Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  ‘The enemy was on his toes,’ said Haukelid, but they were not as sharp as him. Although the Rjukan area was under constant surveillance, the Germans had neglected the most obvious target. ‘By some freak of folly, not a single German guard had been posted on the Hydro herself.’

  Haukelid decided to exploit this weakness, biding his time until all thirty-nine drums of heavy water had been loaded aboard the ferry. He knew that the ship was due to sail on the following morning, leaving him a unique window of opportunity.

  In the early hours of Sunday morning, when the ship’s deck was deserted, he clambered aboard with a sack of plastic explosive. ‘Almost the entire ship’s crew was gathered together below, round a long table, playing poker rather noisily.’ In the engine room, the engineer and stoker could be seen hard at work. They were undisturbed by Haukelid.

  ‘I wriggled through a hole in the cabin and crept along the keep, up to the bows.’ He laid his charges in the bilges and coupled them to time-delay fuses. ‘I reckoned that the charge was big enough to sink the ferry in about four or five minutes.’45

  The operation took three hours: by 4 a.m., he was finished and left the vessel unseen by anyone. His hope was that the ferry would leave on time and that the time fuses would work. It would be eight hours before he would learn whether or not his mission had been successful.

  Others were to have rather more direct experience of Haukelid’s sabotage operation. The Hydro’s captain, Erling Sørensen, set sail precisely on schedule and by 10.30 a.m. was crossing the deepest part of the lake. Suddenly, quite without warning, there was a huge explosion inside the bowels of the vessel. It blasted such a devastating hole beneath the waterline that the ship was on her side within minutes. Sørensen jumped into the freezing water just as the train containing all the heavy water slid off the ferry and sank into water that was some 400 metres in depth. He swam further away from his ship, to avoid being sucked under, then ‘turned around and watched her go down’.46 Within a matter of seconds, the doomed Hydro had disappeared from view, carrying eight people to their deaths. Sørensen himself was fortunate to get plucked from the water.

  Haukelid learned of the sinking from Einar Skinnarland, who informed him how the ship had sunk. He was particularly pleased to learn that the railway trucks had fallen irretrievably into the deepest part of Lake Tinnsjø ‘having trundled forward, the full length of the deck’.47

  It was left to Haukelid to write the epitaph on one of the greatest sabotage missions of the Second World War. ‘So it was that the manufacture of heavy water ceased in Norway, and so it was that all stocks available to German scientists from that source were lost.’ Colin Gubbins had just one thing to add. ‘It was a one hundred per cent success.’48

  16

  Enter Uncle Sam

  COLIN GUBBINS HAD always been sensitive to criticism from senior officers and he jotted down their more colourful insults in order to recount them to Joan Bright when they met for drinks after work. Millis Jefferis, by contrast, was more of a bulldozer: he had never remotely cared what people thought of him and it was left to Stuart Macrae to shoulder the constant sniping from the army high command. The attitude of the various ministries continued to rankle him throughout the spring of 1943 and he was therefore pleased to notice a subtle change as spring gave way to summer. Senior officials were beginning to court Jefferis and seek his opinion on matters of weaponry. To Macrae’s ever observant eyes, it was as if they were trying to make amends.

  When the Air Ministry invited the two of them to a bomb-dropping exercise in Wales, officials went overboard in their efforts to please. Macrae expected to be booked into a third-class sleeping carriage for the train journey from London. He was therefore astonished to find that they were given the red carpet treatment on arriving at Paddington Station. ‘A reception committee ushered us into a royal train definitely more magnificent than the one in which we had accompanied Winston Churchill to Dover.’ He was told that the bar would be kept open all night, that all their expenses had been covered and that they had been assigned first-class sleeping berths.

  Macrae awoke at dawn the following morning to find they were already in Fishguard. When he asked how the train had covered the journey so quickly, he was informed that one of the directors of the Great Western Railway had ordered his traffic superintendent to ensure that all trains were ‘cleared out of our way on pain of death’. The same superintendent had ‘ridden down on the footplate himself to make sure that they were’.1 After four years of war, Jefferis was at last being treated as one of the most important players in the fight against Nazi Germany.

  Macrae hired many more staff that summer as he and Jefferis struggled to cope with the increasing demand for their sabotage weaponry. There were now some 250 people employed full time at the Firs, along with a veritable army of part-time workers, packers and drivers, and the team was producing an eye-stretching amount of weaponry. Six million detonators had rolled off the Firs’s production line, along with 4 million anti-personnel switches and almost 3 million L-Delays. This was not all. They were still manufacturing the staples of guerrilla warfare, such as the limpet and clam, along with new weapons like the Puffball, a soft-nosed anti-tank bomb. The Firs now had a global reach, with weapons ending up in places as far afield as Kursk and Bombay.

  Jefferis’s new recruits rubbed their eyes in disbelief on first being initiated into the Whitchurch country house. It was as if they were being invited to join a parallel world, one that functioned according to its own rules and timetables. The working day often stretched so far into the night that mealtimes became completely inverted. Sleep, when possible, had to be snatched in intensive bursts.

  Macrae felt there were distinct advantages to living ‘in a closed community’, for it enabled the team to work without any distraction. There was ‘no wear and tear on the mind and body travelling to work every day’, and ‘no need to live by the clock’. Everyone could ‘just get on with the job’. Yet he conceded that ‘it was an odd life’, one that was given an extra splash of excitement by the fact that it was entirely forward-thinking.2 Even the machine tools looked as if they belonged to the future: rotating micrometers, diamond-tipped precision drills, a high-velocity wind tunnel and one of the most powerful centrifuges ever built. ‘This was frightening,’ confessed one of the early recruits, Edward Daily, when he first saw it in action. ‘It was surrounded by a circle of sandbags and things were rotated at enormous speed, often to destruction.’3 The velocity caused even the thickest steel to fragment into lethal shards.

  Jefferis had also built a precision counter-chronoscope that consisted of rows of interlinked valves and dials used to measure the exact speed of a projectile. ‘Cables were connected to two cameras at a known distance apart and the time was recorded for a missile to cross the path.’4 This could then be cross-checked by firing a Winchester rifle across the cameras, with the results logged against Jefferis’s algebraic equations. Only if all three readings gave the same calibration would the prototype under test be given the green light. ‘We could claim without fear of contradiction,’ said Macrae, ‘that we had the finest and best equipped armaments development and research station in the country.’5

  Jefferis was always at his best when confronted with an intellectual jigsaw with no obvious solution. He would stand in front of the giant blackboard that hung in the front office of the Firs, sketching out in coloured chalk the mathematical formulae that would underpin his new weapon. As Macrae watched him at work that summer, toiling through the early hours under the dim light of an electric bulb, it became apparent that he was on the brink of a spectacular breakthrough. For some months, Jefferis had been studying a scientific theory known as the Munroe effect and had reached the conclusion that it could transform the future of weaponry.

  More than half a century earlier, an American chemist named Charles Munroe had discovered that it was possible to focus the blast of an explosion if the charge was shaped into a specific form. Traditional shells
were pointed like bullets, in the belief that they would more easily puncture armour-plating. But Munroe had discovered that the explosion was infinitely more deadly if the tip of the shell was blunted into an inverted cone. The entire explosive force could be focused backwards into a tiny point. Then, once transformed into a ball of energy, it would shoot itself forward at high velocity with devastating consequences for anything in its path.

  Munroe had published his findings in Popular Science Monthly, setting out his ground-breaking idea. But no one had truly appreciated the significance of his work until Jefferis began to examine it in detail. ‘At this period, practically nothing was known of the mechanism of the hollow charge work.’6

  He now hoped to put Munroe’s theory to practical use. The mathematics was staggeringly complex, yet every equation pointed to the fact that Munroe was right: a hollow cone could indeed be used to focus explosive energy. And Jefferis had a further thought, one that would render the charge even more deadly. If he lined the inside of the cone with metal, the energy of the explosion would instantly melt this metal and transform it into a lethal plug. This could then be discharged with such force that armour-plating would be turned to plasma. Nothing – not even a German tank – could withstand such high-velocity explosive.

  Jefferis knew he was on to a breakthrough of great significance. If his idea worked, then the hollow charge could be used to attack not just tanks, but planes and submarines as well. The possibilities were endless.

  He was helped in his quest by James Tuck, a thirty-three-year-old physicist with an intense gaze, a neat moustache and a side parting so sharp it was as if someone had drawn a white line across his scalp. Professor Lindemann had poached Tuck from Oxford University and appointed him as his personal assistant, but even Lindemann conceded that Tuck was so smart that his talents would be of greater use at the Firs. Tuck was quick to recognize the theoretical brilliance of Jefferis’s work and helped knock the mathematics into shape. But he also knew that the algebra couldn’t provide all the solutions. ‘The remainder could only be found empirically,’ said Macrae, ‘so the boys were busy working through the trials programme on the ranges.’7

  The prototypes tested that summer were slowly transformed into a weapon of spectacular power. Jefferis wanted his hollow charge to be fired from a shoulder gun that could be carried into battle by a single man. In part, this was to lay to rest an image that had haunted him ever since his lightning trip to Norway three years earlier. He had observed British infantry firing their weapons at advancing German tanks and watching in despair as the shells bounced back at them. Now, with his fifteen-kilogram shoulder gun armed with a hollow charge, an infantryman was the equal of an armoured vehicle. When the trigger was pulled, the gun fired a warhead that no conventional tank could withstand.

  ‘Trials with prototype rounds showed that Millis was really onto something,’ said Macrae. The first rounds were fired at thick sheets of metal plating installed on the lower lawn at the Firs. ‘Remarkable penetration of armour plating was at once achieved. True, the hole would only be a small one, but the blast effect was lethal.’8 Anyone inside the tank would be torn to shreds by fragments of burning metal.

  The tests that followed were undertaken on a tank filled with wooden dummies. The result was devastating for the dummies. They were completely carbonized by the heat of the explosion.

  Jefferis’s breakthrough was of such importance that news reached the Ordnance Board and the chiefs of staff within days. The top brass demanded an immediate demonstration of the prototype weapon, to be staged at their Small Arms School at Bisley. Macrae watched nervously as the gun was fired, hoping it would blast a hole through the plating. It did indeed create a devastating hole, but not through the metal plate. It misfired backwards, driving a mercifully small plug of metal through the man selected to fire it. He was fortunate not to be killed.

  Jefferis rectified the problem and took over the firing. From this point on, the test went like clockwork. ‘There was a satisfying bang as the round hit the target and, as was afterwards found, punched a nice hole in it.’9 All four subsequent shots hit their target and smashed huge holes through steel plate almost five inches thick. Professor Lindemann immediately dictated a memo to Churchill extolling the extraordinary power of the gun. ‘German tanks, with two-and-a-half inch armour, should be easy game,’ he said.10

  Jefferis was now told to perfect the weapon. As soon as it was ready for production, the War Office promised to place an order for 1 million, along with 5 million rounds of hollow charge ammunition. They had but one problem: they refused to countenance the idea of the weapon being named the Jefferis Shoulder Gun, claiming that ‘no weapon or equipment should be named after its designer’. Lindemann knew that this was due to residual resentment against Jefferis and he took his objections to Churchill. He argued that if weapons couldn’t be named after their inventors, then ‘it would seem logical to stop the Army talking about Mills grenades, Stokes guns, Hawkins mines, Kerrison predictors, Northover projectors’.11

  In this particular instance, the War Office bureaucrats got their way. The Jefferis Shoulder Gun was renamed the Projector Infantry Anti-Tank, or PIAT for short.

  The very first PIATs were made ready in time for the invasion of Sicily in July 1943. General Andrew McNaughton, commander of the First Canadian Army, witnessed one in action and declared that he had never seen such an effective weapon. ‘Really one hundred per cent,’ he said.12

  There was an upsurge in production in the weeks that preceded the invasion of Italy, where the weapon was to prove its devastating power. A BBC war correspondent, Frank Gillard, was recording a news bulletin when he found himself becoming the news rather than reporting on it. He was advancing with a small group of soldiers when they heard four Mark IV German tanks thundering towards them. The tanks were under orders ‘to engage these British troops and wipe them out’. As they advanced, ‘guns spluttering’, Gillard switched on his microphone and then joined his comrades in a ditch. He sensed that the Germans were scenting victory, but added that ‘our men were not quite as helpless as the Germans reckoned, for they had a PIAT with them’.

  They held fire until the very last moment, waiting until the leading tank was no more than fifty yards away and still pumping out bullets. ‘It was kill or be killed,’ said Gillard, aware that only one of the outcomes would make it on to the evening news. As the lead vehicle loomed ever nearer, the PIAT proved its worth, scoring a direct hit with its devastating hollow charge.

  ‘The great German tank was knocked out,’ Gillard reported, and left as a charred and smoking ruin, its men inside obliterated by shrapnel. ‘The other three behind it turned back, obviously in amazement, and made off at top speed.’ He contended that an infantryman, equipped with a PIAT, ‘seems to have a pretty effective answer to marauding German armour’.13

  Jefferis had designed the PIAT for regular infantry, but he was quick to realize that it could be adapted for use by Gubbins’s saboteurs. ‘Once Millis had the hollow charge bit between his teeth, he raced off with it,’ said Macrae. He designed a whole range of sabotage weapons that were given the collective name, Beehive. ‘The smallest weighed only 6 lbs but would drill a nice hole through two inches of armour plate or a yard of concrete.’ A single saboteur could now take on virtually any target, however well protected.

  Jefferis next developed a set of larger Beehives that ‘would penetrate any concrete pillbox’.14 This was a crucial development. It had long been recognized that Allied forces would one day have to land on the northern coast of France, defended by a string of fortified bunkers that stretched from Brittany to Dunkirk and beyond. These presented a deadly threat to invading infantry, but Jefferis’s invention meant that they would now be equipped with a weapon that could blow a hole through the strongest bunker.

  Jefferis’s invention had not gone unnoticed in America, whose army was already buying large quantities of sabotage weapons from the Firs. Indeed, it caused something of a stir
as its full potential became apparent to a small clique of American scientists. For if the hollow charge could be used to create a concrete-busting explosive, then it could perhaps be adapted to generate the necessary force to trigger a plutonium bomb.

  * * *

  Millis Jefferis was not alone in finding himself courted by America in the summer of 1943. Colin Gubbins was also spending an increasing amount of time consulting with his American allies. His sabotage work had aroused interest in Washington ever since he had been placed in command of the Auxiliary Units back in the summer of 1940. It had left a particularly deep impression on Colonel William Donovan, a much decorated veteran of the First World War who visited Britain twice in that year while working as President Roosevelt’s informal emissary to the country. They were visits that were to change his life.

  Colonel Donovan had first won his spurs many years earlier while engaged in cross-border gun battles with the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa. His tactics were a mirror to Gubbins’s irregular warfare against Michael Collins’s Sinn Fein revolutionaries. Indeed Donovan bore many similarities to Gubbins, including irresistible charm, immense force of character and tireless energy. He had a near-legendary status for every American magazine reader, to whom he was known by his nickname, Wild Bill. It had been earned during his dashing exploits in the First World War when he was commander of the famed ‘Fighting 69th’.

  He had visited Colin Gubbins during his second trip to London and the two of them immediately realized they shared a great deal in common. He leaped at Gubbins’s suggestion that they visit the Scottish Highlands together, in order to watch the guerrilla training programme in action. He was so impressed that he decided to establish a similar camp in North America, one that was to be a joint British–American venture. In Baker Street, it was known as Special Training School 103. In America, it was called Camp X.