October 1942, Adolf Hitler signed an order so extreme that his own legal staff spent days arguing against it before he forced it through. It was stamped top secret. Only 12 copies existed. And what it contained was something that had never happened in the history of modern warfare. Hitler was not targeting spies.
He was not going after resistance fighters or partisans. He was ordering the immediate execution of uniformed British soldiers, men in proper military uniform, carrying weapons openly, following every rule of war to the letter. Any British commando captured anywhere in Europe or Africa was to be shot.
No trial, no prisoner of war camp, no exceptions. Even if they were wounded, even if they were trying to surrender, even if they were lying helpless on the ground, shot. Now consider what that order tells us. Germany’s treatment of Soviet prisoners was catastrophic. Of the 5 12 million Soviet soldiers captured during the war, more than 3 million died in German captivity through starvation, forced labor, and systematic brutality.
That is one of the great crimes of the 20th century. But even that policy was not the commando order. The Soviet prisoners died because Germany regarded them as racially and ideologically beneath the protections of international law. The commando order was something different entirely.
It targeted men Germany had no ideological reason to hate. men in proper British uniform, following every rule of war, doing precisely what soldiers are permitted to do under international law. The order existed for one reason only, because these men were too effective at fighting, and Germany had run out of every other answer.
What had a few thousand British volunteers done to make the most powerful military machine in Europe so afraid that its Supreme Commander ordered them shot on site rather than taken prisoner? That is what this video is about. And the answer begins not with a great battle, but with one of the lowest moments in British military history.
June 1940, France had fallen in 6 weeks. The British Expeditionary Force had been evacuated from Dunkirk in a desperate retreat, leaving behind nearly all of its heavy equipment, tanks, artillery, thousands of vehicles, enormous stockpiles of ammunition. Britain stood alone. The Vermachar controlled the entire European coastline from the northern tip of Norway to the Spanish border.
Hitler was drawing up plans for the invasion of Britain itself. By any rational military calculation, the war was over. Germany had won. Winston Churchill did not operate by rational military calculation. Even with Britain stripped of most of its army’s fighting equipment, even facing the most powerful military force the world had ever seen, Churchill was already thinking about how to hit back.
Not with armies Britain no longer had, not with weapons rusting on French beaches. He called for the creation of troops who could develop what he described as a reign of terror along enemy coastlines. Mun of the hunter class, soldiers who could strike without warning and vanish before Germany could respond.
His military advisers looked at the state of Britain’s armed forces and told him it was impossible. Churchill ignored them. Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clark came forward with a proposal. He had studied the Bo commandos who had caused the British army serious trouble in South Africa four decades earlier.
Small mobile units operating behind enemy lines, hitting where least expected, disappearing before a coordinated response could be organized. Clark suggested Britain build something similar. Volunteers from existing regiments, men who wanted to fight. And the name commando was chosen with full knowledge of what it implied.
Unconventional, unpredictable soldiers who operated by different rules than any army Germany had faced before. What Clark did not yet know was what it would actually take to turn a British soldier into a commando. That question had one answer, and its name was Ankarry. Accarry Castle, deep in the Scottish Highlands, remote and cold, and chosen for every one of those qualities.
This was the Commando Basic Training Center. And the moment you stepped off the train at Spain Bridge Station, training had already begun. There was a 7mi speed march to the castle, full kit, no stops. Anyone who fell behind was returned to their unit before they had even seen the place.
Being sent back, those three letters RTU, returned to unit, was not treated as a punishment. It was treated as a verdict. The commandos did not lower their standards for anyone. If you could not meet them, you went back to ordinary infantry. That was all. Those who made it inside found six weeks of training designed to be the most demanding military program in the world.
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30-mile marches with full equipment. Navigation across featureless mountains in complete darkness. Silent killing. How to eliminate a sentry without making a sound. Demolitions. Cliff climbing. Amphibious assault in rough seas. weapons training on British, German, and captured enemy firearms.
Everything a man might need if he found himself operating alone behind enemy lines with no support and no rescue coming. But there was one thing about aeri that separated it from every other British training establishment. They used live ammunition from the very first day. Machine guns fired over the obstacle courses.
Mortars landed nearby during assault exercises. Instructors threw live grenades during combat training. Men died in training. The castle kept a small cemetery and its graves were visible from the training grounds. Every trainee passed them every single day. The message was clear enough. If you cannot handle this in Scotland with instructors who know what they are doing, you will not survive what is waiting for you across the channel.
25,000 men attempted commando training at Annearry between 1942 and 1946. Only those who passed every element earned the green beret. And what those men did next is the reason Hitler eventually ran out of every other option. March 4th, 1941, Operation Claymore. Three commando units landed on the Lefotan Islands off Norway’s coast.
The islands produced half of Norway’s fish oil and glycerin, materials Germany needed to manufacture explosives. The commandos destroyed the factories, sank 11 German ships, took over 200 German prisoners, and brought back more than 300 Norwegian volunteers who wanted to continue the fight from Britain.
German casualties were significant. British casualties were zero. They were gone before German reinforcements arrived. The shock in Berlin was immediate. Hitler ordered coastal defenses strengthened throughout Norway, but he had misread what was happening. This was not a probe. It was a statement, and the next one would be louder.
December 27th, 1941, Operation Archery. The target was Vogsoy, a Norwegian island garrisoned by troops who had just rotated back from the Eastern front. Battleh hardardened mountain soldiers, experienced combat veterans, the best Germany had in that theater. The commandos landed at dawn behind a naval bombardment.
And here is where you meet a man who tells you something important about what kind of soldiers these were. Major Jack Churchill, no relation to Winston, went ashore at Vogsoy, carrying a Scottish broadsword strapped to his waist, a long bow and arrows across his back, and a set of bagpipes in his hands.
He played the march of the Cameron men as his men charged the German positions. The German mountain troops, veterans of the Eastern Front, found themselves in a house-to-house battle through the narrow streets of Vogsoid Town against men who seemed to operate on entirely different terms than any enemy they had faced before.
By midafternoon, every German position had been destroyed. German dead numbered over 150. British casualties were 20 killed. The strategic consequence of that single raid was something German high command did not see coming. Hitler, convinced the British were preparing a full invasion of Norway, immediately transferred 30,000 additional troops to the country.
30,000 soldiers pulled from the Eastern front from North Africa from France. Norway already mattered to Germany. The fjords sheltered the surface fleet and Scandinavian iron ore was essential to German industry. But the commando raids transformed Hitler’s strategic anxiety about Norway into something close to an obsession. Every raid confirmed his fear that the British were probing for a full invasion.
By 1944, 400,000 German troops were sitting in Norway in static defensive positions, waiting for a landing that never came. They were there for several reasons, but commando raids were the constant evidence Hitler pointed to when his generals questioned whether that commitment made sense. 400,000 men removed from every other theater of the war in part because a handful of British volunteers kept arriving by sea and destroying things.
But the operation that finally exhausted Hitler’s patience came in the spring of 1942, March 28th, 1942. And this is the raid you need to understand because this is the one that changed everything that followed. San Nazair on the Atlantic coast of France held the only dry dock on the entire Atlantic seabboard large enough to service the German battleship Turpets.
If Turpets put to sea and took damage and in the open Atlantic she eventually would, San Nazair was the only place she could be repaired. destroy that dock and Tpets was confined to Norwegian fjords for the rest of the war. The problem was that San Nazair was 400 miles from Britain, surrounded by coastal guns and naval patrols with a substantial garrison.
A bombing raid had already failed. A conventional naval assault would be slaughter. So the British came up with something else entirely. HMS Cample Town was an old American destroyer transferred to Britain under Len lease. The British stripped her to resemble a German torpedo boat and packed her bow with 4 and 1/2 tons of high explosive sealed inside a concrete casing with a time delayed fuse.
The plan was straightforward in concept and close to suicidal in execution. Campbell Town would ram the dock gates at full speed. The commandos aboard would leap ashore, destroy the dock’s internal machinery, and attempt to fight their way out to waiting motor launches. 612 men sailed from Falmouth on the night of March 27th.
The officers briefed on the full plan said little to their men about the odds. As the flotilla approached in the early hours of March 28th, German search lights caught them. Campbell Town flew a German flag and transmitted a signal in German claiming to be a damaged vessel requesting harbor entry. The Germans hesitated long enough for the ship to close the distance.
Then they opened fire. Campbell Town raised the white enen increased to full speed and drove straight into the dock gates. The impact drove her bow deep into the structure. She stopped, wedged in place. The commandos jumped ashore. They worked fast. Pumping stations destroyed, winding houses demolished, machinery wrecked, while German reinforcements poured into the port.
The motor launches that were meant to evacuate the raiders came under devastating fire from shore batteries. Small wooden boats with no armor against heavy guns. Most were sunk or burning. Of 612 men, 228 made it back to Britain. 169 were killed. 215 became prisoners. German officers declared the raid a failure. The dock was still standing.
Senior commanders and local officials crowded onto Campbell Town to inspect her. At noon, 12 hours after the raid ended, four and a half tons of high explosive detonated. Everyone on board was killed instantly. Everyone standing nearby was killed. The dock gates were destroyed completely.
The Normandy dock at San Nazair was out of service until 1948, 3 years after the war ended. Tear pits never entered the Atlantic. She stayed in Norwegian fjords until RAF bombers found and sank her in November 1944. Five Victoria crosses were awarded for the raid, more than for any other single operation of the entire war.
Hitler had watched over 2 years as small groups of British volunteers had struck at will across the entire European coastline. He had watched them land on Norwegian islands and leave without casualties. He had watched them pin 400,000 of his troops to positions that served no purpose.
He had watched them sail 400 miles into occupied France and destroy one of his most strategically vital installations. And he had no military answer. None of his commanders could predict where commandos would strike next. None of them could defend every potential target simultaneously. So in October 1942, he did the only thing he had left, the commando order.
Any British commando encountered in Europe or Africa, was to be executed immediately, in uniform or not, armed or unarmed, fighting or surrendering, wounded or healthy. German commanders who failed to carry out these executions would face court marshall. Bodies were to be buried in unmarked graves.
The Red Cross was not to be informed. Several senior German field marshals recognized the order as a war crime under international law. Irwin RML, the desert fox, the most celebrated German commander of the war, refused outright to implement it. He continued treating captured commandos as prisoners of war and made no secret of his contempt for the order.
RML understood that an army which murders prisoners has already lost something it cannot recover. But RML was not the rule. He was the exception. Many German officers obeyed without question, signed the paperwork, and gave the orders. And the men who carried out those executions would eventually face the same justice they had denied to soldiers lying unarmed on the ground.
December 1942, 10 Royal Marines paddled folding kayaks into the Girand estuary in southern France and began moving upstream toward Bordeaux. They paddled at night and hid through the day, lying motionless in the reeds, while German patrols passed within yards of them. After five nights on the water, they reached Bordeaux Harbor and placed limpit mines on six German cargo ships.
Then they paddled back out into the dark and separated, each pair making for the Spanish border on foot. Of the 10 men, only two made it home. Major Herbert Hazler and Marine Bill Sparks crossed the Pyrenees and reached Spain after weeks on the run. The other eight were captured. Six of them were executed under the Commando Order, shot without trial, buried in unmarked graves. They were not spies.
They were not criminals. They were royal marines in uniform who had carried out a legitimate military operation. Two of the eight had already died of hypothermia during the approach before they ever reached the harbor. Hassler and Sparks came home. But Hassler never forgot the six who did not.
He spent years after the war working to ensure they were commemorated by name, that what had been done to them was part of the public record. Bill Sparks lived until 2002. into his 80s. He was still talking about those men, still making sure they were not forgotten. At Nuremberg, the commando order was placed before the tribunal as evidence.
Alfred Jodel, who had distributed it, was convicted of war crimes and hanged. Field Marshal Wilhelm Kitle, who had signed it, was convicted and hanged. German General Anton Dosler, who in 1944 ordered 15 American OSS operatives shot under the order despite their proper uniform and prisoner of war status, was tried after the war, convicted and executed by firing squad.
The order achieved nothing except to confirm what the commandos had already proven. That when Germany ran out of military answers, it reached for murder. And that murder in the end did not deter a single raid. By June 1944, British commanders had become something beyond a raiding force. They spearheaded the D-Day landings on both flanks of the invasion beaches.
Number four commando included 177 free French soldiers who four years after France had fallen came ashore on French soil and fought through Westrom street by street until the town was free. Lord Lovevet led his commando brigade ashore accompanied by his personal piper playing blue bonnets over the border.
Love it was 13 minutes late reaching Pegasus Bridge where the paratroopers had been holding since the early hours. He had been told to be there by 9. He looked at the men who had been waiting and said simply, “Sorry I’m a bit late.” The paratroopers had held the bridge for hours under fire. The commandos had fought their way off the beach through German defenses.
It was, as military understatements go, a considerable one. By the end of the war, British commandos had operated in Norway, France, the Mediterranean, North Africa, Italy, Burma, and the Pacific. They had trained the American Rangers in commando tactics. They had forced Germany to permanently divert 400,000 troops to Norway.
They had destroyed the only Atlantic dry dock capable of servicing tear pits. They had led the largest amphibious landing in history. And every single man who did any of it had been a volunteer. Men who could have remained in safe postings. Men who looked at Ankarry and the survival odds of what they were being asked to do and said yes anyway.
Not because they were told to, not because they had no choice, because they wanted to fight. and they believed that what they were fighting for was worth it. Hitler issued the commando order because he had run out of military answers. But consider what happened to that order. The officers who signed it were tried and executed.
The officers who refused it are remembered differently. The commandos who were murdered under it are commemorated by name. and the men who carried out the raids, who paddled through French eststeries in the dark, who rammed explosive packed destroyers into dock gates, who played bagpipes charging German mountain troops are still part of how Britain understands itself.
Hitler thought the order would stop them. It stopped nothing. The commandos kept coming. And when the war ended, the men who had signed execution orders faced the same justice they had denied to unarmed prisoners buried in unmarked ground across occupied Europe. History has a long memory and it forgot
