Culley For As Long As But A Hundred Of Us Remain Alive

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-83615-087-9
Verlag: Grosvenor House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 425 Seiten

Before WW2, the Labour Party held 'Home Rule for Scotland' as one of their fundamental principles. However following the end of the war and the unionism it engendered, notions of Scottish independence slipped down the political agenda until unionism edged it out completely. Formed in 1934 from a union of the National Party of Scotland and the Scottish Party, the Scottish National Party began to demand a Scottish Parliament but until the 1960s the movement for Scottish independence achieved little success and was sustained only by symbolic victories, such as the repatriation in 1950 of the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey. But as the century progressed, the aspiration of independence was on the rise in Scotland. This book chronicles the rise of the Scottish Independence movement from the end of WW2 to the turn of the century. It is a fact based novel that also attempts to typify the interventions of the British Security Services in frustrating that goal.

Ron Culley is an author who lives in the Glasgow suburbs. He has a wife, four sons, four grandchildren and two dugs.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Culley, Ron

Leseproben

Chapter One

1945. DRESDEN, GERMANY

My given name is Manus, my surname is Canning and I come from the age of steam. I write these words at the end of the second millennium, which seems as good a vantage point as any from which to tell my story.

I hail from a windswept and damp croft on the Isle of Lewis where my family eked a living from the land for generations and from where, in 1943, aged eighteen, I left to fight Hitler.

I am old now, slightly doddery and I’ve served time in prison as a Scottish patriot because while a long life brings many things, a blameless life is seldom among them. War changed me. When I caught the ferry from the island to the mainland harbour of Ullapool, the khaki uniform and the dark green, white and red kilt of the Highland Light Infantry, I was excited. My teachers thought me bright and in other times, an education in one of Scotland’s great universities would have lain before me as it had other scholars from the island. Instead, I shot and killed other men. I survived due to my then belief that the small Gaelic Bible, forced into my top left uniform pocket would protect me from a kill-shot. Other Western Islanders had testified to its efficacy in this regard. Mind you, they were mostly talking having first spoken with John Barleycorn.

At the time I felt no remorse as soldiers of the Axis forces would surely have killed me had they been able, and all around were engaged in that same ghastliness. I even received a field promotion aged only twenty-one to sergeant and confess that at the time I believed it well-deserved as I was popular, brave and had the respect of my fellow soldiers. But, as I say, war changed me as it changed everyone. Gradually my feelings towards my adversaries altered and I came to believe that they were mostly young men who were trapped in a nightmare as was I. As the war drew to an end, my heart was no longer prepared to kill for Queen and Country so it was something of a relief when, in 1945, after the Battle of the Reichswald and the final advance into Germany, I was given a detail of six squaddies and told to escort an eejit General called Ernest. E. Clutterbuck - and honestly, that was his real name - who was sent south-east to Dresden in order to hold talks with the Russians about Christ knows what. The First Armoured Guard Army of the Soviet Army and the Seventh Panzer Division of the National People’s Army had been stationed in and around Dresden as the great powers began carving up Germany.

Clutterbuck was not untypical of many of the officers under whom I served. With the squaddies he was brusque and spoke to us monosyllabically as much as possible in order to issue instructions but when meeting other officers of similar social standing as he saw it he’d become almost garrulous and always make it plain that he was one of the Hampshire Clutterbucks and they’d nod knowingly. When speaking with those he considered his equals, he was inclined to speak for long moments with his eyes closed, a trait which left me curious as to how and when he’d decided that this might be a better way of communicating. I’d shake my head imperceptibly at his sense of entitlement and mindful class-consciousness.

When we arrived, General Clutterbuck was billeted in a large mansion that had largely escaped destruction. Me and the boys were offered a nearby hay-loft on the northern bank of the Elbe. We’d become accustomed to roughing it and having a straw bed and a leaky roof over our heads was no inconvenience whatsoever. With bugger all to do while the General was conferring with the Ruskies, we took it upon ourselves to visit the city of Dresden. What I saw there scarred me.

Churchill had dropped untold tons of ordinance a few months earlier which set ablaze a largely wooden habitation killing thousands of innocent mothers and children. From February through April of that year, more than five hundred Lancasters dropped almost six thousand tons of bombs on the city, many of them incendiary. Over four hundred American bombers unloaded more tonnage. Some of the Russians spoke decent English and told us that cremated adults had been shrunk to the size of small children, whole families had burned to death and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm drew people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from. It was carnage. It was unnecessary. It was blood-lust. The war had all but been won.

The lucky ones in Dresden were those who had been killed outright by the explosions and shrapnel. Many of the maimed and burned lingered painfully before surrendering to the inevitable. We spent some time helping the Russians offer some relief to those starving and injured who might make it through the end days of the war if given food, water and shelter. Russian soldiers had themselves undergone great privation and were then bent upon securing cigarettes more than the demise of Fascism when we met them, offering vodka in exchange. Americans we bumped into were loud, cocky and well-supplied. I didn’t take to them but back then we were in the process of winning a war together and I tolerated their relative brashness given that quite a few of us in the HLI had our own frailties in that regard.

All of our boys were big fans of our British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. They loved his confident ‘‘V’ for Victory’ gesture, his enthusiasm for appearing unannounced but with great subsequent publicity in war zones, his purported enjoyment of a glass and his speechifying. Me? I thought him a mass-murdering psychopath. I’d read of his starving the Indian population, his early enthusiasm for using poisoned gas in a war zone and was aware of his proprietorial attitude to Ireland. When he firebombed Dresden, it was inhuman. He was of his age, I suppose, and was an enthusiastic racist, a steadfast royalist and a fervent colonialist. But I had to remember that Hitler was an evil adversary who had to be defeated. Still, much as I was repulsed by Churchill, I nevertheless learned at that young age that keeping my own counsel was a wise practice and it served me well in later years in Scotland when I couldn’t be sure if I was speaking to a Scottish patriot or an agent of the British Government. It was also an advantage once the war ended and the British Establishment came calling.

So, as I say, I left a rural Lewis excited and optimistic but returned to an urban Glasgow hardened, bloodied and angered. I had survived the war. Many friends hadn’t.

Although I didn’t realise it at the time, a pig changed my life.

In our small farmyard encampment, my men were retrieving cooked potatoes from the coals of a hot fire and were tossing them from hand to hand to cool them. Russian soldiers in charge of about fifty defeated German prisoners had been chasing a domestic pig around, anxious to have it butchered for dinner that night, when its frightened evasions saw it crash unceremoniously into a bicycle whose rider careered into a group of Germans. One of them was knocked backwards and I saw him knock his head against a stone mooring bollard before he splashed unconscious into the River Elbe.

Due to attending to my ablutions, I was dressed only in pants and a vest and had lain down my battledress outside the barn to dry in the sun. My boots had also been set out to dry. I was therefore, as a consequence of this coincidence, perfectly prepared to attempt a rescue. The German, still insensible, surfaced and was immediately swept downriver by the dark, fast-flowing Elbe. Without giving any thought to the consequences of failure. I ran fast along the bank and as I came up alongside the man, dove into the swirling waters, my breath immediately being caught by the freezing temperature of waters that had but recently tumbled from the high Krkonoše Mountains on the Czech-Polish border. It took me several long strokes before I came up beside the soldier whom I grabbed roughly by the neck. Gathering him into my body, I changed to a side-stroke using only my left arm and slowly, against the flow, brought him back towards shore where several of his colleagues had now gathered. One of them waded towards us but was instantly surprised by the steep bank of the river at that point so he too, was submerged. He surfaced close enough for me to grasp his collar and now on my back, I kicked furiously, unable to use my arms for propulsion until I made shore with the two men. The Russians looked on disinterestedly, their general demeanour being one of ‘Zhopa! Let the German bastard drown’.

Strong arms lifted us from the water and rather intemperately, I pushed aside those helping and turned the still unconscious soldier onto his side in order to affect ventilation of his lungs. As my thoughts turned to additional resuscitation, the man began to recover, coughing water out of his mouth and after a few moments, had manoeuvred himself on to his knees where blood from his head-wound and water from his lungs mingled and flowed together onto the brown earth. The other soldier was only slightly the worse for wear. One of my men, Ian McMurtrie, offered him a sip of earlier stolen schnapps which was willingly accepted. My soldier recovered more slowly due to his more protracted immersion in the Elbe but he too rallied following some of Ian’s purloined schnapps. Two Russians attempted gruffly to intervene but my harsh language stopped their commands being followed.

The German was surprised at my bullish attitude towards his guards.

“You speak English! You are English?”

I smiled. “One more insult like that and I’ll throw you back in the river. I’m Scottish.”

He returned my grin. “I think I owe you my life, Scottish.”

I turned to McMurtrie who hovered beside...