Churchill's Wizards (35 page)

At Burwash, Roland Penrose's lantern slides certainly caught the eye of his Home Guard students. Some were from Cott's
Adaptive
Coloration in Animals
, but one that flashed up was a colour photo of his beautiful wife Lee Miller, daubed in light green camouflage paint, lying naked on a lawn under a soft-fruit net and some tufts of raffia. Solomon J. Solomon would have appreciated Penrose's
Manual of
Camouflage
which assimilates every hard-earned point from WW1, and begins with the need for surprise in defending Britain.

Penrose's first point is the need to escape observation from all angles. A parachutist can land behind you, the enemy pilot can spot you from the air. ‘From directly above there is no dead ground, and trenches, wire and tracks show up as though drawn on the map.' The Home Guard would have to learn to conceal their fixed positions, quarters and transport by fitting in with the patterns of the landscape, using nets and screens or tarred sandbags covered with earth and rubbish. It is all very much in the tradition of Hesketh Prichard's disguised loopholes and sniper suits cut out and stitched from panels of hessian sacking in WW1, but what was then an obscure art was now becoming part of accepted military thinking. Penrose made the Home Guard conscious of their black shadows and white faces when taking cover, and taught the usefulness of cow dung. The aim was not just concealment:

The British were rallying after the German victories across Europe, knowing they were underdogs. Penrose saw that the whole point of camouflage was to make the weaker party stronger. ‘It is useless in warfare to be merely brave, if bravery means presenting oneself as a useless target to the enemy. It is far better to employ intelligence and concealment, so as to induce
him
to present a target.'

Camoufleurs
were getting into their stride all over the country, with plenty to conceal. To stop the invader getting a foothold, arrays of defences were being engineered around the south-east English coast, many of them guarded by seaward-facing gun batteries salvaged from ageing ships and obsolescent tanks. Metal scaffolding was erected in the sea, hundreds of mines were buried in beaches, there were miles and miles of coiling barbed wire, thousands of concrete pillboxes for machine guns and hefty anti-tank blocks. More defences were erected inland along ‘stop lines' designed to slow down enemy armoured forces pushing towards London. In Norfolk, for example, the stop-lines ran along the courses of the rivers Ant, Bure, Wensum, Yare and Ouse, whose bridges were rigged with explosives, and there were 30,000 men wearing the brassard of the Local Defence Volunteers (‘Look, Duck and Vanish'), mostly with bicycles, whose role was to observe, patrol and protect, as well as help obstruct. Anti-tank obstacles included ditches, deepened canals, slots in the road into which iron girders were socketed, and dragon's teeth of concrete blocks, at least five feet high. Open fields had carts put in them to prevent planes landing, or poles put up to rip the wings off gliders.

Every village had its ‘strong post' to defend and eight different kinds of concrete pillbox could be erected at key spots. Some of these were hideously prominent, poorly designed deathtraps. Other pillboxes conformed better to the cliffs, fields or hedges and were camouflaged afterwards with earth and undergrowth. The best were built into existing structures – barns, haystacks, lighthouses, medieval ruins, sheds, windmills, yacht clubs – so as not to be seen straight away. As the war went on, subsequent
camoufleurs
competed with ingenious disguises for strongholds: beach huts, bookstalls, bungalows, bus stops, cafés, chalets, garages, ice-cream parlours, Regency pavilions,
railway signal boxes, gentlemen's toilets, half-timbered Tudor tea-shoppes and twee thatched cottages. The
camoufleurs
did their best, but it did not alter the fact that there were no tanks available to fight the Germans if they invaded, and no armour-piercing anti-tank weapons. Ironside's plan was that householders would drop homemade Molotov cocktails from upper windows on to enemy vehicles.

They were certainly ready to have a go. The LDV managed to shoot and kill their first four motorists, none of them Germans, in separate locations on the night of 2/3 June, and there were more fatal accidents to come. Battle of Britain pilots who ejected over England faced a real danger of being riddled with bullets by their own countrymen as suspected German parachutists. In the summer of 1941, the Home Guard was organised into battalions affiliated to county regiments, with military ranks, but some people did not take them seriously. A. J. P. Taylor wrote in
English History 1914–1945
that

This is the line also followed by the affectionate and popular BBC TV comedy series
Dad's Army
, which ran for ten years from 1968, written by David Croft and Jimmy Perry. It was in keeping with wartime skits by comedians like Robb Wilton, and other contemporaneous jokes. ‘And what steps would you take if the Germans invaded, my man?' asks the inspecting officer. ‘Big long 'uns, sir!'

And yet perhaps the Home Guard and the
camoufleurs
, in their determined efforts against as yet unrealised enemies, were taking part in a huge effort of psychological warfare. John Colville's diary,
The
Fringes of Power
, records a dinner at Chequers on Friday, 12 July, with Generals Paget, Auchinleck, and Ismay as well as Duncan Sandys at the table. The day before, Churchill had toured the defences in Kent, inspecting pillboxes and troops from Dover to Whitstable. The discussion turned to invasion. There was ‘an argument about encouraging the populace to fight. If they meet the invader with scythes and brickbats they will be massacred.' Churchill pointed out that ‘here we want every citizen to fight and they will do so the more
if they know the alternative is massacre. The L.D.V must be armed and prepared…' According to Colville, Churchill thought the invasion scare was ‘keeping every man and woman tuned to a high pitch of readiness. He does not wish the scare to abate therefore, and although personally he doubts whether invasion is a serious menace he intends to give that impression, and to talk about long and dangerous vigils, etc., when he broadcasts on Sunday.'

In that talk on 14 July 1940 Churchill said that the war would be long and hard, but he also delivered a magnificent morale-boosting piece of rhetoric that praised both the armed forces and the British Home Guard:

The Home Guard, like so many things in WW2, was not actually all that it seemed. Its great secret was camouflaging the Auxiliary Units, one of Britain's nine wartime secret services. The Auxiliary Units wore ordinary Home Guard uniforms but were actually guerrilla cells. They had been set up by Lawrence Grand's secret organisation Section D, who supplied weapons and explosives, acting in unison with MI (R), whose field was guerrilla warfare. The Auxiliary Units' job would only begin after the ‘stop lines' and fixed positions had been overrun. They were the ‘stay-behind parties' that Major General Thorne had requested of the War Office, when he was in command of XII Corps, whose job was defending Sussex and Kent against the first thrust of
the imminently expected German invasion, code-named
Seelöwe
or
SEALION
. General Ironside had then tasked his former ADC, Colonel Colin Gubbins, the professional soldier who had just been in Norway with the Independent Companies, to organise this resistance. Gubbins chose other enterprising officers to set up cells of Auxiliary Units all around the British coast.

Ian Fleming's older brother, the writer and explorer Peter Fleming, from the Grenadier Guards like Thorne, was 33 years old when he went to assist him in setting up the ‘XII Corps Observation Unit' in Kent. The glamorous and good-looking travel writer and journalist, author of
One's Company, Travels in Tartary
and
Brazilian Adventure
, had already written a paper for MI (R) on the possibilities of guerrilla warfare with irregular cavalry in China. He had also shown a talent for deception, proposing a fake document to alert the USA to Japanese ambitions in the Pacific and South-East Asia. But now, in May 1940, just back from reconnaissance activities in Norway, Peter Fleming helped to create a real partisan force.

Basing himself at a farm near Bilting, north of Ashford in Kent, and assisted by a detachment of Lovat Scouts ‘of WW1 fame' and a formidable sapper called Michael Calvert (who later won renown with Wingate's Chindits in Burma and the SAS in north-west Europe), Fleming picked countrymen – foresters, gamekeepers and poachers who knew the lie of the land – and trained them to hide up by day and come out to sabotage at night. This was just the job for the adventurous Fleming, who would end his days as a country squire in Oxfordshire, happiest out shooting.

The Auxiliary Units dug underground lairs in the woods, one of which was an expanded badger sett in a derelict chalk-pit, and skilfully concealed all sign of them. These hideouts were like the den made by the hunted hero of Geoffrey Household's 1939 novel
Rogue
Male
, or as Fleming himself wrote in his book
Invasion 1940
(reissued as Operation Sea Lion) ‘the Lost Boys' subterranean home in the second act of
Peter Pan
'. Fleming was also inspired by the English mythic hero Robin Hood, acquiring half a dozen longbows and encouraging men to use them not only to kill quietly, as guns could not, but also to carry fire and noise to the enemy by shooting arrows fitted with incendiaries or detonators. Thinking about it later, Fleming reckoned that the greenwood game could work in the summer, but
with the leaves off the trees, the English resistance outlaws would soon be tracked down and eliminated by
Einsatzkommandos
. German plans make it clear that armed insurgents in occupied Britain would have been shot out of hand, and there would have been ruthless reprisals against civilians, some of whom might have given vital information away to save themselves. Some Auxiliary Units seriously considered the assassination of collaborators in the event of invasion.

Colonel Gubbins chose another veteran of MI (R) and Norway, the young Arctic explorer Andrew Croft, to organise Suffolk and Essex. Croft, who had been at Stowe with David Niven, was the son of the vicar of Kelvedon, and he based himself at home, storing explosives and weapons in his father's coach house. Then he began enlisting the locals: farmers and fruit-growers, a game warden, a master of foxhounds, a butcher and some poachers and smugglers, in order to create two dozen small patrols each working out of their well-hidden Operational Base (OB).

By the end of 1941 the Auxiliary Units had 534 concealed OBs in the UK, with 138 more on the way. Over 3,500 men served in the Auxiliary Units and most went for their resistance training to Coleshill House, the Inigo Jones-designed home of the Earl of Radnor, situated north-east of Swindon. The address was GHQ Auxiliary Units, c/o GPO Highworth, Wiltshire; the formidable postmistress Mabel Stranks acted as a gatekeeper. Coleshill was the professional version of Osterley Park. Every weekend, two dozen Auxiliary Unit members came for courses given by regulars: close-quarter combat, weapons, explosives and fieldcraft by day, and silent exercises at night. Auxiliary Units got first pick of scarce weapons like Thompson sub-machine guns, semi-automatic pistols and Springfield rifles from the USA, and Section D's technical establishment near Stevenage supplied the Auxiliary Units with spigot mortars, incendiary fougasses, and blocks of the new yellow plastic explosive, together with the delayed-action chemical fuses known as time-pencils.

The English
maquis
learned hands-on how not to over-egg the pudding. One group watched in amazement as the car they merely wanted to disable rose high into the air and crashed in the next field. Readying Kent for invasion, they buried explosives in milk churns under bridges, and booby-trapped the large mansions that the Germans might commandeer as headquarters. ‘Mad Mike' Calvert
also blew out the centre sections of the piers at Brighton, Worthing and Eastbourne.