Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Joan briefly dated Ian Fleming – ‘a ruthless man’21 – and was rumoured to have been Fleming’s model for Miss Moneypenny, James Bond’s secretary.

Gubbins had been quick to see that Greece presented fertile territory for sabotage, with an underground resistance that had sprung into action within weeks of Mussolini’s invasion in the autumn of 1940. Peter Fleming had smuggled himself into Greece as soon as his work with the Kent Auxiliary Units was over: he managed to establish a small group of

While still nursing their wounds they were given lessons in field-craft by David Stirling (who went on to found the SAS) and Lord Lovat (who was to become captain of the Lovat Scouts).

Churchill instructed Dalton to establish – as he called it – a Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

Winston Churchill kept a close eye on Gubbins’s work and praised him for organizing the Auxiliary Units ‘with thoroughness and imagination’. He also expressed his hope that the guerrillas would fight to the death inside the German beachhead and ‘perish in the common ruin rather than to fail or falter in their duty’.41

Colin Gubbins’s office-based work came to an end shortly after five o’clock each Friday afternoon when he and Peter Wilkinson clambered into their Humber and drove down to Kent. Here, they spent the weekend helping to train Peter Fleming’s guerrilla unit. The work was exhausting and physically demanding. ‘Into this short time,’ wrote Gubbins, ‘we h

Winston Churchill constantly expressed concern that the Auxiliary Units didn’t have enough weapons. ‘These men must have revolvers!’35 he scribbled in the margin of one memo. They got them soon afterwards, along with American .32 Colt automatics acquired from the New York Police Department. Each underground cell was also equipped with at least one

Colin Gubbins had been in his new job less than four weeks when the threatened invasion became a dramatic reality. On 16 July 1940 Adolf Hitler issued Directive No. 16, the Nazi invasion of Great Britain. Even Churchill felt that the final showdown was now just days away. ‘The scene has darkened swiftly,’ he wrote in a letter to President Roosevelt

News of the invasion reached Whitehall within hours, causing outright panic. Clement Attlee, Leader of the Opposition, immediately called up the War Office file on Norway, only to find that it was completely empty. On the cover were the cryptic letters SFA. ‘I suppose it means Sweet Fanny Adams,’ he said to Winston Churchill when the two of them me