Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Ian Fleming’s older brother, the writer and explorer Peter Fleming, from the Grenadier Guards like Thorne, was 33 years old when he went to assist him in setting up the ‘XII Corps Observation Unit’ in Kent. The glamorous and good-looking travel writer and journalist, author of One’s Company, Travels in Tartary and Brazilian Adventure, had already written a paper for MI (R) on the possibilities of guerrilla warfare with irregular cavalry in China. He had also shown a talent for deception, proposing a fake document to alert the USA to Japanese ambitions in the Pacific and South-East Asia. But now, in May 1940, just back from reconnaissance activities in Norway, Peter Fleming helped to create a real partisan force.

  Basing himself at a farm near Bilting, north of Ashford in Kent, and assisted by a detachment of Lovat Scouts ‘of WW1 fame’ and a formidable sapper called Michael Calvert (who later won renown with Wingate’s Chindits in Burma and the SAS in north-west Europe), Fleming picked countrymen – foresters, gamekeepers and poachers who knew the lie of the land – and trained them to hide up by day and come out to sabotage at night. This was just the job for the adventurous Fleming, who would end his days as a country squire in Oxfordshire, happiest out shooting.

  The Auxiliary Units dug underground lairs in the woods, one of which was an expanded badger sett in a derelict chalk-pit, and skilfully concealed all sign of them. These hideouts were like the den made by the hunted hero of Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel Rogue Male, or as Fleming himself wrote in his book Invasion 1940 (reissued as Operation Sea Lion) ‘the Lost Boys’ subterranean home in the second act of Peter Pan’. Fleming was also inspired by the English mythic hero Robin Hood, acquiring half a dozen longbows and encouraging men to use them not only to kill quietly, as guns could not, but also to carry fire and noise to the enemy by shooting arrows fitted with incendiaries or detonators. Thinking about it later, Fleming reckoned that the greenwood game could work in the summer, but with the leaves off the trees, the English resistance outlaws would soon be tracked down and eliminated by Einsatzkommandos. German plans make it clear that armed insurgents in occupied Britain would have been shot out of hand, and there would have been ruthless reprisals against civilians, some of whom might have given vital information away to save themselves. Some Auxiliary Units seriously considered the assassination of collaborators in the event of invasion.

  Colonel Gubbins chose another veteran of MI (R) and Norway, the young Arctic explorer Andrew Croft, to organise Suffolk and Essex. Croft, who had been at Stowe with David Niven, was the son of the vicar of Kelvedon, and he based himself at home, storing explosives and weapons in his father’s coach house. Then he began enlisting the locals: farmers and fruit-growers, a game warden, a master of foxhounds, a butcher and some poachers and smugglers, in order to create two dozen small patrols each working out of their well-hidden Operational Base (OB).

  By the end of 1941 the Auxiliary Units had 534 concealed OBs in the UK, with 138 more on the way. Over 3,500 men served in the Auxiliary Units and most went for their resistance training to Coleshill House, the Inigo Jones-designed home of the Earl of Radnor, situated north-east of Swindon. The address was GHQ Auxiliary Units, c/o GPO Highworth, Wiltshire; the formidable postmistress Mabel Stranks acted as a gatekeeper. Coleshill was the professional version of Osterley Park. Every weekend, two dozen Auxiliary Unit members came for courses given by regulars: close-quarter combat, weapons, explosives and fieldcraft by day, and silent exercises at night. Auxiliary Units got first pick of scarce weapons like Thompson sub-machine guns, semi-automatic pistols and Springfield rifles from the USA, and Section D’s technical establishment near Stevenage supplied the Auxiliary Units with spigot mortars, incendiary fougasses, and blocks of the new yellow plastic explosive, together with the delayed-action chemical fuses known as time-pencils.

  The English maquis learned hands-on how not to over-egg the pudding. One group watched in amazement as the car they merely wanted to disable rose high into the air and crashed in the next field. Readying Kent for invasion, they buried explosives in milk churns under bridges, and booby-trapped the large mansions that the Germans might commandeer as headquarters. ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert also blew out the centre sections of the piers at Brighton, Worthing and Eastbourne.

  Adrian Hoare’s Standing Up To Hitler (2002) gives details of some of the forty-five Auxiliary Units in Norfolk from 1940 to 1944. Fewer than 300 men were recruited, cautiously and quietly, and signed the Official Secrets Act. They got no medal, just a small badge with 202, the number of their battalion. The Royal Engineers dug several of the Auxiliary Units’ OBs, but they made others themselves at night and weekends. These had camouflaged entrances and exits, and some were booby-trapped. All the Norfolk men had Smith and Wesson.38 revolvers, a military pass and three morphine pills, one for severe pain, two for unconsciousness and three for suicide. Their copy of the 1938 Norfolk Calendar concealed a saboteur’s handbook with instructions how to blow up tanks, planes, trucks, armoured vehicles, railway lines, ammunition dumps etc. They had magnets to clamp explosives to metal, thin wires to trip-wire spigot mines and to disable motorcyclists, and a wide variety of destructive ordnance. They trained at Coleshill but also at Leicester Square Farm, Syderstone, North Creake, where they had to run and shoot wearing gasmasks, and crawl under live machine-gun fire a few inches above their heads while instructors threw thunder flashes at them. They also studied German military tactics, routines and sentry procedures, and were taught stalking by Lovat Scouts and unarmed combat by ferocious commandos. Most of their exercises were carried out at night.

  The British resistance was best at secrecy and stealth. Few knew, fewer talked, and no one saw them on their black-face night manoeuvres as they slipped around the regular forces, probing and penetrating their defences. When General Bernard Montgomery took over the corps that was defending Kent and Sussex in 1941, he was taken by Peter Fleming’s successor, Captain Norman Field, to a sloping pasture above the village of Charing with a magnificent view south to the English Channel. Field suggested that the general sit a while on a weathered sheep trough. Montgomery, the future victor of Alamein, stared aggressively towards occupied France, turned to speak to Field, and found himself alone with turf-munching sheep. Then he heard a voice beneath him and Field’s head popped up from a rectangular aperture that slid open in the wooden trough. A ladder led down to a two-man observation post stocked with food and water. Its windows were genuine rabbit holes, now weatherproofed and glazed. The Auxiliary Units had made the hide by placing an anti-aircraft gun on top, and its ‘crew’ had filled the protective sandbags around it with the chalk spoil they secretly dug out.

  As David Lampe was the first to point out in his revealing 1968 investigation, The Last Ditch, the greatest legacy of the Auxiliary Units was the practical experience it gave its overall supremo, Colonel Colin Gubbins, in organising, equipping, supplying, camouflaging and inspiring clandestine armies for resistance and liberation. On 22 July 1940, Hugh Dalton’s Ministry of Economic Warfare was given a new striking force ‘to co-ordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas’. This was the SOE, whose unofficial mandate came from Churchill: ‘Set Europe ablaze!’ Gubbins, now brigadier, became SOE’s director of operations and training from 18 November 1940 until the Labour government closed down its worldwide operations on the last day of 1945.

  The novelist Graham Greene was working in the Ministry of Information, persuading other authors to come on board the war effort, when he wrote a short story about the British resistance which was published in Collier’s magazine in June 1940. In ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’, a squad of German parachutists land near an English village called Potter, lock up the inhabitants in the only pub and set off to blow up the nearby London to Edinburgh railway line. They are foiled by a shabby old tramp and poacher who has a Mauser rifle from when he fought the Boers and who knows the land better than they do. In 1943, Mike Balcon’s Ealing Films – the scriptwriters were Angus McPhail, John Dighton, an
d Diana Morgan – turned Greene’s story into Went The Day Well?, one of the really interesting British films of the war, directed by Greene’s friend Alberto Cavalcanti, the gay Brazilian maverick and avant-garde documentarist who had helped make the brilliant Night Mail for John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit.

  In the film Went the Day Well? a party of Royal Engineers arrives in an English village called Bramley Green. Slowly their deception is unmasked: they are actually English-speaking German parachutists in disguise, and the local squire is a Fifth Columnist helping them. The Germans in British disguise kill the vicar in his vestry when he starts to ring the church bell, and massacre the Home Guard on their bicycles.

  An evacuee boy and a sailor on leave save the day, but it is the homely English village women who break their codes of domesticity and hospitality to start killing the enemy. The post mistress uses an axe, the vicar’s daughter shoots the treacherous squire dead with a pistol, the land girl snipes with a Lee-Enfield .303, and the bossy lady from the manor house whom we thought was a prattling middle-class fool heroically scoops up a German grenade to save the working-class evacuee children, but not herself.

  Went the day well?

  We died and never knew

  But well or ill,

  Freedom, we died for you

  As early as January 1937, the Air Ministry had recognised that the British film industry might be useful in war time. After an approach by Alexander Korda of London Films, RAF officers saw the potential of Denham Studios’ workshops, lighting rigs and versatile craftsmen:

  These men are specialists at ‘make believe’ and deception in defeating both the eye and the camera. They possess the workmen, material and shops to build jerry constructions for deception purposes.

  Alexander Korda was born Sándor László Kellman in Hungary and had escaped from poverty and anti-Semitism in the flat plains by dreaming big and living extravagantly. Korda realised early that if you tipped waiters and doormen at the best restaurants and hotels generously in cash you could actually hold off paying the big bills until someone turned up with a business proposition. After making films in Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Hollywood and Paris, he came to England in 1931. His first film was with another Hungarian (acting under the name Leslie Howard) whom he would later make a star in The Scarlet Pimpernel.

  Korda became more British than the British, living north of Regent’s Park in Avenue Road (with a camp butler called Benjamin), acquiring a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, and buying shoes for his tiny, dainty feet at Lobb, Homburg hats at Locke, double-breasted suits in Savile Row. He became a British subject in 1936, and was knighted in 1942. Korda founded London Film Productions in 1932 (its logo was Big Ben) and had a huge international success in 1933 with his first big film, The Private Life of Henry VIII, starring Charles Laughton (who won the Best Actor Academy Award) and Merle Oberon, Korda’s discovery and future wife. This was the first British feature film to conquer world markets. Suddenly all sorts of people saw that money could be made from cinema and there was a mini gold-rush to finance more British films and film studios. Sir Connop Guthrie, chairman of the wealthy Prudential Insurance Company, encouraged by Sir Robert Vansittart of the British government, enabled Korda to build Denham Studios, which he wanted to be the best outside Hollywood.

  In Winston Churchill, Korda recognised a fellow showman, and in September 1934 he offered Churchill £10,000 to write the script of a film on King George V for the Silver Jubilee in 1935. The film was never made, but Korda also wanted Churchill to ‘advise’ on various historical and imperial movies he planned, including one on Lawrence of Arabia that the subject himself personally dissuaded Korda from attempting. Ten years later, Korda offered £20,000 for the film rights to Churchill’s Life of Marlborough and paid £50,000 for A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. According to Korda’s nephew Michael, it was Churchill who stocked the pond outside Korda’s office at Denham Studios with swans (having gained royal permission).

  The British secret services were also among those drawn to the possibilities of the British film industry, in particular Claude Dansey, who saw that London Films could be useful ‘cover’ for persons from his ‘Z’ network travelling to foreign countries. Moreover, Korda had a double debt of honour to Britain, not only because he had been financed by Dansey’s rich friends but because a shadowy figure from the secret services known as Brigadier Maurice had once saved his life. Just before WW2, Korda made the patriotic spy-film, Q Planes, and on the outbreak of war, he swiftly made the first propaganda film about the RAF, The Lion Has Wings (with Ralph Richardson), which was in cinemas by November 1939. Korda also helped his adopted country by making films which boosted Britain, whether set in the imperial past (Sanders of the River, Elephant Boy, The Drum, The Four Feathers) or the idealistic future (Things to Come, The Man Who Could Work Miracles). Churchill sent Korda to Hollywood during the war to continue making propaganda films that were also romantic entertainment. In 1941, Lady Hamilton (known in the USA as That Hamilton Woman) starred Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, then in the full limelight of their adultery, as Admiral Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton. Winston Churchill adored the film. And why not? It was Churchill himself who wrote Nelson’s stirring speech on why Napoleon Bonaparte must be resisted.

  Film-set crews from Shepperton started building fake aircraft factories to decoy bombers away from the real ones, Short’s at Rochester, De Havilland’s at Hatfield, Boulton & Paul’s at Wolverhampton and the Bristol aircraft Company at Filton. Technicians from many British film studios – Gaumont-British, Sound City, Green Bros – were building dummy RAF aircraft – Battles, Blenheims, Hurrcanes, Wellingtons, Whitleys – for dispersal on real and dummy airfiels. The decoy airfields, which had lit-up landing paths at night, wer known as ‘Q sites’ after the ‘Q ships’ of WW1. One RAF veteran rcalled them looking ‘pathetic’ in daytime, just some poles, wires andbulbs, but at night the effect was amazing. ‘It was quite impossible totell a fake from the real thing.’ In Trojan Horses: Deception Operatins in the Second World War (1989) by Martin Young and RobbieStamp, the electrician Geoff Selwood described how his unit expermented with visual effects for fake airfields. They made what they clled a ‘Running Rabbit’, a long curve of wires which a light could runalong. Then they built a railway out of barrage balloon cables and a seies of small steel towers to carry a lighting rig on a trolley with a littlerocket engine:

  So what happened, we powered this trolley along the rails with the rocket, then we would switch the lights on and the running Rabbit would take over. The whole effect was just like a plane coming in to land very fast. It would slow down and then the Running Rabbit took over and for all the world it looked as if a plane had landed and then turned off the runway to the dispersal area.

  In a further ingenious development, ‘K sites’ were built, more elaborate than the ‘Q sites’. They simulated small aerodromes and attempted to draw the enemy away from the real ones. To look authentic by daylight, the ‘K sites’ needed more personnel than the ‘Q sites’, to move dummy aircraft about, to fake tracks, rearrange supplies and even man machine guns. ‘K sites’ were normally laid out on the line of enemy approach, that is, east of the real target, and were connected to it by telephone. Seymour Reit’s Masquerade: The Amazing Camouflage Deceptions of World War II (1978) records one K-Area call overheard during the Battle of Britain that seems almost too good to be true:

  Flight Sgt. (agitated): Sir! We’re being attacked!

  Pilot Officer: Splendid, Sergeant. Good show.

  Flight Sgt.: They’re smashing the place to bits!

  Pilot Officer: Yes, excellent. Carry on.

  Flight Sgt.: But, sir – we need fighter cover! They’re wrecking my best decoys!

  19

  Fire over England

  If the Invader Comes, ‘issued by the Ministry of Information in cooperation with the War Office and the Ministry of Home Security’, was a 1940 government leaflet whose authors were determined that no British citizen should b
e taken by surprise as the citizens of Poland, Holland and Belgium had been. In the event of invasion, there were seven rules. The first was to stay put, and not move. ‘If you run away … you will be machine-gunned from the air … and you will also block the roads.’ The seventh was to think before you act: ‘But think always of your country before you think of yourself.’

  There is another method which the Germans adopt in their invasion. They make use of the civilian population in order to create confusion and panic. They spread false rumours and issue false instructions. In order to prevent this, you should obey the second rule which is as follows: –

  (2) DO NOT BELIEVE RUMOURS AND DO NOT SPREAD THEM. WHEN YOU RECEIVE AN ORDER, MAKE QUITE SURE THAT IT IS A TRUE ORDER AND NOT A FAKED ORDER. MOST OF YOU KNOW YOUR POLICEMAN AND A. R. P. WARDENS BY SIGHT, YOU CAN TRUST THEM. IF YOU KEEP YOUR HEADS, YOU CAN ALSO TELL WHETHER A MILITARY OFFICER IS REALLY BRITISH OR ONLY PRETENDING TO BE SO. IF IN DOUBT ASK THE POLICEMAN OR A.R.P. WARDEN. USE YOUR COMMON SENSE.

  For Churchill, almost all means were valid in self-defence. The man who was prepared to spray mustard gas on German troops from massed aircraft if they got ashore obviously saw rumour as another useful weapon against them. John Baker White, an officer in the overlap between EH and Section D and then later in the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), wrote a book in 1955 about British psychological warfare, which he called The Big Lie. ‘We used the Big Lie when we were weak and the Great Truth when we were strong,’ he stated. ‘By rumour and deception we built another wall about Fortress Britain, when we stood alone.’ This was the dark corollary to Churchill’s speeches, using words not to hearten and lift up your own people, but to discourage and depress the enemy.