Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  Still Prendergast held his fire. Indeed it was not until the first of the cyclists was halfway across the bridge that he shouted the order. A split second later, the two hidden machine guns let rip, spraying a lethal rain of bullets into the German cyclists.

  ‘At the first burst, from all arms, the majority of the cyclists seemed to fall.’ They crashed into each other, and then fell to the ground. ‘As they were lying spread-eagled on the crown of the road, [they] were clearly killed outright.’

  A few at the rear had time to react. They leaped off their bikes and threw themselves into a ditch at the side of the bridge. But Prendergast had planned for that. ‘As we could see right into that at different angles, we were able, by deliberate fire, to mop up the rest.’

  Prendergast had insisted that ruthlessness was the key to success: Germans were no different to the jihadist tribesmen of the North-West Frontier. He certainly displayed no squeamishness about killing in cold blood. He spotted several stragglers trying to make their escape and ‘was myself able to shoot one in such a manner’.34 His men brought down the rest.

  The Germans managed to fire just two rounds of ammunition before the engagement was over. A body count revealed that all sixty cyclists were dead. ‘The first burst of fire killed many and the rest, shouting Heil Hitler!, rode jinking through the dead to their own destruction.’35 The attack had been swift, brutal and effective. It was textbook guerrilla warfare, the first action of its kind since the outbreak of war.

  Gubbins’s hopes of repeating the attack proved impossible. The German drive northwards was unstoppable and the collapse of organized Norwegian resistance left his men dangerously exposed. Captain Prendergast himself warned against further action. The recruits were untrained in winter warfare ‘and quite unsuitable for the task’. He reminded Gubbins that to be successful, guerrilla forces needed to be immune to hardship. Yet these men ‘were exhausted and it is doubtful that they could have fought another day’.36

  Gubbins’s men retreated northwards to Bodø, blowing up everything they could, and then rejoined the comrades they had left a few days earlier. They clung to their precarious positions, but the shortening nights left them at a huge disadvantage. Just a few weeks earlier, Millis Jefferis had warned the Cabinet that the Germans had complete mastery of the skies. Now, General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst threw all his aerial firepower against Gubbins’s men as they awaited rescue from Bodø.

  The German pilots were determined to exact revenge for the ambush against their cycling comrades. Their attack began just as Captain William Fell arrived with a rescue fleet of six trawlers. Hearing a low throbbing noise, he turned his head to the sky. ‘At first, one reconnaissance plane circled high over the town, then came wave upon wave of bombers till the roar of the engines filled the air. Then that sinister whistle and scream and double crack as the bombs fell.’

  The destruction was meticulous, methodical and total. ‘From end to end and side to side bombs crashed. In half an hour the whole lovely innocent little town was blazing to heaven.’ A hundred planes took part in the raid and bombed the town for a further three hours. They even targeted the hospital, forcing its evacuation. Then, when the patients were being wheeled through the streets, they were machine-gunned from the air. Captain Fell was staggered by the ruthlessness of the Germans. ‘At the end nothing was left of Bodø but a blazing inferno of hell.’

  The British soldiers were no less dazed by the ferocity of the attack. ‘Gaunt, exhausted, they had despair stamped all over them.’ Yet Gubbins himself gave every appearance of enjoying himself. Captain Fell could scarcely believe the pluck of ‘the amazing little general who never slept but grinned enchantingly’.37 He seemed to be living entirely off adrenalin. ‘How and when he slept I can’t remember, but it was seldom for more than half an hour and was never in or on a bed.’

  Gubbins would not return to London for another fortnight, but when he did, he was received as something of a hero. The success of the Norwegian campaign had been limited in both scope and destruction: sixty dead cyclists was never going to stop an invasion. But it had shown – in a small way – that guerrilla warfare could be a highly effective form of fighting back at the Nazis.

  First to congratulate him was Joan Bright, who listened with pride to the stories from the battlefront and declared that he had ‘made a very respectable showing’.38 She said that his first guerrilla command had seen him ‘at the very top of his form’ and that his experiences ‘had left him full of confidence in his ability to handle major units in battle’.

  More important was the praise from General Auchinleck, overall commander of Allied forces in Norway. Gubbins, he said, had been ‘first class’39 and recommended that he should be given command of ‘the New Army’, as he dubbed the guerrillas. The mission also brought Gubbins a medal. Just days after landing back in Scotland, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order.

  There was an important lesson to be learned from the Scissorforce campaign, one that Gubbins would never forget. If British guerrillas were to defeat the Nazis, they needed to be properly trained and equipped. The difference between his own men and those of General Falkenhorst was striking. ‘The German infantry, who needed machine-carbines, had them; those who had snow-shoes could use them; they were specialists in Norwegian warfare, not just Poor Bloody Infantry.’40

  Above all else, his guerrillas needed to be the most elite force ever sent into battle. ‘We must see that our officers are properly selected and trained, and weed them ruthlessly so that only those who have a real devotion to duty and fighting spirit can achieve command.’ There was no room for slackers. ‘Officers who are useless must be reduced to the ranks and made to fight in the ranks.’

  The Norway campaign had also sharpened Gubbins’s concept of guerrilla fighting. Against the Nazis, he was prepared to use ‘hitherto unthinkable methods of warfare’, justifying it on the grounds that ‘this was total war, and total war is a very cruel business indeed’.41

  He suspected that he would have further business in Norway. For even as his men had been doing battle against the Germans, alarming intelligence reached London – intelligence that was handed to him on his return. Among the many Norwegian installations captured by the Nazis was the Norsk Hydro heavy water factory at Rjukan. One of their first acts was to order the factory ‘to increase the production of heavy water (deuterium oxide) at Vermork to 3,000 lbs’. This was ominous indeed, for heavy water was – as Gubbins well knew – ‘a basic requirement in her attempts to produce the atomic bomb’.42

  Such intelligence caused deep alarm in Whitehall. And it made Norsk Hydro a most important target for future sabotage.

  5

  The Wild Guerrillas of Kent

  SIXTY MILES FROM London, in rural Bedfordshire, Cecil Clarke had developed a theory about how to defeat the Nazis, one that might have been dismissed as fantasy were it not for the fact that it was a theory shared by Hitler.

  In his leisure time, at weekends and late in the evening, Cecil put his caravans to one side and indulged his passion for the theory of war. Quietly, obsessively, he embarked on a study of scores of historical battles, from Arsuf and Crécy to Gandamak and Majuba. In each case, he investigated the weapons used by the victors, be they muskets, wire guns or lyddite shells. His findings were startling and formed the subject of a brilliant little thesis he wrote entitled The Development of Weapon Potential.

  Clarke contended that Captain Henry Shrapnel’s revolutionary spherical case-shot had swept the British to victory at the Battle of Vimeiro, and George Koehler’s newly invented Depressing Carriage had helped defeat the Great Siege of Gibraltar. The Sussex-made breech-loading guns of Elizabethan England had proved decisive in countless sea battles, while the Duke of Marlborough’s greatest triumphs had been possible only because of the precision flintlock muskets made by Messrs R. Brook of Birmingham. Clarke concluded that in a thousand years of conflict, ‘it is difficult, if not impossible, to find an instance in which British force
s achieved victory except with a novel weapon in their hands’.1

  He had long argued that Hitler’s downfall would at some point necessitate an Allied attack on the heavily defended western frontier of Nazi Germany. And this posed a significant problem. The Siegfried Line was an impregnable system of 18,000 interlocking bunkers, tank traps and ditches. According to one report, ‘the ground is chequered with little forts, machine-gun nests and strong points’.2

  Clarke’s experience of trench warfare in the First World War had taught him that infantry was at its most exposed when advancing towards fortified bunkers. Any assault on the Siegfried Line was certain to provoke a deluge of fire from the German defenders, making a conventional attack doomed to failure. Technology alone could be guaranteed to breach the German defences, but it would have to be technology so strikingly original that it would catch the Germans completely unawares. With this in mind, Cecil began to sketch the design of a hydraulic excavating machine of such immense power that it could plough a deep trench through the Siegfried Line, uprooting topsoil, tank traps and bunkers.

  Clarke’s digger was a veritable beast of a machine, the like of which had never been seen in the history of mechanized transport. It was 90 feet long, weighed 140 tons and was equipped with a revolutionary pump system that propelled it relentlessly forward. At full thrust, it could advance at a rate of approximately four miles in a single night, carving a trench that was ten feet wide and eight feet deep.

  Clarke was so proud of his design that he took the unusual step of writing a letter to the War Office, enclosing plans of his invention. ‘I envisage a machine which would, by hydraulic means, more or less row itself through the ground. This is rendered possible by the use of the latest hydraulic pump gear.’3

  Officials in Whitehall were astonished by Clarke’s drawings, not least because they had also been trying to work out how to cut a swathe through the German defences. More than £100,000 had been earmarked for their project and a replica of the Siegfried Line had been built on Salisbury Plain. They had got so far as to build a prototype machine, but it was discovered to have a major flaw: it got stuck whenever it hit a large concrete obstacle.

  Clarke had foreseen this problem. His digger was armed with a multitude of cylindrical ammonal charges powerful enough to shatter any concrete obstacles that lay in its path. The machine would then plough through the broken remnants until it had forced a passage across to the far side of the line.

  Clarke’s idea was so groundbreaking, in every sense, that it was taken directly to Winston Churchill, whose fondness for unconventional machinery was well known. He immediately wanted to know the identity of this maverick inventor. He then ordered the government’s leading scientific adviser, Professor Lindemann, to go and meet Cecil Clarke. He also sent a personal letter to 171 Tavistock Road, Bedford, praising Clarke for his work.

  Events now proceeded swiftly. After his meeting with Lindemann, Clarke was summoned to Whitehall for a more thorough interview. The notes of this interview were later filed in a box labelled ‘Most Secret: to be kept under lock and key’.4

  Mr Clarke called to see me by appointment this morning. I formed a very good opinion of him. He is frank, direct, obviously knowledgeable, very keen to put his whole weight into the war effort … Mr Clarke is accustomed to secret work and has access to a special naval school [Bedford swimming pool] where certain experiments have been carried out by him.

  The official who interviewed Clarke also paid a visit to Millis Jefferis, who was known to have utilized Clarke’s talents for the creation of the limpet mine. Jefferis gave his assurances that Clarke was a staunch patriot, ‘absolutely reliable’ and in possession of a febrile imagination when it came to the design of unorthodox weaponry. He was the sort of person who could create weapons for the most elaborate sabotage operations.

  Clarke was immediately offered the job of assistant director of the Naval Land Section, in charge of developing his monstrous digging machine. He accepted that same day and wrote a second letter to Churchill thanking him for his support. ‘You can rely upon me to push forward this project with all possible speed.’5

  Clarke’s letter arrived in Whitehall on 10 May, a momentous day for Churchill, for the country and for Colin Gubbins’s staff at MI(R). Joan Bright was seated at her desk when the ‘ticker-tacker’ telegram machine began spitting out an urgent message. It had been sent in such a hurry that it contained a typographic error that might have been amusing were it not so serious. ‘Hotler’s troops have overrun Luxembourg; Dutch and Belgian Cabinets appeal to France; Hotler proclaims fall of Belgium and Holland; Hotler says he will crush Britain.’

  One of Gubbins’s team read the telegram to everyone in the room and then turned to Joan and wryly remarked that if Hotler was replaced with Hitler, ‘the meaning will immediately become apparent’.

  The invasion of Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg was grave indeed, but it was not the only big news that day. In the early evening, Neville Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister and Britain had a new wartime leader.

  ‘Winston is in!’ wrote Joan that night. She also made a note of Churchill’s conviction that the country’s future was entirely dependent ‘on winning this battle, here in Britain, now, this summer’.6 In her opinion, there was only one man who could win it, and that was Colin Gubbins.

  * * *

  Colin Gubbins did not arrive back in London from Norway until Monday, 10 June, a day of unremittingly bleak news. Italy had declared war on Great Britain and German panzers were thrusting westwards to Paris. Although more than 300,000 Allied troops had been plucked from the beaches of Dunkirk, an entire division of 51st Highlanders – 10,000 men from Gubbins’s home turf – were trapped in the town of Saint-Valéry-en-Caux. There was no hope of rescuing them.

  Gubbins had long warned the War Office that Hitler’s Polish blitzkrieg tactics might be repeated against the French. He had even put his warning into writing after returning from his mission to Warsaw. But his words had been received ‘with various degrees of scepticism’ and even downright mockery. Whitehall officials had told him it was ‘inconceivable that the German panzer tactics could succeed against such a sophisticated defence as the Maginot Line’.7

  Now, those same officials were forced to eat their words. Hitler’s panzers had swept to the north of the Maginot Line, avoiding it altogether as they thrust deep into eastern France. As the key Channel ports fell into German hands, War Office officials changed their tune about Gubbins. On Saturday, 22 June they took a decision that was unexpected, secret and immediate.

  Gubbins knew nothing of what was taking place until he found himself summoned to a private meeting in Whitehall. Once there, he was left in no doubt as to its importance, for there was none of the usual preamble and small talk. ‘The briefing was brisk and to the point,’ he later wrote. ‘I was told: “We must expect the German invasion at any time.”’8 Hitler was poised to attack by air and sea and was likely to use the same blitzkrieg tactics that had proved so successful in Poland, France and the Low Countries. Every human resource was to be thrown against the Nazi invaders as they sought to land on British beaches, but no one doubted the stark reality of the outcome: Hitler’s panzer divisions would almost certainly succeed in creating a beachhead.

  Those same forces also looked set to seize strategic positions right across southern England, for military intelligence suggested that extensive parachute drops would ‘put areas behind the lines in German hands’.9 It was not just possible, but probable, that large parts of Kent and Sussex would be under Nazi occupation within hours of the invasion.

  During Gubbins’s five-week absence in Norway, the task of planning how to sabotage any Nazi-controlled beachhead had fallen to his old Caxton Street colleague, Lawrence Grand of Section D. Grand had begun the process of hiding secret caches of explosives in areas close to the expected invasion zone. But as with everything done by Grand, there was an element of fantasy to his work. He had refused to liaise with police or loc
al authorities, leading to a string of unfortunate incidents. One Section D agent ‘in pin-striped trousers and dark coat turned up in a village and asked the bewildered postmaster, whom he had never seen before, to hold a store of explosives for him’.10 Not surprisingly, the postmaster phoned the village constable who promptly arrested the man.

  Lawrence Grand was far too mercurial to be entrusted with the nation’s defences, which was why Gubbins had been summoned to Whitehall. The Chiefs of General Staff had decided to place him in charge of the defence of southern England. He was ‘instructed to form an organisation to fight the Germans behind their lines’.11 This secret guerrilla force was to operate inside the envisaged German beachhead, wreaking havoc on supply lines.

  Gubbins’s specific task was to cause such destruction that the Nazi advance on London would become impossible. He was told he could recruit anyone he wanted, including his comrades at MI(R), and could call upon any of the weaponry being developed by Millis Jefferis. He was also promised unlimited financial resources in this life-or-death struggle. Indeed, he was offered ‘a blank cheque’, although his Scottish prudence prompted him to question whether ‘there was any money in the bank to meet it’.12

  Security was paramount. Neither the Germans, nor the country at large, were to know about this clandestine army. He was ‘to report directly to General Ironside’ – the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of Home Forces – ‘and the Prime Minister’.

  Gubbins accepted the post immediately, even though he had misgivings. ‘As I left the room,’ he later recalled, ‘I realized it wasn’t going to be a particularly easy task.’13 Yet it was an exhilarating one. He was to be in command of his own private guerrilla army charged with defending the realm. The army was to be known as Auxiliary Units, a bland name that was suitably vague. Gubbins felt that it covered ‘a multitude of possible lines of action and wouldn’t create too much suspicion’.14