Pioneers of Irregular Warfare

Secrets of the Military Intelligence Research Department of the Second World War

Malcolm Atkin

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526766014
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

Covert operations and ingenious weapons for irregular warfare were developed rapidly, and with great success, by the British during the Second World War, and the story of the most famous organizations involved like SOE, the SAS and Section D of SIS is now well known, but Military Intelligence (Research), the smallest but one of the most influential of these units is relatively unknown. Malcolm Atkin's intriguing and meticulously researched account describes their role at the heart of the War Office in trying to develop a 'respectable' arm of irregular warfare and their innovations ranging from the early Commandos, sticky bombs, limpet mines, booby traps, and even helicopters to the creation of the MI9 escape organization. They were an 'ideas factory' rather than an operational body but the book describes their worldwide operations including Finland, Norway, Romania, the Middle East and Central Africa. This is also a story of conflicting personalities between Jo Holland, the visionary but self-effacing head of MI(R) and his ambitious deputy, Colin Gubbins (later head of SOE), and the latter's private war with SIS.

Chapter One

The Formation of MI(R)

Inspired by the success of the Arab Revolt and its attached British officers, in January 1918 the War Office had created a prototype special forces unit under Major General Lionel Dunsterville (Dunsterforce). Its task was to unify the disparate anti-Bolshevik and anti-Turkish groups fighting in Persia (Iran) and the Caucasus, to secure the important oil installations at Baku and protect the strategically important Trans-Caucasian railway. Success would also secure the exposed eastern flank of the British troops in Mesopotamia, previously protected by the Czarist forces. Dunsterforce comprised up to a thousand men who were required to be of ‘strong character and adventurous spirit, especially good stamina, capable of organizing, training and eventually leading, irregular troops’.1 The project had only limited success but set an important precedent.

In the 1920s and 1930s Britain faced guerrilla warfare at the hands of the IRA, Indian nationalists and the Arab Revolt in Palestine. Together with the operations of Chinese guerrillas opposing the Japanese invasion of 1937, such attacks emphasized the need to better counter guerrilla tactics and for the War Office to incorporate irregular warfare into its own planning. Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads were formed in Palestine in June 1938 from British personnel, Jewish police and members of the paramilitary Haganah, using guerrilla tactics to contain the Arab insurgents, but brought accusations of acting as ‘death squads’. A new urgency came from the Germans’ successful use of the Sudetendeutsche Freikorps (which became the basis of the Branden-burg special forces regiment) to carry out subversion in Bohemia and Moravia during the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia from 1938. Fear of enemy guerrilla operations and ‘fifth column’ activities (first given a name in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939) increasingly took hold of the military and diplomatic psyche and seemed to threaten the conventional approach to fighting a war.

The War Office needed a strategy for both countering and developing these ‘ungentlemanly’ tactics for its own ends. In 1936 it had formed a small research section innocuously titled General Service (Research) under the Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff (DCIGS) to provide a fellowship for an officer to carry out a period of undisturbed research into a topic that was outside the scope of everyday War Office responsibilities. Its charter was to research into problems of tactics and organization, consulting with other branches of the War Office and Commands in order to collect new ideas, and to liaise with technical research branches.2 The DCIGS explained: ‘This section must be small, almost anonymous, go where they like, talk to whom they like, but be kept from files, correspondence and telephone calls.’3 The existence of GS(R) was belatedly made public on 10 March 1938 when, in a statement to the House of Commons, the Secretary of State for War (Hore-Belisha) announced ‘When so much instruction is to be gained from present events the absence of any branch exclusively concerned with pure military research is noticeable, and a small section to study the practice and lessons of actual warfare will be established.’4 GS(R) was not secret per se but it was to maintain a low profile so as to keep it free from interruption and interference within the War Office.

The reports produced by the early incumbents were considered useful but had little practical impact (Fig. 1). This changed when, in December 1938, the post was offered to Major Jo Holland, a Royal Engineer staff officer in the War Office, then recovering from a bout of recurring illness arising out of his First World War service in Salonika.

J.C.F. ‘Jo’ Holland (Plates 1 and 35) was born in India, the son of a noted geologist, and was universally described as being intelligent, imaginative and practical. Full of humour, he also had a ruthless streak. His obituary by Major General William Broomhall recalled:

Being able to see the solution to a difficult problem more quickly than most people, he would at once initiate a course of action to achieve that solution. Thereafter, he would ensure that nobody impeded the achievement of the object … Persons less able than himself (of whom there were many) who could not see so clearly how the result was being achieved were apt to resent the ruthless way he pursued the object and he inevitably made some enemies.5

Figure 1. GS(R) Reports 1936–1939. (TNA HS8/258)

No. 1	The Reorganization of the War Office
No. 2	Employment of Historians by the War Office in a consultative capacity
No. 3	Reorganization of the General Staff
No. 4	Army Requirements from the RAF in modern warfare
No. 5	Organization of Armoured and Mobile Units and Formations
No. 6	Training of the Army
No. 7	Considerations from the Wars in Spain and China with regard to certain aspects of Army policy
No. 8	Investigation of the possibilities of Guerrilla Activities

His frustration with ponderous War Office procedures was expressed in bursts of fiery temper and Holland’s secretary in MI(R), Joan Bright, remembered how ‘I can feel now the quick downward movement by which I ducked the impact of a book flung at my head one day on opening the door of his office’.6 But Holland soon recovered and he inspired great respect and affection. For Joan Bright: ‘The engine which drove us was Colonel Holland. We admired him, feared him. Loved him.’7 He was more relaxed outside his work environment, and his daughter Elizabeth remembers him as effervescent, a skilled raconteur and the automatic centre of attention at parties, but in common with the other tight-lipped pioneers of Intelligence work at the time, he never spoke of his work in MI(R)!

Holland had been commissioned into the Royal Engineers in 1914 and developed a speciality in Wireless Signals (until 1920 the Royal Engineers were responsible for all military communications). He served in Salonika with Divisional Signals and was then seconded to the Royal Flying Corps as an aerial observer. In October 1918 he was awarded the DFC after having completed over 200 hours of long-distance reconnaissance and contact patrols but there is no basis in the myth that he served with Lawrence of Arabia on aerial reconnaissance.8 During service in the gruelling Salonika campaign, he contracted amoebic dysentery, leading to recurring bouts of illness which significantly impaired his career. His RAF squadron moved to Ireland in 1919 but he then transferred back to the Royal Engineers and served in the Special Signal Company as a temporary major. It is uncertain if he was officially connected with any Intelligence work but he certainly had direct experience of the IRA.

On the night of 9 January 1921, aged 24, he was shot in the right chest during a mysterious confrontation in a Cork public house.9 He had been posted to Chatham in October 1920 on a signals course but during the Christmas vacation it is claimed in his Royal Engineers obituary that he had unofficially returned to Ireland to take revenge after the IRA had killed a friend. The obituary maintained he waited in a public house for the killer to appear, indicating he knew the identity of the IRA man and that this was, therefore, likely to be a sanctioned operation. Whilst waiting, the barmaid reputedly urged him to leave but he refused, which begs the question how she knew that Holland was a British officer and the nature of his mission.10 Shots were fired and Holland staggered out of the pub wounded and was rescued by a conveniently passing armoured car. The Cork Constitution of Monday, 10 January reported an ‘Exciting City Incident’ in which, on the previous night at around 8.00pm in the South Mall/Anglesea Street area, ‘five revolver shots in quick succession’ were heard but there were no signs of an ambush. When the police arrived they failed to elicit any information on the shooting.11 Holland subsequently received £125 compensation for ‘gunshot wounds through body’, and £5 for expenses in making the claim.12 This may have been a semi-official Intelligence mission (not unknown in Ireland at the time), with the story as recounted in the Royal Engineers obituary being a long-surviving cover story. The incident does not appear in his service record and, despite Holland’s reputation as a raconteur, the story was never told to his family.

After his eventful time in Ireland, Holland served in a succession of divisional staff posts before being posted in 1928 to India, where he served on the North West frontier and attended Quetta Staff College. Promoted major in 1933, Holland returned to England and became a staff officer in Southern and then Northern Command. He worked at the War Office from April 1936 in the wide-ranging Staff Duties Directorate, first in SD2 (War Organization) and from September 1937 in SD7 (organization and equipment of armoured vehicles). There he would have met another Royal Engineer, Laurence Grand (Plate 4), who from 1935 to 1938 was Deputy Assistant Director of Mechanization. In 1938 Holland was due for posting overseas but in October he was declared unfit after being diagnosed with a duodenal ulcer. As a consequence, in December he accepted the opportunity given by the VCIGS to take up the vacant research post in GS(R) and carry out a piece of research exploring the methodology for a future war with Germany. The specific topic was to be irregular warfare, focused initially on defensive counter-measures to protect the Empire from the threat of German-inspired subversion and insurrection. This followed long-running efforts by the War Office to establish clear guidelines for dealing with guerrilla warfare, beginning with Notes on Guerrilla Warfare in Ireland (1921) which morphed into Imperial Policing and Irregular Warfare (1933).13 Holland’s lack of formal Intelligence expertise was symptomatic of the ad hoc nature of recruitment to Military Intelligence at the time. This was considered only a temporary posting, probably with low expectation, but Holland (with the considerable assistance of Laurence Grand, now on secondment to SIS as head of Section D), managed to establish a radical new field of study in the War Office. Section D had been formed a few months earlier in April 1938 to progress plans for clandestine civilian sabotage and subversion from within SIS. The topic chosen for Holland may reflect a concern of the War Office not to be left behind, and wanting to explore the use of guerrillas on a military (more respectable) basis.

Both Holland and Grand believed that guerrilla warfare was likely to be important in any coming war, capable of diverting large numbers of troops from attacking conventional forces and contributing to the expected implosion of the Nazi state by economic disruption. Holland wanted to establish a doctrinal approach to organizing irregular warfare on a para-military basis but rather than managing an executive arm like Section D, Holland believed the role of GS(R)/MI(R) ‘was to produce ideas, work them up to a practical stage and then cast them off to grow under their own steam under whomever in MI(R) he had brought up for the purpose’.14 In accepting this limitation, fellow MI(R) officer Colin Gubbins saw Holland as ‘completely unselfish … [and] had no intention of building an empire for himself’.15 Similarly, for Joan Bright Holland ‘never sought personal aggrandisement’.16 M.R.D. Foot interpreted such comments as representing ‘an unusually modest and selfeffacing member of a traditionally self-effacing caste’.17 Holland did not lack ambition, but instead of building an empire for himself, he firmly believed that irregular operations should be the responsibility of the existing operational departments of the War Office, modernized to incorporate this new form of warfare, rather than create ad hoc new structures: ‘I have always thought that each appropriate branch of the General Staff ought to deal with the various activities which we have undertaken, except for the fact that it is probably useful to have a branch with a certain amount of freedom and contact with unusual sources of information and possibilities of action.’18

The concept of guerrilla warfare was popular at the time, greatly inspired by the posthumous publication of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1935. In that year Second Lieutenant Harry Fox-Davies of the Durham Light Infantry (who later assisted in raising the Middle East Commandos) had promoted guerrilla warfare to his then divisional commander, Archibald Wavell. Fox-Davies pointed out that ‘a handful of men at the heart of the enemy’s communications could do damage out of all proportion to their numbers’. In response Wavell, an admirer of Lawrence, maintained that a ‘trained guerrilla’ was impossible but believed it would be possible to train specialist uniformed troops to operate behind enemy lines and that ‘guerrilla warfare … is well worth reading and thinking about’.19 During army man-oeuvres in 1936 Wavell had Fox-Davies mount an unscheduled raid on the rear of the opponent’s forces to capture the ene...