In the early summer of 1944, Simon Wingfield-Digby, the Conservative Member of Parliament for West Dorset, posed a question in the House of Commons to Winston Churchill. “Is it true, Mr Prime Minister,” he enquired, “that there is a body of men out in the Aegean Islands, fighting under the Union flag, that are nothing short of being a band of murderous, renegade cut-throats?”
Churchill did not appreciate the question. “If you do not take your seat and keep quiet,” he snapped, “I will send you out to join them.” Churchill’s tart response would have come as no surprise. He was, after all, indirectly responsible for the ‘cut-throats’ that Wingfield-Digby spoke of. In reality, they were the Special Boat Squadron, an elite unit whose origins stretched back to the early…