by Trevor Royle
Three battalions of these secret units were formed across the UK, with 201 Battalion covering Scotland and Northern England. Individual units usually consisted of an officer and up to twelve men, and they operated with the assistance of their designated IO. In Scotland the organisation’s headquarters was at Melville House, the seat of the Earls of Leven, near Ladybank in Fife, which was chosen by the senior IO for Scotland Captain Eustace Maxwell, brother of the writer Gavin Maxwell. Not only was the house centrally situated but it also contained ample grounds for training including a secluded small arms range. Units were brought here for training in demolition, signals work and close-quarter combat, but all this activity had to be carried out without any fanfare. By the very nature of their duties members of Auxiliary Units tended to be a close-knit group, most of whom came from the same neighbourhood or workplace, and not even their families were allowed to be told what they were doing. On one occasion those under training tested the security of Scottish Command and managed to leave behind a timed thunderflash in the GOC’s private lavatory. Other exercises were held with Auxiliary Units operating against the Polish forces who were guarding Fife’s coastal defences.
The grounds of Melville House also housed a model Observation Post which was built by Welsh miners brought up to Fife and returned immediately to their homes in order to maintain secrecy. This was the standard base from which patrols operated, and which, in the event of an invasion, would provide lairs varying in size and design. Situated in remote areas, usually underground, these positions contained basic living facilities and arms caches, and were considered to be so secret that construction workers were never told their real purpose. Around 100 were thought to have been constructed in Scotland. Some were purpose-built by tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers to a design by Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Field: Nissen huts made of corrugated iron were placed in trenches and buried with ventilation shafts camouflaged as rabbit burrows, but these proved to have condensation problems which made explosives unstable. Other hideouts were built into badger setts; still more were simply basements in houses or the ruins of buildings. There were even hides in castle dungeons or in underground chambers, the most famous being the souterrain or earth house on the machair at Ness on the Isle of Lewis. A natural hiding place, it had been built with a long underground passage leading to a circular central chamber. Unfortunately it had to be cleared out, and the IO responsible for the area Captain A. G. Fiddes-Watt (an artist and picture restorer in civilian life) was appalled by the unnecessary destruction of priceless Iron Age shards.
Perhaps the most dramatic secret location for use by the Auxiliary Units was a large underground bunker constructed on the flanks of East Lomond Hill above the village of Falkland in Fife. The brainchild of General Andrew ‘Bulgy’ Thorne, who had become General Officer Commanding-in-Chief in Scotland in April 1941, it was planned as the nerve-centre for the Scottish resistance, and with its superb location overlooking the Howe of Fife it would have been a difficult position to dislodge. Thorne, a Grenadier Guards officer from Moray, knew what he was talking about: before the war he had served as military attaché in Berlin where he learned that East Prussian landowners were training their estate workers as irregular ‘stay-behind’ units, and he believed that the idea had merit. Although the threat of invasion had lapsed, Thorne also believed that the Germans were still capable of launching a successful attack against the Scottish mainland, using airborne forces to capture Fife and create a lodgement while a twin-pronged seaborne attack would be made against the Forth and Tay estuaries. Having established a hold in the east he expected that the German panzer forces would then drive westward to cut the country in half. Thorne’s main concern was to integrate the Auxiliary Units into the home defence structure of Scottish Command, especially the last line of defence known as the Scottish Command Line, a series of defensive blocks to protect the Tay, the Forth and the Clyde. The East Lomond–Melville House nexus was central to those plans. Local people in the area knew nothing about this; the bunker on East Lomond was constructed by Canadian Army tunnellers, and once the job was completed they were posted elsewhere. The position itself was filled in after the war, and for many years only a heavily padlocked ventilation shaft revealed its existence.22
Some idea of the secret nature of the work of the Auxiliary Units in Fife can be found in the experience of Tom Wilson, a farmer at Carslogie near Cupar, who was a lieutenant in 1st Fife Home Guard. At the age of thirty-six and in a reserved occupation, he was telephoned shortly after the fall of Dunkirk by Eustace Maxwell. He was informed that he had been recruited into a new top-secret unit and that no one, not even his family, was to be told what he was doing. On the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Auxiliary Units Wilson finally broke cover and told his story, summing up his experiences with a terse comment: ‘We were to work behind enemy lines, sabotage was to be our business.’ Wilson’s squad comprised six men, all locals known to him. There was a shoemaker, a roadman, an electrician, a butcher and a barber. As happened elsewhere, none knew which of the others had been chosen from their battalion until their first meeting at an empty house on his farmland at Carslogie. ‘We knew the country and that was the point,’ he explained in an interview later in life. ‘We could move about freely in the countryside.’23 So good was the security that long after the war many units thought that they were unique, and that there was no overall command structure. The IO for Fife and Angus was Captain W. D. Clark; at one stage he had 121 men under his command, and 25 secret hideouts were constructed in his area.24
In addition to the protection of the civilian population, the Scottish Office had also laid plans for safeguarding the country’s treasures. The most important of these were the Crown Jewels, the so-called ‘Honours of Scotland’, consisting of the Crown, Sceptre and Great Sword of State. Last used in 1651 to crown Charles II, they had been in danger before, having been hidden in Dunottar Castle and then in Kineff Church in Perthshire during the Cromwellian occupation of Scotland. Although they had been restored in 1660 they went missing after the Act of Union in 1707, and were not recovered from their sealed case in Edinburgh Castle until the novelist Sir Walter Scott engineered a much-publicised ‘discovery’ in February 1818. Clearly they were still of symbolic importance, and on the outbreak of war the decision was taken to remove them from public display in the Crown Room in Edinburgh Castle and to place them in a locked case which was then removed to a vault. Two years later they were moved once more and placed in two zinc-lined cases which were sealed and placed in separate concealed locations in the nearby Half Moon Battery. Four sealed envelopes contained the exact location, and one bore the instruction that the regalia were to be destroyed in the event of an enemy invasion.
Scotland’s main art treasures and other irreplaceable objects were also moved from their collections in Edinburgh – from the National Gallery of Scotland, the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, the Royal Scottish Museum and the National Library of Scotland. In conditions of great secrecy, 418 paintings and 609 portraits were removed in 12 wagon-loads on 31 August 1939. On 12 October an official of the National Galleries of Scotland was able to inform the Scottish Office that ‘the Collections of the National Gallery, Portrait Gallery and Museum of Antiquities have been moved to six mansion houses, 3 in Peeblesshire, 1 in Berwickshire, 1 in East Lothian and 1 in Selkirkshire’. To oversee them in their new locations a gallery attendant was placed in each house where he was given basic accommodation and paid an additional fourteen shillings per week. As a concession they were also allowed to take with them a few items of personal furniture.25 Although precise details were kept secret at the time, it transpired that for the safekeeping of these treasures the Scottish Office requisitioned accommodation in a number of country houses, mainly in the Borders: The Glen at Innerleithen, Glenmoriston at Innerleithen, Leithen Lodge at Innerleithen, Fernilee at Galashiels, Manderston at Duns and Winston Castle at Pencaitland. A number of other country houses were requisitioned to sto
re valuables from other Scottish cultural institutions. The full list reads as follows:
Borthwick Castle, Middleton, Midlothian
National Library
Royal Scottish Museum
Registrar General
Geological Survey
Morinish Lodge, Killin
National Library
General Register House
Blackness Castle, West Lothian
Royal Scottish Museum
Torwoodlee, Selkirkshire
Royal Scottish Museum
Crookston House, Midlothian
Royal Scottish Museum26
Throughout the period of the evacuation there were problems in guarding the various locations and maintaining the correct levels of humidity. By December 1940, after the invasion scare had died down, the National Galleries re-opened two of its rooms for an exhibition of photographs to raise money for the Polish Relief Fund. All the collections were returned and the operation was concluded on 18 July 1945
In retrospect, and with the benefit of hindsight, the Germans’ ability to mount a cross-Channel invasion was vastly over-rated, but at the time the threat was taken very seriously indeed. It also suited Churchill’s purpose to unite the nation behind him to act in common cause, both through his own rhetoric and by the rapid expansion of measures to stem any enemy assault on the British mainland. Following the rapid fall of Norway and France there was a need to rebuild national confidence and morale, and that necessity accounts for the enthusiasm and determination which suffused the national mood in the summer of 1940. That being said, Hitler’s ambition to mount an invasion was not entirely make-believe but rooted in military reality. With Poland and Western Europe in his hands it seemed inconceivable that the German leader would not turn his attention to Britain. His commanders were cock-a-hoop following their easy victories, and the litter on the Dunkirk beaches told them all they needed to know about Britain’s plight. Such was the disarray in the defending forces that the 1st (London) Division, responsible for defending the Channel coast from Sheppey to Rye, had only eleven modern 25-pounder field guns, as well as four obsolete 18-pounders and eight 4.5 howitzers which had been used in the previous conflict. In the whole of the United Kingdom there were only 80 heavy tanks, all incapable of engaging modern German panzers with any hope of success, and 180 light tanks used largely for reconnaissance purposes. For the fifteen divisions available for combat after the fall of France on 31 May there was insufficient transport, and contingency plans had to be put in place to use civilian buses.
It was a curious time. Throughout the summer the possibility of invasion remained a potent threat, and the southern counties along the Channel coast became a huge armed camp. However, no precise plans had ever been laid to counter an invasion of the UK, as the last serious attempt had taken place in February 1797 when a small French force had landed at Fishguard in Wales during the war against Revolutionary France. Commanded by Colonel William Tate, an American who had fought the British during the war of independence, it was the precursor of a larger invasion force but it was quickly subdued and rounded up. The Irish rebel Wolfe Tone who supported the action described Tate’s men as ‘unmitigated blackguards’, and in one instance a dozen French soldiers surrendered to a Welsh woman armed only with a pitchfork, in the mistaken belief that her traditional red cloak denoted that she was a soldier. Half a century later, during the reign of Napoleon III, there was another scare but the possibility of any invasion actually taking place was so remote that it had never been considered by the army’s Staff College.
It was at that juncture when a German invasion might have succeeded that Hitler hesitated. He still hoped that the British government would sue for peace, enabling him to turn his attention to Eastern Europe, the real object of his territorial ambitions. There was also a very real possibility that a seaborne invasion would fail through lack of specialist equipment, and Hitler was far from certain that his navy and air force would be able to gain the tactical superiority for such a venture. In addition, accurate intelligence about British resistance was in short supply, leading the German leader to complain to his generals: ‘We are divided from England by a trench 37 kilometres wide and we are not even able to get to know what is happening there.’ However, despite those misgivings the Germans continued with their plans for an invasion. The army tested new equipment such as amphibious and submersible tanks, and logistics experts began assembling the shipping that would convey the invasion forces, the basic units being large commercial barges used on the Rhine. The head of the Luftwaffe, Herman Göring, began to make fanciful claims that his aircraft would destroy the RAF in the air and smash their bases in Kent.27 Only the navy’s commander-in-chief, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, was sceptical, telling Hitler on 11 July that an invasion had to be an operation of last resort, and could only be carried out once German aerial superiority had been established. Nevertheless, five days later Hitler issued Directive No. 16, ‘Preparations for the Invasion of England’, which gave the go-ahead for the operation to commence in the first half of September when conditions would be favourable – a dark passage and a rising tide on arrival. The operation was codenamed Sealion.
Throughout August the German thinking underwent several modifications, and at the same time plans were also laid for controlling the country once the invasion had succeeded. Prepared under the direction of Heinrich Himmler’s Reichssicherheitshauptampt, the central security office ran by Reinhardt Heydrich, second-in-command of the secret police (Gestapo), they envisaged the immediate creation of Gestapo headquarters in London with five Einsatzgruppen working in Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh, the main purpose being ‘to combat with the requisite means all anti-German organisations, institutions, opposition and opposition groups’. The man given responsibility for the operation was SS Standartenführer Dr Franz Six, and he had a formidable array of assets at his disposal. Indeed, from the archival material relating to the German invasion it is possible to build up a detailed picture of what the UK would have looked like under Nazi control.28 One handbook contained 174 photographs, mostly taken from the air and culled from publications such as the Illustrated London News and Country Life. For the Scottish section there was even a glossary of words in Gaelic.
Central to Six’s policies was the arrest and liquidation of leading figures and the elimination of organisations which might oppose German authority such as churches, trades unions, schools and the police. All suspects were listed in the Informationsheft GB (Special Wanted List), and the Scottish content contained some curious bedfellows. The Scottish Farm Servants Union was to be closed down because it was of ‘Marxist persuasion’, and for different reasons the Scottish Boy Scouts Association was on the list because it was such ‘an excellent source of information for the British intelligence service’.29 At the time Jim Brown was a nineteen-year-old Rover Scout with the Edinburgh Craiglockhart troop. For him and countless others scouting meant the simple pleasure of camping at nearby Bonaly or tramping the Pentland Hills; it certainly was not about working covertly for the intelligence services. ‘The Germans may have come to conclusions about [Robert] Baden-Powell’s activities but they were wide of the mark as far as we were concerned,’ he claimed in 1990. ‘If anything, the Boys Brigade was more militaristic than us. We all came from different backgrounds, religious and social, and we all went to different schools.’30 Nevertheless Brown would have been one of the many Scout leaders rounded up by the Gestapo had Scotland been invaded in 1940.
The Scottish Unionist Association would also have been raided, and there were plans to close down every local office of the Transport and General Workers’ Union from Aberdeen to Stornoway and Barrhead to Methil. The principal Scottish freemasons’ lodges were also on the hit-list, along with two major and long-established Scottish businesses – publishers William Blackwood and Sons Ltd and J. & P. Coats, the Paisley cotton manufacturers. Both were unusual selections for attention by the Gestapo. The Edinburgh publishing ho
use of William Blackwood had been founded in 1805, and had recently published the work of John Buchan and Hugh MacDiarmid as well as a wide range of well-known English authors including George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and R. D. Blackmore. According to the Informationsheft, Blackwood’s only fault had been the publication in 1936 of Tales from Tyrol, a run-of-the-mill collection of short stories by Olga Watkins, a member of a leading Anglo-Austrian family who gained fame as a prominent member of the legislative council in Kenya. A fluent German speaker, as a young woman during the First World War she had attracted the attention of the notorious British spymaster Richard Meinertzhagen. No one knows why the Paisley ‘cotton kings’ were included on the list although by the outbreak of the war J. & P. Coats was one of the largest commercial concerns in Scotland, employing 28,000 workers at their Anchor and Ferguslie mills in Paisley.
Heydrich’s headquarters also produced the Sonderfahndungsliste GB (Special Search List, also known as the Black Book) which included the names of 2,820 British politicians, writers, artists and intellectuals, as well as European exiles resident in London, all of whom would have been taken into custody by the Gestapo: ‘All persons enumerated in the Special Search List will be seized.’31 On the evidence of what happened in the rest of Europe, and in view of Dr Six’s infamous record in Moscow two years later when large numbers of prisoners were executed on his orders, that would have meant arrest, interrogation, torture and almost certain death in a concentration camp. Most of the names on the list are fairly obvious (Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden), others less so (Noël Coward and Virginia Woolf) but the Scots on the list make a variegated group. Listed for arrest by the foreign department of the German security forces were the Duchess of Atholl who had raised funds for humanitarian relief during the Spanish Civil War, the scientist J. B. S. Haldane, Professor R. W. Seton-Watson, the novelists Naomi Mitchison and Rebecca West and the MPs Robert Boothby, James Maxton and Mannie Shinwell. A different fate awaited Willie Gallacher, Communist MP for West Fife, who was wanted for immediate imprisonment by the Gestapo, and the writer and historian Robert Bruce Lockhart who was wanted by Walter Schellenberg’s counter-espionage department.
