Episode 2 Blitz: The Bombs That Changed Britain

In September 1940 death and destruction came to the streets

of Britain on a scale never seen before or since.

The noise was deafening.

Bang, bang, tremendous explosions, one after another.

They called it the Blitz.

The whole of the city was aglow.

In the space of little over eight months,

more than 450,000 bombs rained down on British soil.

But in the midst of the chaos and confusion,

meticulous records were kept.

This is a bomb map. Every single dot is where a bomb landed.

Using this untapped archive, we'll identify individual bombs...

That's the bomb that you were looking for.

Oh, it is, yes.

..with consequences which rippled down from the point of impact

through the lives of people and beyond to help shape modern Britain.

Of all the houses that plane was flying over

and one bomb, why did it hit us?

In this episode, March 1941,

the bomb fell on a quiet suburban street in the city of Hull.

I just remember a skirting board going across my neck,

could see up t'street, all the lights and all the bombs dropping.

It destroyed lives.

And that's when the three children were killed instantly.

It entangled its victims in an extraordinary psychological study.

He heard moaning and set about digging for his children,

he felt in a mental frenzy.

A study that was used to support one of the most controversial wartime

strategies the British government would ever carry out.

And it began with one bomb.

By March 1941, the Blitz on Britain's regions was at its height.

One city, Hull, was about to enter its most intense period of bombing.

You could hear the drone of the German engines, you know,

and you used to think, "Oh, I wonder if we're going to get it tonight."

For the Luftwaffe, Hull was a key target

because of its docks and industry.

It was also a good place to dump leftover bombs

before returning to base.

This plane went over and you saw the doors literally open

and the bombs just go like that.

And it was an easy target,

its location on the Humber Estuary, making it identifiable for miles.

There was a deluge of incendiary bombs.

They literally rained them over Hull.

Air raids had brought a new level of terror to war.

Civilians across the country were now under threat in their own homes.

For many, the psychological impact would be devastating.

You can only imagine what it must've been like to not know

when you go to bed at night whether or not you're going to wake up

the next morning, really.

Before the war, Hull was the third largest port in Britain

and its main fishing centre.

Its residents were fiercely proud of their city

and its industrial heritage.

Bordering farmland on the edge of the city was the North Hull estate.

Building had begun on the site in the 1920s.

Planned by Hull Council as a model garden estate

for the residents who had moved there from the unsanitary slums

of the town centre.

The area was literally a breath of fresh air.

Living at 56 Eighth Avenue was Arthur Hicks

with his father George, a boilermaker,

his mother, Eva, and his brothers, Clarence and Norman.

My two elder brothers decided to take me to see this new house

and one of my brothers opened the letter box,

and I said, "What's that?"

And that of course was the end of the bath

which was curved, was there.

I hadn't seen one of those before.

Two streets away, at number 60 Sixth Avenue,

lived Tina and Doreen Taylor,

their mother, Annie, and their sisters Vera and Irene

and brothers Bob and Peter. Their father, John, was away in the Army.

All the families were all bringing up children as old as us

so we all used to play together, but all the mums got together

and did lots of things.

Next door to the Taylors, at number 62, lived the Owens.

Alma and Edith and their children Harry, Donald, Margaret,

Doreen and David.

Janet Owens, who was born there after the war,

is their youngest daughter.

They used to call it the garden estate

and I think it was the first lot of council houses

that actually had huge gardens and indoor toilet and indoor bathroom.

We had a garden for the very first time.

Pop went out and bought this garden spade and for the first season

he planted potatoes.

But gardens and bathrooms were not the only advantage

the estate had to offer.

Unlike families living at the centre of Hull,

who shared cramped public shelters,

the authorities provided residents with air-raid shelters

in their own gardens.

Most of us in the Eighth Avenue area got Anderson shelters.

They didn't just sit them on the grass, they dug a hole

which was encroaching on my dad's beautiful garden.

He didn't like it but he realised it had to be done.

-NEWS REEL:

-Anderson shelters are stocked so that there may be

nothing to think of at the last moment.

We had a concrete shelter in the back garden which we

used to go in at first, and then Mum found it was a bit damp

so she brought the big double bed down and the mattress underneath

so that's where we stayed when the sirens went.

By March 1941, the Luftwaffe had inflicted severe damage on London.

They now set their sights on other cities.

Hull had already suffered several small-scale raids.

But now the attacks started to intensify.

The sirens was nearly every night, weren't they?

-Oh, yes.

-Every night.

And the balloons.

Big barrage balloons.

Flying high because my mum used to always say, don't go far,

they're high tonight and that meant planes were coming round.

On Thursday the 13th of March,

a fleet of 78 Luftwaffe planes headed towards Hull.

They were carrying 39 tonnes of high explosive bombs

and 4,500 incendiaries.

Out on the edge of the city,

the sirens of the North Hull estate sounded sometime after 8:30pm.

We knew the sound of the German engines and that,

and then we knew that town had been hit.

You could see the flames.

The, kind of, smoke and flames.

Flames in the town.

There was no dark patches at all,

the whole thing and you got the silhouettes of what was there

and then across the skies you got the searchlights

and then you'd see a flash of the ack-ack sites.

And then the bombing and the boom, boom, terrible sounds.

That night, the Luftwaffe's targets

were supposed to be the power station, waterworks and gasworks.

But several planes had missed their mark and were heading towards the

North Hull estate and Sixth Avenue.

It's difficult to describe the rumbling from a long way away

and then getting louder and louder and louder.

At number 60 Sixth Avenue, Mrs Taylor's five youngest children

were asleep under the bed in the living room...

..while she and her 14-year-old daughter Vera

had taken cover under the table.

Next door at number 62, Mrs Owens also decided

not to take her children into the shelter

she shared with the Taylors.

There was a lull with the sirens.

And Mum said to Vera, "Come on, I'll do your hair,"

and I think Vera was sat on a pouffe

and Mam was doing her hair to go to work the next morning

and then all of a sudden...

AIR-RAID SIRENS WAIL

The high explosive bomb, later known as bomb 31, had detonated on impact.

60 and 62 Sixth Avenue took a direct hit

with the Taylors and Owens still inside.

The explosion could be heard for miles around.

I can remember my father almost rushing into the shelter.

And I can remember, quite clearly, him saying,

"Bloody hell, that was close."

All I remember was waking up and it wasn't waking up,

just waking up,

I think it was the blast must have knocked me out.

-What about you?

-I just remember the skirting board, we were laid down,

skirting board across my neck, could see up t'street,

-all the lights and all the bombs dropping.

-And I couldn't...

-She couldn't see it.

-I couldn't see that.

I had the skirting board as well but it was just, when I came to,

I found out afterwards it was the blast what had sort of

knocked us out and I come to and my mum was making us sing

because there was water, it was dark, it was horrible.

And my mum was singing, and trying to make us sing.

# Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run. #

# Run, rabbit, run, rabbit Run! Run! Run!

# Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Goes the farmer's gun

# Run, rabbit, run, rabbit Run! Run! Run! #

The bomb hit the chimney, the fire blew out on Vera and a red hot tank,

scalding hot water, come on Mum and Vera.

She was burnt and scalded at the same time.

She was saying, "Mum, it's running up my legs,

"it's running up my arm."

So she said, "Whatever you do, try and get the soil

"and put it on your face, don't let it touch your face."

That advice saved Vera's face.

But her entire body was horrifically burnt

before rescuers could pull her and the rest of her family

from the wreckage.

I just heard the ARP warden say to his mate, "That's the lot, George."

And then I said, "Don't forget me."

So they lifted us out

and then we got taken to the lady opposite's house.

Mrs Ansen, they called her.

But not everyone in the family survived.

12-month-old Peter was found dead but completely unmarked.

He'd been killed by a shock wave

caused by the sheer force of bomb 31.

Peter was in his, like a big black... Like that.

You know, where babies used to go.

Like a shelter thing.

That's where he was, under the bed.

So, and he's still...

Yeah.

I think he was on the draining board in Mrs Ansen's back kitchen.

I think that's where they'd laid him and then we never saw him any more.

Never spoke about it any more, Peter.

Our mum, or dad, or...

-Didn't know where he'd gone, did we?

-No.

I think this is the first time we've ever spoke about it in depth.

-Everything has come out.

-The fire has all come out...

..and I'm pleased.

You see... Oh, God! We didn't have counselling, did we?

We didn't have anything.

They just said afterwards, did you get any counselling?

And they said to old Vera, you know,

said, "Well, there wasn't counselling in them days."

Next door at number 62 the fateful decisions made by Mrs Owens

would also cast a shadow over her family for decades.

Janet Owens grew up knowing nothing about what happened to her family

that night.

I was talking to my sister one day,

I always got on very well with my sister.

I was 26 at the time.

And she said about the three children that were killed in the war

so I said, "What are you talking about, what three children?"

So she said, "Well, you know, our two brothers and sister."

I said, "I don't know what you're talking about, Margaret."

And it was like, oh, right, yeah, of course.

Well, we was never allowed to talk about it.

When the Blitz began, Janet's parents

evacuated two of their children,

eight-year-old Donald and four-year-old Margaret.

The rest, Harry, Doreen and baby David,

had remained at home with their mother...

..whilst their father was out on air-raid duty.

They were all inside the house the night bomb 31 hit.

When the air-raid siren went, Mum took the three children

into the electric cupboard under the stairs.

One of the children wanted some water so she went into the kitchen.

And that's when the bomb hit.

And Margaret told me that she was told the three children

were killed instantly.

My mum survived because she went into the kitchen

which obviously was stronger.

Rescuers found the body of 11-week-old David that night.

18-month-old Doreen was found the next day.

And ten-year-old Harry the day after that.

Soon after the war, the Council rebuilt the house.

Mr and Mrs Owens and their surviving children moved back in

and carried on with their lives.

Janet was born in 1950, nine years after bomb 31

had devastated her family.

I was brought up in the house never knowing what had happened,

never talking about the war.

Never knowing anything about the war because my father would not allow us

to talk about it.

"You don't talk about things like that in this house,

"you don't need to know about it, you don't talk about it."

And, to me, that was normal.

The trauma that left Janet's father unable to talk about the blast

that killed three of his children has left her wanting to understand

more about what happened that night.

It's like nobody cares about those three children.

Enough to talk about them.

I mean, would you like to think that when you die nobody wants to talk

about you? I don't.

I want all my family to talk about me forevermore

but no-one was allowed to talk about those children.

Was they?

It was like they never existed.

Janet has never met anyone outside her family

directly affected by bomb 31.

Until today.

I was brought up on North Hull estate after the war

-and I understand that you two ladies were.

-Yes.

Next door to your mum and dad.

-Taylor?

-Yes.

You OK?

Come on, what do you want to know?

I don't know. I wasn't expecting this.

Sorry. So, you knew my mum and dad and...

Yeah. We knew all the children.

-That were killed?

-Yeah, of course.

Sometimes I thought my dad was a bit mean to my mother...

..and I've always had this terrible, terrible idea,

would his first thought have been,

"Why didn't you go into the shelter?"?

Janet, the reason why we never, we used to go in the shelter,

and then it was damp, horrible and things.

And I think your mums were fed up of getting you all ready,

putting blankets round and rushing to the shelter.

Because having a three-month old baby or around three months -

I'm not absolutely sure how old he was -

and a little two-year-old, and like you say,

if they went night after night after night.

-Yes, yeah.

-And it was March time so it was after winter -

-that would have been horrible in there.

-Yeah, it was awful.

Yeah.

One of the things that's been real hard for me

is this thing about my father, never...

Insisting nobody ever spoke about it in the house, ever.

To me, those three children have been forgotten.

-It's like they never existed.

-If anybody ever said, you'd just say

"Oh, we was bombed out. And we lost Peter, and Mrs Owens lost..."

They've never...

It's always been, "Mrs Owens lost three."

It was just remembered like that.

They was never, ever forgotten.

And where is your brother buried?

In with yours.

Your family. Peter's there, with the other children who got killed

on that night.

When my memory serves me right.

-Where?

-In Chanterlands Avenue.

-So that's where they are, then?

That's where they are, with ours.

The high explosive that fell on the Owens and Taylors

was numbered 31, as part of the national bomb census

run by the Government to try to understand

the enemy's bombing tactics and their effect on the country.

Detailed maps were drawn up, marking out and numbering

each individual bomb that dropped on Britain's towns and cities.

Janet has come to the Hull History Centre to look at the bomb census

material relating to the night her family's home was hit.

This particular map details all the bombs that were dropped on Hull

on the evening of the 13th and 14th of March 1941.

So I believe that's the date that you're looking for.

-That's the date.

-Yeah.

-So, if we have a look, and it's Sixth Avenue...

-That's right.

..isn't it, that you are looking for...?

So, if we look up here we can actually see the bombs

that were dropped on Sixth Avenue and in that area on that evening.

We can see...

That's the bomb that you are looking for.

Yeah. 31.

And of course the damage didn't just occur where the bombs dropped,

you know, there were shock waves went across the other streets.

So many lives affected.

Yeah. And yet my mum went on living there.

And Dad.

How hard...?

I don't know, maybe that was their way of coping, I don't know.

Sorry.

My father decided that he didn't want to talk about the war

any more. Was he suffering from what we now call, is it P...?

Post traumatic stress syndrome? You know, if this was happening today,

he would be diagnosed with that.

And, you know, they didn't really get much help, did they?

No.

If the adults who survived the Blitz were too mentally scarred to

speak about their experiences,

it was even more unusual for the voices of children to be heard.

But the archive also holds a small collection of essays

about the Blitz written by schoolchildren in Hull.

None of these essays refer to bomb 31,

but they do give a unique view of the air raids.

Here we have the essays that were actually written.

So if you'd like to have a look through those.

"What happened to me and what I did in the air raids.

"When the sirens go, we have to go into the shelter

"in case the aeroplanes come over and drop their nasty bombs.

"When the all-clear was sounded, we all gave a sigh of relief.

"When I went home...

"I have no home to go to. I felt as though I could...

"just go across to Germany and punch Hitler

"and his Nazi gang in the jaw.

"We heard them dropping the bombs, then the guns started.

"It got worse and worse, and we heard the aeroplanes above.

"In the next terrace, the people began to cry

"and the little children began to cry.

"When it was quiet, my father went into the kitchen...

"..and made a fire and then made a cup of tea for us."

They're invaluable, aren't they?

We're used to seeing the official records.

-Yeah.

-But we're not used to seeing this.

-The the real war, isn't it?

-That's right.

This is the real war.

Arthur Hicks, who lived just two streets from the Owens family,

was a schoolboy during the war.

He was one of the children who wrote a Blitz essay.

Although he escaped bomb 31, Arthur had a close shave

when he and his brother were almost killed by a parachute mine

outside the cinema.

I want to show you something, Arthur.

-Yes.

-See if you remember this.

"Age four..."

Goodness me!

Arthur hasn't seen his essay since he wrote it 75 years ago.

-REPORTER:

-Do you know what that is, Arthur?

Where the hell did you get that?

"What happened to me and what I did in the air raids.

"On our way home, we were passing another cinema

"which was the National.

"When we were about 25 yards past it...

"..it went sky high and it blew us flat.

"There were clouds of smoke,

"the guns blazing away, and there were hundreds of HEs dropping.

"The all-clear sounded at 12.45."

I wrote that.

But Arthur's essay and the other 29 held in the Hull archives

are in fact part of a much larger collection

of around 2,000 Blitz essays written by the city's schoolchildren

in the space of a single week in February 1942.

They are held at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

Janet was unable to find an essay about bomb 31

in the whole city archives.

Oh, look.

But she's hoping that she might find one here

that describes that devastating night.

Oh, look, he's done the search lights. Wow.

He's very...

Very astute.

Oh. It's Beryl. This is Miss Beryl Wilkinson.

Oh, Miss. She's put "Miss Beryl Wilkinson."

Mrs Wilkinson, she was my mum's best friend.

Oh, right. And that 58 was next door to us, the house that was bombed.

"The planes were humming round us, then my father said,

"Jerry's hit something.

"And then bombs were flying all over the place, one hit next door."

"The house came down like a pack of cards."

L Wilkinson. This is obviously the brother.

"We heard the bombs whizzing down and all the people were terrified

"in the shelter.

"And the shelter rocked, and the shelter was full of dust."

My goodness.

"And all the men running...

"..into the bombed house, getting the people out of the ruins."

These two eye-witness accounts of the devastation

caused by bomb 31 are typical of the hundreds of stories

recorded in these children's essays.

Malet Lambert is one of the last surviving schools in Hull

to have taken part in this extraordinary project.

Some of today's pupils have been looking at the essays written

by their counterparts 75 years ago.

"John Matthews, aged 13.

"I ran across our garden and stopped suddenly,

"for there in front of me was a girl

"whose legs were severed from her body.

"I suddenly felt very faint and sick. And with a groan,

"I turned towards our shelter."

"Marion Bird, age 13.

"I don't think I shall ever forget the scene which met my eyes.

"Our house was still stood up and so was the one nearest to it,

"but the next one was half down and the next four,

"and the terrace was not there at all.

"I picked my way through the chaos which prevailed in our house,

"and a tear ran down my face."

"Margaret Jefferson, age 13.

"One plane seemed to be coming straight at our house,

"but crashed about two miles away,

"where I saw after the burned bodies of German airmen,

"and also a black burnt hand of one man who had a gold ring on."

"I could not find any pity for these men after the terrible sight

"I saw they had made Hull to be.

"Such horrible and terrifying screeches,

"we all became very frightened."

They suffocated because the shelter was made of sand.

I was buried, but I still helped to pull out the dead and injured.

It took two whole days to dig the people out.

These Blitz essays, including the accounts of bomb 31,

give a rare child's-eye view of war.

But they weren't just part of an innocent school exercise.

They were commissioned for a very different purpose,

by a government scientist, Professor Solly Zuckerman.

Zuckerman was born in Cape Town, and came to London in the 1920s

to continue his studies in medicine and comparative anatomy.

He made his name in 1932 with a groundbreaking study,

The Social Life of Monkeys And Apes.

I had no idea what my father was doing,

except that he had monkeys in his office and that was kind of fun.

He used to talk to the monkeys,

he had this strange thing with his tongue that he could do -

they seemed to react and used to greet him with great pleasure.

He was really good fun to be with, he was very interesting.

He knew an enormous amount about things

and he didn't suffer fools gladly, at all.

Zuckerman's expertise in anatomy brought him to the attention

of the Ministry of Home Security.

Early in the war, he was recruited to help the authorities

better understand and prepare for the effect of bombs on humans,

as experienced by the residents of Sixth Avenue when bomb 31 fell.

Paul has come to the University of East Anglia,

where his father's archives are held, to meet Professor Ian Burney.

In 1940, the British government commissions a bomb survey,

a survey to get information on every bombsite in terms of the damage to

the physical infrastructure.

What your dad proposes is, on the back of that,

to send out people who are not interested only in buildings,

but are interested in bodies in relationship to buildings

-and where it is...

-For every one of these bombs?

For every - yes, that's right.

And he called this The Casualty Survey.

He had a team of trained bomb site investigators

who went out with specific instructions

about what kind of data needed to be collected,

and what he's interested in is how it is that he can detect

and demonstrate the effects of blast on the human body.

How extraordinary.

One of Zuckerman's findings was that the sheer force of a blast

could cause a huge internal blow to the lungs,

killing people without leaving a single mark on their bodies.

This may have been what killed Peter Taylor when bomb 31

fell on Sixth Avenue.

So your dad's project is effectively to take the immediate chaos

of a bombsite and victims within it,

to turn that initial scene of horror into a set of useful data.

In 1941, Zuckerman's groundbreaking work on the effects of bomb blast

led the government to ask him to undertake a more detailed study

of the impact of air raids.

He chose to survey Birmingham and Hull

because they had comprehensive bomb records.

But Zuckerman's study would be about more than just the physical impact

of the Blitz.

He proposes to extend this survey idea one step further,

and he calls it a psychological - or a neurosis - survey.

This is all part of the government's interest in civilian morale.

They were thinking that one of the worst enemies of morale

was going to be aerial bombardment.

You're telling me my father was asked to do a survey

-on people's morale?

-Yeah.

The government had been monitoring the nation's morale

throughout the war, but now they wanted to get a detailed picture

of how bombing affected civilians mentally.

Zuckerman's idea was to conduct a series of psychological interviews.

He understood that for traumatised Blitz victims,

like Janet Owen's father,

it was hard to describe the impact air raids had had on them.

So he set out to record the behavioural symptoms of neurosis.

Symptoms that today might be recognised as post-traumatic stress.

So he designs a questionnaire. There are 900 Hull dock workers

that are interviewed face-to-face on their experiences

and how it is that bombing has affected their behaviour.

This is just one example.

-So this guy's age 56.

-Yep.

"A depressive reaction with some anxiety features

"following a severe personal bombing experience."

He's been dock master for the last seven years.

In 1941, when Zuckerman was carrying out his survey,

Captain Albert Eastwood was in charge of King George Docks.

Philip Eastwood is Albert's grandson.

He's come to the dock entrance where the family house once stood.

This is where the house was, with the sheds behind it,

and he lived in this house which is, as you can see,

quite a large impressive-looking building, really,

with his family which were his wife, Ethel, and six kids,

three boys, three girls, of which my dad was the youngest, Roy.

A hardened seaman,

Albert had had several near-death experiences

in the First World War. When asked about them by the local newspaper,

he said his motto was "not to talk".

Albert's toughness extended to his family, too.

They lived next to the dockyard police station,

where Airedale Terriers were kept to guard the wharfs.

The Eastwood children always had one as a pet.

My grandad was a strong man.

When one of the dogs, one of the Airedales...

They were all called Peter, every one of them -

his imagination didn't stretch further than that.

Actually bit a postman, unfortunately,

one morning, and my grandad just went out

and got his gun and shot the dog.

I think that sort of summed up his character.

I don't think he was a particularly sentimental sort of bloke.

On the night of May 7th, 1941,

British pilots returning from a bombing raid on Germany

reported seeing the city of Hull ablaze

as they crossed the North Sea.

Hull was being bombarded by 72 Luftwaffe planes.

In just two hours,

they dropped 110 tonnes of high explosives,

and almost 10,000 incendiary bombs over the docks of the town centre.

It was just the start of two nights of heavy bombing

that would leave 450 dead and over 30,000 homeless.

At around 1:45am, bomb 26 was dropped.

A parachute mine, it started its descent towards King George Docks

and the Eastwood family home.

Philip's father, Roy, who was 17 at the time,

was standing just outside the front door with his brother, Ken,

when they saw something caught in a nearby tree.

Ken shouted to everybody, "That's a mine, a landmine, run for it."

The bomb went off...

The house was obviously blown up.

Ken, sadly, was killed instantly. Inside the house, his sister,

Winifred, had a big hole put into her leg, but survived.

My grandma and grandad had taken refuge in the cupboard

under the stairs and they survived.

My dad was out there in the road, badly injured.

His sister, Muriel, was reading a book

and was killed instantly, sadly.

Apparently, she didn't have a mark on her, it was just blast injuries,

and she was just statuesque in her chair, book still in her hand.

Albert seemed to have survived the blast unscathed.

But seven months later, despite his motto being "not to talk",

he gave an interview to one of Zuckerman's team.

His story would be recorded in Zuckerman's archives as Case 1.

Philip didn't know of the existence of this interview

with his grandfather, until now.

"A depressive reaction with some anxiety features

"following a severe personal bombing experience.

"Past history - during the last war, he was torpedoed and mined.

"He was once in icy water for one hour,

"at which incident three of his companions died from exposure.

"Raid experience - he heard moaning and set about digging

"for his children.

"He felt in a mental frenzy.

"He then called for the ambulances and fainted.

"In hospital, he felt terrible, collapsed,

"upset with hearing his wife screaming.

"After being put to bed, he vomited for two days,

"but could not sleep at all during this period.

"He still reproaches himself for not having provided a shelter."

I find that actually incredible, really.

But as I recall him, he did seem quiet and somewhat reserved,

and that didn't seem to be the character of somebody

who had lived the sort of life that he lived.

That totally explains, in very detailed terms,

the reason why that would be.

Probably he was suffering from post-traumatic stress.

It's so stoic and it's so self-effacing.

They don't take any credit for it.

And yet...

..they deserve all the credit, don't they?

Yeah.

Just as bomb 31 had rendered Mr Owens

unable to even hear any mention of the war...

..bomb 26 had left Albert Eastwood mentally scarred for life.

But Albert was only one of the 1,000 or so working-class men

and women of Hull studied by Zuckerman.

Case 31, CM.

General description - single man with a shut-in,

ineffective personality,

who was invalided out of the army after receiving a head injury.

Reaction to raids. He feels safe in the shelter

and has been able to make friends and met girls

for the first time in his life.

Case 38, Miss D.

General description - a single woman who has not been upset by raids,

but who is stupid and easily led.

Case 9, HS.

Raid experience. Several of his relatives were killed

in another shelter - his mother and three nieces.

He had to go round the mortuaries and to identify them.

Personality. Usually cheerful, happy-go-lucky

and does not worry easily, though at the present he looks miserable.

When these men and women of Hull talked to Zuckerman's interviewers,

they had no idea how the information they gave would ultimately be used.

Although Zuckerman's psychological survey appeared to be concerned with

the victims of bombing, its real focus was on bombing the enemy.

In 1941, the British government was split

over how best to use RAF Bomber Command to end the war.

There was growing concern over the effectiveness of RAF bombing.

It was found that only one in four RAF bombers struck

within five miles of their target.

Some argued it was time to abandon precision raids

on key German military and industrial targets

and adopt area bombing -

the indiscriminate bombing of German towns and cities...

..with the express purpose of breaking the morale

of the German civilian population.

Churchill was inclined towards area bombing,

as was the man about to be appointed head of Bomber Command,

Bomber Harris.

A lot of people do say that bombing can never win a war.

Well, my answer to that is that

it has never been tried yet, and we shall see.

FA Lindemann, Churchill's scientific advisor, was in favour, too.

But as this policy was contentious, he wanted scientific evidence.

Lindemann turned to Solley Zuckerman and asked him

if he could answer a blunt question...

How many tonnes of bombs does it take to break a town...

..not just physically, but mentally?

Zuckerman's psychological study of Hull

provided the perfect basis for finding out.

The devastating consequences of bomb 31 and the thousands of other bombs

dropped were analysed in a bid to provide an answer.

The survey is written up and is what we have here.

So, "Summary of Conclusions..."

"There's no evidence of breakdown of morale for the intensity

"of the raids experienced by Hull or Birmingham."

So the headline there in capital letters is,

"There's no evidence of breakdown of morale."

This is good news for anybody who is interested in the nation

coming out successful in the war effort.

But in terms of it being useful information

in order to support carpet bombing, this is problematic.

But there's a twist in the tale here,

because Lindemann actually used it and, to some extent,

distorted the information in order to make it a case for...

-Carpet bombing.

-..carpet bombing.

Yeah. This document says that this amount of intensity

of exposure to air raids did not break morale,

however it does not necessarily say that no amount of intensity

will break morale.

Seizing on this ambiguity, Lindemann sent Churchill a memo,

now known as the Dehousing Paper.

"Investigations seem to show that having one's house demolished

"is most damaging to morale.

"People seem to mind it more

"than having their friends or even relatives killed.

"On the above figures, we should be able to do ten times as much harm

"to each of the 58 principal German towns. There seems little doubt

"that this would break the spirit of the people."

This is depressing, isn't it?

Yeah. So, what Lindemann has done is to take

what is actually quite a careful and nuanced analysis

that your father worked out and sort of taken what he wanted out of it.

Lindemann simply concluded that if the bombing intensity

inflicted on Hull and Birmingham had caused no breakdown in morale,

then ten times that number of bombs should do the trick

on German civilians.

Area bombing raids went ahead,

a decision in which Lindemann's use of the psychological survey

of the Hull Blitz lent a powerful stamp of scientific approval.

What followed was the destruction of Cologne, Hamburg

and other German cities, including Dresden.

Rod Clayton grew up in Hull during the Blitz.

We were going into the Morrison shelter virtually every night.

It was very frequent.

When I was a little bit older, later on in the war,

the bombsites around, we used to play in the bombsites -

it was great fun to do that -

but obviously a lot of damage was done at that time.

Rod's father, Eric, was a mid-gunner on a Lancaster,

and was stationed at RAF Wickenby in Lincolnshire.

Eric and his crew set off on an area bombing raid.

Bombing Nuremberg, similar load, 4,000lb high capacity.

1,000lb bomb.

Mixture of incendiaries.

But failed to return.

They were shot down by a German night fighter.

It was hit several times, I think,

and caught fire, obviously trying to crash-land,

and the report from the villages,

they saw the aircraft circling around.

They did see one paratroop come out and opened,

but then candled again and collapsed.

On the body the villagers found the next day was this photograph.

So I was five when my father died.

Rod's elder brother, Derek,

was another one of the Hull schoolchildren who wrote an essay

about the Blitz.

"What happened to me and what I did in the air raids."

It's my brother's report here.

He's aged 13 years.

"The sky all over the town was a mass of red

"and the night was filled with screams.

"Two whistling bombs had dropped also, but only one had exploded.

"In that piece of German work,

"four men were killed and one little boy of seven died of shock.

"Then we heard something which makes your blood run cold -

"it was the whistling bomb echoing in our ears and bringing destruction

"with them and killing defenceless women and children."

Derek's essay was also part of Zuckerman's psychological survey,

the same survey that was used to provide a scientific rationale

for area bombing.

For Janet, these essays are a poignant reminder

of what bomb 31 cost her family.

That's what you come to realise, that,

like we've said before about this one bomb, it was only one of many.

But the impact it had...

I might have been reading one from my brother,

Harry, if he had survived.

If Harry had lived to write an essay describing his fear in the Blitz,

its intended use would have been to test the theory

that German civilians could be terrorised into surrender

by aerial bombardment.

What the government was doing was studying the population of Hull

in order to get a sense of how they were being affected

and developing their own policies accordingly

of how they would then carpet bomb German civilians.

-Children like this.

-Hmm.

I find that horrifying.

I'm sorry, I don't know if I should say that,

but I find that horrifying, because...

It's just that, you know, it's just that expression, "carpet bombing".

Kills innocent people...

..and children.

Over the course of the war, nearly 500,000 tonnes of Allied bombs

were dropped on German cities.

It's estimated that 353,000 German civilians were killed,

including tens of thousands of children.

At the end of the war,

Zuckerman was asked to analyse British bombing strategy.

He concluded the bombing had not broken the morale

of German civilians, but had diverted resources away

from more valuable military targets -

thereby possibly even prolonging the war.

Although Zuckerman found little proof of psychological breakdown

as a result of the air raids on Hull,

for many the legacy of the Blitz will be far wider-reaching

than anything that could be noted in a two-page profile,

or expressed in a child's essay.

Doreen, Tina and Janet have come to the Northern Cemetery,

where their brothers and sister are buried together in a communal grave.

When bomb 31 fell on Sixth Avenue 76 years ago,

the ripple effect of that one bomb would last for decades...

..just as it would for the many thousands of other bombs

dropped during the Blitz.

A bomb falls on a Scottish tenement.

I went to bed at night a boy, I wakened up a man.

The community of Clydebank is torn apart.

It was the largest evacuation in the history of these islands.

But in the shipyards...

"He has also been invaluable against Communist infiltration

"through shadow organisations."

..a secret war was already being waged.

Well, well, well!

Daddy, you kept that very quiet!

How were the lives of Germans affected by air raids

when the Allies retaliated?

To explore this and more, go to...

..and follow the links to the Open University.