Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  He confided his idea to Joan, who by now knew more about guerrilla warfare than any other woman in the country. He told her that he envisaged sending in hit-and-run teams that ‘would be independent and self-sufficient, and know where and how to use the explosive they brought with them’.13

  Gubbins was never one to hang around. He proposed his idea to the War Office on 13 April, four days after the German invasion. Two days later, he was given permission to form specialist units that were to be known as Independent Companies. Five days after that, he was given overall command of four of these companies, which were to be known as Scissorforce. He was also given permission to establish a guerrilla warfare training centre in Scotland: ‘A bit late in the day,’ he noted in his office diary, ‘but it was something to get the thing pushed through.’14

  There was no time to give specialist training to the guerrillas heading to Norway. Scissorforce was scraped together with volunteer units that had completed their training and were waiting to be sent to France. On paper, they sounded impressive. Each company comprised 20 officers and 270 men, including sappers, signals experts and infantry. They were issued with Alpine rucksacks, snow-shoes, Arctic boots, leather jerkins and woolly sheepskin coats, essential protection against the sharp chill of a Norwegian spring.

  The kit turned out to be rather more impressive than the men. One officer was surprised to discover that ‘no one knew how to use the snow-shoes’, a serious oversight given that they were to be operating in an area where the snow lay more than two feet deep.15 That same officer was no less alarmed to be told that the sheepskin coats were too bulky to be transported and were to be left in England. As compensation, the men were offered extra supplies of pemmican, a gumlike mixture of animal fat and protein. At its best, it tasted like salt-pork chewing gum. At its worst, it was like rancid whale blubber.

  Gubbins could do nothing about equipment, but he was shrewd enough to realize that a guerrilla force is only as good as its leaders. There was no one in London (with the exception of himself) who was fit to lead the troops on the ground. Even men like Peter Wilkinson had only undergone the most rudimentary training. He therefore wired Indian Army headquarters in Lahore and asked for twenty of their finest officers to be dispatched to England with immediate effect. He specifically requested officers with experience of guerrilla warfare on the troubled North-West Frontier.

  The twenty officers were sent to Karachi, where they boarded an Imperial Airways flying boat named Cathay. It was only designed to carry seventeen passengers, requiring three of the men to spend the entire voyage squashed into the freezing luggage compartment, half buried under kit-bags. ‘This was noisy, smelly and dark,’16 wrote one of the unfortunate three, who humoured himself by naming it the ‘Black Hole of Cathay’.

  Gubbins was under few illusions about his guerrilla mission to Norway. He could not stop Hitler’s invasion and nor could he reverse the German advances. At best, he could slow their drive towards the three key towns of Bodø, Mo and Mosjøen. His War Office orders reflected this reality. He was given free reign to destroy roads, railways and communications and was told to ‘ensure that all possible steps are taken by demolition and harrying tactics to impede any German advance’. In short, he was to make Hitler’s drive northwards ‘slow and costly.’17

  For this, he needed the help of Millis Jefferis.

  * * *

  No sooner had Colin Gubbins’s Norway mission been given the green light than Jefferis found himself under intense pressure. On Thursday, 25 April he received a memo to the effect that Gubbins’s men – all 1,200 of them – needed to be fully equipped with sabotage weaponry by the following Tuesday. They required Camoflet mines, pressure switches and time vibration switches, the last two to be used to blow up railways being exploited by the Nazis.

  Jefferis’s decision to stockpile these weapons while Gubbins had been in Paris now proved to have been a wise one. Bob Porter’s team at Riley Motors, along with Mr Thomassen of Clerkenwell and the specialists at Franco’s, had all been hard at work and Jefferis had managed to assemble a significant arsenal. But more was needed. Stuart Macrae dipped deep into his ‘bag of gold’ – the limitless supply of funds that fell outside any Whitehall accounting system – in order to encourage these freelance artisans to work even harder.

  Once the commissioning was set in motion, Macrae headed to Edinburgh in order to instruct two of Gubbins’s Independent Companies in the use of these strange new weapons. Sergeant Bidgood meanwhile went to Dymchurch in Kent and then on to Suffolk, where the other two companies were billeted. ‘We took some of the gear with us,’ said Macrae, ‘whilst the rest followed by road or passenger train.’ He had hired more staff in order to keep Room 173 running smoothly, yet there was a palpable sense of urgency in the air. Macrae confessed to having never worked so hard in his life. ‘I flattered myself that I was working myself to death and was chastened when I realized that these others were working even harder.’18

  Once Jefferis was satisfied that production was proceeding smoothly, he made a surprise announcement to the team: he was taking a short overseas break. Macrae was never in any doubt as to his destination. He was heading to Norway in order ‘to get some practical experience in blowing up railway lines’. He had been keen to try out his weaponry ever since he joined MI(R). Now, ‘his wicked face lit up with joy’19 as he helped himself to 1,000 pounds of high explosive, along with pressure switches, time delays and enough blasting gelatine to blow up half of Norway.

  He arranged for the RAF to fly him from Hendon airfield to Scotland; from here, he was to board a Sunderland flying boat that would drop him into occupied Norway. His intention was to stage a lightning, hit-and-run operation on the Western Railway that ran through the centre of the country. If all went to plan, he would be back in London before Gubbins’s men had even set sail.

  The War Office’s car pool was so busy on the morning of his departure that Jefferis had to drive his own car to Hendon. Delayed by traffic, he was obliged to make up time by driving at breakneck speed down the Finchley Road. He drove so fast, indeed, that he got ‘pinched’ by the police for speeding. Next morning, an officer from Hampstead police station appeared at MI(R) and announced that Jefferis had been summoned to appear in court.

  Macrae expressed his indignation in no uncertain terms. ‘Speed limits, I pointed out, were admittedly very necessary in peace time, but in wartime it must be understood that army officers in the course of their duty were entitled to disregard them.’20 He told the officer that Jefferis could not attend because he was busy blowing up Nazis. His protest fell on deaf ears. Jefferis was fined a hefty £6 for his failure to appear in court.

  Jefferis landed safely at the snowbound fishing port of Åndalsnes, some hundred miles south-west of Trondheim. He followed the railway out of town until he reached a pre-agreed rendezvous with Brigadier Harold Morgan, commander of one of the hapless platoons sent to Norway in the wake of the Nazi invasion. The brigadier spilled a sorry tale. His men had come under sustained attack from shells and machine-gun fire from low-flying German aircraft. Jefferis found them chastened and scared. ‘The moral effect of seeing the aircraft coming, of being unable to take cover, of being able to observe the bomb dropping, and of the terrific explosion, had been overwhelming.’21 He felt rather differently, smelling the cordite with relish. He had not been in a combat zone since his battles in the Himalayas almost two decades earlier. There was a sense in which he was returning home.

  Selecting a sergeant and two privates, he picked his way through the German front line ‘in order to lay his recently invented protracted delay action explosive charges’. These were set to detonate at various intervals over the next few months, in order to give the Germans a string of unwelcome surprises. He had been tipped off about two key targets, one in Øyer and the other in Lillehammer. He first made his way to Øyer, where he blew up the strategically vital bridge and caused major problems for the German thrust northwards. Once this was done, he pre
ssed on to Lillehammer, where he ‘placed an electrically fired mine and an anti-tank trap’,22 both of them wired to one of Mr Thomassen’s detonators.

  By the time this was done, the Germans were advancing so rapidly that Jefferis had no option but to take flight. He reached the port of Åndalsnes under heavy bombardment and took shelter on a sloop. Thirty high-explosive shells fell around him, ‘a third of these within a ship’s length’. Jefferis had always enjoyed mathematical puzzles, but this one had an answer that was altogether too uncomfortable. ‘He calculated that his life would probably not be more than three days.’23 He was fortunate to be plucked from Åndalsnes soon afterwards; he was back in London on the last day of April.

  He was immediately asked to write a report for the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, informing him of the military situation in Norway. This was discussed at length at the following day’s Cabinet meeting. Everyone present came to the same conclusion: that the remaining British forces in Norway were doomed and that ‘it was quite impossible for land forces to withstand complete air superiority’24 on the part of the Nazis.

  The last remaining hopes were now pinned on the pioneering guerrilla force under the command of Colin Gubbins. On Sunday, 5 May they set sail aboard the Orion, the Royal Ulsterman and the Ulster Prince. Their destination was the as yet unoccupied area of Norway, but they were aware that the Nazi invaders were driving north at alarming speed under the command of one of Hitler’s most experienced generals.

  * * *

  General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst played the game of war with the same attention to strategy as a grandmaster of chess. He was the principal architect of the Norwegian invasion and had plotted each move with care, aware that losing the game would almost certainly mean losing his head.

  A patrician aristocrat from eastern Prussia, Falkenhorst had all the verve and mettle of a Teutonic knight. ‘A soldier first, second and last,’ was the opinion of one who served with him.25 At an early age he had changed his patronymic from the Slavic, Jastrzembski, to the more Germanic-sounding Falkenhorst. It meant Falcon’s Eyrie, a fitting name for a military commander with a hawk’s eye for detail.

  Hitler had placed him in charge of the invasion in the third week of February 1940, demanding that he produce a battle plan that would guarantee victory. When the general asked how long he had got, the Führer said he wanted it by 5 p.m. that same day.

  General von Falkenhorst knew absolutely nothing about the country he was to invade. ‘I went to town and bought a Baedeker, a tourist guide, in order to find out what Norway was like,’ he later confessed.26 He read the relevant chapters, studied the maps and was back in Hitler’s office later that afternoon with a workable battle plan.

  Now, just eight weeks later, his life had changed for ever. His new home was Oslo (he had taken modest lodgings in the Royal Norwegian Automobile Club) and his troops were punching northwards at an astonishing speed. Southern Norway was already in their grasp and they were rapidly approaching the coastal town of Mosjøen, equidistant between Oslo and Tromsø, when they found themselves confronting a wholly unexpected enemy.

  Colin Gubbins and his Scissorforce guerrillas had set sail from Scotland after breakfast on 5 May, equipped with their snow-shoes, their pemmican and a growing sense of unease. They knew little about the enemy and even less about Norway. No one had thought to pack a Baedeker.

  The atrocious weather made them realize what a mistake it had been to discard their sheepskin coats. They shivered into their sou’westers and cursed the biting North Sea gale. It flung fine sheets of salty spray across the poop, along with ‘a mixture of sleet and snow’.27 As the metal deck turned to a slick of ice, some of the men began to question the wisdom of signing up for their Norwegian adventure.

  Shortly after midnight on the third day at sea, one of the crew sighted the snow-covered hills of Norway, lit by the glancing sheen of an Arctic moon. It might have made a romantic sight, were it not for the fact that those hills were already under the control of Nazi storm-troopers.

  The Ulster Prince and her two-ship escort reached land in the chill of dawn, dropping one group of men at the port of Bodø while Gubbins and the rest headed eighty miles further south to Mosjøen. Here, they were met by a company of French Chasseurs Alpins led by Captain Coche. The captain warned Gubbins of the perilous situation into which he was landing. German storm-troopers were just twenty miles away and Norwegian resistance was crumbling fast, having been ‘stunned by the rapidity of the enemy advance’. Gubbins had been promised that Captain Coche and his skiers would fight alongside his guerrillas. But when he asked the captain for support, he was met with a Gallic shake of the head. Coche said he was getting out while it was still possible, ‘on direct orders from Paris’.

  Gubbins and his men were in an acutely dangerous situation. They were in an exposed port with no air cover and little winter equipment. ‘In a panic,’ noted Gubbins tersely in his war diary. The captain of the Ulster Prince was also in a panic. ‘Get to hell off this ship,’ he shouted to the men. ‘I’ve got to get moving before the bombers arrive.’28

  Gubbins had spent many months studying the theory of guerrilla warfare and knew the strengths of a good leader. ‘Bold in action and cool in council, of great mental and physical endurance, and of strong personality.’29 Now, he proved himself up to scratch by taking command of a potentially catastrophic situation.

  His Indian Army officers were deeply impressed by his energy. Few on the North-West Frontier displayed such bravado in the face of adversity. Yet Gubbins ‘moved unceasingly by car, by bicycle, walking and even swimming in order to reach all detachments’.30 That tough Highland upbringing was paying dividends. Not many commanders would be prepared to swim a fjord in order to issue instructions to their troops.

  The dapper little officer with a freshly cut buttonhole had transmogrified into ‘a brute in a khaki shirt with the sleeves cut off, snoring prodigiously in a twenty-minute squirt of sleep, then waking up alert and talking coherently’. Even his physical appearance seemed to have changed: dressed in army fatigues, he seemed ‘very short and thick, with vast heavy arms that looked as if they could crush rocks and hung down to his knees’.31

  Gubbins was under no illusions that he could stop the relentless German advance. Nor could he even prevent the capture of Mosjøen. But he could put his guerrilla tactics to the test, if only to see how his men performed under pressure. Even if they didn’t kill a single German, it would provide him with invaluable experience.

  Norwegian partisans brought news that the German Army was making a lightning advance along the main road to Mosjøen and that the main body of troops was preceded by a large scouting party of soldiers on bicycles. Gubbins’s guerrilla mantra was blunt: ‘shoot, burn and destroy’.32 Now, he placed the defence of the Mosjøen road in the hands of one of his finest Indian Army experts, Captain Prendergast, along with a platoon of men. They were to prepare a nasty little surprise for the advancing Germans.

  The choice of Prendergast was wise. He was an expert in Pathan guerrilla tactics, which utilized ambush to devastating effect. He knew that success would be entirely dependent upon his men being able to hide, strike fast and then blend back into the snowy landscape. He spent the night reconnoitring the best place to attack.

  The snow on these bleak hillsides was waist deep and as soft as cream, quite different from the icy crusts of the North-West Frontier. It had clotted in the hollows, wiping contours and making every step slow and treacherous. ‘Exceedingly difficult going,’ wrote Prendergast, who tried hard to avoid sliding into drifts. ‘I had twice to be dug out of the snow with bayonets.’33

  After several hours of reconnoitring, he found the perfect place for attack. The main road narrowed to single-track as it crossed a fast-flowing river just a few miles from Mosjøen. There was a freshwater lake on the left side and an ice-blown ridge on the right. If the Germans could be ambushed here, while they were crossing the long bridge, they would have little chance of e
scape.

  There was an additional reason why Prendergast selected the bridge. It had small roadblocks at either end, requiring the cyclists to dismount in order to lift their bikes over the blocks. If Prendergast got his timing right, they would be desperately exposed.

  He told his novice guerrillas to bivouac themselves into the snow as he reminded them of the rules of a successful ambush. Surprise was the key factor, but speed was also important. It was kill or be killed. If his men didn’t shoot the Germans as they crossed the bridge, the tables would rapidly be turned.

  It was just after 5.30 a.m. by the time the last of the men were in position. The sky held the sullen grey of a spring dawn and a knife-blade wind was rasping across the snowfields. The mercury was far below zero. The men shivered uncontrollably as they awaited the German cyclists.

  Captain Prendergast had been monitoring the upper stretch of road for the better part of an hour when he detected a distant noise. A minute or so later, he spied the first of the cyclists. They were approaching in pairs and were separated by ten-yard intervals. They were oblivious to the imminent danger.

  Prendergast had been expecting them to be dressed in Arctic combat gear and was surprised to see that they were in uniform, ‘very smartly dressed in short tunics and high boots’. He was also surprised by how many there were: he counted sixty in total.

  He watched them intently as they approached the bridge. They braked, slowed to a standstill and then dismounted from their bikes and began lifting them over the roadblocks. They had no idea that they were being watched by fourteen pairs of eyes.

  Captain Prendergast had stressed to his men the importance of patience. If they opened fire too early, they risked missing their target. Too late, and they would expose themselves to unnecessary danger. It was nevertheless agonizing for the men to watch the Germans clamber back on to their bikes and start pedalling across the bridge.