North East England How We Won the War

September 3rd, 1939.

And families all over the country flock to their radios.

RADIO: '..No such undertaking has been received.

'And that consequently, this country is at war with Germany.'

In that brief moment, life in our country changed for ever.

World War II had begun.

But victory wouldn't be assured by military might alone.

The Blitz, evacuation, rationing,

the loss of loved ones.

The war on the home front meant that everyone had to do their bit.

From the country's women who took on everything - farming,

factory work, even flying Spitfires -

to the nation's auxiliary firemen,

who worked through the terror of countless air raids -

this is the story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

This is How We Won The War.

In this series, I'm travelling all over the UK

exploring how different areas made unique contributions

to the war effort here at home.

I'll be looking at the lives of ordinary citizens

and the incredible efforts they went to throughout the war years.

I've left Scotland behind me

and I've crossed the border into Northumberland.

Today, we've got a chance to explore

what the region in general did during the war.

Coming up, we'll be looking at the biggest air-raid shelter

outside London - Newcastle's Victoria Tunnel.

And this is the real thing?

It is. That's a World War II chemical toilet.

Uncovering the secrets of Churchill's clandestine civilian army.

The idea that we would be secreting some of our own men deep in our countryside

and that they would, if necessary, be killing British citizens,

was fairly revolutionary

and rather dark stuff altogether.

And chopping down trees

with one of the war's forgotten corps, the Lumberjills.

Some were termed Amazon women that were equally as good as the best men at felling trees.

-It's going.

-Timber!

The North East has a history as a major centre of industry,

from the coalmines of County Durham to the shipyards of Tyne and Wear.

But with the onset of war in 1939, manufacturing massively increased.

Great Britain lost more than four-million tonnes of shipping during the war,

and half of it was replaced by a North-East workforce.

But the contribution the people of the region made to the war effort

goes well beyond its industries.

With the fall of France in June 1940,

the United Kingdom was one of the only countries in Europe

that didn't have German boots on it.

But in July of that year, Hitler issued his infamous Directive 16,

his plan for the invasion of Britain.

Now, as you can imagine, Churchill had other ideas.

He was determined that if German troops did get ashore,

they wouldn't have an easy time of it.

# Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler

# If you think we're on the run... #

Local historian John Sadler

has brought me to Druridge Bay on the North-East coast

to explain Britain's plans for ordinary members of the public

in a radical defence strategy.

As invasion beaches, the North East was quite attractive.

It was a very long, sandy coastline,

very close to a major coal-producing area,

South-East Northumberland coalfield.

Newcastle was still arguably the world's greatest arms manufacturing area and location.

They'd have taken that straightaway.

And so the Home Guard would be deployed

as the first line of defence.

The idea was that they would hold the Germans up on the beaches.

We tend to think of the Home Guard, the ubiquitous image of Dad's Army,

but within that, there was a much darker side to it.

There were troops who were much more highly trained.

There was indeed. The Home Guard had, if you like, their own version

of what we now call special forces, who were called the auxiliaries.

A rather innocuous name, but these were young men primarily

who were trained to stay behind,

to create mayhem behind the German lines,

to carry out sabotage and assassination

and who would expect effectively

to be undertaking suicide missions.

Selected from those prevented from going to war

because their occupations were reserved,

these ordinary people would be organised into small, covert units.

They'd be completely on their own, they'd be isolated within their deep dugouts, bunkers.

It's believed this secret army of citizens were issued with kill lists

identifying known German sympathisers

and anyone with knowledge the Nazis might try to exploit.

They'd be reliant on a network of many young women couriers

who'd be their eyes and ears to assess German movements, identify targets

and possibly they'd be responsible for a series of assassinations

of collaborators in the area.

This was all new thinking. The idea that we would be

secreting our own men deep in our own countryside

in specially prepared dugouts and bunkers

and that they would, if necessary, be killing British citizens,

was fairly revolutionary

and rather dark stuff altogether.

It was essential the auxiliary units remained undetected,

even in their own communities.

Their family were not ever to know. Not their mother, not their father,

not their wives or girlfriends, that they were to be activated

because that person could be interrogated or tortured.

They were made aware that their life expectancy,

once the Germans had invaded, once they were activated,

was no more than 14 days.

They were assuming an enormous responsibility.

And if the Germans had invaded,

these men would have risen to the test, I think.

This whole area is dotted with remnants of our World War II coastal-defence system.

Some less obvious than others.

Along the outside, it looks like a shepherd's hut, doesn't it?

It certainly does. It looks totally innocuous.

This pillbox disguised as a cottage is a perfect location

to hear more about the auxiliaries.

Now, then, yeah, this is interesting, isn't it?

-Not a lot of space in here.

-Not a lot of room, no.

And what have you got tucked away in here?

"Highworth's fertilisers. Do their stuff unseen until you see the results."

"The Countryman's Diary 1939."

This doesn't look very dangerous to me.

There's an irony in the title.

The results would have been very surprising for any gardener.

That is a DIY manual to sabotage assassination

and generally creating mayhem behind enemy lines.

Page one - burning fuses, detonators.

Detonating fuses, high explosives.

-I don't know about your garden, but there's none of that in mine.

-No.

That's extraordinary.

The auxiliaries may have been made up of ordinary members of the public,

but they had help from some less-than-ordinary sources.

-Anthony Quayle, I gather, had a role to play up here.

-He did.

We mainly know Quayle as a famous, renowned British actor

but he was actually a British army officer.

He was a special operations executive.

And he was responsible...he was the co-ordinator,

the training officer for all of the auxiliary units in Northumberland.

-Gladiators to fight as soldiers?

-Why not?

We'll teach your legionaries how to kill!

When we see him on the screen handling these sorts of things,

he was a man who knew what he was doing.

In a way, yes. He's an actor, a great actor,

but as you say, he was immediately familiar with any wartime role

because he had done it for real.

We did a lot of training, which was very interesting,

and all this stuff you see here on the table.

we had these Thompson machine guns and Winchesters here.

Let's have a look at this because it's secretly disguised as a gas pipe,

-but inside, there's a dagger.

-Very alarming. It frightens me.

The method Quayle used to train his men in the art of ambush

has passed into local legend.

So Quayle got to where the ambush was, nobody there,

stopped the car. "What the hell's going on?"

Got out, walked around the car and got back in.

There were two guys behind him,

one guy under the car and another in the passenger seat.

And they all had guns on him as soon as he got back in.

He never saw them coming.

For film star and ordinary citizen alike,

the idea of fighting a guerrilla war against an occupying Nazi force

was a formidable prospect.

When you think about what they were going to give up,

it would have been so easy to lie low,

just stick your head down below the parapet and hope it all went away.

Think of the terrible sacrifice the French Resistance suffered,

and the Norwegians and the Poles.

That gives us an idea of what would have happened here.

I am filled with admiration for these men and women and those who helped them.

By 1941, there were some 5,000 auxiliaries

poised to tackle any German invasion.

Now, of course, thankfully, that never happened

and they were never put to the test.

But we do know that the skill and bravery of ordinary young men

demonstrated just how determined we all were to win the war at any cost.

I'm now heading further down the coast to Newcastle,

where the shipyards and other vital industries

meant the city had to find imaginative ways

of protecting its people from Hitler's bombs.

Providing enough air-raid shelters for the local population

presented an almost impossible challenge.

But luckily, the very thing the German air force were aiming for -

Newcastle's industry - provided an intriguing solution from its past.

In 1842, a two-and-a-half mile tunnel

from Newcastle's Town Moor to the quayside

was opened to transport coal beneath the city.

-This is extraordinary, isn't it?

-This is the first entrance...

Ian Holloway is one of the tunnel's curators.

By 1935, every city in the country had been given a government document

saying that in the event of another war,

because people in the know realised there was going to be one,

they wanted air-raid protection

for the population in the cities.

The Victoria Tunnel was an obvious solution

and was refitted as an air-raid shelter at a cost of £37,000.

The doors were open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

So people just came in here. And they sometimes came in for other purposes

-than using it as an air-raid shelter.

-Such as?

A good umbrella if it was raining and you wanted to walk

from this part of Newcastle into the centre of the city.

Extensive work was carried out to ensure

the tunnel functioned effectively and safely.

They had to make sure that if the tunnel had been penetrated,

the blast wouldn't have travelled along a two-and-a-quarter mile tube,

taking everybody and everything with it.

So they built in a series of these blast walls.

-So it's a fair wiggle, I imagine.

-It is indeed. Wind around it.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's amazing. The acoustics are extraordinary, aren't they?

Yeah. And then we get the very echoey bit here.

And it wasn't just safety the planners had to think about.

The toilet facilities had to be provided for men and women separately

in well-ventilated areas away from the main thoroughfare.

-There's no ventilation whatsoever.

-Nor a lot of privacy either.

Very little. There would be posts and sack clothing wrapping around.

And this is the real thing?

That's a World War II chemical toilet.

I have heard of a great sense of community spirit that thrived here.

Yes. This shelter was well known for that.

The humour and the good atmosphere, the friendliness

is something that came up time and time again

when we interviewed people who were down in the tunnel.

We have evidence that people did stake out a territory

and that families preferred to meet from different parts of the city,

they would come together always in the same part of the tunnel

each time there was an air raid.

Basil McLeod was 12 years old

when the bombs started to fall on Newcastle.

What do you remember about the atmosphere down here

in terms of people getting on with one another? It's a tight spot.

Actually, they got on quite well.

There was a lot of neighbourliness and a lot of jovial backchat.

And one or two women would grumble about rationing

or shortages, that sort of thing.

But as a youngster, we just did our own thing.

We walked off with our friends, school friends

from one entrance to another.

Occasionally, there was a singsong going on.

-Really?

-Yeah. Someone came down

after spending a few hours in the pub, you know,

he'd come down singing.

Complaining that the Germans had interrupted his drinking habits.

They came before time was called.

What would it have been like during the war? Very similar?

Yes. We have a story from somebody who was in in WWII

who said it smelt like a damp tent

after you've been holidaying in the rain for a week

and you'd been sharing your tent with a dog.

But they had a humorous phrase - it was better to be damp than dead.

-And that probably is a truism.

-I should think it is, yeah.

Throughout the war, the North East endured repeated bombings,

killing more than 700 people in the Tyneside area alone.

But the children who emerged from the safety of the tunnel

viewed the bomb-ravaged city very differently to their parents.

It was an adventure playground.

In fact, we looked upon it as a time...

an adventurous time of our lives, you know.

We weren't frightened.

Although we were taught to be sensible, to take cover.

You didn't stand outside watching the fireworks going on,

otherwise you could get killed.

It never occurred to any of my friends or myself

that we would lose the war.

Things were bad, but we had always thought for some reason

that, um...we would get through it.

The Victoria Tunnel saved countless lives.

But up the coast in North Shields,

another shelter would become the site

of one of the worst disasters to hit the North East.

One single bomb, one aircraft,

direct hit on a public air-raid shelter.

107 people died.

41 of those were children under the age of 16.

The Wilkinson building was a well-known landmark in North Shields.

The lemonade factory itself was a Victorian three-storey building

with a substantial basement area.

And it was decided in 1940

that it would make a useful air-raid shelter for the public.

On the floors above it, the heavy equipment, the bottling machinery,

thousands of glass bottles, vats of chemicals,

all of which would have nasty repercussions

should the building suffer a direct hit.

The Saturday evening of May 3rd 1941,

began like any other for the people of North Shields.

The pubs were busy, the cinemas were busy.

Lots of people out and about. It was a warm night.

And the public air-raid siren sounds at about 11:12.

SIREN WAILS

There's Mrs Ellen Lee, the shelter warden, at the doorway,

and she's guiding people down into the shelter.

And by 11:45pm, there are 192 people in that shelter.

Little do they know that within a few minutes' time,

virtually everybody in that shelter would be dead

and entire families would be wiped out.

A single German aircraft released four bombs

in the skies over North Shields.

One scored a direct hit on the lemonade factory.

Inside the shelter, the walls and ceilings collapsing,

the dust, the smoke, the debris.

The shouts, the screams and then silence.

As dawn broke the next day,

the full extent of the destruction was revealed.

Incredibly, 85 people made it out alive.

Although difficult, for some of the survivors of that dreadful night,

rare footage like this offers an opportunity

to share their common experiences.

All the time, there was screams.

Everybody shouting.

It was horrible.

My Auntie Kathy says,

"I'm going to go through into the middle to talk to our Edith.

"I won't be five minutes."

Just as she walked through the door, the bomb dropped.

She was killed instantly.

I was in shock for two years.

Bad time, I had.

I was knocked off the bunk and felt a terrible blast on the side.

And, um...everything was dark.

It was...streamed with dust.

There was debris all over the place.

It was, you know, just absolutely black.

Robert William Suthurst was just 11 years old

when the bomb brought the building crashing down

around him and his family.

I heard me brother Tommy crying in a funny sort of way.

And I says, "Come on, we've got to get out of here, like, you know."

He says, "I can't walk."

And, um... I says, er...

"What's the matter? Why can you not walk?"

He says, "Me leg, me leg hurts."

So, um...I felt his leg

and there was a large lump of...flesh

had been taken out of his leg.

Well, um... It just shocked me.

I-I, you know, I-I, I just... My God.

You know, I-I just couldn't understand,

you know...what, what had happened.

Although seriously injured, Tommy was to survive.

But the brothers lost their mother that night.

As the Air Raid Protection or ARP teams arrived,

ordinary people were becoming heroes.

Norman Darling Black was a first-aider with an ARP rescue party.

He managed to squeeze into one of the basement spaces

and he spent four hours, inch by inch

trying to rescue a trapped girl

who was just pinned down by tonnes of masonry.

And finally, he managed to extricate that girl

and then went back in to try and rescue a similarly trapped man.

George Newstead was a sergeant with the ARP rescue squad.

And he spent hours trying to rescue a man

who was trapped by metal and fallen debris.

The decision was made to actually amputate the man's foot.

And whilst the doctor went away for his surgical implements,

Mr Newstead gave it one more go

and he managed to jack up that iron girder by a few more inches.

And using a penknife, he cut away the man's boot

and he was able to drag that man to safety.

Clarence Burdis, again with the ARP,

he spent four hours unaided,

passing survivors through the hole

that he had made into relative safety.

All three men received medals for their outstanding bravery.

But a fourth hero that night has gone largely unrecognised.

Ellen Lee was a considerable local character, and six foot tall.

It was her shelter and she ran it properly.

She wouldn't allow courting couples

or any kind of misbehaviour in the shelter at all.

Now, Ellen Lee, despite being very badly burned in the explosion,

shoulder-charges one of the walls repeatedly until the wall collapses.

And then she stands at that exit

until 32 people have clambered to safety.

Positions of utter peril for hours on end,

never knowing whether the building is going to collapse on you.

They were the right people there at the right time.

They had the skills. And more than that,

they were rescuing their own neighbours,

their own friends, their own community.

For the children who survived,

the trauma of that night has never left them.

I would never go in a shelter again after that.

When the air raids came,

Dad used to shove us in a cupboard under the stairs.

Even today, I'm frightened. I couldn't go in a lift by meself.

When I look back, I wonder how there was as many saved, to be honest.

An entire community struck by unimaginable loss

came together in the face of catastrophe.

It's that sense of shared resolve,

of determination to get on with life regardless of its hardships,

which really goes to the heart of how we won the war.

Outside the cities, the North East's countryside

became home for more than 40,000 child evacuees

in September 1939.

In Bishop Auckland, County Durham,

teacher Matthew Walton was part of the Mass Observation Project.

An archive of more than 300,000 pages of personal writings

held at the University of Sussex.

His diaries offer an insight into the lives of citizens

struggling with the reality of war.

Friday, September 1st, 1939.

School at usual time, 9:00am,

to find out arrangements for receiving evacuees.

Find everyone on edge.

More, I think, from inevitability than anything else.

On the way to the station, handwritten newspaper placard put out.

"Germans Bomb Polish Town."

Immediate reaction, "Well, lads, it's on."

Train arrived on time.

This contained about 300 elementary schoolchildren and teachers

who had to march about half a mile to the nearest elementary school,

there to be sorted and sent off in buses to surrounding villages.

After counting them, we let them go.

The teachers, without exception, felt impelled, without a word being said,

to load themselves with children's suitcases

and haversacks and accompany them.

It brought home to the majority for the first time, I think,

that this was not a nuisance, but the beginning of something terrible.

The day was unbearably hot.

The little ones, six and seven, staggering along with bundles as big as themselves.

To me, it revived my feelings of the Spanish War,

Those endless trails of refugees

only brought home to OUR doorsteps.

Elsewhere in the North East,

even the forests were contributing to the war effort.

In 1942, the government set up the Women's Timber Corps,

affectionately known as Lumberjills,

to help keep up with the war industry's massive demand for wood.

# We're the girls who fell for victory

# We're the girls who chop the trees... #

Jo Spouncer became fascinated with the Lumberjills

when she started working for the Forestry Commission.

They were quite novel.

I've heard stories about Chopwell Wood, where we are today,

where some of the local people would come up to the forest

to see the girls at work in the forest.

-Because nobody could believe it.

-No. I think it was quite surprising

to see women at work.

And I've seen photographs with the girls

with dungarees rolled up to their thighs with their leg showing,

which was...you didn't do that in that day.

More than 8,000 Lumberjills felled trees all over the country

to produce everything from essential pit props

to parts for fighter planes and even the packaging for bombs.

But getting all that timber out in all weathers was far from easy.

Most often than not, they'd walk two, three, four, five miles

to the forest where they were working.

It was snowing in the winter and I've read stories about girls

standing up eating their packed lunches

with the snow up to their knees because there's nowhere to sit down.

And that's basically how they grabbed their lunch.

Before the war, few women had entered this male-dominated world.

You think, how on earth could women do that all day long every day?

There were some women that were termed Amazon women

that were equally as good as the men, as the best men, at felling trees.

The corps was disbanded in August 1946,

but they had forged a path for future generations of women.

Two of today's Lumberjills have agreed to show me

the way it was done during the war.

So, are we finished on this side, or a bit more?

Yeah. The process is to go gently at first.

-Obviously, the teeth are very big.

-Yeah.

So...both people just pull.

So just gently pull it back towards you.

It is harder than it looks, actually,

just to keep the saw working efficiently.

It does get snagged quite a lot, doesn't it?

It's because it bends, as well.

It's quite tricky to keep it straight.

How many trees do you suppose

they were expected to cut down as a team every day?

We think each pair of ladies

would have cut down about 30 trees.

Exhausted, I stepped aside to let the experts take over.

-It's going!

-Absolutely.

OK. Just push on it very gently.

Timber!

Well done, guys. That's absolutely brilliant!

The women who left their comfortable homes to take up hard, manual labour

miles from friends and family

embodies the story of the North East in World War II.

Like so many people up and down the country,

they put their lives on hold

to help the country achieve ultimate victory.

It's the sort of self-sacrifice we should never lose sight of.

On the next How We Won The War, I'm in God's own county, Yorkshire.

I'll hear how railways were key in keeping our war effort on track.

Ammunitions were moved by rail.

The raw materials to build all the aerodromes were moved by rail.

How Sheffield's Women of Steel endured horrendous conditions

to keep our troops supplied.

We knew the boys were wanting what we were doing,

so we just got on with it.

And how a four-legged mascot kept a squadron's spirits high.

They went off on a mission and they shot down six enemy aircraft.

And they all thought, "Wow, this is really making a difference here."

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