The Special Boat Squadron, Anders Lassen and Halki

Major Anders Lassen VC MC (2 bars)

In summer 1940 the British Army began the training of the famous Commando units, special forces designed to raid and inflict maximum damage on German troops and installations in occupied Europe.  These activities captured the imaginations of many young men of continental origin who were stranded in Britain after the occupation of their home countries.  One such was the Danish merchant navy cadet Anders Lassen who joined one of the first commandos being trained in Scotland.  He proved to be an extraordinary military talent – extremely quick reflexes and an ability to move smoothly and silently over the ground.  This he once demonstrated by stalking and killing a stag with a knife.

He participated in one of the first commando operations, the capture of three German merchantmen lying at anchor in the Vichy French held harbour of Dakar.  They boarded the ships under cover of darkness, sank two of them and sailed the third back to Britain.  Lassen was commissioned as a result of his endeavours.  For the next two years he both trained his own countrymen as Commandos and saboteurs and participated in numerous raids on the French coast and channel islands with No 62 Commando.  By the end of 1942 the British decided to disband the Commando for security reasons (it was felt that the identities of certain of its better operators had become well known to German Intelligence) and Lassen was sent to join the Special Boat Squadron then in training at Atlit in what was then Palestine.

The SBS were what had become of a force assembled in early 1941 of Nos 7,8 and 11 Commandos under the command of Colonel Bob Laycock and known as Layforce.  They arrived in the Middle East in March 1941 and immediately set about training for the operation which had called the force into being – the occupation of the island of Rhodes from which enemy aircraft were harassing British maritime communications in the Eastern Mediterranean.  However in late March and April things took an unfortunate turn in Greece as the Wehrmacht successfully occupied the country.  Allied energies concentrated on evacuating troops from the Greek  mainland and  the vain attempt to hang onto Crete.  The Rhodes operation was cancelled.

For the rest of 1941 and 1942, the SBS as they had now become (Layforce having been disbanded), made themselves useful in various raids along the African coast, Crete, Sicily and Italy and on Rhodes, being landed in canoes (folboats) from submarines.  Their raid on Rhodes was particularly successful.  Although half the raiding party was captured, numerous aircraft were destroyed at Maritsa (the military airstrip to this day) and Calato (Kalathos), an airstrip on the plain before Lindos.  For a time they were a squadron of the SAS, founded and led by the legendary David Stirling, but resumed a more or less independent existence after his capture.  (For the record they are at present a specialised wing of the Royal Marines and their last operation about which anything is known is their role in the recapture of the Falklands in 1982.)

The SBS, which Lassen joined in early 1943, was under the command of  Major the Earl Jellicoe and was as we said in training – including a spell of ski training in the mountains of Lebanon.  Lassen was quickly absorbed into the group, despite some xenophobia from one of his British NCOs.  The two fell to fisticuffs one evening and thereafter became the best of friends.  Lassen’s obvious talents and experience won wide respect and he had, it was said, ‘immense personal charm when he cared to exert it.’ (Pitt, p.69)

Jellicoe (left) entertaining a Greek commando on board a caique

The opening gamut of the 1943 raiding season was a raid on Crete in June in which Lassen participated.  By high summer 1943, however, it was apparent that Italy was losing interest in the war and was almost certain to make a separate peace.  It was clear that there was likely to be a race between the Allied and German forces to occupy previously Italian held territory if the Italians were to lay down their arms.  One such piece of territory was, of course, the Dodecanese.

Mussolini was deposed and Marshal Badoglio made contact with the Allies.  There began that curious period of deceit, double-cross, vacillation and plain confusion which was to lead to the needless deaths of so many Italian servicemen, as readers of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin will be aware.  Though not as extensive as on Cephallonia there were to be similar scenes of mass execution of Italian servicemen on Rhodes. Including, it is reported, the throwing of unfortunate individuals out of aircraft over the sea.  A speciality, coincidentally, of the SBS’ later opponents the Argentinean Junta.

Wehrmacht General Klemaan

But I anticipate.  The governor and military commander of Rhodes and the Dodecanese was one Admiral Inigo Campioni.  It was decided to sound him out with a view to organising a surrender.  Jellicoe and two companions were parachuted into Maritsa.  They were eventually taken to Campioni who, although sympathetic, was in a difficult position.  Although he had 35 000 men on the island he had to contend with the Sturmdivision Rhodos, 10 000 men under the very capable command of Wehrmacht General Klemann.  (The local Italian division, by contrast, was known as the Retsina Division.)  Jellicoe could not offer immediate military assistance and returned to Cyprus after having observed the situation on Symi.  It was clear that there was to be a free for all.  The SBS set up a forward base at Kastellorizo with a view to picking up as many of the pieces as it could, under the command of their new commander, Brigadier Turnbull.

Italian General Campioni reviewing troops on Symi

Campioni’s indecision cost him dear.  He was outmanoeuvred by Klemann whom he allowed to occupy the key positions before the shooting started.  When it did – and it was a brisk affair costing 125 Italian and 91 German lives and more than double that wounded - the Italians were outclassed.  Italian servicemen who refused to cooperate with the Germans were shot, imprisoned or otherwise disposed of.  Many were to die when a transport they were on was torpedoed by the Allies.  Campioni himself was arrested and lived to die in Parma at the hands of a firing squad of Mussolini’s short-lived Salo Republic, court-martialled for treason in May 1944.

Tanks outside Rhodes Old Town

The fate of Rhodes was settled but the situation on the other islands was far from clear.  On 12 September 1943 Jellicoe sailed into the Aegean with a dozen or so caiques and launches and 55 fighting men.  Their mission was to stiffen the resistance of the Italians to the Germans, to take control of as many islands as possible until Allied reinforcements could be sent.

Cramped caiques but morale was high

Jellicoe headed to the north Dodecanese while his colleague Major Jock Lapraik (about whom much will be heard in a follow up article concerning the SBS and Symi) sailed in from Haifa with another small flotilla and managed to establish himself on Symi on 17 September.  One of his first acts was to send Anders Lassen off with a detachment to bolster the defences of that strategic speck a few miles off the coast of Rhodes – Halki.

Taken from the Naval Intelligence handbook

Lassen found the island garrisoned by twelve carabinieri, well disposed to the Allied cause.  He and his men landed stores, weapons and ammunition and built barbed wire entanglements and machine gun emplacements.  He then put the remarkably keen and co-operative carabinieri through a commando style assault course to ‘tone up their muscles.’  He gave them some instruction in basic infantry tactics.  Not much of a carrot and Lassen made sure he also provided a stick.  He threatened them with dire consequences if they did not resist German attempts to retake the island.  He would return with his men and deal with them himself.  He then left them to it.  By all accounts when the Germans did arrive to take control of the island the carabinieri resisted strenuously and inflicted several casualties.  It would be interesting to know how the Germans treated the survivors.  They must have been very brave men.

What happened on Halki was mirrored to a greater or lesser extent on all the other Dodecanse islands.  Substantial British forces which had been landed on Kos and Samos were defeated and captured by the Wehrmacht. Italian forces resisted heroically on Leros, but  like the British, were no match for Wehrmacht professionalism. The Royal Navy suffered severe losses to German aircraft.  Lapraik was forced to evacuate Symi after three months.  By the end of 1943 the Dodecanese was in German hands, the last German territorial acquisition of the Second World War.

The SBS had fought heroically throughout this period and were lucky not to have suffered serious casualties.  They resorted to their raiding role, setting up clandestine bases in the wooded coves of theoretically neutral Turkey for the purpose.  It fell to Lassen to open the 1944 raiding season and his target was, once again, Halki.

Lassen was keen to discover what had happened to the defences he had prepared.  On January 31^st he landed on Halki from a naval motor launch with four men and a Greek officer interpreter, Lt Katsikas.  He contacted the mayor who informed him that the island’s garrison now consisted of only six Italian fascists.  In Lassen’s own words:   “This hardly seemed to me to be worth the voyage but I proceeded to the police station and ordered those inside to open the doors.  They refused, so I broke the doors down.  I took the Italians prisoner, and with them, one typewriter, one shot-gun, six rifles, a wireless receiver, two Beretta machine carbines and a telephone.  I could not find any money, but I noticed a safe.  I was about to blow open this safe when I heard the sound of motor-boat engine…” (Lodwick, p.110)

This was a party of Germans over from Rhodes to drop off stores.  Lassen concealed his men and opened fire as soon as their launch came alongside the quay.  Two Germans were wounded and the other four were so shocked by the sudden ambush that they surrendered immediately.  Several hours later the launch was on its way to the secret base at Port Deremen in Turkey, loaded with its captured crew, the six Italian fascists and its cargo of general stores which included four live pigs.  It is not recorded whether Lassen continued with his attempt to blow open the safe.  Knowing his character - he was said never to be able to resist experimenting and tinkering with things - I should think it almost certain…

Back at Port Deremen the German prisoners were handed over to the intelligence Sergeant, Priestley by name, for interrogation.  In a marvellous piece of non-politically correct writing which I, as a member of the maligned race can repeat with a smile, John Lodwick (a fellow SBS officer) wrote in 1945:  “This Priestley was a South African.  I do not in any way wish to libel South Africans, but they are not conspicuous for those qualities of mercy popularly associated with Englishmen…These particular Germans knew a great deal.  Cajoled by Priestley, they told it.” (Lodwick, p.111)

Lassen, however, did not get away from this incident unscathed.  In the excitement of the hastily ordered ambuscade of the launch he was shot in the foot by one of his own men, Guardsman Sean O’Reilly, who was both devoted to him and terrified of him at the same time.  He skulked in the forepeak of the boat all the way back to Deremen, not daring to face Lassen.  Eventually Lassen had to approach him and sooth him with rum.  ‘The scene was really most pathetic,’ writes Lodwick. (p.111)  Lassen’s wound turned septic.  He had to spend two months in hospital in Alexandria.  He had, as Lodwick writes, “a disgusting little dog lurking under his bed.  This dog, Lassen claimed, against all evidence, to be a Maltese terrier.  Its habits, which Lassen encouraged, were lubricious and obscene.”  (Lodwick, p.138)   He brought it back with him when he was discharged. 

With this little postscript Lassen fades from the history of Halki but not from that of the SBS.  I hope to continue his story in the second article of this series.

Halki featured once more in the annals of the SBS.  In April 1944 Captain Bill Blyth with a party of three men was landed on the island by a caique commanded by a naval officer, Sub.Lt Tuckey.  Their mission was to find a suitable laying over spot for a caique for a proposed raid on Tilos.  Blyth and his men were re-embarking when four German patrol boats entered the cove.  The operation had been betrayed.  Tuckey and the survivors of his crew were taken prisioner.  Blyth and his men managed to slip ashore.  They hid up for a few days and then cadged a lift on a fishing boat over to Rhodes.  They were stopped at sea and captured by a German patrol boat.  The informer who had betrayed the operation was later caught and shot.  It is not known what happened to the crew of the fishing boat.  Blyth was well treated – flown to Athens and sent to an officers’ prison camp in Germany.  He was apparently  happily playin g hockey a week later.  Of Tuckey and the others no more is heard.  It may be that they were shot.  Such derring do has its cost, as even Lassen was to discover in the last days of the war.

In the south bay at Alimnia, between Rhodes and Halki, there are some abandoned buildings of the Second World War period.  On one of these a bored and homesick German soldier drew a series of cartoons of life back home and how life could be on the island without the threat of intervention by the likes of Anders Lassen.  When I look at them I am reminded that warfare, despite its seemingly frequent necessity and its the occasional excitement, is a tremendous waste of young men’s lives - even if it does not succeed in killing them.

Sources:

Hoe, Alan David Stirling, the Authorised Biography of the Creator of the SAS.  Warner, London 1992.

Diakoyiannis, Eleutherios I Anipotakti  Tis Simis—Vretaniki Katochi Sta Dodekanisa.. Proskenio, Athens 2005

Langley, Mike Anders Lassen VC MC of the SAS.  New English Library, London, 1986.

Lodwick, John Raiders from the Sea.  Greenhill, London 1990.  (Reprint of ‘The Filibusters – the Story of the Special Boat Service’, 1947)

Mastorakos, Manos Aigaio 1943 Doureios Ippos Athens, 2004.

Pitt, Barrie Special Boat Squadron, the History of the SBS in the Mediterranean.  Century, London 1983.

 Dodecanese –Geographical Handbook for Official Use.  Naval Intelligence Division, Second Edition 1943.

Note:  Anders Frederick Emil Victor Schau Lassen came from an established, adventurous Danish military family.   His grandfather was a planter in Sumatra.  His father, Capt Emil Lassen, upped and fought as a volunteer on the Finnish side against the Russians in the 1939/40 Winter War and was highly decorated.  His family had no particular love for the Germans – many of his military forebears lost their lives in the Prussian/Danish War of 1864 and the Three Year’s War  1848-51. Not that he was not Teutonic in appearance—he often passed himself  off as a German officer on his clandestine missions.

Nicholas Shum
The Halki Visitor

Part Two: The Special Boat Squadron Fights Back