Duncan Harley

A friend keeps a Saturday paper for me and in return I keep him copies of the Times Crossword. I think it is a good bargain. At least I hope so since I have never completed a sudoku much less a crossword in my life. Seemingly those Bletchley Park heroes were chosen from aficionados who could complete a Times puzzle in something less than three minutes. I am guessing that the war was won not just by troops on the ground but by folk in huts pinpointing targets and first-guessing enemy actions. My old mum would probably have agreed. As a WAAF radar operative in that Hitler war she scanned the skies for signs of enemy bombers arriving from Norway. In four years of service, she only saw the one and recalled reporting the sighting to the sergeant who, disgracefully, took his time over a mug of Bovril before calling in the local Hurricanes, thus allowing the insurgent time to get away back to Trondheim. She rarely spoke about her war service except to say that once she was charged wi...

During the early years of WW2, spies and saboteurs were put ashore all around the UK coastline, often by flying boat and sometimes from submarines . Usually they were quickly picked up by police suspicious of forged documents and in at least one case due to cycling along on the wrong side of the road. Spies making landfall on the Aberdeenshire coastline had a particularly difficult time of it since, due to the close-knit nature of the coastal communities, any stranger instantly came under special scrutiny. During April 1941, two armed men landed at Crovie pier from a rubber dinghy. Road signs in the North-east had been removed and the Emergency Coastal Defences were in place. General Ironside’s nearby Innes Links Coastal Gun Battery was yet to fire a shot in anger, but the general mood was fear of invasion from German held Norway and deep distrust of German sounding foreigners. It was just before 6 a.m. on April 8th, and three hours earlier the two men had been dropped off a ...