The first Luftwaffe raids on Britain

On 16 October 1939, six weeks after the outbreak of war, German bombers attacked a target on British territory for the first time. Twelve modern Junkers Ju 88s of I Gruppe of Kampfgeschwader 30 (I./KG 30), led by Hauptmann Helmuth Pohle, flew in over the Firth of Forth in eastern Scotland and bombed the warships lying off the Royal Navy base at Rosyth. The Germans hoped to find there the battlecruiser Hood, the largest ship in the British fleet. They did not hit her, but they damaged two cruisers and a destroyer, on which more than a dozen sailors were killed. They paid for it with two aircraft: Supermarine Spitfire fighters shot down the machines of Pohle and his deputy, Oberleutnant Hans Storp, over the firth. These were the first German aircraft brought down over Britain in this war. The following day, 17 October, four Ju 88s of the same Gruppe attacked Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, the fleet’s main base, where they found only the old, disarmed battleship Iron Duke. Damaged by near misses, the ship was beached to prevent her from sinking.

An air war with restrictions

In September 1939 London had widely expected the war to open with massive raids on cities. Before the war British politicians had repeated that “the bomber will always get through”, and civil defence planners had prepared for tens of thousands of casualties in the first weeks. Nothing of the kind happened. Each for its own reasons, both sides waged the air war in the west with restrictions. Adolf Hitler hoped that after defeating Poland he could induce Britain and France to make peace, and he did not want to provoke them needlessly. In response to Roosevelt’s appeal of 1 September both sides gave assurances that they would not bomb civilians, although in Poland the Luftwaffe had broken this principle from the first day. Hitler reserved to himself the decision on attacks against the British Isles, and the instructions issued to the airmen allowed them to strike at warships at sea and in roadsteads, but not at those lying in dockyards or alongside quays, because bombs might kill civilians there.

The British acted in much the same way. RAF bombers flew over Germany dropping leaflets, and the only real attacks, such as the raid on Wilhelmshaven on 4 September, were aimed at Kriegsmarine warships. The air war was therefore fought mainly over the sea. On 26 September German bombers attacked the Home Fleet in the middle of the North Sea, and the only outcome of that clash, the false announcement of the sinking of the Ark Royal, became an embarrassment for Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda.

The turning point came on the night of 13–14 October. The submarine U-47 under Günther Prien broke into Scapa Flow and sank the battleship Royal Oak. The Admiralty concluded that the base in the Orkneys, whose booms and anti-aircraft defences had been neglected, was not safe. The main body of Admiral Charles Forbes’s Home Fleet was moved to Loch Ewe on the west coast of Scotland and to the Clyde estuary, while some ships lay at Rosyth. Encouraged by Prien’s success, the German command decided to find out whether the air force could finish off the dispersed fleet.

Bombers from Sylt

The task was given to I./KG 30. This was the first Luftwaffe unit equipped with the Ju 88, a fast twin-engined bomber capable of dive attacks. The Gruppe, which specialised in anti-shipping operations, was based at Westerland on the island of Sylt, the German airfield nearest to Britain, and came under X Fliegerkorps, then being formed for the war against the British fleet. On the morning of 16 October Heinkel He 111 reconnaissance aircraft of KG 26 flew over the Firth of Forth and reported warships in the firth, probably including the Hood. At around 10.20 a.m. three Spitfires of No. 602 Squadron fired on one of the Heinkels, which escaped into the clouds. These were the first shots fired in air combat over Britain in this war.

At around midday twelve Ju 88s (some sources say fifteen) took off from Westerland in four flights of three. Each carried only two 500-kilogram bombs, as the rest of its load was taken up by fuel for the flight across the North Sea and back. The British radar stations of the Chain Home network detected the approaching aircraft, but a power failure at one of them and confused reporting meant that the defences did not know exactly how many there were or where they were heading. No air-raid warning was sounded. Pohle’s flight, blown north of its planned route by the wind, crossed the coast near Dunbar and flew straight on over the firth.

The attack over the Forth Bridge

At around 2.30 p.m. Pohle was over the famous railway bridge, the Forth Bridge. From a height of several thousand metres he could see that the ship he took for the Hood lay within the Rosyth dockyard and therefore could not be attacked. According to most accounts it was in any case not the Hood but the battlecruiser Repulse, which closely resembled her. Pohle therefore chose ships lying at anchor in open water: two new light cruisers, Southampton and Edinburgh. He dived on Southampton; during the dive the upper part of the cockpit canopy broke away, taking the rear machine gun with it. The bombs, released from a few hundred metres, missed. A few minutes later Storp’s flight attacked. One of its bombs struck Southampton, passed obliquely through three decks and out through the ship’s side, exploding only in the water. The ship suffered minor damage, and Edinburgh was slightly damaged by splinters from near misses.

The worst hit was the destroyer Mohawk, returning to Rosyth from convoy escort duty. Two bombs from one of the last Ju 88s exploded close alongside, and splinters swept her deck. Fifteen men were killed and about thirty wounded. Her mortally wounded captain, Commander Richard Jolly, refused help and remained in command until he had brought the destroyer back to base; he died soon afterwards. He was posthumously awarded the Empire Gallantry Medal, later exchanged for the George Cross. The next day the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, told the House of Commons that three officers and thirteen ratings had been killed or had died of wounds in the whole raid, and that more than forty had been wounded. On land two people were slightly injured, and damage to civilian property was negligible. Passengers on a train that happened to be crossing the Forth Bridge believed the bridge was the target, but the Germans did not attack it.

Spitfires over Edinburgh

The firth was defended by two Spitfire squadrons of the Auxiliary Air Force, the reserve in which local volunteers – lawyers, businessmen and students – flew in peacetime: No. 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron from Drem and No. 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron from Turnhouse near Edinburgh. German intelligence had assured the crews that there were no Spitfires in Scotland, only obsolete Gladiator biplanes. It was a costly mistake.

Spitfires of No. 603 Squadron caught Storp’s flight as it headed away south. His Ju 88, with one engine knocked out and its air gunner killed, tried to reach the open sea but ditched in the firth near Port Seton at around 2.45 p.m. The three wounded airmen were picked up by a fishing boat. At almost the same time three Spitfires of No. 602 Squadron overtook Pohle’s aircraft; he had been circling over Inverkeithing to observe the subsequent attacks and was now making for the sea. Their fire killed two of the crew and stopped both engines. Pohle ditched in the sea not far from Crail in Fife. He was picked up together with a badly wounded airman who died the next day, so that the raid leader was the only member of his crew to survive. There is still a dispute over which of the two squadrons was first; a comparison of the times in the reports tends to favour No. 603. The leaders of the two victorious sections, Flight Lieutenants Patrick Gifford and George Pinkerton, were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

The remaining flights arrived over the firth throughout the afternoon, and the pursuits went on until dusk. One Ju 88 flew low over the centre of Edinburgh pursued by a Spitfire whose pilot held his fire so as not to hit the city; stray rounds nevertheless damaged several buildings and wounded a house painter in Portobello. Chamberlain told Parliament that four bombers had been shot down, but in reality the Germans lost two over Scotland. A third, badly damaged, crashed while making a forced landing in the Netherlands, and its entire crew was killed. The four airmen taken prisoner were treated with respect, and the dead were buried with military honours. Pohle was taken for treatment to the hospital in Edinburgh Castle, and later to the prisoner-of-war camp at Grizedale Hall in the Lake District.

Iron Duke in Scapa Flow

At around 11 a.m. on 17 October four Ju 88s from Sylt arrived over Scapa Flow. After the sinking of Royal Oak there was no longer a fleet in the great anchorage. All that remained was the Iron Duke, Admiral John Jellicoe’s flagship at Jutland, which under the London Naval Treaty of 1930 had been stripped of her armour and most of her guns and converted into a gunnery training ship. In 1939 she served as a depot ship and as flagship of the admiral commanding the defences of the Orkneys and Shetlands, lying at anchor off Lyness on the island of Hoy. Diving out of the sun, the bombers dropped their bombs around her. Two exploded close alongside. The hull, deprived of its former armour, began to take in water, and the ship listed. To keep her from sinking, tugs towed her into the shallows of Ore Bay and beached her. Chamberlain assured the House of Commons that no one had been killed.

This time the anti-aircraft artillery managed to respond. The guns of 226 Heavy Anti-Aircraft Battery, manned by Territorials from Orkney and Caithness, hit one of the Ju 88s, which fell in flames on the island of Hoy. According to local historians it was the first German aircraft of this war to be shot down over British soil by anti-aircraft fire; one of the bombs from this raid, which fell in a field on Hoy, is regarded as the first bomb dropped on British soil. The British believed a second aircraft had been damaged. German aircraft appeared over the Orkneys again later that day, but the second attack brought the Germans no success. Their real target, the Home Fleet, was already far away.

What “first” meant

The raids of 16 and 17 October were the first German attacks on British territory and the first opportunity for the country’s air defences – the radar chain, the posts of the Royal Observer Corps and the fighters – to prove themselves in action. The destruction of the two Ju 88s over the Firth of Forth was the first victory of RAF fighters over Britain, but not the first German aircraft shot down by the British. Earlier, on 26 September, naval airmen had shot down a Dornier Do 18 flying boat over the North Sea, and on 8 October an RAF patrol Hudson had brought down another aircraft of the same type. The claim, found in some publications, that Pohle was the first German prisoner of war in British hands is inaccurate: the crew of the Dornier had been taken prisoner on 26 September. The first German aircraft shot down over the British mainland by RAF fighters is considered to be the Heinkel He 111 that crashed in the hills near Humbie, south of Edinburgh, on 28 October.

Place in the war

Militarily the raids achieved little. No ship was sunk, and the Iron Duke, though resting on the bottom, served until the end of the war as a base and an anti-aircraft gun platform. Their significance, however, was greater. For the British, the victory over the Firth of Forth was the first proof that the air defence system built up since the mid-1930s under Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding worked, and that the volunteers of the reserve squadrons were as effective as regular pilots. It also exposed the system’s weaknesses: gaps in radar coverage, confused reporting and the unreadiness of the anti-aircraft artillery, some of which never opened fire at all. For the Germans it was a sign that attacks on warships in well-defended bases were costly, and that their intelligence had misjudged the British defences.

The attack on Scapa Flow, a day after the sinking of Royal Oak, confirmed that the fleet’s main base was unusable until it had been fortified. Throughout the winter the Home Fleet wandered from one loch to another on the west coast of Scotland, where it was not safe either, while Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, pressed for the defences of the Orkneys to be built up: new anti-aircraft batteries, a fighter airfield, booms and sunken blockships, and later permanent causeways linking the islands, named after him the Churchill Barriers. The fleet returned to Scapa Flow only in March 1940. On 16 March 1940 another raid on the base damaged the cruiser Norfolk and killed the first British civilian to die from German bombs on British soil.

The real air war over Britain began in the summer of 1940, after the fall of France. In the Battle of Britain Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe tried for several months to destroy the RAF, and then through the winter of 1940–1941 bombed British cities. The Spitfires and the fighter control system that had first passed their test over the Firth of Forth on 16 October 1939 played a decisive part in it. The Ju 88s of KG 30 fought on against British warships – in Norway in April 1940, at Dunkirk and over the Arctic convoys. Pohle spent the rest of the war as a prisoner.