Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  The original draft of the Lovat Scouts was formed in 1900 by Simon Fraser, 14th Lord Lovat and 41st chief of Clan Fraser. It comprised 150 stalkers and ghillies recruited from game estates in Scotland (where Fraser’s family owned over 180,000 acres), all men with the fieldcraft to take on the Boer Commandos. These crack shots who had spent their lives outdoors spotting stags for rich Victorians adapted well to the job of scouting, observing, signalling, guiding and sniping in South Africa, the only drawback being that few of their Anglicised officers spoke the Gaelic.

  Hesketh Prichard considered the Lovat Scouts Sharpshooters were the best battle observers and scouts in the British Army in WW1, saying that:

  … behind the lines the Major-General, the Corps Commander, the Army Commander and the Commander-in-Chief himself are all blind. Their brains direct the battle, but it is with the eyes of Sandy McTosh that they see.

  The Lovat Scouts were superb ‘glassmen’. Like Hesketh Prichard, they used brass sliding telescopes made by Ross of London that they brought out with them (always preferring a spyglass to the binoculars that became so popular with officers on both sides in WW1). With a telescope they could read a cap badge or cockade at 140 yards or even identify a shoulder flash seen upside down through the enemy’s own trench-top periscope. Years of crawling through heather, gauging wind, observing tiny movements, and counting the points on distant stags, paid off. ‘The Lovats never let one down,’ wrote Hesketh Prichard. ‘If they reported a thing, it was as they reported it.’

  Lord Lovat’s Scouts were a re-invention, exactly a hundred years later, of the British Colonel Coote Manningham’s experimental Corps of Riflemen which later evolved into the famous 95th Rifles. The Riflemen dressed in bottle green and black, used ground and cover to best advantage, and went forward as scouts to observe and report but also to inflict serious damage on the enemy with their short, grooved Ezekiel Baker rifles. These mobile marksmen were trained by humane officers like Sir John Moore to be ‘intelligent, handy and active’, rather than just mindless cannon-fodder.

  The sharpshooting rifleman evolved into the sniper. Visible signs of status began disappearing from military officers in the field after keen-eyed, well-hidden riflemen began singling out badges of rank. Germans shot at ‘thin legs’ during WW1 advances because officers had better-cut trousers. The job of military snipers, who often work in pairs, alternating spotting and shooting, is precisely to pick off enemy leaders, officers and NCOs, artillery and mortar crews, forward observation officers, reconnaissance scouts and other snipers, to cause maximum damage for minimum effort, and to be ‘force-multipliers’.

  After the Boer War and defeats like Magersfontein in 1899, British infantry shooting was radically improved by the Musketry School at Hythe in Kent. Its chief instructor from 1901–3 and commandant from 1903–7 was the South African veteran Sir Charles Carmichael Monro. Thanks to his ideas of training troops for battle conditions rather than competitive target-shooting, the Germans mistook British infantry rifle fire for massed machine guns at Mons in 1914. Monro linked firepower to tactical movement forward. New tactics, making use of ground while shooting fast and accurately, seemed more interesting and competitive to junior leaders. By 1911, ‘the Monro doctrine’ was accepted throughout the British Army.

  In August 1914, 54-year-old Major General Monro led the 2nd Division; by January 1915 he was in charge of the whole of 1st Corps, and on 15th July 1915 he was appointed to command the newly formed Third Army. This was Hesketh Prichard’s chance. Monro was not only interested in new ideas about shooting, he also liked, and played, cricket. Monro appreciated what Prichard was trying to do, and secured him a roving commission with Third Army to develop the art of counter-sniping. Sniping appealed to men in the field because it was something more skilful and individual than group fire. Aubrey Herbert also found it more sporting:

  At one place on the way, we ran like deer, dodging. The General, when he had had a number of bullets at him, also ran. Sniping is better fun than shrapnel; it’s more human. You pit your wits against the enemy in a rather friendly sort of way.

  Alan Lascelles visited a Yorkshire regiment in September 1915:

  A little lower down the trench we came on a sergeant perched just under the top of the parapet, with a telescope and rifle, in a little eyrie of sandbags that he had built with extreme cunning. ‘This man,’ said the Captain who was showing us round, ‘is our crack sniper. He has mopped up eleven of them since we came in five days ago.’ ‘Twelve sir,’ said the Sergeant. ‘They’ve just pulled him into yon dug-out.’

  The counter-sniping project got under way in June 1915 when Major Hesketh Prichard went to see his old friend Captain Alfred Gathorne-Hardy, further south down the line at Neuve Chapelle with the 9th Scottish Rifles (he was killed a few months later at Loos). Together they crawled out across no-man’s-land to steal some of the large protective iron plates through whose loopholes the German snipers used to shoot. Prichard took them home on leave in July to test against different rifles and ammunition. He found that big bullets (.577 or .470 Nitro Express) from a double-barrelled elephant gun, or even the smaller but high-velocity Jeffreys .333, punched through the sheet-metal as if it were chocolate.

  Hesketh Prichard approached John Buchan in London about raising money to buy more such guns. The Spectator ran an appeal and Buchan got Lord Haldane and other wealthy men to assist. Meanwhile, Prichard visited Willie Clarkson (the famous London costumier who had dressed Virginia Woolf for the Abyssinian Dreadnought hoax), from whom he obtained a supply of the model heads used to display wigs. In September 1915, H. P. managed to escape from GHQ escort duties and began teaching ‘Sniping, Observation and Scouting’ to officers and men of Third Army. In the summer of 1916, he started an innovatory sniping school at Linghem in Belgium for First Army. By then, his mentor Charles Monro was back from Gallipoli and commanding First Army.

  Prichard had to overcome inertia above and ignorance below. He started out as a lone individual with no ‘Establishment’, authority or charge code. He had to step down in rank from major on the staff to infantry captain, and received no pay for eight months. Telescopic sights for rifles were in short supply, and 80 per cent of them were useless because improperly aligned and maintained, and no one knew anything about concealment or observation. But slowly, as he moved from brigade to brigade, Major Hesketh Prichard found allies and converts (‘Who is this blighter who’s coming?’… ‘Plays cricket, doesn’t he?’) as he demonstrated old ruses and new tricks to counter German sharpshooters, helping sniper/scouts to earn their fleur-de-lys badge.

  The theatrical heads from Clarkson’s the costumiers could be used as decoys to help locate hidden snipers. The head, set on a stick that slid up and down a grooved board, would be pushed cautiously above the parapet like someone taking a look; if hit by a sniper’s bullet, it was swiftly lowered. By inserting a rifle-cleaning rod through the bullet’s entry and exit holes in the dummy head you could get the exact angle and alignment of the shooter. Or you could slide a periscope up the groove in place of the head, spot the sniper, and then get counter-snipers to fix him in their sights.

  When Prichard visited the French Camouflage Works at Amiens in 1916 he fell on the camoufleur Henri Bouchard with joy. Here was a sculptor already making brilliantly realistic heads and shoulders of French and British soldiers out of papier mâché. They were more readily available than Clarkson’s models from London, and so well done that they were impossible to tell from the real thing at 300 yards. H.P. got Bouchard modelling Gurkha and Sikh individual heads too, to vary the target and to worry German intelligence compiling an ‘order of battle’ or inventory of enemy troops. Some dummies even had a slot in the mouth for a lighted cigarette which could be puffed from below through a rubber tube. Prichard wrote: ‘It is a curious sensation to have the head through which you are smoking a cigarette suddenly shot with a Mauser bullet.’

  Camoufleurs helped snipers in the field by making realistic hides and observati
on posts which fitted seamlessly into no-man’s-land or the trenches: shattered brickwork, a French milestone, shorn-off poplars, a swollen dead horse, even the corpse of a Prussian or a French soldier. Camoufleurs also painted special full-length ‘sniper’s robes’ in the appropriate earth and vegetation colours.

  German soldiers grasped sooner than British ones that sticking out like a sore thumb was no good. Philip Gibbs describes a wooded section of the line between Vaux-sur-Somme and Curlu where a kind of warfare more like violent paintballing went on in the summer of 1915. Raiding parties of thirty to forty men stole into the thickets of no-man’s-land where they met

  a party of Germans … creeping forward from the other direction, in just the same way, disguised in parti-coloured clothes splashed with greens and reds and browns to make them invisible between the trees, with brown masks over their faces. Then suddenly contact was made.

  Into the silence of the wood came the sharp crack of rifles and the zip-zip of bullets, the shouts of men who had given up the game of invisibility.

  Realities of War (1920)

  Major Underhill of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry recreated no-man’s-land for Allied trainees to crawl around in at night, on a realistic site made by blowing craters in an old cornfield and littering the zone with wire and other authentic detritus. The (dummy) corpses had German Soldbücher or pass-books in their pockets and other useful identification on their sleeves. While defenders fired flares, attackers had to crawl as close as possible and hammer in a peg to prove in the morning where they had got to.

  Making use of cover, stalking, hiding, blending, waiting, concealment, careful aiming: it was precisely the world of rough shooting and big-game hunting, but with quarry that could fire back. Prichard’s book Sniping in France is like African or Indian shikar or hunting literature where, as in the classic stories by Jim Corbett, Colonel Patterson et al, the hunter has to offer himself rather than a tethered goat as the bait for a man-eater. Drawing the sniper’s shots by pretending to be an overeager duffer, blazing away carelessly from a loophole, while other judiciously sited spotters on your own side pin-point through telescopes the enemy’s flicker of muzzle flash or the wisp of smoke that lingered longer on chilly days, was all part of the deadly sport.

  Hesketh Prichard’s quest for what he called ‘the hunter spirit’ in the army was what first led him to the Lovat Scouts. They contributed the ‘ghillie suit’ to the art of camouflage from their deer-stalking origins. Modern British Army snipers still make ‘ghillie suits’ themselves for field use: a shrubby overcoat and trousers hung with long ragged strips of frayed nylon and dyed hessian, topped with dreadlocks of greenery, a camouflage suit that makes them look like vegetating yetis or sloths when they move, but turns them into bushy undergrowth wherever they settle to kill.

  Hunters understood camouflage because it was part of their regular practice. Two days after Solomon J. Solomon’s letter about camouflage appeared in January 1915, The Times printed a response from Walter Winans, a trotting-horse fanatic and Olympic pistol-shooting champion. Born in St Petersburg in 1852, where his father was US Consul, fabulously wealthy from Baltimore railway and engineering money, domiciled in England, but with a large boar-hunting estate in his ancestral Belgium, Walter Winans indulged his sporting passions to the limit.

  Uniforms and colour

  To the Editor of The Times

  Sir, – There is one point ‘S.J.S.’ has left out of his letter, with which I entirely agree otherwise. That is the importance of breaking up the outline. However well the tone of the clothing of a man is made to agree with its surroundings, the outline of the man is apt to show.

  Now, as an artist and big-game shot, I have found that if the waistcoat is one colour, the coat another, the leg coverings another, &c., its outline is less easy to make out. For instance, if lying down on a Scotch deer-forest waiting for deer – if the cap is the colour of a stone, the coat a peat hag, the knickerbockers grass colour, the stockings and boots black, to represent the exposed black peat, if the man keeps still he looks, not like one object, but an agglomeration of a small stone, peat hag, patch of grass, and a piece of exposed peat. The face is the difficulty, and that can be got over by wearing a veil, green or grey. I have walked close up to a man dressed as I have described and his face covered with a long bag veil of grey without noticing him, although he was the very man I was trying to find, when out deer stalking. The great thing, next to protective colouring, is breaking up the outline. I suppose rifle barrels get rusty, or else it would be as well to paint them grey or green, as they are apt to flash. W.W.

  Other sportsmen too saw what Hesketh Prichard was trying to do. When George A. B. Dewar, editor of the Saturday Review and author of several books on fishing and wildlife, came out on one of many visits to the Western Front in the summer of 1917, he wrote a piece on the sniper schools for The Times, extolling the virtues of hunting and shooting as preparation for war.

  The best natural training for sniping in warfare lies in ‘rough’ sport … The best sniper in war is he who can not only hit his game but discover it himself, and at the same time hide himself from it …

  The snipers we need today to put against the cunning enemy are men who can not only shoot true, but who, besides, can ‘creep and crawl’ … for hours unseen; who knows how to avail himself of every plant stem and grass patch as cover; and who – perhaps above all – can spy between the lines of the landscape and read its tiniest types.

  Lord Lovat himself visited Hesketh Prichard’s school and was impressed enough to loan him his head stalker, Corporal Donald Cameron, to teach detailed observation, compass work and intelligent use of the telescope. Once, when students reported ‘soldiers in blue uniforms’ at 6,000 yards, Cameron looked through the glass and was able to pronounce them Portuguese. The uniforms could have been French-style, but the shape of their British headgear marked them clearly as ‘our oldest ally’, the Portuguese.

  Often a subtler, more deductive kind of intelligence was required to make sense of the information that came from close observation. Thinking about why a tortoiseshell cat should be strolling or sunning itself regularly unmolested on one particular section of the rat-haunted trenches led to the identification of a German officers’ front-line mess by photoreconnaissance, and its eventual destruction by shelling.

  5

  Deception in the Dardanelles

  Chlorine gas at Ypres had no impact on the agreeably privileged life of Duff Cooper at the Foreign Office in late April 1915. He was more upset at being hit in the mouth by the beautiful Lady Diana Manners in a weekend tiff at the Cavendish Hotel. (They later married.) What really shocked him in Monday’s newspaper was seeing that the ‘good poet’ and ‘beautiful man’ Rupert Brooke had died ‘from sun-stroke’ (in fact an infected mosquito-bite on his lip) on a Greek island in the Mediterranean, on his way to fight the Turks. Brooke’s obituary tribute in The Times was written by Winston Churchill, for the poet had been serving in the Royal Naval Division that Churchill had founded, and died at the beginning of the strategic Dardanelles Campaign which Churchill had inspired.

  If you unrolled a map centred on the Mediterranean Sea in 1915, you would have seen only three entrances for ships. Two of them, Gibraltar and Suez, were controlled by the British, but the third was held by the Ottoman Turks, then an enemy in alliance with the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. In the north-east corner of the map, the narrow passage called the Dardanelles runs out of the Aegean Sea, past the peninsula of Gallipoli (Gelibolu in Turkish) to the Sea of Marmara and then the Black Sea. The importance of the Dardanelles for the Entente Allies in WW1 was as a lifeline to Imperial Russia, the only sea route from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea ports of Odessa and Sebastopol. After Ottoman Turkey joined forces with the Central Powers, Russia’s way out from the Black Sea was blocked. Northern ports were frozen in winter so the Ukraine grain harvest could not be exported, nor military supplies imported. While fending off Germany
in the west, Russia was also being attacked by Turkish troops in the Caucasus. The Tsar appealed to his allies, Britain and France, for a demonstration of force to draw off the Ottoman Turks.

  From the very start of 1915, Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted to support the Russians by attacking the Dardanelles. Lord Kitchener and Jackie Fisher, the First Sea Lord, seemed to support him. But the idea grew in Churchill’s mind from a diversion to a grand vision: a daring thrust through the Dardanelles in order to take Constantinople, which the Turks called Istanbul, and to knock Ottoman Turkey out of the war. Larger hopes (or what Sir Ian Hamilton called ‘a bagful of hallucinations’) also rode upon this coup: Germany would thus be cut off from meddling in the East, Greece sustained, Serbia saved, Egypt and the Persian Gulf protected, the Balkans rallied, the mouth of the Danube seized, Russia rescued and her granaries freed, and the Central Powers enclosed in the Allies’ ring of iron. There was also a non-secular vision, something like the one in Ernest Raymond’s 1922 best-selling novel, Tell England: ‘It’s the Cross against the Crescent again, my lads. By Jove, it’s splendid, perfectly splendid! And an English cross too!’

  The British and French navies tried to force a passage through the Dardanelles on 18 March 1915 with ten battleships (mostly expendable old ones destined for the scrapyard). First they bombarded the shore forts and the Turkish guns sited along a dozen miles of both the Gallipoli peninsula and the Asiatic mainland. The kite-balloon ship HMS Manica sent spotters aloft to report how shells were falling up to seven miles away. The newest Dreadnought battleship Queen Elizabeth also tested her 15-inch guns with tremendous sound and fury, signifying effectively nothing. Assuming the Turkish guns had been silenced, the civilian trawlers were then supposed to clear a 900-yard passage through the minefields. But after a string of twenty Turkish sea mines, spotted neither by seaplanes nor picket boats, managed to sink the French battleship Bouvet and two British battleships, Irresistible and Ocean, with over 600 (mainly French) dead, naval operations were halted by Rear Admiral John de Robeck.