Birmingham Blitz Cities

AIR RAID SIREN

This was Hitler's Blitzkrieg, or lightning war.

During their nine-month bombing campaign,

the Nazis devastated cities and towns

across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

London bore the brunt of the initial raids.

But soon after, the Luftwaffe

began attacking other industrial centres.

I'm David Harewood.

And in this programme, I'm finding out why

my home city of Birmingham became a target.

People genuinely thought that English society might end any day now.

I'll meet some of those who lived through the heaviest bombing of the war.

-So this is actually one of the German incendiary bombs?

-Yes.

I'll discover the personal tragedies that history often forgets.

And I said to my auntie, "Is that true, what I've just heard?

"That Mum and Dad are dead?" And she just says, "Yes".

And I'll experience a view of my city that will stay with me forever.

Where I grew up as a child was right in the heart of it,

right in the middle of it, and that's quite fascinating.

I'm a Brummie and extremely proud of it.

But like many people, I've never delved

into my city's history.

I've built an acting career appearing in dramas like Homeland,

playing fictional characters often caught up in terrifying global events.

But today's story is all too real.

And it couldn't be any closer to home.

'I now split my time between London and LA.

'But for a few days at least, I'm back in the West Midlands.'

I'm hoping this journey will educate me about the past

and reconnect me with my roots.

You know, I've obviously been back to Birmingham many times

to visit my family, Mum or Dad...

But it's strange, really. This is probably the first time

I feel I'm coming back to visit the city.

I don't know if I've done that...

..ever.

AMERICAN VOICEOVER: This is my kind of town.

I grew up in 1970s Birmingham.

An exciting, confident place, with its sights set on the future.

I found the city exciting.

The modern buildings reflect its position as

the nation's industrial powerhouse.

You feel as if you've been projected into the 21st century.

The city has always seemed to be changing, developing, regenerating.

'Apart from the Small Heath district, that is.

'This area, where I grew up, has hardly altered at all.'

It's really strange to be back in the place where it all started.

Actually, THIS was my house.

This particular street, this stretch of the street,

was just full of kids round about my age,

and we were forever playing hide-and-seek until midnight,

the wee small hours.

And one of the best places to hide was...

..up there.

So we used to basically get up like this and make our way

to the top of the wall and hide there for literally hours.

Like, 20 of us would just kind of cycle up to Small Heath Park

and just play all day long in the park,

just great memories of camaraderie, of friendship.

There were Irish kids, Indian kids, black kids, Jamaican kids,

all just playing together.

28 bus, I used to get that to school.

Interesting, really. As a kid growing up, you know,

I never really had a sense of...

of anything other than this place

just being a great place to play, but...

God, there used to be this gorgeous girl who used to live...

I think she used to live...in...

She used to live just opposite us. Absolute stunner.

Can't remember what her name was.

Used to... I think we'll stop right there!

Stop right there.

# Back to life, back to reality. #

'Happy times. And innocent times.

'Like all kids, I lived in the moment,

'and I certainly wasn't interested in dull stuff, like local history.'

The city I grew up in was all about clubs, music, girls.

I never really had a sense, growing up, of the war,

or the damage that Birmingham went through.

I mean, my parents got here in the '60s.

I wonder if they had any sense of the destruction

that Birmingham had gone through.

Probably not. By then, Birmingham's population was changing rapidly

with thousands of new arrivals who had never experienced the Blitz,

coming from the Caribbean and beyond, helping to rebuild Britain.

Birmingham's town planners were also busy,

clearing the bomb-damaged Victorian housing

to create a new city for a new age.

'By the time me, my sister and my two brothers arrived,

'the Birmingham of the Blitz had almost disappeared.'

-Hi, Mum.

-Hi! You all right?

'Still, the war had been over for barely 20 years

'when my parents pitched up in Birmingham.

'Surely they had some sense of what had gone on here?'

So, when you arrived, was there any kind of physical evidence,

-any bomb damage, any...?

-Not in the '60s, when I first came,

we didn't get that.

I mean, there were still remnants of what happened,

-like when we lived in Oldknow Road, remember?

-Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We didn't know what that was, but then we found out

it was the remnants of a shelter in the back...

in the bottom of the garden.

Was there a sense that, you know, the city was on the up,

or was it quite, as you say, it was quite poor?

It was quite poor, to be truthful. It was quite poor.

I was surprised, when I first came here, to see that people were,

literally, as poor as we were in the Caribbean

and most people lived in one room.

-Not a whole house?

-No, no! Not like today,

when you have kids and you want a whole house.

Most... A lot of people lived in one room.

Well, it was lovely seeing my mum,

but as I suspected, she didn't really know too much about the war.

I guess, coming here in the '60s,

the Blitz really wasn't part of her story,

so it's going to be really interesting for me to go on

this journey to see if I really do have any connection

to that part of Birmingham's history.

To find out, I need to go back to November 1940, when another

Midlands city, Coventry, was flattened by Nazi bombers.

Words are hopelessly inadequate to describe the horror and indignation

felt all over the civilised world at this wanton devastation.

The Germans claimed this was revenge for the Allied bombing of Munich.

But it also marked a shift in their tactics,

widening the Blitz from London to other UK cities.

Coventry's harrowing experience was broadcast around the world,

but less well known is that

Birmingham's turn came just five days later,

with three consecutive nights of raids that

also killed hundreds of people.

Why did my city make it onto Hitler's target list?

I'm meeting up with aerial archaeologist Chris Going.

He has rare intelligence documents that the Germans

prepared before the war started

and they show precisely why Birmingham had to be bombed.

The single most important factory here in the Small Heath

part of town is this - it's the Birmingham Small Arms factory.

Close by, you've also got the Singer works.

Now, where are you on this map?

I lived on a place called Oldknow Road. It's right...

Hang on, let's find it. There it is. There it is. There it is.

It's actually just at the end of the road.

So, I would've been almost smack in the middle of a target.

You're wedged between two of the most important industrial

targets in Birmingham.

-Astonishing.

-It is.

Birmingham wasn't the only important industrial centre

in the Luftwaffe's sights.

As the Blitz went on, they attempted to bring war production

to a halt by attacking Nottingham, Sheffield and Newcastle.

But alongside Coventry, Birmingham felt the full force.

Those first three nights of bombing left a trail of destruction

and the Nazis themselves took photographic evidence of their success.

-This is the day after those attacks.

-Wow.

A is "zerstorung" - destruction.

They got the Singer works. Here's the BSA works.

When this photograph was taken, which was on the 23rd,

they would be... They'd still be bringing up the bodies.

It's astonishing to know that, actually, I grew up...

the house I grew up in was a target area for the German Luftwaffe.

-I had no idea about that.

-Absolutely.

..1005...

'Now I've seen those German documents and photos,

'I want to view my city as their pilots did

'so Chris and I have come to Wellesbourne Mountford Airfield in Warwickshire

'to fly the actual routes the Luftwaffe took back in November 1940.

'Our pilot today is Bill Giles.'

OK, is everyone happy, comfortable, secure?

-Yes.

-All good?

-All good.

-Great.

I've actually been flying quite a lot this year.

But about this time on a 747 or whatever, I'm normally fast asleep,

but taking off in something as small as this is really quite something.

Wow, look at that! Beautiful!

Fantastic visibility.

I can actually start to see, if I'm not mistaken, Birmingham, right?

You can see Birmingham ahead of us. We're coming from the south-east.

You can see the Post Office Tower.

I had no idea just how exposed everybody would have been,

but you really see that from this perspective.

Well, it's interesting that you say that.

In December 1940, the Birmingham Post reported

that the bombing of Birmingham was as random as ever,

that the bombs were so scattered across the city,

they couldn't quite fathom what they were aiming at.

There, on your right, is Small Heath.

Here we are, flying over the mighty Blues' ground,

what a gorgeous sight that is!

We're really going to fly directly over my road now,

which is this road here, Oldknow Road.

You can see my house, I know exactly where it is.

And this is the Singer factory, which was badly attacked in November

and there, that whole complex just to the south of the railway line,

-is the BSA works.

-We are a stone's throw from the BSA works.

You are absolutely seconds away.

I had no idea, growing up, just how surrounded my road was

by major Second World War manufacturing plants.

It's easy to feel quite detached from up here,

I guess, thinking as a bomber to think that, down there,

there are people working in factories,

working on things that really are going to destroy your countrymen.

You're not thinking about people,

you're just thinking about buildings, shapes in the dark.

You'd probably just be thinking about your target.

Get in, drop my ordnance and get home to my loved ones.

There's no personal feeling at all, you're just coming in, doing a job

and trying to get home.

'So I've now seen Birmingham from the point of view of the bombers.

'But what about those who were bombed?

'I've come to meet a survivor of the Blitz, Barbara Johnson.'

-Hello, David.

-Hello, how are you?

-Nice to meet you.

-Nice to meet you.

'Barbara was only five when the war started.

'She now visits schools, talking about her experiences,

'and she has a treasure chest

'full of memorabilia from Birmingham's Blitz.'

My God! So, who would carry one of these around, then?

The wardens or the ARP men.

So you would hear that sound and everybody would run

and put their masks on?

Yes, put the gas mask on.

-So this is actually one of the German incendiary bombs?

-Yes.

The majority of times, when they went off, they lost the tail

but, fortunately for me, I've got one whole.

Sparks came out of there and set fire to buildings.

There's all the holes and sparks would come out of there.

-This is a child's gas mask, under fives.

-Look at that!

And this one is for anybody over five and adults.

Issued to all civilians.

But we can't take them out the plastic cases

-because there's asbestos in the bottom.

-Oh, right. Asbestos?

Asbestos. And we had them on our faces.

'Barbara was among nearly two million British children evacuated

'when the war started and one of 25,000 from Birmingham.

'The idea was to remove them from the area of danger

'and place them in safe havens. It didn't always work out that way.'

When I was five, I went on an evacuation to Evesham with my sister.

I was only there for a short while because I started wetting the bed

and the gentleman that we were there with,

he used to get his belt off and used to lash the back of my legs.

-What?!

-Every morning.

And in the end, he said I couldn't sleep in his bed any more

and he put me in a cubbyhole on a bag of straw

with a pillow and a blanket

and that's where I was to sleep, a five-year-old.

And my sister was eight, she was at school

and she was able to write a letter home to Mum

and she put in there that we were being treated badly

and so, in September '41, my mum came over to Evesham

and fetched us back.

'Like many evacuees, Barbara returned to the city

'just as the German bombing campaign was getting started.

'It was another unforgettable experience...

'for all the wrong reasons.'

We were all down the shelter and my dad didn't go to war

because he'd got a bit of a heart defect from rheumatic fever

so he used to do fire watching and he'd come and tap the shelter

and Mum got out, but she never used to leave us

and she never came back and I thought, "Where has she gone?"

And then, on the evening, when Dad came home from work...

Sorry. When my mum and dad came home from work,

my mum sat us down and said, "Nana and Grandad have gone to heaven."

She didn't say they were killed, she just said they went to heaven.

-So do you actually have a picture of your grandparents?

-Yes, I have.

-Oh, it's up there.

-There, it's there.

-Right here?

That's the only one I've got.

Louisa and Harry.

She was 68, he was 72.

I feel as though I was robbed of my grandparents.

I loved them so much.

Before doing this programme,

I really didn't know to what extent

Birmingham had been affected by the Blitz

so this has been a real revelation to me.

I had no idea it was hit quite so hard.

Yes, because of the situation that we made everything in Birmingham -

Spitfires, bombs, you name it, we made it.

But it's a shame that Birmingham was forgotten.

It was quite an amazing experience in there, talking to Barbara.

She obviously still feels deeply the scars of war

and it's strange, I kind of decided to do this programme

because I thought it could be interesting.

Actually, now, I feel as though I'm doing the programme

not just for myself, but for people like Barbara,

giving her a voice, really.

This journey into Birmingham's wartime past

gets ever more fascinating,

but no story on how the Midlands suffered during the Blitz

is complete without travelling 20-odd miles east, to Coventry.

When I was a kid, getting the bus to here from Small Heath

was as easy as going into Birmingham City Centre.

I know the place really well, but I've never seen it like this.

We're coming in from the angle

that most of the bombers from the air fleets two and three

would have flown on the night attacks.

And the first attack which took place,

the night of the 14th and 15th of November,

was on Coventry, but the shock of this night attack,

the destruction that it inflicted on the town,

really changed the regional mood, as well as anything else.

On the 14th November, 1940, it became a city of destruction.

For three nights, the German bombers attacked in their fullest force.

This introduced a new word into the vocabulary of mass murder -

"to coventrate".

From this vantage point,

it's obvious that most of Coventry's centre has had to be replaced.

But, to be honest, I couldn't see many pre-war buildings

during my flight over Birmingham, either.

There's a definite feeling amongst the people I've talked to that,

whilst Coventry's suffering caught Britain's attention,

Birmingham's experience was somehow hidden from public view.

Is that true? And, if so, was there any official reason?

I'm at the BBC Birmingham newsroom to meet media historian Mike Temple.

-ARCHIVE REPORT:

-The martyred city of Coventry -

amid the wholesale wreckage of a noble city,

crushed by the force of hundreds of tonnes of bombs,

the steeple of her one-time beautiful 14th century cathedral

looks down on a scene of indescribable desolation.

I remember going to Coventry as a kid and seeing, you know,

the destruction of the cathedral and reading about it.

But I don't remember hearing anything

about the destruction of Birmingham.

Well, many people didn't because, of course,

Coventry and London were the two cities that were highlighted

and, you know, the experiences of Birmingham

were largely hidden behind a sort of...a wartime censorship.

So was there official censorship?

Cos I was under the impression that the reason Birmingham

wasn't reported was because they had Spitfires there,

the BSA factory, they had all the munitions factories there.

Certainly, Birmingham was a key strategic target

for the Germans, a key industrial powerhouse,

if you like, of the UK and of the Midlands.

So that was an official reason but, of course,

another reason was not to spread fear and despondency.

So, in a sense,

it was almost what you might call positive censorship, right?

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.

It was not censorship in the sense that someone was standing

over your shoulder all the time.

There was a great deal of self-censorship as well.

These pictures from the north-east area...

There, we have a reference to "the north-east area",

an example of the sort of voluntary censorship that was taking place.

Birmingham, typically, was described as "a Midlands town".

Manchester...the Manchester Guardian was not even allowed to report

that Manchester had been hit.

It was "an inland town in north-west England".

All this was supposedly designed so that the enemy wouldn't know

how successful or otherwise they'd been.

What we've seen is a massive destruction in Coventry,

almost apocalyptic scenes of death and destruction.

If we contrast those with the pictures from Birmingham,

which don't have sound,

we see a slightly different view of the world.

So, what we're seeing here in Birmingham is not images

of death and destruction -

what we're seeing is images of "life will go on", if you like.

They're the phlegmatic British population -

we'll carry on, they'll move house,

they'll collect their water, they'll get by.

These pictures are for different purposes.

Look, Joey still survives.

We will go on, the British way of life will continue.

Why would those pictures be broadcast like that?

It was necessary to create that myth, if you like,

of the British people all together,

the fact that, whatever Jerry threw at us, we could take it.

I had no idea

that the way Birmingham's Blitz experience was reported

was a key part of Britain's propaganda war.

No idea at all.

I'm nearing the end of my Blitz journey,

but before I finish,

I want to catch up with Barbara Johnson,

who I met earlier.

Oh, hi. Don't get up...

'She's invited me along to chat to some of her friends from BARA -

'the Birmingham air raid survival group.

'What stories they all have.'

How often did you have to go down into the shelters?

Was it every night, every other night?

Went every night because we lived up on the second floor

and, of course, when the raids started,

you want to be in your shelter

as quickly as you could.

I mean, the noise of the bombs falling

must have been extraordinary.

-Oh, yeah, yeah. Definitely.

-Can you remember that?

Yeah, quite frightening, really.

So, whose decision was it to go down into the shelters?

It was your parents'.

My mum used to leave our coats

and shoes ready for us

to put them on and run to the shelters as fast as we could.

My mum made cocoa, she used to make six jugs of cocoa

and we got my grandad's old box on wheels

we used to go around with this box on wheels,

giving drinks of cocoa to the firemen,

because we had some hard winters during the war.

And in the winters, I've even heard their sleeves crack

because they've been frozen.

'Like Barbara, Mary has some painful memories

'of her wartime childhood.'

So, my two elder sisters and myself,

we were all evacuated.

-You didn't get to choose where you went?

-Oh, no, no.

We just stood in the field, in a big, long row,

and then people from the village just came along and said,

"Come on, you can come with me. Come on, you can come with me."

And that's how it worked.

And they never thought, you know, "This is a family..."

Oh, no. I mean, they didn't even ask our name.

My two sisters went to other people

and I went to a lady named Mrs Bree.

That was terrifying, really, because, I mean,

I was still only five years of age.

And then, one day,

this gentleman stepped out of a car

and he says, "I'm your uncle."

I'd never seen him before, I hadn't got a clue who he was.

And he says, "You're coming to live with us."

I was really scared because I didn't know the people.

They'd just got one daughter

and I thought, "Well, what's going to happen to me?"

So, I reached about 11 or 12.

I was in the local fish and chip shop,

and I overheard two ladies talking

and they were sort of nodding in my direction.

"Oh, that's the little girl whose mum and dad and sisters got killed."

So, I just couldn't believe what I was hearing.

So, I ran over home and I said to my aunt,

"Is that true, what I've just heard -

"that Mum and Dad are dead?"

And she just said, "Yes."

And I just ran upstairs and I just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed,

and I thought, "I'm never going to see them again", you know.

It was terrible. It really was.

How...how...?

HE CLEARS HIS THROAT

How long was it, um...until you met your sister?

Time went on and, um...

I just asked my aunt and uncle about my sisters, my two elder sisters.

And they did eventually follow them up.

But we never had anything in common because we'd all been split up.

-Thank you very much for that.

-Thank you.

Appreciate it.

'I'm an actor, but when you hear stories like that,'

you realise that real life can be much more raw and emotional

than any drama.

I want to end my journey with a visit to The Tree Of Life -

a monument that those ladies

campaigned to have put on public display.

On its base are the names of the victims of Birmingham's Blitz,

including Barbara Johnson's grandparents.

Oh, there they are - the names of her grandfather and grandmother.

Having met Barbara yesterday

'and held a picture of her grandparents,

'I have some kind of physical connection to it, so...'

Yeah, it's quite...

It's quite moving, when you think about it.

I've recognised it really is a tough resolve of people

in this city

and you look at how modern it is now,

you look around and see how it's continuing to evolve

and continuing to grow.

You feel enormously proud

that...not only have we come through an incredibly traumatic experience,

but we continue to move forward.

It makes you feel enormously proud

and I think we owe that generation of people

a tremendous debt of gratitude

because they showed incredible strength

and, if it weren't for them, perhaps,

you know...we'd maybe be facing a very, very different history.

# Why do you whisper, green grass?

# Why tell the trees what ain't so?

# Whispering grass The trees don't have to know... #