William Douglas-Home - Military Service

Military Service

Despite his opposition to the policy of requiring the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany he was conscripted into the Army in July 1940 and joined the Buffs (Royal East Kent Regiment). He went to 161 Officer Cadet Training Unit (161 OCTU) in the buildings of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst where one of his colleagues was David Fraser. At Sandhurst, he was critical of the war, which he said had been unnecessary. Douglas Home was commissioned in The Buffs in March 1941. While an officer he stood in the three parliamentary by-elections.

In 1944 Douglas Home was an officer in the 141st Regiment, Royal Armoured Corps (7th Battalion, Royal East Kent Regiment "The Buffs") in the Normandy campaign. This was the first regiment to be equipped with the Churchill Crocodile flame-thrower tank.

As part of the policy of unconditional surrender being implemented by the Allies in 1944, the 1st Canadian Army accompanied by the 1st British Corps was detailed to mop up German forces which had been cut off and trapped in various seaside ports in Normandy and Pas de Calais as a result of the Allied advances. Following the reduction of Caen, the Allies in the first week of September 1944 turned their attention to the port of Le Havre, where the city was being defended by SS Colonel Wildermuth, who had secured the town with his garrison principally dug in in the hill overlooking the city. In parallel with the Allied policy of unconditional surrender, SS Colonel Wildermuth had been ordered by Hitler to defend Fortress Le Havre to the last man, and not to surrender.

When the Allied forces invested the city in advance of the planned aerial bombardment and subsequent assault, Col. Wildermuth asked the British commander if the French civilians could be evacuated from the city, but that request was refused. The British commander would only agree to have civilians allocated to earmarked parts of the city. The laws of warfare on land relating to sieges dated back to the 17th Century, and after an unsuccessful international attempt in 1907 to update the rules relating to the siege of cities and towns, the rules of siege at the outbreak of the Second World War were effectively those which had been formulated in Flanders in the wake of Louis XIV's attempt to defeat William of Orange (later King William III of England).

The rules enabled a besieging force to refuse the request of a besieged force to evacuate civilians from a besieged town, on the basis that if the civilian popultion was kept locked up this would lead to starvation and the weakening, and eventual capitulation of the besieged force. But those rules had been formulated before aerially launched bombardment had been conceived, and were hopelessly outdated by the Second World War. The allied refusal was not illegal, nor did it amount to a war crime by the then rules of warfare on land.

Douglas-Home, who was waiting outside the city pending the completion of the aerial bombardment, was informed of the German Commandant's request to evacuate the civilians and its refusal on the second day after the aerial bombardment had started, and the consequences of the bombardment were apparent to the waiting allied ground forces. As a result, and for three reasons he advanced subsequently, - a disagreement with the policy of unconditional surrender which compelled the enemy given contrary orders to fight to the end, and because he regarded the refusal to permit the civilians to be evacuated as morally unacceptable, and because he regarded himself as obliged to refuse to take part in the operation, Lt and acting Captain Douglas-Home refused to participate as a liaison officer in the Allied operation to capture the port of Le Havre. After the aerial bombardment by combined RAF and Royal Canadian Air Force units for four nights at Le Havre which resulted in the death of in excess of 2000 French civilians, 19 German soldiers, and the levelling of the city, and its subsequent surrender, the corps moved on to Boulogne, which was subjected to a heavy aerial bombardment. At that time Douglas-Home, who had been placed under supervision (he did not consider himself at that time to have been "arrested") - wrote to the Maidenhead Advertiser and the publication of his letter in the newspaper prompted his formal arrest, and detention.

Douglas Home was charged at a Field General Court Martial held on 4 October 1944 that, when on active service, he disobeyed a lawful command given by his superior officer (contrary to Section 9 (2) of the Army Act 1881). He conducted his own defence. Regrettably neither the Field Court Martial nor he had a copy of the updated Manual of Military Law, which had been prepared and published in April 1944, but not distributed to the troops which had invaded Normandy. Prior to April 1944, there was no defence available to a British soldier of refusing to obey an order because the order itself was illegal. Even had that been brought to the Court-Martial's attention, the grounds of objection by Douglas-Home for refusing to obey Colonel Waddell's order were rejected as he had to admit that the order itself to act as a liaison officer, was not in itself an illegal order. His argument that he was being required to take place in an event which was morally indefensible fell on deaf ears. He was convicted and sentenced to be cashiered and to serve one year's imprisonment with hard labour. The whole proceedings lasted two hours.

However, as a result of the article appearing in the Maidenhead Advertiser, the Allied forces besieging Calais allowed the civilians to be evacuated from the town before it was subjected to a heavy aerial bombardment and final assault; and, in contravention of the policy of unconditional surrender, Dunkirk was allowed to remain in German hands, with the besieged force bottled up, until Germany itself surrendered on 8 May 1945. In the wake of the publication, the British became sensitive to indiscriminate bombing of occupied cities and towns, although that consideration was not extended to towns and cities in Germany.

One of the officers, Second Lieutenant James Wareing, described Douglas Home as follows:

"He did not go into any action as far as I am aware and when we were not in action he did nothing. I really don’t know how he came to be there at all in such an elite regiment.

"In the field he ate by himself and slept under a tank. He did not seem to be in charge of anyone. However he was put in charge of a group of tanks for the attack on Le Havre. This created something of a situation because he refused to go into action but at the same time was claiming that he could capture Le Havre without firing a single shot. The CO accordingly put him under close arrest under the supervision of another officer."

Another officer described the incident in front of Le Havre as follows:

"I was a troop leader in C Squadron 141 RAC and was the escorting officer of William Douglas Home, for two or three days, following his arrest. If my memory serves me correctly he was arrested by order of Major Dan Duffy, our squadron commander and he so ordered the arrest because Captain Douglas Home refused to act as an LO. Home told me that the reason he refused this duty was that if the operation was carried out as planned a large number of French civilians would be killed. He told me that he had offered to negotiate a German surrender but had been refused and consequently declined to serve." "I did not know Home before his secondment to the squadron as an LO for the Le Havre operation as he spent most of his time at RHQ."

Wareing continued:

"Whilst under arrest Home had written to the editor of the Maidenhead Advertiser who published an exclusive on how Le Havre was captured without firing a single shot. Unlike the letters from other ranks the letters from officers were not subject to 100% censorship but to random screening."

"In any event when the War Office saw the newspaper article they immediately investigated the source of the information. The initial upshot was that our CO Lieutenant Colonel H. Waddell was relieved of command and demoted to Major although he continued in combat until we reached Brussels. Here he faced a Court Martial and managed to win his case and be reinstated. It was suspected that Home had used his influence with his brother, a member of the Government, the future Lord Home and future Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas Home. This could have explained the demotion of our CO. Justice was finally seen to be done because William Home was sent to prison."

"He served 8 months, initially in Wormwood Scrubs, then completing his term in Wakefield Prison."

Captain Andrew Wilson, M.C. also served in 141 RAC. In his autobiography Flame Thrower, published in 1956, he recounts this incident and its consequences. Wilson wrote his story deliberately in the third person:

"Even when he sailed with the regiment to Normandy, William had continued his private war-against-war. While headquarters were near Bayeux, he had written to the newspapers about some German ambulances shot up by British fighters. And what he had written was true. Wilson had seen the ambulances, riddled with bullets on the Tilly road. Later Waddell had posted William to Duffy’s squadron to take part in the assault on Le Havre. There were thousands of civilians in the town, which was soon to be bombed with 50,000 tons of explosive. William’s moment of decision had at last arrived. On the morning of the battle he returned to regimental headquarters and, finding the C.O. in the act of shaving, told him that be refused to take part. Waddell called a witness. “Will you carry out my order, Home?” – “No, sir.”"

In 1988, Douglas Home was roused to challenge his cashiering for disobeying orders, in the wake of an article in The Times, prompted by the election of Kurt Waldheim as the president of Austria. The article attacked Dr Waldheim, who was claimed to have been an SS Officer in the Greek theatre of war supervising the loading of prisoners who were being transported north, for imprisonment or worse, and that Dr Waldheim should have disobeyed those orders which were sending people to their deaths. It is reasonable to assume, as did Douglas-Home that if Dr Waldheim had disobeyed those orders he would have been punished and probably executed. This smelled of British cant and hypocrisy; if Dr Waldheim ought to have disobeyed orders to save lives, Douglas-Home was justified in refusing orders to do the same. Douglas-Home accordingly applied for a pardon. He was told that he had to petition the War Office to reverse the sentence of the Court Martial. He was supported in his efforts by the military law expert Professor Gerald Draper OBE, who died in the midst of preparing the arguments supporting the petition. His argument was that the attack on Le Havre was morally indefensible because of the failure to evacuate civilians, and that even though he himself was not engaged directly in attacking those civilians, he was entitled to refuse to take part in the operation or to support it. It was Professor Draper who had discovered that the current edition of the Manual of Military Law had not been available to the October 1944 Field Court Martial. However, the duty on a soldier not to obey an illegal order - because a morally indefensible operation rendered all orders underpinning it illegal - did not find favour with the War Office, which focussed solely on the specific order itself, which Douglas-Home had never denied he had disobeyed. Sir David Fraser's take on it was that he did not question Douglas-Home's courage, but he had disobeyed an order and he was properly punished for doing so. The petition was rejected.

The citizens of cities in Flanders and the Netherlands in the latter months of 1944 and early 1945 may well have had cause to be grateful for Douglas Home's exposé in the Maidenhead Advertiser.

Douglas-Home had to rely on the judgement of the public as to whether, some three decades after one of the worst civilian tragedies in French history, the public perception of indiscriminate aerial bombing of civilians in pursuit of wartime objectives was acceptable.