Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Scott RIP

Kyt · Feb 10, 2008

Royal Engineer who joined a daring operation to blow up a crucial bridge in wartime Greece

Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Scott obituary - Times Online

Ken Scott won his first Military Cross with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Axis-occupied Greece in 1943. The single-track railway through northern Greece to the port of Piraeus was carrying 40 trains per day with supplies for the German and Italian forces in North Africa. The line was cut in November 1942 when an SOE team under Brigadier Edward Myers (obituary, December 10, 1997) assisted by Greek partisans blew up the Gorgopotamos Viaduct.

It was repaired after six weeks, and an attack was ordered on the viaduct on the same line over the precipitous Asopos gorge. Three Royal Engineer officers — Scott among them — were parachuted into the mountains north of Athens for the task.

The viaduct was 175 metres long, supported by three towers on the shoulder of the gorge and a 100-metre steel arch over the river. The SOE party calculated that cutting one of the two legs of the arch with an explosive charge would collapse it completely and drag down the adjacent trusses, creating a 100-metre gap. The viaduct was patrolled from end to end between two tunnels, leaving only the course of the Asopos river 100-metres below as a line of approach.

The communist leadership refused partisan support, so the SOE group resolved on a stealth attack by five British officers, a Greek officer as an interpreter for any locals encountered and a British lance corporal, an escaped prisoner-of-war. Having shaped the explosives in the mountains, the party started down the icy and fast-flowing Asopos river, occasionally carrying the charges on their heads to keep them dry. After three days and nights they reached a

7-metre waterfall across the width of the gorge that barred further progress.

Leaving the explosives under cover on a shingle beach, the party returned to the mountain base to radio to Cairo for an airdrop of more rope. This duly received, they returned to the waterfall, negotiated it and on the night of June 20 reached the point where the northern leg of the arch was embedded in the side of the gorge.

To their surprise, German engineers maintaining the arch had left a ladder to a platform partway up the span. Scott and Captain Harry McIntyre scaled the ladder, hauled the explosives to the platform, fitted them into the girders and having set the time pencils withdrew with their two companions up the previously unknown track used by the German maintenance party. Two hours later the viaduct arch was destroyed.

The line was not reopened until September 1943, by which time the North African campaign was over. Scott won a Bar to his MC for undercover work with the Greek partisans in support of a deception plan to create the impression that the Allied invasion of southern Europe would be made in Greece, rather than in Italy.

After the war, he joined the consulting engineers Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners, but kept his military connections through his membership of the Engineer and Logistic Staff Corps Royal Engineers, a body of experienced and highly qualified individuals who became Territorial Army officers to give advice on engineering and logistics.

In his capacity as chairman of the Military Engineering Committee of the MoD in 1982, he was able to save the Exchequer a great deal of money by recommending that the construction of a new airfield on the recaptured Falkland Islands be undertaken by the private sector, rather than by the Royal Engineers over a matter of years.

His wife, Betty, died on Christmas Day, 2004, and he is survived by a son and daughter.

Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Scott, MC and Bar, Royal Engineer officer of SOE, was born on December 21, 1918. He died on December 25, 2007, aged 89
Click to expand...

Antipodean Andy · Feb 10, 2008

Operation reads like a Boy's Own story!

Good head on his shoulders by the sounds of it. RIP.

Log in or Sign up

Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Scott RIP

Kyt Άρης

Antipodean Andy New Member

Share This Page

Log in or Sign up

Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Scott RIP

Thread Tools

Kyt Άρης

Antipodean Andy New Member

Share This Page

Useful Searches