by Sean Longden
They were right, they did get a holiday in the form of a week-long camp outside Dundee, but being a Territorial didn’t change their lives. It simply meant they were even busier than before, spending even more evenings cycling through the empty lanes to Cromarty to attend evening drill sessions. It would be another year before war would finally tear Mowatt away from the Highlands. The news of war came at a fitting moment for a born countryman:
I was in the field cutting the harvest. We’d just given up the horses and it was the first – and last – harvest I had a tractor to use. I had cut two fields and I was halfway through the last field. All of a sudden I could see the old farmer walking towards me. I thought, what’s happened? I switched off and he said, ‘Pack up. Go home. Get into your uniform and report to the nearest drill hall.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘You’ve been mobilized.’
Dressing in his uniform, with its smart Seaforth kilt, he cycled to town to meet his fellow Territorials. Within hours they were on a boat heading for the regimental headquarters. Like so many of his fellow soldiers, it was the last he would see of his Highland home for five long years.
Initially the division was stationed in northern France before later being transferred to the Maginot Line as part of a plan to foster cooperation between the British and their French allies. Prior to the move south the Highlanders enjoyed the experience of being away from home. One recalled spending evenings in Lille during the phoney war:
Me and my mate Paddy used to go to the brothels. One night we were in a nice bar, Paddy fancied this African girl. So he went upstairs with her. I waited for ever such a long time for him. I thought he must be having a good time – it’ll cost him a fortune! There were a couple of French officers in there and one of our sergeants chatting at the bar. Then all of a sudden this African tart came down, gabbling away in French. I asked her ‘where’s my mate?’ With that she whacks me across the face! I thought ‘what have I done?’ So I pushed her over. Of course these French officers get up. They had no chance. They came at me. I picked up a chair and hit one of them, then I put a nice boot in on the other one – just where it hurts the most! He went down. I turned to go. Then this other French squaddie came up to me. He was in dead trouble. Bang! I head-butted him. He went down – straight out. So I ran. I found Paddy. He said he hadn’t been enjoying it so he tried to take his money back – she’d tried to take his cap, so he’d escaped out of the window. Another night we went out to a bar. Again he went upstairs with this girl. When he came down he looked strange. He’d only knocked off this bloody great French clock and hidden it under his battledress! As we go out of the door this bloody thing starts chiming! So the girl behind the bar realized what’s happening – she sent this French sergeant after him. That did no good – Paddy just bashed his head against the door. Goodnight! Down he goes. So we run down the road with this clock. The funny thing is, we’d had a few too many beers and on the way back he dropped it and smashed it.
The high life enjoyed by some of the soldiers didn’t last for ever. Once the Highlanders were transferred to the Maginot Line, they received an introduction to the real war – one that was far removed from that enjoyed by most of their comrades during this period. Once in position, the Highlanders soon discovered that the so-called ‘phoney war’ was in fact very real. The notion that the BEF was idle from September 1939 until 10 May 1940 was a fallacy. There was plenty of activity for the infantrymen stationed in the ligne de contact seven miles in front of the Maginot Line. There were trenches, command posts and listening posts to be dug. There were telephone lines to be laid. There were positions to be camouflaged. And above all else there were enemy soldiers a few hundred yards away.
The Highlanders were kept busy as they awaited the inevitable enemy assault. They occupied forward posts, from where they could observe activity. There was the vital role of gathering intelligence to build up a picture of the strength of the enemy facing them. Most importantly, the intelligence officers attempted to establish whether the Germans were building up their forces ready to attack. The troops listened for the sounds of vehicles and tried to work out where they were going. They also watched all enemy movements – counting the Germans as they moved in and out of houses and calling down artillery fire against any groups of enemy officers they spotted. They listened to the sounds of picks and shovels as labourers built defensive positions. From their own cold, damp positions they watched for which buildings showed signs of occupation – smoking chimneys were a tell-tale sign – laboriously counted and timed the sentries on duty in the enemy lines and counted the flares that hovered in the night sky. More ominously, they listened intently for the peal of church bells sometimes used to mask the deadly crack of sniper rifles. There was also the threat of enemy aircraft. On 21 April, C Company of the 7th Argylls reported five enemy aircraft brought down by infantry fire.
To fulfil the vital task of gathering intelligence, the forward platoons of the 51st had to carry out intensive patrols along the front. David Mowatt, with the 4th Battalion Seaforth Highlanders, remembered their role:
We were in the Maginot Line to gain experience. We were going out on patrols – it wasn’t all fighting. It was skirmishes and recce patrols. The boys didn’t like that because they weren’t allowed to fire. They were just looking at the enemy. They’d have rather been firing. They wanted to be able to defend themselves. We were keen, we were trained for it. We knew we would go into action at some point and we were ready. Of course, we didn’t have a clue really.
Each night patrols sneaked out into no man’s land looking for signs of whether the Germans were occupying their own forward positions. They searched for enemy telephone lines, then cut them to hinder communications. They looked for signs of new barbed wire being laid and searched the ground for any footprints that indicated enemy activity. At other times they went on hunts through woods and orchards, trying to locate the snipers that plagued them. Even when these patrols met no resistance they still faced danger since the enemy regularly shelled woodland in which they believed the British troops to be active.
The nightly patrols, and the serious reason behind them, were remembered by one soldier. Like so many youngsters, Jim Reed had joined the army to escape the boredom of his job in a Sheffield foundry. When he first visited the army recruiting office he had been immediately sent out again by the sergeant, who told him that at seventeen he was too young to volunteer. However, he did offer one piece of good advice, telling Reed: ‘Go out and come back in and say you are eighteen!’ By spring 1940 Reed found himself in an outpost in front of the Maginot Line, serving with the Seaforth Highlanders:
We got broke in gently. A section of us were in a dugout. At night one man would get blacked up and go on patrol. We’d look for Germans and they’d look for us – but I never found any. There was just a bit of shelling – it was noisy. At mealtimes one of you would have to go down with a canister to collect the food. It was dicey, you had to be careful, because there was a German out there. Sometimes he managed to get the odd one. Once one chap has been shot you realize it’s not a game any more. It makes you a bit careful.
The Highlanders soon got an opportunity to take part in more aggressive patrolling when they sneaked forward to snatch prisoners, to attack enemy positions or to harass the enemy patrols that also used the cover of darkness to gather intelligence. In early May 1940, Second-Lieutenant Orr-Ewing, of the Black Watch, recorded the activities of his fighting patrol:
About forty yards away from me I saw three men running from the woods towards the stream, I opened fire with my Beretta and two men dropped. Immediately, heavy firing from at least four tommy guns opened up on my flank. My patrol and I all dropped flat and continued to fire and throw grenades. About eight to ten men then left the wood and opened fire. More men from the wood also fired on us. One man advanced towards us but was severely hit in the stomach. At least two more were hit by grenades as we heard them screaming. The enemy threw stick grenades, one landing near my bearer a
nd me, cutting us both and temporarily blinding me with blood owing to a cut above my eye. Owing to the fact that our ammunition was running low and their superior numbers, we withdrew about sixty yards under covering tire . . .1
Despite the dangers of such actions, some of the patrolling troops were able to make light of their activities. One officer, calling himself ‘Bashful’, wrote a colourful account of a patrol. The action began as he opened fire on an enemy patrol: ‘The enemy were very rude and fired back with automatic weapons and also had the bad manners to throw a stick grenade . . . This annoyed “Bashful” no end so he played the game and pumped plenty of lead out of his weapon. The enemy retired discomforted and, “Bashful” hoped, wounded; two grenades were bunged at them as they hastily hastened back from whence they came.’2
As these encounters showed, it was not just the British who made nightly excursions into no man’s land. Forward positions of the Lothian and Borders Horse reported hearing German patrols in the woods communicating by using owl and frog noises. Sometimes it was the German patrols whose aggression was fully displayed. In the final days of April the forward platoons of the 1st Black Watch in Hartbusch Wood came under attack by enemy patrols. The attack came in just after midnight, signalled by the stark white light of a magnesium flare fired from the woods. One platoon was able to keep the enemy at bay using grenades and well-aimed bursts of Bren-gun fire that scattered the advancing Germans. The other platoon found repulsing the assault was less simple. Under a hail of mortar bombs and machine-gun fire that seemed to be coming from posts that had been unoccupied a few days earlier, the enemy attacked from both flanks and then from the rear. In the light of the flare an estimated hundred Germans charged their position, throwing grenades and firing machine-pistols. Bizarrely, it seemed none of the Germans was wearing a helmet and seemed to be wearing overalls. Then an attack came from the flanks, the Germans using a ride through the woods that had concealed their advance.
The Highlanders’ Bren gunners opened up a steady beat of fire, keeping the enemy at bay. Some brave men ran from cover to collect grenades and boxes of ammunition to keep the guns firing. In desperation the platoon commander fired a flare to signal SOS. It took twenty minutes for their signal to be answered. Despite the delays, caused by the difficulty of raising the carrier platoon from their beds, the arrival of the carriers saved the day. They moved forward, pouring rapid fire into the German patrols, scattering them and sending them back towards the German frontier. Two nights later another attack was made against the Black Watch’s forward posts and three men were wounded when a grenade was thrown into the platoon HQ.
These activities were just a prelude for what was to come in May. The aggressive patrolling and night-time attacks on isolated outposts – followed by increased artillery activity around 9 May – masked the fact that the main assault was due to the north, through Belgium. At 7.45 a.m. on 10 May, Major-General Fortune passed the news to his front-line battalions that the enemy had launched an assault into Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. The news was passed on with the instruction that the troops were to move into battle positions – or as their French leaders put it, they were to be mis-en-garde. As the positions in front of the Maginot Line became a hive of activity, with all spare vehicles withdrawn a safe distance, ammunition rushed to the forward platoons and nervous men quietly accepting they would soon be thrown into battle, some responded with the characteristic phlegm of the officer class of the period. In the positions of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, the battle diarist noted the news of the German invasion with the simple words ‘The balloon is up.’3 Elsewhere, as he recorded the momentous news in the battalion war diary, an officer of the 1st Black Watch added the words ‘Leave cancelled yet again’. There was an unconscious irony and sense of sad prophecy in his choice of comments. The location of the German assault, bypassing the positions of the 51st Division, meant they would see little action in front of the Maginot Line. Yet it would be years before most of them would get another chance to see their homes.
Despite light-hearted comments noted by the diarists, the division’s situation was less than certain. As soon as the news came of the German assault, the commander of the 6th Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers, Lt-Colonel The Lord Rowallan, contacted Major-General Fortune to plead that his unit not be used in any forthcoming operations. He was blunt in his assessment of the situation. Quite simply his battalion was underequipped, undertrained and unready to face the enemy. They were not the only ones. As the men of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers prepared their Vickers heavy machine-guns for the forthcoming battle, they could not fail to notice the words stamped into the sides of some of the weapons – ‘For Drill Purposes Only’. As one of the gunners, Jim Charters, a former miner and prewar Territorial, remembered: ‘We weren’t prepared for war. It was a hopeless position, we were short of every damn thing. We took those “drill only” guns to France. It wasn’t a good start.’ He was right, it was an inauspicious start to what was to be a fraught month of fighting.
Although the main battles were taking place to the north of them, it didn’t take long for the men of the division to begin to react to the changing situation. Drivers stopped using convoy discipline and instead sped along roads, failed to keep gaps between vehicles and rushed through villages in clouds of dust. Officers noticed their men had hair that needed cutting. In the days following the German assault Major-General Fortune complained about his men taking off their jackets and discarding their headgear. As he pointed out to all ranks in the division: ‘The pride of a well-disciplined unit is for all ranks to act in times of emergency exactly as they do in times of peace.’4
Yet it was not the changing attitudes towards discipline that really counted. What mattered was the attitude to war and the creeping violence that entered their world. Enemy patrols, though few in number, now used aggressive tactics – firing and moving to appear more numerous – to draw fire. By constantly infiltrating between the forward positions they were able to disturb the British troops all night long, increasing the frustration for the men whose days and nights were spent in dirty, damp and dangerous holes, far beyond the safety of the Maginot Line.
For the men of the 51st Division these early encounters were their first real taste of war, and many of them were relieved that it was a gradual introduction. Dick Taylor, a Territorial from Berwick-on-Tweed, approached war in a sanguine manner:
When war came I was just anxious to get to France, I didn’t have any real thoughts about what was going to happen. It was youthful enthusiasm. When we were mobilized I didn’t have time to think, it was a change from working behind a shop counter! In France we were gradually introduced to war. I was in a trench – there were four or five of us – we could see the Germans in the distance. A few shells came across but it was nothing to worry about, in fact it was just a bit of a laugh. I was not nervous, I just accepted it.
His comrade Jim Charters also remembered his first experience of coming under fire: ‘It was a shock the first time we got mortared. But what can you do? You just got down as far as possible in your hole. The survival instinct just takes over.’
On the day following the German assault into the Low Countries the 1st Black Watch came under heavy artillery fire and encountered an enemy patrol during the night, as they attempted to sneak through the lines. The men in the forward posts waited until the enemy were moving between their positions then opened fire, hitting the leading Germans, who were walking openly, obviously not expecting to meet any resistance. The patrol scattered and ran off under the cover of smoke: ‘Two men were obviously hit and lying exposed in the open . . . they were considered dead but three bursts were fired at them with obvious effect but producing no movement. One man who had taken refuge in what appeared to be a shell-hole, attempted to crawl out, was obviously hit by a rifle bullet and fell backwards.’5
The division’s gunners were soon embroiled in battle as well. The two forward troops of the 17th Field Regiment Royal Artillery fired
1,289 rounds of high explosive in the course of a single day. Previously, the regiment had laid claim to being the first British gunners to fire shells into German territory when they had gone into action on 6 May. Yet this activity came at a price and they lost one man killed, three wounded and one man with shell shock as a result of bombing and enemy counter battery fire. Peter Royle, a lieutenant serving with the regiment, recalled the incident: ‘I well remember seeing my first dead man as one of E troops’ trucks came back through our positions with a dead gunner on board. He was covered by an army blanket but his boots stuck out and the sight of these haunted me for days.’6
During this period the light tanks of the Lothian and Borders Yeomanry also had their first taste of action. At 6.30 p.m. on 11 May they took part in a reconnaissance patrol through woodland in front of the division’s positions. They were soon spotted by the enemy. As one tank commander later recorded, they advanced along a road before veering off cross-country:
This meant crashing through some barbed wire. We skirted round the left-hand corner of the wood about thirty yards out, and eighty yards between tanks. There was a considerable amount of shelling and gun fire . . . Made a quick inspection of the tank. I found that the camouflage net had been set alight by the exhaust and was burning . . . Shells were bursting very close and my spotlight was blown off. At this point my tank got bogged and I found the crew of number 3 tank hanging on to the outside. Whilst getting into position the number 2 tank got bogged, endeavouring to tow us out.
Still under fire, the crew worked quickly to put wood under tracks to grip in the mud, but just minutes later they got bogged down again. Realizing the dangers of remaining in the open, they left the tanks, first removing the firing mechanism from the guns. The next day they returned to fetch the tank, only to discover the towrope was caught in its tracks. As they attempted to free the tangled ropes they were again shelled by the enemy. This time it was with deadly results, leaving one man dead and one wounded. Efforts were also made to locate the other tank that had been lost the previous day: ‘No. 2 tank was found in the morning to be well out in no man’s land. It was visited. Both tracks were off, one could not be found. The tank had been hit by a shell, the turret was twisted, and no doors could be opened.’7
