Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  The location was chosen with care. America was at the time forbidden by the Neutrality Act from being directly involved in the war, making it necessary to situate the camp in Canada, on the wind-blown shores of Lake Ontario. It was easily accessible from New York State, which lay on the other side of the lake, enabling Donovan’s first batch of would-be guerrillas easy and surreptitious access to specialist training.

  Donovan was quick to recognize Arisaig as the finest guerrilla-training establishment in existence. In the spring of 1942 – having been appointed head of the new Office of Strategic Services (America’s answer to Baker Street) – he asked Gubbins if William Fairbairn could be transferred from Arisaig to Camp X. Gubbins signalled his agreement and Fairbairn arrived soon after. He began training the first intake of Wild Bill’s guerrillas almost immediately and his silent killing classes caused as much of a sensation among the Americans as they had with the British. Charles Rolo, a young guerrilla volunteer, confessed to never having met anyone quite like Fairbairn. ‘Before you have time to blink, his powerful hands have caught you in a mock death grip and you know why Nazi sentries have the “Commando jitters”. You know, too, that this Major Fairbairn is a very dangerous customer.’15

  Only once did Fairbairn find himself outsmarted by one of his students. He goaded a young American trainee named Geoffrey Jones into attacking him with an unsheathed, double-bladed knife. Jones circled Fairbairn for a moment before striking with all the force he could muster. To his horror, he saw he had slashed his tutor down one side of his face, causing blood to spurt from the open wound. ‘I thought, Jesus Christ, I’ve done it now, he’s going to kill me’. But Fairbairn declared himself delighted by Jones’s skill and beamed broadly as he mopped up the blood. ‘Good boy,’ he said, ‘well done!’16

  Colin Gubbins had been quick to welcome America’s entry into the war. ‘The stage was finally set,’ he wrote, ‘with all the contestants in the ring, in boxing parlance, and the fight to be fought to the bitter end.’17 He also recognized the potential of American saboteurs, of which there was a potentially inexhaustible supply, and hastily established an office in New York. One of his Baker Street staffers, Bickham Sweet-Escott, was sent to America and was most impressed by what he saw. The offices were on the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth floors of the Rockefeller Center, where ‘fifty or so exquisite Canadian typists made the air hum with activity’.

  Sweet-Escott was also able to see Donovan’s fledgling organization at work. He felt that the Americans had a great deal to bring to the underhand war against the Nazis, including technical equipment, wireless sets and Americans of Greek, Yugoslav and Romanian descent who were fluent in their native tongues. In short, America offered a rich field for recruitment.

  Sweet-Escott had the opportunity to visit Camp X and saw that Fairbairn had stamped his personality on the place. Many of America’s military establishments had a ‘somewhat happy-go-lucky, lackadaisical atmosphere’, with a surprisingly lax approach to discipline. Camp X, by contrast, was ruthlessly efficient. It was ‘organized with real Knightsbridge barracks efficiency’, and ‘there was a great deal of spit and polish, saluting and sharp words of command’. Although Fairbairn had never been a fan of regular warfare, he was a stickler for discipline. His would-be saboteurs graduated from Camp X with a detailed knowledge of explosives, demolition and silent killing, as well as ‘a much clearer idea of what secret operations were likely to involve’.

  In addition to the New York office, Gubbins also established a liaison bureau in Washington run by Barty Pleydell-Bouverie, whose family seat, Coleshill House, had been the original training centre for the Auxiliary Units. Sweet-Escott visited Barty on several occasions and was impressed to find his offices equipped with ‘every conceivable kind of gadget’. It was far more advanced than anything Baker Street had to offer. Barty even had his own ‘little machine for squirting iced water into your mouth to quench your thirst or allay your hangover’.18 Sweet-Escott had never seen anything quite like it.

  Wild Bill Donovan established a reciprocal headquarters in London and his team soon came to appreciate Gubbins’s brisk, no-nonsense approach to guerrilla warfare. But they found others in Whitehall far less congenial, especially the staff of the Ministry of Information who looked upon the newly arrived Americans with disdain. Malcolm Muggeridge was one of many who refused to take them seriously, saying that they arrived from America looking ‘like jeunes filles en fleur, straight from finishing school, all fresh and innocent, to start work in our frowsty old intelligence brothel’.19 The Americans were deeply insulted by such condescending treatment. ‘The British kept tactfully reminding us that they had been in the intelligence business since Queen Elizabeth’s day,’ said one.20

  The competing interests rapidly descended into a bitter wrangle over which organization – Baker Street or Wild Bill’s team – would serve in which geographical area. Early in 1943, Gubbins flew to Algiers in order to clarify matters with both General Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and Wild Bill himself. Here, at last, they thrashed out conditions that would apply to all future guerrilla operations. There were still disagreements over sabotage operations in the Balkans, which Donovan was keen to spearhead. When this news reached Churchill, he was adamant that the Americans would not encroach on Gubbins’s Balkan fiefdom. He reminded them that Gubbins had established no fewer than eighty guerrilla missions there and that these were working with partisans over an area covering almost 300,000 square miles. Moreover, Baker Street had already delivered 650 tons of explosive and equipment and a further 2,000 tons was on the way. It was unthinkable that such a rich field of operations would be handed over to the Americans.

  Other territories were less contentious. Gubbins had always held that any Allied landings in France would need to be preceded by massive acts of sabotage. As the first graduates from Camp X began arriving in Britain, it became clear that they would soon be heading across the English Channel in joint operations with their British allies. Gubbins believed that France was the country in which Nazi Germany would lose the war – both the conventional one and also the unconventional. He also knew that he potentially held the winning hand.

  17

  Gubbins’s Trojan War

  SHORTLY AFTER THE news on the evening of 18 July 1943, the BBC’s French service broadcast a curious message to its overseas listeners, one that had no apparent meaning. ‘La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu,’ it said.1 ‘The Trojan War will not take place.’

  The message was sent with the blessing of Colin Gubbins and intended for the ears of just two men. One was an Englishman hiding out in the Jura Mountains in eastern France. The other was Rodolphe Peugeot, a member of the illustrious car-making dynasty.

  The BBC broadcast hundreds of messages personnels to France each night: they were used by Gubbins’s team to transmit information to the local resistance. Meaningless to all except the addressee, they provided coded details of forthcoming operations.

  The message about the Trojan War was somewhat different. It was a deeply personal pledge sent from one man to another and was received by each in very different fashion. For the Englishman, Harry Ree, it came at the end of a week that had nearly cost him his life. But for the French recipient, Rodolphe Peugeot, it was to mark the beginning of a wholly new way of life. A sensational act of sabotage was in the offing and it was to be spearheaded by these two individuals.

  Harry Ree was one of Gubbins’s more unlikely recruits to guerrilla warfare. A conscientious objector, he had signed the peace pledge at Cambridge University in the autumn of 1939 and joined the National Fire Service when called up for service. He preferred to spend his wartime dousing flames rather than shooting Nazis.

  But he soon found that deeply held convictions cut two ways. As much as he was a pacifist, he had a half-Jewish father and was disgusted by the racist brutality of the Third Reich. He performed a dramatic volte-face and abandoned his pacifism. ‘The concentration camps and the Jewish busines
s convinced me to do everything possible to defeat the whole Nazi thing because of its racial policies.’2

  Personal enemies can often be deadly ones, and Ree’s battle was to become intensely personal. His near-fluency in French gave him swift access to Baker Street and before long he found himself planning an audacious cat-and-mouse game with the Gestapo. And although the Gestapo were adept at such games, they were to find that this one had very different rules. For Harry Ree was determined to play the cat, while they were to be relegated to the role of mouse.

  There was only one problem. When Ree was sent to the Scottish Highlands for training, he was found to be clumsy and incompetent. In pistol training he was ‘a poor shot’. In explosives he was ‘not particularly outstanding’. In signalling ‘he has a poor memory and forgets quickly’. Although his ‘imperturbable coolness’ was not in doubt, he was so cool that he kept nodding off during lectures. ‘Rather disappointing,’ noted one of his Scottish trainers at the end of his course. ‘A very nice fellow,’ said another.3 It was hardly a ringing endorsement.

  After scraping through Arisaig, he was transferred to Brickendonbury Manor where George Rheam taught him every conceivable means of blowing up a train. Rheam then moved him on to turbines, compressors, transformers and lathes. He even told him how to firebomb a tyre warehouse. Once again, Ree failed to shine.

  Gubbins might easily have rejected his services, just as he had rejected so many others. But he was quick to see that Ree had a quality possessed by few other men, one that could only be described as his own personal magic. He had an instinctive ability to empathize with people whose lives, ‘at any moment, might be totally and even tragically disrupted’.4 It was an ability that was to prove of crucial importance. For Gubbins knew that if you can empathize with someone, then you can inspire them. And in wartime, that made Ree a valuable recruit indeed.

  There was one last thing for Ree to do before leaving the country and that was to choose his nom de guerre. Never short on confidence, he plumped for Caesar. It was an appropriate moniker for someone intending to go on the rampage in the territories of ancient Gaul.

  Ree was dropped into France by parachute in the spring of 1943 and initially made his way to a safe address provided by Baker Street. He had left behind a heavily pregnant wife, having been reassured that news of the birth would be transmitted in another of the BBC’s coded messages. He was listening to the wireless on 5 May when he heard the phrase: Clémence ressemble à la grand-mere. It meant that his beloved Hetty had just given birth to a baby girl.

  Ree slowly made his way to Besançon, where he made contact with a member of the resistance. He was still sheltering in the man’s house on the night of 15 July when he heard the low rumble of RAF bombers in the sky. Their destination was the nearby village of Sochaux.

  * * *

  Sochaux was no ordinary French village. It was home to the Peugeot car factory, a vast industrial complex that employed no fewer than 60,000 workers. Sprawled over many acres, it functioned like a giant machine, its jib-borers and panel-beaters punching out a ceaseless production of cars and vans. As befitted one of Europe’s most sophisticated factories, it even generated its own energy supplies. The rest of France could be shut down – switched off – yet the Peugeot-Sochaux works could continue to function.

  At the outbreak of war, the company was still in the capable hands of the Peugeot dynasty, with Robert Peugeot at its head, a gruff old patriarch who had been born before cars were even invented. He was ably assisted by his business-savvy sons, Jean-Pierre and Rodolphe.

  The family had tried to keep a firm hand on the steering wheel throughout the early days of war, driving Peugeot safely through the minefield of occupying Nazis. Their disdain for the Vichy regime was matched by a feeling of duty towards their workers. ‘A question,’ said old Robert, ‘of keeping people in employment.’5 But such a huge complex was far too valuable to the Nazis to remain in the family’s hands for long, especially as it lay just forty miles from the frontier of the Third Reich. It was seized by Berlin within weeks of the German occupation and the Peugeot family relegated to factory foremen. Car production was brought to a halt and, in its place, workers spent their days building tanks and aeroplane engines. These were then transported to BMW or Klockner-Humboldt-Denz for the finishing touches.

  The Peugeot sons did their best to disrupt production, much to the fury of the new German manager. He complained that six out of every ten vehicles were developing a problem with the clutch. Jean-Pierre Peugeot could offer nothing more than a Gallic shrug: you shouldn’t buy a Peugeot if you want a BMW.

  In the early months of 1943 the entire complex came under the direction of Ferdinand Porsche, the brilliant inventor of the Volkswagen Beetle and an enthusiastic member of the SS. He was quick to realize the potential for further exploitation of Peugeot-Sochaux. The most skilled workers were now set to work on producing specialist parts for the Focke-Wulf TA154, a prototype twin-engine night-fighter aircraft. More ominously, Herr Porsche ordered them to work on a secret German project with the codename 1144. This was the infamous V1, a jet-powered missile that Hitler believed capable of winning the war.

  Colin Gubbins knew a great deal about Sochaux, for his secretary, Margaret Jackson, had kept him supplied with intelligence from undercover agents. The RAF had also been keeping a close eye on the Peugeot works and ranked it as number three on their list of the industrial targets to be destroyed. Now, as news of increased production reached Whitehall, the army’s high command decided it was time to act.

  The most sensible course would have been to place the entire operation in Gubbins’s hands. Instead, the Sochaux brief was given to the Chief of the Air Staff, Charles Portal, and the head of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris. Portal had already clashed with Gubbins on several occasions and was his antithesis in every respect: a sharp-nosed warmonger with an unswerving belief that might is right. The principal advocate of the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of Germany, his specific recommendation was to carpet-bomb every German city with a population of more than 100,000. ‘Cool and detached’, is what Gubbins’s former secretary, Joan Bright, thought of him. She found his love of hardship somewhat perverse. ‘He preferred a bench to a feather bed, a hunk of cheese to a soufflé.’6

  Portal didn’t mince his words when speaking about Gubbins’s Baker Street team. ‘Your work is a gamble which may give us a valuable dividend or may produce nothing,’ he said. ‘My bombing offensive is not a gamble. Its dividend is certain. It is a gilt-edged investment.’ Irritated by Gubbins’s constant demands for more planes, he added: ‘I cannot divert aircraft from a certainty to a gamble which may be a gold-mine or may be completely worthless.’7

  On 15 July Lord Portal and Bomber Harris decided to put their gilt-edged investment to good use. Their intention was to drop so much high explosive on the Sochaux factory that it would cease to function for the rest of the war. No fewer than 165 Halifax bombers set off from their base that evening, preceded by Pathfinders whose task it was to drop incendiary flares around the factory’s perimeter as a marker for the bombers.

  The raid went like clockwork. The night was clear, there was little enemy flak and the Pathfinder flares were clearly visible to the pilots. As the aerial armada thundered over Sochaux, it dumped vast quantities of explosives on to the industrial complex below. Pilots witnessed the works exploding into a fireball as the bombs hit their target. They returned to their bases with tales of fabulous destruction. Lord Portal’s ‘gilt-edged investment’ had reaped rich dividends and Gubbins had been taught a lesson in destruction. That night, Bomber Harris went to his bed a contented man.

  He awoke to news that was rather less edifying. The Pathfinder flares had landed short of the factory, in the residential area of Sochaux, with devastating consequences for the local population. The pilots had dropped no fewer than 700 high-explosive shells on to the villages of Sochaux, Vieux-Charmont, Allenjoie and Nommay.

  One hundred and twenty-five civilia
ns were killed instantly and a further 250 gravely injured. The destruction on the ground was catastrophic. More than 100 houses were pulverized and a further 400 seriously damaged. The town hall was flattened, along with the local school, post office and police headquarters. A mere thirty bombs – strays – hit the factory, causing negligible damage. The report handed to Bomber Harris made for unpalatable reading. ‘Production [at the factory] was normal immediately after the raid.’8

  Harry Ree had watched the raid from the garden of his contact in Besançon and was deeply shaken when he learned of the civilian deaths. Now, he decided to act. Aware that Rodolphe Peugeot was a man of high moral principles, he telephoned him, explained who he was and warned that the RAF was certain to bomb the factory again. The only way to prevent more civilian deaths was to sabotage the place from the inside.

  Peugeot couldn’t quite believe what he was being told. Indeed he suspected the caller was a German provocateur trying to induce him to say something incriminating. But Ree assured Monsieur Peugeot that he could prove he was from London, offering to get any phrase of Peugeot’s choosing broadcast on the BBC’s messages personnels. After much deliberation, Peugeot finally agreed. He said he would trust Ree if he heard the phrase, ‘La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu’, on the following evening.

  The message was duly broadcast and both men heard it. For Ree, it was a call to action. Emboldened, he now paid a visit to Peugeot at his bourgeois residence, ‘expensively furnished and hung with tapestries’, to discuss the project further. He got straight down to business, picking up from his conversation a couple of days earlier. ‘I will tell you quite frankly what the position is,’ he said. ‘The people in London want the Peugeot factory put out of action. They will bomb you, they say, unless production can be stopped within a short time.’ He warned that a second raid was likely to cause yet more casualties. And then he offered an alternative scenario. ‘Now if you were to let a few of my men get into the factory one dark night…’