Winston Churchill’s best gamble… an act of piracy 3,000 miles aw | Films | Entertainment | EUROtoday

Operation Postmaster was, in accordance with main navy historian Damien Lewis, maybe the most important gamble of Winston Churchill’s total political profession. Utterly deniable within the occasion of failure, it concerned a small group of raiders navigating a Brixham Trawler 3,000 miles throughout the Atlantic Ocean to a tiny Spanish island off the West coast of Africa.

There they engaged in what amounted to blatant piracy, boarding and stealing three vessels, an 8,000-ton Italian liner, a German tug and a pleasure yacht, in flagrant breach of Spain’s Second World War neutrality, earlier than rendezvousing with the Royal Navy. The mission concerned the blackmail of the island’s Spanish governor – photographed bare, showering his native mistress with a watering can – an tailored trawler armed to the enamel with hidden weapons, and a motley all-volunteer crew posing as Swedish vacationers.

And the “cutting out” operation in January 1942 was conceived, partly, by James Bond creator Ian Fleming. It could be dying or glory. No marvel the staid British navy management and political hierarchy wished nothing to do with it. If this all sounds extra like a Guy Ritchie movie than a severe undercover mission, it is each. Lewis’ stirring 2014 account was tailored earlier this 12 months right into a riotously entertaining and deliciously-titled new movie, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. And it’s nonetheless delighting Amazon Prime viewers.

Featuring Henry Cavill as British particular forces pioneer Gus March-Phillipps, and Jack Reacher star Alan Ritchson as his Danish colleague Anders Lassen, later the one member of the British SAS to win the Victoria Cross, it is a basic Ritchie manufacturing, combining the form of pitch-black humour, brilliantly over-the-top motion sequences and razor-sharp enhancing which have come to outline the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels director’s finest work. The movie additionally contains memorable performances by Alex Rider star Alex Pettyfer, enjoying real-life Commando Geoffrey Appleyard, and Mexican actress Eiza Gonzalez as Special Operations Executive agent Marjorie Stewart, who went on to marry March-Phillipps.

“Seeing them at work, I realised somehow the cast had recreated that maverick, do-the-unthinkable, think-the-unthinkable, let’s-all-have-fun-while-we’re-about-to-diestyle atmosphere on the set,” Lewis says.

“There was real chemistry. It was like a real special forces unit, a ‘Chinese parliament’ as the SAS calls it, where everyone throws ideas in. It doesn’t matter how unthinkable, because they have to do the unthinkable.”

Operation Postmaster itself, evenly fictionalised on display screen, is a living proof.

As Lewis marvels: “To this day, I cannot understand how Churchill got this plan through, it just beggars belief. I mean, on the one hand, I take my hat off to his sheer balls.

“But the draw back was incalculable, that is why there was a lot opposition.That’s why so many occasions all through Operation Postmaster, the navy management tried to torpedo it.The raiders could be violating that neutrality of Spain by sinking or stealing German or Italian vessels – Spain might have closed the Mediterranean to the British.

“But Churchill backed it to the hilt, which was, in my view, the biggest gamble of his political career. If Postmaster had gone wrong, Spain would be forced to join the war.”

Having fashioned the Special Operations Executive in 1940 to “set Europe ablaze”, little excited the PM greater than the concept of dashing commando-style raids, later described by Churchill in his wartime memoirs as “butcher and bolt” operations.

“Churchill realised the war was going to be fought as no conflict had been fought before – no holds barred, everything on the table,” says Lewis. “The rules of war had been torn up by Hitler. In fact, you had to out-Hitler Hitler, and the SOE was set up to do all the things you weren’t allowed to do: bribery, corruption, money laundering and smuggling. I mean, you name it, they did it.

“Churchill stated, ‘Leave a path of German corpses in your wake and guarantee no enemy can sleep soundly at evening’. He knew when you might strike behind their strains killing anyone, it doesn’t matter what their rank or, even higher, capturing and spiriting them away, it will strike terror into their hearts. Morale would collapse.”

He also understood that even “pinprick, mosquito raids”, as Churchill called them, would be worth their weight in propaganda. “It confirmed the ‘British Bulldog’ nonetheless had bark and the power to chew again, even in our darkest hour.”

By contrast, the powers-that-be believed war should be “performed by the foundations”. “Most of the senior navy commanders and political leaders had been schooled within the First World War and so they nonetheless considered issues as static trench warfare,” Lewis, 58, a father of four who lives in the West Country, continues.

“But extra importantly, they believed you possibly can wage struggle in a gentlemanly, chivalric approach, which you could not. And the extra profitable the SOE and, later, the SAS have been, the extra they have been resented as a result of they have been proving the naysayers flawed.” The SOE became known by its detractors as all sorts of things: “The agency”, “The Racket”, “The Baker Street Irregulars”, and even “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”, “as a result of that is what it was and that is what British officers should not have been doing,” Lewis explains.

“And in typical trend, as maverick, freewheeling, freethinking people, they embraced their nicknames. I feel that is fairly good.”

Having been approached by an SAS contact with a story that needed to be told “for posterity”, Lewis revealed the incredible tale in his bestselling 2014 account, Churchill’s SecretWarriors, now retitled to match the film, which introduced the exploits of March-Phillipps and his team. Back then, there were still half a dozen veterans alive.Today just one remains, Jack Mann, 98, although he did not take part in Postmaster.

As founder of No 62 Commando, also known as the Small Scale Raiding Force – precursor to today’s SBS – March-Phillipps created the template for modern Special “They have been the unique deniable operatives. It was the form of stuff we now virtually settle for as a given, however again then this was an unthinkable approach to behave,” says Lewis.

“They have been posing as Swedish vacationers on a pleasure cruise realizing that, if captured, the federal government would deny any information of them and they’d be handled as spies. That complete bundle was simply extraordinary. No one had accomplished it and it was deeply, deeply reprehensible to an terrible lot of individuals on excessive. Now it is a given these items happen.

“We have bespoke items within the shadows that do these items.”

March-Phillipps’ boss at the Admiralty was Fleming, who went on to create 007, infusing his fictional super-spy with much of his former comrade in arms’ character.

“Fleming got here up with numerous good schemes and so they have been all blocked by their political and navy masters, as a result of nobody favored these folks, nobody favored what they have been doing, nobody favored their totally different mind-set,” says Lewis. “It was solely March-Phillips and Fleming’s perseverance that obtained Postmaster off the bottom.”

Perhaps the greatest character in the saga is Anders Lassen, the scion of a wealthy Danish family who had made their money in tobacco. He was overseas working as a merchant seaman when the Germans invaded his country.

“He volunteered for the British military however they mainly determined he was simply too wild and unruly,” chuckled Lewis. “So they handed him to the SOE. One of the primary issues Lassen does is petition the War Office for the usage of the bow and arrow as the best weapon: a silent killer that by no means runs out of bullets – you possibly can make arrows from something. And the War Office did a research, it is all within the archives, extremely, and so they got here again saying, ‘Yes, you are proper. However, it is too inhumane a weapon to be used’.

“So on paper they didn’t let Lassen use it. But of course, that didn’t stop him at all. With his blonde hair and foreign accent, Lassen kept getting arrested by the Home Guard during training in Dorset as a suspected German spy. Eventually he was nicknamed the ‘Danish Robin Hood’.”

The irrepressible Dane would develop into March-Phillipps’ trusted second in command. Having met US actor Ritchson, 41, whereas they have been filming aboard the Imperial War Museum’s floating museum, former Royal Navy cruiser HMS Belfast, Lewis reveals: “He’s something like 6ft 4ins and equally wide. I asked what it was like playing Lassen who was slim, less than 6ft tall and had a strong Danish accent.

“He informed me, ‘I is likely to be twice his dimension, however I can let you know one factor, I’m bloody good with the bow and arrow’. And he was.”

Lewis believes Lassen was probably responsible for more enemy fatalities than any other similar operative in the entire war. “In my view, you’ll be able to have good and dangerous psychopaths, and Lassen was an excellent one.”

Later, the Small Scale Raiding Force was taken to North Africa, trained as SAS, and became the SBS under General Dwight Eisenhower’s command to take part in Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943. By then, March-Phillipps would be dead. Having received the Distinguished Service Order for his part in Operation Postmaster, and married, he was killed aged 34 in September 1942 during a failed raid on the coast of occupied France on part of what later became Omaha Beach in the D-Day landings. Lassen died aged 24 in April 1945 in Italy.

Posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, he was the only non-Commonwealth recipient of the honour – and, incredibly, remains the only member of the British SAS to this day to receive a VC. He is one of only three statues at the SAS regimental headquarters in Hereford today, the others being SAS founder Sir David Stirling, and his successor, Paddy Mayne.

Despite their deaths, a potential sequel might massage the historical record to allow the actors to return, featuring later SOE ops.

Lewis smiles: “Henry Cavill held his hand out to me and stated, ‘Without you, we would not have a movie and I’m so honoured to be enjoying this man’. When I informed him his character dies, he stated he would not enable it!”

Otherwise, however, the self-described “fashionable historian” is happy with Ritchie’s adaptation of his book, even the trademark humour. “If this movie will get seen by tens of millions of younger folks – which it already has – and only a fraction go and purchase the e-book or analysis the topic, that is music to my ears, as a result of it means they’re discovering out about Second World War historical past,” he adds.

“We have a struggle happening in Europe. We’ve obtained Putin making an attempt to mess with democracy – the freedoms for which these folks sacrificed a lot. So if we will hold getting that message out, I’m all for popularising historical past as a lot as we will.”

The Ministry of UngentlemanlyWarfare is accessible now on Prime Video. Damien Lewis’s e-book of the identical title is printed in paperback by Quercus, priced £10.99. Visit expressbookshop.com or name 020 3176 3832