Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

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).

He decided to make use of the old public school network, turning to rugby-hardened alumni from schools such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester. In particular, he was keen to enlist school-leavers who had gone on to become polar explorers, mountaineers and oil prospectors, men who knew how to survive in a tough environment.

All shared one thing in common: they had been given an education that, while expensive, had toughened them up and made them immune to hardship.

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

It was also extremely versatile. Its magnetic surface meant that it could be used to blow up turbines, generators, trains – anything, indeed, that was made of metal. It was the perfect weapon for sabotage, small, silent, deadly, and with a touch of dark mischief that particularly appealed to Jefferis.

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

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

Senior figures in the War Office and Admiralty decided that sinking German ships would be more cost-effective than building British ones.

If you could cripple a bridge, you could stop an entire army in its tracks.