Smith, C. K. With the SBS and SAS in WW2

Corporal Ken Smith's Wartime Service from the Royal Marines to the Special Forces

From a choirboy on HMS Victory to a Royal Marine and an early recruit to the Special Boat Service and Special Air Service, Ken Smith witnessed many important events of the Second World War. It was not without reason that he often said, I never thought I would live to see the end of the war. He survived and credited the SAS with saving his life, although for over seventy years he carried a lasting reminder of his service: a bullet lodged in his arm. As a Royal Marine, Ken Smith survived the North Atlantic, the Arctic and the Mediterranean. When he heard that men were being recruited for a special unit, Smith volunteered and was accepted into the SBS. The SBS operated throughout the Mediterranean, raiding German garrisons in North Africa, the Greek islands, Albania, Italy and Yugoslavia. In the Dodecanese, Smith and his comrades terrorised the German occupiers. We went out every night, landed on all these islands and shot at Germans, recalls Ken Smith. One of these missions was the famous raid on the island of Symi in July 1944. In this raid, one of the largest carried out by the SBS, the entire German garrison was killed or captured. Ken Smith was also there, as part of a specially selected force of eighteen men, when the legendary Dane Anders Lassen was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross during a raid on the north coast of Lake Comacchio in Italy. During a raid in Yugoslavia, Smith was hit by a bullet that pierced his back and a second that remained in his arm for the rest of his life.