Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

A superb Second World War Sicily operations M.M. group of seven awarded to Troop Sergeant-Major E. G. “Lofty” King, Rifle Brigade, attached No. 3 Commando, who was originally recommended for a D.C.M. for his bravery in the successful but costly Commando raid on the Punta Dei Malati in Sicily in July 1943: ‘a hard fellow in many ways’, he knocked out an Italian soldier with a ‘terrific uppercut’ on the day he won his M.M. - he had earlier participated in the Lofoten, Vaagso and Dieppe raids and again went into action on D-Day

Military Medal, G.VI.R. (6911407 Sjt. E. G. King, Rif. Brig.); 1939-45 Star; Africa Star; Italy Star; France and Germany Star; Defence and War Medals, a little polished and minor contact wear, very fine or better (7) £3000-4000

M.M. London Gazette 21 October 1943. The original recommendation, reduced from a D.C.M. to an M.M. by Montgomery, states:

‘On the night of 13-14 July 1943, after the landing at Agnone and during the advance to Punta Dei Malati, Sergeant King continually led the H.Q. Party forward under fire quite regardless of his own safety, his only desire being to get forward and engage the enemy. During the fight at Punta Dei Malati, and in the subsequent withdrawal, Sergeant King was continually taking messages and exposing himself under heavy mortar, M.G. and shell fire. He was of the greatest assistance in organising the withdrawal, always remaining with the rear elements. His steadiness had an inspiring effect on all ranks. Sergeant King was also outstanding in the advance and attack on the Cassibile Battery on the night of 9-10 July 1943.’

Edward George “Lofty” King was recommended for his M.M. by Lieutenant-Colonel (afterwards Brigadier) John Durnford-Slater, D.S.O., the C.O. of No. 3 Commando, and later the author of Commando, Memoirs of a Fighting Commando in World War Two, in which King is mentioned, not least for his part on the daring raid on the Punta Dei Malati in Sicily in July 1943. But it is apparent that he had made his mark in the Commando long before then, or certainly if Durnford-Slater’s description of him is anything to go by at the time of No. 3 Commando’s formation in July 1940:

‘The first intake of officers and men contained all sorts of interesting characters ... Corporal Lofty King of the Rifle Brigade was very tall and very tough. He was a hard fellow in many ways, and very hard with his men; he didn’t give a damn if he knocked a man down. Sometimes I told him he was being too rough; Lofty would say:

“It’s good for them, Colonel; it won’t do them any harm.”

He would mean it and believe it. He genuinely enjoyed fighting and looked happiest, and indeed inspired, in battle. In the field he was kinder to his men, as if the fighting were a kind of release for him.’

The Lofoten and Vaagso Raids

As such a prominent member of No. 3 Commando “Lofty” King was undoubtedly present in the unit’s earlier operations, most notably the raids mounted against the port of Stamsund on the Lofoten Islands in March 1941 and on Vaagso that December - but possibly not in the one-Troop-strong force sent to raid Guernsey as early as July 1940. At Stamsund, the Commando rounded-up several members of the Gestapo, Durnford-Slater spotting King hard at work:

‘Fifteen minutes later I was standing in the doorway when I saw Lofty King and Bill Chitty, both big men and unit military police, forcing a prisoner along betweeen them. Each had one of his arms. Squealing his protests, he looked and sounded like a fat pig being taken to the slaughter. He wore a dark civilian suit. Lofty King saw me and grinned.

“Here’s your top Gestapo boy, Colonel. What do you want done with him?”

Behind this ill-matched trio trailed a gang of locals, men, women, children and dogs, jeering, barking, laughing in delight. The Gestapo chap was cursing balefully in German. You didn’t have to understand the language to guess his feelings. I said:

“Put him on a landing craft and send him right off to the Beatrix.” ’

Prior to setting-off for Vaagso that December, King won fame for another “policing” success while the Commando maintained its ardous training agenda back in the hills around Largs. Keen to keep up good relations with the locals, Durnford-Slater had appointed Sergeant Chitty to the command of an internal police force to keep a watchful eye on some of the more wayward members of the unit during rare moments of “R. & R.”, and to add weight to the Sergeant’s force he enlisted the assistance of “Lofty” King:

‘This taught everybody to be extremely careful not to misbehave, but I must admit that sometimes my conscience was a little troubled when a man, escorted by King and Chitty, appeared before me with a couple of black eyes, charged with assaulting the unit police.’

In fact such was King’s reputation for keeping order that the Largs police force sometimes asked him for assistance, a case in point being the arrival of a 50-strong team of hardy labourers - mostly Irish - who were employed on a large new reservoir project but prone to get a little out of hand on a Friday night. When, fuelled by drink, they “hijacked” the local bus, King and Chitty were summoned to the rescue:

‘The civilian police sent a message to King and Chitty for help, as the situation was out of hand. Bottles had been broken over heads, windows smashed, and the bus conductress was badly bruised. This was right up King’s street. He quickly gathered up a few of our troops and commandeered another bus which was driven out of camp. With King and Chitty in the lead, they went through the [labourers’] camp hut by hut and gave the belligerent Irish a severe beating. In the morning I had heard nothing of this until I received a telephone call from the Superintendent of Police.

“Colonel, I want to thank you for the wonderful job your chaps did last night,” he said.

Later I called King and asked:

“What’s all this about?”

“It’s those Irish again,” Lofty said. “We gave them a real beating up last night. It’s one of the best evenings I have ever had.”

The Irishmen kept well clear of Largs after this.’

But for the intervention of the Vaagso operation a week or two later, the “Irish Question” was going to be further addressed by six men of the Commando, King among them, and led by Durnford-Slater, in a totally unofficial visit to Dublin to blow up the German Embassy.

Unlike the raid on the Lofoten Islands, Vaagso was a bitterly contested battle, house-to-house and hand-to-hand combat being the order of the day. The enemy lost 120 men, with another 98 being taken P.O.W., while No. 3 Commando lost 17 men, with 53 wounded: as Durnford-Slater put it, ‘The battle of Vaagso had been won against a first-class opposition by the utter ruthlessness and complete professional competence of our officers and men’ - ideal conditions then for the likes of “Lofty” King.

Dieppe

Next up on No. 3 Commando’s operational agenda was the Dieppe raid, when its men were charged with taking an enemy battery near Bernaval Le Grand, a small village about half a mile from the sea. As it transpired, only a few them ever reached the beaches, their landing craft and H.Q. ship, a Steam Gun Boat of Peter Scott’s S.G.B. Flotilla from Newhaven, having run into five E-Boats mid-Channel. Durnford-Slater was embarked on the S.G.B., which attracted the full-force of the enemy’s wrath:

‘All around me the bridge was piled up with dead and wounded like a collapsed rugger scrum. There must have been ten casualties there, all hit when looking over the top of the armour-plating. One officer, whom I knew to be of considerable naval experience, stood with his head and shoulders exposed and directed the ship. The he fell to the deck ... He was bleeding where a shell splinter had penetrated his skull. Brutally, I pushed him upright again. I felt he was our last remaining hope ... The landing craft had scattered in all directions and there was none to be seen. Dawn was breaking but we were beyond sight of land. There was a slight haze on the water and nothing was visible. I knew that some of the landing craft had been sunk, perhaps all of them. Then I saw a small boat push through the haze towards us. It was one of the missing landing craft and I could make out Charlie Head and Lofty King standing up and waving towards us ... ’

Lieutenant Charlie Head came aboard the S.G.B. to assist with the wounded, Durnford-Slater raising morale by stating that he was a doctor - infact Head was was a veterinary surgeon by profession, ‘but he did what he could with many terrible wounds and gave each man a large tot of rum. By the time the last man had been attended to they were the happiest bunch of casualties I had ever seen. Leaving all the wounded in the Gunboat, which no longer seemed likely to sink, the rest of us piled into the undamaged landing craft and headed for Dieppe. It was now broad daylight. After about an hour we found the main anchorage. I reported to General Roberts in his headquarters ship. I found him in a mood of the deepest depression ... There was nothing I could do to help him with the handful of men I had available. I had to hang around for the rest of the day watching the spectacular air battle and feeling useless ... ’

So, too, “Lofty” King, who was no doubt relieved to hear a little later that his friend, Sergeant Bill Chitty, who was posted missing, had in fact been taken P.O.W.

Sicily and Italy

In early 1943, No. 3 Commando was embarked for the Middle East, via Gibraltar, where the unit was to investigate mounting seaborne raids on Spanish territory should the Germans occupy that country. Here, according to Durnford-Slater, King was far from happy with the lax arrangements at the Rock’s detention barracks, for, having sent one of his wayward charges there for 14 days, he was horrified to find him returning on the first Sunday after his freedom to have tea with the warders - ‘so we decided the atmosphere of the detention barracks was too friendly and did not trouble them any more.’

April 1943 saw the Commando embarked for North Africa, where an early incident was the shooting of an Arab who tried to steal Lofty King’s rifle - he grabbed another Commando’s rifle to carry out the deed. By now, of course, the North African campaign was coming to a close, and it was to Sicily that the Commando was to be directed, firstly to knock-out an enemy battery to the north-west of Cassibile following a seaborne landing:

‘Charlesworth sounded the Advance on his bugle, and we went in for the final assault. We came to barbed wire and blasted paths through it with bangalore torpedoes, long metal tubes filled with explosive. We dashed through the gaps firing from the hip ... Finally we used the bayonet. The Italians stuck it fairly well until near the end, replying to our fire with automatic weapons. When we had cleaned them up, we proceeded to blow up the guns. Some enthusiast, just in the spirit of clean fun, also decided to blow up the ammunition supply of the battery, about one thousand shells. It was a very loud bang. There was plenty of stuff flying and it was a very foolish action, but no one was hurt. The battery was blown up eighty-five minutes after landing.’

The Commando’s next objective, the Punta Dei Malati, a vital bridge, proved to be a much harder nut to crack - moreover, Durnford-Slater was given just 24 hours notice of the plan before embarking with his Commandos. It was the night of 13-14 July 1943, and “Lofty” King was assigned to Durnford-Slater’s H.Q. party, their arrival off Agnone in landing craft, some seven miles from their objective, being met with concentrated fire from several pill-boxes:

‘The whole place was lit up with tracer bullets which passed angrily in the air from both directions [but] we continued in good formation and hit the beach ... The sand boiled up around me as the bullets struck. Somebody also started throwing grenades down the cliff at me ... With a cheer the men went to work on the wire ... Over the next mile, through the village of Agnone, we had a series of violent little battles. We had to advance continually against machine-gun posts ... Peter Young, Charlie Head and Lofty King were also operating in magnificently aggressive form ... ’

King’s aggression was very much to fore after the Italian-held defences to the front of the bridge had been overcome, Durnford-Slater recording that he delivered a ‘terrific uppercut’ to a screaming enemy prisoner who was in danger of revealing their position. With orders to hold on until the arrival of elements of 50th Division later that day, No. 3 Commando now endured several hours of ferocious and accurate mortar fire, this time from determined German troops, and casualties rapidly mounted. Worse was to follow when a Tiger tank appeared on the scene, ‘shooting at us with its eighty-eight and its machine guns ... A minute later I felt the wind of another shell parting my hair (I had some in those days)’. And amidst this mounting carnage, “Lofty” King lent assistance to the wounded:

‘A mortar bomb which burst at his feet, badly wounded Bill Lloyd just after this, fracturing both his ankles so that the bones of one protruded from the flesh. Lofty King found a bicycle and propped Bill up on it.

“If you’ve never seen a man ride a bike with two broken legs,” Bill said bravely, “look at me.”

He rode off, assisted by two men, to continue the battle. Some time later still on the bike and still helped by the two soldiers, he led an attack on a German machine-gun post and was killed. This was my most serious personal loss of the war. Bill died fighting mad. He was a quiet man normally; courageous but unspectacular. He died in a spectacular way.

Sergeant Hopkins, a regular soldier and a King’s shot had two fingers shot off his right hand at about the time Bill was first wounded. He walked back to Lofty King, waving his hand, which was streaming with blood.

“That’s the lot Lofty,” he said. “I’m finished with shooting now.”

He didn’t realise that he had received two severe chest wounds. He died of them later that night.’

It was about this time that Durnford-Slater realised that his Commando was in danger of being decimated, and although No. 3 Troop made a gallant effort to hold the bridge for about an hour, the whole of it under fire from crack German parachutists, it was clearly time for him and his men to depart the scene, not least since there was no sign of 50th Division - in point of fact held up in a major battle at Lentini. His plan, therefore, was to hold some hilly ground to the west from which his men might yet dominate the fate of the bridge - and in the knowledge that No. 3 Troop had dismantled enemy chrages affixed thereon during their gallant one hour holding action. As - troop by troop - No. 3 climbed to the hills in extended order, shell after shell from the Tiger tank came crashing down, one of them felling Charlie Head, one of Durnford-Slater’s best officers. “Lofty” King gathered him up and started to carry him along, but Head told him to drop him and go on, telling him he wouldn’t do it for him. The Sergeant’s large frame came to a sudden halt. “No,” he muttered, “I don’t believe you would,” but he continued to carry him nonetheless:

‘They were two big men; they made quite a lump together ... the fragments from the airburst shells made nasty sounds, ricocheting from the [railway] lines and metalling. Shortly we were established, however, in a good position on the hill. The tank had crossed the bridge after us and got busy sweeping the hill with its machine-gun. I called for another troop commanders’ meeting ... ’

In short, the decision was made to evacuate the beleaguered force in small groups of men and, by making use of the darkness that night, try and reach the advancing Allies. For his own part, Durnford-Slater lay-up in a ditch with his H.Q. party for the remainder of the day, before safely reaching our lines after a 10 mile dash, quite often under fire.

The Commando went into Agnone about 350 strong. Of these five officers and 23 other ranks were killed, four officers and 62 other ranks wounded, while eight officers and 51 other ranks were posted missing, mostly prisoners of war. Thus a total of 153 casualties.

Among the subsequent Honours and Awards was an M.M. for “Lofty” King and a Bar to his D.S.O. for Durnford-Slater. After the fall of Catania, the latter was summoned by Montgomery:

“Durnford-Slater,” he said, “this was a classic operation, classic. I want you to get the best stonemason in the town. I want you to have him engrave ‘No. 3 Commando Bridge’ on a good piece of stone. Have this stone built into the masonry of the bridge.”

D-Day and Beyond

After seeing more action in Italy, particularly at Termoli, where Durnford-Slater was delighted to be presented with the ‘long, low, black and very fast’ motor car left as a result of the hasty departure of its previous owner - General Heydrich of the German Parachute Divisional Commander - No. 3 Commando returned to the U.K. in January 1944, in readiness for the coming Allied invasion at Normandy.

One of Durnford-Slater’s first objectives, having been promoted, was to bring together certain Army Commandos alongside their Royal Marine counterparts, for they would be landing together in Normandy. This, however, proved a difficult task to achieve, and he was somewhat annoyed, but by no means surprised, when he heard that “Lofty” King had announced through certain channels that no R.M. personnel were welcome in the town of Worthing, where No. 3 Commando was billeted: to prove his point, he thumped a Marine outside a local pub, told him to get the hell out of town, and to inform his Marine friends how No. 3 felt about them. It was not a good moment to attract his C.O’s attention, who was busy posting-out long-served personnel for a break from operations. “Lofty”, however, somehow managed to persuade him otherwise, and remained with No. 3 throughout the remainder of the War.

No. 3’s allotted task on D-Day was to land with 1st Commando Brigade at La Breche to the west of Ouistreham. They were then meant to advance four miles to the bridges over the River Orne, and if the bridges had been destroyed, they were to ferry themselves over in rubber boats. They were then to continue their advance in a north-easterly direction, seizing the high ground near Le Plein. It was a task of no little magnitude.

What actually happened to the Commando on that memorable day, and in the period following until it was withdrawn to the U.K., is best described in the account written by Major (afterwards Colonel) Peter Young, D.S.O., M.C. (see Storm From The Sea). Of their actual run-in to the beach, he writes:

‘The enemy fire by now was far too accurate to be pleasant, and the small craft were rocked by the explosions from near misses while shell splinters rattled on the decks. Away to the left a tank landing craft was burning fiercely and the crew were seen scrambling off as the ammunition exploded. Three of the Commando’s craft received direct hits from high-velocity shells. No. 6 Troop’s was badly holed and all the three-inch mortar ammunition exploded. The Troop sustained at least twenty casualties before the craft beached. Nevertheless, in view of the sustained and accurate enemy fire, overall casualties during the landing were much less than expected ... The beach was negotiated without much difficulty in spite of wire and obstacles, and soon the Commando was being assembled under cover of the houses between the sand dunes and the road. It was a scene of confusion. Large numbers of troops lying about in the sand dunes and very little appeared to be happening, although the enemy were maintaining sporadic mortar fire.’

As the Commando moved forward to its forming-up point a little further inland, this enemy fire started to claim more victims, one of them being a section commander, Lieutenant Coweson. Young continues:

‘His duties were taken over by Lofty King who commanded the section in an officer’s capacity for the next three weeks. Lofty had been offered a commission in England, but preferred to remain as Troop Sergeant-Major.’

Covering much of the distance at the double, with occasional halts for “clearance” purposes, No. 3 Commando made its way to “Pegasus bridge” on the River Orne, where, having linked up with the Airborne, it was decided that Young and his men should in fact move to the area of Le Bas de Ranville to protect the Airborne’s Divisional H.Q., but once this task had been performed, they proceeded to the vital high ground around Le Plein where ‘All units dug-in and waited for the inevitable counter-attacks. Their ambitious D-Day task had been accomplished.’

As part of 1st Commando Brigade, No. 3 Commando remained actively employed in the Normandy operations until late August, when the whole returned to the U.K. in readiness for deployment to the Far East in 1945: an indication of the severity of the fighting encountered in France may be gleaned from the Brigade’s casualties - of the 146 officers and 2252 other ranks that had landed on D-Day, 77 officers and 890 other ranks became casualties.