Across the Channel Again

A clammy Channel mist hung chilly over Boulogne as the British ships sneaked inshore. In the murk of the early morning, the Commandomen, their faces daubed with jet black war paint like fantastic military minstrels, splashed into the surf and slipped ashore.

Not until they had made their way through barbed-wire barricades to sand dunes several hundred yards inland did the Nazis wake up to the alarming fact that the British were once again poking around the coast of France.

As the Commandomen split up into patrols and fanned out to cut Nazi communications, searchlights picked up the British speedboats, and soon tracer bullets. Very lights, anti-aircraft shells flashed brightly above them. German flak (antiaircraft) ships moved in to the attack. Ashore, while whistles blew and signal lights blinked, the Commandomen moved silently about their business.

For two hours, on their silent sneakers (except one officer, who wore just-as-silent bedroom slippers), they snipped wires, potted sentries, shot up pillboxes, made notes on Nazi fortifications. Then, without the loss of a man, they made their way under stiff German fire back through the barbed wire to their ships.

Unwillingly at home, chafing for news of the show was the Commandos' boss, gay but cutlass-keen Captain the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 41-year-old second cousin of King George, great-grandson of Queen Victoria. Lord Louis, who has had four ships shot out from under him in naval action, was recently made head of the Combined Operations Department, now reports only to the Prime Minister.

Leading them was tall (6 ft. 4 in.), curly-haired, 30-year-old Major the Lord Lovat, famed Scottish horseman, whose Commando included men of Ulster, Palestine, Indian as well as Scottish and English regiments.

The raid was small but it was significant. Boulogne, which in 1803-05 was to be a jumping-off spot for Napoleon's invasion of England, bristles with protective armament. If a handful of men could thus dare the Nazi guns, perhaps something was rotten in all Hitler's coastal defenses. Certainly the defenses of Boulogne were not raid-proof. Shortly after the raid, Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, lately named as commander of all German forces in western Europe, ordered the arrest of several Nazis, jailed 150 Frenchmen suspected of having given assistance to the British.

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