Pro chancellor, I present to you for the award of the degree of the Master of the University honoris causa Mr Jim Glennie BEM, and holder of the legion d’ honour.
Today ladies and gentlemen we honour an ordinary man who did extraordinary things, like so many others of his generation, during their military service during the Second World War. Jim was an ordinary Tura loon who was called up at 18 like most young men of his generation to fight in the War to free Europe from Nazi tyranny. Not all wars are good but without doubt the one waged to liberate Europe from the murderous anti-Semitic and xenophobic genocide unleased by Adolf Hitler in 1939 was a truly a just war.
On June 6th 1944 the combined forced of Britain, Canada and the United States of America launched the largest seaborne invasion in history against Hitler’s Much Vaunted Fortress Europe! Prison Camp Europe would have been a better description for Europe in 1944. Code named Operation Overlord the assault targeted five beaches: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword, each heavily fortified by German forces. The allied forced landing on the French beaches on 6th June on these five numbered over 156,000 men and one of those men was Jim Glennie.
Many of us will have seen the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan where the director Steven Speilberg meticulously recreated the sights and sounds, the fear, terror and confusion of the America Troops landing on Omaha beach that Day. What we have seen only on the screen, Jim lived through in the flesh with his fellow Gordon Highlanders on Sword Beach. He staggered through the hail of bullets and the screech of the shells seeing comrades fall down beside him but like the well trained soldier that he was he was he just chaved awa up the beach until the Gordons had achieved their objective.
On Sword Beach that same day Jim may well have been surprised to hear the skirl of the pipes as the eccentric but brave Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat lead his Commandoes across the beach. Lovat instructed his personal piper, Bill Millin, to pipe the commandos and himself ashore, in defiance of orders specifically forbidding such actions in battle. When Private Millin demurred, citing the regulations, he recalled later, Lord Lovat replied: "Ah, but that's the English War Office. You and I are both Scottish, and that doesn't apply". The 15h Laird’s ancestor the 11thr laird can be seen painted on the outside walls of this chapel. He was Jacobite and the last man to be beheaded for Treason at the Tower of London in 1747.
Jim was very fortunate to have to survived the longest day, unlike so many of his comrades, allied casualties on that first day were 10,000! But Jim’s luck ran out a week later when the Gordon Highlanders ran into the 21st Panzer Regiment. The troops were making their way towards Caen when they came across that Panzer tank regiment. In an interview Jim gave to the Press and Journal back in 2019 Jim recalled that he and some others managed to take refuge in a roadside trench.
He said: “The tank came past us and was just spraying us, but we managed to keep our heads down. “I remember thinking ‘I dinna like this’ and I jumped out and ran up the road to try and get them when they came round a bend.”
“So I’m standing there like this, firing my gun, and all of a sudden I felt shots hit me in my right arm and the gun just dropped out of my hand,”.
A badly wounded Jim was captured by German troops took him prisoner and but also took him to a field hospital where he was cared for along with German tropes. Jim recalled “I was taken to another ward which was all German soldiers, and just me, you can imagine what that was like.
“They called me Scottie, and once I got to know them, they would offer me food and cigarettes.” A striking example of the way ordinary solders can respect each other in war. Those German troops were ordinary men like Jim even if they were serving under a deranged Fuhrer.
After Jim was released from hospital, he was transferred by cattle train along with hundreds of others to camp Stalag IV-B, near Muhlberg, Germany. His first day in the camp was his 19th birthday. One can think of better birthday treats than arriving at a German POW Camp! He spent several months there before being transported to Leipzig, where he was forced to work, filling bomb craters.
Eventually, in April 1945, as the Nazi regime collapsed under the Russian forces advancing from the East and the British and American from the West Jim’s work party group returned to their camp one day to find their German guards had “disappeared”. They were liberated by American forces a short time later. Jim retuned to Scotland, resumed his trade as a welder, enjoyed a long and happy marriage and became the proud father of two children.
Today we honour not just Jim but his entire generation who fought and, in many cases, died so that Europe could be freed from Nazi tyranny. Every one of us alive today owe a debt of gratitude to that generation, a debt we can never repay. It is therefore highly fitting that after his degree is awarded that Jim, instead of giving a speech will lay a poppy wreath at the University war memorial to honour the fallen.
But Jim is now the last of the generation that fought in the Second World War, as old age takes its inevitable toll. The lived experiences that Jim remembers so vividly we can only experience second hand in films or read about in books. This will be the last time that a living Gordon Highlander veteran of the Second Word War will lay a wreath for the fallen dead.
This is a moment when memory turns to history. We shall not meet Jim’s like again.
It is for these reasons, Pro Chancellor, that I invite you to confer upon Mr Jim Glennie the degree of Master of the university Honoris Causa.