The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: Part 2 - Crazy Contraptions and Artful Ambushes

In the winter of 1938 Hitler was building his Kriegsmarine, the Nazi naval armada. Composed of almost 300 ships (most of them the dreaded U-boat) the British decided that even they, the preeminent naval power for years - centuries, really - couldn't compete with that level of production. So, they got a better plan: don't out-build the competition, just sink them. And who could do it better than our rag-tag bunch of inventors?

Ah, the mighty aniseed ball. The ol' Boom-Boom Bonbon,
the Ship-Stopper Sweets, the Delectable Detonator,
the Callous Confectionery...

The task fell to Cecil Clarke and Stuart Macrae, the caravan builders. What they had to create was a mine that would attach to ships underwater, as this would be a great way to sink the submarines that would prove to be so crippling in the war ahead. The biggest problem was finding a fuse that could work underwater and detonate reliably, which ended up being solved in a hilariously odd-ball manner. As it turns out, a child's aniseed ball (an old-timey candy that is undoubtedly terrible) proved to dissolve at just the right speed they needed. I'm picturing the discovery as something straight out of an episode of House; one of the inventors sees a kid chewing on a piece of candy, he pauses thoughtfully, typically in mid-conversation for added suspense, has his eureka moment, and boom, fantastic idea. It gets better, too. What did they use to protect it until the detonation was set to occur? Condoms, of course.

So two men were tasked with stopping the Nazi war fleet, and their solution was to go to every store in town and clear the aisles of all the candy and contraception they could find. And yes, it was just these two guys that were doing it. They were the ones going store to store, as this wasn't some massive government operation where you send some lackeys to pick up the supplies while the main guys get all the credit. It really was just the two for this particular operation (although they would expand later). They didn't even really have an official place to test this out, so they borrowed a public swimming pool after hours and worked on their detonators there. All of this hard work ended up with an incredible, cheap, and effective underwater explosive - the limpet mine. The whole thing, an explosive powerful enough to quite often down a ship, could be made for as little as six pounds - including labour!

A mighty warship of the Kriegsmarine. Caution:
keep away from children's candy.

Millis Jefferis loved these mines. He included it in what he called his demolitionist toolkit. "The irregular soldier or saboteur was fully equipped to blow up absolutely anything in any way he chose" using the explosives provided for him, Jefferis would say, and the limpet mine would be a tremendous addition. Unfortunately, getting the mines in the hands of those that would use them would prove to be difficult. The problem was this was still a secretive, underground group that was working for the government but in a disjointed, informal way. They had difficulties bypassing the Ministry of Supply which was severely hampering their efforts due to their belief that this style of warfare would be ineffective and immoral. The solution was to pay everyone under the table and have the two main men (and eventually plenty more once demand rose) build the explosives in their garages, carefully avoiding the proper channels while, paradoxically, still working for the same army they're avoiding. In spite of everything, they managed to make a heck of a lot of them. All told, the mines that were to stop the Nazi force were cheap as dirt, made with condoms and candy, tested in a public pool, and produced in a place where the caravan-maker inventors would have to move their car and park on the street. You can't make this stuff up.

Since the limpet mines were looking promising, the word eventually got out. Winston Churchill, at the time not yet Prime Minister but instead First Lord of the Admiralty, (perhaps the most British title since the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley) got word of the guys. His idea was to mine the Rhine river. Churchill, being the rough and tough type, was more than willing to abandon the traditional English holier-than-thou style and get down in the mud with dirty tricks as his forte. He took the idea to the French, and while they liked it, they were reluctant to pull the trigger and waited too long. By the time they had the opportunity to properly use them, it was already too late as the Germans had advanced far into the river. Nevertheless, 1,700 bombs would be placed in the Rhine and used to make a wonderful mess of things. While it certainly could have done a lot more, and it's hard to consider it anything but a missed opportunity, there were a few good things that came from it; Churchill was in their corner, their inventions were making a real impact, and the limpet charge was a wild success.

A limpet mine, and how a swimmer would
bring it to a ship. Sweater-vest
optional.

Meanwhile, Colin Gubbins was on the other end of production. While making explosives was great, there had to be someone to sneak in there and use them. Gubbins was put in charge of creating the first guerrilla units for the British in the war. The first was unsuccessful; sent into the recently attacked Norway, the men had little time to train, equipment was poor, and they couldn't figure out how to use the darn snowshoes they were given.  Eventually they started to get their act together and began taking out infrastructure, specifically bridges to slow the Nazi advance and limit their supply lines. But they would need to do more than that.

The first attempt at a more nontraditional style of warfare came through an ambush on a German patrol. A bicycle patrol to be exact, because yes, that's a thing. Nazis on bikes. Waiting for them to cross a bridge and have to dismount, they hid in the bushes until the most opportune time and killed all sixty of the patrol with the use of only fourteen men on their side. While these numbers were insignificant in the grand scheme of things, it did show something; hit and runs and small groups could wear down morale, take out key targets, and make a large impact with little investment. Churchill heard of this success, and the next time he would promise a much larger task.

That, and a blank cheque.

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.