It’s all quiet today in Ocean View, Whitley Bay - but nearly 80 years ago, all hell was let loose there.
In April 1941, the Germans launched heavy air raids targeting the newly-commissioned Vickers-Armstrong-built aircraft carrier HMS Victorious which was due to sail out of the River Tyne.
In the event, the ship was left unscathed by the Luftwaffe attack, but during the raids, landmines and bombs rained down on Tyneside, several of them bringing widespread destruction to Charles Avenue, Oxford Street and, as we can see, Ocean View in Whitley Bay.
A local newspaper reported after the raid: “Two streets in a coastal town suffered severely and casualties were fairly heavy.”
Wartime press stories of attacks such as this were deliberately circumspect with the details so as not to damage local morale, and not to give information and encouragement to the enemy.
The tragic reality was that 16 local people were killed in the attack. The only apparent advantage to the enemy was the destruction of a few boarding houses, and the release of livestock into the Brier Dene allotments. Tynemouth Castle moat was hit that night, and devices also fell over Tynemouth borough, some landing in open fields
1941 saw Tyneside take a heavy beating from German bombers. There were deadly and damaging raids on Newcastle, North Shields, South Shields, Jarrow, Hebburn and elsewhere as Hitler’s aircrews targeted the important shipyards and industry of the River Tyne.
But the failure of the German bombers to lay a finger on HMS Victorious would have a significant impact on another major wartime incident which took place just a month later, 300 miles West of the coast of France in the Atlantic Ocean.
In May 1941, newspaper reports told how "it was aircraft from HMS Victorious which, during the pursuit of the German pocket battleship Bismarck, launched attack after attack and, with well-aimed torpedoes, succeeded in slowing up this 'unsinkable' German raider, and so enabled our own ships to catch and sink her before she could find sanctuary in port."
The Bismark was famously sunk with the loss of more than 2,000 lives.
Closer to home - as we can see from recent times, as well as in our photograph from 1957 - the physical reminders of the war in Ocean View, Whitley Bay are long gone.
