Since the publication of David Lampe's The Last Ditch in 1968, a huge mythology has built up around the Auxiliary Units that has remained largely unquestioned.  This has been fuelled by a desire of veterans to distance themselves from the comic impression of the Home Guard as portrayed in the TV series Dad's Army, the temptation of researchers to accept oral evidence without corroboration, and the romantic attraction of 'secret armies'.  

 

The hagiography of the Auxiliary Units is a topic in itself and is discussed in more detail in Britain's Guerrilla Army.  Contrary to the popular belief in its secrecy,  a rather prosaic summary of the role of the Auxiliary Units was included in the 1957 volume of the Official History of the Second World War dealing with Home Defence. Here, with no sense of mystery, it was recorded ‘Auxiliary Units were trained to work in the rear of an invader, harrying his advancing columns and cutting them off from supplies of water, food and petrol’. Collier continued: ‘Thus an enemy who landed would find himself opposed, not only by a Field Army supported by substantial bomber and fighter forces and backed by the Home Guard, but also by patrols emerging from hidden centres to check his advance and strike at his communications'. There was also a broad discussion of the Auxiliary Units in Peter Fleming’s 1957 Invasion 1940.  

It was, however, David Lampe’s pioneering publication of The Last Ditch  in 1968 that really brought the Auxiliary Units to public attention and associated them with the label ‘British Resistance’. Not yet appreciating how biased Colin Gubbins (first CO of the Auxiliary Units) was as a source, the book was accepted almost without question by historians and was avidly read by veterans. The Last Ditch introduced a flawed mythology that has been hard to dispel and the book became part of the memory of the veterans when they began to tell their stories decades later. For many years, Interpretation of the Auxiliary Units’ role continued to suffer from an initial reliance on a ‘bottom-up’ perspective from the surviving local veterans, who were to be left to their own devices once having ‘gone to ground’. Their opinions were also influenced by their Intelligence Officers who sometimes had their own vision of official policy and were also concerned to boost the morale of the volunteers. After the war there  was also an element in building the mythology to redress the ‘guilt’ that many veterans remembered about not being able to explain their secret wartime role to neighbours. Most obviously, in an era where visions of the Home Guard were distorted by the popular TV series Dad’s Army, there was a natural inclination to over-emphasise the distinction between the Auxiliary Units and the regular Home Guard, even to the point of claiming they would fight as ‘civilians’. As early as 1957, Peter Fleming (himself a pioneer of the XII Corps Observation Unit) had written a warning on the use of oral history in Invasion 1940: 'Yet legend plays a large part in their memories of that tense and strangely exhilarating summer, and their experiences, like those of early childhood, are sharply rather than accurately etched upon their minds. The stories they tell of the period have become better, but not more veracious, with the passage of time. Rumours are remembered as facts, and – particularly since anti-invasion precautions continued in force for several years after the Germans had renounced their project'.  Former Intelligence Officer Stuart Edmundson similarly offered a warning in 1998: ‘many glamourised stories have come out on the media, told by the warriors themselves. Membership of A. U. was the big event of their young lives'.

 

Interest in the Auxiliary Units was stimulated by a fascination for their hidden Operational Bases.  Research into these, led by CART, was totally laudable but they encouraged a sense of wider mystery in the organisation. The reality was that the bases were a practical device, openly acknowledged in the 1957 Official History of the Second World War,  to allow the patrols to fulfil their short term role. The official desire for secrecy only came during the Cold War to avoid giving a clue to the fact that the British army was now planning to employ similar stay behind units in North Germany. As media interest in the Auxiliary Units grew, so did the a need for a simple marketable label, while national pride also demanded that Britain provide something to rival the now famous European resistance movements. The Auxiliary Units have even been claimed to be the first 'resistance' movement that was created before a Nazi invasion of that country. This blinkered perspective ignores the much earlier plans for Czech and Polish resistance,  which provided inspirations for Section D of SIS and MI(R) as well as the operations of SIS in Belgium and Norway. D for Destruction: forerunner of SOE and Auxiliary Units (2017 and updated in 2023), showed how the 'blueprint' for the multi-layered British resistance and guerrilla system relied heavily on precedents set in Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as planning for the occupation of, among other countries including France, Norway and Greece. To create the image of civilian resistance fighters on the European model, after the war one Auxiliary  Units Intelligence Officer exaggerated in maintaining he had never trained his men in uniform (choosing not to regard the standard  1940 Home Guard denim overalls as ‘uniform’). The romantic notion that the patrols of the Operational Branch of the Auxiliary Units were 'civilians', in contravention of government policy,  has been accepted almost without question. It ignores the well-documented motivation of  the government and War Office in creating the Auxiliary Units that the civilian Home Defence Scheme of SIS Section D should be replaced with a legal military alternative.The Chief of Staff, Home Forces (General Paget)  stressed that: ‘The action of these units is not sabotage, but offensive action by fighting patrols against military targets’. They   were therefore to be engaged in legitimate 'military action' rather than the disreputable civilian 'sabotage' of SIS. .As part of the media appeal the Auxiliary Units are also  often mistakenly claimed to have been personally founded by  Winston Churchill or reported directly to him. This is another  post-war media marketing myth. Actually they were created by a decision of the War Cabinet following a recommendation from the War Office and were structured under GHQ and C-in-C Home Forces. In1940 Churchill asked to receive progress reports but once the immediate invasion crisis was over he lost interest.

 

By 1997, with as yet no knowledge of the existence of Section VII, the assumption that the Auxiliary Units was the ‘British Resistance’ had taken firm hold.  Consequently, when a museum dedicated to the Auxiliary Units opened at Parham, Suffolk it was as the 'British Resistance Organisation Museum'.   Pioneer historian John Warwicker explained in 2022 how the confusion had originally arisen: ‘if in doubt about any secret discoveries, we were to contact a certain individual with a Whitehall telephone number. When contact was established with him, he asserted, with some emphasis: “I have one hundred and fifty thousand WW2 organisations to declassify, and I can’t even find the British Resistance Organisation!” Of course, he could not, simply because we had given him the wrong name!’. (In fact, some documents regarding the Auxiliary Units had been released into the public domain as early as the mid-1970s).  In the Winter 2022  Issue of the Parham Museum Newsletter John Warwicker finally  admitted that the 'British Resistance Museum' had been knowingly mis-named. Going back to 1997 he  explained 'we had worked out that the correct and official title of this secret 'Stay Behind' group of spies and saboteurs was 'The GHQ Auxiliary Units' and not, as supposed until then, the British Resistance Organisation. It was in this way that those members of Parham Airfield Museum, already familiar with the history of the USAAF 390th Bombardment Group, were authorised by the Committee to discover as much as possible about the British 'Stay-Behind' men and women, and were committed to a title for the new exhibits, taken from the cover of 'The Last Ditch.’ So they ' settled for the 'The British Resistance Organisation' Museum and not, as it should have been, 'The Auxiliary Units of General Headquarters of the War Office.' It was now too late to turn back. Thus we irrevocably contributed our share of the obfuscation favoured by HM Secret Services'.

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The most secret element of the Auxiliary Units was undoubtedly the intelligence-gathering  Special Duties Branch. This is discussed HERE.  It was the result of an uncomfortable transferr of the intelligence-gathering section of the  SIS Home Defence Scheme into the Auxiliary Units. Its role was initially confused as it was ill-equipped to meet the War Offcie expectation of  a body to quickly pass on intelligence to the field army during the actual invasion. It finally found its true purpose as a body spying on the British public as part of the sophisticated network of organisations trying to contain 'careless talk'.  Unsurprisingly, the veterans preferred to focus on more dramatic tales of preparing to spy on an enemy invader and theis has greatly distorted perception of the organisation. 

 

Despite the long-standing accumulation of evidence to the contrary, including the reservations expressed by Warwicker in 2008 and Ward in 2013, the   fresh research published by Atkin in 2015 in Fighting Nazi Occupation, the admission by Warwicker of the mis-naming of the Parham museum in 2022, and the publication of Britain's Guerrilla Army in 2024 (which discussed the issues surrounding the use of veteran testimony), there remains a popular reluctance to abandon the appeal of the ‘British Resistance Organisation’. In 2013 Arthur Ward provided an explanation for the term's appeal in his Churchill's Secret Army  'The term BRO [British Resistance Organization] is frequently used today, I think principally because it conjures up a 007 stereotype beloved of so many ‘secret war’ enthusiasts.'  Long-standing evidence from official documents, written at the time, has been ignored. A 'blind eye' has been turned to the obvious conflicts between the concept of a 'British Resistance' that only had an expected life expectancy in action of two weeks. By contrast, the actual British resistance of Section VII was ordered to be 'quiescent' during any invasion in order to preserve its structure for long term activity. This was the doctrine preached to resistance groups across Europe in 1940. 

 

The legend of the Auxiliary Units as the 'British Resistance' still persists. We still have the 'British Resistance Organisation' museum at Parham and the CART database is still the 'British Resistance Archive'.  The term is regularly repeated in posts across social media.  Sadly, this label has obscured the real purpose and significance of the Operational Patrols of the Auxiliary Units in 1940-1 as a uniformed commando force, supporting an active military campaign.​

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