Alone British landing ship (HMS LCM24) hit the beach at Cape Passero lighthouse on 9 July 1943. It was the beginning of Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. Tumultuous seas pushed the stern of the craft at such an angle that the 200 soldiers she carried could not use the ramps alongside the ship’s bow to go ashore. Using ropes, they lowered themselves into the surf and scrambled across the beach to take up their positions. No enemy opposition was encountered, much to the surprise of the commander of the landing craft.
Suddenly, from out at sea, a thunderous barrage began, and explosions erupted half a mile inland. The commander, Sub-Lieutenant Alec Guinness, had expected this shelling an hour earlier. Puzzled, he watched as several of the soldiers he had landed returned to the beach, along with a few terrified Italian prisoners. An hour later the sub-lieu- tenant stood before an angry Royal Navy commander, who demanded to know why he had been so late in landing. Guinness, Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) and commander of the LCI-124, replied that he had not been late. In fact, he had been the first to land his men. The officer did not believe him. He asked just what Guinness did as a civilian. Acting, replied the latter, adding that although it had not been part of his orders, he had in fact landed first, leading all others. He had landed on time, he insisted, at the exact spot specified in his orders. “And you will allow me to point out, sir, as an actor, that in the West End of London, if the curtain is advertised as going up at 8:00 p.m., it goes up at 8:00 p.m. and not an hour later, something that the Royal Navy might learn from.”
World War II records confirm that Alec Guinness brought ashore the first invasion force at Sicily. However, things had not gone according to plan. Hours before the invasion, Guinness had maneuvered his landing craft alongside a troopship to pick up 200 soldiers from the 5th Battalion of the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment). Boarding the soldiers became extremely hazardous, owing to heavy seas that damaged the ship’s bow ramps. They became useless for transporting the troops to the landing craft. The soldiers had to jump into the LCI as waves lifted the craft alongside the troopship. In the confusion of getting the men safely on board, Guinness missed the signal to all ships that the invasion had been postponed by one hour. Once free of the troopship, he headed straight for land just left of the Cape Passero lighthouse. He was eight miles away from his landing beach point in his assigned quadrant passing other landing craft that were circling off the beach. He beckoned them to follow, but none did.
The legendary stage and screen actor was born Alec Guinness de Cuffee in London on 2 April 1914. During his teen years he attended Pembroke Lodge boarding school, Southbourne. His early desires to participate in school plays were dashed when the headmaster informed him that he was not the acting type. He was not given his first chance to act until 1932, when he attended Roxborough, Eastbourne, where he completed his formal education. Guinness was given the role of the breathless messenger in Macbeth, an appearance for which he prepared himself by running around the school’s playing field six times before making his entrance.
Upon graduating at age 18, he joined a London advertising agency as an apprentice copywriter and layout artist. But the work bored him; he felt completely un- suited for it. Instead he decided to pursue his true interest, acting. He arranged to work with actress Martita Hunt, who after their first session declared that Guinness had no talent at all. But the fledgling actor persevered and persuaded her to coach him. Within a few years, her work had paid off. Guinness was awarded a two-year scholarship to the Fay Compton Studio of Dramatic Art and soon made his stage debut in a walk-on part. Lacking the means to continue at the studio after his scholarship ran out, he left the school. During the next year he landed small parts in less than notable stage plays. Still he persevered.
Alec Guinness’s big break came in 1934, when famed actor John Gielgud cast him as both Osric and the third player in Hamlet. By 1936 he had found regular work with the Old Vic Company, playing roles in plays by Shakespeare, Shaw, and Chekhov. In 1938 he married actress Merula Salaman, with whom he continued to share his life until his death in 2000. They had one son.
When Britain and Germany went to war on 3 September 1939, the recently married Guinness enlisted in the Royal Navy. An actor friend had originally offered to get him into an Army antiaircraft unit, but he quickly learned that it was already overstaffed with actors and thus his presence would not be welcome. He was processed in a disused school in North London, passed the necessary tests, and within ten weeks was ordered to HMS Raleigh for training as an ordinary seaman. A commission lay in the offing if he could satisfactorily complete several training courses at various stations. Following his Raleigh tour, Guinness received further training at Lancing College and HMS King Alfred at Brighton.
In 1942 he went before a commissioning board to determine his suitability as an officer. Standing at rigid attention before ten seated admirals, he overheard their initial comments about his training, which were not too encouraging: “Navigation not too good” . . . “Mathematics very poor” . . . “Gunnery marks are appalling.” There were a few good marks: “Drill, good” . . . “Smartness, yes.” After a few questions, he was curtly dismissed. The admirals’ notes were collected. The senior officer had written on the back of his notepad, “Probably more to him than meets the eye.” Shortly thereafter, Alec Guinness received his commission, designated sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. He would not see his new wife and son for the next two-and-a-half years, time that he served mostly in the Mediterranean theater.
Guinness may not have seen enough of his family, but he did have pals he could talk to, including actor Peter Bull, whom he had befriended during training. Both became Royal Navy officers and LCI captains, and they ran into each other regularly. Bull became a character actor after the war, best known in the United States as the German gunboat captain in The African Queen (1951) and the Russian ambassador in Dr. Strangelove (1964).
In the summer of 1942, Guinness was appointed first lieutenant of a tank landing craft, HMS TLC-24, on Loch Fyne, Scotland. The greasy, rusty ship underwent naval exercises up and down the loch all through the cold fall, with a first lieutenant who never did learn exactly what his duties were, though he found the commanding officer friendly enough. Nor, during his three months on board ship, did he get to know the crew. Eventually Guinness and other Royal Navy officers were ordered to the United States to take command of the new large infantry landing craft, or LCI(L)s, that were being built in a shipyard on Quincy Bay, near Boston. Traveling on the Queen Mary, they crossed from the gray, cold, blacked-out British Isles to the dazzling lights of New York City.
Four days later, Guinness was posted to Asbury Park, New Jersey, there to await the completion of his new command. Within a few weeks he was contacted by a fellow British thespian, Terence Rattigan, who was in New York on leave from Royal Air Force bomber duties. His play, Flare Path, was to be produced for Gilbert Miller’s theatrical company. There was no one available to play the juvenile in the production. Rattigan insisted that Guinness play the role. He had cleared the way through the British ambassador, who had been given permission to use Guinness by the British Admiralty, since the play offered an excellent propaganda opportunity. Guinness appeared in the production for eight weeks before returning to Asbury Park and his ship.
Finally commissioned, the ship, the LCI-124, was prepared for her Atlantic voyage. Both officers and men were green at this point, and Guinness feared they might sink the ship before arriving at their eastern Atlantic destination. He was pleasantly surprised when they managed to complete the first task, taking on fresh water and diesel oil Each fluid went into its proper tank successfully. Next they attempted to take the craft out for a trial run, in the process of which several starboard stanchions were snapped off and a wooden jetty severely cracked. The LCI-124 gained such a reputation for mishaps, in fact, that other LCIs upon sighting her often put out their fenders and fled in mock terror.
Problems dogged them from their first trip, Boston to New York. Arriving as darkness descended, the LCI-124 turned into the East River and a dense fog, meaning they would have little chance of mooring in the ship’s assigned slip. Ships were forbidden to anchor in the river, so Guinness, in order to avoid a possible collision, decided to sidle up to an embankment and make fast to whatever solid structures they could find along the shore. They finally located and tied up to a lamppost and bench. After warning his quartermaster to observe the tide during the night and let out slack as necessary. Guinness retired to his cabin.
The next morning when he went on deck, a nightmareish scene awaited him. The park bench was in the lamppost was bent over at a 90° angle, and the ship had moved away from the shore. The quartermaster had fallen asleep. Guinness started his main engines, severed the lines, and slipped away from the area to scurry to the ship’s proper berth.
With a slightly more seasoned crew, the LCI-124 crossed the Atlantic in 16 days with a small armada of British ships, docking at the town of Djidjelli, Algeria, in the spring of 1943. Djidjelli was located 120 miles west of Algiers, and it offered a peaceful respite for the officers and their crews. The enemy lay to the north across the Mediterranean in Italy, Greece, and France, and no one knew of the operations that lay ahead. All they knew was that an Allied invasion of one of these countries would take place soon.
A week after their arrival, all LCI commanders were summoned to a top-secret meeting to study photographs taken by a submarine. Beaches were clearly marked by lettered quadrants, but there was no identification of where the photos had been taken. Guinness noticed on one of the prints a small white lighthouse with a barely visible number 58 underneath. Thinking that perhaps they could identify the lighthouse’s location, after the briefing Guinness and another skipper went hack to the LCI-124 and began studying the two volumes of The Mediterranean Pilot, a mariner’s mapping of Mediterranean sea lanes that included navigational aids and lighthouse locations. Only one lighthouse was listed as being 58 feet high. It was located at Cape Passero, on the southeastern tip of Sicily.
On 9 July 1943, when Guinness opened his secret orders an hour after leaving Malta, he was not surprised to read that the beaches at Cape Passero were in fact among the shore areas where the invasion of Italy would take place. The invasion force of troopships, destroyers, cruisers, and an aircraft carrier rendezvoused a few miles west of the southern tip of Sicily. Guinness took aboard his landing force and landed them at Cape Passero.
He had to wait ten days following the invasion before a destroyer could tow his beach-entrenched LCI-124 seaward. The crew relaxed on the beach, swam, and played games. One man developed an acute toothache, and Guinness decided to walk with him to the nearest Army camp. During their short journey, the two plodded through a large bean field, taking care not to damage it. They found the camp, and the ailing crew member was attended to. The dentist asked how they had got to the camp. Guinness told him, and the shocked doctor gave them the news that they had just walked through a minefield. Practically every bean had been booby-trapped. They stuck to the shoreline on their return trip.
At sea once again, the LCI was used to ferry men and supplies to the Sicilian ports of Syracuse, Augusta, and Catania. By September 1943 the Italians had signed an armistice, and Guinness was assigned to the Adriatic. There he supplied arms and munitions to the Yugoslav partisans.
Guinness lost his ship on one of these missions, during a terrifying storm en route from Barletta, Italy, to the Yugoslav island of Vis. As they neared the island, they were caught in a hurricane that had blown in from the southeast, across the Mediterranean from Egypt and Libya. Fighting thrashing seas that engulfed the ship in 30-foot waves and gales that made control almost impossible, Guinness took the LCI into the harbor at Termoli, on the Adriatic coast of Italy. The LCI-124 was already severely damaged, and a huge wave lifted it onto rocks forward of an abandoned tank landing craft. Amazingly unhurt, the crew scrambled ashore and awaited the end of the storm, which raged for three days. Damaged beyond repair, the LCI-124 was eventually turned into a concrete jetty at Termoli.
With his ship gone, Guinness was ordered to Malta. Here he took command of the LCI(L)-272, and he settled into a daily routine of ferrying supplies to Yugoslav partisans, then returning to Italy with their wounded. But they were not always welcome in Yugoslav ports. Often when they dropped off supplies marked as gifts from the United Kingdom or United States, young partisans appeared with pots of red paint with which they painted over the UK/USA markings, “From the USSR.” Soon thereafter Rome fell, and two days later, on 6 June 1944, Allied forces stormed ashore at Normandy.
The rest of the year proved uneventful for Guinness and his crew, who continued their runs in the Adriatic. Only once did they bring supplies to partisans on the Greek mainland. One morning while docked in Barletta, Italy, Guinness received a signal that his relief was on the way. After his replacement arrived and turnover procedures were completed, he traveled to Naples for shipment to England.
Arriving on board a troopship at Liverpool, the actor was reunited with his family in London. He was shocked at the devastation of the grand city he remembered. The sound of air-raid sirens, which he had not heard in a long time, alarmed him more than anything he had experienced in the Mediterranean. After four weeks of desk duty in Southampton, he made a few forays across the channel in a tank landing craft. The war with Germany was soon over.
While he awaited demobilization, Guinness was asked to play the role of Herbert Pocket in a film to be made of Charles Dickens’s 1860 novel Great Expectations, which was released in 1946. Guinness’s commanding officer gave him permission to accept the offer, and so the actor returned to his profession. It was the beginning of a new, and soon-to-be-illustrious, movie career.
Previously a theater actor, Guinness continued to appear on the London stage through the 1970s, building a reputation as one of England’s finest dramatic actors. Over the years he has received numerous awards for his brilliant, often mesmerizing performances. Before Great Expectations, he had appeared on screen only once, as a walk-on in the movie Evensong (1934). But the Dickens story would be followed by many film roles showcasing his versatility and comedic talent. Between 1946 and 1992 he appeared in more than 50 movies. In 1957 he won an Oscar for his brilliant performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 1959 for his achievements on stage and screen. And in 1980, Hollywood awarded him an honorary Oscar “for advancing the art of screen acting through a host of memorable and distinguished performances.” Recent generations of moviegoers remember him best as the wise old spiritual warrior Obiwan Kenobi in Star Wars (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
For his military service Guinness received five campaign stars and war service medals: the 1939-45 Star, the Atlantic Star, the Italy Star, the Defence Medal, and the War Medal. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1955. In 1994 he was appointed a Companion of Honour, a very prestigious honor usually limited to top scientists and artists, though others have received it also (e.g., Winston Churchill). There are only about 50 current holders of the order. He also had the rare distinction of being awarded honorary Doctor of Letters degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, as well as a Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Boston University.