OPERATION FOXLEY
British Sniping and the Hunt for Hitler
Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany’s Führer, was very well aware that he was a marked man – and that it was a sniper that stood the best chance of killing him. As he told his first Gestapo chief, Rudolf Diels, in 1933:
One day a completely harmless man will establish himself in an attic flat along Wilhelmstrasse [in the centre of Berlin]. He will be taken for a retired schoolmaster. A solid citizen, with horn-rimmed spectacles, poorly shaven, bearded. He will not allow anyone into his modest room. Here he will install a gun, quietly and without undue haste, and with uncanny patience he will aim it at the Reich Chancellery balcony hour after hour, day after day. And then, one day, he will fire!1
It was a remarkably prescient description of the kind of assassin who would target victims in the later twentieth century. Hitler repeated his fear of death by sniper during one of his appearances at major party events while having lunch at the Berghof on 3 May 1942, with Martin Bormann recording his conversation:
In the midst of such crowds, it is easy for some fanatic armed with a telescopic-sighted firearm to take a shot at me from some corner or other; any likely hole or corner, therefore, must be kept under careful observation. During the hours of darkness police search lights must be so sited that their rays light up these danger-spots and are not, as happened to me in Hamburg, concentrated all the time on my own car. Narrow streets should, as far as possible, be avoided on official occasions; the five-metre-wide lane leading to the Kroll Opera in Berlin is potentially one of the most dangerous bits of road I know.2
Hitler was dismissive of the efforts of the thousands of security officers surrounding him whose attentions seemed more likely to attract assassins than dissuade them. He frequently drove them mad by ignoring their carefully planned schedules, changing his mind at the last moment on routes and modes of travel. As far as he was concerned this was the best way to protect himself. ‘The only preventive measure one can take is to live irregularly – to walk, to drive and to travel at irregular times and unexpectedly,’ he said
Hitler knew there was little he could do against a determined attacker and, until the last months of the war, was not prepared to hide away from his supporters:
As there can never be absolute security against fanatics and idealists on official occasions, I always make a point of standing upright in my car, and this method has again and again proved the truth of the proverb that the world belongs to the brave. If some fanatic wishes to shoot me or kill me with a bomb, I am no safer sitting down than standing up.
Several assassination attempts were made against Hitler through out the 1930s, but these mostly came from disaffected Germans. It was only in the months leading up to war that a Briton first thought of killing the Führer and that was by sniping at him. In 1938, Colonel Sir Noel Mason-MacFarlane was the British military attaché in Berlin and had witnessed Hitler’s triumphant entry into Austria in March of that year. Watching the German convoy full of heavily armed troops and armoured vehicles had sent a chill down his spine. He was convinced Hitler posed a threat to Britain and was determined to avoid another world war by doing something practical about it.
Mason-MacFarlane lived in Berlin at 1 Sophienstrasse, just a hundred metres from where Hitler regularly stood to review his troops. ‘All that was necessary,’ he recalled, ‘was a good shot and a high velocity rifle with telescopic sight and silencer. It could have been fired though my bathroom window from a spot on the landing some 30 feet [10 metres] back from the window.’3 Since he was a diplomat, Mason-MacFarlane’s house was within the security zone put round Hitler by his SS bodyguards and the noise of marching men and cheering would have disguised any noise from his rifle. He was quite prepared to pull the trigger himself.
‘He discussed the plan with me in the summer of 1938,’ said the Germany correspondent of the Times, Ewen Butler, ‘as I sat looking out of the window of his Berlin flat – the window from which his rifleman would have fired the shot which would have ended Hitler’s career.’ Both men believed the Führer’s personal security was a shambles and could be easily penetrated. Just weeks later, the British journalist got to within half a dozen metres of the Nazi leader outside the Anhalter station in Berlin:
In my case the Gestapo security arrangements had collapsed. I was not searched, although I had no right to be where I was and might have had several Mills bombs in my pocket. In that case I could have disposed not only of the Führer but of most of his accomplices. I told Mason-Mac about this and he reproached me bitterly for having missed such an excellent opportunity.4
Mason-MacFarlane reported his golden opportunity to Foreign Office officials in London but was told not to proceed. They said it was un-sportsmanlike to assassinate the dictator. More importantly, the mood of the moment was appeasement. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain wanted to avoid a war in Europe at any cost and preferred to do this by giving Hitler exactly what he wanted. Mason-MacFarlane was un repentant, however, saying in October 1938, just after the Munich agreement: ‘I regard that sheet of Munich notepaper with Hitler’s and Chamberlain’s signatures on it as already a “scrap of paper”.’5
Further British plans to assassinate Hitler in the early years of the war were discouraged by the Venlo Incident in November 1939. Tempted by the prospect of meeting German officers plotting to kill the Führer, two British Secret Intelligence agents working in then-neutral Holland drove to a rendezvous near the town of Venlo on the German border. Unfortunately, the meeting was a sting organised by the German Security Service, whose operatives kidnapped and interrogated the two British agents, gaining much information from them about the Allied intelligence network in Europe. Most damagingly of all, it made the British very wary of dealing with any Germans claiming to be part of a conspiracy to kill Hitler.
This caution continued until 1944 when discontent within German ranks was so widespread that the British felt confident they could again begin to trust information forwarded to them from German sources. It was at that moment that a series of very thorough plans was made to assassinate Hitler. Called Operation Foxley, this was devised by SOE – Special Operations Executive – under the command of Brigadier Colin Gubbins, Director of Operations. One of the chief weapons deployed by SOE would be the sniper’s rifle and it depended on the very high quality of British sniper training.
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Sniping in the British Army had rapidly developed in the First World War. As their officers were picked off with pinpoint accuracy by Germans using high-velocity sporting rifles equipped with telescopic sights, so the British retaliated by turning to their own hunting experts. Combining the talents of scouting, observation, and stalking, they placed an emphasis not only on accurate shooting but also on a mastery of fieldcraft. This included the development of a variety of camouflage and decoy techniques. Papier-mâché dummy heads were placed on the edges of trenches to distract German snipers, while the highland ghillie suit evolved into the scrim-decorated Symien Sniper Suit with hood.6 These lessons were resurrected in the Second World War by Lieutenant Colonel Nevill Armstrong.
Chief Reconnaissance Officer and Canadian Army Chief Instructor at the Second Army School of Scouting, Observation and Sniping in Flanders in 1915–16, Armstrong ended the First World War as Commandant of the Canadian Corps School of Scouting, Observation and Sniping in France in 1917–18. Twenty-two years later, he put his talents at the service of the British Army as Senior Instructor, Sniping Wing, at the Small Arms School, at Hythe and Bisley, and then as Commandant of the Royal Marine Snipers’ School. When he came to write up his knowledge in a book entitled Fieldcraft, Sniping and Intelligence, running to six editions up to 1944, Armstrong paid tribute to ‘that intrepid band of hunters, scouts and snipers’, members of the battalion intelligence sections of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914–18. The foreword to the book was written by Lord Cottesloe and reiterated the hunting analogy: ‘What indeed is the human animal in war but a special variety of soft-skinned dangerous game?’7
Armstrong’s book gives us a comprehensive record of the state of sniping in the British Army in the Second World War, but much of it was built on combat experience gained in the First World War. He even referred to the use of dummy heads. In Belgium in 1916, he recalled, he was asked to help out a brigadier whose soldiers were suffering heavy casualties from German snipers:
So we gave special training to two of his officers and sixteen men and sent them off. Some two weeks later we received a letter from this Brigadier, stating that the sniping had been checked and the tables turned, and that one of the most dangerous and persistent snipers had been spotted by using a camouflaged head, two of which we gave the sniping officer and trained him in their use. The head was carefully exposed and the Hun immediately bit, but missed with his first shot; the second shot, however, hit the dummy head in the eye and came out behind. By looking through the holes with a periscope the Boche was spotted in a tree and killed.8
Armstrong’s preferred sniping rifle was a First World War model – the P14 Lee-Enfield. First appearing in 1914, the gun included modifications from the P13, itself based on the Mauser front-locking lug bolt-action rifle. With greatly improved accuracy, it was set to take over from the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE) Mk III to become the standard British Army rifle, but with the beginning of the First World War, it was considered confusing to introduce a brand-new weapon at that moment. This attitude changed in 1915 with the enormous expansion of the British Army and a need for more guns. With British factories already busy, the manufacture of P14s was contracted out to the expert American gun-making firms of Winchester and Remington.9
Design glitches halted the wide acceptance of the P14. It was considered too long for everyday infantry use and its U.S. production meant spare parts were harder to find. As a result, the half-kilogram-lighter and 5-cm-shorter Lee-Enfield remained the primary British infantry weapon, but the superior accuracy of the P14 made it the first choice for British snipers using it with telescopic sights. Eighty years later, a former U.S. Army officer and firearms expert tested the P14 to see it how it compared with later rifles. The P14, he concluded, ‘is certainly as good as many sniper rifles seen in today’s armies. An L42A1, which is still used in the British Army in the 1990s, with similar ammunition will shoot similar groups, and it is just as long and heavy. I do not think the P14 sniper rifle is a great 600-yard-plus rifle, but for 400 yards or less it could be deadly even today.’10
With modified 1940 P18 telescopic sights, the P14 remained the best British sniping rifle in the Second World War, although Armstrong also conceded it was ‘heavier and less easy to handle’ than the SMLE Mk III, and its magazine held only five rounds, but none of this was a major problem for a sniper. Regarding the recruitment of soldiers as snipers, Armstrong had a very definite kind of man in mind. ‘Stalkers, keepers, poachers, prospectors, trappers, out-of-door people, hill and moorland farmers’, he put at the top of his list. ‘It is useless to try to make a sniper out of every man in a battalion.’ He wanted men who had first-class observational skills and could read a landscape. They should study the movement of mammals and birds and note how their actions can give away the presence of humans. Animals provided other clues too. ‘In position warfare we are very much like animals,’ he said. ‘We do the same thing more or less in the same way day after day.’11 Understanding the habits of a target was vital to a successful kill.
Outlines could prove a dangerous give-away and Armstrong spent much time recommending all forms of disguise. Camouflage had been taken up with enthusiasm in the Second World War and many official government manuals appeared covering every aspect of it, from hiding buildings, tanks and vehicles to protecting soldiers. Former surrealist artist Roland Penrose wrote a guide to camouflage for the Home Guard and in it he made the point that camouflage was not about selecting the right colour, but the correct texture. He also explained the technique of disruptive patterning, which meant breaking up the outline of a figure or object.
For the purposes of the Home Guard, Penrose had to choose readily available materials and he recommended that a cheap and quick sniping suit could be made out of hessian sacking in less than ten minutes:
If the seams are turned outwards, a jagged edge can be obtained. In painting them disruptive patterns will be found to be useful and as in nature the upper surfaces, such as the back of the hood, shoulders and back, may be kept darker in tone than the front. It is sometimes a good plan to make the pattern cut across the back and legs, as this part is likely to be most visible when a man is lying on the ground.12
When it came to using the urban environment for sniping, Lieutenant Colonel Armstrong recommended securing a room in an upper storey of a house. This would help protect the sniper from an enemy armed with hand grenades:
He should take up a position in the room which will give him an oblique line of fire protected by the wall of the room and well clear of the window. If unable to get a good view while standing on the floor of the room, the sniper can pull out a bed or chair or table, and for protection may possibly use mattresses, pillows, furniture etc.
A position in the rafters of a ruined house or behind rows of chimney pots also provided excellent cover for snipers. Further chapters in Armstrong’s book covered care and use of telescopic sights, sniping in attack and defence and at night, scouting, observation and landscape sketching.
It was not the only manual available for teaching sniping in the Second World War. Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard was an explorer and big-game hunter who founded the First Army School of Scouting, Observation and Sniping at Linghem in the Pas de Calais in 1916. He put all his knowledge into a book called Sniping in France, published in 1920. John Buchan, the best-selling thriller writer, then Times correspondent, encouraged Hesketh-Prichard and even raised funds for his sniping school.
It was Hesketh-Prichard who originated the use of dummy heads to fool enemy snipers:
The uses to which the heads were put were varied [he recalled]. They were most useful in getting the enemy to give a target. It was also possible, by showing very skilfully the heads of Sikhs or Gurkhas in different parts of the line, to give the German Intelligence the impression that we were holding our line with Indian troops, and I have no doubt they were considerably worried to account for these move ments.13
He described in detail how dummies could also be used to track shots by looking through the bullet holes left in the front and back of a fake head.
Early on, Hesketh-Prichard had faced prejudice against setting up his sniping school from superior officers who preferred the blunt impact of massed musketry rather than, what they termed, ‘an excess of accuracy’. ‘But this war,’ argued Hesketh-Prichard, ‘was largely a war of specialists [and] changed many things, and among them the accurate shot or sniper was destined to prove his extraordinary value.’ At first, the duty of British snipers in the Great War had been to dominate German snipers, destroy their morale, and make life in the trenches secure for their own comrades. Later in the war, as British forces took the offensive, the sniper was put out in front to keep enemy heads down while his companions consolidated their newly won positions. ‘Many a sniper killed his fifty Germans in a single day, and whether as a rifleman or scout, he bore a part more perilous than that of the rank and file of his comrades.’14
Hesketh-Prichard’s anecdotes in Sniping in France often turn on a hunting analogy and when it came to spotting the enemy he recommended the use of a telescope rather than field glasses. ‘Anyone who has tried to count the points on the antlers of a stag will know this,’ he concluded.
Hesketh-Prichard died in 1922, but his advice continued to inspire snipers over the following two decades. One of them was Captain Clifford Shore, a sniping instructor who saw action during Operation Overlord in 1944, and wrote With British Snipers to the Reich, first published in 1948. Shore referred to the game-hunting Hesketh-Prichard as the main inspiration behind sniper training in the Second World War. Along with Armstrong, Shore favoured the intuitive hunter-sniper over the trained marksman, saying that sniper instructors could quote many instances of ‘brilliant performers on the range at normal targets failing to retain that shooting capacity on “live” targets – game in general, deer – and Man!’
Generally, Shore was unimpressed with the employment of British sniping on the battlefield and felt that more could have been made of snipers on covert missions:
During the Second World War snipers were not used enough, and the real lone sniper was very seldom, if ever, used. Lone snipers could have been used in a deep penetrative role, well behind the enemy lines. Given guts, absolute fieldcraft ability, stealth, cunning, supreme confidence in his own prowess, and a splendid shot, the death and confusion that such a man could have caused in the enemy’s rear is inestimable.15
Shore feared that, in the months immediately following the end of the Second World War in Europe, a similar lone German sniper could cause havoc among the Allied occupiers. ‘In the forest areas of Germany a man knowing the country like the back of his hand could add many scalps to his totem,’ he warned, ‘and escape the dragnet which would be sent sweeping against him.’ Only a like-minded British sniper would be able to track him down.
It was just this kind of deep-cover sniping operation that SOE had in mind when they came to consider methods of killing Hitler in 1944.
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To kill Hitler, SOE followed the advice of Lieutenant Colonel Armstrong and concentrated on getting to know his daily habits. That way, a sniper could lie in wait for him, just as a hunter would track an animal. SOE focussed on the Führer’s daily routine at his favourite location – the Berghof – his mountain top lair near the town of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. It stood on the Obersalzberg and reminded the Nazi leader of the mountain landscape of his childhood in Austria. He claimed that it stimulated his imagination and gave him space to think. ‘All my great decisions were taken at Obersalzberg,’ Hitler recalled. ‘That’s where I conceived the offensive of May 1940 and the attack on Russia.’16
Hitler loved the outdoor life and his one main regret about becoming leader of Germany was that he could no longer pull on a pair of leather shorts and go hiking. In his early years at the Berghof, he would set off into the forest with a few friends, frequently bumping into hikers curious to see the man who claimed to be able to save Germany, but as he came close to power in 1933, more and more crowds were drawn to his Bavarian retreat, until it became a security problem. Land was bought, barbed-wire fences raised and the surrounding area divided into security zones patrolled ultimately by 20,000 SS body guards and soldiers. During the war, the Berghof was Hitler’s alternative power base, his other main residence after the Reich Chancellery.
For Operation Foxley, SOE made a thorough study of the area around the Berghof – its geography and its climate. Most of the land on the Obersalzberg was heavily wooded and hilly, making it a difficult place to guard and offering good cover for covert action by a sniper. The Berghof complex was known to contain members of Hitler’s elite bodyguard – the SS Begleit-Kommando. They slept in bedrooms in the same house and on the same floor as he did. Nearby were barracks containing SS Leibstandarte soldiers. An attempt on the Führer’s life near any of these buildings would be suicidal.
Instead, there were moments in the day when Hitler walked away from the main buildings in the compound and wanted to be more alone. It was at this point that the sort of lone sniper described by Captain Shore – with ‘stealth, cunning, supreme confidence in his own prowess’ – could target him.
The information about Hitler’s private daily movements came from German prisoners of war interrogated by SOE. One of these was a member of the SS Wachkompanie Obersalzberg – a bodyguard unit recruited from SS mountain troops and part of the Leibstandarte guard. The informers revealed that Hitler was a late riser, rarely getting up before 1000. Given a shave by his barber, he would then either go for a morning walk to the tea-house at Mooslaner Kopf for his breakfast or attend a conference. The stroll to the teahouse would take fifteen to twenty minutes at a normal leisurely pace. Most importantly he would walk alone. There was an SS guard at either end of the walk and one man would patrol the route, but Hitler hated seeing him. If he did, the Führer shouted at him ‘If you are frightened, go and guard yourself.’17
When Hitler arrived at the teahouse, he was given a break fast of milk and toast and then driven back to the Berghof. Probably because he felt safe within the Berghof environs, the Führer ignored his own advice of leading an irregular life to avoid assassins. That brief period of time when he didn’t wish to be observed in the woods appeared to be the first chink in his armour. In the SOE proposal for Operation Foxley, the planners outlined a possible assassination mission. Two separate snipers would cut their way through the Berghof perimeter wire fence and position themselves 100–200 metres away from Hitler’s route near the teahouse. They would arrive no earlier than 1000, so as to miss an earlier security dog patrol of the area.
The equipment to be carried by each of the snipers was listed by SOE and included a ‘Mauser sniper’s rifle, telescopic sight (carried in pocket), explosive bullets in a magazine, wire-cutters (for making hole in wire fence), HE grenades carried in haversack for close protection and assistance in making get-away’.18 The Mauser was the Karabiner 98k, a bolt-action rifle that was a shortened version of the First World War Mauser Gewehr 98. The 98k was the most common German infantry rifle in the Second World War and with an added Zeiss scope was a popular sniper weapon.
Interestingly, recent firing tests of the Karabiner 98k with Zeiss 1.5-power scope concluded that it was ill-balanced with poor optics and was probably intended less as an expert sniper’s rifle and more one designed to enhance the accuracy of the ordinary infantryman – ‘a marksman ship rifle’.19
The most important factor, as far as SOE was concerned, was that the rifle was German – not British. SOE had no wish to create a martyr out of Hitler by openly killing him, but if they blamed it on forces within the German Army, then that might work. The failed bomb plot against Hitler in July 1944 confirmed the existence of German resistance at a high level and provided good cover for a British assassination attempt. SOE considered the best operatives for such a mission would be Austrians or Bavarians with a grudge against Hitler, but the large number of foreign workers – especially Czechs and Poles employed on building work within the Berghof security zone – were also seen as potential recruits.
Any of these foreign agents could be given a fake uniform copied from detailed notes made on the outfits worn by Hitler’s various security forces at the Berghof. The operatives would be trained in sniping and sabotage techniques in Britain or by British instructors based abroad, then infiltrated into the Obersalzberg via Salzburg. From there, they would make contact with foreign workers who would smuggle them into the Berghof, or, wearing German security uniforms, they would penetrate the forest and fences surrounding Hitler’s residence.
If the teahouse snipers failed to kill Hitler, then a back-up unit would be placed in the woods to intercept Hitler in the car taking him up the hill later. For this, a sniper’s rifle was thought to be less useful. Instead, men armed with a PIAT rocket launcher or bazooka would blast him in the vehicle. The PIAT was reasonably light to carry and packed an enormous punch, able to penetrate through a dozen centimetres of armour plate of the sort used to protect Hitler’s Mercedes cars.
Other more elaborate assassination missions were designed for the Berghof, one of them being a combined arms aerial assault on the mountaintop complex. After an attack by low-flying bombers, aircraft would drop SAS paratroopers to kill Hitler. Such an option, however, would be too high-profile and could be easily traced back to Britain. The foreign operative with a sniper rifle was by far the preferred option.
Away from the Berghof, Operation Foxley considered killing Hitler in his mobile headquarters, an armoured train dubbed the Führer Special. Inside information about this came from a steward who had worked on the train. He revealed that Hitler was protected by at least twenty bodyguards, comprising his Begleit-Kommando SS elite, soldiers from the SS Leibstandarte, and Gestapo agents. Whenever he got off the train these men surrounded him. It was a formidable ring of steel to break through, but one weak point was thought to be the railway sidings at Klessheim, near the Berghof. A regular stopping point used to service Hitler’s train, the sidings were surrounded by thick woods and could provide good cover for a sniper armed with a high-velocity rifle. When Hitler stepped down from his carriage for a breath of fresh air, the sniper could shoot him. The main obstacle facing this attempt was that soldiers of the Führer Begleit-Bataillon were housed in the nearby Schloss Klessheim. Patrolling the landscape around the railway sidings, they would make it difficult for any sniper to get close to him. Bearing in mind the lower level of track security in Austria, SOE considered simply bombing the railway – with the subsequent derailment having a bigger chance of success.
In the end, events overtook Operation Foxley. The relentless advance of the Soviet Army on the Eastern Front demanded Hitler’s constant attention. Hitler flew out from the Berghof in mid-July 1944 to go to his battlefront headquarters at Rastenburg – the Wolf’s Lair – in East Prussia. His staff at the Berghof expected him to return to enjoy a holiday away from the fighting, but he never came back. Having narrowly avoided being blown up by his own generals a few days later, Hitler spent most of the last months of the war at Rastenburg before the proximity of Soviet soldiers forced him to flee to Berlin. With the Berghof remaining unused, the detailed plans by SOE to kill Hitler by sniper fire were redundant.
The SOE author of the Operation Foxley report is usually identified as Major H. B. Court. Recent research, however, suggests this may be a typing error and that the author was really Major H. D. Court – Harold Darlington Court – a military engineer.20 Major Court gained useful experience during the First World War in Bulgaria setting up observation posts looking out for enemy firing positions. The meticulous observational field craft skills he learned there, similar to those outlined by Lieutenant Colonel Armstrong in his Aldershot sniping manual, may explain why he selected a sniper as one of the best military technicians to kill Hitler.
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Despite the imagination shown by Operation Foxley and the central role to be played by British sniping, it is hard to disagree with Captain Clifford Shore that British snipers were generally underused as weapons directed against enemy commanders. In the event, no British snipers or foreign agents trained in British sniping were sent undercover to assassinate senior Nazis. It may well be that the terrible retribution suffered by Czech civilians as a result of the killing of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 by British-trained assassins dissuaded similar such ventures early on in the war. Certainly, by 1944, it was probably believed by the British that Hitler and his generals were doing a good enough job of losing the war that there was little value in hastening their end with a sniper’s bullet.
Notes
1. Quoted in P. Hoffmann, Hitler’s Personal Security (Da Capo Press, 2000), p. 24. See also R. Diels, Lucifer ante Portas: Zwischen Severing und Heydrich (Zurich, 1950).
2. Bormann notes, midday, 3 May 1942, Hitler’s Table-Talk (Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 453.
3. Quoted in Hoffmann, Hitler’s Personal Security, p. 99. See also Mason-MacFarlane Papers in Imperial War Museum, London.
4. E. Butler, ‘I talked of plan to kill Hitler’, The Times, 6 August 1969.
5. Mason-MacFarlane’s Berlin report on Sudeten transfer, 11 October 1939, in British National Archives, WO 106/5421.
6. Plate 5, The Principles and Practice of Camouflage, British Army pamphlet March 1918, Imperial War Museum, 182.7 K.37025. See also Tim Newark, Camouflage (Thames & Hudson, 2007), pp. 64 & 84–5.
7. Lt-Col N. A. D. Armstrong, Fieldcraft, Sniping and Intelligence (Gale & Polden, 6th edition, 1944), p. vii.
8. Ibid., p. 24.
9. T. Gander, Allied Infantry Weapons of the Second World War (Crowood Press, 2000), p. 16.
10. T. J. Mullin, Testing the War Weapons, (Paladin Press, 1997), p. 157.
11. Armstrong, Fieldcraft, pp. 23–4.
12. R. Penrose, Home Guard Manual of Camouflage (George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 98.
13. H. V. Hesketh-Prichard, Sniping in France, (Hutchinson, 1920), p. 7.
14. Ibid., p. 58
15. C. Shore, With British Snipers to the Reich (Greenhill Books, 1997), pp. 141–2.
16. Hitler’s Table-Talk, 2–3 January 1942, p. 165.
17. Operation Foxley, SOE report, British National Archives, HS6/624, p. 60. See also M. Seaman, Operation Foxley: The British Plan to Kill Hitler (Public Record Office, 1998).
18. Operation Foxley, SOE report, p. 66.
19. Ibid., pp. 114–15.
20. B. Ross, ‘The Foxley Report: Plotters against Hitler’, BBC History website.