The little-known story of the British Resistance Organisation (BRO)
Autumn, 1944: Russia has fallen, the D-Day landings have failed and the German Wehrmacht has invaded Britain. The country is now under enemy occupation. Panzer divisions and columns of Nazi troops sweep westwards, striking fear into a demoralised nation whose forces lie decimated across the shell-pocked landscape of mainland Europe.
In a remote valley in the Black Mountains of Wales, farmers’ wives awake to discover that the men of the village have vanished during the night. Like women across Britain, they silently suspect their husbands, brothers and sons have melted away to join the Resistance, whose members are hiding out in the hills and woods, awaiting the inevitable arrival of German troops.Although this might sound like just another imagined account of what might have been had Britain failed to hold Hitler at bay, Resistance, a new British film starring Michael Sheen, famous for his portrayals of Tony Blair and Brian Clough, shines a light on the little-known story of the British Resistance Organisation (BRO). This top-secret and highly trained civilian army was designed to wreak havoc on occupying enemy forces.
The author of the novel the film is based on insists this fictional past is based on ‘what was, at one point in time, an all too possible future’.
Owen Sheers explains his book was inspired by the stories he heard of wartime farmers in his native Wales going on training missions in the dead of night, armed with caches of weapons that were stashed away in elaborate underground bunkers in the woods. Such stories, it transpires, were not the stuff of local folklore, but rooted in the truth.
Established in 1940 on the orders of Winston Churchill, the British Resistance Organisation was the government’s highly classified response to the threat of imminent invasion following the evacuation of British troops at Dunkirk. Churchill stated that regular defences required ‘supplementing with guerrilla-type troops’ that would ‘be responsible for hitting the enemy in the comparatively soft spots behind zones of concentrated attack’.
The aim was to deny mobility and disrupt vital supply lines.
‘The order for a government-funded and -trained insurgency was extremely controversial,’ says Sheers. ‘It casts a chilling new light on Churchill’s 1940 speech in which he vowed that “we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”. Churchill was effectively advocating continuing acts of sabotage regardless of the reprisals.’
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