If Britain Had Fallen (40 page)
They were all Jews and … we were at the gate to see them come in … You just couldn’t believe they were human beings any longer. [There was one of them] well, we didn’t know if he was a man or a boy or what he was, he was so thin. He had Army boots on and as he dragged his feet he just came out of them. His legs … just wouldn’t stay in … The people were very lousy, they had to be taken into the baths and their clothes were put into the corner and I’m not telling a word of a lie when I tell you that those clothes were literally moving … Tears were rolling down the commandant’s face, he just didn’t believe it. He shook his head and he said … to us, ‘How can we win a war when we treat people like that?’
Armed insurgents of either sex will be dealt with with the utmost severity.
Directive for Military Government in England,
September 1940
While in June 1940 the French government was planning to surrender, the British government was planning to resist even if its country were overrun. No one at this stage was thinking of a permanent underground resistance movement such as later sprang up in all the occupied countries, but merely of a small military force behind the enemy lines, which would harass the Germans in the rear as they advanced and give the forces defending the ‘stop-lines’ inland more time to prepare. During the Norwegian campaign, even before Hitler’s offensive in the West, dumps of explosives for this purpose had been hidden at various points around the country, and after Dunkirk a full-scale, if small, organisation was set up to form ‘stay behind’ parties in a coastal strip thirty miles deep, from John o’ Groats in the far north of Scotland right down to Lands End, in the far west of Cornwall, and then round the Atlantic coast as far as Pembrokeshire in South Wales. The stretch of coastline from there back to Scotland was left unguarded, the colonel in charge deciding, rightly we now know, that no danger of an attack from that direction existed.
At the start the whole of the area to be protected was divided into twelve sectors, each manned by a ‘striking force’ of twelve soldiers, led by a subaltern, signallers, clerks and a storeman being added later. They were recruited by one of a small team of officers looking for initiative, resourcefulness, and an enthusiasm for ‘irregular’ operations, rather than the more orthodox military virtues, and the men who did the selecting were themselves of this type. In the area of highest risk, for example, in the south-east, where XII corps was protecting a front from Greenwich, well up the Thames estuary towards London, to Hayling Island, nearly at Portsmouth—thus covering almost precisely the territory chosen by the Germans for the initial lodgement of Army Group A, and the Army Command objective after the subsequent break-out—the man responsible was the author and explorer Peter Fleming, a hostilities-only Guards officer with the unconventional outlook to be expected of a successful journalist, author and explorer. Eventually some twenty Auxiliary Units, as they became known, manned by soldiers, were set up, but they were reinforced by a far larger number of ‘cells’ or ‘patrols’ recruited solely
from civilians, who carried on with their ordinary jobs, but were expected, if the Germans arrived, to retire to their secret hideouts and become full-time guerillas, emerging after dark to blow up an enemy petrol dump or sabotage a troop of tanks.
Many of those invited to take on this lonely, dangerous and, of course, unpaid job, offering in full measure Churchill’s ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ with the chance of getting shot thrown in, were already members of the Home Guard, from whose rolls they were quietly dropped—so quietly that some were threatened with court-martial for not turning out on parade with their old units. But the Auxiliary Units also recruited civilians, especially men like gamekeepers and farmers, and even a Master of Foxhounds, who knew the country intimately, as well as clergy, doctors and local officials, who could travel round after an occupation without attracting attention. Other recruits were selected because they, too, showed the right spirit and aptitude, among them tin miners in Cornwall, coal miners in the industrial North, fishermen, blacksmiths, hotel-keepers and publicans. Some were aged no more than seventeen, some were in their seventies. But all, though they would never have put it in such terms, were ready, for their country’s sake, to live a cramped, dangerous, secret existence, while their homes were destroyed and their families killed, knowing that the best they could hope for if caught was a speedy execution. Paragraph 3 of the Commander-in-Chief’s
Directive for Military Government in England
warned that ‘armed insurgents of either sex will be dealt with with the utmost severity. If the population initiates active operations after the completed conquest of a locality, or in places behind the fighting front, the inhabitants involved in the fighting will be regarded as armed insurgents.’ The poster prepared for public issue went even further. ‘I warn all civilians’, read von Brauchitsch’s proclamation, ‘that if they undertake active operations against the German forces they will be condemned to death inexorably.’
In fact, technically speaking—and when it was one’s life at stake technicalities mattered—it was doubtful if many members of the Auxiliary Units, even though they wore Home Guard uniform, were really Home Guards at all, for their former units had disowned them, or they had never belonged to the organisation, while no central records were kept of the three special battalions on whose strength they were supposed to be, which existed on the ground rather than on paper, a reversal of the usual situation in 1940.
The first approach to a man to join an Auxiliary Unit often came from someone already connected with it over a quiet drink after a Home Guard parade, and the potential recruit would then be exhaustively ‘vetted’ by
local enquiries. Once accepted, his evenings and weekends would be spent in training, either locally or at a country house at Highworth, near Swindon in Wiltshire, acquired for the purpose in 1940. One farmer recruited to a patrol at Romney Marsh, Kent, remembers the training as ‘really good’, and this impression is confirmed by the ‘saboteur’s handbook’ issued to members, an innocuous-looking buff-coloured booklet, labelled ‘The Countryman’s Diary 1939’, with, printed below it:
HIGHWORTH’S FERTILISERS
DO THEIR STUFF UNSEEN
UNTIL YOU SEE
RESULTS!
This, quite literal, ‘cover’ story may have been designed to discourage prying eyes, though it seems more likely to have been a private joke, but the contents in any case fully lived up to the promise on the front, consisting of fifty-two pages of admirably forthright and lucid information, sufficient to convert any man not incorrigibly clumsy into a dangerous saboteur. The section headed ‘Some Improvised Mines’, which is illustrated by cut-away drawings, gives an idea of what the Germans would have been up against.
These are all things you can easily make yourselves, as the materials are easy to find.
The first step is to make a ‘burster’. This can be made by filling a small cocoa tin with Gelignite—1 lb is enough—and moulding in a small knot of Cordtex … Bring the spare end out through the lid.
The next step is to make the ‘shrapnel’ part of the mine. The shrapnel itself is usually small pieces of scrap metal such as nuts and bolts, nails, etc. If you can’t get these use small, sharp stones … The more shrapnel the better—but remember you will have to carry the thing about.
A very good method is to use an old motor cycle cylinder filled with gelignite. The fins fly very well … With a little imagination dozens of other ideas will present themselves … The essential point is that for outdoor booby traps you must aim at killing by splinters—not by blast.
Later sections of the booklet were equally informative about attacking ‘shell and bomb dumps’, ‘petrol dumps’ (‘in large dumps concentrate on the up-wind end of the dump. The wind will help to spread the fire’), ‘Aeroplanes: the Tail is the best part to attack’, ‘Armoured cars’ (‘fix a charge of 2 lb primed gelignite on … the side of the engine’), ‘Trucks’ and ‘Tanks’, the advice here showing a vast advance in realism on the days of Molotov cocktails and blankets hung across streets: ‘Best of all attack the repair lorries which always go into ‘harbour’ with the tanks and let the field army do the “tank bursting”.’
The Auxiliary Units would have concocted their lethal devices, and lived their solitary lives, in tiny hideouts officially known as observation Bases’ or OBs. By the end of 1940 about 300 had been constructed, some of them being in the cellars of ruined castles or abandoned farmhouses, in caves unknown to tourists, in abandoned coalmines and, in Scotland, in the 2000-year-old dome-shaped stone dwellings last used by the Picts. The secret of their location was well kept. The Kent farmer already quoted remarks that ‘I had two brothers-in-law in another patrol and had not the slightest idea where their OB was’.
This was the more remarkable because many had to be specially built by Army engineers in hillsides and in woodland, the finished result resembling a small, concrete-lined, underground kitchen, the domestic atmosphere being heightened by paraffin lamps, cooking stoves and piles of tinned food sufficient to enable the five or six occupants to stay literally underground for at least ten days. After 1940 other refinements were added to the organisation, including an elaborate signals network, manned by Auxiliary Territorial Service girls, who were asked to volunteer for ‘an interesting and possibly dangerous assignment’, and were interviewed, as if to underline the basic respectability of the whole organisation, in the public lounge of the most aristocratic of London department stores, Harrods, by the niece of the then Archbishop of Canterbury. By that time the total strength had reached 5000 men, well equipped with the latest weapons and explosives, such as the invaluable ‘stickybomb’, which attached itself to a tank and directed a concentrated explosion at the armour. In 1940 numbers were smaller and it would all have been a far more desperate affair, with bands, one suspects, of rather dirty and unshaven desperadoes slipping out of their hideouts in the darkness to stab a sentry in the back or lob a grenade into the German headquarters established in some local country house, many of which had already been reconnoitred with this very prospect in mind. The basic aim, however, was not so much to kill people, who could easily be replaced, as to throw enemy plans into disorder by destroying equipment. ‘The whole object of our existence’, another Kent Auxiliary Unit member recalls, ‘was to go behind the enemy lines to do as much damage as we could, blast petrol dumps, ammunition dumps, lorries or anything … . In the course of this one might come up against sentries … . We were taught to kill these … .One went behind the sentry, put the knife behind his ear, gave a sharp push, and you had a very, very quick death, and a very quiet death’—to be followed, of course, by a very noisy explosion.
The Germans would not have tolerated such action for long. Reprisals would have been immediate and savage, and would certainly have
included the taking of hostages, for the German
Directive
already quoted advised that ’when taking hostages those persons should if possible be selected in whom the
active
enemy elements have an interest’—meaning presumably the families and neighbours of men suspected of being involved. Would this have caused the Auxiliary Units to stop their operations? A group of former members to whom this question was put in 1972 were unanimous that it would not. ‘We’d taken the job on’, one pointed out, ‘and if people that we knew had been shot we couldn’t have brought them back to life by stopping. I think we would have owed it to them to go on despite what might have happened and, if we’d seen things destroyed that we’d known for a great many years, I think it would have made us go on and on … as long as we stayed alive’. Even if his own loved ones had been put at risk by his activities he believes that they, too, would not have wished him to stop: ‘I’m sure their feeling would have been to go on. Mine would have been anyway.’ Another of the unit agrees. ‘If they killed hostages’, he would, he believes, have decided it was ‘up to me to get my own back and kill some of them’.
The Germans also hoped by reprisals to force local people themselves to discourage military resistance. This policy had some success on the Continent, where even the most loyal patriots sometimes urged the resistance men to go away and cause trouble elsewhere, but it was generally ineffective. ‘The reaction’, comments one Auxiliary Unit member, ‘was never against the resistance movement, it was always against those who caused what had happened, in other words, the invaders.’ The attitudes of peacetime, he points out, offer little guide to one’s feelings in such a situation. ‘If the Germans had been here … our minds would have been very different from what they are today. What future would there have been other than try and get rid of the invaders—and do your damnedest while you were alive to do it?’
How long would the Auxiliary Units men in fact have stayed alive? Although their stores were originally only intended to last ten days, some members believe that, if given a sufficiently remote hideout from which to forage for further supplies, they might have stayed hidden for months. Peter Fleming felt that most might have escaped detection for six or seven weeks, if the invasion had come around 20 September, until the leaves began to fall from the trees and the frosty ground betrayed their giveaway tracks to low-flying aircraft. In distant areas, like the north of Scotland (with few German targets to attack but equally few enemy to observe them) they might have gone on living their curious lives for years. But this was not the real aim for the Units really existed to cause behind-the-lines disruption before the battle had been lost and they had
been given no instructions what to do if the Germans were finally victorious, each Unit having to search its own collective conscience as to whether there was any point in fighting on.
