The letter is written in pencil from a dugout, somewhere on a Normandy beachhead. It is dated June 13, 1944, and it is a love letter to his wife from my father-in-law, Captain Michael Lyle, who has just landed with the 7th battalion of the Black Watch.
“I am sitting in a hole in the ground, writing this letter to you,” he writes, “only this time it is a much smaller hole, and not nearly so comfortable as the one I was in yesterday. I am sharing it with Sam Small, who is in very good form …”
Two days later, Lyle will learn that his brother Robin, of the Scottish Horse, has been killed just a few miles away. A month later, he himself will be lying wounded on Juno Beach, fighting for his life.
It is quite hard, impossible even, for those of us who have never experienced war, to understand the resilience of those who fought for us in the aftermath of D-Day, and the horror to which they were exposed. Even harder to imagine that one day another generation of Scots may have to go through it once again.
That, however, is the reality the defence secretary wants us to confront. John Healey might be accused of hyperbole on the eve of a spending review, but it is hard to argue with the facts he puts before us.
“The threats we face are now more serious and less predictable than at any time since the end of the Cold War,” he warns. “We face war in Europe, growing Russian aggression, new nuclear risks and daily cyberattacks at home … we are in a new era of threat, which demands a new era for UK defence.” Or as Mark Rutte, secretary-general of Nato, put it on Monday: “To preserve peace we must prepare for war.”
At the same time, the review carried out by Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, the former secretary-general of Nato, concludes the UK’s armed forces are “not currently equipped” to fight opponents like Russia or China. We are short of manpower, we have inadequate stockpiles of weapons, and morale is “crumbling”. Robertson’s warning comes as the definition of what constitutes warfare today is changing at a speed which we are only beginning to grasp.
You only have to look east to see what is happening on Ukraine’s front line to realise how rapidly the skills, equipment and tactics deployed by a modern army are evolving by the day, sometimes by the hour. Ukraine’s astonishing drone attack on Russian bombers has changed the whole perception of how long-range warfare is conducted.
Some things do not change, however, and that is the reliance on manpower — on battle-trained soldiers to hold off the next wave of attacks, the next attempt to advance just a few miles across a front line that has barely moved in the last two years. There are times when reports from the Ukraine defence positions in the Donbas, around towns like Pokrovsk and Chasiv Yar — names that are becoming as familiar as Ypres or the Somme — are reminiscent more of the First than the Second World War; so too are the horrendous casualties on both sides.
The UK is short of this manpower, and it is also short of munitions — we do not need Healey to remind us of that — which makes the Scottish government’s attitude towards recruiting and re-arming, not just naive, but incomprehensible. On the first there is silence, on the second, obduracy: even as Healey was announcing defence spending in Scotland, which promises a major boost to investment and jobs, Scottish ministers were repeating their opposition to the principle of funding munitions — that is to say, the arms and ammunition soldiers need to fight wars.
Rolls-Royce wants to build a specialist welding skills centre in Glasgow, but has been told it is not eligible for funding from Scottish Enterprise because, as the cabinet minister Mairi Gougeon explains, the Scottish government has a well-established and “principled” policy of not providing public funding for ammunition. There is, she says, “a longstanding policy position that … we do not provide or support the use of public funding for the manufacture of munitions”. To which, she added: “I think the key difference between ourselves and the UK government is that, when we have principles, we stick to them.”
That raises the question of what constitutes a principle for a government whose first priority should be the security of its citizens. To accept the massive MoD investment in ship-building on the Clyde, the £350 million redevelopment of RAF Lossiemouth, the 50-odd military installations across Scotland that support some 13,000 jobs, while at the same time opposing the manufacture of munitions — that is to say, the missiles and the bullets that defend the lives of fighting men — is not a principle, it is hypocrisy. Or, as Healey more politely describes it, “student politics”.
Across Europe, nations this government professes to admire — Sweden and Finland among them — have recognised the shift in defence priorities that follow from Russian aggression in the east and America’s retreat from its commitments to Nato. Both countries have been willing to revise their anti-nuclear stance; Sweden is to lead a new Nato defence base to be established in northern Finland, for instance. They are on what could become a front line in the face of Russian aggression. The facts have changed, so too have their defence priorities. Not so in Scotland, it seems.
I have a question to put to John Swinney, who has praised Ukraine’s fighting abilities. Would you withhold ammunition from a Ukrainian soldier if his life depended on it? If not, why would you oppose the manufacture of munitions for our own troops? I have little doubt what the answer would have been from the men of the Black Watch or the Scottish Horse as they waded onto the beaches of Normandy.
