The remarkable contribution to the British army in the second World War by a galaxy of generals from Ulster has been well recorded. Alanbrooke, Alexander, Auchinleck, Dill and Montgomery all ended their careers as field marshals. There was another general, a quiet Dubliner, who became known as the "Scourge of the Luftwaffe", and who is now largely forgotten. General Sir Frederick Pile, who died just over 30 years ago, commanded the anti-aircraft defences of Britain and Northern Ireland throughout the war.
Known to all ranks as Tim, the general had to work with what he described as "the leavings of the Army intake after every other branch of the Services had their pick". In his book Ack-Ack, published in 1949, he described the first batch of recruits to report to his Anti-Aircraft Command at Christmas 1939: "Many were quite unsuited for military duty, let alone the highly technical duties of AA. Out of 25 who arrived at a fairly representative battery, one had a withered arm, one was mentally deficient, one had a glass eye which fell out whenever he doubled to the guns, and two were in the advanced and more obvious stages of venereal disease." Pile himself could have been described as the "leavings" of the candidates who sat the entrance examination for the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in 1902. He scraped into the last place at the age of 18 only after a number of other candidates failed their medical tests. At school he was a poor student and his enthusiasms were horse-riding, polo and tennis, but by diligent study at Woolwich he passed out well up the class and was commissioned into the Royal Field Artillery.
Pile was born in Dublin in 1884, the eldest of three sons of Sir Thomas Devereux Pile, a Protestant member of Dublin Corporation, and his wife Caroline, the daughter of John Martin Nicholson JP, of Rathgar. As Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas welcomed Queen Victoria to the city in 1900 when she came to pay tribute to the gallantry of her Irish troops in the Boer War. One of the first postings of his soldier son was to South Africa. Later in India, he transferred to the Royal Horse Artillery where he excelled in every form of mounted sport.
He served throughout the first World War on the Western Front, where artillery dominated the battlefield. "The war was not fought by machines like the last war [ Second World War] but by flesh and blood and the horse played a tremendous part in it," he recalled in his memoirs. "Anyone who loves horses would not wish them ever again to take part in a war." His youngest brother was killed in action in 1917. Pile won the Military Cross and returned to England where he transferred to the Royal Tank Corps and became involved in the mechanisation and modernisation of the army.
He succeeded his father to the baronetcy in 1931 and a year later he was in Egypt as commander of the Canal infantry brigade. One of his junior officers was his fellow Irishman, Bernard Montgomery, who opposed some of Pile's unconventional schemes such as training for large-scale night attacks - a tactic that Monty had no reluctance about using years later at the Battle of El Alamein. With another war with Germany threatening he re-entered the world of artillery as major-general commanding the 1st (and then the only) Anti-Aircraft Division. It was in poor shape. Made up almost entirely of part-time Territorial Army soldiers it had an appalling shortage of equipment.
When the war started in September 1939 Pile was struggling unremittingly to obtain modern guns and improved searchlights. Just three days after the start of hostilities the AA battery at Sheerness in Kent went into action against a formation of planes, shooting one down. The aircraft were British. The anticipated heavy German air attacks did not materialise in the early months of the war, giving Pile time to exert pressure on Churchill and his production minister, the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, to supply equipment and recruits.
The AA continued to expand but the quality of the recruits remained poor. Of 1,000 recruits in one brigade 50 were rejected on the spot because of deafness and another 20 were deemed to be mentally deficient. Pile filled the gaps by recruiting more than 70,000 young women volunteers from the ATS (the Auxiliary Territorial Service) who joined members of the Home Guard at the gun sites.
In the summer of 1940 the Luftwaffe raids intensified in the hope of destroying the Royal Air Force before a land invasion. On August 12th every airfield in southern England was attacked and some left unusable. The Battle of Britain was on. Pile's guns brought down many German aircraft.
Pile was congratulated by the chiefs of Fighter Command and he, in turn, acknowledged that the RAF had played the predominant part in the battle. But he lamented: "It is, therefore, not unreasonable to expect that the lesser role played by the ground defences should, first of all, fade into the background, and then into complete obscurity. Yet without the ground defences the Battle of Britain could not have been won by the fighter pilots."
As the Luftwaffe turned its attention to civilian targets the AA was stretched for resources. Requests for support could not be met quickly. For Belfast it came too late.
Frightened out of our house in North Belfast by the first bombing raid of April 7th, 1941 my own family evacuated each night to the fields above the city for a cold and comfortless sleep. On the night of April 15th we stayed at home and it was not long before we heard the German bombers coming in over Belfast Lough,
flight after flight, with
their high explosives and incendiary bombs. They met with little resistance. The entire city had fewer than 40 anti-aircraft guns and no searchlights to defend itself. The Luftwaffe inflicted the highest single night's casualties on any city outside London, leaving 745 people dead and thousands injured in the ruins. In May there were two more raids on Belfast, killing another 164 people.
Belfast got its full complement of Pile's guns in the autumn and there were no more raids.