Captain O’Hanlon split 6 (GHQ) FSP and instructed his CSM and five NCOs to remain with GHQ Rear, while he, his batman and eight NCOs advanced to Renaix with the Advanced Command Post to ensure that whenever it moved, no documents were left behind and to keep its immediate location free of refugees. When the General Staff Branch at Rear moved closer to the front, Major Sullivan was tasked to requisition billets and offices but found the situation consistently fluid. On 23 May, when the Command Post moved to Hazebrouck into the path of the German advance directed at the Channel ports, Sullivan and a force of seventy mainly Intelligence Corps, including 6 FSP, spent an uneasy night defending the outskirts of the town with nothing between them and the German with orders that if tanks appeared, they were to ‘jump on them and fire through the slits’. Sullivan suffered his only wound of two World Wars when his helmet nicked his nose as he dived into a ditch when the position was machine-gunned by an aircraft. Next day, the Command Post returned to Premesque. On 25 May, the section lost Sergeant Victor Williams killed when Armentieres was bombed. On the same day, a patrol led by Sergeant Burford, 1/7th Middlesex, a machine gun battalion, that crossed the River Lys between Comines and Menin to reconnoitre the exposed right flank of 4th Division, saw Burford snatch a briefcase from a German staff car that he had ambushed. It was being examined at HQ 3rd Division when Lieutenant General Alan Brooke, commanding II Corps, was visiting. Recognizing its importance, he instructed that it be sent to GHQ where Captain Louis Osman, a German teacher at Oundle School, discovered that it belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Kinzel, a liaison officer to Colonel General Walther von Reichenau, the German 6th Army commander, and that it contained orders to prevent the BEF from reaching the coast. When Lieutenant Colonel Whitefoord, who had taken over as GSO1 (Counter-Intelligence), saw that the documents were genuine, a view supported by Templer on a visit, Gort faced the dilemma of believing the intelligence assessment and saving the BEF by withdrawing to Dunkirk or remaining loyal to the French proposed counter-attack and risk being cut off from the coast. He chose the former and ordered the retreat. In spite of the importance of his find, Sergeant Burford was only awarded Mentioned in Despatches.
With the British squeezed into a decreasing perimeter on beaches and the naval Operation Dynamo evacuation underway, on 26 May, Major Sullivan led his GHQ Command Post party to Dunkirk where they wrecked their vehicles and, after spending the night in two cellars, embarked on a destroyer from the Eastern Mole the next afternoon. The next day, as the Advanced Command Post withdrew through Cassel under heavy attack along roads clogged with refugees, 6 FSP had considerable difficulty controlling leaderless French colonial troops who were interfering with its activities. Nevertheless, he requisitioned a beach villa at La Panne for GHQ. O’Hanlon ordered four men to join the evacuation. By now, the Y Service jamming of Luftwaffe communications was frustrating the bombing of the beaches, thereby giving the Royal Navy improved control of the evacuation. The GHQ Photographic Interpretation detachment had reached the beach at Wimereux with its stock of photos and maps, but since there was room on the ships only for troops, they burnt everything – a significant loss of intelligence.
Lance Corporal Arthur Gwynn-Browne was with 30 (Lines of Communication) FSP at St Nazaire when it arrived at Dunkirk on 26 May and sheltered in the town. Next day, he was in a column being marshalled by Royal Marines waiting for small boats taking the troops to ships offshore when a German air raid sank them. Separated from his colleagues in the confusion, he spent the next thirty-six hours wandering around the beaches, at one stage joining another column snaking into the chilly water. When rumours circulated that all officers had been evacuated, he joined some 2,500 soldiers walking to the Eastern Pier about a mile away and embarked in a destroyer in which sailors fed the exhausted soldiers with tea, white bread and cheese. After boarding a troop train at Dover, it stopped at a small station for about twenty minutes where local people supplied the troops with tea, rolls and sandwiches from trestle tables. Gwynn-Browne noticed how clean everyone was. He eventually reached Blandford Forum and discovered that the rest of 30 FSP were in Exeter. Interestingly, in 1943 he wrote a book entitled FSP describing his experiences at Mytchett and in France. Sadly 17 (5th Division) FSP lost Corporal Terry killed in action and Captain Bartlett wounded in the face when the destroyer on which he had embarked was attacked by a German motor torpedo S-Boat. On 29 May, Sergeant Jaspar Kingscote, of 3 (1st Division) FSP was killed during an air raid on Bray-Dunes.
On 31 May, after Gort closed down GHQ, Captain O’Hanlon and his ten NCOS drove to the outskirts of Dunkirk and wrecked the car and motorcycles. They then made their way to the Eastern Mole where they helped carry stretcher cases onto the Great Western cargo ship, the Roebuck. As 6 FSP seemed to be the only group functioning as a unit, O’Hanlon instructed his NCOs to move the troops to the bow and use their weight to free the stern wedged in mud. Such was congestion at Dover that the ship could not be unloaded until the following morning. Few, if anyone, on board knew that she was the only vessel that had not been degaussed against magnetic mines. The section was taken by train to Leominster in Herefordshire where they rested for a week before being sent to Avonmouth on Port Security.
Lance Corporal D.H. Crane was with 12 (46th (North Midland and West Riding) Division) FSP when the Division was switched from line of communication defence at Nantes to help defend the Dunkirk perimeter. Captured by a German tank unit, he escaped from a column of prisoners and bought a canoe in a coastal village. Linking up with some Belgians, he made landfall south of the River Somme estuary where a village mayor took charge of the canoe and gave Crane a receipt. Crane then reached Dieppe but was arrested by the military police as a enemy suspect until Corporal Lionel Lethbridge, who had known him at Mytchett, confirmed his identity. When France was liberated in 1944, the owner of the canoe wrote to Crane confirming that the mayor had returned it to him. On 8 June, 31 FSP was providing lines of communications security around Rouen and Le Mans when Sergeant Edward Jouault, a Jerseyman, was tasked to contact its detachment in Forges-les-Eaux but he and his motor cycle collided with a German tank column and he was captured. French artillery shelling of the tanks gave him the opportunity to escape and although he acquired some civilian clothes from a farm, he was captured half an hour later and escorted back to the village. Escaping a second time, he rejoined 31 FSP early the next day with valuable information on the enemy. Jouault later arranged the evacuation of his family to England. Crane and Jouault were both awarded Military Medals.
In the Saar region, 51st Highland Division initially encountered low level action until 13 May when it withstood a heavy attack but was then ordered to retire. A 300-mile road and rail move brought most of the Division to near Abbeville. A week later, Captain Irvine Gray and three NCOs were ordered to deliver a captured pilot, some documents and a map to the RAF at Rouen. Then making for the port of Cherbourg amid a mass of refugees. Lance Corporal Oliver, on his motor-cycle, became separated from their car, however he made his way back to England and rejoined the section when it re-assembled in Winchester. When the Division, cut off from the BEF, was eventually trapped in Saint Valery-en-Caux and forced to surrender, among the long columns of dejected British prisoners plodding to prison camps in Germany and Poland were several 21 FSP. Lance Corporal Edgar Fryer broke way from a column with two military policemen near Lille and spent five months working on a farm before returning to England via Gibraltar in mid-April 1941. Shortly before the French surrender on 17 June, the 5 FSP detachment at Metz and about fifty British soldiers joined a troop train that trundled south until the driver abandoned it near Besancon. Lance Corporals Anthony Howard and Hugh Grant and the soldiers were locked up in a barracks with several thousand French prisoners until, in December, the prisoners were replaced by about 3,000 British women and children internees. The two NCOs became the camp interpreters and adjudicators between the British women who liked sleeping with closed windows and the French married to British husbands who preferred open windows, until
both were accused of being spies and transferred to a prison camp in Poland.
CHAPTER THREE
The Formation of the Intelligence Corps
Nothing should be as favourably regarded as intelligence;
nothing should be as generously rewarded as intelligence;
nothing should be as confidential as the work of intelligence
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 4th Century BC
The defeated British Expeditionary Force had been poorly-equipped and ineffectively trained, had been outnumbered and had lacked effective intelligence and had been defeated by a formidable war machine using combined operations techniques. General Sir Archibald Wavell, who had been the second Commandant of the Intelligence Corps in 1914, and was now commanding Middle East Command, commented:
British military authorities have seldom realized that an Intelligence System cannot be improvised and requires to be built up over a period of years.
Already thirty-one FSP sections had served in France, however, the demand for interpreters meant that about 50 per cent of the first ten sections to arrive had been cross-posted to form the nucleus of new units. Three had been killed and twelve captured. One Member of the British Empire honour, two Distinguished Conduct Medals, five Military Medals, the latter all to 21 FSP, and one Mentioned in Despatch were awarded. The intelligence officers who made it back to Great Britain received valuable operational experience. Major Arnold Ridley was evacuated with a nervous breakdown and was reprimanded for not disclosing his First World War wounds and the impact of his experiences.
Having outgrown its accommodation at Mytchett, in May the Field Security Wing moved to the former Senior Officers’ School at Sheerness, where it was known as the Field Security Centre and Depot, with Lieutenant Colonel Davis appointed as Commandant. Under his command was the Other Ranks Training Wing, His instructors included the newly commissioned Lieutenant Muggeridge. June was a busy month as the FSP sections refitted while others were formed and posted to meet worldwide deployments. But Sheerness soon proved inadequate and with invasion perceived to be imminent, Davis requisitioned the ecclesiastical seminary of King Alfred’s College, Winchester and St Grimbald’s Girls’ School next door as the Intelligence Corps Depot and Training Centre. The lack of a drill square was solved by using one in the neighbouring Green Jackets’ barracks.
One morning, Lieutenant Colonel Percival, a colleague of Templer, telephoned Davis and asked if he was attending a conference. When Davis replied he knew nothing about it Percival then said that the agenda focused on the establishment of an Intelligence Corps; Davis had his driving licence endorsed for speeding on his way to London. The conference went well except that his application for a Regimental Sergeant Major was postponed until the Corps establishment reached three. As the demand for intelligence grew, Majors Strong and William Jeffries, then both at MI1 (Administration), convinced Brigadier K.J. Martin, the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence, and Major General Frederick Beaumont-Nesbitt (late Grenadier Guards), the Director, that the intelligence and security functions could not be met by inadequately-trained intelligence officers and soldiers formed into an ad hoc Corps. Major General Beaumont-Nesbitt and Major Jeffries then suggested to Secretary of State for War, Oliver Stanley, that the Royal Holloway College in Virginia Water was a suitable Intelligence Corps, Headquarters, Stanley replied, ‘We cannot interfere with women’s education’. Jeffries then suggested Oxford University but was advised that while official support was unlikely, a private agreement would be acceptable. By chance, Captain John Russell, a former Oxford Union President (later Professor Sir John Russell), was working at MI1 (X) and so Jeffries instructed him to use his influence and not to return to London until he had obtained a headquarters. Russell returned five days later having secured Pembroke College for the Commandant and Oriel College as the Headquarters and Officers’ Wing. Russell was later part of the entourage when the Duke of Windsor sailed to Bermuda.
A note sent to King George VI by the War Office seeking authority to establish the Intelligence Corps was ratified in Army Order No. 112 dated 15 July and followed four days later by Army Council Instruction No. 1020/1940 authorizing its fixture in the British Army, an event that is celebrated annually as Corps Day on the weekend nearest to 19 July. MI1 (X) remained the sponsor branch at the Directorate of Military Intelligence. On 25 July, the King accepted the recommendation of the new Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, that the Corps cap badge should be a double Tudor Rose flanked by laurel leaves, signifying victory, resting on a scroll inscribed ‘Intelligence Corps’, with the display surmounted by the Crown, signifying loyalty. In heraldic terms, the rose signifying secrecy originates from the myth of Cupid bribing Adonis with a rose to prevent him divulging his amorous relationship with Venus. From this fable emerged the practice of roses suspended over banquet tables to remind guests of the necessity for discretion, hence the term sub rosa. The first to be photographed wearing their badges were Davis and Regimental Sergeant Major William Smith, the first Corps Regimental Sergeant Major, and Corporal Monro fittingly in civilian clothes. Most officers and other ranks in intelligence appointments and units were transferred under the Army Council Instruction. Some, following the traditional view that intelligence was a wartime necessity, rejected transfer in case it affected their careers.
The reason for the adoption of green, grey and a thin red stripe as the Corps colours seems to have been submerged in the fog of history. July 1940 was a period of intense national anxiety and just how much time and debate was spent at the War Office in deciding the colours the new Corps to be green, grey and red is not known, however, they bear a close similarity to the ribbon of the Indian General Service Medal 1936 to 1939. Perhaps, in a period when there were more important issues, someone in the War Office remembered that the Corps had adopted green in 1916. In any event, cypress (or sage) green traditionally signifies intelligence. One account of its origins dates to the 1857 Indian Mutiny when a British intelligence officer disguised as a native in a loincloth passed through mutineer lines to bring news of the relieving columns to the defenders of Lucknow Residency. To avoid embarrassing the ladies, a wife arranged for a suit to be made for him using the green baize from a billiard table. The secondary colour of grey possibly originates from the first attempt to dye white uniforms into khaki. The scarlet stripe introduced into the Corps tie in 1949 and Stable Belt in 1957 is said to record either its association with 10th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, Intelligence (B) during the First World War or acknowledges the link with the Corps of Military Police. Entry into the Intelligence Corps is signified by wearing the green lanyard, which first appeared for officers in about 1942 and was rolled out to other ranks after 1945. The Corps Quick March The Rose and Laurel, written at the Royal Military School of Music, Kneller Hall was approved in 1953 by the Colonel Commandant, Major General Francis Davidson CB DSO MC, after he had noted at three passing-out parades at Eaton Hall Officer Cadet Training Unit commanded by Intelligence Corps Senior Under-Officers that they marched to British Grenadiers. It is based on Let Bucks a’Hunting Go and Sly Renard. The motto Manui Dat Cognito Vires (Knowledge Gives Strength to the Arm) was approved by Queen Elizabeth II in 1964 after being submitted by the third Colonel Commandant, Major General A.C. Shortt CB OBE, from a draft by the Eton College teacher, Mr B.G. Whitfield. The Slow March, Purcell’s Trumpet Tune, scored by the Director of Music at Kneller Hall, and Collect, written by the Reverend B.W. Howarth CF, were both approved in 1971. The first Colonel Commandant was General Sir Bernard Paget MC (late Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry) when he was Commander, GHQ Home Forces in 1943. He had commanded with the withdrawal from Åndalsnes in Norway.
During the summer, Lieutenant Colonel Robbins established the Military Intelligence School at Swanage to train intelligence officers. In October it was renamed the Intelligence Training Centre with Lieutenant Colonel Karl Barker-Benfield DSO MC (late Royal Artillery) appointed as Commandant; he later became Inspector of I
ntelligence Training. Towards the end of 1940, the Centre emerged as two components. The Special Military Intelligence Wing at Smedley’s Hydro, Matlock ran five week Intelligence courses for divisional and brigade intelligence officers, photographic interpreters and Defence Security. In December, the newly promoted Colonel Jeffries, as the first Commandant, moved into Pembroke College with five officers and formally formed the Intelligence Corps with Lieutenant Colonel Davis appointed Assistant Commandant, Chief Instructor and Officer Commanding, the Depot. At Oriel, Major Squire Duff-Taylor MC (Royal Scots Fusiliers) formed the Officers Wing. In January 1941, the HQ Intelligence Corps and Depot establishment was a full colonel, a lieutenant colonel, four majors, sixteen captains, four lieutenants, a Quartermaster and 275 other ranks. The Depot establishment of twenty-seven officers, ten warrant officers, thirty-five SNCOs and 229 JNCOs and privates, mostly Intelligence Corps, was structured to process 100 officers and 450 other ranks. The title of Field Security Personnel, which had been changed from Field Security Police when the Corps was formed, still suggested law enforcement and was later altered to ‘Field Security’ (FS).
With the need to form the new Corps, the application of the 1922 Manual of Military Intelligence recruitment principles led to an interesting mixture. MI1 (X) trawled potential intelligence officers from Officer Cadet Training Units and notifications from Depots. Several were commissioned from the other ranks, including thirty-seven who had been in France. This set a tradition of a large number of officers being commissioned from the ranks. Other ranks, particularly those with languages a priority, were talent-spotted at the Corps of Military Police Recruiting Office, Trafalgar Square, London and at Depots and training regiments. Bearing in mind that almost everyone selected to join the Corps had served with a basic training unit, the Depot training schedule reflected the nature of the Corps. The basic training company reinforced the military skills of drill, map reading, fieldcraft, weapon training and tactics. Another company taught motor cycle riding. The third company concentrated on Defence Security at the School of Military Intelligence while the fourth company administered men on notice of postings and casualties. Determined to knock the other ranks into soldiers were Guards Division instructors. Company Sergeant Major Drakely seems to have had a reputation of being in a state of permanent fury. When the avant-garde composer, Private Humphrey Searle, transferred from the Gloucesters in 1940, he found the discipline to be more strict. David Engleheart recalls:
Sharing the Secret Page 4
