by Trevor Royle
However, instead of addressing these issues the Ministry of Supply tended to relate the men’s negative response to their predicament, and by the beginning of 1943 officials discussed repatriation as the only solution, citing as reasons poor health, general inefficiency and ‘associations’ with white women in the camps or in the nearby communities. As was the case with the appearance of black servicemen in the rest of the UK, this latter point was considered to be a real threat, and the idea of the British Hondurans entering into relationships with local women was taken very seriously indeed. In the autumn of 1942 the Duke of Buccleuch, a leading Scottish aristocrat and landowner in the Borders, complained to the Colonial Office that ‘the people in the neighbourhood [Kirkpatrick Fleming] were encouraged to be friendly to them and the girls have interpreted this rather widely . . . personally, I dislike this mixture of colour and regret that it should be allowed with no discouragement’.36 A response was promised, but if it ever emerged it was not recorded in the archives.
Inevitably, given human nature and a willingness to make the best of a bad issue, some of the foresters looked back on their service with some gratitude. In East Lothian a jazz band was formed and played regularly in towns such as Haddington and Tranent, where the foresters’ dancing abilities were admired by the local women, and, following a frosty beginning, there was an element of togetherness. Initial suspicions also blighted the arrival of the foresters in the West Highlands where one of the members of the unit, Sam Martinez, found that he really was entering a foreign country:
We went to the village of Ullapool, just three miles, a group of us, for the first time, I think it was when we went into the village, the children were all running about the street when they see us coming, they said the coal men are coming and they all disappeared and even the woman in the shop, the lasses in the shops went behind there and leave the men to serve us and I think the men were even nervous because it was the first time they seen black people.’37
However, the discrimination was short-lived, and not only did Martinez eventually discover that he ‘couldn’t find better people to deal, they organised parties, dances, entertainments, service and help us with eggs and milk and food’ but he eventually fell in love and married a local girl.38 After the war Sam Martinez stayed on in Scotland, but for most of the British Hondurans it was not a positive experience, and it was not until much later that their services were brought to public notice as accounts of their ill-treatment began to be published.39
The final group of tourists also came to Scotland through the exigencies of total war were German and Italian prisoners of war (POWs). The first arrivals were downed aircrew, but they were only a prelude to a growing number of enemy sailors and soldiers as Britain took the war to the Axis powers in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, North Africa and Italy and, later, France and north-west Europe. Under the terms of the Geneva Convention of 1929, to which Britain, Germany and Italy were signatories, captured service personnel had to be treated according to strict rules, and generally these were obeyed.
All told, by the end of the war, some 400,000 Axis POWs were held in around 600 camps across the UK, all of which offered basic living facilities. Some were purpose-built camps with Nissen-hut accommodation, but most were disused buildings which could be made secure. Ration scales were the same as those used for British service personnel, and all camps offered educational and recreational facilities. International law dictated that no POW was obliged to work, but many undertook agricultural labour or bomb damage repair because it gave them the opportunity to meet locals and broke up the generally dull routine in the camps. Although fraternisation was not allowed, many POWs struck up friendships, and, in some cases, romances blossomed: at the conclusion of hostilities over 15,000 remained in the United Kingdom
In Scotland there were forty-five main camps, most of which were working establishments, and these were situated across the country in rural areas. Many were in the central belt and the east coast counties of Fife, Angus and Aberdeenshire, but there were also camps in more remote areas in Argyllshire, Caithness, Orkney, Ross-shire and Wigtownshire.40 One of the most inaccessible camps was at Watten near Wick, which was opened in 1943 to hold high-security prisoners including Gunter D’Alquen, the editor of Das Schwarze Korps, the official newspaper of the Schutzstaffel (SS), and Otto Kretschmer, a U-boat captain known as the ‘Wolf of the Atlantic’ who was responsible for sinking forty-seven Allied merchant ships between 1939 and his capture in 1941. In common with others in Scottish camps they were encouraged to undertake agricultural work and, all told, by 1945 20,000 Axis POWs were working on the land in Scotland.41 Following the invasion of France in June 1944 this figure had been swollen by the arrival of 3,435 wounded German prisoners who were brought north from the English Channel ports for emergency treatment in Scottish hospitals, part of an extraordinary operation which saw 16,576 Axis service personnel being treated in this way.42
For the most part the experiences of the German and Italian POWs were unremarkable. While conditions were generally good, and attempts were made to keep POWs employed either on work schemes or through educational and recreational activities, boredom was a problem, as was the stress of isolation from Germany and Italy. Even after the war had ended prisoners were denied access to information about their families, and the post-war Labour government ignored the Geneva Convention by delaying immediate repatriation. The last German POWs were not returned until November 1948, and as fraternisation had been disallowed until Christmas 1946, this caused additional strains.
Nevertheless, many POWs working on the land struck up relationships with the farming communities in which they laboured – this was more or less unavoidable – and in some cases love blossomed. In Hawick Sergeant Rudi Drabner was a POW in the local Wilton Camp, having been taken prisoner in Normandy, and following the Christmas 1946 amnesty he fell in love with Anna Scott, a local dancing champion and bus conductress. Both admitted that their relationship was fraught with difficulties from family and friends who believed that she was wrong to become involved with a German, but they persisted, and were eventually married at the end of 1947 once Rudi had been demobilised. However, years later Anna admitted that it had not been an easy decision, and many local people were affronted by their relationship: ‘They said I was wasting my life. “Aren’t our boys good enough for you?” That sort of thing. I never had any hostility to my face, but I knew people were talking. Men were the worst. And older people.’43
The collision between the different cultures also spawned one of the best novels (also made into an equally memorable film and radio play) about the POW experience in Scotland – Jessie Kesson’s Another Time, Another Place (1983) which tells the story of a doomed love affair between Janie, the recently married young wife of an older farmer on the Black Isle, and Luigi, an Italian POW working on their farm. Any kind of liaison would shock the close-knit community, but Kesson subtly introduces the notion that while Janie is a prisoner in a loveless marriage she uses Luigi as much as he uses her. In that sense the arrival of the Italians has changed everything for her: ‘The young woman felt a small surge of anticipation rising up within her at the prospect of the widening of her narrow insular world as a farm worker’s wife, almost untouched by the world war that raged around her. She always felt she was missing out on some tremendous event, never more so than when she caught a glimpse of girls of her own age, resplendent in uniform, setting out for places she would never set eyes on.’44 The affair eventually becomes public after Luigi is falsely accused of raping another girl and Janie provides him with an alibi, but that is not the end of the story. In a bleak finale it becomes clear that there is no absolution for anyone. Luigi is still arrested, and Janie and her husband are forced to remain on their farm in the closely knit rural community which now despises both of them. She is still as much a prisoner as she ever was.
During the war Kesson was a cottar’s wife living at Udale Cottages, Poyntzfield, near Jemimaville on the Black Isle,
where three Italian POWs were employed on the land, but she always remained coy about any autobiographical context in her novel, telling her biographer that while she was fond of the Italians and was attracted to one of them, ‘she ruled herself out from the first day. ‘No posseeble!’45
Perhaps the most significant memorials to the presence of Axis POWs in Scotland can be found on Orkney, where Italian prisoners constructed an ornate and hauntingly beautiful chapel on Lamb Holm island, and at Cultybraggan Camp at Comrie in Perthshire which was home to hard-line Nazi officers. It would also be difficult to find a starker contrast. The Orkney chapel was built by 550 Italian soldiers who had been taken prisoner in North Africa and transported to Orkney to construct the Churchill Barrier defences. Built to block the east side of Scapa Flow, the barriers linked the Orkney Mainland in the north to the island of South Ronaldsay and the two smaller islands of Lamb Holm and Glimps Holm. The chapel was constructed out of two Nissen huts, with a façade added to replicate a chapel entrance, but it was the interior decoration which gave the building its religious intensity. Most of the work was done by Domenico Chiocchetti, a POW from Moena who painted the sanctuary end of the chapel while fellow prisoners decorated the entire interior.
On the other hand, and in deep contrast, Cultybraggan was built as Camp 21 in 1940 and eventually housed 4,000 German POWs who had been classified as ‘black’ or irredeemable Nazis, many of them members of the SS. Inevitably the atmosphere within the camp was tense, not least because some of the guards were Polish, and things came to a head shortly before Christmas 1944 when two German POWs were found hanged and badly beaten. Following investigations it was discovered that they had been sentenced to death as traitors by a drumhead court-martial, and eight POWs were eventually arrested. The British investigating officer was Captain John Wheatley, a lawyer whose uncle of the same name had been imprisoned as a pacifist during the First World War and had also served as Health Minister in the first Labour government of 1924. On arriving at Cultybraggan camp, Wheatley described the atmosphere inside the camp as ‘extremely violent and threatening’, and his work was made more difficult by the code of silence imposed by the Nazi prisoners.46 Eventually the arrested men were sent for trial in London where five were sentenced to death and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 6 October 1945.
Many of the Nissen huts remained intact after the war when Cultybraggan was used as a training facility for the Territorial Army. In 2007 the camp was bought by the local community for use as a heritage centre and a reminder of its past use as a military camp. In the post-war world the camp compound also housed a fully equipped secret bunker which would have been used by the regional government in Scotland in the event of a nuclear war. Through the quirks of time both Cultybraggan and the Lamb Holm Italian Chapel are popular tourist attractions.
10 Striking Back
At the beginning of the summer of 1942 it suddenly seemed that the balance of the war had shifted imperceptibly in favour of the Allies. There was no decisive moment, and dangers still lay ahead, but for the first time the Allied war effort had been stabilised, and with the US in the war there were grounds for cautious optimism.
While there had been a massive setback in North Africa in May when Rommel had captured Tobruk and forced British and Dominion troops to fall back on the border with Egypt, losing 235 tanks in the process, the arrival of General Claude Auchinleck as GOC Middle East had stopped the rot. In July Rommel’s forces were halted at the First Battle of El Alamein, and as a result it became clear that the Germans would not reach Alexandria that summer. In the Pacific Ocean the Japanese had also reached the limit of their advance in the Coral Sea where their naval forces were badly mauled by naval aircraft flying from the US Navy’s carrier fleet. This was followed (4–7 June) by Admiral Chester Nimitz’s stunning victory at Midway where, once again, the issue was settled by superior US air power.
In Europe the Germans were also facing problems in the Soviet Union which had been invaded in the previous summer. At first everything had gone the way of the advancing panzer divisions but by the onset of winter Moscow had not fallen and the German advance had stalled along a wide front with terrifyingly long lines of communication. By the spring of 1942 the campaign was still unstable, with German successes on the Caucasus front, but already the Red Army was beginning to hold ground and in some places showed that they could drive back the invaders. Ahead lay setbacks, blunders and further disappointments, and it would take time for the transatlantic alliance to gel into a working relationship, but as summer turned into autumn the Allies were no longer oppressed by the spectre of defeat. Two great victories, at El Alamein in October and at Stalingrad during the autumn and winter months of 1942–3, gave some much-needed foundation to that optimism by proving that the Germans could be beaten and that the tide could be turned.
For the Royal Navy, though, the year had begun badly when the German battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst had escaped back to Germany from the French port of Brest, together with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. Despite the valiant attempts made by Fleet Air Arm torpedo bombers to halt the ships, the ‘Channel dash’ was successful and reawakened fears about the threat of German capital ships acting as surface raiders from their ports in the Baltic and Norway. Earlier in the year the battleship Tirpitz, sister ship to Bismarck, arrived at Altafjord in Norway and was used almost immediately to attack the convoy PQ12. Only the arrival of a superior naval force, including the carrier HMS Victorious, prevented the Germans from making a successful interception. Even so, the presence of such a powerful ship as the Tirpitz continued to be a major concern for the Admiralty. Although she fired her guns in anger on only one occasion (covering German land forces landing at Spitsbergen), and operated only three offensive operations, the fact that she lurked in the Norwegian fjords made a her a virtual ‘fleet in being’.
The potency of her threat was exposed in June 1942 when she left her base in Trondheim to meet other German forces assembling to attack convoy PQ17. Composed of thirty-five merchant ships this was one of the most heavily protected convoys of the war but its fate was sealed by a misreading of available intelligence. On hearing that the Tirpitz was at sea the Admiralty ordered the convoy to scatter and in the confusion twenty-two isolated and unprotected merchant ships were sunk by U-boats and aircraft in one of the worst Allied naval setbacks of the war. Tirpitz went into maintenance at Trondheim and then Narvik, and only just survived an order from Hitler to be decommissioned as a result of her lack of success as a surface raider.
On the ship’s return in September 1943 the Admiralty attempted to neutralise the threat by attacking Tirpitz with a new generation of small submarine-type vessels. In April 1942 the Experimental Submarine Flotilla was formed in Portsmouth but within two months moved to a new base codenamed ‘Port D’ on Loch Erisort south of Stornoway on the island on Lewis. In that remote setting a small group of volunteers tested a new weapon known as the Mark I Chariot which was based on a 21-inch torpedo specially adapted to carry a two-man crew wearing bulky divers’ suits. The idea was to make covert attacks on enemy warships by cutting through boom defences and placing limpet mines on the target. Training was hard: the crews had to work long hours underwater using oxygen sets while steering and manoeuvring the heavy craft, and many suffered oxygen poisoning during the process. Later in the summer the flotilla moved to a new base, Port HHZ, at Loch Cairnbawn not far from Ullapool in the north-west of Scotland, where they defied sceptics by making successful dummy attacks on the heavily defended battleship HMS Howe.1
Encouraged by this progress, and aided by intelligence from Norwegian resistance groups, an attack was planned on the Tirpitz which was now based at Asenfjord near Trondheim where she threatened to break out into the north Atlantic. The operation was led by Leif Larsen, the Norwegian naval officer who ran the ‘Shetland Bus’, and it included two Chariots and seven crew members from the Cairnbawn flotilla. The weapons were stored below the hull of the fishing boat Arthur and the party lef
t for Norway from Lunna Voe on Shetland on 26 October. Two days later they reached the Norwegian coast, but a sudden storm caused the Chariots to break free and the attack had to be abandoned with the fishing boat being scuttled. All but one of the original party of ten managed to escape to Sweden, where they were eventually flown back to RAF Leuchars on board one of the regular civilian flights between Scotland and Stockholm which were operated throughout the war by Hudson and Mosquito aircraft flying under the aegis of the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC).
The failure of the Chariots paved the way for another attack on the Tirpitz, this time by midget X-class submarines whose crews were trained at Loch Cairnbawn and Loch Striven on the Firth of Clyde. Just over 50 feet in length, the X-class submarines were designed for stealthy penetration of enemy harbours to attack individual targets, and with a pressurised hull only five and a half feet in diameter they provided desperately cramped conditions for the four-man crew. Specially equipped side-cargoes carried high explosive charges which would be dropped beneath the hull of the target. For limited running on the surface they had a diesel motor but their small size and light endurance meant that they had to be towed towards their targets by S- or T-class submarines, with the passage crews exchanging places with the attack crews at the last minute. As with the Chariots, all crew members were volunteers from the submarine service. The first prototypes came into service in March 1942, and training began immediately in the remote lochs on Scotland’s west coast.2 By September 1943 six X-craft and their crews were considered ready to make their attacks on Tirpitz and Scharnhorst in Kaafjord at the head of Altenfjord and Lützow in nearby Langefjord.
