False Flag Publishing?
John Sadler, Operation Agreement: Jewish Commandos and the Raid on Tobruk
Osprey, 340pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781472814883
reviewed by Rafe McGregor
Operation Agreement is a fascinating and timely contribution to the literature on the Desert War, but Osprey Publishing have done author John Sadler – Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland – a disservice with their marketing campaign. The subtitle suggests an equal or at least comparable split between the Special Interrogation Group, a British Army Commando platoon of German-speaking Jews, and the raid on Tobruk in mid-September 1942. The book’s blurb focuses exclusively on the SIG and the flap text on the SIG’s part in the raid. The promotional information on Osprey’s website is unequivocal: ‘This is the history of the SIG, revealing startling details about the group and offering moving insights into the Jewish volunteers putting their lives on the line to fight against the evils of Nazism.’ The definite article creates the expectation of a definitive history of the SIG that integrates and augments the scarce and disparate information currently available. This is not even a history of the unit, however, but a history of Operation Agreement (the raid) – its context, conception, execution, and aftermath – and readers anticipating the former are likely to be disappointed by the latter.
The idea of Army Commandos was proposed on 4 June 1940, the last day of the Dunkirk evacuation, and seized upon by Winston Churchill as one of the two means (the other being the Special Operations Executive) by which Britain could to take the fight to the ever-expanding Third Reich. The story of the dozen Commando battalions is as compelling as it is convoluted, with changes of name, structure, command, and even role befitting what was always a loose grouping of essentially ad hoc formations. This lack of thematic unity is exacerbated by the fact that there were already a number of Army Independent Companies operating on land and sea by June 1940 and that the contemporary implementation of the idea belongs to the Royal Navy, who converted their marines from light infantry to the Royal Marines Commandos post-war. Sadler does his best to negotiate this difficult terrain in the limited space devoted to the SIG and Long Range Desert Group (a Special Forces unit that was not part of the Commandos), but the content of the book reflects his lifelong interest in Operation Agreement. Osprey seem to have calculated that a book on the SIG would sell better and dressed Sadler’s history of the raid up accordingly.
On that note, one of the most interesting aspects of the SIG was that it constituted a particularly unusual combination. On the one hand, it was a Special Forces unit in the traditional – false flag – sense, trained to fight in enemy uniform in express contravention of the Hague precursors to the Geneva treaties. As such, the SIG invites comparison with Wilhelm Canaris’ Brandenburg Training Regiment, which adopted various Allied uniforms across Europe and North Africa before finishing the war – like the Commandos – in a conventional military role. Despite their controversy, false flag operations were employed by the British post-war, in the pseudo-gangs of the Mau Mau Uprising. On the other hand, the SIG embodied the philosophy of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ as a large proportion of the Jewish recruits were Zionists opposed to British policy in Palestine. In the same way that the Nazis made use of anti-imperial feeling in raising units such as the Free Indian Legion (a regiment assigned to Atlantic Wall duties), Britain was prepared to make use of future enemies to fight current ones. A similar philosophy was at work in Afghanistan in the eighties, when British Special Forces trained mujahideen groups to fight the Soviet Union. This combination of false flag and enemy of my enemy isolated the SIG from their colleagues and this isolation was exploited by their commander, Bertie Buck, in order to make the commandos appear more German and less British.
Setting aside the disappointing lack of detail about Special Forces, Sadler provides an in-depth but nonetheless fast-paced narrative of Axis and Allied losses and gains to establish the context of Operation Agreement, which was a response to the situation in the Western Desert in July 1942. Erwin Rommel had made substantial advances in the previous months and although his offensive capacity had reached its limit, Churchill demanded action. Britain had recently suffered embarrassing defeats in Greece, Crete, and Singapore and was once again on the defensive, just as she had been two years beforehand. Dissatisfied with Claude Auchinleck’s lack of aggression as the Middle East Commander-in-Chief, Churchill replaced him with Harold Alexander, who had been assigned to lead the British contingent of Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa. The coincidence of intense political pressure, a new C-in-C, and a general staff who ignored the lessons of the Dieppe Raid (on 19 August 1942) set the scene for two disasters in two months. A proposal by Jock Haselden, of Middle East Commando, for a low risk, low yield overland raid on the coastal guns of Tobruk was seized upon and transformed into a six-stage, all-arms, combined operation that required the coordination of: a bombing raid at 2130; Haselden’s originally planned infiltration of the enemy with a company-sized Commando unit at 2145; a beach reconnaissance (deployed by submarine) at 0140; two separate beach landings by a half-battalion of Royal Marines (deployed by two destroyers) and a company of seaborne infantry (deployed by torpedo boats) at 0200; and the extraction of all raiders by sea at 0900. As if this wasn’t enough for one night, there were three other operations planned: a two-stage Special Air Service raid that would begin at Benghazi; an LRDG raid on Barce; and a feint on Siwa. Crucially, the embellishment of Haselden’s plan increased the risk but not the yield, which remained low.
The execution of Operation Agreement on the night of 13 September would have been a comedy of errors were it not so needless a tragedy. Haselden’s Force B was the only successful component, with the seven SIG commandos playing their role to the hilt. The most significant effect of the seven-hour air raid was to put an unscathed garrison on alert. The beach reconnaissance was aborted due to the heavy swell and the same swell played havoc with the landing craft and torpedo boats. First the German and then the Italian defenders cut both the marines and the infantry to pieces and the few that set foot ashore all arrived in the wrong place. HMS Sikh, which was attempting to rescue the raiders, was struck a crippling blow at 0500. HMS Zulu entered the harbour to rescue the rescuers and was similarly incapacitated at 0625. A cruiser, HMS Coventry, was sent to rescue Zulu (and Sikh’s sailors, who had abandoned ship): Coventry was destroyed by dive-bombers at 1330 and Zulu abandoned at 2200. A few marines and soldiers (including several of the SIG, but excluding Haselden, who was killed in action) managed a remarkable escape and evasion, reaching Allied lines in November. The raid was a complete fiasco, with around seven hundred and fifty British casualties and three ships and several boats destroyed. Axis casualties were under ten percent of this figure. Unlike Dieppe, which was spun as a rehearsal for D Day post hoc, Operation Agreement was ultimately entirely pointless.
The raid was over-complex in its conception, but the numerous and various problems that dogged each stage make for a difficult narrative to recount while retaining clarity, momentum, and relative chronology. Sadler never loses momentum, but there are brief losses of clarity, which may be the result of confining the execution of the raid to one third of the book. Despite this reservation, the work serves an important purpose in drawing attention to a Commando raid whose timing was practically a guarantee of obscurity: a month after the more dramatic defeat at Dieppe and a month before the turning point of the war in the West at the Second Battle of El Alamein. Sadler’s interest in Operation Agreement was sparked by Arthur Hiller’s film, Tobruk, but the 1967 tagline – ‘What they did that day will be remembered for all time!’ – has proved sadly inaccurate when one contrasts Tobruk with the equivalent raids on Vaagso and St Nazaire. The courage of the soldiers, sailors, and marines who performed their duty in the face of such poor planning and preparation deserves recognition – not the least of which was the courage of the small band of exiled Jews for whom surrender was not an option.
The idea of Army Commandos was proposed on 4 June 1940, the last day of the Dunkirk evacuation, and seized upon by Winston Churchill as one of the two means (the other being the Special Operations Executive) by which Britain could to take the fight to the ever-expanding Third Reich. The story of the dozen Commando battalions is as compelling as it is convoluted, with changes of name, structure, command, and even role befitting what was always a loose grouping of essentially ad hoc formations. This lack of thematic unity is exacerbated by the fact that there were already a number of Army Independent Companies operating on land and sea by June 1940 and that the contemporary implementation of the idea belongs to the Royal Navy, who converted their marines from light infantry to the Royal Marines Commandos post-war. Sadler does his best to negotiate this difficult terrain in the limited space devoted to the SIG and Long Range Desert Group (a Special Forces unit that was not part of the Commandos), but the content of the book reflects his lifelong interest in Operation Agreement. Osprey seem to have calculated that a book on the SIG would sell better and dressed Sadler’s history of the raid up accordingly.
On that note, one of the most interesting aspects of the SIG was that it constituted a particularly unusual combination. On the one hand, it was a Special Forces unit in the traditional – false flag – sense, trained to fight in enemy uniform in express contravention of the Hague precursors to the Geneva treaties. As such, the SIG invites comparison with Wilhelm Canaris’ Brandenburg Training Regiment, which adopted various Allied uniforms across Europe and North Africa before finishing the war – like the Commandos – in a conventional military role. Despite their controversy, false flag operations were employed by the British post-war, in the pseudo-gangs of the Mau Mau Uprising. On the other hand, the SIG embodied the philosophy of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ as a large proportion of the Jewish recruits were Zionists opposed to British policy in Palestine. In the same way that the Nazis made use of anti-imperial feeling in raising units such as the Free Indian Legion (a regiment assigned to Atlantic Wall duties), Britain was prepared to make use of future enemies to fight current ones. A similar philosophy was at work in Afghanistan in the eighties, when British Special Forces trained mujahideen groups to fight the Soviet Union. This combination of false flag and enemy of my enemy isolated the SIG from their colleagues and this isolation was exploited by their commander, Bertie Buck, in order to make the commandos appear more German and less British.
Setting aside the disappointing lack of detail about Special Forces, Sadler provides an in-depth but nonetheless fast-paced narrative of Axis and Allied losses and gains to establish the context of Operation Agreement, which was a response to the situation in the Western Desert in July 1942. Erwin Rommel had made substantial advances in the previous months and although his offensive capacity had reached its limit, Churchill demanded action. Britain had recently suffered embarrassing defeats in Greece, Crete, and Singapore and was once again on the defensive, just as she had been two years beforehand. Dissatisfied with Claude Auchinleck’s lack of aggression as the Middle East Commander-in-Chief, Churchill replaced him with Harold Alexander, who had been assigned to lead the British contingent of Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa. The coincidence of intense political pressure, a new C-in-C, and a general staff who ignored the lessons of the Dieppe Raid (on 19 August 1942) set the scene for two disasters in two months. A proposal by Jock Haselden, of Middle East Commando, for a low risk, low yield overland raid on the coastal guns of Tobruk was seized upon and transformed into a six-stage, all-arms, combined operation that required the coordination of: a bombing raid at 2130; Haselden’s originally planned infiltration of the enemy with a company-sized Commando unit at 2145; a beach reconnaissance (deployed by submarine) at 0140; two separate beach landings by a half-battalion of Royal Marines (deployed by two destroyers) and a company of seaborne infantry (deployed by torpedo boats) at 0200; and the extraction of all raiders by sea at 0900. As if this wasn’t enough for one night, there were three other operations planned: a two-stage Special Air Service raid that would begin at Benghazi; an LRDG raid on Barce; and a feint on Siwa. Crucially, the embellishment of Haselden’s plan increased the risk but not the yield, which remained low.
The execution of Operation Agreement on the night of 13 September would have been a comedy of errors were it not so needless a tragedy. Haselden’s Force B was the only successful component, with the seven SIG commandos playing their role to the hilt. The most significant effect of the seven-hour air raid was to put an unscathed garrison on alert. The beach reconnaissance was aborted due to the heavy swell and the same swell played havoc with the landing craft and torpedo boats. First the German and then the Italian defenders cut both the marines and the infantry to pieces and the few that set foot ashore all arrived in the wrong place. HMS Sikh, which was attempting to rescue the raiders, was struck a crippling blow at 0500. HMS Zulu entered the harbour to rescue the rescuers and was similarly incapacitated at 0625. A cruiser, HMS Coventry, was sent to rescue Zulu (and Sikh’s sailors, who had abandoned ship): Coventry was destroyed by dive-bombers at 1330 and Zulu abandoned at 2200. A few marines and soldiers (including several of the SIG, but excluding Haselden, who was killed in action) managed a remarkable escape and evasion, reaching Allied lines in November. The raid was a complete fiasco, with around seven hundred and fifty British casualties and three ships and several boats destroyed. Axis casualties were under ten percent of this figure. Unlike Dieppe, which was spun as a rehearsal for D Day post hoc, Operation Agreement was ultimately entirely pointless.
The raid was over-complex in its conception, but the numerous and various problems that dogged each stage make for a difficult narrative to recount while retaining clarity, momentum, and relative chronology. Sadler never loses momentum, but there are brief losses of clarity, which may be the result of confining the execution of the raid to one third of the book. Despite this reservation, the work serves an important purpose in drawing attention to a Commando raid whose timing was practically a guarantee of obscurity: a month after the more dramatic defeat at Dieppe and a month before the turning point of the war in the West at the Second Battle of El Alamein. Sadler’s interest in Operation Agreement was sparked by Arthur Hiller’s film, Tobruk, but the 1967 tagline – ‘What they did that day will be remembered for all time!’ – has proved sadly inaccurate when one contrasts Tobruk with the equivalent raids on Vaagso and St Nazaire. The courage of the soldiers, sailors, and marines who performed their duty in the face of such poor planning and preparation deserves recognition – not the least of which was the courage of the small band of exiled Jews for whom surrender was not an option.