by Trevor Royle
This was the prelude to another move which would influence the fate of the division in 1940. In April Gort decided to deploy the Highlanders in the Saar region of Lorraine where they were stationed on the Maginot Line, the huge French defensive system consisting of fortifications, underground shelters, block houses and anti-tanks ditches which had been constructed to deter German aggression. It was a highly sophisticated system with a network of railways and hydraulically powered gun positions, but much work still needed to be done to create associated trench systems, especially in the Metz region between Hombourg and Boulange. For the Highlanders this required further digging, but there were also opportunities to engage the Germans by mounting offensive patrols which allowed young and inexperienced soldiers like 2nd Lieutenant John Parnell, 7th Argylls, to discover the gulf between peacetime training and active service.
On patrol we wore the absolute minimum and just had our weapons and little else so that we could move quickly and get through fences. We didn’t have sub-machine guns like the fighting patrols; the only weapons we had were the rifle and the Bren. I carried a revolver. It was only later, on the Somme, that I discovered how useless a revolver was and used a rifle instead. I don’t think we blacked our faces or anything sophisticated like that, and we had no communications at all . . . We weren’t exactly experienced soldiers at that stage.20
Battle patrols of this kind were a throwback to the infantry tactics which had been used in the previous conflict, but they proved their worth by gaining intelligence about enemy movements and by giving unblooded soldiers some idea of what lay in store for them.
There were also two other Scottish infantry divisions, both with equally famous histories – the 15th (Scottish) Division and the 52nd (Lowland) Division. Both had become inextricably linked by the sudden transformation of the Territorial Army in the summer of 1939. When the call had gone out from the War Office for the TA to be doubled in size, it was decided to form a second line division for the 52nd (Lowland) Division, and so the 15th (Scottish) Division was born, taking its numbering from the illustrious division of the same title which had built a formidable reputation in the First World War. It proved to be a difficult business. Not only was the new division scattered all over the country, with brigade headquarters in Glasgow, Hamilton and Edinburgh, there were few drill halls for training the men, and as the divisional historian remembered, equipment was mainly noticeable by its absence. For example the gunners ‘may have heard of the 2-pounder A.Tk. [anti-tank] Gun – then the very latest – but had certainly never seen it.’21
However, by 15 September the new division had come into independent existence under the command of Major-General Roland Le Fanu, and started moving into its training areas in the Borders. Divisional headquarters was established at Jedburgh; 44 Brigade was based at Melrose, St Boswells and Earlston; 45 Brigade was based at Hawick; 46 Brigade was based at Galashiels; and the divisional artillery was based at Selkirk and Jedburgh. As happened so often during that time of turmoil, the division lost many of its first recruits when they were found to be essential workers or were declared unfit for further service. In October reinforcements started arriving from the English midland counties, and as happened throughout the conflict they quickly became perfervid Scots on donning the tam-o’-shanter bonnets worn by the Scottish regiments. The first order of battle was as follows:
44 Lowland Infantry Brigade, Brigadier B. C. Lake
8th Royal Scots
6th King’s Own Scottish Borderers
7th King’s Own Scottish Borderers
45 Lowland Infantry Brigade, Brigadier D. S. Davidson, DSO, MC
6th Royal Scots Fusiliers
9th Cameronians
10th Cameronians
46 Lowland Infantry Brigade, Brigadier H. J. D. Clark, MC
10th Highland Light Infantry
11th Highland Light Infantry
2nd Glasgow Highlanders (Highland Light Infantry)
Machine-gun Battalion
1/7th Middlesex Regiment
Royal Regiment of Artillery, Brigadier John Scott
129th Field Regiment RA
130th Field Regiment RA
131st Field Regiment RA
64th Anti-Tank Regiment RA (Queen’s Own Royal Glasgow Yeomanry)
Royal Engineers, Lieutenant-Colonel J. F. Gibson, MC, TD
278th Field Company RE
279th Field Company RE
280th Field Company RE
281st Field Park Company RE
Royal Signals, Lieutenant-Colonel V. D. Warren, MBE, TD
15th Scottish Divisional Signals
Royal Army Service Corps, Lieutenant-Colonel E. Doolan, MC
282nd Company RASC
283rd Company RASC
284th Company RASC
Royal Army Medical Corps, Colonel J. Gibson, DSO
193rd Field Ambulance RAMC
194th Field Ambulance RAMC
195th Field Ambulance RAMC
40th Field Hygiene Section RAMC22
The make-up of the division would change several times during the course of war, and more supporting arms would be added, but the original formation was a great example of improvisation and a willingness to work together. In December, 15th (Scottish) Division moved north into winter quarters, ostensibly to guard the Forth and Clyde approaches, but in reality to spend most of its time aiding the civil authorities during the bitter winter weather. During this period its brigades were scattered across Kilsyth, Kirkintilloch, Johnstone, Hamilton, Kilmarnock, Strathaven and Glasgow, and the division did not return to the Borders until April 1940.
The fate of its parent division was rather different. The 52nd (Lowland) Division had a distinguished record, having taken part in the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 and the final fighting on the Western Front in 1918. Like its Highland counterpart it was composed of TA battalions which were drawn mainly, though not entirely, from the central belt and the Borders, and was had a good conceit of themselves. Divisional headquarters were located in Park Circus, Glasgow, with two brigades also located in Glasgow (Yorkhill Parade) and one in Edinburgh (Forrest Road). Following the urgent reform of the TA, each infantry brigade had been reduced from four to three battalions to enable the creation of new specialist formations – this resulted in 4th/5th (Queen’s Edinburgh) Battalion Royal Scots becoming 52nd Searchlight Regiment Royal Artillery; 5th/8th Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) becoming 56th Searchlight Regiment Royal Artillery; and 7th (Blythswood) Battalion Highland Light Infantry becoming 83rd (Blythswood) Searchlight Regiment Royal Artillery. As a first-line fighting formation it did not take long for the reformed 52nd (Lowland) Division to be fully trained up for active service and moved south to Tidworth prior to deployment in France under the command of Major-General J. S. Drew, a Cameron Highlander. In June 1940 its order of battle was:
155 (East Scottish) Infantry Brigade – Brigadier T. Grainger-Stewart, MC, TD
7th/9th (Highlanders) Royal Scots
4th King’s Own Scottish Borderers
5th King’s Own Scottish Borderers
156 (West Scottish) Infantry Brigade – Brigadier F. G. Chalmers, DSO, MC
4th/5th Royal Scots Fusiliers
6th Cameronians (Scottish Rifles)
7th Cameronians (Scottish Rifles)
157 (Highland Light Infantry) Infantry Brigade – Brigadier N. R. Campbell, MC, TD
5th Highland Light Infantry
6th Highland Light Infantry
1st Glasgow Highlanders (Highland Light Infantry)
Machine-gun Battalion
5th Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
Divisional Troops
Royal Regiment of Artillery – Brigadier D. J. M. Campion, DSO
78th Field Regiment RA
79th Field Regiment RA
80th Field Regiment RA
54th Anti-Tank Regiment RA
Royal Engineers – CRE Lieutenant-Colonel R. E. Keelan, MC, TD
240th Field Company RE
241st
Field Company RE
241st Field Company RE
243rd Field Park Company RE
Royal Corps of Signals – Lieutenant-Colonel T. M. Niven
52nd Lowland Divisional Signals
Royal Army Service Corps – Lieutenant-Colonel F. R. Topping
528th Company RASC
529th Company RASC
530th Company RASC
Royal Army Medical Corps – Colonel G. J. Linklater, OBE, TD
155th (Lowland) Field Ambulance23
Of the three Scottish divisions the 52nd was destined to have the most unusual war history. As a frontline formation it moved south at the beginning of June and was earmarked to join the BEF, but the retreat to Dunkirk and subsequent evacuation changed all that (see Chapter 3). Instead, the division was despatched to Normandy between 7 and 12 June as part of the so-called Second British Expeditionary Force which was ordered to bolster the French forces in western France in the face of the continuing German invasion. From the outset the mission was doomed to failure, and as Captain Jack Lambert, 4th/5th Royal Scots Fusiliers remembered, the air of make-believe began when his battalion was ferried across the English Channel on a luxury liner which had been requisitioned for war service. Not only did all officers take a huge amount of luggage with them, including their blue patrol uniforms, but once on board they were treated to a superb lunch on a properly laid table ‘with the appropriate wine for each course’.24 Reality set in with the arrival of Lieutenant-General Sir Alan Brooke on 12 June. An experienced soldier and veteran of the Dunkirk evacuation, he could see that the French were in no condition to continue fighting, and from his first meeting with the overall French commander General Maxime Weygand at Le Mans he surmised that any further resistance would achieve nothing other than unacceptably high Allied casualties. Brooke’s diary entry for 14 June is thoroughly dispiriting: ‘Found him [Weygand] looking very wizened and tired looking with a stiff neck from a car smash on previous evening. He said he would speak very frankly. That the French Army had ceased to be able to offer organised resistance and was disintegrating into disconnected groups. That Paris had been given up and that he had no reserves whatever left.’25
Brooke had to act quickly, and he immediately contacted the War Office to order the bulk of his forces – 52nd (Lowland) and 1st Canadian Division – to make their way back to Brest and Cherbourg. To his astonishment he found himself talking to Churchill who seemed to have no knowledge that 52nd (Lowland) was under his command, and reminded him that he ‘had been sent to France to make the French feel that we were supporting them’. (In his later comments Brooke simply noted that ‘it was impossible to make a corpse feel and that the French army was, to all intents and purposes, dead’.)
Fortunately common sense prevailed, and the division began reembarking at Cherbourg on 16 June. Despite the failure of French dock workers to offer assistance, most of the waiting warships and troop transports managed to get alongside, and most of the division was able to re-embark with their equipment intact. According to the War Diary of 7th/9th Royal Scots ‘the Hun bombed the town blindly through the clouds in a mild and spasmodic way, but did the shipping little harm.’26 Due to the exigencies of wartime censorship no news was released about the futile Normandy deployment, and nothing was released about the division’s role until 1946 even though 157 Brigade had been involved in fierce defensive fighting during the retreat from Le Mans. In one action 5th HLI lost one officer and nine other ranks killed, and A Company of 5th KOSB had the distinction of being the last unit of 2nd BEF to engage the enemy when it ran into a German ambush in the last hours of the retreat. On its return to England, the division deployed in East Anglia where it trained in the anti-invasion role before returning to Scotland in October.
Although the 52nd (Lowland) Division had managed to escape relatively unscathed, others were less fortunate. On the day that they began their re-embarkation at Cherbourg, the liner HMT Lancastria was bombed off St Nazaire and sank with the loss of around 4,000 lives, many of them Scots, including remnants of 5th KOSB who were amongst the last to leave. (Due to the confusion and the need to get people on board as quickly as possible it proved impossible to compute the exact total.)27 This was one of the worst tragedies of the war involving British troops as the casualty list was higher than the numbers lost in the Dunkirk evacuation. The ship had been built by Beardmore on the Clyde, and had started life as the Tyrrhenia, operated by Anchor Lines on the north Atlantic route to New York. On the outbreak of war she had been requisitioned as a troopship, seeing service in the earlier operations in Norway, and at the time of the Normandy evacuation while under the command of Captain Rudolf Sharp, a Shetlander, she was severely overloaded with passengers and military equipment. During a day of intermittent air raids Lancastria was bombed in the middle of the afternoon by Junkers 88 aircraft of II Gruppe/Kampfgeschwader 30. Three direct hits caused the ship to list, first to starboard, then to port, and she rolled over and sank within 20 minutes; around 1,400 tons of fuel oil leaked into the sea and was set partially ablaze, possibly by the German aircraft machine-gunning the survivors in the water. There were only 2,477 survivors.
Give the scale of the disaster, the government took immediate steps to prevent the news being given a wider circulation under the restrictions covered by the D-Notice system. Newspapers were banned from reporting the incident or from interviewing the survivors, and to all intents and purposes the story was to be buried; at the same time official papers relating to the sinking were restricted in the Public Record Office (National Archives) for 100 years. However, photographs of the tragedy were in existence in the US, and on 26 July 1940 the Scotsman took the momentous decision to publish a report of what had happened. Although the story was not entirely accurate, it did make use of first-hand accounts and painted a vivid picture of the terrible moments when the Lancastria began to succumb to the effects of the bombing: ‘A cook told how he saw a soldier grab a young girl both of whose legs had been broken. He swam with her and both were picked up but she died later. Other survivors said that when the Lancastria heeled men clambered on the side in the belief that she would remain afloat, but within 20 minutes she sank suddenly and all the occupants were thrown into the water.’28
Because it was such an unusual occurrence for a national newspaper to break the D-Notice system, the Scotsman’s editor Sir George Waters published a trenchant editorial explaining why he had decided to break the rules – not for sensationalism but because the newspaper believed that its readers had a right to know what had happened.
The Government has given repeated assurances that it is not their policy to conceal news of losses and reverses since they know that the people of this country are not easily depressed by misfortunes. There is no reason to suppose that in general the Government are not fulfilling their undertaking of dealing honestly with the people in the publication of information and there may have been special reasons for delaying the announcement of the loss of the Lancastria.
Yet it is obvious that the belated release of news gives an opportunity for rumour to get busy and to embellish facts in a sensational form.
It also spreads suspicions that the Government’s policy is to tell the public what they think is good for them to know and no more. People with an itch for news are always prone to imagine that they are being kept in the dark and that much is happening behind the scenes. Frank and timely publication of information, good or bad, is the best antidote for gossip and distrust.29
The story did not become a public issue again until 2007 when the tragedy was debated in the Scottish parliament, and calls were made for the creation of a commemorative medal for those who had sailed on the doomed liner-cum-troopship.
Unfortunately it was not the last occasion when a liner would be sunk with numerous casualties and attempts made to cover up the real facts. On 2 July 1940 the former Blue Star luxury liner Arandora Star was hit by torpedoes off Malin Head and sank within half an hour. On board were 734 recently interned
Italians, 479 German internees, 86 German prisoners of war, 200 military guards and 174 officers and crew. Of that number 446 Italians and 175 Germans perished; amongst them were 94 Italians of Scots extraction. Ironically, the commander of the German submarine was Gunther Prien, the so-called ‘Bull of Scapa’ who had been responsible for the earlier sinking of the battleship HMS Royal Oak. His decision to attack was influenced by the fact that the Arandora Star was armed with a 4.7-inch cannon and 2-pound anti-aircraft gun, and was sailing on a zig-zag course suitable for an armed merchantman. Several hundred Scottish-based Italians were on board the Arandora Star including Alfonso Crolla of the well-respected Edinburgh grocery firm of Valvona and Crolla, and Silvestro d’Ambrosio, a confectioner from Hamilton, who had lived for forty-two years in Scotland, and who had one son serving in the British Army and another serving in the Canadian Army. In an attempt to mitigate the incident the British government placed the blame firmly on Prien and encouraged the Scottish press to produce news stories which suggested that the death toll had been higher than expected because the Italian internees had panicked and started fighting with the Germans.30 This was blatantly untrue. Most of the survivors were rescued by naval vessels and returned to Greenock where they were interviewed by the Admiralty Shipping Casualties Section, but the evidence about the sinking was not released until after the war.31 In another incident which was hushed up at the time, it later emerged that one of the casualties, Antonio Mancini from Ayr, had become a British subject in 1938 and had been wrongly detained. As a result the Home Office paid compensation to his family and admitted that ‘his detention from first to last was unlawful’.32
Why such a strange complement of passengers should have been making its way across the Atlantic is one of the sadder stories of a conflict in which human suffering was the norm. Shortly after the outbreak of war the government introduced stringent measures under Defence Regulation 18B to round up ‘aliens’ of German and Austrian extraction who might be considered security risks. These were divided into three categories: Class A who were considered high security risks and who numbered 596; Class B who were considered doubtful cases and numbered 6,742; and Class C who were considered no risk and numbered 66,002. At first only Class A aliens were interned, but by the summer of 1940 the rest had also been rounded up. When Mussolini entered the war on 10 June some 15,000 Italians were arrested immediately under Churchill’s terse command ‘collar the lot!’ Given the sizeable Italian community in Scotland at the outbreak of the war, it was not surprising that many of that number, almost 2,000 males aged 17 to 60, were resident in Scotland, mainly in Edinburgh, Glasgow and the west of Scotland.33 Under the government’s catch-all legislation the Italians were then rounded up and despatched to internment camps in the Isle of Man, Northern Ireland and Orkney, prior to being forcibly evacuated to Canada.