"A great story" - Max Hastings, Daily Mail

"A compelling account of an often heroic history"
- The Scotsman

"Told with respect, enthusiasm and style and drawing on the personal experiences of soldiers"
- Soldier, the magazine of the British Army

This work had been in progress for some months when, in November 2004, the Black Watch became engaged in battle, fighting on two fronts. The battalion itself was operating in the most dangerous area of Iraq, after the Americans called for assistance in trying to bring some order to the shambles of the ‘peace’ prior to the Iraqi elections. The Black Watch duly responded with a performance that an American general described as ‘awesome’ in undertaking demanding work around Baghdad, where five of their men were killed and seventeen were wounded. It was during the Baghdad deployment that battle opened up on a second front, in London. There, news finally emerged from the Ministry of Defence that this historic regiment was to be disbanded and merged with other Scottish units into a single regiment. Old soldiers and Black Watch supporters charged to the south in a last ditch bid to save the regiment they loved. They had been campaigning for months against the rumoured changes, but it appeared that this one battle the Black Watch was destined to lose, and that is much against the grain.

Their story is among the richest in spectacle, longevity, drama and courage in British military history, an epic journey for tens of thousands of Highlanders which now has a foot in five centuries. What emerged from a relatively small guarding force to help keep the peace in the braes of Scotland in the late seventeenth century went on to expand into the Highland Watch, then the Black Watch, and thereafter to fight for the British in virtually every major war between then and now, involving a cast of characters ranging through Bonnie Prince Charlie, Napoleon, George Washington, the Kaiser, Hitler and Saddam Hussein.

The Black Watch made a name for themselves because their soldiers, from the outset, were rather special – definitely a breed apart. And while in the beginning their English masters in London regarded them as cannon fodder, like so many other regiments in the British army at that time, the Black Watch quickly showed them the difference. They may well have been at the front of the infantry assault, but they were not getting knocked over at the same rate as others in the line. In their very first battle, the Black Watch asked to be allowed to fight in their own way and having proved the point, their soldiers were seldom out of the front line of successive British campaigns from then until the present day. It is a brilliant story of what became a battle of will over adversity, all that the British generals could throw at them, in fact, and that was plenty. Although the Scottish exclusivity was lost in the nineteenth century, the Black Watch has remained a tribal group sustained by discipline and pride. If nothing else, that will become most apparent in this book. In which their stories are examined with the added colour and drama from many first hand accounts and records drawn from the regiment’s own archives and photographic collections, along with other sources, dating from the earliest days to modern times.

Copyright © John Parker 2004
Site design: Chris Mitchell