The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: Part 1 - Fight Dirty

Think Victorian era England. All pomp, polish and pride. Downton Abbey-esque servants; giant manor houses for the wealthy; titles like Lord and Baron and Viscount (although Viscount Chocula never took off). Now think of the way people of that time would have fought wars. I'm thinking refined British redcoats, far from the grit and grime of soldiery and more akin to the spit-and-polish style. What goes hand in hand is a certain style of warfare, where there's a right and a wrong way to kill a man, and the right way is exclusively in an honourable fashion that without a doubt would be considered British. One British politician once said the only way to kill a man like a gentleman is when both are armed with a sword.

Victorian Era England, the time of the over-sized buttocks.

That all changed in World War I. 

Warfare was dirtier, grittier and far more wide-reaching than ever before. The advent of chlorine and mustard gas made battlefields poison-ridden cesspools. Artillery and bombing raids killed people indiscriminately. The aftermath of battles would leave the land, so hard fought over, entirely worthless. The time for honourable pitched battles between two sides died with all these new, terrifying firsts. 

Enter World War II. All these things are not only still true, but heightened. The world had just seen the worst that had ever happened to it by leaps and bounds, and now not only was it happening again, but greater than the previous. And worse yet for Britain, with the shocking speed of the fall of France, they were losing, and losing badly. If they were to win this war, they would have to abolish all the old ways of fighting clean. The time for honourable, knightly duels had passed. They had to get down in the muck and the mire and get the job done. 

"Ah, I have been most exquisitely slain! Good show,
good show!"

The answer to that was to have a division dedicated to these newfangled dirty deeds. The creation of Section D was for the purposes of making weapons to drive back the Nazi force that moved beyond the traditional, as well as training men that would use them to their best. It was a clandestine, little respected, small branch of the military that would come under constant assault due to its very nature of being underhanded. The leaders of the organization took notes not from the great, traditional generals of old, but men like Lawrence of Arabia - and also Al Capone. When searching for men to fill their ranks, they weren't looking for stand-at-attention soldiers, but rather ruffians and miscreants (to use what I assume is old-school British terminology). Oil drillers, explorers, dropouts, rugby players - guys that had a high degree of self-reliance and a natural toughness. Being a criminal was more a line on the resume than a detriment. To name an example, thieves were seen as individuals that could find their way into buildings, sneak in the shadows, and not be hampered by morality. Plus, anything went wrong, these men weren't acknowledged by the government as ever being a part of their personnel anyway. The British would wash their hands of them.

For this, they had a strong leader in Colin Gubbins. A tough-as-nails Scotsman, Gubbins grew up not being allowed to sit in the presence of his aunts that raised him (straight up child abuse) and later survived a bullet to the neck in World War I (somehow). His job was to run Section D with the purposes of creating as much havoc outside of the actual fighting as possible. Operations were to be based on stuff like damaging supply lines, brief hit-and-run assaults, and taking out key targets behind enemy lines. He wrote the book on this stuff. Two books, actually. One, The Art of Guerilla Warfare, and two, The Partisan Leaders' Handbook, were both used as training guides for his new army of the underhanded. Both of those books could be eaten with the help of water in two minutes. Classic spy stuff, straight out of the movies.

Colin Gubbins. The tie serves as a tourniquet
for his neck wound.

His weapons expert was Millis Jefferis, a chain-smoking man described as kind of looking a little gorilla-like, but a math genius just the same (Winston from Overwatch, anyone?). In many ways Jefferis was the second half of Gubbins, as the former would build the explosives and the weapons and the latter would show how to sneak in and use them. Jefferis wrote a novel to be used for training as well, focussing on explosives. 

The next two men of the troop were more mild. Cecil Clarke was a towed trailer designer and Stuart Macrae was the editor of Armchair Science. But I'm sure Armchair Science was really hardcore too.

Together, these men would create a vast network of highly trained guerrilla soldiers in addition to the the incredible feats of engineering that would help them do their dirty work. The following years would be full of espionage worthy of James Bond, explosions worthy of Michael Bay, and assassinations worthy of Sylvester Stallone in the 1995 action thriller, Assassins. The work they did with minimal supplies, few soldiers, and constant disdain from higher ups is nothing short of incredible. Their story reads like a spy novel moving from caper to caper, each more important and devastating than the last.