The War Years: Air Raids, City and Countryside, and Strength in the Gospel

"They're just trying to break our morale down," her mother would tell them when the sirens would go off and the German Luftwaffe airplanes would start coming through, usually at night between 10 and 11 pm. Her parents, sister, and herself would jump into their siren suits (her mother had knit one for her and her sister) and head to the bomb shelter that was built behind their building on Holburn Street, joining the other tenants from their building (2 families per floor, 3 floors.) There they would wait until the "OK" signal was sounded.

Image Source

After so many times of doing this, especially on those harsh winter nights, Grandma's mother (Ursula Katherine Bruce Beattie - 1904-1990) declared: "We'll sooner die of pneumonia than from a bomb." For the rest of the war, they would instead crouch under their kitchen table when the sirens would sound, rather than in that cold and damp bunker.

In the years of the war, 1939-1945 (when Grandma was aged 5-11 years old), Aberdeen had 32 raids, but 364 air raid warnings and 7 raids without warnings. In total, 365 bombs fell in their city, destroying 78 homes and damaging 13,120 others. (Source) (Another source with slightly contradictory numbers.)

The worst of it was the night of April 21, 1943, when between 40-50 bombers flew over Aberdeen. This was the "Aberdeen Mittwoch Blitz." Those planes, coming from Stavanger, Norway, dropped 127 bombs, killed 125 people (98 civilians, 27 servicemen at Gordon Barracks), injured 232, and damaged 9,668 homes. This was the last German raid on a Scottish City during the war. (Source)

Was Grandma ever scared? She doesn't remember being so. Perhaps it was the naivete of youth, but most likely she was drawing upon the solidarity of her stalwart parents, who with their faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ, believed that they would be protected and all would be OK.

And protected they were. One story Grandma shares is of her father, George Findlay, who was working late one night at the harbor fixing the trawler boats. It was a dark night, about 9 pm, and they had to sometimes crawl on the planks back to shore -- because of the blackouts, visible lights outside at night were prohibited. "The men got off [the boat] and said, 'Come on, George. We're gonna go to the pub.' He said, 'Nope, I'm going home.' That pub got a bomb dropped on it [that night] and several of them got killed."

Grandma does remember a few war experiences quite vividly:

Image Source

• One day walking home from school, down Holburn Street, a German plane was flying incredibly low...and during the day. Usually they only flew over at night. But it was eerie how low he was, and Grandma could clearly see the iron cross emblem on the airplane's tail. 
• A member of their church branch had shards of glass embedded in her arms when a bomb dropped in her neighborhood, and the blast of the bomb blew out the windows and sprayed the glass everywhere. She suffered from that for quite some time.
• Her parents sent her to stay on a farm in the countryside near Kemnay for a couple months one summer, to keep her safe outside of the city. One night they watched what seemed like fireworks in the sky, but it was really probably the British artillery on the ground firing toward German bombers overhead. "It's still so bright in my memory...the flashing." She wasn't worried for her own welfare; she was far enough out in the country that the planes didn't bother go there. But she was worried about her parents and sister back in Aberdeen (her sister was in a hospital for treatment of tuberculosis.) 

"The Scots are tough," Grandma said. They sure are. They sure are.

Source: From a telephone conversation between Ella and KF, recorded May 30, 2014.