As the bells fell silent, new airfields were being laid out all over the country, especially in East Anglia, some with grass strips good enough for fighters and light bombers, others with asphalt or concrete runways for heavier aircraft. Hangars and Nissen huts made from curved sheets of corrugated iron (for accommodation and storage) sprouted at their edges. To the irritation of people living close by, footpaths across these new bases and other military areas were closed for the duration.
Besides the genuine airfields, numerous decoys were created in the hope of luring Luftwaffe pilots away from vulnerable targets. Daylight airfields, known as K sites, were furnished with inflatable or wooden aircraft, usually with wings but only a skeleton fuselage. To add verisimilitude, redundant training aircraft, old bomb tractors and other service vehicles were parked in the open and moved around to new positions during the night. On dummy night airfields, known as Q sites, there was often a runway flare path made from small burning lamps, and lights that went on and off at various points to give the impression of vehicles moving. Experiments were made with various kinds of fires, including drums of burning creosote, designed to simulate activity in railway yards or factories.
The decoy fields began to attract attention immediately after the withdrawal from Dunkirk. One successful K site was at East Kirkby in Lincolnshire, where wooden Whitley bombers were trundled around from day to day by the local RAF contingent: their efforts evidently paid off, for German planes bombed the airfield several times. The Q sites in East Anglia and Lincolnshire were the most frequently targeted, and during June thirty-six Q raids were recorded in England as a whole.
All farming became more difficult and dangerous, especially in the south and east of the country as, out of sheer spite, stray German aircraft began to attack obviously civilian targets before they headed for home. One Luftwaffe pilot provoked a volley of sarcastic comments on the ground in Kent when he bombed a hayrick and then came in on another low pass, riddling the stack with his machine guns. As the farm workers had already taken shelter, the only casualties were a few sheep.
Some countrymen went to extraordinary lengths to safeguard their property. Colonel Charles Owen, who had been involved with the development of camouflage during the First World War, lived in a house called Tre Evan on a hill outside the Herefordshire village of Llangarron, near Ross-on-Wye. There he went up and down a ladder to paint the building’s white, stuccoed front with splodges of green and brown, both to make it a less conspicuous target, and to disguise a landmark that might be useful to the enemy pilots on their way to or from Coventry or Cardiff. Neighbours – mostly First World War veterans – considered the exercise mildly eccentric, and the Colonel’s family found it rather embarrassing; but he – head of the local ARP squad – was serious about it, and organized regular fire drills, during which his grandchildren stood to with stirrup pumps and pails of water.
Five
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well … First she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything: then she looked at the sides of the well and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and bookshelves: here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs.
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Captain Peter Fleming was an unconventional figure, to say the least. An Old Etonian aged thirty-two at the start of the war, he was well known to the public as the author of two runaway bestsellers published in the 1930s, twenty years before his younger brother Ian thought up James Bond. Brazilian Adventure – funniest of travel books – sent up a quest for the explorer Percy Fawcett lost in the Mato Grosso, and News from Tartary described how the author had walked 3500 miles from Peking to Kashmir in the company of Ella Maillart, lesbian captain of the Swiss women’s hockey team, without telling his fiancée, the actress Celia Johnson, that he was accompanied by a woman. Yet, in spite of his renown, Fleming was essentially a private person, and one main qualification for an unusual wartime commission was his first-hand knowledge of the English countryside.
At home in the woods and fields of his 2000-acre estate in Oxfordshire, he could distinguish the sett of a badger from the earth of a fox; he could read the tracks left by animals and interpret the calls made by birds and animals both in daylight and in the dark. As a means of confusing the enemy, he would sometimes advocate the Victorian poacher’s trick of walking backwards through mud or snow, to make it look as if the passer-by had been moving in the opposite direction.
As the threat of invasion intensified, General Andrew Thorne, Commander of XII Corps, was given the task of defending south-east England along a front that stretched from Greenwich, on the Thames, round the coast of Kent and Sussex to Hayling Island, in Hampshire. Remembering how, six years earlier, he had seen peasants in East Prussia digging last-ditch defence positions in the hills and stocking them with food, weapons and ammunition, in the hope that they would be able to disrupt the supply lines of an invading army, Thorne appointed Fleming to do much the same in England: to raise and train a body of men whose role would be to go to ground behind any German advance and harass the invaders from the rear, while the main line of defence was organized nearer London.
Armed with a letter of authority, and operating in the strictest secrecy, Fleming set up his headquarters in a brick and timber farmhouse called The Garth on a hill at Bilting, between Ashford and Faversham. The true identity of his organization was buried under the meaningless title ‘The XII Corps Observation Unit’, and individual patrols were assigned an equally uninformative name, the ‘Auxiliary Units’.
Together with Captain Mike Calvert, a Royal Engineer, Fleming first went about his area setting up booby traps by stuffing ammonal explosive into the churns in which dairy farmers set out their milk for collection – but even though these home-made bombs were never fitted with detonators, they made people nervous and were soon removed. He and Calvert also mined a whole belt of bridges, in the hope of slowing any German advance, and booby-trapped country houses which the enemy might use as headquarters by cramming the cellars full of explosives. As Calvert put it, their task was ‘to make Kent and Sussex as unsafe and unpleasant as possible for the Germans if ever they got that far’. They also blew out the centre sections of the piers at Brighton, Worthing and Eastbourne. Then, in absolute secrecy, they began recruiting gamekeepers, poachers, foresters, gardeners and farmers – men with intimate knowledge of the area in which they lived. All were hand-picked, after apparently casual approaches, and all were vetted for security by their local police – even though the police did not know what role the candidates were going to undertake.
Meanwhile, Colonel Colin Gubbins (a specialist in guerrilla warfare, and later head of Special Operations Executive) established a training base in Berkshire at Coleshill House, a relatively small but elegant seventeenth-century mansion bristling with tall chimneys, home of the Pleydell-Bouverie family, well isolated by its own park, shrubberies, fields and woods. Recruits were told to report to Highworth village post office, where the elderly postmistress, Mabel Stranks, would check their identity papers, disappear for a few minutes, then return and say ‘Someone’s coming to fetch you’. A vehicle would appear to ferry the newcomer to the house. Training weekends took place in the house and grounds, and three manuals were produced, each succeeding the earlier one as guerrilla activity became more refined. Some predictions were blissfully optimistic: ‘In districts where the war is intense and enemy troops thick on the ground, it will not be necessary to go far to find a target.’
Men chosen to be auxiliaries were set to work building subterranean lairs which they stocked with ammunition, explosives, sabotage