A Time of Tyrants

by Trevor Royle

  Bad weather was the main problem – a force 5 storm was blowing – but there was also a fair degree of confusion. The rest of the convoy scattered and kept going as another ship, SS Marina, had also been hit. Without the naval escorts the survivors were on their own. The first help did not arrive until the following afternoon when HMS Hurricane (Lieutenant-Commander H. C. Simms RN) arrived from the north and picked up 105 survivors. Unfortunately, in the confusion one of the lifeboats was missed and was accidentally left behind when Hurricane steamed off to Greenock. The remaining boat contained forty adults and six children and was not picked up until eight days later. The sinking of the City of Benares was one of the worst civilian maritime disasters of the war, and the loss of so many children forced CORB to suspend operations. There were to be no more evacuations, and the loss of the children was to leave a long shadow over the whole programme. A quarter of a century later the novelist James Kennaway, whose father worked as a lawyer and factor in Auchterarder, could clearly summon up the thought of the whitening bones beneath the Atlantic swell of the wife of a local laird who had been lost with her son while ‘doing her duty to protect’ him.29

  The submarine offensive confirmed suspicions that Germany would ruthlessly exploit its capabilities by attacking British shipping in the Atlantic where surface raiders would also be deployed. As a result the North Sea became Tom Tiddler’s Ground, with both sides manoeuvring to gain control of the important Norway gap and its access to the waters south of Iceland. Because RAF Coastal Command’s Avro Anson patrol aircraft lacked the range, the Dundee-based submarines maintained their patrols off the Norwegian coast but this could only be a stop-gap measure. Thought was given to repeating the ‘Northern Barrage’, a huge minefield bridging the gap between Shetland and the Norwegian coast which was put in place in the winter of 1917–18 to prevent German submarines from entering the Atlantic. It stretched for 250 miles, and of the 70,177 mines used in the defensive system, the US Navy’s First Mine Squadron planted 56,571, working from bases at Invergordon and Inverness. Although a similar plan was prepared by Winston Churchill, who had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty on the outbreak of war, the barrage was not created due to cost and concerns about the impact on neutral shipping. That being said, the pace of mine-laying in the North Sea did increase. In the opening months of the war the Royal Navy created a minefield between Orkney and Dover; in September 1939 alone, the minelayers HMS Adventure and HMS Plover planted 3,000 mines across the Dover Strait, and in the second half of the month the barrage was completed by 3,636 anti-U-boat mines. At the same time the navy created the East Coast Barrier, a mine barrage between twenty and fifty miles wide from Scotland to the Thames, leaving a narrow space between the barrage and the coast for navigation.30

  As happened on the outbreak of the First World War, the Home Fleet made its way to Scapa Flow which was thought to be a safer option than the naval base at Rosyth. Initially it was very much a makeshift arrangement as the facilities were basic and the defences were inadequate. Although booms had been put in place to defend the three main entrances at Hoxa, Switha and Hoy, the air defences were modest, consisting of eight 4.5-inch anti-aircraft guns at Lyness, two 6-inch guns and one 4.7-inch gun at Stanger Head on Flotta, and two 6-inch guns at Ness. There was also a Royal Marine detachment equipped with machine-guns, and two TA companies from 5th Seaforth Highlanders and 7th Gordon Highlanders guarded the coastal defence batteries. At that point there was no RAF or Fleet Air Arm presence. That was not rectified until October when 804 Squadron formed at Hatston, one mile north-west of Kirkwall, equipped with Gloster Gladiators and Grumman Martlets. However, the naval presence was formidable, and at the time of the outbreak of war there were forty-four ships in the Flow including the carrier HMS Ark Royal and the battleships HMS Nelson, HMS Rodney, HMS Resolution, HMS Royal Sovereign, HMS Ramillies and HMS Royal Oak. Some were of First World War vintage, and there was a further reminder of that conflict when HMS Iron Duke, Jellicoe’s flagship at Jutland, arrived as a floating administration block for the base’s commander Admiral Sir Wilfred French. Stripped of its main turrets, it was anchored off Lyness.

  On 15 September Churchill visited the naval base and found the occasion vaguely disquieting. Although the main warships provided solid evidence of British sea power, he disapproved of the renewal of the policy of ‘distant blockade’, which had been used in the First World War and which in the new conflict was revived by fitting out armed merchantmen to provide a Northern Patrol operating out of Scapa to interdict German traffic in the North Sea. He was also aware of the deficiencies in defence, especially the fact that there were insufficient destroyers to provide cover for the Home Fleet, and found his inspection ‘a strange experience, like suddenly resuming a previous incarnation’. True to form, he also yearned for an offensive strategy, and told the First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Dudley Pound that ‘the search for a naval offensive must be incessant’.31

  So too did the Germans, who were intent on mounting a submarine attack on the British naval base. Shortly after the outbreak of war, Luftwaffe reconnaissance photographs suggested to Admiral Karl Dönitz, head of U-Boat Command, that there appeared to be a gap in the blockship defences in Holm Sound and that this could be exploited at flood tide. The task was given to Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien, the commander of U-47 who had already accounted for one British ship, the Cunarder Bosnia. In mid-September he was recalled to Kiel to begin planning for the daring assault which was fixed for the night of 13/14 October. By then fears of an attack from the air had encouraged Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, commander of the Home Fleet, to remove his capital ships to Loch Ewe on the west coast of Scotland. Even so, Prien would have no shortage of targets, including the battleship Royal Oak which had been left behind because her top speed of 20 knots was inadequate to keep up with the rest of the fleet.

  In the early morning of 13 October Prien arrived off Scapa, and after darkness fell he surfaced U-47 and took her on a course to the north of Lamb Holm island and the mainland. A mistake almost forced him into the shallow waters of Skerry Sound but the navigator’s skills corrected the course and he was able to thread his boat past the blockships Seriano and Numidian. Only the bright lights of the aurora borealis and the headlights of a passing vehicle discomfited him. Once inside the Flow, shortly after midnight, he headed west. Had he continued on that course he would have encountered the newly commissioned light cruiser HMS Belfast but instead he embarked on a reverse course, and 4,000 yards to the north saw the unmistakable outline of HMS Royal Oak with the elderly seaplane carrier HMS Pegasus anchored behind her. Shortly before 1 a.m. he fired a salvo of four torpedoes from his bow tubes; one misfired, two missed the target but the fourth hit the bow of the Royal Oak causing minimal damage and triggering little concern amongst the battleship’s crew. Prien then renewed the attack, and having missed with his stern tube, fired a salvo from the reloaded bow tubes, two of which struck home, hitting the battleship amidships and doing fatal damage. The explosions destroyed the starboard engine room, and as the lights went out the magazine caught fire, sending a fireball through the mess decks. The stricken ship started listing, and within thirteen minutes of Prien’s second attack Royal Oak rolled over and sank. Lack of life-jackets and insufficient life-saving arrangements meant that the casualty list was high – 833 officers and men, many of them boy sailors aged fifteen to seventeen. Only the presence of the tender Daisy 2 and rescue boats from Pegasus prevented further casualties amongst those who had managed to jump overboard.

  As for Prien, he quickly retraced his course and by two o’clock in the morning U-47 was back in the North Sea heading for home. In the confused aftermath it was thought that the battleship had succumbed to an internal explosion or had been hit from the air but divers sent down the following morning confirmed the torpedo attack. This was announced in the House of Commons on 17 October when Churchill conceded that the ship had been lost to ‘a remarkable exploit of professional skill and daring’. He als
o had to face hostile questioning on the practice of using boy sailors in war zones and on the inadequacy of the defences. The former complaint was promptly resolved with eighteen becoming the minimum age, and steps were taken to improve the islands’ defences after a Board of Inquiry identified nine possible access routes into the Flow.32 The ships of the Home Fleet were also ordered to stay away from the base for six months.

  Amongst the new measures was the strengthening of the air defences, including the construction of new fighter bases at Skeabrae, north of Stromness, and Grimsetter, south-east of Kirkwall. During the winter, work also began on the creation of the Orkney balloon barrage which consisted of twenty sites from which land-based balloons were flown (twelve on Flotta, four on Hoy and four on Fara) while a further eight waterborne balloons were flown from trawlers and covered the fleet anchorage. The sites were operated by 950 Squadron Auxiliary Air Force with its headquarters at Ore Hill on Lyness, and its records show that the task was not for the faint-hearted: ‘The chief impression of the first few months at Scapa were mud, deep clinging mud and wind, wind beyond the dreams of any Balloon Operator; and many and various were the “jury rigs” devised to protect the feeble fabric of the balloons from the raging storms.’33 Inevitably there were occasions when balloons escaped their moorings and had to be shot down by fighter aircraft, and on one occasion a gale dragged a winch over the cliff at Cava and into the sea. In time the barrage proved its worth against air attack, but it was not yet in place when Scapa Flow was attacked by four Junkers 88 bombers on 17 October. During the raid HMS Iron Duke was holed and had to be beached, first in Ore Bay and then at Longhope. During the attack, one of the German aircraft was shot down by a Martlet from Skeabrae.

  By then the first enemy aircraft had already been destroyed in Scottish skies.34 On 8 October a Lockheed Hudson of 224 Squadron operating from RAF Leuchars shot down a Dornier Do 18 flying boat while patrolling twenty miles off Aberdeen.35 (The same squadron has the distinction of the being the first to attack a German aircraft when a Hudson fired on a similar Dornier over the North Sea on 4 September.)36 However, the aerial war in Scottish skies began in earnest on 16 October when two Heinkel 111 reconnaissance aircraft appeared over the Firth of Forth and were picked up by the radar station at Drone Hill near Cockburnspath. Having flown over Rosyth where they came under fire from an anti-aircraft battery – a ‘first’ for the gun crews of Anti-Aircraft Command – they were heading for home when they were intercepted near May Island at 10.21 a.m. by two Spitfires of 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron (Auxiliary Air Force) from nearby RAF Drem. Although the aircraft managed to escape by heading into the clouds, the pilots Flight Lieutenant George Pinkerton and Flying Officer Archie McKellar became the first Spitfire crews to engage an enemy aircraft over the British land mass. It was also the prelude to a day of continuing and frequently bewildering action, and on the next occasion when Pinkerton was given the chance to open fire he got his kill.

  That afternoon a larger force of Junkers 88 bombers was despatched to the area with orders to attack the battleship HMS Hood which German intelligence believed to be in the Firth of Forth. Before leaving his base at Westerland on the island of Sylt, the German commanding officer Helmut Pohle had received specific instructions from Hitler that the naval dockyards at Rosyth were not be to attacked to prevent civilian casualties, but as it turned out the intelligence was wrong and Hood was not there – the battleship refitting at Rosyth was HMS Repulse. However there were a number of capital ships in the Firth of Forth including the cruisers HMS Southampton and HMS Edinburgh which were lying off Inchgarvie, and these were legitimate targets. At 2.15 p.m. Pohle’s aircraft approached the estuary over East Lothian but by then they had been picked up by the Royal Observer Corps as the ground tracking stations were temporarily out of action. The response was immediate. From RAF Turnhouse a section of three Spitfires of 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron (Auxiliary Air Force) took off, led by Flight Lieutenant Pat Gifford, and were immediately joined by another section which had attacked German aircraft as they flew over Threipmuir Reservoir near Dalkeith. As one of the Junkers flew towards the Forth it was intercepted by the second section and promptly shot down by a Spitfire piloted by Flight Lieutenant George Denholm. It crashed into the Forth where three of its four-man crew were rescued by the fishing yawl Dayspring from Port Seton.

  It was not the end of the action. Pinkerton’s section had been on patrol 20,000 feet above Dalkeith, and quickly joined the fray. As they headed towards the Fife shore they saw Pohle, who had just completed a bombing run on Southampton, which had the dubious distinction of being the first British warship to be attacked in the war. This time Pinkerton and McKellar were able to keep on the tail of the Junkers and shot it down, with Pinkerton, a Renfrewshire farmer in peacetime, getting credit for the kill. Despite Pohle’s efforts at evasion the bomber crashed into the sea three miles off Crail where he was rescued, two of his crew having been killed in the attack.

  Although the Germans had been beaten off they had succeeded in damaging the destroyer HMS Mohawk and killing sixteen seamen. They had also given a civilian population a grandstand view of what it was like to be under aerial attack – the entire raid lasted two hours, and people on the ground in Edinburgh, Fife and East Lothian were treated to the sight of Spitfires chasing and firing at enemy aircraft. There were casualties, fortunately minor. Two women were hit by flying glass in Davidson’s Mains in Edinburgh, and as the German aircraft flew over the north of the city they machine-gunned targets on the ground. In Portobello two painters Frank Lynn and Joe McLuskie were working on the exterior of a house at 45 Abercorn Terrace when one of them, McLuskie, was hit and was rushed to Leith Hospital to have a machine-gun bullet removed from his abdomen. Other houses in the vicinity were damaged including 10 Hamilton Street (later Brunstane Road North), the residence of Lord Provost Sir Henry Steele who was reported to be ‘very annoyed’, not just because his house had been attacked and damaged – windows and internal mirrors had been smashed – but also because there had been no warning prior to the raid.37

  If anything, the whole affair had been treated as a piece of exciting entertainment, with numbers of people, including a group of schoolboys from Fettes College playing rugby at Inverleith, straining to watch the action. Some people claimed later that they thought it had been a training exercise, and the following day the Scotsman reported the incident under the headline ‘Spectacular Sight for Population, Thought it Was a Practice’. It was fair comment: no air-raid sirens had sounded in Edinburgh to warn of any danger, and apart from the minor wounds to civilian personnel on the ground no great damage had been done. Four days later the bodies of two of the German aircrew were buried in Portobello after their swastika-draped coffins had been laid in St Philip’s Church. When the funeral procession set off, thousands lined the streets, many of them members of 602 and 603 Squadrons, and pipers played the haunting tune ‘Over the sea to Skye’. First blood had been drawn by RAF Fighter Command, and it was fitting perhaps that the kills had been made by part-time pilots of the Auxiliary Air Force whose squadrons had only recently converted to modern Spitfires. But it came at a cost. The operational books of 13 Group responsible for conducting air defence in eastern Scotland show that the squadrons expended a huge amount of ammunition – 603 Squadron alone fired 16,000 rounds – and those levels would be unsustainable in a lengthy war of attrition.38 Equally, the experience had given a brief demonstration of what aerial bombardment would be like for the civilian population. On that sunny October day in Edinburgh, Fife and the Lothians, they had not been found wanting, and there was none of the panic that had been forecast by pessimists, but ahead lay sterner tests.

  2 Phoney War

  For the majority of the people living in Britain during the winter of 1939–40 there was a period which came to be known as the ‘phoney war’ or ‘bore war’. It lasted from the outbreak to the early summer of 1940, when Hitler unleashed his forces to complete the invasion of France and
the first serious enemy bomb attacks were mounted against the main cities of the United Kingdom. During that time neither the ground forces nor the air forces saw much action, the French did little to disturb the Germans in the Saar where there were possibilities of offensive action, and the only positive step taken to help the Poles militarily was the passing of the Franco-Polish Military Agreement on 9 September which allowed Polish forces to form and train in France. Otherwise the Poles were on their own, and following a short and sharp German onslaught they were soon forced to give up the unequal struggle. On 17 September, in support of the terms of the earlier Nazi–Soviet Pact but in breach of an even earlier non-aggression pact, the Red Army had crossed Poland’s eastern border, thereby putting paid to any hope of further resistance. Those Poles who were able to escape fled south into Romania and Hungary, and as members of the Polish Free Forces many of their number eventually ended up in Scotland (see Chapter 9).