X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II. Leah Garrett

There are lots of books about World War II. A great many of them claim to be about the most secret aspect of the conflict, to offer a story never before told, revealing something that changed the course of the war. Garrett does not quite fall into this hyperbolic trap in X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II, but she does nonetheless make a number of claims that would need to be addressed by any reviewer. On a separate note, I should also mention that I feel a personal link to the book—my great-uncle was an X Trooper and elsewhere I published a short article about his wartime experiences.

“X Troop” is a colloquial name used to refer to a British military unit that was formally instated midway through the war, in July 1942: No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando, 3 Troop. It comprised eighty-seven men, each attached to another commando unit or to a specialized part of the army. While there were other British army commando troops comprised of non-Britons (including troops of French, Norwegian, Dutch, and Belgian soldiers), X Troop was different, because its fighters were German-speaking refugees, largely Germans and Austrians, the vast majority of them Jewish. Trained as commandos and put through utterly hideous-sounding physical endurance tasks, they were extraordinarily tough and resilient. Physically and mentally fit, they were trained in unarmed combat, explosives, breaking and entering, and other specialized skills. But they were more than just elite fighters—their fluency in the German language also equipped them for an intelligence function, and a great many were used to interrogate captured German soldiers.

Garrett begins X Troop with a big, bold claim: that this a “virtually unknown story” she is telling “for the very first time in book form” (p. 1). This statement, however, is sadly not true, as her bibliography would suggest. This objection might seem a bit pedantic, but it highlights my only real gripe with the book: at times it is prone to excessive claims. It is no simple task to write about a heroic individual or group of people without slipping into hagiography or losing broader perspective, and at times Garrett’s writing falls into this trap.

Minor grumbles aside, this book is otherwise absolutely top notch. It is well researched, drawing on the author’s interviews of some living X Troop members (most are no longer with us). Garrett also provides fascinating, detailed insight into some of the operations involving X Troopers, and she sheds light on their strategic value in a broader perspective. One of the most important and interesting aspects of the book is its final chapter, which looks at how X Troopers and their families make meaning out of the legacy of their wartime experiences. It is telling that very few of them spoke publicly about their experiences, both in the 1940s and later in their lives; even more interesting is that many did not raise their postwar children as Jewish. This might relate to the fact that, early in the war, each of them had been told to choose new British-sounding names to conceal their Jewishness, as well as to hide all aspects of their prewar lives.

Garrett focuses largely on only three X Troop members. This small sample size is understandable given space constraints and the limited availability of material, but these three troopers’ experiences have already been detailed in other publications. Garrett thus misses an opportunity in not drawing more substantively on other troopers’ experiences. Nevertheless, Garrett does a marvelous job of interweaving the personal narratives of her specific subjects with frequent mentions of other X Troopers, as well as narrating the broader history and evolution of the unit. The most detailed and exciting chapters are the later ones, which examine the roles played by several X Troopers in the days and weeks following the D-Day landings in the summer of 1944. It was here that the real value of tough, fit, brave, multilingual commandos came to the fore, and the book retells a number of heroic incidents, as well as examples of their value to the intelligence services at the time.

These brave derring-do stories make for great reading, but most valuable are those chapters looking at the roles of individuals. There is perhaps no greater example recounted in the book than that of Manfred Gans and his mission after D-Day to find his parents—he had been told they had been taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he eventually found them. The story is harrowing, Gans being one of the lucky ones.

X Troop is a richly illustrated and researched book that, at times, has the pace and prose style of a novel, though without concealing the seriousness of the subject matter. These individuals were heroes and, like so many others, contributed to the war effort and to the defeat of Nazi Germany. As German-speaking Jews serving Britain and the Allied cause, they carried more “baggage” than a great many other military personnel, which adds to their achievements. This is a book that anyone interested in World War II should read, likewise anyone interested in Jewish history during this period. Simultaneously and equally, it is as a personal story of exceedingly brave men and of the impact and legacy of war on their subsequent lives.