The Daring Dozen

World War II was the first conflict of the modern age. While the Great War of 1914–18 had much in common with the American Civil War of the 1860s and the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, World War II benefited from the rapid technological advances of the 20th century. There were modern aircraft (even jet aircraft by the end of the war), powerful radio communications, light and rapid motorized transport, mobile armoured vehicles and new and destructive weapons, from Germany’s flying bombs to sub-machine guns such as the Sten and the Schmeisser MP40.

Unfortunately many senior officers, irrespective of nationality, failed to grasp the potential of the innovations, or how soldiering might change in this new world. For them, war was still fought along the lines of the massed infantry attacks of World War I.

The man who did much to alter this moribund mindset, certainly on the Allies’ side, was British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. After German paratroopers had jumped into the Low Countries in May 1940 with such devastating effect, Churchill knew the British must produce their own Special Forces to counter them and to inspire fear among the enemy. On 5 June 1940 he ordered his Chiefs of Staff to ‘propose me measures for a vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive’. What sprang from the memo was the first Commando unit.

Yet despite the enthusiastic endorsement of the Prime Minister, the formation of these special units was viewed with distaste by many senior officers within the British Army and, later, in the American high command. This cabal of Luddites considered Commando units as ‘irregular’ or ‘renegades’, an affront to civilized soldiering.

Fortunately there were enough younger officers with sufficient boldness and determination to pursue their vision of what modern warfare should entail. One of the most famous was a 25-year-old Scottish lieutenant called David Stirling, the founder of the Special Air Service; he called the superannuated staff officers ‘freemasons of mediocrity’.
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In North Africa, in 1941, Stirling saw that the Desert War was ripe for irregular warfare; the vast, uninhabited regions of the Libyan Desert could be exploited by small units of highly trained, motivated and well-equipped men. It was a theatre made for hit-and-run raids, as was the war in the Pacific, the fighting in Burma and much of the conflict in Western Europe. And it wasn’t just on land that the nature of warfare had irrevocable changed. At sea the mechanical and technological progress of the 20th century had opened up new opportunities for destruction. One of the first to recognize this was the brilliant Italian naval commander Junio Valerio Borghese, whose human torpedo unit caused grave trouble for the Royal Navy in 1941–42. The following year the British Special Boat Squadron wreaked havoc of its own kind on Axis forces using lightweight kayaks and small but powerful explosives.

The men featured in this book fully deserve to be called ‘daring’. But there was more to the Daring Dozen – arguably the 12 most important British, American, German and Italian Special Forces leaders of the war – than just personal audacity. Between them, these men pioneered the concept of Special Forces, often struggling to establish and maintain their special units against opponents within their own armed forces. They were determined enough to press on despite what Stirling called the ‘fossilized shits’ among the top brass who stood in their way. They were courageous enough to put their theories into practice against the enemy, but above all they had the self-belief to persevere when – as in the early days they often did – their plans went awry.

They had something else in common, too. They shared a common attitude, a creed best encapsulated by one of World War II’s finest guerrilla fighters, ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert:

If we have got to fight in this world we prefer to fight where any skill or initiative counts a lot, and where even on the smallest scale it is possible to practice the art of war against a personal opponent rather than just being pawns in a very large operation.
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Lake Comacchio has been likened in terrain to the Fens, that marshy land leaking out from the Wash on England’s east coast. Situated between Rimini to the south and Venice to the north on Italy’s Adriatic coast, the shallow and fetid waters of Lake Comacchio are a haven to the myriad breeds of fish as well as a million and more mosquitoes. A thin strip of sand, known as ‘the spit’, separates the eastern edge of the lake from the Adriatic Sea and several small islands are dotted across the lake, which stretches for five miles at its widest point and 20 at its longest.

In the spring of 1945, as the Allies swept north through Italy, Lake Comacchio was still in the hands of the Germans, whose seasoned troops under the command of General Heinrich von Vietinghoff were well dug in among the reeds and alongside the causeways of the lake’s shores. The eastern side was defended by the 162nd Turkoman Division with dozens of mines sewn into the thin strip of sand.

The lake posed a problem for the Allies, blocking as it did the progress north of Lieutenant-General Mark Clark’s V Corps and of the British Eighth Army as they sought to overrun the retreating Germans. The solution was Operation
Grapeshot
. On 6 April a southern promontory was seized by the British 56th Division and 700 enemy soldiers fell into Allied hands as the first stage of the operation was accomplished successfully. Now Clark was nearly ready to launch the next stage of his assault on Comacchio, sending 2 Commando and 9 Commando to secure a bridgehead on the northern shore of the lake preparatory to the main attack.

Appreciating the hazardous nature of his task, the brigadier of the Commandos, Ronnie Tod, instructed the Special Boat Squadron (SBS) to create a diversionary raid on the German positions on the eastern shore in the hope of fooling the Germans into deploying troops from the north shore to repel the assault.

The man chosen to lead the diversionary raid was Major Anders Frederik Emil Victor Schau Lassen, or as he preferred to be called, ‘Andy’. The 25-year-old Dane was a holder of a Military Cross and two Bars, and a reputation as the finest fighter in the Special Boat Squadron. His commanding officer, George Jellicoe, considered Lassen to have ‘all the qualities of the buccaneering Viking – extraordinary courage, physical endurance, devil-may-care and keenness’.

In the wake of the raid on Comacchio Lassen would have something else – a Victoria Cross, the first for a member of the British Special Forces, but it would come at a terrible price.

Lassen was born on 22 September 1920 to Emil, a captain in the Danish Lifeguards, and his wife, Suzanne, a writer whose children’s books had earned her fame and fortune throughout Scandinavia. Lassen was born in the family home, a mansion near Mern in South Zealand that boasted nearly as many rooms as it did acres, an ideal stamping ground for a young boy to grow up in.

As boys Lassen and his younger brother Frants spent hours roaming the woods that encircled the family home, exploring as far as the coastline that lay two miles from the house, and learning how to fire a rifle and use a bow and arrow. Their parents did little to check their behaviour and Anders developed a reputation as a wild boy at school, charming but occasionally cruel in his humour. He felt imprisoned by the classroom, lessons bored him – except nature studies – and he resented having to wear a school uniform. One female childhood acquaintance of Lassen’s described him thus many years later: ‘I remember very clearly his incredible beauty, the looks of the perfect hero – but I was repelled by his aggressive, macho behaviour.’

Tall, athletic, blond and blue-eyed, Lassen conformed to the Danish stereotype, but there was far more to him than beauty. Though he had not done particularly well at school, Lassen was intelligent and forceful, and imbued with the self-confidence of the privileged. To no one’s great surprise, Lassen declared peremptorily at the start of 1939 that he was going to sea to discover the world. He sailed from Denmark in June that year aboard the
Elenora Maersk
, a merchant tanker skippered by Captain P.V.J. Pedersen. Lassen was just 18, but a few months later he was the ringleader of a mutiny.

On 9 April 1940 the 16,500-ton
Elenora Maersk
was en route towards the Persian Gulf when news reached them of the German invasion of Denmark. Captain Pedersen said there was nothing they could do and ordered the oil tanker to continue on its way. But Lassen demanded they hold a council of war among the ship’s company, the outcome of which that the vessel sailed out of neutral waters to British-held Bahrain. ‘Mutinied in the Persian Gulf,’ wrote Lassen in his diary.

It took Lassen a further eight months to negotiate his passage to Britain, but on Christmas Eve 1940 he stepped ashore at Oban on the west coast of Scotland. From there he travelled to Newcastle, then on to London where, on 25 January 1941, he became one of the 467 Danes who would enlist in the British armed forces during the war. On joining the Free Danes, as they were then known, Lassen swore an oath of allegiance to King Christian X and also vowed ‘to serve loyally whatever authority is working against the enemy that occupied my Fatherland’.

If Lassen had been expecting imminent action he was sadly disabused. The war in early 1941 was not going well for Britain, which stood alone against Nazi Germany in Europe and against Italy in Africa. The only glimpse of an enemy that Lassen saw in those first, dragging months were the Luftwaffe bombers overhead, targeting Britain’s cities and docks.

Instead of seeing action, Lassen was ordered to Scotland to undergo weeks of training at Arisaig, a remote spot on the west coast of Scotland just south of the Isle of Skye. Lassen and 16 other Danes were put through a series of demanding physical and mental tests as their British instructors assessed their suitability for Special Operations Executive (SOE). One of the assessors was Brook Richards, a former naval commander who had joined the organization a few weeks earlier. He described Lassen as ‘a remarkable young Dane’ and remembered in particular his unshakeable conviction as to the outcome of the war. ‘He started telling everybody how important it was for Denmark’s future that Denmark should be fighting [for] the Allied cause because the Allies were going to win,’ reflected Richards. ‘For a 19-year-old (he was actually 20 at this time) this is really rather a remarkable vision.’
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