[BITList] Clydebank blitz

[HUGH]

Mike,

Clydebank is one of the places in the UK that usually come under the "and other towns" heading, when the history of the bombing of the UK is discussed.  When a book on the Clydebank Blitz, 13th and 14th March, 1941, was offered to the Imperial War Museum, it was rejected on the grounds that they already had enough such accounts. Of 35,000 houses, only a handful were left intact.  Ironically, the shipyards, which one assumes were the real targets, suffered comparatively little damage.



I saw the red glow in the sky over the town from Port Glasgow, across the river and about 12 miles west - we children spent as much time outside the shelters as we did inside them. I remember the adults discussing what the glow meant.



Our geographical position further west, tucked into a long narrow shelf between steep hills and river, saved us from major damage and loss of life, though that was small comfort to the few hundred who did die. The window of opportunity for the bomb aimers here was very small indeed, and most bombs landed in the river or on the hills.  Though the whole area was bombed, our blitz is usually called the Greenock Blitz, 7th and 8th May, 1941, and Greenock did sustain most of the damage.  As in Clydebank, the shipyards were hardly touched - not so the distillery and the sugar houses, but they were not beside the river.



Despite the concentration of industry, and the Tail o' the Bank anchorage almost permanently full of warships and convoys, it may be that the profit in bombing us wasn't worth the loss, for there were no further mass raids here.  And the German Naval High Command banned U-Boats from entering the Clyde after 2 were lost.



Hugh.
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