Blitz Wales with John Humphrys

Early in 1941, Hitler's bombers crossed the Channel.

It was Wales' turn for the blitzkrieg, the lightning war.

75 years ago, Britain came under the heaviest attack in its history.

First, London endured 57 nights of intensive bombing.

Then the terror spread, devastating 16 cities

in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

So we're going to do now, as it were, a sort of dummy bombing run.

I'm John Humphrys

and I'm taking to the skies above my home city of Cardiff

to follow the flight paths of the Luftwaffe bombers.

What we're looking at now was just wiped out.

Their bomb went right through the shop,

right through into the cellar, exploded.

I'll also fly over Swansea,

where the Three Nights' Blitz destroyed its centre

and changed the landscape for ever.

It was burning from Swansea Castle down to St Helens Road,

and people were running for the beach,

because if the worst came to the worst,

they could get into the water, see?

I'll see the reminders of the war,

meet those who lived through the bombings

and discover how they changed the face of our cities.

I was born in Cardiff in 1943, a war baby.

I came into a world ravaged by conflict

and into a city shattered by bombs.

The fighting and the fear would last for another two years.

This is the house where I was born - 193 Pearl Street.

The middle of five children.

I THINK I remember the bombs dropping.

Certainly, I learned about it later.

And I know what happened to us when the bombs did fall.

We were taken to the shop on the corner.

It's a house now, but it was a shop then, a chemist's shop.

Vivian Morgan's chemist's shop.

And they had a cellar and that's where we took shelter.

And I was told afterwards that they put me in a cardboard box...

I was only a baby, after all.

..and took me down to the cellar and there we were safe from the bombs.

Those bombs fell everywhere.

First, causing carnage in London.

Then throughout Britain.

Any city with strategic or economic importance

was on the Luftwaffe's target list.

And that meant Cardiff was near the top.

This port was the reason.

In the years before the war,

more coal passed through here than almost anywhere else in the world.

Welsh coal was central to the British economy,

powering industry, railways, shipping.

The docks were a vital part of the war effort.

The Germans wanted to destroy them.

They didn't succeed, but they got perilously close.

On January 2nd 1941, around 100 of their planes

took off from airfields in occupied France

heading directly for South Wales.

The pilots were well briefed. They had clear targets in mind.

And the reason for that was simple - they'd done their research.

-The tools of the trade, if you like.

-Yeah.

These are the documents they took with them.

You've got the docks, you've got the steelworks.

'Chris Going is an aerial archaeologist.

'He has the reconnaissance photographs the Nazis took,

'rather chillingly, even before the war started.'

This is Cardiff, and they have very clearly delineated the targets

that they were going, ultimately, to try to hit.

It was a bureaucratic process, the creation of these things.

The graphics are being printed up,

they're going into a filing cabinet somewhere, in a buff envelope,

stamped "GB".

This one is labelled "4561".

-Now, 45 is the code for dock targets.

-Hence what we're seeing down here.

Hence exactly what you're seeing down there.

They are analysing and pulling apart very carefully

the dock facilities and so on.

Obviously, they've got the steelworks there.

And I have a particular interest in those steelworks,

because my father was ordered to work in them during the war,

because he'd lost his sight as a young man and as a boy.

And they made people like him work in the steelworks.

-He was working in the works.

-Which is what he did.

He was working there. So, he was a target.

-Your father worked in target GB 7032.

-There we are.

And could easily have been, one night, under the aiming point.

-And I wouldn't have been here.

-And you wouldn't have been there.

-A sobering thought.

-Very true.

So, let's go to this picture, then, and if I'm right...

And you'll certainly tell me if I'm wrong! My home...

Can't quite see the house! But that's Pearl Street.

That's Pearl Street, in Splott, which is...

Not that far from lots of targets, which would explain, of course,

why many bombs dropped within the neighbourhood.

-We're talking about, what?

-One kilometre.

You're talking about three-quarters of a second of flying time, really.

Mm. No wonder some of the bombs went astray.

Indeed, a lot of them went astray.

The Luftwaffe certainly had strong intelligence

and lots of accurate information

about the port and industrial targets.

I want to see for myself how so many of the bombs could go astray,

dropping on civilian homes.

-OK, everyone secure and happy?

-Secure and happy.

Nearly 75 years after the German pilots flew over Cardiff,

I'm following their flight path to see the city as they did.

-It's fantastic visibility.

-Isn't it just?

-Wonderful.

-That's the Millennium Stadium. This is Cardiff Castle grounds.

-Yep.

-I think it is, just there, by the river.

-It has to be.

There's the river.

-So, we're going to do, now, as it were, a sort of...

-We'll go...

-..a dummy bombing run.

-Yep.

This is almost certainly how you'd have done it.

Looking at it now from this angle, Chris,

we can see the whole of the port over to the east.

It is so compressed, isn't it?

And you have so little time to get rid of your bombs.

-You have almost no time.

-Almost no time at all.

You've got Victorian streets just there, you know,

and they've been completely cleared and replaced to the north of them.

But they were very heavily populated.

-They were very heavily populated.

-Yeah.

So, this was the very reason why Cardiff was bombed.

All of the docks here.

You've got Queen Alexandra Dock just down below us,

which was a major aiming point.

But cheek by jowl, all of the workers' houses nearby,

which became targets, too.

What amazes me is that it looks so easy

when you're looking at a map, doesn't it?

You can imagine them

sitting in Luftwaffe headquarters, or whatever it was,

"We'll bomb that bit there

"and then we'll move on and bomb that bit there".

-But it ain't like that, is it?

-It ain't like that.

And what is cynically called collateral damage,

a lot of this sort of description, masks the reality of what this was,

and it was high explosives on civilians.

Well, I'm trying to imagine

that I'm flying a German bomber at this stage,

and we're flying now at about 160mph.

The Germans would have been flying a bit more than that - about 200, 220.

We're at about 2,000 feet.

They were way above that - 4,000 or 5,000 feet.

Maybe even more than that.

It's a beautiful, sunny day.

Then, for them, of course, it was pitch dark.

And they have...

In fact, we're just over the docks now.

They'd have had literally seconds to get rid of those bombs. Seconds.

And now, even as I speak, we're away from the docks,

and we're into some fairly heavily populated areas.

A lot of houses down there.

They've got to get rid of their bombs.

Demonstrates yet again the random nature of aerial war.

Where would they drop? Who knows?

Like many people in South Wales, my parents may have thought

they'd escaped the worst horrors of the Blitz.

By December 1940, the Nazi bombardment was four months old

and the number of raids over other cities had started to wane.

At Christmas, they stopped altogether.

It was, indeed, a time for peace.

But then came the New Year, a new wave of attacks and renewed terror.

Thursday, January 2nd in 1941 was cold and clear with a full moon.

A so-called "bomber's moon", providing near-perfect visibility.

Sirens wailed

as the advance bombers appeared in the skies above the Bristol Channel.

The first bombs fell at 6.37pm.

More followed for ten hours.

If you were in Cardiff on January 2nd 1941,

you'd probably remember what happened that dreadful night.

If you were here in Grangetown,

on the corner of Corporation Road and Stockland Street,

those events would surely be seared into your memory.

AIR-RAID SIREN WAILS

This dockland neighbourhood was the first to be hit.

Then, as now, it was densely populated

with family homes and small businesses.

On this corner, there used to stand the local bakery, Hollymans.

It was destroyed in the worst single atrocity of the Cardiff Blitz.

I used to go in there and I used to give him a hand kneading the bread.

John Williams is now 89, but in 1941,

he worked at Hollymans as a delivery boy.

On January 2nd, he called by the bakery on his way home.

I'd been out on my round, I'd come back and they said,

"Oh, come in and have some soup before you go home."

So, I went down the cellar with them and I had my soup.

But this night, Bill Holliman said,

"There's a lot of air activity coming across today," he said.

"I think you'd better go home,

"because I think your mother and father might be worried."

-You were 14 at the time?

-I was 14. So, I went home.

'Tragically, many others didn't.

'When the siren sounded, they took shelter in the bakery cellar.

'It took a direct hit.'

I went to work the next day, didn't know anything had happened.

I turned the corner and it was all flat.

They were bringing out bodies wrapped up in sacks and things like that.

But it was never ascertained how many people were down there.

-But certainly more than 30.

-Well, they say there was about 30.

Bill Hollyman, the man who owned the bakery,

he was down in the cellar with everybody else.

Yeah, him and his wife and his daughter

and one of his uncles and his sister.

And all the rest were people that had got called down there.

Just neighbours who were looking for somewhere to shelter.

-Yeah, that's right.

-So, he was...

He thought, obviously, he was doing people a favour

-by giving them shelter, and they all got killed.

-Yes. Yes.

And what were you doing yourself

when the bombs were falling that night?

I was in an Anderson shelter

with my mother and father and my sister and brother,

in one of these Anderson shelters, in 6 Devon Street in Grangetown

And you could hear the bombs falling?

And we heard the bombs falling. And we had a little...

-We had a gramophone in there, we used to play records.

-Oh!

God! Oh...

-Were you not scared?

-No.

Well, I mean, we went to work the next day.

Carry on with life, don't you?

-But they weren't so lucky here, were they?

-No, they weren't.

MUSIC: Come Rain Or Come Shine

This photo shows the gap amongst rows of houses

where the bakery once stood.

What strikes you so powerfully about a story like John's

is the sheer random nature of aerial warfare.

If John had gone down into the shelter that night,

as he very well might have done,

he would have been one of those 30-odd people

who were blown to bits by that bomb.

Instead, he was in another shelter, in another place,

listening to music...

..and lived to tell us about it today.

That first night of bombing claimed 165 lives and 430 casualties.

It also created memories that can never be erased.

Keith Flynn was a schoolboy at the time.

Fear is a strange thing.

Although we were in very dire circumstances,

could have been killed any moment,

and although bombs passed quite close and felt quite close,

I don't think we ever showed any outward sign of distress in any way.

No... Certainly, no crying or screaming.

Next morning, when the noise had stopped,

it was a brilliant, lovely, crystal clear morning.

Turned the corner into Glamorgan Street,

not knowing that a bomb had fallen there.

And this lady was standing to my right.

As I say, she was standing there.

I remember it was a navy blue overcoat, over her nightclothes.

I do remember her rather long, dark hair.

And I noticed that she was staring at that rubble.

Just staring. Not crying. Not making a sound.

Until she suddenly said, "My mother's under that lot."

And then my aunt and I walked up to Llandaff Cathedral.

Because we...

Simply because we were told that it had been destroyed.

It hadn't been destroyed, but an awful mess.

Whether it was an accident or a deliberate attempt to damage morale,

the Luftwaffe did hit this famous city landmark,

Llandaff Cathedral.

A bomber dropped a parachute mine overhead

and it floated down silently by the spire.

The parachute got caught on that spire,

caused some damage to the spire, just because the sheer weight of it.

But then it dropped, and that's where it fell.

And you see that stone down there.

That is the point at which the land mine hit the ground and exploded.

Dr John Kenyon is the cathedral archivist.

The most damaged part is the south aisle

and the south side of the nave roof,

because all this collapsed

and all the debris came down on part of the cathedral stalls.

Most of the windows were blown out, so the glass all went.

And, obviously, some of the tombs and other items in the cathedral

were damaged simply by the falling debris - stonework and timberwork.

So, it wasn't just the force of the blast. It was...

It was what then came down as a result of the blast.

And so the photographs show this debris

occupying the whole of this area here.

-So, we're going up to the archives now, John?

-Yes, take care.

This is a very old staircase.

-So, this is how you get to the office?

-Indeed.

'Up in the rafters, I'm about to see a fragment

'of what caused so much destruction.'

And here's the evidence for it, with part of the cord

and the parachute itself, which remains in the archives.

I'm sure most of it was taken away elsewhere for souvenirs.

Yes, I imagine there are little bits in lots of houses.

But they were into the cathedral fairly quickly,

trying to remove as much as they could that was salvageable.

And, of course, Dean Jones, here... Very Reverend David Jones.

According to one of the local recollections,

the Dean couldn't find a hard hat,

so he borrowed his wife's colander and came down.

-And according to...

-No great dignity involved in it!

And, of course, stained glass smashed everywhere

and some fragments have been collected.

We don't know where this came from.

-You've got a nice squirrel's head there.

-Oh, right, so it is.

-I thought it was a rat.

-Yes, yes.

No, I think a squirrel rather than a rat!

But here is the Garden of Remembrance,

which you were looking at.

-That's where the mine actually landed?

-This is the crater here.

-Yep.

-And, of course, where the land mine landed, there were burials

and there were bones scattered over Llandaff,

so they had to be gathered up...

Really? They were blown up into the air?

Along with all the memorials, as well,

and so that caused a lot of damage to the houses with falling gravestones.

Within weeks, the cathedral was holding services again,

in part of the building, at least.

Today, of course, it's fully repaired, although one scar remains.

The force of the explosion created a crater

and you can see how big the crater is.

It's surrounded by those rosebushes that were planted since then

to mark out where it fell.

Here's the thing, though.

Had it fallen another 20, 30 yards in any direction,

the damage to the cathedral would have been utterly devastating.

You could say there but for the grace of God.

Near misses, tragedies, tales of incredible courage.

The blitz and subsequent bombing raids created them all.

And many of those stories and visual records

are preserved here at the Glamorgan Archives in Cardiff.

It also stores copies of newspapers from down the decades,

including my own.

I left school when I was 15 and went to work for the Penarth Times,

a little newspaper in a seaside town five or six miles outside Cardiff.

Now, this in front of me, and I'm careful about touching it,

because it is the original, was the copy of the Penarth Times

that was published a few hours before the Cardiff Blitz began.

So, we had been at war already for a couple of years.

Almost no coverage of the war on the front page of the newspaper,

except in the gossip column, the Have You Heard column.

And there are some wonderful little snippets about the war.

One of them, to be proven very soon tragically wrong, says this.

"One of the blessings this Christmas was that there were no air raids."

Within hours, of course, of people reading that,

the blitz was to begin.

There are even jokes in the newspaper

and one that I particularly like is this.

The landlord says to the tenant, "I'm putting your rent up."

The tenant asks why.

The landlord said,

"Because after last night's raid, your house is now detached."

Managing to find humour when a house has been blown away.

But, they had to have something to keep them going, didn't they?

This is St Agnes Road in the Heath,

and we can see an entire section of the street just taken out here.

'The archivist Rhian Phillips has a collection of records

'which give a window into everyday life during that time.'

Rhian, these pictures are interesting material from that time.

-I like the air-raid wardens here.

-Yes.

Because this gives us a nice idea

of the mix of people who were volunteers, in some cases,

in other cases dragooned to become...

Just run me through that.

It's interesting, because looking at the people who are in there,

you realise all the young men

would have been away serving with the forces.

So, it's the older men who weren't in the Army

-and the women who were involved with the ARP system.

-Right.

-So, quite a mixture and a social mix and all the rest of it.

-Definitely.

-And here they are, all ready to go.

-Yes.

Yes, with their gas masks on, ready for action, I think.

-Looking terribly sinister.

-Exactly.

But how important it was that they had those.

And now, the bomb damage.

This one was my old employer, the Western Mail printing works.

Yes, that was the printing works on Tudor Road and, of course,

I mean, that would have been devastating for the Western Mail.

Trying to get their newspaper out to the public, to the presses.

And finding their works then destroyed, really, in this way,

would have had an impact on their business, certainly.

-And our newspapers were very important.

-They were.

At that time especially so, because it was the main means

of people getting the news and finding out what was happening.

-Yes, no telly.

-No, exactly. Yes.

-Radio, of course.

Yes, there was the wireless.

-We mustn't forget the Home Service was very important.

-Indeed.

Now, this I find absolutely fascinating,

and I know I mustn't pick it up and wave it around,

because it might well fall apart.

But tell me what it is.

It's the log of a primary school, a particular primary school.

Yes, it's the logbook for the Splott Road primary school.

-Which is where I went!

-It was, yes.

-At the age of four, or nearly five.

-Yes.

-And so this was a diary that the head teacher kept.

We see here an alert at 11.30. All clear, 12.

Alert, 3.10. All clear, 3.30.

This would have been hugely disruptive for the school day

and we see, as well, a note here that attendance was very low.

Only 87 of the children present

owing to the raids the previous night.

So, if the children had been up all night in the shelters

with the bombing going on,

they weren't coming to school the next day due to exhaustion.

But it's as though they're saying...

Because it's all terribly formal

and records must be kept under all circumstances.

-It's as if they're saying "Tut, tut, tut".

-Exactly.

"Children weren't coming to school".

There is that sort of attitude coming in there a little.

Extraordinary, isn't it?

-You think, my God, they're lucky to be alive.

-Yes.

Here's something else that interests me - this map.

A bombing map. This was a bit after the Blitz. This was in...?

-This is 1943. May '43, this is.

-Right.

And it shows us what their target was,

which, obviously, was the docks, as we've been hearing.

-Yes.

-That's what they were really after.

-But this is the Splott area.

-Yes.

Where, of course, I lived.

-And this is Pearl Street.

-Yeah.

-And there's a bomb...

-It looks as if it is just...

-Right at the end of the street.

Right at the end of the street, which is where I lived.

-That's quite chilling, actually, looking and seeing how close...

-Yes.

Even though I knew about the bombsites,

looking at that map and seeing...

If that bomb had been delayed by a fraction of a second...

I wouldn't be here talking to you now.

-Exactly. Yeah, it's scary.

-Mm.

The bombing permeated every part of life.

Cardiff would endure sporadic bombing and many air-raid warnings,

the horrors of each of these raids

lasting long after the bombers had gone.

For Keith Flynn, the dread of another Blitz was always there.

Probably every night a siren would go, pretty well.

When you'd had a good dose of it and you know what to expect,

that was the worst part.

At about six o'clock every evening...

It was dark in those days. ..I'd go out into the back garden.

And I had my favourite place where I'd stand and look,

to look at the weather.

Was there a moon? Or were clouds coming up?

Or was there going to be rain?

If there was a moon, there was going to be an air raid.

Your life was governed by this sort of thing.

The presence of war and the constant threat of attack was everywhere.

Cardiff Castle.

For centuries, millennia,

a magnificent symbol of defence and defiance.

But during those dark days of 1941, it became something else as well.

A refuge.

Existing spaces within the castle walls

were turned into air-raid shelters.

Four large holes were made in the walls

and ramps were built to allow quick access.

When the siren sounded,

hundreds of people who lived and worked in the city

would rush here looking for safety.

AIR-RAID SIREN WAILS

This really is the grandaddy of all air-raid shelters.

This tunnel...

Just paced it out.

..is about 200 yards, a bit more than 200 yards,

from one end to the other.

And you can see the benches where people sat.

Not... Not desperately comfortable.

I have to say, I wouldn't want to be sitting here for too long.

You certainly have to sit upright.

And...some comforts.

There's a kitchen. So, if you needed a cup of tea...

Various tins of this, that and the other.

This plan from the time shows how the castle walls

were divided into eight separate sections.

If one took a direct hit, blast barriers made of brick

would protect those in other parts of the castle walls.

And they could fit as many as 1,800 people in here.

1,800 people.

And if the air raid was a really long one

and people needed them - bunk beds.

They could spend a reasonably restful night,

although whether you could get any rest at all

when you're hearing the bombs drop

and waiting for that precious sound of the all-clear, I rather doubt.

EXPLOSIONS

MUSIC: Stardust

Thankfully, the castle shelters were never tested by a direct hit.

Other shelters had been built across the city

in cellars, gardens and streets.

After 75 years, there are few people now

who can tell us what it was like to spend nights in a shelter.

And I went over into this shelter,

where there were about half a dozen people sheltering,

frightened...

in the darkness, because there was no light in there.

The great Welsh entertainer Wyn Calvin, 90 now,

was an Army Cadet during the war.

But I did recognise two of the people who were there,

that I knew were very keen members of the church nearby.

And I thought, "Oh, maybe I'm in good company here."

Because by now,

the screaming sound of a bomb falling,

followed very swiftly by the explosion of the bomb,

and with it all,

the sound of anti-aircraft fire,

made a cacophony of sound that was...

..frightening and memorable.

Although the sort of memory that one would prefer to forget.

EXPLOSIONS

I was thinking, "Perhaps we should pray. What do we do?"

And the only prayer that I could think of was,

"For what we are now about to receive,

"May the Lord make us truly thankful."

I didn't laugh about it then.

As the Blitz continued and the number of targets increased,

prayers were being said throughout the whole of Wales.

The port of Pembroke in the west had already suffered badly.

In August 1940, a direct hit on one oil tank

sparked the biggest blaze in Britain since the Great Fire of London.

EXPLOSIONS

It burned for nearly three weeks, destroyed 33 million gallons of oil

and threatened to engulf the town.

It took more than 600 firefighters to put it out.

Five of them from Cardiff were killed.

North Wales didn't escape, either.

Bangor, Llandudno and Holyhead were all hit,

primarily because they were on the Luftwaffe's flight path

to the Liverpool docks.

On 24th October 1941, three people in Bangor lost their lives

as a result of parachute land mines.

Ironically, many vital national services,

including the Inland Revenue and the BBC light entertainment department,

had relocated to this area to escape heavy bombing in London.

Bangor became a hive of entertainment industry,

and so many of these great names of variety,

in those days, of entertainment, were there in Bangor.

Some of it...

Some of them stationed there for several years.

'It's That Man Again.'

Among the biggest names was Tommy Handley, who used the Bangor studio

to record his hugely popular wireless programme

It's That Man Again.

'..his infantile indefatigability...'

One evening, while that was being broadcast live,

a plane that had been, they think,

damaged by anti-aircraft fire over Liverpool

was leaping back from whence it had come.

And wanting to get rid of its...

the bomb that it had left onboard,

just let it go

and it fell on Bangor.

It was heard over the air,

but nobody knew what the sound of this in the distance was.

A bomb blast can just be heard in the background of this recording.

'# It ain't what you do... #'

FAINT EXPLOSION

'# It's the way that you do it... #'

But with true Blitz spirit, the show went on.

That was the bombing of Bangor.

North Wales was spared the worst.

The bombing never reached the intensity of the Cardiff Blitz.

Back in the capital, the people continued to call

on their own reserves of courage and resilience.

But they also relied on others.

The war brought out a spirit of selflessness,

typified by one young woman - Edith Shute.

She was 23 when the Cardiff Blitz started.

She had a driving licence and basic first-aid training,

so she volunteered for the ambulance service.

She is now 98.

I drove the ambulance twice or three times, I think,

before I went out on duty.

-So, you just did it.

-Oh, we just did it.

I think a lot of other people did the same.

-You did see some terrible things, didn't you?

-Yes.

On one occasion, we were called out to Violet Row in Whitchurch

and we had to stand by while they dug people out.

-Because the bomb had flattened their house?

-Yes.

And we were...

They loaded up this patient and...

..we were instructed to go to Whitchurch Hospital.

So, we went into this hospital

and the man came out and said, "Why have you brought this woman here?"

And I cottoned on to what it was all about

and said, "Who am I to say she was dead?"

Because he thought you should have taken her straight to the morgue.

He was a doctor.

I said, "I'm not qualified to," you know,

"to express a person's life or death."

When there were a lot of raids,

you were taking more people to the morgue...

Oh, I went more to the morgue than hospital.

Because it was mostly bodies that were being brought out?

Yes, that's right.

There was one occasion when a bomb had fallen near a bridge

and quite a few people were very badly hurt.

Do you remember that?

A piece of the bridge came down,

bringing three men with it who were trying to repair it.

We were trying to tie one man's legs together

to stop them moving around.

And a lady doctor who lived in that area, she came along and said,

"I wouldn't bother, if I were you, love.

"You'll be lucky if he lasts very long.

"Get him to hospital as quickly as you can."

And one man's blood was running like a river in the gutter.

And then we had to drive to St David's Hospital.

And the one man breathed his last

as we were entering the precincts of the hospital.

-Because nothing had prepared you for this.

-No. No.

Nothing had prepared us for it.

And no training, or proper training, or anything.

-No, no. No proper training.

-So you just had to...?

You had to learn on the spot.

You see, to people listening to you today, they would just say,

"Well, that must have been terrifying, awful."

Well...

If you had somebody in trouble beside you,

you have to do what you can to help.

There were more than a dozen heavy bombing raids on Cardiff in total.

By the end, countless buildings and many lives were in ruins.

But the Luftwaffe wasn't finished with South Wales.

They'd already selected another target 40 miles to the west.

They'd launched a few attacks.

Now, they were to return with unexpected ferocity

and with devastating results.

AIR-RAID SIREN WAILS

Like Cardiff, prewar Swansea was a crucial port

and a centre for military-based industries.

So, it was inevitable the city would appear on the Nazis' hit list.

This image, which is, I think, quite the most chilling graphic

you can possibly look at of Swansea,

shows just how dense the dock facilities were

and how close by the housing was.

And literally, if you were...

If you press a button a second late, two seconds late,

your bombs will, without any doubt, have gone into the town.

And, indeed, the early attacks in February 1941

effectively destroyed the... sort of the city centre.

They missed the docks.

-They really did miss the docks.

-That is extraordinary, isn't it?

And they flattened the city centre.

What was not happening during these raids, of course,

was great squadrons of massed bombers coming in.

It was very different from that.

But you believe, in a sense, even more frightening.

If you are looking at two or three hours

and 50 or 60 aircraft, maybe 100 aircraft,

they're coming in at the rate of sort one every minute, minute and a half.

You know, there you are, you can hear the engines rising, it's coming in.

Then you would probably hear bombs.

And then you'd think there's another one coming, and another one coming.

-Psychological effect.

-Another one coming, and another, and another.

And that must have had a really perturbing effect.

The psychological effect.

-"Is the next one going to drop on me?"

-Absolutely.

Viewed from the air,

you can see why this place was a sitting duck for the Luftwaffe.

Even without any modern navigational aids,

the Germans would have had absolutely no trouble

finding Swansea even at night, because, of course,

you just come up the Channel, you stick to the coast, and there it is.

And you've got the hills behind to tell you where the port is,

even if you can't see the actual dock buildings.

So, an easy target to find.

And, as we now know, tragically,

a very easy target to cause massive, massive damage to.

Swansea was so badly hit.

All of the focus...

is it just that area enclosed by that outer breakwater there.

-Yeah, that's it. Yes, we can see it in one sweep.

-Absolutely.

That's the entire old centre, isn't it, which was completely flattened.

Yes, exactly. What we're looking at now...

In Feb '41, there were three attacks in so many days

and they destroyed the city centre.

-Shudder to think what those few days must have been like, eh?

-Ohh.

Horrifying.

Just to give you an idea of the concentrated nature of the bombing,

40 acres of Swansea town centre was flattened.

That is the most concentrated bit of bombing of the war.

Between 19th and 21st February,

bombs fell for a total of 13 hours and 48 minutes.

They set whole districts ablaze.

This is the only known photograph

taken during the three nights' blitz.

The attacks killed 230 people and injured more than 400.

857 properties were destroyed, 11,000 damaged,

and 7,000 people were made homeless.

Elaine Kidwell was the youngest warden in Britain. She was 17.

What they said to me was, "18?" "I'm in my 18th year," I said.

So, I didn't lie.

So, let's just go back to the Swansea Blitz, and it was so bad.

It was, yes.

Just describe what it was like on those nights

when they were bombing and bombing and bombing.

Well, we'd come running out and we'd be blowing our whistles and yelling.

And the shelters were open.

Stand and say, "Come on, come on, get in there."

And they were machine-gunning the balloons down,

because they were over the docks, you see.

And I remember running along Quay Parade for my life,

because the bullets were coming behind me, you know.

And then I dived into a doorway and they went past, you know.

Then I heard a whistle going, blowing frantically.

I rushed down the steps and over to...

where the whistling was coming from.

And when I got there - it was in Quay Parade -

there was a warden leaning over a body on the ground.

So, I went up and he said, "This is for you."

He said, "You'd know what to do." "Where is it?"

He said, "I don't know. He's bleeding from somewhere."

Anyway, it was black, you see, you couldn't tell. And I said...

The man, he was unconscious, thank goodness.

Anyway, I felt around and then where his leg was, there was nothing.

"Oh, God, blood. The leg's gone."

So, put a tourniquet on him now and put everything right.

In any case, this ambulance came along, which was really a van.

And he said to me, "All right?" I said, "Yes." I said, "I'm fine."

"Right," he said. "Listen now," he said. "You saved his life.

"All right, he hasn't got a leg, but he's going to live."

Anyway, he came to see me some years later and he said,

"How in hell did you get through the Blitz?

"Cos you were always out in it."

I said, "I rather would have been out than been in,"

cos your imagination can... when you're in

and you hear the banging and the banging.

When you're out, you can see what's happening, you know.

So, there we were. But the damage was so bad.

I remember I went up the top of one street where...

there were three men now of a bomb squad, taking a bomb apart.

And I got up just before the explosion

and, of course, it was terrible.

The three had been blown to bits.

There were bits of bodies everywhere, all blood...

And that spot I can still go up and I avert my...like that.

I know the exact spot where those three were killed, and I knew them.

She was just a girl and she was seeing things

most of us would hope never to have to see.

There was one thing I haven't forgotten,

but I'm coming to terms even though it's a long time ago.

I was coming off duty

and they were bringing the dead from where there was a lot of casualties.

And in the back of this car, now I can see... The hood was down.

And I could see two little babies in a white box like that.

And one was lying...

The little girl lying like this, and the little boy was a bit older,

had his arm on her, but he was dead, too.

And I still can't get over it.

But I'm not grieving and I'm glad that they both went together.

You know what I mean?

But the waste of it, you know. It was so wicked.

-Yeah.

-And they were still bombing us.

That night, I remember going up and seeing

that from Swansea Castle down to...

Oh.

..the bottom of St Helens Road was burning.

-And it burned...

-The whole swathe of it?

Yeah. And it burned from...

..that side to that side, the same.

Everything was in flames.

And people were running for the beach.

Because if the worst came to the worst,

they could get into the water, see?

-The heat must have been tremendous.

-Terrible.

-It sounds like a hell.

It was hell. There was no other word for it.

'Morning is breaking over Wales at war.'

Dylan Thomas was a Swansea man.

His writing showed how haunted he was

by the destruction of his hometown.

Thomas had been declared medically unfit for military service,

so he spent much of the war writing scripts

for the Ministry of Information propaganda films.

'In the furnaces of Llanelli...'

Those who studied his life

believe he was actually in Swansea at the height of the attacks.

There's testimony from a very close friend of his

who saw Dylan and his wife, Caitlin,

walking through the streets of bombed Swansea

after the Blitz in that February.

And Dylan turned to his friend

and said, "Our Swansea has died."

So, parts of the town that he knew and loved and was so familiar with,

had written about in his short stories, were just flattened.

In a sense, what one would love to see

is his chronicling of the terrible events

of early 1941 here in Swansea.

-But he didn't do that, did he? He wrote later.

-That's right.

It took him six years to absorb those traumatic events of Swansea,

the destruction of the Swansea he knew and loved.

Return Journey was the great play that he wrote in 1947.

Yes, that's right. This is the original script.

-This is the actual broadcast script that he'd have read from.

-Yes.

He was very keen to get every detail right in this script,

to the extent that he checked the order

of all the shops that had been bombed,

to make sure he had them in the correct order

when he was writing about them in this piece.

'WHSmith, Boots Cash Chemists, Leslie's Stores, Upson's Shoes,

'Prince of Wales, Tucker's Fish, Stead And Simpson,

'all the shops bombed and vanished.'

But he even wrote to a former grammar school master of his

to get the names of those former boys who had died in the war

who were on the roll of honour

so he could include their names in this broadcast.

BELL TOLLS

'Evans KJ.

'Haynes GC.

'Roberts IL.

'Moxham J.

'Thomas H. Baines W.'

And it's not an attempt to put a gloss on what happened

in any sense at all.

It's not lyrical in that sense, is it?

-In fact, it's brutally truthful.

-Yes.

-But there is...

-Well, there's a beauty in it.

-Yes, and it's an elegy.

It's a very beautiful elegy, I think,

to a lost Swansea, a lost childhood, which resonated with so many people.

It's a very, very long time since Dylan Thomas wrote that play.

He was in his thirties then.

And, obviously, nothing that he describes is as it was then.

This is the new Swansea. None of the old remains.

But his words remain,

and they are as colourful and evocative today

as they were when he wrote them.

Let's give you another flavour of it.

"Boys romped, calling high and clear,

"on top of a levelled chemist's and a shoe-shop,

"and a little girl..."

"..wearing a man's cap,

"threw a snowball in a chill deserted garden

"that had once been the Jug and Bottle of the Prince of Wales."

"..for where the squat and tall shops

"had shielded the town from the sea

"lay their blitzed flat graves marbled with snow

"and headstoned with fences."

"David Evans, Gregory Confectioners, Bovega, Burton's, Lloyds Bank,

"and nothing."

One of the pubs reduced to dust and rubble was the King's Head.

It had been home to Marion Garnett's family.

She was just a baby at the time.

On the third night of the blitz,

my mother was standing opposite our pub

and a man came down and said to her, "You'd better move from there,

"because that pub will be up in flames."

With the centre of Swansea burning, they had to flee for their lives.

My mother told me that she walked over bodies

and then we all went down to the air-raid shelter.

The family survived, but the pub was gone.

All they had left were the clothes they wore.

My mother was in quite a bad emotional state

because, of course, she had lost everything.

But she had a glimmer of hope,

knowing my father would be coming home

and then, perhaps, life would start as normal again.

But it never did.

Marion's father had been serving in Africa.

The year after the blitz,

the family received the worst possible news.

My mother and I had been to the Post Office to collect her Army pay.

And we came back, and Nana - I can see it now in my mind's eye -

was waving a telegram.

And my mother took it.

She opened it and she sat down on a big armchair near the fire...

..and started to cry.

And that scene is, really, my first memory,

and it's something that will always be with me.

The sadness was so intense.

Not only my mother had lost her house and home.

Now she'd lost her husband and my father.

Her family devastated, a town destroyed.

In Swansea, many lives were changed for ever.

But what the bombs and the flames never killed

was the spirit of the locals.

It survived and the place itself was rebuilt.

The centre is now full of tall buildings,

unrecognisable from what it was before the war.

Despite all the careful preparation and planning,

Hitler's blitzkrieg, lightning war, failed to break Britain.

I know now just how close his pilots came to dropping a bomb on my home.

And yet it, like the people and the nation,

stood firm against the onslaught.

Back on the ground in Splott,

the bombsites that were once my forbidden playgrounds are long gone.

In their place, family homes for the next generation.

Childhood produces a million false memories

and, of course, I was a baby when the bombs were actually falling.

So, it's been fascinating to talk to people who were older

and who really do remember what it was like

when the bombs were dropping.

What I remember, and this is a real memory, is playing on the bombsites.

They were all around here, the bombs dropped on these streets,

and so there'd be that gap, and the house would be utterly destroyed.

And now, well, the streets are back to normal,

houses are painted a little more brightly than they were then.

And things have changed.

Everything has changed.

Our memories, though, for those who really can remember, are vivid.