A Time of Tyrants

by Trevor Royle

The road to Rangoon lay ahead. Mandalay fell to the 19th Indian Division on 13 March, while the 2nd Division, attacking from the west, captured Fort Ava. During this final phase of the operations the Royals were in constant contact with the enemy, although one action almost ended in farce. After capturing the railway station at Paleik an elaborate attack was planned on the nearby railway works at Myitnge, but no assault was needed and no shots were fired as the Japanese had already withdrawn. On 2 May the remaining Japanese were cut off in the Arakan, and the next day the first units entered Rangoon following amphibious landings by the 26th Indian Division. For the Japanese in Burma the war was over, and fighting came to an end on 14 August, after the dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Two other Scottish battalions were involved in the Burma campaign –8th and 9th Gordon Highlanders, Territorial battalions which served as anti-tank gunners and as an armoured regiment operating Sherman tanks. The 9th Battalion had arrived in Bombay towards the end of July 1942, and on their arrival at Sialkot the officers and men received the tidings that the battalion would be converted into an armoured regiment, serving in the Royal Armoured Corps as 116th Regiment (Gordon Highlanders). Although the pipe band continued in being, and flashes of Gordon tartan were worn, 9th Gordons had become an armoured regiment and the men became ‘troopers’. Slowly but surely the first tanks began to appear – elderly and under-gunned US Lee and Grant models – and it was not until the end of 1943 that the first modern Shermans arrived. The new regiment was assigned to 255 Tank Brigade in the 44th Indian Armoured Division. For the 8th Gordons there was also a lengthy voyage to India by way of South Africa, and as 100th (Gordon Highlanders) Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery, the renamed battalion joined 2nd Division at Ahmednagar equipped with 6-pounder anti-tank guns. Later the new formation was re-equipped with 3-inch mortars so that it could also be used in the infantry role.

  Throughout the battle for Kohima the guns and mortars of the Gordons supported 2nd Division positions including those of The Royal Scots and Royal Scots Fusiliers. With batteries scattered over a large area it was impossible for the commanding officer Lieutenant-Colonel D. B. Anderson to maintain any central control, so that individual commanders had to reply on their own judgement. One troop of mortars fired 600 rounds in a ten-hour period, fighting in a battle which broke the back of the attempted Japanese invasion. The operations in the ‘Railway Corridor’ also brought the battalion into frequent contact with the enemy, fighting major actions at Nansankyin, Pinbaw and at the railway town of Mawlu on 27 October.

  At this stage the Gordons armoured regiment entered the fray when it joined 7th Indian Division in its drive towards Meiktila in December 1944. The regiment was in continuous action for a month, and quickly discovered that operating a tank in extreme temperatures was a hazardous and exhausting business. At the beginning of April Meiktila with its railhead and two airfields fell into the hands of the advancing Fourteenth Army, and at long last the road to Rangoon was open. During this phase the Gordons acted as a spearhead force for 5th Indian Division, together with 7th and 16th Cavalry and 3/9th Jat Regiment, all of the Indian Army. There was a close call at Pyinmana where the bridge had been mined, but the Japanese sapper charged with the task fell asleep and woke to find the British and Indian tanks making the crossing. By the time the war came to an end with the capitulation of Japan on 14 August, 116th Gordons were still in action, and to their men falls the honour of being the last armoured regiment to come out of action in the war against the Japanese in Burma.

  12 Brave New World

  For everyone who lived through those tumultuous days of spring 1945 the approaching end of the war came as a great relief. It had been a long and bruising six years, and because no one in the country had been left unaffected by the conflict with its casualties, hardships and deprivations, the fact that the conclusion was in sight brought added hope and a sense of optimism.

  Ever since the invasion of France in June 1944 and the advance towards Nazi Germany in the latter half of the year, there had been huge expectation that victory was around the corner, but it had taken another winter of hard fighting before it became clear that the enemy was on the point of collapse. The first harbinger had been the Rhine crossings which had been spearheaded by 15th (Scottish) Division and 51st (Highland) Division, and this was followed by the advance to the Elbe, while the Red Army pushed on inexorably from the east. On 30 April Hitler committed suicide, and this was followed a week later by the unconditional surrender of the German forces in Europe. Long awaited, Victory in Europe (VE) Day was announced on 8 May (a day later for the Soviet Union), and although the war against Japan had not yet ended and continued to involve Scottish service personnel, it was still possible for hundreds of thousands of people to take time off and celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany.

  In expectation of the public need to mark the end of the war, the Home Secretary had established an Interdepartmental Committee as early as 11 September 1944 ‘to consider the arrangements which should be made for celebrating the cessation of hostilities with Germany’. While it was concerned primarily with events in London, which would be the fulcrum of the nation’s celebrations, the committee also took advice from the Scottish Office so that due recognition could be given to the needs of the people of Scotland. From the outset it was agreed that the main focus of the celebrations should be ‘light and illumination’ – a good choice after the years of blackout – but it was also acknowledged that sobriety should be the order of the day, that ‘the present war differs from the last in that it has directly involved the Home Front and it may be assumed that the mood of the country when hostilities cease will not be one of universal noisy rejoicing.’1

  Even so, the committee recognised that a degree of licence would be in order, and while the main recommendations were not prescriptive they reflected the need to celebrate the end of a conflict which had brought great misery and hardship to the nation. The main desiderata were the inclusion of the following: the cease-fire to be signalled by the ‘all clear’; street lighting to be increased; searchlights to be switched on, but no guns or maroons to be fired; licensed premises to be opened for an extra hour, with additional supplies of beer but not spirits; theatres and dancehalls to be opened; bonfires to be lit; and church bells to be rung.

  Before the Scottish Office responded to the proposals a meeting was held on 22 September with the Chief Constables of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and it was agreed to offer the following comments to the committee. The two officers were opposed to any extension of the licence for alcohol as well as for the extended opening of billiard saloons, ‘as few people would spend armistice night in such places’ but they agreed that dancehalls could be kept open to 1 a.m. in Edinburgh because ‘most patrons could walk home’. However, the same dispensation would not apply in Glasgow due to transport difficulties. Above all they wanted ‘to avoid the hooliganism which may develop amongst an excited crowd with nothing to do.’2

  It was also agreed that services of thanksgiving should be held on the first Sunday after VE Day, one at St Paul’s in London which would be attended by the king, and the other at St Giles in Edinburgh which would be attended by the Lord High Commissioner, the Marquis of Linlithgow. There was a slight hiatus when the Scottish Office reported on 11 April 1945 that the latter commemoration would form part of a regular Sunday service, and as St Giles was a parish church its congregation would have first call on seats, but this was solved by reassurances that the scale of the Edinburgh service would be restricted compared to the service in St Paul’s.

  There was more consternation when it came to the decision to broadcast messages of loyalty to the king from all the armed forces and those representing civilians and the civil defence services. The draft for the latter included the phrase ‘our battle honours are British names’ but an official in the Scottish Home Department pointed out that the majority were English, and that only Clydeside and Belfast had been included amongst the names of t
he main cities which had been bombed by the Luftwaffe. Further dissatisfaction was caused by the prevalence of English accents in the BBC broadcasts, ‘with the consequent spate of complaints from North of the Border’; this attracted a proposal from the Scottish Office that the message of loyalty from the Metropolitan Police need not be ‘a pure [English] accent’. Instead, they proffered the suggestion that ‘it is, of course, possible that one of the numerous Scottish members of the Metropolitan Police might be chosen; if a native of Inverness, of which I know there is at least one, were selected, he might, of course, be taken for an Englishman!’3 Another suggestion was that the readers of the messages from the fishing or agricultural sectors should be Scots.

  As it turned out, the celebrations for VE Day were generally muted, although there were large crowds in the streets in the main Scottish centres, and in many of them it was not unknown for alcoholic drink to have been taken. The following day most sectors of the press noted the orderly spirit that had generally prevailed, and that there had been none of the drunken revelry that had accompanied the Armistice of 1918. Not everyone was happy: to the obvious displeasure of the Edinburgh press, the castle had not been illuminated in order to save money – fuel was still in short supply and it had been thought frivolous to waste it on extravagant public displays.4

  If anything, though, the celebrations for the end of the fighting against Japan – known as VJ Day – were the exact opposite of what had happened on VE Day. Perhaps it was because this really was the end of the war, and perhaps it helped that it was summertime and that two days’ holiday with pay had been granted. It might also have helped that by coincidence the day was also marked by the State Opening of Parliament.5 Throughout Scotland there was an outbreak of joy and relief with large gatherings in the streets in all the main cities – the Ross Bandstand in Edinburgh’s Princes Street was packed with dancers, mainly women, due to the shortage of men on war service – and there was a feeling of release that had been missing three months earlier. Only a few voices were heard criticising the use of the atom bomb, ‘this awful weapon’ (Churchill’s words) which had brought the war to a precipitate end when two bombs were exploded over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Those killed in Japan during the last days of the war were part of the estimated 57 million people who died during the conflict – the exact figure will probably never be known. Of the estimated 260,000 British war deaths, some 10 per cent would have been Scots although, once again, it is difficult to compute a precise figure as conscription was carried out on a UK basis.6 All told some 60,000 civilians were killed in the whole of the United Kingdom, mainly as a result of bombing, and of those 2,520 were killed in Scotland with a further 5,725 injured or detained in hospital.7 The territorial connections of the Scottish regiments had also been loosened during the conflict, and this brought about a reduction in casualties. As the war progressed reinforcements and battlefield casualty replacements came from all over the UK, with the result that most Scottish infantry regiments contained large numbers of soldiers from outside Scotland and their traditional recruiting territories.

  For those who had survived the experience of war, though, demobilisation was not always the happy event servicemen and servicewomen had long anticipated. Although there were improvements on the same situation in 1919, there were unacceptable delays which led to strikes in army and RAF bases in the Far East where there were cases of near mutiny by men no longer prepared to accept wartime conditions of discomfort. The most serious of these involved 13th Parachute Regiment which mutinied at Muar camp near Kuala Lumpur in Malaya (later Malaysia) in May 1946. It was not the only trouble. Many reunions were blighted by evidence of marital infidelity or a failure by returning combatants to re-adapt to civilian life. In July 1945, a soldier from 1st Royal Scots Fusiliers stabbed his wife when he returned from India on compassionate leave to find that she had been made pregnant by an Italian prisoner of war. Instead of facing a possible death sentence, the jealous husband was sentenced to five years in prison for manslaughter; he was the first of several similar soldier offenders to be treated in this way.8

  By then the war was over; now the Allies had to deal with the future of the world they had fought for. In Scotland the service personnel of the Allied forces began to go home, and the country said farewell to temporary residents who had trained and served amongst them for so long or who had been enemy prisoners of war. Due to the need to retain essential personnel to work on the land, the last German and Italian prisoners of war were not released until 1948, but for most of the Allies there was a rapid transformation in their fortunes. Free French Navy ships left the Clyde to return home to a country which had created a new republican constitution and had elected General Charles de Gaulle as head of the provisional government.

  The Norwegians were also on their way home. Following the German capitulation some 40,000 members of the Norwegian resistance occupied key points and began arresting Quisling members of the collaborationist administration. At the same time the German army commander General Franz Friedrich Böhme was ordered to surrender to representatives of Scottish Command who had flown immediately to Oslo on the cessation of hostilities. This was followed by the dispatch of the first occupation forces – 1st Airborne Division, a Special Air Services Brigade and the Norwegian Brigade. On 11 May General Andrew Thorne, as Commander Allied Liberation Force Norway, and Crown Prince Olav, together with senior British officers and Norwegian ministers, left Rosyth on board the fast minelayer HMS Ariadne. Other Rosyth-based ships taking part in Operation Kingdom were the cruiser HMS Devonshire, the destroyers HMS Iroquois, HMS Savage and HMS Scourge, the fast minelayer HMS Apollo and the Norwegian destroyer Arendal. They arrived in Oslo to receive a rapturous welcome; as Thorne later told his wife: ‘Everyone who had a boat or could get into someone else’s did so and came out to cheer him [Crown Prince Olav] and the squadron. The only one who didn’t appreciate it was the German officer naval pilot who came on board off Lista lighthouse. It must have been very humiliating for his feelings to see the real joy and gladness in the faces of the people.’9

  Months of planning by Scottish Command had finally paid off. Although Thorne did not have to lead an invasion force to recapture Norway the administration for the Allied Mission to Norway was in place, and there was a smooth transition from German occupation to rule by a caretaker government, all overseen by Scottish Command. It was no easy task. German forces had to be disarmed and rounded up prior to being returned to Germany; food supplies and fuel had to be imported; aggressive interest from the Soviet military command had to be countered; and steps had to be taken to stabilise the local political situation. On 7 June, exactly five years after the capitulation of Norway, King Haakon returned to Oslo and was greeted by Thorne with the simple welcome: ‘Sir, I return to you your kingdom.’

  Others were less lucky. Most of the Poles who had come to Scotland in 1940 had continued the fight against Nazi Germany because they believed that in no small measure their sacrifices would enable them to return to their homeland. It was not to be. Following the invasion of France the 1st Polish Armoured Division had been heavily involved in the fighting, and together with 1st Polish Parachute Brigade had fought their way into northern Germany under British command. In Italy Lieutenant-General Władysław Anders’s 2nd Polish Corps had played a key part in the operations, and Polish soldiers had distinguished themselves in the fierce fighting to take the German position at Monte Cassino during the advance towards Rome.

  However, as the war came to an end it was already clear that the Poles were to become pawns in the carve-up of Eastern Europe which had been agreed by the Allies at their planning conferences in Tehran in November 1943 and Yalta in February 1945. At the first summit the western Allies conceded to Stalin’s demands for the extension of Poland’s borders westwards to the rivers Oder and Neisse to include German territory, while much of eastern Poland was ceded to the Soviet Union. At the second summit this secret accord was agreed and th
e Soviet Union was given virtual hegemony over most of eastern Europe, with Poland becoming a satellite of the Kremlin. By then, of course, the Red Army had occupied most of the territory in question, but the agreement, under Article VII of the protocol was still regarded as acquiescence and a betrayal of the Poles fighting in the west.

  A new situation has been created in Poland as a result of her complete liberation by the Red Army. This calls for the establishment of a Polish Provisional Government which can be more broadly based than was possible before the recent liberation of the western part of Poland. The Provisional Government which is now functioning in Poland should therefore be reorganized on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad. This new Government should then be called the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity.10

  This decision effectively sidelined the Polish government-in-exile in London, and gave the advantage to the Soviet-backed home government in Warsaw. For the Poles fighting in the west it was both a betrayal and a death knell. For the British government which had encouraged the Polish government-in-exile in London, and which had relied on Polish forces for the prosecution of the war against Germany, it also proved to be a very sensitive situation and one that caused no little shame. Small wonder that when the news about Yalta became common knowledge the Poles felt that all their efforts had been in vain. At the time Władysław Fila’s Lancaster squadron was preparing to fly a mission deep into eastern Germany in support of the advancing Red Army, and the reaction of the Polish bomber crews was perhaps predictable.

  The feeling was very, very highly strung. Quite a number of aircrew took off their flying gear including parachute. They threw it into the corner in the briefing room and they said from today onwards our war is over and we are not flying any more because we have no reason and no purpose to fight any more. Well, commanding officer informed Bomber Command about the feeling of the squadron. Air Marshal came to our squadron, he addressed us and then he was asking the commanding officer to ask individual crew whether we are prepared to fly that night to give support to advancing Russians. Strangely enough our Lancaster had the letter O for Oboe and we were first on the list. We were asked, O for Oboe are you prepared to fly tonight or not? Members of my crew ask me to reply, I said yes we are flying. Next crew are you flying? Yes, no and so on. So on that night instead of 14 or 15 aircrew flying I think that about half of them went actually to give that support in agreement with Bomber Command. But the rest of them gave up flying altogether, some of them were crying that Poland was betrayed so badly by the friend Britain for whom we gave everything to win the war.11