Lieutenant, 1st Special Boat Service
Lieutenant Michael Answell-Jones, 1st Special Boat Service - attached to North Force
Inspired by the protangonist from the popular Rebellion Games Sniper Elite series Karl Fairbourne, we call to muster Lieutenant Michael Answell-Jones of 1st Special Boat Service. His speciality is sneaking into harbours, disabling or destroying harbour installations then going on to crippling or sinking shipping before exiting without a trace. He knows his way around almost every weapon system in the German and Italian arsenal and has the advantage of being able to speak a sufficient amount of German to get all kinds of information out of prisoners. Part of North Force, Michael regularly takes part in attacks on harbours and ports in occupied Norway, often linking up with members of the Milorg - the Norwegian resistance movement. His missions have seen him conduct raids on Narvik, Bergen, Trndheim, Namsos and Vaagso. In seperate attacks, he has sank two destroyers and four freighters with limpet mines, along with destroying six aircraft in airfield attacks. His future looks bright, but he knows the next mission he goes on could be his last. You can follow some of his many exploits in our upcoming media releases.
Origins of the Special Boat Service
The Special Boat Squadrons can trace their routes back to the start of the Second World War. Originally, it was formed as the Special Boat Section, an Army Commando unit tasked with carrying out amphibious operations, including small-scale raids. The men of the fledging unit were not particularly well trained or equipped but they were enthusiastic, resourceful and cunning. Tasked with sneaking up on lightly defenced coastal areas using collapsing dinghys (which could hold about 6 men and a small amount of equipment, usually demolition charges), they would conduct small acts of sabotage before making their escape. Although this approach was initally successful, the Germans soon learnt that each boat lost would mean that six men wouldn't be able to return to base. After some raids with disasterous losses, tactics were switched from dinghys to canoes or kayaks, which they called foldbots. Although the collapsable dinghys would be used in smaller numbers throughout the war (notably the capturing of the Nijmegen Bridge during Operation Market Garden), they had effectively been replaced. The Special Boat Section started using foldboats for operations fairly soon after they were introduced. Although the Special Boat Section was the initial user of the Foldbots, it would be two other units that would take the use of the foldboats to a whole new level and one of these units, the Royal Marines Harbour Boom Patrol Detachment, would carry out a raid that would make them go down in history as "The Cockleshell Heroes".
The Special Boat Section wasn't just used for "pin-prick" raids on france, it had many other target areas and purposes. One of it's lesser known areas of operation was norway, where they took part in a number of sabotage operations and attempts to destroy key installations - more often than not, these would be a total disaster. On one infamous operation, operation checkmate, seven members of No14 (Arctic) Commando only managed to sink a single minesweeper using limpet mines before being captured (following which they were taken to Germany and later executed). This typified the risks that came with every mission the Special Boat Section were tasked with. A veteran of the Special Boat Section likened it to poaching when he said the aim of each mission was “Creep in, set the traps, hang about, collect the spoils, and get away without being caught.”
With the creation of the Special Air Service (SAS) in 1942, it's founder, David Stirling, brought in foldbots as part of the SAS equipment collection. D Squadron was formed to act the the Boat Unit who focussed on Foldboat operations. Following Stirling's capture in Tunisia in January 1943, the SAS was restructured, with D Squadron (also known as the Foldbot Section). The Folboat Section was established as its own independent unit, the Special Boat Squadron, later the Special Boat Service (SBS), on March 17, 1943. Its first commander was 24-year-old Lt. Col. George, 2nd Earl Jellicoe, son of the World War I Admiral John Jellicoe, who commanded the Royal Navy forces during the pivotal Battle of Jutland. Jellicoe organized and trained the SBS at a base at Haifa, Palestine, with never more than 100 men under his command at any time. Starting with Folbots launched from submarines, the SBS moved up to caiques, Greek fishing schooners the SBS valued for their range, endurance, and the fact that there were too many of them in use for the Germans to attempt to search them all, and finally to fast motor launches. The SBS fought its way through the Mediterranean, the Aegean, and the Adriatic, on the Dodecanese and Dalmatian Islands, in Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Albania. The SBS would paddle, sail, or speed from out of the darkness into an enemy harbor, either to silently attach limpet mines to shipping or loudly shoot up and blow the place apart, sometimes continuing inland to commit sabotage. “The SAS liked to burst gallantly through the front door,” an SBS captain remarked, “while the SBS preferred to slip in at the back through the bathroom window.” Although Jellicoe commanded and its accidental founder Roger Courtney was in it, the most important figure of the SBS would in fact not be British at all. “In England,” remembered Jellicoe, “I met a marvelous Dane named Anders Lassen.” Lassen was a 20-year-old cadet-officer aboard a British merchant ship in the Persian Gulf the day he heard of the early morning German blitzkrieg against Denmark, leading a veritable mutiny to reach the nearest port. From there he headed straight to England to join what there was of a free Danish army. Too impatient for regular soldiering, he joined the Special Operations Executive, taking part in Operation Postmaster - the raid on the island Fernando Po (immortalised in the film "Ministry of Ungentlemenly Warfare"). By the time Jellicoe acquired Lassen for the SBS, he had already earned the first of eventually three Military Crosses. But their association almost ended before it could get properly started - in a bar back in Palestine. “I must have said something that offended him and ignited his quick fuse,” remembered Jellicoe. “Two or three minutes later I found myself getting up from the floor.” Jellicoe would have been in his rights seeing Lassen in the stockade for the rest of the war; instead he had him spend it in the thick of the deadliest, most desperate SBS operations of the conflict. “He was brave with such a calm, deadly, almost horrifying courage,” another officer said, “born of a berserk hatred of the Germans who had overrun his country. He was a killer, too, cold and ruthless—silently with a knife or point-blank range with a pistol. On such occasions, there was a froth of bubbles round his lips, and his eyes were dead as stones.”
The last operation for the SBS in World War II was against a network of German pillboxes and machine-gun posts in Italy after midnight on April 9, 1945, led, aggressively from the front as always, by Anders Lassen. The heroic Dane’s sergeant major, Leslie Stephenson, had his doubts: “All our success had come from stealth, but now we were used for an infantry assault that, considering our type of soldiering, was a suicide mission.” But Lassen evidently did not care. He had impatiently, angrily, been kept from action for months, but shortly before this fight had talked ominously for the first time about possibly not making it back.
Lassen was making sure the Germans did not survive the onslaught, singlehandedly knocking out two pillboxes and a machine gun with grenades. “He forgot where he was,” one of his men remembered. “He forgot about taking cover. He forgot every damn thing except going forward.” At the next pillbox he heard a shout of “Kamerad!” and ordered Stephenson and the others to stay back as he approached it alone. He disappeared from view around the side. Then there was a burst of machine-gun fire. Seconds that seemed as long minutes to Stephenson passed. Then, “SBS, SBS, Major Lassen wounded. Here.”
Stephenson dashed to find the Germans gone and Lassen on his back. “Who is it?” the wounded man asked.
“Steve.”
“Good. Steve, I’m wounded. I am going to die.”
Stephenson put a morphine tablet on Lassen’s tongue, assuring, “We’re going to get you back.”
“No use, Steve. I’m dying and it’s been a poor show. Don’t go any further with it. Get the others out.”
These were Lassen’s last words. There was understandable bitterness inside the SBS for such a loss in what was regarded as a pointless attack with the war’s end so close. But there had already been another loss, the full extent of the tragedy not known for decades. The half dozen men of Mission LS24 had disappeared in the Aegean in April 1944, the only SBS operation never to return. “The war is over but they remain listed as ‘missing,’” an officer sadly wrote in 1947. It was not until the 1980s that the terrible truth came out. They had been captured, tortured, and executed by the Germans under the Commando Order, in blatant breach of the Geneva Convention.
Anders Lassen was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, but it was the only recognition that the Special Boat Service got out of the war. Fighting in such obscure corners of the conflict, it had never attracted the attention of the renowned Commandos, the Special Air Service, or the Long Range Desert Group, and the buccaneering, piratical image it enjoyed repelled the more conventionally minded, such as Prime Minister Winston Churchill. During an astonishing exchange in Parliament in 1944, Churchill was asked, “It is true, Mr. Prime Minister, that there is a body of men out in the Aegean Islands, fighting under the Union Jack, that are nothing short of being a band of murderous, renegade cutthroats?” Churchill found himself in the rarest of situations for him—at an utter loss for words. “If you do not sit down and keep quiet, I will send you to join them,” was all he could say in frustration.
Insignia of the Special Boat Squadrons/Service
During it's short original lifespan, the Special Boat Service served under two cap badges. When originally formed as the Special Boat Section, members wore the cap badges of their home regiment, as they were officially listed as being "on secondment" to the Special Boat Section. It was only after it became an independent unit in its own right that it gained its own cap badge. 1 SBS were soon to wear the cap badge of the SAS following its absorption due to the number of casualties it had sustained in operations in the Mediterannean. 2 SBS would wear a cap badge featuring excalibur being held above the waves with the letters SBS to display it's name.
Just like today's SBS, the SBS of the Second World War wore shoulder titles that said "COMMANDO SBS" with the Combined Operations patch displayed underneath. Some of the members of the SBS that had come from the SAS (that is to say D Squadron / Foldboat Section) wore the SAS wings either on the chest or the shoulder. These individuals would have been trained alongside the SAS in their desert training facilities in Egypt.
Anyone joining the SBS in the period of relative independence would have standard parachute wings that would be worn underneath the Combined Operations badge. For these individuals, they would have been sent to RAF Ringway for parachute training.
There would be the odd occasion where the SBS would deploy on an operation with only their Fairburn-Sykes Dagger - everything else would have been got hold off by either having encounters with sympathetic locals or by killing enemy soldiers. There have been documented cases where members of the SBS went on operations only carrying their dagger and coming back with a canoe full of loot; be it weapons, ammunition or highly-sensitive material. It was not unheard of for members of the SBS to eat rather well on operations, notably in Norway or on the coast of France, Belgium, Holland or Denmark. Those who found themselves operating in Norway (with their base of operations being in the Shetland Isles) soon discovered the bounty of wild food that could be "found and devoured" as one veteran put it. Contact with the Milorg would have been very frequent, enabling the use of radios to send back intelligence to their base or directly to Headquarters Combined Operations.
With missions to France, getting into a suitable hiding spot after coming ashore was more tricky. Moreover, trusting the locals was a lot harder, as the chance of being betrayed to the Germans in France was a much higher possibility than it was in Norway. The terrain was far different to that which they had come actoss in Norway - instead of mountains and forrests, there would be open beaches with the very high possibility of German coastal defences overlooking the landing site. The French resistance, or Maquis, could not always be relied upon to make rendezvous on time or in sufficient strength to ensure safety for the entire mission period. It was also likely that with the presence of German coastal defences, the SS and the Gestapo wouldn't be too far away. Norway was safer, as the Gestapo was less likely to be wondering around the country (which required skis to get around for most of the year), climbing mountains or crawling through caves. Having said this, the overall chances of being betrayed by collaborators was fairly low, but each time it happened, the consequences were often fatal.
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