I was born in 1954, the year World War II rationing ended. I have vague memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and my parents’ distress, but that is all I have experienced in terms of the threat of war. Of course, much later, we had the Falklands War and the various Middle East conflicts, but there was never any question of my British generation being subjected to a general call-up or even having to do National Service. By contrast, as young Americans, my friends Al and Ken had to endure the Russian roulette of the Vietnam War draft. In the end, by good fortune, neither of them were called up. Thanks to Harold Wilson’s refusal to put ‘boots on the ground,’ the worst our British Cold War generation had to contend with was the constant background threat of nuclear war. We read Bomb Culture, but we didn’t have to fight. We did have to endure black and white TV dramas depicting what was in store for us should we survive the initial nuclear exchange. A visit to the decommissioned ‘secret bunker’ in Fife is an unsettling reminder of those far-off times before the Wall came down and Vladimir Putin got very rich.
A regular topic of conversation among us old hippies is how glad we are that we have never had to fight in a war. A friend has a recurring nightmare that he is standing in the front rank of some unspecified army, in the rain, holding a spear. He asks his neighbour what they are doing there and is told that ‘the battle’ is about to start – at which point he wakes up, terrified. While cold steel does seem a genuinely remote possibility, at my now advanced age, 1954 seems terribly close to the largest and most extreme conflict in human history.
Farming was a reserved occupation; one that excused you military service on the basis that your job was essential to the war effort. As a result my family largely escaped doing any actual fighting. Had it been otherwise, I might not be sitting here writing this. Almost all my contemporaries had fathers who served. My mother’s parents were the only grandparents we knew as children. Granny and Grandad were born in the 1890s and married shortly after the end of World War One. Even as non-combatants their experience of that war must have been appalling. Granny frequently told me, ‘You never opened the paper without reading that someone you knew had been killed.’
She herself lost ‘a lad’ she was very fond of. He tried to write to her from a field hospital after he had been wounded. Distressingly, the handwriting trails off mid-sentence and the letter was sent on to my grandmother posthumously. He was an only son and Granny felt very sorry for his parents. She invited them to post war family events – even after she married my grandfather. The elderly couple appear in some of our family photographs – and the letter from their son is still among Mum’s papers.
Even though as a family we were relatively unaffected by the armed conflict in the First World War, ‘Spanish Flu’ (an H1N1 avian virus), arrived with American troops and eventually killed far more people than the war itself. Some estimates are of 500 million infected and 50 million deaths. The virus spread in the trenches and barracks and penetrated every corner of the globe with the returning troops. In fact, there was nothing Spanish about it. The belligerent countries suppressed the dreadful death rate for reasons of national morale, while neutral Spain reported it and became eponymously associated with the disease.
In 1919 flu nearly killed my grandfather who at one point wasn’t expected to survive the night. The fragility of existence in the face of war and disease would have been a basic fact of life for my grandparents in the pre-antibiotic era. Still, the Twenties must have brought some kind of relief. My mother was born in June 1925 and my uncle on ‘Black Tuesday’, the night of the Wall Street Crash of 29th October 1929. The subsequent depression plunged the world into financial extremis and fomented the rise of extreme fascist and communist movements.
I did my surgical house officer job on the orthopaedic wards of the Royal Infirmary. In 1979 I admitted a patient who had broken his hip. It transpired he was from a travelling family and enjoyed being outdoors. He was tanned and sported a neat white goatee beard. He said he had spent the first two years of his life strapped to his mother’s back, sharing all her conversations, and travelling through ‘every town in Britain’. He liked to take a bottle of wine and drink it ‘in God’s good air’. The previous day, whilst walking up the Mound, carrying his bottle, he had fallen and been unable to rise. He asked many passers-by for help but no one would stop, so he had to lie there all night. The next morning a secretary in the Bank of Scotland building sat down at her desk and noticed that the man she had seen lying on the pavement the day before was still there. She called the police and finally he made it to the ward.
I was shocked that no one had been prepared to help him. Presumably they thought he was simply drunk. Having completed the history, I needed to examine him and mark up his broken leg for theatre. I pulled back the bedsheets and was confronted with a heavily scarred and deformed left leg – the opposite side from the broken one. I asked him what on earth had happened. He said, ‘In 1936 doctor a few of us thought democracy was in danger in Spain and so we went over there to fight.’ He had been a member of the International Brigade. I cannot now recall which battle he was wounded in, but he said they wanted to amputate his leg afterwards. He wouldn’t allow it and eventually he recovered and made it home to Scotland.
Having completed the formalities, I told him he would have his broken hip pinned later that day. At that moment a young woman appeared in the open Nightingale ward carrying a baby. She rushed down to the man’s bed, upset, but delighted to see him. At first I thought she must be a relative but it turned out she was the warden of his sheltered housing. She was very fond of him and had reported him missing when he failed to return from his day out.
My mother was 14 when the second war broke out in 1939. The farm was on very flat land near the Firth of Forth at Grangemouth, just north of the Wall of Antoninus Pius. Mum remembered hearing the declaration of war on the radio in the kitchen. Barely a month later, in October, she and Grandad were outside thatching stacks when the Germans attacked warships at anchor in the Firth of Forth. This turned out to be the first German raid of the war – although at the time my mother and grandfather assumed it was an exercise.
Falsely reported in Britain as an attack on the Forth Bridge, the Luftwaffe’s target was actually HMS Hood. A radar failure at Cockburnspath had allowed the bombers to reach the firth undetected. Notably, it was the first occasion Spitfires were used in combat. 602 Squadron (City of Glasgow) based at Drem, and 603 Squadron (City of Edinburgh) based at Turnhouse were scrambled. Said by British sources to be a failure, the Luftwaffe actually hit several ships; 24 men were killed and 44 injured. The Germans lost two bombers, one shot down off the coast at Port Seton and another at Crail in Fife. A further plane crashed in Holland on the way back, killing all the crew. Fortunately the Hood had been moved into dock and was undamaged. Later she would blow up at the Battle of the Denmark Strait when a 15 inch shell fired by the Bismarck hit her magazines. She sank in three minutes and of the 1418 men on board only three survived.
As the war progressed, German bombers would repeatedly attack installations on the Forth or pass overhead on their way to bomb Clydebank. There was an air raid shelter in the garden of the farm and mum said that during attacks they could hear spent anti-aircraft shell fragments hitting the metal hay shed roof. A Polish fighter squadron was based at the neighbouring Grangemouth Airfield and planes would take off low over the farm steading during sorties.
Prisoners of war were held at various places in the Lothians such as Mortonhall Camp and Donaldson’s school. They were put to work on local farms to help the war effort. Some Italian prisoners were sent to my grandparents’ farm. They seemed pleased to be out of the fighting and enjoyed the work. They were nice to the children and even made them toys. At that time the war in North Africa was going badly for the Allies. Granny said the prisoners would tell them in broken English, ‘You see. Rommel do it! Rommel do it!’ which annoyed her greatly. She gave the prisoners their lunchtime sandwiches wrapped in pages from The Scottish Farmer because they contained no war news. As the tide turned under Montgomery she switched to pages from the Scotsman.
Over on the other side of the country, in Ayrshire, my farmer father had yet to meet my mother. During the Second War he was a Special Constable, checking on the blackout in the local town. His cap, uniform and truncheon hung in the hall cupboard and intrigued us as children. We found his gas mask in the attic.
My first flat in Edinburgh was on the second floor of a tenement in Marchmont Road, on the southern margin of the Meadows. I moved there in 1974. The common stair had a rear door leading to the ‘back green’ an area for drying clothes and for some half-hearted gardening. It had the usual unkempt appearance with self-seeded elders, sycamores and long grass. The various properties’ grounds were separated by stone walls. Close to our building there was a large gap in one of the walls associated with an extensive, indistinct, grassy hollow. On the ground floor lived the elderly Mrs Bowie-Deans. She had stayed in her flat throughout the war. One day, on an impulse, I asked her what the odd excavation was in the back green. She told me that it was a bomb crater. German bombers that had lost their way to the target or had to turn back for some other reason would drop their bombs on any urban area they could identify in the blackout. Mrs B-D said the bomb had blown out all the windows at the back of the building.
Later I moved to a flat in a New Town tenement. One of my neighbours was a lecturer in architecture at the at Edinburgh College of Art. He came from a Viennese Jewish family. His father got most of his relatives out of Austria in the 1930s before failing to return from his final trip. Those that remained in the country, including Bob’s father, were lost in the camps. Bob ended up in a displaced children’s refugee camp in the south of England along with future members of the Amadeus Quartet. He remained friends with them for the rest of his life. At the end of the war he was old enough to do national service with the sappers of the Royal Engineers, stationed in the north of Scotland. One day a notice went up asking any German speakers to report to the adjutant’s office. By that time Bob had anglicised his name. ‘How good is your German, Farnborough?’ he was asked. ‘Pretty good sir, I’m Austrian,’ he said.
Bob was sent to Sweden where he discovered his task was to interview the last commandant of Auschwitz, who had been captured trying to escape to South America. It turned out this man had only been in charge of the camp for a couple of weeks and was a pathetic specimen unworthy of Bob’s hatred. The previous commandant had successfully evaded the Allied forces. Later Bob was sent back to Vienna, his home city, as part of the British Army of occupation. He didn’t find any of his family. Vienna is, famously, the city of the film The Third Man. I told Bob his story was amazing. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘All of us who survived have stories like that. Everyone else is dead.’
My boss when I was a medical house officer at the Northern General Hospital was the neurologist Ernest Jellinek. He was another Austrian refugee of part-Jewish origin. His mother’s family estate included a chapel where Hitler had been christened. In the 1930s it was clear things were getting very serious and his family fled Austria for Britain. On the outbreak of war he was interned on the Isle of Man – which he found tolerable and even interesting because of the brilliant people he was locked up with. Later he was offered the chance of release if he was prepared to join up. At first he did labouring jobs, but graduated to a tank regiment and described his reconnaissance missions in northern France as being a ‘moving target’. He was wounded twice, the second time badly, losing an eye and ending up in a brain injury unit back in England. He said that was what sparked his interest in neurology. You can hear him talk about this and the rest of his fascinating life on the Edinburgh College of Physicians website.
https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/heritage/ernest-jellinek
Many years later I attended a conference in Vienna. A colleague who is a keen student of military history asked if I wanted to see the ‘flak towers’. I had never heard of them. These are massive concrete anti-aircraft towers which also served as bomb shelters for as many as 30,000 civilians. The walls are 3.5 metres thick. They were constructed in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna from 1940 onwards and were virtually indestructible.
Understandably they are not publicised as a tourist attraction and coming across them in the parks around central Vienna is a stunning experience. During the early part of the war Allied bombers could not reach Vienna but after the invasion of Italy the city was heavily bombed. By that time fuel for the ammunition lifts was running out and the flak batteries on the platforms could no longer be supplied. For a while German defenders held out in the towers which were impervious to the Russian artillery. If you are ever in Vienna I recommend you seek them out.
https://www.hamburg.com/architecture/11748556/st-pauli-bunker/
Working as a doctor has given me access to many veterans’ stories which they often volunteered unasked. A colleague examined a nonagenarian Spitfire pilot who was shot down over northern France. He was picked up by the resistance and smuggled through the south into Spain. After 18 months he made it back to Britain and rejoined the RAF. After the war he found the field in France where he had crashed and picked up a piece of his plane which he kept on the mantelpiece.
Many Polish servicemen stayed on after the war rather than return to a communist régime. A Polish hairdresser I met was warned by a hand-delivered letter from his mother not to return. All it contained was a newspaper cutting describing how Polish ex-servicemen with combat skills were being sent to gulags. He never saw his family again. I also met a German prisoner of war who had been held in a camp at Gosford in East Lothian. He decided to stay on in Scotland after the war ended. He said he liked it there and he had married ‘a beautiful girl from Aberlady’. I suspect his home had also been sealed off behind the Iron Curtain. My own school friends included a smattering of Polish and Eastern European surnames, the sons and daughters of WWII world War servicemen.
My parents’ generation are all but gone now, and with them the chance to hear their first-hand experiences. If they seem lucky to us it is only, as my neighbour said, the fact of their survival that allows us to contemplate their remarkable stories. It is not just the anecdotes that are going, something of the reality of war is fading to be replaced by a thoughtless disregard for what they went through. Worse still, revisionists are waiting to reinterpret history in the light of current prejudices and fashionable tropes.
The Bohemian Waxwing 