​A small Welsh town and its connection to a secret Jewish WW2 suicide squad

Earlier this month a blue plaque was unveiled outside a little grocer’s shop in the small town of Harlech in North Wales. I’ve been a regular visitor to Harlech all my life, as it’s just down the road from the remote farmhouse where my grandparents spent most of their retirement, and which my brother and I recently inherited.
 
Harlech is best known for its medieval castle - a Unesco world heritage site, its long, sandy beach and, recently, a tussle with Dunedin in New Zealand to be home to the world’s steepest street. I for one knew nothing of Harlech’s link with an elite secret commando unit of Jewish refugees, sometimes referred to as the real life Inglourious Basterds of the Quentin Tarantino film.
 
Number 3 (Jewish) Troop, No 10 Commando – otherwise known as X Troop – was established in July 1942, on the suggestion of Lord Mountbatten, when Britain seemed on the brink of defeat. It was to be a highly trained commando unit made up almost entirely of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria who had escaped on the Kindertransports that brought young Jews to Britain. They were a disparate group made up largely of intellectuals, artists and athletes, many of whom had been interned as enemy aliens, having lost their homes and families to the Nazis. All were hellbent on revenge.
 
Because of the men’s origins, and the dangers they would face if captured, the very existence of the troop was shrouded in secrecy. Members of the unit had to adopt fake British names and personas and destroy all traces of their former selves. Winston Churchill himself gave the troop its name. “Because they will be unknown warriors…they must be considered an unknown quantity. Since the algebraic symbol for the unknown is X, let us call them X Troops,” he said.
 
X Troop operated as a commando unit, using advanced combat skills to fight behind enemy lines. Described as a suicide squad, many did not come back alive. Members of the troop were attached to other units rather than fighting together as a group, but were referred to as the most effective commando unit in World War II. Their daring undercover missions included in an operation to steal a German Enigma code machine.
 
X Troop fighters were also trained in counterintelligence and played an important role in interrogating German soldiers as soon as they were captured, making use of their native language skills.
 
After the war, members of X Troop went on to become Nazi hunters, routing out hidden party members and gathering intelligence and documentation used at the Nuremburg trials. One member of the troop made an arduous journey across Germany to rescue his own parents from the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
 
The troop first assembled in a traditional stone building on Harlech’s main street, now the blue-plaqued grocer’s shop, and used it as a social club. Its commanding officer, Major Bryan Hilton-Jones, a Cambridge modern languages graduate, was born in Harlech and grew up in Caernarfon, another North Wales town famous for its castle.
 
The group spent nine months training in the rough terrain of Snowdonia, including running nearly 40 miles from Harlech to the top of Snowdon – the highest mountain in England and Wales – and back, and scaling the walls of Harlech Castle.
 
The BBC quotes Bryan Hilton-Jones’ daughter, Nerys Pipkin, saying, "Dad was a quiet man, but legendary for his physical fitness and sense of humour…he was as tough as nails and the sort of man who inspired people – just the right type of person to lead this unit." Major Hilton-Jones was a father figure to the troop and won their utmost loyalty and respect. He died near Barcelona in 1969 aged just 51, in a car crash that also killed two of his daughters and seriously injured his wife Edwina.
 
Bryan Hilton-Jones’ friend Kevin Fitzgerald wrote of him in an obituary, “No one could tire him. Many so-called hard men were glad to fall back a little after the first five or six hours. They could outclimb him (some of them) but never outwalk him. He had a map of Wales in his head and never failed to select the hardest, longest distance between any two Welsh points. It was always worth it; he was the perfect companion.”
 
In 1999, a large memorial stone was erected in Aberdyfi, 20-odd miles south of Harlech, where the soldiers were billeted and did much of their training.
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The story the clandestine commando unit is told in Leah Garret’s 2021 book X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II.

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