They were the men from the ministry – Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Their commander was the man who inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bondand their most inventive killer a Dane whose weapon of choice was a bow and arrow.
These two fought alongside a black ops expert who served on so many covert missions that when he went toBuckingham Palace for his third medal in a year the King said, ‘You again?’
Their ship was a Brixham trawler, a wooden deep-sea fishing boat with sleek underwater lines and a tall mast. But while Maid Honour looked like an ordinary trawler, she had a collapsible deck, a plywood wheelhouse hiding a Vickers cannon (115 rounds per minute of armour-piercing shells), twin Lewis machine guns that fired through her deck drains and four anti-tank guns designed to fend off a submarine.
The men from the ministry conducted hand-to-hand combat with a Fairbairn Sykes Fighting Knife, a 7in blade with two murderously sharp edges whose heavy handle gave a firm grip even when slick with blood.
Pistols were fired, Shanghai-style, from the hip, and the men were also habitually armed with coshes, grenades and that 1930s gangster favourite, the Tommy gun.
Guy Ritchie's The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare stars: (L-r) Hero Fiennes Tiffin as Henry Hayes, Alan Ritchson as Anders Lassen, Henry Cavill as Gus March-Phillipps and Eiza Gonzalez asMarjorie, later Mrs March-Phillipps
Their January 1942 mission, codenamed Operation Postmaster, was to sail to the Spanish-controlled island of Fernando Po off the West African coast and pinch a bunch of boats from under the noses of the Nazis. Their booty had to be delivered into international waters without anyone knowing whodunnit. Ever.
It was a critical moment in World War II. Britain, standing alone against Hitler, was being starved of her supply of food and munitions by his fleet of U-boats. The vessels sailing in and out of Fernando Po were keeping these German subs at sea. Taking them out was a dirty job, dazzlingly executed, that would remain classified for decades.
But there was never any question that when it was revealed,Guy Ritchie, the director behind Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels and The Gentlemen, would amp up the story and turn it into a film, in homage to the founding fathers of Britain’s special forces. The only surprise is it’s taken him this long.
The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare, released in the UK later this month, is – in his signature style – jam-packed with mavericks and one-liners. There’s Churchill as played by Rory Kinnear, Freddie Fox coolly perfect as Ian Fleming and an army of stuffed shirts who think black ops are not, well, gentlemanly.
SupermanHenry Cavill is Gus March-Phillipps, the template for 007, and Reacher’s Alan Ritchson is ‘Danish Hammer’ Anders Lassen. Geoffrey Appleyard, the commando who caused King George such merriment with his many medals, is played by Alex Pettyfer.
There’s also a femme fatale who can pick locks with her jewellery and fits in her spying between reading the menu and eating her main course.
She’s Marjorie Stewart, who genuinely served in Churchill’s Special Operations Executive, although she was part of the London planning team for Operation Postmaster, not abroad with the chaps as she is here.Eiza Gonzalez, recently seen in Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, plays Marjorie, later Mrs March-Phillipps.
Watch out for Gonzalez’s scene-stealing turns including a fabulous set piece at a party designed to keep the Germans away from the harbour on the night of the British raid. She sings Mack The Knife in a white slink of a dress best described as a weapon of mass distraction.
The team’s real leader Gus March-Phillipps,the man who inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bond
It’s important to say the film is not wholly faithful to the reality of the raid and doesn’t pretend to be. Ritchie has been fastidious in saying it’s ‘based on’ the events of 1942. Crucially however, the bits which aren’t true are amalgams of other special ops missions by the men from the ministry.
Historian and author Damien Lewis, who wrote the book that inspired the film, has already had grumpy emails from a few military purists but he’s personally delighted with the cinematic version, believing it will drive interest in the real thing.
So let’s start with the actual Operation Postmaster. Fernando Po, now the island of Bioko, part of Equatorial Guinea, was then a Spanish colony. Hitler craftily ran his U-boat repairs and resupply from it, knowing Britain could not openly attack without dragging Spain into the war.
Churchill, says Damien Lewis, recognised that his only option was to ‘out-Hitler Hitler’ and cheat.
Operation Postmaster required the theft of the liner and cargo ship duch*essa d’Aosta, the tug Likomba and the Bibundi, a pleasure yacht, from Santa Isabel, the island’s port. They were to be delivered to a British Navy patrol in the Gulf of Guinea and the men from the ministry would disappear in the diplomatic chaos which ensued.
It was an extension of the ‘butcher and bolt’ reign of terror the British PM had demanded across German-occupied Europe from small black ops squads.
The Operation Postmaster crew, styled the SSRF, Britain’s Small Scale Raiding Force (also known as No 62 Commando), was a specially trained assault unit like that portrayed in last year’s BBC drama SAS Rogue Heroes. Formed in 1940 by order of Churchill, these units would evolve into today’s SAS and SBS.
In the film we meet the SSRF mid-ocean, pretending to be Swedish fishermen, with Maid Honour being boarded by Nazis. ‘Just a little sailing holiday,’ says Cavill’s March-Phillipps before bursting into a very unmanly fit of tipsy giggles.
Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels director Guy Ritchie (pictured) pays homage to the founding fathers of Britain’s special forces withThe Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare
‘Drunken animal,’ a German officer snarls at Lassen. ‘Guilty as charged,’ he agrees amiably before unleashing an orgy of violence; machine-gunning, throat-slitting and a lot of stabbing, with bodies despatched to a watery grave.
The movie makes the mission look funny, glamorous and terribly bloodthirsty. ‘Stealth mode is over,’ sighs March-Phillipps at one point as Lassen pops a grenade though a slit into a fortified control room. Toss in some well-deployed swearing, a car battery wired up to nipple clamps by the Gestapo, lobster and Champagne courtesy of Churchill, and an old-Etonian cricket-loving prince and you have a classic Ritchie caper.
Damien Lewis’s source material makes, of course, a more sobering read. ‘Churchill said from the very outset that this was total war, that Hitler would fight with all means at his disposal and that we had to not only do the same, but go one better,’ the author tells me.
‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare was founded to do all the things you’re not allowed to do under the rules of war – murder, assassination, bribery, corruption, money laundering, smuggling, raising guerrilla armies.
'Nothing was off the books because this was a battle for the survival of the civilised world. But it had to all be utterly deniable. If captured you’d be disowned by your own government, hung out to dry, and tortured until you died.’
He was invited to write the book by a group of SAS veterans who wanted the regiment’s origin stories recorded before they died. Today only one soldier from that era survives, but Damien hopes he’s got enough down in print for the rest of us to understand Britain’s collective debt to them all.
The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare is expected to be the first in a quartet of films, based on other raids chronicled in his book.
The historian’s favourite moment in this first film comes right at the start when March-Phillipps is naming his team. ‘He says something like, “You won’t like them, they’re all bad.” It’s that one word, “bad”. They were bad. But they were bad guys on the side of right, who delivered.’
Neither Lassen nor March-Phillipps made old bones. Lassen died in action in Italy in 1945 and March-Phillipps just a few months after his success with Operation Postmaster while reconnoitring the Normandy coast.
‘What do you think chaps? Shall we have a bash?’ he asked as he stepped into enemy territory only to be rumbled by a German guard dog and killed by a roving patrol. The Nazis celebrated by awarding the dog the Iron Cross.
- The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare, from Thursday, Amazon Prime Video. Damien Lewis’s book of the same name is published by Quercus, priced £10.99.
