The great D-Day dry run: How a top-secret operation in a tiny Highland village helped the Allies smash Hitler’s legions (with the help of 8,000 sheep, 50 pigs and some VERY reluctant evacuees)

In the winter of 1943, the quiet farming communities of the Tarbat Peninsula were shocked to find themselves unexpectedly caught up in the war raging on a far-flung continent.

In a packed village hall they received orders from the Admiralty to announce that 25 square kilometers of land were to be ‘requisitioned’ for military purposes.

A total of 900 people were given a month to leave their homes, while more than 40 farms had the same amount of time to move or sell their livestock, equipment and crops.

The operation was conducted with such a degree of secrecy that even those a few miles away from this new restricted area had no idea what was going on.

The real reason was kept quiet – even from the evacuees.

The truth was that the beach west of Portmahomack turned out to have just the right layout to make it the ideal place to practice for the D-Day landings.

The long-prepared invasion to reclaim Europe from Hitler would prove to be the turning point in World War II and is considered one of the largest military operations in history.

But part of D-Day’s success was down to six months of covert operations carried out 80 years ago on a stretch of the coastal Highlands that also occupied the beaches of Normandy.

The residents who were hastily removed from their homes would only discover much later that their country did not need them so much as their countryside.

The Admiralty had scoured the country to identify suitable training areas for D-Day, according to local historian Dr. James Fallon, who has written a booklet about the little-known evacuation.

‘They put in a lot of effort. “There were a lot of criteria that had to be met before an area could qualify,” he explains.

The Tarbat Peninsula, in Easter Ross, with its beaches to the north and steep cliffs to the south, seemed to fit this picture perfectly.

For those who lived there, it was a matter of going along with the war effort whether they liked it or not.

The affected area stretched from east of Hill of Fearn and north of the coastal town of Hilton to south-west of Portmahomack and Rockfield.

Two schools were also closed. Most people found shelter with relatives nearby, but the biggest headache was for farmers, most of whom had no choice but to sell their entire livestock.

A special auction market was hastily set up in Dingwall to sell the 8,000 sheep, 1,000 cattle and 50 pigs – and secrecy required that only selected buyers from across Scotland and northern England be invited.

Crops such as wheat, barley, oats and potatoes were picked by Italian prisoners of war, the Women’s Land Army and even members of the Home Guard.

Evacuation is a word more often associated with bombed cities.

In the village of Inver, then little more than a row of thatched cottages on a dirt road overlooking the Dornoch Firth, children like Marion Fleming were used to running around the fields and beaches. She and her mother, brother and sister were sent to live with her grandmother in Tain.

“I think there was some resentment, some bewilderment. Where were we going? Where would we go to school? And with my grandmother we had to be on our best behavior,” she later recalled.

She and her friends found the busy market town an ominous place: ‘It was terrible.

“There was traffic and sidewalks, no beaches to play on, just a little rookie. The Inver children had no knowledge of roads, we didn’t need that either – there were two cars in our village.’

She added: “There was a corner in Tain close by where many evacuees lived.

“My uncle called it Hellfire Corner because every time he drove around it he said, ‘Hellfire, I missed another one!’.”

In his work, Evacuation Tarbat Peninsula 1943-44, Dr Fallon revealed that the elderly were particularly upset by the move, with a Captain de Courcy Ireland, commander at Fearn airfield, reporting that some villagers in Inver refused to leave.

“When threatened with violence, they claimed to have the flu and went to bed,” he wrote. “The authorities deployed a fleet of ambulances and carried the people out.”

However, there were some benefits to moving, such as running water and electricity. John Ross was seven when his family moved to Invergordon, a military town full of soldiers.

A few years ago he said: ‘It was as different as chalk and cheese. Invergordon was panting.

At home I saw a train about once a year when we went to Tain – in Invergordon they ran every day. I couldn’t overcome the electricity; flip a switch and a light comes on.”

But the excitement of new experiences was tempered by fear. He added: “We wondered if we would ever go back, and if so, where.”

Farmer Billy Innes, who was eight at the time of the evacuation, would long remember the day the troops arrived.

“They were digging, putting up barbed wire and getting ready. They made an excavation in the hill with seating all around.

‘That’s where I tasted my first cup of coffee. They were always there making coffee.”

On December 12, 1943, the army invaded. It turned out to be a long, harsh winter – ideal, as it turned out, for the dire conditions that broke out on June 6, 1944.

About 15,000 troops from Assault Force ‘S’, the combined army and navy force that would take part in the D-Day invasion of Sword Beach, were based around Inverness and Invergordon.

Although the fishing village of Portmahomack itself was not evacuated, it was isolated by closed roads and military checkpoints.

The Tarbat Peninsula was used as a firing range for Third Division infantry and as support vessels firing from the sea.

Tarbat was an important training area for armored units, including the secret new ‘swimming tanks’ that eventually provided vital counterfire against enemy guns on the beaches of Normandy.

Not only did the exercises at Portmahomack prove essential to the success of D-Day, but some believe they also helped fool the Germans into believing that the Allies were planning to strike further north, perhaps even in Norway, where the Nazi army retained six divisions, weakening their forces. defensive force in Normandy.

DR Fallon captures the atmosphere of the evacuated zone as described by a teacher, Mrs Macdonald from Balintore, who passed by every day on her way to Tarbat Old Primary School and saw not a soul on the farm or in the barnyard, not a sheep or cattle . a beast everywhere, not even a rabbit out of sight, and a deathly silence everywhere, except for the intermittent gunfire. It was quite eerie, especially as the daylight faded.”

Stories of the evacuation of Tarbat have long since become local legend: the collie dog who found his way back to Inver from Tain on his own and lived there alone until his master returned, befriended and fed by the soldiers; the old lady who lived near the exclusion zone and survived a grenade flying through her roof while she was drinking tea.

Although the military was prohibited from entering any evacuated home, many evacuees worried about their property until troops finally moved south in April 1944 and residents were allowed to return the following month.

They found the land littered with shells, the roads and fields churned up by tanks and the trees littered with bullets.

Fences and dikes were broken, there were no livestock and everything had to be replanted. Even the wild animals had fled. For the next twenty years, farmers would dig up live, unexploded shells in their fields.

Nevertheless, most people were happy to be back, especially the children. Marion Fleming recalled: “I remember the breathless excitement. I think I would have died if I hadn’t come home, I was so homesick.’

Two inscribed boulders commemorating the evacuation were first unveiled on June 6, 2004, to mark the 60th anniversary of D-Day.

The two stones at Inver and Portmahomack are a permanent reminder of how a quiet corner of Scotland endured a mock battle to help win a war.