Blitz Street (2010) s01e01 Episode Script

1 It's 70 years since the bombs fell on Britain during the Blitz.
For those of us who weren't there, it's hard to imagine what it was like.
That's why we've built this.
It's not a film set.
It's real bricks and mortar, built the same way as a typical pre-war terrace.
We'll be blowing it up with real bombs.
Using high-speed filming and modern blast gauges, Defence scientists will be able to analyse the effects of these bombs for the first time.
It also gives us the unique opportunity to see what the bombs of the Blitz did to streets like this.
Using period archive and the extraordinary memories of those who lived through it, we'll tell the story of the Blitz, as it's never been told before.
You felt you couldn't take much more.
Our street's already been hit by the equivalent of two Second World War bombs, the SC-50 and the SC-500.
But there are bigger bombs to come.
This time we will be detonating a 1,000 kilogram bomb, one of the biggest the Luftwaffe ever dropped.
We'll also see the effects of incendiaries, tens of thousands of which landed on our cities, and we'll be examining the deadly Flam bomb.
We'll witness the effects of these weapons and also learn how German bombing expanded beyond London to bring total war to the whole of Britain.
London was at the centre of an intensive bombing campaign.
By now, 250,000 people were homeless, and life was a daily grind of rationing, shortages and sheltering from bombs.
Hitler had planned all this as a precursor to invasion.
However, he'd failed to destroy the RAF and the invasion plans were put on hold.
Still, he decided to continue bombing the British people, in the hope that this alone could bring them to surrender.
Fortunately the capital already had a ready-made network of bunkers, 15 miles of tunnels and stations where people felt safe.
The authorities, though, had a different idea.
The government decided that they did not want people to use the tubes for sheltering.
It was their fear of what they called "deep shelter mentality".
That is that people would be Go down in to the tubes during a raid, they would be terrified, they would become like troglodytes, refusing to come up again.
And, of course, that would have been a disaster for war production.
But, of course, in the end, what happened was people power.
The gates were shut, and the crowds Just pushed them open.
And it was a kind of victory.
And they flooded down into the tubes.
More and more people realised that it was safer in the tube.
And people tended to have a part of the platform that they considered was their little piece.
And there was my mum in her pink bandana round her hair, and a green overall, serving this ghastly stuff they called cocoa.
After 57 nights of continuous bombing, whether it was in the bowels of the tube system, in their houses, or in shelters, the people of London showed no sign of breaking.
So Hitler changed to a new tactic.
He expanded his raids to our industrial heartland, towns and cities across Britain, such as Birmingham, Cardiff, Belfast and Glasgow, were about to be on the receiving end of blanket bombing.
This new onslaught would be delivered with massive bombs, like the SC-1000, nicknamed the Hermann.
The SC-1000 is the same design as the other Luftwaffe bombs, only bigger.
It's two and a half metres long.
It contains a different explosive to the bombs we've set off so far on Blitz Street, more than 500 kilograms of high explosive Amatol, a mixture of ammonium nitrate and TNT.
It was specifically designed to take out factories, but many landed in our city streets.
And we'll be able to see its devastating force when we unleash one on Blitz Street.
Defence scientist Robin Hiley is one of the country's leading explosive experts.
Today's bomb is going to be over the other end of the terrace, a little bit further away than yesterday's, but it's going to be a bigger charge, about twice as much explosive weight.
It's a gentler explosive.
But it gives more of a heave than a shatter.
Why did they use a gentler explosive? It was a matter of production.
They had big plants for making ammonium nitrate for fertilizer, and if you mix ammonium nitrate with TNTin a bomb, you can make a fairly good explosive so they could make a lot more explosive by using this ammonium nitrate.
What do you reckon will happen? I think most of the rest of this one will go.
Perhaps some of the back wall might still remain, and I think there's a fair chance that the front wall of the terrace behind might start to come away.
That's the theory.
But as a bomb of this size set off against a real street has never been analysed before, our high-speed cameras and blast gauges will help Robin examine the effects of this bomb.
The Luftwaffe and the RAF were engaged in tit-for-tat bombing raids.
Each was attacking not only military targets but also each others' cities.
After we attacked Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi party, Hitler ordered a huge raid involving more than 500 aircraft.
They'd be loaded with bombs including the SC-1000, a bomb so big the Heinkel bomber could only carry two at a time.
They called this raid Operation Moonlight Sonata, and it was to be one of the biggest raids of the entire Blitz.
It was a very clear night.
We'd all seen pictures of London, we knew what it was like, so we were all frightened that that was going to happen to us now.
Hitler's target was the cathedral city of Coventry.
Coventry was a lovely old town.
It was mostly medieval lanes and streets, medieval houses that were hanging over the pavements.
Alan Edgson was living in Wyken, Coventry.
We were living close to the Morris works, which was a very big works.
My mother worked there.
She was doing the munitions.
Coventry was a target because it had a lot of industry.
And, of course, during the war then those were turned over to war production, so they were making things like aircraft parts.
That night, the sirens went quite early.
Marjorie Edge lived Just north of the city centre.
There was a noise on that night.
It was just a faint rumblings to start with.
And we knew, "Oh, my God.
"This was gonna be a bad 'un.
" The Luftwaffe began their attack with high explosives and more than 10,000 incendiary bombs.
They caused raging fires throughout the city.
Forty minutes into the raid, at 8.
00 p.
m.
, they hit its major landmark.
They lit the cathedral with their incendiary bombs.
They were lucky to get it, I suppose, quickly, and that made us a great target for the bombers.
The sky was just red, totally red.
From the central part of Coventry, it was just blazing from end to end.
To us, the world was on fire.
With the city now ablaze, it was easier for the bombers to see their target.
We're about to see what one of these SC-1000 bombs actually does.
Our final preparations are in place.
The site has been evacuated.
The screaming of the bombs, it seemed endless.
Endless.
It was just one after the other, one after the other, with very little space between each explosion.
You couldn't tell if they were coming straight at you, which they all seemed as though they were, but then there'd be a terrific , and that one hadn't hit you.
But there'd be more, following on.
I've had to move to a roof over one kilometre away with Defence scientist Robin.
We're about witness one of the biggest bombs the Luftwaffe dropped.
Countdown starting now.
The most terrifying part was bombs falling incessantly.
Five It was a bit like being pinned to a dartboard while some bloke with a blindfold was throwing darts at you.
four You did expect every one to hit you.
three, two, one There was a bomb that dropped at the back of the house, which brought the shutters on the sash windows in on top of us.
That absolutely terrified us all.
So we went in to the front room, and we had a bomb fall at the front of the house.
And that's when all the front window came in.
And we'd got no shutters, no curtains at that window, so we were all in the dark.
We were just all screaming with terror, really.
That night's attack on Coventry was one of the most intense of the Blitz.
The Luftwaffe bombers had been pounding the city for hours in a continuous attack.
Eileen Bees and her family had a bomb land either side of their house, and now they're trapped inside.
The next-door neighbours heard us all screaming and they had to force their way in because the door was all jammed, and they got us all outside.
There was guns going off, fires everywhere, glass crunching under our feet as we ran.
We knew we were running for our For our lives.
There was no other way of explaining it, really.
And the bombers kept coming.
After each wave of aircraft dropped their bombs, they returned to base, reloaded and came back.
There was lots of bombs, and we were under the stairs.
We knew that Dad was at work and he should have stayed at work, really, you know, that was the rules.
Fearing for his family's safety that night, Marjorie's father returned home.
As he came up the side of the house, he whistled, so that we'd know it was him and not a stranger.
And we all knew, "Oh, Dad's home.
Oh, good, Dad's home.
" That was it, everything was okay, Dad was home.
And then this awful roaring, rushing sound.
It just seemed like everything had been taken completely away from you, and then you hear the crashing.
That was close.
We knew that that was part of our house.
It was just constant, constant noise.
The sound of shrapnel rolling down the roofs, Just like musical notes, almost.
And they would tingle as they went down the roof.
You just felt, even as a child, that not understanding, you felt you couldn't take much more.
Couldn't hear me dad whistling any more, and we went in to the front room of the house.
Dad was wedged somewhere against the cabinet or something, and he just looked like he was, been knocked out.
He wasn't cut and bleeding, or anything like that at all.
He was just lying there, rubble all over him and everything.
And after a while, they took him away.
He'd died.
What killed him was the debris.
The raid finished about 7.
30 in the morning, and it was just utter chaos.
There was water running down the streets because all the water mains had broken.
There was gas everywhere.
There was ambulances all over the place.
Everybody looking for people, their family.
It was disbelief.
So much had been destroyed in such a short time.
Just total destruction and despair.
Everything was just finished.
Statistically, that night, Coventry was one of the most dangerous places to be in the whole of British history.
More than 800 people were injured, and nearly 600 killed.
Being bombed was a terrifying experience.
It left people in a state of shock and despair.
Josef Goebbels, the German propaganda chief, coined a new word, "coventrieren'", "to be Coventried", or "Coventrated", as the British took it, to describe the destruction of a British city.
Stop there, Tony.
Okay.
I didn't expect this but it's held up that corner of the building.
It's perhaps the same as the corner we were talking about over there.
There's more rigidity in the structure there, and it's held it up.
I think what's so striking is the blanket coverage of the debris across the street.
You can see why there was such carnage in Coventry.
If you'd been trying to get anything out, or escape, or run down the street, you wouldn't have stood a chance.
No.
No, no.
And that debris is heavy material.
You'd need teams of people to clear this.
The one thing that's really impressed us has been the luck, the arbitrariness, the sheer unpredictability, of what's been damaged and what's been saved.
God, this isn't rigged, this is just how we found it later on.
There, see? It's built its own Anderson Shelter.
Our slow-motion footage not only allows us to illustrate what it was a like to be bombed, it gives Defence scientist Robin an opportunity to examine the impact of explosives like the SC-1000.
We've got a very, very good view here of the refraction caused by the blast shockwave.
You can see it coming out as a hemisphere away from the charge, throwing up dust from the ground.
But if you look carefully, you can see a shock coming back towards the charge.
Now, that's a reflected shockwave from the wall of the terrace.
This is a larger charge this time of ammonium nitrate.
It has less of a shattering brisant effect and more of a heaving effect.
And that actually can be more damaging to buildings, particularly at some distance away, and that's what's going to push the walls down.
We can see that the strongest part of the structure is actually the chimney, which because of its construction a box-like construction, has remained standing.
And that image of a building with just the chimneys standing is quite commonly seen in bomb-damaged areas from the Second World War.
Londoners had been bombed night after night, but for the people of Coventry, the attack came as a complete bolt from the blue.
Those who survived were ill-prepared for the devastation all around them.
It looked like Hitler might achieve his aims.
In Coventry at least, the very fabric of society was on the verge of collapse.
We couldn't go back to our own house.
None of the shops opened, of course.
And Dad said, "I'll have to go and see if I can get some food.
' So he went to the local shop, and he knocked on the door, and there was no one there and he went round the back, climbed over the back gate, and when he went into the back of this shop, there was a window that was broken, obviously from the blast, I would think, from the bombing, and he forced the door And And took us all inside.
He took us all inside and he went in to the shop, and it was a meat shop, and all there was there was a tray of faggots, cold faggots, and he brought them back in to the room, and we all sat and ate the cold faggots.
And while we were there, the owners of the shop came back, and the wife was hysterical that we'd got in to their property.
Um, but her husband calmed her down, 'cause she said she was going to call the police, and he calmed her down.
And he said to my dad, "If I'd have been in your position, "I'd have done exactly the same.
" He said, "Just have what you want and then you go when you're ready.
" It was desperation, because he wouldn't have touched anybody's property.
In fact, law and order didn't break down.
Hitler's plan to expand his bombing to different cities actually gave each one time to recover.
It also pulled the nation together through shared tragedy.
Churchill decided to visit the bombed-out ruins of the cathedral.
In a way, the cathedral put us on the map.
It became an icon.
But everybody almost forgot that the time it took the cathedral to burn, nearly 600 people died.
The scale of the death in Coventry was so great that it was decided it was better to have a mass funeral.
One of the other things that wasn't talked about very much was that not everybody had a body to bury.
What they had were bits of body parts.
And so what Coventry had to do, this awful job of just trying to assemble some sort of semblance of a body and put it in a sack and then put it in a coffin.
And there was this dreadful mass burial, Just coffin after coffin going, this sonorous, grey day, being buried in a mass funeral.
Anybody who was related, or wanted to be there, was there.
But they are all in one long line.
If anybody's buried in there, you wouldn't know where they were, whether in the middle or the ends.
At school, they would call the register, and all the kids would call their names out, and sometimes there'd be a pause.
"Where's so and so?" "Oh, they're dead, miss.
Their house was hit last night.
" The first mass funeral buried 172 bodies, but not all the dead had been discovered, and the next Saturday, the people of Coventry followed another 250 coffins.
It stopped me believing in God.
I don't believe in God.
And I think that's partly Partly down to that.
On Christmas Eve, Hitler paid his first visit to the airfields of the Luftwaffe.
They hadn't made the triumphal progress they'd envisaged six months earlier.
GÃring had promised to take control of the skies of Britain, but, in fact, the RAF had improved their air defences with night fighters, and were stepping up their bombing of German cities, including Munich, Berlin and Hamburg.
On Christmas Day, both sides informally agreed to suspend bombing raids.
The people of Britain were unaware of this, but as no bombs fell they had a brief respite to enjoy what Christmas dinner they could rustle up from the rations.
When the Nazis resumed bombing, they started dropped fewer high explosive bombs and increased the number of incendiaries.
Incendiary devices were a key part of the German strategy during the Blitz, and tonight we're gonna witness an incendiary attack here on Blitz Street.
Before the war, the government had planned for many different types of attack.
They'd expected high explosives and even thought they might face gas attacks, but they hadn't anticipated the scale of the firebombing to come.
This is an incendiary bomb.
It takes fire on impact, and may burn 15 minutes, and will ignite anything in its vicinity.
The one kilogram incendiary bomb was 14 inches long and contained a firing cap that ignited the thermite filling, which burnt at over 2,500 degrees centigrade.
They were dropped in containers called "breadbaskets' that carried up to 700 incendiaries each.
Here on Blitz Street, we are going to see what they did.
And I'm with former fireman and historian, Neil Wallington, to examine their effects.
They take a few seconds but then they really kick off, don't they? They certainly do.
They were actually dropped as a mixture along with high explosives, and they were designed to punch a hole in a roof, a slate roof like we have here in Blitz Street, and ignite on impact with something solid in the building.
Yeah, the one in the roof, it looks almost like - a firework, doesn't it? - Absolutely.
So what were all those spatters of flame dropping down? That's the burning casing, which just turns to molten metal, and it would shower molten droplets of burning magnesium.
That would ignite pretty well anything in a property, an office, a house, or indeed, in a street.
Incendiary bombs were a nightmare for firemen like George Wheeler.
They just dropped literally thousands of incendiary bombs down.
You had this vivid white light.
Then all this burning material would be thrown about and start off more and more fires.
Suppose the fire service wasn't around, or you just had a little fire in your home you wanted to put out.
How would you deal with that if you were an ordinary citizen? Well, what you would use is this stirrup pump that was issued to street wardens and groups of householders on the basis of one pump to about 20 properties.
The Germans are trying to burn down our cities.
They rain down incendiary bombs from the sky, yet this great danger can be dealt with by these simple weapons, and by you yourselves.
How does it work? Well, this is a very primitive double-acting pump, a little bit like a bicycle pump, that pulls water up and then pushes it out on the down stroke.
It's funny, it looks pretty pathetic but it's actually effective.
It is, as a basic bit of fire-fighting kit, and you'd use this until the fire service hopefully arrived.
Many of the people who turned up to deal with these fires were amateurs or teenagers with no real experience of putting out fire.
London was exposed to tens of thousands of incendiaries each night, and their training was about to take a steep and dangerous learning curve.
Adolf Hitler ordered another raid on London.
With the River Thames at its lowest, he sent his bombers to deliver 100,000 incendiaries and unleash the biggest firestorm in history.
His target was in the heart of the capital.
The first wave of bombers would drop incendiaries, so they would start the fires off.
So after an hour or so, you could look down the river and both sides of the river and all you could see was this red, red glow.
It was a weekend, and many volunteer fire watchers were at home, not working in the city.
Fire fighters battled the blaze while the area was still being bombed.
George vividly remembers that night.
You could hear all the tiles were coming off the roof, the window frames were coming out, the door frames were falling out.
There's debris falling down around you.
You could be fighting a fire one side and then suddenly you realise that the building behind you's on fire.
And before you knew where you were, you're fighting a fire one side, and then the other side, you've got another big fire going.
Gas mains, severed by the bombing, were ignited by the incendiaries that continued to rain down.
An hour into the raid, the firemen faced temperatures in the buildings in excess of 800 degrees centigrade.
The heat is terrific.
You see all these massive, big flames coming out through doorways, windows, the flames are so high.
You've got all hot water coming out from the bottom of the building, it's running over your feet.
You can only stay there a certain time and then you've got to come out of it.
Otherwise, you're gonna get cooked.
You're looking at it and you thought, "Where's this going to end? ' Then, in the middle of all this, George and his team were told that St Paul's Cathedral was in danger, and it was their mission to save it.
We arrived up at St Paul's at 8.
00 at night, and when we got there, we found all the buildings round about were well and truly alight.
And it wasn't any heavy bombs, it was all incendiaries, so he was firebombing it.
The Luftwaffe targeted the square mile of the city of London that night, and they got lucky.
Somebody said to us, "Oh, the main water supplies have been bombed, "the whole lot's gone.
' He called the water officer over and said alternative supplies and the chap said, "Well, you've got the river.
" Water was constantly failing.
The fireboats could still pump water from the river, but the crews had to get across mud flats, which is a really dirty, horrible, rotten job.
There was 50 or 60 foot of mud to get over before you could get any water supplies.
He particularly picked that night because it was what they call a neap tide, when the Thames would be at its lowest point.
It was low water and he was very, very lucky, that you had a bomb that hit a main water main.
Hitler's plan to firebomb the city at low tide looked like it was going to succeed.
The fire chief is saying "Well, we have got to contain this fire "because whatever happens, we've got to save St Paul's.
" And by that time, there was a big departmental store right near St Paul's, and that was really going up.
And they were frightened it was gonna jump across the road and set one part of St Paul's on fire.
Fires of this magnitude could only be contained by creating a fire break between the buildings.
We started fetching water up, and also pulling a lot of the front of the shops down.
We managed to stop it from jumping the road.
They battled all night against the fire.
It surrounded St Paul's and was only a street away when they got it under control.
It was a close call, but London's landmark remained standing.
Well, we found out afterwards that it was on the orders of Winston Churchill.
He said, "It doesn't matter what happens, "we want St Paul's saved because it's, um "It's an icon," you know.
It's a vital part of London, and if that had gone, well, I just don't know.
All I know is we were told that we had to save it, and we did save it.
It was a dreadful night that night.
Not so much of human life, because there weren't very many people there, but the amount that the firemen had to do to try and contain the fires, and the amount of damage done to public buildings, offices, the people arriving the next morning for work.
It was just like a desert, a burning desert of timber and masonry.
Clambering over, wondering where on earth your office had gone, not being able to find your way, completely disorientated.
Where was the city that you had left the Friday night before? I'd never seen my dad so shocked before.
And he said there was hardly a building standing.
He walked through the city and he said nothing.
Just every building was down all around St Paul's.
It was just devastation as far as you could see in the city.
And at that point, I think he thought that the war was as good as over.
But it gave him an enormous feeling of pride, really, that St Paul's was standing, pretty much untouched.
In December, 1940, the Germans were firebombing our cities with incendiaries.
Ton for ton, they were nearly twice as effective at causing damage than high explosive bombs.
But the Germans had an even nastier weapon, Flam bombs.
Flam bombs were about the size of a dustbin, and they were usually full of high explosive and oil.
They'd be dropped out of an aeroplane, and on impact, they'd split open and ignite, sending burning oil all over the place, as you're about to see.
The C250 Flam bomb had a thin metal casing.
It was packed with petrol, oil and other flammable material.
On impact, a TNT charge exploded the bomb and ignited the filling, spreading burning oil over a wide area.
It would engulf a street like ours in flames.
Not only were they effective at starting fires, but they were a deadly anti-personnel weapon, especially for firemen like George.
This stuff, it was like a napalm bomb.
If you got it on your body or on your clothes, it used to stick and it was still burning.
If it fell on anything that was inflammable, it'd just stick to them and just burn away, so within, say, 10 minutes or so, you had major, major fires going.
On Blitz Street, we're about to see what a Flam bomb does, and this time, I'm less than 100 yards away from it.
Neil and I have had to retreat to a safe place, behind this solid concrete.
Ear defenders in, and we'll watch the action from here.
You heard the whistle, and you heard it get louder and louder, and then you, for a split second, you would get a red flash.
That would turn to a white flash, and then you would hear the explosion.
Five, four, three, two, one Wow, that was a much bigger explosion than I expected.
It would have been quite terrifying if one of those had dropped on your street, wouldn't it? Absolutely.
You can see the effect immediately, of the way it's ignited the timber in the already partly collapsed structure that's been damaged by the high explosive.
It feels like quite a crude weapon, Just a bucket full of petrol, basically.
It probably was, but you can see how effective it is, because when it hits the ground and explodes, it throws burning fire everywhere.
It's primitive, but it works.
How did our fire services deal with them? The strategy really was to let them burn, and really accept that the area which was on fire was going to burn and do some damage, but protect the surrounding risk with plenty of water, houses on either side of the street to prevent the fire spreading into those properties.
Dealing with incendiaries came at a cost.
By the end of the war, nearly 800 firemen and 25 firewomen would lose their lives.
Like the other bombs, incendiaries and firebombs were intended to have a demoralising effect by causing damage to property and tying up lots of manpower extinguishing fires and repairing buildings.
In fact, all this kept people busy.
There was no time to contemplate defeat, even though Britain's cities were suffering.
Drainage and water supplies were damaged, people were living in boarded-up houses with no heating, and there was more bombing.
But it became a way of life.
You became less frightened as raids went on, because, "Well, I haven't been hit yet," sort of attitude.
Uh, "So I probably won't get hit.
" I can remember that the fear ebbed away, basically.
Churchill nurtured this spirit of optimism.
This was the key to help him win the war.
The British made a very effective propaganda film released in the United States under the title London Can Take It.
I'm speaking from London.
This has been a quiet day for us, but it won't be a quiet night.
The sign of a great fighter in the ring is, can he get up from the floor after being knocked down? London does this every morning.
This was not just important because the British were trying to shape the attitude of the United States and other neutrals.
The British were also reinforcing their own myth of the Blitz.
Historians used the term "myth'", to mean a real event which takes on great significance for a people.
But a bomb has its limitations.
It can only destroy buildings and kill people.
It cannot kill the unconquerable spirit and courage of the people of Churchill's island.
There's always somebody who wants what you've got, and you've always got That awful question is, "Do you give it to them, or do you fight them? "And say, 'No, you're not having it.
"' Because if you believe something really strongly, you're going to fight to the death for it, aren't you? Whether I or you think it's right or wrong, it's what you believe.
By the end of 1940, Britain had suffered four months of bombing and firebombing.
Adolf Hitler still hadn't bombed the British people into submission.
Instead, he was inadvertently uniting the nation as one.
The Blitz spirit was born.
Was it really true that the British emerged from being bombed out with their thumbs up, singing happy songs? The truth of the myth of the blitz is that the myth is essentially true, that the British people, faced with the possibility of caving in, didn't behave like that because they chose not to behave like that.
We didn't sing rousing patriotic songs.
Except there was one, there was, you know, well, There'll Always Be An England.
That was a great favourite, that was, There'll Always Be An England.
You're going to make me cry.
In the next episode, we tell the story of how Adolf Hitler changed tactics again, tried to starve us into surrender, how the Luftwaffe delivered their biggest raid ever on London, and we see what happens on Blitz Street when it's hit by Hitler's weapon of vengeance, the V-1 Rocket.