James Nesbit

James Nesbit went to Fort William to take the Comando training course.

The Patrol did a fair bit of training locally at the OB and night time raids on RAF Milfield to the west. One of their favourite activities was to get onto the airfield and turn all the planes around to face the opposite way to how they had been parked.

The Units existence was known to his family and the Home Guard but what it was for or did, they did not know or ask.

James went to Balmoral to guard the Royal Family with others from 201 Battalion.

He was also part of the 201 Battalion who volunteered for overseas duty. Taken by train to London and on to Portsmouth then over to the Isle of Wight to form part of the Island's garrison in the lead up to D-Day. They were there for the first two weeks of June in 1944.

James's job was to guard the MTB (Motor Torpedo Boats) these were to be used to take resistance fighters to the Channel Islands after the D-Day fleet had sailed.

He said the the Kyloe men were not keen on the issued fighting knives. The handles were too narrow and hard to control with cold hands.

They favoured the Thompson Sub Machine Gun for covering raids. Always using straight magazines as the drum type rattled when you ran with it.

Long after the war, a stash of explosives was found at the top of the steep hill to the north of Belford on the old A1 when the council were doing road repairs. James Nesbit told the police exactly what it was and that they should look at the bottom of the hill as a similar amount of explosives had been planted there in a classic convoy ambush set up.