The Swansea Three Nights’ Blitz

On the evening of 19 February 1941, shortly after 7.30 p.m., the first bombs fell on the snow-covered streets of Swansea in south Wales. It was the beginning of the raids that the townspeople would later call the “Three Nights’ Blitz”. German bombers returned over the town on 20 and 21 February as well. In all, for almost fourteen hours, they dropped high-explosive bombs and tens of thousands of incendiaries on Swansea. About 230 people were killed, several hundred were injured and some 7,000 were left homeless. Fire consumed almost the whole of the old town centre: shops and department stores, the market hall, churches and schools. It was the heaviest bombing Wales suffered during the war, and the poet Dylan Thomas, who walked through the smouldering ruins of his home town the next day, told a friend: “Our Swansea is dead.”

A port of coal, copper and oil

Swansea, which lies on the bay of the same name on the northern shore of the Bristol Channel, was one of the largest towns and ports in Wales. In the nineteenth century so much copper was smelted there that the town was nicknamed “Copperopolis”, and a large share of the world’s exports of the metal passed through its docks. By the early twentieth century its export trade rested on Welsh coal and on tinplate from the surrounding rolling mills. A chain of docks stretched along the east bank of the River Tawe: the Prince of Wales Dock, opened in 1881, the great King’s Dock of 1909, and the Queen’s Dock of 1920, built to handle crude oil. A few miles away, at Llandarcy near Neath, stood Britain’s first oil refinery, opened in 1921 by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (Anglo-Iranian from 1935, later BP). Its crude oil was brought in by tankers that unloaded at the Queen’s Dock.

The port, the fuel tanks and the refinery made Swansea a military target as both sides understood the term. After the fall of France the town came within range of bombers flying from airfields in Brittany and Normandy. The first bombs fell on the Danygraig district on the night of 27 June 1940, and on 10 July German aircraft attacked the docks and the refinery in daylight. The heaviest raid of 1940, on the night of 1–2 September, killed 33 people. That same night incendiaries set fire to the tanks at Llandarcy; according to local historians seven tanks were ablaze, and smoke from the refinery drifted as far as Cardiff. On 17 January 1941, according to German records, 88 bombers came over Swansea. Fifty-five people were killed, and the bombs destroyed much of the residential and shopping districts.

Swansea was not defenceless. The town was protected by the heavy anti-aircraft guns of the 79th (Hertfordshire Yeomanry) Regiment, Royal Artillery, by searchlights, barrage balloons and night fighters from RAF Pembrey. Under the Air Raid Precautions Act of 1937 the borough council had built communal shelters, requisitioned cellars, issued corrugated-steel Anderson shelters to families with gardens, and organised rescue squads, a fire service with trailer pumps and a network of wardens – the volunteer air-raid wardens of the civil defence.

The Blitz in the winter of 1940–1941

In the winter of 1940–1941 the Blitz changed its character. After the autumn raids on London and the destruction of Coventry, Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe turned more and more to the ports through which Britain imported food, fuel and arms. In November and December Southampton and Liverpool burned, as did Bristol. On 2 January 1941 more than a hundred bombers attacked Cardiff, Swansea’s neighbour and the other great coal port of Wales, for ten hours. There 165 people were killed and more than 400 injured, and the bombs damaged Llandaff Cathedral. On the night of 3–4 January Bristol endured the longest raid in its history, lasting twelve hours. That night the largest bomb the Germans ever dropped on the city came down on it: an unexploded device weighing about two tonnes, which the bomb-disposal men nicknamed “Satan”. On the night of 10–11 January fire gutted the centre of Portsmouth, and the following night in London a bomb killed dozens of people at Bank Underground station.

Frost, fog and snowstorms, however, often grounded the German bombers, and units worn out by six months of raiding were sent back to rest and re-equip. According to figures cited by historians, in January and February 1941 the Luftwaffe had little more than 550 of its over 1,200 bombers ready for operations. On 6 February Adolf Hitler signed Directive No. 23, which made cutting Britain off from its seaborne supplies the main aim of the air and sea war. The bombers were to attack ports, docks, warehouses and ships, while raids on industrial centres inland were relegated to second place. The ports of western Britain, which received the convoys from America, went to the top of the target list. Swansea was especially suited to such attacks: it lay on the sea, was easy to find even at night, and was not far from the airfields of Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3 in north-western France, with most of the route lying over water. German aerial photographs taken on 15 February 1941 marked the docks, the tankers moored in them, the fuel tanks in the port and at Llandarcy, the railway sidings and an anti-aircraft battery by the River Neath.

The first night, 19 February

Wednesday 19 February was bitterly cold, and a thin layer of snow covered the town. At about 7.30 p.m. the warden Laurie Latchford, whose wartime diary is among the most important records of those days, recognised overhead the distinctive throbbing drone of German bomber engines. Moments later flares came down, followed by the first stick of high-explosive bombs and incendiaries. The incendiaries were dropped in containers that opened above the ground and scattered dozens of bombs over a small area, so that the firemen could not put out all the fires at once. One local account records that houses “melted like hot butter”.

On the first night a bomb hit the building that housed the headquarters of the 79th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment and the Gun Operations Room that directed the whole of Swansea’s anti-aircraft defence. Two officers and five other ranks were killed. The guns did not fall silent, since the batteries switched to independent fire control and communications were kept open, but the defences had lost the centre that coordinated the guns with the searchlights and the night fighters. Fire engines and rescue squads went from fire to fire until late into the night.

The second night, 20 February

The bombers came back the following evening. That night the worst damage was done to the residential districts on the hills above the town centre: Mayhill, Mount Pleasant, Cwmbwrla and Manselton. Mayhill suffered the heaviest loss of life. In Teilo Crescent the bombs destroyed fourteen houses. Twenty-four residents were killed, together with six firemen and civil defence workers who were fighting the fires. According to residents’ recollections the water mains ran dry, so the men filled buckets from the baths in neighbouring houses and passed them from hand to hand. According to the same accounts a high-explosive bomb fell right next to a fire engine and the chain of people with buckets. In the area around Teilo Crescent as a whole 38 people died that night. It was the greatest single loss of civilian life in the entire history of the air raids on Swansea.

The third night, 21 February

On the last night the sirens sounded at 7.50 p.m., and the raid lasted about five hours. It began with a misunderstanding that cost the town dearly. The sector fighter control room at RAF Pembrey and the makeshift gun operations room in Swansea misunderstood each other. The guns ceased fire, as was the practice when night fighters were due to operate over the town, and stayed silent from 8.20 to 9.10 p.m. But the fighters never came. For almost an hour German bombers circled over the town centre almost unhindered. Latchford headed his entry for that day “The Drowning Wave”. He described wave after wave of aircraft: first parachute flares, then incendiaries, and finally high-explosive bombs that smashed walls and water mains.

The town centre went up in flames. That night Ben Evans, the department store that was the town’s pride, burned down. The Victorian market hall with its glass roof was reduced to a tangle of twisted girders. Over the three nights, and above all on the last, St Mary’s parish church, the Methodist Wesley Chapel, the Kardomah café where the town’s young artists had gathered before the war, and most of the shops in Castle Street, High Street, Oxford Street and Temple Street were also destroyed. A direct hit left Swansea Grammar School on Mount Pleasant hill, which Dylan Thomas had attended, a burnt-out shell. The school of printing in Rutland Street, opened only a year earlier, was also gutted. Fires and delayed-action bombs cut the telephone lines. Over the three nights the fire service answered more than 170 calls. The glow was seen in Llanelli, in Fishguard in Pembrokeshire and, according to Welsh accounts, even on the far side of the Bristol Channel, in Devon and Cornwall. Fifteen-year-old Richard Jenkins from nearby Port Talbot, the future actor Richard Burton, noted in his diary that Swansea was “burning”.

The toll of the three nights

British records logged a total of almost fourteen hours of enemy air activity over Swansea across the three nights. Sources differ on how many bombs fell on the town. According to J. R. Alban’s study The Three Nights’ Blitz, published by Swansea City Council in 1994, there were 1,273 high-explosive bombs and some 56,000 incendiaries. Other frequently cited figures speak of about 800 high-explosive bombs and 30,000 incendiaries. All agree, however, that most of the bombs fell not on the docks and fuel tanks but on the town centre and the residential districts. Fire and blast destroyed a compact area of the old centre covering about 41 acres, just under 17 hectares. According to the Neath Antiquarian Society, during those days bombs also fell on the tanks of the Llandarcy refinery and set them alight again, but the refinery kept working.

According to the council’s figures 230 people were killed. Among the victims were 122 men, 68 women and 37 children, which makes 227, and some Welsh sources give that figure for the dead. About 400 were injured – between 391 and 409, depending on the tally – 254 of them seriously. Some 282 houses and 575 commercial premises were destroyed, and more than 11,000 other buildings were damaged. Around 7,000 people were made homeless. Local historians attribute the relatively low death toll, given the weight of bombs, above all to the Anderson shelters in back gardens and to the communal shelters. According to British accounts, on the third night, once they had resumed firing, the anti-aircraft guns shot down several German bombers.

On 22 February the townspeople saw a town that no longer existed. Dylan Thomas, who was in Swansea at the time, came with his wife Caitlin to the ruins of the centre and met his friend Bert Trick, who was then serving as a warden. “Bert, our Swansea is dead,” he said, according to Trick’s recollection. Six years later Thomas captured the Swansea of before the war in his radio feature Return Journey for the BBC, listing the names of the shops and cafés that had vanished in three nights. The local painter Will Evans, who lived on Mount Pleasant hill and could see the whole town centre from his windows, painted a series of watercolours of the ruins, exhibited after the war at the Glynn Vivian gallery.

In March 1941 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited the town. The visit was kept secret, and the royal couple viewed the ruins from a terrace by Milton Terrace on the hillside above the centre. Later Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was then touring one bombed town after another to show that the government stood by their people, stood on the same spot.

Place in the war

Swansea was one of the first towns the Luftwaffe struck on several nights in succession in order to destroy it completely before it could recover. British studies of air defence even regard Swansea as the first target of this tactic. In the spring of 1941 the Germans applied it to one port after another: in March to Clydebank near Glasgow, in March and April to Plymouth, in April and May to Belfast, and at the beginning of May, for a whole week, to Liverpool. Bombs continued to fall on Swansea in 1941 and 1942, in a dozen or so smaller raids. The last, on 16 February 1943, killed 34 people. According to different tallies the town suffered between 40 and 44 raids over the whole war.

The bombing did not achieve the purpose it was meant to serve. The docks and the refinery went on working, and the population did not call for peace. But the town lost its historic heart. The centre was rebuilt only after the war, in the 1940s and 1950s, to a new plan, with the broad Kingsway and modern buildings, while St Mary’s Church and the market hall were built anew. The three nights of February 1941 remained in Welsh memory as the hardest ordeal their country went through in the war.

For the Blitz as a whole it was only the beginning of the last, spring wave. In March and April the Luftwaffe returned in great strength over London, and on the night of 10–11 May it carried out the bloodiest raid of the whole war on the British capital. After that most of the German bomber units were moved east ahead of the attack on the Soviet Union. The offensive that had been meant to break Britain from September 1940 onwards cost the lives of more than 40,000 civilians, but it neither halted British war production nor cut the islands off from their supplies from across the ocean.