Forbidden History - Battle of the Skies: The Blitz

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

World War Two. For the first time in history, the battlefield has shifted mainly to the skies. Control of airspace now determines victory below, sparking a fierce race to outsmart the enemy. From the invention of radar to Hitler’s so-called “Wonder Weapons,” every innovation becomes a weapon in the struggle to bring the enemy down. Go to ⁠⁠https://surfshark.com/forbiddenhistory⁠⁠ or use code FORBIDDENHISTORY at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! Cast List: Guy Walters: Author and Historian Nigel Jones: Author and Historian Katherine Sharp Landdeck: Author and Historian Chris Kolonko: Archaeologist  Ben Bishop: LIDAR Operator Victoria Taylor: Aviation Historian Geoffrey Wawro: Military Historian James Corum: Military Historian Robert M. Citino: Senior Historian, The National WWII Museum Stephen Fisher: Historian Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Throughout the world, the intriguing remains of structures and machines lie testament to one of the most crucial aspects of the Second World War. Airpower Military aviation came into its own during World War II.

They are now ready to become a central strike. force on the new modern battlefield. Fighter aircraft production was stepped up. Anti-aircraft defenses were stepped up. This was a purely an air battle. The natural target for the Luftwaffe to go for was London. And Goering had this obsession with London. He wanted to see it go up in flames.

From the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz to Hitler's miracle weapons and the air war over Berlin. This is the story. of World War II's Battle for the Skies. By 1944, the tide of war has turned. Germany's quest to build an all-powerful Third Reich has become a fight just to survive. But on an island in the Baltic Sea, German scientists have developed a new weapon

that Hitler hoped would change the Nazis' fortunes. The V-1, also known as the doodlebug. The V1 is essentially a drone. It's a pilotless plane that you just fly across the channel and then it drops hopefully on the target and causes mayhem. In mid-1944, Hitler orders their deployment against Britain. The war was prematurely thought to be coming to a swift end and suddenly these weapons arrived out of a clear blue sky.

They reigned terror on cities like London. They fire them at the United Kingdom. They do considerable damage. To a war-weary British public, the arrival of the V-1 is a new and deadly terror. Flying at an altitude of around 3,000 feet, at a speed of up to 400 miles an hour, they were difficult to shoot down. So Britain's engineers needed to turn to a new technology to counter Hitler's latest gambit. At Flamborahead in Yorkshire, on the coast of Northern England, archaeologist Chris Colonco is examining what little remains of Britain's cutting-edge defenses

used against Germany's V-1s. These things were massively high-tech at the time, you know, using state-of-the-art technology which had come to a pinnacle at the end of the Second World War in 1945. These crucial wartime defenses highlight the fact that during World War II, London wasn't Nazi Germany's only target. Bluffafer started launching V1 flying bombs, off aircraft out to sea with the intention of hitting Manchester. The north of England was home to much of Britain's industrial production during World War II. And so, with Germany having developed the technique of dropping V1s from planes, the North becomes a prime target.

But while Britain's military were trying to innovate, trying to innovate to combat the threat of the V-1s, civilians remained terrified by the many flying bombs that did get through. Morale didn't break, but it was heavily strained. So you had this real issue of trying to protect your own life from the dangers above and having that problem of not knowing if you're going to wake up the next morning. I remember my grandmother telling me that she'd been in a pub in Fleet Street called the Rainbow, when the sound of a doodle bug approaching came,

and suddenly it stopped. And the hubbub in the pub immediately ended, and people waited, was it going to fall on them? And then there was a low sound of a distant explosion. Immediately the hubbub resumed, people thought, it had fallen on some other poor sod, not on them. Germany's deadly V-1s were a terrifying weapon that Britain had to stop.

Fortunately, Britain's coastal defense batteries had an ace up their sleeve. In December 1903, the Wright brothers achieved the first successful, heavier-than-air-powered flight. But even as humanity celebrated the dawn of the aviation age, the world's military began considering how to use this new invention. And by World War I, the first experimental steps were being taken to seriously weapon. weaponize aircraft. In World War I, air power was in its absolute infancy. You know, we're dealing with big decisions.

Do we use dirigible, you know, blimps, or do we use fixed-wing aircraft, you know? And there's a whole lobby that says dirrigibles are the way to go, and that aircraft are just sort of a primitive technology. Nobody knew quite what to do with it. They used aircraft as observer planes. They put cameras on the bottom of the planes, and then, And then they started by the end of the war, using aircraft to drop small bombs and gas. You have the famous battles of Rickenbacher and the Red Baron that we all know so well.

The First World War saw aircraft take their place in the arsenals of nations around the world. But with this new technology came a new danger to civilians too. In Britain there was this real obsession with the threat of aerial bombardment. which actually stemmed from the Gota raids over London in the First World War. So it wasn't a completely out there a possibility that London could come under siege once more. After World War I, the memory of the successful raids by Germany's Gota bombers leads Britain to invent a method of detecting aircraft before they can be seen.

On the southern coast of England, one of these devices still watches out over the sea to this day. They built a number of these acoustic devices in the 1920s and early 1930s along the British coast that would give them some warning. The distinctive shape of these devices, plus strategically placed microphones, enabled them to magnify the sound of aircraft crossing the English Channel. They were like giant earphone, but built out of concrete with these baffles, they could pick up the sound of an aircraft engine 20, 30 miles out. But these remarkable acoustic mirrors became obsolete almost as soon as they were built.

By the late 1920s, aircraft were becoming so fast, their sound couldn't be detected in time to stop an attack. Between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II, aircraft continued to rapidly evolve. Their development driven not by war, but by competition. Events like the Schneider Trophy saw planes from all around the world race against each other. Crowds of hundreds of thousands would assemble wherever it was raced, and it was extremely popular, and the flyers became the stars of the time.

To stay ahead of the competition, aircraft companies continued to develop ever faster planes, fueling dramatic changes in aircraft design. They were metal, they were streamlined, they were, of course, much, much faster, and it was a real step change in the development of aviation. The improvements that were developed through the sport of racing soon forged a new generation of military aircraft and reshape the future of warfare.

These are things that hadn't been thought about 35 years before, and suddenly, you know, they are in every Air Force in Europe. Within two very, very swift decades, you have got air power in all its violent modernity. These aircraft were now ready for prime time in a way that World War I aircraft had not been. One nation eager to exploit these developments was Germany. But after defeat in the First World War,

the country was no longer permitted to have an Air Force. And so the Germans... exploited a loophole. Germany, while banned from having an Air Force, was not banned from having civil aviation. So the German government poured large subsidies into building modern airfields, modern long-range navigation systems.

And in a sense, German aviation was much better subsidized and financed than French or British civil aviation. Despite these restrictions, by the 1930s, Germany was building modern airfields, training pilots, and designing cutting-edge aircraft. In 1933, Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany. Eighteen months later, he becomes Führer of Nazi Germany.

The country's advanced civil aviation provides the foundations of a secret air force. They pledged billions of Reich Marx into creating this new air force. Building up the Luftwaffe was a massive priority for the Nazis. the Nazis. In 1935, Nazi Germany finally publicly acknowledged the formerly secret Luftwaffe. Given the speed of the newly developed aircrafts of the 1930s, Britain knew its listening ears' early warning system was now hopelessly out of date in the event of war. But at Baudzi Manor on the Suffolk coast, engineers were secretly working on a revolutionary

new aircraft detection system that would change. change warfare forever. This top secret new technology was being developed by Robert Watson Watt. A meteorologist by trade, Watson Watt discovers that radio waves beamed at the sky are bounced back by thunder clouds. This was developed into the idea that radio waves could be bounced off approaching enemy aircraft, and this was the origin of radar. And Watt refined the system, and by the end of 1935, aircraft were being detected up to 60 miles

away. But Britain's development of radar was about to become much more urgent. When we think about preparedness, you've got to think about experience. The German pilots had been practicing for war. In February 1936, the people of Spain elect a left-wing government. The right-wing officer class led a military coup and the divided country erupts in civil war. Germany provides air cover when the rebels, led by General Franco, besiege Madrid. A year later, Franco gives the Nazis free reign to test out their new bombers on the Spanish town of Gurneka.

It was a market day in Gurneka, and they suddenly swept in out of a clear blue sky, bombed the place. ordinary people were killed outright or trapped under the rubble. The bombing destroys most of Gurneka. But for Hitler, the attack is merely useful practice for the Luftwaffe. They tried different things. What is it like if we bomb a city? What is it like if we fight this way?

When the news of Gurneka's fate reaches Britain, there is utter shock. So this led to absolute panic, you could say, that in In the event of another war, whole cities would be laid waste. Thousands and thousands of people would die. And I think this was the time when the world woke up to the potential for aerial bombing. For the British, the idea that what happened to Gurneka could one day happen to London is horrifying. The English Channel now seemed a tiny barrier against an enemy. But there was one new technology that Britain had taken the least

on in the 1930s. Radar. Radar gave Britain a complete technological leg up. If we hadn't have had it, we would have had to rely on civilians scanning the skies with binoculars and listening out for the drone over the approaching planes. At Bodzi Manor, the race began to develop the burgeoning radar technology into a comprehensive aircraft detection system. Under the code name Chain Home, the first radar station at Bodzi is soon followed by others erected elsewhere. The advantage of the early warning system is that you can pinpoint exactly where the enemy is coming from, and you can marshal all your planes to that spot.

You don't just have to keep patrolling up and down hoping you're going to find them at some point. But it would take more than a few radar stations to cover the main approaches to the country. In fact, Britain planned to construct 21. But building this new technology to prepare for war was going to take time, and time was about to run out. In September 1939, Hitler orders the invasion of Poland, sparking the Second World War. The Luftwaffe's dive bombing techniques, perfected in Spain, are combined with very rapid attacks by tanks and ground troops in a tactic known known as Blitzkrieg. The word Blitzkrieg in German literally means lightning war.

And this was a tactic to coordinate an air offensive, to bomb them from the air at the same time as armored columns were breaking through on the ground. The squadrons of Stuka dive bombers descend on Poland. These planes would come screaming out of the sky with their sirens, drop their bomb and streak away again. And so this was very much a psychological weapon of war as well as a technological weapon of war. Germany's combination of air power and ground forces saw Poland surrender in less than four weeks. And in the following nine months, many other countries across Europe fell to the seemingly

unstoppable Third Reich. Britain knew that its time would come soon. Fighter aircraft production was stepped up, anti-aircraft defenses were stepped up, things like barrage balloons and anti-aircraft guns. By mid-1940, German forces were occupying France after winning victory in just 46 days. And as a triumphant Adolf Hitler toured Paris as a conqueror. Britain knew it would be next on Hitler's list. But as an island nation, with a very strong navy, Britain would be a hard nut to crack. Germany would have to rely on air power alone.

This was purely an air battle. The victories that the Germans had achieved with their Blitzkrieg tactics in Poland and in France who were achieved in coordination with offensives on the ground. And there wasn't that. This was the Luftwaffe versus the RAF. Fortunately for Britain, it had the chain-home radar network

to counter the onslaught of the Luftwaffe. The chain home system only is completed just before the war breaks out. But you have the entire coast covered. When the German air offensive began in July 1940, Britain could see it coming. Radar is absolutely crucial because it allows the British to see

what's coming towards them and what to scramble in response. You can get your squadrons up in the air and go and fight them. During the late summer, summer of 1940, the fate of the United Kingdom hinged on the crucial battle of Britain, between the Luftwaffe and the RAF. The chain-home system saved Britain from defeat.

By using radar, British aircraft were immediately deployed to specific locations to counter German attacks. So, Hitler changed tactics. Instead of trying to destroy the RAF, the Nazis would bomb British cities and tried to force the people into submission. The Blitz had begun. We continue the story after the break. With Britain's radar system stopping the Luftwaffe from gaining air supremacy over the RAF, Germany adopts a new approach in September 1940. Now the main target won't be the RAF, but British cities. The natural target for the Luftwaffe to go for was London, and Goering had this obsession with

London. He wanted to see it go up in flames and to make the British Sufa piece as quickly as possible. Over the next eight months, London and other strategic English cities are subjected to an intense bombing campaign known as the Blitz. But the morale of the British people does not break. In fact, the Blitz would prove a costly error for Germany. Switching from targeting the RAF in the Battle of Britain to attacking British cities in the Blitz, gives the RAF time to rebuild its strength and take the fight to the Luftwaffe. But although Britain successfully avoids total defeat in 1940 and 1941, the Luftwaffe remains a threat to London throughout the war.

The capital is always vulnerable for one simple reason. It's very easy for German planes to locate. The Luftwaffe were following the course of the Thames from the Thames estuary into the heart of London. In a bid to stop the German bombers using the winding River Thames to guide them straight to London, Britain builds a new type of anti-aircraft defence, just offshore from the mouth of the river. Guy Mounsel was a civil engineer. He formed what became known as a chain of Mounsel towers or Mounsel forts in and around the Thames Estuary off the Essex coast. The Ige Geim Mounsel came up with with a structure,

which in many ways was the forerunner of today's oil platforms in the sea, which was a concrete and steel platform with stilts going down into the seabed. Back in the Second World War, the towers were crowned with deadly anti-aircraft guns, ready to shoot down any German plane that dared to use the river to its advantage. Together with other increasingly effective means of air defense, radar being the prime example, the Mountsle Towers off the Thames Estuary, definitely discouraged the Luftwaffe from intensifying the blitz. In June 1941, Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union also helped take a lot of pressure off Britain.

With a Luftwaffe forced to fight on two fronts, Britain could now more easily go on the attack. Bomber squadrons were repeatedly sent over to Germany to pummel military targets. But Britain's bombers didn't have accurate target aiming devices, so a lot of practice was needed to try to achieve precision bombing. In February 1942, in an attempt to shake things up, Arthur Bomber Harris was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command. Since the RAF were unable to hit their targets with any accuracy, accuracy, Harris' new approach was as simple as it was deadly.

Bombers should not attempt to hit specific targets. Harris says, look, let's just fly at night and let's not aim precisely at targets. Let's area bomb. Harris' proposed strategy saw debate rage in the corridors of power. Should bomber production be ramped up to destroy Germany's cities? though tens or even hundreds of thousands of German civilians would be killed? There was a debate about bomber Harris from the very, very first moment about whether, first of all, these raids were efficient, whether they were having any impact on German

war-making capability at all, and secondly, whether they were morally right. Germany had already targeted British civilians in the Blitz. So after months of discussions, the British reached a decision. They would go ahead. Much of the industrial production of Britain was harnessed to build a vast fleet of heavy bombers. And with the United States also joining the war, Allied air superiority would now become the single most crucial factor in the struggle to defeat Nazi Germany. From early 1942, the U.S. Army Air Forces began arriving in Britain. 70 airfields largely

in the southern portions of the country, probably 250,000 Americans. And with the pilots came the planes, including the B-17 Flying Fortress Bombers. The B-17s of the Eighth Air Force were real workhorses. They had good guns, they had good armor, and they worked hard. The B-17s were equipped with an advanced new type of bomb site that allowed for more precise targeting. And so, while Britain bombed indiscriminately by night, America concentrated on specific high-value targets during the day. Germany will be subjected to 24-7-365 bombing, quite literally,

until its entire infrastructure has been destroyed. Germany was getting overwhelmed by wave after wave of Allied bombing attacks. But the Nazi's anti-aircraft defenses ensured that Allied bomber crews paid a heavy price. On a beach in Kent lies the wreck of an American B-17 bomber. Having sustained heavy fire over Germany, it nearly made it back to England, but had to ditch in the sea just offshore. Remarkably, all the crew survived the crash. Many other shot-up aircraft weren't so lucky. Tens of thousands of of allied crewmen were killed during the war.

They'd be buffeted by gales of flack, and then they'd be hit with German fighters, and they could not swerve or try to avoid. They had to remain in formation and take whatever punishment they got. So an individual bombing run wasn't so much a mission as it was a kind of trauma for the crew.

It's no wonder that some of these young men cracked under the strain. The ordeal of these bomber crews must be set against the suffering of the German civilians killed by their bombs. Whether the Allied bombing campaign could be morally justified is still debated to this day. By virtually wiping out many industrial cities, area bombing was undoubtedly effective at crippling the Nazi war machine. The brutal air war looked sure to defeat the Nazis.

But Hitler had a terrifying trick up its sleeve. rockets. By late 1943, Germany was on the retreat on the Eastern Front in Russia. When the Western Allies invaded Nazi-occupied France on D-Day in June 1944, the situation for Hitler's Nazi regime became desperate. But at the same top-secret weapons testing facility that made the V-1, German scientists were working flat out on a new miracle weapon that Hitler hoped would turn the tide of the war. Hitler begins relying more and more on these so-called Wunderwaffe and these miracle weapons, which he thinks will be a stand-in for conventional air power,

that if you can't feel the big fleets of aircraft needed to take on the allies, you can terrorize them into submission. Pina Muna was a very large site on this distant island, which protected it from prying eyes. If you like, the Germans were putting all their eggs into this basket. While the secret research facility's first effort, the V-1, was successfully resisted by the Allies earlier in the war, the Germans had a second more ambitious weapon waiting in the wings, and it was the brainchild of Werner von Braun. Werner von Braun, he was only 31 or 32 when the war ended, a young German rocket scientist.

Von Braun spent his childhood devouring science fiction comics. and dreaming of a future of interplanetary travel. He therefore began working in the burgeoning field of rocketry. German interest in rocketry began before Hitler came to power because under the Versailles Treaty, Germany is forbidden in Air Force. They're not forbidden rockets. Nobody thought of rockets.

Well, the German artillery branch started research into rockets. By 1944, with Nazi Germany's armies forced to retreat on every front, rockets became Hitler's last hope to avoid total defeat. Werner von Braun turned his dreams of spaceflight into a weapon of war, the V-2 rocket. His motto was, I aim for the stars, and as the American humorist Mautzal says, Werner von Braun aimed for the stars, but sometimes he missed and hit London. In September 1944, the first wave of V-2s were fired at the British Capitol. The world's first long-range supersonic ballistic missiles were a huge leap in weapon technology.

Rocketing towards London, at over 3,000 miles an hour, there was no defense against them. You can't shoot it down, it's just so quick. I mean, blink and you miss it. It's not just that, it's blink and you're dead. And that will land an expensive. before you hear it coming, because it's going obviously so much faster the speed of sound. It's just a huge explosion, and these were one-ton warheads. I mean, they devastated city blocks.

But V-2s came too late in the war to make a difference to its outcome. The problem, of course, is that, you know, the payloads weren't big enough, the guidance system wasn't good enough, and they couldn't make them in anything like the kind of numbers needed to subvert the allied advantage in air power. And so, while a technical tour de force, V-2s weren't going to save the Nazis. As the war drew to a close, the British were also developing advanced weapons of their own. At Ashley Walk bombing range in England, British engineers tested variants of the legendary bouncing bomb that was used during the famous Dam Busters raid.

And in the final months of the war, the biggest and most destructive weapon ever exploded in Britain, was also tested here. In March 1945, the largest munition ever exploded on British soil was tested out at Ashley Walk. It's the famous 10-ton Grand Slam bomb, and frankly, I wish I'd been there to witness it. The Grand Slam bomb worked on a radically different principle

to conventional bombs. The idea behind his Grand Slam bomb was that it would penetrate into the ground and create a small earthquake, which would be powerful enough to destroy targets, particularly bridges. Bridges being very narrow are very difficult to hit with regular bombs, and you would need a direct hit on a column to destroy it, which was almost impossible to achieve. But if you could generate a small underground earthquake close to the columns of a bridge,

you could actually shake it to the extent that it would collapse and bring the bridge down. The largest non-nuclear bomb of the war was deployed against the Third Reich. just after one day of testing. The Bielefeld Railway Viaduct was a crucial transport link for Germany's industrial Ruhr-Heartland. Despite over 50 Allied attacks on the viaduct with conventional bombs, it remained intact. But the Grand Slam bomb put it out of action for the rest of the war. Less than two months later, on May 8, 1945, the Allies accept Germany's surrender. But even as the public celebrate VE Day, there were some concerns about the price of victory.

And the Allied attacks on Germany were 10, perhaps 20 times more destructive and effective than the German bombing campaign, the Blitz, against Britain, had been. And after the war, even Churchill seemed to have had a sense of shame. Yet despite the regrettable civilian casualties, it had had a sense of shame. It had now become clear that air power would be the future of warfare. World War II was the very first war in history in which the battle for the skies was critical. But it certainly wouldn't be the last.

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