London Blitz Cities

This was Hitler's Blitzkrieg, or lightning war.

During the bombing campaign, the Luftwaffe devastated towns

and cities across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

But it was the nation's capital that suffered the most from the Blitz.

'Night after night, London is left a sea of fire.'

I'm Shane Richie, and this is my home city.

Today, I'm seeing London as I've never done before,

finding out how it endured almost nine months of heavy bombing.

I can remember walking home and glass scrunching under my feet.

You can't think straight, you just want to get home,

if your home is still there, that is.

Discovering how its people survived the relentless attacks.

Would you get hundreds of people making their way down here?

-15,000, every night.

-15,000?!

# London pride has been handed down to us

# London pride is a flower that's free

# London pride means our own dear town to us

# And our pride it forever will be. #

'I'm a Londoner through and through.

'I might travel around, but today I'm coming home.'

How are you, darling?

How are you?

You grew up in Harlesden? And you went Brondesbury in Kilburn?

-I went to a proper school, what you talking about?!

-Yeah, you're a posh boy!

'A lot of people tend to recognise me from a certain TV drama,

'but I'm not actually an East Ender myself. Nah, this is my manor.'

Now, literally, 200 yards up the road is where I used to live,

Harlesden, northwest London.

About the age of ten,

I would come tearing down here on a skateboard, knowing everybody.

A lot of shops are still very much the same

and the great smells of Asian and Caribbean food.

And, of course, there'd be street parties, not too often,

but my mum would work and clean a lot of these offices

and some of the shops along here.

And it still feels like home, still feels like home.

As a child of Irish immigrants,

I'm not that familiar with the story of the Blitz.

My mum and dad only arrived from Dublin in the '60s,

so they had no direct experience of it themselves.

As a kid, I had no real interest in the past.

No, my mind was on the future, a future in entertainment.

'The Gwalia Working Men's club was kind of my dad's office and my second home.'

There it is. Oh, it's all coming back.

Look at this.

'And this is Carol, my old mate from back in the day.'

My favourite blonde in the whole wide world! Hello, sweetheart.

-How are you?

-My first love.

-Oh, my goodness.

My first love, and you're still only in your 40s, ain't you, girl?

-It hasn't changed a bit.

-You used to collect the glasses, didn't you?

Yeah, I done so much here. This was my introduction to showbiz.

-Do you remember Gerry?

-Gerry!

-Friend of your father.

Yeah, everyone was a friend of my dad's.

What do you remember about the Blitz? Ha-ha! I'm joking.

'Now, to be honest with you, I know very little,

'in fact, nothing about the Blitz.'

So, I am slightly nervous, if I'm being honest,

and excited about the prospect of going all over London

to find out how London coped during the Blitz.

Night and day, day and night, indiscriminate attacks continue.

Like a scene from Dante's Inferno,

the first act tells of destruction wrought by a deadly foe which

tries also to destroy the soul

and break the morale of a nation by savage barbarism.

By September 1940, World War II was just over a year old.

The Nazis were in the ascendency.

They had taken Holland and Belgium, moved into France,

and were on Britain's doorstep.

The country was preparing itself for the worst.

All summer, the Luftwaffe had been attacking British airfields,

engaging the RAF in a series of aerial battles.

History's greatest drama is being performed in the London

theatre of war...

But on September 7, later to become known

as Black Saturday, Hitler's bombers headed straight for the capital.

AIR-RAID SIRENS BLARE

London is an open city, a city open for battle.

This was the start of Blitzkrieg,

a devastating campaign that would last until May 1941.

Londoners bore the brunt of the so-called Blitz.

Night after night, London is left a sea of fire.

And their city would never be the same again.

75 years on, I'm planning to fly the actual route

taken by the Luftwaffe during that first night of bombing.

I'm taking off from Biggin Hill airfield.

During the war, this was used as a base for Spitfires.

'But today, I'll be taking a different kind of flight,

'along with aerial archaeologist Chris Going and pilot Bill Giles.'

So, got a busy day ahead of us today, I understand.

You're going to be wearing your Luftwaffe uniform for today.

Oh, lovely! Home from home, really.

The bombers who caused

so much damage that night certainly had a definite plan of attack.

In fact, they literally had it all mapped out,

as these actual German intelligence photos show.

So, it's 7th September 1940,

we've been at war just over a year.

These are surviving German target documents

and these would have been the documents they were briefed on.

What I want to show you is that date there.

Well, that's like 4th June 1939.

But this is months before the war actually started.

-It's three months before, before the war.

-So they've done their homework?

They were taking clandestine spy photos.

There was a special unit based near Berlin which flew this kind of stuff.

And the head of it, interviewed in the '70s, said, "We photographed

"every blade of grass from Hull to the south coast before the war."

You see that number there, 45?

That designates dock targets, the docks, the economic heart of the UK.

London, Liverpool had to be strangled.

It's interesting, you know, you talk about numbers.

And, of course, we're looking at people's homes here,

it seems very cold.

The fact is, in London, the docks and the people

who serviced the docks are intertwined, they're going to be.

So, although you could draw a little red rectangle around "the docks"...

-Still a lot of housing.

-There's an awful lot of housing in there.

And the people who lived in those houses were right in the firing line.

The Germans may have planned a precision bombing campaign,

but it turned out to be anything but.

All of this looks utterly precise, these are the designated targets,

this is what you're going to attack, and so on.

In truth, it wasn't like that.

What you ended up with is something far more messy.

There is the Isle of Dogs, that's the designated sort of target.

And this shows you the bomb fall of the first 24 hours of the Blitz.

Those red dots represent one or more bomb impacts, and what you can

see here is a phenomenon that later got called creepback.

You're getting people who are starting to drop

ordnance before they actually hit the dock area.

You could get quite a heavy concentration within a mile or two

of a target. But a mile or two is a long way in London.

Looking at this map, Chris, it just seems like anyone who

was in London and the surrounding areas was a target.

'Well, that was a really strange feeling with Chris talking me

'through those maps.

'I mean, he's talking about numbers, all I'm looking at is the people

'that lost their lives or their property

'throughout this whole Blitz.'

And now I'm about to take a similar route that the German aircraft

would have done back in the day, I'm about to do it in a little plane.

And I really have got mixed feelings about it.

Like the German pilots back in 1940,

we'll be travelling in from the southeast of the country, and

using the Thames to guide us towards the target, London's Docklands.

MUSIC: Mars, The Bringer Of War by Holst

And we're up, making our way towards London.

The air crew who would be flying these attacks would be really barely

out of their teens, they'd be 19, 20 years old.

And war to them, to some degree, is, is an adventure still.

This is the route, the actual route that we're on right now,

heading towards London, that the Germans took.

Whay-ay, and it's a bit bumpy.

This is our run?

This is where they had lined up on the target,

which would be the docks on the Isle of Dogs, and they'd be coming in.

The first bombs being dropped were being dropped more or less now.

So, Chris, how many planes would be in formation now?

The two formations were about 600 or 700 aircraft altogether.

600 or 700?!

So you had this massive formation in the sky,

like black flies hanging as it approached London.

I mean, the civilian population had a grandstand view, it had been

a beautiful day, it had been football, people out in the parks.

It was around tea-time. It had been unusually hot.

I think the temperature was in the late 70s, 80s,

and, boy oh boy, you know, here came the Luftwaffe.

AIR-RAID SIREN BLARES

The first air-raid sirens sounded at 4.43pm.

There was a break for two hours at 6.30,

and then a further eight hours of bombing continued until dawn.

The codename for the operation was Lichts Meer, which meant

sea of light, and the intention clearly was to

bring London to its knees.

I can't even imagine the reaction of being a child

and playing out in the streets or in the fields,

and then seeing the shadows of the German aircraft coming over London.

As a child it must have been frightening. Your worst nightmare.

London has the misfortune to have this river running through it,

which is a very distinctive set of curves.

I can actually see it now, when you're up this high,

how the river gives away all the landmarks around London.

So when the moonlight was shining, or even if it's only half moon,

you only had to glimpse a little bit...

-And you knew exactly where you were.

-And you know where you were.

-Right.

'Bombing wasn't just confined to the East End.

'As the Blitz wore on, my own neighbourhood became a target too.'

We're now coming to a part of London which I know really well.

So, Chris, Willesden Junction, because it's such a big junction,

would have been one of the main targets?

It won't necessarily have been anything other than

a target of opportunity, which meant, if you couldn't drop

your bombs on your designated target,

it would be your secondary target.

You could unload on railway marshalling yards...

I've just gone over me mum's house. Can't believe it, eh?

Strange coming over now, flying over from Harlesden, Stonebridge, Willesden, Neasden,

and knowing that this was a bomb target 75 years ago.

And my mum and dad never talked about it.

I'm not even sure my school spoke about it.

I think all schools should know about it now.

Before I went on this flight over London I was very blase about it.

I thought, "It's a job, I'm going to do a documentary about the Blitz."

But this is very different, this has opened my eyes and I'm going to

talk to people that lived through it, that smelt it, that breathed it.

And hopefully, at the end of it, I'm going to know a lot more about it.

'It's hard to imagine living through such destruction.

'But hundreds of thousands of people did.

'Trudy Goodman was one of them.

'She grew up in Stepney and had to move out

'when her family home was destroyed at the start of the Blitz.

'At 95, she still remembers it vividly.'

Thank you so much for inviting us into your lovely house, my darling.

-Now, you were in Stepney...

-Yes...

-..at the start of the Blitz.

-Yes.

What was that like?

-I was 19...

-Right.

-..on the 1st of September, when Poland was invaded.

I was 25 when the war finished.

That was quite a slice out of my life.

Yeah. So, what are your memories of the Blitz?

Burning wood, smoke, dust...

and the incessant noise.

This time of the year, when the barbecues are out in the gardens,

the smell of burning wood, that brings it back.

I can remember walking home

and glass crunching under my feet.

You can't think straight, you just want to get home.

If your home is still there, that is.

I can't remember a lot after that until I went into the fire service.

-Is that right, you were in the fire service?

-Yes.

-Do you have a picture at all?

-Yes, I do.

-Let me have a look at this...

I'm going to try and guess which one is you, OK?

-I think you're the prettiest one.

-Naturally!

-Of course.

SHE LAUGHS

-It's the pretty one right at the end. The last one here.

-Well done.

-See?

I recognise a pretty lady when I see one.

And so, what did you actually do then, for the fire service? What was your job?

-Well, mainly in the control room.

-OK.

-A telephonist with a switchboard.

-OK.

You've got the old hooter, the horn, coming up like that...

and the earphones. And the plug... Pfft! Pfft!

And that was four days on and four days off.

-But when you did get spare time, what would you like to do?

-Dance.

-Really?

-Yes, on your leave days, I was at the Astoria, dancing.

-Did you really?

-Yeah, you should see me jive and jitterbug!

That's why I've got such short legs, I wore them down!

It's up to you whether you tell me or not

-but I can imagine there was a lot of GIs, yeah?

-Oh, of course!

-But not too romantic.

-No?

I got to my marriage as a virgin, but how I got there I don't know!

SHANE LAUGHS I had a great time fighting!

God bless 'em!

But I can remember the back of an open Jeep. All the GIs packed in.

As I'm crossing the road in my uniform,

"Ho-ho!" They said. "So round! So firm! So fully packed!"

And I had no idea what they were talking about.

I just thought they were being saucy.

-Actually, it was the advert for Lucky Strike cigarettes.

-Oh, really?

-Yeah!

-They were really talking about you.

-Yes!

It's still fully packed but it's not firm!

Well, I've just come face-to-face

with what they call the Blitz spirit.

And Londoners, well, they certainly needed plenty of it.

Because they faced death and destruction day after day.

-NEWSREEL:

-In this demonstration test, the Anderson shelter successfully withstood the blast

of a 500lb bomb, even though the building close by was wrecked.

And here's an actual shelter that was bombed.

All that happened was that the protective earth was blown off.

Without it, there might have been serious consequences.

The Anderson shelter was a curved corrugated steel tube

that could be set up in people's gardens,

half-buried in the ground, with earth heaped on top.

-NEWSREEL:

-That one would have been near.

But there's no need for anyone to be so uncomfortable.

The government distributed 1.5 million shelters before the war

and in total, over 3.5 million shelters were produced.

It was left to the people to construct their own.

Although, there was no shortage of advice.

-NEWSREEL:

-A cup of tea and a biscuit just before turning in

and now to spend a comfortable night undisturbed by the Blitzkrieg.

-Martin, thank you so much, buddy, I'm Shane.

-A pleasure, Shane. Very good to meet you.

'I've never seen an Anderson shelter up close. I've only ever seen pictures.

'So, I've come to south London to meet Martin Stanley.

'He's got one in his back garden!'

In the war, these beautiful houses stretched all the way down this street.

One bomb fell there, blew all that whole terrace down.

How many houses would have been there, do you think?

-It must be, what, approaching 20, I would think?

-What, and one bomb would have devastated...

One bomb in the middle blew the lot down. Absolutely.

'At Martin's house, I have also arranged to meet Joan Longley.

'She was three when the war started

'and regularly took cover in an Anderson shelter with her family.

'But she hasn't seen one for more than 70 years.'

Yes, in my back garden, in Charlton, in southeast London,

-but this is not like my air-raid shelter.

-What was yours like?

-Well, it wasn't covered with lovely plants.

-OK.

It was a bare garden, where we had trampled all over it.

There were nine children in my family, cold, damp, horrible.

It wasn't gentrified at all. Some people gentrified their shelters.

-We didn't.

-So, how bad was your area, where you grew up, affected?

Quite a lot. There were bombs everywhere. Incendiaries mostly.

But a family down the road got killed

because they didn't have a strong door on it.

If we had to go and see this shelter here,

how do you feel about going in for the first time in 70 years?

Very interested to see how it affects me, actually.

-All right, follow me, Joan.

-OK.

-Do you want to hold my hand, sweetheart,

cos it is a bit bumpy, all right? Mind your head.

-Oh, gosh!

-What are you thinking?

-It's jolly small!

-It is, isn't it?

-It's a lot smaller than I thought it was going to be.

-Yes!

If they were like this - and you say you'd get NINE of you in here?

You'd get nine of us in here but we had an earth floor,

we had no concrete like this has got.

This corrugated iron went right down into the ground.

And we would sit on either side, almost knees touching.

I don't think ours was as long as this.

-So, you think yours might have been smaller?

-Yes. Smaller than this.

This looks much bigger.

So, this is a bit of a posh one, as far as shelters go? Is that right, Martin?

Yeah, it was, the house was owned by a builder in the war.

Obviously very concerned about the safety of his family.

So, he built this shelter with a concrete base

and a little bit bigger than normal. This was a high-class shelter.

It probably saved his family's life because there was a bomb very close by.

How does it feel for you being down here right now?

-It feels all right, actually.

-Yeah?

-I thought it might be a bit of a shock.

But I'm actually quite pleased to be here.

It's cos it's such a long way in the past.

-I'm not thinking, "Oh, dear, how dreadful."

-No.

I'm thinking how lucky we were to be safe.

In the war, it would still have been dark.

-You weren't allowed candles, even to find your way to the shelter.

-No.

-And it'll have been pretty scary.

-We were all scared.

I think we were probably more scared than we showed

because children became very used to it.

But we'd huddle together to keep warm but it was cold,

dark, spiders... We didn't like that very much as kids.

And around you, just imagine sitting in it

and hearing bombs dropping and the ground would shake.

And the worst thing, really, was looking out to see

-if your house was still there because nobody expected it to be.

-Of course.

So, one of my big brothers or sisters would look out just

-to make sure. "It's still there, Mum!" You know?

-Oh, wow...

As soon as it was over and you could go outside, we would often jump

on top of the roof and triumphantly "King of the castle" kind of stuff.

And think, "We are alive!"

So, there was a lot of triumph, erm, between life and death,

that we...you knew, even as a child, that you had survived something.

And that was very, very important.

-Because that gave you, that feeling lasted for life.

-Yeah...

MUSIC FADES OVER HER VOICE

It was lovely meeting Joan. And when she was telling me about her mum

and nine children all in that cramped little space,

and immediately I thought, "Blimey, how would I cope?"

Me and my wife, and having FIVE children down there.

So, and I don't know if she was getting a bit emotional...

At the time, I just found it a bit eerie.

Imagine being down there with, you know, all lights off

and the blackout and being woken in the middle of the night as a child,

being brought to that shelter and not knowing what was going to happen when you came out.

But what a lovely lady. And...

God, we had no idea, really, it was going to be like that, though.

So, it's nearly the end of my Blitz journey,

and where better to wrap things up than back where I began?

At my favourite working men's club in Harlesden.

Here, I've arranged to meet a group of Londoners who were

all small children at the start of the war,

and lived through the darkest days of the bombings.

So what are your earliest memories of the Blitz?

I was born in '35,

so in '39, '40, I was about five years old.

And where I lived off of Church Street in Marylebone,

the whole middle section was attacked with incendiaries,

and the whole lot went up.

My first recollections was my aunt waking me up.

She said, "There's all incendiary bombs at the bottom of the garden."

And as I looked through the bedroom window,

I could see all the fires alight.

All along the bottom.

Though I was so young, I thought to myself,

"If only I could have a good night's sleep."

What about you, Gordon, what's your earliest memories?

My earliest memories were when I started school, which was 1941.

Right.

And as I went into the school, the end of the school was still

alight from overnight incendiary bombing.

Can you imagine today, going into a school with half of it alight?

-Whereabouts was this?

-This was at Lyon Park School in Alperton.

I was three, just over three and a half when the war broke out.

In 1941, when I started school, every time the siren went off,

down the bottom of the field we went,

where they had got all these Anderson shelters.

With a candle.

Can you imagine a candle today? And your book.

And you'd no sooner get down there, and the siren would go to finish,

and then start again. And we were in and out of the shelter all day.

It was horrendous, really. How we learned anything, I don't know.

So, you're all children at the time.

This is probably a strange thing to ask,

but was there something exciting about it?

Of a sort.

It was one of those things that, well, this is the norm.

It got to be a game towards the end, especially with the V2s.

V1s, I should say.

Because you could hear them coming, that low drone.

And all of a sudden, the engines would cut out,

and you could see it just taking a dip to fall down to the earth.

Being a child, then I knew it was dangerous.

So I used to run for a shelter or to get out of the way.

But it became, as I say, a game.

The sound of the siren, it never leaves you.

You remember it for a very long time.

But the relief you feel when the all-clear goes,

and you know, "Oh, everything's all right again."

Listening to this generation is humbling.

Not only did they survive the nine months of the London Blitz,

they survived six years of war.

They were never beaten.

They were never cowed.

And they will always be heroes.

These are what the King gave out to everybody.

-This is incredible. Do you mind if I read this out?

-Yes.

8th of June, 1946.

"Today, as we celebrate victory, I send this personal message

"to you and all other boys and girls at school.

"For you had shared in the hardships and dangers of a total war.

"And you have shared no less than the triumph of the Allied Nations.

"I know you will always feel proud to belong to a country which was

"capable of such supreme effort.

"Proud too of parents and elder brothers and sisters,

"who by their courage, endurance and enterprise, brought victory.

"May these qualities be yours as you grow up

"and join in the common effort to establish among the nations

"of the world unity and peace." Signed, King George.

And on the back, it's all different, important war dates.

Oh, you've kept this for so long.

It's all there.

On this journey around London, talking about the Blitz,

I'm trying to think about what I've learned most about it all.

One thing comes to the top every time,

and that's people's courage, bravery.

And they just got on with it. They just got on with it.

Because basically, what else could they do?

What else could they do?

Around 20,000 Londoners lost their lives in the Blitz.

Thousands more were killed throughout the war.

Add to that the vast amount of injuries and the number of people

made homeless, and you realise what a battering our capital took.

But London is a tough, resilient place.

It's big part of who I am.

And looking down for a final time,

I now feel I know it better than I ever did.

There's something I love about my city, Chris.

How it moves with the times

and it's constantly evolving, constantly changing.

It's renewing itself all the time.

The Second World War gave the London authorities an opportunity to

clear and renew. After the destruction,

they seized the opportunity to replan.

And much of what you see now is, of course,

a consequence of the destruction which was carried out in 1940/41.

So it has shaped what we can see of the town today.

It's clear that London has healed and regrown.

And nowhere shows this more than the Isle of Dogs.

As we saw, this area

was the first to suffer a pummelling by the Luftwaffe.

Today, it is a global centre of business and finance,

the skyscrapers, a towering symbol of the city's ability to

renew itself, no matter what.

And you know, looking over the city now,

and I see a city of the 21st century, a thriving city.

But in the back of my mind, as I'm looking down, I'm thinking

how it survived the Blitz.

It sounds like a cliche, but how a phoenix rises from the ashes.

It's amazing, the people I've met.

They were talking about their London, and what it meant to them.

And now, I get it, I totally get it.

But I honestly feel like I've found an old friend.