Auxiliary Units
British stay-behind units in the Second World War
The Auxiliary Units, Home Guard Shock Squads or GHQ Auxiliary Units were specially trained, highly secret quasi military units created by the British government during the Second World War with the aim of using irregular warfare in response to a possible invasion of the United Kingdom by Nazi Germany. With the advantage of having witnessed the rapid fall of several Continental European nations, the United Kingdom was the only country during the war that was able to create a guerrilla force in anticipation of an invasion.
Auxiliary Units relied on pre-prepared bunkers known as "operational bases", into which they were to disappear in the event of invasion. They would not maintain contact with local Home Guard commanders, who were to be wholly unaware of their existence. Auxiliaries would not participate in the conventional phase of their town's defence, but would be activated once the local Home Guard defence had been ended to inflict maximum mayhem and disruption over a further brief but violent period. They were not envisaged as a continuing resistance force against long-term occupation. The secrecy surrounding the insurgent squads meant that members "had no military status, no uniforms and there are very few official records of their activities".
Service in the Auxiliary Units was expected to be highly dangerous, with a projected life expectancy of just twelve days for its members, with orders to either shoot one another or use explosives to kill themselves if capture by an enemy force seemed likely.
Urged on by the War Office, Prime Minister Winston Churchill initiated the Auxiliary Units in the early summer of 1940. This was to counter the civilian Home Defence Scheme already established by SIS (MI6), but outside War Office control.
“Auxiliary Units” enters the record as british stay-behind units in the Second World War. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Auxiliary, Units and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2400296. The Library of Congress control number is nb2010003446. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1940.
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This entry incorporates text from “Auxiliary Units” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.