Short URL for this page:
bit.ly/SAUCOC2

[Much of my site will be useless to you if you've got the images turned off!]
mail:
Bill Thayer 		[Link to a series of help pages]
Help 		[Link to the next level up]
Up 		[Link to my homepage]
Home
previous:
[Link to previous section]
Chapter 1 		This webpage reproduces a chapter of

Combined Operations
by Hilary St. George Saunders

published by The Macmillan Company
New York,
1943

The text is in the public domain.

This page has been carefully proofread
and I believe it to be free of errors.
If you find a mistake though,
please let me know!

next:
[Link to next section]
Chapter 3

 p9  2. Training for Attack

Special Service Troops are not the only contingent of the Army who raid the enemy. Many units, American as well as British and Dominion, notably those who took part in the operations against French North Africa, have passed through the Combined Training Centres; many more will do so. Those so trained — and already they number many thousands — will form part of the spearhead of the great offensive when it begins.

One of the first objects of the instruction given at these centres is to make sure that officers and men of the Army become familiar with the way of life pursued by officers and men of the Navy. Thus it is arranged that both live in close contact with each other, sharing the same quarters, eating in the same mess and sleeping in the same conditions. The life of the soldiers immediately takes on a strong naval flavour; they learn to find their way about a ship, to pull a cutter, to enter and leave a small boat, and many other naval matters. Their interest is quickly stimulated; their outlook and speech begin to change; their minds become filled with naval expressions, naval oaths, and naval slang; they begin to grasp, a little vaguely at first but with swiftly increasing understanding, the meaning of a tradition which has endured for as many centuries as their own. The pride of both Services turns to mutual esteem and therefore to mutual advantage.

A great and success­ful effort is being made at these centres to achieve a real understanding between the Army and the Navy. The cheers which, one summer day in 1942, greeted the victory of a crew of sergeants and other ranks belonging to the Duke of Wellington's Regiment in a cutter race against a crew of naval ratings, might have caused a superficial observer to imagine that what he was watching was a meeting of a Mutual Admiration Society. He would have been very wrong. Such an understanding, of which this was a small manifestation, shows the existence, not only of good feeling but of the conviction that a task common to both must be carried through by methods each can use and  p10 understand. On the 19th August, 1942, a sergeant brought back from Dieppe to England an assault landing craft whose entire naval crew had been killed or grievously wounded. He navigated her by means of an Army compass, since that with which the boat was fitted had been damaged. Such a feat, performed in the ordinary course of duty, is a vindication, if any be needed, of the methods used at these centres.

It is not necessary to enter into details of the training; to do so would be to give information which the enemy would be glad to possess. It must suffice that it is comprehensive, vigorous, and designed to make the fullest and most intelligent use of that spirit of attack which is the secret of the warrior. The Commandos undergo such training in order to fit them for raiding, the purpose for which they were called into being. The armed forces of the United Nations in their thousands are undergoing it so that they may deliver, when the time comes, a sustained and victorious onslaught upon our fierce, our mortal foe.

As with the soldiers, so with the sailors. They are trained to handle the strange diversity of craft used to put the army ashore, take it off after a raid and keep it supplied when on shore. These craft are of curious and unexpected shape. Some of them, such as the assault landing and the tank landing craft, look like oblong floating boxes of steel, and bear as much resemblance to the ordinary conception of a boat as a tank does to a motor car. They are the remote offspring of the "River Clyde," which represented at Gallipoli in 1915 the first attempt to give some protection to troops landing on beaches swept by the fire of the enemy.

The Craft and the Crews

The Combined Operations Development Centre at Portsmouth, formed in 1936, produced the first specially-designed armoured landing craft. It carried thirty‑six men in addition to a naval crew, and drew only •nine inches forward. It was self-propelled, proof against rifle and machine‑gun fire, and could be carried at the davits of a merchant ship. The factors governing the design of such craft, whether they are to land troops, tanks, vehicles or artillery, correspond to the requirements for success. These are — speed in getting on to the beaches, protection during the process, ability to put troops ashore on as wide a front as possible, the provision of covering fire during the assault and the maintenance of supplies in its early stages. Craft such as these are far from handy; their blunt bows, which open to release down hinged ramps, men, tanks or  p11 vehicles, are ill fitted to plough through a head sea, and their flat bottoms make them poor sea boats in rough or even choppy water. They are of several kinds and dimensions, and are powered mostly by American engines.

In contrast to the blunt-nosed assault craft, there is the personnel landing craft of American construction. it is a motor vessel, fast and seaworthy; but it is of small size and has no armour. It is used mostly at night.

Landing craft are carried by infantry landing ships, originally known as assault ships, of which many were employed in the days of peace in the less hazardous task of carrying travellers on their lawful occasions to ports all over the world. When on an operation they are escorted by various types of motor gunboat, motor torpedo boat and motor launch. These are fast — some of them very fast — and they make up what are known as our Light Coastal Forces. Their exploits have been described in many Admiralty communiqués. Behind them are the destroyers detailed to act as covering forces, if necessary; and behind these, ultimately, is the Home Fleet.

The officers and men who man the landing craft, the gunboats and launches are, for a great part, enlisted for the duration of hostilities only — the H. O.s as they are known in the Royal Navy. It is in the handling of such craft that the experience of the Merchant Navy officer, now an officer with the Royal Naval Reserve, and of the peacetime yachtsman, now a member of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, is of the greatest value. There is something, perhaps much, to be said in wartime for the enthusiastic amateur who carries out his duties under the guidance and command of regular officers of the Royal Navy. Such men know the waters round these islands and those that wash the western coasts of Holland, Belgium and France as few know them, and when it comes to putting ashore a few dozen men of a Commando in a quiet Breton cove or several battalions of assault-trained infantry on half a dozen scattered beaches, that knowledge tells.

When not on patrol or engaged in an operation, they live in shore establishments run on strictly naval lines. When a car arrives, for instance, to take someone away, the naval sentry will report that it is "alongside"; the bedrooms are "cabins"; the living room "the ward-room"; the terrace fronting the estuary, where strong-winged duck fly in season above the opalescent mud, is the "quarter deck." Here they train as strenuously as does the army, and here, too, their craft are maintained  p12 and repaired. Much of this, and all the office work, is done by the members of the Women's Royal Naval Service — the Wrens. Ratings belonging to this famous corps also handle picket boats and other small harbour craft and by so doing, have earned the nickname "Water Hens."

The training undergone is designed to overcome the problems of approaching the shore, landing on it, remaining off it within instant call and re‑embarking troops from it. Much of it appears highly unorthodox. Men who, for years, have regarded running a ship aground as the first, last and most perfect example of professional incompetence, now spend their days doing little else. How to beach, when to beach, how long to remain aground, how best to use a kedge for getting off, how to avoid the disaster of stripping a propeller — these are some of the problems they learn to master. They need no Canute to tell them that the tide never stands still. If it is going out, then the landing craft must be continually eased down the beach towards deeper water or she will become stranded. If the tide is coming in, she must be driven with it up the beach or a cross wind may catch her and put her bows about.

"The business of keeping a ship beached but not stranded, shuffling it on its belly up and down the shore while it is being loaded or unloaded, possibly under fire, is no game for any but the trained." It is here that the man joined for war service only is especially suitable. To one accustomed to years of service in a destroyer, a cruiser or a battle­ship, this art of beaching — for it is an art — seems sometimes a little peculiar; but the man who a few months before was a foreman, a clerk or a salesman, has never known any other form of naval existence and does not therefore have to overcome the habits of half a lifetime. "The good thing about this job," says one of them, "is that we all know we are doing something that has never been done before."

The living accommodations on these craft is very cramped, even in the larger types of motor gunboats. When the army is on board there is very little room indeed. The captain of a gunboat once tried to reach his quarters. He returned baffled to his bridge and was heard to mutter, "There are fifty soldiers frying bacon in my wardroom." Close co‑operation between the services is of the body as well as of the mind.

One of the most important and dangerous duties is that performed by the Beachmaster and his opposite number, the Military Landing Officer. They work as a team and their task is to control the beaches with the help of Assistant Beachmasters and Unit Landing Officers. They must see that the beach is clearly marked so that craft moving in later will not  p13 mistake it; they must discover and mark the best exits from it towards the country behind; they must attend to craft coming ashore, to the hauling-away of vehicles which may have become stuck in the sand or shingle and to the re‑floating of craft aground. For this and other purposes the Bulldozer, a small tracked vehicle with a movable steel shovel in front of it and tremendous pushing power, is invaluable. It is the Beachmasters who call in the boats to take off the men returning from a raid; while on the beaches they are, indeed, at once the constable on point duty and the foreman in charge of the delivery van.

Air Co‑operation and Airborne Assault

The training of the Royal Air Force in combined operations is proceeding side by side with that of the other two services. Its most obvious task is to provide in daylight air cover for the craft carrying the troops and for the naval forces protecting them, and close support during the attack. Co‑operation with the Army, which in this war began with the campaign in Flanders, is the special business of Army Co‑operation Command. More and more squadrons are coming into service with it, some of which shared in the great air victory over Dieppe.

Just as the Royal Navy puts the infantry ashore in small boats, so does the Royal Air Force take parachute or glider-borne troops to their objectives. The main difference between the two operations lies in the training. Airborne troops have the harder task. They jump, not from the ramp of an assault landing craft, but from the belly of an aircraft. For this they require special training and equipment. After a preliminary period of jumping from a platform and a caravan balloon, they practise dropping from an aircraft, first in "slow" then in "quick" pairs, until they are proficient enough to drop in "sticks." This they do through a hole in the floor of the fuselage above which are two lights — a red switched on when the pilot is beginning his run‑in to the dropping zone and a green indicating that the moment to jump has arrived. Each man in turn slips in a sitting position from the edge of the hole. His parachute is on his back carried in a bag divided into two sections. He first falls the length of his "strop," a cord of which one end is firmly attached to the aircraft, the other being joined to a length of cord known as his "static line." This is housed in the top half of the bag and on becoming taut pulls out the rigging lines which in turn pull out the canopy. The whole process takes between two and three seconds.

"On falling through the hole your legs are immediately blown sidewards  p14 by the slip stream and you find yourself parallel to the ground. A moment later there is a nibbling feeling at your shoulders; the canopy has opened; but the jerk is no harder than that made by a fair-sized trout when you hook it. After that, all sensation of falling ends. When near the ground, it is the earth moving up to meet you and not you meeting the earth, which you notice." The landing is no light matter. Only those who have jumped off the roof of a slowly-moving train can have an idea of what it is like. It was troops trained on these lines who seized the North African airfields and formed the spearhead of the First Army.

The pilots of the aircraft carrying the airborne troops must be most exactly trained. They have to drop live bodies, not live bombs; and while a bomb may do much damage even if it does not fall directly on the target, an airborne soldier can effect nothing and will in all probability very swiftly become a casualty unless he is dropped exactly in the right place and in the company of all or most of his comrades. Troops carried in gliders are also trained with the Royal Air Force, whose aircraft tow the gliders and whose fighters afford them the most necessary protection. The pilots belong to the Army but are trained by the Air Force.

Much of the air support given in a combined operation is indirect, in the sense that the aircraft taking part in it may be attacking targets many miles distant from the centre of the raid. Bombers can be, and are, used to prevent the arrival of reinforcements, to break up tank concentrations, and generally to harass the enemy striving to rush troops and aircraft to the defence of a threatened position.

In the raid on Vaagso on the 27th September, 1941, the enemy airfield at Herdla, •a hundred miles distant, was put out of action at the critical moment by a perfectly-timed bombing attack. German bombers hastening from Holland to bomb the raiding force attacking Dieppe on the 19th August, 1942, were intercepted by our fighters thirty miles or more to the north over the mouth of the Somme, while the main German fighter airfield, at Abbeville, was knocked out for the day by American Flying Fortresses.

Masters of a New Technique

Raids, large and small, are the responsibility of the Chief of Combined Operations, who plans them with the aid of a small expert staff, nearly all of whom have had practical experience in this form of warfare, and who not infrequently take an active part in the operation which they themselves have helped to plan. Their growing knowledge and experience  p15 are at the disposal at all times of those responsible for the general direction of the war, and have been put to good use. General Eisenhower, for example, has stated that in the success­ful operations on the north coast of Africa "much was owed to the assistance received from, and the work done by 'Combined Operations' in the preparatory and assault stages." These planners are becoming masters of a new technique. They belong to all three Services, and each has special knowledge of his own Service. They acquire knowledge of the other two by working closely and constantly together and discussing every problem as it arises. After every raid the lessons learnt are carefully noted and discussed, so that next time a particular mistake may be avoided, a success­ful method of attack exploited.

To aid them they have at their disposal a large and ever-increasing volume of intelligence collected from many sources at the risk of many lives, and covering everything that a raider, and presently an invader, ought to know. For the raid on Dieppe, for instance, a Confidential Book of 48 quarto pages with a compendium of maps and plans displaying in great detail the enemy's defences, known or suspected, was prepared, printed and distributed to those concerned. Without intelligence of this kind no raid, whatever its size, has much chance of success. Accurate knowledge of the enemy, of his methods of defence and counterattack, of his weapons and his morale is as indispensable as is the rifle or the grenade. On good intelligence depend both the plans and their execution. The modern soldier is no longer sent into battle with — as so often happened in the last war — only a vague, general idea of what his task is to be. He is carefully and accurately briefed, and it is intelligence which provides the material for such briefing.

So much, then, for general considerations. It is time to set down — in part only, for much must still remain secret — the story of raiding from the modest beginning on the coast of France in June 1940, to the attack on Morocco and Algiers which resulted in the occupation of those countries, and is in itself but a prelude to that final assault by which victory will be achieved.

[Valid HTML 4.01.]

Page updated: 8 Apr 22

Accessibility