All the troops later rendezvoused at Freetown, Sierra Leone, which was to be their base of operations. The rest of the SSRF, commanded by Captain Geoffrey Appleyard, had left earlier aboard a troop transport ship. They made this voyage in a 65 ton Brixham yacht trawler, named Maid Honor. The specific unit of the SSRF, No.62 Commando, was itself under the command of Major Gustavus Henry March-Phillips.Ī small, five man crew under the command of the Major left Poole (Dorset, England) on August 9, 1941, were travelling for West Africa.
This outfit was formed only a year earlier in 1941 and only consisted of a small group of 55 personnel working with the SOE. This was when the SSRF first became involved. The first inklings of Operation Postmaster began when, in 1941, the British Admiralty received reports that German submarines were refueling using the rivers in Vichy French sections of Africa. It was left up to the Small Scale Raiding Force (SSRF) and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to carry out the mission. What made the Operation Postmaster a rather grey area at the time was the fact that British authorities refused to support the raid, considering it a breach of Spanish neutrality. The operation’s objective was to board the Italian and German ships in the harbor and sail them to Lagos, putting a dent the area’s Axis Forces. Operation Postmaster was a British operation which took place on the Spanish island of Bioko, formerly known as Fernando Po.
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