Ok, Scott's book arrived this morning and I've read through it.
The first tank hit contained 12,000 gallons of "oil"...the exact grade of which is not specified, but it certainly wasn't Trinidad or any other aviation spirit. In the minutes following the attack, the residents of Pennar and Llanreath...but particularly Pennar...came out of their houses in their hundreds, blocking the arrival of the Pembroke Dock fire fighters fifteen minutes later. Some were shocked, some were escaping damage to their houses by the blast, some were looking for husbands and children...but into the middle of the crowd charged over fifty maddened
PIGS from a pig farm right beside the tank farm! They were described as all coated in a "
thick, gluey oil" and several were on fire! A bit like that level crossing scene at the start of
Mars Attacks! 
That description would rule out "Trinidad".
The fire fighters arrived in a trickle; the VERY first response was by the staff of the Depot, who came out of where they had been sheltering in the underground tunnel down to the haven, and they tried fighting the fire with a couple of small pumps, but it was described by participants as "pissing in the wind". The PD part-timers arrived 15 minutes after the attack under Chief Morris, the Pembroke Fire Brigade about the same interval after that - and detachments from all over South Wales arrived through the evening, followed by detachments from as far afield as Brimingham the day after.
It looks like the bomb hit the roof of the tank...setting light the oil below. A few minutes' AFTER the actual bomb, the top blew off the tank with a HUGE
secondary explosion. Through the night there was an issue with water pressure, as the old cast iron and rusted water mains had started to collapse with the extra pressure and demand uphill from any of the areas' housing....but it was got round by daisychaining pumps down to the water's edge at Llanreath. The two tanks marked on the pro forma as containing water DID contain water at the time of the bombing...and this was used to get over the low pressure period until the seawater solution could be effected...
But the battle against the fire was "lost" the next morning;
as the tide went out the pump engine that had been driven out onto the beach wasn't able to go any further as the water line went down over soft mudflats
Water pressure dropped disastrously, and although a temporary reserve source of pumpable water was found in the old "pickling pond" in Pembroke Dock, full pressure wasn't restored for many hours until a series of fire boats from the haven were daisychained out to deeper water to allow the pumping of sea water to re-start. In the meantime a SECOND tank blew, and the fire fighting because containment and limiting rather than extinguishing.
The other major contributory factor was that
the area was WHOLLY unprotected; there was no fighter cover, there were no AA assets of ANY size in the area despite so many strategically important installations! The area had in fact been bombed before....two German bombs had landed inside berms at the depot on May 4th...but failed to explode! It wasn't until the Home Office official, the Chef Inspector of Fire Brigades Capt. Tom Breaks was sent on the 20th to take charge of the firefighting, and he began agitating urgently for protection that the first AA gun arrived in the area three days later. In the meantime....
the Germans came back! There were several strafing attacks made on firefighters during the first week of the fire....
In 1980, when Vernon Scott published an early account of the fire and the events surrounding it in the
Telegraph newspaper over a number of days, he was contacted by a native of Pembroke who was the nephew of a Lt. Col. Tom Powell REME, who had met a Luftwaffe colonel who was still a POW in Palestine in 1946 awaiting repatriation. It turned out that the Luftwaffe officer had been the pilot who led the attack on Llanreath. He told Powell that shortly after dawn on the 19th of August, a high-level German recce flight had been made over Pembroke Dock
to ascertain if any AA cover had been provided for the town since the previous visits that year. Once the pilot returned to France with the news that there wasn't...the order to fly the mission against the tank farm was given. Which would also explain why only one bomber in the formation attacked the tank farm; once the tank farm had visibly been hit - their mission was accomplished.
Finally - I wondered why there was only one bomb hit the tanks, and four craters...five would be an odd number (sic!) for a stick of bombs.
SIX were indeed dropped, but one failed to explode. The PD AFS team later posed for a photographer with the tail section of the defused bomb.
Twenty years ago we had Johnny Cash, Bob Hope and Steve Jobs. Now we have no Cash, no Hope and no Jobs....
Lord, please keep Kevin Bacon alive...
