Blitz Street (2010) s01e03 Episode Script

TONY ROBINSON: The Blitz.
Few events live on in our collective consciousness like it.
(SIREN WAILING) A time when our streets were bombed day after day.
Yet only those who lived through it really know what it was like.
So on the 70th anniversary, we've built this, a terraced street of real houses.
The aim, to bring the story of the Blitz to life, bomb by bomb.
Each one the same size and type of explosive dropped by the Luftwaffe.
We'll analyse how they caused such damage to the streets of Britain.
This is what our Blitz Street looks like after days of bombardment.
We're here on a secure military base, and we're trying to recreate the feel of the Blitz and what it would have felt like to people who lived in streets like this.
Our first bomb was an SC-50, which punched a huge hole in the wall.
Our second bomb was an SC-500, which went off over there, where it's all scorched.
And that took off the whole of that end house, and it also took off most of the slates from those roofs.
Our third and biggest bomb was the SC-1000.
That wiped away the whole of the rest of this terrace.
And then we firebombed the lot.
In this programme, we'll learn how people survived bombs like these.
We'll put our Anderson shelter to the ultimate scientific test, to see just how effective it was.
We'll be remembering Londoners worst-ever night of the Blitz, when even the House of Commons was destroyed.
And Blitz Street itself will be blasted again, with the bomb that, for some, caused the most fear of all, the world's first-ever guided missile.
Pound for pound, it packed a bigger punch than anything the Nazis had sent over before.
Londoners called it the doodlebug.
It was Hitler's revenge weapon, the V-1.
Heavy snows closed down the air fields on both sides of the Channel.
Hitler's planes were grounded and Britain enjoyed a brief respite from bombing.
It was a pause that gave the authorities a chance to start counting the cost of the damage.
So far, thousands of houses and hundreds of factories had been destroyed.
But it was the loss of life that was worse, 22,000 dead in just four months.
But, surprisingly, the government actually saw this figure as a cause for hope, because it was far lower than expected.
In 1937, the Committee of Imperial Defence estimated that over 60 days you could have almost two million killed and seriously wounded.
ROBINSON: One of the main reasons it's thought fewer people died was the effectiveness of the shelter policy.
As well as sheltering in the Tube, there were also municipal street shelters in areas of dense population.
And for those with a garden, there was the Anderson.
MALE ANNOUNCER: The first of the Anderson steel shelters comes to town.
They're unloaded from the stations for delivery to householders with incomes under £250 a year.
Above that limit, householders may buy them.
The council just dumped the pieces at the front gate, and everybody had to do their own, if they wanted one.
ROBINSON: Tested and designed in 1938, well over three and a half million had been erected by the end of the war.
In our authentic Anderson shelter, I've been joined by Nick Hill, who runs a Second World War museum and has built many of his own.
When one arrived at your home, how would you know how to set it up? I mean, it was a two-man job to actually construct and, really, the hardest job was digging the hole because it had to go down between three and four foot.
ROBINSON: Did people do it properly? I can imagine a lot of people would have messed it up a bit.
The problem was it was very difficult digging the hole, and so, in fact, people didn't really stick them down far enough.
Those that did, often, they would end up digging so far down, they were into the water table and Anderson shelters became renowned for being damp and wet and horrible places.
DOROTHY HUGHES: The Anderson shelter in our garden was constantly damp.
We had to keep getting water out of it because the floor was always sloshing.
We had a double bunk in it, but they were very uncomfortable.
MALE ANNOUNCER: And there go the Smiths to spend another night in their family shelter listening to the all-too-familiar concert.
Chilly, uncomfortable, everybody getting temperamental.
(INAUDIBLE) (EXPLOSION) That one was a bit near! (SIREN WAILING) ROBINSON: Survivors vividly remember what it was like to be bombed in an Anderson shelter.
HAZEL HACKING: The earth moved.
It really did move.
The whole shelter, sort of "whoomp, whoomp," and you got this thump, almost like an earthquake.
It seemed to be coming up from underneath the earth.
MARJORIE EDGE: It was just a terrible shaking.
It was the movement of the air, as the air was being pushed aside.
That gave you this feeling of being almost lifted.
You just felt the air was just gonna suck you out.
ROBINSON: So could one sheet of corrugated steel really save so many lives? Now we're able to put it to the test using tools that weren't available in the '40s.
We can measure the forces inside with blast gauges, and document what happens to the exterior with specialist high-speed cameras.
Defence scientist Robin Hiley is keen to look at this footage.
First, the results from the smallest bomb, the SC-50, detonated at 25 metres away.
The structure itself is actually quite flimsy, but the earth over the top makes all the difference.
The debris falling down from the house, it will all just impact on the earth and the energy will be taken out of it.
ROBINSON: The power of a blast is measured in a unit called kilopascals.
At around 40, your eardrums can burst, while a level of 400-500 is lethal.
HILEY: The blast gauge reading from the Anderson shelter was about 50 kilopascals.
That could have damaged people's eardrums, but it probably wouldn't have done anything much more than that.
ROBINSON: Our next bomb was the SC-500, detonated 31 metres from the Anderson.
The blast wave from this SC-500 passes over the top of the Anderson shelter from the back.
The smooth shape of the shelter will help to deflect the blast.
This bomb was further away, so it produced a similar pressure, again of about 50 kilopascals, which would also have been survivable.
ROBINSON: It held up well to this point, but the next bomb was twice the size and was placed just 22 metres away.
Would people in the Anderson shelter have survived this? Okay, this shot of the SC-1000 shows the shock wave particularly well.
You can see it coming out as a hemisphere.
You can see it curves over the top of the Anderson shelter.
But if you look carefully, you can see a shock coming back towards the charge.
Now that's a reflected shock wave from the wall of the terrace, and that passes back over the Anderson shelter again, so the Anderson shelter has had two shocks.
The blast wave from this bomb produced an over-pressure of about 100 kilopascals, which would have damaged people's ears, and could have started to cause some lung damage in some people, but it would have still been survivable.
ROBINSON: Surveying the carnage back on site, I just find it incredible that you'd have survived in here with a bomb that big, so close.
ROBINSON: You see that tablecloth up on the roof there? Well, that was on table before the blast, and I know that kind of thing isn't an isolated event because we know of a bloke in Coventry who came back to his street and found his daughter had been blasted out of the house right up onto the roof.
What was going on there? What kind of force is that? Well, when an explosion goes off, the chemical energy of the explosive spreads out, pushes the air back, so as well as the shock wave, you also have very strong winds, stronger than hurricane force, Just briefly, as the explosion goes off.
That wind can pick things up and move them around, so it's picked up the tablecloth, pushed it up, picked up a person, lifted them up.
ROBINSON: Hitler's bombing campaign was not going according to plan.
After the months of intensive attacks of 1940, he realised we were withstanding everything he could throw at us.
It was time for him to change his tactics once more.
He was now going to focus on our supply lines.
By bombing the ports, he hoped to starve us into submission.
ROBINSON: With no sign of British morale breaking under the Luftwaffe's bombing campaign, Hitler decided to try a new strategy.
He'd already been attacking merchant ships in the Atlantic.
Now, to finish the job, one by one, he bombed the ports they were heading to.
I can remember seeing planes coming up the Bristol Channel and bombing the city, and bombing the docks.
ROBINSON: On Clydebank, more than 500 died in one night.
Belfast's infamous Easter raid killed 1,000 people and damaged a large part of the city.
We used to go on the moors and watch the raids over Plymouth, and the whole of Plymouth had a glow.
It was almost magical, but very frightening.
I was living in Liverpool, about a mile and a half or so from the docks.
And there was real devastation there on a huge scale.
ROBINSON: Ever vigilant of the need to keep up morale, Winston Churchill would go and visit the scenes of destruction.
WINSTON CHURCHILL: I thought it would be a good thing to go and see for myself some of our great cities and sea ports which have been most heavily bombed, and to some of the places where the poorest people have got it worst.
But it is just in those very places where the ordeal of the men, women and children has been most severe that I found their morale most high and splendid.
ROBINSON: Churchill was engaged in what we might now call spin.
Even though it was time-consuming work, his visits and words were very effective at boosting the national spirits.
But here at the Imperial War Museum, tucked away in the sound archives, we can hear evidence that there were some people who weren't that convinced.
In the Liverpool Blitz, Marie Price lost many relations.
ARCHIVE RECORDING: When Churchill was telling us how brave we all were, and we would never surrender, I tell you what, the people in Liverpool after that Blitz would have surrendered overnight, if they could have.
You know, it's all right for people in authority, sitting down in their steel-lined dugout to tell us, but to be there in amongst it, it was just too awful.
ROBINSON: Marie wasn't alone in her thoughts.
Although, luckily for Churchill, it was uncommon for those voices to be expressed.
It was more popular to voice anger and desire for revenge.
What do you think of us going over to Berlin and doing the same to them? I should think so, too.
Bit worse than this, I hope, with a wicked bugger like he is.
Bomb 'em ten-fold.
I'm sorry for the women and children of Berlin, but what about the women and children of this country? If I was a man, I'd go over there and I'd give them the same as what they've gave us here.
ROBINSON: The RAF continued their attacks with 400 bombers attacking the northern ports of Bremen and Hamburg.
It's not known exactly how many German civilians were killed that night, but as we ramped up our bombing of Germany, the Allies would eventually kill 10 times as many German civilians as died in Britain.
That weekend, Hitler gathered his houseguests at his alpine chalet near Berchtesgaden and ordered London to be bombed as it had never been bombed before.
Double summer time had been introduced a few days earlier.
(CROWD CHEERING) London was full of visitors for the FA Cup final between Preston North End and Arsenal.
MALE ANNOUNCER: The Arsenal red shirts turn on the heat now to level the score.
Compton equalises with a crashing shot which skims the underside of the bar.
ROBINSON: The game ended in a draw and fans dispersed into the city.
At 11.
15 that night, London was hit.
The death toll that one night was nearly 1,500 people.
Phyllis MacDonald-Ross worked at Hackney Hospital.
MACDONALD-ROSS: One lady I had in, she had her legs amputated.
And I know she's going to die, and I think she knew herself, and she was frightened.
So I said, "Do you believe that there's an ever-after?" She said, "I don't think I do.
" So I sat with her, I held her hand and all I said was the Lord's Prayer.
I don't know what made me say it, because I'm not that sort of a person, really, although I've got faith.
And she looked at me and she smiled.
She said, "Thank you.
Thank you.
I should be all right now.
" And she closed her eyes and she was gone.
This was the worst-ever attack on London.
The bombs struck right at the heart of power.
ROBINSON: Big Ben was hit, and the House of Commons chamber destroyed.
But what they didn't know, as they started clearing through the rubble of Westminster that May morning, was that Hitler already had other plans in place for bombing Britain.
London wouldn't be subject to this kind of bombing again till 1944, with the arrival of the V-1 s.
At this point, Hitler made an infamous error.
He launched the largest military offensive in history against the Soviet Union.
Operation Barbarossa would eventually prove a step too far for the Nazis.
Although he was looking east, he was worried about the British enemy at his back door.
Conventional bombing hadn't worked.
He believed he needed totally new weapons to break us.
He'd already encouraged his leading scientists to find a wonder weapon that would win him the war.
In Peenemünde, a small town on the Baltic coast, a crack troop of some of the Reich's most able brains had gathered to devise new weapons of mass destruction.
They started research in three areas, a rocket, a supergun, and a pilot-less plane.
What they came up with was the most technologically advanced weapon Britain had ever faced, the V-1.
And that's the next bomb we'll be exploding on Blitz Street.
The plan is to use 880 kilos of a more powerful explosive, RDX, which will make it the most shattering bomb so far.
(IT'S A LOVELYDAY TOMORROW PLAYING) ROBINSON: Back on the home front, times were hard.
There were food shortages and clothing rationing was now introduced.
The end of the war seemed a very long way off.
And there was another constant menace.
Although the bombs were no longer falling from above, there was still an ongoing problem from the bombs beneath our feet.
MALE ANNOUNCER: UXB, the menace from the night sky, the pride of Göring's Luftwaffe.
Any one of you may have to tackle a UXB.
Unexploded bombs, UXBs, were extremely dangerous.
Areas had to be closed, streets had to be shut.
And that was often part of the dislocation of a raid.
It wasn't only the debris blocking the streets, but there'd be a UXB in the area which had to be defused.
MALE ANNOUNCER: Bombs causing idle factories, bombs paralysing railways, bombs blocking streets and thoroughfares, and all these bombs are UXBs.
ROBINSON: It was the job of the people like the Royal Engineers to sort them out.
George Carroll was still at university doing a degree in engineering when he was called up.
The bomb would be uncovered, and when it was uncovered it then became my responsibility and mine alone.
And I had to find out where the fuse was.
And so we were armed with a torch with a rod and a mirror on it.
Now, by making a hole behind the bomb, I could actually put the torch in, shine the light on the mirror and recognise the fuse, if it was there, and then you remove the fuse.
ROBINSON: But they'd never know which fuse they'd have to face.
The Germans started sending over delayed-action bombs that were designed to cause additional havoc by adding a timer to the explosion.
MALE ANNOUNCER: The clock may be set to operate at any time, up to 80 hours after landing.
When you got down to a bomb, the first thing you did was listen to it.
Because if it had a clock on, it was going tick-tick-tick.
So when I got to the bomb, I sat on it.
Why? So I would know nothing about it if it went off.
ROBINSON: But there was even worse to come in this cat-and-mouse arms race.
The Germans then introduced an anti-handling fuse.
This was a booby trap deliberately devised to target the bomb disposal men themselves.
I was always aware that I might be killed.
I didn't spend my time sitting at home saying, "Am I going to be killed today?" You haven't got time to think about that sort of thing.
You've got a job.
You couldn't allow yourself to be overcome by your feelings.
ROBINSON: On Blitz Street, I'm getting a hands-on demonstration of how to defuse a bomb from Sergeant Doc Savage, a current bomb disposal operator from the Royal Air Force.
It's a delayed-action timer fuse, and there's just a small area at the side that it's safe to drill into.
ROBINSON: It's quite tough.
You really have to press pretty hard, don't you, before it even begins to bite? Throughout this drilling operation, you still have to be quite careful, 'cause any jarring may function the fuse.
(CHUCKLING) Thanks for telling me that.
Of course, it's relatively easy doing it here, 'cause we're on a flat surface and it's a nice day, plenty of light.
But I can imagine that a lot of bombs wouldn't have been in this kind of position at all.
Potentially you can find the weapon in any orientation.
You can find it nose up in the air, or even the fuse on the underside of the weapon.
- I'm think I'm through, aren't I? - Yeah, we're through.
ROBINSON: Then I have to create an air-tight vacuum with putty, so I can fill the fuse with liquid.
SAVAGE: This is BD fluid.
BD fluid's a mixture of benzol, methylated spirits, salt and a food colouring.
ROBINSON: The benzene and meths act together to break down the insulation on the wiring, so the electricity discharges safely.
SAVAGE: Yeah.
ROBINSON: Now to remove the fuse, by undoing the locking ring.
If this was for real, this would have been the most nerve-racking moment of all.
Okay, now you've removed your fuse locking ring, now attach a piece of string through the loop on the crabtree.
Yeah.
- Ooh, it's coming.
- SAVAGE: Yeah, that's not ideal, is it? The idea is you then retire to a safe distance and pull the fuse.
Oh, I thought I'd done really well, then.
I'm supposed to get back there and pull it up, am I? You are, yes.
- Well, I've done it now, haven't I? - You've done it now, yes.
ROBINSON: If that had been a real bomb, that one small action could have killed me.
Little surprise it's claimed that the average life expectancy of a bomb disposal man was just 10 weeks.
I was lucky.
I was one that didn't get killed.
I was always aware that I might be killed, which is why, in a sense, I became involved with a girl and I never admitted that to her.
I wouldn't let my friendship with her grow to the point of being anything more than that because I didn't like the idea of my being killed and leaving her in In tears, as it were.
ROBINSON: On the front line, there were long, hard years of battle before the tide turned.
But, eventually, Hitler had his back to the wall.
I ask that the Congress declare a state of war between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
MALE ANNOUNCER 1: The peril of a second front to the Axis looms large.
Rommel's army was driven into a full-scale retreat.
Now they're getting a taste of their own medicine.
MALE ANNOUNCER 2: We are marching on the road to victory.
The German position is desperate.
D-Day was a tremendous boost to everybody because that was what everybody had been waiting for.
That was the second front.
So there was a great feeling of relief and that the war was bound to be over by Christmas.
ROBINSON: But just seven days after D-Day, Hitler unleashed his secret weapon.
My father came and woke me, and we went to one of the bedroom windows and we saw this strange red trail, like a firework.
All of a sudden, the whole of our street lit up, with dark red and the whole of the porch was lit.
It passed in a moment, and I You know, "What was that?" This is it, Hitler's first weapon of mass destruction, the V-1, 2,000 kilos of pure terror.
Hitler was about to take revenge to a new level.
The people of Britain had no idea what was gonna hit them.
ROBINSON: The V-1 was the first pilotless jet-powered bomb.
It was made of two tubes of steel.
The tube on top held a radical new propulsion unit, the pulse jet engine.
The lower one was the fuselage.
In it was the guidance system, a simple autopilot for height and speed and a wind vane that measured the distance to target and armed in-flight the warhead in the nose.
It contained RDX, one of the most powerful military explosives ever used.
And today, we've got 880 kilos of it, Just the same as a V-1 warhead.
Explosives engineer Charlie Adcock took me to see just what RDX can do.
So we've got two different types of explosive here.
This one that looks like putty, what's that called? It's The active ingredient is RDX.
ROBINSON: And this one here? That's ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, ANFO.
ROBINSON: ANFO was the explosive used in our last test, and 500 kilos of it did this.
RDX is nearly one and a half times more powerful.
So what's this experiment set up to prove? It's just really showing the difference between the two.
This has the ability to shatter.
It's got a very high brisance.
It's a great word, "brisance".
What does it mean? It means, in French, it's to break with great violence.
ROBINSON: Oh, it's a good word for people who do your job, isn't it? So this experiment is to see which is more potent? And we've put them all on top of this.
What's this, steel plate? Yeah, it's got a steel witness plate, and we'll come back and we'll see what the difference in their brisance was? ROBINSON: While Charlie and I retreat, a member of his team sets the charge.
That's ANFO on the left and RDX on the right.
ADCOCK: Five, four, three, two, one.
Here's one.
- It's made a nice little dent.
- It has.
And which was this explosive? That was your ammonium nitrate fuel oil, or your ANFO.
Right, pretty effective.
What about the other one? This is This is RDX.
Well, I think we can see that that's had some effect on it.
- That's a heck of a kick, isn't it? - It is.
ROBINSON: That was 80 grams of RDX.
Our plan is to use 10,000 times more than that to show the power of a V-1.
Everyone on site is understandably nervous.
And we've just had a report in about today's weather.
The wind's getting up, which means the explosion could cause window damage and disturb animals on farms over two miles away.
Every large test that we do, anything over 25 kilos, we get a noise footprint for, Just so that we can ensure that we're not disturbing any of the neighbours.
And we've got the noise footprint from the Met Office, and if you look on the map here, the contour map, the red area is the high level.
Unfortunately, the noise levels are just far too high.
We cannot expose anybody to these levels of noise at all.
(INAUDIBLE) ROBINSON: But Robin's got a solution.
What we can do is use the scaling rules for explosions to use a smaller charge closer to the target.
And the computer calculations that I've done this morning suggest that that will produce about the same scale of damage to the effect of that charge further off.
What do you think the effect might be? I think it will remove this building almost entirely, being so close to it, and over there, will remove a good part of it, perhaps up to about halfway.
ROBINSON: So we're back on course.
The RDX has arrived, and it's time to get down to the delicate operation of priming this highly-powerful explosive.
The Germans initially were launching their V-1 s from sites mainly in northern France.
Around 10,000 V-1 s would be fired at England.
At first, they were filled with 600 litres of fuel, Just enough to get them over the Channel to London.
They were powered by an engine called the pulse jet.
It's this that created the distinctive buzzing.
Charlie showed me how it worked.
Well, it's a very simple jet engine, valve at the front, tube at the rear.
You would basically ignite fuel inside it, the gasses will expand to the rear, pushing your projectile forwards, and then the whole process starts again, which gives you that noise, that (SPLUTTERING) noise, that you hear people talk about when they're describing the V-1.
So how does it work? Okay, just to show how simple a pulse jet is you can actually demonstrate the principle with a jam jar with a hole in the top.
We're just going to put some fuel in the bottom of this jam jar, screw the lid on and ignite it through the hole in the top.
ROBINSON: I'm glad I'm with an explosives specialist, because this is highly dangerous.
The jam jar could blow up at any time.
(WHISTLING) (SPUTTERING) (SPUTTERING CONTINUES) That's extraordinary.
That's the noise that people really dreaded.
Oh, absolutely.
ROBINSON: The pulse jet alone couldn't produce enough power to lift the V-1 s off the ground, so they were catapulted off a ramp into the air.
Once in the air, they reached speeds of 400 miles per hour and took less than 25 minutes to get to London.
It wasn't like an aircraft engine, it was more like a It was more like a motorcycle engine, but very much louder, spluttery sort of sound.
(MIMICS SPUTTERING) (MIMICS SPUTTERING) "Voom, voom, voom, voom, voom, voom" MICHAEL MOSS: You'd be walking along quite happily with your mates and you'd hear this noise coming.
And wherever you were amongst people, they'd always stop.
There was a cartoon with everybody with very big ears.
But that was a tension that was there.
You were sitting there with bated breath, waiting for the engine to stop.
And there was a terrible moment where it would cut out and then complete silence, and you were waiting for it.
And people would sit there and count.
And then you waited probably four or five seconds.
Countdown starting now.
Five Well, you're just petrified.
Four We'd all been taught to put your hands over your ears and lay on your stomach and keep down.
Three Hope for the best, all you could do.
Two, one And then the blast came.
ROBINSON: Bernard Harber lost his mother early in the war, then his uncle was killed by a V-1.
The day after the funeral, he went back to his factory job in Pimlico.
HARBER: So I was asked to go down to the works' manager's office and take a phone call.
And they said, "Bernard, I'm afraid your place has been hit.
" So I cycled home and got there, and it had hit the back of where I lived.
The whole lot had collapsed.
My father and my sister, they'd gone home to lunch.
You always hope that they're going to find some sign of life, or what have you, but I realised then that there was There was no hope.
I knew that it was too much to survive.
And we found them in the shelter underneath, sitting there dead.
Brick dust and things like that on them, but not damaged, other than my father.
Something had hit him across his forehead.
But, other than that, they weren't They weren't It must have been blast.
It was a dreadful thing to happen, but I had to get on with it and get used to it.
There was nothing else that I could do.
All I had was what I was stood up in, a shirt and trousers.
The V-1 s, they seemed very sinister.
They seemed to change the rules of the game.
You didn't know how to hit back at them.
And they caused tremendous devastation and fear.
ROBINSON: I've come down to see what damage our V-1 explosion has done to Blitz Street.
We set off just 125 kilos of RDX, which is a seventh of a real V-1.
ROBINSON: Look at the mess it's made.
The whole thing around here, completely flattened.
Over here, the end wall has completely pulled away from the rest of the house.
That's a real mess.
After the dust had cleared away, people used to be clambering through the rubble, looking for their most precious possessions.
Well, I just want to see if my milk bottle's still here.
It's survived three bombs.
Can it survive a fourth? ROBINSON: There it is.
It's just where I left it.
Makes me realise that surviving these blasts really was a matter of luck.
Of course, when the first V-1 s landed, it was a complete surprise.
Londoners hadn't experienced real bombing for the best part of two years, and, suddenly, the V-1 s arrived with all this incredible force and they were right back at the heart of the bombing.
ROBINSON: Churchill knew he had to respond.
ROBINSON: In those first few days, more than 500 V-1 s got through, and 500 people died.
The V-1 s really lowered morale.
After all, the war had been going on for nearly five years.
People were exhausted.
Britain was a scarred, a desolate, devastated country, and the government was very worried.
They really felt that people couldn't cope with the feeling that it was another wave of terror.
They were afraid that morale would break.
ROBINSON: People felt helpless against these fast, pilotless bombs.
Even barrage balloons could do little after the Germans fitted wire-cutters to the V-1 wings.
On Blitz Street, Robin has read the blast readings in our Anderson shelter to find out if anyone would have survived.
The Anderson shelter itself has still survived, the basic arch structure is so strong, but the front wall here has been pushed in by the last explosion.
And the blast gauges indicate a pressure in excess of seven atmospheres.
That is in the range where people would have been killed Just by that blast pressure.
And, of course, there were also pieces of debris, fragments flying around, as well.
I think the chances of surviving would have been very low.
Of all the V-1 s sent over in 1944, it was the one that landed here that hurt most.
This is the Wellington Barracks, right next to Buckingham Palace.
And here, at the Guards Chapel one Sunday morning, the guards, officers, men and their wives gathered for church parade.
ROBINSON: Among the congregation was a young Guardsmen, Keith Lewis.
Everybody had to go on church parade.
It was compulsory.
But luckily, on that day, I was detailed to go into the choir.
We were shown where we had to sit in the choir stalls and the service started.
They had just stood to sing the Te Deum, "To thee all angels cry aloud, "the heavens and all the powers therein," when a V-1 flew over.
(SPUTTERING) The V-1 was loud, and I knew it was near, but when you're at that age, nothing's going to hurt you, and it was going to fly past and land in one of the parks, I thought St James's or Green Park or somewhere, and then the engines stopped, and then you had that sort of "uh-oh".
I didn't see anything of the bomb, Just this very vivid flash, and then an explosion.
And then I just felt all this rubble pummelling me.
And the next thing I knew, I was curled up in the darkness.
ROBINSON: Keith was unable to move beneath a mountain of rubble.
LEWIS: I could only move my hands a little, nothing else.
And all I knew was that I couldn't breathe.
All I was doing was dragging my breath in and out as much as possible.
ROBINSON: Hundreds of soldiers scoured the rubble all day, searching for survivors.
LEWIS: As time went on, I got to the point where I thought, "Well, this is the end, ' because I realised I was getting a lot weaker.
And I thought, "Well, I haven't had such a bad life after all.
" At that, at 18 years of age, and the one thing I regretted was perhaps I hadn't written home often enough.
ROBINSON: It took several hours to find Keith.
He was minutes from death.
For me, it was It was forever.
And finally, the rubble was removed from my upper body.
And that's when I could take a few breaths and that was wonderful.
But that's when the pain started.
I've never felt such pain.
I had never before, and I haven't since.
It was horrific.
ROBINSON: He'd got broken bones, and he'd lost the top of his scalp.
But I suppose I thought I was lucky to be alive, and not one of those being killed.
Lucky to get out of it.
Hundred and twenty one people lost their lives that day.
The Guards Chapel was the largest loss of life from a V-1 throughout the entire war.
ROBINSON: Churchill knew it was important to be seen to fight back as soon as possible.
He moved ack-ack guns down to the south coast and Thames estuary to try and intercept them before they got through.
He also charged the RAF with the terrifying task of trying to fight them in the air.
Eric Brown was a spitfire ace and a chief test pilot.
He had the unenviable task of trying to bring down the V-1.
It was one of their great technological ideas, and very difficult to deal with.
First, the fighter boys let fly with their guns, but this was highly dangerous because you'd blow up the bomb, and probably yourself with it.
ROBINSON: They went back to the drawing board and came up with the most audacious plan.
We realised that if we could fore-mate with it, literally, and put our wing under its wing, you could create a pressure pad between the two.
So if you rolled up, you tipped up the flying bomb, and toppled its gyros, and as soon as it toppled its gyros, it was out of control, and just spun down and crashed.
ROBINSON: In scenes of bitter fighting, advancing Allied forces eventually managed to break through to the V-1 launch sites and close them down.
But V-1 s still came, air-launched from Heinkel bombers.
Some had a surprising sting in their tail.
Among the rubble were found piles of propaganda leaflets.
"How are the Allies going to win the war?" "What good are all your planes, warships and tanks "against that new German weapon, V-number 1?" "Are you still convinced that you're winning?" "How about V-number 2 and V-number X?" ROBINSON: The research scientists in Peenemünde had been working overtime, and now led by maverick genius Wernher von Braun, they'd come up the most advanced earth-shattering piece of war technology the world had ever seen.
Next time, we explore the rocket science of the V-2, and how its technology changed warfare forever.
We set an equivalent off on Blitz street.
It'll be the biggest explosion on British soil since the Blitz itself.
And we learn just why the Blitz finally failed.