Why did clydebank get bombed

Some Scottish towns were central to Britain's war effort and therefore an obvious target. Unfortunately, towns such as Clydebank were not, as some had believed, beyond the range of German bombers, as its inhabitants would learn on 13 March , when more than Luftwaffe bombers were headed for the town. National Records of Scotland.

Map of bomb hits on Jellicoe Street bottom left and other streets in Dalmuir. They lived with their families in crowded tenement buildings built for them to provide cheap and convenient housing near the factories. Clydebank had a long history of industrial conflict, and workers had suffered under terrible working conditions, their families living in poverty in cramped housing. Communism was considered by some a viable alternative to these harsh conditions.

So, for some loyal Communist Party members the war was not a just war against fascism but an imperialist war which ought not be fought. This policy which led to a lot of communists leaving the party lasted until the German invasion of the USSR in June Communist sympathisers were regarded with distrust by their fellow workers and by the Government in London, which had put an Industrial Areas Campaign in place to keep an eye on Communists and to counteract the threat of a potential Communist takeover.

When the Blitz came to Clydebank, bombs rained on a workforce in which some 6, apprentices were engaged in a strike over their working conditions that had already lasted several days. Many found to their peril that stairwells did not protect from a direct bomb strike.

In one instance, 31 people, including 15 members of the Rocks family, died at 78 Jellicoe Street see map, Bomb ; the only family member to survive had worked the night shift at the nearby Royal Ordnance Factory. Or the cellar beneath a Dalmuir pub, where dozens had taken fearful shelter — and then the pub took a direct hit. The authorities did not even bother to recover those bodies, minced beyond any identification; they just poured in quicklime.

For years afterwards, people were still happening on overlooked human remains. Small boys, as late as the s, found skeletons in the ruins of the Ben Bow Hotel. About , an year-old lad at play found one skeletal finger.

It troubled him and, after much thought, he put it in a matchbox and gave it reverent burial. When approached for television interview today, survivors — the mass of them, in , just small children — still marvel how frequently they are asked to share photographs of the kin they lost in the Blitz; how such fatuous researchers still do not get it.

There are no photographs of granny, or Dad, or Jim, or Agnes. Do people not understand that they lost everything in the bombing? Clydebank, in hindsight, had always been an obvious target for the Germans. It was a vital industrial town — surely the only community in Britain actually named after a limited company, and raised by the Clyde Bank Ship Yard only in the s.

By it was home to a rake of shipyards and factories, many central to the war effort, and — critically — of densely packed population, the mass of folk living in tenement-canyons. Many Clydebank folk would love to know why, in March , the town was so poorly defended: why anti-aircraft guns nearby fast ran out of ammunition, why RAF fighters circling overhead were repeatedly denied permission to engage with the enemy.

And why, in contrast to many other bombed British towns, there was so little post-war reconstruction. But most bewildering is the great forgetting. Yet few books about the Blitz even mention the town and its ordeal. But the Blitz iconography engraved in the national consciousness, too, is of the likes of London and Coventry — not least because, at the direction of the laughably named Minister of Information, their blasted streets and indefatigable citizenry were exploited for propaganda purposes.

But its panjandrums censored any mention of Clydebank — and certainly the scale of destruction and loss of life — from the newspapers. There were but vague reports of some bombs on a town in the west of Scotland.

A detailed account of the attack by one survivor was intercepted by the authorities: his letter would not surface till Glasgow suffered the highest number of fatalities about , but in proportion to its population of about 50, the burgh of Clydebank suffered the worst. According to an official count in the Clydebank raids killed people and seriously injured , compared to totals of 1, people, and 1, in the whole of Clydeside.

A report by the Civil Defence Regional Commissioner on 3 April included an assessment of the impact on industrial production on Clydeside. Official assessment of damage to industrial production in Clydebank by Civil Defence Regional Commissioner, 3 April Industrial production was affected by the severe casualties and the evacuation of the town after the raids, causing difficulties in getting the workforce to the workplace.

Immediately after the raids people left in droves. Some found shelter with family or friends in Glasgow and elsewhere, and the authorities evacuated many people in buses and provided them with accommodation in rest centres elsewhere. On 17 March the figure of homeless people who had been given accommodation stood at 11, Distribution of people made homeless by the raids who were evacuated from Clydebank, 17 March