Winston Churchill's Toyshop

To name everyone who helped Millis Jefferis and myself to build up M.D.1. would be quite impossible. Some names will come into the story; others will just miss doing so. But I should like to take this opportunity of thanking all those who served with me in M.D.1. — the service personnel, the civilian staff, and the little Welsh factory girls — for

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Life at the War Office was very strange at first. Millis had to share an office with Lieutenant-Colonel Gubbins, who also came under Joe Holland in some capacity or other. It was quite a pleasant office on about the fourth floor and as Gubbins was a half colonel it had a carpet. But it was not very large, and had to accommodate Gubbins plus his mil

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This is the story of a rather unorthodox department known as M.D.1. (Ministry of Defence 1). Born at the War Office early in 1939 with a staff of one commissioned and one non-commissioned officer charged with the task of devising special weapons for irregular warfare, it rapidly grew up into an establishment equipped to design and develop new weapo

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M.D.1. was under the direct control of the War Cabinet, for there was no Ministry of Defence at this time, although there was a Minister of Defence — the Prime Minister. It was not surprising, therefore, that those who wanted to disparage the establishment should choose to call it ‘Winston Churchill’s Toyshop’. The toys we produced were rather dang

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At the start, the situation had been complicated by the fact that the so-called Cloak and Dagger boys, under the control of a mysterious Colonel Grand and the Foreign Office, were involved in this adventure. But it had now been decided that they should break away from the War Office and go off on their own. This left Colonel Holland with a very-muc

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Appendix I ATTACK ON ENEMY SHIPPING WITH LIMPETS The incidents described below in which enemy shipping was damaged or sunk through being attacked with Limpet Mines have been selected from a large number of official Admiralty reports on the subject. On 7 December 1942, a raid against shipping at Bordeaux was carried out under the code-name Operation

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