CHURCHILL’S MINISTRY OF UNGENTLEMANLY WARFARE

Nonfiction

Hard candies, condoms and dirty tricks

CHURCHILL’S MINISTRY OF UNGENTLEMANLY WARFARE: 

The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat

By Giles Milton

356 pp. Picador

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

A couple of generations ago, British military officers looked upon war as a sporting exercise, in which rules and fair play were expected. One such gentleman opined that the only proper weapon for fighting was the sword, as it gave each man an equal chance.

The brutality and efficiency of the Nazi war machine in Europe led England’s more intelligent gentlemen, Prime Minister Winston Churchill included, to a different conclusion. The Nazis’ opponents would only have a chance of surviving if they resorted to ungentlemanly tactics. Thus the formation of a secret branch of the war office designated Section D: for Deception, Destruction and Dirty tricks. 

Its operatives were told that if caught they would neither be acknowledged nor defended by their government. They were trained in silent killing – the expert who taught them knew a dozen ways to break bones with the edge of the hand; he claimed he could kill a man with a folded newspaper. They were also equipped with vicious weapons – plus, if all else failed, cyanide pills that would ensure their own deaths in three seconds.

In a neighboring office to D Section was a little cadre of out-of-the-box thinkers who ran a laboratory for the development of the fiendishly ingenious weapons D’s agents used. MI(R)c, or Military Intelligence, invented gadgets that readers of spy fiction now take for granted. Teams from D Section blew up rail viaducts in Greece, stole three ships out of a Nazi-friendly harbor, destroyed the only berth on the Atlantic coast that could accommodate Germany’s biggest battleship, and crippled Germany’s atomic weapons research. 

Heading MI(R)c was a military man, Colin Gubbins, who in World War I and afterward in Ireland displayed incredible, and successful, recklessness. In Ireland he learned that “irregular soldiers, armed with nothing but homespun weaponry, could wreak havoc on a regular army.” 

He was joined by a mathematical genius named Millis Jefferis, who believed that every problem could be solved by algebra – not simple school algebra, but equations of staggering complexity. To amuse himself, he devised formulae to predict at what point a racing greyhound would overtake the rabbit – which could also predict at what point a rocket would intercept an aircraft. Possibly the most unlikely bomb-designer was Cecil Clarke, a big, slow-moving tinkerer whose passion was designing caravans (Brit for camper-trailers) in his back yard. He and recruiter Stuart Macrae jerry-rigged the first “limpet,” a small magnetic time bomb, from metal bowls bought at Woolworth’s, magnets, detonators, hard candies and condoms.

Despite the dogged support of Churchill, the dirty-war division constantly had to defend itself against conventional military people. Shortly before Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Gubbins and an irregular team infiltrated Poland in hopes of setting up a guerilla network. Though they made contact, they were soon routed by the Nazi blitzkrieg invasion into that country. Gubbins requested weapons for his Polish guerilla contacts and was told none were available. In fact, his request had been blocked by the Secret Intelligence Service, whose senior officers had come to view guerilla warfare as a blunt-edged tool that risked compromising their undercover agents.

A version of the limpet called the W-bomb was designed to float down a river and explode on contact with a vessel. Churchill urged the French to float them in the Rhine, where they could have crippled German shipping. The French government refused, fearing the Nazis might retaliate by bombing Paris.

Milton does a good job of condensing buckets of facts into fast-moving narratives, although there are so many characters that it’s easy to forget who’s who. Mere prose, despite this writer’s skill, cannot really convey the nerve-wracking dangers the men faced; any one of these capers would make a script for a high-powered action movie. Consider his account of the attack on  Norsk Hydro in occupied Norway, where German scientists produced heavy water, an ingredient for atomic fission. Not only located on a remote glacial highland, the plant topped a 700-foot shaft of vertical rock. A single well-guarded road was its only access point.

To train the handpicked commando team that would attempt to blow up Norsk Hydro, Gubbins’ group built an exact replica of the production room from plans smuggled to England. There the commandos practiced placing their explosives in pitch dark. So perfectly was the raid planned and practiced that the plant was demolished without the loss of a single man. 

Some 3,600 gallons barrels of finished deuterium survived the raid; the Germans decided to ship it to Germany where it would be safer. As a postscript to the raid, a lone saboteur planted on the ferry a “limpet” bomb that sent the vessel and its precious cargo to the deepest part of the fjord. 

I am not an aficionada of cloak-and-dagger literature, but this is an exception. It’s history. It’s mind-boggling. And it’s true.