Just as in England large areas of country were cleared of their inhabitants to make way for military training, so in Scotland entire communities were suddenly obliged to leave home. Three of them were the hamlets of Inver, Tarbat and Fearn, way out on Tarbat Peninsula just south of the Dornoch Firth, some forty miles north of Inverness. On 11 November 1943 an order to evacuate gave the 800 inhabitants a month to leave their homes, and forty farms had the same amount of time to move or sell their livestock and crops. Most of the people from Inver sought refuge with families in Tain, a few miles inland – but they could not take their chickens with them and were forced to kill the birds. As Marion Fleming remembered of Inver, ‘everybody, but everybody, was living on chicken soup, but we got so sick of it that for weeks and months afterwards I don’t think there was one person who could look at another plate of it, however good it was’.
Nobody told the evacuees the reason for the upheaval – that the Admiralty wanted the 3rd Infantry Division to train for the D-Day landings on the Dornoch beaches. An area of about fifteen square miles was requisitioned; mock-ups of German defences were built on the shore, and the peninsula became a live firing range, shelled from the sea by support ships. Throughout a bitter winter the men of Assault Force ‘S’, the combined army and navy force destined to land on Sword Beach in Normandy, crawled and ran all over it.
The troops went south in April 1944, and within a month the people were back in their homes; but to this day stories of the evacuation persist, not least that of the collie which found its way home from Tain and lived alone in Inver, befriended and fed by the soldiers, until its master returned.
The war was only six weeks old when it reached the northern extremities of Britain. During the night of 13–14 October 1939 a German U-boat penetrated the anti-submarine defences of the anchorage at Scapa Flow, in Orkney. The eastern approaches to the natural harbour had been blocked by sunken ships, booms and underwater cables, but at high tide Günther Prien, commander of U-47, managed to manoeuvre over the obstructions and past three block-ships in Kirk Sound, between the mainland and Lamb Holm island, travelling on the surface. With three salvoes of torpedoes he sank the veteran battleship HMS Royal Oak before escaping eastwards. Five of his torpedoes missed, but two struck. Although 401 of the battleship’s complement were rescued, 833 men and boys lost their lives. In Germany Prien became a hero and was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, the first submarine officer to receive the decoration. He was nicknamed der Stier [the Bull] von Scapa Flow – and a snorting bull was painted on his conning tower.
The disaster gave the Royal Navy a severe shock, for Scapa Flow had been considered an impregnable anchorage. To prevent further attacks, Churchill (then First Lord of the Admiralty) ordered the immediate construction of solid barriers linking Lamb Holm, Glimps Holm, Burray and South Ronaldsay to the mainland. Work on them began in May 1940. For their bases, 250,000 tons of rock were quarried, transported by a small-gauge railway and sunk in gabions, or wire cages. These were then topped with 66,000 concrete blocks of five or ten tons. The smaller ones were laid on the rock base, and the ten-tonners rested on the sides to act as wave-breakers.
The large labour force needed for the project was augmented by successive contingents of Italian prisoners captured in North Africa, who began arriving in Orkney early in 1942, and by 1943 numbered 550, out of a total workforce of over 2000. Because the Geneva Convention prohibited the use of prisoners of war on military projects, the barriers were described as ‘improvements in communications’, linking the islands for the benefit of the local community. After fighting in the desert, the newcomers must have thought the treeless, windswept northern islands the abomination of desolation, particularly in winter, when daylight lasted barely four hours a day, and especially as they could not get the ingredients for making pasta. At first the Italians sought to assert themselves by refusing to work on a project which they claimed was ‘warlike’. Put on a punishment diet of bread and water for three days, with normal meals on the fourth, they held out until the arrival of Major T. P. Buckland, who spoke Italian and told them that they were there to build a road linking the islands, for benefit of local people. Whether or not they believed this evasion, they accepted it and got on with constructing the causeways.
Two hundred of them were quartered in Camp 60, on the otherwise uninhabited Lamb Holm, where they lived in huts and built a theatre, in which they put on plays and opera. One commodity they had in abundance was concrete left over from the barrier-building, and with it, late in 1943, they fashioned a chapel on the bare north side of the island. The skeleton of the building was two Nissen huts joined end to end, but the builders masked the corrugated iron with a coat of concrete, and created a charming little shrine.
The altar was made from concrete and decorated with painted glass; the ceiling, lined with plasterboard, was elaborately painted and a mosaic pavement covered the floor. A metalworker called Palumbo made candelabra, a rood screen and gates. At the entrance end, an Italianate façade, with a pillared porch flanked by slender windows and topped by a little campanile, concealed the hooped shape of the huts and gave the church a striking presence.
All this was achieved under the direction of a mastercraftsman from the Dolomites, Domenico Chiocchetti, who painted the frescoes and, behind the altar, a strikingly beautiful picture of the Madonna and child, garlanded with the legend Regina Pacis, Ora pro Nobis – Queen of Peace, Pray for Us. He also created a statue of St George slaying the dragon from concrete moulded on a barbed-wire skeleton.
Meanwhile, a colony of Wrens had been established at HMS Tern, the airfield at Twatt, in the north-west corner of mainland Orkney. Muriel Bacon, an air-mechanic electrician, remembered how they would supplement their meagre rations by buying eggs from the local women around Kirkwall and Stromness – a ‘hardy bunch’ who gave them tots of their home-brew. In their camp the Wrens held classical record concerts on Sundays – and great was the excitement when one of the officers brought a friend, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, to play for them.
The Italian prisoners left Orkney in 1945, but Chiocchetti stayed on for a while to finish his work, before giving the chapel to the islanders. He returned twice, in 1960 and 1964, to supervise restoration, and after his death in 1999 a Requiem Mass was held for him on Orkney. For seventy years the chapel has been kept in good repair: it remains a remarkable tribute to the Italians’ religious devotion, and to their determination to construct a comforting reminder of home in a foreign land.
Twenty-Three
On the Springboard
Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not nor faileth,
And as things have been, they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be in yon smoke conceal’d,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field …
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61), Say not the struggle naught availeth
By the beginning of 1944 many thousands of people in England were working on secret preparations for Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of northern Europe. To divert German attention from the principal target area – the Normandy beaches – and to pin their forces down in Norway, Denmark, Bulgaria and the north of Italy, a grand deception was put in hand. Under the general title Operation Bodyguard, two concurrent deception schemes were devised for Britain: Fortitude North and Fortitude South. The northern scheme created a phantom British Fourth Army in Scotland, supposedly gearing up for an invasion of Norway, where the Germans had 250,000 troops; while Fortitude South invented another non-existent force, FUSAG – the First United States Army Group, consisting of eleven notional divis
ions, based in Kent and Sussex.
The purpose of both schemes was to anchor German armies in places where they could do least to disrupt Overlord; but Fortitude South was by far the more important of the two, since it was designed to convince enemy commanders that the Allied invasion would be launched from the south-east corner of England, across the narrowest stretch of the Channel, rather than from ports a hundred miles to the west. By this means, it was hoped, the Germans would be persuaded to maintain their formidable forces entrenched in the Pas de Calais area, rather than move them down the coast to reinforce the defences in Normandy.
Fortitude North consisted largely of wireless traffic between the elements of the imaginary British Fourth Army, supported by equally non-existent American rangers coming from Iceland. Dummy aircraft were deployed at Peterhead and Fraserburgh to give an illusion of increased activity on the north-east coast of Scotland. Whether or not the scheme had any effect, it was hard for the Allies to determine; but the German forces in Norway stayed put.
Fortitude South was on a much larger scale, and was planned in six separate but closely coordinated phases. Quicksilver 1 was the creation of FUSAG, the fictitious First United States Army Group. Quicksilver 2 set up the radio network over which the fake units communicated. Quicksilver 3 was the launch of dummy landing craft in south coast ports and south-eastern estuaries. Quicksilver 4 was a series of bombing raids on the Pas de Calais, to suggest that this would be the target of the Allied invasion (for every bomb dropped on Normandy, five times as many were dropped on the Pas de Calais). Quicksilver 5 was an increase in military activity in and around Dover. Quicksilver 6 was the activation of diversionary lighting schemes.
Part of FUSAG was real: the First Canadian Army, whose signallers ran the radio deception. But the imaginary army as a whole was supposed to consist of a million men, and the main physical evidence supporting its existence was deployed just inland from the Kent and Essex coasts, where field after field was filled with inflatable tanks, trucks and twenty-five-pounder guns, some made of rubber, some of impregnated cloth, but all realistic enough to fool airborne observers. One lorry could carry about thirty Sherman tank kits, and a team could inflate one tank with a stirrup pump in only three and a half minutes before four men lifted it into a realistic position. Alex Lyons, a Royal Engineer during the war, remembered how the crews preferred to set out their ‘deceptions’ in the evenings or at night so that nobody saw them making encampments of twenty or thirty tanks deployed in realistic formations. He particularly liked working on wet ground, as the lorries left tracks which they would otherwise have had to create artificially, to make the picture look authentic.
The actual erection of the devices was only a minor part of the operation, as the men would have to live on the site to give it life, build fires, walk in the open and, where necessary, wear the appropriate headgear and badges. We would need to put up latrines and make sure that there were tracks to them. Everything had to look just as if it was a real tank group or whatever we were imitating.
Besides the tanks, guns and lorries, hundreds of tents, sheds and bigger buildings sprouted from the fields. Dummy aircraft resembling Hurricanes and Spitfires but made of wood and canvas were set out on small airfields. They too could easily be moved about, and sometimes they were shifted by cattle trying to eat them.
To carry through the deception, dummy landing craft were needed to transport the imaginary troops and their heavy equipment across the Channel. The first of these – the LCA, or Landing Craft Assault, known as a ‘Wetbob’ – was a failure. An inflatable boat, ten feet wide and thirty feet long, it proved quite uncontrollable: it bounced about on waves in giveaway fashion, and was soon discarded. Far more effective as decoys were the LCTs (Landing Craft Tanks, known as ‘Bigbobs’), which were much larger and heavier. Made of steel tubes, wire, plywood and fabric, these were 175 feet long and 31 feet wide, with walls of heavy canvas, and floated on forty-gallon metal drums. In spite of their size, the component parts of each one could be transported in a three-ton lorry, and assembled in eight hours – fast enough for the task to be completed in the protective darkness of a single night.
After elaborate trial exercises along the south coast, some prototypes were taken apart and stored, but in the spring of 1944 construction began in earnest near Ipswich, and by April 700 men were working all out (though again, for security, only at night) to put the huge kits together. The main launch points were the Waldringfield base on the River Deben and HMS Wolverstone on the Orwell, both in Suffolk; but by May Bigbobs were being assembled also on the beach at Folkestone and on the waterfront at Dover, where they were floated out into the harbour. Near Dover a whole dummy oil terminal, built from board, was visited by the King. Altogether some 270 Bigbobs were constructed, and all who saw them, even at close quarters, were amazed at how realistic they looked:
The craft were crewed by the construction teams. Oil burners were fitted inside the funnels to produce the odd plumes of smoke, washing was hung out on deck, crews fished over the side, cradles were hung over the side to ‘paint ship’, coils of rope and all the deck furniture of a real ship were replicated, and … the White Ensign was flown during the hours of daylight.
Deceptive lighting also played a part in the preparations. Along the south and south-east coasts QL sites – displays of lights and basket fires – were set up, either to decoy enemy aircraft away from vulnerable points, or (in the east) to suggest unusual activity, as if a major force was assembling for departure.
All this would – it was hoped – be spotted by Luftwaffe photo-reconnaissance pilots making high-altitude passes. But the apparent reality of the objects set out on the fields, or floating in the estuaries and harbours, was reinforced by a blizzard of wireless traffic which suggested that huge forces were massing in the South East.
The main orchestrator of the deception was the XX or Double-Cross Committee, chaired by the Oxford don J. C. Masterman, and its team of twenty-four (mostly non-existent) double agents, led by the very real master spy Juan Pujol Garcίa, known as Agent Garbo.
In 1941 Pujol, a diminutive Catalan chicken farmer, had been living in Portugal. Aged twenty-nine and already balding, he loathed the Nazis and offered his services as a secret agent to the British in both Lisbon and Madrid. Spurned by the embassies, he approached the Germans, with the aim of doing them damage by feeding them false information, and in due course he was taken on by the Abwehr, who gave him codes, invisible ink and the cover name Arabel and sent him to England. Or, rather, they thought they had. In fact for the time being he stayed in Portugal, from which, with astonishing ingenuity and imagination, he sent fictitious reports of events and conditions in England, relying on a pre-war travel guide for many of his facts.
When Bletchley Park began intercepting his messages, the British were alarmed by the fact that a German agent seemed to be at large in the United Kingdom. But when they realized where he was (still in Portugal) and who he was, they recruited him, smuggled him to England, renamed him Agent Garbo and installed him in a house at 15 Crespigny Road in Hendon, where he was soon joined by his wife Aracelli and their young son. To work with him, MI5 appointed a talented case officer, Tomás Harris. A half-Spanish, half-English artist, Tommy (as he was always known) made an ideal partner: under the direction of the XX Committee the pair created a fantastic array of non-existent agents and sent immense numbers of misleading messages to Germany.
Between them they put more than half a million words on paper – 315 handwritten letters, averaging 2000 words apiece, with their ostensibly important secret information concealed in invisible ink beneath banal covering texts. Furnished with a radio, they transmitted more than 1200 messages. Throughout the war the Abwehr supposed that the stream of information coming from Garbo was genuine. So skilful was he that the Germans came to believe that he was running a network of two dozen agents, when in fact none of them existed.
As Masterman later wrote, ‘Garbo himself turned out to be somet
hing of a genius … The one-man band of Lisbon developed into an orchestra, and an orchestra which played a more and more ambitious programme.’ The leader of the band was extraordinarily industrious. Day in, day out, year in, year out he took the Underground to an office in St James’s and worked up to eight hours a day, drafting letters, enciphering messages and composing cover texts. His notional organization grew until it covered the whole country; by the spring of 1944 his twenty-four ‘assistants’, described as ‘agents’ or ‘contacts’, all imaginary, were scattered about from Glasgow to Harwich, to Exeter and Swansea.
As D-Day approached, through Garbo these alleged assistants reported American formations heading for the south-east corner of England. They transmitted details of tell-tale insignia glimpsed on passing vehicles, and sightings of shoulder badges representing previously unseen units. Some of the reports contained kernels of truth, but almost all were false. At the same time, notional agents in the south and west of England reported fewer troop movements than usual, as if units had been withdrawn from there and transferred to the east. But the web of deception stretched far wider than the Home Counties:
British diplomats dropped misleading hints at cocktail parties to be overheard by eavesdroppers and channelled back to Germany. Conspicuously large orders were made for Michelin Map 51, a map of the Pas de Calais area. The French resistance, SOE agents, Jedburgh saboteur and guerrilla teams, MI6, the code-breakers at Bletchley, secret scientists and camouflage engineers would each play a part in this great, sprawling, multifaceted deception campaign.
Our Land at War Page 35
