comando

The English military term 'commando,' denoting an elite soldier trained for rapid raids and unconventional warfare, derives from Afrikaans kommando, itself borrowed from Portuguese comando (command, a military unit under command). Portuguese comando comes from comandar (to command), derived from Old French commander, from Latin commandare, itself a compound of com- (with, together) and mandare (to entrust, to order, to send with a message) — the root of 'mandate,' 'demand,' 'command,' and 'commend.' The word traveled an unusual route: from Latin through French into Portuguese, then via the Portuguese presence in southern Africa into Afrikaans (the Dutch-derived language of Boer settlers), and from Afrikaans into military English during the Second Boer War (1899–1902).

The Portuguese presence in southern Africa began in 1488 when Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and continued with trading stations at Mozambique and along the East African coast. Dutch settlers (the Boers) arrived at the Cape in 1652 and absorbed Portuguese vocabulary from the existing contact languages of the region. The Boer communities that formed in southern Africa developed their own military tradition: the kommando was the basic unit of Boer military organization, a local militia of mounted riflemen who were called up for specific campaigns and could disperse back to their farms when not needed. This system proved devastatingly effective during the Boer Wars — the kommando fighters used the terrain, moved rapidly on horseback, and avoided pitched battles in favor of ambushes and raids.

British forces during the Second Boer War (1899–1902) encountered the Boer kommando system and experienced its effectiveness firsthand. The word entered British military vocabulary during this conflict — 'commando' appeared in English dispatches and journalism of the period — but it was not yet a specialized term for elite troops. That transformation came in World War II. In June 1940, following the fall of France, Winston Churchill authorized the formation of special raiding units to conduct hit-and-run attacks on German-held coastlines. He wrote in a memo to the War Office: 'We ought to have a corps of at least five thousand parachute troops... There ought also to be — and I have urged it before — Leopards.... Let there be no mistake about this.' The units formed were called 'Commandos' — borrowing the Boer term and applying it to the new specialized raiders.

The Commandos of World War II — who conducted raids from Norway to Dieppe to North Africa — gave the word its modern connotation of elite special operations soldiers. After the war, 'commando' was adopted by military establishments worldwide and became a generic term for special forces troops in many languages. The word also entered civilian culture with the force of wartime legend: 'commando' describes any action conducted with surprising speed and audacity, 'commando raid' became a news journalism formula, and — in a usage peculiar to English slang — 'going commando' (without underwear) derives from the popular belief that commando units, in the field, dispensed with this item of clothing for practical reasons. A Latin word for trusted orders traveled through French, Portuguese, Dutch, and Afrikaans, was absorbed by the British Empire during a colonial war, and became one of the twentieth century's defining military-romantic terms.