Norwich Blitz Cities

This was Hitler's Blitzkrieg, or lightning war.

During the nine month bombing campaign,

the Nazis devastated 16 cities across England, Scotland,

Wales and Northern Ireland,

but as the war progressed,

they widened their targets beyond our big cities

and industrial heartlands.

I'm Myleene Klass and, in today's programme,

I'm finding out why my hometown area also came under attack.

I'll discover how the Nazis used an unlikely source

to plot their devastation.

This is a story of Hitler using a tourist guidebook

in an attempt to destroy the heart and soul of England.

And I'll take a flight I'll never forget.

To think that somebody was looking down on my hometown,

wanting to bomb it...

I'm on my way to Norfolk, where I grew up with my mum,

dad, brother and sister.

Our family actually lived right on the coast in Gorlestone-on-Sea

near Great Yarmouth,

and my Blitz journey is starting on the train back home.

I was quite surprised

when I was asked to take part in this programme.

Namely because, when I was at school,

I thought I pretty much knew all there was to know about the area -

we learned about the Vikings,

we definitely learned about the Romans, cos I remember

having to take that long walk all the way through Colchester.

However, when it came to learning about World War II,

I remember that we took a school trip all the way back

down to London, would you believe?

We walked around St Paul's, we learned about the Blitz there,

but there was no mention whatsoever of Norfolk,

so I reckon the next few days are going to be pretty interesting.

I left Norfolk to study music in London when I was 18.

My parents moved away after that, so I rarely get to go back now,

but it's always a treat when I do.

I've got a bit of a knot in my stomach.

I think it must be, like, excitement,

but nothing has changed, everything looks the same, same faces,

same concourse.

Even the weather's the same.

First up, my old house in Gorlestone,

around 20 miles from the heart of the city.

The journey's hardly started and already I'm getting emotional.

God, I didn't even think I'd think about it.

I didn't think I'd miss it and you come back, it's just quite...

That room is right where the piano was and you could walk back

and forth, you could hear the piano playing all the time,

I'd hear my sister playing or my brother.

All these people, I know every single one of these houses.

I've been in all of these houses...

And then my girlfriends all lived down that way,

so we'd have sleepovers and just walk back in our pyjamas.

This is, like... This is my neighbourhood.

Cannot believe that I haven't come back for so long.

Maybe I've avoided coming back here, cos it's a lot to think about.

My dad said, "You'll miss it when you've gone."

And he's absolutely right. 18 years... I was here for 18 years...

This part of the country means the world to me.

It's tranquil, picturesque,

and the people are friendly and welcoming.

Why on Earth would anyone want to drop bombs here?

Well, it turns out it was as much a target as our great ports and

industrial cities that were all hit in the first Blitz between

September 1940 and May 1941, but Norfolk's turn came a year later.

The raids were in revenge for the Allied bombing

of the scenic German town of Lubeck.

Hitler was outraged by the destruction.

He told the Luftwaffe to draw up a list of our most beautiful,

iconic towns, and then target their best-known landmarks,

all in an effort to demoralise the British people.

In compiling that list, the Germans used a tourism book called

the Baedeker guide, in which Norwich featured prominently.

So, according to this Baedeker guide of 1937,

"Norwich is an irregularly-built city of 126,000 inhabitants."

"Now, in the county town of Norfolk, besides its cathedral,

"it possesses over 30 old churches, more than any other city in the

"country except London, and numerous other interesting buildings.

"Its manufacturers include ladies' and children's shoes,

"mustard and starch, chocolate, silk, electrical machinery

"and domestic appliances, hardware and beer.

"The breeding of canaries is a minor industry."

Destroying a city, because of its history,

culture or beauty seems extraordinary,

but that was the precise aim of the so-called Baedeker Blitz.

The Nazis attacked York, Canterbury, Exeter and Bath,

and, for two nights in 1942,

Norwich.

They descended from about 14,000ft rapidly to three.

Chris Going is an aerial archaeologist.

Today, I'm meeting him

and pilot Bill Giles on the former site of RAF Horsham,

an old bomber station.

Today, it's home to Norwich Airport.

From here, we're recreating the journey

of those Luftwaffe pilots back in 1942.

I've been in a lot of planes a lot of times.

However, this one just feels a little bit different,

because I think I feel like I'm seeing it with different eyes.

Like, the eyes of a bomber. I feel like I'm going on a bombing mission.

OK, Myleene, what we're doing is

we're heading east or south east from Norwich Airport now.

We're going to go out to sea

and then we're going to turn

close to Great Yarmouth and come in from the north-east,

which was the route the second big attack, the Baedeker attack,

was flown from.

So we're going to fly the exact route that the Baedeker bombers

took to get to Norwich via Great Yarmouth.

We're certainly going to come in from that angle, yeah.

This is the coast. Where are we?

The Gorlestone's going to be off the wing.

You can see the river

and you can see where it finally bends round to the sea.

Oh, my gosh! Is that my house?!

There!

Right. OK.

That's fantastic.

I can't take my eyes off it.

And so they would have bombed very close to here.

There were certainly attacks along the seafront.

And there would have been occasional sort of bombs along the sort

of dock facilities, so...

OK, you can see, I'm, like, three minutes away.

Oh, less than that. I mean,

you know, if you're flying an aircraft, if you'd pressed

a button two seconds later, it could have easily struck your house.

Oh, my gosh.

-And here we are. We're just coming up to Norwich.

-Wow.

They'd be flying in in the wake of the

so-called pathfinder force,

whose job it was to identify the centre of the city.

You see, the aiming point for this Baedeker attack, all of them,

was the railway station, the city railway station just, you know,

close to the castle, north west by the river.

It was not the industrial heartland here.

The attacks were aimed at the cultural heart of the town.

How much warning would the, erm,

civilians get? Would they maybe hear the planes coming?

Well, the two main attacks, it was about ten, 15 minutes warning,

public warning, from the sounding of the sirens.

It was about ten past 11

on the first night

and about half past 11 at night on the second night.

ENGINES DRONE

EXPLOSIONS

What they tended to do was make quite sure that you didn't

warn people unnecessarily, so you were fairly confident

that they were going to end up in your area

by the time you got the sirens publicly sounding.

I've taken so much for granted, just walking through this city,

blinkers on, to school, back home.

This whole city's alive for me.

I just had no idea.

It's already been quite an experience.

I initially felt giddy at seeing my hometown from above, but

imagining our plane was on a mission to drop bombs was pretty upsetting.

But how successful were those Luftwaffe pilots?

And how much damage did they cause on the ground?

I've seen where the bombs fell,

but I want to hear about what people's lives were like.

Mike Bailey is a local artist whose paintings are still

inspired by his childhood during those war years

Who is that fine looking chap?

Well, this is me at the age of eight with my mum.

She's beautiful.

And how come we find you and your mum in this book?

Well, this is a book of my paintings which was published about five

-years ago.

-So, this is your book, your published work?

Even to see, at 80 years old,

you're sitting here showing me images that you painted of the war.

It must have had a profound effect on you as an eight-year-old.

Yeah, I think it shaped my life, actually. I was totally obsessed.

All I cared about was aeroplanes, ships, tanks, guns, you know.

Terrific, all exciting, you know, bring it on.

People think, oh, my God,

it must have been terrible for young children.

But to horrible little boys like me, it wasn't horrible at all.

The death and destruction passes over your head

and you think, oh, well, that's something that happens to

everybody else, it can't happen to me or my family.

But, of course, with so many bombs falling,

no-one was immune to tragedy, even an excited schoolboy like Mike.

Well, my best friend, a guy called Reggie Wright,

he was about three years older than me.

He was 11 and, on the Monday night,

the first night of the Baedeker raids,

I was actually round his house having tea.

I left about seven o'clock.

"Bye, Reggie, see you tomorrow." "OK, Mike."

Fine. Went home but, of course, next day, Reggie was dead.

They went down the shelter like everybody else

and there was a bomb landed right on the spot,

and I was told it blew the shelter right out off the ground.

Did you feel that loss?

Well, it must have had an impact,

but there was so much going on around you, it didn't have the same

sort of impact as it would have done if I was a bit older.

It's really surprising to hear that, for some children at least,

the Blitz felt like an exciting adventure, but, of course,

that didn't stop the adults from trying to keep them safe.

I've heard about a network of tunnels under the nearby

Norwich Grammar School.

They were built to provide shelter for the pupils during air raids

and, apparently, they've survived to this day.

After a quick change of wardrobe, I'm going to get a guided tour

by the current school archivist, John Walker.

Whoa!

Well, Myleene, this is the actual entrance we're going to

-use into the underground shelter.

-That looks insane.

Well, this is actually the emergency exit.

This whole network of shelters did extend across that far, to the far

-corner, there.

-Where the tree is?

You're making out that it looks pretty big underneath,

-but all I can see is...

-Well, it does develop.

-..tiny space.

-It does develop into quite a system.

-OK, well, after you.

All right, here I go. I'm all right.

-OK, we're all right now, Myleene.

-OK.

-It's safe to come down.

It's a bit squelchy underfoot.

I'm a Norfolk girl, we're made of strong stuff, it's OK.

You're not wrong.

Oh, what am I standing on? Gosh, look at this.

-You can see, it's a bit gloomy, isn't it?

-Oh, my gosh, look at this.

-This is the loos.

-Yes, they're the toilets.

And there's somebody's boot that got left behind.

Well, Myleene, if you want to see more of it, we'll go this way.

Yes, please.

-This is incredible.

-Well, we're in a long corridor now.

-There's several of these.

-This looks brand-new. When was this built?

This was built in 1939 and only took a matter of weeks to build

and, when the air raid shelters were on, the boys actually

came down here with their teachers and they were taught lessons.

Certainly well underground, well protected

and this top is made with concrete to give it a more solid structure.

-And they put it together in three weeks?

-About three weeks, yeah.

Above ground, of course, things were a whole lot more scary.

Norwich was being decimated

and yet one building stood tall against the bombs - the spectacular

cathedral which lies just next door to the grammar school.

On June 27th, 1942, it was attacked with hundreds of incendiary bombs.

Back above ground, and having cleaned ourselves off,

John explains how the older pupils came out of the shelters

and played a role in saving the day.

So, you can see the cathedral and the roof perfectly here.

Whereabouts would the incendiary devices be landing?

Of course, it was random where they fell,

but the roof being sloping, they would fall into that pit

just behind the windows of the crenulations.

The boys would be stationed there with their buckets of water

and their stirrup pumps.

BIG BAND PLAYS

The main problem with incendiary bombs was fire.

Armed with stirrup pumps and buckets of water,

it was possible to deactivate the bombs before they caused

too much damage, but it took courage and speed.

And if one of the incendiary devices landed,

they'd have to do what with it? Pick it up?

Put it in a bucket of water, dowse it with a stirrup pump,

try and get it into soil, anything to put it out.

-The thing was, you only had a certain time to do that.

-How long?

If you let it flare up... About five minutes or so before it detonated.

So, do you think that the actions of those boys,

and they were boys, saved the cathedral?

They helped save the cathedral, there is no doubt.

By the time some of them had left the school at the end of the war,

-they were Spitfire pilots.

-Gosh!

So, actually, they saw quite a lot of action.

The survival of Norwich's most historic and impressive building

would no doubt have been a blow to the Nazi's plans.

The whole point of the Baedeker Raids, after all,

had been to target the heritage of Britain's most historic towns.

It's certainly something the current canon thinks helped

galvanise locals who are looking for hope in those dark days.

Can you show me where exactly were the bombings here?

Most of them were on the north and south transepts.

Mercifully, because the cathedral has got this wonderful stone vault

that you can see here, which is pretty impervious to bombs

and to, particularly, lightweight incendiaries,

the damage was sustained by the lead and the timber of the roof above,

but nothing actually came down into the body of the cathedral.

So the bombs weren't heavy enough to penetrate through the stone vault

and just such damage as was done was confined to the roof above.

I think if you've been born and bred in Norwich and you've lived

under the shadow of the cathedral all your life, whether you have

a faith system or not, it's a very reassuring presence and to see it

undamaged was an undoubted boost to the morale of the people of the city.

There is no film of fires raging around the cathedral

like those famous images from the City of London around St Paul's.

In fact, unlike London,

or even other cities involved in the Baedeker Raids,

archive footage of any of the Norwich raids is rare.

Thankfully, some locals fought hard to record the horrors that they

and their neighbours faced.

Hello.

I've come to meet Judy Ball whose dad, George Swain,

was a photographer during the war.

Whilst most people were running away from the bombs, he would be

on his bike, cycling furiously towards the latest attack,

camera in hand.

Yes, that's the camera he had.

He just looks wonderful. I love the jacket, the corduroy.

Yes, yes, he was about 40 when that was taken.

He was a brilliant photographer. Camera went everywhere.

Even when he and my mum got married,

the camera went on honeymoon with them.

If he was in the car and he saw a fire engine or something and he had

the camera with him, he had to turn round and follow the fire engine.

Now, look at this. You look like a tiddler. Tiny.

-Yeah, I was about four.

-Gosh.

I mean, it's brilliant that he was a photographer,

-because I've not seen anything like this.

-No.

There was the other one that went on the back of the book with me,

with the teddy bear. That became quite famous, that picture.

-So, a gas mask for you and a gas mask her teddy?

-Yes.

This is Norwich Under Fire. My dad wrote this book, A Camera Record.

Here you are. Look, that's where it starts.

"For some of us, the siren was a warning of danger calling us

"to seek shelter, but for others, it was a summons to duty.

"Wardens hurried to their posts or patrolled their areas.

"Fire guards put on their tin hats and got ready to man the pumps.

"All the civil defence workers sprang into action.

"As for me, as I loaded my camera

"and set out for the places where bombs were dropping,

"I felt that mine also was a war job,

"as exciting as any and useful too.

"But it was not with any idea of making a book of them,

"that I took these pictures.

"They were taken, because I felt that such opportunities to picture

"historical events at the moments of their happening ought to be seized."

The Baedeker Raids may have been targeting Norwich, but as I learned

on my earlier flight with Chris, all through the war, bombs fell

far and wide across the surrounding area, including Great Yarmouth.

I'm heading there to meet local historian, Colin Tooke,

and to brave the typical British seaside resort weather.

So, the troops here in Yarmouth removed

-this whole chunk from the pier.

-Yeah, they were just blowing it up.

So why did they do that?

So nobody could use it as a landing stage...

-On the pier?

-Otherwise they would've landed at the end of the pier

and then ran into the town.

So bizarre to think, as well, that all these German soldiers

running past the candyfloss machines and the carousel.

1940, the invasion was quite likely and the East Anglian coast,

being very close to occupied Europe,

was an ideal place for the invasion force to come.

Population wise, were there a lot of people living in Yarmouth

-at the time?

-In 1940, there was a large evacuation from the town.

Children were evacuated from many seaside towns.

In my head, oh, I don't know, from what I've been fed, I thought

all the children from London, during the Blitz, came to the countryside.

They came to places like here.

Well, strangely enough, the London children did come

here at the beginning of the war.

When the war first started, they evacuated children from London

to coastal towns.

And then they realised this was a very bad idea

and so the children, they were gone.

In June that year, 3,500 Yarmouth children were evacuated on trains

all in one day and, very soon after that, a lot of the adult population

left as well, because the livelihood of most people had gone

during the war, because most people in Yarmouth relied on

the holiday industry or the fishing industry for their livelihood.

And these both finished.

I grew up here and I didn't have a clue 200 bombs had dropped

in a matter of years ago and I didn't know.

Why don't Yarmouth schoolchildren know about this or even the locals?

How come no-one has got any idea?

Once the war was over, you see, people forgot about it.

They wanted to not remember the war any more.

Yarmouth had to rebuild, everybody had to rebuild

and they were more interested in building houses, getting ready

for the holiday season again and the beach was cleared very quickly.

All the barbed wire taken down,

the pill boxes were taken down and the seafront opened again.

MUSIC PLAYS

I'm nearing the end of my Blitz journey, and I feel like I've learnt

a huge part of Norfolk's history, history that somehow seems secret.

Coming face-to-face with some of the survivors who enjoyed the bombs

and uncertainty has been pretty emotional.

It's so hard standing here on this beautiful beach, to imagine it full

of land mines and barbed wire and scaffolding,

trying to keep any soldiers away, when you also then think 200 feet

in that direction, its Joyland, there's the snails, candyfloss.

So hard to marry the two images.

You can completely understand why people wanted to forget about it.

It's a seaside town, it's meant to be for holidays.

Before I finish, I want to pop in on someone who's very special to me.

My old piano teacher, Miss Wright,

lives a few miles from Great Yarmouth.

I've known her almost all my life.

She's taught me, my sister and my brother to play piano.

She's more than a teacher, she's family.

Hello. Hello.

-Hello, Myleene.

-Hi. Look at you.

-Thank you very much indeed.

These are for you.

How old am I there, Miss Wright? 13?

Your sister, Jessie, on the end there.

Myself, my sister, my brother.

I'm going to fill you in on what we've been up to,

because I think you're going to really love it.

We went up in a plane and I got to see my house from way up.

It was amazing.

I just wanted to know, because you and I have never discussed this.

-Did you have any experiences during the war?

-Yes, I did, yes.

Well, we used to hide.

When we heard the sirens, we used to hide under the table.

-In this cottage?

-Yes. It was in the other room.

I know the table you mean. Do you mean the one in the alcove?

Where you used to give me lemon cake and salmon sandwiches?

-That's right, yes, yes.

-That little table?

So, how old were you, then, Miss Wright?

I would think I was about 15.

So you're old enough to really remember how you felt.

-Oh, yes, indeed.

-Were you frightened? What did you feel?

It wasn't very nice. We had the gas masks.

I think we were always frightened until the war ended, really.

-What did you do during the war?

-Well, I had scarlet fever, yes.

Of course, it left me with a weak heart,

so I couldn't do any war work.

But we had a doctor of music come to our village.

-All the organists were called up, you see.

-Oh, OK.

Yes, and he said, "Well, if I give you some organ lessons,

"would you help with the organ?"

-That's that is how I came to go to Fritton.

-This is because of the war?

-Yes.

-I had no idea. So, you became the organist.

Well, I was the organist of Fritton church, yes.

-Because all the other organists had been deployed elsewhere?

-Yes.

No idea that is why you learnt to play the piano.

And then, also, he said, "I think, really,

"that you'd make a good teacher."

In a nutshell, everything that I have today,

everything that I've learnt, is because of you.

You taught me everything I know and I owe you so much,

but what I didn't realise is that everything that you were able

-to teach me was all because of the war.

-That's right.

I can't believe that you and I have never had this discussion before.

That's probably because I was too busy asking for more cake

every time I came.

Before I say my goodbyes, I can't resist playing a duet

with my piano teacher on the piano on which I learnt so much.

WE'LL MEET AGAIN PLAYS

Yay!

When I was 18, I couldn't wait to get out of Norfolk, get down

to London, see all the bright lights, be a part of the action.

But what I have learnt, is that even small ordinary places with

seemingly ordinary people have extraordinary stories to tell.

You should never forget that.