Home Guard Auxiliary Units
A state secret until 1968, Graham Caldwell appraises the value of the staybehind guerrilla Auxunits, had Germany occupied Great Britain
A state secret until 1968, Graham Caldwell appraises the value of the stay-behind guerrilla Auxunits, had Germany occupied Great Britain. The life expectancy for the men serving was just 14 days!
Six weeks after the evacuation of British troops off the Dunkirk beaches, Adolf Hitler, on 16 July 1940, issued Directive No. 16 headed: ‘On Preparations for a Landing Operation against England’, which read in part: ‘Since England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, shows no sign of being ready to come to an understanding, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England. The aim of this operation will be to eliminate the English homeland as a base for the prosecution of the war against Germany and to occupy it completely. Commander-in-Chief Army will detail an Army Group to carry out the invasion, which will bear the cover name Sealion’. The formation of the GHQ Auxiliary
Units on 1 July 1940 pre-dates a detailed briefing about their existence in a secret War Office communication to Winston Churchill, which began: ‘SECRET: Home Guard Auxiliary Units. (a) They are intended to provide, within the framework of the Home Guard organisation, small bodies of men specially selected and trained, whose role it will be to act offensively on the flanks and in the rear of enemy troops in this country. (b) They will also provide a system of intelligence, whereby the regular forces can be kept informed of what is happening behind enemy lines. Because members of these units should be intimately familiar with the countryside, they are largely recruited from among farmers, game keepers, hunt servants and others who are well acquainted with their own locality. The men will be equipped with wireless, field telephones, rifles, grenades, plastic H.E., delay fuses, incendiary bombs and tommy guns when these become available’. Later the Welrod, a suppressed bolt-action silenced pistol, was issued on a trial basis for assassination purposes, but ultimately the Home Guard was only used as a cover and as a recruitment pool.
Churchill, on 25 September, shortly after receiving the briefing, wrote to Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for War: ‘I have been following with much interest the growth and development of the new guerrilla formations, known as Auxiliary Units. From what I hear these units are being organised with thoroughness and imagination and should, in the event of invasion, prove a useful addition to the regular forces.’ This evidence tells us that it was not the Prime Minister’s idea, as is often depicted in books and articles titled, Churchill’s Secret Army or the like, but certainly Churchill asked to be kept regularly appraised of their development, at least until the threat of invasion had passed by early 1942. To uncover whose idea it actually was, we have to go back to December 1938.
Security Service Department MI(R)
The career Royal Engineer and WWI veteran, Lieutenant Colonel John (Jo) Holland, was on the brink of being retired, but when war seemed inevitable he was singled out by the War Office in December 1938, promoted a Temporary Brigadier and told to create a small unit within MI5 to research unconventional tactics and organisation due to his experiences combatting irregular warfare in India and Ireland. By April 1939 his staff had expanded to 25 officers and the section was named Military Intelligence (Research) or MI(R) for short. One significant early appointment was Colonel Colin Gubbins, Royal Artillery, just back from the unsuccessful Norwegian Campaign, but with his reputation enhanced and a DSO award. Gubbins had commanded the Independent Companies, the forerunners of the Commandos and had previous experience of guerilla tactics in Ireland during the 1920s. He had also authored three Army booklets, Partisan Leaders Handbook, The Art of
Guerrilla Warfare and How to Use High Explosives and was to command the Auxiliary Units from inception until his transfer as Operations Director, Special Operations Executive (SOE) in November 1940. Holland and Gubbins both ended the war as Major-Generals. The most likely origin of the staybehind organisation’s name is a simple adoption of the earlier use by the
Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) of the name ‘Auxiliary Units’ stamped on the boxes of weaponry and explosives that had been dumped around the British Isles in anticipation of invasion, an occurrence completely unrelated to MI5’s involvement. Volunteers, many transferring from the Home Guard, wore the basic Army denim coverall uniform (replaced in 1941 by battledress) for cover as genuine Home Guard (HG) personnel, including being issued with fake HG passes. In early 1943, long after the invasion threat had passed, as additional cover members were organised into one of three GHQ (Home Guard) Special Reserve Battalions numbered 201 (Scotland and the North), 202 (The Midlands) and 203 (Southern Counties) but the commemorative shieldshaped enamel Stand-Down lapel badges, each numbered to its owners’ regional battalion, were not issued until late 1945, well after the war. Numbers enrolled are estimated to be somewhere around 3,250 because, whilst the Ministry of Defence held a complete nominal roll dating from 1942, any national roll for 1940-41 was missing, other than random surviving county lists.
Life expectancy was 14 days!
Patrols were formed of six or seven-man teams headed by a Sergeant, which benefited by being the first to be issued, in 1940, with the American M1921 Thompson Machine Gun, well before the regular Army. Their hideouts, or Operational-Bases (OBs) were situated underground in locations where enemy troops would be unlikely to investigate too closely, often in dense woodland. Originally very crudely constructed with poor ventilation, later they were professionally built by the Royal Engineers, including bolthole escape exits. The purpose was to emerge at night to carry out acts of sabotage against enemy targets such as supply dumps, railways, airfields and vehicle parks etc, equipped with a variety of explosives, timing devices and detonators. Stores and rations were sufficient for 14 days only, the anticipated useful life of the fighting patrols. Training was mostly undertaken at Coleshill House, a requisitioned country estate situated in Oxfordshire adjacent to the boundary with Wiltshire. The mixed enlisted
and civilian Auxiliary patrols were supplemented from November 1940 by 14 regional Scout Sections, each made up of a subaltern, 11 other ranks and transport drawn from infantry of the regular Army. These had their own OBs and were also trained at Coleshill. The 6-7 manned OB patrols and the 14-man Scout Sections, jointly reported to their local AUX I.O. (Auxiliary Intelligence Officer) ranked as a Captain, but this title was a cover for what was in reality a Regional Operational Coordinator.
Entirely separate from the fighting patrols were the Special Duties
Section personnel: men and women recruited secretly to provide an intelligence gathering service, spying and observing enemy formations and troop movements. Later, yet another organisation named the Signals
Network was established, made up of underground radio stations which, following a successful invasion, would have been manned by men and women of the Royal Signals, who would transmit the intelligence gathered by the Special Duties operatives to the headquarters of any remaining British opposing force. These bases were also secretly built, but on a larger scale with the addition of electricity generators for their radio equipment. However, it has to be recorded that by early 1942, when Germany was fully committed to its invasion of Russia, the more elaborate organisation’s described above, including the Auxunits, were redundant due to the threat of invasion having long passed.
When Gubbins went off to command SOE in November 1940 he was replaced by Colonel Cyril ‘Bill’ Major, until February 1942, at which time Colonel Lord Glanusk, aged 51, succeeded to the command. Being an ex-Guards officer he introduced parade ground drill into the guerrilla courses! Nothing more emphasises the redundancy of the whole scheme by this date; the most common excuse for their retention was said to be the continued threat and paranoia of the population from large-scale German paratroop raids.
Malcolm Atkin, in his online thesis Myth and Reality: The Second World War Auxiliary Units, wrote: ‘There was a marked change in the composition of the officer class of the Auxiliary Units from 1941 onwards. Gubbins successors were a different caliber; command of the Auxiliary Units, in their comfortable HQ at Highworth House, became increasingly a reward to officers nearing retirement and seeking a final promotion to increase their pension’. The final command of the Auxunits from March 1943 fell to Colonel Frank Douglas, previously Glanusk’s senior staff officer, who had the unenviable task of issuing the organisation’s formal Stand Down order on 30 November 1944. Douglas issued a letter to members which in part read: ‘In view of the fact that your lives depended upon secrecy, no public recognition will be possible’, consequently, unlike their Home Guard colleagues, Auxunit members were not considered for the Defence Medal. It took a newspaper campaign in 1996 to gear the Army Medal Office into action and offer the award, but only upon application, by which time the majority of eligible members had died. Even then, the three-year service rule within the UK was rigorously applied to the disadvantage of some applicants.
Would Auxunits have worked?
Hitler’s Commando Directive (Kommandobefehl) that referred to sabotage and armed guerrilla action
in occupied territories included the passage: ‘If the population initiates active operations, the inhabitants involved will be regarded as armed insurgents. When taking hostages, those persons should be selected in whom the active enemy elements have an interest’. In other words, round up the inhabitants of the nearest village or town. There is ample evidence during the war in Europe that the German authorities were ruthless when taking reprisals for insurgency, including the raising of whole villages, the adult males shot and the women and children taken away to concentration camps.
Whilst this is no excuse not to offer the invader resistance, the reprisal outcome throughout Britain would have been appalling. No doubt Auxunits would have provided good results in delaying the invaders’ advance in the early stages, thus assisting the regular defence forces, but after occupation the majority of the OBs and their occupants would have been detected. In fact
Auxunit patrols were never intended to offer long-term resistance.
Quoted in John Warwicker’s book, With Britain in Moral Danger: Britain’s Most Secret Army of WWII, Colin Gubbins told American author David Lamp: ‘They would have justified their existence: to what degree would have been entirely dependent on the circumstances; but my judgment is based heavily on the fact that they were costing the country nothing either in manpower or in weapons. These patrols, entirely on their own, would have given some account of themselves, but their usefulness would have been short-lived. They were designed, trained and prepared for a particular and imminent crisis: that was their specialist role.’
The Auxunits Administration Staff Officer, Colonel Peter Wilkinson, wrote in 1997: ‘Any suggestion that Auxiliary
Units could have provided a framework for long term underground resistance is, in my opinion, absurd’. Auxunit members anticipated being shot if they were captured and were expected to shoot themselves first rather than be taken alive and almost certainly tortured to reveal the names of their colleagues. There is absolutely no doubt about the courage and bravery of the men and women who volunteered.