When cinema faces the war stories It is always difficult to separate fiction from reality. Yet, when it comes to the British special services and their egocentric officers, the scriptwriters must never try too hard: because reality surpasses fiction, and recklessness often goes beyond the point of no return established by common “common sense”. This is the case of the operation that took the code name of “Postmaster” conducted by the Special Operations Executive (Soe), the private army of saboteurs, infiltrators and war madmen wanted by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, at the basis of the events narrated in “The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare“, the dirty war told by the film by Guy Ritchie.
The Real Operation of the SOE
Undertaken by the so-called “Maid Honor Force”, named after the former trawler Brixham chosen to reach the daring goal, a group of SOE agents led by Major Gustavus Henry March-Phillippscreator of No. 62 Commando, forerunner of the Special Air Service and inspiration for the young Royal Navy intelligence officer Ian FlemingOperation Postmaster was aimed at sabotaging the supply lines refueling of u-boats Nazis and the clandestine bases that gave them shelter in the Gulf of Guinea to make the routes used by Allied merchant ships from the Americas and South Africa to the United Kingdom less dangerous.
Following initial “reports” that U-boats were using river estuaries in Vichy French Equatorial Africa as supply bases in 1941, a British commando unit selected to Small Scale Raiding Forcethat is, to conduct raids and small-scale incursions had been formed to work in close collaboration with the Special Operations Executiveor SOE, a clandestine and secret organization composed of British military personnel and agents recruited from among foreign exiles to conduct espionage, sabotage and intelligence in Nazi-occupied Europe and wherever else it was needed.
As soon as March-Phillipps’ commandos came under the control of the Combined Operations Headquartershe was given the secret and extremely delicate mission of sailing the trawler from Poole Harbour on the south coast of Dorset on 9 August 1941 and heading towards theWest Africa with a crew of only five men under March-Phillipps while the rest of No.62 Commando, fifty-five men in all, preceded them aboard a troop vessel bound for Freetown, in Sierra Leone.
In September the decoy ship March-Phillipps had not yet found any trace of the clandestine U-boat bases and none of the “incursions” into the estuaries and river deltas of the African coast had yielded any results. It was then that SOE agents learned that “three Axis ships” were operating in the Port of Santa Isabel on the Spanish island of Fernando Po, formally neutral territory controlled from Madrid close to the Axis forces, 30 kilometers off the African coast on the border between Nigeria And Guinea.
Objective Santa Isabel
The target of the raid was the Italian merchant ship Duchess of Aosta 8,500 ton, the large tug Likomba and the barge Bibundiboth German ships. According to the true story, the Duchess of Aosta did not represent a threat for its cargo, but for the possibility of radioing the presence and coordinates of the convoys it crossed, of which the packs of wolves of Nazi U-boats were supposed to be hunting. However, it was not excluded that the ship could also be carrying weapons or ammunition in this specific case.
Contrary to what is portrayed in the film, the British Admiralty initially approved the operationdespite it being a neutral port, on 20 November 1941. The raiding force consisted of 32 men: four Soe agents, 11 commandos from No.62 and 17 men recruited from the local population. “bureaucratic problems” were raised, in truth, by General Sir George Giffard, British military commander in West Africa who refused to give his support to the mission, risking compromising the entire operation which – legally – could pass for a act of piracy. For this reason the Admiralty suspended “Postmaster” until January 6, 1942when the Foreign Office again granted approval on the condition that there were no “tangible evidence of British involvement“.
The Royal Navy was ordered to send a corvette, the HMS Violet to “intercept” Axis ships that would be hijacked on the high seas. Important, as expressed in Guy Ritchie’s film, is the role of the SOE agent Richard Lippettwho had been assigned a covert job with the shipping company John Holt & Co. of Liverpool who had a trading post on the island. It was Lippett who actually planned the details of the raid after studying the island and obtaining information about the crew of the Duchess of Aosta who did not disdain the dancing parties and the “social” life that took place on the small Spanish island.
The Raid to Capture the Duchess
The actual raid on the port of Santa Isabel took place at 23.15 of the January 14, 1942 under the direct command of the captain Graham Hayes and it lasted just a little 15 minutes while the officers of the Duchess of Aosta They were at a dinner specially organised by some British counterparts, together with two German officers of the Likomba.
Once the anchors were mined and the crews captured without bloodshedthe Duchess of Aosta was taken out of the port by the English tug Vulcan while a second tug, the Nuneaton, towed the Likomba. The anti-aircraft positions defending the port opened fire on “hypothetical targets” in the air. The explosions of the charges placed by the commando on the anchor chains had been mistaken for “bombs” dropped by planes that no one had actually heard coming or seen in the sky. The 150 mm guns placed in defense of the port did not fire a single shot.
The Hand of a Writer, the Act of Piracy and the End of a Hero
The Volcano and the command reached the coordinates of the Rendez Vous fixed with the ship sent by the Admiralty to be “pretend captured” by HMS Violet. Germany, Italy and Spain reacted “vehemently” speaking openly of a “act of piracy“. The speculations that spread about the capture of the ships leveled accusations against the English, the Americans, Spanish anti-Franco subversives, French against the collaborationist Vichy government. The attempt to raise the case by the German press was “neutralized” by the British at the hands of a Naval Intelligence officer: the same Ian Fleming who would become known for other operations details and for inventing James Bond.
There Maid Honor remained in Lagos and was sold to the Government of Sierra Leone. Duchess of Aosta sailed to Greenock to be operated by Canadian Pacific under the name Empire Yukon and on behalf of the Ministry of War Transport. The Likomba was operated by Elder Dempster Lines who renamed her Malakel and sold to Liberia in 1948.
The success of the operation significantly and positively impacted the Soe and its ability to plan and execute covert operations independent. A practice that was pursued by the Combined Operations Command.
Major Gustavus Henry March-Phillipps was killed in action during theOperation Aquatintraid on the coast of German-occupied France, launched in September 1942 to “raise the morale of the allies“. The operation will fail due to an error in locating the landing beach of Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes. He is buried in France, in a village near the American landing sectors chosen for the Normandy landings.