Commando courage

Patrick Hagen served as a wireless operator with 4 Commando Brigade signals troop. Here he describes the moment when, while guarding their exit route during a four-man hit-and-run raid on a radar site on the French coast, he and his friend Harry were discovered by two Germans.

‘There were only two types of commandos, the quick and the dead. This is what we’d been taught. So we both shot at once. Harry gave his man on his side two shots and I gave my man two shots. There was a small hole in his front — where the other shot had gone to, I don’t know — but a very large hole in his back and there was a lot of tomato sauce. By now, the other two who had gone to the radar site, which was only 400 or 500 yards away, were running like hell towards us and we all picked our way through the sand hills which was difficult because it was said that they were mined.