Castle Commando

Autumn 1942.

A raiding party glides through dark, freezing waters.

Special forces. A British military elite.

Trained to expect anything.

Lethal fire screams out from the shoreline. The bullets are real.

The raid isn't.

Attackers and defenders are both British.

This operation, under live fire, is the conclusion

to a terrifying ordeal in the wilds of Scotland.

A new kind of training, for a new kind of soldier.

The commando.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill had called for their creation.

A band of highly-trained elite soldiers,

designed to hit back at Nazi-occupied Europe.

This wilderness would become their training ground.

A Highland estate, Achnacarry.

A place rooted in the bloody history of the Scottish Highlands,

transformed into a paramilitary academy,

a finishing school for elite forces.

With its ferocious and occasionally fatal training regime,

Achnacarry built a new generation of fighting men.

It also built a legend.

'The news from France is very bad...

'..and I grieve for the gallant French people.'

Winston Churchill had been Prime Minister for all of 16 days.

In that short time, Hitler's Blitzkrieg, or lightning war,

had overrun the Low Countries and northern France.

Over 200,000 British troops retreated towards the Channel ports.

From the beaches of Dunkirk, most escaped back to England.

A brave yet undignified rescue.

This was the end of May 1940. The situation was desperate.

But the Prime Minister's rhetoric was uncompromising.

'We have become the sole champions now in arms

'to defend the world cause.

'We shall fight on, unconquerable,

'until the curse of Hitler is lifted

'from the brows of men.'

On 3rd June 1940, the Prime Minister wrote to his Chiefs of Staff.

'It is of the highest consequence to keep the largest numbers

'of German forces all along the coasts of the countries

'that have been conquered, and we should immediately set to work

'on organising raiding forces on these coasts.'

It's a simple military equation.

You've got no heavy forces. You've got command of the sea,

but you can't take soldiers and all the equipment needed back across

to the continental mainland. So, what do you do?

You try to work out how you can get small parties of soldiers

into key positions on the European mainland, especially on the coast,

where they can do great damage to the German war effort.

There are two things there.

One is, it makes the Germans realise that Britain hasn't

thrown in the towel, and secondly, and perhaps more importantly,

it shows the British people who are being bombed day in and day out that

it's still possible to take the war to the Germans. Terrific for morale.

Britain already had elite amphibious raiding troops -

the Royal Marines, under the command of the Royal Navy.

Churchill's new force would be established by their deadly rivals,

the British Army.

This sort of job calls for selected and highly-trained men

who can work and fight in small parties, or even alone.

What are they, then?

Specialists, my son. Specialists.

-Highly-trained amphibious soldiers.

-See?

This 1945 propaganda film tells the story of their early years.

Thanks, pal. What I call service!

And how these new soldiers recruited

a new word into the English dictionary.

"Commando - a term used during the Boer War. A body of armed burghers."

-Blimey, nobody can call me that and get away with it!

-That's an insult!

Forget it, mate. The bloke who wrote this dictionary can't even spell.

Commandos were all volunteers, from every regiment of the British Army.

Jimmy Dunning worked in the family butchers in Southampton.

He played drums in a dance band.

In June 1939, he decided to join up.

I saw in the musical magazine Melody Maker that

the 11th Hussars in Egypt wanted a drummer

with experience in a dance band. I thought, "That's a job for me."

I was then 19 years of age.

Jimmy signed up, but the war interrupted his plans.

The posting to Egypt was cancelled.

After a year at a desk job,

the young sergeant was looking for something new.

The orders appeared,

calling for volunteers for special service.

It didn't say what it was, but the list of things,

the details they gave, able to swim,

not prone to seasickness, willing to parachute.

It is your opportunity to become

a first-class British fighting soldier.

That's exactly what a commando is.

If you are in earnest, we want you, and we want you badly.

There was no test at all. Just an interview.

And it seemed to be, if your face fitted

and you had the right sort of attitude to this, you were in.

-Cough.

-HE COUGHS

-Louder.

-HE COUGHS LOUDER

They were given an allowance of six shillings and eight pence,

which in today's currency is 33p,

and a ration card, and had to find our own billets.

British seaside towns had no shortage

of bed-and-breakfast billets for this new fighting force.

Jimmy Dunning joined No. 4 Commando,

based initially in Weymouth, and later on the Clyde Coast.

Those first months were beset with difficulties.

All too often, Churchill's special forces seemed far from special.

We didn't have any suitable landing craft. So in Weymouth, for instance,

we had to carry out amphibious exercises

from either requisitioned fishing boats or borrowed rowing boats.

It was a bit shambolic, from that point of view.

And also, we suffered from a lack of weapons.

The newborn British Army commandos had no shortage of critics.

Evelyn Waugh, the celebrated English novelist and satirist,

transferred from the Royal Marines

to become intelligence officer for 8 Commando.

He was less than impressed.

'Took the morning train to Largs.

'A smug, substantial, modern pleasure resort.

'Or rather, pleasure as the Scots perceive it.

'Two night operations in which I acted as umpire showed

'great incapacity in the simplest tactical detail.

'The indolence and ignorance of the officers seemed remarkable.

'One troop leader was unable to read a compass.

'Setting out, drunk, for one of the operations,

'I fell down and cut my lip, but nobody thought the worse of me.'

Waugh was a ferocious drinker, a ferocious snob.

His accounts of the early commandos should be seasoned with

more than a pinch of salt.

But his description of these supposedly elite soldiers

wasn't entirely fictional.

They had to learn as they went along. It was the only possible way.

And so, inevitably, mistakes were made.

Inevitably, egos were punctured.

And no ego was more punctured than that of Admiral Sir Roger Keyes,

the man in overall charge of the commandos.

His letters to his superiors at the War Office reveal

a desperate struggle for support.

'The Navy has failed to provide the ships and landing craft

'to prosecute amphibious warfare.

'The Air Ministry puts every obstacle

'in the way of carrying them overseas by air.'

Time and again, the Prime Minister was called on

to intervene personally

to demand more and better resources for his commandos.

But to survive, the commandos needed more

than the support of their Prime Minister.

They needed better organisation, and above all, better training.

A solution came from the north.

In May 1940, a young Scottish nobleman set out on a journey

to the north and west,

to Fort William and beyond, to the untamed Lochaber hills.

That young man was Lord Shimi Lovat, chief of the Fraser clan,

an outdoorsman, a soldier and hunter.

Lovat, his cousin David Stirling

and their gang of upper-class military mavericks had a plan

to toughen up Britain's elite soldiers.

They wanted to build a top-secret Highland academy,

teaching the dark arts of guerrilla warfare.

At the head of Lochailort, Lovat found the ideal location -

Inverailort House.

Their first mission was to evict the owner,

the 80-year-old Mrs Cameron-Head,

something they achieved with ruthless haste.

'When I arrived at Lochailort station,

'there were only two officers, who said the castle was half emptied,

'and they had no accommodation for me.'

Her family home was about to become

the British military's school of irregular warfare,

staffed by a unique team of specialist instructors -

mountaineers, Arctic explorers, Olympic marksmen.

They had this sense of the tradition of the Highlands

and of the sporting culture, the field sports in the Highlands,

of this being a testing ground,

a place where men's individual character

and worth and endurance could be put to the test.

People could use the sea lochs, the mountains for the training.

There's a railway line here that they used for demolitions.

So, you've got practical reasons.

So, all that combines with this older idea

about this being a place where hard men are bred.

Lovat himself remembered just how hard the training could be.

'Gales of wind and rain swept the glens

'all through October and November. We worked hard to keep warm.

'The elements combined to provide new and dangerous conditions

'for day and night training exercises.

'30% of students failed to last the course.'

As the commandos really get going,

small groups of commando officers and NCOs and selected men are coming

from their units. Their units are training all the time,

but they come here

to get a particularly intensive training scheme,

which they are intended to take back to their units and pass on.

The Lochailort curriculum included sabotage, climbing,

navigation and weapons training.

Men arrived from every area of the military to take the course.

And none more famous than

a 30-year-old veteran of the Highland Light Infantry

who arrived in July 1940.

David Niven was already a major movie star.

He deserted his contract with Sam Goldwyn

and re-enlisted in the British Army.

'I was to report to a prohibited area in Scotland, Lochailort Castle.

'After two months running up and down

'the mountains of the Western Highlands,

'crawling up streams at night

'and swimming in the loch with full equipment, I was unbearably fit.'

But the real stars of Lochailort were not from the movie business.

They were two mature gentlemen - Mr Fairbairn and Mr Sykes...

..masters of dirty fighting.

They were former Shanghai policemen in the '30s, Shanghai being a place

of particular problems with gangs and violent crime,

and this pair had developed ways of dealing with that

for the Shanghai Police,

particularly in unarmed combat and knife fighting

and in close-quarter shooting.

Fairbairn even published a guidebook to this ruthless new philosophy.

This is All-In Fighting, which is a training manual,

and it runs the range from

straightforward knee in the groin-type actions

to how to break someone's back.

As soon as you're up on that target, you're going to want him

down on the ground, telling him what to do,

giving him directions of exactly what you want him to do from then.

Hands out to the side!

Inverailort developed methods and philosophies of fighting

still relevant to today's commandos.

Loads of aggression, get him on the floor, put his face in the dirt,

get that weapon off him, let him know you're in charge.

Get on the floor!

Disarm pistols from behind.

It's exactly the same technique you've just seen demonstrated

by my guys here.

The fact is that this manual that was first brought in by WE Fairbairn

has stood the test of time. A lot of these techniques have been used

56 years later, not just by British forces,

not just by British commandos, but around the world.

# Don't lets be beastly to the Germans

# When we've definitely got them on the run

# Let us treat them very kindly

# As we would a valued friend

# We might send them out some bishops As a form of lease and lend... #

Some of the methods of unarmed combat outlined by Fairbairn were

deeply controversial.

Strangulation, the deadly bronco kick, and even eye gouging.

Fairbairn talks about moral scruples in doing this kind of thing.

"Some may be appalled at the suggestion

"that it be necessary for human beings in the 20th century

"to revert to the grim brutality of the Stone Age in order to live.

"But when dealing with an utterly ruthless enemy

"who has clearly expressed his intention

"of wiping this nation out of existence,

"there is no room for any scruple or compunction

"about the methods to be employed in preventing it."

# London pride has been handed down to us

# London pride is a flower that's free... #

Late in 1940, Fairbairn and Sykes travelled from Lochailort to London

for a meeting with designers from the Wilkinson Sword company.

The result was a commando legend - the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife.

What strikes me about this is that it's just got one purpose,

and that is to kill.

Whereas a modern-day commando will have

a variety of knifes for a variety of purposes,

this just had one task, and it just really proves

how "in your face" and how personal the commandos got with their enemy.

Pull. Down.

Nice.

This shows how long it would take to lose consciousness or death.

The interesting thing for me is this chart is still being used today

and the timings are exactly the same.

This book is from the 1940s.

Britain's commandos had come to life in 1940,

a year marked by frustration, disappointment

and battles with the War Office.

In 1941, now better organised and better trained,

the commandos began to build a reputation.

Raids on German-occupied Norway, at Lofoten and later Vaagso,

were spectacular successes.

The combined operation continued its successful course

with fires gutting the German positions, their ammunition dumps

and the industries forced to work for them.

Men drawn largely from 3 Commando, some trained at Inverailort,

overpowered the German garrison

and obliterated Nazi-controlled industry.

That was a fish oil factory, that was.

Then they disappeared back to sea.

They'd been ashore for less than eight hours.

It was called the perfect raid.

Vaagso forced Hitler to deploy extra men to defend Norway

and forced the British War Office

to recruit and train even more commandos.

This very specialised course that's run at Inverailort,

isn't quite doing what's needed any more.

The commandos become something that's going to be much bigger

and that's going to work more closely with conventional military forces.

The feeling was that some sort of

dedicated commando training centre was needed.

The answer wasn't far away.

30 miles east was Achnacarry,

a strip of land between Loch Lochy and Loch Arkaig,

home to the Cameron Clan.

This ivy-clad chimney is all that remains

of the first Achnacarry Castle,

burned to the ground by the British Army in 1746,

punishment for the Camerons' support of the Jacobite rising.

200 years later, the British Army were back,

this time as a force of occupation.

My grandfather was a military man.

He raised three battalions of Cameron Highlanders in the First World War,

one of which got wiped out at Loos with very few survivors.

I don't think he ever really recovered from that,

but he was a proud man and I think he thought that Achnacarry,

if it could help the war effort, would be fine to be requisitioned.

He was, indeed, quite proud of the fact.

What was being planned in these Lochaber hills

had never been done before.

Achnacarry was to mass-produce elite fighting men

on an industrial scale.

Recent raids into occupied Europe had proved the Commandos' worth.

Britain was desperate to produce more.

Thousands and thousands more.

If Achnacarry was to be a success, it needed the best talent available.

Men like Sergeant Major Jimmy Dunning.

At the age of 23, the butcher's son from Southampton headed north

to become an instructor at Achnacarry.

Like thousands after him it began at Spean Bridge Railway Station.

This unassuming Highland village welcomed commando recruits

from the Army, then later the Royal Marines, and even the Police.

Blow me if we didn't start training as soon as we got there.

No getting out onto the platform. That's too civilised.

They made us get out on the wrong side and scramble across the lines.

Inverailot had taught men by the dozen.

Achnacarry's all new Commando course was preparing to train hundreds and thousands of men.

Trainees arriving, most of these lads in their early twenties,

and they hadn't been more than a hundred miles from their home.

And coming up to Scotland to see these hills and mountains

was quite an eye-opener for them. No idea of what it was like.

As you imagine, men are marching down here in the introduction,

"God, have we got to climb these hills in full kit?"

And it was quite a... Well, it was a shock.

'But the scenery hit us right in the eye, all the way to the camp.

'Hills, rivers, mountains. Bonnie Scotland.

'It's a hell of a place, Steffi.'

Turn right up here.

It all comes back to me after nearly 70 years.

I suppose it was firmly implanted on my mind then.

-What a pleasure.

-What an honour.

I'm sure this place brings back many happy memories.

-Yes. 70 years nearly.

-Since you've been here?

-Yes.

-Oh, golly.

-It's a long time, isn't it?

-Long time.

And do you remember a lot about it?

-Yes, I was here for about 20 months.

-Right.

We lived rough here, you know. We had canvas beds and no water.

We had buckets, canvas buckets.

70 years ago, this first floor bedroom

was home to Jimmy Dunning and four fellow instructors.

That's a photograph taken from this room.

And you see our views were the Nissen huts down here,

and the barrack square, just out there.

Most recruits would never see the inside of the castle.

Norman Rose arrived as a 17-year-old Royal Marine.

His experience of Achnacarry was radically different to Jimmy's.

None of this greenery behind the wire fence was there.

And in its stead was a row of Nissen huts

that went the whole way

right as far as the far end of the field.

This side of the Nissen huts,

there were tents, and I lived in a tent.

I never got into a Nissen hut, except the one that was the dining hall.

You only remember the good bits, you know. We had some good fun.

As I say, we were all 17-year-olds.

But, uh, it was pretty grim.

I was always a bit cold and always wet.

And always terribly hungry.

For the privileged few living inside the castle,

officer and instructors, this was the mess room.

-That's this room, you see.

-Ah, yes.

But, you see, there weren't windows,

-there and there. We knocked those through.

-Yes, quite.

And I think people said that the wood was stained more here than anywhere else,

because of all the drinking.

A young instructor called Brian Mullen transformed the room

into a temporary art gallery.

And he died on D-Day, did he?

He died on D-Day, one of the first casualties going up the beach.

He was in the Engineers and he had quite a creative mind.

Right. You've got an amazing memory for all these people. Well...

-Etched into your brain, are they?

-I know.

But I can't remember what happened last Tuesday!

I think he was a very good artist, actually. They're all quite fun.

But my mother felt she couldn't live with them so we...

Yeah. I think she's right, really.

Jimmy Dunning was the camp's youngest instructor.

In overall charge was the Laird of Achnacarry,

camp commandant, Charlie Vaughan.

He was an ex-guardsman.

He'd been an NCO. He'd become a commissioned officer.

Very experienced soldier.

He'd been an administrative officer with the commandos for some time.

He brought a mix of the commando idea,

which he fully endorsed and understood,

but he also had this regular kind of Army Guards discipline approach.

Charlie had a wonderful understanding of human nature.

He knew just when to give a chap a real...what we'd call a bollocking,

and when to praise him.

And he didn't mince his words. He had a lovely delivery.

The best surviving examples of Vaughan's vernacular

are in the pages of Castle Commando,

written by Vaughan's great friend, camp adjutant Donald Gilchrist.

Setting out on an exercise, a young officer asks Vaughan

if transport will be laid on to bring his men back to base.

Transport? Transport? Good God.

Here I am, I've done my best to help you,

I lay on a very pleasant day on Ben Nevis.

You'll like that hill. It belongs to Loch Eil and he's very proud of it.

But all you can think of is transport! Gah!

Charlie Vaughan's training school

was radically different to anything that had gone before.

This one remarkable photograph shows the sheer scale of the operation.

This is a photograph from Achnacarry here in front of us from June 1944.

Probably, this is the operation at its height.

Achnacarry had a production line of commandos in training.

You've got the staff at the front here and there's the pipe band.

Achnacarry had its own pipe band,

which was a kind of nod towards the Highland heritage of the place.

It would greet the trainees when they arrived from the train at Spean Bridge.

From the moment we arrived here,

we were run round the hills,

assault courses, forced marches, never a minute to ourselves.

Even a bit of...

..perverse sadism in it, because when you thought the day was over

and everything was finished, the whistle would blow

and they'd say, "Right, up the mountain here," and right into the dark at night.

It was four or five weeks of absolute hell.

As a trainee at Achnacarry,

you are put through a daily diet of different lessons, if you like.

It's almost like an intensified schooling.

So you would have different disciplines going on at different times of the day.

So you might in the morning be on the rope assault course.

In the afternoon, you might be doing hand-to-hand fighting.

The difference from Inverailort is there's more unit fighting going on here.

They're training together. It's a combination of

preparing them for combat and testing them as individuals

to see whether they were good enough for the job.

And the first test was fitness.

Even today, Achnacarry's gruelling forced marches

remain part of commando folklore.

Left, right, left, right, left.

What's it like being back here now? Does it bring back all the memories?

Yeah. First time back, this is,

the first time I've seen this place since May 1943.

It's a long time.

The wartime commando course lasted between four and six weeks.

'Commando basic training centre, forced marches,

'number of 40-minute periods, 19.'

Today's Royal Marine basic training course lasts 32 weeks,

held at Lympstone in Devon.

70 years on, the objectives haven't changed.

The aim of commando training is to produce somebody who's strong

and tough and fit and resourceful.

Resourceful because when things don't go as planned,

and they never do, you've got to have people

who can make up their own minds as to what's best to do.

I'm delighted we're filming in this weather.

This is very much what we do.

It's doing your job under these conditions.

The sort of training they did here is exactly the sort of training

which Royal Marines commandos do today at Lympstone.

We've got a nine-mile speed march, endurance course.

We used to do the speed marches and assault courses.

My uniform was never dry.

You think, "This is going to hurt, this is going to be painful. I can't do this."

The test, or whatever it is, is explained to you and you do it,

and it gives you confidence.

And a commando, having done the training they do today,

and the training that took place at Achnacarry,

gives you confidence that you can overcome obstacles in your path,

whatever they may be.

One, two, three, four. One...

'There's quite a big dropout rate in all this.'

About 30%, and sometimes 50% of every squad never got through.

'I can remember I was absolutely determined

'I would do the course, even if I was dead at the end of it.

'But lots didn't.'

They said, "No, sorry, Sarge, I can't do any more,

"I can't live this life any more."

And they were just sent back.

Troops, halt!

To be honest, the kit we've got these days

gives us a significant advantage, I think.

I can't imagine what the likes of Norman had to do that march in.

To be honest, that's the sort of basic minimum standard I expect from my Marines.

I've remembered the aspects all my life,

though it's a long, long time ago.

Other things I've forgotten, they're gone for ever,

but this bit I'll always remember.

Fitness was the foundation of the commando course.

But fitness alone didn't win battles.

The recruits were taught to survive and strike out from the harshest conditions -

a skill the Army called...

Fieldcraft. Number of 40-minute periods, 40.

A fieldcraft was basically the teaching of troops to go over

all types of ground in action.

Tactical movement by day and by night.

It really meant just being able to appreciate

the folds in the ground where there was cover here and there.

I had two wonderful assistants.

One was a chap called Davidson, who was out the Lovat Scouts,

and by profession, he was a ghillie.

All I needed to say to the troops... I used to say, "Watch Davidson,"

and he'd move as though he was stalking a prey.

He'd see a quarry, like a deer or an enemy,

and he'd move to the ground almost like a cat

and his rifle would come up to the shoulder all in one movement.

I said, "That's what you've got to aim for."

GUNSHOTS

Achnacarry still bears the scars of those wartime fieldcraft lessons,

souvenirs of the famous Tarzan course.

The beech trees that supported the commandos

had been planted in the summer of 1745,

just as Bonnie Prince Charlie arrived in the Highlands

and prepared for battle against the British Army.

Two centuries later,

this Highland terrain had become the perfect classroom.

Now the commandos were fit and ready for any environment.

The next stage was weapons training.

We don't only just look at them, but actually handle and fire them.

If you couldn't see where the enemy was when they'd opened fire,

you could, by training, determine where they were by sound.

We used to do a demonstration called Crack And Thump.

I used to put chaps out, just over here at the back here,

armed with a rifle and ammunition

and they'd be concealed.

And I used to challenge the trainees and say, "Can you see anybody?"

They couldn't. I'd blow the whistle

and they'd fire a couple of rounds over their heads.

Of course, when a bullet goes over your head, there's a crack.

CRACK!

And then it's followed by a thump of the actual explosion.

THUMP!

So you hear the crack.

I'd say, "That's all right.

"If you hear the crack, the bullet's missed you.

"It's gone. But look for the thump." And you'd just hear it.

And that was a technique.

This one Highland estate was mass-producing

thousands of highly trained men.

But it was also producing a potent propaganda message.

The commandos had a public persona, and actually,

Achnacarry and the legend of Achnacarry grew up very quickly,

because it served that purpose.

Publicity was always part of the commando concept.

We were talking about the special training in Inverailort -

that was secret. No-one knew about it. That didn't come out until after the war.

There was nothing secret about Achnacarry, about the commandos.

Standby, beach defences.

The gentlemen of the press were given the ringside seats

to the great Achnacarry set piece -

the opposed landing.

Rapid.

Fire.

Live bullets flew overhead.

No records were kept of the number of men killed or injured during training.

'Commando basic training centre. Safety precautions.

'It must be remembered that we are training for war

'and that if any degree of realism is to be reached,

'the chances of accidents occurring cannot be completely eliminated.'

As a performance,

the opposed landing impressed the most cynical spectators.

'A fine series of exercises and demonstrations

'by the passing out squad of police recruits.

'Bullets whistling everywhere.

'They had killed a man two days earlier.'

The landings took place by day and night.

MUSIC FROM LAPTOP

This is a night opposed landing,

which was the showpiece of many of the courses.

'No sissy stuff, but real bullets, real bombs and real explosions.

'Training with the lid off.'

Bullets going over the head, but they get the sensation of being fired at.

They get that familiar crack of the bullets passing by.

'It was a performance fit to top any bill,

'a spellbinding affair in widescreen and glorious Technicolor,

'a dazzling cross between the Blackpool Illuminations and Guy Fawkes Night.'

"Widen the shore, get off those boats as quick as you can

"and clear the beach as quickly as possible."

That's one thing we learned right from the beginning in 1914 -

when you land on the beach, get off it as quickly as possible.

Don't try and go to ground to cover. You'll be a sitting target if you do.

Take a chance and go like hell.

After weeks of intense training, the recruits were fighting fit.

The commando reputation was at a peak.

Their audacious raid on Saint-Nazaire in March 1942

had destroyed docks vital to Germany's lethal battleships.

The commandos were glamorous, exciting and under new management.

The well-connected Lord Louis Mountbatten had taken charge.

In the early summer of 1942,

he was preparing Britain's most ambitious raid yet.

How would the men of Achnacarry cope when it was their turn to fight?

Among the first graduates of Achnacarry were 50 former policemen,

dispatched to No. 4 Commando in Troon.

Their new boss was Shimi Lovat.

Two years had passed since Lovat had established that first training base at Inverailort House.

He'd risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

In the summer of 1942, he and his men had been selected

for an audacious mission into occupied France -

a raid on Dieppe.

Dieppe was not important as a military target in its own right.

What was important about the Dieppe raid was it allowed the British,

at a very bleak time in the war,

to send a signal about their aggressive intent.

That was important in implicating the Americans and the Russians.

Things were going very badly on the Russian front,

and the Russians needed pressure relieving on that front.

The new boss of the commandos, Mountbatten, had a plan.

A straightforward plan.

The town was to be taken by a direct frontal assault,

spearheaded by the Canadian infantry.

But before they could get anywhere near Dieppe,

the Canadians faced a deadly threat.

MAN SPEAKS GERMAN

Huge German guns to the east and west of the town,

guns that could sink a troopship ten miles away.

Those guns were to be silenced by the commandos.

In London, Lovat was shown aerial photographs of the gun battery.

He identified flaws in the plans for the raid

and insisted on two crucial changes.

First, he was able to demand that 4 Commandos' attack would not take place during daylight,

but that landing would take place while it was still dark,

and second he was able to demand that he and only he

would have the final say in how the plan was actually structured.

No 3 Commando, led by John Durnford-Slater,

would attack German guns to the east of the town.

4 Commando, led by Lovat, would attack the guns to the West.

They would clear the way for the main force

to begin its assault on Dieppe.

On the evening of 18 August 1942,

Lovat and the men of 4 Commando prepared to take the battle back to France.

We were sailing from Southampton, and I was Southampton born and bred.

As I got on the deck, I just looked over into the area of Southampton

where my widowed mother was living and I just pondered and thought

and I thought, "Mum, you don't know where I am

"and you don't know what I'm going to do."

This was to be the biggest raid of the war.

50 squadrons of aircraft.

250 ships.

10,000 men, among them, for the first time, graduates of Achnacarry.

4 Commandos' target was the Hess gun battery,

a kilometre inland from the cliffs at Vasterival, west of Dieppe.

Lovat split his force in two.

One section, led by Derek Mills-Roberts,

to make a direct assault.

The other, which he led, would loop around and attack from the rear.

Shortly before 5am,

Lovat and his 250 men landed on the shingle beach of Sainte-Marguerite.

The Germans had seen the landing craft approaching the beach

so they were putting fire down on the landing craft as they arrived.

They crossed the beach at a run. Lovat had insisted any man who went to cover on the shingle

would be court-martialed for that. Speed was of the essence.

At the top of the beach, there were wire entanglements that they had to cross in order to move inland.

Some were wearing thick leather jerkins

and they threw themselves down, rolled around in the wire to help crush it and create a path.

A private took a couple of quick glances,

one up at the arc of enemy fire, the other across at me.

Out of the side of his mouth, he panted, "Jesus Christ, sir,

"this is nearly as bad as Achnacarry."

Two kilometres to the east, the 88 men of group one,

led by Derek Mills-Roberts, had landed under the Vasterival cliffs.

Lovat had banned cameras.

This illicit photograph is the only known record of the landing.

Jimmy Dunning was in charge of a mortar section.

We had a choice of two cliffs.

There were gullies in the cliff to go up.

The left-hand one was choked full of barbed wire

and possibly mined as well, so we said, "That's not on."

We tackled the right-hand one.

With the aid of Bangalore torpedoes,

which are six-foot iron tubes filled with explosives,

we cleared our way to get up, to scramble up the cliff.

EXPLOSION

On the way along, we decided...

Well, it was already decided that we'd knock at one or two doors

to find out if there were Germans in the locality

billeted with the people.

14-year-old Gerard Cadot lived in a cottage just above the gorge.

He'd grown up playing beside the deadly German guns.

That morning he was woken by the sound of fighter planes.

He and his father went out to investigate.

-TRANSLATION:

-Directly opposite with their faces blackened

were four soldiers in khaki uniforms.

I was surprised to see khaki,

we were so used to seeing German uniforms!

Just down the coast, Lovat's section had left the beach at St Marguerite

and started the long circular track around the battery.

Unfortunately, the Germans had flooded the valley of the River Saane so the banks were very boggy.

One of the commandos said it was like running through rice pudding.

Obviously, that puts a great physical demand on them

and this is where the training they'd done at Achnacarry came in really useful.

When they got about 1,000 yards inland, Lovat's men moved east across the slopes

towards the battery position, still more than half a mile away.

And as they did so there was a real sense of urgency in their movement

cos they could hear that the German guns had opened fire.

The battery opened up, they could obviously see the main convoy

so Derek Mills-Roberts,

who was commanding our particular party decided to speed everything up

and to get in position and open fire as soon as possible.

We positioned the mortars

and I had decided that I'd aim at the centre of the battery.

At first, a shell went slightly to the left...short, rather.

The second one was slightly to the right but the third one...

Wahey, bingo.

Troop Sergeant Major Jimmy Dunning with his two-inch mortar

in the tree line a few hundred metres to the north.

It's the bomb from that mortar that ignites the German cordite charges

within a few metres of where I'm standing, so a huge explosion.

Only a few minutes later,

the commandos come storming in from the south.

Lovat with B and F troops, bayonets fixed,

grenading the Germans as they come in, close-quarters combat.

Scenes of almost mediaeval savagery.

SHOUTING AND GUNFIRE

Lovat himself described the brutality of the fighting.

'Considerable numbers of Germans who'd hidden in underground tunnels

'were either bayoneted or shot at close range by machine gun.'

'Lovat's next words brought me to my feet.

'"Set them on fire", he ordered,

'with a gesture at the surrounding building.'

'Burn the lot.'

'These were not the words of a commanding officer of the British Army.

'They were the words of a Highland Chief bent on the total destruction of the enemy.'

TRANSLATION: My father said,

let's go and see what's happening at the cliffs.

My mother didn't want us to go, she was nervous.

The two of us went to the cliff and saw the boats in front of the gorge.

We saw soldiers coming down the path.

The commandos began the difficult task of withdrawing back towards

this beach where Jimmy Dunning and his men had landed two and a half hours earlier.

They were under sporadic German fire

but they moved down the gully and onto the beach

and waded through the water to the landing craft waiting offshore, up to their shoulders.

Once they were on the landing craft, they could set off back to the UK,

satisfied that they had carried out with great success

the mission they had been assigned to complete.

The big guns would never fire again.

The way was clear for the main assault on Dieppe

by the Canadian infantry.

Their first task was to capture the cliffs surrounding the town centre.

Despite heroic efforts, they failed.

The Canadians who landed here on the morning of the 19th were slaughtered.

They landed on the shingle against German opposition that was fully intact,

no preliminary bombardment by air or sea.

The Germans were not surprised, they were in control

of their firepower in place on the headlands and in the town.

The Canadians fought with extreme bravery.

They tried to get into the town. Maybe 100 men, out of 2,000 who came ashore, succeeded in doing so.

Most of the rest spent their last few hours pinned down on this beach.

Hundreds of them were killed and almost all of the remainder were rounded up and captured.

We had no idea of the tragedy, really,

because the newspapers that came out the next day

just talked about a successful commando raid

and didn't give the full details of the Canadian and naval losses.

The raid on Dieppe achieved little, except casualties.

From the navy, from the air force, from the commandos.

Over 900 Canadian soldiers lost their lives.

And yet, to his death, Mountbatten remained convinced

that despite the human cost,

it had been a worthwhile rehearsal for D-Day.

The Duke of Wellington said that the Battle of Waterloo was won

on the playing fields of Eton.

I say that the Battle of Normandy was won on the beaches of Dieppe.

For every one man who was killed in Dieppe,

at least ten or more had their lives spared on the beaches of Normandy.

If you need to put 2,000 men ashore against a prepared German defence

with wire, machine guns, artillery pieces and so forth

in order to learn that a frontal assault is likely to be

a suicidal disaster in those circumstances,

then you need your head examined.

But regardless of the rights and wrongs of the Dieppe raid,

of one thing we can be absolutely certain.

The 4 Commandos role demonstrated

that effective training, especially mission-specific training,

was likely to create success.

And certainly the commandos could go away from this operation

with their head held high about a job well done.

Back in the Highlands,

the Achnacarry machine continued, relentless,

but with one notable addition.

In the months after Dieppe, the commandos were given a new

and distinct symbol of identity.

Beginning in the late summer of 1942

Charlie Vaughan presented every graduate with a green beret.

This was the birth of a military legend.

But just as the commandos gained their identity,

they were losing their original role.

By 1943, the time for small raids in Europe was over.

And we were working up for D-Day which of course was in June, 1944.

And the Royal Marines

and army commandos were preparing for that in every way possible.

For the remaining months of the European conflict,

the British commandos successfully waged an unfamiliar war.

The idea was that they would be used as the assault troops

to break the crust of the enemy defences.

They weren't actually used for commando raiding

from the sea for the rest of the war in Europe.

The Germans defeated, Britain erupted in the joy of victory.

CHEERING

For the army commandos, this would be their final victory.

On 25th October 1945,

Brigadier Bob Laycock broke the news to the men of 1st Commando Brigade.

'It is a feeling of very deep regret that it has fallen to my lot

'to tell you today that you are to be disbanded.'

The green beret would live on,

but as the sole responsibility of the Royal Marines.

Achnacarry was returned to Cameron of Lochiel...

..a little the worse for wear.

The house was a bit of a mess. There'd been a fire inside.

My grandfather said that the last time the English

had come to Achnacarry in force they'd burned the old house down,

so the second time that they'd allowed them back,

they'd done exactly the same again, all those years afterwards!

The Commando training depot, Achnacarry,

closed its gates for the last time on 31st March 1946.

A remarkable 25,000 men had come here

and passed the commando basic training course.

Today, on a hill between the camp

and the railway station at Spean Bridge,

those early commandos are immortalised in bronze.

Scott Sutherland's three soldiers have their eyes forever fixed

towards the wild Highland hills.

No-one forgets going to Achnacarry

and that lovely statue of the men looking beyond.

That's a symbolism and one does feel proud

because it conjures up a lot of memories,

conjures up some very fine men.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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