Banks of Sicily (The 51st Highland Division's Farewell to Sicily)

DESCRIPTION: The singer bids, "Fare thee well, ye banks of Sicily. Fare thee well, ye valley and shaw." Members of the 51st division prepare to leave Messina, and Sicily, and the girls they met as they occupied the island
AUTHOR: Words: Hamish Henderson / Music: "Farewell to the Creeks," by Pipe Major James Robertson
EARLIEST DATE: 1972 (Dallas-TheCruelWars-100SoldiersSongs); recorded by the Mitchell Trio in the 1960s
KEYWORDS: soldier music separation farewell
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
July 10, 1943 - Allies invasion of Sicily
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Dallas-TheCruelWars-100SoldiersSongs, pp. 106-108, "The 51st Highland Division's Farewell to Sicily" (1 text, 1 tune)
ADDITIONAL: (Hamish Henderson), _Freedom Come-All-Ye: An 80th Birthday Souvenir for Hamish Henderson_, Chapman Publishing, 1999, pp. 43-44, "The 51st Highland Division's Farewell to Sicily" (1 text)
Roud #10501
NOTES [2703 words]: Obviously not a folk song, but I've heard several pop folk recordings, no two alike in their texts -- and none of them matching Hamish Henderson's original. Dallas-TheCruelWars-100SoldiersSongs claims that it has entered British military tradition. The claim would be better for evidence, but all that variation in the recorded versions is perhaps enough reason to include it here. Plus the tune is excellent -- I've never heard anyone change that.
The 51st Highland Division, Hamish Henderson's unit, began its history in 1740 with the Highland Regiment (Grant, p. 8). When increased to divisional strength, it was originally known as the 1st Highland Territorial Division. When it was deployed to France in 1915, it became the 51st Highland Division (Delaforce, p. 6). The division fought well in World War I; five members earned Victoria Crosses (Delaforce, p. 9), and the Germans called them the "Damen aus Helle," or "Ladies from Hell," because they fought in kilts (Grant, p. 41. In World War II, they mostly fought in standard uniforms, but the name was still used at times). Like most World War I units, it was reduced to skeleton status after the First War, but rebuilt as World War II approached. Under Major General V. M. Fortune, it served in the Battle of France (Delaforce, p. 10) -- but was deployed in front of the Maginot Line rather than with the rest of the British forces (Grant, pp. 24-25). Hurrying toward Dunkirk as the Germans broke the French front (Grant, p. 26), it was effectively destroyed at Saint-Valéry-en-Caux northwest of Rouen (Delaforce, p. 19; there is actually an Avenue du 51 Highlands Division there now). A few men made it to Dunkirk, but the larger part of the division was captured.
Although the division had been so shattered that it could easily have been disbanded, the decision was made to rebuild it, transferring troops from its home equivalent, the Territorial 9th (Scottish) division and bringing in newly drafted units (Delaforce, pp. 21-22). The resulting division, which was really a new formation, was the one that became famous during the war.
The troops first went into battle in North Africa. Having made the long journey around Cape Horn to the Red Sea (Delaforce, pp. 28-31), they unloaded in Egypt and spent just long enough there to acclimate before being sent west (Delaforce, p. 38). Parts of the division were present near the field of the battle of Alam el Halfa, but they were not engaged (Carver, p. 76). So their first active service was at the Battle of El Alamein (Delaforce, p. 38), the climactic battle between Bernard Montgomery's British army and Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps. The division did well but took heavy casualties (if I read Delaforce, p. 58, correctly, their 2827 casualties was the most of any division at Alamein); even the division's commander, D. N. Wimberley, was injured when his vehicle went over a mine (Delaforce, p. 52).
The 51st was, along with the New Zealand division, the first to reach Tripoli near the end of the North Africa campaign. Their pipe and drum band played for the victory celebrations (Delaforce, p. 77). Indeed, Delaforce, p. 96, reports that they often played in battle -- causing complaints, because the pipes often got shot and had to be replaced! (One presumes the pipers also suffered, but this is not mentioned.) They then went on to fight in the campaign to take Tunisia. Many of the men apparently thought they would get a break to go home after that, but instead they started training in amphibious operations (Delaforce, p. 98).
A man in the division recorded, "on 5th July 1943 we marched down to Sousse docks and embarked. There were few regrets about leaving Africa" (Delaforce, pp. 100-101). Their next stop was Malta, but they weren't there long (only from July 6-9). When Montgomery was ordered to take charge of the British army in the invasion of Sicily, the 51st went with him.
The 51st at this time consisted of the 152nd Brigade (5th Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, 2nd and 5th Seaforth Highlanders), 153rd Brigade (5th Black Watch, 5th/7th Gordon Highlanders, 1st Gordon Highlanders), and 154th Brigade (1st and 7th Black Watch, 7th Argyll and Southern Highlanders), plus seven attached units (artillery, etc.) not from the Highlands (d'Este, p. 586).
The whole Sicily campaign -- the largest amphibious attack in history -- was planned in less than five months, which perhaps would have been enough time had the senior officers been involved in the planning, but all of them were involved in the North Africa fighting, meaning that all the initial staff work was done by junior, often inexperienced, officers, resulting in a plan that didn't really match the realities of the situation very well (d'Este, p. 74)
The British (and Canadians and other Commonwealth nations) sent two reinforced corps to the island (Delaforce, p. 101); there was also a smaller American army under George Patton. The 51st was was part of 30 Corps under Oliver Leese, the other division in the corps being the First Canadian. They were "to assault both sides of the southeastern tip of Sicily: the Pachino peninsula" (d'Este, p. 148). In other words, they were south of the 13 Corps, which attacked around Syracuse, and east of the Americans, who landed on the south shore of the island, around Gela. The goal of the British forces was to move north toward Messina; the Americans, to protect them from German forces in the west of the island. Beyond that, there was no general plan at all; General Harold Alexander, who was supposed to coordinate the movements of Patton and Montgomery, had not issued one (d'Este, p. 322). Even Montgomery said "Alexander's plan for Sicily was idiotic" (d'Este, p. 551), though others think he was simply keeping his options open to respond to events.
After the landing, supplies were so short that the Highlanders were even requisitioning perambulators to try to get more transport! (d'Este, p. 324). They suffered badly in the heat and from the lack of necessary food and other items. (Sicily was such a horrid place that, according to Holland, p. 493, more than 20,000 troops caught malaria -- roughly four times the number killed in combat!)
The British soon found themselves in a bitter struggle with the German and Italian forces, in which the division took many casualties (including even most of the battalion commanders) as they fought their way up the Catania plain along the island's east coast (Delaforce, pp. 101-110) -- a fight that took about three weeks (Botjer, p. 18), or more than half the length of the whole campaign; it was tough, deadly combat. According to d'Este, p. 396, "The battle for the plain of Catania was one of the bitterest fought by British troops during the war" -- in no small part due to bad command communications and failure to coordinate army, navy, and air forces.
The Highlanders weren't part of that (d'Este, p. 401); Montgomery sent them off to the left, to attack Paterno to the west and somewhat north of Catania (and south of Mount Etna, the height of which was funneling the battle into a series of bottlenecks). But this left them attacking effectively alone, with no support on either side, making their attack relatively ineffective (d'Este, p. 404).
The whole British army had taken about 9000 casualties in Sicily, the Americans less than 8000 (so Botjer, p. 25; d'Este, p. 597, gives higher losses -- 8781 for the Americans, 11843 for the British, plus some naval losses. Plus there were tens of thousands of cases of disease; d'Este, p. 598, says Eighth Army had about 10,000 cases of malaria, meaning the Highlanders probably suffered a couple of thousand cases). It appears the Highlanders had taken their share of casualties -- perhaps more than their share. The losses weren't terrible compared to the numbers engaged, but certainly the Allies had not put in a very good showing; d'Este, p. 551, says, "One historian has described Sicily as 'an Allied physical victory, a German moral victory', and undoubtedly this is how the campaign ought to be remembered."
The division also lost its popular commander, General Wimberly (1896-1983), after Sicily had been secured; he had been the commander for two years, and Montgomery considered him tired; he was moved into a staff post, never to serve as combat officer again; he retired in 1946 (d'Este, p. 570). Charles Bullen-Smith took over the division (Delaforce, pp. 115-117. On p. 118, he says that Bullen-Smith had limited combat experience and was not a Highlander). The loss of their commander was a true blow; Major J. D. McGregor of the Black Watch recorded, "No understandable reason was given.... The Jocks reacted with amazement that their 'Tartan Tam' was leaving: the man they knew, the man they trusted. The man who had made every single one of them believe he was a Highlander, whatever his birth certificate said to the contrary. When he came to say his farewells to the B[attalio]n on 20th August, tough battle veterans had real tears in their eyes."
D'este, p. 407n, gives a capsule biography of Douglas N. Wimberly (1886-1983), calling him a "somewhat eccentric Scot" and "Lanky and rather ungainly," but well-liked and known as "Tartan Tam." He had graduated from Sandhurst in 1915 and served in the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders in World War I, then in the Russian Civil War in 1919. He had joined the rebuild 51st division in North Africa. He worked hard to make sure the Highland Division was truly Scottish, having his soldiers wear kilts whenever possible and encouraging the use of pipe music. He also scattered unit logos around the countryside so freely that the joke was that "HD" ("Highland Division") really stood for "Highway Decorators." Five of his junior officers would eventually become division commanders in their own right, and one of his officers said that no one was better at bridging the gap between British regulars and the "Territorial" forces. D'Este concludes, "Undoubtedly his tendency to place his men and his division before his own career, and his somewhat abrasive outspokenness, resulted in denial of a knighthood after the war." Clearly his reassignment was a deep loss to the division.
"A week before departure [from Sicily], Major General Bullen-Smith and many members of HD [Highland Division] unveiled a Celtic Cross memorial in stone on the Gerbini battlefields [Gerbini is somewhat west of Catania, in an area where Montgomery's troops had the hardest fighting of the entire Sicilian campaign]. It commemorates the loss of 224 officers and other ranks killed in the Sicilian campaign" (Delaforce, p. 121; on p. 114, Delaforce says the division suffered 1312 casualties in the campaign, so presumably there were 1088 wounded and missing). Delaforce then quotes the chorus of this song.
The division had plenty of time to scout out the wine and women of Messina (the point in Sicily closest to the Italian mainland, and the final objective of the invasion of the island). Sicily wasn't really hostile -- few Italians had wanted to be involved in the war -- but someone had to run the place! The Highlanders were assigned to serve as the garrison of Messina, and they spent three months there, training, parading, and enjoying the local scene (Delaforce, p. 119). However, this also meant that they had to watch the troubles the island had after the invasion; food was so short that hundreds starved to death in Sicily in the winter of 1843-1944 (Botjer, p. 117).
A side effect of the invasion was the overthrow of Mussolini (Botjer, p. 24), who was forced out during the Sicilian campaign, but that didn't immediately take Italy out of the war. Many of the forces in Sicily would become involved in the soul-numbing Italian Campaign (for which see "The D-Day Dodgers"). The 51st was at least spared that; apart for a few hundred stragglers who were left behind and ended up in the invasion of Salerno (Botjer, p. 57), they were sent back to Britain to prepare for other work (Delaforce, pp. 120-121). They spent the next half a year leaning tactics for the Normandy invasion (Delaforce, p. 123). They were not part of the initial landings, but went in the invasion armada; they were supposed to arrive in the second wave, on the day after the landing (Delaforce, p. 125).
During the 1944 invasion, Montgomery became so dissatisfied with Bullen-Smith, and a decline in the performance of the members of the division, that he had Bullen-Smith fired (Delaforce, pp. 141-146), replaced by a former Highland Division brigadier, T. G. Rennie.
The decline in the unit's performance seems to have been real; d'EsteNormandy, pp. 271-272, thinks that the division (which was still largely comprised of the veterans of El Alamein and Sicily; few troops had been retired or recruited because Britain was running out of cannon fodder) was very battle-weary, full of "old soldiers," and hadn't been trained for the conditions of Normandy. Their corps commander, G. L. Verney, had an even worse opinoin: "the 7th Armored and 51st Highland were extremely 'swollen-headed.' They were a law unto themselves; they thought they need only obey those orders that suited them.... Both these divisions did badly from the moment they arrived in Normandy" (d'EsteNormandy, p. 273).
Despite that, at the end of August 1944, Montgomery send down instructions to let the Highland Division retake St. Valery, the place where the original 51st had been dispersed four years earlier. They entered the town around the beginning of September, to find many relics of the old division still in the fields and by the roads (Delaforce, pp. 161-162).
The division continued in Montgomery's army as the Allied forces moved toward Germany. During the Battle of the Bulge, although not directly attacked, the division was called upon to guard river crossings against potential German attack (Parker, p. 260), although the German forces never made it there. Afterward, it was involved in pushing back the Germans after the Ardennes offensive failed (Delaforce, pp. 194-201); many in the unit suffered frostbite and other problems in the severe cold. They lost their highly respected commander, Major General Rennie, to a mortar attack just a few weeks before the end of the war (Delaforce, p. 222; on p. 228, we learn that pipers from the division played "The Flowers of the Forest" at his memorial parade).
The division was fighting near Bremen when the war ended in Europe. Delaforce, p. 235, calculates that the division took 16,469 casualties, including 3084 killed, in the course of the war, not counting the men who were captured at Saint-Valéry. Since a division at various times in the war was supposed to number from about 14,000 to 18,000 men, that means it took total casualties greater than its initial strength. Grant, p. 8, says that the division took part in thirteen major battles during the war (not counting the campaign in France), and only two other divisions out of the roughly thirty the British fielded fought more. It was a hard war for the Highlanders!
Grant, pp. 82-95, has several dozen photos of the Highand Division in Sicilty, including one on p. 93 of a certain Lieutenant Henderson interrogating a German officer, Captain Gunter, who was captured (while not in uniform) trying to make his way through the Allied lines.
This was not the only poem Hamish Henderson wrote about the Highlanders; "Mak Siccar," a poem about El Alamein, was published in an anthology, "Elegies for the Dead" by John Lehman, in 1945; Grant, p. 43, reprints parts of it. But is essentially free verse; I can't imagine it being sung. "Ballad of the Simento" is about Sicily, and is more regular: "Armament, vehicles and bodies / make heavy cargo that is checked and away / to Sicily, to Sicily, over the dark moving waters." It is on pp. 10-13 of Henderson. But I don't believe it has been sung; it is said to have been recited as part of a television show. The Simeto is a river running west and south of Catania, the region where the British had their heaviest fighting shortly after their landing; the poem is a lament for the losses by Catania: "A bonnet on two sticks / is tomb for the Gael. / Callum Mor, mak / mane for Argyll." - RBW
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