One of the great obstacles to intelligence was the almost universal ignorance of all ranks as to what intelligence might be. It was generally regarded as secret service and nothing else, and comparatively few realized that conditions in Ireland emphasized the importance of the words that in war the bulk of all intelligence is, or should be, obtained by fighting troops. The first lesson we learn therefore is the necessity for a thoroughly good intelligence system so that the Government’s advisers may be in a position to appreciate the situation justly and to put it squarely, fully and honestly before the Cabinet.
An Irish Republican Army (IRA) intelligence coup in 1920 resulted in the killing and wounding of members of the Cairo Gang, a group of intelligence officers who had gained their experience in the Middle East.
By late 1922, as the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission took over from the Military Government, the War Office took responsibility for counter-intelligence. The Directorate of Military Intelligence was re-absorbed into the Directorate of Military Operations, nevertheless, the pre-war Directorate system of maintaining a card index of officers who could be formed into an Intelligence Corps, particularly those who spoke a foreign language or with intelligence experience, was kept. No such system was developed for other ranks. Intelligence as a subject was excluded from the Royal Military Academies at Woolwich and Sandhurst and at the Staff Colleges, indeed Field Marshal Douglas Haig said ‘Intelligence is a rather special kind of work and has a very small place in the Army in peacetime’. While commanding I Corps in 1914, he had rejected Intelligence Corps support. By 1925, the recognition of emerging states in Eastern Europe and normalization of relations with Germany agreed by the Treaty of Lucarno resulted in HQ British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) moving to Wiesbaden. The agreed merging of intelligence and civil affairs saw the Intelligence Corps exchange the word ‘counter-intelligence’ in favour of ‘security’ with its implications of protection. This led to the wartime Intelligence Police being renamed the Field Security Police (FSP). Most of their work was in civilian clothes. Nevertheless, the Corps was fully occupied addressing the spread of communism, the rise in National Socialism and opposition to the occupation. By 1928 predictions in Intelligence Summaries submitted by Directorate of Military Intelligence to the Committee of Imperial Defence about German resurgence were rejected on the grounds that they did not fit the profile of a defeated nation. By the time that HQ (BAOR) left Wiesbaden in December 1929, the Intelligence Corps had effectively become the Civil Affairs and Security Section. Its Rear Party included Major Kenneth Strong (Royal Scots Fusiliers), a former intelligence officer.
In 1931 War Office contingency planning for war in Europe continued the strategy of remobilizing the BEF to France and that it would be accompanied by a 175-strong Intelligence Corps. This 1922 Manual of Military Intelligence in the Field:
The best sources of supply for the Intelligence Corps will be the professional and literary classes, also public schools, universities, banks and commercial houses with overseas branches or trade connections with foreign countries.
While the principle demonstrated that the War Office had recognized that the management of intelligence and counter-intelligence requires skills and talents outside conventional military thinking, the figure of seventy officers and 120 other ranks to support the BEF General Headquarters (GHQ), I and II Corps and their cavalry, infantry and lines of communications divisions was well short of the wartime establishment in 1918 but nearly equated to the Intelligence Corps which entered occupied Germany. The 1936 Establishment listed an infantry division intelligence section to consist of an intelligence officer, two cipher officers, eight other rank cipher clerks and three batmen. Lines of communications sections were to have four intelligence officers, six cipher officers and six other rank cipher clerks and three officers and twenty-seven FSP sections spread between Cherbourg and Le Havre, with eighteen-man sections for each additional port. A definition of lines of communications is:
A route, either land, water or air, which connects an operating military force with a base of operations and along which supplies and military forces move.
In addition, the Royal Air Force Bomber Wings and Army Co-operation Squadrons were to be supported with an air photographic interpretation function. The Corps would be supported by Royal Army Service Corps clerks and drivers, Royal Engineer draughtsmen, Royal Artillery attached to the Army Co-Operation squadrons and Royal Signals cipher officers encoding and decoding classified signals, not forgetting batmen for officers. The 1931, 1936 and 1937 War Establishments also applied to Home and Overseas Commands raising Intelligence Corps from within their own resources. Mobilization was to be administered from Tournai Barracks, Aldershot by an officer appointed as Adjutant and Mobilizing Officer. The plan was:
Phase One. M+4 (Mobilization Day plus four days). Deployment of forty-six officers and ninety other ranks to support General Headquarters, HQ Lines of Communication and I Corps.
Phase Two. M+13. Deployment of fourteen officers and twenty-five other ranks to II Corps. It was also envisaged that each Corps would be commanded by a major, designated as the Commandant, commanding 300 Field Security Police spread in Field Security.
The Security Service had performed well during the First World War and adequately against the wily IRA but it lacked sufficient resources to create a security cocoon around the country to vet immigration. When in 1937, E (Port and Border Security) Branch was formed to address the threats of infiltration by hostile intelligence services during a war, Major Strong, who had been posted to the Directorate of Military Intelligence, injected energy into the review of national defence by inviting Captain Frank Davis MC (Glosters) to lunch with him and the Security Service founder and Director-General, Major General Vernon Kell. Davis was a former Intelligence Corps officer who had served in Ireland and was fluent in French and German and who had worked for Strong in Germany when he had advertised for officers to monitor the German press and periodicals. Although Davis had retired in 1935, Kell persuaded him to accept two months’ consultancy on a captain’s pay and develop a plan to deploy military counter-intelligence Home Port Security Sections (HPSS) at large ports to support his Port Security Officers and Security Control Officers, most of whom most were former First World War officers. As Davis explained the Home Port Security function to Chief Constables, it became clear his consultancy period was woefully inadequate; nevertheless, he proposed that the sections of an officer and thirteen other ranks should be raised locally under the cloak of the Corps of Military Police.
As the threat of combined aggression – from the tripartite Axis of Germany flexing its muscles in Europe, Italy expanding in northern Africa, and Japan eyeing up the Far East – escalated global tension, in 1938 General Hastings Ismay, Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, authorized detailed mobilization planning. Thus far, economic contractions throughout the Armed Forces had restricted the development of operational intelligence to table top planning and assumption that the battlefield would be static trench warfare. Although Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain cheerfully returned from meeting Adolf Hitler in September waving his ‘peace in our time’ note, anxiety filtered across Great Britain.
Captain Davis was then asked by Major Strong to train Field Security Police to manage Defence Security, the name given to the combination of protective security and counter-intelligence. Hitherto, training Field Security was a military police responsibility. Unable to separate office accommodation at the Corps of Military Police Depot at Mytchett, Davis negotiated two sections of a hut for the ‘Security Section, Corps of Military Police’ and then ran fourteen-day courses for intakes of twelve Regular other ranks nearing the end of their service and liable to be recalled to the Colours in the event of mobilization. Subjects included interrogation, the maintenance of morale through security awareness and counter-propaganda, and developing orders of battle, in particular of Germany. The course was taught on a need to know basis with lecture notes destroyed at the end. Th
ose who passed were inducted as Corps of Military Police. Davis was helped by Captain S.H.C. Woolrych OBE, a First World War intelligence officer and second in command; Captain L. Wallerstein as the Military Training Officer; and Captain John de Vine as Adjutant. Sergeant William Smith was the Company Sergeant Major. The Orderly Room of eight included five Auxiliary Territorial Service. They continued the involvement of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps in intelligence during the First World War and were forerunners of the women who have played such an important role in the development of the Intelligence Corps.
Posted to the Directorate of Military Intelligence in October 1937 as a General Staff Officer, Grade 2 Military Intelligence 1 (Administration, Personnel and Training), GSO 2 MI (Administration) was Major Gerald Templer, with a remit to review intelligence mobilization planning. Born in 1898 in Colchester, he had served with the Royal Irish Fusiliers in France from 1916. Templer found an immediate problem. Checking the card index of reserve officers, he found that it had been neglected and that of the 100 listed on the Regular Army Reserve of Officers list, just thirty were still eligible to be recalled to the Colours, of whom several were former Intelligence Corps – not enough to fill the intelligence officer slots. A search of the new volunteer Army Officers Emergency Reserve led to an additional 180 officers being talent-spotted for War Office and BEF intelligence appointments but while linguistic and academic abilities and business acumen were evident, most lacked basic military skills.
In March 1939, Colonel K.G. Martin, Deputy Director of Military Intelligence, advised Eric Shearer, joint managing director of Fortnum and Mason, that in the event of war he would be appointed Commandant, School for Intelligence Training at Minley Manor, near Camberley. Shearer was a former Indian Army officer who had served in the Directorate during the 1920s.
With those officers selected for intelligence appointments paying course fees, Templer and Shearer held the first of two introductory General Intelligence courses at the Royal United Services Institute over nine evenings between 7 March and 4 April. The eighteen lectures included Intelligence in the Field, Air Intelligence, Defence Security, the Intelligence Office, an introduction to the German Army and interrogation, during which Templer acted as a German prisoner. The courses allowed the Directorate of Military Intelligence officers to assess the aptitude of the delegates and test their language skills. Home Command intelligence officers attended ten day courses. Unfortunately, inexpert instruction weakened the quality of teaching; nevertheless, it was better than nothing.
Against the backdrop of the May 1939 Military Training Act enforcing conscription for all men aged between 18 and 41 years, Templer also talent-spotted several Emergency Reserve officers, all aged over 30 years, doing their best to avoid being assigned into military employment not of their choice and despatched them on a weekend Field Security Officer (FSO) course at Mytchett to equip them to command FSP sections. He also selected several ex-cavalry officers with good German and French, later known as the Twelve Apostles, to act as GHQ liaison officers. One was Captain Sir Basil Bartlett. King’s Messengers couriered classified documents to and from the War Office.
Between 3 July and 12 August, three weeks before war broke out, Colonel Martin organized a second course at RUSI for 150 delegates run by officers earmarked as Intelligence School instructors. Although still lacking sufficient linguists, Templer ensured that every intelligence appointment at the Military Intelligence Directorate, with the BEF and in Home Commands was filled, but few officers had been tested in action and there was no flexibility in the event of casualties. One of those selected was Arnold Ridley, who later achieved fame as the medical orderly in BBC Television’s Dad’s Army. While serving in the Somerset Light infantry during the First World War, he had been severely wounded and was invalided out but he apparently told no-one. When the GHQ sought four additional intelligence officers, only three were available and the fourth was found in the Emergency Reserve.
The Cabinet decision on 22 August not to mobilize disappointed the Service chiefs, however, it was rescinded two days later and Great Britain finally prepared for war with Germany. On 31 August, Captain (Retired) Arthur Sullivan (Queen’s) had accepted a proposal from Templer in 1938 that he be appointed the BEF Intelligence Corps Adjutant/Mobilizing Officer. The next day, as Germany invaded Poland, Sullivan, dressed in his old uniform, reported to the Corps mobilization unit, the 1st Battalion, The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (1 Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders) at Blenheim Barracks, Aldershot where he was allocated the only space available – the Sports Store. Helped by a formidable warrant officer Chief Clerk from the War Office and equipped with trestle tables, chairs and a typewriter and, working from 6.00am to 11.00pm, they soon developed an efficient administration to mobilize the Intelligence Corps. Equipment and transport was collected by grabbing ‘the first officers returning from leave, handing them a list of certain items and sent them off to draw our needs’, Sullivan later claimed that ‘If I was the mother of the Intelligence Corps, Colonel Templer, who had carried out all the planning, was its father’.
The FSP arriving from Mytchett were already formed into fourteen-strong sections of a Field Security Officer, usually an Intelligence Corps captain, his batman/driver, the Company Sergeant Major, two sergeants, four corporals and five lance-corporals. At Aldershot they collected a car for the officer and motor-cycles, other equipment and movement orders. The intelligence officers were a different matter. Some were serving Regulars and Territorial Army while others were First World War veterans gazetted onto the General List as honorary second lieutenants with no power of command, as instructed in the Manual of Military Intelligence in the Field (1939), but insisting on wearing their previous commissioned rank badges. Such were the complexities of the mobilization administration that some officers were financially embarrassed when their pay details did not follow them and a few families of other ranks experienced hardship when separation allowances were not received. A large number of officers and men were briefly declared ‘hors de combat’ after inoculations. The lack of a Depot meant that some officers were told to go home until they received their movement orders, thereby denying them the esprit de corps so important to the British Army.
CHAPTER TWO
The BEF Intelligence Corps September 1939 to July 1940
On 3 September, as the nation crowded around wirelesses to listen to Prime Minister Chamberlain announcing that Great Britain was at war with Germany, the Home Port Security Sections (HPSS) mobilized and the Field Security Police sections joined their formations and Home Commands. Lieutenant Colonel Shearer and several friends whom he had appointed as instructors assembled outside White’s Club in London and drove to Minley Manor in two cars. Captain Bartlett attended No. 1 Intelligence Course and then went to France. Major Thomas Robbins MC (Lancashire Fusiliers), a former Rio Tinto director, also attended the course but, having been appointed as an instructor on the German Army and interrogation, he found that there was no information on the latter. Incognito, he solved the dilemma by trawling second-hand bookshops in Brussels for books and pamphlets.
It had been intended that GHQ and the Intelligence Corps would assemble in adjoining barracks in Aldershot, but when the threat of air raids led to the Headquarters moving to Camberley, mobilization plans were thrown into chaos as officers and men reported to the wrong locations. Communications collapsed when telephones were not connected. Equipment arrived in single consignments but lacked unit or branch address labels. Some demands never appeared. Fortunately, the organizational abilities of Captain Sullivan and his Chief Clerk prevented the Corps mobilization developing into a shambles so that a day after the declaration of war, 15 (HQ Lines of Communication) FSP landed at Cherbourg and deployed to Le Mans to be followed the next day by 7 (HQ 1 Corps) and 10 (Port Security, Cherbourg) FSP sections as the Royal Navy shepherded 1 Corps from Southampton to Cherbourg, where the troops then boarded trains for the 250-mile journey to their defensive positions in northern France. Vehi
cles followed lines of communication routes from Brest and St Nazaire. On 11 September, in a unique event, the Intelligence Corps paraded under command of its Commandant, Major The Honourable Bertram Foljambe, a 1914 intelligence officer and a Reserve officer, and then crossed to France. On 22 September, II Corps began deploying. When 4 FSP, then supporting 3rd Infantry Division commanded by Major General Bernard Montgomery, was instructed at Mytchett to collect its Ford and thirteen motorcycles from a rubbish tip, the FSO, Captain Langdon, asked, ‘Hands up those who can ride a motorbike!’ Half could. The rest had a day to learn. On the drive from Cherbourg, on 20 October two NCOs were knocked off their motorcycles by a French driver at St Lo.
Sharing the Secret Page 2
