Scotland on the Frontline E-Book

Dr Chris Brown

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 235

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Traditionally Scotland has made a contribution to Britain's wars well out of proportion to her population and her military achievements are recognised throughout the world. 'Scotland at War' provides an outline of Scotland's war effort drawing on extensive photographic evidence from commercial, state and personal collections, looking beyond the experience of individual regiments to provide a wider picture of the experience of the Scottish soldier, sailor and airman in the struggles against Germany, Japan and Italy. This book will provide any teacher or student of military history an insight into what it was really like at the Front.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1    The Scottish Soldier

2    Before the War

3    The Phoney War

4    The Desert

5    Italy

6    Northern Europe

7    Training and Preparation – and a Little Leisure

8    The Far East

9    Into the Bag

10    After the War

Further Reading

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A short book – or even a very long one for that matter – cannot possibly touch on every aspect of Scotland in the Second World War. It can do no more than touch on a handful of operations, units and individuals. If this book can raise a little money for the Erskine Hospital and raise a little bit of awareness of Scotland’s experience of the greatest conflict in history it will have served its purpose and, hopefully, have justified the trouble that many institutions and individuals have gone to in the provision of the memoirs, photographs and artwork that appear here. I am indebted to a great many people and associations including Tony Banham and Steven Foster of the Far East Prisoners of War Association; Jack Burgess of the Scottish Saltire Aircrew Association; the Museums of the Royal Scots; Major Robin MacLean of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Museum; the Black Watch; Rod MacKenzie at the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders; Ian Martin at the King’s Own Scottish Borderers; the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department; Jonathan Moffat of the Malayan Volunteers Group; John Pollock; Heather Johnson; Martin Langford of the Royal Armoured Corps (Bovington Tank Museum); Tempus Archive; Jo de Vries at The History Press; Sutton Publishing; Sarah McMahon at the Random House Group; Louise Miller; Kevin Turner and Elaine Jeffrey of the Glasgow Herald and Evening Times; Alex Hewitt of The Scotsman and Writer Pictures; ‘Trond’ of NF Stamps; the Daily Telegraph; Jenny Murray of the Shetland Museum; Krystyna Kennedy of the Erskine Hospital; the two soldiers who wished to remain anonymous (but you know who you are); Sir Simpson Stevenson; the ‘on-line museum’ of 51st Highland Division; Brid Hetherington of Cualann Press; Bill Simpson; Squadron Leader Bruce Blanche; David Ross; Marcus Geddes; Keith Chalmers-Watson; Professor Dugald Cameron; Roddy Macgregor and the 602 (City of Glasgow) Museum Association for the photographs of 602 and 603 Squadrons, RAF; Jack Amo of the Regimental Museum of the Canadian Scottish Regiment; Andy Leishman of the Royal Highland Fusiliers; Rab Hailstones; Sergeant Gorman of the Scots Guards; Pete Rogers; Geoff Murray and Peter Copland of the Commando Veterans Association; ‘Jon’ of the Paradata team at the Airborne Assault Museum; Anne MacGregor; my son Robert who provided me with a scanner, laptop and the solution to several computer problems.

If I have missed anybody out (and there are so many people who have helped that I almost certainly have) and for those who contributed material that has not been used, please accept my heartfelt apologies as well as my gratitude. My thanks are also due to the members of my family who, yet again, have borne with fortitude my endless wittering about war and history: Charis and Alex; Chris and Mariola; Colin and Juliet; my late father-in-law Robert Smith; my parents Peter and Margaret Brown; my brother Peter; and most of all my wife Pat; and, of course, the sounding board for all my thoughts, my Irish Terrier, Sam.

I have made a lot of use of the work of Colonel J. Kemp, who published a history of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, and of a website dedicated to 15th Scottish Reconnaissance Regiment. Colonel Kemp’s work is more than just a collection of anecdotes and diary entries from members of the battalions; it includes material from the official war diaries of the different battalions and from several units and individuals that served with or beside fusilier battalions and is therefore a very full picture of the life of the regiment. The various battalions of the fusiliers served in many theatres – Africa, Burma, Italy, northern Europe and in the little-known, though important, Madagascar campaign against the Vichy French colonial army. The variety of stations and tasks allocated fusiliers were fairly typical of Scottish regiments generally and I have chosen them as a sort of ‘control sample’ to show the experience of one regiment over the years from 1939 to 1945. In a sense, I have used Colonel Kemp’s book as a prose equivalent of a photograph album, using images from this or that theatre to illustrate the process of the war, not from the point of view of one individual, but from that of the thousands of men who served in the Royal Scots Fusiliers. I have used the web-published account of 15th Scottish Reconnaissance Regiment as a second ‘control sample’ to try to give an impression of the experience of one unit over a relatively short period in one theatre of the war – the campaign through northern Europe. The publishers of Colonel Kemp’s history have been defunct for some decades, and efforts to locate a copyright holder have proven unsuccessful. I have no doubt at all that the colonel would have been pleased to see his material get another airing more than half a century after publication and that he would have been more than happy to know that his work was being used to support a cause like the Erskine Hospital. I have made several equally unsuccessful attempts to make contact with the owners or administrators of www.15threcce.org and the excellent online ‘Virtual Museum’ of the 51st Division. I hope both the colonel and Captains Kemsley and Riesco (the original compilers of the 15th Reconnaissance Regiment material) and the compilers of www.51HD.co.uk would approve the extracts I have chosen.

INTRODUCTION

Given the very large number of Second World War books that appear in our bookshops every year, one might be forgiven for wondering if there was any possible avenue that had yet to be explored and therefore what possible point there could be in publishing yet another volume on the conflict of 1939–45.

An important part of the rationale for writing this book has been to raise money for the Erskine Hospital for disabled veterans and at the same time raise awareness of the valuable work that has been carried out there since its foundation in 1916. One of the tragedies of both the First and Second World War was the failure of successive governments to honour their obligations to those who sustained physical and emotional wounds. That failure continues to have an impact on men and women who served in the Second World War. The Erskine Hospital has been doing what it can to redress the balance for nearly a century. If this book does a little to help then the effort involved will have been well worthwhile. The Erskine Hospital exists to help those who have served their country on the battlefield; the rights and wrongs of going to war are not the issue. This is not really a question of charity, more a question of fair play. By purchasing this book you will have made a contribution to the Erskine project; if you feel moved to do something more to help our veterans I shall be personally very grateful.

The other major motivation for writing this book has been to raise awareness of Scottish service in the Second World War. Ever since the war ended, and increasingly over the past forty years or so, there has been something of a tendency to see the 1939–45 war as the triumph of the men of the English army. It is a phenomenon that can even be identified in the genre of popular songs. It is now nearly forty years since Lennon and McCartney penned the lyrics to A Day in the Life, which includes the lines: ‘I saw a film today, Oh Boy/ The English army had just won the war …’

5 Troop, No 2 Commando march to war, Dumfries. (Collection of Pete Rogers/Courtesy of the Commando Veterans Association)

Clearly, no one would look to the Beatles as a historical source or to justify a particular view of the events of the past, but the words of the song are not far removed from the perception of the Second World War held by a significant proportion of the book-reading public, not only in England, but all over the world – or at least in those places where there is no clear distinction between the terms ‘British’ and ‘English’. The perception that the men of the ‘English army’ won the war does a disservice to the hundreds of thousands of men who served in the RAF and the Royal Navy, not to mention the many women who served in uniform.

It might also be less than warmly received by the other countries that spent blood and money to bring down Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperialist Japan. It is rather disparaging not only to the Scots, Welsh and Irish, but to the many Canadians, Indians, East, West and South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders, Americans, Poles, Czechs, Fijians, West Indians, Nepalese, Malaysians and others who served in British and Commonwealth units.

Even among those who are aware of Scotland’s participation in the war there is often very little idea of the breadth or scale of Scottish involvement, which is remarkable given that something like 40,000 Scottish people lost their lives and many, many thousands more were wounded, both physically and emotionally. There is, for example, a relatively common perception that Scots served in the Highland Division alone, even though, in fact, there were other Scottish formations in the British Army – the 9th, 15th and 52nd divisions. Many Scottish infantry and armoured units served in other formations; battalions of the Scots Guards served with the Guards Armoured Division and 7th Battalion King’s Own Scottish Borderers in the 1st Airborne Division to cite just two examples. Many Scots served in the Royal Artillery, the Royal Engineers, the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, the Commandos – No 2 Commando was largely Scottish – the Royal Army Service Corps and, indeed, in every corps and department of the Army. Naturally, large numbers of Scots also served in the Royal Navy, the Royal Marines and the RAF. They did not do so, by and large, in specifically Scottish units, but they did constitute a disproportionately large number of personnel serving in the regular military units in existence at the start of the war.

It is my hope that this book will also serve a useful function for Scottish schoolteachers. Although some study of the Second World War is virtually compulsory in Primary 6 and/or Primary 7, there is a singular lack of suitably focused material for the purpose and the approach that has developed in most schools is to look exclusively at the Home Front. Children look at rationing and evacuation, though in reality not that many Scottish children were evacuated at all and few of them stayed away from home for very long. One has to question the validity of getting Scottish children to go through the motions of being ‘evacuees’ as a useful learning experience. Even the Home Front is seldom really explored; most Scottish children are aware of the Blitz, but only as something that happened in London or, in a few cases, in Birmingham and Coventry. Bombing raids on Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the wholesale destruction of Greenock and Clydebank do not generally make it to the classroom. Few people anywhere are aware that the first bombs that fell on Britain fell in Shetland. Scottish children are, as a rule, quite unaware that the Battle of Britain was not fought exclusively over London and the Home Counties.

The women who served in the Armed Forces are often overlooked, despite their making an invaluable contribution to intelligence, aerial photographic interpretation, medical services and many other functions. (Daily Mail)

Lerwick experienced its first air raid when six Heinkel IIIs attacked the harbour on 22 November 1939. (Courtesy of the Shetland Museum)

The first German aircraft destroyed in the Second World War was a Junkers 88 fighter-bomber; it was shot down by Flight Lieutenant George Pinkerton over the River Forth. In one of those ridiculous situations that arise from petty policy decisions and book-keeping procedures, one of the greatest ‘aces’ of RAF history, Archie McKellar, does not appear on the Battle of Britain Memorial since he was killed eight hours after the official end of the battle. Few Scottish children know that the many great convoys of warships, troopships and supply vessels that took part in the Battle of the Atlantic started or ended their journey at Glasgow or Greenock rather than Liverpool or Manchester, or that many of the aircraft that flew missions to protect those convoys operated from Scottish airfields.

Flight Lieutenant Cardell, 603 Squadron. (Courtesy of 603 Sqn RAFVR)

Flight Lieutenant Patrick Gifford of 603 Squadron and ‘Red Section’ turn to attack a Ju88 attempting its escape after dive bombing Royal Navy ships near the Forth Bridge on 16 October 1939. This was the first enemy aircraft to be shot down in British airspace during the Second World War. (Painting reproduced by kind permission of Prof. Dugald Cameron)

Flight Lieutenant John Cruickshank attacks a German U-boat on 17 July 1944. Although the Catalina of 210 Squadron sank the enemy submarine, it was damaged by return fire which killed one crew member and injured the others. Cruickshank, born in Aberdeen, was extensively and badly wounded but continued to fly the machine until he was satisfied that it was on the right heading for its base at Sullom Voe. The trip back took over 5 hours. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for his courage. (Painting reproduced by kind permission of Prof. Dugald Cameron)

There can be no denying that there is a real value to studying the effects of the war at home. It is desirable that children should have some understanding of the war as it affected the communities in which they live, but it does rather lead to a study of the war in which – to use a phrase that will be familiar to some readers – ‘nobody mentions the war’, or more accurately no one mentions that the war involved fighting. Even if they do, discussion of the actual combat seldom strays beyond northern Europe. Perhaps this is an inevitable cultural consequence. Our political, economic and social focus is centred more on European affairs than was the case in the past.

This Eurocentric view may or may not be inevitable, but it is surely not altogether desirable, and certainly not to the extent of marginalising the global nature of the conflict. Conversations with both teachers and pupils have provoked surprised reactions that Scottish soldiers, sailors and airmen fought in Italy, Egypt, Libya, Greece, Madagascar, Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, India, Tunisia, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Yugoslavia, Hong Kong and in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. They are even more surprised to learn that Scots took part in the occupation of Iceland in May 1940 – probably the only really successful operation in Europe that year – or that they served in what we now call Indonesia and Vietnam when the war had finished. The same conversations have also provoked considerable surprise that Scottish women served in all of these locations and that they served in a wide variety of roles, not just as nurses, but as communications staff, drivers, administrators, in anti-aircraft units and, in the UK at least, as pilots, ferrying newly built aircraft to operational stations.

An anti-aircraft gun from the Second World War in Shetland. (Courtesy of the Shetland Museum)

The lack of knowledge of the war years among children is mirrored in their parents. Thirty or forty years ago almost anyone who was too young to remember the war was aware of it from the conversations that they had overheard among those of their parents’ generation. Naturally this is no longer the case; beyond service reunions and care homes very few conversations nowadays begin with ‘remember when you couldn’t get such-and-such a thing because of the war …’ or ‘When I was in the Army in Burma …’ or ‘in the Navy in India’ or ‘in the Air Force in Iraq’.

1

THE SCOTTISH SOLDIER

Scots have had a long relationship with soldiering. From the late thirteenth century until the Union of the Crowns under James VI there was always the danger of war with England, war that was not always restricted to the British Isles. Many Scots served in English and French forces during the Hundred Years War and for some years in the 1420s an entire Scottish army served the French Crown. Many Scots found employment in other European wars, so much so that when the Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640 broke out the Scottish Government was able to raise substantial armies with a strong cadre of experienced officers and non-commissioned officers in a very short space of time, which were more than capable of dealing with King Charles’ Scottish supporters in 1639 and a projected English invasion in 1640. Scots served in large numbers in the Irish, English and Scottish conflicts that comprise the War of the Three Kingdoms. The wars brought about Scotland’s first regular army, named, like its counterpart in England, the New Model Army. The first regular army unit had, however, been raised some time before. In 1633 Charles I issued a warrant authorising Sir John Hepburn to raise a regiment from Scotland for service in France. Hepburn’s regiment included a number of men from a unit of Scots that he had led in Swedish service, and in a sense the regiment became the Royal Scots – the oldest and most senior formation in the British Army until its amalgamation with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in 2006 to form a single battalion in the new Royal Regiment of Scotland.

Scots served in foreign armies for a variety of reasons. Some joined up because of the possibility of economic gain and social advancement, some for sheer adventure, some to avoid the consequences of criminal activity. Some prospered and some did not, but soldiering has long been seen as a perfectly honourable career in Scotland.

Scots take their Scottishness with them wherever they go, and even within the context of British formations overseas, a considerable number of distinctively Scottish units were raised. This was particularly strongly developed in Canada, due largely to the very large number of Scottish immigrants in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Over the years there have been a total of fifteen Canadian Scottish infantry regiments and one air defence regiment. At different times Australia has had six Scottish regiments, including no less than two associated with the Cameron Highlanders – the 16th and 61st battalions. At least four battalions in the South African Army have adopted Scottish traditions at one time or another and New Zealand had the 1st Armoured Regiment, also known as the New Zealand Scottish.

When the Home Guard was first formed there were neither uniforms nor rifles to issue to the volunteers; men drilled with broom handles and in their own clothing for some months before equipment became available. (Scotsman Publications).

Scottish units, or discrete Scottish elements within units, could, at one time, be found among British colonial volunteer formations as far apart as South Africa and Hong Kong. This was not limited to army units in the Empire and Commonwealth; Liverpool, Tyneside and London have all had Territorial Army Scottish regiments at different times.

Even within the English line regiments there has often been a surprisingly large contingent of Scots. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries English regiments often found it hard to attract an adequate supply of men from their home areas and made good the shortfall by sending recruiting parties to Scotland and Ireland. Ireland tended to be more fruitful in terms of numbers, but the early advent of near-universal literacy in Scotland compared to any other country in the world made Scottish recruits desirable in a period when only a minority of working-class men could read or write.

Scottishness could even make its way beyond the boundaries of the British Army. In June 1859 a unit called the 79th or Cameron Highlanders came into being. They adopted Cameron of Erracht tartan trews or kilts and wore diced Glengarry caps. What is curious about the 79th is that they were raised not in Scotland, but in New York, and were a volunteer unit of the United States Army. They had no connection with the Cameron Highlanders of the British Army other than the fact that they liked the name and doubtless admired the reputation. It is not clear that the trews and caps lasted long once the American Civil War started in 1861, but more than 2,000 men of the 79th saw action at many of the great battles of the eastern theatre, including Bull Run, Antietam and Fredericksburg. The regiment was eventually disbanded in 1876.

A number of Gurkha and Indian regiments have in the past adopted certain Scottish attributes, most notably pipe bands, of which there are a number in both India and Pakistan to this day. The first Indian unit with a clear Scottish connection may have been the 45th (or Rattray’s) Sikhs, which was an infantry regiment of the British Indian Army. The 45th were originally known as the 1st Bengal Military Police Battalion, which was raised in April 1856 in Lahore by Captain Thomas Rattray. The regiment originally comprised a troop of 100 light cavalry and 500 infantry, half Sikhs and half Muslims, and saw service in Bihar and Assam.

Although the Scottish divisions did not come into being until the twentieth century, highland brigades were formed on a number of occasions, including the Crimean War, where the formation consisted of the 42nd Foot (the Black Watch), 79th Foot (Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders) and the 93rd Foot (the Sutherland Highlanders). The latter was commanded by Sir Colin Campbell and served with distinction at several engagements, such as when the Sutherlands famously repelled an attack by Russian cavalry at the Battle of Balaclava, and the regiment became the original ‘thin red line’. Campbell – who became Lord Clyde in 1858 in recognition of his exceptional leadership during the Indian Mutiny – was the son of a Glasgow carpenter, an illustration of the opportunities for social mobility afforded by the Victorian army.

The Egyptian Rebellion of 1882–85 saw the formation of another highland brigade from battalions of the Black Watch, Highland Light Infantry, the Camerons and the Gordon Highlanders. The brigade performed well despite heavy casualties at the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir.

A highland brigade was formed from the 2nd Seaforths, 2nd Black Watch, 1st Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the 1st Highland Light Infantry for service in the Second Boer War, 1899–1902. The brigade suffered heavy casualties at Magersfontein and Paardeberg. The Boer War led to the foundation of one of Scotland’s more unusual military institutions. Concerned that while the family of officers killed in action would probably still be able to afford to see to the education of their sons, but that the families of other ranks may not, Queen Victoria felt that some provision should be made for the education of the sons of ‘ORs’ (other ranks – privates, corporals, sergeants in the army, seamen and petty officers in the Royal Navy) and was instrumental in setting up a free boarding school for the sons of Scottish soldiers and sailors killed in action. Queen Victoria School opened at Dunblane in 1908 and continues to fulfil the function for which it was intended.

The years after the Boer War brought a wave of reform to the armed services, particularly the Army. The war in South Africa had shown that the British Army was not really equipped or structured to provide an army for any operations beyond the requirements of intervention in such conflicts as might arise within the Empire. In addition to reforming the reserve forces so that they could act as an effective supplement to the Regular Army in time of need, Haldane, with the considerable assistance of Douglas Haig, set about reorganising the Army so that a major force could be deployed as a single, coherent entity in a reasonably short space of time. One of the factors that propelled this initiative (though in reality it was long overdue anyway) was the Tangier Crisis of 1905–6.

The crisis had nearly brought France and Germany to war, essentially over the question of Germany’s growing imperial ambitions in Africa. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had agreed to support France militarily in the event of war, but Haldane recognised that the British Army was in no position to provide a force of the scale required to make a worthwhile contribution to a European war. The Haldane Reforms led to the creation of a revamped ‘Expeditionary Force’. The force was not an army kept in being for immediate deployment, but was a system for committing the existing units of an army to battle in a rational manner. The new system would have a permanent general staff (the Imperial General Staff) with a suitable body of technical and administrative personnel. The General Staff would have responsibility for ensuring that colonial, imperial and dominion forces would, by and large, have a common structure, as well as common offensive and defensive policies, and armament. They would be capable of an integrated strategic and tactical doctrine which would simplify the defence needs of the British Empire as a whole. The training of the British Army, and consequently the armies of India, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, would now be based firmly on the precepts and objectives laid down in Douglas Haig’s Field Service Pocket Book.

The structure that Haldane put in place was the one that governed the British Army in 1914 when the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was sent to the continent to face the Germans. Within weeks it had become apparent that the two corps of the BEF would need to be heavily reinforced by new recruits as well as by the reserve formations. It is not the practice in the British Army to raise new infantry battalions, but rather to raise second, third, fourth and subsequent battalions of existing regiments, and over the next four years each of the Scottish regiments would raise several battalions for war service, chiefly in France and Flanders, but also on other fronts. The First World War saw the creation and deployment of three Scottish divisions, the 9th, 15th and 51st, though many Scottish battalions saw service with other divisions and several English battalions served in Scottish divisions.

Wojtek, a Syrian brown bear who was adopted as mascot of the Polish Army. Wojtek was presented to Edinburgh Zoo in 1947. (Scotsman Publications)

The end of the war in 1918 led to wholesale demobilisation for the majority of the soldiers, sailors and airmen who had volunteered or been drafted for the duration. Despite the horrors of the trenches and a strong wave of pacifist feeling, soldiering continued to be a popular career choice for young Scots. Pay and conditions were not good, but unemployment was high and the prospect of foreign travel and adventure was attractive compared to poverty at home.

Overseas commitments were part of the problem when the war broke out in 1939. British ships, squadrons and regiments were scattered across the globe from China to the West Indies and could not simply be withdrawn to Europe. The Royal Navy was much larger and more powerful than the German Kriegsmarine, but had a much greater burden in the way of commerce protection and also had to contend with the threat of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific and the Italian Navy in the Mediterranean. The RAF and the British Army had worldwide commitments and although the RAF did have two high-quality aircraft in the Hurricane and Spitfire fighters, a great deal of the army’s equipment was old-fashioned to the point of obsolescence. Worse still, despite the training and conscription measures taken in 1938–39, with a combat strength of only nine divisions, the Army was desperately small in comparison with the seventy-eight divisions of the German Army. Worst of all, the strategic policies and tactical doctrines were a generation behind the times.