Tag: incendiaries

Swansea Blitz, 1941: Fighting the incendiary bombs

Incendiary bombs were heavily used by all World War Two air forces to attack civilians. Swansea was attacked on several occasions with large numbers of incendiary bombs, which eventually caused complete destruction of most of the town centre.

Incendiary bombs to specifically attack houses were a German invention from World War One. Still, it was in the middle years of the Second World War that they really became a favourite weapon of air forces.

The incendiary bomb used to attack Swansea was known as the ‘Elektron‘. a slim tube of aluminium and magnesium with an incendiary filling. The little bomb had a hard nose designed to penetrate a slate roof and settle in the attic, where it would gradually start a fire. The Swansea Civil Defences and auxiliary firemen learned various ways to deal with the bomb, but it was civilians, including women and children, who tackled most of the burning bombs.

Below is a page from Y Tân: A History of Destruction, Swansea 1941, with pictures from a civil defence manual showing how to tackle a burning Elektron bomb. It was important for morale to show a woman dealing with the bomb and hundreds of bombs in Swansea were extinguished by women with sandbags and stirrup pumps.

The full story of Swansea dealing with incendiary bombs during the Three Nights’ Blitz is told in the book.

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.