Clydebank Blitz

I was sitting in the living room with my dad and my brother.

My dad was reading the papers, my mum was next door at a neighbour.

We'd been at school and out playing, and then came up and my brother and I were getting ready for bed.

The nine o'clock news was on the radio.

I turned the wireless on to hear the news, and the sirens went.

You could hear a sort of low whine.

In the spring of 1941, the town of Clydebank experienced Scotland's biggest civilian loss of life.

All the windows fell in,

the balcony started to collapse.

On the 13th and 14th of March, almost 1,000 tonnes of explosives

and incendiaries were dropped on and around the town.

Over 1,200 people were killed, another thousand were seriously

injured and 50,000 people were left homeless.

The refugees came streaming up the road dragging what precious belongings they could save.

And headed for the hills.

Despite the enormous scale of the disaster, the truth about the raid never hit the headlines.

There was a lot of blood, a lot of quite ugly scenes which was...

not very nice.

But the story of one of the most intense and deadly bombing raid

in wartime Britain lives on in the minds of the children that survived.

I'm only a boy of nine. I didn't really understand war.

I didn't really think that people got killed and got blown to pieces and never ever came back again.

I never ever thought that way at all. War didnae matter.

It didn't matter. I didn't understand it.

Until 13th March.

At the beginning of 1941, the war seemed a long way from the west of Scotland.

The battle of Britain and the German bombing campaign that followed it had mostly happened in England,

and the war had brought a lot of extra work to Clydebank.

The town was, in fact, booming.

A trip down the Clyde affords the truest evidence.

At every yard are ships being built to the cheerful sound of riveting.

Sitting seven miles down the River Clyde from Glasgow, Clydebank was bursting with war orders.

At John Brown's shipyard they were building and repairing warships, and

at several other factories they were making munitions, especially at the huge Singer sewing machine works.

John Brown's, Beardmore's, ROF, Singer had turned to munitions.

They were making tank tracks, stain guns, bullets, millions

of bullets, millions of fuses, anything to help the war effort.

Everybody was employed, every factory was working round the clock,

and of course, you know, the pubs would have been exactly the same, and the shops and commerce.

So it's this odd kind of black irony, that you know,

it's happy times in Clydebank, albeit the world is at war

and jackboots are storming across Europe.

But the war-work that made Clydebank so busy also made it a prime target for a German bombing raid.

Eastern Scotland had been almost continuously harassed by German

bombers since the beginning of the war, but the massive bombing raids

that became known as the Blitz were most largely felt in cities like London and Coventry.

The King has been to see how the people of Coventry were carrying on after their terrible ordeal.

These cities were held up as examples of the "Blitz spirit"

but in reality the raids only underlined how vulnerable Britain was to intense aerial bombardment.

And in March 1941, a new German bombing campaign began.

On Saturday 8th March, London was the target,

on Sunday and Monday nights Portsmouth was badly hit.

Birmingham was attacked on Tuesday,

and on Wednesday, Liverpool.

Now, on Thursday 13th March, 236 Junker and Heinkel bombers were

being prepared in German-occupied Europe, for their next and biggest raid of the campaign so far.

The key military objectives had been clearly identified from aerial photographs and

the place they planned to attack was almost at the limit of their range.

It was a Scottish target they had codenamed "Gregor" -

the industrial town of Clydebank.

Clydebank was riddled with military targets.

The most important was the huge Admiralty Oil depot on the western edge of the town.

Further up river lay plenty more targets.

The Royal Ordnance Factory, or ROF, was making armaments at Dalmuir.

Part of the Beardmore shipyard next door had been taken over for

war work by their old rival and neighbour, John Brown's.

Most famous for building the transatlantic liners

Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, it was now building battleships.

The largest target was the Singer's complex of factories, sidings and

wood yards, almost entirely turned over to the making of munitions.

And all around lay more targets, including railway lines, docks and scores of smaller factories.

Surrounding them, 12,000 overcrowded homes.

The population of Clydebank was about 55,000. It is a small area.

Already, it was packed.

In Dalmuir, in the west of Clydebank, Brendan Kelly lived with his family

in one of the many tenements originally built by the Beardmore shipyard.

There was my mother and father.

One, two, three, four,

five brothers.

Three sis... four sisters. Nine. 11.

Counting my mother and father.

And it was a two room and kitchen.

Isa Mackenzie stayed in a tenement in Bannerman street, close to the Singer works.

There was my mum, my dad, my twin brother and myself.

In this room and kitchen and WC on the top floor of a tenement building.

Charles Grozier had only just moved from a crowded tenement

to a recently completed house at Park Hall, in the north of the town.

It was a brand new house.

A bathroom, a toilet, a bath,

two bedrooms, a living room, a hall and a kitchen.

Plus the big garden at the back.

Up above me was Granda Swan,

and his son, and his daughter-in-law, and his grandson.

Across from there was old Granny and Granda Robertson.

Mr Robertson was the steel buyer for John Brown's shipyard.

Up above them was Mr Robertson's married daughter, Mrs Young,

and her husband and two sons. They were my pals.

Across the landing from there was the McColl family.

And old man Swan, he'd an airlock, and every now and again it'd go, "bu-bu-bu-buh."

You would hear the banister rattling.

You even hear somebody coughing up the stairs.

Tom McColl used to go out at night time.

I always knew when he was going up the stairs,

cos every time he hit the bottom of the stair he whistled a tune and his mother knew to open the door.

I still remember and I can still hear it to this day.

As the sun began to set, the first of the German aircraft took off and headed towards Scotland.

Leading the raid was the elite Kampfgeschwader 100 Pathfinder unit.

It was their job to pinpoint the target,

mark it with bombs and incendiaries, and leave the rest to the waves of bombers that would follow.

They were good at their job.

Almost exactly four months earlier, they had successfully led the devastating raid on Coventry.

Britain was well aware that industrial centres like Glasgow

and Clydebank were likely targets for a German bombing raid.

Anti-aircraft guns were in place, barrage balloons hung in the sky and on the ground, metal Anderson

shelters had been supplied to those properties that had gardens.

But thousands of tenements had little or no garden.

Some communal shelters had been built in the streets, but often

people had to take cover in the entrance to their close which had

been strengthened with struts and with a baffle wall built outside, designed to deflect any blast.

By 8.30, the full moon had risen well above the horizon in a clear sky.

It was a "bomber's moon", making the town and its targets clearly visible from above.

On the night of the blitz, Tommy Rocks and my brother and I and

a couple of other pals were sitting on the wee step out at the close.

Tommy looked up at the moon and, "God," he says,

"if a Jerry comes over tonight," he says, "he cannae miss."

He did.

But the specially-equipped Pathfinder bombers

weren't just relying on the moon to find their target.

They closed in using directional radio beams transmitted from the continent.

Below them, the people living in and around Clydebank still knew nothing of what was to happen to them.

I was sitting in the living room, with my dad and my brother, and my dad was reading the evening papers.

My mum was next door at a neighbour. She was knitting a pullover for me.

I was writing to the school to tell them I wasn't coming back,

cos my mum had kept me off for some reason in the afternoon and

I hated the school, so I was writing a letter.

It must have been a lot of gibberish cos I couldnae spell.

We'd been at school and been out playing, and then came up and my brother and I were getting

ready for bed, the nine o'clock news was on the radio.

I was doing my homework for school,

and I turned the wireless on to hear the news and the sirens went,

and I says to my dad, "That's the sirens, Dad."

So he says, "If you don't put that off and get to bed you'll get a leather."

My mother, she came flying out, came into the close.

She says, "I don't like the sound of this."

You've maybe what, maybe about 20 or 30 of them in the town

all going at the one time.

It was a terrible noise. It was, em...it was quite frightening.

At just about two or three minutes past nine o'clock, the sirens went.

We just shrugged the shoulders in the best Gaelic fashion.

We'd heard all this before.

There had been up to 40 false alarms in the months leading up to the blitz.

The siren would go, perhaps because a single aircraft was flying overhead.

So in the events, when the sirens went on 13th March,

a lot of people thought initially, it's another false alarm.

We saw the German plane above this house here.

The pilot, the gunner,

and the tail with these German signs, flying towards Knightswood.

All the lights went out,

and then we heard one or two crumps here and there - the first bombs starting to fall.

The next thing was an explosion into the air, just a helter-skelter of debris.

We knew this was no longer fun, we were a target.

Davie had seen one of the first bombs to drop on Clydebank.

The warehouses at the old Yoker distillery were badly hit

and burning whiskey sent flames high into the sky.

My father went through into our back bedroom and he looked out, and the next thing he says to my mother is,

"There's a big fire over by Singer's.

"I think it's Singer's wood yard."

The second big fire was quickly established at the westernmost end of the Singer's site.

The wood stored there had now become a huge burning beacon that could easily be seen for miles.

My father tried to push us under the bed. He says, "Get under the bed,"

but there's no way I was going under the bed, cos something kept saying

to me, "You're better outside, you're better outside."

The prime target also took an early hit when the first of the Admiralty's oil tanks caught fire.

Bombs were now exploding everywhere, but these three large fires meant

that Clydebank was now clearly marked as a target for every following bomber to find.

The walls of the house were heaving with the explosions and the noise was incredible.

I was sitting on one of these sort of pouffe things at the fireside.

I got blown off it and my aunt says, "Oh, my God we'll need to get out of here."

For the people living between the targets, this was their first experience of a bombing raid.

And even as the bombs and incendiaries rained down, not everyone took to the shelters.

My mother says, "Go upstairs," she says, "and get the neighbours and bring them all down here.

"We'll put them all in under the stairway."

We brought them all down

and put them into our house.

My father had us all lined against the walls of the house and he was telling

people don't go near the windows, keep to the wall, keep to the wall.

My dad put us in the coal cellar.

Sat my mother in a chair.

We sat on a sort of a wee bench.

We came down to the bottom floor. Went in this neighbour's,

what you called the lobby, and the lady ARP warden she stood at the entrance to the close

and when she heard the bomb coming down, it made a whistling noise,

she heard a bomb coming down, she would shout DUCK!

However the threat was not just from high explosives but from the thousands and thousands

of incendiary bombs, small sticks of burning phosphorous that ignited almost everything they touched.

All the bombs started falling through, and this one came right in

the coal cellar where I was sitting and hit my mother in the foot.

And because it was a concrete floor, it couldnae burn, just sparked away.

My dad pulled my mother out, lifted Gordon out, he was only three, lifted him out,

I jumped over the bomb.

Alastair wouldnae come out.

He was in the corner screaming his head off.

So I'd to go back in and pull him out.

This woman came down the stairs, she'd a wee baby.

And my dad says, "Put the baby in there in the bed recess."

She put it away over in the corner.

It was a wee girl. Maureen was her name, Maureen Scanlon.

And my father drew the big heavy curtains across.

He says, "The baby'll be all right there," he says.

Anyway there's a bomb fell nearby and our windows came in and the soot

came down the living room and everyone was blackened.

And this woman she let out a scream.

"Ma wean, ma wean!" she says. "She's away through the window."

She made to go and my father pushed her back.

He says, "Get back, the baby's all right.

"It's the cat that's went out the window."

And then you'd hear boom-boom! Boom!

Then you'd hear you'd hear one a wee bit nearer. "Oh, God, that one that was pretty close, that one."

And my dad says, he says, "This is getting heavier,"

he says, "I think it's time we'd be better getting out into the shelters."

And he started to move us out in groups.

Took out so many out there, through the back close and across and into the shelter.

And then he'd another group waiting. Maybe took over half an hour.

But he got everybody all herded

into the shelter quite safe.

The emergency services in Clydebank were quickly overwhelmed

and the call went out to Glasgow and elsewhere for assistance.

17-year-old schoolboy Bill Taylor was one of the ambulance men called in to help.

It was quite

a sight. The whole place was burning.

You were driving down a street and both sides of the tenements were on fire.

There'd been forced closures so people could sit in them

and they'd built a baffle wall in front to stop the blast.

But it was, unfortunately the opposite happened.

The bomb had burst quite close and had blown the baffle wall right into

the close mouth, there was quite a few killed.

We'd to leave them and took the worst wounded. By the time we got to the hospital two of them were dead.

So that became the pattern for the rest of the night.

You would went down a street and they stopped you and you took on the

casualties and you attended to them and you went back to the hospital

and that became the pattern.

You just, all the time the bombs were dropping, the fires were burning and

it just became quite a chaotic scene.

One person sheltering in the centre of town was Betty Norwood.

She had been attending a concert, here, at the Co-op Hall in Hume Street.

The hall is still owned by the Clydebank Co-operative Society,

but now it is home to their funeral service.

Oh, that's the undertaker's. Oh!

Big changes since I was here.

The hall has undergone quite a few changes since 1941.

I haven't been here since the blitz, you know, when it was a hall.

That's amazing.

The MC had just got up on the platform and said,

"The sirens have gone."

But they'd been going regularly so we never paid any attention to it.

And we've decided to continue and that was it, all the windows fell in,

the balcony started to collapse, we were caught under all these chairs, because panic...

That's the first time I've ever seen panic in my life.

Betty and her mother were pulled from the wreckage

and everyone in the hall headed for the relative safety of the basement.

Oh, my!

Oh, my goodness me.

-Take your time.

-Oh, I will. Don't worry.

The basement has hardly changed from that night.

Then as now, the lights were not working.

I think this is probably the door we came through because it wasn't a tall door, if I remember rightly.

Oh, my.

Think of all the years that have gone by since I've been in here.

Oh, dear.

To think we spent from, what, nine o'clock till half past seven the next morning in here.

Absolutely amazing.

Absolutely amazing.

And not knowing what you were coming out to in the morning.

My mother, she didn't know if my father had gone to work or not.

He was on constant night shift and we'd heard Brown's had been bombed.

And she didn't know whether he'd gone to work or not.

Just think of us all running around here.

And there were a lot of children here, if I remember rightly.

A lot of children. Cos it was a family night out.

It's amazing, isn't it, what you...

..what happens during a war.

I never ever expected to see this again, that's for sure.

Above the town, the RAF had brought into play a new defence plan.

It was called Operation Fighter Night and some of the 602 City of Glasgow squadron of Spitfires

took part in the mission to fly over the Clyde and wait for the German bombers.

Four of them took off and they orbited at 20,000 feet. Once the fires started

and started to spread

they could see quite clearly from 20,000 feet the River Clyde.

The plan was simple.

Anti-aircraft fire, known as ack-ack, would drive

the bombers up to a height where RAF fighter aircraft could engage them.

In between the anti-aircraft fire and the fighters would be a buffer zone.

This would ensure that fighters were not hit by flying shrapnel from the exploding anti-aircraft shells.

They could see the German bombers below them.

The ack-ack were not getting them. The fighters weren't allowed to come down to attack them.

As Hector McLean said, one of the pilots, "All we got was a better view of the bombs."

Apparently there were so many aircraft up there,

that pilots spent more time trying to look after themselves

than look out to see what was happening below.

Any request to come down was denied, they had to stay where they were.

The Germans had flown over Clydebank at a much lower height than expected,

choosing to take their chances with the ack-ack.

When the fighters came back for refuelling, they were told to stand down. The plan had failed.

602 pilots came back rather angry, very frustrated.

It was bad enough watching it over London, but watching it over your own home city was something else.

Fighter Night was a total disaster, and it was never used again.

This is the one and only occasion it was used.

The first wave of bombers left at around 11pm.

Hundreds of people lay dead and dying in the rubble and burning streets.

Somehow, you almost became, it was a strange thing to...

you almost became immune to it.

There was a lot of blood and a lot of quite ugly scenes which were...

It was not very nice.

One Clydebank man has made the Blitz his work.

Artist Tom McKendrick became so fascinated by the Blitz stories he'd heard as a child,

he studied the terrible event and turned it into an artistic statement about the horror of what happened.

This is the size of a parachute mine.

There were basically two types.

There was one about 650kg and there was one which almost weighed a metric tonne,

and this was this beast here. Now, these things could create devastating walls of blast.

For a quarter of a mile on each side of that, that would lift the roofs.

That would shred houses. It would destroy.

And these things were dropped,

maybe 30 or 40 of these things were dropped in a place like Clydebank.

And you can see why the devastation was so extensive.

Because rather than blowing up a house, that'll take down a tenement.

There's stories of people watching these things coming down

and the first thing they think is, "Oh, my God it's a pilot.

"Somebody's bailed out." You know,

ARP, we'll go and arrest them. And they're running towards these

and all of a sudden they realise it's a bomb, so they jump over a fence or a hedge and it goes off,

and they're literally lifted, and taken for 200 yards across the road.

There's this great sheet of flame.

But one of the very interesting sort of stories you hear about these is the peculiarity of blast.

You get that enormous blast and flame and the big ring going out, but you also get the vacuum as well

and that's what kills an awful lot of people.

Suddenly you've got this massive air pressure then a sudden vacuum and their lungs collapse

and they're almost killed instantly because the air's sucked out of them.

At midnight, the next wave of aircraft arrived, flying in from the west.

One plane following another, they approached from the direction of Loch Lomond,

past the Kilpatrick hills,

and then followed the course of the moon-lit River Clyde

to the burning target up ahead.

As the Germans dropped their bombs, Isa McKenzie and her neighbours

continued to shelter at number 12 Bannerman Street.

But after five hours cowering in the entrance lobby of one of the downstairs flats, they had to leave.

This lady ARP warden shouted, "You have to evacuate the building, it's on fire."

In actual fact,

what we thought

we heard was slates falling off the roof, this slap, slap, slap.

But, in fact, this was incendiaries falling.

The residents of the tenement ran out to the shelters that were being built in the street.

There were four walls, but the roof was still unfinished.

We ran into these shelters, but, of course, the sparks were falling in between the girders.

So we came out, and we started to go up this slope, run up this slope...

and we had to turn, and come back, because we could hear bullets

hitting this wall. So we run back

and there was a back entrance at the end of our street,

into a billiard room.

And we went

in there

and sheltered under the tables.

At two in the morning, the four anti-aircraft guns just north of Clydebank ran out of ammunition.

But shortly after, came another lull in the bombing as the last plane in

the second wave flew back to the continent, leaving behind even more crushed and shattered buildings.

Many buildings still bear shrapnel scars from bombs that exploded nearby.

This street of tenements in Dalmuir survived the Blitz

while many of the neighbouring properties were completely destroyed.

Now they have a very different death sentence hanging over them.

They are to be demolished to make way for a new social housing scheme.

For thousands, this was where they had to hide out during the Blitz,

in their own close, at the bottom of their stairwell.

If you never had a garden to build a shelter in, this was your shelter.

They built struts inside the closes, almost like a mine to actually prevent the close caving in.

So they've maybe up to 20, 30, 40 people huddled in places like this.

Within a hundred yards of where we are, there was

16 bombs and three parachute mines in this small concentrated area.

Over 120 people died, 140 were seriously injured, just in this tiny little area,

trying to take shelter in buildings exactly like this.

'The lull did not last long.'

Less than an hour later the third wave approached Clydebank.

At three o'clock, one of the first bombs hit the Central Library

and knocked out the telephone lines to the local control centre below.

Extra firemen, police, rescue workers and ambulance crews had been drafted in,

but they were now working on their own in chaotic streets filled with rubble.

All the main arteries were severed.

The town was, if you like, trapped in its own environment.

Some of the roofs were just burning from end to end, and rubble went down, falling into the streets.

The firemen were out in that all the time,

which must have been pretty terrible for them because they were fighting a terrible losing battle.

They just... It was impossible.

You just

seemed to be in a bit of a vacuum.

I mean, you knew this was going on, but you...

you didn't know how long it was going to be.

Most of these tenements were sandstone. You know, blocks of sandstone.

To try and move them and get in, it was very, very difficult.

And trying to get people out through these places, without hurting them worse than they were,

it was very difficult indeed.

And all the time there were stuff falling down.

You were into places and the whole place was burning up above you and falling in.

By about four o'clock, the whole system's down.

The whole apparatus is down. The fire service has been overwhelmed.

The telephone communications have almost been cut.

They're now using youngsters as messenger boys.

The police are all fully occupied trying to direct and trying to make sure that no-one's trapped.

The noise, there seemed to be an awful lot of noise.

These bombs were making a noise.

The planes were making a noise, and the roaring of the fires, the crash of the buildings,

and there seemed to be a lot of noise and smells. Burning smells.

Almost burning flesh some of them when they were getting burned.

People you couldn't get out.

Buried.

At 5.47am, just before sunrise, the last bomb exploded on Clydebank that night

and the last of the German raiders headed back to its base.

As a school-kid...

..you weren't aware of what you were going to come out and face in the morning.

At 6.20 in the morning, the all-clear sounded

and the people of Clydebank slowly emerged to a scene of terrible devastation.

There were big gaps, just facades of some of the buildings.

People coming out and...

gasping and...

Absolute chaos.

I looked up at the house, my mum was standing crying with my dad.

Everything was, from that mark in the wall you can see, collapsed.

And the place was just burning inside, it was like inside a fire.

This is the third model

that Brendan Kelly has made of the scenes he saw that Friday morning.

There was my... my father, my mother,

mate Dennis and myself.

And we just kept looking along

at the debris, totally silent.

My mother was silent, my father was silent, and I was silent and we were just standing looking.

Just like a vacuum.

I felt nothing, absolutely nothing.

Although Brendan's tenement was still standing, all those to one side had been destroyed.

Buried in the rubble were the neighbours he still can't forget.

Soldiers started to arrive in the street, and they were shouting,

and they would shout, shout to everybody, "Still! Still!"

They'd shout, "Hello!

"Can you hear me? Is there anybody down there?"

And they would come round our close and go up the back and...

these guys, these guys were bleeding.

Bare hands, they were pulling big chunks of sandstone literally by their hands.

Lumps of steel pipe and God knows what.

Desperate but... at that particular...

As I say, I felt nothing but when you look back, there was no chance of anybody coming out of there.

It was a total disaster.

I saw them taking somebody out, I don't know who it was, it could have been anybody.

But again, I wish I'd never seen it.

I must have some kind of camera up here, damn thing keeps running.

Brendan's closest friend Tommy was one of

fifteen members of the Rocks family that died in the tenement next door.

Tommy's father was not amongst them as he had been working

at the Royal Ordnance Factory when the sirens sounded.

The father was on a night shift, over on the other side of the canal.

In fact, they were telling me that, when the all-clear went and he looked out and saw the building,

he ran out of the factory across the railway, across the field, dived into the canal and swam over.

That's what I heard.

That's what I heard. I've no reason to doubt it.

I remember seeing the man going about

that morning. I definitely remember Mr Rocks going about

and now as I'm getting older I'm looking back at the picture, the man was obviously beside himself.

Up that whole close, I think it was the highest fatality

in one dwelling in, I think, maybe the whole of Britain.

Even London.

34 people up that close.

When we approached

our own close

it was nothing but debris.

And there was my mum and dad standing looking

at what had been 27 years of married life together.

All these years of hard work.

Scrubbing, cleaning, polishing.

Everything we owned was in a pile of rubble

at the bottom of the...

the stairway.

We came out the shelter at half past eight in the morning.

I decided to go and look in the shelters further up in the gardens.

And I looked in one, there was a lady over a baby.

The family was dead but the baby was alive.

She was more or less protecting the baby.

A lot of people were getting out of town.

There was a sort of exodus.

People were grabbing what they could

and getting out and they moved away.

And the roads, some of the roads were blocked completely.

Getting out was actually quite difficult.

They were driving down streets with piles of rubble and things like that.

Tens of thousands were now without homes and possessions.

And with a real expectation that the Germans would be back to finish off the job that night,

they left as soon as they could, by whatever means.

A soldier says to my mother, "Get yourself and your family out,"

"Get out," he says, "because Hitler's going to flatten Clydebank.

"He's going to flatten it and take it off the face of the Earth."

They weren't waiting for transport, they weren't waiting for permission.

They made their way out best way they could. But other people were

either in the town hall or in some of the rest centres, waiting to be evacuated.

But the communications were down and it wasn't always realised that

people were where they were, or that they were waiting for assistance.

We knew nothing about buses.

Nobody told us anything.

Nobody told us there were buses waiting to take anybody anywhere.

All the refugees from the centre of town came streaming up the road,

people with arms in slings and walking with crutches

and pushing prams and dragging what precious belongings they could save,

and heading for the hills.

When I was interviewing people, I'd say things like,

stupidly in retrospect, "Have you got a photograph of your..."

And they would say, "No, we don't have anything."

All the family bits and pieces, all the wee things that we treasure, photographs of the weans or the kids

or Uncle Joe or something like that, they were all destroyed.

There were very, very few things actually survived,

so people left with nothing. They literally had what they were actually standing in.

As the people of Clydebank tried to leave the town or seek help from the authorities, rescue workers fought

to save people from buildings in which they had become buried.

Just behind these wrecked trams in Dalmuir lay the ruins of Robert Cochrane's house.

I'm still lost at the moment at this part here.

Robert Cochrane is looking for the home in which he was buried alive, 70 years ago.

He was not quite four years old at the time, but his memories of what happened are still very strong.

It's amazing the changes.

Yep, so... Castle Street now.

This is Castle Street we're on now.

Our house was up at the corner here.

Robert's house at number 2 Castle Street collapsed after the bombs had fallen.

Like many properties in the town, it had been seriously weakened by the nearby explosions.

The tramcars would be...

..about halfway down, the bus stop there, towards the taxis.

That's where the tramcars were sitting.

And that's the ones that were wrecked.

The corners of the room

at ceiling level all separated and opened up

and it was limestone and dirt and muck that came down,

then crash, the whole three storey down on top of us.

The army rescue workers, they had put planks up to the back window and they brought us out

so I remember being carried through all this rubble in total darkness with all the dust,

and brought down, assisted down a plank with the rescue workers.

Everyone in the family came out of the ruin alive,

except Robert's younger brother Wallace.

The rescue workers handed him to Robert's mother with instructions about what to do with the body.

She'd to take him across to Pattison Street.

There was an aid station over there and of course he was certified dead.

She gave them the particulars, lay him down there, which she did.

But with so many bodies left laying together,

it was perhaps inevitable that mistakes would be made.

Wallace's body was lost.

Now my father was round the mortuary in Clydebank to try and locate Wallace's body.

Couldn't find it. Went to the town hall and the various schools and churches where the mortuaries were.

So finally he's at St James Church,

and the mortician up there has said to him they'd had a wee laddie answering that description,

but he'd just left a few minutes ago for the mass burial for the unidentified.

So my father, oh, he started to go berserk.

A policeman said, "Hold on, son, just calm down."

He said, "Look, I'll phone the gatehouse,

"and if we can get the hearse stopped at the gatehouse, we'll get the body brought back."

He said, "If it's already through and into the cemetery, we've no chance.

"The body'll be in the hole along with the rest of the bodies for up there."

But as it was, he phoned up and by luck he was able to stop the hearse

and Wallace's body was brought back.

By late afternoon on Friday the 14th of March, tens of thousands had left the town.

Many, though, were left behind.

They either had no means to get away or nowhere to go.

Charles Grozier and his family also had nowhere to live and no possessions.

His mother was now injured,

but the rest of the family had to walk to an aid centre one-and-a-half miles away.

Bare feet, pyjamas, nothing.

And you saw all the houses on the way down, all bombed.

On the main Kilbowie Road, right in the middle of the hill,

there was men working on a bomb that hadnae went off

and all the houses were burning.

When David Thornburn emerged from his shelter,

he joined hundreds of exhausted survivors sitting in the small park

that overlooked the pitiful sight of their homes on fire.

If you wanted to see the sight in Clydebank, this was where to see it at close quarters.

It was all a mass of flames,

a distant mass of flames, so that it was evident, standing here,

they'd be back the next night.

And everyone in Clydebank knew that.

While the people of Clydebank left behind in their homes and church halls

prepared themselves for another raid,

the Luftwaffe prepared 203 bombers

for their second night of destruction.

At 8.40pm the air raid sirens in Clydebank sounded yet again.

This time we had sheltered immediately

because...everybody knew what was happening.

Everybody. It wasn't long after the sirens stopped.

In fact, the first bomb started falling

when the sirens was still wailing.

Charles Grozier had ended his journey from their burned-out house in this church near Rothesay Dock.

Now derelict, that night the church was sheltering Charles, his family and scores of others.

Well, that's the hall there that we slept in, on the right-hand side.

Everybody was upset and frightened.

We were feart in case the church got a hit, a direct hit.

It would have killed quite a lot of people.

Cos it was, the whole hall, we were all lying on the floor and the kids were just running about.

They didn't realise what the Blitz was or the war.

As the bombs crashed down on the second night,

Isa McKenzie was yet again holed up in the billiard room near her wrecked tenement.

As children, you know, you're just...

we're listening for the next time, the next lot of bombs.

And you also had the thought that, "Hope it doesn't hit here,"

because if there had been...

if that billiard room had been hit, there would have been hundreds,

as there was in other parts of the town.

There was a public house cellar full of people sheltering

and a landmine... it got hit by a landmine.

They didn't rescue anyone.

They just filled it with lime

because people would have been in bits.

The final all-clear of the raid sounded at 6.25am on Saturday

and those still in the town looked out on a landscape vastly changed from the night before.

Again the Dalmuir district had been badly hit

and Brendan and his family emerged from their second night in the shelter

to find that all the tenements in his street had now been destroyed,

apart from his own.

The back was totally gone.

The walls just collapsed in,

everything just eventually became one big pile of rubble.

Throughout the town, only seven or eight buildings had escaped damage,

and almost all the housing in the borough was now uninhabitable.

In the streets, the remaining refugees left the town on foot or in lorries

or waited for the authorities to get them out of Clydebank.

A fleet of 200 buses were now running a continuous shuttle service

to reception centres throughout the West of Scotland.

My father's brother, Uncle Bob,

his wife Annie and himself were there

and when it came their turn, Annie got on to this bus

and the guy in charge put his hand across and he says,

"That's enough. The bus is full. No more."

And Bob says, "Hey, wait a minute!

"That's my wife that's just got on. Can I not get on with her?"

"No, the bus is full." He said, "Where are you taking her?"

He says, "We're no' allowed to tell you." And so they...

Poor Bob! They drove away with his wife and there he was left.

He'd no idea where she'd gone and it took him...

I think it was something like three to four weeks

before he discovered through various agencies

where they'd taken these refugees.

Clydebank had become a virtual ghost town.

Out of 60,000 people two days earlier,

only about 2,000 were now left.

The Clydebank Blitz had been even more deadly than the raid on Coventry,

but all details about the Scottish attack were strictly censored.

There was a clampdown.

All that was said the morning after the Blitz was, there had been some bombs dropped in the Clydeside.

Newspapers were unable to give an account of what had really happened,

or where.

Instead, they published vague reports

and pictures of dogged Blitz spirit.

The censorship also meant that some relatives, like soldier John Bowman,

had no idea what had happened to his town or his family.

Well, I was quite excited

inasmuch as I hadn't had leave for about four or five months,

so I thought to myself, "Ach, well, I'll not tell the folks

"I'm coming home on leave.

"I'll just turn up and give them a surprise."

The only thing I'd read was that there were a few casualties.

That was all it said at that particular time.

As John arrived in Clydebank and walked up the hill towards his home,

he soon realised that there were clearly more than the few casualties that he had read about.

He found someone he knew in the ruins of a local shop.

So I shouted in through the shop because the windows had got blown out,

said, "Bobby, what's happening here?"

He says, "John, don't, whatever you do, go up to where you lived."

He says, "Your house is destroyed and all your family are dead."

Where I actually lived there were four long terraces

and they were all gone.

John returned to the town centre,

where casualties and missing persons were being registered.

The woman at the desk gave him the bad news he had feared.

She says, "I'm sorry, John,"

she says, "But your mother's dead,

"your two brothers... Archie and Albert are dead,

"your sister Hannah's dead."

Things just had gone from bad to worse.

The next step was for John to try and identify the bodies of his family

at one of the makeshift mortuaries.

And I walked inside and I was not prepared for what I saw.

There must have been over 100...

things, that's all you could call them.

Things stretched out up and down in rows along the floor.

It was... They were actually corpses.

No arms, no legs, badly burnt,

you just couldnae recognise anything.

So I walked out of the church hall and lo and behold,

walked straight into my father.

So he says, "Who sent for you?"

I says, "Nobody sent for me.

"I've been given leave and I thought I'd come and surprise you all."

The Bowmans had lost their home and four members of their family.

John spent the rest of his leave attending their funerals.

There were numerous acts of heroism both during and after the raid.

Many ambulance men, firemen, police and rescuers risked their lives to save people

and two Polish sailors furiously fired anti-aircraft guns

at the bombers from their destroyer in the shipyard.

But despite all the anti-aircraft fire, barrage balloons and fighter aircraft,

439 German bombers had still managed to drop over 500 tonnes

of high explosives and over 600 tonnes of incendiaries in the raids,

almost without hindrance.

Within Clydebank, 4,000 houses were destroyed,

another 4,500 were severely damaged.

By far the worst-hit area was Radnor Park

and the area they called Holy City,

where John Bowman's family had lived.

Here, almost all the tenements and shops were destroyed.

The industrial targets, however, were not as badly hit as the German raiders might have liked.

Although the 11 oil tanks that were now alight took weeks to put out,

it was less than a fifth of the total.

John Brown's shipyard and the vessels being built there were little affected

and 70% of the labour force had returned to work after only 2 weeks,

some travelling great distances each day.

The Singer's munitions factory lost a huge amount of timber in the wood yard

and several offices were badly damaged,

but here again, production resumed within weeks.

It took much longer to fix the housing problem.

Unsafe properties were demolished, and repairs undertaken

so that at least some people could return to Clydebank.

But the town they returned to was a shadow of its former self.

We were back in Clydebank, I think, round about maybe June or July.

Right up to the Blitz, you'd go in and you could shout,

"Whoo," and you'd hear an echo coming back down and hitting you,

but when we went back after the Blitz it was like in here... "Howf!"

It just...falls flat.

I mind this my brother and I saying to my father, "There's no echo in the close."

"No," he says, "no."

He says, "Eventually," he says, "eventually it will come back."

Some of them left the town on that day after the raid, and they never ever returned.

They thought they would, but they never ever returned.

Because they went away to places like Kirkintilloch and Stirling

and down the Ayrshire coast and down to Dumbarton and places like that.

And by the time, you know, the town started to get rebuilt,

they'd made lives elsewhere and they never ever returned.

And that created an awful lot of kind of sadness and resentment.

And that was a real shame,

because it wasn't only the destruction of a town,

it was the destruction of very close-knit communities,

that had grown up together.

That boy Tommy Rocks, I've often said to my family,

a big chunk of my life got taken off me within 24 hours.

Maybe Tommy Rocks, some of his family

would have married some of mine, who knows?

Who knows? I never...

With that part of our future taken off us.

Sad.

At first the Government played down the number of dead,

but they later gave the total killed in Clydebank as 528.

But the bombs also fell well outside Clydebank's boundaries.

One parachute mine landed next to a tram in Glasgow, killing over 100 people.

In total, at least 1,200 are thought to have died as a result of the attack

and many in Clydebank still think the true figure is much higher.

A warden was told

the Government had issued in the next few days, loss of 500.

And this warden said, "What street is he talking about?"

In a few places, you can still see evidence of Clydebank's Blitz,

but the ruins were cleared away a long time ago.

More recent buildings now fill most of the spaces left behind

and retail parks have taken over from the streets of shops.

But the town has never returned to the same population levels

or regained the same sense of purpose that it once had.

The old Singer factory has gone

and the vast John Brown's shipyard site now awaits redevelopment.

I used to go down to the Clyde and just stand looking up

towards John Brown's, God, and you'd see a thousand faces.

And man will never learn.

We'll never learn. It's a shame, but it's always innocent that suffer.

Row B I'm looking for. Row B.

Although Robert's younger brother Wallace was saved from the mass grave of unidentified bodies,

there was one final ignominy.

His gravestone was broken a few years after he was buried

and war shortages meant that it couldn't be replaced.

The whereabouts of his body were again lost.

I know the last time it was pretty high up and it seemed to look right down the town.

Robert is now trying to find Wallace and mark the grave for the last time.

The night of the Blitz

he'd been playing with a potato, an old potato.

And my grandfather was playing with this and the sirens went

and my grandfather had picked this tattie up anyway and put it in his pocket.

Now, he discovered that and he kept that for years.

It actually finished up like a walnut, this potato

and it shrunk down and it went hard.

It was just like a wee walnut and that was the potato

that Wallace had been playing with on the floor, you know?

So that was another wee point

that always stuck in my mind too, you know?

Aye.

Oh, I say, that's fine.

Really glad to find this.

It's sad that there's no marker there, you know.

That's the part that really gets you.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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