When Churchill said ...we shall never surrender, he really meant it.
One of the relevant bits:
The men recruited for operational duties were selected chiefly for their knowledge of the local terrain – farmers, poachers and gamekeepers among them. Having signed the Official Secrets Act, they received intensive training in guerrilla-warfare techniques, including unarmed combat, sabotage and demolition, on weekend courses at Coleshill House, the Auxiliary Units’ HQ near Swindon.
Gee, local citizens who were already familiar with arms and moving through the woods...
4 comments:
From the look of things, if something similar were to happen today, the Brits would simply have to learn to speak German.
The man chosen in the village I grew up in, as far as I'm aware, only told one person after the war, my father.
They chose well, and no records were kept. Our local man quietly buried his demolition explosives, grenades and STEN several years after the war.
During the war, he had the manager of a big industrial plant and his family as lodgers, safely hidden from bombing and assassins.
My grandfather was in the home guard, and in training exercises with combat troops, they got into trouble for appearing from the "wrong direction" and capturing the regulars
like German paratroops would appear from an expected direction?
That makes complete sense!It sounds like a great book. Thanks for sharing.
Read of an exercise done by the Army shortly before WWI when they were still using horse cavalry. A big cav unit rode right into an ambush set up with several machineguns(firing chalk bullets, the book said); they hit a lot of the horses in the legs, lots of stampeding and bronc riding and various injuries. The CO of the cav raised hell about the ambush because it wasn't 'proper' or some damn thing.
Boiled down to, this proved horse cavalry to be on the way out, and he was pissed about it. Even without that it sounded like one of the more idiotic objections I ever read.
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