I HAVE read with interest the recent letters (January 26, 27 & 29) on the 51st Highland Division.
However the tragedy of the loss at Saint-Valéry-en-Caux is not so much the sacrifice that was made by these gallant men but the fact that year on year their contribution to the outcome of the war is not so much ignored as deliberately overlooked.
Why do they continually fail to be mentioned at the Dunkirk anniversaries or at best as a side note in history? Their orders were "to engage the enemy", the enemy being General Rommel and the 7th Panzer Division. The Highland Division along with their colleagues in the French 9th Division led Rommel a merry dance across Normandy for three weeks, with the Highlanders suffering 209 losses and the French 214. If the 7th Panzer Division had not been led away and had been allowed to get near to Dunkirk the effects would have been devastating and it is reasonable to conclude that the Dunkirk evacuation would not have succeeded. The War Office probably never thought the Division would get anywhere near Saint-Valery and being on foot and up against Panzer tanks it was probably a reasonable assumption to make; thus no real thought was put in to evacuating them. However they did make it; but only for 10,000 to have to surrender, stranded on the beach with nowhere to go, and nobody to help.
After Saint-Valery the War Office re-recruited and a new 51st Highland Division was formed, fighting under Field Marshall Montgomerie in North Africa against, ironically, Rommel. Again, they acquitted themselves heroically. The unbroken spirit of the 51st Highland Division has also been attributed to General de Gaulle's decision "to continue fighting on the side of the Allies unto the end, no matter what may be the course of events".
What is also regularly not recalled is that the Highland Division represented the last British soldiers to fight on continental Europe after we pulled out; fighting valiantly alongside the French through the Battle of France. The Battle of France is regarded by the French as one of the most poignant defining historical moments in recent French History. The 51st are remembered and revered in France, why not at home?
Andrew J Beck,
3 Andrew Crescent,
Stenhousemuir.
MY father was a Territorial with the 52nd (Lowland) Division and escaped through Dunkirk. We have a letter written home two days after he landed in the South but nowhere did he distinguish between English or Scottish troops in this desperate situation; so I'm saddened by Donald J MacLeod's assertion(Letters, January 29) that the brave Petty Officer Morrison would take time to notice which part of the UK (or France) the survivors came from.
Only the other day I wrote complaining to the publisher of a new book entitled Invasion which asserted that the Nazis fought the "English" and which displays the Union Flag on its cover, so I am equally sensitive to the description of our forces at that time.
Ian Gilbert,
16 Robertson Crescent, Pitlochry.
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