Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  While the King and his Government stood fast, Nazi propaganda took to the air by way of the New British Broadcasting Station, which sent out messages intended to intimidate the population of the United Kingdom. The broadcasts, purporting to emanate from dissident elements within the country, sought to portray a nation in disarray and ripe for takeover. ‘Disunity, demoralisation, hatred of its leaders and a passionate yearning for peace were the distinguishing characteristics of this cloud-cuckoo land,’ wrote one historian.

  Everybody knew that not only Churchill and his friends but even Socialist Cabinet Ministers were being bribed by Jews to continue the war. Sabotage was rife, and so were foot-and-mouth disease, faked Treasury notes and tins of meat poisoned by German agents in the Argentine.

  More concrete attempts were made to unnerve the population. On the night of 13/14 August 1940, German aircraft staged an Abwurfaktion (throwing-down or dropping action), in which ‘pack assemblies’ were released by parachute over various parts of the Midlands and lowland Scotland. The packs contained maps, wireless transmitters, explosives, addresses of prominent people and instructions to imaginary agents about their roles in the imminent invasion. The aim was to suggest that the attack would come from the east coast, and that a Fifth Column of Fascists and Nazi sympathizers eager to undermine the regime was established all over the country, ready to receive the invaders. Farmers, in particular, were sceptical: they pointed out that documents purporting to be those of parachutists who had landed in standing corn, but had left no trails when they moved out of the field, must have been carried by men with exceptional powers of levitation.

  There was much talk of Fifth Columnists, but most people thought that, if any existed, they were harmless. On the contrary: in the words of the historian Ben Macintyre, ‘There was an active and dangerous Fifth Column working from within to hasten a Nazi victory … motivated in large part by a ferocious hatred of Jews.’ Not for seventy years did the release of secret files reveal that during the war a large network of crypto-Fascist spies in Britain had been run – and neutralized – by one extraordinarily skilful and courageous agent working for MI5, who posed as a member of the Gestapo. He was known as Jack King, until, in 2014, his real name was revealed as John Bingham. His contacts thought he was working for the Nazis, and happily revealed their treachery to him, but none of them was ever prosecuted, partly because they were doing no real harm, and partly because any action taken against them might have broken Jack King’s cover.

  On 13 June 1940 the Government imposed a ban on the ringing of church bells, except to warn of imminent air raids or invasion – in which case they would play the role of the beacon fires which signalled the approach of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Even in an emergency they might be rung only by the military or the police. Senior clerics protested, and the restriction caused displeasure among many villagers, who felt that an important part of their lives had been suppressed, and that, in the event of an attack, the invaders might single out churches for retribution, on the grounds that they were part of the defenders’ warning system. Prophesying doom, The Ringing World denounced the ban as ‘a stunning blow to ringing, from which, even when the war is over, it will take a long time to recover’. On the other hand, some people who lived near churches were delighted, and hailed the silence on Sunday mornings as one of the few blessings brought by the war. As the threat of invasion waned, the restrictions were gradually lifted, but not until VE Day in May 1945 were full peals allowed again.

  Country priests and members of congregations did what they could to protect their churches from bomb damage. At Fairford, in Gloucestershire, the vicar, the Revd Francis Gibbs, supervised the removal of the outstanding medieval stained glass from the windows of St Mary’s Church and had thousands of pieces buried in a vault beneath a large memorial cross in the grounds of Fairford Park, outside the village. In a similar but even bigger undertaking, the twelfth-century stained glass was removed from the great window in the south-west transept of Salisbury Cathedral. Three effigies from the Cathedral were wrapped up and taken to East Quantockshead in Somerset, where they were hidden in the cellar of St Audrey’s School; the transfer was supposed to be deadly secret, but pupils in the school saw the bundles arriving, thought they were bodies, and alarmed their parents with lurid stories about casualties or plague victims.

  As the bells fell silent, new airfields were being laid out all over the country, especially in East Anglia, some with grass strips good enough for fighters and light bombers, others with asphalt or concrete runways for heavier aircraft. Hangars and Nissen huts made from curved sheets of corrugated iron (for accommodation and storage) sprouted at their edges. To the irritation of people living close by, footpaths across these new bases and other military areas were closed for the duration.

  Besides the genuine airfields, numerous decoys were created in the hope of luring Luftwaffe pilots away from vulnerable targets. Daylight airfields, known as K sites, were furnished with inflatable or wooden aircraft, usually with wings but only a skeleton fuselage. To add verisimilitude, redundant training aircraft, old bomb tractors and other service vehicles were parked in the open and moved around to new positions during the night. On dummy night airfields, known as Q sites, there was often a runway flare path made from small burning lamps, and lights that went on and off at various points to give the impression of vehicles moving. Experiments were made with various kinds of fires, including drums of burning creosote, designed to simulate activity in railway yards or factories.

  The decoy fields began to attract attention immediately after the withdrawal from Dunkirk. One successful K site was at East Kirkby in Lincolnshire, where wooden Whitley bombers were trundled around from day to day by the local RAF contingent: their efforts evidently paid off, for German planes bombed the airfield several times. The Q sites in East Anglia and Lincolnshire were the most frequently targeted, and during June thirty-six Q raids were recorded in England as a whole.

  All farming became more difficult and dangerous, especially in the south and east of the country as, out of sheer spite, stray German aircraft began to attack obviously civilian targets before they headed for home. One Luftwaffe pilot provoked a volley of sarcastic comments on the ground in Kent when he bombed a hayrick and then came in on another low pass, riddling the stack with his machine guns. As the farm workers had already taken shelter, the only casualties were a few sheep.

  Some countrymen went to extraordinary lengths to safeguard their property. Colonel Charles Owen, who had been involved with the development of camouflage during the First World War, lived in a house called Tre Evan on a hill outside the Herefordshire village of Llangarron, near Ross-on-Wye. There he went up and down a ladder to paint the building’s white, stuccoed front with splodges of green and brown, both to make it a less conspicuous target, and to disguise a landmark that might be useful to the enemy pilots on their way to or from Coventry or Cardiff. Neighbours – mostly First World War veterans – considered the exercise mildly eccentric, and the Colonel’s family found it rather embarrassing; but he – head of the local ARP squad – was serious about it, and organized regular fire drills, during which his grandchildren stood to with stirrup pumps and pails of water.

  Five

  Going to Ground

  The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well … First she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything: then she looked at the sides of the well and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and bookshelves: here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs.

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Captain Peter Fleming was an unconventional figure, to say the least. An Old Etonian aged thirty-two at the start of the war, he was well known to the public as the author of two runaway bestsellers publis
hed in the 1930s, twenty years before his younger brother Ian thought up James Bond. Brazilian Adventure – funniest of travel books – sent up a quest for the explorer Percy Fawcett lost in the Mato Grosso, and News from Tartary described how the author had walked 3500 miles from Peking to Kashmir in the company of Ella Maillart, lesbian captain of the Swiss women’s hockey team, without telling his fiancée, the actress Celia Johnson, that he was accompanied by a woman. Yet, in spite of his renown, Fleming was essentially a private person, and one main qualification for an unusual wartime commission was his first-hand knowledge of the English countryside.

  At home in the woods and fields of his 2000-acre estate in Oxfordshire, he could distinguish the sett of a badger from the earth of a fox; he could read the tracks left by animals and interpret the calls made by birds and animals both in daylight and in the dark. As a means of confusing the enemy, he would sometimes advocate the Victorian poacher’s trick of walking backwards through mud or snow, to make it look as if the passer-by had been moving in the opposite direction.

  As the threat of invasion intensified, General Andrew Thorne, Commander of XII Corps, was given the task of defending south-east England along a front that stretched from Greenwich, on the Thames, round the coast of Kent and Sussex to Hayling Island, in Hampshire. Remembering how, six years earlier, he had seen peasants in East Prussia digging last-ditch defence positions in the hills and stocking them with food, weapons and ammunition, in the hope that they would be able to disrupt the supply lines of an invading army, Thorne appointed Fleming to do much the same in England: to raise and train a body of men whose role would be to go to ground behind any German advance and harass the invaders from the rear, while the main line of defence was organized nearer London.

  Armed with a letter of authority, and operating in the strictest secrecy, Fleming set up his headquarters in a brick and timber farmhouse called The Garth on a hill at Bilting, between Ashford and Faversham. The true identity of his organization was buried under the meaningless title ‘The XII Corps Observation Unit’, and individual patrols were assigned an equally uninformative name, the ‘Auxiliary Units’.

  Together with Captain Mike Calvert, a Royal Engineer, Fleming first went about his area setting up booby traps by stuffing ammonal explosive into the churns in which dairy farmers set out their milk for collection – but even though these home-made bombs were never fitted with detonators, they made people nervous and were soon removed. He and Calvert also mined a whole belt of bridges, in the hope of slowing any German advance, and booby-trapped country houses which the enemy might use as headquarters by cramming the cellars full of explosives. As Calvert put it, their task was ‘to make Kent and Sussex as unsafe and unpleasant as possible for the Germans if ever they got that far’. They also blew out the centre sections of the piers at Brighton, Worthing and Eastbourne. Then, in absolute secrecy, they began recruiting gamekeepers, poachers, foresters, gardeners and farmers – men with intimate knowledge of the area in which they lived. All were hand-picked, after apparently casual approaches, and all were vetted for security by their local police – even though the police did not know what role the candidates were going to undertake.

  Meanwhile, Colonel Colin Gubbins (a specialist in guerrilla warfare, and later head of Special Operations Executive) established a training base in Berkshire at Coleshill House, a relatively small but elegant seventeenth-century mansion bristling with tall chimneys, home of the Pleydell-Bouverie family, well isolated by its own park, shrubberies, fields and woods. Recruits were told to report to Highworth village post office, where the elderly postmistress, Mabel Stranks, would check their identity papers, disappear for a few minutes, then return and say ‘Someone’s coming to fetch you’. A vehicle would appear to ferry the newcomer to the house. Training weekends took place in the house and grounds, and three manuals were produced, each succeeding the earlier one as guerrilla activity became more refined. Some predictions were blissfully optimistic: ‘In districts where the war is intense and enemy troops thick on the ground, it will not be necessary to go far to find a target.’

  Men chosen to be auxiliaries were set to work building subterranean lairs which they stocked with ammunition, explosives, sabotage equipment, rations and cooking stoves. One of these dens in Kent was in the cellars of a ruined house that had been destroyed by fire years earlier, but most of them lay in dense woods, and at least one was excavated from on old badger sett in a derelict chalkpit: the long, winding tunnels – a foot or so in diameter – were enlarged into a reasonably comfortable hideout, which Fleming himself later described:

  They [the men] took a pride in their place. They schemed endlessly and worked hard to improve it. Ventilation shafts, alarm signals, dustbins, lights, clothes pegs, bookshelves hollowed out of the chalk, washing up arrangements – all these tactical problems they tackled with enthusiasm.

  In his book A Very Quiet War Ralph Arnold, ADC to General Thorne, gave an idea of how cleverly the den was concealed. In the middle of a thick belt of woodland on the hillside above Charing, the General was led into a clearing and challenged to find the entrance to the local unit’s hideaway:

  We poked about unsuccessfully for a few minutes, and then our guide casually kicked a tree stump. It fell back on a hinge to reveal a hole with a rope ladder dangling into a cavern that had been enlarged from a badger’s sett. In this cave, sitting on kegs of explosive, and surrounded by weapons, booby-traps, a wireless set and tins of emergency rations, were some Lovat Scouts and half-a-dozen hand-picked Home Guards … It was pure Boys’ Own Paper stuff, and the Corps Commander, whose brainchild the Auxiliary Units had been, simply loved it.

  Another distinguished visitor was General Bernard Montgomery, who took over from Thorne as Commander of XII Corps, and early in 1941 was escorted out onto a Kent hillside by Captain Norman Field, Fleming’s successor as the Auxiliary Units’ Intelligence Officer. When the walkers reached a battered old wooden trough, Field suggested they should sit on it to enjoy the view. They did just that, but a few moments later Montgomery was startled to find that, without a sound or any apparent movement, his companion had vanished. Only when he saw Field’s head appear beside him, sticking up through a rectangular opening in the bottom of the trough, did he realize that he had been perching on top of a perfectly concealed hideout. When the young officer told him that this was one of XII Corps’ two-man observation posts, he was furious, because no one had let him know that such lookouts existed; but when he wormed his way down into a small chamber hacked out of the earth, he could not help admiring the way in which two authentic looking rabbit holes leading out through the steep bank beneath the trough had been adapted to give a view of the A20.

  In the construction of such dens, the disposal of excavated soil was a problem, not least because it usually had to be done in the dark. The diggers would carry away earth and rocks in buckets, and either dump them elsewhere in the wood (having first scraped back the leaves and earth on the forest floor), or tip them into streams strong enough to wash new deposits away. If the site was on sandy ground, the spoil could be loaded into hessian bags, thousands of which were being piled up all over the country to protect buildings or gun sites from blast.

  Many of the larger bases were built by the Royal Engineers or by civilian contractors, who told inquisitive locals that the holes being dug in the woods were to house emergency food stores. These professionally made dens were lined with sheets of corrugated iron, and had access and escape tunnels made of wide-diameter concrete pipes. Later in the war one, near the Northumberland village of Longhorsley, caused huge excitement among a gang of boys, vividly remembered by Bill Ricalton:

  We climbed up the wooded hill from the burn side for perhaps fifty or sixty yards. Beside the base of a large tree our leader stopped and cleaned away decayed grass and leaves with his hands, which exposed a wooden door with a handle on it. When the door was opened it revealed a concrete shaft, about two to three feet square. A metal rung ladder was attached
to the side, and disappeared into the darkness below …

  We all descended the steps and into the tunnel below. The bottom of the iron ladder must have been eight feet or more below the trap door. Leading from the bottom was a concrete tunnel, large enough for a grown man to stand up. We were to visit this place many times over the next few years, sometimes just to sit and talk and wonder why it was there and what it was for.

  Years later shivers went down his spine when he discovered that it had been one of the Auxiliary Units’ lairs, and that the locked rooms (which he and his friends never penetrated) had been stocked with food, water, the new plastic explosive (known as ‘PE’) and weapons, among them Piat anti-tank grenade launchers and the first Thompson sub-machine guns imported from the United States.

  During the war Boy Scouts were taught to carry verbal messages from one place to another, using roundabout routes to dodge other Scouts sent to intercept them: back gardens, passageways, ditches, orchards, fields – all became familiar undercover approaches. Few, if any, of the boys realized that what seemed an amusing game might, in the event of invasion, suddenly become an important messenger service.

  Because the role of the Auxiliary Units would be mainly nocturnal, most of their training was done at night, or wearing dark goggles during the day. ‘Make a patrol march past and listen for avoidable creaks,’ Fleming noted in his diary. ‘Even at his stealthiest the British soldier emits a sound as of discreet munching.’ In his own headquarters officers sat on packing cases of explosives and ate off a table formed from boxes of gelignite; but because of his social standing, the diners might sometimes include a brace of generals or even a Cabinet Minister.