With the SBS and SAS in WW2 : Corporal Ken Smith’s Wartime Service from the Royal Marines to the Special Forces

From a choirboy on HMS Victory to a Royal Marine and then an early recruit of the Special Boat Service and Special Air Service, Ken Smith was a witness to many of the key events of the Second World War. Not for nothing was he often heard to say, ‘I never expected to see the end of the war.’ He did survive and credited the SAS with saving his life, although he carried a permanent reminder of his service for over seventy years: a bullet embedded in his arm. As a Royal Marine Ken survived the North Atlantic, Arctic and Mediterranean. When he heard there was a call for men to join a special forces group, Smith volunteered and was accepted into the SBS. Operating across the Mediterranean, the SBS raided German garrisons in North Africa, the Greek islands, Albania, Italy and Yugoslavia. In the Dodecanese, Smith and his comrades terrorized the occupying Germans. ‘We used to go out every night, landing on all these islands, shooting up Germans,’ recalled Ken. One of these missions was the famous raid on the island of Symi in July 1944. In what was one of the SBS’s largest raids, the entire German garrison was killed or taken prisoner. Ken was also there, as part of a specially selected force of eighteen men, when the legendary Dane, Anders Lassen, earned his posthumous Victoria Cross a raid on the north shore of Lake Comacchio in Italy. It was in a raid in Yugoslavia that Ken was hit with one bullet going through his back and out the other side, and a second being the one which remained in his arm for the rest of his life. Ken’s many missions saw him cradling his mortally wounded officer in his arms and sitting alongside an officer, in the same canoe, when he earned his Military Cross. This is Ken’s astonishing story.