Читать книгу Our Land at War: A Portrait of Rural Britain 1939–45 - Duff Hart-Davis - Страница 15

The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well … First she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything: then she looked at the sides of the well and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and bookshelves: here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Captain Peter Fleming was an unconventional figure, to say the least. An Old Etonian aged thirty-two at the start of the war, he was well known to the public as the author of two runaway bestsellers published in the 1930s, twenty years before his younger brother Ian thought up James Bond. Brazilian Adventure – funniest of travel books – sent up a quest for the explorer Percy Fawcett lost in the Mato Grosso, and News from Tartary described how the author had walked 3500 miles from Peking to Kashmir in the company of Ella Maillart, lesbian captain of the Swiss women’s hockey team, without telling his fiancée, the actress Celia Johnson, that he was accompanied by a woman. Yet, in spite of his renown, Fleming was essentially a private person, and one main qualification for an unusual wartime commission was his first-hand knowledge of the English countryside.

At home in the woods and fields of his 2000-acre estate in Oxfordshire, he could distinguish the sett of a badger from the earth of a fox; he could read the tracks left by animals and interpret the calls made by birds and animals both in daylight and in the dark. As a means of confusing the enemy, he would sometimes advocate the Victorian poacher’s trick of walking backwards through mud or snow, to make it look as if the passer-by had been moving in the opposite direction.

As the threat of invasion intensified, General Andrew Thorne, Commander of XII Corps, was given the task of defending south-east England along a front that stretched from Greenwich, on the Thames, round the coast of Kent and Sussex to Hayling Island, in Hampshire. Remembering how, six years earlier, he had seen peasants in East Prussia digging last-ditch defence positions in the hills and stocking them with food, weapons and ammunition, in the hope that they would be able to disrupt the supply lines of an invading army, Thorne appointed Fleming to do much the same in England: to raise and train a body of men whose role would be to go to ground behind any German advance and harass the invaders from the rear, while the main line of defence was organized nearer London.

Armed with a letter of authority, and operating in the strictest secrecy, Fleming set up his headquarters in a brick and timber farmhouse called The Garth on a hill at Bilting, between Ashford and Faversham. The true identity of his organization was buried under the meaningless title ‘The XII Corps Observation Unit’, and individual patrols were assigned an equally uninformative name, the ‘Auxiliary Units’.

Together with Captain Mike Calvert, a Royal Engineer, Fleming first went about his area setting up booby traps by stuffing ammonal explosive into the churns in which dairy farmers set out their milk for collection – but even though these home-made bombs were never fitted with detonators, they made people nervous and were soon removed. He and Calvert also mined a whole belt of bridges, in the hope of slowing any German advance, and booby-trapped country houses which the enemy might use as headquarters by cramming the cellars full of explosives. As Calvert put it, their task was ‘to make Kent and Sussex as unsafe and unpleasant as possible for the Germans if ever they got that far’. They also blew out the centre sections of the piers at Brighton, Worthing and Eastbourne. Then, in absolute secrecy, they began recruiting gamekeepers, poachers, foresters, gardeners and farmers – men with intimate knowledge of the area in which they lived. All were hand-picked, after apparently casual approaches, and all were vetted for security by their local police – even though the police did not know what role the candidates were going to undertake.

Meanwhile, Colonel Colin Gubbins (a specialist in guerrilla warfare, and later head of Special Operations Executive) established a training base in Berkshire at Coleshill House, a relatively small but elegant seventeenth-century mansion bristling with tall chimneys, home of the Pleydell-Bouverie family, well isolated by its own park, shrubberies, fields and woods. Recruits were told to report to Highworth village post office, where the elderly postmistress, Mabel Stranks, would check their identity papers, disappear for a few minutes, then return and say ‘Someone’s coming to fetch you’. A vehicle would appear to ferry the newcomer to the house. Training weekends took place in the house and grounds, and three manuals were produced, each succeeding the earlier one as guerrilla activity became more refined. Some predictions were blissfully optimistic: ‘In districts where the war is intense and enemy troops thick on the ground, it will not be necessary to go far to find a target.’

Men chosen to be auxiliaries were set to work building subterranean lairs which they stocked with ammunition, explosives, sabotage equipment, rations and cooking stoves. One of these dens in Kent was in the cellars of a ruined house that had been destroyed by fire years earlier, but most of them lay in dense woods, and at least one was excavated from on old badger sett in a derelict chalkpit: the long, winding tunnels – a foot or so in diameter – were enlarged into a reasonably comfortable hideout, which Fleming himself later described:

They [the men] took a pride in their place. They schemed endlessly and worked hard to improve it. Ventilation shafts, alarm signals, dustbins, lights, clothes pegs, bookshelves hollowed out of the chalk, washing up arrangements – all these tactical problems they tackled with enthusiasm.

In his book A Very Quiet War Ralph Arnold, ADC to General Thorne, gave an idea of how cleverly the den was concealed. In the middle of a thick belt of woodland on the hillside above Charing, the General was led into a clearing and challenged to find the entrance to the local unit’s hideaway:

We poked about unsuccessfully for a few minutes, and then our guide casually kicked a tree stump. It fell back on a hinge to reveal a hole with a rope ladder dangling into a cavern that had been enlarged from a badger’s sett. In this cave, sitting on kegs of explosive, and surrounded by weapons, booby-traps, a wireless set and tins of emergency rations, were some Lovat Scouts and half-a-dozen hand-picked Home Guards … It was pure Boys’ Own Paper stuff, and the Corps Commander, whose brainchild the Auxiliary Units had been, simply loved it.

Another distinguished visitor was General Bernard Montgomery, who took over from Thorne as Commander of XII Corps, and early in 1941 was escorted out onto a Kent hillside by Captain Norman Field, Fleming’s successor as the Auxiliary Units’ Intelligence Officer. When the walkers reached a battered old wooden trough, Field suggested they should sit on it to enjoy the view. They did just that, but a few moments later Montgomery was startled to find that, without a sound or any apparent movement, his companion had vanished. Only when he saw Field’s head appear beside him, sticking up through a rectangular opening in the bottom of the trough, did he realize that he had been perching on top of a perfectly concealed hideout. When the young officer told him that this was one of XII Corps’ two-man observation posts, he was furious, because no one had let him know that such lookouts existed; but when he wormed his way down into a small chamber hacked out of the earth, he could not help admiring the way in which two authentic looking rabbit holes leading out through the steep bank beneath the trough had been adapted to give a view of the A20.

In the construction of such dens, the disposal of excavated soil was a problem, not least because it usually had to be done in the dark. The diggers would carry away earth and rocks in buckets, and either dump them elsewhere in the wood (having first scraped back the leaves and earth on the forest floor), or tip them into streams strong enough to wash new deposits away. If the site was on sandy ground, the spoil could be loaded into hessian bags, thousands of which were being piled up all over the country to protect buildings or gun sites from blast.

Many of the larger bases were built by the Royal Engineers or by civilian contractors, who told inquisitive locals that the holes being dug in the woods were to house emergency food stores. These professionally made dens were lined with sheets of corrugated iron, and had access and escape tunnels made of wide-diameter concrete pipes. Later in the war one, near the Northumberland village of Longhorsley, caused huge excitement among a gang of boys, vividly remembered by Bill Ricalton:

We climbed up the wooded hill from the burn side for perhaps fifty or sixty yards. Beside the base of a large tree our leader stopped and cleaned away decayed grass and leaves with his hands, which exposed a wooden door with a handle on it. When the door was opened it revealed a concrete shaft, about two to three feet square. A metal rung ladder was attached to the side, and disappeared into the darkness below …

We all descended the steps and into the tunnel below. The bottom of the iron ladder must have been eight feet or more below the trap door. Leading from the bottom was a concrete tunnel, large enough for a grown man to stand up. We were to visit this place many times over the next few years, sometimes just to sit and talk and wonder why it was there and what it was for.

Years later shivers went down his spine when he discovered that it had been one of the Auxiliary Units’ lairs, and that the locked rooms (which he and his friends never penetrated) had been stocked with food, water, the new plastic explosive (known as ‘PE’) and weapons, among them Piat anti-tank grenade launchers and the first Thompson sub-machine guns imported from the United States.

During the war Boy Scouts were taught to carry verbal messages from one place to another, using roundabout routes to dodge other Scouts sent to intercept them: back gardens, passageways, ditches, orchards, fields – all became familiar undercover approaches. Few, if any, of the boys realized that what seemed an amusing game might, in the event of invasion, suddenly become an important messenger service.

Because the role of the Auxiliary Units would be mainly nocturnal, most of their training was done at night, or wearing dark goggles during the day. ‘Make a patrol march past and listen for avoidable creaks,’ Fleming noted in his diary. ‘Even at his stealthiest the British soldier emits a sound as of discreet munching.’ In his own headquarters officers sat on packing cases of explosives and ate off a table formed from boxes of gelignite; but because of his social standing, the diners might sometimes include a brace of generals or even a Cabinet Minister.

Fleming himself was almost comically cack-handed, but he took delight in devising esoteric methods of attacking the enemy, such as training his men to shoot with bows and arrows. Archery, he thought, might come in useful, either for silently picking off individual German sentries, or for causing confusion in their camps if arrows carrying small incendiary devices could be shot over perimeter defences, to cause inexplicable fires or explosions within. Posterity credited him with the ability to bring down a running deer at 100 yards, but in reality he could not be sure of hitting a barn door at twenty-five paces.

If the invasion had taken place, the auxiliaries would have immediately left their homes and gone to ground, emerging at night. No one will ever know how much the troglodytes could have achieved if the Germans had come. Fleming himself doubted if his force could have been ‘more than a minor and probably short-lived nuisance to the invaders’: he feared that his men would have been hunted down as soon as autumn stripped leaves from trees and hedges, and that reprisals against the civilian population would soon have put the teams out of business. Besides, he noticed that among his own recruits ‘it was not long … before claustrophobia and a general malaise set in, because they were civilised men who had suddenly executed a double somersault back into a cave existence’. His colleague Mike Calvert was more optimistic:

If it had been called to action, the Resistance Army of Kent and Sussex would have had at its core some of the toughest and most determined men I have ever met. Their farms and their shops and their homes would have been highly dangerous places for any enemy soldier to enter.

No doubt the defenders would have killed quite a few Germans, had the invasion taken place; but, judging by the brutality shown by the Nazis to French resistance fighters, of the two estimates Fleming’s seems the more likely. (As an illustration of this, in July 1944 the Germans massacred hundreds of Maquis in an all-out attack on their stronghold in the Vercors massif, in the south-east of France.)

Fleming’s counterpart in Essex, Captain Andrew Croft, a former head boy of Stowe, felt the same as Calvert, and believed that his units could have held out indefinitely by stealing food, weapons and ammunition from the invading forces. In any case, under Colonel Gubbins’s direction resistance cells came into being all over the country, not only in Kent, but in the South West, in East Anglia and up the coasts of Yorkshire, Northumberland and Scotland, as far as Cape Wrath in the far North West. Scotland certainly needed them, for regular troops were thin on the ground, and there was always a chance that the Germans might invade up there.

The man chosen to create Auxiliary Units north of the border was Captain Eustace Maxwell, nephew of the Duke of Northumberland and brother of the writer Gavin. His aristocratic connections made it easy for him to recruit, as did the fact that he was an Argyll and Sutherland Highlander; and the terrain in which he went to work – miles upon miles of scarcely populated moors, mountains and coastline – was ideal for guerrilla warfare. So were the inhabitants: farmers, foresters, deerstalkers, ghillies – all used to living and working in the open air.

Melville House, a huge, square, four-storey building, the Palladian home of the Leslie-Melville family at Monimail in East Fife, became the Coleshill of the north – a training centre, surrounded by woods and farmland, approached by a beech avenue and equipped with all the facilities needed for firing weapons, setting demolition charges and learning hand-to-hand combat. Behind the house a gentle slope made an ideal background for a small-arms range, and rail tracks were laid in the woods so that budding demolition experts could practise blowing them up. When a German prisoner-of-war camp was established at Annsmuir, near the railway station at Ladybank, Wehrmacht uniforms found their way into Melville House to add verisimilitude to the training.

As recruits went through the mill there, hideouts were being dug or built all over Scotland. Ruined castles made ideal sites: caverns were dug out beneath heaps of stone at the foot of collapsed walls, with access via a single, spring-loaded slab. Once a few rainstorms had swept over the rubble, there was no sign that anyone had been there for centuries. Other dens were made beneath houses in villages and entered through cellars – but always with an escape tunnel leading to a disguised exit some distance away. By the end of 1940 about a hundred units were fully established, and Maxwell himself had driven 70,000 miles overseeing their creation. In Britain as a whole some 3000 men were trained to go to ground, and they were issued with liberal amounts of ammunition and explosives. They remained ready for action throughout the war; but so deeply secret was the organization that its existence was not officially admitted until the middle of the 1950s.

Later in the war a parallel clandestine organization was formed, under the cover name of the Special Duties Section of the Auxiliary Units. This was a secret radio network staffed mainly by women, who went to ground with transmitters in hideouts of their own, charged with the task of keeping communications open in the event of an invasion. Like the operational bunkers, every den was elaborately concealed: if there was no building at hand tall enough to carry a forty-foot aerial, men from the Royal Corps of Signals would climb a tree, cutting grooves in the trunk, laying the wire in them and filling them with plaster of Paris painted to resemble the bark.

During the Phoney War Fleming at times thought uneasily of Rogue Male, a thriller by Geoffrey Household set in the 1930s. In the novel an anonymous British sportsman, ‘who couldn’t resist the temptation to stalk the impossible’, is at large in central Europe, bent on personally assassinating a loathsome dictator. The target’s name is never mentioned, but clearly it is Hitler whom the rifleman has in his sights.

Before he can fire a shot, he is seized by security men and beaten up, but escapes and flees back to England. Even there, however, he is not safe. Enemy agents pursue him so tenaciously that he is forced to go to ground in an old badger sett, with the entrance tunnel disguised as an ‘apparent rabbit hole’ in the side of a sunken lane. His only ally is a feral cat which he calls Asmodeus – the legendary king of the demons – and in the end it is this animal, or, rather, its skin, that saves him. The chase is immensely exciting, and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the dank hideaway is powerfully evoked. The timing of the novel’s publication, in 1939, was extraordinarily apt, and the book foreshadowed many of the elements – the claustrophobic subterranean redoubts, the nocturnal forays – with which the Auxiliary Units became familiar.

Above ground there was at first no place for female talent in the Home Guard; but in 1942 the Women’s Home Guard Auxiliaries were formed, and girls were allowed to join the men, both in the office and in the field. At St Ives in Huntingdonshire a small team dealt with telephone and radio equipment in the local headquarters, and also took part in night exercises. One of them remembered how disconcerting it was to find ‘well-respected businessmen from the town crawling along ditches in camouflage, with blackened faces’, and another gave herself a nasty fright when she blundered on all fours into a big, solid, warm lump, which turned out to be a recumbent cow. In the office they whiled away spare time by sending each other frivolous radio messages – until some of them were intercepted by staff at Wyton Airfield, three miles away, who thought the traffic was coded signals transmitted by enemy agents, and the girls were severely reprimanded.

Yet another agency at work in town and country was the Royal Observer Corps, whose members spotted, identified and tracked any aircraft that appeared in the sky and reported its details to group headquarters, whence the message was swiftly passed to the RAF. The organization’s motto was ‘Forewarned, Forearmed’ – and success depended on continuous vigilance backed by speedy reaction. During the Battle of Britain the volunteer observers, stationed in posts about ten miles apart, furnished the only means of tracking enemy aircraft once they had crossed the coast; and so valuable was their work that in April 1941 the King awarded the Corps the prefix ‘Royal’.

The two-man crews devised any number of comfortable lairs from which to keep watch: wooden huts, little brick buildings, concrete boxes on prominent mounds, penthouses on the roofs of factories. One outpost was beautifully captured by the war artist Eric Ravilious, whose delicate watercolour portrayed two watchers standing in a kind of grouse butt, protected by sandbags and a canvas screen, with a single telephone wire disappearing through the air above a wintry landscape. Still more elaborate was a contraption in Ayrshire which consisted of a heavy metal post sunk into the ground, topped by a revolving cross-piece, on either end of which was a padded seat made from a car’s steering wheel. Each seat revolved individually, and one of the team was always aloft, binoculars at the ready.

Although able to operate only in daylight, and often blinded by fog, the Observer Corps provided a vital service throughout the war. But in the autumn of 1940 the enormous, all-round effort of the Auxiliary Units in going to ground proved unnecessary – for the time being, at any rate. It has never become clear why, on 17 September 1940, Hitler ordered the postponement of Operation Sealion until the spring, or why in the end he abandoned his invasion plan altogether. Instead, he unleashed the full fury of the Luftwaffe in the Blitz on London.