Dan Snow's History Hit - The Blitz: An Alternative History

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

Between September 1940 and May 1941, the German Luftwaffe relentlessly pounded British cities with bombs in an attempt to force the British to surrender. Ultimately whilst killing thousands and causing extensive damage the bombing offensive failed. The morale of the British public was largely undimmed and war production was never seriously impacted. The Blitz has become a key part of the British national psyche with many celebrating the 'Blitz spirit' with people coming together and helping one another during the crisis. But, as with much of history, the reality was much messier and complex. Spivs and looters profited from the chaos, people explored new ideas and sexualities, and there were new opportunities for women. In this interview taken from our archive, Joshua Levine author of The Secret History of the Blitz discusses the myths and realities of the Blitz and the social and political changes it brought about.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're going deep back into the archives, the History Hit vault. We've spun the big silver circular handle thing, we've slid back the vault, we're deep underground. Like Indiana Jones when he puts the Ark of the Covenant somewhere it's never going to be found, and we found this from our archives. This week in 1940 was the start of the Blitz on London, the air assault on London as Hitler directed Luftwaffe to try and smash Britain's imperial capital, to bring the British government to their knees, make them see sense, force them to negotiate a peace with Hitler so he could turn east and achieve his dream of Lebensraum, of empire in the east.

And so Luftwaffe bombs fell on the docks of London on the 7th of September 1940 and for most of the days following right up to and after Christmas. It's an event that's formative in Britain's National Characters Day. It's become mythologised. So we thought we'd talk to Joshua Levine back in 2016 in this podcast about the Blitz, the real history, the secret history of the Blitz. Joshua Levine has written prize-winning history books. He's written about the Second World War and other subjects. He was the historical advisor of Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan's epic adventure movie set during the Dunkirk evacuation of May, June 1940. Love that film. So he is the guy to tell us all about it. You can listen to other episodes in the deep, deep archives of this podcast only at

History Hit TV by becoming a subscriber there. Only the most recent pods are available for free on the rest of the internet. The real goal, the real archive is buried away there on historyhit.tv. Go there, historyhit.tv, subscribe, you get the world's best history channel, you get hundreds of hours of TV documentaries, you also get all these podcasts. It's a sweet deal. It's amazing. I'm so glad we invented it. In the meantime, everyone, here is Joshua Levine on The Blitz. Enjoy. How do we define The Blitz? The Blitz runs from September 1940 to May 1941. Is that about right? Yeah. Officially, that's the case. It's September 7th through to 11th of May of 1941. So it's a period of eight and a half months. You know, that is the official

period that's gone down. But of course, you know, there was bombing outside of this. I went to Cambridge recently, for example, and met people who had remembered bombing in June 1940, before the Blitz had officially begun. You know, nine people were killed there, including a girl who'd been evacuated away from London to be safe. So it's actually quite vague. The whole period, even though that's officially what it was, and there's no doubt that September the 7th was the day that Herman Goering changed his focus from bombing the airfields and the Battle of Britain to bombing the cities. The fact is that people died outside of this period. So you can't necessarily say the Blitz ran from day X to day Y. Okay, but they've had to give it some official date. So that's a good

place to start. Now, why did the Blitz begin? So let's just say France falls to Nazi Germany in the early summer of 1940. Britain stands alone. Churchill refuses to either surrender or make peace with the Germans. The Germans attempt to knock Britain out of the war. I think that's an important phrase, isn't it? It's not necessarily invade. That's right. They tried to knock Britain out of the war.

Initially, they do so by attacking the RAF airfields, by attacking coastal trade. But then in September, as you point out, the strategy changes. So briefly, why does Germany start the Blitz? Why do they start attacking cities and bombing civilians? Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head there. The fact is that what Hitler, what the Nazis wanted was to bring Britain to heel. So whereas for the British people, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz are two very, very different things. They happened in different places. The Battle of Britain happened over their heads in southern England. The Blitz was an actual attack on their towns and

cities, on them. People became, as is often said, frontline troops. For the Germans, I don't think it was quite that distinction. It was an attempt. First of all, the Battle of Britain was the attempt to lure the fighter command of the Royal Air Force up into the air to knock it out so that an invasion might become possible. Well, when that didn't succeed or when it seemed that hadn't succeeded, they simply changed their focus slightly. They decided to attack the cities. And the idea was, you know, partly to knock out the centers of government, to knock out the location of trade where supplies came in, but also to affect civilian morale. The idea was, because there hadn't been such a concerted bombing attack before in history. So the idea was that if sufficient bombs were dropped on a civilian population, then that population might well

rise up against its own government. It might insist on peace being made. It might insist on surrender. So this was a change of focus, but not really such a huge change in German strategy, in German attitudes. It was an attempt, basically, one way or another, to bring Britain to heel, to bring Britain under the power of Nazi Germany. And when that didn't seem to succeed by May 1941, that's when Hitler's focus moved elsewhere, moved to the Soviet Union. So the war against England, Gagin-Engeland, came to a halt at that point. Of course, the wider war didn't. The wider war was just kicking off. But the war where Britain and its colonies and its dominion were standing alone, that's where that ended.

Now, Josh, I want to pick you up because that's, for me, one of the most interesting things about the Blitz is this was the first great aerial bombardment, sustained aerial bombardment in history. So no one knew what was going to happen. Would the population rise up? Would the government fall? Would war weariness or would the economy literally collapse? And there had been a very effective bombing against the Dutch. The Dutch had sort of bowed out of World War II after about two days, particularly after Rotterdam was very badly bombed.

That's right, Rotterdam. So people thought, if you're sitting in the summer of 1940, you think, well, air power is this new thing. Strategic bombing is now a thing. It's never really been done before on a strategic level. This might work. That's absolutely right. I mean, it was, you know, there were genuine fears. In fact, all, if you think about it, there'd been quite heavy bombing during the First World War, what's become known as the first blitz on Britain with Zeppelins and then Gotha bombers. blitz on Britain with Zeppelins and then Gotha bombers. And it did seem, I mean, the British public really were scared by that. You know, there was genuine panic in Britain at the fact that,

you know, these bombers were coming over, these airships were coming over, and there didn't seem any way to fight back against them. So that was an initial experience. And then there were other, there was, you had Guernica, you had Rotterdam, as you said. And these, even though these were large-scale attacks, they weren't concerted. They weren't over a long period of time. So by the time the Second World War came around, we'd had limited, well, by we, I mean people, had had limited experience of bombing campaigns. And there'd always seemed to be a sense that if they were cranked up somewhat, then real damage could be done, real damage to civilian morale above all. And so it was completely untested. When the Second World War started, the idea was,

it was very common, that when a great bombing campaign begun, the civilian population simply would not be able to put up with it. People would be killed in huge numbers. People who weren't killed would be driven mad. And the population would simply insist on peace being made. It wouldn't be able to tolerate it. So how did Britain deal with this massive assault on its civilian urban centres from September 1940 on? Because obviously for those people listening abroad, you can't underestimate the importance of the Blitz here in the UK. It's a word that's entered our language, the Blitz spirit. We survived the Blitz. You always hear that said after every terrorist attack or after every, well, so many occasions in our political life and our cultural life. We like to think that we sailed through it,

no problem at all, everyone working together. And we all summed up the blitz spirit and got on with it. How true is that? As with most of these things, it's both true and untrue. I mean, it all depends on who you speak to. It depends on the people you're talking about. For those who's, first of all, about 43,500 people were killed during the Blitz. So that's a large number, huge number of people. If you were involved with that, if your family members were killed, if you were wounded, if you lost all your possessions, then the Blitz to you was a dark and terrible time. But that obviously is not the whole story, because for many people who lived through this period, they found that their lives completely changed.

It was such a time of extremes, I think, extremes in all directions. I mean, people didn't know if they would be alive tomorrow. People suddenly found themselves living different kinds of lives. These sort of extremes absolutely changed the way people live, changed the way that people's attitudes to their lives, their attitudes to each other, changed the whole sort of tenor of people's lives. So for some, clearly the Blitz was a dark event, a terrible event. For them, Blitz spirit is utterly meaningless. For others who, because of this extremity, found themselves meeting each other, talking to each other, sharing each other's clothes, being in shelters with each other, meeting members of different classes, actually meeting each other for the first time. For those

people, they actually have positive memories of the Blitz. And then, of course, you have these extremes. I met one lady who told me an extraordinary story. Being on a bus in London, this was during the height of the Blitz, and she was traveling through, I think it was Chelsea and Westminster, and she was on the bus, and she was at the back, and at the front of the bus there was a man who was on his own. She was on her own. Neither of them knew each other. They heard a stick of bombs coming down.

The driver obviously heard it as well. He veered off the route. The bomb exploded elsewhere. He cut back on the route. And while the bomb had been coming down, the man at the front had got bomb exploded elsewhere. He cut back on the route. And while the bomb had been coming down, the man at the front had got up, slowly walked to the back and held hands with this woman. And then when they were safe, he'd got up again and walked back to the front of the bus and sat there. The two of them never even looked at each other. They never shared a word. That to me is blitz spirit. That to me is in its absolute purest form, people coming together,

people in danger, people suddenly putting aside all their day-to-day differences and coming together in common cause. And that is what blitz spirit was. To me, having spoken to a lot of people, blitz spirit was absolutely real. But the extremes, as well as bringing people together, also forced people apart. People started behaving in ways they never had done before. I'm talking in terms of crime. I'm talking in terms of sex. I'm talking in all sorts of different ways, even in tiny little ways. A woman who went into a pub on her own. Before the war, she never would have done that. But at this period, she was willing to do it because why not? People's attitudes change, people's expectations change, what they were willing to put up with and what they considered normal all changed. So this was a period where

socially, sexually, politically, criminally, in so many different ways, attitudes changed and we were moving forward to something completely new you've given us a big sweep there um what about some of the we all we all get talked about in school how altruistic and wonderful everyone was and helping each other out what about some of the darker sides of the blitz because there was actually a lot of looting there was a lot of theft you know when properties were what are some of the stories that we brits don't like to tell ourselves about the blitz well i mean i think you know first of all we're what are some of the stories that we Brits don't like to tell ourselves about the blips? Well, I mean, I think, you know, first of all, we're all people, we're ordinary people. So it's not surprising that given opportunity, things like this happen. So

if you think about it, during the blips, you had, you had a blackout. So there was instant opportunity. You had police who, there weren't as many police around, a lot of police had joined up and a lot of their places had been taken by special constables, and police had new roles. They had to show up at bomb incidents. So they found themselves very stretched. You had a black market. You had all, suddenly morality shifted. People didn't mind so much doing things that before they would never have done. And in fact, you know, the wartime regulations came in and suddenly criminalized people. So, you know, you had the well-known, you know, turn that light out sort of crimes of people leaving lights on in the blackout. And you had the well-known sort of food crimes. But you had other things as well, extraordinary arbitrary crimes like driving a light-colored car

or having a car radio. I spoke to a woman whose chicken hadn't been weighed before she received it. And so she became a criminal overnight because of that. And this was also arbitrary. Suddenly people who had never even considered breaking the law before became criminals. And when these lines start to blur, then once again, you have attitudes changing, shifting, and society begins to change. crime um that that i've come across someone that really seems to sort of highlight that the extremity of the blitz is is a a man who used a bit he had a small gang four people and they used the blitz as an opportunity to to break into warehouses and steal safes and that's what they started doing they did it as often as they could and you had this this this gang who waited in the midst of a blitz at a warehouse in London Bridge. And they crept in, they broke into the warehouse, and they picked up the safe. And they were on their way out during the raid with the safe when a bomb dropped nearby and threw them all up into the air. They were all okay.

So they started to run. And as they ran away, one of them, who was known as Spider, noticed a little girl in a window about three stories up, and she was trapped, and the building was on fire. So Spider sort of shimmied up the building and took the girl in her arms, and then tried to find a way down. In the meantime, you had the fire engines coming. You also had a policeman coming. And they managed to get Spider and this girl down. And a policeman was there at the bottom saying to Spider, you know, congratulations, you've saved this girl's life. You know, can we have your details, your name, your address? We'd like to recommend you for an award. Now, Spider was a cat burglar. Spider,

the last thing he wanted on earth was to give his details. So he just made his apologies and made off. And I think this is fascinating to see how, you know, in the flash of a bomb, somebody goes from being a thief to being a lifesaver. That is this kind of, that's what this period is about, this intensity, these extremes, the fact that people didn't know what their role, what they were going to be doing from moment to moment. And it's why I think so many changes were able to come out of the Blitz, because people started behaving and thinking differently. Let's talk another, I mean, Hitler deliberately, as I understand it, targeted the East End, because he hoped that the largely poorer people of the East End would rise up against the elite

who lived in West London, because they were suffering more from German bombs. And the Queen Mother famously said when Buckingham Palace was hit by bombs during the Blitz, thank goodness for that. Sorry, the Queen said, thank goodness for that because I can now look the East End in the face. How close, although we like to talk about Britain now, everything was very socially harmonious. How close did we come to real public order, perhaps proto-revolutionary incidents during the Blitz? My own view is that we didn't come particularly close to that. I mean, I think a lot of people were very disgruntled. And there's no doubt about it, as you say, when the East End was being very heavily hit. And it didn't at first seem as though, you know, any of the West End and certainly not the sort of more expensive boroughs were being hit.

And a lot of people were very, very disgruntled. There's no doubt about that. But I think we fell far short of what some people feared, which was it was going to actually cause a schism in society. I think, you know, undoubtedly the fact that the Buckingham Palace was bombed and bombed more than once, you know, it bombed a lot was, was, was, you know, in a way, in a sort of public relations sense, very, very good because it did, um, it, it, it did suggest that we're all in this together. And I think the Royal family and those advising them were, were, were actually probably, you know, up to a point quite pleased about that. But I think it's a bit of a red herring to say that we genuinely came close to any kind of popular uprising. It was more a fear before the war and in the early stages of the Blitz that that would be the case that's remained with us. We know, we remember that that always was a fear. But I think in practice, we were quite a long way from that. I was very struck by that because it's not something that I ever thought about.

But then you read there were a few incidents when an East End mob turned up at the Dorchester and said, you know, cause trouble. And then also I was reading some letters in the archive the other day from Edwina Mountbatten, Sir Lord Mountbatten's wife. And she said they were, she was very happy. She was living at Kensington Palace and she made lots of suggestions they'd be protected there and I thought against too that invading Germans and I suddenly realized that she was actually talking about against the mob against the people if society starts to break down under the pressure of German bombardment so but I think this is more to do with the fear this is more to do with the fear of that happening that you know people people became very insecure people became very paranoid.

And it's not surprising. I mean, people who had been in positions of power and positions of relative comfort were nervous that society was going to upend and a period of misrule was going to take over. So I think it was more to do with fear than actual events. But when you talk about what actually happened in terms of the mob from the East End coming into the West End, they went into the Savoy, actually. It was the Savoy shelter that they took over. And it wasn't actually a mob in quite the sense that people think. It was actually organized by a communist counselor down in Stepney called Phil Peratin. And it was quite an ordered invasion. What he did basically was bring a group up from Stepney and they entered the Savoy and they went

into the shelter and they basically said, we're not going to leave for a while. We're just going to make our point that we don't have deep shelters. Because what he was complaining about at that point was this really interesting idea that the government was very, very keen on everybody sheltering separately. You know, the idea of Anderson shelters in everybody's garden, which people were granted, and they built them and they were covered in corrugated iron. And they were actually pretty good unless you got a direct hit. You were generally pretty safe in an Anderson shelter. And then later in the bits, they brought in Morrison shelters, which were actually inside the house, big sort of sturdy cages you could eat your dinner off and then shelter inside after it, because a lot of people

preferred to sit under the stairs. So those were where people sheltered individually. But that's what the government wanted. That was their policy. But what a lot of people wanted, and certainly before the war and in the early part of the war, they wanted these large, deep shelters, which they considered much safer. And so at the beginning of the war, the government decided people were not going to be allowed to shelter in the underground. They were worried that by lots of people going into these deep shelters, a kind of troglodyte community would build up. People would become so comfortable living their sort of dirty lives underground that they wouldn't want to come up again. It would become a sort of anti-establishment society living underground. And this is, you know, depending on how you look at it, but perhaps it's a rational fear or perhaps it's a kind of patronizing fear of the working

class mentality. But either way, the fact was that the authorities, the government decided that people would not be allowed to shelter in the London Underground. And, you know, I found the cabinet records of this, where the chief of the Metropolitan Police actually says, what do we do if people come down? Do we open fire on our own people? And in the end, that's sort of started moving in that direction. First of all, people started buying tickets and just staying down in the underground. And then after that, people started actually trying to force their way in. So you had this invasion of the Savoy shelter by Phil Perattin. And then people started forcing their way down into, I think it was Liverpool Street and I think Hoban. And eventually, the government decided there's nothing we can do about this. Yes, we don't want people

going down. Yes, we want to keep the tubes open for essential business, but we are going to have to give into it. And of course, now it's one of the sort of totems of blitz spirit, the fact that people did go down, people did, you know, a lot of people had a wonderful time down there at the end of the war. A lot of people, you know, particularly older people, had been very lonely, hadn't had any kind of community. They suddenly found themselves having these underground communities. And at the end of the war, even when people were safe, they really didn't want to come back up at all. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. Talking about the Blitz, more after this. Hello, I'm James Rogers, and over on the History Hit Warfare podcast,

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Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. it's one of the great tragedies of our human condition that it takes hardship and danger and pain and suffering to remind us about what's really important and actually often people find those some of the most enjoyable experiences of their lives certainly well i think that's right and out of this pain you see when you talk to somebody who was badly injured during the blitz who lost people and you try and suggest that anything good came out of it you know they quite understand that they get annoyed about

it i mean it's it's you know this was not a good time it was a very black time for many people it absolutely was but for many others they actually found a sense of community for the first time um but it worked the other way you know i found a picture of community for the first time. But it worked the other way. You know, I found a picture of a badge somebody wore saying, I'm not interested in your bomb. You know, because people, the great common denominator this time was the fact people could sit down, the rich, the poor, everybody could sit down and compare bomb stories.

Not everyone wanted to do that. Some people, you know, like you imagine many people today, were just simply, well, no, why should I be interested in you? I'm the same person I was last year, and I'm not interested. So all kinds of people behaved in all kinds of different ways. But I think it is true to say that on a much bigger scale than before, or possibly ever before, people from different backgrounds, with different attitudes, who would never have found

any common ground suddenly did find themselves drawn to each other because they were sharing. They were sharing food, the kinds of food. They were sharing clothes. They were sharing fire watching duties. They were sharing shelter, doing all these things. And they were also in it together, trying to win, well, trying to survive, and hopefully in the longer term, trying to win the war. And, you know, so much of it is touching. I found quite recently, you know, all these documents in Coventry to do with the rebuilding of Coventry after that, because Coventry was very, very badly damaged and almost destroyed the center in November of 1940.

And it's quite strange that the Coventry architect, official Coventry architect, had actually drawn up plans for the rebuilding of Coventry in 1939, before the war. But he'd actually stated at the time, there's very little chance of this happening because you'd have to tear down large swathes of Coventry and no one's going to give me the permission to do that. Well, then in November 1940, the Luftwaffe gave him the permission to do that. They did it for him. And the plans were quickly put in place for the rebuilding of Coventry along his lines. And I listened to this wonderful BBC radio program from 1941, still when the war is absolutely, could go either way, you know, if anything was going against the British. And you hear these people being interviewed about what they want from their new houses. And it is so touching. They're talking that, you know, they want indoor toilets. They want places where they can go to shops and get shopping centers where they can get everything in one go. They want modern appliances. They want refrigerators. It's all so modest what people are

asking for. But what perhaps is most, to me, most moving about it is they're talking about it at a time when really you think because people were being brought together, people were thinking in the longer term of, you know, of a closer, more society based around more harmony. And I think this is really, once you get deep into it, a very exciting period, as well as a very dark period. Were people having sex with each other more than they would have done in the 1930s? Was this the first sexual revolution? It was. I mean, I don't think, you know, you can give two sides to a lot of different things here, but I'm pretty clear that this was the first sexual revolution. You know, first of all, you know, people didn't know whether they were going to survive. People were living in these dangerous, dangerous times. And so the first thing that goes out of the window is a sense of, you know, why shouldn't I do this? So that's one thing. Another thing, you had families being split up. You had men away in the

army. You had others who weren't in the army who were being sent to other parts of the country. So you had that. You know, you also had, you had this sort of entity coming, that came into being called, you know, people actually started calling them wartime marriages, where people got together for the period. So married people who had husbands, wives elsewhere, who found themselves in close confinement during the wartime period, actually came together with these wartime marriages, where they were loyal to each other. And they carried on as though they were in a marriage, but always with the understanding that it would come to an end once the war ended. And they carried on as though they were in a marriage, but always with the understanding that it would come to an end once the war ended. And I spoke to one woman who told

me about her mother, who'd been very unhappy before the war, had engaged in one of these wartime marriages in London with somebody from one of the ministries who'd come down from Scotland, and was a much happier person for the rest of her life. And so you had all this kind of thing. I think in terms of homosexuality as well, you had all sorts of doors opening. Things were suddenly happening. If you read Quentin Crisp, for example, he talks about London becoming one huge paved bed.

Also, if you think about it, you had the whole sort of pyrotechnics of the war. One account I read of a man saying, you know, having sex during the bombing and saying it was the most intense experience of his life. So in all these different ways, yes, absolutely, sexuality was being encouraged. And then at the end of the war, the government did everything it could to sort of place this genie back into the bottle. the government did everything it could to sort of place this genie back into the bottle. And to some degree, it succeeded.

You know, they encouraged, absolutely encouraged marriage at the end of the war, encouraged fidelity at the end of the war. And, you know, the marriage rate went up and the explosion in children born out of wedlock came down again. But, you know, it was only, it had been experienced. And when these kind of things are experienced, they don't disappear altogether. And there's no doubt in my mind, this was absolutely the sort of bedrock out of which what we think of as a sexual revolution of the 60s came. Because, you know, by the time the people who were experiencing the sexual revolution at this point, by that time, you know, they were middle aged, they were in their 40s and they were in positions of power. They had already experienced this and they weren't going to stand in its way a second time. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

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There are new episodes every week. That's very interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Let's go back to the chronology of the Blitz. So it begins with massive assaults on London itself. The eastern, particularly the docks of London, let's destroy Britain, the greatest maritime power, the greatest commercial power in the world, still just about at that stage. But then it spreads out to the other cities. Let's not forget. Let's not forget Liverpool. Let's not forget Glasgow, even Belfast, I think. So how did it progress? Was there any logic to it or was it just different cities different nights no i think there was a logic to it i think you know it's it's as you say it started off in london in the docks in london and also the the center of government in london and the fact is most of the people were you know not most of the people but the the largest single civic agglomeration was london so idea was, you know, we will attack the area of supply, the docks where things come in, we'll attack the center of government, and we will

attack the people. The idea being that, you know, we will encourage this sort of breakdown of morale, which will force the country to come to terms with us. So that was the beginning. When, you know, by after a few months, it seemed as though that this wasn't particularly working. That's when it was broadened out to provincial cities. That's when, you know, so many of the cities and towns of Britain started receiving these extraordinarily heavy, extraordinarily terrifying raids. And as you say, I mean, it got to, you know, Belfast, people often forget that Belfast was attacked. You had Clydebank, you had Glasgow very heavily attacked. You had Liverpool, you had Manchester, you had Coventry. I mean, Coventry was attacked

because it was where so many of the factories were based. Before the war, these had been car factories, automotive factories. But then during the war, a lot of these were turned into munition factories. And so that was an obvious place to attack. And so the attacks were broadened out. And in a way, I mean, that meant the whole country started to understand actually what was going on. The Blitz wasn't just a London thing. Although it's very interesting, if you speak to people today, a lot of people think the Blitz was only on London. You know, when I was talking about, you know, I'm writing a book about the Blitz. And they'll say to you, oh, right. So, you know, are you just talking about London then? And you say, no, no, no, it wasn't just London. It was a whole country was absolutely involved in this. And that's why when you talk about the, you know, the social

changes and the changes in attitudes, you're not just talking about the capital, you are talking about the entire country. And some really strange bombing raids, you know, bombs were actually dropped on Dublin, probably by mistake. But, you know, Ireland wasn't even in the war, Ireland was neutral. You know, it was a very, very wide scale attack. And it ended in May 1941. But of course, that wasn't the end of the bombing. The bombing raids carried on, perhaps not on quite that big a scale for a while, but you had the Baideka raids. And then of course, you had the V1 and V2 raids of 1944 and 1945 and had the war continue. Who knows what Hitler had up his sleeve. But so the bombing actually did carry on, basically, throughout the war. In this winter of 1940-41, you've got what, it's all night bombing, but well, apart from the very early stuff, it's night bombing by Daunies and Heinkels, is it? And they're dropping, what are we talking, incendiary bombs or high explosives? What's doing most of the damage? Both. In fact, a lot of the big damage is actually done by incendiaries.

Because initially, I think the idea was incendiaries were going to be useful to sort of show the path for bombers that came afterwards. And the damage was going to be done by the high explosive bombs. But actually, what people discovered, and actually discovered in bombing raids elsewhere towards the end of the war, later on in the war in Germany and then in Japan, was incendiaries could do an enormous amount of damage on their own. They could start fires on a really quite horrifying scale. And fires could do more damage when they joined together than high explosive bombs. So you were talking about incendiary bombs on the smaller scale, but absolutely not causing the least damage. Then you're talking about high explosive bombs. And then during the Blitz itself, the biggest bomb that was dropped was the landmine, this absolutely enormous shipping mine that had been adapted to float down on a parachute. And

I spoke to one man who remembered a landmine floating down. And they used to come down very, very gently. And he saw it coming down. This was right at the beginning of the Blitz. And he jumped up thinking that he could catch it. He was on the top of a hill. He had no idea what it was. And he saw this parachute coming down and it drifted off and landed several hundred yards away. And he'd almost grabbed hold of a landmine, which could destroy an entire street. So, you know, people, you did have a wide range of bombs coming down. And as you say, they would drop from Dorne, as they dropped from Heinkels. You know, people, you did have a wide range of bombs coming down. And as you say, they were dropped from Dorniers, they were dropped from Heinkels. You know, the Germans had discovered that the dive bombers, the Stukas, weren't really particularly good up against the fighters.

So that was what they used. And they bombed at night. And, you know, enormous number of huge damage was done. I mean, on the last night of the Blitz, you had 10,000 houses destroyed. I mean, it's massive, massive, talking huge scale. Did the Luftwaffe sort of say to their pilots, right, chaps, tonight we're going to go and hit this supermarine or Vickers factory in Birmingham,

or by the end of the Blitz, they're just saying, we are just going to go and drop bombs on British people who live in Coventry or Birmingham. What was the targeting like? What was the aspiration? The targeting was pretty poor. I mean, there was very, very limited ability to target accurately. So what they would do is they would send people over, they'd send airplanes over to attack a

particular city, to attack a particular area. And, you know, sometimes to try and attack particular factories or particular points, but it was almost impossible to hit them. I mean, there was no pinpoint bombing in those days. So, for example, when they went after Coventry, they sent huge numbers of aircraft over. This was the heaviest raid ever to that date. And they did damage a huge number of the factories that were in Coventry. They also completely flattened the city center, but they didn't do it in any pinpoint way. They did it by flattening as much of Coventry as they possibly could. And what people discovered often, in fact, for the most part, was that, yes, even though a lot of damage was done, even though a lot of factories were destroyed, even though a lot of houses were destroyed and a lot of people were killed, the fact was, A, morale wasn't as seriously affected as people had feared before the war and in the early part of the Blitz. And B, the factories could really get back on

their feet surprisingly quickly. So even though Coventry, for example, was very badly damaged, the fact was most of the factories were back up and running in weeks and running to almost full capacity. So I think what the Second World War showed in terms of bombing was that until the raids could be absolutely huge, as they were on Germany from 1943 onwards and then on Japan in 1945, until that point, the damage done, although huge, wasn't quite as breathtaking as people had feared. And in fact, the damage was sort of

different to what they'd expected. There's a very, very touching and very sad case I came across, an old Bailey case I came to the records across in the National Archive, of a woman called Ida Rodway, who had been bombed out of her house in Hackney. And she was an old woman. Her husband had been a car man. And he was starting to suffer from senility. And their house in Hackney. And she was an old woman. Her husband had been a car man. And he was starting to suffer from senility. And their house in Hackney had been bombed. They'd been forced to go and sleep on her sister's floor. And they'd been completely left helpless. And the point here was that before the war, Britain had sort of prepared for huge numbers of deaths. They thought that the death toll would be enormous. What in fact happened was that large numbers of people were left homeless, but not as many people were killed

as they'd expected. And they were caught out, severely caught out. So they had huge numbers of effectively refugees. And they didn't know what to do with them. They had rest centers where people could spend a night, but they weren't able to rehouse them initially. There was no way of giving them money. People who went to centers that had been set up for money were basically treated like Victorian beggars. They had to justify themselves. In fact, all they needed was a loan to get themselves back on their feet. So there were all these problems with homeless people. Ida Rodway is a very good example of this because she and her husband were left homeless. They were sleeping on their sister's floor with absolutely no prospects whatsoever, with no money. She was

very, very worried. And what she did, instead of bringing her husband his morning tea one morning, she went to the kitchen, got a carving knife and slit his throat and killed him. And the case came up at the Old Bailey and and she was found guilty, but insane, and sent to Broadmoor. Now, she protested that she wasn't insane, that actually she'd done the only thing she could do for her husband because there was nothing else. They were getting no assistance at all from the authorities, and there was nothing else that she could do. But she avoided the hangman by being found insane. But she avoided the hangman by being found insane. So even though that's only one story, I think it's very indicative, and it's much more extreme than most stories, indicative of what was happening in October and November of the Blitz in London, where so many more people were being left homeless. And the authorities had ever imagined they simply didn't know what to do.

And in the end, they appointed a man called Henry Willink, who was a conservative member of parliament. And Henry Willink just reordered society, basically, in London. He changed, first of all, changed the attitude towards giving people money so people didn't have to justify themselves on the old poor law principles. But he also brought in a whole swathe of emergency housing where people could move into. He brought in a policy where things were quickly repaired. He completely reordered society. And he did it on the sort of principles that became the sort of post-war labor government principles.

So in a way, the roots of all that, all that we consider to be the welfare state, really came out, I think, came out of this period. And, you know, especially when you consider that the Education Act was put in motion at this time as well, that allowed all sorts of people, my father included, to go to secondary school and further education. And then the seeds of the NHS were sown at this time, absolutely during the Blitz. were sown at this time, absolutely during the Blitz. I think it's very, very interesting that this, I'm not sure this period has ever quite got the recognition that it deserved for the shift, not only in people's attitudes, but also in the attitudes of society towards its people. Let's also talk about the long shadow the Blitz cast

on the physical environment, the built environment, the British cities. It's hard here, isn't it? Because modernism, the decline of industry kind of came right off the back of the Blitz cast on the physical environment, the built environment, the British cities. It's hard here, isn't it? Because modernism, the decline of industry kind of came right off the back of the Blitz. So it's sort of hard to be precise about who caused what. But there are cities in Britain, Coventry, Exeter, perhaps Liverpool, which you could argue never kind of recovered, or can you, from the unbelievable beating it took in that winter of 1940 to 1941? Well, I think that all depends on your perspective with these things. I mean, you know, as I was saying earlier, the people of Coventry, you know, they wanted new housing. They had been living in what, you know, really nowadays we would consider slums. And they wanted something better for themselves to the point that,

you know, in 1941, 1942, they were getting excited about what they would have after the war. This was a period of hope. Now, the buildings that were built after the war, we can look at them now and say, oh, you know, these weren't fit for purpose. They were absolutely, you know, they were monstrosities. They should never have been built in the first place. Well, that's really, you know, it may be that in 50 years time, we think very differently about them. And in fact, if we look at some of these buildings now if you look at the i think it's called the park estate and uh in sheffield which was exactly one of these estates that was built after the war to give people a better you know the streets in the sky to give people a better standard of living you know for

many years people wanted to tear it down now it's considered one of the great pieces of architecture and it's being rebuilt and it's a grade two listed building. So we may think differently about a lot of these places in a number of years' time. I think the fact is that even if mistakes were made in the 50s and 60s about a lot of the houses that were built, the fact is that this period and the bombing that was done highlighted the fact that people did need some kind of improvement in their lives. I mean, you know, during the First World War, a lot of homes for heroes were built. A lot of housing was improved.

The fact was still huge numbers of people in Britain were living in slums. And a lot of people saw this period as an opportunity to sweep those slums away and make people's lives better as a result. sweep those slums away and make people's lives better as a result. So, you know, whether that was carried out properly or not, that's really, you know, that's almost a moot point. The fact is it was seen, the Blitz, as well as a time of darkness, was seen as an opportunity to make people's lives better architecturally and in terms of their housing. So actually there was a bit of creative destruction going on there as well, perhaps as well. Obviously, I suppose that's the sort of architectural legacy of the Blitz, legacy of it's in the UK. One immediate legacy of the Blitz is that the Brits then turned around

and attempted to bomb the Germans back to the Stone Age, using the same idea of strategic bombing, the hope that people would rise up against Hitler, hope it'd bring the war to an end. So that's presumably an important sequel to the Blitz, the British attack on Germany. I think it is. I think it absolutely is. I think, you know, for one thing, it gave the British a justification for doing it. They started it. They did it to us. We can now do it to them. Then, you know, you had people, you had, for example, Bomber Harris, who was absolutely single-minded in his belief that bombing could end the war, that it wasn't even necessary to have a ground war. The bombing would do it on his own. And so I think absolutely this was in many ways the sort of precursor to the bombing of Hamburg,

to the bombing of Dresden, and then subsequently to the bombing of Tokyo and the dropping of the atom bombs. And I do think it is quite interesting that with the bombing of, when the real firebombing began, when you had the firebombs that took place, for example, in Dresden and then in Tokyo, that is when bombing sort of reached its zenith. That's when the fears, the pre-war fears of what bombing could do actually started to be realized, when entire cities were actually being razed to the ground. I went to Tokyo recently, and when you compare a place like Kyoto, which wasn't bombed at all, with a place like Tokyo, which was absolutely, you know, people talk about the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but more people were actually killed by conventional bombing in Tokyo than were killed by either of the atom bombs. So, you know, conventional bombing could be absolutely horrific in terms of death toll as well. And I think absolutely, Bomber Habit actually during the blitz stood on a roof, I think the roof of the Air Ministry in London, watching the bombing and saying, you know, they have like, forget the precise quote, but it's something like they have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind.

And, you know, quoting the Bible. And I think that was all set in motion at that point. It was kind of inevitable that Tit was going to be for Tat. And a lot of people were killed in Dresden, a lot of people killed in Hamburg and in other places. And yes, I think its roots were in the Blitz. It's an appalling idea, isn't it? That what began in London in September 1940 with a sizable raid against East London, within three or four years' time, had grown to take the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world and destroy some of the most precious architecture and treasures of

societies from Japan to Germany and beyond. It's an extraordinary story, the use of air power, the use of strategic bombing in the war that goes from dropping leaflets in 1939, the Brits thought that was the best use of air power, to drop leaflets, to by the end of the war, unleashing nuclear armaments and wiping out entire cities. It's an extraordinary story. Josh, I've taken too much of your time. That was fascinating. Please come back and talk to us on history here another time. Tell people what's the title of your book and where can they get it? It's called The Secret History of the Blitz.

It's get it, I suppose, all good bookshops or on Amazon. Josh, thank you very much indeed. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

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