The Auxiliary Units, Home Guard Shock Squads[1] or GHQ Auxiliary Units were specially trained, highly secret quasi military units created by the British government during the Second World War with the aim of using irregular warfare in response to a possible invasion of the United Kingdom by Nazi Germany. With the advantage of having witnessed the rapid fall of several Continental European nations, the United Kingdom was the only country during the war that was able to create a guerrilla force in anticipation of an invasion.[2]
Auxiliary Units relied on pre-prepared bunkers known as "operational bases", into which they were to disappear in the event of invasion. They would not maintain contact with local Home Guard commanders, who were to be wholly unaware of their existence. Auxiliaries would not participate in the conventional phase of their town's defence, but would be activated once the local Home Guard defence had been ended to inflict maximum mayhem and disruption over a further brief but violent period. They were not envisaged as a continuing resistance force against long-term occupation. The secrecy surrounding the insurgent squads meant that members "had no military status, no uniforms and there are very few official records of their activities".[3][4]
Service in the Auxiliary Units was expected to be highly dangerous, with a projected life expectancy of just twelve days for its members, with orders to either shoot one another or use explosives to kill themselves if capture by an enemy force seemed likely.[citation needed]
Urged on by the War Office, Prime MinisterWinston Churchill initiated the Auxiliary Units[5] in the early summer of 1940. This was to counter the civilian Home Defence Scheme already established by SIS (MI6), but outside War Office control. The Auxiliary Units answered to GHQ Home Forces but were legally an integral part of the Home Guard.
In modern times, the Auxiliary Units have sometimes misleadingly been referred to as the "British Resistance Organisation".[5] That title was never used by the organization officially but reflects a subsequent misunderstanding of what their role might have been. Colloquially, members of the Auxiliary Units were referred to as "scallywags" and their activities as "scallywagging".[6][7]
Beginnings
Section D, a sabotage and resistance unit which was part of MI6, began recruiting personnel and accumulating arms and equipment in mid-June, 1940. This roused suspicion among the military authorities, and General Ironside, the C-in-C of GHQ Home Forces, insisted that all guerrilla and sabotage organisations be subject to military control. Colonel Colin Gubbins was the obvious choice to command the new organisation.[8] Gubbins was a regular British Army soldier who had acquired considerable experience and expertise in guerrilla warfare during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1919 and in the Irish War of Independence of 1919–1921. From early 1939, he had served with MI R, another guerrilla organisation controlled by the War Office. Most recently, he had returned from the Norwegian campaign, where he headed the Independent Companies, the predecessors of the British Commandos, before succeeding to the acting command of a Guards brigade. He later wrote:
I had, in fact, been given a blank cheque, but was there any money in the bank to meet it? Everything would have to be improvised. Time was of the essence ... at the shortest we had six weeks before a full-scale invasion could be launched; if we were lucky, we might have until October, after which climatic conditions would give us a respite ...[8]
Gubbins used several officers who had served with the Independent Companies in Norway and others whom he had known there. Units were localised on a county structure, as they would probably be fragmented and isolated from one another. They were distributed around the coast rather than being countrywide, with priority being given to the counties most at risk from enemy invasion, the two most vulnerable being Kent and Sussex in South East England. The two best known officers from the period are CaptainPeter Fleming of the Grenadier Guards and Captain Mike Calvert of the Royal Engineers.
Operational Patrols
Operational Base reconstruction at Parham Airfield Museum, SuffolkAuxiliary Units, Operational Base, emergency exit
Operational Patrols consisted of between four and eight men, often farmers or landowners. They were usually recruited from the most able members of the Home Guard, possessed excellent local knowledge and were able to live off the land. Gamekeepers and even poachers were particularly valued.[9] They were always intended to fight in Home Guard uniform and from 1942 the men were badged to Home Guard battalions 201 (Scotland), 202 (northern England), or 203 (southern England).
Each Patrol was a self-contained cell, expected to be self-sufficient and operationally autonomous in the case of invasion, generally operating within a 15-mile radius. They were provided with elaborately-concealed underground Operational Bases (AUOB / OB),[5][10] usually built by the Royal Engineers in a local woodland, with a camouflaged entrance and emergency escape tunnel.[11] It is thought that 400 to 500 such OBs were constructed in England, Wales and Scotland.[11]
Some Patrols had an additional concealed Observation Post and/or underground ammunition store. Patrols were provided with a selection of the latest weapons, including a silenced pistol or Sten gun and Fairbairn–Sykes "commando" knives, quantities of plastic explosive, incendiary devices, and food to last for two weeks. Members anticipated being shot if they were captured, and were expected to shoot themselves first rather than be taken alive.[citation needed]
The mission of the units was to attack invading forces from behind their own lines while conventional forces fell back to prepared defences. Aircraft, fuel dumps, railway lines, and depots were high on the list of targets, as would be the assassination of senior German officers and any local collaborators.[citation needed] Patrols secretly reconnoitred local country houses, which might be used by German officers, and prepared lists of suspected fifth columnists as early targets for killing.
Although the Auxiliary Units would fight in Home Guard uniform, they would otherwise clearly be irregular combatants under the Geneva Conventions. They and their weapons would be concealed, they would not be under the control of the local Home Guard commander, and they would not be constrained by the 'rules of war' in combat. General Home Guard units were instructed to fight on and not to surrender, but it was expected that nevertheless, once their ammunition was exhausted, they would have to give themselves up to capture. That was seen as creating an opportunity for a hidden Auxiliary Unit in the locality to kill as many Germans as possible just when they might be considering themselves as victors.
Special Duty Sections and Signals
Separate from the Auxiliary Units' Operational Patrols was the Special Duty Branch,[12] which was originally recruited by SIS and carefully vetted and selected from the local civilian population. It acted as "eyes and ears" and would report back to military intelligence any information that it heard from 'careless talk' or from watching troop movements and supply routes. It was supported by a signals network of hidden, short-range, wireless sets around the coast. The structure allowed no means to pass on such information to the Operational Patrols.
It is unlikely that the wireless network would survive long after invasion and that it would not have been possible to link the isolated Operational Patrols into a national network that could act in concert on behalf of a British government in exile and its representatives still in the United Kingdom. Instead, SIS (MI6) created a separate resistance organisation (Section VII) with powerful wireless sets that was intended to act on a longer-term basis.
The Special Duties Sections were recruited largely from the civilian population, with around 4,000 members. They had been trained to identify vehicles, high-ranking officers and military units and were to gather intelligence and leave reports in dead letter drops. The reports would be collected by runners and taken to one of over 200 secret radio transmitters operated by trained civilian signals staff. The civilian personnel operated as 'Intelligence Gatherers' and operated the OUT Station radios. ATS subalterns or Royal Signals personnel operated the Special Duties IN-Stations and Zero Stations.
Later history
In November 1940, Gubbins moved to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which had incorporated Section D and MI R, as its Director of Operations.[13]
The Auxiliary Units were kept in being long after any immediate German threat had passed and were stood down only in November 1944.[9] Several Auxiliary Unit members later joined the Special Air Service. Many men saw action in the campaign in France in late 1944, notably in Operation Houndsworth and Operation Bulbasket.
From 1942, the Operational Patrols of the Auxiliary Units tried to reinvent themselves as an anti-raiding force. That was primarily a device to avoid them from being disbanded, as the War Office had made a promise that the volunteers would not be returned to normal Home Guard duties. They therefore had to be kept in existence until the general stand-down of the Home Guard. Nonetheless, some units were deployed to the Isle of Wight prior to the D day landings in 1944 to help protect the Pluto fuel pipeline from being attacked by German commandos. It was then suggested that the Auxiliary Units should be fully administered by the Home Guard, but that was not enacted before the final stand-down in November 1944.[14]
Cultural references
An Auxiliary Unit arms cache features in the 1985 BBC TV series, Blott on the Landscape.
British partisans feature in two UK films that imagine what would have happened if Germany had successfully invaded Britain: the 1966 film It Happened Here (which simply refers to 'partisans') and the 2011 film Resistance based on Owen Sheers' first novel, Resistance. The partisans in the latter are loosely based upon Auxiliary Units, albeit with considerable artistic licence.
The Auxiliary Units feature in the BBC TV series Wartime Farm although there is some confusion between the roles of the Operational Patrols and the Special Duties Branch.
The Auxiliary Units and Special Duties Branch feature heavily in Gordon Stevens' 1991 novel And All the King's Men ( ISBN978-0330315340). The novel examines an alternate history following a successful German invasion of England.
Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a British organisation formed in 1940 to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in German-occupied Europe and to aid local resistance movements during World War II.
Aaron Bank was a United States Army colonel who founded the US Army Special Forces, commonly known as the "Green Berets". He is also known for his exploits as an OSS officer during World War II, when he parachuted into France to coordinate the French Resistance and organizing an operation intended to capture Adolf Hitler. In retirement, Bank warned about terrorism and modern technology. He is largely responsible for the high level of security at U.S. nuclear power plants since the early 1970s.
The Home Guard was an unpaid armed citizen militia supporting the 'Home Forces' of the British Army during the Second World War. Operational from 1940 to 1944, the Home Guard comprised more than 1.5 million local volunteers otherwise ineligible for military service, such as those who were too young or too old to join the regular armed services and those in reserved occupations. Excluding those already in the armed services, the civilian police or other civil defence volunteer organisations, approximately one in five men were Home Guard volunteers. Their primary role was to act as a secondary defence force in their home locality in case of invasion by the forces of Nazi Germany.
Major-General Sir Colin McVean Gubbins, was the prime mover of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the Second World War.
Operation Gladio was the codename for clandestine "stay-behind" operations of armed resistance that were organized by the Western Union (WU), and subsequently by NATO and by the CIA, in collaboration with several European intelligence agencies during the Cold War. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organizations, Operation Gladio is used as an informal name for all of them. Stay-behind operations were prepared in many NATO member countries, and in some neutral countries.
Irregular military is any non-standard military component that is distinct from a country's national armed forces. Being defined by exclusion, there is significant variance in what comes under the term. It can refer to the type of military organization, or to the type of tactics used. An irregular military organization is one which is not part of the regular army organization. Without standard military unit organization, various more general names are often used; such organizations may be called a troop, group, unit, column, band, or force. Irregulars are soldiers or warriors that are members of these organizations, or are members of special military units that employ irregular military tactics. This also applies to irregular infantry and irregular cavalry units.
Auxiliaries are support personnel that assist the military or police but are organised differently from regular forces. Auxiliary may be military volunteers undertaking support functions or performing certain duties such as garrison troops, usually on a part-time basis. Unlike a military reserve force, an auxiliary force does not necessarily have the same degree of training or ranking structure as regular soldiers, and it may or may not be integrated into a fighting force. Some auxiliaries, however, are militias composed of former active duty military personnel and actually have better training and combat experience than their regular counterparts.
A stay-behind operation is one where a country emplaces secret operatives or organizations in its own territory, for use in case of a later enemy occupation. The stay-behind operatives would then form the basis of a resistance movement, and act as spies from behind enemy lines. Small-scale operations may cover discrete areas, but larger stay-behind operations envisage reacting to the conquest of whole countries.
During World War II, resistance movements operated in German-occupied Europe by a variety of means, ranging from non-cooperation to propaganda, hiding crashed pilots and even to outright warfare and the recapturing of towns. In many countries, resistance movements were sometimes also referred to as The Underground.
British anti-invasion preparations of the Second World War entailed a large-scale division of military and civilian mobilisation in response to the threat of invasion by German armed forces in 1940 and 1941. The British Army needed to recover from the defeat of the British Expeditionary Force in France, and 1.5 million men were enrolled as part-time soldiers in the Home Guard. The rapid construction of field fortifications transformed much of the United Kingdom, especially southern England, into a prepared battlefield. Sea Lion was never taken beyond the preliminary assembly of forces. Today, little remains of Britain's anti-invasion preparations, although reinforced concrete structures such as pillboxes and anti-tank cubes can still be commonly found, particularly in the coastal counties.
Tarfside is a small hamlet in Angus, Scotland. It is situated in Glen Esk, on the upper course of the River North Esk, around 8 miles north of Edzell, and has a footpath to nearby Loch Lee. Tarfside is commonly seen as a very beautiful place for walkers.
Naval trawlers are vessels built along the lines of a fishing trawler but fitted out for naval purposes; they were widely used during the First and Second World Wars. Some, known in the Royal Navy as "Admiralty trawlers", were purpose-built to naval specifications; others were adapted from civilian use. Fishing trawlers were particularly suited for many naval requirements because they were robust vessels designed to work heavy trawls in all types of weather, and had large clear working decks. A minesweeper could be created by replacing the trawl with a mine sweep. Adding depth charge racks on the deck, ASDIC sonar below, and a 3-inch (76 mm) or 4-inch (102 mm) gun in the bow equipped the trawler for anti-submarine duties.
In US military doctrine, unconventional warfare is one of the core activities of irregular warfare. Unconventional warfare is essentially support provided by the military to a foreign insurgency or resistance. The legal definition of UW is:
Unconventional Warfare consists of activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt or overthrow an occupying power or government by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary or guerrilla force in a denied area.
The Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) was a communist guerrilla army that resisted the Japanese occupation of Malaya from 1941 to 1945 in World War II. Composed mainly of ethnic Chinese guerrilla fighters, the MPAJA was the largest anti-Japanese resistance group in Malaya. Founded during the Japanese invasion of Malaya, the MPAJA was conceived as a part of a combined effort by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and the British colonial government, alongside various smaller groups to resist the Japanese occupation. Although the MPAJA and the MCP were officially different organisations, many saw the MPAJA as a de facto armed wing of the MCP due to its leadership being staffed by mostly ethnic Chinese communists. Many of the ex-guerrillas of the MPAJA would later form the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) and resist a return to pre-war the normality of British rule of Malaya during the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960).
Coleshill Auxiliary Research Team (CART) is a network of British historians. It is named after Coleshill in Oxfordshire where Winston Churchill had arranged for groups of soldiers, called Auxiliary Units, to develop and be trained in guerrilla war tactics for use in the event of a Nazi invasion of England during World War II. CART is the largest group in the UK researching this force and have put together a national database listing the 3,500 men.
Scallywag may refer to:
The British home army in the First World War served the dual purpose of defending the country against invasion and training reinforcements for the army overseas. Initial responsibility for defending the nation lay with the Territorial Force, a part-time auxiliary designed in 1908 as a means of expanding the army in a major foreign conflict but, as a result of political compromise, implemented as a home defence army. It was supported in this role by 42,000 regular army troops, primarily belonging to the Royal Garrison Artillery and the Royal Engineers. The 14 infantry divisions and 14 mounted brigades of the Territorial Force were mainly allocated either to the Local Force, stationed near the coast and tasked with disrupting an invasion at the point of landing, or the Central Force, a mobile element tasked with defeating the invading force as it marched on London. The Local Force was augmented by units of the Special Reserve and Extra Reserve, which were the third battalions of the regular army line infantry regiments established to recruit and train replacements for their regiments' two combat battalions. The home army was also largely responsible for guarding vulnerable points, such as the communications infrastructure, rail network and munitions works.
The Natal Border Guard was an auxiliary force levied for the defence of the Colony of Natal during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. British military commander Lord Chelmsford had intended to raise a large auxiliary force to support his invasion of the Zulu Kingdom but was opposed by the civilian government of the Colony of Natal, led by its governor Henry Ernest Gascoyne Bulwer, who would have to finance the unit. Bulwer eventually allowed a smaller force to be raised with the stipulation that it not be deployed outside of Natal. This unit was to serve only on a part-time basis, receive no training and fight with the traditional weapons of spear and shield.
The Guard Force was an arm of the Rhodesian Security Forces. Coming under the Ministry of Defence it was organised on similar lines to, but separate from, the Rhodesian Army. The Guard Force was set up from 1975 to provide security to protected villages. These had been established by the Ministry of Internal Affairs to separate black rural civilians from guerillas during the Rhodesian Bush War. Guard Force units took over security duties from Ministry staff.
Scallywag bunkers or Auxiliary Unit Operational Base/OB were underground bunkers used by GHQ Auxiliary Units of the British Resistance against axis invasion of the United Kingdom.
Lampe, David (2007) [1968]. The Last Ditch: Britain's Resistance Plans Against the Nazis. Greenhill Books (Foreword by Gary Sheffield). ISBN978-1-85367-730-4.
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