Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

by Giles Milton

  The Firs was to have one final role to play and it was a spectacular one. The Americans had been deeply impressed by Millis Jefferis’s hollow-shaped charge and were keen to develop it further. Jefferis himself could not be spared for a lengthy trip to America, so in early 1944 he had sent his young protégé, James Tuck. Tuck was immediately taken to Los Alamos to work on America’s nuclear programme.

  It soon became apparent that he had brought a solution to a hitherto intractable problem. The Americans were unable to produce enough uranium to make two atomic bombs in the short time available, obliging them to use plutonium for their second nuclear warhead. But this required a wholly different method to detonate it: indeed, it needed a massive force to trigger the violent implosion of the bomb’s two masses. Millis Jefferis’s hollow charge was now fine-tuned by the brilliant young Tuck and incorporated into the triggering device for the Nagasaki bomb. It was an extraordinary postscript to the work of the Firs.

  On 16 August 1945, the morning after VJ Day, ‘everything went flat as a pancake’. After five years of working with relentless energy, Macrae said that ‘the spirit had suddenly gone out of us and there was no incentive to go on.’4 It was as if they had been working on adrenalin for the last five years, and that the adrenalin had abruptly ceased to flow.

  The sense of gloom only increased when Macrae picked up alarming rumours that the Firs might not survive the post-war era. These rumours were fuelled by the news that Millis Jefferis had been offered the job of Chief Engineer to the Indian Army, a post he promptly accepted. At Churchill’s insistence, Jefferis was also made a Knight Commander of the British Empire and promoted to acting major-general.

  With Jefferis’s departure from the Firs, Stuart Macrae was placed in temporary charge of the place and ‘fought like a wild cat to save it’, aware that many of his old enemies were plotting to have it closed down. He felt sure that Winston Churchill would have guaranteed its future, if only he had won the 1945 general election. But he had lost and with his defeat went any long-term hope of saving the facility. ‘It was now more than ever evident that the plan was to wipe MD1 off the earth as completely as possible,’ said Macrae. In October – less than eight weeks after VJ Day – a Whitehall bureaucrat bluntly informed him that ‘the plant must go, the equipment must go and the staff must go’.

  A swansong party was held in the second week of November and the staff celebrated until dawn, aware that they were fast approaching the end of an era. A few of the more fortunate members of staff were to find themselves transferred to other military departments. The rest were allowed to remain on short-term contracts until the spring of 1946, when they were all fired. ‘This left the way clear for the Ministry of Works to tear down all the factory equipment, load it together with most of the machinery into trucks and take it to Wescott’ – a government research establishment – ‘where it was thrown on the rubbish dumps.’

  Macrae surveyed the wreckage in a state of blank incomprehension. ‘The Americans envied us and freely admitted that they could not rival us here. We had the materials, the men, the equipment and the know-how.’ They also had a glittering track record. Professor Lindemann had tried to keep a tally of the numbers of weapons produced by the Firs during the long years of war. The exact total was impossible to compute, but it included at least 3½ million anti-personnel mines, 1½ million sticky bombs, 1 million puff-balls and 2 million anti-aircraft fragmentation bombs, not to mention the many millions of innovative booby traps, specialist explosives and complex fuses. This had all been done on an annual budget of £40,000 and by a staff of just 250 people. It was an astonishing achievement.

  But Macrae had always known that the success of the Firs was also its greatest weakness: other ministries had wanted the place shut down ever since the spring of 1940. Now the war was over, they saw their chance for revenge. ‘It was totally destroyed through jealousy,’ he said.

  Macrae had been the first person to visit the Firs; it was appropriate that he was the last one to leave, packing his bags in the autumn of 1946. Before he left, Winston Churchill had requested that he collect one example of every weapon produced by the team. These were to be saved for the nation and given to the Imperial War Museum where they could be put on special display. Churchill was anxious that the efforts of Jefferis’s workforce should have some sort of public recognition.

  Macrae set to the task with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, handing over limpets, sticky bombs and any number of booby traps. But it was all to no avail. None of them went on display, and nor was there to be any mention of MD1 in the museum’s exhibits about the war.

  ‘We created an establishment which contributed more to the war effort than any other weapons design department,’ said Macrae. But it was an establishment so ungentlemanly in its outlook that it was to be for ever erased from history.5

  * * *

  Colin Gubbins faced a similar problem at the war’s end. As an increasing number of countries fell under Allied control in the early months of 1945, so the area in which his saboteurs could operate became correspondingly restricted. Some of his more audacious Jedburgh teams were transferred from France to South-East Asia, along with a small army of saboteurs from the Balkans. Here in the sweltering tropics, amid mango swamps and malarial marshland, their training at Arisaig and Brickendonbury proved its worth. Joan Bright was to hear many stories of their derring-do and concluded that they were ‘as outstandingly successful in jungle warfare as they had been with the European Resistance’.6

  By the time Japan surrendered in the summer of 1945, Gubbins was in command of a slick, well-oiled machine. Baker Street’s success was no longer in question: one expert contended that it had proved a great deal more efficacious than Bomber Command, especially in France. For four years, Arthur Harris and Charles Portal had sent wave after wave of bombers across the English Channel and had made ‘much larger holes in the ground [than Baker Street] and damaged a great deal more inessential property’. Gubbins’s saboteurs, by contrast, had crippled ninety Nazi-run factories – factories essential to Hitler’s war machine – and put them completely out of action ‘with a total load of explosives that was less than that carried by one light bomber’.7 And that, of course, had been just one small part of their work.

  In spite of the successes, Peter Wilkinson overheard rumours that the new government was planning budget cuts and dismissals: he felt sure that Baker Street’s days were numbered. In the post-war world ‘there were few peaks left to conquer’ – indeed there was none – and when Wilkinson paid a visit to Gubbins, he found him ‘depressed and preoccupied with the search for tasks which would hold the organisation together in the post-war years’.8

  It was to prove a forlorn search. Even Winston Churchill had privately accepted there was no longer any place for an organization dedicated to sabotage and guerrilla warfare. When the ministerial head of Baker Street, Lord ‘Top’ Selborne, had asked for support in safeguarding its future, he received a most disappointing reply. ‘My dear Top,’ wrote Churchill, ‘the part which your naughty deeds in war play, in peace cannot at all be considered.’9

  Selborne reminded Churchill that Gubbins had created ‘a highly specialised weapon which will be required by His Majesty’s Government whenever we are threatened’. But he knew, deep down, that Gubbins and his inner circle would be ‘put to sleep’ – a sleep ‘from which they will never wake up’.10

  Gubbins clung to the hope that he could preserve ‘a skeleton headquarters in some dark corner of Whitehall’.11 It was not to be. The Labour victory in the 1945 election sealed the fate of Baker Street, just as it had sealed the fate of the Firs. The new Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, wrote a stiffly formal letter to Gubbins on behalf of the government expressing his ‘high appreciation of your distinguished service’.12

  His words signalled the death warrant for Baker Street: it was to be abolished with the same secrecy as it had originally been established. On 15 January 1946, five months to the day after the
Japanese surrender, Gubbins’s outfit was dissolved at the stroke of a pen. The staff was to be dismissed, the buildings returned to civilian use. No one would ever know of the extraordinary missions that had been orchestrated from Number 64 Baker Street.

  It was a curiously bland end to the most swashbuckling organization ever to be sponsored by a British government. Ernest Bevin’s letter of valediction made no mention of the audacious undercover operations, the daring acts of destruction, the demolition of bridges and railways. There was no mention of the 7,500 successful air sorties that had seen hundreds of brave men and women parachuted into occupied lands. Nor was there any mention of the fact that guerrilla movements in Greece and the Balkans, led by men like Eddie Myers and Chris ‘Monty’ Woodhouse, had tied down fifty enemy divisions in the most critical phase of the war. But perhaps the most striking omission in Bevin’s letter was that there was no mention of Gubbins’s inner circle of brilliant, devious and wildly creative experts, without whom there would have been no guerrilla warfare.

  * * *

  The closure of Baker Street spelled doom for all its offshoot stations up and down the country. Arisaig House in the Scottish Highlands was returned to its owners, who dismantled the firing ranges and ‘killing rooms’ in the cellars and restored the place to something resembling a family home. Brickendonbury Manor – Station 17 – was to have an even less glamorous post-war role. Over the previous five years it had played host to some of the most daring gentlemen adventurers of the Second World War. Now, it was acquired by the Highways Department of the local county council. One of their first acts was to slick the damaged walls with government-issued mustard-brown paint.

  One by one, the requisitioned properties were returned to their rightful owners, often in a sorry state of disrepair. Their plaster was chipped, their furniture broken and their once immaculate croquet lawns pitted with craters. The wartime story of these houses was to remain an absolute secret. No one was ever to know of the ungentlemanly antics that had been taught behind closed doors.

  And what of the gentlemen themselves? What of Gubbins’s elite circle of mavericks who had worked so assiduously during the long years of war? A Special Confidential Report produced shortly before the armistice acknowledged Eric Sykes as the consummate master of silent killing. ‘Few equals and no superior,’ was the verdict. But Sykes was also to be one of the war’s final casualties. Four days after the armistice with Germany was signed, on 12 May, he died of a heart attack ‘caused by overwork, anxiety and standing about in snow, rain and mud’. He had told a female friend that ‘he didn’t want recognition’ and nor did he want medals or honours. All he wanted – all he had ever wanted – was to preserve the lives of as many of Gubbins’s saboteurs as possible. His death was a sad end to a brilliant, complex individual who, in the words of his unnamed lady friend, was ‘the kindest, straightest man I have ever known’.13

  Sykes’s partner-in-crime, William Fairbairn, fared rather better. His genius in knife-fighting and the martial arts was recognized by the American government, which honoured him with the Legion of Merit for his work at Camp X. ‘Outstanding ability’,14 was the verdict of William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, who knew that Fairbairn’s training had saved the lives of hundreds of American servicemen. Fairbairn had a curriculum vitae unlike any other and it was to stand him in good stead in the post-war world. He spent time training Singapore’s anti-riot squad before moving to Cyprus, where he taught SWAT teams in counter-insurgency tactics.

  Millis Jefferis headed to India at the end of 1945 in order to take up his post as Chief Engineer to the Indian Army. He found it a strange experience to be in the regular army, where rules and regulations were there to be obeyed. In a letter to Professor Lindemann, he spoke of his hankering for the old days. ‘I expect I shall find my way back to unorthodoxy again.’15

  In those post-war years, he was to find himself granted an honour that was both unsolicited and surprising. The Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors offered him a six-figure sum in recognition of his pioneering wartime inventions. Jefferis was gratified but turned it down. ‘His Edwardian principals of right and wrong were very strong,’ said his son John.16 He did not believe he should profit from having helped to defeat Hitler.

  When he died in September 1963, his obituary in The Times betrayed little about his wartime work, describing him as ‘a backroom boy’ who had somehow earned himself a KBE.17 It was left to Macrae to produce a more compelling portrait of the complex and idiosyncratic Jefferis. He could be irritable, moody and introverted, as Macrae knew only too well, but he was also intensely loyal and – whisky in hand at the end of a sixteen-hour working day – a most genial companion-in-arms.

  George Rheam had been the last member to join Gubbins’s inner circle but he had swiftly made himself indispensible, displaying his mastery of the sabotage brief when planning the Norsk Hydro mission. He found it hard to return to civilian life after the exhilaration of the war. In the immediate aftermath of the conflict, he wrote a secret report on the decisive role that sabotage had played in the Allied victory. He was looking forward to the next war with a glint of malice and hoped that sabotage would this time begin at the very outbreak of hostilities. If so, he intended to play a leading role, aware that ‘it will have an immediate and decisive influence on the course of events.’18

  Cecil Clarke’s war came to an end with the closure of the Firs. His last invention was a monstrous steel bridge-laying contraption whose name, Great Eastern, was a doff-of-the-cap towards Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It was a beast of a machine, equipped with a massive girder ramp that enabled tanks to cross the canals and rivers of Holland, whose bridges had been destroyed by the Nazis. In building such a monster, Cecil Clarke’s war had turned full circle. He had first come to the notice of Winston Churchill on account of his vast digging machine. Now, his final project was even more lavish in scale.

  The first ten Great Easterns had been shipped to the Continent in the dying months of 1944, but they came too late in the day. Clarke was furious that they had not been more useful and told his son of his ‘private disgust and disappointment’ that the Germans had surrendered before his machine could prove its worth.19 It was as if Hitler had personally insulted him.

  Clarke returned to LoLode in November 1945 and continued to build state-of-the-art trailers and caravans. He spent his leisure hours designing labour-saving domestic contraptions that proved rather less efficient than the weapons he had built during the war. His daughter-in-law Ann was on hand to see the test drive of his homespun pressure cooker. ‘It exploded,’ she said, ‘and bits of chicken had to be picked out of the kitchen ceiling.’20 Indeed everything that Cecil touched in that post-war period seemed to explode, even his jars of homemade tomato soup. They blew up in the larder, splattering everything with fermented juice.

  Clarke’s wartime work had seen him devise some fiendishly powerful weapons. But the mass destruction caused by the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki so appalled him that he became an enthusiastic member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and continued to lobby against nuclear weapons until his death in 1961. In common with many of Gubbins’s men, he was a gentle individual who turned his talents to destruction only because Hitler had forced his hand.

  Gubbins had been aided throughout the long years of war by two formidable ladies, Joan Bright and Margaret Jackson. Joan’s wartime had been rather more extraordinary than most. She had always aspired to be at the vanguard of a feminist revolution and so it proved to be. After leaving Gubbins’s service, she was hired to run the Secret Intelligence Centre of the Cabinet War Rooms, with custody over all the greatest wartime secrets. Later, she was given a new role as personal assistant to General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, with near constant access to Churchill. Indeed, she travelled with Churchill to the Yalta summit, meeting with Stalin and Roosevelt, as well as accompanying him to the summits at Teheran and Potsdam.

  Joan briefly dated Ian Fleming – ‘a ruthless man’21 �
�� and was rumoured to have been Fleming’s model for Miss Moneypenny, James Bond’s secretary. She later married Colonel Philip Astley, a specialist in political warfare, who had previously been married to Madeleine Carroll, the world’s highest-paid actress at the time. Many years after the war, in collaboration with Peter Wilkinson, Joan wrote a book about Colin Gubbins’s outstanding role as maestro of sabotage and guerrilla warfare. She lived until the ripe age of ninety-eight, dying in 2009.

  Margaret Jackson also had a distinguished post-war career. She first joined the Allied Commission for Austria, taking all the notes at the quadripartite meetings. Later, she worked for the Organisation of European Economic Cooperation, which implemented the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of a continent shattered by war. Margaret had once jested that her ardent desire in life was to make men fall in love with her, yet she remained single until her death in 2013, aged ninety-six.

  Colin Gubbins kept in regular touch with both Margaret and Joan: they remained bright links to a war that had cost him his marriage and his elder son. The armistice brought a further blow, leaving him without gainful employment. His first post-war job was with a rubber company, but he found it deeply uninspiring and soon quit. He was next offered a job in a textile firm run by his old Baker Street friend, Edward Beddington-Behrens, in whose Regent’s Park mansion he had first interviewed recruits to the fledgling MI(R). But after the excitement of blowing up the Nazi war machine, selling carpets seemed dreadfully dull and humdrum.

  There were the occasional bright moments. He was to find himself much decorated for his wartime work and even gained the grudging appreciation of General de Gaulle. The French general invested him with the Légion d’Honneur at a colourful military ceremony at Les Invalides, the first of a string of awards that Gubbins would receive from the grateful leaders of countries in which his saboteurs had operated.