Air raids on Wales and Scotland

On 12 July 1940, the third day of the Battle of Britain by the British reckoning, the air war reached the furthest corners of Britain. At midday a German Heinkel He 111 bomber, which had flown in across the North Sea from occupied Norway, bombed the Hall, Russell & Company shipyard in Aberdeen, in north-east Scotland, without warning. Several dozen people were killed, most of them shipyard workers. That night bombs fell in South Wales, around Newport and Cardiff, and on several towns in Fife and on the Firth of Clyde. The day before, on the night of 11 July, RAF Bomber Command had sent several dozen aircraft over the occupied Netherlands and Germany. The air war was now being waged in both directions and across the whole country, from Cornwall to Shetland.

War chronologies link three events to this period: the first bombing of Cardiff on 3 July, RAF raids on targets in the Netherlands and on German munitions factories on 11 July, and Luftwaffe attacks on Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland on 12 July. The first two can be confirmed. The third needs qualifying: Wales and Scotland were indeed bombed that day, but the British daily reports for 12 July record no raid on Northern Ireland. The first bombs did not fall on Belfast until the spring of 1941.

The Luftwaffe over the whole island

The fall of France had moved the German airfields to the Channel coast, to Belgium, the Netherlands and Brittany, and the Norwegian campaign had given the Luftwaffe bases in Norway. After the Armistice of Compiègne the whole of Britain lay within range of German bombers, including the western ports, which until then had been considered safe. General Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2 was based in Belgium and the Netherlands, Hugo Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3 in France, and General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff’s Luftflotte 5 in Norway and Denmark.

Until the Luftwaffe was ready for its great offensive, its commanders sent small groups and single aircraft over Britain. These nuisance raids, in German Störangriffe, were meant to probe the British defences, lure out the fighters, destroy individual targets and drag people from their beds every night with the wail of the sirens. The first bombs on a major British industrial town had fallen as early as the night of 24–25 May, near Middlesbrough. In June night raids grew more frequent, and on 1 July the Germans attacked in daylight for the first time: a lone Junkers Ju 88 dropped bombs on Bank Row in Wick, at the far tip of Scotland, killing 15 people, eight of them children, while other aircraft bombed Hull.

On 30 June Hermann Göring issued a directive naming the British air force and its industry as the main target, and ports and shipping alongside them. On 11 July the Luftwaffe chief of staff, Hans Jeschonnek, ordered attacks on coastal shipping as a prelude to the main showdown with the RAF and added the armaments industry to the list of targets. Since 10 July fierce fighting had been raging over the convoys in the English Channel, but at the same time single bombers were penetrating deep into the country.

The first bombs on Cardiff

Cardiff was one of the greatest coal ports in the world. Through its docks, and those of neighbouring Barry, Newport and Swansea, flowed the Welsh coal that powered British power stations, railways and warships. After the fall of France the ports on the Bristol Channel came within range of bombers flying from Brittany and Normandy.

The first bombs on Swansea fell on the night of 27 June on the Danygraig district, killing no one. On 3 July the Luftwaffe bombed Cardiff for the first time. It was a small raid, and the available sources record no deaths. On the same day, far to the south, the Royal Navy opened fire on French warships at Mers-el-Kébir, while over Britain itself German aircraft were mainly flying reconnaissance missions. According to Welsh records, Cardiff suffered its first fatalities on 9 July, when single Dornier bombers struck the docks and damaged the ships berthed there. On 10 July King’s Dock in Swansea was bombed in daylight, killing ten to twelve dockers and wounding several dozen.

Aberdeen, 12 July

From the morning of 12 July German aircraft appeared over British coastal waters. The day’s largest battle was fought over a convoy sailing along the coast of Norfolk and Suffolk, and in the afternoon there was fighting over shipping off the Isle of Wight. In the north, between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., British radar stations tracked aircraft circling off the coast near Aberdeen.

According to the German loss returns, the bomber that attacked the city belonged to the 9th Staffel of Kampfgeschwader 26 (9./KG 26) and had taken off from Stavanger airfield in Norway. Its crew had been ordered to bomb Leuchars airfield in Fife or, failing that, the harbour installations at Dundee. The target was covered by cloud, and the aircraft turned north. Local accounts speak of several Heinkels, British official reports of a single aircraft. At around 12.45 p.m., with no air-raid warning sounded, a stick of a dozen or more high-explosive bombs fell on the Hall, Russell & Company yard in the harbour district. Most hit the boiler shop and workshops during the lunch break, when the workers were queuing for their meal. Bombs also struck the nearby Neptune Bar, a ship on the London run lying at Waterloo Quay, and several streets of the harbour district.

The first report of the British Ministry of Home Security gave 26 killed and 79 injured. Later tallies, which include those who died of their wounds, state that 32 people were killed in the shipyard alone and around a hundred injured. According to the British report, the warships under construction or repair in the yard were not damaged.

The fighters responded late. From nearby Dyce airfield, now Aberdeen Airport, a section of Spitfires of No. 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron – the same squadron that in October 1939 had shot down the first German bombers over Britain – took off, led by Pilot Officer J. R. Caister. The Heinkel tried to escape out to sea, but the fighters turned it back over land. For several minutes hundreds of people watched the chase over the city. At around 1.10 p.m. the burning bomber clipped trees on Anderson Drive with a wing and crashed onto the newly built city ice rink, which collapsed in flames. The whole crew of four was killed. The airmen were buried with military honours on 16 July in the old churchyard at Dyce.

Wales and Scotland by night

In the evening and during the night of 12–13 July the Luftwaffe returned to the west of the island. Between 10.40 p.m. and 1 a.m. seven groups of aircraft crossed the coast near Portland and headed for South Wales and Bristol. Colonel Alois Stoeckl’s Kampfgeschwader 55 (KG 55) took off to attack Cardiff. Bombs fell on the railway sidings of the Lysaght’s works in Newport, killing no one, and an unexploded bomb halted traffic on the Great Western Railway main line between Newport and Cardiff. The same night a dozen or so aircraft crossed the coast of Fife and the Aberdeen area, dropping bombs on Cupar, Dunfermline and Helensburgh on the Firth of Clyde. Bad weather prevented British fighters from intercepting the raiders, and the damage was slight.

Northern Ireland does not appear in the reports of these days. It lay at the edge of the German bombers’ range, and its industry, especially the Harland and Wolff shipyard and the Short Brothers aircraft works in Belfast, was very poorly defended. The aircraft seen over it and over the waters around Ireland were above all long-range reconnaissance machines and the four-engined Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condors of Kampfgeschwader 40, which from the summer of 1940 hunted ships in the Atlantic. The first raid on Belfast came on the night of 7–8 April 1941.

RAF bombers over the Netherlands and Germany

At the same time RAF Bomber Command was waging its own air war. Since it had begun its raids on the Ruhr in mid-May, its heavy bombers had been flying over Germany almost every night. After the fall of France the targets changed. The Air Ministry ordered attacks on the aircraft industry, oil and armaments plants, Kriegsmarine ports and shipyards, and above all on the airfields from which the Luftwaffe was to strike at Britain. The light Bristol Blenheims of No. 2 Group bombed airfields in the Netherlands, Belgium and France by day, but had orders to turn back if they could not hide in cloud, because without escort they were easy prey for the Messerschmitts.

On the night of 11–12 July Bomber Command dispatched 64 aircraft: Wellingtons, Hampdens and Whitleys. The targets were airfields and military installations in the Netherlands and Belgium, and industrial plants and communication hubs in Germany. The German night fighter force, still being formed, did not fly that night, but anti-aircraft guns shot down three bombers: a Hampden came down near Sevenum in Dutch Limburg, a Whitley hit by the defences of Deurne airfield crashed into a street in Berchem near Antwerp, and a Wellington went down north of Papenburg in East Frisia.

These raids achieved little. The crews searched for their targets at night with map and compass. There were hundreds of airfields, and the aircraft were dispersed around their edges. According to British figures, Bomber Command lost 72 aircraft in these operations in July 1940. The raids nevertheless mattered psychologically and politically. They showed the British that their country was not merely defending itself, and the Germans that the war would not pass the Reich by. Göring considered the threat serious and on 17 July entrusted Josef Kammhuber with organising Germany’s night fighter defence.

Place in the war

The raids of the first days of July 1940 were minor compared with what came later, but they showed that in the new war there was no safe home front. Aberdeen, Wick, Cardiff and Swansea did not lie on the route of the great raids on London, yet their inhabitants died before Londoners did. The British defences, geared to protecting south-east England, now had to spread fighter squadrons, anti-aircraft guns and barrage balloons across the whole country. The head of Fighter Command, Hugh Dowding, had opposed the dispersal of his forces from the start, but he could not leave undefended the ports through which coal and grain supplies passed.

The heaviest raids were still to come. In August 1940 the Luftwaffe struck at Fighter Command’s airfields, and from 7 September it began the series of night raids on London and other cities known as the Blitz. On 2 January 1941 a raid on Cardiff killed 165 people. In February 1941 three nights of bombing destroyed the centre of Swansea, in March German bombers burned Clydebank near Glasgow, and in April and May 1941 Belfast, almost defenceless, lost around a thousand of its inhabitants in a few raids. Aberdeen was bombed many more times, most heavily in April 1943. The British bombers that in July 1940 were searching in the dark for airfields in the Netherlands became, in the years that followed, the nucleus of an offensive that reduced most of Germany’s cities to rubble.