Sublime

Winston Churchill kept a close eye on Gubbins’s work and praised him for organizing the Auxiliary Units ‘with thoroughness and imagination’. He also expressed his hope that the guerrillas would fight to the death inside the German beachhead and ‘perish in the common ruin rather than to fail or falter in their duty’.41

‘The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.’

Eisenhower, supported by the British, advocated landing on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria, as far east as possible, within striking distance of Tunisia. Both saw the swift occupation of Tunisia as the most crucial element in the invasion—vital to prevent Axis reinforcements coming from Sicily, and essential to trap Rommel’s Afrika Korps in Liby

Another supporting character who comes close to Churchill’s half-century-plus of involvement in irregular matters is Jan Smuts, who started out as a Boer insurgent but later ran the British East African campaign against von Lettow-Vorbeck during World War I. He reappears again during World War II as a bureaucratic thorn in the side of Britain’s mas

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and the Schutztruppe

As the Navy was pressuring the Marine Corps’ planners to create island raiders and the Army was begrudgingly partnering with the Navy to create Scouts and Raiders for marking beaches but not really raiding anything beyond the high-water mark, another unit had already started performing the actual mission of the commando raid. Because that unit wasn

And that was enough. In early 1954, only five months after Unit 101 had been established, Dayan merged it with the Paratroopers Brigade, with Sharon as one of the battalion commanders. Dayan believed that Unit 101 had become a model—of training and discipline, of dedication and skill—that Sharon could replicate with the paratroops and then in the e

Charles Bosman’s classic short story The Rooinek opens with two ragged Boers lying in hiding, shooting with smokeless Mausers at smart British officers riding out openly on horseback. The last British regiment ever raised by a Highland clan chief, the Lovat Scouts, were formed in response to such guerrilla marksmen in South Africa. The original dra