No. 4 Commando - Background

Background

The British Commandos were a formation of the British Armed Forces organised for special service in June 1940. After the Dunkirk evacuation, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, called for a force to be assembled and equipped to inflict casualties on the Germans and bolster British morale. Churchill told the joint Chiefs of Staff to propose measures for an offensive against German-occupied Europe, and stated, "they must be prepared with specially trained troops of the hunter class who can develop a reign of terror down the enemy coast." One staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel Dudley Clarke, had already submitted such a proposal to General Sir John Dill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Dill, aware of Churchill's intentions, approved Clarke's proposal and on 23 June 1940, the first commando raid took place.

The request for volunteers for special service was initially restricted to serving Army soldiers within certain formations still in Britain, and from men of the disbanding divisional Independent Companies originally raised from Territorial Army divisions who had served in Norway.

By November 1940, more than 2,000 men had volunteered and were organised into four battalions in a Special Service Brigade, under the command of Brigadier J. C. Haydon. The Brigade quickly expanded to 12 battalions, which were renamed commandos. Each commando had a lieutenant colonel as the commanding officer (CO) and numbered around 450 men (divided into 75 man troops that were further divided into 15 man sections). Technically these men were only on secondment to the commandos; they retained their regimental cap badges and remained on the regimental roll for pay. The new force of commandos came under the operational control of the Combined Operations Headquarters.