The Weapons of the Auxiliary Unit
The members of the Auxiliary Units patrols
were the first Britons to be armed with the Thompson sub-machine-guns which
were imported from the United States, the first to be issued with sticky bombs,
the first to get the PIAT anti-tank weapon, the first to have phosphorous
hand-grenades and the special tyre-bursting mines disguised as lumps of coal
and horse manure. Before anyone else they were given one of MI(R)'s
uglier weapons, the Switch No.8 AP - or as it was later know to soldiers in the
One sinister weapon which was given to the members of certain Auxiliary Units
patrols was a special .22 rifle - usually manufactured BSA, Winchester or Remington. This rifle, 
which was fitted with a powerful telescopic sight and a silencer, fired
high-velocity bullets. The
Resistance men who received these weapons were told that they were for sniping
at German officers and for picking off tracker dogs before they came too near,
but several members of the Resistance have admitted that they intended also to
use the rifles on Britons in their areas who they thought might collaborate
with the Germans. More recently it is thought that this rifle was for the assassination of our own people that could have proved to be "loose tongued" under torture.
The snipers' .22 became Auxiliary Unit standard issue. It was generally the only firearm carried on patrol because it was the only one that could be fired with a chance of getting away afterwards. The wandering zero of scopes was a problem but as the rifles generally retained their "iron sights", the scope could be removed if doubt about zero was an issue. Officers sent out from Coleshill noticed that the
telescopic sights needed constant realignment.
All Auxiliary Units’ men were issued with pistols but not,
as many of the members of the patrols believed, to use on themselves in a final
moment of desperation. Certainly this
was not what Mr. Churchill had in mind when he penciled in the margin in one of
Colonel Gubbins’s weekly reports, “these
men must have revolvers!”.
Rubber truncheons were also handed out to all members of patrols, and they were issued with thick rubber – soled agricultural workers’ boots, similar to those which were later given to the commandos. Outwardly, however, the members of the Resistance patrols managed to look to the casual observer like ordinary members of the Home Guard although they sometimes wore their Battalion badges, and many of them had their uniforms slightly altered to give them greater freedom of movement.
After 1941 most Auxiliary Unit members were given the Fairbairn Commando
dagger but many used and indeed preferred the hardier general purpose sheath knife obtained from ironmongers and home made or trench raid relics from the Great War, to the rather delicate Fairbairn. which suffered greatly if for example, you used to open a tin.
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Most information on this page was taken from "The Last Ditch" by David Lampe but has more recently been amended by Richard Ashley our Weapons Adviser. Picture of a Thompson M1928 sub-machinegun reproduced by kind permission of Bill Gibson.
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Coleshill House, Coleshill, Mabel Stranks, Highworth, Highworth Post Office, Colonel Gubbins, Auxiliary Units, Churchill's secret army, Special Operations Executive (SOE), Home Guard, The Countryman's Diary-1939, Peter Fleming, Ian Fleming, Pleydell-Bouveries, Sir Thomas Freake, Sir Henry Pratt, guerrilla warfare
