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.

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

Just a few weeks after his introductory luncheon at the Art Theatre Club, Macrae was able to show Millis Jefferis the prototype magnetic mine that had been given the provisional name of limpet. Jefferis immediately recognized Cecil Clarke’s weapon as a work of technical wizardry. For a little less than £6 (including labour), he had produced an expl

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

the British alone played by the rules. They formed orderly queues at the bus stop, they said sorry when there was no need to apologize. In her view, decency and fair play were integral parts of being British.

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

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

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

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