by Trevor Royle
As had happened in the previous conflict people remembered the summer of 1939 as being one of the best in living memory. In stark contrast to the rain which had made the previous summer months such a trial, Scotland enjoyed high temperatures and sunny skies. At the time the future poet and critic Maurice Lindsay was on holiday with his family in the Kyles of Bute on the Clyde and he could see that they were living on borrowed time. In the previous summer he had been commissioned in the 9th Cameronians, a Territorial Army battalion, and as a critic of appeasement he was perhaps better placed to see that ‘reality demanded repayment’: ‘It was especially difficult to believe that the scent of the old-fashioned roses in the garden, the soft peach-down on the arms of the girls with whom we played idle tennis or gently dallied, and the cheerful phut-phut-phut-phut of the busy paddle steamers fussing over the glinting, sunny Clyde, was but a surface cover over the menacing march of distant soldiers bearing death and destruction on a scale we could not visualise but found it impossible not to fear. Yet so it was.’21
The balmy weather and holiday atmosphere only added to the sense of unreality as the situation became more tense in Europe, with Hitler increasing pressure on Poland by threatening to occupy the Baltic port of Danzig (Gdansk) which was a free city under the mandate of the League of Nations. As German forces began to assemble along the eastern border of Poland the people of Scotland went on with their business as if they were divorced from events which were not part of their lives. How could they not have done otherwise? On the last Saturday of peace, 2 September, there were full crowds at all the main football matches in the Scottish League where Rangers beat Third Lanark 2–1 in front of 30,000 spectators at Cathkin Park, Celtic defeated Clyde 1–0 in a close-fought game at Parkhead, Hearts overcame Motherwell 4–2 at Tynecastle, while Albion Rovers outclassed Hibernian 5–3 at Cliftonhill. They were the last official competitive football games to be played for seven years.
By then the fighting had already started. On the previous day, 1 September, in the early hours of the morning the first shots of the conflict had been fired when the aging German pre-Dreadnought battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish naval base at Westerplatte in Danzig while making a courtesy visit to the port. At the same time a border incident was fabricated and four German divisions of Army Group North poured into the ‘Polish Corridor’, the disputed territory which provided Poland with access to the Baltic while cutting off Germany from East Prussia. Ahead of the advancing tanks flew strike aircraft such as the much feared Junkers Ju-87 (Stuka) dive-bomber which began pounding strategic targets and machine-gunning anyone on the ground. These were the tactics of blitzkrieg (lightning war) and from the outset it was apparent that they were both terrifying for those on the receiving end and hugely successful for those carrying them out. Close-range artillery fire was also useful in neutralising Polish defences as was the sheer weight of the infantry assault on Polish positions.22
In response to the German aggression, Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, sent a curt message to Hitler informing him that Britain would fulfil its obligations to Poland unless German forces withdrew, but the German leader was not in the mood to respond to firm words. There was a delay as the formal diplomatic response had to be finalised with France, and there was some last-minute wavering in Paris, but at nine o’clock on the morning of 3 September Sir Neville Henderson, Britain’s ambassador to Germany, delivered an ultimatum stating that if hostilities did not stop by 11 a.m. a state of war would exist between Great Britain and Germany. Hitler did not respond and a quarter of an hour later Chamberlain went on the radio to announce to the British people that they were at war with Germany.
It was a moment which no one would ever forget. Although Chamberlain’s broadcast had been trailed by the BBC earlier in the morning, many people were attending church services when the declaration of war was made. Bill King, a miner’s son from Dalkeith, was with his family in St John’s Church when the minister made the announcement from the pulpit, and he remembered that the effect on the congregation was ‘just absolute stillness’. For Constance Ross, attending a similar church service in Buckhaven in Fife, the moment was even more dramatic. During the reading there was a knock on the main door which was answered by the beadle who then turned to the congregation to confirm their worst fears: ‘That was Civil Defence to tell us that Neville Chamberlain the Prime Minister has just announced over the radio that we are now at war with Germany. You’ve to go home immediately, take shelter and wait for further instructions.’ Years later, on the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war Constance Ross still recalled a ‘feeling of dread and uncertainty as we scuttled home, looking fearfully upwards, expecting an aerial bombardment at any moment.’23
No sooner had the declaration of war been made than the air-raid sirens sounded in Edinburgh, the result of an enemy aircraft reported off Berwick-on-Tweed. A few minutes later came the ‘all clear’ when it was found to be a false alarm. In the west of Scotland Chamberlain’s announcement was followed by the onset of a late summer thunderstorm, the thunder and lightning providing another harbinger of the sound and fury of the years ahead. That evening the Edinburgh Evening News published a special edition announcing the declaration of war and carrying other pages of announcements including the news that ‘from now until further notice the one o’clock time gun at Edinburgh Castle will not be fired’.24
While these were natural precautions, and steps had to be taken to put the country on a war footing, the initial excitement and momentum was followed by a curious lull. In the opening months of the war it became clear that the Germans had laid no immediate plans to attempt to invade Britain or to attack civilian targets. However, that exclusion did not extend to traffic on the sea, and as a result Scotland was to play a part in an incident which led to the first Allied civilian loss of life in the conflict. Two days earlier, shortly after midday on 1 September, the Glasgow-registered Donaldson Atlantic liner SS Athenia left Princes Dock in Glasgow bound for Montreal. (Some of the dockers booed the departure, claiming that the passengers were ‘cowards’ who were deserting the country.) En route she called at Liverpool and Belfast, and on the day that war was declared she was sailing to the north-west of Ireland, some sixty miles south of Rockall. So too was U-30, a type VIIA Atlantic submarine under the command of Fritz-Julius Lemp, one of twenty-seven long-range boats which had been ordered to put to sea on 22 August to patrol the area to the west of Britain as far south as the Straits of Gibraltar. On the outbreak of war all the boats had gone on a war footing which meant that they had to operate under the terms of the Prisenordnung (prize regulations) which permitted them to stop and search merchant ships and to ensure the safety of passengers and crew before sinking them.
At that point the Germans had no intention of waging unrestricted submarine operations as they had done in 1917. Not only was this outlawed under the London Naval Treaty of 1936, but Hitler was still hopeful of reaching a diplomatic settlement with Britain and France. With that in mind Lemp and his fellow captains had been ordered not to attack Allied vessels of any kind. All that changed as dusk fell across the Atlantic when Lemp sighted a large blacked-out vessel sailing westward on a zigzag course. This was the Athenia under the command of Captain James Cook carrying its complement of 350 crew and 1,103 passengers, many of them Americans escaping the coming war. Unsure of what action to take – the vessel was sailing an unusual course and showed no lights – Lemp submerged U-30 and began tracking his target. Clearly it was a medium-sized liner but it also seemed to be behaving suspiciously, and Lemp might have believed that it was either a troopship or an armed merchantman. At any rate he was taking no chances, and shortly after 7.30 p.m. he fired two torpedoes. One misfired, but the other slammed into the port side of Athenia and exploded in number five hold, smashing the bulkhead between the boiler and engine room and destroying the stairways in the third-class accommodation.
A huge column of spray shot skywards, and Athenia began s
ettling by the stern as panic-stricken passengers thronged the decks. As preparations for evacuation were hurriedly put in place distress signals were sent from the radio room. These were picked up at the Malin Head receiving station, prompting a rescue operation involving three British destroyers (HMS Electra, HMS Fame and HMS Escort), a Norwegian tanker (Knute Nelson), a Swedish yacht (Southern Cross) and a US tanker (City of Flint). Despite mishaps during the operation when one of the lifeboats was crushed by Knute Nelson’s propeller, the casualty list was relatively small – ninety-eight passengers and nineteen crew. Athenia eventually sank the following day, and the first survivors began arriving a day later. Those taken to Galway by the Knute Nelson received a warm welcome, but there was chaos when the British destroyers arrived at fogbound Greenock on 5 September. The survivors found themselves on a quay where a sugar ship was unloading, and it took the initiative of Donald Maclean, Greenock’s Inspector of Public Assistance to retrieve the situation. Two days later he informed the Scottish Office: ‘Having visited the scene and witnessed the awful condition of the survivors I, with the concurrence of the Provost and Town Clerk, immediately secured from a large Drapery Firm in the town, sufficient new clothing, comprising Suits, Dresses, Boots etc, and all manner of underwear, both ladies, gents and childrens [sic] and within 1 hour of their arrival the survivors were all suitably clothed for their journey by buses to Glasgow.’25
The cost to the Corporation of Greenock was £733, and Maclean hoped that this would be made good by the government. Although there was an outbreak of local generosity with an appeal led by Glasgow’s Lord Provost Patrick Dollan which raised £5,707, both the Scottish Office and the Treasury refused to make any funds available to cover the cost of the clothes given to the survivors at Greenock.26
By then British submarines had also been in action. Shortly after the outbreak of war HMS Oxley, a Dundee-based O-class submarine from the 2nd Submarine Flotilla was sunk by a sister boat HMS Triton while on patrol close to the Obrestad light on the Norwegian coast. Shortly before war was declared the flotilla had deployed to Dundee and this was their first offensive patrol which had in fact begun on 24 August. It ended in tragedy late at night on 10 September when Triton’s officer of the watch noticed another submarine, also on the surface, on the port bow. Although three warnings were given on the box lamp and a final warning was made by firing green flares by rifle grenade, there was no response. Triton’s captain, Lieutenant Commander H. P. de C. Steel, RN, concluded that it was a German U-boat, and ordered tubes 7 and 8 to be fired with a three-second interval. Less than a minute later, an explosion was heard: it was Oxley which sank almost immediately. Three survivors were found, including the boat’s commanding officer, but one of them was drowned during the rescue operation. On the return to Dundee a Board of Inquiry found that Steel had done all he reasonably could in the circumstances. Oxley was out of position, Triton had acted correctly, and as a result the first Allied submarine casualty of the war was due to what later came to be known as ‘friendly fire’.27 At the time the loss of Oxley was attributed variously to an internal explosion or to a collision with Triton, and the truth was not revealed until the 1950s. As for Triton, it too was sunk a year later, in December 1940, while on patrol in the southern Adriatic.
It had proved impossible, though, to disguise the fate of the Athenia, and inevitably its sinking caused international outrage. Comparisons were made with the similar torpedoing of the Lusitania in 1915, but the Germans countered the anger with propaganda claims that the ship had been sunk by a mine or deliberately by a British submarine. They also took steps to cover up the incident: Lemp did not note it in his log, his crew was sworn to silence, it was not mentioned in the war diary of German U-boat Command and the whole facts were not made available until after the war. A few days after the incident Lemp was in action again when he sank another Glasgow-registered ship – the merchantman Blair Logie – but only after he had permitted the crew to take to the lifeboats. Towards the end of U-30’s tour it was involved in a bizarre incident when it was attacked by three Blackburn Sea Skua dive bombers of 803 Squadron flying from the carrier HMS Ark Royal. Two of the aircraft were destroyed by dropping their bombs too early, and the surviving pilots were picked up by Lemp to become prisoners of war. One thing was certain: the submarine was back as a key component in naval warfare. A steady succession of further sinkings followed in Scottish and Irish waters, including the obsolescent aircraft carrier HMS Courageous which was torpedoed to the west of Ireland on 17 September.
As for Lemp, he did not survive long, succumbing to gunfire from the destroyers HMS Broadway and HMS Bulldog after his new command U-110 was depth-charged to the surface south of Greenland on 9 May 1941. Bulldog’s commander, Captain Joe Baker-Cresswell, was initially intent on sinking U-110 by ramming but pulled out at the last minute to take her into captivity intact. It was a judicious decision: on board the submarine the boarding party led by Sub-Lieutenant David Balme, RNVR, found a top-secret Enigma coding machine together with its code-books, a vital piece of intelligence which enabled British code-breakers to decipher signals sent between German warships and submarines and their home headquarters. For the British it proved to be a priceless discovery, and just as Lemp kept quiet about his part in the sinking of the Athenia, so was it never disclosed by the Royal Navy that his second command, the U-110, had fallen into enemy hands.
There was another grim homecoming on the Clyde involving the loss of civilian passengers when the destroyer HMS Hurricane docked at Gourock on 19 September 1940 carrying 105 survivors from the torpedoing of the Ellerman Lines passenger liner SS City of Benares. Once again the ship had fallen victim to a U-boat attack while crossing the Atlantic, on this occasion as part of the westbound Convoy OB-213 which had left Liverpool on 13 September heading for the Canadian ports of Quebec and Montreal. Although by then the country was becoming hardened to the losses of merchant and passenger ships to submarine attack, this incident was made worse by the fact that amongst the passengers on City of Benares were ninety children who were being evacuated to Canada under the terms of a scheme operated by the Children’s Overseas Reception Board (CORB). This well-meaning organisation had been established with government sponsorship earlier in the year to co-ordinate the growing activities of wealthy families who were sending their children overseas to escape the increasing dangers of enemy air attack and the threat of German invasion. They were also responding to offers of hospitality from families in countries friendly to the UK, notably Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States, to provide safe havens for children at risk, and whose parents could afford the necessary expense of travel. To co-ordinate the British response to these offers, an interdepartmental committee was established, chaired by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Dominions, Geoffrey Shakespeare, and including representatives from the Ministries of Health, Labour, and Pensions, the Dominions, Home, Foreign and Scottish Offices, the Treasury and the Board of Education. As a result the committee formed CORB with the following terms of reference: ‘To consider offers from overseas to house and care for children, whether accompanied or unaccompanied, from the European War Zone, residing in Great Britain, including children orphaned by the war and to make recommendations thereon.’28 A special Board for Scotland with its own Advisory Council was also established, and while it followed the policy laid down by CORB, a Scottish Liaison Officer was appointed to keep the Scottish Office informed of daily decisions and progress being made.
Through organisations such as Barnardos, Quarriers and Fairbridge, Britain had a long history of organising juvenile emigration, sending children, mainly paupers and orphans, to live and work in the Dominions as farm labourers and domestic servants. Those involved thought that they had the best interests of the children at heart, but this was the first time that children had been evacuated in time of war, and the first time, too, that those involved came from mainly wealthy families. Perhaps because it was thought to be a temporary e
xile, CORB had been inundated with 200,000 applications between June and August 1940 when the scheme was suspended. The first to be chosen came from areas which were thought to be especially vulnerable to bombing, and in that initial period CORB selected 2,664 children for evacuation. Canada received the bulk of them – 1,532 in nine parties, while three parties sailed for Australia, a total of 577, a further 353 went to South Africa in two parties and 202 to New Zealand, again in two parties. During the selection process it was agreed that at least 10 per cent should be Scottish applicants, and each sailing party was selected with care to represent a cross-section of British society.
By the end of the summer a further 24,000 children had been approved for sailing in that time, and over 1,000 escorts, including doctors and nurses, had also been chosen. At a time when Britain was facing the very real danger of German invasion, CORB was considered to be a success story even though it was already becoming apparent that there would be insufficient shipping to transport the chosen children to their destinations. Fears were also expressed about the wisdom of risking children on the high seas at a time when the U-boat menace was growing – the Dutch liner Volendam was damaged off the west coast of Scotland on 30 August while carrying 320 children – and as a result of those concerns CORB decided that evacuee ships crossing the Atlantic should sail in convoy.
However even that sensible move could not save those who perished on the City of Benares. Launched at Port Glasgow in 1935, she was a fast and modern liner, and was made the flagship of the nineteen-strong convoy which was under the command of Rear Admiral E. J. G. Mackinnon, DSO, RN. In that position she was the lead ship in the centre column, but that made her an obvious target when the convoy was 600 miles off the west coast of Ireland in the gap between the extent of the Royal Navy’s escort provision and the US neutrality zone. At that point, some 250 miles west of Rockall, Mackinnon was forced to lose his escorts, the destroyer HMS Winchelsea and two sloops which broke off to meet the eastbound Convoy HX-71, a move which gave Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Bleichrodt of the shadowing U-48 his opportunity to attack. Although two torpedoes missed the City of Benares, a third hit the rear of the hull shortly before midnight on 18 September, and the liner quickly listed so that it was impossible to launch all the lifeboats. Of the 406 people on board the City of Benares, 248 perished, including the master (Captain Landles Nicoll from Arbroath), the commodore, three staff members, 121 crew members and 134 passengers, including 77 of the 90 child evacuees.
