Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  Only once they were all safely across did Barnes look up to the distant command post. As he did so, he saw a flashing torch signalling to him. Then, echoing off the rock walls of the ravine, he heard a shout from Myers. ‘Go in Tom! The south end of the bridge is in our hands. Go in!’28

  Barnes’s men now began unpacking the plastic explosives and strapping them to the supporting girders. This took time, but eventually they were all secured. Barnes gave a blast on his whistle, signalling that he was poised to detonate his explosive. He struck the fuse caps, lit them and ran for cover. He and his men had just seconds to take shelter before the explosive charges would blow.

  They threw themselves into a ditch just in time. ‘Flattened out against the ground, they were shaken by the sudden tremendous blast and by the thousands of pieces of red hot metal flying in all directions.’29 The cataclysmic explosion was witnessed by Myers, who had inched even closer to the viaduct. He couldn’t resist raising his head as a crash of explosive thunder resonated through the deep gorge. ‘I saw one of the seventy-foot steel spans lift into the air and – oh what joy! – drop down into the gorge below in a rending crash of breaking and bending steel-work.’

  When all the debris had fallen back to earth, Barnes went to admire his handiwork. He was staggered by the extent of the destruction. Two of the vast metal spans had crashed into the gorge and lay tangled beyond all recognition. Where once there had been a viaduct, there was now only stars and sky.

  Myers now ran down to the viaduct and walked gingerly along the buckled track until he reached the jagged end. He peered over the edge, curious to see the destruction. ‘In front of me I clearly discerned two complete spans which had been dropped into the gorge below.’

  Barnes still had a little explosive left so he fixed a second charge to the mangled ruins, in order to cause further damage. ‘He blew his whistle again,’ said Myers. ‘Everyone took cover and a bit more of the bridge came down.’ Once this was done, Myers sounded the withdrawal. The exhausted men now faced a fifteen-hour hike back to their hideout. They had suffered no deaths and only one casualty, a Greek fighter wounded by shrapnel. The Italians had fared rather worse. At least thirty had been killed, perhaps more. Myers himself had stumbled over half a dozen corpses.

  After a gruelling hike through deep snow, the guerrilla band finally reached their camp, where Uncle Niko was waiting with a hot meal. Myers ‘experienced a glow of satisfaction from the realisation that we had achieved our mission’.30 He thanked all the men, congratulated them and then fell into a deep sleep.

  The German high command was furious when it received news of the destruction of the Gorgopotamos viaduct. Sixteen local villagers were arrested at random and shot at the base of the ruined structure. ‘It was a terrible, terrible war,’ said Woodhouse.

  General Alexander Loehr, commander of the Fifth Army Group, ordered the immediate rebuilding of the viaduct. He optimistically informed Berlin that this would take just seven days. In fact it took fully six weeks before the first supply trains could tentatively use the restored viaduct.

  The Gorgopotamos sabotage was a triumph, as Chris ‘Monty’ Woodhouse was quick to recognize. ‘It showed for the first time in occupied Europe that guerrillas, with the support of allied officers, could carry out a major tactical operation coordinated with allied strategic plans.’31 The fact that it coincided with Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa, made it an even sweeter act of sabotage.

  ‘It had a great effect on Rommel’s supplies,’ said Myers, ‘because it cut for six valuable weeks all supplies going that way.’32 In that time, the Afrika Korps was deprived of more than 2,000 trainloads of supplies. By the time the viaduct was finally repaired, the battle for North Africa was fast slipping from Rommel’s hands.

  The destruction of Gorgopotamos was also a personal triumph for Gubbins, as Joan Bright was quick to point out. She overheard senior army commanders welcoming it as ‘an outstanding contribution’ to the struggle in North Africa and a near faultless coup de main operation ‘executed by British officers with the indispensible assistance of Greek guerrillas’.33

  Eddie Myers’s twelve-man team was supposed to be evacuated by submarine just a few days after the attack. But when they finally managed to get a wireless message through to Cairo, they were told to stay in Greece ‘with the object of unifying guerrilla activities’. The idea was to form a major guerrilla army that could put relentless pressure on both German and Italian forces in Greece.

  Myers worked tirelessly to build his guerrilla force, despite the difficulties caused by intense political rivalry between the different Greek factions. He was soon able to report that he was ‘at the head of five thousand armed and disciplined guerrillas’ operating against the Italians in western Greece. He was also in contact with another group who were tasked with sabotaging Nazi transport ships heading for North Africa. In a single raid, they managed to sink five heavily laden vessels, ‘just one highlight from an underground campaign which has caused the greatest inconvenience to the Axis’.

  And so the attacks continued: troop trains derailed, eleven major mines destroyed and Italian outpost garrisons surrounded and liquidated. The German high command was so infuriated by the Italian Army’s inability to contain Myers’s men that they vowed to send ‘two wagon-loads of bloodhounds’ from the Russian Front to Greece.

  Shortly after the Gorgopotamos viaduct was back in action, Myers’s men scored a second triumph when they succeeded in blowing up the Asopos viaduct, the second of the three crucial bridges in the Roumeli Mountains. Churchill grinned broadly when he was shown photos of the wreckage.

  Eddie Myers vowed to continue his work, sending a simple wireless message to headquarters. ‘Give us the tools and we will do the job.’34 Colin Gubbins had little doubt he meant it.

  14

  Man of Steel

  CECIL CLARKE WAS having a good war. Three years earlier, he had been struggling to balance the books at his Bedfordshire caravan business. Now, he was one of the country’s leading experts in sabotage, responsible for training Colin Gubbins’s most intrepid agents. He had developed some of the most effective weapons of the war, notably the grenade that killed Reinhard Heydrich, and his limpet mine was being produced in the tens of thousands. It had been used to blow up everything from factories in the Balkans to transport ships in Greece.

  Three weeks before Christmas 1942, Clarke learned that his limpet had played its most spectacular role to date. A team of commandos led by Herbert ‘Blondie’ Hasler had crept into Bordeaux harbour and slipped limpet mines on to enemy vessels, severely damaging five of them. Operation Frankton, the Cockleshell Raid, was a brilliantly audacious strike at the enemy. Lord Mountbatten said that ‘of the many brave and dashing raids carried out by the men of Combined Operations Command, none was more courageous or imaginative than Operation Frankton.’1 The imaginative element was due, in no small part, to Cecil Clarke.

  Mrs Clarke did not share Cecil’s enthusiasm for war. While he was blowing craters in the grounds of Brickendonbury Manor, she was struggling to lay her hands on enough food for her three young boys, while simultaneously trying to cope with the running of LoLode. The company now had ten employees who were undertaking orders for the War Office, constructing ambulance trailers and other towed vehicles. Clarke was noticeable only by his absence.

  By Christmas of that year, Clarke was growing restless with life at Brickendonbury and was keen to lead a saboteur unit of his own. He appealed to Colin Gubbins to let him take a freelance band of guerrillas to the Middle East, where he felt sure he could wreak havoc. He was to be disappointed. Gubbins told him it was ‘impossible to entertain the suggestion’,2 for he was far too valuable to the home team. Yet he acknowledged his desire for change, allowing him to step aside from his role at Brickendonbury and giving him a temporary posting to Arisaig.

  Clarke made his way to the killing school, where he was made Officer in Charge of User Trials. This placed him in cha
rge of fine-tuning all the prototype weaponry that was being tested in the Highlands. His first task was to trial the new generation of limpet mines in the chill waters of Loch nan Ceall. Gubbins knew all about Clarke’s hands-on approach to testing weapons – it invariably involved him plunging into the water in his underpants – and offered a piece of friendly advice. ‘In view of the cold at this time of year,’ he said, ‘I suggest you get some of the special Air Force bathing suits which will keep out all the water.’3

  Clarke had always been a restless individual, distracted by any passing curiosity. He soon requested to be moved again, only this time he asked to be transferred to the Firs, in order to work alongside Millis Jefferis. Stuart Macrae was delighted when he learned that Gubbins had approved the transfer to Whitchurch. ‘Like you,’ he said to Clarke, ‘we have always been irregular and always will be.’4

  Poor Dorothy was now to see even less of her husband, for the Firs was more than thirty miles from Bedford. Clarke was not inclined to share quarters with the other staff (and they, perhaps, had little desire to share with him). It suited everyone when he rented a cottage in Whitchurch village. He took particular delight in discovering that it was the only one known to be haunted. When his young boys came on a rare visit, he told them that the ghostly apparition of a woman was said to drift through the house at night and that people sleeping in the bedrooms used to ‘wake up feeling they’d been throttled’.5 It was hardly a reassuring image, but Clarke was careful to remind his sons that ghosts didn’t exist. When his bottle of Brylcreem inexplicably toppled over, he told young David that he wouldn’t believe the house was haunted until the bottle righted itself. It never did.

  No sooner was Clarke installed at the Firs than he set to work on a novel little invention called the Aero-Switch. It was designed to be used on German planes while they were on the ground, where they were particularly vulnerable to sabotage. The Aero-Switch was a pressurized explosive charge that, as he explained to Macrae, ‘could be inserted into a German bomber by some brave fellow and would explode when the aircraft reached a certain height’. It worked by means of an ingenious metal bellows that expanded with the reduced atmospheric pressure, forcing two wires to connect and detonate the charge, with devastating consequences for the plane.

  The explosive itself was housed in a flexible sausage casing and Clarke maintained that although it ‘could not be conveniently concealed in the pocket’, it could ‘without comment be carried in the trousers’. Macrae begged to differ as he watched Clarke parading around the room with a giant sausage in his pants. ‘He was wrong about the “without comment”,’ he said, ‘and there was always considerable ribaldry when he demonstrated this method to his pupils.’

  The Aero-Switch was an inventive way of reducing the size of the Luftwaffe and the Firs immediately set up a production line. It soon became the weapon of choice for many saboteurs working in occupied territories. German-controlled airbases were often too large to be well guarded, enabling any would-be saboteur to crawl through the perimeter fence under the cover of darkness and plant their weapon on the plane. ‘The usual drill was to make a slit in the wing fabric of a German bomber and pop the thing inside so that in due course the wing would be wrecked and the bomber likewise.’

  The weapon had not long been in service when Macrae learned from intelligence sources that ‘the entire Luftwaffe bombing fleet about to set out for London had been grounded whilst a search was carried out for this sabotage weapon which had already caused them too many casualties.’ Macrae proudly passed this information to his wife, who was working at Bletchley Park, ‘only to be informed that she knew all about it because she had handled the message’.6

  While Clarke had been working on the Aero-Switch, Macrae had been busy perfecting his clam, the miniature version of Clarke’s limpet. When demonstrated to the Russians, they immediately recognized its potential on the Eastern Front and placed an order for 1 million. Soon after, the Allied armies in the west ordered a further 1½ million. The clam, like the limpet, was another winner for Millis Jefferis’s team at the Firs.

  * * *

  Cecil Clarke’s move to the Firs left a vacancy for the top job at Brickendonbury Manor. Colin Gubbins had no doubts as to who he wanted as his new commanding officer. George Rheam had first come to his attention a few months earlier, when he had been told of a brilliantly gifted northerner living in a suburban house in High Barnet. He was said to be the country’s leading expert in steam turbines, power stations and generators: he was immediately summoned to Baker Street for an interview.

  Those who met Rheam rarely forgot the experience, for he was a chilling individual, an unsmiling genius with thatch-coloured hair and penetrating steel eyes that betrayed no hint of his inner thoughts. He spoke sparingly, precisely, as if adjectives and adverbs were a frivolous waste of time. Gubbins was quick to realize that Rheam had a very clear idea of how to destroy the Nazis. His great desire was to turn Occupied Europe into an industrial junkyard and he insisted that ‘sabotage, if properly planned and carried out, can reduce a country’s war-potential to the point where it becomes impossible to wage war.’7

  Rheam also knew more than most people about industrial engineering. He had worked for nearly a decade at Metropolitan Vickers, where he displayed more aptitude for interacting with steam turbines than with his colleagues. In 1930 he and Mrs Rheam had moved south so that he could take up his job at the North Metropolitan Power Company’s generating station at Southgate, near London. Here, he spent his working day studying the component parts of electricity generators. He was soon the country’s leading expert.

  In the late 1930s, as Britain drifted towards war, Rheam began to turn his thoughts to the destruction of machinery. One day, he was struck by the exhilarating thought that he could cripple all the most important power stations in Britain with a very small quantity of explosives. Indeed, he reckoned that he could completely paralyse British industry ‘for a very long period with less than two tons’.8

  And herein lay his genius. Although he gave the appearance of being narrow-minded and introspective, he was in fact the very opposite. ‘A large man with a large mind,’ said one, ‘[and] the inventor of many industrial sabotage techniques.’9 Gubbins was deeply impressed. ‘First class,’ he jotted in his notebook. ‘A first class officer.’10

  Now, with Cecil Clarke’s permanent departure from Brickendonbury Manor, Rheam was offered the job. He accepted with alacrity and immediately took up his role as commanding officer. The change in regime was instant and total. Clarke had pushed his men hard, but he had done so with a twinkle in his eye. Rheam, by contrast, was never knowingly caught smiling. ‘A strong, dour, efficient officer who does not easily brook any outside interference.’ Such was the opinion of Colonel Young, one of the junior staff at Brickendonbury. He said that Rheam ‘would run most efficiently any post which he undertook’, although he added that this would not be done ‘through his personal charm’.11

  Rheam shared one thing in common with the other members of Gubbins’s inner circle, ‘that rare combination, accurate hands and a highly imaginative brain’. Above all, he seemed to have a far greater understanding of the Nazi mentality than his colleagues and ‘knew rather better than most of the rigidities of the systems they were trying to conquer’.12

  Rheam took up his new post at a time when the number of saboteurs undergoing training at Brickendonbury Manor was on the rise. In the early months there had rarely been more than two dozen students at any given time, but by Christmas 1942, Gubbins was sending more than 150 students a month. This placed strain on the running of Brickendonbury and required the services of a small army of young ladies from the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.

  One of them, Sue Ryder, was quick to note that Rheam did not approve of employing female staff. ‘But he had to,’ she said, ‘because it was laid down by Gubbins.’ She went out of her way to avoid the new master, for she found him ‘very strict’ and rather unpleasant. ‘We were all very frighten
ed of him.’

  Rheam firmly believed that saboteurs needed to develop an intuitive understanding of the machines they were hoping to blow up. To this end, he ordered the acquisition of industrial plant machinery, sending his staff to scour factories and scrapyards for old turbines, electrical installations and generators. These were all installed in Morgan’s Walk, in the lower garden of Brickendonbury Manor, and included ‘a two engine Manchester, a Tempest or Typhoon with a Sabre engine and a German JU88’.13 He also had a Churchill tank parked on the East drive, along with a Great Western Railway locomotive.

  Rheam adapted many of Cecil Clarke’s ideas, taking his students to transformer stations and teaching them how to locate key parts of plant machinery. Once back at Brickendonbury Manor, in one of his all too rare moments of geniality, he would offer a glass of whisky to any student who could place a detonator on any part of the building, or any item of furniture, timed to set itself off before he could find it. No one ever succeeded. ‘He seemed to have a sixth sense,’ said one, ‘and expected something to be there.’14

  Colin Gubbins paid frequent visits to Brickendonbury Manor and was impressed by Rheam’s thoroughness, noting that his training ‘covered the whole field of expertise, from oil wells, arms factories, marshalling yards and shipping, down to tyre-bursters, abrasives and adulteration of lubricants’.

  The timing of Rheam’s appointment could not have been better, for Gubbins was in the process of planning his most audacious act of industrial sabotage to date. The target was ‘of really first-class importance’:15 indeed, there were some who were already arguing that it was the most important target of the war. For the Norsk Hydro plant at Rjukan in Norway was the only one in Europe to produce heavy water, otherwise known as deuterium oxide. This was an essential ingredient in the production of plutonium and therefore in the building of an atomic bomb. If the factory was not destroyed – and soon – Hitler would have enough heavy water to start building a weapon of mass destruction.