Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  Both men answered without displaying any emotion. Gabčik told Moravec that ‘he viewed the mission as an act of war and the risk of death as natural.’ Kubis simply thanked Colonel Moravec ‘for choosing him for a task of such importance’.22

  * * *

  Colin Gubbins had been helping to organize the technicalities of the Czech mission while the assassins had been training in Arisaig. He had recently appointed the brilliant young Cambridge graduate Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard to head his Czech Section. It was a wise choice. Hesketh-Prichard had previously lived in Prague and knew the city well. Now, his task was to help with the detailed planning of the assassination.

  It soon became clear that the principal problems were technical ones. ‘Chief among these was the difficulty of providing a bomb which could be concealed in a briefcase, used at short range without killing the operator, but which was nevertheless sufficiently powerful to penetrate the armour-plating of the Reichsprotektor’s official motor car.’23

  Heydrich’s car was likely to be within range for just four or five seconds as it slowed down at the Holešovice crossroads. The fuse on a standard grenade was too long for an attack where speed would be essential. Nor could a grenade be guaranteed to pierce the armour-plated Mercedes. Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard realized that an explosive device would have to be specially designed and built. Millis Jefferis’s team at the Firs would have been well placed to construct such a weapon, but they were deluged with work in the final months of 1941. Hesketh-Prichard turned instead to Cecil Clarke, who had shown considerable mastery at blowing up cars with his specially adapted spigot mortar.

  Clarke agreed that a standard grenade would not puncture the armour-plating of Heydrich’s car. He also knew that an anti-tank grenade, which would blow a hole in almost anything, was far too cumbersome to be thrown across a road. It was almost a foot long and weighed some four and a half pounds. It was not a weapon for assassination. What was needed was some sort of hybrid grenade, powerful enough to pierce armour-plating but also light enough to be thrown. Clarke now began sketching a uniquely destructive explosive device, modelling it on the cylindrical No. 73 Anti-Tank percussion grenade. With its screw-on cap, it looked like a thermos flask. Cecil decided to streamline it still further, packing its top end with a pound of nitro-glycerine explosive. This reduced the weight by a third, making it a great deal easier to throw. He then fitted the grenade with a No. 247 fuse made of black bakelite that was ‘designed to function on impact, irrespective of how the grenade landed’.24 It would detonate, come what may.

  The explosive was held in situ by adhesive tape, which lent a Heath Robinson touch to the grenade. But Clarke’s weapon was anything but makeshift. When it exploded, it was designed to shatter with such force that shards of metal shrapnel would tear through the bodywork of the car with unbelievable force, inflicting devastating injuries on anyone inside. It was so lethal that the two assassins were warned to take great care ‘to avoid the powerful blast’.25 They needed to take cover within seconds of throwing the device.

  There was perhaps another reason why Clarke warned them to take cover, one that needed to remain absolutely secret. It is possible that he had laced his grenade with botulinal toxin, a deadly poison that had been developed at the biological warfare wing of Porton Laboratories and given the codename X. The Porton scientist who developed substance X, Paul Fildes, was a genius in biological warfare. He later confided to two scientists that he ‘had a hand’ in the death of Heydrich. Indeed, he told the American biologist Alvin Pappenheimer that Heydrich’s murder ‘was the first notch on my pistol’.26 There are no other records to substantiate his claim and Clarke himself never admitted to using any biological agent. Yet he was certainly interested in biological warfare and at one point had even managed to acquire his own supply of poison gas from a ship in Barry docks, exchanging it for a large box of plastic explosives. ‘No one thought it much of a swap,’ said Eveleigh ‘Dumbo’ Newman, who had been training at Brickendonbury Manor at the time.27

  Newman and his comrades never ceased to be amazed by Clarke’s capacity to invent dirty weapons, unaware that he was fighting an intensely personal battle against the Nazis. It was a battle born out of an experience on the Italian Front in the final hours of the First World War. As he crossed the corpse-strewn River Piave in November 1918, he had stumbled across a shot and dying Austrian soldier who stretched out his arm, imploring, quizzical, looking at him ‘with composure, with an enquiring and kindly expression’. Clarke felt a surge of emotion unlike anything he had experienced before. ‘As I shook his hand,’ he wrote, ‘a feeling of newness spread over me, and the scene appeared brighter and more intense. It was as though the illumination of the sun had been intensified, and I became unconscious of the presence of my body.’ The mysterious glow in his soul ‘lasted probably two seconds’, before being replaced by an icy chill as he watched the man die at almost same moment as the armistice.28 More than a year later, Clarke was still replaying the scene in his head.

  That poignant encounter was to trigger a complete mental collapse in the aftermath of the war. Indeed, it caused him such anguish that he refused to talk about it with anyone, preferring to commit his most intimate feelings to a private notebook. Yet it was ultimately to change his life, for when he eventually emerged from his breakdown, he had developed his own theory about how to fight a war with a minimum of human casualties. Sabotage and targeted killing – eradicating individual monsters like Heydrich – was better by far than the slaughter of conscripted civilians.

  The effectiveness of his Heydrich grenade, and therefore of the assassination itself, was to be entirely dependent on the accuracy of the person throwing it. This was deemed so important that the two assassins were taken to Aston House in Hertfordshire where they were given intense training under the auspices of Cecil Clarke, Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard and Peter Wilkinson, who, like Hesketh-Prichard, had previously lived in Prague. The men ‘spent several Arcadian afternoons in the autumn sunshine carrying out field trials on an ancient Austin saloon’. To make the trials as accurate as possible, the vehicle ‘had been rigged up with armour-plated panels and was towed behind a tractor’. A second car was also used, a Canadian Buick, that had a colourful history. It was one of two Buicks owned by King Edward VIII and had taken him to Windsor Castle to make his abdication speech. Clarke had bought the car shortly before the war and loaned it to Brickendonbury, where it was used for military trials.

  The Czech assassins and their trainers practised with the car travelling at various speeds. Hesketh-Prichard was the first to throw the grenade and was surprised how easy it was to hit the target, although he reasoned that this was probably because he came from a long line of keen cricketers. His father had played for the Gentlemen versus the Players at Lords before the First World War and Alfgar, too, was a skilled bowler. Indeed he had ‘no difficulty in hitting the moving target at speeds of up to 25mph’, the maximum that Heydrich’s car could conceivably be travelling as it approached the Holešovice crossroads.

  Gabčik and Kubis found it rather harder to throw the grenade, ‘not having been reared in a cricketing tradition’.29 The two of them were so concerned about missing their target that they decided to carry a veritable arsenal of additional weaponry. In addition to Clarke’s six percussion grenades, they also took two Colt.38 Supers, four spare magazines, four Mills bombs, one of Clarke’s tree spigot mortars, a Sten gun, ten pounds of gelignite and ‘one lethal hypodermic syringe’.30 No explanation was given for this last item. As with Clarke’s grenade, any mention of biological weaponry was carefully expunged from the records.

  The two men were kept apart from everyone else during their stay at Brickendonbury Manor. Secrecy had always been Cecil Clarke’s priority and this mission was the most secret of all. When Sue Ryder arrived at Brickendonbury shortly before Gabčik and Kubis, she was told to keep her ears and mouth closed. ‘Anybody who comes here is not expected to ask questions. You will find out what you need to know, bu
t always keep your own mouth shut.’31

  Back in London, secretary Margaret had one last memo to type, one that set out the precise details of the killing. Gabčik and Kubis were to be disguised as street cleaners and ‘were to begin sweeping the road at a selected corner. Their explosives and arms were to be concealed in their dustman’s barrow.’ If Clarke’s grenade failed to kill Heydrich, they were to shoot him ‘at close quarters with their Colt .38 Super’.32

  Once the two men had undergone their parachute training and learned every last twist and turn in the road layout of Prague, they were taken for a night at the theatre with Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard and Peter Wilkinson. Their behaviour took both of them by surprise. When the actors on stage embraced, ‘they thought it screamingly funny and roared with laughter.’ But during all the jokey parts, ‘they remained stolidly glum.’ To inject a note of cheer, the four went off to the Criterion afterwards for ‘a slap-up supper’. Wilkinson found them ‘utterly reliable, utterly fearless, absolutely devoted to their cause’. He was most impressed. ‘I could not have admired them more.’33

  They were taken out again on the eve of their departure, this time by Colonel Moravec. He escorted them to an Italian restaurant in Bayswater where they enjoyed the food, cracked jokes and made no comment about the final item of equipment that Moravec handed to them as they ate their meal: ‘two capsules of quick-acting poison to be used on themselves in the event of unbearable torture’.

  The men were driven directly to Tangmere aerodrome in Sussex, arriving there in the deep winter twilight. They were met by Flight Lieutenant Ron Hockey, whose task was to fly his Halifax to the Protectorate and drop them into the night sky.

  As the men boarded the plane, Gabčik turned to Colonel Moravec. ‘You can rely on us, Colonel,’ he said. ‘We shall fulfil our mission as ordered.’34

  * * *

  Nothing was heard from the two assassins for more than a month. In London, it was assumed that something had gone seriously awry. This was indeed the case. The men had been dropped far from Plzen, their intended landing point, and Gabčik had injured himself on landing. But the men were fortunate that local villagers had heard the Halifax overhead and guessed that it was dropping agents. They went in search of the two men and found them hiding out in a quarry.

  Gabčik and Kubis accepted assistance with great reluctance, for in doing so they were breaking the first rule of their mission: no contact with the local resistance. Yet they also realized that those locals had almost certainly saved the operation from being aborted. For the next six weeks, they were hidden in safe houses as they planned where and when to strike.

  They finally settled on a date for action on receipt of crucial information from a member of the resistance, Josef Novotny. He was responsible for the castle clocks in Prague Castle and he overheard precise details of Heydrich’s travel arrangements for 27 May, including the exact time at which his car would be travelling into Prague. Gabčik and Kubis decided to wait no longer: the assassination was set for that day.

  Both men were confident in every aspect of the attack except one. They still did not trust Cecil Clarke’s percussion grenade. When they headed to Holešovice crossroads on the morning of the attack, they took the precaution of packing their Sten gun and Colt pistols, in addition to Clarke’s grenades. The weapons were placed in an old case and then covered in a thick layer of grass as a precaution against any police inspection. This was not as bizarre as it sounded. There was such a shortage of food in Prague that many people had started to breed rabbits. To feed them, they collected grass and weeds from the local parks.

  Gabčik and Kubis took a train to the suburb of Žižkov, where they collected bicycles that had been left for them at a prearranged spot. They then cycled to the junction at Holešovice and made contact with an accomplice, Josef Valcik, who was to stand at the top of the hill and flash a mirror when Heydrich’s car came into view.

  The two assassins now took up their position at the very point at which Heydrich’s car was expected to slow to walking pace. Gabčik assembled the Sten gun while Kubis prepared Clarke’s percussion grenade. Both men kept their eyes fixed on Valcik at the top of the hill, waiting nervously for the signal.

  Heydrich was late. The clock sounded ten o’clock and then ten fifteen. Unbeknown to the assassins, the Reichsprotektor had decided to take a stroll around the castle gardens with his wife and three children. It was much later than usual when he finally climbed into his vehicle, sitting in the front seat beside his chauffeur, the six-foot Johannes Klein.

  Kubis and Gabčik were by now growing jumpy. They had been loitering in the street for almost half an hour and were in danger of arousing the suspicions of passers-by. They were wondering how much longer to remain in wait when, at precisely 10.32 a.m., Valcik’s mirror flashed a signal. Heydrich’s Mercedes had swung into view.

  The assassins had spent weeks training for this very moment. Gabčik released the catch on his Sten and rushed across to the sharpest point in the bend. Kubis pulled one of Clarke’s grenades from his briefcase. Both men could see Heydrich’s car as it approached. It was travelling quite fast, but dramatically decelerated as it approached the bend and prepared to make a wide sweep. It was now or never. As it slowed to walking pace, Gabčik raised his gun. For a split second he had Heydrich at point-blank range. He squeezed the trigger.

  Nothing happened. There was just a faint click. The Sten had failed to fire, possibly because there was grass caught in the mechanism. Gabčik was left standing at the side of the road, fatally exposed, with a gun that was jammed.

  Johannes Klein, the chauffeur, had been trained for just such a scenario. His duty was to accelerate sharply away from trouble and whisk Heydrich to safety. But Heydrich was furious at the attempt on his life. Seeing that Gabčik’s gun was jammed, he ordered Klein to stop the car and then pulled out his automatic pistol as he prepared to shoot his would-be assassin. As he did so, Kubis stepped from the shadows and hurled Cecil Clarke’s bomb at the car. He had practised for this moment so many times during his training but now, in the heat of the moment, he missed his target. Clarke’s percussion grenade exploded against the rear wheel of the Mercedes, detonating with unbelievable violence and flinging shards of glass and shrapnel through the body of the car. It was so powerful that Heydrich’s and Klein’s SS jackets, folded on the back seat of the soft-top vehicle, ended up draped on the high wire of the nearby tramway.

  Kubis had been hit by the flying shrapnel and blood was streaming into his eyes. Through a veil of blood, he saw Klein jump from the car and run towards him, pistol drawn. Gabčik had managed to avoid the shrapnel, but he was horrified to see Heydrich drag himself from the vehicle and level his gun. He was lurching forward, shouting wildly as he prepared to fire. Gabčik ditched his jammed Sten and drew his Colt, taking pot-shots at Heydrich from behind a telegraph pole.

  Kubis wiped the blood from his eyes, dodged Klein’s bullets and jumped on to his bicycle. Klein took aim once again and tried to bring down the fleeing Kubis with a hail of bullets. But his gun also jammed, enabling Kubis to get away. Less than ten minutes after hurling his grenade, Kubis had made it to a safe house.

  The situation was more desperate for Gabčik. He was caught in a shoot-out with Heydrich and risked being either shot or captured. But as he was ducking the bullets – suddenly – the unexpected happened. Heydrich staggered to the side of the road and collapsed in agony. Unbeknown to either of his assassins, Cecil Clarke’s grenade had done precisely what it had been designed to do. As the shell fragmented, it had driven metal, glass and fragments of horsehair from the car’s upholstery deep into Heydrich’s spleen.

  ‘Get that bastard,’ shouted the Reichsprotektor to his chauffeur, pointing at the escaping Gabčik.35 As Klein chased after the assassin, Heydrich clutched at the bonnet of the smoking, mangled Mercedes. He was in agony. Not a single eyewitness went to his help.

  * * *

  Colonel Moravec was the first person in England to learn
news of the attack, picking it up on Prague radio. ‘So that was it,’ was his first reaction. ‘Gabčik and Kubis had done it.’36 He immediately informed Gubbins, who began dictating a memo for Margaret to type up. It was to be circulated to just one person, Lord Selborne. ‘I would ask that this report be treated with the utmost secrecy,’ he said, stressing that it was ‘absolutely essential’ that no one knew about Baker Street’s involvement in the assassination.

  ‘Even should Heydrich not die,’ said Gubbins, ‘and it is to be sincerely hoped that he will, he must obviously be incapacitated for a very long time.’ He was delighted that Gabčik and Kubis had managed to strike at such a high-ranking Nazi. ‘This is a most important matter on which we can congratulate ourselves, as even in Germany there is a limit to the number of men of his type who combine both the special aptitude and the special degree of brutality required.’

  After praising his Czech Section and the wily Colonel Moravec, he also praised his own team: Eric Sykes, Cecil Clarke, Alfgar Hesketh-Prichard and Peter Wilkinson, ‘for the meticulous care with which they prepared the operation and the necessary stores’.37

  If Gubbins himself was impressed with the professionalism of the attack, then so were the Gestapo. Gubbins managed to acquire their official report into the assassination, which admitted that ‘the attack was carried out in a most skilful manner.’ The extraordinary grenade had been crucial to its success. ‘It was an extremely powerful bomb,’ read the Gestapo report, ‘for only the fuse and a few pieces remained of it.’