Scotland & the Second World War

The core claims on this card are Established: they rest on official records held by the National Records of Scotland, Historic Environment Scotland, museum institutions (Orkney Museum/Scapa Flow Museum, Scalloway Museum), and the Royal Navy. The principal areas of genuine dispute are numerical — the Clydebank Blitz death toll (official 528 versus widely repeated higher figures for the wider Clydeside) and the exact HMS Royal Oak death toll (833 vs 834 vs 835). These are flagged explicitly in the Caveats section rather than presented with false precision.

The story of Scotland's war opens where Card #22 left off — with rearmament reviving a Clydeside that had been devastated by the Depression. The abandoned hull of Cunard's "Ship No. 534" (the future Queen Mary), looming unfinished over Clydebank after work stopped in 1932, had become a global symbol of the slump; when work restarted in 1934 it was read as a sign of Britain emerging from depression. By the mid-1930s rearmament brought a flood of naval orders to the Clyde, and yards that had closed — such as Charles Connell's Scotstoun yard (shut 1930–37) — reopened.

During the war the Clyde operated at full stretch, building, engining and repairing warships and merchant tonnage. John Brown & Company of Clydebank produced a "veritable fleet," including the King George V-class battleship HMS Duke of York (launched 28 February 1940, commissioned November 1941 — later the victor over Scharnhorst in December 1943), the aircraft carrier HMS Indefatigable, and numerous cruisers and destroyers such as HMS Javelin and HMS Hardy. The last British battleship ever built, HMS Vanguard, was laid down at John Brown's in October 1941 and launched on 30 November 1944. The Clyde's industrial concentration — shipyards, the Singer works at Clydebank (turned to munitions), Beardmore's engine works, foundries and distilleries — is precisely what made it a Luftwaffe target.

On the nights of 13–14 and 14–15 March 1941 the Luftwaffe struck Clydeside in Scotland's most concentrated air raids. According to National Records of Scotland, "in proportion to its population of about 50,000 the burgh of Clydebank suffered the worst. According to an official count in 1942 the Clydebank raids killed 528 people and seriously injured 617, compared to totals of 1,200 people, and 1,100 in the whole of Clydeside" — with Glasgow suffering the highest number of fatalities (about 650). In proportion to its population, Clydebank suffered the worst of anywhere in Britain.

The German aiming points were the Singer works, John Brown's shipyard and Beardmore's engine works, but the bombs fell overwhelmingly on the tightly packed tenements alongside the industry. NRS records that most of the town's roughly 12,000 houses were damaged and about 4,300 completely destroyed; the widely repeated statement that of 12,000 dwellings only seven were left entirely undamaged — with around 4,000 utterly destroyed and 4,500 rendered uninhabitable — captures the scale, though the precise "seven" is a traditional figure (some sources say eight). Individual tenement strikes were catastrophic: 80 people died in Second Avenue; 31 died at 78 Jellicoe Street, including 15 members of the Rocks family.

The human displacement was near-total: by 17 March some 11,350 homeless people had been given accommodation, and the burgh's population collapsed from tens of thousands to a fraction of its pre-raid size. Wartime censorship "hushed up" the full scale. Remarkably, after emergency "first-aid" repairs, industrial production on Clydeside returned to near-normal levels within weeks — the raids devastated the people of Clydebank far more than its factories.

Historians note the raids were arguably not, on the first night, a deliberate terror attack: German bombers, deflected by anti-aircraft fire from their industrial targets, dropped much of their load over housing (a "creep-back" effect). The second night's raid has been characterised as intended to break civilian morale. Less than two months later, on 6–7 May 1941, the Greenock Blitz killed 271 people and injured over 10,200 in a near-identical pattern of shipyard targets and civilian casualties.

Scapa Flow, the vast natural anchorage in Orkney, was again the Royal Navy's main Home Fleet base in 1939 as it had been in the First World War. But most of the earlier defences had been dismantled, and the anchorage was dangerously exposed. On the night of 13–14 October 1939, Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien navigated the U-boat U-47 through Kirk Sound — a channel supposedly sealed by sunken blockships that time and tide had shifted — and into the Flow.

At anchor lay HMS Royal Oak, a Revenge-class battleship and Jutland veteran, by then too slow for front-line duty and stationed to bolster anti-aircraft cover. Prien fired two salvoes; the second, striking amidships, was fatal. The battleship capsized and sank in about 13 minutes. 835 men and boys were killed — the figure now used by the Royal Navy, revised upward from the long-quoted 833 (see Caveats) — among them Rear-Admiral Henry Blagrove. Of the dead, 134 were boy seamen not yet 18 years old — described by the Royal Navy as "the largest ever such loss in a single Royal Navy action" — and the disaster prompted the Navy largely to end the practice of sending under-18s to front-line warships.

The loss was a profound shock and a propaganda triumph for Germany — Prien was fêted in Berlin and awarded the Knight's Cross. Strategically it exposed grave weaknesses in Scapa Flow's defences and triggered an urgent programme of blockships, booms, minefields, anti-submarine nets (ultimately 6.52 miles of anti-submarine and 6.1 miles of anti-torpedo net) and, most enduringly, the Churchill Barriers. The wreck of HMS Royal Oak remains where she sank, an upturned hull in about 30 metres of water, a designated and protected war grave marked by a buoy; every year Royal Navy divers place a White Ensign on her stern. Twenty-six of the recovered dead lie in Lyness Royal Naval Cemetery on Hoy. Lyness itself became the main shore base for the Home Fleet, with more than 12,000 personnel by 1940.

The Royal Oak disaster prompted Churchill to order four permanent causeways to seal the vulnerable eastern channels into Scapa Flow. Work by Balfour Beatty began in May 1940, linking the Orkney Mainland to Lamb Holm, Glimps Holm, Burray and South Ronaldsay. Facing a labour shortage, the authorities brought in Italian prisoners of war captured in North Africa — around 550 reached Orkney from January 1942, housed in Camp 60 on Lamb Holm and Camp 34 on Burray. Because the Geneva Convention barred POWs from working on military projects, the barriers were officially designated causeways. The structures were complete by September 1944 and formally opened as public roads on 12 May 1945, four days after VE Day; their lasting role has been as road links (carrying the A961), not as defences.

The prisoners of Camp 60 left an extraordinary legacy. In 1943, with the agreement of the camp commandant Major Thomas Pyres Buckland and the camp priest Father Gioacchino Giacobazzi, two Nissen huts were joined end-to-end and transformed into the Italian Chapel. Under the artist Domenico Chiocchetti, prisoners lined the corrugated interior with plasterboard, built an altar and rail from leftover barrier concrete, forged a wrought-iron rood screen, and painted a trompe-l'œil "stone" interior. Chiocchetti's altarpiece — a Madonna and Child based on a devotional card he carried from home — is the centrepiece. The façade carries the date AD MCMXLIV (1944). Chiocchetti stayed behind after the other prisoners left to finish the font.

Before departing, the Italians secured a promise from the local landowner that the chapel would be cared for, and the Orcadians kept it. A Chapel Preservation Committee was formed in 1958; with BBC support, Chiocchetti was traced to Moena and returned in 1960 to restore his paintwork, coming again in 1964. The chapel is now a Category A listed building, still consecrated, and one of Orkney's most visited landmarks — a symbol of reconciliation made by Italians and preserved by Scots.

The "Shetland Bus" was a clandestine sea link between Shetland and German-occupied Norway, running from 1941 until the occupation ended on 8 May 1945. Norwegian fishing boats, crewed largely by young Norwegian fishermen and sailors who had escaped the occupation, ferried SOE and Norwegian agents, weapons, radios and explosives into Norway and brought out refugees and resistance workers whose cover was blown. Crossings were made mostly in the dangerous winter darkness to avoid detection, exposing crews to fierce North Sea storms and German patrols.

The service began from Lunna in the north-east of the Shetland Mainland but soon shifted its main base to Scalloway on the west coast, where William Moore & Son's workshop and the purpose-built "Prince Olav's Slipway" provided repair facilities. Early operations relied on fishing boats and suffered losses; from October 1943 the US Navy transferred three fast, armed submarine chasers — Hitra, Vigra and Hessa — after which no more vessels or men were lost.

Over the war the operation completed some 198 trips, transporting 192 agents and 383 tons of arms and supplies to Norway and bringing out 373 refugees and 73 agents; 44 men and around ten boats were lost. Its most celebrated figure, Leif "Shetlands" Larsen, made 52 trips and became — in the words of NorthLink Ferries — "one of the most highly-decorated Allied naval officers of the Second World War," holding the DSO, DSC, CGM, DSM and Bar; his Conspicuous Gallantry Medal (for the 1942 Operation Title attempt on the Tirpitz) made him the first non-Briton to receive it. Today the Scalloway Museum, run by the Shetland Bus Friendship Society, preserves the story, and memorials in Scalloway and at Lunna Kirk honour those lost.

Scotland shared in the UK-wide evacuation, Operation Pied Piper. In the three days from 1 September 1939, about 1.5 million people were moved to safer areas across Britain; in Scotland the vulnerable centres were Edinburgh, Rosyth, Glasgow, Clydebank, Dundee, Inverkeithing and Queensferry, with Greenock, Port Glasgow and Dumbarton added after the Clydeside raids of 1941. Glasgow's pre-war plans envisaged evacuating around 190,000 people; roughly 120,000 left the city in September 1939, dispersed to Perthshire, Lanarkshire, Ayrshire, Rothesay, Kintyre and elsewhere. As across Britain, many returned during the quiet "Phoney War" before bombing began. A smaller number of Scottish children were evacuated overseas to Canada under the Children's Overseas Reception Board.

The wider home front was defined by the blackout, air-raid precautions, "Dig for Victory," salvage drives and UK-wide rationing of food, clothing and fuel. Scotland also acquired lasting wartime and administrative legacies — Tom Johnston, Secretary of State for Scotland, established the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board in 1943 and the Scottish Tourist Board in 1945. New war industries and airfields spread across the country, from Prestwick (a transatlantic aircraft reception hub) to the huge ICI incendiary-bomb factory at Charlesfield, St Boswells.

Scotland held prisoners of war in numerous camps, but the most notable was Cultybraggan Camp (Camp 21) near Comrie, Perthshire. Built in 1941 to hold up to about 4,000 prisoners, it was one of only two maximum-security "black" camps in Britain, holding those classified as the most committed and fanatical Nazis — many young Waffen-SS, paratroopers and U-boat crew. It became notorious for the murder of Feldwebel Wolfgang Rosterg, a known anti-Nazi mistakenly sent there, who was beaten to death in Hut 4 of Compound B on 23 December 1944; five prisoners were later hanged at Pentonville on 6 October 1945 (by Albert Pierrepoint) — described as the largest mass execution in the United Kingdom since the perpetrators of the Phoenix Park murders. Cultybraggan is today one of the best-preserved POW camps in the UK, retaining most of its Nissen huts (several listed) and now managed by the Comrie Development Trust. Popular rumours that Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess was held there have been debunked by researchers.

Scottish women were mobilised on a large scale. Tens of thousands entered munitions and engineering work — at Charlesfield, nearly 900 of about 1,280 workers were women. The Scottish Women's Land Army, restarted in 1939, put "Land Girls" to work on farms across Scotland, and from May 1942 the Women's Timber Corps — the "Lumberjills" — felled and milled timber, trained at camps such as Shandford Lodge near Brechin. Women also served in the WRNS, the WAAF, the ATS, civil defence and the Women's Voluntary Service; several Clydebank women, including ambulance attendant Mary Haldane and ARP head Jenny Hyslop, were decorated for bravery during the Blitz. The National Records of Scotland preserves the Land Army and Timber Corps index cards, now searchable via ScotlandsPeople.

Victory in Europe was declared on 8 May 1945 — the same day the German occupation of Norway ended and the Shetland Bus stood down; four days later the Churchill Barriers opened. By the war's end more than 57,000 Scots had died. Weeks after VE Day, the UK general election of 5 July 1945 produced a Labour landslide: nationally Labour won a majority of 146, and in Scotland the party gained 17 seats to hold 37 of the 74 seats, against the Conservatives' 32. The vote signalled a decisive public appetite for post-war reconstruction and the welfare state — the story taken up on Card #24, "Post-War Scotland (1945–1979)."