GHQ AUXILIARY UNITS

 

The official  Home Guard guerrillas (supported by regual army 'scout sections') controlled by GHQ. Originally intended only  as an emergency response to the invasion crisis in 1940, the War Office stressed their role was legitimate ‘military action’ rather than the ‘sabotage’ practiced by SIS. They were considered cheap and expendable, and were not the priority for weapons as presented in  modern mythology -  considered for disbandment as early as October 1940.

 

With no clear brief, it had hesitant beginnings and did not begin to properly mobilise until mid-July 1940. The Auxiliary Units officers were originally intended only to serve  as an advisory body to the creation of small commando teams directly managed by the  LDV,  rather than managing its own patrols.  These  were primarily to act as  guides to regular army commando units, who would be slipped behind enemy lines. Unfortunately there were not the resources at the time to expand the existing 'Independent Companies' to provide the army commando units and the LDV organisation was not sufficient to organise its own teams. Aux Units HQ began to organise its own small patrols on the model of XII Corps Observation Unit but its confused origin mean that its existence was already known to the LDV/Home Guard.

 

The organised system of 8-man Operation Patrols under a sergeant, and hidden Operation Bases, were not created until August and were not fully equipped or trained until September 1940, hampering any role when arguably it was most needed. From November there was a small regular army element of Scout Sections (based on XII Corps Observation Unit 'Battle Patrols'), which formed their strategic core.  They  remained an essentially coastal organisation (unlike the Section D Home Defence Scheme). 

 

Organised with a military structure and stressed to be still part of the Home Guard (whilst managed essentially as Corps troops), the  teams were not 'civilian' in the legal sense or in comparison to the civilian HDS - but were constituted as part of the 'Armed Forces of the Crown'. They would fight in uniform and under military discipline as part of the organised military response to invasion and this all meant that they were not as secret as the veterans subsequently liked to believe.  Longer-term civilian resistance was left to SIS.

 

The instructions were to operate on the flanks and to the rear of an invading army during an active military campaign, thereby extending the official harassing role of the rest of the Home Guard, but the lifespan of the teams was assumed to be not more than two weeks. Despite the modern mythology, it was therefore not considered worth undergoing much expense in equipping them - with there even being a ban on providing them with weapons in August 1940. The main priority was in providing explosives to conduct as much sabotage as possible before being wiped out.  See HERE for further details of weaponry. A major weakness was that the  continued lack of wireless communications greatly limited the strategic role of the Operational Patrols after the destruction of their designated primary targets. Despite all the weaknesses of the organisation, the ability to delay enemy movements even by just a few hours by the combined action of beach defenders, Home Guard and Auxiliary Units was considered critical in the 1940 anti-invasion planning. The problem for the War Office was then what to do with the Auxiliary Units  thereafter!

 

The nature of the Auxiliary Units changed considerably from 1941 as it became more clearly absorbed by regular army structures and the strengthening of convention forces meant that GHQ increasingly saw them as having little serious purpose.  They survived until 1944 as reconnaissance units for the Home Guard, and until the disbanding of the Home Guard as the men had been promised they would not be returned to general  duties.  The need to maintain morale-during this difficult period saw the Intelligence Officers encouraging a degree of self-delusion as the men continued to train for a role that the War Office now considered  unlikely, with recruitment continuing for two months after the decision to disband had been made. This, coupled with a tendancy for post-war romantic embroidery of personal accounts, has greatly distorted their story - most clearly seen in the mythology that has grown up around the  issue of .22  'sniper' rifles in 1942/3, even as their existence was again being questioned.

The most strategically significant element of the Auxiliary Units was probably its intelligence wing  - the Special Duties Branch. The local element of this was (in contrast to the Home Guard of the Operational Branch) civilian and was directly inherited from the Home Defence Scheme of SIS, whose officers continued to manage it during 1940. Its original function was confused by  an initial methodology drawn from SIS which was designed to operate as a'resistance' during a period of settled occupation but was poorly designed to fulfil the current War Office expectation that it would provide rapid battlefield intelligence. At this time,  the SDB had no effective mechanism for speedily passing on any intelligence (relying on 'runners' and 'cut-outs' passing on written messages).  The Special Duties Branch effectively remained a separate organisation and the Auxiliary Units HQ were never quite sure of its role. From 1941 it developed  a  wireless network based on the novel  TRD set, whose system of voice transmission made it suitable for rapid civilian use without the need for extensive training. The local OUT stations were operated by civilians but the control IN stations relied on Royal Signals or ATS operators from Auxiliary Units (Signals) whose positions would be quickly overrun in an invasion.  The network was also dependent on a continuing Royal Signals  support to ensure its directional aerials maintained a link to the IN station, which were based at army HQs (until 1942 in surface huts vulnerable to dive bombing). As the IN Stations  were  expected to move with army HQs during a rapid blitzkrieg, it is likely that the OUT Stations would quickly become out of touch, with the network collapsing in a matter of days. Nonetheless, the network could have finally provided  an important, albeit brief, notification that the enemy blitzkrieg had penetrated a locality, supplementing he similar work of the Coastguard and Observer Corps. The Special Duties Branch proved to be most important  as an internal security body. Although the wireless network became redundant, as the threat of invasion decreased  its growing number of agents (over 3,000 in 1944) assisted MI5 and Military Intelligence in eavesdropping on the loyalty of the British populace and any loose tongues in the troops massing for D Day. This was the main contribution of the Auxiliary Units singled out for praise at its stand-down in 1944.

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See HERE for further discussion of the mythology of the Auxiliary Units and HERE for a series of quotes from the original organisers, directly explaining their purpose.