clydebank blitz - march 1941

[sanderson]

My son is doing some research on the Clydebank Blitz. I would be very grateful for any information on the warplanes involved, and where I might source pictures of those planes.

Many thanks

[simon]

Can you provide some more information on the Clydebank Blitz, such as when it was? Without that though (before anyone says how wrong I am about anything, this is basically a stab in the dark), and assuming the Clydebank Blitz was a WWII Luftwaffe attack, the most likely participants in any Luftwaffe attack would have been the Heinkel He111H and/or He111P series bombers, possibly also including Junkers Ju88A series bombers, Dornier Flying Pencils (Do17, Do217, Do215 and related aircraft) and if it occured after 1943 there may have been a small number of Heinkel He177 "Greif".

Pictures for most of these are quite commonly available, Taglia's got some of them on this site. On the RAF side of most night time attacks, the principle defending night fighters would probably have been Bristol Blenheims (Summer-Winter 1940), Boulton Paul Defiants Bristol Beaufighters and de Havilland Mosquitoes of various marks at various times.

If you want to e-mail me directly (simon.ross@bbrail.com) with some more background information on the Clydebank Blitz, I'll see if I can find out some more detailed information on the various planes.

Good luck with your son's project.

Simon.

[simon]

My humble apologees since you actually included the date in the title!

By that point the Luftwaffe's Bomber Arm had switched almost exclusively to night attacks over Britain. By far the most common night bomber in the Luftwaffe armoury at this time was the Heinkel He111H series (The slightly poorer performance of the He111P series had lead to them being replaced by "H"s), and the Dornier Bombers I mentioned in my earlier post were being relocated to the Mediterranean and North Africa, as were the Ju88s.

Information about the He111 bombers can be found in any book on the Battle of Britain, but for a brief overview:

The He111 was a twin enginned Medium Bomber (The Terms Light, medium and heavy relate to the weight of Bombs the bomber could carry). An He111H carried four or five crewmen including gunners, the pilot, navigator and bombardier (Bomb aimer) all housed in a heavily glazed nose which increased the visability of each crewman at the expense of crew protection.

Defensive armament consisted of 6 machine guns or cannon of various calibres in the nose, dorsal (roughly where the dorsal fin on a fish would be), ventral (Sort of belly position) (Both fore and aft) and each beam (Sometimes called waist) position, and an additional optional fixed gun fired remotely by the pilot in the tail. Whilst this afforded effective all round defensive fire, the guns were pintel mounted (loosely bolted on flexible mounts) this meant that the recoil from firing the guns was basically absorbed by the gunners which reduced the accuracy of defensive fire over range.

To put this in perspective the offensive firepower of the Spitfire MkI and Hurricane MkI was 8 machine guns and the Hurricane MkIIb had 12, whereas an individual He111 could only bring a single gun to bear on an attacking plane at any one time. The Bristol Beaufighter (a contemporary radar equipped night-fighter) was even more heavily armed with 6 machine guns and 4 20mm automatic cannon.

The top speed of an H series bomber was around 250 mph (400 kph) (by comparison top speed for a Spitfire MkI was around 350mph (560kph)), and whilst the He111 was supposedly quite manouevrable for an aircraft of its size, this was of course nothing compared the abilites of any contemporary fighter. The ceiling (maximum operating height) of the He111H was 25,000ft and the maximum rate of climb was around 1,000 ft per minute.

The power for an He111H was in the form of two Junkers Jumo liquid cooled engines, these provided a good level of power whilst being aerodynamic in form, however the liquid cooling was quite prone to battle damage as the slightest damage to the cooling system could cause the engine to over heat, seize or potentially catch fire.

The He111H series could carry between 2,000kg (earlier models) and 4,000kg (later models) of bombs (Standard Avro Lancasters could carry around 7,000kg, specially modified Lancasters could carry a 10,000kg Bomb)). Luftwaffe bombs in aircraft of this type would usually individually weigh either 250kg or 500kg. In Heinkel He111H these were carried in the bomb-bay stacked vertically on their tails so that they would initially spin end over end on leaving the aircraft (This was extremely unusual, and I'm not aware of another aircraft that carried its bombs like this).

Hope there's something in here you can use!

[sanderson]

Simon,

Thank you very much for the information. It was kind of you to go to such lengths of detail, which will help make my son's project more complete.

Regards

[simon]

Just a note to add on to this...

I've recently found out that bomber versions of the Sm.79 Sparviero carried their bombs stacked vertically on their tails too. I don't know about any of the other Italian tri-motors though.

:)