THE CLYDEBANK BLITZ
“You know, Clydebank was a really beautiful wee place…the terraces and the red sandstone buildings… all the shops… the big schools… and we even had our own little police station separate from the main one… everybody knew everybody and were a real part of the community… people were much closer then… you felt really safe”.
Clydebank 1941
The Clydebank Blitz could not be least described in a single story. It is thousands of tragic experiences bonded together by a single catastrophic event and like all things which entail human activity it is complex.Through lessons learned elsewhere, Clydeside by 1941 had prepared itself comparatively well to undergo aerial attack.
No one however could have predicted that in the first brutal onslaught the Luftwaffe would dump the bulk of its destructive load on the small industrial town of Clydebank. All who inhabited this small Clydeside town were effected by it’s wide spread ferocity. Terror, pain, grief, loss and breathtaking bravery were all to be experienced on those two dreadful nights. Above all things, this is a story of humanity which belongs to the blitz generation.
As the sirens faded, the night air filled with the drone of laden bombers and the screams of descending bombs. Thousands upon thousands of incendiaries rained down and as the darkness fell, Clydebank began to burn.
“I heard the siren and we ran from the hospital to get to the shelter ... it was like daylight ... they were dropping flares ... I couldn’t believe it ... they were so low I could see the crosses on their wings ... and the noise . . . I’ve never seen so many aeroplanes. They passed overhead and within minutes we could see the red glow above Clydebank”.“
The bombers had a strange vibrating drone that seemed to come and fade, come and fade almost as if their engines were going to cut out ... they came in waves ... you would hear the bombs dropping ... then the drone would fade away ... you could hear them coming from miles away and your heart would sink”.
“I wouldn’t have believed that the sound of an aeroplane would put the fear of death into you”.
Ablaze, beneath a full moon, the target was marked. Beckoned by the inferno on through the night, wave after wave of bombers dumped their heavy loads of high explosive and incendiaries into the conflagration below.It was in this environment of blast and fire that the citizens off Clydebank were to meet their death, or suffer mutilation. Or by some miracle escape the random destruction unscathed.
Such was the intensity of the raid that the organized services were soon overwhelmed. Communications badly interrupted by direct hit on the control centre, fire-fighting and rescue units toiled independently. A bomb, leaving a crater 30 feet wide by 20 feet deep, severed the town water main in the early hours of the raid cutting fire-fighting supplies.
Immediate rescue and assistance by outside organization were made impossible by craters in roads and collapsed buildings.
“Five minutes after the siren ... every ambulance in the depot had been called out ... then they started to come in ... the injured and dead ... all night ... a constant stream of injured and dead
“There were firemen slumped on the road ... buildings on both sides of them were blazing and crumbling ... they had run a hose all the way to the canal because the mains had gone ... the hoses were gashed from being dragged over broken glass and rubble ... water was pouring all over their legs ... some of them had been injured ... they could hardly move ... I have never seen such dirty or tired men”
What I’ll never forget as long as I live was the noise and the screams and cries when I was taken to the First-Aid post….This was something you couldn’t believe ... the screams were terrible ... people had lost arms and legs ... some people were doing what they could to help but it was just too much for them”.
“Oh ... what a catalogue of injuries ... people broken, smashed and burned ... and others dead without so much as a scratch on their bodies ... killed by blast
They brought in this fireman ... he had been injured by flying debris and his arm was split to the bone from wrist to elbow ... they patched him up with what was available ... it looked as if he had lost a lot of blood ... he was really grimy and exhausted ... after about twenty minutes he got up from the stretcher mumbled something about ‘being no bloody use lying here”… and went back to rejoin his unit ... where that man found the strength..... God only knows”.
We were so tired that we couldn’t carry the casualties up the corridor ... we laid them at the door ... there was this wee boy crying for his mum and dad ... he died ... we heard this noise ... it was like an express train coming out of a tunnel. It hit the wall in the middle of the corridor ... I thought ... this is it ... there was a roar and we were all blasted into the air ... I looked up and saw the corridor walls caving in . . . ‘I hope it stops, stop, for God’s sake!’ I kept saying to myself ... it did ... just a few feet from the casualties. Later we went outside ... all that was left of the ambulances were bare chassis. We were all badly shaken ... it was a miracle nobody was killed”.
“Two of us never made it to the shelter because we had to cover all the children’s cots with big sheets to protect them ... after we had finished we sat in the corridor with a sheet over our heads ... we were too terrified to talk ... we could hear the noise of the bombers droning overhead ... we were really frightened ... we couldn’t even cry ... we heard a bomb coming down ... I thought I was going to die ... it blasted and roared ... the noise was horrible ... windows were smashing, doors were blasted off and we were thrown about ... the roof caved in and we could hardly breathe ... I remember feeling all numb ... I thought I was dead ... everything became very quiet ... there was not even a whimper from the childen ... I thought they had all been killed ... you would hardly believe it ... the hospital was like a smashed dolls house ... the roof had been ripped off ... the windows and doors had been blasted in ... the ceilings were down all over the cots ... the children had been saved because they were covered ... it really was a miracle that those covers had taken all that weight”.
“We were in the ladies’ hall downstairs ... the close had been fixed up with struts as a kind of shelter...I had my sisters baby in my arms ... we could hear bombs all around ... you could see glowing red from the houses on fire ... it sounded as if every bomb was coming at you ... then it seemed to whoosh away and you’d hear the explosion and feel the shake. About two o’clock in the morning we heard this one come down ... it was different ... it seemed to take a long time ... we were terrified and were praying ... I lifted the lid of the coal bunker and threw the baby in ... at least she’ll be saved I remember thinking ... this thing kept coming ... then it seemed to stop ... there was a massive explosion ...we were thrown all over the place by the blast… I thought we had all been killed we couldn’t breathe and the dust and dirt filled the air ... doors were blown off, floors ripped up and the tenement smashed. The shelter in the street had got a direct hit ...we were all trapped… it was six o’clock in the morning before they managed to get us out”.
“I saw a little girl standing at an upstairs window ... she was about seven years of age ... the house was blazing ... up until that moment I had been doing things ... helping ... there was no way I could get to her ... the roof caved in and she disappeared ... seeing that, changed my whole life ... I became so bitter ... it still hurts to think of it”.
“I was sitting in the shelter, playing cards with my two pals ... my mother and father were sitting on each side of the door with my brother in the middle facing me ... it was a great shelter ... three joined together at the back of the house ... we had a charcoal fire ... it was really comfy ... we never heard it coming down ... you would think you’d feel yourself being blasted about ... it was as if I was the centre of everything ... I was still; everything else was moving around me like a whirlpool ... I remember it so clearly ... I felt the wall on my back ... saw my brother being blasted through the door ... my pals ... blasted to bits... the concrete roof caved in smashing into my mothers chest ... crushing my father ... the screams .......I was sucked down as if I was looking through a telescope ... I felt numb ... I was crying for help ... but nobody seemed to hear. ‘I was buried ... with a fire beneath me ... and my dead friends on top of me ... the shelter was lying on top of us ... I could feel the rescue people walking above... they took away the injured and it was only when they came back to take away the bodies of my friends that they discovered me beneath ... I was buried for 81/2 hours down the side of the bomb crater ... I was paralysed from the waist down ... my mother was killed ... my friends were killed ... my father and brother survived ... all the other people in the adjoining shelters were killed”.
“I can only remember little bits of what happened ... I was unconscious for most of it ... I remember going into the shelter ... I was terrified ... the raid seemed to be going on for so long ... I was about twenty years of age at the time ... I remember the smell from my brothers hair cream, it was annoying me ... then being blasted about ... the rescue men were digging us out ... I couldn’t see anything but I heard somebody saying ‘come on’ . . . ‘I can’t. I’m stuck I said ... the rest is what people told me ... both people were killed on each side of me and each side of my brother, who was unharmed … I had a child on my knee ... she was blasted to pieces...... I had a fractured skull and a list of other injuries ... too many to go into ... I had taken most of the blast on my head...if you look carefully you can still see the grit and dust blasted into one side of my face...like a faint tattoo … I was in hospital for months and they thought I was going to be blind for life ... it was long and slow but I got my sight back ... a lot of people were killed by that bomb ....... I was really lucky”.