Earlsferry in World War II

In one form or another few places in Britain escaped the effects of Adolf Hitler's wrath including the village of Earlsferry.

The first air raid of the war occurred on the 16th of October 1939 when German aircraft bombed warships that were laying alongside of the Forth Bridge near the Royal Naval dockyards at Rosyth.  The pride of our navy, the battleship HMS Hood, was at anchor in the dockyard but wasn't hit. That same day the destroyer HMS Mowhawk was on escort duty in the Firth of Forth.  When the Mowhawk was operating in the shipping channel and straight out from the Kincraig Cliffs at Earlsferry, it was dive bombed and damaged. On the Mowhawk sixteen men were killed including the captain of the ship, Commander Jolly. Nine other men were wounded by bomb fragments. In all a total of twenty five casualties.  The ship limped to Rosyth for repair. One of the attacking aircraft a JU88 dive bomber was shot down into the sea by a Spitfire of 602 City of Glasgow squadron near Crail. This was the second German aircraft to be shot down that day. Just 10 minutes earlier a Spitfire of 603 City of Edinburgh Squadron  shot down a JU 88  German bomber that crashed into the Firth of Forth off Port Seton. This was the very first German aircraft to be shot down over Britain during World War II.

First we had an imposed blackout as it was reasoned that most air raid attacks would come during the hours of darkness. All windows had to be covered so that not one chink of light could be seen from the outside.

To prevent injury from broken window glass all windows were crisscrossed with adhesive tape to lesson the effect of flying glass fragments.  All vehicle headlights had to have an attached metal shield to prevent any light being visible above the horizontal plane.

The country went on a severe austerity program.  Ration books were issued to everyone for all essential commodities such as food and clothing.  Children were assigned to walk the hedgerows to gather wild rose hips. These were used to be processed into vitamin C as a source of nourishment for babies.  At war's end there were few overweight people in the country.  Austere as our food supply was maybe that was when we were at our fittest.

Fuel for cars was almost unavailable. You had to have a very good reason in order to get even a tiny allocation of petrol. Some ingenious individuals actually made coal burning devices that they attached to the front of their cars. The fire cooked other coal that produced gas that was plumbed to the carburetor. In beating the energy crunch innovative Victor Boullet our baker par excellence was away ahead of the crowd and his time. He stunned the village by converting his delivery vans to electric/battery power.

In anticipation of whatever invasion plans that Hitler might have had our military  fortified the cliffs at Earlsferry by installing large caliber naval guns at the highest vantage point. Lookout observation posts were built into the side of the cliffs and were manned 24 hours a day by the 258^th Battery, 505 Coastal Regiment.  At several locations on the cliffs and the golf course, high powered searchlights and anti aircraft guns were installed.

Other camouflaged observation posts were built and manned near the quarry at the top of the Ferry Road and also near the Elie Lighthouse. A concealed machine gun nest was built  into the sea wall at the west end of the Earlsferry beach.  If a landing had been attempted on the beach this gun emplacement was capable of sweeping the entire length of the beach including to the harbour. All around the shoreline of the beaches heavy concrete blocks were built and spaced at just the right distance and of a height such that vehicles that might try to come ashore would become high centered.

Fairways on the golf course and the farm fields had rows of telephone size poles implanted such as to make the safe landing of German aircraft and troop carrying gliders impossible. The Germans did the same thing on the fields of France.   After D Day these  wrecked havoc with our men who were onboard our Horsa  troop carrying gliders.

The call went out for scrap metals to be converted into munitions. Many of the houses in Earlsferry had decorative iron gates and railings around the properties. These were all cut off and donated. Almost a quarter of a mile of closely spaced heavy five foot high iron fencing rods that belonged to the Lilburn family of Craigforth House, where it bordered their field and the West Sea Road, were donated. The large heavy wrought iron gate that barred the entry way to the Dome Park also went.  Women thinned out their kitchen cupboards and donated several of their aluminium pots and pans to be melted down to be made into aircraft parts. Between World War I and World War II Isaac Newlands, scrap merchant, who lived at Pittenweem had amassed an enormous pile of scrap metals. His scrap yard was swept clean. No doubt the shrewd Isaac had anticipated this event. At the Earlsferry chapel and at the Elie harbor were several old World War I artillery cannons. These all disappeared in the name of the cause.

A large detachment of Polish army personnel occupied the Golf Hotel where they trained as paratroopers.

At all times every man, woman and child carried a gas mask that was slung on the shoulder. 

A Home Guard unit was formed of volunteer men who also acted as Air Raid Wardens.  A high powered siren that could be heard for miles was installed on the roof of the Earlsferry Town Hall.  Another was placed near The Toll Green at Elie.

School age teenagers enlisted in cadet training services of the armed forces and were issued military uniforms.  (The war did have it's lighter moments. Not long after I enrolled in the Air Training Corps I was fitted for  a clip on chest pack parachute harness at the Crail RNAS base HMS Jackdaw.  A pretty young WREN did the honours of fitting me. After she'd pulled all of the adjusting straps to the very end of their adjustments there was still quite a gap between the straps and my crotch. Whoever was the designer of the harness never figured that they would also be worn by boys.  She looked at me and I gave her a questioning, what now ?, look  and she just lost her professional cool. Ha, ha, ha, ha ,ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. To solve the problem a navy rating produced a punching tool to make extra holes in the webbing. We all had a good laugh as the young lady made further adjustments to snug me in and inked my name on the webbing.

HMS Jackdaw, had a great dance band and several very fine vocalists who sang the songs of the time. Saturday nights were dance nights at the  NAAFI canteen which was in a large Nissen hut. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" and  we cadets had a standing invitation to attend. What great nights these were. My favourite music is still that of the sentimental forties. There will never be another era or time of camaraderie like the 40's.)

Trains started to arrive at the Elie railway station that brought evacuated children from London, Glasgow and many other cities that were likely to be targeted for concentrated air raids. The local people met the trains at the railway stations and one by one the children, who all had pinned-on labels with their name and family information, found foster homes for the duration.

Many of the local men and women went off to fight in the various services, some never to return.

The merchant ships that plied the waters of the Firth of Forth flew barrage balloons for protection from attacking  German dive bombers.

In an attempt to augment the food supply the Dome Park at Chapel Green was ploughed up and planted to potatoes. This was really an exercise in frustration as at harvest time the yield was hardly worth the bother of picking up. As I recall after the first year the ground was allowed to return to it's original state of wild sea tolerant grasses.

At the time of our darkest moment Winston Churchill buoyed the nation as he  growled the words that made every man, woman and child in the country stand taller, "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and it's Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour."  It certainly was Winston's. The island homeland was his frontier of freedom.

Later "The Spectator" was to declare, "We are a free people because a man named Winston Churchill lived."

Even school children were influenced by the war.  While at Waid Academy  my school class made a field trip  to visit the Henry Balfour factory at Leven. This factory made both the  left and right wings for Spitfire fighter aircraft.  First, on scrap metal, we learned how to use pneumatic  drills to drill  holes in wing skin panels then correctly install rivet fasteners. After we drilled  a sufficient number of practice holes  and  installed  rivets in the holes and  we were declared proficient we each got to drill holes and install  rivets in a  wing that would end up on an actual fighting Spitfire. 

I'm mid center

I'm front center

Another Waid Academy field trip I went on was for the whole eight weeks of one Summer. Since most all of the  men of military age were off fighting the war there was a shortage of manpower for other jobs. This field trip was to the village of Deskford near the town of Cullen in Aberdeenshire.   For the summer we stayed in and slept on straw filled mattress pads on the floor of the village school. We worked as forestry workers. After trees were felled our job was to cut off all of the side branches. These telephone pole size logs were planted in level fields at places where it was thought that German aircraft might try to make a landing.   We were issued razor sharp axes and sharpening stones. It's a wonder that none of us was seriously injured although several quite large wounds were inflicted by skidding and bouncing axes.. This was in the day when the chain saw was yet to be invented.

On nights that German bombers headed our way the throbbing and groaning of the engines of the heavily bomb laden aircraft could be heard ten miles or more away. The primary target in Scotland was Glasgow and the surrounding area where our heavy industrial factories were located, the shipbuilding yards on the River Clyde, the Rolls-Royce engine plant, our torpedo manufacturing facility at Greenock to name just a very few.   The Royal Naval dockyard at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth was another prime target. 

First the air raid sirens would wail. Then the searchlights on the golf course would stab the darkness and sweep the skies. As bombers were caught and held in the glare of the intense beams of light the ack-ack guns, that were in place alongside of the lights, would open up. A few bombers would turn back but the rest would push on to their targets. Before morning many civilians in the Glasgow area would die.

"Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance,

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody but unbowed."

 William Henley

It just so happened that from the take-off airfields in Germany, Earlsferry  and the East Neuk of Fife lay under the flight path of the bombers that were heading for Glasgow. When the coastal searchlights caught and held an enemy aircraft the usual response from the aircraft was the indiscriminate jettisoning of the bomb load and the fleeing for home of the aircraft before being caught by our night fighters. One night one of my best friends, a Waid Academy classmate who lived at Crail,  was shutting up his pet rabbits for the night in their hutch at the end of his garden.  A jettisoned high explosive bomb took his life. Not one thread of his clothing was found. Several times Earlsferry and other of the coastal villages were the recipients of these abandoned bomb loads. Small fire starting incendiary bombs were held in large containers nicknamed Molotov Breadbaskets. The incendiary bombs were made of a magnesium casing with a core of phosphorus.  After being dropped the doors on these containers sprung open to shower the bombs in all directions. Many fell on the Earlsferry golf course. On nights of air raid attack we local boys scooped buckets of sand from the bunkers on the golf course, to smother the intensely hot but slow burning bombs. At daylight after the incendiary bombs had time to cool off we collected the finned tail cones as souvenirs.

There were times that German submarines attempted to penetrate the Firth of Forth. Our destroyers on detecting one would race up and down the Firth as they heaved depth charges overboard. When this happened the shoreline of our beaches for miles became strewn with all kinds of fish that were killed by the concussion of the blasts.

Our beaches became strewn with flotsam and jetsam from deck cargo as our ships were sunk in the North Sea. The saddest thing was the number of Royal Navy and Merchant Marine  hats that floated in to arrive on the tide lines of the beaches - the only thing now visible of the men who had worn them.

There was one high explosive bomb that really ticked me off. Straight down from the Cadgers Wynd was my favourite lobster hole. This rocky place was inshore to the extent that even in a neap tide the sea would go far enough out for me to get good sized lobsters. Until one day. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.  Where this lobster getting place had been was an enormous bomb crater.

Even the Earlsferry lobsters felt the brunt of the war.

When the winds of war blew across the Pacific had Japan not committed it's ultimate act of folly by attacking Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941  I very much doubt that I'd be writing this today.  

The old Scottish adage was verified.  " It's an ell wund that disnae blaw somebody some guid. "

To celebrate the end of the World War II conflict (VE Day)  about six months prior to victory over Japan being declared on the fifteenth of August 1945 (VJ Day) the people of the towns and villages all over the country collected combustible materials of every type imaginable to build enormous bonfires.  The Earlsferry and Elie bonfire was built above the  quarry near The Ferry Road.  As it got dark in the evening of the fifteenth of August 1945, after almost six years of war, the bonfires were torched.  Our bonfire was so illuminating that night became almost like day. The heat was so intense that  onlookers had to move to a considerable distance from the flames.  Bonfires could be seen burning  at each of the  towns all along   both the southern  and the northern shores of the Firth of Forth. We sang "Roll out the Barrel".  Partying and merriment went on all night long and right into the next day.  After daylight the remains of our bonfire  smoldered for over a week.

And, "The Bells of Hell went ting-a-ling-a-ling" as the names of more of our young men and women got chiseled into polished granite.

"Where have all the flowers gone?" 

When will we ever learn?