Thomas Archibald Blythe (updated Thursday 27th June 1pm)
If any of Thomas's relatives want to contact me they can do so at andrew.walker66@btinternet.com.
Thomas was born at 4.15 in the morning on 14th October 1914 at 11 Danes Drive, in the Scotstoun area of Glasgow.
His father, Bruce Crawford Blythe was an engineer, who had married his mother, Anne Monteith Blythe just over ten years earlier. Anne's father was Thomas Archibald, thus the name was 'inherited'.
Thomas was the youngest of four children; his elder siblings were Annie Monteith (1905), Norman Crawford (1908) and Alison Joyce (1910).
In the 1921 Census the family still lived at 11 Danes Drive, now with two spinster aunts (on his mother’s side). His father occupation was manager of Thermos Flooring Company.
His parents were at 11 Danes Drive until at least 1930.
After attending Hillhead High School, Thomas (Tom) started work at the Albion Motor Company. They had a factory on South Street in Scotstoun and were a major manufacturer of trucks and buses until 1980 (as part of British Leyland in their final years).
He then moved to Sheffield, probably to work for one of the city's companies specialising in steel manufacture. There were reports of him passing accountancy exams in 1937 and 1938:
The outbreak of war in 1939 found Thomas working as a commercial representative for the steel company, living in Swindon. He was also a corporal in the 8th Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, so may have been in the territorial army prior to that.
On 29th September 1939 he married Sheila Mary Rae at 74 Gordon Street (right opposite main entrance to Central Station). Today it is the site of a branch of Sainsburys, which seems an unlikely venue, but in 1939 it was the Grosvenor Restaurant:
"From 1907 until 1967, it was home to the gracious Grosvenor Restaurant, a multi-storied mix of dining rooms, bars, smoking lounges and one of the finest function rooms in the city. On the ground floor were bars and tea-rooms. You went up a huge marble staircase to restaurants and function rooms. For years it was the centre of upmarket night life in Glasgow." (link)
Sheila lived at 161 Maxwell Avenue, Westerton and her father was a schoolteacher. Thomas's father was an engineering works manager.
He was then sent to the 162nd Officer Cadet Training Unit at Salisbury and in February 1940 he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant.
There is then a gap in our knowledge; he may have served in the British army in France and Belgium and been evacuated at Dunkirk
By 1942 he was a chief instructor at the Eastern Command Infantry Battle School, with the rank of Major. The following pictures were all taken there - the first shows troops advancing while live ammunition was fired over their heads, the second illustrates doing everything on the double.
At some point he requested a move to a frontline unit and was posted to 1/7th Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He was put in charge of C Company, which would have had about 4 junior officers and 120 men (reference).
The battalion was a part of 59th Division and at the time of D-Day was in billets in Margate, Kent - they were reluctant witnesses to the first 'doodlebug' flying bombs to pass over heading for London. On 20th June they moved to a beautiful location, Firle Place (or Park) in Sussex:
Ironically in view of where they were to go next, this building is clad in Caen stone (i.e. quarried in Caen, Normandy). They stayed here for one week; the church where many of the battalion attended for a service is in the background to the right.
About a week later than originally intended, the battalion embarked in ships at Newhaven (photo below) on the 28th June 1944 and landed on the Normandy beaches on the 29th.
The battalion had eight full days to prepare themselves for their first battle, an attack towards the small city of Caen as a part of Operation Charnwood.
Many thanks to David Ryan for supplying key pages from a history of the regiment and making the following description possible.
Moving up to the line on the night of the 7th-8th July, the battalion rested between Villons-les-Buissons, a small village captured by Canadians on the day after D-Day, and the hamlet of Les Buissons. This photo shows the type of area where the battalion spent the rest of the night (300 metres off this road to the right):
Despite being July, it was a cold night and men needed their greatcoats to keep warm.
The objective was the equally small village of St Contest, about 3000 yards away heading south across cornfields. Other battalions would attack either side of the 1/7 Royal Warwickshire with their own objectives, clearing their flanks. In particular, another battalion would have taken the tiny hamlet of Galmanche on its eastern flank.
This map is orientated with north at the top and shows the approximate direction of attack; note Caen in the bottom right hand corner. The location of Galmanche is approximately under the letter N in its name.
The advance would take place behind an artillery barrage aimed to land in advance of infantry and moving further south at the rate of 100 yards every three minutes. Incredibly, this would have included gunfire from Royal Navy ships off the coast of Normandy whose big guns could fire with reasonable precision over 15-20 miles. Battle school training was for the infantry to stay as close to the advancing barrage as was judged safe, the idea being German defenders would still be taking cover when the British arrived.
There was also a squadron of tanks from 1st East Yorkshire Yeomanry; it is not clear if there was any time for the Warwicks and tanks to practice together in advance which would have restricted opportunities to discuss or build any relationships. Another concern was that the battlefield was quite flat and the Warwicks officers like Thomas would not have been able to observe it directly in advance. This is illustrated by the following photo showing the view from the start line for the attack:
The plan was to attack with B Company on the right (from the battalion's point of view, on the left as you look at a map) and Thomas's C Company on the left. In the following view from Google Earth, flipped round to face south, Galmanche is ringed in red on the left and the approximate line of advance for the two companies are shown in blue (Thomas's C Company) and in green (B Company).
A Company were to follow up, attacking any German positions bypassed by B and C Companies, and D Company was held in reserve. It is not stated but I imagine a troop of 3-4 tanks would have been attached to each company.
Late in the evening of the 7th, the Warwicks watched the RAF bomb the ground ahead of them - 450 heavy bombers, usually deployed on missions to Berlin, or the industrial targets in the Ruhr, were used to try to 'precision bomb' the German defences. It made a morale-boosting spectacle but the bombs fell entirely on Caen itself, killing hundreds of citizens; the German defences ahead of the Warwicks were untouched.
Next morning, the barrage started as planned and lasted for about an hour before moving forward in line with the timetable. At 4.20am the 6th South Staffordshires attacked Galmanche to clear the Warwicks left flank, but were under fire within the first few hundred yards and lost the barrage (i.e. they could not keep up). They did get to Galmanche and cleared the hamlet of buildings; it was not appreciated that Germans may still be occupying the woods nearby.
The Warwicks advanced as planned at 7.30am. An account speaks of the noise, a continuous roar such that no individual explosion stood out, and the dust and smoke. The Germans also began firing blind into the area where they could anticipate the infantry would be.
As the advance reached Galmanche, the full effect of the Germans still occupying the wood at Galmanche (now partly cleared) became apparent:
Thomas's C Company were advancing from the bottom of the screen on approximately the axis of the blue line, assuming the first enemy they would meet were in St Contest because Galmanche (ringed in red) had been cleared. As the Germans there opened fire - albeit blindly because of the smoke and dust we have heard about - they would have been in the open with no cover.
The troops closest to Galmanche were C Company and it is here that Thomas was killed. Lieutenant Dugmore was also killed and the other three officers in the company were wounded. Without officers, the survivors took what cover they could.
B Company had made better progress, although also having men killed and wounded by the defenders of Galmanche wood, reaching the edge of St Contest. A Company came up in support and the village was eventually captured
This diagram, taken from a French source (link), shows the capture of the church at St Contest - note C Company described as "closee dans les bles" which I loosely translate as "pinned down in the wheatfield".
Thomas's body was buried at St Contest; CWGC records provide a map reference and with the help of Richard Lewis I can now show this was just to the west of St Contest:
He was reburied in a permanent CWGC cemetery at La Delivrande on 19th June 1945. The inscription selected by his family is "Who died / As firm as Sparta's king / Because his soul was great". These are the last two lines of the poem "The Private of the Buffs" by Francis Hastings Doyle (link).
This photo shows the entrance to the cemetery at La Deliverande.
He is commemorated at Bearsden, of course, but also at Carsphairn in Galloway (south-west Scotland) where his father was born:
Commentary
The Germans were excellent soldiers. As the artillery arrived in position on the evening before the attack, the gunners took their bayonets and began stabbing the earth in the area around their camp, unearthing a camouflaged and armed young German soldier. A report written after the events of 8th July described how in the area where C Company attacked "a great swathe had been cut in the standing corn, clearing a field of fire for a machine-gun position, which appeared as no more than a slight mound among the stubble. Between the machine gun and the corn, the open field ... was strewn with trip-wire grenades. barbed wire lined the edge of the crops where our riflemen emerged into the open ..."
As I wrote the above post on the attack towards St Contest I was reminded of many of the First World War battles I have written about in other posts, so little had tactics changed in the intervening 25-30 years. Yet if Galmanche had been completely cleared, the Warwicks would have had a clearer run to St Contest, so what went wrong? This part of the post will evolve as I find more information, but a history of the accompanying tank regiment, the East Yorkshire Yeomanry ("Forrard" by Paul Mace), outlines the key events.
Firstly while officers of the tanks and infantry did not practice co-operation in advance, they did meet to liaise. However, in the case of the South Staffs battalion they disagreed about tactics: the infantry wanted close support and the tank officers wanted some freedom to choose the best positions.
When the attack began it was the German counter-barrage of mortars and artillery that caused casualties, stemming in part that camouflaged German positions were nearer to the starting point for the attack than had been anticipated. This caused the infantry to lose touch with the advancing barrage. In the tank regiment history, it was the tanks that were mainly responsible for capturing the houses at Galmanche and they held them for five hours. Given that this part of the attack began at 4.30am and assuming they reached the objective around one to two hours later, this would mean they were at Galmanche hamlet until around 11am. This source confirms the first objective (presumably Galmanche) was taken by 6.15am.
During this time, they were attacked by snipers and by handheld anti-tank weapons (akin to a bazooka) so they would have been well-aware that while they had reached Galmanche, the area was far from clear. However, this information does not seem to have reached the 1/7th Royal Warwicks.
Even then if the Warwicks had received close fire support from the tanks when the shooting from Galmanche wood started, casualties could have been reduced. The regiment's history is less clear on this point - the tanks of A Squadron advanced to within 200 yards of St Contest: "They had no infantry with them by then ... The infantry, having suffered heavy casualties, had not advanced with the tanks." The interpretation of this is unclear but it seems the tanks had pulled ahead and had then not noticed C Company being shot at; given the smoke and dust, and the need to look out for German anti-tank guns, this may be easier to understand. I believe at this stage of the war there was no effective radio communication between the tanks and infantry.
After the tanks had withdrawn from Galmanche, the South Staffs fought their way up to it but this was around midday. In doing so they suffered 70 dead according to CWGC, more than any other Allied battalion and twice as many as the 1/7 RWR - so there was no question of the South Staffs being slow or neglecting their duties.
Finally, the tank regiment history says that a chateau at Galmanche still held out at the end of the day, and had to be demolished in an attack the following morning. Twelve Germans were taken prisoner and forty were killed, so the position was strongly held. But this makes it even more mysterious that Galmanche would have been regarded as cleared when the Warwicks attack began.
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