DEATH FROM THE SKIES
A clear night... a full moon... then wave upon wave of Nazi bombers smashing lives and homes to atoms. Eighty years on from the Clydebank Blitz, how the Luftwaffe’s terrifying onslaught obliterated a town and its defenceless people
Thursday, March 13, 1941, 6pm
From bases in France and elsewhere – the main attacking force is Luflotte 3 – 236 Junkers Ju-88 and Heinkel He-111 bombers take off for the skies of Scotland. They will come in three big waves, an hour apart, each flight ten minutes apart, headed by the 12 He-111s of Kampfgeschwader 100, the elite pathfinder force, loaded largely with incendiary bombs.
7.30pm
In Clydebank a low golden sun has quit the stage for the high full moon. Henry Kelly, the town clerk, answers the phone. It is the Civil Defence ‘war room’ in Glasgow. A German radio-navigational beam has been detected, he is warned, running right through Clydeside.
Grim-faced, he, his deputy James Hastings and others gather in their control centre in the basement of Clydebank Public Library. They have begged for a peripheral, safer location – not so near John Brown’s Shipyard, the juiciest target on Clydeside – but the Scottish office will not listen.
8pm
NINE-YEAR-OLD Brendan Kelly has been playing football with friends in Castle Square. now he sits on the stoop of a Jellicoe Street tenement with his big pal Tommy rocks, 13, marvelling at the brilliant moonlight. ‘God,’ breathes Tommy, ‘If Jerry comes the night, he cannae miss…’ They part for their homes, never to meet again.
8.30pm
AT 135 Queen Victoria Drive, Scotstounhill, Sydney and mina Hutton make ready for the night. Their son George is home on leave from the royal Engineers, and their married daughter Hylda richmond is staying too, with her little boys Brian and Alan. The wireless is tuned to the Scottish Home Service, and the milk now warms for the children’s ovaltine.
9pm
RAF FIGHTERS, now fully alerted, circle over bases from Dyce to Prestwick. The Germans arrive, over the Firth of Forth, feigning imminent assault upon Edinburgh – but swerve away, over Stirlingshire, to the real target.
They codename it ‘Gregor’ – but, replete with shipyards, munitions works and factories, it is Clydebank; an industrial, densely populated tenement-canyon town raised only in the 1870s by the Clyde Bank Shipyard, and surely the only British community ever named after a limited company.
9.10pm
SIRENS start to wail in greater Glasgow and Clydebank as the Germans arrive and the first flares and incendiaries fall. These can burn through and ignite practically anything – even slate. They begin greedily to smoulder in the Yoker distillery, the vast piles of timber at the Singer sewing machine factory lately repurposed for munitions; on the bitumenthick flat roofs of packed radnor Park…
9.20pm
In Scotstoun, an appalled ArP warden sees something huge floating down in eerie slowness over Queen Victoria Drive, and flings himself flat. The parachuted, 1,000kg Luftmine demolishes an entire row of villas, smashes hundreds of windows, and shakes dwellings on the other side of the suburban railway. But no 135 is directly hit and the Hutton family is obliterated, save for Hylda’s younger sister – she is out at the pictures with her boyfriend.
9.45pm
THE West wing of Bankhead School in Knightswood seethes with first aid volunteers, auxiliary firefighters and bicycle messengers – many of them schoolboys. Young neil Leitch, of 21 Hayburn Crescent, is sent with a note to Partick Fire Station. He is only 15. Blown from his bicycle by a bomb, he is badly bruised, very shaken – yet remounts his machine and presses on.
He does not know that a Luftmine has hit Bankhead School and that 46 people there are now dead. on his way back, an oil bomb – the ghastly granny of napalm – explodes near neil. Hideously burned, he dies several hours later in hospital – according to one Glasgow paper, with ‘astonishing fortitude’.
For weeks afterwards, grim discoveries will be made in the vicinity of the wrecked school – a hand, a charred leg, the odd head.
10pm
THE Yoker distillery is now ablaze. Then, out west at Dalnottar, an Admiralty oil tank explodes in flames, and nothing wardens can do prevents what is now a huge blaze at Singer – £500,000-worth of seasoned timber, dry as toast. The town is now highlighted from east to west, attracting enemy aircraft in concentrated attack that might otherwise be totally dispersed over greater Glasgow. A thrawn old man, being dragged to a communal shelter by his family, turns back: ‘Ah need ma false teeth.’ His exasperated son grabs him. ‘Are ye daft? It’s no pies they’re dropping…’
11pm
rAF FIGHTErS high overhead plead repeatedly for permission to engage with the enemy: it is denied. Within three hours, the anti-aircraft guns nearest Clydebank will run out of ammunition. But the lads crewing a Polish destroyer in rothesay Dock, orP Piorun, will not submit meekly to nazi terror – and they, too, have anti-aircraft guns. They start blazing away, and German aircraft are not tempted to linger. Those Polish teenagers probably save rothesay Dock, and certainly newly built battleship HmS Duke of York, lying at an adjacent berth.
Midnight
nEW waves of enemy aircraft arrive every ten minutes. Schools and churches all over Clydebank
are ablaze. Water mains burst. Electricity fails. Telephone receivers die in appalled civic hands. So ferocious is the German assault that the explosions can be heard in distant Bridge of Allan; so vast are the fires of Clydebank that the glow in the night sky can be seen from Aberdeenshire, from the Inner Hebrides, and even from Ireland.
All over the town, in communal shelters, in cellars and basements, in little Anderson shelters in their gardens – but, mostly, huddled at the bottom of tenement closes – the people of Clydebank tremble under the onslaught, each wondering if he is about to die.
Friday, March 14, 00.30am
WILLIAM Smillie, fire brigade sub-officer, is earthing over incendiaries on Second Avenue when someone cries: ‘For God’s sake, come and help us!’ A shelter has collapsed, its roof upheld only on the shoulders of desperate men. Smillie leaves his crew and runs for a rescue unit. He returns to find several of his men have passed out on account of a leaking gas main. Revived, they are fighting a tenement blaze on Montrose Street when another bomb blast blows Smillie over a churchyard wall. He comes to, staggers to his feet – and continues to work.
2am
TOMMY Kelly, Brendan’s father, at first makes the boy and his mother hide under the bed. But he feels increasingly uneasy and, despite the perils outside, insists that they all leave the building. Brendan is sent to rouse neighbours. All mass in the close for an age until, a few at a time, amidst the blasts, the assertive Tommy shepherds everyone to a communal shelter. It is an uncomfortable night, but all survive. When they emerge, they find nothing stands of their close but its bare external walls. Though he will never be publicly honoured, an astute man has saved a rake of lives.
At 12 Pattison Street, a single street-level explosion kills 14 people. Another slams a communal shelter on the same street – everyone inside dies. But there is carnage in Glasgow too. Just one bomb destroys three crowded shelters in Scotstoun; another, a luftmine in Tradeston, accounts for 110 lives, including several French sailors on the opposite bank of the river. Bombs fall on Knightswood, Maryhill, Jordanhill, Hyndland, Partick, Kelvinside, Kelvindale, Govan…
2.30am
A RESOURCEFUL Clydebank nurse has hitched a lift to Glasgow Royal Infirmary and persuades some medical students to go out to Clydebank with her. They trundle towards the town through appalling conditions when, suddenly, their transport collides hard with an object on Great Western Road. They curse their driver until they realise what it is – another huge, unexploded luftmine – and make away with all speed. When, many hours later, they drive back in exhaustion, it has gone off – leaving a vast crater on the
Boulevard.
3am
BOMBS are still falling, but help is at hand – fire crews arrive in Clydebank from Stirlingshire, from Helensburgh, from lanarkshire and even from Edinburgh. yet, strangers to the district, they struggle to locate hydrants; when they do, many are dismayed to find their hose-couplings are incompatible with Clydebank fittings. Getting about is hard, with streets cratered, piled with rubble, choked here and there by burntout trams. Fire engines everywhere run out of petrol – by morning, Clydebank will have only two working pumps – and, worse, water, with so many smashed mains. They try pumping from the Clyde, from the yoker burn and from the Forth and Clyde Canal, but all these are too far from Radnor Park. It can only be left to perish. Inevitably, a bomb hits Clydebank Public library. Fortunately the control centre below is well-braced but there is a ‘most damnable crash’, as James Hastings will laconically recall, and the shaken officials are showered with dust and broken glass. They get on with their job.
5.30am
PATRICK Rocks has toiled at Beardmore’s all night, and is now so desperate to check on his family he takes a short cut, swimming across the canal. Now he picks his way to 78 Jellicoe Street and in growing alarm. He rounds the corner, and his heart skips when he sees what he thinks is the lit window of his tenement home. Then he realises it is but the moon, and glowing flame, through one tottering gable.
But 78 Jellicoe Street is no more. Just one bomb at one address, on this smouldering heap of ruddy locharbriggs stone, has killed 31 people. They include Patrick Rocks’s wife, his 84-year-old mother-in-law, all six of his sons, one of his daughters, his daughterin-law and five of his grandchildren, including pawky Tommy – the greatest loss of any British family in all the Blitz.
Brendan Kelly never forgets the disorientated Mr Rocks stumbling about Dalmuir, for day upon day, in gibbering grief.
But the authorities, already mounting Britain’s most shameful exercise in Second World War censorship, within weeks bundle Patrick Rocks back to his native Ireland, lest he blab. His unimaginable tragedy will remain unpublished until 1974.
6am
IN Radnor Park Church Hall, Jenny Hyslop – Scotland’s most senior female ARP warden, a pillar of the Kirk, a Communist town councillor – has been directing first aid for hours. Now the allclear blows and, in bloodied apparel, she ventures outside as dawn rises on a shattered town. Clydebank has not just been hammered. Much of it has simply disappeared. of the town’s 47,000 population, 35,000 are this morning effectively homeless – and lord alone knows how many are dead.
Midday
PEOPLE stream out of Clydebank on foot, carrying what they can. The authorities establish ‘rest centres’ with hot food and drink as well as officials to create emergency ration books and identity cards. They also try to organise more formal evacuation – a nightmarish task when so many streets and roads are impassable and there are quite a few unexploded bombs. Scottish office chaps arrive to chide exhausted local leaders. They set up an ‘administrative centre’ and send out loudspeaker vans to order the survivors about.
Quietly, without invitation, a crowd of Fife miners arrive in town – and set at once, with experienced hands, to digging survivors out of the rubble. And everyone grimly knows, as is long-established Blitz custom, that the Germans are coming back…
2pm
THERE are bodies everywhere.
Officials realise that, in many instances, identification is going to be a serious problem, between mutilated features, missing papers and effects, and that so many were slain outwith their own homes.
In Knightswood, little Bryan Cromwell – only five – will never forget the bits of people on Broadley Drive and Killoch Drive. ‘I think I just stared curiously at the lumps of burned, charred flesh and bits of uniform attached to limbs,’ he will tell a journalist 50 years later. ‘I don’t remember being horrified by what I saw, just a feeling of detachment, like it was all unreal.’
What shocks everyone is how many victims have not the least visible marks on their bodies, sitting as silent mummies in some packed tram or communal shelter. Few have heard of ‘blast lung’. An explosion creates a momentary but total vacuum and, if you happen to be in it with your mouth open and your nose unpinched, it kills instantly.
6pm
JAMES Hastings’s telephone in the control centre starts ringing – and a scottish Office bureaucrat grabs it before he can. The conversation is brief. The fellow turns. ‘Well, they’re coming back.’
8.40pm
ONCE more the sirens wail, as 203 German bombers sweep implacably towards Clydebank – this time, coming in from the north and west. Despite the town’s best efforts, there are still enough ongoing blazes to guide the enemy. Drumchapel is hit first, on the dot of nine. Then Dalmuir, Radnor Park and Kilbowie are pounded all over again. soon, ten more great Admiralty oil tanks are afire.
But one thing is on the town’s side tonight – there is a light but persistent fog.
10pm
THE Germans are dropping fewer but bigger bombs – mostly the frightful Luftmines. They are also meaner, several planes strafing streets and tenements with machine guns. They bash away at maryhill and Knightswood too. But there are odder attacks, with bombs falling at Blanefield, Killearn, Drymen and Baldernock.
One maryhill warden never forgets the dreadful sight of a slain young mother, sprawled on the pavement with her child clutched to her bloodied breast. The baby has no head.
Saturday, March 15, 4am
THE tug Warrior is puffing up the Clyde, towing the steamer Ferncourt, when she sets off a Luftmine; her crew quickly run her ashore at Renfrew. Twenty-seven bombs are dropped on erskine Hospital – a care home for disabled veterans of the First World War – and even on the chain-ferry nearby.
As dawn nears, the German bombers fly back to bases in Denmark and the netherlands. There will be future attacks on Greenock, Paisley, Dumbarton, even wee Cardross – but their war with Clydebank is done.
8am
JOHN Bowman has won ten days’ leave from his detachment of the Cameronians and has come all the way from suffolk to surprise his family at 10 Church street. He suspects little amiss till he actually arrives in Clydebank – and is appalled by the devastation.
As he drifts past the colony of shops on Kilbowie Road, he recognises a local man. ‘Bobby, what’s going on?’
The shopkeeper pales. ‘John, don’t, whatever you do, go up to where you lived. Your house has been destroyed and all your family are dead.’
John Bowman can scarce take it in. He goes to Clydebank Town Hall where a strained woman confirms the worst. ‘I’m sorry, John, but your mother is dead, your two brothers Archie and Albert are dead, your sister Hannah is dead.’
He is asked to identify them, in a makeshift mortuary. There are more than 100… things, it is all he can call them, stretched out, up and down, all along in rows on the floor. no arms, no legs, on some; some with no heads. ‘You couldnae identify anything…’ He reels outside – and collides with his father who, though limping, is alive.
10am
OFFICIALs assess the catastrophe. Of Clydebank’s 12,000 homes, only seven are entirely undamaged. Around 4,000 have been completely destroyed; 4,500 will be uninhabitable for months. There are scarce 2,000 people left in the burgh and, of those now being billeted in the Vale of Leven, Helensburgh, Aberdeenshire and elsewhere, many will never return. Tenements can be rebuilt, but the intangible bonds and networks of community are gone for ever.
Of all British towns and cities assailed in the Blitz, Clydebank has come closest to universal destruction. But the censors are already at work. Reporters and photographers are kept away.
The papers are only allowed to write of ‘some bombs’ and ‘some casualties’ in a ‘town in the west of scotland’. One survivor writes a detailed account of Clydebank’s horrors to a relative in Ireland. It is intercepted by the snoopers – and will not see the light of day until 1971.
In military terms, though, the two air raids have accomplished little. no yard or plant or factory has been grievously damaged. most are running normally within a matter of days, as the authorities coax the workforce back.
Officially – and getting even that number out of ministers is like pulling teeth – 528 Clydebank people have been killed and 617 badly injured. The Glasgow death toll – from, of course, a far greater population – is 647.
Few believe those Clydebank figures. One firefighter, on hearing of them, snaps: ‘Which street?’ many bodies, of course, have been quite obliterated; others are simply never discovered. And, despite the best efforts of James Hastings – under great pressure, as they begin to decay – 180 bodies cannot be identified.
Confronted with one horror – the cellar of a pub, packed with folk sheltering from the bombs, which sustained a direct hit – there is no attempt at recovery. The authorities just pour in quicklime.
Monday, March 17, 4pm
A MASS grave has been dug at Dalnottar Cemetery. The town has not even been furnished with cardboard coffins: the dozens of anonymous corpses are but tied in bedsheets and string. A brief multidenominational service is held after the first are lowered in. The single press photograph permitted is heavily cropped by the censors, so that the scale of the slaughter cannot be seen.
And there will be one last fiendish twist…
September 15, 1941
As boats manoeuvre in the old Beardmore’s Basin at Dalmuir, a sunken Luftmine explodes with devastating force, not only blowing off the stern of the tug Atlantic Cock but hurling her right across the Clyde to land on its southern shore. One man is thrown around 70 feet into the air.
The nine dead include two brothers from Lionel on the Isle of Lewis. But the greatest disaster in modern scottish history is over.
River of Fire: The Clydebank Blitz. By John MacLeod. Birlinn Ltd. £12.99