The Men | 30AssaultUnit

The individuals

From all services and backgrounds and one very important lady...

If you are relatives of, or researching other men involved in the unit please supply portraits and a few words. info@30AU.co.uk

Cdr Ian Fleming RNVR

Creator of James Bond.

Miss M Preistley? which one?

1982? One of these lady's is Margaret Preistley. The Leeds History professor and the only civilian based inside Admiralty citidel. Who was a highly capable and organised and instrumental in the running and administration of 30AU. she shunned all recongnistion for her role during her lifetime.

Lt Cdr T J Glainville RNVR

1943 - ITALIAN ADMIRAL CAPTURED BY LT. GLANVILLE. THE FIRST OF HIS 'HAT-TRICK' OF AXIS ADMIRALS.
Capture of Admiral Minisini 18th September 1943
Following the capture of the islands of Capri and Ischia, which was under the sole control of 30 Commando, attention turned to the torpedo works at Baiae and testing range on the small island of San Martino. An operation was planned to remove Admiral Minisini, a high priority target for the Allies, capture as much intelligence as possible on the development and use of the midget submarines and prevent the destruction of the plants and any torpedoes. Date and time were set for 2330 on 17 September.
On the 16th, reports were received from the American OSS* of German E-boats operating in the seas around Naples and so two Italian torpedo boats, known as MAS, were dispatched to search the area. No E-boat was found but a small boatload of Neapolitan refugees was picked up. Following interrogations several German agents were found amongst them. They had been sent to spread discord and rumours of a cholera outbreak in Naples.
Conflicting intelligence reports, false rumour and often sensationalised information from refugees meant that planning for the operation was not straightforward. Speed and surprise would be the key to success, particularly as the exact nature of the defences and enemy forces was unknown so a fast, modern Italian MAS boat, fitted with a silent underwater exhaust and a top speed of 38 knots was selected. The party selected for the raid consisted of Captain Martin-Smith of the Army section, Lt. Berncastle and six Royal Marine OR’s the whole under the command of Lt. Glanville, acting as ‘Admiral” of the operation. The landing party was split into four groups; Lt. Glanville and Captain Martin-Smith with Corporal Ellington, RM. L/Cpl. Blake, RM. and Pte. Edwards (Kings Liverpool Regiment) to handle the Admiral and his companions, a party under Sergeant Whitby to look for documents, a fire support party under Sergeant Whyman, RM, and finally Lt. Berncastle and two Royal Marines were to keep charge of the boat and supervise its navigation.
The operation set off at just before midnight on the 17th and, having crossed the calm sea undetected, the MAS slid silently alongside the jetty. The landing party were quickly ashore and a small group of Italian watchmen and workmen were rounded up and interrogated. Very forthcoming with information and assistance, they guided Lt. Glanville to the admiral’s sleeping quarters and also pointed out two German machine gun posts, one either side of the range. ‘Lofty’ Whyman and his fire support party were ordered to keep a close eye on these and open fire if the Germans showed any signs of movement.
Admiral Minisini was quickly located and Glanville informed him he was being removed to a place of safety. A staunch fascist, Minisini refused to move unless he was declared a prisoner of war, which he promptly was. He immediately acquiesced, simply asking asking that his wife be allowed to accompany him. Captain Martin-Smith, a fluent German speaker was sent to persuade the pro-German Signora Minisini to pack her belongings and join her husband. Martin-Smith’s German was so good that the Signora was convinced she was being removed by a ‘charming young Rhinelander” and it wasn’t until she had finished packing her thirteen pieces of luggage that she realised anything different. The captain of the Italian boat remembers ‘a little slender woman was helped over the side’ followed by ‘a quite stout Admiral in beautiful overcoat’. The Admiral and his wife were first taken to Ischia and then were transferred to the Americans on Capri early the next day.
*The OSS officers were all first generation Americans of Neapolitan origin and had been selected for their language qualifications and had, in most instances, received little or no training in intelligence work. Interestingly, one of these officers, Edmund Burke, later claimed to have been part of the group that smuggled Minisini off the island and later received the Silver Star for his efforts. Yet another case of the Americans claiming the fruits of British success - Minisini was quickly transported to the US where he became a vital part of future American torpedo development.

Ralph Izzard

Pratchett

Lt. James Besant RNVR

The mix of caps within the rapidly moving jeep field teams led to some dicy incidents.

Lt. Theo Ionides

Killed near St Marie Du Mont just after D-day

W G Cass 1939

The W G stands for William Geoffrey, although he was always known as Geoffrey. He died in 1982, and never spoke about his involvement with 30AU to his family, although we knew he knew Fleming.

In March 1942 my grandfather was living in Chalfont St Giles at Home Farm Orchard, a house my grandmother built, in the next village to Amersham. Their only child, my mother, was born on 29 March. She would have come along just as the unit was forming. She is still alive and well and living in the Chilterns area. She was fascinated to learn about her father's involvement with 30 AU.

As you rightly say W G Cass was in The Buffs regiment. After school he went straight to Sandhurst and had a military career during the 1920s. He received an MBE at 21. He bought himself out of the army in about 1931, the same year he married my grandmother, Marjorie Bingley.

When WWII was looming, he went back into the military because of all his experience especially in military intelligence. He was sent to SE Asia (via Lisbon) in April of 1943 and was in that theatre until 1946 with the Intelligence Corps. He was itching to be in Europe too, as he had suffered a lot with the loss of his family during WWI. During his teens he lost his older brother and only sibling Hugh Cass in WWI (South Wales Borderers, killed Gallipoli 19 June 1915) and his two first cousins, Jack Duncan and Christopher Duncan, killed in 1915 and 1917 on the Western Front. His mother had died of pneumonia in April of 1915 and after the loss of Hugh, his father Tom Cass, went to serve in Salonika aged 59. Tom did return from the war but Geoffrey was left really without a home or family due to the First World War.

He ended the Second World War as Lt. Col. and remained in the army until about 1951, teaching military history at Sandhurst. He then went into civilian life, and eventually retired to Presteigne on the Welsh borders. He had lost his sight due to his war service but continued to fly fish for many years and I have fond memories of him from my childhood, walking along the river Lugg with his cairn terriers, and smoking his pipe in the kitchen of their house. He was a lovely grandfather.

I am attaching a photograph taken in 1939 at Salisbury when he was back in uniform and preparing for the war.

Dunstan Curtis

1910 - Dunstan Curtis born.

A solicitor before the war, Curtis joined the RNVR on 11 March 1937 and attended HMS King Alfred in 1940. Having won a DSC commanding MGB314 during the raid on St. Nazaire in 1942, he was appointed to 30 Commando. Commanding the unit during Operation Torch and it's North African operations, Curtis went on to play an important role in the later operations in the Mediterranean, the re-organisation of the Unit in preparation for D-Day and its subsequent operations in Europe.

Here are a list of his wartime awards:

DSC 21.05.1942 attack on St Nazaire

DSC 09.05.1944 Operation Stanley (various clandestine operations in Mediterranean 43)

MID09.02.1943 special duties

MID 11.12.1945 wind-up Europe 45

CdeG ? St Nazaire raid

R Ryder RNVR

Commander Robert Ryder, VC is born. "Red' Ryder was the man tasked with initially organising the Intelligence Assault Unit, later to become 30 Commando, in 1942.
An experienced naval officer he had done his VC at St Nazaire and had later commanded the 'cutting out' force at Dieppe.

Cdr Robert Harling RNVR

Commander Robert Harling RNVR was recruited by Fleming to act as liaison officer between NID and 30 AU, having previously been a navigation officer on the Atlantic Convoys and part of the Inter-Services Topographical Department (ISTD.
Initially working from Room 39 he helped reorganise 30 in preparation for D Day. Against Fleming's wishes, Harling accompanied PIKEFORCE on D Day, landing alongside the Canadian forces on JUNO. He then spent his time working alongside the teams racing across France and travelling backwards and forwards to NID in London. Often seen as Fleming's Man by some of 30, he became close with many of the officers and men and shared their exploits and hardships in the field.
Having retired as an editor, he wrote a memoir of his time working for and knowing Ian Fleming (Ian Fleming: A Personal Memoir). It is well worth a read and includes some excellent anecdotes regarding Fleming and 30 in general. It gives another insight into their story, from a very personal point of view.
The photo below shows Harling in a perfect example of a 30 RN Officer, khaki BD, blue cap, RN shoulder titles and 30 unit patch. The photo was taken in 1945 in Norway as part of the 'mopping up' operations.

Col. R H Quill 'H'

LT. COL. R. H. QUILL, RM
We were recently contacted by a relative of 'H' as he was known, and she has been kind enough to allow me to publish these photos of him.
Raymond Humphery Quill was born in May 1897, the son of Major-General Richard Quill, C.B., and was educated at Wellington and Cheltenham. Commissioned into the R.M.L.I. at about the time of the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, and following a brief period of training, he served out in the Dardanelles and in France, in which latter theatre of war he was mentioned for his ‘zeal, initiative and courage ... and resource under fire’ by Lieutenant-Colonel C. Omaston, Commanding R.M.A. Anti-Aircraft Brigade. Quill spent the remainder of the War aboard the battleship Lord Nelson out in the Aegean and Caspian and was onetime a personal aide to the S.N.O. Piraeus.

Between the Wars he enjoyed further seagoing appointments and was appointed M.V.O. in 1935 for his services during the Duke of Gloucester’s visit to Australia and New Zealand, the same year in which he was advanced to Major. But in the period leading up to the renewal of hostilities he was increasingly employed by Naval Intelligence, the period 1937-39 seeing him employed as a Staff Officer (Intelligence) out in Singapore. Returning home in the latter year, he took up another intelligence post at the Admiralty, and in 1940 he accompanied the Royal Marines Expedition to Iceland, where he managed to prevent the enemy from destroying their papers and documents - an opening success in intelligence gathering that would set the pattern for his later wartime career in North-West Europe. First of all, however, he was posted to the Middle East as a Staff Officer (Intelligence), in which capacity he served until returning home in 1944.

30 Assault Unit, R.M.

Thus ensued his final wartime appointment as C.O. of 30 Assault Unit, R.M., the jeep-bound Commando which on occasion operated ahead of the advancing Allies in North-West Europe in order to surprise the enemy and capture valuable secret papers and weapons. Comprising two dozen R.N. and R.M. officers, and around 300 R.M. Commandos and ratings, 30 A.U. went onto achieve some notable successes, not least the seizure of the enemy’s Naval H.Q. in Paris, complete with a mass of paperwork, the capture at Kiel of Dr. Walter, the inventor of high-speed hydrogen peroxide engines for torpedoes and U-Boats, and the discovery in a remote Bavarian schloss of the archives of the German Navy dating back to 1870.

Quill first arrived in France in November 1944, and, following early success at the German Naval H.Q. in Paris, moved on to a new assembly point for his unit at Genappe, near Brussels, in February 1945. Here he quickly sought out the co-operation of 21 Army Group and the U.S. 12th Army Group, as a result of which he was able to disperse a number of ‘field teams’ around likely hunting grounds, among them the Ruhr-Hartz mountains, the Westphalian Plain and Kiel. Yet the pace of the Allied advance often meant the unit found itself operating inside dangerous pockets of enemy resistance, but none of which ever kept Quill from keeping well forward in his command vehicle.

In early April the unit moved to Venlo on the east bank of the River Maas, and further specialists arrived to assist in the investigation into captured documents and hardware - one of them was heard to whisper that he was an atomic scientist. Two weeks later 30 A.U’s H.Q. was once again on the move, this time to Osnabruck, and in the coming weeks a number of important finds were made, not least on the unit’s subsequent arrival at Hamburg, Bremen and Lubeck. The former turned up one of Dr. Walter’s Walttherboot, a high-speed submarine which was fuelled by hydrogen peroxide, and the latter the hitherto unknown 50-knot hydrofoil. But it was at Kiel that 30 A.U. finally uncovered much of the secrecy surrounding the Third Reich’s military might.

Aware of the city’s potential importance to 30 A.U’s objectives, Quill had hastened to General Dempsey on the eve of the German surrender. Anxious that the enemy be allowed minimal time for sabotage, he asked for the General’s permission to enter the city ahead of the main Allied force. The General eventually agreed to the plan, but made it clear that no assistance would be forthcoming if 30 A.U. ran into trouble. In the event, most of the 40,000 enemy troops inside the battered city were more than ready to surrender, thereby allowing Quill and his men the opportunity to make a number of important arrests. Their biggest catch was Dr. Walther, who was picked up in his residence next door to the famous Waltherwerke complex. Added to which Quill’s men uncovered microfilms of all of his blue-prints and drawings, which had been hidden under the coal in his cellar. Meanwhile, another field team raced across Kile canal to Eckernforde, their haste being rewarded by examples of every enemy torpedo then in use, together with the plans of those yet to be put into manufacture.

Later, at Flensburg, Quill rushed to rescue one of his teams which had been apprehended by a group of senior enemy Naval officers. In his subsequent negotiations, the no-nonsense Colonel insisted that all details of research and development be handed over to his care. As one witness to these events later commented, ‘There followed a series of breathtaking discoveries, the average rate of finding new weapons for the first fortnight being about two a day’. Among them were a 25-knot, one-man midget submarine, a radio-controlled Hs. 293 glider bomb and the Blohm and Voss 143 jet-driven glider bomb. And more was to follow, another of Quill’s teams having sped southwards in time to capture the entire archive of the German Navy - this latter gold-mine was later passed to the control of Ian Fleming at Naval Intelligence.

At length, after many adventures and startling discoveries, 30 A.U. finally returned to the U.K. and was disbanded, ‘the sailors in jeeps’ having made a significant contribution to the war’s outcome and, equally important, to future development in the post-war era. As the Director of the Admiralty’s Torpedo and Mining Department later concluded, ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the information obtained by 30 A.U. was both a material contribution towards winning the War, and also helped us to get well into the lead with various technical and scientific devices which all navies must have nowadays’. Quill was awarded the D.S.O., one of 38 won by the Royal Marines in the 1939-45 War, and the American Legion of Merit.

In the five years following the War, he commanded the R.M. Barracks at both Deal and Eastney, and was appointed an A.D.C. to H.M. King George VI. He also added a C.B.E. to his wartime accolades. Following his retirement, the Colonel pursued his interest in Horology, in which field he achieved a reputation that was second to none in this country. Author of the acclaimed and authoritative work, John Harrison: The Man Who Found Longitude, Quill died in December 1987, aged 90 years.