British Scout master gave special forces their punch and helped them defeat Hitler - Mirror Online
British Scout master gave special forces their punch and helped them defeat Hitler - Mirror Online
British Scout master gave special forces their punch and helped them defeat Hitler
John Skinner Wilson was 53 and had no military experience when called on by Churchill - but his exploits still influence the SAS and CIA to this day
Scoutmaster John Skinner Wilson, left, was called upon at the height of WW2 to train the men and women who would stop Hitler getting an A-bomb
British Scout master gave special forces their punch and helped them defeat Hitler
John Skinner Wilson was 53 and had no military experience when called on by Churchill - but his exploits still influence the SAS and CIA to this day
Scoutmaster John Skinner Wilson, left, was called upon at the height of WW2 to train the men and women who would stop Hitler getting an A-bomb
By
Damian Lewis08:00, 22 Oct 2016
UPDATED10:33, 24 OCT 2016
The brutal training regime called for by Churchill upon founding Britain’s Special Forces was devised by a former Scoutmaster and modelled upon his decades in the Boy Scouts movement, a new book reveals.
The Special Operations Executive - the infamous ‘School for Mayhem and Murder’ - gave birth to such iconic units as the Special Air Service and the Central Intelligence Agency, and Churchill needed a man to instil toughness into the new and secret organisation.
by Taboola
That man, Scoutmaster John Skinner Wilson - nicknamed Baghmarra, the Leopard Killer, due to his pre-war exploits wrestling tigers when serving as a policeman in India - was the highly unlikely inventor of the gruelling Special Forces selection which still holds good today.
From 1923 Wilson had been the Director of Training of The Boy Scouts Association, working for the movement in Japan, India and Scandinavia.
Pensioner 'finds Hitler's secret stash of nuclear bombs hidden underground' with radar equipment
Winston Churchill outside Downing Street in 1943 (
Image: Getty)
Upon war’s outbreak he was recruited to be Head of SOE Training. The SOE - more commonly known as Churchill’s ‘Schoolboy Spies’, or his ‘Secret Army’ - valued Wilson’s Scouting experience above all else.
‘Major Wilson has very useful qualifications for the post due to his pre-war training, as Camp Commandant of the Boy Scouts Association,’ the SOE noted in a Top Secret recruitment document.
The SOE was tasked by Churchill to foment a ‘reign of terror down the enemy coast’, where no enemy should ‘sleep soundly in his bed at night.' Wilson was charged to train the men and women to make that a reality.
When called for ‘special duties’, Wilson wrote to the Scouting Association, explaining that his new role was, ‘considered of sufficient importance to justify the Boy Scouts Association in releasing me.’
IC MARKETS
Learn MoreTrading Gold CFDs With One Of The Lowest Spreads?
COMPARE THE MARKET
Read MoreAussies 50+ With Private Health Need To Know This.
by Taboola
Newly installed at the SOE’s Baker Street headquarters, Wilson - nicknamed ‘the canny old Scoutmaster’ by SOE colleagues - set about drawing up a training regime from scratch for something that had never been done before.
With Britain reeling from defeats on all fronts, Churchill had challenged the SOE to rip up the rulebook on war, and to fight hard and dirty with no holds barred, taking the fight to the enemy. They were to ‘set the lands of the enemy ablaze.’
China 'tests terrifyingly powerful Dongfeng-41 nuclear missile' which could destroy London in HALF AN HOUR
Colonel Wilson's SOE thwarted Hitler's plans for a nuclear weapon (
Image: Getty Images)
Wilson realised from the start that what the SOE had to build was no regular military unit. ‘Its discipline had to be largely self-applied.
A blind eye had to be turned to certain personal failings and idiosyncrasies.
For strict military discipline a policy of mutual confidence and trust had to be substituted.’
He would learn quickly the type of man - and woman - the SOE sought.
‘However brave and efficient men were, I began to realise other abilities and qualities were required.’
Wilson - schooled at Trinity College Glenalmond, where he was transformed from a sickly infant with swollen glands into the young man who would captain the school rugby team - fell back on what he knew best: the Boy Scouts.
He based the SOE’s months-long selection process, including the merciless vetting procedure, carried out at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School, in London, on the basic tenets of Scouting, and especially inclusiveness: that anybody, however seemingly unlikely, can be a fine Scout.
‘No normal course of training can determine a man’s character,’ Wilson mused. ‘It is curious but true that some of the best recruits were thought at first not likely to make good agents, and one redoubtable member was almost rejected outright as unsuitable.’
Hitler's top nuclear scientists dubbed the 'Uranium Club' were kept in British mansion bugged by MI6
The US ended WW2 by dropping atomic bombs on Japan - a technology the Allies feared Hitler would develop first (
Image: Getty)
Upon entering Wilson’s Patriotic School all hopefuls had to sign the Official Secrets Act, binding them to a life of silence about their wartime activities. Once there would-be agents were spied on at night, to see if they talked in their sleep and gave secrets away.
Young and lithesome beauties bearing copious quantities of alcohol were used to tempt the recruits into unwitting ‘betrayals’ of an evening down the local pub, at which point they were unceremoniously binned.
Those that made it through Patriotic School were sent to Aviemore, at the foot of the Cairngorms - the ideal training ground especially for the coming missions to occupied Europe, for the scenery most closely resembled the mountains, forests and snowfields in which many would operate.
Wilson’s training was divided into distinct parts. First came three weeks of explosives, pistol shooting and physical trials, ‘mainly to see if the candidate was suitable.’
For those deemed up-to- it, there followed ‘a further weeding-out process’, set in the highlands of Scotland, consisting of instruction in ‘all the latest explosive devices, small arms, unarmed combat and fitness training’.
Hiroshima 70th anniversary: Atom bomb survivor says he's spent his whole life trying to forget the horror but never will
Modern Royal Marine Commandos use brutal training methods refined during WW2 by Wilson for the SOE (
The attrition and drop out rate was murderous. For those few who survived, a third period of specialist training followed, at a grand country house in the Beaulieu area of the New Forest, learning “codes, secret writing and psychological warfare” to prepare recruits as Agents, Wireless Operators or Saboteurs.
At Beaulieu, men and women were told that much of the intelligence they gathered behind enemy lines would be too sensitive for radio transmission back to Britain. Instead, it was to be sent via courier to an SOE office in a neutral country - Sweden or Spain - and from there by diplomatic bag to London.
The couriers - moving by bicycle, train or on foot over challenging terrain - often consisted of girls, for they tended to attract less suspicion.
‘Both verbal and written messages were passed,’ Wilson remarked, ‘the length of the message being governed by the amount of paper one could swallow in a hurry. It might take a courier a week to travel along the tops of ridges and mountains, and so avoid the many controls and patrols in the valleys.’
Hitler's Nazis developed an atom bomb carried by a flying saucer, documentary claims
Author Damien Lewis
Those messages that proved too detailed to eat in a hurry would have to be sent via the postal system, using an ingenious means of concealment. They would be meticulously encoded and sent in ‘Duff’ - microdotted - wherein an entire page of typeset was photographed, reduced to a tiny spot no larger than a pinhead, and hidden in a seemingly innocent letter, or parcel.
The tiny pinhead-sized negative was lifted out of the photographic emulsion using a modified hypodermic needle, and cemented into a letter via collodion, a syrupy solution then used widely by photographers.
The microdots would be scattered throughout an ordinary-looking letter, hidden in the full-stops like raisins in a Christmas pudding; ‘Plum Duff’ in British Army speak, hence the nickname. To recover the message a 200-times magnification microscope was required.
These extraordinary revelations are contained in a new book by acclaimed historian and author Damien Lewis, in which he tells the story of the SOE Agents, Special Forces and Commando units Wilson sent into battle, to hunt down and stop Hitler’s programme to build an atomic bomb.
New Nazi atrocities revealed as Hitler tested rockets on GERMAN people and towns
Hunting Hitler's Nukes tells the story of the units sent to stop the Nazis' plans
Wilson’s shaping of the most ruthless and cutthroat special operations unit ever devised - the model for those that followed - is revealed in documents unearthed at The National Archives and the Imperial War Museum, including an unpublished memoir by Wilson, entitled ‘Memories of a Varied Life’.
Hailed as one of ‘the three great figures of Scouting’, Wilson, then 53, had no prior military experience. Yet the training regime he founded proved so successful that he went on to head up the SOE’s Scandinavian section - arguably its most important, for its agent-commandos would spearhead the battle to stop Hitler getting an atom bomb.
The former Scoutmaster shared with Churchill a stout, bulldog-like profile. He’d earned a corresponding reputation for stubbornness and tenacity.
Dry-humoured and implacable to a fault, he cared for the men under his command as if they were his own children. Indeed, he was old enough to be many of their fathers.
Adolf Hitler's childhood home WON'T be bulldozed as it would 'deny Nazi history'
The memoirs of JS Wilson, regarded as one of the most important figures in the scout movement
A Churchill so presciently foresaw, Hitler’s nuclear ambitions would win him the war if the Nazis got the bomb first. When Churchill met US President Roosevelt in 1942 both men decided sabotage was the way to stop the Nazi bomb from becoming a terrifying reality.
‘We both felt painfully the dangers of doing nothing,’ Churchill would write. ‘What if the enemy should get the atomic bomb before we did! We could not run the mortal risk of being outstripped in this awful sphere.’
Roosevelt demanded immediate action to sabotage Hitler’s nuclear efforts. Daring raids would need to target the giant Norsk Hydro plant at Vemork, in Nazi-occupied Norway, which produced ‘heavy water’, the key element of their nuclear programme, along with uranium.
Only Britain had the capacity to act, utilising the SOE, Commandos and Special Forces then at our command. Churchill ordered a series of near suicide missions to be carried out by his ‘Volunteers for Special Duties’.
The Nazis lost the Battle of Britain because the Luftwaffe were all high on crystal meth
A note from Winston Churchill calling for honours for Wilson's men
But when a force of thirty-four Commandos laden with explosives flew into Norway to sabotage the heavy water plant, things went disastrously wrong. Gliders carrying the saboteurs crashed in heavy storms, and those Commandos not killed outright were captured, tortured and executed by the Gestapo.
It was Wilson who stepped in to take charge. Ten of his foremost SOE agents - led by native Norwegians Jens Poulsson and Joachim Ronneberg - volunteered for what they were told was ‘a particularly dangerous enterprise.’
Parachuted into the remote and storm-swept Hardanger Plateau, in Norway, they penetrated the minefields, guard-towers, electric fencing, machine gun nests and search lights at Vemork to place charges on the heavy water cells.
Top MI5 double-agent was primed to work against Britain's ally Stalin - before WWII was even over
The operatives landed on Norway's brutal Hardanger Plateau
The saboteurs scaled a 600ft vertical, ice-bound cliff face to gain access to the plant - using a route that the Germans had failed to guard because they deemed it was impossible.
Miraculously, Wilson’s raiders blew to pieces the heavy water apparatus, sabotaging the Third Reich’s nuclear efforts, and escaped with their lives.
The founder of the Scouting movement, Baden Powell, taught all Boy Scouts to ‘Never say die until you are dead.’ That motto epitomizes Wilson’s training regime and the mission to sink Hitler’s nuclear programme.
War veterans' outrage after new Transformers film stages Nazi invasion at Sir Winston Churchill's home
Truman's presidential citation praising Wilson's contribution to the war effort
So impressed was Churchill by the success of Wilson’s nuclear-busting missions, that he penned a memo demanding: ‘What rewards are to be given to these heroic men?’ Wilson was duly made an OBE.
At war’s end US President Truman - Roosevelt’s successor - would take the unprecedented step of personally recommending Wilson for US honours.
‘Displaying a keen sense of imagination, sound judgment and zealous perseverance … Colonel Wilson made a definite contribution to the success of the Allied forces in the war against Germany.’
Damien Lewis’s new book, Hunting Hitler’s Nukes - the secret race to stop the Nazi bomb - is out now, published by Quercus.
FollowMirror
FacebookX (Twitter)
Damian Lewis08:00, 22 Oct 2016
UPDATED10:33, 24 OCT 2016
The brutal training regime called for by Churchill upon founding Britain’s Special Forces was devised by a former Scoutmaster and modelled upon his decades in the Boy Scouts movement, a new book reveals.
The Special Operations Executive - the infamous ‘School for Mayhem and Murder’ - gave birth to such iconic units as the Special Air Service and the Central Intelligence Agency, and Churchill needed a man to instil toughness into the new and secret organisation.
by Taboola
That man, Scoutmaster John Skinner Wilson - nicknamed Baghmarra, the Leopard Killer, due to his pre-war exploits wrestling tigers when serving as a policeman in India - was the highly unlikely inventor of the gruelling Special Forces selection which still holds good today.
From 1923 Wilson had been the Director of Training of The Boy Scouts Association, working for the movement in Japan, India and Scandinavia.
Pensioner 'finds Hitler's secret stash of nuclear bombs hidden underground' with radar equipment
Winston Churchill outside Downing Street in 1943 ( Image: Getty)
Upon war’s outbreak he was recruited to be Head of SOE Training. The SOE - more commonly known as Churchill’s ‘Schoolboy Spies’, or his ‘Secret Army’ - valued Wilson’s Scouting experience above all else.
‘Major Wilson has very useful qualifications for the post due to his pre-war training, as Camp Commandant of the Boy Scouts Association,’ the SOE noted in a Top Secret recruitment document.
The SOE was tasked by Churchill to foment a ‘reign of terror down the enemy coast’, where no enemy should ‘sleep soundly in his bed at night.' Wilson was charged to train the men and women to make that a reality.
When called for ‘special duties’, Wilson wrote to the Scouting Association, explaining that his new role was, ‘considered of sufficient importance to justify the Boy Scouts Association in releasing me.’
IC MARKETS
Learn MoreTrading Gold CFDs With One Of The Lowest Spreads?
COMPARE THE MARKET
Read MoreAussies 50+ With Private Health Need To Know This.
by Taboola
Newly installed at the SOE’s Baker Street headquarters, Wilson - nicknamed ‘the canny old Scoutmaster’ by SOE colleagues - set about drawing up a training regime from scratch for something that had never been done before.
With Britain reeling from defeats on all fronts, Churchill had challenged the SOE to rip up the rulebook on war, and to fight hard and dirty with no holds barred, taking the fight to the enemy. They were to ‘set the lands of the enemy ablaze.’
China 'tests terrifyingly powerful Dongfeng-41 nuclear missile' which could destroy London in HALF AN HOUR
Colonel Wilson's SOE thwarted Hitler's plans for a nuclear weapon ( Image: Getty Images)
Wilson realised from the start that what the SOE had to build was no regular military unit. ‘Its discipline had to be largely self-applied.
A blind eye had to be turned to certain personal failings and idiosyncrasies.
For strict military discipline a policy of mutual confidence and trust had to be substituted.’
He would learn quickly the type of man - and woman - the SOE sought.
‘However brave and efficient men were, I began to realise other abilities and qualities were required.’
Wilson - schooled at Trinity College Glenalmond, where he was transformed from a sickly infant with swollen glands into the young man who would captain the school rugby team - fell back on what he knew best: the Boy Scouts.
He based the SOE’s months-long selection process, including the merciless vetting procedure, carried out at the Royal Victoria Patriotic School, in London, on the basic tenets of Scouting, and especially inclusiveness: that anybody, however seemingly unlikely, can be a fine Scout.
‘No normal course of training can determine a man’s character,’ Wilson mused. ‘It is curious but true that some of the best recruits were thought at first not likely to make good agents, and one redoubtable member was almost rejected outright as unsuitable.’
Hitler's top nuclear scientists dubbed the 'Uranium Club' were kept in British mansion bugged by MI6
The US ended WW2 by dropping atomic bombs on Japan - a technology the Allies feared Hitler would develop first ( Image: Getty)
Upon entering Wilson’s Patriotic School all hopefuls had to sign the Official Secrets Act, binding them to a life of silence about their wartime activities. Once there would-be agents were spied on at night, to see if they talked in their sleep and gave secrets away.
Young and lithesome beauties bearing copious quantities of alcohol were used to tempt the recruits into unwitting ‘betrayals’ of an evening down the local pub, at which point they were unceremoniously binned.
Those that made it through Patriotic School were sent to Aviemore, at the foot of the Cairngorms - the ideal training ground especially for the coming missions to occupied Europe, for the scenery most closely resembled the mountains, forests and snowfields in which many would operate.
Wilson’s training was divided into distinct parts. First came three weeks of explosives, pistol shooting and physical trials, ‘mainly to see if the candidate was suitable.’
For those deemed up-to- it, there followed ‘a further weeding-out process’, set in the highlands of Scotland, consisting of instruction in ‘all the latest explosive devices, small arms, unarmed combat and fitness training’.
Hiroshima 70th anniversary: Atom bomb survivor says he's spent his whole life trying to forget the horror but never will
Modern Royal Marine Commandos use brutal training methods refined during WW2 by Wilson for the SOE (The attrition and drop out rate was murderous. For those few who survived, a third period of specialist training followed, at a grand country house in the Beaulieu area of the New Forest, learning “codes, secret writing and psychological warfare” to prepare recruits as Agents, Wireless Operators or Saboteurs.
At Beaulieu, men and women were told that much of the intelligence they gathered behind enemy lines would be too sensitive for radio transmission back to Britain. Instead, it was to be sent via courier to an SOE office in a neutral country - Sweden or Spain - and from there by diplomatic bag to London.
The couriers - moving by bicycle, train or on foot over challenging terrain - often consisted of girls, for they tended to attract less suspicion.
‘Both verbal and written messages were passed,’ Wilson remarked, ‘the length of the message being governed by the amount of paper one could swallow in a hurry. It might take a courier a week to travel along the tops of ridges and mountains, and so avoid the many controls and patrols in the valleys.’
Hitler's Nazis developed an atom bomb carried by a flying saucer, documentary claims
Author Damien LewisThose messages that proved too detailed to eat in a hurry would have to be sent via the postal system, using an ingenious means of concealment. They would be meticulously encoded and sent in ‘Duff’ - microdotted - wherein an entire page of typeset was photographed, reduced to a tiny spot no larger than a pinhead, and hidden in a seemingly innocent letter, or parcel.
The tiny pinhead-sized negative was lifted out of the photographic emulsion using a modified hypodermic needle, and cemented into a letter via collodion, a syrupy solution then used widely by photographers.
The microdots would be scattered throughout an ordinary-looking letter, hidden in the full-stops like raisins in a Christmas pudding; ‘Plum Duff’ in British Army speak, hence the nickname. To recover the message a 200-times magnification microscope was required.
These extraordinary revelations are contained in a new book by acclaimed historian and author Damien Lewis, in which he tells the story of the SOE Agents, Special Forces and Commando units Wilson sent into battle, to hunt down and stop Hitler’s programme to build an atomic bomb.
New Nazi atrocities revealed as Hitler tested rockets on GERMAN people and towns
Hunting Hitler's Nukes tells the story of the units sent to stop the Nazis' plansWilson’s shaping of the most ruthless and cutthroat special operations unit ever devised - the model for those that followed - is revealed in documents unearthed at The National Archives and the Imperial War Museum, including an unpublished memoir by Wilson, entitled ‘Memories of a Varied Life’.
Hailed as one of ‘the three great figures of Scouting’, Wilson, then 53, had no prior military experience. Yet the training regime he founded proved so successful that he went on to head up the SOE’s Scandinavian section - arguably its most important, for its agent-commandos would spearhead the battle to stop Hitler getting an atom bomb.
The former Scoutmaster shared with Churchill a stout, bulldog-like profile. He’d earned a corresponding reputation for stubbornness and tenacity.
Dry-humoured and implacable to a fault, he cared for the men under his command as if they were his own children. Indeed, he was old enough to be many of their fathers.
Adolf Hitler's childhood home WON'T be bulldozed as it would 'deny Nazi history'
The memoirs of JS Wilson, regarded as one of the most important figures in the scout movementA Churchill so presciently foresaw, Hitler’s nuclear ambitions would win him the war if the Nazis got the bomb first. When Churchill met US President Roosevelt in 1942 both men decided sabotage was the way to stop the Nazi bomb from becoming a terrifying reality.
‘We both felt painfully the dangers of doing nothing,’ Churchill would write. ‘What if the enemy should get the atomic bomb before we did! We could not run the mortal risk of being outstripped in this awful sphere.’
Roosevelt demanded immediate action to sabotage Hitler’s nuclear efforts. Daring raids would need to target the giant Norsk Hydro plant at Vemork, in Nazi-occupied Norway, which produced ‘heavy water’, the key element of their nuclear programme, along with uranium.
Only Britain had the capacity to act, utilising the SOE, Commandos and Special Forces then at our command. Churchill ordered a series of near suicide missions to be carried out by his ‘Volunteers for Special Duties’.
The Nazis lost the Battle of Britain because the Luftwaffe were all high on crystal meth
A note from Winston Churchill calling for honours for Wilson's menBut when a force of thirty-four Commandos laden with explosives flew into Norway to sabotage the heavy water plant, things went disastrously wrong. Gliders carrying the saboteurs crashed in heavy storms, and those Commandos not killed outright were captured, tortured and executed by the Gestapo.
It was Wilson who stepped in to take charge. Ten of his foremost SOE agents - led by native Norwegians Jens Poulsson and Joachim Ronneberg - volunteered for what they were told was ‘a particularly dangerous enterprise.’
Parachuted into the remote and storm-swept Hardanger Plateau, in Norway, they penetrated the minefields, guard-towers, electric fencing, machine gun nests and search lights at Vemork to place charges on the heavy water cells.
Top MI5 double-agent was primed to work against Britain's ally Stalin - before WWII was even over
The operatives landed on Norway's brutal Hardanger PlateauThe saboteurs scaled a 600ft vertical, ice-bound cliff face to gain access to the plant - using a route that the Germans had failed to guard because they deemed it was impossible.
Miraculously, Wilson’s raiders blew to pieces the heavy water apparatus, sabotaging the Third Reich’s nuclear efforts, and escaped with their lives.
The founder of the Scouting movement, Baden Powell, taught all Boy Scouts to ‘Never say die until you are dead.’ That motto epitomizes Wilson’s training regime and the mission to sink Hitler’s nuclear programme.
War veterans' outrage after new Transformers film stages Nazi invasion at Sir Winston Churchill's home
Truman's presidential citation praising Wilson's contribution to the war effortSo impressed was Churchill by the success of Wilson’s nuclear-busting missions, that he penned a memo demanding: ‘What rewards are to be given to these heroic men?’ Wilson was duly made an OBE.
At war’s end US President Truman - Roosevelt’s successor - would take the unprecedented step of personally recommending Wilson for US honours.
‘Displaying a keen sense of imagination, sound judgment and zealous perseverance … Colonel Wilson made a definite contribution to the success of the Allied forces in the war against Germany.’
Damien Lewis’s new book, Hunting Hitler’s Nukes - the secret race to stop the Nazi bomb - is out now, published by Quercus.
FollowMirror
FacebookX (Twitter)
Comments
Post a Comment