Liverpool Blitz Cities

This was Hitler's Blitzkrieg, or 'lightning war'.

LOUD EXPLOSIONS

London endured 57 nights of bombing, but the Blitz also spread

to towns and cities across Britain, including mine.

-NEWSREEL:

-'The Luftwaffe attack from places all along the coast.

'The struggle for the Western oceans has begun.'

I'm Ricky Tomlinson and I'm taking to the skies to discover

how my city survived the Blitz by the skin of its teeth.

Them docks are like a line of sitting ducks, really, aren't they?

-Exactly.

-Because they're in a straight line,

and there's row after row after row.

And I'll meet the women of Liverpool who survived.

And the bomb came down.

You could hear it whistling down,

and we just grabbed each other in the bed,

the whole house on top of us,

and we both thought, "Oh, we're going to die."

MUSIC: There She Goes by The La's

I was raised in Liverpool and I've spent most of my working life here.

Not always as an actor, though.

No, I was a plasterer and trade unionist

long before I became a luvvie.

This city is my home and I don't think I'll ever move away.

My old neighbourhood was Everton, just outside the city centre,

and there was five of us in a small terraced house on Lance Street.

The neighbourhood's still there,

but it's very different to how it looked when I was little.

This is where I grew up during the war years.

And obviously, it's all changed now, but to see all these houses

with the space they've got, we didn't have that much space.

And in the middle of the street, with these brick air raid shelters

with the big, thick concrete ceiling on them.

And that's where we used to play, play of a day and of a night,

when the bombs came over, we would go inside them.

HE EXHALES DEEPLY

Hey...

Who'd have dreamed 50 years ago that I'd be sitting

here on someone's garden wall?

With all this shrubbery around me, it's as if...

I could be in the middle of an African jungle, really, couldn't I?

Because we never saw a blade of grass.

I could actually be sitting in what was our living room,

or the back kitchen.

That...

It's wonderful.

It's amazing and I'm so glad I've come back to see it.

I entered the world in September 1939,

the same month that Britain entered the war.

I don't remember much about the early years of the fighting,

so I've invited my big brother, Albert,

to meet me for a cuppa at my own cabaret club.

You must have been smelling the tea. Do you want one?

We never talk much about the war,

but as he's older, I'm hoping he remembers more than me.

Sort this tea out for us, will you, love?

Yeah, so, I'm busy at the moment.

I'm just...well, we're hoping to make a documentary about the Blitz,

so I'm looking for stories from old people,

and just get some stories...

Old folks? That's why you brought me in, is it?

That's one of the reasons! You were older than me

-and I can remember quite a bit about the war, so you...

-Well, you were a war baby, weren't you?

-I was born at the start of the war, wasn't I?

-You caused the war, didn't you?

-Yeah, they reckon I was responsible for it, so...

-THEY LAUGH

Heavy Blitz bombing raids began in London in September 1940.

Two months later, it was Liverpool's turn.

LOUD EXPLOSION

-NEWSREEL:

-'Never in history has an entire people borne

'so frightful an ordeal so bravely.'

At this point in the war, it was all going Hitler's way.

His army had occupied much of mainland Europe

and they were within striking distance of Britain.

London's docks were under constant attack

and the English Channel was no longer safe.

PLANE ENGINES ROAR

But controlling Britain's West Coast, especially at the ports,

was also crucial for the Nazis.

'It is in shipping, and in the power to transport across the oceans,

'the crunch of the whole war will be found.'

Liverpool was the busiest port of all

and as the docks were just a couple of miles from Everton,

that meant our house was in the firing line too.

All I remember from when I was a young child

was the air raid shelters right outside the house, you know.

And then the sirens. We all remember the sirens, you know.

We hardly used the air raid shelters.

-You know, my dad only worked down the bottom of the street in the baker's?

-Yeah.

And as soon as he heard the sirens, whether it was morning,

noon or night, he'd be home, grab me on his shoulders,

my mum would grab you and we'd be down to Gran's.

That's my dad's mother's, remember? And into the basement.

-But Granny's was, like, a Dickensian place.

-Oh, yes.

Five foot tall, five foot one.

But I remember people telling me that after the air raids,

all the bodies would be picked up and taken

and lined out in her lobby, and she'd wash them.

Sometimes she'd have to wash them down with a sweeping brush.

-That's how tough she was.

-She was.

-NEWSREADER:

-'Day in, day out, the endless flood of crates and packages

'passes from ship to shore - foodstuffs essential to our needs.'

The men who caused the devastation

were the pilots of the Luftwaffe.

I'm about to discover how they carried out their attacks.

I'm at Hawarden Airport

meeting up with aerial archaeologist Chris Going

and pilot Bill Giles.

Just going through the flight plan to see if we can work out roughly

how we're going to pretend to be a German flight this afternoon.

Before we go up, Chris is showing me

some rarely seen target documents

used by the Luftwaffe to plan their attacks.

This is how the German intelligence saw Liverpool.

-It come across...

-This stuff got captured in 1945.

Most of it was trashed or burnt, but we did capture some.

If you enlarge it and look at it...

So, what do all the numbers signify?

They're all related to specific individual targets.

These are all targets which have a number 45, which means docks.

If you could strangle the docks, if you could prevent

food being unloaded or you could prevent armaments being exported

to support the forces in North Africa and elsewhere,

you were well on the way to winning the war.

And that was just what the Nazis were determined to do

throughout 1940.

In the Atlantic, the Royal Navy was battling to protect shipping

from the Germans' deadly fleet of U-boats.

-MAN WITH GERMAN ACCENT:

-'In the first two years of war,

'the Allies have admitted losing three million tonnes of shipping

'to our torpedoes and guns.

'In this way, we will slowly strangle them.'

Supplies of food and equipment vital to the war effort were under threat.

On 1 August 1940, Hitler issues a directive -

the Luftwaffe were to start preparations

for the aerial destruction of the UK ports.

If the British government wouldn't surrender,

then Hitler's plan was to starve the British people out.

Finally, just before we go off on our flight, I want to show you

a night map.

These were carried in the cockpits of the aircraft

and they were for reading under red or blue night lights.

And here you can see just what their interest in Liverpool was.

-That whole strip outlined in red...

-That's the whole of the docks,

-isn't it?

-..of Liverpool Docks.

-So, you live...Everton, just there?

-There, yeah.

-That's, what, a mile, mile and a half from the docks?

-Yeah.

-If that.

-That's it, yeah.

A few seconds' flying time, you're right in the firing line.

That's amazing, isn't it?

That'd send a shiver down your spine.

It's the main artery to the rest of the country,

to getting stuff abroad and getting stuff in.

If he'd have done that, that would have been the end of the war for us.

Just looking at them 70-odd-year-old maps,

with Liverpool all marked out in red as the target for the German bombs,

is quite disturbing, really.

It's not a very nice feeling, really, not nice at all.

Armed with our target maps,

the time's come to get into the plane and recreate history.

-OK, is everyone happy and secure?

-Yep.

I've never been on a plane as small as this before.

Although it's a calm day, I'm still apprehensive.

Might just be a little bit bumpy as we climb out,

just because of the bit of turbulence off the hills here.

But nothing's going to stop me taking this opportunity

to look at my city in a completely new way -

through the eyes of someone trained to destroy it.

How long would their flight take, do you think?

From the minute they left to get here.

Well, they would take a couple of hours

to get from their base to Liverpool.

One of the big problems, of course, was navigation -

making sure you could get to the target.

There was a blackout in the UK, so there were no lights showing.

So really, they were flying blind, to a great extent.

What the Germans tended to do was use specialist units

who had the latest technological equipment -

a unit called a Beleuchtergruppe,

the Firelighter Group.

And the idea was to set fires

so that once those fires are alight,

the main force, other bombers coming with worse...

or not-so-good navigation techniques could home in on the fires.

-NEWSREADER:

-'These raiders were the elite of the German Air Force,

'groomed for victory.'

The British were aware that the bombers followed fire,

so they built decoy sites.

We fool Jerry sometimes, though.

We bend his radio beams so he flies on a duff course,

then we light decoy fires in the open country for him to bomb.

Fake towns and factories were set on fire

to fool the enemy into thinking they were real targets.

Just a few wasted bombs could save hundreds of lives.

One night we collected 230 AGs,

one oil bomb and a packet of incendiaries.

Our casualties were two cows and two chickens.

-Can you see those buildings in there?

-Yeah.

Right, that's more or less where the decoy site was.

And if you look down, you've got a slight hint

that the coast mimics that further south round Liverpool.

Look to the right - can you see four gun positions?

-You can see four squares.

-Yeah.

-Yeah?

-Little sort of grey cubes.

-Yeah!

That's anti-aircraft, so they had a gun site there as well.

Although the decoys had some success,

most planes made it down the River Mersey to their real target,

the Liverpool Docks - a narrow strip of land

that then employed nearly 20,000 people.

You know, really, them docks

-are like a line of sitting ducks, really.

-Exactly.

Because they're in a straight line, row after row after row.

Absolutely. It's about six, seven miles long,

it's about half a mile wide,

and that was one of the most strategically important parts

of the entire United Kingdom.

So they must have dropped a third of a million incendiary bombs

on Liverpool during the war.

But one of the things that I find really amazing

is the air raids lasted a very long time.

So at any one time, there might be one or maybe two aircraft coming in

to drop bombs - it was like being, you know, in a bowling alley,

but a skittle at the wrong end.

So you would hear the bombs, four or five,

and then you would think,

"OK, I survived that one, maybe the next one. The next one."

How brave were them dockers, getting up every morning

and going to work knowing, KNOWING,

that they were going to be under attack that night or that afternoon?

Kissing their kids goodbye, kissing their wives goodbye.

They didn't know if they'd see them again, and vice versa.

And yet they never stopped, they kept the docks going.

-Fabulous.

-Absolutely.

From up here, it's obvious how vulnerable the docks were,

as bombs rained down night after night.

What's even more frightening is just how close my street was

to the focus of the bombing.

This is amazing for me.

I'm flying over where all this action took place during the war.

I've just gone past all sorts of landmarks

that I knew, not only as a grown-up, but as a child.

-And you can see the Liver Building.

-Absolutely!

So that's... That's right within the vicinity of where we were reared.

Exactly. So if they've flown sort of 300 miles,

it's literally seconds,

and precision bombing is not really something you can achieve

at this sort of distance.

You know, by the end of the war,

most of the casualties here were not dock workers, they were civilians.

Something like 2,500, 3,000 people were killed.

About 50% of all the housing in Liverpool was damaged in the war.

So, I mean, you've got a population of what, 870,000 in 1940?

Just under a million.

That's an enormous economic and sort of human price that was paid.

I knew before we took off that this would be a unique journey.

But I didn't expect it to open my eyes as much as it has.

I always think of Liverpool as a tough city.

But when you see it from the point of view of an aerial bomber,

it looks helpless.

I've always been fascinated by our docks,

even more so now that I know what part they played in the war.

I'd still like to find out more, though,

so I've arranged a tour with a historian, Mike Royden.

We're starting at the highest point, on top of a grain silo.

Liverpool had taken a bit of a decline

just after the First World War

and when the Americans started to help us with supplies,

-this was going to be the major port.

-All the different cargo -

munitions, food, hospital gear - coming in and out, going abroad,

looking after the soldiers and stuff like that.

Must have been absolutely amazing.

Of course, when the Blitz began, it suffered major damage

in those few days in May.

At least half of the berths had gone out of action

during that time. And in fact, when the bombing took place,

there were ships in being worked on and loaded.

Probably as soon as the siren went the all-clear,

they'd be back out loading the ships, getting munitions on and off.

-That's quite right.

-So really, they must have had the heart of a lion,

mustn't they, to have worked under them conditions.

They must have been incredibly brave.

The courage of the dock workers was tested to the limit

during the May Blitz of 1941,

when the HMS Malakand, a large ship loaded with munitions,

was destroyed in Huskisson Dock.

It led to the largest explosion in the city's history.

This is where the Malakand was.

170-foot vessel that was berthed here on the night of 3 May 1941,

and an incendiary hit the deck, and the men

were struggling to try and stop the fire spreading everywhere else,

but what they were worried about, of course,

was it's going to spread into the ship itself,

because the vessel was carrying almost 2,000 tonnes of munitions.

2,000 tonnes?

Yeah, and if that was going to ignite,

the whole thing was going to explode.

You can see how frantic they were in their fight.

Who was in charge at the time, the captain of the ship?

Incredibly brave man called Captain Kinley.

He had a number of officers on board and 60-odd lascar sailors as well.

It was absolutely frantic, the scene you would have seen here -

the flames going everywhere, trying to get fire engines in,

men running all over the place trying to put things out,

it must have been unbelievable.

In the end, around about half seven in the morning,

Kinley said, "Abandon ship," and it was just as well he did,

because a few minutes later the whole thing went up.

Absolutely... It was the biggest explosion that the city had seen.

That was throughout the war, not just on that night.

2,000 tonnes, you can't imagine it, can you, going up?

When you can see the damage one shell can do or one grenade can do.

And the debris was flying all over the place.

It was hitting other ships.

An anchor actually flew about 400 yards.

One piece even sliced through a horse that was pulling a cart

on the dock road.

But what was also worrying at that time,

they wondered how much longer Liverpool could withstand this,

especially the docks. Because much longer on that,

and maybe that would have brought Liverpool to its knees.

But thankfully, the Luftwaffe

didn't really have a particularly organised long-term plan,

and Hitler's attention then turned towards Russia,

and thankfully the Luftwaffe was shifted over there instead.

Their loss was our gain. It's a terrible thing to say,

but thank God it happened that way

because we mightn't be standing here now talking, mightn't we?

I never knew that Liverpool was literally days from being beaten.

But we got through,

thanks in large part to the resolve of the people.

And I'm not only talking about the dock workers,

but all the others too,

like the women of the city who worked tirelessly

to support the war effort.

Women like my mam, who struggled to keep the family alive at night

and feed them during the day.

Some of them were just girls at the time.

But I want to hear their stories,

so I've come to the Poppy Centre

to meet a group of women who all survived the Blitz.

-Cup of tea.

-Cup of tea?

-Cup of tea already for me!

-Oh...

-What more do you want?

I want some lovely stories off you about the war.

I was 11 when it started, 16 when it finished.

And I can remember

the first day of the war, when we were at church

and the priest come and said the war had started.

Next thing was when we went out, my brothers were queuing up already

to go and join the Army.

When it first started we used to go down in the air raid shelter -

three of us, my mum and dad, the cat and the dog.

They'd stay there till morning.

Was it a brick air raid shelter?

No, it was the Anderson shelter in the garden,

and you covered it over so you couldn't see

and you had plants, flowers and things on.

What about the ones

in the street, all the way over...?

That's what we had.

-They were brick.

-They were made of bricks,

and sometimes we stayed there all night.

Where I lived, in Lamb Street off Heyworth Street,

in the panic and the pandemonium in the pitch dark,

you couldn't find your way around.

There was an old man lived across the street called Mr Hart

and he used to get your hand and take you in.

And I could never understand how he could do it, but he was blind,

so he didn't need any lights!

One night my dad said, "Ooh, they seem to be getting awful close,"

so he said, "I'll go out and have a look." And as he did,

they dropped all the shrapnel and he got a big piece under his eye

and it went right through his eye and was there on his cheekbone,

it was a big square.

He used to say to us all, "Feel it there!"

And what did you say to him?

"That's what you get for nosing!"

THEY ALL LAUGH

Yeah. Yeah.

-So you could still have a laugh in the middle of the war.

-Yeah.

Come on, Doreen, you can tell me your little story now.

Dad was on fire watch, and me mother had the four boys

in the parlour, and me and my sister,

we sneaked up to bed. Nobody knew we'd gone up there.

And the bomb come down...

We could hear it whistling down.

And we just grabbed each other in the bed,

and the whole house on top of us,

-and we both thought, "Oh, we're going to die."

-OTHERS: Yeah.

And then my father realised that we were still in there,

and he started moving the bricks one by one.

They heard us crying, and they finally found us,

and, er...

brought us out. We had no clothes on, they were blown off us.

One of the reporters came to take our photograph

and me dad chased them.

He said, "You're not photographing my daughters," he said,

-"they've got no clothes on!"

-Quite right. Absolutely right.

Listening to these women talk, I recognised their resolve

in the memories of me mam.

But while we had parents looking out for us,

Nancy was a young mum herself.

What about you, young lady, what can you remember?

-Well, I lost my little boy, my baby.

-Aww.

That was me saddest thing of the war.

I had a little girl, and I was having me second baby.

And it came early, it was seven weeks early.

It was a terrible night. It was in the Blitz,

and the nurse didn't want to come out, she was frightened.

And he only lived a couple of hours,

and then he had to be buried.

But, er, I didn't have a lot of money,

so I hadn't got enough money to pay for the funeral.

George got a box, they gave him a wooden box.

And I worry over it now, even although it's a long time,

thinking he didn't have a proper coffin.

He knows you loved him, it doesn't matter what they buried him in.

But that's the main.

And he was buried with a lady.

In his...in her coffin.

So that was lovely. I called him David George.

-Yeah. But he'd have been 74 now.

-74!

And me other daughter, she's 75 next month.

Your stories are unbelievable. They make me quite angry,

because of what's gone on,

but they make me feel very, very sad at the same time.

Honest to God, I can't thank yous enough.

What yous done, I mean, I was only a kid and it rolled over me,

you were wonderful! You were absolutely wonderful.

You were the bulldog breed, I mean that.

That meeting with them five wonderful old ladies

made me feel so humbled.

They were absolutely magnificent.

And do you know, no wonder we won the war,

because with people like that, camaraderie like that,

and a fighting spirit like that, how could you lose?

They were wonderful.

Before I finish my Blitz journey, I've decided to catch up with

an old mate of mine from Liverpool's comedy circuit, Stan Boardman.

I've known Stan for nearly 50 years,

and he's always good for a bit of banter and a few old jokes.

-I started at the MAA Club...

-BOTH: ..in Sheil Road!

You know, it's funny.

We're about the same age and we were both brought up during the war,

just a mile or so apart, and yet

we've never spoken to each other about it.

That means I've never heard his incredible story -

until today.

-This is where me mam's house was, and see that tree?

-Yeah.

That probably was in her front room, that tree.

Who'd ever thought that there'd be a tree...

where you live?

And I wish that this would have been here when I was a lad.

I would have loved it.

Just round the corner here, it was Morley Street,

and it was a shelter, a communal shelter,

and everybody in the street, when they heard the sirens going,

they'd all rush out the houses.

Gives me the creeps even now, when I hear the fire sirens

from the local fire station.

Them days, they used to say, "The Germans are coming."

I had a babysit...

I was being baby-sat by a girl called Mary Munroe,

my mother used to tell me about her.

And we ran to the thing and I sat...she sat me on her knee.

My mother was there, sitting on, like, stools,

and it was pitch-black and dark. She had a baby on her knee -

our Ada - and Tommy, my brother, was sitting next to them.

On that fateful night, the Germans did come and they bombed Liverpool.

And all the shelter was blown up

and all the people in the shelter were either killed or injured.

And I found out...

My mother told me when I was a little bit older

that the girl who...

I was sitting on her knee,

-Mary Munroe, she was killed. 14.

-No way.

All her family sat on that side of the shelter,

they were all killed, and my brother Tommy, he lost his life as well.

So the bricks and everything must have hit him on the head.

I woke up next morning...

on the side of the road here on a slate

and the sun was...morning was just coming up.

You could smell the burning, grit in my teeth,

and every time I feel a bit of grit in my teeth...

-It reminds you.

-It reminds me of that night.

And my Uncle Arthur,

he came down cos he only lived up there.

He was 16, 17 and he came over and he found me in the morgue

because the place was just littered with bodies and people were...

And he found my brother Tommy, who was dead,

and he found me. Luckily enough, I wasn't injured,

only because Mary Munroe must have fell on me and saved my life.

-She took the blast, didn't she?

-Mary Munroe, God bless you.

-Mary, if you're up there, thank you, love.

-She will be, eh? Ah.

Around 4,000 people from Liverpool and its surrounding areas

lost their lives during the Blitz - more than anywhere outside London.

I thought I knew my city, I thought I knew my friends.

But I've learnt so much on this journey,

I'm not sure I'll ever look at my home in the same way again.

And as I take to the sky for the last time, I can see how much

Liverpool has changed, how much rebuilding

and regeneration has gone on over the years.

But something that hasn't altered at all is the spirit

and the character of those below.

I've always been proud of the people of Liverpool.

In fact, I have the honour of being a Freeman of the City

and being up here now, I owe them so much.

They've gave me this honour, but it should be the other way round.

It's awful to know what went on and it must have destroyed

families for generations, torn about their lost ones

and those who have never seen their parents again

or their fathers again or their sons again.

But there's thousands and thousands of unsung heroes -

the ARP wardens, the nurses, the fellows patrolling the streets.

The way they banded together, the way they kept the morale up,

the way they made sure the children went to school...

Everyone, thousands and thousands of unsung heroes out there

and sometimes we forget...sometimes we tend to forget about them.

But being up here now just gives me a little... It makes me feel....

..quite emotional.

It was all so bloody futile, wasn't it?

They were doing what they were told to do,

and the fear and the horror and the sad stories,

there must be as many in Germany as there are here,

in Dresden and other places like that.

So while this has been a wonderful experience for me,

I don't want to do it again.

I don't want to do it again.

That experience I've just had has made me feel so humble.

They talk about the bulldog breed...

There's never been a truer expression made,

they must have all had that bulldog spirit.

They got Liverpool through and they got Great Britain through,

and thank God for that.

I can't praise them enough.

MUSIC: Yours by Vera Lynn

# ..here on far or distant shores

# I've never loved anyone

# The way I love you

# How could I

# When I was born to be

# Just yours? #