The Collection of Second World War and Modern Gallantry Awards formed by the late William Oakley Vaagso - December 1941
No. 3 first went into action proper in the Vaagso raid in December 1941, in which, as stated, Walsh, as a member of No. 6 Troop, was wounded - by a grenade splinter in the head. Peter Young’s takes up the story in Storm from the Sea:
‘No. 3 gun was surrounded by a low wall, perhaps two and a half feet high and fairly thick; behind this cover we paused for a moment to weigh up the situation. Ahead we could make out the outline of wooden huts looming through the smoke. Suddenly things began to happen. A little way to the right a grenade exploded, and almost simultaneously a German soldier appeared twenty yards away charging towards us - perhaps the leader of a counter-attack. I was glad I had got the men under cover ready to receive it. Kneeling inside the gun position, my rifle resting on the wall, I was able to shoot him. He screamed, spun round and fell. Sergeant Vincent and one of the Norwegian guides fired too. “If I’m killed today at least I take one of them with me,” I said, a barbarous sentiment with which Sergeant Vincent was in full agreement.
The grenade which we had heard just before this incident had caused our first casualty, Walsh, the Irish Guardsman. Connolly, now one of my Sergeants, saw two Germans in a small wooden hut about thirty yards away and ordered one of his men to throw a bomb at them. Walsh, who was a little deaf, had dashed forward at that moment and had been hit in the neck. The two Germans promptly surrendered and he escorted them back to the beach. He thought so little of his wound that when he was sent off to H.M.S. Kenya he did not report for treatment until the next day, since there were already many casualties whose condition he considered more serious than his own. It so happened that the wound had narrowly missed his jugular vein!’
Vaagso was a bitterly contested battle, house-to-house and hand-to-hand combat being the order of the day. The enemy lost 120 men, with another 98 being taken P.O.W., while No. 3 Commando lost 17 men, with 53 wounded: as Durnford Slater put it, ‘The battle of Vaagso had been won against a first-class opposition by the utter ruthlessness and complete professional competence of our officers and men’.
Dieppe - August 1942
Next up was Operation “Jubilee”, the ill-fated Dieppe raid and, as it transpired, especially ill-fated for No. 3 Commando, who, as part of a flotilla known as “Group 5”, ran into an enemy convoy long before even the coast hove into view. John Mellor’s Dieppe Raid takes up the story:
‘Suddenly at 3.50 a.m. Group 5 was nakedly exposed in an artificial daylight created by star shells bursting overhead. About half a mile off the port bow, five motor vessels were approaching; they were escorted by two submarine chasers and a minesweeper. This was the German convoy en route from Boulogne to Dieppe that the British Admiralty had detected by radar. The tiny
L.C.Ps were built entirely of wood, which afforded no protection whatsoever against bullets or shrapnel. They were capable of transporting 25 soldiers plus a naval crew of three. Their armament was a solitary Lewis gun, and their top speed was 9 knots. Obviously they had not been designed to fight a sea battle ... ’
Indeed one N.C.O. later voiced the opinion that the
L.C.Ps were so flimsy that ‘a rifle bullet would go right through about ten of them’. And Peter Young’s eye-witness account of the incident in Storm From the Sea leaves no doubt as to the ferocious nature of the “firefight” that ensued:
‘At 3.47 a.m., when we were still about an hour’s run from the coast, a starshell went up on our port bow illuminating the group. Immediately a heavy fire was opened on us; 3 and 4-inch ack-ack guns and machine-guns poured a stream of shells and tracer into the flotilla, while further star shells lit up the sky. It was by far the most unpleasant moment of my life. Five enemy craft were converging on us. It seemed impossible that our wooden landing-craft could survive more than a few minutes. The tracer seemed to come swooping straight at us. In a few minutes we would be dead and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. We crawled upon the face of the ocean, and always nearer to the deadly line of enemy ships. It was certainly very frightening - far more so than any land battle I ever saw before or since.’
But for the extremely gallant actions of a Steam Gun Boat (S.G.B.) crew from Newhaven - from whence Group 5 had earlier set sail - it is likely a complete massacre would have ensued. But by means of drawing the enemy’s fire, S.G.B 5 afforded the vulnerable
L.C.Ps an opportunity to flee, albeit with consequent loss. John Mellor continues:
‘Group 5 had been decimated and scattered. Out of a total of 23
L.C.Ps that had set out of Newhaven, four did not reach the scene of the encounter due to engine trouble and had to return to England. Of the remaining 19, four were badly hit with most of their crews killed or wounded, so that they were forced to return to England. The remaining
L.C.Ps split into several groups during the action. Five of them attached themselves to the Gunboat, determined to follow the leader; three others had closed with the flak-ship and were battling the German ships; the remaining seven veered away from the Group and proceeded on their own to the Yellow Beaches ahead.’
Of these seven
L.C.Ps, six eventually reached “Yellow 1” beach, and another “Yellow 2” beach. Here then a second hair-raising encounter with the enemy, for the latter was fully alerted, defences at the ready - namely machine-gun parties and riflemen on the cliff top. And the first man to go down as the “Eurekas” hit the beach was a Lieutenant-Commander, a rifle bullet hitting him between the eyes. Luckily for those who got ashore, M.L. 346 was lying off “Yellow 1” and lending valuable support, but it was soon apparent that the position was untenable, even though some of the Commandos and Rangers did manage to get inland, although whether Walsh was among them remains unknown.
No. 3 Commando sustained 140 casualties at Dieppe, the brunt of those losses being borne by No. 5 and No. 6 Troops. Sicily - July 1943
No. 3 Commando's opening raid on Sicily was made with the objective of destroying the coastal battery and defences near the town of Cassibile, thus allowing the vanguard of the 8th Army to land - a successful operation carried out on the night of 9-10 July 1943, but only after carrying out a frontal assault on the battery and much bitter fighting. Durnford Slater takes up the story:
‘Charlesworth sounded the Advance on his bugle, and we went in for the final assault. We came to barbed wire and blasted paths through it with bangalore torpedoes, long metal tubes filled with explosive. We dashed through the gaps firing from the hip ... Finally we used the bayonet. The Italians stuck it fairly well until near the end, replying to our fire with automatic weapons. When we had cleaned them up, we proceeded to blow up the guns. Some enthusiast, just in the spirit of clean fun, also decided to blow up the ammunition supply of the battery, about one thousand shells. It was a very loud bang. There was plenty of stuff flying and it was a very foolish action, but no one was hurt. The battery was blown up eighty-five minutes after landing.’
The Commando was then re-embarked on the Prince Albert for its next task - the capture of the Punta dei Malati Bridge - Durnford Slater being given just a few hours notice of a plan that also involved a separate attack on another bridge at Primasole by the Airborne. Moreover, he was dubious about intelligence reporting ‘some easily discouraged Italian toops’ as the only opposition, for if the bridge was worth taking, it was equally worth defending - and he was right, his Commando eventually running into the 1st German Parachute Division after landing under fire several miles behind enemy lines at Agnone at 2200 hours on 13 July. First of all, however, operations at the bridge went well, the defenders being knocked out and the 350-strong Commando deployed in captured pill-boxes, surrounding orange groves and ravines. But, as Robin Neilland's The Raiders - The Army Commandos 1940-46 explains, elite German forces were on their way to do battle:
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