This article, written by Consultant Solicitor Michael Large, commemorates Commander Dunstan Curtis (1910-1983): human rights hero and inspiration for James Bond, ahead of Remembrance Day 2024.
This is the third in my annual series to commemorate solicitors who served in the two world wars. The career of Commander Dunstan Curties CBE (1910-1983), both in war and peacetime, seems particularly relevant today.
Dunstan Curtis’ gunboat, MGB 314, was the last to leave St Nazaire on 28 March 1942. The gunboat was a mass of bullet holes, the gunner dead, and everyone on board wounded. Operation Chariot, the raid on St Nazaire, has been called “the greatest raid”. It has been celebrated in dozens of books and in the film ‘Attack on the Iron Coast,’ in 1967 (starring Lloyd Bridges).
A joint attack by the Royal Navy and the Commandos, the assault involved ramming an obsolete destroyer (HMS Campbeltown) disguised as a Nazi warship, and packed with explosives, into the gates of the Normandie dock. At the same time, the Commandos also attacked nearby U-Boat yards. The dock was the only facility outside Norway capable of being safely used by the formidable German battleship Tirpitz. The raid was carried out at night against strong defences, by a force of gunboats and torpedo boats, including Curtis’ gunboat MGB 314. Dunstan Curtis and the other gunboats hazardous task was to take the Commandos in – and out – of St Nazaire. It sounds like the stuff of boys’ own fiction.
Incredibly, the raid was a complete success: HMS Campbeltown was detonated near enough to the dock to cripple it, and, in a macabre twist, was crowded with inquisitive Nazi souvenir hunters at the time that it exploded. The Tirpitz was bottled up uselessly in Norway until it was finally sunk by the RAF and played no part in the war.
Unsurprisingly, British casualties in the raid were appallingly high: of 612 men set out on the raid, only 228 returned to Britain. 169 were killed, and 215 were captured. German casualties were over 360 dead. 89 members of the attack force were awarded medals, including five Victoria Crosses. Dunstan Curtis himself was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
The truly remarkable thing about Dunstan Curtis’ career is that Operation Chariot isn’t even the most important thing on his CV by a long way.
Curtis qualified as a solicitor in 1937, and joined the Royal Naval Reserve the same year. Before war broke out, he was legal advisor and business manager to Michel Saint-Denis, the theatrical director of the Old Vic theatre school. Besides his long and distinguished career in European politics, after the war he was Senior Partner of the Paris office of Herbert Smith & Co from 1964 to 1973.
There were many “solicitor yachtsmen” such as Curtis who served in the Royal Navy in World War Two, and far too many to mention here. His war service was spent in the gunboats and torpedo boats, as was that of a surprising number of other solicitors. My own grandfather (who was not a solicitor) served on one of these boats as part of his Royal Navy service in the war. These boats were petrol driven, with wooden (not metal) hulls and no armour plating at all. They were lightly armed with machine guns and torpedoes. Frankly, these gunboats were cheap and inadequate death traps, which was one of the factors in the high casualty rate at St Nazaire. You can see a good surviving example of one of these boats at the Royal Navy museum at Chatham Docks.
The Nazi equivalent was the infamous E-Boat (not to be confused with the U-Boat submarine). The E-Boat was much bigger than the British gunboats and much faster, with a metal hull, thick armour plate, and radar-guided cannons firing explosive shells. In the course of putting this blog together, I discovered that the Admiralty could have bought as many E-Boats as it liked before the war, but didn’t bother. There might be a lesson there, perhaps, for us today?
Curtis’s other wartime exploits in the navy, besides Operation Chariot, would easily fill a book themselves. They included commanding Ian Fleming’s 30AU (assault) unit, taking part in the Dieppe Raid and the capture of Algiers, leading his ‘Curtforce’ onto the beach on the first day after D-Day, and accepting the surrender of the city of Kiel. As a result of his involvement in these actions, and many others, Commander Curtis was one of a number of officers said to have inspired Ian Fleming to create Commander James Bond.
But, again, none of that would make the top of his CV, either.
At the war’s end, Curtis became involved in politics, both British and European. His long and distinguished service in European politics is also worthy of a chapter of its own, but he lived by the highest ideals of freedom, democracy, peaceful European integration, European security, and the rule of law. In 1947, he became deputy secretary-general of the European Movement. When the consultative assembly of the Council of Europe met in August 1949 at Strasbourg University, he helped in drafting their proposals, including the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). And this was his crowning achievement, as one of the architects of modern human rights laws and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
I invite you, the reader, to consider the achievements and character of Commander Curtis: decorated war hero, model for James Bond, defender of the rule of law, advocate of human rights. There are today some senior politicians who are saying that the United Kingdom should leave the ECHR. I suggest that you examine the achievements on their CVs, and compare and contrast them to those of Commander Curtis.
Then draw your own conclusions.
This article was written by Michael Large, Consultant Solicitor at Setfords.
Sources:
- Journalists in a time of crisis, Julia Jones, 9 May 2020
- The Greatest Raid, Giles Whittell (2022)
- Attack on The Iron Coast (1967) Dir. Paul Wendkos, starring Lloyd Bridges
