Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  When he asked where the ‘left wing’ had its offices, Grand got up from his chair, walked over to the far side of the hotel room and with a theatrical flourish unlatched a hidden door.25

  ‘The suite, true to the best Boys’ Own Paper traditions, had a secret passage communicating with Section D’s offices at Number Two, Caxton Street, next door.’26

  * * *

  Few in the regular army had any experience of fighting an ungentlemanly war. Gubbins’s priority was to prepare an instruction manual in such warfare, setting out in terse prose how best to kill, incapacitate or maim the maximum number of people.

  ‘My difficulty,’ he later admitted, ‘was that, strangely enough, there was not a single book to be found in any library in any language which dealt with this subject.’27

  Gubbins had to look elsewhere, drawing inspiration from Sinn Fein and T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), as well as from Al Capone and his Chicago gangsters. They had terrorized America with their audacious hit-and-run raids on nightclubs and their tommy guns had proved devastatingly effective. Gubbins wanted his band of men to be similarly armed. He felt that ‘the whole art of guerrilla warfare lies in striking the enemy where he least expects it and yet where he is most vulnerable’. Guerrillas should not think of themselves as soldiers; rather, they were gangsters working outside the law and their task was to inflict ‘the maximum amount of damage in a short time and then getting away’. Gubbins wanted them to be ‘a running sore’ that would confuse, exhaust and ultimately defeat Hitler’s regular army.

  As he began to prepare his instruction manual, he set down practical advice on everything from strangling sentries with piano-wire to contaminating water supplies with deadly bacilli. A pint or two of biological agent could wipe out an entire town. A carefully placed explosive could kill hundreds of people. There were also handy tips on such things as how best to destroy factories and ambush trains. ‘It is not sufficient merely to shoot at the train,’ he said. ‘First derail the train and then shoot down the survivors.’28

  He was already eyeing the bigger opportunity: destroying infrastructure so vital to the Nazi war machine that it could wholly change the nature of the conflict. But he also knew that such destruction could only be undertaken by specialists. It would require the services of men outside the military, men who understood how power plants worked and how viaducts were constructed. And it would require weapons that didn’t yet exist.

  Seated at the far side of the office, secretary Joan grew increasingly intrigued by Gubbins. Whenever she brought him his afternoon cup of tea, she found him hunched over his desk drawing neat diagrams of bridges and viaducts. They were no idle sketches. The arrows and crosses showed would-be saboteurs where best to plant their gelignite.

  Joan couldn’t help feeling that Gubbins’s impeccable politeness masked a far more turbulent spirit. He was ‘a still-waters-running-deep sort of man’, she thought, who had ‘just enough of the buccaneer in him to make lesser men underestimate his gifts of leadership, courage and integrity’.

  She also found him darkly romantic in a way that Lawrence Grand and Joe Holland were not. For beneath the starched-collar exterior she could sense ‘a man at arms, a campaigner, the fires banked up inside him as glowing as those round which his Celtic ancestors had gathered between forays for glen and brae’.29

  Joan had a sharp insight into people’s characters and she had read Gubbins to perfection. He was a curious blend of Scottish prudence and youthful recklessness. She duly typed up his guerrilla warfare texts on her Imperial; he called them The Art of Guerrilla Warfare and The Partisan Leaders’ Handbook. He had stressed the importance of agents being able to dispose of the manuals quickly and quietly. Joan therefore took the decision to have them published on pocket-sized edible paper. Both manuals could be consumed in less than two minutes, if swallowed with a large glass of water.

  2

  Thinking Dirty

  JOAN BRIGHT HAD lived in Argentina, Spain and Mexico City and the experience of life abroad had taught her an important fact: the British alone played by the rules. They formed orderly queues at the bus stop, they said sorry when there was no need to apologize. In her view, decency and fair play were integral parts of being British.

  It was much the same with sport. In villages across the realm, well-spoken youths in whites and flannels spent their Sundays playing cricket, a game with so many rules that only the British were equipped to master it. Even more violent sports like boxing came with a book of regulations. In 1867 the 9th Marquess of Queensberry (though hardly a gentleman) had put his name to a set of rules that ensured boxing was fought in a spirit of decency. No longer could you hit a man when he was down: that was deemed to be underhand.

  As international relations grew increasingly strained in the late 1930s, the question of what constituted gentlemanly combat became a subject of heated debate on the letters page of The Times. A certain Dr L.P. Jacks of Oxfordshire fired the opening salvo when he wrote to the editor expressing his belief that the sword alone was ‘a gentleman’s weapon’. His reasoning was quintessentially British. Attacking someone with a sword ‘was more likely to give the other fellow a chance, and so make it more of a sporting affair between him and me’1.

  Not everyone agreed. Writing from his club in St James’s, Mr Edward Abraham wanted to know how it could be considered gentlemanly ‘to slash at a human being’s jugular vein with a sword’,2 yet ungentlemanly to kill him with a bayonet. Where did Dr Jacks stand on less conventional weapons? Mustard gas, for example? Gentlemanly? Or ungentlemanly?

  There followed a furious spat in which other readers entered the fray. Leslie Douglas-Mann confessed to not giving two hoots about the rules of the game. If you wanted to win – and win at all costs – there was no place for gentlemanly behaviour. Guns, gas or grenades; you should be prepared to get your hands dirty. ‘A spiked mace smashed in the face,’ he reasoned, ‘is probably quite as unpleasant as poison gas.’3

  The issue rumbled on for weeks until an exasperated Dr Jacks (who had started the fight in the first place) begged for a gentleman’s truce. ‘May I withdraw my rash description of the sword as a gentleman’s weapon,’ he wrote, ‘and describe it, with greater caution, as less ungentlemanly than poison gas?’4

  The epistolary spat would have been of little long-term consequence, were it not for the fact that it raised an important point. Was there any place for rules in the modern game of war?

  The issue would eventually be debated on the floor of the House of Commons. Most members were rigidly conservative in outlook and spoke vigorously in defence of the rules. But one of them begged to differ. Robert Bower was the Conservative MP for Cleveland, a member whose ungentlemanly behaviour had already gained him notoriety in Westminster. Two years previously he had shocked his Tory colleagues by his use of unparliamentary language, insulting a Jewish backbencher with a nasty racist jibe. The backbencher in question, Emanuel Shinwell, was so incensed that he crossed the floor of the house and punched Bower in the face.

  Now, once again, Bower was prepared to nail his ungentlemanly colours to the mast. He expressed shock at the manner in which his Tory colleagues continued to treat Hitler with kid gloves, even though he was breaking every international law in the book. He contended that there was no place for the rule book when dealing with the Nazis. ‘When you are fighting for your life against a ruthless opponent,’ he said, ‘you cannot be governed by the Queensberry rules.’

  He poured scorn on his frontbench colleagues for their outdated notions of fair play, claiming that most of them would rather lose a war ‘than do anything unbecoming to an absolutely perfect gentleman’.

  Bower’s parliamentary colleagues were appalled by what they were hearing, but the honourable member for Cleveland was not yet finished. He warned them that Britain was doomed to destruction if it clung to the old ways. ‘We must have a government which will be ruthless, relentless, remorseless,’ he said. ‘In short, we want a few more cads in this governmen
t.’5

  * * *

  Colin Gubbins’s strict Scottish upbringing had instilled a powerful sense of morality in him, yet he was content to let others trouble themselves with the rights and wrongs of ungentlemanly warfare. He was more concerned with the practicalities of an effective guerrilla campaign against Nazi Germany.

  It was clear that he could not do it alone. He would need an inner circle of experts who could help him plan how best to strike at Hitler’s Nazi war machine. Such experts were unlikely to be found in the regular army. Gubbins needed rule-breakers: mavericks and eccentrics with a talent for lateral thinking and a fondness for making mischief.

  He had been in Caxton Street for little more than a week when he was joined by Millis Jefferis, the gorilla-like officer who had first conceived the idea of a magnetic mine.

  ‘Red of face, kind of heart’, at least that’s what Joan Bright thought when first introduced to the chain-smoking Jefferis.6 He arrived in a cloud of tobacco, bringing yet more nicotine into her life. She was in awe of him during his first days in Caxton Street. He was gruff, impatient and rougher around the edges than the ever courteous Gubbins. His jacket was crumpled, his trousers creased: the overall impression was of someone with a complete disdain for military etiquette. His brother-in-law thought he looked ‘more like a race-course bookie’ than a soldier.7 Joan wasn’t so sure. She took one look at his ruddy cheeks and declared that ‘he could never have belonged to any other branch of the Army but the Royal Engineers’.

  Although he continued to intimidate her for weeks to come, she soon came to appreciate that he had a great deal more to offer than the typical British bulldog. He was inquisitive, wildly creative and, most impressive of all, entirely self-taught, ‘an inventive genius, his dreams and thoughts linked with all forms of infernal machine – and the bigger the bang, the louder his ready laugh’.8

  Jefferis’s grizzled face was a result of too much exposure to the high-altitude sunshine of the Indian Himalayas. An engineer by training, he had started his career on the troubled North-West Frontier in the employment of the Madras Sappers and Miners. It quickly became apparent that he had a magician’s hands when it came to designing bridges and viaducts. The Royal Engineers Journal described him as ‘an outstanding man of rare inventive genius’,9 someone who was able to span impenetrable Himalayan ravines with his unique blend of algebra and imagination. His subaltern confessed to having never met anyone so driven by the will to succeed. ‘Difficulties existed only to be surmounted, and there was no setback that a little thought and determination could not overcome.’

  Jefferis had spent the bloody Waziristan campaign of 1922 hacking his way through impassable mountains until he had created a road of sorts that linked the strategic settlements of Isha and Razmak. It was a feat made all the more remarkable by the fact that he and his Afghan contractors were under constant gunfire from hidden snipers. ‘Bet you never have another up to this level,’ wrote his company major.10 His bravado in the face of adversity was to earn him a Military Cross. More importantly, it earned him first-hand experience of guerrilla warfare.

  Colin Gubbins was quick to see that Jefferis’s craggy exterior masked a unique skill, one that had stood him in good stead during the Waziristan campaign. His floating bridges and concrete piles were merely the outward expressions of a passion for applied mathematics. For Jefferis believed that every problem could be solved by algebra – not the simple algebraic equations taught at school, but equations of staggering complexity. This, indeed, was his great discovery in life: everything conformed to an equation, if only you looked hard enough.

  He had worked out the algebraic formula to explain how an albatross stayed aloft without flapping its wings. He had even found an equation that could predict the point at which a greyhound would capture a hare on any given racetrack, assuming that the hound was travelling at a slightly faster speed than its quarry. When Joan was first introduced to him in the spring of 1939, such matters seemed of trifling consequence. But Jefferis knew differently. For if you could predict when a greyhound would capture a hare, then you could also predict when a rocket would hit a plane. And that made both algebra, and Jefferis, very important indeed.

  It was while serving on the North-West Frontier that Jefferis underwent a bizarre Damascene conversion. Hitherto, he had lived, breathed and dreamed of bridges. But as he trudged his way back to the town of Isha, depleted of men after a bruising campaign, he developed an overwhelming desire to blow them up.

  Close friends had noticed the sudden change. ‘Millis Jefferis had taken a dislike to bridges,’ wrote one bemused observer, ‘and was anxious to do them an injury.’ There was logic to his antipathy. His Waziristan adventure had given him first-hand experience of the strategic importance of both railways and bridges. If you could cripple a bridge, you could stop an entire army in its tracks.

  Jefferis’s induction into Caxton Street was to mark a turning point in his life. He was given command of his own little unit called MI(R)c, an adjunct to Gubbins’s team, with the task of ‘designing and producing special weapons for irregular warfare’. These were the weapons on which Gubbins’s guerrilla operations would succeed or fail.

  Now, seated impatiently at his desk, his dark thoughts could be turned into an even darker reality. Others watched in awe as he scribbled numbers, letters and equations on to loose sheets of graph paper, systematically turning complex mathematics into diagrams of destruction. When the maths was done, he ‘acquired some large drawing pads marked off in one sixteenth inch squares’11 and began making detailed plans of viaducts in order to work out how best to reduce them to rubble. His finished work was to be published as a companion volume to Gubbins’s edible pamphlets.

  The title left little room for the imagination. How to Use High Explosives contained highly accurate advice for anyone who wanted to blow up a bridge, building, railway or road. It was illustrated with line drawings that showed ‘how to fit a stick of gelignite under a railway sleeper or where to pack a lethal brown paper parcel under a bridge’.12

  There were also handy tips on how to wreck train pistons, how to cripple points, how to blow up pylons (plant gelignite under three legs, not four, or it won’t fall over) and how best to sabotage a factory. This little pamphlet, scarcely longer than a copy of Science Illustrated, was a historical first, the first manual in the history of the British Army to teach men how to wreak havoc on civilian targets with a small bag of explosives.

  Not content with offering advice about weaponry, Jefferis began to design and build his own. Each chuckle from the far side of the office would announce the conception of some lethal new weapon. ‘Blowing up railways appealed to him most,’ wrote one colleague, ‘but as a close second came the burning of pontoon bridges.’ He took particular pleasure in designing a mine in which the train itself acted as the detonator. He also devised an ingenious floating fire-mine which would detonate itself when it hit a pontoon.

  In his spare time, he invented booby traps intended to give a nasty surprise to any Nazi unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end. One of the most devious was the innocuously named Release Switch, ‘which could be concealed under a book or a lavatory seat or something of that sort and cause a bang when it was lifted’. Men not in the habit of lifting the toilet seat at last had their excuse.

  Most devilish of all was the aptly named Castrator, a concealed, spring-loaded striker that did exactly what it claimed. ‘They were certainly a cheap and effective way of keeping down the birth rate of the Germans,’ noted Stuart Macrae wryly, ‘as they only cost 2/- each.’13

  All these prototype bombs had to be tested. It was fortunate that the Caxton Street office had a secret stash of plastic explosive that was kept in a locked stationery cupboard. Only one man had the key, a roguish Cockney who ‘habitually and quite naturally talked in rhyming slang’.14 He had previously earned his living as a gun-runner and boxing promoter, thereby adding a further whiff of illegality to the activities of Caxton Street.


  Some of Millis Jefferis’s larger weapons were trialled at the Bedfordshire farm belonging to Cecil Clarke’s brother. It was the ideal place for detonating his powerful incendiary bombs. But the working day was too short for constant trips to the countryside, so Jefferis began to use Richmond Park instead.

  Keeping one eye on ramblers, dog-walkers and deer, he detonated increasingly large amounts of explosives. One mine, tightly packed with ammonal powder, caused such a massive explosion that it flung bags of earth into the Richmond skyline and created ‘a most impressive crater’.15

  * * *

  It was one thing to build weapons for use in guerrilla warfare, quite another to find guerrillas who would be prepared to be dropped behind enemy lines. Gubbins was not immediately clear as to what sort of person would be willing to risk their skin on missions that would lead (as Colonel Chidson was always quick to point out) to certain torture if caught.

  The British Army in 1939 was a volunteer force boosted by conscription; its men were poorly trained and not suitable for guerrilla fighting. The British Expeditionary Force offered more fertile recruiting. It had been established in the previous year, in the wake of Hitler’s annexation of Austria, and some of the initiates had shown a reasonable degree of competence. But Gubbins knew that it could not spare any manpower in that fraught and uncertain summer.

  He therefore elected for a rather more eccentric approach when seeking men for his guerrilla army. He decided to make use of the old public school network, turning to rugby-hardened alumni from schools such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester. In particular, he was keen to enlist school-leavers who had gone on to become polar explorers, mountaineers and oil prospectors, men who knew how to survive in a tough environment.

  He had few contacts among the old school brigade: it stood at a far remove from the world of his Highland childhood. But he found himself receiving help from an unexpected quarter. Brigadier Frederick Beaumont-Nesbitt was an Old Etonian with an impeccable pedigree, ‘tall and polite, an erect, good-looking man, his crisp moustache brushed up’. A well-connected Guards officer, the brigadier had been appointed head of the army’s Intelligence Directorate. He had only recently drawn up a list of fearless, enterprising young men, anticipating their recruitment into his directorate. Now, with characteristic generosity, he handed the list to Gubbins and told him to take his pick.