HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-06-08T15:42:34.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandyhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/d-day-battle-normandy-allied-navies-sailors-operation-neptune/2026-06-05T23:01:32.000ZOn 30 July 1944, nearly two months into the Allied invasion of northern France, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay reflected on his command of the naval operations so far. “It may seem to some people that it was all easy and plain sailing,” he wrote in his diary. “[But] nothing could be more wrong. It was excellent planning and execution.”
Ramsay died in 1945 without leaving a full memoir, but thousands of sailors could testify that nothing about their lives was “easy and plain sailing”. As late as 8 August 1944, with Allied troops poised to smash the German army in Normandy, sailors were still fighting to protect the beachhead. On that same day, the German submarine U-667 torpedoed both the US freighter Ezra Weston and the Canadian corvette HMCS Regina, the latter attack claiming the lives of 30 men.
Ramsay’s words were prophetic. Today, discussions regarding sailors during the Normandy campaign mainly focus on their actions during the first day of the invasion: 6 June 1944, or ‘D-Day’. They are often absent from the wider story, despite the exhausting and dangerous campaign they fought to seize, exploit and defend the waters around Normandy throughout the summer of 1944.
- Read more | The road to D-Day: the masterplan
The focus of the campaign was the Baie de la Seine, or Seine Bay, the huge inlet of the English Channel stretching nearly a hundred kilometres along the coast of Normandy from Le Havre in the east to the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula at Cape Barfleur in the west. Within the bay lay the five assault areas or so-called ‘beaches’: Utah and Omaha for the Americans, and Gold, Juno and Sword for the British and Canadians.
Through this highly congested and vulnerable body of water passed a constant stream of transport ships carrying supplies and reinforcements, without which the military could not hope to win the more widely recognised battle of Normandy on land. Defeat was unlikely, but any setback could have prolonged the war for months. As the Allied commander-in-chief, General Dwight Eisenhower, recognised in his final report: “For the successful maintenance of the armies in France… we were dependent upon the ceaseless work of the Allied navies, assisted by RAF Coastal Command.”
Normandy had been confirmed as the site for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe at the Quebec Conference, codenamed ‘Quadrant’, in August 1943. Two months later, Ramsay was appointed Naval Commander-in-Chief, Expeditionary Force, with the rest of the command team appointed in December. The overall commander-in-chief was Eisenhower, and the military and air commanders were General Sir Bernard Montgomery and Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory.
The countdown to D-Day
With the leadership structure in place, Ramsay then issued his Naval Operation Plan for Operation Neptune, the invasion’s assault phase, on 28 February 1944. While the planners worked, extraordinary efforts were made to assemble the huge fleet required for the invasion.
Royal Navy officer Christopher Clitherow, for instance, commissioned a new Landing Ship (Tank), or LST, which would help transport men and vehicles across the Channel. Created using innovative mass production methods in the US, the vessels resembled welded steel shoeboxes, and offered very little in the way of comfort. “She reacts to a bump like a diving board off which one has just jumped,” Clitherow later recalled. “Every conceivable piece of the ship rattles as if its teeth were about to fall out.”
Meanwhile, the sheer number of men required to deliver Neptune meant that most new British recruits were posted to Combined Operations, which had been founded in July 1940 to plan and carry out amphibious warfare. They were put through their paces at special centres across the UK, before joining their units and taking part in huge pre-assault exercises.
Exercise Tiger, held on 26–28 April, saw the most significant setback of the training cycle, when a convoy of American LSTs making a practice landing at Slapton Sands, Devon, was attacked by German motor torpedo boats (also known as ‘E-boats’), killing 749 US servicemen and wounding more than 300 others.
Yet despite this tragic turn of events, Operation Neptune officially began at 11.30pm on 25 May, when commanders opened Ramsay’s sealed orders and military camps in southern England were closed off to the outside world. D-Day itself was scheduled for Monday 5 June, but after an unseasonal summer gale, it was determined that the invasion would instead be pushed back to Tuesday 6 June.
The Normandy landings in numbers
7,016
Ships and major landing craft that participated in Operation Neptune. Approximately 79 per cent of the vessels were either British or Canadian
195,701
Naval personnel involved in Operation Neptune
917
Allied ships and major landing craft lost or seriously damaged between 6 and 30 June 1944
509
German mines, of all types, swept in the Allied assault areas between 4 June and 3 July 1944
183,540
Vehicles landed in the British and US sectors by 4 July 1944 – the day after Operation Neptune officially came to an end
After setting out on the 5th, the armada passed along the south coast and turned out into the Channel, with most of the ships passing Area Z, a buoyed patch of water south-east of the Isle of Wight nicknamed ‘Piccadilly Circus’. From there, the vessels then passed down the ‘Spout’ – 10 marked and mine-swept channels – into their designated assault areas. Sweeping and marking this huge stretch of sea was fraught with danger. When the US Navy minesweeper Osprey struck a mine, caught fire and sank, the five sailors and one officer who lost their lives became Neptune’s first deaths in action.
Arriving off Normandy, bombarding warships subdued the German coastal defences while soldiers got ashore. Warships provided an overwhelming advantage on the battlefield, but bombardment was exhausting work – and quite different to the stop-start nature of conventional naval action. Gordon ‘Putty’ Painter, a 20-year-old gunlayer aboard the cruiser HMS Belfast, would later recall firing broadsides that rocked the ships “backwards and forwards” for hours on end. In fact, such were the demands of the operation that the only time that Painter and his comrades could leave the turret “was if nature called”.
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Naval bombardment would prove instrumental to ensuring D-Day’s success, particularly within the American Omaha area, where destroyers operating dangerously close inshore helped the army establish a precarious beachhead. But the fire support came at a cost: two destroyers, the Norwegian Svenner and USS Corry, were both sunk with heavy loss of life, the former by German torpedo boats and the latter by coastal defence guns.
Meanwhile, more sailors carried assault troops to the shore in landing craft – and their experiences were often extraordinary. George Kirkby, for example, was the coxswain of a Landing Craft (Assault) launched from HMS Prinses Astrid, one of several converted Belgian ferries that was tasked with delivering British commandos and US Rangers. Later, he would describe a beach “strewn with dead and wounded bodies, the air thick with smoke and the water around us spraying up into the craft through concentrated mortar and machine gun fire”.
After D-Day: the remarkable logistics that kept the fight going
The initial follow-up forces also landed in assault craft, but from 10 June onwards, the focus of Operation Neptune switched to methodical logistics, with at least eight convoys of merchant ships sailing across the Channel every 24 hours. The process was remarkably efficient: allowing for loading and unloading, any individual ship could make a round trip from England to France in just four days. They not only brought in fuel, vehicles, ammunition and reinforcements, but they also took out wounded Allied soldiers and German prisoners of war.
Once the ships had arrived, there were several methods of getting supplies into the beachhead itself. The first was to bring everything over the beaches or from anchorages offshore, using assault craft and barges, while the second was to make use of the small harbours captured in the landings. The third option, meanwhile, was to utilise the two huge artificial harbours known as ‘Mulberries’ that the Allies constructed off Saint-Laurent in the Omaha area and Arromanches in Gold.
Assembly of the harbours began as soon as the beaches were secured, with sailors playing a leading role. Able Seaman Kenneth Bungard, for example, crossed the Channel riding on one of the prefabricated concrete caissons used to create the harbours’ walls. Crawling along on a slab-sided monster with the seakeeping qualities of a house brick was far from pleasant. “If we were hit with a torpedo, that would be the end,” he recalled. “It was all concrete [and] it would just disintegrate.”
All this vulnerable shipping had to be protected. In the Eastern (British) Task Force area, the defence was largely static to reduce the risk of collisions and friendly fire. Defence Line A, consisting of anchored minesweepers, ran along the assault area, six miles offshore, to guard against attacks from the north, while a line of armed landing craft and Coastal Forces craft (later christened the ‘Trout Line’) ran south to the shore, watching the German naval base at Le Havre.
Elsewhere, in the Western (US) Task Force area, destroyers, patrol craft and British steam gunboats patrolled the ‘Dixie Line’, which ran parallel to the coast to meet Defence Line A. Radar-equipped destroyers patrolled south of this, and more Coastal Forces craft watched the ‘Mason Line’, which ran up the Cotentin Peninsula to the northern edge of the Utah area.
Timeline: how the Allied navies turned the tide in Normandy
17–24 August 1943
The Quebec Conference (codenamed ‘Quadrant’) takes place in Canada. Allied leaders decide that the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe, Operation Overlord, will begin with an assault landing in Normandy.
25 October 1943
Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay is appointed Allied Naval Commander Expeditionary Force.
28 February 1944
Ramsay issues the Naval Operation Plan for Operation Neptune – the initial assault phase of Operation Overlord.
28 April 1944
Nearly 750 men are killed in a German E-boat attack at Slapton Sands, Devon, during Exercise Tiger – one of the final rehearsals for the seaborne invasion.
25 May 1944
Operation Neptune officially begins at 23:30. Ramsay’s sealed orders are opened and military holding camps on the south coast of England are closed off.
6 June 1944
The Allied invasion of Normandy begins. Known as D-Day, the first day of the campaign sees 132,715 British, Canadian and American soldiers coming to shore across five landing beaches, with a further 23,400 airborne troops dropping further inland.
25 June 1944
The US-led Task Force 129 bombards Cherbourg in support of a US Army assault on the city.
3 July 1944
Operation Neptune comes to an end. The last of the senior officers leading the assault are withdrawn and new headquarters are established ashore.
5/6 July 1944
Human torpedoes of the German Navy’s Kleinkampfverbände (small battle units) launch their first attack on the Allied assault area. Two minesweepers and the British frigate HMS Trollope are sunk.
12 September 1944
With much of the fighting now moving further inland, British troops finally take the German naval base at Le Havre. Three months and six days after D-Day, combat operations for the Allied navies in the Seine Bay come to an end.
Despite these formidable lines of defence, enemy attacks continued apace. E-boats and other German warships frequently sortied from Le Havre and Cherbourg, trying to strike the supply ships or lay mines, while the Luftwaffe carried out bombing and torpedo attacks almost every night. On one particularly bad day, 8 June, three US warships went down to mines, while the British lost the frigate HMS Lawford to a remote-controlled glider bomb. Another Luftwaffe raider hit a huge petrol and ammunition stores dump in the Sword area.
On 14 June, an increasingly concerned Admiral Ramsay asked for RAF strategic bombers to strike Le Havre, and they duly responded, sinking three of the German Navy’s large torpedo boats and 10 E-boats. Yet there was more turmoil to come.
A few days later, the worst summer storm in living memory swept through the Seine Bay, halting the fighting and delivery of supplies until late on 22 June. The Mulberry harbour at Saint-Laurent was smashed beyond repair, while more than 800 vital ferry craft were left stranded. The churning water also triggered the sensitive detonators on German pressure-operated ‘oyster’ mines, which blew up unexpectedly across the assault area.
The assault on Cherbourg
Once the storm had passed, the US Army attacked Cherbourg on 22 June, while a naval task force bombarded the defences on the 25th in support. This time, the German gunners were ready to respond, and all but one of the seven battleships and cruisers taking part were hit. US Rear-Admiral Carleton Bryant’s flagship USS Texas came under particularly heavy fire, with one shell smashing the battleship’s bridge structure, killing the helmsman and wounding several others. “Having 11-inch shells fired at you is no fun,” Bryant later recalled. “When the salvo hits the water there is the most ungodly smack you ever heard.”
Cherbourg surrendered on 26 June, but the submarine and air attacks continued, as did the minelaying, and July saw the arrival of the Kleinkampfverbände – the German Navy’s ‘small battle units’. The first weapons to turn up at Villers-sur-Mer near Le Havre were explosive motorboats and craft known as ‘human torpedoes’, ridden into action by young volunteers whose confidence was boosted by cocaine and amphetamines.
Twenty-six human torpedoes attacked on the night of 5/6 July, and although 10 were lost, they succeeded in sinking two minesweepers and the frigate HMS Trollope. Two nights later, the Kleinkampfverbände returned and sank the old Polish cruiser ORP Dragon with the loss of 37 officers and men.
Despite the constant pressure from sea and air, the vital supply build-up continued at an impressive rate. By 14 July, a million tons of stores and nearly 300,000 vehicles had been put to shore, and on 25 July, the US First Army was able to break out of the beachhead and race into France. The western flank of the assault area was now secure, and the fleet started to operate further west, blockading German bases in the Bay of Biscay and destroying evacuation convoys.
On the eastern flank, however, Le Havre remained an enemy stronghold. On the night of 30/31 July, German E-boats struck the Allied convoy FTM53 with long-range pattern-running torpedoes, hitting five freighters. Although only one of the freighters, SS Samwake, actually sank, none of the others went to sea again. Samwake’s captain, Owen John, described his ship’s end in a melancholy report: “She dipped by the head, the stern reared up vertically and held for a few minutes, then very slowly she rolled over to starboard and disappeared at 0545 in a small fountain of water.”
End of the Normandy's naval campaign
Alarmingly, there were more losses to come. As well as the aforementioned HMCS Regina, further Allied casualties included the hospital ship Amsterdam, which was mined and sunk on 7 August, claiming the lives of 55 patients, 10 Royal Army Medical Corps staff, 30 members of the crew and 11 prisoners of war. Among the dead were military nurses Mollie Evershed and Dorothy Field, the only women named on the British Normandy Memorial in the village of Ver-sur-Mer.
Later, the cruiser Frobisher was torpedoed and damaged on the 9th, and the valuable repair ship HMS Albatross was torpedoed on the 11th with the loss of 67 naval and military personnel. It wasn’t until 12 September, with the land fighting far away, that the British captured Le Havre and the complex infrastructure of the Seine Bay was dismantled. More than three months after D-Day, the naval campaign was finally over.
Looking back at the events more than 80 years on, the sailors who served should not be remembered as mere taxi drivers, ferrying men and supplies to the shore, but as active combatants who guarded the vital coastal waters and Allied assault areas until the very end. Whether by day or by night, they maintained a ceaseless watch against all manner of threats – and in some cases, ended up paying with their lives.
Counting casualties is not an exact science for a campaign that has never been studied coherently, but nearly 3,000 Allied sailors are known to have died in the operations in and around the Seine Bay – and possibly many more. As General Sir Bernard Montgomery would write in May 1945, “any success achieved by the British Armies has been made possible only by the magnificent support given us by the Royal Navy”.
This article first appeared in the June 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>I’ve just been to Europe’s weirdest theme park – and came face to face with Josef Stalinhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/ive-just-been-to-europes-weirdest-theme-park-and-came-face-to-face-with-josef-stalin/2026-03-01T15:30:45.000ZI am standing in a clearing in a Lithuanian forest, surrounded by guard towers and electrified fences. To all intents and purposes, it looks like I’m in a Soviet prison camp. Up above me a loudspeaker barks out orders in Russian. I hurry along a corridor of barbed wire. Up ahead, peeping ominously through the trees, I can see the barrel of an anti-aircraft gun.
But all is not as it seems. It doesn’t take long to realise that the loudspeaker is playing some sort of recording on a loop. The guards in the towers are not real either, but poorly disguised mannequins in theatre costume. And who are they guarding? Beneath them, in the barbed wire enclosure, is a row of Communist statues and half a dozen grazing llamas. Further along there are emus, cockatoos, a depressed-looking brown bear, and some statues of mass murderers. As for the gun, when I reach it, I discover that the only thing it is guarding is a children’s playground.
Rifles and roundabouts, cockatoos and cattle-trucks, Lenin and llamas: welcome to Grūtas Park, Europe’s weirdest open-air museum. Its combination of terror and kitsch is so controversial that it almost got shut down. I first came here in 2018 as part of my research for a study of Second World War monuments. But I felt compelled to return, because I still can’t quite believe that this place actually exists.
A brutal past
Grūtas Park has its roots in Lithuania’s very troubled history. Like several of its Baltic neighbours, Lithuania began the 20th century as part of Russia and only gained its independence in the chaotic aftermath of the First World War. Just over 20 years later, at the beginning of the Second World War, it was invaded by Soviet troops all over again. Then came the Nazis, followed once again by the Soviets three years later – and with each new invasion came new brutality.
In 1945, the country was swallowed whole into the Soviet Union. Anyone who refused to accept the nation’s new Stalinist rulers was arrested, deported to Siberia, imprisoned or executed. Tens of thousands of Lithuanians resisted this new oppression. They took to the forests and fought pitched battles against the combined forces of the Red Army and the Soviet secret police but in the end the uprising was brutally crushed: according to the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius, around 300,000 Lithuanians were sent to Soviet gulags between 1945 and 1950, where between a third and a half of them died.
The Soviets then embarked on a program of Russification throughout the country. Russian speakers began moving into Lithuanian territories in large numbers; their descendants still live there today. Lithuanian culture was thoroughly purged of its bourgeois influences, and replaced by Socialist literature, art and architecture. Statues of Soviet heroes began to spring up in every town square, along with victory monuments and memorials to the glory of the Red Army.
Marx and mushrooms
When the country finally regained its independence in 1990, almost all the monuments to Lenin and other Communist figures were torn down. Countless statues were decapitated, cut into pieces with blowtorches, or crushed into rubble. Some were even dynamited.
In an attempt to save some of these sculptures for posterity, the new Lithuanian government decided to rescue some of them, with the vague idea that they might one day go on display in a museum somewhere. They invited institutions to bid for the right to display the statues, but unfortunately none of the nation’s museums was willing to take the project on without some kind of state funding. There was only one bid – from an entrepreneur named Viliumas Malinauskas – that did not ask for any government money at all. Malinauskas offered to pay all the transport, maintenance and restoration costs out of his own pocket. He was duly awarded the contract.
This was where the controversy began. Because Malinauskas was not a historian, an art critic or a museum professional – or indeed anyone who had any background in this kind of work. In fact, he was a former wrestling champion who made his living as a mushroom farmer. He now has a multi-million-dollar business exporting his mushrooms all over the world.
Some of his proposals for the sculpture park were quite bizarre. He wanted to build a special railway line, so that tourists from Vilnius could be brought here on cattle trucks, as if they were being deported to a Soviet-era gulag. He wanted to hire actors who would pretend to be soldiers, herding the tourists onto the trains. For the full gulag experience, Grūtas Park itself would be surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, and the monuments would be displayed as if they were part of a Siberian prison camp. Unsurprisingly, critics began to call Malinauskas’s project a “Stalin theme park”.
It did not take long for the complaints to come rolling in. Local politicians opposed the building of the park. National politicians opposed the building of the rail line. A petition was drawn up denouncing the whole idea of his sculpture park, which was signed by Catholic Church officials, national NGOs, prominent academics, art professors and over a million other people around the world. “This part of history is full of suffering,” said one member of parliament, Juozas Galdikas, in 2000. “It should not be used for show business.”
- Read more | Nazino was Stalin’s worst labour gulag. Its inmates knew it by another name: Cannibal Island
Perhaps the strongest voice of opposition came from former victims of the regime. More than 30 groups of former partisans and political prisoners banded together to protest about the sculptures going on display. They accused Malinauskas of trying to profit from their misery and described the statues as “monsters from a horror film”. Some of them even went on hunger strike. “Imagine yourself as a resident in a small village,” said one former independence fighter named Leonas Kerosierius, “and someone came and attacked your village, killed your brother and raped your daughter. Would you allow your neighbour to build a park for these executioners and rapists, or make money off these crimes?”
MPs pushed for a vote in parliament to take back the statues and keep them in State hands, and their resolution was accepted by a majority. But their victory was short-lived, because it was overturned by the Constitutional Court: Malinauskas had won the government contract fair and square, and Parliament had no right to take it away from him simply on a matter of taste. The most they could do was to create a government watchdog to oversee the construction of the sculpture park.
The whole controversy quickly became international news. Not only did it feature in newspapers throughout the Baltic countries, but also in other parts of Europe. It even made the newspapers in America, parts of Asia and Australia. “Miss the Soviet Era? Come to Stalin World” ran the headline in The Sydney Morning Herald.
Snow White and Stalin
Grūtas Park officially opened to the public in 2001 and immediately proved a hit with visitors from all over Lithuania and beyond. Even before the official opening it had already seen around 100,000 visitors. Since then, it has added to its collection and become quite a well-established tourist destination.
People still occasionally call this place ‘Stalin World’, but there is actually only one full-size statue of Stalin in the whole park. I found him just beyond the zoo, peeping out between the trees like some fairytale troll. (The comparison to a fairytale is not made randomly: in a nearby glade, closer to the children’s playground, there is also a set of sculptures representing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The difference between folk tale and reality is not always scrupulously delineated here.)
It is easy to see why so many people became upset when the creation of this park was first announced. Many dissidents had spent their whole lives struggling against the Soviet system. In 1991 they had torn down these icons of Soviet power with great joy: it must have been deeply painful to see them so lovingly restored and put back on their pedestals, regardless of the setting.
The resurrection of Stalin’s statue was perhaps the most painful thing of all. This man had been responsible for tens of millions of deaths across eastern Europe, and the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians. He had not been on public display for decades. (This particular statue had been taken down by the Communists themselves, back in 1960.) And yet here he was, standing in a sunny glade, waiting for tourists to come and take selfies with him.
Critics pointed to a worrying trend in contemporary Russia for the rehabilitation of Stalin’s memory, with brand new memorials to him being raised in many parts of Russia, particularly since the start of the current war with Ukraine. What if this trend were to spread to Lithuania and beyond? What if Grūtas Park, too, were to become a 21st-century shrine to this monstrous dictator?
The power of ridicule
Had this statue, and all the others, been given to one of the other bidders for the monument park contract, perhaps there would have been less controversy. Europos Parkas, in Vilnius, wanted to exhibit the statues purely as works of art, alongside a whole variety of avant-garde creations by artists from all over the world. Here, perhaps, the aesthetic qualities of a Stalin statue might have been divorced from its political meaning.
The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius also applied for the contract. It would have displayed the monuments in its main hall and courtyard. Had Stalin’s statue been placed here, it would have been seen alongside an extensive exhibition dedicated to his crimes. Many of those who protested against Grūtas Park wanted the museum to have won the bid precisely because it would have put the benign looking statues of figures like Stalin in a much, much grimmer context.
But there is something about the way that Grūtas Park displays its statues that is enormously refreshing. Seeing Stalin with a squirrel on his head takes away some of the nightmarish power he continues to exercise over us from beyond the grave. When birds are nesting in Lenin’s fingers, and children are climbing over the guns that were once aimed at Lithuanian partisans, these symbols of state power no longer seem as frightening as they once did.
This seems to be exactly what Viliumas Malinauskas is trying to achieve. In an interview with the Guardian shortly before the park opened, the proprietor was unapologetic about his peculiar approach to Lithuania’s troubled history. “People can come here and joke about the sculptures,” he said. “And that will mean Lithuania is no longer afraid of Communism.”
Grūtas Park is a bizarre mix of playground, zoo and atrocity museum. It trivialises the past in the most appalling ways, especially with its Disneyfied guard towers and barbed wire. Some of the museum displays in its barrack-style huts are more nostalgic than critical of the regime. And its commercial exploitation of Lithuania’s painful past is questionable to say the least: I managed to buy myself a Stalin mug and a Stalin keyring in the gift shop on my way out.
In fact, there are so many things about Grūtas Park that could be considered offensive that I hardly know where to start; and yet somehow, through its sheer banality, it comes closer to freeing Lithuania from its history than any of the more serious and thoughtful monuments that have been so carefully produced in other parts of Europe.
The magic ingredient is ridicule. I’m not sure how much this ridicule was ever intended by the park’s founder and owner, and how much is just a function of a ridiculous set-up. Nevertheless, it is there, and it is a powerful antidote to the atmosphere of fear that plagued this country for so many years.
Keith Lowe is an author and former military history publisher who has spent more than 20 years writing about the Second World War and its aftermath. His most recent book is Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos (William Collins, 2024)
]]>The SAS played a vital role in defeating Hitler – so why did Britain disband them?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-sas-played-a-vital-role-in-defeating-hitler-so-why-did-britain-disband-them/2026-01-23T15:30:41.000Z“Light-hearted banditry”, “ruthless pirating”, a “phantom army” – it’s fair to say that the Special Air Service (SAS) didn’t always attract the most complimentary headlines. In the white heat of the Second World War, when this and other British special forces achieved unlikely successes through a series of daring raids, disparaging press reports could be discarded as merely tomorrow’s chip paper. Nonetheless, they fuelled the impression that the SAS operated outside the rules of the regular British army, and were used as ammunition by some who aimed to whip special forces into line – or even shut them down altogether. That threat became a reality after the conflict ended.
David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, coined a description – “freemasons of mediocrity” – for a certain kind of staff officer who looked upon his men with suspicion and, in some cases, hostility. These ‘freemasons’ regarded the SAS and other irregular outfits – the Long Range Desert Group and the Chindits – at best as private armies, at worst “café gangsters”.
This view extended to the Special Boat Squadron (SBS), which spent the spring of 1944 waging a bloody guerrilla campaign in the Aegean to tie down German troops ahead of the invasion of France. Its actions prompted a sharp exchange between Winston Churchill and Simon Wingfield Digby, the Conservative MP for West Dorset. “Is it true, Mr prime minister,” enquired Wingfield Digby, “that there is a body of men out in the Aegean Islands, fighting under the Union Flag, that are nothing short of being a band of murderous, renegade cut-throats?”
“If you do not take your seat and keep quiet, I will send you out to join them,” retorted Churchill.
One could argue that Churchill was the founding father of Britain’s special forces. It was he, shortly after coming to office in May 1940, who instructed the formation of a commando force to launch a “vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive” against the Axis.
Men such as Stirling, Paddy Mayne (Stirling’s second-in command) and George Jellicoe (the commanding officer of the SBS) first learned the art of guerrilla warfare with the commandos. Churchill’s son Randolph served briefly in the SAS in 1942, and wrote to his father describing how they were destroying dozens of enemy aircraft in daring raids – accounts that made the PM “terribly proud”. When Churchill visited Cairo in August 1942 to discuss the next phase of the north African campaign with his generals, he found time to lunch with his son and Stirling.
Churchill dined with Stirling again at the end of May 1945, following the latter’s release from Colditz, having been captured in January 1943. Stirling had plans to re-deploy the SAS Brigade to the far east, and he wanted to sound out their principal benefactor. But within weeks Churchill was gone, voted out of office by a British public who believed a new leader was required to rebuild the country. The SAS would soon follow the wartime leader into temporary retirement.
Uncertain future
Even if Clement Attlee hadn’t been elected prime minister in July 1945, the SAS and Britain’s special forces might still have faced an uncertain future. The country was practically bankrupt, having spent almost £7bn (a quarter of the national wealth) on the war effort. Defence spending would obviously be slashed, and those ‘private armies’ were an obvious place to start. After all, what was the point in maintaining a guerrilla force now that the war was over?
The SAS paraded for the final time at their Essex HQ on 8 October 1945. Four days later, Brigadier Michael Calvert, commanding officer of the SAS Brigade, sent a memo to 12 of the most senior officers of the SAS, SBS and Long Range Desert Group entitled ‘Future of SAS Troops’. He explained that the War Office had asked for his “recommendations for the future of SAS in the next war and its composition in the peace-time army” as part of its review into Britain’s military capabilities. Calvert feared that the bureaucrats within the War Office – those “freemasons of mediocrity” – were determined to disband the SAS.
One of the most forceful and erudite replies came from Major Roy Farran, DSO and MC, a senior SAS officer who had served in north Africa, Italy and France. He began by stating that, though special forces warfare was still in its infancy, its potential was enormous – particularly because it could exploit the rapid recent developments in air power, communications and motorised transport. “Since it is now so easy to place troops across the enemy lines of communication, I feel that it is important to have a unit of the Special Air Service-type trained to operate individually with the minimum support and with the maximum amount of improvisation,” he wrote.
Farran had already identified Britain’s likely next foe and envisaged how special forces could be used in the event of a conflict. “I believe there will be great opportunities for guerrilla troops in the event of a war against the Soviet Union, which I suppose is the only possibility at the moment,” he told Calvert. Such a war would be either a defensive or offensive one. “In the former case a unit like the Special Air Service could inflict damage on the enemy and slow up his advance out of all proportion to its size… In an offensive war the SAS would increase the speed of our advance by spreading panic and confusion in the enemy’s rear.”
But the prescient Farran also envisaged that, before a large-scale war with the Soviets, Britain could well find itself entangled in insurgencies as its empire began to break up. Counter-insurgency, he declared, was a role to which the SAS and SBS were ideally suited, adding: “If the principle of the SAS does not continue, I cannot believe that the army is thinking along progressive lines.”
Another important figure contacted by the War Office was Lieutenant Colonel Tony Simonds, the commander of MI9’s A Force, who had worked with the SAS in Italy in the autumn of 1943. The main task of MI9 – a secret department within the War Office – was to assist Allied military personnel in enemy territory to evade and escape. Simonds recommended the establishment of three SAS regiments: one for Europe, based in Britain; a second for the Middle East, based in Cyprus; and a third for the far east, based in Singapore.
Simonds wrote that “the role of guerrilla forces in any future war is to defeat the enemy, behind his defended front lines, while the orthodox forces prevent the enemy from advancing”. However, he also suggested that the SAS should “familiarise themselves topographically, militarily, socially and politically with the area. To know and to study the various factions and elements of their area… and to know which personalities should be eliminated should it become necessary in British interest.” That latter role had been the modus operandi of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War – acting more like secret agents than special forces.
Ultimately, however, the arguments put forward by Calvert and other senior special forces officers fell on deaf ears, and their regiment and units were disbanded.
End of an error
It didn’t take long before the War Office realised its mistake. In January 1946, Jewish paramilitaries in Mandatory Palestine derailed a British train – the first serious guerrilla act in an insurgency that grew increasingly violent as the fight for the establishment of a Jewish state intensified. It was the first of many such insurgencies as Britain’s empire began to fracture.
In 1947, Major Pat Hart, a staff officer in the SAS during the war, learned that the SAS was going to be revived as a territorial regiment under the command of Colonel Brian Franks. Hart was appointed Franks’ second-in-command of 21 SAS – a designation that merged the 1st and 2nd Regiments of wartime fame. According to Hart’s recollection, a War Office study group had been formed in 1946 to re-examine the future of Britain’s special forces. “The result of the study was the recommendation there should be a continuing presence in the army, so the knowledge gained should not be lost, and whilst it could be called anything, probably the best thing was to call it SAS,” he said.
Recruitment began in September 1947. Of the first 200 soldiers signed up, 59 had served with the SAS during the war. One of those was Pat Duggan. “While the majority in the forces were pleased to return to their former lifestyles [in 1945], many of us, hemmed in by the norms of a peaceful civilisation, felt only frustration and spent our time dreaming of, or searching for, something that resembled our wartime role,” he reflected. “When the SAS was reformed as part of the TA [Territorial Army], we homed in like pigeons – a roll-call of the dispossessed.”
Having so many experienced soldiers in their ranks made it easier to train the new recruits in their unorthodox methods. “We were creating an SAS unit that would be available to do any sort of SAS job once it was trained,” explained Hart. “We went off on Nato exercises, as part of the training, and it was very helpful for Nato command to have an SAS unit there.”
The first active deployment of 21 SAS was to Malaya (then a British colony, today peninsular Malaysia) to help quell a two-year-long communist insurgency. The uprising – which the British knew as the Malayan Emergency – threatened colonial rubber plantations and tin mines, so the government called on the talents of men skilled in guerrilla fighting.
“There were a few contacts,” recalled John Gardner of the SAS. “A few seconds, perhaps minutes, of intense shooting, then silence. Blood trails were followed, and some CT [insurgent] bodies were found and brought in, but many blood trails led to nothing… during these weeks we lived in a general state of alertness, even at night half awake, of dirt and sweat, our blood sucked by the many leeches.”
The SAS remained in Malaya throughout the 1950s – years that proved a crucial learning curve for a regiment that was intent on mastering all environments, whether desert, jungle or Arctic.
Johnny Cooper, one of the original 66 recruits to the SAS when the unit was formed by Stirling in 1941, was a squadron commander in Malaya. “We were carrying out trials to develop a two-week ration that was possible for a man to carry,” he recalled. “The object was to avoid the weekly air drops which were a complete give-away and lost us the vital element of surprise.” As a result, the SAS produced a ‘starvation ration’ consisting of dehydrated rice-based food carried in a four-gallon petrol tin.
A global audience
It was no coincidence that in 1952 – shortly after Winston Churchill had been returned to Downing Street – it was decided to raise a regular-army SAS regiment: 22 SAS. Over the following decades, the SAS was sent to fight insurgencies in other remote corners of the British empire and spheres of influence – Aden, Borneo, Oman – before being deployed to Northern Ireland in the 1970s. But perhaps the most high-profile of all its operations occurred in the spring of 1980 when it ended the Iranian embassy siege in London in dramatic style, watched by a global television audience. It was a feat that underlined the regiment’s reputation as the world’s pre-eminent special force.
Throughout these operations, one aspect of the SAS was immutable, and that was the temperament of each recruit. In 1956, Dare Newell, the SAS regimental headquarters major, wrote to several wartime special forces officers to ask what characteristics they thought essential for an SAS soldier. From their answers he compiled the selection criteria.
“A man’s personal qualities and make-up count more than technical efficiency in his own arm of the service. Technical efficiency can be taught; the personal qualities required for long-range, long-term operations in enemy territory, however, are part of a man’s character and, although they may be developed over a period, they must be learnt in childhood.” The qualities deemed essential were initiative, self-discipline, independence of mind, ability to work without supervision, stamina, patience, and a sense of humour.
These characteristics continue to underpin the SAS ethos today. Warfare and weaponry evolve, but not human nature. One of the 12 recipients of Mike Calvert’s worried memo in October 1945 was Major John Verney of the SBS. “We came to know one another’s physical and mental capacities, and with them our own,” he said of his wartime service. “Strength and skill were respected, and a fair degree of both were essential, but there were other qualities, such as a cool head, or a good temper, that might well prove more valuable.”
CLONE WARS
Countries worldwide have established forces based on the British SAS template
The reputation of the SAS, encapsulated by its ‘Who Dares Wins’ motto, is global. Its influence is evident in France’s 1er Régiment de Parachutiste d’Infanterie de Marine (1erRPIMa), the US Delta Force and Germany’s GSG 9. New Zealand and Australia have their own SAS regiments, both raised in the 1950s and using the same motto as their British counterpart. It is also alleged that the SAS has trained Ukrainian special forces for many years. The wartime SAS included two regiments of French troops who fought under British command. In June 2024, to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, President Emmanuel Macron visited the French SAS memorial in Plumelec in Brittany. According to France’s Ministry of Defence, the 1erRPIMa “has its roots in the SAS of World War II, [and] is based on daring, determination and endurance”; its motto is Qui ose gagne – a direct translation of that of the British SAS. The founder of Delta Force, Charles Beckwith, was one of America’s most innovative military thinkers in the late 1950s. A member of the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Beckwith was posted to 22 SAS as part of an exchange in 1962. During that time, he conceived the idea of an American equivalent. On his return to the US, Beckwith received encouragement from General Sam Wilson, a Second World War veteran who had been trained by the British Chindits in south-east Asia. In a 2016 interview, Wilson explained that he had met David Stirling in the course of helping to establish Delta Force. Like Delta Force, Germany’s counter-terrorism unit GSG 9 was formed in the 1970s in response to a series of high-profile terrorist atrocities. When GSG 9 rescued all hostages from a hijacking at Mogadishu airport in Somalia in 1977, it was assisted by two SAS soldiers. Over the course of three decades, David Stirling’s band of “renegade cut-throats” had become a blueprint for special forces units across the globe.
This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
]]>Keep calm and carry on singing: why Britons fell in love with opera during World War Twohttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/keep-calm-and-carry-on-singing-why-britons-fell-in-love-with-opera-during-world-war-two/2026-01-07T15:00:58.000ZGlasgow, 1942. The Carl Rosa Opera Company was in town to perform Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Tickets had been snapped up by local people – including many who didn’t really know what an opera was. The soprano Joan Hammond, who sang the title role that night, later recalled that there were always newcomers in the audience wherever the Carl Rosa performed, searching for something different to do – but also for some kind of transcendental escapism. Invariably, they cheered the singers to the rafters. Surprising though it may seem to us today, opera was hugely popular during the Second World War.
This was part of a broader surge of interest among the British in the so-called high arts – a sudden and rather urgent desire to ‘become cultured’ and to enjoy the best that life had to offer – when every day might be your last.
Guy Ramsey reported in the Daily Mail in 1943 that “every day in every way Britain’s musical and dramatic taste is becoming more and more ‘highbrow’”. Tram drivers were listening to Tchaikovsky, waitresses were revelling in Wagner, and operas were drawing large audiences at provincial theatres. This war, Ramsey wrote, was more personal than any before it, and felt closer to home. Serious times called for serious art, and popular variety shows no longer seemed in step with the national mood.
Workers’ playtime
Opera had already enjoyed reasonably wide popularity in Britain during the interwar years. In London, the enterprising impresario Lilian Baylis had set up companies at the Old Vic in the 1920s and Sadler’s Wells in the 1930s that were explicitly aimed at fostering a love of opera among local working-class communities. And over in the East End, people could regularly watch operas at the People’s Palace, a large entertainment complex on the Mile End Road.
Touring opera companies regularly visited towns and cities around the country, and were eagerly anticipated by people of all social classes. Operatic music could also be widely heard in restaurants, hotel foyers and cinemas, and broadcasting and gramophone records had done a great deal to popularise and democratise the art form. But the opera boom of the early 1940s was in a different league.
It would have been logical if opera had ground to a halt during the war, given the large resources conventionally needed to stage performances. To be sure, the most prominent venues did close: the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden was turned into one of the most popular wartime dance halls, and Glyndebourne in East Sussex became a home for evacuees from London.
Sadler’s Wells soldiered on during the early months of the war, staging matinees to get around the problem of blackouts, but soon enough the Blitz put paid to this, and the theatre became a refuge for the newly homeless. However, the company moved its operations to Burnley and toured extensively from there, putting on works including The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro, Rigoletto and La bohème with a scaled-down cast, piano accompaniment, a simple painted backcloth and a sofa.
The Times praised Sadler’s Wells for “Making converts to the art of music-drama” in places such as Oldham, Accrington and Stockport. Performances were so popular that theatres were desperate to book the company. The manager of the Hull New Theatre reported that his postbag was constantly full of letters from audience members “representing a cross-section of the community” who wanted to see the troupe.
Periodically, when it was safe to do so – and even when it wasn’t – the company returned to London to perform in the West End. The soprano Elisabeth Parry recalled a performance at the Haymarket Theatre in 1944 when the show went on even while alarms rang and ‘Doodlebugs’ (V1 flying bombs) could be heard buzzing overhead. Audience members remained in their seats, and the singers and orchestra carried on as if nothing was happening.
The success of the Sadler’s Wells tours showed that the British would happily embrace opera if only they were given the opportunity. Journalists expressed frustration that there had never been a move to set up a similar opera company in every major city around the country, because there was clearly plenty of demand. “No doubt there are as many busmen as there are butchers, bakers, baronets and bankers who enjoy a good opera when they can get it,” argued The Times. And the Times Literary Supplement proposed that, with a dozen more companies along the lines of Sadler’s Wells, “we should have a genuine art of opera in England as we already have a genuine public for it”.
Sadler’s Wells worked in partnership with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), which also arranged concerts in which professional musicians, including opera singers, performed in factories, air-raid shelters and hospitals. CEMA’s broad aim was to “carry music, drama and pictures to places which otherwise would be cut off from all contact with the masterpieces of happier days and times”.
Operatic performances also featured in the Holidays at Home initiative organised by the Ministry of Labour, which turned open areas in cities into makeshift seaside resorts, and put on a wide range of entertainments. One such scheme in Liverpool, which included performances of opera, ran for 11 weeks in 1942 and attracted an audience of three quarters of a million.
Arias on the airwaves
Of course, there was also plenty of opera on the radio. In 1941, regular monthly broadcasts of studio operas resumed for the first time since the outbreak of war. The emphasis was primarily on well-known classics such as La Traviata and The Barber of Seville because, as the conductor Sir Adrian Boult said, “The evidence is general that the musical public turns to these sources for mental and spiritual recreation more eagerly than ever today.” BBC listener research from 1943 revealed that the numbers listening to variety shows were down by 20 per cent, whereas audiences for classical music and serious drama were on the rise.
Victor Hely-Hutchinson, the BBC’s director of music from 1944, wrote that one of the few benefits of the war was the rise of an immense public enthusiasm for good music. “Go to an orchestral concert, or a fine operatic performance,” he said, “and you will find a corporate appreciation and desire for music of a kind, and on a scale, that has never been seen in Britain before.”
Radio broadcasts allowed audiences to enjoy the highest standards of singing, which were not always evident in rough-and-ready touring productions. “Stayed at home tonight to listen to Faust – complete – on the wireless,” wrote one unnamed office worker in a diary submission for Mass Observation in 1942. “Feel very grateful to the BBC for giving us first-class opera; it is not often we get first-rate opera in Manchester, and there is nothing worse than good music badly executed.”
Many people, men in particular, first encountered opera in the forces. Some took part in amateur operatic productions of works such as Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at military bases in Britain. Others stationed in the Middle East with Paiforce (the Persia and Iraq force) had the opportunity to hear operatic arias in concerts organised by the Entertainments National Service Association. Some of the most respected British opera singers of the day, such as Walter Widdop, Dennis Noble and Miriam Licette, toured that region. But by far the most significant boom in enthusiasm for opera among soldiers was seen in Italy.
In 1944, the Daily Express reported that “one of the biggest surprises of our ‘invasion’ of Italy has been the way the men have become opera fans”. Some enterprising army captains reformed the mothballed opera company at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. Word soon spread that watching opera was a good way to spend an evening, and British troops took to queueing around the block to get tickets.
The 1,600-seat theatre was always full to capacity, and two performances a day had to be scheduled to meet demand. A similar enterprise was also set up at the bomb-damaged and abandoned Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania, Sicily and, as the Allies moved north, more companies were founded in major cities across the country.
Naomi Jacob, who in 1948 wrote a book about opera aimed specifically at the soldiers who had come to love it in Italy, recalled that when the idea had first been mooted, there had been a lot of scepticism about whether British and American troops would be willing to listen to opera. But houses sold out in advance, and audience members often came back several times. Jacob reported that “no better audience ever existed… they were punctual, they gave rapt attention, and their appreciation was unstinted”.
From September 1943 to the end of the war, countless British servicemen watched performances of opera in Italy. The composer and broadcaster Spike Hughes reported that “in every town the same thing happened: the British soldier took to grand opera as if it were in his blood”.
Exposure to Italian opera in Italy helped soldiers to become more discerning listeners. In Britain before the war, opera was performed in English translation everywhere except Covent Garden and Glyndebourne, two ‘luxurious’ venues that sat apart from the national norm. But here, suddenly, was an audience that had shown itself perfectly capable of appreciating opera in the original language.
The Rome correspondent for the Sunday Express reported that “an ‘opera-conscious’ audience is being created for Britain after the war, but if any theatre magnate wants to cater for them he must offer something better than a third-rate touring company”.
Optimism for opera
Hopes were high, then, for what Britain’s operatic landscape might look like in the postwar period. Even the most sceptical commentators were coming round to opera: the Daily Express reported that “the most ridiculous art-form ever invented” was “proving more popular than anybody ever imagined”.
Of course, many people who had encountered opera in pared-back productions during the war had no idea what it really could be. The public was, as The Liverpool Daily Post put it, “as ignorant of the real taste of opera as a wartime infant is of the taste of bananas”. But appetites had been whetted, and Britons emerged from the war wanting to see not only more opera but better opera.
To a large extent, these expectations were met. The theatre director Tyrone Guthrie argued after the war that London was becoming the musical centre of the world, with opera at its heart. In the autumn of 1947, audiences in the capital had the opportunity to watch no fewer than 23 different operas performed by five companies.
A new company based at the Cambridge Theatre in Seven Dials performed Italian opera in Italian to groups of former servicemen and West End shopworkers. For a while, even glamorous Covent Garden presented a form of “opera for the people”, running regional auditions and recruiting talented opera-singing coalminers, secretaries and milkmen as soloists for a new company.
Some of these initiatives were only short-lived. Even so, there was very much a buzz in the air around opera after the war, with the Musicians’ Union declaring in 1947 that classical music had become “a necessary part of the life of the people”. The wider acceptance of opera as bona fide popular entertainment seemed to be summed up by the fact that when the San Carlo Opera Company from Naples visited just after the war, it performed not only at Covent Garden but also at Butlin’s holiday camps in Filey and Skegness.
Sadler’s Wells, meanwhile, made a triumphant return to its Islington home, where on 7 June 1945 it staged the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes – a rapturously received work that seemed to signal a hopeful new beginning for British operatic composition. New troupes formed to take touring opera around the country in the late 1940s. The 1940s also saw the foundation of Welsh National Opera – a group of talented amateurs at the outset but later a major player on the British operatic scene.
Perhaps most importantly, thanks to the huge explosion of interest in the high arts that had taken place during the war, the nation was far more open-minded towards the possibility of funding it afterwards. Up to this point, public subsidy had only ever been a pipe dream. Now CEMA provided a model for the new Arts Council of Great Britain, which leaned heavily towards favouring opera. Thanks to subsidies, opera could be staged at Covent Garden year-round rather than just for a three-month summer season, and prices could be kept low. The Arts Council also undertook local measures to foster music-making and music appreciation, setting up clubs in workplaces and lending gramophone records. Meanwhile, opera featured prominently on the BBC’s new Third Programme.
“Fifteen years ago I should have felt obliged to defend opera as a form of art,” said the critic and academic Edward J Dent in a lecture delivered at Liverpool University in 1945, “but that is no longer necessary.”
Opera continued to be enjoyed by large, socially mixed audiences through the 1950s, sixties and seventies, and was drawing record audiences in the eighties and nineties. But by those later decades, the media had begun to circulate a simplistic idea that opera was elitist, and by the turn of the millennium the idea was so entrenched that it was deterring newcomers to the genre. Opera was also becoming more expensive, declining on television and disappearing from the school curriculum.
Today, opera still has something for everyone, but it has receded from the mainstream cultural conversation. Regrettably, it has become necessary, once again, to defend it as a form of art.
Alexandra Wilson is a senior research fellow at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Her latest book is Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British (Oxford University Press), published in September 2025
This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>He shot down 3 planes in 4 minutes: meet the WW2 pilot you won't have heard abouthttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/he-shot-down-3-planes-in-4-minutes-meet-the-ww2-pilot-you-wont-have-heard-about/2025-12-19T09:00:18.000ZIf you stroll across the green swathe of the Maidan in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) – past the monumental marble Victoria Memorial built to honour that Empress of India – and keep heading south, the city noise fades, and so too does the bustle. Off Debendra Lal Khan Road by the Tolly Canal, and opposite the zoological garden, are the gates of Bhowanipore Cemetery. Walk through them and you enter a world of order and peace.
At the back, beyond lines of graves from the 19th and 20th century, are the headstones of young, mainly British men who fought in both world wars and died here. Many perished from diseases such as malaria and smallpox; some were killed in accidents, and one was apparently murdered while off duty. Also here are the graves of 14 Scottish soldiers from the Black Watch battalion who died in the cyclone of 16 October 1942 in Midnapore, west of Kolkata, as well as troops from a merchant ship hit by the Japanese in the Second World War.
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On one headstone is etched the name of a man I had heard about from elderly Indians and British people who had lived in the city during the war. Arthur Maurice Owers Pring – known to everyone simply as Pring – was a pilot in the Royal Air Force. He was killed at the age of just 22 while defending Calcutta from an aerial bombing attack by Japanese forces.
This dark chapter opened on 20 December 1942, when Japanese fighter planes filled the skies. Navigating by moonlight, a force of eight Imperial Japanese Army Air Service medium bombers, code-named ‘Sally’ by the Allies, scattered their weapons around the city. The oil plant at Budge Budge, on the Hooghly river south-west of the city, was one of the places hit. Raids continued the following night, and on 23, 24 and 28 December – the most devastating assault coming on Christmas Eve.
The city was largely undefended militarily. A detachment of Beaufighters from RAF 89 Squadron in Egypt was diverted to Calcutta, arriving on 12 January 1943. Two days later, a new squadron was raised: No. 176. Its motto was Nocte Custodimus – “We keep the night watch.” The young men who made up that new squadron were already veterans. One of them, Flying Officer Arthur Maurice Pring, had successfully taken out enemy planes at night over Egypt and Sicily. He had just been initiated into his new squadron when the moon returned – and so did the Japanese bombers. By 9.45pm he was in the air east of the city, and successfully destroyed three ‘Sallys’ in just four minutes.
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This was the first time Japanese planes were intercepted over Calcutta. When I interviewed 93-year-old Sri Sen, who was a teenager at the time, his eyes lit up as he recalled the incident. Even today, people who remember that time mention Pring by name, and remember his heroics. Pring’s photograph was in the newspapers, and was used on recruitment posters, above the slogan: “A cool nerve, a clear brain, and unlimited ‘guts’, that’s what it takes to make an ace pilot like Pring.” He was feted in military and civil circles around the city, as well as by locals.
When the Japanese returned on 5 December 1943, they came at noon. Among those flyers sent up to intercept them was Pring. He was hit, and his plane went up in flames. There was no sign of a parachute. His body was eventually found, and he was laid to rest on 12 December 1943 in Bhowanipore Cemetery. It was a moment that provoked profound emotion in the city: Ron Walker, at the time a young boy whose father was in the Calcutta Police, recalled how everyone “cried unashamedly” at Pring’s death.
Still today, that one young man who died in the Second World War is remembered by those who lived in Calcutta back then, his grave cared for in a quiet corner of the city, a long way from home.
This column was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>Terror in the deep: how Hitler's U-boats pushed Britain to the brinkhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/terror-in-the-deep-how-hitlers-u-boats-pushed-britain-to-the-brink/2025-11-03T09:00:20.000ZOn the night of 13 March 1944, the Greek-registered steamship SS Peleus was en route from Freetown to Buenos Aires when she was hit amidships by two torpedoes, launched by a German U-boat, U-852. The twin-masted merchantman, of around 5,000 tons, swiftly began to sink, her internal bulkheads ruptured by the detonations. Within three minutes, the Peleus disappeared below the surface, leaving the surviving members of her 39-strong crew clinging to rafts and flotsam in the darkness.
As sinkings go during the naval war, it was unremarkable, one might even say routine. But what followed would set it apart. Soon after, U-852 surfaced close to the debris field, hoping to identify her prey and glean some information. Her captain, 27-year-old Kapitänleutnant Heinz‑Wilhelm Eck, ordered one of his men – who spoke some English – to come up to the bow to question one of the survivors. After learning the identity of his target, Eck gave the order for U-852 to move away. But then he changed his mind.
Eck was nervous. Prior to his departure from port, he had been given a lecture from his superiors on the perils of passing through the Atlantic Narrows, around Ascension, and was told that all four of the previous patrols undertaken by his predecessors had ended with the vessels being sunk. Due to the heightened risk of air attack he was urged to take every precaution to avoid being spotted by enemy aircraft. Even debris from a sinking, it was stressed, could give away his position.
Calculating that he could be only some 200 miles away by daybreak, when the wreckage of the Peleus would doubtless be spotted, he made the decision to attempt to destroy the debris. He brought a party of his men up on deck and ordered them to open fire on the rafts and other debris with machine guns. In the moonless night, they were largely firing blind, but the operation continued for hours, with grenades being thrown and U-852’s anti-aircraft gun even being brought to bear.
The number killed by these actions is unknown, but only four members of the Peleus’ crew – three Greeks and a Briton – survived among the wreckage. Three of them would endure until they were finally picked up by a Portuguese steamer, more than a month later.
A bloody exception
It is often assumed that the brutal treatment of the survivors of the Peleus was somehow the norm: that U-boat crews thought little of brutalising, even of murdering, their victims. That certainly was the assumption of Doris Hawkins, a young British nurse who was torpedoed and then picked up by a U-boat in 1941. “We had heard so many atrocity stories,” she later wrote. “We feared a shower of machine gun bullets.”
Bearing in mind the atrocities that were routinely committed by German forces elsewhere in the war – especially in eastern Europe – this assumption is entirely understandable. But, if the written records are to be believed, it is also entirely wrong. The example of the Peleus was very much the exception. Indeed, it was the only documented example of a U-boat action in the Second World War resulting in a war crime.
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Sceptical readers might question this assertion – and rightly so. For one thing, it is well known that Hitler was instinctively secretive and had a preference for issuing verbal rather than written orders when dealing with sensitive matters.
Consequently, at the Nuremberg trials, the prosecution was keen to assert that the available documentary record of the U-boat war was somehow incomplete, or that mendacious amendments could have been made. More than that, given the brutality with which most branches of the German armed forces conducted their war, is it perhaps naïve to imagine that the men of the Kriegsmarine somehow managed to resist both the heat of the moment – and the bloodthirsty rhetoric of their superiors – and refrained from straying into barbarism?
Licence to kill?
At Nuremberg, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the erstwhile commander of U-boat forces, rejected robustly the claims that the Germans had somehow covered up atrocities committed during the war at sea. Yet the testimony of Korvettenkapitän Karl-Heinz Moehle, former commander of the 5th U-boat Flotilla, suggested that the culture within the U-boat arm may have been less ‘clean’ than Dönitz was willing to admit.
Moehle’s testimony centred around the so-called Laconia Order, Dönitz’s instruction to his crews, issued in 1942, to refrain from assisting shipwrecked crewmen. When he asked his superiors about the implications of the order, Moehle was told that it was a coded instruction to kill survivors. And that’s how he passed it on to his officers, albeit with the caveat that each individual commander had to act according to his own conscience.
It is quite possible, then, that there were other atrocities committed by U-boat crews against stricken merchant crewmen, but that circumstances conspired to consign them to oblivion. Perhaps there were no survivors to tell the tale, or the perpetrators were themselves sunk later in their patrol. Absence of evidence, then, should not be confused with evidence of absence.
Nonetheless, it is striking that so few examples of atrocities committed by U-boat crews have come to light. And this should prompt the curious to seek to understand why. The reasons why commanders might have resisted the urge to kill survivors – assuming they felt it at all – would have been multi-layered and would doubtless have evolved with time. But a few explanatory factors are worth bearing in mind.
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For one thing, the typical U‑boat – such as the Type VII – was small and cramped. With its crew of around 50, it had no space to accommodate survivors and only limited capacity to offer material assistance. Bearing that in mind, it is remarkable how often, in the opening phase of the war, U-boat crews assisted the surviving crewmen from the ships that they had sunk, offering food, cigarettes, blankets and a compass bearing.
In the most astonishing example, the commander of U-35 opted to take the 28 surviving crewmen of the Greek-registered Diamantis aboard his submarine and sailed more than 30 hours to the beach at Ventry, in western Ireland, where they were then ferried ashore in a dinghy.
Such chivalrous actions could scarcely survive in the age of total war, of course, and after the Laconia Order, all such humanitarian impulses were formally banned by the German naval command. As a result, after the initial phase of the war, contact with survivors was effectively forbidden. By mid‑1942, then – aside from a brief interrogation to confirm the identity of the sunk vessel – U‑boats tended to avoid survivors altogether.
The culture within the U‑boat arm is also worth consideration. One should be wary of underestimating the influence of ideology in any arm of the Nazi state, but it is notable that even contemporaries considered that the Kriegsmarine was less ideologically aligned with Nazism than other branches of the armed forces. Hitler himself is said to have complained that he had “a Nazi air force, a Prussian army and a Christian navy”.
That quotation, though apocryphal, may nonetheless have had the ring of truth. Crewman Hans Goebeler, aboard U-505, recalled that – on his boat at least – ideology simply didn’t seem to matter: “Who were the Nazis aboard our submarine?” he asked: “I never met one. We were identical to the sailors from every nation who faced the hazards of war and the sea during those years. Party members or not, we performed our duties with professionalism and honour.”
Every boat would have had a cross-section of German society aboard, from fervent Nazis to the apolitical and even those who opposed the regime. Yet the question of how far the U-boat arm was indoctrinated is an interesting and complex one.
Dönitz himself was a convinced Nazi, who was fiercely loyal to Hitler, and a few of his commanders shared that enthusiasm. But active indoctrination of the U-boat arm appears to have been limited. While other branches of the German armed forces were increasingly subjected to ideological control as the war progressed, this was simply not the case for the navy.
Despite his own enthusiasm for Nazism, Dönitz appears to have stopped short of establishing genuine ideological oversight over his men. The office responsible for indoctrination within the navy, for instance, was staffed largely by men without Nazi backgrounds and – given that they were also not permitted to ‘ride along’ on patrol – they were in any case prevented from exerting any real influence over operational units.
This doesn’t mean that the U-boat arm was some sort of haven for anti-Nazi thinking or oppositional attitudes. It was not. The Kriegsmarine was far from apolitical, but its leaders held the view that its coordination to Nazi goals was self-evident, a natural corollary to the patriotism and sense of duty that were essential components of their collective identity. Dönitz held the attempts to enforce ideological conformity at arm’s length, not because he disagreed or was minded to resist, but because he considered such measures to be an unnecessary imposition. The Kriegsmarine, he believed, was already wholly on side.
We should also keep in mind that there was no single ‘way of war’ practised by the forces of the Third Reich in the Second World War. The murderous methods deployed on the eastern front, for instance, were only rarely in evidence in the west, while the war in the desert, lacking an ideological dimension, tended to be similarly unsullied by atrocities. These differences in behaviour by German forces were not the result of whim or happenstance. Rather, they were contingent on the nature of the enemy and whether Nazi ideology deemed them to be civilised and worthy of respect – as in the west – or to be subhumans slated for extermination, as in the east.
The available evidence shows that the naval war, and the submarine war in particular, cleaved more to that western model than to anything else. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the U-boat war does indeed appear to have been the ‘cleanest’ of the theatres of the European conflict, with many more instances of the old fashioned ‘solidarity of the sea’ in evidence than there were examples of atrocities.
Moral outrage
Such logic cut little ice with the judges at Nuremberg, of course, as Dönitz was found guilty on two of the three charges against him and was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. As the former commander of the Kriegsmarine, and Hitler’s successor as Reich President, he deserved neither leniency nor sympathy. And, in the first flush of moral outrage over the crimes of Nazism, the Nuremberg judges were inclined towards the view that all Germans were Nazis and that everything that German forces had done was evidence of Nazi barbarism.
Nonetheless, it was a verdict that provoked no little controversy, even from some senior Allied naval officers. US Admiral Daniel V Gallery – who had spent most of the war hunting U-boats – was especially vociferous in his condemnation. Dönitz’s trial, he said, was an “outstanding example of barefaced hypocrisy”, and his conviction was “an insult to our own submariners”. “If the old gentleman ever gets out of jail,” he wrote, “I hope I never meet him. I would have trouble looking him in the eye. The only crime he committed was the crime of almost beating us in a bloody but ‘legal’ fight.”
He had a point. Dönitz’s defence at Nuremberg – brilliantly conducted by his lawyer, Otto Kranzbühler – had turned largely on the apparent hypocrisies of the Allies’ accusations, given that they, too, had effectively been carrying out unrestricted submarine warfare for most of the war. To hammer home the point, Kranzbühler had produced an affidavit from Admiral Chester Nimitz, wartime commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, which asserted that it had been customary for US submarines to attack Japanese merchant ships without warning, and that ‘general principles’ did not permit US submarines to rescue enemy survivors. In short, Nimitz’s testimony implied that the US Navy had conducted its submarine war precisely as Dönitz claimed to have conducted his.
The truth on this point was more damning than Kranzbühler could have known. Naval records released in the 1960s would reveal that the crew of the American submarine USS Wahoo had themselves participated in an action not unlike that involving the Peleus. In January 1943, the Wahoo sank the 5,000-ton Japanese troopship Buyo Maru, north of Papua New Guinea, which had been carrying Japanese soldiers and nearly 500 PoWs from the British Indian army. In the aftermath, as Japanese and Indian survivors bobbed around some 20 lifeboats, the crew of the Wahoo opened fire with machine guns. “We proceeded to have a field day,” said the captain, Lt Commander Dudley Morton.
Biological hatred
In his defence, Morton claimed that he was returning fire, but this is disputed. Some of his crew were even shocked by his evident “biological hatred” of the enemy. Whatever justification he felt he had, Morton’s attack on the Buyo Maru cost the lives of some 87 Japanese soldiers and more than 195 Indians. His after‑action report included the shooting, but he faced no punishment, and the incident was suppressed by his navy superiors. In postwar narratives, the example of the Buyo Maru was quietly forgotten, while that of the Peleus would be held up as symbolic of Nazi brutality.
- Read more | Before the atomic bombs, the USA hit Japan with one of the most overlooked (but deadly) campaigns in WW2
This is not a game of moral equivalence. It would be wrong to draw from a few isolated cases the false conclusion that the Allies and Axis were morally indistinguishable. The broader war aims mattered. However ‘clean’ the U-boat campaign may have been, it was serving a regime synonymous with evil. Conversely, even when the Allies faltered morally, their cause – resisting tyranny – remained just.
The point, rather, is to challenge the lazy assumption that German U-boat crews were sadistic murderers. The Peleus atrocity was very real, but it was an outlier. U-boats dealt devastating blows to Allied shipping and caused enormous loss of life, but there was only one confirmed instance of the deliberate killing of survivors.
The murder of the Peleus survivors was not a feature of the U-boat war. It was a chilling, singular exception.
Britain's near-death experience
How U-boats drove a nation to the brink of economic strangulation
During the early years of the Second World War, Britain came perilously close to defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic – a prolonged struggle against German U-boats aiming to sever the maritime lifelines sustaining Britain. As an island nation dependent on imports for food, fuel and war materiel, Britain faced an existential threat from the Kriegsmarine’s submarine campaign.
Between 1939 and 1945, German U-boats sank more than 2,700 Allied merchant ships, totalling approximately 14.5 million gross tons. The most dangerous period came in 1942, when 1,160 ships were lost to U-boats– more than 6.2 million tons – much of it along the poorly defended US coast during Operation Drumbeat.
Britain’s shipping losses outpaced production for much of 1941–42, and food rationing became more severe. At one point, Britain had only six weeks’ worth of grain reserves. Winston Churchill later wrote that the U-boat threat was the only thing that truly frightened him during the war.
The crisis peaked in early 1943, when monthly merchant shipping losses reached around 700,000 tons. German Admiral Karl Dönitz believed victory was within reach, committing more than 100 U-boats to mid-Atlantic ‘wolfpack’ operations.However, from May 1943 – dubbed ‘Black May’ by the Germans – the tide turned. Allied advances in radar, sonar, Ultra intelligence, long-range patrol aircraft and escort carriers decimated U-boat fleets. That month alone, the Germans lost 41 U-boats, forcing a temporary withdrawal from the Atlantic.
Though never completely severed, Britain’s shipping routes were
strained to their limits. Without technological breakthroughs, convoy reforms and American shipbuilding – producing Liberty ships faster than U-boats could sink them – Britain might have been economically strangled into submission.
In the end, the U-boat campaign claimed the lives of more than 30,000 Allied seamen. But it failed to deliver a knockout blow.
How the Allies turned the tide
A timeline of the war against the U-boats
3 September 1939: The British liner SS Athenia is sunk by U-30 just hours after Britain had declared war on Germany, marking the start of the Battle of the Atlantic 14 October 1939: U-47 penetrates Scapa Flow and sinks the battleship Royal Oak, killing 833, shocking the Royal Navy and boosting German morale June 1940: Following France’s fall, Germany gains Atlantic U-boat bases at Lorient, Brest and elsewhere. This dramatically extends U-boat reach into the Atlantic and intensifies Allied shipping losses
March–June 1941: U-boats enjoy high success against British shipping, aided by poor Allied convoy tactics and limited air cover, marking their most effective early-war period 12 September 1941: U-156 sinks RMS Laconia carrying civilians and PoWs. After surfacing to help survivors, the U-boat is attacked by US aircraft. This prompts the Germans to introduce the Laconia Order, forbidding the rescue of survivors October 1941: German U-boats operate in coordinated ‘wolfpacks’ to attack convoys, reaching peak effectiveness in the mid-Atlantic and causing severe shipping losses, despite increased Allied defences December 1941: Following Pearl Harbor, U-boats begin Operation Drumbeat, targeting unprepared US coastal shipping. This results in catastrophic losses early in 1942 May 1943: In what the Germans will dub ‘Black May’, the Allies turn the tide with improved radar, codebreaking and air cover. U-boat losses spike dramatically, forcing Germany to temporarily withdraw many boats from the Atlantic June 1944: U-boats fail to disrupt Allied landings in Normandy. With air superiority, improved technology and better escorts, the Allies dominate the Atlantic, further reducing U-boat effectiveness 5 May 1945: Admiral Dönitz orders all remaining U-boats to surrender. More than 150 comply, marking the official end of the U-boat war and the wider naval conflict in Europe
This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict"https://www.historyextra.com/membership/kavita-puri-on-vj-day-we-dont-talk-about-the-war-in-asia-which-was-a-messy-complicated-conflict/2025-09-03T08:00:44.000ZMatt Elton: Your new series, exploring fighting on the Asian front during the Second World War, is called The History Podcast: The Second Map. Why did you choose that name?
Kavita Puri: It came to me after I met a man called Peter Knight, who is now 98. At the time of the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor [on 7 December 1941], he was a 14-year-old boy living in a terraced house in Bromley, a south-eastern London suburb. He had been following the war in Europe using a map posted on the wall alongside his dresser.
After Pearl Harbor, he put up another map on the other side of the dresser – a map of Asia and the Pacific. He would sit down every evening with his mum and grandparents to listen to the BBC bulletin, hearing about places for the first time, and about this other war on the Asian front, in British colonies. And he would trace what was happening on that second map.
So he was now updating two maps in tandem: one covering the war in Europe against the Nazis, and the second encompassing the war against Japan in Asia.
Why has the war against Nazi Germany come to dominate how we view this conflict, at least partly to the exclusion of the conflict in Asia?
I think it’s understandable: that war was close by and involved places whose names were more familiar to people in Britain. And it affected people here more directly: Peter Knight had experienced the Blitz, for example. So the European war was close to home, whereas this other war was far away.
It was also a messy, complicated war – and not just because it was fought in jungle terrain, and soldiers were dying of malaria and other diseases as well as in combat. It wasn’t a neat good-v-bad situation, like the war against the Nazis. The war with Japan was essentially about two empires competing with each other, so it’s a much harder story to explain. It also involved a lot of troops from the colonies, as well as from Australia. So again, it’s a story about our empire.
Historians such as Rana Mitter, who helped me with the making of this series, argue that actually we should see the origins of the Second World War not in the German invasion of Poland in 1939, but much earlier in the early 1930s, with Japanese activities in China. Another aspect of that war on the ‘second map’ that we still don’t talk about much was the fact that the Chinese also fought with the Allies against Japan in some of the major battles.
So do you think we struggle to see the Asian war as also being a story about the British empire?
Yes – and I do think that part of the reason we don’t talk about the war in Asia is because many places that were attacked had been part of the British empire for more than a century, and the losses were humiliating. Winston Churchill said as much when Singapore fell in February 1942, describing it as one of the worst military defeats in British history. A lot of the soldiers who fought and won back places such as Burma [now Myanmar] were soldiers from the empire – and sentiments are complicated by the fact that India then won its independence in 1947.
In the series, you make the point that the evacuation of Burma isn’t well known. Could you talk us through what happened there?
Many people think of the war in Asia and the Pacific in terms of two incidents involving the US: Pearl Harbor, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and Nagasaki three days later. They don’t really know much about what happened in between. Particularly, one element that’s not often discussed is that British colonies, including Malaya and Singapore, were attacked at almost exactly the same time as Pearl Harbor.
- Read more | VJ Day: turning the tide in the east
Again and again in the oral testimonies, I heard how the British saw themselves as racially superior. I think it was hard for them to understand how their colonies could be overrun by people that they considered inferior. Yet as well as possessing superior tanks and aircraft, the Japanese also used bicycles: they were nimble and they moved very, very quickly. Not only was the loss of Malaya and Singapore humiliating, but it resulted in the capture of around 130,000 British and Indian troops and other colonial and Commonwealth soldiers as prisoners of war.
Then Japan set its sights on Burma. Rangoon [now Yangon] fell in March 1942, and the rest of the country was lost as early as May. The result was that soldiers had to trek across vast stretches of terrain in a devastating retreat. General William Slim, who later commanded the Fourteenth Army in Burma, described men who were just completely exhausted.
It wasn’t just soldiers retreating, but also colonial civilians – Europeans and Indians, about a million of whom had been working in Burma. Along with some Burmese who were afraid of Japanese reprisals, they headed for India. But the evacuation was quite racialised. White British and European people were given priority and assistance. If you were Indian or Burmese, particularly if you didn’t have means, you were on your own. And that journey was so difficult: it involved walking barefoot with whatever you could carry across very challenging terrain, much of it jungle. You had very little food. You might encounter crocodiles or elephants.
An estimated 600,000 refugees were on the move but, though it was such a major event, there was so much going on – not only in that region but in the wider war – that this story has often been obscured in popular memory. It was really quite difficult for me to find testimonies of people who had made that journey.
Why have stories of this event not been told before?
Partly because most refugees arrived in Bengal, where a terrible famine was developing. If you were an Indian or Burmese person, you were just one of many trying to survive. In addition, that was a tumultuous time in India. There was the famine, the Quit India movement, and the Great Calcutta Killings [deadly riots in 1946], then the violence in the run-up to partition – when, again, millions were on the move, a million people died and two new countries were created. So the story has been obscured in India, even though many Indian nationalists were infuriated at the racialised nature of the evacuation from Burma. It became one of the causes underpinning the Quit India campaign.
In Britain, too, it’s a very difficult part of our war story to recall: not just the retreat and defeat, but also the racialised aspect undermining the moral underpinnings of empire.
In the series, you speak to relatives of people held in prisoner-of-war camps, including civilians. Can you tell us about the experiences of Shelagh Brown?
Shelagh was 25 when the Japanese took Singapore, where she’d been born and had lived all her life. And hers had been a grand life, like lots of colonial families. Before the invasion, Singapore had been largely untouched by the war, unlike Britain. But it was bombed just a couple of hours after Pearl Harbor, and life changed very quickly for her. Even at that point, though, she didn’t think she would have to leave.
It was only when British soldiers began to cross the causeway, retreating from Malaya, that her family realised things were really serious and tried to evacuate Shelagh and her mother. They got on a small boat, hoping to get to Australia, but were bombed from the air. Shelagh was adrift at sea for 19 hours before Japanese forces caught her and she was interned for the rest of the war. In fact, it wasn’t until six weeks after the war had ended that news reached the internment camp.
She died some time ago, but her daughter shared some cassette tapes (never broadcast before) on which Shelagh told her story of survival while being moved from camp to camp. It’s difficult to listen to, particularly because Shelagh’s mother died in the camps, but it’s also remarkable – particularly in how the women kept up their spirits. Shelagh had been in a choir, and her father had been the choir master. So the women formed a vocal orchestra, which was really moving: she said that the notes they were singing were the only free things they had. The Japanese guards would stand outside and listen, and were moved by what they heard.
Another way that she dealt with the situation was that she somehow got hold of little bits of paper on which she wrote lavish recipes in minute detail, like cakes with 12 eggs. The funny thing is that her daughter said Shelagh had never cooked before in her life, because she had servants in Singapore. But because they were really malnourished, it was just a way to deal with their hunger.
So it’s an emotionally complicated story. And the stories of women like her haven’t really been well remembered.
Can you tell us about the experiences of Ursula Graham Bower?
Ursula’s incredible story is told in an interview with her that we found in the archives. A young woman from north London, at the start of the war she was in her mid-twenties, working as an anthropologist in the tribal regions of north-east India near the border with Burma. She was living with a group called the Nagas when Pearl Harbor was bombed, after which she was recruited to work with Naga people gathering intelligence, monitoring what was happening across the border.
When the Japanese tried to invade India at Imphal and Kohima in 1944, she found herself on the front line. She cabled headquarters to request weapons – and a box arrived containing grenades and guns – and she used them fearlessly. She was a remarkably brave woman – but so were the Naga people who fought alongside her.
Military historian Peter Johnston says that the Fourteenth Army was possibly the greatest that Britain ever put into the field. Why don’t we hear more about the story of this ‘Forgotten Army’?
The Fourteenth Army was formed after the defeats of Singapore and Malaya. It mostly comprised colonial soldiers – predominantly Indians, but also soldiers from west and east Africa as well. By the end of the conflict, it numbered around a million troops. By then, the British had learned lessons about how to lead these soldiers, who were treated much better than colonial troops had been previously. The extraordinary battles that they fought in such challenging terrain, and the conditions that they endured, are remarkable.
Even at the time, people such as Lord Mountbatten and even the army’s commander, General Slim, joked that it was a forgotten army, fighting a far-away war. Partly, that’s because the Burma campaign and the battles at Imphal and Kohima were fought around the time of the Normandy landings, which of course dominated the headlines. I think there is probably a racialised aspect to it, too. The majority of soldiers in the Fourteenth Army were colonial subjects.
Equally, I spoke to children of some of the soldiers in the Fourteenth Army, and they didn’t talk about it much, either. After independence, people in India and Pakistan found it hard to remember their soldiers who had fought with the British – that was not the story they wanted to tell about the Second World War. Another factor is that the collection of oral histories hasn’t been done much in India or Pakistan.
The Imperial War Museum has been trying to gather oral testimonies, but it’s very late now – most of the people involved have died. There are some really important stories that we will never capture now.
Was there a turning point when people in Britain started to find out about these wartime experiences?
I’m not sure that ever happened. When I tell people that I’m working on a series about VJ Day, most people ask: what’s that? Or: is that the American War? Yet there are thousands of homes in Britain where a family member was part of this story but didn’t talk about it.
I was interviewing one 98-year-old veteran, when he said to me: “I’ve got a suitcase in my study. Why don’t you go and have a look?” His daughter said: “I didn’t know about this suitcase.” I don’t know if that generation didn’t talk about it because they saw difficult things, or if they just thought, well, everyone has a war story, what’s the point of talking about mine? Or perhaps because people wanted to hear about the war in Europe. Shelagh Brown’s daughter told me that she was the only one she knew in Chichester who put out a flag for the 75th anniversary of VJ Day – no one else knew why.
I think broadly people don’t know about the war in Asia, what it was about, why it was a British war, and how our country was connected to it. Yet many south Asians in postwar Britain had their own connections to that war, too, as well as British families.
One thing I’ve realised making these programmes is that each generation asks different questions about the Second World War. But it’s a race against time to capture these memories – and, it pains me to say, it’s almost too late now.
How is the war remembered in Japan? Are these kinds of conversations happening there at all?
It was very important for me to include Japanese voices in the series. I found recorded testimony from a young kamikaze pilot in his early twenties. He was just a kid who was told that he had to undertake this mission. He wanted to do good things for his country, but he also wanted to live. He wanted to get married, have a normal life.
But, interestingly, Japan doesn’t really remember the Asian war, focusing instead on the war in the Pacific. They see the conflict particularly through the prism of America, because the US rehabilitated Japan very, very quickly after the war. During the Tokyo War Crimes Trials [1946–48], Emperor Hirohito was not part of proceedings, and he built the pacifist constitution in the postwar years. An expert I spoke to for the series observed that it took decades for the Japanese people to talk about the atrocities that their forces committed, and that talking about war memory has become very politicised. But he does say that the new generation is looking at it in a different way.
Now that few from the generation who lived through those events are still alive, maybe the Japanese today are freer to talk about things they weren’t able to before. For example, when their soldiers came back, they were traumatised and humiliated. They were told not to talk about it. And the children of those families are now opening up about the levels of domestic violence inflicted by some of those men. It can free you up to talk and ask some really difficult questions about your country and the people who led it at the time.
So many of those who took part in the war in Asia found it difficult to talk about these events – as you say in the series, it’s almost like a confession for them. Is that one reason why it remains obscure in the countries involved?
It was hard to talk about for lots of reasons, not least the traumatic nature of the events. Whether you were a PoW or a civilian, or witnessed action in battle, it was difficult. So people who came back home didn’t talk – but, also, people didn’t ask. I’ve spoken to family members who were explicitly told not to ask.
When one PoW, Maurice Naylor, returned home to Manchester, his family were advised not to talk to him about his experiences – that it would be too much for him. His daughter found some sketches that he’d made. She asked her mother: what is this? And her mother said: don’t ask your father – he was in a PoW camp, and he has nightmares. She thought it had been a Nazi concentration camp, because that was the only kind she knew about. She didn’t even know that there were Japanese PoW camps. So one generation was told not to ask. But I would also say that not only do you need a public space for people to speak, but people also have to know what to ask. If your children are not learning about it in school, and if collectively we don’t know about that history, we won’t know the questions to pose.
And now, because people didn’t ask, there is often a sense of regret. That’s what I meant by confession. They know something happened. They know a relative saw something, and it was probably not a good thing. I think there is a guilt in not having asked – and now not being able to ask.
Were there other factors that added to the complications of remembering this story?
Perhaps one reason is the simplified narrative we tell ourselves about our war: we fought the Nazis, and they were bad; we were good, and we were heroic. And that’s not wrong – but there was also this other war that we fought, and we need to understand that – not least because it touched many thousands of families in Britain.
This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>"England is invincible": How the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britainhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/england-is-invincible-how-the-luftwaffe-lost-the-battle-of-britain/2025-07-02T08:00:31.000ZOn a muggy night in late August 1940, Hinnerk Waller’s fraying tether had finally snapped. Relentlessly deployed in the Battle of Britain as part of the Luftwaffe fighter wing JG 52, Waller was paying for every nerve-wracking sortie with his sanity. Snatching hold of his Walther pistol, he sprinted into some nearby woods with the grim intention of killing himself. A few concerned airmen rose up to stop him, but their Staffelkapitän, Helmut Kühle, bade them to resume their seats. “He was a shrewd judge of character,” as Waller’s friend Ulrich Steinhilper later recalled, “and as we all sat waiting for what we thought was the inevitable shot, nothing happened.”
Steinhilper added that this “was our first case of Kanalkrankheit [‘Channel Sickness’] – a combination of chronic stress and acute fatigue” that was brought on by constantly flying in the Battle of Britain. That this dramatic episode came only two months into the Luftschlacht um England (‘Air Battle for England’) – the German name for the Battle of Britain and the Blitz – highlights just how frenetic this aerial campaign had become for the Luftwaffe. Just four days after his suicidal crisis, Waller was unceremoniously flung back onto the frontline.
What is most important to observe about his breakdown, however, is that it happened when the Luftwaffe was actually in its most successful phase of the aerial campaign against the RAF. Waller’s mental anguish, then, starkly demonstrates that military success and heightened morale do not necessarily go hand in hand. It also demonstrates that we should be wary about imposing British perspectives on the Luftwaffe’s mentality during the Battle of Britain.
The enemy’s flaws
Pointing out that the German air force was not as indefatigable as it is often presented is certainly not to downplay the monumental achievement of the RAF’s ‘Few’ in denying the necessary air supremacy and build-up of invasion barges for the Wehrmacht to invade Britain in Operation Sealion. On the contrary, to wear the aggressors down to their last nerve is testimony to the hellacious fight that the RAF put up during the campaign.
Yet, if we are to recount faithfully why the Battle of Britain unfolded as it did, we must pinpoint how the Luftwaffe’s internal doubts and weaknesses rapidly conspired to erode its seemingly unflappable fighting spirit. Thoroughly fleshing out the Luftwaffe’s hopes and hangups allows us to transform its historical role in the RAF’s ‘Finest Hour’ from a cartoonish antagonist to a multidimensional, flawed yet formidable opponent. This makes it even more remarkable and crucial that the RAF managed to repel its aerial onslaught.
Mood of jubilation
During the spring and early summer of 1940, Nazi Germany had captured Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and France. With much of Europe sunken under the swastika, the Luftwaffe’s general mood was one of jubilation. Yet, for as long as Britain remained in the war, the Germans were unable to bask in their continental victories.
The Luftwaffe had started to ponder clearing the English Channel for an invasion, but they mainly hoped that Britain could be pressured into suing for peace by throttling its essential shipping lines and maritime assets. Thus, on 2 July 1940, Hermann Göring directed Wolfram von Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps to begin attacking “Channel sea traffic”. The first phase of the Battle of Britain – the Channel Battle – was now under way.
The German fighter pilot Günther Rall wrote optimistically of needing “a few more days, and the strait will be impassable. Then an essential prerequisite for the invasion will be created.”
Yet Adolf Galland, who was more experienced than Rall, noted how “the German pilots thought that the [Nazi] propaganda about England being unprepared was wrong. It annoyed us. We found the English well prepared. Not an easy job. We were not hopeful of victory.” He added that “many pilots feared the water – the small, dirty water. All Channel Flyers felt this. I emphasise: the ‘Shite Kanal’ did as much damage to our morale as the English fighters.”
As a Luftwaffe Soldat attached to an airfield operations company wrote on 20 July 1940, “We have a big victory behind us, but the biggest fight is still ahead of us. We don’t have earth beneath us, but water – that’s more dangerous. We hope for the best and wish to return to our homes as victorious soldiers.”
British radar, too, was rattling the Luftwaffe. The German fighter pilot Hans-Ekkehard Bob noted of a sortie gone wrong over Britain in late July 1940 that “it was incomprehensible how this [Spitfire] formation could reach us in the rear without any sight in such a good attack position.
“Later,” he continued, “we learnt that the British were at that time already in the possession of a kind of radar that could lead exactly in height and direction.”
The RAF incorporated radar into the highly sophisticated ‘Dowding System’. Spearheaded by Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the system included radar transmitters, receivers and stations as part of Chain Home and Chain Home Low, the latter of which was optimised for detecting incoming Luftwaffe aircraft at lower altitudes. This not only gave the RAF an advance warning of up to 20 minutes as the Luftwaffe passed over the Channel, but it also constituted a huge blow to the German airmen who feared coming up as a blip on British radar.
In the face of this increasing military resistance, Göring instigated Operation Eagle Attack, which was devised to sock the knockout blow to Britain. RAF flying units, ground installations (including radar), supply organisations, and the British aircraft industry would all come under intense attack in this next phase of the Battle of Britain.
Göring had made Adolf Hitler the rather lofty promise that the RAF could be subdued within five weeks – spanning from 8 August to 15 September – ahead of the amphibious Wehrmacht invasion on ‘Sealion Day’. After a bout of patchy weather, the Eagle Attack was finally earmarked to commence on 13 August 1940, codenamed Adlertag (‘Eagle Day’). Yet, that same day, a junior doctor with the Luftwaffe bomber wing KG 2 wrote a most forlorn letter to his wife:
“Here in France, we are all slowly going crazy. If we don’t get relieved in the autumn, I think almost all of our men will be nervous and exhausted. What has been asked of us for years is too much. God grant us that the last stroke of violence succeeds. As a doctor, I see how things are with us. People gather their last strength to win. The last few days have brought us some terrible experiences. We have lost many brave and loyal comrades and are immensely sad.”
- Read more | 6 Battle of Britain Myths
The junior doctor’s observations suggest that the Luftwaffe was in a far worse psychological state early into the campaign than is often acknowledged. To add to the operational strain, the morning of Adlertag opened with disaster for the Luftwaffe. Several unescorted bomber units did not receive Göring’s early postponement order due to the poor weather, as their radio crystals had not been updated to be compatible with the fighter units’ communication system.
As the weather cleared up in the afternoon, the Luftwaffe went on to launch 1,485 sorties, hitting RAF Detling and Eastchurch especially hard. Nevertheless, with much of the German bomber crews striking at the wrong targets, Adlertag exacted too heavy a price for what was achieved. The Luftwaffe lost 42 aircraft, along with 89 pilots and aircrew killed or captured – 13 per cent of its striking force. On 15 August, Göring hastily organised a staff conference to dissect the air force’s mistakes.
On this same day, the Germans suffered their heaviest losses of the battle so far – a day they dubbed ‘Black Thursday’ and the RAF hailed ‘The Greatest Day’. Then, on 18 August 1940, came ‘The Hardest Day’, due to the fact that it saw the highest number of combined RAF and Luftwaffe aircraft losses in a single day. By late August, the Eagle Attack began to swing in favour of the Germans, who had managed to bring the kill tallies on both sides to a more even ratio on its best days.
Yet, in a reflection of how their hunger for medals and victories could sometimes get the better of them, a captured Leutnant and Oberleutnant were overheard discussing in September 1940 how, “We underrated the English fighters. Recently everyone who wanted a few easy additions to his bag flew over, but they got a surprise.”
By late August, Ulrich Steinhilper had become greatly disillusioned with this opportunism: “The picture looked grim. I was thinking we were all fighting to rid the sky of the RAF, and what was really developing was that many individuals were using this battle as a stage upon which they could further their own careers and personal scores, while apparently giving little consideration to the overall tactics or the losses of their men who were behind them. There were times when my morale took severe knocks.”
IN NUMBERS: THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN
- 30,000 is the number of sorties that the Luftwaffe flew over Britain during the Blitz
- 600% is how much Luftwaffe losses shot up from previous operations during the first week of the ‘Eagle Attack’ in August 1940
- 26 was the average age of German airmen during the summer of 1940 – six years older than their British counterparts
- Between 3 and 4 is the number of sorties that it's estimated the average German bomber crew survived during the most intense periods of the air war over Britain
The Blitz begins
Things were about to get even more complicated. On the night of 24–25 August 1940, stray German bombs were unintentionally dropped over civilian boroughs in East Ham and Bethnal Green. On 7 September, after the British prime minister Winston Churchill immediately greenlit a retaliatory blow from Bomber Command against Berlin, an enraged Göring launched his first major strike against the British capital.
The opening day of the Blitz killed 448 civilians and wounded 1,337 more, marking the start of the campaign’s longest phase – one that would run until May 1941. For some Luftwaffe personnel, the Blitz was seen as a natural escalation of the Luftschlacht um England.
One Soldat wrote confidently on 8 September 1940 that: “I have a lot of work these days. There is no longer any ‘closing time’ at all. Unfortunately, I cannot write to you about our special tasks. But you will have already heard on the radio in detail about the extensive destruction in England and especially in London caused by our bombers. We’ll soften up the English. Our planes all returned from combat missions yesterday…”
Hans-Ekkehard Bob, on the other hand, claimed that “as far as I could learn, the RAF had by accident bombed Berlin. The supreme command retaliated and ordered to bomb London. We, the fighter pilots, were told at that time that strategic aims in the district of London were attacked. The bombing of civilians was out of the question for us.”
Not all Luftwaffe airmen, however, shared Bob’s sentiments when it came to attacking non-military targets. One captured Luftwaffe prisoner reportedly said of bombing British hospitals: “Well, the people are half dead anyway, and if the hospitals are bombed, no fresh casualties can be admitted.” Another had tried to bomb Hyde Park because “he knew there were a lot of air raid shelters there”.
In a bugged conversation between three captured fighter pilots from September 1940, one claimed that “England is invincible. That is the mentality of the people here, and if every civilian defends his home stubbornly, then it’s a difficult matter.” His colleague replied: “They’ll simply be shot.” Thus, even the German fighter pilots – who are often portrayed as a noble adversary to Fighter Command in British histories – were hardly blind to the criminal nature of the regime they were fighting for, nor the deadly repercussions of a Luftwaffe victory for Britain.
On 15 September 1940, the Luftwaffe launched a major raid on London, Portsmouth and Southampton. Benefiting from the lull in attacks on RAF airfields during the Blitz, however, a revitalised Fighter Command shot down 56 German planes – two for every British fighter lost. The RAF would hail this day as ‘Battle of Britain Day’; the Luftwaffe would remember it as a disaster. The bomber pilot Otto Bechtle said of his men’s losses that “the whole Gruppe was nearly demoralised. It was a drunken party, weeping for comrades. The survivors sang: ‘The steel wings are flashing; the Tommy has given us a hiding.’”
This defiant counterattack stunned Hitler into postponing Sealion indefinitely on 17 September 1940. From July until the end of October, the Germans lost around 1,887 aircraft of all types. The Luftwaffe’s nerves were now so on edge that an unprecedented number of 79 suicides and suicide attempts was reached among its personnel between mid-September and October 1940. By 1941, the Luftwaffe surgeon-general even had to issue a special directive that dealt with the prevention of suicide within the organisation.
The impact of losses
Towards the end of 1940, however, it was not just the Luftwaffe’s mental wellbeing that was suffering. The German air force’s lack of a proper reserve compared to that of the RAF meant that, as the senior Luftwaffe psychologist Dr Siegfried Gerathewohl put it, “even the totally unsuitable were accepted for training”. Inexperienced and overzealous recruits posed a risk not just to themselves, but also to their more senior commanders. Oberst Johannes Fink, who was Kommodore of the bomber wing KG 2, witnessed the disconcerting combination of operational naivety and night-time flying during the Blitz.
“On the way back from London, I saw the flight mechanic of a plane ahead fire wildly and shoot holes in his own tail. In my aircraft, all the crew were wounded. No pilot in my aircraft – I flew the machine myself, had only the observer/bomb aimer up front with me. All except me were wounded, mostly splinters. I had a map in my hand – a bullet went through the map. When we got back to the airfield, the flight mechanic of the machine ahead was excitedly pointing to all the holes in the tail of his aircraft and saying what a narrow escape he’d had: ‘Look at all the hits we’ve had.’ I walked up to him and said: ‘That was you.’”
More alarming still for the Luftwaffe was the number of airmen being lost in crashes in the darkness, as well as those forced to bale out over the English Channel during the perishing autumn and winter months. In November 1940, a British intelligence report documented that “a total of 158 German air force personnel were reported, as either PoW or dead, by this section. Of these, 54 were living and 104 dead, which is a considerable reversal of the proportions previously encountered.”
Throughout the Blitz, the Luftwaffe haemorrhaged a further 600 bombers on top of its previous losses in the main Battle of Britain – resulting in a total of 2,487 German aircraft lost across the entire Luftschlacht um England. Nearly 2,000 members of its flying crews were killed and a further 2,600 had gone missing during its full 10-month assault on Britain. Although the Luftwaffe’s bomber crews had succeeded in leaving scores of British cities in rubble, the country’s overall wartime production had not been greatly affected in return for the considerable strain of launching nearly 30,000 sorties during the Blitz alone.
Some Luftwaffe veterans later tried to downplay the long-term detrimental effects of the British campaign on its operational strength, with Walter Lehweß-Litzmann – who later became the Kommodore of a Luftwaffe bomber wing – claiming that “the Luftwaffe was by no means weakened as it moved east, as its superior initial effectiveness subsequently demonstrated. The crew losses over England were offset by the combat experience gained by the units and commanders, of which I was a member.”
In reality, however, the Luftwaffe that headed into 1941 had been badly affected in both the quantity of its aircraft and quality of its aircrews.
The butterfly effect
The Germans knew that a failure to subdue the British in 1940–41 would now have negative repercussions for the war in the Mediterranean and north Africa, with the Luftwaffe having been assigned to protect General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in February 1941. And, with the Luftwaffe failing to replace its earlier losses over Britain, the further depletion of its operational bomber strength during the six-month struggle of ‘Barbarossa’ – the titanic invasion of the Soviet Union – was acutely felt. By the time that the USA entered the war in December 1941, the Luftwaffe theoretically fielded only 47 per cent of its intended bomber strength. And, with roughly half of these aircraft actually being in commission, the Luftwaffe possessed just 468 serviceable operational bombers by the first week of December 1941.
The true importance of the Luftwaffe failing to knock the British out of the war during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, then, lies in the potent butterfly effect that this failure triggered. Its disappointing aerial campaign over Britain may not have guaranteed Nazi Germany’s eventual defeat, but the unfavourable outcome had certainly robbed the Axis of being able to secure a swift, decisive and straightforward victory by 1941.
Thus, as Herbert Rieckhoff – formerly the Geschwaderkommodore of the bomber wing KG 30 – later confirmed, “the first blow from which [the Luftwaffe] never recovered came in the late summer of 1940, during the fight against England. This was followed by the Blitz against England in 1940/41, in which it slowly continued to bleed out.”
Fighter Command, then, had not only saved Britain from going down the darkest of timelines. It had also helped to wear down the German airmen’s resources and resolve. In doing so, it helped set a crucial precedent for the Luftwaffe’s chronic overexertion during the latter half of the Second World War.
Timeline: The Luftwaffe's assault on Britain
10 July 1940
The Battle of Britain begins
The intensification of German air attacks against Allied shipping in the English Channel marks the opening of the ‘Channel Battle’. The Luftwaffe flies more than 1,300 sorties during this five-week phase. 13 August
Hitler ramps up the pressure
‘Eagle Day’ sees the Luftwaffe beginning a full-scale assault on RAF airfields, radar installations and other critical defence infra-
structure. The Germans lose 48 aircraft in the air, compared to 13 for the British. 15 August
A black day for the Luftwaffe
The Luftwaffe loses a further 75 aircraft on what it dubs ‘Black Thursday’. Fighter Command, which sustains less than half of the losses incurred by the Germans, hails this ‘The Greatest Day’. 18 August
‘The Hardest Day’
Fierce air battles over southern England, including RAF Kenley and Biggin Hill, result in Fighter Command losing 68 fighters to 69 Luftwaffe aircraft downed – the heaviest daily combined loss for both sides. 24/25 August
Britain bombs Berlin
Perceiving stray German bombs that accidentally hit residential London areas on 24 August to be deliberate, Winston Churchill greenlights a retaliatory blow against Berlin on 25 August. 7 September
London is hit hard
Göring launches his first thunderous attack on London and other neighbouring cities, describing it as “a stroke right into the enemy’s heart”. A total of 448 British civilians are killed and 1,337 are injured. 17 September
Hitler shelves invasion plans
During a raid on London, Portsmouth and Southampton on 15 September, the Luftwaffe loses two aircraft for every British fighter lost. Two days later, Hitler postpones Operation Sealion indefinitely. 31 October
The Battle of Britain comes to an end
The Germans launch their final daylight raid before the solely nocturnal phase of the Blitz gets under way. This signals the end of the Battle of Britain. 14-15 November
Coventry takes a pounding
The Luftwaffe inflicts a deadly raid on Coventry. The bombing kills 554, while a third of the city’s houses are destroyed and Coventry Cathedral is razed to the ground. 10-11 May 1941
The last major raid
With 1,500 civilians killed, 10–11 May marks London’s ‘Hardest Night’ of the Blitz. By the end of the Blitz that month, around 43,000 British civilians have lost their lives.
Victoria Taylor is an aviation historian. Her new book, Eagle Days: Life and Death for the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, is out now, published by Apollo
This column was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>A hill to die on: why the Allies almost failed in the battle of Monte Cassino in WW2https://www.historyextra.com/membership/battle-of-monte-cassino-1944-italy-rome-what-happened-allied-leadership/2025-01-23T09:59:43.000ZFor the men of the US 34th ‘Red Bulls’ Infantry Division, just getting up onto the Monte Cassino massif was an achievement. To reach this rocky outcrop, in late January 1944 those troops had crossed a two-mile-wide flooded valley, an area laced with enemy mines and overlooked by German troops in the mountains above.
The weather was cold, wet and miserable, and the Americans’ route had taken them across a badly smashed causeway that offered an easy target for enemy artillery. Those troops had then traversed the bed of the Rapido river, which was impossible for tanks to cross, and clambered up into the hills and gulleys that comprise the lower reaches of the towering massif. Finally, they had slipped and scrambled their way up onto two of the ridges that cross Monte Cassino.
By 6 February, the Second Battalion of the 135th Infantry, one of the three regiments of the Red Bulls, was within a stone’s throw of Point 593, the rocky outcrop at the end of one of these long ridges dubbed ‘Snakeshead Ridge’ by the Americans. The Germans launched a frenzied assault to displace them, only for the Red Bulls to counter-attack.
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Bayonets fixed, shooting from the hip, they moved from rock to rock, picking their way through the increasingly loose and stony terrain along the narrow ridge. Bullets were zipping and pinging all around, mortars and grenades were exploding, and shrapnel and lethal shards of razor-sharp rock were fizzing through the air.
“There was a lot of screaming and cursing,” recalled 23-year-old Sergeant Ralph Schaps from Minnesota. “We were not going to let the goddam krauts push us off the hill.” So close was the fighting that a rifle butt smashed into Schaps’ jaw but, somehow, he survived.
The Red Bulls prevailed, though Point 593 itself remained tantalisingly in enemy hands. Schaps found an abandoned bottle of brandy, which he swilled around his mouth. After spitting out some blood and fragments of teeth, he took a couple more swigs and started to feel better.
A costly campaign
The Americans were now looking down over the far side of the Monte Cassino massif, directly onto the Liri Valley and, more importantly, onto Highway 6, the ancient Via Casilina – the main road north. If they could reach it, the entire German Gustav Line – the system of defences constructed across Italy from the mouth of the Garigliano river on the Tyrrhenian Sea to the mouth of the Sangro on the Adriatic, south-east of Pescara – would be unlocked and the route to Rome, around 75 miles to the north-west as the crow flies, laid wide open.
All of which raises the question: if things were going so well at this point, why did the battle result in such a waste of lives, with the Allies suffering at least 55,000 casualties?
It can be partly explained by difficult terrain and awful weather conditions; heavy rain fell almost continuously through much of the previous winter. Yet, though this was clearly a terrible place and time to fight, there were sound reasons to do so – and, were it not for lamentable failures of leadership, casualties might have been far fewer.
The Allied invasion of mainland Italy in September 1943 had four key aims: to ensure that Italy was knocked out of the war for good; to draw German troops away from the eastern front and soon-to-be-opened western fronts; to capture Rome; and, perhaps most importantly, to take control of the airfield complex around Foggia, in Puglia near the spur on Italy’s heel, from where heavy bombers could further tighten the noose around Nazi Germany by bombing the southern Reich.
Three of these four aims had been achieved swiftly after the initial landings at Salerno, south-east of Naples, on 9 September. However, by early 1944 Rome still eluded the Allies. In addition, having captured Foggia in September 1943, they needed to ensure that it wasn’t retaken by the Germans, who had more divisions in Italy than the Allies did.
Establishing a buffer of at least 50 miles north of Rome was, therefore, a priority. That’s why, in early 1944, the Allies were desperately trying to break through mountain defences to clear a route to the capital.
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By the time the Red Bulls approached Point 593, the German forces had already suffered a battering at the hands of a polyglot international force led by General Mark Clark, commander of the US Fifth Army. The ferocity of the onslaught had so depleted the troops of the German 44th Hoch und Deutschmeister Division, which was defending the Monte Cassino massif, that its numbers were down to about 800 men from a full-strength complement of 15,000.
That high level of casualties explains why, all things considered and despite the privations their troops had endured, the Americans had enjoyed a comparatively easy time getting up onto the massif.
Though they’d mounted a highly effective defence up to that point, almost every senior German commander in Italy now believed that the time had come to pull back. In the north of the country, mountains stretched almost continuously across the peninsula between Pisa and Rimini, forming a natural barrier. Defences were already being built along this new front, where supply lines were shorter and positions easier to maintain.With German forces in retreat on the eastern front, and with an Allied assault imminent west of the Reich, it made sense to cut losses and withdraw to this defensive line far north of Rome.
The führer’s folly
Hitler, though, refused to cede ground – and his supremo in Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, was determined to do the führer’s bidding.
- On the podcast | Keith Lowe tells the story of the liberation of Naples, the first major European city to be freed by the Allies during the Second World War
The result was an appalling misuse of infantry divisions: units were pulled apart, sent hither and thither, filling holes and gaps, and being butchered as a result. The replacements that arrived were largely older men and teenagers with little training.
So worried was General der Panzertruppe Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, the German XIV Corps commander, that he decided to risk the wrath of Kesselring and Hitler, and made one more personal appeal to withdraw. “This proposal,” von Senger noted tersely in his diary, “was not approved.” By doggedly defending the Gustav Line, Kesselring was committing his troops to ever more sacrifice – and for no tangible long-term benefit.
Whatever the shortcomings of the overall German approach, the situation at Monte Cassino was being bolstered. Reinforcements were hurriedly sent forward, including the 90 Panzergrenadier Division and First Fallschirmjäger (Airborne) Division. Sent to take command was General Ernst-Günther Baade, a highly intelligent, experienced and skilful leader.
Baade immediately organised the defence of Monte Cassino far more effectively. He created two linked rings of defence, rather like a figure of eight, with Point 593 where the two circles met. This meant that, should it be overrun, heavy fire could be directed on the attackers from each side, allowing the defenders to quickly retake it.
Manning machine guns and mortars effectively required some skill and training, but the key was to avoid giving up ground and to keep firing. The newly arrived Fallschirmjäger, though hideously understrength, were ideally placed to do this, with enough experienced warriors to ensure that the under-trained teenage replacements could provide stout defence.
Among those now defending Point 593 were Major Rudolf Kratzert and his Third Battalion of the Third Fallschirmjäger Regiment, which reached Monte Cassino with just 236 troops rather than the 1,000 he should have been commanding. (It was one of his men who walloped Ralph Schaps.) Time and again, the Red Bulls tried to take Point 593 and the parallel Phantom Ridge and Colle d’Angelo. Every time, they were pushed back.
Down in the valley, US commanders reckoned that one more push would do it – but they had no idea of Baade’s defensive system, and could not see how these narrow ridgelines were canalising the attackers. Rather than attacking on a broad front and overwhelming the enemy, the Americans were forced to inch forward companies of 100 or fewer men across bare rock, while being mown down by mortars, grenades and machine guns.
The Red Bulls were rapidly running out of steam. So General Sir Harold Alexander, the Allied Army Group Commander, created the New Zealand Corps comprising men from the New Zealand Second Division, Fourth Indian Division and British 78th Division.
Leading that new force was New Zealand Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg VC, the most senior divisional commander, who had already briefly led a corps in Tunisia. He’d won his Victoria Cross on the western front during the First World War, but he was no great intellect – and, compounding this deficiency, he’d been given no corps staff.
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Political sensitivities
As General Clark quickly discovered, Freyberg had been horribly over-promoted. Yet the Fifth Army commander’s hands were tied because of political sensitivities. The New Zealanders represented a British dominion, and were punching significantly above their weight in the war. There were also morale problems.
Some 6,000 Kiwi veterans of the North Africa campaign had been sent home on furlough – only to discover that large numbers of their compatriots had avoided the draft. Most of these experienced soldiers refused to return for a second stint until those exempted had done their first. News of this mutiny spread to New Zealanders in Italy, and Clark had been warned to tread carefully.
Freyberg’s shortcoming shouldn’t have been an issue, because commanding the Fourth Indian Division was the extremely able Major-General Francis Tuker, a soldier who could provide the strategic thinking that Freyberg lacked. Having arrived at the front ahead of Freyberg, Tuker soon realised that the only rational option was to abandon the Monte Cassino massif and to instead attack farther north.
There the ground was higher but wider and less scored with gulleys, fissures and narrow ridges. It was also significantly less well defended. Tuker additionally suggested mounting a crossing of the Rapido where the Texans had earlier attempted, but this time with properly planned fire support (which the Texans had, inexplicably, not used).
Freyberg readily supported these suggestions – then disaster struck: Tuker was hit by a crippling bout of rheumatoid arthritis, and had to be taken to hospital. Left without Tuker’s strategic vision, the easily swayed Freyberg was influenced by the views of the US II Corps commander General Geoffrey Keyes and General Charles ‘Doc’ Ryder, commanding the Red Bulls, who both questioned Tuker’s plans.
Neither had been on the mountain, and were unaware of the situation on the ground. Freyberg was persuaded to continue the assault on the Monte Cassino massif. When Tuker learned of this change of tack, he forced himself from his hospital bed to plead with Freyberg – but found the New Zealander deaf to his arguments.
Tuker pointed out the problems of troops attacking along narrow ridges, and suggested that the only way to break the German defences was with an overwhelming bombardment of the entire massif using high-capacity 2,000lb and 4,000lb ‘bunker buster’ bombs. Among other things, this would be necessary to destroy the tall, thick stone walls of the ancient Benedictine abbey perched at the end of the massif, which the Allies believed housed a German observation post.
“The 1,000lb bomb,” Tuker told Freyberg in a follow-up note, “would be next to useless to effect this.” Heavy four-engine bombers were needed, not fighter-bombers, and the bombing should be carefully co-ordinated with an immediate infantry attack to follow. “The essence of the bombardment,” Tuker added, “should be its obliterating weight, suddenness and duration and the immediate continuance of the bombing by artillery bombardment and infantry attack early in the night under the artillery bombardment.”
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Fatal misunderstanding
Tuker’s intention had been to shock Freyberg into readopting his original plan. Instead, the New Zealander headed to Clark’s command post, where he demanded an air assault using single-prop ‘Kittybombers’ and 1,000- pounders to destroy the abbey.
How Freyberg could have so badly misunderstood Tuker’s suggestions is hard to fathom: the latter had followed up his personal visit, conducted in acute pain, with written instructions so that there was no chance of mistaking his very specific plans.
Clark was, understandably, opposed to destroying the abbey for what seemed to him to be no good reason. The way Freyberg presented it, there was no co-ordinated plan involving the infantry or the destruction of other German positions on the massif. Moreover, the historic site was originally founded in the sixth century, and the Allies aimed to portray themselves as liberators, not cultural vandals. Clark appealed to Alexander, who backed Freyberg. Had Freyberg been American, it’s clear, Clark would have kicked this plan into the long grass.
The bombing itself was a catastrophe. The Fourth Indian Division was delayed in getting onto the mountain, because so many of the surviving Red Bulls had to be carried back down, and because different ammunition had to be brought up. In addition, in Tuker’s absence his command had passed to Brigadier Dimoline, the division’s artillery commander, who had neither the experience nor the strength of character to impose himself.
Having finally ascended onto the massif, the Fifth Indian Brigade discovered that – despite being told otherwise – Point 593 was still in German hands, and hatched plans to capture it first in a preliminary assault on the night of 15 February. That morning, however, without any warning from Freyberg or anyone else, they learned that the bombers would arrive to unleash their loads at any moment.
There was to be no co-ordination between air and ground forces. The strategic air forces had a weather window and a gap in action elsewhere, so flew over quickly, dropping a handful of 1,000-pounders but mostly 500-pounders – far less powerful than the bombs that Tuker had insisted would be necessary.
True, the abbey was destroyed, leaving a shattered wreck of tumbling debris and killing hundreds of civilians sheltering there – though not, it seems, a single German. But when the First Royal Sussex tried to take Point 593 that night, they failed. So did a subsequent attack the following night and, with it, the chance of swiftly clearing Monte Cassino. The Germans held firm in their figure-of-eight positions, with the Fourth Indian Division, supported by the Texans on their right flank, holding the Allied half of the massif.
A subsequent German counter-attack in Italy – Operation Fischfang, launched on 16 February at Anzio on the coast between Cassino and Rome – was thwarted by the Allies. This only served to re-emphasise the challenges of launching a successful offensive in this inhospitable terrain during a savage winter.
Alexander thus decided to wait for better weather before the next push, and to bring both the Eighth Army – mainly on the Adriatic flank of Italy – and Fifth Army side by side, to hammer German supply lines with air power and then to strike along a broad front once he had built up overwhelming strength.
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Alexander was, though, persuaded to make one more attempt on Monte Cassino and at capturing the town below. Rain fell solidly for more than three weeks, so the attack was not launched until 15 March. Freyberg was still in place – a situation that Clark, much to his frustration, was unable to change, such were Allied politics.
This time, Freyberg insisted on obliterating Cassino town with the same weight of bombs and shells Tuker had suggested for the mountain above. The town was destroyed but, instead of sending in overwhelming numbers of tanks and infantry immediately after, as Clark had instructed, a couple of battalions carefully inched into the town from one direction only.
Overnight, the Germans reinforced – and the chance to sweep through the town was lost. What followed was a brutal attritional battle amid the ruins. After this debacle, the New Zealand Corps was finally dissolved and Freyberg posted away from the immediate firing line.
With the arrival of spring, the ground hardened. Alexander was able to bring his two armies side by side and, with the advantages in men and materials he had always wanted, on the night of 11 May he launched Operation Diadem. Monte Cassino fell on 18 May to the Polish II Corps in what was their first battle. It was the Poles, after their initial assault had failed, who finally discovered the secret of the figure-of-eight defences.
Once Monte Cassino was taken, the entrance to the strategically vital Liri Valley – and the route to the capital – was secured, and the Allies pushed rapidly north. Rome fell on 4 June.
Diadem was a great Allied victory – an operation that showed what could be achieved when skies were cleared, the ground was dry, and commanders had time to plan and prepare properly. Yet it is the earlier setbacks, and especially the images of the shattered abbey and the utterly obliterated town below, that continue to define the campaign in Italy, rather than the enormity of the victory two days before D-Day. The tragedy is that these dark stains on the campaign were so very avoidable.
This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>Dudley Clarke: the spy who hoodwinked Hitlerhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/dudley-clarke-podcast-long-reads-robert-hutton/2024-10-14T06:30:30.000ZDummy tanks at El Alamein, bogus generals in Algiers, sham armies on D-Day – all were ruses masterminded by World War II's master of deception Dudley Clarke. This Long Read, written by Robert Hutton, tells the story of the British soldier who made an art form of duping the Nazis.
HistoryExtra Long Reads brings you the best articles from BBC History Magazine, direct to your ears. Today’s feature originally appeared in the September 2024 issue, and has been voiced in partnership with the RNIB.
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