Edit The dark days of World War Two
Local defence volunteers (LDVs) paraded in soft hats, sports jackets and flannels.
Later, uniformed Home Guard units set up machine-gun posts round the city.
Trams and buses had their headlights masked and their bumpers and fenders painted white. Getting on one was a challenge. Fuel rationing meant few buses and queues for trams were so large and vigorous, women complained of bruising and torn clothing.
Baffle walls were put up across tenement close entrances.
Dave Willis sang ''In my wee gas mask, I'm working out
a plan; though all the kids imagine I'm a bogeyman.''
Barrage balloons hovered over the city. Restaurants were forbidden to charge more than five shillings (25p) for a meal. Cigarettes were hard to find. Books were scarce.
Such was the humdrum daily life of wartime.
But high drama and the threat of death and destruction were seldom far away.
The first day-time raid was on July 19, 1940.
It demolished a tenement in Scotstoun, including the home of Queen's Park footballer, Jackie Gardner.
The first night raid was on September 18, missing major targets but destroying a building in Royal Exchange Square and setting fire to a cruiser
in Yorkhill docks, so that Yorkhill Hospital had to be evacuated.
Then, starting around
9pm on March 13, 1941, Clydebank was turned into
a burnt-out shell.
The Admiralty tanks at Old Kilpatrick, Singer's woodyard, the distillery at Yoker, the rubber store at John Brown's Rothesay Dock all set ablaze. Ironically, the light from the flames spotlit other targets for the Luftwaffe.
Also damaged were Turner's asbestos works, Beardmore's, the Royal Ordnance factory at Dalmuir, some schools and churches.
Wave after wave of bombers swooped over the town. ''There were firemen slumped on the road'', recalled a survivor. ''Buildings on both sides were blazing and crumbling.'' Later, the people of Clydebank were to place on record many of their poignant perceptions of these nights.The ''constant stream of injured and dead,'' the screams in the first aid centres from those who lost arms and legs, ''people broken, smashed and burned and others grey and dead without so much as
a scratch on their bodies''.
Windows were shattered, doors blasted off their hinges, a hospital roof was ripped away, an ambulance was torn apart, bodies and body parts were tossed in the air by the force of many explosions.
Children watched their parents die. Other children were thrown about like rag dolls.
When daylight came, bodies were laid out by roadsides and covered with sheets.
There weren't enough coffins; bodies were wrapped in the sheets and tied with string.
The area was left with a sea of rubble and 96 bomb craters.
Over the two nights 40,000 people were evacuated.
Only seven or eight homes survived undamaged; 4500 were irreparably damaged or utterly destroyed.
The population slumped from 50,000 to 2000. Many never went back.
Yet the Germans' main aim - to create panic and demoralise the population - was a failure.
Instead, the survivors were angry and united in a determination to resist.
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