Hitler's Graveyard

At the outbreak of World War II the United Kingdom was ill-prepared for hostilities. In particular, beach defences were required to resist a possible German invasion. In Scotland 52 miles of eastern coastline offered access for tanks, and a further 20 were considered vulnerable to infantry assault. All needed defence in depth. The North East of Scotland was thought to be ideal site for a beach landing by the German army, due to its firm sandy beaches. Indeed, during 1938, the German airship Graf Zeppelin had photographed the North East Scottish coast in great detail and other German aircraft had also been seen photographing the coast.

The man responsible for the erection of beach defences in northern Scotland, from the Forth to Wick, was Chief Royal Engineer G A Mitchell, a veteran of the First World War. In a few months on 1940 he organised the construction of an array of beach defences including concrete blocks and complexes of interlocked tubular scaffolding poles to hinder the landing of tanks and other vehicles, as well as barbed wire entanglements, pillboxes, mine fields and gun emplacements. Mitchell is buried in Holyrood cemetery at Newburgh, Aberdeenshire, close to some of the defences that he designed and organised.

The tank blocks were usually cubes of concrete, cast on site, often with stones set on their top, and laid in a long line at high water mark. The people building the blocks, as well as the local children, sometimes scratched their names and messages in the still wet concrete of newly cast blocks. This unusually richly decorated block lies near to the mouth of the river Ythan at Newburgh, Aberdeenshire. The block is usually buried in the sand but recent strong winds and high tides have temporarily exposed the block. The block has been signed by Louis Lawson, presumably one of the men making the defences, and shows caricatures of Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, who is looking up at a falling bomb. At the bottom of the block is the chilling message HITLER'S GRAVEYARD.