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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.

Leith Town Hall (now the Theatre) commemorative plaque marking damage done in the air raid, original picture © Leith Theatre

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.

Anstruther Smith, a photo displayed in Leith Library in his memory

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.

“Bombed Out”, illustration by War Artist Edward Ardizzone in April 1941 who was working in Glasgow and Edinburgh at this time. IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 1344)

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:

A photo showing the wrecked interior of the Leith Town Hall concert theatreDamaged interior of Leith Library during post-war repairs, 1953. © Edinburgh City LibrariesLeith Town Hall in 1957, the damage still not repaired after 16 years. From “The Sphere” magazine.Bomb damage of the “DK” school and annexe, a photo taken in April 1941 but not published until the war’s endBomb damage caused in Leith on April 7th 1941

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.

Luftwaffe night-time bombing map of Edinburgh, Lothians and south Fife. It is tinted yellow to be better viewed under the night-time cabin lights of an aircraft. Targets (Ziele) were marked in luminescent ink.

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.

WW2 German B1E 1kg incendiary, IWM MUN3291

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.

Repairs at Portland Place. © Edinburgh City Libraries

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.

The replacement flats for 8 George Street in Leith, a mid-century building replacing a Victorian tenement.

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.

21-27 Crewe Place, with a flat roof compared to the pitched roof of its neighbours.

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.

Firefighters damping down the remains of the Duff Street whisky bond.

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.

Unusually, a photograph of the raid that caused damage in Marchmont was published in the newspapers at the time, under the vague caption of “Tenements Resist Bomb Blast… in South-East Scotland”. Notice how many windows have been blown out.

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.

View from the back greensView from the frontPost-war replacementBomb damage at 35 Loaning Road, © Edinburgh City Libraries

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

Air raid shelters in the back greens of Loaning Road. © Edinburgh City Libraries

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.

Date of Air RaidLocationFatalities18th July 19408 & 13 George Street, North Leith722nd July 1940Albert Dock, Leith1 29th September 194025 & 27 Crewe Place, East Pilton37th April 1941North Leith36th May 194123-27 Milton Crescent & 26-30 Niddrie Road, Duddingston56th August 194235 Loaning Crescent, Craigentinny2Civilian fatalities in Edinburgh and Leith directly due to aerial bombing

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.

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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.

Luftwaffe bombing map of Edinburgh, Lothians and south Fife

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).

Targets marked on the Edinburgh, Lothian & Forth map

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!

WW2 German naval chart showing Edinburgh. Note that “armenhaus” (poorhouse) on the left side which dated from copying a much older map before the Craigleith Poorhouse became the Western General Hospital in 1927. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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.

The German bombs begin to fall over the Forth Bridge from The Illustrated London News, 28th October 1939

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.

Formation patch of the 3rd AA Division

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.

Edinburgh Anti-Aircraft Battery designations and locations.

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.

Google Earth aerial photography of Alnwickhill battery.

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

Gunners and their QF 3.7-inch gun in April 1942. Notice the size of the weapon behind them and the two men holding the large, fixed round. IWM (H 19090)

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.

Gunners of an anti-aircraft battery at the start of a cross-country run at West Pilton battery. They are being watched by the ATS women. Imperial War Museum IWM (H 30227)

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.

The ATS women watch the men at Tug-of-War at West Pilton, 30th July 1943. It looks like they are dressed to compete too. Imperial War Museum H 31590

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 ATS women who “man” the Predictor of an unidentified Edinburgh battery. Two of the guns can be seen in the background, and camouflage netting appears to be strung over their positions. Notice the cable trailing from the arm in the foreground, which transmitted commands computed by the Predictor to the guns. IWM H 19092

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.

ATS women with their UB-10 rangefinder at an unidentified Edinburgh battery. IWM (H 19093)

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!

Gun-laying radar GL Mark II transmitter cabin

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.

Demonstrating one of the twin-rail launchers of a Z-battery to the Scottish press. This demonstration was in suburban Edinburgh and the bungalow housing in the background suggests this may be Craigentinny. Imperial War Museum credit.

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.

Rev. Selby Wright chatting to a Search-light detachment at Hunter’s Tryst. Photography by Lt. Lockeyear, 26th April 1942. Imperial War Museum, IWM (H 19086)

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.

A sketch of Home Guard positions around Burdiehouse in the south of Edinburgh. © Edinburgh City Libraries

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.

“A Blasted Heath – 02:00”

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.

EDG3 Battery, SighthillEDG1 Battery, CraigentinnyEDG5 Battery, SilverknowesEDG4 Battery, West PiltonPost war aerial photography showing four of the Edinburgh HAA batteries

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.

EDG1 battery, CraigentinnyEDG4 battery, West PiltonEDG2 battery, AlnwickhillPost-war censorship of the AA battery sites

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.

A Bloodhound missile at Alnwickhill pointed directly at Arthur’s Seat. Credit likely BMPG

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.

Modern aerial imagery of the Hilltown dummy battery

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.

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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.

#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret