Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Fleming himself was almost comically cack-handed, but he took delight in devising esoteric methods of attacking the enemy, such as training his men to shoot with bows and arrows. Archery, he thought, might come in useful, either for silently picking off individual German sentries, or for causing confusion in their camps if arrows carrying small incendiary devices could be shot over perimeter defences, to cause inexplicable fires or explosions within. Posterity credited him with the ability to bring down a running deer at 100 yards, but in reality he could not be sure of hitting a barn door at twenty-five paces.

  If the invasion had taken place, the auxiliaries would have immediately left their homes and gone to ground, emerging at night. No one will ever know how much the troglodytes could have achieved if the Germans had come. Fleming himself doubted if his force could have been ‘more than a minor and probably short-lived nuisance to the invaders’: he feared that his men would have been hunted down as soon as autumn stripped leaves from trees and hedges, and that reprisals against the civilian population would soon have put the teams out of business. Besides, he noticed that among his own recruits ‘it was not long … before claustrophobia and a general malaise set in, because they were civilised men who had suddenly executed a double somersault back into a cave existence’. His colleague Mike Calvert was more optimistic:

  If it had been called to action, the Resistance Army of Kent and Sussex would have had at its core some of the toughest and most determined men I have ever met. Their farms and their shops and their homes would have been highly dangerous places for any enemy soldier to enter.

  No doubt the defenders would have killed quite a few Germans, had the invasion taken place; but, judging by the brutality shown by the Nazis to French resistance fighters, of the two estimates Fleming’s seems the more likely. (As an illustration of this, in July 1944 the Germans massacred hundreds of Maquis in an all-out attack on their stronghold in the Vercors massif, in the south-east of France.)

  Fleming’s counterpart in Essex, Captain Andrew Croft, a former head boy of Stowe, felt the same as Calvert, and believed that his units could have held out indefinitely by stealing food, weapons and ammunition from the invading forces. In any case, under Colonel Gubbins’s direction resistance cells came into being all over the country, not only in Kent, but in the South West, in East Anglia and up the coasts of Yorkshire, Northumberland and Scotland, as far as Cape Wrath in the far North West. Scotland certainly needed them, for regular troops were thin on the ground, and there was always a chance that the Germans might invade up there.

  The man chosen to create Auxiliary Units north of the border was Captain Eustace Maxwell, nephew of the Duke of Northumberland and brother of the writer Gavin. His aristocratic connections made it easy for him to recruit, as did the fact that he was an Argyll and Sutherland Highlander; and the terrain in which he went to work – miles upon miles of scarcely populated moors, mountains and coastline – was ideal for guerrilla warfare. So were the inhabitants: farmers, foresters, deerstalkers, ghillies – all used to living and working in the open air.

  Melville House, a huge, square, four-storey building, the Palladian home of the Leslie-Melville family at Monimail in East Fife, became the Coleshill of the north – a training centre, surrounded by woods and farmland, approached by a beech avenue and equipped with all the facilities needed for firing weapons, setting demolition charges and learning hand-to-hand combat. Behind the house a gentle slope made an ideal background for a small-arms range, and rail tracks were laid in the woods so that budding demolition experts could practise blowing them up. When a German prisoner-of-war camp was established at Annsmuir, near the railway station at Ladybank, Wehrmacht uniforms found their way into Melville House to add verisimilitude to the training.

  As recruits went through the mill there, hideouts were being dug or built all over Scotland. Ruined castles made ideal sites: caverns were dug out beneath heaps of stone at the foot of collapsed walls, with access via a single, spring-loaded slab. Once a few rainstorms had swept over the rubble, there was no sign that anyone had been there for centuries. Other dens were made beneath houses in villages and entered through cellars – but always with an escape tunnel leading to a disguised exit some distance away. By the end of 1940 about a hundred units were fully established, and Maxwell himself had driven 70,000 miles overseeing their creation. In Britain as a whole some 3000 men were trained to go to ground, and they were issued with liberal amounts of ammunition and explosives. They remained ready for action throughout the war; but so deeply secret was the organization that its existence was not officially admitted until the middle of the 1950s.

  Later in the war a parallel clandestine organization was formed, under the cover name of the Special Duties Section of the Auxiliary Units. This was a secret radio network staffed mainly by women, who went to ground with transmitters in hideouts of their own, charged with the task of keeping communications open in the event of an invasion. Like the operational bunkers, every den was elaborately concealed: if there was no building at hand tall enough to carry a forty-foot aerial, men from the Royal Corps of Signals would climb a tree, cutting grooves in the trunk, laying the wire in them and filling them with plaster of Paris painted to resemble the bark.

  During the Phoney War Fleming at times thought uneasily of Rogue Male, a thriller by Geoffrey Household set in the 1930s. In the novel an anonymous British sportsman, ‘who couldn’t resist the temptation to stalk the impossible’, is at large in central Europe, bent on personally assassinating a loathsome dictator. The target’s name is never mentioned, but clearly it is Hitler whom the rifleman has in his sights.

  Before he can fire a shot, he is seized by security men and beaten up, but escapes and flees back to England. Even there, however, he is not safe. Enemy agents pursue him so tenaciously that he is forced to go to ground in an old badger sett, with the entrance tunnel disguised as an ‘apparent rabbit hole’ in the side of a sunken lane. His only ally is a feral cat which he calls Asmodeus – the legendary king of the demons – and in the end it is this animal, or, rather, its skin, that saves him. The chase is immensely exciting, and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the dank hideaway is powerfully evoked. The timing of the novel’s publication, in 1939, was extraordinarily apt, and the book foreshadowed many of the elements – the claustrophobic subterranean redoubts, the nocturnal forays – with which the Auxiliary Units became familiar.

  Above ground there was at first no place for female talent in the Home Guard; but in 1942 the Women’s Home Guard Auxiliaries were formed, and girls were allowed to join the men, both in the office and in the field. At St Ives in Huntingdonshire a small team dealt with telephone and radio equipment in the local headquarters, and also took part in night exercises. One of them remembered how disconcerting it was to find ‘well-respected businessmen from the town crawling along ditches in camouflage, with blackened faces’, and another gave herself a nasty fright when she blundered on all fours into a big, solid, warm lump, which turned out to be a recumbent cow. In the office they whiled away spare time by sending each other frivolous radio messages – until some of them were intercepted by staff at Wyton Airfield, three miles away, who thought the traffic was coded signals transmitted by enemy agents, and the girls were severely reprimanded.

  Yet another agency at work in town and country was the Royal Observer Corps, whose members spotted, identified and tracked any aircraft that appeared in the sky and reported its details to group headquarters, whence the message was swiftly passed to the RAF. The organization’s motto was ‘Forewarned, Forearmed’ – and success depended on continuous vigilance backed by speedy reaction. During the Battle of Britain the volunteer observers, stationed in posts about ten miles apart, furnished the only means of tracking enemy aircraft once they had crossed the coast; and so valuable was their work that in April 1941 the King awarded the Corps the prefix ‘Royal’.

  The two-man crews devised any number of comfortable lairs from which to keep watch: wooden
huts, little brick buildings, concrete boxes on prominent mounds, penthouses on the roofs of factories. One outpost was beautifully captured by the war artist Eric Ravilious, whose delicate watercolour portrayed two watchers standing in a kind of grouse butt, protected by sandbags and a canvas screen, with a single telephone wire disappearing through the air above a wintry landscape. Still more elaborate was a contraption in Ayrshire which consisted of a heavy metal post sunk into the ground, topped by a revolving cross-piece, on either end of which was a padded seat made from a car’s steering wheel. Each seat revolved individually, and one of the team was always aloft, binoculars at the ready.

  Although able to operate only in daylight, and often blinded by fog, the Observer Corps provided a vital service throughout the war. But in the autumn of 1940 the enormous, all-round effort of the Auxiliary Units in going to ground proved unnecessary – for the time being, at any rate. It has never become clear why, on 17 September 1940, Hitler ordered the postponement of Operation Sealion until the spring, or why in the end he abandoned his invasion plan altogether. Instead, he unleashed the full fury of the Luftwaffe in the Blitz on London.

  Six

  Adapting to War

  Necessity is the mother of invention

  Traditional proverb

  When petrol rationing came into force on 19 September 1939, only 10 per cent of the population had cars; and now each owner was limited to seven gallons – or about 200 miles – a month. The result was that many people put their vehicles into storage, mounting them on blocks in shed or garage to take the weight off the tyres. After November 1940 no new cars were built for civilian use, and those that were available (about 400 in the whole country) were allocated for use by doctors, police and so on. Buses ceased to run, leaving many country people marooned, and most rural roads were almost free of traffic.

  Restrictions brought out a rash of new bicyclists, who often discovered that travel on velocipedes is hard going: as someone pointed out, ‘A bicycle finds out the uphill gradients in a remarkable manner.’ Because they lacked both practice and confidence, and rode machines bedevilled by lack of maintenance, these novices were a menace to other road-users; but boys soon mastered the trick of catching hold of the back of a slow-moving lorry and getting a tow uphill. Children lucky enough to own bicycles rode to and from school as a matter of course.

  Old pony traps and governess carts were dragged out of sheds in surprising numbers: dusted down and polished up, they commanded two or three times the price that any owner would have dared ask before the war: £30 or £40 instead of £10 or £12. The writer Penelope Chetwode (wife of the poet John Betjeman) described how she taught Mrs John Piper, wife of the artist, to ride. Myfanwy had never been near a horse before, but now she sold her car, bought a 14.1 hands black gelding, and after minimal instruction was riding twenty or thirty miles a day around her home near Henley-on-Thames.

  Farmers were allowed an extra ration of fuel. Even so, lack of petrol often meant that they had to move their sheep and cattle to market on foot, sometimes walking ten or twenty miles a day. Because the police began to stop private cars and ask drivers to justify their journey, many farmers took to carrying a decoy sack of wheat, or the punctured front tyre of a tractor, which remained on board indefinitely as a decoy to allay suspicion.

  Fuel shortages put new life into another transport medium: the canals. The Grand Union Canal from London to Birmingham was a key route for shifting heavy loads: boats carried fifty tons of steel, aluminium and cement northwards to the industrial Midlands and brought back coal. When some of the barges were laid up for lack of crew, a scheme was launched to recruit women, and more than sixty took up the offer. One, Emma Smith, found that the experience changed her life. Having grown up in a privileged background, the daughter of a banker, she felt that in joining the dockers, the boatmen and the regular boaters who travelled with their families, she had ‘crossed over a boundary line, and never went back. I became a working-class girl.’

  On the land, every effort was being made to increase food production. In a message to The Farmers’ Weekly the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Reginald Dornan-Smith – a popular figure, who had served with a Sikh regiment in India, and was a former President of the National Farmers’ Union – offered the magazine’s readers some stirring thoughts:

  The fresh-turned furrows are our trenches: the added blades of grass are our bullets, and every extra sheaf of corn is a shell in this war of resources … The war is here in earnest, and two opposing ideas, freedom versus a ruthless tyranny, are locked in a grip in which one or other must die … The farmer is a key man in the events which now shake Western civilisation.

  In response to the Government’s urgent appeal, agricultural machinery began pouring into the country: from America, under the Lend-Lease agreements made in the spring of 1941, came big Allis-Chalmers and Minneapolis-Molines tractors, but also small Ford Fergusons, built in Detroit under a contract signed in 1938 between the Irish engineer-inventor Harry Ferguson and Henry Ford Senior. Ferguson’s key innovation was the revolutionary three-point linkage, which attached the tractor to an implement (for instance a plough) with hydraulically operated arms, and in effect made the pair a single unit, instead of one pulling the other. During the war thousands of Ford Fergusons were made in America and shipped to Britain, and the three-point linkage has been taken up all over the world.

  Besides tractors, Massey-Harris combine harvesters came in from America, Sunshine combines from Australia, and various types of drill for sowing seed. Crawler tractors went high up hillsides in the north of England and in Wales, ripping out bracken, which had invaded over two million acres and was useless as fodder, being poisonous to ruminants. A study by the Oxford Agricultural Research Institute worked out that ploughing with a horse and a single-furrow plough cost 12s per acre, whereas a two- or three-furrow tractor cost just over 9s per acre – and the tractor could cover at least four times as much ground in a day.

  With American imports pouring in, the number of tractors available to farmers increased so fast that in 1941 190 Oxford undergraduates (a third of them girls) were given instruction in the basics of driving and maintenance and sent to a hundred public and secondary schools to pass on their skills to older boys. Each instructor was detailed to take on twenty-four boys of sixteen or over, who would learn to drive ‘dead straight’, and to back a two-wheel trailer between stakes (no easy task). They were also to learn about servicing, ‘the meaning and use of the grease gun and nipples’. The idea of fitting tractors with cabs was still so new that a photograph of a man ploughing steep ground at Almondbank in Perthshire was captioned: ‘The cab on this caterpillar tractor makes the driver independent of good weather.’

  Some farmers invented methods of their own for speeding production. One was Jack Hatt, who hitched four implements in line behind a powerful tractor and proclaimed the virtues of PPDH – Plough, for turning the furrows over, Press, for levelling, Drill, for sowing the seed, and Harrow, for working it in. By this means he was able to cover enormous acreages, saving time and fuel.

  On waterlogged land, especially in the clay of East Anglia, ploughing had to be preceded by the restoration or creation of drains – and here again astonishing results were achieved. By February 1943 the Government had sanctioned 10,380 mole-drainage schemes, 19,725 tile-drainage schemes, 66,011 farm-ditch schemes and 5338 schemes for small areas. The land improved extended to more than four and a half million acres. One outstanding success was the reclamation of 400 acres on Ferrymoor Common in Yorkshire, which until then had been used as a camping ground by gypsies, but after treatment yielded huge crops of potatoes, wheat, oats, rye, clover and turnips.

  The frenzy of ploughing led to some unforeseen results. One was that on upland farms the pastures on which dairy cattle had been grazing disappeared under corn, and the cows had to move to higher ground. Up there, however, there was often no water, so that the Government had to offer farmers 50 per cent grants to install piped systems
.

  So urgent was the need to increase food production that the Government declared war on all species which it reckoned were inhibiting farmers’ efforts. The first and foremost enemies were rabbits; thousands of acres round the edges of fields close to woods and spinneys were being eaten to the ground, yielding only a quarter of their potential output. Norman Sharpe, gamekeeper on the Apley Hall estate in Shropshire, attributed their proliferation to the fact that control measures had been abandoned during the Great War, and remembered how some of the fields bordering the Spring Copse at Apley Hall ‘simply appeared to be moving of an evening’.

  On a farm at Linkenholt in Hampshire four guns killed 940 rabbits in a morning, but that made little difference, and the owner became so desperate that he decided to wire in his whole estate. This drastic solution took fourteen miles of rabbit netting, four feet tall, with a mesh of 1⅝ inches, and with the bottom turned outwards horizontally so that rabbits outside the pale could not burrow underneath. Those that remained inside were exterminated by gun, dog, trap, snare and gas; and although fiendishly expensive, the experiment was reckoned to have paid off in the amount of crops saved.

  If live rabbits were a menace, dead ones were very popular. On one farm near Newton-by-the-Sea, on the Northumbrian coast, the assembled villagers killed 250 out of a single field of corn, whereupon the chief vermin-catcher gave one to everybody present and loaded the rest into his Austin Seven. He and the farmer then drove to the Ship Inn to celebrate their record bag, but got so drunk that when they reached home they failed to empty the car – only to find, in the morning, that most of their cargo had disappeared.

  As for rats – the annual damage done by them was estimated at £12 million (over £600 million in today’s terms), and Mr E. C. Read, later technical adviser to the Ministry, quoted the cost of every rat as 30s a year. The Ministry commissioned a study to determine the cost of rat-proofing corn stacks with circular walls of corrugated-iron sheets, sunk two feet into the ground and protruding four feet above it. Estimating that 411,000 stacks would have been needed to store the 1939 harvest, researchers concluded that the cost of corrugated iron for 1940 would be £2,719,000. Since this was clearly prohibitive, the Ministry urged farmers to use every means to destroy the vermin: ‘Spring traps, wire traps, snares, sunk pit traps, barrel traps, break-back traps and varnish traps, known as sticky boards.’