A few months ago on an open day we visited the Old Kirk, Kirkcaldy, the old parish church of the town, whose tower can be seen here from Kirk Wynd.

We knew before we went that there was some stained glass by the pre-Raphaelite (in its later phase) Edward Burne Jones.

The church is no longer in use as a place of worship having been closed as such by the Church of Scotland in November 2010. The congregation merged with that of St Brycedale Church – no more than 50 yards away! – to become known as St Bryce Kirk. St Bryce is the patron saint of Kirkcaldy. (See here.) These two Burne Jones windows are towards the back of the building if you were entering from Kirk Wynd and are only two of many stained glass windows whose splendour cannot be fully experienced from the outside.

The above much more recent stained glass windows represent the flames of the fire which damaged the interior a good few years ago. These flank the main entrance from Kirk Wynd.

One slightly older window by Crear McCartney is on the immediate left wall (see left.)

None of the pews remain as the space inside has been cleared for community use.

It is possible to climb the tower. Don’t do it on a windy day (of which there are a quite a few in Kirkcaldy) as you are fairly exposed on the tower parapet.

Before the stairs/ladders which allow the climb we passed the impressive memorial – see below – to the members of the congregation who died in the World Wars. (The 1939-45 addition blends in well.)

I had to stitch three pictures to get the full panorama of the memorial as the space to step back was limited. The passageway to the stairs is on the left of this.

Grafton, 1987, 272 p including Source Notes and Index.

*

To counteract the German surge during the famous Battle of the Bulge in the Belgian Ardennes, Allied Supreme Commander, Eisenhower, was forced to move General Patton’s troops away from a more southerly front in Alsace and along the Rhine on the border of France and Germany. This dangerously thinned the Allied forces in that area – so much so that Eisenhower ordered General Devers (in whom he apparently had little confidence) to withdraw to the Vosges in the event of being attacked. This was contrary to all US military convention which is against the giving up of ground hard won by US blood. Moreover it meant that Alsace would once more be under German control and that Alsatian city beloved by the French, Strasbourg, would for the third time in 70 years have fallen to Germany.

The Germans had foreseen most of this and, hoping to drive a wedge between the Allies, attacked here also in Unternehmen Nordwind, Operation Northwind. The resulting crisis caused a major rift between the French and US commands and poisoned French attitudes to the US for decades after. At the hint of withdrawal De Gaulle told Eisenhower that even if US troops would not defend Strasbourg French ones would. Eisenhower then threatened to withhold supplies from the French army and De Gaulle, de facto leader of France, then counter-threatened to deny the Allies transport rights across France! Partly as a result, but also because General Devers wanted to fight his ground, thousands of US troops – not to mention the French and the Germans – became casualties, in atrocious winter conditions. One of the troops involved was the most decorated US soldier of WW2 and later Hollywood film star, Audie Murphy, who won the Medal of Honor in these actions.

The author occasionally displays an animus against the French. He lays at their door the lack of withdrawal and hence the responsibility for subsequent US casualties – though the French attitude to Strasbourg in particular and Alsace in general is perfectly understandable, especially since their fall might have led to De Gaulle’s government being replaced by the communist elements of the Resistance. In the epilogue we find Whiting also blames General Leclerc’s determination to restore French military pride for the French attempt to retain their colonies in Indo-China hence the subsequent US embroilment in Vietnam, and thousands more US deaths.

As is usual with military history the text sometimes resembles an alphabet soup of Divisional nomenclature. A serious lack here is of maps. There is at the beginning of the book one map of the general area of operations but the place names are tiny. More detailed maps of parts of the overall battle would have aided comprehension of the ebb and flow.

In the end the Allied troops held out (but not without retreats, surrenders, self–inflicted wounds and even desertions along the way) and the Germans exhausted themselves against the defence, failed to hold off the counterattack and broke off, partly to send troops back to the Eastern Front.

*This is not the cover of the Grafton edition that I read. Neither was/is the cover shown on my Library Thing pages.

I suppose a seventieth anniversary is something special but perhaps it is more so when it involves an almost iconic event.

7/12/2011 marks seventy years since the Pearl Harbor attack, the event which turned relatively localised war into World War. “7^th December 1941: a date which will live in Infamy,” – FDR.

It is sobering to realise that the Second World War lasted less than four years after that. The US and UK have now had troops dying in Afghanistan for much longer than that; and in Iraq for not much less time. Not so many troops dying admittedly, but dying nonetheless.

I vaguely remember Gore Vidal saying something to the effect that the difference between Pearl Harbor and the September 11^th attack was that no-one saw the latter one coming. He had a personal reason to blame the US authorities for the war with Japan, though. His lover died in the Pacific fighting.

The most prominent feature of Dundee Law is the War Memorial erected there.

The east side commemorates the men of Dundee who died in the First World War.

The west side commemorates the Second World War dead.

The door must allow access to the inside. Apparently the device at the top is a lantern of remembrance which is lit on four occasions through the year:
25th September; in memory of the Battle of Loos,
24 October; United Nations Day,
11 November; Armistice Day
and Remembrance Sunday.

This is the view of the Memorial from just in front of the radio/mobile phone mast which also sits on the summit. You can see the rail bridge across the Tay in the background to the right here.

On Saturday we ended up at Dollar, Clackmannanshire.

This is Dollar’s WW2 memorial, situated in a small memorial gardens just off the main A 91 road. The gardens side has two names for servicemen killed in Northern Ireland. There was no sign of any First World War names.

We walked up the hill beside the burn, over which there are two nice bridges.

The white building behind the second one houses Dollar Museum, which contains, among other things, a display on the Devon Valley Railway (now sadly defunct, victim of the greatest act of institutional vandalism in Britain in my lifetime, the Beeching cuts, though the part to Alloa has been reopened recently.)

We asked the attendant if there was a WW1 memorial anywhere and were told it was in the school grounds.

Of course, Dollar Academy. Lots of former pupils would have served in the wars. The memorial is unusual, showing a figure with outstretched hands.

The main school building can be seen in the first photo. The side facing it seemed to contain names from the parish rather than FPs. Other sides were reserved solely for ex-pupils, with WW2 and later conflicts also commemorated.

Stalin’s War With Germany Volume 1
Grafton, 1985, 814p (including 144p of sources and references and a 26p index.)

I remember seeing a newspaper review of this and thinking, “That sounds interesting, I’ll maybe get it in paperback.” Then I realised it was the paperback. (£7.99 was a lot of money for a book in 1985. And there was the second volume to consider). It was a few years later before I bought both, I believe. They are weighty tomes and I didn’t feel able to give them the necessary time till now.

Originally published in 1975, firmly during the cold War era, The Road To Stalingrad filled a gap by being the first UK history of the Russian Front to focus primarily on Soviet sources.

Its starting point is the disruption to the Soviet armed forces caused by the purges of the 1930s, the rearrangements and lack of preparedness which that caused, all of which was exacerbated by the strange purblindness of Stalin with regard to German intentions in the run up to war. Thereafter it considers the frontier battles, the deep German advance, touches briefly on events behind the German lines, deals with the Moscow counterstroke and the following abortive Soviet offensive in early 1942 with which Stalin thought he might win the war that year, up to the German drive to the Volga and the Caucasus.

The book is strongest on the deliberations within the stavka, the Soviet high command, but really that means the decisions reached by Stalin. Marshal Shaposhnikov, the main military voice within the stavka – even though Zhukov was made Stalin’s deputy in 1942 – seems to have learned early to go with that flow.

Unfortunately it is not till page 538 and the start of the Battle of Stalingrad that the narration comes to life. Here Erickson begins to leaven his account with details of the battle. Up till then he is more concerned with the general sweep of events and is peculiarly fixated on enumerating the switching of multifarious Divisions between the various Soviet Armies, Groups and Fronts. Along the way there is a daunting array of Russian General’s names to deal with.

While the book does have maps, they are very few and only depict large areas. Some showing the smaller movements involved would have provided clarification of the somewhat dense prose.

What, for me, it all illuminated was the unlikelihood of any attack to liberate Europe by the Western Allies being likely to succeed had Hitler’s armies not already been embroiled and macerated in the East. The sheer numbers of troops involved, the scales of the operations, are stunning. As it was, Stalin’s pressing of Britain and the US to initiate a Second Front quickly was deflected as they were as yet not adequately prepared for any such endeavour.

At the end of the 642 pages of narrative we have reached only the encirclement of von Paulus’s Sixth Army, trapped in the city. The second volume of Erickson’s history, The Road To Berlin, awaits. It may be some time.

Last Saturday we had a trip round Fife and stopped off in Newburgh.

This is the War Memorial. There are only First World War names on it; I saw no sign of a World War 2 Memorial. It is just possible no-one from Newburgh died in the second conflict.

Down by the River Tay there is a nice grassed area which can be used for picnics etc. There was an unusual sculpture showing leaping salmon (I suppose) in the middle of it. And some nice yachts on the river. The reed beds in the background are apparently the biggest in Europe.

On the way back home we went via Cupar. This is the former Woolies there. It had been turned into an Allworth’s but that was having its closing down sale’s final day! Looks like replacing a Woolies with something very similar isn’t viable either.

For what it’s worth I’ll be voting for a change to the alternative vote in the referendum tomorrow.

Not that I think it’s a perfect system, there isn’t one – and there’s not a snowball’s chance that anyone but Labour will win in my parliamentary constituency, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, anyway, under any system – but simply that it’s a (tiny) bit fairer than the so-called first past the post method which I have blogged about before.

[To see just how perverse the FPTP system can be see doctorvee's excellent post on the subject here.]

I also see AV as an essential first step towards a more fully proportional election procedure. Consider: the coming of universal suffrage in the UK took nearly 100 years from the Great Reform Act of 1832 till women finally got the vote on the same terms as men – and one person one vote was not achieved (with the abolition of university seats) till after the Second World War!

If the AV referendum posts a no vote it will be taken to mean that, or represented as, there is not a wide desire to see a fairer system in place and the chances of any sort of PR system for UK parliamentary elections will thereby be lost for perhaps a generation, maybe even for my lifetime. Anyone who votes against it on the grounds that it isn’t the PR system they prefer is letting the worst (FPTP) take the place of the acceptable-for-now.

Hutchinson, 1964. 231p.

This is a book I got at a library sale years ago and have only just got round to reading. Rather than an overview of the Western Front as a whole it turns out to be a series of essays Terraine wrote between 1957 and 1962 which were finally collected in book form in 1964.

In the introduction Terraine is at pains to emphasise that the casualty rate in World War 1 was by no means unprecedented. Starting with Waterloo and taking in the Crimea, The American Civil War and the Boer War he illustrates that, for those with eyes to see, in a time of increasingly industrialised warfare high casualties were inevitable once the fighting started. This was a theme he developed fully in his later book The Smoke And The Fire.

World War 1 was unique, though, in the prolonged timescale of the battles and the static nature of the Western Front. (Other fronts had movement but sustained equally high, or even higher, percentage casualties.) The carnage of the Second World War eclipsed even that of the First, but Britain escaped most of it.

The focus of the book is, however, more on the personalities on the British side than the battles themselves; in particular in the antipathy between Lloyd George and his top commanders. Now, Terraine is a military historian and it is not surprising that his sympathies should lie with the generals but the evidence he presents for Lloyd George’s unhelpfulness is convincing.

His assessment of Douglas Haig as being far from the stolid and hidebound figure of the popular imagination is well argued. His highest praise, though, is reserved for the all but forgotten British general Herbert Plumer.

There is also a discursion into the baneful effect the cult of Napoleon had on the French military mind – and on others. In Terraine’s view Napoleon was anything but the tactical and strategic genius he is usually taken for and, moreover, was exceedingly careless with the lives of his men. The yearning for “something else,” the strategic or tactical genius who might have been able to circumvent the Western Front’s defences was always a chimera. None of the generals, on either side, had a quick and easy solution. In the end, by applying the lessons learned throughout and the integration of new tactics and weapons like the tank, it should not be forgotten that the war was won, and it was won on the Western Front. And that within the three months of late summer and early autumn of 1918.

While Terraine mentions it briefly, the most important assessment of the implications of the war is outwith the scope of this book. Britain was unable to wield sea power effectively (with the launch of the first modern battleship, Dreadnought, and the subsequent naval arms race its dominance had in essence been lost.) The development of the mine and torpedo and the advent of the submarine made a surface fleet almost useless in any case. As a result Britain was sucked in by force of events to becoming a land power; from 1917 onwards – arguably from the Battle of the Somme a year earlier – the major contributor to the Allies’ fighting strength and the instrument of final victory.

Had the navy been able to ensure safe passage across the North Sea (rather than keep secure the shorter distance to France) an amphibious landing might have been attempted in Northern Belgium and the Western Front’s flank turned. Whether that would actually have led to an earlier German defeat is another matter.

In the gardens surrounding the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, inside a hedged enclosure just behind where I took the picture in the post linked to above there is a memorial to the Cameronians Regiment, also known as the Scottish Rifles, which has a long association with Glasgow.

The statuary is not, like some, a mawkish example of the form, representing as it does members of the regiment in action during the Great War. Indeed it is unusual in that it seems to depict one of the fallen – which such memorials tend to shy away from.

Front view

Side view

Wording on plinth