🔴 Air Raid | 8/10
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Red alert sirens in northern Israel — interceptions underway
Red alert sirens are sounding in three regions of Northern Israel: Confrontation Line, Katzrin, and Upper Galilee. About 7 interception attempts were recorded. IDF stated it was a false target.

#OSINT #NewsGroup #AirRaid #Israel #Lebanon #Hezbollah

Blitz! The thread about WW2 air raids in Edinburgh and Leith

An air raid on Leith on the night of Monday April 7th 1941 saw extensive property damage caused in North Leith. But it wasn’t just bricks and mortar that suffered: three people were killed and 118 injured in the raid which makes it the 10th most deadly such event (by total casualties) in Scotland during the war.

Note, there was deliberately limited and non-specific press reporting of the details and casualties of air raids during the war itself. Some such reporting only took place, retrospectively, after the war but understandably details were occasionally incorrect or overlooked. For accuracy and out of respect I have endeavoured to cross-reference everything below that refers to individuals with the official civilian war death records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and Scotland’s People.

One of those who lost their lives in the raid that night was 17 year old Anstruther (Ernie) Smith, a delivery boy from 15 Graham Street who also worked as a messenger for the Leith ARP (Air Raid Precautions – civil defence). On hearing the sirens he had assisted his elderly neighbours to a shelter before reporting for duty at Leith’s Town hall a few streets away where Ferry Road meets Great Junction and North Junction Streets. It was here that he lost his life when a bomb landed nearby and exploded. He was fondly remembered in his community as someone who freely helped the elderly; checking in on them on his way to work each morning to light their fires and make them a cup of tea, and running errands for them. The Anstruther Pensioner’s Club was formed after the war in his memory, it was held in the very room in the Town Hall where we died and it attracted 300 members and a waiting list of 200.

Also killed by the same bomb that claimed Ernie was 85 year-old Jane Notman Young, who died in her house by the Town Hall at 21 North Junction Street. Lastly a 19 year-old apprentice draughtsman and Home Guard volunteer, Kenneth James Anderson, died in hospital the following morning after his house at 5 Largo Place was badly damaged in the blast. This block would later have to be demolished.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/15989027951/

Mercifully the death-to-injury ratio was substantially lower than other comparable attacks on Scottish cities; Leith had been hit by two bombs known as Luftmines – large weapons that were dropped on a parachute and intended for use against dock areas to attack shipping. These as it turned out were not very effective against other targets such as buildings, despite their size. Never the less, three hundred people in North Leith were rendered homeless due to the damage caused to housing in the neighbourhood. £1,500 was allocated to Leith from the National Air Raid Distress Fund, which provided emergency clothing, bedding and canteens to raid victims.

The bombs that hit Leith damaged the three principal public buildings of the burgh; its Town Hall (which included its main public auditorium), its Library – both of which were hardly 10 years old – and the large David Kilpatrick (“DK“) School adjacent. As well as the tenement houses, the Norwegian Seaman’s Lutheran Church, North Leith Parish Church and a railway embankment and signal box of the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) all suffered varying degrees of damage. The gallery below shows some of these:

The main lending room of the library was not fully repaired until 1956 although the reference room had been re-purposed to serve as such in the meantime. The Town Hall and its auditorium had to wait until 1961, a full 20 years after the bombs had fallen. The city’s apparent neglect in restoring the public buildings of Leith after the war caused much local consternation at the time. This damaged caused to the outbuildings of the DK school, which were in use as a nursery school, became known locally as the Bombies and was apparently where pupils would gather to sort out their differences with fists. It would not be replaced until much later and this in turn was demolished, along with the rest of the school, in the 1980s.

Although Leith was marked as a bombing target on German maps, the intended target of this raid had actually been Clydebank almost 50 miles to the west, where 20 souls lost their lives and 313 were injured that same night. This attack was a follow up to the Clydebank Blitz of March 1941 but the raiders had become scattered and twelve other targets across Scotland, including Leith, were hit that night with a total of 49 killed and 456 injured. Most of the deaths night were in Gretna in Dumfriesshire where a lone aircraft jettisoned its bombs and hit a Masonic Lodge, killing 22 and wounding 18. Other bombs were dropped as widely as Bankfoot and Stanley in Perthshire, Loch Nevis in Knoydart, Fife and Arbroath in the east of the country and Greenlaw to the south in the Borders; a huge margin of error. Closer to Leith were the mainline railway leading to the Forth Bridge near Turnhouse and Braehead House in Cramond with thirty four incendiary bombs between these points. These were 1kg aluminium tubes filled with a compound called Thermite which burned at around 2,500°C and were intended to set fire to wooden structures and the timber flooring and roof structures of buildings. These were a far cry from the ineffective rope and tar incendiaries dropped on Edinburgh and Leith by a German Zepellin in 1916.

Although this raid caused the greatest damage to property in Leith during the war, it was not the worst in terms of the loss of life. The previous summer, on the evening of July 18th 1940 at 7:45PM, seven people were killed on George Street in North Leith (now known as North Fort Street). At 8 George Street David Lennie Duff (a 33 year-old basket maker) and his sister Lily Duff (a 23 year-old biscuit packer); Catherine Helliwell (a 61 year-old housewife) and her son-in-law Robert Thomson (a 25 year-old baker); Catherine Fallon Baird (74); and Catherine Redpath (41) who had been visiting the address from her home at 20 Gorgie Road were killed. Over the street at number 13, 15 year-old Jane (Jean) Bauld Rutherford from number 17 was killed when the bomb shelter she was in was hit. The fatal damage had been caused by bombs intended for the Victoria Dock, one of which hit the foot of Portland Place where a nearby tramcar was fortunate to miss getting a direct hit that would surely have resulted in more fatalities.

Number 8 George Street, where six people had lost their lives, had to be demolished along with its neighbour at number 10 and was not rebuilt until 1959. The rest of the tenements of George Street – apart from the northern corner blocks – were later levelled by the city planners as part of the Fort Area Comprehensive Redevelopment not long afterwards.

Four days later, on July 22nd, a raid on Leith Docks killed Robert Hume of 45 Glover Street (aged 33), a fireman with the Auxiliary Fire Service at the Albert Dock. Also on this night Mary Fulton Riach (aged 65) of 23 Woodbine Terrace and Catherine Leishman (aged 68) of 4 Meadowbank Crescent both died from heart failure during the raid, the official cause of death being put down to “war operations“. Two months later, on September 29th, a single stray bomb fell on the block of number 21 – 27 Crewe Place in East Pilton killing the young McArthur children; brother and sister Morag Elizabeth (aged 5) and Ronald Egbert (aged 7) from number 27. Their neighbour Charles Fortune Wilson (aged 69) of number 25 would die the next day in hospital. The landlords and builders of this housing scheme, Mactaggart and Mickel, rehoused the now-homeless survivors and had rebuilt the house at their own expense within 6 weeks. A wartime shortage of timber meant it was given a flat roof, the only such house on the street and the only clue to its sad history.

Another single, stray bomb dropped that evening hit a bonded whisky warehouse of the Caledonian Distillery on Duff Street in Dalry. The distillery was home to over a million gallons of highly-flammable spirit and an immense fire erupted, so ferocious that the reflection on the clouds in the night sky was apparently visible to German aircrew flying over Middlesborough, 150 miles (240km) away to the south. The bond was totally destroyed, as was one adjoining tenement of fourteen flats at 28 Springwell Place.

A week later around 745PM on October 7th, five small bombs were dropped in the district of Marchmont, landing at 29 Roseneath Terrace, 20 Meadow Place, 16 Roseneath Place, 13 Marchmont Crescent and 21 Marchmont Road. Eleven people were injured by flying glass and splinters. Three weeks later on the morning of October 26th, Margaret Ridley Stuart (aged 72) died at her flat at 45 Tolbooth Wynd in Leith from a heart attack brought on by another air raid leaving her husband Thomas, a retired dock labourer, a widower.

The following month the animal population of Edinburgh Zoo was reduced slightly when, on November 4th, two stray bombs hit the park killing six budgerigars and a wild rabbit (as reported by Zoo Director T. H. Gillespie to The Scotsman, Friday 20 December 1940). The craters were left unfilled and became a visitor attraction. A crater caused by a bomb dropped on the lawn of Holyrood Park was used by enterprising locals to raise money for a Spitfire Fund by charging for access to view it.

The month after the raid on North Leith which had killed Ernie, on the night of 6th May 1941, five lives were lost in the suburban bungalows of Duddingston on the outskirts of the city. One large bomb, three smaller ones and 100 incendiaries fell on Niddrie Road (now called Duddingston Park South), Milton Crescent and the Jewel Cottages at around half past midnight. Leonard Arthur Wilde (aged 39), an Air Raid Warden, was killed in his home at number 27 Milton Crescent along with his neighbours Joseph Watson (aged 40) of the Home Guard and William Dineley (aged 37). Lilias Tait Waterston (aged 69) was killed in her house at 26 Niddrie Road and her neighbour Barbara Thomson (87) was killed at number 30.

The last bombs of the war which caused fatalities in Edinburgh fell on Loaning Road in Craigentinny on the night of August 6th 1942, demolishing the Corporation tenement at number 35. Two people were killed; Elizabeth Veitch (aged 13) at number 35 and Robert Wright (aged 66), the janitor of Craigentinny Community Centre next door. A replacement tenement was built here post-war.

You can see in the first picture where the bomb has left a crater (green arrow), upended an “Anderson” shelter (blue) and the entrance to another shelter (orange). Note the white painted poles, so you don’t run into them in the dark

Edinburgh and Leith were mercifully spared most of the horrors of aerial bombing meted out to other cities during WW2. Altogether there were 21 civilian deaths and about 210 injuries caused directly by aerial bombing. At least 5 further deaths were recorded as being due to “war operations” when people had heart attacks brought about by the shock and stress of experiencing an air raid.

If this thread has proved interesting you may be interested in a thread on the first aerial raids and shooting down of German aircraft over the UK in WW2 which took place over the Firth of Forth in view of Edinburgh and Leith or a thread detailing some of the anti-aircraft defences of the city during the conflict.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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Womanning the Guns: the thread about Edinburgh and Leith’s WW2 aircraft defences

Today’s Auction House Artefact is a German Luftwaffe bombing maps centred on Edinburgh and Leith from WW2. These very maps may have been used in air raids on Edinburgh and Leith during that conflict. They have a deliberate yellow tint to make reading them under the night lighting in an aircraft easier and were printed on plastic-coated fabric to avoid creases and allow the navigator to mark on them in a wax pencil. Water, rivers, roads, railways and forests are all marked as obvious navigation markers. The map dates from 1941 and interestingly all the place names are in English – probably because German maps were basically reprints of captured or purchased British Ordnance Survey maps.

Ziele (targets) were marked in yellow in ink that may have been luminescent so that they would appear brightly at night and account for the major docks and shipyards, airfields, military facilities and power stations along the Forth Coast. Below is my best guess at the full list of target sites (excepting the Forth Bridge, which I mistakenly overlooked).

The German Naval Command (OKM) at least bothered itself to translate some of the descriptive words on their charts into German, although again they had simply bought up sets of official and readily available Admiralty charts and reverse engineered them. The below OKM coastal chart was printed in 1938 but was already well out of date – entire interwar districts are missing; Craigentinny, Lochend and Restalrig in the east and Wardie, Granton and East Pilton in the north. The Western General Hospital is marked as Armenhaus, the translation of Poorhouse, which it had ceased to be in 1927. The fact that the railway to Leith Central Station is missing and there is no gasworks marked at Granton suggests the map predates 1900 and so was 38 years out of date at the time of issue!

Such maps show that the German military considered Edinburgh and Leith to be targets of interest. The British authorities were more than a little aware of this and were relatively well prepared when war broke out to defend the city from air attack.

The principle defence was provided by the fighter squadrons stationed at the RAF airfields at Turnhouse, to the west of the city, and Drem in East Lothian. These were the first British home air defences to be tested in the war; on 16th October 1939 a Spitfire of 603 Squadron from Turnhouse piloted by Flt. Lt. Gifford shot down a Junkers 88 bomber, one of 12 that had attacked the Royal Navy anchorages in the Forth. This was the first German aircraft of the war brought down over Britain and one of the four crew, Obergefreiter Krämer, was killed in this action. Spitfires from 602 Squadron from Drem under Flight Lt. Pinkerton brought down another bomber off of Crail, with 3 of the 4 crew being killed.

But it wasn’t just from the skies that the city was defended, it was also protected from the ground by a ring of anti-aircraft gun batteries. This was a far cry from WW1 when Edinburgh and Leith were almost completely undefended when a Zeppelin air raid dropped 44 bombs and left 14 dead. All the anti-aircraft guns in Scotland (and Northern Ireland) were part of a Territorial Army formation called the 3rd Anti Aircraft Division, which was headquartered in Edinburgh.

There were five gun batteries around the city of Edinburgh plus a decoy site (although the one at Silverknowes may have been a decoy too and the others weren’t always armed depending on the phase of the war). The defences of Edinburgh and Leith benefited from their proximity to the Royal Navy Home Fleet’s base at Rosyth and were a component of a wider network defending the Forth anchorages, with thirteen further batteries along the coast. These defences were manned overall by 36th (Scottish) Anti-Aircraft Brigade, with Edinburgh being covered by the 94th Regiment. As the war progressed the organisational structure changed and due to a shortage of manpower mixed units were introduced by incorporating women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) into the gun batteries.

The gun batteries were of a standard design known as HAA sites (Heavy Anti-Aircraft) and the remaining structures of site EDG2 at Alnwickhill can still be clearly seen in aerial photography (and from the ground), underneath the equestrian paraphernalia from its modern-day use as a horse farm. The gun battery was composed of four QF (Quick Firing) guns – the pink dots – on concrete plinths with protective walls of brick and earth. These were arranged in an arc around a control bunker (white arrow). Each gun had ready-to-use ammunition lockers arranged around its inner walls, with more stored in two magazines (orange arrows) nearby. The distinctive circular feature to the north of the battery was a large calibration mattress for the site’s gunnery radar.

Most such batteries were armed with the QF 3.7-inch gun (the inches refers to the calibre, or diameter of the gun bore) that were sited at these batteries could fire an explosive shell weighing 28lbs (13kg) to an effective height of about 25,000ft (7,600m). They could shoot higher than this, but this was the maximum height to which they were able to accurately track and engage a target and was sufficient to engage all but the highest-flying enemy aircraft at this time. A photograph of one of Edinburgh’s 3.7″ guns is shown below

Each gun could fire 10-20 rounds a minute, depending on how well drilled the crews were and how physically fit they were to man-handle the heavy ammunition for any extended period of firing. The performance of the guns was therefore directly proportional to how fit the crew were and one of the principal responsibilities of battery commanders was to keep the men active. Interestingly the only other wartime photos I can find of the gun batteries around Edinburgh – at West Pilton – show physical training in progress.

The large protective shields around the guns in the background indicates that this site was actually armed with the less common QF 4.5-inch guns that were based on a Royal Navy design. They fired a heavier projectile (54lb or 24kg) to a greater height but the rate of fire was much reduced as a result, to about 8 rounds per minute.

Each gun battery was controlled by a mechanical computer known as a predictor, which would be located at the central building marked with the white arrow on the aerial photo. This box of tricks had various dials into which its operators could dial input parameters about the target and ambient conditions (measured or guessed). The internal electro-mechanical innards of the box would calculate the direction and elevation in which each gun should be pointed and the guns followed its lead; the crews just had to keep on loading them.

The distance to the target and its height was calculated using a device known as a Rangefinder. The static HAA batteries used a huge 18-foot wide Barr & Stroud UB-10 device.

Hitting a tiny, fast moving target moving in three dimensions – like an aircraft – with a projectile fired by a gun mounted miles away and tens of thousands of feet below was a tall order: so tall in fact that it was actually fundamentally impossible. As a result the projectiles were not actually expected to hit their target, rather they were to explode in its vicinity, close enough to do damage. Each projectile therefore had a clockwork fuse in its nose which was set to explode when it reached its target, a setting calculated by the Predictor which sent its outputs to another machine called the Fuse Setter. As part of the loading drill, each shell would be placed nose-first into the Setter which automatically adjusted the timer, before the loader shoved the projectile into the breach of the gun. Despite all this mechanical sophistication it was still a monumentally complicated mathematical problem that could be thrown out by tiny variations in the predictor inputs, or the weather, or the ambient conditions, or the target manoeuvring. It was calculated that it would take 41 thousand rounds fired from 3.7″ guns to bring down a single aeroplane! To put this into context, the five batteries of 4 guns around Edinburgh could fire up to 320 rounds per minute at best: if you could keep that up without running out of ammunition, it would take 2.2 hours to bring down an enemy plane – which by then was halfway back home. The role of these guns therefore was less actually shooting aircraft down and more just making sure they flew high enough and took enough avoiding action to make dropping their bombs a far more challenging and less accurate task.

To improve the accuracy of the inputs to the Predictor, the HAA batteries were progressively equipped with Gun-Laying (GL) radar sets which could accurately measure the range to target with an accuracy of about 50 metres. But these early GL radar sets were primitive by even the standards of the day and used a long wavelength which was susceptible to ground interference which caused false returns. To negate this issue the ground around each radar set was “calibrated” using an enormous wire mattress; this is the circular platform visible in the aerial photograph above of Alnwickhill. A 120 metre diameter ring of ground was flattened off, with the radar antennae positioned at its the centre on a raised platform. This area was laid with a 13,000m2 mattress of ½-inch chicken wire mesh, suspended on a wooden frame at a height of 1.5m from the ground. This required 230 rolls of wire mesh, 4 feet wide by 50 yards (1.2x46m) long; 650 miles (1,050 km) of wire per site plus a further 10 miles (16km) in the supports. Such was the scale of and priority given to these calibration mattresses that they consumed the nation’s entire supply of chicken wire at the time!

The anti-aircraft defences of Edinburgh also included more exotic weaponry; there were two Z-Batteries, reinforcing the regular guns at Craigentinny and West Pilton. These sinister sounding devices were batteries of 64 twin-barelled rocket launchers that fired projectiles which deployed a 500ft long cable suspended by a parachute, with a grenade attached at the other end. The theory was that the launchers would unleash their 128 rockets across the flightpath of an oncoming enemy aircraft which would hopefully snag one or more cables and then draw the dangling grenade towards itself. These were a rather makeshift, emergency weapon to try and make up for a lack of proper weapons and were rarely effective. They did at least create a decent fireworks display to give the public the impression that they were being defended and could be manned by older members of the Home Guard up to an age limit of 60 as the rounds were much lighter than the heavy 3.7″ and 4.5″ gun rounds – the age limit for which was 40. An Edinburgh Evening News report of 25th September 1944 reports that the 101st (City of Edinburgh) Home Guard Ant-Aircraft Rocket Battery at Craigentinny had been on operational service for 820 consecutive nights, i.e. since June 1942 and was the first such battery to become operational in Scotland. At the time of reporting, each of the Edinburgh rocket batteries had fired their weapons in anger once, both on the night of 24th March 1943, and each was credited with the shooting down of an enemy aircraft, which they shared with the regular gun batteries of the city.

For night-time actions there were powerful searchlights to try and identify targets for the guns to fire at – a largely fruitless task. I have so far identified two recorded locations and suggestions of more. The first is a photograph taken in April 1942 which shows a visit to a searchlight position near Hunter’s Tryst, looking towards the Pentland Hill. The visitor is the Rev. Ronnie Selby Wright, formerly minister of the Canongate Kirk and by then senior Padre to the Army’s 52nd (Lowland) Division. He acquired the nickname “Radio Padre” after a series of popular radio broadcasts he made for the BBC.

I have also found a Home Guard sketch map in the City Libraries collection that shows a portion of the south of the city at Southhouse, with X marking the spot of a searchlight position.

Lastly I have in my possession a little book that is an account of the Home Guard activities in this district of the city during the war and it has an illustration of two searchlights being visible from the Braid Hills. This is the earliest days of the war, note the men are still wearing their LDV (Local Defence Volunteers) armbands, lack an official uniform and carry a variety of weapons.

The last fatal air raid in Edinburgh occurred on 6th August 1942. After that, there was local peace in the skies until the night of 24-25th March 1943 when there were scattered attacks across Fife and the Lothians that saw some incendiary bombs dropped harmlessly on farmland near Balerno beyond the then outskirts of the city. In “This Present Emergency: Edinburgh, the river Forth and south-east Scotland and the Second World War“, Andrew Jeffrey suggests that three German Ju-88 bombers were downed by the defences of Edinburgh during this raid, with one crashing on Hare Hill in the Pentlands and two others ending up in the Forth. Newspaper reporting at the time credits a kill each to both Z-batteries, the 102nd battery at West Pilton sharing theirs with the guns. The online database of wartime Luftwaffe losses records the loss of a plane crashing into Hare Hill outside Balerno killing pilot Fritz Foerster, gunner Willi Euler, observer Heinz Kristall and radio operator Horst Bluhm. This was the aircraft that had jettisoned its bombs in the field shortly beforehand. The other two aircraft losses that night were one that crashed on a hillside in Northumberland while being attacked by an RAF Bristol Beaufighter and another that hit a hillside near Earlston in Peeblesshire.

Through improvements in training, organisation and the technology of radar and predictors, as the war progressed the number of rounds the guns would have to fire to bring down an aircraft was reduced by an order of magnitude, to just 4,100. For Edinburgh’s defences this equated to a much more realistic 10-15 minutes of firing to get a “kill“. The last German aircraft to fly over the city likely did so on May 5th 1944, but by this time the course of the war itself had also progressed and by mid-1944 most of the UK’s heavy anti-aircraft defences, including those around Edinburgh, were redeployed to the south coast of England to counter V-1 flying bombs. The more mobile parts of Scotland’s 3rd Anti-Aircraft Division also went south and were attached to the Allied invasion forces, fighting with them across mainland Europe. By this point further technological advance had brought the number rounds required for a “kill” down by another order of magnitude to about 100.

With their guns removed the anti-aircraft defences of the city were mothballed, but we can clearly see their distinctive ground layouts in post-war aerial photography. Each gun battery is accompanied by rows of huts and buildings to house and support the personnel and all the required stores. These photographs suggest that battery EDG4 at West Pilton was fitted with radar as we can see the large circular footprint of the radar calibration mattress (the photo below of Sighthill is censored, but an uncensored version also shows the outline of the mattress). They also hint that battery EDG5 at Silverknowes was either never finished or was purely a decoy.

Although the sites were out of use by the war’s end they remained military property and a state secret. They are missing from detailed 1:1250 Ordnance Survey town plans made in 1944 and on some versions of the above aerial photos they have been censored; crudely scratched out or in the case of Alnwickhill and Sighthill, more subtly removed.

The defences of were officially stood down in 1948 and each site had a different fate after that. Sighthill was soon cleared away and the land returned to civilian use when the new industrial estate was laid out there post-war. The huts and structures of West Pilton were used as a Territorial Army (TA) training centre before being turned over to a rather grim-looking and latterly notorious housing estate. The huts at Craigentinny were also re-used, given over to emergency post-war housing as Craigentinny Camp before being returned to their pre-war use of a golf course. The camp at Alnwickhill was kept on by the army before later being used by Ferrantis at East Pilton for testing military electronics and weapons. One of its uses was for testing Bloodhound anti-aircraft missiles in the 1950s, demonstrated wonderfully by the below photograph showing such a missile pointing towards the distant Arthur’s Seat.

Along with the well-preserved structures at Alnwickhill, the dummy battery at Hilltown near The Wisp survives largely intact as it was returned to the farmer’s field from where it sprung and left too the odd cow to shelter in. From the air its layout is still unmistakably a very close copy of one of the active batteries.

Edinburgh and Leith were mercifully spared most of the horrors of aerial bombing meted out to other cities during WW2. Altogether there were 21 civilian deaths and about 210 injuries caused directly by aerial bombing during the war. Further details can be read in the thread about the air raids on Edinburgh and Leith during WW2 and the civilian loss of life they caused.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Death from above: the thread about the 1916 Zeppelin air raid that terrorised Edinburgh and Leith

It was fittingly dark and late when I started to write this, but here follows the story of the Zeppelin air raid on Edinburgh and Leith of 2-3 April 1916. It’s a long-ish story which I’ll break down into 3 parts. Hopefully as we go I can clarify a few points and add some extra details to other versions of it

Part 1. Prelude

The frightening and fascinating new technology of Zeppelins burst quite literally into the British public consciousness on 19-20 January 1915 when an attack on Great Yarmouth, King’s Lynn and Sheringham left four dead and fifteen injured. Follow up raids are a failure, until bigger and more capable Zeppelins arrive and in April and May 1915 towns across the southeast of England from Ipswich to Dover are targeted and hit. Three are killed and there is public outrage. Public and newspaper ire is directed as much at the authorities for failing to protect the populace and smite the aerial menace as much as at the German military. In September a Zeppelin humiliatingly appears with impunity over London.

By the end of 1915, 203 people have been killed and a further 711 injured in monthly raids over (mainly) the Eastern and South Eastern counties of England. The authorities have been largely impotent in response, but try to mobilise the public outrage as a recruiting tool.

British companies also utilise the Zeppelin scare in patriotic advertising. North British Rubber, based in Fountainbridge in Edinburgh and the largest rubber products producer in the British empire, took out adverts in the illustrated papers imploring customers to Buy British as German rubber companies made the fabric for Zeppelins.

The Daily Mail is amongst popular newspapers which offer its loyal readers a compensation scheme should they or their family be killed or injured by a Zeppelin air raid.

There are public awareness campaigns, warning people what to look out for when scouring the skies for aerial attackers.

In early 1916, during a winter lull in the bombing campaign, George Currie MP for the Leith Burghs asked the Scottish Secretary about what was to be done by local authorities to guard against the aerial threat .

A week later, the Secretary for Scotland, the Rt. Hon Thomas Mackinnon Wood, issues the “Lighting Order”, which obliges local authorities to implement a basic blackout and put in place warning measures of air raids, but leaves the details to local discretion.

A debate rages in Edinburgh Town Council about the best way to enact the order. The Chief Constable wants a complete night-time blackout but is felt to be over-reacting and over-stepping his authority. An audible warning is felt to be unnecessary and might just draw people out onto the street anyway. It is eventually settled that in the event of an air raid, the Corporation Electrical Department will dim the lighting supply as a warning before cutting it entirely as a blackout. However the gas lighting supply (the predominant domestic lighting) will not be dimmed or cut, over fears that it will lead to leaks from unlit lights when the supply is restarted.

This means that there is no warning system in place for people who use gas lighting – the majority – and the blackout will not be effective. However this is accepted. After all, Edinburgh is very far away from it all and probably feels its isolation is protection enough. The burgh of Leith follows suit and issues similar orders, however these do not apply to the shipping sitting in Leith Roads and they continue to burn lights at night.

The raids begin again at the end of January 1916 with the full moon; 57 are killed and 117 injured. There is respite as a result of the weather at the end of February but the Zeppelins return at the end of March. On the night of the 31st, 43 are killed and 66 wounded. But a Zeppelin is shot down during that raid, to public jubilation.

On the next night (1-2 April), it is the North East of England that is hit, 16 people are killed and 100 are injured. The bombs are creeping northwards, but are still more than 100 miles from Edinburgh

Part 2. The Raid

On the bright spring morning of April 2nd 1916, the residents of Edinburgh open their morning newspapers to read headlines and horrifying details of the latest series of raids. Unknown to them, something sinister is stirring 500 miles to the east.

At the Nordholz naval air base north of Bremerhaven, the Imperial German Navy readies four of the latest P-class Zeppelins for a raid on Rosyth on the Firth of Forth, the base of the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet – the most powerful fighting force on the high seas.

In the early afternoon, Zeppelins L13 (pictured), L14, L16 and L22 take off and begin their long voyage west. These 163m long, 4-engined craft have a crew of 19, cruise at 39mph, can reach an altitude of 11,600 feett and carry up to 2,000kg of bombs; high explosive and incendiary.

L13 soon develops engine troubles and turns for home. L14, L16 and L22 press on west, but are troubled by a northerly wind that blows them well off course. L16 makes for the secondary objective of Tyneside but drops her bombs 11 miles off target. L22 gets a bit lost and mistakes the river Tweed for the Tyne, bombing fields around Chirnside. She will later claim to have destroyed one of the bridges over the Tyne.

L14 – under the capable command of Lt. Commander Alois Bocker – however is on course and schedule. She passes the Scottish coast near St. Abb’s Head, being spotted here and possibly engaged by Royal Navy destroyers (although they have no practical weapons to really do so). Nevertheless, the alarm is now raised and the Admiralty dispatches the 2nd Light Cruiser Squadron from Rosyth on a pre-determined search pattern of the Forth to look for the raider. At East Fortune naval air base, Sub Lt. GA Cox is scrambled in an Avro 504C fighter on an ultimately fruitless interception mission. Cox will be injured later trying to land his rickety aircraft in the dark.

And in Edinburgh and Leith, the warning message is received by the authorities that an air raid may be imminent, and the electric lights are dimmed and the tramway is stopped. The fire brigade, hospitals and Red Cross are put on alert.

Bocker turns L14 turn back out to sea after passing St. Abbs, using the Isle of May in the outer reaches of the Forth to get their bearings, then flying directly down the middle of the Firth. They appear over Inchkeith around 11:15PM. Over Inchkeith they do what Zeppelin attackers often do; they stop to take their bearings, floating high over the island. The night is clear but there is a low haze and they cannot make out their target from the glazed cabin high above the sea.

Instead, the welcoming lights of the ships in Leith Roads point Bocker towards the docks and L14 sets off again with a new target in mind. Bocker is familiar with the port having visited it as a sailor in peacetime and he knows if he follows its river it will lead him to the city centre of Edinburgh.

The Leith Police spot L14 around 11:25, approaching from Inchkeith. She is flying high, perhaps as high as 10,000ft. The zeppelin (the black track on the below map) is heading southwest, straight towards the heart of Leith.

The first three bombs are unleashed here. Bomb 1, a 50kg high explosive (yellow marker), lands in the Edinburgh dock, sinks two rowing boats and destroys the skylight windows of a Danish sailing vessel. The two incendiaries, bombs 2 and 3, land near the Albert Dock but cause no damage beyond a burnt fence which is quickly extinguished.

Bombs 4 and 5 are High Explosive. They hit a grain warehouse in the Timberbush and the Custom House Quay. Damage is done to property from flying masonry and smashed glass, but it’s largely superficial and nobody is hurt.

Bomb 6 is high explosive, it hits the roof of the tenement at 2 Commercial St. and takes L14‘s first victim; 61 year old engineer Robert Love- husband of Ann Porteous and father of James – is killed as he sleeps in his bed in the top floor flat.

A few doors down at 14 Commercial Street, bomb 7 – an incendiary – smashes through the roof and then through the floor of the top floor flat before starting a fire in the flat below. The elderly woman who had been sleeping in her bed calmly got up and poured a pan of water in the hole and extinguished it. More bombs rapidly drop. 8, 9 and 10 are incendiaries and land on Sandport Street. A fire is started and rapidly extinguished and no further damage is caused.

Bomb 11 is another 50kg HE. It comes down in Innes & Grieve’s whisky bond on Ronaldson’s Wharf and sets the spirit store on fire. The inferno lights up the night sky, making the job of navigating the Zeppelin and aiming the bombs easier. The entire stock, worth £44k (an enormous sum in 1916) is destroyed. It is not insured against aerial attack (this seems to be a recurrent situation at the time, special “air raid insurance” schemes were set up to cover where other insurance would not) . Bomb 12, an incendiary, lands at 15 Church St. and falls through the roof into a room where a mother and 3 children are asleep. The flats are set on fire but the residents have a lucky escape before it is quenched.

Bocker now steers L14 along a course following the Water of Leith. A stick of four incendiary bombs is dropped around Mill lane. The St. Thomas Church manse is largely destroyed, but the minister and his family are miraculously unharmed. Clearly he had been saying his prayers as somehow he, his wife and their servant girl asleep in the attic were spared.

The St. Thomas’ School next door and the Leith Hospital across the street get lucky escapes as bombs 14 and 15 land directly outside. Bomb 16, landing on Hawthorn & Co’s shipyard, sets fire to a fence but it is quickly put out. L14 continues its course along the Water of Leith.

Four HE bombs are dropped over the industrial quarter of Bonnington. Seemingly little damage is done beyond smashed windows, but when the dust settles it is found that little David Robb, just 1 year old and who had been sleeping in his cot has been tragically killed by shrapnel. David’s parents, Robert and Jane, were just getting over the loss of another infant the previous year.

The “disconsolate” Robert Robb gave an upsetting interview to a journalist which, unusually for the time, passed the censors.

L14 had now completed wreaking its terrible toll on Leith. Bocker took his bearings again from the Water of Leith and turned his ship to head south, directly towards the city centre of Edinburgh. It is 11:50PM. an HE bomb, number 21, is dropped, landing on waste ground at the end of Bellevue Terrace. It blows out windows in houses and flats for streets around and demolishes a tin shed, but no further damage is done. Likewise bomb 22, an incendiary, does no damage when it lands on the road surface of The Mound.

L14‘s course takes it just past the Castle atop its promontory. The next bomb, 23, is another 50kg HE (my map has it coloured wrong). It crashes through the roof of the Georgian townhouse at 39 Lauriston Place. The McLaren family are awake inside and hear it descending on them.

Dr Mclaren and his wife and teenage daughter miraculously are unharmed at 39 Lauriston Place, despite the damage. The family reputedly still have a piece of the bomb’s nose cap. The Skins – the Edinburgh Special School for children with ringworm – next door is also damaged.

This bomb claims a victim though. David Robertson, a 27 year old soldier invalided out of the Royal Field Artillery, is outside in an adjacent street to see what is going on and is hit in the stomach by flying shrapnel, later succumbing to his injuries.

Bomb 24 is high explosive. It lands in the playground of George Watson’s College school and causes extensive damage to classrooms. It is perilously close to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh next door. Bomb 25 is an incendiary and lands near Jawbone Walk on the Meadows without causing damage.

L14 continues south over the Meadows before making a turn to east, dropping bomb 26 – another 50kg HE – as it does so. This comes down in the tenement at 82 Marchmont Crescent. It fails to properly explode but its kinetic energy carries it through floors and ceilings to the ground floor flat at no. 80. It is this bomb that is now on display at the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune.

Meandering east across the Southside, incendiaries are dropped (bombs 27 and 29) at Hatton and Blacket Places, landing in gardens and doing no damage. An HE bomb comes down at 183 Causewayside and “practically wrecked” the tenement. Six are injured, four of whom are hospitalised. One of the injured, 71 year old Wilhelminha Henderson, will succumb to her injuries in the following days and dies in hospital of a heart attack brought on by the shock.

L14 now makes a U-turn back towards the city. This time it passes directly over the Royal Infirmary, dropping an incendiary (bomb 30) as it does so. This comes down on a roof but fails to do any damage.

This is the incendiary on the roof of the RIE. This was a conical-shaped bomb with a central fuse. Inside the cone was a mix of oil and kerosene, on the outside it was wrapped in tar-soaked rope. It was not particularly effective and would be replaced by fearsome Thermite weapons towards the end of the war.

There are multiple eye-witness reports of seeing “blue lights” dropping from the Zeppelin. What people were seeing was the long streamers on the incendiary bomb’s tail, which were meant to stabilise it, catching the light as it fell. One of these incendiaries from the night is also on display at East Fortune.

L14 is now on a heading directly for the Castle. Another HE bomb – number 31 – is dropped, coming down in the Grassmarket outside the White Hart Hotel and Gothenburg tavern. Four men gathered in the area are injured and more damage is done to buildings. One of the injured, a 45 year Corporation Porter by the name of William Breakey, will die shortly afterwards from his injuries having been struck on the chest by flying debris

Most of the windows in the area were blown out. Buildings took the scars of flying debris. Given how usually busy and how densely overpopulated the neighbourhood was, it was remarkable that the death and injury toll here was not much higher.

L14 was perhaps aiming for the Castle, as bomb 31 at the Grassmarket and 32 and 33 – which fall immediately after – are in a straight line across it. Bomb 32 hits the southwest face of the Castle Rock. The Castle gunners impotently fire two blank rounds from the One O’Clock Gun in response. At the County Hotel on Lothian Road number 33 falls, an HE bomb, and there is another miraculous escape. The bomb explodes in the hotel roof causing extensive damage, but casualties are limited to a woman resident in a bedroom below suffering slight injuries .

Having missed the castle, L14 continues on its course before picking up its navigational maker of the Water of Leith again. Again a 180° turn is made, again bombs are unleashed as it does so. What Bocker is aiming for is anyone’s guess. Perhaps railways, perhaps the prominently large building of Donaldson’s Hospital. But all 3 bombs land in the river and although countless windows are blown out – including Donaldson’s chapel stained glass – there are no injuries.

L14s new course takes it back directly over the Castle agai but this time no bombs are dropped; not until it is well past it at least. Bomb 37, a high explosive, comes down outside the tenement at 16 Marshall Street off Nicolson Square.

This will be the most deadly bomb. Residents had gathered in the passageway of the building, probably up and about due to the excitement of it all and taking shelter within as the drone of the Zeppelin’s engines approached again. The 50kg bomb strikes the pavement outside, the blast is driven into the stair of No. 16 and kills six men and boys standing within instantly. It injures a further seven.

The victims are William Smith 15, his father John Smith 41, Henry Rumble 17, David Graham 5, William Ewing 23 and Victor MacFarlane. The injured include the brother and son of the deceased Smiths and the father of Henry Rumble. Private Thomas Donoghue, 24, of the 3/4 Royal Scots who was home on leave was also injured. He had been visiting family. He would succumb to serious injuries to the abdomen and is the 7th fatality from Marshall Street.

The bomb at Marshall Street fell at about 00:25AM, fully an hour after L14 was first spotted approaching Leith. And still it droned on over the city, at complete liberty to undertake its terrible deeds. As it continues on its course, two more HE bombs are dropped. 38 lands in the tenement at Haddon’s Court and 39 comes down in the tenement at 69 St. Leonard’s Hill. Each of these bombs will claim a victim.

At Haddon’s Court, James Farquhar, a 73 year old mason, will die 5 days later from his injuries in hospital. At St. Leonard’s Hill, 4 year old Cora Edmond Bell is killed in her bed.

L14‘s course takes it over the south western edge of the King’s Park. Here the City finally fights back, soldiers have been dispatched to the Salisbury Crags (where there was a military rifle range) and engage the Zeppelin with a Lewis and a Vickers machine gun. L14 drops four of its last five bombs, an incendiary and three HEs. It is perhaps aiming for the railway yard at St. Leonard’s, or the flashes of gunfire far below, but no damage is done beyond to some walls and the gunners have no chance of hitting the Zeppelin anyway at its altitude.

The last bomb, number 44, falls further south in the grounds of Prestonfield House at around 00:40AM (times in the records vary and conflict slightly). L14 now turns east around the south of Arthur’s Seat and strikes a course for home.

In the approximate hour and 15 minutes when it was over Edinburgh and Leith, it dropped 44 bombs, caused 14 fatalities and 24 injuries. No targets of any military value had been hit, a whisky bond and a manse had been destroyed, and countless thousands of window panes smashed.

Part 3. The Aftermath

It took until April 4th, the day after the morning after the raid, for the events in Edinburgh and Leith to hit the papers. Reporting censorship restrictions kept things vague and just referred to “south east Scottish counties” and “an eastern coastal town” .

The Scotsman praised the public response “the raid… naturally caused some excitement, but failed to produce any panic or do otherwise than steel the hearts of the people against the nation capable of using such barbarous methods of warfare against the civilian population“.

The first 3 Funerals took place on the afternoon of April 5th. A further 4 Funerals took place on the 6th. Municipal representatives were present and there “were numerous manifestations of public sympathy as the cortège passed.” It was announced that the National Relief Fund had made “provisional arrangements” to give grants to local committees for the purchase of furniture for displaced persons. It was anticipated that applications would be made to the fund for indirect losses, e.g. loss of lodgers.

The lack of accurate reporting meant rumours and gossip was rife. The word on the street in Dundee was that the Scott Monument had been destroyed. Visitors from there to family in Edinburgh asked if they could please go and see the ruins? Unable to report the facts, the Scotsman settled for odd editorials, for instance extolling the virtues of traditional Scottish construction over suspect English ways.

Scottish stone proved more resisting than English bricks; instead of the crumbling ruins of houses… the only evidence of the raid on the tough fabric of Scottish buildings was shattered windows and indentations on the walls. This first raid on the costs of Scotland has been a great triumph for the Scottish builder.

And there was an even weirder one on how the general lack of public panic was some sort of proof evident of the racial and genetic purity of the people of Edinburgh and Leith.

The Lord Provost, who was in London on council business, met with John French, 1st Earl of Ypres and Commander-in-Chief of the British Home Forces to “explain to him the position of matters in connection with the raid“. French was reportedly “quite sympathetic.” Sympathies were sent from war-torn France.

And in the letters columns, recriminations were quick to come. Multiple organisations of the city worthies and self appointed committees of dignitaries wrote their opinions about what must be done. All that could be agreed was that something must be done. Given the woeful state of the anti-aircraft defences in the country, Mr Ralph Richardson wrote to suggest that local authorities must be empowered to raise their own air forces, as they did fire services “to defend the lives and property of the lieges committed to their care“. There was also the question of the warning and blackouts. It was ordered that the gas supply would be cut along with the electricity in the event of a raid. Stricter blackout conditions were made, to be “drastically enforced” due to the “slackness in various parts of the city”

The Army provided a rudimentary anti-aircraft battery on Corstorphine Hill. Manned by artillery volunteers the gun was a QF 13pdr 6cwt Mk.I. This was a “marginally effective” weapon, and indeed was a cast off. Only 20 had been made before replaced by something better. This had likely been sent to Scotland as a token gesture to show that the military authorities were doing something, anything, in response. The battery was provided with a searchlight and an acoustic direction finder, which was meant to help locate the direction from which a Zeppelin was approaching from the noise of its engines (it didn’t really work).

These defences were more morale-boosting “security theatre” than anything effective. However subsequent “War Weapons Week” campaigns encouraged the public in Edinburgh to directly finance better anti aircraft weapons to guard against the Zeppelin threat.

The proximity of the bombs to Edinburgh castle worried the governor, who wrote to the Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland to inform him that the Regalia of Scotland had been moved for safekeeping from the Crown Room to the Castle vaults.

At least two babies born just before or after the raid were named in its honour;

• Catherine O’May Campbell Raida Smith was born 2nd April to Janet Smith at 49 Montague Street
• Raida Alexandra Douglas was born May 21st to Barbara Mackay Douglas of 88 Nicholson Street

Raida Smith’s father, Peter, made an appeal against conscription on account of his wife “remaining ill… she did not make a good recovery and has been nervous and sleepless since… A strain that at present she is ill able to bear“. I don’t know if he was successful.

The L14 would become the most successful German Zeppelin of the War. It made 17 attacks on Britain and dropped 22 tonnes of bombs. Alois Bocker was shot down commanding L33 in September 1916 over London. He survived, was captured and reportedly treated well as a Prisoner of War.

In 2016 on the centenary of the attack, Edinburgh University Library published a fascinating first hand account of the aftermath, from the diaries of schoolboy Archibald Campbell who had roamed the city the day after taking notes of his impressions.

https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/untoldstories/2016/03/30/i-100th-anniversary-of-zeppelin-air-attack-on-edinburgh-a-school-student-walks-among-the-wreckage/

Points to Clarify

There are many good accounts of this story, however there are various points and facts which have inevitably become confused or corrupted (with honest intention) over time. I will try to clear up those that I have identified.

Firstly, only one Zeppelin, L14, bombed Edinburgh and Leith. L22 never made it and erroneous reports of it being over the city persist. German and British official records all agree that only L14 was within 100 miles of Edinburgh that night. L14 was much higher – 10,000ft – than you might think. It was dark and unlit, many people heard it, very few saw anything. As it flitted between pockets of cloud and light and went back and forth over the city it would be easy to think that you had seen or heard 2.

Secondly, there are no photos of L14 over the city. There are photos that purport to be it, but this is of the civilian airliner Graf Zeppelin over the city in 1930. There are other mockups too. But they are just that. The illustration below from the “Illustrated London News” shows what people *might* have seen in the night sky had they been able to get a view of L14 – but it qould have required a good set of binoculars or a telescope. It is an older, smaller model of Zeppelin though.

The third point concerns the number of bombs and fatalities.

• 20 bombs were dropped in Leith and 24 in Edinburgh, Leith was a separate burgh at this time and some accounts overlook this nuance and thus get the total wrong.
• 14 people lost their lives in total; some reports miss out some of those who died of their injuries up to 5 days later, they are listed in the table below

As far as I’m aware, there are 3 public memorials to the air raid.

• A flagstone on the Grassmarket where William Breakey was fatally wounded.
• a piece of damaged masonry from the old Grassmarket Corn Exchange, now removed to the back of the Apex Hotel car park (see picture below)
• A plaque on the Castle Rock, near where the bomb fell there. There is a picture on this site;

The events of this night were commemorated back in 2016 but still don’t really pervade the local public consciousness, at least not to the extent of the attacks made during WW2.

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Air raid alert: UAVs heading towards Zaporizhzhia, Ternuvate, and Novomykolaivka
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