Andy Chatterton

It has its roots in two pre-war organisations, one set up by MI6, one set up by the British military.

By kind of May, just around Dunkirk, it's kind of up and running and being recruited very, very quickly across the countries in these kind of key vulnerable counties.

Yeah, training locally, obviously training to gain access to the targets that they would try and hit as the Germans came through.

They used the British Army as practice, which the regular troops did not enjoy because they were so often shown up as not being very good at guarding airfields or country houses, and also train at the auxiliary unit's

headquarters in a place called Coleshill House up near Highworth near Swindon and there they would go and train for a weekend again not being able to tell their wives and family where they're going but nonetheless go up there train and learn everything they need to know so going across fields at night where to place explosives on German tanks and planes how to take out a sentry silently with a knife all the stuff that you need to know to be effective.

Yeah, absolutely.

And quite tough day jobs.

I mean, lots of them are farmers and quarrymen and miners.

So during the day, just carrying on as normal.

And then at night and weekends, training to a really high standard in terms of their kind of guerrilla saboteur roles.

And they would live their normal lives right up until the point the Germans enter their town.

So if we're in Devon, for example, and the German invasion is taking place in the southeast, the guys in Devon would not become operational until the Germans are almost on the boundary of their town or village.

Nobody could know, not their closest family and friends.

And anyone who did happen to come across their operational base or ask too many questions would have to be added to a list of people that have to be assassinated as soon as the Germans came in.

Because their window of operation is so short, it's perceived to be around two weeks, they had enough rations for two weeks, that anything that had the potential to shorten that time, they had to deal with immediately.

So it sounds overly brutal, but actually, you know, looking at that bigger picture...

If Britain had fallen, that's essentially it.

A lot of the auxiliary unit members we've spoken to over the years kind of understood that bigger picture, that the sacrifice that they would have to make, their communities unknowingly would have to make, would have been worth it for the bigger picture.

They are the most remarkable structures.

They are underground.