MoD - Ministry of Defence

.

[MoD-SOE-MIR-MD1] Churchill's Toyshop: WW2 Deadly Inventions - War Stories > .
Explosive Toffee Apple Invention - Churchill's Toyshop | Discovery UK > .

Giles Milton - Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare - PA T > .
PIAT: Anti-tank weapon could punch through steel - Forces > .

The Ministry of Defence (MOD or MoD) is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It is responsible for implementing the defence policy set by the government and serves as the headquarters of the British Armed Forces.

During the 1920s and 1930s, British civil servants and politicians, looking back at the performance of the state during the First World War, concluded that there was a need for greater co-ordination between the three services that made up the armed forces of the United Kingdom: the Royal Navy, the British Army and the Royal Air Force. The formation of a united ministry of defence was rejected by the coalition government of David Lloyd George in 1921, but the Chiefs of Staff Committee was formed in 1923, for the purposes of inter-service co-ordination. As rearmament became a concern during the 1930s, Stanley Baldwin created the position of Minister for Co-ordination of Defence. Lord Chatfield held the post until the fall of Neville Chamberlain's government in 1940. His success was limited by his lack of control over the existing Service departments, and his lack of political influence.

On forming his government in 1940, Winston Churchill created the office of Minister of Defence, to exercise ministerial control over the Chiefs of Staff Committee and to co-ordinate defence matters. The post was held by the Prime Minister of the day until Clement Attlee's government introduced the Ministry of Defence Act of 1946. After 1946, the three posts of Secretary of State for War, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Secretary of State for Air were formally subordinated to the new Minister of Defence, who had a seat in the Cabinet. The three service ministers — Admiralty, War, Air — remained in direct operational control of their respective services, but ceased to attend Cabinet.

From 1946 to 1964, five Departments of State did the work of the modern Ministry of Defence: the Admiralty, the War Office, the Air Ministry, the Ministry of Aviation, and an earlier form of the Ministry of Defence. Those departments merged in 1964, and the defence functions of the Ministry of Aviation Supply were merged into the Ministry of Defence in 1971. The unification of all defence activities under a single ministry was motivated by a desire to curb interservice rivalries and followed the precedent set by the American National Security Act of 1947.

MD1: Major-General Sir Millis Rowland Jefferis KBE MC (9 January 1899 – 5 September 1963) was a British military officer who founded a special unit of the British Ministry of Supply which developed unusual weapons during the Second World War.

Jefferis started working on sabotage devices for the "Military Intelligence Research" (MIR). When MIR was combined with other hush-hush elements to form the SOE, Jefferis' unit was not included and it instead became a department in the Ministry of Defence; the only unit of the Minister of Defence (The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill) and was known as "MD1", ultimately based in a house called "The Firs" in Whitchurch near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire England.

The unit was responsible for the design, development and production of a number of unique special forces and regular munitions during the Second World War. It gained the nickname "Winston Churchill's toyshop".

Jefferis was an explosives expert and engineer, but lacked the ability to manage men well. He was assisted in the management of MD1 by a wily assistant – Major Stuart Macrae, whose book Winston Churchill's Toyshop, is still one of the few published works on this unique unit.

Over the period of the Second World War, MD1 was responsible for the introduction into service of a total of 26 different devices. Their designs include the PIAT, the Sticky bomb and one of the first magnetic Limpet naval mines.

Through the application of the Squash head and HEAT technology they had a role in the development and production of Lt-Col Stewart Blacker's Blacker Bombard, the PIAT (Blacker's smaller version of the bombard) matched to a hollow charge warhead, Hedgehog (effectively an adaption of the Bombard spigot mortar principle working with the Navy's Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development) and tank variants including the AVRE with its "Flying Dustbin" 230mm Petard spigot mortar, and a bridge-laying tank.

Jefferis developed the idea of the squash head further. His most ambitious project was a bomb designed to sink capital ships, his ideas were put forward by himself and Lord Cherwell in 1944 and coincided with the Admiralty's interest in developing a homing bomb for use against the Japanese. The development of this weapon was supported by the Air Staff and MAP who allocated it a higher priority that any other anti-capital ship weapon. When the war ended, development of the 'Cherwell-Jefferis' bomb was continued under the code names Journey's End and Blue Boar.

Jefferis' development of the hollow charge led ultimately to the same design being used, after refinement by James Chadwick, in the core of the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki.