The Commandos

COMBINED OPERATIONS: The Official Story of the Commandos--Macmillan ($2).

This is the latest addition to the biggest-selling series of books in the world--the British Government's official accounts of the war (priced from 10-c- to 40-c-). Bomber Command, Coastal Command and Battle of Britain alone have had total world sales of 12,000,000 copies--twice the last official sales total of Mein Kampf. Their anonymous author (revealed as Hilary St. George Saunders, the House of Commons assistant librarian) now turns his attention to the Commandos. Combined Operations, like its predecessors, has very lively passages indeed:

"Shortly before midnight on the 2nd September, 1942 . . . [German] Chief Mate Munte . . . was seated in his office in the Casquet [Channel Islands] lighthouse. . . . A slight noise--it may have been the click of the door as it closed softly--caused him to turn in his chair. Leaning against the door were two men with black faces. . . . Colt automatics, negligently poised, were in their hands."

Chief Mate Munte blanched, passed his hand over his face, looked again and fainted with terror. He soon found himself under escort, bobbing over the dark waters towards England. With him were his subordinates, dressed as they had been when roused--in pajamas and, curiously enough, hair nets.

The story of the Commandos is rarely so spectacular. As told in simple, forceful language by Combined Operations Recorder Saunders, it is a story rich in dogged labor as well as sparkling achievement. And the enemy does not usually faint when surprised.

Combined operations are no new thing, says Recorder Saunders. "The inevitable consequence of sea power," they were practiced by Drake against the Spaniards in 1585, by Lords Essex and Howard against Cadiz in 1596, by Wolfe against Quebec in 1759, by a grandson of the great Duke of Marlborough against the French in 1758. Long in the mind of Britain's Lieut. Colonel D. W. Clarke, today's Commandos were shaped from Clarke's knowledge of guerrilla warfare in Palestine.

They and Their Pals. To be amphibious--that was the basic Commando requirement. On Britain's coast, selected soldiers merged the lore of the Royal Navy with their own. They learned how to "get in and out of a small boat in all kinds of weather"; to swim, fully equipped, holding their firearms above water; to know about mortars, anti-tank rifles, high explosives. They also had to learn the double lesson of cooperation, individual initiative. Each man was encouraged "to do everything with a friend"--fall in beside him, handle the magazine of his Bren gun, scout with him, conquer with him the tough assault-training course known as "Me and My Pal."

But, when alone, every commando man must be self-sufficient. He is given six shillings, eightpence-a day, and must live on it. He may be paraded at 3 p.m. one day and told that the next parade will be at 6 a.m. the following morning, at a place 100 miles away. How he gets there is his own business. He must be his own cook. Muttered the horrified captain of a Commando-carrying gunboat: "There are 50 soldiers frying bacon in my wardroom."

The finished product is a soldier-sailor who calls his bedroom a cabin, is capable of marching 63 miles in a little over 23 hours, may also be a parachutist and engineer. He is scarcely ever punished for misdemeanors, but the man who commits too many is out of the Commandos forever--there is no such thing as a second chance.

Admiral Cowan, K.C.B. The Commando aides are sometimes lone, mysterious spies. And occasionally there is someone like Commando "volunteer" Admiral Sir W. H. Cowan, Bart., K.C.B., D.S.O., M.V.O., "who, at the age of 71, did not consider his period of active service at an end. On [the Bardia] raid he fell into a deep ditch and, being a man of small stature, found some difficulty in getting out; his efforts to do so were, in his view, severely handicapped by those of friends near by who sought to help him." This spirited old gentleman was later captured by the enemy after a sharp "hand-to-hand fight."

Little Ones Into Big Ones. The year 1940 was devoted to small-scale raids. By 1941 bigger attacks were being at tempted: Commando parachutists flashed from the sky over the ankle of the Italian leg, blasted a bridge, railroad and aqueduct in the heart of Campagna province, "created a sensation" in Italian official circles. Thousands of miles to the north, at the Lofoten Islands, Commandos captured 225 prisoners, including ten quislings, destroyed eleven oil and fish factories, an electric-light plant, 800,000 gallons of oil, five ships of nearly 19,000 tons, returned to England with 315 volunteers. They repeated this success hundreds of miles south at Vaagso.

In March 1942 came "one of the most hazardous and successful experiments" in Commando history--the ramming and smashing of the lock gate of the great dry-dock of St.-Nazaire, to prevent Germany's mammoth battleship Tirpitz from using it. The ram chosen was formerly the U.S. destroyer Buchanan, rechristened H.M.S. Campbeltown.

In 1940, reflects Recorder Saunders, the first Commandos had made their first raid in eight motor boats. "Those who went with the expedition to North Africa . . . sailed in convoys numbering hundreds of ships." And the last, and greatest, assault is still to come.

The Author. "Combined Operations Headquarters, London," says Commando Captain Evelyn Waugh (Vile Bodies, etc.) in his jacket note, "is where the simple soldier moves cautiously. . . . Here an admiral munches a stick of dehydrated pork; there a general pushes a collapsible bicycle; . . . a chaplain flashes Morse with a lamp; . . . a charwoman sticks colored pins into a map." In the center of this "surrealist whirligig broods the benign figure of Mr. Hilary St. George Saunders . . . sanguine, almost jovial. There is something monkish about him . . . Friar Tuck of Sherwood Forest."

Saunders' life has been as mixed as smoergasbord. At Balliol College, Oxford, he roomed with esthetical Novelist Charles Morgan (The Fountain). A lieutenant in Britain's crack Welsh Guards, Saunders won the Military Cross at Bavai in World War I. For 17 years he worked in the Secretariat of the League of Nations, resigned in 1937. He is an epicure and a passionate skier.

For 20 years Saunders was one of the world's most successful literary collaborators. In 1923 he and League of Nations associate John Leslie Palmer teamed up as novelists, adopted the pseudonym "Francis Beeding." From the Beeding pen came some 40 novels of intrigue and mystery (Death Walks in Eastrepps, The Norwich Victims, Twelve Disguises), some featuring detective heroes, others aglint with the secret-service adventures of "Colonel Alastair Granby." As "David Pilgrim," Saunders and Palmer wrote a historical novel based on the life of Napoleon (So Great a Man, TIME, Oct. 18, 1937).

When the war started, Saunders got a job with the Ministry of Information. In writing his war books, his method is to play the part of both "reporter and historian." His stories are based not only on the full official reports, but also on interviews with fighting men themselves. "That's why I don't have any rank--so that the men will talk. If I wore a uniform, the men would have to call me Sir and I would have to call the officers Sir. As it is, I only say Sir to very junior officers somewhat conscious of their own importance."

"Until I came along," says Saunders of his work, "the best-selling booklet on His Majesty's Stationers' lists had managed sales of only 4,000. It was an unfortunate report called Traffic in Women and Children." Last fortnight "the man who outsold Hitler" arrived in the U.S. for his first visit.

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