This page tells the city’s civilian war; the industrial epic of the river — the yards, the convoys, the Tail of the Bank — has its own page in the Shipbuilding section. For Glasgow’s people the war began with departure: in the first days of September 1939 the city evacuated on a vast scale, something like a hundred and twenty thousand children, mothers and teachers entrained for Ayrshire, Perthshire and beyond — though, the Phoney War proving quiet, a large share had drifted home within months, in time for the real thing.
The real thing was the blackout city: windows taped and curtained, closes lit by pinprick lamps, trams creeping behind masked headlights — the blackout itself killed steadily on the roads — with rationing, queues, dig-for-victory plots in the parks, and the parks themselves sprouting anti-aircraft batteries and barrage balloons over the Green and Bellahouston.
The bombs, when they came in strength, fell hardest just downriver — the Clydebank Blitz of 13–14 March 1941, told on its own page, was Scotland’s greatest civilian catastrophe — but Glasgow burned and bled the same nights and after: parachute mines devastated Kilmun Street in Maryhill and Nelson Street in Tradeston, a direct hit on a Yarrow’s air-raid shelter killed dozens of shipyard workers, and the May 1941 raids added Greenock’s agony. Across Clydeside the spring raids left well over a thousand dead, hundreds of them within Glasgow itself.
The city’s war held one episode of pure strangeness: on the night of 10 May 1941 Rudolf Hess, deputy Führer of Germany, flew a Messerschmitt alone across Scotland and parachuted into a field at Eaglesham on Glasgow’s southern edge, demanding to see the Duke of Hamilton to negotiate peace. A local ploughman detained him with a pitchfork’s worth of authority; he passed that night through Home Guard hands and Maryhill Barracks into captivity, and history has argued about his mission ever since. Grimmer by far was 1940’s blow to the city’s Italians: when Italy declared war, Glasgow’s café families were interned wholesale, and the torpedoing of the deportation ship Arandora Star that July drowned hundreds of Italian internees, many from Scotland — a wound the city’s Italian community carries to this day.
Victory in 1945 emptied into the streets around the Cross and the Square, and the reckoning followed: the dead remembered, the returning absorbed, and a bombed, overcrowded, exhausted city turning to the enormous question of housing — the story that dominates Glasgow’s next thirty years, and this site’s Politics pages.