First Air Raid of WWII – 21

Eye witness accounts of the second wave attack

On 18 November an account of the raid by Mr A. Neilson was published in The War lllustrated.  On that day he happened to be driving along the coast road alongside the Firth of Forth with his wife. As the bombing began they were adjacent to Edinburgh and Southampton giving them an uninterrupted view of events:

Suddenly there was a loud cracking noise which seemed to be within the car, and which I immediately diagnosed as a broken ball-brace. Again! But this time the cracking noise was a few hundred yards away and easily recognisable as machine-gun fire. I stopped the car and jumped out just in time to see a great volume of water shoot up within a few yards of one of the cruisers.  ‘Air Raid!’ I called, ‘Come out, quick!’

The attacker had gone, but presently the cruisers started loosing their shells to a height of about 6,000 feet. Up among the white puffs of smoke my wife spotted something.  ‘Look, there he is!’  As she spoke the machine banked and came down in a fast dive from the west.

Down, down he came, until directly over the Forth Bridge he released two large bombs whose course we were able to follow until they plunged into the river within a few yards of one of the cruisers.

Several times this happened, and of the bombs which were dropped I should say more than one was as near as thirty yards from one or other of the cruisers.  Certainly, a lucky day for them.  Right behind us in a wood an anti-aircraft battery blazed away, and as we were not more than 400 yards [actually nearer 1,000] from the cruisers the noise was terrific, and all about us we could hear quite distinctly the orders given on the ship’s loudspeakers.

As we were on rising ground and looking down on the scene we had a perfect view of the whole affair.  My wife was a bit afraid to start with, but I insisted that we were tremendously fortunate to get such a view and that we might never have such an opportunity again.  I may say it was fairly obvious she was satisfied on this point – but not just in the way I intended her to be.  I continued to reassure her, however, and pointed out that there was not a chance in a million of a bomb dropping near us as the marksmanship was far too good for that.  The danger of shrapnel dropping on us was slight as we were too close to the guns.  One large piece did, however, land within fifty yards of my car.  What I did not tell her and what I dared not think about was my secret fear of what would have happened to us if one of the bombs had made a lucky hit where the raider was aiming.  It was a most thrilling experience which I should not have missed for a great deal.

Whilst eyewitness accounts from civilians are notoriously unreliable they are often the only testimony available. However, as there were a great many witnesses to the events of 16 October, the common denominators allow us to establish a reasonably accurate record of what happened.  Nevertheless, a number of inaccuracies have been perpetuated over the years, the most common being that the German aircraft which carried out the bombing were He111s.  Another was that the aircraft dropped a number of bombs before going round again for another run.  The Junkers carried just two bombs and these were dropped during the culmination of just one dive attack.

The fact that Pohle was circling over Inverkeithing, observing the success of the other aircraft in his unit, may have given eyewitnesses the impression that just three Ju88s carried out repeated attacks instead of what was actually several waves of aircraft.