Lieutenant-Colonel John Woodhouse RIP

Kyt · Feb 21, 2008

John Woodhouse obituary - Times Online

When Colonel David Stirling, founder of the Special Air Service in the Western Desert in 1941, opened the Regiment’s headquarters in Hereford 43 years later, he acknowledged five co-founders including, in his words, “John Woodhouse, who created the modern SAS during the Malayan campaign by restoring to the regiment its original philosophy”. Woodhouse had not served in the wartime SAS, but his grasp of how men should be selected, trained and directed for special force operations places him close in repute to Stirling himself.

Although in 1945 disbandment of special forces was accepted as the natural course in the reversion to a regular peacetime army, a need to keep the ideas and techniques of the SAS alive was recognised by the formation of 21 SAS, a Territorial Army unit based on the Artists’ Rifles. Then an urgent demand for a special force arose in Malaya, where the communist insurrection had broken out in 1948.

It soon became apparent that finding terrorist base camps in primary jungle was not a task economically undertaken by infantry battalions manned by National Service soldiers. Thus the Malayan Scouts were raised under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Calvert, a veteran of Chindit operations in Burma.

Calvert was eager to get to grips with the communist terrorists and so took what volunteers he could find from units in the Far East to form his first squadron. (The second and third came from 21 SAS and volunteers from Rhodesia and were more thoroughly vetted and trained). “A” Squadron, which Woodhouse later commanded, was initially neither successful on operations nor well-disciplined, despite containing some outstanding individuals.

Woodhouse was chosen to return to England to establish a selection process based on his own professional standards of self-discipline and endurance. The system he developed over three years provided the basis of selection and training of the modern SAS.

He returned to Malaya as a squadron commander in 1955 by which time the ill-disciplined elements of the unit, now named 22 SAS, had been replaced by volunteers who had passed through the rigorous selection and training system he had established in England. By 1956 five SAS squadrons with a total strength of 560 men were operating in the Malayan jungle.

Woodhouse was appointed MBE in 1957 for his services in command of D Squadron 22 SAS in Malaya. It was around this time that someone remarked, “With Woodhouse you just had to be on top of your job. God knows what would have happened if you weren’t because no one ever took a chance on it.”

In 1958 Woodhouse transferred from the Dorset Regiment to the Parachute Regiment and commanded a company in the 3rd battalion for a year before being appointed second-in-command of 22 SAS in 1960. In 1962 he was chosen to command the regiment and that December the Brunei revolt erupted and was followed by President Sukarno’s confrontation with the new Federation of Malaysia. This initially took the form of incursions across the land border into the former British territories of Sarawak and North Borneo.

At that time, the SAS was being considered for contingency operations in Europe in the event of any Warsaw Pact attack, but Woodhouse had anticipated problems in South-East Asia, albeit in the form of communist subversion rather than the nationalist aggression instigated by Sukarno. (After a Russian language course at Cambridge in 1946, he had been a Russian interpreter with the Allied Control Commission in Germany, 1947-49, when he made it his business to study communist methods of seizing control by subversion.)

The Brunei revolt was speedily dealt with but once the Indonesian threat became clear, he called on the Director of Military Operations in the MoD and offered the services of 22 SAS. The suggestion was accepted by Major-General Walter Walker, Director of Operations in East Malaysia, and Woodhouse arrived with an advance party in January 1963.

In the period before cross-border intelligence gathering and ambushing began, SAS four-man teams sited themselves close to the geological fault lines of the border mountain range and, as they had done with the aborigines of northern Malaya in the previous decade, organised the jungle tribes to be their eyes and ears for Indonesian intentions.

In January 1964 Woodhouse launched one of his squadrons on Operation Claret — cross-border patrols to locate camps, close to the frontier, from which Indonesian incursions were launched, and their routes into Sarawak. He determinedly applied a policy of “shoot and scoot” developed while in command of a special patrol unit in Italy in the Second World War, convincing his SAS troopers that intelligence was of more long-term value than a few dead Indonesians.

Commonwealth forces brought the Indonesian incursions to an end in 1965 and 22 SAS was withdrawn. Woodhouse retired to civilian life.

John Michael Woodhouse was born in London the only son of Brigadier Charles Woodhouse, sometime Colonel of the Dorset Regiment. He was educated at Malvern and commissioned into the Dorset Regiment in 1942. As was often the case during the war, he was sent to serve with a regiment other than his own.

It was while with 1st Battalion the East Surrey Regiment in the 11th Brigade of the 78th Division that he won his Military Cross as commander of the unit’s battle patrol group. Guided by two co-operative Italians, he led a night attack using grenades and explosive charges on a group of buildings occupied by tank crews of what proved to be the 16th Panzer Division.

He achieved complete tactical surprise by deep penetration behind the enemy’s forward positions and, after negotiating a minefield, captured a prisoner to identify the enemy formation and inflicted a number of casualties among the tank crews. In March 1944 a patrol he was leading was ambushed near Cassino and he was taken prisoner.

After retiring from the Army in 1965 he worked for three years as a security consultant to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office until joining Hall & Woodhouse Brewery, Dorset as the managing director of its soft drinks division, later known as Panda Drinks. He was also involved in local forestry management. He served as chairman of the SAS Association, 1976-84.

In 1958, he married Peggy Lacey. She predeceased him, and he is survived by their two sons.

Lieutenant-Colonel John Woodhouse, MBE, MC, SAS commander, was born on September 29, 1922. He died on February 15, 2008, aged 85
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