by Trevor Royle
One other incident stands out from that desperate period. Many of the surviving Royals were placed in a camp at Sham Shui Po on the mainland where they were commanded by their senior officer Captain Douglas Ford. Early on he managed to make contact with Chinese collaborators who managed to smuggle in badly needed medical supplies. Plans were also made for a mass breakout, although the weakened condition of the men inside the camp made this something of a non-starter. In any case, as Ford’s brother, James Allan Ford, has pointed out, ‘the outward messages contained little, if anything, more than the International Red Cross would have learned, if Japan had been a signatory to the Geneva Convention.’30
But it was always a high-risk gamble, and when the Japanese discovered the extent of the communication, reprisals were inevitable. Along with others, Douglas Ford was arrested on 10 July 1943, subjected to sadistic torture, and held in solitary confinement on starvation rations. Throughout the experience he refused to give anything away, despite receiving agonising treatment from his captors, and continued to accept sole responsibility for his actions. As a result two sergeants implicated in the plot received prison sentences instead of the death penalty when the trials for espionage were held in December, but after perfunctory proceedings Ford and two other officers were condemned to death for committing an act of espionage. On 18 December they were shot by firing squad, but even in those last dreadful minutes Ford’s courage and resolution never wavered. Although weakened himself, he gave assistance to his brother officers, and as the junior of the three took his place on the left of the line. In acknowledgement of Ford’s courage the Japanese officer in charge of the firing squad insisted that the condemned man, a gallant Royal Scot, should stand on the right. After the war, Ford received the posthumous award of the George Cross ‘in recognition of his most conspicuous gallantry while a prisoner-of-war in Japanese hands’.
The ruinous defeats of the British Army in France and the Far East could have had a damaging influence on the people of Britain but the opposite seemed to happen. For the next eighteen months Britain was on her own, supported only by the forces of the Dominions and by the forces of free Europe which had managed to escape the Nazi and Soviet invasions. It was a parlous period but within weeks of the defeats at Dunkirk and St Valéry there was renewed hope when RAF fighters overcame their German opponents in the skies above southern England and gained sufficient superiority to persuade Hitler to abandon plans for a cross-Channel invasion. By any standards the Battle of Britain was a glorious and hard-fought victory, and the author George Orwell was right to compare it to Trafalgar or Salamis. It has also created its own mythology. Quite apart from the fillip to the national psyche, it gave substance to the defiant decision to fight on against Nazi Germany, and to refuse all overtures to make any bargain with Hitler. History generally records it as an English victory which was won over the counties of Kent and Sussex – often in full view of those living below – but amongst the air crew were squadrons and aircrew representing the Dominions, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the United States and Scotland, which was represented by its two auxiliary air force squadrons.
In the middle of August 602 Squadron left Drem for Tangmere to replace 145 Squadron’s Hurricanes, and were first in action against enemy aircraft on 16 August. A fortnight later 603 Squadron left Turnhouse, and replaced 65 Squadron at Hornchurch in Essex. It too was soon in action, losing three Spitfires and two crew on 28 August, a fact recorded by one of the pilots Richard Hillary, who watched the squadron returning with ‘smoke stains along the leading edges of the wings showing that all the guns had been fired.’31 Before the war Hillary had been a noted athlete at Oxford and had served in the University Air Squadron. On the outbreak of war he had joined 603 Squadron whose B Flight was operating from RAF Montrose. No sooner had the squadron moved south than Hillary had five kills to his name, and had also experienced his first crash on 29 August when he crash-landed in a field near Lympne. Four days later during a dogfight over the Channel, Hillary’s Spitfire was hit by a Me 109 and he only just managed to escape from his cockpit after the canopy jammed. Horribly burned during the descent, he landed in the sea off the Kent coast, and after three hours in the water was picked by the Margate lifeboat.
From there, after treatment at Margate and in London, he was sent to the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead where his severe burns were treated by the distinguished plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe, who was responsible for treating aircrew who had been badly burned, mainly in the face and limbs. Like most members of the ‘Guinea Pig Club’ – the treatment was in its infancy and largely experimental – Hilary survived, and eventually returned to flying duties. Having used his influence to persuade the authorities to agree to this move – his memoir The Last Enemy had become a bestseller – he was posted to 54 Operational Training Unit at RAF Charterhall near Greenlaw in Berwickshire. It was clearly a mistake as Hillary was physically incapable of handling an aircraft and the inevitable happened: on the night of 8 January 1943 he was killed together with his navigator Sergeant Wilfred Fison when he lost control of his Bristol Blenheim V light bomber which crashed in heavy fog near Crunklaw Farm.
Hillary’s squadron fought for the remainder of the Battle of Britain, and returned to Scotland in December, as did 602 Squadron. Both of the Scottish auxiliary squadrons saw out the rest of the war and were disbanded in the summer of 1945 having seen active frontline service in the UK, Europe and Malta. Their record speaks for itself: both were first to see action against the Luftwaffe, and first to shoot down German bombers over the UK mainland. In New Zealand-born Flying Officer Brian Carbery, 603 Squadron had one of the RAF’s five top-scoring aces in the Battle of Britain, and the squadron itself had the honour of being the highest scoring squadron, with 58 kills in return for the loss of 30 aircraft, while 602 Squadron’s record was 35.5 kills for the loss of 17 aircraft.32
4 Frontline Scotland
In common with the rest of the UK, Scotland was put on a war footing as soon as hostilities with Germany began. At that early stage defence of the homeland was a priority, and even before the outbreak, as the international situation worsened, steps had been taken to establish an administration to deal with civil defence issues. On 26 August, a week before the declaration of war, Tom Johnston, Labour MP for West Stirlingshire, was appointed Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence in Scotland (one of twelve commissioners created for the United Kingdom), a powerful post which gave him a wide range of responsibilities not just for co-ordinating measures for the protection of the civilian population, but also for taking over the administration of Scotland in the event of the collapse of central government.1 His appointment came against a background of existing constitutional changes to the way the Scottish Office operated: under the terms of the Reorganisation of Offices (Scotland) Act of 1939, all the Scottish government departments had been effectively abolished as legal entities and made subject to the direction of the Secretary of State for Scotland.
Initially, as a Labour MP, Johnston had been chary about accepting the commissioner’s post as he believed that it could have implicated him in the Chamberlain government’s policy of appeasement, but as soon as he took up the position he emerged as the ideal choice, with a rare gift for understanding the threat posed by enemy aerial bombardment and the need, as he put it in his memoirs, ‘to prepare for the worst and hope for the best’.2 His political associate was David Ogilvy, 12th Earl of Airlie, a prominent Angus landowner who was also Lord Chamberlain and a committed public servant. Working with them were a number of talented individuals including Johnston’s chief of staff Norman Duke and his press officer Alastair Dunnett, later to become a distinguished editor of the Scotsman newspaper.
Johnston proved to be the right person for such an exacting job which required not only political skills of the highest order but also a good deal of tact and discretion. In all those respects he was no stranger to the demands that would emerge once he took up office in Edinburgh. Indeed, it could be said that
there was no other candidate who could have brought so many talents to public life during wartime, even though he had a history of being a thorn in the flesh to the authorities during the previous conflict. Born in Kirkintilloch in 1881, as a young man Johnston had embraced socialism, joining first the Fabian Society and then the Independent Labour Party (ILP). With the help of a modest inheritance he founded a weekly magazine Forward in 1906, and quickly developed it as a significant campaigning publication with a strong emphasis on self-help and political integrity, and imbued with a distinctly humanitarian outlook. At the outbreak of the First World War the magazine’s tone was sceptical of the war effort and at the end of 1915 it was closed down under regulations 2, 18 and 27 of the Defence of the Realm Act after Johnston broke the censorship rules by reporting the opposition of Glasgow munitions workers to David Lloyd George’s ‘dilution’ plans (the system by which men were replaced by women in skilled jobs). The order was rescinded in February 1916, but from that point onwards Johnston was under increasing scrutiny by the authorities, not least because of his political associations and the robust editorial stance he adopted in his magazine’s editorials. As a result he was investigated by the Lord Advocate but no further charges were brought against him or Forward.3
Through his journalism and his own political leanings Johnston had become associated with the group of ILP politicians known as the ‘Red Clydesiders’, men such as James Maxton and Willie Gallacher who were opposed to the war and who were imprisoned for their support of the wartime strikes in the Clyde’s shipbuilding yards. In 1922 Johnston was elected ILP MP for West Stirlingshire, and although he lost the seat two years later he was quickly returned for Dundee at an early by-election. When Labour returned to office in 1929 he gave up Dundee and was returned as MP for his old seat of West Stirlingshire. During the 1920s and early 1930s Johnston’s political career was marked by an interest in the colonies, regarding the empire as a means of encouraging social and political progress and the needs of the unemployed.
Never a strict party man, he began to believe in the importance of consensual politics, and enjoyed friendships across the spectrum, including the Scottish Conservatives Walter Elliott, later a Scottish Secretary, and the novelist and historian John Buchan. Opposed to the formation of Ramsay Macdonald’s National Government Johnston lost his West Stirlingshire seat in 1931 but re-won it four years later. He also supported the League of Nations, was opposed to re-armament and held a number of ministerial posts including Under-Secretary of State for Scotland and Lord Privy Seal. Although a pacifist by inclination, he was also a realist and when war with Germany became inevitable in 1938 he was ready to admit that while he was saddened by the turn of events at Munich, something had to be done to stand up to the Nazi menace. At the time he made his feelings clear in an editorial in Forward: ‘I confess I found it difficult to clarify my emotions about the events of last weekend. Relief, almost gratitude, that our generation has had another escape – however temporary – from war. Shame and humiliation at the way the Czechs were egged on and “guaranteed”, and then left in the lurch! And finally apprehension that every ally we abandon, every friend we betray, leaves us the weaker for the day when the goose-stepping gangsters will order us in turn to put up our hands.’4
As a principled socialist and humanitarian Johnston was opposed to the concept of war but by 1938, having recognised its inevitability, he quickly came to the conclusion that preparations had to be made to protect the civilian population. When he was asked to become a Regional Commissioner that same year he agreed in principle but asked to be allowed to make his final decision when the country was at war or ‘the selection will be deferred until the occurrence of an emergency’. Such was the importance the government placed on his acceptance of his post, this condition was agreed by the House of Commons.5
Once appointed he set to work with a will. At the time there were complaints that the twelve Regional Commissioners would simply become ‘dictators’ in the event of government collapsing or a German invasion, and there were even hostile comments that the system replicated the regional associations created by Oliver Cromwell in 1655, the period known as the rule of the major-generals, ‘the most intolerable experience England ever had’.6 However, those protests missed the point that the Regional Commissioners were supposed to act as facilitators and enablers and not, as was often claimed, as ‘janissaries’ or even as ‘Nazi Gauleiters’. At the time the threat posed by enemy bombers was well enough known and understood but government measures were still inadequate and piecemeal, and Johnston had been highly critical of the lack of urgency shown by Sir John Anderson, the Lord Privy Seal, who was responsible for the United Kingdom’s air-raid precautions policy. In short, Johnston saw it as his duty to correct the shortcomings and to ensure that the people of Scotland were not only protected but were fully aware of the dangers they faced.
Amongst his concerns was the haphazard way in which plans for the evacuation of children had been drawn up by the Department of Health in Edinburgh (see Chapter 8). In particular he was disappointed by the low take-up in pre-war trials for evacuation and the apparent lack of urgency in getting the message across to the public. He was also much vexed by practical matters such as ensuring the proper provision of accommodation and fresh food for the evacuees. In Scotland the problem had been made worse by the fact that not only was there a lower standard of housing but the Department of Health found itself working with a smaller margin of available rooms, and even before evacuation began there was a marked degree of opposition to the whole concept of making accommodation available for what had been called the ‘dregs’ of the big cities.7 It had already been agreed that Scottish children would not be sent to England or English children sent to Scotland.
In the event, when war did break out, the evacuation of large numbers of Scotland’s children was only a mixed success – as was the provision of air-raid defences which was Johnston’s main preoccupation when he took office. During the First World War a policy of strategic bombing had been utilised by the main combatants using airships and heavy bomber aircraft, and in the 1920s and 1930s it was assumed that ‘the bomber would always get through’. One prophet of air power, the Italian General Giulio Douhet even suggested that the ferocity of unrestricted bombing of civilian targets would encourage the population to give up the will to continue, and demand that the fighting come to a stop. While many of the predictions about the destruction of civilian morale were so apocalyptic that many people believed that mass bombing would never be carried out, the theory had already been put into practice by the British in Mesopotamia (Iraq) in the early 1920s and by the Germans during the Spanish Civil War in the following decade. Mindful of the dangers posed by unrestricted enemy aerial bombing, the Cabinet turned its attention to the problem at a meeting on 7 November 1938 which considered the response both from a military and a civilian point of view. It was recommended that the fighter construction programme begun under the re-armament policy should be accelerated, that 20 escort vessels should be laid down for the Royal Navy, and that the army should be provided with 1,264 new anti-aircraft guns ‘of all types’. This latter policy would have ‘absolute priority’.8
In the wake of the Munich crisis the mood of the meeting was obviously sombre, and it was recognised that ‘it was Germany’s strength in the air and the relative weakness in this sphere of the other Powers which was the main factor causing the unrest and anxiety which existed in the world to-day’. Consideration was also given to extending and enhancing air-raid precautions including the construction of blast-proof shelters and strengthening existing buildings against bomb attack. In all instances this would be a devolved responsibility under the direction of the Air Raids Precaution Department which had been founded in 1935, and the Cabinet’s first recommendation spelled this out: ‘That the duty of organising air raid precautions should be left to the local authorities, but that powers should be taken in the forthcoming Air Raid Precautions Bill [15 November 1937] to d
eal with an authority which is clearly neglecting its duties, and also to strengthen, in quality and numbers, the regional inspectorate of the Home Office.’9
It had been against that background that Johnston had taken office, and he quickly accepted the view that there had been a fair degree of neglect in organising Scotland’s air defences, especially with regard to safeguarding the civilian population. Glasgow had been particularly tardy, virtually ignoring the government’s instructions, and providing only £4,617 for precautionary measure in the 1938–9 financial year. (At the same time almost four times that amount was voted for expenditure on the city’s parks.)
Pacifism was one reason as many Labour councillors believed that preparations of this kind were ‘warlike’ and would encourage militarism. For example, on 28 May 1936 a meeting of Glasgow Corporation ‘moved as an amendment that the Corporation do not proceed with a scheme of Air Raid Precautions but calls upon the Government to take the lead in securing the abolition of aerial bombing, believing as we do that this would prove the most effective way in safeguarding the citizens of this and other cities.’10 Lack of informed opinion was another: there was still a widespread belief that little could be done against the power and aggression of sustained aerial bombardment, and that measures to contain the threat would be too expensive and time-consuming.
