Churchill's Wizards (36 page)

Adrian Hoare's
Standing Up To Hitler
(2002) gives details of some of the forty-five Auxiliary Units in Norfolk from 1940 to 1944. Fewer than 300 men were recruited, cautiously and quietly, and signed the Official Secrets Act. They got no medal, just a small badge with 202, the number of their battalion. The Royal Engineers dug several of the Auxiliary Units' OBs, but they made others themselves at night and weekends. These had camouflaged entrances and exits, and some were booby-trapped. All the Norfolk men had Smith and Wesson.38 revolvers, a military pass and three morphine pills, one for severe pain, two for unconsciousness and three for suicide. Their copy of the 1938
Norfolk Calendar
concealed a saboteur's handbook with instructions how to blow up tanks, planes, trucks, armoured vehicles, railway lines, ammunition dumps etc. They had magnets to clamp explosives to metal, thin wires to trip-wire spigot mines and to disable motorcyclists, and a wide variety of destructive ordnance. They trained at Coleshill but also at Leicester Square Farm, Syderstone, North Creake, where they had to run and shoot wearing gasmasks, and crawl under live machine-gun fire a few inches above their heads while instructors threw thunder flashes at them. They also studied German military tactics, routines and sentry procedures, and were taught stalking by Lovat Scouts and unarmed combat by ferocious commandos. Most of their exercises were carried out at night.

The British resistance was best at secrecy and stealth. Few knew, fewer talked, and no one saw them on their black-face night manoeuvres as they slipped around the regular forces, probing and penetrating their defences. When General Bernard Montgomery took over the corps that was defending Kent and Sussex in 1941, he was taken by Peter Fleming's successor, Captain Norman Field, to a sloping pasture above the village of Charing with a magnificent view south to the English Channel. Field suggested that the general sit a while on a weathered sheep trough. Montgomery, the future victor of Alamein, stared aggressively towards occupied France, turned to speak to Field, and found himself alone with turf-munching sheep. Then he heard a voice beneath him and Field's head popped up from a rectangular aperture that slid open in the wooden trough. A ladder led down to a two-man observation post stocked with food and water. Its
windows were genuine rabbit holes, now weatherproofed and glazed. The Auxiliary Units had made the hide by placing an anti-aircraft gun on top, and its ‘crew' had filled the protective sandbags around it with the chalk spoil they secretly dug out.

As David Lampe was the first to point out in his revealing 1968 investigation,
The Last Ditch
, the greatest legacy of the Auxiliary Units was the practical experience it gave its overall supremo, Colonel Colin Gubbins, in organising, equipping, supplying, camouflaging and inspiring clandestine armies for resistance and liberation. On 22 July 1940, Hugh Dalton's Ministry of Economic Warfare was given a new striking force ‘to co-ordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy overseas'. This was the SOE, whose unofficial mandate came from Churchill: ‘Set Europe ablaze!' Gubbins, now brigadier, became SOE's director of operations and training from 18 November 1940 until the Labour government closed down its worldwide operations on the last day of 1945.

The novelist Graham Greene was working in the Ministry of Information, persuading other authors to come on board the war effort, when he wrote a short story about the British resistance which was published in
Collier's
magazine in June 1940. In ‘The Lieutenant Died Last', a squad of German parachutists land near an English village called Potter, lock up the inhabitants in the only pub and set off to blow up the nearby London to Edinburgh railway line. They are foiled by a shabby old tramp and poacher who has a Mauser rifle from when he fought the Boers and who knows the land better than they do. In 1943, Mike Balcon's Ealing Films – the scriptwriters were Angus McPhail, John Dighton, and Diana Morgan – turned Greene's story into
Went
The Day Well
?, one of the really interesting British films of the war, directed by Greene's friend Alberto Cavalcanti, the gay Brazilian maverick and avant-garde documentarist who had helped make the brilliant
Night Mail
for John Grierson's GPO Film Unit.

In the film
Went the Day Well
? a party of Royal Engineers arrives in an English village called Bramley Green. Slowly their deception is unmasked: they are actually English-speaking German parachutists in disguise, and the local squire is a Fifth Columnist helping them. The Germans in British disguise kill the vicar in his vestry when he starts to ring the church bell, and massacre the Home Guard on their bicycles.

An evacuee boy and a sailor on leave save the day, but it is the homely English village women who break their codes of domesticity and hospitality to start killing the enemy. The post mistress uses an axe, the vicar's daughter shoots the treacherous squire dead with a pistol, the land girl snipes with a Lee-Enfield .303, and the bossy lady from the manor house whom we thought was a prattling middle-class fool heroically scoops up a German grenade to save the working-class evacuee children, but not herself.

As early as January 1937, the Air Ministry had recognised that the British film industry might be useful in war time. After an approach by Alexander Korda of London Films, RAF officers saw the potential of Denham Studios' workshops, lighting rigs and versatile craftsmen:

Alexander Korda was born Sándor László Kellman in Hungary and had escaped from poverty and anti-Semitism in the flat plains by dreaming big and living extravagantly. Korda realised early that if you tipped waiters and doormen at the best restaurants and hotels generously in cash you could actually hold off paying the big bills until someone turned up with a business proposition. After making films in Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Hollywood and Paris, he came to England in 1931. His first film was with another Hungarian (acting under the name Leslie Howard) whom he would later make a star in
The Scarlet
Pimpernel
.

Korda became more British than the British, living north of Regent's Park in Avenue Road (with a camp butler called Benjamin), acquiring a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, and buying shoes for his tiny, dainty feet at Lobb, Homburg hats at Locke, double-breasted suits in Savile Row. He became a British subject in 1936, and was knighted in 1942. Korda founded London Film Productions in 1932 (its logo was Big Ben) and had a huge international success in 1933 with his first big
film,
The Private Life of Henry VIII
, starring Charles Laughton (who won the Best Actor Academy Award) and Merle Oberon, Korda's discovery and future wife. This was the first British feature film to conquer world markets. Suddenly all sorts of people saw that money could be made from cinema and there was a mini gold-rush to finance more British films and film studios. Sir Connop Guthrie, chairman of the wealthy Prudential Insurance Company, encouraged by Sir Robert Vansittart of the British government, enabled Korda to build Denham Studios, which he wanted to be the best outside Hollywood.

In Winston Churchill, Korda recognised a fellow showman, and in September 1934 he offered Churchill £10,000 to write the script of a film on King George V for the Silver Jubilee in 1935. The film was never made, but Korda also wanted Churchill to ‘advise' on various historical and imperial movies he planned, including one on Lawrence of Arabia that the subject himself personally dissuaded Korda from attempting. Ten years later, Korda offered £20,000 for the film rights to Churchill's
Life of Marlborough
and paid £50,000 for
A History of
the English-Speaking Peoples
. According to Korda's nephew Michael, it was Churchill who stocked the pond outside Korda's office at Denham Studios with swans (having gained royal permission).

The British secret services were also among those drawn to the possibilities of the British film industry, in particular Claude Dansey, who saw that London Films could be useful ‘cover' for persons from his ‘Z' network travelling to foreign countries. Moreover, Korda had a double debt of honour to Britain, not only because he had been financed by Dansey's rich friends but because a shadowy figure from the secret services known as Brigadier Maurice had once saved his life. Just before WW2, Korda made the patriotic spy-film,
Q Planes
, and on the outbreak of war, he swiftly made the first propaganda film about the RAF,
The Lion Has Wings
(with Ralph Richardson), which was in cinemas by November 1939. Korda also helped his adopted country by making films which boosted Britain, whether set in the imperial past (
Sanders of the River, Elephant Boy, The Drum, The
Four Feathers
) or the idealistic future (
Things to Come, The Man Who
Could Work Miracles
). Churchill sent Korda to Hollywood during the war to continue making propaganda films that were also romantic entertainment. In 1941,
Lady Hamilton
(known in the USA as
That
Hamilton Woman
) starred Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, then in
the full limelight of their adultery, as Admiral Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton. Winston Churchill adored the film. And why not? It was Churchill himself who wrote Nelson's stirring speech on why Napoleon Bonaparte must be resisted.

Film-set crews from Shepperton started building fake aircraft factories to decoy bombers away from the real ones, Short's at Rochester, De Havilland's at Hatfield, Boulton & Paul's at Wolverhampton and the Bristol aircraft Company at Filton. Technicians from many British film studios – Gaumont-British, Sound City, Green Bros – were building dummy RAF aircraft – Battles, Blenheims, Hurrcanes, Wellingtons, Whitleys – for dispersal on real and dummy airfiels. The decoy airfields, which had lit-up landing paths at night, wer known as ‘Q sites' after the ‘Q ships' of WW1. One RAF veteran rcalled them looking ‘pathetic' in daytime, just some poles, wires andbulbs, but at night the effect was amazing. ‘It was quite impossible totell a fake from the real thing.' In
Trojan Horses: Deception Operatins in the Second World War
(1989) by Martin Young and RobbieStamp, the electrician Geoff Selwood described how his unit expermented with visual effects for fake airfields. They made what they clled a ‘Running Rabbit', a long curve of wires which a light could runalong. Then they built a railway out of barrage balloon cables and a seies of small steel towers to carry a lighting rig on a trolley with a littlerocket engine:

In a further ingenious development, ‘K sites' were built, more elaborate than the ‘Q sites'. They simulated small aerodromes and attempted to draw the enemy away from the real ones. To look authentic by daylight, the ‘K sites' needed more personnel than the ‘Q sites', to move dummy aircraft about, to fake tracks, rearrange supplies and even man machine guns. ‘K sites' were normally laid out on the line of enemy approach, that is, east of the real target, and were connected to it by telephone. Seymour Reit's
Masquerade: The
Amazing Camouflage Deceptions of World War II
(1978) records one K-Area call overheard during the Battle of Britain that seems almost too good to be true:

If the Invader Comes
, ‘issued by the Ministry of Information in cooperation with the War Office and the Ministry of Home Security', was a 1940 government leaflet whose authors were determined that no British citizen should be taken by surprise as the citizens of Poland, Holland and Belgium had been. In the event of invasion, there were seven rules. The first was to stay put, and not move. ‘If you run away … you will be machine-gunned from the air … and you will also block the roads.' The seventh was to think before you act: ‘But think always of your country before you think of yourself.'

For Churchill, almost all means were valid in self-defence. The man who was prepared to spray mustard gas on German troops from massed aircraft if they got ashore obviously saw rumour as another useful weapon against them. John Baker White, an officer in the overlap between EH and Section D and then later in the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), wrote a book in 1955 about British psychological warfare, which he called
The Big Lie
. ‘We used the Big Lie when we were weak and the Great Truth when we were strong,' he
stated. ‘By rumour and deception we built another wall about Fortress Britain, when we stood alone.' This was the dark corollary to Churchill's speeches, using words not to hearten and lift up your own people, but to discourage and depress the enemy.

Baker White's own most notable contribution to the 1940 war effort is recorded in his book's first chapter – ‘The Sea Is On Fire!' Were the German Army (quite unused to amphibious operations) ever to invade England, it would have to cross the English Channel in some kind of landing craft. Baker White's notion was to make them fear they might be cooked alive in the process. He wanted them to imagine a frightful double death, first blazing hot and then drowning cold. This was not a wholly new idea: ‘Greek fire', a kind of napalm, had flared in Byzantine times, and burning ships were used by the British against both the Spanish Armada and the Napoleonic fleet.

Baker White's immediate source may have been Dennis Wheatley. The best-selling author of
The Devil Rides Out
and
They Found
Atlantis
had found no war job to date but had been busy penning the lurid (and ludicrous) adventures of his secret agent hero, ‘lean, Satanic-looking' Gregory Sallust, ‘the man the Nazis couldn't kill!' in thrillers like
The Scarlet Impostor, Faked Passports
and
The Black
Baroness
. However, Wheatley was close to the Security Service, and his second wife was working as an MI5 driver in May 1940. When one of her counter-intelligence passengers told her he was a bit stuck for ideas to resist invaders, Joan Wheatley suggested trying her imaginative husband. In twenty-four hours from 27 to 28 May 1940 Wheatley produced a 7,000-word paper,
Resistance to Invasion
, fizzing with forty-five ingenious ideas of how to ‘undermine enemy morale', which was circulated in Whitehall. One proposal was for an oil ship to be detonated from shore, ‘so that flaming oil will spread over the water and ignite the enemy craft'.

As it happened, there was an excess of petroleum products in Britain owing to the disruption of Shell and BP's trade with Scandinavia and Europe. General Ironside had noted it on 27 May: ‘There is far too much petrol in the coast areas, most of it unguarded.' But Maurice Hankey, Minister without Portfolio, thought that these fossil fuels could be used ‘for defensive purposes', so various flamethrower trials and experiments were carried out along the south coast at places like Dumpton Gap and Dungeness, which were in full view
of occupied France and passing German aircraft. John Baker White saw an experiment at St Margaret's Bay in Kent, when oil was pumped from bowsers down the cliff along pipes buried in the beach to ignition flashpoints, and he found the flame barrage's red tongues in clouds of black smoke ‘a frightening spectacle'. It was, in fact, soon found impossible to set the sea on fire. Notwithstanding the truth, Baker White was determined to use the idea of a burning ocean to terrify the enemy.

Rumours were an established part of psychological warfare. The British called them ‘sibs' – from the Latin
sibilare
, meaning ‘to hiss' or ‘to whistle' – and their purpose was to disturb enemy soldiers. In September 1940 Baker White put his idea of ‘setting the sea on fire' through the three committees that vetted all sibs before release, in case they were genuinely true or compromised actual operations.

There was a tangled bureaucracy to negotiate. In July 1940, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) had been set up under Hugh Dalton, who was also head of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, founded when war broke out. SOE effectively took over the coordination of Section D (the Sabotage Service, formerly under the Foreign Office), MI (R) (guerrilla warfare, formerly under the War Office) and EH (Electra House, Propaganda to Enemy Countries, formerly under joint control of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Information). Initially the idea was to split the new SOE itself into words and deeds, SO1 (Subversion/Propaganda) and SO2 (Sabotage/ Operations). The dichotomy was, in fact, disastrous. Ministry fought with ministry. Only after many months of tedious Whitehall interdepartmental turf wars did a new secret service emerge separately out of SO1. This was the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), chartered on 20 September 1941 and no longer under the Ministry of Economic Warfare. PWE's cover name was Political Intelligence Department (PID) of the Foreign Office, and its job was all forms of propaganda against the enemy, including overall control of the BBC. As John Baker White put it: ‘A deception – a Big Lie – was a military operation. Political warfare was the machine used to project it to the enemy.'

A big pearl of a lie is best seeded with a grain of truth. Whereas the sib that the British had imported 200 man-eating sharks from Australia to release in the English Channel was strikingly short of supporting evidence, there really were some burned Germans to
support Baker White's sib about setting the sea on fire. Churchill told the secret session of the House of Commons that the Germans had gathered ‘upwards of 1,700 self-propelled barges and more than 200 sea-going ships' in occupied ports, ready for invasion. When the RAF attacked this German shipping in harbours from Emden to Le Havre with incendiaries and high explosive in September, the flames could be seen from Kent. Injured German soldiers were transferred to Paris hospitals and the story spread that they had been burned in a failed invasion. French wags began to stand behind the German soldiers occupying their country and pretend to warm their hands on them. Belgians swore they knew nurses who had tended hundreds of moaning Germans with burns.

The RAF dropped leaflets and a
Short Invasion Phrasebook
with handy phrases for ‘The Water's on fire!' in German, French and Dutch: (
Hier brennt sogar das Wasser! Même l'eau brûle ici! Hier staat
waarachtig het water in brand!
) On the BBC German Service, Sefton Delmer gave mock English lessons: ‘
Das Boot sinkt
… the boat is sinking' with useful verbs ‘
Ich brenne
… I burn,
Du brennst
… you burn,
Er brennt
… heburns … And if I may be allowed to suggest a phrase:
Der SS Sturmführer brennt auch ganz schön
… The SS Captain is al-so bur-ning quite nice-ly.' Other broadcasts in German gave out the names of captured German seamen saying they had been ‘rescued' from the sea while the fate of their unfortunate companions was not known.

All along the Atlantic coast German soldiers put two and two together and made four hundred. Captured Luftwaffe pilots had all heard the story, Wehrmacht personnel wrote home with lurid versions of it. The burning-sea story also spread through Britain (whether by accident or design) almost as fast as the Russians-with-snow-on-their-boots story had in WW1. From Dorset to Dover and from Sandwich to Shingle Street in Suffolk there were stories of dozens, scores, hundreds, no,
thousand
s of German soldiers hideously charred and incinerated in a seaborne invasion that failed horribly sometime around the weekend of 14–15 September 1940.

In fact, only thirty-six German dead bodies were washed ashore in Britain that year, mostly Luftwaffe pilots and air crew. If they were burned, it was because they had been shot down in flames. However, the first crack at ‘The Big Lie' was astonishingly successful. Perhaps
Hitler was right when he sneered sarcastically on 4 September 1940 that ‘the British should not forget to raise their most important general to the rank of Field Marshal of the Empire. I mean General Bluff. That is their only reliable ally.' (Hitler also made use of bluff, keeping the invasion threat going long after he had decided to turn on Russia instead.)

The German invasion came not by water but by air, because Hermann Göring promised Adolf Hitler that his airmen would win command of the skies before the army and navy crossed the sea. In 1937, while entertaining Lord Trenchard, boasting of the superior powers of his secretly rebuilt Luftwaffe, Göring took his guest outside for a magnificent firework display in the chilly night. Loudspeakers blared out an amplified recording of an artillery barrage, mixed with the whine of dive-bombers swooping to drop their whistling loads of explosive bombs. This was barely two months after the destruction of Guernica. ‘That's German might for you,' Göring shouted. ‘I see you trembled. One day German might will make the whole world tremble.' ‘You must be off your head,' the founder of the RAF angrily replied. ‘I warn you, Göring, don't underestimate the RAF.'

From July to October 1940 the Luftwaffe and the RAF clashed above southern England in the series of air combats that became known as the ‘Battle of Britain'. Some doubt if there was ever a coherent German plan; bombers would simply bash Britain until it gave up, which it surely had to. But the illogical British stubbornly refused to surrender, and what ensured was the mythic battle of which Churchill said, in August 1940, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.' The ‘few' were British, Canadian, Czech, Polish and South African pilots.

London's Croydon Aerodrome was attacked on 18 August, when the Home Guard managed to shoot down a Dornier with 180 rounds of rifle fire. Central London and the City were first hit by the German air force on the night of the 24th. Then it became a war of tit for tat. RAF Bomber Command bombed ‘military targets' in the German capital Berlin. Major Nazi reprisal bombing started at teatime on Saturday, 7 September 1940. A huge armada of enemy aircraft flew up the Thames estuary in broad daylight, over 300 bomber planes with more than 600 fighters protecting them. The journalist Virginia Cowles, weekending in the country, saw them in the distance like a
swarm of insects. They were heading for the wharves and warehouses of the East End of London where the riches of the British Empire were unloaded and stored at the sprawling docks. The Port of London Authority Docks had forty-five miles of quays and moved a third of the UK's imports and a quarter of its exports. Three big railway stations – London Bridge, Waterloo and Charing Cross – were knocked out, water mains and sewage pipes were broken, gas and electricity cut. Two hours after the ‘All Clear' sounded, another 250 bombers returned at night, their path clearly lit by flames, to add their tonnage of explosives and incendiaries to the inferno below. More than sixty major blazes and a thousand smaller ones made it the worst conflagration since the Great Fire of London. From five miles away, you could read the
Evening Standard
by it in the blackout.

Colonel John Fisher Turner, in charge of creating dummy airfields, was put on his mettle by the Blitz. His job was to improvise and coordinate the military and civil bombing decoy systems from his office at Shepperton Studios. From November 1940 he set in motion the decoy fires of the QF sites, and the Special Fires of the SF or ‘Starfish' sites. As Colin Dobinson showed in
Fields of Deception: Britain's
Bombing Decoys of World War II
(Methuen, 2000), these decoy fires were set in country outside urban areas where further bombs would do no harm. The idea was to simulate the different visual effects of burning buildings; the aim of these second-degree decoys was to catch the attention of the second and third waves of Luftwaffe bombers who would then unload their bombs uselessly on what they thought were the right targets. Cans of creosote and roofing-felt generated what the manual calls the ‘large spluttering fire', while big drums of creosote with rolls of roofing-felt stuffed in end-on led to ‘heavy initial smoke fire'. The ‘dull basic fire' was a brazier of coal, ignited by flare cans. With the addition of a header tank of oil and a structure of pipes, this became the ‘coal drip fire', which flared up dramatically when fuel was sprinkled on it. Eventually forty-two towns had 130 ‘Starfish' systems helping to protect them. As German use of incendiaries increased in 1941, so did the sophistication of the dummy Special Fires mimicking what the Germans called the
Brandbombfeld
or ‘firebomb field'. These later Starfish were laid out in patterned groups and ignited in relays. They contained ‘basket fires', crates of wood wrapped in wire netting
and hessian, containing wood shavings, sawdust and flammable waste, soaked with layers of creosote. These burned impressively for an hour and were interspersed with ‘crib fires' of firewood and coal, dramatic boiling oil fires and yellow-flamed ‘grid fires'. The Luftwaffe were not always deceived, for they had their own decoys, but sometimes they were, because navigation in those days was not always accurate. Dobinson concludes that Colonel Turner's decoys probably wasted about 5 per cent of the German bombing effort, and may have spared nearly 2,600 civilians from death and over 3,100 from serious injury.