Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  One of SOE’s precepts was that different nationalities must be kept apart, and at various times Czechoslovak and Polish students took over Traigh House – a white, solid looking building comfortably tucked in against a wooded bank and looking out over a beach to the sea, with the Sgurr of Eigg rising into the sky in a dramatic hook of rock on the horizon. One of the trainees, Antonin Petràk (later a general), never forgot the demanding PT sessions on the lawn in front of the house, or how he learned silent killing on the field behind.

  The instructors in the various schools included many eccentrics, among them Gavin Maxwell, who later became fascinated by otters and enthralled thousands of readers with his autobiographical Ring of Bright Water. Arriving at Arisaig in 1942, he soon gained an enviable reputation. ‘His knowledge of fieldcraft and minor tactics is an eye-opener,’ said one report. ‘His knowledge of weapons is first class.’ His lectures and demonstrations on the nature of night vision and hearing, the use of broken ground, approaching the enemy out of a low sun, and reading different footprints, were a revelation. He taught his pupils how to live off the land – for instance, by eating raw mussels and limpets; he could also behave explosively, and would ‘interrupt students’ ping-pong matches by bursting into the games room and blasting the ball in midair with a Colt .45’. According to Matthew Hodgart, another of the instructors, there was never any shortage of whisky in the training establishments:

  We used to drink like fish in the evenings after the day’s work and talk about everything under the sun. Looking back, that’s what it was all about – being young and alive in the most beautiful place in the world.

  The difficulties for civilians living in the Protected Area were well illustrated by the diary of Rosemary Bowman (later Rosemary Law), whose family home was Camusdarach Lodge, close to Traigh, on the coast between Arisaig and Mallaig. At New Year 1941 a telephone call came from the War Office saying that the house was being requisitioned immediately, along with the walled garden, a quarter of a mile away. The family moved out and squeezed into a cottage on the shore, where they spent much of the next three and a half years. They were allowed to visit the farmhouse and collect belongings from the garage, but barred from the lodge and its immediate environs. As they had no car, Rosemary’s father would walk into Mallaig and back, and once, in that round trip of eleven miles, he saw only three vehicles.

  Civilian and military lives were curiously mixed. The Bowmans’ farming tenant, Simon McLennan, continued to work the land, and delivered milk from his dairy herd to Mallaig every morning; but it was a fifteen-hundredweight army truck that collected the family’s laundry in a hamper and took it to Morar station, whence it went down by rail to Glasgow, to be washed by nuns. One day in the autumn of 1941 when the Bowmans went to sea for a picnic tea, a party of Czech students floated past chanting ‘The Song of the Volga Boatmen’.

  Next year martial activity increased. Rosemary remembered how ‘little parties of Poles or Czechs came tramping to and fro from Camusdarach across our shore at the cottage for their daily firing exercises on our bays’. Whenever the students fired out to sea, fishing expeditions became hazardous. One day Polish soldiers clustered on the rocks above the family’s harbour, throwing home-made bombs into the water. ‘Each explosion sent water about thirty feet into the air, and we thought that we should pick up dead fish, but when we went to collect them later, there were only shell-shocked eels floating on the water.’ Rumours sped up and down Lochaber – among them, one that a German, probably an escaped prisoner, was living in a cave near Arisaig and being secretly fed by sympathizers.

  The estate that suffered most was Achnacarry Castle, ancestral home of the Camerons of Lochiel, which early in 1942 became the centre for Commando training. There the regime was even more rigorous than at Inverailort. The tone was set the moment recruits came off the train at Spean Bridge and were launched on a forced, eight-mile march to the castle. Soon the environs of the castle were overrun by the army. The house itself became the Commando training headquarters, the officers’ mess and staff accommodation – and the four-storey building’s height offered scope for abseiling down the outside walls. The grounds sprouted Nissen huts and tents. Close by were small-arms and grenade ranges, and wooden building façades for instruction in street fighting. Obstacle courses added to the clutter, and climbing ropes dangled from trees, especially along the River Arkaig, which men crossed swinging Tarzan-style.

  In the owners’ absence, and without their knowledge, the main rooms of the house were decorated with wall paintings several feet wide. Although not perhaps what the Camerons would have chosen for themselves, the pictures were attractively done in watercolour, straight onto the plaster surfaces, and ranged widely in theme, from mermaids and old-fashioned sailing ships at sea to the Rock of Gibraltar and modern military subjects featuring aeroplanes and landing craft.

  Already, in 1746, after the battle of Culloden, British troops had once burnt the castle to the ground; and now the fine, castellated house, built of grey stone, which had replaced the original early in the nineteenth century, was again set on fire by troops in the middle of the night – but by accident, rather than intention. Although the blaze was put out, part of the roof was destroyed.

  Far more damaging was another conflagration, which started at lunchtime on 27 April 1942, high on the hill opposite the house, at a spot where students had been rock-climbing. Fanned by a strong east wind, the blaze spread through the old, woody heather and ignited the fir, spruce and Caledonian pine, with disastrous results. It also got into the peat, which kept it going, and along Loch Arkaig alone more than 3000 acres of woodland were destroyed.

  Two days later Lochiel’s secretary sent an urgent letter to the Command Land Agent in Edinburgh:

  I have to inform you that the whole of Lochiel’s Old Forest, consisting of very valuable Pine Trees, has been completely destroyed, from Achnacarry to the head of Glen Maillie – a distance of nine miles. In addition, the fire spread across the River Maillie and continued along nearly the whole of Loch Arkaigside. There have also, I fear, been a number of sheep burned in the fire. The fire is still burning, in spite of all the efforts that have been made and the number of people that have been collected.

  There was no proof that soldiers had started the blaze; but common sense made it clear that they were to blame, as no one else had been in the area at the time. The cause was probably just a cigarette butt carelessly thrown away. When Lochiel put in a claim for £100,000, the War Department offered him £20,000, and after numerous exchanges some intermediate figure was decided upon; but it took many years for the forest to recover, and charred skeletons of trees stand on the horizon to this day.

  Another letter from Lochiel, written in February 1945, showed how uncomfortable life on the estate had become. Having given a list of civilians living in various cottages and estate houses (about a dozen in all), he estimated that at any one time there were between 600 and 1000 soldiers in the camp.

  Nobody goes off-road on account of danger from bullets, bombs, grenades and other explosives. No one knows when these practices take place, and they are practically daily. No one uses the private road except the military, their families and persons enumerated above … The private road joins the public road at the east end of Loch Arkaig, but no one can go up the loch without a permit.

  Thus, in the short term, military occupation brought widespread changes to the Highlands. For nearly five years the silence which normally reigned in the hills was punctuated by the clatter of small-arms fire and the boom of grenades or demolition charges. Rocks were rearranged by explosions, new pools were created on rivers, and mountainsides came alive with small groups of men scrambling across country or attacking each other on live-firing exercises. Not a few salmon were taken with the help of explosives, and the number of deer shot was far higher than usual, many of them mown down indiscriminately with automatic weapons.

  In the long term – apart from the burnt forest at Achnacharry – no
t much in the countryside was altered by military activity. The Commandos were tough, but the Highlands were even tougher. Even the deer soon recovered. Lochiel, back from service with the Lovat Scouts in Italy, wrote in his game book:

  In the war years the deer on the estate were shot very hard … under the direction of the Deer Controller for Scotland. The Commandos also gained in skill on the hills and in marksmanship by constant practice with all kinds of weapons in the deer forest. As a result of such indiscriminate shooting, the deer forest had to be carefully nursed afterwards, to allow numbers to get up and the stock to improve. This was achieved remarkably quickly, and by 1953 there appeared to be as many stags and hinds as ever on the South Forest.

  It was in the big houses that the damage was done. Inverailort Castle was left empty and scarred – an abandoned barracks. Most of the destruction had been caused by the cadet ratings of HMS Lochailort, the Royal Naval training school, who succeeded the army as tenants. The Cameron-Head family returned to find the walls of outbuildings riddled with bullet holes; the policies, bristling with barbed wire, were pitted with slit trenches and bomb craters. Yet the worst barbarity had been silently committed indoors. In 1940, as the military were taking over, a porch attached to the old library had been boarded up and sealed, for it contained irreplaceable family heirlooms: bits of Charles Edward Stewart’s kilts and plaids, swords and dirks that had been carried at Culloden, gold rings and so on. When the family reopened the room, they found to their dismay that everything had gone: someone had cut his way in and stolen the lot. The CID were called in but nothing was recovered.

  Glencripesdale House had also suffered. Most of the contents had been locked away for the duration in two of the largest rooms, but when the Newton family returned they found that many of their possessions had disappeared, and the house needed extensive renovation. Outside, much damage had been done, and the lovely fishing lodge at Duncan’s Loch had been burnt to the ground.

  Upsetting as such losses were for the owners, they seem trivial when set against the accomplishments of the Special Forces who went through their training in the Highlands. To put this into perspective, of all Commando exploits during the war, the most celebrated and perhaps the most valuable was the sabotage raid on the heavy water plant at Vemork in Norway, carried out on the night of 27–28 February 1943 by a Norwegian team code-named Gunnerside. Having dropped by parachute, they approached the site on skis, avoided a suspension bridge which they knew was guarded, scrambled down into a gorge, scaled a 600-foot rock face, cut their way through a security fence, entered the heavy water building through a service tunnel and laid explosives with thirty-second fuses. The charges went off while they were still within the site, but the German guards were slow to react, and the raiders escaped – having destroyed the entire stock of heavy water, and substantially set back the Nazis’ efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.

  Today the Commandos are immortalized by a splendid memorial, set high on a knoll in the rough, broken landscape near Spean Bridge, a few miles south of Achnacarry. Three bronze figures, eight feet tall, stand shoulder-to-shoulder on a pedestal, fully equipped for an operation, with their rifles, belt pouches and cap-comforters cast in realistic detail. The statue has a fittingly heroic air: the men gaze into the wide-open spaces of the Highlands, ready to take on all comers in the setting they knew so well.

  As the Special Forces tramped the hills around the Road to the Isles, even more hazardous training was in progress at HMS Varbel, the headquarters of the Royal Navy’s 12th Submarine Flotilla on the Isle of Bute, some forty miles west of Glasgow. Although nominally a ship, HMS Varbel was located in the requisitioned Kyles Hydro Hotel, overlooking Port Bannatyne – the only British base for midget submarines and human torpedoes. The three- or four-man Xcraft – fifty feet long and five feet in diameter – were developed specifically to attack German warships sheltering in the Norwegian fjords; the first trials were held in March 1942, and crews trained in the bay below the headquarters, and in Loch Striven, immediately to the north. Another vital base was the shore establishment known as Port HHZ in Loch Cairnbawn, a sea inlet north of Ullapool. There capital ships of the Home Fleet acted as targets, surrounded by anti-submarine defences, to give the Xcraft crews practice at cutting their way through nets, booms and other obstructions.

  Operation Source – an incredibly dangerous undertaking – was launched in September 1943. Six Xcraft, manned by passage crews, were towed across the North Sea by conventional submarines, but two were lost en route and a third returned to base without having engaged a target. This left three – X5, X6 and X7 – to attack the 43,000-ton Tirpitz (known as ‘the beast’), which was moored in Kåfjord, at the head of Altafjord in the far north. X5 and her crew disappeared without trace, presumed sunk by a shell from one of the battleship’s four-inch guns, but the crews of X6 and X7 cut their way through anti-submarine nets and managed to drop their 1½-ton Amatex charges underneath the ship. Trying to slip away, they were detected and attacked: both submarines had to be abandoned, and six of the eight crew survived in captivity. Their explosives did not sink the Tirpitz, but they lifted the battleship seven feet out of the water and damaged her so badly that she was out of action for more than six months and never returned to active service. The commanders of X6 and X7, Lieutenant Donald Cameron and Lieutenant Basil Place, were both awarded the Victoria Cross.

  While the Xcraft submariners risked their lives in the water, a hazardous trial of an entirely different sort was taking place on land. Gruinard Island – lozenge-shaped, a mile long and half a mile wide – lies aligned north and south a few hundred yards offshore in Gruinard Bay, on the coast of Wester Ross. From the beaches on its eastern (inner) side ragged fields of grass and heather climb gently towards a rocky spine; in the middle of the old pastures, surrounded by broken-down stone walls, stand the ruins of a few small houses, long abandoned. The western edge of the land falls steeply to the sea, in cliffs alive with seabirds. Local memory recalls that seven families once lived on the island, but for at least forty years before the beginning of the war it had been uninhabited, except by sheep in summer, and by rabbits, many of which had gradually turned black, as they do with inbreeding in other isolated West Coast communities.

  In 1942 this beautiful, lonely place was requisitioned by the Government from its owners, the Dunphie family, for a secret experiment – to test the potency of anthrax spores, which are lethal if inhaled by animals or humans. At the time the Government was considering the possibility of a biological attack on Germany, and assessing the damage that a similar attack on England might entail. The immediate aim was to discover whether it was possible to disperse anthrax germs in the air, and so make a useable weapon. Because the release of spores would cause immediate and long-lasting contamination of the surroundings, any experimental area had to be well isolated from humans and animals. Hence the choice of Gruinard.

  The strain of anthrax used, Vollum 14578, was a highly virulent one, named after the man who supplied it, Professor R. L. Vollum, Professor of Bacteriology at Oxford University. Glass containers of anthrax culture looking like thick, liquid gruel were prepared at the Government’s Microbiological Research Centre at Porton Down, on Salisbury Plain, and driven to Scotland embedded in crates of fuller’s earth by a young Sapper officer, Lieutenant Tony Younger. In Gruinard Bay he was joined by Dr Paul Fildes, the head of the Porton Down establishment, and sundry assistants.

  The plan was to test the effect of the anthrax spores on sheep – and because corpses would be highly infectious, arrangements had to be made in advance to bury them. Younger therefore reconnoitred the seaward cliffs and found a place where bodies could conveniently be thrown over; he then cut a trench and buried 1000 lb of ammonal explosive in the top of the cliff, so that, when he set it off, hundreds of tons of rock would break away, crash down and entomb the victims.

  The experiment was short and sharp. Sixty Blackface sheep were tethered at intervals along a rope, and a small bomb
containing spores was detonated on top of a pole, held upright by cords, some 100 yards upwind. A brownish aerosol cloud drifted towards the animals, and within three days they began to die. Soon all were dead. Their bodies were duly buried beneath an engineered rockfall, but contamination of the heather and soil was so severe that only technicians wearing protective suits could venture onto the island. In a similar experiment a couple of months later a small bomb was dropped from an aircraft. The results were the same, and the sheep were buried by the same method; but the island was closed to the public indefinitely.

  That winter – 1942–3 – there was a sudden scare when anthrax was discovered in sheep grazing on the mainland, opposite the test site. Returning to make a check, Fildes and Younger decided that spores might have survived in the island vegetation, and then been blown across the bay by the wind. They therefore set fire to the heather on the island and watched the blaze sweep across the low hills – after which there was no more trouble. In 1946 the Crown agreed to buy the island for £500 and take on the responsibility for it.

  The experiments proved that anthrax spores could survive an explosion; they also convinced scientists that a large airborne release of spores over Germany would kill thousands of people and pollute cities so effectively that they would remain uninhabitable for generations. Drastic as the idea was, enthusiasm for biological attack persisted. In 1944 five million linseed cakes impregnated with anthrax spores were prepared and stored at Porton Down for Operation Vegetarian, an attack on German livestock by the RAF. Had they been dropped on farmland and eaten by cattle, they would have killed thousands of animals, and possibly thousands of humans who ate contaminated meat. At the least, they would have caused a crippling food shortage. The cakes, however, were never used, and were incinerated in 1945.