The Red Devils
The Red Beret. By Hilary St. George Saunders. (Michael Joseph. 15s.).
MUCH of the cream of the war-time soldiers went to the airborne' forces, and so did many of the best Regulars. James Hill and Dickie des Voeux were in the same term at Sandhurst : Hill won the Sword of Honour and des Voeux passed out top ; the vintages above and below them were equally well represented. Why was this? Largely because such men were eating their hearts out after Dunkirk, when, unless one had the good fortune to be sent to the Middle East, there was little prospect of getting to the war for a long time to come. Parachutists (and commandos) were entirely drawn from volunteers at the expense of other units. It was and is very reasonably a source of pride, but I still maintain that it was a wiser system which said : " Your battalion's turning into Chindits. Congratulations ! " Or even, " Bad luck ! " But this is a perennial argument which often nearly comes to blows.
No account of their doings could ever do full justice to these men ; but nobody could get nearer than Mr. Hilary Saunders in this book. He begins fittingly with Operation Colossus, the first descent by British parachutists on to hostile soil, and then he harks back to the dark days of pioneering in the race of many conflicting priorities. (Even so late as July, 1943, I heard an Air-Marshal, now an Air- Ch:ef-Marshal, maintaining angrily that every transport aircraft built instead of a bomber was a major tactical defeat —and lack of transport aircraft was the chief cause of the partial failure at Arnhem fourteen months later.) He gives due place to the early experimenters, such as Norman and Rock, both killed in flying accidents as their work was reaching fruition ; to the early victims of inexperience, such as Driver Evans and Trooper Watts, who bought know- ledge for their successors with their deaths ; and to the earliest raiders—" Tag " Prichard's in Italy in February, 1941, and J. D. Frost's on to Bruneval a year later.
The first major drops, of a battalion strong, were in support of the First Army in North Africa. Here the battalion commanders had the hideous responsibility of choosing their dropping zones from the air while over the objective. The story of the 2nd Battalion's withdrawal from Oudna is an epic in its own right ; so is that of the battalions engaged at Breville in Normandy. Here the second in command of the 6th Air Landing Brigade, at a loose end, went wistfully forward to watch his old battalion cross a start line ; finding his successor and most of the company commanders dead or wounded, he assumed command while it did its job. And here at last is an orderly and easily followed account of the Arnhem battle, where the loss of control was less disastrous than it might have been because every man knew his task and essayed to do it, with or without his immediate commander.
Arnhem was a failure in that it failed to secure the bridge which was its object, but it sucked up vital German reserves. Prichard's raid was a failure in that it did not do all the damage that was hoped for, but it tied up countless troops in unprofitable guards thereafter. It is a paradox that what seemed the most successful airborne operation of the war, Crete, was the biggest failure; it was so costly that the Germans gave up the game.
The maps are adequate, the photographs are excellent, and Mr. Saunder's narrative is easy to read. The reader may feel that there is -too great a profusion of individual names, for the author has managed to mention 413 officers and men in 330 pages. But let nobody feel that of the many hundreds whose names do not occur " there is no memorial," for their deeds will not be forgotten, and this book will keep them fresh. BERNARD FERGUSSON.
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