Early service
After a brief period as a seaman, he was given a chance for an officer’s commission if he could pass several training courses. When standing at attention before ten admirals at the commissioning board in 1942, he overheard them muttering about his results: “Navigation not too good,” “Mathematics very poor,” “Gunnery marks are appalling,” with a few better ones: “Drill, good,” “Smartness, yes.” He nevertheless got his commission as sub-lieutenant, possibly due to the senior officer’s note “Probably more to him than meets the eye.”
 
Guinness spent some time on a rusty of tank landing craft on a Scottish lake for exercises, and was eventually ordered to the United States to take control of a new LCI(L), a “Landing Craft, Infantry (Large)” still under construction for British use. While waiting for construction to be completed, he was given permission to play a junior role for eight weeks at a New York theater. Flare Path, a play written by a fellow British actor, was about Bomber Command and was seen as good propaganda.
 
Landing ship commander
As commander of the new ship, LCI-124, Guinness had a green group of officers and men under him, and the ship herself proved unlucky when several stanchions were snapped off and a wooden jetty cracked on a trial run. Arriving from Boston to New York at nightfall, Guinness could not find the ship’s assigned slip in the dense fog, and decided to look for an improvised mooring spot. Forbidden to anchor in the river, he approached an embankment and made fast to a lamppost and a bench, telling his quartermaster to observe the tide and let out slack as necessary.

When he went on the deck in the morning, Guinness found that the quartermaster fell asleep, and the tide lifted the ship, pulling the bench into the war and bending the lamppost at right angle. He quickly severed the line and sailed away to find the ship’s proper berth. LCI-124 crossed the Atlantic with a small fleet of ships, docked in Algeria and prepared for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. Nobody on Guinness’s level of clearance or below knew where in the Mediterranean the next offensive would be (Operation Mincemeat), but he and all other LCI commanders were summoned to a top-secret meeting where they were shown photographs of a shoreline taken by a submarine. Various landing beaches were marked by letters, but there was no way of telling where the photos were taken. Guinness noticed a small lighthouse on one photo with the number 58 barely visible underneath. He and a fellow skipper later checked a civilian navigational reference of Mediterranean sea lanes, and found one lighthouse that was listed as being 58 feet high. It was at Cape Passera on the southeastern tip of Sicily, tipping Guiness off about the landing target.
 
Landing in Sicily
Guinness’s ship carried 200 men ashore on July 9, the first day of Operation Husky, but not without mishap. Hours before the invasion commenced, his landing craft pulled up to a troopship to take the men onboard. Rough seas made the boarding slow and dangerous, and a signal was sent out that the invasion would be postponed an hour. Guinness, however, missed the signal and moved out at the original time, completely alone.

LCI-124 was stuck on the beach for ten days before a destroyer could tow it back in the water, giving the crew time to relax. One man got a bad toothache and Guinness walked with him to the nearest army camp, crossing a large beanfield on the way. Once at the camp, the dentist asked how they got there. Told that they came through the beanfield, the doctor informed them that they had walked through a dense minefield.
 
Once at sea again, Guinness ferried men and supply to several Sicilian ports. He was sent to the Adriatic after the Italian surrender, where he shipped weapons ammunition to Yugoslav partisans. He noticed on several occasions that young partisans showed up with just as the crates were carried off the ship, and used red paint to cover up the British and American markings, replacing them with “From the USSR.” LCI-124 was lost during the Yugoslav supply missions, lifted onto rocks by a fierce storm; Guinness commanded another landing craft afterwards.

Guinness’s film career took off after the war with movies like Great Expectations and the black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets in which he played eight roles. He became a star in films including Our Man in Havana, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Doctor Zhivago, and Hitler: the Last Ten Days, in which he played the Führer himself. He won the Oscar for his role in the World War II epic The Bridge on the River Kwai. Younger generations know him best as Obi-wan Kenobi in Star Wars. (World War II guns in a galaxy far, far away)
 
Douglas Fairbanks Jr
Sir Alec Guinness was not the only actor who saw action during the Sicily landings; Douglas Fairbanks Jr (1909-2000), son of the legendary silent film star and an accomplished Hollywood actor in his own right, was also there as creator and part of a very special outfit.

Joining the Navy
Unlike Guinness, Fairbanks was already a famous movie star before the war and had friends in high places, including President F.D. Roosevelt. He also publicly supported aiding Britain and entering the war. Always having been interested in ships but having little sailing experience, Fairbanks decided to join the Naval Reserve but did not qualify due to a lack of college education. He got a correspondence course degree and was commissioned as a lieutenant junior grade in October 1941.
 
Fairbanks served on a number of ships, including the battleship USS Mississippi, the carrier USS Wasp while it was delivering planes to the embattled island of Malta (The Siege of Malta), and the cruiser USS Wichita while it was escorting the ill-fated PQ 17 arctic convoy to the Soviet Union. Wishing for more, he reached out to “Dickie,” an old British family friend, better known to the world as Admiral Lord Louis Moutbatten. (Lord Mountbatten) Fairbanks was posted to Mountbatten’s Combined Operations, where he learned about commando operation, deception, explosives and the operation of Higgins boats (The Higgins Boat), and even participated in several “pajama raids,” nighttime cross-Channel hit-and-run attacks on German-occupied France. Fairbanks returned to America in mid-November 1942 with his head full of ideas for exploiting his new-found knowledge.

Beach Jumpers
He quickly persuaded Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King to set up a deception unit to aid Allied amphibious invasions. He envisioned small units of a few dozen men in boats who would use special equipment to “simulate” an attack by a much larger force, pinning local defenses in place and summoning others from elsewhere – while the real attack occurred in a different location. Fairbanks did not have a high enough rank at this stage in his military career to actually command such a unit, but he was trusted with setting it up. The result was the first Beach Jumper unit, allegedly named thus because it was designed to “scare the be-jesus out of the enemy.”