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THE LOWLANDER SCO 3 - GER 0
208 Plays1 year ago
Snow everywhere - this is the week we take out a Tiger with a PIAT in Waldfeucht. Plus, there's a look at he Ledo Road; Jan Smuts; and the artistic talents of the Jocks. Andy and Merryn dig in to the Lowlander...
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Transcript
The 52nd Lowlander Division in WWII
00:00:05
Speaker
From 1944 to 1945, the 52nd Lowlander Division is fighting its way across Northwest Europe. The writing is on the wall, but it's also on the page. The Army Education Branch sends a newsletter out to thousands of men, all pulling together, pushing the enemy back. This newsletter is called The Lowlander.
Analyzing The Lowlander Newsletter
00:00:42
Speaker
Hello Andy. Hello Mary. Hello hello. We are back again and this week we're looking at editions of The Lowlander that were sent out to the men between the 22nd and the 28th of January 1945. That's right, we're looking at the newsletter in detail, picking it to pieces and having a little think about what articles are covering. Be that updates from the front or jottings from home, well whatever really. But what's going on this week Mary?
00:01:06
Speaker
This week, January 1945, we have, what's going on?
Key Military Operations and Events
00:01:10
Speaker
We've got four squadrons of Spitfires destroyed a factory in Ablassadam, which was manufacturing liquid oxygen for German rockets. The West Africa 82nd Division occupied Myohang, Burma, and technically the Battle of the Bulge ended in Allied victory. Oh, and the other thing that happened this week was the concentration camp at Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet forces.
00:01:33
Speaker
But shall we find out first what the jocks are up to, please? Tell us where the men of the 52nd Lowland Division are and what's going on. Well, I always want to tell you what the 52nd Lowland Division doing, so yes, definitely. Well, we talked about last week was the start of Operation Black Hawk, which is the capture of the Royal Triangle, 12 Corps with 52nd Lowland, 7th Armoured Division, 43rd Wessex Division and 8th Armoured Brigade.
00:01:58
Speaker
And that's well underway by now. In fact, this week it'll actually come to an end and it'll finish on the 25th of January after the clearance of Heinzberg, which is the last big town in the Roar Triangle that sits right on the River Roar and on the western edge of the Siegfried Line.
00:02:13
Speaker
So by the end of the week the jocks have dug in, they're taking rest and recuperation, they're taking stock of the massive battle that's just carried on. A successful battle at that, I might add, it was completely successful well within the timescales. So we find them ready to go on to the next stage of the war. Brilliant, well let's get going then, see what they're reading.
Field Updates and Challenges
00:02:40
Speaker
22nd January 1945 A good day in the West
00:02:46
Speaker
We have now carved well over 30 square miles of enemy salient between the mass and the roar. Yesterday, several more German villages fell to our vans towards Heinsberg, less than four miles away. Our progress and cleaning up of isolated pockets is methodical and unrelenting. Despite some enemy attempts to interfere with tanks, the prisoners are a mixed bag. A batch of very old and very young was dismissed by one officer with a remark, not one of them would last five minutes at Glasgow Cross.
00:03:14
Speaker
I take it Glasgow Cross is a bit rough is it? Well on a Saturday night yeah yeah I mean I don't know what it's like nowadays but certainly back in the day it was a bit wild. It's actually the sort of junction between the east end of Glasgow and the centre of Glasgow so I think that's where that comes from. Tell me about Heinsberg then.
00:03:31
Speaker
Well, Heinzberg is the main city in the Roar Triangle, so Operation Black Hawk, which we've been talking about for the last couple of weeks, which this news report is about, is the clearing of the Roar Triangle. And Heinzberg is that main city, that main town. It's a communication centre for the Germans. It's got roads, railways, etc. into that. It's at the eastern edge of the Roar Triangle, so it's kind of the last place you would capture.
00:03:54
Speaker
And also, it's on the west bank of the river Roar and the western edge of the Sea Creed line, which is the huge defensive line that runs through up and down the length of Germany. So it's a very serious thing, and once you've captured that, pretty much the Roar Triangle is actually cleared. Okay, so are they going to get a breather after this? Because they've had a week hard at it, haven't they?
00:04:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean the division has been operating for about a week, the 7th Armoured Division and the 43rd Wessex as well, but the main fighting after the initial couple of days is actually the 52nd. And the 155 Infantry Brigade who we talked about last week, they are the ones that actually capture Heinsberg, they capture it on the 24th into the 25th of January, so some stiff fighting, but it's cleared. And then
00:04:38
Speaker
They basically spread out right across over the Roar Triangle to sort of secure the ground but it is very much that set the main battle is over and you can now rest. There are a few other clearance operations going on but actually the main fighting and really the division is now going to go into a kind of rest and recuperation holding a line type job for the next few weeks until the next big operation which comes along in the start of February which is Operation Veritable which is clearing the Vineland.
Winter Warfare in Heinzberg
00:05:03
Speaker
And it's absolutely hooling with cold at the minute. It's snowing, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, at some point the temperatures, some people say the temperatures get down to minus 20 and definitely minus 10 I've seen reports of. And of course, wind chill is very cold. If you see any pictures of Heinsberg in the Second World War, it's snow everywhere and it's definitely unrelenting weather.
00:05:29
Speaker
24th January 1945.
Strategic Developments and Supply Lines
00:05:32
Speaker
Lado Road Clear. Convoys are today rumbling up the new Burma Road with war equipment for the hard-pressed armies of China. Yesterday, Admiral Mount Battle was able to inform Mr Churchill and President Roosevelt that he'd completed, with the help of General Sultan's Chinese troops, the first task set him at Quebec, the opening of the land route to Chongqing.
00:05:56
Speaker
On three sides, west, north and northeast, we've gained ground towards Mandalay. The 15th Indian Corps has enlarged its two beachheads on the Burma coast, at Hunters Bay near Akyab and on Ramri, Tokyo. Good imitators that they are, they have now borrowed the German technique of minimising defeat by talking of our vast numerical superiority in Burma. Now, let's talk about the Lido Road. What do you know about the Lido Road?
00:06:22
Speaker
Well, there's quite a lot of information in that tiny little news report. But yeah, the leader road, so that's one of the main objectives of the war in North India and Burma. It's so that they can actually get a physical road, a physical land bridge to support the Chinese troops that are fighting the Japanese in China under a friend of the show, Kang Chang-shek.
00:06:43
Speaker
I think it was his wife who was friend of the show but yeah because at the minute or up until this point in fact it's still carried on actually and all the the transportation of supplies equipment material men etc was actually being flown over what they call the hump which is the Himalayas by US troop carrier or US carrier command so basically fire them over the cotas and supply planes and things like that
00:07:06
Speaker
huge effort, very dangerous, very costly and actually now that we've opened up the Lado Road you can actually support them and General Stilwell, the American General, General Vinegar Joe as he's known, actually supply them in the ground, in the field by using road transport and it's quite a feat of engineering. I mean really, I mean in the last month of the war, July 1945, skipping ahead a little bit,
00:07:29
Speaker
71,000 tons of supplies were flown over the hunt compared to 6,000 using the ladle road. So it's adding a little bit more, but they're still flying the hump, but they're still being able to get stuff across that road. Yeah, it was something like 15,000 American soldiers were tasked to build it. I think there was about another 30,000 local workers. But loads and loads of men died. It was terrible conditions, thick, inaccessible jungle, malaria, dysentery.
00:07:59
Speaker
But the trouble was that although they'd worked out where they wanted to build it, they knew very little about the topography and the soils and the behavior of river courses before construction started. So they were finding this out as they went, which it was just a nut of a nightmare all the way through. I know the first convoy took something like about 110, 112 vehicles up the road. And I think it took three weeks from start to finish to travel 1,700 kilometers.
00:08:25
Speaker
It was still a bit of a struggle to get from one end of the road to the other. Churchill called it an immense laborious task, unlikely to be finished until a need for it has passed. That's a metaphor for life, isn't it? Indeed. 26th January 1945.
Anti-Tank Platoon's Success
00:08:49
Speaker
Six Pounders can get Tigers.
00:08:53
Speaker
In a field on the outskirts of Walwaucht can be seen the wrecks of two German Tigers. They are a testimony to the gallantry and good shooting of an anti-tank platoon of the Cosbys. Four nights ago the battalion took the village, they expected a counter-attack and sure enough at first light all health let loose around them.
00:09:11
Speaker
With a hail of spand out and mortar fire bursting around him, the anti-tank gun crews saw a line of tanks, led by the Tigers, breaking through the morning mist. They got the first tank squarely in the sights. The next thing the Bosch knew was when there was a big muckle hole, as one sergeant expressed it, in the side of his vehicle. Not content with one, the gunners plugged away and got the second. Their action, though not achieved without casualties, took the sting out of the determined attack.
00:09:38
Speaker
But for them was one comment, we may all be in the stalag now. Cool. Yeah. Do we know what we're talking about here, Mary?
00:09:45
Speaker
Oh, we certainly do. We certainly do. Walk through Val de Waite a few times. Well, I'm going to flag something up straight away. It says an anti-tank platoon of the Cosby's. Now, there is no crime greater to the King's Own Scottish Borders than calling them Cosby's. It's KOSB or the King's Own Scottish Borders. There is no alternative. I should imagine that raised a few
00:10:08
Speaker
A few, a few angry letters, knowing the reading of the Lowlander. Yeah, so I'll just fill in the blanks for everybody. So Valde Voigt is a small German town and it's on the German-Dutch border. And it was one of the tasks for 5th Battalion, the King's own Scottish borders, to take
00:10:27
Speaker
on the night of the 21st of January. And it was a night attack. They didn't expect the town to be occupied, so they actually moved into the town fairly quickly, fairly easily, and they took up their positions. And over the night, they secured those positions and then by first light, they expected to have their anti-tank gun platoon on the northern edge of the village overlooking the fields where they thought maybe the Germans might attack.
00:10:51
Speaker
And lo and behold, that's exactly what happened. And as they said, Tiger tanks, and they were Tiger tanks, not mistaken for Mark IVs or anything like that, they actually broke out of the mist about a range between about 70 and 100 yards.
00:11:05
Speaker
Now, the reason why the anti-tank guns managed to get them is because just about 100-odd metres to the left of the anti-tank guns was a firefly, a Sherman firefly tank of the 13-18 Huzars, and it seems that the Germans' attention was taken by that. So while they were banging away at the firefly,
00:11:24
Speaker
It gave Hunter, and Captain Hunter is the platoon commander they're talking about, and his sergeant timed to line them up and actually take on the Tigers. And of course at 100 yards, even a six pounder, which is actually not a bad anti-tank gun, managed to knock them out.
00:11:39
Speaker
Yeah and actually there's some great film footage and I think we'll pop some of the film footage on the Twitter feed of some jocks from what's probably the fourth battalion of Kingsland Scottish Borders who reinforced the fifth later on that day actually having a good look around the tank and putting their fingers in the hole where the round went through. You can actually see that on the film. Brilliant and they go on don't they into the town?
00:12:04
Speaker
Yeah, so, well, the tanks sort of split into three parts, and I won't get too technical, but a few of the Tiger tanks go to the northern, the northern sort of flank, which is a town of Eklerbosch, which is just about a mile from Wald Voigt. A few of the tanks come into that northern part of Wald Voigt, which is what we've just described there.
00:12:24
Speaker
and about two, maybe more than two, maybe three Tiger tanks infiltrated into the centre of the village and they started wreaking havoc on the 5th Battalion. And in fact, they cut the 5th Battalion off. And for those of you who have read Withage Ox by Peter White, which we've mentioned before, these are the tanks that he takes on when he drives up in his kangaroo with his platoon to counter-attack.
00:12:47
Speaker
And in fact, his team and his platoon, Peter's platoon, actually take on one of these Tigers and knock it out. They get a functional kill on it. They don't kill the tank outright.
00:12:59
Speaker
but they kill it enough to make it drive back and clear off out of the village. You can tell I'm quite interested in this subject, can't you? Very much so indeed. It feels like you've put your comfy slippers on, it really does. I have, yeah. Of course, it's not the first time I've mentioned Wald Voigt in my life, it's one of the things. I think one note we should just bring before we finish this off.
00:13:20
Speaker
somebody in the lowland art I suspect has never seen a tiger tank because the tank drawing that they've put on there I thought it was a flying saucer to begin with we'll stick that on twitter as well yeah
00:13:42
Speaker
Oh Monsieur, it is so hard, so hard! I am trying, I am trying! No seriously, it is so hard to read these propaganda leaflets in the blackout, and yet the message is so clear! A battlefield tour, October 2024. Discover what happened after Arnhem, clearing the Rhineland.
00:14:06
Speaker
following the 52nd lowland division and walking with the jocks.co.uk Is that a baguette in your pocket? Well put it away! 27th January 1945
00:14:26
Speaker
Sitard triangle almost cleared. The enemy pocket on the west bank of the Ruhr River has now almost been eliminated. Yesterday morning the American 9th Army on the right of the recent British push were due to join in the attack but their patrols found the enemy defenses deserted and they have therefore been able to advance without opposition. On the British part of the front
00:14:51
Speaker
Our patrols have reached the Ruhr river beyond Heinsberg and more progress has been made northwards towards Ruhrmond. A number of small villages have been taken and the number of prisoners captured since this operation began is now almost two and a half thousand. Further to the south, the Ardennes Salient now no longer exists.
00:15:09
Speaker
The Americans are now actually at some points beyond the places from which von Rundstedt began his attack. Street fighting is reported in Wasserbilich at the junction of the rivers Mersel and Sauer, and the German town of Trier is under shellfire. The tactical air forces by day and mosquitoes by night destroyed 1,250 vehicles.
00:15:30
Speaker
In Alsace, the initial gains of the enemy north of Strasbourg have now been almost offset by Allied counterattacks, which have wiped out two of the four bridgeheads over the Moda River on either side of Hagenau. South of Strasbourg, American and French troops have made more slight progress on an eight-mile front to the north of Colmar. There's a lot of movement there. It's all go, isn't it? It's all go.
00:15:53
Speaker
I mean basically this is just clear, this is the start of the whole clearance operation to clear basically the west bank of the Rhine and the Roar to get to the point where they can launch a proper cross-rhine attack which will actually happen in the end of March 1945.
00:16:11
Speaker
But I think the listeners might know that we're quite interested in the Roar Triangle, Heinzberg, Sittard, and everything. But it's good to see there's a big, big push. And of course, he mentions the Americans, and we've mentioned the Americans a couple of times, a few times, in the Lowlander.
00:16:29
Speaker
about a couple of weeks after that, they actually move up and they take over the whole of the Royal Triangle area as the British move out, and they actually end up setting up shop in Valfeucht. And that's it. So they're now in charge of that area because the British are moving north, getting ready for Operation Veritable.
00:16:51
Speaker
26th January 1945, Upper Silesia isolated. With two new victories in Upper Silesia, the first Ukrainian army has virtually severed the mines and iron foundries there from the rest of Germany. Yesterday's greatest success was the storming of Gleiwitz.
00:17:10
Speaker
With over 100,000 inhabitants and oil refineries, which last year supplied the Wehrmacht with over a million tonnes of fuel, it's the largest centre on German soil yet to fall to the Russians. 30 miles to the south-east, Krzysznow, in the heart of the Polish Silesian coal field, has also been seized. Well, I mean it's interesting that
00:17:32
Speaker
the modern Russian army, we won't go too much into detail, doesn't actually recognise Ukrainians, but here as part of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian army has severed the mines and iron foundries. So it's interesting there's a little bit of these sort of pick and choose when Ukrainian identity is a thing or not. I'm sorry, I'm not even listening, I'm distracted by Stalin.
00:17:55
Speaker
I mean, let's be honest, this is why we're here. We're going to go into lots of details about the iron ore foundries in Upper Silesia. We've got a latest addition to our pantheon of terrible drawings. However, like all of the other terrible drawings we've had in the past, you can spot who it is straight away, can't you?
00:18:15
Speaker
You can indeed. He's got this sort of tooth comb moustache and a pipe and this weird wacky hair. It's definitely Stalin. Oh yeah, it's definitely Stalin. And I think suggests maybe they've given him slightly asiatic looks as they would have called it in them days to try and express that fact. So it's a very interesting, very interesting picture. We'll pop that up. Definitely pop up on Twitter. And in fact, maybe we'll even get people to vote on the best picture at the end of the lowland. Maybe that's a good idea.
00:18:43
Speaker
It's not very flattering. No. 27th January 1945.
Post-War Development Setbacks
00:18:53
Speaker
The government decided that construction of a road bridge across the fourth cannot be given a high priority after the war, but will be kept under review. As Scott Shelby described his decision as a real blow to the development of South East Scotland. Now, what do you know about this?
00:19:08
Speaker
Well, I get my fourth road bridges muddled up with the fourth rail bridge. I only know that one because it's red and you paint at one end, you get to the end and you go back again.
00:19:19
Speaker
Yeah, so they found the plans for this bridge not long ago. It was discovered by engineers working on the design for a new visitor center. There aren't any pictures online, but there is a good description and it was a triple arched structure that bore a resemblance to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It was almost three times bigger and it had 110 meter arches and 70 meter masonry towers. And the idea was that, I mean, it was attributed to the engineers department in Edinburgh.
00:19:48
Speaker
The idea was that it was planned as a replacement for the bridge if it was destroyed by long range German V2 rockets, but it was never built. Oh, OK. So it was just a bit of a pipe dream, maybe. It was a bit of a pipe dream. It was put in the bottom drawer and it was discovered, rediscovered about 10 years ago. Oh, I never.
00:20:11
Speaker
28th January 1945.
Allied Progress in the Far East
00:20:14
Speaker
Far East. The 15th Indian Corps is following the American example by leapfrogging down the Arakan coast.
00:20:22
Speaker
Its latest landing, reported yesterday, is on Chiduba, an island five miles south of Ramri. Bopping up continues on the approaches to Mandalay, but once again our Irrawaddy bridgehead has run into stiff opposition. Stiffening resistance is reported from Luzon against American thrusts into the mountains.
00:20:42
Speaker
Clark Airfield has been shelled by the Japanese. Super forts from India have raided bases in Indochina while others from the Marianas attack the main Japanese island of Honshu. Tokyo was among the targets. Now I know very little about the Far East, I'll put my hands up to this one.
00:21:00
Speaker
Well, in a couple of paragraphs, they've covered about 3,000 miles. I mean, it's just astonishing the amount of information in there. The British part they were talking about is the Southern Arakan campaign, which is this leapfrogging amphibious campaign all the way down, basically Burma. So while they're fighting in the north of Burma, from India after Impal and Gahima, then down into attacking places like Mandalay, et cetera,
00:21:26
Speaker
There's also this concurrent activity going on in the south where there's these amphibious sort of, they're actually sort of all completely created out there by Field Marshal Slim, the commander of 14th Army. He sets these small amphibious forces up and they fight these little battles all the way down, putting more and more pressure on the Japanese to hopefully cut off Rangoon, which is the capital of Burma, or Myanmar as it is now.
00:21:48
Speaker
Now, early on in January, there's a really big battle, which they don't mention, called Battle of Hill 170. And that is a huge battle. Yeah, and basically the Third Commando Brigade landed and basically set themselves up on Hill 170 and cut off the Japanese 54th Division. And for 36 hours, they basically fought them off and completely defeated them. And then there's the assault on Ramri Island again. It's one of those leapfrogging ones. And after that, we've then got the
00:22:15
Speaker
the attack on Chiduga Island. And they would construct airfields, so it's very similar to what the Americans are doing in the Pacific campaign, construct airfields which could then further reach in for their bombers, which of course we mentioned later on in the article you just read there.
00:22:30
Speaker
So, yeah, I was going to say this is what they were doing in 43, wasn't it, in the South Pacific? Yeah, still doing it at the same time. New Guinea and Bougainville and just working their way up. So what they do is they pick a small island that wasn't occupied. They leapfrog to that, set themselves up, make sure that that was a cut in the supply lines for the Japanese in the South Pacific. And then from there, they then work on to the next one, wouldn't they? Although the problem is quite often they find they were occupied. Well, yeah.
00:23:18
Speaker
28th January 1945 What will the Fรผhrer do now?
Red Army's Advance on Berlin
00:23:24
Speaker
If there's any truth in Hitler's communiques, Berlin faces her greatest peril.
00:23:31
Speaker
Yesterday, the ruined city, crowded with over a million refugees, heard from the German High Command that the Red Army was only a hundred miles away. In the words of the communique, Soviet spearheads had been halted on the river Obra, which for part of its cause marks the frontier between Poland and the German province of Brandenburg.
00:23:50
Speaker
No confirmation of this new onrush has come from Moscow, but it's known that Zhukov's troops are rapidly spreading over the last Polish territory still in German hands. They're outflanking the bastion of Poznan both to the north and south, and yesterday had definitely reached points only 30 miles from the Polish-German frontier. But even if the enemy is admitting a fictitious retreat in the hope that the Russians will yet give him time to claim a propaganda victory, there is no doubt about his failure on three other sectors of the huge front.
00:24:20
Speaker
Now this article goes on for ages and I'm going to inject you there. We need to talk about the question mark.
00:24:28
Speaker
at the question mark at the top of the page. So this is the front sheet of the Lowlander and usually we've got two columns of information and then it goes on to the back page when you've got another two columns of information. But today's article pretty much takes up the whole page top to bottom. But the words on the page are rather overshadowed by this tiny little picture at the top, which is a question mark in which there is very definitely a cartoon of Hare Hitler. And how can you tell it's Adolf Hitler?
00:24:56
Speaker
Well, it's the little toothbrush moustache, the two pinpoint eyes and the swoosh of hair down to the right hand side. Definitely not Charlie Chaplin. So do you know the book I mean if I say that it's also got a swoosh of hair on the right hand side? I know that very well. It's Luke Who's Back.
00:25:13
Speaker
Yeah, that's the one. There is no doubt about the fact that this tiny, tiny, tiny little cartoon is Mr Hitler, unfortunately. We should point out that that book, Don't Look Back, is a novel. It's a fiction comedy, sort of horror historical fiction, where Adolf Hitler all of a sudden wakes up in modern day Berlin and can't understand why people aren't saluting him.
00:25:36
Speaker
Back to the plot though, I mean, this whole article goes on to, what is the fear going to do now? And I suppose for the guys who are reading this, it must be on their minds of what is going to happen. If they are advancing with some degree of success now, the writing's on the wall, at what point is somebody somewhere going to say, it's all over?
00:25:55
Speaker
Well, the interesting thing is, I mean, the striking thing there is that it's about 100 miles from Berlin. And that's not very far at all. And of course, I think the guys would have been quite motivated by that because if you're Tommy McCatkins and you've just been fighting in the Royal Triangle, you're quite happy for the Soviet Union to do all the fighting for you.
00:26:15
Speaker
Yeah. You're cheering them on. But I think the interesting thing is, of course, Berlin doesn't really fall until the last few days, basically, of the war in Europe. So even though it's only 100 miles, there's still a hell of a lot of fighting to go and a hell of a lot of killing and dying and destruction. And one thing we've noticed in the Lowlander is sometimes you're getting different people writing this. It's not the same person every week. And whoever's writing this, they've obviously gone off in a little bit of a tangent.
00:26:45
Speaker
They've gone off the reservation and they're just sort of sitting there, maybe pontificating a little bit. They're having a little bit of a think about where the war is going and they've just put it down on paper. It has a different feel from a lot of the other Lowlander articles which are normally shorter, a bit punchier. Yes, it feels different.
00:27:03
Speaker
even the layout's different this week. I mean we've been struggling, I should say actually that this week we've got, we've got Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We're actually missing two days worth of the loan lender but we've been struggling to find articles that actually were interesting and I think part of that is down to the fact that it's being written by somebody else and that person has obviously gone off on one and is just wondering about what's going on in the world
00:27:30
Speaker
Just as you do. I mean, it's not as though anything else was going on. And finally, we go to this week's Thought for the Day on the 28th of January 1945.
Optimism in Adversity
00:27:45
Speaker
I have passed through pretty rough passages, I have sampled the world in human nature at many points, but my conviction has only deepened that there is nothing in the nature of things which is alien to what is best in us. J.C. Smuts.
00:27:59
Speaker
Mr Smuts. He's so far from Guinea. Yes, he is. He is. And Smuts is fascinating. You have to leave aside his absolutely abhorrent views on segregation of race. You know who Smuts was, don't you?
00:28:12
Speaker
He's in charge of South Africa, isn't he? Well, he was the second most powerful man in South Africa after Berta. Oh, yes. And I've been looking at the German South West African campaign recently, because that's where Peter White's father fought as part of the South African Engineers. So did you know Smuts interrogated Churchill in the Boer War?
00:28:31
Speaker
I actually did know that. I had heard of that before, yes, and that's why his name rung a bell. But I don't heard of them and other stuff, but I didn't really know much about them. They became lifelong friends. Smuts... As you do? Yeah, as you do. He used to say, Smuts and I are like two old lovebirds, molting together on a perch, but still able to peck, which I think is rather lovely. And of course, he made Smuts a field marshal in 1941. But, but did you know that John Colville, Sir John Colville, Churchill's private secretary,
00:29:01
Speaker
put forward a plan to make smuts our Prime Minister if Churchill was the incapacitated. No, I did not know that. Yeah, I mean, that's quite a leap from from torturing him. Sorry, interrogating him to become, to replace him as the Prime Minister. Now, I have to say, Erin, can you just explain to me exactly what he's saying here?
00:29:21
Speaker
OK, well, so so you have to understand that this came from a speech he made when he became the rector at St Andrews. OK, the editor has missed an absolute doozy here. I don't know where he's got the quote from. I mean, do you know about rectoring at a university? Don't you sort of take on this? Yes, yes. OK, so other rectors up there who we got, Andrew Carnegie, Rudyard Kipling, J.M. Barry, John Cleese, Timbukh Taylor. He was also a rector of St Andrews.
00:29:51
Speaker
But Smuts, when he made his speech up there, let me just read the story that he told when he was making his rectorial debut. He said, I used to spend time with one of my father's old shepherds, and at the time the First Boer War was going on, and I remember asking him who he thought would win. From all of his great military knowledge, the shepherd had no doubt the British would win, so I asked him whether he thought the English were the greatest nation in the world, and he replied, no,
00:30:16
Speaker
there was one nation still greater who lived in the furthest land in the world and they were the greatest of all nations and even the British were very much afraid of them and they were called the Scots. Now the editor missed that and he did this passage that we've got on the Lowlander instead which doesn't make sense until you add the tale of Smuts' paragraph onto it.
00:30:39
Speaker
If I read it like this, it makes much more sense. I have passed through pretty rough passages. I have sampled the world and human nature at many points. And I've learned that it takes all sorts to make a world. But through it all, my conviction has only deepened that there's nothing in the nature of things which is alien to what is best in us.
00:30:59
Speaker
This is my ultimate credo, and it's not founded on hearsay, but on my first-hand experience in that cross-section of the world through which I have lived, that I should remain at heart an optimist." So what he's saying is there's nothing that's so bad that you can't look on the bright side. It doesn't matter how bad it gets. There you go. Well, that's a good thought for the day. It's not bad, is it? I suspect it might have been an English person writing this, and that's why they can't
00:31:25
Speaker
I have to say I'm very disappointed because you picked out thought for the day this week and you missed a friend of the show, the Lord protect himself, Oliver Cromwell. We weren't doing too bad. I think we were quite short on good articles this week, but we were quite flush with thoughts for the day. Who knows? Maybe Oliver Cromwell will pop up again somewhere. Maybe indeed. All right. With that in mind, shall we call it a short one? I think we should call it a short one and move on, yeah.
00:31:52
Speaker
All right. OK, I'll catch you next time. All right. Bye bye. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Lowlander. The Lowlander was written, produced and presented by Andy Anderson and Meryn Walters. This was a hellish good production.
00:32:38
Speaker
And now we go to the classified football results for the week commencing the 22nd of January 1945. English League Cup North Barnsley 2 Bradford City 1 Birmingham 0 Aston Villa 1 Blackpool 3 Blackburn 1
00:32:58
Speaker
Bradford 2, Hull City 1. Barnley 3, Acreinton 0. Murray 4, Huddersfield 3. Coventry 0, Walsall 2. Doncaster 5, Grimsby 1. Everton 9, Stockport 2. Leeds 4, York 3. Leicester 2, Chesterfield 2. Notts County 2, Derby 4.
00:33:25
Speaker
Alderham 3, Manchester City 4 Preston 1, Rochdale 1 Rotherham 1, Sheffield Wednesday 1 Sheffield United 10, Lincoln 2 Southport 3, Bolton 4 English League South Arsenal 8, Fulham 3 Charlton 3, Southampton 5
00:33:54
Speaker
Chelsea 1 Tottenham 2 Crystal Palace 4 Reading 1 Queensborough Rangers 3 Claptonores 3 Scottish League South Albion Nell Rangers 4 Celtic 2 Sipmaren 1 Scottish League North East Rangers 1 Aberdeen 2
00:34:37
Speaker
They went in there and they just saw the bloody Germans off. They were hellish goods.