A Time of Tyrants

by Trevor Royle

  The Poles had paid a high price for their resistance – 65,000 casualties and 660,000 taken into German or Soviet captivity – but amongst their western allies there was still an air of unreality. An indication of the passivity of those early days of the war was given by the British Air Minister Kingsley Wood who responded to proposals that Germany should be bombed with the thought that ‘there was no question of our bombing even the munition works at Essen, which were private property.’1 Only at sea were hostile operations conducted by both sides, with German and British surface ships and submarines in constant action in the North Sea and the Atlantic. Following the sinking of HMS Royal Oak the Royal Navy gained a measure of revenge when the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee was scuttled in the Uruguayan port of Montevideo on 17 December 1939 following a running battle with a joint Royal Navy–Royal New Zealand Navy cruiser force off the mouth of the River Plate. It was considered to be a triumph and was much applauded, but amongst the civilian population in general the prevailing lack of action diluted the feelings of determination and resolve which had accompanied the declaration of war. As a result large swathes of the population became bored with air-raid precautions and disillusioned by the constant emergency legislation which imposed restrictions on their daily lives.

  In Scotland it was quite a different matter, especially on the east coast where warfare had quickly become a fact of day-to-day life and the phoney war was no such thing. For the rest of the year until the arrival of harsh winter weather curtailed operational flying, the broad expanse of the Firth of Forth seemed to act as a magnet for Luftwaffe bombers. Following Pohle’s unsuccessful raid two more Heinkels were plotted off the Fife coast on 22 October 1939 and one of them was shot down by a section of 603 Squadron’s Spitfires. Six days later another Heinkel was intercepted and hit while flying over Preston-pans and Tranent in East Lothian. Two of the crew were killed but the pilot Kurt Lehmkuhl kept control of the aircraft and managed to crash-land it near Humbie. He and the navigator Rolf Niehoff were captured and taken to Edinburgh Castle where they were entertained to lunch in the officers’ mess before being sent to the Tower of London. Niehoff expressed considerable surprise at the excellent fare offered to him as he had been given to believe that there were serious shortages of food.

  In addition to attempting to bomb the warships in the Forth estuary the Germans used submarines to sow magnetic and acoustic mines in the same waters and on the west coast. These were very different from the horned contact variety which floated on the surface, and initially they were extremely difficult to counter as they lay on the seabed and were detonated either by a ship’s magnetic field or by its sound signature. They soon had victims, too, the first and most prestigious being the recently commissioned cruiser HMS Belfast. On 21 November while she was steaming towards the open sea to take part in gunnery practice in the company of the destroyer HMS Afridi and the cruiser HMS Southampton, Belfast was rocked by a huge explosion as she sailed between Inchkeith and May Island. A magnetic mine had exploded on the port side, destroying the boiler room and breaking the ship’s back. One sailor was killed and twenty-one were injured, and it was a severe jolt to the navy’s pride. Not only had the cruiser just entered service but a month earlier it had successfully intercepted the German liner Cap Norte which was attempting to get back to Hamburg under the guise of being a neutral vessel. At that stage of the war she was the largest enemy ship to fall into the navy’s hands and her capture was a huge fillip for the North Sea blockade. Following the explosion in the Forth estuary tugs took Belfast in tow, but so great was the damage that thought was given to scrapping her. As it was, she did not return to fleet duties until November 1942. Another victim was the battleship HMS Nelson which was holed by a magnetic mine while approaching Loch Ewe on 4 December. The weapon was one of eighteen which had been laid by the submarine U-31 during the night of 27/28 October, each one of which contained between 420kg and 560kg of explosives.2

  However, by the time that Nelson had been damaged the menace posed by magnetic mines was close to being solved. Because the Luftwaffe was loath to use bombers to sow mines, the task was given to untrained aircrew flying seaplanes – one reason for the prevalence of Dornier aircraft in Scottish skies during the early months of the war. During an operation over the Thames estuary on the night of 24/25 November a modern magnetic mine was dropped onto the mud flats close to Shoeburyness where it was located and made safe by a naval team from HMS Vernon, led by Commander J. G. D. Ouvry RN. The discovery of the mine and its safe retrieval allowed scientists to develop counter-measures which included degaussing coils which reduced a ship’s magnetism, as well as other ship-borne and airborne magnetic devices.

  Despite the onset of unseasonable weather – the winter of 1939–40 was one of the coldest on record across Europe – the Luftwaffe continued to send hostile patrols to attack targets in eastern Scotland. Throughout December a number of fishing trawlers from Leith and Granton were sunk or damaged while operating in the North Sea, and both the Turnhouse- and Drem-based squadrons were kept busy, with a healthy rivalry being built up between the Edinburgh and Glasgow auxiliary pilots. They enjoyed a reward of sorts when the pilot of a Heinkel shot down over Fife Ness admitted that the German air crews had not expected to encounter Spitfires, and regarded the Firth of Forth as ‘suicide corner’. In stark contrast to the deployment of the modern Spitfire fighters the RAF often had to resort to the use of older aircraft and more basic tactics. One of the strangest flights was provided by No. 1 Coastal Patrol of Coastal Command which operated out of RAF Dyce using slow-flying Tiger Moth training aircraft – in the event of ditching, each aircraft carried a car tyre’s inner tube and two homing pigeons. Known as ‘Scarecrow Patrols’, these venerable unarmed aircraft flew over the North Sea to search for German submarines travelling on the surface, the reasoning being that any aircraft noise would be a deterrent. On 25 January 1940 the tactics seemed to work when a Dyce-based Tiger Moth sighted a trail of surface oil, and the crew (Flight Lieutenant Hoyle and Pilot Officer Child) was able to direct a destroyer to make a successful depth-charge attack.

  However, not everything went the RAF’s way. A month earlier, on 21 December 1939, 602 Squadron was scrambled to intercept an incoming flight of twelve bombers over Dunbar. Despite the poor visibility, the Spitfires made contact and attacked, shooting down two of them and killing one of the aircrew, only to find that they were not enemy aircraft but RAF Handley Page Hampden medium bombers of 44 Squadron returning from a sweep over the North Sea. The subsequent Board of Inquiry found that the bombers were well off course and were not flying with their under-carriages lowered in a defended area to signify that they were friendly aircraft, but it was still an unpleasant incident. When 44 Squadron left for their home base at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire the aircrew made their feelings clear by over-flying the airfield at Drem and dropping hundreds of toilet rolls on their unwitting assailants.3

  The approaches to the Tay estuary also became a battleground, with attacks being made on shipping by enemy submarines and bomber aircraft. On 2 December U-56 managed to sink two merchantmen, first the Swedish-registered Rudolf and then the 3,829-ton steamer Eskdene, owned by the Dene Shipping Line. Although the crew abandoned ship and were rescued by an Admiralty trawler, Eskdene remained afloat, helped by her cargo of timber, and was towed into the Forth. Later she returned to service but was eventually torpedoed and sunk off the Azores in April 1941. The city of Dundee became the target of the first of a number of enemy raids when it was bombed on 2 August 1940, but the local newspaper reported somewhat derisively that the only casualties had been ‘a cat and a flock of swallows’.4 Heavier attacks were made later in that year with the first casualties being suffered on the night of 5 November, but there was an optimistic local hope that the city would be spared further damage on Hitler’s orders because Dundee had failed to re-elect Churchill in the 1922 General Election. This myth was widely believed – after fourteen years as MP for Dundee, Church
ill had lost out to Edwin ‘Neddy’ Scrymgeour, an Independent and the only prohibitionist ever to be elected to parliament. For his part, Churchill entertained little love for the constituency he had represented since 1908. After being defeated he vowed never to revisit Dundee, and in the summer of 1943 kept his word when he rejected the offer of being granted the Freedom of the City when it was offered to him by the council on a narrow vote of sixteen to fifteen.

  Other parts of Scotland were also in the front line during the first winter of the war. At the beginning of December Scapa Flow became a Protected Area under Defence Regulation No. 13 which empowered the home secretary to prevent ‘persons other than existing residents, Servicemen or police’ entering the area with permit or permission.5 This meant that the whole territory north and northwest of the Great Glen became a no-go area – a vast region which included Inverness-shire, Ross and Cromarty, Sutherland, the Western Isles and Orkney and Shetland. As if any additional evidence were needed following a succession of bombing raids, this put Orkney on the frontline, and throughout the autumn months the naval base at Scapa Flow came under frequent attack until the fleet dispersed to Loch Ewe. There were also raids on Shetland: on 22 November six Heinkels raided Lerwick harbour and succeeded in sinking an elderly Saro London flying boat of 201 Squadron which operated out of Sullom Voe. The short days of winter put a stop to this kind of hostile activity but the respite was only temporary. On 16 March 1940 Britain’s first civilian casualty was caused when James Isbister, a 27-year-old workman was killed at the Bridge of Waithe on Orkney while watching a German air raid on the nearby Hatston air base.

  Throughout this period the busiest army personnel were the gunners who manned the air defences in the Forth estuary and at Scapa Flow, most of whom were recently called-up members of the Territorial Army. On the wider front the build-up of the army was solid and unspectacular – in August and September 546,000 Territorials and Reservists were mobilised under the terms of the Reserve and Auxiliary Force Act of 1939. Following the peacetime call-up in June, all men aged from eighteen to forty-one became liable for conscription into the armed forces under the terms of the National Service (Armed Forces) Act, and it began with immediate effect. Shortly after his twentieth birthday, and three weeks after the declaration of war, Alistair Urquhart received ‘the dreaded letter from the War Office’ ordering him to report to The Gordon Highlanders’ depot at Bridge of Don in his native Aberdeen. His father had served in the same regiment during the First World War, fighting with them at the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916, and the irony was not lost on young Urquhart when he arrived at the depot gates along with ‘a mixed bunch, made up of farm-workers, plumbers, labourers, fishermen, apprentice engineers and plumbers’. At the time of his enlistment Urquhart had spent the previous five years working as an apprentice in Lawson Turnbull Ltd, an Aberdeen firm of plumbers’ merchants and electrical wholesalers, and his one concern was that his job should be kept open for him.6

  Although conscription avoided the ‘volunteer craze’ which had seen thousands of men sign up for service in the late summer of 1914, especially in Scotland, it did allow men to pre-empt the process by putting their names forward for service in particular arms thought to be glamorous such as the RAF. Amongst those who took that course of action was Bill King, who had been working as a coalminer at the Easthouses pit at Newtongrange in Midlothian, and volunteered immediately after he had passed his eighteenth birthday. With two friends he went to the recruiting office in the Music Hall in Edinburgh’s George Street, and after a medical was accepted for service.

  I don’t think there was any specific reason I went to the Air Force rather than the army or navy, except the Air Force was needin’ people an we thought we’d mair chance o’ getting away. I think that was mair the reason we volunteered: we didna want tae go in the army. God Almighty! Just imagine yourself rushin’ across a battlefield wi’ a bayonet and a big six foot man comin’ rushin’ at ye! Ah’d ha’ died o’ fright! Up in the air everybody’s the same size.7

  The following spring King received his call-up papers and did his basic training at RAF Padgate near Warrington in Lancashire.

  Volunteering was popular because it allowed an element of choice and provided the impression that despite the prevailing bureaucracy it was possible to control one’s fate – an important consideration following the experience of the previous conflict, when the vast majority of Scotland’s casualties had been infantry privates.8 Eddie Mathieson from Edinburgh was turned down for the RAF because he lacked the educational qualifications, but he successfully joined the Royal Navy and served in the Royal Marines. Like many others of his generation who remembered the slaughter on the Western Front he did not want to be ‘duffed into the Black Watch or Cameronians’.9 There was another difference. Whereas the voluntary system in 1914 immediately brought huge numbers of recruits into the armed forces, conscription relied on registration, and initially it proved to be a slow and somewhat cumbersome business which began on 21 October with males in the twenty to twenty-three age group. Allowance was also made to exclude those in reserved occupations, such as farmers, medical workers, skilled tradesmen in war industries, firemen and policemen, who were considered essential to the war effort. Because registration was done through the Ministry of Labour, a Whitehall department, it makes it very difficult to assess the size of the Scottish response to the call-up, other than to estimate that it would not have been less than 10 per cent of the total UK population. There were other differences. Unlike the First World War there was less emphasis on immediately placing men in the infantry, and because men who joined up together did not necessarily serve in the same local unit there was no repetition of the ‘pals’ formations. While these had been beneficial in the earlier conflict by allowing men from the same localities to serve together, it meant that casualties would be concentrated on one area in the event of a high death toll. For example the two men who joined up with Bill King were not conscripted until later with the result he ‘only saw them when we come home on leave’.

  Even so, as far as the army was concerned Scotland’s military contribution to the war effort was not very different from what it had been twenty-five years earlier. Men like Alistair Urquhart were called up immediately – his parents had hoped that the initial of his surname would delay the process – while others had to wait for their call-up papers to arrive. There was seemingly no logic to the process. Most of the conscripts would be bound for the army, then as now the service which needed the greatest number of recruits. In the early days at least, Scottish recruits joining the Regular Army tended to be placed in one of the existing ten line infantry regiments, each of which was composed of two regular battalions and an assorted number of Territorial Army battalions.

  Traditionally, all of the regiments recruited on a territorial basis so that a man from the north-east like Alistair Urquhart would be directed to The Gordon Highlanders while in all likelihood men from other parts would also join their local regiment: The Royal Scots (Edinburgh and Lothians); The Royal Scots Fusiliers (Ayrshire and the south-west); The King’s Own Scottish Borderers (the border counties); The Cameronians (Lanarkshire); The Black Watch (Angus, Fife and Perthshire); The Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow); The Seaforth Highlanders (Ross and Cromarty, Sutherland and Western Isles); Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders (Inverness-shire); The Gordon Highlanders (north-east, Orkney and Shetland); and The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (Argyllshire and Stirlingshire). There was also a regiment of foot guards with two battalions (Scots Guards) and a heavy cavalry regiment (Royal Scots Greys), both of which recruited across the country.

  All the Scottish regiments had long histories, some of which stretched back to the seventeenth century, and all had fought with distinction during the First World War when the numbers of the line infantry regiments (but not foot guards or cavalry) had been swollen by the creation of special service battalions of the New Army, raised specifically for war service. One regiment, The Royal
Scots, had produced thirty-six battalions (Regular, Territorial and New Army), which had served on every battle front except for the campaigns against Ottoman forces in Mesopotamia and against German forces and their local allies in east and west Africa. Six of its soldiers had been awarded the Victoria Cross, the regiment had won 71 battle honours, and over 100,000 men had worn the Royal Scots cap badge, but the price had been high in human terms. The Royals lost 583 officers and 10,630 men killed in action, an estimated 40,000 soldiers had been wounded and an unknown number of survivors succumbed to physical and mental wounds throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s.10

  In the aftermath of that earlier conflict, in common with Scotland’s other regiments, The Royals lost their New Army battalions to disbandment in 1919, and their Territorial battalions also suffered cuts as the army was reduced once more to a peacetime standing. In 1922 the 4th and 5th Battalions amalgamated as the 4/5th (Queen’s Edinburgh) Battalion, and the 7th and 9th Battalions (the ‘Dandy Ninth’) amalgamated as the 7/9th (Highlanders) Battalion. All the other wartime Territorial battalions were disbanded, and the 3rd Battalion was placed in a state of ‘suspended animation’ which allowed it to continue in being without having an operational existence.

  It was a similar story in the other Scottish regiments. As had happened throughout Britain’s history the conclusion of hostilities brought an immediate reduction in the huge wartime armed forces and in most respects it was a case of ‘business as usual’ as regiments went back to the familiar patterns and routines of peacetime soldiering. Following the construction of the huge volunteer and conscript army, the post-war Regular Army returned to its position as an all-volunteer force, and horizons narrowed as regiments revived a way of life that all professional soldiers recognised and understood. A bottleneck in promotion prospects also led to complacency and to a comatose condition which discouraged radical thinking and put a stop to reform. Pacifism, arising largely from the huge death toll from the war, was also a disincentive for change. All too often anti-war sentiments became anti-armed-forces sentiments, and the army suffered as a result. As the historian Correlli Barnett explained, the situation produced a time of stagnation when ‘the professional horizon of regular officers shrank again from the complex management of technological war to the life of the regiment, to small wars in hot places and police duties in support of the civil authorities in India and Ireland’.11