It's going to hear with another episode of the History and Plugged podcast.

When Franceville to the Nazis in 1940, Winston Churchill declared that Britain would

resist the advance of the German army alone if necessary.

Churchill also believed that Adolf Hitler wouldn't abide by conventional rules of warfare, so neither should Britain.

Churchill commanded the Special Operations Executive

to secretly develop a very special kind of military unit

that would operate on their own initiative deep behind enemy lines.

They'd operate outside of typical military chain of command, be disavowed if discovered,

licensed to kill, and used ruthless force. They were basically the first modern black ops group.

The first of these units was led by Gus March Phillips, a British eccentric of high birth, and also led

by aristocratic, bloodthirsty Danish man in Anders Lassen.

One of the first operations this Renegade group undertook was admission to seize Nazi shipping

in the far distant port of Fernando Poe in West Africa.

There, they stole a pair of German and Italian supply ships by sailing a pair of tugboats into the

Harvard night while the ship's officers were on shore at a huge party.

They blew the anchor chains with explosive charges,

blocking the crews below deck, and sailed the ships out to sea where they could be legally

captured by a British destroyer. And they did it without a single death on the other side.

To look at this mission and the origin of Black

Ops is today's guest, Damian Lewis, author of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which was

made into a movie directed by Guy Ritchie. We look at the planning and execution of this mission in detail, everything that went wrong, and how the unit had to improvise on the fly, and the follow-up missions they did across the English Channel and on Greek islands. Finally, we look at their legacy and their influence on modern day black ops.

Hope we enjoyed this discussion with Damien Lewis.

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