Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  He was fired by the sense of urgency, aware that Hitler’s generals were working day and night to prepare the invasion. ‘At the shortest, we had six weeks before a full scale invasion could be launched.’15 Six weeks was not long to train and equip a guerrilla army: his first decision was to poach Peter Wilkinson from MI(R). Wilkinson had shown himself to be professional, creative and quick to learn, all valuable skills in guerrilla warfare. He accepted the job with alacrity and then asked what he would be expected to do. Gubbins gave him a typically forthright response. ‘Blowing up bridges, slashing car tyres and creating a pretty uncomfortable situation.’ He added that they had been given carte blanche to act in whatever way they saw fit, a freelance approach to warfare that particularly appealed to Wilkinson. ‘Walking across the park in London with Gubbins that afternoon,’ he said, ‘we started making it up, and continued making it up for two months or more.’16

  Next to be hired by Gubbins was Bill Beyts of the Rajputana Rifles, ‘a deceptively mild-mannered regular’17 who had been one of the twenty officers serving under his command in Norway. The Kent coastline had none of the geographic features of the North-West Frontier, but Beyts was a master of guerrilla warfare and was placed in charge of training.

  Gubbins’s MI(R) room at the War Office was too small to accommodate his growing staff. He was therefore allotted new offices at 7 Whitehall Place, an anonymous white stone building close to Downing Street. One of his early recruits, Donald Hamilton-Hill, was struck by the clandestine nature of the organization. All the other rooms had ‘not only the designation of the department, but also the names, ranks, regiments and decorations of those who inhabited them’. But Gubbins’s office was completely anonymous, with ‘nothing on the door, not even a number’.18

  Gubbins intended his Auxiliary Units to be an elite force of highly trained specialists: ‘very small units, locally raised, and able to melt away after action’.19 They were to be quite different from the Home Guard, whose amateurishness had become apparent within weeks of it being established. He divided the British coast into twelve sectors, each of which was to have its own field commander. Of the twelve, Kent was by far the most important. It was widely believed that Hitler would land his invading army on the east Kent coast, where the broad beaches and low-lying grassland favoured the invader. The beachhead – and the fight for survival – was likely to be in Thanet, close to the little villages of Guston, Woodnesborough and Great Mongeham. If the invaders pushed further inland, then the critical battles would take place in the Kentish farmland between Canterbury and the coast. It was essential that the commander of this stretch of territory should be of the highest calibre.

  Gubbins never had any doubts as to who that person should be. Peter Fleming belonged to that rare breed of gentleman who seemed to have it all: movie-star looks, a glamorous wife (Celia Johnson, of Brief Encounter fame) and a patrician grandeur that had been finely honed at Eton. ‘Tall and slender, rich and urbane,’ wrote one, ‘he would appear on duty in well cut riding breeches and highly polished riding boots.’20

  The older brother of Ian (of James Bond fame), he had found celebrity after hacking his way through the Amazonian jungle in search of the lost explorer, Colonel Percy Fawcett. His account of the trip, Brazilian Adventure, had become an immediate best-seller.

  Fleming was a close friend of Joan Bright, who was so impressed with his disdain for physical comfort that she had first suggested his appointment to MI(R) almost a year earlier. ‘He was a four-square, basic, solitary sort of person,’ she wrote, ‘immune to luxury, to heat or to cold, with a rock-like quality which made him the most staunch of friends.’21 He had already proved his mettle in Norway, where he had served with the expeditionary force: now, he relished the idea of playing dirty in Kent.

  Gubbins provided him with a detailed brief on the sort of men required for his Kentish guerrilla army: men ‘who knew the areas in which they would operate as well as their own homes’ and men ‘who could move about from coppice to coppice, in darkness and daylight, making use of every bush and ditch’. In particular, Fleming was to hire local people ‘who could appear from nowhere, hit hard and then vanish as mysteriously as they came’.22 They were to work at night, under the blanket of darkness, and were to be armed with specialist weaponry.

  Gubbins was quick to see the importance of hiring people who were intimately connected with the areas of land they were charged with defending. ‘Poachers and gamekeepers, fishing and shooting ghillies, stalkers, Verderers in the New Forest, farmers and farm labourers, tin miners and coal miners, market gardeners and fishermen.’23 Knowledge of underground caves and abandoned cellars ‘would be particularly valuable for the siting of caches and hideouts we visualized for storing arms and rations’.24

  The defence of each of his twelve sectors was to require very different skills. To this end, Gubbins travelled around England personally recruiting suitable individuals. In Lincolnshire, he sought out Fenmen ‘who knew every foot of their marshes and tricky fens’. They could strike invading paratroopers with lightning speed ‘and then return to their muddy hideouts where any following soldiers would have been quickly lost, drowned or trapped in the mud’.

  Next stop was Hampshire, where he recruited forest rangers, ‘men who could appear and vanish in the forest as silently and swiftly as their own red deer’. And then it was off to the vitally important south coast, where he hired lobstermen and fishermen. ‘From boyhood days they knew every creek and nook from which fishing boats might be able to glide silently out and lob explosives at landing enemy units.’25

  After a hectic fortnight of recruiting, Fleming felt confident that his own strike force would be able to cause serious damage inside any German beachhead. ‘The guerrillas would have a sporting chance, not merely of inflicting one suicidal pinprick, but of remaining a thorn in the enemy’s flesh for weeks or perhaps even in some cases for months.’26

  * * *

  Colin Gubbins had been in his new job less than four weeks when the threatened invasion became a dramatic reality. On 16 July 1940 Adolf Hitler issued Directive No. 16, the Nazi invasion of Great Britain. Even Churchill felt that the final showdown was now just days away. ‘The scene has darkened swiftly,’ he wrote in a letter to President Roosevelt. ‘We expect to be attacked here ourselves, both from the air and by parachute and airborne troops in the near future and we are getting ready for it.’27

  Hitler’s Operation Sealion was as grand in scale as the War Office had feared: an amphibious landing of 67,000 men, supported by an airborne division that was to be parachuted into Kent and Sussex. The aim of this first wave was to seize and fortify a beachhead before pushing outwards towards their first major operational objective, a front line stretching from the Bristol Channel to Maldon in Essex.

  The plans were meticulous – far more so than for the Norwegian invasion – and covered details of the occupation itself. The former German ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was being widely touted for the job of Reichskommissar: his appointment was to be followed by a ‘cleansing’ operation undertaken by one of Dr Franz Six’s Einsatzgruppen death squads. Some 3,000 notable people were to be arrested, including Noël Coward, Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf. Britain’s 300,000 Jews were to be interned, with an even darker fate awaiting them.

  A further plan envisaged the deportation of vast numbers of people. ‘The able-bodied male population between the ages of 17 and 45 will, unless the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling, be interned and dispatched to the Continent.’28 Britain was to be treated far more harshly than other occupied countries. Not even Poland had hitherto been subjected to such a brutal regime.

  Within hours of Hitler’s issuing of Directive No. 16, Gubbins summoned a meeting of his twelve newly appointed guerrilla commanders, with Peter Fleming as the first among equals. Others included the veteran Greenland explorer Andrew Croft, and Donald Hamilton-Hill, whose forebears had fought with distinction against Napoleon in Egypt.

&nb
sp; His briefing reflected the depressing reality of the situation. ‘In clear, concise terms,’ said Hamilton-Hill, ‘he described the situation in Britain as it then stood.’ Gubbins reminded his twelve appointees that they were guerrillas, not regular soldiers, and had been selected because they had ‘a non-military and independent approach to life’.29

  Peter Fleming was to display a professionalism sorely absent in the regular army. He studied every nook and hollow of the Thanet countryside before deciding to establish his guerrilla headquarters in a half-timbered farmhouse called the Garth in Bilting, a village some fifteen miles inland from the east coast. It was likely to fall just outside the initial German beachhead, making it the ideal place for him to mastermind his operations. It also became his principal weapons’ dump, with the big barn next to the house stashed ‘from end to end and from floor to roof with explosives, ammunition and weapons, including half a dozen longbows’.

  Fleming had good reason for acquiring the longbows. He intended to teach his men to use them ‘to hurl incendiary charges into German petrol dumps’.30 Without fuel, Hitler’s tanks and jeeps would be trapped inside their beachhead.

  Fleming was shrewd enough to realize that his men would need underground cells if they were to fight a sustained dirty war against the occupying Nazis. ‘A guerrilla without a base,’ he told them, ‘is no better than a desperate straggler.’31 He also knew that cells would need to be well stocked if the guerrillas were to continue their operations over many weeks. Each one was to be self-sufficient and stocked with food rations, chemical Elsan toilets, wireless sets and large quantities of explosives.

  It was essential that they should remain undiscovered by the Germans. To this end, the men concealed the entrances and exits with gnarled, ivy-clad roots, while the ventilation funnels and water supply pipes were interwoven with branches, leaves and man-made camouflage. One of the key cells in the Kent area set the gold standard for the rest: anyone wishing to enter had to drop a marble down a mouse-hole. The marble rolled down a twelve-foot-long pipe and into a tin can, a signal to the men below ground to open the trapdoor concealed in the roots of a tree.

  The planning of the cells was combined with an upper-class savoir faire about the finer things in life. One group of army officers was invited to a meal in one of these cells and expected to be served powdered rations in an earthen hole. But when they slipped down through the trapdoor, ‘they were faced with a long dining table covered with a crisp damask cloth. The candles were in candelabra and the cutlery on the table gleamed.’32 Even when training for ungentlemanly warfare, Gubbins’s guerrillas remembered to dine as gentlemen.

  * * *

  While Gubbins was busy directing the Auxiliary Units, his colleagues in MI(R) found themselves caught in a whirl of energy. They embarked on what one of the staff described as ‘a whole series of Scarlet Pimpernel missions’, crossing the English Channel in great secrecy in order to secure limited but vital objectives. Colonel Chidson succeeded in smuggling himself into Amsterdam and ‘returning to London by the skin of his teeth with many thousands of pounds of industrial diamonds’. Louis Franck made it to Brussels and returned with a stockpile of Belgian gold. Tommy Davies took himself to Calais ‘and stripped Courtauld’s factory in the town of several hundred thousand pounds’ worth of platinum’.33 He was almost caught red-handed.

  Other members of the extended team were sent to Albania, Greece, Hungary and Egypt in order to prepare anti-Nazi patriots for guerrilla warfare. There was an overwhelming desire to ensure that the previous year’s debacle with Poland – too little, too late – would not be repeated.

  Millis Jefferis and his team were meanwhile working hard to supply the Auxiliary Units with all the weaponry they needed. The persistence of Stuart Macrae had enabled MI(R)c to move out of its cramped quarters at the War Office: it was now based in the former headquarters of the International Broadcasting Company at 35 Portland Place. Here, in a veritable rabbit warren of underground rooms, he had installed lathes, workbenches and specialist engineering tools.

  ‘I could never have achieved this impressive result by myself,’ confessed Macrae. ‘It became possible only because Joan Bright’ – who seemed to know every general in town – ‘took pity on me and dropped the right words in the right ears.’ It enabled the team to speed up production of their booby traps, phosphorus bombs, Molotov cocktails, detonators, Castrators and delayed-action fuses.

  They also produced a prototype anti-tank grenade that was a triumph of homespun engineering. The Sticky Bomb was invented for a specific purpose: to knock out German tanks as they thundered through the Kent countryside. It consisted of a glass flask filled with nitro-glycerine. This was then wrapped in a sleeve (to prevent it from fragmenting on impact) and coated in toffee-like glue. The glue was a unique concoction created by Mr Hartley, the chief chemist at a Stockport-based chemical manufacturer called Kay Brothers.

  The Sticky Bomb was thrown by means of a glue-free handle. On hitting the target, the glass shattered inside the sleeve and fused the nitro-glycerine to the tank. It then exploded, creating a deadly inward blast that flung high-velocity shrapnel into the interior of the tank.

  A prototype of the bomb mistakenly found its way to the Ordnance Board, whose officers expressed revulsion that such a dirty weapon could have been conceived by a civilized human being. They told Macrae that it ‘broke all the rules of the game and just could not be permitted’.

  Churchill thought otherwise. After weeks of frustrating hold-ups in production, he wrote a blunt note to Jefferis. It was scribbled in his own hand ‘on 10 Downing Street notepaper’ and its message was perfunctory: ‘Sticky Bomb. Make one million. WSC.’

  Within hours of getting the green light, Jefferis’s freelance contractors set to work. The flasks were made by a specialist glass-blowing company run by a certain Hugo Woods of Leeds, while the glue was supplied by Kay Brothers, who were also tasked with assembling the grenades. But the order was so huge that Macrae found it necessary to call upon the help of other craftsmen and small businesses. ‘Our contractors’ service was operating so well that it was no trouble at all to arrange this production work,’ he said. ‘One firm made the handles, another the metal covers, another the glass flasks, and another the wool socks.’ Once this was done, the Sticky Bombs were transported to ICI’s outpost factory at Ardeer on the west coast of Scotland, where they were filled with explosive.

  Gubbins’s guerrillas were trained to use the Sticky Bomb and found that it exceeded all expectations. It was better than any defensive weapon available to the regular army. The Americans would later put the bomb through a series of stringent tests before accepting it for their army. There was to be just one change. The name – Sticky Bomb – was deemed too homespun. Henceforth, it was to be known as MKII No. 74 Grenade. Stuart Macrae was delighted with the outcome. Years later, he would write that ‘although the W-Bomb started us off … it was the Sticky Bomb that first brought us fame’.34 It was a fame restricted to a tiny clutch of people, but it included the Prime Minister and his chiefs of staff.

  Winston Churchill constantly expressed concern that the Auxiliary Units didn’t have enough weapons. ‘These men must have revolvers!’35 he scribbled in the margin of one memo. They got them soon afterwards, along with American .32 Colt automatics acquired from the New York Police Department. Each underground cell was also equipped with at least one tommy sub-machine gun.

  * * *

  Colin Gubbins’s office-based work came to an end shortly after five o’clock each Friday afternoon when he and Peter Wilkinson clambered into their Humber and drove down to Kent. Here, they spent the weekend helping to train Peter Fleming’s guerrilla unit. The work was exhausting and physically demanding. ‘Into this short time,’ wrote Gubbins, ‘we had to cram rifle and revolver [training], hand grenades, Molotov and sticky bombs, mock ambushes and raids, night work, penetration of defences including barbed wire, hide out construction.’

  Colonel ‘Billy’ Beyts o
f the Rajputana Rifles led these weekend sessions. His speciality, perfected on the North West Frontier, was the art of silent killing. He had learned how to move through the darkness without making any noise; now, he stressed upon Gubbins’s men the importance of moving with stealth rather than speed. ‘If you have eight hours of darkness, then use four to reach your objective and four to get away again. Don’t hurry and be killed.’36

  As the guerrilla army grew in strength, Gubbins needed a larger base that could serve as a professional training centre, preferably somewhere in remote countryside. He procured the services of a Home Guard captain, the Honourable Michael Henderson, and sent him on a tour of suitable properties.

  Henderson knew just the place. Coleshill was a Wiltshire country estate whose sprawling grounds lay adjacent to those owned by his brother. The house itself was a large Palladian manor designed by Inigo Jones. It was the home of Miss Molly Pleydell-Bouverie and her elderly sister (members of the Earl of Radnor’s extended family), who were somewhat surprised to be told that their home had been commandeered by the War Office. The two ladies were permitted to remain in the house, even though it was to be overrun by guerrillas. They soon regretted their decision to stay, for their beloved dogs were so petrified by the constant explosions that they had to be put on a diet of aspirin and brandy.

  Coleshill’s private parkland with its unploughed fields and fast-flowing streams made it the ideal training camp for Gubbins’s private army. The coursework taught the men how to kill, with special emphasis on the most vulnerable points of the body. It was not for the faint-hearted. ‘Mouth-slitting, ear-trapping to break ear drums, eye-gouging, the grallock (or disembowelling), rib-lifting, “lifting the gates” – temporary dislocation of the jaw – ear-tearing, nose chopping, shin-scraping with the edge of a boot, shoulder jerking.’ The hands-on training included practising killing ‘on a stuffed dummy mounted on a doorway with elastic bands’. The men were told that once the victim had been disembowelled, he was to be castrated.