germany’s Fallschirmjäger paratroopers had seized Belgium’s key defences. Waves of DFS230 gliders had landed silently, enabling German airborne soldiers to seize key objectives, opening the way for ground-troops to use Belgium as the launch-pad for the coming Blitzkrieg.

Churchill took in the lesson. “Let us raise a force of 10,000 parachutists,” he declared.

The challenge was equipment: All the RAF could offer were a few ageing Whitley medium bombers, already obsolete.

The first would-be paratroopers headed to Ringway, a windblown airstrip lying just to the south of Manchester, where Clarke’s top-secret airborne training establishment was founded.

As Clarke was keen to distinguish this airborne force from his seaborne commandos, he inserted the word ‘Air’ into the Special Service volunteer name, at a stroke the Ringway volunteers becoming the Special Air Service. And so, unwittingly, a legend was born.

The first unit was christened 11 Special Air Service Brigade; ’11,’ so as to bluff the enemy that ten other airborne brigades were already in existence

Clarke’s airborne forces were to be some of the first to carry out the next strike against the enemy. By autumn 1940, Operation Colossus was in the offing, a daring raid designed to prove that Britain had the pluck and punch to take the fight deep into the enemy’s back yard.

But Colossus was to be an operation that Clarke was sadly to miss. In November 1940 he received an urgent summons from General Archibald Wavell, commander of Middle East operations, ordering him to depart post haste for Cairo. There, Clarke was charged to develop the dark arts of trickery, deception and bluff to help trounce the Italians in North Africa.

Bidding farewell to his Commandos with lingering regret, Clarke reached Cairo on Dec. 12, 1940. His cover was that he was working for MI9, the British “escape and evasion factory,” charged to better enable Allied POWs to slip the enemy’s clutches.

His real mission – codenamed Operation Abeam – was to fabricate the supposed existence of British airborne units in North Africa, which in truth did not exist. Realizing that bending the truth was far better than creating a lie, Clarke formed I Special Air Service, using faked documents, photos and reports, which he made sure fell into enemy hands.

He had dummy parachutists dropped into the open desert, where they would be seen by the enemy, while men wearing SAS uniforms wandered around the streets of Cairo, talking all-too-freely about their daredevil, cut-throat airborne missions.

In the summer of 1941, Clarke was to make the acquaintance of David Stirling, recently-arrived in North Africa. Stirling shared with Clarke his ideas for creating a deep-desert raiding force. Clarke sensed an opportunity here to further his deception: If real parachutists could strike at the Italians’ rear, it would give body to his lies.

He counselled Stirling to use the name of an already-existing outfit, taking on their mantle and legacy.

“Dudley Clarke promised to give me all the help he could,” Stirling remarked of the moment. “If I would use the name of his bogus brigade of parachutists, which was the Special Air Service – the SAS.”

In fact, they were far from bogus; they were Clarke’s originals, formed out of his earliest commandos.

In February 1941, 36 men of Clarke’s fledgling SAS had carried out Britain’s first-ever airborne mission: Operation Colossus, a daring raid on an aqueduct in Italy. Now all-but forgotten, Colossus had the personal backing of Churchill, who doggedly believed that airborne forces were vital to winning the war.

Dreamed up by an Oxford professor of classics seconded to the Special Operation Executive (SOE) – ‘Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ – the aim of Colossus was to blow up an aqueduct channelling water from Italy’s Apennine Mountains to the vital naval ports of Brindisi, Bari and Taranto – water which kept three million souls alive.

Once Churchill had personally signed off on the order, on Feb. 7, 1941 Britain’s fledgling airborne forces embarked on a fleet of ageing Whitley bombers, flying 1,600 miles through enemy airspace. Thirty-four SAS parachutists – aided by two fiercely anti-Fascist Italian SOE agents – leapt into combat laden with weaponry and explosives, on a mission of spectacular daring and heroism.

Against all odds, the raiders blew up the aqueduct, but Allied reconnaissance photos taken after the attack seemed to show it still intact. The Colossus saboteurs commanded by the redoubtable Major Trevor ‘Tag’ Pritchard – an army boxing champion – had blown up the piers that supported the aqueduct, but photos shot from 10,000 feet failed to reveal that detail.

Colossus was duly reported as being a failure; those in the high command concluded that the 36 raiders must have been captured. As a result, the submarine HMS Triumph was recalled from her top-secret mission, to pluck the raiders off the Italian coastline and to spirit them to safety. Major Pritchard and his men were abandoned to their fates. All were subsequently captured or killed.

This ‘lost’ history of Operation Colossus and the founding of the SAS is recounted in my book, SAS Shadow Raiders. It has been hailed by Colonel Tim Collins, former commander of the SAS, as, “one of the most important Special Forces books ever written” as it “traces the daring, ingenuity and sheer courage that is the foundation of the modern service.”

Veteran SAS operator and former Channel 4 Who Dares Wins personality, Colin Maclachlan, has described the book’s revelations thus: “Another masterpiece of impeccable research that tells the story of how my predecessors in the SAS changed the course of WWII.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Damien Lewis is the author of the upcoming book Churchill’s Shadow Raiders: The Race to Develop Radar, World War II’s Invisible Secret Weapon. An award-winning writer, Lewis has spent 20 years reporting from war, disaster, and conflict zones for the BBC and other global news organizations. He is the bestselling author of more than 20 books. For more information visit: http://damienlewis.com/