The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
BOMBING TARGETS
Maps of Courier Country reveal how air attacks were planned
They are maps divided by 40 years but they illustrate how the German and Russian military machines created detailed plans of strategic sites on Scotland’s east coast.
Although the charts from the Second World War are written entirely in German, their subject matter is made clear from such chapter headings as “Blick von Queensferry uber die Forthbrucke” and “Bodenver-haltnisse im Hinterland und Firth of Tay”.
The preparation of these maps proved invaluable to the Luftwaffe, which regularly launched assaults across the north-east of Scotland.
Dundee’s worst incident happened on November 5 1940 when a stick of four bombs came down in what seemed to be a random attack by a German raider.
One crashed all the way through a four-storey tenement in Rosefield Street, killing two people and destroying the property. Another missed by just 20 yards the Forest Park Picture cinema, which was packed with children at the time.
Montrose experienced 10 air raids, the worst of which was on October 25 1940 when four Norwegianbased Heinkel 111s bombed the airfield.
Five men were killed, 21 wounded and extensive damage was done to buildings and aircraft after the Montrose defences were caught off guard.
As a former stronghold of Scottish manufacturing with the country’s oldest working port and a key position in the North Sea, Aberdeen was heavily bombed and suffered a large toll of casualties, none more so than during the night of April 21 1943.
In less than an hour, German aircraft dropped 127 bombs, damaging or destroying more than 12,000 homes and killing 98 civilians and 27 soldiers.
In the previous decade, enemy agents gathered information about such places as Aberdeen, Dundee, Lossiemouth and Fife’s industrial communities to assist a Nazi invasion.
One of the most notorious agents was Jessie Jordan who worked in espionage from a hairdressing salon in Dundee to help the Germans learn more about Tayside. Her exploits and subsequent incarceration in Perth Prison even persuaded some people to believe she was related to Adolf Hitler.
The Nazi regime amassed a wealth of knowledge about a country it assumed would surrender in 1940.
Several of the charts appear in the book Scotland: Defending the Nation by Carolyn Anderson and Christopher Fleet, in association with the National Library of Scotland.
The book’s authors said: “Their information was primarily drawn from British civilian topographic maps and photographs, supplemented by limited aerial reconnaissance. The photographs were often of key military targets with their locations shown on accompanying maps which described the nature of the coastline for an invasion from the sea. An accompanying land cover map was also drawn, showing the characteristics of the terrain for tanks and other armoured vehicles.”
They continued: “The German army was excellently briefed on the military geography of Britain.
“As part of its detailed preparations for potential invasion or occupation, they reprinted standard topographic mapping by Ordnance Survey.
“Ironically, the map includes a few features including the military aerodrome at Leuchars, which were subsequently erased from later OS mapping from the 1930s for censorship reasons, so the German map, which was obtained before the introduction of wartime restrictions, was more useful for wartime purposes.”
The RAF responded to the challenge in the air and through their network, allied to the assistance offered by airbases dotted around the country, from Montrose and Moray to Orkney and Shetland.
The Luftwaffe also attempted – and failed – to destroy a key target – the Forth Bridge.
The German pilots christened the Firth of Forth a “suicide alley”, due to its artillery defences and because of fighter aircraft stationed nearby, at places such as Donibristle, Turnhouse and Montrose.