Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  One suspects that she was looking back through rose-tinted spectacles, for in fact Tyneham had been in decline for years before the war. The isolation of the people from other communities was reflected in their quaint expressions: ants were emmuts, cows bleared instead of lowing, a mess or muddle was a caddle, and when you were out of breath you panked rather than panted. The inhabitants had become inbred, and since the 1920s the population had been falling as families drifted away. The school had closed in 1932. Nevertheless, the eviction came as a profound shock, and Lilian, for one, never went back. Having steadfastly refused to revisit her old haunts, she died in 1980, aged ninety-three.

  One training exercise had already been carried out at Slapton, on the Devon coast, in August 1943, when ships of the Royal Navy put American troops ashore. It was a cheerful occasion: the landings went well in fine weather, and the Americans made many friends in the village pubs. But then in November something much more sinister began.

  The inhabitants of Slapton and the surrounding villages received letters from the Admiralty telling them that in six weeks’ time they would have to give up their homes and take their belongings with them: not only furniture, but farm animals and pets as well. No reason was given, and people could only suppose that a major exercise was about to take place on the shore. In this they were right – but what they could not know (because of the tight security cloaking the event) was that Slapton Sands, in Start Bay, had been chosen for its resemblance to Utah Beach, code name for the westernmost of the beaches identified for the invasion of Normandy – the one which would be on the right flank of the Allied attack. Slapton Sands – in spite of its name, a curving, two-mile stretch of fine pebbles, with a road on a narrow strip of land behind it, and a few yards behind that again, a shallow freshwater lagoon – closely resembled Utah, and was therefore ideal for a practice assault landing.

  As in the other areas cleared for battle training, the people of south Devon were unsophisticated, and few of them had travelled far from home. Most of their houses had no electricity or running water. Now suddenly 3000 of them – 750 families from 180 farms and hamlets – were ordered out of an area covering nine parishes, and extending to 30,000 acres, most of it rich, red land. There were two reasons for clearing such a large space. One was the danger that civilians might be killed or injured by the firing of live ammunition; and the other, the risk that local people might witness what was happening and become privy to the secrets of Operation Overlord.

  At first many of them thought the rumours about eviction were a joke; but at meetings in village halls they found that the stories were all too true. When vans began to load up their possessions for removal to the homes of friends or family beyond the exclusion zone, children were delighted, for they thought they were going on holiday; but for their parents the evacuation was a nightmare. Everything had to go: farm animals, chickens, dogs, cats. Even the corn ricks had to be taken apart, sheaf by sheaf, and transported to new sites. With orders to be out of their houses by 20 December, people were given the impression that they would be back in six weeks – but it was the old folk who suffered most, as many of them had never left home before.

  Reg Hannaford, then a schoolboy, lived with his family in the coastal village of Torcross, four miles south of Slapton, and he was among the last to leave on 20 December. His father (a butcher) and mother had gone the day before, taking all the butchery equipment in a van, and his elder brother John rode his bike to Stokenham, where he had to hand in the key of the house. That left young Reg with two men whose lorry was full of the family’s hen houses, coops and poultry. As there was no room for him inside the vehicle, he had to sit on a bag of coke on the tailboard, with his head between the rungs of a ladder tied to the roof for the short journey to his uncle and aunt’s farmhouse at Chivelstone, another hamlet four miles to the south-west.

  At the end of January one of the fields there was taken over, and a large camp was built by black soldiers – the first black people Devon had ever seen. By March the whole area was awash with Americans. Military vehicles growled along the road from Plymouth to Start Bay, and GIs came marching in single file on either side of the road through the village of Aveton Gifford, some ten miles inland from Slapton, as they massed for Operation Tiger. Oddly enough, although they had food galore, they craved fresh bread, and paid for it at five or six times the going rate.

  Eisenhower, by then Supreme Allied Commander, considered it essential to accustom men to the noise and fury of battle by using live ammunition in training; and the central objective of the exercise was that LSTs – Landing Ship Tanks, flat-bottomed assault vessels of 4500 tons, carrying several hundred men as well as trucks and tanks – would come ashore at Slapton under a realistic naval bombardment.

  The first flotilla of slow-moving LSTs set out from Plymouth during the night of 26 April, and the first landing was scheduled to begin at 7.30 a.m. on the 27th, but right at the start things went seriously wrong. The British heavy cruiser HMS Hawkins had been detailed to bombard Slapton beach with live rounds from H-hour minus sixty minutes to H-hour minus thirty, and at the same time troops on land were to fire live rounds over the heads of the men coming in on the LSTs, to accustom them to the noise of battle. But because several of the LSTs were delayed in transit, the officer in charge ordered the whole exercise put back by an hour. His message was received by Hawkins, but not by some of the LSTs, with the result that men began going ashore while the bombardment was still in progress, and some of them were killed by friendly fire.

  That was a bad start, but far worse followed a day later. Another group of landing craft, which left from Plymouth at 9.45 on the night of the 27th, should have been escorted by two destroyers, but one was damaged in a collision and the other was left behind, apparently as the result of an error in communication, leaving the LSTs lightly protected.

  German E-boats – fast-moving craft which could achieve nearly forty knots and were armed with torpedoes – were regularly patrolling the Channel on reconnaissance missions, and that night they set out from their base at Cherbourg soon after 10 p.m. Sometime later they spotted the eight LSTs – sitting ducks as they proceeded at five knots in line astern, 400 yards apart, with only a single corvette as escort – and moved in to the attack. Just after 2 a.m. LST 507 was hit by a torpedo which knocked out her electric power, and the ship burst into flames. Shortly afterwards two torpedoes struck LST 531, which rolled over and sank in six minutes. Then LST 289 was also hit.

  LST 507, crippled by lack of electricity to power her firefighting equipment, had to be abandoned. LST 289 managed to reach Dartmouth harbour, but with many dead and wounded on board. Altogether, the number of casualties was horrifying: during the night 749 American soldiers and sailors died, most of them drowned because they had mistakenly fastened their life jackets round their waists, rather than under their arms, with the result that they turned turtle in the cold water, weighed down by their equipment. Altogether the exercise cost the lives of 946 US servicemen.

  Their commanders were appalled by the fiasco and by the loss of life; but their greatest anxiety was that they had lost ten senior officers who were cleared to the highest security level, knew the plans for the invasion, and might, if captured, give them away. Until the men were found, Overlord was in doubt. Should it be altered or postponed? Miraculously, all ten bodies were recovered, and the Germans did not discover the significance of the exercise they had so successfully disrupted. Survivors of the landings were sworn to secrecy, and on land in Devon all news of the disaster was suppressed for the time being – but the people outside the exclusion zone could hear the live firing which continued for several days and nights. Rumours spread that most of the dead were buried in a mass grave on a farm at Blackawton, five miles inland from Slapton, but casualty figures for Tiger were not released until the autumn.

  In August, four months after the disaster, and nine months after the evacuation, the War Office allowed journalists to visit Slapton. They found 1000
black American troops helping to clear the ground of shells, shell cases and barbed wire; they also learned that the American authorities had allocated £6000 to a Slapton hardship fund. No doubt the newsmen’s reports were carefully censored. One of them took an optimistic line, admitting that ‘the houses in some cases were not what they were’, but not saying that there were shot holes clean through the walls. He claimed that ‘the [number] destroyed could be reckoned on the fingers, and those severely damaged were practically non-existent, except at Slapton and Strete’. Among the casualties was the hotel on the front at Slapton, which had been used as a target for naval gunfire. In the surrounding farmland gates had disappeared, and many field boundaries had been destroyed.

  That same month – August 1944 – Reg Hannaford and his brother John, together with two friends, went to see for themselves. They walked five miles across country, sneaked into the evacuated area, and as they came over the hill into Torcross they were surprised to find most of the village intact; but the farm buildings at the back of their house had been demolished, and the trees in the orchard had vanished – apparently flattened to make a tank park. Reg thought the place ‘quite ghostly – no birds, only rats and rabbits everywhere’, and the garden was waist-high in weeds. But they discovered a great dump of food that the Americans had left behind, including plenty of tins, with labels missing; they swagged away what they could carry and had fun opening them, as they couldn’t tell whether they were going to find bully beef, hash, cake or peaches.

  There and elsewhere in the area, rats also had a bonanza. They drew into the food dumps in hundreds, and when they had eaten everything accessible, they moved into farm buildings, only to find that, because no harvesting had been done that summer, the barns contained no corn. Thwarted, they climbed trees to eat the unripe apples, and devoured the fresh putty recently put in place when broken windows were being replaced.

  When official permission came for humans to return, on 8 November, the Hannafords were the first family back in Torcross, but it was ten days before the electricity was restored. Soon farmers were again at work in the fields, which were still littered with mortar bombs and shells, and the bomb-disposal squad went into action almost every day. As Reg remarked, ‘It remained a miracle to us that no one was killed by what had been left behind.’ Some people were less enthusiastic about returning: having experienced the joys of electric light, water laid on and good sanitation, they did not want to go back.

  Twenty-Two

  Far North

  Lo! For there, among the flowers and grasses,

  Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;

  Only winds and rivers,

  Life and death.

  Robert Louis Stevenson, In the Highlands

  Many specialist training schools were established in other parts of Britain, but the area chosen for paramilitary instruction was Lochaber, the wild country in the north-west Highlands, which includes Moidart, Morar and the Rough Bounds of Knoydart. Lochaber had unparalleled advantages for bringing men to the peak of physical fitness and endurance, and teaching them irregular fighting techniques. The environment was exceedingly challenging: precipitous bare hills, outcrops of rock, cliffs, ravines, bogs, fast-flowing burns, patches of thick forest, the sea coast close by – all offered scope for violently energetic exercises, live firing and demolition work. There were few inhabitants, but several large, isolated houses were big enough to accommodate headquarter staff; there was good access by rail, for the importation of trainees and supplies, and – a vital consideration – the region could easily be sealed off from the outside world.

  Early in 1940, to keep out unwanted observers, the whole of northernmost Scotland, above a line from Loch Linnhe in the south-west corner, up the Caledonian Canal to Inverness and beyond, was declared No. 1 Protected Area. Control points manned by the army were established on roads that crossed the line, and people living inside it had to obtain permits which allowed them to pass through, or to travel on the railway from Mallaig down to Fort William. Outsiders wanting to enter the exclusion zone were required to furnish some adequate reason for needing special passes, which were coloured, and changed at short notice. All civilian mail posted in the Protected Area was routed through a censor in Glasgow, and letters written by trainees were censored on the spot before being dispatched under special cover to Scottish Command, so that they carried an Edinburgh postmark and their place of origin was concealed. Telephone calls emanating from the Protected Area were also censored. On all military sites security was rigorously enforced. The big houses were designated Protected Places, and entry to their grounds could be gained only with a special permit issued by the officer commanding each establishment: a general permit for the Protected Area was not enough. Photography was forbidden, except by official cameramen.

  Such was the haste with which the army moved in that eighty-one-year-old Christian Cameron-Head, owner of Inverailort Castle, suddenly found herself without a home. She had travelled down to London to visit her son Francis in hospital – only to receive a registered letter which told her that her house had been requisitioned by the War Office. Hastening back north by train, she found the place being stripped, and her furniture, pictures and china being carted away in army lorries. From the Lochailort Inn, where she took refuge a few hundred yards from home, she wrote in distress to her friend Sir Donald Cameron of Lochiel:

  When I arrived at Lochailort station there were only two officers who said the Castle was half-emptied and that they had no accommodation for me and I could not go to it. They have taken my three garages and planted tents everywhere, even in the middle of the farmyard without any permission from me or anyone representing me.

  To her solicitor in Edinburgh she wrote:

  I have been refused every room except my bedroom in which I am allowed to store some things, but I am not allowed to sleep there or go near the house after the troops have moved in … Please advise me if I have any redress or if the military have the right to turn me out in this way without a roof over my head.

  She had no redress, and Inverailort – the first of the properties seized for military occupation – became the Special Training Centre. Soon other big houses were taken over for similar purposes: Glencripesdale on the Morvern Peninsula, on the south side of Loch Sunart; Dorlin on the north shore of Loch Moidart; Arisaig House, Traigh House and Camusdarach Lodge, the last three on the Road to the Isles. Remotest of all were Inverie and Glaschoille, both on the shore of Loch Nevis. There was (and is) no road to either, the only access being by sea or on foot through the rock-bound passes of Glendessary. Both houses belonged to the Brocket family, notorious for their Nazi sympathies, and in 1938, when their friend Neville Chamberlain came to stay, they had arranged for a telephone line to be laid ten miles across the bed of the sea loch from Mallaig, so that the Prime Minister could be in touch with Westminster if a fresh political crisis blew up.

  In the words of Maurice Buckmaster, head of SOE’s French Section from 1941 to 1945, men went to the Scottish toughening schools to train their bodies to withstand fatigue:

  They walked, they ran, they swam, they bicycled … they learned to avoid skylines, to move silently through undergrowth, to use the natural background of rough country to get, unobserved, from one point to another. They scaled crags and cliffs, they stalked game, they practised rifle, Sten-gun and Bren-gun firing, they blew things up, they ambushed other parties … Undoubtedly this course of intense physical training saved lives, when lives depended upon the physical ability to walk thirty or forty miles a day up and down steep hills.

  Although styled a castle, Inverailort was more a several times extended country dwelling, largely Victorian and bristling with sharply pointed roofs, set gloomily against the foot of a towering mountain, An Stac. For headquarter staff not the least of the building’s attractions was the staircase rising out of the central hall; training officers could demonstrate their technique for falling by hurling themselves down the bare wooden steps, ro
lled up like hedgehogs and springing up unhurt in combat attitude when they reached the bottom. The hardwood banister rail was also excellent for sliding down after dinner. On the flat ground in front of the house a forest of tents and huts sprang up, and, inside, so sure were the military of their tenancy that instead of merely putting up notices to indicate the use of individual rooms, they had signs neatly painted on the wooden doors: INSTRUCTOR, SECRETARY and so on. Alas for the owner! The despoliation was more than Christian Cameron-Head could bear. She died (people said) of a broken heart at her sister’s home, Dunain House in Inverness, on Easter Day 1941, and came back to Inverailort in her coffin, to be buried in the family vault.

  ‘Intense’ was the word for the training. Mornings at Inverailort began with a run to the top of An Stac – a climb of 2,500 feet – and students (as they were called) found themselves constantly swept into other strenuous activities designed to push them to their limits: night treks to distant rendezvous in the hills, competitive runs over assault courses, map-reading, fieldcraft, guerrilla raids, demolitions, river crossings, opposed landings on the coast, silent killing, and – the speciality of an instructor known as the Shanghai Buster – rolling off the footboard of a fast-moving train. To make things as realistic as possible, live ammunition and explosives were used freely, and, inevitably, a few men died of wounds, drowning or exposure, their deaths being recorded as ‘On Active Service’.

  It was not only the instructors’ goading that kept students under pressure: the weather also played a part in the toughening process. On breezy summer days the Highlands were pleasant enough, but whenever the wind dropped, midges swarmed out of the heather and peat in millions and became an insufferable irritation, especially to men whose role (for instance in an ambush) required them to keep still for long periods. Repellent cream proved ineffective against the menace, and, minute though the aggressors were, people suffered torments. Again, in winter, when snow lay on the tops, cloaking the hills down to 1000 feet or lower, and torrential rain came blasting through the glens, prolonged exposure to the elements tested even the most resolute recruit. Gales sometimes blew so viciously that it was impossible to stand up, let alone make any progress against the wind.