Author: Grumpy
Saul David has written a new authorised history of the SBS and has uncovered some of the most extraordinary stories of World War Two.
Silent Warriors
Britain’s SBS – or Special Boat Service – was the world’s first maritime special operations unit. Founded in the dark days of 1940, the SBS 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 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 Gironde River, deep behind enemy lines, 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 submachine 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.
An Unlikely Partnership
The acknowledged “father” of the SBS is Roger “Jumbo” Courtney, a 38-year-old former big-game hunter with a “bashed-in kind of face” and a “blunt, no-nonsense manner”, who in October 1940 came up with a new way to take the fight to the enemy: using two-man folding canoes (known as folbots) to deliver teams of highly trained commandos deep behind enemy lines. Having provided his superiors with proof of concept – by paddling up to and then sneaking aboard a heavily guarded ship in Inveraray harbour in the Scottish Highlands – he was given permission to form the Folbot Troop, later renamed the Special Boat Section (or SBS). Thus was born “a new style of warfare: a Special Force who came from the sea”.
Deployed to the Middle East, Courtney quickly joined forces with Lieutenant Commander Nigel Willmott, a 30-year-old Royal Navy navigator who was convinced that secret beach reconnaissance was vital if the amphibious landings needed to defeat the Nazis were to succeed. Willmott’s conundrum was how to land on beaches silently; Courtney’s canoes provided the answer. It was an unlikely partnership. Courtney was a big picture person “with a flair for improvisation in a tight corner”, Willmott a details man. This combination of vision and precision would be the making of the SBS.
In March 1941, the two men were transported by submarine from Alexandria to a point off the coast of the Italian-held island of Rhodes. From there they paddled in by canoe and took it in turns to swim ashore and carry out a clandestine survey of the closely guarded shore as preparation for an amphibious assault.
The dangerous mission – undertaken with improvised equipment and at a time of year when the weather was wild and unpredictable – almost resulted in their capture or drowning. Yet, each time they returned safely to the submarine with vital information and proved, beyond doubt, that folbots could make a difference. Together they had pioneered a new technique – close beach reconnaissance – that would save thousands of Allied lives in the years to come.
The two men soon went their separate ways: Courtney to develop the SBS whose multiple roles included landing secret agents, assisting Commando operations, and destroying ships and coastal infrastructure; and Willmott to create, in December 1942, the brilliant maritime special operations unit known as COPP – or Combined Operations Pilotage Parties – that provided beach intelligence for the great amphibious landings in Sicily, Italy, Normandy and later the Far East. Both units are forerunners of the modern SBS.
The Men and Their Missions
Two of Courtney’s most effective operators were Lieutenant “Tug” Wilson and Marine Wally Hughes who would, over the course of eight months in 1941, execute a succession of extraordinarily daring and successful operations that made them the scourge of the Italian military. Yet, both were slight and unassuming types, “the complete opposite of the Commando of fiction, usually portrayed by post-war journalist-authors as rip-roaring, bloodthirsty thugs ever ready to slit a throat”. Hughes, a man of few words, was “short, lean, tough and ready to tackle anything”; Wilson his “suave, sophisticated opposite”.
Their nerve-wracking missions – carried out at night, deep behind enemy lines – involved their transport in submarines to the coasts of Sicily and mainland Italy where they paddled ashore and laid explosive charges that destroyed trains, railway lines and bridges.
On their last operation together, a failed attempt to use a limpet mine to sink an Italian destroyer in the Greek harbour of Navarino in December 1941, Wilson almost drowned in freezing water. “Wetsuits were in the future,” commented a submarine officer, “and Wilson was a skinny man; a plumper operator might have managed.”
Wilson’s long reign of terror was finally brought to an end in September 1942 when he and a new partner, Bombardier John Brittlebank, were captured after they tried to sink a ship in Crotone harbour in Southern Italy with mini hand-operated torpedoes. A hard man to replace, Wilson has been a model for SBS operators ever since: small-framed but deceptively strong, a team player but capable of independent action, an intelligent problem solver, eager to embrace new technology and as brave as a lion.
Another prominent SBS man was Lieutenant Ted Wesley who, in late 1944, took part in a daredevil mission to destroy a railway bridge in northern Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia). Dropped off by submarine, four pairs of canoeists – two officers and six men – lost their way because of a faulty compass, blundered around in the dark jungle, and had to abort the first attempt. Undeterred, they tried again the following night and, having avoided a Japanese bicycle patrol, got to the bridge where they attached 400lbs of explosives and set off their pencil fuses.
Observed by some locals, they took one prisoner and attempted to force him into a canoe to be quizzed later. He resisted and thus began a comical struggle as Ted Wesley tried to subdue the captive by punching him, hitting him with the butt of his luger, and, in a final act of desperation, forcing him under the water ‘to drown some of the life out of him’. The captive responded by biting Wesley’s hand. It was the final straw. Exhausted by the struggle and unwilling to inflict any more harm on the local, Wesley let him go and ‘patted him on the back – a poor atonement for all that bullying!’
Late for their rendezvous with the submarine, they were paddling furiously when a huge explosion heralded the destruction of the bridge.
Preparing for D-Day
Nigel Willmott’s Coppists did vital work throughout the war, losing several men in the process. But their finest hour was in preparing the ground for D-Day. First, during the night of New Year’s Eve 1943, two of Willmott’s best men – Major Logan Scott-Bowden and Sergeant Bruce Ogden-Smith – swam ashore in a highly risky mission to take samples from Gold Beach in Normandy to confirm the sand was firm enough for Allied vehicles to land. Narrowly avoiding detection by German sentries, they returned with the evidence that it was. “On these operations,” wrote Admiral Bertram Ramsay, commanding D-Day naval forces, “depends to a very great extent the final success of operation ‘Overlord’.”
A fortnight later, the same pair scouted Omaha Beach by swimming ashore from a midget submarine. Once again, they brought back vital intelligence, particularly on Omaha’s intimidating defences, and advised American commander Lieutenant General Omar Bradley that “this beach is a very formidable proposition indeed”.
Partly, as a result of the Coppists’ report, the number of invasion beaches was increased from three to five. But nervous about giving the game away, the Americans chose not to accept the Coppists’ offer to signpost their two beaches – Omaha and Utah – on D-Day. The decision had disastrous consequences. “They could have done with that offer of markers,” wrote one Coppist history. “With no inshore signal to guide them, the whole assault force set its predetermined course for the unseen shore from its start point twelve miles out to sea. Immediately the weather and the powerful tidal set took hold of the mass of boats and swept them steadily, innocent, and unknowing, to the east…The whole assault force on ‘Omaha’ had slipped sideways and was surging straight for catastrophe.”
Put ashore in the wrong place, weighed down by weapons and kit, the American troops were massacred. More than 2,000 died on Omaha on 6 June 1944.
Operation Gambit
The value of beach markers was demonstrated a short way to the east of Omaha where Coppist teams in two midget submarines – X20 and X23 – were tasked with guiding British and Canadian landing craft into their respective beaches. The mini-subs were needed for D-Day because the shallow depths and stormy seas off of Normandy were unsuitable for normal submarines and canoes.
The plan, Operation Gambit, was for the two mini-subs – just 50 feet long and each with a 5-man crew – to depart Portsmouth on the night of 2 June 1944, cross the Channel and wait submerged off their respective beaches until just before dawn on 5 June (the original date for D-Day) when they would surface and begin flashing signals.
It was the toughest and most important job on D-Day. To pull it off required perfect timing, nerves of steel and no small amount of luck. Failure was not an option: their premature discovery, they knew, would jeopardise the whole invasion.
Arriving off the Normandy coast in the morning of 4 June, they remained submerged for most of the next two days as bad weather forced a 24-hour postponement of the invasion. This meant another torturous 18-hour oxygen-starved stint beneath the waves on 5 June. From which, they finally emerged at 11.15 p.m. to the “worst hangover in the world” and the news that the invasion was a go for the morning of the 6th.
X23 surfaced off Sword Beach at 4:45 a.m. on Tuesday 6 June and its crew began rigging the signals that would guide the invasion fleet. These lights began flashing seawards at 5.07 a.m. With dawn fast approaching, it was only a matter of time before they were spotted by the shore defences.
Suddenly, recalled 22-year-old Sub Lieutenant Jim Booth, a Coppist on his first mission, the “light must have changed because we saw a huge host of ships coming towards us. Thousands of them. It was incredible. The landing craft came incredibly close to us.” Booth and the others cheered and yelled as the landing craft ploughed past them, a curious sight to the helmeted soldiers as, with most of the submarine underwater, it must have seemed as if they were walking on water.
Though it would not be acknowledged publicly for years, Willmott’s top-secret Coppists had played a key role in the success of D-Day. They were the first to set foot on the beaches, and their lonely and dangerous vigil in X-craft from 4–6 June 1944 would ensure that on the British and Canadian beaches, at least, the assault troops landed in the right place at the right time.
The success of the hazardous operation, wrote Admiral Ramsay, had “materially assisted the greatest landing of British forces on any enemy coast that has ever taken place in the history of the world”.
Saul David is an award-winning historian and the author of SBS: Silent Warriors, which is now out in paperback.
During World War II, the mere mention of the name Tiger was enough to set Allied troops on edge.
ullstein bild Dtl.//Getty Images
In the years since World War II, much mythmaking has mucked up history with various often incredible claims about the effectiveness of certain weapons. And no country’s wartime record is more muddled than Germany’s, whose arms and armies have attracted legions of devoted fans. From the battleship Bismarck to the V-2 rocket, Germany’s weapons have near a mythic hold on history like few others. But how effective were these weapons really?
A new video at the YouTube channel Military History Visualized breaks down actual data on the German Tiger tanks. The Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger tank was a German heavy tank that served on the Eastern Front, Western Front, and in North Africa during World War II. The final version of the tank weighed 54 tons, had a crew of five, and was equipped with a mobile version of the famous 88-millimeter anti-tank gun. First fielded in 1942, the Tiger was meant to forge breakthroughs on the battlefield, destroying enemy tanks at long range while shrugging off hits from lesser Allied anti-tank guns.
The Tiger is one of the most revered tanks of the war, if not in the entirety of tank history. And, as Military History Visualized reveals, an effective tank—though perhaps not as great as history tends to portray it. The channel charts the combat effectiveness of the various tank battalions equipped with Tiger, comparing wartime and total losses versus the number of enemy tanks destroyed. Unlike other tanks, Tigers were primarily assigned to independent heavy tank battalions of 45 tanks each that the high command parceled to help out in particularly tough battles.
ullstein bild Dtl.//Getty Images
The verdict? If one counts Tiger tanks versus the number of enemy tanks claimed destroyed by Tiger tanks, Tiger tanks killed 11.52 tanks for every one of their own destroyed in battle. Tigers suffered a large number of non-combat losses, however, as the chaos of wartime and the Tiger’s mechanical finickiness chipped away at the number of deployable tanks. If one counts non-combat losses, such as vehicles broken down and abandoned, that number drops sharply to 5.25 enemy tanks killed for every lost Tiger.
Another way to measure effectiveness, as the channel explains, is to examine how much of a threat the Allies considered the Tiger battalions. The Allies took the Tiger very seriously, devoting considerable time to tracking their movements. The Tiger could penetrate the armor of any Allied tank on the battlefield, and the U.S. and British forces would often try to team together air and artillery support along with ground forces to increase odds in their favor.
One major problem with the Tiger: it was very expensive, both in terms of money and resources. As the war dragged on and Germany had less of either, it was deemed important to make the most of war production. The Germans could build many more tanks and cheaper tank destroyers for the cost of one Tiger. A single Tiger used enough steel to build 21 105-millimeter howitzers.
So was the Tiger tank great? Yes, but at what cost?
Meaner than McGregor, meet the Irish MMA fighter who took on gangsters, Nazis and foreign spies.
Forcemen of 5-2, First Special Service Force, preparing to go on an evening patrol in the Anzio beachhead, Operation Shingle, Italy, ca. 20-27 April 1944. PUBLIC DOMAIN
With two world titles to his name and a high-profile fight against Floyd Mayweather under his belt, Conor McGregor is undoubtedly Ireland’s most famous ever MMA fighter, but another man, more merciless than McGregor, can claim to be its deadliest.
Dermot ‘Pat’ O’Neill was an unbeatable grappler who combined techniques from half-a-dozen styles to take on notorious Kung Fu experts, ruthless Asian gangsters, and battle-hardened Nazis in confrontations where defeat meant death.
The original ultimate fighter, he began his remarkable rise to seventh dan in Jiu Jitsu by keeping law and order as a cop in the back alleys of Shanghai, and his career reads like the biography for an Irish James Bond: intelligence officer shadowing communist agitators, handpicked member of the first SWAT team, hand-to-hand combat instructor for the OSS in WWII, army captain who led his Special Forces squad behind enemy lines, and finally, the man to whom the US Marines, US Air Force and even the CIA turned to learn new fighting skills during the Cold War.
Born to Francis O’Neill from County Laois, and his wife Mary (née Moore) from County Offaly, on March 21, 1905, at Newmarket, Cork, police service was always likely for Dermot as his father was a District Inspector with the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC).
In 1924, he signed on as a cabin boy on a steamer, jumping ship 12,000 miles later when they arrived in Shanghai where his oldest brother Frank worked for a bank.
Shanghai was divided in every sense, made up of the Chinese city, the French ‘Concession’, and the International Settlement, which was part of China but since 1863 had been run by the British to protect their business interests and those of America.
In the International Settlement, the British and Irish held most of the top positions in the Shanghai Municipal Police’s (SMP) Foreign Branch while the Japanese worked alongside Germans, Sikhs, Chinese, and ‘White’ (pro-Tsar) Russians in the 14 stations, battling groups like the Green Gang who earned millions controlling drugs, prostitution, and arms smuggling, using martial arts, blades, and firearms to protect their rackets.
O’Neill’s family name and his nationality were a help when he answered the SMP’s newspaper ad in 1925. Headquarters had sent cadets to the RIC for training, and long recruited directly from both that force and the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) so just six weeks later this youngster, who wrote ‘school’ under ‘Previous Employment’ on his application, found himself on patrol for the first time, and inevitably in a gunfight.
A generation before, a tough young English patrolman named William E. Fairbairn found that the bayonet skills which won him fame in the Royal Marines were useless against skilled Asian gangsters trained in ‘Kung Fu’. He spent two years training in ‘Judo’ with a local sensei, emerging a second dan black belt and introducing his simplified ‘Defendu’ to ensure the SMP could protect themselves.
Dermot, who had been a boxer in his teens, rose to sergeant within two years. By the 1930s he was a Sub Inspector shadowing foreign insurgents for Special Branch, and an expert in Jiu Jitsu, eventually studying under legendary sensei Tatsukuma Ushijima.
Corruption was widespread. Many of O’Neill’s Chinese colleagues were gangsters, swearing oaths to brotherhoods similar to the Mafia. SMP Detective Lu Liankui, for example, became a key Green Gang boss.
The Settlement’s Municipal Council turned a blind eye to the deliberate recruitment of such criminals hired to keep a lid on other gangs, but in the wake of 123 murders and almost 1,500 armed robberies in 1927 they demanded action.
Fairbairn’s solution was to form the first SWAT Team, the SMP ‘Reserve Unit’ which would also handle riots, guard VIPs, protect gold shipments, and escort condemned prisoners.
Fairbairn had complete faith in O’Neill, and as the highest ranked non-Japanese in the world in his art, a natural choice for the unit’s unarmed combat instructor. When he wasn’t going out on raids, the Irishman trained the USMC 4th Marine Regiment, the ‘China Marines’, who sometimes supported the unit on missions.
By 1934, Shanghai had grown to the sixth-largest city in the world and the fame of the innovative Fairbairn, who some suggest was a model for Ian Fleming’s’ M’ in the Bond novels, had spread too, his officers’ tough-guy exploits filling newspapers and even a US comic book.
O’Neill’s reputation also rose and in 1938 he accepted the job of Head of Security with the British Legation in Tokyo, where he earned his fourth dan black belt.
Back in Shanghai, Pat had regularly grappled with Judo students from the local Tung Wen College, well aware that his opponents were being trained as spies at a school with close links to Japan’s secret societies, and the feared Kempeitai, Tokyo’s version of the Gestapo.
Determined not to be trapped in Tokyo, on October 4, 1941, Pat smuggled himself onto a fishing boat, eventually reuniting with his brother Frank in Sydney just before the attack on Pearl Harbor, where he was soon telegrammed by Fairbairn urging him to join his old boss in the USA working for the Office for Strategic Services (OSS).
In May 1942, the Irishman found himself teaching agents at ‘Camp X’ just over the border in Ontario, Canada but soon became restless jumping at the chance to work with volunteers drawn from the US and Canadian armies with the ‘First Special Services Force’ (FSSF).
The FSSF’s inspirational CO Lt. Colonel Robert Frederick, a major general in the United States Army during World War II, initially asked OSS head William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan if he could borrow this valuable civilian for two months, and told Pat that he had 40 hours per intake to train not only the officers but 1,800 who enlisted in unarmed combat, knife fighting and SMP-style pistol shooting.
“I am not here to teach you how to hurt,” the new instructor would curtly snap across the parade ground at their base in Fort William Henry Harrison near Helena, Montana. “I’m here to teach you how to kill!”
Pat soon realized he would need a system as good as Defendu, but more direct, dirty and evasive.
“The aim of hand-to-hand combat,” he later told USMC Brass, “is to make every man a dangerous man, armed or unarmed”.
His trademark ‘O’Neill to the nuts’ of a Nazi sentry would ensure he would never father a son and he also combined brutal eye gouges, deadly punches to the throat and vicious stomps to form ‘The O’Neill Method of Close Combat’.
On June 19, 1943, though still not an American citizen, he accepted the Colonel’s offer of a commission-in-the-field with the rank of US Army Captain.
“They ‘Shanghai-ed’ me,” the new captain chuckled.
O’Neill took part in all aspects of the brigade’s grueling training, so determined not to be left out of the action he persuaded his CO to have him assigned as an Intelligence Officer and Frederick’s bodyguard before they shipped out in November 1943.
Originally destined for commando missions behind German lines in Norway, the FSSF ended up fighting the Nazis first in Italy, where they played a key role in crucial battles, amazing General Eisenhower when they scaled soaring peaks at the vital Monte la Difensa in spite of stiff resistance from battle-hardened Panzergrenadiers, and later facing an equally tough enemy at Monte Cassino.
O’Neill became Uncle Sam’s newest nephew at an Italian farmhouse a few hours before St Patrick’s Day 1944 when he was awarded his US citizenship. He would soon personally lead heavily armed light infantry squads behind German lines at Anzio when with faces blackened night after night they silently killed sentries and stole documents and maps which Pat would vet before passing back to US Fifth Army Intelligence.
His ‘Braves,’ as they called themselves, used psychological warfare too, planting cards with their USA-Canada red arrow patch and Das dicke ende kommt nocht (‘The worst is yet to come’) on corpses.
With their combat strength dropping to 500 men, the FSSF’s end soon came, and though they never failed in a mission, after fighting in the Liberation of France, the proud ‘Devil’s Brigade’ was officially disbanded near the town of Menton, close to Nice, on December 5, 1944, their success making them a model for future special units like the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, and the Green Berets.
O’Neill became Provost Marshall of Monte Carlo before working with General MacArthur as Liaison Officer in Okinawa, retiring with a Bronze Star and the rank of Major, when always keen to learn, he took in lethal Okinawan Karate, and studied Aikido.
The Irishman was not so fortunate in his personal life. He had married a local schoolteacher named Mary Frances Hardigan in 1943 but their union, which produced one daughter, Barbara, did not survive the immediate postwar period.
Now a fifth dan he spent much of the 50s in Japan helping the State Department monitor communist insurgents, even traveling to Vietnam long before the US became officially embroiled there.
Pat got to see his beloved Ireland one last time in the 1970s before life did what few opponents ever could, laying the now-seventh-dan black belt flat on his back after a fall in his apartment in DC from which he never fully recovered.
Major Dermot O’Neill succumbed to pneumonia on August 11, 1985, and his cremated remains were buried in the military section of Arlington Cemetery on December 5, 41 years to the day after the FSSF was disbanded.
In spite of all his success, O’Neill never saw himself as a soldier or an early MMA fighter in the samurai spirit.
He remained, like his father, an Irish cop, happy to leave the money and fame to others.
It was simply as an old-fashioned ‘intelligence man’ that perhaps the greatest Irish fighter of them all hoped to be remembered.
*Originally published December 2015. Updated in August 2022.
