Why Hardened German Troops Admitted in Private That of All the Allied Units They Faced, It Was the Silent, Vanishing British Commandos They Feared Most—And How That Reputation Was Earned in Raids, Rumors, and Ruthless Night Fighting

By the time the German army had marched to the edges of Europe, its soldiers had gotten used to categories.

Infantry.

Armor.

Artillery.

Enemy forces were weighed and sorted the same way.

The French were dismissed—after 1940—as beaten.

The Soviets were feared in mass.

The Americans were respected for their material and firepower, even as they were mocked in jokes about chewing gum and jazz.

The British? The British were complicated.

As an army, they were seen as stubborn, disciplined, sometimes slow to adapt, sometimes devastating when they got it right—like at El Alamein.

But to German soldiers along the coasts of occupied Europe, there was a very specific kind of British they talked about in lower voices.

The ones who came at night.

The ones who hit and vanished.

The ones who left behind not banners or speeches, but blown bridges, stolen prisoners, and the lingering sense that nowhere was truly safe.

They were not simply “enemy raiders.”

They were “die Engländer Kommandos.”

And by 1942, German field reports and private letters home agreed on one thing:

Of all the Allied units they ran into, they feared fighting the British Commandos more than any other.

Not because the Commandos were always there.

Because they might be anywhere.

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“We Saw the Damage Before We Heard Their Name”

The word “Commando” was an import.

Winston Churchill liked the sound of it—short, sharp, with a sense of movement built in. He had plucked it from the Boer fighters he’d seen during his youth in South Africa, where small groups of mobile riflemen had bedeviled a much larger British army.

After the disaster in France in 1940, when the British Expeditionary Force had escaped across the Channel with its skin and little dignity, Churchill wanted something offensive.

He couldn’t yet invade.

He could raid.

“Set Europe ablaze,” he told the new Special Operations Executive. “Hit them wherever they are weak and make them feel hunted.”

Out of that impulse, British Commando units grew—trained for speed, silence, and the kind of self-reliance most ordinary soldiers only encountered in movies.

At first, to the Germans on the receiving end, they were just “odd British raids.”

March 1941, the Lofoten Islands in Norway: a force of British Commandos and naval units landed, destroyed fish-oil factories and fuel, and snatched up codebooks and a few prisoners.

A German private stationed there wrote in his diary:

“They came in the morning, fast, from the sea. We heard shots, explosions. By the time we got organized, they were gone. We saw the damage before we heard their name.”

His sergeant added, more bitterly:

“It is one thing to fight a battle. It is another to be beaten without seeing the enemy clearly.”

That was the first layer of fear.

Not mortal terror.

Irritation mixed with unease.

People who could hurt you without letting you hit back.

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Training to Be a Nightmare

The fear wasn’t accidental.

It was a design goal.

In the rugged hills of Scotland, along the coasts of Wales, and in secret corners of England, early Commando units went through training that would have made ordinary battalions revolt.

They learned to row silently for hours, then fight the instant they hit a beach.

They learned to march with full kit over mountains in the dark and find exact points on maps without torches.

They learned to climb cliffs wet with spray, to find handholds by feel and sound, and to trust ropes that looked thinner than sense would allow.

They shot.

Constantly.

Not at neat paper bulls-eyes, but at silhouettes in low light, at moving targets, at shapes half-hidden in scrub or behind mock walls.

The instructors were not gentle.

“You are not here to be good soldiers,” one told a new troop. “You are here to be bad dreams. The enemy must never be able to relax by the sea again.”

They practiced demolitions on hulks and mock piers.

They learned to rig charges that would blow just enough and nothing more.

They were taught languages, enough to pass basic orders or interrogate prisoners.

They learned to fight quietly with knives and bare hands—moves that would eventually get mythologized and exaggerated, but which at their core were about overcoming men who might otherwise raise an alarm.

Most importantly, they were taught to think in two modes:

Commander follows orders.

Commando follows intent.

If the original plan became impossible, they were expected to invent a new one on the spot.

That mindset terrified higher-ups in the regular army and delighted Churchill.

It would, eventually, terrify the Germans.

Because in a world of predictable attacks, unpredictability is the sharpest edge.

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The First Rumors

German soldiers heard of Commandos not from official orders at first, but from each other.

“Have you heard?” one would ask another at a coastal garrison.

“Heard what?”

“Somewhere up the coast, a small British force came in at night. They blew up a radar station and left leaflets on the officer’s desk. They were gone before the alarm finished ringing.”

The leaflets were Churchill’s idea, too.

They were not polite.

They mocked German claims that Britain was finished.

They promised more visits.

The Germans collected them, filed them, and showed them to their men as “proof” that the British were desperate, resorting to “piratical” tactics.

The men reading them saw something else:

If these British could come and go at will, what else could they do?

The rumors grew.

A patrol found a section of railway line cut by explosives, with boot prints leading in from the coast and disappearing again.

A small garrison woke to find their ammunition dump aflame and a message painted on a nearby wall in broken German: “Kommen Sie und fangen Sie uns”—come and catch us.

In the officers’ mess, jokes were made about “Englisher ninjas.”

The laughter always had a brittle edge.

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Vaagso: The Day the Fear Got Teeth

December 27, 1941.

While much of the world was still absorbing the shock of Pearl Harbor, a group of British Commandos headed toward the small Norwegian port of Vågsøy, near a village called Måløy.

Operation Archery, they called it.

The Germans called it something else later, in internal memoranda: “A costly lesson.”

The Commandos came ashore in daylight this time, supported by Royal Navy ships and aircraft.

They dashed into the town, engaging German defenders in tight, brutal close-quarters fighting—room to room, house to house.

They seized objectives, blew factories, took prisoners.

German units rushed to respond.

One officer, later interrogated, described it like this:

“We were told to expect British attacks in battalion strength for a landing. This was different. Small groups were everywhere at once. They seemed to know our positions before we could organize. One moment we were in our barracks, the next there was shooting in the streets.”

What made Vågsøy different from earlier raids was not just the damage done.

It was the way it looked.

German propaganda photographers arrived too late to spin it.

But British cameras didn’t.

The Commandos posed in the ruins, grinning, showing off their green berets and Thompson submachine guns.

Some of those photos made their way into Allied newspapers.

A copy fell into German hands, then another.

Men stared at the images.

These were not regular British infantry.

They looked like something between soldiers and pirates.

In one staff office in France, a German colonel tossed the newspaper onto the table and grumbled:

“Churchill’s small bands. They are too expensive for the effect they have, in real numbers. But in morale… that is another matter.”

His adjutant, younger, said quietly:

“Sir, with respect… I would not like to meet them in a dark street.”

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Saint-Nazaire: “The Greatest Raid of All”

If there was a single Commando operation that lodged itself in German minds as proof that these men were not to be underestimated, it was the raid on Saint-Nazaire in March 1942.

The target: the Normandie dry dock—the only facility on the Atlantic coast big enough to repair the German battleship Tirpitz.

The plan was audacious even by Commando standards.

A single elderly British destroyer, HMS Campbeltown, would be packed with explosives and driven full tilt into the dock gates at high tide, disguised as a German vessel for as long as possible.

Commandos on board would then disembark, fight into key points, throw switches, blow secondary targets, then try to get back to sea on small boats or escape through France to Spain.

It was, on paper, insane.

It worked.

Partly.

Campbeltown rammed the dock gate.

Commandos stormed ashore.

They fought like cornered animals through Saint-Nazaire’s docks and streets, planting charges, shooting it out with German defenders who had been caught off guard but recovered quickly.

Many Commandos died.

Many more were captured.

But the explosives in Campbeltown went off hours later, tearing the dry dock apart and rendering it useless for the rest of the war.

The Germans, examining the wreckage and the shattered dock, were grimly impressed.

“These men were not simply raiders,” one Kriegsmarine officer wrote. “They were determined to die rather than fail. This changes the calculus.”

The local German commander, when asked later in a postwar interview which Allied forces he most disliked facing, didn’t hesitate:

“Commandos,” he said. “Because we knew that if they were here in small numbers, something larger was coming. They were the tip of a spear we could not see.”

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The Kommandobefehl: Fear Turned Into Policy

Adolf Hitler was not a man given to nuance.

He read reports of British raids with a growing fury and a grudging admiration laced with a particular anger reserved for people who hit him without the courtesy of a formal battlefield.

In October 1942, he signed the Kommandobefehl—the infamous Commando Order.

It read, in part:

“From now on, all terror and sabotage troops of the British and their accomplices encountered by our troops in Europe or Africa are to be annihilated to the last man, whether they are soldiers in uniform or saboteurs with or without weapons, and whether fighting or attempting to escape.”

No quarter.

No prisoners.

Captured Commandos were to be handed over to the security services, not treated as regular POWs.

The order was illegal under existing laws of war.

Many German officers knew it.

Some disobeyed it, quietly, when it suited them.

But its existence told the Commandos something important:

They mattered enough that the enemy’s leader was prepared to risk his officers’ respect and his postwar moral ledger to deal with them.

It also told German officers and soldiers something else:

The Führer was afraid.

He wrapped it in words like “terror troops” and “saboteurs,” but underneath, the message was:

“Do not let these people live.”

That was fear dressed as policy.

In officers’ messes and bunker maps, the tranh cãi trở nên nghiêm trọng và căng thẳng over what it meant.

One colonel slammed his fist on the table when read the order.

“This is madness,” he said. “This will only stiffen their resolve.”

A more political major disagreed.

“It will deter them,” he argued. “If they know we will show no mercy, perhaps they will think twice.”

A seasoned captain, who had seen the look in a Commando’s eyes at Saint-Nazaire, said nothing for a long time.

Finally he murmured:

“The type of men who volunteer for such missions do not think twice. That is the problem.”

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The Enemy’s Compliments

To understand why German soldiers feared fighting British Commandos, it helps to consider how they talked about other units.

About American infantry:

“They shoot a lot and have good artillery. They are brave, but their officers are sometimes clumsy. They can be tricked, but once they have supplies, they are hard to dislodge.”

About Soviet troops:

“There are so many. They keep coming. They are dangerous in close and have no regard for casualties. But their attacks can be predicted.”

About regular British soldiers:

“They are stubborn. They do not give up quickly. Their officers are cautious. They can be slow to exploit success but rarely collapse once prepared.”

And about Commandos:

“They are few. They arrive when we least expect them. They know our weak points better than we know theirs. They do not seem to fear death the way ordinary men do. They are… unnerving.”

One Wehrmacht NCO wrote home after his unit had been stationed along a coastal sector known to be a Commando “favorite”:

“I would rather fight a whole Russian battalion in daylight than lie awake wondering if tonight the English ghosts will come through the wire. At least the Russians shout when they come. The Commandos do not.”

Another, after surviving a brief clash with a Commando patrol in Italy:

“They moved like cats. Small group, but every man knew what to do without shouting. It was as if they had rehearsed our positions. I emptied a magazine at shadows and then they were gone, leaving only two dead guards and our pride.”

Fear, in soldiers’ hearts, often takes the shape of anticipated helplessness.

The Commandos specialized in making their enemies feel that way—hit, confused, and unable to strike back at anyone specific.

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Why the Italians and Others Couldn’t Copy Them

The Germans weren’t stupid.

They understood the usefulness of small, highly trained units.

They had their own “Brandenburger” units—special forces skilled in infiltration, languages, and unconventional tactics.

They deployed them with effect in the early stages of the war.

But the systematic, high-profile use of commandos as a kind of psychological weapon was more a British specialty.

Italian and other Axis attempts to emulate them were often hampered by different institutional cultures.

The British Commandos enjoyed—and endured—a peculiar freedom.

They were encouraged to be creative, to push against boundaries, to question orders that no longer fit the situation.

Not everywhere.

Not always.

But enough that their doctrinal DNA allowed them to be outliers.

German officers, raised in a doctrine of initiative within strict bounds, were both impressed and offended by this.

A diary entry from a German battalion commander in Greece noted:

“The British sabotage troops we have encountered here do not behave like ordinary soldiers. They are too… flexible. It is at once admirable and deeply irritating.”

He contrasted them with resistance fighters in the Balkans:

“Partisans fight for their homes. Commandos fight for Churchill’s dreams. The former are tied to the land. The latter to the sea.”

That last phrase was key.

The Commandos’ ability to appear and disappear by sea meant that, unlike many enemy forces, they could not be “fixed”—tied to a front line, reliably located, predicted.

They were not tied to one sector.

They were tied to opportunity.

That made them a nightmare for planners—and a source of vague dread for sentries.

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The Knife and the Note

Stories about Commandos grew in the telling.

German soldiers told each other tales of “silent knives” and “garrote specialists” and “men who painted their faces black and ate chocolate while they cut your throat.”

Only some of it was true.

The Commandos did train in silent killing.

They did use knives.

They did sometimes blacken their faces.

They rarely ate chocolate in the middle of it.

But the stories, exaggerated or not, served the same function:

They built a myth.

And myths have real effects.

One German sergeant, stationed on a lonely stretch of Norwegian coast, wrote home:

“The officers tell us to watch the water and the wire. They say the English may come. At night, when the wind sings in the wire and the shadows move, some of the younger men imagine they are already here. They jump at every sound. Truly, these English have managed to fight us even when absent.”

There was a flip side.

Sometimes it wasn’t German soldiers who spread the fear.

Sometimes it was the Commandos themselves, deliberately.

On one raid in 1943, a Commando unit that had blown its primary target and withdrawn to the beach discovered that they had a few minutes before extraction.

The troop commander, a man with a dry sense of humor, pulled a notebook from his pocket and scribbled a line.

He handed it to his demolitions sergeant.

“Leave this on the officer’s desk,” he said. “If he survives tonight, I’d like him to have something to think about.”

The message, in halting German, read:

“You were asleep. We were not. Next time, perhaps you will stay awake. Or perhaps not. Regards to Rommel.”

When the German officer in question found it, he didn’t show it to many people.

He burned it.

But the story leaked.

Soon, other garrisons were trading tales of British raiders leaving notes, photographs, even playing cards tucked into unlikely places as signatures.

True or not, those stories made men check their doors twice.

That is fear, too.

Not screaming, battlefield terror.

The quieter kind.

The kind that wears people down.

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“They Are Not Giants. They Are a Knife.”

In the end, British Commandos did not win the war by themselves.

They suffered failures—Dieppe’s costly raid, for one, where Commando units were embedded in a larger operation that went badly wrong.

They were sometimes misused, asked to do jobs that regular infantry could have done more efficiently.

They were killed, wounded, captured.

The Kommandobefehl cost lives long before any tribunal recognized its criminality.

In some sectors, German units never encountered them at all.

But for those who did, the impression was lasting.

When Allied interrogation teams questioned German prisoners after the war, they asked a range of morale questions.

When asked which Allied troops they considered the most dangerous, answers varied.

“Russians in great number.”

“American artillery.”

“British tank crews.”

More than once, though, in coastal units, the reply was:

“English Commandos.”

One former coastal artillery lieutenant explained:

“Not because they could destroy us. They were too few. But because when they appeared, it meant we had failed. Failed to guard, failed to foresee. They forced us to think of the war not just as lines on a map, but as holes in those lines.”

He paused.

“They are not giants,” he added. “They are a knife. A small blade that finds the gap between armor plates. One does not fear the knife as an army, but as a man on a wall at three o’clock in the morning, you think of it.”

Perhaps the strangest compliment came from a German officer who, after the war, met a former Commando at a gathering organized for veterans on both sides.

They spoke halting English and German, shared cigarettes, and compared notes.

At one point, the German said, with a wry smile:

“You made us rewrite our sentry orders four times.”

The Commando laughed.

“Good,” he said. “We felt we hadn’t done enough.”

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Why Fear Matters

It’s easy, in hindsight, to treat “fear” as a curiosity—something to be analyzed, explained, tucked into textbooks.

But in the moment, for the men involved, it was not abstract.

For British Commandos, knowing that the enemy feared them meant more than ego stroking.

It meant that their raids had an effect beyond the local.

German units moved resources.

Increased defenses in some places, thinned them in others.

Overreacted sometimes to rumors of raids that never came.

For German soldiers, fearing Commandos did not mean they broke and ran whenever a coastal shrub moved.

Most did their duty, stood their posts, fought as trained.

But when one sleeps poorly, when one imagines hands on the wire at night, when every seagull’s cry sounds like a boat keel scraping, performance degrades.

Error creeps in.

The Commandos, with exaggerated help from Allied propaganda, amplified that.

That was the whole point of “set Europe ablaze.”

Not that every hill, every house, every pier would literally catch fire.

But that every German soldier, from France to Norway, would live with the possibility that this night, this quiet, might be broken by men in green berets who would be gone by dawn.

That fear was not always rational.

But it was real.

And as long as it kept German eyes turned seaward and German minds distracted, it served its purpose.

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In a small English coastal town decades after the war, an elderly man in a blazer with a faded Commando dagger patch on the pocket sat with his grandson on a bench overlooking the sea.

The boy, ten or eleven, swung his legs.

“Granddad,” he asked, “were the Germans afraid of you?”

The old man chuckled.

“Not of me,” he said. “Of us, maybe. Of what we represented.”

“What did you represent?” the boy pressed.

The Commando looked out at the water.

At the gray waves.

At the horizon where once, long ago, he had set out in a small craft with a large amount of explosives and a larger amount of nerves.

“We were a reminder,” he said slowly, “that no wall is perfect. No guard can see everywhere. No one sleeps easy if their conscience is bad.”

The boy frowned.

“I don’t think I understand,” he said.

“That’s all right,” the old man replied. “Just remember this: We weren’t the biggest. We weren’t the strongest. But we were the ones they didn’t want to see when they looked over their shoulders.”

He smiled faintly.

“And if that made even one of them hesitate before pulling a trigger at some poor French farmer, or made them keep a division in Norway that might otherwise have gone to the Eastern Front, then I’d say the fear was worth it.”

The boy nodded, in that serious way children sometimes have.

“Were you ever afraid?” he asked.

“Of the dark?” the old man said. “Always. That’s why we learned to move in it. So it wouldn’t own us.”

He looked down at his hands.

“They were afraid of us,” he added, “because we weren’t afraid to be afraid—and go anyway.”

The boy, after a while, went back to watching the waves.

He imagined men climbing out of small boats onto cold stones, knives and guns held close, breathing hard under heavy packs.

He imagined German soldiers doing the same in reverse—jerking awake at some noise, staring out into the night, wondering.

In that imagined space, the battle between fear and duty played out again.

Quietly.

Where it had always really mattered.

Not just on the maps or in the orders.

But in the minds of men.

And somewhere in that space, the British Commandos still lived—not in the number of raids they’d carried out, nor even in the amount of concrete they’d blown up, but in the fact that for a few crucial years, the enemy with the biggest army in Europe had to admit, if only to himself:

“There are some foes I would rather not meet.”

THE END