Clydebank Blitz

The Clydebank Blitz

It was a Scottish town on the crest of an industrial wave, bustling, with a strong sense of community…
Then within the space of two nights it was decimated, vast swathes of its population killed or made homeless.

It was one of Britain's worst bombing raids and Scotland's biggest civilian disaster.

There was the human cost of families wiped out, others left bereaved and often homeless – and the chaos of the aftermath and the emergency evacuations of people, many of whom never returned to live in the town.

The Blitz on the industrial town of Clydebank, seven miles from the centre of Glasgow, was one of the most intense, deadly yet least well-known of the war. Well over 1,200 people were killed across the Clydeside area and at least the same again were seriously injured by the bombing on the nights of the 13th and 14th March 1941. In Clydebank, the destruction was so severe that only seven properties were left undamaged by the bombing and the population was reduced from between 50,000 and 60,000 to little more than 2,000.The awful truth about the scale of destruction and the number of casualties never hit the headlines as wartime censorship meant that a tight lid was kept on press coverage.