Bows and Arrows
By PETER FLEMING
IRECEIVED last week an invitation to become president of a local society devoted to the sport of archery, and as I sat down to write a suitable letter of acceptance my mind went,back to what must, I am pretty sure, be the last occasion on which British soldiers on active service were equipped with bows and arrows.
It was in the summer of 1940. What was left of the B.E.F., less most of its equipment, was back in England. The Local Defence Volunteers had not yet been rechristened the Home Guard and many of them were still in the shotgun-and-pitch- fork stage. The merits of the Molotov cocktail as an anti-tank weapon were being widely canvassed in polite society; it con- sisted of a bottle filled with petrol. Thomson sub-machine guns, hitherto in the minds of the British exclusively associated with the Chicago underworld, were beginning to trickle into the country; some battalions were reputed to have as many as two of these weapons. , The infantry were equipped, parsimoniously, with the Boyes anti-tank rifle, which was incapable of penetrating a fourteen inch brick wall at a range of one hundred yards. ,.
Crouched in the ha-has of requisitioned country houses, devoted madmen tested out strange, newly improvised weapons: fougasses and spigot mortars, and great catapults which lobbed phosphorus grenades—with any luck—into the hard tennis court. These places were called Station Umpty-nine and were shrouded in secrecy. In the neighbourhood of airfields, lorries with their sides reinforced by concrete deputised for' armoured cars. Open -spaces bristled with poles and butts of timber, and farmers were urged, as a further precaution against air- borne landings, to site their hay-ricks in the middle of the fields. A vast but not very formidable fosse was dug all round the southern outskirts of London; it was known, hopefully, as the Stop-Line. Above the capital, like palm trees sprouting from a surrealist oasis, invigilated the barrage balloons, argent and docile.
Twelve Corps, who were responsible for the defence of Kent and half Sussex, held the sector most obviously threatened by invasion. The troops were thin on the ground and under- equipped, and the Corps Commander (General " Bulgey " Thorne) had to envisage at least the possibility that the Ger- mans might establish a bridgehead. which he would be unable to contain, and thus force him to withdraw to previously pre- pared positions (surely the most ominous words in the military vocabulary) behind the Stop-Line. Anything likely thereafter to delay or interfere with the enemy's .preparations to assault the Stop-Line would clearly be of value; and I found myself charged with the duty of organising some sort of guerrilla force which would allow itself to be overrun by the invaders and thereafter harass them to the best of its ability. It was a sen- sible idea, and was shortly afterwards taken up in a big way by Home Forces and became a small but integral feature of the nation's strategy against invasion. I was given a small detachment of Lovat Scouts, two leading aircraftmen with portable wireless sets and a sapper subaltern (the formidable Mike Calvert). This was a nucleus to which in time we precariously linked a network of picked sub-units of the Home Guard, who would in theory—after fighting like lions in their normal role—withdraw to well-stocked hide-outs in the woods when their localities were, overrun by the Ger- mans. The whole scheme in its early stages was typical of the happy-go-lucky improvisation of those dangerous days, and though we gradually built it up into something fairly solid I doubt if we should have been more than a minor and probably short-lived nuisance to the invaders.
My own small force was based in a huge tract of woodland on top of a ridge, and we had not been there very long before I procured, at the taxpayers' expense, two large bows and a supply of arrows and told the Lovat Scouts to learn how to use them. This measure was perhapS not as silly as it sounds, for the following reasons: Our chances of doing any good at all depended to a large extent on the accuracy with which we foresaw what conditions would be like under a German occupation. Our own base was remarkably secure. It consisted of a large underground cham- ber fitted with bunks and well stocked with rations, ammu- nition and demolition stores. But our greatest protection was the huge, rambling wood in the heart of which this Peter Pan- like lair had been excavated. There were, or there hadateen, a number of rides through this wood, and these were marked on the Ordnance Survey map (which of course would be avail- able, to the Germans); but superimposed on the somewhat irregular lay-out of the rides was a more recent and completely aimless pattern of tracks made by tractors extracting timber— or rather not so much extracting it as collecting it at points within the wood to await removal along one or other of the rides. Although they were well-defined, none of these timber- tracks led, for practical purposes, anywhere, and the whole Wood was such a labyrinth that, when a neighbouring battalion deployed two companies against us on an exercise designed to perfect their technique in mopping up parachutists, the left hand company finished up on the right and the right hand company on the left. One section actually marched over our heads while we sat in our hide-out.
From this friendly jungle we reckoned we should be able to operate with much convenience at night, and we made a parti- cular study of the approaches to various large country houses which.stood on or near its outskirts and which were likely to be used as headquarters by German units or formations. By day, however, we expected that we should have to lie up, and the question then arose of what action we should take against any enemy who entered the wood. Merely to lie low until they had gone away again would be bad for our morale and mean neglecting an opportunity of harassing the invader, which was what we were there for. On the other hand, to engage the enemy with our normal weapons would advertise our presence in the wood and might lead to the destruction of our base.
This, in theory, is where the bows and arrows came in. For whatever purpose and in whatever strength the enemy entered the wood—whether we were dealing with a solitary botanist or a fighting patrol—we knew that he would move on the rides and tracks and we knew that some of him would get lost. If he presented a target at all, he would present it at very close range; and it was at least on the cards that circumstances would arise in which a silent arrow could advantageously be used when a noisy bullet could not.
We realised, of course, that if we did implant an arrow in one of our would-be conquerors, the chances were against our implanting it in a vital spot, and that he might get away and give the alarm; but we consoled ourselves with the belief that a casualty of so unexpected a nature would have a dis- tracting effect upon the mind of the German High Command and that exaggerated versions of it would arouse awe and mis- givings in their troops. Our purpose was to cause delay and diversion, and the diversionary effect on a modern army of wounding one of its soldiers with an arrow is probably less trivial than the effect of shooting half-a-dozen of them dead with more orthodox missiles.
In the end the only living target ever engaged with our bows was a fallow deer, which I hit far back, followed up for hours and finally lost. We did however find a real though limited use for bows and arrows on night operations. You strap a detonator and a short length of safety-fuse to the arrow and, having reached the perimeter of the position you are attacking, you light the safety fuse and fire the arrow over the heads of the outposts, thus causing a brisk and unexplained .explosion within their lines and often creating a certain amount of confusion.
This was (as far as I know) the nearest the British soldier has come for several centuries to discharging an arrow in anger; and on the whole I think it is probably just as' well that in 1940 he never had to come any nearer.
Previous page
