They [the men] took a pride in their place. They schemed endlessly and worked hard to improve it. Ventilation shafts, alarm signals, dustbins, lights, clothes pegs, bookshelves hollowed out of the chalk, washing up arrangements – all these tactical problems they tackled with enthusiasm.
In his book A Very Quiet War Ralph Arnold, ADC to General Thorne, gave an idea of how cleverly the den was concealed. In the middle of a thick belt of woodland on the hillside above Charing, the General was led into a clearing and challenged to find the entrance to the local unit’s hideaway:
We poked about unsuccessfully for a few minutes, and then our guide casually kicked a tree stump. It fell back on a hinge to reveal a hole with a rope ladder dangling into a cavern that had been enlarged from a badger’s sett. In this cave, sitting on kegs of explosive, and surrounded by weapons, booby-traps, a wireless set and tins of emergency rations, were some Lovat Scouts and half-a-dozen hand-picked Home Guards … It was pure Boys’ Own Paper stuff, and the Corps Commander, whose brainchild the Auxiliary Units had been, simply loved it.
Another distinguished visitor was General Bernard Montgomery, who took over from Thorne as Commander of XII Corps, and early in 1941 was escorted out onto a Kent hillside by Captain Norman Field, Fleming’s successor as the Auxiliary Units’ Intelligence Officer. When the walkers reached a battered old wooden trough, Field suggested they should sit on it to enjoy the view. They did just that, but a few moments later Montgomery was startled to find that, without a sound or any apparent movement, his companion had vanished. Only when he saw Field’s head appear beside him, sticking up through a rectangular opening in the bottom of the trough, did he realize that he had been perching on top of a perfectly concealed hideout. When the young officer told him that this was one of XII Corps’ two-man observation posts, he was furious, because no one had let him know that such lookouts existed; but when he wormed his way down into a small chamber hacked out of the earth, he could not help admiring the way in which two authentic looking rabbit holes leading out through the steep bank beneath the trough had been adapted to give a view of the A20.
In the construction of such dens, the disposal of excavated soil was a problem, not least because it usually had to be done in the dark. The diggers would carry away earth and rocks in buckets, and either dump them elsewhere in the wood (having first scraped back the leaves and earth on the forest floor), or tip them into streams strong enough to wash new deposits away. If the site was on sandy ground, the spoil could be loaded into hessian bags, thousands of which were being piled up all over the country to protect buildings or gun sites from blast.
Many of the larger bases were built by the Royal Engineers or by civilian contractors, who told inquisitive locals that the holes being dug in the woods were to house emergency food stores. These professionally made dens were lined with sheets of corrugated iron, and had access and escape tunnels made of wide-diameter concrete pipes. Later in the war one, near the Northumberland village of Longhorsley, caused huge excitement among a gang of boys, vividly remembered by Bill Ricalton:
We climbed up the wooded hill from the burn side for perhaps fifty or sixty yards. Beside the base of a large tree our leader stopped and cleaned away decayed grass and leaves with his hands, which exposed a wooden door with a handle on it. When the door was opened it revealed a concrete shaft, about two to three feet square. A metal rung ladder was attached to the side, and disappeared into the darkness below …
We all descended the steps and into the tunnel below. The bottom of the iron ladder must have been eight feet or more below the trap door. Leading from the bottom was a concrete tunnel, large enough for a grown man to stand up. We were to visit this place many times over the next few years, sometimes just to sit and talk and wonder why it was there and what it was for.
Years later shivers went down his spine when he discovered that it had been one of the Auxiliary Units’ lairs, and that the locked rooms (which he and his friends never penetrated) had been stocked with food, water, the new plastic explosive (known as ‘PE’) and weapons, among them Piat anti-tank grenade launchers and the first Thompson sub-machine guns imported from the United States.
During the war Boy Scouts were taught to carry verbal messages from one place to another, using roundabout routes to dodge other Scouts sent to intercept them: back gardens, passageways, ditches, orchards, fields – all became familiar undercover approaches. Few, if any, of the boys realized that what seemed an amusing game might, in the event of invasion, suddenly become an important messenger service.
Because the role of the Auxiliary Units would be mainly nocturnal, most of their training was done at night, or wearing dark goggles during the day. ‘Make a patrol march past and listen for avoidable creaks,’ Fleming noted in his diary. ‘Even at his stealthiest the British soldier emits a sound as of discreet munching.’ In his own headquarters officers sat on packing cases of explosives and ate off a table formed from boxes of gelignite; but because of his social standing, the diners might sometimes include a brace of generals or even a Cabinet Minister.
Fleming himself was almost comically cack-handed, but he took delight in devising esoteric methods of attacking the enemy, such as training his men to shoot with bows and arrows. Archery, he thought, might come in useful, either for silently picking off individual German sentries, or for causing confusion in their camps if arrows carrying small incendiary devices could be shot over perimeter defences, to cause inexplicable fires or explosions within. Posterity credited him with the ability to bring down a running deer at 100 yards, but in reality he could not be sure of hitting a barn door at twenty-five paces.
If the invasion had taken place, the auxiliaries would have immediately left their homes and gone to ground, emerging at night. No one will ever know how much the troglodytes could have achieved if the Germans had come. Fleming himself doubted if his force could have been ‘more than a minor and probably short-lived nuisance to the invaders’: he feared that his men would have been hunted down as soon as autumn stripped leaves from trees and hedges, and that reprisals against the civilian population would soon have put the teams out of business. Besides, he noticed that among his own recruits ‘it was not long … before claustrophobia and a general malaise set in, because they were civilised men who had suddenly executed a double somersault back into a cave existence’. His colleague Mike Calvert was more optimistic:
If it had been called to action, the Resistance Army of Kent and Sussex would have had at its core some of the toughest and most determined men I have ever met. Their farms and their shops and their homes would have been highly dangerous places for any enemy soldier to enter.
No doubt the defenders would have killed quite a few Germans, had the invasion taken place; but, judging by the brutality shown by the Nazis to French resistance fighters, of the two estimates Fleming’s seems the more likely. (As an illustration of this, in July 1944 the Germans massacred hundreds of Maquis in an all-out attack on their stronghold in the Vercors massif, in the south-east of France.)
Fleming’s counterpart in Essex, Captain Andrew Croft, a former head boy of Stowe, felt the same as Calvert, and believed that his units could have held out indefinitely by stealing food, weapons and ammunition from the invading forces. In any case, under Colonel Gubbins’s direction resistance cells came into being all over the country, not only in Kent, but in the South West, in East Anglia and up the coasts of Yorkshire, Northumberland and Scotland, as far as Cape Wrath in the far North West. Scotland certainly needed them, for regular troops were thin on the ground, and there was always a chance that the Germans might invade up there.
The man chosen to create Auxiliary Units north of the border was Captain Eustace Maxwell, nephew of the Duke of Northumberland and brother of the writer Gavin. His aristocratic connections made it easy for him to recruit, as did the fact that he was an Argyll and Sutherland Highlander; and the terrain in which he went to work – miles upon miles of scarcely populated moors, mountains and coastline – was ideal for guerrilla warfare. So were