The Scapa Flow raid and the first civilian death

At dusk on the evening of 16 March 1940 German bombers attacked Scapa Flow in Orkney, the main base of the British Home Fleet, to which the fleet had returned only a week earlier. Junkers Ju 88s dived on the ships lying at anchor, while Heinkel He 111s bombed the airfields on the islands. One bomb hit the heavy cruiser HMS Norfolk and killed four of her crew. The greatest stir, however, was caused by bombs that fell far from any ship: on a handful of houses at the hamlet of Brig o’ Waithe, in the parish of Stenness on Mainland, the largest of the Orkney islands. There 27-year-old James Isbister, an employee of Orkney County Council, was killed. He was the first British civilian to be killed on British soil by German bombs in this war. Three days later the British government retaliated: on the night of 19–20 March RAF bombers attacked the German seaplane base at Hörnum on the island of Sylt. These were the first RAF bombs aimed at a target on German land, and the dispute over what they had actually destroyed dragged on for weeks.

The fleet returns to Orkney

All winter Scapa Flow had stood almost empty. After U-47 sank the battleship Royal Oak there on the night of 13–14 October 1939, and a few days later German bombers damaged the old Iron Duke in the anchorage, the Admiralty judged the base unsafe. The main body of Admiral Charles Forbes’s Home Fleet used the lochs of western Scotland, where it was not safe either: on 4 December the battleship Nelson was badly damaged by a mine in Loch Ewe. Meanwhile in Orkney new blockships were sunk in the sounds, booms were laid, anti-aircraft batteries were brought in and the airfields were enlarged, among them the Fleet Air Arm station at Hatston near Kirkwall. On the orders of Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, work began on permanent causeways closing the eastern entrances to the anchorage, later known as the Churchill Barriers.

At the beginning of March 1940 the Admiralty decided that the base was ready. It first tested it with decoys: converted merchant ships disguised as the battleships Revenge and Resolution were anchored in the Flow. On 7 March the battleship Valiant and the battlecruiser Hood entered Scapa Flow, followed on 8 and 9 March by Forbes’s flagship, the battleship Rodney, with the battlecruisers Renown and Repulse. German air reconnaissance quickly detected the fleet’s return. For the command of Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe, whose X Air Corps (X. Fliegerkorps) was earmarked for the war against the Royal Navy, this was an invitation to repeat October’s attack, this time on a larger scale.

The evening of 16 March

The attack was carried out by Junkers Ju 88 dive bombers of Kampfgeschwader 30 (KG 30), the same unit that had attacked the Firth of Forth and Scapa Flow in October, and by Heinkel He 111s of Kampfgeschwader 26 (KG 26). The aircraft flew some 900 kilometres across the North Sea. The number of machines is variously given: British reports at the time spoke of a dozen or so bombers that reached the target (about 14), while later studies write of more than thirty aircraft from the two units. The attack began at about 7.50 p.m. local time, in the fading daylight, and lasted roughly an hour. The Ju 88s dived on the ships and the He 111s bombed the airfields, above all Hatston. The anti-aircraft defences put up a barrage, but the batteries had equipment problems and the gathering darkness made aiming difficult. RAF fighters took off from northern Scotland.

At 7.59 p.m. a bomb dropped by a Ju 88 (a 250-kilogram bomb according to most accounts) hit Norfolk, a County-class heavy cruiser, on the quarterdeck next to Y turret. It went through three decks and exploded near the shell room of that turret, blowing a hole in the starboard side below the waterline. Water flooded the magazines of X and Y turrets, which removed the danger of an explosion. Four men were killed: a warrant engineer of the Royal Naval Reserve and three midshipmen, one of them a paymaster midshipman. The number of wounded is given in various lists as between six and ten. Two bombs exploded astern of Rodney without doing her any harm, and three fell close to the old Iron Duke, which had been lying beached in the shallows since October. According to the Admiralty’s record, no other ship suffered any serious damage. On 19 March Norfolk sailed under her own power for a shipyard on the Clyde, and she rejoined the fleet at the end of June 1940.

Brig o’ Waithe

Some of the bombs fell far from the anchorage. One Ju 88, fleeing from the fighters, jettisoned its load over Stenness, between Kirkwall and Stromness, near the bridge over the Waithe (Brig o’ Waithe; in some publications Bridge of Waithe or Bridge of Waith), where there was no military installation of any kind. According to various accounts, between 19 and 22 high-explosive bombs fell. They damaged cottages and the road. James Isbister, who lived there with his wife Lily and their baby son Neil, had gone out of his house to help a neighbour when a bomb exploded nearby. He was killed by splinters. The house across the road was destroyed and its occupant, Isabella McLeod, was injured. Several other civilians were wounded as well – seven in all, according to some sources.

Isbister’s death has ever since been cited as the first time a German bomb killed a civilian in the British Isles. The claim needs some precision. German aircraft had already killed British civilians at sea: the crews of fishing boats, merchant ships and lightships attacked in the North Sea from the autumn of 1939. The first bombs had fallen on British soil as early as October and November 1939, in Orkney and Shetland, but had killed no one. Isbister was therefore the first civilian killed in an air raid on British land. Bombs dropped by the belligerents’ air forces had, moreover, killed civilians in western Europe even earlier: on 4 September 1939 a stray British bomber killed a woman in Esbjerg in neutral Denmark.

The dispute over the scale of the raid

The German command proclaimed a great victory. The High Command communiqué spoke of damage to at least three battleships, a cruiser and two other vessels, and the press listed Hood, Repulse and Renown among the ships hit. The British replied that only one ship had been hit. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke about the raid in the House of Commons on 19 March, during a debate on the conduct of the war and on the Finnish–Soviet peace. He called it “a very unimportant affair” and a failed attack on the fleet: no more than 20 bombs, he claimed, had fallen on the anchorage itself, and the damaged ship was not a capital ship. He drew attention, however, to a new feature of this raid. For the first time, he said, the Germans had attacked the land: 121 high-explosive and some 500 incendiary bombs had fallen over an area of more than a hundred square miles, and among the civilians there were wounded and one dead. The Germans claimed they had been bombing military targets. Chamberlain replied that whatever the intentions, those were the facts, and the responsibility lay with those who had done it. The next day Churchill called the attack “petty and ill-aimed” and remarked that the Germans’ eagerness to present it as a great military event was telling.

The British press, however, reacted differently from the government. That German bombs were hitting British homes while the RAF had for six months been dropping mainly leaflets over Germany aroused anger and demands for a response. The War Cabinet agreed to retaliate, but carefully: against a strictly military target connected with the war at sea and far from any large centre of population.

Reprisal on Sylt

The choice fell on Hörnum, the seaplane base at the southern tip of Sylt, the largest of the North Frisian Islands, close to the Danish border. From here German seaplanes took off to lay mines off the British coast and attack shipping. On the night of 19–20 March 30 Armstrong Whitworth Whitley and 20 Handley Page Hampden bombers flew out to the island. It was one of the largest operations so far by RAF Bomber Command. The aircraft arrived singly and in small groups from about 8 p.m. until the early hours of the morning, by moonlight that was later obscured by cloud. Some forty crews reported that they had bombed the target. One Whitley failed to return.

While the raid was still in progress, at 10.18 p.m., Chamberlain, winding up the debate in the House of Commons, announced that the RAF had “attacked and seriously damaged” the base at Hörnum, adding that the attack was still going on. The next day the Secretary of State for Air, Kingsley Wood, answering a question from Clement Attlee, and in the House of Lords the Minister for Coordination of Defence, Lord Chatfield, read out the same communiqué. It spoke of six hours of continuous attacks, by a force “more than twice as large” as the German one over Orkney, of direct hits on hangars that were left burning, of fires in fuel tanks, and of hits on the jetty, the narrow-gauge railway and other parts of the base. The opposition congratulated the airmen. Lord Strabolgi calculated that more bombs had fallen on Sylt than on London in all the raids of the First World War.

This picture soon began to crumble. Photographs taken in the following days by Bristol Blenheim reconnaissance aircraft showed only slight damage, and the Air Ministry refused to publish them, explaining that they were of too poor a quality to assess the results. The Germans made their own propaganda out of the raid. They took American correspondents to the island, who described the hangars as untouched. The damage they saw was to a sick-bay building and a storehouse, and the bomb craters they found were mostly outside the base. According to the German press, quoted ironically by British newspapers, the total damage amounted to £97: the roof of one house, a shooting range and some broken windows. Danes on the neighbouring island of Rømø spoke of a “firework display”, dozens of explosions and one aircraft that went down in flames. The truth probably lay closer to the German version than to Kingsley Wood’s communiqué. Night bombing of a small target from altitude, with poor navigation and primitive bombsights, could not have produced the destruction reported by the crews, who were sincerely convinced that they had hit it.

“Firsts” on both sides

Both raids went down in history as turning points, although their military effects were modest. Over Orkney, for the first time in this war, German bombs killed a civilian on British soil. Over Sylt the RAF for the first time struck a target on German land. Earlier British raids, from the attack on Wilhelmshaven on 4 September 1939 to the air battle of the Heligoland Bight in December, had been aimed solely at warships, while the bombers that flew over Germany by night dropped leaflets. These restrictions stemmed from the undertakings given in response to Franklin Roosevelt’s appeal of 1 September 1939 and from fear of reprisals against British cities. In March 1940 both sides still observed them, but already in a tit-for-tat logic: a German attack on land met with a British response on land, carefully aimed at a military target.

The dispute over Hörnum was also the first public sign of a problem that was to weigh on Bomber Command for years to come. The crews sincerely believed they were hitting their targets, and the command took their reports at face value until they began to be systematically checked against photographs.

Place in the war

In military terms 16 March changed little. The Home Fleet stayed at Scapa Flow, and further German raids on the base in April 1940 brought the Germans no greater success. At the beginning of April it was from Orkney that the ships sailed which were to take part in the Norwegian campaign. Norfolk, repaired in the summer of 1940, was in May 1941 one of the two heavy cruisers that shadowed the battleship Bismarck in the Denmark Strait, and she took part in her sinking; in December 1943 she fought in the battle in which Scharnhorst was sunk.

Of greater significance was the course of events on 16 and 19 March itself. The restraints on the air war, observed in the west since September 1939 (in Poland the Luftwaffe had broken them from the first day), began to crumble as each side justified its attacks as reprisals for the enemy’s. After the German offensive in the west and the bombing of Rotterdam on 14 May 1940, the British War Cabinet authorised raids on industrial targets in the Ruhr. In the summer of 1940 the Battle of Britain was fought over Britain, and from September the Luftwaffe bombed London and other cities. James Isbister, killed outside his home in Orkney, was the first of more than 40,000 British civilians killed in German air raids up to May 1941; by the end of the war more than 60,000 had died in air raids and rocket attacks. The raid on Hörnum, with its exaggerated communiqués, was in turn the modest beginning of the bombing of Germany, which in 1942–1945 reduced most German cities to rubble.