Carnage on the Clyde: A WWII cover up

18 Mar 2014 | Magazine, News and features, Volume 43.01 Spring 2014

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A destroyed tram is surrounded by the rubble on Dumbarton Road, Clydebank, after a WWII bomb raid
(Image: West Dunbartonshire Libraries and Cultural Services)

On a moonlit evening on Thursday 13 March 1941, just after 9pm, the first of 236 German bombers converged on Clydeside. By 9.10pm, over the western suburbs of Glasgow, over Bowling and Dalnottar and – especially – over the crowded, densely housed and productive little town of Clydebank, the bombs had begun to fall. And the next night, it happened all over again.

This was bombing of such ferocity that the explosions could be heard clearly at Bridge of Allan in Stirlingshire. The fires were of such frenzy that their glow could be clearly seen from rural Aberdeenshire and Northern Ireland.

Clydebank was all but destroyed. According to the official statistics 528 people, from one geographically small community, were killed, 617 seriously injured. Hundreds – perhaps thousands – more were superficially hurt and cut, or traumatised by blast. Of some 12,000 dwellings – including tenement blocks as well as villas and semi-detached homes – only seven were left entirely undamaged. Four thousand homes were completely destroyed, 4,500 more so severely damaged as to be uninhabitable for months.

The morning of the 14 March saw thousands of dazed survivors shambling along Dumbarton Road into Glasgow and, by the night of Saturday 15 March – as official records would eventually reveal – it was reckoned that more than 40,000 people had left the town amid utter chaos.

And, in the days immediately following the German assault, soldiers and servicemen came home on leave to Clydebank wholly innocent of what had happened. John Bowman, in March 2011, bleakly recalled – for a BBC Scotland audience – returning from his distant base in Sussex to find not only his house obliterated, but most of the street; and that his mother, two brothers and a younger sister had been killed.

There is still a place called Clydebank, and many who survived March 1941 still live there. But thousands who fled never returned. The community that had retired for the evening of Thursday 13 March 1941 was smashed beyond recovery in a single night in what, in proportion of lives lost and homes destroyed, was the worst bombing raid anywhere in Britain in the entire war. Clydebank, the historian Angus Calder bleakly noted in 1969, “had the honour of suffering the most nearly universal damage of any British town”.

But, outside Scotland, few have ever heard of the Clydebank Blitz. The Blitz, to most today, conjures up images of heroic London and battered Coventry – the first because it was, of course, the capital; and the second because the authorities deliberately exploited its ordeal for newsreel propaganda.

Of course very many towns and cities were bombed. Those particularly hard-hit included Liverpool, Hull, Southampton and Belfast. Besides, Clydebank is readily confused with the vague term “Clydeside”, used to describe the greater Glasgow area. But – beyond that – there was calculated wartime censorship by what was laughably known as the Ministry of Information.

Officials refused to allow any mention of the town’s name in subsequent newspaper reports – which only speak of the bombing of “a town in western Scotland”. No film-crews were allowed into the ruins. Neither royalty nor Prime Minister Winston Churchill sped north to visit and console. And, when one survivor, Thomas Kearns, wrote a detailed letter to family in Belfast, it was intercepted (and held) by censors. His words would not see publication till 1971.

A stark photograph, days later, of a Clydebank mass burial, was cropped before publication – on ministry orders – so that the public would not grasp just how terrible the disaster had been; sixty-seven people, or bits of them, lay in it. And the government did its best at first not to issue casualty figures at all and then to give most misleading ones. 

On 18 March 1941 that the Ministry of Home Security – headed by Home Secretary Herbert Morrison – issued a foolish communiqué declaring that “about 500 persons had been killed on the raids in Clydeside”. In fact, 647 had died in Glasgow alone – quite apart from the Clydebank death-toll – and, on hearing of this fatuous announcement, a Home Guardsman in Clydebank is said bitterly to have exclaimed: “Which street?”

Bureaucrats seem to have been determined deliberately to conflate Clydebank and Glasgow fatalities, to the point where the home secretary was accused in the House of Commons of making “misleading statements”. Inevitably, feelings around Clydebank ran high.

A high official warned Tom Johnston, secretary of state for Scotland, that locals heard such official statistics with “frank incredulity” and, a year on, there was great consternation in high places when a Sunday Post anniversary piece, on 15 March 1942, lamented the “1,200 Clydebank people” who had died “as the result of the savage two-night blitz on the town”.

This article had somehow evaded censors. Clydebank Burgh Council now held a furious debate, in which all sides demanded hard, accurate numbers from the government.

But these it refused to yield for the rest of the war. Thus, to this day, many regard the official death toll, as at last made known, with profound scepticism – especially when, years and even decades after the attack, human remains were still being found in Clydebank rubble.

Such games of officialdom were not unique to the Clydebank catastrophe. As the historian Peter Lewis dryly notes, after the dreadful bombing of Manchester on 22 and 23 December 1940 The Manchester Guardian “was not allowed to name the city in its reports of the raids on ‘an inland town in north-west England’ or state that ‘a newspaper office’ hit by incendiaries was its own. Only when the Germans boasted of hitting Manchester was Manchester entitled to be told how heavy the raids and the damage were.”

Hull, the worst-bombed city in England, likewise grew inured to being described as “an east-coast town”, even as sailors came home on leave and lamented through incessant raids that they felt safer at sea. Yet the suppression of detail on Clydebank’s ordeal was determined and exceptional.

There were four evident reasons for this. The first was military. The Clyde generally was a vital workshop for ships, munitions and ordnance. Clydebank was of particular importance, notably for the great yard of John Brown’s. The authorities genuinely believed the Germans should never be told what they had actually hit, far less missed, lest they return and make good their failures.

The second was mortification. Though the imminent attack had been known for hours by the authorities, no warning of any kind had been given the people until German aircraft were practically within earshot. RAF tactics for the defence of greater Glasgow on those nights – too complex to discuss here – had been a humiliating failure. The scant anti-aircraft guns by Clydebank had run out of ammunition. Scottish Office officials had treated the town so contemptuously that Clydebank could not bury her dead even in cardboard coffins; most finally deposited in that huge grave were in bed-sheets tied with string. 

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Evacuees in Whitecrook Street, Clydebank (Image: West Dunbartonshire Libraries and Cultural Services)

Evacuees in Whitecrook Street, Clydebank
(Image: West Dunbartonshire Libraries and Cultural Services)

A third undoubted concern was the spectre of Scottish nationalism. Tom Johnston had talked it up at every opportunity in the pursuit of London largesse, especially after a succession of witless mistakes. The BBC had ended all Scottish regional broadcasting when war began. The new BBC Home Service then persisted, for months, in the incessant playing of There’ll Always Be An England and authority at every level persisted stubbornly on using “English” as a synonym for British. In a spectacular gaffe – when a newsreel described the unambiguously Scottish RAF hero Donald Farquhar as an “English airman”, there was booing throughout Scottish cinemas.

The final factor was a baseless fear of Marxist sedition. Clydeside was an early – and, by 1941, the most organised – fortress of British socialism. She had Independent Labour Party and communist councillors. During World War I, her womenfolk had waged a determined (and successful) rent-strike against rapacious landlords. David Kirkwood – by 1941, the town’s veteran MP – had, as an earnest and vocal pacifist, been locked up in Edinburgh castle during that conflict and, in 1919, unrest was such that the Coalition government even sent troops and tanks into the streets of Glasgow.

In fact these “agitators” were a decent and remarkably conservative bunch; most, for instance, regularly attended church. But, in distant London, shattered Clydebank was viewed as a tinderbox of Bolshevism – especially as, at the time of the raids, there had been a protracted strike of apprentices in the local shipyards. (Not, in fact, greedy young lads, but time-served tradesmen still, unjustly, on apprentices’ wages.)

On all these counts, then, officialdom toiled tirelessly to block, from wider national consciousness, the effective destruction of an entire community.

It is only fair to remind ourselves – seven decades later, in a comfortable age – that Britain in March 1941 was battling for national survival – bombarded from the air, throttled in the Atlantic, close to starving and in real fear of invasion and conquest.

The desperate desire to maintain morale, deny useful information to the foe and stamp on defeatism was by no means dishonourable. And the public information films and perky propaganda posters of the struggle are maddening today less for their bossiness than for their sexism. All the same, the fatuity of wartime censorship and propaganda – much of it to mask incompetence – is remarkable.

Churchill himself intervened in two grave misjudgements. The first was in the wake of the Dunkirk disaster, when the Ministry of Information urged folk to report “defeatists” – having established it as an offence in law to spread “alarm and despondency”. Some 70 people were prosecuted after being shopped by ministry spies (cynically dubbed “Cooper’s Snoopers” after the minister of information, Duff Cooper) until Churchill ordered the nonsense to stop. 

The second was after Buckingham Palace was bombed on 12 September 1940, when the king and queen only narrowly escaped death. “The Ministry of Information, with its genius for missing propaganda opportunities,” notes Lewis, “was busy suppressing news of the Palace bombing when Churchill heard of it. ‘Dolts, idiots, fools!’ he is said to have exploded. ‘Spread the news at once. Let it be broadcast everywhere. Let the people of London know that the King and Queen are sharing the perils with them…’”

Royalty was one matter; the people of Clydebank another. Whatever the motives and by whatever authority – perhaps even that of the prime minister himself – “official estimates of the damage and dead were deliberately played down”, as Meg Henderson, whose novel The Holy City is based on the experience of wartime Clydebank, put it in 1999.

“Unlike modern conflicts… there were no TV cameras to bring the horror directly into the nation’s living-rooms, but there were newsreel cameras. What Clydebank has never understood is why in Coventry and London the newsreel films were widely broadcast with proud boasts of ‘We can take it’, while in Clydebank the official view was that there had been little damage and few casualties…”

The town was never properly rebuilt; most of its March 1941 citizens never returned; and by the mid-1980s Clydebank had lost almost all her traditional industry. It’s a ragged, palpably sad place today, and with one lingering legacy from past ship-building glory – leading all Europe in asbestos-related illness and death.

This article is taken from the spring 2014 issue of Index on Censorship Magazine. Get your copy of the issue by subscribing here or downloading the iPad app.

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Paul Conroy: “War journalists must avoid being used as propaganda”

14 Oct 2013 | News and features, Syria

Paul Conroy at a protest in London last year calling for peace in Syria. Image Demotix/Russell Pollard

Paul Conroy at a protest in London last year calling for peace in Syria. Image Demotix/Russell Pollard

Journalists have a bigger influence on how war is perceived than in years gone by, said war photographer Paul Conroy at the Cheltenham Literature Festival yesterday.

Discussing how journalists and photographers cover wars and the pressures they are under, Conroy, who covered Syria with Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin, said: “Everything is in the instant now, battles have been influenced by the immediacy of information.”

Conroy described how he and Colvin got into Syria using underground tunnels and the assistance of rebels. They were smuggled into Syria through a 3km scramble down a storm drain, which he described as “the only way”. He added: “The risks were quite high.”

He also talked about the attack on the media centre they were operating from, which killed Colvin. Conroy, who was badly injured, was rescued and got out of the war zone so he could be treated.

When asked about how newspapers’ tightening budgets were affecting foreign new coverage, Sunday Times associate editor Sean Ryan, who was chairing the event and was Conroy and Colvin’s desk contact, said: “We will always cover the biggest conflicts.” Conroy called for more funding for foreign news coverage from the media in general.

The acclaimed war photographer, who also covered the Balkan conflicts, said it was now impossible for journalists to switch from being with one side to covering the other side of a conflict. It had been possible in the 1990s, but this was no longer the case.

Because of this journalists had to be wary of how they might be used to put forward a biased or inaccurate picture. “What we realised was that you are open to be used for propaganda. What you have to do is double check and get eye witness accounts.”

 

Assessing Obama’s record on transparency

29 Jul 2011 | Uncategorized

Emily Badger speaks to Geoffrey R Stone on what could be the US’s single most important civil liberties issue in the age of the War on Terror
Geoffrey R Stone

First Amendment scholar Geoffrey R Stone wrote for Index back in 2008 that the American public’s right to know had been one of the greatest casualties of the Bush Administration. A previous colleague of Barack Obama at the University of Chicago Law School, Stone had high hopes that the new president would reverse many of his predecessor’s damaging policies. That has not exactly been the case. This week, Stone sat down with Index to assess Obama’s record on transparency, which, he concludes, may be the single most important — and fragile — civil liberties issue in the age of the War on Terror.

Index: When you wrote for Index at the end of the Bush Administration, the state of the public right’s to know had largely been damaged by government secrecy. At the time, what were you hoping would happen under the Obama Administration?

Stone: I was hopeful that when President Obama took office he would have a much more open sense of the importance of the actions of government being made transparent to the American people. Certainly, that was a theme in his campaign. So I think it was reasonable to expect major change in some of the Bush-era policies.

Index: In some cases, that has happened, particularly around changes Obama has made to Freedom of Information policy and classification standards.

Stone: Right. Most notably, the President has changed the standard for the classification of information. Under President George W Bush, the prior standard was expanded to allow greater classification, so that any material that, if disclosed might have harm to the national security, was to be classified. Under the Clinton Administration, and now under the Obama Administration, the standard was changed to say that classification was permissible only if the potential harm to the national security outweighs the value of the disclosure of the information to the public, which is a more appropriate way to strike the balance between the need of the public to know, and the need of the government to keep things confidential. So, in some respects, the Obama Administration has made significant progress. But in lots of other areas, I think it’s been disappointing.

Index: Can you walk through those areas?

Stone: One of those areas has to do with journalist-source privilege. Forty-nine states and the District of Columbia provide a privilege to journalists not to disclose the identities of confidential informants, either at all or unless the government could show a very substantial justification and need for the identities. The federal government does not have such a privilege. Obama was a supporter of the bills in Congress to create a federal privilege, but since taking office, he’s been much more skeptical about it and has essentially suggested it should not be adopted if the information would be potentially harmful to national security. As a consequence, nothing has happened, no legislation has been enacted, and that’s quite disappointing.

Another area where he’s been less transparent than people had hoped had to do with the issue of whistleblowers. Federal law does not give any clear protection to whistleblowers in the national security context, and yet there are certainly circumstances – for example, where a whistleblower reveals information about illegal government policies, or reveals information about highly wasteful or incompetent government action, or simply reveals information that’s of grave importance to the public — where there should be a clear privilege for whistleblowers to expose that information without risk of prosecution. Once again, the legislation simply has been stalled in Congress. The President has not made any effort to push it along, and indeed has prosecuted several people in circumstances that are problematic.

The third area where he’s been disappointing has been in State Secrets. The State Secrets doctrine has been around almost 60 years, and it means that the federal government can refuse to reveal information in litigation if the information may be harmful to national security, and indeed can simply close down the litigation if it feels it can’t adequately defend itself without revealing the information. If, for example, someone sues the government claiming that the National Security Agency’s surveillance program initiated under President Bush violates federal law, what the Bush Administration did was to essentially assert that that litigation could not go forward because the only way that we could defend the legality of our policy was by revealing information to the court that would, if revealed, harm national security. And the Bush Administration took the position that judges should simply defer to the assertion by the government that there would be this damage. At the very least, it was expected that the Obama Administration would take a much more reserved approach with respect to the use of the State Secrets doctrine and would approve legislation that would limit the application of the doctrine to situations where the judge himself is in a position to evaluate the degree of potential danger to the national security. But, nothing has happened on that, again. The Administration has not moved forward on it and has indeed continued to assert the State Secrets doctrine in situations not dissimilar to that of the Bush Administration.

Index: You’ve mentioned that there are several areas in which Obama’s actions in the White House have been very different from what he said he believed when he was a senator. Do you think that’s because all of these issues look different when you’re looking at them from the White House, or because as president he’s been influenced by people with different views within the security world?

Stone: There are a lot of factors that enter into play. One of them is the sense that, “well now my guys are in charge, so we’re going to behave, so we trust ourselves to do well, and the public should trust us to do well, even if you couldn’t trust George Bush to exercise good judgment on these matters.” So one part of this is that when you’re in a position of authority, you believe your motives are good, and therefore there’s no need for a check on your behaviour. That’s a natural phenomenon, it happens all the time, and I think it plays a role.

Part of it may be that you have a better appreciation of the complexities of the situation than you did before you were inside, and that with that greater appreciation, you in fact wisely changed your position, because you recognised it’s not as easy to do the things you thought should be done when you were outside the Administration.

A third factor is politics. Some of these [positions] would appear to be politically weak on national defence, and even though you believed it was the right thing to do, you might decide that to actually do them when you’re the president would cost you support. Your enemies would characterise you as being ineffectual when it comes to protecting the nation from external enemies. And therefore, you don’t want to expose yourself to that kind of attack, even though you still believe the right thing to do on the merits of the issue, as opposed to larger issue of electability, would be to change the law.

Fourth, there are relationships with other people in your Administration that you have to be cognisant of. You don’t want to alienate unnecessarily – even though you’re the boss – people in your administration, like members of the military or Defence Department by doing what you believe is the right thing and they believe is the wrong thing. You may believe you’re right but decide “I don’t really want to alienate all these people by overriding what they think is their better judgement on these matters.”

There are lots of reasons why these changes [in position] may take place, and some of them are better than others. But I suspect in varying degrees, all of them play a role.

Index: Particularly around the Thomas Drake case, there has been a lot made out of the fact that Obama has been a more aggressive pursuer of whistleblowers than any of his predecessors. Is it fair to characterise him that way, or is that more of a statistical anomaly given that he inherited many of these cases from the Bush Administration?

Stone: I think the latter. My guess is that Obama is not more aggressive; it’s just that he has more cases that are holdovers from situations that arose in the prior Administration. I have no reason to believe that he’s actually being more aggressive than the Bush Administration would have been in the same circumstances.

Index: Do you think that since the administration is actively pursuing the handful of whistleblower cases it has to essentially create a chilling effect on other would-be whistleblowers?

Stone: I think that’s exactly right. There’s no real need to punish these people –– they’re not going to be in the position again to be whistleblowers. If nothing else, they’ve been fired, and never again given a security clearance. So, the punishment of them, and the pursuit of them, is clearly designed to deter others in the future from following their example. You don’t want to be prosecuted and investigated and have your life exposed in the press, and that’s going to make people who are tempted to be whistleblowers to think twice, and three times, before they actually act on it. I think the purpose here is much less the prevention of harm by these people in the future, it’s really about sending a message to other government employees not to do this.

Index: You’ve written a lot about how in past wartimes, the US has made some bad decisions restricting civil liberties – but that we’ve always snapped out of it and later restored rights that were taken away during wartime. The War on Terror seems like a different situation, in that it may not have an obvious end. Given the pattern throughout US history, should we be concerned now that we may be giving up some rights, and it won’t be clear when the time has come that we can have them back again?

Stone: I’ve always been skeptical of the notion of it being a “war without end.” When you were in the middle of World War II, or the middle of the Civil War, you didn’t know when it was going to end. You only knew when it was going to end after it was over. It’s true this is not a conventional war where you can defeat the enemy in as neat a way as you could by capturing the Confederate Army, but I suspect this war will end. And I think the rhetoric of that is blown too much out of proportion on both sides – among those who say “we can’t mess around here because it’ll be a life-and-death struggle as far as the eye can see,” and those who say that “there won’t be an end to this, so we have to be especially wary.” I’m much more closely aligned with the latter. If you believe it’s an unlimited war, or at least a long war, then the message you should take from that is not that we should pull out all the stops –– do whatever you can to win this war, civil liberties be damned –– but that we should be especially cautious.

If you ask, “What are the freedoms that we’ve given up as a consequence of 9/11 thus far?” it’s actually not that easy to identify specific things that are egregious. It’s not like the Civil War, where there was a suspension of habeas corpus throughout most of the United States. Or World War I, where there were prosecutions of anyone who criticised the war or the draft. Or World War II, where we had the Japanese internment.

The issues that are most threatening are the questions of transparency. Because the government can’t any longer suppress dissent, it has an even greater political need to prevent the public from knowing things. Whereas you could once control public discourse by making it a crime to criticise the government, you can’t do that any more, which means you’ve got to really do what you can to prevent people from criticising the government. That’s the instability that’s created here that’s most troublesome.

Guantanamo is a serious concern, and the temptations we fell into –– both with respect to torture and with respect to detention even of American citizens – were very dangerous. But those practices were abandoned pretty quickly. I think it’s the transparency issue that’s the most important, and potentially the most damaging.