Category: Eye of the Eagle: Luftwaffe Intelligence and the South Wales Ports

U-boats in Swansea Bay and Bristol Channel

Starting the new book project. I initially looked at the war diaries of Bristol Channel U-boats back in the 1990s. Research is now easier as more primary records have been released by US archives, at least until the latest President Trump directives close everything down. Modern technology in GIS and GPS has made map research much easier, and I am busy tracking down the original locations of magnetic mines originally planted in Swansea Bay and around the Scarweather Lightship. There have already been a few surprises as the mapping throws up all sorts of questions and new insights into the highly technical war of minelaying and minesweeping in the Bristol Channel.

Starting the new book project. I initially looked at the war diaries of Bristol Channel U-boats back in the 1990s. Research is now easier as more primary records have been released by US archives, at least until the latest President Trump directives close everything down. Modern technology in GIS and GPS has made map research much easier, and I am busy tracking down the original locations of magnetic mines originally planted in Swansea Bay and around the Scarweather Lightship. There have already been a few surprises as the mapping throws up all sorts of questions and new insights into the highly technical war of minelaying and minesweeping in the Bristol Channel.

The war against the U-boats is a complex subject to research thoroughly. There was considerable secrecy on both sides, and very often, the knowledge gap has been filled with wild speculation and inaccurate writing. This means I’ve had to reject a lot of secondary sources that continue to repeat what I’ve learned to call the ‘BBC History’ approach of ruthlessly clever Germans versus plucky eccentric Englishmen. There is also a surprising amount of rivalry and bias between British and US naval sources, both in the 1940s and in the present day. Again, I’ve learned to be scrupulous in testing opinions by viewing primary sources rather than derived history, often from writers who have not worked in the original German language sources.

Above: U28 was one of the Bristol Channel U-boats. This is the boat as she looked just before the war began in September 1939.

Some initial work was included as an Annexe in ‘Eye of the Eagle’ where I looked at the war diary of U32 as it laid magnetic mines near the Scarweather Lightship in 1939. The new work looks at all the other U-boats that came into Swansea Bay in the early years of the war. Again, it reinforces the crucial role Swansea had in the minds of the German naval staff.

Above: An extract from a U-boat war diary, with my translation. From the Eye of the Eagle book.

My next illustrated talk

This will be at the Local Studies Room at Swansea Central Library on Saturday, 22 February 2025 at 2.00 pm. This will be one of Gwilym’s local studies talks in the afternoons. (https://www.swansea.gov.uk/centrallibraryevents).

Above: The Lower Swansea Valley as seen by German bomber cre3ws in February 1941

I’ll talk about the three nights of air attack that transformed the town centre. Based on my research for my Y Tân: A History of Destruction, Swansea 1941.

In World War Two, Swansea was regularly attacked by the German Air Force. The worst attacks were over three nights in February 1941. The bombs and fires transformed the centre of the town, and the author’s grandfather was killed as a volunteer firefighter. This book explores the events of the three nights, the loss of the author’s grandfather, how the fire was used to destroy the town and the consequences of the raids for the future of Swansea. Swansea Blitz was an early example of a firestorm and became a template for attacks on many European towns and cities in 1942 and 1943. The author reconstructs the events of the three nights and includes eyewitness descriptions from some of the people who worked to save lives and property. The book also includes an analysis of the loss of the Ben Evans department store and the detailed history of the land we call Castle Gardens. With technical details of the bombs and explosives that were used to attack the town and the history of the bomb disposal teams that worked to save Swansea. Based on meticulous research this fully referenced book examines the vulnerability of the town to air attacks, the technical background of the incendiary bombs, the events of the three nights of terror, the ecology of the devastated town centre and the aftermath of rebuilding.

I’ll have both Y Tân and Eye of the Eagle books for sale at a discount price of £10.00 each. The new editions won’t be available on Amazon or local bookshops.

History of the Luftwaffe Reconnaissance and Intelligence during the air war over South-Wales 1939-1941. Over 130 maps, illustrations, and images, many in colour. Individual biographies of the Luftwaffe intelligence of Newport, Cardiff, Penarth, Barry, Port Talbot, Llandarcy Oil Refinery, Briton Ferry, and Swansea. Explanatory text and translation of original Luftwaffe intelligence records. Annex describing intelligence records, U-boat operations off Swansea and Magnetic Mines. Explanatory text covering the role of intelligence and reconnaissance and explanations of why the Welsh ports were bombed in the Blitz attacks of 1941. Illustrated with Luftwaffe intelligence maps and documents gathered from over 10 years of research. Fully academically referenced.

Kilvey Hill and its Second World War archaeology

In Swansea, as the anniversary of the February 1941 bombing raids approaches, interest in the Blitz always increases.

Kilvey Hill has many bomb craters across its southern part and into the woodlands near Pentrechwyth. Most craters date from September 1940 to February 1941. The German Air Force didn’t aim at Kilvey Hill; it’s just that the bombs that were intended for the docks missed and ended up on the hill. Bomb craters in town were quickly filled in, but craters on the hill were left and still survive today. A few have filled with water and have become biodiversity hotspots.

Above: bomb craters and anti-landing defences on the top of Kilvey Hill as identified by German bomber aircraft in February 1941. The anti-landing trenches are marked with ’11’ and a white line.

Kilvey also has a series of ditches and banks across the top, which were hastily constructed to prevent German soldiers from landing on the Hill in gliders. It was a definite threat, and my reconnaissance research confirms that the Germans had evaluated the usefulness of the Hill as a landing ground if they ever invaded. They survive as a poignant reminder of how real the threat was in 1940. The Council/Skyline development will destroy some of the banks, breaking a remarkable historical link between the darkest days of World War Two and our present day.  It is ironic how so much is made of the disappeared Swansea copper industry in Landore is revered, but so much more recent and relevant history is ignored by Swansea Council.

Above: A modern Lidar image of the top of Kilvey Hill showing the anti-landing trenches as they exist today as little square hillocks either side of deep trenches. They would have made landing by glider very dangerous or impossible. The flat part of the hill top was particularly attractive as a landing ground.. Morris Lane runs from the top to the bottom of the image and is seen as a series of earth banks.
Above: The top of Kilvey Hill today. Bomb craters in red, Glider defences in Red.

If you want to know more about all of the archaeological features on Kilvey Hill, they are listed and described in the third Cilfái book available here.

Cilfái: The History and Heritage Features is a 100-page illustrated book of all the historic features on the hill.

If you want to know more about Swansea and World War Two you can read my book on German Intelligence and the bombing of the South Wales Ports 1040-1941.

Or if you want to know more about the Swansea Blitz, you can read Y Tan: A History of Destruction, February 1941.

When it is considered inconvenient, the archaeological history of World War Two is easily and regularly destroyed in Wales.

Eye of the Eagle: Luftwaffe Intelligence and the South Wales Ports 1939-1941 ISBN 978-1-7393533-3-9

This has now been reissued as a 2025 Second Edition. I’ve also updated the copyright and EU product compliance details.

The first version of Eye of the Eagle was published in 1993. At that time, the research was to look at local landscape history, and British government aerial photographs were prohibitively expensive for such research, whereas, with a bit of effort, the Luftwaffe aerial surveys were freely available albeit via the record offices of the USA. As a geographer, my first instinct was to look for photographs and maps that give a first impression of a landscape before experiencing the land by walking. Since those days, a revolution in information sciences has changed so much. British record offices are far easier to engage with, and online and digital sources provide a wealth of resources and historical riches that were undreamed of in the 1990s. Combining the images with appropriate GIS/GPS systems has provided spectacular insights into ancient woodland and post-industrial recovery of land.

However, what has not changed is the research and writing techniques that underpin our discipline. This book has been written several times, only to be rewritten when new sources become available or are revealed in the improved access or digitisation of various records. Some of the many images and sources you will see here were rescued from rubbish dumps as organisations sought to ‘become digital’ in the early 2000s by throwing away ‘old’ records. Which explains their rather ‘worn’ looks.

Llandarcy showing destroyed oil tanks and near misses after the 1940 bombing raids.
One of the GWR plans of Cardiff used by thew Luftwaffe to plan their air attacks in September 1939.

My books: latest…

I’ve now got a stock of my latest book Y Tân.

Y Tân: A History of Destruction, Swansea 1941 is about my history of the Three Nights Blitz in February 1941. The town suffered appalling damage, and many argue it has never recovered. My grandfather died fighting the fires on the last night of the Blitz in Castle Street which was the site of a number of tragedies on that dreadful Friday.

In Y Tân I examine the situation in Swansea in the month before the attacks and look at the vulnerability of Swansea to German bombs and incendiaries. I examine the history of the weapon that destroyed the town and explain why Ben Evans was so vulnerable to fire. I examine the history of Castle Gardens and the reasons it became so dangerous. I also reconstruct the events of the three nights with eyewitness testimony from local people, war diaries and German air force sources. A chapter explains what happened to the piles of rubble in the town that eventually gave way to the redevelopments we see today—copiously illustrated with photos, maps and archive records from the author’s collections. Fully academically referenced.

Y Tân complements the groundbreaking examination of Luftwaffe intelligence maps and plans published earlier this year, Eye of the Eagle: Luftwaffe Intelligence and the South Wales Ports 1939-1941.

Y Tân is £16.99, easily available from the author, or you can buy it online here.

Also available from me or online:

Eye of the Eagle: Luftwaffe Intelligence and the South Wales Ports 1939-1941: A4 170 pages with over a hundred illustrations and map extracts.

The Cilfái Trilogy

Cilfái: Historical Geography on Kilvey Hill, Swansea: £15.99, many colour illustrations and maps, 126 pages

Cilfái: Woodland Management and Climate Change on Kilvey Hill, Swansea: £15.99, many colour illustrations and maps, 130 pages.

Cilfái: The History and Heritage Features on Kilvey Hill, Swansea: £14.99, many colour illustrations and maps, 98 pages.

Contact me via email at nyddfwch@gmail.com or message me. All payments are made easily with Paypal.

Or you can order from my bookshop at Nigel A Robins: Geographer – Books and Publications Spotlight | Lulu

Air Raids and Communication during air attacks on Swansea, 1941

Just starting a new research project on the 1940s incendiary bomb attacks on Swansea. Although a few books have been written on wartime Swansea, the reliability can be suspect because of the lack of documentary records. The primary source is still John Alban’s keystone work on some of the archival sources that survived (Alban 1994). The response of a local authority to the challenges of an intense air attack varied widely across the country and has been the subject of a growing body of research, such as this thesis from 2020 (Wareham 2020)In this study, the author examines Cardiff Council’s response to wartime life and air attacks. It’s a mixed bag of successes and failures as the Council struggled to meet the challenges of maintaining services under air attacks. Some local authorities did little to meet their responsibilities, and civilians have died in various towns where bomb shelters, services and food supplies were poorly managed. As historians, we are not helped by the limited nature of the official history of civil defence, which barely investigated matters outside London (O’Brien 1955).

Swansea’s air raid precautions and defences worked well, and senior members of the Churchill government and officials of various agencies praised the efficiency of their response. However, local Swansea politicians criticised them and insisted on complaining that the ARP staff did not sufficiently recognise their role as politicians even amid incredible tragedy of 1941 (Alban 1994: 59–61).

Understanding the situation faced in the Blitz of February 1941 relies heavily on understanding the role of the ARP Controller, who led the entire local authority response to the bombing. For Swansea, this was the Town Clerk Howell Lang Lang-Coath. He was a veteran of over thirty years of Swansea’s local government processes, but at the end of his career, at sixty-six years old, his leadership and authority did much to save lives during and after the raids.

Understanding his role and effectiveness relies on understanding his communication flows and processes as he managed the ARP response from his control room in the Guildhall in Swansea. The dearth of contemporary records has meant I have had to reconstruct the communication flows from a wide range of local sources. Here’s my first pass through the information. Imagine having a small team of secretaries having to deal with over 8,000 messages for 561 incidents and controlling First Aid, Alarms, ARP staff, Rescue, Ambulances, Gas, Electricity and Water supply in an era where communications were unreliable telephones and a network of messengers in cars and on bicycles (often teenagers).

The police forces of the country were unwilling to share or modify their status and their responsibilities even during the hardest times of the war and a dual response method was imposed on the country where ARP and Fire services were managed separately. The success of this approach depended on the personal  qualities of the ARP Wardens. You can see this on the diagram with different communication flows to ARP Control (at The Guildhall) and the Fire Control Centre (at Central Police Station).

One of the surprises was the efficiency of the ARP M2 Reporting Form which allowed structured information at the correct level of detail to be quickly transmitted or passed to the staff andv the ARP Control Centre.

Alban, J.R. 1994. The Three Nights’ Blitz: Select Contemporary Reports Relating to Swansea’s Air Raids of February 1941, Studies in Swansea’s History, 3 (Swansea: City of Swansea)

O’Brien, Terence H. 1955. Civil Defence (London: HMSO)

Wareham, Evonne Elaine. 2020. ‘Serving the City: Cardiff County Borough in the Second World War’ (unpublished PhD, Cardiff: Cardiff University)

Above: The story so far on understanding the relationships between ARP Warden, Police, AFS, and the ARP Control Centre.

Above: A rough copy of the ARP M2 Reporting Form which was instrumental in allowing effective incident communication. People gave their lives moving these forms through the streets of the blitzed town in February 1941.

Swansea: Looking at Castle Gardens, Ben Evans and the Blitz fires

Castle Gardens appears to be unlovely and unloved. I know it is the target of a proposed refurbishment ‘after consultation’. The plan I saw promises small (cheap) changes.

I grew up wandering around the original Castle Gardens in the 1960s. Chasing the army of pigeons that lived on the roofs of the Sidney Heath’s buildings. It was full of green spaces and the Sidney Heath fountain, and the covered area was always full of (to me) old men sitting and drinking. The fountain seems to now be in the gardens in Singleton.

I think this is the remains of the Castle Gardens Fountain ?

The open space originated as a ‘Garden of Rest’ site after the Blitz. (Evans 2019). It eventually (after the inevitable Swansea Council arguments!) became the open space of some grass, some paths and the fountain, which stayed until 1990 when it was obliterated for the ghastly makeover we see today.

The plot of land is fascinating. It was the site of the famous Ben Evans store and, before that, the Plas manor house. As one of the most significant urban areas of the medieval town, it may be that significant archaeology lies underneath the northern side close to where the Plas and Temple Street were.

In my latest research on the Blitz, the plot is helpful to study the impact of incendiaries on the wider town and it’s become a case study in my next book.

Understanding the site that once held Ben Evans entails delving back into the past to look for the Plas manor house and the rebuilding of Cae Bailey Street between 1840 and 1850. The maps are poor, but we do have a fantastic model of the area made in the 1840s, which is now in Swansea Museum, and Gerald Gabb has examined all the paintings and prints in his books (Gabb 2019: 199–207).

The model of the centre of Swansea made in the 1840s. Damaged in the Blitz and repaired by Bernard Morris. Now in Swansea Museum.

I’m digitising the various stages of buildings in the Castle Gardens site as part of the background for understanding the Swansea fire catastrophe of February 1941 (Alban 1994). I’m lucky in that there is a detailed survey of the area from 1852, which is the basis for establishing the area that eventually became Ben Evans in the 1890s.

Alban, J.R. 1994. The Three Nights’ Blitz: Select Contemporary Reports Relating to Swansea’s Air Raids of February 1941, Studies in Swansea’s History, 3 (Swansea: City of Swansea)

Evans, Dinah. 2019. A New, Even Better, Abertawe: Rebuilding Swansea 1941-1961 (Swansea: West Glamorgan Archive Service)

Gabb, Gerald. 2019. Swansea and Its History Volume II: The Riverside Town (Swansea: Privately published)

Above: My digitising of 1840 to 1852 properties that were Castle Gardens. The grey block at the top of the image is the location of the Plas manor house. The area was heavily resculpted after 1945 to create Princess Way and the David Evans shops.

The Natural History of Destruction

Last Saturday, I discussed publishing my newest book, Eye of the Eagle. The venue was the Discovery Room at Swansea’s Central Library, which has become a focus of contemporary local studies and research for Swansea’s residents.

My research on World War Two goes back decades and is primarily concerned with the bombing of Welsh towns and cities and, of course, the maps and images used. All in answer to the questions of how and why.

There is still a massive interest in Swansea’s war years. Many of us lost family members, and many who experienced it are still eager to listen and share their memories. The continuing wars in Ukraine and Gaza ensure images of destruction and suffering are still with us and not confined to history books. In setting the scene for the talk on my research, I mentioned a book that I feel strongly highlights the horrors of modern war and its direct impact on civilians (and particularly children). The book is ‘The Tree of Gernika’, written in 1938 by a journalist witnessing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War as they affected people in Spanish towns and cities. It’s as powerful a book today as it was then (Steer 1938). The author describes the reality of terror bombing and mass slaughter and destruction to a European audience looking on with horror and assuming it was something too horrible to be replicated across the Continent. Of course, we all know that what happened in Spain would be eclipsed hugely by mass attacks on civilians in the following years. The parallels with the Ukraine war are incredible. Despite the media hype about precision weapons, both the Russian and Israeli governments have concluded that terror attacks on vulnerable civilians are more effective and satisfying…particularly when their armies are finding it hard to get a decisive battlefield result . The same happened in 1918 in Germany,  Iraq in 1923,  Spain in 1936, and South Wales in 1941-43 (Saundby 1961; Alban 1994). You can’t blame Russians or Israelis for today…they took their lessons from the RAF, the United States air forces,  and the Luftwaffe.

The title of this post is challenging. Nowadays, Natural History is associated with an Attenborough TV programme. The expression was coined in 1944 by Solly Zuckerman, a renowned war scientist who, upon seeing the blasted remains of buildings and people in Aachen, planned to write an article on the nature of the destruction. On seeing the enormous damage to Cologne in 1945, Zuckerman decided he could never write a sufficiently eloquent piece covering the loss of life in the most awful of circumstances, and he quickly forgot about the idea (Zuckerman 1978: 322).

The phrase was resurrected in the controversial lectures of W G Sebald (One of the finest writers of the post-war years) in his famous book (Sebald 2004). The ethics and issues of mass murder of civilians resurfaced and have never gone away since, particularly after the release of ‘The Fire’, a haunting review of civilian deaths in wartime Germany (Friedrich 2006), and Derek Gregory’s review of Sebald’s work on the true nature of the air war against British and German civilians (Gregory 2011).

I concluded my talk on the bombing of Swansea with this…

“In twenty-five years of research on the bombing of Swansea and the other South Wales ports, I never saw a single piece of evidence that the deaths on the ground (or in the air), and destruction of the towns, resulted in military or strategic benefit for the Nazi government.”

Alban, J.R. 1994. The Three Nights’ Blitz: Select Contemporary Reports Relating to Swansea’s Air Raids of February 1941, Studies in Swansea’s History, 3 (Swansea: City of Swansea)

Friedrich, Jörg. 2006. The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press)

Gregory, Derek. 2011. ‘“Doors into Nowhere”: Dead Cities and the Natural History of Destruction’, in Cultural Memories: The Geographical Point of View (New York: Springer), pp. 249–83

Saundby, Robert. 1961. Air Bombardment: The Story of Its Development (London: Chatto & Windus)

Sebald, W.G. 2004. On the Natural History of Destruction (Penguin Books)

Steer, G.L. 1938. The Tree of Gernika: A Field Study of Modern War (London: Hodder and Stoughton)

Zuckerman, Solly. 1978. From Apes to Warlords 1904-46 (London: Hamish Hamilton)

Bombs on Llandarcy, 1940

The technical problems of bomb aiming were massive for all air forces. The Luftwaffe began the war with an ambition of pinpoint accuracy for key targets and expected electronic systems to guide their attacks.

The Heinkel He 111 aircraft was an interim bomber that carried a light bomb load and had a cramped crew cabin making space for the bomb aimer challenging, as can be seen from this early illustration. The main Luftwaffe bomb sight was technically advanced for the 1930s but less effective in the more demanding flying conditions over wartime Britain.

The early attacks on the ports were daylight raids and allowed for accurate bombing. This near miss of four bombs at Llandarcy oil storage (below) was from a daylight raid in 1940. The switch to night time bombing and the need to bomb from higher altitudes led to more inaccuracy and error. Pinpoint targets such as grain mills, lock gates and warehouses, or ships in the docks were missed but the surrounding streets of the Welsh ports suffered badly from the inaccurate bombs.

P24-25 Eye of the Eagle: Luftwaffe Intelligence and the South Wales Ports 1939-1941.

A near miss. Bombs dropped on Llandarcy in 1940.

Incendiary bombs and the Welsh Ports

The Luftwaffe had a wide range of weapons available to drop on urban areas in the early years of the war. Lock gates, coal mines, and food storage all had buildings with varying levels of resilience and required different tactics to destroy them. The ports were susceptible to damage in some aspects such as power stations or cranes but generally quite hardy in the face of attack. Larger bombs over five hundred kilogrammes in weight with hardened steel noses were need for the power stations and lock gates. The Luftwaffe was always short of these types of bombs. However, the real terror weapon was the incendiary bomb shown below.

Page 20 of Eye of the Eagle: Luftwaffe Intelligence and the South Wales Ports 1939-1941.

This one kilogramme bomb (the ‘Elektron’) was dropped in thousands on the Welsh ports but it was only ever effective in destroying houses and shops. Creating a firestorm to kill civilians was eventually developed by the RAF and perfected by the US Army Air Forces. The Luftwaffe were experimenting in firestorm tactics in late-1940 and the raid on Swansea in February 1941 shows the early firestorm approach with early arrival of incendiary bombing followed up by high explosive bombs to kill firemen and civil defence staff. The damage to Swansea (shown below) was typical of intensive firestorms which could not be extinguished because firemen were killed and their pumps destroyed. Burning buildings collapse and obliterate the streets with rubble.
The RAF intensively investigated these early Luftwaffe raids and based their own strategic campaign against Germany on the nature of these early raids.

Above: Fire damage in Swansea immediately after the attacks of February 1941.