Jenkins - World War 2 Untold Daring Secret Missions & Raids Soldier Stories in WWII

The Commandos were made famous during WWII, but the original commandos weren't British at all. As a matter of fact, they fought against the British in the Boer Wars in South Africa in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. These irregular soldiers so impressed one of their enemies, whom they took prisoner (he escaped, famously), that he later used the Afrikaner word kommando to describe the special forces units he was in the process of developing. His name was Winston Churchill. He fought against the kommandos in South Africa, and they gained his respect.

The Boers (as the Dutch South Africans were known), were mostly a rural farming and ranching people who depended on their horses and rifles both to feed and defend themselves. In the South Africa of the 1800s, three groups were fighting for control: the British, the Dutch South Africans, and the Zulus. The Zulus had been defeated for the most part by the 1890s, and the British, who had mostly resided in the coastal areas of South Africa, began to grow interested in the interior, both for its resources and as a transit route to its other colonies in Africa. The Boers, who had already been pushed by the British into the African interior in the 1700s, were not about to leave again. This is the root of the Boer Wars.

The Boers were outnumbered in both men and weapons, so they fought in the manner which best suited them and their situation wherever possible launching raids on superior British forces from horseback, inflicting as much damage as they could in a short time, and then beating a hasty retreat to fight another day. Frustrating, damaging and demoralizing, these raids played a large part in the first and second Boer Wars, and contributed to the negotiated peace which resulted in the Union of South Africa, a British/Boer power sharing nation.

When WWI broke out in 1914, the First Lord of the British Admiralty was Winston Churchill, and though he pushed for the formation of special commando type forces, his position as the head of the Navy made it difficult for him to push his ideas on the army chiefs, many of whom had never really liked him.

It was the Germans who developed a sort of special operations unit during WWI. Though the Nazi SA and SS were called stormtroopers in the 1930s and 40s, the original stormtroopers were German army units who had undergone intensive training on assaulting and infiltrating enemy trenches during WWI. Known in German as sturmtruppen or Stosstruppen (shock troops), these units were the first to use sub-machine guns in combat. They were often armed with flamethrowers, brass knuckles, trench clubs, and even armor. They constantly practiced assaulting enemy trenches, and though they had their first use in 1915, it wasn't until 1918 that they made their full impact.

In the German spring offensives of 1918, which were designed to break through the British and French lines and seize Paris before the Americans could arrive in force, storm-troops spearheaded the attack, and were largely successful. That is, they allowed the German assaults to move through, but in a number of areas, the storm-troops raided British, French, and American stores, and, because German supplies had been so low for so long, many of them stuffed themselves sick and drank themselves blind.

However, the Germans had, in both 1918 and earlier, impressed and frightened the Allies so much that they began to train special assault squads too, especially the British and Italians (who were fighting the Austrians in the tough terrain of the Alps). Before these troops could be really effective, the war came to an end, and to a large degree, so did the storm-troop idea.

The storm-troops had specialized weapons, practiced infiltration and intense close quarter assault techniques, and worked as a unit. However, there were large differences between the WWI storm-troops/assault troops and the commandos of WWII. One of the most important differences was this: the commandos generally worked far behind the lines (at least that was the initial intent), and were much more autonomous in structure and ability. The stormtroopers worked in close concert with the bulk of the attacking forces.

The storm-troop idea, though the military establishment in Britain, France, and other countries left it behind at the end of the war, was an idea that continued to resonate with younger officers and career NCOs in most Western European countries. The storm-troops of the United States military were the Marines, always considered to be the first in, and the last out, of battle. It was not until after England had developed the Commandos that the United States began to develop equivalent units.