The Wartime Years 1939-1945
Wartime – 1939 - 1945
Mike Waldren QPM
On 1 September 1939 Hitler’s troops invaded Poland and two days later Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. There was then a period of comparative inactivity before German forces invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands on 10 May 1940. Almost immediately the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and the other defending forces (mainly the police in the case of Luxembourg) suffered serious reverses. Between 27 May and 4 June over 300,000 British, French, Polish and Belgian troops were evacuated from Dunkirk. Italy declared war on Great Britain and France on 10 June with the latter surrendering twelve days later. On 10 July Germany began an air campaign, now known as the ‘Battle of Britain’, in preparation for an assault by land forces across the Channel. On the same day during a meeting of the War Cabinet a throwaway remark by the Home Secretary on the role of armed police officers resulted in several months of serious discussion during which it was even suggested that if there was an invasion the British police should become part of the armed forces of the Crown. It also led to an unedifying schism between chief constables after the final decisions on the subject had been made known.
In September 1939 there were about 60,000 officers serving in 182 police forces in England and Wales. About a third of the total strength was in London (Met and City) but there were also 58 county forces and 122 forces in other cities and boroughs, many of which only had a handful of officers such as the Liberty of Peterborough with ten and Tiverton with eleven. All forces were about to face an enormous challenge and twenty-three of them would find themselves unable to cope. They would be swallowed up by their larger neighbours before the war’s end and unfortunately their historical records largely disappeared with them.
At first, war preparations by the British Government concentrated on the probability that, while fighting was taking place overseas, there would be an extensive bombing campaign aimed at major cities in Great Britain during which gas could be used on the civilian population. By March 1937 a start had been made in giving instruction to all police officers on the wearing of respirators (gas-masks). To give confidence in the use of the equipment, mobile ‘gas-vans’ travelled around from division to division and force to force and officers wearing respirators had to walk up a ramp through an airlock into the van’s rear compartment which was filled with a mild dose of tear gas (probably CN). Many were also taught ‘gas-drills’ during which they were covered from head to foot in protective clothing and shown how to use chemicals (usually bleaching powder) to neutralise a contaminated area – the earliest form of CBRN training.
The Committee of Imperial Defence was told the following June that: ‘From the statistics of raids on London in the last war, the Air Ministry estimate that one ton of bombs dropped in a densely populated area may be expected to result in 50 casualties, of which one-third would be deaths and two-thirds would be injuries. On this basis, there would be 30,000 casualties per day throughout the country, of which 10,000 would be deaths and 20,000 injuries. ... When it is necessary to assume a proportion of the daily tonnage of bombs dropped to be allotted to gas, the Air Ministry consider that 25 percent might be regarded as a reasonable amount. It is understood, however, that the Chemical Defence Research Department take the view that if the civil population have some training in anti-gas precautions and possess respirators, the number of casualties from gas is not likely to exceed the number of casualties from high explosive bombs, but the proportion of deaths from gas would be smaller and of injuries larger than from high explosive bombs’.
Over thirty-eight million respirators had been distributed to the civilian population by April 1939. Despite advice that they did not afford protection against carbon monoxide, it was not long before the Government had to issue a warning that people should stop testing them in gas ovens or in the exhaust from motor cars.
At the end of 1938 a handbook was delivered to every household in Great Britain headed ‘National Service – A guide to ways in which the people of this country may give service’. Among more than forty-five listed occupations that people were encouraged to register for were the First Police Reserve consisting of police pensioners, the Police War Reserve consisting of men who would serve only in the event of a war and the Special Constabulary, either full or part-time.
All three police reserves were mobilised in September 1939 when war was declared but over 2,000 of the regular officers were ex-servicemen on the reserve list and so they were eligible to be recalled to the colours. Recruiting was suspended but officers who were due to retire were not allowed to leave. It was not until June 1940 that the police service was made a ‘reserved occupation’ and February 1941 before enrolment (of nineteen-year-olds) could start again. By mid-1941 the strength of the police (according to information supplied to the War Cabinet) stood at about 103,000, which included all the full-time auxiliaries and about 500 women serving either in the regulars or in the newly formed Women’s Auxiliary Police Corps, with London accounting for over forty-four percent of the new total.
There was also a Police Auxiliary Messenger Service consisting of young men aged between 15 and 18. They were trained in first aid and the use of a stirrup pump but they had to provide their own bicycles.
At a meeting of ministers held at the Admiralty on 11 May 1940, the day after the German army offensive began, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, raised the question of whether it was time to arm the police. Major-General Hastings Ismay was instructed to look into the matter with the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson. When the War Cabinet met at 10 Downing Street on 21 May, Anderson reported that ‘the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, after full discussion with his Superintendents, was opposed to the arming of the Police. Only a small proportion of the Police had been trained in the use of firearms, and in the Commissioner’s view, provided that there was no shortage of personnel who could be armed, the Police should be kept for civil police work, of which there would be plenty, while the available arms were issued to other personnel’.
Churchill was not to be put off so easily and said that he ‘was reluctant to accept the view that the police should not be armed. In many instances, foreign police forces carried arms; and he thought that the matter should be further examined before any final decision was reached’.
War Cabinet 1940
Back row – Arthur Greenwood; Ernest Bevin; Lord Beaverbrook; Sir Kingsley Woods
Front row – Sir John Anderson; Winston Churchill; Clement Attlee; Anthony Eden
After seeing which way the Churchill wind was blowing, Anderson presented the War Cabinet with proposals on police arming in the form of a seven-point memorandum at its meeting on 24 May: ‘1. The police are a civilian force, normally unarmed, and only a minority of the members of the regular and auxiliary police forces are at present trained in the use of firearms. 2. Even in the existing situation the main body of the police must remain available for the performance of normal police duties, for most of which the carrying of arms is unnecessary and undesirable. There is, however, a large number of men - approximately 10,000 full-time policemen and many thousands of part-time Special Constables - now employed in guarding vulnerable points against sabotage. 3. As regards the risk of enemy landings by parachute, the functions of the police should in the main be confined to (a) observing, and reporting to the military authorities, the presence of parachutists; and (b) preventing attempts at sabotage or other acts of violence by isolated individuals and overpowering and arresting the individuals where possible. 4. There are accordingly, certain particular purposes for which it would be proper and desirable to take steps immediately to arm the police, namely (a) Guarding vulnerable points against sabotage, as far as this is undertaken by the police. (b) Protecting important police stations against attempts to seize them by enemy raiding parties, whether parachutists or not. For this purpose selected members of the staffs of the stations should be armed. (c) Armed motorised patrols employed in parties of from two to four men, especially in rural districts and at the approaches to important towns. (d) Armed Police posts should be established, where men can be spared, at bridges or other key points with a view to controlling movements on the road, and holding up individual parachutists attempting to reach their rallying point or to approach particular objectives, e.g. for [the] purpose of sabotage’.
In paragraph 5 Anderson suggested that overpowering formed parties of parachutists and protecting some vulnerable points such as railway stations and power stations should be the responsibility of the military. Paragraph 6 explained that the police ‘are already in possession of a certain number of arms, including (a) arms – mainly revolvers or automatics – held as part of normal police equipment for occasional use e.g. in arresting dangerous criminals, and (b) a limited number of rifles and service revolvers lent by the War Office for use by the police employed at ports or in protecting certain vulnerable points’. Finally, in paragraph 7, it was pointed out that: ‘The numbers of arms now held by the police would fall far short of those required for the duties enumerated in paragraph 4, and it has been provisionally estimated [probably by Ismay] that for these purposes an additional 12,000 rifles and 10,000 revolvers would be required’.
Churchill accepted the compromise and the War Cabinet ‘approved the proposal of the Home Secretary to take steps immediately to arm the Police - so far as the arms available permitted - to enable them to carry out the functions referred to in paragraph 4 of his Memorandum’. The next day, Anderson wrote to all chief constables in England and Wales (in a Home Office circular) to inform them of the decision of the War Cabinet. This must have been greeted with a mixture of concern and amusement in those forces that only had a handful of officers and had never had any firearms, or where a lone police officer (with his wife as an unpaid assistant) was responsible for a considerable rural area with no help for miles.
The weapon available to the Met at the time was the .32 calibre Webley & Scott ‘M.P.’ model self-loading pistol (see The Siege of Sidney Street – 1911) but during the 1930s there had been a reduction in the number of officers considered ‘trained’. In the 1920s, terrorist activity by IRA ‘Volunteers’ on the mainland had resulted in more officers carrying firearms than ever before. Indeed, after the assassination of Sir Henry Wilson in June 1922, when Churchill was Colonial Secretary, questions were asked in the House of Commons about why the police were not yet fully armed so that they could prevent such outrages. The Home Secretary at the time, Edward Shortt, answered that it was because the police did not wish it, although it would probably have been more accurate to say that it was the Met Commissioner, Brigadier-General Sir William Horwood, who did not wish it. Nevertheless, Horwood had substantially increased the number of weapons available to the Met and had introduced, over and above the armed protection already being provided, additional armed foot and motor patrols for the duration of the IRA campaign (see The Nineteen Twenties).
In November 1931, Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Lord Trenchard, was appointed Commissioner of the Met and he made so many changes that the Daily Express commented dryly that: ‘The monthly reorganisation of the Metropolitan Police will take place weekly in future’. On 12 June 1934, Confidential Memorandum No. 9 standardised the number of weapons held by each division, sub-division and sectional station for the first time. Weapons over and above the new allocation were returned to central stores leaving 1,099 pistols in divisions with another 119 held by Scotland Yard departments.
A few other changes were announced in force orders dated 28 July 1936. Officers on night duty could no longer carry a firearm at their own request (see Armed Burglars – The 1880s) and the Station Officer (a sergeant), under the directions of the sub-divisional inspector, became responsible for ensuring that pistols were ‘only be issued to officers who have been properly instructed in their use, and can give a satisfactory reason for issue’.
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However, one addition to the regulations was that officially only twenty-four officers in each of the Met’s twenty-three divisions (i.e. including Thames Division) were to attend the annual ‘firing practice and proficiency test’ and thereby be considered ‘properly instructed’. Before this regulation was introduced, superintendents could decide for themselves how many ‘trained’ officers they had. Because the weapons were shared and cover was needed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the numbers ‘trained’ always exceeded the number of weapons available, usually by a considerable margin (the opportunity to get away from the day-to-day routine by taking part in the annual practice may have had a bearing on the number of officers keen to be included). If the new regulation was followed to the letter, even in the unlikely event that all ‘properly instructed’ officers were on duty at the same time, there were nearly enough pistols for them to have two each. The record of whatever logic was behind this attempt to dramatically reduce numbers has not survived (although a cutback in what were probably seen as wasted ‘away-days’ for ‘training’ may have had something to do with it) but even if the figures were only partially adhered to, and in some divisions and Scotland Yard departments they must have been ignored as being unworkable, the force was in no state to provide anything like the kind of armed manpower needed to cover the circumstances envisaged by the Home Secretary in 1940.
The Commissioner, now Air Vice-Marshal Sir Philip Game, was obviously being kept informed of political developments by the Home Secretary but on 24 May, when Anderson’s seven points were due to be discussed by the War Cabinet, he allowed the Assistant Commissioner ‘A’ Department, John Fillis Carré Carter, to jump the gun and issue Confidential Memorandum 20/40 headed ‘Protection of Police Personnel and Police Buildings. Issue of Firearms’: ‘In view of the prevailing conditions, it is necessary to take precautions against the possibility of the enemy or his agents obtaining control of, or causing damage to, certain vulnerable points and buildings of public importance including Police Stations’. It was suggested that pistols be distributed throughout each police station ‘and maintained in a state ready for immediate use, and kept in positions which are most likely to prove effective’.
In a masterpiece of understatement, Carter added that: ‘It is appreciated that all officers who may possibly be called upon to use these weapons are not qualified to do so in the normal way. To overcome this difficulty, it will be sufficient if an officer who is thoroughly conversant with the use of pistols explains the mechanism in any case where this is necessary’. As far as the actual use of the weapons was concerned ‘... obviously much must be left to the discretion of the individual concerned, but it should be pointed out that the firing of a shot, not necessarily at the intruder, and even after an entry has been effected, may be the best means of giving the essential warning to those inside’.
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When the Home Office circular explaining the War Cabinet decision arrived a few days later, Game decided to distribute an extract from it in the form of a secret memorandum (6/40) dated 29 May 1940. Interestingly, he had evidently made up his mind right from the start that he did not have men who could be ‘spared’ to cover all ‘bridges or other key points’ in London and so, using the loophole provided by Anderson, he omitted any reference to forces setting up ‘armed police posts’.
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Even so, Anderson had included ‘motorised patrols’ with no handy escape clause. Whatever discussions took place over this are not recorded but on 28 May, the day before the extract was circulated, it was decided that ‘arrangements are to be made for a short course of instruction in the handling and loading and unloading of pistols ... to be given to as many Regular Police [of whom there were about 19,500 in the Met] as possible. A limited amount of firing practice may be carried out if ranges are available, but firing is to be done with the .22 pistol, and Divisions who have none of these weapons will be supplied with 4 weapons from Store. Supplies of .22 ammunition, up to 2,000 rounds [for each division], will be allowed for practice purposes’. The 2,000 rounds would not have gone very far amongst as many as 800 or more regular officers in each division and Scotland Yard departments appear not to have been allocated any.
The ‘.22 pistol’ was a Webley & Scott single-shot version of the force issue weapon that had first been taken into use for training in 1911. By 1934 during Trenchard’s period of office they were considered obsolete and given free of charge to any of the divisional shooting clubs that wanted them (see Churchill’s Other Bodyguards). Carter had not joined the Met until 1938 and so he would have been unaware of what had gone before but the Assistant Commissioner ‘D’ Department, George Abbiss, had joined the Met as a constable in 1905 and so he had been able to tell Game and Carter all about them.
When the .22 pistols were recovered from the clubs, four turned out to be completely unusable and another twenty had to be comprehensively repaired before they could be fired again but a return, dated 11 October 1941, shows that by then there were 128 training pistols back in use, although it seems that no one had wanted to be so impolite as to ask for the handing back of .22 pistol now belonging to HM King George VI. It was included in the return but the Met would just have to manage somehow without it.
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It was decided that Abbiss would take over responsibility for any further arrangements relating to police arming and discussions with the War Office resulted in him issuing Confidential Memorandum 25/40 on 29 May 1940 to accompany Game’s secret memorandum of the same date: ‘In view of the decision to arm Police whilst engaged on certain duties it is necessary to (a) revise the existing allocation of pistols and ammunition, and (b) issue rifles and ammunition to Divisions’. Additional pistols would be supplied and also made available for all officers of Inspector rank and above as a personal issue. Rifles were to be supplied on the basis of fifteen to each sub-division (five were for the protection of the station and ten were for use ‘should the need arise’ anywhere on the sub-division) and five to each sectional station. Each district garage (the Met was divided into four districts) was to have ten rifles, each Group Reserve Centre five rifles and each stables either ten or five depending on location. Each wireless car (up to four operated on each division as an immediate response to 999 calls – a system first introduced in June 1937), ‘Q’ car, CID car and Traffic Patrol car was to be equipped with two rifles so that the force could undertake ‘motorised patrols’. Two magazines, each with eight rounds, were to be issued with each pistol and twenty rounds with each rifle.
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For training in the use of rifles Abbiss wrote that ‘in Secret Memo. 6/40 it is stated that firearms should only be entrusted to thoroughly reliable personnel who are trained in their use. This must be interpreted in a somewhat liberal sense’. In fact, the requirement that officers should be ‘reliable’ and ‘trained’ had been in the Home Office circular but Game had not included this part, probably because he too realised that it needed a ‘liberal interpretation’ and thought that it would cause misunderstandings if he left it in. Abbiss went on to say that ‘it will not be possible, nor in fact is it necessary, to arrange for firing practice. If however, there are available in Divisions some .22 rifles, ammunition, and suitable ranges, no objection will be raised to a limited number having practice in the case of men who have not previously fired a rifle’. Any .22 rifles ‘available in Divisions’ would have been civilian target-rifles owned either by divisional shooting clubs or by individual police officers.
The War Office supplied the Met with 3,500 First World War vintage Canadian Ross rifles and 72,384 rounds of .303 calibre ammunition on 1 June 1940 (another fifty rifles and 34,000 rounds were delivered over the next few months). Fifty rifles and 1,000 rounds were handed over to the London Fire Brigade and one hundred rifles with 2,000 rounds to the Port of London Police. 3,122 rifles and 62,440 rounds of ammunition were distributed to divisions in accordance with the arrangements notified on 29 May. Even Thames Division was issued with sixty-one rifles in case any enemy paratroopers landed in the river.
That left 228 rifles and on 3 July Abbiss asked the Commissioner what he should do with them. He also had sixty-seven rifles (this would increase to over 120 by 1945) and 2,300 rounds of .303 calibre ammunition that had been either commandeered from gun-dealers or handed in by their private owners for official use. Also in the stores were still 585 Webley & Scott pistols that were all that remained after the additional allocations to divisions and the personal issue to inspectors and above the previous month (the Commissioner had been issued with his (Serial No. 137478) on 6 June; in addition, twelve had been allocated to the Met officers serving in the detention camp detachment on the Isle of Man (housing ‘enemy aliens’) and for some reason one had also been issued to HRH the Duke of Kent (Serial No. 63765). The DAC of No. 1 District declined the offer, preferring to carry his privately owned revolver). To this he added 1,721 revolvers, in calibres ranging from .38 to .455, together with 3,120 rounds of ammunition, all of which had been handed in. He explained that: ‘We have now to consider how we are going to deal with this stock; obviously we should not continue to hold such a large amount at this office’ and suggested that there should be a further issue of pistols and rifles to divisions.
Game replied that: ‘I agree to the further issue of our own 320’s [the Webley & Scott pistols] ... G.O.C. London District would be very glad of any revolvers we can let him have. Is there any particular point in keeping the revolvers we got from gunsmiths? We were told to hand them over to the Military’. As a result, all the surrendered revolvers were collected by the War Office two days later. Abbiss issued Confidential Memorandum 44/40 on 4 July 1940 in which he explained that there would be an increase of 226 rifles and 380 pistols held by divisions, to be collected from Scotland Yard (by an armed escort) the next day.
For full document click HERE
On 6 July (in Con Memo 46/40) Abbiss agreed to training in use of pistols and rifles being given to the 25,000 full-time male auxiliaries in the Met. However, only 18,800 rounds of .22 calibre ammunition could be provided for training purposes because supplies had dried up. On 10 September the force was told by Imperial Chemical Industries Limited, the company which had provided the ammunition used so far, that its ‘entire output of .22 rimfire ammunition has been requisitioned by the Ministry of Supply’. When the force contacted Major Polehill Drabble at the Ministry of Supply it was referred to the War Office. Eventually a Colonel Peploe at the War Office was tracked down and he explained that he had received similar requests from many other police forces around the country. He suggested that the force put its request for more ammunition in writing so that it could be considered by a ‘Priority Committee’ because he was also inundated with requisitions from Home Guard commands.
The Home Guard had been formed initially as the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV) after Anthony Eden, newly appointed as Secretary of State for War, broadcast a message on the radio during the evening of 14 May 1940 calling for ‘large numbers of men ... between the ages of 17 and 65 to come forward now and offer their services’. Within six days there were 250,000 volunteers and by July the figure had reached 1,300,000. A report by Eden to the War Cabinet dated 5 June headed ‘Preparations for Home Defence’ identified that: ‘Two million rounds of .22 ammunition have been issued to Commands and military Area Commanders have been instructed to make full use of all existing facilities for miniature rifle shooting’. It is therefore not surprising that police forces were having trouble getting supplies.
The country was full of rumours about the possibility of an invasion and attempts at sabotage by ‘fifth-columnists’. The state of national nervousness (and the unrestrained zeal of the LDV) was such that during the night of 2/3 June, no less than four innocent people were shot dead in separate incidents for failing to stop at LDV checkpoints. The LDV was renamed as the Home Guard in July/August and on 19 August Special Constable Ronald Smith of Gloucestershire Constabulary was with another special constable and driving his own car back to the police station at the end of a tour of duty at a vulnerable point. It was night-time during the blackout and he too inadvertently drove through a Home Guard checkpoint without stopping. He was shot and killed, as was, on 27 February 1941, Charles Vereker, the son of the man who had been the General Officer Commanding the BEF in France, Lord Gort. The growing list of similar tragedies (up to fifty by some estimates) resulted in an instruction that Home Guard weapons were not to be carried loaded. Five rounds in a clip were to be carried in a pocket and the rifle only loaded when ‘in contact with the enemy’.
It also appears that some members of the Home Guard were not averse to taking pot-shots at passing ‘enemy aeroplanes’, some of which turned out to be ‘ours’. Another instruction directed that: ‘All Home Guards must be trained in anti-aircraft defence before being allowed to open fire on hostile aircraft, and this includes training on recognition of aircraft and behaviour of aircraft. ... An aircraft will not be fired on unless:- (i) it commits a hostile act or (ii) it is definitely recognised as a hostile aircraft’.
A meeting of the War Cabinet on 10 July 1940 chaired by Churchill discussed whether the defence arrangements in case of an invasion should include active resistance by the civilian population or whether it should be left to the army and the LDV. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John Dill, argued that no civilian who was not a member of these forces should be authorised to use lethal weapons. In general discussion it was agreed that there was no need to go quite as far as that but Anderson then suggested that instructions to civilians might be drafted on the lines of those already issued to the Police, who, he said, ‘had been informed that, until the enemy had obtained effective control of an area, it was their duty to fight and to treat the enemy as miscreants’.
This would have been news to the police who had received no such orders but the country was in a desperate situation and the thought of it being the duty of the police to resist an invasion alongside the army and the LDV struck a chord with Churchill. When the subject came up again on 26 July Anderson tried to explain that the instructions to the police ‘had become known in very misleading forms’ (whatever that meant) but it was too late. The seeds of the idea had been sown and in general discussion it was suggested that, when the invasion came, the Police should have military status conferred on them. This was to forestall accusations by the enemy that they were being engaged by ‘non-combatants’ which could be used as an excuse for retaliation against the civilian population. The Lord Privy Seal, Clement Atlee, was ‘invited to confer with the Home Secretary with a view to considering the desirability of amending instructions to the Police in the event of invasion’. During a further discussion on 5 August it was again suggested that the police should become part of the armed forces of the Crown but Anderson argued that ‘a civilian body could hardly be converted as a whole and automatically into a combatant force’. He agreed however, that ‘in actual practice the younger men trained in the use of arms would be withdrawn with their arms as far as possible, leaving older and unarmed men behind. Means might, perhaps, be found of making this arrangement rather more explicit’.
This was more easily said than done and on 23 August Anderson reported back to the War Cabinet that: ‘His difficulty was that the instructions to the Police clearly depended on the instructions to the general public, as to which, there seemed to be some doubt’. Churchill was having none of it and said that ‘his view of the Cabinet decision ... was that we did not contemplate or countenance fighting by persons not in the armed forces, but that we did not forbid it. What he had had in mind was that the police, and, he hoped, the A.R.P. services, could be divided into combatant and non-combatant branches, armed and unarmed; those armed would co-operate actively in fighting with the Home Guard and Regulars in their neighbourhood, and would withdraw with them if necessary; the unarmed would assist in the "stay put" policy for civilians’.
Anderson discussed Churchill’s ideas with the Met commissioner and His Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary (HMIC) and soon discovered, if he didn’t already know, just how unrealistic they were. Apart from the practical difficulty of dividing the officers who were armed (and these were not just the ‘younger men’) from those who were not, and making sure that the former were only given duties which would not prevent them from readily joining in the fighting when it came, there was the little matter of there being no love lost in some parts of the country between the police and the Home Guard to consider. A few Home Guard units were starting to claim primacy over the police and were making it quite plain that there was no point in the police carrying firearms since they (the Home Guard) could and would do any shooting that needed to be done.
This stemmed in part from the general Home Guard disdain for the pistols or revolvers which were all that were usually carried by police officers at vulnerable points. A handgun was not seen as being of any use whatever, an attitude clearly identified in a report on the Home Guard in June 1941. When the authors of the report ‘asked a Home Guard Instructor what he thought was the proper range for training the Home Guard in the use of the pistol and revolver, he answered, "As far as they can reach, and if the enemy is further than that I advise them to throw the weapon at the enemy." This is perhaps extreme, but it is indicative. ... From our observations there has certainly been very little training in the use of this arm’.
Anderson must have sat down privately with Churchill and explained the difficulties to him because on 10 September 1940 the War Cabinet, with Churchill in the chair, agreed to the text of a memorandum that would be sent to all chief constables in England and Wales on ‘Duties of the Police in Case of Invasion’. ‘The general principles governing the position of the police in the case of invasion are (a) that the police are not part of the armed forces of the Crown, and that therefore, in the event of a landing and effective occupation of an area by the enemy in force, the police should not use arms, nor carry arms, in the occupied area; but (b) that in the event of a landing by isolated parties who do not form part of an occupying force and whose object is, or must be assumed to be, to attack civilians, destroy property and cause confusion and devastation, neither the police nor civilians are debarred, either by international law or domestic law, from resisting and, if possible, destroying the enemy, in order to prevent him carrying out these objects’.
It was further explained that if there was an invasion and the enemy occupied an area in force then the police should help with the evacuation of civilians and withdraw as well. Any officers who were armed should then put themselves at the disposal of the military authorities. If any of the civilian population remained or an evacuation was not possible, as many members of the police as could be spared should also remain behind. As far as possible, these should be men ‘who are over military age and whose families have not been evacuated’. Their instructions ‘should be to ensure that the civil population conform to any orders which may have been issued, e.g., to remaining where they are, and generally to do everything in their power to assist the civil authorities and the civilians who remain’.
However, if there was a landing by isolated parties of troops or saboteurs the police should ‘do all in their power to overcome the enemy and prevent destruction of life or property’. It was stressed that ‘the measures which may properly be taken for this purpose ... are particularly mentioned in the Home Office circular of the 25th May last, [and] should be borne in mind - (i) the employment of armed patrols, especially in rural districts and the approaches to important towns; (ii) armed police posts at bridges or other key points’. This was followed by a paragraph which must have puzzled chief constables whose relationship with the Home Guard was quite cordial: ‘For purposes of this kind, the armed parties should be made up of police personnel, and, generally speaking armed parties should not be formed partly of civil and partly of Home Guard or other military personnel. Where, however, both police and Home Guard personnel are employed on guard at vulnerable points, the former may retain their arms for the present, pending further instructions. ...’ There were no ‘further instructions’ and the question of who had primacy between the police and the Home Guard was avoided.
An event that may have helped to persuade Churchill of the impracticality of dividing the police (and the ARP) into combatant and non-combatant branches had occurred three days earlier. At 8 o’clock in the evening of 7 September 1940 GHQ Home Forces sent out the codeword ‘Cromwell’, meaning ‘invasion imminent’, to all Southern and Eastern Commands but it would turn out to be a false alarm. A change had been noticed in the activities of the Luftwaffe and this had triggered the alert but it did not presage an invasion. Instead, it was the start of a sustained bombing campaign, now known as ‘The Blitz’.
Constable 585 ‘E’ Simpson was on duty in London during the night of 8/9 September. He had been posted to the vulnerable point at Holborn Telephone Exchange and issued with a Webley & Scott pistol. At about 3.30 in the morning the Exchange was hit by a bomb and Simpson was buried under the rubble and debris. He was found later in the morning but by the time he had been removed and taken to hospital he had lost his helmet, uniform tunic and one trouser leg. A search for his pistol in his remaining clothing turned up nothing and a search of the rubble later that day proved futile. Simpson recovered but the pistol was written off.
London and many other cities were targets of the Blitz with Coventry city centre being almost completely destroyed. The number of civilian casualties by the end of May 1941 was less than two percent of that predicted in 1937 but this must have been cold comfort because there were still in the order of 43,000 killed, about 23,000 of whom were in London, and the police were at the forefront in dealing with this unprecedented level of death and destruction. It must have been immediately obvious that the police had enough to do without those who were armed being kept aside ready to engage the airborne and land forces of the Wehrmacht as well.
By January 1941 there were 1,780 Webley & Scott pistols in Met divisions although one pistol had gone missing in undisclosed circumstances on ‘X’ Division and Constable Simpson’s pistol had been lost ‘due to enemy action’. There were also 3,470 rifles spread around the force.
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In December 1940 the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, declared that the US should be ‘The Arsenal of Democracy’ and in March 1941 he signed a bill into law which allowed him to ‘sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of ... any defence article’. Amongst the material supplied were thousands of .32 calibre Colt revolvers that had been in storage for years and which the US was probably glad to offload onto anyone willing to take them. In April, the War Office offered them to the police and 20,062, along with 346,776 rounds of ammunition, were distributed to Met divisions. The idea was that not only would there then be enough to equip every regular and auxiliary officer on duty but that they would also replace all the Webley & Scott pistols which would be withdrawn. Unfortunately, there were soon so many complaints about the condition of the revolvers that on 28 April it was arranged for inspectors from the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield to attend Scotland Yard every morning to be taken by police transport (the inspectors would not have wanted to use up their small petrol ration) to examine the weapons in every division from 30 April to 24 May. The results were that although the revolvers were generally considered ‘serviceable’, the condition of many was described as ‘poor’. Even so, all but 72 remained in use but it was suggested that divisional superintendents should keep the Webley & Scott pistols in their divisions as a ‘reserve’.
An interesting side effect of the issue of revolvers was that it more or less put an end to the reports of unintentional/negligent discharges. Police weapons (although probably not the rifles) were usually carried loaded but the combination of virtually untrained men, albeit through no fault of their own, and a self-loading weapon like the Webley & Scott pistol meant that shots were fired into such objects as the wall of the Police Room at the House of Commons, the front door of Islington Police Station, the left boot of a constable (while his foot was still in it) outside the front of Southgate Police Station, a chair in the front office at Chelsea Police Station and a table at the Group Reserve Centre at Broadcasting House. Far more serious was the death on 30 September 1940 of Constable Henry Thomas Brooks who was accidentally shot with a police pistol at Chelsea Police Station during a changeover of shifts. Even after the issue of revolvers, any firing practice that could be arranged still had to be done using the .22 pistol and by far the most serious training incident in the Met occurred on 16 October 1941 when Special Constable Arthur Guest was shot and killed during pistol practice at the University College School, Frognal, NW3. An instruction issued to the force on 1 November gives only a limited idea of what had happened: ‘A serious accident occurred recently during firing practice with a .22 pistol and subsequent examination showed that the firing pin had become defective. All .22 pistols are to be examined by a competent officer’.
Other forces also suffered. On 15 December 1942 Special Constable John Ratcliffe of Bristol Constabulary was accidentally shot and killed by an instructor and on 30 March 1950 Sergeant Harry Walton of Lancashire Constabulary died ‘as a result of injuries sustained in 1940 when accidentally shot on duty’. However, the number of fatalities in Home Guard units due to accidents was far worse. It has been suggested that a man in the Home Guard was four times more likely to die in a training or firearms accident than a regular soldier. Accidents involving firearms were not recorded separately but 438 members of the Home Guard were killed and 557 were wounded ‘as a result of enemy action’, presumably air raids. However, a staggering 768 died and 5,633 were wounded as a result of ‘other causes attributable to service’. The worst single accident happened in 1944 when a grenade exploded and killed six men and injured fourteen. In comparison, 278 police personnel died ‘as a result of enemy action’ during the war (208 in London), a figure that was proportionally about ten times greater than that for the Home Guard. Another 1,275 police officers were killed while on active service in the armed forces.
During 1941, police regulars had been allowed to volunteer for duty as RAF pilots and observers. On 7 December 1941 Japan attacked the United States fleet at Pearl Harbour and Great Britain declared war on Japan the next day. Early in 1942, regulars and auxiliaries under the age of twenty-five and thirty respectively were released to join the other armed forces. By November 1943 some 15,000 regular officers were performing military service (4,000 as air crew, 2,000 in the navy and 9,000 in the army). A great many additional women and part-time and full-time Special Constables had to fill in the gaps. Nevertheless, the total number of police in England and Wales by mid-1942 (according to figures supplied to the War Cabinet) had dropped to a total of 101,100.
Meanwhile, a return of firearms in the Met in December 1941 had shown up 197 Webley Mark VI .455 calibre revolvers in the stores. There were also 60 Smith & Wesson and 44 Colt revolvers in the same calibre and all of them had been handed in by members of the public but not yet forwarded to the War Office. In March 1942 it was decided to issue 124 of the Webley revolvers in place of the .32 Webley & Scott pistols to all officers of the rank of chief inspector and above.
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The subject of police arming was discussed (somewhat belatedly) at a meeting of the Central Conference of Chief Constables on 16 September 1942. The reaction to the Home Office circular in May 1940, and the subsequent ‘Duties of the Police in Case of Invasion’, had varied considerably between forces. In some cases the local police authority appears to have decided that nothing need be done at all. In others, the training of police officers was arranged either with the army (some Kent officers attended the Small Arms Wing of the School of Infantry at Hythe) or using the ranges of local shooting clubs when (or if) ammunition could be obtained from the War Office. At the other end of the scale, some chief constables took their responsibilities very seriously indeed and in May 1942, members in No. 8 District (England was divided up into ten civil defence districts and No. 8 included Herefordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire) put a formal resolution on the agenda of the next central chief constables’ meeting because they were not satisfied with just the somewhat dated Colt revolvers and Ross rifles supplied by the War Office. The war had brought about the introduction of Thompson and then Sten sub-machine guns into the British army and No. 8 District saw ‘the need for providing the Police with defensive weapons (e.g. hand grenades and automatic machine guns) and to secure the training of the Police in them, so that in [an] invasion they may be useful in dealing with enemy paratroops before the arrival of the Military’.
This really put the cat amongst the pigeons and there was an animated discussion on the role of the police if German airborne forces actually landed. Some members stuck to the parochial view that it was not the duty of the police to take on the enemy whether they were in the form of ‘isolated parties’ or not, regardless of any decisions taken by War Cabinet. Such action, they insisted, was the responsibility of the Home Guard, some of whose members sometimes also sat on local police authorities, an explanation perhaps for the cases of a lack of any response to the two Home Office missives. Others took a broader view and argued, equally forcefully, that it was neither desirable nor practicable to withdraw officers from any fighting once they had become involved in it and that they should have the most modern weapons available if they were to be of any value in helping to achieve the overall objective of defeating an invasion. The majority view was recorded as being that the ‘police should continue to fight once they had started, or they should not fight at all’. Although this was probably intended to convey the impression of unity, it backed both sides of the argument at the same time and so it was not particularly helpful. Those in favour of further police arming managed to overcome the opposition and force through the motion that: ‘This conference support[s] the resolution of No. 8 District and that facilities for modern weapon training should be given to the police’. A copy of the motion and the resolution with an explanatory letter was forwarded to the Home Office where it must have been pigeonholed for the duration because nothing seems to have come of it. Far more important is the insight the whole affair provides into just how impotent the Home Office was without the cooperation of individual chief constables and police authorities when it came to exercising control over police forces outside the Met (which had the Home Office as its police authority) even when the country was at war.
On 12 August 1943 the police in London tried using a lachrymatory agent (tear gas) on an armed man for the first time. In the late evening Owen Munro fired at police with a double-barrelled shotgun and then barricaded himself into the attic of a house in Barry Road, East Dulwich. He was surrounded by armed police and called upon to surrender but this he refused to do. In a flash of inspiration the senior officer present got it touch with a local army unit and borrowed a few (probably CN) tear gas grenades. This seems to have been accomplished with a degree of ease that could only have happened during the war because at the time the only countries in the British Empire in which His Majesty’s Government had agreed to the use of a lachrymatory agent against ‘armed criminals and armed lunatics’ were India, Palestine and Ceylon. Nevertheless, the police put on their service-type issue respirators in accordance with the drill they had been taught since 1937 and set off several grenades inside the house but the result was not all that had been hoped for. Munro merely put on his civilian-type issue respirator and the stand-off continued.
The Times reported on 14 August that: ‘After defying all efforts by police to dislodge him with tear gas from the upper part of the house ... an armed man who held off all comers with shots was found dead when police forced their way into the house shortly before dawn yesterday. ... Police found him dead from head wounds in the barricaded attic. ... A doctor had advised Munro that he should be removed for hospital treatment and this apparently upset him. When he saw the ambulance in the road outside he barricaded himself in the attic. His sister went up to the attic when the shooting started and tried to persuade him to drink a cup of coffee containing a sedative. Munro kept her in the attic and used her as a hostage. She was unable to get away until 1.30am yesterday. Munro wore his gas mask at the height of the siege when police outside the house were using tear gas. No one was injured except one policeman who received a slight finger wound’.
The incident attracted very little attention in senior circles although when the Assistant Commissioner ‘A’ Department, now Sir John Nott-Bower, was asked whether it was time for the Met to have a supply of tear gas of its own, he noted that in his view its use would not be in accordance with the traditions of the English police and that he had ‘... an instinctive dislike of introducing as a regular feature of police work anything remotely savouring of American gangster films’.
By mid-1943 the number of regular and auxiliary police officers in England and Wales had fallen to a combined total 86,000 men and 5,000 women. Fears of an invasion had reduced considerably and, although there were still bombing raids by the Luftwaffe, they were of much less intensity than they had been in 1940. The manpower priority was now for the armed forces and the War Cabinet insisted on still further reductions (as was also the case with Civil Defence and the National Fire Service). In mid-1944 the combined police figure stood at 74,000 men and 5,000 women. Even at the time, concerns were being expressed about just what would happen at the end of the war once the auxiliaries had left.
On 6 June 1944 allied forces landed in Normandy and the first of Hitler’s ‘terror weapons’, the V1 flying bomb, landed on British soil on 12 June. The first V2 rocket fell on Chiswick on 8 September. The rocket attacks had been foreseen and codenamed ‘Big Ben’. Contingency plans had been drawn up to prevent the enemy getting detailed knowledge of were each rocket landed with the police and the fire service being warned against any reference to the attack in communications passing over their wireless networks. Between then and 27 March 1945, 1,356 rockets were fired at London, forty-three at Norwich and one at Ipswich. Security over the location of ‘Big Ben events’ meant that deliberately leaked falsified information picked up by the Germans resulted in many of the weapons being calibrated to fall short of their intended targets. Even so, an estimated 7,988 civilians were killed and another 20,783 injured either by V1s or V2s and once again it was the police, this time with greatly reduced numbers, who were at the forefront in dealing with the aftermath.
Italy had surrendered on 28 September 1943 and Germany surrendered to the Western Allies on 7 May 1945. It was time to decide on the future need for police firearms and by 23 May there were suggestions from two of the District DACs that the time was right for the Met to adopt a revolver as its official weapon – it was evidently a safer weapon for police officers with virtually no training to carry. The Met had let the War Office have 1,000 of its Webley & Scott pistols between 1942 and the end of the war and that left barely enough original Met police weapons for the force to revert to their 1934 distribution. On the other hand the poor quality of the lend-lease weapons meant that new revolvers would have to be bought. Any finance available was needed for more important matters and in the end it was decided that the force would stick with the Webley & Scott pistol, although it was noted that ‘sooner or later we will no doubt have to change over to revolvers’. The change would come in 1956.
A Met return dated 25 May 1945 shows that there were 22,264 .32 calibre lend-lease revolvers still on issue along with six on loan to the War Cabinet Office and 1,494 in stock. In addition, there were 1,030 Webley & Scott pistols on issue with another 168 in stock, or so it was thought. At the time it was believed that only four weapons had been lost. It would have been five but one was later recovered. On 25 August 1942 HRH the Duke of Kent had been killed when his plane crashed in bad weather and his pistol was believed lost with him. In December it was found by his chauffer behind the back seat of his official car.
Three of the pistols had been written off as being ‘lost due to enemy action’ but the fourth was a weapon issued personally to Sub-Divisional Inspector Blenkin which had gone missing in July 1942. In his case the loss was deemed to have been through carelessness and the cost of a replacement was deducted from his pay. However, in March 1946 it would be discovered that another personal issue weapon, this time belonging to Sub-Divisional Inspector Galloway, could not be found either. Bizarrely, in its place was a Mauser 7.65mm pistol which no one could account for but by then Galloway had left to join the Allied Control Commission in Germany. In a probable example of war-weariness it was agreed that ‘no really useful purpose would be served by pursuing this enquiry’ and the matter was dropped.
On 31 July 1945 Abbiss issued General Memorandum 12/45 which informed the force that: ‘In future the .32 Automatic pistol will be regarded as the official Service firearm. Pistols and ammunition will be held at [Scotland Yard] and Stations on the pre-war basis [as notified on] 12th of June 1934’. In addition, all confidential and secret memoranda concerning the issue of additional revolvers, pistols and rifles were officially cancelled (indicated by ‘Cancelled vide 262A’ on the documentation). The .22 pistols were returned to the divisional shooting clubs. The Ross rifles and the Colt lend-lease revolvers were returned to the War Office where they were put into storage ready for the next war. The rifles, pistols and revolvers that had been surrendered during the war, and had been kept for police use, were returned to their previous owners if and when they could be traced. In many forces the leftover weapons, in assorted calibres, were kept for issue in emergencies.
An atomic bomb was dropped on Japan over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 with a second over Nagasaki three days later. Japan surrendered on 14 August. It was the dawn of a new age and with it gradually came the realisation that Great Britain, with its recent experience of being on the receiving end of the world’s first true ballistic missile, could be subjected to ‘nuclear rocket warfare’ at some time in the future. All the lessons learned over the past six and a half years seemed to no longer apply and trying decide what the role of the police would be under the ‘new conditions’ would exercise the minds of senior police officers from around the country on a newly formed ‘Police War Duties Committee’ of the Central Conference of Chief Constables for many years to come. But that is a story for another time – or perhaps even for a book!
By 1945 the number of police officers in England and Wales stood at about 41,500 men and 400 women in the regulars and 17,200 men and 3,700 women in the auxiliaries, a total of 62,800. However, the pensioners in the First Police Reserve (who had not already left as being well past the maximum retirement age of 65), the new police pensioners who had completed their full length of service but had not been allowed to leave, the Women’s Auxiliary Police Corps, the Police War Reserve and the full-time special constables could not wait to get out at the end of the war. Many were induced to stay on for a while but forcing them to remain proved to be more trouble than it was worth. By the end of 1945 the strength of the Met stood at about 12,000 regular officers and less than 2,000 auxiliaries, the lowest figure for more than sixty years, and most if not all other forces were in similar dire straits. Another thirty-one forces (and their records) would disappear in 1947 as a result. In grateful recognition of their service to their country a war-service gratuity of 10/- (50p) a month was awarded to the male auxiliaries. Women were awarded 6/8d (33½p).
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Were there any developments to do with police firearms in your force/area or its predecessors during this period of history? If so please contact mike.policehistory@yahoo.com.
© Mike Waldren