CLYDEBANK BLITZ !!!

An unusual event this morning, i was listening to the radio. A very interesting subject was in discussion the devastation in the Clydebank Blitz during ww2.there were lots of people phoning in with stories who lived through it, or stories handed down father to son etc. I was Amazed, most of the stories had lots of Humour well
i suppose it was Humour ,Resilience,Bravery that seen the people through the Devastation of the Blitz.

one woman told a story. When the All Clear was Sounded she went out of her home in search of food, in what shops that were still standing . as she was walking through the Rubble a man was walking towards her on the other side of the street. she noticed he had a Wooden Leg, he also had a wooden leg tucked under his arm,he lifted the spare wooden leg ,waved it in the air and shouted to her"Good Morning Darling,Well the Germans got ma hoose but the SW***S didnay get ma spare leg ".

She also seen another man rushing through the devastation , with a Large framed picture of ( The Pope )!!!

there must be a lot of stories out there ,be it Personal Experience or father to son etc..

 

My dad told me a storey that one of his older friends told him.

Apparently my dad's mate (who was a young lad at the time) was walking in Saltburn woods (Saltburn is on the north east coast, just down a bit from teesside). Apparently the weather was miserable that day, a salient point as you'll come to realise later. It was a very low risk area as it is just woodland with nothing of strategic interest in it. Imagine his shock and horror when first he heard the drone of aircraft getting gradually louder, then all hell broke loose as the woods he was in were subjected to an air raid. He said he ran like a bat of hell and just kept running, and by some miracle got out in one piece.

One might wonder why some woodland on the edge of a small town would be of interest to the luftwaffe. We must remember that in those days there was no satnav or laser guidance, so most navigation and targeting was done the old ways with maps and compasses, and by eye. Just up the coast there is Sunderland, where a lot of the ships were built during the war. The geography of Sunderland and Saltburn is superficially similar, with a wooded valled leading right to the coast, a large bridge crossing the valley, a railway leading in etc, and on a murky day it would be difficult to sea any detail from above. The theory is that the german's were aiming for the shipyards at sunderland but got it slightly wrong, by about 25 miles.