Bletchley Park is one of the most famous World War II sites in England. Tourists flock to the estate, where Alan Turing cracked the Nazis’ Enigma machine, enabling the Allies to read secret dispatches between Hitler and his generals.
Some 10 miles down the road is another manse that played a key role in the war — but almost no one knows about it. That home, the Firs, is where a secret band of engineers invented diabolical bombs, detonators and booby traps that were used in what today might be called a dirty war against the Germans.
It was all done with the blessing — and the enthusiasm — of then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
That “dirty” war, which included assassinations and the possible use of chemical weapons, is the focus of a new book, “Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” (Picador), by Giles Milton. The author highlights the men and women who set into motion dramatic and effective acts of sabotage behind enemy lines.
One of the most brilliant was Cecil Clarke, who in civilian life designed camping caravans. He also had a knack for inventing lightweight mines that could be used to blow up bridges. An engineer named Millis Jefferis devised a nasty little item called the sticky bomb: Thrown at tanks, it was so powerful it drove shrapnel inside, slicing passengers to ribbons. Eric Sykes and William “Shanghai Buster” Fairbairn ran a “killing school” for assassins at an estate in Scotland.
Overseeing this ministry of ungentlemanly warfare was Colin Gubbins, who wrote a 1939 book called “The Art of Guerrilla Warfare” and advocated for rail sabotage. “It is not sufficient to shoot at the train,” he wrote. “First derail the train and then shoot down the survivors.”
This did not go down well with many politicians and officers. “They were appalled by what Gubbins and his men were doing,” Milton told The Post. “Assassination and sabotage weren’t fair play. British gentlemen did not engage in such things.”
Churchill, however, “understood that the Nazis were a brutal regime and that you had to tear up the rule books to defeat them,” Milton said.
Sabotage proved quite effective against the highly mechanized German army. In 1942, the Germans, under the command of Erwin Rommel, had the British up against the wall in North Africa. But Gubbins and his men found a fatal flaw in the Nazi war machine. Rommel’s weapons and supplies came from Germany along a railway that ran to a Greek port, where they were then shipped to Libya. The railway crossed three viaducts in northern Greece; if Britain could blow up one of the bridges, Rommel was crippled.
The successful operation was planned and executed from England, using explosives invented by Jefferis at the Firs.
Perhaps the most controversial operation was the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust and the brutal ruler of Czechoslovakia under the Germans. Heydrich deserved a dog’s death. But the British and the exiled Czech government in England knew the Nazis would react to his murder with reprisals against civilians.
Nevertheless, the decision was made to kill him by throwing a bomb into his car as he was driven to his office in Prague. A bomb had to be invented that could penetrate his armor-plated Mercedes but light enough to be thrown by one man. Using nitroglycerine, Clarke came up with a device that looked like a thermos. The two Czech assassins were trained at the killing school in Scotland.
On May 27, 1942, as Heydrich’s car slowed to make a curve, the assassins — disguised as street cleaners — lobbed the thermos bomb, which may have contained chemical agents, at the car. Heydrich survived and began shooting at the assassins. But fragments of his bombed Mercedes had been driven into his spleen and he died a few days later.
In reprisal, the Nazis wiped out every male over the age of 16 in two Czech villages.
When Franklin Roosevelt asked Churchill if the British had a hand in Heydrich’s assassination, Churchill simply winked.
As Milton writes, “There were some secrets too sensitive to be revealed, even to the American president.”
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