1/5
One of the great figures of British wartime special forces is also, regrettably, one of the least known.
Tony Browne, MC, DCM, was born in England in 1908 & later quit Cambridge Uni to emigrate to New Zealand.
Tony (pic) dabbled in journalism pre-war & then joined up in 1939. 2/
In this week in 1941 Browne was a member of S Patrol led by John Olivey (3rd, front). They conducted an outstanding road watch in Libya, deep behind enemy lines.
During 168 hours they noted traffic, such as:
'Lorries between 3 and 10 tons - eastbound 1218, westbound 764.'

1/5
I see the Anti-Semitic idiot brigade were out in force at Glastonbury at the weekend.
This thread is for those morons.
Disaster nearly befell the SAS in June 1942.
It could have ended in the death/capture of Stirling & Mayne, but for this man:
Karl Kahane, an Austrian Jew 2/
Stirling & Mayne, with Johnny Cooper & Reg Seekings (pic, l-r 2 & 4th), Jimmy Storie, Bob Lilley & Kahane, were in a truck heading to raid Benina in Libya.
I heard the story of what happened from Storie & Cooper. Johnny laughed about it 60 years later but not at the time.

1/6
One of the great special forces operations of WW2 began on March 25 1945.
Eight men parachuted into an upland valley in Borneo.
They were led by the very eccentric Tom Harrisson (pic).
An anthropologist, he was summoned to a "mysterious interview" in a London hotel in 1944. 2/
Harrisson was not natural SF material. He was 33, an academic with a volatile temperament. But he had something that SOE needed: intimate knowledge of Borneo: its terrain (pic) & its people. Harrisson had acquired this during a 6-month field study trip with Oxford Uni in 1932.

1/4
Remembering on this day two very gallant men.
Sub-Lt Grigor Riggs, a Scot, and Sgt Colin Cameron from Australia.
They were members of Z Special Unit, engaged on Operation Rimau, a raid on Singapore.
On Nov 5th the raiders were cornered by the Japanese on the island of Merapas
2/
This map of Merapas in the South China Sea was sketched by one of the raiders.
When a large enemy search party hove into view on the morning of Nov 5, Riggs & Cameron devised a plan: they would create a diversion, allowing their six comrades to escape in local fishing boats.

1/4
Last time I saw Mike Sadler (pic) was at the final LRDG lunch in 2017. We talked of Paddy Mayne & Mike lamented the rubbish written about him in recent decades.
I asked Mike to sum up Mayne.
'Controlled recklessness,' he said
Ambrose McGonigal of the SBS had the same quality. 2/4
Mayne & McGonigal (pic), MC & bar, had much in common.
They were both fine rugby players (Ambrose was a Leinster Schools cap) & contemporaries at Queen’s Uni, Belfast.
The pair served in the Royal Ulster Rifles, and then the Commandos, as did Eoin, Ambrose's younger brother.

1/4
August 30 1944
Significant date in SBS history.
On this day 80 years ago Andy Lassen, pic, & 11 men raided Yugoslavia, blowing a bridge a few miles south of Dubrovnik.
They'd come across the Adriatic in a motor launch from the SBS base in Italy.
Blowing the bridge was easy... 2/4
...the extraction was trickier.
Particularly when confronted with dozens of Nazis & Ustaše.
I met 2 men on the raid: Dick Holmes (lt) & Doug Wright.
The Daily Telegraph claimed Doug ‘strangled nine Germans with his bare hands’ during the war.
Little exaggerated, said Dick.

¼
June 6 1944.
Operation Titanic.
The 6 men of 1SAS parachuted into Normandy just after midnight.
They came down close to Remilly-sur-Lozon. The 2 officers, Fred Fowles (l) and Norman Poole (r) were separated from their men. The four set off their explosives & then found a hedge.

2/
Four Brits hiding in a French hedge…
Locals soon spotted them & word was passed to André Le Duc (pic), a 33-year-old shopkeeper & father of seven from Remilly-sur-Lozon, who was in the Resistance.
On the night of June 6 he moved the four to the ruins of Château de Montfort.

1/4
April 28 1944.
On this day began one of the great feats of endurance in the history of US special forces.
The march up & over the 6,100ft Naura Hkyat Pass in the Burmese jungle was undertaken by ‘Merrill’s Marauders’.
One Marauder described it to me as 'a trail of sadness'. 2/
That man was Bernard Martin, seen here 2nd row, two from right.
Bernie’s best friend, Bill Smawley, next to him on the end of the 2nd row, didn’t survive.
The Marauders were riddled with malaria, typhus & amoebic dysentery.
Feverish & exhausted, every step was an effort.

1/7
At dawn on December 3 1941 L/Cpl Mike ‘Lofty' Carr (pic) was alone behind enemy lines in Libya.
The previous night he’d got separated from his LRDG patrol.
Then he saw a Senussi camp.
What happened next was a lesson in humanity that Lofty kept with him for all his 101 years. 2/
In 2014 I read him his report of the encounter, which he’d written 73 years earlier. “I asked for food & water & was provided with camel’s milk, macaroni & coffee by the natives,” wrote Lofty in 1941. “Having been fed I was next provided with blankets and taken to a cistern."

1/7
September 26 1943 – the date of arguably the greatest special forces raid of WW2.
It was codenamed Jaywick & comprised 3 Brits & 3 Aussies
Wally Falls, Don Davidson, Andy Huston, Ivan Lyon, Arthur Jones & Bob Page.
Here they toast their success
Wally, Don & Ivan were British. 2/
They departed Exmouth Gulf, W.A, on Sep 2, in the Krait (pic), a 70-ft long fishing vessel with a 6 cylinder H.P engine.
Their target was Singapore harbour, 1800 miles north.
They were going deep into enemy territory, but only Ivan Lyon knew that among the crew of fourteen.

1/6
On this day in 1944 Sergeant Gerald Davis of 2SAS was given a choice by the Gestapo:
Either he talked or he died
He was left alone for 10 minutes to make his decision.
Davis lies in Moussey cemetery, eastern France.
The inscription on his headstone reads: ‘Loyal Unto Death’. 2/
The previous photo is of Davis’s pal, Len Owens (pic in 1944), visiting his grave in 2005.
Len & Gerald were Phantom Signallers attached to 2SAS & dropped into the Vosges region on August 13 1944.
In a contact with a German patrol on Aug 17 Davis became separated from his unit

1/6
On June 18 1944, Lt Leslie Cairns & 15 men of A Sqn, SAS, along with 7 RAF crew, vanished en route to the Morvan in France.
The Stirling aircraft has never been conclusively found.
Six months earlier Leslie had married Irene in Edinburgh, where they'd met at university. 2/
Cairns and his men are remembered on the Bayeux Memorial to the Missing. Among the dead were several SAS ‘Old Hands’, including Reg Wortley, Barney Bryson & Bill Leadbetter.
Also listed are SAS men murdered in France by the Germans and whose bodies were never found.

1/16
June 15 1945
‘Last Big Nazi in the Bag’ was the headline in the Nottingham Evening Post.
The Nazi was Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (pic).
Bagged in a Hamburg boarding house.
By the SAS
This is the story of how a SAS sergeant nabbed one of the most infamous Nazis. 2/
Of the many SAS veterans I met few were as formidable as Jacques Goffinet (pic). "Fighting was in my blood,” he told me.
Jacques was a Frenchman who served in the Belgian SAS. They were a crack outfit, led by the outstanding Eddy Blondeel.

1/12
On June 13 1944, Lt Johnny Cooper & his stick of A Sqn, 1SAS, were crouched in a ditch near Les Valottes (pic) deep inside Occupied France. In the distance they heard an odd noise.
"What the hell's that?" Johnny whispered to his mate, Reg Seekings.

Was it friend or foe? 2/
On the night of June 11/12, a recce party of 19 men from A Sqn, led by Bill Fraser, had jumped into the Morvan. Their DZ was at Vieux Dun (pic) but they were scattered over a large area. Cooper, using his schoolboy French, asked a local for help in locating the Maquis.

1/9
June 6:
Also the day in 1922 that Johnny Cooper was born.

Johnny (pic) served in the SAS from 1941 to 1959 with a brief intermission working in the wool trade.
But knitted cardigans weren’t really his thing.
So he re-enlisted & added Malaya & Oman to his WW2 battle honours. 2/
A sign that someone has reached legend status is when they’re immortalised in song. That was the case with Johnny – who cropped up in an A Squadron favourite - ‘Old Uncle Bill Fraser & all’, lustily sung in spring 1944 while the Regiment trained at Darvel in Scotland.

1/8
This is a thread about Teddy Mitford of the LRDG.
Distantly related to the sisters.

Pre-war desert explorer.
One of the first LRDG officers.
The Kiwis hated Mitford (pic) & at one point plotted to murder him for being an upper-class English prat.
Why didn't they?
Read on 2/
Someone asked me if he had a part in the LRDG badge.
Yes, it was Mitford's idea to put Bluey Grimsey’s Scorpion design inside a wheel, taking inspiration from the Italian Auto-Saharan Coy's badge. This happened in Nov 1940 when the Long Range Patrol officially became the LRDG

1/9
Following Sunday’s LRDG thread, 1 or 2 have asked about the motto & scorpion badge.
The motto was explained in Tracks, the LRDG newsletter, which first appeared in June 1941.
Not by strength, by guile (non vi sed arte) was chosen by Captain Frank Edmundson (pic with Senussi). 2/
Frank, a Kiwi, was the LRDG MO in 1940/41. He also had a hand in the Scorpion badge, one of its first appearances being in Tracks (pic).
The full story was recounted in the 1973 LRDG newsletter – with the man responsible for the design, Kiwi Claude ‘Bluey’ Grimsey, explaining:

1/6
May 28.
Remembering the ‘Boss’, Ralph Bagnold, founder of the Long Range Desert Group, who died on this day in 1990.
The LRDG: the first, and the finest
"Not by strength, by guile" 2/6
David Lloyd-Owen said that Bagnold’s four tenets for the LRDG were:
1) planning
2) equipment
3) communication system
4) ‘human element of rare quality’.

One of the 'human element' recruited to the Rhodesian Patrol in the summer of 1940 was Cecil Jackson (pic)

1/14
On this day in 1944 Major Ian Fenwick, 1SAS, told the papers: ‘Wonders will never cease.’
He was talking about the fact he’d just got engaged, three weeks after meeting his bride-to-be on an SAS training exercise.
Pic: Fenwick, 3 from left, training in Scotland in May 1944. 2/
Margaret was serving tea from a YMCA van & Fenwick stopped for a brew.
It was love at first sight.
The wedding was set for September. Shortly after the engagement was announced in The Times, Fenwick & 1SAS left Scotland for Fairford in Gloucestershire.

1/8
This is Austin Hehir, MM, of 2SAS,
Back in March I tweeted a thread about the Ironman Irishman, and said I would love to know more about this remarkable soldier.
Thanks to his family (& Twitter) I now do after they contacted me.
This photo of Austin was taken in his POW camp. 2/
Quick recap:
Hehir was part of Op Maple, parachuting into northern Italy in January 1944.
His method of eliminating Nazi staff cars was ‘to draw his two revolvers & walk up the road firing at the car’. He did this twice.
In 10 days his team accounted for 25 enemy vehicles.

1/10
It’s happy birthday 2SAS.
To use a modern word, they officially ‘transitioned’ from No62 Commando to 2nd Special Air Service on May 13 1943 under the command of Lt-Col Bill Stirling.

An eclectic bunch. They included:
An American athlete
A French gangster
A German Communist. 2/
The American was John Cochrane, born in Buffalo, but educated at Appleby College in Ontario. He’s front, 2 from left, in this photo.
John enlisted in the Toronto Scottish in 1939 but volunteered for No62 Cdo in November 1942. Writing to his parents in Jan 43, he explained why: