The Clydebank Blitz

On Thursday 13 March 1941, shortly after nine in the evening, the sirens sounded in Glasgow and neighbouring Clydebank. Under a bright, almost full moon the first German bombers came in over the valley of the Clyde. All night long wave after wave dropped incendiary and high-explosive bombs and parachute mines on the shipyards, factories, fuel tanks and the closely packed tenements of the workers. The following night, 14 March, the aircraft returned. These were the heaviest raids Scotland suffered in the whole war. In Clydebank alone, a town of some 50,000 people, 528 were killed and 617 seriously injured according to official figures. Some 650 more died in Glasgow and the surrounding towns, bringing the death toll across Clydeside to about 1,200. Of roughly 12,000 houses in Clydebank, seven or eight, depending on the source, were left undamaged. The Polish destroyer ORP Piorun, then under repair at John Brown’s yard, took part in the town’s defence.

The forge of the fleet on the Clyde

Clydebank lay on the north bank of the Clyde, some ten kilometres downriver from the centre of Glasgow, in the historic county of Dunbarton (today West Dunbartonshire). It was a typical industrial town, stretching in a narrow strip along the river: works and quays stood right beside the sandstone tenements, several storeys high, in which the workers lived. The largest employer was the shipyard of John Brown & Company, one of the most famous in the world. Before the war it had built the liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, and in 1941 the new battleship Duke of York was fitting out at its quay. In May 1940 the same yard had launched the destroyer Nerissa, which in the autumn was handed over to the Polish Navy as Piorun.

The town’s second pillar was the great sewing-machine factory of the American Singer company in the Kilbowie district, the largest sewing-machine factory in the world, with its famous clock tower. In wartime, as in 1914–1918, it produced mainly weapon parts and munitions. At the western end of the town, in Dalmuir, stood the works of the Beardmore company and a state munitions plant (Royal Ordnance Factory Dalmuir), and along the river lay Rothesay Dock, a harbour basin with cargo-handling quays. Just outside the town, at Dalnottar near Old Kilpatrick, the Admiralty had established the main fuel depot for warships on the Clyde: a complex of large tanks covering more than 50 hectares.

The Firth of Clyde was of exceptional importance to Britain. Atlantic convoys were assembled in the anchorages off Greenock and Gourock, escort groups fighting the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic were based there, and the yards along the river built and repaired warships for the Royal Navy and merchant ships to replace those sunk. After the fall of France and Norway, however, western Scotland came within range of the German air force. The Luftwaffe knew its targets: aerial photographs of Clydebank and of the Dalnottar tanks, taken as early as 2 October 1939, survive in German target files. On the maps the fuel depot was marked as a first-category target. Until March 1941, however, Scotland had known mainly isolated attacks, such as the raid of July 1940, and its anti-aircraft defences were weak.

The spring offensive against the ports

In the winter of 1940–1941 Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe shifted the weight of its night raids from London to industrial centres and ports. After the destruction of Coventry, Southampton and Liverpool, Bristol, Cardiff and Portsmouth burned. On 6 February 1941 Adolf Hitler signed Directive No. 23, which made cutting Britain off from overseas supplies the main aim of the air and sea war. From then on the bombers were to strike above all at ports, docks, warehouses and shipyards. At the end of February the Germans bombed Swansea for three nights in a row.

In March, as the weather improved, the offensive gathered pace. According to German figures, the Luftwaffe flew some 4,000 sorties over Britain that month, including a dozen or so major raids, but it ventured against inland targets only on moonlit nights. Ports, lying by the water, were easier to find. On the night of 12–13 March a heavy raid fell on Liverpool and Birkenhead on the Mersey. The following night, under the same full moon, the target was Glasgow and the shipyards on the Clyde, the northernmost of the island’s great centres of the armaments industry.

The first night, 13 March

The alert was sounded a few minutes after 9 p.m. According to Scottish studies, the first over the target were crews of Kampfgeschwader 100, a specialised bomber wing which since the autumn of 1940 had been leading other units to their targets along radio beams transmitted from occupied France and marking the target with incendiaries. Fires broke out in Clydebank very quickly. The timber yard at the Singer factory was ablaze, so was the distillery in neighbouring Yoker, and above all so were the Admiralty tanks at Dalnottar. Their glow served the following waves of bombers as a beacon visible from far away. According to accounts collected by local historians, the glare of the fires could be seen even in Aberdeenshire and in Northern Ireland.

Behind the pathfinders came further waves of bombers from airfields in occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands. According to German figures cited by British historians, 236 bombers operated over Clydeside that night, dropping 272 tonnes of high explosive and some 1,650 containers of incendiary bombs, each of which scattered several dozen small bombs over the ground. The last aircraft passed over the town only at about 5.45 a.m. The bombs fell not only on the shipyards and factories, which stood amid dense housing, but on the town itself. One of the first high-explosive bombs blew a crater nearly 10 metres wide and broke the main water pipe, so the firemen were soon without water. Another hit the civil defence control centre, cutting communications between districts.

Most people died in the tenements and shelters within the town. Some 80 were killed in Second Avenue, and 43 in Pattison Street in Dalmuir. A single bomb that struck the tenement at 78 Jellicoe Street killed 31 people, fifteen of them members of one family, the Rocks. Rescue workers, firemen, civil defence wardens and volunteers dug in the rubble with their bare hands. Fire brigades from Glasgow and all over western Scotland came to help, but their equipment did not always fit the local hydrants, and water was short. The first death entered in the registers of the Old Kilpatrick registration district was that of a seven-year-old girl crushed by a wall in a shelter in Burns Street. For weeks afterwards the clerks wrote the same formula hundreds of times in the column for cause of death: “as a result of war operations”.

That same night bombs also fell on Glasgow, especially on the western districts along the river, and on the towns in the Clyde valley and on the slopes of the surrounding hills. In Glasgow itself some 650 people were killed over the two nights – more than in Clydebank, but in a much larger city.

ORP Piorun at John Brown’s yard

Among the warships lying at John Brown’s yard that night was the Polish destroyer ORP Piorun. After a winter spent escorting convoys and after storm damage to her hull, she had come into Greenock on 23 February and from there to Glasgow for repairs. She was commanded by Commander Eugeniusz Pławski. Much of her crew consisted of sailors who had survived the sinking of ORP Grom off Narvik in May 1940. The ship, which had been sailing under the Polish ensign only since November 1940 and had been visited in December by the Commander-in-Chief, General Władysław Sikorski, lay alongside the quay, but her guns were ready to fire.

When the raid began, the Polish gunners opened fire on the bombers and on the mines drifting down on parachutes, trying to detonate them in the air before they fell on the shipyard and the town. According to Polish accounts, two incendiary bombs landed on Piorun’s deck. The sailors threw them off before the ship caught fire. Part of the crew went ashore and helped to fight fires on neighbouring ships, including the battleship Duke of York, then fitting out, and one of the Hunt-class escort destroyers. For their conduct during the raid the crew received a commendation from the head of the Polish Naval Command, Vice Admiral Jerzy Świrski.

In Clydebank it is still said today that Piorun’s fire brought down a German bomber. British records do not confirm this: according to them, over the two nights RAF night fighters shot down two aircraft and the anti-aircraft guns none. For the townspeople, however, what mattered more was that the ship did not fall silent when the land defences seemed helpless. Years later a memorial to Piorun’s sailors was put up opposite Clydebank Town Hall, and the town authorities invite representatives of Poland and Germany to the anniversary commemorations.

The second night, 14 March

On Friday evening the bombers came back. According to German figures, a total of 439 aircraft operated over Clydeside on the two nights, dropping 503 tonnes of high explosive and 2,412 containers of incendiaries. The second raid was weaker and more scattered. Bombs fell on Clydebank, Glasgow and the villages and hamlets of the Clyde valley, and dozens of bombs churned up the empty Kilpatrick Hills above the town. According to the tallies of local historians, more than 400 high-explosive bombs and mines fell on the town itself over the two nights, 96 on the Dalnottar tanks and more than 300 on the surrounding villages and hills. About 50 people were killed in Clydebank that night, fewer than the night before, because many inhabitants had already left the town.

The historian Les Taylor, author of a study of the German raids on Scotland, believes that the first raid was aimed at industrial targets and that the huge civilian losses resulted from the works standing amid dense housing. The second raid, by contrast, he regards as a terror attack meant to break the spirit of the population and make them demand peace. This distinction, however, is an interpretation, not a finding based on German orders.

The defences proved weak. Western Scotland and Northern Ireland were covered by the 12th Anti-Aircraft Division, formed in November 1940. The approved establishment of heavy anti-aircraft guns for the Clyde area in March 1941 was 144, but at the end of February the division had only 67 in position, and 88 at the end of March. Apart from the two bombers shot down by RAF night fighters, the defences failed to inflict losses on the attackers.

A town without homes

On the morning of Saturday 15 March Clydebank was a town of ruins. According to the official reckoning, of some 12,000 houses 4,000 were completely destroyed, some 4,500 seriously damaged and the rest damaged less badly. Depending on the tally, seven or eight were left untouched. The Singer factory lost its timber yard and several smaller buildings, but its main halls and famous clock tower survived. John Brown’s yard and Rothesay Dock suffered from fires, and the Beardmore works lost their furnaces. The Admiralty tanks burned for weeks – for anything from two to more than four weeks, according to different sources. Eleven of them were destroyed and seven seriously damaged, and millions of litres of fuel for the fleet went up in smoke.

The industrial losses, however, proved smaller than the ruins suggested. According to local studies, John Brown’s yard was back to almost full production within a few days. Rebuilding the town was far harder. Some 35,000 people were left homeless. Some sources speak of as many as 40,000–48,000 people who left the town or needed new accommodation. As early as the Friday, before the second raid, some 3,500 inhabitants had left Clydebank for the small towns of the Vale of Leven, for Helensburgh and for Kirkintilloch. According to eyewitnesses, others went out every evening to spend the night on the surrounding hills and in the woods, returning in the morning to the ruins. By 17 March more than 11,000 people had been placed in rest centres and emergency billets.

The dead were buried in haste. In Dalnottar cemetery above the town, some of the victims, including those who could not be identified or whom nobody claimed, were laid in a common grave. Today the main memorial to the victims of the raid stands over it, bearing the names of the 528 people of Clydebank who were killed.

The silence of the censors

Winston Churchill’s government feared that full information about the losses would undermine morale and help the Germans assess the results of their raids. The press wrote of the bombing of “a town in the west of Scotland”, and according to researchers into wartime censorship, newsreels were not allowed to be filmed in the ruins of Clydebank. On 18 March the Ministry of Home Security, headed by Herbert Morrison, announced that some 500 people had been killed in the raids on Clydeside. That was less than half the real figure. The inhabitants, who were burying their neighbours and families, received the figures with disbelief. One senior official warned the Secretary of State for Scotland, Tom Johnston, that in Clydebank the official figures were being heard with “open disbelief”.

A year later, on 15 March 1942, the Scottish weekly Sunday Post wrote in an anniversary article of the “1,200 Clydebank people” killed in the two nights of bombing. The article got past the censor and provoked a stormy debate in the town council, while in the House of Commons there were charges that the public had been misled. The authorities did not publish the full figures before the end of the war. The discrepancy between the figure of 528 dead in Clydebank alone, fixed in the official tallies and on the Dalnottar memorial, and the figure of some 1,200 victims across Clydeside is still a source of confusion today: both are true, but they refer to different areas.

Place in the war

The Clydebank raid was the most tragic event of the war in Scotland. Few British towns lost such a large proportion of their homes in the Blitz: for several months Clydebank virtually ceased to exist as a town, although its shipyards and factories kept working. From the German point of view it was another blow at the ports and shipyards that, under Directive No. 23, were to cut the islands off from the Atlantic. That aim was not achieved. John Brown’s yard was quickly back at work, Duke of York was commissioned in the autumn of 1941, and convoys continued to assemble on the Clyde. Two days earlier, on 11 March, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had signed the Lend-Lease Act, which opened America’s arsenals to Britain. Ports such as Glasgow were to receive the supplies shipped from there.

The Luftwaffe returned to the Clyde again in the spring of 1941. On 7 April bombs fell once more on Glasgow and Clydeside, and at the beginning of May, on two successive nights, on Greenock at the mouth of the river, where some 270 people were killed. In April and May Belfast suffered a similar fate, as did Plymouth, Liverpool and Hull. On the night of 10–11 May London endured the last and bloodiest of the great raids. After that most German bomber units were moved east before the attack on the Soviet Union, and the Blitz came to an end.

ORP Piorun returned to convoy duty on 24 March. Two months later, on the night of 26–27 May 1941, she was the first of the destroyers of Captain Philip Vian’s flotilla to make contact with the battleship Bismarck and open fire on her. In Clydebank, however, she is remembered above all as the ship that fired in the town’s defence on the worst night in its history. The town itself was rebuilt over many years after the war, and every year the anniversary of the raids brings its people together at the memorial in Dalnottar cemetery.