← Dan Snow's History Hit
Dan Snow's History Hit
The Blitz Beyond London
00:42:31
Newcastle, Liverpool, Glasgow, Cardiff - examining the air war beyond the capital.
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- [00:00]
Dan Snow
Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard iii. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyit.com subscribe.
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- [03:18]
Dan Snow
May 31, 1942. High among the peaceful rolling hills of Kent, the quiet midnight air begins to vibrate with a low synchronized thrum. The heavy unrhythmic heartbeat of a predatory aerial armada. Finally, out of the dark, this emerges. A swarm of Heinkel HE111 bombers. Glass nosed cockpits gleaming in the moonlight. Distinctive spade shaped wings slicing through the clouds as they rumble over the sleeping countryside. Inside the cramped metallic bellies of these machines, the German bomb aimer is not looking for munitions factories or ports or political nerve centers. Instead they're peering down through that glass nose, peering at an ancient undefended landsc below. Tonight their purpose is somehow much more sinister. This is one of the raids of the Baedeka Blitz, a cynical retaliatory campaign launched by the Nazi regime in Germany to rip the cultural heart out of Great Britain. Tonight their crosshairs are locked firmly onto the wellspring of the Church of England, Canterbury Cathedral. As the armada roars over the outskirts of Canterbury, thousands of white hot magnesium incendiaries rain down on a city completely unequipped for total war. The city has ancient narrow streets packed with Tudor and Jacobean and Georgian timber homes. They catch like kindling. The historic heart is engulfed by a roaring, suffocating firestorm. Over 800 homes and historic buildings are pulverized, gutted in a matter of hours. The roads melt, the local water mains rupture under the high explosives, leaving fire crews scrambling for sources of water to fight the inferno that sweeps through the city. Rising out of this ocean of black smoke and orange flame is the great silhouette of Canterbury Cathedral. Bombs do hit the cathedral. They pepper its roof. They burn at a terrifying 2,000 degrees centigrade. If they can melt through the lead roof and get amongst the centuries old oak rafters below, well, the entire monument will go up. But standing between the cathedral and that total annihilation is not the British army. It's a tiny breathless band of local volunteers. They're armed with nothing but ladders and hand operated stirrup pumps, buckets of sand. But they're fueled by adrenaline determination. They scramble up the narrow stone spiral staircases directly into the jaws of the inferno. Up they climb onto the exposed roof. Bombs still landing around them Shrapnel tearing through the air, these volunteers do the unthinkable. They don't run for cover, they run towards the white hot flares. With blistered hands and blinded eyes, they physically scoop up the spluttering devices and they toss them off the edge of the roof. They watch them plunge down into the dark courtyards below. They're fighting for every metre squared of roof. They're fighting for their history. When we think of the Blitz, that gigantic aerial assault on Britain, we tend to picture the iconic images of London. The Tube shelters, the subway stations full of people sleeping on the platforms, the smoke rising past St. Paul's Cathedral. But the reality of the air war, the bombing war, extended far beyond the capital. It was truly a national trauma that stretched from the shipyards of Glasgow down through the docks of Liverpool and onto the historic rooftops of Canterbury. Today we're gonna be talking all about that and talking about the Blitz, the aerial assault on Britain. We're gonna be joined by the bestselling historian and former RAF navigator, John Nicholl. He's been on the podcast many times before. Go and check out his past episodes. He's a real live wire. He' both a brilliant communicator and a very knowledgeable historian. And he's written his latest book, when World War II came home. In that book, John strips away the sanitized wartime propaganda to reveal the raw, gritty reality, to reveal what it was like to be in cities right across Britain on the home front. Let's get into it. John, good to see you again, buddy.
- [07:57]
John Nicholl
Thank you so much for having me on, Dan. This is becoming a regular experience as you're very kind, my friend.
- [08:02]
Dan Snow
Well, no kind, your box office mate. You're kind to us for writing these wonderful books and coming on the show to talk about them. So we're gonna sort of get beyond London because in some ways, the effects of the Blitz were probably felt even more terribly on the smaller communities and cities that experienced them. I mean, you're from Tyneside. Is that where this story, in some way, your interest begins? In some ways, yeah.
- [08:25]
John Nicholl
So, I mean, the premise of the book is twofold. So first of all, people talk about the Blitz in terms of it being in London for a few months either side of Christmas 1940. And so if you look at history websites, you know, it'll say that the Blitz started on perhaps the 6th of September 1914, went through to the 30th or 14th of May 1941. But if you were being bombed on the at the end of August in 1940, or if you are being bombed in July 1941. Nobody talked about the Blitz in those terms. They didn't say, oh, well, this isn't the Blitz anymore, this is something different. And it's quite interesting because those dates, September 1940 to May 1941, were simply created by historians. Dan, I don't know if you know any historians, but they were created by historians in the aftermath of the war. They're just not real. And so the first premise is that it just wasn't a few months, it was the whole of the war. The second premise is that people have got the image of the plucky EastEnders, the smoke rising around St. Paul's Cathedral, and they think it was just London. And if you look at the enormity of the attacks across the United Kingdom, from Aberdeen to Exeter, from Dover to Glasgow, whole communities were shattered. And that's why I chose this particular subject this time. And it starts with my mum in North Shields, who was a war child. She was, what was she, 11, I think, when the war started. And she never spoke about her experiences, Dan. She never really talked about the war on Tyneside other than one major thing. She said there was an incident in North Shields, which is on the banks of the Tyne near the coast where I grew up and where she lived with her family. There was an incident where whole families died and I never explored it. I never went any further until after her death a few years ago. And I was mulling this over. I was back in Newcastle visiting my sister and I decided to investigate this. And that is when my absolute astonishment was piqued. So I found this incident. And it was one incident, North Shields, and I'd never heard of this. I'd never been to this site and I'd passed it on countless occasions on my way home from school. May 3rd, 4th, 1941, there was an air raid shelter in the center of North Shields, about 2, 300 yards from my mum's house. And the other thing my mum had said was that my grandmother, her mum had said, you'll never be evacuated and we'll never go to an air raid shelter. If we die during the war, we'll die together at home. That's the two things I remember about my mother's wartime experiences. And the air raid shelter was under the Wilkinson's lemonade factory in North Shields. Very famous landmark, a wartime landmark. And on the night of the 3rd of May, 1941, there's 192 men, women and children sheltering in the air Raid shelter, which was just the basement in this lemonade factory and a bomb hit it, one German bomb hit the factory and it went through all of the floors, exploded and it brought all the machinery and all the floors down into the basement where 192 people were sheltering. And 107 people died that night. 107 in one incident, Dan, including 43 children and whole families perished. And that was the incident that my mum mentioned in passing and never spoke about. And that is where I start with the book. How could this happen? How could I not know about this? One of the largest losses of civilian life during the war in one incident. How could I not know about it? And that's where it all starts and where my interest started.
- [12:15]
Dan Snow
As you say, you passed it every day. That's crazy, isn't it? For people that don't know, people aren't lucky enough to know. The Tyne and what goes on on the banks of the Tyne, north and south. Tell us why the Germans were interested in dropping bombs on that part of the world.
- [12:29]
John Nicholl
Well, like all of those major industrial sites, whether it was Liverpool, whether it was Glasgow, whether it was Tyneside, it was the heavy industry, so the shipbuilding, all of the heavy steel, metal industry of, you know, when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, of which Tyneside, Liverpool was famous for its shipbuilding, when I was going to school, the train went along the Tyne from North Shields to Newcastle and the thousands of cranes, shipyards, the tank works, they were everywhere. And of course the Germans were targeting that massive heavy industry. And it wasn't the days where you now see what's going on, God forbid, in the Lebanon or in Iran or in Israel, where we see largely guided weapons, let's just leave it like that for the moment. This was just because of the nature of war. Here was area bombing to destroy the heavy industry. And so if you lived anywhere, whether you lived on the time near the shipyards or five, ten miles away from the time you are going to be bombed. And one of the things that I got was the North Tyneside bomb map, which again, you know, kind of start part of my exploration. I got the bomb map from the war and you look at this thing and somebody has gone to incredible lengths to plot every single bomb, not the incendiaries, just the high explosives bombs that fell on North Tyneside and you can see every single one. So you can see the one that fell on Wilkinson's factory that night. You can see that bomber dropped four bombs, one dropped on the banks of the Tyne and exploded, but didn't do any damage. One landed in a street nearby and killed two people in a house. One landed in another street nearby and didn't explode and one landed on Wilkinson's factory. But if you draw out your lens, which is what I did a mile away, the streets that I grew up down in their council estate, there's dots everywhere around my council estate. When I was growing up, I didn't know any of this. Everybody had been affected by the war in the 60s and the 70s when I was growing up, nobody talked about it. And here were that. You could see that where I played kick the can and hide and seek, people had died where I walked to church or to my primary school every day. And the buildings were slightly different. Slightly different roof, slightly different brickwork. Well, I've never thought why that would. And then you can look in the archive. You see at the end of your street, three people died in an Anderson air raid shelter there that night. And then you could find their stories. You can look in the archive and you can find their stories. And you can find Pathe news footage of the houses at the end of my street with a union flag flying outside and people digging through the rubble and girders and rafters and you can see the blown up Anderson shelter. That's history. I love history, Dan, and I know that you do. History was happening in my street, on my council estate, and I didn't know till I started writing this book.
- [15:30]
Dan Snow
And you've got astonishing eyewitness testimonies in this book. I was so struck by Millie Matthews, who was a little child in that bunker. I mean, it's just astonishing. I mean, if you're a child, I mean, is Millie still with us? Yeah, yeah, she's still with us, yeah. There's people amongst us, walking amongst us today who are still the survivors. Experience this blitz. It's amazing, isn't it? But tell the world about Millie.
- [15:53]
John Nicholl
So Millie's the same age as my mum would have been if she was alive. So Millie's 99. She'll be 100 in December. I'm going back up to her birthday party in December, back up to my hometown. Millie was exactly the same age as my mum, lived just a couple of hundred yards away. They didn't know each other, but Millie became my guide to what my mum would have experienced, but never spoke about. So Millie was in the factory, in the basement that night with her brother, with two of her cousins, with two or three of her aunties, when the bomb went off and I spoke To Millie and her brother, who is so. Millie's 99, her brother will be 96 or 97, lives in Canada now. I spoke to him and they told me what it was like to be in that area shelter. And so two things happened, Dan. First of all, it was astonishing to hear those stories, but it really brought to me the reality of being bombed. But it awoke my experiences about me being bombed in 1991 in Baghdad. And it was just such an astonishing awakening to listen to them talking. But Millie and her brother Stan were both in that area shelter when the bomb went off. And Stan said he was. He'd been reading a copy of the Beano on one of the tops of the bunks and they'd fallen asleep and people had been playing the accordion. There were people singing, there were people smoking, there were people chatting. Everybody fell asleep and it was quite dark and both of them said there was no noise, there was no flash of light. All that they can remember is waking up amidst dust. And Stanley said he was half hanging off a bed, he was bleeding. And Millie, who was about 10, 15 yards away, said her school friend was pulling her, trying to get her off the bunk and said, we've got to get out, we've got to get out. And that was so in the seconds after the blast had gone off and people had been killed and the building had come apart. And then they said, and then the screaming started and then the shouting started and they were buried in the rubble. And Millie, who was. Would it been, what, 13 then? 13. So she was one of the older ones, she said the kids were holding onto her, they didn't know what was happening. There was an airid shelter. Warden Ellen Lee, a legendary figure, I have since discovered an 18 stone lady, Dan, who were trapped in, barged a wall down, ran into a wall like a rugby would be, a prop, you know, player, a forward, barged the wall down, got round to one side and dug through some of the rubble. And then a rescue workers were appearing and she was shouting back into the shelter because she'd been in a different part and Millie was still trapped. Can you hear us? Or in a Geordie accent, can you hear us? Can you hear us? Can you hear us? And Millie said, yes, yes. And she said, come to the light. She had a little torch. Come to the light. And Millie said she was gathering children together and they're crawling. She said, I don't know if I was crawling over rubble or bodies, but I was crawling up towards this patch of light that was coming through a Gap in the wall and Mrs. Lee was digging through the rubble and Millie was passing children through and then her brother appeared and there was a little bit more light as people were shining torches in and her brother was covered in blood where he'd been hit by debris. And her cousin, his leg was not quite hanging off but he'd been really badly injured. They were screaming and Millie was saying get out, get out. And her brother wouldn't leave without her so they then got out together. But one of her cousins was killed that night and her auntie, the auntie that she'd been staying with who'd taken her to the shelter was killed that night. And they didn't find the body for I think four or five days back then Dan, because there was a 107 people killed. You just went to the local. Well it wasn't a mortuary, it was at the local bath house where the bodies were being stored wrapped in burlap sacking. And she just opened the sacking to see if it was your relative that was missing. So it would say lady, black hair, wearing this coat or something like that. And so that's how they discovered that one of her aunties was killed. One of her other aunties that was there was badly injured, had to have a metal plate put in her head. Her sister, her five year old sister Mona was there, simply was missing, didn't know where she was. She wasn't amongst the dead or she wasn't amongst the dead that were being gathered in one place. I don't think they found her sister for a week 5 year old. Can you imagine one of your children being missing for a week five year old and they found Mona in a shop, in a nearby haberdasher shop. Mona had got out of the bomb blasted air raid shelter, was wandering around alone, didn't know anybody. So a lady had found her, picked her up, collected her and taken her home. What she hadn't done is reported any of this to any. I mean you know the chaos and confusion there probably wasn't the systems but there were lists of the missing and there were lists of the dead. She'd taken her home and they found her in this haberdasher shop dressed in the most beautiful clothes. But they found her after. So can you imagine her mother, the fear and the worry, not knowing where your, your five year old daughter was. It was an astonishing time Dan, and the stories are astonishing. They shine a light onto a period of time in our history where we think we know the story but we
- [21:20]
Dan Snow
really don't And Millie was. You write that she was traumatized. You've experienced bombing as well. It does seem to me from reading lots of accounts, there is something about bombing. Is it the feeling of helplessness, the scale, the noise, the fact the earth is moving? It's a different kind of fear, a different kind of trauma to someone galloping towards you on a horse with a sword, which I no doubt is terrifying as well. But there's something about that long range bombing. There's nothing you do in return. You're passive. Seems to work on you in a particular way.
- [21:50]
John Nicholl
I think that what we now recognize as post traumatic stress disorder, but certainly wasn't recognized in any way or understood back then, affects people in different ways. People talk about their mental health now, but nobody talks about mental health during the blitz. They just didn't understand. So Millie was talking about this. And again we discussed the reality of being bombed. And you pick up on a very interesting point because you are passive. You are having something done to you that you're simply waiting to find out if you are going to survive or you're going to die. And on a couple of occasions when I was being bombed, I thought I was going to die. And then when you don't, it's simply you're moving on to the next stage. And Millie was like that as well, thinking she's going to die. And when she's not simply moving on because she was in the middle of a war and she talks about the immediate aftermath, the weeks, months, and indeed years afterwards, she couldn't leave her mother's side. When her mother went out, Millie went with her. When her mother went to the toilet, her. Millie would sit outside until she'd come back out of the toilet. She would hang onto her skirts, thunder and lightning, the crashing of thunder. Millie would jump up in fear. And she was seeing exactly my symptoms done. So my symptoms from 1991 and where are we now? 20, 26. So for her, what is that? 85 years after her experience? For me, 35 years after my experience, we have the same, same indications of post traumatic stress disorder. So I saw Millie a few weeks ago when we had a big boot launch up in North Shields and she was on stage with me talking about telling her story. And she said, so when she's on a bus, she has to be at the front of a bus in case something happens, so she's not got people pressing behind her, crushing her to get off. And I have that same thing if I'm on a train or something like that. She hates crowds. So when she goes to the Eldon Square Shopping Center, I don't know if you've been there. Down in Newcastle, she hates going there because of the crowds pressing around her. She still jumps if fireworks go off, and I do exactly the same. It's funny how you're affected by these disparate decades parted experiences.
- [24:10]
Dan Snow
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- [26:17]
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- [27:17]
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- [27:55]
Dan Snow
Let's move on from the wonderful Millie and all our best and love to her on her 100th birthday. Let's move across to the West coast particularly two West coast ports were astonishingly badly hit. Should we start with Clydeside? So another great river we've gone from the Tyne, we've gone from Tydeside to Clydeside. People know about the city of Glasgow that sits there, but other places as well. And again massive shipbuilding yards. Was it the John Brown and co yards where HMS Hood, Duke of York were built. The Royal Navy's finest warships at that point. Biggest and biggest big gun battleships I guess at that point. Astonishing ferocity of bombing that took place
- [28:33]
John Nicholl
here over a period of weeks and months around that 1940, 1941 period. But Glasgow and Clydes bank Clydesdale suffered its worst night for the whole of Scotland March 1941 when there was a concentrated effort to hit the industrial heartland. So you're not just hitting the docks, you're hitting the nearby areas, you're hitting the workers, you're hitting the housing. And nowadays there would be serious questions asked about that. But back then at night with very limited aiming capabilities, that was the way that war was waged and we shouldn't bulk from that. We can talk about it but we were doing the same to the industrial heartlands of Germany. Later on in Hamburg and places like that, we were doing the same. And so March 1941 I think a thousand people died over the course of 2436 hours bombing, that's a thousand people dying. And then over the rest of the war, I think Scotland was attacked about 500 times more. And so the death toll from the Blitz through the whole of the wartime period for Scotland was two and a half thousand people killed and 8,000 people injured, tens of thousands made homeless. And you just don't hear about it. But there are some astonishing pictures from Glasgow of people walking through the rubble with prams, with trolleys, carrying their possessions, trying to get to safety. And we just don't really hear about those sort of incidents when we talk about the Blitz as a wartime experience.
- [30:16]
Dan Snow
Well, I've heard about it in your book. The fact that you quote, which is, there are 12,000 houses in Clyde banks. This is just as west of Glasgow, just as the Clyde widens and heads towards the sea. Of those 12,000, only eight remained, completely undamaged. That's an astonishing fact.
- [30:31]
John Nicholl
And again, can you imagine a Blitz now? Can you imagine the trauma and the terror and the reality of 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 people being bombed out of their home, A thousand people being killed in one industrial town in one night? And then take yourself to Glasgow or to Liverpool or to Aberdeen or any of those big industrial towns, Manchester. Can you imagine the next morning what you'd be doing with your family? Where would you go? You know, there's this. It's not, you know, we've got mobile phones, you know, I suppose our families are more disparate now, they spread all over. Where would you go? Where would you be taken to? What would be the. The governmental infrastructure to try to support you? Well, it was more or less limited. Some people would say it was almost non existent back then because it was so widespread. Where would you go? What would you do? Well, back then, you kind of just got on with it and prepared for the next night, prepared for the next night of horror, the next night of terror. That's one of the things that really came through to me when I was reading the accounts down, when I was talking to people, it was relentless. It didn't stop. It went on and on and on. And it wasn't just 1940, 1941, depending on where you were in the country, whether it was the baby Blitz, whether it was the Baedeker raids, whether it was the V1 attacks, whether it was the V2 attacks, it went on and on and on.
- [32:01]
Dan Snow
Well, we'll come to some of those. Let's quickly just go down the west coast a little bit, get to Liverpool. Why was Liverpool so important? Why did the Germans want to hit Liverpool again?
- [32:08]
John Nicholl
Docks, industrial heartland. So Liverpool was hit on many occasions. So started, I think in the September, November 1940, massive raid just before Christmas 1940 and then a huge series of raids in May 1941, I think over eight days, the first eight days of May 1941, Merseyside attacked every single night. So I sometimes kind of feel bad about quoting these facts and figures, but it does help to put it into context. So eight days, first eight days of May 1941, 1,900 people killed, another near 1500 seriously wounded. 70,000 made homeless. 70,000 made homeless in Bootle. 8,000 of 17,000 houses destroyed or damaged. And you're talking about almost half of a district, half of an area, half of a town on Merseyside. It is so difficult for us to understand what it must have been like.
- [33:20]
Dan Snow
So at that point of the war, May 1941, something like three or four transatlantic convoys are arriving every week and the figure is a third of all wartime imports entering the country through Liverpool. So obviously the Germans enormously keen to disrupt that flow of imports. My grandfather's on a Canadian naval ship and he witnessed, I think at least one night of that Liverpool Blitz from anchored in the Mersey. Extraordinary. Keep going down the west coast, poor old west coast, Cardiff and Swansea. And this is slightly different, isn't it? This is about energy.
- [33:49]
John Nicholl
Well, huge power supplies, huge generating coal mining. All of these places that you and I are talking about are all on a river, on an estuary, in a dock. They all are major transport hugs as well. And so again, being hit not on a regular basis, but being targeted depending on what stage of the war they were at. And also what we would now call de housing, basically attacking the ability of the enemy. And we were the enemy of the Germans, obviously, and they were the ability to wage war and the means of war production. And so everything, I'm going to use this term advisedly, was fair game. And we did the same back to the Germans in the subsequent years when we opened that front, bombing the Germans. And so all of those places across the UK that were involved in the means of waging war, they were all back then legitimate targets.
- [34:51]
Dan Snow
And as you just quickly alluded to with the so called Baedeker raised Baedeker guidebook, Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York, Canterbury. So for people from outside the uk, those are some of the most beautiful and historic centres in Britain. And it's tragic what was done to so many of those heritage centres of those cities. And interestingly, that wasn't necessarily a Military target in a conventional sense, not big wartime production. That was an idea about attacking a sense of Britishness, of Canterbury, the mother church of the Church of England. It's about striking a blow in this more subtle and perhaps equally important front of the war. And that's people's minds. That's about identity.
- [35:32]
John Nicholl
Very much so. So the Baedeker raids were in response to some of our attacks on German historic towns. And so that was kind of April to June 1942. So depending on what your historical context was, you know, the Blitz finished in supposedly May 1941. Well, not if you are in those historic towns in the summer of 1942. They were. So there's a book, Baedekker's Great Britain, the Handbook for Travelers. And basically the Germans, if you remember the Grand Tour, when we would go over to Europe and see the historic sites of Europe, well, the Germans would come here and they'd use the Baedekker's Great Britain Handbook for Travelers and that listed all of the great, largely cathedral cities. So anything Canterbury, Exeter, Norwich, and they were attacked. And so it was in revenge for our attacks on the great German cities, but also sending a message to the people of Great Britain. Nowhere is safe. We can attack you in your homes, we can attack your cathedrals, we can attack your historic sites, we can attack your beautiful buildings, whether you're in Bath or in Exeter. Canterbury, June 1, 1942. And I think Canterbury, I think it was ordered in retaliation for an RAF raid on Cologne in the days before. And so 130 HE high explosive bombs, nearly 4,000 incendiaries dropped on one raid. Doesn't sound much. One hundred and thirty bombs, 4,000 incendiaries. But it largely leveled the medieval part of Canterbury. Interestingly, of course, the cathedral for some reason survived. 40 people killed, 100 people wounded, 800 buildings destroyed. Corn exchange, the city market. Anybody who was around that time at the Rose Hotel, the cathedral was hit by incendiaries. But there were fire watchers, and the job of a fire watcher was, as the name would tell you, to watch for fire and to then to alert the authorities. And they saw that incendiaries landing, started burning. They rushed at the cathedral, rushed into the roof space and managed to extinguish them. And so the cathedral was a survivor of the Blitz, but many people were not
- [38:01]
Dan Snow
more Blitz after this, folks, don't go anywhere.
- [38:11]
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- [39:11]
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- [39:47]
Dan Snow
Yes, we should say, John, we've raced ahead of ourselves a little bit because there's, roughly speaking, two kinds of bombs that are being dropped, aren't there during the so called blitz? There are big high explosive bombs that blow things up that can bring the facades of buildings down and things like that. But they're also these incendiaries which are very small, aren't they? They're like little bomblets. Just clarify what's the difference?
- [40:08]
John Nicholl
So you've got what we would in the military called he bomb high explosives. So basically it is a steel iron case filled with explosive and so it can be fused in the different ways. And I talk about these when I'm talking about the bomb disposal guys because they're faced with different types of fuse. So the bomb can go off when it hits the ground. An impact fuse, it can be on a time fuse so it hits the ground and then ticks merrily away for an hour, a day, two days, and it can explode afterwards. But basically. And they can have anti tamper fuses so it can just lie there and do nothing until somebody touches it or tries to disarm it. And then it kills the bomb disposal people or kills children who kind of, you know, the next day are wandering around the bomb sites. The he bombs are designed to basically blow buildings apart, to kill, to destroy. But then what you're also doing is dropping thousands and thousands of incendiaries on an area. So Canterbury is the classic example. So 130 high explosive bombs, but 4,000 in centuries. And they're kind of milk bottle sized. You know, if you remember your school chemistry lesson, Dan, when you're burning magnesium and you can't put it out, you have to deprive it of oxygen, you can't put water on it, it just makes it worse. And so these things just burned. And they then set fire to, you know, if they'd gone through the roofs of buildings, they set fire to the buildings, the buildings would be blasted apart. So they set fire to the contents and creating a firestorm, which, of course, you remember the, the images from the Blitz with the firefighters, the firestorm created there. It's what we did in Hamburg, notably within centuries. So you're creating a firestorm to burn the industrial heartland of a country, which sounds terrible, but that's what we were doing. So they're dropping two different types of bombs, high explosive and incendiary.
- [42:05]
Dan Snow
Now, John, you went into this big debate about what it was really like for people during the Blitz, not just in London, but around the country, because the way we were taught it in the years after the war and the decades that followed is that Britain actually developed a Blitz spirit and that we all pulled together and that people collaborated and cooperated and shared and obeyed the law and behaved in a humane and decent fashion. And in fact, Hitler had hoped to unleash violent social forces, unleash rebellion, revolution, factional unrest. In fact, he did the opposite. And those bombs made a more civil and polite society. Having studied all these sources now and talked to so many people, where do you stand all this? What was the reality of the communities that been bombed?
- [42:52]
John Nicholl
Well, it was a community spirit. You could call it the Blitz spirit if you like. And you can see plenty of examples of this. The bombing of Coventry would probably be one of the classic examples. And so November 1940, you know, again, Coventry is one of the big images that people have of the Blitz, where, you know, you had four and a half thousand homes destroyed, the fires that destroyed Coventry. And in the aftermath, there are stories about women coming out and the fires are still burning the next morning and they've got tea urns on their, strapped their back and they're going out and they got sandwiches and they're feeding the firefighters and they're helping to rescue people when they're helping to clear the debris. So that definitely existed. But there is no doubt that the concept of a Blitz spirit was something that was encouraged by the Government and was not always there. There were looters, there's no doubt about that. There are clear examples of looters. There are clear examples of people selfishly hoarding and not helping their neighbors. One of the examples that I talk about, some of the crime and there was real crime, I mean, there was real crime, never mind the non crime incident. So there was a massive increase in unmarried pregnancies, which was a big thing back then. There was a massive increase in venereal diseases, a huge increase in the occurrence of sexually transmitted diseases. But one of the incidents, and I really kind of focus in on as a. An indicator, they were really quite nefarious people who used the blackout for their own hideous aims. One of the stories I tell is of the blackout Ripper, who's an Air Force guy, in actual fact, who used the blackout to stalk the streets in and around London, murdering, raping, mutilating women, that he used the Blitz and the blackout as a cover for something that he already was. He was clearly a murderer and a rapist, but he used that as a cover. And the story, what he did, how he was discovered, his execution during an air raid in London, in actual fact, is an incredible story. So the Blitz spirit was there, it existed, but it was certainly something that was hyped up by the government at the time, which chose to, in many cases. The government didn't inform the people about many of the horrors that were going on in the bombing, and they certainly weren't looking at some of those aspects either. So the Blitz spirit existed, but they were adjuncts to that as well.
- [45:30]
Dan Snow
So the Blitz is usually, we usually talk about the Blitz, as you say, and ending in May 1941, as Hitler sends the vast majority of his air forces to the east to take on the Soviet Union. But it will go on through the war. There'll be V1 and V2 attacks. What do you think is the legacy of the Blitz? We talked about the legacy that lives on in the minds and the lives of people like Millie to this day. Presumably the legacy you can see as you drive through cities around Britain now, you can see that legacy.
- [45:58]
John Nicholl
You can absolutely see it. So, and if you go to London, St Paul's Cathedral, obviously an iconic image of the Blitz. Of St. Paul's Cathedral, there's a famous image of St. Paul's Cathedral with smoke rising in the background, but St. Paul's Cathedral, Cathedral survived, but if you know what to look for. So, first of all, there's a couple of very small memorials in the grounds of St Paul's Cathedral to the Blitz generation that I didn't know about until I went to look for them. There's a memorial to the firefighters just across the road from St. Paul's Cathedral. And if you go around the back, you can look at the shrapnel marks on the wall. There are still World War II shrapnel marks spreading up the wall in our own church. I think you've been to St. Clement Danes, the RAF church on the Strand, Dan. So that was bombed and destroyed during the Blitz and rebuilt in the aftermath and it is now the RAF church. And if you go there, if you know where to look, you can see the shrapnel marks going up the side of the wall where bombs exploded and they're still there. And they're anything from kind of golf ball size to football size chunks out of the wall that have never been repaired. You can still see that if you know where to look. So, you know, I did that in Newcastle, where I live in North Shields when I was going around looking at the bomb plot map in different areas you can see what were either Edwardian Victorian housing and then every now and then there's some what are now relatively new houses and they just stuck in the middle. You'd never say, oh, look at those two completely different houses on that row. But my daughter can see why that is. I can find that photograph of the before and then I can see the building that's collapsed and I can see people getting their possessions out. And now I can look now and I can see the 1950s, 1960s, quite kind of industrial building that's been put in the place. So you really can, if you're interested, you can really track where your own area was affected by the German bombing during the war.
- [48:10]
Dan Snow
About a decade ago I was in Hull and I went to see the last building in Britain that was still derelict as a result of the Blitz. And it was in the, you know, 21st century. It's a cinema in Hull. They've actually, since 2024, they've fixed it up so it's now community center. I think it's a memorial. But you would go and they would still be behind hoardings. The windows are blown out. It looked a bit, you know, there's plants growing out of it. That was blitz damage that was yet to be repaired. I got to see that. That was an astonishing thing. So anyone, if you visit Britain and Northern Ireland, you will see, well, you'll see landscapes, city states completely transformed by the Blitz.
- [48:46]
John Nicholl
Hull is what is called the forgotten city.
- [48:49]
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- [48:49]
John Nicholl
Because very few people this. I mean, interesting that you talk about that. So for some reason it was never named during the war in any of the bombing and lots of places weren't, but it was just called, I think the government referred to it as an unnamed north east coast town. But Hull, again, Port City was absolutely battered. 1200 people killed, 3000 injured in Hull. And we talk about the blitz being those kind of few months around Christmas 1940. Last civilian casualties in Hull, March 17, 1945. March just weeks before the end of the war, a lone German bomber swept along Holderness Road in Hull, simply dropping its bombs, killing 13 people. The last civilian Luftwaffe casualties of the war. Hull. People just don't talk about that.
- [49:42]
Dan Snow
Crazy.
- [49:43]
John Nicholl
But you know, so these tiny little places all over our nation suffering till the final days of the war. Suffering, yeah.
- [49:51]
Dan Snow
Well, thank you John for another brilliant book from you. What's it called? Make sure everyone knows the title.
- [49:56]
John Nicholl
It is Blitz when World War II came home.
- [50:01]
Dan Snow
Thank you very much, John Nicholl for coming on the pod and talking about it.
- [50:05]
John Nicholl
Thanks Dance. Always a great pleasure. I really appreciate it, mate.
- [50:10]
Dan Snow
Thank you so much to you for listening. Listening to this episode of Dan Snow's history Hit. We could not make this podcast without you. That's actually true. So make sure if you want to keep it going, that is to hit follow in your podcast player right now. You'll get new episodes dropped into your podcast library automatically. By the power of tech, you can listen anywhere you get your pods, Apple, Spotify, even BBC Sounds. Imagine a world. Just imagine you never miss an episode of this podcast. I mean it's there. The technology makes the that possible. That could be your reality right now if you hit follow. See you next time.
- [50:53]
Optum Advertiser
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- [51:22]
John Nicholl
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- [51:55]
Dan Snow
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