Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  Churchill had known nothing of the work being undertaken by Millis Jefferis and his team, nor even of Colin Gubbins. But he was no stranger to dirty warfare. Two decades earlier, when serving as Minister for Munitions, he had taken the unprecedented decision to use chemical weapons against Bolshevik forces in northern Russia. He had also argued in favour of using chemical gas against the truculent tribes of the North-West Frontier. When his colleagues demurred, he told them he was ‘strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes’, and proceeded to lambast them for their ‘squeamishness’.22

  As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill’s principal concern in the opening weeks of war was an underwater mine being deployed by the Germans to devastating effect. In one four-week period, almost thirty vessels had been sunk in British coastal waters. Churchill was particularly furious about the losses to shipping in the Thames estuary and was ‘anxious to get his own back’.23 His idea for revenge was to fill the Rhine with submersible mines. ‘It seemed to me,’ he later wrote, ‘that the proper retort for indiscriminate sinkings by mines at the mouths of British harbours was a similar and possibly more effective mining attack upon the Rhine.’24

  But there was a problem. When he asked senior military figures if they had any suitable weapons for such an attack, he was greeted with a negative. Such weapons did not exist.

  Churchill persisted in his enquiries and, ‘from somewhere or other, he learned that the War Office had a department dealing in special weapons’.25 This was Millis Jefferis’s team in Room 173. Now, he wanted to know Jefferis’s thoughts on the possibility of a spectacular operation to mine the Rhine.

  Once Jefferis had recovered from his initial surprise at the identity of his host, he told Churchill that such an operation ought to be feasible. He promised to report back within a fortnight, by which time he hoped to have outline drawings of how a prototype weapon might work.

  Churchill felt an immediate affinity with Jefferis, whose positive stance was in striking contrast to Leslie Burgin’s staff at the Ministry of Supply, whom he found ‘dismally slow and unimaginative’.26 Churchill promised Jefferis his wholehearted support, although he made it clear that such backing came at a price. He expected instant and tangible results.

  Jefferis was rarely one to fluster. His work on the North-West Frontier had long ago taught him that a cool head was the key to success. But on this particular occasion, Macrae noticed that he returned from his meeting with Churchill ‘in a highly excited state’. He whisked the team to his gentlemen’s club ‘for a little fortification’ before dropping his metaphorical bombshell. They had just two weeks to assist him in designing a technically complex mine, one that (according to Churchill’s brief) could be dropped from a plane, must be no bigger than a football and had to float just beneath the surface of the Rhine. Most importantly, the W-Bomb – as Churchill had christened it (the W stood for water) – needed to detonate itself automatically before it was washed downstream into Dutch territory, in order to avoid inadvertently blowing up friendly shipping.

  Jefferis had always been a workaholic and he expected his team to work a minimum of fourteen hours a day. They were often exhausted and unable to think straight, yet he continued to drive them hard into the early hours. Macrae thought him a tyrant, albeit a tyrant that he came to respect. ‘If he had lived in Roman times, I am sure he would have become a chief flogger on one of those slave-powered galleons.’

  Jefferis knew that the key component in any new weapon was the fuse. He flirted with the idea of once again using aniseed balls for the W-Bomb, before stumbling upon a far better solution. ‘Because of our wearing work and the need to keep ourselves going with alcohol,’ wrote Macrae, ‘I kept in Room 173 a supply of Alka Seltzer tablets.’27

  These, tested in conjunction with spring-loaded detonators, were found to dissolve with absolute regularity. The most challenging problem had been overcome. The W-Bomb was to be the first weapon of war that could both sink a ship and cure a hangover.

  Churchill placed Jefferis under immense pressure during that second week of November. First, he demanded to see a scale model of the weapon before it was scarcely off the drawing board. Next, he began selling his idea of attacking the Rhine to the Cabinet. Long before Jefferis’s W-Bomb was anything more than a prototype, he called for a demonstration in a specially made glass tank installed on a table in his Admiralty office. He was so excited by the results that he ordered Jefferis ‘to get it into production right away’.

  Within weeks of first meeting Churchill, Jefferis found himself in the extraordinary situation of being invited to join his inner circle. He became a regular attendee at his ‘Midnight Follies’, the secret late-night meetings attended by senior generals and Cabinet ministers. Churchill sought Jefferis’s advice on everything from detonators to dirty war, and treated him ‘as a kind of wizard who could produce new armaments out of a hat in a hurry’.

  Stuart Macrae often attended the Midnight Follies as Jefferis’s assistant: on one notable occasion, he accidentally dropped the prototype W-Bomb. It fell apart, flinging antennae, rods and springs across the room. Churchill was furious ‘and roared out something in which the words “bloody incompetence” occurred’.

  Jefferis continually urged caution about the W-Bomb, warning Churchill that it was far from ready. But Churchill refused to listen. ‘The trouble was that Winston was a born showman,’ noted Macrae, ‘and that the W-Bomb was his greatest act.’

  Churchill soon decided to take his show on the road, travelling to Paris in order to sell Operation Royal Marine to the French. He insisted on taking Jefferis and Macrae with him, along with their half-finished W-Bomb. Macrae feared they would soon fall out of favour. ‘I could think of no better way of ending a beautiful friendship than this one.’28

  Churchill liked to travel in small groups and the trip to Paris was no exception. His party included Professor Lindemann (his old friend and scientific adviser), his then bodyguard Mr Hopkins, and a handful of others.

  Travelling with Churchill was rather like travelling with an avuncular bachelor, or so it seemed to Macrae. Churchill’s hunger for knowledge was matched by an accompanying thirst for alcohol. There was never any doubt as to who was to pay for the drinks. As the most junior member of the party, Macrae was made an honorary member of the mess, which meant that he ‘was entitled to buy them drinks at around 8d per shot’.

  When the little team arrived in Calais after a tense crossing of the English Channel (well lubricated with pink gins), they boarded a private night train to Paris. Macrae went to the bar for a final snifter, only to find himself in a tête-à-tête with Churchill. Another round of drinks was ordered and Macrae (somewhat nervously) recounted an anecdote of how he had once written an article about Churchill’s love of hats. Churchill exploded with laughter, ordered more brandy and was about to offer Macrae a cigar when he noticed that he only had three stars on his epaulettes. ‘He then hastily changed his mind,’ having decided ‘that it would be wrong to waste a good cigar on a mere captain’.

  Once in the French capital, the team was whisked to the Hôtel de Crillon in order to prepare for the morning’s demonstration of the W-Bomb. Churchill had slept for less than two hours and drunk an ocean of cognac yet he was on irrepressible form. The W-Bomb demonstration was due to take place at Versailles in front of senior generals: Churchill insisted on being the principal showman, ‘speaking mainly in schoolboy French’.

  Rolling his Rs in true Gallic fashion, he spoke excitedly about Jefferis’s miracle weapon and told his audience that the bomb was one of the most mischievous weapons ever invented. It primed itself as it floated downstream and then lurked for days just inches beneath the surface. When he reached the denouement, he pretended to be a German warship, performing the collision with Jefferis’s W-Bomb with wild theatricality. ‘Bang,’ he shouted. ‘C’est fini!’29

  It was a remarkable performance and it impressed everyone in the room. Even the gravest French general
s were heard to shout ‘bravo’. But the chief obstacle to Operation Royal Marine was the French government. Prime Minister Edouard Daladier refused to countenance the idea of dropping 10,000 of Jefferis’s W-Bombs into the Rhine, worried that it might provoke Hitler into launching retaliatory bombing raids on Paris.

  Churchill was dismayed by such a defeatist attitude and heaped scorn on the French. ‘Good, decent, civilised people, it appeared, must never themselves strike till after they have been struck dead.’ He warned Daladier that the time for playing by the rules was over. Hitler was preparing ‘a vast machine, grinding forward, ready to break upon us’.30 And the French, it seemed, were prepared to allow themselves to be trampled on.

  Operation Royal Marine was not given the French green light until May 1940, by which time it was far too late. Hitler’s panzer divisions were already thrusting deep into France. Churchill felt a certain vindication when he was brought news that Jefferis’s W-Bomb had worked to perfection. Some 1,700 were dropped into the Rhine and, for a brief period, caused absolute mayhem, sinking ships and blowing up bridges.

  ‘Practically all river traffic between Karlsruhe and Mainz was suspended, and extensive damage was done to the Karlsruhe barrage and a number of pontoon bridges.’ But even Churchill was forced to admit that it was too little, too late. ‘The success of the device was however lost in the deluge of disaster.’31

  But Millis Jefferis’s work had one outcome that was both unexpected and fortuitous. It had brought the little team in MI(R)c ‘to the notice of the man who was to become the most powerful in the land’. Churchill was already looking to the future and was fully aware of the potential value of Jefferis’s work. He now vowed to protect him from the interference of ministers, generals and civil servants. Macrae saw it as a turning point. ‘He was to save us from being abolished or swallowed up.’32

  He was to do more than that. Within weeks of Operation Royal Marine, he fired off a memo to General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, his chief military adviser. ‘Report to me on the position of Major Jefferis,’ he said. ‘By whom is he employed? Who is he under? I regard this officer as a singularly capable and forceful man, who should be brought forward to a higher position. He ought certainly to be promoted Lieutenant-Colonel, as it will give him more authority.’ Jefferis, he added, was a ‘brilliant officer’ with an ‘ingenious, inventive mind’.33 He refused to have such men quashed by the War Office and Ministry of Supply.

  If they couldn’t work within the strictures of Whitehall, then they would work directly for him.

  4

  Sweet Fanny Adams

  COLIN GUBBINS HAD spent the autumn of 1939 in Paris. The French authorities were told that he was working for the War Office’s Military Mission, but they soon suspected he was ‘more concerned with covert activities than with normal military liaison’.1 This was absolutely correct. Scarcely had he arrived in Paris than he took himself off to the Hôtel Regina, a luxurious fin de siècle pile just a stone’s throw from the Louvre. This was the temporary home of Stanislav Gano, head of the Polish Deuxième Bureau.

  Gubbins had last met Gano in Warsaw three months earlier. Since that meeting, Gano had found himself dragged through a series of unwelcome adventures. He had been seized by the Gestapo and interned in a prison camp, but he had outwitted the Nazis by escaping their grasp and making his way overland to Paris. Now, he was attempting to orchestrate resistance inside occupied Poland.

  He spilled a woeful tale of the guerrilla activities being attempted by his compatriots. They were hampered by a lack of equipment and stood in desperate need of radio transmitters and automatic pistols. Gubbins promised to help and immediately contacted the War Office in London. The response was hardly encouraging. There were only two spare transmitters in the whole of England, and these would not be available until the following spring. As for automatic pistols, the War Office didn’t have any at all. All they could offer were some old revolvers, weapons that were totally unsuitable for guerrilla warfare.

  General Gano found it hard to believe that the British had no spare supplies and concluded ‘that it was more likely due to unwillingness than inability’.2 He was absolutely correct. Gubbins’s request for weapons had been blocked by the Secret Intelligence Service, whose senior officers had come to view guerrilla warfare as a blunt-edged tool that risked compromising their undercover agents. According to one of those agents (and later, double-agent), Kim Philby, they ‘resisted bitterly the whole idea of letting a lot of thugs loose on the continent’.3 Just as Leslie Burgin was intent on undermining Millis Jefferis and his work, so the Secret Intelligence Service was determined to put Gubbins’s team out of business. It was another warning that not everyone in the establishment was as enthusiastic about ungentlemanly warfare as Winston Churchill.

  Gubbins found himself in a quandary as he attempted to help Gano’s efforts to build a Polish resistance. He was living in great comfort in a top-floor apartment on the rue de Varenne, with a view over the garden of the Musée Rodin. He had a housekeeper (who also happened to be a gourmet cook) and the use of a large Renault saloon. But he was unable to put any of his theories about guerrilla warfare into effect.

  In the evenings he would take himself off to one of the city’s White Russian nightclubs where he and other expatriates found consolation in magnum after magnum of pink champagne. When the band’s leader came to play at their table, Gubbins would jump unsteadily to his feet and give ‘a lusty performance of Ochi chornye and Stanka razin, to the astonishment of the other patrons’. It was an enjoyable enough existence, but it was hardly the life of a guerrilla leader.

  Joan Bright was in regular contact with Gubbins and could sense that he was starting ‘to feel restless’.4 He was not alone in having such feelings. Peter Wilkinson, back in the office after his Polish jaunt, felt as if he should be doing something constructive for the war effort, even if it was ‘digging trenches on the Franco-Belgian frontier’.5 Instead, he was having a ball in his bachelor pad in Clarges Street, off Piccadilly.

  If the war seemed unreal to those in MI(R), it was even more so to the population at large. One expat returning to London after a spell in Germany was astonished by the general lassitude. He had witnessed the Third Reich’s ‘massive preparations and mobilisation of her youth’. Yet here in London, his friends were ‘blissfully interested in cricket, tennis, gold and the results of the four-thirty’.6

  On the far side of the Atlantic, seasoned American observers began saying it was a war that didn’t exist. Senator William Borah spoke for many when he attacked the European powers for their lack of action. ‘There is something phoney about this war,’ he said.7

  Phoney. The word stuck. It was a Phoney War. The British Expeditionary Force had dug itself into the trenches on the borders of eastern France, yet there was nothing to be done except to wait for the Germans to attack. Officers got so bored that they imported foxhounds and beagles from England so that they could spend their time ‘in the open air with the music of hounds and the clean fresh smell of the countryside reminding them that there still existed the old traditions of sanity and justice’.8 If they weren’t able to kill any Boche, then they could at least slaughter a few foxes.

  * * *

  The Phoney War came to an abrupt end at a few minutes before midnight on 8 April 1940. Captain Leif Welding Olsen, commander of the Norwegian patrol boat Pol III, was scanning the moonlit horizon when he noticed a group of silhouetted warships entering the mouth of Oslofjord. He immediately recognized them as German and fired a warning shot.

  When the vessels continued to steam into the fjord, Captain Olsen took the momentous decision to attack. He stoked his engines to full throttle, hurtled across Oslofjord and then rammed his patrol boat hard into the German torpedo ship, Albatros. It was a brave act of defiance but a fatal one. ‘He was sprayed with machine gun fire, both his legs pierced by bullets.’9 He died from severe blood loss, earning himself the dubious distinction of being the first mortality of the German in
vasion of Norway.

  News of the invasion reached Whitehall within hours, causing outright panic. Clement Attlee, Leader of the Opposition, immediately called up the War Office file on Norway, only to find that it was completely empty. On the cover were the cryptic letters SFA. ‘I suppose it means Sweet Fanny Adams,’ he said to Winston Churchill when the two of them met later that day. ‘I sincerely hope there is no other interpretation to be placed on those letters,’ replied Churchill.

  Two expeditionary forces were rushed to Norway in the vain hope of blocking the Nazi drive towards Narvik. This was a key objective for the Germans, as it was the winter outlet for all the iron ore mined in neutral Sweden. The British landings proved a farce. None of the officers spoke Norwegian and they were wholly unprepared for the hostile terrain. ‘You can really do what you like,’ was the instruction that one officer gave to his men after a briefing at the War Office, ‘for they don’t know what they want done.’10

  Colin Gubbins had returned to London shortly before the invasion of Norway. He was relieved to be back, for his time in Paris had been a disappointment. The office in London, by contrast, was abuzz with men and ideas. There were now more than a dozen staff working for MI(R), all of them sniffing at the danger ahead. Secretary Joan felt that everyone was driven by the same motivation, ‘the taut thread of adventure and desire for individual action’.11

  Two days after the landings in Norway, Gubbins attended a sherry party in the typists’ room at the War Office. Joan had managed to lay her hands on a couple of bottles with which to toast the first birthday of MI(R). Gubbins was in no mood for celebrating. Indeed his mind was on other matters entirely. The German invasion of Norway at long last provided him with the opportunity to put guerrilla warfare to the test by sending elite companies of men deep into the country in order ‘to conduct small harassing operations on the enemy’.12