Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  This all took time and it was not until the spring of 1943 that the first Hedgehogs were being installed on Royal Navy vessels. When Commander Reginald Whinney took command of the HMS Wanderer, he was told to expect the arrival of a highly secret piece of equipment. ‘At more or less the last minute, the bits and pieces for an ahead-throwing anti-submarine mortar codenamed “hedgehog” arrived.’

  As Whinney watched it being unpacked on the Devonport quayside, he was struck by its bizarre shape. ‘How does this thing work, sir?’ he asked, ‘and when are we supposed to use it?’ He was met with a shrug. ‘You’ll get full instructions.’4

  Whinney glanced over the Hedgehog’s twenty-four mortars and was ‘mildly suspicious’ of this contraption that had been delivered in an unmarked van coming from an anonymous country house in Buckinghamshire. He was not alone in his scepticism. Many Royal Navy captains were ‘used to weapons which fired with a resounding bang’, as one put it, and were ‘not readily impressed with the performance of a contact bomb which exploded only on striking an unseen target’.5 They preferred to stick with the tried and tested depth charge when attacking U-boats, even though it had a hit rate of less than one in ten. Jefferis’s technology was too smart to be believed.

  The Americans proved quicker at embracing the Hedgehog, equipping large numbers of their ships in the final months of 1943. Among them was the USS England, which went into service in the Pacific shortly afterwards. She was soon to find herself caught in the opening shots of Operation A-Go, the Japanese quest for the total destruction of the American Pacific fleet in the spring of 1944. It was an operation driven by Admiral Soemu Toyoda, who knew that submarines would play a central role in the battle ahead. Indeed he said that ‘the success or failure of Operation A-Go depends on the submarines’. What he didn’t know is that he would be pitting his fleet against Jefferis’s mathematical genius.

  Admiral Toyoda issued his pre-battle orders to Rear-Admiral Naburo Owada on 3 May 1944. Owada was commander of the Japanese submarine force, Squadron Seven, and he was instructed to launch ‘a surprise attack against enemy task forces and invasion forces’.6

  The Americans were quick to intercept the Japanese wireless transmissions: one of the first intercepts revealed that a lone Japanese sub, I-16, was heading towards the Solomon Islands. The I-16 was an enticing prize, one of the largest submarines ever built in Japan. She was almost 350 feet long and heavily armed with eight 21-inch torpedo tubes. She was so big that she could carry a small supplementary sub in her deckhouse. Moreover, she was commanded by the brilliantly gifted Yoshitaka Takeuchi.

  American intelligence discovered not only the sub’s destination, but also her intended route and speed. This was immediately forwarded to the USS England, which set out in hot pursuit.

  The England’s executive officer, John Williamson, was one of the new breed of navy men: savvy, clean-shaven and passionate about the latest gadgets. With his large ears and goofy smile, he looked like a typical college geek. But he was a geek who was hungry for victory. And in Jefferis’s Hedgehog, he smelled triumph. Long before his vessel set sail from San Francisco, he had instigated a series of test firings in the harbour. ‘If it hit,’ he noted, ‘the concentrated power of its thirty-five pounds of TNT was enough to blow a two- or three-foot hole in a submarine’s three-quarter-inch rolled-steel hull.’ Unlike the depth charge, the Hedgehog only detonated on making contact with the submarine. ‘You knew you had scored a hit, and a devastating one.’

  Now, as Williamson went in search of the Japanese sub, he felt ‘a heady mixture of excitement, eagerness and trepidation appropriate to new boys on the block’.7 One slip on his part and the England herself would come under attack from Commander Takeuchi’s torpedoes.

  At exactly 1.25 p.m. on 18 May, the England’s soundman, Roger Bernhardt, gave a shout from the bridge. ‘Echoes sharp and clear, sir!’8 The echo detection equipment revealed that the submarine was just 1,400 yards away. The chase was now on and the vessel began to shudder as the engines were cranked to full throttle.

  Williamson was impressed by Takeuchi’s reactions, for he proved a skilled quarry. ‘At four hundred yards, the target turned hard left and kicked his screws.’ Takeuchi was making his escape, using a procedure known as ‘kicking the rudder’. This threw up disturbances in the water, distorting the sonar echoes and making the sub’s position impossible to pinpoint with accuracy. But Williamson had made it his business to locate subs, even in turbulent water. He studied the Doppler machine intently as he tried to calculate the exact depth of Commander Takeuchi’s sub. At precisely 2.33 p.m., he got a fix. A split-second later, he fired his weapon and the Hedgehogs roared away from the ship and upwards into the clear blue sky, forming themselves into a perfect ellipse and then entering the sea in symmetry, just as Millis Jefferis had intended.

  ‘No one said a word. All eyes were fixed on the water’s surface, everyone imagining the huge steel fish below.’ Everyone knew that unlike the old depth charge, the Hedgehog would only explode if it hit the sub.

  Silence. Tension. And then – ‘V-r-r-oom! We heard it again and again, in rapid-fire succession, four to six hits coming so fast on top of one another as to seem almost simultaneous.’ Williamson had just one word in his mind: ‘Bull’s-eye!’

  Deep below the surface, Commander Takeuchi had been engaged in a desperate struggle to evade the England when his submarine was hit by six shattering explosions. Jefferis had spent months calculating the mathematical equation that would ensure his Hedgehog would strike with deadly precision. Now, that mathematics reaped dividends. As the I-16’s steel hull was punctured by multiple spigots, the rigid hull instantly and violently crumpled in on itself like a tin can crushed by a giant fist. Commander Takeuchi and his crew were engulfed in a catastrophic decompression that sucked in a high-velocity avalanche of water, along with twisted shrapnel from the crippled outer shell. Death was mercifully quick. There was no hope of escape.

  There was jubilation aboard the England at the sound of the underwater explosions. The crew ‘broke out in cheers, everyone jumping and slapping one another on the back like a team that had just won a tournament game’. The cheering continued for fully two minutes, ‘and was just beginning to die down when all of a sudden we heard a giant wham!’ The sea erupted into angry wavelets and the England ‘shuddered violently and started rocking and reeling’.

  Williamson’s first thought was that they had been torpedoed. He feared that Commander Takeuchi had somehow detonated his on-board torpedoes as a final, desperate act of revenge. In fact, it was the violent implosion of the submarine that caused the shockwaves. The men on the England were nevertheless terrified. The fantail of the ship ‘lifted as much as a foot, plopped heavily back in the water, while men throughout the ship were knocked off their feet and deck plates sheared loose in the engine room’. Williamson concluded that the aftershock marked the ‘cataclysmic certainty that we had heard the last of the Japanese submarine’. It left the men ‘sobered and subdued’. The Hedgehogs had made their job of killing very easy.

  The submarine had been sunk at more than 500 feet below the surface and almost twenty minutes were to pass before the first wreckage began to appear. Williamson was staring intently at the sea when he saw some shredded cork insulation pop to the surface. It was followed by deck planking and the remnants of a filing cabinet. Next to float up was a prayer mat decorated with Japanese characters, a lone chopstick and a large rubber container holding a seventy-five-pound bag of rice.

  There was increasing excitement on deck as more evidence of their ‘kill’ started floating to the surface. Everyone was awaiting the inevitable appearance of human remains. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, but they never arrived. John Williamson peered into the water and was quick to see why. ‘Soon a dozen or so well-fed-looking sharks were milling around the vicinity.’ Commander Takeuchi and his crew had fallen prey to two different enemies, one above water and one below.

  A small oil slick soon ap
peared on the surface, evidence that the Hedgehogs had ruptured the sub’s fuel tanks. ‘The slick grew steadily in size until profuse amounts of oil were bubbling to the surface, along with more debris.’

  All the detritus needed to be collected, for the US Navy would only confirm a ‘kill’ if there was evidence. One of the England’s whaleboats was lowered and a few of the crew began collecting relics of the sub. Williamson was concerned for the men’s safety, for ‘there were a dozen or more huge sharks swimming excitedly through the floating debris, looking for blood and shredded limbs.’

  Over the course of the next twelve days, Williamson achieved a record unbeaten in the history of naval warfare. He and his men sank a further five submarines, all destroyed by Hedgehogs. Each time, the effect was the same: a deep-water vroom, an oil slick on the surface and dozens of marauding sharks. One young mariner aboard the England confessed to being upset at the ease with which their Hedgehogs were destroying the subs. Williamson had a ready answer. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘war is killing. The more of the enemy we can kill, and the more of his ships we can sink the sooner it will be over.’ He added that ‘we are in a war that we must win, for to lose it would be far worse.’ It was a sentiment that could have come straight from the mouth of Millis Jefferis.

  At the naval headquarters in Japan, Admiral Soemu Toyoda was still unaware of the catastrophe that had befallen Squadron Seven. He was eagerly anticipating the onset of Operation A-Go, aware that his submarines had a unique role to play. At 9 a.m. on 15 June he gave the order for battle, using exactly the same words as Admiral Togo had used to address his fleet on the eve of the famous Battle of Tsushima, thirty-eight years earlier. ‘The fate of the empire rests on this one battle. Every man is expected to do his utmost.’9

  As part of the general deployment, he sent an urgent directive to Admiral Owada: ‘Submarine Squadron Seven is to be immediately stationed east of Saipan, to intercept and destroy American carriers and transports, at any cost.’ Admiral Owada’s reply was succinct. Squadron Seven, he said, ‘has no submarines’.10 Jefferis’s Hedgehogs had claimed the lot.

  Stuart Macrae was delighted when he was brought the news: indeed, it would remain with him for years. ‘The hedgehog was an out and out winner,’ he wrote. ‘It went into service rather late in the day, but was credited with thirty-seven confirmed submarine killings.’11 What had begun as a sabotage mortar for use against the Nazis in Kent had been transformed by Jefferis into a devastating weapon of destruction.

  19

  Operation Gubbins

  TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY marched hand in hand in wartime, or so it seemed to Colin Gubbins. The triumph, when it came, was as unexpected as it was welcome. In the last week of September 1943, Gubbins learned that his boss, Charles Hambro, had resigned. His resignation came after a lengthy wrangle over the running of Baker Street, and there were many who felt it was high time he left. Even one of his supporters referred to him as ‘always the gentleman among the professionals’.1 It was a backhanded compliment and the inference was clear: the professionals, not the gentleman, had been running the show.

  There were never any doubts as to his successor. Ever since Gubbins had joined Baker Street in November 1940, he had been the driving force behind its most spectacular missions. He had also displayed a rare gift for hiring brilliant mavericks with unorthodox talents. And he had established a string of secret stations like Brickendonbury Manor and Arisaig, which had become the finest training academies in the world, so good that even the Americans had copied them.

  Now, Winston Churchill rewarded Gubbins with the top job: henceforth he was to be known as CD. The C stood for Chief, the D for Destruction. It was a neat little reminder of the early days in Caxton Street, where Gubbins had shared an office with Lawrence Grand of Section D. The new job also came with a new rank. Gubbins was elevated from brigadier to major-general, the first person in the history of the British Army to be so promoted for services to dirty warfare.

  Gubbins’s first recruit to Caxton Street, Peter Wilkinson, was delighted when he heard the news. When he thought back to the early days, he could scarcely believe their change in fortunes. He and Gubbins had started out with a shared back office in Berkeley Court, furnished with one table and two chairs. Now, less than three years later, Gubbins stood at the head of his own empire with hundreds of office staff and a global reach. ‘The Baker Street headquarters had been brought to a hitherto undreamed of level of efficiency,’ he said.2

  Joan Bright was also delighted that Gubbins had at long last been rewarded with the top job. She said that he had transformed Baker Street ‘from a community of individual enthusiasts into a military bureaucracy’.3 It was a formidable fighting force, one that was ready to tackle Hitler head-on.

  As the fourth full year of war gave way to the fifth – 1944 – Gubbins began preparing for the battle to come. He first embarked on a whistle-stop tour of his sabotage fiefdom, travelling to the Middle East and North Africa, where he had a meeting with his American counterpart, William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. He visited Italy and reorganized his guerrilla operations in Greece, where Chris ‘Monty’ Woodhouse and Eddie Myers were still blowing up bridges and barracks. He then headed back to Cairo for a luncheon with Winston Churchill, General Ismay and Fitzroy Maclean (who was leading his guerrilla operations in Yugoslavia). Shortly afterwards, he returned to London in order to overhaul the office in preparation for what he believed would be the final showdown with the Nazis. The chiefs of staff all agreed that his guerrillas would have a potentially vital role to play in the planned invasion of Occupied France.

  Aware that even the most sceptical army generals were by now more or less converted to sabotage, Gubbins staged an exhibition of explosive devices, ‘on private view in one of the dissecting rooms at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington’.4 The exhibition displayed the most devious weapons produced by Millis Jefferis’s team at the Firs, including scores of booby traps, detonators and limpets. It was an invitation-only show, one that the king himself was delighted to attend. For Gubbins, it was a very personal moment of triumph.

  * * *

  It was quieter than usual in Baker Street on Sunday, 6 February. Gubbins himself was not in the office and weekend duty had been placed in the hands of Alan Ritchie, an air vice-marshal who had only recently joined his staff. Ritchie was busy with paperwork for much of the day, handling wireless telegrams from across the world and placing them in Gubbins’s in-tray. One of these telegrams was rather more personal than usual. Ritchie flagged it up for special attention, pushed it close to the top of the pile and then left for the night.

  Gubbins arrived early for work the following morning, anxious to read through the backlog of telegrams before secretary Margaret arrived at the office. As he sifted through the pile, he noticed one marked ‘deepest sympathy’. Intrigued, he tore it open. As he did so, a chill ran through his veins. It was the one marked up by Alan Ritchie on the previous evening and it informed Gubbins that his elder son, Michael, had been killed in action.

  Gubbins was totally unprepared for such devastating news. He had assumed the telegram would be referring to a failed sabotage operation or botched attack. Instead, its terse prose brought news that would mark his life for ever. Stunned, horrified, appalled, he reached for the phone and urgently tried to find out more.

  It was some days before the whole terrible story unfolded, one that he eventually confided to Joan Bright. It transpired that young Michael had volunteered to serve in an advance assault group set ashore at Anzio, some thirty miles to the south of Rome. He and his comrade-in-arms, Malcolm Munthe, had been crossing an exposed stretch of no-man’s-land when they found themselves under fire. Michael had always been ‘eager for excitement’, but he now found himself with an overdose of adrenalin. Munthe was hit in the head and chest and collapsed with serious wounds. He was later rescued and nursed back to health. Michael himself was raked with gunfire and killed in an instant. He never stood a chance.

 
; Gubbins had first-hand experience of war. He had seen men maimed, shot and blown apart. But the loss of his own son overshadowed every other death. One of the ladies working for him recalled him ‘walking backwards and forwards murmuring “so useless, so useless”’ as he fought back the tears. He tried to explain his grief to Peter Wilkinson, but words failed him. ‘A totally useless death,’ was all he could muster.

  Gubbins would later travel to Italy, where he was comforted by his son’s friend, Gerry Holdworth. Holdworth had laid out Michael’s kit and clothing on the floor but had the unenviable task of informing Gubbins that ‘they never found a trace of Michael’. His corpse was one of thousands that was simply trampled into the winter mud. Holdworth ‘was very distressed by Colin’s grief, but there was nothing he could do except fetch a carefully hoarded bottle of Black Label whisky which the two men drank together’.5

  Bereavement takes many forms and Gubbins went through every possible emotion. Michael’s death might yet have been the catalyst to bring him and his wife, Nonie, back together. Instead, it did the very opposite, causing a permanent rift. Within months, they would be divorced.

  Ultimately, there was only one thing that could make sense of Michael’s death, and that was to defeat Hitler at any cost. And that – in the spring of 1944 – was what Gubbins was preparing to do. He began hand-picking a group of young men for what was to be the adventure of their lives. It was an adventure that Gubbins believed could turn the tide of war.

  * * *

  Colin Gubbins had kept a sharp eye on France ever since the attack on the Pessac power station in the spring of 1941. In the intervening time, a growing number of highly trained saboteurs and wireless operators (including thirty-nine women) had been parachuted into the country. By the spring of 1944, he had some 1,200 agents in the field. Their role was to create networks of French resisters (known as ‘circuits’) that could wreak mayhem in the immediate aftermath of Operation Neptune, the assault phase of the invasion of northern France. It was imperative that Hitler’s defensive battalions in Normandy should be deprived of supplies, equipment and reinforcements, and sabotage was a far more effective means of achieving this than aerial bombardment.