In this series of blogs, I have up to now written about the area close to Whaddon (a couple of miles from Bletchley Park), the headquarters of MI6’s communications network during World War Two. I have talked about some of the astonishing sites in the hills there - where MI6 put up their listening and transmitting posts during the war. I have visited nearly all of these places in my walks in the area. Although most of the aerials are long gone, all of the sites have some evidence of their extraordinary past. Often it is slight; perhaps a concrete block in a field where a cable-stay to an antennae was moored, or an oddly-sturdy cow shed.
There is one place, however, which does not feature on my map of the aerial sites, for no evidence remains that MI6 provided it with communications. That place is Coleshill, near Swindon, a little to the west of Oxford. The reason why there is no trace of aerials at Coleshill is that, although Whaddon did indeed supply their communications, MI6 never had – or ever intended to have – a permanent site there. And that, paradoxically, is the very reason that Coleshill was, arguably, the most important of all of the secret service’s sites.
The radio links MI6 set up with Coleshill were not to communicate with our generals in the field, or Washington, or Russia, or Churchill, or the seemingly endless array of the secret service’s many other customers. They were to keep contact with behind-the-lines guerrillas in Britain itself; our last desperate defence of our own islands. Their radios were mobile sets which wouldn’t have stayed at Coleshill at all. They were in boxes or suitcases (such as the one I photographed for my blog 3a) and would have gone where the fighting was; be that in Kent, or Sussex, East Anglia, Lancashire, Scotland – wherever. When the British guerrillas – the Nazis would have called them terrorists – were over-run and died, their radio links would have gone. The other – MI6 – end of the conversation would also have been mobile - from cars converted at Whaddon, of the type I mentioned in my second blog.
This was planning for Armageddon; a last-ditch and probably doomed attempt to save the British nation from destruction. But how had it come to that?
Desperate times seek desperate measures. After Dunkirk, Hitler ordered the amassing of an invasion fleet to invade Britain; ‘the man was’, as Churchill put it - 'going to try'. Many defensive measures were taken in our country; machine gun and mortar posts on the cliffs and along rivers (some of these still remain), mine fields and endless barbed wire on the beaches and road blocks just about everywhere.
Units were hurriedly recruited to supplement the regular army (who had left most of their heavy weapons in France).The Home Guard was formed.
The stay-behind resistance force was also set up; ‘go-to-grounds’ who would attack the invading enemy troops, often from behind. In one of his most stirring speeches, Winston Churchill said: “We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the fields. We will never surrender.” These were the men (and it was an all-male force) who would ‘fight them in the fields’. The force that was to do so was raised under Churchill’s direct orders. Coleshill was their headquarters. The person who was initially in charge of them was Peter Fleming, the traveller, author and brother of James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming. Unconventional warfare – or dirty tricks if you prefer – owed a lot to the Fleming brothers.
Personnel of the Home Guard and local volunteers were formed into top secret patrols throughout the entire country and sent to Coleshill for training in the use of explosives, booby traps, time-fuses, mines, and unarmed combat. These resistance fighters were called Auxiliary Units. Some five thousand recruits trained at Coleshill.
Peter Fleming
They were to operate from specially prepared underground bases set up country-wide. To this day the original model still exists at Coleshill. It has a vertical entrance shaft with an anti-blast wall at the bottom, a kitchen area, an 'Elsan' toilet cubicle, and space for six bunks (the remnants of which still survive). The idea was to pop up from shelters like this, kill and destroy and go back to ground.
Not surprisingly, those who best knew their local landscape were highly suited for this work. Farmers and land-owners were often chosen as Patrol Leaders and asked to select recruits from their own workers to staff their patrols. They knew who were the most enterprising, industrious and brave; preferring, of course, single men and those without dependants.
Hides were built all over – and under - the country. One officer (Norman Field) who showed off his unit to Field-Marshall Montgomery tells how he took him to the brink of Charing Hill, where they sat on a fake sheep trough. The bottom of the trough slid sideways to give access to an underground Observation Post from which the outside world was viewed through rabbit holes in a steep bank. There was just sufficient space for two persons. Charing Hill is in a position to view the convergence of two very major routes to London. It is the hub of a wheel: an ideal place for enemy dumps and depots to be set up. Other members of Field’s team had already raided Montgomery’s Headquarters, removing secret papers from his safe and leaving explosives instead. Nobody was spotted getting in or out; but Peter Fleming got a dressing down from Monty for showing up deficiencies in his security set-up and blowing up his flower bed.
If the Germans had over-run southern England, gone-to-ground units would have appeared at night from such lairs to sabotage their supply lines.
They were armed with various types of fuses, igniters and detonators. The sabotage manual the trainees were issued with listed many of them; and how to use them. Plastic Explosive, invented at Woolwich, 'the finest general purpose explosive in the world' was in short supply but “as it was really Churchill's idea to set us up, we got plastic explosives before the regular army.” Many of the weapons that the stay-behinds would use were made by ‘Winston Churchill’s toyshop’ – at Whitchurch, north of Aylesbury. The Time Pencil which 'looks rather like a propelling pencil', was primed by inserting a fuse into the 'spring snout' of the pencil. 'Once it has been taken out the enemy has no way of telling the delay period.' A chapter which described how to calculate the precise amount of gelignite required to destroy a particular target ended, 'If in doubt, double the calculated charge!'
Whaddon’s part in all of this was to provide radios and radio operators to the groups. Their job would be to talk with their headquarters on the British-held side of the frontline, who would order, agree and co-ordinate their actions. Possibly, if they lived that long and the RAF still had any planes, they might even be resupplied. Thus, the stay-at-homes in Folkestone would, perhaps, report the arrival of a new division of Panzer tanks and report it to their HQ. The anticipated marshalling yard for tanks between Folkestone and Ashford was in the area allocated to 21 year old Sergeant Peter Boulden, a farmer. He and some of his eight man patrol (two of them trained as radio operators) would rise from their hidden bunker to kill as many Germans and blow up as many vehicles as they could.
Peter Boulden (there is a youtube video by him). Resistance fighters were told they should expect to survive for 10 days
As one recruit said: “Barbed wire, with training, was not difficult to crawl through. The barbed wire was simply propped up with foot-long forked sticks so that you could crawl underneath.”
As in France, the Ukraine, Russia, Poland and all the other Nazi conquered lands, the civilians would have borne the reprisals.
When fighting in the open – and it would inevitably come to that as the teams were flushed out – the Auxiliaries would use the Sticky Bomb - a device that when thrown would stick to armour and burn through it. This was another weapon from ‘Churchill’s Toyshop’ (to which I devote a chapter in The Intelligence Zone) Initially development of this weapon had been slowed down by red tape. When Churchill was made aware of this he got cross and wrote a note which read: ‘Sticky Bomb. Make one million. WSC.’
As Churchill later wrote: ‘We had the picture in mind that devoted soldiers or civilians would run up close to a tank and even thrust the bomb on it, even though the explosion cost them their lives …many would have done it.’
The Sticky Bomb – a lethal toffee apple. Remove cover. Stick to target. Leave
This, it must be stressed, was not funny ‘Dad’s Army’ stuff. It was to be the last ditch attempt by the last fighting country - Britain - to oppose the Nazis and their monstrous, murderous, racist, creed. The Auxiliaries would fight to keep freedom alive, giving their lives if that was what it took.
Luckily, in Britain, it never came to that. In Europe it did (millions of sticky bombs and other devices were shipped from Whitchurch to arm partisans in Russia and the Ukraine).
In the next (slightly expanded) extract from my book I will talk about how resistance saboteurs in continental Europe were supported from a network of communication sites in the hills above Bicester.
The Intelligence Zone is on sale through Amazon. To see reviews of it – and buy it should you so wish, please follow this link
©Alan Biggins September 2023
PS. Many local magazines and newspapers have asked me if they could run this series of articles for free in print. In principle yes! Spread the word! Contact me, Alan, at intzoneuk@gmail.com if you wish to do so.
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