"Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare"

Giles Milton's brisk account of various British derring-dos in WWII can easily provide material for five action movies.

• In the summer of 1937, Clarke had submitted a LoLode advertisement for inclusion in his favourite magazine, Caravan and Trailer. Describing his vehicle as a ‘three berth living van of the most advanced design’
• Clarke had an expanding brain that functioned like an accordion. He sucked in ideas, mixed them together and then expelled them as something altogether more melodious.
• Britain was in no position to compete in such a naval arms race and was faced with having to find a more creative way to redress the balance. Senior figures in the War Office and Admiralty decided that sinking German ships would be more cost-effective than building British ones.
• But Jefferis faced an insurmountable problem. He was unable to find magnets that would function underwater and was also too busy to build a reliable time-delay detonator... Macrae popped one into his mouth and began playing with it on his tongue. As he did so, he was struck by how it shrank in size with absolute regularity. It was exactly what was needed. Clarke rigged up his strikers to the children’s aniseed balls while young John Clarke looked on crossly.
• Macrae was able to show Millis Jefferis the prototype magnetic mine that had been given the provisional name of limpet. Jefferis immediately recognized Cecil Clarke’s weapon as a work of technical wizardry. For a little less than £6 (including labour), he had produced an explosive device that was lightweight, easy to use and devastatingly effective, one that had the potential to be a game-changer in time of war. For if a single diver equipped with a single limpet mine could destroy a single ship, then it stood to reason that a team of divers could destroy a fleet of ships.
• Colin Gubbins was a dapper little fellow... Some of his acquaintances were troubled by the sharp glint in his eyes, which seemed to hint at an icy ruthlessness. But Joan convinced herself that the glint was more of a twinkle, reflecting mischief and an inner playfulness... Gubbins, by contrast, had a clipped speech, clipped moustache and clipped façade... He found himself engaged in running street battles with Michael Collins and his band of Sinn Fein revolutionaries, a bitter, nasty and unpredictable conflict... But those men in trilbys taught him a lesson he would never forget: irregular soldiers, armed with nothing but homespun weaponry, could wreak havoc on a regular army.
• Gubbins’s priority was to prepare an instruction manual in such warfare, setting out in terse prose how best to kill, incapacitate or maim the maximum number of people. ‘My difficulty,’ he later admitted, ‘was that, strangely enough, there was not a single book to be found in any library in any language which dealt with this subject.’27 Gubbins had to look elsewhere, drawing inspiration from Sinn Fein and T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), as well as from Al Capone and his Chicago gangsters.
• The Art of Guerrilla Warfare and The Partisan Leaders’ Handbook. He had stressed the importance of agents being able to dispose of the manuals quickly and quietly. Joan therefore took the decision to have them published on pocket-sized edible paper. Both manuals could be consumed in less than two minutes,
• Colin Gubbins was quick to see that Jefferis’s craggy exterior masked a unique skill, one that had stood him in good stead during the Waziristan campaign. His floating bridges and concrete piles were merely the outward expressions of a passion for applied mathematics. For Jefferis believed that every problem could be solved by algebra... after a bruising campaign, he developed an overwhelming desire to blow them up. ‘Millis Jefferis had taken a dislike to bridges,’... There were also handy tips on how to wreck train pistons, how to cripple points, how to blow up pylons (plant gelignite under three legs, not four, or it won’t fall over) and how best to sabotage a factory.
• the Caxton Street office had a secret stash of plastic explosive that was kept in a locked stationery cupboard. Only one man had the key, a roguish Cockney who ‘habitually and quite naturally talked in rhyming slang’.14 He had previously earned his living as a gun-runner and boxing promoter,
• Not entirely sure as to what he should pack for guerrilla warfare against the Nazis, he sought the counsel of his ageing stepfather, a veteran of the First World War. <> The old man had ready advice. Hunting wire-cutters and a liquid prismatic compass, those were the two essentials.
• Yet as she handed the men their passports, she was shocked to learn that Caxton Street had made its first fundamental blunder. ‘It was a sign of our immaturity in such matters that the numbers on the brand-new passports were consecutive.’23 It was as if a school group were heading to the battlefront.
• mute white forerunners of London’s ordeal by raid’.25 She felt suddenly depressed. Although she had spent the last four months helping to prepare for war, only now did the reality strike home. The barrage balloons reminded her of her frightening childhood during the First World War.
• When Biffy peered inside the bag, he found that it contained a strange-looking machine built of rotors, cogs and an illuminated keyboard. Resembling some sort of futuristic typewriter, it was so valuable that the head of MI6, Stewart Menzies, turned up in person at Victoria Station to collect it... For the machine – filched from the Nazis and transferred to Britain with the aid of Gubbins’s Polish contacts – was called Enigma.
• He had already begun this work in Caxton Street, where he had developed his miniature time vibration switch. Now, a new little beauty emerged from his design sheet. The pressure switch was a piece of consummate craftsmanship, combining the precision of a Swiss watch with the mischievous humour of a devious brain. As its name implied, it used the pressure of the train on the track to trigger the explosive. The humour was Jefferis’s own: he relished the idea of the train itself setting off the charge... The pressure switch worked by means of a spring-loaded striker, a steel rod hardened to brittleness and a sealed compression chamber: it took accuracy to new levels. ‘When a train came along, the rail had to be deflected only a few thousandths of an inch to cause it to fire the mine.’ <> Jefferis was using advanced mathematical formulae to conjure up a whole new generation of weaponry.
• His appointment as head of one of the key government ministries was memorably described as ‘another horse from Caligula’s well-stocked stable’.11 The inference was clear: Burgin was not up to the job.
• There was a faintly comic element to many of the workmen hired by Jefferis, one not lost on Macrae. While Hitler was using the industrial powerhouses of Germany – Siemens, Thyssen and I.B. Farben – Jefferis was forced to rely on men like Mr Thomassen of Clerkenwell.
• Macrae (who was to help build the mines) added a whopping £2 commission that was to go to himself. He justified this on the grounds that he had found Clarke in the first place. <> The first order yielded £500 for Macrae and a little less for Clarke. A second, much larger order earned them a further £2,000. Clarke was by now using aniseed balls at such a rate that it was no longer practical to buy them from the local sweet shops... But employment by MI(R)c meant he would no longer be able to claim his freelance commission on the limpet mines... Every genius needs a sidekick, and Macrae was the perfect prop to the ramshackle Jefferis. A jack of all trades, Macrae also happened to be master of one: cajoling unwilling partners into doing whatever was necessary to turn MI(R)c into a smooth-running machine that could properly exploit Jefferis’s brain... at last, he had fallen into a job for which he was extremely well qualified, one in which the only seeds to be planted were those of wholescale destruction.
• Churchill: Two decades earlier, when serving as Minister for Munitions, he had taken the unprecedented decision to use chemical weapons against Bolshevik forces in northern Russia. He had also argued in favour of using chemical gas against the truculent tribes of the North-West Frontier... he wanted to know Jefferis’s thoughts on the possibility of a spectacular operation to mine the Rhine.
• They had just two weeks to assist him in designing a technically complex mine, one that (according to Churchill’s brief) could be dropped from a plane, must be no bigger than a football and had to float just beneath the surface of the Rhine. Most importantly, the W-Bomb – as Churchill had christened it (the W stood for water) – needed to detonate itself automatically before it was washed downstream into Dutch territory,... He flirted with the idea of once again using aniseed balls for the W-Bomb, before stumbling upon a far better solution. ‘Because of our wearing work and the need to keep ourselves going with alcohol,’ wrote Macrae, ‘I kept in Room 173 a supply of Alka Seltzer tablets.’27
• Jefferis continually urged caution about the W-Bomb, warning Churchill that it was far from ready. But Churchill refused to listen. ‘The trouble was that Winston was a born showman,’ noted Macrae, ‘and that the W-Bomb was his greatest act.’
• Operation Royal Marine was not given the French green light until May 1940, by which time it was far too late. Hitler’s panzer divisions were already thrusting deep into France. Churchill felt a certain vindication when he was brought news that Jefferis’s W-Bomb had worked to perfection. Some 1,700 were dropped into the Rhine and, for a brief period, caused absolute mayhem, sinking ships and blowing up bridges.
• According to one of those agents (and later, double-agent), Kim Philby, they ‘resisted bitterly the whole idea of letting a lot of thugs loose on the continent’.3 Just as Leslie Burgin was intent on undermining Millis Jefferis and his work, so the Secret Intelligence Service was determined to put Gubbins’s team out of business.
• he was shrewd enough to realize that a guerrilla force is only as good as its leaders. There was no one in London (with the exception of himself) who was fit to lead the troops on the ground... He therefore wired Indian Army headquarters in Lahore and asked for twenty of their finest officers to be dispatched to England with immediate effect. He specifically requested officers with experience of guerrilla warfare on the troubled North-West Frontier.
• At an early age he had changed his patronymic from the Slavic, Jastrzembski, to the more Germanic-sounding Falkenhorst. It meant Falcon’s Eyrie, a fitting name for a military commander with a hawk’s eye for detail.
• Colin Gubbins and his Scissorforce guerrillas had set sail from Scotland after breakfast on 5 May, equipped with their snow-shoes, their pemmican and a growing sense of unease. They knew little about the enemy and even less about Norway. No one had thought to pack a Baedeker.
• Yet Gubbins ‘moved unceasingly by car, by bicycle, walking and even swimming in order to reach all detachments’.30 That tough Highland upbringing was paying dividends. Not many commanders would be prepared to swim a fjord in order to issue instructions to their troops. <> The dapper little officer with a freshly cut buttonhole had transmogrified into ‘a brute in a khaki shirt with the sleeves cut off, snoring prodigiously in a twenty-minute squirt of sleep, then waking up alert and talking coherently’... ‘Gaunt, exhausted, they had despair stamped all over them.’ Yet Gubbins himself gave every appearance of enjoying himself. Captain Fell could scarcely believe the pluck of ‘the amazing little general who never slept but grinned enchantingly’.37 He seemed to be living entirely off adrenalin.
• His findings were startling and formed the subject of a brilliant little thesis he wrote entitled The Development of Weapon Potential. <> Clarke contended that Captain Henry Shrapnel’s revolutionary spherical case-shot had swept the British to victory at the Battle of Vimeiro, and George Koehler’s newly invented Depressing Carriage had helped defeat the Great Siege of Gibraltar. The Sussex-made breech-loading guns of Elizabethan England had proved decisive in countless sea battles, while the Duke of Marlborough’s greatest triumphs had been possible only because of the precision flintlock muskets made by Messrs R. Brook of Birmingham. Clarke concluded that in a thousand years of conflict, ‘it is difficult, if not impossible, to find an instance in which British forces achieved victory except with a novel weapon in their hands’.
• If the invaders pushed further inland, then the critical battles would take place in the Kentish farmland between Canterbury and the coast. It was essential that the commander of this stretch of territory should be of the highest calibre. <> Gubbins never had any doubts as to who that person should be. Peter Fleming belonged to that rare breed of gentleman who seemed to have it all: movie-star looks, a glamorous wife (Celia Johnson, of Brief Encounter fame) and a patrician grandeur that had been finely honed at Eton... The older brother of Ian (of James Bond fame)
• The plans were meticulous – far more so than for the Norwegian invasion – and covered details of the occupation itself. The former German ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was being widely touted for the job of Reichskommissar: his appointment was to be followed by a ‘cleansing’ operation undertaken by one of Dr Franz Six’s Einsatzgruppen death squads. Some 3,000 notable people were to be arrested, including Noël Coward, Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf. Britain’s 300,000 Jews were to be interned, with an even darker fate awaiting them.
• Fleming had good reason for acquiring the longbows. He intended to teach his men to use them ‘to hurl incendiary charges into German petrol dumps’.30 Without fuel, Hitler’s tanks and jeeps would be trapped inside their beachhead.
• But when they slipped down through the trapdoor, ‘they were faced with a long dining table covered with a crisp damask cloth. The candles were in candelabra and the cutlery on the table gleamed.’32 Even when training for ungentlemanly warfare, Gubbins’s guerrillas remembered to dine as gentlemen.
• They embarked on what one of the staff described as ‘a whole series of Scarlet Pimpernel missions’, crossing the English Channel in great secrecy in order to secure limited but vital objectives. Colonel Chidson succeeded in smuggling himself into Amsterdam and ‘returning to London by the skin of his teeth with many thousands of pounds of industrial diamonds’. Louis Franck made it to Brussels and returned with a stockpile of Belgian gold. Tommy Davies took himself to Calais ‘and stripped Courtauld’s factory in the town of several hundred thousand pounds’ worth of platinum’.
• ‘Into this short time,’ wrote Gubbins, ‘we had to cram rifle and revolver [training], hand grenades, Molotov and sticky bombs, mock ambushes and raids, night work, penetration of defences including barbed wire, hide out construction.’
• The two ladies were permitted to remain in the house, even though it was to be overrun by guerrillas. They soon regretted their decision to stay, for their beloved dogs were so petrified by the constant explosions that they had to be put on a diet of aspirin and brandy.
• Castration was to be an important element in Gubbins’s game of psychological warfare against captured Nazis. His men were ‘to cut off their “knackers” to demoralise the rest’.37 If all went to plan, Kent’s trees were to be festooned with German testicles.
• As he turned to leave the Prime Minister’s study, Churchill issued him with one final, famous instruction: ‘And now set Europe ablaze.’
• ‘Before long,’ said one recruit, ‘we were employing one or more representatives of most of the merchant banking houses in the City.’ Dalton also hired most of the partners working for the legal firm Slaughter and May. As summer drifted into autumn and the tally of attempted guerrilla operations remained stubbornly at zero, one office wag joshed that ‘we seemed to be all “may” and no “slaughter”.
• Joan Bright felt that Dalton was living in fantasyland. ‘In these early days, most people in Occupied Europe were still stunned by defeat and, except for a few ardent patriots, asked for nothing except to be left in peace.’24 If there were to be resistance to the Nazis, it would have to be spearheaded by British-trained guerrillas.
• Robertson confessed that ‘she frightened the life out of me’, but he soon discovered that Baker Street contained scores of Annabels, ‘refined, chatty, intelligent gentlewomen’ of impeccable pedigree, who hailed from large mansions in the Home Counties. ‘They all had names like Claudia and Bettina and Georgina, they all called their bosses by their Christian names, and were crisply efficient and nineteen-twentyish, enervated by turns.’
• He would then proceed with his lecture, unconcerned by the ticking bomb, while his students nervously counted the minutes. Cecil Clarke: ‘During the last half of the last minute the sound of his voice was almost drowned by the shuffling and scraping of chairs, especially from the front rows. When only five seconds remained, and every head in the class was down, he would suddenly remember, pick up the infernal machine, look at it for a moment, thoughtfully, and toss it nonchalantly through the window to explode on the lawn with barely a second to spare.’... He particularly excelled himself on the occasion of a visit from Hugh Dalton and a select group of Whitehall officials. ‘Various booby traps had been laid for them, with bangs going off and grenades rolling out at their feet, so that they arrived at their bomb-proof observation redoubt walking stiff-leggedly like cats on miry ground.
• But for Gubbins, these factors were completely overshadowed by the fact that Pessac was supplying all the power for the massive German submarine base outside Bordeaux. If his men could knock out the transformer station, they would strike a crippling blow to German U-boat operations in the North Atlantic.
• Goodeve was at his best when given the crumbs of an idea. Quick as lightning, he envisaged an even more devastating weapon. ‘Do you think we could use this spigot mortar of yours to fire a whole ring of bombs?’ His idea was to create a multi-firing launch-pad that would send several dozen spigots into the sea, all entering the water simultaneously. If these could be propelled downwards and inwards, the spigot could be transformed into a truly lethal weapon against Hitler’s U-boats. <> The viability of such a weapon was contingent on the mathematical configuration of the mortars.
• Highland wilderness of his childhood. This was where he felt truly at home: a land where the lead-grey lochs carved gashes into the fractured coast, where the offshore isles of Eigg and Muck showed up as lilac smudges in the mist.
• The first of the men, Eric Sykes, was known to his friends as Bill, a reference to Dickens’s famously shady character... He was an expert in silent killing – chilling, ruthless and clinical – and a man whose every sentence was said to end in the words, ‘and then kick him in the testicles’. <> His previous employment had been in Shanghai, where he had worked as the representative of two American firearms companies, Colt and Remington.
• Fairbairn’s conversation was generally limited to two words, ‘yes’ and ‘no’, and he didn’t allow his discussions on human anatomy to stretch his vocabulary unduly. ‘He had never attempted to find out the names of the various bones or muscles, and throughout his short, jerky explanations he would merely refer to “this bone” or “that muscle” and point it out or touch it with his finger... ‘His system is a combination of ferocious blows, holds and throws, adapted from Japanese bayonet tactics, ju-jitsu, Chinese boxing, Sikh wrestling, French wrestling and Cornish collar-and-elbow wrestling, plus expert knowledge of hip-shooting, knife fighting and use of the Tommy gun and hand grenade.’... His principal interest in life, apart from fighting, was his prize goldfish. He had the finest collection in China – more than 100,000 in total – which he kept in specially constructed pools.
• ‘In this war,’ he would say, ‘you can’t afford the luxury of squeamishness. Either you kill or capture or you will be killed or captured. We’ve got to be tough to win and we’ve got to be ruthless.’ <> He would recount eyebrow-raising anecdotes from Shanghai before glaring at the men through his pebble glasses. ‘What I want you to do is get the dirtiest, bloodiest ideas in your head that you can think of for destroying a human being.’ He told them to forget all notions of fair play.
• He bragged that he could kill a man with a folded newspaper, and his finger-jab to the eye had blinded many a Shanghai gangster. <> Fairbairn particularly relished his dining room routine, showing them how to whisk up a tablecloth as you dived over a table and then ‘wrap it round your opponent’s head as he crashes down under you and, finally, how to push it into his mouth with the remains of the bottle meanwhile smashed over his skull’.
• ‘Each of us had to plunge a knife into a recently killed animal to get the feel of human flesh that was still quivering,’ said one new recruit. There was a reason for this practice. ‘It was to make us realize that when you put a knife into any living creature, the contractions of the sinews is such that it’s very difficult to get it out.’
• Anders Lassen, ‘the Viking’: One day, he was out on the moors with his fellow trainees when he spotted two huge stags in the distance. ‘I want that one!’ he roared, as he set off in hot pursuit, his Fairbairn-Sykes dagger at the ready. Fleet of foot and spurred on by hunger, he was soon bearing down on the unfortunate beast. His comrades watched on aghast. ‘He stabbed it with his knife,’ said one, slaughtering it in an instant. ‘It was a fine, big animal and the next few days we had lovely roast.’... Anders Lassen supplemented their meagre rations by means of an old nautical trick. He pierced a tin can, placed pieces of carbide-laced bait inside and then tossed it into the water. Swallowed by one of the many sharks that tailed the vessel, the can exploded when the carbide mixed with the acid contents of the fish’s stomach. The next few hours were spent pulling floating chunks of shark meat from the water.
• The plan was for March-Phillipps and his men to perform one of the greatest nautical conjuring tricks in history, causing the three enemy vessels in Santa Isabel to vanish into thin air.
• It was only now, just as they prepared to enter the harbour, that March-Phillipps realized he had made a disastrous mistake in the planning. The island generator was always switched off at 11.30 p.m., extinguishing the harbour lights, which was exactly when he was intending to strike. He had assumed Fernando Po kept the same time as Nigeria. It didn’t. The island was on Spanish time, one hour behind Lagos, which meant they had arrived an hour too early.
• The Duchessa had by now been roped to the helm of the Vulcan. As the tug’s propellers started churning the water, her skipper, Mr Coker, performed a deft nautical manoeuvre. He ‘gave the Duchessa two slews, one to starboard, one to port, like drawing a cork out of a bottle’.26 Appleyard watched transfixed as ‘the huge liner lurched and began to slide forward.’
• The Nuneaton had scarcely left the harbour, towing the Likomba and Burundi, when the stolen vessels began smashing into each other. The Nuneaton was forced to cut her engines while the Burundi was secured at the end of a longer rope. But this soon frayed, prompting a dazzling display of acrobatics from Anders Lassen. Using skills learned from Sykes and Fairbairn, he performed a tightrope walk along the line that joined the Nuneaton to the Burundi. ‘With a heaving line tied around his waist, he swarmed across the fraying tow rope.’32 Several times he was flung into the air and was lucky to regain his balance. But he eventually made it to the Burundi and attached a new rope to the ship.
• But now that she was out on the high seas, albeit unwillingly, she was fair game for any Allied vessel that happened to chance upon her. And this is where the second part of March-Phillipps’s mission came into play. It had been previously agreed that the HMS Violet would intercept the Duchessa d’Aosta while she was at sea. She would then be seized and impounded as an enemy vessel. If all went to plan, the Italians would have been worsted for the second time in just a few hours.
• But her greatest strength – her size – was also her most significant weakness for it left her vulnerable and exposed. Every captain knows that a battleship is only as good as the docks in which she is serviced, and the only Atlantic dock large enough to service the Tirpitz was the Normandie Dock at St Nazaire. Admiralty officials had long believed that Hitler would not dare to deploy his greatest battleship in the Atlantic if the Normandie Dock were to become unavailable, for she would have to return to Germany for repairs, and that meant exposing her to unacceptable risk as she made her way up the English Channel... most daring adventure to date: an amphibious assault on the biggest dry dock in the world.
• As Hughes-Hallett studied the water depths in the Loire estuary, he realized that there was a significant flaw to the defences of St Nazaire, one that had hitherto been completely overlooked. In springtime, when there was the conjunction of a full moon and a rare flood tide, water levels rose to such a height that a shallow-draught vessel could reach the southern caisson without having to use the dredged channel. This meant that a ship could approach the dock gates without having to run the gauntlet of the coastal defences.
• The idea was to ram the southern caisson at high speed with an old destroyer packed with delayed-action high explosive. It was to be the dirtiest bomb ever devised, one encased in so much steel and concrete that it would explode with devastating force.
• The only option was to rely on the Time Pencil, a fuse that had an alarmingly poor track record. ‘A very dodgy device indeed,’ was the opinion of Stuart Macrae. ‘One had to be very brave to use it.’ Its most striking feature was its simplicity. A spring-loaded striker was held under tension by a piano wire. The wire was surrounded by a fragile glass tube filled with acid. When this tube was broken, the acid began to eat away at the wire. When the wire broke, it released the striker that detonated the explosive. <> And herein lay the flaw: no one could predict how long it would take for the wire to break... The success or failure of the attack on St Nazaire would be dependent on a highly inaccurate fuse that was little bigger than a pencil.
• Chant’s wounds were bleeding profusely, yet he hauled himself down into the echoing chamber of the pump house, followed by his little team. Here, deep below ground, the only noise was the distant boom of explosions until one of the saboteurs, Arthur Dockerill, started singing: ‘There’ll be blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover.’27 It was a surreal moment, even for Dockerill, but it broke the tension.
• The final insult came when Beattie was interrogated by a German intelligence officer, who began gloating in English. ‘Your people obviously did not know what a hefty thing that lock-gate is,’ he said. ‘It was really useless trying to smash it with a flimsy destroyer.’ <> At that very moment, exactly as he spoke those words, St Nazaire was hit by an earthquake of such magnitude that the ground felt as if it were being ripped apart. ‘An explosion of unbelievable violence’,
• Jefferis had discovered that the purest lead wire from the Broken Hills Mines in Australia, when blended with 5 per cent of tellurium, crept with absolute uniformity under tension. It was the breakthrough he had been seeking for so long and meant that a highly accurate fuse could now become a reality. Constructing the prototype was a complex process that required the latest automatic lathes. The lead had to be stretched to an accuracy of one-tenth of a thousandth of an inch
• The quality of the weaponry produced by the Firs was in striking contrast to the other development stations up and down the country. The experimental base at Welwyn, known as Station IX, was producing all manner of prototype machines, yet few of them ever entered production. There was also the Thatched Barn in Hertfordshire, Station XV, that produced such curiosities as exploding rats and self-detonating camel dung, the latter designed for use in North Africa.
• Efficiency was Dodds-Parker’s byword. Everything he ran ‘was reminiscent of a bracing north Oxford preparatory school’,25 which was just as Gubbins wanted it to be. But to the select few who were allowed into the Operations Room, the overall impression was one of unstudied calm.
• she learned that an attack on Heydrich’s car, while en route between Panenské Břežany and Prague, had become the favoured option for the assassination. ‘Practical experiments proved that such an anti-personnel attack on a car must be carried out at a corner where it is forced to slow down,’ she wrote. <> Colonel Moravec managed to lay his hands on a large-scale map of the road from Panenské Břežany to Prague and this was studied ‘in minute detail’.
• What was needed was some sort of hybrid grenade, powerful enough to pierce armour-plating but also light enough to be thrown. Clarke now began sketching a uniquely destructive explosive device, modelling it on the cylindrical No. 73 Anti-Tank percussion grenade. With its screw-on cap, it looked like a thermos flask.
• It is possible that he had laced his grenade with botulinal toxin, a deadly poison that had been developed at the biological warfare wing of Porton Laboratories and given the codename X. The Porton scientist who developed substance X, Paul Fildes, was a genius in biological warfare. He later confided to two scientists that he ‘had a hand’ in the death of Heydrich.
• A second car was also used, a Canadian Buick, that had a colourful history. It was one of two Buicks owned by King Edward VIII and had taken him to Windsor Castle to make his abdication speech. Clarke had bought the car shortly before the war and loaned it to Brickendonbury, where it was used for military trials.
• But Heydrich was furious at the attempt on his life. Seeing that Gabčik’s gun was jammed, he ordered Klein to stop the car and then pulled out his automatic pistol as he prepared to shoot his would-be assassin. As he did so, Kubis stepped from the shadows and hurled Cecil Clarke’s bomb at the car. He had practised for this moment so many times during his training but now, in the heat of the moment, he missed his target.
• But as he was ducking the bullets – suddenly – the unexpected happened. Heydrich staggered to the side of the road and collapsed in agony. Unbeknown to either of his assassins, Cecil Clarke’s grenade had done precisely what it had been designed to do. As the shell fragmented, it had driven metal, glass and fragments of horsehair from the car’s upholstery deep into Heydrich’s spleen.
• Colonel Moravec and Colin Gubbins always knew that Czech civilians would pay a high price for the assassination. Several thousand were killed in the aftermath of Heydrich’s death and there was a renewed reign of terror throughout the country.
• The route through Greece used a single-line standard-gauge railway that meandered across the baked plains of Thessaly before weaving upwards into the wilderness of the Roumeli Mountains. Here, miles from anywhere, was a sparse backland that looked from afar like a vast sheet of hammered pewter, beaten into sharp clefts and ridges.
• herein lay a problem. Aris’s men were Communists while Zervas’s were Republicans. The two leaders and their men were bitter rivals. <> When Woodhouse learned that Aris’s base was just a few hours’ march away, he used all his persuasive powers to induce Zervas to meet his Communist foe, arranging a rendezvous in the village of Viniani,
• At this critical juncture, Myers showed decisive leadership. He had withheld a small reserve force, to be used in emergency. Now, he sent them into action and they more than proved their mettle. A ferocious shoot-out was followed by sudden and complete silence. It was as if the battle had been switched off. A few seconds later, a second Very light could be seen winking in the darkness. The northern end of the viaduct had also been captured.
• ‘It had a great effect on Rommel’s supplies,’ said Myers, ‘because it cut for six valuable weeks all supplies going that way.’32 In that time, the Afrika Korps was deprived of more than 2,000 trainloads of supplies. By the time the viaduct was finally repaired, the battle for North Africa was fast slipping from Rommel’s hands.
• Gubbins was in the process of planning his most audacious act of industrial sabotage to date... For the Norsk Hydro plant at Rjukan in Norway was the only one in Europe to produce heavy water, otherwise known as deuterium oxide. This was an essential ingredient in the production of plutonium and therefore in the building of an atomic bomb.
• He also knew that parachuting the men into Norway was merely the first of countless difficulties to be overcome. A far greater hurdle was the fact that Norsk Hydro was constructed in the fashion of a medieval fortress, perched atop a 700-foot shaft of vertical rock. Three of its sides were sheer, plunging deep into one of the most spectacular gorges in Norway: ‘So deep,’ wrote Margaret Jackson, who was involved in the planning, ‘that the sun never reached the depths of it.’... He also knew that there was little option for the saboteurs but to scale the gorge, break into the site, force an entry into the heavy water room and blow up the machinery. All this would have to be done in darkness.
• After completing their gruelling training at Brickendonbury Manor, the six men were sent back to their base station in Cambridgeshire. They now had to wait for the necessary conditions for them to be flown to Norway. Haukelid had the feeling ‘of being fenced in and protected at every point from the dangers and difficulties of this world, so that we might be used for one single purpose at home in Norway’.
• They would be parachuting into pitch darkness, falling through the knife-edge of an Arctic gale so cold it could freeze human skin in seconds. The men’s initial goal was scarcely less forbidding than the jump itself. They were heading to the Hardanger plateau, a high-altitude wilderness locked firmly into a thick crust of ice. Here, at the ends of the earth, there was nothing but relentless desolation punctured by the occasional glacier.
• Once this was done, they began the treacherous descent into the depths of the gorge, clutching at trees and spruce branches as they slithered down. The side of the gorge was in places almost sheer, but there were always trees to cling to and a deep cushion of snow... The ascent was far tougher than the descent. They hauled themselves up, clutching at the dangling branches and finding precarious footing on icy ledges of rock.
• He was just about to light them when the guard, still held at gunpoint, asked if he could fetch his glasses before they were blown up in the explosion. ‘They are impossible to get in Norway these days,’ he explained.28 The tension was broken for an instant.
• It was Arne Kjelstrup, who called out the agreed password: Piccadilly. Haukelid was anxious not to make any noise and declined to answer. Kjelstrup persisted, whispering Piccadilly for a second time. Haukelid and Poulsson both replied: ‘Shut up, for God’s sake!’ Kjelstrup was indignant. ‘What’s the good of having passwords if we don’t use them?’33 he said as he rushed over to join the men in their flight.
• ‘It was sunrise, it was a lovely morning, excellent, and we were sitting there knowing that the job was done, nobody had been hurt on either side.’ They hadn’t even fired their guns. ‘And when we were sitting there, we were eating chocolate and raisins and biscuits and nobody said anything at all,
• The Hydro was a train-ferry: the train itself was to be loaded on to the vessel and would continue its journey by rail when it was offloaded at Hamburg. Skinnarland weighed up the options and told Haukelid he believed ‘the safest solution to be sinking of the ferry’ while it was crossing the lake.44 <> ‘The enemy was on his toes,’ said Haukelid, but they were not as sharp as him. Although the Rjukan area was under constant surveillance, the Germans had neglected the most obvious target. ‘By some freak of folly, not a single German guard had been posted on the Hydro herself.’
• More than half a century earlier, an American chemist named Charles Munroe had discovered that it was possible to focus the blast of an explosion if the charge was shaped into a specific form. Traditional shells were pointed like bullets, in the belief that they would more easily puncture armour-plating. But Munroe had discovered that the explosion was infinitely more deadly if the tip of the shell was blunted into an inverted cone. The entire explosive force could be focused backwards into a tiny point. Then, once transformed into a ball of energy, it would shoot itself forward at high velocity with devastating consequences for anything in its path... until Jefferis began to examine it in detail. ‘At this period, practically nothing was known of the mechanism of the hollow charge work.’... And Jefferis had a further thought, one that would render the charge even more deadly. If he lined the inside of the cone with metal, the energy of the explosion would instantly melt this metal and transform it into a lethal plug. This could then be discharged with such force that armour-plating would be turned to plasma. Nothing – not even a German tank – could withstand such high-velocity explosive.
• it caused something of a stir as its full potential became apparent to a small clique of American scientists. For if the hollow charge could be used to create a concrete-busting explosive, then it could perhaps be adapted to generate the necessary force to trigger a plutonium bomb.
• In the early months of 1943 the entire complex came under the direction of Ferdinand Porsche, the brilliant inventor of the Volkswagen Beetle and an enthusiastic member of the SS.
• ‘My bombing offensive is not a gamble. Its dividend is certain. It is a gilt-edged investment.’... He awoke to news that was rather less edifying. The Pathfinder flares had landed short of the factory, in the residential area of Sochaux, with devastating consequences for the local population.
• Rodolphe Peugeot stopped him in mid-sentence. ‘I am to destroy my own factory? My dear man…’ <> Ree nodded. That is exactly what he was suggesting. ‘One way or another it will be destroyed,’ he said. ‘If we do it, there will be few casualties and furthermore we can put the explosive where it will do the greatest harm to production and the least to the fabric of the factory.’ Once again he warned that if the RAF returned on a second raid, ‘the whole place will be smashed to smithereens.’9 Rodolphe Peugeot mulled over what Ree had told him and realized he had little choice. He decided to allow saboteurs into his factory.
• André van der Straaten ‘took a kick of the ball’ and sent it flying across the courtyard.16 As he did so, a limpet mine fell out of his pocket and clattered to the ground. ‘One of the Germans said, helpfully: “Attention, vous avez laissé tomber quelque chose, monsieur” – you’ve dropped something.’ <> André van der Staten was horrified and ‘hastened to pick it up, murmuring something about electric fuses. This was accepted without question and the game continued.’ <> The football match lasted so long that the attack had to be postponed for the night. Ree rescheduled it for 5 November, Guy Fawkes Night in Britain and a fine date for making loud bangs.
• On 19 November an auxiliary compressor was delivered to the Peugeot factory to replace the one destroyed in the initial attack. That very evening, as it stood in the front yard, Ree’s men scaled the fence and attached a limpet mine, wrecking the machine before it had even been unwrapped.
• It was followed by deck planking and the remnants of a filing cabinet. Next to float up was a prayer mat decorated with Japanese characters, a lone chopstick and a large rubber container holding a seventy-five-pound bag of rice. <> There was increasing excitement on deck as more evidence of their ‘kill’ started floating to the surface.
• Bridges were blown, vital junctions destroyed and all the roads leading to Normandy scattered with tyre-busters. The railways were hit particularly hard, with the system cut in almost 1,000 places. Gubbins would later learn that this was more than the British and American air forces had achieved over the previous two months.
• One of his most formidable fighting forces was the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, commanded by General Heinz Bernard Lammerding. The Das Reich was stationed at the town of Montauban, just north of Toulouse, having been moved there six weeks earlier on the grounds that it would be conveniently placed to intervene on both the southern and northern coasts of France, the two possible areas where the Allies might land.
• For weeks, he had been waiting to use his pots of carborundum, the sticky axle grease laced with abrasive. Now, in the hours before the Allied landings, his time had finally come. Tipped the wink by Baker Street, his team – which included two young sisters, one sixteen, the other fourteen – launched their highly idiosyncratic war of sabotage against the Das Reich division. Brooks had located every tank transporter in the Montauban region. Now, under the mantle of darkness, his fellow saboteurs siphoned off the axle oil, replaced it with carborundum and then vanished into the night.
• And so his devious game continued for the rest of the day: trees felled, booby traps hidden in the branches and the occasional burst of Sten gunfire to hinder the Germans yet further. After just two days on the road, General Lammerding was in a state of despair. Even the Eastern Front hadn’t been this bad. His panzer division had set off from Montauban in an orderly column. Now, after repeated ambushes and breakdowns, it had covered less than fifty miles and was dispersed across three French départements. The true picture was even bleaker. After consulting with his regimental commanders, he learned that six out of every ten tanks had broken down due to driving on tarmac... Das Reich’s journey to Normandy should have taken no more than seventy-two hours. Instead, it took seventeen days for the main body to arrive, and it was even longer before the last of the vehicles reached the battlefield. By the time General Lammerding’s men and tanks were ready for action, it was too late. The Allied beachhead was secure.
• ‘This left the way clear for the Ministry of Works to tear down all the factory equipment, load it together with most of the machinery into trucks and take it to Wescott’ – a government research establishment – ‘where it was thrown on the rubbish dumps.’
• The exact total was impossible to compute, but it included at least 3½ million anti-personnel mines, 1½ million sticky bombs, 1 million puff-balls and 2 million anti-aircraft fragmentation bombs, not to mention the many millions of innovative booby traps, specialist explosives and complex fuses. This had all been done on an annual budget of £40,000 and by a staff of just 250 people. It was an astonishing achievement.
• Gubbins’s saboteurs, by contrast, had crippled ninety Nazi-run factories – factories essential to Hitler’s war machine – and put them completely out of action ‘with a total load of explosives that was less than that carried by one light bomber’.7 And that, of course, had been just one small part of their work.
• Cecil Clarke’s war came to an end with the closure of the Firs. His last invention was a monstrous steel bridge-laying contraption whose name, Great Eastern, was a doff-of-the-cap towards Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It was a beast of a machine, equipped with a massive girder ramp that enabled tanks to cross the canals and rivers of Holland, whose bridges had been destroyed by the Nazis.

Epstein’s head of Paul Robeson’: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/jacob-epsteins-paul-robeson-18981976