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COPP Remembrance Trust

Discover COPP

At the lowest ebb of the Second World War, Allied planners knew that liberating Europe from Nazi domination and pushing the Japanese out of Burma would involve landing troops on enemy-held beaches in a series of amphibious assaults.


The prospect filled the planners with dread. Memories of the First World War’s disastrous Gallipoli landings hung over them like a spectre.


But their concerns were at least partially eased thanks to the vision of Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott, a young Royal Navy navigating officer who pioneered the idea of in-person beach reconnaissance and became ‘the father’ of Combined Operations Pilotage Parties (COPP).

Landing craft and forces going ashore on D-Day. (NARA)

D-Day and Operation Overlord

Half a year before D-Day took place, COPP men Logan Scott-Bowden and Bruce Ogden Smith swam ashore onto first Gold beach and then Omaha beach (twice) to probe the enemy defences and take soil samples.


Then on D-Day itself, COPP used two X-craft midget submarines to act as light beacons, marking the way towards Juno Beach and Sword Beach for the assault force. Other COPP teams were in the first-wave of landing craft as they headed in, spearheading the liberation of Europe.

Find out about D-Day and Operation Overlord

Men unloading landing craft over a sandy beach during Operation Torch, the landings in North Africa.
Troops going ashore during Operation Torch. (NARA)

Pioneering days

In early 1941 Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott was involved in planning an Allied assault on Rhodes, which was then held by the Italians. Responsible for getting the troops ashore, he worried about the lack of information about the beaches and got permission to team up with the SBS’s Roger Courtney to swim ashore and investigate in person.

It wasn’t until late 1942 that the next recce took place. Ahead of landings in French Algeria (Operation Torch), Willmott at the last minute had to throw together an improvised reconnaissance and pilotage team dubbed Party Koodoo–Inhuman. Shortly after the landings took place, COPP was officially formed.

Find out about Pioneering days

An LCT unloads during Operation Husky in Sicily. (CARL)

COPP in the Mediterranean

Thrown into service too soon to carry out reconnaissance of Sicily, the first COPP teams in the Mediterranean suffered heavy losses.


But once training was properly established, COPP teams went on to serve with distinction during all the major landings on Sicily, at Salerno and at Anzio.


Teams also supported numerous small-scale amphibious in the Adriatic and the Aegean Sea.

Find out about COPP in the Mediterranean

Landing craft approach Rangoon in Burma. (HMSO)

Service in South-East Asia

The first COPP teams arrived in South-East Asia following Louis Mountbatten’s appointed as Supreme Allied Commander in the theatre in late 1943.

These teams put their lives at risk to carry out reconnaissance for several amphibious landings that were cancelled as Allied planners instead focused landing craft in Europe and the Mediterranean instead.

It wasn’t until the big push to liberate Burma in 1945 that COPP teams saw their work come to fruition, supporting numerous landings in the Arakan (now known as Rakhine State).

Find out about Service in South-East Asia

Post-war

As with almost all the wartime canoe-based units, COPP was disbanded at the end of the Second World War.

But the legendary ‘Blondie’ Hasler, who’d led the Royal Marines’ ‘cockleshell heroes’ raid on ships at anchor in Bordeaux in 1941, was allowed to retain a small nucleus of staff that included COPP’s Alex Hughes.

They formed a ‘small boats school’ that earned itself such a reputation that, alongside its teaching, the operational demand placed on its staff became overwhelming. They decided to ‘spin off’ some of the tutors into an operational unit: the modern-day Special Boat Service (SBS) was formed.

Find out about Post-war

One of our trustees, Rob Crane, is uploading his extensive and ongoing research onto his COPP Survey website. For more in-depth coverage of COPP, its men and its equipment, please visit.

COPP Survey website
COPP men and X-craft crew pose with Evelyn Cross, one of the COPP Wrens, at submarine base Fort Blockhouse in Gosport. The COPP men had been to have their photographs taken in civilian clothing in case they were needed for fake ID cards if forced ashore in occupied France. (Public domain)

​D-Day and Operation Overlord

COPP played a key role in the D-Day landings – not just on 6 June 1944 but in the months leading up to it.

Of all COPP’s wartime operations, its ones for the D-Day landings are the best known. Many people have heard that two Commandos who slipped onto the Normandy beaches before the invasion to take sand samples, or that two X-craft midget submarines waited off the French coast to guide in the invasion fleet.

Yet people who have heard the stories often still don’t asssociate them with COPP.


In fact COPP’s role was far bigger than those two stories suggest, with only the Americans’ Utah sector not benefitting from COPP work either on the day of the landings or during the earlier planning phase.


  • Omaha beach received reconnaissance and pilotage.
  • Gold beach received reconnaissance only.
  • Juno beach received pilotage and beach marking.
  • Sword beach received pilotage and beach marking.


Select each of the following items to find out more.

A map of Lower Normandy with arrows indicating the landing beaches and the predominant nationality of forces that landed there: Utah (US), Omaha (US), Gold (British), Juno (Canadian) and Sword (British)
The D-Day beaches. (Adobe Stock)

Reconnaissance


In mid-January 1944, COPP used the midget submarine X-20 to reconnoitre Omaha beach (Operation Postage Able. On two nights, COPPists Logan Scott-Bowden and Bruce Ogden Smith slipped from the submarine and swam ashore.


By day, X-20 lay in the surf while the men studied the coast. Omaha’s defensive gun emplacements were taking shape at speed, and the COPP team reported the sites they saw under construction.


For the planners, though, the crucial question lay at the back of the beach: would a shingle bank and the sea wall stop tanks?


On their first nighttime swim from X-20, Scott-Bowden and Ogden Smith were caught by the current and swept farther east than planned, landing in front of the beach’s main exit. As they lay in the surf, two torches snapped on from the back of the beach and pinned them in their beams. But the sentries didn’t come to investigate. With the tide rising, the COPP men edged back into the water and swam west to their intended landing point, near what later became known as Cota’s draw.


The next night, they came ashore below the present-day US cemetery and examined the shingle bank. As they clambered over it, the stones clattered loudly. Hearing voices nearby, they retreated to the sand, continued taking soil samples, and successfully completed the reconnaissance.


After the mission, Scott-Bowden was summoned to London to brief senior military leaders in person, including General Omar Bradley, who led the US First Army.


Pilotage


On D-Day, Scott-Bowden and Ogden Smith returned to Omaha beach. Although US experts handled most of the pilotage, each COPP man was assigned to one of the boats guiding in the landing craft carrying the Duplex-Drive ‘amphibious’ swimming tanks.


In the west, Scott-Bowden and the men leading in the 743rd Tank Battalion judged the sea too rough to risk launching the tanks offshore. Instead, the landing craft drove them straight onto the beach.


But in the east, the men with Ogden Smith guiding in the 741st Tank Battalion decided to launch regardless. The result was disastrous: only two tanks managed to swim to the beach without sinking.

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X-23 on D-Day

While midget submarine X-20 marked Juno beach on D-Day, X-23 marked Sword beach.


COPPists Geoffrey Lyne and Jim Booth joined regular X-craft men George Honour, Jimmy Hodges and George Vause.


D-Day's postponement by 24 hours because of bad weather meant they had to sit on the bottom off Sword beach for an additional day.


The atmosphere inside an X-craft was repugnant at the best of times, but almost 24 hours without being able to ventilate made it even worse than usual.


Finally, after completing her beach marking role, X-23 was able to come alongside HQ ship HMS Largs.


In memoriam

COPP men Caruth Main and Eric Fletcher were both killed in Normandy. ‘Loaned’ to Force ‘S’ at Sword beach to act as bodyguards for artillery observers ashore, both were in Landing Craft Headquarters (LCH) 185 when on 21 June it triggered a German sea mine and sank. Their bodies were never found.

Into Germany

After Allied forces had advanced through France and into western Germany, two COPP teams were called on to support river crossings.


In March 1945 a team led by Nick Hastings carried out reconnaissance on the River Rhine ahead of Operation Plunder, an amphibious crossing accompanied by airborne landings dubbed Operation Varsity.


And just days before the war in Europe ended, a hastily assembled team under the command of John Hashim carried out recce of the far bank of the Elbe river at Lüneburg (near Hamburg) before Operation Enterprise.

​​Pioneering days

While the D-Day landings are the best-known COPP operations, its history goes back much further.


In early 1941 the Allies were making plans to seize Rhodes, the island off the coast of Turkey that had been under Italian occupation since 1912. Liberating the island would help secure the Eastern Mediterranean, protecting approaches to the Suez Canal and to oil fields in modern-day Iraq.


But as planning progressed, the Royal Navy navigating officer responsible for getting the troops ashore started to get increasingly worried.

The visionary

Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott was born in India in 1910. After educating at Marlborough College, he commissioned into the Royal Navy as a Sub-Lieutenant in 1932.


He completed his training as a navigating officer in 1937 and joined the sloop HMS Wellington, serving in her in the South Pacific until the outbreak of war.


After steering Wellington home to the UK after war was declared, Clogstoun-Willmott transferred to destroyer HMS Faulknor. He served in her throughout the Norwegian campaign.


By late 1940 Clogstoun-Willmott was navigating officer in cruiser HMS Glasgow when it was badly damaged by an Italian torpedo-bomber while at anchor off Crete. Glasgow’s crew limped her back to Alexandria in Egypt where she entered dock for extensive repairs.


This is when Clogstoun-Willmott joined the Combined Operations staff in Cairo. Appointed to work with Rear Admiral Tom Baillie-Grohman, little did Clogstoun-Willmott know he’d soon play a pivotal role in transforming the Royal Navy's planning for amphibious operations.

Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott photographed after the war when serving as a Captain in the Royal Navy. (Public domain)
Nigel Clogstoun-Willmott

“It seemed to me that it would be a disaster if we didn’t know where we were. And we wouldn’t have, because the charts [of the Rhodes coast] were wrong by at least a mile.

“They also didn’t know what the beaches were like. They might be rock shelves or they might be a false beach, with a bar on which the landing craft would debouch and out would come the tanks, then it would get deeper instead of shallower as they went in."

Worried by the lack of reliable information about the Rhodes coast, Clogstoun-Willmott secured permission to join Roger Courtney for hands-on reconnaissance. Courtney had just a few months previously founded the Army Commandos’ Special Boat Section (SBS), which used canoes for its operations. He was already in Egypt with the force assembled for the planned Rhodes invasion.


Together they developed new techniques, including how a swimmer could clamber back into a canoe after completing his swim, and how to cross a pebbly beach without alerting sentries.


Then they took submarine HMS Triumph to sea and put the techniques into practice. In late March and early April 1941, Clogstoun-Willmott swam ashore on two successive nights; Courtney followed on the third. Legend has it that on one of his nights, Willmott even crawled into the grounds of the Axis headquarters (in the modern-day Casino Rodos) just behind one of the beaches.


The reconnaissance paid off. Clogstoun-Willmott found a sandbar close to one beach, while another beach earmarked for tank landings proved unsuitable.

But the mission’s discoveries were overtaken by events: soon after the reconnaissance ended, the Rhodes invasion was cancelled so that Allied forces could be evacuated from Greece instead.

​​COPP in the Mediterranean


COPP was officially formed on 27 November 1942. Within days, before the assembling men had received almost any training, they were summoned to the Mediterranean to carry out reconnaissance ahead of Operation Husky, the landings on Sicily.


It was a premature move that was to cost the early trailblazers severely.

Heavy losses in early Sicily operations

The first two COPP teams to be called for duty were both led by veterans of Party Koodoo–Inhuman:

  • COPP 3 – led by Norman Teacher
  • COPP 4 – led by Neville McHarg

Deprived of the chance to train properly in the UK, they improvised training routines as best they could.


But crucially, they lost the chance to practise homing to the submarines that would carry them and their canoes from Malta to Sicily.

Landing Craft Tank (LCT) beached during Operation Husky. (NARA)

In memoriam

The early reconnaissance operations off Sicily cost the life of George Burbidge, Noel Cooper, Alf Crossley, Victor de Kock and Norman Teacher. On the night of the landings, Victor Manning and Anthony Sayce disappeared while providing beach marking by canoe; their bodies were never found.


Towards the end of the war, while his team was in Greece as the country's civil war flared up, Eric Harding was shot dead in crossfire.

​​Service in South-East Asia

The first COPP teams to arrive in South-East Asia in late 1943 experienced frustration as their work seemed to be in vain: with Allied planners focusing on Europe and the Mediterranean, reconnaissance operations were followed by disappointment as the landings were cancelled.

 

It wasn’t until 1945 that COPP teams saw their dangerous work rewarded as they played a key role in the third Arakan campaign, supporting the Allied advance during a series of ‘chaung hopping’ landings that aimed to get behind Japanese lines. 

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In memoriam

Frederick Cammidge and Bill Johns died during reconnaissance of Phuket in March 1945, likely drowned after their canoe capsized. And sadly Geoffrey Richards lost his life in India in December 1943 when he fell from a train as his team returned from operations.


We should also acknowledge the non-COPP men who made the ultimate sacrifice during operations with COPP. In October 1943 landing craft crewman Alfred Sayers drowned after falling into the Indian Ocean following a collision between two landing craft. And in March 1945, Brian Brownlie from Royal Marines Detachment 385 died from his wounds after an operation led by a COPP officer was discovered by a Thai naval patrol. John Maxwell and Ernest Smith were captured at that time and were executed by Japanese officers in July 1945.

SBS men photographed during a training exercise. (Crown copyright)

​​Post-war

Although COPP was disbanded at the end of the Second World War, the work it did was soon taken up by a new unit.

In South-East Asia, COPP was part of the Small Operations Group (SOG), whose second-in-command was legendary Royal Marines officer Herbert ‘Blondie’ Hasler. Hasler had earlier in the war conceived and led the Royal Marines’ famous Cockleshell Heroes raid on shipping in Bordeaux harbour.


SOG included a number of other canoe-using units besides COPP: the Army’s Special Boat Section, the Sea Reconnaissance Unit and the Royal Marines’ Detachment 385. 

At the end of the war, all these units were disbanded. The existence of special forces outside the ‘proper’ chain of command had been caused resentment among some senior officers in both the Army and the Navy throughout the war. Now it was felt there was no further need for them and they could safely be abolished.

But Hasler was allowed to retain a small number of staff from officers within SOG, including COPP’s Alex Hughes. After returning to the UK they set up the School of Amphibious Warfare to keep alive the ‘small boat’ skills and expertise that they had gained during the war.


Herbert ‘Blondie’ Hasler paddling in the front cockpit of a canoe. (Royal Navy)

Additional photo credits for this page: Adobe Stock, Australian War Memorial, Jack Crane family, McMaster University, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)