Exile Vic recalls role as Rysa gun shot down first German plane over Hoy
By Brian Flett
(From The Orcadian dated January 10, 2002)

Fritz Ambrosius in his Luftwaffe uniform, pictured before his capture in October 1939, after his plane, a JU 88 bomber, was shot down over Scapa Flow.

An exiled Orcadian, now living in Australia, has been recalling the day he helped to shoot down one of the first German planes to crash on British soil in World War Two.

Victor or Vic Clouston from Stromness was 18 years old and serving with 226 Heavy Anti Aircraft Battery based at Rysa and Ore in Hoy, on October 17, 1939, when four (Junkers) JU 88 bombers based at Westerland on the island of Sylt in north Germany, near the Danish border, attacked the ships of the British Home Fleet in Scapa Flow.

Coming as it did just days after the sinking of the Royal Oak by the submarine U-47, most of the fleet had left the hitherto safe anchorage of the Flow for open waters. But still in port was the battleship Iron Duke which had been for a time flagship of the British Grand Fleet at the outbreak of World War One.

The enemy aircraft were said to have “come in out of the sun” at 11,000 feet in arrowhead formation. They dived to 700 feet and dropped four bombs round the Iron Duke. They scored two direct hits on the ship and she sustained considerable damage and began to founder. Luckily, a tug managed to get a line aboard the battleship and towed her to Ore Bay where she was successfully beached.

One person was killed and 25 were injured in the bombing of the Iron Duke. As the German bombers were executing their attack on the fleet, the heavy guns of the anti aircraft battery opened up.

Vic Clouston – now 82 – was a member of the team manning Number 1 Gun at Rysa. He described the incident in his own words: “I was one of the layers on our gun and we got a direct hit on a JU 88 as he came out of the dive after dropping his bombs on the Iron Duke which was the head ship there at the time. Our 4.5 inch shell blew the turret and gun right out of the plane and it landed a few feet from our gun and of course the plane was a mass of flames from one end to the other. The radio operator jumped out and landed about half a mile up the hill but the other three went down with the plane.”

Bill Hewison’s book This Great Harbour - Scapa Flow records the sole survivor of the aircraft as its gunner. He managed to parachute from the aircraft although he suffered severe burns. His name was Fritz Ambrosius, and he was taken prisoner, but Vic Clouston managed to talk to him.

“He spoke very good English in 1939 and was very arrogant. He told us Hitler would be in London by Christmas,” said Vic.

“I found out that he had been across in Orkney in the early 1990s trying to find out where the plane landed after all those years. That prompted me to try to get in touch with him.

Fritz Ambrosius as he looked shortly before his death in 1999, at the age of 85.

“Eventually, with the help of someone in a shop here in Camden (50 kilometres west of Sydney) I traced Mr Ambrosius through the Internet to his home in Germany. I believe he lived near Düsseldorf, but by the time I got in touch, he was very ill and had been taken to hospital, where he died three weeks later. His daughter sent me some photos and documents, but I was so disappointed not to have been able to meet him again.

“I tried to keep up correspondence with the daughter, and I even sent her a calendar this Christmas, but I’ve heard nothing back from her since her father died.

“It’s a pity, but she doesn’t seem to want anything to do with me,” Vic told The Orcadian. “But now I’ve had a letter from Orkney’s museums officer, Bryce Wilson, who is keen to put these photos on show in the Scapa Flow Visitor Centre in Lyness, as part of Hoy’s wartime past. I’m delighted to help tell the tale of the first enemy bomber to be shot down on British soil by anti-aircraft fire.”