Dan Snow's History Hit - Inside the Royal Marines

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

The Royal Marines are the UK's Commando Force and the Royal Navy's own amphibious troops. The Commandos have become a byword for elite raiding skills and cutting-edge military operations. They are globally renowned, yet shrouded in mystery.Former Royal Marine Monty Halls joins Dan to shed light on the modern vanguard of a legendary unit, the descendants of the misfits and eccentrics who were so effective and feared in WW2 that Hitler famously ordered them to be shot on sight. They reveal the history behind the green beret, the real stories of extraordinary individuals and what it means to patrol the high seas and police coastlines around the globe.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Seyi AdaobiIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History here. I've got the brilliant, brilliant communicator, TV presenter and writer Monty Halls on the podcast today. We're talking about his beloved Royal Marines. He is a former Royal Marine. He managed to have a very particular time during the 350 years of the existence of the Royal Marines where no shots were fired in anger and perhaps that's why he's looked for adventure non-stop since leaving the forces he goes on expeditions he makes tv shows he writes great books and his most recent book is on the history of the royal marines and on commandos in particular fascinating opportunity to look at one of the world's most professional military organizations if you want to watch

numerous documentaries in which the Royal Marines feature be the documentaries on D-Day or Special Forces operations in the Channel Islands you can go do so at History Hit TV it's a new history channel very exciting tens of thousands of people subscribe to it we are creeping towards a very very big round number quite soon which can be great and you can subscribe by following the link in the notes this podcast it. That's all you've got to do. And then you get taken there. And for less than the price of a pint of beer, particularly these days, you get History Hit TV. You become a member of the team of History Hit TV.

You get to subscribe and watch all these wonderful documentaries, listen to all these fantastic podcasts. So here we are, which brings us to the very brilliant Monty Halls. Enjoy. Monty, thanks for coming on the show. No worries. My pleasure. Thanks for the invitation. I had to get you on because a veteran of so many of the epic,

epic Royal Marine actions that you write about so beautifully in this book. Oh, that's very kind, Dan. That's very magnanimous because I gave a talk on the book last night to a group of Royal Marines and I said, it's funny, if it was describing my career, it'd be more of a pamphlet than a book, I think. It'd be more of a leaflet than a book.

Well, you have said to me in the past that the Royal Marines have been in action for three centuries and more than three centuries and you managed to hit the precise period at which they did absolutely nothing. Oh, no, no, it's so true. The exact eight years of global serenity and peace was the period that covered my Royal Marines career. I always like to think with appalling vanity, I think those two things are probably interconnected. The fact that I was a Royal Marine meant there was absolutely no outbreaks

of a sort of serious conflict anywhere in the world. It's all about deterrence, brother. It's all about deterrence. It's like HMS Warrior. Never fight a shot in anger because it didn't need to. Exactly. My mere presence. But, well, the funny thing was,

I ended up specialising as a physical training officer. And again, I was chatting to some Marines friends last night and they said, what was the very last thing you did in the Royal Marines? What was the final evolution you organised? And it was the Royal Navy Netball Tournament. That was the last thing I did in the Royal Marines to defend my nation. That leads directly to another quite interesting point, actually, because I only did eight years. And yet it really sort of entered my DNA. This organisation really came to define me and I developed a very strong sense of identity. And that always intrigued me as I went through life. Subsequently, I was like, why do I feel such a strong affinity to this organisation? And so that's why it's been so lovely to circle back and make the series and write the book.

It's funny because I've been a friend of yours for years. You very rarely mention it. Yeah. Irony. We love a bit of irony. Yeah. Well, again, that's the thing. It emerges as this sort of touch point. Anytime you find yourself in a slightly awkward situation, you need a touch point. You come back to that DNA. You say, oh, no, this is who I represent. This is who I am. And it's quite important that, isn't it? Having a sense of identity and understanding who you are and who you represent. So yeah, yeah, it's funny. I did nothing, but I've been banging on about it for, I'm all talk and no trousers when it comes to the Marines. Now you've got loads of trousers. Now in the book, you talk about some astonishing episodes, which I'll ask you to tell me about, but just quickly, what's the idea behind a Royal Marine, a sea soldier?

How far back does it go? 350 years. So they were formed in 1664, and there was this very simple principle of you needed to project power ashore. And as we're finding nowadays in the sort of geopolitics around the world, you can't beat boots on the ground. Technology, data, electronic warfare, all this sort of stuff is all well and good, but you've got to get boots on the ground. So for 350 years, the Royal Marines have been doing that. They've been a projectile to be fired by the Navy ashore, as it were. And 80 years ago, straight after Dunkirk, so it was 1st of June 1940, there wasn't a single organized army in Europe opposing the Nazis. And obviously Dunkirk had happened, so 380,000 troops in disarray had been evacuated from Dunkirk, left all their heavy weapons behind.

And Churchill realized that he needed to create a raiding force, basically. And a lot of that was based on his time in the Boer War. He was a war correspondent in the Boer War, as you know, hence the word commando. And so he formed the commandos. Now, one of the things I've discovered in my research is there were all sorts of names put forward for the commandos. And one of them was the Knight Panthers. I could have been a Knight Panther. I know, missed opportunity, massive missed opportunity, you know. But the commandos they became. And so for the first couple of years, the army filled the role. And then the Royal Marines came on board in sort of

1943 and have had the role ever since really. By the way, before we talk about the Second World War, my ambition in life is to find a comprehensive list of all the times that Royal Marines have been deployed ashore on operations for the last 350 years. I don't think there's any unit on planet Earth like it, given Britain's global reach and the period of globalisation which the British Empire took advantage of and helped to create. I just think it's extraordinary. Yeah, yeah. I mean, their badge is essentially a globe laurel. And the reason for that is it was King, I should know who this is, can't remember which one, basically said, right, we're not going to give you battle honors anymore

because you have dominated the entire globe. You've been everywhere around the world. So that's the reason they have a globe on their cat badge is they're essentially a truly global force that spans three and a half centuries of history. And you're right, in terms of being deployed ashore and contacts with the enemy, engagements with the enemy, I dare to sort of suggest that it's a military outfit that's only matched in success by the Roman legions, really. You know, they have

this ability to prevail in almost every environment and conflict they've gone into. And that's a really interesting aspect of them as well. That DNA, they've evolved over three and a half centuries to deal with any kinetic environment, any change of circumstance, any improvise, adapt and overcome. That's right in the heart of their DNA. And again, that got me really interested. And that was one of the reasons I really wanted to write the book, actually, to understand them a little bit more. It's always music to my ears when people get fascinated by history because they wish to understand the present in a really practical way. I mean, how did the history of the commandos help you to understand

what you'd been through and the skills that you'd learned and the attitudes and the manners that you'd adopted? They're a tribe. And it's always interesting when you meet a tribal group, as it were. And the closest I could come to them as an approximation is I worked as a fisherman for a series down in Cornwall. And they had a very similar ethos as sort of a tribe going back hundreds of years. They had their own rules. They had their own language, their customs, the way they went about their business, a lot of it unspoken.

There was an academic called Dr. Anthony White, who did a study into the Marines in 2004. He likened them to a tribe. And he said, there's a series of unwritten rules about the way they go about their business. They're unwritten, they're unseen, but they're crucial for the performance of the organization. Now, when I went through, I was just trying to get through. I was just trying to get my green berry. And I didn't quite understand the significance of a lot of the stuff I was doing. But of course, so much of it is grounded in history and it's grounded in conflicts and it's grounded in success in battle and lessons learned and lives lost. test that you do at your end of training you do with 22 pounds of kit and i never really questioned that i just thought just you know you stuff your webbing with 22 pounds of stuff and you crack on but 22 pounds was pretty much the amount of kit required to survive on a raid for 24 hours and they were always seen as a raiding force so that's the reason the modern marines all carry 22 pounds

of kit because that's what a commando in World War II would have taken into battle. So everything they do is a touch point in history, essentially. But you only realize that in retrospect, I think, looking back, they have a great tradition, for example, they call it ditz spinning, storytelling. You know, they love sitting around and telling tall stories and all that. And that's oral history. Like all tribes, they have great oral history traditions. So there's a little bit of kind of anthropology thrown in there as well, which, again, it's only with a little bit of distance and time and perspective that you suddenly start appreciating. What are the episodes that you think are particularly instructive or fascinating

from the history of the Royal Marines that you've shared in the book? The Falklands was seminal for them. It's one of the longest range amphibious operations ever launched. This sort of great watchword of when you go into an environment that's unpredictable, you need certain characteristics.

One of those is professional excellence, but the other one is the ability to appreciate that the plan will go wrong. You're entering an environment where things will change. That great expression, General von Moltke in World War I, saying that no plan survives contact with the enemy. And Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. And that's what happens.

The moment you enter this environment, the moment you cross that kind of crackling border between the sea and the land, you're in a new world where the environment might not be what you're expecting. The enemy won't do what you're expecting them to do where the environment might not be what you're expecting the enemy won't do what you're expecting them to do things will go wrong and so the Falklands was a classic example of that and absolutely seminal so it was a very very long way obviously thousands of miles away from any logistical support Atlantic conveyor got sunk so all the helicopters went to the bottom and the marines had to rely and the paris had to rely on this really basic elemental thing the ability to adapt and to endure and put a kit on

their back and yomp 50 miles over the falklands islands which all the locals by the way said was impossible said couldn't be done due to the nature of the terrain so i think the falklands was pretty seminal oh you know latter day iraq and af, different style of soldiering, but the same sort of commando qualities to the fore, really. But if you do look, you know, you mentioned earlier on that all the different conflicts they've been involved in. So Suez, Aden, loads of little global flashpoints around the world, Bosnia, etc, etc. Each one is very, very different. And yet each one has required those similar qualities the ability to adapt and evolve very rapidly and be intelligent have that sort of intelligence to evolve very rapidly to the situation around you and i think the rule reads do it particularly well

listen to dan snow's history we're talking about the commandos. More coming up. Throughout June on Not Just the Tudors, we're honouring Queen Elizabeth II's platinum jubilee by focusing on queenship in the 16th and 17th centuries. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and all this month with my guests, I'll be exploring the coronations of Tudor queens, Queen's regnant and Queen's consort, who wielded power in ways we haven't thought about. Really, when we begin to look at queen consorts, we notice that there's a lot of ways that the Renaissance court that women could hold informal power through their relationship with the king. Then there's the queen who ruled over the Spanish Netherlands and the female Swedish king. You heard that right. What did a 17th century person actually mean by saying,

oh, she dresses like a man? If she would have worn male clothing, she wouldn't have been able to rule Sweden. So for a month of all things magisterial and monarchical, look no further than not just the Tudors from History Hit. who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. In everything you've learned,

what makes commandos different to a infantry regiment that they might end up serving alongside? It's a good question. And the first point to make is the line infantry regiments, the other branches of the armed forces in the UK are formidable and really good at what they do. That's very nice of you, buddy. Yeah, let's get disclaimer in. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely true. And we're really lucky to have a formidable armed forces,

basically. And now more than ever, we're realising the relevance and significance and importance of that, essentially, certainly facing these existential threats. And you suddenly realise we live in an age of everything's very woke and everything's very snowflakey and things like that. And actually, we're quite a mongrel nation in that regard. We're quite a martial race. We are fearsomely well-equipped for military conflict, essentially. But I think one of the things that perhaps characterises the Royal Marines is the individual level of training.

It's the longest infantry training in the Western world. It's seven months. But it's also the quality of the individual coming through the door. So 40% of Royal Marines have degrees, are qualified to be officers, but choose to be Marines, you know, serving the rank. I remember thinking that the first time I stood in front of my troop of hairy bummed Marines, you know, they'd all served in the Falklands. This was 1988. I was 19 years old. And I remember looking at them and thinking, my God, most of these blokes are not only more experienced than

me, they're a lot brighter than me as well. So they've got that sort of intelligence element, I think. And also, as I said, just this long standing history, the Comet's tale, it's always been adapting, overcoming, improvising, understanding the nature of battle and warfare. And that sort of institutionalised memory is really valuable for any military organisation. You do pull out a couple of episodes that you think are really instructive and illustrative. Just tell me about a couple of them.

I feel bad saying favourite because they involve, obviously, people fighting, dying, getting wounded and stuff. But pull a couple out that you think really does give people a flavour for this unit. I think one of the first ones really was the comparison through the ages of Clifford Coates, who was our World War II commander who we interviewed. So 1943, joined when he was 16 years old. But mirroring that is the young recruit we followed going through modern commando training, who was also 16 years old, young Dom Berger.

I'm realising that these two individuals had exactly the same qualities, but it was just an accident of time that saw them joining at different times in the history of the commandos, the history of the Royal Marines. So that was quite striking for me. You could see a young Clifford in Dom, in the modern manifestation of Clifford, was Dom. The same fundamental qualities, the same ability to endure, the same determination, same qualities, same intelligence, same everything. So that was quite striking for me. And thinking, oh, these are the sort of guardians, the custodians of the Green Beret moving forward. And they seem pretty good hands, you know,

when you look at the young lads going through at the moment. So there was that. I mean, there was one very memorable session in terms of an interview. And I don't use the word session lightly there. It was with a guy called Mark Hammond, who's the only distinguished Flying Cross winner serving in the Royal Marines at the moment.

And he flew a Chinook into Mutakala. It was a suicide mission. It was described as the most dangerous mission ever undertaken by a British rotary crew. And he flew in to get a casualty out, basically. But that interview took place at 3am, about two thirds of the way down a vodka bottle. And he's a pretty uncompromising individualist, Mark that was wonderful just seeing him come alive and tell that story and this great feat of valor and it was elemental there was a very good chance they weren't going to make it out of there and yet as a crew they were like no we're going to go in and

do it but there's loads you know john white triple amputee from afghanistan who's rebuilt his life he's now a world-class kayaker takes on able-bodied kayakers on the World Ocean Circuit. Matt Tomlinson, the most decorated Royal Marine since World War II. His story of being ambushed on the Euphrates River and engaging with the enemy there

is sort of boys' own stuff. And what you don't want to do, Dan, I think, in this, is you don't want to celebrate warfare. You don't want to make it out as being anything other than what it is, which is a pretty unpleasant affair where people lose their lives and lots of fabric of societies are destroyed. And it's awful, as we're seeing. But what you do want to do is celebrate the qualities of the

people who hold the line on our behalf, I think. And that's what the book does to a large degree, I think. Do you have concerns about the future of the Royal Marines? I mean, it's a time of such extraordinary change. Looking right at what's going on at the moment. Do you think, as you mentioned at the beginning, there's always a place for boots on the ground? Do you think the highly professional trained soldiers with a strong professional ethos has got its place on the modern battlefield? Yeah, I do. And I think what's happening in Ukraine is a real manifestation of that. Because the one thing we're seeing in Ukraine is what can happen when you get small groups of very well-trained people disrupting supply lines, creating confusion and

chaos in larger sort of maneuver warfare, and using technology to do it, using really good communications to do it. So a lot of the Ukrainian army has been trained by American Green Berets, by NATO to operate in precisely that way. So what the Royal Marines are doing, they're circling around. They've got a thing called Future Commando Force, which actually has small groups of very well-trained guys and girls using technology to disrupt the enemy from sort of behind enemy lines, as it were. It's quite a traditional commando role. the enemy from sort of behind enemy lines, as it were. It's quite a traditional commando role. So I think what's happened in Ukraine, oddly enough, has assured the future of the Marines, much the same way as the Falklands, as you may know, Dan, actually saved the Marines, because the Marines, that's it, they were gone as a viable force. And the Commandant General at the time in 1982, they were just about to burn the unit colours and the core colours. And I was chatting to Julian Thompson, who's the general who took the Marines out to the Falklands. And he said,

oh, we had it all figured out. We were going to burn the core colours and we were going to put the ashes in a bottle of port and we were all going to salute each other with a bottle of port. That's it. You know, 330 years of history gone. And that conflict saved the Marines. And I think the current conflict has given real credibility and kudos and longevity to the current Royal Marines model, I think. That's really interesting. That's fine. Mount Harriet is often talked about as the kind of, I'm going to get in trouble here with certain other members of the armed forces, certain veterans, but it's seen as the kind of textbook mountain assault during the hill battles, the Falklands. Mount Harriet is seen to be the one that was so brilliantly executed by the Royal Marines.

Yes, 4-2 Commando, 4-5 Commando, Two Sisters, all of these battles, they were seen, you're absolutely right, as impeccable patrolling, impeccable intelligence gathering, which is the sort of build-up to a surprise attack as it were there's no such thing as a surprise attack when you're doing a surprise attack as it were and the fact that they'd faced such arduous conditions to actually get there and were still fit to fight and did this impeccable intelligence gathering exercise i talk about it in the book some of the patrols were so audacious and were so right within the midst of the enemy in the dead of night but all gathering intelligence to say okay this is the perfect way to do it but

you've got to remember again the powers were heavily involved as well you know it wasn't simply a raw marines thing scott's guards as well and it's seen as almost sort of the textbook conflict textbook for sbs as well the falklands was suddenly putting into practice all of these things that the Marines have been talking about for years. And the Falklands was just almost the perfect theatre to do that. And a description of the Falklands is one of the Marines asked one of the other ones on the way out, what's the Falklands like? He said, we take Dartmoor and you float it in the Southern Ocean. That is the Falklands. And of course, where do the Royal Marines train? They train on Dartmoor, you know. So yes, you're right. It's looked upon as a sort of textbook operation, that one. So hey, listen, you've got a TV show at the moment,

you've got the book. Tell us what everything's called. Right. The TV show is called Commando, Britain's Ocean Warriors. And the book is called Commando, A History of Britain's Royal Marines. And the interesting thing about the book, Dan, dare I say, is that the book very swiftly The book is called Commando, A History of Britain's Royal Marines. And the interesting thing about the book, Dan, dare I say, is that the book very swiftly stopped being a history thing and it became a portrait of individuals within the Marines. And that was the way you suddenly realized they were the mosaic that made up the picture of the organization, as it were. So it's a sort of personal accounts of extraordinary individuals within the Royal Marines

who'd been involved in seminal moments in the history of the organisation since the Second World War. For me, I mean, it was a rare pleasure. I got to go and meet my heroes. So it was a lovely book to write. Absolute pleasure. I'm sure you're their hero as well, buddy.

Very nice of you to say so. Thank you very much for coming on the pod. Good luck with the book and the TV and everything, and looking forward to talking to you next time. Lovely. Lovely. All right, Dan, take it easy. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history,

our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done.

And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favour, if you go to wherever you get your podcast and give it a review give a rating obviously a good one ideally then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it we obviously depend on listeners depend on more and more people finding out about it depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in really appreciate it thank you Thank you.