Per Mare, Per Terram: A History of the Royal Marines Commandos

The Royal Marines' motto, Per Mare, Per Terram, "by sea, by land", is one of the least misleading mottos in British military history: it describes almost exactly what the Corps has spent 360 years doing. Raised originally to stop sailors from mutinying and to do the fighting nobody else on a warship particularly wanted to do, the Marines spent two and a half centuries as the Royal Navy's seaborne infantry, garrisoning Gibraltar, storming colonial forts across the Empire and blocking a Belgian harbour under fire, before reinventing themselves in the Second World War as the commando force that stormed a French dry dock in 1942, helped force open the Normandy beaches in 1944, and yomped 56 miles across East Falkland carrying more kit than most people carry on a house move.

This is a factual account of how that long evolution happened, and of the battles, reforms and reinventions that shaped it, from the original 1664 regiment to the modern green-bereted Corps.

Soldiers of the Sea: Founding and Early Service (1664 to 1755)

The Royal Marines trace their origin to 28 October 1664, when King Charles II's court ordered the raising of the Duke of York and Albany's Maritime Regiment of Foot, also known as the Admiral's Regiment, to provide land soldiers for service at sea during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. It was, in its first form, a single regiment of 1,200 men organised into six companies of 200 under Colonel Sir William Killigrew, armed from royal stores and intended, in the wording of the original order, to be "distributed into Majesties Fleets prepared for sea service".

The word "Marines" had entered official use by 1672, though the men themselves spent the rest of the seventeenth century being raised, disbanded and raised again as one regiment after another took on maritime duties, a fairly haphazard arrangement for a force that would go on to outlast most of the regiments that periodically replaced it.

Their first genuinely famous action came during the War of the Spanish Succession, when marines went ashore to seize the mole at Gibraltar in 1704 while the Royal Navy secured the Rock itself, then helped hold the fortress through a lengthy siege alongside Dutch marines. Gibraltar remains proudly carried as a battle honour, and the fortress's continued status as a British territory is a fact modern Marines are not shy about pointing out was rather their doing.

The Corps finally gained a settled, permanent structure on 5 April 1755, when His Majesty's Marine Forces were established as fifty companies in three divisions, based at Portsmouth, Chatham and Plymouth under Admiralty control, a reorganisation that turned a recurring wartime expedient into a standing institution.

Earning the 'Royal': The Napoleonic Century (1755 to 1855)

For much of the eighteenth century the Marines occupied an awkward middle rank aboard ship, providing musketry in close-quarters actions, manning some of the guns, and, not incidentally, standing between the officers and any sailor who fancied a mutiny; promotion above lieutenant colonel was barred to Marine officers until 1771, a ceiling that says a good deal about how the Admiralty viewed the Corps at the time. The Napoleonic Wars changed that perception considerably.

Marines served in fleet actions from the Glorious First of June to Trafalgar, provided landing parties for amphibious raids along the French and Spanish coasts, and by the war's end had built a reputation for reliability under fire that eventually earned formal recognition: in 1802, largely on the advocacy of Admiral John Jervis, King George III granted the Corps its "Royal" title, and the Royal Marines have kept it ever since.

Globe and Laurel: Empire and the Victorian Corps (1815 to 1914)

The century after Waterloo gave the Marines their enduring cap badge and a great deal of unglamorous, unrelenting colonial work. The Corps took part in the bombardment of Algiers in 1816, received its distinctive Globe badge, marking Marine service literally around the world, from the Duke of Clarence in 1827, and in 1855, following its service in the Crimean War, was formally redesignated the Royal Marine Light Infantry, with strength that year reaching around 15,500.

It was during the Crimean campaign that Corporal John Prettyjohns became the first Royal Marine awarded the Victoria Cross, for close-quarters fighting at the Battle of Inkerman in 1854, one of the first VCs given to any serviceman when the decoration was instituted.

In 1862 the Corps split into two distinct arms, the Royal Marine Artillery and the Royal Marine Light Infantry, which between them supplied landing parties for practically every colonial campaign of the Victorian era: the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s, the Ashanti War of 1873 to 1874, the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, the occupation of Egypt in 1882 and the Sudan campaign that followed. In 1900, Royal Marines fought alongside United States Marines for the first time, defending the international legations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion, an early instance of an Anglo-American partnership that would matter a great deal more in the century ahead.

By 1914 the Corps numbered around 18,234 officers and men, a sea-soldier force that had spent the better part of a century providing the Royal Navy, and by extension the Empire, with infantry it could put ashore more or less anywhere a ship could reach.

The First World War and the Zeebrugge Raid (1914 to 1918)

The First World War put Royal Marines into battles a very long way from any ship, most notoriously at Gallipoli in 1915, where the Royal Naval Division, made up largely of Marines and surplus naval reservists for whom there was no room afloat, fought as infantry alongside the Army in one of the war's grimmest and least successful campaigns. But the Corps' single most celebrated action of the war came at sea, or at least at the edge of it, on St George's Day, 23 April 1918, when Vice Admiral Sir Roger Keyes sent a raiding force to block the Belgian port of Zeebrugge and deny it to the German U-boats using it as a base.

Around 2,000 sailors and marines took part, with the 4th Battalion Royal Marines landing from the cruiser HMS Vindictive onto the fortified Zeebrugge mole under heavy fire after a shift in the wind blew away the smokescreen meant to cover the approach, while three obsolete cruisers were scuttled to block the canal entrance and a small submarine, packed with explosives and commanded by Lieutenant Richard Sandford, rammed and destroyed the mole's viaduct.

The raid's practical results were mixed at best, the port was only briefly and partially blocked, but its cost and courage were not in doubt, and the entire 4th Battalion Royal Marines was awarded the Victoria Cross by ballot, since only a limited number of crosses could be given and the men themselves had to choose who among them would receive one, the last occasion on which the VC was awarded by that method. It remains one of the most fiercely fought amphibious raids in the Corps' history, and a clear rehearsal, in hindsight, for the kind of audacious coastal raiding the Marines and their Army counterparts would make their speciality a generation later.

From Ship's Guard to Commandos: The Birth of a New Role (1940 to 1942)

The word "Commando" did not originally belong to the Royal Marines at all, and the story of how it came to define the Corps is really the story of Winston Churchill losing patience. After the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, Churchill demanded that his military chiefs "organise small self-contained, thoroughly-equipped raiding units" capable of striking back at German-occupied Europe, since sitting on an island waiting to be invaded struck him as an unsatisfying way to fight a war.

The Army raised the first Commando units in response, and under Lord Louis Mountbatten's Combined Operations Command from 1941, the concept spread to the Royal Marines as well, despite an Army initially reluctant to release troops it wanted for the eventual invasion of France.

The first 250 Royal Marines selected for the new role arrived at Deal North Barracks in February 1942 under Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Picton-Phillips, forming Royal Marine 'A' Commando before relocating to the Isle of Wight, and a training depot opened at Achnacarry House in the Scottish Highlands the same March to put recruits through the punishing regime that became, and remains, the Corps' defining rite of passage.

The lovat green beret adopted by Commando units during the war became so associated with elite, hard-trained infantry that the American Green Berets later borrowed the name for their own commando tradition, a small but satisfying piece of cultural export from a windswept training camp in Scotland.

Operation Chariot: The St Nazaire Raid (1942)

If any single action explains why the word "Commando" still carries weight, it is the raid on St Nazaire on the night of 27 to 28 March 1942, codenamed Operation Chariot. The target was the Normandie Dock, the only dry dock on the Atlantic coast large enough to service the German battleship Tirpitz; denying it to the Kriegsmarine would force any damaged Tirpitz to sail all the way home to Germany for repairs, through waters the Royal Navy could far more easily contest.

The plan was audacious even by commando standards: the obsolete destroyer HMS Campbeltown, packed with over four tons of delayed-fuse explosives, was disguised as a German vessel and rammed directly into the dock's caisson at 1.34 am, while roughly 611 raiders, about half of them commandos and half naval personnel under Lieutenant Colonel A.C. Newman and Commander R.E.D.

Ryder, went ashore to destroy the pumping machinery and other port installations under heavy fire.

The raid succeeded in its primary aim, and rather more explosively than planned: Campbeltown's hidden charges detonated the following day, killing an estimated 360 German personnel who had gathered to inspect the ship, and the Normandie Dock remained out of action until the 1950s. It came at a heavy cost, 169 raiders killed and roughly 200 more captured, most of them wounded, out of a raiding force that had never expected to bring everyone home.

Five Victoria Crosses were awarded, to Ryder, Newman, Campbeltown's commanding officer Lieutenant Commander Stephen Beattie, Sergeant Thomas Durrant and Able Seaman William Savage, and survivors and historians alike have called it, without much exaggeration, the greatest raid of the war.

More to Explore

D-Day: The Largest Commitment in Corps History (1944)

By June 1944 the Royal Marines had grown into something considerably larger than a raiding force, and D-Day remains, by their own reckoning, the largest single commitment of Royal Marines in the Corps' history, with more than 17,500 taking part on the day itself and over 25,000 involved by the end of the wider Normandy campaign. Most of that contribution never gets the film treatment: roughly two-thirds of all landing craft used on D-Day were crewed by, or included, Royal Marines, some 500 officers and 12,500 other ranks ferrying British, American and Canadian troops onto beaches under fire, alongside Marines serving as naval gunners, tank crews and specialists in obstacle-clearance and beach-recovery units.

Five Royal Marine Commando units also went ashore in the direct assault role. 41 Commando cleared coastal defences on Sword Beach's western flank; 48 Commando landed with Canadian forces at Juno; 46 Commando came in as floating reserve on 7 June; 45 Commando pushed inland to reinforce the 6th Airborne Division beyond the River Orne; and 47 Commando fought its way along the coast to capture Port-en-Bessin and link up with American forces advancing from Omaha Beach, closing the gap between the British and American sectors.

It was, across every one of those roles, the moment the Corps' wartime reinvention as both a seaborne transport arm and a commando raiding force came together at genuinely enormous scale.

Korea and a Corps Made Commando for Good (1950 to 1959)

The Commando ethos that had been an emergency wartime measure in 1942 was tested again, brutally, in Korea. In late November 1950, 41 Independent Commando, around 200 men under Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Drysdale, was fighting alongside the US 1st Marine Division near the Chosin Reservoir when Chinese forces launched a massive offensive.

Ordered to help relieve the besieged garrison at Hagaru-ri, Drysdale's force was combined with two American companies into the roughly 900-strong Task Force Drysdale, which fought its way for ten hours through what the men who survived it named Hell Fire Valley, advancing barely a mile an hour against determined Chinese opposition after an ammunition truck explosion split the column apart. 41 Commando alone suffered losses of around 50 per cent, roughly 100 men, but the survivors fought on through the subsequent breakout to Hungnam, earning praise from the American command for conduct "worthy of the highest traditions of Marines", a fair review from a Corps not naturally given to handing out compliments to allies.

The lesson of Korea, together with the Suez landings of 1956 (where 42 and 45 Commando made one of the first helicopter-borne assaults in history) and a string of counter-insurgency deployments through Cyprus, Aden and Borneo, was that commando training was no longer a specialist add-on for a select few but the basic standard the whole Corps needed. In 1959 the Royal Marines formally made commando training compulsory for every recruit, folding what had begun in 1942 as a wartime experiment into the permanent identity of the entire Corps, so that from that point on there was, strictly speaking, no such thing as a Royal Marine who was not also a Commando.

Falklands: The Yomp and the Mountains Above Stanley (1982)

Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982 gave the post-war Royal Marines their defining modern campaign, and one image in particular became shorthand for the whole war: 45 Commando yomping, in Royal Marine slang for a long march under load, some 56 miles across the boggy, exposed terrain of East Falkland from San Carlos Water toward Stanley in roughly three days, because the limited number of helicopters available had to be reserved for artillery and ammunition rather than infantry.

It was gruelling, unglamorous, and became, more or less immediately, one of the defining photographs of the entire conflict.

The fighting that followed was sharper still. On the night of 11 to 12 June 1982, 42 Commando under Lieutenant Colonel Nick Vaux attacked Mount Harriet, a fortified Argentine position, using a diversionary attack from the west while the main assault came from the south and east through a minefield gap Marines had scouted on earlier patrols, supported by more than a thousand rounds of naval and artillery bombardment.

The position fell for the loss of two Royal Marines killed and 30 wounded, against 18 Argentine dead and around 300 taken prisoner. Nearby, 45 Commando fought a similarly hard action for the Two Sisters ridge the same night. Together with the Parachute Regiment's battles at Goose Green and Mount Longdon, these actions secured the high ground overlooking Stanley and, within days, brought about the Argentine surrender.

Afghanistan and the Long Wars (2001 to 2014)

The Royal Marines' more recent operational history has been dominated by Afghanistan, where 45 Commando Group ran four separate operations, Ptarmigan, Snipe, Condor and Buzzard, against Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in the mountains of the south-east during 2002, an early taste of the high-altitude, dismounted fighting that would characterise much of the following decade. From 2006, 3 Commando Brigade took its turn commanding Task Force Helmand under Operation Herrick, with 42 Commando securing Lashkar Gah ahead of a wider British deployment and 45 Commando later serving as a rapid reaction force while also mentoring Afghan National Army units, rotations that continued at intervals through the campaign's long, costly middle years before British combat operations wound down in 2014.

Into the Modern Age: The Future Commando Force

Every recruit who wants to wear the green beret still has to earn it the same punishing way their wartime predecessors did, if rather more efficiently: the 32-week basic training course at the Commando Training Centre Royal Marines in Lympstone culminates in the Commando Tests, four events in a single gruelling week that include the six-mile Endurance Course, run partly underwater and finished off with a marksmanship test after 73 minutes of exertion; the Tarzan Assault Course, a high-wire obstacle circuit finished with a 30-foot rope climb; a nine-mile speed march carrying fighting order in 90 minutes; and the 30 Miler, an eight-hour tactical march across open country.

Close to half of those who start basic training do not make it through, which is not a bad way of explaining why the green beret still means something.

The Corps itself is now considerably smaller than its wartime peak, with a trained strength of around 6,000 regulars, but it remains the only element of the British armed forces capable of mounting an amphibious operation at brigade level, and it is currently mid-reinvention again under the Future Commando Force programme, launched from 2019 and formalised in 2021, which is restructuring 40 and 45 Commando into smaller, more dispersed Littoral Response Groups designed to operate persistently from Britain's amphibious ships in contested coastal waters rather than massing for a single large landing.

It is, in its way, a very old idea in modern dress: a force of soldiers who are equally at home by sea and by land, adapting yet again to whatever the next few decades of naval warfare turn out to require.

The Royal Marines' history does not divide neatly into a naval half and a land half, however much the motto might suggest otherwise. It is a single continuous story of a force built to do whatever job the Fleet needed done, whether that meant putting down a mutiny in 1690, storming a dry dock in 1942, or crewing the landing craft that put someone else's army ashore in Normandy.

What has stayed constant since 1664 is the underlying premise: that some jobs need soldiers who can fight just as well coming off a ship as they can on solid ground, and that Britain has, with only the occasional administrative reshuffle, kept just such a force in being for three hundred and sixty years.

You Might Also Like