The real Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare in Dorset

North Dorset CPRE’s Rupert Hardy looks at Major Gus March-Phillips, whose daring missions helped shape the modern Special Boat Service

Guy Ritchie’s latest film, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, featured a little-known military hero from Dorset: Major Gus March-Phillips. The film was based on the best-selling book of the same name by historian, war reporter and author Damien Lewis, a Dorset resident. As you’d expect, the film takes artistic liberties with the true events that inspired it.
Gus March-Phillips – under the auspices of Special Operations Executive (SOE) – was tasked with destroying part of Germany’s West African U-Boat re-supply operations in 1942. What was not clear from the film was the lasting significance of this Dorset man. He set up the Small Scale Raiding Force (SSRF), also known as 62 Commando, which was one of the precursors to today’s Special Boat Service, the Navy equivalent to the SAS.
Gus was a remarkable figure. After a brief career in the Royal Artillery in India – which he found rather boring – he based himself in Dorset, living in the family home in Blandford, trying to earn a living as a writer. He was keen on sport, especially riding and sailing. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he fought with distinction in the British Expeditionary Force, escaping from Dunkirk. Afterwards he determined to fight in a more unconventional manner than the British Army, which he felt had failed Britain so badly in 1940. Gus was one of the early recruits for the newly formed Special Operations Executive, SOE, tasked by the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, with taking the war to the enemy on the continent – to “set Europe ablaze”.
The squad’s covert and ‘ungentlemanly’ tactics against the Nazis not only altered the course of the war but also laid the foundations for modern Black Ops units.

Operation Postmaster
SOE’s loose brief may have been in Europe, but its activities stretched far and wide. Gus was authorised to set up a small team of Commandos, Maid Honour Force, which trained at Poole harbour. In the summer of 1941, the war in North Africa was at a critical point. British forces relied on West African ports to receive vital aircraft and spare parts, but German U-boat attacks posed a severe threat to these supply lines.
Although officially neutral, Spain—under its neo-fascist leader General Franco—was known to favour Hitler. Intelligence reports suggested that the port of Santa Isabel, on the Spanish-controlled island of Fernando Po (now Bioko), was secretly being used as a refuelling and re-arming station for German submarines. Moored in the harbour were three key targets: the Duchessa d’Aosta, an 8,000-ton Italian merchant ship, the Likomba, a 200-ton German tugboat and the Bibundi, a motorised barge.
The chances that any operation would go wrong were very high: and if it did, Spain’s neutrality would have been violated, prompting it to join the Axis powers of Germany and Italy in the war.
It was all very risky – but the SSRF team successfully towed all three boats out of the harbour, having first overpowered the ships’ crews without firing a shot. To ensure the German and Italian commanders were absent when the Maid Honour Force struck, a party was held on shore by undercover SOE agent Richard Lippett.
Operation Postmaster was a huge success – a rare occurrence in 1942. The exploit could have been part of a James Bond story, and might well have been the inspiration behind the Ian Fleming creation – it just so happened that Fleming was then a Naval Intelligence Commander and one of the planners of the top-secret mission.
Gus March-Phillips was awarded a DSO for his role in Operation Postmaster, and soon afterwards he married a fellow SOE agent, Marjorie Stewart.

Disaster of Operation Aquatint
He was now authorised to set up the SSRF, having found a suitably discreet base in Anderson Manor, deep in the Winterborne Valley near Blandford. The force carried out a series of successful raids into France, using a modified motor torpedo boat (MTB) – a fast, small, torpedo-armed ship designed for close-range attacks in shallow water – nicknamed The Little Pisser because of its outstanding turn of speed. The best known raid was that on the Casquets Lighthouse in the Channel Islands in September 1941, when the SSRF captured some German personnel and all their code books.
The success of these operations was attributed to diligent preparation, high fitness, excellent morale and speedy execution.
However, later that month their luck changed: during Operation Aquatint, a navigational error meant they ended up on the wrong Normandy beach.
Gus asked his team ‘What do you think chaps? Shall we have a bash?’, but they were soon discovered by a German patrol. Half were captured, and three killed, including Gus. He was buried in St Laurent–sur Mer nearby. His death was a severe blow to SSRF, but they reformed and continued to raid France for another year.
Looking back, Gus was seen as an inspirational leader, able to motivate and delegate and known for extraordinary bravery. Marcus Binney, whose father served in SOE, said ‘he had the guts and derring-do to carry off great coups, as well as an engaging ability to admit his own fear to others. But while courage was his greatest attribute, it was also his undoing, for at times it veered into foolhardiness.’
Anderson Manor was used as the SOE base until the end of the war. The commandoes’ presence, however, continued to be felt afterwards. The current owner’s daughter, then aged three, casually told her parents about a man who stood several times in her room, decribing him as wearing what can be assumed was Commando attire. The ghost of one of those men? James Bond?

The most famous agent
There are no shortage of clues to tell us what inspired Ian Fleming. Gus worked for Brigadier Colin Gubbins, whose code name was M, after his middle initial. The Q Department of his Bond stories may relate to a day when Ian visited Maid Honour Force in Poole harbour: it was an adapted Brixham trawler, whose deck house could suddenly collapse to reveal a two pounder cannon.
Gus had been an author and poet. His spy novel Ace High featured a hero called John Spake, who fitted well the James Bond mould. Had Gus survived the war would his own fictional character have been as well known as James Bond? Fleming went to school in Dorset too, at Durnford House. They were all Dorset heroes.