How the lords fought: the British special forces are Hitler's personal enemy.

Colonel Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat, 4th Baron Lovat, the head of the Scottish clan Freser, on August 19, 1942, stands on the plank of the pier in the port of New Haven, where he just returned with his commandos after the raid on Dieppe. A tall man with delicate features is covered with a gun, dressed in a jacket with a collar and baggy trousers, he relaxes his hands in his pockets, and you can not tell from him that he came back from hell.

Look at the people behind him. Alone, with a cigarette burned to the very toes in his lowered hand, with unshaven cheekbones, detachedly looks into the void in front of him, as if he still sees nightmarish scenes on the coast. Another, low in the pilot's cap, holds the rifle of Lee-Anfield with his left hand, and at the bottom on his leg he has a round hole. Perhaps I tore my pants off about the barbed wire, but rather the bullet pierced my trouser leg and did not hurt my leg.

So they stand in the summer morning on the New Haven berth waiting for trucks that will take them to the base, the surviving soldiers with their commander, who has a gun in a canvas holster and under his jacket a white sweater with the monogram "lord Lovat".

The raid through the English Channel to French Dieppe was well planned: escorts, landing ships, cover aircraft, smoke screen, four landing zones on the coast. But the plan, which looked logical and orderly on paper, turned from the first minutes into chaos. Destroyers in the English Channel flew into German ships and engaged in a battle with them, the roar of which awakened the entire coast. The Canadian division landed successfully, but not there. Tanks «Churchill», powerful machines with armor of 15 centimeters, slipped from the landing barges onto the stony beach, cut off the caterpillar stones and stood up. These stones, for some reason, no one has foreseen in the plan. The coast, about which intelligence reported that it was empty, in fact turned out to be lined with defensive structures and snipers, which shot the Canadians and Englishmen gathered on the narrow coastal strip. There were also 50 American Rangers - the first Americans to enter the war on the land of Europe.

It is known that the Germans immediately destroyed captured politicians and Jews. But it is less known that there was a third category of persons subject to immediate destruction: English commando. This was the order of Hitler.

England, having entered the war, had almost nothing to do with the war. After the disaster in Dunkirk, even rifles England did not have enough. Commandos in 1939, the British were not at all, they did not exist. But there was Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, who had a predilection for war, which is not led by a huge mass of troops with guns and tanks, but small detachments of trained athletes with blackened faces, armed with a Bren gun and pistols with silencers. He gave his reindeer reserves and all 80,000 hectares of his gigantic manor for the training of the first English commandos, who were exhausted by running for thirty kilometers not by anyone, but by Eton's graduate Randolph Churchill, the son of the prime minister.

Lord Lovat in the English commandos of the lords were not exhausted, there was among them also Lord George Jellico, the 2nd Earl of Jellico, who received the first wound in January 1941, when Stalin still strengthened an unbreakable friendship with Hitler. On Crete in 1942, he blew up 20 German planes, but about this another time.

In the meantime, about Lord Lovate and his commandos from the 4th order. In the photos you rarely see among them giant men with huge biceps mounds. More common are people of normal growth and addition. They were trained not to break their bricks, but to think well in the conditions of night and darkness, chaos and danger. In these often small, strong people, the training was amazingly endurance, allowing them to move ten hours in a row with a cargo of 36 kg in the rear of the enemy - on the cold Norwegian islands and in the scorching Libyan desert.

During training, they did not use blank ammunition, only combat ammunition. There were no writers or cooks in the commando units, everything they needed was to be done by themselves. One day, during training conducted in a storm near the rocks of Wales, they were put on landing barges and allowed to shore. Landing was possible only one way: to jump on the rock at the moment when the barge took off on the wave and was at the highest point. Two broke and drowned.

The ideas that were proposed and discussed at the headquarters of United operations of Count Mountbetten, another aristocrat with a passion for commando actions, were considered by many to be insane. Mountbetten was fantastic: he proposed to build amphibious ships that could move on water and land, and an aircraft carrier 600 meters long from reinforced ice. There was an idea to seize a train in France, stuff it with explosives, enter it to the port where German warships were based, and blow up. There was an idea to attack a villa in Africa where Rommel stayed and kill him.

Surprisingly, some of the insane ideas still come true. At the villa where Rommel was supposed to be, the commandos came at night and, finding the back door locked, politely knocked on the front door. After they opened it, the villa started with the usual hell. But Rommel was not there.

Another idea was that the two commandos at night on a kayak penetrated the port of Boulogne, where there was a German ore carrier with 5,500 tons of copper, and blew it up. Strange as it may seem, they succeeded.