This is not a review of Guy Ritchie’s new movie The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. It’s been reviewed widely already, almost always favorably, with reviewers generally characterizing it as a thoroughly entertaining romp based on an obscure but fascinating actual World War II adventure. I have nothing to add to these reviews, not least because, living in a movie theater desert, I’ve not yet had a chance to see it. But when it comes to my favorite TV streaming service, I will tune in eagerly, simply because it punches every one of my entertainment buttons.
When I first saw the publicity, I dismissed it as another lame, warmed-over Hollywood action-adventure akin to the profoundly irritating Inglourious Basterds. I suspected it conjured up World War II for no better reason than our unwillingness to tell stories involving confrontations with present day villainy, something our own Lou Aguilar has called out frequently. Confounding Nazi villainy remains the easy option; one waits, without holding one’s breath, for a big-budget Hollywood action-adventure that involves, say, taking on Hamas or features Ukrainian special operators sinking Russian warships — or an international band of special operators thwarting a Chinese-sponsored bioterrorism plot (for the latter, I have the story dialed up and waiting).
Then I saw the names of the characters. Gus March-Phillips. Geoffrey Appleyard. Anders Lassen. Real men, not made-up characters. All boyhood heroes of mine, men cast in a special mold, exemplars of the world of special operations. The very first “grown-up” book I ever read was Gordon Landsborough’s unjustly forgotten Tobruk Commando, the story of an ill-conceived but heroically executed attempt to destroy Rommel’s main logistics base on the eve of the battle of El Alamein.
At age 8, reading this wonderfully accessible tale, I began a life-long appreciation of “behind the lines” special operations heroes. David Lloyd Owen, a stalwart of the Long Range Desert Group, features prominently in the book. David Stirling, the founder of the Special Air Service, makes a cameo appearance. Above all, there was John Haselden, the pivotal figure in the Tobruk raid itself, whose inspirational leadership and ultimate self-sacrifice resonated deeply. My dad, a veteran of more prosaic but nonetheless bitter infantry combat, had already begun to inculcate in me a deep appreciation both of heroism and of sacrifice. Haselden’s example made me see it in the starkly dramatic context of special operations. (READ MORE from James H. McGee: Learn of Heroes at a Young Age)
Our tiny southern town had a tiny public library, maybe 1,500 volumes. Still, in the ’50s, a nobler time when virtually every dad was a veteran of World War — and many granddads of World War I — the library contained an outsized collection of military histories. (Would that this remained the case in our woke-addled contemporary library systems.) Even more exciting, the World War II section contained a treasure chest of special operations histories.
Our library had — and I eagerly devoured — C.E. Lucas Phillips’ The Greatest Raid of All, the story of the legendary undertaking to deny the German battleship Tirpitz the repair facilities of the harbor of Saint-Nazaire. It also had his Cockleshell heroes, about a team of British raiders infiltrating a Nazi-held French harbor using, of all things, kayaks. Commando veteran Peter Young’s Storm from the Sea introduced me, in successive chapters, to the Lofoten, Vaagso, and Dieppe raids, culminating in the role of the commandos on D-Day. The British seemed to have a knack for this kind of warfare, going back to Lawrence of Arabia, famously the prototype of “gentleman, scholar, thug.”
There was also well-crafted fiction, notably Alistair MacLean’s The Guns of Navarone, a thinly fictionalized treatment of numerous special operations missions in the Aegean. Our eighth-grade English teacher promoted reading by acquiring and reselling paperback books. While most of these were “kid lit,” they included such notable adventures as Robb White’s famous frogman tale, Up Periscope, and, best of all, and special ops anthology entitled Behind Enemy Lines. The latter marked my introduction to perhaps the most fascinating of the World War II raiding specialists, the legendary “Popski,” Vladimir Peniakoff, and his band of special operations brigands, the wonderfully named “Popski’s Private Army.”
It was about this time that I first encountered the real-life heroes of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. The action depicted in the movie, a raid on shipping in the harbor of Fernando Po (now Bioko), a Spanish island off the coast of Africa, figured only fleetingly in the books available in our little library; it tended to be represented as little more than a side show. But the heroes themselves appeared again and again until each met the predictable sad demise. Number 62 Commando, aka the Small Scale Raiding Force (SSRF), went on from the Fernando Po expedition to conduct a series of raids along the French coast, part of Churchill’s famous remit to “set Europe ablaze.”
In and of themselves, none of these raids were strategically significant, and the conventional military mind tended to dismiss them, in the language of the time, as mere “pinpricks.” But at a time when Nazi Germany was riding high on all fronts, each raid reminded the Germans that their hold on France couldn’t be taken for granted. These “pinpricks” soon got under the skin of Adolf Hitler himself, whose infamous “commando order” directed that raiders, when captured, were to be summarily executed.
The first of the “ungentlemanly warfare” heroes to die was Gus March-Phillips, who was killed on one of these little raids, a reconnaissance operation targeting a stretch of French coast that, two years later, would become famous as Omaha Beach. Geoffrey Appleyard then assumed command of the SSRF, which would be relocated to the Middle Eastern theater and ultimately absorbed into the SAS. When he was overseeing an SAS parachute drop during the invasion of Sicily, Appleyard’s aircraft disappeared without a trace, quite possibly a victim of friendly fire.
Perhaps the most remarkable member of the trio was Anders Lassen, scion of a prominent Danish family, whose taste for adventure had led him first, as a teenager, to the life of a merchant seaman and then, when his homeland was attacked and occupied in 1940 by the Nazis, into the world of British special operations. After the dissolution of the SSRF, Lassen became an officer in the Special Boat Section of the SAS, the predecessor to today’s vaunted Royal Marine Special Boat Service, the British equivalent of our Navy SEALs. For the balance of the war he repeatedly led daring raids across the Mediterranean, Aegean, and Adriatic Seas.
On April 8, 1945, only a month before the end of the war in Europe, Lassen’s breathtaking indifference to danger finally exacted its price. Tasked with what he surely knew might be his final raid of the war, his force ran into heavy resistance. Leading, as always, from the front, Lassen destroyed multiple German positions singlehandedly and, even after being mortally wounded, refused evacuation until his men could be taken care of. For this action, he was posthumously awarded Britain’s highest military honor, the Victoria Cross, the only non–British Commonwealth citizen so recognized in World War II.
We Americans would do well to remember our own such heroes — not just those of World War II but also those of wars since. It’s been my good fortune to know several among a later generation of special warfare heroes, starting with the Vietnam era and continuing right down to the present day. Men like these, every bit as much as the heroes of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, deserve to be celebrated. Villainy didn’t die with Adolf Hitler, and woke pieties shouldn’t prevent us from appreciating our modern-day heroes. For too long we’ve dodged the inconvenient truth that there are people out there who hate us and want to do us down.
We can’t prepare new generations for the threats they will face by conjuring up comic book villains and superpowered superheroes. Heroes such as March-Phillips, Appleyard, and Lassen aren’t men of steel — they bleed and die. We once understood that heroes begat heroes, and we celebrated them accordingly, nurturing their example as a means of nurturing the next generation of heroes. We may wish, with Bertolt Brecht, to live in a land that needs no heroes, but look around you — that day is yet to come.
James H. McGee’s 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region.
